by DS Butler
It sounded like a groan.
She stood fixed to the floor for a few moments. Should she go in? What if it was like the last time? Swallowing back the nausea that swept over her again, she opened the door. Mr. Weston lay on the floor, motionless, but moaning, in a pool of vomit.
Sally reached for the telephone and with trembling fingers she dialled 999.
6
Dean Wagstaff stood in his normal spot in the car park on the opposite side of the road to Mason House. In one hand, he held a bunch of bright yellow fliers, advertising Bob’s Fried Chicken. Buried deep in his coat pocket, his other hand closed around two twenty-pound notes.
Every couple of minutes or so, he checked the two twenty-pound notes were still safe in his pocket. He had finished the first part of his job. Now he had to do the second part.
Easy money, that’s what he’d been told. He just had to wait until he saw an ambulance outside Mason House and then put the note on the windscreen of the dark blue Mercedes. Easy.
The idea of the ambulance made him nervous. He didn’t want to be involved if someone was going to get hurt. But when the money was wafted under his nose, he thought about what he could spend it on and decided not to ask any more questions.
He lifted the windscreen wiper of an Audi, slipped one of the yellow fliers underneath and walked on to the next car.
He knew the owner of the Audi; he was a miserable bugger. He’d shouted at Dean once, and told him to piss off with his fliers. Dean had responded politely, telling him that everyone needed to make a living, but the man looked at him as if he was shit on his shoe. He’d been high at the time, so the words and the look bounced off him. Now, when he remembered how that man looked at him, he wanted to get some superglue and cover his whole car with fliers permanently.
It wasn’t exactly cheap to park here. Most people got the train into the City, but the ones who drove in had to pay for the privilege. All the parked cars were top of the range, expensive models. Car parks in the City were thin on the ground and word was this one would soon be replaced by another office block.
The car park itself wasn’t much to look at, just a square of tarmac surrounded by a two-foot high brick wall. A man sat in a little hut at the entrance, raising and lowering the barrier and issuing day tickets.
Dean glanced over at the fat man in the ticket booth on the other side of the car park, who was looking angrily in Dean’s direction. That didn’t worry Dean because he knew the ticket man was too lazy to try to chase him away.
When the ticket man first got the job, he had tried to move Dean on, tried to scare him off. Told him the fliers bothered his customers. But Dean just kept coming back, and in the end, the ticket man chose the easy option. He kept his fat arse dry and warm by sitting in the booth all day.
The whole day he sat there - raising and lowering the barrier at the car park entrance. But he didn’t stop shooting Dean dirty looks, like he wanted to come over and sort him out, if only he wasn’t so lazy.
Dean looked across at the dark blue Mercedes. It was a nice car, if you like that sort of thing; but it looked like an old man’s car. He’d seen the driver, and he was old, at least fifty or sixty, or something like that. He parked his Mercedes in this car park from eight ‘til six all week.
The sound of a siren made him look up. The sound came from a fair way off so Dean waited to see if the noise got closer. He reached inside his jacket and touched the note in his inside pocket.
The noise got louder and louder until the ambulance pulled up right outside Mason House with its blue lights flashing.
This was it.
Dean took the note out of his pocket. The note was in a transparent plastic, sealable bag. When he thought no one was watching, he slipped the note under the windscreen wiper of the Mercedes and turned to walk away.
As he made his way to the exit, he saw the man in the booth staring hard at him. Dean left the car park and threw the rest of the fliers in the bin.
He’d done enough work for today.
7
Jack Mackinnon sat staring at the walls of Chloe’s dining room. Chloe had suggested it might be nice if they redecorated some of the rooms in her house together. Mackinnon suspected it was an attempt to make him feel more at home, but if he were honest, he didn’t pay much attention to things like patterned wallpaper and colour schemes.
To make her happy, he booked a week off work and they had planned to go to B&Q together and pick out the wallpaper. This morning, before they set off, they had a row. Chloe stormed out and she hadn’t yet returned.
Things had been rocky all weekend. Since that stupid fight with DC Brookbank. All Chloe wanted was an explanation, which wasn’t really much to ask. But he wouldn’t tell her, and just made up some stuff about Brookbank spilling beer over his shirt.
She knew he was lying, although she didn’t come right out and say it. Instead, she’d been picking up on things all weekend. He didn’t empty the dishwasher the right way, or he left the bottle opener on the kitchen counter instead of putting it back in the drawer. But he could put up with that for a couple of days if it meant she never found out why he really hit Brookbank.
Mackinnon had stripped the wallpaper from the walls and laid down the dust covers while he waited for her. All he needed now was the new wallpaper and that was the problem. He wouldn’t dare go and pick the wallpaper himself. She might want him to feel at home, but he was pretty sure his interior design skills wouldn’t meet her expectations.
Mackinnon heard someone in the hallway. Thinking it was Chloe, he called out. “I made a start.”
Sarah, Chloe’s elder daughter walked in, yawning. Her hair was tangled and her eyes were smudged with last night’s makeup.
“Haven’t you been busy?” She walked over to the armchair, covered with a dust sheet and perched on the arm. Her minuscule nightshirt slid up her thighs as she crossed her legs.
Mackinnon turned his back and concentrated on straightening the plastic sheeting on the floor. “Aren’t you supposed to be at school?” he asked.
“It can be our little secret,” she said.
Although he wasn’t looking at her, he could picture the tight smile and the cat-like tilt of her eyes.
She coughed hard, and Mackinnon turned to see she had lit a cigarette.
“What are you doing? You know you can’t smoke in here.”
“Right, but Mum can? Anyway you won’t tell on me, will you?”
She pouted and took a drag on her cigarette.
She was pushing him, seeing how far she could go. In her eyes, she held all the power because he wanted them to get on, to make Chloe happy. She flicked her long hair.
“You should get dressed and get to school before your mum gets back.”
She sucked on the cigarette and coughed again.
“Sod off.”
He wondered if they would ever get on. If he would ever even like her. In twenty years time, would they all meet up for Christmases and birthdays and laugh about how they didn’t get along at the start?
He wandered into the kitchen to put the kettle on and heard his mobile phone ringing. He followed the sound until he located the phone in his coat pocket and answered it.
The call was from Detective Superintendent Bob Wright. Mackinnon cringed. He hadn’t spoken to him, or any of his colleagues, since he a made a complete idiot of himself on Friday.
“Where are you, Jack?”
“Home, sir. I’m doing a spot of decorating this week.”
“Can you come in? You can postpone the decorating, can’t you? We’ve got an investigation that looks like it could get complicated. We’re going to need all the manpower we can get our hands on.”
Mackinnon hesitated before answering. He had expected a bollocking. “I can be there in an hour or so. Sir, about Friday, I...”
“We’ll talk about that later. Just get in as soon as you can. Briefing’s at four.”
The Detective Superintendent hung up before Mackinnon co
uld ask for any details about the case.
Sarah had sloped off upstairs. Mackinnon looked around at the room at the stripped grey walls and the covered furniture. He would just have to leave it like that. He looked at his watch as he jotted down a note to Chloe and left it on the kitchen table.
The trains ran regularly from Oxford to Paddington, but living in Oxford was not ideal when he had to work in the City.
On his drive to the train station, Mackinnon wondered, not for the first time, if it had been wise to give up his London flat so soon.
8
Sean Barrett stalked into the newspaper’s open plan office. His day had not started well.
After working for this paper for eight years, he still hadn’t achieved the successful career he craved. Now the place was full of fresh graduates, who published blogs and filed their stories using their fancy phones, driving him out of a job.
He had considered quitting frequently over the past few months, but what could he do instead? Where would he go?
Cherry McCarthy, dolled up to the nines, walked past his desk. She gave him a wink. She probably thought it made her look young and hip, but she just looked like she had something in her eye.
Cherry was older than Sean, but dressed like someone half her age. Face caked in makeup, hair elaborately styled, piled up on top of her head. As the paper’s show business features editor, she knew underlings were snapping at her heels.
Six months ago, Cherry had a drastic makeover and she now dressed like one of the soap stars that featured in her column every week, covered in dangling jewellery and lashings of fake tan.
But at least Cherry was an editor. It might only be celebrity dross, but Sean had to admire her determination. His own career was at a standstill. He needed to do something to keep hold of his job. Nothing as drastic as Cherry, but something that would remind his editor that Sean was a good journalist, who could pull in a good story.
Sean felt the youngsters eyeing up his job every time he walked into the room. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when things had changed. He and Cherry used to be admired and would often dole out advice and tips to the new recruits; but now when he spoke to them, it wasn’t respect he saw in their eyes, it was pity.
Last week, he caught a few of them gathered around the vending machines, taking the piss out of Cherry’s latest outfit. They were right. She looked bloody awful, but their words were like needles.
He walked up to the group with his cheeks burning and his fists clenched, but when they saw him, they rolled their eyes and tittered, and in the end, he said nothing. He just selected a coffee from the vending machine and went back to sit at his desk, wondering where all that respect had gone.
When his back was turned, he knew they laughed at him the same way they laughed at Cherry.
Words, just words, but they hurt.
His editor, Max, was the worst. Younger than Sean, he dressed in sharp suits paired with brightly coloured ties and talked about the importance of blogs and Twitter to engage their audience.
Sean seriously thought the print business might cease within his lifetime. Papers would be defunct. People would get their news online for free, updated every few minutes straight to their phone or laptop. But who would fund the publication of this news?
Major companies and governments could publish their own version of events, but who would know if the reporting was biased? Even the Evening Standard was free now, but the money to report the news had to come from somewhere. If governments bankrolled the news, they were likely to omit certain news items, like the recent expenses scandal.
Sean knew that acting like a moaning, old git was unlikely to help him get out of this dead-end. He needed to make Max, or better still, the people above Max, realise his talent. He had to make the break on his own. He wasn’t going to wait until they forced him out of his job.
In an attempt to dazzle Max with his brilliance, Sean spent two weeks researching a political scandal and he edited and polished the article until it shone. He handed the story to Max, like a child anxious to impress his teacher with his homework.
As he read the article, Max kept his face blank, fiddling with his lurid yellow tie. When he finished reading, he looked up at Sean and said it was a “nice try.” Then he handed it over to a political correspondent for “further investigation,” telling Sean some rubbish about how they had to be careful things were one hundred percent accurate. “Don’t want to get sued, do we, Sean?”
This morning, Sean had picked up his morning copy on the way to work and saw his story in the paper, with a few words changed and another journalist’s name on the byline.
He became so livid, so filled with fury, he couldn’t think straight. He spent the morning seething in a coffee shop until his mind settled on a plan of action. He then made himself sit on a wooden, graffiti-covered bench across from the paper’s offices for a full forty minutes until he was reasonably sure he wasn’t going to hit anyone.
The first thing he needed to do was tell Max exactly what he thought of him and his paper. After that, he would quit. He imagined, with satisfaction, throwing the paper in Max’s face.
But Sean never got to find out whether or not he would have gone through with his plan.
After he stalked through the office, speech prepared, he saw Max’s office was empty. Sean settled down to wait at his own desk when his telephone rang.
It was Natasha Green, a nurse from the hospital. He had used her on several occasions as an anonymous source. She told him she had something she knew he would find interesting.
Despite his foul mood, Sean’s curiosity got the better of him, and he agreed to meet her.
He would deal with Max later.
9
Mackinnon reached the eastbound platform of the underground station just as the train pulled away.
Looking up at the rectangular digital display, the orange text informed him he had four minutes to wait until the next train arrived. His journey had taken over an hour already. Oxford to the City was a long commute. Every time he made the journey, he thought about renting a room somewhere closer to work during the week.
Chloe told him if he moved in, they would have more time together as a couple, which they did, but it wasn’t quality time. It was grumpy “just got out of bed” or cranky “I’ve had a long day at work, and now we have to prepare dinner for the girls” time.
In the evenings, Mackinnon just wanted to unwind with a beer. Maybe get a takeaway, or shove a M&S ready meal in the oven, but there were four of them now, as Chloe pointed out, and kids needed proper meals. So that took more effort. By the time they had cooked dinner, eaten it and cleared up, there wasn’t much left of the evening. Plus the fact Chloe wanted them all to eat together, which meant most meals descended into an argument between Chloe and Sarah, her eldest, which left Mackinnon and Katy miserably pushing food around their plates.
The girls always had the TV on in the evening, so no chance of watching any sport, and he couldn’t even concentrate on a book with all the shouting from the soaps they watched.
The worse bit was he knew he was being unreasonable. They were Chloe’s kids, so of course, she had to put them first, just as a good mother should; but life had definitely been more fun before he’d moved in.
It had all happened too quickly.
A low rumbling sound and a glance at the announcement screen confirmed his train was approaching the station. A rush of warm, stale air pushed past him and the train’s lights appeared in the blackness of the tunnel as the train clattered over the track.
Mackinnon stepped onto the train behind a teenage boy who nodded his head along to the music playing through his white headphones.
As the train doors closed, a man, smartly dressed in a navy suit, dashed through the doors. Although he made it safely through, the briefcase he carried didn’t. It remained clamped between the two doors. He pulled it sharply two or three times, but the case didn’t budge.
Mackinnon stepped towards him
and reached out to help. The man’s eyes widened and his glasses slipped down his nose. Together, they managed to yank the case free of the doors and the man clasped it firmly to his chest as if he were worried that Mackinnon was going to run off with it.
He gave Mackinnon a curt nod of thanks before making his way to the opposite end of the carriage.
Mackinnon held onto the metal rail as the train pulled away with a familiar, rhythmic click-clunk and the lights flickered as they entered the tunnel. The train was not as busy as usual, a benefit of working odd hours.
But when he got off the train at Bank Station, it was heaving. Where did all these people come from? Mackinnon felt a steady pressure behind him from the crowd of people, moving en masse towards the way-out sign. The crowd shuffled forward to the escalators.
Once on the escalator, Mackinnon stood behind a young woman who reeked of cigarette smoke.
As he stepped off the escalator, Mackinnon wondered if Chloe had seen the note he left for her and thought maybe he should send a text to warn her he wouldn’t be back until late tonight.
The note would lead to another transfer suggestion from Chloe and probably another argument because he didn’t want to leave the City, especially as this new case meant he had a chance to work with MIT, the Major Investigation Team.
He understood why Chloe wanted to stay in Oxford. She had a good job at the university, working as an administrator for the English department, and her daughters were settled. But sometimes he felt like he was the one doing all the compromising. He was willing to give up his flat and put up with the tedious commute, but he wasn’t going to change jobs. That was too much to ask.
The crowd slowed as they approached the ticket barrier, forcing Mackinnon to take tiny steps. A woman on his right gave him a sharp elbow to the ribs, but he couldn’t move out of her way. He was enclosed on all sides by the crowd. She shot him a dirty look.
