Young, Gifted and Deadly

by William Stafford

  “No, ta, love; you know how it bloats me right up.”

  They finished the spag bol in silence - apart from Darren’s grunts of appreciation. Miller eyed her boyfriend through the prism of her wine glass. She supposed she should be relieved he wasn’t having protracted phone calls with Brough, who blatantly fancied Darren, and for whom she had once held a candle...

  She drained her glass, drowning those thoughts.

  But if not Brough, then who the bloody hell had Darren been speaking to for so long?

  ***

  Before bed, Brough, wrapped in his voluminous bathrobe, attempted to make a Skype call to Oscar. He couldn’t work out if it would be lunch- or teatime where Oscar was filming - What am I thinking, he laughed? Oscar’s American; they don’t do teatime.

  There was no answer. Oscar was invariably busy and when they did get to connect it was because he was the one to make the call. There was no chance of that million-dollar smile tonight then. Looking at a DVD cover was not the same.

  Probably for the best, Brough reflected as he crawled under the duvet. Let him see me when I’ve shed a few pounds - several tons, in fact! I am such a fucking narwhal.

  Brough forced himself to think of the unfolding murder case in order to distract himself from what he perceived to be his gigantic circumference.

  Oscar’s not the only one to go global-

  No, stop it!

  Think of the dead man on the bandstand. Who would do that to him? Was he a random victim, fallen prey to a cult? Or was he the specific target of ritualised slaughter?

  Oddly, these thoughts did nothing to help Brough get to sleep.

  ***

  Mrs Phillips intercepted her son on the landing. “Callum? What are you doing up? It’s the middle of the night.”

  Callum grunted: the language of the teenager. Then he translated for his mother’s benefit. “Getting a drink of water. Not a crime, is it?”

  Mrs Phillips frowned. She didn’t care for his tone lately. It was his age, she supposed. And the company he was keeping at that school.

  “You’re still dressed, love.”

  “You want me to strip off? Perv!”

  “No, I’m just saying you should be in bed. Asleep.”

  “I was working,” Callum snapped. His mother could be such an idiot sometimes. How she managed to reach her great age (forty-six) he couldn’t imagine.

  “You can work too hard, you know.” She reached for the sleeve of his hoody but withdrew her hand as though repelled by a force field.

  “Make your mind up,” he shrugged her off all the same. “Can’t win, can I? I’m not studying enough. I’m studying too much.”

  “That’s not - I’m just - worried. The police were around earlier. Two detectives.” She looked for a reaction but there was no discernible change in Callum’s slouched posture, his long-suffering scowl.

  “What the hell did they want?”

  “It’s bad news-”

  “Not Dad?”

  Mr Phillips was often away on business. That was part of the problem, thought Mrs Phillips. I can’t handle everything on my own.

  “No! Not your father. It’s Mr Barker, next door. He’s dead, love.”

  “Oh. Him.”

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “It was on the news. He was a prick anyway.”

  “Callum! I didn’t bring you up to use such language. And about the dead!”

  “Well, he was.” Callum glowered at his mother. “I’m fetching my water now.”

  Mrs Phillips gave up. “Goodnight, love,” she said sadly and withdrew into her bedroom. Callum didn’t even mutter a reply. He hurried down the stairs to the kitchen.

  He unlocked the back door and slipped out into the night.

  Mrs Phillips lay awake, listening, waiting for her increasingly wayward son to come back upstairs and return to his room. After a while, she wondered if she had dozed off and missed him. After about an hour, she could bear it no longer. She sprang from her bed.

  Callum’s door was open and his bed was empty.

  “Callum?”

  She tripped down the stairs. The kitchen light was on. The sink was empty. No glass of water had been filled that night.

  The back door was unbolted.

  “Callum...”

  Mrs Phillips peered out into the back garden as if expecting to find him there.

  8.

  Wheeler held the team briefing early the next morning. The murder victim was something of a bigshot in certain circles, not least of which was Dedley Chamber of Commerce. As ever, money means connections and connections mean power. Several councillors had already bent Superintendent Ball’s ear, applying pressure to get the killer or killers brought to justice.

  Maybe if they weren’t spending all the fucking council tax on twenty recycling bins of many colours for every fucking house in the borough, the police might be better resourced. Honestly! You only need one bin for recycling; let the fuckers sort through it at the rubbish tip, for fuck’s sake.

  “Um, Chief?” It was Harry Henry who brought Wheeler’s attention back into the room. “You were saying?”

  “Was I? Oh, yes.” Wheeler extended her arm in what, to a casual observer, might be misconstrued as a fascist salute, in order to point the remote control at the video projector suspended from the ceiling. A shot of the bandstand in Field Park appeared, the victim’s face superimposed on Wheeler’s own while behind her a Wheeler-shaped black hole menaced the dead man. “Fuck it,” she muttered and sidestepped out of the way.

  “Speak to me, people. What am we looking at here? What am we not seeing?”

  “Victim is male,” offered Miller.

  “Mid-to-late forties,” added Pattimore. “Fifty at a push.”

  “Name: Paul Barker, founder of Barker’s Bogs, establishing his factory in 1993,” Brough reeled off the facts from his notebook.

  “Jesus wiped,” Wheeler groaned. “I told you all that shit yesterday. Nobody got nothing new to bring to the party or shall we all phone our mummies and daddies and ask them to pick us up early?”

  “He was garrotted,” said Stevens, “with a standard length clothes line, available from several outlets in the town. Just about every-fucking-where, in fact.”

  “Owner untraceable then?”

  “You’d think so,” Stevens continued with a smirk. “I’ve asked the lab to check for prints.”

  Wheeler shook her head. “Our man could’ve been wearing gloves. If he had any fucking sense.”

  “Yes...” Stevens’s moustache twitched as his smirk grew larger. “But whoever used it to peg out the washing probably wouldn’t have. We might be able to trace the owner.”

  Everyone stared at him. Stevens wilted a little under the collective gaze of the team.

  “Well, spit on my clit and tell me it’s Tuesday!” Wheeler marvelled. “You might actually be on to something there, Benny-boy. Will wonders never fucking cease?”

  Brough and Miller exchanged glances, both thinking the same thought.

  “Actually, Chief,” said Brough, “we think we might know where to start looking. It might be coincidental but Barker’s next-door neighbours have no washing-line.”

  Wheeler’s eyes widened like twin balloons inflating. “This is too good to be fucking true!” She clapped her hands and rubbed them together. Visions of closing the case on the first day of the investigation danced in her head. That would show those shitheads, those penny-pinching, pen-pushers what a crack team she had!

  “Excellent! We might catch the bastard by teatime. Yes, Harry?” She turned her grin to the detective whose finger was raised like a nervous child asking leave to go to the toilet.

  “Um,” Harry used that finger to push his spectacles back up the
bridge of his nose. “I’ve been looking into that five-pointed star stuff.”

  “Eh? Oh, never mind that shit,” Wheeler waved a dismissive hand. “We can ask the bastard all about that when we’ve collared him.”

  Harry Henry slumped in his seat, nursing a folder bulging with research on his lap.

  “This could be a record! Murder solved within twenty-four hours. We could be a one-stop cop shop!”

  But Wheeler’s high spirits were to be short-lived. Superintendent Ball came in.

  “I’m afraid,” he addressed the group directly, “things may not appear as cut-and-dried as all that.”

  “Here we fucking go,” Wheeler sighed. “Just when you get your chips, some bugger comes along to piss on them.”

  “What is it, sir?” asked Pattimore.

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t deliver the news in a Scottish accent as they are wont to do on the old television programmes my wife insists on watching ad nauseam but there has been another murder.”

  ***

  Brough and Miller were despatched to the scene: the car park adjacent to the playing field of Priory High School. It was already crawling with forensic detectives, like ants at a picnic. Brough lifted the blue and white plastic tape across the entrance (formerly the gates to Dedley Girls High) so that Miller could duck underneath. He followed her to the eye of the activity, a burned-out Volkswagen Golf.

  Brough flashed his i.d. and a forensic photographer pointed him in director of the SOCO in charge.

  “Morning,” the SOCO nodded to the detectives. “I thought Serious had disbanded.”

  “Not disbanded,” said Brough. “Just moved house. What are we looking at?”

  The SOCO sucked air in through his teeth. “Nasty one, this. Worse than that poor sod on the bandstand.”

  “Who is it?” said Miller. “Do we know?”

  “Running the licence plate now but that will only tell us who the car belongs to. There will have to be dental checks before we know the identity of the poor bastard inside. But it’s probably the owner. This car park is used mainly by people who work in the town - council offices are just around the corner - and you drive your own car to work, don’t you?”

  “So, he might work for the council, do you think?” said Brough.

  “Or she,” said Miller.

  “You’re right,” the SOCO smiled at her. “To question the victim’s gender. So badly burned we don’t have a clue. Not yet. We’ll know more when we get him - or her - out.”

  “And when will that be?”

  The SOCO bristled, detecting a note of impatience in Brough’s tone.

  “Inspector, you don’t appreciate the delicacies of our work. Not only must every aspect of the scene be documented before we can touch anything but the poor bastard is quite literally welded to the interior of the vehicle. The seat, the steering wheel, the dash... It’s hard to tell where one begins and the other ends.”

  “Coo,” said Miller. “It must have got quite hot in there.”

  “Of course it did, Miller. It was a bloody fire! Any idea how it might have started? Are we sure we’re dealing with a murder here?”

  “Pretty sure,” said the SOCO, growing annoyed with the male detective. “And we believe it’s linked to the previous one in the park.”

  “How so?”

  “Come and have a squint. Mind where you’re treading.”

  They picked their way closer to the car. A couple of the team was in the process of removing the driver’s door. Miller gasped when she glimpsed the unfortunate person inside. A blackened skeleton, crisp and flaking, the mouth gaping in a silent, unending scream. Miller looked away, focussing her attention on the SOCO.

  “Burned into the roof is a five-pointed star, such as was found on the bandstand.”

  Brough and Miller exchanged sidelong glances.

  “And how - how was it done?” Miller almost choked; she couldn’t bear to look at the car and was trying not to breathe in. She didn’t want her brain to identify the scorched and smoky smells she was trying to keep out of her nostrils.

  “Best guess is the victim was drenched in petrol - or some other combustible - and set on fire. Perhaps via the sunroof. Would have gone up in an instant - Woof! - and the car would have worked like an oven or kiln.”

  “Ugh,” Miller shuddered.

  A woman approached. She beckoned the SOCO aside and showed him something on her tablet.

  “Well, well,” the SOCO returned to the detectives. “The car is registered to none other than the deputy leader of Dedley Council himself. I am ninety-nine per cent certain our overcooked friend will turn out to be Mr Barry Norwood.”

  ***

  Mrs Phillips allowed her tea to steep for longer than usual. She would have preferred a stronger drink but it was too early for booze. Hands shaking, she upended the teapot over her mug and then fumbled the teaspoon, shedding granulated sugar across the worktop. She burst into tears - I haven’t even spilled the milk yet.

  She sank onto a chair and tried to steady her nerves. The ride to school that morning had been fraught with tension. Callum had been belligerent. Obnoxious, even. She had confiscated his phone - he had left it charging up in the kitchen while he was in the shower and she’d seen her chance. Denying him phone privileges might be the only effective method of disciplining him but so far all it had got her was a lot of invective accompanied by the slamming of doors.

  “Give me my fucking phone back, you fucking bitch!” he had spat at her when she pulled up at the school gates.

  “Get out,” she’d said.

  “I fucking hate you,” was his parting shot, along with a slam of the passenger door.

  Now, in her kitchen, Mrs Phillips was wracked with sobs. What had happened to her sweet little boy? Why was he being so cruel, so horrible?

  His phone was on the table in front of her. She couldn’t bring herself to touch it. It lay there, dormant, a malevolent slab.

  Oh, it serves me right for looking at it, she scolded herself. Serves me right for looking at his private things.

  But I was only trying to be a good mum, to find out what’s going on. He used to tell me everything - including the passcode to unlock his phone: the year of his birth - and Mrs Phillips was unlikely to forget that.

  And there, in the phone’s photo gallery, she had seen things that disturbed her. Oh, she’d steeled herself for pornography - he was a teenage boy, after all - but not for the images she had found, pictures taken in real life not downloaded from some grubby website.

  There was nothing else for it. She would have to phone his father. So what if he was in a meeting? This was important. This was their son. Their Callum. Their everything.

  She reached for the handset for the landline. It took three attempts for her fumbling fingers to tap in the number correctly.

  “Bloody hell, Sheila - how many times do I have to-”

  “It’s Callum!” Sheila Phillips interrupted her husband’s tirade. “We have to talk about Callum.”

  She heard her husband make apologies to whomever he was with. She could almost hear his eyes rolling. He moved to a quieter spot - out in the corridor, she imagined.

  “What the hell is this about?” he snapped but there was panic in his voice. “Is he hurt?”

  “No! No!” she said quickly. “He called me a fucking bitch today.”

  “Who did? Our Callum did?”

  “Yes! He was horrible.”

  “That doesn’t sound like our Callum.”

  “That’s why I’m phoning. Oh, Donny; it’s been awful. The mood swings. The disrespect. And now I’ve seen things on his phones.”

  “What things?”

  “Photos.”

  “What photos?”

  “Oh, Donny; I’m so wor
ried.”

  “Sheila!” Don Phillips barked. “Just tell me. What fucking photos?”

  “If you’re going to start swearing at me as well-”

  “Sheila, please. I’ve got very important clients waiting.”

  “Arses!” Sheila Phillips cried.

  “Some of them, yes, but I have to keep them sweet.”

  “On his phone! Arses! Three of them.”

  “Oh, well, he’s a teenage lad. Bound to be taking an interest in the female form.”

  “These are boys’ arses! Pale, skinny, flabby, spotty, all sorts. But they’re definitely boys’ arses. Oh, Donny; where did we go wrong?”

  “Fuck’s sake, Sheila. You’m making the Grand Canyon out of a couple of bumholes. I’m sure you’re worrying about nothing. Listen; I’ll phone you later. Just don’t embarrass the boy. I’ll have a man-to-man talk with him when I get back. Day after tomorrow. Sit tight until then, all right?”

  He rang off and returned to his meeting.

  Mrs Phillips hurled the handset at the wall.

  ***

  Dennis Lord swivelled in his chair and squeezed a button on his earpiece. His office of chrome and smoked glass overlooked the development of apartment blocks and trendy restaurants around the Birmingham canal basin. You could get bespoke beefburgers now and it would only cost you an arm and a leg. Dennis could remember not many years ago when it had all been derelict factories and warehouses as far as the eye could see, when the canals were stagnant and putrid - a place where supermarket trolleys went to a watery grave. But look at it now! It was amazing how a little investment and entrepreneurship could work miracles and transform a blighted area into a lucrative one. And talk about job creation! People were raking it in, in somewhere in the region of the minimum wage (give or take a couple of quid). Yes, they were all service jobs with little to no hope of advancement but the students and immigrants and immigrant students seemed to quite like a zero-hours contract. At least the ones he employed in the CostBusters Locale did. Locale - he had insisted on the ‘e’ at the end. It made it French. And classy. And meant he could charge between five and ten per cent more for the goods than at his larger stores without a crimp in his conscience. They’m paying for the convenience of a local (locale) shop, ain’t they?