Fairwood (a suspense mystery thriller) (11 page)

He heard the man shuffle away, the floorboards released their long groan as they crept back into place. He disappeared into another room; Dorothy seemed to remain standing.

Dexter finished up, took his time washing his hands, studying his reflection and wandering what the elderly couple were talking about. Why would they care where they were going? It was possible that they knew who they were and were coveting the ransom money, but if so they would have turned them in already. They had them in their house; they were asleep in their bed all through the night -- the perfect opportunity to hand them over to the police.

He opened the door briskly and stepped out with a smile on his face, pretending nothing had happened just in case one of them was waiting for him. They were. Dorothy was standing at the top of the stairs, her hands on one of the paintings that hung from the wall, readjusting the perfectly level frame.

“Oh, hello dear,” she said, pretending to have just noticed him. “We were just talking about you.”

Dexter looked around, only he and Dorothy stood in the hallway. “We?”

“Oh, my husband and I, I mean. He just went for a lie down.” She clasped her hands together, brought them in front of her, the stance of the sweet and innocent. The friendly grandmother who has nothing to hide.

“Okay,” Dexter said warmly, quickly dismissing any thoughts he had about questioning her. If she was up to something then he would find out in time and deal with it when it arose. He didn’t want to ruin what they had in this quiet, inoffensive and backward slice of the country by throwing around accusations. “Nothing too bad I hope?”

“We were just wondering if you fancied coming to the quiz tonight, meet the locals. Everyone will be there.”

Dexter held her stare; he saw something that he couldn’t put his finger on. Before he could give it further thought, before he could reply, he saw Pandora coming up the stairs, a perturbed look hidden behind her beautiful smile.

Dorothy followed Dexter’s eyes.

“Oh, hello dear.”

Pandora smiled a meek greeting and slid past her on the stairs, moved beside Dexter.

“We were just discussing tonight,” Dorothy proclaimed.

Pandora turned to Dexter. “Tonight?”

“The quiz,” Dorothy said, eager to control the conversation. “You’ll be there, I hope? The locals would love to meet you, I’m sure.”

“Oh.” Dexter was ready to refuse, blame the need for an early night, but between trying to look social and friendly for Dorothy and trying to warn Pandora against accepting the invite, he got caught up.

“Sure,” Pandora exclaimed, much to Dexter’s disappointment. “We’d love to.”

12

Detective Superintendent Clarissa Morris had her prey in her sights. She stared him down, weakening him with her icy expression before she went in for the kill. She screamed at him, her voice rocking the office into silence. Conversations hushed; phone calls halted; fingertips paused above mice and keyboards.

The young sergeant didn’t know what hit him. He quivered and squirmed in front of her, his chin pushed as low as it would go, the top of his head facing her anger.

She barged past him, throwing her arms as she stropped across the room like some villainous B-rated movie beast. She drew the blinds, stopped everyone from witnessing whatever slaughter she had in mind. They still heard though, even when the phone calls and the conversations restarted in tones louder than before.

“Jesus, wouldn’t like to be him,” Sergeant Adams said, sucking a breath in through clenched teeth.

Detective Cawley nodded, still gazing at the blinds, through which he could see the dancing shadows of interoffice bullying play out for his amusement. The sergeant was new, had just transferred in two weeks ago. This was his first run-in with the boss, the evil superintendent formed entirely of bone, sinew and malice. He underestimated her, allowed his youthful confidence to get in the way of logic, ignoring the way his balls crept back into his stomach whenever he saw her or listened to her; disregarding the way she made his skin crawl and the hair on the back of his neck stand up, preferring instead to dismiss her as a harmless, uptight, little Hitler. He was certainly learning his lesson, the question was whether it would serve him any good as there was a good chance of resignation after Clarissa Morris finished unloading on him.

“What exactly did he do?” Cawley asked the sergeant next to him, slurping loudly from a cup of vending machine coffee which smelled and tasted like the grime scraped from the heels of a sewage worker.

“He ballsed up on some job or another,” he replied dismissively, wiping the sloppy coffee from his thick, sugary lips and taking a bite from a sweet pastry sweet. “Then he had the balls, or rather the stupidity, to talk back to her when she called him in.”

Cawley made a face. Clarissa despised all of humankind, but she hated cocky little upstarts even more than that.

“Yep,” the sergeant said slovenly. “She’s in a bad mood. Best to stay out of her way.”

“Speaking of which,” another sergeant piped up from the next desk, a grin on her pudgy, dimpled face. “She’s been looking for you, wants to have a word.”

Cawley sunk, grimaced. “You’re shitting me?”

The female sergeant shook her head, the grin still on her face. The office was like a large family household, a pattering of mischievous kids happy to watch their siblings squirm under the enforcement of the dominating matriarch. Others tuned into the conversation at the sign of Cawley’s discomfort, halting their activity to listen in
, with crude and twisted grins.

Cawley shook his head, the idea of speaking to Clarissa in her current state, in any state, was repugnant to him. “I’ve gotta go,” he said, turning. “Tell her something came up.” He could have told them not to say anything at all, to say that he hadn’t shown up, but he couldn’t trust them all to keep quiet -- one of them would throw him under the frothy, thin-legged bus that was Clarissa Morris.

The smiled dripped from the sergeant’s face. “What do you want me to say?” she mumbled fruitlessly as Cawley made a hasty exit.

He went straight to the pub, knocked back a flat and un-refreshing pint of beer whilst listening to the prattling of a drunken idiot who wouldn’t take the hint no matter how many times Max refused to reply or shifted to another stool. He had plenty of dealings with alcoholics to know that drunks don’t necessarily think the world cares about their problems, they just don’t care that nobody cares and don’t possess the social aptitude to shut up when no one displays any interest.

He was technically on duty and wasn’t supposed to drink, but there was no way he was going back to the office. He didn’t know what he would tell the little demonic bitch with the half-skirt and half-smile when he did return. Andrew, his former partner, had been drunk on duty a few times, especially in the last few years when Cawley noticed the emptiness behind his eyes; the dread whenever they were called out to a homicide; the misery whenever they were filing away reports of violence and abuse like clerks at the post office.

He bought a bottle of bourbon on his way home, drank some of it straight from the bottle before he even climbed into his car. He hated drunk drivers, had seen the catastrophe that it could cause, had witnessed the horrors that one drink too many could bring for unsuspecting motorists who hadn’t touched a drop; for children who were years away from even contemplating doing so and would now never be able to. He had also berated Andrew the times he’d tried to drive after he’d had a few. But he ignored his own advice this time, pushed it to the back of his mind where the bitter, twisted, abyss of his conscious used to reside before it decided to expand and conquer.

At five, when his shift would have been ending, he had bypassed tipsy and had gone straight to full blown drunkenness. The alcohol didn’t take away the fog that enveloped his mind like a shroud of melancholy; it sedated him, subdued him, expanded on his depressive state but took away his ability to care.

The bourbon, now half-full, swished around in the bottle as he scooped it roughly from the floor. He stared at the liquid through the glass, watched it through blurry eyes as it sloshed lazily around the inside of the bottle. He hated drinking when he was younger, couldn’t see the benefit in drinking to forget or socialise -- especially when too much alcohol typically created the most forward, obnoxious and disgusting human beings that society had to offer. As he aged he realised there was more to it, it was about cutting through the monotony of life, about finding a mental state different from the norm, especially when the norm was driving you around the bend.

It was why people took drugs, something that he didn’t object to. He didn’t appreciate the way certain substances could destroy the lives of individuals and families, but there was no harm in trying to break from the bullshit of the day to day existence. If he trusted his body a little more and if they were legal, he wouldn’t object to using them himself.

He poured himself a large measure, struggling to concentrate on the neck of the bottle as the dark liquid gushed out. It tasted disgusting, it was cheap and nasty, the appearance of burnt treacle with the taste of burnt rubber. He didn’t care, it did the job. He would suffer for it tomorrow, but tomorrow was an eternity away.

His mobile phone had asked for his attention since he had arrived home, buzzing in his pocket like a trapped insect. He checked it, chortled softly to himself when he saw that he had twenty missed calls and a number of text messages and voicemails, and then dropped it onto the chair where it would eventually lodge itself down the back of the cushions.

***

The sound of the doorbell woke him. He had drifted into a dreamless void of sleep; a drooling, empty state of rest. His body jolted when he woke, his feet kicked out, knocked over the glass of bourbon near his feet.

He coughed, cleared his throat of the sticky mucous that had set up residence in his mouth like some slimy plague. He smacked his lips opened and closed, it tasted like he’d spent the last few hours licking his own arsehole. He was still drunk, could feel the fading bliss of alcohol coating his nerves, but the buzz was fading and a headache was creeping in. He also felt cold, hungry and--

The doorbell sounded again. He grumbled, climbed steadily to his feet, wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and checked the clock. It was nearly nine. He guessed that he’d been asleep for a few hours but he couldn’t remember drifting off. He hadn’t been watching television, hadn’t looked at the clock, hadn’t been doing anything that may have given him a notion of time. He’d just sat, drank and then, apparently, slept.

He stuck his head through the curtains and groaned when he saw the agitated, irritable feet of Andrew Simpson shuffling on his doorstep. He thought about ignoring him, the drunkard was probably looking for some money, some booze or for forgiveness for his blatant stupidity in quitting his job, but there was nothing Cawley could do about that.

The doorbell sounded again, and again, a persistent, insistent ringing that threatened to tear Cawley’s head open.

“Hold on!” he shouted angrily, “I’m coming.”

He stuttered to the door, turning lights on and squinting through the resulting glare. He opened the door, nodded questionably at his former partner. “What the fuck do you want?”

Andrew looked desperate. He wasn’t drunk, not that Cawley could tell anyway, but he looked gaunt, pale and desperate.

“I need a favour.”

“Of course you do,” Cawley grumbled. “Why else would you be here?” he didn’t realise he’d said that aloud until he had, but he didn’t care. He didn’t have to hide his contempt from Simpson; he already knew how he felt.

“I have no place to go,” Simpson said. “I need a place to stay, just for--”

“You have a house,” Cawley interrupted. “What happened to that?”

Simpson looked around irritably, ran a hand through his hair and clasped his hands together in front of him. “I haven’t paid the rent for a few months, they kicked me out.”

“Why?” Cawley wanted to know. “You were paid up before you pissed off.”