In Too Deep

Chapter 3

3

The young police officer grimaced as he looked down at the perverse shape of the woman’s skull. It was dark and cold outside the house, and he shivered as he put his hands back in his pockets, trying to get warm.

The paramedics had arrived just moments before him and his partner, PC Chloe Kirkpatrick, and were now attending to the woman lying on the ground.

‘I think we’re going to need to radio this one in for CID, Stu,’ Chloe said. ‘We need an SIO on the scene.’

He knew she was right; they were way out of their depth on this one. Before he could murmur his assent, however, Chloe was already speaking into her radio.

‘6224 to Control. I’m at the incident on Manor Way with PC Easton. I think we’re looking at a very serious assault. We need a senior investigating officer, over.’

There was a couple of seconds of silence before the reply came back over the radio.

‘Received, 6224. Will keep you posted, over.’

The original call had come in from a neighbour of the victim, who had reported that her four-year-old daughter had knocked on his door in the middle of the night to say that her mummy was hurt. When he came out to see what the matter was, he found the woman lying on her front doorstep with her head caved in. Somehow, though, she was still alive. The officer didn’t need a paramedic to tell him that — he could hear the low, guttural noise that came from the woman’s throat, a cross between a growling dog and a train screeching to a halt.

The noise made him feel sick to the pit of his stomach; seeing people in this sort of state was something he wasn’t sure he could ever get used to. This was one of the reasons he knew that he didn’t want to go into CID. After all, the Criminal Investigation Department was the team who were tasked with investigating murders, rapes, and other serious violent crimes. His squeamishness tended to put Traffic out of the equation too, unfortunately. Sometimes he wished he’d just got a job working in a shop somewhere. It would be a lot easier.

‘What do we know?’ he asked the two paramedics, both of whom were busy trying to assess the situation. Stu knew that putting his brain into work mode was the only way he was going to be able to keep hold of his stomach.

‘Blunt trauma to the skull, by the looks of things,’ the paramedic replied. ‘It’s made a mess of this side of her head, and it looks as though she’s been hit on her upper back, too. There’s some bruising starting to appear already.’

‘What about moving her?’ he asked. He was conscious of not wanting to get in the way, but having only been in the job a few months, he was keen to pick up all he could.

‘That’s always the difficult decision,’ the older paramedic answered, throwing a glance at his partner that said Is this guy for real? ‘In this case, she’s still breathing and we’ve got a pretty decent pulse. She needs urgent treatment, and she’s not going to get it here.’

‘Right. Is there anything we can do?’

The older paramedic decided to leave it to his partner to answer this one.

‘Just try and keep a bit of distance, give us a bit of space. You’ll need to keep this lot away, too,’ he said, gesturing towards the small crowd of neighbours who’d come out in their dressing gowns and slippers to see what was going on. Right down the road, curtains were twitching and lights were coming on in bedrooms.

‘I’ll do it,’ Chloe said, heading off towards the end of the drive. Although she was barely five and a half feet tall and was invisible if she turned sideways, PC Kirkpatrick took no prisoners when she was trying to get people to do as she asked. She’d been known to take down men twice her size in under a second. The neighbours seemed to pick up that vibe, too, as they mostly made their way back to their respective homes, with just a few stragglers insisting on trying to get a good view of what was going on.

It was at times like this that Stu despaired of the Great British public. What on earth possessed people to want to stop and look at something like this? He’d lost count of the number of times he’d seen people slow down past a road traffic incident, taking pictures on their mobile phones, and he often wondered how they’d feel if it was their mother, son or grandparent who was seriously injured. But then again they wouldn’t even consider that, would they? He knew that most people never thought beyond their own skulls.

His thoughts were interrupted by Chloe jogging back up the driveway, her feet crunching on the gravel as she did so.

‘Right, they’re sending another unit down to help keep control,’ she said. ‘CID are on their way too. Shouldn’t take them too long. If I keep a cordon around the scene, can you meet the SIO when he turns up?’

‘Yeah, course,’ Stu replied, beaming inside at the added responsibility he’d been given, albeit only a fairly small one. ‘Who’s the poor sod you’ve dragged out of bed at this time of the night, then?’

‘Jack Culverhouse,’ Chloe said, before leaning over to speak to the paramedic again.

Stu swallowed hard and looked back at Chloe. ‘Uh, I don’t suppose you want to swap, do you?’