Bright Spark

by Gavin Smith

  “Six. Since invalidated out o’ special forces. My vigil. Hot. Cold. Dry. Wet. Keeping stag. That’s what. My job, ain’t it.”

  “Did we wake you up last night, Mickey?”

  “Drunks. Fuggin’ typical.”

  “Well, just a bit of food poisoning I’m afraid, but I’m sorry to have disturbed your sleep. And you still bivvy down under the eastern end of the Burton Road bridge over the A46? Just to be sure, Mickey, you know what us police are like.”

  Harkness glanced left to find Slowey dutifully taking notes. Mickey grunted his assent.

  “So tell me all about it.”

  “Sleepin’. Bivvied down. Shoutin’ woke us up. Parapet up above. Worse than traffic. Used to traffic. Not used to shoutin’ fuggin’ drunks. Shoutin’ ‘bout killin’ and maimin’ and life bein’ shit. I looks out, looks up. Dark but shape o’ bloke in streetlight. Made me angry. Thought under attack. Combat stress, ain’t it.”

  “Go on,” said Harkness, resisting the urge to prompt, to interpret too soon, to skew the narrative his way.

  “Slip on infra-reds. Grab silenced SMG, all quiet like. Greased it special. Full clip, one in the spout. Ready. Hatin’ noisy stupid pissin’ pukin’ drunks. Threat to realm. If he takes me out, what happens to bridge an’ major trunk road? Lines o’ commun’cation an’ that, eh?

  “Want him to go away. Don’t happen. He’s dancin’ on the parapet, wavin’ his stupid arms, shoutin’ and bawlin’ an’ weepin’ like a girl. ‘Come an’ fuckin’ face me, runt. You freaks. All o’ you wankers. Am right ‘ere.’ Tha’s what he shouts. Anyhow, need to tell police ‘bout this. This mess under my bridge. ‘Fore foxes get all o’ him.”

  “About what, Mickey?”

  “Had to kill ‘im. Keepin’ me awake. Disturbin’ peace. Danger to motorists an’ pedestrians on major trunk route. Seen idiots on bridge before. Prancin’ on parapet. Wastin’ time. Police talkin’ ‘em down. Not this one. Dangerous nutter. Had ‘im in sights, took the shot. Semi-auto. One burst o’ three into the chest. Would o’ won me a goldfish. Down he comes like his strings was cut. Screamin’ like a woman then crashes through my tarp like a fat side o’ beef then all quiet.

  “Had to decamp. Sharpish. Move to bus shelter. Pendin’ repairs to tarp. But couldn’t go back today. Had to think. Now here I am. Confessin’. Ready to do my time. Her Maj’sty’s pleasure again. Winter’s comin’, an’ all.”

  Harkness took a deep breath despite the stench. The stench couldn’t be ignored. It told a story of filth, decay and a slowly poisoned mind. Mickey wanted to be believed. Perhaps he even believed it all himself. He glanced sideways. Slowey had drawn parallel lines between two separate but apparently identical accounts in his notebook. Mickey could at least tell the same story twice.

  “You’re a brave man, Mickey. A lot of men in your shoes would just hide from the truth, but not you.”

  “All ‘bout honour wi’ me, see. Ain’t got a pot to piss in but got me honour.”

  “That you do. Tell me, Mickey, what time did all this happen?”

  “Ain’t had a watch for years, youth. After dark, coupl’ hours ‘fore you saw me in the bus shelter. Mebbe.”

  “And where have you spent the last 24 hours or so?”

  “Anywhere but there. West Common. High Street Bridge. About. Here for an hour ‘til your pal let me in.”

  “What kind of weapon did you use?”

  “Heckler & Koch MP5, SD series. You know. Silenced. Compact. Accurate. ”

  “And where would you get one of those, Mickey? Souvenir?”

  “No, no. Not British Army issue, them.” He raised a finger to his lips. “Got it on eBay.”

  “And where’s this gun now? Same place as your computer?”

  “Gun’s in the Brayford. Don’t need a ‘puter. I know people. People who know people.”

  “Are those glasses much use for shooting, Mickey? What prescription are you on at the optician’s?”

  “Dunno.” Mickey stared hard with wide open eyes through his scuffed and bleary lenses. “Use iron sight. Old school. Shoot fine.”

  “Need another coffee, Mickey?” asked Harkness, nodding vigorously and standing.

  “S’pose.”

  “Let’s all have a coffee.” Harkness looked at Slowey at dipped his head towards the door. “I’ll borrow Ken here to help me carry ‘em.”

  Harkness closed the interview room door tightly behind them and motioned Slowey into the deserted town enquiry office.

  “Thoughts?” said Harkness, rubbing at the fingerprint smears on the glass exterior door with his shirt sleeve.

  “You mean beyond sleeping in a bed tonight? I should be intrigued, excited, all that stuff. But I’m mostly dreading it.”

  “Dreading what?”

  “What we find under that bridge. Complications.”

  “Believes it, doesn’t he? Some of it, anyway.”

  “Well a fantasist isn’t exactly a liar. Must have got his inspiration somewhere.”

  “We need to bottom this out, even if it’s total bollocks. Here’s the plan then. You nick him for murder and get him booked in.”

  “They’ll just laugh at me and tell me to piss off.”

  “I’m sure you can talk them round. If you’re quick, you’ll catch Dawson and he’s game for a laugh. Besides, you can insinuate with a clear conscience that Mickey’s confessed to murdering Dale Murphy. Who, don’t forget, is our outstanding victim stroke suspect. And you’ll be helping Mickey.”

  “How’s that?”

  “If ever a man needed three square a day, shower facilities and a change of clothes, that’s Mickey. That’s probably why he’s here. Murder beats shoplifting as a way of getting a bit of subsidised accommodation.”

  “What will you be doing while I’m perjuring myself?”

  “I’m going to acquire a search bag, a dragon light and a biddable probationer or two. Then you and I can go and ruin these suits on the bypass.”

  The night swallowed up the van’s diesel clatter. Harkness gave up tinkering with the van’s ventilation system and cranked open a window to find that the air outside tasted burnt as if laden with gunpowder. The pubs had either closed or were half empty with no door staff in sight. The odd forlorn drunk swayed homewards, lacking anyone to drink or dance or screw or fight with now that the holiday was over and the working world was swimming back into focus.

  On Burton Road, nice people lay awake beneath whispering plane trees and well maintained mock Tudor facias, minds roving into the night where rattling diesels scattered their reckless noise, foxes prowled and - perhaps but who knows where - arsonists lurked. The tower blocks of the estate behind were hazy in the murk, lozenges of light drifting upwards.

  Harkness jolted the van onto the pavement where the housing petered out and Burton Road spanned the four lane city bypass before disappearing into the woods and fields beyond. One hundred feet below, the bypass descended through a gouged-out valley towards the flood plain of the Witham.

  “Welcome to the glamorous world of CID.” Harkness killed the engine and turned to peer through the mesh separating him and Slowey from their two passengers.

  It was like a ‘before and after’ picture from an all too honest recruitment campaign. Slouching on the bench at the back of the crew compartment was Newell, a name Harkness recognised from dozens of sloppy handover files over the years. His gut and shirt tails bulged from beneath the stab vest that might have fitted once. Perched eagerly on the jump seat nearest the sliding door, Aspull was the very model of short back-and-sides keenness, polished, ironed and groomed. The night-turn sergeant had been happy to lose the knowing old lag and the unknowing probationer for an hour or two.

  “Happy to help, Sarge,” said Aspull, seemingly without irony. “Could be interesting.”

  Newell shrugged.

  “You’re the fittest and most expendable,” said Harkness, motioning to Aspull, “so you can shimmy down the embankment with us. If Mr Newell would kindly gu
ard the scene from above…”

  “Roger wilco,” muttered Newell, appearing comfortable with the prospect of sitting in a van for an hour or two.

  The four men decamped. Harkness ripped off his tie, stuffed it in a pocket and rolled up his sleeves, Slowey following suit.

  “You got a torch, son?” said Harkness, hefting the bulbous dragon light from the van’s cage. Aspull tapped the outsized maglite suspended from his belt. Slowey hefted the search bag over his shoulder.

  Slowey led them to the point where the ground on either side of the bridge descended sharply away towards the bypass. On either side of the bridge, the road was bordered by a wide pavement and a thick steel armco which doubled as railing and crash barrier and ran the length of the bridge to sink into the concrete at either end. On the southern side nearest the van, a rough dirt trail led into the undergrowth and down into rustling shadow.

  Harkness led the way down the dirt trail. Within a few seconds, the ivy and nettles thronging the path had reached waist height and he was grateful he had the powerful torch to pick out tree roots underfoot and jagged twigs at his eye level. Swinging the light to his left showed him where the thick bulwark of the bridge’s eastern side moored it fast in the clay.

  The path twisted steeply and abruptly downwards, forcing the three men to descend crabwise with one arm gripping rocks, boughs or handfuls of ivy. Something shone too brightly below and ahead of Harkness, synthetic and reflective. Craning forwards, his footing failed, his light went out and he gouged a new trail in the clay, ripping out strands of ivy as he slithered into a ditch alive with stinging heat and the rank odour of wet clay and something worse; acrid and foul.

  “Mickey’s fucking latrine. I am never buying another decent suit. It’s not even as if I’m off the fucking peg twenty quid at Asda material. I don’t get paid enough for this.”

  Another light was turned on him, allowing him to find his torch nearby and flick it back on.

  “Think you got away with it, Sarge,” said Aspull, illuminating a midden of excrement and rotting food loosely covered by moss and clay at the base of the slope.

  “This chap didn’t though.” Slowey was staring along the line of the dragon light’s beam to where a figure sprawled on the ground twenty feet away, almost directly under the southern edge of the bridge, white and inert and draped in the tatters of a tarpaulin that had been ripped from uprights driven into the slope. Flitting lights and the rushing grind of lorries told Harkness the bypass was a brief drop ahead of them.

  “Ever seen a dead body, son? said Harkness, standing and assessing the damage to his clothes.

  “Not as such,” said Aspull thoughtfully.

  “Not as such?”

  “Well, not up close. Nothing human anyway.”

  “My mind is boggling. Right. Stand here, like so, and put some light on him for me, just about there.”

  Harkness took the maglite from Aspull, handed him the dragon and positioned the tall probationer’s hands so that the torch was suspended above his head, floodlighting the scene and reflecting light from the nearest blank concrete leg of the bridge.

  “Perfect. Don’t move. I said you’d come in handy.”

  Harkness and Slowey moved forward, avoiding the dirt track and its myriad footprints and instead tramping down the nettles and parched grass alongside it. Something with a rasping exhaust sped past, unzipping the air. Above them some creature shrieked and glided away on wings of unfurled silk.

  Harkness knew without fear or regret that he was in the presence of a wrenching, unnatural death. While the air soured his mouth with the beginnings of corruption, he knew he’d find Murphy mutely and stupidly dead at his feet for no other or better reason than natural symmetry. The slender cone of the maglite’s beam picked out broken fingernails on blanched fingers not quite touching the ground and the blinking mobile phone they were reaching for. Had Murphy died in a ditch, five inches and two seconds from civilisation?

  They had wandered into what must have been Mickey’s improvised home, a level patch of earth outlined with rocks, partially covered by the thick shadow of the bridge above them, with posts driven into the ground at each corner to support a tarpaulin. Dozens of plastic bags held twigs, branches, off-cuts of metal and wood and scavenged tins of food. A depression in the ground about the length of Mickey himself had been lined with softer, springier fir branches. A pair of binoculars held together by gaffer tape and a handful of paperback books lay strewn nearby, suggesting Mickey had abandoned his treasure in haste.

  Spread-eagled across the wide, flat boulder that could well have been Mickey’s hearth and dining table, Dale Murphy must have dropped in without warning. He laid face up, limbs splayed, head and upper chest kinked backwards over the lip of the stone, staring hard at them with wide open eyes. One shoe was missing, the white sock half off. A darker tidemark stained the crotch of his unzipped pale blue jeans. Ribs crested backwards from the ample, bare belly, three lions still rampant on the clinging white t shirt.

  Slowey had produced the full face photo of Murphy released by the Prison Service. His hair had been glossy with gel, his eyes shining, high cheekbones perma-tanned, wide mouth biting down on a toothy grin.

  “Changed a bit, hasn’t he?”

  “Well he’s lost a bit of colour, certainly. Nice to meet you, Dale.”

  Harkness stooped and slipped on latex gloves while Slowey began scribbling in his notebook. He pressed two fingers into Murphy’s carotid artery for form’s sake, stifling a retch when the cold, taut flesh moved too easily, as if some vital connection between the upper and lower body had been shattered and only gristle and habit held it all together.

  Murphy’s wallet was half out of his waist pocket. A cigarette packet, crumpled around the lighter nestling within, had dropped to the beaten earth with a handful of loose change. Dangling from his still buckled belt, a silver key chain held at least six keys on a ring; one was obviously a car key, two or three may have been door keys, but the others were too small and simple to be anything other than window keys.

  Why on earth did anyone wear a key chain with window keys while out boozing? Could Murphy really have been so deranged that he denied his wife any means of leaving the house without his permission? His derangement had proved a death sentence for his entire family.

  Harkness remembered how he’d got here and scanned the corpse head to toe again with the maglite. He didn’t know which to disbelieve most; Mickey’s ludicrous but entertaining account of Murphy’s death, or the fact that he was actually looking for bullet wounds.

  “Don’t know about you, Ken, but I’m not seeing bullet holes in this chap. And in this neighbourhood, I think we’d have heard about gunshots.”

  “All credit to you for looking. Mickey will be touched.”

  Slowey stepped around Harkness, intent on sketching out the scene, determined to capture the telling tessellation of limbs and objects and disturbed ground before anyone else polluted its truth. “Where do you think this leaves us then?”

  “Desperately tired. One less suspect. One more victim. No further on.” Harkness yanked off his gloves and rubbed his eyes. “You all right back there?”

  “Err, yep, magic.” The light wobbled as Aspull shrugged, his face set in revolted fascination.

  “Tell you what, let’s swap torches again. You go back up top, call this in, get the DI and SOCO down here and request the pathologist. Then come back and confirm you’ve done it. Got all that?”

  “Chrystal. En route,” said Aspull, sagging with relief.

  “Hope you’re fit, youth. You’ve just become my runner.”

  A slick of syrupy coffee lapped against the edges of the upturned cardboard lid that served as a tray. Cellophane, crumbs and tufts of pastry speckled the uneven surface of the table on which the weary conference was centred.

  “Sorry about the meagre rations, gents. The Mekong Junction was shut so I took a ride out to the supermarket.”

  DI Ray Newbould stood a
t his whiteboard, willing his audience to engage. To Harkness’s irritation, Newbould’s shirt and trousers looked clean and fresh and he had the air of a man who’d slept within the last 24 hours.

  “Come on. It’s past midnight. It’s not late any more. It’s early again. A bright and beautiful new day. Nobody got a smile for the boss?”

  The assembled detectives slumped, too weary for their binge of sugar and starch to make them feel anything more than restless or jittery.

  “We’re all shagged out,” barked DCI Dave Brennan, just loud enough to startle Biddle out of his micro-nap.

  At least Brennan had the good grace to look haggard, thought Harkness, noting the rasp of stubble against a ragged looking shirt collar. He was also propelled along by something stronger than orange juice, judging by the odour of pear drops.

  “But we have to bottom a few things out before anyone disappears. Dead people can be inconvenient but it’s not like you won’t get paid for your dedication.”

  Slowey looked up from his notebook and closed it with the peaceful expression which said to Harkness that he had finally written up an incident to his own complete satisfaction. Harkness tugged the book from Slowey’s paternal grasp and perused the last few pages of writing and analysis that was far too clear and artful for a CID man. He grunted with unconscious approval.

  “Keeping you up, Rob?” demanded Brennan.

  “Good stuff, this.” Harkness brandished the notes. “Think you promoted the wrong one.”

  “Then you’ll both have plenty to say.”

  “He always bloody does,” muttered Biddle.

  “I expect you all to have plenty to say if you want the OT signed off. Ray if you please.”

  Newbould grabbed the ancient 24-inch ruler that he seemed to treat as his swagger stick and trundled out his whiteboards to their fullest length. Slowey nodded briefly, impressed that Newbould had listed so many bullet points when he and Harkness had so far given him a far from complete picture.

  “Simple process, gentlemen. Let’s all piss into the pool of knowledge. Last things first: the new body. Rob?”