Death of a Cave Dweller (3 page)

The superintendent grinned. “You're right, they'll use pretty much any excuse to get him out of their hair,” he agreed. “But I'm not a complete idiot, Frank. As soon as I got the idea of callin' in the Yard, I was on the phone to a mate of mine in administration. I asked exactly where Woodend was at the moment, an' it turns out that Cloggin'-it Charlie is up to his neck in a double murder in Birmingham. My mate doesn't think he'll be able to untangle himself from that mess until much before this side of Christmas.”

Detective Sergeant Bob Rutter lay on his back in bed, smoking a cigarette and listening to his wife's slow, careful footsteps as she made her way up the stairs. She would be carrying a cup of tea in one hand, he thought – a cup of tea it had taken her at least ten minutes to produce.

He could picture her making that tea; counting slowly after she'd turned on the tap, so she knew when the kettle was full enough; positioning the tea pot in exactly the right spot on the work surface, so that when she poured the boiling water it wouldn't spill everywhere; feeling around with her left hand because the sugar bowl wasn't quite where she remembered leaving it . . .

He had watched her go through the same motions on hundreds of occasions in the previous few months, and sometimes it almost broke his heart. Yet even though he always longed to offer his help, he forced himself to keep quiet because he knew that his offer would at best cause resentment, and at worst, rage.

And who could blame her for that? he asked himself. Who could wonder that she felt the need to demonstrate her independence after the terrible tragedy which had befallen her?

The bedroom door opened, and Maria stepped into the room. As usual, her appearance caused Rutter's heart to give a little flutter. As usual, he was mildly surprised that he seemed to have forgotten just how stunning her dark Spanish beauty was.

Maria walked over to the bedside table, and placed the cup on it. It was almost as if she could see again, Rutter thought. But she couldn't. It was simply that she had practised this movement, just as she had practised her walk down the aisle in the church where they had been married.

“So you finally have a day off,” Maria said, with just the slightest trace of a foreign accent in her voice. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Haven't really given it much thought,” Rutter told her.

It was quite true. He'd expected to be stuck in Birmingham for at least a couple more weeks, but then his boss, Chief Inspector Woodend, had made one of his famous – some said
infamous
– imaginative leaps, and the case had been wrapped up at breakneck speed.

“It's nice to be home again,” he continued. “Maybe I'll just potter round the house today.”

“You don't have to stay in,” Maria said, almost defensively. “I have plenty to keep me occupied.”

“I thought I might help you.”

“There's no one here to help me when you're out on a case,” Maria reminded him. “And I manage perfectly well then.”

“Perhaps I
want
to stay in,” Rutter said, a defensiveness now creeping into his own voice.

“You used to play tennis nearly every day,” Maria said, “but it's months since you even picked up a racket.”

I used to play tennis with
you
, Rutter thought. Can't you see how painful it is for me now to play against someone else?

“I will not be treated like a child,” Maria complained.

Rutter reached out, and gently pulled her on to the bed beside him. “Is that how I treat you?” he asked. “Like a child?”

“Sometimes.”

He brushed his lips against hers. “Am I treating you like an adult now?” he asked.

“You're starting to,” she admitted.

He reached up and caressed her right breast. “And now?”

“Your tea will go cold,” she warned him.

“To hell with my tea,” he said, starting to unbutton her housecoat.

Billie Simmons and Pete Foster sat opposite each other in the Casablanca Coffee Bar, just off Cook Street. In front of them were two untouched cups of cappuccino, which had been steaming when they'd first got them, but now were lukewarm. Neither the slightly plump bass guitarist nor the normally placid drummer looked at all happy.

“This thing with Eddie couldn't have happened at a worse time,” Pete Foster said, lighting up a Woodbine.

“Oh, so there's a good time to be electrocuted on stage, is there?” Billie Simmons asked.

Pete jerked his head, as if he'd suddenly received a slight electric shock himself. “No, of course there isn't,” he said hurriedly. He held his hands out, palms upwards. “Look, I'm as sorry about Eddie's death as the rest of you. I mean, he was my mate as well.”

“He was
Steve's
mate,” Billie corrected him. “As far as Eddie was concerned, you an' me were just the other fellers in the group.”

“The point is,” Pete persisted, “Eddie's death leaves a big gap in the band – my mum was sayin' the same thing just this mornin' – an' that's just what we can't afford right now.”

“Why right now?” Billie asked, picking up on the last two words. “Do you know somethin' I don't?”

“How could I?” Pete asked, avoiding the question. “All I meant was, after all the work we've put in we're finally startin' to make a name for ourselves, and losin' Eddie is a big setback.”

He was lying, Billie decided. Pete and Jack Towers were as thick as two thieves, and if the manager had any news to give them, Pete always got it first. But whatever the secret was that he was hiding, there was no way it could pried out of him now.

“When you asked me to come out for a coffee, you said you were worried about two things,” the drummer said. “So what's the other?”

Pete Foster puffed nervously on his cigarette. “I'm scared, Billie,” he admitted. “
Really
scared.”

“Of what?”

“Of what?” Pete repeated. “Isn't it bloody obvious? I mean, it's not as if Eddie's death came completely out of the blue, is it? There's been all the other stuff – like the dead rat.”

“That didn't have anythin' to do with Eddie gettin' killed,” Billie said dismissively.

“Didn't it?” Pete replied, a hysterical edge creeping into his voice. “How can you be so sure of that? Are you an expert on murders, all of a sudden?”

“There's a big difference between bein' willin' to play a few dirty tricks an' bein' willin' to take somebody's life,” Billie argued. “The joker an' the killer just have to be two different people.”

“When I was a kid, there was an old feller lived on his own at the end of our street,” Pete said. “He was a right loonie – always shoutin' at us, an' wavin' his fist. Well, we began playin' this game with his front door. When it first started, the rule was that all you had to do was run up to the door an' touch it. But after a bit, that got borin'. So we said that from then on, you had to knock on the door as loud as you could. Finally, you had to knock on the door, an' actually wait there until he started to open it.”

“What's your point?”

“That's what this feels like to me,” Pete said. “First there were the phone calls, then the rat, now Eddie. Whoever's doin' this is gettin' more an' more extreme every time.”

“You can't get more extreme than murder,” Billie pointed out.

“Can't you?” Pete asked, nervously lighting a new cigarette from the stub of his old one. “Well, what about
two
murders?”

“You've got a screw loose,” the drummer told him.

“I don't think I have,” Pete countered. “It seems to me that somebody's got it in for the Seagulls – an' I don't want to be the next one to end up dead.”

Rutter lay back contentedly, his wife's head buried in his chest. There were a few difficulties in their situation, he thought. More than a few. But not for a second did he regret marrying his beautiful, blind wife.

The nagging ring of the telephone in the hall cut into his thoughts. “Damn!” he said.

“You don't have to answer it,” Maria murmured sleepily.

“If I don't, he'll only ring back in five minutes.”

“You can't be sure it's Mr Woodend.”

“Oh yes I can. I don't know how he does it, but nobody can make the telephone bell ring like Cloggin'-it Charlie.”

Maria sighed, and shifted her position so that Rutter could swing his body off the bed. Perhaps he was right. The telephone did seem to have a more insistent ring whenever the caller was Charlie Woodend.

Rutter made his way quickly down the stairs. They'd get a phone extension put in the bedroom, he decided. That way, when Maria was upstairs when it rang, she'd have time to answer the phone herself – before the caller hung up in exasperation.

He lifted the receiver. “Hello, sir.”

The man on the other end of the line chuckled. “We'll make a detective of you yet,” he said.

The voice sounded like the man himself, Rutter thought. Big and square and dependable. He remembered the first time he had met Woodend, on Euston railway station, and how shocked he'd been that a chief inspector should be dressed in a hairy sports coat, cavalry twill trousers and scuffed suede shoes. With the arrogance of youth, he'd assumed that Woodend's wife was to blame for his scruffy appearance. Now he knew better. Joan Woodend had tried for years to smarten her husband up, but though she could usually bend most people to her will, she'd had no success with her Charlie.

“Got any plans for your unexpected day off?” the chief inspector asked.

“Not really.”

“Very wise,” Woodend said. “A bobby should never count on havin' any free time.”

“Where are we being sent?”

“Nowhere yet. But from what I've just read in the papers, I shouldn't be surprised if we get a call to say we're wanted in Liverpool.”

Rutter nodded at himself in the mirror. If there were a case in Liverpool, it would almost definitely be theirs. “So what's the job?” he asked. “Does it sound interesting?”

Woodend chuckled again. “Oh, it sounds interestin' enough,” he said. “An' it should be right up your street, an' all.”

“Right up my street?” Rutter repeated, mystified.

“Aye, it's what you might call a
rock'n'roll murder. Maybe the first one there's
ever been.”

T
he ferry chugged stoically across the grey-blue water towards Liverpool's Pier Head. It was a mild morning in early April. The sun shone down benevolently on the docks – those same docks which had made Liverpool rich during the height of the slave trade, and had been the target for so much of the German Luftwaffe's fury during the war. Overhead, sea birds glided on the air currents and cawed incessantly. Underfoot, the boat's engine sent vibrations throbbing through the deck floorboards. An hour earlier, the ferry had been packed with commuters, but now the two men on the upper deck pretty much had it to themselves.

“We didn't need to take the train to Birkenhead, you know, sir,” Bob Rutter said. “I checked up in the timetable. There was a direct connection from Euston to Liverpool Lime Street.”

“So I believe,” Woodend replied. “But if we'd gone direct, we wouldn't have had the pleasure of arrivin' in the 'Pool in style, would we?”

Rutter permitted himself a grin. He supposed he should be grateful that the ferry trip was putting his boss in such a good mood, because the journey up from London had been by diesel train, and Woodend – who thought that the only manly way to travel was under steam power – had been distinctly grumpy about it.

Woodend reached into one of the voluminous pockets of his hairy sports jacket and pulled out a package carefully wrapped in greaseproof paper. Rutter made a private bet with himself it contained corned-beef sandwiches, with the bread cut doorstep thick, and when his boss had unwrapped it, he saw that he was right.

“Dickens used to like comin' to Liverpool, you know,” Woodend said, before taking a generous bite out of his sandwich.

“Did he, sir?”

“Aye, he did that. He said that it was his next favourite town after London. He used to take the ferry across the Mersey regularly. Claimed it helped him to clear his head.”

Rutter shook his own head, wonderingly. Charlie Woodend and his Charles Dickens. The chief inspector was fond of saying that his favourite author should be used as part of the police training course, and though there were other officers who thought he was only joking, his own sergeant knew that he was deadly serious.

“I've got some old friends in Liverpool,” Woodend said. He paused. “Some old enemies, an' all, if it comes to that.”

Rutter simply nodded. That was how things were with his boss, he'd learned – either people liked him so much they'd climb a tree for him, or else they felt much happier when he was out of the way.

The chief inspector examined the dock front. Cranes were busy unloading cargoes from ships weighed down with fruit fresh from Africa. Liners, heading for American and Australia, bobbed quietly in the water and waited for the right tide. Even from a distance, he could sense the bustle.

“Bein' a southerner, you'll not have been here before, will you, Bob?” he asked, somehow making Rutter's unfamiliarity with the town sound like a character defect.

“No, sir, I haven't,” the sergeant replied, deadpan.

“It's a grand place,” Woodend told him. “There's a lot of life – a lot of excitement – in it. Do you know, I'm rather lookin' forward to workin' on this case.”

“Are you indeed,” Rutter said, raising a surprised eyebrow.

“An' what's that supposed to mean? Is it some clever grammar-school way of takin' the piss?” Woodend asked, without rancour.