One Last War, page 25
Bruce broke the silence, ‘Are the noises at specific times of the day, can we catch him at it?’ he whispered conspiratorially.
‘The worst are at night. It’s like he is banging on the adjoining wall. That’s why the other neighbours don’t hear those. But they must have seen him run to his gate, slam it, and run off again, whenever I’m in the front garden. Or take his hammer to the nearest object, usually his bench. At the back garden, he rattles his railings with a metal pipe, or his hammer. He also uses this to hammer on his wheelie-bin lid.’
Bruce turned to look at him and said aloud, ‘You are having me on?’
‘No, really,’ implored Carl. ‘I wish that I can show you.’
‘Do you have a good mobile phone?’
‘Aye,’ replied Carl absently, not sure of why the question was asked. ‘I left it at home. I knew that you’d search me and thought that it would save you logging it all in along with my wallet.’
‘What he means is do you have a good video camera on it,’ said Yvonne over her shoulder helpfully. She drove on through St Fergus, the oil refinery was lit up like a space station with all its antennas, pipes, and other metal installations.
‘To record him,’ suggested Bruce.
‘Oh, I had thought of that, but isn’t it against the law, to record someone against their will, without permission?’
‘No,’ explained Bruce. ‘The law changed a few years ago. You can film, but whatever you do, don’t put it on social media. It can bias a trial. Get us the evidence and we’ll do the rest. We didn’t have this…’
‘Conversation!’ finished Carl. He sat up in his seat, enjoying the moment an owl swooped low over the car and plunged into the nearby trees. He made a note of its colourings and size, he’d check out his book later. He grinned. Getting evidence would be like taking candy from a kid. He’d set himself up as bait in his arbour. Simon wouldn’t be able to resist smashing away at his dustbin like a possessed fiend. It’ll be nice to have him taken away in a police car, whilst he watched at the window.
Lee looked upon his car with utter disbelief and a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Brodie stood next to him, an incredulous look upon his face. Daisy sat obediently, her leash was held loosely by Brodie, but she could sense the despair emanating from her owners and elected to wait patiently. Her tail gave periodic tentative sweeps along the path and then was stilled as Lee broke the silence with, ‘Who would do such a thing, I love my car? I’ve been in all day and only came out to get a treat for Daisy that I’d forgotten about. I bought them yesterday, on the way home. The car was fine when I parked it. I’d have noticed something like this.’
‘I know love, I know,’ replied Brodie, trying to comfort his husband. He knew just how much pride he took in his car. ‘It’s easily fixed.’
‘I’ll have to use our holiday money to get it repaired. The gouge runs deep as well as long. We’ve saved up so hard and I was looking forward to relaxing on the beach.’ He looked down at Daisy, ‘Though I’d have missed you.’ Her tail wagged away, hoping to cheer her owner up. ‘Who’d have done such a thing?’ he wailed forlornly.
The couple instinctively looked towards Simon’s house and their eyes locked on his, Simon was continuing his vigil at his window for Carl’s return. As a bonus, he was able to see the hurt in the couple’s faces. Pain that he had inflicted earlier with his nail. Simon grinned back.
‘He always finds a way to upset folk, to get in their heads. This is his retribution for the other week when you answered him back and almost swore at him. He waited for an opportunity to get the upper hand. Let’s go back inside,’ advised Brodie. ‘There is nothing that we can do until the morning. Let’s not give him the satisfaction of seeing us upset. We’ll go in and phone the police and ask them to make a note on their system. In case anything else happens.’
Lee reluctantly agreed and took his husband by the hand and the trio made their way across the street and into their house. As Lee closed his front door, a police car turned the corner of their road.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The two police officers followed Carl into his house and waited patiently in the hallway whilst his children and wife made a fuss of him and welcomed him home, like a soldier returning from deployment.
‘Are you okay, I’ve been so worried? Did you get charged? What sentence can you expect?’ bombarded Tilly, not waiting for her questions to be answered. ‘I hate that old man for what he is putting you through.’
Whilst the children hugged their father and asked what the police station was like and if he saw any really bad people and was he handcuffed and did he try to escape, Yvonne said to Tilly, ‘We know about the noise harassment and have advised Carl to film your neighbour.’
‘Oh. We thought that he’d complain to you that he was being harassed and that we’d get arrested for filming him. So, we can whip out our phones and film him in the act, if we are quick enough?’
‘That’s right,’ confirmed Yvonne.
Bruce nodded in agreement too. ‘And you should be dialling 101 whenever he makes extreme noises after eleven at night. I’ll be suggesting to my sergeant that we have officers standing outside his property, ready to hear the noises themselves. Then we can charge him with harassing your family.’
‘Can you do anything about his cameras, they are pointing to the pavement too. Your officers will be spotted,’ protested Tilly.
‘We’ve several unmarked cars and if the noises are as loud as you say they are, then they should hear them from across the road. Hopefully, the cameras don’t stretch that far.’
Tilly ruminated for a moment, from what was just said she surmised that the police had not actually seen the CCTV screens and angles of filming for themselves and had probably just taken Simon’s word for it that they weren’t trained on their front and back door. ‘Well, if anything, Carl will get a good night’s sleep on those nights. It might help settle his mind. Peterhead environmental health officers have been next to useless.’ She remembered who she was talking to, ‘In my opinion.’
Bruce smiled grimly. It was a difficult situation this family found themselves in, and sadly an all too common one. But they could only work on the evidence given to them.
The courier eyed the blue coloured wheelie bin as he rang the doorbell and waited a few seconds. That would be counted as a safe place to leave the parcel. Though many households across the country would differ in that opinion.
Carl opened the door, feeling refreshed, despite the early hour, seven on the dot the doorbell had rung. They were first on the route, the nearby villages’ households expecting a parcel from this delivery driver would benefit from a lie-in. ‘Cheers mate, that was a swift delivery, I only ordered it two days ago.’
The courier, not caring, held out an electronic keypad for Carl to sign.
Carl juggled his parcel and the piece of equipment and duly signed, his signature appearing as a random scribble on the pad.
The man eyed the pad as he received it, ‘Don’t worry mate, they all look like that!’ Have a great day!’ he cheerfully said as he ran up the path and jumped back into his van.
Carl eyed his parcel, ‘Oh, I will!’ He looked up and smiled at the cameras on his neighbour’s roofline. He closed the door and walked back to the kitchen, where he’d left his coffee machine working its morning magic. He was surprised to see his wife up and about, pouring herself some cereal out of a cheery looking box. Chocolate orange flavoured cardboard, he thought, that won’t be full of sugar and all things bad.
‘You look surprised to see me up.’
Carl was astonished that she had read his mind, she could read him like a book. ‘Well, you don’t normally surface until after ten, is everything alright?’
‘Yes, I just slept like a log. I’m guessing you did too, laughing boy next door didn’t keep you awake?’
‘Not a sound. I reckon Bruce was true to his word. I’ve slept soundly for two nights now. I bet that a police car was sat outside again.’
Tilly nodded. Dotty had remarked yesterday that she’d seen one there the night before, a nondescript grey car with two men in the front seats, wearing casual clothes. At about two in the morning. When she went for a pee, she’d peeked through her net curtains. ‘If only they’d stay there every night. It seems such a waste of police resources.’
‘It’s that clown next door who is wasting the council and the police resources, they’ve better things to do than catch a bitter old man noise harassing us over birds. He’s pathetic.’
‘Yes, yes he is,’ agreed Tilly. ‘Though he shouldn’t get away with it.’
Carl beamed, placed his parcel on the kitchen table and pointed to it, like a child delivering a Christmas gift to a favourite relative.
‘Okay, I give up, what’s in the box, you are dying to tell me,’ sighed Tilly theatrically.
‘Okay, I can’t go into specifics, but some of the jobs I did, for The Regiment.’
‘Shhh!’ interposed Tilly, continuing her dramas, ‘It’s all very hush hush!’
Carl rolled his eyes, ‘Anyway, to continue, before I was so rudely interrupted.’ He cast his hands over the box with a flourish, like a magician revealing his magic trick. ‘These little gadgets will record video and sound. They are motion detected, even through windows. They can be applied to most surfaces, very discretely, and they’ll record next door’s actions from our kitchen, study, and Annabelle’s windows. I’ll even put a few outside, especially from the arbour. I’m going to enjoy a mug of coffee out there as soon as I come back from dropping the children off at school. I bought seven of them.’
‘Clever, let’s have a look then, and how much did that set you back? Where do you even buy these from?’
‘Best not to ask,’ replied Carl tapping his nose. ‘I’ve made several contacts over the years.’
‘Craig,’ guessed Tilly, ‘you got them via Craig.’
Carl looked at Tilly in astonishment, she really did know everything. ‘Yes, he knows the best suppliers from the dark web. Unsavoury characters come in handy in his line of work.’ Craig, like Carl, had served for seven years in the SAS and now had set himself up as a highly regarded detective agency for celebrities and high income business men and women in need of specialised operatives, employing many of his former buddies, Carl included.
Tilly walked over to a nearby drawer and took out a pair of scissors. ‘Well, let’s have a look then. It’s not an excessively big box.’
‘That’s not what you said last night,’ winked Carl.
Tilly chose to ignore his innuendo, though a smile cracked her lips at the joy of seeing Carl so enthusiastic. She handed him the scissors.
Carl took them and sliced open the tape and opened the box and pulled out several tiny black objects. The lenses on them were about the size of a ballpoint pen tip.
‘They are ever so small, will they work?’
‘Ahem. That’s what you said last night!’ quipped Carl, much to Tilly’s chagrin, as she saw her children race each other to the bathroom. She hoped they were out of earshot.
Gordon lost, so wandered into the kitchen, ‘What are those?’ he asked whilst reaching over the table for a croissant.
‘Okay, this is top secret Private Gordon,’ joked his father.
Gordon rolled his eyes, ‘Get on with it, dad,’ he ordered.
‘You mustn’t tell anyone, otherwise we lose the element of surprise, but these are secret cameras, to record next door. He’ll not be upsetting your sister again.
‘Cool!’ exclaimed Gordon, reaching up to give his father a high-five.
Carl grinned as he returned the gesture with a resounding clap that noted its approval of the spy systems.
A withered hand with liver spots poked through the railings of his back step and reached for a drawstring. It tugged and the wheelie bin lid opened, like that of a coffin lid creaking open in a ham seventies horror movie. The hand snatched at it, opened it wider, and then rammed it home with a resounding slam. A pair of legs, dressed in stained denims, a wet patch at the seam of its seat, ran from the back step and into the kitchen. The door was slammed tight.
Carl, in the arbour, tried not to react, he needed his prey to reveal the depths of its wickedness to his hidden camera. He sipped at his coffee, the caffeine making his already fast-beating heart pump that little bit faster. He remembered his special forces mantra and took two deep breaths, recalibrated and waited to deliver. He didn’t need to wait much longer, he’d stalked his prey and knew its routines, a schedule cast in stone and not deviated. The habit was derived from the sole focus of annoying Carl, upsetting his family and him as much as possible.
The old man did not disappoint. He went running down the stairs, almost tripping up over the last step from his kitchen door, to his rear slabbed garden. He turned left and reached his wheelie bins, withdrew a hammer from up his sleeve of his heavily soiled donkey jacket, his work uniform for over forty years and proudly never washed, and thumped on the bin lid for all he was worth. Three times. He grinned as he looked to Carl in the arbour and his face froze, his victim did not jump with fright. Instead he was laughing. He stared at him brazenly through the wooden slats, was holding up his phone between the gaps, and was laughing hard and long whilst waggling his mobile.
Carl switched off the recording and shouted, ‘Gotcha!’ and hit the record button again. The reaction of this lunatic was priceless. He couldn’t wait to share this to his pals. He might even share it on social media. A crazed old man hammering on a dustbin lid for no apparent reason. It might even go viral, like the old woman who put the poor cat in the wheelie bin. He laughed, even louder so that his mocking tones would carry, as the old man turned on his heels and scampered up his back steps, closing his back door quietly behind him.
‘Worth every penny!’ chuckled Carl, racing heartbeat not subsiding. He sat down, picked up his mug and took a slow, enjoyable sip of his coffee. He pulled out a protein bar from his pocket, slowly unwrapped it and took a bite. As he slowly munched through the treat he listened to the cooing of the wood pigeons, the ooo-woo of the pair of collared doves that fluttered down to his feeders and the tcheer call of the group of starlings busy at the fat-balls. He loved this new harmonious soundtrack of his back garden. His new pal, the robin, sang out his melodious tune in approval at his actions. The birds would now also enjoy a peaceful back garden.
Now all Carl had to do was to stop the Hippo from slamming her small shed door, located at the foot of her patio, and overlooking Carl’s wall, next to the arbour. Since the bird-table incident, she had taken to opening and slamming home its doors in unison with Simon’s wheelie bin hammering. He had no doubt that her beady eyes would be popping over the fence and gossiping with Simon. Though Simon would of course play the wounded martyr and complain that he was spied upon. The voyeuristic watcher really did not enjoy being watched in turn. Carl pitied Wayne, to work so hard all week and not realise what his wife got up to with Simon and other men. He quivered at the thought of Simon and that woman rolling about in bed, then immediately put those thoughts out of his mind and looked back to the birds frolicking about in his garden, just as nature intended. He patted his pocket and felt his phone snuggle safely from the cold late January day. He’d take his time transferring the recording to his laptop and then onto a memory stick. He didn’t want his phone taken away as evidence by the police. He’d make Simon sweat for a bit. Carl thought that he might even lie back in his study recliner and enjoy the peace and quiet for a while longer.
Lewis drove into the disabled parking bay, thankful that he and Shona had found one so near to the rheumatology unit of Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. It was housed in the old part of the hospital, built to accommodate the influx of limbless casualties of the First World War. Its boxed brickwork had stood firmly against the North East elements and provided shelter and rehabilitation to countless servicemen and then for decades had been used for innumerable clinics. The listed building could not have double glazing installed and many of the original windowpanes had been deemed too thin to provide heat for overnight patients. The old boiler would only produce enough heat to sustain warmth for the day. Instead, patients needing overnight care went down the hill, towards the main building with its hodgepodge interconnected array of buildings, ranging from concrete monstrosities to recent urban architectural aesthetically pleasing newbuilds. All famed for excellent care. And that was what Shona was about to receive, an infusion of a drug that neither she nor her husband could pronounce. All they cared about was that it took much of her rheumatic pain away.
‘Do you want me to find you one of their wheelchairs?’ asked Lewis helpfully.
‘No, no, the leg stretch will do me the world of good. The doctor said that it was important for me to walk as much as possible, to stop my muscles wasting away.’
‘I’ll just see you safely in then.’
She nodded. She appreciated the escort, ever since a young lad, who looked spaced out on something, slammed into her as he ran out of the building and knocked her off her feet. Lewis hadn’t managed to get a parking space that day and had driven through the one-way system and double backed to the Borg Cube, the tall multi-storey car park, just off-site. It had been nicknamed by the local Star Trek fans. He’d then spent his customary hour wait in the canteen, innocently enjoying a mug of tea and a piece of cake, unaware that his wife was being checked over by the on-call doctor before her infusion.
Lewis slipped his gloved hand into her warm mitten-covered hand and they walked over to the automatic doors like two teenagers out for a summer stroll.
BANG, BANG, BANG.
Carl leapt from his armchair and dived under his desk. ‘Gav, Gav,’ he shouted several times. He started to rock, hitting his head on the wood. ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ he despaired.
