Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

By nightfall Clegg was in Salzburg. A room was on reserve for him at the Hotel Bristol on Makart Platz, under one of the assumed names he had used in Hong Kong, but never in Europe. The fax awaiting his arrival said: “Phone any hour. Another masterpiece has surfaced.”

He stretched out on the narrow bed, shut his eyes against the harsh overhead light, thought again about the kids in The Sound of Music, and began whistling that tune, that happy tune that Julie Andrews sang to them.

So, another masterpiece to retrieve, maybe a few more murders to charge against his conscience, then maybe he could reunite with his son once and for all time.

His son.

The only masterpiece that mattered to him.

That precious jewel of a child.

His son.

Clegg reach blindly for the phone on the nightstand and gave the number to the hotel operator.

© 2008 by Robert S. Levinson

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.