The Vacant Casualty
PATTY O’FURNITURE
The Vacant Casualty
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First published 2012 by Boxtree
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-0-7522-6543-8
Copyright © Patty O’Furniture
The right of the author to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written
permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized
act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal
prosecution and civil claims for damages.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.
Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham ME5 8TD
Prologue
Mrs Elizabeth Bottlescum
always pottered around the
garden in the very first moments of the day. Primarily this
was because she always woke so early, but it was also due to
the little gossipy titbits she could glean while she watered
the azaleas.
For there was much gossip to pick up in the small town
of Mumford. On the surface it might appear a sunlit vision
of English perfection, a sleepy idyll of old-fashioned good
taste and family values, but if one knew where to look it
was packed to the rafters with rotters of the first water.
It had been many years since Mr Bottlescum passed
away, and left her alone in this little house. She often
thought of him now, not because he had been particularly
interesting, or because he had any even mildly pleasant personality
traits, but because he’d been in possession of an
absolutely colossal wanger. On warm summer evenings, she
often daydreamed about it for hours.
The beauty of this setting could not be denied. The early
sun rose slowly in the East over the hilltops, glowing pale
1
2
orange. In the narrow streets, the cottages with their
thatched roofs and whitewashed walls slumbered in silence.
Ducks fretted playfully in the millpond, while a gentle
morning wind drifted with dandelion seeds. And from the
freshly tilled fields that surrounded the town at not a
quarter of a mile’s distance drifted the aroma of twenty
thousand tonnes of cow shit that had been spread there the
previous afternoon. It was the country. What can you do?
In just over an hour the local little darlings would be
threading their way happily down the hill towards Pigfarts,
the exclusive local school – and at the sight of them Mrs
Bottlescum would wonder for the hundredth time why they
always carried broomsticks and had what looked like gunpowder
stains on their uniforms. The pips signalled the end
of
Farming Today on Radio 4 and the beginning of the morning
in earnest.
The blessing of being awake at this time was in the comfort
to be taken from the various routines that one could
always observe so early. First, one saw Mildred Penstroke’s
dog, Glands, taking a colossal dump on the neighbours’
lawn, as she had painstakingly trained it to do. Then came
Hetty McBride sneaking back from Bill Strange’s house,
where she had spent the night, and pretending not to notice
Mrs Bottlescum’s bald gaze. A minute later Hetty’s husband,
Lionel, came out of the next-door-but-one house and
scurried ashamedly in through his own back door.
PATTY O’FURNITURE
3
The Vacant Casualty
‘So it begins. Do you know what, Pocket?’ she said to
her cat, which purred quietly by her ankles, ‘I think it’s getting
warm enough for us to crack out the old deckchair,
you know . . .’
And so she toddled off to the shed and shortly returned,
set out the aforementioned apparatus and sat back in it with
a deep sense of pleasant relaxation and a quiet thrill at the
entertainment to come.
Moments later, Mrs Glendinning from number 47
peeped round the door of the Smythington abode before
making a dash back to her own house, shortly followed by
three other women, who all dispersed in different directions.
‘Lesbo tryst,’ muttered Mrs Bottlescum, returning from
the kitchen with her breakfast on a tray.
Next it was Reggie Farmhurst and Oliver Patchbury
who snuck out of the disused windmill, no doubt woken
from their carnal slumbers by the crowing of the cock.
‘Gayers,’ said Bottlescum, munching a bit of toast. ‘They
tie each other up in there, you know, Pocket.’
She finished off her tea as she saw the entire local fire
department abseil via their hose from the bedroom window
of one of the town’s more notorious teenage girls – followed
shortly afterwards by the first fifteen of the Mumford
rugby league team.
‘Good Lord, how does she fit them all in that tiny
PATTY O’FURNITURE
bedroom?’ Elizabeth wondered. It brought to mind an incident
from her own childhood in a similar rural village,
when she had celebrated St Swithin’s Day 1944 by entertaining
a dozen members of the Airborne 353rd Regiment
of the United States Air Force. ‘The young do have to try
and take things
further these days,’ she tutted. ‘Perhaps
young Penelope could hold one of her soirées in a Mini
Cooper – invite a brass band along to play “Abide with Me”
and we can get someone from
Guinness World Records along.
Hah!’
The morning’s amusement was nearly at an end. Almost
everyone in the town was now safely returned to their own
beds. There were only a few last stragglers remaining – the
local piano teacher sidling from the pet shop wearing a
nasty smirk and some mysterious stains on his waistcoat,
and someone in a nun’s costume leaving the Catholic
church. But then, she supposed, it was possible that it was
actually a nun.
‘Stranger things have happened, Pocket!’ she said, and
her cat assented with a mew.
At last, with nothing remaining of her breakfast but an
empty cup and saucer, and some breadcrumbs scattered
down her blouse, she was about to pack up her things and
go upstairs to wake up the major and tell him to get back to
his wife when she spotted something that was, for once, out
of the ordinary.
4
Down the lane that led out of town was tripping that
man from the Parish Council. The nice one, what was his
name? – Terry Fairbreath. He was known thereabouts as
just about the only person who could be relied on to give an
issue a fair hearing, the rest of the council being filled with
ancient madmen, cranks and troublemakers. He was handsome
too, and considered quite the catch by the local
females (even the group Mrs Bottlescum had referred to
under the appellation ‘lesbo tryst’ had considered making
him the first male member of their little gathering), yet he
always remained single, was always composed, thoughtful,
polite and well turned out. It was a mystery to everyone.
‘Well, not
that much of a mystery. Gay as a peacock, no
doubt. But then the gayers had no luck with him either . . .’
After re-entering the house she washed and put away
her breakfast things, and it was only on the stairs that it
occurred to her there was something strange about his
appearance. It was not simply the fact that he was out so
early, although that in itself was unusual. Perhaps it was that
he had been carrying an axe.
Was that it, she pondered, or was there something else
as well?
Yes, surely it was that he had been dripping blood from
a conspicuously large wound in his back. But there was
something else . . .
Was it that he had been carrying a smoking shotgun
The Vacant Casualty
5
PATTY O’FURNITURE
under one arm? Well, he had, but that wasn’t what was niggling
at the back of her mind. Was it that glimpse she had
caught of someone leaning out from the bushes, pointing a
bow and arrow at him? Perhaps. But there was another
detail that lingered there, waiting to be found.
Maybe it was that his coat flapped open and she had
caught sight of what looked like a fat pack of dynamite
strapped to his chest, with a jolly modern-looking digital
countdown, and a string of hand grenades.
‘Yes, that was it,’ she nodded to herself. ‘It was that, and
the fact that he was sprinting fast as he could go, screaming,
crying and begging for his life. That was definitely what
caught my attention . . .’
She pondered this strange circumstance for a moment
before shaking her head. It was all too much for a sex-mad
septuagenarian like herself to take in.
‘Ah well, I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocent explanation,’
she said quietly, hoisting herself up the few final steps
before entering her room and slapping the major’s backside
with all her might.
And yet, when the town’s citizens rose (again) from
their beds later that morning and went about their business,
they would find that not only had Terry Fairbreath
gone missing, but that his disappearance was just the beginning
of the terrible sequence of events that would result in
catastrophe.
6
Chapter One
The police station
in Fraxbridge received the call at
eleven o’clock on the Monday two weeks following. Mr
Fairbreath’s cleaner, Mavis Ritter, had gone as usual to let
herself into his home and discovered the front door wide
open. Feeling somewhat concerned, she decided she ought
to check with Mr Fairbreath that there was nothing amiss
and so, once she had taken her customary four shots of
gin from his ‘secret’ bottle in the airing cupboard and
(after whipping her duster quickly across the top of the
microwave) put in a couple of hours at The Elder Scrolls V:
Skyrim on his Xbox 360, she took the five-minute walk
round the corner to the architect’s office where he worked.
On enquiring after his whereabouts, she discovered that he
had not been into work for ten days, and was not answering
his mobile phone. She decided to put the matter in the
hands of the police.
Mumford itself had the smallest possible police station a
village could have, a cubicle adjoined to the Town Hall not
much larger than an old-fashioned police phone box. In
7
PATTY O’FURNITURE
fact, this is exactly what it had been until the town’s sole
part-time community officer, PC Staplethorpe (in whose
person was also made up the body of Mumford’s traffic
police and its Territorial Army), converted it into a small
kiosk in which he could sleep off his hangovers under the
protection of the law, and away from his wife, Angela. The
station was, therefore, so unused to receiving allegations of
serious crime that when he got Mavis’s report, Staplethorpe
had no choice but to give it pride of place in the centre of
the orange plastic ‘My First Business desk’ children’s accessory,
which was all that could be fitted into the office space
underneath his hammock.
This was Staplethorpe’s personal technique, which had
until now proved 100 per cent effective. All crimes in
Mumford came face to face with the complete indifference
of the law, and eventually turned out not to be crimes at all
(cats returned home, surreptitiously borrowed items were
replaced in the dead of night), or were retaliated against in
a petty enough way to teach the perpetrator a lesson.
Thus Mavis’s report of the missing Terry Fairbreath
remained under the scrutiny of the law (in the shape of PC
Staplethorpe’s backside as it swung to and fro) until two
weeks had passed, when, having achieved no results from
the local force, Mavis deemed it advisable to put a call
through to the police station in Fraxbridge, the next town
across.
8
Mumford, as I have attempted to convey, was a sleepy
little town hardly worthy of the name – a swollen village,
really, of perfect Englishness. It had a millpond; it had a
cricket team; it had an ancient abbey that required millions
of pounds for its upkeep, for no visible benefit; it had quaint
thatched buildings, winding streets, curious little shops
and hundreds of white-haired denizens who tended their
gardens, waved happily to one another in the street and
considered their lives to be blessed.
Fraxbridge, by contrast, but five miles away, was considered
by the upstanding citizens of Mumford to be a
plague-ridden city of vice and corruption. It had, after all,
a railway station, by which undesirables could come and go
as they pleased. It boasted also a chain bookshop (‘The one
that begins with W’, Mumfordians would tell you darkly,
disdaining to actually say the word), and a
Marks & Spencer.
All these things placed the town beneath contempt and of
course contributed to its need for a substantially larger
police force.
Thus it was that when Mavis Ritter telephoned
Fraxbridge Police HQ in some considerable distress two
weeks after her original report, the missing persons case
found its way onto the desk of Detective Inspector Reginald
Bradley. It arrived just as he received a call to tell him he
had a visitor in Reception.
‘This isn’t ideal timing,’ he thought to himself, reading
The Vacant Casualty
9
10
the report and starting to feel anxious. Bradley had never
had a missing persons report. He had never had a report of
any kind at all. The truth is Bradley had until this point
spent his entire seventeen-year career policing in a small
village twenty miles south of there, and had only the shadiest
notion (gained from watching half an episode of
NYPD
Blue
when he was fourteen years old, which he had
switched off out of fright) of what ‘real policemen’ were
like. The only exemplar to have crossed his path so far was
the hard-bitten cop who occupied the desk next to his,
Detective Brautigan, a physically huge man, hard-packed
with loathing and frustration, who could regularly be seen
punching the inside of his windscreen as the sports results
were read out over the radio, and who sometimes chewed
whole packets of cigarettes rather than walking seven paces
to smoke outside on the fire escape.
Bradley was not sure he could live up to this, this life of
a cop in the ‘big city’, as he considered Fraxbridge to be,
with its two betting shops, its amusement arcade and its
Wetherspoon pub. In fact, shortly before he received the
written report of a missing person named Terry Fairbreath
and the telephone call telling him his expected visitor (one
Mr Sam Easton) was waiting in Reception, he was wondering
whether there was a chance that, after being promoted
so suddenly a week before, he might be able to avoid ever
getting any cases at all.
PATTY O’FURNITURE
11
The Vacant Casualty
‘Perhaps if I take up smoking, I could always dart out for
a cigarette whenever the phone rings,’ he had wondered,
just as the phone had rung, and he had, without thinking,
answered it.
‘Sam Easton in Reception for you,’ said the voice.
Too late.
He rose from his desk and marched to the stairs, thinking
that at least a missing person case would give him
something to talk to his visitor about. As he went down into
Reception he spruced himself up in the reflection of one
of the windows, and ran a hand over his hair, smoothing it
onto his head.
He reached the reception area, somewhat anxiously distracted,
and as he spotted his visitor, a slim youth in a hoody
top, he waved. Unfortunately at that moment Detective
Brautigan came into Reception ahead of him. Like a furious
bull fixing on a feeble matador, or some smaller creature it
considers a natural enemy, he made a compressed grunting
noise and charged over.
‘Detective Inspector Bradley?’ asked the young man, in a
rather worried voice.
Brautigan, already travelling at thirty miles an hour,
reared somewhat.
‘Bugger off, shithead!’
The youth thought about this for a moment and clearly
12
decided it was some sort of joke, so he gave a high-pitched
laugh.
There were probably many things you could do in front
of the astonishingly muscular Detective Brautigan to escape
an immediately violent response. Setting off a nuclear
weapon, for instance, might be one possibility. Escaping
down a wormhole into another dimension in space and time
could be another. Laughing, however, was not one. The
large man picked the youth up, spun him round and
bounced his face off the window five or six times before
saying into his bleeding ear:
‘Listen up, gobshite. My colleague Bradley here’s got a
writer from London coming in to talk to him later. The last
thing he needs is a fucking teenage reprobate getting under
his shoes and taking the piss, OKAY?’
Having smashed the youth’s face against the glass a few
more times, he noticed that this had left a rather unpleasant
smeary mark, so he deemed it advisable to wipe the face up
and down to try and buff the glass, and teach the lad a further
lesson.
It was as he was judging that he had done a fair clean-up
job that some other more urgent thought popped into
Brautigan’s head. He dropped the youth, darted out of the
room, climbed the stairs and disappeared from sight.
Bradley felt somewhat awkward as he made his way over
to the young writer, helped him to his feet, dabbed some of
PATTY O’FURNITURE
13
The Vacant Casualty
the blood from his nose, introduced himself and invited him
to come upstairs for a sit down.
The young man had not yet had the chance to recover
fully, and simply nodded. As they walked, Bradley made an
attempt to make light of the other detective’s behaviour.
‘That was an example of exactly the sort of thing which
we
don’t approve of here in the Fraxbridge police community.
But my colleague has been investigating a number of
murders in the local area, and I’m sure you understand, at
times of stress, tempers run high. I don’t think he could
imagine someone as young as you being a writer. Here you
go, sit down,’ he said, before adding simperingly, ‘May I
fetch you a coffee?’
The youth nodded, looking dazed.
‘Latte? Espresso?’ enquired Bradley, almost falling over
himself.
The other cleared his throat and said a cappuccino
would be great, and Bradley left him at his desk while he
went to fill a cup with the foetid ash-grey froth that spewed
from the hissing machine in the corridor.
‘Is
that a cappuccino?’ asked the writer dubiously, looking
down at the cup he was handed.
‘It came from the machine after I pressed the cappuccino
button,’ said Bradley, before conceding, ‘but that is far
from the same thing. I certainly don’t advise drinking it –
14
the rats don’t touch that stuff. You’d probably get botulism
or dengue fever or something.’
The writer nodded somewhat mournfully and contented
himself with sniffing the drink instead, discovering that
Bradley was in fact right. The revolting smell made him
snap his head back up, which sudden movement at least had
a ghost of the revivifying effect that a bolt of caffeine would
have done.
‘Again, I am most
dreadfully sorry for my colleague’s earlier
behaviour,’ said Bradley, leaning over the table. ‘It was
most uncharacteristic.’
The writer shook his head to rid himself of the shock.
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘In fact, that was exactly the sort of
behaviour I was hoping to come across.’
Bradley looked confused.
‘You see, I’m here to study cops. I’m just a lily-livered
writer from the leafy suburbs but I want to get to know the
real workings of the police force inside out. I’m working on
a novel – a gritty crime novel that I hope to make into a
series of novels. And then, perhaps, one day, a really great,
hard-hitting TV series.’
‘I see,’ said Bradley, whose eye wavered from the young
man to the report on his desk, his mind rapidly trying to
calculate which of these to pursue first for the least disappointing
outcome. He did not feel confident of either.
‘To have experienced police brutality at first hand –
PATTY O’FURNITURE
15
The Vacant Casualty
well, it will be very useful as a . . . a sense memory, if you
will, when I’m writing. I’m Sam Easton.’ He offered his
hand.
The detective took it, looking as relieved as he was
grateful, and drawing his chair in closer to his desk, he leant
across once more and said confidentially: ‘You see, I don’t
want to disappoint you, but I’m not really that sort of
policeman at all. I was only made a detective last week. I’m
just trying to live up to expectations.’
‘Right,’ said Sam dubiously. ‘Whose expectations,
exactly?’
Not even daring to point directly towards his fellow officer,
Bradley indicated over his shoulder and Sam followed
his gaze. There at the next desk sat that other detective,
who had appeared to Sam no more than a terrifying blur.
Now he had a chance to take him in. He was a bruising hulk
of a man, bald and with sweat patches sprouting from
beneath his arms. There was a Chinese food carton on one
side of his desk, along with a half-eaten burger the size of a
sponge cake. As Sam looked on, he gargled a hefty measure
of brandy like mouthwash, and splashed the remains of the
half-bottle into his coffee cup.
‘Detective Brautigan,’ Bradley whispered. ‘He’s a
real
policeman.’
‘Maybe I should be following him around, then?’ suggested
Sam hopefully.
16
‘You wouldn’t survive a week,’ said Bradley. ‘None of his
partners ever do.’
‘God DAMN IT!’ screamed Brautigan from the next
desk, making them both jump. They looked around to find
that he was talking into his telephone and staring down,
eyes bulging, at a square open box that had just been delivered
to his desk, his expression a mixture of fury and
revulsion. When his voice at last broke forth, it sounded like
a Formula One car coming out of a tunnel at full pelt.
‘I said JAM doughnuts! NOT RING DOUGHNUTS!
Get it right next time or I’ll punch your fucking nose out
through your arse!’ He smashed the receiver back into place
so hard it snapped in half and, snarling, he pulled the line
from the wall and tossed the whole pile of junk into a
corner, where it landed on a heap of discarded telephones.
Then he turned to the little old lady sat primly in the chair
next to his desk and pointed at her with a finger trembling
with fury.
‘You sure it’s a Pekingese you lost? God damn it, give
me the
truth!’
The lady nodded mutely.
‘You better not be fuckin’ lying to me,’ he screamed, his
voice becoming hoarse. ‘Okay, tell me – where did you last
see the little motherfucker?’
‘Or, actually, maybe I would be better off with you after
all,’ Sam conceded quietly.
PATTY O’FURNITURE
17
The Vacant Casualty
‘Indeed,’ said Bradley. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.
The eleven o’clock snack trolley’s coming round and
he always flips out when that happens. I’ve got a missing
person report to investigate and there’s only so much of
him I can take.’
‘NO FUCKING CREAM BUNS!’
Brautigan’s voice followed them down the corridor as
they left.