Studies in Detective Fiction III

Jenny

"She's not replying to my texts," Jenny said, scrolling up and down her message thread with Clara as though it held a clue for her to analyse. But there was nothing of note. When she looked back, most of the messages between the two of them consisted of her letting Clara know that she was going to be late home, something had come up, she had been asked to work overtime, an extra shift, don't wait up for her, she would make her own dinner, she would see her in the morning. And Clara's replies were nearly always in emojis or acronyms, love hearts, OKs and smiley faces, and kisses. Often, Clara ignored her and waited up anyway, or ordered takeaway for them both and left Jenny's on top of the microwave for her, or made sure something they were going to watch together was recorded and unwatched until they were both at home. But now, Clara wasn't saying anything.

"Maybe she's busy," said Elliott, sipping cold coffee, leaning on the car door with the window rolled down; the rain from earlier had cleared up. They were parked on the opposite side of the street to an alleyway which was a known spot for drug deals, waiting for a ne'er-do-ell called Ricky Collins to show his face, a real scumbag Jenkins often picked up and convinced to act as an informant. He was sketchy and slimy, and their first (and hopefully last) stop in the quest for information about the drug Elliott was calling 'One Hit Wonder.'

"Busy doing what?" Jenny asked.

"I don't know, Young. Forgotten to charge her phone? Dropped it and broke it? Nipped to the shop and left it behind? It could just be in a different room? Maybe she really just hasn't heard it? Maybe she's asleep?"

"She was awake when I left this morning."

"People can go back to sleep."

"Maybe she's upset with me…"

"Did she say she was upset with you?"

"She's been acting weird. And I asked Cohen about it and she refused to answer, flat-out."

"Since when was Cohen refusing to talk about personal things with someone a sign that something was wrong?"

"I should be able to tell that something's wrong. I think she's hiding something. And now she's not talking to me? Maybe I should call her…" While Jenny was thinking about that, Elliott's phone began to vibrate on the dashboard. A picture of Sally Sparrow, smiling warmly, came up to accompany her contact name. James swore to himself and rejected the call, then switched it off. They had walkie-talkies if someone important needed to get in touch with them while they were on duty. "What did happen between you this time?" That was her third call to him he had declined in the last hour.

"I don't know. We were due an argument. Things change, people change."

"I don't think either of you have changed."

"Then maybe that's what the problem is," he sighed, "She's going to say sorry and expect me to say sorry back, even though I'm not even sure what I should be apologising for, and then she'll shout at me again. I'm reevaluating my priorities. I've been a Detective Inspector for years, maybe I want to aim for a promotion, how does Chief Inspector James Elliott sound?"

"Like a mouth full."

"Just because 'Major' only has two syllables." Jenny smiled a little. "Maybe you should revaluate your own priorities, too."

"In what way?"

"Do you care about this job more or do you care about your girlfriend?"

"I'm not going to quit."

"I didn't say quit, just maybe stop taking overtime at every opportunity? Makes it look like you don't actually want to spend time with her. And I bet you didn't even argue with McHale when you got called in this morning – you could have refused. If Turner made a fuss, take it to a tribunal. You'd win," he shrugged. She wasn't going to do that, though. But did Clara really think that Jenny didn't want to spend time with her? Elliott's attempts to talk things out with her were just making her worry even more. Wasn't that a primary reason why people cheated? Being ignored, made to feel like they weren't valuable? She knew that she had felt pretty worthless when Captain Jack had refused to get her an engagement ring, and she had begun to look in other places… had she pushed Clara to the edge with her latest career obsession? "Here we go, Ricky Collins, two o'clock," James interrupted her. Jenny followed his gaze and saw Collins, a deceptively weedy man who looked quite poor but was wearing what she recognised as an incredibly expensive pair of the newest Nike trainers. He was also holding a shiny, gold-plated iPhone to his ear. Was there ever a more obvious drug dealer?

She and Elliott got out of the car together to cross the street.

"Okay, you're good cop, I'm bad cop," Elliott said.

"What? Why do I always have to be good cop?"

"Because you're adorable." She scowled. "Oi, Ricky Collins?" he shouted, then he pulled his badge out of his pocket and held it up, "I'm DI Elliott, this is DI Young, we want a word with – shit!" Collins dropped his phone and ran, turning on his heel and vanishing right back down the alley he had just come out of. The two detectives gave chase immediately, Jenny trying to remember the best routes around the area so that she could head him off – he had quite a good head start.

"Keep on him, I'll cut him off," Jenny said to Elliott, then she veered off left while he carried on going right, and found herself in another abandoned building with smashed in windows, broken down doors, and graffiti-lined walls. To her horror, she also realised it was an old meat-packing plant, and it had quite the odour about it. She ran up a metal staircase, three flights, across balconies, until she was on a narrow catwalk suspended above the floor of the factory, which looked to have closed down some time earlier. She knew that there were dead-ends and high fences where Ricky Collins had chosen to run, and so despite her strange detour she knew she could still catch him out. It was almost too easy to climb onto the rusty and very thin railing of the catwalk – which wobbled and was suspended only by chains – and then do a jump to grab the ledge of one of the open, smashed skylights, trying not to cut her hands. Then haul herself up through the roof, thinking back to her circus days, and run along top at odds to where Elliott and Collins ran below, doing a Spiderman-like leap from the roof of the meat-packing factory down onto the lower roof of a smaller, storage warehouse next door which was still, technically, owned by Sprite, but they had left it empty a decade ago. It was actually still full of Sprite, too, interestingly enough.

She ran across the flat roof, trying not to succumb to the desire to break in and steal an enormous amount of lemonade (maybe Clara would tell her the truth about what was going on if she got her the gift of sixty cans of stolen pop?), and dropped over the edge, sliding down a drainpipe just as Ricky Collins climbed over a fence. He was in exactly the right position for her to push off from the wall like a champion swimmer in a pool and deliver a flying kick to his face.

"Holy shit," said James Elliott. She wasn't even out of breath, but he was, struggling to heave himself over the fence.

"You need to go to the gym more," Jenny told him, standing over Collins, who was winded half from the force of her kick and half from shock, because he hadn't seen her coming down the side of the roof.

"They should let more ex-circus performers into the police," Elliott grunted, landing and staggering on the other side of the chain-link.

"This is assault and battery," Collins complained, "Totally unprovoked. I was only stretching my legs, I missed my morning run today."

"You forget about that, and we'll forget to pick you up for possession with intent, does that suit you?" Jenny said to him. She was so used to dealing with criminals. Probably because she was a criminal, in some quite extreme respects. "We just want to talk, Ricky." He got back to his feet, rubbing his feet.

"You damn near knocked out my teeth," he complained.

"You're fine. You'll just have a cut lip," she said, "Now, we've got some questions."

"About some mysterious deaths," said Elliott, "We might make you for it. How does a manslaughter charge sound to you? Maybe even murder in the third degree?"

"Or you could just answer a few questions," said Jenny sweetly, trying to regain her 'good cop' composure after kicking him in the mouth. "We've got half a dozen dead people who had all ingested what's looking like a dangerous new street drug."

"And you're going to tell us what you know about it and hope we don't decide to search you for drug paraphernalia. You've probably got a few thousand pounds worth of drugs on you."

"What drug?" he asked, looking between them shiftily. He was almost as short as Jenny; no wonder he rolled over so easily.

"Phytolomide Neotracin," said Jenny. That was what Helix had identified it as, anyway. No nickname or special use had come to the fore, all they had was a fancy name and a jigsaw of chemical symbols, some of which she was sure she had never seen on the periodic table. Predictably, Collins looked blank.

"Come on, think harder," James ordered him.

"I don't know the real names for this stuff," he argued, "Be more specific. What does it look like?"

"No idea, but it has some nasty side effects," said Elliott.

"Is it a downer?"

"You tell me – would you feel 'down' if all your internal organs, muscles and soft tissue dissolved into goo?" Elliott said, "That's what the bodies are. Bags of skin full of pulp and viscera. Only skeletons and teeth are intact. You're sure you haven't heard anything about that?"

"Nothing."

"I knew you were a low-life, but I never thought you'd stoop to killing your own customers."

"Piss off, mate," Collins spat on the floor at Elliott's feet.

"Hey," Jenny took the lead again, "He only means that some known associates of yours are the people who have turned up dead. We don't think you'd really kill your client-base, you'd lose your money."

"I don't know, Young. He's got a dodgy look about him. I think we might break a confession out of him in interrogation," Elliott threatened.

"Samantha Olson? Neville McBride? Neville's body was only found this morning," Jenny said. Cohen's x-raying and cross-checking medical records and missing persons reports had come good; only one of the seven was still unidentified. "Both had criminal records, both got arrested and charged with possession and both named you as their honorary dealer in previous statements. And now they've had all their innards turned to slime."

"We could pin this on you sooner than you could blink, Ricky."

"Help us out here, yeah?"

"Alright, alright. I know what you mean. There's been a lot of talk about it, on the streets. They call it White Doom," he confessed, "I've only seen it once. Comes in this tiny little canister, you're supposed to inhale the whole thing – I guess it's a gas. I've never sold it, I've never even touched it, someone else showed it to me."

"Where did they get it from?" Jenny asked.

"They said they got it from one of Needles' crew."

"Needles? You mean Harry Phelps?" Elliott asked.

"Yeah, that geezer. Needles Phelps." Jenny knew the name. There wasn't an officer in all of the Met who didn't know that name – Needles Phelps was the primo heroin supplier in the city. That was why they called him 'Needles.' Apparently, he'd expanded into an area even more destructive, this 'White Doom,' so-named because its consumption meant certain death. "Listen, officers, I don't want to get on the wrong side of Needles and his crew, but Sammy and Nev? They were good customers of mine. Reliable. Good people, too, in bad circumstances, stuck on the streets."

"A drug dealer with a conscience? I'm weeping," said Elliott dryly.

"And the bloke who had the canister I saw? Said he got it from one of Needles' guys who dropped a whole bag full of them in the gutter. Nobody would drop product like that just in the road. And I've heard of more people dying than you've found. In fact, I haven't heard of anyone who takes it and lives. I'm not even sure Needles is letting it onto the street anymore – you can't get people hooked if they die straight away."

"So, where's he keeping his stash?" Jenny asked.

"Or do you want us to make good on our threat to bring you in? Aiding and abetting? Obstruction of justice?" Elliott added, "We could get a good prison sentence out of you. Get a dangerous criminal off the streets. Let everyone in prison know you're a snitch? How long will a snitch last behind bars? A week? Two?"

"Alright, alright. But I want protection."

"Protection?" Jenny frowned.

"Ha! You think I'm going to give you the location of Needles Phelps and his whole gang without a guarantee of protection?"

"I think you might give us it if we start breaking your fingers one by one," threatened James, "Say you fell over the fence. Who are they going to believe?" Ricky went silent, thinking. James made a move to step closer to him, and he shrank away.

"Alright, alright! There's this care home, okay? An old care home. That's where they've got their meth lab set up, at least. Since you lot raided the last one in the dockyards."

"Yeah, sorry, we have a tendency to raid drug labs," said James sarcastically.

"He's going to leave soon, though, because of the heat around the White Doom."

"So hurry up and give us the address before we beat it out of you."

"Aurora Acres. The building is condemned. It's been a property guardianship for years before – hey! You said you'd protect me!" They had turned and begun to walk away from him, now getting all the information they needed.

"Actually, we didn't," said Jenny, "So I'd get far away from here, if I were you. Just in case Needles Phelps finds out who grassed him up and orders a home visit from behind the bars of Her Majesty's Finest Cell."

"Oh, fucking hell! Fucking pigs!" he shouted as he ran between them and away again, off down the street, splashing through the puddles and the mist. They let him go without a fight. Elliott was already unhooking his radio from his belt.

"This is DI Elliott, come in Turner," he said into it. In the meantime, Jenny checked her phone and found that there was still no message on it from Clara.

"You better have some good news for me, Elliott. I've spent the last two hours trying to find out who called in a bomb hoax to a primary school," Turner responded.

"Got you an early birthday present, ma'am. The drug they took, it's called White Doom and it's being peddled out of the derelict Aurora Acres building by Needles Phelps and his gang. Apparently, he's got the only stash and it's all in there."

"Is this credible information?"

"Credible enough."

"You're sure? Harry Phelps?"

"The one and only."

"Get down there and don't make a move until backup arrives – we're going full SWAT on this one. Keep your heads down and out of sight. Is that clear?"

"Yes, ma'am. Over and out."