He shrugged. “Guy’s coming down with a cold?”
“Out of the blue? Just like that?”
“Maybe he decided to have a wee taste of his own product.”
“Oh aye, right. You wake up in the night, you can’t get back to sleep, so you do a line of coke?”
Dennis laughed. “Right enough,” he said. We left it at that. After all, there’s nothing inherently suspicious about somebody having a sneezing fit in the middle of the night. Unless, of course, they never wake up.
I was spark out myself when Greg Thomas made his presence felt again. Groggy with tiredness, I reached for the phone, registering the time on my bedside clock. Just after one o’clock. I’d been in bed for less than four hours. I’d barely grunted a greeting when a familiar voice battered my eardrum.
“What the hell were you doing last night?” Detective Inspector Phil Barclay demanded.
“Listening in, boss,” I said. “With Dennis. Like I was supposed to be. Why?”
“Because while you were listening in, somebody cut Greg Thomas’s throat.”
On my way to the scene, I called Jimmy Lister and tried to piece together what had happened. When the day shift hadn’t heard a peep out of Thomas by noon, they’d grown suspicious. They began to wonder if he’d somehow done a runner. So they’d got the management company to let them into Thomas’s flat and they’d found him sprawled across his bed, throat gaping like some monstrous grin.
By the time I got to the flat, there was a huddle of people on the landing. Drugs Squad, Serious Crime guys, and, of course, the Scaffies. Phil Barclay was at the centre of the group. “There you are, Chrissie,” he said. “So how the hell did you miss a murder while you were staking out the victim?” For Phil to turn on one of his own in front of other cops was unheard of. I knew I was in for a very rough ride.
Before I could answer, Dennis emerged from the stairwell. “Listen to the tapes, boss,” he said. “Then you’ll hear everything we did. Which is nothing.”
“Except for the sneezing,” I said slowly.
All the eyes were on me now. “About twenty past three. Somebody had a sneezing fit. It must have lasted a couple of minutes at least.” I looked at Dennis, who nodded in confirmation.
“We assumed it was Thomas,” he said.
“That would fit,” one of the other cops said. I didn’t know his name, but I knew he was from Serious Crime. “The pathologist estimates time of death between two and five a.m.”
Samuels from the Drugs Squad stuck his head out of the flat. “Phil, do you want to take a look inside, see if anything’s out of place from when you had the video running?”
Barclay looked momentarily uncomfortable. “Chrissie, you and Dennis take a look. I didn’t really pay much attention to the video footage.”
“Talk about distancing yourself,” Dennis muttered as we entered the flat, sidestepping a SOCO who was examining the lock on the door through a jeweller’s loupe.
I paused and said, “Key or picks?”
The SOCO looked up. “Picks, I’d say. Fresh scratches on the tumblers.”
“He must have been bloody good,” I said. “We never heard a thing.”
Greg Thomas wasn’t a pretty sight. I was supposed to be looking round the flat, but my eyes were constantly drawn back to the bed. “How come we never heard it? You’d think he’d have made some sort of noise.”
One of the technicians looked up from the surface he was dusting for prints. “The doc said it must have been an incredibly sharp blade. Went through right to the spine, knife through butter. He maybe would have made a wee gurgle, but that’s all.”
At first glance, nothing in the flat looked different. I stepped round the bed towards the alcove where Thomas had his work station. “His laptop’s gone,” I said, pointing to the cable lying disconnected on the desk.
“Great. So now we know we’re looking for a killer with a laptop,” Dennis said. “That’ll narrow it down.”
Back on the landing, Phil told us abruptly to head back to base. “We’ll have a debrief in an hour,” he said. “The Drugs Squad guys can run us through Thomas’s known associates and enemies. Maybe they’ll recognise somebody from our surveillance.”
I walked back to my car, turning everything over in my head. The timing stuck in my throat. It felt like an uncomfortable coincidence that Greg Thomas had been killed the very night we’d lost our video cover. I knew Phil Barclay and Samuels were tight from way back and wondered whether my boss had mentioned the problem to Samuels. If the mole knew we were watching, he might have decided the best way to avoid detection was to silence his paymaster for good. That would also explain the silence. None of Thomas’s rivals could have known about the need to keep the noise levels down.
Slowly, an idea began to form in my head. We might have lost the direct route to the Drugs Squad’s bad apple, but maybe there was still an indirect passage to the truth. I made a wee detour on the way back to the office, wondering at my own temerity for even daring to think the way I was.
The debrief was the usual mixture of knowledge and speculation, but because there were three separate teams involved, the atmosphere was edgy. The DI from the Serious Crime Squad told us to assume our unidentified drunk was the killer. He hadn’t been heading for a flat, he’d been making for the back stairs. Apparently the lock on the door leading to the penthouse floor showed signs of having been forced. He’d probably left by the same route, using the fire door at the rear of the building. He showed our pix on the big screen, but not even the guy’s mother could have identified him from that. “And that is all we know so far,” he said.
The silhouette I’d been expecting finally showed up outside the frosted glass door of the briefing room. I put up my hand. “Not quite all, sir,” I said. “We also know he’s allergic to lily pollen.”
As I spoke, the door opened and the desk officer walked in, looking sheepish behind a big bouquet of stargazer lilies. The fragrance spread out in an arc before him as he walked towards Samuels. “I was told these were urgent,” he said apologetically.
I held my breath, my eyes nailed to the astonished faces of Samuels and his cohort of Drugs Squad detectives.
And that’s when Phil Barclay shattered the stunned silence with a fusillade of sneezes.
Copyright ©; 2005 by Val McDermid.
Road Hazard
by David Dean
“If there is a theme to this story,” author David Dean told EQMM, “it is the difference betwixt justice and reckoning, and how one can so closely resemble the other.” The situation his protagonist confronts is one many readers will be familiar with, even if not to so devastating an extreme: the need to deal with a socially disruptive neighbor. Mr. Dean is a police captain in a New Jersey resort town, and he’s chosen to make his lead character this time someone from the police.
Rueben had lived in the same house for twelve years and held the same job for two more and considered himself a steady man and a good neighbor, or at least an undemanding one. When, he asked himself angrily on his drive home, had he offended anyone? In what way? Why did he now have to dread returning to his own neighborhood each night after work? When had the comfort of his routine and the blessed placidity of his solitary existence become so threatened?
These were not new questions that Rueben grappled with and, in fact, were rhetorical in nature: a mantra of dissatisfaction, unease, and frustration that was recited nightly on his long way home from the police department where he was employed. Rueben already knew the answers to the why and when of his questions; the agony lay in the what-to-do.