Trenchard

By Colin Hazel

The daughter of an influential aristocrat disappears in the shires.
They were supposed to send Caruthers of the Yard.
They got Trenchard.
An embittered husk cast from years of service on the unforgiving streets of the capital, wallowing in vice to numb the relentless awfulness of it all, praying for his pension, prized from the cracks of the concrete jungle and dispatched south to delay an imminent disciplinary.
Unleashed on the unprepared local constabulary like a deranged Marple, his desperate, damaged psyche rampages rogue through the quiet county hamlets, scything through parochial bureaucracy, local hoods and nubile rookies as his unorthodox insight and sense for sleaze lifts the lid on the insidious secrets lurking beneath the serene facade of the benign countryside and a seemingly straight forward investigation rapidly descends into murder and mayhem.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Colin Hazel
• Release date: Jun 14, 2020

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TRENCHARD

Copyright 2020 Colin Hazel

Published by Colin Hazel

License Notes

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‘What are right and wrong in the end but opinion held to.....’

Oakley Hall

PROLOGUE

The Metropolis in the early hours, the night sky illuminated by pools of light cast across the urban sprawl; rose pink, cyan blue, brilliant white, sodium yellow, scattered in depth across the cityscape like embers smouldering on coals; beautiful, from afar. A lone, garbed figure observed this glowing panorama from the Hungerford Bridge, a gentle creak and sway beneath his feet, the distant hum of traffic, the rattle of passing trains, a gentle damp wind blowing in from the east, catching his coat tails, ruffling his hair, dappling his face, a bluster that rose and faded like the wake below. His joints ached; his lungs weren’t what they used to be, exposed to years of smog, harmed by the city, a city of decay. He had seen so many bad things in those streets, so many things that he carried with him through these end times. With so much tainted past to dwell on, the future seemed inconsequential. His head was light from the whiskey, his stomach burning, emotion rising within. Through the windows of a passing train he caught the adoring glance of a fashionista gazing at her banker boyfriend; lifestyles of the rich and famous, oblivious pockets of opulence amongst the ripped seams and frayed edges of depravity, cruelty and decrepitude. Tormented by the unobtainable. He’d once received such glances, a long time ago. People who only existed on these streets because of the years he’d given, the years he’d sacrificed; the sweat shed and the blood spilt. Cities are built with bodies. The establishment would have you believe that everything is rosy, that society is evolving, that in a few years everyone’s going to be talking into their watches and colonising Mars, but he’d walked a higher path, traversed a society in terminal decline, all the things he’d seen, you can’t deny universal, irrepressible truths, he knew where it was all headed. His work was all consuming, everyday a personal apocalypse. His own family were all gone, his parents passed in quick succession; good people cheated of their twilight years by disease and despair. He’d never had chance to mourn, never moved on because duty called. His group of friends had whittled down over the years to just a couple of casual drinking partners. No wife. No loved ones. No one left to disappoint. If his folks were still alive maybe he’d still be on the straight and narrow, maybe he’d be striving, but nothing lasts forever, not amongst the transience of the city. Everything degrades; friends, family, relationships, neighbourhoods, societies, empires….. Maybe his self destruction was inevitable; pre-determined, necessary. You can’t escape yourself, trapped in a cage of your own choices, we’re all prisoners only the cells are different sizes, he lamented as he rested his elbows on the railings and watched the cloudy wake breaking against the abutments below. A rhythmic, fluid cycle swayed beneath him. A gentle bluster rose and fell like the tide, the hum of traffic whirled around him. To drink himself into oblivion, to drink himself into that deep. To sink beneath those waves, to sink from the unrecognisable world, to slowly drift downwards into the anonymous depths, to leave the city, to leave his problems behind. Darkness, the natural state of things. They were drunken, flippant thoughts.

CHAPTER ONE

Parade gleam. The rows of uniformed ranks stretched across the drill square; bulled boots and pressed trousers, crisp white shirts with perfectly linear creases ironed down the sleeves, custodians for the boys, bowlers for the girls, the Brunswick star beaming brightly above the brim, a beacon of integrity. Trenchard stood among them, anonymous amongst the identical rank and file. The Superintendent paced past him, looking for a rogue grain of lint on a shoulder, a stray strand of hair, a bearing of authority, a crown on his shoulder, the training sergeants in tow, Chiltern and Woodhouse, veterans all and still shining brighter than the most diligent recruit. They wore the uniform, it didn't wear them, like a second skin, they'd earned their stripes and had the shoulders to carry them. In an uncertain world they represented control and security and that’s why most had joined. The young in service hung on their every word; obedient and unquestioning, whether it be reciting legislation or swinging the lamp regaling some heart pounding encounter facing off against armed blaggers down a darkened back alley.

'If I could be half the copper they are.....' the young in service would yearn.

For hours the recruits would stand there under scrutiny on the parade square.

'TRENCHARD! The definition of Robbery, go! COLLINS! State codes, go!' 

Endless lecture theatre slides, hours with their noses in handbooks, scribbling crib notes for nerve wracking exams, the fear of expulsion hanging over them, sweating through gym PT sessions, locking wrists and striking pads, patrolling supermarket car parks in fluorescent tabards acting out role plays in front of gawking shoppers, ironing, polishing, studying, proud parents and attestation, then down the local for a well earned pint to let off some steam and bitch about the day. That's when they became close, bonding over textbooks and clinking glasses. Her name was Felicity; she came from a good family in the home counties, a tom boy in her youth she’d been enticed by the variety and adrenaline that an office job could never provide her, and so, much to her father’s chagrin, she submitted an application, passed the assessments and arrived for induction. But she was not like the other girls in Trenchard’s intake, for a start she was straight and secondly she was a looker, not just ‘job fit’ as it was termed but attractive enough to turn heads outside of the very limited horizons of the Police environment which pretty much made her a Unicorn in the law enforcement world. She took good care of herself; sunbeds, manicures and designer hair with a body sculpted through obsessive hours of gym work. Male attention was in abundance from day one; wry smiles amongst the PT instructors during the stretches, armed response vehicles randomly arriving during lunch break, flashing the HK to adoring glances. Trenchard watched it all, bemused from the sidelines, until the pair of them were eventually partnered together for a presentation and spent an evening alone in a pub booth carving up the project. After a couple of hours soaking up her perfume and gazing into her piercing blue eyes he was in her thrall. Like most girls she didn’t shun the attention, late night texts pinged back and forth, steady progress in the bubble of training school until graduation was suddenly upon them. They arrived together to the graduation ball and as the drinks flowed she drifted further across the room, further way from him. By the early hours he was unsteady on his feet and ready to leave. As he scanned the dance floor he sighted her disappearing through a fire exit with Chiltern. It crushed him to see the unattainable cheapen herself in a drunken dalliance with a married man. But what killed him most, more than the heart break of unrequited desires, was the invalidation of the past thirty weeks. All of Chiltern’s insight about honesty and integrity, all of the talk about pride and service that their fresh faces had lapped up, he realised it was a charade; a PR sales pitch, a cast iron image of incorruptibility that the force was hawking. He now saw the reality; the organisation was just like any other, staffed by the fallible, staffed by high functioning alcoholics who’d undermine it all for a car park grope at a work function. He resolved there and then to surpass their exploits, to eclipse them as coppers, to transcend the organisation.

The following day he received a series of messages, embarrassed excuses that he never replied to nor had the heart to challenge, a period of leave followed after which they were awkwardly posted to the same division though thankfully on different teams and he watched from afar as Felicity ricocheted through a raft of largely unattractive middle aged married men; the firearms got into her first, then the old sweats on response team ‘showed her the ropes’. Like a rabbit caught in the headlights of experience she yielded to them all, finally succumbing to the charms of the station house player who already had a plethora of female probationers on his resume, becoming yet another notch on his well worn kit belt. That particular dalliance abruptly ended with the discovery on his phone of flirtatious messages from a co-worker. A pregnancy termination and bout of depression followed and after a few months marinating in night shifts and a vending machine diet, gone was the beaming, confident girl with the gym body and flawless skin, replaced by a pasty, haggard, frump with a dubious reputation that was a depressing sight to behold.

Trenchard occasionally overheard a few snippets on the station house grapevine; a rumoured new relationship, a move to another unit, but when he saw her in person one afternoon, passing through the canteen, when the portal of her eyes betrayed the contents of her soul, he determined that she had lost her spark. Gone was the optimistic girl he pined for, replaced by an anxious, tormented wretch. Though they would never admit to themselves, many like her simply joined to find a husband and it was an environment where even a moderately attractive girl could have her pick but without the same constraints of say military service.

It was a common fate and as he was to find out, division was filled with many more arrogant, emotionally immature supervisors such as Chiltern and Woodhouse. He had to watch as Felicity after Felicity passed through the parade room, had to watch them slope off with an assortment of Chiltern clones at Christmas parties and leaving do’s. Bosses he respected by day, cheating on their wives at every chance they got. No one can escape the base leveller of the sex drive; the pressure cooker of stress that manifested as infidelity. The unsociable hours put pay to establishing any semblance of a steady, meaningful relationship. Affair after affair, some of which he himself eventually indulged in, and before he knew it he was one of them, everything he despised, an emotional husk out for anything he could get. Carnal pleasures to ease the daily grind. And that was where the spiral started.

CHAPTER TWO

Sirens and speed. Idle dreams. Fifth night on, fifth crime scene. Municipal stairwells; stark, austere, stained, pitted concrete, steel panels, UPVC frames, fluorescent tubes. Residences that resemble penitentiaries. Soulless, monolithic blocks. Cheap, post-war housing. They all looked the same, all smelt the same; sweat, urine, faeces, grease, tobacco with an overlay of local authority detergent. But when the rush of residents died down, it was the silence, the lonely relentless silence of the early hours that ate away at him, where minutes passed like hours, where the cold niggled mercilessly, working its way through his body, deep into his joints, searing the extremities. He paced in futility, thick condensation clouding from his mouth, he felt every pound of kit, his feet grew numb, his back ached and still he knew that he had hours ahead of him; alone, no chit chat, no relief, no toilet, full bladder, solitary, just his thoughts for company until dawn crept across that dark sky. His only company; a lone gnat dancing around a single bulb, hour by hour, round and round that only lonely light, a whole city of souls and only he alone was there to witness it. Blinking planes slowly traversed the night sky, he’d wonder on their destination, he’d glance up into that wide, silent, endless expanse and realise how small he was in the world, a mere atom amongst millions.

The young in service drew a relentless, soul destroying stream of mundane duties. To the control room he was nothing more than a dot on a map, a tick in the box. Training school was a fond distant memory now; an irrelevance. The previous night he’d been sat on a drugs den for eight hours waiting for boarding up to arrive. Tonight he was in the ground floor vestibule of a tower block, tucked into a dark alcove guarding a rape scene. He could look forward to eight, maybe nine, more hours of staring at a used condom strewn across the floor of a small broom cupboard where some hood rat gang groupie had been rough housed by an on-off boyfriend. Would it ever get to court? Unlikely. Most allegations never did. To wait over a year for a trial then stand in a dock for hours under cross-examination took an uncommon determination that few victims had the appetite for. A series of concerned residents’ faces filed past; eating their dinner that night knowing crime and depravity was right outside their door. No one wants to be reminded of that, he was no friend to them; he was an inconvenience, a uniform, so no offer of tea or toilet would be forthcoming and apathetic supervisors would be in no rush to relieve the new face whose value to the team was yet to be determined. Out of sight, out of mind. They failed to mention to newbies that tower blocks in estates were signal blackspots, something to do with construction materials he had surmised; radio bars flatlined and mobile service died within those urban labyrinths. It was only after they had dropped him at the crime scene that he realised but by then it was too late to communicate, too late to call them back. Unable to leave an open scene he had learned to improvise; twisting and turning to get one bar to fire off a text, beg a resident for a landline, but as the night pressed on there was nobody to spare, his little scene had been replaced by more recent, more pressing calls, crimes and scenes.

‘We’ll send someone to check on you….’ comes the eventual reply.

It’s a vague promise with no guarantees; they’ll spend more time trying to find him than actually relieving him. The more experienced just suck it up, they come equipped; energy bars and phone games, avoid liquids, reabsorb the piss trickling down the urethra and slink into those idle dreams of better days…..

It was 0335 Hours when he saw them; two silhouettes ducked into the low-walled courtyard that housed the communal bins just outside the hallway he guarded. They had not seen him in his alcove. He watched them through the vestibule doors. At that late hour bleary eyes cannot always be relied upon so he snapped awake, switched off his radio light and angled himself to get a better look. As the boredom ate away at him, he had prayed for activity, but now suddenly it was happening, and happening in the extreme. He had two options; he could cower, or he could deal. He’d cowered before,