Death Watch (18 page)

Doyle flung the teatowel in his hand over his shoulder and took the photograph. ‘Ah sure, yes, Dickie Neal,’ he said at once. ‘Is that right he was killed in the fire on Monday?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ Atherton said.

He nodded. ‘They’ve all been talking about it. Poor feller. What did you want to know about him?’

‘He was a regular here, was he?’

‘He’d been coming in for years, but not on regular nights. It was just now and then.’

‘When did you see him last?’

‘Sunday night, it would be.’ Atherton felt an inward glow. At last they were on the trail! Doyle grinned suddenly. ‘Caused a bit of a stir, didn’t he, coming in with a woman – the like of which had to be seen to be believed! Well, Dickie was always one for the ladies, but this one was a real cracker – and young enough to be his daughter, the owl beggar!’

‘What did she look like?’ Atherton asked.

‘Tall girl, about twenty-five, gorgeous. Long red hair and long white legs a man could get himself tangled up in.’

There was a touch of poetry about Doyle, Atherton noted. ‘And was he?’

Tangled?’ Doyle asked intelligently.
‘He
was, that’s for sure.’

‘Not her?’

‘Well, he was a lot older than her. He was a nice man, but—’ An eloquent shrug. ‘I don’t say she was playing hard to get, but she wasn’t giving it away, either. Dickie was all over her. Like the divorced man that only gets to take his little daughter out once a month. She was just sitting tight, waiting to see if there was an ice-cream in it for her.’

A graphic picture. They could do with more substance, though. ‘Do you remember what time they came in?’

Doyle thought. ‘Not to swear to the minute. Between eight and half past, I should think. It was still early, anyway. They came and sat at the bar to begin with, but when it started to get crowded later on they went off to bag a table before they all got taken.’

‘Were you serving at the bar all evening?’

‘Till about nine, then Alice came on. Then I went on the tables.’

‘Did you notice what time Neal left, and who was with him?’

Doyle looked at Atherton thoughtfully. ‘Is it the row you want to know about, with Dave Collins? There was nothing much to it – just a bit of a barney between friends. When Alice told them to take it outside it was pretty well all over anyway. I don’t believe it would ever have come to blows, if that’s what you’re wondering. Not them two.’

Atherton practically quivered with triumph. ‘They were friends, you say?’

‘What, Dave and Dickie? Since dot. Sure they used to argue all the time, but it never meant anything.’

‘But wasn’t Collins a violent man?’

‘Violent? Not that I know of. He had a temper, but it was more shouting and roaring, kind of style. He and Dickie were always at it. And Dickie would never have risen to it, only he wanted to show up well in front of the girl. Normally he just let Dave get on with it.’

‘Did you hear anything of what the quarrel was about?’

Doyle raised his eyebrows. ‘Everyone in the whole club heard what it was about. That’s why Alice put a stop to it, in the end – people were listening instead of drinking.’

‘About women, was it?’ Atherton asked casually.

‘Money,’ said Doyle, little knowing that with that one word he had shattered a man’s dreams. ‘Dickie owed Dave some money, and he’d promised to pay him back that weekend, only it seems he’d lost quite a bit at Newbury, and couldn’t cough up. It wouldn’t have mattered, only it was Dave’s missus’s birthday the Monday, and he wanted to buy her something special, so he needed the cash. So he got mad. Well, Dickie didn’t like being embarrassed in front of the girl -– she got up the moment it started and went off to the loo and stayed there – so he got mad back. They went at it hammer and tongs for a bit, until they realised the whole bar was listening to every word, and then they started to look a bit embarrassed. Then Alice tells them to take it outside. They went out all right – glad to hide their faces, I should think – but they weren’t gone more than a minute or two. Then Dickie come back in and fetched the girl, and that’s the last I saw of him.’

‘Neal came back in on his own?’

‘Yes. He just came back down and fetched her away. She’d come back from hiding by then, d’ye see.’

‘So you didn’t see Collins again?’

He shook his head. ‘He hasn’t been in since.’

‘And what time did all this happen?’

‘It’d be half-tennish, something like that.’

A bit early for their purposes, Atherton thought. Still, men with a pint or two on them could stand on the street talking nonsense for an hour together, in his experience.

‘You say Collins wanted the money to buy his wife a present,’ he asked.

‘So he said. Thought the world of her. And he was always strapped for cash, where Dickie generally sported considerable amounts. So it was a bit ironic, really, Dickie saying he couldn’t pay.’

Atherton thought for a moment. ‘Had you seen the girl
before, the girl Dick Neal was with?’

Doyle thought a moment before answering. ‘I’m not sure, now. He never brought her in here before, but I had the feeling when they came in that I’d seen her somewhere, only I couldn’t put me finger on it. No, I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘If you should happen to remember, you will let me know? We’d like to have a word with her, but we haven’t been able to find out so far who she is.’

‘Sure, if anything occurs to me,’ Doyle said. He looked at Atherton keenly. ‘Is there something funny about the fire? It was an accident, wasn’t it?’

‘Has anybody been suggesting it wasn’t?’

‘No, only that it was pretty ironic, given that Dickie was a fire alarm salesman. There’ve been some woeful jokes going up and down the bar, I can tell you. Along the lines of “Come home to a living fire”.’ He shook his head. ‘Some people have a narful sense of humour.’

‘But Neal was liked, wasn’t he?’

Doyle hesitated a telling second. ‘He was liked well enough. He was one of the lads, told a lot of jokes, you know the way his sort are. He was free with his money, always bought his round and more.’

‘But?’

Doyle wrinkled his nose. ‘I dunno. I never got the feeling he was anyone’s best buddy, d’you know what I mean? It was all front and no back – if he’d’ve been in trouble, they’d’ve looked the other way, and vice versa. Well, most people don’t care, do they, as long as someone else buys the drinks? And then, he was always with a different woman. There’s a lot of fellers, particularly the married ones, don’t trust a man who gets on with women like that.’

‘He died because he never knew these simple little rules and few,’ Atherton observed.

‘Come again?’

‘Oh, nothing. I was just thinking, if you want sober analysis of the human condition, you should always ask a professional barman.’

‘You said it, boy,’ said Doyle.

*

When Detective Chief Superintendent Richard ‘God’ Head turned up at the department meeting, they all knew they were in trouble. He walked in ahead of Dickson, tall, Grecianly fair, immaculately suited, with a high enough gloss on the toecaps of his shoes to have dazzled an oncoming motorist. He strode with measured tread the length of the room, parting the throng ahead of him like Moses on a particularly good day, and Dickson surged after, massive, stony-faced and ash-strewn: a perambulating Pennine Chain smoker.

At the far end Head turned to face them, unbuttoning his jacket with an air of being about to get down to it really seriously, chaps. Slider noted gladly that their Adonis-like leader had a slight but satisfyingly incongruous paunch.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘now we’ve got a lot to get through and not much time, so let’s get on with it. I’m not here, I’m just a fly on the wall, so I shall leave it to Detective Superintendent Dickson to conduct this meeting in his usual way. Just ignore me, everybody. George?’

Slider winced at Head’s bonhomous smile. No-one called Dickson ‘George’ and lived. Wisps of steam drifted out of the old mountain’s ears, and the floor seemed to shift slightly underfoot.

He began. ‘In the matter of the death and presumed murder of Richard Neal—’

‘Yes, now are we still presuming it’s murder?’ Head trampled in. ‘It seems to me that we’ve no evidence whatsoever that it wasn’t just an accident. Or suicide.’

‘There are a number of small points that are inconsistent, sir,’ Dickson said with furious patience. ‘The post mortem report suggests the hands were tied behind the back, which would be—’

‘May have been,’ Head interrupted. ‘Only may have been.’

‘And the wreckage of the room has been searched, but deceased’s car keys have not been found—’

‘He could have dropped them somewhere on the way to
the motel. Come on, George, you’ll have to do better than that. Look, Neal was in dire financial straits, he had women chasing him right left and centre, his job was going down the toilet, the whole thing was going to blow up in his face at any minute. Isn’t it much more likely that he’d simply reached the end of his tether?’

Someone, probably Anderson, snorted audibly at the choice of metaphor.

‘If he went to the motel to hang himself, sir, why did he seem so cheerful to the desk clerk? And what about the wire around the genitals?’

‘You can’t expect a suicide to act rationally,’ Head said blithely. ‘And there’s no knowing what sort of perversions he was used to practising. The fire team found pieces of leather straps and the remains of strop magazines in the room, which suggests he’d gone there for his own strange purposes. After all,’ he flashed a titillating smile about the room, ‘what else does a man go to a motel for? It ain’t to get a good night’s sleep, boys.’

Only Hunt laughed, and finding himself alone in his adoration, stopped abruptly.

‘Now you’ve been on this over a week, and you haven’t got the sniff of a suspect,’ Head went on, ‘whereas you’ve all the evidence you need for suicide. Unless you can show me some good reason not to, I’m going to close it down. We can’t keep this sort of show running on public money for ever, you know.’

Dickson rolled flaming eyes towards Slider. ‘Bill – let’s hear what you got this morning.’

Slider laid out the business of the quarrel in the Shamrock Club, together with the complication of Mrs Collins’s sexual appetite. ‘We haven’t been able to interview Collins yet, to find out what happened afterwards. We’ve spoken to Mrs Collins, but she doesn’t know what time her husband got in that night, because she took a sleeping pill, and slept right through until half past nine the next morning, when she woke alone in the house.’

‘Why haven’t you interviewed Collins?’ Head asked restively.

‘He’s somewhere west of Exeter at the moment, sir. We’re still trying to find him. He’s a commercial traveller.’

Head’s head went up, and he sighted on Slider down his nose. ‘It doesn’t sound as if you’ve got anything to go on there. Your witness says the quarrel was about money, not about the wife.’

‘Sir, we—’

‘No, I’m sorry,’ Head said. He turned to Dickson. ‘My mind’s made up. Unless anything better comes in today, I’m crashing this one, George. I’m sure you’ve got far more useful things for your men to be doing. Our clear-up rate isn’t so good it can’t stand improvement. So now if we can move on to other things—’

He swept the troops with his eye. ‘There’ve been quite a few complaints from members of the public that break-in reports are not being followed up quickly enough. Now I’m sure you all realise that this is the very area where the public has most opportunity to get a good look at us and how we work …’

Slider avoided looking at Dickson, as one might look away from a nasty road accident. The fly on the wall, he thought ferociously, had a hell of a lot to say for itself.

Atherton arrived chez Château Rat in the middle of what was obviously a row. There was a car on the hard standing – a Ford Orion in the colour known to the trade as Gan Green, with a sticker in the back window which said
If you can read this you re TOO BLOODY CLOSE
– which told him that the master was home even before he got near enough to the purple door to hear the raised voices inside. The door chimes cut the quarrel short, and a moment later the door was opened abruptly by a furious scowl.

‘David Collins?’ Atherton said pleasantly, flashing his brief. The scowl disappeared, leaving behind it only a wary expression on the very tired face of a man in his mid-fifties. He was a five-niner with enough body to have gone round a six-footer comfortably, and Atherton guessed from the meat across his shoulders that he had
once gone in for weight training – a grave mistake when the greatest weight you were ever going to handle in real life was a pint pot.
A pint of cold water weighs a pound-and-a-quarter,
a junior school memory chanted from the back of his mind. Plus the weight of the glass, and it added up to a lot of muscle going rapidly to seed.

There was also the sneaky, soft, middle and lower spread of the long-distance car-driver, and the fullness of jowl of the beer drinker and travelling eater. A man away from the disciplines of home had no reason not to eat chips which was anywhere near as strong as his reasons for doing so.

That apart, Collins was not a bad-looking man, with strong features, a good mouth, and curly grey hair. Atherton guessed that until recently he had looked much less than his age. Now, however, he looked exhausted, and there was something about his eyes and the lines around his mouth that suggested recent shock or pain.

‘That’s me,’ he said, in a voice without inflexion. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’d like to speak to you for a few minutes, sir, if that’s all right?’

The hand gripping the door forbiddingly high up tightened a little, but Collins did not move to allow him in. ‘What about?’ he said in the same flat voice. Behind him in the passage Mrs Collins appeared with a handkerchief to her face, saw Atherton, and ducked back whence she had come. Collins must have seen the reflection of it in Atherton’s eyes, for a look of faint annoyance flickered through his face, and he said, ‘Was it you came round here yesterday, bothering my wife?’

‘Yes. But it was really you I wanted to see,’ Atherton said blandly. ‘Could I come in, do you think? Unless you really want to talk to me on the doorstep?’