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It was a beautiful day for a drive through the countryside. Just sunny enough, not too hot, and everything green from recent rain that was at the moment nowhere in sight. The scenery flowing by on either side of the highway looked like an advert from a travel agent’s poster.
Andy Wainwright didn’t even see it. He was looking ahead, on down the road, to his eventual destination. He was on his way home – finally! – to Sandford bloody Sandford, former home of the friendly Neighborhood Serial Murderers Association. And present home of Inspector Nick Angel, who was happily back to work in spite of the fact that he still couldn’t climb two flights of stairs without doing himself in for the rest of the day.
Andy had John Turner to thank for that little piece of information, and for the blow-by-blow account of at least the tail-end of what had happened two weeks ago in the shiny new Sandford P.D. He snorted. Nick had been the one to contact him first – no doubt to keep Andy from blowing up at John. Nick’s concise explanation had been that his doctor had agreed to release him to light duty, meaning desk work, mainly because he was going out of his mind with boredom and they needed another man at the station.
According to John the doctor had just barely agreed, and then only because Nick had come just that close to begging and the doctor had decided that he’d probably be less stressed doing paperwork at the station than he was sitting around at home worrying about what was going on while he wasn’t at the station. Which Andy thought was probably right, but he still hadn’t liked it very much. Not so much Nick being at the station, or even doing paperwork there; no, it was the idea of Nick walking through the streets of Sandford on his way to and from the station that was worrying him. Sandford wasn’t safe, not for Nick – possibly not for any of them, at least not any time soon, but mostly not for Nick. There would still be NWA sympathizers out there, and angry friends and relatives of imprisoned NWA members, and angry friends and relatives of NWA victims…and there was no way for Nick to know who those people were if they approached him, at least not until it was too late. He wasn’t up to outrunning anybody, or holding his own in a fight, and his fancy judo skills would only work on one person at a time in real life.
Andy had been thinking a lot about real life since the old station had been blown up. Everything that had come before the explosion had seemed sort of like one of Danny’s cop movies, just a script playing out; no one had died, no one had even been seriously injured except for Simon Skinner…and, well, Skinner’s injury had fucking well looked like something you’d only see in a movie, so that hadn’t been very real either. Even Danny getting shot right there in the station – and how they’d forgotten to round up that sly old bastard Weaver Andy never had figured out – had happened too fast to really register. But then the mine had gone and taken the building with it, and after that real life had slammed down hard and heavy along with the remnants of the station’s roof. Andy remembered the sounds the best. Saxon’s panicked barking over Bob Walker, who was having a heart attack; Nick’s hoarse, frantic pleading with an unresponsive Danny; John Turner’s anguished wail when he found his brother’s body half-buried in the rubble; Doris’s near-scream when Cartwright had tried to stabilise her broken arm. And the very worst one of all, the wet, bubbly rasp of Nick’s breathing after he’d passed out in Andy’s arms, full well twenty minutes after the ambulance had roared away with Bob, Danny and Doris.
Nick had damn near died in Andy’s arms that day, blood pooling up in his blast-ruptured lungs, choking him, drowning him. He’d been unconscious in hospital for days, with tubes sticking in his chest to drain off the blood, unconscious so long that Danny had been recovered enough to sit in a chair beside his bed before he’d actually awakened. And after that he’d been so weak…
He still was, of course. He still wasn’t back to 100%, might not be back to it for months more to come. But still, had the whole team been back already, Andy wouldn’t have had much of a problem with Nick coming back to work – it would have made him happy, and they all would have watched out for him. Nick coming back to work with only two arseholes and a green rookie at his back, however, was tying Andy’s stomach in knots. John was still on nights and nothing to be done about it. That bastard Lawson had a reputation, not a good one, and he probably wouldn’t move his fat arse away from his desk unless he was moving it down to the pub. The older PC was a worthless toady who, according to John, was only really skilled at finding ways to do as little work as possible and at kissing Lawson’s arse. And the younger PC was barely more than a kid, next to no experience and a bit too much enthusiasm.
It was all Andy could do not to step on the gas and break the speed limits all the way back to Sandford. He wanted to. His imagination was running away with him as every slow mile of green-bordered road crept by, coming up with horrible scenarios for him to arrive just half an hour too late to prevent…
The Welcome to Sandford sign actually startled him when he passed it, and Andy realized that he’d worried away quite a lot of the drive. The man who’d been in charge of his retraining, one DCI Barnaby in another little murder-happy part of the country disarmingly called Midsomer, would have laughed at him for it. And Andy wouldn’t have resented it, either – Barnaby’s humor wasn’t mean unless you gave him cause, which meant you were acting like an idiot anyway and therefore deserved to be taken down a peg or two. Or possibly down all the way, if you were being enough of an idiot to actually make him angry. Andy’d only gone that far once, and he hadn’t done it again as the aftermath had left him wondering if he shouldn’t just crawl back to Sandford sans badge and uniform and take the now-vacant job of idiot trolley-boy at the local market.
The new station was more on the edge of town than the old one had been, and as he pulled up to the kerb in front of it – going home first had never even crossed his mind – Andy was struck by how unlike the sprawling Midsomer station it was, and how unlike the former Sandford one as well. He remembered the particular building having previously been a boutique-y short of shop once upon a time, until the owner had ‘accidentally’ hanged/electrocuted himself while stringing Christmas lights. The NWA hadn’t thought much of his choice of bed partners, apparently, if gossip Andy remembered hearing at the time was anything to go by. No one else had ever moved in and taken the shop over after that, so the building had just been sitting empty.
Now, however, it was fitted up with a heavy new front door, and a well-polished brass plate beside it engraved with the words Sandford Police Department and the building number gleamed smugly against the sooty red brick of the wall. Andy walked up the clean-swept steps, feeling unaccountably nervous, and pushed open the door. A very young constable at the front desk greeted him with a pleasant smile. “Hello! What can I help you with, sir?”
“That’s Detective. Wainwright.” Andy took off his sunglasses and resisted the urge to be more intimidating. In the old days he’d have happily scared the rookie into pissing himself…but this wasn’t the old days. “Is Inspector Angel in?”
The younger man nodded. “Yes sir, Detective Wainright. He said you’d most likely be in this afternoon and just to send you straight back. Are you familiar with the layout of the new station?”
“Yes.” And, as an afterthought as he went around the wicket, “Thanks. Trotter, right?” The smile and nod that got him actually meant something to Andy now. Politeness, Barnaby had insisted, cost you next to nothing and returned quite a lot. Especially when it was directed at the men coming up under you. Men who did the work you didn’t want to do. Men who you might need at your back some day, who you needed to be able to trust – and who needed to know they could trust you. And that was an argument that had hit Andy where he lived, because in Sandford bloody Sandford…trust was something that was in short supply.
The door at the rear of the nicely laid-out wardroom had a small brass plaque attached to it with INSPECTOR engraved in block letters, and that was all. Andy raised his fist and knocked right beneath it, getting an immediate response from the other side that told him to come in. The knob turned easily, the hinges didn’t squeak – not at all like their old doors, then. And the man sitting behind the desk in the surprisingly small office was nothing like the old inspector, either.
For one thing, he wasn’t a homicidal loony. He was also much younger and far too thin. He smiled, though, when he saw who had come into his office, and damned if Andy didn’t find himself smiling back. “Detective Wainright,” Inspector Angel greeted him. “Close the door and pull up a chair. Just got back into town?”
“Yeah, just. Nice day for a drive, too.” Andy pulled up one of the two chairs on his side of the desk and sat down. “There’s only Trotter out front, where’s the rest of us?”
Angel did not quite snort. “If you mean Lawson and Elwin, I sent them out on a call about an hour ago. Mr. Brickford’s back pasture fence was reported as having been tampered with near the public road, he asked us to come have a look. He’s got some prize stock out and he’s afraid it might be in danger of being stolen.”
“Could be, yeah.” Andy knew the pasture in question, which would be a muddy mess this time of year; the two policemen would doubtless come home a muddy mess as well. He might just hang around the wardroom for a bit so he could see that. “Will everyone else be comin’ back soon?”
“Detective Cartwright is due back at the end of the week, and PC Thatcher should be here by Sunday,” was the immediate response. “We won’t have Sgt. Butterman for another fortnight, though, since he got a late start to his retraining.”
Andy nodded. “When do we lose Lawson?”
“Next week, and I’ve decided against keeping PC Elwin on here,” Angel told him. “I think he’d do better in a larger station, village life doesn’t seem to suit him. I’m keeping PC Trotter, but we’ll be losing him for up to a week while he relocates his family to Sandford.”
“He’s got a family?”
“A wife and a two-year-old daughter.” The inspector’s thin face twisted with a grimace of grim displeasure. “He should never had been sent on this sort of long-term temporary assignment in the first place, especially not when it was so far away from his family. My first job for you is to see what you can find out about how it was allowed to happen. I’ve already written up a report on Sgt. Lawson for gross and unnecessary abuse of his authority with regards to his handling of the situation, but if there was more to it than him just being a power-drunk incompetent excuse for a police officer I want to know who and why before the report goes up the chain of command.”
Andy nodded slowly. “What’ve you got so far?”
Angel pulled a folder out of a pile of them on the corner of his desk and handed it over. “Don’t leave that unsecured in the wardroom until Lawson is gone, I don’t want him to have opportunity to cover his tracks – or anyone else’s.” He saw Andy’s raised eyebrow and shook his head. “I’m not being paranoid, I’m being cautious.” he emphasized, “If we’ve got more bad apples in the trees above us, I want to know where they are – there were too many people who knew something was wrong here before it all blew up, and we need to know if any of them had reasons other than lack of solid evidence for not acting on their suspicions.”
“I’ll get right on it…”
“Tomorrow,” Angel interrupted. “You’re not on duty officially until tomorrow.” And then he smiled. “But I appreciate you stopping in here first.” He relaxed somewhat, leaning back in his chair. “How was Midsomer, Andy?”
Andy let himself relax too; the professional part of his visit was apparently over. “Interestin’,” he said. “DCI Barnaby’s a damned genius, I felt like a rookie next to him. Learned a lot. Ran around a lot, too – they’ve always got somethin’ to investigate there, it’s a busy station.”
Nick nodded. “I’ve heard that. So he had you running a lot?”
“Yeah, I did all his driving.” Andy laughed. “He’s a fair bloke, don’t tell you to do nothin’ he can’t do himself, but he’s dead flat about what privileges rank gives him that it don’t give you. He says he’s earned it with hard work, and that if we want it we have to earn it too.”
The other man snorted softly. “I’d hate to hear what he’d have to say about me, then.”
“Actually, he said you’d say that.” Andy fished inside his jacket and pulled out a sealed envelope addressed to Inspector Angel, Sandford PD in a firm, neat hand, which he shoved across the desk. “Barnaby’s scary that way sometimes.”
Nick looked at it, then set it aside. “Thank you, I’ll read it in a bit. So you had a good experience there in Midsomer?”
“It weren’t too bad once I got my head the rest of the way out of my arse,” Andy admitted with a shrug. “Like I said, I learned a lot. And there’s a lot I know to do different now. Barnaby was flat horrified by some of the tricks I’d been taught to pull by the old inspector when it came to investigatin’ crime scenes, and he made me read every book on forensics he could find.”
“I’ve got a few of those myself,” Nick told him. “We may have to compare notes later. And if there are any of them that you think we should have here, have John order them for the station. We’ve still got some discretionary funds left over.”
Andy nodded, liking that idea. “I’ll make up a list.” He shifted in his chair, not sure how to ask the question he really wanted to ask. “So other than Lawson bein’ the ass that he is, have you had any…other problems since you started back to work?”
“Other than a few residents crossing the street to get away from me when I walk to and from the station?” the other man asked. He didn’t sound upset about it. “No, not so far. But I’ve also been careful to make my commute during daylight hours when there are plenty of people about. I’m not really up to taking on a serious assailant just yet.” Andy deflated so much with relief that Nick’s eyes widened. “Good lord, you were that worried?”
“Yeah.” Andy couldn’t stop himself from flushing a little with embarrassment. “I…it’s bloody Sandford, Nick. And you don’t know anyone from anyone.”
“No, but Tony does.” Nick smiled. “He’s made a point of showing me who’s related to whom. And my route to and from the station goes past his shop. Which strangely he always seems to be closing up for the evening when I walk past, so he quite naturally walks the rest of the way with me.”
Tony had taken over the little shop which had previously belonged to Annette Roper, and he so far seemed quite happy running it if the chatty letters he’d sent to Andy during his sojourn at Midsomer were to be believed. Andy also wasn’t surprised that Tony had appointed himself Nick’s guardian in the absence of the rest of them. “Why don’t you just take one of the station’s cars home?”
“Exercise,” Nick replied at once. Just a little too quickly, and Andy raised an eyebrow at him. He colored up a little. “And the doctor won’t release me to drive yet,” he admitted. “But I do need the exercise, all the same, since I’m still not allowed to run, either.”
“I was plannin’ to stop and see Tony anyway, so I can take you today if you want,” Andy offered as offhandedly as he could manage. The truth was, now that he was back he intended to put a stop to at least half of the walking commutes, preferably the evening ones, until Angel’s doctor had released him to full duty. He knew better than to say this, however. “When does John come in?”
“Around eight thirty.” Nick was giving him a look like he could see through the nonchalant façade – which he probably could, being Nick – but he apparently decided to let it go and cocked an eyebrow. “Trying to hang around until Lawson comes back from his mud-hole investigation?”
Andy grinned. “I have to amuse myself somehow. Barnaby broke me of harrassin’ the PCs.”
Nick smiled wryly. “I’m sure Trotter will be thankful for that, he’s rather jumpy still.”
They talked aimlessly about the rest of their team until Trotter called from the front desk to let Angel know that Lawson and Elwin were back. Nick got up, but motioned Andy to stay where he was. He went to the door and opened it, stepping out. “Oh good, you’re back,” he said mildly to the two mud-covered men as they slogged past on their way to the locker room. He frowned at the muck being tracked onto the floor. “Trotter, get a broom and mop,” he called out, and then before Elwin could get too happy tacked on, “PC Elwin will be out here to help you clean up as soon as he’s changed into a fresh uniform.” He checked his watch. “You’ve both got about two hours left on your shift, should be plenty of time to get your paperwork completed. Carry on.” And then he turned and came back into his office, shutting the door. He held a finger to his lips when Andy would have said something, and a few seconds later the sound of swearing was heard. Nick took a deep breath and called out, “Something the matter, Sergeant?”
Silence. Then something that sounded like, “No, Inspector!” filtered back through the closed door.
Nick went back to his chair and dropped into it. Smiling. “Sorry about that, Detective,” he said, and then he winked. “But that particular amusement is one of those privileges you have to earn.”
Andy just laughed – quietly, so the sound wouldn’t carry outside the office. It was good to be home.