Made To Be Broken

by Rebecca Bradley

  Connie was upstairs, lying in Emma’s room. The room hadn’t been changed, touched or emptied of anything. She often walked into the room and came out several hours later, face flushed, streaked and her eyes somewhere else. Lost to him.

  He straightened himself in the chair, pushed his shoulders back and felt a calm settle over him. They had to be getting anxious about things now.

  He unfolded the Nottingham Today and looked at the front page.

  Police Charge Man With One Count of GBH

  Police have charged 24-year-old Lewis Armitage of Lenton with one count of GBH after he admitted to adding rat poison to ice cream in a store.

  The 22-year-old woman has been seriously ill after buying the ice cream and ingesting the rat poison and was kept in hospital for a week.

  Armitage is still being held by police and will appear at Nottingham magistrates’ court today for a remand application hearing.

  A neighbour of Armitage said, ‘I’m surprised by this news, Lewis is a quiet neighbour. We rarely see him. He spends so much time in his flat.’

  Nottingham has recently suffered with a spate of poisonings, which has resulted in the deaths of three Nottinghamshire residents, including a sixteen-year-old boy. As of this date the murders are undetected.

  Progress of the multiple murder case appears slow and police are not offering much. Two businesses have been closed down, creating a further two victims. The authorities have refused to disclose what poison is being used, for investigative reasons, but are warning the public to be cautious when buying food goods and to check all seals and packaging carefully. They advise shoppers to only buy goods that are properly packaged and not damaged in any way.

  Isaac put the paper onto the table at the side of him and clenched his teeth until his jaw hurt. Why were the police refusing to name the digoxin? How could he get his message out there if they wouldn’t work with him? This was stupidity. What ‘investigative reason’ was there that prevented the basics of the case from being disclosed? Someone somewhere was not doing their job and they were now going to end up killing more people because he now had to up the stakes. He couldn’t have done all this for nothing. People had lost their lives. That was an awful thought. He wouldn’t allow them to have lost them for nothing, in vain. Isaac couldn’t just give in, so he had to push harder. It was the only way.

  He’d done his homework; he knew that if the medicine were given to someone who didn’t need it and in too high a dose, they would die from it. He wasn’t doing it for any other reason than for those in power to sit up and take notice, so that someone listened to how Em could have and should have been saved. He needed them to realise that the drug wasn’t working properly, that they had work to do before more people died. At their hand, not at his. He was doing it for a purpose, to stop any more victims like his daughter. The pharmaceutical companies were doing it out of sheer negligence and the need for higher profit margins rather than wanting to help anyone. They had to notice.

  Whoever was responsible for the decision to not name or report the digoxin was now going to regret it – because they had just sealed the fate of several more people.

  74

  Damerae Rabasca loved noise. The sound of people talking. Shouting. Bad-tempered people. Happy people. Traffic. Car horns.

  He loved the exhaust fumes that made the city streets all the more grey. Flat-fronted buildings. Local markets, spilling out onto the street with their wares. The oppressive heat that seared them all together. This was his home. And it was his. All of it. No one sneezed without his say so.

  It had been his ever since the house fire that had killed Odane last year. Not so much a house fire, as a firebombing. O hadn’t seen it coming. His closest friend. But Damerae took what he deserved. It wasn’t going to be given to him on a silver platter and no matter how close they were, O was a selfish cunt. Treated him like one of the guys on the street. And Damerae deserved better than that. So he took it.

  They’d just finished breaking Dean’s right leg that night and Damerae had driven Odane home, as usual. O was laughing about how, when they’d taken Dean to the rear of The Happy Tyre Man, he’d pissed himself, because he’d known what was coming. After all, you didn’t get Odane Hajric and Damerae Rabasca dealing with you themselves – unless you’ve royally fucked up. And you couldn’t fuck up more than by stealing from them. Did Dean think they wouldn’t notice he’d been skimming off the top of the coke and taking their profits? O had laughed. And he’d laughed. And he’d laughed. It was his crazy high-pitched, I-want-to-break-some-bones laugh. And Damerae had sat at the side of him and forced himself to laugh along.

  The snivelly little cokehead, he’d managed to gasp while shrieking with laughter. His face was a picture. And did you hear that crack, man? Oh Damerae had heard the bone crack all right. He had no problems with the breaking of bones. Dean deserved every painful second of it, and more. If he Damerae had his way, both his legs would have been gone. No, what Damerae was silently seething about was how O asked the question about it being ‘their’ profits. O was the man – everyone below him was below him and he made sure they knew it. Damerae didn’t see a share of the profits. He was paid the same way as everyone else, by selling and enforcing for Odane. Long-time friendship and loyalty didn’t count for anything and Damerae had had enough. So he watched O walk into the house and pulled away as usual. Not half an hour later, the house had been razed to the ground and a new chain of command was already in place.

  Now Damerae stood here, feeling it and loving it. He watched as his baby-mama came waddling towards him, skinny white arms swinging wildly at her sides as she huffed her way up Ilkeston Road, flip-flops slapping at the soles of her feet. She was hot, her face was red, but it wasn’t surprising, she was huge. Due any day now.

  ‘Damerae, what’d I say to you?’ she bellowed as she walked.

  Damerae didn’t hear what was said next as a weight pushed down on his chest, crushing and squeezing, forcing him down to the floor. The sun-warmed pavement rushing up to meet him was the last thing he saw.

  75

  This was a man whose dead body I had fully expected to be standing over one day – but with blood slipping from bullet or stab wounds, a violent end to a violent man. Not this, not him face down in the middle of the pavement with not an injury on him.

  The rustle of the paper Tyvek suit told me Aaron was now standing at the side of me as I looked down at Damerae Rabasca. Doug Howell, the CSI, was taking photographs of the body. I was aware of eyes watching us from above as residents in the flats peered out. We’d kept a wide crime scene cordoned off but those people in their homes could look out as much as they wanted.

  I clenched my fist in my pocket.

  I’d already shouted at someone who had opened their window to lean out and over the scene, asking if they wanted to be arrested for murder because they were currently contaminating the scene with their DNA by leaning right over it. They had rapidly closed the window and now had their nose pressed to the glass.

  ‘So, Damerae Rabasca?’

  ‘Yes, I wasn’t expecting this one,’ I answered.

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I’m suspicious. As head of The Niners I’d expected him to be killed in a gang-related incident, not to keel over in the street. We need the PM doing quickly and the tox screen results as fast as we can.’

  ‘Ah, young Hannah and my favourite detective sergeant.’ Jack’s voice came from behind me. ‘You enjoying keeping me busy?’

  ‘Hi Jack. Well, I do like to keep you out of trouble.’ I grinned at him. I thought, as a pathologist, his job was grim, but he was always so upbeat. So open to the good in life. I wasn’t sure how he did it, but his attitude was infectious.

  ‘So, what do we have?’ Jack asked as he snapped on his gloves, pulling them over the elasticated wrists of his own paper suit.

  ‘Well, here we have Damerae Rabasca, twenty-four years of age. Head of the gang known as The Niners; so called becaus
e of their penchant for 9mm automatics, though, out of interest, more recently they’ve been using the Glock semi and the odd Mac-10.’

  ‘Lovely, lovely.’

  ‘The gang marker is a tattoo of a 9mm bullet on the back of the neck – you can see his is clearly visible from this position – but to identify each other easily and quickly,’ I pointed down to his right hand, open as though waiting for someone to hand him monies owed.

  ‘The bandana on his wrist?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Exactly. Red, because no matter how bloody it gets, it’s not going to upset the gang colours.’

  ‘Well, he had no need of it today, did he?’ Jack hitched up his trousers, and crouched down to the body, taking Rabasca’s core body temperature.

  Doug continued with his photographs.

  ‘Any witnesses, Hannah?’

  I looked down the street to where Martin and Ross had been. ‘Yes, his heavily pregnant girlfriend, Gemma Spicer. She said she was walking towards him and he just went over. No sound, he just went down.’

  Jack pushed himself back up. ‘You know what I’m going to say.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I can’t tell you anything from this. I need to do the PM and I’ll do it as soon as we move him from the scene. I’ll supervise the removal and I’ll get the tox screen off straight away. He’s a young, fit man. Find out from Ms Spicer all the illicit drugs he was taking so we can ascertain if they played any part, but looking at him, it doesn’t look like a typical drug overdose, what with the surroundings and him looking well. Once I’ve done the PM I’ll let you know the results, but we won’t know what we’ve really got until we get the tox screen back if it’s what we’re all thinking.’

  I huffed, I couldn’t help it.

  ‘I know it’s a slow and frustrating process, but that’s science for you. I’ve sped up the process as best I can. Everything that comes through that looks as though it’s to do with this case is marked as high priority and is moved to the top of the list and dealt with first.’

  ‘It’ll come, Hannah.’ Aaron backed him up.

  ‘Good man, Aaron.’ Jack slapped him on the shoulder and Aaron tried not to flinch.

  I glared up at the flats again then turned to Aaron. ‘What if Rabasca was the intended target all along? All the previous victims may have been a smoke screen. Rabasca had more enemies than any one of our victims, though I’m not sure if any of them have the wherewithal to be able to pull something of this scale off. Not just the scale, but using such a poison and being able to administer it in such a way … but we can’t rule it out. It could also be that the previous deaths were just fortuitous to Rabasca’s killer and they decided to make it look like it was a part of the same job so we don’t look anywhere else. With someone like this guy, we need to think very carefully.’

  ‘I don’t know, Hannah, you’re right about the level of thought that needs to go into something like this. These guys are just point and shoot.’

  ‘We need to speak to Gemma Spicer,’ I said.

  76

  There were no tears.

  She stood in the clean, sparse kitchen, stomach touching the worktop, arms stretched out in front of her, making a cup of tea. I’d offered to do it for her but she’d looked insulted. As though I’d insinuated she was incapable of doing something quite so domesticated. When she finished she spread her knees wide and pushed her bum down to the floor so she could reach the tabby cat that had been circling her feet. She rubbed the top of his head.

  ‘Stop fussing now, Norman, I’ve to talk to these here plods.’ She reached a skinny arm up, grabbed the worktop and pulled herself back upright before walking past me, back into the living room, carrying her tea with her.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Gemma.’ I sat opposite her on the worn but clean sofa.

  ‘Why you sorry? You lot aren’t gunna miss him, is you?’

  ‘If someone has done this to Damerae, we have every intention of investigating it fully, but first, we need to wait for the post-mortem to find cause of death.’

  ‘Of course you are.’ She tried to take a drink but it was too hot, so she settled the cup on top of her expansive stomach instead, folding the material of her top over to shield her from the heat.

  ‘He’s your partner and to lose someone is always hard, but I can only imagine the difficulties in your situation, with a baby on the way.’ I tried to connect with her. Aaron, I noticed, was leaving me to it, probably recognising that dealing with heavily pregnant women was not one of his strengths.

  She grunted at me. ‘What do you know? I’m no worse off with him dead that I would have been had he lived. He wouldn’t have been a dad to this kid. All he were interested in was running that fucking gang of his and ruling with his iron dick. I were there to just hang off his arm whenever he needed me. It’s no loss, let me tell you.’

  Gemma was honest. I liked that. And I could work with that.

  ‘Okay, what can you tell me then about his enemies, his recent life? Has there been anything you’ve noticed out of the ordinary?’

  ‘You’re not listening to me, are you?’ She tried her tea again, this time managing to drink some.

  I waited.

  ‘I were only there when he wanted me. It’s not like I were his confidante. I’m a mere woman, meaningless to him, a trinket on his arm and about to be his baby mama. I’m not stupid. I accepted him for who he was.’

  I nodded my understanding at this comment.

  ‘His life were about making sure the Niners were the top gang. He was always looking for trouble. But I ain’t heard any threats against him, if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t think anyone dare. Not after what he did to O.’

  ‘So, that was him?’ asked Aaron.

  ‘Yeah, that were him all right. Came round that night all hyped up. Pumped, he was. Told me if I told anyone, he’d kill me. I believed him. Kept me mouth shut.’

  She looked from Aaron to me. ‘But he can’t kill me now can he?’

  77

  Grey’s fingers twitched on the desk in front of me. His once-blue eyes, now sliding into a murky pond colour, froze me in my seat. He had to have known this was coming but the feeling in the pit of my stomach was telling me something else. It had been four days since Rabasca’s post-mortem. Four days where we’d talked to Gemma Spicer at length, worked with source handling to see if they could task their informants with obtaining intelligence on whether this was to do with Rabasca and the gang world, though I was told it was sensitive work and we’d hear back when they were ready. And so far, we hadn’t. When we’d moved his body from the street we’d recovered a Glock, which was a change of weapon for him; it also tied him to a shooting that had occurred a couple of weeks ago, so I passed the weapon and the information onto DI Amanda Lawrence who was the SIO for the case. It appeared the death of this man cleared up many cases – apart from our own.

  I focused on Grey’s fingers, which always fascinated me. They were his giveaway, his tell, the thing that told me if he was anxious about what was happening. At this moment in time, his fingers were doing a merry dance on the desk top. He couldn’t keep still. He moved his pen from one side of his laptop to the other, without looking away from me.

  ‘And he’s sure?’

  ‘Sir, it’s science, of course he’s sure. Jack would never guess and he’d only ever phone and tell me when the results are in, never before.’

  ‘Did they double check?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Did they double-check the results? The sample? It could have been from one of the other victims.’ The pen moved back to its original place. His stare was getting harder, a steely glint, a warning.

  My stomach twisted in on itself. Grey was clutching at straws. I knew he hated that this case could get any bigger.

  ‘Sir, they tested the correct sample. Jack and his team are scrupulous.’ I ran my fingers through my fringe, buying a little time, mere seconds. ‘There is no mistake. Damerae Rabasca had digoxin in his system
and no other cause of death was evident. We made enquiries with his girlfriend Gemma Spicer on the day he died and she had nothing obvious to offer. It could be a rival gang – or one of his own, bearing in mind what he did himself. There had been no suggestion that anyone would make a play for Hajric’s hold on the gang so when it happened it took everyone by surprise, including the Niner’s themselves, according to the intelligence that came in following the incident. Spicer’s disclosure last week tied up a long-running investigation.

  ‘But, my feeling in relation to this, is that it’s simply a part of our bigger picture. This has come unexpectedly for everyone who knew him. Spicer stated she doesn’t know anyone who is ill or taking any medication. Of a legal variety, anyway. I lean towards believing her. I’m not sure any of the gang members from either side are smart enough to pull this off. We’ve brought her in and got her interview on camera to cover our bases. She’s not the most helpful of witnesses but she went along with us.’

  Grey closed his eyes.

  ‘On the positive side,’ I tried to help him process what was happening, ‘We no longer have a problem with the copy-cat. Armitage was kept in on remand and won’t be going anywhere for a while. That’s one file for court that is currently being put together and wrapped up.’

  ‘Okay, Hannah. I get that, but we still have a huge problem. No one sleeps. No one leaves. No one has a life until we get to the bottom of this. Am I understood?’

  He’d stopped moving. I wasn’t sure which was more unnerving. ‘Yes, Sir. I’ll let the team know where we’re up to now.’