Bricks and Mortality: Campbell & Carter 3 (33 page)

But city rats, they were another matter. Gaz was, in Alfie’s judgement, a city rat and he, Alfie, was about to corner him. No wonder he was nervous.

He stood at the entry to the garage and peered into the dim interior. There was an old Volkswagen Beetle, stripped of its wheels and propped up on blocks, but he couldn’t see anyone working at it. He moved cautiously into the gloom and as his eyes adjusted was able to see more clearly. Gaz was there, in his office, his head visible through the glass. He was talking on a mobile phone. Alfie waited until he’d finished before making his approach.

He had not seen the dog. The first he’d known of it was a low menacing growl over to his left. He froze in his steps and turned his head in the direction of the sound. Something stirred in the shadows. He could smell it now, a rank smell of an animal kept out of doors. It had scrambled to its feet from an improvised bed made, incongruously, of an old satin quilt thrown on the floor. It was of mixed breed, mostly of pit bull type, and its brindle coat had camouflaged it well against the wall. Alfie was relieved to see it was chained up; and his first reaction to that was to calculate how long the chain was, and whether he could reach the door of Gaz’s office without moving into the dog’s orbit.

‘Hello, old chap,’ he said placatingly. ‘It’s all right.’

As he had caught the dog’s scent, so the dog had caught Alfie’s. It hesitated. Alfie, too, had the smell of something that roamed outdoors in the wild. The dog was unsure for a moment or two. It didn’t know quite how to place the intruder.

‘I’ve come to see your boss,’ Alfie informed the dog in as cheerful a tone as he could muster. He didn’t smile because a suspicious dog could misinterpret a show of teeth. He didn’t hold its eye, which would be a challenge, but allowed his gaze to wander vaguely around it without ever losing sight of it completely. He didn’t move. He knew better than that. As long as he stayed absolutely still, the dog would remain uncertain. If he turned to flee, it would leap at him immediately. It might be chained, but the chain was fairly long. More than likely it would grab Alfie, if only by his jeans’ leg, at best to cause him to stumble before the material ripped; in the worst-case scenario to bring him down. If that were to happen it would maul him and even if Gaz heard and came to the rescue – and Alfie couldn’t be sure about that – he would be at least horribly scarred, possibly have whole chunks of his ears or face torn off.

But he couldn’t just stand here. He was in the same situation here as he’d been in his dream, vis-à-vis the rat. He couldn’t move but that meant he couldn’t retreat.

The dog moved. It padded up to him. Alfie held his breath. The dog sniffed at him. Then it sat down on its haunches and waited. Stand-off.

But Gaz had observed the situation from within his glass-panelled office. He’d finished his mobile call. He opened the door of his sanctum and called out sharply, ‘OK, Oscar! Stay!’

Then he turned to Alfie and asked curtly, ‘What do you want?’

‘Can I come in?’ asked Alfie. Inside the office the dog wouldn’t be able to reach him. It had settled down in response to its owner’s order, but it still watched him with its evil little bronze-coloured eyes.

‘Scared of the dog?’ asked Gaz with an unlovely grin.

‘Yes,’ confessed Alfie.

Gaz assessed him. ‘You done the right thing, anyway,’ he said suddenly. ‘If you’d done the wrong thing, Oscar would’ve had you by now.’

‘He’s a great dog,’ said Alfie. Dog-owners, whoever they were, liked people to admire their pets. ‘He’s – er – in good nick.’

‘Yeah …’ agreed Gaz in suddenly sentimental tone. ‘He’s a good old brute. I brought him in because of the rats. He caught several of the blighters. The rest can smell him and they’ve cleared out for a while. They’ll come back, like they always do. But not while Oscar’s here. OK, come on in, then.’

With relief, Alfie entered the office and Gaz closed the door. Sanctuary. Except, of course, that in here Alfie was closeted with another type of beast of uncertain temperament. The expression ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ did not occur to him, but it would have described his situation well. Moreover, when he left, no matter how, he’d have to pass by Oscar again.

‘Well?’ asked Gaz impatiently. ‘I’m a busy man. Get on with it.’

‘It’s about my – it’s about the money for the car I brought in.’

‘You little toad!’ said Gaz, in a blaze of anger that made Alfie cower back. ‘That motor wasn’t just hot; that motor is part of a murder inquiry.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ whimpered Alfie.

‘Yeah, well, the raid went belly-up and now it’s tied into a murder investigation and half the cops in the county are on it. They found the car, knew it for the murdered bloke’s, and if that wasn’t enough, the next thing to go wrong was they picked up the wheelman. I don’t know who fingered him …’

‘Not me!’ yelped Alfie. ‘I don’t even know who he is! I didn’t know what you wanted the car for. It was just a little bit of business for me.’

‘Yeah, well, now we’re all lying low – except you, you dead-brain. If you had any sense, what you haven’t, you’d be keeping away from here. You’d be keeping away from
me
!’ Gaz glowered at him. ‘I oughta let Oscar have you.’

‘Gaz, I’m really sorry if what you needed the car for didn’t turn out. But I’m skint and you did say …’

‘That was before everything went wrong, wasn’t it?’ Gaz accompanied the interruption with a wave of his hand. ‘I can’t pay you yet. You’ll be flashing the cash around and attracting attention.’

‘I
won’t
, Gaz, I promise!’ Alfie wailed.

‘Yes, you bleedin’ will! You come back in a couple of months’ time.’

‘Months!’ howled Alfie. His anguished tone penetrated the glass screen and, outside, Oscar sat up and let out a single sharp bark. ‘I’m stony-broke, Gaz. I gotta live with my mum out at Weston because I can’t afford to move out anywhere else and the council won’t help me find a place. It’s not like I had a girlfriend and kids …’

‘Spare me the sob story. All right.’ Gaz moved a hand towards his lapel and Alfie’s hopes soared. But the move suddenly changed direction and gathered momentum. Gaz’s fist smashed into Alfie’s nose and he was pitched backwards on to the floor to land in a sitting position with his back against the door. Warm salty liquid trickled down his cheek and into his mouth: blood.

On the other side of the fragile panel of thin wood, Oscar went into action. He leaped at the door like a battering ram, chain clanking. It shuddered beneath his weight. His hoarse breath sounded terrifying close to Alife’s ear. His violence threatened to demolish the obstacle and gain him entry.

Alfie put a hand to his face and it came away coated in his blood. ‘Whad did you do thad for?’ he managed to say. ‘You broge my dose …’

‘I’ll do more than break your nose. I’ll break your bloody legs!’ Gaz stooped over him and Alfie cowered back. On the other side of the door, Oscar gave vent to his frustration at not being able to reach his quarry by giving a howl that would not have disgraced the hound of the Baskervilles. ‘Now then, I’ll let you out of here and you go back to that dump of a village and your mum. In two months’ time you come back, right? Just like I said. And if –
if
, mind you! If everything’s quietened down and the cops aren’t sniffing around here, I’ll pay you a hundred quid.’

‘A hundred?’ Alfie gasped. He didn’t know whether to be grateful at the offer or appalled at the thought that a car in such good condition was going to be worth so little to him.

‘Don’t like the sound of a hundred?’ enquired Gaz.

‘Well, I did think it was worth—’ Alfie was unwise enough to begin.

‘Worth
less
? You’re right. OK, when you come back, I’ll give you seventy quid.’

Alfie got the message. He scrambled to his feet. ‘You gonna call that dog off first?’ he asked sulkily. He had no handkerchief and was dabbing his sleeve at his smashed nose.

‘I’ll call him off.’ Gaz surveyed Alfie and possibly the youngster’s abject misery suggested some humane gesture. Gaz was not a charitable man, but he did pick up a soiled rag and offer it to his victim. Alfie accepted it.

Gaz opened the door and spoke once more to the dog, ordering it to stay. Alfie hurried past Oscar whose battle-scarred face expressed as much disappointment as a dog’s face could. His bronze eyes promised Alfie, ‘Next time!’

Alfie made his way home, the rag pressed to his face. Passers-by avoided him. Only one elderly woman enquired if he needed help. But after he’d sworn roundly at her, she waved her umbrella threateningly at him and told him he was a disgrace.

The bus service to Weston St Ambrose was notional. A bus made the round trip there, through several other smaller places, twice a day. Alfie had to huddle in a corner of the bus shelter until it came. It had begun to rain. He was hungry, wet, frightened, disappointed and in pain. The driver didn’t want to let him on at first. ‘I live at Weston!’ protested Alfie. ‘How am I going to get home? I’ve had an accident.’

‘You’ll bleed all over the seats,’ said the driver unsympathetically.

‘For Pete’s sake, Darren, you know me!’ Alfie pleaded. ‘And I’m not bleeding much now. It’s stopped.’

‘Yeah, I know you. I let you on my bus one time when you’d had a skinful and you threw up all over the floor. It stank the place out, even after the cleaners got in, for a week.’

‘I’m not drunk, Darren, I had a fall.’

Clearly Darren didn’t believe that, but he did allow him on the bus at last, with instructions to sit right at the back. All the other passengers squeezed themselves into the front seats.

His mother was not at home when he let himself into the house. He had no idea when she might return. It could be late, or even the next day. When he was a school kid she’d done the same. He’d come home in the late afternoon and there would be no one there. Occasionally, if she remembered, she’d leave a note and something in the fridge for his tea. More often than not, there had been no note and no food. He would scavenge around for anything to eat: biscuits, cornflakes if there was any milk or even eaten in dry handfuls, peanuts. Once he’d retrieved some dry old bread from the back garden, thrown out for the birds.

When she eventually reappeared she would atone by bringing home fish and chips or pizza, hamburgers and cola, and he’d gorge himself. She had not been so much a neglectful mother as an absent-minded one. When she’d been enjoying herself, wherever she was, she’d simply forgotten about him. But she’d never turned him away, not after he’d started getting into trouble, nor after the police started turning up regularly at the house to look for him, or started searching the place for his hidden stash of grass or other drugs. ‘It’s your home, ain’t it?’ she’d said once.

Now he was glad of her absence. He went upstairs, pulled off his bloodstained upper clothing and stowed it in a supermarket carrier bag to be disposed of later. Then he ran the taps in the washbasin and sluiced away the blood. He peered into the mirror and groaned. His nose had swollen to clown-like proportions and appeared to veer to one side. His upper lip was split. He waggled a front tooth. It was loose.

Behind him, the bathroom door swung open. Against the noise of running water he’d not heard her return.

‘Now what have you done, you stupid little bugger?’ she asked in maternal concern. ‘And don’t think I’m going to clean that washbasin after you. Look at the mess!’

Jess came into the interview room where Muriel sat facing Carter across the table and Phil Morton lurked in the background. Carter looked up and raised his eyebrows in question. Jess nodded.

For the benefit of the tape recorder, Carter said, ‘Inspector Campbell has just come into the room.’

Jess took a seat beside him. ‘Miss Pickering,’ she said, ‘the implement called a priest that I removed from your garden shed has been sent to the forensics laboratory.’

‘Do what you like with it!’ Muriel shrugged and gazed past her towards Morton, stationed by the opposite wall. ‘I recognise you,’ she informed him. ‘You’re the policeman who first came to talk to me at Mullions.’

‘Miss Pickering has indicated Sergeant Morton,’ said Carter to the tape recorder.

This had the effect of attracting Muriel’s attention to the recorder. ‘It’s like a person,’ she mused, ‘just sitting there, listening to us.’

‘Would you like to tell us about the fire at Key House?’ Carter invited.

‘Fire?’ Muriel was still staring thoughtfully at the tape recorder.

Carter glanced briefly at Jess. It had been obvious, during the journey here from Ivy Lodge, where a protesting Hamlet had been left with Poppy Trenton, that Muriel’s previous loquaciousness was giving way to an introspective taciturnity. Was she now going to refuse to admit to anything? Perhaps it had been a tactical mistake to stop off at the Trentons’. Roger, thank goodness, hadn’t been there, but Poppy had been so dismayed at the situation and Hamlet made such desperate efforts to follow his mistress that it was possible the reality of what she faced had come home to Muriel for the first time.

‘Miss Pickering,’ she asked, ‘did you set fire to Key House?’

Muriel stopped studying the tape recorder to look at her. ‘The problem with you people,’ she said, ‘is that you go about things in the wrong order. You always want to know what happened last, when you haven’t heard what happened first. How can you understand what happened later, if you don’t know what happened before?’

‘You’ve told us what happened before,’ Carter pointed out. ‘You told us about the drunk-driving incident involving Gervase Crown, as a result of which your dog, Warwick, died.’

‘You also mentioned the later accident in which Petra Stapleton was badly injured,’ Jess added. ‘You said you felt a moral responsibility for that. Would you like to go on from there?’

‘All right,’ said Muriel, amenable now that things were progressing in what she felt was the right order. ‘After that second accident, when that poor young girl’s life was ruined, Gervase went to jail. He didn’t go for nearly long enough in my book; they let him out halfway through his sentence. Sebastian took it badly. His precious family name was damaged and, with it, his social standing in the community. That meant a lot to him. He didn’t like other chaps at the golf club looking embarrassed when he hove into view. He even gave up playing for a while; Poppy told me that. He’d also been put under an obligation to me and that must really have bugged him. He didn’t trust me to keep my side of the bargain. I wouldn’t have welched, mind you. I’d given him my word and I’d have kept it. He’d lost his wife (through his own fault, mind you!). Now, in a sense, he’d lost his son. One would have felt sorry for anyone else in his situation. But I didn’t feel sorry for him because he carried the major share of the responsibility. He’d brought every darn thing on himself. He shouldn’t have kept buying Gervase those fast cars. Then Sebastian upped and died while Gervase was still doing time. He had a heart attack. You’ll have to ask Trenton if you want the detailed description of that.’