Four Below

by Peter Helton

  It was a kind of snuffling sound, like a suppressed cough or laugh, and so close that he could not tell which direction it had come from. He swung the torch left and right. Then he turned it off and closed his eyes. He thought of Leigh Woods in the dark. He thought he could smell something that did not belong here. ‘Police, show yourself,’ he called loudly.

  It was as if the echoing call itself brought the place crashing down on top of him. It was the tilting shadows and movement of air that warned him, only too late. Even as he turned to ward off the avalanche of boxes, the f rst one knocked him off his feet. Bundles of piping, each weighing five stone or more, cascaded after it, pinning him to the concrete floor, burying him, crushing down. He cried out first in dismay, then in pain as the last bundle of metal rods dealt his left ankle a hammer blow in the dark. The light had been turned off. He heard the door he had entered by being gently closed, making the darkness complete.

  ‘It’s not much of a lead, but it’s the first bit of good news we’ve had since the deaths started,’ Denkhaus said.

  ‘It feels like it. Sugar?’

  Denkhaus made a show of patting the pockets of his suit. ‘Yes, I don’t seem to have brought my sweetener.’

  It was one of the superintendent’s favourite delusions that he carried his little box of sweeteners everywhere to shave a few calories off his daily intake. Fairfield had never even seen the thing. She stirred both sugar and cream into his cup before putting it down in front of him and sliding back into the seat behind her desk. She always made sure that the superintendent’s chair was placed slightly to the left, making it less formal. She disliked Denkhaus and found him hard going. She had treated the discovery that his super-efficient secretary was mysteriously incapable of making decent coffee as an opportunity to fit another string to her bow. It wasn’t much, perhaps, but whenever he deigned to come to her office and drink her coffee, he seemed better disposed to listen to whatever she had to say.

  ‘I knew persistency would pay off eventually. We got lucky, doubly lucky. It was the sisterof the dead junkie who decided to talk. She’s not an addict. She does use drugs, of course, E and blow, but she’s against hard drugs. And perhaps she’s not yet quite clear about what dangers squealing can bring. But she’s given us a good description of the man she says was her brother’s dealer.’

  ‘Shame it’s not the anthrax we’re talking about.’ Denkhaus frowned, took a sip of coffee. His frown disappeared. ‘Still. Doubly lucky, you said?’

  ‘Yes. The description fits the man both Sorbie and I saw making off from a squat in Easton where a dead junkie had been discovered. He had his face obscured then, but together with the description, I’m confident we’ll recognize him.’

  ‘Well, that sounds like at last—’ A knock on the door, fast, urgent, interrupted him.

  ‘Come,’ Fairfield called.

  It was DC Dearlove. ‘Sorry, sir, ma’m, from control: DI McLusky has been injured. They’ve taken him to the Royal Infirmary.’

  ‘Right. We were finished here anyway, weren’t we?’ Denkhaus said. He left his barely touched coffee behind as he followed Dearlove into the corridor. ‘What happened and how bad is he …?’ Fairfield heard him say before Denkhaus closed the door.

  For a full minute Fairfield stood by her desk, staring down at it. Then she cleared away the coffee cups. As she did so, she noticed that her tremor had returned.

  ‘Have you come to spread your germs through the entire hospital?’ McLusky complained. He was sitting on an easy-wipe chair in the A&E cubicle. His left foot was heavily bandaged.

  Austin thought the DI looked pale. ‘I don’t think my germs can survive their germs. Are you ready to leave, then?’

  ‘I am, but you can put the wheelchair back where you found it. I hurt my foot, not snapped my spine.’

  ‘They said you broke your toes, too. Cracked your ribs …’

  ‘I did, I did. But it’s hardly tragic. They don’t even put you in plaster. And …’ He reached beside him. ‘I have been furnished with these excellent NHS crutches and shall walk out under my own steam.’

  ‘You know how to use those?’

  ‘You forget, they ran me over in Southampton. Got plenty of practice then.’ He pushed himself up and tried not to wince. It was his two cracked ribs that hurt most whenever he moved. ‘Do me one favour, though.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Carry my boot.’

  Austin did, feeling slightly foolish without quite knowing why. ‘Was it deliberate?’

  ‘Oh yes, someone put his weight behind the stuff and pushed hard.’

  ‘Who, do you think?’

  ‘Not sure what I think.’ He propelled himself expertly along the ground-floor corridor on his right foot and the crutches.

  ‘You’re a natural,’ Austin said. ‘Were they waiting for you there?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. They could have seen me coming, but as a method of attacking someone, it’s rubbish. I think they were there, heard me stupidly announce myself as police and panicked. I’d clocked someone was in there and said so. Not so clever in retrospect.’ They had reached the exit and the doors opened in front of them. ‘Oh, crap. I’d forgotten all about the snow.’

  ‘Thought you had. Don’t worry, I’ll try and catch you if you slip. Car’s over there.’

  With some groaning and much complaining about the smallness of Austin’s car, McLusky managed to get into the passenger seat.

  ‘Where to now?’

  McLusky checked his watch. ‘Might as well just drive me home. Or better still, drop me at the pub.’

  ‘What about the lockup?’

  ‘I got the local nick to secure the doors for us. We’ll pick up the keys tomorrow, bright and early.’ Just now he was ready for a bit of self-medication. ‘Not sure how bright I’ll be, but I’ll be early.’

  Not very, the answer would have been had McLusky remembered the question when he poured himself his first coffee in the morning. It was still dark outside, and even the Rossis, who ran the Italian grocer’s downstairs, hadn’t yet started setting out their vegetable stalls on the pavement. McLusky moved convincingly on one crutch around his kitchen, putting the pot back on the heat diffuser on the stove and catching toast from the toaster one-handed.

  He had stayed at the pub until closing time and hobbled home across the street in optimistic mood. Yet by two in the morning the self-medication had worn off. He had woken up feeling cold, with his foot throbbing and his ribcage sending out jabs of pain with every careless breath he took. After washing down a good dose of painkillers with some water – strictly a night-time drink – he had slept fitfully for another few hours until finally giving up altogether around five. Three times he had woken from dreams that involved things falling on him, knocking him down, burying him alive. The dream felt worse than his memories of the real event. In reality, it hadn’t taken him long to fish out his mobile and call for help. By the time a PC together with the caretaker arrived to fuss over him, he had managed to extricate himself from the boxes and even found the torch he had dropped. The trip to the hospital hadn’t been his idea, but the ambulance crew were adamant that he needed X-rays; his protestations that he was ‘just fine’ were soundly contradicted by his obvious inability to walk unaided.

  Now all he needed, apparently, was time to let it heal; keep it propped up; not move about too much. And the cracked ribs? Avoid exercise and, of course, coughing. He lit another cigarette, and the thought of not coughing made him cough.

  Austin called for him at eight. He had DC French with him, already sitting sideways on the back seat to allow the passenger seat to be pushed right back for the DI. French thought McLusky was mad not to stay at home, but she was in a good mood and glad to be out of the office. The last three days she had spent stuck in interview rooms with dickhead druggies or in front of the computer doing background checks. Not that they wanted her along for her expertise. She was only going to Portishead to drive the DI’s car back.
/>   Coffee sloshed around in McLusky’s stomach. He imagined it there, darkly bubbling and acidic, with bits of toast and paracetamol floating around on top. His foot throbbed and was cold, despite the fact that he had managed to pull a thick sock over the bandages. That in itself had been a painful procedure; so had dressing and undressing, because it made his ribs sing out. This morning he felt too groggy even to wind up Austin about his car.

  Austin noticed it. He didn’t admire machismo when it came to working despite illness and injury, but thought McLusky had other reasons for not taking a day off. He probably wanted to see if it had been worthwhile. He wanted to see what was in the lockup. Austin hoped for all their sakes they’d find more than yacht varnish and Sailing Monthly magazines.

  A PC from the local nick was already there, supervising the removal of the messy delivery that had done for McLusky’s foot. It belonged to the lockup on the left, where a small heating-engineering firm stored its supplies. The PC had opened the lockup for the owner, Roddy Gow, and when McLusky heaved himself through the door, most of the delivery had disappeared to where it belonged.

  ‘You weren’t here yesterday afternoon by any chance?’ he asked.

  Gow, who was working in nothing but a rugby shirt despite the cold, let the box he had begun to lift slip back to the ground and straightened up. ‘Are you going to ask me this question many more times? Because if you do, I’ll have a card printed: No I wasn’t. He’s asked me twice,’ he nodded towards the constable, ‘the caretaker did, and I had phone calls from you lot about it last night. I wasn’t here; I was in Cardiff, with the missus. This stuff,’ he picked up the box again, ‘should have arrived today, not yesterday. It’s called a clerical error.’

  The outside door had been secured by police; the double door to Donald Bice’s lockup had been sealed with police tape. Like a conjuror, McLusky produced the keys attached to the block of wood from his black jacket and handed it to French. ‘In we go, then.’

  French chose the right key first time. She pulled back the first leaf of the large door. McLusky only noticed that he had been holding his breath when he audibly expelled it. ‘Right, get SOCO down here pronto. I’m not going in there, there’s no room to swing my crutches. But you two have a careful look round.’

  The lockup was three times as long as it was wide. Right at the front stood the missing VW Passat, driven in nose first and parked close to the partition wall on the left. Behind it, in the gloom created by the snow-covered skylight, he could make out the shape of a sailing dinghy, covered in faded tarpaulin. A narrow corridor allowed access to the back, while the right-hand side was taken up by a workbench, storage lockers, and shelf units crammed with sailing paraphernalia, tools, paint cans, sagging cardboard boxes and generally the kind of clutter that accumulated when people had a lot of space to leave it in.

  French pulled on her gloves and clicked on a penlight. ‘Are we looking for anything in particular?’

  ‘Yes. We’re looking for anything that might have got Bice killed.’

  Austin opened the boot of the Passat. ‘I wonder if our dust expert SOCO can tell us how long the car’s been in here undisturbed. Boot’s empty.’

  French, meanwhile, had gingerly opened the driver’s door. ‘Forensics can probably tell us. Nothing interesting in the car that I can see without crawling all over it. Mind you, the keys are in the ignition.’

  ‘Perhaps they attacked him here, or got to him in his car and parked it here.’ McLusky remained leaning in the door frame. ‘Right, leave it, keep SOCO happy; tell me what else you see.’

  ‘Dinghy on a trailer.’ French lifted the tarpaulin, shone her torch underneath. ‘Sailing stuff inside.’

  ‘Sailing stuff?’ McLusky managed the first smile of the day.

  ‘Oars or paddles or whatever.’

  ‘You come from a long line of seafaring folk, DC French?’

  ‘Normandy peasant stock, sir.’

  ‘Sailing stuff it is, then. I think I’ll go next door.’ Bice’s lockup neighbour Gow was getting ready to leave. ‘How well did you know Donald Bice?’

  ‘I didn’t. To say hello to, but when I’m down here, I’m usually in a hurry to load stuff or drop things off and have no time to chat. Not that they were chatty themselves.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Did I say “they”?’

  ‘He brought people with him?’

  Roddy Gow thought for second. ‘Erm, no, but it wasn’t always him. Once or twice I saw a younger bloke.’

  ‘Could you describe him?’

  He could. ‘Yeah, quite a contrast to the older guy. He always had a tan. The younger one, he was blond, blue eyes, and quite pale.’

  McLusky thought he could smell marzipan. ‘When did you last see him here?’

  Gow shrugged and secured the door to his lockup, tested the lock. ‘Not sure. Last week, I think.’

  ‘There it is, page three.’ Ed folded the page over to give Phil Warren an opportunity to admire the item. In the top right corner, set into a box, ran the fat headline CAN YOU HELP SOLVE THIS MYSTERY? Underneath, a few lines set out the information that the ‘mysterious fragments’ had been received anonymously. The lucky puzzle solver would win a meal for two at a well-known pizza chain. The text surrounded the reproduction of the first piece of the photograph that had landed in the Herald’s post room. Warren glanced at it without comment and went back to clacking away at her keyboard, though slower than before. Ed picked up the paper and looked at it again. ‘Well, I’m glad we’re running it. We haven’t had anything like it for ages. We used to run stuff like that all the time.’

  Warren snorted. ‘Spot the ball.’

  ‘I know it seems naive now, but people really loved it. I remember blokes arguing over the pictures in the pub. And we used to stick close-ups of architectural detail on page three and give cash prizes to the eagle-eyed readers who could tell where they were taken.’

  ‘This is different. We don’t know where it was taken, or who the people are.’ She couldn’t believe the editor had gone for it. She wished Ed had never mentioned it to him. But circulation figures had dropped again, and even hits on the online edition had fallen. People were becoming news-weary. By the time they got home, they were convinced they had seen it all on their mobiles.

  This was different in other ways, too. Another slice of photograph had arrived, even narrower than the others. You could now see there were at least three people in the picture, though one was a little blurred. It was a night-time scene. Trees, a silver car, possibly a Mercedes. The tableau was illuminated by the headlights of the car, or another car. It was grainy, and it gave her the creeps.

  ‘That’s why we’re asking for “help to solve this mystery”.’

  She had argued against it with the editor. Whoever had taken the picture wanted something. It hadn’t been taken by a professional photographer, at least not a press photographer, or they wouldn’t be playing games with a local paper. To publish the picture slices meant doing the photographer’s bidding without knowing what his purpose was.

  The editor had asked her if she was feeling all right.

  The item would not appear in the online edition, only in hard copy. ‘It’s even grainier in print,’ Warren said. ‘With any luck, no one’s going to recognize it.’

  Ed shrugged and walked off. ‘The people in the photograph will, surely.’

  ‘You won’t even try and guess?’ Dearlove asked French, flicking the copy of the Bristol Herald on his desk.

  French shook her head and went back to work, logging on to the network. ‘Deedee, that could be anything. Could be the bottom of my garden. In fact I’m sure it must be.’

  ‘I’m going to keep this; they’ll print the next piece tomorrow.’ Not that he had any idea who he might invite out for a meal-for-two should he win. He definitely couldn’t ask French; she’d just laugh at him. He tore inexpertly around the mystery picture and stuck the piece of paper under a tin mug full of chewed and leaky biros. As
he did so, one of several empty crisp packets from his desk sailed to the floor.

  McLusky, holding a full mug of instant in his right and wielding a crutch with his left, eyed Dearlove’s desk with distaste as he hobbled past it. It was even messier than his own, and that suit definitely needed dry-cleaning. He’d talk to him about it in a quiet moment. Of course when he did, he would first have to make sure his own desk wasn’t strewn with pastry crumbs.

  In his office, he checked his watch. Twenty minutes or so. They’d call his mobile. He sat the mug on his desk and began straightening piles of papers, and the tottering hill of files on the floor beside his desk. The bin was heaped high with rubbish. He tried compressing it down, but he had done it several times before and it appeared the rubbish could only be compressed so far and no further. Still, the place didn’t look so bad now. Not as bad as Deedee’s, surely. His mobile chimed and he answered it. ‘Be right down. Well, actually it’ll take a couple of minutes.’

  Since his first outing to the Portishead lockup, McLusky had slush-proofed his left foot by tying a plastic carrier bag round it and stretching a second sock over that. It now looked even bigger, but it was no longer cold and felt better protected. He grabbed his second crutch and left the office.

  ‘That looks painful. I can see why you asked for an automatic,’ said the man who handed over the keys. The hire car, a graphite-coloured Alfa Romeo MiTo, looked improbably clean and shiny, at least for a vehicle that McLusky was going to drive. It brought back memories of a short-lived police Skoda he had once driven. He signed for it, adjusted the seat, stowed his crutches in the passenger space and drove off. He didn’t bring a camera; his phone took adequate pictures for what he had in mind.