Fragile Cord (11 page)

He paused,
‘What if they were in on it together? Now
that
would explain why I’m not
getting any contradictory statements from the regulars in the bar –
if these guys had anything to do with Ricky’s assault, then no
one’d want to point the finger at them. They were well placed too -
out of sight all the time they claimed to be on the door. The bar
staff were busy pulling pints and serving shots and once the
punters were inside getting tanked up, no one would actually be
keeping tabs on the security staff would they?’ He spat out the
word
security
as
though he’d bitten on a turd.

Coupland considered Turnbull’s
comments, giving them serious thought. He was on edge. The smell of
the mortuary was embedded in his nostrils. In his stomach. The one
person he could talk freely to, who never judged him, was barely
speaking to him at all.

‘How many work on the door?’ he
asked.

‘There’s four on each night.’ Turnbull
replied. The finger beneath his navel had been working in a
circular motion, was now moving side to side.

‘Two on the front door, two roaming. If
the guys on the door need to take a dump they have to radio the
other two requesting cover before they can even think about
dropping their trousers. ’

‘And of course they’re all
backing each other up?’

‘Precisely. I’ve questioned
them all – and at the time of Wilson’s attack, Brook and Horrocks
were on the door.’

‘But they didn’t see or hear
anything?’

‘You’ve got the general gist of
it.’ Turnbull answered wryly.

Coupland’s smile was a
disappointed one; he hated assuming the worst of people and being
proved right. It was the part of his job that gave him the least
satisfaction.

‘So what now?’ he asked.

‘
I’m going back to
the hospital to see if I can get anything more from Wilson’s
family, something that might corroborate this,’ said Turnbull, ‘but
first I’m going to pay Horrocks and Brook a home visit.’

‘
I’ll do it.’
Coupland offered. He was in the bloody mood for it.

Turnbull smirked,
‘You sure about that?’

‘
Why, where do they
live?’

‘
Not so much where,
in fact they both live on the same road, it’s just that after
release from prison both suspects went back to live at their
parents’ home.’

Coupland nodded his
understanding. Often, the most challenging part of dealing with
thugs wasn’t putting up with their abusive behaviour or the
constant threat of violence. The biggest hurdle, he found, the
absolute pain in the arse, was dealing with their
mothers.

‘Hey little man, how’s it
going?’

Alex looked around her as she
spoke into the phone, relaxed into her chair when she was sure she
wouldn’t be overheard. She wanted to get through as many of the
contacts in Tracey’s Filofax as she could before calling it a day
but first she wanted to hear Ben’s voice, find out what was going
on in his little world.

Such was the way of things, she
observed, that when a man called his family he was applauded for
being a good father, yet when a woman did the same thing she was
accused of not being able to separate her professional life from
her domestic responsibilities. It was unfair, but it was a fact of
life that went way beyond the force, with thousands of women facing
the same inequalities every day. It was better to just get on with
it, she reasoned, her problems were no different from anyone
else’s. She guiltily pushed the thought out of her mind that
Emmeline Pankhurst, who’d grown up in Salford, would be turning in
her grave at such a passive attitude, reminding herself it had
never been her intention to change the world, just to earn a decent
enough living for her family.

She smiled as Ben’s sing-song voice
tumbled down the line to her:

‘Daddy took me to McDonalds after
school,’ he told her triumphantly, the way kids do when the more
gullible parent has succumbed to their constant demands.

‘
Did he now?
’ Alex raised her eyebrow
in disapproval, then chided herself. She couldn’t be in two places
at once, she wouldn’t be home for a couple more hours – at least
Ben had been fed, although she used the term loosely.

‘Have you read your reading book to
Daddy yet?’ she asked him hopefully. There was a pause while he
considered his answer.

‘Daddy said I can do it after
the cartoons.’

Cartoons before schoolwork? She
tapped her short fingernails on the desk-top. ‘You know you should
read your book to Daddy before you settle down to watch the
television, Ben.’ she said firmly, scratching at an ingrained
coffee-ring. She listened to his heavy breathing down the phone
line, detected an impatient sigh as she pictured him glaring at the
device that brought his mother’s instructions to him even when she
wasn’t there.

‘
I’m
not
watching the cartoons,’ he muttered indignantly.

‘Daddy is.’

Coupland stared along
the row of terraced pebbledash houses that looked out onto
Pendlebury Road and squared his shoulders. There were no other cars
parked along this stretch of road, the majority of tenants relied
on buses when they needed to go into town, everything else could be
obtained from the concrete precinct that separated the single row
of maisonettes from the Tattersall Estate. That is, if you didn’t
mind walking through groups of off their face teenagers intent on
taking the piss no matter what.

Coupland’s hand
lingered on the car door handle longer than was necessary, checking
and rechecking it was locked; yet still he didn’t move. Instead he
scanned the windows of the neighbouring houses. This was the part
he hated, the time wasting foreplay before the main event. Pound to
a penny he’d been seen pulling up, that right this minute size ten
feet were pounding upstairs to a small back bedroom before he’d
even turned the engine off.

The woman who
answered the door glared at Coupland for a full ten seconds before
speaking. No one wore a suit around here; save for the filth or the
debt collectors, and by the look on her face neither were welcome
in her home. Her eyes raked Coupland as she made her assessment,
her gaze settling on his hard-earned belly.

‘
You’ll be a copper
then?’ she accused him, before he had a chance to speak.

She had a bitter,
staring face, and when she sneered her lips pared back to reveal
nicotine-stained teeth at angles with each other like neglected
tombstones in a cemetery. Two rows of lines beneath her eyes hinted
at sleepless nights worrying about what her boy was up to, and more
importantly, who he was up to it with. Hollowed out cheeks gave a
haggard appearance framed by short brittle hair, an
uneven parting revealed a scalp stained auburn
from a home colouring kit.

‘
Jimmy Brooks’ mam?’
Coupland asked, already knowing the answer. It was the same old
dance, just with different partners.

The woman sighed.
‘What’s he bleedin’ done now?’ It wasn’t a question really, more
the exasperated response of a put-upon mother. Coupland tilted his
head and held out his hand to pacify the woman. ‘Nothin’ as I know
of yet luv, I just need to ask you some questions.’

‘Me?’
That threw her. She folded heavy arms across a
body that had long
since lost its shape
and now resembled a lumpy sack
.
She regarded Coupland with open hostility. ‘What
d’ya wanno ask me about?’

Coupland took a
breath before he answered. ‘The assault on the precinct on Sunday
night luv. I’ve reason to believe-’

‘
He was workin’.’ She
cut in quickly. ‘He didn’t do it.’ Her reply was automatic,
ingrained over a lifetime of blame being laid at her door. First
her old man, now the boy.

He wasn’t there.

He didn’t do it.

Same game, just different players.

‘
Look,’ Coupland
glanced around, word would be spreading like wildfire that he was
there, he tried to minimise the damage this would do. ‘Can I come
in?’

‘
A’ll not ‘ave a copper in
my
‘ouse.’ She informed him. ‘So say
what you’ve got to say, then piss off.’

‘
Everythin’ all right Sheil?’ a hardboiled voice called out
from somewhere to Coupland’s left, and before he knew it they’d
been joined by a tank of a woman, hell-bent on joining in the
conversation. Danny Horrocks’s mam, going by the house number she
stomped over from and the way his luck was petering out. Christ, he
thought as he gave her the once-over, she brought a new meaning to
the word hefty. Hard faced too. One of those women who could pee
standing up. He’d seen enough of ‘em do it – after hours in bus
shelters and shop doorways
and
stare you down while they did
it. One of those women who if they told you to shift you just kept
on walking, didn’t ask why. Everything about her looked mean, from
the set of her shoulders to the face flattened from a lifetime of
brawling. Hooded lids drooped over flint-like eyes. She stared hard
at him now, and as she did so every one of her features looked to
him down-turned, as though God had put her face on upside down for
a joke, only forgot to change it back again to its rightful
position. Coupland cursed silently, Jimmy’s mother had been
difficult enough on her own, now she had reinforcements he’d be
pissing in the wind.

Sheila
turned to her
ally, told
her the copper’d been asking about the assault on Sunday night.
A
calculating look crossed the other
woman’s face as she stared long and hard at Coupland. ‘You’ll be
asking after our Charlie an’ all then?’ she asked him, a hint of
malice in her eye.

Coupland sighed. ‘I take it there’s not
much point eh?’ he replied, weary now.

He nodded at the
woman whose doorstep he was standing on, keeping him at arm’s
length like he was a Jehovah’s Witness.

‘
I’ll come back
another time, Sheila.’ He said, and he made to head back towards
his waiting car, but not before hearing the sour one
mutter

‘Don’t bother.’

The CID Room was
deserted. It was the transitional time, the in-between hours when
those without families pile into the pub and those with families
pile into the pub before returning to loved ones but Coupland
remained at his desk. Given the trouble it had landed him in a
swift half was no longer an option and with the best will in the
world the thought of going to home to a frosty reception didn’t
appeal, so he stayed put, not yet ready to return to the apocalypse
that was his marriage.

Savouring the silence he
re-played the recording the photographer had taken of the cutting
and removal of the cord around Tracey Kavanagh’s neck. He’d managed
to get a close up shot of the knot behind her head, and Coupland
could see his own hands moving swiftly to sever the rope either
side of the ligature before bagging it for later.

The camera then panned
backwards taking in the wider scene. At the time Coupland had been
so wrapped up in his own tasks, cross-referencing each knot with
the location it came from, that he hadn’t paid attention to what
else had been going on around him. Now, alone in the silence of the
CID room he was able to observe Benson, the pathologist, as he
handled Tracey once she’d been freed from the rope, and in the
moments afterwards, when Coupland had moved away.

Benson seemed to hold onto her
longer than he needed, as though willing her back to life. It was
probably the pregnancy, Coupland reckoned, that made it so much
harder. A life slain before it even had a chance to gasp air. He
watched now as the video showed Benson lowering her carefully,
almost reverently, onto the floor, before laying his hand on her
stomach and closing his eyes. Coupland remembered at the time
seeing the pathologist crouched down beside her, he’d presumed he
was continuing with his examination. But it occurred to him now, as
the camera zoomed onto Benson’s bowed head and moving lips that he
wasn’t checking her for further injury.

He was praying.

Both knots lay in separate
evidence bags on the desk before him, already tested for DNA. He
picked up the one that had been cut from behind Tracey’s neck,
slipping it out of its plastic cover, running his fingers along the
twisted strands. A wave of sadness swept over him as he reconciled
the smiling family captured in the photographs on each wall in the
house with the forlorn figures laid out in Benson’s laboratory.
Different people reacted to pitfalls in their lives in different
ways. There was no right and wrong, no way to second-guess them.
Maybe in Tracey’s own mind her actions made perfect sense. A
solution to a terrible problem. But what had been the problem?

The rope
seemed to beckon him, taunting him to place it around his throat,
and he did so, tightening his grip until his knuckles turned white,
feeling the searing sensation of rough fibre against skin. In that
moment he knew without doubt that Tracey Kavanagh had
intended
to kill
herself. He closed his eyes, imagining her determination.
Breathless, overcome with panic, pain……and then nothing. His eyes
shot open and he found himself gasping for air, his hands flaying
at the rope until it fell to the floor and there was nothing to
grab onto, nothing but his own skin.