Cath Staincliffe - Desperate Measures

Marcie shivered and scratched her neck. ‘You don’t get it,’ she said.

‘Maybe not,’ Adele said, her voice rising, ‘but what I do get is that you can’t carry on like this, babe. It’ll kill you. Don’t go out,’ she had begged later, ‘I’ll sit up with you.’

The next time Howard had seen Marcie on his way home from work, begging. The building was in a row that had been waiting years for redevelopment. Boards over the windows, grass in the guttering, pigeons on the roof. The place was freezing cold, the stones glistening damp, a smell of wet earth and human mess. Marcie was filthy, dirt ingrained in her hands, pin thin arms livid with sores and needle marks.

Adele had thought that was the lowest point. To see Marcie had started injecting now, that the high couldn’t come fast enough or go deep enough.

They had brought her home, stuck her in the shower, given her clean clothes, fed her Coco Pops and toast and drinking chocolate. Adele slept with her purse under the pillow. Twelve hours later Marcie had gone again.

The turning point had been an intervention from a drug abuse officer who worked with the neighbourhood policing team. Marcie had been arrested again and was facing possible charges which could lead to a custodial sentence. The officer, Sandra Gull, was working with a small group of offenders with substance abuse issues to try and get them on the rehab route. Faced with the choice, Marcie agreed to try the scheme. The day Marcie went to the surgery to see Dr Halliwell about the methadone replacement programme, Adele felt as though the sun had returned after a long, dark, winter. Hope replaced dread. Sandra was having excellent results with the programme and lives were being saved. Adele felt hopeful, at least for those first few weeks before it all went so very wrong.

Fraser McKee’s neighbours on one side were away, according to the ones on the other side, who were only just arriving back from work as Butchers went to greet them and were astonished to see the state of the house. So the police had no witnesses to the destruction of the property.

Butchers was heading for the police station when he was notified that there’d been a road traffic accident involving Fraser McKee’s Peugeot on the dual carriageway near the airport car-hire village in Wythenshawe.

Butchers doubled back and made his way there.

His first thought, as he saw the car, was that they’d got a second fatality. The vehicle was upside down, on its roof, on the grass verge, at a bend in the road. A traffic police unit was attending.

One of the traffic officers came to meet him and Butchers introduced himself, explained they were looking for McKee. The officer told Butchers the Peugeot was empty and there was no sign of any occupants in the immediate vicinity.

Butchers looked up the road, ‘Any cameras?’

‘No. Not on this stretch.’

‘Can I take a look?’ Butchers asked.

‘Sure. We’ve got blood on the driver’s side. The driver is likely to be injured.’

Butchers crouched down to peer into the vehicle. The airbag had inflated and there were smears of red on that, more on the side window.

‘Could he have walked away?’ Butchers asked.

‘See all sorts,’ the traffic officer replied.

Butchers rang and discussed the situation with the boss. She agreed he could organize a search of the immediate area but not to run it all night, give it a couple of hours then close it down.

It was close to midnight when Janine arrived home. She sat for a moment in the car, summoning the energy to move. Her back ached and her feet throbbed, she felt light headed and slightly nauseous from too many cups of coffee and not enough to eat.

It was quiet as she got out of the car, just the sound of a goods train rattling through the station, almost a mile away.

It had been a long day. Tonight Don Halliwell’s widow was facing a future on her own, her world torn apart by the violent death of her husband.

And Fraser McKee?

Whoever was after McKee meant business, Janine thought to herself. And, if they had caught up to him, Janine and her team could be faced with investigating a double murder.

All Janine wanted to do was sleep.

The kitchen looked more or less how she’d left it, the dirty dishes still on the table, though someone had put the ice cream away – unless they’d polished it off. Janine surveyed the mess, considered leaving it till morning but told herself to just stop wimping out and get on with it.

Half an hour later, after checking Tom and Charlotte were safe in their beds, she got into her own, setting the alarm for six-thirty and praying that Charlotte wouldn’t wake in the night.

The constable on the front desk looked up as the buzzer sounded for the exterior door. The security lamp illuminated the man outside: youngish, suit and tie, short sandy-coloured hair, face cut and bruised, blood stains on his shirt collar. A fight, the constable wondered, or a drunk? Or both? He wasn’t a regular customer. There was no match on tonight. Tuesdays were usually quiet. The man’s body language wasn’t aggressive, he wasn’t mouthing off or hammering to get in, so the constable released the door switch.

The man limped up to the counter, his face pale, his breath coming fast as though he’d been running. ‘You’ve got to help me,’ he said, ‘I need protection. My name’s Dr Fraser McKee and somebody’s trying to kill me.’

As soon as Janine heard that Fraser McKee was in police custody for his own protection, she arranged to have him transferred to her station for interview as a victim and potential witness.

Her first impression was that the man was scared witless, tension evident in the set of his shoulders, the light in his eyes. Wounds on his face had been cleaned up but Janine doubted that he’d got any sleep.

‘I’m DCI Janine Lewis,’ she told him, ‘in charge of the inquiry into the murder of Dr Halliwell.’

McKee nodded, rubbed a finger under his nose.

‘DI Richard Mayne,’ Richard introduced himself.

‘You’ve seen a doctor,’ Janine said. ‘Is there anything else you need?’

‘No.’ McKee kept blinking, pale lashes against pale blue eyes. He seemed to find it hard to maintain eye contact.

‘Perhaps you could tell us what happened?’ Janine said.

‘I…erm…’ he was jittery, a fist tapping on the edge of the table as he talked, ‘I left work and went home and my house…they’d completely wrecked it. It was… it was incredible, the scale of the destruction. I knew what it meant – they were after me. I had to get away, so I… erm, I got in the car and started driving. I didn’t know where to go. They’d be looking for me.’ His breath was uneven, panicked.

Janine wondered who ‘they’ were but didn’t want to break the flow yet. She nodded for him to continue.

‘Then the news about Don came on the radio. They’d killed Don, oh God, and now my house and I didn’t know what to do.’ He splayed his hands, imploring. ‘Then this car was right up behind me, he forced me off the road. My car turned over, I thought I’d had it… I got out and I just ran, there were woods nearby and I hid there for a while until it got dark, then I made my way to the police station.’ He stopped, his breath uneven and noisy in the small room.

‘What time was it when you left work?’ Janine said.

‘About five thirty,’ McKee said.

‘Dr Halliwell was still there?’ Janine said.

‘Yes.’

‘You sound as though you know who’s behind all this,’ she said.

McKee hesitated, his eyes intense, then said, ‘It’s the Wilson Crew, you’ve heard of them? They broke into the surgery before and now they’ve come back and Don’s got in their way.’