Tightrope

Book 0: The Fine Line

by Andrea Frazer

Genres: Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Detective Inspector Olivia Hardy and Detective Sergeant Lauren Groves are sent to investigate a commotion at a house and make a horrific discovery. The investigation ends up with Hardy being usurped as Senior Investigating Officer. It's yet another problem for Hardy, as she suspects husband Hal is having an affair. Meanwhile, as Groves descends into alcoholism after her husband?s desertion, both officers' lives seem to be spiralling out of control. When a baby's body is found at the back of the police station, Hardy takes the unpleasant case, determined to succeed and show the world she's still capable, but things don't turn out exactly as planned?

Release date: September 17, 2016

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 300

Sample

PROLOGUE

The door swung open at a touch, unlocked and unlatched, revealing a wide hallway. Dimly visible, the staircase rose from deeper in the house. There was a carpet, but its pattern was dirtied beyond recognition and the pile was matted and sticky. There was no central light fitting and the walls were scarred with pale patches where pictures had once hung, and the bloom of mildew. The whole scene was utterly bare and forlorn.

The one clump of real colour that caught the eye was a string of red, already turning brown, that ran like a thin river from just beyond the entrance to the house, through the house, disappearing into the gloominess of the interior. Silence hung in the air like a scream, and specks of dust swam through the sea of it, disturbed by the movement of the door.

A low moaning pierced the atmosphere; a spear of sound that was agonisingly loud in the dead house and drew the callers to the middle room on the right-hand side, from which protruded a lone foot, on the toe of which was a female shoe. A male counterpart was caught in a shaft of sunlight from a distant window in the depths of the large house, elevated on a step that indicated a slightly lower level in the ground floor.

Her jaw was broken, her teeth a bloody mass of stumps made jagged perhaps by the steel-capped toe of a boot, and the ends of her fingers twitched with a life of their own, but there was something wrong with her face which took a couple of seconds to comprehend. Her eyes were gone, the sockets bloodily empty.

And still her fingers twitched, and she moaned quietly, her limbs at unnatural angles.

The man’s shoe came into contact with something gelatinous underfoot and he looked down. The woman looked from the face of the thing on the floor, then at the man’s shoe, and vomited.

The man was in the kitchen, agonisingly close to the freedom of the rear door, sprawled in a pool of blood which surrounded the pile of his disembowelled insides, an expression of gut-wrenching agony and disbelief on his dead face.

The male caller half-dragged his companion into a room empty of everything except a worm-eaten wooden chair and settled her there, as a babble of voices intruded from the outside world and broke his mood of absolute horror. Putting a finger to his lips to keep her silent, although he didn’t know why, he left her and crept through the rest of the rooms on the ground floor. Apart from the room where they had found that poor wretch of a woman, there was not another stick of furniture.

He made a quick call, sotto voce, and then crept up the stairs, wary of others present but hidden, his senses heightened for confrontation, his breathing shallow and careful.

The tracks in the dust of the first floor were numerous, and the inside walls were stacked to the ceilings in each room, but this was not the only unexpected aspect of the property. Looking up the next flight of very narrow and steep stairs to the attic quarters, he unclipped the torch from his belt, for he dare not flip on a light switch in case he disturbed somebody concealed up there. A creaking tread had his heart in his mouth but no shadowy figures appeared above him.

The second floor proved as devoid of people as the first, but he was unnerved by a bright light that shone at the bottom of the three doors at the top of the staircase. Should he risk going in, or should he collect his partner and just skip it? Taking his courage in both hands, he flung open a door as a pungent aroma assailed his nostrils, and the lit space, all knocked into one huge room, revealed a complex network of hydroponics and plants. An indoor forest of money lay before him: an expanse of evil triffids that could fill the mental health wards and fatten the coffers of whichever evil bastard had planted this ‘field of dreams’.

He encountered no opposition and made no sudden movement, stunned into immobility, until the wailing scream of an ambulance siren cut through his thoughts with the precision of a lancet, and he flew down the stairs like a hunted animal.

CHAPTER ONE

‘And where exactly was this?’

DI Olivia Hardy, passing a fairly average day in the CID suite in the town’s police station, held the handset away from her ear and stared at it as if it were a snake, her face livid as if what she was being told were an outrage. ‘And this was just down the road?’ There were a few seconds of relative silence as she listened intently, and then said, with incredulity, ‘And the poor cow survived?’

DS Lauren Groves looked up at these words, scenting trouble. ‘Whassup?’ she asked, still mentally embroiled in the paperwork she had been catching up with.

‘Come on. We can walk. It’s only in Gooding Avenue,’ was the terse reply. ‘It’s a nice day: for us, anyway.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘You’ll see. And right under our bloody noses. I don’t believe it. The barefaced cheek of some criminals.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘It’s quicker to look than to talk. Let’s be off.’

Nowhere in Littleton-on-Sea was far away from anything else, although this did not really include its new and rapidly burgeoning suburbs. The old town was small, and when Olivia had joined the police service, had little modern housing on its perimeter, with the exception of what had been, then, a brand new, sprawling council estate.

That had been in the days when the police station had been new as well, and the town was not a hotbed of crime. In the intervening years, however, it had spawned a huge ring of new and fairly cheap housing. The older buildings had continued to age and fall into disrepair and it was now like a pie, with a stale Georgian and Victorian filling and a hugely thick crust of rapidly ageing, jerry-built boxes.

The financial recessions of the last three decades had taken their toll on the economy of the town, as had cheap flights to Spain, and its mainstay – family holidays – had all but disappeared. There were precious few of the bucket-and-spade brigade left in England, most of them converted to kids’ clubs and sangria.

The boarding houses and bed and breakfasts had slowly dwindled and died, along with the jobs that they provided, and the town was now a sink for petty criminals, illegal immigrants and the casual trafficking of drugs. Olivia had seen this transformation and often mourned the loss of the olden days which, with the benefit of hindsight, she now regarded as the golden days.

She was, after all, approaching the big five-o in the next couple of years, and she felt every day of her age some days. She was married, and suddenly, with the good weather, remembered fondly how the summer had been a string of treats for her and her two children. Her husband, a teacher, had a lot of free time in the month of August, and ice creams, paddling, sandcastles and candyfloss had filled a lot of days and produced suitably exhausted and happy children at the end of them. August had been a month of endless pleasure, negating the need to go away for a holiday.

Now the summer meant the endless problems of what students, released from the endless round of partying of which their term-time consisted, relocating their louche activities back onto home soil. There were precious few holiday jobs for them to come back to, and so her days were filled with incidents of shoplifting, petty theft, small-scale drug deals and weekend fights fuelled by alcohol, drugs and legal highs, the like of which didn’t exist when she had been a rookie cop.

There had been no skunk then to suck kids into paranoia and schizophrenia, just good old hashish. There had been no alcopops to encourage kids to drink at a younger and younger age, and the concept of the legal high had not even been predicted. Life was so much harder for kids now. It wasn’t just an unwanted pregnancy that had to be avoided; it was the other multifarious temptations that modern life threw at them and expected them to be able to cope with.

With the advent of all these temptations, Olivia’s time in the service had had more and more to do with younger people getting involved in criminality, but a case that she and her fairly new partner, DS Lauren Groves, had dealt with late the previous year, and the personal problems that must have been forming for some time but which had eventually come to a head, had really piled on the pressure. Suddenly the presence in her life of her husband and children had been painfully highlighted, and she realised that she had not kept her eye on the family ball.

At least she still had Hal. Lauren had been deserted by her husband, Kenneth, who had run off with the family’s nanny, and was now having to cope with life as a single parent. Olivia was keeping a firm eye on the three other members of her family, determined that her job should not distract her as devastatingly as it had done such a short time ago.

This was a lot of introspection in such a short walk, and in just a couple of minutes they had reached the perimeter wall of a large, three-storeyed Victorian villa, set four-square in its gardens. At the wall stood a whey-faced community police officer and her male partner, who leaned against its solidity trying to appear as if he faced such horrors every day. An ambulance was just leaving the kerbside, its lights and siren on, and a gaggle of neighbours clustered on the pavement, weaving the cloth of rumours and speculation in an excited undertone.

Shaking her head to clear her mind of everything except what she was about to discover, she said, ‘DI Hardy and DS Groves. You found this?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ replied the male officer. He was tall and broad with dark skin and reminded Olivia of her husband Hal when he was younger.

‘You both look like you could do with a cup of something hot and sweet. Get yourselves back to the station and report to my office when we’ve finished here. I want a full verbal report and a written back-up. Don’t miss out any detail, no matter how small.’

The female officer looked after the disappearing ambulance and then whispered barely audibly, ‘Did they take the eyes? Please tell me they took the eyes.’

As Groves looked nonplussed, Hardy, keeping her voice gentle, instructed them to give their names to her sergeant and she’d see them back at the station later. ‘What was she talking about?’ asked Groves.

‘I hope you haven’t got a full stomach. Gird your loins. Let’s walk this one through, and I’ll get the station to contact the FME and a CSI team.’

A couple of uniforms sauntered up to guard the exits but soon altered their relaxed body language when they caught the inspector’s eye. The two detectives found the door on the latch, but not yet locked. Paper suits were donned in public view in the front garden, giving the goggling neighbours full value for money. This was the sort of thing that Hardy particularly disliked, being on the short and tubby side and managing to look scruffy even in her best clothes, whereas Lauren was tall and willowy and would have looked elegant in a bin liner.

Without a thought, the inspector yelled at them to disperse, as the pair stepped over the threshold into the drab void of the house. The flowers in the front garden, grown wild through lack of care, mingled their sweet perfumes, disturbed by the unaccustomed passage of visitors up and down the path, with that of the blood in the interior.

Within what seemed only seconds, they were joined by a white-suited horde, all eager to get involved in what promised to be a very unusual case. The position the woman had lain in was marked out, and numbered markers were placed where there was any sign of blood or other possible evidence. A photographer began to click away, occasionally pausing to take a sweep of video film on his small handheld camera.

Although the officers were fast, they were also thorough, and they soon moved ahead of the two previous arrivals on the crime scene. Hardy and Groves stepped slowly and carefully, observing each part of the house as they moved through it. The hall and ground floor rooms of the building gave the impression of a house, no longer a home, abandoned long ago.

The room, in the entrance of which the blinded woman had been found, was furnished only with two venerable but disintegrating sofas, each topped with a grubby sleeping bag and a filthy pillow. There was some detritus of everyday living, in the shape of a few empty beer cans, crushed and discarded, and a number of empty takeaway cartons, their contents long-consumed and casually discarded onto the already filthy carpet.

A room across the hall held only a solitary, rickety wooden chair – the one where PCSO Harris had bidden PCSO Strickland wait while he went through the rest of the house – and the remains of curtains, now in tatters, hung at the windows, doing their inadequate best to provide privacy for any inhabitants in the room.

The first foot or two of the kitchen looked like a tiny square of abattoir had been transferred there, so covered was it in blood, and numerous indications showed that there was a lot of evidence in this area. The victim here seemed to have been eviscerated and his face, even in death, showed his fear and incomprehension at the way events seemed to have overtaken him. Lauren had to look away from his eyes which appeared to be fixed in an expression of mute appeal for help that had never arrived. Without entering and contaminating the scene, the two women moved to the foot of the stairs where they waited whilst a couple of anonymous suited and masked officers scurried down. One murmured, ‘You’ll be amazed at what you’ll find up there,’ in her ear, scuttling off before she could identify his voice.

Before they could mount, however, a voice summoned Hardy to a cupboard underneath the wide staircase and showed her the electricity meter, which had been bypassed and was whirling away at great speed indicating a heavy usage of the utility. After a whistle of appreciation, they reached the first floor only to be overwhelmed by the amount of cigarette cartons, boxes of cigars and bottles of high-end malt whisky.

‘Good God!’ exclaimed Olivia. ‘Someone was planning a helluva party.’ The goods were stacked from floor to ceiling, with the exception of where there were windows, and several piles of exotic alcoholic ingredients were piled up in the middle of the floor. All the rooms proved to be similarly stuffed, but that did not explain the heavy use of electricity.

‘Next floor,’ an anonymous voice advised them, and they headed towards a much narrower staircase, this one covered in worn linoleum rather than the threadbare carpet of their route to the first floor.

It was the smell of which they were aware first, harsh and pungent, making them catch their breath. ‘Has some idiot left that door open?’ the same voice called out in disgust, and Hardy and Groves continued to mount the stairs, their hands over their mouths as they had not donned masks. ‘Get it shut!’ Whoever was calling the shots was determined to contain the odour.

Stepping gingerly through the door and closing it behind them, the two women were dumbfounded to see a waving crop of marijuana plants. The temperature was high, as was necessary for them to thrive, the floor lined with thick plastic so that the sprinklers could do their work without leaving watery signs on the ceilings below. The lights of the heat lamps were blinding.

The rest of the vast space, for all the rooms had been knocked into one, had been thickly insulated and then covered in a sturdy silver foil to reflect heat back into the attic, including the skylights. There were also wide pipes snaking around the room, all disappearing into what was evidently a chimney breast, and there were large fans which directed much of the smell into these flexible pipes. No wonder so much power was being used and, thanks to the meter being illegally bypassed, free gratis.

‘I’ve seen enough. I’ve got to get out of here. The smell’s making me feel really sick and peculiar.’

‘That, Sergeant, is the smell of ‘skunk’; hybridised by an American chap who managed to increase the strength of the drug thirty-fold, but omitted to transfer an important chemical which makes the effects benign. It’s from this evil combination of other strains that cannabis psychosis has emerged. Users become more and more paranoid and sometimes violent in the mistaken idea that they’re protecting themselves.

‘Skunk has virtually nothing in common with the hash the old hippies used to smoke and I strongly believe that instead of reclassifying it back up to Class B, it should have been separated out into its different strains and one made legal the way they’ve done in the Netherlands, the other stamped out with a viciousness that would leave its growers’ heads spinning.’

‘I didn’t realise you knew so much about it,’ coughed Groves, backing out of the doorway.

‘I made a point of it when I had that trouble with Ben last year.’ The inspector and Hal, a steel drummer and retired teacher from Barbados, had two children, Hibbie and Ben, aged sixteen and eighteen respectively. Both had rather blotted their copybooks in the previous year, and Olivia was still smarting from the incidents that had so rocked her world.

Groves had understood how shaken her partner had felt, as she contemplated the end of her marriage at the end of the previous year, when she had caught her husband in bed with the au pair, and they had both fled back to the Middle East where he was working on contract. Her children, Sholto and Jade, were, however, far too young to be involved in drugs, but had also suffered from the wind of change that had dragged them from attendance at their prep schools and catapulted them into a faith school close enough to their home for them to attend every day instead of boarding.

With a similarly nauseated expression, Hardy followed her, bidding her to get a move on. ‘We’ve got two new officers starting today, now that Redwood’s not coming back, and I want to be there when they arrive. We’ve also got a talk from someone from drugs and from traffic about some zero tolerance operation that’s coming up. As if we didn’t have enough to deal with here!’

Superintendent Devenish had decided that his force – strike that; his service – wasn’t ethnically diverse enough, so two officers were being transferred, one from Brighton and one from Yorkshire. Both DCs, Ali Desai complemented Terry Friend from the uniformed branch in representation of the Asian community, and Lee Oh satisfied the Far Eastern sector. Winston Harris, the Police Community Support Officer, had been an earlier appointment when the idea had first crossed devilish Devenish’s mind.

As the two women climbed the station stairs to the first floor CID office, the Super was on his way down from the second floor, his two new members of staff in tow. He seemed to have decided that he’d like to introduce them to the team himself. Gosh, he must be feeling smug, thought Olivia, as she tried not to stare at Devenish’s intimidating features. These two new appointments, apart from being a necessary addition to the CID staff, were typical of him – to blow with the wind on current thinking, in the hope of extra brownie points from above.

‘Come along, ladies. Where have you been?’ he bellowed and then, without giving them a chance to answer, added, ‘Your place at the moment is with your team, settling in these two new officers.’ Both women clamped together their lips lest they should say something they might regret. Hardy was being particularly cautious as she had been under the senior officer’s beady surveillance since they’d had a little professional difference of opinion at the end of last year, and she’d been trying to keep her nose clean ever since.

He entered the CID office with no clue to his imminent arrival therein, and discovered a cacophony that would’ve disgraced an unruly classroom. ‘Silence!’ he bellowed, clapping his hands for extra volume and, as the noise tailed away, turned to DI Hardy and gave it as his opinion that she should teach her staff a little office decorum. ‘This is a place of work, not a playground – who threw that paper aeroplane?’ he continued, raising his voice again.

An embarrassed silence greeted this question, and he resumed in a slightly quieter voice, ‘May I introduce you to your new colleagues, DC Oh and DC Desai.’ He waved a magnanimous hand in the direction of the two embarrassed but smiling strangers. To this there was a smattering of applause and a couple of catcalls. ‘I want you to take them under your wing and assimilate them into your team as . . .