Fairwood (a suspense mystery thriller) (15 page)

They were being welcomed and the more they drank the more welcomed they felt. They were both at ease, comfortable and enjoying themselves.

By the end of the quiz, when the papers were collected and the scores were tallied, Dexter and Pandora were beyond tipsy. They were slurring their words; she nearly tripped over the back of the chair on her way to the toilet; he lost half of his drink down his top when he missed his mouth. The others seemed to be drinking and revelling too though, so they didn’t mind their drunkenness.

The music returned after the quiz, the voice of the bartender replaced by the heavy tones of classic rock.

The conversation was less joyous, less friendly than it had been before, but Dexter and Pandora barely noticed it. There was a tension that hung heavily over the group and spread its way around the room, but they couldn’t feel it through the sedated pulse of intoxication.

Dorothy’s husband, Eric, bought them more drinks, topping them up just as they drained their glasses.

“You’re slacking,” Dexter nodded with a joking slur. He received a half-arsed smile before Eric scuttled out of his seat and headed to the bar. Dexter watched him converse with the bartender briefly and then turn his attention to a suddenly despondent Dorothy.

“The depressing effects don’t usually take effect until much later on in the night,” he noted.

She raised her head, gave him a confused half-smile. He gestured towards her glass; she had been drinking gin and tonic but had barely sipped a drop from the one that had been in front of her for the last hour.

She completed the smile and then looked away.

“Eddie and Marie won,” Eric said when he returned to the table, putting the drinks down with a disinterested thump.

Dorothy didn’t raise her head. She sighed heavily. “It should have been us,” she said bitterly.

Pandora grinned. “Maybe next time Dotty,” she slurred.

Dorothy turned to face her; the smile was gone from her ruby face. She didn’t say anything, just stared then turned away. “Come on,” she said to her friends. “Let’s go.”

“You’re leaving?” Dexter asked, preparing to stand. “So soon?”

Dorothy and her friends barely even regarded Dexter or Pandora. They stood, put on their jackets, collected their belongings and walked to the bar, talking to the bartender. They all turned back to look at the drunken couple briefly; Dexter and Pandora smiled at them, it wasn’t retuned.

“You think we offended them?” Dexter slurred.

Pandora giggled. “Do we care?”

Dexter shook his head, laughed. They were far too drunk to care, far too drunk to stop themselves from falling into a fit of uncontrollable and pointless laughter.

They didn’t hear the music stop, but when they opened their eyes, awoke to the sudden dimming of the light around them, they stopped laughing immediately. Everyone in the bar was standing over them. No one was smiling anymore; no one was ready to offer any greetings or small talk.

“What’s the matter?” Dexter asked, halting his laugh with a stifled hiccup.

The bartender, standing at the centre of the mass, answered: “They’ve come to collect their prize.”

Disappointed faces stared on; two eager faces flickered. Dexter swallowed thickly, looked towards Pandora who was retuning the stare of one of the flickering, lustful faces. She looked worried, seemed suddenly sober.

“What’s the prize?” he asked.

The lusting man turned his eyes from Dexter to Pandora and then back again. “You,” he said with a grin.

***

He grabbed her roughly, first by the arm -- his thick fingers sinking into the soft flesh above her elbow -- until she resisted, at which point he grasped a clump of her hair and tugged until she relented.

Dexter tried to intervene but his reactions were slowed by the alcohol and the others stopped him before he could pry Pandora's hair away from the eager hand. They piled on him, he felt their grasping hands on his body, forcing him back, keeping him pressured. He struggled to breathe in the gathering throng of bodies that piled on top of him, struggled to resist as they hauled him upwards and began to drag him across the floor, his legs kicking out behind him.

He heard Pandora screaming, heard her orally assaulting her tormentor and then trying to reason with him, but he couldn’t see her. He thought he caught a flash of her golden hair at one point, seen through the thick wall of pulsating, grasping bodies, but it could have been anything.

He clawed at his attackers, at the wall of flesh, at himself, at the hard floor beneath him. He was like a child throwing a tantrum, forcing every muscle into any action he could muster. He picked up something from the floor; it was small and hard with a little pin attached. He attempted to stab someone with it before setting himself to hurl it at them. He stopped when it brought it in front of his face, when he saw what it was. It was Pandora’s brooch, the little bronze butterfly given to her by her grandmother, a piece of jewellery that was second nature to whatever outfit she wore, regardless of the fact that it didn’t go with anything.

He lost his fight at that point; he was too tired, too drunk. He gripped the butterfly tight in his hand and prayed that she would be okay. The noise became almost unbearable, heard over the sound of his own pounding anger, his own rushed breath and Pandora’s tormented cries. They were all yelling, spitting violent obscenities and chants, eager for their pound of flesh. He felt more hands poke through the bodies, heard screams of blood lust when they grasped at his flesh, tugging and picking at his clothes and skin. He was powerless to stop them; too inebriated and outnumbered.

He hadn’t seen Pandora dragged ahead of him, hadn’t seen the other men join the one with the lustful eyes. He didn’t see their groping hands on her flesh, didn’t see the vigorous anger with which they tore at her clothes, her hair and her skin.

She had more fight in her than Dexter, there were less men on her and she had things to fear that he didn’t. She struggled loose, free of their grasp -- lingering fingers on the edges of her jacket. She turned, saw the rabble of people surrounding her partner, of which she saw nothing; looked towards the exit, saw an armful of people waiting there for her, watching her next move. She turned back to her attacker, back to the exit, back to Dexter; then she felt the full force of a fist between her shoulder blades. It knocked the air and the fight out of her, threw her upper body forward; shocked her system into a dizzying coughing fit. She lunged towards the floor, stopped short of hitting it, then the fist clipped her on the back of the head and she couldn’t stop herself from falling.

17

Cawley woke with the illusion of freshness, of feeling alive, devoid of the retributions from a night of drinking. That feeling subsisted after he took his first few breaths and his hangover caught up with him.

The previous
night, following Simpson’s arrival, he had stayed awake for another hour or two in the hope he could refresh himself from his early drinking and avoid a hangover. It clearly hadn’t worked. His head throbbed and pulsed, he still felt tired despite being asleep for more than half of the last twenty-four hours. His stomach kicked and rocked, spitting a foul concoction of gastric breaths into his rancid mouth.

He lifted himself up on his elbows, wiped a thick stream of sleep from his eye, picked a dried strand of saliva from his chin. He looked across the living room. Andrew was curled up on the chair, his head tilted awkwardly to the side, his eyes closed; his breaths slow and steady. He was sleeping, that was a plus. Cawley doubted whether his troubled former partner would sleep at all -- he looked like he hadn’t closed a fitful eye in weeks -- but he was going to have an awful agony in his stiffened neck when he woke.

He had given Andrew a pillow and a spare duvet, gave him the choice between sleeping on the floor or the chair. They had a guest bedroom but that, like the bedroom Cawley once shared with his wife, had been ransacked. Cawley nodded off on the couch, his last words to his former partner being the directions to the toilet: ‘the only room up there that the bitch hasn’t stripped bare.’

Cawley squinted at the clock, straining his eyes through the line of light that blistered through a gap in the curtains and stabbed at his brain. It was just after eight. He was due at work in less than an hour.

He groaned, cursed under his breath and rubbed his tired eyes. He didn’t feel like working at all, didn’t want to face the office or the evil bitch that resided within. He scrambled to his feet, took his mobile phone from the coffee table and carried it into the kitchen, dialling the number to the office.

A pleasant, early morning voice -- a female fit for children’s television -- answered with a peppiness that fired bile from his stomach into his throat.

“Detective Cawley,” he told her in an almost incoherent grumble. “I won’t be coming into the office today. Something's come up.”

“May I ask what?” she wondered.

He peeked into the living room. Andrew was still sound asleep.

My former partner, my former friend, is asleep on my sofa and has nowhere else to go; my wife is a malicious bitch who is trying to strip me of everything I own just because she once slept in it, sat on it, touched it or looked at it, and my boss is the devil incarnate and is waiting to rip me a new arsehole when she finds out what I did. That’s what he wanted to tell her, that’s what pressed against his tired, aching brain, desperate to find a release.

What he actually said was, “Personal problems.”

She didn’t seem satisfied. After all, what middle-aged detective
didn’t
have personal problems. She’d heard it all before and had probably heard it dismissed as a worthless excuse from her superiors, but she didn’t make the decisions,
they
did, and by the time she relayed the information to them, Cawley would be asleep, comatose or nursing a cup of coffee and waiting for some painkillers to kick in. He could deal with the retributions when he returned to work, whenever that was.

He hung up, turned the phone off and dropped it into his pocket. He splashed some water on his face and took a swig of milk from the fridge before heading back to the couch, back to his slumber.

Simpson opened his eyes when Cawley returned, alerted by his presence. When he saw him he lifted his head, quickly jolting back in pain when the strained muscle in his neck revolted.

“Sleep well?” Cawley asked sarcastically as Simpson moaned and rubbed the offending muscle, his neck cricked to one side.

He mumbled a reply.

“What time did you drift off?” Cawley wondered.

Simpson looked at the clock and then lied. “Just after you, I think.” He hadn’t fallen asleep until just a few hours ago. He had stayed up, staring into nothing and contemplating on his own misery. Then he’d started on the bourbon that Cawley had left on the floor, draining what remained in the toppled glass before drinking half of the bottle. He doubted the senior detective would remember how much he’d drunk when he woke, his thoughts were confirmed when he watched Cawley retrieve the bottle and take it to the kitchen without mentioning the dwindled contents.

“Tea, coffee?” Cawley shouted over the sound of a boiling kettle.

“Coffee. Strong. Black.”

Cawley made the drinks, the notion of returning to sleep now gone. He swallowed a couple of painkillers with the scalding liquid of a sweet and milky cup of tea and then stared at Simpson who sucked in the heat from his steaming cup of coffee.

“So, any plans on going back to work?” he asked.

Simpson gave him a bemused look, not sure if he was joking or setting up another round of insults. He shook his head, took a sip from the hot liquid and then wished he hadn’t. It burned his tongue.

“You going to try something else?” Cawley wondered. “Learn a trade maybe, or--”

“Don’t do this,” Simpson interjected.