A Narrow Trajectory Read online

  In her office, which only had room for a tiny desk, a single chair and one set of old tin filing cabinets, Hillary sat down and reached for the desk phone. She punched in Steven’s extension and watched as Jake, with literally nowhere to sit, leaned a shoulder casually against one wall.

  He was expecting her to fill him in on their new case assignment and consequently looked slightly surprised when Hillary asked Steven Crayle to join them instead. Because of her joke of an office, normally if they had meetings, they were held in either the boss’s office, or the communal space.

  A moment later, Steven knocked and entered, closing the door firmly behind him.

  ‘Thank you for joining us, sir,’ she said, nodding and smiling politely at him. And it was only then, when Hillary Greene turned and looked at him with the stone-flat look that she usually reserved for her prime suspect, did Jake Barnes realized that he was in trouble.

  Deep trouble.

  ‘OK, Jake,’ Hillary said. ‘Suppose you tell us just what the hell is going on?’

  For a moment, he went utterly still, and she could almost hear that very clever brain of his going into hyper-drive. Obviously he was desperately trying to read the situation, but in the meantime Hillary could almost see the shutters come down firmly. He made some attempt to relax his shoulders by shifting slightly against the wall.

  ‘Sorry?’ He sounded almost genuinely baffled, but Hillary could see that his body language was screaming alarmed caution, and she had no doubt whatsoever that he was going to start lying to her. And nor did she particularly blame him. In his place, she’d want to find out exactly what the situation was before committing herself.

  ‘Come on, Jake, remember who you are talking to,’ Hillary said. ‘And don’t start insulting my intelligence,’ she added, almost as an afterthought. ‘Did you really think you could just waltz in here and help yourself to my computer and who knows what else, and I wouldn’t twig?’

  Jake shot Steven a quick look, but the Acting Chief Super’s face gave literally nothing away. He wasn’t even looking at Jake, but at some point over his shoulder and seemed, if anything, slightly bored.

  As the silence lengthened, Hillary waited with growing impatience for Jake to weigh his options, and was relieved when he evidently decided that outright denial was pointless. Instead he went for the shame-faced, but no real harm done approach, by spreading his hands slightly and giving a rather cheesy grin. Nevertheless, she could clearly see the growing panic at the back of his green eyes.

  ‘OK, OK, you’ve caught me,’ he admitted briefly. ‘Look, what can I say?’ He gave a graphic shrug. ‘I was curious, and computers are my thing. I just wanted to learn more quickly, you know, get a head start on things.’ His eyes flickered between them, to see how they were reacting, and when they simply stared back at him, he rubbed one eyebrow worriedly with the back of his thumb. Clearly, a lot more explanation was needed. ‘Wendy can be pretty competitive and, although I know it’s not a competition exactly between us, I still wanted to do—’

  ‘Stop it,’ Hillary interrupted his woeful diatribe. ‘You’re just embarrassing yourself now and – even worse – wasting my time. You’ve got ten seconds to start to spill your guts, or Steven will just have to read you your rights and take you across to Holding, where you can find out first-hand what the inside of a cell looks like.’

  This was news to Steven. They hadn’t discussed the possibility of arresting Jake right then and there, but he was willing to let her have her head, so he merely sighed slightly and continued to stare at the wall just above Jake’s head.

  ‘And you’re a bright boy, Jake,’ Hillary swept on remorselessly. ‘You must have researched just how many laws you were breaking before you went ahead and broke so many of them, so you know exactly what kind of penalty you can expect.’

  At this, Jake glanced down at his hands and seemed slightly surprised to see them clenched into fists. Carefully, he spread out his fingers and took a deep breath.

  Hillary was fairly sure that getting arrested wouldn’t worry the boy wonder all that much – after all, he had the money to buy the best lawyers. And besides that, he might even be willing to bluff it out in the hopes that the top brass would rather hush things up than be humiliated by the fact that their golden boy had been shafting them all this time.

  So she was almost certain that it wasn’t the thought of having to face criminal charges that was making him look so damned unhappy. This realization only reinforced her belief that the man had come here in order to do something that was vitally important to him – something that would definitely get screwed up if he should be arrested and charged.

  ‘Look, I’m really sorry, OK?’ he pleaded. ‘And I’ll sign anything you want, and pay any fine, but I really want to stay and continue working here. I think …’

  ‘And why should we let you stay? So that you can go on paying mysterious visits to our local Mr Fixit?’ she shot at him grimly. ‘Mr Gordon Tate is well known around these parts for being the go-to man for any dodgy bastard who wants to get things done. So just what was it that you wanted from him, Jake? Funny money that needs laundering? Dodgy papers? An introduction to some high-ranking, usually shy villain?’

  Jake’s mouth literally fell open as he gaped at her. Then, slowly, the look of shock morphed into one of wry amusement – to think he believed he’d been so clever. Had he really thought that things had been going to plan, when all the time … He gave a little grunt and smiled bitterly. ‘I should have known, shouldn’t I? Just how long have you suspected me?’

  Hillary shrugged. ‘From the moment I got back from holiday and found you with your feet already tucked so firmly under the table, I knew that something was off,’ she informed him.

  Since she had nothing to do with the hiring and firing, when she’d returned from her annual leave and found Jake had been allocated to her team in her absence, his presence wasn’t a particular surprise. But when she’d read his personnel file, alarm bells had definitely started ringing.

  ‘Self-made rich boy wanting to give something back to his community? Please!’ She smiled dryly. ‘The PR department and top brass might have swallowed that bullshit whole, but it only sent me cross-eyed.’ She sighed and shrugged. ‘It was only a matter of time – a game of wait-and-see – until I figured out what you were really up to. And once I realized that you’d been sniffing around my computer, I put Jimmy up to following you.’

  She wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t felt a certain sense of satisfaction in seeing him go slowly white with the realization that she knew far more than she was letting on.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, although he hadn’t actually spoken. But then, they both knew that he didn’t need to. ‘Which leads us nicely on to the crux of the matter, and your interest in a certain Mr Darren Chivnor, doesn’t it?’ she said quietly. ‘The main suspect in umpteen assault cases, pimp, thief and all round bad boy. So tell me, Jake, given that you’ve met this scumbag at least twice to our knowledge, just why shouldn’t we sling your duplicitous backside to the media wolves and just wash our hands of you?’

  He swallowed hard. ‘Look, it’s not what you think,’ he began nervously. He was openly sweating now, and the look of panic was back in his eyes.

  Hillary smiled over at Steven. ‘Hear that? It’s not what we think.’

  Steven sighed heavily. ‘If I had a penny …’

  Hillary shook her head sadly.

  ‘I wasn’t after drugs—’ Jake flashed hotly.

  ‘Never thought you were,’ Hillary shot back, ruthlessly interrupting him before he could work himself up into a lather of righteous indignation. ‘You’re a clever boy, Jake, you could score whatever poison you fancied in much easier ways than that. No, our Darren and his boss specialize in a different kind of merchandise altogether,’ she continued, watching him like a hawk. She was satisfied to see the white lines around his mouth turn to red as he realized just what she was implying, and he flushed angrily.

&nb
sp; Good, Hillary thought. It was just as she thought. Now, all she needed was one more nicely placed insult and it should have him erupting nicely. Then they could start to get to the bottom of things.

  ‘So what did you fancy, Jake, hmm? An underage girl, perhaps? A cross-dresser? Tranny? What’s your fantasy?’

  Pushed beyond his limit, Jake launched himself from the wall and took a single step towards her. The fact that was as far as he got was due to several things. Firstly, the office was so tiny, that that single step took him right up to her desk. Secondly, as he moved, so too did Steven Crayle, who looked ready to grab him and slap on the cuffs without a moment’s hesitation.

  But mostly, it was the look on Hillary Greene’s face that stopped him dead.

  She looked at him like she’d look at a dog turd on the pavement. On her face there was contempt, and impatience, and maybe a touch of wry disappointment. And it was that more than anything that made Jake Barnes feel like crying.

  Because he’d worked with this woman on several murder cases now, and had come to respect and admire her enormously. She’d won a medal for bravery in the past by taking a bullet meant for a superior officer. She had a solve rate that was literally second to none. The brass ranked her as one of their best detectives, whilst the rank and file respected her for different reasons. Her reputation was for looking after her own, even in the face of a real shit storm. In the short time he’d known her, Jake had never seen her back down from anything. And for her to be looking at him as she was now, made him feel sick at heart.

  ‘No! It’s nothing like that,’ he denied passionately. ‘That’s not what this is about,’ he added hoarsely. ‘In fact, you’ve got it so far wrong it’s almost ludicrous!’

  Hillary’s lips twitched slightly. Damn if he didn’t look like a little whipped puppy. ‘So, you gonna keep it to yourself, Jake?’ she asked him wearily.

  ‘No,’ Jake muttered eventually, slumping back against the wall and sighing heavily. ‘It’s about Jasmine.’

  Hillary nodded. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Steven smile slightly. ‘Tell me about her,’ she said softly. Although she could already make a bloody good guess as to what was coming next. ‘She was someone in your life who got mixed up with the wrong people, and you want to get her out of it. Right? Pay her pimp off maybe? Get her out of the life? Into rehab, if she needs it? You’re gonna be her knight in shining armour, is that it?’

  Jake’s lips twisted wryly. ‘Seen it all, know it all, done it all. That right, guv?’ he asked a shade bitterly.

  Hillary sighed heavily. ‘Sometimes it feels like it,’ she surprised all three of them by admitting just as bitterly. Then she nodded. In truth though, she wasn’t feeling nearly as world-weary or cynical as she sounded. Her manner was mostly for show, to get Jake to open up. In reality, she felt for him. She knew all too well – hell, what copper didn’t? – how life could make a victim out of anyone. And when you loved someone, you were willing to do all sorts of crazy things to try and put things right. ‘OK, give it to us straight, from the beginning, and don’t mess us about and we’ll see what we can do for you. All right?’

  She looked across at Steven who nodded his permission for her to go ahead. He was already looking relieved that the worst-case scenario had been avoided. Jake clearly hadn’t been out to set himself up as some kind of criminal mastermind. He was just an idiot with a big cheque book and a super-hero complex.

  ‘Jasmine is my sister,’ he began flatly, then immediately contradicted himself. ‘Well, not my sister really. After my dad died when I was little, my mum married my stepdad, Curtis. He had already had a little girl by his first partner, and this partner had something of a drink and drugs problem, as we later came to realize. Since they were never married, Jasmine’s surname was the same as her mother’s – Sudbury. I think Curtis, even at the beginning, doubted that…. Oh, hell, hardly any of that matters now.’ He paused to collect his thoughts, and leaned his head back wearily against the wall.

  ‘Jasmine came to live with us when Curtis and my mum got married. By then her mother was judged unfit to care for her, and Mum had always wanted a daughter. And Jasmine took to her right away – she was such a loving, needy little thing. So in spite of the odds being against us, it all seemed to work out. And even though she was littler than me, and could be a bit of a clingy pest, instead of resenting her, I loved her right away as well. I was an only child and, I suppose, was probably lonely. Besides,’ he grinned a bit at the memory, ‘she idolized me, and for a young lad, that did my ego an enormous amount of good.’

  He paused and shrugged.

  ‘Anyway, as I said, at first everything seemed to be fine. Her birth mum was in and out of rehab and barely bothered to visit her, which was something of a relief, as you can imagine. Curtis had always worried about what influence her mum’s behaviour was having on her. We grew up in a council house, as you know, and although we didn’t have much money, both Curtis and Mum worked, and Jas never had to go without. She got the pretty dresses, and the toys she wanted at Christmas. She made new friends and she was happy. Or so we all thought.’

  Steven and Hillary exchanged glances, knowing just where this was going, but knowing that Jake needed to tell it anyway.

  ‘When I went off to uni, Jasmine was barely fourteen,’ Jake carried on sadly.

  ‘And it was only when I came back home in the holidays, that I first began to notice stuff. She’d go out drinking with her mates, even though she was underage. She started cheeking Mum and defying Curtis. Being rebellious. Stuff like that. It didn’t seem like a big deal at first, you know? Just the usual teenager playing up. But… .’

  ‘It got worse,’ Hillary said. ‘She ran away from home?’

  ‘Several times,’ Jake confirmed. ‘Once, I managed to find her and bring her back. And I was really appalled when I realized she was on drugs. We got her into rehab right away, of course. But it didn’t take. And it didn’t help that, around then, I began to make all my money. Jas seemed to think that that meant I would bankroll her habit. Of course I didn’t – that was the worst thing I could have done. In spite of all her pleading, I wouldn’t enable her to carry on being a junkie. It made me feel so guilty, but both Mum and Curtis and her counsellors agreed I was doing the right thing. Tough love.’ He grunted softly, a bitter bark of laughter. ‘So she began to resent me. And she ran away again.’

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair.

  ‘All traces of the sweet, happy girl we knew seemed to vanish. Once, she got pregnant and lost the baby. That seemed to scare her for a bit and she sobered up for a while.’

  ‘But it didn’t last,’ Hillary said.

  ‘No. Then, a couple of years ago, she went missing and just didn’t come back. She just – well, stayed missing. And this time I couldn’t find her. None of her friends knew where she might have gone, either. Mum and Curtis were going out of their minds imagining the worst. Well, you know – I don’t have to tell you how girls like Jas can end up.’

  He didn’t. She and Steven shared a long, level look.

  ‘So I hired private investigators, and eventually they got a lead.’

  This time it was Steven who spoke. ‘You found out she’d become a prostitute?’ he said gently.

  Jake swallowed hard. ‘Yes. They tracked her down to Oxford. But then they refused to stay on the case. I had to pay them off. I think the pimp she was working for scared them off.’

  ‘Yes. He would,’ Steven said. ‘You’re talking about Dale Medcalfe now, right?’

  Jake nodded. ‘Apparently, Jas had been a girl in one of his stables for a few years. The investigators thought she was working the S&M circuit.’

  Hillary winced. That was bad news. Very bad. Only girls that Medcalfe was willing to throw on the scrap-heap got hired out to the kind of risky John who was into sadomasochism.

  Jake caught the look and swallowed hard again. ‘Yes. I know,’ he all but whispered. He looked so miserable that she had to
fight the urge to get up and go and put her arms around him. But right now wasn’t the time for that.

  ‘Go on,’ she said instead.

  ‘I found out that she dropped out of sight nearly a year ago. She had been living in a squat in Cowley, but … she just vanished again.’

  Hillary slowly leaned forward on her desk, she intended to say something like, ‘Jake, that probably only means one thing,’ but she was saved from actually having to say the grim words.

  ‘I know. You think she’s dead,’ Jake said, his voice as dead as the look on his face. ‘You think that some sick John got too aggressive and killed her. Or the drugs got to her. Or perhaps AIDs or who the hell knows what else. I know that. I know she’s probably dead.’ His voice had been growing steadily louder and harsher, but now he fell abruptly silent. And then he took a long, shuddering breath. ‘But I have to find out for certain. I need to know. Mum and Curtis need to know. We can’t go on living in limbo like this. So that’s why I joined the police as a civilian consultant. That’s why I went into your computer. I needed to get access to police records. I needed data. I needed to get a foot in the camp that could help me find out what happened to her.’

  Hillary nodded.

  ‘And that’s also why I approached Darren Chivnor,’ he added.

  At this, Steven stirred a shade restlessly, since Jake was straying into the remit of his new job.

  ‘I hired another top-notch PI team, and they gave me as much intel as they dared on this Dale Medcalfe character. So I know a lot about the set-up that he runs. His gang consists of mainly family members or long-term friends and people from his old neighbourhood. They take the fall for him, as well as acting as his enforcers. He’s never even been inside a prison cell,’ Jake swept on, sounding disgusted.

  But Steven didn’t need telling any of this. It would be part of his new job to put men like Medcalfe away. It wasn’t going to be easy – it never was. Men like that ruled by fear and intimidation and casual, gut-churning violence. Who would testify against a man if they knew that their daughter could be raped on her way home from school? Who would lodge a complaint against one of his thugs, when doing so meant you could end up knee-capped, or worse? Silence and acceptance became the norm, and the police, more often than not, were helpless to offer a viable alternative. You couldn’t be everywhere at once. But how could he explain these very hard facts of life to a man like Jake?