‘Thanks.’ McLusky shivered. He thought he could feel the dampness in the fifty-year-old cement bricks on the other side of the plasterboard, could hear the rustle of their slow crumbling. He pointed to the envelope. ‘This is precisely the amount of paperwork I can cope with. Can you see it stays like that, please?’
‘We’ll do our very best, sir.’ Austin’s lopsided grin acknowledged the avalanche of paperwork heading for the inspector’s in-tray.
The phone on his pristine desk rang. He took a deep breath then picked it up. Anyone could make a mistake. ‘DI McLusky.’
It was Area Control. ‘Sir, I know this sounds like a job for Uniform, but …’ The young male voice hesitated.
‘Go on then.’
‘The original call was made by a Mrs Spranger, sounded like a domestic at an address in Redland. We’ve sent two units so far and both have gone off the air. We always have reception problems in Redland. We’ve since had a mobile phone call from one of the officers and he seemed a bit incoherent. There was a lot of background noise …’
‘Okay, we’ll deal. What’s the address?’ He snatched up the keys, turned the form around and snapped his fingers for a pen. Austin unhooked a biro from his shirt pocket and obliged. McLusky scribbled down the unfamiliar address and hung up then pocketed the pen in his leather jacket. Austin opened his mouth then thought better of it.
‘Right.’ McLusky held up the paper for Austin to read. ‘Where is this place? We’ll take my car, just lead me to it.’
The car turned out to be a grey Skoda. ‘You sure you want to drive, sir?’ Austin doubted the wisdom of it but got in at the passenger side anyway.
‘Positive. Just give me clear directions and in good time. The sooner I find my way round town the better.’ McLusky avoided being driven if at all possible. He hated being a passenger, always had done. ‘Never driven one of these before, though.’ He pulled out of the station car park. It felt good to be holding a steering wheel again. Skodas used to be joke cars, now the police couldn’t get enough of them.
‘Go left here. The new Skoda. 180 bhp, they’re okay, actually.’
‘We’ll find out if you’re right in a minute. How long’ve you been at Albany Road?’
‘Two years. Bath before that, then a spell at Trinity Road.’
‘Your accent?’
‘I grew up in Edinburgh but we left when I was sixteen. We moved around a lot. Straight across here, sir, and keep going downhill till the next set of lights, then left and left again.’
Traffic really was appalling but using the siren sometimes made matters worse, people froze or blundered into each other. ‘Keep telling me where I am so I’ll learn the streets. I did spend a couple of hours with the A-Z a while back but it’s not the same.’ After the lights McLusky found a stretch of miraculously drivable road, put his foot down and got blitzed by two speed cameras in short succession before having to slow right down again.
‘This is Broadmead, still faster through here this time of day.’
‘Trinity Road is district headquarters, right?’
‘Right. I hated it. Keep going, but try and get into the left laaaaane.’ Austin gripped the dashboard as McLusky braked abruptly so as to narrowly miss colliding with a biker who hadn’t expected a Skoda doing fifty across the junction.
McLusky barged on through the traffic. ‘It does move, this thing. What’s the super like? I mean I have met him, of course, once, but that was formal. To work under?’
‘Ehm, Denkhaus?’ Austin sounded distracted as his DI drove across three lanes, getting snarled in traffic, weaving, bullying his way through. ‘Up Stokes Croft until I tell you. Ehm, he’s a no-nonsense copper, can suddenly become a stickler for procedure when the mood takes him. I have book-shaped indentations on my head to prove it. Someone suggested it always happens when he tries to lose weight. Sugar cravings.’ He pointed across the street. ‘Not a bad takeaway that, by the way.’
McLusky came up behind a bus going at walking pace. He worked the horn, mounted the pavement and managed to overtake in the space between two lamp-posts. Just.
Austin kept his eyes firmly shut until he felt the car regain the road.
‘I remember this bit, came down here on my way to the station. But keep up the directions. Albany Road a happy nick?’
‘Depends who you’re working with, but yeah, it’s all right, I suppose.’
McLusky parped his horn at a pedestrian who looked like he might just be thinking of stepping into the road.
Austin hung on tight and gave directions in good time since the inspector was already cornering with squealing tyres. He didn’t know a lot about the man and half of that was rumour. He was about five years older than himself, he guessed, thirty-three or — four. He’d transferred up to Bristol from Southampton after nearly getting himself killed in the line of duty there. University man and difficult with it, someone had said. And something about being a bad team player. Unpredictable. Not exactly what they needed at Albany. He sneaked a glance at the new DI. He seemed utterly relaxed despite driving at speed in a new town and an unfamiliar road system. Some system. ‘Next left.’
McLusky didn’t slow. ‘I live down that street over there, next to the Italian grocer’s.’ He cornered and accelerated up the hill.
‘Above Rossi’s? What’s it like? Left and directly right again.’
‘The grocer’s?’
‘Your place.’
‘Well … Quite cheap. Totally unmodernized, wonky floorboards, no central heating or anything.’ No heating at all, now he came to think of it.
Austin shrugged. He could only dream of central heating. He and his fiancee had just scraped together enough for a tiny dilapidated end-of-terrace. Heating would have to wait. ‘I quite like Montpelier, couple of good pubs round there. Go left, no idea what that’s called, and right up the hill.
‘Keep going, nearly there. Careful, there’s often dopey schoolkids wandering across this street.’
McLusky worked the horn again. Austin had never driven through the city at this speed, not even with Blues and Twos. He hated to think what kind of speeds the DI reserved the siren for. McLusky drove up on the wrong side of the road, overtaking everything, barging through, getting a chorus of angry horn play in return.
‘Turn right, that should be it.’
‘Very leafy round here.’ They certainly had the right place. There was no need to look for the paper on which he had scribbled the name of the house. Just beyond the crest of the humpback street was the scene of the disturbance, unlike any domestic McLusky had yet attended in his eight years on the force. Spectators had gathered on the opposite side of the road. He pulled up and jumped out. They were intercepted by a distraught-looking constable. McLusky showed him his ID.
‘I’m glad you’re here, sir.’
‘I bet you are. What the hell’s going on?’
The drive of the squat detached house looked like a scrapheap. At various angles stood two squad cars, a BMW and what appeared to have been a green civilian Volvo. All four cars were utterly destroyed, their roofs caved in, windows missing, in fact there wasn’t a single surface left undamaged on any of them. Behind all the battered metal, on the once well-kept lawn, stood an enormous wheeled digger, its engine growling, its hydraulic arm pivoting left and right, threatening two uniformed constables with oblivion. At the house the curtains were drawn at all the windows.
‘It’s a domestic, sir. The individual in the cab of the digger is a Mr Spranger and he is the owner of the house. He intends to destroy it.’
‘Did he steal the digger?’
‘No, he owns that too.’
‘He owns the house and he owns the digger? Well, that’s all right then. Why don’t we let him?’ McLusky shrugged. He hated domestics. Everyone hated domestics. There was nothing more tedious on the planet than people who needed the police to sort out their relationships.
‘My sentiment entirely, but we can’t. It appears Mrs Spranger is still inside. Though that doesn’t seem to bother him. He’s going to demolish it around her ears. Told us to clear off his property, sir, and when we didn’t he attacked our vehicles. The other cars were already totalled when we got here.’