Bright Spark (5 page)

“She
was spot on last time, but it’s not an exact science,” said McKay, examining
his palms. “Most of the time, we get nothing. Unless we’re in someone’s house
and we’re expecting to find it. Which I don’t suppose is that useful right
now.”

“Last
time?”

“Byron Street.”

“That
was really the last time? That’s two years ago.” Harkness shook his head and
rubbed a hand over yesterday’s stubble.

“’Fraid
so. Nice dog though.”

“Yes.
Charming.”

The
dog was sweeping the pavement next to Slowey’s Fiesta, attracting the attention
of a grey-haired woman in the passenger seat. Slowey seemed to be reaching for
something in the foot-well. A bark made Slowey start and glare with an
inquiring flex of the eyebrows at the three men staring at him.

The
dog circled the car’s rear bumper, stood to attention there and barked again
with a note of finality. A trail of greasy and fragrant delight had dripped
from the petrol cap and was without doubt an accelerant. Her job was done and
her treat was long overdue.

“Sadly,
he’s got a good alibi,” said Harkness. “Perhaps Gretel can write her own
statement.”

“I’ll
get her prints some other time,” said Slowey, as they watched Marjorie waving
at them in regal fashion from the back of a departing taxi.

“What
did you make of her?” said Harkness, allowing himself a cigarette and relishing
every filthy, toxic particle as his heart slowed to walking pace. He blew a
lungful of stale air through the Fiesta’s open passenger window, grateful he
could no longer smell his own breath, and slotted the lighter back into the
dashboard. The smoke dispersed slowly, the air sluggish and thick with other
poisons.

“Sad
and mad but not bad. Didn’t really get to the bottom of her story but she
didn’t like her neighbours. Mind you, cooped up in that house with mentalist
son and crippled husband, or vice versa; that’d make me twitchy. She’s the only
witness so far though, and she saw nothing, just heard gravel.” 

“As
your supervisor, I really should address some of your training needs,
particularly when it comes to disrespectful terms for the otherwise enabled.
What about the ranting man?”

“Interesting.
Keith Braxton, not so solid citizen of this parish. Form for fighting but not
much else, lives over the road. Thoroughly enjoyed himself tonight. Not long
before closing time at the Friars Vaults, he sees Dale Murphy getting thrown
out. Dale’s tanked up and fighting with ‘some scrote’. Keith doesn’t like Dale
on account of him being a prison officer. He doesn’t like coppers either, but
apparently I’m alright. 

“One
brief lock in later, Keith staggers home to see Dale’s house on fire. Give him
his due, he tries to get in but can’t and gets himself instant sunburn. He was
most disappointed to learn of Dale’s absence from the household.”

A
cool breeze swept through the car, a taste of rain and wet grass, a memory of
hope. Above their heads, the black night was diffusing into blue dawn, the
horizon rimmed with ochre and pink that would learn to blaze in white and
gold.    

“Start
the car. I think better when you’re driving.”

Slowey
brought the car back to hacking and spluttering life and reversed out of the
cul-de-sac. Harkness found he was looking into his own eyes, and didn’t care
for the spectacle: bloodshot eyes barely open, skin a livid red with black
loops and smears where he’d wiped away sweat, crescents of stubble where his
eyebrows should be. He gripped the rear view mirror, tried to turn it back
towards Slowey and found it floating free in his hand.

“Don’t
worry about it,” said Slowey. “I’ve got two others. Don’t use it much anyway.” 

“So.
Murphy,” said Harkness, flicking the cigarette stub from his fingers to flicker
through the air and bounce and roll along the tarmac where its trapped heat
would slowly fade and wink out.  He turned the rear view mirror over in his
hands, looking for a way to reattach it and seeing only shapes that didn’t seem
to fit together.

“Burning
down his own home with the kids still there? When he still lives there himself?
Don’t know. He was pissed up and he hasn’t turned up. Yes, we need to lay hands
on him.”

“And
the mysterious stranger from the Friars Vaults?” Harkness reattached the mirror
with a satisfying clunk, then noticed it was facing oncoming traffic.

“A
personal grudge against Murphy? Don’t suppose we can ignore that possibility.
Look, I’ll sort the mirror out later. At least it’s attached again. Please
stop.”

Harkness
released the mirror, thinking that if Slowey were to mow someone down, they
would at least be distracted in their terminal seconds by their own bewildered
face looking back at them.

“Right,
here’s the plan.” Harkness slapped his palms together, making Slowey jump and
veer across the centre line. “Drop me off at the ranch. I’m going to apprise
the top brass and waste time on the computer when I should be out pounding the
streets. You are going to knock up the landlord of the Friars Vaults and find
me a mysterious stranger.”  

Divisional
Headquarters on Beaumont Fee won an architectural award once. The evidence
still lingered, a framed certificate nailed to a wall in a caretaker’s cupboard
somewhere, its ink as faded as the decade it represented.

The
vision must have burned brightly once. Entrenched in a steep slope midway
between the wharf and the hilltop medieval quarter, the station’s back door was
on the third floor and its basement garage on street level. Perhaps the
architect wanted to imitate the mighty legionary fortress of Lindum Coloniae,
now buried under office blocks and supermarkets. Yet the station’s mighty
blocks, arranged in tiers around a central keep, failed to cow the barbarian
hordes of drunks, thieves and miscreants.

Perhaps
the architecturally literate might concede that the pre-cast concrete with its
roughened edging and pebble-dash dared to fuse the contemporary and the
timeless. To Harkness, it was every bit as timeless and elegant as a paisley
kipper tie with a brown nylon suit. Such abominations had been in vogue within
the working lives of some of his colleagues; but the changes of style they most
rued were of a far more practical nature.

Up
until the mid-eighties, a recalcitrant suspect could have been left in the
cells over the weekend; he would learn to cooperate without disrupting a
detective’s social life. If he were fitted up now and again, so be it; it was
just recompense for the things he’d got away with, karma given a helping hand.
If he were knocked around, it just showed that justice had to get its hands
dirty from time to time.

Anything
that didn’t fit the facts as you wanted them to appear could be lost down the
back of the office sofa. The saloon bar of the Nip & Tuck was as good a
workplace as any; reeking of ale or driving half cut were natural consequences
of a high-pressure job, and far preferable to not standing your round or being
one of the boys. Rules could be broken and bent to serve the greater good.

Now,
every Billy Burglar had more rights than he knew what to do with. Every
conceivably relevant scrap of paper had to be catalogued, scrutinised and
disclosed if major prosecutions weren’t to founder on the rocks of the
technical defence. Interviews were recorded in a way that limited a detective’s
scope for creativity. Where once they’d made the law, cops could now be
pilloried, dismissed or jailed for the kind of transgressions that would earn
the average citizen a fine and a polite rebuke. The rules were prized above the
greater good, and a problem statistically analysed was more welcome than a
problem messily solved. 

They’ve
ripped the arse out of this job, the old-timers would insist over whisky
chasers. Harkness, head thick with fatigue and the dregs of a hangover, could
hear the same old litany looping through his head every time he walked into
this monument to times best forgotten. He stumbled down the slope to the
basement garage, pressed his wallet to the wall sensor and ground his teeth in
time to the clanking of the roller shutter door.

What,
he asked himself, would the old timers do with this barrel of worms? Should he
be rounding up the usual suspects, taking names and breaking balls, or retiring
to the office to ensure that every procedure and line of enquiry was followed
to the highest standards of diligence and integrity; or whatever the manual
said. The lift door was standing open and he allowed it to carry him up one
floor, forehead pressed into the cold film of grease on the control panel. 

The
sticker on his desktop computer congratulated him on his upgrade to ‘Windows
95’. He switched it on and knew there would be ten minutes of electronic
churning beneath a flickering hourglass before he could coax any work out of
it. He draped his jacket and tie on the back of a chair and unbuttoned his
shirt. He retrieved the high-backed executive swivel chair which was now his by
right, and rolled the smaller minion’s chair into a corner. An artist’s palette
of food stains marked his seat, a cultural history in nylon, lard and ketchup,
the previous incumbent’s territorial pissing.

The
light slanted through the blinds, kind at first, glittering on dust motes and
brilliant on screens and windows. The sun crested the horizon, clear and
truthful, the dust settling on towers of paperwork in disarray, human misery
analysed endlessly; on mugs discarded in a hurry for fungus to feast on at
leisure; on bins overflowing with fast food wrappers; on boxes that had split
and spilt a thousand pamphlets on this year’s third definitive crime prevention
initiative; on the ransacked search kit in the corner, guaranteed to contain
nothing but the wrong-sized gloves and torn evidence bags; on the whiteboard,
now grey with a thousand layers of smeared ink, with its names, call-signs,
numbers and mug-shots; on the gun-metal cabinets where a hundred types of form
and a dozen CS gas canisters were stored. 

The
fluorescent lights stuttered into life and the cleaner walked in, industrial
vacuum cleaner in tow. She registered Harkness with a nod, eyes and mouth
down-turned.  She seemed neither surprised nor happy to find company. He was a
trespasser in her world and he found himself removing his feet from the table. 

He
dialled a cup of syrup masquerading as coffee from the vending machine in the
night canteen. The TV had been left on and selected members of the urban
underclass were being goaded into flurries of rage and repentance by a man who
truly, passionately wanted to understand their pain, but was there to lay it on
the line and give them hard facts and home truths and then offer them a team of
counsellors to wave a magic wand over life’s horrid complexities.

His
phone chirped, its battery waning. He should text Hayley, but that might wear
the battery down and he couldn’t remember where he’d left his charger. In any
case, the volumes left unsaid would eclipse whatever thoughts his fat thumbs
could squeeze into crude shorthand.

Sugar
was always an answer. He pushed some change into another machine, dialled a
number and saw his own reflection, like a lion watching a crippled zebra, as
the Mars bar uncoiled from its row, inched forward slowly, tilted to drop and
deliver its rush of glucose goodness, then hung there, wedged.

He
could stand the expense of walking away or buying another. He could see the
sense of the notice warning against trying to shake items loose from a
top-heavy hunk of glass and metal. But that was his Mars bar, he needed it and
this machine really should know better. The pressure spiked behind his forehead
and he shoulder-charged the machine, felt it rock backwards, heard something
drop, felt it rock towards him, flung his shoulder into it again, swore and
spat and made it stop moving.

He
was panting, spent, calm. He crouched to retrieve the Mars bar and some other
items he’d liberated. As he stood to leave the contraband on top for other
gannets to take, he traced a crack running the length of the machine's glass
casing. He glimpsed his own reflection again, his face in two ragged halves. He
glanced at his watch, peered down the corridor and listened, hearing nothing
but the TV where fingers were jabbing and chairs flying to a fugue of righteous
hatred, threats and self-pity.

 
Harness pocketed the free snacks, took a clean tea-towel, wiped clean any part
of the machine he might have gripped, butted or tackled in an unusual way,
replaced the towel on the tea urn and sauntered back to the office, seeing
nobody. He resisted the urge to whistle.

Chewing
the Mars bar in delicious figures of eight like a candy floss machine, he tried
and failed to log on to the computer. According to the password protection
protocol, he was either an expired user or he should have changed ‘Hayley’
before today. Prepared to believe either explanation, he logged on using
Slowey’s details, and was gratified to find that he was still using child
number three, ‘Jemima’, as his password.

He
brought up the incident log entitled, ‘Fire – Persons Reported’, scrolled
through twenty pages of machine code, situation reports and resource
allocations, found room to type and used his two fastest fingers to give his
instructions in five hundred words of scrappy prose. As his words solidified on
the screen, an almost identical text appeared from DCI Brennan.

Harkness
hadn’t seen any trace of him in the office and supposed he must be observing
all from HQ. He liberated his radio from a locked drawer and switched it on,
expecting to be summoned by the channel he was least likely to be using.

The
‘nominals’ tab was flashing on the screen. He clicked on it and was surprised
to find the names and dates of birth of every occupant of 13 Marne Close, along
with one of their neighbours. Then some of the lines of numbers began to make
sense; the incident handling system had linked all previous police call outs to
the address.  Harkness drew himself over the screen like a preying mantis, and
busied himself scribbling notes, opening new screens and printing out reams of
data.

Symmetrical
green digits resolved themselves into jagged, human shapes.  A dozen late night
phone calls from Suzanne Murphy reported violence from Dale, actual or
threatened. Half a dozen weary reports by uniform showed that they’d attended
domestic disputes and found all quiet on arrival with no offences disclosed.
Suzanne made half a dozen formal complaints of assault, but the suspect left
before police arrival, no arrests were made and the complaints were withdrawn
the next morning. A dozen computer generated reports were added to the mountain
of paper given to the solitary domestic violence officer to climb.

Marjorie
Jennings made occasional reports of excessive noise from next door, not
violence but music and drunken arguments; the noise was therefore a civil
matter, she was advised, and should be referred to her local authority.
Anonymous and vague reports of child abuse were referred to social services
with no further police action.

Dale
Murphy’s was the only name to appear on the crime system, linked to two
complaints that had been discontinued before they could cost him his job.  Both
were made by guests at Her Majesty’s pleasure, one claiming ABH, the other
false imprisonment. With an involuntary shiver, he noted the complainants’
names; one was new to him, while the other was as familiar as a lover’s

On
both occasions, Murphy had obligingly turned up at Beaumont Fee with his
solicitor and federation representative and made full and frank denials. The
incidents had not been witnessed and the victims lacked credibility. Nothing
had stuck to him. He was innocent or covered in Teflon. Harkness added these
records to the torrent of paper flowing from the printer, taking care to
include conviction and nominal prints for the gaoled assault victims and daub a
fluorescent marker all over references to them. It might all be relevant. He
might get to read it all.     

The
phone rang with the monotone of an internal call. He glanced at his watch,
amazed to find he’d been lost in the database for half an hour. The call was
bound to be Brennan. He unclamped his teeth from the mutilated cap of his biro
and picked up the receiver, idly wondering how Slowey was getting on.

A
cherubic friar lay against a barrel, legs splayed before him, winking at Slowey
as he quaffed from a stone jug. The artist’s use of perspective was so adept
that Slowey feared he might get an unwelcome glimpse under the friar’s cassock
if he stood any closer to the sign. The sign for the Friars Vaults was by far
its most distinguished feature. A rusting satellite dish and a hanging basket
of dead stalks and desiccated soil nearly obscured the friar’s view of his
neighbourhood.

Slowey
parked his car in the one space at the side of the pub not littered with shards
of glass, next to an ancient caravan with disintegrating tyres and traceries of
mould on its sills. Not much bigger than the terraces surrounding it, the pub
had been daubed in cream paint to mark it out. A steel bin had been pushed up
against the caravan’s tow-bar to make room for a smoker’s terrace; four plastic
chairs and a folding umbrella.  The frosted windows of the ground floor were
dark, but net curtains and open windows upstairs suggested the landlord lived
on the premises.

The
sky was brightening but this street smelled no cleaner; stale beer and ancient
urinals coloured the air. Slowey slammed the car door, drawing a cascade of
barking from someone’s back yard as if some cur had been waiting wide-eyed all
night for just such a provocation.

He
looked in vain for a way to rouse the landlord without waking the street.
Nowhere could he see an intercom or doorbell, and hammering on the stout double
doors at the front would make him sound like Marley’s ghost. If there was a
back door, it was beyond the tangle of barbed wire and nettles that were busy
claiming the caravan. A fire door at the side had no external handle, but was,
he noticed, ajar by an inch or two.

Hands
in pockets, he ambled towards the door, peering into the line of darkness. The
dull embers of dawn at his back showed little but the glimmer of optics and
horse brasses. He patted his inside pocket and discovered he’d left his torch
and phone in the car. Then he looked at the door, wedged open with a folded
beer-mat, gouges and new splinters in the woodwork where it should have been
secure. Silence swelled, breath being held. He heard himself mutter under his
breath. Shadows inside gathered and surged outwards with a smack of metal on
wood.