Oh, and he was off the promotion list for the foreseeable future.
Thirty years of loyal service but it only took one misdemeanour to cancel it all out.
Phillips waited to feel some sense of disappointment but it never came. The fact was, he’d do the same all over again to protect the woman he loved and who had, against all the odds, survived. The Hacker had always planned to kill Denise and theirs had been a race against time. What was a setback in the workplace, compared with her life? Three months’ suspension had enabled him to devote himself entirely to her recovery but, now he was back at work, he was finding it hard to keep his mind on the job. He worried about how she was coping on her own, particularly since she showed no inclination to come back to work herself.
That was a problem for another day.
When he stepped into their bedroom a few moments later, MacKenzie was not sleeping peacefully. She was sitting bolt upright in the double bed they shared, her fingers clutching the handle of a kitchen knife.
“Frank?”
Banking down the impotent anger he always felt when he saw that look in her eyes, the fear another man had put there, he moved quickly across to the bed and curled his hands around hers.
“Aye, lass. It’s me.”
He watched the fight drain out of her body, leaving her limp and tired. The knife shook and he tugged it gently from her fingers.
When she tried to reach for it again, he took her in his arms.
“Shh, now.” He began to rock her, rubbing wide circles against her back. “He’s gone, he’s dead and gone.”
MacKenzie buried her face in his shoulder and breathed in the comforting smell of him.
“He’s dead,” she repeated, thinking of The Hacker’s remains lying on a cold, impersonal slab at the mortuary. “He’s dead.”
“You saw him.” Phillips knew the drill. They’d been through it numerous times but it seemed to help her to remember that the man who haunted her nightmares was reduced to ash, his body incinerated and incapable of hurting another living soul.
MacKenzie nodded and let her eyelids droop, snuggling into the hollow of Phillips’ neck until her breathing became even and he knew that she slept. With infinite care, he laid her down against the pillows, drew the covers over her slender body and held her hand for a while longer, wishing he had been taken instead.
*
The wait was agonising. It had been two hours since they’d given their statements to the police and more time had been wasted listening to a long-winded rehash of the life of Victor Swann, whose dubious character had taken on the quality of a martyred saint in the eyes of his co-workers. The place had been awash with tearful anecdotes and sob stories about the many times Victor had saved the day, forcing disingenuous smiles and polite murmurs from anybody required to listen.
The man was dead and he’d been an average man at best.
End of story.
But no, the caterwauling had continued as people piled into the minibus that had been laid on to ferry them all back to their respective homes, mostly within the grounds of the estate or in the nearby town of Rothbury. There’d been precious few minutes to change clothes and gulp down a glass of water before slipping out again.
The police lingered into the early hours of the morning. Their voices carried across the quiet gardens down into the shadows of the forest, their clumsy feet crunching across the gravel driveway while Ryan presided over it all like a Mother Goose, clucking around as if he were master of all he surveyed.
Arrogant bastard.
But so long as they didn’t stray too far, there was time to make one final, very important house call.
CHAPTER 4
Sunday 14th August
Ryan opened his eyes one at a time and made a swift assessment of the damage. His head was pounding but the ache was low grade, nothing a couple of painkillers wouldn’t cure. His throat felt scratchy and dry, which was no more than he deserved after an evening quaffing red wine as if it were going out of fashion. He could have done with another eight hours’ solid sleep but that was wishful thinking. After all the drama of the previous evening, he and Phillips had eventually classified Victor Swann’s untimely demise as ‘not suspicious’ but that didn’t mean there wasn’t paperwork to clear up and calls to make, even at the weekend.
They needed to find Swann’s next of kin, for starters. Nobody seemed to know much about Victor’s private life beyond the fact he was a familiar face at Cragside. But by the time the body had been collected for transportation to the mortuary and Faulkner had completed his work, it had been after two o’clock in the morning and they were all exhausted. Ryan had taken the decision to go through the dead man’s personal effects with the benefit of a few hours’ sleep and some natural light.
Technically, Ryan knew Victor’s death should be passed on to another team to free up resources for the more serious cases that were the domain of CID. There was no evidence to suggest foul play; an extensive search of the crime scene had shown no indication of it. Yet, it continued to trouble him and so, until the results of the post-mortem came back in a few days’ time, he planned to keep hold of the case for as long as he could.
Caseloads and budgeting ran through Ryan’s mind as he weighed up all the active investigations into murder, manslaughter, rape and GBH alongside the officers attached to each. He considered who he could enlist to deal with the mind-numbing bureaucracy of a non-suspicious death and thought immediately of PC Melanie Yates. It was character building for an ambitious young officer and he happened to know that Yates hoped to get her stripes working in CID. She had a solid backbone, which was a crucial component in all the staff on his division, and she held up well at a crime scene. Maybe it was time to authorise a permanent transfer to see what she was made of.
Ryan glanced at his watch and was dismayed to find it wasn’t even eight o’clock. Weren’t Sunday mornings supposed to be slumberous days of rest, spent in bed with the object of one’s desire?
“Ryan! Get your arse out of bed, y’ lazy lump!”
Speak of the devil.
He huffed out a laugh, then swung down into a few quick press-ups on the floor to get his blood flowing. His nose detected the scent of smoked bacon as it wafted upstairs and his mood perked up considerably.
A few minutes later, Ryan was towelling himself after a quick shower and looking forward to breakfast when his mobile phone began to shrill.
He made a dive for it.
“Ryan?”
He was caught off-guard and unconsciously squared his shoulders when he recognised that the caller was Chief Constable Sandra Morrison.
“Good morning, ma’am. Has there been an incident?”
“No, nothing like that. I’m sorry to disturb you at home but there was a matter I wanted to discuss with you privately.”
“Oh?”
There was a short pause while Morrison fiddled with the biro she twirled in her hand and searched for the right words.
“Phillips has been back at work for three weeks now.”