complaint against you. You assaulted a man on life support!’
‘I wobbled his pipes, that’s hardly an assault,’ Gene said dismissively. ‘And you’re forgetting – Uncle Genie had a ferret about and came up this.’
He held up the folded piece of paper. It was dotted with the truck thief’s blood.
‘It better be worth it,’ said Sam, watching Gene unfold it. ‘What is it? Looks like a letter.’
‘A spot of bedtime reading. Let’s see how it compares to Dick Francis, eh?’ Angling it towards the light coming from a sodium lamp, Gene perused it for a moment. ‘Nice handwriting. Very neat.’ And then he started to read it out. ‘“Dear Derek …” That our lad in there, you reckon? “Dear Derek, so brilliant you could make time for a visit. Really good to get time with you again. Tell Auntie Rose not to fret so much.” Gene shot Sam a serious look. ‘I hope he did tell her. I won’t have Auntie Rose worryin’.’
‘Get on with it, Guv.’
Gene peered closer at the letter, falling silent, his eyes narrowing, his expression darkening.
‘Guv?’ Sam asked.
‘My God, Tyler!’
‘Guv, what is it?’
Gene gave Sam an intense look. Gravely, he announced: ‘It’s Fluffy, Sam. She’s back on the tablets.’
Sam looked blankly at him. ‘What?’
Gene read out, “‘Don’t forget to give Fluffy her special tablets – take her to the vet in Lidden Street if she gets sick again.”’ Gene looked up sharply from the letter. ‘Sam, this stuff is dynamite.’ He balled the letter in his fist and bounced it off Sam’s chest. ‘Too exciting for me. I’ll never get to sleep after that.’
Sam retrieved the screwed-up letter, flattened it out, and glanced over the rest: ‘“… if she gets sick again. It’s very important I can trust you to look after her. See you again soon I hope. Love – Andy.” Andy,’ he said. ‘Derek and Andy.’
‘Those names don’t mean anything to me,’ said Gene.
‘Me neither. But look here – there’s a rubber stamp at the top of the letter approving it for posting. It says “HMP Friar’s Brook”.’
‘HMP!’ scoffed Gene. ‘It’s just a bloody borstal, Tyler. A kiddies’ lock-up for scallies whose balls ain’t dropped. That’s where his mate Andy is, is it? Doing a spot of bird in the nippers’ clinky? And what high-profile criminal caper did he mastermind, d’you think? Clocked some old granny for her pension book and Green Shields to pay for Fluffy’s suppositories? Or is he the Mr Big behind the Manchester used-fridge mafia?’
‘Something weird’s going on here,’ said Sam. ‘It’s not those fridges that lad was after, it was something else. But what? And is there a connection between him and the body in the crusher?’
Silently, Sam and Gene stood beneath the black, starless sky, waiting for inspiration to strike.
With an exaggerated sigh, Gene chucked away his dog end and declared, ‘I’ve ’ad enough of this bollocks. Hozzies give me the bleedin’ ’abdabs. I’m closing shop for the day. The Genie wants his beer. C’mon, Tyler, let’s leave chatterbox in there to suck on his pipes and dream of fridges, and get ourselves down the Arms for a few swifties.’
‘I think I’ll give it a miss this time,’ said Sam. ‘I’m going to swing by the station then head on home. I really do need some kip.’
‘DI Tyler needs kip more than beer,’ sighed Gene, rolling his eyes. ‘Kids today. Lightweights. A bunch of ruddy lightweights.’
When Sam got to the station, he found Annie Cartwright’s desk empty, and the sight of her chair and neatly piled paperwork made his heart ache for her.
Carefully, he sealed the letter from ‘Andy’ in an envelope and wrote on the front, ‘See what you make of this – are there any hidden clues???’ He left if tucked into Annie’s typewriter. It pleased him to have any opportunity to show that he took her seriously, that he valued her mind and police skills, that he saw her as an absolutely integral part of the team. Looking at the envelope left in the typewriter, it occurred to Sam that it was almost a love letter, from him to her.
It’s the first time I’ve left a bloodstained love letter! he thought.
A bloodstained love letter. All at once, the humour of the phrase curdled within him. He felt an icy coldness in the pit of his stomach, as if he was suddenly aware of being watched by malevolent eyes.
Sam glanced anxiously about, but the CID office was empty. And yet the fear remained. He knew that somewhere out there, hiding in the shadows but drawing steadily closer, was something evil. He had sensed it first as a vague apparition on the very margins of perception, and tried to dismiss it as a figment of his subconscious. But then, later, he had somehow recognized that same spectral presence reflected in the monstrous tattoos of bare-knuckle boxer Patsy O’Riordan. At the fairground, pursuing Patsy into the ghost train in an attempt to arrest him for murder, Sam had encountered an even stronger manifestation of that same horror – a rotting corpse, standing upright and seemingly alive, dressed in a sixties Nehru suit. The vision had vanished almost at once, but it had struck Sam with more immediacy and reality than just a trick of the mind. Whatever it was, it had been real – and it had been aware of both him and of Annie.
‘The Devil in the Dark …’ Sam murmured to himself. It was the name he had given this abominable thing. And briefly, after Patsy O’Riordan’s death, he had heard its voice, issuing momentarily from the mouth of a young scally Sam was passing in the street:
‘I’ll keep coming at you, you cheating bastard. I’ll keep coming at you until I’ve got my wife back – my wife – mine.’
‘You won’t mess with my mind,’ Sam said out loud, as if the Devil in the Dark could hear him. ‘I’m strong. Annie’s strong. And all your lies and mind games will get you nowhere. Our future is our own – and there’s nothing you can do.’
He found himself holding his breath, waiting for an answer. But there was nothing, just the sound the of the night cleaners starting up their hoovers in nearby offices.
Sam looked back down at the letter resting on the typewriter, silently wished the absent Annie a good night, and then headed out. He’d go home, alone, knock back a couple of bottles of brown ale and fall asleep. A dull, lonesome end to yet another chaotic day on the force with Gene Hunt.
In a corridor leading to the main doors, Sam came across Chris and Ray. They looked red-faced and out of breath. Ray was reviving himself by drawing heavily on a cigarette, wiping the sweat from his blonde moustache with a rough, fag-stained finger. Chris was finger-combing his hair and readjusting his knitted tank top, which had been pulled askew.
‘I hope you two haven’t been fighting,’ Sam said, striding towards them.
‘Not with each other, Boss, no,’ Chris said. There was a zip-up sports bag at his feet, which he picked up gingerly.
‘We just been banging up a poofter,’ announced Ray with contempt. ‘A right little pervert, Boss, delivering filth to some other pervert. We caught ’em at the handover. Show him the bag, Chris.’
Chris thrust the sports bag at Sam.
‘Take a gander inside that, Boss – if you dare,’ Chris said, backing up as if the bag might go off at any moment.
Sam looked into the bad and was confronted by a messy stash of photos. It was all boys together – in bed, in the shower, on a grubby sofa, on a bare floor – with masses of pallid, spotty male flesh on display. The harsh flash used to take the pictures did the models’ skin tone no favours at all.
‘It’s baffling!’ put in Chris. ‘Why would a fella want to look at other fellas’