Slow Slicing (DI Bliss Book 7) Page 6

After Chandler had found a parking spot and killed the engine, Bliss remained in his seat. When she asked him what was up, his thoughts turned to a disturbing incident the previous afternoon. It had left him feeling rattled, and he found himself telling the story. ‘Curious thing,’ he said softly. ‘When I got home yesterday, there was a dog curled up on the little open porch outside my house. I saw its ear twitch, and it opened one eye, but other than that it didn’t stir. Not even when I went to the front door. It was an old lab, and it reminded me of my two towards the end. But this one was so thin its bones protruded through its pelt. It didn’t have a collar on, but you don’t usually see stray labradors. Anyway, I tried to coax the poor thing indoors, but it just lay there. So I brought it out a plate of food and a saucer of warm tea and left the door open in case it decided to follow me inside.’

  ‘And did it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did you feed it? I’ve been to your house, Jimmy, and it’s usually a toss-up between you and Old Mother Hubbard as to who has the barest cupboards.’

  ‘I had half a loaf of stale bread left over, so I made a couple of slices of toast. Bonnie and Clyde used to love a bit of hot buttered toast.’

  ‘Yeah, but to be fair, they would have wolfed down anything you gave them.’

  He smiled at the memory. ‘That’s true. Anyhow, when I went back outside half an hour later the plate was empty, the tea was all gone. But so was the dog.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t a stray, after all. Maybe it was just hungry.’

  Bliss nodded, reaching for the handle to open his door. ‘I suppose. The thing is, the bloody image of it stuck in my mind all night. The dog was old and tired, looked as if it had no place to go, and I couldn’t shake the idea that it was going through the final motions. Winding down its clock.’

  Chandler’s gaze across the roof of her car was shrewd as she locked up. ‘Don’t worry about it, Jimmy. It was a hungry animal. No more, no less. It didn’t represent anything greater. You didn’t see yourself in dog form.’

  Bliss laughed the suggestion off as the pair headed into the station; outwardly, at least. Inwardly, he wondered why Chandler’s mind had taken her to precisely the same place as his own. From the moment he first laid eyes on the dog until the point at which sleep eventually claimed him, he’d accorded the animal greater significance than a mere stray happening to have settled on a patch of ground outside his house to grab a nap.

  Throughout the night, his sleep had been uneasy. He worried about where the dog was. Had it gone off somewhere to die? All alone. Nobody to care for it, nobody to provide it one last night of shelter. Was it out there now, wandering lonely streets as its wearied body began to break down?

  The first thing Bliss had done after waking was to check outside. The water he’d left beside the doorstep was gone, but any passing animal might have lapped it up. As he showered and dressed, he fretted, asking himself why he was associating the dog so closely with himself. They were not at all the same; he had choices, but the lab did not have free will. The whole thing was ridiculous, yet it clung to him like a second skin.

  Shrugging all thoughts of the dog aside as he and Chandler made their way into the building, Bliss got his head back on straight. A tough few days lay ahead, and he needed all of his wits about him. As soon as he was safely ensconced behind his desk, he entered his credentials into the computer system and caught up on the weekend jobs.

  Uniform had been busy with the usual nightclub fallout, Traffic equally so in separate vehicle thefts and chases across the city, while the drugs squad had been called out to the same address twice in one night. A single major crime had occurred when a teenage boy was stabbed by a girl also in her teens, thought to be earning her stripes with an all-female gang whose territory stretched from the Dogsthorpe area to New England. The young lad was recovering in intensive care, having required surgery after a kitchen knife penetrated his spleen. The girl had been arrested by officers following up on a witness statement, and removed from her mother’s home. She was charged at 1.37am with wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. A Section 18 offence was a serious one, and if found guilty the girl’s gang entrance fee might cost her the rest of her life behind bars. If legal aid pleaded it down to an assault without intent, the maximum sentence reduced accordingly to five years. Her solicitor would fight for the reduction, but going by the report Bliss was currently reading, the CPS were hot for this one.

  Knife crimes were never anything less than tragic and wasteful, in his opinion – a view he often extended to the perpetrators as well as the victims. His thoughts drifted back to the first time he had set eyes on Molly, standing on a hotel rooftop in the icy winter rain, clutching the knife with which she had stabbed a drug dealer by the name of Ryan Endicott. So long ago, yet it felt like yesterday to Bliss. How close had Molly come to ruining her own life only hours before he met her when she was a mere step away from certain death?

  Not wishing to dwell on the awfulness of such a possibility, Bliss logged out. He’d follow up on the stabbing later on, but he thought right now it would be best to get a head start on the joint task force by running the situation past his own boss. He sent a text message to DCI Warburton, requesting a meeting as soon as it was convenient, then went in search of his team.

  Chandler was chatting with her fellow sergeant Olly Bishop, and DC Gul Ansari. There was no sign of his valuable DCs Hunt and Gratton. When Bliss questioned their absence, Bishop reminded him that Hunt was on annual leave, while Gratton was tied up in court all day. He and Hunt had made an arrest following a series of armed robberies in which a pair of crowbar-wielding thugs on a motorcycle had attacked the windows of small jewellery stores. Turned out to be brother and sister, keeping it in the family after their father had been sent down on his fourth stretch for burglary. With the more experienced detective expected to be away on holiday, Gratton had volunteered to work with the CPS and give evidence.

  ‘Has Penny filled you in regarding my little jaunt to Wiltshire?’ Bliss asked the remaining two detectives. He already knew the answer, but wanted to give the impression of being charitable to his DS. In reality, he had no doubt Chandler had recounted his news the moment she’d laid eyes on her colleagues.

  Bishop nodded. He was a bull of a man, and already looked uncomfortable in his ill-fitting navy Cambridgeshire Police T-shirt. Bliss always thought it looked as if it had been designed to be worn by a Yeti. ‘Sounds as if they had about as much luck as us – amounting to zilch. This second carving sounds interesting, though.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’ Bliss still believed there would be further figures on additional slices of flesh, which explained his lack of enthusiasm. ‘Once we can make sense of them, it’ll open up an avenue for us to explore. Right now, I’m pissed off again. Our wheels were stuck in the mud and we were going nowhere fast, so when I heard about the second chunk of flesh, it got my hopes up.’

  ‘And we all know how you feel about hope, boss,’ Ansari said, raising her eyebrows.

  Bliss was not a fan, and those who worked closely with him knew better than to express their own blind optimism in his presence. He cleared his throat and said, ‘I don’t feel as if we’re going to be moving forward any time soon. If this is a game, I’m convinced our man still has several pieces of the puzzle for us yet.’

  ‘So how do you think this JTFO will work?’ Chandler asked. ‘We stick to our own areas of investigation and link with Swindon online and through records?’

  Bliss had worked on many joint task force operations. The largest ops tended to have too many moving parts to work cohesively, invariably leading to confusion and territorial disagreement. Those with two, three, or a maximum of four separate units involved in a single operation were big enough to make a difference, yet small enough to be effective without unduly ruffling feathers.

  ‘It depends,’ he replied. ‘I suspect it’ll be a mixture, doing prett
y much as you suggest on a daily basis, but with some face-to-face meetings and briefings thrown in. Most of them we can do online, but others we may need to drive down for. It’s a five-hour round trip, so there are likely to be some overnighters involved. That going to be okay with Shrek, DS Chandler?’

  Matching his leery smile, Chandler fluttered her eyelashes and said, ‘I’m sure Graham will understand. His own job requires him to travel extensively, remember?’

  Bliss did. At the start of the year, Chandler had flown out to Turkey to spend a week with her daughter who lived on the south coast. On the flight home, she’d sat next to a chatty man who happened to live in Huntingdon. They got on well during the journey, and as they headed to passport control, the man – Graham – took a shot and asked her out on a date. Chandler had accepted, and the pair were now a steady item. He was built like an oak wardrobe, bald with curiously twisted ears, and Bliss had immediately christened him ‘Shrek’ following their first meeting.

  Ignoring the numerous possibilities for humorous quips, Bliss was delighted for his colleague and friend. Chandler had endured a lot of pain and ugliness in her life, especially after her Turkish boyfriend had abducted their two-year-old daughter and taken her back to his homeland, where she had remained without word for almost seventeen years. By the time Chandler got to see her own daughter again, Anna was a young woman herself – not far off the age Chandler had been when the girl was so abruptly removed from her life. Two weeks ago, Anna had come over to the UK on a student visa to prepare for her linguistics PhD at Cambridge University, having been accepted into Churchill College. Already buzzing with her new relationship, Chandler found it hard to believe her change in fortune at having her daughter now living an hour’s drive away as well, their close relationship restored.

  About to get deeper into the conversation about the JTFO, Bliss’s attention was diverted by his mobile telling him a text message had come in. It was from DCI Warburton, instructing him to meet her in the conference room in five minutes.

  He glanced up to see three expectant faces. ‘The boss,’ he said, jiggling the phone. ‘I thought I’d get in first on the whole joint task force angle.’

  ‘You think they’ll go for it?’ Ansari asked.

  Bliss pocketed his mobile and spread his hands. ‘I don’t see why not, Gul. A nice big win for Major Crimes is precisely what the doctor ordered.’

  ‘You’re assuming it’s a case we can win, boss.’

  He teetered in place, about to leave but forced to stop by her apparent doubt. ‘I don’t like to assume anything,’ he said. ‘However, I do have faith in this team. Even with doubters like you in it, Gul.’

  He winked at the horrified expression on her face and left the room, laughing to himself.

  Nine

  The canteen was still open by the time Bliss’s meeting with his boss was over. The room was heaving, leaving not a single spare chair available, so he bought himself a coffee and took his drink back upstairs. A small partitioned room at the back of the Major Crimes area had once been used for breaks and minor meetings, but had since been commandeered by DCI Warburton for use as an office. She had eschewed the larger, grander room on the floor above to be closer to the team. The concept was fine by Bliss, but it had robbed the squad of their own area in which to snatch a drink together away from their desks. Bliss brought the coffee into his office and shut himself away.

  Moments later there was a knock on the door. He closed his eyes and blew out a long, irritated breath. This was precisely why he preferred to take breaks elsewhere; if you were in your office, people considered you available. The door opened without him having uttered a word. His exasperation increased – until he saw DCI Warburton’s head peek around. Seeing him at his desk, she came all the way in.

  The meeting had gone about as well as he had expected, after a surprise beginning. Bliss had wondered why the DCI had chosen the conference room to meet in – a puzzle solved the moment he entered to find Superintendent Fletcher waiting for him as well.

  ‘I thought you were on annual leave, ma’am,’ Bliss said as he took his own seat at the table. ‘Otherwise I would have come to you directly with this.’

  ‘I was. We were only in the Peak District, and when I heard about the find down in Swindon, I thought I’d better get back here.’

  Bliss liked that about the DSI. She allowed her team to carry out their duties without micromanaging, but she believed in making herself available throughout the more serious crimes. Having gone on to discuss the second find in more detail, Warburton and Fletcher agreed it made sense for Bliss and his team to lead a joint task force with Gablecross. Fletcher said she would call her counterpart in Wiltshire to suggest they combine efforts and budgets, and to draw up specific protocols for the operation. Bliss had left the DCI and Super to it afterwards, so Warburton must have come to his office to discuss something further.

  ‘Happy with the arrangements?’ she asked, remaining on her feet but leaning back against the wall. As a rule she’d always worn trouser suits, but he’d noticed a shift towards long, flowing dresses lately. Today’s was sleeveless, with a faint butterfly pattern on the sky-blue material.

  ‘I was,’ he replied carefully. ‘Whether I still will be after you’ve said your piece is a different matter.’ He took a long draw from his coffee, the hot liquid spiking his system.

  ‘It’s nothing you haven’t already realised, judging by what you said upstairs,’ Warburton said. ‘The DSI made the call while I was with her. She asked for, and received, full cooperation. However, Gablecross mentioned their concerns over the possibility of DSI Conway being compromised by a potential prior association to the case and to you, though they are no further along in understanding exactly why or how that might occur.’

  Bliss brushed it aside. ‘So these crimes have ended up being investigated by two people whose careers crossed many years back. And now they’re projecting further down the line and seeing problems where none exist.’

  ‘It’s called anticipation, Jimmy. You have no idea precisely what kind of case you have on your hands, and DSI Conway has admitted the same thing. Neither of you know what these weird flesh carvings mean. But you did work for the same unit at the same time many years ago, and now the connection between your two individual cases is clear. I’m not suggesting they’re right to have concerns, but they are absolutely right to consider the potential and anticipate problems arising from it.’

  ‘And I still say there’s nothing to it, boss. This kind of chance encounter happens all the time. Take that fraud case we ran with Leicestershire a few months ago, for instance; I happened to have worked a couple of cases with their SIO when I was based in Bedford. Nobody imagined that investigation was personal to us, and of course it never was. Also, as I’ve been at pains to point out, Conway and I never worked the same case together. There is no connection between me and him, other than a passing one.’

  ‘I understand, and I agree with you – it’s extremely unlikely, because the association between the two of you is so tenuous. However, Gablecross are already imagining the headlines once these two crimes are officially linked and the media’s FOI requests confirm the SOCA association.’

  Bliss threw himself back in his chair and groaned. ‘Bloody Freedom of Information requests. The bane of our existence.’

  ‘I thought the bane of our existence was policy and procedure, according to you?’ Warburton’s lips thinned, hinting at banter rather than complaint.

  ‘Yes, well… those as well.’ His brief amusement faded. ‘If it becomes a sideshow to the investigation, though, it’s a pain in the arse. Conway’s bosses are just worried that he may be compromised by media speculation. They need to get over it.’

  ‘They’re being proactive, Jimmy. It’s a watching brief for now, that’s all.’

  ‘Leaving you with the small matter of whether I end up in the same boat.’

>   Bliss saw by the change in Warburton’s expression that he had guessed right.

  ‘Look,’ he said, taking the edge off his voice. ‘If I’m wrong and somehow we’re linked to these crimes in a way we can’t yet see, then we’ll deal with it at the appropriate time.’

  ‘Of course,’ Warburton said. ‘But we both know there’s a difference between how you currently regard the issue – before you’ve got the bit between your teeth – and how you’ll feel further down the track if you have to be removed from the case when you’re into the final straight.’

  Bliss raised a feeble smile. ‘You did well to keep the horse racing analogy going there, boss.’

  Warburton inclined her head and pushed her mass of wavy auburn hair to one side. ‘I thought so. I almost lost the reins halfway through, but I whipped myself back into line just in time.’

  He nodded his appreciation this time. ‘Smoothly done.’

  ‘Thank you. Listen, we’ve worked together long enough now for you to understand the way I do things.’

  ‘And vice versa.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d go that far. I think even if I had a dozen more years under my belt I’d still not fully get to grips with the way your mind works. However, we have reached an understanding. I also think we get along pretty well. Unlike Alicia Edwards who claimed to be giving you enough rope to hang yourself with, I think of it more as one of those extendable dog leads. I want you out there doing your thing and sniffing out clues, but I also need to know you’ll come to heel when I call.’

  Bliss set his coffee down on the desk harder than he’d intended. The mention of him and a dog in the same sentence so soon after his conversation with Chandler was unnerving, but he shut it down before it caused his mind to race. He liked and admired the DCI, and was keen for them to continue working closely together. ‘With respect, boss, I see no issue here. There’s no current evidence to suggest a personal or professional prior connection to this case, and I don’t foresee any. Admittedly, there are a couple of minor coincidences in play, but I’ve already considered and dismissed them. And unless circumstances change, I see no reason why I should not run the JTFO.’