High-Wired

by Andrea Frazer

  ‘I think I’d better get home tonight. I could do with doing some laundry, and if I get back late, I might be able to get it on without the pathetic performance from beyond the annexe door. I am having a good time, but I have to exercise some sort of responsibility. I can’t just abandon the place and stop keeping myself clean and tidy.’ When was the woman anything other than pristine? thought Olivia, but she let it go. Lauren was old enough to make her own decisions.

  ‘You know you’d have been welcome to stay with us and do your smalls in our machine,’ she replied.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, but I just want to keep an eye on the place. They’ll be gone soon, and I want to make sure that that bitch doesn’t go off with anything of mine, at least anything that I value. I wouldn’t put anything past her. She’s already stolen my husband from beneath my nose, and I don’t want her doing the same with my jewellery. I shall take that into the bank tomorrow, ask them to put it in a safety deposit box for a while until I stop feeling vulnerable on my own.’

  ‘Do you want Leon to drop you off home?’

  ‘No, my car’s at yours, and I’ve had nothing since I left your place hours ago, and then it was only one small – well, small-ish – glass of wine.’

  They didn’t get back to the cottage until a little after midnight, but it was a merry group that rolled out of Leon’s van. Olivia even went so far as to hug Lauren goodnight, a gesture that was definitely not in her normal repertoire. Leon chugged away in his old bus with a wave out of the driver’s window, and Hal opened the cottage door. The two women waved goodbye, and Lauren went over to her car, rummaging through her handbag to locate her keys.

  As she strapped herself in, she suddenly felt apprehensive. It was all very well declaring that she had to act responsibly when she was sitting in a dimly lit club with a friend. It was quite another to think of running into Kenneth or Gerda even at this late hour, and she sent up a little prayer that they would be long asleep when she slipped into the house.

  As she drew up at the old barn a hideous thought lodged in her head. The man wouldn’t have had the audacity to change the locks, would he, or the code on the alarm system? Her key inserted in the door she twisted it and, with a great sigh of relief, she felt the lock give. It had been a mad few seconds thinking about the other possibilities, and she realised that, if Kenneth earned just a bit less, and didn’t have such good prospects, it was something that might well have happened.

  As quietly as she could she slipped off her coat and shoes and put them away in the hall cupboard. Leaving her handbag by the stairs, she made her way to the kitchen. No lights were burning, but she still felt her hands trembling and damp with sweat. She couldn’t wait until the day arrived when they would both go, and she could just look forward to seeing the children again. She really would have to speak to that local school about them attending.

  Perhaps they could start after Christmas, she thought as she switched on the light. With a flash of panic, she realised she could hear the sound of someone else breathing, and turned round to face the bogey. She had almost no time at all to realise that Kenneth was standing right behind her, before his fist hit the bridge of her glasses. They broke into two halves, and she could see the blurry impression of drops of blood falling to the ground.

  Why the hell had he done that? She’d done nothing wrong. It was he who had committed adultery. She was paralysed with shock, and could neither move to pick up her broken glasses, nor move away to get something to stem the bleeding from her nose. ‘What was that for?’ she asked in a tremulous voice with little volume.

  ‘Why couldn’t you just stay at home and be the wife I wanted, instead of having to go running back to work as soon as the children were approaching school age. You’ve brought all this on yourself.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘If you’d just stayed here and managed without a nanny for your precious working shifts, I’d never have thought of another woman, but you got so wrapped up in your precious job that I felt alienated in my own home – and God knows I pay enough for it.’

  ‘And what was I supposed to do when you were away working?’ asked Lauren, still stunned by his accusation.

  ‘You could have taken on some good works, so that you were free for me when I was here. As it is, you were so taken up with your working life that our relationship just withered and died.’

  ‘You mean you wanted me to be a virtual prisoner, on call for if and when you needed my services?’

  ‘No. I wanted you to be here with me for all the hours I was at home.’

  ‘You could have taken us all with you. There are English schools out there, or they could have boarded and flown out to us in the school holidays.’

  ‘When I suggested it once, you said you didn’t want to, and you were so vehement about not wanting to live in that particular country that I never brought it up again.’

  ‘I might not have been keen, but how could I know that my marriage depended on it?’

  ‘You couldn’t, and neither could I. This time you’ve reaped what you have sown. This is all your doing, and I wanted you to be aware of that.’

  Lauren didn’t know how she did it, but she pulled back a fist and thumped Kenneth right in the eye, making him stagger and put his hand up to the injured area. ‘If you touch me again I shall press charges for assault,’ she informed him, a ring of steel in her voice. How dare he blame his own infidelity on her!

  ‘I want you out of my kitchen now, or I’m going to call the police. I need to do some laundry, I want to do it in peace, and I don’t want to set eyes on you or your tart before you leave. Just get out of my house and leave me alone.’

  He turned on his heel and left her. As she loaded dirty laundry into the machine and set it going, she decided she’d have to get a bolt for that door. She’d do it first thing in the morning. If he ever came back to stay there to visit the children – if there was nothing she could legally do to stop him – at least she could stop him entering the house at his leisure. She’d also have to be the one that had all the locks changed and change the code on the burglar alarm. She couldn’t risk him just waltzing into the house whenever he wanted something.

  In her bedroom, she pushed Kenneth’s erstwhile bedside table against the door, stripped off her clothes, and got into bed. She simply was too stunned to be bothered with a shower. Her nose hurt abominably, and she’d taken some time to clean up the blood and find her spare set of glasses, but it was with a sense of history repeating itself she cried herself to sleep again.

  The following morning, one look in the bathroom mirror told her that she wouldn’t be able to hide what had happened; she had no chance of keeping Kenneth’s inexplicable violence to herself. Both her eyes were blackening, and her nose was red and swollen. The bruising had drained down to below her eyes, so that even sunglasses wouldn’t hide her shameful state, nor avoid enquiries as to how it had happened.

  She could, of course, lie, but that would do her no good whatsoever. If she told people she’d had an accident, they might think her clumsy or even a drunk. No, she’d have to let everyone know that her high-flyer husband, as well as being unfaithful to her with the au pair, had also punched her on the nose for daring to have a life outside the house. She had no intention of covering up for his unreasonable behaviour, and if he told anyone that she’d thumped him, then perhaps she might get the chance to tell whomever he’d told exactly why she’d hit him. He’d started it.

  Now she began to feel childish, but then things like this probably made everyone feel a bit infantile. Maybe Kenneth would claim that he’d hit her back, that she’d hit him first. Oh, what the hell. She’d just tell the whole story, including the bit where she’d struck him. Her reaction didn’t seem unreasonable, given the circumstances.

  Dammit, she’d leave buying the bolt for the annexe door until her way home. Kenneth wouldn’t dare have the locks changed, denying his children shelter when they would be home in only a few weeks, and he simply didn�
��t have enough time to legally get possession of it. He’d be gone very soon, and she’d just have to brazen things out. All that time spent on her own during term-time – Gerda hardly counted as company – had made her a stronger person, and she still had the diversion of her work to keep her mind occupied.

  When she got into the office she found Olivia already there, looking grey with exhaustion, her clothes the same ones as she had been wearing the night before and her desk covered with paperwork.

  ‘What happened to you?’ she asked, getting the question in first before her boss asked it. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Since about one a.m.,’ came the bleak reply.

  ‘But you were sozzled when I left just after midnight,’ replied Lauren with surprise.

  ‘It’s amazing how sobering another dead body can be, when coupled with several cups of very strong coffee and a taxi to stop one losing one’s licence,’ she replied, somewhat grandly.

  ‘Whose body?’ asked Lauren, with a sinking feeling in her stomach, Kenneth now completely forgotten.

  ‘Genni Lacey’s.’

  ‘Oh, no. Where was she found? Who found her? Any idea what happened to her? Was it an accident that went unreported?’

  ‘Whoa, Sergeant. Let me start at the beginning. She was found bundled into one of the commercial wheelie bins at the back of the River View pub by the landlord, when he took out the rubbish after he’d closed up and cleared away. Her body had clearly been dumped; no sign of an accident. We have no evidence yet of who did it, but I still reckon on our quartet of usual suspects, and I’m going to have to step up our investigations now there has been a third murder.

  ‘It looks like she died from an injected overdose of drugs, but not straight after she disappeared. This was no unreported accident: this was cold-blooded murder, and it also looks as if she’d been raped violently several times. I’m waiting on results from Dylan MacArthur. We got him out of bed and he said he’d start on it straightaway. There’s madness here, or just pure, unadulterated evil.’

  ‘Was she beaten like the others?’ asked Lauren, a moue of disgust wrinkling her nose painfully.

  ‘She’d been slapped around a little, but the most prominent marks were bite marks. We’ve got some sick pervert, or perverts, plural, on our hands.’

  ‘Have her parents been informed?’

  It was only this far into their conversation that Olivia looked up enough to notice that Lauren had received some sort of trauma to her face, and her mouth fell open in disbelief. Without hesitation, she asked, ‘Did Kenneth do that to you? Or Gerda? Why?’

  ‘Kenneth. Because I’ve got a life,’ she replied, and then burst into laughter that soon became hysterical, and Olivia had to give her a slap across the cheek to stop her.

  ‘Thanks a bunch, guv. I actually needed that.’ Before she could continue, the DI’s phone rang and she answered it almost as a reflex reaction. After a couple of minutes, mainly of listening, she put down the handset and turned to Lauren.

  ‘Sorry to rain on your parade, but our guy from that nasty head-on has come round – remember the man so full of drugs that he went straight into another car and killed three people? He’s talking about drugs, and it sounds as if he wants to get something off his chest, in return for immunity. Well, we’ll see about that. We’ll let him unburden himself, first, shall we? The only promises on offer are of the pie-crust variety at the moment. Come on, Raccoon-Face, we’ve got a job to do.’ Raccoon-Face was a risk, but Lauren didn’t seem to take it amiss.

  ‘Please don’t make me laugh, boss. It hurts. And why are you treating this as a priority?’

  ‘Because I think that everything’s part and parcel of the same thing: the supposed abduction, the two first murders, the drugs in this town, and this guy that was so pumped full of drugs that he fell unconscious at the wheel of his car. Maybe even this latest body.’

  ‘How can you be sure? Is there any evidence?’

  ‘None whatsoever,’ replied Olivia, ‘but as sure as I’m riding this unicycle, they’re part and parcel of the same thing.’ Pause. ‘Don’t laugh. It’ll hurt.’

  ‘It does.’

  They were allowed only just over ten minutes with the man from the accident, whose name turned out to be Peter Hanger; Cliff to his friends and associates. He kept lapsing back into a state of either unconsciousness or sleep while they questioned him, but they did glean enough information to know that he was bringing a big cache of illegal drugs down to the town. There was to be a big drive to up sales and sort out those dealers who were ripping off the management.

  He told them he had been asked to get together with some of the local members of the gang and sort out a list of names that only he had, but which he had not read at the time. He had been more nervous of what was expected of him, for he was not usually a violent man. The car had been stuffed with drugs, and as he had become a user, he couldn’t resist testing the merchandise. Unfortunately for him it had proved purer than he was used to, hence the car crash.

  He’d never met the boss of the ring and had always received his instructions from someone on an unidentifiable phone with a heavily disguised voice. It had seemed the sort of stuff that cheap movies were made of, but he’d never questioned it because he had some serious gambling debts, and the work paid well.

  ‘Can’t you remember the names on the list, or how many of them there were?’ asked Hardy. ‘I’m sure you couldn’t have resisted the temptation to have a quick butcher’s.’

  He had replied that he had had just a quick squint at them – he thought – but things had become blurry since his accident, and he couldn’t remember anything in any detail until some hours before the accident happened.

  At that point they were ejected from his room as he needed to rest. Hardy observed that it was just as well that the man had been involved in an accident, or he might be involved in a murder case by now, but she wished she had been able to prise his local contact out of him, and who was on that hit list.

  ‘I’d bet my shirt on it being our first two murder victims, and somehow I’ve got to tie up that abduction and murder with it too. I know it seems unlikely, but I can feel it in my water that they’re connected.’

  ‘It could have been a list of local goons,’ suggested Lauren. ‘Why don’t we get those men in again and re-question them? We can leave the driver to the Drugs Squad.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  As they went to leave the ward they were approached by a nurse.

  ‘Yes, Sister,’ said Hardy, ‘what can we do for you?’

  ‘Are you the two detectives that came in to question our unconscious man?’

  ‘We are, indeed.’

  ‘I thought so,’ said the nurse, ‘only, I’ve just heard from one of my colleagues that that little girl that was so seriously injured in the other car involved in the accident …’

  ‘Yes, go on,’ Hardy prompted her.

  ‘They’ve done tests for brain death. I know it seems a bit early, but there really seemed so little hope for her, and the results have just come through. I’m afraid she is brain-dead, and her father is being asked to come in to discuss when – and if, I suppose – we turn off her life support machine. Poor man, to lose his wife and his daughter so tragically.’

  ‘That’ll be another charge of causing death by dangerous driving,’ commented DI Hardy in her official voice, her face as hard as marble.

  Back in the car, Hardy dissolved noisily into tears and, when her sergeant asked her what was the matter, she replied, ‘It was only a few days ago that my own son was in there, and we didn’t know whether he was going to live or die. I’ve been so lucky, and I should stop feeling sorry for myself.’

  ‘Nonsense. You’ve been through a dreadful time.’

  ‘So have you,’ retorted the DI, trying her hardest to pull herself together. ‘Now, describe to me how you got those two lovely black eyes,’ and she sang the last four words, making Groves simultaneously smile and wince with pain.
‘Come on, let’s stop off at mine for a very quick coffee so you can tell me in complete privacy.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  As Olivia was spluttering with rage at what Kenneth had done and said, simultaneously making coffee – the good stuff this time – Lauren noticed that her boss walked with a slight limp that she had never observed before.

  ‘You didn’t fall over last night when we got back, did you?’ she asked.

  ‘Whatever makes you think that?’ Olivia was obviously surprised at the question.

  ‘Because you were rather pissed last night, pardon my language, and today you seem to be limping a bit. I just wondered if, in the hurry to sober up and get back to the station, you might have twisted your ankle.’

  ‘If only it were that simple,’ she replied. ‘It only happens when I’m very tired, and after the last few days that I’ve had, followed by a night on the lash and then being called back into work to deal with another grisly murder, you can imagine that I’m not as fresh as a daisy.’

  ‘Go on, then,’ Lauren urged her.

  ‘I got shot. Simple as that.’

  ‘You were shot?’ Lauren’s eyebrows nearly disappeared into her hairline, causing her considerable facial pain. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I’m surprised some of the older staff haven’t told you. It was back when I was a PC, and the drugs squad was looking for volunteers for a raid on a notorious club on the seafront – it’s not there now. It burnt down a few years ago. Anyway, PC Muggins here volunteers, we went in mob-handed – stupid really – and some guy pulls out a gun, which we didn’t expect – we had no idea there were any firearms, not like nowadays when we know there usually will be. The guy with the gun shouts a warning and then I get this burning feeling in my calf.