He stood and went to the door and watched the tubby figure pacing about in the orchard, kicking at the newly laid turf. He had all the hallmarks of a practised snooper. And there were more of them. He had a so-called wife down at the Blue Boar. A snooperess! Well, that was all right. He could handle that. And he wouldn’t be surprised at all if they were both in cahoots with the landlord at the Blue Boar and his wife, who were both known spies and eavesdroppers. Well, he could deal with them, too. And any other henchmen or henchwomen who happened to be about.
Tragically, Loopy had been obliged to let fall the torch for urgent personal reasons, but he, Jimbo, would snatch it up and carry it ever forward. The call had come and whenever the call had come in the past, Jimbo Garside had never been found wanting. He would not be found wanting now.
He picked up Loopy’s trilby from the table and put it on. It was a little small but snug enough. Actually, old Loopy might have been on to something with this BacoFoil wheeze of his, because the ringing in his head seemed to diminish instantly. He stepped outside and picked up the faithful shovel from where it leaned against the kitchen wall, right there next to the spot where the Mem had plummeted from a ladder while heroically trying to save a cat.
And with the sound of muted carillons and trumpets in his ears, the simple soldier hitched up his pyjamas, shouldered arms, and walked into the orchard, to begin doing his duty for the Old Country and for Loopy Drinkwater, the best chum a chap could ever wish to have.
Copyright ©; 2005 by Neil Schofield.
Sneeze for Danger
by Val McDermid
Val McDermid’s name has appeared on numerous awards lists over the past few years. In 2004, her novel The Distant Echo (St. Martin’s Minotaur) won both Sherlock magazine’s award for best novel (unique among mystery awards in that it goes to the fictional detective, not the author) and the Barry Award, sponsored by Deadly Pleasures magazine. The author’s many fans will be happy to know that her new book, The Torment of Others, will soon be out.
I shifted in my canvas chair, trying to get uncomfortable. The hardest thing about listening to somebody sleeping is staying awake yourself. Mind you, there wasn’t much to hear. Greg Thomas was never going to get complaints from his girlfriends about his snoring. I’d come on stakeout duty at midnight, and all I’d heard was the tinny tail end of some American sports commentary on the TV, the flushing of a toilet, and a few grunts that I took to be him getting comfortable in the big bed that dominated his extravagantly stylish studio penthouse.
I knew about the bed and the expensive style because we also had video surveillance inside Thomas’s flat. Well, we’d had it till the previous afternoon. According to Jimmy Lister, who shared the day shift, Thomas had stopped in at the florist’s on his way back from a meet with one of his dealers and emerged with two big bunches of lilies. Back at the flat, he’d stuffed them into a vase and placed them right in front of the wee fibre-optic camera. Almost as if he knew.
But of course, he couldn’t have known. If he’d had any inkling that we were watching, it wouldn’t have been business as usual in the Greg Thomas drugs empire. He wouldn’t have gone near his network of middlemen, and he certainly wouldn’t have been calling his partner in crime to discuss her forthcoming trip to Curacao. If he’d known we were watching him, he’d have assumed we were trying to close him down and he’d have been living the blameless life.
He’d have been wrong. I’m not that sort of cop. That’s not to say I don’t think people like Greg Thomas should be put away for a very long time. They should. They are responsible for a disproportionate amount of human misery, and they don’t deserve to be living the high life. Thomas’s cupidity played on others’ stupidity, but that didn’t make any of it all right.
Nevertheless, my interest was not in making a case against Thomas. What mattered to me was the reason nobody else had been able to do just that. Three times the Drugs Squad had initiated operations against Greg Thomas’s multimillion-pound business, and three times they’d come away empty-handed. There was only one possible conclusion. Somebody on the inside was taking Thomas’s shilling.
Samuels, who runs the Drugs Squad, had finally conceded he wasn’t going to put Greg Thomas away until he’d put his own house in order. And that’s where we came in.
Nobody loves us. Our fellow cops call us the Scaffies. That’s Scots for “bin men.” My brother, who studied Scottish literature at university, says it’s probably a corruption of scavengers. Me, I prefer to knock off the first two letters. Avengers, that’s what we are. We’re there to avenge the punters who pay our wages and get robbed of justice because some cops see get-rich-quick opportunities where the rest of us see the chance to make a collar.
It’s easy to be cynical in my line of work. When your job is to sniff out corruption, it’s hard to see past that. It’s difficult to hang on to the missionary zeal when you’re constantly exposed to the venality of your fellow man. I’ve seen cops selling their mates down the river for the price of a package holiday. Sometimes I almost believe that some of them do it for the same reason as criminals commit crimes — because they can. And they’re the ones who are most affronted when we sit them down and confront them with what theu’ve done.
So. Nobody loves us. But what’s worse is that doing this job for any length of time provokes a kind of emotional reversal. It’s almost impossible for us Scaffies to love anybody. Mistrust becomes a habit, and nothing will poison a relationship faster than that. In the end, all you’ve got is your team. There’s eight of us, and we’re closer than most marriages. We’re a detective inspector, two sergeants, and five constables. But rank matters less here than anywhere else in the force. We need to believe in each other, and that’s the bottom line.
Movement in the street below caught my attention. A shambling figure, staggering slightly, making his way down the pavement opposite our vantage point. I nudged my partner Dennis, who rolled his shoulders as he leaned forward, focussed the camera, and snapped off a couple of shots. Not that they’d be any use. The three a.m. drunk was dressed for the weather, the collar of his Puffa jacket close round his neck and his baseball cap pulled down low. He stopped outside Thomas’s building and keyed the entry code into the door. There were sixteen flats in the block and we knew most of the residents by sight. I didn’t recognise this guy, though.
Through the glass frontage of the building opposite, we could see him weaving his way to the lift. He hit the call button and practically fell inside when the doors opened. I was fully alert now. Not because I thought anything untoward was going down, but because anything that gets the adrenaline going in middle-of-the-night surveillance is welcome. The lift stopped on the second floor, and the drunk lurched out into the lobby, turning to his left and heading for one of the flats at the rear of the building. We relaxed and settled back into our chairs. Dennis, my partner, snorted. “I wouldn’t like to be inside his head in the morning,” he said.
I reached down and pulled a thermos of coffee out of my bag. “You want some?”
Dennis shook his head. “I’ll stick to the Diet Coke,” he said.
It was about fifteen minutes later that we heard it. Our headphones exploded into life with a volley of sneezing. I nearly fell out of my chair. The volume was deafening. It seemed to go on forever. A choking, spluttering, gasping fit that I thought would never end. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it ended. I looked at Dennis. “What the hell was that?”