Tony was halfway out of the door when he heard Spoony’s valediction. ‘You don’t want to disappoint me, Doc. Druse don’t cut no ice with the people I know.’
Just like that, the fear ratcheted up the dial again. No such thing as a place of safety here.
5
Every crime scene has its retinue of specialists. Police officers, medics, photographers, forensic specialists, profilers. Just as we all read the same book differently, taking different messages from it and finding different echoes in its pages, so it is with crime scenes. Every specialist reads the scene in their own way. When we put our heads together, it’s like a symposium on the dead person.
From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
Paula took a cautious step forward. ‘Time to put the knife down,’ she said conversationally. ‘There’s better ways to sort this out.’
The man started, casting a quick glance over his shoulder. But his grip on the woman didn’t slacken, nor did he move the knife.
‘Let her go. You can walk away from this.’ Paula kept her voice level and her body still. ‘It’s the only way out.’
‘Why don’t you fucking walk away? This is none of your business.’ His voice was less assured than his words. The woman squirmed, and he turned away from Paula to push harder against her.
Paula dredged her experience for the right thing to say. ‘If you don’t stop now, it’s your life that ends here,’ she said gently. ‘There’s no going back from this. I don’t believe you want that. What’s your name? I’m Paula.’
Now his head whipped back to face her. ‘What’s it to you? Who the fuck do you think you are?’
‘I’m just somebody that hates to see a man throwing away his life chances.’
‘You sound like a fucking cop,’ he exclaimed, outrage in his voice. ‘Only a fucking cop talks like that.’ And all at once he let the woman go and sprinted across the clearing towards Paula, the knife held out in front of him. The woman ran stumbling in the opposite direction.
‘Stacey, get her,’ Paula shouted, never taking her eyes off the man. He drew his knife hand back as he came near, preparing to strike. She waited till the last possible moment then stepped smartly to one side, lashing out sideways with her foot.
She’d been hoping for his knee and the scream as he crashed to the ground told her she’d hit lucky. Paula pivoted on one foot, stamped on his knife hand then dropped like a stone on to his back. He was shouting incoherently in pain but she paid no attention. Paula grabbed his right arm and twisted it up his back, then dug with her free hand into her jacket pocket for the plastic cuffs she always carried. It took less than a minute to cuff the man and then to caution him. She pulled him up, using the cuffs for leverage, and he yelped as his knee took his weight. ‘Not your day, is it?’ she panted, only then searching the trees for any sign of Stacey and the woman.
‘You’re fucking mental,’ the man exploded. ‘I’m a bloody copper.’
Paula laughed. ‘That’s the best one I’ve heard for a long time.’
Then from behind, she heard a chuckle. ‘He’s not lying.’
Paula had only been working for Detective Chief Inspector Ian Rutherford for three days. But already she recognised his soft Borders accent. Slowly she turned to face him. ‘Sir?’ It was a question whose answer she already knew.
‘Today isn’t just about team building, Inspector McIntyre. It’s also about me finding out how you operate under pressure.’
‘Is somebody going to get me out of these cuffs? She needs to learn about not making restraints too bloody tight. Not to mention my knee feels fucked.’ The man sounded as pissed off as he had every right to be, Paula thought. She didn’t imagine he’d expected to be done over by a woman at least ten years older than him.
‘Meet DC Thwaite from South Yorkshire. Drafted in for today’s little operation. You can release him now.’
As he spoke, the ‘victim’ pushed her way through a thicket and back into the clearing, closely followed by Stacey, who had lost her hat and gathered a random crop of leaves and twigs in its place. One leg of her trousers was streaked with dark mud. She looked furious. ‘And this is DC Vaughn from Manchester,’ she said, her mouth tight, her voice clipped. ‘Who very kindly helped me out of a ditch.’
‘She’d already caught up with me by then, in fairness,’ DC Vaughn said with a grin.
Releasing Thwaite, Paula could feel the adrenaline draining from her. DCI Rutherford looked very bloody pleased with himself. He was, she thought, a man who liked to feel pleased with himself. He clearly worked at keeping himself in shape and wore clothes that made sure nobody could miss that. His hair was always beautifully groomed – cut close at the sides to reveal the beginning of silvering, longer on top to prove he still had plenty of it. He could look stern or friendly; his jaw was as square as Clark Kent’s. He came with the reputation of doing things by the book, which was also, she thought, all about keeping up appearances. What this episode had shown her was that he was as capable of being devious as Carol Jordan.
To hell with Rutherford and his games. Paula turned to face Stacey and made a point of consulting her watch. ‘We’ve got a rendezvous to make, DC Chen. We’ll need to get a move on.’ And she retraced her steps towards the track, not needing to check whether Stacey was at her back.
Later, the real team-building exercise happened after they’d all shaken off Rutherford and gone to the pub. Paula and Stacey were joined by their long-standing colleague DS Alvin Ambrose and Steve Nisbet, a new recruit to their team. Nisbet was a recently promoted DS from West Yorkshire police. The grapevine said he was quick on the uptake and a good team player. That didn’t necessarily mean he’d be at home with this bunch of misfits, Paula thought.
Alvin and Steve had faced a test too, within fifteen minutes of setting off on their orienteering assignment. They’d rounded a bend and stumbled on a man dragging a woman out of the woods towards a van parked on the track. She was wearing a low-cut short dress, her hands were tied behind her back and she was snarling and shouting in what sounded like Polish. She had one shoe on, its spike heel hanging loose. ‘This is the last time you’ll fucking run out on me, you fucking whore,’ the man yelled.
They were a couple of hundred yards away. But they didn’t need to say a word. Whether it was people trafficking or a woman who’d failed to escape an abuser, the only thing that mattered was putting a stop to it. Both men took off at top speed. Steve Nisbet had the wiry build of a runner, but although Alvin was burly, he was fit too and kept pace as they raced down the track together.
There was nothing subtle in their approach and before he could get the woman in the van, the man saw them coming. He moved faster, wrenching the door open and forcing her inside. He slammed the door and made for the driver’s side just as the two cops reached the van. ‘The girl,’ Alvin grunted, cutting to the side to go for the man, already half-inside. Steve opened the door but before he could grab the woman she’d kicked out at him with her bare foot, catching him a glancing blow on the jaw.
‘I’m a bloody cop,’ he yelled. She recoiled, scrabbling further into the cramped cubicle and screeching incomprehensibly. He tried to climb after her, but she was kicking out like a madwoman.