Pawn (3 page)

It was over. He had survived.

So why didn’t he believe it?

Chapter Three.

Upper Plimmerton Police Station was quite a nice looking building from the outside. In fact it looked rather picturesque and would have been perfectly at home on many postcards. But the outside of the building, a genuine Georgian architectural beauty, and the inside did not marry up. The same was true of course of many buildings in the town.

Upper Plimmerton was one of those once rural towns that was slowly being transformed into a small urban city as people fled from London seeking the more rural life. In short it wasn’t very rural any more. Not the town at least. Instead, the various commercial streets were packed with modern shops, outlets from big chains that had seen a business opportunity opening up in the east. And all of them were trapped in Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian buildings that had never been built with shopping in mind. The police station was simply another one in a long list of unsuitable buildings being used.

As a result it was over-crowded, and becoming more so with each new year that passed. As the town grew, and money flew into the region in the form of Londoners all wanting their piece of the good life, commerce came with them. After all they all needed their morning cup of coffee, not to mention the newest fashions to wear as they wandered up and down the streets pretending to be locals. And where money and commerce came, crime soon followed. The police of course, followed the crime.

As a result a station which maybe twenty or thirty years before had had a single detective, a sergeant and a couple of beat police, now had a commander, a detective chief inspector and at least twenty officers, all trying to squeeze themselves into a building not that much larger than a normal house. Detective Chief Inspector Barns was actually lucky to have his own office, though some days it didn’t seem that way.

It wasn’t a very big office, and the size of it was made a lot smaller by the full sized filing cabinets full of papers lining two of the walls. More piles of paperwork that couldn’t fit in the filing cabinets were piled in vaguely organised heaps on top of them. Still more were stacked up in little heaps all around the floor, covering most of the threadbare, pale green carpet.

Of course there were many more piles covering the desk. Reports from forensics, witness statements, background checks, credit checks, stacked up in two foot high piles covering most of it so that what remained of clear desk top, was a little breathing space and room for a pair of hands to type at a keyboard. In fact there were so many files in the room that sometimes Barns could sit at his crappy Formica covered desk completely unseen by the others in the outer office. Sometimes he liked that. But he didn’t like the paper.

The office was a testament to the sheer bureaucratic nightmare that was policing in the twenty first century. So much paper work that a man could drown in it. Computers, once the great hope of the world hadn’t created the paperless office after all. They’d added paper. And worse, the endless army of file clerks and typists who should have dealt with the mountains of paper had been fired, to pay for the computers and the expensive IT people, who couldn’t even file their nails, needed to run them.

Of course right at the moment, the paperwork was multiplying, and some of the piles of reports were getting so high that he was seriously worried they might fall on him as he worked. That would have been a minor problem though. Compared with the nightmare in front of him, very minor indeed.

Barns sat at his desk chewing restlessly on a pen. It was a bad habit he’d acquired as a child, and it had returned with a vengeance when he’d given up smoking a decade before. But he didn’t begrudge it as habits went. At least it wasn’t going to kill him. Stress might though. And his current case was causing him more stress than he’d ever known before. The stress a man felt when he knew nothing was as it should be.

Normally things were straight forwards. Criminals weren’t very intelligent no matter what the movies portrayed them as, and it was a simple matter of finding the motive and then tracing it. Cases could be solved in days like that. Sometimes hours. But this? This wasn’t a case like anything he’d ever seen before. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever heard of. And the ever growing piles of reports, analyses, interviews and whatever else his team could generate, weren’t making anything any clearer. They were making it worse. He hated that.

The others knew it. They were avoiding him like the plague. Out in the main room the junior officers were hiding behind their computers, speaking in hushed tones, and when they had to tell him something it was in hurried bursts of conversation from the doorway to his office, which they barely cracked open. They knew he wasn’t in a good mood. They almost certainly knew why. And they absolutely knew that there was nothing any of them could do about it. So they huddled at their desks, hid behind their computers and pot plants, and whenever possible, ran away to do field work. Even the two new detectives he’d been assigned from London specifically to deal with the case, were keeping their heads down.

Was he really that bad he wondered? So terrible that he could terrify an entire office filled with junior detectives? And the answer he had to admit, was that he just might be. He didn’t mean to be, but apparently he was.

Still it seemed strange. He was well into his fifties, almost at the age of retirement, and never a physically imposing man. In fact he was of barely average height and thin build, and even the little muscling he’d developed as a younger man had left him over the years, possibly because he hated the gym. He didn’t shout and scream like some he knew, he certainly never hit anyone, he didn’t make official complaints, and though he carried a gun from time to time, he hadn’t pulled it in the last decade. In fact these days when he strapped it on, it was starting to feel more like an annoying item of apparel rather than a weapon. He certainly wasn’t going to shoot anyone.

So what was so terrible about him? Barns chewed at his pen and wondered. It was better than staring at the ever-growing pile of impossible reports in front of him.

“Inspector?”

Startled, Barns looked up to see one of the computer tech guys peeking in from the doorway, and he desperately tried to remember his name. He was terrible with names, a problem that seemed to be getting worse as the years passed. He could remember the names of all the perps he’d ever arrested, and of the victims he’d interviewed. He could remember the names of streets, as long as they were crime scenes. He could even remember the names of the witnesses he’d barely even spoken to. But colleagues, friends and neighbours? Not a hope. He had no idea what this guy’s name was, though he’d met him before. Probably several times.

“Yes.”

“The information from the company.” The man darted into his office like a nervous sparrow, handed him a couple of white cardboard files full of paper, and vanished in the blink of an eye, saving the inspector the trouble of having to think of his name. But the paperwork when he looked at it, just gave him a new problem. More stress.

It was the details of Rufus Hennassy’s work assignments for the day, pulled of the company’s computers by their own people, and it backed up everything he’d said. He’d been given the wrong address, and that mistake had even been faithfully recorded in Associated Prudential Insurance’s computer records as such. And just like that another suspect, in fact his only suspect and the victim of his own crime, had slipped out of his grasp. The man was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was nothing more to say about it.

Of course computer records could be faked. The man surely had access to his company’s computers, even if their head office was in London. But even so, Barns knew he was clutching at straws. There was no way a criminal plot could be that complicated. And there was no reason why a criminal would even make up such a crazy tale, or for that matter arrange such a stupid crash in the first place. Besides criminals were stupid. Mr Hennassy wasn’t. He had degrees, he had a well paying job, disgustingly well paying in truth. He had money in the bank and a freehold home. He had no reason to resort to crime. No history of it either, unless you counted a few speeding tickets.

But there was still something wrong with him. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, something he didn’t quite know how to put in a report, but which disturbed him deeply. The man was too calm. Too empty for want of a better word. It was as if when you looked at him, you were looking at a picture. An image. Not a man, but rather an idea of a man that somebody wanted you to think was real. A shadow. A cardboard cut out.

When he’d sat down with him at the hospital to do a more detailed interview, he’d instantly sensed that. The man wasn’t really there.

Who Mr. Hennassy actually was he didn’t know. That was hidden somewhere deep inside, buried under that fake, civilised surface, and he knew he should do some digging even if he couldn’t possibly be involved in the crime. It would not be easy. The records showed he had been who he said he was for a very long time. A bright, law abiding, hard working citizen. The perfect citizen in truth. All he needed was the cat, the dog, and the two point four metric children, and he would have been the poster boy of normality. The only problem was that there was no such person, and if there had been, Rufus Hennassy, whoever he really was underneath, would not have been him.

His colleagues said the same, even if they didn’t realise it. The piles of transcripts from their interviews did not lie. They called him a robot behind his back, though the inspector doubted that Mr. Hennassy would have cared if they’d used it to his face. He came, he did his work, and he was very, very good at it, spotting a lie or a discrepancy from many miles away, and he left. There was something odd in that too. How was he so good at spotting a lie? Unless he had been around liars all his life? He knew the breed.

Still at the end of the day, he collected his bonuses, very large bonuses, and went home to his small house in one of the more exclusive streets around Upper Plimmerton. And there he seemed to become invisible. He had no friends. His neighbours didn’t know him. He was a member of no clubs. He didn’t drink or smoke so hardly ever went to his local dairy. He didn’t even go to the pub with the rest of his office when the week was done. And as far as they knew he’d never had a girlfriend. In short he was a perfect robot.

But still, whoever he was, however he’d become what he was, there was no reason for him to be involved in any crime. In fact the truth was the exact opposite. He had every reason to avoid it. More than that, he would have abhorred it. Rufus Hennassy was a man who avoided excitement of any sort.

Inspectors had been to his house checking details, and again what they reported back of his house and the photos they’d taken all told him that the man was a robot. Boring and clean, sterile and impossibly neat. All the things a robot would be. Everything always in its right place and not a speck of dust anywhere. Not a speck of personality either. No art on the walls, no knickknacks on the shelves, just endless shelves of books and dvds.  Strange, probably not completely human, but most of all not exciting, and whatever else crime was, it was exciting.

The entire thing made no sense. Barns tossed the new papers on to the nearest stack of old ones, wishing they’d all just go away. This latest report wasn’t shedding any light on the matter. It was just adding to the string of impossibilities. In fact all of the reports were proving less useful than they should be. Actually they were completely useless no matter how much analysis was done.

The recording of the phone call had been analysed in depth. Every sound on it had been enhanced and identified, bullet shot by bullet shot. And in the end it could give them nothing, save for the fact that there had actually been someone shooting at their victim, and that the truck had in fact sped up as it approached. It spoke of desperation and murderous intent, but it gave not a single clue as to who or why.

Paint scrapings from the remains of the car told them that the truck had in fact smashed into it, but not been significantly damaged. As for the colour, it was white. Exactly like another million goods vehicles on the roads.

Even the photo, something that in the normal course of events should never have been taken, wasn’t helping as much as he’d hoped. It should have been a goldmine. A photo of a crime actually in progress. That was almost unheard of. It should have cracked the case wide open. Instead, though it was a miracle it had actually been taken at all, it was turning out to be a rather minor miracle. The image was blurry, too blurry to make out much of the perp’s face, though they could see the gun in his hands. The licence plate had been enhanced, that was the first thing the techs had done, but it lead nowhere. It was a plate that had never been issued, and now never would be. It was a fake. And as for the truck itself, it was simply a Canter, one of thousands on the roads, except that it now likely had some serious panel damage.