The Missing Hours (7 page)

‘Won’t we all?’ I mutter.

I glance to Leah’s desk. Still empty. She should be back by now. I pick up the phone. Put it down again. Then stare at it. Like that will make a difference.

I called my neighbour, on my way back to the nick. A retired teacher, Stan, says he’s getting fat, that the sedentary life style doesn’t agree with him. He laughed when he heard my voice. Another late one, then? Ah, you youngsters. Yes, I’ll get the dog, take him for a good run. I’ll not be running, though. Just to clear that one up.

I look at the photo stuck to my computer. Strider. A long-haired German Shepherd. He was supposed to be a police dog. That, it had seemed, was his destiny. But his trainer said he was just too stupid. Lovely dog, affectionate as the day is long. Unfortunately dumb as a brush. It’s been, what, four years now?

He’s still stupid.

It didn’t take Isaac too long to run out of tears. It took him less time still to run out of words. So in the end, we just sat there, me and him, sharing a stultifying silence.

‘Is there someone I can call? Someone you would like to be with you?’ I asked. It feels a lot like guilt, this awareness that you have changed a person’s life simply by the act of arriving at their door. This man, this seemingly ordinary man, was living a perfectly normal existence, and then I show up, bearing my basket of bad news. You want someone else to come sweeping in, some overbearing mother, some calm and collected best friend, hell, some hobo that you picked up off the street. Anyone who can diffuse the impact.

Isaac made a sound. For a second I thought he was crying again; took me longer to figure out that it was a laugh.

It’s funny what it does to you, the sound of laughter in the middle of a murder. An effect similar to footsteps in a dark alley.

I watched him closely.

He looked up at me, a rictus smile. ‘There’s no one.’ Shook his head.

‘Okay … Parents?’ I floundered, grasping at straws, still trying to fit him into a category, because in grief he was the victim. Then he laughed again, and the walls of that category juddered.

‘My parents are back in the US. Wouldn’t matter much if they lived next door. They don’t speak to me. They don’t approve of …’ He waved his hands, indicating himself, the room, the world. ‘Well, they don’t approve of me. I went home, after I met Dom. I wanted to tell them face to face. Be a man about it. Fess up to being gay.’ He laughed again. ‘My dad punched me. Broke my tooth. Told me they were done, that I had upset them enough.’

I nodded, shifting in the quicksand of the conversation. ‘Okay. Friends?’

Isaac looked at me, shook his head. ‘There is no one else,’ he repeated. ‘There was only Dom.’ Then another smile, my hackles climbing further. ‘It’s ironic, isn’t it? You worry so much that you will lose them, because you love them so much, that you cling and cling, and then you lose them anyway.’

I nodded, my thoughts elsewhere. ‘Isaac, would you mind if I just took a quick look around? See if I can spot anything that may give us a clue what Dominic’s plans were, how this happened to him?’

He agreed with a wave, head sinking back into his hands.

I moved through the apartment. Everything modern and shiny, all squared away. Thought how different it was to my little barn conversion, a slice of paradise in the middle of the countryside. A slice of paradise with a used cup on every surface, takeaway cartons ruling the kitchen counters, and the ubiquitous smell of dog. Yeah, I thought. I could wreck this apartment inside an hour.

I kept my expression flat, my eyes roaming the kitchen counter, the knife block. Five slots. Five knives. Across the floor, looking for signs of blood, an attempt at a clean-up. Into the bathroom, scanning the sink, the bathtub, looking for any indications that someone had got themselves covered in blood, washed it away. Pawing through the dirty laundry and thinking that life does not get much more glamorous than this.

I’m not sure what it was I expected to find. Whatever it was, it wasn’t there.

I am getting the sense of being stared at. I turn away from the window, look back into the office with its banks of desks, long-outdated computers.

‘All right, Finn?’ Oliver asks.

We were friends once, me and Oliver. At least, I think we were. He is a mercurial guy. You never entirely know where you are with him. At one time I thought he was, well, kind of cool. Sharp-witted, smart. I liked him. But then you realise that those sharp wits are not as much fun when they are pointed right at you, that the smart is not so appealing when it is being used to undermine.

Oliver wanted the sergeant’s post. My sergeant’s post. He failed his boards. I didn’t.

We’re not friends any more.

‘Yup,’ I say, careful to shift my expression into neutral. I pull myself up straighter. Glance around. Looking for an inspector, a chief inspector … the chief constable. Anyone that means I am not the highest rank in the room. But no. Of course not.

I suppress a sigh.

‘So, where are we up to now, guys?’ I try to sound confident, but I can tell by Oliver’s eyes, the way they narrow, the rise of his eyebrows, that he has seen straight through that ploy. He glances across at Christa at the desk next to him and I see the silent message he sends her. I know what it says. What a prick.

No. I’m pretty sure we are no longer friends.

‘Well, Sarge.’ Oliver drags the word out, resting heavily on it. ‘Uniform found Dominic Newell’s wallet. It had been tossed out on the road, a couple of miles from the body. No money in it, but credit cards, ID and such were all there. Still no sign of his keys, though.’

‘And the car?’

He shrugged. ‘Who knows. It’s not at his apartment, it’s not where he normally parks it at work, and there’s no sign of it in the surrounding area.’

‘Okay. Who’s on that? We need that car.’

Oliver gives me a long look. ‘You mean you haven’t used your sergeant superpowers to find it yet?’

Yeah. And I’m the prick.

I flick on the computer, ignore Oliver until the urge to punch him recedes. Think of Isaac. You look to the spouse in a murder. It’s pretty much the law. You look to the spouse first because they are the person closest to your victim and there is a thin line between love and hate. So your first consideration has to be: what makes it evident that this person is not the killer?

I think of Isaac’s raw grief, the shock, then that laughter, so out of place. Is it possible that he is a murderer? I think of his hands, large, the kind of long fingers that my mother would describe as pianist’s fingers (a comment that always prompted much hilarity when I was a teenager). I looked for cuts, scrapes, anything that would suggest that he had been wielding a knife lately, that it had slipped.

But there was nothing, no neon lights showing me the way.

Could he have done it?

Of course he could. In theory.

I think of the photos in the apartment, a gallery of couple shots, Dominic and Isaac pressed cheek to cheek. They looked happy. They looked like they were in love.

But it is impossible to judge any relationship from the outside. Like trying to reconstitute a cake when all you have remaining is crumbs. You take a picture, you smile for the camera, you set the scene for the way in which you want the world to perceive you and your love.

It’s all a lie, when you come right down to it.

My sister knows my views on this. The Facebook generation. All dedicated to capturing their version of true love’s dream. But none of it is real, I complain. That’s not for you to determine, Leah says. Their relationships may not be exactly like those pictures or those statuses suggest, but perhaps there are moments of that. You have to have a little faith, Finn. Sometimes things, people, really are as good as they seem. My sister has way more faith in people than I do.

‘Christa,’ I say, ‘did you know Dominic?’

She is concentrating on something, doesn’t hear me right away. ‘Huh?’

‘Dominic. You knew him?’

‘Well, yeah. I mean, I knew him well enough to chat to in the nick, or if we saw each other out and about.’

‘What did you make of him?’

‘Seemed a good guy.’

I think of Dominic Newell, living and breathing. He was, or at least he seemed to me, confident, sorted.

‘He talked about his partner a lot,’ she offers.

‘Isaac? What did he say?’

‘Oh, you know. This and that. Talked about the holidays they went on, how he was doing in school – he’s a teacher, you knew that, right?’

I study her. ‘What was your impression?’

‘Of their relationship, you mean?’ She shrugs. ‘Good. Seemed solid. If you’d have asked me yesterday, I’d have said they had a happy relationship.’

‘And today?’

She looks at me, grins. ‘Always look to the partner first.’

I grunt.

‘I still can’t believe it, you know.’ Christa has leaned back in her chair, her dark curls billowing out around her head like a pillow. ‘I mean, Dominic dead. I was talking to him on his way into the station just yesterday morning.’

I push myself up in my seat. ‘Wait, where was this?’

‘Here.’ She gives me a flat look. ‘He was here for Beck Chambers.’

The Rescuer

Tobias Kender

(Originally published in
K&R Today
)

They were building a road, a swathe of asphalt that cut through the blasted desert lands of northern Colombia. Night had begun to creep closer, the searing blue sky staining crimson as the sun began to set over the plains. They should have finished by now. It was always a good idea to be out of the way by the time evening came, to head back to the bare-scrubbed hosteria with its paper-thin walls, preternaturally narrow beds. But on that day there had been a delay, a problem with the materials. And so they were stuck there, on the plains of La Guajira, as the sun began to set.

You have to wonder if they were twitchy. If they were looking over their shoulders, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Colombia’s reputation as the kidnap capital of the world is hard earned, with more than 3,500 recorded cases in the year 2000. Things have settled down a little since then, though, and with the peace accord between the government and FARC, kidnappings dropped to a somewhat less terrifying level of 299 in 2013.

Not that those statistics helped. Not on that day. As the sun began to sink behind Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the workers of Baeliss Construction noticed a dust storm approaching from the north. Only it wasn’t a dust storm. It was a convoy. Three pick-ups. Innumerable men with guns. They tumbled out on to the dusty plain, waving their AK-47s in the air, shouts staccato and unintelligible to the foreign workers who only wanted to build a road.

They took five in the end. Five men, all but one UK nationals. Loaded them on to the pick-ups and took off into the setting sun.

There was a time when a Colombian kidnapping was a long-term arrangement. When a victim, often a well-targeted wealthy businessman, would be picked up going about his usual day, would be taken into some remote jungle setting and held, for weeks, months, sometimes years. The trend, however, has shifted. With the reduced role of FARC, the Colombians are seeing more and more kidnaps by organised criminal gangs. They want money and they want it quickly.
Secuestro exprés
is a thing now – express kidnappings that happen in a flash and are over just as quickly, leaving their victims a couple of million pesos worse off.

But this wasn’t that. There was no quick trip to the bank for these five men, no hurried payment of their life savings for a speedy release. They were simply gone.

What came next was what comes next in many of these cases. A flush of barely organised chaos. A flurry of calls to the UK, insurance companies scrambling, negotiators hitting the ground with barely a second to figure out what country they are in.

If you ask anyone, they will tell you that there was a plan. That there was always a plan. If you’re going to do business in one of the kidnapping hotspots of the world, you need a plan, right?

The first step involved a company called the Cole Group, a boutique kidnap and ransom consultancy firm with a powerhouse reputation. Its founders, Ed and Selena Cole, have built quite a name for themselves throughout the industry.

And so the call was made, and within thirty-six hours of the kidnapping, Selena Cole, a psychologist specialising in kidnap and negotiation psychology, was on the ground in La Guajira. She doesn’t look like someone who belongs in the murky world of K&R. You could more see her teaching on a university campus, or tending to your tonsillitis in her GP surgery, than sitting in a windowless office in Baeliss Construction’s Colombian HQ running a negotiation.

‘It’s always a tense time when you begin a negotiation with a kidnapper that you have never dealt with before. You don’t know them. They don’t know you. So in the beginning, it’s all about putting them at ease, steadying their trigger finger so that no one gets hurt.’– Selena Cole

Based out of Riohacha, a wannabe city with desert one side, ocean the other, Selena was walking into a quagmire. You see, there are professionals in all walks of life, people who know how the game is played. And that brings with it a certain level of comfort, that everyone is playing from the same rule book, heading for the same destination. The same is true in the world of kidnap for ransom. The experienced players understand how these things work, that even kidnappers have a certain set of rules they must play by. It is an oddly comforting fact in a world that offers little in the way of comfort. But with the rise in criminal kidnappings throughout Colombia, the rules are changing. You get kidnappers now who simply do not know how much they can ask for, who begin by wanting the moon, who may get dangerous once they realise that they simply cannot have it.