Death Call Read online

  Death Call

  A Crane and Anderson crime thriller

  By

  Wendy Cartmell

  © Wendy Cartmell 2017

  Wendy Cartmell has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2017 by Costa Press

  This book is dedicated to all the 999 emergency services staff who provide an outstanding service, sometimes in extremely difficult circumstances.

  When the emergency rule is in place, due to limited resources because of an increase in the number of calls, 999 operators are told to clear everything except a cardiac arrest. However, in a medical emergency, the chance of living drops 10% for every minute that you are not breathing.

  By Wendy Cartmell

  All my books are available for sale and to borrow on Amazon.

  Sgt Major Crane crime thrillers:

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  Emma Harrison mysteries

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  Check out my website and blog, where I review the very best in crime fiction.

  Wendy Cartmell

  Table of Contents

  By Wendy Cartmell

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  By Wendy Cartmell

  From Wendy

  Prologue

  Five years earlier…

  It’s the dream. Always the dream. As hard as I try to wake up, I can’t, and I am forced to relive the awful events of that night, time and time again, as my subconscious battles to make sense of what happened. But I’ve never been able to reconcile the hurt and loss I have had to bear, with their pathetic excuses.

  It started out much the same as any other night, the night I keep dreaming of. Mum and I had eaten in the kitchen earlier that evening and were relaxing in front of the TV. She had been complaining of a bit of a headache most of the day, but had tried her best to shake it off, not wanting it to spoil the remainder of our time together. But just as our favourite reality TV show started, I saw her wince in pain.

  “Are you alright, Mum?”

  “This headache is getting worse. Go and get me a paracetamol would you?”

  “Of course,” I replied getting up and walking into the kitchen.

  In truth, I would have done anything for Mum. No task would have been too small, nor too great. I’d seen her struggle for years to bring me up on her own; taking several menial jobs a week, just to put food on the table, clothes on my back and shoes on my feet. I’d had to grow up quickly and learn to be independent as I was a latchkey kid – always arriving home before Mum, who was still hard at work at some poorly paid job, being exploited by dispassionate employers who could sack her for any small infringement, real or imagined.

  But all that was behind us. I was about to embark on my ‘great adventure’, having earned a place at university. I was finally moving out (except for the holidays, of course when I imagined I would return with a suitcase full of washing!).

  It only took a few minutes. In the time I’d taken to rummage through the kitchen drawer, realised the tablets were upstairs, then wandered up to the bathroom, brushed my hair and run back downstairs, Mum had gone. When I’d left the kitchen, she just had a bit of a headache. When I returned, she’d collapsed. I found her lying unconscious in a crumpled heap on the floor, where she’d toppled off the settee. At least I’d thought she was unconscious. Straightening her out I put my head on her chest, but couldn’t hear anything. I put my hand across her mouth, but couldn’t feel any breath. My mind went blank. Rational thoughts had flown out of my head, like a frightened flock of birds taking to the skies. I couldn’t remember what to do to help her.

  Finally, I remembered. 999. I had to call the emergency services. I grabbed the phone from the table and hunched down beside Mum, handset pushed to my ear, hand still over her heart. It seemed an age before anyone answered and when they did, all I could do was gabble incoherently. Finally, the operator had managed to get me to answer his questions.

  Is she breathing? No.

  Can you feel a pulse? No.

  What does her face look like? One side is all droopy and pulled down.

  When did this happen? Maybe five minutes ago.

  Are you sure? No, possibly longer.

  Listen, he’d said. There are no ambulances available at the moment. I’m very sorry but there’s nothing we can do for your mother. She’s been unresponsive for too long and it sounds like she’s had a massive stroke. There’s nothing you could have done about it. You would never have been able to revive her.

  Noooooo, I’d cried, not believing him. Nooooo. You must send someone. I need them now! They can shock her with their thingies; put a bag over her mouth to help her breathe. Something. Anything.

  There is nothing anyone can do. I’m very sorry for your loss, he’d said, not sounding sorry at all.

  I wailed like a wounded animal. At that moment I was, in the basest sense, a distressed cub, crying and howling for its mother. Bereft, lost, alone, scared. I dropped the phone and fell onto my mother’s chest, sobbing for all the years that had been taken from us, for all the happiness we’d been robbed of.

  But after a while my sadness turned to anger. Rubbing some feeling into my now dead legs, sitting up and dashing the tears from my cheeks, flames of anger, born of fear, replaced my sorrow. As it burned away the last vestiges of my distress, filling me with a white, hot, fierce, determination, I vowed that someone would pay for this. I wouldn’t suffer alone. No matter how long it took, I would find a way to get back at them. The so-called emergency services. The ones who had failed us.

  1

  Today

  Clive was nearing the end of his shift. Rolling his neck to try to get the kinks out, he had just taken a short break and was now back at his desk ready to take the next call on the board. Closing his eyes and counting backwards from ten, he felt himself relaxing a little more with every number. He’d taken a 999 call from an idiot who’d lost his way and wanted directions. What a jerk. He’d sounded drunk, or high, or even both and had had the temerity to get angry when Clive wouldn’t help. Clearing the call and cutting off the idiotic diatribe, had given him a measure of satisfaction, but now he had to put the anger behind him and take another call. The next one could be a real emergency. Squaring his shoulders, smoothing down his uniform and adjusting the wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose, he pressed the button to take the next call in the queue.

  “999 what’s your emergency?”

  “My husband, he’s collapsed!”

  “Can I have your location please?”


  “I’m at home. I’ve already told you that.” The voice sounded elderly. A woman with a slight tremor to some of the words.

  “Tell me again, love,” Clive said.

  “10 Washington Close.”

  “Which town is that in?”

  “Portsmouth, of course.”

  “Of course it is,” Clive agreed. “What’s your emergency?”

  “Well it’s Bill. As I’ve already told you, I think he’s had a heart attack. He needs an ambulance.”

  “What’s your name, love?”

  “Why are you asking me all these questions?” The elderly caller now had a measure of anger in her voice.

  “Please, just give me your name.”

  “Josie.”

  “Right, Josie, why don’t you tell me what’s happened?” Clive very much hoped he could get a straight answer from her.

  “Well, I’m ringing to see where the ambulance is. Someone said one was already on the way, but it’s not arrived.” Jose was crying now; small fluttering sobs that tore at his heart. “So I thought I’d call back and see where it’s got to.”

  He quickly scanned the information on his screen, trying to concentrate on the job in hand and not Josie’s pitiful weeping. Above all, he had to remain cool and calm and definitely not get emotional himself. He was very aware that each and every call he took was recorded.

  “I’m sorry, Josie, but there’s no record of an ambulance being sent to your address.”

  “But I talked to someone,” she insisted. He could hear her taking shallow rapid breaths before continuing. “She said she would help me keep him alive while I waited for the ambulance. I did everything she said, I even put the phone to his mouth so she could hear what was going on. Now Bill’s dead and no one has come and the woman put the phone down on me. I don’t know what to do now. Please help me.”

  “How long ago did Bill stop breathing?” Clive closed his eyes, knowing what the answer would be.

  “Maybe 10 minutes or possibly more.”

  That did it. Clive knew that there was no chance of resuscitation now.

  “I’m so sorry, Josie. I don’t know who you spoke to before, as I’ve no record of it on my system. So I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll send an ambulance for you now. They’ll help you and Bill.”

  Clive expected that Bill would be pronounced dead on arrival and that the authorities would take it from there, but he didn’t want to tell Josie that. So instead he said, “Is there anything else I can do for you, Josie?”

  “Just bring him back. Can you please bring him back to me?”

  Josie’s pleading, tremulous voice was too much for Clive and he closed his eyes battling with the threatening tears.

  He cleared his constricted throat. “I wish I could, love,” he said. “I wish I could.”

  2

  Glad he was finally off duty, Clive pushed his way into the small chill-out room reserved for the 999 operators and sat down, just before his legs gave way. Ripping off his glasses, he put his elbows on his knees and screwed his palms into his eyes. The pale blue shirt he was wearing was wet under the arms and when he held out his hands, they were both trembling. He heard the door open and creak closed as someone entered the room.

  “You alright, Clive?”

  It was the voice of his manager; a rank Clive had never aspired to. He was happy on the phones helping people; not having any desire to fill his days doing staff rotas or compiling tables of figures, that no one took any notice of. He was a regular mentor to the new recruits and this gave him far more job satisfaction than any management role would ever do.

  Clive stood. “You got a minute? There’s something you should know about.”

  Terry looked at Clive for a moment, then with a sharp nod of his head turned and left the room. Clive followed the younger man as he marched to his office, where he was given a restorative brew from Terry’s personal coffee machine. Clive, who was in his 40’s, had never had a problem with the age difference between them. Terry being at least 10 years younger than Clive. Supervisors came and went. Clive was the fixture. The one with the most experience. The one all the new operators looked up to and respected. The voice of calm in a sea of raging emotion. Although he wasn’t sure about the calm bit right at that moment, but could definitely relate to the sea of raging emotion.

  “What’s going on?” Terry asked as they sat down.

  Clive recounted the strange conversation he’d had with Josie. “What I don’t understand is who she spoke to the first time and why there isn’t a log of that call on the system. You can’t even answer one without using the board.”

  “Do you think she was confused? Maybe she thought she’d called us, but she hadn’t.”

  “I don’t think so. She was emotional, but rational. I’d say she definitely knew what she was talking about.”

  “I’m not sure what I can do about it, Clive. Maybe it was just a computer glitch. One random call that didn’t log on the system or make a record of the conversation.”

  Terry was peddling backwards so fast he could have won an Olympic medal.

  “But you’ll report it? Get someone to investigate?” The problem had become personal for Clive. “We owe it to Josie, and to Bill, to find some answers and to stop it happening again. Maybe Bill could have been saved if an ambulance was dispatched at Josie’s first call. Perhaps we’re responsible for his death.”

  Terry, who had just about to take a drink of his coffee, stilled at Clive’s words and then put his cup slowly back onto his desk.

  “Obviously I’ll raise a query and report it up the line and to the computer department, and make sure you let me know if it happens again,” he said. “I’ll pass the information of a potential problem to the other operators and get them to keep a note of any callers that say the same thing. But I’m sure it’s nothing. Our system isn’t unstable and isn’t liable to faults. It can’t be.”

  Terry said the last sentence emphatically, and stood to indicate that was the end of the matter. Clive wasn’t so sure that it was. For several years, there had been talk of upgrading the system, but the pen pushers were reluctant to spend the millions of pounds it would cost. All the departments were feeling the constraints of the austerity budgets and it didn’t look like anything would change anytime soon.

  Clive drained the last of his coffee. “Cheers, Terry,” he said. “See you tomorrow,” and left his boss frowning at his computer terminal.

  As he changed out of his uniform in the locker room, Clive looked at the pictures he had taped to the inside of the door of his cabinet. His daughter, Debbie, in various poses, snapped on a day out to the Isle of Wight; ice cream in hand, hair blowing in the wind, stroking the smelly beach donkeys. He tenderly touched the picture in the centre of the group. “See you later, kid,” he said and closed the door, leaving the pictures and the memories behind, as he left the building with his laundry and laptop and made for home.

  Yet, that night, the memories didn’t stay in his locker, but followed him on his journey home. He kept seeing Jan sitting next to him in the car as he drove through Winchester and catching glimpses of Debbie in the rear view mirror as she sat humming along to tunes on her iPod. His chest constricted with his loss, as it had done so many times before, and no doubt would for many times to come. Through blurred eyes dazzled by the lights of on-coming vehicles, he just about managed to guide the car home. As he pulled into the car park, he put the handbrake on and slumped against the steering wheel. The faint smell of Jan’s perfume confirmed to him that he was in for a rough night of sleeplessness, or nightmares, it didn’t matter which really, both being as bad as each other. It seemed his dead wife and daughter were determined not to be forgotten.

  3

  Crane took another chocolate biscuit from the packet on Anderson’s desk. He was eating too much and not exercising enough and was in danger of putting on weight. He knew the reason he was eating too much. It was because he was bored. Nothing much was happening i
n the Major Crimes team. They were all catching up with paperwork and looking at those cases that were on the back burner. Not closed exactly, but not very active either. Crane and Anderson had just finished going through the pile of files on Anderson’s desk and nothing had been suggested to move any of the cases forward.

  “I could do with a bloody good murder,” said Crane, scratching at the short stubble on his chin that was masquerading as a beard and deciding he could risk a third digestive if he walked up and down the stairs at work. Then he looked down at his gammy leg, and his stick propped up against his chair. Maybe not. Perhaps fifty push-ups would be better, he thought.

  His accident last year had necessitated his leaving the army and joining the police as a civilian consultant. But after the subsequent mess he’d made with his recovery, his pain had now calmed to manageable levels and regular physiotherapy was gradually strengthening his injured limb, meaning it didn’t seize up as much as it used to, for which Crane was grateful. Suddenly falling down because his leg had given way didn’t do much for his image. Or for the other parts of his body that he hurt in the process.

  “Bugger off, Crane,” said Anderson. “That means someone has lost a loved one. Father, mother, daughter, son…”

  “Well, yeah, I’m only messing, you know what I mean. We need a good meaty case to get our teeth into.”

  “Have you got one then?” DC Ciaran Douglas said from Anderson’s open door, his phone in his hand, something of a permanent fixture.

  “No, Ciaran we haven’t, so get back to your paperwork. Where have you been anyway?”

  “Sorry, boss, I was just, you know…”

  “Chatting to Donna on the phone?”

  Ciaran blushed. It always amused Crane that the tips of the poor boy’s ears went red, as well as his face. He really was besotted with the lovely Donna, a flight attendant on an airline that flew out of Heathrow, who he’d met whilst investigating the case of a dating site killer. Not that she was on the site, Ciaran was always quick to point out, rather her flatmate was, the one who had been killed.