Death of a Cave Dweller (23 page)

The interview room was painted institutional chocolate brown up to about waist height, and in a kind of muddy cream from there up to the ceiling. The battered wooden chairs squeaked with even the slightest movement, as in almost every other interview room Woodend had ever used, and the chief inspector found himself wondering if there was a special factory which produced them with just that intention.

The man sitting opposite him didn't appear to wondering about anything. All his energy was channelled into an expression of defiance which already filled his entire face and still seemed to be looking for space to expand.

“Mrs Pollard asked me to come an' see you,” Woodend said.

“So what?”

“I think she's worried about you.”

“I've told the other flatfeet, and now I'm tellin' you – I didn't beat up Jack Towers, an' I didn't kill Eddie Barnes,” Rick Johnson replied, as if the chief inspector had never spoken.

“If that's true, why won't you tell us how you got that black eye?” Woodend asked.

“Because it's none of your bloody business.”

Woodend shook his head, almost sadly. “Inspector Hopgood wants to pin somethin' –
anythin'
– on you. He has to do that, you see. Otherwise he'll end up lookin' like a right bloody idiot for arrestin' you in the first place. Now I can probably talk him out of bringin' any charges, but before that, you've got to play your part by tellin' me what happened to you.”

“I've said all I'm goin' to say,” Johnson told him, folding his arms across his chest.

“Do you have any idea of just how upset Mrs Pollard is about you bein' in police custody?” Woodend asked.

“You leave her out of it!” Johnson shouted.

“Touchy on the subject of Mrs Pollard, aren't you. An' you know somethin' else? She's touchy on the subject of you, an' all. Strange that, isn't it, considerin' that all you are to her is an employee?”

“You're a bloody bastard!” Johnson said vehemently.

“I've been called worse things in my time,” Woodend replied. He stood up. “Much worse – an' by experts. If you decide to behave sensibly, Mr Johnson, just tell the custody sergeant you'd like to see me again.”

He opened the door and stepped out into the corridor. Two men were standing there, just as they had been when he'd started the interview with Johnson. One of them was a uniformed constable, the other a decidedly frosty Inspector Hopgood.

“You've finished with him, have you . . . sir?” Hopgood asked.

“That's right,” Woodend agreed.

Hopgood turned to the constable. “Go and keep the toe-rag company until
I
can find the time to talk to him,” he said.

The constable entered the interview room. Hopgood waited until the door was closed behind him, then said, “I don't suppose you had any luck with Johnson, did you . . . sir?”

“If you find it such a strain to keep callin' me ‘sir', then drop the bloody title altogether,” Woodend said.

The expression on Hopgood's face said he thought he'd probably gone too far. “Sorry, sir,” he said.

“An' in answer to your question,” Woodend continued, “no, I didn't have any luck with Johnson.”

A triumphant sneer replaced the look of mild apprehension on Hopgood's face.

“With respect, sir, the trouble with bobbies like you – bobbies who've left the sharp edge of policing very far behind them – is that you forget what things are like in the real world,” he said. “You'll get nothing out of a hard case like Johnson by holding his hand, and offering him a cup of tea. Firmness is the only language his kind understand.”

It would serve him right if he was left to stew in his own juice, Woodend thought, but when all was said and done, the man was a colleague, and it was perhaps worth making one more effort to show him the error of his ways.

“Why don't you let Johnson go?” he suggested. “You'll never be able to pin the attack on Jack Towers on him, even if he did it – an' I'm almost sure that he didn't.”

“He'll crack,” Hopgood said stubbornly. “Sooner or later, he'll crack. They all do. And now, if you don't have any more business here, sir, I'll escort you to the door.”

They walked in chilly silence down the long corridor which led to the lobby. From beyond the door at the end of the corridor there was suddenly the sound of loud voices. Inspector Hopgood tut-tutted disapprovingly, but seemed in no particular hurry to find out what was going on.

They entered the lobby and saw the cause of the disturbance for themselves. Two uniformed constables were struggling to restrain a man in a smart blue suit who seemed to be on the verge of hysteria.

“This is outrageous!” the man screamed, as he fought to free himself from the policemen's grip. “I'm not some kind of common criminal! I'm a physician, for God's sake!”

“I don't give a toss what you do for a livin', sunshine,” one of the constables grunted as he twisted the prisoner's arm firmly behind his back. “You've been arrested an' charged, all in accordance with the law, an' you'd save us all a lot of trouble if you'd come quietly.”

Suddenly, the prisoner stopped resisting – perhaps because he finally realised how undignified he must look, perhaps because he saw the pointlessness of struggling any longer. The two officers, still keeping a firm grip, led him, unprotesting, towards the custody cells.

“He really is a doctor, you know,” Woodend said. “His name's Atkinson, an' he works at the University Hospital. You probably saw him yourself. Last night. When you went to the hospital without rememberin' to ring me first.”

“We get all sorts in here,” Hopgood replied, indifferently. “Anyway, it's nothin' to do with me.”

You've no curiosity, lad, Woodend thought – an' without curiosity you'll never make a really good bobby.

They had reached the main desk. A white-haired sergeant sat behind it, writing in a ledger.

“That feller they've just brought in? What's he charged with?” Woodend asked.

The sergeant looked up from his work.

“Him?” he said in disgust. “One of our lads in plain clothes caught him solicitin' outside the public lavatories in St John's Gardens. Bloody queers – I bloody hate them.”

“A homosexual, is he?” Woodend mused. “An' not a pink handbag or a powder puff in sight. Well, it only goes to show – you never can tell just by lookin' at them, can you?”

“When he goes to court, he'll probably get no more than a six-month sentence,” the desk sergeant growled. “As if that'll do any good! In my opinion, if the courts are too squeamish to hang 'em, they should at least lock 'em up an' throw away the key.”

“Tolerance has always been a quality I've admired in a man,” Woodend said mildly.

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Well, I think you should certain beg somebody's,” Woodend told him.

Hopgood coughed. “If there's nothing more, I'll see you to the door, Mr Woodend.”

He's like a pub landlord at closin' time, Woodend thought, with mild amusement. He's got to show a certain amount of civility, but he just can't wait to get me off the premises.

The inspector held the door open, and Woodend stepped out on to the street. It had been cloudy when he'd entered the police station, but now the sun was shining brightly again, and the people walking past seemed to have developed an optimistic spring in their steps.

Woodend turned round. Inspector Hopgood was still standing there, as if he wanted to make absolutely sure that the troublesome bobby from London was actually leaving.

“I really would let Rick Johnson go if I was you,” Woodend told Hopgood, knowing, as he spoke, that he was probably wasting his time. “He had nothing to do with the attack on Jack Towers. I guarantee it.”

“You sound a lot more sure of yourself than you did a few minutes back,” Hopgood said.

“I am.”

“In that case, I suppose you imagine that you know who
did
attack him, as well.”

“No, I don't,” Woodend admitted. “That's something we'll probably never know. But I do think I know
why
he was attacked.”

Mike Finn's mother, a string shopping bag on her arm, closed the royal-blue front door behind and set off down the street. Finally! Steve Walker, puffing nervously on a Woodbine, waited until she'd turned the corner, then he threw the cigarette away and made his move.

He sprinted down the alley which ran at the back of the houses, counting off the numbers until he reached the one he'd just watched the woman leave. He lifted the latch on the back gate and pushed. The door gave a little, but not much, and he realised that the bloody thing was bolted from the inside.

“Shit!” he said, louder than he had intended.

A locked gate just about doubled his chances of getting caught, he thought, but there nothing else for it – he was going to have to go over the wall.

He stepped back and took a running jump. His hands connected with the crumbling brickwork on the top of the wall, and he pulled himself up and over, landing heavily next to the outside lavatory. He paused there for a moment – partly to listen for anyone raising the alarm, partly to let his galloping heart slow down. He had never done anything like this before, and it was turning out to be harder – and far more frightening – than he'd ever imagined.

He moved quickly past the coal shed to the back door. Once there, he pulled the jemmy out of his jacket and inserted it between the door and the jamb. When he'd planned the job, he'd pictured the door flying open immediately, but all his initial efforts succeeded in doing was splintering the wood.

Sweat was dripping down the back of his neck. He forced himself to pull the jemmy free, and insert it closer to the keyhole. He levered again, and the door groaned. He tried once more, and felt the lock give.

He was in the back kitchen now, but what he was looking for wouldn't be there.

Perhaps it wouldn't be in the house at all, he told himself.

It was more than possible, now he thought about it, that Mike Finn had realised how incriminating it would be, and had got rid of it – which meant he was putting himself through all this gut-wrenching terror for nothing.

Now wasn't the time for thinking, his mind screamed. Now was the time for action.

He made his way into the hallway and up the stairs. There were three bedroom doors, but only one them had a poster of the Knockouts pinned to it. He turned the handle and stepped inside.

The room was a mess. Clothes lay strewn all over the floor, bits of old amplifiers were spread out haphazardly on the table. But it was the corner of the room which caught Steve Walker's attention, because lying there, amid a pile of other miscellaneous junk, was what he'd come for.

He picked up his precious trophies and rushed downstairs again. Once in the hall, he was faced with two choices. It would be quicker to leave through the front door – and anything which was quicker had to be very tempting – but there was more chance of being spotted by some passer-by. Better, then, to take a little while longer and leave, as he had arrived, through the back gate.

He retraced his steps through the back kitchen and across the yard past the coal shed and lavvy. No need to climb over the wall this time. All he had to do was draw back the bolt. He did, but before he had time to open the door, it swung open of its own accord.

A volcano of nausea erupted in Steve Walker's stomach as he realised that the gate had not swung, it had been pushed – and that the pushing had been done by the man in a blue serge uniform who was standing in the alley.

“Looks like that shop keeper was right,” the constable said. “You
were
up to no good, weren't you, son?”

Steve Walker glanced longingly over his shoulder at the open back door. “Listen . . .” he said.

“No,
you
listen,” the constable said commandingly. “You're in a lot of trouble, kid. It's a very serious charge, breakin' and enterin'. An' if I was you, I wouldn't make things worse for myself by tryin' to make a run for it, because there's another officer posted outside the front door.”

Steve bowed his head, acknowledging defeat. “I'll come quietly,” he promised. “But I've got to speak to Chief Inspector Woodend right away.”

“
Got
to, have you?” the constable asked. “Well, we'll see about that when we're back at the station.”

The Grapes had only just opened its door for business again, so Woodend was not more than a third of the way down his first pint of bitter when Bob Rutter walked into the bar.

Rutter sat down opposite his boss. “First the good news,” he said. “Eddie Barnes did have a girlfriend.”

“You're sure of that?”

The sergeant nodded. “I've turned up three witnesses – a waitress in a coffee bar where they used to go, the landlord of a pub who wouldn't serve them, and a cinema usherette who says she noticed them because they sat through two complete showings of
Spartacus
.”

“So what's the bad news?” Woodend asked.

“None of them could give me anything like a clear description of her, so while we now know she does exist, we're no closer to finding her than we ever were.”

“Well, we've at least made some progress anyway,” Woodend said encouragingly.

“But not enough,” the sergeant countered. “I'll grab a bite to eat, then hit the streets again. There's usually a different crowd of people around at night to the ones who are out in the day, so who knows, I might just get lucky.”

But he didn't sound very hopeful, Woodend thought. “There's one thing that's not clear to me,” he said.

“And what's that, sir?”

“You say the landlord you talked to barred them from his pub. But from all we've learned about Eddie Barnes, he just doesn't seem like the kind of lad who'd cause enough trouble to get himself barred.”