Falling More Slowly (2 page)

One man looked up, frowned, then tried for a smile and got up. ‘Inspector McLusky, sir? I’m DS Austin.’ He stretched out a broad and darkly hairy hand. McLusky shook it. The whole man was darkly hairy and broad, probably worked out. Intelligent, open eyes, blinking fast. The soft Scottish accent sounded like Edinburgh to him, but he was no expert. ‘Welcome to Albany. Ehm, your office, sir, is just along here.’

His office. He’d never had his own office. He’d not been a DI long enough for them to even find one for him in Southampton before the bastards rammed him off the road. Then came back and ran him over as he staggered from his car.

Austin led the way back into the corridor and to a door right at the end. ‘You’re taking over from DI Pearce, it’s his old office.’

McLusky had read about Pearce, a bent copper, currently on the run with a goodly amount of drug money, probably in Spain. Enjoy it while you can. Spain was no longer a safe hiding place.

He walked straight in. It was about the size of the box room in his new flat – space for second midget here – and smelled aggressively of cleaning products. It contained a dented filing cabinet, two chairs, an empty bookshelf, a metal dustbin and a small battered desk. The window faced out the back overlooking graffiti-covered walls, chaotic pigeon-shit rooftops and the shadowy backs of houses. In the middle distance, between tall buildings, he glimpsed a sliver of the harbour. Apart from in- and out-trays, monitor, keyboard and phone he’d been furnished with a set of car keys sitting on a form for him to sign and an envelope lying across the keyboard which he knew would contain the gaff he needed to log on to the computer.

‘Thanks.’ McLusky shivered. He thought he could feel the dampness in the fifty-year-old cement bricks on the other side of the plasterboard, could hear the rustle of their slow crumbling. He pointed to the envelope. ‘This is precisely the amount of paperwork I can cope with. Can you see it stays like that, please?’

‘We’ll do our very best, sir.’ Austin’s lopsided grin acknowledged the avalanche of paperwork heading for the inspector’s in-tray.

The phone on his pristine desk rang. He took a deep breath then picked it up. Anyone could make a mistake. ‘DI McLusky.’

It was Area Control. ‘Sir, I know this sounds like a job for Uniform, but …’ The young male voice hesitated.

‘Go on then.’

‘The original call was made by a Mrs Spranger, sounded like a domestic at an address in Redland. We’ve sent two
units so far and both have gone off the air. We always have reception problems in Redland. We’ve since had a mobile phone call from one of the officers and he seemed a bit incoherent. There was a lot of background noise …’

‘Okay, we’ll deal. What’s the address?’ He snatched up the keys, turned the form around and snapped his fingers for a pen. Austin unhooked a biro from his shirt pocket and obliged. McLusky scribbled down the unfamiliar address and hung up then pocketed the pen in his leather jacket. Austin opened his mouth then thought better of it.

‘Right.’ McLusky held up the paper for Austin to read. ‘Where is this place? We’ll take my car, just lead me to it.’

The car turned out to be a grey Skoda. ‘You sure you want to drive, sir?’ Austin doubted the wisdom of it but got in at the passenger side anyway.

‘Positive. Just give me clear directions and in good time. The sooner I find my way round town the better.’ McLusky avoided being driven if at all possible. He hated being a passenger, always had done. ‘Never driven one of these before, though.’ He pulled out of the station car park. It felt good to be holding a steering wheel again. Skodas used to be joke cars, now the police couldn’t get enough of them.

‘Go left here. The new Skoda. 180 bhp, they’re okay, actually.’

‘We’ll find out if you’re right in a minute. How long’ve you been at Albany Road?’

‘Two years. Bath before that, then a spell at Trinity Road.’

‘Your accent?’

‘I grew up in Edinburgh but we left when I was sixteen. We moved around a lot. Straight across here, sir, and keep going downhill till the next set of lights, then left and left again.’

Traffic really was appalling but using the siren sometimes made matters worse, people froze or blundered into each other. ‘Keep telling me where I am so I’ll learn the streets. I did spend a couple of hours with the A–Z a while back but it’s not the same.’ After the lights McLusky found
a stretch of miraculously drivable road, put his foot down and got blitzed by two speed cameras in short succession before having to slow right down again.

‘This is Broadmead, still faster through here this time of day.’

‘Trinity Road is district headquarters, right?’

‘Right. I hated it. Keep going, but try and get into the left laaaaane.’ Austin gripped the dashboard as McLusky braked abruptly so as to narrowly miss colliding with a biker who hadn’t expected a Skoda doing fifty across the junction.

McLusky barged on through the traffic. ‘It does move, this thing. What’s the super like? I mean I have met him, of course, once, but that was formal. To work under?’

‘Ehm, Denkhaus?’ Austin sounded distracted as his DI drove across three lanes, getting snarled in traffic, weaving, bullying his way through. ‘Up Stokes Croft until I tell you. Ehm, he’s a no-nonsense copper, can suddenly become a stickler for procedure when the mood takes him. I have book-shaped indentations on my head to prove it. Someone suggested it always happens when he tries to lose weight. Sugar cravings.’ He pointed across the street. ‘Not a bad takeaway that, by the way.’

McLusky came up behind a bus going at walking pace. He worked the horn, mounted the pavement and managed to overtake in the space between two lamp-posts. Just.

Austin kept his eyes firmly shut until he felt the car regain the road.

‘I remember this bit, came down here on my way to the station. But keep up the directions. Albany Road a happy nick?’

‘Depends who you’re working with, but yeah, it’s all right, I suppose.’

McLusky parped his horn at a pedestrian who looked like he might just be thinking of stepping into the road.

Austin hung on tight and gave directions in good time since the inspector was already cornering with squealing
tyres. He didn’t know a lot about the man and half of that was rumour. He was about five years older than himself, he guessed, thirty-three or -four. He’d transferred up to Bristol from Southampton after nearly getting himself killed in the line of duty there. University man and difficult with it, someone had said. And something about being a bad team player. Unpredictable. Not exactly what they needed at Albany. He sneaked a glance at the new DI. He seemed utterly relaxed despite driving at speed in a new town and an unfamiliar road system. Some system. ‘Next left.’

McLusky didn’t slow. ‘I live down that street over there, next to the Italian grocer’s.’ He cornered and accelerated up the hill.

‘Above Rossi’s? What’s it like? Left and directly right again.’

‘The grocer’s?’

‘Your place.’

‘Well … Quite cheap. Totally unmodernized, wonky floorboards, no central heating or anything.’ No heating at all, now he came to think of it.

Austin shrugged. He could only dream of central heating. He and his fiancée had just scraped together enough for a tiny dilapidated end-of-terrace. Heating would have to wait. ‘I quite like Montpelier, couple of good pubs round there. Go left, no idea what that’s called, and right up the hill.

‘Keep going, nearly there. Careful, there’s often dopey schoolkids wandering across this street.’

McLusky worked the horn again. Austin had never driven through the city at this speed, not even with Blues and Twos. He hated to think what kind of speeds the DI reserved the siren for. McLusky drove up on the wrong side of the road, overtaking everything, barging through, getting a chorus of angry horn play in return.

‘Turn right, that should be it.’

‘Very leafy round here.’ They certainly had the right place. There was no need to look for the paper on which
he had scribbled the name of the house. Just beyond the crest of the humpback street was the scene of the disturbance, unlike any domestic McLusky had yet attended in his eight years on the force. Spectators had gathered on the opposite side of the road. He pulled up and jumped out. They were intercepted by a distraught-looking constable. McLusky showed him his ID.

‘I’m glad you’re here, sir.’

‘I bet you are. What the hell’s going on?’

The drive of the squat detached house looked like a scrapheap. At various angles stood two squad cars, a BMW and what appeared to have been a green civilian Volvo. All four cars were utterly destroyed, their roofs caved in, windows missing, in fact there wasn’t a single surface left undamaged on any of them. Behind all the battered metal, on the once well-kept lawn, stood an enormous wheeled digger, its engine growling, its hydraulic arm pivoting left and right, threatening two uniformed constables with oblivion. At the house the curtains were drawn at all the windows.

‘It’s a domestic, sir. The individual in the cab of the digger is a Mr Spranger and he is the owner of the house. He intends to destroy it.’

‘Did he steal the digger?’

‘No, he owns that too.’

‘He owns the house and he owns the digger? Well, that’s all right then. Why don’t we let him?’ McLusky shrugged. He hated domestics. Everyone hated domestics. There was nothing more tedious on the planet than people who needed the police to sort out their relationships.

‘My sentiment entirely, but we can’t. It appears Mrs Spranger is still inside. Though that doesn’t seem to bother him. He’s going to demolish it around her ears. Told us to clear off his property, sir, and when we didn’t he attacked our vehicles. The other cars were already totalled when we got here.’

‘Any sign of the woman?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Has anyone tried to enter the premises to see if there really is a woman in the house?’ Because if there wasn’t he’d pull those constables out of danger and let the lunatic get on with it.

‘Constable Hanham tried and got chased right round the house by the digger. That’s how the shed and the greenhouse at the back got it.’

McLusky watched as the burly red-faced man operating the digger took another swipe at an officer. He didn’t like the odds. Spranger seemed to be shouting continuously though no one could hear what he was saying over the noise. He looked like a man about to explode. Perhaps he was going to give himself a heart attack and save them all some bother. ‘Any ideas, DS Austin?’

Austin scratched the tip of his nose. ‘Perhaps if we rushed the cab from both sides one of us could get to him and pull him off or snatch the keys out of the ignition.’

‘Fair enough – you up for it then?’

The constable vigorously shook his head. ‘With respect, sir, we tried that. He’s locked himself in and I caught a nasty whack on my side when he suddenly swung the thing round.’

‘Are you okay though? What’s your name? Will you need medical attention?’

‘I’ll be all right. It’s Constable Pym, sir.’

‘Okay, Pym. Request an ambulance anyway. This looks like it has the potential to get painful for
someone
. And then make sure you keep those civilians out. And move those cars along.’ The number of onlookers on the pavement was growing all the time and several cars had stopped in the lane. There were worried faces at an upstairs window in the house to the left, peering across at the noisy yellow digger swinging its bucket arm wildly from side to side. Pym, in his mud-stained uniform, walked off with a slight limp. The digger churned up the damp lawn with its five-foot wheels, lurching forward another yard towards the
front of the house, the constables jumping back but not prepared to give way. They’d soon be with their backs to the wall.

McLusky didn’t like the look of it. ‘Okay, we can’t play cat and mouse with him all day. I think the fact that he hasn’t actually touched the house yet is a good sign, but all the same. Go round to the right and attract the constables’ attention and wave them off. As soon as they’re clear I’ll try and put the Skoda between him and the house.’

Austin scratched his nose harder. ‘Do you think that’s wise, sir?’

‘No, I don’t, but I can’t think of anything else short of getting Armed Response out and letting them shoot the place up.’ It was his first day back at work on a new force and he wasn’t going to mark it by calling firearms officers to attend a domestic. He got into the Skoda and lightly closed the driver door. To make sure of getting out again he also wound down all the windows, then started the engine. Automatically he reached up to pull down the seatbelt, then thought better of it. This was one journey where a seatbelt might just be a hazard. He started the engine and patted the dashboard. ‘Been nice knowing you.’

It took a moment for Austin to get the constables’ attention since they were concentrating hard on not getting caught by the swinging bucket arm. When at last they both ran off to the right the digger swung in their direction, the moment McLusky had been waiting for. He drove on to the lawn, wheels not gripping well at first, then surged in a tight curve round the back and left of the digger. The Skoda’s engine whined in first gear as he drove through what was left of brand new bedding plants in a half-moon bed. He was decimating a row of lavenders just as the digger suddenly swung back. McLusky stopped, threw the car into reverse and flew backwards at the huge yellow thing filling his mirrors. Wheel on full lock now but there was just not enough space left to aim the car properly between the front wheels of the monster. His car made
contact with the digger’s right front wheel and got bounced back against the other one. The Skoda stalled. Time to get out. He tried the driver door but it wouldn’t open far enough for him to squeeze through. The giant wheel blocked his window too. He could see the digger’s arm travel up, like a fist drawn back before the deciding punch.

Passenger side. He scrabbled across just as the bucket landed a crumpling blow on the bonnet, bouncing him hard against the roof of the car. A jacket pocket caught on the gear shift. He yanked it free. The door was no use. Head first out of the passenger window, chest and groin scraping painfully over the sill, hands first on the ground, wriggling and kicking himself free just as the bucket smashed through the windscreen and the digger bucked and growled.