Four Below

by Peter Helton

  And so the anger ate at what was left of you. Actually they had all been really good, the doctors, the nurses, the physio. But none of them were stuck in a wheelchair, were they? At the end of their working day, they literally walked away from it all. When the compensation came, it should be enough to adapt a car for wheelchair use so he’d be able to drive again, not be driven, not depend on others.

  But until then it was muscle power. He pulled the padded jacket on over his broad shoulders. And what a set of muscles it had become. All the bloody leg muscles he’d developed from cycling had wasted away, but his upper torso had changed beyond recognition from the relentless workout. Quite ironic, really: he was probably fitter now than he was before the accident. But if these muscles gave out, then you were on your way down. You’d stall. You’d roll to a halt. And become a target for the do-gooders. He tucked the tartan blanket around his lower body. He hated it, it made him feel even more like an invalid, but it was minus whatever out there. He slipped his mobile phone and a couple of heat pads that he could activate into the side pocket of the chair. His hand hovered over the camera on the table; he hesitated, then decided against taking it. He was only going shopping. Of course the photography tutor would have frowned at this. A real photographer, Ellen would have said, never leaves the house without his or her camera.

  The ramp had been completely cleared, swept and gritted. Once at the bottom, he powered himself on to the pavement. It was a pleasure to be moving again, even at these modest speeds. He enjoyed the exertion, the forward movement, the crisp air. Even car fumes became sharp, separate smells in this cold, rather than an all-enveloping miasma. The sun was beginning to break through and the light intensified as it reflected off the snow on cars parked along Ashley Road. The going was good until a cluster of uncollected rubbish sacks forced him to slow down. A stupid van had been parked half on the pavement by some thoughtless moron. The side door slid open and a swarthy-looking idiot jumped out right into his path. Before he could shout his protest, the man landed a punch on his throat. Now all he could do was struggle for air; it was like trying to breathe through a straw. A broad sheet of MDF slid like a ramp from the van, his chair was tilted backwards, and seconds later the door slammed to behind him, shutting out the light.

  Fairfield checked her purse for cash. Had to leave enough for a cab. Plenty there. Not that this pub was that expensive. It just felt like it. Another pint of Butcombe, then. She always drank beer in pubs, wine at home. Though this being a posh gastropub, they probably had drinkable wine here. Not the same, though, not when you had worked up a thirst during a long, frustrating, annoying, bloody tedious day at work. What you dreamt of then was a cool pint standing on a polished bar top with many of its mates waiting in the barrel.

  Not exactly her usual haunt, the Albion. Or Clifton, for that matter, though she did like Boyces Avenue in summer. She was looking for a new pub to adopt, one uncontaminated by association with her ex or her job. She’d left the car at the station, knew then already she would drink more than was good for her, and had taken a taxi. It was an ancient place tarted up tastefully and minimally, with polished wood floors and practically bare walls, just the antidote she needed tonight for the poison that had leached into her mood from interview rooms full of stupidity and frozen squats smelling of stale piss. Two men drinking at a table across the room kept looking over. Only a matter of time before woman drinking on her own would transform in their minds to woman needing to be chatted up. There were other, slower poisons, too. Being stuck at a small station with Superintendent Denkhaus was one. It was inner city but definitely not inner circle; for that you had to be at Trinity Road, not at a crumbling, make-do-and-mend nick like Albany Road.

  ‘Anything else for you?’ the barman asked.

  She realized she’d been staring into space, staring right through him. She was getting drunk, no doubt about it. And why the hell not? Should have eaten something, though. Should probably eat something now, before it was too late. ‘Yeah, some olives would be nice.’

  The barman furnished her with a triangular dish bearing a small mount of olives, a little dish of olive oil and some pieces of crusty bread to dunk into it. Meze. Her mother would approve. In Greece, no one drank without some food on the table. She dunked the bread and savoured the earthy taste of the oil – it wasn’t bad. For a split second Katarina Vasiliou made an appearance, remembering Corfu, smelling the dusty tracks through the olive groves. A good draught from her pint of Butcombe should have washed her away. Not this time, it seemed. Of course after the divorce she could go back to her maiden name, though she had not felt maidenly for some time. She had only toyed with the idea out of anger, had long decided that Fairfield worked for her and changing her name back would simply attract attention to her domestic arrangements and the failure of her marriage. As a police officer you could more or less do what you liked in your private life as long as it didn’t attract public attention, but if you wanted to progress beyond inspector it became an issue, and beyond superintendent you could forget it. A presentable spouse and preferably a couple of kids at uni were practically a precondition.

  Ah well, here it came. The one who’d been sitting with his back to her had decided to make his move. He came over carrying two empty pint glasses. ‘Hi. Erm, I, that is, we couldn’t help noticing you were on your own. I hope you’ve not been stood up?’

  Fairfield took a draught from her pint before looking up at him. ‘Shouldn’t that be I hope you’ve been stood up? I haven’t, thanks for asking.’

  ‘I’m just off to the bar. Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re quite welcome to join us at our table.’

  ‘Ditto.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ He stood there for a few seconds more, looking down at her with an expression that was meant to say what are we going to do with you?, then went on his way.

  Fairfield’s mood plummeted further. He’d been an okay-looking guy, nothing wrong with him, not pushy or geeky or full of himself, and she’d even liked his sweater, but somehow the mere thought of nice blokes in nice sweaters made her heart sink. Nice shoes, too, she noticed. She drained her glass, popped the last olive into her mouth and got to her feet. She wanted another drink, but it was getting late. She’d call a taxi out there, from her mobile, rather than wait for one in here, with the nice bloke and his mate throwing glances in her direction.

  The narrow little street was still busy. The air didn’t feel as cold as when she had come up here, or perhaps that was the alcohol. While she stood on the pavement buttoning up her coat and digging for her mobile in her bag, the door of the Primrose Café across the street opened to let out a murmur of conviviality and a couple linking arms. Fairfield looked up and froze. McLusky with what had to be his partner. She didn’t know he had one. It was too late to hide; he had spotted her straight away.

  ‘Hey, Kat!’ He happily steered his companion towards her and made the introductions. ‘This is Kat Fairfield. Katarina. Louise Rennie.’

  ‘Hi, Katarina. I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Louise said.

  ‘I’m sure you have,’ Fairfield said. ‘It’s all lies, you know.’

  ‘I see. But the idiot failed to mention just how stunningly beautiful you are.’ Rennie squeezed McLusky’s arm to stop him protesting.

  ‘What are you doing up here?’ he said instead.

  ‘Oh, I just came up for a quiet drink after work.’ Damn, why had she said that? She could see on McLusky’s face that he had no problems doing the arithmetic: four hours of quiet drinking. And Louise had also lifted one ironic eyebrow. ‘I was just calling myself a cab.’ She waggled her phone as evidence.

  ‘On a Saturday night? Forget it,’ Rennie said. ‘You’d be waiting out here in the cold for ever. I live just around the corner. Literally. Come in for a coffee, then you can call a cab and wait for it in comfort.’ Fairfield was still looking for polite words of refusal as Louise Rennie gently took the mobile ou
t of her hand and with a smile dropped it back into her handbag. ‘Good, let’s go.’ She abandoned McLusky’s arm and linked hers with Fairfield’s instead. ‘You’re the first of Liam’s colleagues I’ve met. At last someone who can dish the dirt on DI McLusky.’

  As Louise steered her away, Fairfield looked over her shoulder to see how all this was going down with him, but he seemed in an indestructibly good mood, smiling back at her. She fell into step and sighed with resignation. She was not in the mood for chat, but if the woman really lived just around the corner, then perhaps waiting for a cab there did make sense. Two minutes later, Louise disengaged her arm to unlock the front door.

  ‘When you said literally round the corner, you meant that … literally.’

  ‘Yes, it’s different from practically round the corner, which in my experience means a ten-minute walk.’ Their eyes met for a second. ‘For the record, you can always take me at my word. Literally.’

  Once inside the flat, McLusky was dispatched to the kitchen to make the coffee. Louise flicked on the gas fire in the grate with the remote.

  ‘Witchcraft,’ Fairfield said accusingly. Despite herself, she was impressed. The size of the sitting room, of the windows, of the bookcases. The quality of the furnishings. None of this had arrived flat-packed. ‘I obviously have the wrong job, I see that now.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Well, for a start you must get a lot more leisure time than me if you have time to read all those books.’ She also wouldn’t have the space for them; there had to be a couple of thousand volumes.

  They faced each other across the coffee table, each sitting in a corner of their own two-seater sofa while McLusky clinked and clattered in the kitchen. ‘Do you have a television?’ Louise asked.

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘Put it out for the binmen to collect. You’d be surprised how much time to read books you’ll find once you’ve got rid of it.’

  Fairfield looked around. ‘I take it you don’t have a TV set?’

  ‘Listen, no woman lies on her deathbed thinking I wish I’d spent more time watching telly.’ She got up. ‘I can smell coffee; I’d better give the invalid a hand with the carrying.’

  Fairfield watched her traverse the room and disappear through the door. There was so much space here, and air. The room seemed to breathe clarity, exhale order and purpose. You could feel freer in a room like this, uncrowded. And Louise belonged here, she saw that straight away; it was very her, as the cliché went.

  ‘Right,’ said Louise as she reappeared carrying the tray of coffee things and with McLusky in tow. ‘No cop-shop talk allowed tonight, however tempting it must be for you two.’

  McLusky dismissed it. ‘Shop talk tempting? Hardly.’

  ‘Well, detectives do moan a lot at each other,’ Fairfield admitted. ‘Pay and conditions, that kind of thing. It’s a stressful job and it’s easy to take it with you everywhere.’

  McLusky sat down, then wriggled a moment until he had freed his radio from the back of his trousers. He slid it on to the coffee table.

  ‘I rest my case,’ Fairfield said.

  While Louise poured the coffee, McLusky lit a cigarette. ‘If you’re smoking, then so will I.’ She took a short, slender cigar from a box on the coffee table and lit it, releasing blue smoke towards the ceiling. She sat back and gave Fairfield an inquisitive look. ‘Right, I’m starting my own investigation now. Your parents are Greek? Where in Greece are they from …?’

  Half an hour later, it was McLusky’s mobile that interrupted the conversation. He answered it and limped towards the kitchen as he talked, but stopped before he even got to the door. ‘Hotwells? Give me ten to fifteen, Jane.’

  Louise closed her eyes and took a deep breath before self-control was restored. ‘You’re not, are you?’

  ‘Yes, sorry.’

  ‘Another body on the cycle path, perhaps?’

  ‘Oh no, this one’s different.’

  Louise walked McLusky to the front door and put her arms around him. ‘Will it take all night?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘How about breakfast, then? Here, take my keys. It’s your turn to wake me with something freshly squeezed. Pick up a few croissants or something.’ She kissed him goodbye and gently closed the door behind him.

  In the sitting room, Fairfield was standing up, mobile in hand. ‘I’d better call that taxi, then.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense, put that phone away. I think more coffee would be a bad idea, though. How about some whisky? Or better still: some brandy. There’s a bottle I’ve been meaning to open for ages. And then I’ll teach you how to smoke cigars. Brandy and cigars were meant for each other.’

  He stood by his car, waved to Austin and quickly lit a cigarette to fortify himself before he had to enter the zone where face masks and protective clothing would make such luxuries impossible. The dead man had been a wheelchair user; that was as much as McLusky knew. His chair lay upturned near a concrete pillar, more than thirty feet from the body, which was lying in the snow closer to the road.

  The body had ended up in the unclaimed wilderness under the Cumberland Basin flyover. Even drifts of snow and the darkness of the night could not hide the hideousness of this place. It was a non-space, a forlorn area in the concrete shadows of the roads, between fat concrete pillars. This stretch of the A4 had now been closed to traffic. Police vehicles with blue lights flashing marked each end of the area. Torchlight swept the ground; generators for the arc lights were being unloaded from a van. An ambulance stood idle.

  McLusky had pulled on to the verge before the roadblock, next to a burnt-out motorbike. There was so little left of it, he found it impossible to guess what make it had been. He tried not to think of the place he had just left as he stood there and quietly cursed with smoking breath. Even the graffiti on the nearest bit of concrete looked as if the artist had been depressed by his canvas. Austin walked up. ‘Give me one minute,’ McLusky told him, holding up his cigarette in defence.

  ‘All right if I talk?’

  ‘Oh, by all means, Jane. Have you caught who did it yet?’

  Austin ignored him. McLusky was not the only one in a bad mood; when the call had come, Eve had been halfway through undressing him on the sofa. While he took the call, she’d slammed into the bathroom and not answered his knock on the door. ‘You’ll like this one. We have a witness who saw the body being dumped.’

  ‘What? Where? How? Is he still here?’ McLusky took a last greedy drag from the cigarette before flicking it towards the burnt-out bike.

  ‘He’s over in that Polo, a Mr Hicks.’ Austin waved his notebook towards a red car parked close to a police vehicle under the flyover. McLusky was already limping in that direction. ‘Nothing brilliantly useful, though; he only saw the vehicle.’ Austin fell into step. ‘According to him, the victim was pushed out of a moving van. In his wheelchair.’

  ‘Marvellous. That really is the height of laziness.’ The man in the Polo was talking on the phone, but when McLusky approached the car, he put his mobile away and got out. ‘We can talk in your car if that’s better,’ McLusky told him.

  ‘No, no. Been sitting there for ages. Good to move about a bit.’ He was a plain-looking man in his forties; the blue flashing lights gave his pale face an unhealthy tinge. ‘Will I have to stay much longer?’

  ‘I’ll just need to ask a few questions. You saw the incident?’

  ‘Yes, it happened right in front of my eyes. I mean, I couldn’t believe it; it was just like you see in a film. Totally unreal. I didn’t actually see the door open, but the van was driving along and then this bloke in a wheelchair just shot out the side and hit the road. The van never slowed down. It was horrible.’

  ‘Where were you when this happened?’

  ‘Oh, I was driving about seventy, eighty yards behind. I stood on the brakes, I can tell you. The bloke flew out of the wheelchair and tumbled along the side of the road, turning over and over, and the wheelchair flew on even further. The
y must have been doing about fifty? I stopped and ran to him, but it was too late, he was dead; I mean, you could tell straight away he was dead, his head was all smashed in. And they never even slowed down. I mean, who’d do that to a man in a wheelchair? It can’t have been an accident, can it? The way he shot out of there, someone must have pushed him.’

  ‘Quite possibly. Can you describe the van for me, please?’

  ‘It was just a van. One of those box-like ones. I don’t know what make.’

  ‘Colour?’

  ‘I think it was blue or green. It’s hard to say with the orange street lights; everything looks a bit … grimy. Oh yeah, and I got the impression it was dirty, sprayed with mud at the back.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you noticed the index number? The number plate?’ Austin asked.

  ‘At that distance? Actually, I’m not sure there was a number plate, come to think of it.’

  ‘And you couldn’t say what make the van was.’ Austin already knew the answer.

  ‘No idea. Sorry. Can I go now? I’ve someone waiting for me.’

  Austin glanced for guidance at McLusky, who just nodded morosely, turned on his heel and limped away towards the corpse. ‘We could show him photographs of the backs of vans,’ Austin suggested when he caught up with him. ‘See if anything rings a bell with him.’

  ‘We already know how that will go. He’ll either confidently point at the wrong one or give us a choice of six different makes, either green, blue or red, which narrows it down to a million bloody vans.’

  ‘We know it has a side door …’