Rough Justice

Chapter 3

3

Wendy Knight lay sprawled on the sofa, her head resting on her arm as the other stroked the purring cat which was similarly sprawled across her stomach.

The rehoming centre had told her the cat was called Cookie Monster, and said they tended to advise people to stick with the same name. Wendy was still unsure, though, and was sorely tempted to rename him. For now, though, she simply called him Cookie.

She felt daft saying it, but the cat had quickly become her closest friend and confidant. She’d gone to the rehoming centre shortly after the closure of the last murder case she’d worked on: the killing of four women in Mildenheath by a man who’d been trying to emulate the notorious crimes of Jack the Ripper.

The case had also resulted in the death of DS Luke Baxter, a young officer with the world at his feet. Wendy’s relationship with Luke had been strained, to say the least, from the moment they’d met. Shortly before his death, though, they’d managed to clear the air and Wendy had finally felt that she understood him and had come to sympathise with and, dare she say it, quite like him.

Luke’s death had dealt a hammer blow to Wendy and the entire CID department at Mildenheath. An officer dying in the line of duty was thankfully a rare occurrence in the UK at the best of times, and a largely desk-bound CID officer was even less likely to have to worry about being killed. For Luke Baxter, though, odds and probabilities meant nothing.

The funeral had been taken care of, with the local and national media attention on the event having been unprecedented. The force had tried to keep things as low-key as possible whilst giving Luke the send-off he deserved, but the attention that it had attracted from the media had made that difficult. A policeman dying in the line of duty was always bound to make headline news, but a CID officer being killed in the crossfire whilst apprehending one of the most brazen and daring serial killers of the modern age was something else altogether.

The death of a colleague wasn’t something Wendy had experienced before, nor had most of the officers at Mildenheath, and she was surprised at the feelings it unlocked; feelings that took her back to the day she found out her own father had died.

Bill Knight had been a shining light at Mildenheath CID when Wendy was a young child, and had been off-duty when he’d tried to intervene and stop a bank robbery. She had never been told exactly what had happened next — she was too young at the time and hadn’t wanted to ask since — but her father died of a gunshot wound later that day. ‘Gone to join the angels,’ her mother had said.

So many of the feelings and emotions she’d felt at the time had been kept under wraps — something she hadn’t realised until now, when those feelings came flooding back. Oddly, she felt the same sense of the world having lost something. The conversation she’d had with Luke on the night of his death had changed the way she’d thought about him in a way which she was only realising now. She was sure that had Luke lived, they would’ve become good friends.

The whole of Mildenheath CID had been affected by Luke’s death — some more than others — and Wendy had her concerns about one or two people who seemed to be taking it rather badly.

She moved her arm from behind her head and lifted the peaceful, purring Cookie from her lap and placed him on a cushion, stretching as she stood to go and fetch a bottle of wine from the wine rack. She’d perhaps been drinking a little too much lately, she’d be the first to admit, but she also knew she wasn’t the only one. That was what the job did to you at the best of times, but at the worst of times it only became more of a necessity.

She looked back over her shoulder as she walked into the kitchen and could see Cookie stretching out and yawning before nodding back off into his peaceful slumber. She smiled as she thought what it would be like to be a cat, sleeping and eating without a care in the world. No worries about office politics, violent criminals or death. Just eat, sleep, rinse and repeat.

As the deep purple liquid sloshed into the wine glass, Wendy felt her mobile phone vibrating in her jeans pocket. She pulled it out and swiped across the screen to answer it, having seen the name of her superior, Detective Chief Inspector Jack Culverhouse, on the screen.

‘Sir,’ she said, keeping the greeting to a minimum as she knew Culverhouse would start speaking the second the line had connected.

‘I hope you’ve not been on the sauce, Knight,’ Culverhouse said immediately. ‘We’ve got an incident to attend to.’

‘What sort of incident?’ she asked, knowing full-well that it would be nothing short of a dead body if a call had come through to her at this time of night.

‘A f*****g messy one,’ he replied. ‘Certainly not an accident, anyway. Not unless you can Taser yourself in the bollocks, chop your d**k off and slit your throat by accident.’

‘Jesus Christ. Got an address?’

‘Yeah, Brunel Road.’

‘Number?’

‘Can’t remember. It’ll be the one with all the police cars outside. Want picking up on the way?’

Wendy laughed inwardly. Did she really sound drunk? ‘Yeah, go on then. I’ve not even taken a mouthful yet, but seeing as you offered.’