Death on the Levels

by David Hodges

  She frowned, tapping her front teeth with her fingernails as she tried to come up with a solution. What she needed was a diversion of some sort – something to distract the police long enough for her to get into Elsie Norman’s bungalow and out again with her ‘prize’ before anyone was the wiser. But what? Then she glimpsed the orange flicker of an open fire in the window of the property next door and remembered the industrial site where she had bought her burger only that morning. Yes, that was it. And it was within easy pedalling distance of where she now stood too. She felt her heart jump. Of course. So simple and yet so effective. It just couldn’t fail. All she needed was a little more time to set things up.

  Seconds later, she mounted her bicycle again and slipped away into the night.

  CHAPTER 23

  Daniel Tomlinson had been working for Lester Security for what seemed like forever – ever since his retirement from the Metropolitan Police. Now just short of sixty-two and not in the best of health – mainly because of his beer-induced weight and forty-a-day smoking habit – he was actively looking for a way to pack in the job early and spend more time with his lively grandchildren, whom he adored.

  Pullman Paints was just one of any number of factories on his list of nightly checks – an ugly, rambling site of concrete and corrugated iron in an industrial estate just outside Highbridge. Why it was actually on his list of vulnerable premises he couldn’t fathom, as the site had nothing of real value to criminals – just sheds full of tins of paint produced by Pullman’s monster machines for the building trade – but it wasn’t his place to question the wisdom of those who had hired the company he worked for. They had to have their reasons and he happened to know that there was a nice wooden hut just inside the double gates where he could shelter from the cold and the wet with his whisky flask and a roll-up, so who was he to complain?

  ‘Just go with the flow, Dan,’ he’d often said to himself. ‘Go with the flow and be thankful for small mercies.’

  But that was until he made his discovery during his rounds on what had to be his hundredth visit to the factory, a discovery that rooted him to the spot with shock for several seconds. The chain-link fence to one side of the main padlocked gates had been cut and peeled right back.

  ‘Bloody Nora!’ he breathed, following the trail of moonlight with his eyes as it flowed through the gaping hole and along the service road into the site.

  Automatically, he reached for the button of the personal radio clipped to the lapel of his uniform jacket to alert Lester Security’s control centre, but then he paused, thinking quickly as he glanced around him. He’d reported what had turned out to be false alarms on two other premises the previous month and a third would do him no good at all – especially as some of his younger colleagues were already poking fun at him behind his back, suggesting he was heading for the funny farm. Maybe he should check around first before sending the balloon up. After all, the site was in a pretty poor state, with much of the chain-link already rusted and bulging in places, and the damage could easily have been the work of mischievous kids from the nearby housing estate, looking for somewhere quiet to roll a joint. Anyway, why would anyone want to screw a paint factory? It didn’t make sense.

  Mind made up, he unclipped his flashlight and bent down to duck through the hole, swearing as he caught the back of his hand on one of the severed strands of the fence.

  The river of moonlight led him between a couple of long, corrugated-iron sheds he assumed to be paint stores, to a large, brick building, which faced him across a tarmacked apron divided up into white-painted parking bays. He’d done the rounds of the site before and knew that the building he was looking at housed the factory and administrative offices, so was no doubt a hive of activity during the day. It was dead now, of course, and the only light visible in the windows of the building was that provided by the reflected light of the moon.

  He shivered slightly. There was something about the place on this brilliant moonlit night that gave him the creeps and he glanced quickly around him, sensing without any tangible reason that he was being watched.

  ‘Get a grip, you old fool,’ he muttered to himself, thinking of his thirty-year police career. ‘What are you, some kind of bloody wimp?’

  Forcing himself across the car park towards the factory block, he checked the double doors but found them to be securely locked. Then, moving slowly along the wall to his left, he turned his attention to the transom windows. Nothing. Everything seemed secure. He was on the point of taking a look at the back of the place when he heard it – a loud ‘clang’ coming from the paint sheds on other side of the car park.

  He wheeled around, the hairs stirring on the back of his neck. Immediately he saw the light. It seemed to be framed in the side window of one of the sheds. An intense flame that blossomed into an angry glare even as he looked. Fire!

  Depressing the button of his personal radio, he shouted his call-sign and location to the control room as he ran towards the shed, which in the space of those few seconds had erupted into a mammoth blaze.

  Georgina Lupin emerged from the rear of the building even as Daniel reached it. But the security officer was hardly conscious of the figure heading for the front gates at a characteristic loping run. At that moment the thousands of litres of paint, thinners and other corrosive substances stacked in 5-litre cans on the steel racks exploded in a massive fireball, engulfing both him and the adjoining shed and providing Daniel Tomlinson with a much more dramatic, though terminal, exit from his job than the early retirement he had envisaged.

  *

  Kate couldn’t sleep. Jenny Grey had reluctantly taken over from her an hour before and was somewhere downstairs, keeping vigil, but this didn’t give Kate any real sense of reassurance, despite the fact that her colleague was equipped with a Taser. She knew from personal experience what Georgina Lupin was like and how dangerous the woman could be, Taser or not. As Kate herself was not so trained and therefore not authorized to carry the immobilizing weapon, she felt very vulnerable with just her police issue CS gas spray for protection. She could practically feel George’s presence nearby and was jolted into instant wakefulness at every creak and groan of the old sixties’ bungalow, every grunt and snore of the old woman sleeping in the next room, visualizing the bald-headed psychopath creeping up the stairs from the hallway.

  In the end, she got up and left the room to check around – and it was just as well that she did. She found Jenny curled up, fast asleep in one of the armchairs in the sitting room downstairs and shook her roughly by the shoulder.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she hissed. ‘You’re supposed to be keeping watch.’

  ‘Sorry, skipper,’ the young woman mumbled. ‘I just couldn’t keep my eyes open. What time is it?’

  Kate moved to the window and peered out through the tiny gap in the curtains, glancing briefly at the luminous dial of her wristwatch in the process. ‘Just after three,’ she replied, scrutinizing the small front garden and empty street. ‘Go and get your head down. I’ll continue this watch.’

  ‘But I should be doing that. It’s my turn.’

  Kate grunted. ‘Forget it,’ she retorted. ‘I can’t sleep anyway. Have you called in a “sit” report to control, as per schedule?’

  ‘Ten minutes ago. Told them nothing was happening.’

  Kate nodded grimly. ‘Let’s hope it stays that way.’

  But it didn’t. Within twenty minutes of Jenny disappearing in the direction of the stairs, Kate heard the dull and not too distant ‘whoomph’ of an explosion and, returning quickly to the front window and pressing her face against the glass, she saw the fiery glare lighting up the night sky beyond the bungalows towards the end of the street. It was a major fire obviously and she guessed it was located on the other side of the fields she had checked out before, following Elsie Norman’s murder. More explosions followed and this was closely followed by the scream of sirens.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded on her radi
o’s dedicated channel.

  ‘Major fire,’ the control room operator replied tersely. ‘Paint factory on an industrial estate. Outskirts of Highbridge. Fire brigade and all available units en route.’

  ‘Cause known?’

  ‘Too early to say.’

  Kate frowned, feeling distinctly uneasy. But she didn’t communicate the fact to the operator.

  ‘Keep us in the loop,’ she said before signing off.

  A grunt sufficed as an answer and the phone went dead, leaving her to the stillness of the night.

  For a few moments she stood in the middle of the room, chewing her bottom lip and thinking. Fires on industrial sites were not uncommon and most of them turned out to be due to electrical faults, but it seemed a bit coincidental that one should break out on this night of all nights and just a few fields away from the little bungalow development. Maybe she was getting paranoid, but it occurred to her that an incident of this nature was almost certain to suck in every available resource from miles around – including some, if not all, the potential back-up she had been promised in the event of George paying Iris Naylor a visit. Lupin might be crazy, but she was also highly intelligent and would have known only too well what the consequences of such a serious incident would be. As a diversionary tactic, a major fire with all the risk to life and property that it posed – not only from the flames themselves, but also from the toxic cloud that it generated – had no equal and that bothered Kate more than she cared to admit.

  As a reflex action, she abruptly turned on her heel, heading back along the short hallway and upstairs to the front bedroom where Iris Naylor was sleeping, her torch lighting her way but masked in one hand. Loud snores still emanated from the room, but she poked her head inside anyway, just to make sure all was in order. The old woman was lying on her back in a sliver of moonlight, propped up by three or four pillows. Her mouth was wide open and her slight frame in the flannel nightdress trembled with each reverberation that issued from the back of her throat.

  Kate gave a slightly amused smile and, crossing to the window and carefully closing the narrow gap in the curtains, she returned to the landing and shut the bedroom door quietly behind her.

  For a few moments more she stood there, with her head on one side, listening intently. Above the snores she could hear the sound of more sirens on the main road perhaps 2 miles away, almost certainly heading for the blazing factory. But otherwise there was nothing.

  Next, she checked on her colleague and found that she was also out for the count. Peering round the door of the spare bedroom, she just managed to make out the hump on the single bed under the window and marvelled at Jenny’s ability to sleep so soundly in such circumstances. She hesitated for a second, wondering if she should wake her with her apprehensions, but then thought better of it. They would almost certainly turn out to be groundless and she would end up looking a complete fool.

  The floorboards creaked as she withdrew from the room and made her way back downstairs, but it was the only sound to disturb what now felt like an unnatural stillness. The prelude to something perhaps, or maybe just her paranoid imaginings?

  The beam of her torch glinted on the stainless-steel kettle standing alone on the cooker hob in the kitchen and she jumped involuntarily as something suddenly passed in front of it. But it was only the black cat Iris Naylor had brought with her and she gave a relieved chuckle as she bent down to ruffle its ears.

  ‘Out on the razzle, are you, puss?’ she breathed. ‘Let’s hope you’re the only one.’

  Switching off her torch, she crossed to the small window and parted the Venetian blinds to peer out into the back garden – spending a few moments studying the patchy shadows where the moonlight failed to reach. But she saw no one and finally allowed the blinds to fall into place again.

  Turning back into the kitchen after testing the handle of the rear door to make sure it was securely locked, she filled the kettle from the kitchen tap and switched it on. After making herself a black coffee she returned to the sitting room, sipping from the china mug as she went.

  The night retained its composure after the earlier disruptions, the sirens no longer screaming out their warning, but the curtains were touched by a faint orange glow. She peered through a chink and saw that the blaze on the other side of the fields had strengthened considerably, lighting up the whole horizon and spilling out clouds of heavy black smoke, tendrils of which had already begun to reach across the face of the moon.

  She let the curtain drop back into place and was on the point of dropping into an armchair to finish her coffee, when she heard a loud ‘crack’ like glass breaking, apparently coming from the rear of the house. Dumping her mug on a coffee table, she tiptoed across the room to the hall and stared into the gloom, pulling her torch back out of the pocket of her coat as she did so but without switching it on.

  Silence. She could feel it pressing down on her like a tangible thing. She fancied she heard movement in the hall and on sudden impulse, flicked on the torch.

  The cold, green eyes met hers in an unwavering stare and she inhaled sharply. It was the cat again, no doubt seeking company, and it continued playing with what seemed to be some sort of small medicine bottle it had picked up somewhere, pouncing on it and seizing it with its jaws before rolling over on to its back with its claws trapping the thing between them as if it were a mouse.

  Kate took a deep breath. No doubt the sound she had heard was the bottle striking the kitchen tiles in the course of pussy’s game. The damned animal would give her a heart attack if it carried on like this – if it didn’t cut itself on the glass first. She directed her torch down the hall towards the kitchen she had only just checked. Everything looked fine.

  She shivered, thinking of the horror films she had watched as a teenager. It was always the cat that would first startle the teenage girl in the creepy house, wasn’t it? Usually in the cellar, the attic or the outside washroom. And then, just after it had materialized and the girl had relaxed with a sigh of relief, the psychopathic killer would jump out on her from the shadows and cut her throat. She scowled, glancing quickly behind her.

  ‘Nice one, Kate,’ she murmured to herself. ‘Just what I need right now.’

  Returning to the sitting room, she checked the street outside again, then dropped into the armchair she had just left.

  As she did so, Hayden’s chubby smiling face appeared in her mind’s eye. She wondered where he was at that precise moment – still on late duty perhaps? Maybe he was at the fire with everyone else? There could be evacuations underway from nearby houses, which was standard practice if dangerous, toxic fumes were present, and CID as well as uniformed officers would be deployed to knock on doors. Furthermore, if the incident turned out to be suspect, there would be a crime scene to preserve after the fire service had done their stuff and an investigation to undertake.

  She scowled. Yeah, but it was more likely that he had already gone off duty and was at that very moment tucked up with his new love in Uphill. The creep.

  The thought of him in bed with another woman conjured up some very unpleasant visions, but despite closing her eyes tightly for a few seconds, these refused to go away and they would have plagued her for a lot longer had she not been abruptly shaken out of her reverie by a more immediate concern – what she thought was a series of dull thuds coming from somewhere not too far away from where she was sitting.

  She held her breath and leaned forward in the chair, ears straining for a repeat of the sound, eyes fixed intently on the dark, oblong slash of the sitting room door. But she was unable to detect any furtive movement outside in the hall and the sounds were not repeated. Frowning, she climbed slowly to her feet and crossed the room to peer round the edge of the door, thinking that maybe the cat was up to its tricks again or either Iris or her own police colleague had got up to use the toilet upstairs. But nothing now stirred, upstairs or downstairs.

  She stepped carefully into the hallway, switching on her torch but masking the be
am in one hand, as before. Through the open kitchen door, she could see a trace of moonlight on the quarry tiles, but there was no sign of anyone when she directed the full beam of her torch into the small room and certainly nowhere to hide. But then she saw the broken glass – a few glittering shards lying close to the back door – and felt an immediate adrenalin rush.

  Striding swiftly into the room, she saw that the back door was ajar and one of the six glass panels in the upper part of the door – the one nearest to the lock, which had been repaired after Georgina Lupin had previously broken in – had been smashed. Much of the glass, which seemed to have been taped up before being broken, was lying on the grass outside, with tape still attached to some fragments. It was obvious to Kate’s trained eye that the pieces had been carefully removed from the frame and deposited there to enable the insertion of a hand to turn the key and unlock the door. Georgina Lupin was inside the bungalow.

  Depressing the transmit button of her personal radio, she blurted the pre-arranged coded emergency call to the control room. Then, without waiting for a reply, she jerked the CS gas spray from her pocket and headed for the stairs, her torch blazing a path through the gloom as she took them two at a time.

  The door to the spare room was wide open and, despite the gloom, the figure draped across the bed was clearly visible. Snapping on the light, she took in the horrific scene in a split second. Jenny was lying on her back, half in, half out of the bed, her tousled curls practically touching the floor, her eyes bulging from their sockets and lips drawn back in the grotesque, rictus grin of strangulation. From the state of the bedclothes, it was obvious that she had put up quite a fight before she’d died, but the policewoman hadn’t stood a chance against her much more powerful adversary. Kate now knew the cause of the thudding sounds that had alerted her and she felt the guilt all but consume her at the thought that, while she had been rooting around downstairs, just feet above her head her young colleague had been fighting for her life. But she was left with no time for self-recriminations. Even as she choked back the bile surging up into her throat, a shrieking cry, followed by the unmistakable blast of a firearm, erupted from the room opposite, spinning her around and sending her charging across the landing.