DEAD AIR (Henry & Sparrow Book 2) Read online

  Lucas followed the patterns his mind threw up; whirls and eddies in a dimension he could never fully describe to anyone else. Other dowsers he’d met - the good ones, not the performers - had said the same. Some things were just beyond describing. Some things were just a knowing.

  ‘OK,’ he said, snapping Sid into his palm. He had a clear direction. He set out along the corridor, back to the reception area. Louella trotted after him, holding out a small recording device.

  ‘We’re heading down the corridor,’ she said, her voice full of excited reverence. ‘OK - hang on, Lucas, we need my ID card… OK… so now we’re in reception… Hello, Moira! Just passing through! Now - ID card again - we’re out the other side of reception and in the corridor to the back end of the station. Lucas seems very certain about where we’re going. Now we’re heading for the back stairwell… I wonder if we’re going outside. Down we go, and again, another flight… and left… and… OK, ID card again… this is the post room and…’ She faltered into silence.

  Lucas, after another quick consultation with Sid, had reached up into the top right of maybe thirty name-tagged pigeonholes. The name on this one was Kelly Tyler. He slid his hand under a padded envelope and found a small, slim Apple mobile. He held it up to show Louella, who was gaping at him in shock.

  ‘Not yours?’ he asked, disingenuously, turning to replace it.

  ‘No!’ she squeaked. ‘I mean… yes… that’s… that’s mine.’

  She stared at him in a moment of awed silence. ‘You really can do this!’

  ‘Well, like I said… it’s not magic,’ he replied, finding himself impatient to be away now that he’d proved himself, pointlessly, to a radio presenter. He looked at his watch. ‘You can run that without me, yeah? I’ve got to get away now.’

  ‘Oh really..? Can’t you stay until the end of the show?’ She bobbed up and down and gave him a pretty please face. ‘We could get people to call in about things they've lost and maybe…’

  ‘No… sorry… got to go,’ he said.

  She looked crestfallen, but she nodded. ‘OK… let me get you back to reception and signed out,’ she said. ‘And thank you - that was mind-blowing. I’m just gobsmacked!’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. She certainly deserved to be.

  ‘I’ll make sure I tell everyone about your exhibition!’ she said as they headed back to the reception.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  In reception he was signed out, handing in his ID card. Top of the World was winding down to its ending and the producer had just segued into Cracklin’ Rosie. Lucas really had to get out of here.

  ‘He’s just found my phone,’ Louella told the grey-haired lady behind the reception desk. ‘With dowsing. It’s the coolest thing I ever saw! I was gobsmacked. Gobsmacked!’

  ‘Well, fancy that,’ said Moira, smiling warmly. She raised an eyebrow. ‘Maybe you should get him to find Dave Perry!’

  ‘He hasn’t turned up yet, then?’ asked Louella, in hushed tones.

  ‘Nope… not for three days.’ The receptionist leaned in towards Louella and spoke in a low voice, which Lucas still heard clearly. ‘They think he might have gone on a bit of a bender.’

  ‘Oh my,’ said Louella. Then she turned back to Lucas, beaming. ‘Thank you so much, Lucas. Will you come back again? Will you?’

  He beamed back. ‘Not a chance.’

  She pouted. ‘I know… I was naughty! Forgive me..?’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said, heading off to the revolving door. The presenter rushed away to share her recording and her gobsmackedness with her listeners.

  All in all, it was not a great day’s work. He should have stayed at home and got on with another painting.

  He walked into the revolving door, noting someone else coming in on the other side. Two people, in fact, each taking a quarter pie slice of travelling glass and air. Lucas glanced through the glass just as a fair-haired woman glanced through her side. Both of them drew in a short, sharp breath.

  DS Kate Sparrow was arriving as he was leaving. Behind her, if he wasn't mistaken, was her sidekick and admirer, young DC Michaels. Michaels, remembering recent events, glared at him. Lucas exited the door and walked down the steps. He was tempted to look back; to see if Kate had looked back at him. But like a teenager trying to impress a crush, he squared his shoulders and walked on, face front. Kate didn’t want to see him. She’d made that clear. So he didn’t want to see Kate.

  Sid thrummed against his chest, not fooled for a second.

  2

  ‘DS Kate Sparrow and DC Ben Michaels,’ said Detective Sergeant Kate Sparrow, flashing her ID.

  The BBC receptionist looked politely alarmed and reached for her phone. ‘Mr Larkhill,’ she said. ‘I have a lady and gentleman from the Wiltshire Constabulary here to see you.’ She glanced at them both, nodding. ‘He’ll be right through,’ she said. ‘Can I sign you both in, please?’

  After signing in, Kate settled on one of the low chairs by a drinks machine.

  ‘Please - help yourself to coffee or tea or hot chocolate,’ the receptionist called across, sweetly.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Michaels. Her detective constable made a beeline for the drinks machine. ‘What’s it to be, boss?’ he asked. He'd taken to calling her that recently, with a bit of a twinkle, which she did her best to ignore.

  ‘Hot chocolate, I think,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

  It was cold outside and she was glad to warm up after the trek from the car park to the reception area. She’d only been back on active duty for a week. After her last brush with the man she’d just seen leaving she’d needed to take a break. Not really for her mental health; more to preserve her career. Bringing Lucas Henry into her last investigation had very nearly cost her her job. She couldn’t really pin that on the dowser, though - her boss wasn’t narrow-minded about occasional use of fringe talents. It was much more to do with the way she had mishandled evidence and used it to help further her absurd conviction that Lucas could help the case.

  Absurd or not, it had turned out she was right. But that didn’t change that fact that she’d behaved… well… illegally. So when Chief Superintendent Rav Kapoor had suggested she take some time off to recover from her injuries and the trauma of the Runner Grabber case, he’d laid it heavily on the line. Either she take a break… or he would suspend her for her misdemeanours and thereby force her to take a break.

  Coming back had been a big relief. She needed to have focus in her life. Time without focus left her way too much opportunity to brood. She didn’t want to dwell on what had happened to her and she really hated having to talk to a counsellor about it. She would have been lying, though, if she’d said she was unaffected. She had come within a whisker of a very unpleasant death; a future graphically laid out in front of her in a basement where one long dead woman lay in a corner and another one was dying right in front of her. Her dreams were still full of it and she felt tense whenever she was out of her house, especially when a blue van of any kind drove past her.

  But work hadn’t really been a problem. It was good to get back to some kind of normality. It had all been a bit dull and pedestrian, though, so even if she was a little nonplussed to be here, she was glad to be getting out and doing something. She and Michaels were only putting in a visit because the super had asked them to. Normally a misper case for a grown man with no documented mental health issues or criminal record would be logged and, if it was at a low risk level like this one, a PC would attend to it in the next 24 hours. This kind of thing was hardly high on the priority list of a busy city station and certainly not within the remit of the CID.

  But Chief Superintendent Rav Kapoor had a high regard for community relations, and a good relationship with Rob Larkhill, managing editor at BBC Radio Wessex. A call from Larkhill had been routed directly through to the super. So, half an hour later, after sending a couple of PCs to Larkhill’s home address and getting a report back that there was no reply and no car in the drive, she and Micha
els were on their way to BBC Radio Wessex. The newsroom and studios were in a purpose-built red brick building in the lower end of the town, close to the many braids of the River Avon which constantly threatened to flood the A36, and a few minutes away from the cathedral, the square and other tourist spots.

  ‘My mum loves all these guys,’ said Michaels, holding his waxed paper coffee cup and nodding up at the many portraits artfully suspended against the reception walls on clips and wires. ‘She’s always got them on. She knows more about Sheila Bartley’s life than she does about mine.’

  ‘Probably just as well,’ said Kate, arching an eyebrow. Michaels was a few years her junior and a bit of a ladies’ man if the gossip was to be believed. Gossip was as close to her DC’s off-duty activities as she ever intended to get. She knew, from her own observations and from the same sources of gossip (DC Sharon Mulligan mostly) that he had a bit of a thing for her. She did everything she could to discourage it; a lovelorn sidekick she did not need.

  ‘It’s your own fault,’ Sharon had said to her in the ladies’ toilets just last week. ‘If you will go around being all blonde and beautiful and kick-ass, what do you expect?’

  ‘I don’t!’ Kate had exploded. ‘Look - not a scrap of make-up! Hair that hasn’t seen a salon for six months. And it’s not like I dress to impress, is it?’

  Sharon, black, plump and gorgeous in her own style, had folded her arms and rolled her eyes. ‘You don’t need to, boss. The townie boots and the jeans and the jackets… it may be practical but you look like a hottie, like it or not. If you want to damp down little Ben Michaels you’ll have to tell him you’re a lesbian. Oh wait… no… that won’t help.’

  She smirked and Kate had been compelled to flick tap water at her and say ‘A bit more respect for your senior officer, please!’ before departing.

  ‘Josh Carnegy,’ Michaels went on, pointing to a twentysomething guy with tufty fair hair and a wide grin. ‘My gran is nuts about him. She once queued for two hours to get him to sign a postcard at some summer fair. There were about ten other grannies doing the same thing. I don’t get it.’

  ‘He’s there for them,’ said Kate. ‘Even in the wee small hours. I get it. Kind of.’

  She scanned the other portraits, all taken in a professional studio with white backdrops, doing her best to disregard an involuntary shiver that passed through her when she recalled her own visit to a photographer’s studio a few weeks back. Stop it. Focus.

  Judy Goodson was an elegant, auburn-haired lady who, according to the note at the base of the picture, did the traffic and travel. Next along was their misper and after him was a photo of the mid-morning team, Spencer and Jack. The younger guys - late 20s she would guess - were in a studiedly ‘wacky’ pose; one pretending to strangle the other, who was holding a trumpet and pulling a perplexed face. What they were doing here on a station with a demographic of 50+ she couldn’t guess. Perhaps they had a thing for The Carpenters or Neil Diamond. Whenever she stumbled across the Radio Wessex frequency on her car stereo it seemed to be The Carpenters or Neil Diamond. Or Lighthouse Family if they were feeling edgy.

  Neighbouring Spencer and Jack was a pretty black woman, probably around thirty, who presented the mid-afternoon show. Louella Green was broadcasting now through the PA system which piped the station feed through to reception.

  Before Kate could study any more of the line-up a mousy-haired man arrived in reception, looking professionally stressed. He held out a hand to her. ‘DS Sparrow?’ he asked. The swinging BBC staff lanyard badge read Robert Larkhill.

  She nodded. ‘And this is Detective Constable Ben Michaels,’ she said, indicating her colleague.

  ‘Thank you both for coming. Please - come through to my office,’ said Larkhill. ‘Do bring your drinks.’

  They were led along a carpeted corridor, past heavy, soundproofed doors with glass panels. Through the first of these she glimpsed a newsroom filled with desks and six or seven people seated at them, staring at monitors and bashing away on keyboards. Through the second she saw a serious-looking young man attending to a small console of buttons and lights, apparently handling calls for a live phone-in. And through the third she saw what had to be Louella Green, headphones on, talking animatedly into her microphone.

  Larkhill’s office was just beyond this studio; a magnolia room with one burgundy wall covered in the artfully scrawled names of towns and villages across the BBC Radio Wessex patch. The window behind his desk had a view down to the car park and a small garden with some wrought iron benches and a wooden gazebo for the station’s banished smokers to shelter under. The plainer walls were hung with Sony Awards certificates and press cuttings featuring the presenters.

  Larkhill invited them to sit on a couple of chairs in front of his desk.

  ‘Well,’ he said, running his fingers through thinning hair and giving them a tight smile. ‘I certainly wasn’t expecting to have this kind of meeting today.’

  Kate nodded. ‘You’re concerned about a member of staff who’s gone missing,’ she stated.

  ‘Yes - my breakfast show presenter,’ said Larkhill. ‘Dave Perry. He hasn’t been seen since Friday. Of course, he’s not a weekend presenter, so I only noticed he wasn't in on Monday. Now it’s Wednesday and we still can’t get in touch with him.’

  ‘You’ve tried his family?’ asked Kate.

  ‘He lives alone,’ said Larkhill. ‘He’s divorced… twice. His children are grown up now and he doesn’t see a lot of them. We have got in touch, though, as far as we could. We have the second Mrs Perry’s number. She hasn’t heard anything from him and nor has her daughter.’

  ‘Has he been having any… problems? At work?’ asked Kate. ‘That you know of?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Larkhill, rather too quickly, she thought. Didn’t even stop to ponder. ‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘the presenters can all be rather… tricky, shall we say? At times. Highly strung. They need a fair bit of TLC.’

  ‘And Perry - how needy is he?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Oh - about the same as the rest. He’s an important part of our output,’ said the manager, glancing up at the wall where at least two Sony Awards held the name Dave Perry - The Voice of Wessex.

  ‘He’s got a big poster all to himself out front,’ observed Michaels. ‘Must be doing well with the ratings.’

  ‘Well, RAJAR figures go up and down,’ said Larkhill. ‘Our listenership is very loyal, though. Dave is a well-loved presenter. And he loves his listeners too… and that’s why I’m so concerned. It’s completely out of character for him to miss a show. Three shows is unheard of!’

  ‘But he has missed a show before..?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Well, yes, a year or so ago, he didn’t show up but that was because he was… ill,’ said Larkhill.

  ‘Ill… how?’ she prompted.

  ‘Well, he’d got a bit low,’ said Larkhill. ‘And he’d drunk rather a lot. Some kind of relationship issue - a break-up, I think. It was before my time, so to be fair I can’t be sure. I’ve only been running this station for eight months. I was down at Radio Solent before then.’

  ‘Has he got a drink problem?’ Michaels asked, with his usual bluntness. It was warranted on this occasion, though, thought Kate.

  Larkhill looked uncomfortable. He squirmed in his chair and then pressed an intercom button on his desk. ‘Donna,’ he said. ‘Can you pop in here?’

  Donna, it emerged, was his PA. She arrived from her office next door in a matter of seconds. A tall, middle-aged woman with hair cut in a dark bob, she didn’t look surprised to see two representatives of the Wiltshire Constabulary and Kate guessed she was well aware of the reason for their visit. She closed the door with a swift glance into the corridor and then turned to them all, eyebrows raised.

  Larkhill said, without preamble: ‘Donna, between you, me and these two officers, does Dave Perry have a drink problem?’

  Donna considered. ‘Not exactly… I mean, he’s not an alcoholic if that’s what you me
an. But he has been known, every so often, to go on a bit of a bender. When he’s had an upset.’

  ‘So… has he had an upset? That you’re aware of?’ Kate asked.

  Donna looked at Larkhill and then back to them. ‘Not that I know of, no. But it’s not like we’re best friends. We get on well enough but I’m not sure I’d know if anything was wrong. He seemed just the same as usual when I saw him on Friday.’

  Kate sensed they were getting nowhere fast. She had a dozen more important things to do back at the station; so did Michaels.

  ‘We’ll need a good, recent photo of him,’ she said. ‘And contact details for him, his family, any friends he might be staying with, if you know of any.’

  ‘Donna will get those for you,’ said Larkhill. He gazed up at the nearest framed cutting - a photo of Dave Perry at some kind of fun day event, dressed as an old gramophone, its trumpet curving around his head, and a sash reading “The Voice of Wessex” across his chest. ‘I do hope we find him soon. I do hope, if you’ll forgive me, that I’m wasting your time.’

  3

  Lucas had taken the opportunity to visit an art supplies warehouse within walking distance of the radio station, leaving his motorbike - a Triumph Bonneville he’d inherited from his late aunt - in the BBC car park. It was only as he went to pay for some new soft pencils that Lucas realised he’d left his backpack behind. It was still in the studio with Louella Green.

  Cursing, he left the art suppliers and retraced his steps to BBC Radio Wessex. He found the receptionist - Moira, he remembered her name was - doing a word search. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I left my bag in the studio with Louella about half an hour ago.’