by David Haynes
“Shall I come back?” she asked, pushing her chair away from the desk.
White flung the mouse to the side. He looked in a bad mood, like she was the one who had disturbed him.
“No, no. Sorry. I’m trying to do too may things at once.”
Tell me about it, thought Jane, but she just smiled and nodded.
“I’m going through HOLMES and I can’t see what tasks Stu was working on. Have you got them? Chambers wants to see.”
DI White had come from Social Services about ten years ago. He’d been a safeguarding manager over there and just decided he fancied a change. He’d gone up two ranks in half the time Jane had gone up one. That fact didn’t mean he was a good copper though. He wasn’t, he was just good at taking exams and saying the right things to the right people. He was a good, honest man but he was in the wrong job.
She walked around the desk to show him where to find the information. “I’ve got paper copies of the task sheets if he wants them too, but they’re all here.” She moved the mouse around the screen quickly to show him exactly where the information was stored.
Nobody had been there to show her how to use HOLMES, she had just learned.
The Home Office Large Major Enquiry System was a computer program through which passed every single piece of information, evidence, exhibit and statement on an enquiry like this. It was designed to eliminate the risk of missing something; some small sliver of evidence upon which the entire investigation could hinge. It was a product of historical mistakes, missed opportunities and miscarriages of justice.
She sat back down on the other side of the desk. “He’d got twelve outstanding enquiries and was just about to go back through the CCTV again.” She knew what all of her officers had on their task lists, but had gone over Stu’s countless times in the last two days to see if anything would help. Anything that would indicate a pattern.
“I’ve got a list of his completed tasks too if he wants them?”
“No, it’s just these at the moment. Thank you.” White spoke while moving the mouse again. He looked tired, really tired and stressed.
He stopped, rubbed his neck and leaned back. “You know they took his computer, don’t you?”
It was something that hadn’t been mentioned but they all knew about it, each and every one of them.
“I do,” she answered, “but Stu...” But what? But Stu wasn’t a paedophile? All sorts of hypotheses were being put around the office. Theories which were too strong to ignore because of the MO. Stu Kelly was a lot of things but she hoped to god the computer would come back clean.
“I hope they come back clean.” White echoed what she had just been thinking, what the entire force was hoping too.
“Will you let me know?” She was Stu’s last supervisor so under normal circumstances would be kept in the loop, but this was different. His murder was being handled by a different team and they wouldn’t automatically inform her unless it had a bearing on the Bingo case. She knew that whatever was on the computer, whether clean or dirty, would have an impact on her case.
“Of course.”
There was silence for a moment and Jane stood up. She thought it was her cue to leave but White started talking.
“Worst case scenario and Stu’s computer comes back dirty, then we’ll all be working together anyway. One enormous, happy incident room.” His phone rang and he picked it up. “DI White, Incident Room.” A pause and then, “On my way.”
He put the phone down, sighed and put his tie on. “Thanks for this, Jane. I’ll see you in a bit.”
She smiled and walked out of his office. He wasn’t so bad. At least he left her alone to manage the office, unlike some inspectors she had worked for in the past.
She sat down and looked at her own tasks. She had twice as many as anyone else in the office, but as she looked around she knew how snowed-under they all were. It would be unfair to start dishing out Stu’s unfinished enquiries yet, if ever. No, she would take responsibility for them. They were hers now.
She scanned through them and found the CCTV action. It was the most urgent out of the pile, the one Stu had moaned about doing. She remembered their conversation in the briefing room and felt a stab of guilt. He was just seeing out his time, just trying to make it through to the end without getting too dirty along the way. She put her jacket on. She hoped he hadn’t covered himself in shit with his computer.
Stu had made copies of all the footage from the night of the clown’s murder. She booked it out of the exhibit store and put the first disc into her computer. Stu had found Newman’s Ford Focus and traced him from one side of Derby to the other. That wasn’t difficult – he had a photograph of his face on the side of his car and his wig billowed like a cloud in the driver’s seat. He had driven straight home after a child’s party, but Stu lost him before he reached his address. There weren’t many cameras in the suburbs and private CCTV had been a washout.
She went back through the footage using the camera-maps Stu had created. For a change, it looked like he’d been thorough. After seven hours, her eyes felt like they were made of spiky fragments of glass. She had checked every angle to see if he’d been followed home, going backwards and forwards trying to pick out number plates on the grainy images. He hadn’t been followed, of course he hadn’t. Whoever killed him was already there, already waiting for him.
It was a needle in a haystack.
“You going home?”
She jumped and looked up. DI White was standing over her. The office was empty except for the two of them
“Soon, I just want to finish this.” The screen said it was close to ten o’clock and the sky outside said it was ten o’clock at night, not the morning.
“His computer’s clean,” White said.
Jane looked back up and they both smiled. “Brilliant,” she said, a wave of relief washing over her.
“Thought you might like to know. I’ll see you in the morning, I’m going home for the first time in two days.”
“Night, boss.”
White walked into his office and came out a minute later holding his jacket. “Don’t stay late, Jane.”
She held her hand up. “I won’t. Night.”
“Night.” He waved and walked off down the corridor. It was never totally quiet in a police station at any time, but for the first time in days the office felt truly empty.
She ejected a disc and put the last one in. After this she was going home. She was going to take a long hot bath, drink two icy-cold bottles of beer and read her book. Thank god there were no irritating or needy men to spoil it. She’d worked with enough of them to last her a lifetime. That part of the evening would be bliss but the chances of sleeping well were nil. There was too much going round and round in her head for that.
The disc clunked into life. Soon they would be obsolete and everything digital, but the force might actually need to splash out on an upgrade for that to work. The last twenty years had gone by in a flash but she loved every minute of it. Well, perhaps not every minute of it. There had been some low points but this was where she wanted to be, where she always wanted to be. It was corny and it was cheesy, but doing this job mattered. It was an important job and as a police officer, people looked to you for help. If you couldn’t give them that help, then you had no business pretending to be a copper.
She moved the pointer around the screen, trying to find something, anything, to grab at. This footage was later than the estimated time of death. Stu would have looked at it but without being given a registration or even a car make or model, he was just fishing in the dark.
Stu had been right to be grumpy about it. The task was long, unglamorous and fruitless. They needed something more to work with.
“What’s that?” she whispered and leaned in closer.
Her eyes were dry and she rubbed them to stimulate her focus. A car, an old one, pulled up at a set of traffic lights. The interior of the car was too dark and the driver’s head just a black blob, but across the r
oad, a man was sticking large posters to the wall. There was no mistaking the image of a clown or the word ‘circus’ in big red letters across the posters. So the circus was in town, was it? She disliked the circus as much as she disliked clowns. She wouldn’t be paying them a visit any time soon.
She looked away from the poster to the car at the lights and gasped. It wasn’t that the car was too dark to see inside, it was that the driver had been looking at the posters too. He turned around slowly and looked directly at the camera with a vile and pained grimace on his face. It was hideous, like a horror film, and the blurry footage made him look like a ghost. There were dark shapes around his eyes, like distorted and stretched diamonds running down his pasty face. And then he was gone.
The car pulled away but Jane didn’t move. Her body was frozen. She didn’t believe what she had just seen. It couldn’t be right. Her eyes were tired and somehow the poster clown had become superimposed over the driver’s face. That was all.
She let go of her breath, unaware until then that she had been holding it. She needed those beers more than she thought. She moved the slider back, found the image of the poster-boy sticking his posters to the wall then started the footage rolling again.
“Circus posters, dark car.” She talked her way through the scene. “Driver obscure, turns his head...”
She watched as his face came into view. Just as he grimaced, his teeth clearly on show as if he were snarling at her, she heard laughter from somewhere and jumped. She was immediately embarrassed. It was someone down the corridor, in the parade room, that was all.
She wound it back again and paused it on the driver’s face. She had one of Bingo’s promotional flyers on her desk somewhere and she rifled through the paperwork until she found it. She held it next to the screen. The same black diamonds around the eyes.
The driver was wearing Harvey Newman’s face. Bingo was alive again.
She touched the screen. “Boo!” she whispered. The motive for killing Newman had appeared clear. A grown-up victim come to get revenge, but apart from Stu being involved in the investigation there didn’t seem to be a connection.
She went back through the footage and tried to read the number plate, but part of it was intentionally obscured. Only the last two letters were clear. This needed further work. The intelligence guys would be able to do some searches on partial plates and some geek would know what sort of car it was. It wasn’t a new shape, that was for sure.
She printed the clearest image and stared at it. His twisted face was one of the creepiest things she had ever seen.
It wasn’t perfect by any means. It was a long way off that but it was a start, something concrete at last. A picture in her hands of the killer and his car, albeit probably a stolen one. She tried to smile but her tired muscles could only form a scowl.
*
Jane was already at her desk by the time White came in. She had been there for nearly two hours and it wasn’t quite seven o’clock.
“Have you been home, Jane?” He strolled over, the smell of his aftershave preceding him.
“Have a look at this.” She didn’t answer his question although she had been home, just not slept much.
He took the still image off her and looked at it. “What is this?”
“It’s Bingo, or rather it’s his face. Harvey Newman’s face.”
“Is it?” White asked. He didn’t sound convinced.
Jane did her best not to sound exasperated. She handed him Bingo’s flyer. “Look at the eyes.”
There was a pause before he spoke again. She watched him look from one picture to the other in rapid succession.
“Ah, I see it now. The quality’s shit. That’s one creepy grin.” He handed both items back to her.
“I’ve got the team looking at the car,” she said. “Looks like it’s a 1986 Austin Metro in blue. Twelve possibilities with the visible numbers present and none local. One reported stolen from Dorset two months ago.” It was concise information that she knew most bosses loved. No waffle, just facts.
“Seems like you’ve got it under control. Have we spoken with Dorset yet?”
Jane nodded. “Just waiting for a call-back from the shift sergeant to tell me about the car theft.”
She could feel adrenalin rampaging through her body. They just needed a bit of luck with the car theft, something to give the whole team a boost.
“Okay, let me know when you get the info and we’ll go and see the DCI together. Good work, Jane.”
Jane smiled as White walked away. She didn’t need praise but it didn’t hurt. She looked at the image of Bingo smiling at the camera and winced. He would probably look worse in the flesh than he did on the image. It was a grim thought, a grim thought indeed.
10
Two shows down, three to go. Then they would move on to another dump and the fun and laughter would start all over again. Woohoo!
Jim Crawley opened a can of cider and drained half of it in one go. He winced, it was barely cool. The fridge in his caravan was on the blink again, which was hardly surprising given that it was over twenty years old and held together by tape. He finished the rest of the can and started on another. He couldn’t afford a new caravan or fridge. Maybe if he used a touch of gentle persuasion on Denise, she might have a quiet word in Fred’s ear about giving him a pay rise.
Screwing the boss’s wife was uninspiring in a physical sense but over the years it had given him leverage. When Fred wanted to fire him for letting the generator run dry, Denise had been there to talk him out of it. When Fred wanted to let him go for fighting with one of the clowns, Denise had been kind enough to dissuade him. It seemed Denise valued her marriage and the thought of Crawley sharing their dirty little secret with Fred scared the crap out of her.
It didn’t scare him so much, he could take care of Fred anytime he wanted. Ten years ago, things might have been different. Fred was a fighter back then and nasty with it, but he could take him now, no problem. Ten years of manual labour, putting up the big top and hauling equipment around the various sites had given Jim’s body a wiry power. He wasn’t big but he was lean, strong and twice as nasty as Fred had ever been. A few drunken brawls with other technicians and some memorable fights with townies had only built on the fighting skills he’d learned growing up. No, just let Fred try and take him on, then he’d find out what sort of a nasty bastard he had working for him.
There was a bang on the flimsy door of his caravan. He didn’t get up. “What?” he yelled.
“Creep... Jim, the generator’s packed up again. Fred wants you to fix it tonight.”
“Wanker,” he whispered under his breath. He knew the others called him Creepy Crawley but never to his face. This was as close as anyone had come. He ought to get up and beat the shit out of the kid just for starting to call him that name. He knew who it was though, and kicking the boss’s nephew in the face wouldn’t go down well.
“Five minutes,” he shouted back. Make them wait, that was the way to do it. Make them appreciate him a bit more.
He had purposely sabotaged the generator so it wouldn’t work without him, so he was the only one who knew how to fix it. There was nothing wrong with it but he made sure everyone knew how temperamental it was, and always swore when he was repairing it to make it look difficult and infuriating. Sometimes he purposely delayed the show by creating an additional problem with the generator. Hearing people getting inpatient inside the tent made him smile. But what really made him happy was hearing Fred apologising and offering them all a free return ticket the next time they were in town. One day he would force Fred to cancel a whole week’s performance, that would be the ultimate in smiles. It was all leverage, that’s how the world worked.
He would finish his drink then go and pretend to fix the generator. He might even call on that pretty little acrobat who’d just started with them. He had to get in there quick, he didn’t want everyone telling her to avoid him, telling them why they called him Creepy Crawley. He had a week, two to
ps, before she avoided him like the plague. He smiled to himself. She would be right to avoid him too, he was not a nice man, but so what? It was more fun this way.
Not as much fun as being a clown though. That was the reason he’d come to the lousy circus in the first place – to be a clown. But they wouldn’t let him, at least not straight away. They stuck him on the maintenance crew with all the other misfits and drop-outs. Christ, it was like being a kid again, working with that lot of creatures. Fighting, proving yourself and not backing down when the big guy tries to take liberties with you.
Boom, that was the big guy’s name. He thought he was a real hard-nut, a tough guy who could use his size to make you back down. Problem was, Jim had met plenty of boys like Boom before and not once had he backed down then, so he sure as hell wasn’t going to back down when Boom tried to take his cigarettes off him. Boom was big, but he was slow. After Jim had absorbed four or five big haymakers from him on the arms, he saw a glint of panic in Boom’s eyes. It was a little sign that said, ‘This guy knows how to fight, he’s done it before. What do I do?’ Jim had seen that before too and it was enough to know he had already won the fight.
He bit half of Boom’s ear off. When he knelt above the beaten man, he squeezed his cheeks so Boom’s mouth opened like a gasping fish, spat the chewy cartilage into his mouth and laughed. It was important to go the extra mile to make people frightened of you. Nobody messed with him after that, but Fred decided he might not have the right temperament to be a clown. Not even when he came up with a great idea for a bad clown, a naughty or nasty one that frightens the kids. Fred hadn’t liked that idea much and looked at him like he was a lunatic. That was the moment he decided he would sleep with Denise. Just to spite him; the idea of leverage came later.
There was always room for more clowns, especially the bad ones.
His phone rang and he stared at it for a moment. The screen didn’t show a name so he ignored it. It was probably just someone trying to sell him something. At least it wasn’t Denise asking him to come over to her caravan while Fred was out. He didn’t really want to screw her again, she wasn’t his type, she was too easy. He preferred things if they were a little more... difficult.
