Coffin Dodgers , livre ebook

Andrews UK - William Stafford

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96 pages

English

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When the recently departed start getting up and walking around Dedley, the detectives of the Serious Crimes division are plunged into their most gruesome case so far. Meanwhile, Brough and his boyfriend hit a rough patch and Miller is laid low by a mysterious illness. With shocks and surprises along the way, this darkly funny story is the fifth Brough and Miller investigation, the fourth sequel to Blood & Breakfast.

Informations

Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	21 juin 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783338641
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Title Page
COFFIN DODGERS
A Brough and Miller investigation
by
William Stafford

Publisher Information
Published in 2014 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of William Stafford to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2014 William Stafford
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Dedication
For Jon

1.
I t was the dead time, the empty days between Christmas and New Year. It was the middle of the night, just when it was about to decide to become a morning instead. In short: it was Vivian’s favourite time. She had volunteered - just like she did every year - to work right through the holidays. She wasn’t a Christmas person. By the time her colleagues broke up on Christmas Eve, she was glad to see the back of them with their Christmas cards and Secret Santas. They were an overexcitable lot. Some of them had been frothing about Christmas since Halloween. Vivian had learned years ago not to get her expectations up. The others would always come back in January and it would be ‘How was your Christmas?’ and the response would invariably be, ‘Oh, you know: quiet.” All that anticipation for nothing. Unless something dreadful happened like an accident, a death or a birth. Only then would that year be ‘a Christmas to remember’.
It was all the same to Vivian. She was pleased there was a hint of the Grinch to her nature and more than a scruple of Scrooge. For a few glorious days every year she had the mortuary to herself. It wasn’t a place for mince pies and mistletoe, although she allowed Geoffrey his paper crown from the interdepartmental crackers. Poor soul; he’d been through enough, whoever he was, to end up wired together on a stand, the resident skeleton and butt of many a joke.
Vivian pulled up the file for the most recent admission. Another poor soul suddenly called to his maker in the festive season. Cause of death: unknown. Well, that’s what I’m here for, Vivian grinned, relishing the mystery. She padded through to the Fridge in her flat slippers. Quite young too... she did a spot of mental arithmetic on the poor soul’s date of birth. Thirty-four! Poor soul. Thirty-four was no age at all. And three years younger than the woman who was going to cut him open to find out what had finished him off.
She set out the instruments she would need, placing them within easy reach on a stainless steel trolley.
The young man - the dead young man - the dead young man in his early thirties - was laid out on a table of the same stainless steel. A gutter ran around the table’s edge to catch any runoff. Everything was cold and clean and easy to keep that way. And that was exactly how Vivian liked her world to be.
She tucked her hair up under a cotton cap and fixed a rectangular mask over the lower half of her face. Last on were the Perspex safety goggles; some of these stiffs could give you a nasty squirt in the eye. You’d be surprised.
A quick buzz of the surgical saw will get through your sternum, my lad, and then it’s in with the chest-spreader and allez-oop ! Your heart laid bare for me the only way I want it. I’ll soon get to the bottom of this, my lad; don’t you worry about that. You just lie there and keep your eyes closed. I can handle things from here.
She reached for the saw and thumbed the switch. The circular blade growled and whirred into action, buzzing away like angry bees revving tiny motorbikes. She lowered the spinning teeth towards the dead man’s chest.
A cold hand seized Vivian’s wrist, forcing the saw away. Startled, Vivian lost control. The blade chewed hungrily at her neck, a hyperactive puppy relentless to give its affection. Vivian staggered from the table, her arms flailing. She upset the trolley, sending instruments clattering to the floor. They will need sterilising again, she thought wildly. The saw insisted on giving her its love bite, chomping through her trachea and taking a chunk from her jugular. Vivian’s blood sprayed in a wide arc across the room. Some of it was deflected by the ceiling to rain on the body on the table.
The man, apparently not as dead as Vivian had been led to believe, sat up. He surveyed the carnage all around him. There was blood all over him. There was blood everywhere. And there was a dead woman in surgical scrubs on the floor with an instrument protruding from what was left of her throat like a cocktail stick through a maraschino cherry.
Shit, thought the man. Shit. Oh, shit.
***
Detective Inspector David Brough was in a bad mood. His boyfriend had turned up at Brough’s parents’ Warwickshire home without warning, without invitation. Ma and Pa Brough were in bed, luckily, and it was Brough who answered the intercom from the front gates.
“Oh, come on, David.” Detective Constable Jason Pattimore pleaded into the microphone mesh. “I’ve come all this way.”
“I didn’t ask you to!”
“Oh, don’t be like this! You’ve been missing me something rotten and you know it. Let me in and I’ll show you how much I’ve been missing you.”
“I’m sorry; that’s not going to happen.”
Pattimore swore. Brough panicked, rushing to cover the speaker in case the profanity woke his parents.
“Go home.”
“No, I won’t. That flat’s empty without you. And have you seen how much it’s pissing down with snow? Filthy night!”
“Snow doesn’t piss down,” Brough rasped, mindful of his parents’ bedroom at the top of the stairs.
“Spunking down, then,” said Pattimore. “The point I’m making is I miss you. I missed you all over Christmas and now I’m here and you won’t let me in. I’m freezing my bollocks off out here.”
“Go to a B and B,” Brough advised. “There’s one half a mile down the road. The walk will warm you up.”
“Fuck that. I’ll sleep in the car and if I do freeze my bollocks off, well, they’ll be on your head.”
The line went silent. Brough thought Pattimore had gone. He pressed the button a couple of times.
“Jay?” he asked. “Jason? If you’re there, go to the B and B and - and - I’ll join you in half an hour.”
There was more silence. Brough strained to hear, placing his ear next to the speaker.
“You fucking beauty!” Pattimore bellowed. Brough recoiled from the intercom and crashed into the hall table.
The landing light came on. Seconds later, Chief Constable Peter Brough (retired) was waddling down the stairs in dressing gown and slippers, aiming an ornamental blunderbuss at his only son.
“Who goes there?” he barked.
“It’s me, Dad.”
“For fuck’s sake, David.” The old man tucked his gun under his arm. “What are you doing, footling around in the dark? Anyone would think we didn’t feed you. Get to bed.”
He stomped back up to his room. Brough peeled himself off the hallway floor. Moving like a rather balletic ninja, he lifted a hat, coat and scarf from the hooks along the wall. He slipped his bare feet into two mismatched wellington boots and crept through the kitchen and out via the back door.
Christ. Jason had been right about the snow. It was absolutely ejaculating down. Brough huddled into the coat - one of his father’s - threw the scarf around his neck - his mother’s - and tottered away from the house like a duck with birth defects - the wellies each belonged to a different parent’s left foot.
He scaled the wrought iron gates. He could see the curves of Pattimore’s tyre prints straightening off and leading away. In the direction of the B and B.
Good lad!
Brough clapped his hands together.
And fell off the gate.
He landed with a muffled crump in a drift of snow.
Fuck. Ouch. Fuck. Shit.
He got up and hobbled down the road, following the flattened lines of his boyfriend’s tracks.
A hot bath or shower - shared, of course - would be the first order of business. And then they would make up for the time they had lost, the Christmas they didn’t spend together.
Brough slipped. He left one of the wellies in the road and half-hopped, half-shuffled the rest of the way.
***
“Are you feeling better, Mel?” The knuckles of Detective Sergeant Melanie Miller’s horny-handed (and horny in general) boyfriend rapped on the bathroom door. He pressed his ear to the wood but any response Miller may have uttered was drowned out by the flushing of the toilet.
The door opened with a sudden jerk catching Jerry off balance.
“Oh, there you are, Mel,” he observed, somewhat redundantly.
Miller, pale of face and tight of lip, pushed past him. She slumped her way to the bedroom seeking the comfort of the duvet. Jerry followed.
“I can fetch you a glass of water,” he indicated the path back to the bathroom with his thumb. Miller shook her head and began to cry. Jerry rushed to her and perched on the edge of the bed. “Oh, don’t cry, love.” He wondered whether to put his arms around her or pat her on the head. He wasn’t very good at dealing with people. Not living ones anyway. He was the groundskeeper of Dedley’s main cemetery and most of the people he encountered were spark out in wooden boxes or looking lost or crying their eyes out. But if they were crying their eyes out in the cemetery, at least you could make an educated guess why. And now