Foot Soldiers Read online

  Copyright © Neil Williams 2018

  All rights reserved

  For ‘my’ dynamic trio

  1

  It was a stormy night. Not “Count Dracula” stormy, just a regular, everyday, run of the mill kind of stormy, and ruddy cold, too.

  Ned hated cold and stormy nights. He hated being accosted by the rain, which at that very moment felt like knitting needles hitting him in the face.

  He was soaked and miserable and not really sure if he still had feet. He’d not felt them for a few hours now. He tried to scrunch up his toes to check, but all he could feel were the squelch of his socks and that unwelcome ooze of water flooding into his boots.

  Ned couldn’t think of anything worse, which was worrying when you thought about what he did to earn a crust.

  Ned was a cop; a maverick, loose-cannon that gave his cigar chomping and shouty Captain an ulcer, but always got the job done.

  Armed with his trusty semi-automatic and a little book of wise arse remarks, Ned “Death Wish” Hope swept scumbags off the dark city streets and always crashed his battered blue Mustang through the cardboard boxes that were curiously stacked around the alleyways.

  He was Chuck Norris in Code of Silence, dirty vest Bruce in all the Die Hards... well, apart from the fifth one, which was a bit iffy, and Mel “Do ya really wanna jump?” Gibson. At least, that’s the way he saw himself in his head.

  In the real world, Ned was a lowly Police Constable with permanently damp feet, who looked more like Mel Giedroyc than Gibson.

  “How the hell did I get here?” played on a loop in the back of his mind, along with the theme tune to ‘Magnum P.I.’ Yesterday it was the ‘Danger Mouse’ theme, but Jamie at the station had been humming Magnum at the vending machine and now all Ned could hear was, “Dah-da-dah-dum!” It was driving him bonkers. So was the unzipped flap of the forensic tent, whipping like Indy in the wind behind him.

  It was Ned’s third night up at the wall. “Guard the crime scene,” he was told.

  “Again?” he’d thought. “That’s all I ever do.” He felt more like Wurzel Gummidge than a copper.

  Slowly sinking into the mucky ground, Ned wished it would swallow him whole. Thankfully, he wasn’t the only poor sod up at the wall on ‘scarecrow’ duty...

  Constable Matilda Jones had, for reasons unknown, foolishly volunteered to join Ned on operation “slow death by standing in a muddy field” two days earlier. She’d seen Ned knocking around the station and had sat next to him in a briefing once, but this was the first time she’d made any effort to have a proper conversation with him. Not that either of them could hear a ruddy thing over the howling wind.

  “Salami?” he winced, unsure he’d heard her correctly.

  “Army!” she shouted back. “It was either do this or the Army.” She wiped a crumb of rain from her eye and smirked. “Or work in Lidl.”

  Ned smiled and gave her the ‘two thumbs up’… he hadn’t heard a ruddy word she’d said. All he could hear was, “Dah-da-dah-dum.”

  “What about you?”

  Ned heard that, but pretended he hadn’t. He hated answering questions about why he wanted to do stuff, mainly because it made him look like a dufus.

  He cupped his ear. “Huh?”

  Matilda loathed repeating herself, but did it all the same. “What about you? What did you join up for?”

  He wanted to say “Huh?” again, but worried she would punch him if he did. He readied himself for ridicule. “Car chases!”

  Matilda had heard that right, hadn’t she? She thought she’d better check. “Car chases?”

  “Yeah, car chases.” He wanted to stop there, but for some reason couldn’t help himself, “And to work undercover with a bunch of bank robbing surfers.”

  He flinched, waiting for Matilda to accost him like the rain, but she just smiled. He didn’t know what to do, so he just carried on. “And to fight crime and solve puzzling mysteries.” He looked down at his sunken boots in the muck and groaned. “Not to stand in a ruddy field in a squalling wind, getting soaked to the skin and losing all feeling in my toes!”

  “I haven’t felt my toes in days.”

  “I don’t think I’ve got any toes left.”

  Matilda shook her head. “Yeah, you have. If you didn’t have any toes, you wouldn’t be able to stand up.”

  “Is that true?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Did you know that if you cut off a toe, you lose your balance?”

  “If I drink six pints of lager, I lose my balance.”

  She cupped her ear, “Sorry, what?”

  Ned thought about repeating it, but couldn’t be arsed, so simply replied, “Nothing.”

  Matilda looked over her shoulder at the forensic tent, rocking like an empty see-saw in the wind, then glanced back at Ned and yelled, “THAT’S a puzzling mystery!”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “What is?”

  “This,” she said, pointing at the crime scene. “What happened here.”

  “Why, what happened?”

  Matilda was a little thrown by Ned’s clear lack of knowledge. “What, you don’t know? Weren’t you at the briefing?”

  “I was late,” he confessed, already feeling a little ashamed. “That and the Sarg has got one of those monotone voices that makes me feel sleepy. I drifted off and started thinking about Nigella’s Nutella cheese cake.”

  “Ooh, I could go for a slice of that about now!”

  “And me,” he smiled. “It’s lovely.”

  A sudden gush of wind swept over the wall and battered Ned and Matilda with frosty rain. They cowered from the attack.

  Turning his face away from the knitting needles, Ned glanced curiously at the forensic tent and then looked with equal curiosity at Matilda. “So, what’s the skinny?”

  Her freckly face vanished behind her smile. “Thank you!”

  Ned smirked, realising Matilda had thought that he’d said that she was skinny... which, she was... but then he figured it would have been cruel to correct her. “You’re welcome.”

  He looked again at the forensic tent. “So, what happened? I know it was murder, but...”

  Matilda then remembered what they had been discussing before he’d told her how slim she was and said, “Oh, right... yeah.” She turned with him to face the bellowing tent and explained. “A few days ago, a group of ‘Tony Robinson’ types were up ‘ere on a dig. Only what they found wasn’t a little wall.”

  Now all Ned could see in his mind’s eye was Baldrick, gathered around the dusty excavation site with fellow archaeologists, Harrison Ford and Sam Neill, sweeping away crumbs of earth with tiny brushes from what, at first glance, looked like a jagged rock, but upon closer inspection was the eye socket of a human skull.

  Seeing the skull under the thin sheet of soil, Harrison leapt back and Sam shrieked, “Oh my God!”

  Matilda looked Ned bang in the eyes. “It was a skeleton.”

  Baldrick, Harrison and Sam preserved, brushing away the earth and stepping back to leer down at the skeleton in all its macabre glory.

  “At first they’d thought they’d found a Roman foot soldier. The ‘find’ of the century,” she continued, “But the detectives assigned to the case...” She stalled and clicked her fingers, trying desperately to remember their sodding names. “Mulder and Scully!”

  Now all Ned could see were Fox Mulder and Dana Scully oozing sex appeal and spooky mystery as they marched towards the Pathology lab; trench coats flapping in slow mo.

  Then the ‘real’ names of the detectives assigned to the case hit Ned out of nowhere; “Monroe and Sommers?!”

  “Aye,” she grumbled. “That’s them.”

  The swing doors into the Pathology lab flung open and Detective Inspector Colin Monroe; a
scruffy, short and stocky fella that looked like a Sontaran in a coffee stained jacket, and his partner, Detective Sergeant Edith Sommers; a giraffe in a pale brown trouser suit, spilled inside, fiercely slurping Americano coffees in unison.

  Laid out before them on a cold metal table was the skeleton. Behind the table was Dougal, a sharp jawed Pathologist with smouldering good looks who should’ve been a ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ professional. He had no time for Monroe and Sommers because they always stained his lab with coffee cup rings.

  Monroe and Sommers stepped up to the skeleton, gave it the quick once over; it wasn’t the first time they’d seen one, then gawped like bemused toddlers at Dougal and slurped their coffees.

  “They found out the skeleton was that of a local fella that went missing in action a couple of months back.” Matilda racked her brains trying to remember his name, then offered, “Noel? No, Liam! Liam Roberts,” she smiled. “He lived in Harbridge. Was one of those Bear Grylls’ types that was a member of that Metal Detector group that meet up in the Black Bull every other... whatsit.” She paused, then said, “I chatted to him at the bar a couple of times.” She stalled again and shot Ned a sheepish look. “Not interested.”

  Ned smirked at her failure to snag a date with Liam. He looked again at the crime scene, at the ancient wall sheltering it from the storm and surprised himself by having an actual thought. “So he must have come up here looking for something?”

  Liam’s muddy boots trampled through the muck, as his metal detector, cracking and humming, swept like a vacuum cleaner over the murky ground. Liam looked younger than his thirty-two years. He had steely blue eyes and rugged looks, and there was a spark in him; an inner child hungry for adventure. The detector beeped violently. Bingo!

  “That’s the theory. And it looks like he found it,” said Matilda, as Liam dropped to his knees, took a small hand-shovel out of his knackered backpack and started digging.

  Clawing away the damp, crumbly dirt, he looked into the darkness below. Whatever he saw in the shallow hole made his eyes light up. Excited, he reached down to grab whatever it was –

  “And it got him killed.”

  Liam could feel a sharp tingling sensation on the back of his neck. Then it hit him – it was someone’s breath! Before he could even think about looking back over his shoulder to see who was stood behind him, their creeping shadow swept over him and their hand pressed tightly around his mouth, violently pulling his head back until his neck almost snapped. Before Liam could gasp, his unseen attacker plunged a sharp object hard into his chest.

  Liam’s dying yelp echoed in the howling wind, as Matilda nodded at Ned. “That’s the theory.”

  Ned was now getting into the swing of this detective lark. “Then it had to be one of the, erm, metal detector people that did it?”

  “Maybe,” she pondered. But Ned had already lost his train of thought to,

  “What do you call people that metal detect anyway?”

  “Sad.” she said severely, then added, “Thingy and whatsit, they think Liam was stabbed with a knife. The Pathologist found metal splinters embedded in his sternum. They also think the killer stripped the poor sod naked before burying his body. Up in these hills, in this ruddy weather, under that muck, his body would’ve rotted to the bone in weeks.”

  Ned was curious. “How do you know all this stuff? About the splinters and the...”

  “Dougal,” she quickly interrupted. “The Pathologist... he let it slip when I saw him down the pub the other night. Come to think of it, he did tell me not to tell no-one about it.”

  “Then why you telling me?” quizzed Ned.

  “Because you’re a no-one,” she smiled. Ned was a little hurt, but pretended he wasn’t with a jokey “Thanks a bunch.”

  Matilda was about to laugh, but Ned was already back on his roll. “So one of ‘em must have been up here with Liam and wanted whatever he’d found for themselves? They killed him for it?”

  Matilda shrugged her shoulders. She was a tad unsure. “That’s just it. Whatsit and thingy brought the metal detector lot in for questioning...”

  ---

  Detectives Monroe and Sommers couldn’t get over the fact that their first suspect, Ronald Pryce, a shy and nerdy twenty-two year old kid, looked exactly like Captain Jack Sparrow.

  Ronald was an avid Dectectorist and action figure collector that still lived with his mum, and, let’s face it, probably would for the rest of his life.

  Monroe slurped on his Americano, scribbled furiously in his note pad and then burrowed his beady eyes into Ronald’s baby blues. “Where were you on the night of Liam’s murder?”

  “I was at home with my mum, watching telly.”

  “Can anyone verify that?” asked Sommers.

  Ronald thought about it for a moment and smiled. “My mum?”

  Monroe and Sommers swapped glances and grumbles, but Ronald now had a few questions of his own. “So,” he wondered. “Do you get to shoot people?”

  From the look on both their faces, it was clear Monroe and Sommers wanted to shoot him.

  ---

  Dean Holden was a ‘Granola’ type of fella. Bright and fighting fit, but a little washed out from a lack of sleep, thanks mainly to having a new baby.

  His wife, Linda, sat beside him in the dankly lit interview room. She was wholesome, cake sale, ‘Mum of the year’ material, and shy, although she tried very hard to hide it.

  Monroe and Sommers were keen to crack on with their interview, but couldn’t tear their eyes away from Linda, whose two month old daughter, Molly-Jane, was suckered to her breast like a vampire.

  Linda stroked Molly-Jane’s fragile head, then looked at the detectives and said, “We were at home.”

  “We’re always at home these days,” yawned Dean, pointing at Molly-Jane. “Baby!”

  Sommers peeled her eyes away from the vigorous breast-feeding and looked at Dean. “No, really?” she smiled sarcastically. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  ---

  “ZZ” could have easily been mistaken for a vagrant, what with his awesome, messy beard and shabby, mucky jeans and tatty combat jacket. It was anyone’s guess if he knew what a bath was, let alone if he’d ever had one.

  Monroe sucked on the dregs of his coffee and glanced at “ZZ”. “Where were you on the fifth, between nine thirty and midnight?”

  “ZZ” stroked his Gandalf sized beard for a moment, then replied, without a flicker of sarcasm, “I was up at the wall murdering Liam Roberts.”

  Monroe and Sommers shook their heads. They were in no mood for funnies.

  “ZZ” laughed all the same, but then added, a little more seriously this time, “I was in the Bull. It was quiz night. Ask around.”

  Monroe and Sommers were getting nowhere and they knew it. They bellowed sighs and slurped at what remained of their coffees, as “ZZ” sat back in the chair and folded his tree-trunk sized arms with cocky confidence.

  ---

  “They all have solid alibis,” Matilda yelled, as a wash of icy rain jabbed into the side of her head.

  “Or they’re all liars?” suggested Ned.

  She nodded. “Yeah... Maybe,” then looked over her shoulder at the crime scene. “Maybe it’s got nothing to do with metal detecting at all and we just think it has. Maybe Liam didn’t find anything up here and was murdered for a totally different reason?”

  Ned was intrigued. “Yeah – maybe he was.”

  Matilda then gave him a look that he would very quickly begin to dread. “So there you go... a puzzling murder for you to solve.”

  Ned frowned, “For me to solve?”

  “Yep,”

  He could feel his nerves tingling and, like a petulant teenager who’d been told by his mother to tidy his room, said, “Why have I got to solve it?”

  “Because that’s what you joined the Police to do, wasn’t it?” She looked Ned straight in the eyes. “To solve puzzling mysteries.”

  2

  Harbridge was, quite frankly,
drop dead gorgeous. Nestled deep in the bosom of Northumbria and a stone’s throw away from Hadrian’s Wall, the historic and quaintly quaint Roman town of sandy brick cottages, oldie pubs with horse shoes nailed into the wooden beams and guest ales like “Something Fishy”, dinky cafes, bespoke bookshops, woodland walks down by the river and ‘Russell’s’, a family ran bakery on the corner of Cutters road that made Mars Bar topped caramel crispy cakes and still put their delightfully sticky iced buns in pink cardboard boxes, had “Richard Curtis” film location written all over it... well, apart from the Co-Op on Main Street, which had “Bread and MILF” scrawled in neon yellow paint on the wall beneath the window.

  Employee of the month, Patsy Lucas would smirk every time she saw the graffiti on her way into the store. Rumour had it she was the ‘mother’ the Banksy wannabe was talking about. Naturally her husband, Jimmy, was disgusted, no matter how many times Patsy had told him that, if anything, it was a huge compliment and that he should be thrilled to be married to a MILF.

  But just like every town, Harbridge had a dark side.

  Behind the church on Walsden Close was Harbridge Police station. Built in the sixties when the town planners were clearly off their tits on dope and magic mushrooms, it was something of an eye-sore in the otherwise ‘award-winning’ town.

  There had been talk of building a new station on Century Hill, but like most things in the rural community, nothing ever came of it. ‘Change’ was a dirty word in Harbridge. So was ‘murder’, but that was still preferable to ‘change’. Murder, although horrid, at least kept Harbridge on the Google map.

  ---

  Ned and Matilda arrived back at the station not long after Russell’s had sold their first slice of ‘walnut and Rolo cake’ to Ruth “I’ll start my diet next week” Potter.

  It was finally the end of their shift, but Ned’s feet now weren’t the only things throbbing. His ears were ringing, too... with ruddy Matilda, still banging on about solving the murder, as she poked her head around the side of his locker door and said, “You remind me a lot of my sister.”