Kindle Edition
Category:
Crime
Pages: 283
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
An ex-cop settles down in a small town as a taxi-driver, but the past comes back to haunt him.
Once upon a time, Joel September was a detective in the Metropolitan Police Service, with a great career ahead of him and a beautiful, successful wife squarely behind him. But that was before he locked horns with a corrupt undercover cop and his life changed forever.
Now Joel's a small-town taxi-driver, a single-father trying hard to raise his young daughter, and all he asks of the past is that it leaves him alone.
Unfortunately the past seems to have its own ideas, and when his estranged wife goes missing, Joel feels he has no alternative but to investigate.
The QUEEN of HEARTS is a fast-paced crime novel, thoroughly laced with humour.
Approx' 99,000 words.
Excerpt
ONE
My name is Joel September, and until a few years ago I was a Detective Inspector in the Metropolitan Police Service. A pretty good one, too, as it happens. I was strong, healthy and smart, I had a good clean reputation, an intelligent, attractive wife with her own blossoming career in the City, and was generally considered by one and all – myself most definitely included − to be a shiny bright prospect for the future. I was ‘one to watch’. I was what people in the know might have called a ‘boy wonder’, or a ‘rising star’.
As it turned out, however, I was none of these things. I was only a nearly-man.
These days I’m a Hertfordshire-based taxi-driver, a single father separated from the mother of my child, and on bad days I limp, courtesy of the cruciate ligament injury that allowed me to resign from the Met’ without leaving too many red faces behind me. I no longer believe that I’m even slightly smart, and my reputation (so I’m told) is that I’m about as reliable as a newsreader with Tourette’s Syndrome. The future, once so promising and assured, now seems endlessly uncertain.
How are the mighty fallen.
Or, as it says in the Bible − bummer.
I didn’t do anything wrong, I want to make that clear from the start. I never compromised myself, professionally or personally. I didn’t take backhanders from criminals, or play hoopla with prostitutes. I didn’t fabricate evidence or lose it, either accidentally or deliberately. I never bodged an investigation through procedural ineptitude, or scarpered with the booty from a drugs raid.
In fact, my only real fault seemed to be that I was possessed of a certain professional naiveté. Specifically, I was guilty of having a more black-and-white outlook on the enforcement of law than some of my more experienced colleagues. An “excess of zeal”, I remember one particularly outspoken high-ranking critic calling it. And that, in a nutshell, is ultimately what led to my downfall − being caught red-handed in possession of an excess of zeal.
To cut a long depressing story mercifully short, I suspected a handful of undercover officers of taking their roles as villains a little too seriously, to the extent that they had become villains in their own right, and I tried to catch them at it. All well and good, you might say, if I had succeeded I would have been a hero. I’d have got a pay rise and a medal on my chest and my name in the papers. But I didn’t succeed. I failed miserably, and was badly injured in the process.
Afterwards, the man I suspected of being the ringleader of this corrupt group was not only cleared of all suspicion, he was actually promoted. Meanwhile I was immediately shunted sideways into a tedious, dead-end, desk-bound administrative post that was to career enhancement what the flesh-eating disease necrotising fasciitis is to a full and active social life.
This shift was intended, they said, to be a concession to my diminished physical capability, but all it really achieved was to hasten my exit from the Job. I suspect that this was always its real purpose. It was the price of failure.
But as they say, that was then and this is now.
I’ve tried very hard over the years to put the past behind me, and mostly I believe I’ve been successful. It’s true, I’ve never shaken off the habitual nosiness that appears to come part and parcel with being a cop, or the occasional God-like assumption of absolute moral authority that accompanies it. And while I’d be the first to admit that these tendencies have, from time to time, landed me in a certain amount of trouble, so far there hasn’t been anything I couldn’t handle.
So far...
But trouble, of course, comes in all colours, shapes and sizes, and, as I was shortly to learn, from all different angles, too. Unfortunately, it seems that putting the past behind you doesn’t always work out quite as well as it probably should.
In fact, sometimes, no matter how hard you’ve tried, the past simply refuses leave you alone.
I was only working a half-day that Saturday, which meant that I would be home by two o’clock at the latest. It was a beautiful August day, one more in a long sequence of beautiful August days in what, to date, had been a textbook summer, the kind you fondly recalled from childhood and never expected to see again. The plan, such as it was, was to have a pleasant lunch with my mother- and father-in-law, who minded my young daughter Victoria whenever I was working, and then she and I would have the rest of the afternoon and the evening to ourselves.
In theory, Victoria and I could do whatever we wanted with our quality free time together − which in practical terms meant that we’d be doing whatever Vic (a natural born autocrat) wanted to do. If I knew my daughter, this meant a trip to Stanborough Park to feed the ducks and geese, followed by a strenuous hour of horsey-horsey back at home in the living room − an activity otherwise known as the make-Daddy-sweat-like-a-pig game. This, no doubt, would be followed by a long bubble bath and then back-to-back Disney movies till bedtime.
It would be exhausting, of course, but then that’s kids for you. They make you feel both young and old at the same time, and along the way they knock seven shades of shit out of you. By the time Vic was finally settled down for the night, it would be all I could do to keep my eyes open long enough to turn out the lights. However, this happened to be a kind of exhaustion I could cope with and even enjoy. Vic was virtually my sole reason for living now, and I could deny her nothing. She was the apple of my eye, the owner of my soul, and the queen of my heart.
So, driving back home to Welwyn Garden City from Stevenage after dropping my last fare of the day, thinking about the small, precious pleasures to come, I was provisionally a happy man.
And why not? The sun was shining brightly, my top light and the meter were both turned off, and a refreshing, fragrant breeze was blowing in through my open window. The radio, tuned to an oldies station, seemed to be playing the entire soundtrack of my youth, the songs like little memory capsules, relics from a time when music seemed to be an essential part of life itself rather than just the background static it was now. Everything sounded great, even the clunkers I’d hated the first time around.
All in all, it was just one of those fabulous afternoons when you feel as though you’ve been handed a get-out-of-jail-free card, and wherever you happen to be or whatever you happen to be doing, you’re just glad to be alive.
In retrospect, with thirty-six years of life-experience under my belt, I suppose I should have known it wasn’t going to last.
Vic and I live in a little three bedroom terrace house at the end of a cul-de-sac on a leafy estate a couple of miles from the city centre. It’s a nice quiet place to live, as a rule, where nothing much ever seems to happen. But as soon as I stepped in the door, I knew that something had happened today and that things were far from right.
At least Vic was in one piece, and that was something of a relief. Although she was now only a couple of months from her third birthday, the phrase ‘the terrible twos’ could have been coined precisely with my precocious daughter in mind, and she was usually up to more mischief than her old man has ever dreamed of.
Currently she was standing on a slew of old newspapers spread out over the kitchen floor, happily finger-painting at the plastic easel her doting grandparents had recently bought for her. Usually a highly creative dresser, Vic at this moment in time was naked save for a pair of Day of the Week knickers which told me that today was Wednesday, even though it was Saturday. Perhaps that was why they were inside out.
There wasn’t much in terms of a recognisable composition on her canvas, but Vic had done a bang-up job of painting selected parts of her anatomy and the whole of her round face a deep cobalt blue. Her bright green eyes and perfect rows of sharp white teeth shone out at me like gems when she smiled.
‘Daddeee!’
She ran pell-mell into my arms, and when I lifted her up she stamped handprints on my cheeks like little blue starfish.
‘Klown!’ she said. ‘Funnee!’
Yeah, hilarious, I thought.
Over her tiny shoulder I was looking at Henry and Maude, my estranged wife’s parents, and wondering what the trouble was. I couldn’t smell lunch, and they were sitting at the kitchen table with long, stony faces, like an advertisement for timeshare holiday villas on Easter Island.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
Vic, who was obviously in a very literal frame of mind today, immediately pointed at the ceiling. ‘There!’ she bellowed.
Henry and Maude glanced at each other, compressing their lips into angst-ridden frowns, and I groaned internally. Only one thing I was aware of (apart from the thorny subject of bogus asylum-seekers) made them share this grim expression: Lisa, their daughter. My ex-wife. Vic’s mother. Everybody’s nightmare.
‘She’s coming over,’ Henry told me in his precise diction.
My heart sank. ‘What for?’
Once again, Henry and Maude grimaced at each other. Whenever they did this, they looked eerily alike, like ancient fraternal twins.
‘She says she wants to see Victoria,’ Maude replied in a voice laden with doom, as though she were expecting a call from the Grim Reaper and, quite naturally, wasn’t all that enchanted with the idea.
I managed a shrug. ‘Well, she’s entitled, I suppose.’
‘Mmmm,’ they said together, harmonising their doubt.
Henry and Maude were still disgusted with their daughter’s behaviour and had sent her to Coventry on a long-term visa. I didn’t kid myself that this was because Lisa had walked out on our six-year marriage – although I suppose it was that too, to a certain extent. Mostly it was because she appeared to have abandoned her infant child in favour of her career and a fast lifestyle.
It had been only a few weeks after Vic’s second birthday when Lisa had made her hasty exit from the September household, leaving a brief and entirely unsatisfactory note of explanation stuck to the fridge door, and leaving me well and truly up shit creek without a Pamper. Thankfully her parents had come down on my side of the rift and had given me about much help as I could possibly use ever since. They had saved my life. We were doing all right, Vic and me. Not great, but all right.
And yet here I was, struggling to be fair to the woman. Talk about being a glutton for punishment.
‘She is Vic’s M-U-M, after all,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps it’s a good sign.’
‘Good? Good in what way?’ Henry asked sharply. Before his retirement, a baker’s dozen of years ago, he’d been a policeman himself, and he sometimes sounded like he missed the interrogation room.
‘I don’t know. Maybe she’s getting herself sorted out. Maybe she’s thinking about coming back.’
Henry almost snorted. ‘You’re an optimist, boy. I’ve always respected that. Unfortunately, on the subject of my daughter you’re also a blithering idiot.’
Thanks, Henry, I thought. Nice to know where I stand in the grand scheme of things. Hopeless optimist. Blithering idiot. That’s me sorted out, then.
Maude was slightly more diplomatic.
‘Well, I know it’s none of my business, Joel,’ she said gently, ‘but she’s only visited once in nine months. If she genuinely missed either of you, I think you’d have known it by now.’
She was right, of course. There had been only the single visit, almost exactly one month to the day after Lisa had left. A duty call, pure and simple. It had been Christmas Eve, and she had stayed all of twenty minutes.
Maude shook her head and the startling green eyes her granddaughter had inherited from her darkened slightly. ‘I don’t know what this is all about, but I’m sure it can’t be good. Maybe a child has become a desirable fashion accessory in the City, and Lisa’s feeling left out?’
So there it was. Their greatest fear, subtly articulated.
You see, even though Henry and Maude were desperate for Lisa to come back, I knew they were also secretly afraid that if she did come back it wouldn’t last. They were afraid she’d eventually end up taking their granddaughter away from me and away from them, to a life of sloppy day-care centres and unregistered child-minders with suspected Munchausen’s.
This would be an action they would never be able to forgive.
As it happened, Henry and Maude’s fears on this score were completely without foundation, but they didn’t know it, because neither Lisa nor I had ever told them the real truth about why she had left. I suppose Lisa hadn’t told them because she didn’t want to paint herself even blacker in her parents’ eyes than she already had. I hadn’t told them for much the same reason.
Call it misguided loyalty, a known trait of hopeless optimists and blithering idiots worldwide.
The truth was that Lisa had turned out to have all the maternal instincts of a snake, and one of the less affectionate ones, at that. Not only had she never loved Vic, but I don’t believe that she’d ever even liked her. As far as my wife was concerned, getting pregnant had been the second worst mistake of her life.
No prizes for guessing what the first had been. Yeah, yeah, that’s the one.
So whatever Lisa meant to achieve by coming here today, I certainly didn’t believe it was to get her hands on Vic. And by my reckoning a marital reconciliation would be a long-shot on a par with winning the jackpot on the European lottery.
All of which begged the question, what was she really coming over for?
Henry and Maude abruptly stood up together, as though joined at the hip, no longer just fraternal twins but conjoined, too.
‘We’ll get out of your way now,’ Maude said.
‘There’s no need for you to leave. I thought we were having lunch?’
‘It doesn’t matter. We should get back for Daisy, anyway.’
Daisy was their old Golden Retriever, a real gutbucket of a dog also occasionally called Daisy Sausages, because bangers were her favourite treat. If left alone for too long Daisy was apt to eat the carpets. Also the furniture and the doors.
They began to get into their matching Marks & Spencer’s lightweight summer jackets, fawn for Henry to match his socks, powder blue for Maude to match her hair. I shifted Vic to the crook of my arm and opened the door for them.
Maude glanced up at the kitchen clock. ‘She should be here in about an hour.’
‘That girl has never been on time for anything or anyone in her whole life,’ Henry said. ‘She was two weeks late being born.’
‘Eleven days,’ Maude softly corrected.
Henry grumped, ‘Be late for her own damn funeral, most likely.’
Maude gave me a final smile. ‘If there’s any trouble, call us immediately.’
‘I will.’
Henry and Maude made their way to the door and gave Vic a series of affectionate goodbye kisses, miraculously avoiding getting themselves and their lovely jackets smeared with paint. This was a clever trick I had yet to master, and the majority of the items in my wardrobe now looked like Jackson Pollock rejects.
Henry shook my hand, as always, with his trademark vice-like grip. Maude pecked at my cheek and squeezed my arm supportively. Outside the door, she turned back.
‘Don’t forget to call,’ she reminded me.
‘You call me,’ Henry snapped, ‘I’ll call my solicitors. We’ll nip this nonsense in the bud.’
I spent the next half hour or so cleaning both the paint-spattered kitchen and my paint-spattered daughter to the very best of my ability. I had just about finished getting the last of the paint out of Vic’s hair with a washing-up sponge when Albert the Cat bundled his way in through the flap in the back door, en route from some top-secret daytime lair to his favourite snoozing spot in the bottom of the airing cupboard.
Albert the Cat is about the same age as Vic in human years, but on the feline scale of time he is a cat of the world, and he has been my confidant on many a long, lonely night. It is an ideal relationship. I talk, he listens. The best part of the arrangement being that he doesn’t talk back. Or at least, he hasn’t so far.
But now all those shared cosy moments may as well not have happened, and for a while he just stood staring at me intently, frowning, as though I was a baffling species of inedible mouse he’d never come across before.
Then he turned his cold green eyes accusingly on Vic.
Albert was ordinarily a tortoiseshell, but right now he was a tortoiseshell with a significant cobalt blue stripe all the way down his back and along his twitching tail. The fur on his ears had been twisted up into stiff blue antennae, and he looked like a demon.
Vic had been in a creative mood, I guessed.
‘Hi, Albert,’ I said. ‘What’s wrong, feeling blue?’
‘Allie!’ Vic, sitting on the draining board, all but screamed. She held out her chubby arms to the aggrieved cat and made a series of loud kissy-kissy noises with her mouth that sounded like someone trudging through ankle-deep mud.
Albert winced under this sonic onslaught, his long whiskers twitching as he mouthed a series of silent feline obscenities. Then he swung about and stalked away to the corner of the kitchen where his food bowl lived. He hunkered down in front of his dried food with his back to us and started crunching.
Vic tugged at my sodden, rolled up shirtsleeve until I looked at her.
‘Allie loves me,’ she said, nodding solemnly.
Behind me, I heard Albert theatrically choking on his Go-Cat in response to my daughter’s misplaced confidence.
‘Of course he does, darling,’ I told her. ‘In his own strange way.’
I lifted her down from the draining board and gently set her on her feet.
‘Just don’t hold your breath waiting for a Christmas card, eh?’
‘Don’t hold your breath’ would have been pretty good advice for me too, as it turned out. Not with regard to cranky cats and Christmas cards, of course, but to estranged wives and promised visits.
If I had taken this simple phrase to heart, maybe I wouldn’t have bothered rushing around the rest of the house like a mad thing, tidying and straightening as I went. Maybe I wouldn’t have bothered giving myself a swift wash and brush up, just in case Lisa really had sorted herself out and was thinking about coming back to us. Maybe I wouldn’t have wasted my time, or my physical and emotional energy.
Maybe.
But Henry was right about me, it seemed. I am a blithering idiot and a hopeless optimist, and I did hold my breath. And Lisa, true to form, let me down. She never showed. She never called to say she couldn’t make it. She wouldn’t answer her phone when I rang her to ask why.
My only comfort as I carried Vic up to her cot later that night was that my daughter hadn’t caught on to what was supposed to be happening, and so was spared the upset I was going through. Even so, before I went to bed myself I left a couple of messages on Lisa’s voicemail that would let her know, in no uncertain terms, exactly how I felt about this latest example of her chronic irresponsibility.
Hours later, just as I finally began to doze off, I found myself miraculously transported back to the sun-filled kitchen of that afternoon, just back from work, with blue starfish stamped on to my cheeks and a wriggling child in my arms. Maude had just told me that Lisa would be arriving in an hour and Henry had responded by saying that his daughter had never been on time for anything in her whole life.
‘Be late for her own damn funeral,’ he added ominously.
And his voice, echoing against the inside of my skull, seemed to follow me down into the blackness.
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