In Too Deep (Knight & Culverhouse Book 5)

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T
anya Henderson let
the last drop of red wine fall from the glass onto her tongue, before stopping for a moment to consider whether or not she should open another bottle. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea. She knew that a glass or two of wine — and no more — often helped her to think more clearly, to put all of her stresses to one side for a few hours and concentrate on the task in hand. And what a task it was.

Her job as an investigative journalist meant that she was used to having to deal with some real shits. It was her responsibility to dig down into the murkiest depths of criminality and corruption, exposing those people who used their money and their power to create more money and more power. In her time she’d uncovered some big scoops: a billionaire American computer software tycoon who’d been siphoning off money that was being put into a charity foundation and a married Premier League footballer who’d been sleeping his way around half of London and paying off the women to keep them quiet. It wasn’t anything that had particularly surprised anyone who’d paid attention to the news stories when they came out: it was an unfortunate fact that most people just accepted this sort of stuff went on.

As much as she loved her job, Tanya got frustrated sometimes at the amount of work that had to go into each investigation, not to mention the depressingly short odds that meant most of them wouldn’t end up in a story. More often than not, there just wasn’t enough evidence to go on. If people were going to commit a major fraud, they tended to cover their tracks pretty well. But even so, Tanya Henderson was there, ready to pounce on any tiny loophole they managed to leave. It wasn’t high turnover ‘churn’ journalism — she might only have a story published once every couple of years — but she knew that when she did it would make her some big money and give her the satisfaction of exposing some of society’s biggest crooks.

And she knew the case she was working on right now could potentially blow a hole in the entire system of local government. It was something that had come to her attention as a local resident, but which she was planning to expose using her position at a national newspaper. The Inquirer didn’t have the biggest circulation of all the national newspapers by a long shot, but it enjoyed a steady readership of around 50,000 a day — more when they broke a big story.

The story she was working on right now was going to have to function a little differently. Locally, she knew the story would be huge, but for a national scandal she was going to have to dig deeper and find other instances of the tentacles of corruption creeping into local government around the country.

A lot of journalists she knew tended to form teams, getting younger, less experienced journalists on board to help gather information, speak to witnesses and generally try to build a bank of evidence from which they could form a story. But for every time that had been successful, Tanya knew of at least five occasions where one of the juniors had majorly fucked up and blown the whole story before it had even begun. That wasn’t something she ever wanted to risk. Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey.

Before she could decide whether or not to open another bottle of wine, her mobile phone began to vibrate next to her on the wooden desk. As the phone skidded gently across the surface, she looked down at the bright display. It was a withheld number. Nothing unusual in her line of work. She picked up the phone, swiped her finger across the screen and lifted it to her ear.

‘Yep?’ she said — her regular greeting. Giving nothing away as usual.

There was silence at the other end of the line. She gave it a few moments before speaking again.

‘Hello?’

Tanya heard a light click, and then the phone went dead. She pulled the mobile away from her cheek and looked at the display. It had reverted back to her smartphone’s home screen. She was used to getting some abusive phone calls every now and again — it went with the job, and was one of the reasons why she changed her number every few months — but she’d never had a silent call before. She hoped it would be the last, but made a mental note to give her mobile provider a call in the morning, just in case she needed to get her number changed again.

Sighing, she leaned back in her chair. Christ, the mountain of data seemed to be growing by the day. That was one of the downsides to keeping your work to yourself, she realised. Still, it was better than risking the alternative. As she’d come to learn, you couldn’t trust anyone but yourself.

She considered calling it a night. It was already gone midnight and her brain was getting to the point where it wasn’t going to be doing her much good to stay up any longer. But those files, the gigabytes of documents — deeds, agreements, financial records — all needed going through. It all needed going through. And the sooner it got done, the more likely she’d be to have her scoop.

Before she could decide what to do, she heard the faint sound of her doorbell — a soft
bing-bong
, just loud enough for her to hear it from this side of the house but not too loud that it made her jump. When you’ve got your head stuck into investigating some of the biggest crooks in society, anything can make you jump.

She yawned, locked the screen on her computer, stood up and pushed her desk chair out behind her before making her way through to the hallway. She enjoyed living here. It wasn’t a small house by anyone’s standards — the kids had plenty of space and Tanya was very grateful to have her own home office — but it seemed a whole lot bigger and emptier when John, her husband, was away with work, as he was this weekend.

As she got to the front door, she could see the blurred figure behind the glass — big, burly, black. But then again, everyone looked that way when they were standing the other side of that front door. It was a trick of the light, the frosting on the glass. Backlit by the glowing orange streetlight at the end of the driveway, a five-year-old girl would look menacing from the other side of that door.

Sliding the brass chain across and unlocking the latch on the door, Tanya froze for a moment as it swung open and she registered what was in front of her.

A man — probably — dressed head to toe in black, except for a pair of piercing green eyes that looked at her from two of the holes in his balaclava. The first time she registered the crowbar was when it flashed it front of her eyes, the steel reflecting the light of the streetlamp just before she felt the impact on the side of her skull.

She felt instantly sick, an enormous wave of nausea rising from the pit of her stomach as her brain released a huge surge of adrenaline to deal with the trauma. She staggered to her side, crashing into the door and hearing it clatter against the wall. She felt another blow come down from above, this time on the back of her neck, just above her shoulder blades.

The dizziness grew, beginning to overwhelm her, and she felt her vision and hearing start to blur and cloud. In the moment before she lost consciousness, she could just about make out the soft, unfocused smudge of white and pink at the top of the stairs and the faint voice that faded away into the distance.

‘Mum? Mummy?’

T
he whisky glass
was feeling heavier in Jack Culverhouse’s hand with every passing minute. He’d seen with his own eyes how many police officers of his age had ended their careers at the bottom of a bottle, but he was determined to stay in control. One drink a night was about all he was having at the moment. Two, perhaps, if it had been a particularly tough day, which it often was.

The dreaded drink had nearly finished his career once already — he had been back in the saddle only a few months since being suspended from Mildenheath CID during a recent double-murder investigation. The killings had shaken the major crimes unit at Mildenheath for a number of reasons. Having happened barely weeks after one of their own, Luke Baxter, had been killed in the crossfire while apprehending a serial killer, their most recent high-profile case had seen them investigating the murders of two paedophiles. Culverhouse had been of the opinion — and he’d made this known — that whoever had carried out those killings was doing them a favour. The powers-that-be didn’t quite agree, leaving him sidelined with only a bottle of brown liquid for company.

He was used to not having people around — that had always been the way since his wife, Helen, had walked out on him all those years ago, taking his daughter with her. But one thing Jack Culverhouse could not live without was his work. That had been his
raison d’être
— the whole reason he got up in the morning. Having that taken away from him had almost finished him off.

Retirement wasn’t something he ever considered, although he wasn’t far off being able to take his full police pension if he wanted it. He knew some forces tended to pressure officers into retirement after a certain age or a certain number of years’ service, and he was grateful that he had Charles Hawes as his Chief Constable — a man who was far too wishy-washy to ever make real waves in policing, but who was far more sympathetic to Jack’s style of policing than most people. He knew that when Charles Hawes left his post, it would be the beginning of the end for him.

Jack was old school, and he wasn’t afraid to admit it. He’d seen the changes in policing, seen how it had become a glorified office job. He refused to accept the winds of change, though, and carried on regardless in his own way. He was fortunate in that Mildenheath CID had a certain degree of autonomy which a lot of major crimes units didn’t. It hadn’t been subsumed into a bigger, faceless unit at county — or regional — level and had managed to resist any major reforms for a number of years, much to the chagrin of the county’s elected Police and Crime Commissioner, Martin Cummings.

But it wasn’t work that was on Jack Culverhouse’s mind as he sat in silence, save for the sound of his own heavy breathing, the air whistling through his nostrils as he nursed the crystal glass in his hand. It was Emily. The daughter he hadn’t seen for nine and a half years. She’d been three years old at the time her mother had taken her, and now would be getting on for thirteen. It seemed impossible that she would be a teenager in a matter of weeks — that sweet little girl with blonde pigtails, barely waist height, singing nursery rhymes back at him. He tried not to think about it too much. It wasn’t doing him any favours.

It wasn’t a situation he was ever going to be able to accept or deal with, but it had started to become normal. First of all there was Emily’s fourth birthday. Then came the day when they’d been gone a year. Time had blurred, and before he knew it he’d realised that Emily had been gone for longer than she’d been with him. A few years later it was the same milestone with Helen. Looking back now, the time when they were around seemed like a blip on the radar of Jack Culverhouse’s wider timeline. And that hurt.

Just as he’d started to come to terms with things and realise that they weren’t going to change, Helen had turned up on his doorstep unannounced. That was almost a year ago now, but when he closed his eyes he could still see her face in front of him. The same as he remembered, but older, more tired. Whenever he thought back to happier times — times when she and Emily had both been around — it was that jaded, haggard face that he saw rather than the younger, more vibrant Helen. Try as he might, he couldn’t visualise how she used to look.

It wasn’t that she’d turned up out of the blue that hurt; it was the fact that it seemed to be for completely no reason whatsoever. She didn’t have anything new to tell him — other than the fact that she’d been diagnosed with some sort of mental disorder — and the things that she did tell him turned out to be mostly lies. Like the story about having moved out to Spain, for instance. Jack had quickly been able to find out that was a lie by getting in touch with a police contact in Alicante, who was able to confirm that there had been no record of Helen living in Spain at any point over the past several years.

Even though she’d been as flaky and elusive as ever, he couldn’t help but be hurt all over again when she’d left. They hadn’t parted on the best of terms, but what was she to expect? You don’t just disappear for eight and a half years, turn up out of the blue one day and expect everything to be fine. The problem was that she just couldn’t see that. It was as if she’d turned up solely to have a dig at him. No information, no Emily, no nothing.

But he’d done angry. He’d done irate. He’d done exasperated. Now there was only hurt and regret.

Jack, like everyone, had a tipping point when it came to alcohol, where if he drank too much he became irritable and unreasonable — more so than usual, that is. But his recent ration of just one or two glasses of whisky a night had put him regularly in the zone where he became reflective and regretful. And it was a feeling of regret that overwhelmed him as he stared glassy-eyed at the mobile phone on the arm of the sofa. He had a contact number for Helen, the one she’d used last year when she came back on the scene. He knew, however, that it wasn’t a permanent number and that in all likelihood she would have already moved on again. Another phone, another country, another life.

In a way, part of him hoped that was the case, and while she didn’t necessarily need to hear what he had to say, but he had to say it nonetheless. Although he wanted to let her know how he felt, he still couldn’t shake that stubborn alpha-male ego that lay at the core of Jack Culverhouse. Deep down he knew that he was doing this more for himself than anyone else.

He slugged back the last mouthful of whisky, feeling the liquid warming his throat as it slipped down towards his stomach, before picking up the phone and scrolling through the contact list to Helen’s last-known number. He looked at it for a moment, then decided to take the plunge.

The few seconds that it took for the call to connect seemed like an age. Then came the words that he had always expected to hear.

‘The person you’re calling is not available. Please leave a message after the tone. When you have finished leaving your message, please hang up.’

The
beep
seared through Jack’s skull, mixing and mingling with the effects of the alcohol. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, trying to fight back what he knew must come out.

‘Helen. It’s me. It’s Jack.’