Robert Parker - Snow Storm

He phoned home. Any day now he was due to become a father. There was a suitcase packed, a route planned, even a playlist composed on Rachel’s Ipod. She was so very organised, quite the opposite of her husband, who spent his life craving order and even now could not wholeheartedly concentrate because of the awkward angle Edwards had placed his laptop at on his desk, but who did not know where to start. He knew it was a fault; the need to have the coffee table in the living room cleared of all debris or disruptions to his field of vision, the overpowering urge to move that coke bottle on the basis that it would obscure his view of the TV should he choose to lie down, even when he wasn’t planning on it, and he knew that even when it was all done there would be no peace and he still wouldn’t settle. Something always had to be wrong and if he didn’t know what it was, it was just waiting to ambush him.

“When are you coming home?” she asked.

“Don’t know darlin,” he replied, for some reason resenting the question like it was just another demand being made on him. He knew deep down it was an invitation. It was her way of telling him she missed him and loved him and that even after all these years he was still the person she always wanted to spend more time with. He knew it was far more than just a nag. “Maybe another hour or two.”

“That’s not really what I meant,” she said, almost absent minded.

“Then what did you mean?” he asked, eyeing a takeaway menu. Perhaps he could make it up to her, swing by the Guru Balti on the way home.

Home. It seemed a long time since he’d been there. He pushed the thought to the back of his mind. He mustn’t go there.

“Nothing,” she replied, meaning anything but.

“Ok,” was all he could come up with in response, not really wanting to get into an argument right then.

“No,” she replied, as if it had been a question, before telling him she would see him when she saw him.

Might take more than a Guru Balti, he thought as the phone clicked back on the receiver. He leaned back again, looking for a distraction once more.

Edwards woke him from his trance as he stumbled sweating and snuffling through the door, closely followed by Black and Wilson, whom he’d heard Campbell had renamed Decker, partly because of the obvious fit with her partner’s name but partly because she looked like she could throw a mean right hook.

“Team run,” Edwards declared, forcing Burke to conclude that he didn’t rate his detection skills highly as he surveyed them all with their lycra compression gear, MP3 player arm bands and red faces.

Burke nodded to this all the same, unable or unwilling to say anything in return. They were on his turf, in his man cave and he resented the interruption.

“Thought we’d get some cardio in before heading to the billet,” Edwards added, seemingly feeling this wasn’t obvious either.

Burke felt the unmistakeable sensation of a penny dropping inside his head.

Edwards jumped as a phone rang on his arm, deafening him through the adjoining headphones. He tapped the microphone attached, barked his name at whoever was on the other end and fell into a silence for the next few seconds. His face sank as though someone had let the air out of it and then, when all the animation had left it, his lower lip slowly began to curl. “Ok,” was all he said in the end, leaving the other three in the room wondering awkwardly if the call was over.

“Everything ok?” Burke finally asked, hoping on some level that everything was far from ok and knowing deep down that it was childish.

“We’re having to let him go,” he answered in a monotone.

His two minions made a great show of being disappointed, mass outpourings of breath being their initial method of communicating this, followed by the old shake your head and look at the floor when you don’t want to look someone in the eye technique. He particularly loved that old chestnut.

“How?” Burke asked, somewhat perplexed himself, wondering at the greatest effort at escape since Houdini or possibly The Scarlett Pimpernel.

Edwards rubbed his eyes and let out a big sigh. “It seems none of the witnesses saw anything. All of them have checked out of hospital and the CCTV in the bar seems to have been corrupted in some way. There’s nothing on the disk it’s stored on.”

“Magnet?” Burke suggested automatically.

“Cold hard currency more like,” Edwards snapped. “And now we’re going to have to let him go due to a lack of any evidence whatsoever. I don’t suppose we’ve got anything to link him to the murders?”

“Nothing so far,” Burke replied, wanting to add “sir,” bristling somewhat at the fact that Edwards had used the word “we,” implying that this was somehow his investigation, which, all things being equal, it probably was but he was damned if he was going to have it underlined to him by a man wearing tights, even if they did have a Nike swoosh on them. “We were going to check the CCTV in town and cross reference it with the drop off zone at the airport, see if we could find out what kind of vehicle he left in and attempt to track it, see where he was dropped off, assuming he didn’t hire a car. It seems unlikely he’d be involved in a revenge execution personally, although we don’t fully know the depth of his connection to Petrovsky. Would he have got his hands dirty?”

“He might have, if it was an act of revenge,” Black suggested. “Obviously we were letting you run with the whole getting him to reveal his deepest darkest secrets by using an attempted murder rap as leverage plan.”

Burke resisted the urge to point out that this was neither his plan nor something he personally attempted. This must be how it worked around Edwards, palm the blame off onto someone else if results were not forthcoming. Interesting department culture. No matter. The interview tapes confirmed the contrary.

“And it might have worked if he wasn’t so connected to everything,” Edwards snapped, bringing Black to heel.

“I thought he was just an interloping drug dealer,” Burke replied.

Edwards scoffed. “If only. This guy’s a one stop crime shop. He’s into things the rest of the criminal fraternity haven’t even thought of yet. He’s running drugs, arms, counterfeit fags and booze. He’s trafficking girls from most of Eastern Europe with the promise of the western life and the end result that they wind up working it off in one of his knocking shops. He’s got waiters and shop assistants, employees in airlines and banks, anyone with access to cards getting your details and feeding them back to his cyber bods. He’ll sell you anything you like at a knock down rate, which in this harsh economic climate goes down a storm. He’s got contacts in the mother country who get him access to IP addresses in deepest darkest Siberia so he can bring down whatever the hell he likes and the Ruskies just say nothing because he knows who to pay to turn a blind eye. You name it, he’s into it and that’s fine, but not on my turf. Not on my watch.”

Burke was torn between rising irritation and confusion at the lack of communication regarding the size of Edwards’ operation and the hilarity of his last statement. It reminded him of Tony Blair trying to sound Churchillian. “Nice to be kept in the loop.”

“Need to know basis,” Edwards replied, “but yes, there’s a lot more going on than you know.

“I’m sure, but with all of this going on there can only be more opportunities to catch him at it.”

“Of course, but we have a tight window of opportunity. How long before he leaves the country? He’s only here for a finite time. We’ve got to make something stick but I’m fucked if I know what.”

“You must know something,” Burke probed.