Over the Edge Read online

  I was so pleased I decided to reward myself by not going for a jog. I’d settled down with yesterday’s newspaper when the phone rang. The clock on the wall said ten to six.

  ‘What’s the trouble?’ I asked. ‘At this time in the morning it’s got to be trouble.’

  ‘Bugger me, Charlie,’ the voice at the other end said, ‘you’re up and about early. Can’t you sleep?’

  ‘Been for a jog, Arthur,’ I replied. ‘Four miles before breakfast is a great way to start the day.’ No need to explain that it was only in my mind. I’d read a magazine article claiming that thinking about exercise was almost as beneficial as practising it.

  ‘Blimey. How long have you been doing this for?’

  ‘Um, well, actually, today was the first time. What’s the problem?’ Arthur is the controller at Heckley nick, I’m in charge of the CID. He wasn’t ringing me to make smalltalk.

  ‘Rodger’s radioed in, Charlie, from an RTA up on the high road. It happened about an hour and a half ago. Car gone into a wall at high speed, driver killed. Rodge thinks there’s more to it than meets the eye.’

  ‘Is he still up there?’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘What about a photographer?’

  ‘He’s already sent for him.’

  ‘OK, give me the location and I’ll be off.’

  Rodger is our night detective. CID work normal office hours, plus or minus a few, but we have a representative on round the clock in case something crops up that needs a CID presence. Rodger is our regular night man. No doubt he would have told Arthur all about it, but I preferred to be up there, learning firsthand. I pulled my clothes on and finished the toast in the car, heading out of town up on to the moors.

  It was a cold morning, drizzle and mist combining in a way that’s special to this part of the world. According to the clock the sun should have risen, but it was only half-light and all the signs said that winter wasn’t far away. I switched on the headlamps and wipers and groped my way upwards, wondering about the life that had been snuffed out, wondering who was waiting for him to come home.

  The blue lights were visible from a mile away, blurry smears of colour on a grey background. The first set was a roadblock. Anybody using that route to work on a Thursday morning was going to be late. I lowered my window and the PC recognised me and waved me through. I paused alongside him long enough to say: ‘What’s it look like?’

  ‘Grim, boss,’ he replied.

  Further up the road a cacophony of lights, flickering and dancing across the roofs of the assorted vehicles like static electricity, marked the scene of the crash. Two fire appliances and three police cars were clustered around a mangled wreck that sat in the middle of the road like it had been brought down by enemy fire. A deep muddy scar was gouged across the verge, then dislodged stones and shattered coloured glass marked its progress until it came to a halt, broken and silent, pointing in the direction whence it came. Fifty yards of evidence – one or two seconds of time – that told of the transformation of a technological masterpiece into a pile of scrap, and a living, feeling human being into a piece of carrion. Further away, waiting patiently, were a breakdown truck and a milk-float.

  Rodger came to meet me as I took a waterproof coat from the back of the car. He introduced me to the fire chief who said they were going to remove the body, if that was OK. I had no objections if the photographer had finished.

  One of the panda cars was from Lancashire Constabulary. We exchanged greetings and they told me that it had happened about two hundred yards inside East Pennine’s jurisdiction, so it was all mine. I thanked them for their assistance and they went home.

  ‘What’s the problem, Rodge?’ I asked.

  ‘The milkman,’ he replied, nodding in the direction of the float. ‘He reported the accident. Apparently he was overtaken by two cars going at what he called lunatic speed.’

  ‘Racing?’

  ‘Not directly. They were a minute or two apart. This was down the road, back near Oldfield. Then he came upon this and telephoned us. That’s not all. He says that something similar happened about a month ago. Two cars, a minute or two apart, overtook him at breakneck speed. They were sports cars, not hatches like the two this morning, and he says they were all doing well over the ton.’

  ‘So you think it’s more than youthful exuberance?’

  ‘There’s driving fast, Charlie, and there’s racing, and there’s running away from something. This was more than driving fast. I asked the firemen to feel in his pockets for some ID. They didn’t find any but there’s an envelope. It’s stuffed with money. All twenties. A few hundred quid at a guess. I’ve put it in an evidence bag.’

  ‘That’s interesting. Have you had chance to check if there’s anything on this one?’

  ‘That’s not all.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘They found this, too.’ He held a Ziploc bag up in front of my face, containing an automatic pistol. ‘Glock .38, at a guess.’

  ‘Sheest!’ I exclaimed. ‘That will have to go to the lab for a full inspection. Back to the car. Have you checked it out?’

  ‘Yes. It’s registered as a blue VW Golf 1.8 GTi, which is what we’ve got, and it’s not reported stolen. The owner is a Jason Smith, age 28, living in Scarborough.’

  ‘He’s a fair way from home. Any guesses at the age of laddo?’ I asked, nodding towards the wreckage.

  ‘No, sorry.’

  ‘Dare we ring him?’ Jason Smith might be at home in bed, or he might not, in which case we’d have some explaining to do.

  ‘Hmm, I’d rather not.’

  ‘No, I don’t think I want to, either. Lets see if we can find the VI number and take it from there.’

  But we couldn’t. The Vehicle Identity Number is usually on a plate welded on the floor at the side of the driver’s seat, but by the time they’d cut the poor chap from the wreckage there wasn’t much left to look at, and what there was had a liberal coating of blood on it. We arranged to take a full statement from the milkman and sent him on his way. Couldn’t have the kiddiewinks missing their morning cereals. We dismissed the breakdown truck, too, preferring to have our own take the wreckage to the police compound. It was ten o’clock when the fire brigade hosed the road clean and we opened it for normal business.

  We asked Scarborough to do the dirty work and they sent a bobby round to the house where the blue Golf GTi belonging to Jason Smith was registered. If it was still there ours was a stolen car, marked up to look like that one; if it wasn’t there he’d have to break the news that somebody might not be coming home and invite them to make an identification.

  There are thousands of people driving round in cars that don’t belong to them. They are stolen to order and passed on at about a tenth of their true value. They steal, say, a black BMW series 3 – it’s usually an upmarket car – and sit at the roadside watching, or wander round supermarket car parks until they find a similar vehicle. They note the number and have identical registration plates made for the stolen one. That’s it. Any perfunctory enquiry from a passing policeman shows it to be what it says it is, and his suspicions are alleviated. The owner of the original vehicle knows nothing about this, except that he receives the occasional summons for speeding in an area where he never goes, or a fixed penalty ticket for driving in the London congestion charge zone, although he avoids driving in London like a giraffe avoids overhead power-lines.

  Scarborough rang back to say that Mr Smith was alive and well, but we’d already discovered that the crashed car was a ringer. The VIN number didn’t tally with the DVLA records. It had been stolen three weeks earlier, from a house in Leeds. Burglars had broken in, found the keys and driven it away. Nothing else was taken. Nowadays, with all the sophisticated alarms and immobilisers on new cars, using the keys is just about the only way of stealing one.

  We don’t mourn when a car thief kills himself. Truth is, we all feel a little glow of satisfaction, happy that they haven’t taken anybody else with them. P
riority now was his identity, so his next of kin could be informed and the newspapers could announce to the world that justice had been done and the streets were that little bit safer. He’d be buried with all the pomp of a Third World dictator and the Personal column would have messages from all his friends and relatives saying what a kind, loving person he’d been. They’d make pilgrimages to the spot where he discovered that VW Golfs can’t fly, and leave extravagant floral tributes and soft toys, to help him in the afterlife. Rodger asked if he could stay with it because he smelt something big underneath it all. I was happy to close the case and concentrate on the burglaries that make up our daily bread, but I said OK.

  Saturday morning the report came through identifying him. He hadn’t been carrying a passport, driver’s licence or utility bill, so DNA samples and fingerprints were taken and sent for comparison with the databases. Two hits confirmed him to be Dale Dobson, a 26-year-old thug with a record of football violence, racial attacks and ABH. I tried ringing Gareth Adey, my uniformed counterpart, to dump it on him, but he wasn’t answering. The sun was shining, it was Saturday morning and no grieving family had reported him missing. Gareth was probably wearing silly trousers and thrashing a small white ball around a big field, so I slid the report into my Pending tray and went home.

  Many years ago I graduated from art college, with honours, for what it’s worth. As well as strenuous activities like rugby, karate and scuba diving, we have policemen who write poetry and short stories, several who do watercolours, and I’ve heard it said that there’s a sergeant in Barnsley who is a dab hand with the crocheting hook. But as far as I know I’m the only cop in the firm who knocks up the occasional abstract-impressionist work of art. I’d had a couple on display at the Heckley gala and they’d attracted quite a bit of serious attention, as well as the expected hoots of derision from my colleagues. But a local gallery owner – a man of taste and sophistication – had admired them and offered to show a couple in an exhibition he was organising in the autumn.

  So that’s why I spent Saturday afternoon on the roof of the garage, dropping blobs of red paint on to a six-by-four sheet of hardboard.

  ‘What the chuff are you playing at?’ a voice said somewhere below me.

  I peered over the edge. ‘Look out,’ I warned, ‘or you’ll get splodged.’ It was Dave ‘Sparky’ Sparkington, one of my detectives and my best pal, with his teenage son, Daniel. Dave and I first met as schoolboy footballers, and then later when we joined the force. I’ve kept my boyish good looks and figure, but Dave, who is almost as tall as me, has spread slightly and lost most of his hair. We’ve shared a few scrapes, over the years, and he’s kept me out of trouble more times than I care to remember. I’m his daughter’s godfather.

  ‘What’s this: blood splatter analysis?’ Dave shouted up to me.

  ‘No, its for the gallery. Or it would be if I could get it right. I really need to be higher, so it spreads out more on impact. It’s not as easy as it looks. Have you been to the match?’

  ‘Yeah. And do people pay money for this rubbish?’

  ‘Listen, Sunshine. If I get this right I’ll make more out of it than I ever did from coppering. How many did we lose by?’

  ‘Just the odd goal.’

  ‘Practically a victory. ’Spect you want a cup of coffee.’

  ‘Wouldn’t say no.’

  ‘Go put the kettle on, Dan, while I clear this lot up.’

  ‘OK, Charlie,’ Dan replied, heading for the door.

  ‘Uncle Charlie to you,’ his dad shouted after him.

  ‘You went to the fatal on the top road, I hear,’ Dave said when we were seated in the kitchen, eating custard creams with our coffees.

  ‘Mmm. Who told you that?’

  ‘Shirley.’

  ‘Shirley!’ Shirley is Dave’s wife, who teaches home economics.

  ‘She met Davina in the supermarket.’ Davina is married to Rodger, the night ’tec, and is a sister at the General Hospital.

  ‘I see. It’s good to know that all lines of communication are functioning well. So what sort of holiday have you had?’

  ‘Fantastic. Put a lovely shade of duck-egg blue on the wife’s mother’s ceiling. Why did he call you out for an RTA? Is he losing it?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. There was some money in the car – about £500 – and he had a gun in his pocket. I’ve sent everything to Wetherton; see if the boffins can find anything.’

  ‘What sort of gun?’

  ‘A .38.’

  ‘Hmm. I suppose he did the right thing, then, but guns are a fashion accessory, these days, and five hundred’s not much to some of them.’

  ‘He did what he thought was right, and that’s OK by me.’

  ‘Has the driver been ID-ed yet?’

  ‘Umm…’ I hesitated.

  ‘What do you mean, umm…?’

  ‘The results came back this morning, but I haven’t done anything about it.’

  ‘Christ, Charlie. You mean you’re sitting on it? He’s dead, you know who he is and you’re sitting on it. If it gets out they’ll…they’ll…’

  I turned to young Daniel, saying: ‘Hang me by the balls from the town hall clock is the expression your father is looking for,’ and he grinned back at me.

  ‘Well,’ Dave went on, ‘it is a bit much, don’t you think. Do you want me to come in tomorrow?’

  ‘He’s a racist yob,’ I replied, ‘and I’m as entitled to my weekend off as much as the next man. It’ll wait until Monday.’

  ‘I suppose so. Did you know that Tony Krabbe is giving a lecture at the Town Hall a week next Saturday?’

  ‘Tony Krabbe?’ I replied. ‘You mean Anthony Turnbull Krabbe? Conqueror of Everest and numerous other peaks?’

  ‘That’s him. Want me to get some tickets?’

  ‘How much are they?’

  ‘Twelve pounds.’

  ‘Crikey. No thanks.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I went to school with him. He’s a…he’s a…’

  Now it was Dave’s turn to explain to Daniel. ‘Twat is the expression your Uncle Charlie is looking for,’ he said.

  ‘An amiable cove,’ I told them. ‘I got on reasonably well with him. Everybody did, including the teachers. And the girls. Especially the girls. He was a good-looking so-and-so, and he knew it.’

  ‘Sounds like a bad case of jealousy to me,’ Dave said.

  ‘You could be right,’ I agreed. ‘I took over from him as captain of the school team. He was a year older than me, which means a lot at that age. We lost six matches on the trot, then he broke his arm falling off the parallel beams – he was showing off in the gym – and I took over as captain. We won our next six matches but he came back and we started losing again. I don’t think he was very academically minded. He was one of those golden boys who attracts all the attention but has nothing to back it up. You know the type.’

  ‘Yes, we have one or two of those in the firm. Where did ’e go when ’e left?’

  ‘Presumably he joined the army. It must have been about ten years later that he started making a name for himself with his climbing exploits, writing books and all that, and he’s always described as ex-SAS.’

  ‘He must have something, if he was in the SAS,’ Dave said.

  I scowled at him. ‘The SAS,’ I echoed. ‘You must be joking. They’re a bunch of hooligans.’

  ‘They’re the elite of our army.’

  ‘No they’re not. They’re a bunch of trigger-happy incompetents.’

  Dave turned to his son. ‘Your Uncle Charlie doesn’t like the SAS.’

  ‘I suppose he’s done well,’ I grudgingly admitted.

  ‘He’s got the OBE for it, must be Heckley Grammar’s most famous old boy.’

  ‘I know. He’s the public face of mountaineering, knows the right people, always says the right thing, but I doubt if he can lace the boots of some of the others.’

  ‘Sure you don’t want to come? Jeff’s making one in.’ Jeff Caton is
one of my sergeants.

  ‘Go on, then. Get me a ticket. What about you, Dan?’

  ‘Five-a-side,’ he replied, which was teenage-speak meaning that he was playing in a five-a-side football tournament on the evening in question and therefore would not be able to attend the lecture.

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  After Dave’s disquiet about the dead body my conscience started troubling me, so Sunday morning I did some investigating. Dale Dobson’s last known address was a bail hostel in Huddersfield, but a phone call confirmed that he’d moved on. He was now lost to the system and had been living in the black economy – no taxes, no national insurance, no nothing. There’s a whole cash-in-hand world out there, living on its wits, dependent on nobody, no questions asked. They’re outlaws, and when we get on to them they just fold their tents, or leave the bedsit without paying the arrears, and disappear.

  Fortunately for us, Marjory Dobson, his mother, believed in the work ethic, paid her community charge, and was therefore easy to trace. I decided to visit her.

  She lived in a terrace house on the outskirts of Huddersfield, where the back streets were cobbled and the grime of the Industrial Revolution still clung to the walls. The rows of houses climbed up the hillside in steps, their redundant chimneys dominating the skyline, providing roosts for pigeons. They’d gone from desirable residences for workers in the wool industry to starter homes for young couples, then been snapped up by the Asian population who moved in during the last days of the mills. Now they were a cosmopolitan mix of older white tenants, Asian families, and students living in flats, all rubbing along in an uneasy truce. One day, perhaps, they’d be converted into bijou residences for the chattering classes, but nobody was holding their breath.