C.T. Brown - Second Time Lucky?

Second Time Lucky?

By

C T Brown

Published
in 2013 by C T Brown

Copyright
© C T Brown 2013

C
T Brown asserts his right to be identified as the author of this Work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All
Rights Reserved

Part
One

Staring
down at the badly carved mess that had once been her throat and the dark,
glistening pool of blood she lay in, there was no point checking for a pulse. I
bent to retrieve my knife from where it lay, the knife that had hacked open her
neck and let the life drain from her. Sticky with arterial blood, dark crimson
and still steaming slightly in the cold air, it felt heavy, as if weighed down
by the life it had taken. No point leaving solid evidence for the Police, I'd
be their first and most obvious suspect anyway so why leave them a trail - a
knife they could easily link to me as it was undoubtedly covered with my
fingerprints. Avoiding leaving a trail of bloody footprints wouldn't be a
problem thanks to the dirty grey slush which was all that remained of the snow
from the previous night. I stood a good chance of getting away without leaving
any obvious evidence they could use to connect me to this. As dawn wouldn't
break for another hour and a half no-one would find the body anytime soon, even
in London most people avoided alleys like this in the dark. Even the dumbest of
the city's night denizens feared that if they didn't
they
would end up exactly like her, dead in a truly messy and painful way.

Moving
at a nicely nonchalant looking speed I walked out of the alley and emerged into
Soho at its quietest, during that brief interlude between the end of the
night-time glamour and the beginning of the daytime sleaze. Not to say that it
wasn't sleazy at night, it was just obvious what with the darkness and the
copious amounts of alcohol and narcotics necessary to convince people that
ending their evening in Soho was a good idea. Heading away from here by tube
would be an easy getaway, most of the trains would be empty as they'd only just
started running again after the usual ludicrous break in service during the
night, but the CCTV would freeze my image in some digital archive and give me
something else to explain away once PC Plod came calling. Soon enough they'd
check my mobile phone records and know she had called me earlier, no way they
could know what she'd said but it would look better if I was found heading
toward where she was found than if I were seen fleeing the scene. To waste a
little time I headed for the sickeningly brightly coloured neon of Shaftesbury
Avenue and a cafe I knew, better to head back toward the alley after breakfast
and be found arriving for a meeting I could say was set for an hour later than
it actually had been. Along the way my knife made its way between the rust
pitted bars of a drain cover that I spotted between the empty spirit bottles in
the gutter of Frith Street, I thought the coat would be more of a problem but
fortunately the homeless of old London town know not to look a gift horse in
the mouth. Explaining why I was out in freezing weather without a coat would be
easy, I'm a university student and most detectives in the Metropolitan Police
will believe that "scrounging bloody students" are capable of just
about anything, no matter how stupid it may seem.

Leaving
the small, squalid doorways of Soho's thriving trade in overpriced naked flesh,
I emerged onto Shaftesbury Avenue to be bleached and dazzled by the headlights
of grimy minicabs and even grimier kebab emporiums. Once in the cafe I was at
least warm and, over my tea and full English breakfast, I could let myself
think about the events of the last half hour. Firstly I guess I should clarify
something, I didn't murder Emily Parker. Spiriting away the murder weapon may
look a touch suspicious, I will grant you, but when it was clearly the folding
knife from my toolkit that I hadn't even noticed was missing and so was likely
to still be covered in my fingerprints I don't feel I had a lot of choice. Admittedly
I could have tried to explain it away but the Police don't tend to be
understanding about these things, generally they operate on the principal that
if the murder weapon is there, you own it and your prints are all over it there
really isn't much else to look into. They might also get funny ideas because
Emily was my girlfriend, not something suspicious in, and of,
itself
you might think but as my previous girlfriend had
also been murdered in murky and, as yet, unexplained circumstances and I was
still the prime suspect they might make a connection. Terrible how people can
jump to conclusions isn't it?

Pausing
to take a deep breath I decided that for ten seconds I'd let it in, let myself
feel the loss of the only person who didn't treat me with suspicion, the woman
who loved me and who I loved in a way I'd never thought possible. It was a good
thing I was the cafe's only customer, a guy sitting down calmly and then
bursting into tears and shaking uncontrollably for ten seconds can generate a
lot of funny looks, fortunately only the owner was present and the owner of a
twenty-four hour cafe in the West End soon learns not to notice anything his
customers do. If they don't they tend to have unpleasant nightmares and messy
mental breakdowns. Gradually the tears stopped and my hands stopped shaking
long enough for me to scald my tongue and the roof of my mouth by taking a
slurp of tea which had been heated to the point of near nuclear fusion. I
looked around at the largely plastic cafe interior and wondered what the hell
was going on? A panicked phone call at five in morning brings me to Soho and
the dead body of the love of my life. Who would want to kill Emily? She was a
student and, even though I loved her I had to admit, not exactly a star pupil
either. What had she gotten into? Why hadn't she brought me in on it once it
got dangerous? How would I cope without her? No, I couldn't think like that. A
cathartic bout of depression and grief would do no long term good, last time it
had just led to six months on remand for a murder I didn't commit.
Two girlfriends murdered and only nineteen years old.
Delayed entry into university because I was on remand.
There
was no way I was ever escaping this, things just couldn't get any worse. Just
as I thought that, even more trouble walked in through the door.

Dave
'Fingers'
Mackeye
.
A middle aged weasel of a man in a suit that must have looked cheap
when he'd bought it, somewhere over a decade ago by my guess.
Nicknamed
after what he collects if you can't pay the money you owe, a man with a deep
seated hatred of me that I returned with gusto. Like most Scots settled in
London his belief that all things Scottish were greater than all things English
had only strengthened over the years, however unlike most he actually was
genuinely homesick for Scotland. Unfortunately a youthful incident between
himself and a Celtic fan that had resulted in serious injury for both and a
fire which destroyed two streets in Glasgow, there was no homecoming likely in
the near future. Unusually he was
solo,
normally he
was accompanied by a couple of dark suits stuffed with muscle, and just about
enough brain to tie their own shoelaces. Scraping back the orange plastic seat
across the table from me he was brave enough to sit down without brushing it
down, a serious risk in some of the greasier spoons in the area.

"You
need my help."

"Thanks,
but no thanks, Fingers."

"I
wasn't offering, just saying you need it. You
ain't
getting it."

He
looked smug, not a good sign. Dave collects grudges like rotten meat collects
flies and he had a special place in his bile for me, anything that made him
smile at me boded ill. "So why are you interrupting my breakfast?"

"I
like to gloat."

"No,
really?"

"You
might think you're smart you gobby little student but you're in deep this time,
the fuzz have found your bit of skirt already. How long do you think you've got
'til they find you?"

Taking
his mobile phone from his jacket pocket he looked straight at me, no doubt he
was hinting he could just tell the old bill where I was. 'Get lost, Dave, you
aren't going to turn me in. Even a brain-dead idiot like you doesn't need that
sort of reputation.'

'I
ain’t going to call the pigs on you, I just wanted you to know I could . . .
and for you to know I picked up what you dropped on Frith Street. Stay out of
my way or it'll be anonymously handed in to the boys in blue.'

I
grabbed for him but he jumped to his feet too quickly, by the time I'd come to
my feet he was letting the aluminium and glass door swing shut behind him.
Great.
A psychopath with a grudge has my knife. Running from
the cafe I spotted him disappearing round a corner and
followed,
another stellar idea as that's when I found out where the muscle was.

A
few minutes later I was alone in the street and, with a little support from the
back wall of a theatre, was able to drag myself to a close approximation of a
vertical position. A quick check revealed that I still had all my fingers but
two on my left hand were intensely painful and bending too far in the wrong
direction to be anything but broken. Various scrapes, cuts and bruises vied for
my attention in between the throbs of pain from my left hand but were little
more than background noise in comparison. Fingers must have been put in a
really good mood by my misfortune, otherwise I'd be a digit or two down and
bleeding to death quietly. You know you're having a bad day when a good kicking
which results only in a couple of broken bones is a good thing.

Reaching
around with my right hand I managed to pull my mobile from the left pocket of
my jeans, scrolling through my contacts I found the number for Adrian 'First
Ade' Doyle and called it. After a brief, bad tempered and unnecessarily complex
discussion of prices and the discount that favours owed should bring I hung up
and staggered along the litter strewn, neon lit streets to the corner of
Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, the kind of intersection you can
only get in London - a brightly lit tourist area where no-one will look twice
at you if you look like you've just had the crap kicked out of you, hell they
wouldn't even notice if you were on fire unless you got too close and then most
would only mutter about your lack of manners and try to walk around you.

First
Ade's van stopped just long enough for the sliding door on the side to open and
one of his "nurses" to grab me and yank me inside, we were moving
again before the door closed. Inside the van is something like the lovechild of
an ambulance and a butcher's shop that had been dressed by Elton John in the
seventies. Recognisable medical equipment shared space with some pretty
gruesome looking tools that still give me nightmares, all in an interior
covered in dark red velvet that had been attacked my an insane seamstress with
a sequin obsession. Ade was the go to guy for medical help in the west end when
hospitals might ask too many questions and a legitimate underworld legend. No-one
knew how long he'd been at it, he appeared to be an eighty year old hippy but
by all accounts he had looked exactly the same in the sixties when he'd been
treating employees of the Kray twins, pop stars and other criminal types. How
did I know him and what he did? Same way I knew Fingers, spending three months
on remand and another six investigating the murder of a girlfriend whose father
turned out to be less the local grocer and more the local mob boss got you a
lot of contacts in London's thriving criminal classes, and believe me there
really were different classes. When you're investigating a crime as the prime
suspect, and even your family has disowned you because their suspicions closely
mimic the Police's, you soon learn the value of good contacts. You also soon
learn how to take care of yourself. The nurse, well over six foot and the most
muscular woman I'd ever seen, swung me up onto a camp bed that did for a
treatment table and Ade's long greasy hair and straggly beard swung into view. A
wash of weed scented breath passed over me as First Ade looked me up and down. "You
really pissed someone off this time didn't you?"

"Just
sort me out will you,
First
?"

"Ok,
quick or good?"

"Quick,
I ain't got time for good."

"Fair
enough, it’s gonna hurt though and them fingers might not heal perfect."

"As
long as they end up useable then we're good."

"Ok,
but remember, you asked for this."

Sometimes
I wonder what goes through the mind of other road users when the screams come
from First's van as he passes them.

A
ten minute drive later the same nurse practically threw me out of the door as
the van slowed and my tumble was only stopped by a conveniently placed
collection of full dustbins. My wallet was empty of my emergency cash but at
least my fingers had been cleaned, set and strapped up, some shaky stitching of
my larger cuts and some nuclear-grade painkillers in my pocket completed Ade's
work. Blinking in the halogen flicker of an electrical shop's window display I
looked around. Tottenham Court Road, the southern end. All electrical shops,
the northern end
was
mostly furniture shops but this
end was the place to be if you wanted a stereo of uncertain provenance and had
the used notes to pay for it.

There
was no choice
now,
no way I could turn up anywhere
near the murder scene. I show up looking like I've been in a fight and it just
opens up even more avenues of interrogation I'd rather not saunter down. Back
to home then. If the halls of residence for London's Howard University could
count as home that is. Ok, I know what you're thinking, you've never heard of
it have you? London has a lot of small specialist universities and Howard's is
one of them, with a hundred students in total and only two courses it’s hardly
a surprise it isn't
more well
known. Emily had been
taking their specialist criminal law and economics course while I was studying
the forensics and criminal psychology
course,
oddly
enough events over the last couple of years had caused me to rethink my plans
for university. Going to a nice quiet university in a small city somewhere on
the coast and studying history had somehow lost its appeal.