Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

On the Safe Side by Priscilla Masters

Best known for her Joanna Piercy mysteries, Priscilla Masters recently began a new series set in Shrewsbury, England, starring coroner Martha Gunn. The second Gunn novel was released in hardcover in the U.K. by Allison & Busby in June of 2007. This is the author’s first story for EQMM, a twisty tale of cops on the take.

It had started off as a perfectly ordinary day. Alarm waking me up, quick jump into the shower, coffee, orange juice, slice or two of toast and Vegemite. Glance at the morning’s post: electricity and council-tax bills, and the TV licence was about to expire, plus an advert for tasty-looking conservatories headed with the fable: Put thousands of added value on your house.

Nothing unusual there.

Peck on the cheek for Aileen.

Journey to work about twenty minutes.

Then things started to hot up a bit.

Mike Lorenzo met me at the door, already strapping his belt on. “We’re to do a bust, matey,” he said. “You and me pay a little visit to Martin Street, go and see what a nice little druggie’s up to.”

Lorenzo gave me a slow, meaningful wink. I knew what that meant. We’d done jobs together before. There was often a nice little bonus hanging around these people if you looked hard enough. Under the mattress, behind the lavatory cistern, in the fridge, or even, sometimes, if they were careful little sods, in the freezer. The odd snifter we could shove in our pockets and flog to another of the poor, hooked bastards. Money sort of floated around, too. In nice, neat little wads. Twenties usually. A few hundred quid here and there that the tax man couldn’t get his grasping, thieving mitts on. Mikey and I had decided we were a much more deserving cause than the war in Iraq or some other asylum-seeker sinkhole. No — we spent money constructively, on our wives and kids and nice holidays far away from the scumbags we dealt with on a daily basis.

So off we went to Martin Street, to the scruffiest house in the block. They always are. Druggies aren’t into property ladders. Their house is simply a place to shoot up, where they won’t get nabbed — they hope.

We busted the door nice and noisy and found the druggie half comatosed in a dingy little downstairs room. Lorenzo and me had a quick look round before we called the ambulance and found a rich seam — as the miners would say.

I glanced at the bag of humanity sprawled across the bed and wondered how the hell he’d got access to twenty thousand quid and what felt like a good few ounces of dirty brown heroin. God only knows what they’d mixed it with. Shame was, the poor little blighter died. Sometime during the search he must have breathed his last, a bit before the ambulance arrived.

Me and Mikey had a good contact who cleaned us of the heroin for eight-K and we stashed the cash on the understanding that we wouldn’t blow the lot on squandery but would kind of leak it gently into the household finances and the cash flow of the nation. Even so — we couldn’t resist a small celebration with the girls. A stretch limo in Barbie-doll pink would have been a bit obvious and over-the-top, but after treating the girls to a little shopping spree we did manage a chauffeur-driven Rolls to take us to a country-house hotel a few miles from home and lived it up for the night. Champagne, caviar, and a wonderful steak that melted in your mouth like good old-fashioned butter.

The girls didn’t ask where the money had come from. Coppers’ women don’t ask too many questions. They know full well they might not like the answers. But Dad had sort of explained it to me when I was a lad. “Son,” he said. “Coppers” (he was a copper) “roll around in muck all the time. They deal with the sad dregs of society. It’s a sort of inevitability...” He said the word very slowly and deliberately, like he wanted me to remember it. “...that some of the mud sticks to your clothes. Understand, my boy?”

I’d nodded, wide-eyed because I did sort of understand. I think even though I was only eight years old I knew perfectly well what my dad was talking about. He was a good old man.

The girls enjoyed the evening. I really liked Caron, Mikey’s wife. She was Irish, bleached-blond, and funny, and she always got fairly pissed. She was a bit like my first wife, Dawn. Very extrovert and flirtatious. But with Caron that was only skin deep. Underneath she was devoted to Mikey.

Aileen, my current partner, was almost the exact opposite of Caron. Quiet, reserved, and a bit shy until she got to know people. Then she opened up. But you know what I really liked about her right from the start?

Loyalty.

She’d do anything for me. And I mean anything. As you will see.

So the weeks passed. The only real difference was the sound of our renovations and the conservatory being built. After all... “Everyone these days has an en suite,” Aileen said. And yes, I was proud of it too — from the Indian cane furniture to the pottery tiger which lurked in the corner. When Mikey and Caron returned from their Caribbean cruise we had some boozy evenings sitting in the conservatory overlooking the garden, lit by some very subtle and well-placed flood lighting. Oh — didn’t I mention that? In fact, if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Nosey-Neighbour Barnes we could all have been in the middle of the Caribbean it was so perfect.

I remember that night in glorious Technicolor. It all seemed so worth it. This was the real reward of being a cop. At least a clever cop. The only slight flaw in the entire evening was Mikey saying something disparaging about the area going down a bit. He looked around at the sheer opulence of our extension and the truly awesome conservatory — the most expensive in the catalogue. “Sure you’re not pricing yourself out of the market, Steve?”

I turned round, barbecue fork in my hand with a couple of sausages on it. One of the sausages slid off while I gaped at what I read as his jealousy. “What do you mean?”

“There’s a couple of odds lurking around the end of your road.”

“The bloody Social Services,” I said, spearing another sausage. “One of those Care in the Community thingies. There’s half a dozen weirdos living there, courtesy of the local council. All blokes. Not old. Some of them only our age, but unlike us they don’t do anything useful with their lives like cleaning up the mean streets of Staffordshire. The social workers and psychiatric nurses are in and out all day long.” I spooned some beans onto his plate. “All paid for by you and me, out of the taxes we do pay.” I winked at him. “They don’t do any harm, but they do tend to hang around the triangle at the bottom of the street. I don’t think...” I glanced, for reassurance, at Aileen.

“Of course they don’t bring the area down,” she said soothingly.

I think the evening everything changed was in late September. We were aware the nights had been drawing in and didn’t sit in the conservatory quite so often. Maybe it was even the first of October the night that Mikey came round, his face pale and frightened looking. I took him straight into the conservatory, ignoring the chill.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s up? Have a beer. Sit down.”

He grabbed my shoulder. Honest. He looked so bad he was like a dead man walking.

“Party’s over,” he said hoarsely. “Party’s over.” He deliberately shut the door of the conservatory and turned back to face me.

“People have been asking questions,” he said. “About us. About the raid. Missing money. Drugs. Porky Flambard said people was asking round the nick who’d been the arresting officers that night, who’d come into money. Nasty sorts. One of them...” His voice dropped and I bent my head in close. “They said he didn’t speak English. Looked flash. Porky said they was speaking Spanish. It’s the big boys. They’ve come for us.”

“Brazen it out,” I said, sloshing back my beer and trying to ignore the little flutter in my chest. “But maybe we should go easy on the spending. Just for a bit. Make out we’re hard up, eh? Go on about how we’ve overspent on the house and holidays and things.”

He shook his head sadly. “It won’t work,” he said. “Word’s already around. And they’ve...” He could hardly get the next few words out. “Steve.”

I swallowed my Pull yourself together comment.

“They’ve asked Professional Standards Unit to take a look. If they think there’s a sniff of truth in the allegation, we’ll be suspended. Then the Independent Police Complaints Authority will be involved.”

I got my bottle up then. “Guy Whelan was dead,” I snarled, reflecting not for the first time that it seemed a posh name for the little saddo who’d expired at the very moment that we were turning over his filthy little nest. “Don’t go weedin’ out on me now. How can they know what was in that flat. Anyone could have thieved the money. It doesn’t have to be us. They can’t prove anything. Whelan could even have spent it himself. And as for the heroin: He died.” I spoke the words right into his face. “How can anyone be sure he didn’t shoot up the bloody lot?”

His look changed to one of pity. For me. “Maybe we’d have got away with it if we hadn’t been so flash,” he said, his eyes rolling around the room. “But look around you.” His eyes landed on my beloved Casa Finapottery tiger, jaws snarling, glass eyes gleaming. “It’s proper posh. It’s obvious.” With that he walked to the door, pulled it open, and passed straight through it.

I never saw him alive again.

I was on nights that week, Mikey on earlies, so we hardly saw each other, but four nights later when I arrived on my night shift the sergeant pulled me over. “Mike Lorenzo was a pal of yours, wasn’t he?”

I started to say, “Still is as far as I know.” But instead I stared at him. “Was?” I queried. “What do you mean was?”

The sergeant put a friendly hand on my shoulder. “Steve,” he said awkwardly, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this but...” I could hear that his mouth was dry. His tongue was sticking to his palate. I waited, feeling my shoulders brace. “He was stabbed this morning.”

I heard the words but nothing went in. It was as though they had been spoken in another language. Then I heard my own voice speaking the same language. “What happened?” I begged. “Tell me what happened?”

“He was on the beat, in a shopping centre. It was an unprovoked attack. He was stabbed. Right through the heart.”

I didn’t like this. “Did you get the bloke?”

“Melted away in the crowd.” There was something odd, evasive even, in the sergeant’s manner. I waited.

“Thing is,” he said, “there’s something else. It looked like Mike was the target. The constable he’d been on the beat with said he’d noticed the guy hanging around a couple of days before.”

He stood there, chewing his lip, and I walked out.

I walked the streets, thinking. Remembering. Mikey and me had done our cadetting together. We’d been chums. And now?

I went round to his house. There was loads of cars outside. As I watched, a van drew up and they started filming. It would be a cause célébre, I knew. Unprovoked stabbing of a policeman?

Caron herself opened the door and stared at me steadily before speaking. “I didn’t know everything about you and Mikey,” she said in a low voice, “but I knew for sure that you both suddenly got awful lucky on the lottery.” She gave a wry smile as though it was a joke. But I can tell you I wished very heartily that we had got our money from the lottery. We might have kept our lives then.

“Someone did for him,” she said. “He was frightened for weeks before they got him. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t concentrate. He’d sit up in the chair nights on end. He even talked about getting a gun. He knew they were coming, but they still got him,” she said, “and they’ll get you, too.”

She closed the door gently in my face. It felt like the lid of a coffin coming down on me.

I pulled myself together and went home.

I’d never before realised what a very clever person my wife was. Aileen was quiet, as I have said. But inside her head she could think up ideas so clever, so imaginative, that I used to say she should have been a writer.

You see, there was nothing I could do except come clean. I told her it all, about the drugs raid, the money, the drugs Mikey had flogged. She looked around at the affluence of our house and said nothing. But I could tell she was thinking. Really hard. Really really hard. I could tell by the way her lips went pencil thin. And determined. And her eyes went sort of spikey looking.

Then she reached over and touched my hand. It was the most loving and kindly of gestures. I could almost have cried. “I’ve benefited from all this wealth,” she said quietly. “The clothes, the meals out, the holidays, the jaunts, and most of all this house.”

I tried to make some sort of suitable response, but she carried on talking. “Therefore I have a responsibility, too,” she said. “I have an idea.”

And that was the beginning of it.

I knew as well as she did that it all hinged on identification. Aileen made some pretty good points, the first being that the druggies would not be satisfied with simply going for Mike, that they would, certainly, come for me. I was as good as a dead man. The second being that as my next of kin she would be the one to identify my “corpse,” and the third and most important point being that one of our nutty neighbours was roughly the same height and build as me. A bit paunchier but tall. She even had the clever idea of applying for a passport in his name. No need to forge one for me to make my escape and don’t tell me he’d ever been abroad. She befriended him, found out his name, place of birth, mother’s maiden name, and his birthday to get a birth certificate. We applied to have one within the week.

I daresay the inhabitants of Number Seven often went AWOL so no problems there. No one was going to come looking for him!

Tidy him up, hair cut, my wallet in his pocket, and lastly, his battered body being found in my house. Like Aileen, I decided it was worth the risk.

After all — what choice did I have?

I didn’t go back to work but took compassionate leave. I used the time wisely. Within a week, the precious document was in my hand.

It turned out to be easy to lure my selected victim to the house. He was a trusting soul. He didn’t even mind when we trimmed his hair, gave him some of my clothes to wear. He kept babbling on about “kindly people” and asking for a fag. Aileen left me to it. I knew the way the cops think in a killing. They always finger the collar of the nearest person — usually the spouse. So she had a date with Caron.

Even the killing bit was easier than I had imagined. He must have had a weak skull or something. I heard it crack with the first blow of the golf club and gave him a few more just to be on the safe side. In fact, I quite enjoyed it. I had it all worked out, wearing gloves and pressing his fingers round the stem of the murder weapon.

Careful now. I smiled. Don’t want to turn into a loony monster type of serial killer. But honestly it was fairly easy. I stepped back and peeled off my boiler suit to reveal my ordinary clothes.

Now it was important to establish my alibi.

This is how clever my wife is. She’d borrowed Mrs. Nosey Barnes’s garden shears a week before, so how easy was it for me to return them, dropping casually into the conversation that I couldn’t stop for the proffered beer because I wanted to watch Crime Watch. “Aileen’s out,” I said. I didn’t add, With a friend, having a curry to establish her alibi. “So I can watch a bit of telly in peace.”

She returned my smile nicely, without the slightest clue that she had just been used, and I wandered back to the house to fake my own murder.

We’d put my clothes on him. Now I put his in my rucksack. I would take them far away and dump them in a wheelie bin somewhere.

I’d taken the precaution of buying an awful, cheap car for cash, through the papers, and keeping the remainder of my stash of money with me. The car I’d parked round the corner, ready for my getaway.

I switched the telly on and watched the gorgeous Fiona Bruce introduce my programme. I blew her a kiss. Time for action and a bit of scene-setting. It was so easy. I simply pretended I was an actor acting out the scene. Breaking in through the back door. Plenty of noise but not too much. I didn’t want Nosey Barnes coming round to see if I was all right. Not now. It would have ruined the whole thing. I bashed the already-dead schizo a bit more, and to my ultimate grief took a swing at my most treasured possession with a number-nine iron. The thing is, there had to be the signs of a struggle. I would have struggled, so there had to be damage, so my tiger was smashed.

I know that pathologists will argue forever about the time of death. Basically, the only thing they really agree on is that time of death is sometime between the last sighting of the victim and the time of finding his or her body. I was safe on that one. Mrs. Nosey Barnes would be quick to put her oar in the stream and tell the cops that I had popped round a little before nine.

Aileen was set to stay out until a little after ten, by which time I would be seventy or so miles down the M6, so the time of death would be fixed at between nine and ten, when I had actually finished the psycho off at twenty minutes before nine. I challenge the very best pathologist in the whole wide world to pinpoint a time of death down to twenty minutes, but just to be on the safe side I’d made sure the room was warm — to slow down the rate of body cooling. Now I switched the central heating off and opened the windows.

The one thing I had absolutely no worries about was Aileen’s ability to act the part of first-on-the-scene after her husband’s terrible murder.

I had also got a pay-as-you-go mobile phone, because it would be nice to know how things were going for my “widow.” After I’d roughed the room up a bit I splashed a bit of petrol around just for good measure, set a match to it, and walked out of my house forever. Aileen and I would meet up when she’d sorted out the sale of the house, widow’s pension, insurances. See how important it is to marry a competent woman? I’d planned to move to Bolivia.

But I was forgetting a few things. Smoke rises. Fires go out. Smoke alarms go off.

I got the story from Aileen.

Mrs. Nosey Barnes from next-door heard the smoke alarm, got her husband to peer over the wall, and he saw the smoke and the broken glass well before time. He rang the emergency services, the police, the fire engine, and the ambulance.

An ambulance?

They dragged the body out. Only it wasn’t a body. Interfering paramedics felt for a bloody carotid pulse. And know what? They found one. My murder wasn’t. So they put an oxygen mask over his “my” face and with the blue light flashing screamed their way to the hospital while the fire engine dealt with the fire.

Get it so far?

And the police were tracking down my wife to tell her someone’s tried to kill her husband and burn the house down.

Same story but different backdrop.

She was supposed to be the one to find the terrible carnage. Not them. And she wasn’t meant to learn about it in the Jaipur over poppadoms and chicken jalfrezi. It was, admittedly, a help that she was with Caron, who couldn’t have reacted better, putting her hand over her mouth and saying, “They’ve got him, too.” Which was right on cue.

The kindly police took Aileen to the hospital to see her “husband.” And the psycho opened his eyes, smiled, and said, “Hello, Mrs. Arnold. I’ve got a bit of a headache.”

At which point even my wife broke down and started screaming.

Sometimes my colleagues can be smarter than you’d ever give them credit for. Porky bloody Flambard was the sausage-eating sergeant who’d been elected to drive my almost-widow to the hospital. He put his fat little arm around my beloved, sat her down in the chair, and said, “It isn’t him, is it?”

I think by then Aileen was fast approaching a gibbering wreck.

But Porky’s got a soft, greasy little voice and he persisted.

“So if it isn’t ’im, then who is it? And where is your Steve?”

When she didn’t answer, he put his podgy face right by hers. “Now then, darlin’,” he said. “You don’t want to spend the rest of your days in a nasty, cold, dirty old prison, do you? Charged with being a) an accessory to attempted murder and b) withholding information pertaining to the theft of drugs and cash from a crime scene by a serving police officer? So let’s start with the first question, shall we? Who is the geezer in the bed and how did he come to have such nasty head injuries?”

By now she was shaking all over and couldn’t have spoken if she’d wanted to.

“Mind if I take a look?” he’d said and reached inside her handbag, pulled out her mobile phone, scrolled through to “Steve,” and pressed the green button.

“Hello, Steve,” he said when I answered. “Just thought I’d let you know. Your bloke isn’t dead but currently sitting up in a hospital bed, a dirty great big bandage wrapped around his head, eating a marmalade sandwich. You couldn’t even manage a murder, could you? Now then. Why don’t you tell us where exactly you are and we’ll bring you home.”

All in all I only have one real regret. It’s my tiger. My lovely pottery tiger. Broken forever. But I reckon I’m probably safer here, in an English jail, than out there, patrolling the streets, waiting for Juan or Pedro or Sanchez to try a bit of knife practice on my back.

Agree?

© 2008 by Priscilla Masters