By a Narrow Majority (18 page)

So why was his stomach churning as if he’d got a bad case of galloping gut rot?

Tommy Lynch was sitting in a van on the outskirts of Banbury, watching a bookies shop. The van had a pest control logo on the side but was in fact one of many undercover
vehicles
used by the squad. They’d had a tip-off that the bookies were going to get raided that afternoon, and Janine had put him on it, even though they were both sure it was rubbish. More likely a rival bookie had phoned it in, hoping that punters would spot the police watching the place, and take their custom elsewhere. Still, if it
was
raided, and they’d done nothing, it wouldn’t look good.

Tommy would be glad when Hillary got back. Janine was driving him up the wall – carping at Mel whenever she got the chance and giving him, Tommy, all the shitty assignments. He wasn’t even working on the Dale case anymore. Since McNamara had proved negative on the fingerprint match, that investigation was going nowhere fast, and everyone knew it. Janine Tyler most of all.

He sighed, and reached for his thermos to pour a cup of lukewarm tar into the plastic cup. Tommy couldn’t really blame her for being so pissed off. The truth was, Janine was more than half convinced that if Hillary came back, the case would somehow get miraculously solved.

And Mel probably thought the same.

Tommy just missed having Hillary around and would have wanted her back, no matter what. And what the hell was eating Ross? Granted, the horrible little git was always obnoxious, but now he was acting like a cat on a hot tin roof as well.

Oh well. None of it was his problem. He sighed heavily and settled down more comfortably in the van.

Hillary typed in the words ‘Elizabeth Burns’, ‘tragic’, ‘drugs overdose’, and ‘fatal’, and waited for the search engine to do
its thing. And tried to ignore a dark, nauseous sensation that had begun tugging at her stomach.

Within moments, she was in business. The first thing she clicked on to was a newspaper article, and she felt her heart leap as the familiar logo of the
Oxford Times
filled the screen.

So, Elizabeth did have an Oxford connection.

And, as she read on, it was the obvious connection as well. Elizabeth Burns had fulfilled her grandmother’s ambition that she do well at school, and had earned herself a place at St Luke’s College in Oxford, to read modern history. She’d done well in her prelims, earning a 2:1, and had looked set to do well in her finals.

According to friends interviewed after her tragic death, Elizabeth Burns had been a friendly, studious, thoroughly ‘normal’ girl, and the last one any of her friends thought might die as a result of illegal drugs use.

Wasn’t that always the way, Hillary thought glumly.

What must her father have felt, back in London, getting the phone call from Alicia, telling him that their daughter was dead? Would he have identified the body? As a policeman, he’d have known the procedure. And as a policeman, he’d have known all about the statistics relating to students and drugs.

Had he warned Elizabeth repeatedly about the dangers? Had she rebelled? Did he feel as if it was all his fault? Perhaps he’d come to Thames Valley only to try and save other Oxford students from the same fate. Perhaps that was why he’d been so mad keen to see Luke Fletcher, Oxford’s biggest drug dealer, put away.

Yeah. Right.

Hillary took another sip of coffee, but it went down like acid. She was looking disaster in the face and for once, coffee and cynicism wasn’t going to cut it.

As she read on, it only got worse. Elizabeth had been one of four people to die of a drugs overdose that week. One other student – a Malaysian studying engineering, a barman at a
Cowley pub, and a shop assistant in a local supermarket, had all died a similar death. Pathologists confirmed that all four had died as a result of injecting from the same contaminated batch.

Cocaine, as every copper knew, was ‘cut’ with all sorts of things by dealers – baby milk being one of the most popular, but the list was horrendous. In her time, Hillary had come across cocaine that had been cut with household detergent, baking soda, flour, even weedkiller. Anything to bulk out the precious white grains and inflate the profit for the dealer.

But in Elizabeth Burn’s case, and that of the three others who died, this particular cut had proven to be lethal.

Feeling sick at heart, Hillary logged off and left for home, the slight niggling pain in her hip all but forgotten now.

Janine pulled up in front of Mel’s house, and slammed the door of her Mini behind her. She walked up the crazy-paving pathway, ignoring the weeping willows grouped around the ornamental pond, their leaves now turning lime green with the first flush of spring growth, and turned her face resolutely away from the last of the snowdrops and the earliest of the daffodils that rampaged across the immaculate lawns.

She scrambled in her handbag for her set of keys, then opened the letterbox and pushed them through viciously, scratching her palm as she did so and making herself bleed.

‘Bastard,’ she muttered under her breath, as she turned and walked away. From now on, she wouldn’t give the sad old man another thought.

Hillary got off the train, but instead of walking to her car, headed instead into town. Past Carfax, she headed towards the handsome towers of Christ Church, and on the road opposite, walked through the doors into St Aldates nick.

She’d once worked out of St Aldates for a short time, many moons ago now, while still a sergeant. Her old boss had been DI David Kenwick, long since retired. But her face was
known, and the desk sergeant had been a uniformed DC when she’d left.

‘DI Greene, as I live and breathe,’ he greeted her cheerfully. ‘Sorry to hear about the bullet. Things going OK?’

Hillary obliged by giving a blow-by-blow account of the incident, knowing a copper’s love for villain-taking was only exceeded by his love for gossip. Besides, she needed his help and it wouldn’t hurt to keep him sweet.

‘So, I’m still officially on sick leave,’ she concluded with a heavy sigh, ‘but you know what that’s like! I’m bored out of my skull, so I snaffled some cold cases to keep the old brain lubricated.’ She tapped her head. ‘Which is what brings me here. Tell me, is DI Wallace still here?’

‘Wally Wallace? Not hardly – left, must be six, seven years ago now. Retired.’

Hillary knew that. Wally Wallace had lived up to his
nickname
well, and was probably the last person she’d ever want to speak to. But she sighed heavily. ‘Damn, I wanted to pick his brains over this cold case of mine. Don’t suppose I could check with records? Who’s the dragon guarding the sacred files nowadays? Do I know him?’

‘Jack Findlayson,’ the desk sergeant said with a grin. ‘Hold on, I’ll phone down, let him know you’re coming. I’ll put in a good word.’

Hillary smiled a thanks. Most cops had cold cases that they worried at periodically when times were slow, so she didn’t think she’d be arousing too much suspicion in nosing around at another nick. But she’d have to be careful.

From her research, she knew that the initial investigation into Elizabeth Burns’s death had begun right here. Later, when the exact nature and scale of the crime had come to light, Vice had got in on the act. But she was reluctant to ask Mike Regis for a favour, especially now. Besides, the last thing she wanted was to involve another department. Even though she was sure that she could trust Regis to keep his mouth shut, he was too good a copper not to put two and two together if she
suddenly started nosing around one of Vice’s old cases, and Hillary wanted to keep this strictly in-house.

After all he’d gone through, and no matter what the outcome, Jerome Raleigh was entitled to do his grieving in private.

‘Go right on down – remember the way?’ The desk sergeant hung up and pointed a finger through a dingy green door. ‘Black Hole of Calcutta,’ he muttered darkly, although Hillary knew he was exaggerating.

Back in the old days, when she’d first started, old records really were kept in station house cellars and were crammed full of folders of damp paper mouldering away and
decomposing
out of sight. Nowadays, Records was a well-lit office full of computers.

A uniformed PC stood up as she walked in, but he was silver-haired and tired-looking, the kind of copper who was content to be safe and warm and work regular hours, in exchange for a PC’s salary. Hillary had nothing against such men, though she knew the likes of Janine and Tommy probably scorned them. But it was people like this who kept the whole damned machinery running, as far as she could tell.

‘Constable Findlayson? DI Greene,’ she introduced herself and held out her hand. ‘Thanks for helping me out. The sarge explained?’

‘Cold cases, yeah. Help yourself.’ He nodded to one of the computers, and Hillary took a seat. ‘You’ll have to sign out any papers, and initial photocopies in the book, ma’am,’ he pointed out, and Hillary nodded. In truth, she had no intention of leaving a paper trail behind her. If things turned out as she was beginning to dread they would, the less evidence of her activities she left behind her, the more she’d like it. No, she wanted to get in and out and wrap it up, and put the whole sorry mess behind her.

She wanted to find out that she was wrong about everything; that the dark suspicions that had been eating at her ever since she’d learned how Elizabeth Burns had died were
nothing more than the results of her nasty mind. And then she wanted to be able to go home and curl up by the fire, with nothing more strenuous to worry her than what to cook for dinner.

That’s what she wanted.

It wasn’t what she got. 

Hillary studied the files for a long, long time. At first, she’d automatically started off taking notes, but she’d quickly
realized
that she was going to have to take Xerox copies after all. Lots of them. But that would mean signing for them.

Which probably wouldn’t do her career much good at all.

Desperately, she re-read the files again, looking for a way out. For anything that could allow her to read the facts
differently
. For any scrap that could prove she’d got it all wrong. But she couldn’t see one.

Superintendent Jerome Raleigh had set up Fletcher to kill him. Not to arrest him, nor have the satisfaction of being the one to send him to jail. But to kill him. To outright assassinate the son of a bitch. And now that she knew it, she had to do something about it.

She re-read the file yet again, looking for inspiration, knowing that she wouldn’t find it.

Elizabeth’s story was a common one, but no less
heartbreaking
for that. For a start, she wasn’t a regular drug user, and was not one of those raddled, down-and-out street dwellers that most members of the public thought of when they read of drugs abuse. She’d been smart, pretty, and seemed to have it all together. In point of fact, the
investigating
officers had found very little signs of drug use in the young girl’s life at all. No track marks on her body, no heavy stashes hidden in her college room. And from talking to her
friends and peers, it became evident that Elizabeth had
exhibited
none of the signs or personality changes associated with long-term, seriously hooked users.

So, she’d been a so-called ‘social’ user then. Nothing to worry about. Everybody did it. Hillary knew that kind of thinking well. She’d probably started off down the road that eventually killed her by taking the odd E tablet at parties. Went on to try the odd line of coke or two at a private residence now and then, just dabbling here and there. She’d probably told herself that she could take it or leave it. She was young, she was at college, fun was what it was all about. And maybe she’d even have got away with it, too, Hillary thought sadly. Lots did. She might never have become seriously addicted, or fallen foul of any of the other physical risks associated with the habit, or got caught or arrested, or been expelled from college. She might have sailed free and clear, except for one night, when she’d got hold of a ‘bad’ dose. A casual party in another college student’s rooms perhaps. A night that had probably started off as all other party nights had started off – some booze, some dancing, some pairing off. Except that for Elizabeth Burns it had ended in sickness, fitting, and, twelve hours later in the John Radcliffe hospital, death.

And three others, similarly unlucky, had joined her in death over the next week – victims of the same bad dose.

Vice had been able to track the bad batch down to a
small-time
dealer called Johnny ‘Buster’ Smithers. One of Luke Fletcher’s army of boys.

Now that she thought about it, Hillary vaguely recalled this incident. Although Vice wasn’t her beat, she knew a lot of her fellow officers at HQ had been particularly angry about it. Smithers had been sent down for life, and was later knifed to death in prison in a territory dispute, but Fletcher,
naturally
, hadn’t even been hauled into court.

And now Fletcher was dead. Shot dead, in odd circumstances, by a gun nobody could find, by a perp nobody
could find, while Elizabeth Burns’ father had been heading the raid.

Oh yes, she was going to have to take photocopies. Put it all together and tie it all up in a neat ribbon. Proof of Elizabeth Burns’ identity, the whole shebang.

But she was damned if she was going to leave a trail. Apart from anything else, after being married to Ronnie bloody Greene, she was hardly in any position to point the finger at bent cops. Besides, why should she take the shit? She’d already been shot in the line of duty; she’d done her bit. Let someone else take the flak. Someone who had the rank and had been paid to do it.

She glanced across at Findlayson, who was busy tapping away on his own keyboard. He had a stack of files beside him and was going through them one by one, obviously entering old case files on to a database. A soul-destroying task if ever there was one. At some point, surely, he’d have to go to the toilet, or nip up to the cafeteria, or wander out to give his eyes a rest and have a gossip and a fag with someone. It was simply a case of waiting him out.

Hillary kept scribbling notes, feeling more and more sick as she did so. This was bad. As bad as she’d ever known it to get – on so many levels. Cops didn’t grass on cops, that was a given. And what father wouldn’t want to kill the man who’d poisoned his daughter to death? She hadn’t joined the cops so that she could stand in judgement on people. This shouldn’t be happening to her. Self-pity and anger raged, neither winning. For two pins, she could have got up and walked out. She might even have done so if, at that moment, the records clerk hadn’t got up and walked instead.

Hillary couldn’t help but twist her lips into a grim smile. Was that a sign, or what?

Never give a sucker an even break.

Quick as a flash, she selected the most relevant documents and headed for the photocopier.

When Findlayson came back a few minutes later, she was
sitting at the terminal, scribbling notes. She kept at it for another twenty minutes, then sighed, folded her notebook, stretched and got up. ‘Well, that’s me finished,’ she said, slinging her bag over her shoulder. ‘Thanks.’

Findlayson nodded and watched her leave. He went to her terminal and checked that she’d logged back on to main menu. She had. He typed in his code and was about to switch it off when the red flag appeared.

Findlayson silently whistled. He’d worked in records for ten years now, and only occasionally had he seen a red flag appear. He immediately used the mouse to log on to the symbol and clicked.

Flags were put in place for many reasons, but mostly they were used on ‘sensitive’ or ongoing files and nearly always requested the records clerk to contact a certain officer if the files were ever opened. Sure enough, an instruction appeared on the screen, giving him the name of a superintendent at HQ, and phone number.

Findlayson wondered what was so special about an old, solved drugs case, then shrugged. His was not to reason why. He lifted up the receiver and punched the outside number and got through to the switchboard in Kidlington.

‘Hello? Can you put me through to Superintendent Jerome Raleigh, please?’ he asked politely.

In his office, Jerome Raleigh listened to PC Findlayson, thanked him, and hung up. Then he got up and walked restlessly to the window. He’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. With the lucky find of that secret bolt-hole behind the Aga at Fletcher’s farm, he’d been sure everything would work out just fine after all. He wouldn’t need Ross as a fall guy, and nobody would be any the wiser to what had really gone down that night.

For some minutes he watched the comings and goings in the car park, the movement of squad cars, the groups of young uniformed constables chatting over their fag break, the
civilians parking and walking into the building,
distinguishable
by their nervousness or curiosity. His world. His life. But not for much longer.

Would Hillary Greene have got on to him so fast if she hadn’t been shot that night? Would she have been so curious if she’d still been working on a murder case and didn’t find time hanging heavy on her hands? Perhaps not. Finding the killer of Malcolm Dale would have been her top priority, he was sure.

He sighed heavily. Well, it was no good standing here playing the game of ‘what if’.

It was time he got cracking. He had things to do. He was glad now, after searching her boat, that he’d come up with such a good plan B.

It sure beat the hell out of his original plan A.

Hillary went back to the internet café in St Giles to write up the report. She wanted to leave no trace of it on her office computer, and she sure as hell didn’t want it on her personal laptop.

As she ordered a latte and opened up a file, she was
beginning
to feel as if the café was becoming a second home. Certainly the waitresses were beginning to recognize her, as were some of the regulars.

How sad was that?

For a couple of hours she solidly typed, re-read and
rewrote
until she was satisfied she’d included everything. She even made an index for the photocopied documents. She’d toyed with the idea of waiting until she could obtain her own official copies of Elizabeth Burns’ birth and death certificates, but knew that she would just be putting off the inevitable. Instead she ran copies off the internet and added them to the index.

By the time she was finished, she had a neat, carefully itemized report that charted the whole sorry story from start to finish. Some of it was speculation. For instance, she didn’t
know who had helped Raleigh find out so much about Fletcher’s network; she had no idea who his source was. And she was pretty sure that somewhere down the line, Raleigh must have had help from inside the force, but that was
somewhere
she was not about to go. And how had he come to be such a sure thing to get the superintendency here in Thames Valley? Again, not something she touched on.

Hillary stared at the dark blue folder she’d bought from WH Smith before coming in here and smiled grimly. Not even the stationery could lead back to her. Of course, once the investigation started, Geraldine Brewer might come to light, and give a description of the nice reporter who’d interviewed her. As would Marilyn Forbes. And if it came to an
identification
, she’d be in the shit. But at least Ophelia Gosling could be trusted to keep her mouth shut, and tell the plod nothing!

Hillary almost laughed out loud. Almost.

She was probably committing professional suicide. She knew it, and still she was going to do it. Why?

Was she really such a moralist? Or was she just so pissed off that she’d been shot in the arse – well, nearly – that she was out to get revenge? Did she really care that Fletcher was dead? Didn’t he deserve it after all? And just what did she have against Jerome Raleigh exactly?

None of the answers to these questions helped her out. She simply knew, as she got up with the report clutched tightly in her hand, exactly what she was going to do with it. It was really quite simple.

It was a stick of dynamite, and what did any self-respecting DI do with a stick of dynamite?

She would toss it into some other poor bugger’s lap. That’s what.

She waited until the night shift was coming on, then went back to HQ. She let herself in, telling the desk sergeant she’d left her bag behind. The report was carefully tucked down the back of her knickers, and it rested warm and rustling in the
nape of her spine as she took the lift, not wanting to crease it by walking up the stairs.

She was careful to go to her desk and bend down, as if looking for something. She knew that HQ was monitored by CTV cameras and didn’t want to get caught out in any obvious lies. When she left the big, open-plan office, however, she took the lift all the way down to the bottom floor. The mail room was deserted, as she’d expected, and she stuffed the report, now in a plain brown envelope marked ‘Chief Superintendent Marcus Donleavy. Personal and Confidential’ into a pile of internal mail. First thing the next morning, it should find its way to Donleavy’s desk.

When she got back to Puff the Tragic Wagon, she slipped off the cotton gloves she’d worn all that afternoon when making up the report, and stuffed them in her pocket.

Then she went back to the boat and got drunk.

It wasn’t until she was on her fourth glass of wine that she noticed the Dick Francis book was back on her shelf.

She stared at it for a moment. Then thought about it a lot. Then said, ‘Huh,’ and poured another glass of wine.

Next morning, complete with her first major hangover in years, Hillary saw the in-house police doctor. Dr Franks, as opposed to Doc Steven Partridge, was not trained as a
pathologist
, or in forensic medicine, and was mainly on call to attend to suspects who might be ill or came in from bar fights and pub crawls with the usual cuts and bruises. He was also on call for any officer who might need him. But as well as removing beer glass from faces, and stitching up constables who got on the wrong side of Millwall supporters, he was also in charge of overseeing the mandatory medical for serving officers.

The moment she walked into his office, he knew what she wanted, and began to shake his head. ‘Oh, come on, DI Greene, it hasn’t even been a week yet! I’ve been taking bets with some of the lads on how long you’d last and had you
down for early next week. I think it was PC Grover who said you’d be in today. The pot’s nearly two hundred quid. Give me a break!’

Hillary grinned. ‘Sorry, Sean. Look, I’m going mad. I’m walking fine and the district nurse said the last time she changed my dressing that I was healing fast. You wouldn’t want me to go doolally just over a little nick in my hip, would you?’

‘Oh, perish the thought,’ he drawled with a sigh. He was a tall, thin man, with nine children and a wife who was always threatening to divorce him. ‘Come on then, let’s look at it.’

Hillary quickly stripped off her skirt, and pulled her pair of very serviceable, very clean white Marks & Sparks knickers off her hip. Franks looked at the wound, doing the usual muttering doctors did under their breath, then re-attached the gauze. ‘Well, she’s right. You do heal fast.’

‘Good hardy peasant stock,’ Hillary said. Her father had always healed fast too. ‘And look – I’m walking without a stick and everything. Have been for days.’

‘You look terrible,’ he said.

‘Too much wine,’ she shot back. ‘Nothing to do with the hip. Come on, if I promise to stay tied to my desk with my feet up, and send my lackeys running hither and yon while I sip tea and read reports, can I come back? Just part-time?’