Altered Egos by Bill Kitson Page A

he called.
    Binns pulled a second pair of handcuffs from his pocket. Causing Clara to wonder how many sets he carried. As he stepped forward beginning a second recital of the caution, theguard swung his fist and aimed a punch at Binns. The sergeant swayed out of the way and clipped a cuff over the man’s wrist.
    ‘Make this one obstruction, assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest,’ Nash told him.
    He watched as the uniformed men led their prisoner away to join his colleague.
    Clara nudged him. ‘Look there, Mike.’
    Nash followed her pointing finger. Four more security men had emerged from the office block and were walking towards the gates. ‘This should be fun,’ Nash said dryly. ‘You know what you’ve to do, Jack?’
    ‘On my way.’
    Nash waited until the Transit, complete with prisoners, had pulled away. He turned to look at the approaching guards who formed themselves into a line inside the gates. ‘What’s going on here?’ one of them asked.
    ‘Your colleagues have been arrested for obstruction and assault. I’ve asked, quite civilly, to speak to someone in regard to a murder investigation I’m in charge of. Nobody seems to want to talk to me. If you want your men back, I suggest someone starts doing a bit of a rethink.’
    ‘You can’t do that,’ the man protested.
    ‘I’m getting a bit tired of people telling me what I can and can’t do,’ Nash said quietly.
    ‘We’ll get our solicitor onto this. They’ll be free within the hour.’
    Nash smiled. ‘Well, good luck to you.’
    He swung round to Pearce. ‘Viv, will you drop me off at home please? Then, you go off too. I don’t want you back at the station tonight. We’re off duty as of now. Clara, you OK?’
    Clara nodded, then watched as Nash and Pearce drove off. She wandered over to her car and drove a discreet distance from the laboratory. She turned the car so it was facing the main gates and parked.
    On the journey back into town, Nash told Pearce what he wanted. ‘Go straight home, or go for a meal, whatever you want, as long as you don’t go near the station. I’m going forsomething to eat. Later, I’ll take over from Clara. Tomorrow morning, I want you both to go straight out to Gorton. I want you to do another search of Dr North’s house and the grounds. See if there’s anything that got missed in the first place. We were only looking at it as an accidental death then. Now it’s probably murder.’
    ‘You’ll be in the office, will you?’
    ‘No, I’ll be out all morning, things to do. Your search will take at least as long. That means there will be nobody available to order the release of those men until tomorrow afternoon. Perhaps the people in charge of Helm Pharm will have had time to think things over by then.’
    ‘Clara said earlier that you’re a devious bastard,’ Pearce smiled. ‘Now I see what she meant.’

chapter seven
    It was almost dark when Caroline and Dr North reached the house, a semi-detached in a row of similar properties, but there were no lights showing. ‘That’s strange,’ she said. ‘I’d have thought they’d have switched on by now.’
    Across the road, hidden in a dense shrubbery alongside a path leading to a park, a figure watched with interest as they emerged from the car. The watcher raised a powerful pair of binoculars and studied the new arrivals. He couldn’t see their faces in the half-light.
    North stretched, easing his back after the journey. Although the worst of his injuries had been to the head, the force of the collision had caused severe bruising – stiffness was a natural after-effect. They walked the short distance to the front door where Caroline knocked on the glass panel. The door swung open. ‘Something’s wrong.’ She pushed the door wide.
    They went through the ground floor. There was no sign of life. ‘There were two of our men guarding her. I can’t understand what’s happened. Let’s check upstairs.’ In the largest of the three