Falling

Book 0: Karen Sharpe

by John Connor

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals; Female Sleuths; Suspense

Synopsis

A stunning thriller that sees Yorkshire-based DC Karen Sharpe brought to the very edge of her sanity. A year and a half ago DC Karen Sharpe was the victim of a terrifying crime. Desperately trying to shelter from its effects she has been working simple fraud and theft cases in West Yorkshire CID. But the brutal murder of a young pregnant woman threatens the precarious wall she has built around herself. Drafted onto the squad to deal with the victim's six-year-old child, Karen finds herself overwhelmed by the devastating nature of the attack. As nightmares from her past start to reoccur, her relationships with those closest to her begin to crack under the strain. An illicit relationship with her boss promises escape: a new beginning without the trappings of past horrors and guilt. But life has a savage lesson in store for her. As West Yorkshire erupts in a summer of explosive race riots, events tip Karen into the depths of the very world she has been fleeing.

Release date: April 21, 2011

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 344

Sample

Steve Fleming lay in the darkness listening, holding his breath. A noise from outside had punctured his dreams, kicking him back to consciousness. He waited for his senses to catch up, then turned his head, looking towards his wife, who was sound asleep beside him. Enisa was so quiet, so still, he had to place his fingertips against her bare shoulders to reassure himself. She registered his touch and mumbled something from the depths of her sleep.

The heat from her skin was startling. Since she had fallen pregnant strange things were happening to her metabolism. At night she became so warm the quilt was always pushed away from her, bunched up as now in the space between them, leaving her naked. Before the pregnancy – in London – they had slept wrapped around each other for nearly the whole night. Now, within minutes of falling asleep, she was so hot there was a slippery sheet of perspiration between them, and he had to roll away. He could not remember it being like this with Jana, their first child.

His ears strained into the night silence. He could hear nothing. Perhaps he had dreamed it. He allowed himself to breathe, but carefully, still alert. He slept so lightly these days that almost anything could wake him. They had been in this house for six months, but the place still felt unfamiliar to him, full of unexplained night-time movements. Partly it was the entombing silence from outside that unsettled him. He wasn’t used to living in the countryside. Every house he had lived in before had been near a busy road.

He tried to remember the sound. A car door gently closing? But he had heard no engine, and the nearest public road was nearly half a mile away. If a car had driven the distance to his driveway he would have heard the engine long before someone got out and closed the door.

He turned onto his side towards the open bedroom door and looked out along the short corridor towards the living room, listening for sounds from Jana’s room, halfway along. Jana was six years old and slept like a log. Normally she made no noise at all. He was sure it had not been her. He could see that the light in the living room was still on, as he had left it. Nothing different.

He sighed a little. Why was he so frightened? Enisa slept like her daughter; nothing woke her. But then she was used to the countryside – the silence, the space, the blackness of a clouded night sky without electric light, the absence of neighbours. She had grown up in this kind of environment. And West Yorkshire was her home; they had returned here for precisely that reason.

He had no such comforts. He too had grown up here, but he had spent most of his adult life trying to forget that. West Yorkshire only made him nervous.

Outside – from the direction of the tall pines flanking the drive – an owl screeched, disturbing him again. Had something scared it? His eyes found the alarm clock on the bedside table: 3.33 a.m. How many times did he look at a clock and see the numbers lined up like that: 11.11; 10.10; 14.14? It had happened at least ten times in the last two days. He heard the owl call again, further away now.

In his mind he replayed the sound that had woken him. It was definitely a car door, he decided. He even had an image to go with it, implanted into his dream: men getting out of a car parked just outside the house; balaclavas, gloves, weapons. Maybe he had heard the engine. Had there been an engine in his dream? He started to sweat. He had fears like this almost every night. Why had he allowed Enisa to bring them back here?

He had left West Yorkshire fifteen years ago, in 1986, just after his sixteenth birthday. The circumstances of his departure still made him deeply uncomfortable. In effect, he had run away – although he had told his parents where he was going – and went to stay with an aunt who lived in Brentford, a suburb of London. His parents had then come to some kind of arrangement with the aunt to keep him there. He had told no one the reason for his departure, but somehow they had all sensed that trouble was behind it, and that had been enough.

In London things had got better for him. The aunt had encouraged him to study, and taken an interest that was lacking in his parents. His father was an unemployed textile mill worker, and through most of Steve’s childhood he had seemed to be either drunk, asleep or ranting about ‘pakis’. His mother had worked all hours in a variety of menial jobs, trying to support them without State help. But she had shared his father’s reliance on booze and, in the end, it had unravelled her too. By the time Steve was a teenager they were both out of work and the atmosphere in the flat was a poisonous mixture of stale alcohol, racial bitterness and explosive, drunken rows. They had rarely been sober enough to control a teenage son.

The flat had been on a Bradford council estate, near Dudley Hill. Not a bad estate – at least, not as he remembered it – but certainly worlds away from where he was now. That he was living in a ‘detached’ house still made him want to snigger like a guilty kid getting away with something. As a child he had always had the smallest room in the flat – a space a little larger than the second toilet in this place. The flat had been in a five-storey sixties block with paper-thin walls, so he had grown accustomed to filtering out sounds. Now he was finding it difficult to sleep in the absence of noise. He had to remind himself that silence was no cause for fear. Isolation was a good thing. There was much less chance of anything happening out here than on a council estate.

Another noise, again from the front of the house.

His heart began to quicken. He sat up in bed, wide awake now, his brain running through the options. Had he heard someone whispering?

He placed his feet on the cold, rough floor. They had hired a machine for this weekend, to strip the boards. He stood up and turned towards Enisa, ready to tell her to be quiet if she woke, but all his senses focused on the silence now, on what he could detect from outside. He heard it again. Someone was whispering.

Enisa slept on. He walked quickly into the hall, past Jana’s closed door, then crept through the living room towards the front door. There was a small window to the left of it. If there was someone out there he would see them through that. Belatedly he realized he was naked and looked absurd, but there was nothing he could do about that now. He had to see what it was.

As he brought his eye to the dusty pane of glass, he began to think of innocent explanations. The farmhouse was situated in an area of woods and fields east of Leeds, between Aberford and Barwick. To burgle this far out of town meant a deliberate targeting. The thieves would have to get a car, plan the attack. But why would they do that? The place was in the process of being renovated – the entire first floor was gutted and unusable, with flooring and old plaster piled into a skip on the drive – so the house looked shabby from the outside and was even less impressive within. Maybe it was something else. For an instant he expected to see a police car, thinking it might be some work-related issue, but as his sight adjusted he realized he could see nothing. The driveway outside the house was empty. Had he imagined it?

A slight movement in the shadows at the edge of his vision. He twisted his head sharply, trying to peer through the pane at an angle, so he could see along the front of the house. At the same time, from behind him, he thought he heard the sound of someone stepping onto the gravel outside the bedroom window, to the rear of the house. He straightened up, heart thumping loudly.

He heard the sound again: a foot crunching the gravel. It was unmistakable. They had come round the back as he had moved to the front. The bedroom he had just left was at ground level, right beside the patio. They were there – where Enisa was.

He took two quick steps back, still thinking that it couldn’t be true, that he was imagining it, that this was the sort of thing that only happened in a nightmare, or a film. Then he heard the glass break.

He froze. The sound was not very loud, but it had come from the bedroom. A crack, like the pane going in (but broken carefully), then the rattle of pieces on the floor. He heard Enisa waking up, murmuring something. Desperately, he looked towards the kitchen. He was unarmed. He thought of the big bread knife, but immediately there was a louder noise – the patio door to the bedroom being kicked in.

He started to run as Enisa shouted out for him. He entered the bedroom flat out, his brain empty of everything except to get there quickly. As he came through the door he had time to see the flapping curtains, the broken glass and two shapes – huge, threatening, alien to his room and his house: one was in front of him blocking his view; the other was on the bed, actually on the bed, kneeling over Enisa, doing something to her. Then there was a noise like a firework going off. Something flashed in front of him, hitting his chest with an explosive force. He crashed backwards, striking the bedroom wall and sliding to the floor.

A black silence folded over him, cutting him off from everything. He slipped into a different world. He was aware of himself, floating within the silence, but for a moment could not feel, see or hear. The sense of urgency vanished.

Consciousness returned only slowly, in fits and starts, like a badly spliced film. He knew he was still in his house, but couldn’t work out where, or what was happening. The sensations coming at him were ragged; one second rushing and chaotic, saturated with a pain he couldn’t place, the next dead quiet, as if sinking through a deep liquid.

Time moved unevenly. He wasn’t sure if he was conscious, unconscious, or somewhere in-between. He tried to fix on sounds, smells, touches, to hold on to them, but everything slid past him. He tried to pull himself to his knees. He could hear a sound like air being let out of a tyre. Around his eyes there was an intense pressure, but he could see nothing. Was that Enisa, screaming at the top of her voice? He slumped over again, curling into a ball, unable to stand. From above him he heard blows, grunts, men shouting things.

Something was wrong with him. One of them had struck him with something, but he didn’t know what. He tried again to stand but couldn’t get his legs to move. He was gasping for breath. The hissing noise was coming from somewhere near his chest. He tried to hold himself still, to concentrate on being able to see something, to hear what was happening.

There were two male voices, shouting and arguing, but not with Enisa. They were shouting at each other.

‘No fucking violence! I told you no violence—’

‘He was coming at me. I did what I was told to do.’

‘We were told to burgle this place …’

Broad accents. One from Yorkshire, the other from Manchester. Behind them the sound of his wife, whimpering and sobbing, hysterically pleading with them. ‘Please. Please. You have to let me help him …’

They were shouting over her, infuriated with each other.

‘I should fucking kill you for this—’

‘Please. He has hurt no one. Please let me go to him …’

‘I had instructions from Kershaw—’

Kershaw. The name pricked at his memories.

‘You had instructions from me …’

The words faded from him, then returned, but sounding further away now.

‘… keep hold of her, she’s seen everything …’

‘Please. I have to help him. Please. I have a daughter …’

‘You fucking shot him. You idiot … you fucking idiot … Keep hold of her!’

‘Not this … I can’t. I can’t do it …’ Was the one with the Yorkshire accent crying? Something about his voice was familiar.

‘This is your fault. She saw everything, you fucking arsehole …’

Suddenly he couldn’t hear Enisa at all. He began to panic again. He had to move. He had to get them away from her. He reached out a hand in the darkness and found the bed, then turned his head and looked towards the smashed patio doors. His vision cleared slightly, but it felt as if one eye was closed. The room was empty. He could see no one. Outside, as if from very far away, he could hear them arguing still. They were in the garden. He began to pull himself towards the doors.

He managed to stand up, holding himself against the wardrobes, his legs shaking like jelly. He looked around the room, trying to keep focus. He remembered Jana. He couldn’t hear her or see her. Where was she? He tried to look behind him, back towards her room, but began to fall as soon as his head turned that far.

Something was seriously wrong with him. He caught himself and stood still. The bed in front of him was empty, the sheets in disarray. He could feel wetness all down the front of his body. He staggered to the patio doors and looked out. The tungsten light at the side of the house had come on, like a floodlight, showing him everything.

There were two of them there. One was holding Enisa, a hand in her hair, pulling her down to his feet, dipping towards her and swinging the other arm, hitting her. She was struggling, trying to get away. The other man was trying to drag him away from her, shouting at him. Steve began really to panic, chest heaving with fright. He had to stop them.

He stumbled forward, out of the doors and into the garden. On the gravel he fell flat on his face. The hissing noise in his chest was louder now, every time he gulped at the air he could hear it. For a moment he was paralysed. He became frantic with fear, his heart thundering. What were they doing to Enisa?

But time was racing, leaving him behind. Had he lost consciousness again? He managed to get a hand to his chest. There was blood running out of him. He began to crawl across the garden, trying to shout at the men, stupidly, trying to tell them to stop, that she was pregnant. But the men were already gone …

Had there been a blade in the hand of the one standing above her? He rolled onto his back, gasping for breath. He was suffocating. Above him he could see stars through a gap in the clouds. He shouted Enisa’s name, the voice rasping in his throat. The stars began to spin. He saw the man again, dipping towards her. His brain re-interpreted the image, filled in the blanks.

There had been a knife in the hand that was punching her. The man had been stabbing her.

He closed his eyes and turned over, gritting his teeth, crawling in the direction he imagined she must be. He shouted her name again. This time something bubbled into his throat, choking him. He waited until he could breathe then pushed himself to his knees. Something had happened to one of his eyes. He concentrated with the eye that could focus and picked out her shape, a few feet in front of him.

She was naked, lying in a little heap, curled up, covered in blood. He could see no movement at all. He forced himself towards her and reached out a hand to grip her leg. The skin was warm, but it felt different. She was too still, too heavy. He tried to find her ear, to whisper into it, but her hair was matted with blood, obscuring it.

His strength was leaving him. Pulling his arm around her, he could feel the holes in her stomach, where the baby was. A little boy; they had seen the images of him on the ultrasound scan machine.

He buried his face into the back of her neck and began to sob uncontrollably.

Karen was in Leeds with Mairead when her mobile rang. It was a hot summer day – T-shirt and jeans weather – the sky above the town centre a cloudless, washed-out blue. In the streets there was enough heat and congestion to make the air smell of sweat and rubbish.

They were pushing through crowds of slow-moving shoppers on The Headrow, just coming up to Briggate. There was a shop somewhere near the Victoria Quarter Arcades that Mairead had been insisting they visit all morning, a designer ‘boutique’ where she was hoping to talk Karen into buying her an overpriced bikini.

Recently her daughter had been befriended by an older girl called Alexia. Karen had not met her, and knew only what Mairead had said about her. Alexia was from a wealthy family and older than Mairead by at least a couple of years. She had access to a private pool at someone’s house and there was a plan to have a pool party there. That was why Mairead wanted the new bikini.

Mairead swam well, so that didn’t worry Karen, but she wasn’t sure whether she was being given the whole truth about the proposed party. She instinctively didn’t like Mairead mixing with older kids, but there was little she could do about it. She would feel better if she actually met Alexia.

When the phone began to buzz Mairead was in the middle of telling her that Pete Bains – Karen’s partner, the man they lived with – had met Alexia several times already. If that was true he had said nothing to Karen. It was the kind of thing that, at the moment, provoked endless, petty arguments between them.

Karen kept walking and dug into the cloth bag hanging from her shoulder, looking for the mobile. She found it and paused at the top of Briggate, calling out to her daughter to wait. The crowd pushing out of the pedestrianized street parted clumsily around her. She watched the movement warily, individual people indistinct shapes in her vision. She hated being in crowds, hated the smell of them. Someone bumped into her and she stepped sideways, towards the building line. She kept her eyes on Mairead and pressed the phone to her ear, trying to hear above the sound of traffic and shoppers.

‘DC Sharpe?’ A male voice, not one she recognized. ‘Karen Sharpe?’

‘Yes?’ A few paces ahead of her, Mairead had walked over towards Borders bookshop.

‘DS Thorne. I don’t think we’ve met.’

‘No. I don’t think so.’ She had heard of him, but nothing worth remembering.

‘I’m sorry to call you when you’re off duty. I hope it isn’t a bad moment …’

‘It isn’t a good moment.’ She heard him pause, not liking that. ‘But go on. What do you want?’

When he spoke again she could tell he was already irritated with her. ‘I’m on Bulldog,’ he said. ‘I have instructions to call you in. Urgently.’

She felt her spirits sink. It had taken weeks to get this outing with Mairead organized. Not because her own diary was full – for the last year she had been working a straight five-day, nine-to-five shift at Halifax CID – but because Mairead, incredibly at the age of thirteen, never seemed to have a weekend free.

‘Can you get here within the hour?’ Thorne said, not really asking. ‘We work out of Killingbeck.’

She knew that already. She also knew all about Bulldog. News travelled fast from that kind of inquiry. In the last few days she had already picked up more detail about it than she needed or wanted from gossip, Divisional briefings and the press. She looked around her and sighed. ‘What’s it for?’

‘Family liaison. I’ll tell you more when you get here.’ He cut the line.

A rude fucker. He hadn’t even waited for her to say she would come. She looked past Mairead to where the crowd was congealing around a couple of buskers, who were about to start playing.

Family liaison. The words grew slowly in her mind, along with the implications. For the last year there had been an unspoken understanding – in Halifax, at least – that she wouldn’t be asked to do this kind of thing. She had to deal with victims all the time, of course, but family liaison usually meant the relatives of murder victims. At Halifax she had been sidelined into thefts and frauds. There were victims, but all they had lost was money or property. The cases were difficult, from an evidential point of view, but there wasn’t much emotion involved. Emotion was something she needed to avoid.

She knew there was a bereaved child on Bulldog, a six-year-old. When she had been on the CPT – the Child Protection Team – she had dealt with a lot of distressed children. But that was over four years ago. Eighteen months ago things had happened to her which she still couldn’t bring herself to think about. She couldn’t go back to spending all her waking hours with rape victims and damaged children. Not now.

She chewed her lip and thought about it, worried. She hadn’t told Thorne she would come in. Could she try saying she didn’t have the training for it? It was over five years since she had dealt with a murder victim’s relative, and even longer since she’d completed the family liaison course.

Looking beyond the two buskers in front of Borders she could see a news-stand selling the Yorkshire Evening Post. The headlines were the same as they had been every day that week. Tony Blair’s second-term election victory hadn’t even got a look in. At this distance, without putting on her glasses, she couldn’t read all the words, but she could just pick out ‘ENISA FLEMING’ and below that ‘RACIST FURY’ …

‘Mum? Are you OK?’

She looked down. Mairead was standing next to her.

‘Who was that on the phone?’ Mairead asked.

‘Someone who wants me in Killingbeck within an hour,’ she said. She heard the buskers begin to play. There was a girl with a fiddle and a man with a drum, playing Irish folk tunes.

‘Are you going? You promised you would come with me.’

‘We’ll still get your bikini. Don’t worry.’ She smiled at Mairead, but inside she was irritated with Thorne for ruining things. Matters were complicated enough between herself and her daughter, tainted by the peculiar history they shared. They rarely got on without friction, but so far today they had surprised each other. Nothing had gone wrong at all. They had enjoyed themselves. Even the wrangling about the bikini had been light-hearted. The plan had been to get the bikini then eat somewhere, a pizza, maybe. There wouldn’t be time for food now, and Mairead would have to make her way home alone.

‘I might not be able to eat with you afterwards,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

She began to walk towards the buskers. They were playing something she recognized. She stood on the edge of the circle of people watching them, and tried to rationalize the worry seeping through her.

Enisa Fleming was a paediatrician who had been stabbed to death, along with her unborn child. Her husband Steve Fleming – a prosecutor from Leeds – had survived a gunshot wound; a ‘miracle’, the press was calling it. But that was eight days ago. Presumably they hadn’t waited this long to break the news to their six-year-old child. Someone else would have already been given that shitty task. But that didn’t mean they didn’t want her to talk to the girl. That was what she had done best when she was on the CPT – child witness interviews.

She felt Mairead’s fingers slip through her hand, gripping it, and looked down at her again. Not very far down. Mairead was only a few inches shorter than her. She didn’t look thirteen years old. Her unusual height made her proportions seem more adult than many of her friends, not just because she was tall, but also because the growth had stripped her of puppy fat. She had long, straight, dark hair falling to below her shoulders, fine, arched eyebrows (very carefully plucked, Karen noted), high cheekbones and a wide mouth. Of her facial features, only her eyes spoke of youth. She had bright, green eyes, still full of childish innocence. Or so Karen liked to think.

Mairead pushed up against her, slipping her other arm around her waist and squeezing gently. ‘You OK, Mum? You look worried.’ She didn’t have a thirteen-year-old mind, either. Already she had witnessed more horror than most people would encounter in their entire lives.

‘They want me to go on that murder inquiry,’ Karen said to her, not thinking. The buskers were playing a slow air she recognized from her childhood. The theme stirred an indistinct nostalgia in her.

‘Which one?’ Mairead asked.

‘The one with the stabbed woman. The pregnant Asian woman.’ She pointed to the news-stand.

Two hours later, at Killingbeck, Karen took a deep breath and unfolded again the sheets of paper they had given her – copies of the two statements so far made by Steve Fleming. She was sitting alone in the office of David Riggs, the Senior Investigating Officer, waiting for Tim Thorne to appear.

She had already read Fleming’s statements once, but she made an effort to read them again, this time trying to think about what he had said, so she would remember. The first was made three days after the attack, when he was out of intensive care. The statement was written by a detective named Debbie Moor, a hard-headed and competent officer Karen knew from her days on the CPT.

The most harrowing part came after Fleming had been shot:

… I could see two men attacking my wife on the lawn about ten yards away from me. I could not hear anything they were saying. I could not get to them, though I tried and tried. I tried to get to Enisa and to shout at the men, to frighten them off. But I couldn’t shout and couldn’t walk. I couldn’t do anything. I was very desperate and frightened. I could see that one of the men was holding Enisa down, holding her by the hair, but I couldn’t get there to stop him. He was stabbing her, over and over again. I didn’t see the knife very well, but the blade was very long and thick, not like a kitchen knife. The men were white. I cannot say what height they were, or what they looked like. They spoke with Northern accents, but I cannot be sure of the exact area …

Even reading it for the second time she felt her heart reacting to the words. A year and a half ago she would have read it professionally. She would have looked for the details that were useful to the investigation. She would have considered everything rationally, without imagination. The images wouldn’t have touched her. But now the scene was running through her head as if she were there, watching it: a wounded man helplessly witnessing men knife his pregnant wife in the belly. Over and over again. They had told her at divisional briefings that there were thirty-four separate wounds to Enisa Fleming’s torso and that the knife was probably nine inches long.

The men who had inflicted those wounds had looked into Enisa Fleming’s terrified eyes when she was thirty-six weeks pregnant. She would have known where they were stabbing her. What had her eyes been like, looking up at them? Confused, vulnerable, stricken with fear, pleading and begging with them for her life? Could they really have looked into her eyes and felt nothing? Was that possible? She could feel Enisa’s fright and panic now; just imagining it brought a tight knot to her chest, constricting her breathing.

This was no good. She took her eyes away from the statement and looked at the calendar hanging on the wall by the SIO’s desk. She took a long, deep breath. Her pulse was so fast she could feel it beating in her neck. She forced herself to think about what she was looking at, to ignore the images behind her eyes. The picture on the calendar was of a river and a field, with trees and clouds in the background, painted, not photographed. She made herself hold it in the front of her consciousness, then describe it, mentally, finding words to match the pattern of shapes and colours. The more detail the better.

Long ago they had taught her how to do this. To get her mind focused and sharp, to get to a point where she could obsessively and dispassionately observe and enumerate, consciously picking out and memorizing one insignificant detail after another. Her brain was slow to get it now, but she persisted. After a few minutes her mind clicked into the groove, remembering how to do it. She filled her consciousness with the picture, the colours, the shapes. She began to describe them to herself, then memorize them. Her breathing settled, and the images from Steve Fleming’s garden lost their emotional force.

She turned back to the first statement and tried to consider it like that, keeping her mind on the detail; conscious, observant, detached. Her pulse was still racing, but she felt calmer. She memorized everything she could, then turned to the second statement. It was dated a day later. But Fleming had now decided he was uncertain about what had happened:

… In a previous statement I said I thought the men who attacked my wife were white. I have thought about this and can say now that I am not sure about it. For the reasons I have previously given, I was unable to see anything very clearly. I also said they had Northern accents. But their voices sound unclear in my memory. I do not know what accents they spoke with, or what they said. I do not want to confuse anybody, or say things that will lead to the wrong people being arrested. I have tried my best to remember things, but nothing about the night is clear for me …

‘Karen Sharpe?’

She looked up. Two men had entered the office. The first was her own height but powerfully and proportionately built. He was wearing a smart, charcoal-grey two-piece suit, a pale-blue shirt and a navy-blue tie. He looked about forty years old. If he was into a sport she guessed it would be rugby, but not in some brutish position. More like a winger, or fly-half – a role in which speed would be required as well as strength.

He had an immediately commanding presence. He stood in front of her with his hand extended, and she instinctively stood to greet him. She took his hand with the expectation that her own would be crushed. But his grip was careful, surprising. They shook hands, then she stepped back from him automatically, though he was no