Tightrope Read online

  ‘I didn’t realise you knew so much about it,’ coughed Groves, backing out of the doorway.

  ‘I made a point of it when I had that trouble with Ben last year.’ The inspector and Hal, a steel drummer and retired teacher from Barbados, had two children, Hibbie and Ben, aged sixteen and eighteen respectively. Both had rather blotted their copybooks in the previous year, and Olivia was still smarting from the incidents that had so rocked her world.

  Groves had understood how shaken her partner had felt, as she contemplated the end of her marriage at the end of the previous year, when she had caught her husband in bed with the au pair, and they had both fled back to the Middle East where he was working on contract. Her children, Sholto and Jade, were, however, far too young to be involved in drugs, but had also suffered from the wind of change that had dragged them from attendance at their prep schools and catapulted them into a faith school close enough to their home for them to attend every day instead of boarding.

  With a similarly nauseated expression, Hardy followed her, bidding her to get a move on. ‘We’ve got two new officers starting today, now that Redwood’s not coming back, and I want to be there when they arrive. We’ve also got a talk from someone from drugs and from traffic about some zero tolerance operation that’s coming up. As if we didn’t have enough to deal with here!’

  Superintendent Devenish had decided that his force – strike that; his service – wasn’t ethnically diverse enough, so two officers were being transferred, one from Brighton and one from Yorkshire. Both DCs, Ali Desai complemented Terry Friend from the uniformed branch in representation of the Asian community, and Lee Oh satisfied the Far Eastern sector. Winston Harris, the Police Community Support Officer, had been an earlier appointment when the idea had first crossed devilish Devenish’s mind.

  As the two women climbed the station stairs to the first floor CID office, the Super was on his way down from the second floor, his two new members of staff in tow. He seemed to have decided that he’d like to introduce them to the team himself. Gosh, he must be feeling smug, thought Olivia, as she tried not to stare at Devenish’s intimidating features. These two new appointments, apart from being a necessary addition to the CID staff, were typical of him – to blow with the wind on current thinking, in the hope of extra brownie points from above.

  ‘Come along, ladies. Where have you been?’ he bellowed and then, without giving them a chance to answer, added, ‘Your place at the moment is with your team, settling in these two new officers.’ Both women clamped together their lips lest they should say something they might regret. Hardy was being particularly cautious as she had been under the senior officer’s beady surveillance since they’d had a little professional difference of opinion at the end of last year, and she’d been trying to keep her nose clean ever since.

  He entered the CID office with no clue to his imminent arrival therein, and discovered a cacophony that would’ve disgraced an unruly classroom. ‘Silence!’ he bellowed, clapping his hands for extra volume and, as the noise tailed away, turned to DI Hardy and gave it as his opinion that she should teach her staff a little office decorum. ‘This is a place of work, not a playground – who threw that paper aeroplane?’ he continued, raising his voice again.

  An embarrassed silence greeted this question, and he resumed in a slightly quieter voice, ‘May I introduce you to your new colleagues, DC Oh and DC Desai.’ He waved a magnanimous hand in the direction of the two embarrassed but smiling strangers. To this there was a smattering of applause and a couple of catcalls. ‘I want you to take them under your wing and assimilate them into your team as smoothly as possible, as there are important moves afoot.’

  ‘Do you mean the massacre in that drug den in Gooding Avenue?’ called a voice from the rear of the office.

  ‘What massacre? What drug den?’ It would appear that the news of the community officers’ find had not yet had climbed to the necessary height to make a superintendent aware of it.

  ‘DS Groves will accompany you back up to your office and explain everything, while I get these new lads settled in, sir,’ Hardy cut across his spluttering, and pointed to two empty desks awaiting their occupants. ‘Sit yourselves down, lads. We’ve got an operation coming up at the weekend which I want you all to put your hearts and souls into, as well as your backs. We will be carrying out operation ZeeTee, which stands for Zero Tolerance, in regard to drink and drugs. It’s a county-wide operation, with neighbouring services willing to cooperate if necessary.’

  ‘Why is it “zee” and not just “zed”?’ asked the long-serving and long-suffering DC Lenny Franklin in a peeved voice. He hated anything that smacked of Americanism.

  ‘Because it is. Now, pipe down and just listen. We have been issued with a number of the new drugalysers that can detect cannabis and cocaine in saliva. As you will remember from a demonstration a few months ago, these are one-use saliva swabs so I don’t want any of you messing about with them for a lark.

  ‘For your information, a list of illegal drugs and their tolerance limits is posted in the medical room, along with a list of prescription drugs which are on the banned list whilst driving, and the limits under which these are tolerated. We don’t mind people needing such treatment, but we will prosecute if these drugs are misused for other purposes. Feel free to check the list out in your own off-duty time.

  ‘This is a full-on operation which will use every officer available, leaving only a skeleton staff. Traffic will be out with the ANPR cameras, and some officers not usually out in vehicles will be with them so that they can do single shifts. Anyone not involved in this will be out on the streets literally looking for trouble or following up leads.

  ‘Uniformed officers will be picking up every drunk outside pubs and clubs, and we want to show this town a real crackdown. The colleges and universities have just finished their academic year, and students will be celebrating being home for the holidays. Remember that every available and vaguely suitable premises will be running English language courses for foreign students, and they need keeping an eye on too. No wonder they shoplift and pick pockets – considering what they’re charged for the privilege of lacklustre teaching, I’m not really surprised.’

  This was a subject in which she was taking more interest this year, as her husband Hal had taken on a teaching post in one of these out-of-term-time language schools, some of which were pop-up. He had been retired for some little while now and had decided that he really ought to keep his hand in, and had also registered for some supply teaching as well, before the end of the school term.

  Olivia and Hal had been married over twenty years and had been living in the same pretty cottage for most of that time, Hals’s parents having retired early to their native island and leaving their home in two pairs of safe hands.

  ‘Right, now about this incident that DS Groves and I have just attended: as you probably already know, the station grapevine being what it is, there’s been a murder and an attempted murder in Gooding Avenue.’ None of the officers looked surprised at this. ‘It was originally called in by a member of the public reporting the sound of raised voices and screaming. What you may not have heard is that also uncovered has been a large stash of presumably smuggled booze and tobacco products on the first floor, and a cannabis farm on the second floor.

  ‘It’s been well-insulated, which is why we haven’t had any reports, from the helicopter spotters, of the property giving off a large amount of heat. It’s also been well ventilated, so we’ve had no reports from the neighbours about the smell – although I’m slightly surprised. It’s our pungent old friend skunk.

  ‘I want us to dive straight into this so, Desai, I want you to pick up our PC Shuttleworth – easily recognised as the only one of our uniformed branch who looks like he plays rugby for the county, which he does – and get yourselves over to the hospital. I want you to get fingerprints from both the dead man and the injured woman and run them through the Police National Computer, and see if that poor woman’s c
onscious yet – he’ll need to book out a Lantern machine.

  ‘Tell Shuttleworth I want him to stay on duty by her side as she may still be in danger, and I’ll arrange for him to be relieved at the end of his shift. To this end, please take separate cars. And make sure you bring back the fingerprint machine with you; don’t let it stay at the hospital. And for God’s sake, don’t lose it or let it be stolen.

  ‘Lenny,’ she called, fixing her most experienced officer with her beady eye, I want you and Oh to do a house-to-house both up and down Gooding Avenue to see if anyone’s heard or seen anything, no matter how small, either earlier today or in recent weeks. Plants that size don’t grow overnight; they didn’t sprout from magic beans.

  ‘The ring road runs behind it, so ditto with any of the houses carrying on up this road that might have had a view of the rear of the properties. We don’t know how whoever committed these atrocities got in or out. It is worth taking note of, however, that this all sprang from a call to the station about raised voices coming from that particular house, to the point that one set of neighbours thought it sounded like it needed checking out. Luckily for them, although not so for our victims, our community support officers, Strickland and Harris were nearby and immediately dispatched to check out the situation.’

  ‘So, what do I do?’ asked DS Groves, who had re-entered the office halfway through the session.

  ‘I want you to speak to Monty Fairbanks. He knows every face on this patch, and I need you to get a list of names to visit to see if we can uncover any rumours and gossip, and then collect PC Terry Friend and get visiting; it’s safer in pairs.’

  ‘And what will you be doing?’ asked Groves, sounding just a little bit peeved that, whatever it was, she wouldn’t be doing it with her.

  ‘Mind your manners, Sergeant. For your information, I shall be debriefing our two intrepid community officers, to discover whether they saw anything that they might have missed the importance of. I shall then be pushing for identification of our victims and the results of anything found by Forensics. Keep in mind that we’ll be working in collaboration with the drugs squad and HMRC on this one. The only part of it that’s ours is the violent side – as usual. And not a word about the cannabis farm or the contraband on your travels, or one of the other departments will have our guts for garters. Now, get yourselves out there and watch your backs; we’ve got someone very dangerous on the loose, and anything could happen.’

  They all left the office, Lenny Franklin at the back and dragging his heels. As he reached the door, he looked over his shoulder and said, pleadingly, ‘Guv?’

  ‘I know it doesn’t seem very exciting, but you need to be prepared for the unexpected. And, just think, in a couple of years, you’ll be enjoying a well-earned retirement.’ Lenny’s face creased up in a scowl, but he picked up his pace and caught up with DC Oh.

  Looking out of the window of the now empty office, Olivia could see a van parked outside number three Gooding Avenue, and presumed that this was drugs officers taking a separate set of photographs and removing the highly commercial crop. She sincerely hoped that some low-life was watching so that he – or she – could put out the word that there were no pickings left. The last thing they needed was a spate of break-ins looking for crumbs from this table.

  As she exited the office, she left a message on the whiteboard that any officers returning in her absence, for there had been a few, to get in touch with DS Groves to get a list of names to be checked out.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Groves, being a diligent officer, decided to have a quick check of the drugs covered by new legislation while Monty Fairbanks was calling up names for her. To square her conscience for not doing this in her free time, she decided that she would work through her lunch break, and grab a sandwich to eat in the car.

  Fairbanks’ eyes had lit up at her request for names connected with drugs. ‘Do you want users or suspected dealers?’ he had asked. If he had been a dog he would have been panting with anticipation.

  ‘Both, if you can manage it,’ she’d replied without thinking.

  ‘Suspected dealers, I can get a list together fairly quickly, but users, it’ll take some time, there are so many.’

  ‘Just the dealers for now, then.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go on your own, love. You don’t want to go blundering in with faces like that. There’ll be some pretty dodgy characters in there, and you’d probably have to have permission from the drugs squad.’

  ‘Firstly, I am not your “love”, and, secondly, I’ll seek whatever permissions I need before I go. I do not intend to go “blundering in”, as you so delicately put it,’ she snapped, her face reddening, because that was exactly what she had intended to do.

  That was why she’d settled for a list of persistent users and parked herself in front of the notice in the medical room perusing the list of drugs which had a limit on them for driving. She was familiar with the illegal ones, but her brain began to tie itself in knots with the legal ones, and she spoke them to herself under her breath.

  ‘Morphine, methadone, diazepam, clonazepam, flunitrazepam, lorazepam, oxazepam, temazepam’ – so that was anything that ended in -pam, but the legal limits were so diverse. A thousand micrograms per litre were legal for temazepam, but only fifty for clonazepam. At that moment, she considered herself lucky not to be a doctor, but was bounced out of her reverie by a resounding slap on the rump and the voice of DC Daz Westbrook wishing her good day, followed by the lazy voice of DC Teddy O’Brien stating that he wouldn’t have done that because it could be considered assault on a police officer. Lauren blushed, but said nothing, her old-fashioned soul actually taking it as a compliment that Westbrook had been moved so to act.

  Westbrook had been a replacement for former DC Colin Redwood, who had been dismissed from the service after leaking confidential information to the press. He had turned out to be not so much an improvement, as more of the same, in that he was young, mouthy and impertinent. Teddy O’Brien was in his mid-thirties and had retained his Irish lilt even though he had lived in England since the age of ten.

  ‘We phoned Lenny and he said you’d be down with Monty, and he pointed us in this direction. What have you said to upset him? He seemed to be in a right old mood.’

  ‘None of your bloody business, Constable.’ Suddenly, so was she. ‘And if you lay a finger on me again I shall have you up on a disciplinary.’ Why had she suddenly become so defensive?

  ‘Ooh. Aren’t we in a mood? Time of the month, Sergeant?’

  ‘How do you fancy joining the ranks of the unemployed, Westbrook? I shall speak to the inspector later about your disrespectful and sexist behaviour and, no doubt, she’ll have a few quiet words with you – one of which I rather hope is ‘off’.

  ‘No need to be mardy, Sarge.’ Westbrook really was pushing his luck.

  ‘No need to be bloody rude either,’ she snapped back at him. This young man had really got under her skin without her being aware of it. O’Brien, very wisely, kept his lip zipped.

  ‘Are you aware of what was discovered in Gooding Avenue this morning? Allow me to enlighten you,’ she suggested, as they shook their heads in blessed silence. She was more unsettled than she had realised by what had come to light that morning; and practically on the station’s doorstep, too. But how on earth could she do as she had been bidden without mentioning the drugs? She would have to get hold of a name from the drugs squad with whom she could liaise, before setting off on a wild-goose chase. What was Olivia thinking, giving her a task she couldn’t carry out?

  As she scuttled off to get a name and contact number, the two male detectives headed back to the office.

  ‘Come on, Paddy, let’s get out of here. She can find us when she’s ready.’

  ‘My name’s not Paddy.’

  ‘OK, Mick.’

  ‘You cheeky little bastard. Call me Teddy or I’ll start calling you Ariel, and that’s the name of a fairy as well as a washing powder, Daz.’

  �
��Fair dos – Teddy.’

  Liam Shuttleworth proved easy to identify for Ali Desai. Apart from being in uniform, he was easily the largest officer in the station. After introducing himself, he explained what Hardy wanted them to do, and that she wanted Shuttleworth to stay on in the hospital after they had taken fingerprints and seen whether the woman was able to speak to them, to keep a watch on her.

  ‘If someone injured her as badly as the inspector told us, they might have left her for dead. If word gets out that she survived, they might have another go at her,’ he explained. ‘For that reason, she wants us to take separate cars.’

  ‘I’ll just grab my newspaper,’ replied the uniformed constable, picking up his copy of the Daily Express.

  At the hospital, they were shown to a single room in the ICU where the body of a woman lay in the bed, her face heavily bandaged with large pads covering her eye sockets. One of her legs was in a splint, as was one of her arms. She was hooked up to a number of monitors and had two drip bags slowly dispensing their contents into a cannula in the back of her right hand, the other being in a splint, the fingers separately bandaged. Her mouth was slightly open when she breathed, showing the place where teeth had been that morning when she woke up, and her nose was askew where it had also taken a heavy knock.

  The nurse who had led them to the room commented. ‘She’s had a good going over. We’ve got her sedated, and she’s been for X-rays and a scan. Now we’re just waiting for a theatre to be readied so that we can set her broken bones, but she’ll possibly need her spleen removed. And then there’s her eyes, or rather, lack of them. How she’ll cope with living like that I’ve no idea. I don’t think I could do it.’

  ‘What about her eyes?’ asked Shuttleworth, Desai not having gone into specific injuries but who, nevertheless, was looking slightly nauseous.

  ‘She doesn’t have any any more,’ said the nurse, curtly.

  ‘What?’ Shuttleworth looked appalled. Desai kept schtum.