Page 9 of Watching You
Detective Superintendent Overbeck stood at the door of MIT’s briefing room and hit an empty metal mug against a desk.
‘I don’t know what you animals do in here all day but it smells like a cattle barn in Texas.
Open some windows for God’s sake and leave your sandwiches in the fridge when you’re working.
Who the hell still eats mushed-up egg? You, get me a coffee.
’ She held out the mug to a detective constable who stood up so fast that he knocked his own drink all over his desk.
‘Ah, Scotland’s finest,’ Overbeck muttered as she stalked into the centre of the room. ‘Where’s that ballsack Lively?’
As if by magic he appeared in the corridor, leaning over and coughing, and dripping sweat onto his trainers.
‘Detective Sergeant Lively.’ Overbeck took her time pronouncing his name as if he were a newly discovered species with which she was familiarising herself.
‘Has the zombie apocalypse started?’ Lively managed to straighten up but the panting was preventing him from speaking.
‘Only it appears that you have engaged in actual physical exertion. Exertion that gives the impression that you moved at speed. A feat, I suspect, that you have not attempted since there were only a handful of television channels. So I’m assuming threat to life, at the very least, was the cause of your sudden burst of muscular engagement. ’
‘Very funny,’ Lively muttered, heading into the room.
Overbeck held up one carefully manicured hand with nails that had cost more than Lively’s trainers. ‘Under no circumstances,’ she said. ‘You will stand in the corridor until I have finished speaking, at which time you will head directly for decontamination.’
She perched on the edge of a table, her sheer tights showing legs that an eighteen-year-old would have been proud of, at the ends of which were heels that would have put the fear of God into an orthopaedic surgeon.
Overbeck was stick-thin. Her ex-husband used to say it was because even calories were terrified of her and got out as quickly as they possibly could.
Only she knew that insomnia was the real reason.
Daisy Overbeck hadn’t slept more than four consecutive hours since she’d first joined Police Scotland three decades earlier.
‘I’m going to keep this brief. We have three bodies at the mortuary and three separate open murder investigations.
I haven’t seen anything even vaguely approaching a motive or suspects in any of those cases.
That’s no progress from any of the three teams currently working on this floor.
Somebody tell me why those facts have forced me to visit you today. ’
People avoided making eye contact with her and shuffled paper on their desks until someone too junior to know better raised their hand.
‘Because that’s more dead bodies than we normally deal with in a twelve-month period, if you exclude domestic murders.’
There was a sufficient mass intake of breath that some of the air was sucked out of the room.
Overbeck stood and, as one, officers pressed themselves back in their chairs, shrinking away from her. She walked slowly to the detective constable who’d just spoken, picking up a metal ruler as she went and holding it out in front of her.
‘Go and fetch the first aid kit from the kitchen,’ Lively told a uniformed officer who was passing in the corridor.
‘Domestic murders,’ Overbeck said softly.
Her voice was a dart flying towards the bull’s-eye.
‘Like a domestic animal. Something tamed that we hit with a rolled-up newspaper if it pees on the carpet. Domestic like the cleaner we pay less than the legal required amount per hour in cash because then they don’t lose their paltry benefits.
Domestic like men buying their wife a vacuum cleaner in the 1950s because shouldn’t the little woman be thrilled with that? ’
‘Errr …’ The detective constable was having problems controlling the undulations of his Adam’s apple. ‘Errr …’
‘Do you think it hurts less somehow because it’s only a domestic murder, constable?
’ She pointed the ruler at him. ‘Hold out your hand.’ He put it on the desk palm up.
Lively ran his fingers over his eyes and swore silently.
‘It’s like this. When we add the word domestic in front of a noun relating to violence, we soften it. ’
No one moved a muscle.
‘In my hands, this simple item of stationery might function as a weapon. If I bring it down hard enough on your hand it will hurt a great deal. It would be an act of violence, am I right?’ There was enthusiastic nodding from the officer.
‘But if I rename this a domestic ruler, the blow I issue with it hurts less. Correct?’ An equal amount of head shaking.
Overbeck turned round holding the ruler in the air.
‘Learn the statistics and think about them every day. Every year only about six per cent of women are killed by a stranger. The others, these atrocities we call domestic, are committed by people women know. Boyfriends, fathers, husbands, brothers, former partners. Sixty-eight per cent of those deaths occur where women should feel safest, in their own home.’ She returned her focus to the detective constable who hadn’t dared move his hand from the table.
‘If I had my way, we’d remove the sexual organs from every man who killed a woman, but apparently I’m not allowed to express that sentiment publicly.
So I’ll settle for this. No one in this police station is to preface any violent noun with the word domestic.
Not if you don’t want to experience the difference between a normal knee to the testicles and a domestic knee to the testicles.
’ She dropped the ruler and flicked her ponytail before returning to her desk perch.
‘What was it you wanted to talk about, specifically, ma’am?’ Lively asked from the safety of the hallway.
Overbeck brushed a speck of dust from her lapel.
‘To help, in fact. We’re short-staffed, I appreciate that, but the recent spate of deaths is attracting some unfortunate media attention.
I know we have two notable officers missing at present and that you’re all having to act in more advanced roles.
With that in mind, I’m bringing in some outside help. ’
‘Does it come in the form of a pay rise and better overtime rates, because I think that would be what we really all need right now, ma’am,’ Lively said.
‘What you need is a personal trainer with no sense of smell,’ Overbeck snapped back.
‘I’ve actually diverted some of our media budget into engaging a team we worked with some time ago.
Dr Woolwine, a forensic psychologist, and her partner, Brodie Baarda, who’s a former Met officer, are specialist investigators.
Woolwine’s a profiler by trade but she’s experienced in all types of criminal investigations, has worked extensively with the FBI and she’s familiar with the territory.
She’ll be consulting in all three murder investigations in the absence of Detective Chief Inspector Turner and DI Callanach.
Make Woolwine and Baarda welcome. They’ve been granted full security access.
DS Lively, you’ve worked with Dr Woolwine before.
Did you need a moment to rail against the idea of having her brought in to oversee your work, or are you going to play nicely with the other children? ’
‘My sandpit, my rules,’ Lively said.
‘It’s good to know who’s in charge here.
Cancel the entire squad’s leave until someone has been arrested in each unlawful killing case.
I want a progress report on my desk at six p.m. every day from you personally.
Liaise with the media office because it’s going to be your face the public associates with these, as yet, unsolved crimes.
Any problems, officers, refer them directly to your leader DS Lively. ’
She made for the door and put on a show of pinching her finger and thumb over her nose.
‘You set me up, ma’am,’ Lively muttered.
‘If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t make it so easy.
Your first report is due on my desk in just a few hours so you should probably get one of the younger members of your team to show you how to switch your computer on.
And God help you if any more murders occur on this patch before you’ve solved the outstanding ones. ’
Lively felt the tempting of fate like the lure of a pub on a Friday night and crossed his fingers in his pocket as Overbeck’s heels clattered away down the corridor.
‘So what’s this Dr Woolwine like then, sarge?’ someone shouted, once Overbeck was out of earshot.
‘Imagine an all-American cheerleader with Einstein’s IQ but who enjoys the company of the dead more than the living, and who thinks no rules apply to her at all. That’s Woolwine in a nutshell.’