Dead Justice Read online

  A floorboard creaked outside Patricia’s room.

  Brian saw a shadow move across the door.

  He put a finger in front of his lip and crept over to the door. He peeked out of the door hole.

  A man was standing there. He was short, with dark hair, dressed in a black outfit. He had his ear to the door.

  Brian kept his finger to his lips. Patricia frowned, puzzled as to what was going on.

  Then Brian dragged the door open.

  When he looked where the man had stood just moments ago, nobody was there.

  “Detective?”

  Brian stepped outside the room. “Someone was listening to us.”

  “What?”

  “Someone was…”

  He saw it, then.

  The movement right at the end of the corridor.

  The man glanced over his shoulder and looked at Brian with fear.

  “Hey!”

  Then the man turned around, disappeared into the lift and closed the doors.

  Brian clenched his fists and held his breath. The man had run from him. He’d been listening in on his conversation and then he’d run from him, which meant he had something to hide.

  “Detective?”

  “Stay in your room, Patricia,” Brian said, starting to jog, much to his dismay. “There’s something I need to do.”

  Fourteen

  Brian McDone might’ve been in fitter shape than once upon a time, but jogging at full pelt after a runaway suspect was still way out of his bloody comfort zone.

  He sprinted down the creaky narrow corridor of Baker’s Inn. The walls were all covered in the same crinkling cream wallpaper, with the same neutral off-balance paintings of flowers and fruit on every wall. It’d be easy to get lost in this place. Brian just had to hope he wouldn’t get lost anytime soon.

  He heard the lift start to move as he reached the doors. He bashed the button to try and get it to come back up. Then he banged on the metal door. “I’m coming for you!” He knew how ridiculous he sounded, and how he probably wasn’t as intimidating a character as he once was.

  But he was telling the truth. He was chasing after whoever had been listening in on his conversation with Patricia. They had to know something about what’d really happened to Elaine Schumer. Why else would they have been nosying?

  “Is everything all right out there?”

  Brian turned around and saw a woman with long, dark hair looking at him. She was tall and skinny, and held a baby to her chest. She didn’t look healthy. Brian could hear a television rumbling in the background. She clearly wasn’t too fussed about being at the scene of a… well, a scene of a death, however it’d happened. “Stairs,” he said. “To the ground floor. Where’s the nearest stairs?”

  The woman narrowed her eyes, looking at Brian like he was some kind of madman.

  “Please! You need to tell me where the stairs are, love. Please.”

  She lifted a bony hand and pointed down the corridor. “Just at the end down there. But watch out. They’re—”

  “Cheers.”

  Brian ran down the corridor some more. Already he felt tired. His heart pounded, and he could feel his knees starting to cramp. Shitting hell, he used to be able to run for miles. He wouldn’t think twice about doing a full lap of Preston on a Sunday morning back when he was a kid. Now he could barely run a corridor without breaking a sweat.

  He got to the metal door at the end of the corridor. Behind, he heard more doors clicking open, voices whispering. He wondered how many of them knew what’d really happened here but were withholding it for reasons of their own. There were always more witnesses in a case than first seemed. People just didn’t like getting involved for fear it might come back and haunt them somehow.

  Brian pulled open the door to the stairway. Immediately, dust irritated his chest. The corridor was dark, but for a weak light bulb dangling down from above, flickering away. There were all sorts of shite thrown around the place—bin bags, empty food cartons, and graffiti on the walls. If there was a caretaker in this place, he was clearly doing a stellar job.

  Brian rushed over to the top of the steps. He grabbed the handle and started to descend. Right away, he realised just how steep and creaky these steps were. They were slippery, too, like someone had been down here recently in damp shoes.

  But he didn’t have any time to stick around and complain. He had to keep on going.

  He ran to the end of the first set of stairs. Then he ran to the next set, and the next set, all the while wondering just how far away the suspect had got. Would they be outside? Still in the lift?

  Then Brian got an idea.

  He didn’t run down the next set of steps. He was losing too much time. Instead, he ran out onto the next floor of the hotel, sprinted across the identical corridor and over to the lift. It was a gamble, but it was one he had to take.

  When he reached the lift, he noticed something curious.

  The lift doors were open wide.

  He stood there and got a flash to that footage of Elaine Schumer kicking the floor outside the lift.

  He imagined her cowering inside it, hiding from someone…

  Then he cleared his throat and walked towards it.

  He looked up, first. He’d seen enough cheesy action films to know that if anyone was hiding in a lift, they’d either be on top of it, or contorting themselves into a weird shape and holding themselves up there.

  There was no one in the lift. No one at all.

  Brian stood static for a few seconds. He tried to catch his breath, his heart still racing at a million beats per minute. He put his hands on his knees. If the suspect had got out of this lift, they couldn’t have gone for the stairs. Brian would’ve passed them on his way here.

  So that meant they could only have carried on past the lift, into one of the…

  Brian heard footsteps.

  He spun around.

  He saw the man in the black coat running into the stairway where Brian had just come from.

  “Hey!” Brian shouted. He ran out of the lift and back down the corridor. His knees didn’t ache as much now, and he felt stronger for warming up. He was going to catch this guy. He knew something, and Brian would be damned if he didn’t find out what that was.

  He owed it to Elaine Schumer to find out the truth.

  He reached the doorway to the stairs and opened it up. He ran over to the next set of stairs.

  He couldn’t hear a sound.

  He started to climb down the stairs. He couldn’t let the suspect get away. He couldn’t let them run.

  Then, Brian swore he heard running.

  But it wasn’t echoing from below.

  It was coming from above.

  Shit. The bastard was going back upstairs. He was—

  As Brian started to twist around, he slipped on the step and lost his balance.

  He tried to regain his balance but it was too late.

  His head smacked the edge of the metal steps, making his ears ring and filling his mouth with the taste of blood.

  He fell down the steps, rolling on and on, taking a fresh thump to the head with every step.

  When he hit the bottom of the steps, he heard a crack and felt a splitting pain in his left shoulder.

  He stuck his teeth into his bottom lip as he lay there on the dusty floor of the fire escape.

  The suspect’s footsteps had gone.

  Fifteen

  “That really frigging hurts.”

  “It will hurt. You just threw yourself down a load of stairs. What did you expect?”

  Brian gripped onto his shoulder as he walked out of the A&E department at the Royal Preston Hospital. Annie was by his side. He’d thought about ringing Hannah and asking her for help, but he didn’t want to worry her. Besides, he knew Annie had the morning off, so anything to drag her out of bed and wind her up.

  They walked over towards Annie’s car. What started as a nice morning had taken a turn for the worse. Rain lashed down and bounced off
the windscreens of parked cars. Brian got soaked right away. There was that nice earthy smell to the air though, which relaxed Brian somewhat.

  But every time he relaxed, he couldn’t help thinking of that runaway in the Baker’s Inn hotel.

  Annie helped Brian into the passenger seat. He groaned as he climbed in. Annie tutted. “You’ve only frigging dislocated it, Brian.”

  “Have you ever dislocated your shoulder?”

  “Course I have.”

  “Well you should have a bit more sympathy.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Get in before I slam the door on you.”

  Brian climbed into Annie’s car and leaned back on the passenger seat. She closed the door and walked around, joining him. The pair of them sat in silence listening to the rain for a few moments. But Brian knew the question was coming.

  “So what the hell were you doing at Baker’s Inn anyway?”

  Brian closed his eyes and sighed. “I got a call.”

  “A call?”

  “To do with the case.”

  “Hold on,” Annie said. “You got a call about the Elaine Schumer case? The case that, as far as I’m aware, you weren’t in work to investigate?”

  “Annie—”

  “And, oh, wait a sec. When you get calls like that, surely a detective inspector knows damned well he’s supposed to call them in, doesn’t he?”

  “I’m a DI, like you said. It’s within my discretion to investigate leads.”

  “Bullshit,” Annie said. “So go on. Spit it out. What happened?”

  “I got a call from a woman called Patricia. Nice woman. Kind of a hippie type.”

  “Sounds delightful.”

  “She told me she’d met Elaine Schumer several times at the hotel. Three times, in fact. She said the first time she met her they chatted about life, and all was good. The second time, Elaine was more… agitated, about something.”

  “And the third?”

  “The third time was just before Elaine’s death. In fact, I have a feeling from what Patricia said that the part where Elaine spins around at the end of the CCTV footage is the moment Patricia caught her attention. Not whoever…”

  Brian held off what he really wanted to say: “not who killed her.”

  Annie frowned. For the first time in this entire case, she looked unsettled. “What did Elaine and Patricia have to say?”

  “Not much. Elaine told Patricia the lift was faulty. She acted like she didn’t recognise Patricia.” Brian paused. “When Patricia got back up the stairs, she says Elaine was gone.”

  Annie nodded, like she was mulling it over. “So that backs up the psychological breakdown theory.”

  “Patricia doesn’t think so.”

  “What?”

  “She says Elaine was acting weird, but there was something else to the way she was acting. Like she was afraid of something.”

  “And Patricia’s our psychological expert now?”

  “Come on, Annie. You have to accept all this is a bit weird.”

  “There’s weird elements. But Brian, when I got to that hotel just before, I saw what kind of a tip the fire escape area was. You’re seriously telling me a hotel can have a deathtrap of a fire escape and not be capable of leaving a door to the roof unlocked, or leaving a tank lid ajar?”

  Brian sighed and muttered a curse word under his breath. Annie started up the car. He had to admit she had a point. “It just doesn’t feel right.”

  “It doesn’t feel right because you’re so eager to find something here that you’re micro analysing everything.”

  “Micro-what now?”

  “I admit, there are weird things going on here. And I feel like there’s something not quite right too. But the fact is, there’s no evidence of any involvement of any outside parties. There’s nothing to suggest Elaine didn’t have a mental breakdown, no matter what your new girlfriend Patricia thinks. And there’s nothing to suggest Elaine’s death wasn’t anything but an accident.”

  “And the fact she’s visited this place twice before?”

  “What about it?”

  “That not strike you as off?”

  Annie shrugged. “You said it yourself. Elaine liked to disappear from time to time. Maybe this was one of her places.”

  Again, Annie’s argument was too good to counter. “And the guy who did a fucking runner from me?”

  “About that,” Annie said. “I got the hotel to do a quick search when we got you out of there. You say the runner went up, right?”

  “I heard his footsteps going up, yeah. I’m guessing he went to the top corridor, or back to his room to hide, or—”

  “The hotel did a search. They didn’t find anything untoward.”

  Brian shook his head, which hurt his shoulder. “Not possible. They’re covering up—”

  “And you say the runner took the lift down?”

  Brian nodded. “He got in there and started to head down. He must’ve looped around me to try and throw me off track.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What?”

  “Funny, that’s all.”

  “What’s funny?”

  “Just the hotel told me the lift’s been deactivated for service since the Elaine discovery. It’s been out of order since our first visit.”

  Brian frowned. He felt goose pimples creep up his neck. “But I…”

  “We’ve got your shoulder seen to,” Annie said. She turned from the road and looked at Brian. “But have you thought about having your mind checked?”

  Sixteen

  Brian always considered himself pretty adept at keeping secrets.

  But keeping secrets from Hannah? Shit, that was a fool’s errand.

  “I’m telling you, Han. I just lost my footing at work and slipped.”

  “You lost your footing? Just like you lost your footing during the meal the other night?”

  “They’re nothing to do with each other, honest.”

  “Honest? Honest? Brian, you’re practically allergic to the doctors. Of course you’d tell me they’re nothing to do with each other.”

  Brian sat at the kitchen table with his chin on his fists. He’d tried to avoid telling Hannah about his incident, but she was suspicious about why he’d been given the afternoon off work right from the off. He’d tried to lie to her until Hannah spotted a text from Annie asking how the shoulder was. Brian insisted Annie must’ve got the wrong number, so Hannah had squeezed his shoulders.

  She’d got the reaction she’d been looking for. Pure evil.

  “So if it’s not related then what were you doing at work to ‘lose your footing’?”

  Brian sighed. A bitter taste filled his mouth as he thought back to the chase earlier that day. Not just that, but what Annie had told him too. The lift had been out of order. Was it possible all of these incidents were related after all? The collapse in the kitchen, then some kind of mental incident in the hotel?

  Was he losing his mind? There was a history of early onset dementia in his family. The thought of it striking him as Sam grew up was terrifying to say the least.

  Hannah’s hands wrapped around Brian’s. He saw that she was sitting opposite him now, at the other side of the table.

  “Brian, I know when something’s wrong. I don’t like it when you close up like this. Something’s on your mind and you’re going to tell me what it is.”

  Brian attempted a smile, as futile as he knew it was. “There’s nothing wrong.”

  Hannah shook her head. “Don’t do this to me. Tell me the truth. There’s something on your mind. Tell me everything. Right now.”

  Everything flashed back through Brian’s mind.

  Holding the gun to the chief constable’s head.

  Pulling the trigger and ending his life.

  Watching his body fall into those docks.

  He’d made the wrong call. He should’ve lowered his gun and left it to someone else to sort out. Sure, Jerry Matthews might’ve had others working for him, but that personal brand of justice w
as still something Brian shouldn’t have gone searching for.

  He’d made a reckless move that, one day, he knew was going to tear his life apart.

  Now was the time to be open with Hannah. Now was the time to be honest with her.

  “I…”

  He started speaking, and he saw Sam in his mind. He knew if he told Hannah the truth that she’d be in trouble, too. She’d be in danger merely by association. He couldn’t ask her to take on the burden of knowledge he carried with him every day. He couldn’t have Sam grow up without a father or a mother.

  “I… was at the hotel.”

  Hannah narrowed her eyes. “What?”

  “The hotel. The Elaine Schumer case.”

  Hannah shook her head. “Brian.”

  “I got a call and I had to go check it out.”

  “You just persist and persist, don’t you?”

  “I saw something, Han. Someone ran from me. I went after them and I guess I slipped.”

  Hannah’s face turned from understanding to anger. Brian saw the colour in her cheeks. “And you couldn’t trust me enough to tell me?”

  “I didn’t want you worrying about me.”

  “Well congratulations, Brian, because now I’m even more worried about you. Chasing after people and getting yourself in the shit like that. What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking about Elaine Schumer. About doing the right thing by her.”

  “No,” Hannah said.

  “What?”

  “No, I know what you were thinking. You were thinking you want some kind of justice because somewhere in the past, you’ve failed. You’ve done something wrong, and you’re eager to make up for it.”

  Brian’s chest tightened.

  “If you can’t be open and honest with yourself, how the hell can you ever expect to be open and honest with anyone else?”

  Again, Brian wanted to tell Hannah the truth of his concerns. But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. “There’s something wrong with this case, Hannah.”