Seven Bridges

by LJ Ross

  He was almost hyperventilating now, and Ryan took the phone from him, rapping out his details for the telephone operative and ordering a couple of first responders to attend Lucas’s home.

  When the call ended, he found that MacKenzie held a couple of plastic bags in her gloved hands and he nodded his silent thanks.

  “Jack, we need your jacket.”

  The man’s eyes were dark pools of misery, matched only by the silent heartbreak each of them felt as MacKenzie led him towards the bathroom.

  “Come on now,” she murmured. “Anna’s put the kettle on and we’ll get you a nice cup of sugary tea.”

  As they disappeared into the downstairs cloakroom, Ryan and Phillips exchanged an eloquent look.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Phillips muttered. “D’you think he’s—”

  “I don’t think anything until I’ve seen a crime scene,” Ryan said. “I’ll put a call through to the Chief Constable. They need somebody senior to oversee the first response, if there’s anything to find.”

  Phillips nodded.

  “She can’t keep either of us on the investigation,” he warned.

  “I know. But she’ll still need somebody making sure the scene doesn’t turn into a circus.”

  “What about Jack?”

  “MacKenzie will have to take him in,” Ryan replied. “There’s nothing else for it. You know that, as well as I do.”

  Phillips nodded sadly.

  “Aye, I know. I s’pose I was hoping…” He shrugged heavily and then shook his head. “I’ll have a word with Denise.”

  Ryan stood for a long moment watching his sergeant’s burly figure retreating down the corridor, his balding head bent in defeat. He thought of the dinner they had shared and wondered how long it would be before they laughed like that again.

  CHAPTER 2

  It was almost nine-thirty by the time Ryan drove south along the A1 motorway towards the city of Newcastle upon Tyne. At his side, Phillips occupied the passenger seat and stared sightlessly out into the night, watching the flicker of headlights flare up against the glass.

  “How’d Morrison take it?” he asked, eventually.

  Ryan thought back to the difficult conversation he’d had with their Chief Constable. Sandra Morrison had been enjoying a quiet Saturday night in with a rom-com and a Chinese takeaway, no doubt congratulating herself on having finally restored calm productivity to the Criminal Investigation Department after two years of turbulence.

  He’d been sorry to burst her bubble.

  “She’s a professional,” he said, blithely ignoring the stream of expletives she’d emitted when he’d first relayed the news. “Morrison was shocked, but she took it in her stride. We’re to oversee the first response while she gets in touch with Durham CID, then hand over to whoever they send, no arguments.”

  “Durham?”

  “Yeah. We can’t have anyone from our end handling this. There’ll be enough talk, as it is, without fanning the flames with any suggestion of bias.”

  “Aye, that’s two superintendents in as many years,” Phillips agreed. “The papers will have a field day.”

  “And then, there’s Jack.”

  Silence fell once again while scenarios and possibilities ran through their heads.

  “Did he say anything else?” Phillips asked, turning away from the window. “Did he tell you what happened?”

  Ryan flicked the indicator to overtake a slow-moving caravan, his profile silhouetted briefly in the passing light.

  “Jack said she was dead and he was adamant he didn’t hurt her,” Ryan replied. “But he was covered in blood and I cautioned him not to tell me anything further.”

  He felt Phillips eyes boring into the side of his head.

  “What else could I do? He came to me before he rang it in. He turned up, covered in blood. I didn’t want him to incriminate himself.”

  Phillips sighed.

  “Aye, I know. It was the right thing to do. But…look, it could have been an accident— Jack wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “I know that. But even the most non-violent of people can be tested to their limits,” Ryan said, softly.

  He thought of the man he had been, all those years ago. He remembered the whispered threats from the very same woman who now lay dead, the daily insults that had chipped away at the very fabric of himself until there had been hardly anything left to call his own. He remembered the terrible urge to make it stop, the animal need to defend himself in any way he could.

  Though that half-broken man was a distant memory now, he still recognised it in others.

  “We don’t know what happened, yet. But, if Jack says he didn’t hurt her, then I believe him.”

  To his embarrassment, Phillips felt a lump rise to his throat.

  “I didn’t know they were—I didn’t know they were, ah…” He came to an awkward halt.

  Ryan’s jaw tightened.

  “You didn’t know they were together, out of hours. Are you surprised?”

  “She’s fifteen years older than him,” Phillips argued.

  Unbelievably, that brought a reluctant smile to Ryan’s face.

  “Love is blind. Just ask MacKenzie.”

  Phillips let out a bark of laughter.

  “Aye, I’m hoping she doesn’t gan’ to Specsavers any time soon, or I’ll be for the boot.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Ryan manoeuvred his car through a network of residential streets in an upmarket part of the city known as Jesmond. It was conveniently located near the centre, which made it popular with singles, couples and well-heeled families alike. A few streets further afield, Saturday night revellers enjoyed a liquid dinner after the working week in the bars and clubs of Osborne Road but, as Ryan pulled into a parking bay near Lucas’s smart Edwardian terrace, there was nobody to be seen except the shadowed figures of the first responders who had been dispatched to protect the scene.

  “Pinter lives around here,” Phillips remarked. “Might be worth giving him a call.”

  He thought of the chief pathologist attached to Northumbria CID, who was usually their first choice in cases such as these.

  “Not ours to make,” Ryan reminded him, though it stuck in his throat.

  They slammed out of the car and hurried across the empty street, huddling into their coats to protect themselves against the cold wind that whipped along the row of houses and left a thin layer of frost on the tiny patches of lawn separating them from the pavement.

  When they reached Lucas’s front door, they were greeted by two police constables from Tyne and Wear area command, who came to attention as they approached.

  “Been here long?” Ryan asked, making a mental note of their badge numbers.

  The shorter of the two decided to act as spokesperson from behind a thick, magenta pink woollen scarf that was not police issue. He could hardly blame her; the wind was so cold it cut through to the bone.

  “About thirty minutes, sir. We’ve been taking it in turns to do shifts on the door, to keep warm.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “What’ve we got in there?”

  The woman’s eyes clouded as she tried to focus on her report and not on the nausea that still rocked her system.

  “We, ah, we arrived at DCS Lucas’s home at approximately nine-fifteen, responding to an order from Control. The door was closed but the lights were on inside the house, as they are now, sir. We touched as little as possible.”

  Ryan looked over her shoulder to the front bay window, which was illuminated behind a set of voile curtains.

  “We rang the doorbell and knocked repeatedly, calling out a warning before we tried the door. It was unlocked, so we entered using the appropriate warning.”

  Ryan nodded, watching her bear down against the memory of what she had seen, admiring her for the attempt. It was a hard line they walked, particularly when they didn’t deal with the most serious crimes every day, as he did. You got used to it, after a while.

  “Go on
.”

  “We entered the property and began a search, in case DCS Lucas needed medical attention. We found her almost immediately, in the living room.”

  Ryan’s eyes strayed back to the window.

  “Alright,” he murmured. “Reinforcements are on the way. Set up a cordon, keep an eye on the door and log anybody who so much as looks at the house.”

  With that, Ryan covered his hands and feet, took a deep breath and prepared to face his past, one last time.

  * * *

  Ryan felt an acute sense of déjà vu as he stepped inside Lucas’s home.

  He stood just inside the entrance hall and looked around, thinking that it might have been a replica of the house she’d owned in London, all those years ago. Her tastes had changed very little and every wall had been painted white or palest grey; there were no photographs on display nor any mementoes that might give the casual observer any clue of her personality or preferences. Lucas had chosen to live inside an expensive blank canvas, leaving her free to paint the day however she chose and to reinvent herself depending upon her mood.

  “You ready?” Phillips rumbled, from somewhere over his shoulder.

  Ryan gave himself a mental shake and headed towards the living room, following the ripening scent of death that carried on the air. Beneath it, he could detect the heavy floral perfume Lucas had favoured and the sensory memory made his stomach turn. He steeled himself, preparing his body for worse to come. The sight of death in all its untarnished glory did not grow any easier with time or experience but at least he’d learned how to manage his reaction to it.

  Mostly.

  They came to a standstill outside the living room door and Phillips looked across at the huddled, shrunken figure of his former boss lying on the far side of the room. He experienced the same wave of compassion he always felt for the dead, a basic sadness at the loss of a life but no more than that. He was no hypocrite and would not pretend he had thought a great deal of the woman in life or that he would greatly mourn her death. But then, he had not had the dubious pleasure of truly knowing her, unlike the tall, silent man standing beside him.

  He looked up at Ryan’s face, which was so hard it might have been cast in granite.

  “Y’ alreet, lad?”

  Ryan surveyed the room with calm, watchful grey eyes. He noted the deep gash on Lucas’s head, saw the drying blood matting her dark hair and pooling out in a fan on the polished wooden floor where she had fallen, and waited to feel pity. He waited to feel outrage at the premature loss of a life half-lived but, instead, his overriding emotion was relief. The feeling soared like a phoenix, as though an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

  And what did that say of his character? he wondered.

  It was his vocation to seek justice for the dead and to avenge them for the sake of those who lived on. He made a point never to discriminate between those who had lived ‘good’ or ‘bad’ lives. Who was he to judge? He was not their Maker, even if he believed in such a thing.

  For all that, Ryan found himself unmoved by the sight of the woman’s body lying crumpled on the floor and he knew then that the Chief Constable had been right to appoint somebody else to run the investigation. It was chastening to admit that he could not promise Jennifer Lucas the impartiality she deserved because he could not look upon her body and muster the pity to try. It was a watershed moment for him, one he would need to think about at some other time.

  “I’m fine,” was all he said.

  Phillips searched Ryan’s face and opened his mouth as if to say something, then thought better of it.

  “Looks like there was a tussle,” he remarked instead, pointing to a spilt cup of coffee and a small crystal vase that had fallen from the mantelpiece, scattering shards of glass and artificial flowers across the floor.

  Ryan had seen it too.

  “I’d say she was holding the cup when she fell,” he said. “It shattered across the room, nowhere near the coffee table. She must have had it in her hand when it was dislodged.”

  Phillips tried to imagine it, wishing he had Ryan’s unique ability to reconstruct a crime scene.

  “Maybe she tried to steady herself and caught the edge of the vase as she went down.”

  Ryan looked at an empty spot on the mantel.

  “Faulkner’s the expert,” he said of their senior crime scene investigator. “But I’d say you’re right on that score, Frank.”

  Phillips sucked in a breath and asked the burning question.

  “Well? How would you call it? Suspicious or accidental?”

  “Once again, that’s not my call to make,” Ryan murmured, but his eyes continued to trace the details of the room. “And we haven’t heard Jack’s story, yet. But I know one thing: a woman doesn’t usually fall to her death in her own living room without some outside force to ease the journey. Look at the edge of that radiator, Frank.”

  Phillips peered across the room and noted the remnants of blood and brain matter on the sharp, heavy edge of a cast iron radiator not far from Lucas’s body.

  “Aye, that’d do it,” he agreed.

  Ryan turned away and faced his friend.

  “I can see two wounds on her head and there might be more once Pinter examines her properly. I might have passed off the first as an accident but how in the hell did she come by the second?”

  Jack Lowerson’s name hung on the air between them, unspoken. Neither man could even dare to think it.

  CHAPTER 3

  DCI Joan Tebbutt was an attractive woman in her late fifties with a quiet manner, a penchant for reading and over twenty-five years’ experience on the force. She might have been away from her usual turf—and that made things harder—but she considered herself both ready and able to take up the challenge of investigating the death of a high-profile colleague from a neighbouring constabulary.

  She hadn’t needed a brusque conversation with her superintendent to know what the media reaction would be in response to the latest misfortune to befall Northumbria CID. It had been a while since the papers had seen their last juicy murder and it was a gift to have one involving local detectives the public trusted to solve rather than to perpetrate crimes. Understandably, the bigwigs wanted it all tied up in a neat little bow as quickly as possible.

  Well, they’d just have to see about that.

  The late DCS Jennifer Lucas had been a forty-seven-year-old woman at the top of her game. She’d been glossy and polished with a cloud of shiny brown hair and open blue eyes that looked great on camera. If the in-house gazette was to be believed, she’d done wonders for public relations; revamping operations and making sure plenty of ‘lessons had been learned’ from past mistakes and corruption that had been rife during her predecessor’s tenure. She’d succeeded in a Man’s World and, in other circumstances, Joan might have admired her.

  But a woman like that didn’t just turn up dead for no good reason and Tebbutt hadn’t been born yesterday. It would take more than a few good news stories in the Police Gazette for her to overlook more basic methods of communication, such as the gossip chain in the staff canteen. In her experience, it was amazing what could be learned by sitting there and listening while she munched on a ham and cheese panini.

  As she pulled up on the street outside Lucas’s home, her keen eye took in the police cordon and the constables diverting passers-by away from the crime scene, both measures meeting with her approval. A dark van she recognised as belonging to the team of CSIs was parked nearby and she spotted one of them talking to a tall, good-looking man she presumed to be DCI Ryan and an older man she knew to be DS Phillips.

  Ryan peeled away from the small group to meet her. She watched his face closely for the usual signs of displeasure at having been passed over for an investigation but was pleasantly surprised to find it lacking. He flashed a brief, professional smile and she couldn’t help but think that the younger female officers in the staff canteen hadn’t over-exaggerated his charms on that score either.

&nbs
p; But that was neither here nor there.

  “DCI Tebbutt?”

  “DCI Ryan,” she shook the hand he extended. “I understand you’ve been overseeing the first response. Thanks for holding the fort.”

  Ryan nodded, and she had the fleeting impression that he was assessing her. That was fair enough; she was doing the very same thing.

  “DS Phillips and I entered the property just before ten-thirty. We’re both in agreement that the circumstances of the case point to a suspicious death but, of course, that will be your call to make.”

  She inclined her head in the direction of the CSIs, who were zipping themselves into polypropylene suits.

  “Did you call them in?”

  Ryan gave a slight smile.

  “No, the Chief Constable had them on standby. Faulkner’s waiting for your go-ahead before they make a start. We’re not looking to tread on any toes.”

  Tebbutt stuck her hands in the pockets of her waxed green jacket.

  “You’re good at this,” she told him, forthrightly. “I’d heard you were good but, frankly, I was expecting to find a bit more testosterone flying around.”

  Ryan huffed out a laugh.

  “It would accomplish nothing. You’re very welcome to this one, believe me.”

  Tebbutt sensed a thread of discord.

  “We’ll need to have a chat soon, Ryan. You’ll need to make a statement—both of you,” she added, as Phillips left his discussion with Faulkner and moved across to join them. “I understand you were both present when DC Lowerson turned up at your house, unannounced.”

  Phillips shuffled his feet, but Ryan simply nodded.

  “Lowerson was in a state of shock when he arrived but we’ve followed procedures to the letter. We bagged up his clothing and DI MacKenzie took him and the evidence down to the station, so he could make a full statement.”

  Tebbutt nodded.

  “I know. I’ve just come from there,” she said, surprising them both. “I thought it would be prudent to strike while the iron was hot, as it were.”

  “How’s he doing?” Phillips burst out. “He had a bad shock—”