Over the Edge (20 page)

‘You read a poem at Dale Dobson’s funeral,’ I began.

He blinked like an owl in a spotlight, not sure which direction I was coming from.

‘Yeah,’ he replied.

‘It was very moving. Did you write it yourself?’ And did the Spice Girls compose the Brandenburg Concertos?

‘No, not me,’ he confirmed, as if any of us were in doubt, but he swelled, ever so slightly, with pride.

‘How long had you known Dale?’

‘Years.’

‘How many?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Where did you meet him?’

‘At Forpe Arch, when we was doing time.’

‘The young offenders institute?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You were both twockers.’

‘Yeah.’

‘In Leeds.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So you had something in common.’

‘Yeah…’ he hesitated, as if to say something else, then clammed up.

‘Go on,’ I encouraged.

‘Dale was clever,’ he said. ‘We was banged up together. He knew all sorts of stuff, like animals’ names and astronomy. An he was good for a laugh. He used to make up poems, just little ones, about the screws. An we was bofe mad about cars. He was worse than me. That’s all he lived for.’

‘Did you stay in touch?’

‘Yeah, for a bit. Then I got time and lost ’is address. He moved. I fink he worked in Manchester for a few years, then ’e landed a job in Heckley.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘We met. Accidentally, like. He was working for this guy and Mr Crozier asked me to take ’im to a meeting one night. I was told to wait in the KFC and call for ’im in an hour. Dale was already in there. He’d brought the other guy. He said they were planning somefing.’

‘Any ideas what?’

‘No. He didn’t say.’

‘What did you think?’ Nigel asked. ‘Something like a bank robbery, a bullion hold-up?’

‘No, I don’t fink so. Mr Crozier didn’t do business like that. I fink it must have been to do wiv buying an’ selling, or houses. He did a lot about
houses. Not proper criminal stuff.’

I said: ‘Who did Dale land the job with in Heckley?’

He wriggled about on the plastic chair and wiped his neck with a hand. The temperature was about 80° and the room was windowless. I caught the PC’s eye and asked him to open the door for a minute or two.

‘The job in Heckley,’ I reminded Duggie. ‘Who was it with?’

‘Don’t know. He never said.’

‘And you never asked?’

‘No.’

‘So now we’ll never know.’

‘Don’t s’pose we will.’ He looked relieved, but it may have been the cool draught that made him feel more comfortable.

‘Tell me about the racing,’ I said.

And now he didn’t look so comfortable. ‘Racing?’ he echoed.

‘Mmm. Racing. In the cars. The MGs and then the Golfs. It was in all the papers that he’d been killed in an illegal car race.’

‘I don’t know noffing about no car racing.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

The brief sat up at that comment, jolted from his nap, but he wasn’t sure what he’d missed so he decided not to say anything.

I looked across at Nigel, who said: ‘So you admit
that you were working for Crozier at the time of his death.’

‘Yeah, I s’pose so, but I don’t know noffing about it.’

‘Your boss went to Heckley, drank enough wine to render a horse comatose, and didn’t call on his trusted driver to collect him.’

‘No.’

‘So how did he get there and back?’

‘I dunno. It’s a myst’ry to me.’

‘Where were you at the time?’

‘Dunno. Out wiv some mates, I fink.’

‘Was Dale Dobson one of them?’

‘Umm, yeah, I fink he might have been.’

Nigel leant forward. ‘So you weren’t with Mr Crozier when he rolled into the river?’ he asked.

‘No. Nowhere near. I swear it.’

‘And you weren’t there when his hands and feet were wrapped in masking tape, before he was pushed in the river?’

His face turned the colour of catshit and a vein high on his temple started to pulse like a worm burrowing under his skin. I said: ‘Good stuff, masking tape. Guaranteed not to come off in water. But it’s great for holding fingerprints. When it sticks to your fingers you always leave a print behind. The SOCOs sometimes use it for lifting them.’ I wagged my hand as if trying to dislodge something sticky.

Jones said: ‘I don’t know noffing about it,’ but
his demeanour indicated otherwise. He was a bully. There was no way of knowing how many people he’d terrorised in his 28 years, or how many he’d crippled or killed, how many women he’d raped. Sometimes, when I have someone squirming, I have to remind myself of these things.

‘But you know about the car racing,’ I said. ‘Were you part of it?’

‘No.’

‘Did you have a bet?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How much?’

‘I had a couple of ’undred on Dale.’

‘At what odds?’

‘Nine to eleven.’

‘Who was he racing?’

‘A kid from Manchester. Works for someone over there. Don’t know ’is name.’

‘Was Dale good?’

‘Yeah. Brilliant.’

I thought of all those flowers at the roadside, and the messages from the Wallenbergs. ‘Who was Dale working for?’ I asked.

‘I dunno.’

And then of the photographs at the church, with Duggie hovering around the Wallenbergs.

‘And who are you working for?’

‘Nobody.’

He got ten out of ten for loyalty, that was for
sure, but we’d soon crack it.

Nigel said: ‘Let’s go back to the moment when Mr Crozier, your boss, rolled off the dockside into the water. We think you were there, Duggie. You’re looking at a murder rap but we know you weren’t alone, and why would you want Crozier dead? That’s what we don’t understand.’

‘No, I wasn’t there,’ he protested.

‘Who was driving the Range Rover, Duggie? Was that you?’

But before he could reply the solicitor announced that he’d like a consultation with his client. I said: ‘The interview is being halted at the request of the accused’s solicitor,’ and read the time from the clock on the wall behind them. The PC stopped the tape and I stood up and hooked my jacket over my shoulder.

I went for a walk outside and sat on the wall for a few minutes. The streets were busy with workers scurrying for their buses and trains, or back to their vehicles in the multi-storey. Christmas decorations, thankfully still un-illuminated, had started to sprout from all the street furniture, and the stores were advertising their pre-Christmas sales.

When we reconvened the solicitor presented us with a hand-written statement. The story was that on the night of the twentieth, Dale had phoned Duggie in an agitated state. Duggie went to meet him and was told that Dale and Crozier had quarrelled. Dale had hit Crozier and killed him, and
now he wanted Duggie to help him dispose of the body. First thoughts were to bury it on the moors, but then they decided to put it in the river, near where Crozier lived. The tape was Dale’s idea. He said it would confuse things.

Nigel read the statement into the tape recorder and asked us all to sign it. ‘You’ll appear before a magistrate in the morning,’ he told Jones, ‘on the charge of aggravated theft of a motor vehicle. Bail will be opposed on the grounds of more serious charges pending.’

I treated Nigel to pizza and we talked about other things for a while, but inevitably came back to the case. Jones was now happy to point the finger at his dead friend, but was still protecting Wallenberg. We knew that Crozier was alive when he went in the water, contradicting Jones’s story, because if he’d been dead he wouldn’t have drawn river water, with its unique microscopic wildlife, into his windpipe. It was no help though, he’d just say that they must have made a mistake: Crozier hadn’t been as dead as they thought.

I made a detour on the way home, past Rosie’s house, but it was in darkness and her car wasn’t outside. I took it as a good sign.

Jones was charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice and being an accessory to a murder. I interviewed him twice in the next couple
of days, but he didn’t change his story and now he had a clued-up brief at his side. I didn’t talk about Crozier – that was Nigel’s case – and Wallenberg wasn’t mentioned. Jones had attempted to steal the Jaguar, he claimed, for his own use. He was bored, wanted a joyride, that’s all. It was an opportunist theft. He hadn’t spent hours watching the car until he knew exactly when the owner would be climbing into it with the keys in her hand. When I’d suggested that he was going to take part in the next car race himself, maybe to avenge his pal’s death, the expression on his face contradicted his shake of the head. The brief accused me of fabricating the story.

Two days later the fire brigade were called to a burning car in a lay-by up on the tops. It was the Jag stolen earlier from a house in Bradford. It looked as if the car-racing season was over.

In the north of the county the moors are based on limestone and have a unique assortment of plant life growing on them. The ground is stony and breaks the ploughs of farmers unlucky enough to have inherited it. As you come south the geography changes. The underlying strata become sandstone and millstone grit, good for shedding rainfall and therefore the ideal place to build the reservoirs that feed the surrounding conurbations. Further south still, heading into Derbyshire, we
have peat moors which are criss-crossed with deep doughs and virtually sterile. Only cotton grass struggles to maintain a root-hold in the soft, shifting ground.

The long dry summer had caused the peat to shrink and crack, so when the autumn storms came the rain found new gullies to wash down, filling in old streambeds and scouring out new ones. Sometimes, ancient tree trunks, thousands of years old but preserved in the acidic, oxygen-free ground, are brought to the surface.

And sometimes it’s bodies.

The walkers on Bleak Tor found the first one, a police dog found the second a few yards away. I was in the office, Saturday morning, when the call came. Dave had just waved me a goodbye but I caught him before he left the building. We collected his Wellington boots from his car and headed out of town, up onto the tops.

They looked as if they’d been desiccated rather than decomposed, which was marginally more pleasant. They didn’t smell and weren’t buzzing with flies. We stood at a respectful distance, ignoring the east wind whipping at our clothes, as the stone-faced SOCO picked and scraped the soil from around the nearest body with scalpel and paint brush. If they’d been the embalmed bodies of the Boy Kings wives he couldn’t have treated them more carefully.

He stood up to stretch his back and I said: ‘You’re doing a great job, Steve.’

‘Yeah, well, Charlie,’ he replied. ‘With luck this will be my last case. Mind you, I thought the last one would be.’

I was standing on a stepping plate, trying not to lose my balance. The legs of the plate were sinking into the ground and it wasn’t level. It was an easy place to bury something if you were in a hurry. Dave rang me on my mobile, from the roadside about 50 yards away.

‘I’ve asked for a tent,’ he told me. ‘It looks like rain and I doubt if we’ll finish today. The professor says he’ll be about an hour and I’ve asked for task force assistance. Anything to report?’

I glanced at the sky. Ragged clouds were churning up on the horizon and the temperature had dropped a couple of degrees. ‘Both appear to be female,’ I said. ‘God knows how long they’ve been here. Couple of years, maybe. I’ll be with you in a minute or two. I’m sure a flask of coffee would be appreciated.’

Steve, the SOCO, looked up at me and nodded his approval. ‘Come and look,’ he said.

The face of the one he’d done most work on was simply a skull with skin stretched across it and remnants of blonde hair clinging to the sides. The eye sockets were filled with peat and there was a gap where one of the canine teeth should have been.
Her arms were crossed in front of her and she was wearing a knitted cardigan with embroidery on it. Yellow flowers with green leaves on a red background. Flashes of brightness on a cheerless day. Denim jeans completed the ensemble, and her feet were bare.

‘Earrings,’ Steve said, pointing with his little trowel. ‘An upper canine missing, thin gold chain around her neck.’ My phone rang again. ‘Entomologist’s here,’ Dave told me.

‘I’m coming out,’ I said. ‘Send him in.’

Who and when are the burning questions. Until we know those answers we can’t start an investigation. We have a caravan that we sometimes use as a mobile incident room, and office space was running out, so I decided to use it for this case, standing in the nick car park. Sunday morning I had a look in and checked the installation of all the paraphernalia we needed. After that I drove to the place where the bodies were discovered. Task force were doing a fingertip search of the area but hadn’t found much. It was about 50 yards from the road, which fitted in with the normal pattern. Bodies are heavy and awkward to carry. Chances were that the person who buried them would know the area well and live not too far away.

A Home Office pathologist came up from Oxford to do the post-mortems, and I sat in on the
first one. Monday afternoon I had a meeting with Gilbert and my sergeants.

‘Body One has been there about a year,’ I reported. ‘Entomological evidence confirms that it’s been in the ground for one summer. Body Two is in a greater state of decomposition, has been there for about a year longer. We’ll know more about Body Two in a while. Body One is of a young woman, white, aged 18 to 22. Approximately five feet four high and of slim build. In fact, according to the professor, her bones indicated that she was undernourished and had gone through a period of malnutrition. Several of her teeth were missing and she’d had a certain amount of low quality dental work done.’

‘What do you mean by missing?’ Jeff Caton asked.

‘Extracted,’ I replied. ‘Not knocked out. Her front teeth are OK.’

‘She didn’t look after her teeth.’

‘No. Her clothing is of particular interest. Her cardigan is hand-knitted, in what we’d call an ethnic design, and her jeans are of an obscure manufacture but have been decorated with embroidery. The label on them is in a so-far unidentified language with some characters in Cyrillic script. Her blouse and underwear are from Marks and Sparks. She had four small gold studs in each ear and a tiny gold crucifix of an unusual
design on a chain around her neck.’