Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

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?”

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.