Blind Needle (23 page)

In the outer office Detective-Sergeant Dimelow pressed my fingers onto an inked pad and carefully rolled each one into a numbered box on a sheet of paper with a faintly glossy texture. He slid the sheet under a desk-top magnifying lens and examined the prints. Apparently
satisfied, he handed the sheet to a uniformed woman police officer. ‘Run this. C.R.S.C.S. Patundi investigation.' It was the first time I had heard him speak: his voice jarred with his groomed and tailored appearance, for he had a strong north country accent, which even as a career policeman he hadn't bothered to modify or soften. Somehow this made him seem more formidable: a man whose appearance and accent, taken separately, might lead you to underestimate him, yet together they suggested an intelligence that was keen and uncompromising.

I cleaned my hands with tissues and a bottle of clear solution that smelled of pear drops, watching the woman police officer place the sheet on a ground glass screen under a strong light. She adjusted the focus and start tapping on a keyboard. Numbers flashed up on the monitor of a computer terminal.

Dimelow touched my elbow. I dropped the used tissues into a waste bin. ‘I need to use the toilet.'

He took me along the corridor and waited inside the door while I pretended to relieve myself. What I really needed was time to think. Several random thoughts – niggling, disturbing, confusing – jostled all together in my head. The first was that my fingerprints were all over the room above the shop. I'd even left a bundle of odds and ends, socks, underclothes. But not the diary, thank God. Then I wondered: how did you prove that one person had strangled another – or that he hadn't? There was no weapon to find, no gun or knife, no blunt instrument with blood and matted hair. There would be no fingerprints on the neck either, just bruise marks. Such lack of evidence could clear a person, but it could convict him also, by sheer weight of circumstance. It would be too neat an irony, I thought, and found myself smiling rather bitterly, to be charged with a murder I hadn't committed.

‘Something strike you as funny?' Dimelow asked me as I turned and stepped down, buttoning my jacket. His pale blue eyes bored right through me.

I wiped the smile away. ‘No. Nothing.'

‘Nothing,' he said with a sardonic twist of the lips. ‘You want to watch that. Round here we put people away who laugh at nothing.'

‘What makes you think I had anything to do with the murder of the shopkeeper?'

‘Well,' Dimelow said, opening the door; he reminded me of a salesman, slick in every sense of the word, waiting for a client to pass through, ‘he didn't strangle himself now, did he? Crafty bastards, these Pakis, but not that clever.'

It might have been a deliberate mistake, casually dropped in, hoping that I'd correct him on Mr Patundi's nationality; or it might have been that Dimelow thought that everyone with a brown skin was a Paki.

Inspector Blend looked at his watch. He said to Dimelow: ‘What time are they expecting us?'

‘Anytime after ten-thirty.'

‘It's nearly ten now. How far away is it?'

‘Oh – fifteen minutes. If that.'

‘Right.' He pulled at his fleshy nose and sniffed once or twice. He fiddled with the pen, which seemed child-size in his large hands. The room felt almost cramped with him in it. ‘One or two questions and then we'll get along. I've got a bloody meeting at four,' he grumbled. ‘Divisional re-allocation of resources, which is code for cutbacks. Where have you been staying in Brickton, Peter?'

So this was his method: appearing abstracted, his mind busy elsewhere on more important matters – and then dropping in a question out of the blue. Switching casually to first names so you were kept on the hop, never sure from one minute to the next whether this was an interrogation or just a friendly chat.

‘Different places. Bed and breakfasts.'

‘In town?'

‘Yes.'

There seemed no point at all in dragging Diane Locke into it. And I couldn't be sure that Inspector Blend wasn't a bosom drinking crony of Benson's, and that anything I told Blend wouldn't reach Benson via the Masonic hotline.

‘And living rough by the look of it.' The faded brown eyes watched me. ‘Why hang around if there's no work?'

‘I was going to try the processing station.'

‘What as, apprentice nuclear physicist?'

I didn't smile and neither did he. ‘Somebody told me they took on labourers. I thought I'd have a go. It employs a lot of people in the area.'

‘Loaders, labourers – come off it, Peter, you're no more a manual worker than I am. Or Detective-Sergeant Dimelow. You wouldn't last two days with a shovel in your hand.' He glanced down at the sheet, shaking his heavy head. ‘No settled address, no record of employment, not registered for welfare … and here you are, in Brickton, which isn't on the way to anywhere, where the climate is lousy, the unemployment rate is over twenty per cent, you don't know a living soul in the area … or do you?'

Again the question slipped gently in, an afterthought, of minor consequence. I shook my head.

‘So then?' Blend asked, raising his shaggy eyebrows. ‘Why here, the arse-end of the universe?'

‘I hitched a ride on the motorway and the lorry happened to be coming here. In fact – I remember now – it was the driver who told me they might be looking for loaders.'

‘Was it a B-H Haulage lorry?'

‘No.'

‘Whose was it?'

‘I forget.'

‘Excuse me, sir.' Dimelow tapped his watch.

‘Right. Yes.' Blend flipped the file shut and heaved himself up. He handed the file to Dimelow, who tucked it under his arm and opened the door. Blend went ahead. Dimelow jerked his head brusquely at me. The three of us went downstairs in single file and walked across the car park in bright sunshine to a brand-new dark-blue 3-litre Rover, nothing to identify it as a police vehicle. The sergeant got behind the wheel while I sat in the back with Inspector Blend. In answer to my question Blend said, ‘Just somebody to take a look at you.'

The police station was built on a slight rise, modular cubes of grey concrete and tinted glass on a green contoured backcloth with here
and there clumps of young saplings, positioned as in an artist's impression, but paltry and threadbare, adding to the starkness rather than alleviating it. The town was below us, slate roofs falling crookedly away from the high street, a church steeple, the mock-gothic tower of the town hall, the silted-up harbour just glimpsed beyond: in the hard light the town gave the impression of being exposed and unreal, a place which only felt at ease with itself when clothed in dank sea-mist and sweeping radioactive drizzle. We drove in the opposite direction, towards Granthelme. Inspector Blend yawned once or twice and spent the time turning back and forth over the well-thumbed pages of a fat appointments diary, the overlapping folds of his chin resting on his collar.

I tried to feel outrage, to manufacture it, but I couldn't: how did innocent people behave? I didn't know the lines. Blend and Dimelow had scripts for their performances, they were word-perfect. They need do nothing but watch and wait for the ham actor to miss his cue.

We passed by a high granite wall and swung in through some iron gates. It was a hospital. We entered by the main door and Dimelow inquired at a glass hatch reinforced with steel mesh and was given directions.

A sister in a blue uniform and white starched cap was waiting for us outside the ward. She and Inspector Blend strolled a little way along the corridor, out of my hearing, and spoke for a minute or two. They came back, and I was conscious that she was deliberately avoiding looking at me, as if I were morally unclean, a paedophile or something. Blend nodded to her and she pushed through the double doors into the ward, leaving the three of us outside.

‘Now Mr Holford,' Blend said, looming over me, gazing down into my face, ‘I'd like you to accompany the sergeant into the ward and stand where he tells you to stand. You're to say nothing unless he asks you a direct question. When he's ready he'll touch you on the shoulder and you'll come out. Understand? We'd also like you to cover your hair with something …' He glanced over my shoulder at Dimelow. A signal passed between them. He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Okay?'

‘Yes. All right.'

We went into the ward. It was small, containing eight beds, all of
them masked off by curtains. It was absolutely silent, so that when something metallic clinked in the far corner it had the effect of a gunshot. I had smelled death before, but not like this. This kind of death hung clammily to the skin and seeped into the pores. It was like being in a Turkish bath of putrefaction. Dimelow took my arm and led me forward. Blend had disappeared somewhere. We halted before a curtain. The sister's bare dimpled arm came sexily through the curtain and she slipped out. She handed a round paper hat to Dimelow, pale green, of the disposable type surgeons wear, which he fitted onto my head. It came down to within an inch above my eyebrows.

‘Are we ready, Sister?'

She drew back the curtain. Under the pressure of Dimelow's hand I moved up until I was standing at the bed rail, looking at a hairless knob of bone covered in brown waxpaper with two shiny orbs resembling the glass marbles they use for dolls' eyes. The brown torso was bare to the waist, the breastbone and narrow ribcage almost showing white, like those of a starving African child on TV. There were two ridges in the covers, not much thicker than tent-poles, extending towards the foot of the bed and ending in feet. I hardly recognised it but I knew it was Mr Patundi's sick son.

I remembered his name. Kamal.

Next to his head on the pillow lay a stuffed brown elephant with a curled-up trunk and crinkled ears.

The curtain to my left drifted slightly in what I thought was a draught, even though the room was humid and airless. Then I glimpsed Inspector Blend's weary eye observing the child through a slit, watching for a flicker of expression in those shiny too-brightly staring orbs trapped in the wasting piece of tissue.

For perhaps two minutes I stood motionless under the child's scrutiny. The sister's hand rested lightly on the banked pillows above his head, as if to reinforce her role and duty as protector. She didn't look at me; I was, it seemed, condemned already as the killer of the boy's father.

‘He can hear everything we say?' Dimelow asked the sister. ‘And understand?'

‘Yes, he understands. He knows everything that's going on. His mind's still active.'

‘Did the man you saw in the shop say anything to you?' Dimelow asked the child. ‘Did you hear him speak?'

The tiny brown fists curled up. The boy nodded.

‘Tell him your name, where you were born and the date,' Dimelow said to me.

‘My name is Peter Holford.' I tried to speak normally, though to my ears it sounded stilted and unfamiliar, the voice of a stranger. ‘I was born in Chesterfield on the twenty-fifth of February, 1950.'

‘Read this.' Dimelow took out some papers from his inside pocket, sorted through them and shoved a leaflet into my hand.

‘“For those researching their family tree, all three Collections contain much useful information, including the Census Returns, Parish Registers, Non-Conformist Registers, Directories, Electoral Rolls and many more. A full list of holdings is available for consultation in the Local Studies section.'”

Dimelow plucked the leaflet from my hand. He touched me on the shoulder and we came away. The air in the corridor felt like an icy blast, and I could feel cold trickles of sweat on my cheeks and neck. I wiped my forehead with my handkerchief and found I was still wearing the paper hat. Dimelow crumpled it in his freckled fist.

It was ten minutes before Blend emerged. His face gave nothing away. Whatever Patundi's son had or hadn't told him, whether he was triumphant or dismayed or merely disappointed, there was no trace, nor was his manner towards me any different.

In the car park Blend said, ‘Do you know who that was?'

‘The shopkeeper's son.'

Blend nodded. He glanced sideways at me, his eyes hooded. ‘You assumed that … of course.'

‘Yes. Who else could it be?'

Sergeant Dimelow opened the door for the Inspector.

‘What's the matter with him?' I asked.

‘Leukaemia,' Inspector Blend grunted as he curled himself up to squeeze into the back seat. ‘They say he's got three months, poor little bugger, though he could be dead tomorrow.'

The young constable who had brought me up from the cells set down a tray with tea things and a plate of biscuits. Sergeant Dimelow poured out three cups. He added sugar to his and stood up while he drank it, awkwardly feeding himself a digestive from the hand that held the saucer. He was very careful not to get any crumbs on his suit.

There was a strange mood of cosy unreality in the room. It struck me that they had gathered the evidence, fitted the pieces neatly and satisfyingly together to make a watertight case, and now that the strain of confrontation was over and done with, the shifty game of question and answer ended, they could relax in my presence, as if there was a natural complicity between the accusers and the condemned.

Returning to the police station, Inspector Blend and the sergeant had gone away for half-an-hour. I sat and waited in the interview room, watched over by the young sweet-smelling constable, unable to erase the wasted, withering body and the glassily bright doll's eyes staring out from the knob of bone. A cause of leukaemia in children was exposure to radiation. Were the remaining seven beds in the ward occupied by dying children? The town was a dumping ground for radiocative sludge, Benson and his lucrative haulage contract had seen to that. Schoolchildren were probably taken to the local baths, whose heating costs – thanks to enlightened and prudent civic house-keeping – were virtually nil. Benson had the town sewn up tight. Brickton was his private profit-lode. He had made only one mistake, which he might yet live to regret: by not trusting Russell Rhodes, and scheming that something in addition to money might be necessary to secure his loyalty and silence, Benson had made a tape-recording.