Stephen Booth: Already Dead

Biting her lip, Fry examined the paperwork in her in-tray. Brief as it had been so far, her time with the major crime team at the East Midlands Special Operations Unit had spoiled her for this job in Divisional CID. It was endless volume crime — house burglaries, car thefts, run-of-the-mill assaults, and the odd street robbery to add a bit of excitement. The latest reports said that a teenager walking through Edendale town centre late last night had been robbed of his iPod by a trio of youths. What action should she take? Set up checkpoints on all the major roads? Close the airports? Call out armed response? Send in a SWAT team? It was a tricky one.

But this was only a short-term assignment. She’d been promised that. Absolutely promised. Her DCI on the major crime team, Alistair Mackenzie, had seemed genuinely sorry to lose her, even for a few months. But there was no one else to do the job, they said. It was funny how often there was no one else.

Fry surreptitiously rubbed her leg, and removed a small splinter of wood from the fabric of her trousers. It wasn’t as if she had a good environment to work in. In Edendale, the old Divisional headquarters building on West Street was looking exactly that now — old. It had been built in the 1950s, and though it might have won an architectural award once, the past sixty years had left their mark. The Derbyshire Constabulary budget no longer stretched to structural maintenance, unless it was considered essential. Like Murfin’s conservatory, there was a leak somewhere in the roof. When it rained, the water ran through the walls, leaving damp stains in the plaster over the filing cabinets.

And it had rained a lot in Derbyshire recently. It was almost certainly raining now.

Well, she supposed she’d have to make the best of the situation. Some new blood in the division would have been ideal, of course, but Fry knew that was too much to hope for. There were fewer young officers applying for a transfer into CID. Why would they, when there was no extra pay, no promotion, no recognition of the extra responsibility? It just meant a lot more work to do, exams you could only study for in your spare time at the end of a long shift, a bigger and bigger caseload, a role as the muggins everyone turned to for help with their own investigations. You could be the entire CID representation on a night duty, called out to any incident the uniforms felt like passing the buck on. Not that there were many vacancies any more. But when they did get a recruit, they had to be pitched in at the deep end. Without a mentor, they would sink without trace, every one of them.

‘In my day, they were called tutors,’ said Murfin, as if reading her mind. ‘When I was wet behind the ears in CID, I was sent to some fat old DC who basically just told me to watch my back and not volunteer for anything.’

‘Not everything changes, then,’ said Fry.

Of course, Gavin Murfin should be gone by now. His thirty years’ service were up, and he could claim his full pension. His wife had been planning a Caribbean cruise for months. But Murfin had been pressed to stay on as a temporary measure in the current circumstances, and Fry had been presented with the fact as if management were doing her a favour by giving her someone with experience. He’d been bribed with more money, she knew. And probably with an endless supply of jelly babies, judging by the white powder on his fingers and the empty packets in his waste-paper bin. Yes, Murfin had experience. But it was mostly of the kind you wouldn’t want passed on to posterity.

She wondered how much the changes in police pay had affected the service. In the 1980s, pay and conditions had been good, compared to similar professions. Police forces were finding it difficult to recruit the right people in those days, and they had to offer inducements to attract decent candidates. Now, though, it seemed they didn’t want to be bothered by too many applicants at all.

Fry cast her eye over the room again. Becky Hurst was the most willing member of the team, never thought any job too routine for her to tackle. She was like a little terrier, kept at a task until she produced a result. Her hair was very short and its colour seemed to vary week by week, though right now it was a sort of coppery red.

‘Becky,’ said Fry.

‘Yes, Sarge?’

Hurst came over clutching her notebook, her expression just a bit too alert and eager for Fry’s liking. She was always suspicious of those who seemed a bit too good to be true.

‘How are we doing with the cannabis farm?’ she said.

It was the only interesting case they had on the books, a standout inquiry among the mass of run-of-the-mill volume crime.

‘Those reports coming in from the public about a property in Matlock were out of date,’ said Hurst. ‘A Vietnamese cannabis gardener got scooped up when the premises were raided last year. He was given eighteen months inside — and he’ll be deported when his sentence comes to an end. He’s not our problem now, Diane.’

‘He was just the gardener, though. What about his employers?’

‘They were never located. The property was handled by a rental agent, and the actual tenant never lived there. They created a couple of steps to remove themselves from the gardener.’

‘A dead end there, then?’

‘Yes, we don’t seem to be getting the breaks that C Division benefited from. Their operation was a gift from start to finish.’

Fry nodded. Like so many successful inquiries, the recent drugs case had started with a bit of luck. A nineteen-year-old Chesterfield man had been involved in a serious RTC, when his Renault van had skidded, gone off the road and crashed into a tree. While he was being taken to hospital with a broken leg and internal injuries, officers at the scene had examined the damaged Renault. They discovered that he’d been working as a delivery driver for a drugs gang, carrying small bags of cannabis in a cake tin under the dashboard. He had three mobile phones on the passenger seat of the van — one phone to take orders from customers, one to contact his employers, and a third to call his mum to tell her he’d be late home for his tea.

A full-scale operation had been launched after the trail led to a cannabis factory in a house in the eastern borders of Derbyshire, which turned out to have links to growers across the country. A search of the house found more than four hundred cannabis plants being tended by an eighteen-year-old Vietnamese man, who tried to hide in the attic when police arrived. Officers guarding the house on the night of the raid had noticed a suspicious car which drove past several times. They stopped the vehicle and found eight thousand pounds in cash, as well as more mobile phones and SIM cards. Phone records and text messages linked the people in the car to the cannabis gardener and other members of the gang. Warrants had been executed at two other addresses, in each of which a Vietnamese teenager was found hiding out with hundreds of cannabis plants he’d been responsible for.

As a result, a gang involved in growing hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of cannabis across four counties had been jailed for a total of twenty-two years between them. They had more than a thousand plants under cultivation at addresses in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and even down in the West Midlands. Their assets had later been confiscated under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

But the operation had left a few remnants of the drug trade still in existence. Somewhere in their area, at least one more Vietnamese was believed to be holed up in a house full of plants. The sad thing was, those cannabis gardeners were at the lowest end of the food chain in the illegal drugs trade, forced to live in squalid conditions and working practically as slaves for their masters. Fry couldn’t imagine what it would be like for him now, with his contacts gone, his supplies dried up, just spending his time waiting for a knock on the door.