A Long Time Dead

by Andrew Barrett

  “XW to Delta Alpha Three.”

  Micky’s eyes rolled. He was one half of the double-crewed unit known as Delta Alpha Three. “I don’t believe this,” he said, keying his mike. “2894 receiving.”

  “2894, can you and your partner expedite to one-zero-three Sandal Road?”

  “From 2894, yeah, I think you must have my duties mixed up,” he said, “I’m due off soon, over.”

  “2894, 10-20 your last; instructions passed from DI Shelby though, we have no other units to attend, over.”

  “10-20 that. Pass details again please.” He shook his head at Helen.

  “Yes, 2894, address is one-zero-three Sandal Road, Sandal. You are to place Inspector Weston into protective custody; he’s due there shortly after discharging himself from Pinderfields, over.”

  Micky gasped. “XW, er, 10-7 please.”

  “2894, you heard me right, no need to repeat, over.”

  “I thought that address was already under guard, over.”

  “It is, 2894, and it has to stay guarded. Chief Inspector Regan is authorising Inspector Weston’s arrest for his own protection.”

  “XW from 2894, 10-20, en route.”

  “XW further,” said the operator. “A room on the secure ward at Pinderfields has been made available. And 2894, you’re to remain on his door until we receive further instructions.”

  “Think I’ll save the paperwork for tomorrow.” Helen looked at the box. “Shall we save that for later too?” at last she smiled at him.

  Micky nodded, put the box away, and was about to lean forward and collect a kiss, when he suddenly thought of something. “Shit!” he bolted for the door, stopped and turned, “Helen, ring my phone, tell him to get away from Weston’s house.”

  “What? Tell who?”

  Micky whispered, arms flapping, “Roger. He borrowed my phone. He went to Weston’s house. He might still be there.”

  “Micky, I don’t think that’s very funny. Roger’s in serious—”

  “It’s true!”

  She laughed, “I know he’s dumb enough to break out of a cell, but... You knew about Roger and said nothing? Micky, I didn’t think you could be that dumb.”

  “Do it now before Weston finds him there. He’ll kill him.”

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  — One —

  Quickly, he grabbed one from each pair and hurried to the window. “Fuck,” he whispered, “no Hush Puppies.” Roger sighed. They’re downstairs, he thought. Have to be; it’s where I’d take my shoes off. He put them back, closed the doors and exited.

  The last door on the landing was to neither a closet nor a bedroom, but to another staircase. The steps wound tightly up to an attic room, the same room he saw on one of his recces, he guessed, where the light was on at some ridiculous hour. A tingle ran up Roger’s back and he gripped the banister.

  The higher he climbed, the more it smelled of stale smoke. He emerged into an attic so black he could have been wearing a blindfold, and swept his arms before him until he collided with the cold smooth surface of a leather office chair. Nearby was a desk.

  Micky’s mobile phone rang. “Shit!” Panicking, he tore at it and whispered, “Hello?”

  “Roger, Roger, it’s me, Helen.”

  “Helen? What—”

  “Get out of there!”

  “What?”

  “If you’re in Weston’s house, get out now; he’s on his way home.”

  Goose pimples flashed across his body. All he could think of was Weston exploding into the room and ripping his heart out.

  — Two —

  “What’s so urgent about this phone call anyhow?”

  “Geraldine, it’s business, now stop it with the questions while I’m driving.”

  “You’d better be careful, Colin, all this ‘business’ is liable to see you inside one day.”

  “Mind your tongue! It’s business that keeps you in foreign holidays and expensive jewellery; so treat me with some bleeding respect for a change.” He turned onto the drive and was not the least surprised to see the patrol car, or to find it blocking his favourite parking position. “Arsehole,” he said.

  “What’s he doing—”

  “Leave this to me, Geraldine. I mean it, keep your trap shut.”

  — Three —

  Roger closed the door and moved swiftly along the landing. He could hear voices outside, and crept to the window. On the driveway, Weston stood in front of the patrol car, arguing with the officer. Roger’s heart kicked. And then he heard a warble of sirens growing louder.

  Ignoring visions of Weston’s victorious fists, he shuffled back across the landing, and into the bathroom. He climbed on the edge of the bath and then the sink, opened the window and hoisted himself up before he heard the sirens stop. Doors banged. More voices.

  He was shaking.

  He heard a key in the front door. Weston’s voice boomed; several others responded and then, as Roger pulled himself through, the front door opened and Weston shouted, “You have no fucking authority to arrest me!”

  The house phone rang.

  Roger lowered his legs out into the cold and then his feet touched icy roof tiles.

  The phone stopped. Footsteps thudded up the stairs. Weston. The landing light came on. More shouting. More footsteps on the stairs.

  Roger’s feet took his weight. Until they slipped. He hit the roof on his side and then rolled off the edge and landed on the spongy grass. He couldn’t breathe, just squirmed, arms and legs moving feebly, feeling the rain on his bare face. In the glow of the garden lamps, he could see his glasses only a few feet away. Roger scooped them up and limped across to the gazebo.

  * * *

  “I should’ve started downstairs!” Still shaking, and slapping the steering wheel in a rage, Roger sped around Wakefield’s ring road, following a stream of red lights past Sainsbury’s, past Thornes Park and along towards Denby Dale. “Wasted chance.” Regardless of the fury, he tried to rationalise the defeat, knowing that once Paul processed all the evidence from the Bridgestock scene, Shelby would finally understand, and would have to search Weston’s house for evidence anyway. And, he reasoned, it would negate any worries he had about illegality or cross-contamination.

  All this theorising didn’t prevent him feeling robbed again.

  It was quiet when he turned onto the narrow road leading to Chris’s house. He drove straight past, staring at it and its surroundings, and keeping a watchful eye out for police. He saw no one; turned around and parked fifty yards from Chris’s house: a compromise between not having far to run dressed as he was, and not parking the car on the drive and scaring Chris away, or attracting the police unnecessarily.

  Not forgetting the car’s torch this time, he walked towards Chris’s house at a fast pace, breath clouding, fingers cold again, and bare arms numb and tender.

  The driveway was empty. There were no lights on inside the house. The white arms which he had torn from his suit earlier, still protruded from beneath the fallen fence, and the smell of dog shit wafted over from next door. He peered through the kitchen window, hands cupped to the glass. It was all quiet in there. “Where the fuck are you, Chris?” he whispered. “Should have been back hours ago.”

  He tried the handle. Locked. All the windows around here, around the back of the house, were shut tight. Even the bathroom window around the side of the house was shut. How the hell...

  Roger considered the dilemma of breaking and entering again. The back door was white UPVC with a window in the top half and a plastic panel in the bottom half. Strips of plastic beading held this panel in place. And if he wanted the beading out, he needed tools.

  He searched through Weston’s boot; moved aside the large WYP canvas bag containing foul weather gear, moved aside Weston’s assault boots, and lifted the carpet to access the spare wheel. Next to the spare was the jack, the wheel brace, a small selection of spanners. And a screwdriver.

  Quietly, he closed the boot.

 
“Everything alright, officer?”

  Roger dropped the screwdriver.

  An old man walking his dog stood on the footpath. The dog pulled at its leash, eager to resume its walk.

  “Fine, fine,” Roger retrieved the screwdriver. “Hush though; I’m on a job, okay.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “Ah, sorry, I can’t tell you.”

  “You’ve got blood on your lip, officer, did yer know.”

  “Ah, yeah—”

  “Drugs isn’t it? There’s loads o’ drugs round these parts, you know. You don’t have to tell me,” the old man nudged the side of his nose, “I know what’s goin’ on.” He looked down at the dog, “C’mon, Tappy,” he said. “Don’t worry,” he whispered to Roger, “I won’t say nothing.”

  “Thanks, appreciate it.”

  Tappy walked obediently by his master’s side, as his master took out a mobile phone and began talking, something about police around here again, and drugs.

  He set the torch down so that it shone towards the back door, and used the screwdriver to bend the beading away. It pinged and sprang out onto the path. The other three pieces surrendered and fell out without opposition. And that left only the panel, which, after a slight tap, dropped into his hands.

  A black hole stared at him. He crawled through and into the claustrophobic silence of Chris’s house. He’d been in this house only once; it was the Christmas before last, just after Chris split from his wife and they sold their old house; this being the place he bought with his half of the cash. Back then, it was tidy, well kept; the original a-place-for-everything-and-everything-in-its-place kind of home.

  He pressed the light switch. Nothing happened. He shone the torch around the kitchen, and blinked at what he saw. The kitchen worktop was invisible. A small mountain of chicken bones and pizza boxes covered it, empty KFC boxes. Dead cans of Pepsi and Coke lapped at the rim in the sink. The smell was not dissimilar to Sally Delaney’s house. He shuddered, “Jesus.”

  Part-burned candles and a scattering of dead matches lay on the windowsill, soot marks on the glass. In the corner, near the cooker was a small plastic bin. It was on its side, spilling rubbish and candle stubs, a pile of shoes nearby, one upside down. In the opposite corner, a blue Calor gas bottle hooked up to a portable stove.

  Roger edged into the lounge. There were no lights of any description; no standby lights on electrical equipment, no LED clocks, only a mild orange glow from the streetlamps fell into the room through the dirty window. He searched for the light switch, found it and turned it on. Again, nothing happened.

  He waved the torch, more part-burned candles. But what snatched his attention was a sagging green velour armchair with high wings and tasselled valances. A transistor radio, aerial extended, lay next to it on the carpet like a dead dog next to its dead master. And beside it, on a tiny round table was a phone, a pad and a disposable pen.

  Roger took off his glasses, tried to warm them up to stop them fogging with condensation. He replaced them, then, torch swivelling from side to side, inched deeper into Chris’s lounge.

  There wasn’t a single picture or photograph on any wall. A real bachelor pad, Roger thought.

  On the floor, by the armchair, were heaps of newspapers, copies of The Racing Post, form guides and magazines the summit of which would give a small child altitude sickness. In front of the chair was a pile of empty noodle pots, plastic forks inside, noodle juice stains on the cream carpet, more pieces of dead chicken and dozens of empty Lucozade bottles, and more soda cans. There was dust everywhere, and webs hanging from the corners of the room.

  “Shit, Chris, what do you do on an evening?”

  Below one of the larger cobwebs, was a mahogany shelf. It was a big shelf. The wood strong enough to hold a TV and VCR maybe. It supported nothing except a loose pyramid of paper, not newspaper or writing paper, but slips of paper all with the same red border and all with tick boxes, and each bore scribblings in black pen. In Chris’s hand writing. The slips were headed ‘Tony Paxman, Bookmaker’. And there were others from William Hill, and Ladbrokes. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them.

  Shaking his head, amazed by what he saw, Roger turned around. Nothing else but shadows of varying degrees of intensity.

  He reached across the empty chair and picked up the phone. It was greasy. He held near to his ear. No dial tone. On the pad was a red bill from British Telecom. Dated October 12th 1998.

  He took out Micky’s mobile phone and dialled the SOCO office number, hoping from some news from Paul.

  No answer. “Shit.”

  — Four —

  As Shelby and Firth climbed out of the car, the officer guarding Nicky Bridgestock’s house hastily flicked away a half-smoked cigarette and fumbled with his tie. “Can we see the scene log, please?” Firth asked.

  “Sure, yeah, no problem.” The officer leaned into his car and pulled a clipboard off the dash, passed it to Firth with gloved hands.

  Firth scanned through it. Shelby stared at the officer.

  “Christ,” said Firth. “The last entry on here was Paul Bryant signing out twenty minutes ago.”

  “No, that can’t be right.” Shelby snatched the clipboard. He read the entry and asked the officer, “Describe him to me.”

  “He was young with a big purple tie—”

  “Bastard! Come on, Lenny. That’s why we couldn’t find him back at the nick.”

  “Was he alone?” Firth shouted back.

  “Yeah,” said the officer. “What’s all this about?”

  — Five —

  Paul looked on as Barry slid the lifts this way and that, peering through a lens, marking intersections and bifurcations with a long pin. “Right hand,” he said without looking up. “You’ve got the thumb there. And opposite, on this lift, you’ve got index and middle fingers.” He now took the third lift, scrutinised it, “Again, a right hand. Thumb’s useless this time though, but ah... my God, these are good. Look,” he said to Paul, “see there, his name and address.”

  “That good?”

  He laughed. “If only it were true.”

  “So they’re good marks?”

  “Yep, very good. You’ve got a right thumb with a left-hand loop, a right index with a tented arch, and right middle with another tented arch.” And then Barry offered a weak laugh.

  “What?”

  “It’s strange how things can stick in your mind.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, I mean these marks. They look familiar.”

  “A set of fingerprints can look familiar?”

  “I mean the classification is nothing unusual, but the points... well, they seem familiar. See the delta below the loop on the thumb?”

  Paul looked through the glass and Barry slid his pointer from the centre of the loop down, across the ridge detail towards a triangular section of convergence just below it. “I see it, yeah.”

  “Five points between loop and delta. I just have the feeling I’ve seen it before very recently. Maybe it’ll come to me later.”

  “There’s a small problem that I forgot to mention, Barry.”

  He sat upright, clicked his back, and said, “I hate it when people say that. Means snaggy.”

  “Chris thinks they might belong to Weston.”

  “Who?”

  “Inspector Weston. Colin Weston.”

  “Right, let’s eliminate Inspector Weston then. Good,” he said, “it saves hours of work if we can eliminate an attending officer before we start ploughing through the categories.” He walked to the big cabinet by the far wall.

  “How come all this isn’t done by computer these days?” asked Paul.

  “Some of it is.” Barry unlocked the shutter door and slid it up. He knelt by ‘W’. “But with jobs like this, it’s easier and quicker to do it manually. Besides, who wants to be in front of a computer screen all days plotting minutiae when you can stab ‘em with a pin?”

  “What a choice.”

  “Here we g
o. Weston, Colin.”

  “Paul Bryant!”

  He froze.

  Barry said, “I think Inspector Shelby would like that word now.”

  * * *

  “We have several things we’d like to speak with you about,” Shelby said in his best calm and controlled voice. He breathed though flared nostrils.

  Paul hadn’t messed up. The mark itself, labelled 9, did indeed have blue gloss paint sandwiched between the adhesive lift and the acetate. Shelby quizzed Paul; flapped the fingerprint lift constantly in his face, almost had him in tears, but it was Paul who remarked how much like ‘police station blue’ it was. And from there, it didn’t take him long to lead Shelby and Firth to the doorframe in the Scenes of Crime office – the only natural conclusion.

  Though the doorframe had been cleaned of its black powder, the physical fit of the paint was unmistakable. “But it’s your handwriting on the acetate,” Firth said, “with Nicky Bridgestock’s address.”

  “We both did the fingerprinting in the house, we both lifted and mounted marks, but I wrote them all up as mine to save time and inconvenience. This was an exercise,” he pointed to the doorframe, “a test, so I knew how to handle the fingerprint camera when the time came.” His eyes flicked from Firth to Shelby and back again. “I remember seeing Inspector Weston having a good look at them, the marks on the frame, I mean. He asked me what I was doing.” Paul bit his bottom lip, afraid he’d done some real damage. “And I remember him smiling, seriously weird.”

  “Seriously weird?” Shelby asked. “Can’t you use proper words? What the fuck does seriously weird mean?”

  His fingertips tapped the side of his leg. “I don’t know; he was smiling...”

  “And that’s why your details are on the identity label on the photo of the mark? Because you were asked to put them there by Chris?”

  “It was an exercise,” he shrugged. “Chris asked me to fill in the label as though it were a real scene, he said let’s make it the bedroom doorframe, but then he told me to leave the date blank.” He paused, “Have I done something wrong? Am I in trouble? I’m still on probation and—”