Bright Spark

by Gavin Smith

  The pounding from Braxton’s cell brought his eyes back into focus, wolves, flames and charred, entwined corpses wiped clean from the blank canvas of the police cell’s ceiling. He smiled to himself, anticipating the day to come, a day of resolution. Until today, fate had shown him only malevolence as proof of its existence. Now, something had changed. The cops knew Murphy’s family had died by fire. Murphy himself, an institutional tormentor of the old school, was missing, presumed dead or on the lam. Braxton, a one-man occupational hazard for Firth, happened to be sharing this dungeon and would inevitably be looked at more closely by the tall, psycho detective. He closed his eyes and drifted on the warm tide of Braxton’s pain. It was all coming together.

  Sharon had drifted for what might have been seconds or hours and woke with a start, disorientated. The LED of the radio alarm insisted it was 3am. It must be mistaken as a nacreous light still leaked through the curtains and her t-shirt was sodden with sweat. She shuffled backwards onto her elbows and a paperback slid to the floor, losing her place; not that it mattered, as she had little idea after a dozen nights of reading two pages at a time what the wretched thing was about.

  Something was wrong. The room was hers with its blown-up monochrome images of ancient cities she had to see before she died and tomorrow’s business suit hanging from the door to the en suite. Her watch, keys and jewellery lay in the carved wooden bowl Rory had bought her in Finland. Her towering stack of forgettable and forgotten crime novels loomed on the bedside table.

  Yet the curtains were unwrinkled and perfumed. Nothing was dusty. Every wardrobe door and drawer was neatly closed. A rhythmic snorting and hissing reached her from the spare room with the occasional delicate tutting as counterpoint; her father’s stifled excuse for breathing underlined by her mother’s unconscious, clucking anxiety. She sighed; the day had been real after all and she was not alone.

  Brushing back her hair and bringing her knees to her chest, she froze at another sound. The rhythmic thumping she had taken for the leaky guttering above the water butts couldn’t possibly be anything of the kind without the rain that was sorely overdue, nor was it the echo of her own thumping heart. Her left hand itched for the old cricket bat she kept under the bed, more for reassurance than for any real deterrent value. She resisted; it had to be Jeremy. He couldn’t sleep the whole night through, not in a new environment, no matter how precisely his books and cars were aligned.

  She padded to the landing, wincing with every treacherous creak of the cheaply banged together floorboards beneath her feet. What if she was wrong and a sample of her firm’s thieving, violent client-base was making a ham-fisted bid to get in? Her throat went dry as she moved onto the landing, almost letting out a whimper when she felt the gentle draught from the staircase; nothing should have been left open downstairs, even on the hottest nights, not with her experience of the burgling classes.

  Her mobile phone and cricket bat called to her from her bedroom when she found the door to the box room fully closed. She paused, thinking. She was better than this. She drew a breath. Jeremy would leave the door closed even if he’d left the room on one of his sleepwalking odysseys. He was consistent and precise in all things and doors had to be fully closed or fully open for good reason; there could not logically be any intermediate state for a door and ‘ajar’ was a four-letter word.

  Gripping the handle with slick palms, she eased it down and nudged the door gently open against the friction of ill-fitting carpet. The divan bed had been neatly vacated and left crisp and un-creased with what she swore were hospital corners. If she hadn’t said goodnight to Jeremy in person, she wouldn’t have known the bed had been used at all. His favoured die-cast cars flanked the bed in good order, along with his indispensable set of reference books and pencils, all of exactly the same colour and proportion.

  Perhaps she should rouse her mother. Then again, this was Sharon’s house and Jeremy was her brother. She knew from her mother’s lengthy telephone updates that Jeremy had become more and more prone to somnambulism. He generally did little more than tour the grounds before returning himself to bed, but once or twice he’d been found holding the telephone receiver, attempting to light the stove or standing at the garden gate.

  Her mother had reacted peevishly to Sharon’s suggestion that a doctor be consulted; there was no pharmaceutical substitute for a mother’s love. With the stridency of a martyr, she’d insisted she would care for Sharon’s father and brother at all hours of the day and night without thought for her own beauty sleep; this was after all the vocation that had chosen her. She might have brought God’s will into the dialogue but for her distaste for Sharon’s agnosticism. It was as if her love for her family could only be perfected by adversity.

  Sharon tip-toed down the stairs, wary only of disturbing her parents. The recessed lights under the kitchen cupboards had been left on or switched on by Jeremy. The sight of an empty wine bottle on the kitchen table, now holding only the bitter embers of sediment, explained the niggling headache behind her eyes. Oddly, every kitchen drawer was wide open, the contents heaped on the floor or on the worktops. The narrow and high transom windows above the sink stood wide open.

  Jeremy faced the patio doors, oblivious to her, one fist then another pounding at the toughened glazing while his lips worked soundlessly. Reflected, Sharon made out his staring eyes, fixed pupils and a face as inexpressive as ever. As she watched and mustered her thoughts, he rattled the locked handle, turned the absent key, waved his hands as if to attract the attention of someone outside and mimed turning a key in a lock. When no-one responded, he peered through the window with one hand plastered to the glass and the other miming the turning of a handle, then relented and began to pound his fists all over again.

  If he’d been able to unlock the transom windows, why was he now so anxious about finding a key? Perhaps her mother had left those windows unlocked after her obsessive spring-clean and the key remained well hidden as a precaution against Jeremy’s promenades.

  She resisted the urge to clasp a reassuring hand to his shoulder. Jeremy only permitted physical contact from close family, and then only when he was happy and comfortable with his surroundings. Startled from waking sleep in a strange house, he might well react violently. Yet she couldn’t leave him this way; trapped in a behavioural loop, he could carry on until fatigue forced him to stop. He could also change tack and find some much more dangerous compulsion.

  “JJ, it’s me, SJ,” she ventured, whispering.

  He groaned, slamming his fists more forcefully into glass, rattling the metal frame.

  “JJ, it’s alright, everything’s fine, you’re at my house with your mum and dad and all your books and cars and everything’s fine. You’re in my kitchen having one of your walkabout sleeps.” She bit her lip, waiting for the reaction.

  “What an unholy aspect is this,” brayed Jeremy, half sobbing and half laughing. “Screaming not fleeing conflagration. Silliness.”

  Taken aback, Sharon paused. Jeremy dreamed like anybody else, but his preoccupations usually remained fixed in his own world and his sleepwalking activities followed suit; kitchen items re-organised, attempts made to make porridge of precisely the right volume and texture, books re-ordered, hedges trimmed symmetrically with nail scissors.

  “Tell me what’s going on now, JJ.”

  “Handle here secure in my digits. Handle likewise on woman’s side.” Jeremy muttered and slurred, grinning then scowling in quick succession. “Keyhole requiring key, natural means of extrication from conflagration. Occupants screaming silly and declining to unlock. Incomprehensible.”

  It was only natural that the fire should loom large in his thoughts, but the empathic imagining of other people’s experience of it was an unprecedented leap.

  “Flinging things at window, at me. Must never ever never defenestrate. Dire consequences if Jeremy gets giddy and smashes window again. Was told once and forever and did listen at that time and for all times.”

  Jeremy’s
voice was soaring now, lifting in volume as his excitement grew. Feet clumped around upstairs, a voice called out, muffled and indistinct.

  “Get out call fire brigade out stay out,” shouted Jeremy, whooping and giggling. “Get out call fire brigade out stay out.”

  “JJ, for God’s sake, please,” urged Sharon, her hand instinctively clasping her brother’s shoulder.

  He ceased, turning to her, eyes swimming into focus. A mystified frown crossed his face then his head jerked back to allow a hoarse bellow to escape as he clasped his fists above his head and swung them down with a sledgehammer blow onto the handle of the patio doors, splitting it from the frame with a grinding crack to leave shards of PVC and sharp brass edges dangling. Rage evaporated, Jeremy stood, hands clasped to his head and dripping blood, rocking gently and humming.

  “Sharon, what do you think you’re doing?”

  Bristling scarlet in her impossibly hot flannelette dressing gown, her mother glared at her from the kitchen door.

  After the briefest of sleeps, he couldn’t be certain she’d been there at all. After Slowey had dropped him off and he’d managed to fumble the front door open with slightly less noise than a train crash. After he’d staggered up the stairs, sloughed off his ruined clothes and made a pitiful effort to wash his face and brush his teeth. After he’d fallen headfirst into bed, the sense of falling never ending, dropping him further and further into oblivion while his body hung inert somewhere behind him. After he’d heard the alarm on its sixth attempt to rouse him at something past six in the morning, a split second and a fleeting shadow having passed since he’d closed his eyes. After he’d slammed the alarm into the wall in a gentle bid to reset the wretched thing.

  After he’d stared hard at the glimmering curtains trying desperately to understand which version of six o’clock this was and who had managed to set the alarm anyway. After he’d realised he’d had four hours of sleep at best and felt every bit as foggy and far less well than when he’d got into bed. After all of this, he understood that Hayley’s side of the bed was empty but had absolutely no idea whether she’d been there at all since yesterday.

  Her phone was nowhere in sight, and he hadn’t checked his own phone since his last perfunctory text to her last night. Her side of the bed was rumpled and unmade; unusual for her not to have straightened it whenever she’d left it, but hardly conclusive either way. The business suit she’d worn yesterday – the severe, cinched-in affair that always made him vaguely lustful – was absent, as was her briefcase. Her car keys were missing from their hook – the fact that he hadn’t heard the garage door or the rumbling of an engine through breeze-block wasn’t that meaningful in his addled state.

  While hurriedly shaving, he’d shouted a neutral voicemail message into his phone, hoping she was well, regretting he hadn’t had time to chat, suggesting she call back but only when and if it was convenient. While branding the shape of an iron onto his last but one tolerably smart shirt and sluicing toast and instant coffee around his mouth, he found no sign that the kitchen had been used at all for nearly 24 hours.

  Unlocking the front door to leave, he saw the envelope pinned to its inner face, address to him in Hayley’s neat and almost fussy copperplate. She was safe and well, somewhere. He could go about his day having put her welfare to one side. He couldn’t read it now; couldn’t do it justice; knew what must be in it; and didn’t have room in his head for another matryoshka doll of shame and guilt and escalating obligation right now.

  Leaving the letter in place, he locked the door behind him to find Slowey, obnoxiously bright-eyed and tidy, reviewing his notebook from behind the wheel of his scrapheap family runabout.

  “As if by magic, the shopkeeper appeared,” said Harkness, wedging himself into the passenger seat. “I have got a car, you know.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  “I mean thanks and so forth, but isn’t it my turn anyway?”

  “Nope, still my turn. Been keeping track. All in the book. Anyway, if I’m in charge, you can’t be late.”

  “Hey, did you set my alarm as well?”

  “Of course. I also sprinkled sand in your eyes and left that shilling under your pillow when you lost your first milk tooth. Shall we?”

  “Let’s. Any thoughts overnight?”

  “Plenty, thanks. How’s Hayley.”

  “Oh, you know. Can’t complain. ”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “You all look absolutely dreadful,” announced the prosecutor, smoothing down the first page of her new notebook and sweeping her breezy grin around the conference room. “Obviously, I say this with all the love and respect in the world.”

  Harkness blinked away the drowsiness that had settled on his brain like silt while his eyes amused themselves with the prosecutor’s lacy, lilac brassiere, deliciously cupping her breasts beneath her gauzy blouse. He shuffled in his seat and took a deep gulp of his fifth strong, syrupy coffee of the day. It failed to sluice away the salty coating left by the bacon rolls he and Slowey had scooped up at an industrial estate on the drive in.

  Zoe Stewart was the last prosecutor he wanted to adjudicate on the decision on whether or not to charge Firth. It was beautiful to behold her pretending to be the demure, giggling blonde in open court, then deploying her razor intellect to dispatch the opposition. It was less pleasant to see her triage your precious prosecution at the pre-charge stage, where any weakness or omission that might compromise her winning streak would result in a dogged, stone-walling refusal to charge. Challenging her on such a decision would hopelessly pit the police against the sacred tenets of the Crown Prosecution Service’s performance culture.

  “We’ve all had a late night and not very much sleep, so bear with us,” said Brennan, not yet awake enough to sound his usual bullish self.

  “Well, I’ve been here for a few hours going through last night’s paperwork. Couldn’t sleep much anyway – I knew I was duty gatekeeper today and it’s all very exciting. Now then, I’ve got a preliminary opinion for you but let’s have the latest news first, shall we.”

  “Murphy,” announced Newbould, more forcefully than he intended, bloodshot eyes stretched starkly open. “I attended the PM a few hours ago. The report isn’t with us yet but I can give the preliminary view. Basically, Dale Murphy had been dead for around 18 hours when we found him. Not an instant death by any means, if the timeline suggested by our wino confessor is correct.

  “A fairly messy PM,” gulped Newbould, “by my standards, anyway. Not that it bothered Professor Ogilvy. Didn’t even put him off his breakfast. His report will say something like death by internal bleeding and shock following a fast vertical impact with at least one hard, blunt surface. There were multiple internal injuries, all consistent with this thesis.”

  “What kind of injuries?” urged Stewart.

  “Shattered ribs. Punctured lung. Broken pelvis. Perforated colon. Biggest single injury was a displacement fracture of the C7 vertebra crushing the spinal cord. Would have left him quadriplegic. Might have left him with some grip and arm function, hence the mobile phone – he must have grabbed that after the fall.”

  “And what about phone work? What was he doing with that phone?”

  “Nothing to tell you. Yet. It’s going to the lab today.”

  “And has the pathologist been asked if Murphy could have been assaulted?” asked Stewart, who had now donned a pair of demure designer spectacles through which she peered at Newbould.

  “Not unless someone hit him with a concrete buttress or a big rock. I’m quoting,” said Newbould, almost brandishing his notes like a schoolboy insisting he’d done his homework.

  “Great, thanks,” said Stewart, neatly drawing a line under Newbould’s account. “Anything else from anybody else before we review?”

  “I rested the team overnight and I’m satisfied we’re now up to date.” Brennan leaned forward on his chair and straightened his golf club tie. “As you’re no doubt aware, we’ve got a great deal of evidence
to sift through and many more questions for our prime suspect.”

  “So give us our rubber-stamp then we can crack on with the police work, eh?” Stewart sat back and grinned, tight-lipped.

  “I thought it prudent to bring a thrusting young prosecutor on board early doors,” returned Brennan, doing his best not to smirk or wink as he might have done in the good old days, “particularly one with such…winning ways.”

  “Very well. Gents, I’m conscious that this is a serious case. Lives have been lost and more may be at stake. So, I’m not going to waste your time.” She stood and passed around a sheaf of papers thicker than a standard CPS advice sheet. Ten seconds into their reading, Harkness fancied he saw the windows and door bulge inwards as everyone inhaled deeply.

  “You’re serious,” said Brennan, quiet, the gleam faded from his eyes.

  “With regret, yes.”

  “Zoe,” began Brennan, removing his glasses and breaking the silence, “it’ll take me an hour to read this. Just explain to me why on earth you want us to bail out our prime and now only multiple-murder suspect. And why we can’t charge this dangerous nutter and let a court decide.”

  “It wasn’t easy. I thrashed it out with Jim Cummings and in the end he agreed with me.”

  “Nicely done, Zoe,” spat back Brennan, recognising the name of the city’s chief prosecutor. “That means we have go out of the county if we want to appeal.”

  “Look, you’re entitled to badger me and harass me but I have to apply the hard, cold maths: right now, you haven’t given me the evidence to prosecute Firth with a better than evens chance of securing a conviction; and that means I can’t sign off on a charge, even for murder.