Stranded

by Val McDermid

  So Kelly Jane had said goodbye to Santa without a moment’s regret. She might have been more worried if she hadn’t discovered the secret of the airing cupboard. Her mum had been downstairs making the tea, and Kelly Jane had wanted a pillowcase to make a sleeping bag for her favourite doll. She’d opened the airing cupboard and there, on the top shelf, she’d seen a stack of strangely shaped plastic bags. They were too high for her to reach, but she’d craned her neck and managed to see the corner of some packaging inside one of the bags. Her heart had started to pound with excitement, for she’d immediately recognised the familiar box that she’d been staring at in longing in the toyshop window for weeks.

  She’d closed the door silently and crept back to her room. Her mum had said, ‘Wait and see what Santa brings you,’ as if she was still a silly baby when she’d asked for the new Barbie doll. But here it was in the house.

  Later, when her mum and dad were safely shut in the living-room watching the telly, she’d crept out of bed and used the chair from her bedroom to climb up and explore further. It had left her feeling very satisfied. Santa or no Santa, she was going to have a great Christmas.

  Which was why she couldn’t sleep. The prospect of playing with her new toys, not to mention showing them off to Sarah, was too exciting to let her drift off into dreams. Restless, she got out of bed and pulled the curtains open. It was a cold, clear night, and in spite of the city lights, she could still see the stars twinkling, the thin crescent of the moon like a knife cut in the dark blue of the sky. No sleigh, or reindeers, though.

  She had no idea how much time had passed when she heard the footsteps. Heavy, uneven thuds on the stairs. Not the light-footed tread of her mum, nor the measured footfalls of her dad. These were stumbling steps, irregular and clumsy, as if someone was negotiating unfamiliar territory.

  Kelly Jane was suddenly aware how cold it had become. Her arms and legs turned to gooseflesh, the short hair on the back of her neck prickling with unease. Who – or what – was out there, in her house, in the middle of the night?

  She heard a bump and a muffled voice grunting, as if in pain. It didn’t sound like anyone she knew. It didn’t even sound human. More like an animal. Or some sort of monster, like in the stories they’d read at school at Hallowe’en. Trolls that ate little children. She’d remembered the trolls, and for weeks she’d taken the long way home to avoid going over the ringroad flyover. She knew it wasn’t a proper bridge like trolls lived under, but she didn’t want to take any chances. Sarah had agreed with her, though Simon Sharp had laughed at the pair of them. It would have served him right to have a troll in his house on Christmas Eve. It wasn’t fair that it had come to her house, Kelly Jane thought, trying to make herself angry to drive the fear away.

  It didn’t work. Her stomach hurt. She’d never been this scared, not even when she had to have a filling at the dentist. She wanted to hide in her wardrobe, but she knew it was silly to go somewhere she could be trapped so easily. Besides, she had to know the worst.

  On tiptoe, she crossed the room, blinking back tears. Cautiously, she turned the door handle and inched the door open. The landing light was off, but she could just make out a bulky shape standing by the airing cupboard. As her eyes adjusted to the deeper darkness, she could see an arm stretching up to the top shelf. It clutched the packages and put them in a sack. Her packages! Her Christmas presents!

  With terrible clarity, Kelly Jane realised that this was no monster. It was a burglar, pure and simple. A bad man had broken into her house and was stealing her Christmas presents! Outrage flooded through her, banishing fear in that instant. As the bulky figure put the last parcel in his sack and turned back to the stairs, she launched herself through the door and raced down the landing, crashing into the burglar’s legs just as he took the first step. ‘Go away, you bad burglar,’ she screamed.

  Caught off balance, he crashed head over heels down the stairs, a yell of surprise splitting the silence of the night like an axe slicing through a log.

  Kelly Jane cannoned into the bannisters and rebounded onto the top step, breathless and exhilarated. She’d stopped the burglar! She was a hero!

  But where were her mum and dad? Surely they couldn’t have slept through all of this?

  She opened their bedroom door and saw to her dismay that their bed was empty, the curtains still wide open. Where were they? What was going on? And why hadn’t anyone sounded the alarm?

  Back on the landing, she peered down the stairs and saw a crumpled heap in the hallway. He wasn’t moving. Nervously, she decided she’d better call the police herself.

  She inched down the stairs, never taking her eyes off the burglar in case he suddenly jumped up and came after her.

  Step by careful step, she edged closer.

  Three stairs from the bottom, enough light spilled in through the glass panels in the front door for Kelly Jane to see what she’d really done.

  There, in the middle of the hallway, lay the prone body of Santa Claus. Not moving. Not even breathing.

  She’d killed Santa Claus.

  Simon Sharp was wrong. Sarah was right. And now Kelly Jane had killed him.

  With a stifled scream, she turned tail and raced back to her bedroom, slamming the door shut behind her. Now she was shivering in earnest, her whole body trembling from head to foot. She dived into bed, pulling the duvet over her head. But it made no difference. She felt as if her body had turned to stone, her blood to ice. She couldn’t stop shaking, her teeth chattering like popcorn in a pan.

  She’d killed Santa Claus.

  All over the world, children would wake up to no Christmas presents because Kelly Jane Davidson had murdered Santa. And everyone would know whom to blame, because his dead body was lying in her hallway. Until the day she died, people would point at her in the street and go, ‘There’s Kelly Jane Davidson, the girl who murdered Christmas.’

  Whimpering, she lay curled under her duvet, terrible remorse flooding her heart. She’d never sleep again.

  But somehow, she did. When her mum threw open the door and shouted ‘Merry Christmas!’ Kelly Jane was sound asleep. For one wonderful moment, she forgot what had happened. Then it came pouring back in and she peered timidly over the edge of the duvet at her mum. She didn’t seem upset or worried. How could she have missed the dead body in the hall?

  ‘Don’t you want your presents?’ her mum asked. ‘I can’t believe you’re still in bed. It’s nine o’clock. You’ve never slept this late on Christmas morning before. Come on, Santa’s been!’

  Nobody knew that better than Kelly Jane. What had happened? Had the reindeer summoned the elves to take Santa’s body away, leaving her presents behind? Was she going to be the only child who had Christmas presents this year? Reluctantly, she climbed out of bed and dawdled downstairs behind her mum, gazing in worried amazement at the empty expanse of the hall carpet.

  She trailed into the living-room, feet dragging with every step. There, under the tree, was the usual pile of brightly wrapped gifts. Kelly Jane looked up at her mum, an anxious frown on her face. ‘Are these all for me?’ she asked. Somehow, it felt wrong to be rewarded for killing Santa Claus.

  Her mum grinned. ‘All for you. Oh, and there was a note with them as well.’ She handed Kelly Jane a Christmas card with a picture of a reindeer on the front.

  Kelly Jane took it gingerly and opened it. Inside, in shaky capital letters, it read, ‘Don’t worry. You can never kill me. I’m magic. Happy Christmas from Santa Claus.’

  A slow smile spread across her face. It was all right! She hadn’t murdered Santa after all!

  Before she could say another word, the door to the kitchen opened and her dad walked in. He had the biggest black eye Kelly Jane had ever seen, even on the telly. The whole of one side of his face was all bruised, and his left arm was encased in plaster. ‘What happened, Dad?’ she asked, runnin
g to hug him in her dismay.

  He winced. ‘Careful, Kelly, I’m all bruised.’

  ‘But what happened to you?’ she demanded, stepping back.

  ‘Your dad had a bit too much to drink at the office party last night,’ her mum said hastily. ‘He had a fall.’

  ‘But I’m going to be just fine. Why don’t you open your presents?’ he said, gently pushing Kelly Jane towards the tree.

  As she stripped the paper from the first of her presents, her mum and dad stood watching. ‘That’ll teach me to leave you alone in the house on Christmas Eve,’ her mum said softly.

  Her dad tried to smile, but gave up when the pain kicked in. ‘Bloody Santa suit,’ he said. ‘How was I to know she’d take me for a burglar?’

  Sneeze for Danger

  I shifted in my canvas chair, trying to get uncomfortable. The hardest thing about listening to somebody sleeping is staying awake yourself. Mind you, there wasn’t much to hear. Greg Thomas was never going to get complaints from his girlfriends about his snoring. I’d come on stakeout duty at midnight, and all I’d heard was the tinny tailend of some American sports commentary on the TV, the flushing of a toilet and a few grunts that I took to be him getting comfortable in the big bed that dominated his extravagantly stylish studio penthouse.

  I knew about the bed and the expensive style because we also had video surveillance inside Thomas’s flat. Well, we’d had it till the previous afternoon. According to Jimmy Lister, who shared the day shift, Thomas had stopped in at the florist’s on his way back from a meet with one of his dealers and emerged with two big bunches of lilies. Back at the flat, he’d stuffed them into a vase and placed them right in front of the wee fibreoptic camera. Almost as if he knew.

  But of course, he couldn’t have known. If he’d had any inkling that we were watching, it wouldn’t have been business as usual in the Greg Thomas drugs empire. He wouldn’t have gone near his network of middlemen, and he certainly wouldn’t have been calling his partner in crime to discuss her forthcoming trip to Curaçao. If he’d known we were watching him, he’d have assumed we were trying to close him down and he’d have been living the blameless life.

  He’d have been wrong. I’m not that sort of cop. That’s not to say I don’t think people like Greg Thomas should be put away for a very long time. They should. They are responsible for a disproportionate amount of human misery, and they don’t deserve to be inhabiting the high life. Thomas’s cupidity played on others’ stupidity, but that didn’t make any of it all right.

  Nevertheless, my interest was not in making a case against Thomas. What mattered to me was the reason nobody else had been able to do just that. Three times the Drugs Squad had initiated operations against Greg Thomas’s multi-million-pound business, and three times they’d come away empty-handed. There was only one possible conclusion. Somebody on the inside was taking Thomas’s shilling.

  Samuels, who runs the drugs squad, had finally conceded he wasn’t going to put Greg Thomas away until he’d put his own house in order. And that’s where we came in.

  Nobody loves us. Our fellow cops call us the Scaffies. That’s Scots for bin men. My brother, who studied Scottish literature at university, says it’s probably a corruption of scavengers. Me, I prefer to knock off the first two letters. Avengers, that’s what we are. We’re there to avenge the punters who pay our wages and get robbed of justice because some cops see get-rich-quick opportunities where the rest of us see the chance to make a collar.

  It’s easy to be cynical in my line of work. When your job is to sniff out corruption, it’s hard to see past that. It’s difficult to hang on to the missionary zeal when you’re constantly exposed to the venality of your fellow man. I’ve seen cops selling their mates down the river for the price of a package holiday. Sometimes I almost believe that some of them do it for the same reason as criminals commit crimes – because they can. And they’re the ones who are most affronted when we sit them down and confront them with what they’ve done.

  So. Nobody loves us. But what’s worse is that doing this job for any length of time provokes a kind of emotional reversal. It’s almost impossible for us Scaffies to love anybody. Mistrust becomes a habit and nothing will poison a relationship faster than that. In the end, all you’ve got is your team. There’s eight of us, and we’re closer than most marriages. We’re a detective inspector, two sergeants and five constables. But rank matters less here than anywhere else in the force. We need to believe in each other, and that’s the bottom line.

  Movement in the street below caught my attention. A shambling figure, staggering slightly, making his way down the pavement opposite our vantage point. I nudged my partner Dennis, who rolled his shoulders as he leaned forward, focused the camera and snapped off a couple of shots. Not that they’d be any use. The three a.m. drunk was dressed for the weather, the collar of his puffa jacket close round his neck and his baseball cap pulled down low. He stopped outside Thomas’s building and keyed the entry code into the door. There were sixteen flats in the block and we knew most of the residents by sight. I didn’t recognise this guy, though.

  Through the glass frontage of the building opposite, we could see him weaving his way to the lift. He hit the call button and practically fell inside when the doors opened. I was fully alert now. Not because I thought anything untoward was going down, but because anything that gets the adrenaline going in the middle of night surveillance is welcome. The lift stopped on the second floor, and the drunk lurched out into the lobby, turning to his left and heading for one of the flats at the rear of the building.

  We relaxed and settled back into our chairs. Dennis, my partner, snorted. ‘I wouldn’t like to be inside his head in the morning,’ he said.

  I reached down and pulled a thermos of coffee out of my bag. ‘You want some?’

  Dennis shook his head. ‘I’ll stick to the Diet Coke,’ he said.

  It was about fifteen minutes later that we heard it. Our headphones exploded into life with a volley of sneezing. I nearly fell out of my chair. The volume was deafening. It seemed to go on forever. A choking, spluttering, gasping fit that I thought would never end. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it ended. I looked at Dennis. ‘What the hell was that?’

  He shrugged. ‘Guy’s coming down with a cold?’

  ‘Out of the blue? Just like that?’

  ‘Maybe he decided to have a wee taste of his own product.’

  ‘Oh aye, right. You wake up in the night, you can’t get back to sleep, so you do a line of coke?’

  Dennis laughed. ‘Right enough,’ he said.

  We left it at that. After all, there’s nothing inherently suspicious about somebody having a sneezing fit in the middle of the night. Unless, of course, they never wake up.

  I was spark out myself when Greg Thomas made his presence felt again. Groggy with tiredness, I reached for the phone, registering the time on my bedside clock. Just after one o’clock. I’d been in bed for less than four hours. I’d barely grunted a greeting when a familiar voice battered my eardrum.

  ‘What the hell were you doing last night?’ Detective Inspector Phil Barclay demanded.

  ‘Listening in, boss,’ I said. ‘With Dennis. Like I was supposed to be. Why?’

  ‘Because while you were listening in, somebody cut Greg Thomas’s throat.’

  On my way to the scene, I called Jimmy Lister and tried to piece together what had happened. When the dayshift hadn’t heard a peep out of Thomas by noon, they’d grown suspicious. They began to wonder if he’d somehow done a runner. So they’d got the management company to let them into Thomas’s flat and they’d found him sprawled across his bed, throat gaping like some monstrous grin.

  By the time I got to the flat, there was a huddle of people on the landing. Drugs Squad, Serious Crime guys and of course, the Scaffies. Phil Barclay was at the centre of the group. ‘Ther
e you are, Chrissie,’ he said. ‘So how the hell did you miss a murder while you were staking out the victim?’ For Phil to turn on one of his own in front of other cops was unheard of. I knew I was in for a very rough ride.

  Before I could answer, Dennis emerged from the stairwell. ‘Listen to the tapes, boss,’ he said. ‘Then you’ll hear everything we did. Which is nothing.’

  ‘Except for the sneezing,’ I said slowly.

  All the eyes were on me now. ‘About twenty past three. Somebody had a sneezing fit. It must have lasted a couple of minutes at least.’ I looked at Dennis, who nodded in confirmation.

  ‘We assumed it was Thomas,’ he said.

  ‘That would fit,’ one of the other cops said. I didn’t know his name, but I knew he was Serious Crime. ‘The pathologist estimates time of death between two and five a.m.’

  Samuels from the Drugs Squad stuck his head out of the flat. ‘Phil, do you want to take a look inside, see if anything’s out of place from when you had the video running?’

  Barclay looked momentarily uncomfortable. ‘Chrissie, you and Dennis take a look. I didn’t really pay much attention to the video footage.’

  ‘Talk about distancing yourself,’ Dennis muttered as we entered the flat, sidestepping a SOCO who was examining the lock on the door through a jeweller’s loupe.

  I paused and said, ‘Key or picks?’

  The SOCO looked up. ‘Picks, I’d say. Fresh scratches on the tumblers.’

  ‘He must have been bloody good,’ I said. ‘We never heard a thing.’

  Greg Thomas wasn’t a pretty sight. I was supposed to be looking round the flat, but my eyes were constantly drawn back to the bed. ‘How come we never heard it? You’d think he’d have made some sort of noise.’

  One of the technicians looked up from the surface he was dusting for prints. ‘The doc said it must have been an incredibly sharp blade. Went through right to the spine, knife through butter. He maybe would have made a wee gurgle, but that’s all.’