Death of a Cave Dweller (22 page)

“Messing up his marriage? And what exactly do you mean by that?” Mrs Pollard demanded.

“I'm sure you know exactly what I mean, but if you like, I'll spell it out for you. If I was you, I'd give serious thought to gettin' myself a boyfriend closer to my own age.”

The club owner looked shocked. “Is that what you think? That Rick an' me are havin' it off?”

“That's certainly the way it looks from where I'm standin',” the chief inspector told her.

Mrs Pollard shook her head disbelievingly. “You couldn't be more wrong if you tried.”

“So why don't you put me right on the matter?”

For a moment, it looked as if the brassy blonde was about to do just that. Then she shook her head again, even more vigorously this time.

“No,” she said. “I couldn't do that. It just wouldn't be fair.”

“Fair to who?”

“I've said enough,” Mrs Pollard told him. “If truth be told, perhaps I've said too much.”

The Duke of Wellington public house was no more than a stone's throw from the coffee bar where the waitress had seen Eddie Barnes with a young woman, and therefore, Bob Rutter reasoned, it was a pretty good bet as the place to which the young lovers went when they felt like something a little stronger than a cup of cappuccino.

The landlord was a middle-aged man with very short hair and a clipped military moustache. He wore a regimental tie, and when he took the picture of Eddie Barnes over to the window to examine it in better light, he walked as if he were just coming off parade.

The pub he ran reflected the man, and was as neat and orderly as a barrack room awaiting inspection. Rutter got the impression he was the sort of person who would go around rearranging all the beer mats, until their edges were precisely parallel to the bar.

“Maybe,” the landlord said, when he'd closely examined the picture for a full minute and a half.

“Maybe?” Bob Rutter repeated quizzically.

“Well, let me put it like this. If he ever has been in here – and I'm not sayin' he has, mind – then it was only the once.”

“If he's only been in the once, you've got a remarkable memory even to think you recognise him,” Rutter said sceptically.

“It's all part of the trainin' I've had,” the landlord told him. “Both in the army
an'
in the pub business. Besides, I always remember the faces of the people I have to bar. No good barrin' them if you can't recognise them the next time they try to come, is it now?”

Rutter held up the photograph again. “You barred him?” he asked, finding it hard to believe, from the picture he and Woodend had built up of Eddie Barnes, that the dead guitarist could ever have done anything which would have got him thrown out of a public house.

“Well, it wasn't so much him I barred as the girl he was with,” the landlord admitted. “She said she was eighteen – well, she would, wouldn't she? – but she wasn't even close. An' I wasn't goin' to risk my licence for the profit I make on half a pint of shandy.”

Steve Walker, Terry Garner and Billie Simmons sat huddled over their half-pints of bitter at a table in a corner of the Grapes public bar. There was no sign at all of Pete Foster, but then, Woodend thought, it was more than likely that he had gone off in a sulk.

The chief inspector walked over to the Seagulls' table. “I'd like to have a private word with Mr Garner,” he said, in answer to Steve Walker's questioning expression.

“Can't you see that we're havin' a business meetin'?” Walker said aggressively.

“Is that what you call it?” Woodend asked mildly. “Well, I'd still like a word. Course, if he doesn't want to do it now, we can always postpone it till later – down at the local nick.”

“What is this? Has England suddenly turned into some kind of police state?” Walker demanded.

But Terry Garner was already rising to his feet. “It's all right, Steve,” he said. “I don't mind answerin' his questions.”

Woodend led the Seagulls' new guitarist to a table out of earshot of the other members of the group, and signalled the waiter for two pints.

Now that they were sitting opposite each other, Woodend took his first really close look at the young man. He was, the chief inspector guessed, somewhere around twenty, which put him midway, in age, between Steve Walker and the late Eddie Barnes. He had wide, candid eyes, and a few freckles just above his upper lip.

He was the kind of lad, Woodend thought, that he wouldn't have minded his daughter Annie bringing home for Sunday afternoon tea. Wouldn't have minded
too much
, he corrected himself, because no father likes to admit that his darling daughter is finally old enough to be going out with boys.

“So what's all this about?” Terry Garner asked, but without any of the hostility which Steve Walker would probably have displayed if he'd found himself in the same situation.

“Let's just say I'm interested in talkin' to anybody who might have inadvertently strayed into the middle of a murder inquiry,” Woodend told him. “You did stray into it, didn't you? I mean, you weren't in the club the night before Eddie Barnes got electrocuted?”

“No, I wasn't,” Garner said. “I was playin' with a group called Count Dracula an' the Vampires that night. We had a gig at a workin' men's club up in St Helens. We came off stage at closin' time, but we had difficulty startin' the van – well, it is on its last legs – an' the result was that we didn't get back to the 'Pool until after three o'clock in the mornin'.”

“Well, assumin' your alibi checks out . . .”

“It will.”

“. . . then that pretty much puts you in the clear. Why don't you tell me about you an' Steve Walker?”

“Is Steve a suspect?”

“Everybody who was in the club that night is a suspect,” Woodend told him. “But I'm not askin' you to point the finger directly at your mate.”

“Then why . . .?”

“My job is about collectin' details,” Woodend explained. “Most of them turn out to be of no use to me, but I can't know that for sure until I've scooped them all in. An' right now, because you're the closest thing I can find to an expert on Steve Walker, I'd like to know what your impression is of him.”

Terry Garner nodded, as if, now it had been explained to him, it seemed like a reasonable request.

“Where would you like me to begin?” he asked.

And again, Woodend thought how open and straightforward this particular young man seemed to be.

“Why don't you start with the first time that you met him?” he suggested.

“That would be when we were at school. Steve was the feller everybody else wanted to be like. You could tell that he wasn't gettin' properly looked after at home – his buttons were always hangin' on his blazer by a thread – but somehow he acted as if that didn't matter. He was so
cool
. Everythin' about him – the way he walked, the way he brushed his hair – was calculated to make an impression. You could see what he was doin' – it was as plain as the nose on your face – yet somehow you still couldn't help bein' impressed. Even the teachers were affected by it. Steve could be a right bugger in class sometimes, but I don't reckon he got caned half as much as the rest of us did.”

“An' you were a big mate of his?”

“I would have liked to be,” Garner confessed, “but I was never any more than a reserve-team mate – somebody to hang around with when Eddie Barnes was off school with the 'flu. But even that was considered somethin' of a privilege, an' other kids sucked up to me like mad, because they thought that was a way of getting closer to Steve.”

“What about the other side of his nature?” Woodend asked. “The violent side?”

“You have to understand how that comes about,” Garner said. “Steve likes to be the centre of attention –
needs
to be the centre of attention, I suppose. Most of the time he can get what he wants through words or his music, but when that fails he's quite prepared to make a scene, an', yes, there've been times when that's ended up in a fight.”

“You're a very bright young man,” Woodend said admiringly.

“I know that,” Garner replied, without bravado. “If me mam an' dad could have afforded to let me stay on at school until I was eighteen, I might have ended up at university. As it is, I scrape by on what I can earn from doin' odd jobs, an' what I make playin' in groups.”

“Do you still live with your parents?” Woodend asked.

“No, they emigrated to New Zealand a couple of years back. They asked me to go with them, but I didn't want to. I've got my own bedsit now. It's a bit pokey, but I get by.”

“An' what about the future? You'd like to be a professional musician, I expect.”

Terry Garner nodded. “If I can get my playin' up to the standard of the others, I would.”

“So given that everybody seems to think they'll be goin' places, joinin' the Seagulls was a real opportunity for you?”

“I'll not deny it.”

Woodend took a sip of his pint. “Yet from the way you were talkin' earlier, I got the distinct impression that you think you've stepped into a very dangerous situation.”

“Eddie Barnes was the Seagulls' lead guitarist, an' now I am,” Terry Garner said. “An' the only reason I got the job is because Eddie's dead.”

“Steppin' into dead men's shoes is the only reason a lot of us get jobs,” Woodend pointed out.

“I'm sure that somebody followed me home yesterday,” Terry said in a sudden burst.

“Who?”

“I don't know,” the young guitarist admitted. “I didn't see him. But I could feel his eyes on me. I could feel the look of . . . the look of . . .”

“Hatred?” Woodend suggested.

“No, it wasn't as intense as that. It was more like annoyance. It's hard to explain.”

“I think you're doin' rather well,” Woodend told him.

“It's like when you see a fly
buzzin' around the larder window,” Garner said.
“You're annoyed because you know you're
goin' to have to do somethin' about it. I mean,
there's nothin' personal in it, but you're still
goin' to have to swat that little bugger before he lands on
the meat. That's how I feel – like a fly that's
goin' to have to be swatted before he does any
damage.”

I
t was late afternoon, and the sun, which had been smiling down benevolently on the city for most of the day, was covered with thick grey cloud.

Steve Walker shivered – but it had nothing to do with the fall in temperature. He had been standing on the street corner, watching the terraced house with the royal-blue front door, for over half an hour.

He knew he must stick out like a sore thumb – the strange looks he'd been given by passers-by had made that plain enough to him – but there was no help for it. He was there on a mission, and he was determined to stick with that mission to the bitter end.

He glanced quickly up the street, then returned his gaze to the blue front door. The father of the house was out at work, the son was still boozing with his mates in the Grapes the last time that Steve had seen him, but the mother – the bloody buggering mother! – was still inside the house and seemed to have no interest at all in coming out.

Didn't she need to go out to the shops? Steve asked himself. Weren't there any neighbours who she felt like dropping in on, for a cup of a tea and a mid-afternoon gossip?

Apparently not. In the time he'd been standing there, he'd seen her polishing the furniture in the front room and cleaning the upstairs sash window – two things his own mother would never have thought of doing. How he wished that this woman were more like his own mother now. How he wished she would feel the craving for a drink, and raid her son's piggy bank in order to obtain the price of a bottle of milk stout and a whisky chaser.

“Is there anythin' I can do to help you, son?” asked a voice immediately to his left.

He turned to see a grey-haired man in a three-quarter-length khaki coat standing there. Sod it!

“Are you deaf or summat?” the man said impatiently. “I asked if you needed any help.”

“No thanks very much.”

The grey-haired man frowned. “The thing is, you see, I've got the shop across the road,” he said, indicating towards the corner grocery store with his right thumb. “I've got a good view of the street from there, an' I couldn't help noticin' that you've been hangin' around here for quite some time.”

Why don't you mind your own business, you nosy old bastard? Steve Walker thought.

But aloud he merely said, “You're right. I have been here for a while. I'm waitin' for somebody.”

The grocer's frown deepened, and suspicion clouded his eyes as much as the dark shapes overhead had clouded the sun.

“Somebody local?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well, as it happens I know most of the people who live around here,” the shop keeper said, “an' I'd feel a lot happier in my own mind if you'd tell me who exactly it is that you're waitin' for?”

There was nothing for it but to be at least half-way honest. “Mike Finn,” Steve Walker said. “I'm waitin' for Mike Finn. He promised to meet me here on the corner half an hour ago.” He gave the shop keeper what he hoped looked like a rueful grin. “But you know what Mike's like. I mean, reliability's hardly his middle name, now is it?”

“He's probably just about as reliable as the rest of you kids – which means not at all,” the grocer said, but the answer seemed to have satisfied him and he turned and crossed the road back to his shop.

The grey-haired man would remember the encounter later, Steve thought, and when it came to a police line-up he'd have no difficulty at all in picking out the lad he'd seen loitering on the corner. But that didn't really matter. Nothing in the future really mattered. The only thing which was important was for the bloody woman to come out of the bloody house and give him a chance to get inside!