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  HIGH-WIRED

  The Fine Line – Volume One

  Andrea Frazer

  High-Wired is the first volume in The Fine Line series by acclaimed crime author Andrea Frazer.

  The novel introduces us to DI Olivia Hardy, a firm but fair cop, and her new partner, DS Lauren Groves. Their wildly different backgrounds and styles of policing cause problems at first, but the two women bond over a shared love of music, and over the pressures of juggling complicated family lives with the horrors of the job.

  Both women try to reconcile their problematic family lives – Olivia’s issues with her teenage children, Lauren’s collapsing marriage – with the demands of a job that requires heart and soul. Their beat is a decaying coastal town in the south of England – a shadow of its Victorian glory – and criminals are lurking even where you’d least expect them. As Olivia and Lauren investigate a harrowing murder, the events of the case spiral – and so do the issues in their personal lives …

  PROLOGUE

  It had started with curses and insults, spitting and pushing; it had escalated into punching and then, when he’d finally collapsed to the ground, it had continued with kicking. The young man was finally reduced to the only defence left to him, curling into a foetal position on the floor.

  Then all was quiet for a while, but when he uncurled his head and lifted his face to see what was happening, he got a fierce kick from a metal-capped boot that knocked out two of his front teeth. Spitting blood, he turned his head into his body again, only to hear a voice saying, ‘No, not that.’

  Risking a very quick peek out of his hedgehog curl, he was horrified to see one of the figures holding a blow torch. Holy God, surely they weren’t thinking of using that on him? He had felt a rib or several cracking when the kicking had been at its height, and he was pretty sure his eye-socket had suffered damage from one of the early swings of an anonymous boot, for he had no idea who these men were. All of them wore ski-masks and none of them was careless enough to use names.

  ‘Not his eyes, smackhead. We want him to see death coming for him: see its approach and smell its stench. Have you got the cross and the wire? Oh, you dirty bastard,’ said the small one at the sight of their victim spitting blood again and, aiming another kick, he caught the young man on the head, making him drift into a semi-comatose state.

  As he swam in and out of consciousness he was aware of his arms being stretched out as two of them stamped on his hands with their heavy boots, and he heard, in his head, the sound of shattering bones. The blessing of darkness overcame him for a while.

  Before he completely blacked out, he was aware that he had evacuated his bowels in his terror, and the draughts blowing through the derelict warehouse also declared that he had wet himself, as it made the dampness at his front noticeable.

  When he next became fully conscious of his surroundings, he realised that he could not move his arms, and that they were restrained all along their length by something thin and sharp, cutting through the material of his woefully inadequate light jacket.

  Someone grabbed one of his legs, and he tried to kick out with the other one, but that, too, was grabbed in a crushing grasp, the two limbs were forced together, and the binding of his legs began, from the bottom up, some of the others holding him down so that he couldn’t hinder their progress.

  ‘Has the hole been dug?’

  ‘About midnight.’

  ‘Let’s get our little muppet into the ground then. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. I wonder who’ll harvest this little triffid?’

  As they lifted him, he was aware that he was tied – it felt like with wire – to a stout, cross-shaped object, that had the texture of wood, and they were carrying him horizontally towards a large van that was parked over by the big double doors.

  Why had he obeyed this summons to come here? As far as he knew he had done nothing wrong. Well, nothing much that he thought would have been noticed. Just the odd skim here and there, and a few free samples – for personal use only. He had almost always obeyed the rules; there had been no grave transgression on his part of which he was aware, but he had not been given the opportunity to state his innocence.

  He remembered how the figure had appeared out of nowhere, and his present nightmare had immediately started. At first he thought they were just going to rough him up a bit, but as it got more serious, he began to fear for his life. By this stage, as he was manhandled into the rear of the nondescript van, he was practically devoid of hope.

  When the vehicle stopped, his incapacitated body was manhandled back out of the van and through a gate into a field, with a brief stop just after they had entered when he heard a couple of snips, and an evil chuckle of laughter from his prospective executioners.

  His bound body was roughly dropped on the ground, and in the light of the moon, for it was a clear, cold night, he saw one of them approaching him with something round and spiky in his hands. Whatever it was, it was suddenly jammed over his head so that it rested on his forehead, impaling him with small spikes and leaving little trickles of blood, and he realised that it was a circlet made of barbed wire.

  ‘A crown of thorns for our little martyr, eh, lads?’ asked an evil voice with the ghost of schadenfreude in it, and he was aware of being raised upright. For a millisecond it crossed his mind that they were going to let him go; that all this had just been a sadistic and cruel lesson from which he might learn not to try to do anything dodgy again.

  There was an agonising jolt that made the thrumming pain throughout his body positively sing, and he saw them all move away from him, blowing kisses and laughing, as at a hearty joke. Only this was no joke. Left completely on his own in what looked like the middle of a field, tears of frustration, pain, and fear trickled down his cheeks, and he wept for the life he had expected to live, and for what might have been: the injustice of it all, that he didn’t even know why this had happened to him.

  Surely he had been careful enough to keep his little bit of skimming and free samples hidden. Surely it couldn’t just be because he wanted to leave? After all, he’d had enough, he’d even provided his own replacement, and they wouldn’t be any the worse off for his ‘resignation’, if you could call it that? His senses were suddenly distracted at a puff of breeze, but all he could smell was blood, urine, and excrement. Surely this wasn’t it? Was he really going to die here, in this lonely field?

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  INTERLUDE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  INTERLUDE

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  INTERLUDE

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  INTERLUDE – FLASHBACK

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  INTERLUDE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  INTERLUDE

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  INTERLUDE

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  Andrea Frazer

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘I’ve just had another dressing-down by that sod Devenish,’ barked DI Olivia Hardy at her sergeant, Lauren Groves. Superintendent Martin Devenish, their superior, was based at their station, meaning it was hard to avoid one of his frequent outbursts of displeasure. ‘And how come you always look so perfect, in your suits and matching shoes and handbags?’ she asked, apropos of nothing, but curious as to why their appearance was always so at odds.

  ‘I suppose it’s just the way Nanny taught me to present myself,’ replied DS Lauren Groves with a sympathetic smile.

  ‘Nanny?’ responded DI Hardy.
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  ‘Ooh, get ’er! Lady Muck personified,’ jeered DC Colin Redwood, a young man who could be very irritating if he chose. And frequently did.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ said DS Groves.

  ‘Yeah, get off her back,’ Hardy joined in. She’d had enough of Redwood and his smart-alec attitude over the last couple of weeks. ‘Anyway, we’re celebrating winding up our first case together with a decent cup of coffee from that café next door.’ Her demeanour improved as she re-focused on her successful case. ‘And who rattled your cage anyway?’

  As Redwood subsided, the phone on Hardy’s desk trilled. She lifted the receiver and listened, still wearing her smug expression. She had wound up a very messy case of tit-for-tat gang crime and she felt good. Her good humour soon changed, though, to one of resignation and dismay.

  With an abrupt movement of her head, she indicated to DS Groves that she should accompany her, explaining as she grabbed her coat and car keys that there had been a head-on collision on the ring road, and that it was going to be a messy one. ‘You’ll be good at breaking the bad news to the families – must be something to do with your posh upbringing, but it always seems to come better from you than me.’

  ‘Thanks, ma’am,’ replied the younger officer, easing any creases in the back of her skirt that she might have acquired sitting at her desk. ‘I’ll just get my handbag. But why have we been called out? Shouldn’t Traffic be dealing with it?’

  ‘In normal circumstances, but they think the guy who was alone in one of the cars is as high as a kite, and that there may be drugs in the car.’

  ‘So what about the Drugs Squad?’

  ‘Too far stretched, it would seem, so, for now, this is our baby. Don’t whinge, it could be worse. It could be a punch-up in a pub at closing time with broken glasses and knives. Give me a nice, clean accident any day of the week – less chance of getting injured, or even murdered.’

  ‘Can I come too, guv, please?’ pleaded Redwood, but his ambitions were immediately quashed.

  ‘You stay here and mind the phones like a good little doggy. You’ve got about as much tact as a breeze block, and you always look too self-satisfied to be comforting the relatives of the dead.’

  As the two women left the office, Redwood offered an upraised middle finger to them and muttered, ‘Sour old bitches.’

  From the corridor came Hardy’s voice. ‘I heard that, and I don’t approve of that sign. I’ll speak to you about respect for senior officers when I come back, Detective Constable.’

  Redwood slumped back into his chair and played with the pens on his desk. The DI never let him do anything interesting, and he was getting bloody fed up with it. For a few minutes he toyed with leaving the force and joining the army, but the thought of actually going off to war soon made him rule this idea out. He decided he’d be better off staying where he was – and anyway, his present position gave him some inside opportunities. Also, he had some other irons in the fire which could make him a lot of money with his nose for profitable sidelines … ‘How did you know what he was doing?’ asked Groves.

  ‘He always flips me the bird and mutters some insult when I tick him off, so I thought I’d employ that famous attribute that all mothers have – eyes in my arse – and bring him up short.’

  ‘What do we know so far?’ asked Groves, returning to the scene of the accident towards which they were heading, as the two detectives made their way out to the car park.

  ‘Uniform and the ambulances are already there; three dead, one not far off, and one other with multiple injuries who’ll have to be cut out of the car. Fire Service’s on its way.’

  ‘Oh, damn!’

  ‘So, apart from not liking the sight of mangled bodies, how are you getting on in our happy little station?’ Hardy asked, a slight hint of sarcasm in her voice.

  ‘It’s all right,’ was Groves’s short reply, but after a few seconds of silence, she continued, ‘Is that Colin Redwood always so bloody rude? Excuse my language, but he really gets on my nerves.’ She didn’t really approve of swearing – and Nanny definitely would not have approved.

  ‘Join the club, Sergeant. He gets up everybody’s nose. Just ignore him and hope he’ll put in for a transfer soon. What about the rest of them?’

  ‘Well, I don’t really know them very well, but they seem a friendly enough bunch. The superintendent’s a bit scary though, isn’t he?’

  ‘Only if you actually listen to him, and you take what he says seriously.’

  They took a pool car, as DI Hardy wasn’t willing to put any more miles on her own car’s clock than necessary, nor did she want its immaculate bodywork put in any peril. Leaving the car park, she headed north to the ring road round Littleton-on-Sea to see what awaited them in the mangled-limb department.

  ‘God, it stinks in here. Someone’s had one or two sneaky fags when they’ve taken this out last. I’m definitely going to make a complaint this time. I don’t care if it’s pouring down with rain, they’ll just have to find somewhere else to indulge in their filthy habit.

  ‘I only gave up six months ago, and smelling their stale smoke is sheer torture. I don’t know how I haven’t cracked, in this job.’

  Olivia Hardy was on the short side, and somewhat tubby. Her hair was cut short for convenience’s sake, and she wore only mascara and lipstick as her warpaint to work. Her rotundity had increased since she had quit smoking, of which she was well aware, and she was always intending to do something about it ‘next week’, whenever that would be. Maybe. Her everyday attire was casual – very casual since her size had increased.

  ‘My suit’s going to reek when I get home,’ replied Groves, not really listening. ‘I’ll have to drop it into the dry cleaner’s tomorrow.’

  Lauren Groves was always finicky about her appearance. She was a complete physical contrast to Hardy. Very tall – nearly six feet – naturally slim, and brought up never to be sloppily dressed, even in her own home. It really was just the way she’d been brought up, with a nanny first, then life at boarding school.

  The police station they had just left was situated about half a mile from the promenade, in the medium-sized coastal town of Littleton-on-Sea. The station had been built in the 1970s to serve an ever-growing population, and had been constantly added to in an ad hoc manner by the use of Portakabins and other ‘temporary’ structures.

  At first glance the town itself gave a good impression, the road opposite the neat green by the sea lined with Georgian houses, once grand residences for the new middle classes and their live-in staff. Now, though, most were divided up into minuscule flats and bedsits, the facades faded and peeling.

  At night, however, the dark underbelly of the place began to show. Situated on the south coast, it was a regular landing base for what the locals referred to as ‘wetbacks’: illegal immigrants swimming ashore from dodgy vessels that wouldn’t chance bringing them in any closer. It was also a favourite landing place for consignments of drugs, and the town had more than its fair share of users and pushers.

  The number of homeless people had also risen considerably in the last few years – many of them runaways, who often fell into stealing to feed their drug habits. Drugs had become a convenient way to blur the edges of a bleak and loveless existence. Shoplifting from supermarkets and off-licences had also risen, as had begging on the street and sleeping in shop doorways. All in all, these nomads were a pitiful and unwelcome tribe, despised by locals and shopkeepers alike, and a thorn in the side as well as the conscience of the local police.

  The town also had a surrounding agricultural ring of nurseries, now steadily being bought up and built over, where casual labour was a necessity in season and these, along with the extensive building work that was rapidly expanding the place, needed workers, not all of them legal.

  There was, too, a large stock of Victorian houses, mostly terraced, many seedy and rundown, where any amount of domestic and child abuse went on, rarely reported and even more rarely prosecuted. When examined closely,
it was not a place anyone would choose to take an old-fashioned English seaside holiday – but then those who did visit knew nothing of these drawbacks. All they saw were the beach, the sand dunes, the amusement arcades, and the old winding streets of the town, with its easy access to the Downs and more countryside than they could shake a stick at.

  DI Hardy had worked in the Littleton-on-Sea police station for longer than she cared to remember, since when it had had a minimal staff and very little to do. Now it was much expanded, with a greatly increased workforce, times had changed unrecognisably. The many departments now crammed into the building were largely insular and did not mix easily, and DI Hardy knew only a fraction of them.

  She was forty-eight years old, married with two children who were hardly children anymore, and lived outside the sprawling mass that the town was becoming, in a rambling old cottage to which she was looking forward to returning on this grizzly Friday evening.

  Her new DS was younger at only forty, and was also married with two children, but her life was very different, and there were no similarities at all between their domestic arrangements. Groves lived in a huge barn conversion buried in the countryside, quite a secret unless you knew where to find it, with an au pair-cum-nanny, her husband working away in the Middle East for most of the time, as he had a job in the petro-chemical industry.

  Many of those working in the station considered her a rich bitch who was just passing time and slumming it, but Hardy knew better. She could see Groves was a dedicated officer who did the job to give her life purpose and direction, and counteract the smothering atmosphere of her domestic circumstances.

  Both her children were away most of the time at boarding school and, although she was comfortably off, that and her husband’s habitual absence made her feel like a bird in a golden cage, with nothing to do all day except sing for release. Her job provided the necessary stuffing to fill the empty hours that filled what passed for her life.

  Although they appeared outwardly so different, she and Hardy had got on rather well from the first, both giving their jobs high priority, but sharing a mutual interest in music. They both had lively minds that sometimes drove them to distraction, and they had discovered that each of them was attempting to learn how to play the flute.