Bright Spark (24 page)

Sharon
had drifted for what might have been seconds or hours and woke with a start,
disorientated. The LED of the radio alarm insisted it was 3am. It must be
mistaken as a nacreous light still leaked through the curtains and her t-shirt
was sodden with sweat. She shuffled backwards onto her elbows and a paperback
slid to the floor, losing her place; not that it mattered, as she had little
idea after a dozen nights of reading two pages at a time what the wretched
thing was about.

Something
was wrong. The room was hers with its blown-up monochrome images of ancient
cities she had to see before she died and tomorrow’s business suit hanging from
the door to the en suite. Her watch, keys and jewellery lay in the carved
wooden bowl Rory had bought her in Finland. Her towering stack of forgettable
and forgotten crime novels loomed on the bedside table.

Yet
the curtains were unwrinkled and perfumed. Nothing was dusty. Every wardrobe
door and drawer was neatly closed.  A rhythmic snorting and hissing reached her
from the spare room with the occasional delicate tutting as counterpoint; her
father’s stifled excuse for breathing underlined by her mother’s unconscious,
clucking anxiety. She sighed; the day had been real after all and she was not
alone.

Brushing
back her hair and bringing her knees to her chest, she froze at another sound.
The rhythmic thumping she had taken for the leaky guttering above the water
butts couldn’t possibly be anything of the kind without the rain that was
sorely overdue, nor was it the echo of her own thumping heart. Her left hand
itched for the old cricket bat she kept under the bed, more for reassurance
than for any real deterrent value. She resisted; it had to be Jeremy. He
couldn’t sleep the whole night through, not in a new environment, no matter how
precisely his books and cars were aligned.

She
padded to the landing, wincing with every treacherous creak of the cheaply
banged together floorboards beneath her feet. What if she was wrong and a
sample of her firm’s thieving, violent client-base was making a ham-fisted bid
to get in? Her throat went dry as she moved onto the landing, almost letting
out a whimper when she felt the gentle draught from the staircase; nothing
should have been left open downstairs, even on the hottest nights, not with her
experience of the burgling classes.

Her
mobile phone and cricket bat called to her from her bedroom when she found the
door to the box room fully closed. She paused, thinking. She was better than
this. She drew a breath. Jeremy would leave the door closed even if he’d left
the room on one of his sleepwalking odysseys. He was consistent and precise in
all things and doors had to be fully closed or fully open for good reason;
there could not logically be any intermediate state for a door and ‘ajar’ was a
four-letter word.

Gripping
the handle with slick palms, she eased it down and nudged the door gently open
against the friction of ill-fitting carpet. The divan bed had been neatly
vacated and left crisp and un-creased with what she swore were hospital
corners. If she hadn’t said goodnight to Jeremy in person, she wouldn’t have
known the bed had been used at all.  His favoured die-cast cars flanked the bed
in good order, along with his indispensable set of reference books and pencils,
all of exactly the same colour and proportion.

Perhaps
she should rouse her mother. Then again, this was Sharon’s house and Jeremy was
her brother. She knew from her mother’s lengthy telephone updates that Jeremy
had become more and more prone to somnambulism. He generally did little more
than tour the grounds before returning himself to bed, but once or twice he’d
been found holding the telephone receiver, attempting to light the stove or
standing at the garden gate.

Her
mother had reacted peevishly to Sharon’s suggestion that a doctor be consulted;
there was no pharmaceutical substitute for a mother’s love. With the stridency
of a martyr, she’d insisted she would care for Sharon’s father and brother at
all hours of the day and night without thought for her own beauty sleep; this
was after all the vocation that had chosen her. She might have brought God’s
will into the dialogue but for her distaste for Sharon’s agnosticism.  It was
as if her love for her family could only be perfected by adversity.

Sharon
tip-toed down the stairs, wary only
of disturbing her parents. The recessed lights under the kitchen cupboards had
been left on or switched on by Jeremy. The sight of an empty wine bottle on the
kitchen table, now holding only the bitter embers of sediment, explained the
niggling headache behind her eyes. Oddly, every kitchen drawer was wide open,
the contents heaped on the floor or on the worktops. The narrow and high
transom windows above the sink stood wide open.

Jeremy
faced the patio doors, oblivious to her, one fist then another pounding at the
toughened glazing while his lips worked soundlessly. Reflected, Sharon made out his staring eyes, fixed pupils and a face as inexpressive as ever. As she
watched and mustered her thoughts, he rattled the locked handle, turned the
absent key, waved his hands as if to attract the attention of someone outside
and mimed turning a key in a lock. When no-one responded, he peered through the
window with one hand plastered to the glass and the other miming the turning of
a handle, then relented and began to pound his fists all over again.

If
he’d been able to unlock the transom windows, why was he now so anxious about
finding a key? Perhaps her mother had left those windows unlocked after her
obsessive spring-clean and the key remained well hidden as a precaution against
Jeremy’s promenades.

She
resisted the urge to clasp a reassuring hand to his shoulder. Jeremy only
permitted physical contact from close family, and then only when he was happy
and comfortable with his surroundings. Startled from waking sleep in a strange
house, he might well react violently.  Yet she couldn’t leave him this way;
trapped in a behavioural loop, he could carry on until fatigue forced him to
stop. He could also change tack and find some much more dangerous compulsion.

“JJ,
it’s me, SJ,” she ventured, whispering.

He
groaned, slamming his fists more forcefully into glass, rattling the metal
frame.

“JJ,
it’s alright, everything’s fine, you’re at my house with your mum and dad and
all your books and cars and everything’s fine. You’re in my kitchen having one
of your walkabout sleeps.” She bit her lip, waiting for the reaction.

“What
an unholy aspect is this,” brayed Jeremy, half sobbing and half laughing.
“Screaming not fleeing conflagration. Silliness.”

Taken
aback, Sharon paused. Jeremy dreamed like anybody else, but his preoccupations
usually remained fixed in his own world and his sleepwalking activities
followed suit; kitchen items re-organised, attempts made to make porridge of
precisely the right volume and texture, books re-ordered, hedges trimmed
symmetrically with nail scissors.

“Tell
me what’s going on now, JJ.”

“Handle
here secure in my digits. Handle likewise on woman’s side.” Jeremy muttered and
slurred, grinning then scowling in quick succession. “Keyhole requiring key,
natural means of extrication from conflagration. Occupants screaming silly and
declining to unlock. Incomprehensible.”

 It
was only natural that the fire should loom large in his thoughts, but the
empathic imagining of other people’s experience of it was an unprecedented
leap. 

“Flinging
things at window, at me. Must never ever never defenestrate. Dire consequences
if Jeremy gets giddy and smashes window again. Was told once and forever and
did listen at that time and for all times.”

Jeremy’s
voice was soaring now, lifting in volume as his excitement grew. Feet clumped
around upstairs, a voice called out, muffled and indistinct.

“Get
out call fire brigade out stay out,” shouted Jeremy, whooping and giggling.
“Get out call fire brigade out stay out.”

“JJ,
for God’s sake, please,” urged Sharon, her hand instinctively clasping her
brother’s shoulder.

He
ceased, turning to her, eyes swimming into focus. A mystified frown crossed his
face then his head jerked back to allow a hoarse bellow to escape as he clasped
his fists above his head and swung them down with a sledgehammer blow onto the
handle of the patio doors, splitting it from the frame with a grinding crack to
leave shards of PVC and sharp brass edges dangling. Rage evaporated, Jeremy
stood, hands clasped to his head and dripping blood, rocking gently and
humming.

“Sharon, what do you think you’re doing?”

Bristling
scarlet in her impossibly hot flannelette dressing gown, her mother glared at
her from the kitchen door.

After
the briefest of sleeps, he couldn’t be certain she’d been there at all. After
Slowey had dropped him off and he’d managed to fumble the front door open with
slightly less noise than a train crash. After he’d staggered up the stairs,
sloughed off his ruined clothes and made a pitiful effort to wash his face and
brush his teeth. After he’d fallen headfirst into bed, the sense of falling
never ending, dropping him further and further into oblivion while his body
hung inert somewhere behind him. After he’d heard the alarm on its sixth
attempt to rouse him at something past six in the morning, a split second and a
fleeting shadow having passed since he’d closed his eyes. After he’d slammed
the alarm into the wall in a gentle bid to reset the wretched thing.

After
he’d stared hard at the glimmering curtains trying desperately to understand
which version of six o’clock this was and who had managed to set the alarm
anyway. After he’d realised he’d had four hours of sleep at best and felt every
bit as foggy and far less well than when he’d got into bed. After all of this,
he understood that Hayley’s side of the bed was empty but had absolutely no
idea whether she’d been there at all since yesterday.

Her
phone was nowhere in sight, and he hadn’t checked his own phone since his last
perfunctory text to her last night.  Her side of the bed was rumpled and unmade;
unusual for her not to have straightened it whenever she’d left it, but hardly
conclusive either way. The business suit she’d worn yesterday – the severe,
cinched-in affair that always made him vaguely lustful – was absent, as was her
briefcase. Her car keys were missing from their hook – the fact that he hadn’t
heard the garage door or the rumbling of an engine through breeze-block wasn’t
that meaningful in his addled state.

While
hurriedly shaving, he’d shouted a neutral voicemail message into his phone,
hoping she was well, regretting he hadn’t had time to chat, suggesting she call
back but only when and if it was convenient. While branding the shape of an
iron onto his last but one tolerably smart shirt and sluicing toast and instant
coffee around his mouth, he found no sign that the kitchen had been used at all
for nearly 24 hours.    

Unlocking
the front door to leave, he saw the envelope pinned to its inner face, address
to him in Hayley’s neat and almost fussy copperplate. She was safe and well,
somewhere. He could go about his day having put her welfare to one side. He
couldn’t read it now; couldn’t do it justice; knew what must be in it; and
didn’t have room in his head for another matryoshka doll of shame and guilt and
escalating obligation right now.

Leaving
the letter in place, he locked the door behind him to find Slowey, obnoxiously
bright-eyed and tidy, reviewing his notebook from behind the wheel of his
scrapheap family runabout.

“As
if by magic, the shopkeeper appeared,” said Harkness, wedging himself into the
passenger seat. “I have got a car, you know.”

“You’re
very welcome.”

“I
mean thanks and so forth, but isn’t it my turn anyway?”

“Nope,
still my turn. Been keeping track. All in the book. Anyway, if I’m in charge,
you can’t be late.”

“Hey,
did you set my alarm as well?”

“Of
course. I also sprinkled sand in your eyes and left that shilling under your
pillow when you lost your first milk tooth. Shall we?”

“Let’s.
Any thoughts overnight?”

“Plenty,
thanks. How’s Hayley.”

“Oh,
you know. Can’t complain. ”

“You
all look absolutely dreadful,” announced the prosecutor, smoothing down the
first page of her new notebook and sweeping her breezy grin around the
conference room. “Obviously, I say this with all the love and respect in the
world.”

Harkness
blinked away the drowsiness that had settled on his brain like silt while his
eyes amused themselves with the prosecutor’s lacy, lilac brassiere, deliciously
cupping her breasts beneath her gauzy blouse. He shuffled in his seat and took
a deep gulp of his fifth strong, syrupy coffee of the day. It failed to sluice
away the salty coating left by the bacon rolls he and Slowey had scooped up at
an industrial estate on the drive in.

Zoe
Stewart was the last prosecutor he wanted to adjudicate on the decision on
whether or not to charge Firth. It was beautiful to behold her pretending to be
the demure, giggling blonde in open court, then deploying her razor intellect
to dispatch the opposition. It was less pleasant to see her triage your
precious prosecution at the pre-charge stage, where any weakness or omission
that might compromise her winning streak would result in a dogged,
stone-walling refusal to charge. Challenging her on such a decision would
hopelessly pit the police against the sacred tenets of the Crown Prosecution
Service’s performance culture.

“We’ve
all had a late night and not very much sleep, so bear with us,” said Brennan,
not yet awake enough to sound his usual bullish self.

“Well,
I’ve been here for a few hours going through last night’s paperwork. Couldn’t
sleep much anyway – I knew I was duty gatekeeper today and it’s all very
exciting. Now then, I’ve got a preliminary opinion for you but let’s have the
latest news first, shall we.”

“Murphy,”
announced Newbould, more forcefully than he intended, bloodshot eyes stretched
starkly open. “I attended the PM a few hours ago. The report isn’t with us yet
but I can give the preliminary view. Basically, Dale Murphy had been dead for
around 18 hours when we found him. Not an instant death by any means, if the
timeline suggested by our wino confessor is correct.

“A
fairly messy PM,” gulped Newbould, “by my standards, anyway. Not that it
bothered Professor Ogilvy. Didn’t even put him off his breakfast. His report
will say something like death by internal bleeding and shock following a fast
vertical impact with at least one hard, blunt surface. There were multiple
internal injuries, all consistent with this thesis.”

“What
kind of injuries?” urged Stewart.

“Shattered
ribs. Punctured lung. Broken pelvis. Perforated colon. Biggest single injury
was a displacement fracture of the C7 vertebra crushing the spinal cord. Would
have left him quadriplegic. Might have left him with some grip and arm
function, hence the mobile phone – he must have grabbed that after the fall.”

“And
what about phone work? What was he doing with that phone?”

“Nothing
to tell you. Yet. It’s going to the lab today.”

“And
has the pathologist been asked if Murphy could have been assaulted?” asked
Stewart, who had now donned a pair of demure designer spectacles through which
she peered at Newbould.

“Not
unless someone hit him with a concrete buttress or a big rock. I’m quoting,”
said Newbould, almost brandishing his notes like a schoolboy insisting he’d
done his homework.

“Great,
thanks,” said Stewart, neatly drawing a line under Newbould’s account.
“Anything else from anybody else before we review?”

“I
rested the team overnight and I’m satisfied we’re now up to date.” Brennan
leaned forward on his chair and straightened his golf club tie. “As you’re no
doubt aware, we’ve got a great deal of evidence to sift through and many more
questions for our prime suspect.”

“So
give us our rubber-stamp then we can crack on with the police work, eh?”
Stewart sat back and grinned, tight-lipped.

       “I
thought it prudent to bring a thrusting young prosecutor on board early doors,”
returned Brennan, doing his best not to smirk or wink as he might have done in
the good old days, “particularly one with such…winning ways.”

       “Very
well. Gents, I’m conscious that this is a serious case. Lives have been lost
and more may be at stake. So, I’m not going to waste your time.” She stood and
passed around a sheaf of papers thicker than a standard CPS advice sheet. Ten
seconds into their reading, Harkness fancied he saw the windows and door bulge
inwards as everyone inhaled deeply.

       “You’re
serious,” said Brennan, quiet, the gleam faded from his eyes.

“With
regret, yes.”

“Zoe,”
began Brennan, removing his glasses and breaking the silence, “it’ll take me an
hour to read this. Just explain to me why on earth you want us to bail out our
prime and now only multiple-murder suspect. And why we can’t charge this
dangerous nutter and let a court decide.”

“It
wasn’t easy. I thrashed it out with Jim Cummings and in the end he agreed with
me.”

“Nicely
done, Zoe,” spat back Brennan, recognising the name of the city’s chief
prosecutor. “That means we have go out of the county if we want to appeal.”

“Look,
you’re entitled to badger me and harass me but I have to apply the hard, cold
maths: right now, you haven’t given me the evidence to prosecute Firth with a
better than evens chance of securing a conviction; and that means I can’t sign
off on a charge, even for murder.

“Look,
let’s lay it all out. Ok, Firth happened to have a history with Murphy, but
Murphy was the aggressor in all of these so far un-statemented witness
accounts. Then Firth, who lives ten minutes walk away, happened to appear at
the scene along with dozens of other rubber-neckers hours after the event. Yes,
Firth has one conviction for a serious arson attack – that’s not a pattern and
it doesn’t help that he has acrimonious history with your sergeant and a broken
limb as a result – debatably, anyway.

“We
have no eye witness evidence of Firth committing the deed. We have no forensic
evidence of any sort; not yet anyway, and probably not today or tomorrow or
maybe even this week. We can’t positively say it wasn’t Murphy himself or
Christ knows who else from his murky past. The list goes on. If Murphy was
murdered too, and that’s a big ‘if’, we’re a long way from saying how and by
whom. House to house is incomplete so we can’t rule out the possibility of
someone else’s cretinous enemy picking the wrong address…..”

“Yes,
and Lord Lucan could have faked Marilyn Monroe’s suicide to cover up JFK’s
gang-bang with Elvis and Shergar,” exclaimed Harkness, immediately regretting
it.

“Rob,”
growled Brennan, “shut it.”

“As
I was saying,” continued Stewart, slipping off her spectacles and spreading her
hands evenly across her neat paperwork. “You could choose to waste more time
interviewing Firth but we all know from his antecedents that he’ll say nothing
unless it suits him to do so. Gents, you might not think I’m helping, but look
at it this way. If you bail him for a week, you might find yourself with some
compelling evidence to hit him with at your leisure – or you might rule him out
and move on to a better suspect. If you keep him and wind the clock down, even
if you get a magistrates’ extension past the middle of the week, without
dramatic new evidence or some stunning confession, you’ll still fall well short
of the charging threshold.”

Harkness
examined the faces of his fellows, allowing the outrage to simmer, looking for
a cue or an ally. Newbould slumped, too jaded to react. Brennan listened and
scribbled, occasionally glaring at him. Biddle yawned and examined his
yellowing nails. Slowey paid close attention, impassive, occasionally nodding
approvingly at sound points of logic.

Harkness
knew he was about to indulge an appetite for unreasoning anger. He desperately
needed to turn Firth’s heart inside out and bring this case home for reasons he
didn’t want to fathom. More than that, he was too tired to keep the heavy
freight of frustration strapped down and had to let something slide.

“The
bottom line is it’s all just too circumstantial at the moment,” Stewart
continued. “If you’re all honest with yourselves, you’ll admit that juries are
becoming more and more exacting. They’ve all watched CSI Barnsley and think
we’ve failed to prove an offence if we haven’t produced ten types of forensic
evidence and a 3D multi-visual re-enactment of the crime scene presented by Troy
McClure. A little knowledge is a jolly bad thing for us, but the days of
convictions based on logic and circumstantial evidence are over….”

“For
Christ’s sake,” shouted Harkness, bolting upright and toppling his chair over
backwards. “We’ve got four bodies in the morgue, two of them minors. We’ve got
a compulsive fire-starter with means, motive and opportunity banged up in our
cells on our terms ready to be worked on.”

“Sergeant,”
interrupted Stewart, loudly then softening, “I’m sorry, but even by your logic,
Firth is not an indiscriminate killer. Quite the opposite, in fact”

“Write
it up any way you want, just please don’t let this murderous bastard saunter
out of here if any part of you acknowledges what he is.” He raised his hands
placatingly and stooped to pick up the chair, mortified at his own loss of
control.

“Rob,
get your arse out of this room and into my office and you bloody wait there for
me,” said Brennan, softly.

“It’s
alright,” said Stewart. “It’s perfectly understandable. Your officers are
clearly very committed.”

“It’s
alright with you, petal, but it ain’t alright with me.”

The
world must has been nudged off its axis, thought Harkness, gathering his
thoughts in the canteen, the DCI’s private and sustained bollocking still
echoing through his mind. Days earlier he’d been the golden boy, glad-handing
his way through a department that would one day be his to run; now he was
losing his grip on professional detachment and half-way to being seen as a
lunatic liability.

The
case itself had seemed so straightforward, means and motives clear enough,
decisive evidence pending, subject to the odd kink that could be hammered into
shape by ethical if discrete means. Now the adroitness he’d made much of in his
promotion board was deserting him, his instincts suddenly fallible. The clock
on the wall insisted it was half past nine but it felt more like high noon, as
if yesterday’s cloying heat had folded in on itself rather then ebbed.

“We
do not speak our brains, Rob. Not unless we’re fucking idiots.” Brennan had
said, jabbing his point home with an inky finger. “Otherwise, what do you think
I’d have said to the silly bitch with her pedicures and epicures and airs and
silly fucking Calvin Stein goggles. I’d have ended up in the papers and
probably on a register an’ all.

“You
get stripes, that means more not less professionalism. If there’s a grown-up
reason why you shouldn’t be here right now, tell me. If not, get out of my
sight and go and choke your medicine down.”

 
Harkness’s medicine had been to personally arrange for Firth to be bailed out
and then to convey him safely home with the compliments of the constabulary. He
would stomach it; he would have to. It was a deliciously cruel test of
professionalism. But he didn’t have to like it.

Nor
did he have to rush it. Given that a full team was now taking care of humdrum
admin and forensic essentials, and no other compelling suspects had presented
themselves, he could spare the time to take Firth home and make sure he stayed
there. Not that he could stop him leaving, but he had a bona fide, professional
interest in where he might go if he wandered, slowly and limping. All of which
the DCI had no doubt foreseen.

In
the opposite corner of the canteen, two uniformed cops from Volume Crime
hunched over a round table, one filling in tape labels, the other meticulously
plotting out an interview, both working their way through an early elevenses of
crisps and chocolate. He knew the interview planner; Nigel Tomkins, a big man
with a heart who took every misdemeanour personally enough to want to grind
honesty out of his suspects, hence his reputation for lengthy interviews and
the sobriquet of ‘Two-Tape Tomkins’. The other cop looked new, no doubt there
to watch, learn and do the admin, if Tomkins let him.

“That’s
a beautiful plan. Anyone I know, Nige?” asked Harkness, sauntering over and
affecting diffidence.

“Rob.
Moving up in the world?”

“And
down again swiftly on current form.”

“Still
talking to us lesser peons then?”

“Course
I am. Might need to exploit you again sometime.”

“Dingbat
called Braxton, if you must know. See you left an expression of interest on the
custody record.”

“You
got me.” Harkness held his hands up and drew up a chair. “What do you know
about yesterday’s murders?”

“Nothing.
I was camping in Wales.”

“Even
better. I can give you my totally biased version and you’ll have nothing to
measure it against.”

“Before
you get carried away, Rob, or Sarge, or whatever you are now, we’re supposed to
be dealing with affray and police assault, not multiple bloody murders.”