Love You Dead

115 Saturday 14 March

Norman Potting had just reached the top of the drive, racing after the car, when the blast threw him off his feet. He picked himself up and stared, in momentary numb shock and disbelief, at the scene in front of him a hundred yards or so along the road. It was like something out of a war movie. He saw the blazing, skeletal remains of the convertible Mercedes, and a Range Rover, that had been parked in the road, on fire beside it. A solid lump of a smouldering engine rested against a garden wall yards from where he stood.

Even closer, in the middle of the road just feet away, he saw a blackened human arm, wearing a wristwatch. Two wheels, attached to an axle, lay a short distance further on. Unable to help himself, and shaking uncontrollably, he threw up.

His confused mind was in turmoil. Was this Jodie’s doing? Had she engineered him to be driving her car? Just who the hell was the shifty-looking character in the baseball cap, who’d been sitting in the driver’s seat as he’d entered the garage and had raced away in the Mercedes?

His professionalism began to kick in. Pulling out his phone and giving his identity, his voice full of panic, he requested all the emergency services and, panting with exertion, ran forward as close as he could get to the inferno. Twenty feet away the searing heat was so intense he had to stop, impotently. All he could do was watch, transfixed. Thinking.

This would have been me.

He also called his handler, asking for urgent backup, and then Roy Grace.

‘Stay where you are, Norman, don’t go back into the house. We have armed response and a full team on their way.’

‘Thank you, chief.’ Then he began to shake uncontrollably once more.

Staring at the fireball, all he could think again was that person driving could have been him. Should have been him. He tried to piece the last few minutes together. Who the hell was the man driving the car?

People were starting to appear from every direction around him, some of them holding up phone cameras. He saw a woman with two small children, staring, frozen. As he heard the first distant siren, he began shouting at them, ‘Police, keep back! Keep back!’

He saw another woman holding the hand of a small girl who was crying. ‘You really want your child to see this?’ he yelled in blind fury, as he noticed more charred human body parts everywhere amid the glass and debris from the car. All the time he was thinking more and more clearly.

Jodie.

That bitch had set him up. But who the hell was the poor sod in the car?

For some moments he stood, uncertain what to do. He needed to go back to the house to get Jodie. But he had to take charge of the scene. Were there any casualties other than the driver? He realized that the way he was dressed, he looked pretty improbable as a police officer. A woman was screaming hysterically. Only yards from him.

He saw her, with a large dog tugging on a leash, trying to restrain it from reaching a human head and part of a spinal cord only a few feet in front of her.

He looked over at Jodie’s house. At a line of cars backed up down the street. Christ. Christ. Sirens were coming closer.

More and more people were appearing.

‘Back!’ he yelled at them. ‘Stay back, there might be another explosion!’

There were also people gathering on the far side of the car, but the heat was too intense to run past it. To his relief he saw strobing blue lights. The first siren came closer and he saw a patrol car. He ran up to it as it halted, holding up his hands, and jabbered out a quick summary. As he finished, another patrol car, followed by an ambulance with a fire engine in its wake, were all approaching.

He broke into a fast, lumbering run back towards Jodie’s house, down her steep drive and in through the open garage door. ‘Jodie!’ he yelled. ‘Jodie!’

She came down the stairs, looking pale, in her dressing gown. ‘What’s happened?’ she said. ‘Paul, what’s happened?’

‘I’ll tell you what’s happened, young lady.’ He strode over to her before she had a chance to move, grabbed her right wrist roughly, then swung her arm up behind her in a half-Nelson hold. ‘I’m arresting you on suspicion of attempted murder. That’s what’s happened.’ He was shaking like a leaf. But he wasn’t going to blow this by putting a damned foot wrong, despite the state he was in. ‘You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

Something valuable he had learned about over the years he had worked with Roy Grace was the psychology of the behaviour of suspects. Genuinely innocent people often tended to resist arrest vociferously, and sometimes quite aggressively. But most guilty suspects became like putty in your hands, almost as if relieved the game was finally up. She felt like putty, now.

‘Attempted murder? What are you talking about?’

‘You wanted me to take your car, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘So who just drove off in it?’

‘Someone drove off in it?

Who?’

‘You tell me.’

‘I’m sorry, Paul, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What was that noise just now, that explosion?’

He wrenched her arm further up her back, so hard she cried out in pain. ‘You little bitch,’ he replied.

His phone rang. He answered with one hand and heard Roy Grace’s voice. ‘Norman, where are you?’

‘In 191, holding my suspect.’

‘Can you open the front door, there are officers outside.’

Potting frogmarched her across and unlatched the door.

‘You’d better hurry, guys,’ Jodie said with a smirk. ‘One of your colleagues is upstairs and he doesn’t have very long to live — if he’s even still alive.’