Fairwood (a suspense mystery thriller) (3 page)

Andrew lifted his head, stared into his partner’s eyes. He thought about replying, even opened his mouth to offer a rebuttal, but decided against it. He gave a gentle shake of his head, turned and left.

Max watched his former partner clamber forlornly into his car, watched him stare at himself briefly in the rear-view mirror, watched him start the car and leave the crime scene. Only then did Max regret his words. He cursed to himself angrily, kicked an annoyed foot into the floor and reached into his pocket for another cigarette; the sooner the toxic sticks killed him the better.

“Detective. A word, please?”

Max sighed.

The prissy brunette with the stick up her arse. Her bland demeanour had somehow won her much acclaim in the area and she was the go-to girl for anything morbid or worthy of a primetime feature. He hated her, had hated her since her very first job three years ago when she hounded him over the murder of a local addict, insisting he wasn’t doing his job and that the public had a right to know things that they had no right to know.

“I’ve told you all I know,” he said sternly as she approached, her microphone held by her side, her cameraman trailing lazily behind her.

“And you’ve been very helpful. Thanks again,” she smiled a fake smile, the stiffened wrinkles at the corners of her lips typically only creased to commit to her nasal and self-important speech. He’d never seen her crack a smile -- an apt idiom considering how her face broke under the strain.

He sighed, “What do you want?”

She paused, raised her eyebrows and then lowered her head. Scratched her chin with the tip of an outstretched finger. Her attempt at casual friendliness hadn’t worked.

“I want to do a feature on the Bleak and Bright bandits, an hour long--”

“No,” Max cut in abruptly.

“You didn’t let me finish.”

“Let me guess,” he said with a cursory glance at the cameraman who wasn’t filming and looked keen to pack up and leave. “You want to impress the producers, the bigwigs who, until now, see you as the annoying little tart who occasionally reports on the big stories and constantly tries to suck their cocks in exchange for a shot at the big time.”

“How dare--”

“I haven’t finished yet,” Max said, noting the pleased grin from the cameraman whose interest had peaked. “So you want to run a show on the bandits and rope in the head detective to give a few interviews, to twist and pressure me into telling you something I shouldn’t be telling you. Everyone tunes in, you impress the producers and sail your way to national-news-anchor-bitch with your mouth dry and your knees glued.”

Her mouth hung open, her eyes bulged. She snapped her jaws together, screeched a displeased
harrumph
and stormed off, barging past the cameraman who stood motionless, grinning widely at Detective Max Cawley.

“Wow,” the cameraman said with a slow and impressed nod. “You’re my fucking hero.”

***

Max stopped the car outside his house. Grunted. Cursed under his breath.

His wife was there again, trying to take advantage of the fact that he wasn’t home, seizing the opportunity to rob him blind.

Her car was parked in the driveway to the three-bedroomed segment of suburbia. The boot and the doors were open, as was his front door.

He scuppered down the driveway, preparing himself for another argument. The front door was ajar; it swung open before he reached it. His wife breached the threshold with a brimming box cradled in her arms. Her sleeves were rolled up the elbow, exposing the wispy hairs on her skeletal arms; a line of goose-pimples rose as she braced the cold air.

“Oh, you’re back.”

“What the fuck is that?” he asked, edging closer to peek into the box.

She backed away, back into the house. She looked over her shoulder, towards the living room. “Johnny, he’s back.”

“Ah, for fuck’s sake.” Max grumbled. “You brought your brother? Why?”

“
Why do you think
?”

“Because you can’t do anything on your own? Because you can’t make your way in this world without dragging other people into your misery?”

Jonathan Meadows appeared behind his sister and placed a thick hand reassuringly on her shoulder. He was a stocky brick shit-house of a man who had barely lifted a dumbbell in his life but had been gifted with the genetics of a mutant bodybuilder.

“Hello Max,” he said with a nod of his thick head. “How’s things?”

Max stared at Johnny for a moment, beheld his stocky frame, his flattened look of jar-headed idiocy. He was thirty-five and still lived with his parents. He worked with computers, that was all Max knew, although the image of the big man sitting behind a desk hunched over a keyboard was hard to grasp. He was a fairly intelligent, competent man -- albeit bit of a loner -- but from looking at him, at his thick set jaw and the blank look of idiocy that was set permanently onto his simple face, you wouldn’t think he possessed the mental capabilities to tie his own shoelaces.

“What’re you stealing from me now?” Max wondered. “What’s in the box?”

“My things,” Sandra said with a jerk backwards, inching away from her former husband.

He hadn’t beaten her, had never laid a hand on her, yet since their breakup she had played the victim. It was a show; for her brother, for her father, for everyone. She couldn’t tell them what an abusive bastard he was when he wasn’t, but she could play the pitied victim in front of him and let them form their own conclusions.

“Your
things
? You don’t have any fucking things left,” he spat. “Nor do I, for that matter. You took everything. You took my television--”

“--
our
television.”

“--You took my computer--”

“
Our
computer--”

“You even took my fucking bed!”

“It was
our
bed.”

“What, so everything that was ours is now
yours
?”

She didn’t answer; she just gave him a blank stare which she eventually shrugged off. With her brother behind her she moved past Max, dumped the box in the boot of the car and then stood by the open door, looking towards the house, towards him.

“I’ll be back for the rest,” she said.

“The rest?” he looked dramatically towards the house. “You mean you
left
something?”

“Goodbye Max,” she said, lowering herself into the driver’s seat.

“Fuck off.”

Jonathan paused before slipping into the passenger seat; he gave Max a disapproving frown, thought about commenting and then dipped inside the car. Max watched her drive away before walking inside his empty house and slamming the door angrily behind him.

He met Sandra when he was twenty-five and she was nineteen. He was a young recruit, happy with his job and happy with his life. She was fresh out of university and fell for the rugged copper with the optimistic outlook and the bright sense of humour.

After fifteen years of marriage the cracks began to appear. She wanted kids, he didn’t and what she wanted she usually got. He gave in after a year of nagging and they tried to have children, only to find out that he was shooting blanks and she was barren. The perfect scenario in his eyes, but he didn’t tell her that.

They tried fertility treatment for a couple of years, but their marriage was in free fall. He stayed at work for as long and as often as he could. He did his best to avoid her, even came close to having an affair -- fucking off with the first woman who smiled at him and called him handsome.

She was thirty-nine and desperate for a few little smiling faces to light up their house. He was forty-five and confident that he never wanted the screaming, shitting monsters in his life or his house. The tension, the anger and the arguments came to a head just a few days after her thirty-ninth birthday.

The topic of infertility had been broached. She stood in front of him. Her fists clenched into tight balls and thrust into her hips, the stance of a pissed-off woman.

“I told you, we could adopt.”

Max sniggered derisively. “Fuck that. I don’t want some mail-order rugrat from fucking China.”

“What?” she said in disbelief. “That’s not how...
what the fuck is wrong with you
?”

He didn’t know what was wrong with him. He started arguments for the sake of arguing and interspersed them with as much absurdity as he could. It wasn’t just because he knew it annoyed her -- which it did -- nor was it because he believed any of the nonsense he spouted. He had just tired of the typical, bored with the usual. They had been arguing about the same things for what seemed like the majority of their marriage, it was a story he had read countless times and one that never had an agreeable ending. He was just spicing up the narrative.

“I’m not getting any younger,” she said, trying to calm herself down. “I want a kid whilst I still can. We need to come to a decision.”

A decision. He liked that. What she actually meant was ‘
you need to start agreeing with me
’. That annoyed him, riled up what was left to be riled.

“Otherwise,” she continued slowly, preparing for an ultimatum. “I think we should get a divorce.”

“Fine,” he said, perhaps too quickly. She had pissed him off and he was speaking in the heat of the moment, he knew that, but it felt good. “A divorce it is,” he continued placidly, “we both need a new start, a new life. You’re right.”

She opened and closed her mouth several times. She lowered her hands by her side, clenched and unclenched her fists, made a choking sound with her throat and then stormed out of the room.

That wasn’t technically the end of their marriage, but that was the final straw. She moved out, into her parents’ house, and started divorce proceedings before he could apologise and beg for forgiveness. He hated to see her go and part of him wished she hadn’t, but only because he was used to having her around. He was accustomed to the noise, the screams and the fighting. He also still remembered the woman he had fallen in love with, the woman who he had seen brief glances of through the difficult years.

3

The radio fizzed with a static wail, a banshee screaming through resisting airwaves. It heightened and faded as the semblance of music and chatter was discovered and then released. It settled on a distant, buzzing station -- a sombre toned man with a hypnotic drawl was reciting the weather.

Pandora released the knob and sighed. She reached into the
glove box, dug around through the dated collection of CDs, but failed to find one she liked. She squeezed a hand into the pocket of her leather pants which hugged tight to her thighs. She clasped her phone with her fingertips, pulled it out with the sound of a blade leaving a leather sheath.

A USB lead, plugged into the car radio, dangled freely at her feet, waiting to connect to her phone. The phone was dead, had been spluttering on its last legs when she last checked and had slipped into oblivion at some point over the last few hours.

She cursed under her breath, shoved the device into the glove box which she closed with distasteful force. She looked across at Dexter who was watching the road with the distant eyes of a man who had other things on his mind.

She gave his profile a half-smile, a look of compassion and pity. She had known him for a long time, she felt close to him, closer than she’d felt to anyone, including her own parents -- too tied up with their careers, their two bedroom semi and their middle-class tedium to bother with the little girl who wanted to rebel -- and she knew he wouldn’t hurt a fly. He was reckless, an outlaw, that part of him excited her, but he wasn’t a murderer.