Chapter One – The Murder Option

It was a cold morning, and a shimmer of pretty frost was glistening across the whole sloping field in the heatless rays of the February sunshine. It sparkled on every blade of grass and every hair on the back of his head. There would have been a cloud of breath coming from his mouth if he had been breathing.

The blood had congealed around a knife in his back. It had pierced his coat then travelled on its deadly journey through his shirt, eased past his skin, crunched through a rib and then punctured his most vital organ. A dagger through the heart — a classic — not much murder imagination, but effective, none the less.

The insistent whine of the approaching quad bike went unheard by Colin Baxter who was past hearing anything ever again, but it stirred up some of the birds in the nearby hedgerow. From the bottom of the field the farmer had thought he was about to encounter yet another one of the bags of fly-tipped rubble that had become the bane of his life. The top hedge was next to a quiet road, and it was too easy for criminals to hoist rubbish over the top. However, now that he was closer, he could see exactly what the bulky outline was, and he stopped the bike. Damn, it was going to mean trouble. All kinds of police and officials would come charging over his land now. Police vans would churn up his field. It would probably be cordoned off, too, for how long, and then what? Would ghoulish tourists traipse over everything? Reporters? He sighed. What a pain. There was something he could do, though. It wasn’t pretty, but the guy was dead anyway, so what did it matter?

‘The police gave up,’ said Mrs Baxter, the sombre, respectful widow’s tones of her clothing doing nothing to dampen her appealing glow. He knew he was going to like her. ‘They said they couldn’t find any evidence, so they just gave up.’ She raised her hands, palms open, and McQueen nodded. Spread before him on his desk were the police reports and newspaper clippings that detailed the violent and tragic death of her husband. ‘That’s why I want you to investigate,’ she continued. ‘I want you to find my Colin’s murderer.’

They were sitting opposite each other in McQueen’s small office, her in the uncomfortable guest seat back to the window, him on his high-backed swivel chair. The office was an expense he could do without, but he needed it to house his filing cabinets and for these client meetings if nothing else. It also gave him an official business address. He could keep the more unsavoury clients he sometimes acquired away from his home. His office was one of four in the building and he had the room they were in now, a toilet and tiny kitchen all on the ground floor. It was located on a road that led into Leeds city centre and there was always a steady stream of a people trudging by. “Good footfall,” the agent had said when he’d first come to view it, and he was right, although little of that people-traffic diverted to his door.

The main road was on a slight rise so, as passers-by on their way to the busy shops and trendy cafés lent forward against the hill, it gave them a sloping shape reminiscent of the figures in a Lowry painting. McQueen’s window looked out onto the street but he found it distracting so he kept his vertical blinds angled to almost closed most of the time. The shadows of the passing trade were rhythmically crossing the blinds behind Valerie Baxter even now as she sat telling him her story.

‘I can pay,’ added Mrs Baxter. ‘A little was left to me by Colin, and I think the best way I could use it would be to get him some justice. It’s what he’d want.’

McQueen studied the woman in front of him, looking for any discordant signs, anything that might mean in her grief she had lost her grip on reality. The overriding word that came to his mind was driven. She had come to him with a clear purpose, and it had ignited a passionate intensity in her dark eyes. She was both a defiant and an attractive forty- something woman, her shoulder-length hair a rich chestnut brown with some playful curls that were untamed by hairspray. She had a straight-shouldered confident posture, but her outward softness did not mask the fact that something tougher lay beneath. McQueen noticed she was wearing almost no make-up, no lipstick, but some colour had been applied to her cheeks, perhaps to disguise the pallor of grief. Some people are just born good-looking, he thought, and there isn’t much that detracted from that other than a long-term crack habit or bad plastic surgery. She had to be at least ten or fifteen years younger than her deceased husband, whose age at the time of death, he’d already seen in the clippings, was fifty-seven. He considered the age difference might have been interesting to find out more about, but it wasn’t time for that right now.

McQueen knew some of the tabloids would have their readers believe murders happened all the time, but in this country, for middle-aged men who weren’t involved in drug smuggling or some other form of organised crime, they were actually very rare. Like most things which are statistically improbable, when the rare thing happens to you or a loved one, statistics become meaningless. It reminded him the difference between an economic recession and a depression was that a recession was when your neighbour was out of work and a depression was when you’re out of work. Personal perspective had rendered the rarity of murder an irrelevance to the woman sitting in McQueen’s office. Justice had become Mrs Baxter’s mission in life, something to live for. She knew it wasn’t going to bring her husband back, but what else was she supposed to do, move on? It was one of those popular phrases that sounded great in a self-help book, but was hard to transfer into real life.

‘The person who did this needs to be caught and locked up,’ she continued, holding McQueen’s gaze. ‘In fact, if I had my way, they’d be hanged, or better still, boiled alive in oil.’ There it was, the first sign that emotion was ruling her thinking. She was very serious, and becoming quite animated, leaning forward like an impassioned Prime Minister at the dispatch box and tapping on the desk. ‘But they won’t do that these days, will they? A slap on the wrist is all they get and that’s it.’ Sensing a possible meltdown on its way, he decided to steer her away from the politics of modern verses medieval punishment.

‘That’s an understandable reaction, Mrs Baxter,’ he said, charitably. ‘But what makes you think I can do any better than the police? They do have enormous resources at their disposal and, as I understand it, they conducted a very thorough investigation.’

She snorted. ‘Thorough? The only suspect they looked at was the farmer, and it turned out all he did was move Colin’s body off his land. That’s why he had the blood in his trailer. They were convinced it was him, so they spent too long trying to prove it. Meanwhile the real murderer must have been laughing.’

McQueen sat back in his chair to assess how this case was panning out. He’d agreed to meet her because, to be honest, he met anyone who bothered to ring up and make an appointment. You never could tell what was going to unfold even from the most straightforward meetings, but this one was living up to his relatively low expectations. It was a stone-cold no-hoper, a dead-end police investigation where the juices of possibility had been well and truly sucked out of it. Frankly, it was a waste of time. A more cynical private investigator would take her money, make all the right noises, chase up some non-existent leads, build some hopes, and then regretfully dash them. But McQueen wasn’t in the business of ripping-off grieving widows. Business wasn’t great, but it wasn’t that bad yet. Still, Valerie Baxter needed some kind of positive noises to lift her day, and he didn’t want to send her off into the unscrupulous arms of his competition who would be more than ready to shake her money tree.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Mrs Baxter. I’ll keep all these documents with me if that’s okay and I’ll read through them properly? Then, if there’s something I think might be fruitful, I’ll take the case on, but if I think there’s nothing to be gained other than more pain for you and a hole in your bank account I’ll tell you and you can save your money. Is that fair?’

She nodded. ‘Okay, but all you need to do is go and speak to Harper.’

He’d been wrapping up and was about to shuffle her on out of the office and this threw him a little.

‘Who’s Harper?’

She pointed at the papers on the desk.

‘Martin Harper,’ she said as if he should already know. ‘Colin’s boss. He’s the man who killed him. I told the police that right at the beginning, but they did nothing. They were too focused on that stupid farmer and by the time they spoke to Harper he’d had time to cover his tracks.’

It wasn’t unusual for a grief-stricken relative to have a suspect in mind. Quite often it was someone they hated already, but he was sure the police would have eliminated from the inquiry an obvious suspect like the boss.

‘Why do you think it was this guy Harper?’

She pointed to one of the stapled sheets on the desk. ‘It’s all in my statement to the police, Mr McQueen. All you need to do is speak to him and you’ll see.’

Her point made, she stood up scraping the chair back with the backs of her knees and smoothed down the creases in her black skirt. She was very trim and fit-looking. McQueen found himself wondering if she was one of those running obsessives that seemed to be everywhere these days. As she was preparing to leave, as an afterthought, McQueen did his business market research.

‘So, just for my records, Mrs Baxter, can I ask what made you choose to bring this case to me?’ he asked. It was a question he didn’t much like, but he’d been told by a business advisor it would give him a valuable insight into how to attract more clients. More clients was the item at the top of his list of goals the advisor had made him write down.

‘Research,’ she answered. ‘I looked at a number of private investigators’ websites, and yours showed you were the only one that wasn’t an ex-policeman. It said you were an academic criminologist.’

‘Okay. And you liked the sound of that?’

‘To be honest, I don’t really know what it means, but I don’t trust the police, and an ex-policeman is only going to give me the same lies that the real ones did.’

Unsurprised, McQueen nodded. It was an argument he’d heard before and was the reason he mentioned it on the website.

After she’d gone, McQueen bundled up the papers to take home. Challenging murder cases were few and far between, but were exactly why he’d got into this business in the first place. Missing persons, divorce proceedings, and general lack of spousal trust made up the bulk of his routine work, so he should have been more excited about a case that offered a chance to get back to his field of expertise. But at the moment, all he could smell was frustration and disappointment. An unsolved murder had potential for glory, but also carried with it the weight of lack of police cooperation, even obstruction. They wouldn’t want to see an outsider get a result they themselves had failed at. It would be an embarrassment.

Mrs Baxter had seen the fact that McQueen wasn’t an ex- cop as an advantage, but in truth, in his line of work, it was much more of a hindrance. The police tended to look after their own. He couldn’t rely on cosy chats and information leaked by old pals over a pint in the pub for his leads. There were no favours from old mates he could rely on. No, he had to do it all himself, often pushing against a wall of official silence he had to eke out his own information and pick up his own leads. Usually, that was the part of the job which ignited his interest, the man-alone challenge of it, but at other times the strain of it could turn a simple investigation into a frustrating odyssey of dead-ends and slamming doors. Still, you never know with a murder, he thought. There was always potential for glory. Besides, he liked Valerie Baxter, and he wanted to help her. He had to wonder if there was anyone who would be prepared to fight for his justice once he was dead. There was certainly no one who would have the dedication that she had.

The Murder Option (Detective McQueen, #1) – Stewart McDowall

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Category: Fiction, Thriller/Crime