Snakes and Ladders

by Adam Croft

  Tonight, though, the Albert was relatively quiet. There were a few regulars he recognised, who’d been visiting the pub daily for as long as he could remember. He often wondered where they got the money from. Some of the beers were approaching five quid a pint, and he estimated some of these old boys must sink five to ten a day. Fifteen hundred quid a month was a fair chunk of change, especially when you didn’t have enough sober hours in a day to hold down a job. Regardless, he was pretty sure the landlord didn’t mind.

  Jack decided he’d nursed his one pint long enough, so he sunk the dregs and walked back to his car. There were days when he’d been sorely tempted to leave the car at work, have a second pint — and more — then walk home, but it was rare for that temptation to override his aversion to physical exercise.

  He arrived home a few minutes later, parked the car then headed inside. The smell of dinner cooking was a welcome one, and he gave himself a silent pat on the back for managing to make it home in time for yet another warm meal — something he’d rarely done for many years. Now, though, he had two very good reasons for doing so.

  ‘Good day?’ Chrissie asked.

  ‘Not amazing, but we’ll get there. Where’s Em?’

  ‘She’s in the shower. She’ll be down in a bit. Before she is, I meant to ask you, have you given any more thought to what we talked about?’

  Jack looked at her blankly. ‘Come on, Chrissie. Narrow it down a bit.’

  ‘About me moving in permanently, I mean. Making it official.’

  ‘Christ, that was weeks ago.’

  ‘Yes. Exactly.’

  Jack sighed. ‘Sorry, I haven’t really had the time to think much lately.’

  ‘You’ve had a fortnight. Anyway, does it really need much thinking? You must know deep down whether or not you want to make things official. I mean, I’m pretty much living here anyway. All I really need to do is move the furniture into storage and tell Royal Mail I’m here so I don’t have to keep going back every couple of days to pick up my post.’

  ‘I’ll text the Postmaster General for you.’

  Chrissie gave a small placating laugh. ‘I think he went out with the telegram. Finger on the pulse as always, Jack. But seriously. Have you spoken to Emily about it yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You probably should. If you want it to happen, that is.’

  ‘Course I do. I just… I haven’t found the right moment yet.’

  ‘What does the right moment look like?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Exactly. Look, this baby’s going to be here in a few weeks. It’d be good to have everything settled and sorted before then, no?’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I just need to find the right time to tell Em.’

  ‘Tell Em what?’ a voice called from behind him.

  Jack turned round. ‘And if there was ever a time for a heavily pregnant person to get down the stairs silently for the first time ever, this had to be it, didn’t it?’

  Emily ignored the joke. ‘Am I missing something?’ she said. ‘What is it you’re not telling me?’

  26

  Jack had very much wanted to speak to Emily in his own time and his own way, but that luxury had been somewhat forced from him. Chrissie was right — it wasn’t a big thing in practice, because it was virtually identical to their current arrangement. But it still felt like a big step.

  Jack hadn’t had a woman living with him since Helen had left, and he’d been pretty certain he wouldn’t put himself in that position again. He’d been happy on his own. And, if he was honest with himself, he’d wondered if, perhaps, those times might even return again. Moving someone else in permanently would draw a line under everything. His solitude — on which he’d become quite keen — would be over, and it would also end the possibility of Helen coming back and their family life returning to normal.

  And that was when he told himself: this is normal family life now. With Emily well into her teens, it wouldn’t be the same with Helen anyway. In hindsight, they’d only ever really stayed together for Emily, and there wasn’t a logical, sensible world in which Jack could ever see himself rekindling that particular tyre fire.

  Perhaps drawing a line under everything and officially starting a new era was what he needed. Deep down, he knew it was. But it was still an enormous step to take, particularly at his stage of life. Then again, the coming weeks would herald in a huge new era whether he liked it or not. The arrival of Emily’s baby would turn his world upside down and change things forever. Why not combine the two together and use this opportunity to start again?

  These were thoughts he’d been throwing around in his mind for days and weeks, and he’d come to the growing realisation that it had simply been him being stubborn and resistant to change. There was no doubting it would be a wonderful move for them all. It just required him to lift a finger and pull the trigger, even though that seemed like the most arduous task in the world.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, sitting Emily down at the kitchen table and talking to her. ‘Things are about to get a whole lot busier in the next few weeks. My work’s… chaotic, to say the least. We want to make sure you’ve got the support you need, alright?’

  ‘I’ll be honest, Dad. That doesn’t sound like something you needed to work yourself up to saying. What’s the rest of it?’

  Jack exhaled. ‘Look, we don’t want to smother you or force you into anything, and we definitely don’t want to be causing you stress at the moment. Or any moment. It’s going to be tough, though. Much tougher than anyone ever says or than you think it’ll be. So we’ve been thinking of ways we can make sure you’ve got all the support you need, all the time.’

  ‘Okay?’

  Jack looked at his daughter, unsure as to how she would react. He hated feeling like he was walking on eggshells all the time, but he was desperate not to lose her again, and he didn’t feel as though he could ever predict her reactions to anything.

  ‘So, Chrissie and I have been talking, and it’s not anything that’s been decided, far from it, it’s just an idea at the moment, but we’ve been thinking about it and looking at the options, and bearing everything in mind, we just thought that perhaps—’

  ‘You want to move her in, don’t you,’ Emily said, more a statement than a question.

  ‘Well, we just thought maybe it might—’

  ‘Yeah, it’s fine with me.’

  ‘I mean, if you weren’t comfortable then obviously we wouldn’t—’

  ‘I said it’s fine.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Emily looked at him as if he’d just claimed the sky was orange. ‘Yeah. Why, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  Emily shrugged. ‘There you go then. What’s the problem?’

  Jack blinked a few times, and realised he didn’t really know the answer to that. Before he could think of one, his phone rang in his pocket.

  ‘Yeah?’ he said, answering the call before even registering the number on the screen.

  Within a minute, he was at the front door, putting his shoes on and grabbing his car keys.

  27

  ‘What the bloody hell you doing here this time of night, anyway?’ Jack said as he walked into the incident room, where DC Debbie Weston was waiting for him. He desperately wanted to ask her if the reason she was working late was because her sordid affair with the landlord of the Prince Albert had gone south, but he quickly remembered he wasn’t meant to know about that.

  ‘Working. Good job I was too, eh? It’s gone off to forensics, but here are the photos.’

  Jack looked at Debbie’s computer screen. There was no doubting what he was looking at: a knife, which had been wrapped in plastic.

  ‘We won’t have results until tomorrow at the very earliest, but the team who recovered it reckon there are traces of dried blood where the blade meets the handle. If that matches Matt’s blood, we know we’ve got our murder weapon.’

  ‘Where was it found?’ Jack asked.


  ‘You won’t believe it. It’s a massive stroke of luck, if anything. A guy on Calderwood Street went out earlier to put a bag of rubbish in his wheelie bin. It’s bin collection day tomorrow, and his bin’s full, so he’s gone out with his stepladder, knowing he’s going to need to climb in and make some room. He lifts the lid, peers inside and sees this. I quote: “I knew it was odd straight away, because it was wrapped in a white carrier bag and I only ever use the same black bin liners.”’

  ‘Thank God for the anally retentive residents of Mildenheath.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Where was the bin?’

  ‘At the end of his drive, by the footpath. He keeps it round the back usually, and had only put it out three or four hours earlier. He likes to do it before it gets dark, he says.’

  ‘But Connor’s been in a cell all day. I think we’d have noticed if he’d popped out to chuck a knife in a wheelie bin.’

  ‘Could be an accomplice. Personally, I think the homeowner’s being a bit naïve in assuming it happened on the street. It’s totally possible Connor could’ve climbed into his garden and put it in at any point. I had a quick look on Google Maps, and his garden backs onto a public footpath and open fields. Connor could’ve come through the back gate or over the fence at any point.’

  ‘Okay,’ Jack said, sitting down on the edge of the desk. ‘But why now? There’s already been a bin collection in Mildenheath since Matt was murdered.’

  ‘Yeah, but only a day or two after. The knife would’ve been too hot then. And for all our killer knows, we were checking every bin at that point.’

  Jack snorted. ‘Someone needs to do some research into police budgets, then.’

  ‘Quite. But the point is, they won’t have wanted to hang on to it for too long, but maybe they felt they couldn’t dump it so soon after the murder either, when so many people would be out looking for it. Two weeks isn’t a bad time for things to have cooled down enough for them to ditch it, without running the risk of being caught with it if they hang onto it.’

  ‘I guess the real question is where does this leave the Connor French theory? We’ve searched his house from top to bottom. We’d have found a blood-stained knife, for crying out loud.’

  ‘I know,’ Debbie said. ‘Which means, if it was him, he probably hid it somewhere off the property in the interim. In any case, we’ll know more tomorrow. Or the day after. Until then, all we can do is wait.’

  ‘I’ve spent my bloody life waiting, Debbie. We’re not going to get anything before French’s custody clock runs out, are we?’

  Debbie shook her head. ‘I’d be asking for an extension if I were you.’

  Jack sighed and nodded. ‘Right. I’ll put a call in.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll give you a shout if anything else crops up.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ Jack called from the doorway. ‘Go home.’

  28

  Jack was woken shortly after seven o’clock the next morning by Chrissie rummaging around in the wardrobe.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  ‘Bit bloody late now. What are you playing at?’

  ‘Trying to find my other handbag. It’s got my driving licence in it.’

  ‘What do you need that for?’

  ‘I’ve got to pick up the van at eight, and I need it to sign the documents.’

  Jack sat up. ‘What bloody van?’

  ‘The van for picking my stuff up.’

  ‘What, today?’

  ‘Why not? No time like the present. It’s the last day of half-term, so I’m not going to get another chance for a while. Maybe not before the baby comes. Why do you think I’ve been trying to get you to speak to Emily for so long? I can’t just work everything around you, Jack. I’ve got a life and a career too. Ah. Here it is,’ she said, pulling a beige handbag out from behind a shoebox. ‘Christ knows what it’s doing in there.’

  ‘Well hang on a sec,’ Jack said. ‘You can’t do a whole house move by yourself. That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘It’s not a whole house move, is it? Anything I need regularly is here already, apart from a few boxes. The rest’s just putting furniture and rubbish into storage, mostly.’

  ‘You still can’t do all that on your own.’

  ‘I’m not doing it on my own. Miles and Will are helping me. I’ve got to meet them at the van hire place in forty-five minutes.’

  ‘Miles? Your brother Miles?’

  ‘No, Jack. Some random bloke I’ve never met called Miles. Yes, my brother.’

  ‘Well they aren’t going to be much help, are they?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they’re… you know.’

  ‘Gay people can lift things too, Jack. They’re allowed now.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘What did you mean then?’

  ‘I meant they’re just… Well, not very strong. That’s all.’

  ‘I hardly think I need to hire Geoff Capes to help me lift a couple of Billy bookcases into the back of a Transit, Jack. In any case, I was thinking we might all be able to have dinner together later. A celebration, perhaps.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Jack replied. ‘Have to see what time I get home, though. Got a lot on.’

  ‘Alright. I’ll book us a table, and if you can be there, great. If not, we’ll just talk about you behind your back and gossip about how bloody rude you are for not turning up.’

  Jack laughed. ‘Sounds perfect. All the more reason for me to sit in the office with a Pot Noodle.’

  Chrissie walked over and kissed him on the head. ‘You really do need to stop living this life of luxury and excess. It’s not good for you, you know. You should bring yourself down to the level of us mere plebs.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Right. Got to dash. Have a good day, alright?’

  Jack took a deep breath, then let out a huge sigh. ‘I’m promising nothing,’ he said.

  29

  Jack arrived at work shortly after eight, knowing the Chief Constable would turn up around half-past. He hoped he could talk him into an extension on Connor French’s custody clock, an extra twelve hours being permissible without having to take the case to a magistrate.

  He spent that half an hour pulling his case notes together, even though he’d lain awake for most of the night gathering them in his head. As far as Jack was concerned, they had their man. All they needed to do now was wait for the fingerprinting, blood and DNA results to come back from the knife and they’d be able to charge French.

  He knew getting an extension from Hawes shouldn’t have posed too much of a problem, but he wanted to be as prepared as he could be. Besides, if the labs were busy he might have to go in front of a magistrate to request a further extension. They’d want to know why French had to be kept in custody, and why they couldn’t simply bail him. He’d argue that this was a man who was a known drug dealer and suspected killer — someone who had many criminal links. It was a game of chess, the magistrate continually trying to ensure all bases were covered, poking and prodding to ensure the chances of holding an innocent man in custody for days on end were limited.

  Like much of police work, although the processes and routines were the same from case to case, one never knew how things were going to turn out until they actually happened. There were too many variables involved, especially when it came to dealing with human beings. It was that unpredictability which kept people attached to the job, which otherwise would descend into a maelstrom of mind-numbing paperwork and performance meetings.

  Once he felt sure he had more than enough ammunition behind him, Jack picked up his notes and headed for Hawes’s office.

  ‘Morning, Jack,’ the Chief Constable said, his Lancashire drawl always more gravelly first thing in the morning. ‘What can I do you for?’

  ‘I wanted to speak to you about Operation Artisan, sir. We’ve got a suspect in custody at the moment, booked in yesterday, mid morning. Late last night we had a development
. A local resident found a knife hidden in his wheelie bin, wrapped in plastic. It looks as though there are traces of blood in the join between the blade and the handle, so it’s been sent off for testing. Fingerprints, blood analysis, DNA. Then it’ll go off to pathology to confirm and match it up as the blade that was used to kill Matthew Hulford.’

  ‘Good. Excellent. Promising stuff. Keep me posted, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thing is, we’re not going to get results before the custody clock runs down. Fingerprints are a possibility, but unlikely. DNA’ll be two days at a minimum.’

  ‘So you’re after an extension?’ Hawes asked.

  ‘I am, sir.’

  ‘Alright. Okay. And how sure are we that this is going to come back in our favour? I mean, what’s to say it’s not just a knife someone’s used to chop up a bit of old steak, then chucked in the wrong bin?’

  ‘Because,’ Jack said, taking a printed photograph out of his folder and handing it to him, ‘this is the knife.’

  ‘Ah-ha,’ Hawes said, looking at the picture of what could only be described as a flick knife. ‘That’d have to be one hell of a piece of steak, eh?’

  ‘You’re telling me. We got very lucky, actually. The resident went out to stamp his bin down so he could fit another bag in, and that’s when he noticed it. Looks as if someone’s laid low for a while, then chucked it in there ready for bin day. We’ve got officers doing a sweep of the street looking for any houses which have CCTV on the road, but we’re doubtful. Nothing visible externally, and there are only sixteen houses on the street.’

  ‘Alright. Well, keep me posted on that. And on the fingerprinting. If we’ve got some good news we can put out to keep people’s minds at bay that we’ve got the right chap behind bars, that’ll go a long way to silencing all this social media nonsense about drugs gangs running wild around town. Honestly, reading some of that guff, you’d be forgiven for thinking Mildenheath was some Colombian backwater.’