Danielle Ramsay - Broken Silence

He listened to the caller between the pulsating thumping.

‘Conrad? What the bloody hell are you playing at?’ Grunted Brady, affecting a rough, hard-edged Geordie accent for Conrad’s benefit. ‘It’s Sunday for bloody hell’s sake!’

Conrad’s words always had the uncanny knack of sobering him up.

Brady slowly sat up and ran a shaking hand over his narrowed bloodshot eyes.

‘Run that by me again!’ He huskily ordered.

He looked over at the alarm clock and cursed when he saw that it was only five am.

‘Yeah … yes, I hear you Conrad. Yeah … I’ll be ready … No … you’re not interrupting anything …’ said Brady before cutting Conrad off.

Not a lot had happened to him in the last six months. He still had the same hard-nosed boss, Detective Chief Inspector Gates and the same obtuse, career chasing sidekick – Detective Sergeant Harry Conrad. And he still had the same old job as Detective Inspector. Simply put, he wasn’t the kind to get promoted.

But he was still a hell of a lot better off than his long-standing friend and now ex-colleague, Detective Inspector Jimmy Matthews. He had found himself inside Durham Prison, slumming it with the very scum he had risked his neck, and at times career, to put away. Matthews had ended up doing time for conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Instead of acting as a copper, he used everything he had ever gleaned from the job to fool the investigative team. And it worked, right up to the point that Brady couldn’t accept that her teacher, who had been charged with the murder, had actually killed her. Brady had no doubts over the fact that the teacher had had sex with his fifteen year old pupil; repeatedly and in every way imaginable. But a hunch had led to him digging up more than he had bargained for. While the rest of the investigative team celebrated in the Fat Ox, he had followed a trail that led him led circuitously back to Jimmy Matthews.

Brady had tried to go and see Matthews in Durham prison, but Matthews had refused to see him. Not that Brady could blame him.

Brady bent over the bathroom sink threw cold water over his face. He had no choice but to get himself straightened out, and fast. Conrad was already at the crime scene, as was half the force by the sounds of it. And given the crap Gates had been doling out to him recently, who was he to argue about it being his day off? Brady smacked of the old school, which meant he didn’t fit in any more. Coppers like Brady were being squeezed out, replaced by the likes of Conrad; graduate material whose eye was on fast-tracking his way to the top. No getting their hands dirty, no bending the rules and definitely no going out on a limb because of gut feeling.

Brady stared hard at the dark, heavily-hooded eyes reflected back in the mirror. He still looked the same; handsomely rugged with a permanent five o’clock shadow and long dark brown hair that he still hadn’t gotten round to getting cut.

It had been eight months since Claudia, now officially his ex-wife had left him. He’d be the first to admit that both his personal and professional life was shot to hell, which included the bullet in his thigh. He was still single, living in the hope that Claudia would want him back. But he still had a long way to go to convince her he was worth the risk. She was still of the opinion that he was a cheating son of a bitch. Not that he could disagree. But things had changed since he’d screwed up big time. Whether she had noticed was another matter. At least she had stayed around which was more than he had expected. She had taken up the job offered by Chief Superintendent O’Donnell and was now heading the North East’s first Sex Trafficking centre. Not that Brady ever got to see her, either professionally or personally. She claimed she was too busy and kept him hanging by promising that she would get together with him soon. Whether soon would ever come was questionable.

And as for Amelia Jenkins, the police psychologist, Brady hadn’t seen her since she had worked alongside him six months ago on the Sophie Washington case. He had often thought about contacting her, but realised it wasn’t a good idea. First, he had to figure out exactly what was going on between him and Claudia.

He ran a long slender, olive-skinned hand over his stubble as he stared hard at his reflection, wondering exactly what had washed up onto the shores of Whitley Bay beach. Or to be more precise, exactly who had floated to the surface of the cold, grey murky waters of the North Sea.

Chapter Four

Police cars, vans and tape blocked off a good stretch of the promenade. Brady pulled up and nodded at the two uniformed officers who automatically let him through. As he slowly drove along the sea front he couldn’t help noticing the countless boarded up, dilapidated Victorian buildings that had become the scourge of the seaside resort.

He parked up by the old Avenue pub; yet another abandoned eyesore. Originally built as a hotel, it was a dominating three-storey building dating back to a Victorian era of afternoon teas and brass bands. Decades later, when the holidaymakers opted for the sunshine in Majorca instead of the drizzle and biting winds of Whitley Bay, the hotel had been turned into a pub for the locals. Eventually, even the locals stopped coming, driven away by the heavy influx of weekend and Bank Holiday binge drinkers who travelled from Glasgow and Newcastle for a couple of nights of debauchery in Whitley Bay’s nirvana of pubs and clubs. Now the old, sprawling building stood abandoned and in disarray with its state of the art security steel sheets covering the windows and doors while its sign creaked and moaned in protest at the bitter, North East winds.

Noise drifted up from the beach, distracting Brady fromhis morose brooding about what a shit hole Whitley Bay had become. Soon enough the scavengers would be here, Brady mused, pointing their microphones and cameras, trying to get an inside story. Rubenfeld, a hard-nosed local hack, would be one of the first of the many rats scrambling over whatever sordid scraps they could find. Sick, twisted murders sold newspapers and increased circulation figures big-time.

He limped along the bleak, rubbish-strewn promenade. His leg was playing up; some days it was fine, at other times like this morning, it would give him jip. It was clear enough where he was heading; it wasn’t difficult to spot uniform on the sectioned off beach below him. They were stood around trying to look official while head to foot white-clad SOCOs diligently moved in and out of a large white forensics tent.

Brady kicked a broken vodka bottle out of the way, scattering the screeching seagulls from their fight over dumped curried chips. Beside it a deflated, limp condom lay abandoned. Both a testament that despite the credit crunch scum always found money from somewhere to get trashed and then shag and gorge on whatever; regardless. Whitley Bay hadn’t suffered because of the global economic crisis; at least the owners of the pubs and clubs hadn’t, unlike the residents. Property prices had crashed, but unlike the rest of Britain, it wasn’t the global recession that had sunk prices to an all-time low, it was the scum that travelled from miles around to get off their face and into someone else’s knickers just to briefly forget how pointless their lives were.

What more did he expect from Whitley Bay at six am on a Sunday morning?, questioned Brady as he looked around at the debris from the night before. The place was a dump. A half-eaten takeaway was strewn across one of the seats that faced the sea. Beside it empty beer bottles lay discarded. Even the air around him stank of stale piss, spilt beer and take-away food. Brady looked over at the unnaturally still waters of the sewage-strewn North Sea. He stopped for a moment and watched a small fishing boat drift over the eerily calm surface as he wondered how a girl’s body had come to be washed up onto the shores of Whitley Bay?