by Tom Trott
We sat opposite each other in uncomfortable chic chairs, and he tried to hide his hairy legs behind the folds of dressing gown. I couldn’t hide my smart suit and the fact it looked like I had been dipped in mud to halfway up my shins.
The chiselled body of Andy’s partner, Darren, a nurse, in nothing but a pair of sleeping trousers, wafted from the bedroom to the kitchen.
‘I’ll make some coffee,’ he called quietly.
‘Don’t make coffee,’ Andy said, ‘I plan to go back to sleep.’
‘I’ve got to be at work in a couple of hours, there’s no point in me going back to bed. Joe, would you like a coffee?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘See,’ he called to Andy, ‘our guest would like a coffee.’
‘He’s not a guest, he’s an intruder.’
‘Ignore him, Joe, it’s the only time he’s in a bad mood, when he’s been woken in the middle of his sleep. Still, it doesn’t stop him waking me when he gets in from work at two in the morning just because he wants a quickie. That’s our relationship now: ships that fuck in the night.’
‘Ok, ok!’ Andy submitted, ‘I’m sorry.’
Darren arrived with the coffees, and gave Andy a quick peck on the cheek, ‘Cheer up, darling.’ Then he disappeared back toward the bedroom, ‘I’m going to get scrubbed up.’
I took a slurp of my coffee. Andy made small talk.
‘How is Grabarz Investigations going? I heard you moved office.’
‘It’s going well. We turn over a few thousand a month now. I had to move office to have room for my associates.’
‘And a new flat too, I heard.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Down the marina?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the new block.’
‘You’ve been talking to Thalia, I suppose.’
He nodded. ‘We run into each other occasionally.’
I frowned. ‘She didn’t say anything.’
He shrugged. Then a smile bloomed across his face like spring. ‘I’m happy for you.’
I ignored the smile. ‘You don’t sound happy.’
He thought for a moment. ‘Joni Mitchell said, “something’s lost, but something’s gained, in living every day”.’
I bit my tongue. It was my turn to think for a moment. I glanced around his living room, it didn’t take long. ‘Ok, first of all, she didn’t say it, she sang it; and secondly, I’ve gained a bigger flat, a bigger office, a Jaguar, two employees, and a reputation; what have I lost?’
He didn’t miss a beat. ‘Focus.’
‘You haven’t changed, you still love to give advice. “Focus”, what does that mean?’
‘You know what it means.’
‘You mean your bogeyman.’
‘Excuse me?’ He laughed. It cut like a knife. ‘When did he become my bogeyman? You convinced me. And, if I remember correctly, I took some convincing.’
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
He leant forward. ‘He’s still out there. We were in it together, mapping his web, The Society of the Twelve, we spent eleven years working on it, stunted my career, you were obsessed with bringing him down.’
‘Again, first of all, you stunted your career voluntarily, you didn’t want to climb the greasy pole like all the rest. I respected you for that, but it was your choice. Secondly, have you heard a single whisper about him in the last two years?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Have you!?’
‘No,’ he drawled through gritted teeth.
‘And do you know why?’
‘I’m sure you’ll tell me.’
‘Because we stopped looking for him.’
He just stared.
‘Maybe there was a bogeyman, maybe there was a conspiracy of powerful people helping each other to get rich, maybe they did give themselves a fancy name; but we created the legend. We screamed his name into the void and when the echo came back we thought it was something new, like dogs barking in the night.’ I regained my composure. ‘I wasted enough years of my life on that, enough of yours too, I won’t waste any more. And if you ever want to come work for me, you can; you’ll get a pay rise.’
He just stared at me. He looked tired. ‘What do you want? I don’t see you in almost a year, and then you come knocking on my door at four in the morning. Let’s get this over with.’
‘Little Fawn Farm, do you remember the case?’
‘I don’t think so,’ he replied immediately.
I nodded. ‘It rang a bell for me, nothing more, but with your memory I thought you might know something of it. Oh well,’ I sighed, ‘I’m not surprised, it was a long shot.’
After a minute-long staring contest he sighed, broke off, and whispered it to himself: ‘“Little Fawn Farm”?’, swilling it round his head like he was warming brandy. ‘You’re right, it rings a bell, but I don’t know why.’
‘A boy... his family.’
It came to him. ‘Yes, I remember now. I didn’t work the case, but I remember everyone talking about it at the time. Yes... Little Fawn Farm, that was the name of the place. That was ten years ago, you know.’ He was suddenly alert. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘What do you remember?’
‘Why do you want to know, Joe?’
‘You don’t want to know why I want to know, Detective Sergeant.’
He slumped back in his chair. ‘As far as I remember, the little boy, I don’t think he was even ten years old, loaded the shotgun from the barn and blew his sister and his parents away. Someone heard the shots, called the police, and when we arrived he was just sitting there on his parents’ bed, between the bodies, clutching the shotgun.’
‘Did he do it?’
‘He pleaded innocent at trial, but the evidence was overwhelming, he admitted it in prison.’
‘Anything else?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Anything else you can remember?’
‘Like I said, I didn’t work the case. And I was a junior officer, those who did know more wouldn’t gossip with the likes of us. You’re better off asking the boss, he was a DI, he probably remembers more.’ He suddenly frowned, and jabbed a finger toward me. ‘But you let him sleep, don’t go disturbing him in the middle of the night.’
‘I wouldn’t do that. Thank you.’
I stood up and made my way to the door.
‘Say thank you to Darren for the coffee. He’s the only person who makes instant coffee taste good.’
‘You’re welcome!’ Darren called from another room.
I opened the door into the corridor.
‘Joe...’ Andy started.
I stopped, waiting for whatever he wanted to say.
‘...you know I want what’s best for you, right?’
I didn’t answer.
‘And I’ll always be your friend. I care about you. So, with that proviso, I want you to ask yourself a question. I don’t want an answer, any answer. The answer isn’t for me anyway, it’s for you. But still, I want you to ask yourself and think about it, ok?’
I didn’t look back. ‘What’s the question?’
‘How much money did it take?’
✽✽✽
It was 4:52 a.m. when I woke to the knocking on my car window. I had only been dozing.
‘Joe?’ a man asked.
It was Daye. I had driven to Woodingdean to see him, but with Andy’s words ringing in my ears I had decided to wait until a reasonable hour. It hadn’t mattered. He had a blanket wrapped round him and the knuckles that knocked on the glass were as white as the snow.
‘It’s freezing out here, come on inside.’
He shuffled back up the steps to his bungalow and I followed stiffly behind him. Between the cold and the car my legs had seized up.
He let me inside and showed me into the living room, where he had already lit the gas fire. I snuggled into one of the two comfy armchairs pointed at it. They may be ugly, but old people always have th
e best chairs. The chairs are ugly, of course, not the people.
He made us each a cup of tea with two rich tea biscuits on the side, and then sat down in the other chair with some effort. Next to his biscuits was a rainbow of pills.
‘How are you?’ I asked.
‘Not great, to be honest. They had to take out my left lung.’
‘What’s the prognosis?’
‘A couple of years,’ he shrugged, ‘if I behave.’
The pinging bell of a small clock struck five. From the chair opposite I stared at him through the gloom. A strong man made weak. An old man warming himself by the fire, wrapped in blankets, eyes and cheeks sunken, skin translucent, getting ready for the big sleep.
He gobbled a biscuit, then each pill in turn, then the other biscuit. Then he turned his laser-like eyes on me.
‘So what is it you want from me at five in the morning?’ he asked genially. ‘Advice? Ideas? Sanctuary?’
‘Memories.’
He nodded. ‘Of what?’
‘Little Fawn Farm.’
He nodded again. He never asked why.
‘Tell me everything you remember.’
‘I’m afraid it will be less than you’re hoping for.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
He leant back in the chair and stared into the blue buds of the gas fire.
‘It was an upsetting one. I didn’t work the case, but I remember how it affected the mood in the station, especially amongst the older officers. Every junior officer has to see their first dead body, or the first time they wait for an ambulance with someone, the first time they see blood on the road. A traffic collision, that’s normally the worst we get. Or a fire. But they’re rare, and it’s not us that gets the worst of it, it’s the fire fighters or it’s the doctor. And everyone will see someone who has been stabbed, normally they’re still alive. So us older officers thought we had seen it all. But what a shotgun does to a little girl... I only saw the photographs. Some poor bastard had to take them.’
‘Did the boy do it?’
‘It happens. There was James Maxwell, same sort of age, turned the oven hobs on and wandered out into the night, never to be seen again. Gassed his whole family. It became known as the Maxwell House case, even though it had nothing to do with coffee!’ He laughed wheezily.
‘Huh?’
He frowned. ‘Your generation doesn’t even know what instant coffee is.’
‘And people still say things were better in the olden days,’ I drawled.
‘Or Maxine Adeleke,’ he continued, ‘although she only killed her mum. Electrocuted her in the bath with a set of hair straighteners. She claimed she was only trying to teach her a lesson. She only served a few years in juvie, was out before she was an adult.’
‘So it happens. What doesn’t? Did the boy do it?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know: I didn’t work the case.’
‘Who did?’
Those laser eyes glowed. For a moment I glimpsed the Daye I remembered. ‘Raymond Burke,’ he said with precision, ‘the best of us.’
I dunked a biscuit and ate it in one. ‘What made him the best?’
‘Numbers.’
I raised my eyebrows as a question.
‘He had an almost one hundred percent record,’ he elaborated.
‘A hundred percent of what?’
‘Since he became a DI, and then a DCI, every single case he worked on ended in a conviction. And almost all of them was found guilty at trial.’
‘Is that unusual?’
‘I hadn’t heard of it before, and I have never seen it since.’
‘Is it suspicious?’
He tried to hide a naughty smile. ‘It does sound a little too good to be true.’
I nodded. ‘Tell me about him.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Come on, I saw that smile, this is one of those pieces of unfinished business you never thought you’d get around to. Share.’
He leant forward, he was keen. He had already spoken more tonight than he normally spoke in a year.
‘When I first joined I wanted to be like him. From the moment you saw him he made an impression. He was always so well-dressed; not flashy, of course, he was a policeman; but dapper. Criminals respected him too, they were always polite with him. He was like a movie star. And the bosses loved him because he got great numbers. He was just what they wanted: smart, respectable, and good at the job. None of his suspects walked into doors or fell down stairs. And he hardly ever got a complaint, just the odd rough arrest, and you’ll get that whether you deserve it or not. He was the perfect officer. And because of his numbers he had a certain amount of power: he could pick his own bagmen, pursue the cases he wanted, pass on the ones he didn’t. Which helped his numbers, and made him popular with the lower ranks because he got to stick it to the bosses. Yes, he was...’ he searched for the words, ‘hot shit.’ It sounded funny coming out of his old mouth.
He had finished. He leant back again.
‘That’s it?’ I asked.
He looked satisfied enough, whatever wasn’t obvious to me was obvious to him. ‘I’ve been a detective for the majority of my life, and if there’s a tip that has helped me more than any other it is “look for the first time”.’
I raised my eyebrows again, but he didn’t continue, so I asked, ‘Is that cryptic?’
‘No.’ He thought up an example. ‘Say a bank has been robbed, and you’re convinced it’s an inside job, you’ve got five people and you don’t know which one of them to look at. You ask them how they got to work that day, they all normally drive, but that day, for the first time, one of them got the bus. Why?’
‘I don’t know, why?’
‘I don’t know either, it’s an example, I made it up. But the point is it’s unusual. Is it a symptom of something else?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. But I know it’s worth finding out.’
‘So what did Burke do for the first time?’
He frowned. ‘No, that’s not what I meant. In his case, he himself is the first time. His numbers are the abnormality. His success. But no one with the responsibility wanted to question it. They wanted it to be true. I may have been his junior, but it never sat right with me. He’s the Lance Armstrong of policing.’
‘Maybe he’s just a really good detective.’
He gave a little grunt, treating my comment as a joke.
I sighed. ‘Do you know where he lives?’
He got up without speaking and shuffled into another room. I waited where I was. After a minute he returned with a faded yellow index card. On it he had neatly written:
Raymond Burke (DCI, r.)
DoB 10th November 1947
6’1’’, Slim, dark hair, balding
Brook Cottage, Firle Lane, West Firle
4
Old Tricks
It was 7:48 a.m. when the morning glow kissed the weather vane on the top of Brook Cottage, Firle Lane, West Firle. It would be considered grand for a cottage, like the tallest dwarf or the largest pony. Surrounding it was a trim garden which would no doubt be blooming in spring. This morning, as the cold winter sun worked its way down from the weather vain to the soil it would peel off the layer of frost that had painted the bricks in a silver sheen, thawing out the house and its occupant.
The curtains had twitched five minutes ago. I alternated between staring through the windscreen of my Jag at the leaded window twenty metres down the lane, and staring out my side window at the field through the thin treeline that bordered the road. A morning mist was hovering over the clover, soon to vanish when the dawn hit.
I climbed out of my car and trudged up the lane, it was still cold enough for my breath to condense in the air. The little wooden gate creaked as I pushed through it into the front garden, and just as I raised my hand to knock on the door he opened it.
Despite the winter he had a bronze tan. He had on a pair of dark blue jeans, a black and white striped polo shi
rt, and a fleece. His suspiciously dark hair was thin to the point where I could see his scalp. He wore glasses with gold or brass rims, on a gold chain. On his right wrist was a gold watch, and on the little finger of his left hand was a gold signet ring with a black onyx inset. He had a strong nose with a bridge that could support haulage, a jaw that could grind stones, and a face that rested in a scowl.
He drank in my unshaven face and muddy suit. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked bluntly.
‘Are you Raymond Burke?’
His eyes narrowed.
‘The famous detective?’
The scowl relaxed into creased leather. ‘I’m Raymond Burke. Who are you?’
‘Joe Grabarz.’
He waited for me to elaborate, but I didn’t. ‘Well, what is it you want, Mr Grabarz?’
‘This may sound silly, but I’m a detective too, I’m working on a case at the moment, and I’m not ashamed to say it’s got me stumped. I was thinking of running it by another detective, to see what they thought, and who better to run it by than the great Raymond Burke. I know we’ve never met, but I thought I’d drive up here and give it a shot.’
He frowned. ‘How did you get my address?’
‘Richard Daye, he’s a friend of mine.’
He nodded ever so slightly. ‘Well, in that case, I suppose I’d be very happy to offer you some advice. I was just about to take my dog for her morning walk, you don’t mind?’
‘Not at all.’
He nodded, then pushed the door to. I watched the blur of his outline through the stained glass as he picked a coat off a hook and disappeared up the stairs. When I was sure he was out of sight I casually pushed the door open again and gently stepped into the hallway. On a table by the door was a telephone, notepad, and pen. A row of hooks held coats, hats, and scarfs.
From only three steps in I could see into the living room and the kitchen, and still maintain the pretence of waiting patiently.
The living room was full of books, all nonfiction. I could see books on travel, mechanics, precious metals, jewellery, pottery, even dressmaking. I recognised the detective’s insatiable curiosity, a craving to learn. The most popular topics in his library were naval history and the Napoleonic Wars, a tome on the Battle of Austerlitz was open face down next to an ashtray and cigar stub. There were no photos on the mantelpiece.
