‘This is going to take a while. There’s a massive amount of footage to search through. And there’s no guarantee I’ll find anything.’
The Dunk lumbered back up the drive, rain drumming on his shiny, black leather bunnet.
Lucy put her other hand over the phone’s microphone. ‘How is he?’
‘Not great. As in: might not even make it as far as A & E.’ The Dunk peeked over Lucy’s shoulder, back into the house. ‘Looks like she battered the living crap out of him with a sledgehammer. Well, you know, assuming it wasn’t Benedict. Or maybe they took turns?’
Great. That was all they needed.
A high-pitched, electronic wail tore through the downpour, then the ambulance pulled away from the kerb, the engine getting louder as the driver floored it, lights and siren going full pelt.
‘Sarge?’ The Dunk’s forehead wrinkled. ‘What if we got the uniforms to say it was them who turned up and found Ian Strachan? Maybe we were never here? They take the credit, and DI Tudor doesn’t shout at us again?’
Lucy nodded. ‘That’s a great idea, Dunk. I’m sure Mrs Strachan will be happy to play along. You know, while she’s confessing to her husband’s attempted murder. After all, why wouldn’t she lie to protect us? We’re only the ones who caught her.’
‘OK, OK. But for the record, I said we should’ve gone straight to Craig Thorburn’s place.’
‘I know.’
But right now? They were both screwed.
30
‘Come on, Trev, finger out!’
One of Sergeant Trevor Weir’s spartan eyebrows made the long climb up his narrow forehead as he stared at Lucy from behind the custody desk. He was so thin he could’ve been fashioned from pipe cleaners. God knew who he thought he was fooling with the straw-coloured hair, but if that mop was any less convincing it would’ve come with a chinstrap. ‘These things take as long as they take, DS McVeigh.’
‘Trev, I’m begging you here. We need to be gone before DI Tudor gets finished at Olive Hopkins’ house. And I mean long gone.’ And given they’d been buggering about here for nearly an hour, time was running out fast.
A sigh, then Weir went back to his paperwork. Making slow methodical notes with a pen as he worked his way down the form.
The clock ticked.
Someone in the cell block started singing a slow, sad Scottish ballad.
Someone else screamed at them to shut up.
Weir turned his form over and went to work on the other side.
The singing and screaming continued in discordant harmony.
‘Trev!’
Finally, he pulled the sheet of paper from its clipboard and slipped it into a pigeonhole. ‘Done. I’ll let you know when the duty solicitor turns up.’
‘Thanks, you’re a star.’ Lucy turned and hightailed it out of the custody suite, into the corridor, and—
‘Well, that wasn’t unedifying at all.’
She jerked to a halt. Swore. Turned.
Charlie from Professional Standards was leaning against the breeze-block wall. Face like stone, voice flat with disappointment. ‘Tell me, DS McVeigh, when I cut you a bit of slack, back at the cottage, did you not think to yourself, “Maybe I should use this opportunity to take a good long hard look at what’s been going wrong in my professional life and mend my ways”?’
‘Sorry, can’t stay and chat, I’ve got—’
‘To make yourself scarce before DI Tudor gets back? Because when he finds out you’ve been spending your time looking for an ex-con who’s violated his release conditions, instead of revisiting the Bloodsmith’s crime scenes like he’s told you to, multiple times, he’s going to be less than impressed?’
She licked her lips. ‘Something like that.’
‘So, you’re what: rushing off to Craig Thorburn’s in the vain hope you’ll find something there to crack the case, and Tudor will forget all about you ignoring yet another direct order?’
‘Nichola Strachan battered the living crap out of her husband. If we hadn’t turned up when we did, he’d be dead by now.’
Charlie pushed himself off the wall. ‘You’re playing a very dangerous game here, DS McVeigh. The margin for error is vanishingly small.’
‘You’re going to dob me in?’
‘It’s not me you have to worry about, it’s DI Tudor. Think I’ve done about as much as I can.’
‘Good.’ She turned on her heel, marched down the corridor and out the back doors.
The Dunk was waiting for her, sheltering under the narrow concrete canopy just outside, on the phone, kicking his heels on the painted concrete floor.
She flipped her raincoat’s hood up and swept past him into the downpour. ‘Quick as you like, Constable.’
‘Yeah, OK. Thanks, Mr Myers... No, I know... Yup, terrible. Got to go. Bye.’ He hung up and rolled his eyes. ‘God, that man can moan.’
‘“Quick as you like” means get a shift on.’
He lumbered after her. ‘That was the guy who moved into Adam Holmes’ old flat, in Ruthkopf House? Says he did get little notes through the letterbox with “help me!” on them, but they stopped a couple of months ago. And he thought it was the guy in Two G screwing with him, so he threw the lot out.’
‘You tell him, if he gets another one, he has to keep it?’
‘In a sandwich bag and everything.’
Who knew, maybe they’d get DNA or fingerprints off the thing? Probably not, though.
They scrambled into their pool car, the Dunk gunning the engine, down the ramp and out onto Peel Place. ‘Blackwall Hill?’
‘Blackwall Hill.’
And one last chance for redemption...
Cardon House was a six-storey block, mouldering away at the end of a short street lined with tired terraced housing. It had probably looked pretty stylish when it was put up sometime in the late sixties, but its sleek curves and bold lines had greyed and streaked over the years. Some of its cladding had been replaced with cheaper brown panels where the original white had crumbled. Now the building looked more like a brutalist sculpture of a decaying tooth than somewhere anyone would want to live.
Thankfully, the rain had stopped for the first time today, leaving the air crisp and clear — a lone shaft of sunlight piercing the coal-coloured clouds, as if the Rapture was struggling to find anyone in Oldcastle worth saving.
The Dunk locked the pool car and held up a manila folder. ‘You want to be the reading person this time or shall—’ He flinched as his phone launched into something punk-rocky. He pulled it out and grimaced at the screen. ‘It’s DI Tudor.’
Damn.
‘Let it go to voicemail.’ Lucy dug her mobile from her pocket and put it into sleep mode.
‘Oh dear...’ The Dunk held his phone as far away as his little arms would reach, till it fell silent.
‘Now switch it off.’
‘He must’ve heard about Mrs Strachan.’
Yup. Tudor would be pacing up and down the Operation Maypole office right now, wearing a groove in the carpet tiles, face all pink and trembly, looking for someone to shout at.
Still, it was too late to worry about that now.
Lucy made for the block of flats’ entrance. There would’ve been an intercom system at one point, but all that remained was a rectangle of plywood with people’s names written on white stickers, partially covered by a big green, yellow, and black graffiti tag. More graffiti in the stairwell.
To be honest, some of it was quite good, but every three or four steps someone had drawn a squirting knob or some boobs or just scrawled a fistful of obscenities.