Deadly Friends (15 page)

‘Gather round, boys and girls,’ I called out.

There were three of them, Graham’s partner – Claire – still being at the hospital. When I was a rooky PC on nightshift my partner was David Sparkington. Such is life.

‘I appreciate it’s Saturday and you should all be home in bed,’ I said, ‘but are you all right for staying a little longer?’

They nodded.

‘Good. I want to widen the enquiry. First of all, though, let’s have a think about Darryl’s movements.’ I told them about Samantha and gave a brief résumé of what we presumed had happened.

‘If he was wearing gloves,’ I went on, ‘It’s imperative that we find them. Let’s suppose that he did go round to Samantha’s and did beat her up. How did he get there?’

‘Taxi?’ one of them suggested.

‘It looks like it. So he does the deed. How does he get back here?’

‘Another taxi?’

‘How do you get a taxi in Sylvan Fields at eleven o’clock at night?’

‘Ring on your mobile. He sounds the mobile type.’

‘Very good,’ I said. ‘He rings for a taxi on his mobile. Meanwhile what does he do? Wait at Samantha’s? Or sit under a street lamp?’

‘Start walking?’

‘What do you think?’

They all agreed that he’d start walking home, looking out for the taxi coming to collect him.

‘Right,’ I agreed. ‘And I reckon he’d walk downhill towards the town centre. And maybe he got rid of the gloves on the way. I’ll organise some more help. When it arrives, start looking for the gloves along the route he might have taken. I’ll have a word with the taxi firms. Meanwhile, there’s something else, but it’s off the record.’

I told them about the rape, and asked them to make a note of anything that gave a clue towards his sexual inclinations. It wouldn’t be admissible as evidence, but these days nothing is if it incriminates the accused.

Mr Turner didn’t look pleased when I passed him in the foyer of the nick, waiting to be taken to his client. Nigel was in the office, brewing up.

‘You’re early,’ I told him.

‘Eager,’ he replied.

‘I think I’ll let you talk to Buxton,’ I said. ‘Keep the enquiries separate. Otherwise they might just assume that I’m pursuing a vendetta against him and not take it seriously.’

‘That might not be a bad thing,’ Nigel suggested.

‘Mmm, perhaps. Thing is, I’m not so sure myself.
Samantha was scared when I mentioned his name, but that’s hardly evidence. No, you do it.’

We gave Mr Turner twenty minutes with his client before Nigel went down to record an interview. I rang Mr Wood at home to let him know what was happening in his nick and arranged for another crew to assist in the search for the gloves. Then I had a bacon sandwich in the canteen and walked into town to buy another shirt from M and S’s Casual but Smart range.

Turner’s car had gone when I arrived back, and Nigel was in my office, reading the contents of my
in-tray
. He slid a report about the effects of police radios on officers’ hearing back on to the pile and pushed a cassette across the table.

‘According to that you’ll be deaf as a post before you’re fifty,’ I said, nodding towards the report.

‘You’ve seen a ghost behaving shifty?’ he replied. For Nigel, it wasn’t bad.

‘Is this it?’ I asked, holding up the tape.

‘For what it’s worth. He was at the Wool Exchange until about nine, nine fifteen, with a party of managers from Homes R Us …’

‘Homes 4U,’ I interrupted.

‘Sorry, Homes 4U. It was their Christmas gathering. Claims he has a foolproof witness.’

‘Ta da! Me. Go on.’

‘They had a few more bevvies in the pub over the road and dispersed. One of his fellow high-flyers offered him a lift home but he asked to be dropped off at the
Sylvan Fields. He walked the last bit, to Samantha’s.’

‘So he admits being there.’

‘Mmm, but he didn’t see her. He said the place was in darkness, so he knocked once, he says, very softly, and then he realised it was a bit late and went home.’

‘Realised it was a bit late! Him? He won’t realise it’s a bit late until Old Nick’s handing him a shovel and pointing at the pile of coal. How did he get home?’

‘Walked towards the town centre and stopped a taxi.’

‘That’s more-or-less how we’d guessed it. So if we find anyone who saw him near Samantha’s he has a ready-made excuse.’

‘Quite.’

‘What was his manner?’

‘Cocky as you can be with a hangover. Turner had to pull him into line once or twice.’

‘What about?’

‘Oh, he started slagging you off.’

‘I bet. Was Turner his usual obstructionist self?’

‘He wasn’t too bad. I don’t think he was pleased about having to come over. How long are you keeping Darryl?’

‘Is the custody sergeant grumbling?’

‘He’s pulling faces.’

‘We’ll let him stew a bit longer, see if anything turns up. We need to check his story with the bloke who gave him a lift – I’ll leave that with you. Thanks for doing it, Nigel, I’ll have a listen to the tape later.’

My phone rang while I was finding an envelope for the tape. Nigel answered it. ‘Yes, he’s here,’ he said. ‘Good, good. I’ll tell him.’ He lowered the mouthpiece and said: ‘They’ve found the gloves.’

They were floating among the reeds at the edge of the canal. They’d been thrown off a bridge and landed in the water. I had them rushed straight to City HQ so the SOCOs could examine them, but it looked as if Darryl’s luck was still holding.

Nigel went straight home but I stopped for a shoppers’ special at the Indian restaurant on the way. As I drove into my street I saw an elderly Austin Montego sitting on a neighbour’s drive. It was the best news of the week. Mrs Tait is the lady who normally irons my shirts for me. She’d visited her daughter for the holiday period, and now she was back. I hooked a bundle of coathangers over my fingers and thumbs, stuck the box of Black Magic under an arm and went to say how much we’d all missed her.

It’s not normally done, but I’d taken the tape of Nigel’s interview of Buxton home with me. His brief, Mr Turner, had a copy, so there was no question of tampering with it. When I came back from Mrs Tait’s I slid the cassette into the player, turned the volume up and put the kettle on. I brought my tea and the biscuit box into the front room and thumbed the TV remote control. There were a few seconds’ bedlam until I found the right button and wound the TV sound to zero. The choices were: horses running from right to left; a black
and white Gregory Peck film; horses running from left to right or various soccer pundits talking about Manchester United’s match that kicked off in an hour. I zapped them all to oblivion.

Nigel was saying: ‘You were drunk, weren’t you?’

‘Yeah, I’d ’ad a few,’ Darryl admitted.

‘So you thought you’d go round to Samantha’s for your legover, eh?’

‘No, it weren’t like that.’

‘Were you in a sexual relationship with her?’

‘What if I was?’

‘So you said goodnight to your cronies and got one of them to drop you off near her house. Did you tell them that you had it laid on? Did you tell them, Darryl, that your secretary was waiting for you to go round and give her a good seeing-to? Is that your style? Is it?’

‘No, you’ve got me wrong.’

‘And what happened when you got there?’

‘I told you. She wasn’t in, or she was in bed. I realised it was late and started walking ‘ome.’

‘I think she was in, Darryl. I think she said: “You’re not coming in here in that state. You’re not going out enjoying yourself without me on a Friday night and getting pissed and thinking you can come round here for a bit of the other any time you want.” Isn’t that more like what happened, Darryl?’

Turner said: ‘Sergeant, my client has made it perfectly clear to you that he did not speak to Miss Teague on the night in question.’

‘So you lost your rag,’ Nigel went on. ‘You gave her a good hiding. You don’t like it when someone turns you down, do you, Darryl?’

‘I really think that’s enough,’ Turner said. ‘My client is perfectly willing to answer questions but I cannot allow you to harangue him in this way.’

I went through into the kitchen and listened to the rest of it while I washed up. The state of Buxton’s flat had strengthened my resolve to be tidier.

The SOCO was watching the football match on a little portable when I walked into his office in City HQ. ‘Who’s winning?’ I asked.

‘They are, two-nil,’ he replied, switching it off. He ambled over to a lab table under the window and retrieved a plastic bag containing a pair of brown leather gloves. Handing them to me, he said: ‘Men’s, large size, relatively new. Lining worn and leather stretched near base of right index finger, suggesting they have been worn over a large ring. Sadly, they’d been lying in shallow water for several hours and it rained quite heavily through the night. That would be about the equivalent of a colourfast cotton cycle in a washing machine. I’ve dried them out very carefully and sprayed them with reagent, but there’s no trace of blood. We’ve taken fibre samples from inside, which don’t mean anything at the moment, and scrapings from the outside.’

Nigel hadn’t asked Buxton about the gloves because he hadn’t known about them. If they were his, we needed forensic evidence to link Samantha to them.
If he said they weren’t his, we’d then need our brainy friends to link him to the gloves.

‘And the dinner jacket and shirt?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘Sorry. I’ll keep looking, but what marks I’ve found are probably ketchup and gravy stains.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said, disappointed. ‘Thanks for staying over. Can I take these?’ I held up the gloves.

‘We’ve done all we can,’ the SOCO replied. ‘I’ll send the samples to Weatherton for microscopic examination.’

‘Right, cheers.’ Their electron microscope can see the fluff in a virus’s navel, and make individual blood cells look as big as dustbin lids.

As soon as I walked into Heckley nick the duty sergeant collared me. ‘Your prisoner’s grumbling,’ he said, ‘and his solicitor gave us hell before he left.’

‘Give me ten minutes,’ I replied, ‘then we’ll let him go.’

I ran upstairs and read the reports about the search of his flat. They’d found a few porn magazines but nothing you wouldn’t find at most all-male establishments. Tearing out and saving the page three girls was peculiar, and the pair of combat knives told us a lot about the man. Tucked in the back of a drawer they’d found an armband with a swastika on it.

‘Gimme the keys,’ I said to the custody sergeant when I went back downstairs, ‘and lock up your wimminfolk. Let’s get him off the premises.’

He was sitting on the bunk with his head in his hands, looking up as I raised the flap in the door.

‘God, you look rough,’ I told him.

‘What do you fuckin’ expect?’ he snapped back at me.

‘Are these your gloves?’ I asked when I was inside. I took them from the plastic bag and threw them towards him. He caught one and the other fell to the floor.

‘Never seen ’em before,’ he said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive.’

‘Try them on for size.’

He opened the neck of the glove he’d caught and started to push his fingers into it.

‘Oh no!’ he declared, and hurled the glove back at me. ‘I’m not trying it on. You’re not fuckin’ fitting me up like that.’

‘Please yourself,’ I told him. ‘C’mon, you can go.’

We signed him out and returned his property. I didn’t offer him a lift home.

There wasn’t enough daylight left to do anything in the garden, which was all the excuse I needed. I had a shave and shower and settled in my favourite chair, inevitable mug of tea nearby. It grew dark around me. It’s a time I usually enjoy, the gathering gloom emphasising the silence, the shadows, the womb-like comfort.

Trouble was, I had too much on my mind. For a start, I was hungry, but didn’t feel like cooking. Then there was Darryl. We’d get him, one day, but how many more people would he hurt before we did? And
on Monday it was back to the murder hunt. Somebody was out there who put a gun to the head of a highly respected doctor and blew him to kingdom come. But most of all, more than all these, was my little problem with Annabelle and Zorba the Greek.

The meal at the Wool Exchange had been a disaster. Our relationship was a long catalogue of broken dates, late arrivals and hurried meals. I tried to involve her in the job, but there’s a limit to how far you can do that. I could retire in less than two years, but wasn’t sure if I could hold on to her that long. I put the light on and found my book of telephone numbers.

Eric Dobson used to be a motorcycle policeman. He retired early and started his own business, Merlin Couriers. I designed his logo and painted his first van. We’ve kept in touch. I rang the office first but he didn’t answer. If he had, I’d probably have hung up. I didn’t want a job that would require me at five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. He was at home.

‘Hello, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Ringing up for a job?’

‘Yes,’ I told him.

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously.’

‘Why? What have you done?’

There is a general expectancy among people who know me that one day I’ll ‘do something’. ‘Nothing,’ I told him. ‘I’m just sick of it. If I leave, what’s the chances of finding a simple and undemanding occupation to tide me over?’

‘Not with us five minutes and already you’re after my job,’ he replied in a mock Jewish accent. ‘What are you like on a six-fifty Kawasaki?’

‘Cold and scared.’

‘It’ll have to be the Transit then. Is this a firm enquiry or just speculation, Charlie? You haven’t been caught with the Chief Constable’s wife, have you?’

‘Have you seen her? He’d probably recommend me for a QPM. I might set the wheels in motion, see if they can do without me. I don’t mind the job, but it’s mucking up my personal life, and at my age …’

‘Tell me about it. We could always fit you in, Charlie. Fact is, if you wanted to invest some money, we could expand a little. What I need is a depot on the outskirts of London. I could treble my business overnight if there was someone down there I could trust. You’d be just the man. How about that, then? Five minutes ago you were staring at unemployment, and now you’re a partner in a thriving courier business. Can’t be bad.’