Bright Spark

by Gavin Smith

  “I’ll help you. You need help. I’m not going to tell you anything. But I’ll show you the answer, when the time’s right.” Firth laughed again.

  “Fuck. Fuck you. Fuck it all.” Harkness lashed out at the dashboard, scratching his knuckles and cracking an air vent. Jamming the car into gear, he stamped on the throttle and flung the car towards the road-works, narrowly missing the yawning youth as he turned his pole from ‘go’ to ‘stop’.

  Slowey savoured the last bite of his ham and cheese sandwich, sweetened as ever by the fact that someone who loved him and worried about him had made it at some unholy hour of the morning. He always got maudlin when he was this tired, particularly if he allowed work to overlap with his home life, two sides of the self that shouldn’t mix in one another’s circles. The receding echoes of concussion also kept him off-balance. If he didn’t keep both feet firmly planted on the ground and one hand on whatever he was sitting on or standing next to, his body told him he’d either fall over or be flicked off the planet altogether.

  He’d felt no pity or horror at the first Murphy post mortem. It would have been natural to visualise his own brood, tiny and frangible beneath those sheets, but the thought hadn’t crossed his mind until now. His reaction was simpler than empathy; he was utterly determined that he and his family should be placed forever beyond the filth and corruption and evil he saw every day. If he dreaded anything, it was the fledging of his wilful chicks as they hurled themselves from the nest into Christ knows what.

  A private education for his girls had flowed logically from this decision. Sooner or later, they’d have to learn to mix with the rabble, but he would deal with that, somehow, when he had to. He’d give them a high place to start from so that if they stumbled, he’d have the chance to catch them.

  There was of course a price tag. Danielle had helped by inheriting a prodigious musical talent that must have skipped a generation or three and securing a music scholarship. But the Slowey family still had its newer members to finance, from prep school right through to the university places they’d be taking up, whether they intended to or not. So he grabbed all the overtime he could stand. Family cars were always on the cusp of an MoT failure; their clothes and luxuries were handed down, shared and traded up on the internet when no other option appeared; and their house was hammered at, refurbished and extended rather than sold.

  Diane would return to work some day, but medical-sales was a less solid basis for financing the Slowey family in its formative years. Solid arrests might not earn Slowey dazzling commission, but he was guaranteed the ample wage and fiercely negotiated benefits of the public sector, and the knowledge that he’d have to screw up egregiously to stand any chance of being fired.

  Next year, he told himself, definitely, positively, absolutely for certain, he’d knuckle down to his promotion exams. If Harkness could do it with nothing more to finance than his next affair and his last break-up, he could do it for all the best reasons. It wasn’t as if the work got harder as you rose through the ranks; some senior officers of his acquaintance were so adept at delegation that they could easily have developed a second career or a much improved golf handicap with no obvious impact on their annual reviews. Coasting towards a handsomely funded retirement with three pips or a crown on his epaulettes, the girls at university and Diane furnishing a new home that could belong in the magazines she pored over in bed: he could and should make it happen.

  Yet it was a pipe-dream. He didn’t want management, bureaucracy, sloganeering, political initiatives and the rest of the utterly vacuous tosh of senior rank. He liked grilling witnesses, nailing scumbags and all those other stock phrases. Teasing out the evidence that would make sure some miscreant would be stopped from spreading horror and misery, at least for now. Consoling wretched people in extremes of distress, when he could actually, positively make a difference that couldn’t be quantified.

  Whatever the cliché, Slowey relished the purpose his job gave him and it troubled him not at all that this was entirely selfish. He just didn’t think he’d manage to get out of bed if he had to speak meaningfully to the haemorrhoid-cream demographic, pitch marketplace synergies at sales conferences or crunch out figures on cornflake uptake ASAP for the VP.

  Slowey perched on a bench overlooking the gently landscaped lawn and beck at the rear of Police HQ in Nettleham. Amazingly, the grounds were wide open to the public and a succession of dog walkers had already greeted him with a curious deference, taking in his suit and battered demeanour and perhaps wondering what exotic and stressful manner of work formed this copper’s lot.

  He bit into the apple that had been wedged into his lunchbox to ensure he ate at least one green thing at work. ‘Mr Grumpy’ glared back at him from the lid, a present from his eldest. Stowing the box into his backpack, he ambled back to the HQ building. The first tentative gusts of the freshening northerly breeze the weather forecast had promised found his slick brow. He dared to hope that the murk might be dispersed but the air tasted like damp gunpowder.

  In Harkness’s absence, he’d volunteered to personally supervise the processing of Murphy’s mobile phone. A distracted Newbould had readily agreed, still inclined to send Slowey home to lick his wounds but equally happy to have him safely and usefully engaged at HQ. Slowey was grateful for the reprieve and for the chance to tell Diane truthfully that he’d been keeping out of harm’s way. Besides, the phone could be a treasure trove and his hands were the safest on the team.

  Quentin Smith occupied his locked office in the basement in the fullest sense of the word. The door was always locked; entry was strictly by prior arrangement, regardless of rank or the urgency of the enquiry. With his pasty skin and collection of almost identical food-encrusted shirts and ties, Quentin may well have lived in the office.

  Slowey waited until his ‘Buzz Lightyear’ watch said precisely 11 o’clock then knocked on the door marked, ‘Q Smith – Technical Support Unit’. The red light mounted above the door frame winked off and a green light winked on. Slowey shook his head and entered.

  As ever, it seemed that Quentin had never existed outside that office, having evolved from the various laptops, processors, server stacks, routers, cables, discs, circuit-boards and power leads that filled the space in what was undoubtedly a logical order to their owner. A moth-eaten chair and an almost clear desk had been set aside for visitors, almost but not quite in Quentin’s direct eye-line, and low enough so that they wouldn’t interfere with his view of the enormous LCD TV on which he could broadcast images he’d plucked off suspect hardware.

  “Good morning again, DC Slowey, nice to see you’re as punctual as ever. You’d be amazed at some people. Too early or too late. I ask you, why have an appointment book at all if that’s the attitude? Oh, yes. You know the drill. Just work your way through the paperwork and then we’ll begin.”

  Slowey skim-read Quentin’s own prolix variation on the standard pro forma, absolving him of any responsibility for the failings of the less technologically literate when it came to handling electronic evidence. He signed it carefully, ensuring that not so much as a glancing stroke of ink strayed outside the signature box.

  “Lovely. I do like a neat officer. What can I do for you today, detective?”

  “Well, Quentin, I’ve got a phone for you….”

  “That was of course a rhetorical question as your online application was most assiduous and I have been able to read around the subject and compile a few basic facts to expedite matters for you.”

  “Good, great. Right, the phone.”

  “Basic fact number one. The number relates to a ‘pay as you go’ purchase with no subscriber details and no payment card ever supplied. How, you might well ask, did I establish this without the usual reams of paperwork that you will in any case have to fill in to get this evidentially substantiated? Well, Quentin has contacts.”

  Smith tapped his nose with a pudgy finger and winked with all the sparkle of a recent stroke victim. “The service provider’s polic
e liaison officer and I have a sophisticated code arising from natural small-talk. ‘Not a cloud in the sky’ indicates this kind of phone. Do you see?”

  “So, a cash purchase of a ‘pay as you go’ phone only ever topped up with vouchers rather than a payment card.”

  “Quite so. And my contact wasn’t surprised we had the phone.”

  “Go on.”

  “It had made a small nuisance of itself last night, repeatedly dialling 999. Not that pointless emergency calls from anonymous mobiles are exactly rare, but my contact couldn’t resist telling me she’d had a quick peak at the call history. Not that she said so in as many words, but….”

  “More code?”

  “She sings ‘911 Is A Joke’ to me.”

  “How many phrases do you have?”

  “A couple of dozen. I could email them to you if you were interested.”

  “This phone. Topped up with vouchers only then?”

  “Yep. No way of saying how those vouchers were paid for or by whom. Not unless you fancy forming an enquiry team just to find out how many thousands of shops the vouchers went to, on the off chance that the buyer used a card or was memorable in some way. But we know the owner anyway, don’t we?”

  “Probably. I never thought I’d get to say this,” said Slowey signing the evidence bag and handing it to Smith, “but this was prised out of his cold, dead hand.”

  Smith held the bag by his fingertips at arm’s length, peering with appalled fascination as if he’d been handed a freshly dismembered body part.

  “Excuse the fingerprint powder. You’ll need gloves. Oh, it’s been swabbed for fluids too. It’s probably not dangerous, but who knows?”

  Smith rose above and beyond Slowey’s teasing. With the care and rigour of a surgeon, he opened a drawer, tore off cellophane strips and donned a facemask, latex gloves and a plastic apron. Placing the package on a clean work surface, he produced a craft knife and sliced the top off the evidence bag. Reaching in, he withdrew the phone and switched it on.

  “Is that it? You just switch on and take a shufty?”

  “Detective, you would not believe how much grief proprietary operating systems cause me,” announced Smith, as he began to rummage through the phone’s menus. “There is no Windows XP for phones. The tricky buggers all have their own dialects, which means our poorly subsidised, bargain-basement software can’t interrogate all of them. I think this one’s very mainstream though, so I’ll plug it in. It’s your fault anyway; you are supposed to take the battery out and put the phone in one of those expensive evidential boxes we sent out to all the divisions.”

  “I’ve heard about them. They’re so expensive they’re locked in a cupboard somewhere so we won’t waste them.”

  “Where did this guy work, anyway? Abu Ghraib?”

  Smith turned the phone to show Slowey a sequence of photographs on its colour screen; young men in prison fatigues against a background of grey breezeblock and glossy steel, glaring hatefully into the lens from where they cowered on the floor or lay tethered to beds. One of them could have been Firth, kneeling by a lavatory bowl with blood trailing from his nose like a war-stripe, jaw bunched in what could have been a yawn or a snarl.

  Abruptly, the sequence changed to show Murphy’s children dutifully posing with arms around each other’s waists in a suburban garden, a barbecue smoking lazily behind them, or staring joylessly up from their games around the Christmas tree. Suzanne made occasional appearances, but only in her specified place; behind the kids and at Murphy’s left hand. Hers was the only unforced smile, as if she’d been determined to make the most of the plain sailing before the weather turned again. Slowey glimpsed again for a second the unpeeled face blind to its own soiled lungs and cracked ribs.

  “Quentin, let’s get this plugged in and downloaded, please, quick as you like. Let’s get to these 999 calls too.”

  Smith sensed the changed mood and quietly separated the phone from its SIM card before connecting both in turn to one of his laptops and extracting data from them.

  “Ok, here we go,” said Smith, scrolling through multiple pages of data arrayed in half a dozen windows on the laptop and on the LCD screen that dominated the room. “Happily for us, no encryption and my machine speaks its lingo. There’s also a lot of data to plough through. I’ll stick all this on a disc if you can hang around for a bit. But this might interest you.”

  Slowey craned forward as Smith produced a laser pointer and shone it at the a few lines of data on the screen.

  “See that? The half-dozen lines right there” Slowey considered shrugging but nodded instead. “They’re all 999 calls made by this handset. This isn’t just keypad activity either; these calls all connected. As I’m sure you’re aware, emergency calls get routed straight through to the BT operator who allocates it to fire, ambulance or police according to what’s being screamed at them. So we can’t say where the call was picked up or what was said just from this. But on a hunch, I had a little look at this.”

  Smith slid a few feet sideways on his wheeled chair and angled a large VDU towards Slowey. It displayed the familiar blue and beige grid of the force’s incident handling system, with brief descriptions of incidents reported by the public and the call-signs of units tasked to deal with them.

  “These are the incident logs from the early hours of yesterday morning. There’s a match here. Four of the five 999 calls made by this very phone connected to our call centre, a hundred yards away.”

  “Pick one. Let’s have a proper look.”

  Smith double-clicked on one of the sequentially numbered incidents, which unfolded to show a full narrative of the call. The now familiar mobile number appeared under ‘source’. ‘Drunk Man Shouting Help’ formed the title. The narrative was only slightly more informative: ‘Caller in distress / says fell from bridge in Lincoln / having trouble speaking / numerous calls from this number / complains can’t feel legs and arms / abusive language / keeps pushing buttons on phone / slurring / heavy breathing.”

  The second page of the incident log shaded a crisis into routine banality. The emergency operator couldn’t or wouldn’t provide subscriber details or a precise location. The police call-taker rang the mobile number back only to hear a generic voicemail introduction. In his last 999 call to the communications centre, the mystery caller had become exasperated and proclaimed, “fuck you all…too late.”

  Someone had produced a map and a patrol had been dispatched to check bridges where city-centre drunks were most likely to harm themselves, either by violence or an ill-advised balancing act. On an otherwise quiet night, the cops had even made time to check the bridges on foot with torches. Over an hour, they checked the road bridges at either end of Brayford Wharf, the footbridge spanning the railway station between Oxford Street and Tentercroft Street, the Pelham Bridge overpass and the maze of streets beneath it, and various other side streets and foot bridges that Slowey had only a hazy knowledge of.

  To be thorough, a traffic patrol had volunteered to check the Burton Road bridge, driving both over and under it and finding nothing on the parapet or the road beneath. They either hadn’t seen Mickey in the bus shelter or hadn’t thought him worth getting out of the car for.

  Then, inevitably, all available units had been re-allocated to a mass brawl at a late-opening club with multiple arrests. ‘Drunk Man Shouting Help’ had been deferred. Later, when the streets slumbered and lethargy reigned once more, the incident was reviewed, coded and closed.

  “What do those codes mean?” asked Slowey.

  “Reason codes. Allows for these logs to be audited by type. Let’s see. ‘19’ and ‘76’.” Smith pulled up a help screen. “’19’ means ‘alcohol-related’ and ‘76’ means ‘abusive / hoax phone call.’ Oh dear.”

  “And who’s 21899?”

  “That’s the radio dispatcher who dealt with this and closed it.”

  “Think I’ll need a brief chat with them. Do they have a name or just a bar code?”

  Harknes
s cleared the call from Slowey and carried on pacing around the car, pondering his next move. As the sun inched closer to its zenith, his scorched face seemed to absorb its fizzing radiation which zigzagged and prickled behind his eyes. He should move the car to the shade of the massive horse chestnut tree that dominated the car park in front of Kesteven Court; but he wanted to see and be seen by Firth.

  Slowey had derailed him with his news from HQ. He knew Murphy’s death would now almost certainly prove to be accidental. Unless some stunning piece of forensic evidence surfaced, the fact that Murphy’s voice had been recorded in the force’s own control room using the word ‘fell’ – not ‘pushed’ or ‘thrown’ but ‘fell’ – had to make his death accidental. Why rage against this? Could he really be just another old school detective, happy to pin the crime on his favourite suspect, even if the evidence had to be hammered into the right shape to achieve this?

  Pacing around the scorching car and squeezing the mobile as if he might crush it, Harkness continued to stare at the first-floor flat to which he’d returned Firth. If only he’d had a clearer head, been less inclined to believe for those few seconds that he was hallucinating or dreaming, he might have shown them all that what followed was neither logical nor inevitable. But that would have meant he was to blame, again the reckless catalyst and the impotent rescuer.

  He must have looked away for far longer than he’d imagined. Slowey had run through the mobile phone saga at least twice, in that infuriatingly patient way of his that made you doubly conscious of your own befuddlement. Firth might have found a rear exit from the block, but he’d still have had to appear on the landing to get to it; if he’d dropped from the side window again, the scream would still be echoing.

  So he must have staggered out of the front, found the petrol somewhere out of sight, and here he was on his return trip. He used one crutch to keep his plastered leg off the ground as he pivoted along at a determined pace. His other hand carried a red plastic petrol can, which given the set of Firth’s shoulders couldn’t be empty. He paused at the foot of the stairwell, turned, raised the can and shook it jauntily as if he were offering to buy the next round of drinks.