Bright Spark

by Gavin Smith

“You really want to contemplate that? When it’s all wrapped up so neat and tidy, starting with a clear motive and ending with a bit of natural justice?”

  “I think we’ve missed something big. You don’t want to know why. Not yet. But for now, just help me. I need to make sure.”

  Slowey studied the duck that had waddled closer, flicking its emerald head from side to side and eyeing them for more fatty titbits while it chuntered to itself darkly.

  “Doesn’t he make you jealous? No cases, no deadlines, no mortgage, no emotional blackmail from unhinged colleagues. Just a simple life of scavenging, gang-rape and water-sport.”

  “A charming image. Don’t you take the kids to feed the ducks?”

  “Yes, but with them I have to pretend to like Mr Duck. Alright. What do you need?”

  “Were there any forensic hits at all, from the house or from the bypass?”

  “Reports are still trickling in. But nothing on Murphy’s body yet. As for the house, we got a few fingerprint hits on exterior and interior glass. Most match the Murphy family. Some don’t match the Murphys or anyone on the database.”

  “Have we taken elimination samples from all the neighbours yet?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s a low priority now. Why?”

  “You need to visit the Jennings family. Get elimination samples. Fingerprints and DNA. Even if somebody already got them, say we lost them and get more. Then go fishing. Study Marjorie’s initial account. Get another one. A full statement if you’ve got time. Try to speak to Jeremy alone, if she’ll let you. Say you need to evaluate him for the Vulnerable Witness Interview process. Either way, dig around, politely. Then let me know what you think.”

  “So you want me to harass some stand-up citizens and their disabled son?”

  “Someone in that household saw something. If we let this blow over, someone could get away with murder and that family will forever be under their cosh.”

  “Well, I’ll try to unchain this albatross you’ve got wrapped around your neck, but I don’t think I can make it fly again.”

  The base rate remained fixed at a niggardly 0.5% and it seemed the latest lot to sidle into government would keep it that way. After all, they needed the masses to spend money they didn’t have on things they didn’t need otherwise the wheels might grind to a halt and they’d all have to look at themselves and each other instead of their giant plasmatronic fun-centres and play consoles.

  Then they might start thinking and the world would become even more desperate and frightening than it already was. So the shopping masses must keep their easy credit and to hell with the savers; those who saw beyond the next big holiday or flash car or noisy gadget and planned for their own future. Marjorie ticked a box on her mental job list: she would have to review her ledger to ensure that Tony’s lump sum lasted as long as it needed to.

  Yet the nation would have to make savings somehow. The consumer economy must be held sacred but everything else was fair game. The police were to be thinned out and the prisons emptied, all in the name of efficiency; as if we needed more thugs running amok with their noise and violence and vomit. Why Sharon had chosen to waste her brain on representing that type of person was just inexplicable. Why on earth should criminals get protection at the public’s expense? Still, she had at least moved into personal injury work now, even if she wasn’t nearly picky enough about her clients.

  A few months into another change of government and still nobody would talk about what was really going on. Every other worker seemed to a migrant, filling the mini-buses that thronged the back-roads at first light, returning to their ghettos at dusk to drink and sleep, here to live cheaply and earn quickly, knowing the land had no future worth subscribing to. Feral kids roamed the streets, itching to hurt you or steal from you for any reason or none, knowing they had no reason to fear the police or anybody else, that they lived in a world without consequence. Then they’d get each other pregnant, handing down their misery from generation to generation.

  And the NHS was to be squeezed. If only the managers and the bean-counters were culled, the idiots who ensured that Tony’s appointments disappeared into the ether and nobody cleaned the wards or made sure the patients actually ate their meals. Nursing had changed so much since her day; visiting or escorting Tony, she no longer felt part of that institution; worse, she felt chilled by how little anyone really cared.

  Was the real problem just that she was getting old? She didn’t recognise this society and couldn’t call it her own. Behind these walls she held fast to her tranquillity and safety, caring for her men: Tony, fighting hard but losing the battle with the galloping corruption in his cells, and Jeremy, never changing, always challenging. It was good to be back here at Marne Close, no longer cluttering up Sharon’s world. Even with the stench from the fire-damaged walls, it was better; quiet and safe again, now that the Murphys had gone. She wouldn’t have chosen the manner of it, but the fact of their absence was a thing to be treasured.

  The Murphys had chiselled away at her walls, reaching into her world and tainting it with their violence, their noise, their smoke-filled tumult. They had belonged to the new order, to a world without respect for others, a world where neighbours should be treasured or wholly and politely excluded. When they forced her to clasp an oxygen mask to Tony’s face to protect him from their smoke night after night; when they forced her to pick up a phone to report the beatings and raving to the authorities; when they ignored her or glowered at her and laughed or played their disco music or satellite sport at horrendous volumes; when they abused the rudiments in all of these ways, then they included her in their tawdry world, and that was not tolerable.

  Somebody rapped at the front door, brisk and insistent. Her reverie faded as she folded away the tabloid newspaper in which she’d been immersed and placed it on the kitchen table, flush with the edge nearest the door to the lounge. Jeremy sat cross-legged on the floor nearby, absorbed in auditing his die-cast car collection, arranging it in alphabetical order and in line with the equally spaced diagonals in the pattern of the carpet. She peeked around the door to the lounge which she’d turned into Tony’s bedroom until the repairs upstairs could be completed. He lay semi-upright in his bed, lank hair plastered to his skull, eyes closed, pulse fluttering beneath the meagre flesh at his throat, mouth lost in the haze beneath the oxygen mask. His hoarse breathing drowned out the hissing of the oxygen cylinder, the whirring of the electric fan and the footage of panzers charging across the Russian steppe in the documentary he’d been watching. She checked that the curtains blocked out the noon sun as well as they could and carefully closed the connecting door.

  She used the side door to exit the kitchen and made her way down the side path to the front of the house where she found a short, shabby man in a cheap suit. Her first impulse had been to draw his attention to the polite notice on the door advising sales persons, hawkers and all unsolicited callers of that ilk that they were not at all welcome. Then he turned and his harassed but kindly face with its lop-sided grin took her back to that night with its fear and heat and a feverish conversation in a car surely too tatty to belong to a public servant.

  “My husband’s asleep, you see,” she whispered, beckoning him to follow her. “I know we’ve met but you’ll forgive me for asking…”

  “Ken Slowey, madam,” said the policeman, producing his warrant card with a flourish. “Detective Constable. At your service.”

  “Yes, I remember. You were very kind. We’re all most grateful. A terrible shame about. Well. You know. Would you care for a cup of tea?”

  “Now you’re playing my tune.”

  He paused at the kitchen door, allowing her to enter first. With a start, she turned and raised her hands as if to ward him away.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she said, gathering her wits. “Jeremy doesn’t know you. He doesn’t cope very well with new people. Please wait here for a minute.”

  “Of course.”

  Slowey nodded and moved away from
the doorway, just out of Jeremy’s line of sight. He smiled at her patiently, tapping his document case repeatedly against his right hand as if he were testing the heft of a cosh.

  Marjorie closed the door. Like all the other windows and doors, it was double-glazed with some sort of plastic frame. Sharon had insisted she replace the original wooden fittings a few years ago with Tony’s compensation money, and she had to admit she didn’t miss the condensation or traffic noise. Even so, she couldn’t trust the door to be completely soundproof so she stooped and whispered to Jeremy whose forehead was already creasing with anxiety that might become rage if it wasn’t assuaged.

  “Jeremy, you know we talked about the night of the fire.”

  “My recollection is peerless,” he all but shouted.

  “Can you whisper, Jeremy? I bet you can.”

  “Of course,” he replied with his loudest whisper. “Susurration for espionage and assignations and other secret stuff.”

  “Well, do you remember what to do if a policeman talks to you about it?”

  “I say what you said unto me to say unto the policeman.”

  “And what was that?”

  “You said I should say that I was asleep and didn’t see nothing and didn’t do nothing and shouldn’t say anything at all unless I am asked and also that I’m not to say that you told me to say anything but I must trust you because you love me and always look after me.” Jeremy recounted his new mantra robotically and returned to his cars, once again using emergency service vehicles to corral the others.

  “You’re a good boy, Jeremy.”

  “I am superlative, the nonpareil of good boys.”

  Marjorie checked the impulse to touch Jeremy’s arm or tousle his hair, even after all this time finding his aversion to her touch, any touch, a sore spot she couldn’t help but probe. She found her own face reflected in the kitchen window, pale, pinched and severe, the look of a bitter woman walking to the gallows. She forced herself to breathe in deeply, closed her eyes and commanded herself to become the woman they all wanted her to be, the woman she needed to be.

  A heartbeat later she saw the meek and smiling mother once more, apologetic smile and rounded shoulders in place, the supplicant displacing the uglier self that Jeremy never noticed and Tony was never allowed to see.

  “Mr Slurry, come in, please, I’m so sorry to keep you.”

  Slowey seemed not to have moved a muscle although Marjorie wasn’t sure the ink stain on his right hand had been there a few minutes before.

  “It’s no trouble, Mrs Jennings.”

  “Oh, please call me Marjorie. Tea?”

  “T is for trouble,” announced Jeremy. “It’s also for terror and thermal and trauma and Thermopylae.”

  “He’s a clever lad, Marjorie.”

  “I am a clever and perspicacious fellow and I know what not to say because I have manners of the most exemplary kind.”

  “Please excuse him, Mr Slurry. How do you take your tea?”

  “Slowey. With a ‘w’. Two sugars please. I’m cutting down.”

  “You don’t need to, surely,” she chuckled, hoping it sounded spontaneous, as she switched on the kettle and lifted down the biscuit tin. “There’s nothing on you but muscle.”

  “What does he mean, Marjorie?” asked the policeman, staring at Jeremy.

  “Oh, he just likes to talk, to play with words. I don’t think he means anything.”

  “Elucidation required…”

  “A biscuit, Mr Slurry? We have custard creams and….”

  “…I must not say anything other than….”

  “Jeremy, really, the policeman doesn’t have time for your nonsense.”

  “….that which I am allowed to reiterate unto you.”

  “What a mysterious fellow he is,” said Slowey, shrugging. “Do I see ginger nuts, Marjorie? Magic, you’re spoiling me.”

  “Yes,” she gasped, clutching the tin, wondering if you really could knock someone unconscious with a round metal object without doing serious damage. The policeman wasn’t too much taller than her so she could probably bring it down on the crown of his head with a respectable amount of force if she put her heart into it.

  Yet all her professional training, the long years of her twenties spent dealing with gaping lacerations and depressed skull fractures, suggested the harmless knock-out blow was nothing more than a fiction to hurry a novel or a film along. She proffered the tin instead.

  “Please take as many as you like. You keep your strength up.”

  “You’re very kind. Now, I am sorry to….”

  “He uses certain language, you know, rude words. Anyway, he’s knows he’s got to be polite in company….”

  “I understand. Really. Don’t worry.”

  The policeman crunched on a biscuit with a smirk of child-like delight. She took stock of him again in his rumpled suit, tie decorated with cartoon animals, worn wedding ring and scuffed loafers with one lace undone. He was harmless; doubtless a capable policeman when he meant to be, but not in a serious frame of mind right now. Whatever had brought him here seemed to him like going through the motions.

  “Won’t you take a seat?” she urged, motioning him to a kitchen chair.

  She should separate the policeman from Jeremy but Tony needed peace and moving the conversation into the garden might have seemed suspicious and exposed her private affairs to the neighbours.

  “Thanks,” he said, settling on the edge of a chair, unzipping the document case, ready for business. Vulnerable again to a solid blow to the base of the skull, if only she had the right position, the right implement and the nerve. She’d need something weighty but broad at the point of impact to reduce the chance of cracking the skull.

  “Look, I’m ever so sorry to bother you again, Marjorie. It’s just. Well. You know all about routine. I need to complete a few more pieces of paperwork.”

  “But it said in the paper that the main suspect had killed himself. I thought it was all over.”

  “Well, that’s all true, but you know what it’s like in this day and age. Bureaucrats must have their paperwork.”

  The policeman lined up a number of neat bundles of documents as well as several plastic bags and what appeared to be two laminate sheets enclosing a rectangle of black ink.

  “So before we submit our report and put it all to bed, we just need to finish all the tasks we were assigned on day one. I know it doesn’t seem very sensible, but I promise I won’t take up too much of your time.”

  “That doesn’t seem like a good use of taxpayer’s money, officer.” She didn’t have to reach very far to find a clichéd grumble befitting her age and station.

  “Maybe not. But think of it this way. If we’d always been this thorough, some serial psychos would have been caught earlier and some embarrassing law-suits might have been avoided. Consistency has a lot going for it.”

  “Very well. We’re all here. How can we help?”

  “Well, I need fingerprint and DNA samples, purely for elimination purposes. It’s a very simple process, basically…”

  “But we’ve already had them taken. More than a week ago. A nice young lady in a white van came round to my daughter’s house. Ever so polite.”

  “Really?” Marjorie stirred in her seat; she’d seen irritation but not surprise in the policeman’s fleeting frown. Perhaps he wasn’t the actor he thought he was.

  “Then I must apologise, Marjorie. It seems we’ve slipped up. The samples weren’t to be found in yesterday’s audit and we really do need a complete set from the immediate neighbours. I promise I’ll be quick.”

  A month ago, she’d have refused. She paid her taxes and knew her rights and her cooperation mustn’t be taken for granted by public bodies who clearly didn’t value her help otherwise they wouldn’t be losing evidence. But right now, she must cooperate, must be seen to be cooperative. Besides, it wasn’t as if the sampling process could hurt them. She’d been careful.

  “Very well,” she sighed. “Do yo
ur worst. But it is a bit of an ordeal for my boys. Please promise me you won’t lose these samples or whatever they are again.”

  “Cross my heart.”

  Marjorie allowed Slowey to rub the outsize cotton bud inside her cheek, an amazingly innocuous way of sampling something as intimate and fundamental as DNA. Then she once more allowed her fingers to be daubed with ink and rolled gently one by one in the rectangular boxes on Slowey’s form. Throughout, she made sure that Jeremy was watching closely.

  “You may have to allow Jeremy to do this by himself,” she explained to Slowey as he began filling out another set of forms. “He doesn’t welcome physical contact. I’m putting that mildly.”

  “Unnatural unwarranted intimacy,” Jeremy declared. “Not conducive.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem. He’s a bright lad.”

  “Deoxyribonucleic acid. Sectioning my genome. Evidentially. Big Brother watches us all.”

  “That’s right, Jeremy,” said Slowey, speaking slowly and without a hint of mockery.

  He must have kids. He was probably a good father. Not an abuser, not a lager-swilling gorilla. Pole-axing him with the cast-iron skillet hanging from a kitchen cupboard close to hand posed an unacceptable risk to what might be a perfectly nice family, a family she would probably approve of. She would wager that none of them played loud music late at night. Or smoked. Or argued.

  “I’m trying to make a full set. My case file is really untidy with big gaps in it. I just need your buccal cells and your inky prints to fill it and make it neat.”

  Jeremy shrugged and obliged Slowey as he was talked patiently through the sampling process. The mouth swabs were quickly bagged and secured. Jeremy needed a little more encouragement to coat his fingers with ink and had to be shown how easily it had been washed off his mum’s hands. Yet once he saw his very own whorls and arches take precise shape on paper, he was fascinated and determined to complete the set as neatly as possible. Slowey flattered him perfectly, proclaiming it the neatest sample of fingerprints he’d ever seen, so neat in fact that he might frame it in the CID office.