Fairwood (a suspense mystery thriller) (6 page)

Max found himself stuffed into a corner talking to her; a tumbler of whiskey in his hand, a glass of wine in hers. They remained until the others filtered away, the last to leave being a May to December pair who would wake up the following morning in the backseat of a car with blistering headaches and deep regrets. Clarissa was almost strewn out across one of the desks, her legs -- tight and pale flesh wrapped around thin bone like loose skin on a frozen chicken carcass -- dangled enticingly over the back seat of a chair.

He was drunk and he was arguing a lot with his wife at the time. His boss was beginning to look like an attractive catch, despite how deeply unattractive she was, but he maintained enough sobriety to remind himself just how evil she was and just how awkward things would become, so he had no intention of trying anything. She had other ideas.

She threw one of her legs towards his crotch, grinning as her naked foot played with his groin. He tried to ignore it, to shift casually away, but her bony toes followed him like the persistent fingers of the grim reaper. He tried his best to change the subject, he checked his watch, mentioned that he really should be getting home to bed. Then she launched herself at him.

Before he knew what was happening she had her wine-scented musty mouth pressed against his and was trying to stick her slimy tongue down his throat. He played along, hoping it wouldn’t progress, but then she tried to undo his pants, simultaneously slipping a hand up her skirt to remove her knickers.

He pulled back, so did she. She moved to the desk, splayed out like a drunken hooker: her legs open, her eyes lustful. He felt the contents of a night’s worth of boozing fight its way to his throat, threatening to unleash itself over her.

He shook his head slowly. Remained standing, staring. After a while she propped herself up on her elbows, looked at him with a stern annoyance. The same look she gave him a few weeks earlier when he’d failed to secure any evidence against a prolific burglar he’d been forced to release.

“What’s wrong, can’t get it up?” she asked bitterly. She propelled herself forward, grasped a rough hand around his crotch, squeezed. Her eyes looked skyward thoughtfully like a doctor examining her patient. She released, gave him a distasteful grimace. She dropped down, pulled her knickers back up, growled at him and then left.

He had escaped an inhumane fling with an ugly succubus, but after that Clarissa treated him with even more disdain than before. She often singled him out and made no effort to disguise her contempt towards him.

“Simpson’s gone,” was all she uttered in regards to Andrew’s resignation. Max had been called into her office the morning after the robbery and shooting, the morning after Andrew Simpson had left him in the lurch, choosing to find answers at the bottom of a glass rather than in the job that had been his second home.

“So I heard,” Max said softly, still bitter over the incident. He told himself that the bitterness came from pure resentment, resentment that his partner had abandoned him, that he had taken the easy route -- preferring the solace of alcohol to the cold hard reality of everything else. The truth, although he would never admit it, was that he was envious. He was beginning to despise his job and he felt a certain degree of respect for Andrew to have the courage to stand up and fuck off. He still enjoyed the parts of the jobs that he’d always enjoyed, he liked to catch bad guys, to feel like he was making a difference in the world, but the positives that had so blatantly been etched in white at the beginning of his career had greyed around the edges and were now dimming to a mottled black. He was too accustomed to it, to understanding that he never really caught any bad guys, that he spent his days arresting teenage delinquents who were given a slap on the wrists and sent back into society to turn the cogs of a repetitive system that would lead them straight back to him.

His home life also played a big part. At the beginning of his career it didn’t matter that he was so heavily work oriented. He was starting a life, a family. He had bills to pay, a house to buy, a wife to enjoy. That was dwindling now and he’d spent so long in the rut of work, of a life as a copper and not a human being, that he was struggling to dig himself out. He could never find another woman -- he wouldn’t know where to begin, wouldn’t know what to do with her when he had her -- and he couldn’t spend the rest of his days alone and bitter. The force had sucked the life out of him and it was too late to breathe any back in.

“You’re on your own now.” Clarissa hadn’t looked up from her computer screen since Max walked in. She wasn’t busy, Max knew she would be playing a hand of solitaire, spying on her sergeants’ Facebook pages or reading the latest copy of The Satanic Bible. She just wanted him to know that this career affecting change didn’t bother her at all.

“So, who’re you going to set me up with?”

She raised her eyes. Her brow tweaked. “
Set you up
? This isn’t a dating agency Cawley.”

He sighed inwardly. Hated the way she toyed with him, played on everything he said, no matter how trivial. “Who’s my partner?” he pushed, hiding his contempt.

She grinned widely, gave a gentle shake of her head and then returned her attention to the screen. “This isn’t an American cop show; this isn’t the NYPD. You don’t need a partner. You’ll manage, I’m sure.”

He thought he sensed a hint of something else in her words. Did she know about his impending divorce? Was she fucking with him? It could be paranoia, just because something affected his life so deeply didn’t mean the rest of the world gave a toss about it, but she was evil enough, malicious enough and omniscient enough to know everything about his life and use it to mess with him.

“What about Matthews?” Max offered. “She doesn’t have--”

“You want to hook up with the office hottie Cawley, is that it?”

Rebecca Matthews was in her thirties. A plain, almost featureless face and a pudgy frame with a round ring of excess flab around her waist. She wasn’t much of a looker, but put her beside the rest of the female detectives -- and the males for that matter -- and she looked like an angelic beauty.

“No,” Max affirmed honestly. “I just--”

“Forget it Cawley,” she snapped. “She’s taken. She has a husband, a kid.”

Max growled, swore under his breath. His boss heard and smiled slyly at the reaction.

“So I’m on my own,” he stated.

“You got a problem with that? I figured it would suit you.”

He opened his mouth to object but slammed it shut. She wasn’t worth it.

She finished on her computer with a flourishing tap. She gesticulated to a notepad on the desk where someone had scribbled a series of hasty notes. “I need you to check this out,” she said. “Last night at a place called Grubbies, or Stubbies or some such nonsense, about thirty miles north, there was a sighting of Bleak and Bright. We had an anonymous call that they were there. Bartender by the name of,” she paused, checked the notes, squinted to read the writing, penned by an officer who had taken the message, “Sellers, confirmed it. Said they came through, trashed up his pub and then left.”

Max shrugged indifferently. Since the bandits had made the headlines a few months ago the department had received hundreds of suspected sightings, the vast majority of which were nonsense calls, hoaxes and popularity seekers, even people who called just to ask the arriving detectives how the case was progressing. Now that a large reward had been placed on their heads the calls would only increase, as would the absurd claims.

“Why me?” he wondered, “can’t you get the local bobbies to check it out? Probably a far-fetched insurance claim, someone looking for some publicity for his pub.”

“You think I didn’t think of that?” she said with a glare. “They checked it out this morning, an hour or two ago. They said it had some promise, this Sellers chap seemed a bit beaten and reluctant, they reckoned he was hiding something.”

“The truth is what he’s hiding.” Cawley suggested.

“Possibly, but this Sellers probably knows something; certainly more than he’s letting on,” she stated. “If he did see them, great; if not, then he’s up to something.”

Max groaned, retrieved the note from her desk and exchanged one last contemptuous smile with her. “I’ll check it out.”

6

The county was full of tiny holes, pockets of nothingness where small villages flourished. Most began as farming or mining land; small outcrops built around busy farms and busier mines, but over time the mines closed and the farms expanded around the villages like green plumes of smoke. The occupants tended to be those who were old enough to still remember the days when the village flourished; old enough to look back on the past as something resembling perfect, a utopia where no one stole anything, no one killed anyone and no one committed a crime, not like the inner-city yobs of today. Of course these also tended to be the times of world war, of rampant murder on a global scale, of hunger, starvation, of parents stealing to feed their families and of chronic suffering. Time has a way of blurring the edges of truth.

Stubbies, a working man’s pub for the chronically unemployed, was on the fringes of one of these pockets of nothingness. It used to be a mining town, the mines long since closed, the work long since dried up. In the near past the dwindling populace were primarily the direct descendants of those that had toiled the mines; they struggled to work like their fathers did, struggled to scrape a meagre existence and often resorted to living off the state. The current populace were made up of
their
descendants. The second generation without a job, the first that didn’t give a shit.

Detective Cawley worked this county, knew these people well. His own backyard was a touch more urban, but he had plenty of run-ins with the wave of jobless youth who ploughed the streets and littered the cells.

One of them was in the pub when he arrived. A feckless and scrawny thing who propped up the bar with the experience of a veteran alcoholic.

“I’m looking for Sellers,” Cawley said as he eyed up the youngster, struggling to hide the distaste on his face as a waft of body odour leaked into his nostrils.

The youngster spun on his stool, looked Cawley up and down, gave a questionable flick of his head. “Wha’s ‘e to you?”

Cawley regarded him with contempt. He nodded towards the half-empty pint glass on the bar in front of him. “Should you be drinking that?” he wondered.

The youngster's eyes flickered from the glass, back to Cawley. “Wha’s ‘e to you ?”

He showed him his badge, delighted in the fear he saw light up the rat-like face in front of him.

The youngster hesitated, his mind whirring like the spitting, clunking engine of a battered car. “So--
so
?” he said anxiously. “You’re a copper, so what? I’m sixteen, I’m allowed to be ‘ere. I’m allowed to drink.”

“The drinking age is eighteen,” Cawley nodded towards a sign above the bar which validated his response.

“Oh.” He paused, looked up and down, lowered his face and his tone, then snapped into the defensive posture of a stubborn idiot that Cawley had seen on every accused kid he’d ever had to arrest. “So what? Ya wanna arrest me? Prove it. Prove that I bin drinking. You can’t, can you, eh? I bet you--”

Cawley held up a palm, asking the kid to halt his bullshit. “I don’t give a shit. Just tell me where Sellers is.” He couldn’t do anything to the kid and had no intention of arresting or charging the bartender who
could
be prosecuted, he didn’t care either way. Without a pub to drink in, the little waster would be pissing it up in the gutter on cheap cider or stolen spirits. It didn’t matter where he got his booze; he was always going to get it.

He aimed a shout behind the bar where an open door led into a small hallway -- a couple of rooms either side, a staircase visible at the back. He drained the last of his pint, his eyes on Cawley the whole time, and then departed with a hitch of his pants and a throat-clearing snort.

Sellers emerged through the door, a short and stocky middle-aged man with a prominent brow and a perpetual look of suspicion on his face. He nodded at Cawley, a quizzical inflection of his dumpy little head.

“Detective Inspector Cawley,” he answered, flashing his badge. “I’ve come about the sighting of--”