Hide and Die (Jordan Lacey Series Book 4)

by Stella Whitelaw

  Bonzo was galvanized into action. He leaped towards me, head low, growling like a demon. He was truly magnificent, except that he did not look where he was going. He went head first into the bag, the rest of him propelled by force. The moment he was halfway inside, I tipped the bag up. The weight was horrendous, almost pulling my arms out of their sockets. Five stone of mastiff. I nearly let go but knew I dare not.

  A thrashing leg ripped a hole in the bag and clawed nails slashed my arm.

  Bonzo was struggling like fury. I tied the top into a vicious knot, the end of his tail sticking out like a stubby rope. It would only hold him for moments but I knew I could use those moments.

  I dropped the bag and was out of the doorway in a flash, making sure the door closed behind me. I hoped Bonzo was not clever enough to open the door. The only room certain to have a lock was the bathroom. She’d been washing her hair. An open door led me to the towel-sodden hole.

  The bolt on the door worked. I slammed it fast. I could hear voices as the couple were charging upstairs. I did not have long, but long enough to notice a box of brand new top-brand electric toothbrushes on the floor. I tucked one into the waistband of my jeans. I put down the lavatory lid and climbed on to the narrow windowsill. The window opened outwards and there was just enough room for me to get my legs out and then turn on to my hip.

  It looked an awful long way down. I knew how to do a fireman’s drop. Hanging on by your fingertips meant you were extended the five foot plus of your height already. No jumping.

  But I did not want to risk a broken ankle by landing on the concrete yard below. Bathrooms always have drains. I transferred my grip to the nearby drainpipe, my knees and toes turned inwards. There wasn’t time to think. I had no option.

  I slithered downwards, the rusty pipe creaking and protesting. Then it gave way and pipe and I fell in an ungainly heap at the bottom. A shower of brick dust added to the fallout, plus a gallon of dirty water.

  Coughing and choking, I got to my feet. The Gibsons were leaning out of the bathroom window, shaking their fists and yelling at me. I heard a distant Bonzo barking. They would be letting him out in seconds.

  I was over the back wall using a pile of dumped stuff as a climbing frame. My heart was pounding, sweat in my hair, blood dripping from my arm, covered in sticky brick dust. The twitten at the back of the terrace was empty. I chose the quickest route back to civilization. They could hardly set Bonzo on me in a pedestrian shopping street.

  My homing instinct took me towards Latching police station. Several people looked at me in disgust. I suppose I looked as if I’d been in a brawl or drinking. A stitch pierced my side and I doubled over in pain.

  ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ a woman said, thinking I was going to vomit on the pavement. She walked on, stiff-necked with indignation.

  I made myself limp on despite the pain, clutching my side, barely able to see for the dust and sweat in my eyes. I was going to charge damages to that firm of solicitors. My best old jeans were ruined.

  A gang of spiky-haired youths were loitering outside the police station, hands in pockets, kicking air. They began to jeer at me.

  ‘Come on, granny. You’ll make it.’

  ‘The cops’ll find you a nice comfortable cell.’

  ‘On the meths again, are you, gran?’

  ‘Give us a kiss, if you can remember how.’

  ‘Lost yer hearing aid?’

  Sometimes I really hate the very young. What I needed was a helping hand, not this bawdy barracking. I pushed my way between them. Wait till they needed my help. I had a good memory for faces.

  I groped my way into the station. It was like coming home even though it was a long time now since I’d worked there. The colour of the walls was the same, a dull magnolia. The floor was the same, dull washed-over wood. The desk sergeant was also the same, my dear friend, Sergeant Tiger Rawlings. Not dull at all. He glanced up, expecting trouble, seeing me.

  ‘Jordan,’ he said in despair. ‘You always come in here looking a wreck. What’s happened now?’

  ‘I fell down a drainpipe.’

  ‘Breaking and entering, I suppose.’

  ‘Not this time. More like being held prisoner by force and intimidated by massive and ferocious bull mastiff.’

  I held out my arm. The long gash was oozing blood, starting to clot.

  ‘Nasty,’ he said. ‘We’d better see to that. When did you last have a tetanus?’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t remember.’

  ‘Do you want the station doc to look at you or would you like a lift to the hospital? I can arrange either.’

  ‘I’d really like to speak to someone in CID.’

  I meant DI James. The man himself. I wanted to see him more than anyone. I needed to tell him about my experience, to be fussed over, to have a little tender loving care. TLC. Maybe it was not in his vocabulary.

  There were footsteps coming along the corridor and of course I knew them. I was so keyed into his persona that I would know him in a crowd of hundreds. Note I don’t say thousands. I do not exaggerate.

  ‘Jordan, whatever have you been doing?’ said DI James. He pulled up a chair for me, a cheap, grey plastic stackable chair. ‘Sit down before you pass out. Do you want a drink?’

  I nodded. ‘Please.’

  He brought me water in a plastic beaker. I wish I could say that it tasted like champagne, but it tasted like piped water. He stood over me while I drank the water and then he pushed the hair out of my eyes. The elastic band had disintegrated along the way.

  ‘You look a right mess,’ he said, peering down. ‘And you’re bleeding.’ He put a pad of handkerchief on my arm.

  I nodded again, past speaking.

  ‘Anything to tell me?’

  I handed him the expensive electric toothbrush, still swinging a price tag. I got my breath back.

  ‘Found a house full of stuff. A lot new, a lot of junk. There was a box of these in the bathroom. At least a dozen toothbrushes. I want to make a statement.’

  ‘You had to go to the bathroom?’

  ‘To avoid being eaten alive by a bull mastiff.’

  ‘Do you have the address?’

  I started coughing and wheezing. My asthma does not like stress and this had been stress in bucketfuls. My inhaler was at home. Any minute now someone would take me to hospital to be nebulized. I could see it coming. I would spend hours on a trolley in A & E when all I wanted was to go home.

  ‘I’ll … write it down.’ It was a struggle, trying to control my breathing. ‘Mr and Mrs Reginald Gibson. I was Process Serving a debt demand.’

  ‘You ought to be in hospital. Your arm is bleeding. Is your tetanus up to date?’

  It’s quite difficult to lie to the man you love. But lie I did. I’ve been in enough hospitals to last a lifetime. I wanted my own bed and my own bathroom, my own cranberry juice and my own Napoleon brandy. I just hoped Bonzo had clean nails.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’ll take Jordan home.’

  DS Ben Evans had arrived, coming down the corridor on his white charger, exhaling steam. A knight in shining armour. I could not believe it. He was soon beside me, tall and good-looking, eyes full of concern, the kind of concern I wanted to see on DI James’s face but which was never there.

  DI James shot a withering look at his

  Detective Sergeant. He did not seem too pleased. His blue eyes glowed an unusual shade of green. ‘OK, Evans. You take Jordan home if you are free. I’m too busy with that breakin at the off-licence. Come and make a statement tomorrow, Jordan.’

  It was a lot like dying. There’s an Ella Fitzgerald song which says, ‘Everytime we say goodbye, I die a little.’ I died a lot then. Bits of me curled up and fragmented.

  I remember Sergeant Rawlings wrapping a wet antiseptic bandage round my arm and it stinging. I remember Ben Evans driving me home in a white patrol car, no lights flashing, silence plugging my ears. He took my keys out of my back pocket and I remember him steeri
ng me upstairs, taking off my clothes and putting me to bed. The sheets were cold. I don’t remember anything else.

  Sixteen

  It was the longest sleep I’d had for months. Something like twelve hours. When I awoke, I was not sure whether it was night or day. Did it matter? I was not going anywhere.

  My damp, brick-dusted clothes were on the floor but I was decently clad in a long T-shirt and some skimpy panties. Across the front of the T-shirt were two cuddly bears entwined, saying, ‘We need friends’. DS Ben Evans had been my friend. I knew that much. DI James had been too busy.

  I ought to take a course in speed yearning. Then I could do a year’s longing for him in ten minutes.

  I stood in a warm shower, washing out the brick dust, hoping my blood had cleansed the wound on my arm. It did not look too inflamed, only a bit pink. I was exhausted by everything, could hardly remember where I’d got to in the cases I was supposed to be working on. What had happened to this famous note-making? Any minute now I’d need a one-to-one interview with myself …

  The sea would change that. I needed recharging. The tide timetable gave me bad news. Then I remembered. It had been in the newspapers. A tide of seven metres was expected at 1.17 p.m. It was the highest tide of the year. Red alert all along the coast. The council had dragged up a shelf of shingle to make a barrier, placed huge rocks where a diagonal current was expected, issued sandbags to seafront houses and pubs. It was serious.

  If the wind was off-sea, then the tide would surge over the promenade. Fishing boats, those fragile shells, would be flung from their moorings, dragged over shifting shingle. Pebbles would litter the roads as waves encroached on the land, swirling towards doorsteps.

  I hurried down to the front, wind blowing into my face, cooling my skin. Huge waves were surging up the shingle, each one eating into the carefully piled defences. The pebbles slid down into the sea, leaving gaping holes. The next wave made for that gap, swirling over the promenade, catching careless feet.

  Crowds were gathering with cameras and videos. A TV crew was bustling about. It would be on Meridian news.

  The sound was ferocious as tons of stones shifted and crashed together under the weight of water. The deafening music of the sea. A hundred-piece improvised jazz concerto. I stood listening and watching. This video was in my head.

  Jazz never sleeps in my mind. Any doctor listening to my heart would be alarmed by the primitive beat. An ECG would record the rhythm of ‘Call Me Irresponsible’ laced with ‘Shiny Stockings’, the vocalist echoing the high brass.

  I had not heard my jazz trumpeter for months. This was not good news. I needed his kind of music. Classic jazz. There was no way I could find out where he was or what was happening. His wife, or his agent, would not appreciate it if I called. It was only when he played locally that he came into my life. But he was always so caring, so affectionate. He knew our special kind of what might have been.

  Sometimes he played at the Bear and Bait. He turned up and of course, because he was an international star, they loved him and asked him to dust down his trumpet and play.

  If I was lucky, I might be there. It was always crowded on jazz nights so then I sat on the floor. I can curl up small, back against a pillar, making sure no one steps on my juice.

  As I stood watching the sea, I made a mental list of what I had to do, superwoman style:

  1. Resolve paternity case of Phil Cannon.

  2. Find out who electrocuted Brian Frazer.

  3. Find out who suffocated two small children.

  It was a chilling list. Nos. 2 and 3 were not really my responsibility, though Mrs Fontane was paying me for No. 3. I did not seek fatalities but they kept coming like I was a one-woman Samaritan. Was half of Latching bumping off the other half? They belonged to DI James, the bastard, the man who let someone else take me home, let someone else put me to bed. I don’t remember any wandering hands, thank goodness. What was the matter with James? That divorce must have been a hell of a bad news day, but what else? Perhaps I ought to find out what happened then I might understand him.

  There was something not quite right. I cried for a bit, like a depressed teenager. James did not understand me or perhaps he understood me too well. It was like a vast beach with no one on it. The whole world was an empty space. I could hear that music playing soulfiilly, a man and a woman, it tore me apart. I’d seen the film, a long time ago. I could barely remember the story, only that haunting tune.

  Housework was a sure way to wake myself up so I went home to retrain my dusting arm. I cleaned in monumental disgust at the debris and dust. I need glasses. How could I live in such chaos? It took me two hours. By the end, my wrists were aching. I had repetitive dust strain syndrome. Pass me the blue elastic wrist wrappers.

  Statement to make. I inched towards the police station, dragging one foot at a time, brain intact but body strangely aching. The wind was still southeasterly. It was a different sergeant on duty at the desk. This fresh-faced youngster, straight from a training course, took me seriously. He showed me into an interview room. The one glossy magazine was the same one. Hello, look at me, I’m a bride.

  ‘Would you mind waiting? I’ll find someone to take your statement.’

  A WPC took my statement. She had lank hair and needed to lose weight and fast. The buckle on her trouser belt was straining over a bulge, but she was nice despite the discomfort round her middle. Did she drink after hours with my DI James? Did they spend evenings in some corner nook at the Bear and Bait? All the uniformed liked the Bear and Bait. It was convenient. They would not run into any villains. Well, not many.

  It sounded pretty tame by the time she had laboriously written down my account. How could I have been scared of a dog? Even a big, drooling mastiff.

  ‘I’m sorry to have wasted your time,’ I said, getting up stiffly. ‘It was obviously nothing much.’

  ‘It was not nothing much,’ she said. ‘There’s the injury to your arm. I’ll get it photographed. How is it this morning?’

  ‘I don’t know. A bit hot.’

  She insisted on looking, hitching lank hair out of her eyes. I would not have allowed such untidiness if I had been in charge of the station. She should tie it back. An area of skin on my arm was swollen, red, inflamed, pulsing with multiplying bacteria.

  ‘That bull mastiff was a nasty brute,’ she said, peering. ‘You ought to get to Latching hospital immediately and have that seen to. You could lose your arm,’ she said, hoping to comfort me.

  ‘One less arm to wash,’ I said. ‘I’ll pop along.’

  ‘No, not good enough. I’ll make sure you get there.’

  She phoned for an ambulance, photographed wound, in colour, gave me some water to drink. At some point I read and signed my statement. I was starting to feel odd.

  An ambulance arrived and I was loaded aboard. I refused to lay down. I sat up, chatting with the paramedics, clutching my arm which was throbbing. I was light-headed by now, some sort of fever setting in. It was so hot inside the ambulance. We talked about local politics and councillors who did nothing but collect their expenses. I was trying to make sense of their computer system.

  ‘I need to update my word processor.’ Then I remembered that I did not have one. I had to get one. I had to get email.

  I was not sure where I was going. The A & E department looked different even though I was a regular visitor. A sort of vibrating sound was washing round me. They put me on a trolley and I did not protest which was unusual. Darling trumpeter, come and play for me. James, please … come and talk to me. But no one came.

  I washed in and out of the feel of the place. The overhead lights hurt my eyes. The trolley scratched. They rolled me into a ward and on to a hard bed. I wanted to go home. But where was home? I wondered if I would ever see it again. Someone had to come and get me. They stabbed injections into my arm and installed a drip. The ceiling wavered like the inside of a washing machine. The smell of old ladies in wet beds was overwhelming.

  ‘J
ordan? Wotcha doing here? Hey, baby, wake up, don’t go AWOL on me. You ain’t supposed to be dying yet. Where’s yer doc? I’ll speak to him.’

  I was not sure who it was, but I knew the voice. Was it Jack from the amusement arcade? Yes, of course, it was Jack. The lingering, uncouth owner of the arcade who made thousands from the punters, could afford a blue Jaguar. How did he find out I was here? Or was it Miguel? No, Miguel had a different accent. He was smoother. His Mexican restaurant was classy and expensive. It was not Miguel. My mind was wandering again.

  ‘Is it Jack?’ I said, fighting for a voice. ‘Go away, please. I’m too ill for visitors. Don’t hang around. It’s a waste of time. It might even be catching. They don’t know what they are doing. Half the doctors are off duty. They are going to let me die.’

  ‘Not now, they ain’t,’ he said ferociously, scratching his stubble. ‘I’ll make ’em come and see you. You ain’t just nobody. I’m on your side, baby. Hang on there.’

  Jack went off, striding down the ward pulling down his T-shirt, ready to fight anyone. If I had the strength I would have smiled. He wanted to care for me, for better or worse. But how could I agree to that? It was too complicated to sort out now. Yet Jack was the kindest man around. And generous. None of this counting the change, working out the least possible tip. He knew how to give a girl a good time. But it couldn’t be me. Never. I wasn’t his girl.

  ‘Stay there. I’ll find somebody,’ he called back.

  I hardly had a choice.

  Some time later Jack was back with a young man in a flapping white coat. He took my temperature with some handy newfangled gadget.

  ‘Yeah, sure. Her temperature’s coming down. She can be moved to a private nursing home.’

  I did not recognize the voice. I’d never seen this doctor before. He was in the normal white coat with a stethoscope slung round his neck. He looked as if he had qualified about yesterday.

  ‘Do you know my name?’ I asked, struggling to sit up. ‘Have you read my notes? What’s the matter with me?’