by M J Lee
The nurse returned and passed the doctor a folder. The doctor began reading. ‘Mr Ridpath, you were a patient at Christie’s, myeloma wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, but I’m in remission now.’
‘No worries. We’ll need to perform a precautionary x-ray but it looks like you were lucky Mr Ridpath. Just a few stitches above the eye and a couple of colourful bruises to show for your adventures. You’ll be out of here this evening. No need to stay overnight.’
‘How about the others?’
‘I’m sorry I can’t discuss other patients… Julie, please arrange a chest and head x-ray just to be on the safe side.’ He turned back to Ridpath. ‘I’ll inform your consultant at Christie’s, they may want you in for a check-up earlier than usual. Nurse, remove his clothes for the x-ray.’
After two hours, and three stitches over his left eye, he was allowed to leave the hospital. As he was exiting the front door, Eve and Polly came rushing in.
‘Are you alright?’
‘What happened?’
‘We got a phone call…’
The questions and statements came thick and fast, as his daughter hugged him.
‘I’m alright, just a couple of stitches.’
Polly lent in to check the wound. ‘It’s so close to your eye, you could have been blinded.’
‘I’m fine, but I could murder a cup of tea.’
Polly glanced around looking for a cafe. ‘You want one here or at home?’
‘Home.’ Ridpath and Eve spoke at the same time.
Polly drove them both and half an hour later, Ridpath and his wife were sat around the kitchen table drinking the finest cup of tea he’d ever tasted. Eve had already been ushered up to bed but not before giving her father another long hug.
‘Were you involved in the gas leak explosion in Glossop?’
‘Is that what they are saying it was?’
‘We were watching the news when we got the call from a DS Emily Parkinson.’
Ridpath wondered where she had found his home number. He should ring her to check what was happening.
‘It wasn’t a gas leak. Somebody planted a bomb.’
‘Somebody?’
‘Somebody we were investigating.’
‘I thought you weren’t moving back to MIT for two weeks?’
‘I’m not.’
‘So why were you investigating a bomber?’
‘I wasn’t. I was looking into a case and it happened.’
‘Ridpath, you told the hospital about your cancer?’
He stayed quiet.
‘You didn’t?’
‘I didn’t have to. I must be on their bloody computer, they knew already. For the rest of my life, I’m going to be the man with cancer.’
Now it was Polly’s turn to stay quiet.
Her voice when it came was emotionless. She spoke without looking at him. ‘For the two years you’ve been working with the coroner, I haven’t worried. I see you more often, Eve loves the time you spend together at weekends—’
‘Poll—’
‘Let me finish.’ She took a deep breath. ‘When you said you wanted to return to MIT, I thought it was too early, but I kept quiet, thinking it was what you wanted, that it would make you happy, doing what you love.’ She looked up at him finally. ‘Now I’m not so sure.’
‘It was a one-off, Poll, it won’t happen again.’
‘Ridpath, you know I love you. Eve loves you. How would we manage if you weren’t here any more? The cancer was bad enough, but working at MIT is dangerous.’
‘It’s what I love, Poll.’
She stood up. ‘I’m going to bed now. You think about it. Is the job worth it? You can achieve so much with Mrs Challinor, perhaps even more than with MIT.’
She walked to the kitchen door. ‘I don’t want to spend my life waiting to receive another call like tonight, Ridpath. You can’t expect me to live like that. You can’t expect Eve to wait for the call saying her dad isn’t coming home.’
She looked him straight in the eye for a moment and then walked out into the hallway.
Ridpath listened to her going up the stairs. He knew she was right but what could he do? It was the job, the life he had chosen. It wasn’t working in an insurance office, it was the life of a policeman.
For a second, he sat alone in the kitchen, swaying slightly. It suddenly came to him he loved the adrenalin, the surge of energy as action, not thought, was required. He loved that he could do something, not just sit back and watch.
He could understand how Polly felt though. It was always hardest for those not involved, the ones who had to sit on the side-lines unable to do anything except wait for the phone call. It was they who had to pick up the pieces.
A wave of anger shook Ridpath’s frame. Had somebody tried to kill him? Had Dalbey tried to blow him up?
‘Sod it,’ he said out loud, walking into the living room and fixing himself a glass of Lagavulin.
As the golden liquid slipped down his throat, he selected a number on his mobile.
‘Hi Ridpath, how are you feeling?’ DS Parkinson’s voice came through loud and clear. Behind her he could hear a hubbub of activity.
The cut above his eye throbbed slightly but, other than that, he felt fine. ‘You still at work?’
‘We all are. If you’re up to it, the boss would like you to come in for a briefing tomorrow at 10 a.m. Don’t worry if you’re not, we’ll come to you.’
Ridpath thought for a moment. He would go to see Mrs Challinor first and attend the briefing afterwards. ‘No need,’ he answered, ‘I’ll be there.’
‘The manhunt is on for Dalbey, an APB has gone out. We’ve tracked down his last known address and sent an armed team there, but the house was empty. He’s vanished.’
‘Why am I not surprised? You could track his movements through his mobile?’
‘Already done, but BT says his number hasn’t been used for a year.’
‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’
‘Those were Claire Trent’s exact words. Anyway, I need to go, Harry is asking for help. See you tomorrow, Ridpath.’
‘How’s the CSI?’
‘We think she’s going to lose the leg. The pathologist was shaken up but otherwise fine.’
‘Thanks for looking after me, Emily.’
‘No worries, you’d have done the same for me. I’ve gotta go.’
‘See you tomorrow—’ But the connection had already been cut.
Ridpath picked up his glass of whisky. He should go over the events of the day, get them clear in his mind. There must have been something which would help him solve this.
His head began to throb around the cut above his eye. Think, Ridpath! But his mind refused to focus. Perhaps he shouldn’t have had the glass of whisky. He glanced down at the half inch of golden liquid still in the glass. ‘Sod it,’ he said once again and finished it in one swallow.
As he climbed the stairs to bed, a memory from before the explosion rattled around in his head.
What had the woman PC said was written on the card? ‘Who’s next?’
A shiver of fear rattled down Ridpath’s spine.
Chapter 37
Harry Makepeace had already started briefing the team when Emily Parkinson entered. Outside, the night was as dark as a witch’s soul and the window was soaked with rain, each drop sparkling in the light from the situation room.
At the front, Claire Trent and Paul Turnbull stood next to the whiteboards. Whilst on one side Alan Jones wrote action steps on a chalkboard as he was instructed by the senior investigating officers.
‘We canvassed the local area, knocking on seventy-two doors and receiving fifty-four responses. We’ll return to the rest tomorrow morning. The area is quiet and residential, with large houses set back from the road. Only one resident, a woman, reported anything unusual; a man sitting in a car about seventy yards away from the incident. She noticed him on her way to the shops.’
‘Any description?’ asked Turnbull.
The detective read from his notes. ‘Nothing concrete, boss. Middle aged, white male. The car was grey or white, she couldn’t be sure. And she didn’t have a clue what make it was. I’ve asked for the dash cam footage from the responding vehicles to see if it appeared on any of those.’
‘Could it have been James Dalbey? Did you show her a photo?’
‘Didn’t have one.’
‘Go back tomorrow. She might recognise him.’
‘Will do.’
Alan Jones wrote the action step on his board, adding Harry Makepeace’s name at the end of the line.
‘Anything else?’
‘I checked where the car was parked. It gives a view of both the house and the area around it.’
‘So Dalbey could have been watching?’
‘Possibly, boss.’
‘Well done, Harry. Finish the other houses tomorrow.’
Harry Makepeace nodded and stood down.
‘Chrissy, what about the call to the emergency services?’
‘The name given was Don Brown. We traced the number. A pre-paid phone, no longer active.’
‘Can we have the tape of the call to Emergency Services for the meeting tomorrow? I’d like to listen to it.’
‘On it, boss.’
‘Emily, what’s happening at the scene?’
‘The fire has been extinguished and the bomb squad have declared the area safe. A CSI team are going through the house at the moment, but it’s slow and the fire destroyed or damaged the living room, kitchen and basement.’
‘So we can’t expect too much from forensics?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘The bomb?’
‘Still waiting on the report, boss. We should have the top-line for tomorrow’s meeting.’
‘Push them along, Emily. And the body?’
‘It’s the one piece of good news. The freezer protected it from the worst of the explosion. A pathologist will perform the post mortem tomorrow. We’re just checking if Dr Schofield is free.’
‘Why him?’
‘He was recommended, and the Derbyshire pathologist is still in hospital with shock.’
‘Push him to do it as quickly as possible, we can’t lose a second.’
‘It means transporting the freezer to Manchester.’
‘Make it happen.’
Movement on the left as Alan Jones wrote once more on his chalkboard.
Claire Trent looked away from the detective sergeant and across at the crowded room. ‘Right, people, this is the most important case we are working on at the moment. Our main suspect is James Dalbey.’ She tapped a large picture of the man, posted on one of the whiteboards, taken on his release from prison. ‘Finding him is going to be our main focus. Understand? Here is a video of an interview done with him by ITV when he was released eighteen months ago.’ Claire Trent pressed a key on her laptop and an image appeared on the television to the left.
For a second, the face of James Dalbey was frozen on the screen before the picture started running. He was sitting on a couch. Behind his head, net curtains wafted in a slight breeze.
‘Well, Mr Dalbey, you must be delighted to finally have left prison,’ an off-screen interviewer asked.
‘I am, but I should never have been there in the first place.’
‘Your conviction for the torture, rape and murder of Alice Seagram has been quashed by the High Court, how do you feel?’
The face, placid before, suddenly screwed up with anger. ‘How do you think I feel? I was locked up for ten years surrounded by convicted criminals; murderers and worse. Ten years of my life lost.’
‘No doubt you will receive good compensation for the time you spent in jail.’
‘Nothing can compensate me for the life lost. Nothing can soothe the anger I feel raging inside me. Nothing can stop the voices in my head when I’m alone at night. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can ever atone for never seeing my mother again.’
‘Your mother died while you were in prison. The prison authorities refused you permission to go to her funeral, how do you feel?’
Dalbey clenched his jaw. ‘Even before her passing, my mother never came to see me. She thought I was guilty you see. The police and the judges and the courts – everybody – had convinced her I was guilty.’ A long pause. ‘I never said goodbye to her before she died.’
‘Have you been to her grave since?’
‘It was the first thing I did when I came out. There was no headstone, just a patch of earth. There was nobody left to care for her once they put me away, nobody to mourn her…’ Dalbey’s voice trailed off without finishing the sentence.
The interviewer tried to end on a more positive tone. ‘What are you going to do now? The government will pay you compensation for your time inside. Four hundred thousand pounds is one figure being bandied about. How are you going to spend it?’
Dalbey stared into mid-air. ‘I don’t know. I just know it can’t bring my mother back to life.’ He snapped his head back to stare directly into the camera, his eyes unblinking. ‘They are going to pay for what they did to me. They are all going to pay.’
‘Finally, do you have a message for any of the people who made the mistake of putting you in jail.’
The man was silent for a long while, before he looked up and gazed directly into the camera. ‘This is James Dalbey. It’s time for the past to come alive.’
The camera cut to the interviewer for the first time. ‘The first interview with James Dalbey on his release. As he says, the government are going to pay for what they did to him. And it looks like it is going to cost the taxpayer in the region of 400,000 pounds. Back to you in the studio, Kelly.’
Claire Trent paused the film. ‘I don’t know why this wasn’t flagged and this man put on a watch list.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I guess we’ll never know, but it’s what we have to deal with now. We’ve had a forensic psychiatrist look at this footage. I won’t bore you with the psychological mumbo jumbo but here are his main conclusions.’
She pressed another key on her laptop and four bullet points appeared on the screen.
Possible Asperger’s
Neurotic Anger and Hostility
PTSD?
Narcissism – inflated social confidence and sense of entitlement could produce a desire to retaliate against
Conclusion
Highly likely to seek revenge for his time in prison. Revenge seeks to have the transgressor suffer while punishment looks to improve the transgressor’s behaviour or to deter future bad behaviour. In this case, ‘making someone pay’ is an emotional not a financial desire. He has a strong desire to seek retribution.
Harry Makepeace leant into Emily Parkinson and whispered. ‘If someone banged me up for ten years, I’d make the bastards pay too.’
The detective sergeant ignored him as Paul Turnbull stepped forward.
‘Despite all this we are not here to psychoanalyse this man. Our job is to find him and put him away. Clear?’
The assembled detectives nodded their heads.
Claire Trent continued. ‘It’s nearly midnight. Most of you need to go home and get some rest. I’ll brief the night shift separately. The hunt begins in earnest for Dalbey now. We need to get the bastard and get him quick. The chief constable wants this sorted. An attack on a CSI is an attack on the police. Any questions?’
Linda Doran, GMP’s head of PR, put up her hand. ‘I’m getting questions from the papers regarding the gas explosion. It’s gone national and they’re smelling that something isn’t right.’
‘Stall them, Linda, we want to get out in front of this and them.’
‘Right, Claire.’
Emily Parkinson put her hand up.
‘Yes, Emily.’
‘Shouldn’t we be issuing Osman notices? I mean if Dalbey is the killer and the man who planted the bomb, he seems to be targeting people involved in his conviction ten years ago. Shouldn’t we be warning the people involved?’
Claire Trent
thought for a moment. ‘Good question, Emily. Can you compile a list of possible targets for Dalbey? Anybody who was involved in his case ten years ago, even if it was at the periphery.’
‘That could be a lot of people, boss.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Do it.’ Claire Trent clapped her hands together. ‘Get off home and I’ll see you tomorrow at ten sharp. Night shift stay here, I’ll brief you on follow up.’
The detectives began to funnel out of the room.
‘We’re gonna get this bastard and quickly,’ shouted Claire Trent over the hubbub. ‘Understand?’
Chapter 38
It had been planned down to the last detail.
First, a phone call from the gas board telling the former coroner to stay at home as there was a leak in the area. The police calling it a gas explosion in Glossop helped immensely. Thank you, coppers.
He turned up thirty minutes later in the white van, dressed as an engineer come to check the pipes.
Once inside the house the rest was easy. A few drops of chloroform on a pad to knock him out long enough to tie him up, before feeding him with a sleeping tablet dissolved in some water to keep him quiet while he set the scene.
The isolated eighteenth-century weaver’s cottage where the man lived was perfect for what he had in mind.
The wooden panelling of the living room provided exactly the correct atmosphere whilst the beams across the ceiling made what he had to do easy.
The camera was set up and the man dressed and prepared for the show.
While all the preparations were being made, he felt like an actor in a dressing room putting on his make-up, waiting to go on and perform for his audience. He had written the script, constructed the mise-en-scène and given each person their roles and lines.
The words from Titus Andronicus came back to him. Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand, Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.
How apt.
Everything was in place.
The death of Don Brown and the explosion had been a suitable curtain call to the first act, but now he was in the play proper. It was time to give them a thrilling spectacle, lead them on, before turning the tables.
