Death of a Nobody (2 page)

2

The big BMW stayed in the fast lane for over a mile; at this time of night, the motorway was quiet, especially the westbound carriageway which carried the traffic away from London.

He was fifty miles from the capital now, watching the needle creep towards the hundred, then reluctantly easing his foot off the pedal of the big automatic to control his speed. You couldn’t just rely on your rear-view mirror, nowadays. There were all kinds of speed traps, each one more sophisticated than the last. Pity the pigs hadn’t something more important to occupy their expensive resources — he allowed the motorist’s automatic moan to creep into his mind. Then he smiled: it was a good thing for him and his enterprises that the police frittered away their resources on such harmless pursuits.

All the same, he dropped his speed to eighty as he went past the Swindon turning; he had no desire to raise his profile with the police, even if it was for no more than a speeding offence. The temperature had dropped sharply outside, but it was warm and comfortable as always in the BMW. He had restricted himself as usual to two gins and tonics in his office at the gaming club in London, but he must guard against the drowsiness that came with comfort and a steady cruising speed on a quiet motorway. He was reaching for the radio switch when the car phone bleeped.

He had thought it might be the Soho club he had left an hour earlier. But it was Murray, his manager at the Curvy Cats in Bristol. He was nervous at the start, as always; he sounded like a bank clerk, not a man who hired and fired the musclemen which every strip club had to have around. ‘I thought I’d better just keep you in the picture, sir. In case you didn’t manage to get in here this week…’ He left the words hanging in the air, hoping for the assurance of information about the owner’s plans. Murray didn’t like car phones, because you never knew whether the man on the other end of the line was hundreds of miles away or just round the corner.

The man in the speeding car knew that, too. He smiled a little in the darkness and withheld the information his caller wanted. ‘Thank you, Murray. And the picture is?’

‘The man they attended to is in hospital. Bristol General. He has a broken arm and three broken ribs. The sister says he’ll probably be discharged tomorrow.’ He poured out the facts hurriedly, like a child who knows the game is up and wants to get all the worst facts of his confession out in one breath.

The voice from the car phone did not change; it would have been impossible to deduce from its tone whether this news was welcome or otherwise. But in Bristol, Murray knew this was a black mark against his sector of the business. Was it near the club?’

‘No. Three miles or more away. Outside the man’s hotel.’

‘Will he bring charges?’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t see how he can. There’s nothing to connect it with us. And Briggs says he wasn’t recognized.’ Murray was too eager again, now that he had reached the mitigating features. He had planned to get them in first; now he was anxious that if he did not speak quickly the boss would ring off and he would not be able to record them at all.

‘What were your orders to him?’

‘To frighten him off, that was all. Minimal force, if it was necessary at all. They should never have done that much damage. Briggs enjoys working people over too much, that’s the trouble.’

‘So why did you hire him?’

He had walked into that. The sudden volley of crackles as the car phone passed under overhead cables sounded like a mocking chorus to Murray, as he struggled to formulate his answer. ‘I — I thought I could control him. And on the occasions when we need real violence, he’s one of the best. Swift and hard, and—’

‘Get rid of him.’

‘Oh. Are you sure, sir? I could give him a bollocking and tell him to make sure—’

‘Send him on his way, Murray. And make sure that his sidekick knows that your orders are to be obeyed to the letter next time.’

‘Right, sir. And I’ll—’

‘And make sure it doesn’t happen again, eh, Murray?’

The line went dead before Murray could lurch into his assurances.

The man in the car smiled at his little demonstration of power. Keep the troops up to the mark, and you solved most of the problems at the outset. Then you could concern yourself with policy, not the day-to-day skirmishing. He had never been much good at violence himself. Now, when it was merely a case of deploying others to do his bidding, he found it easy to be both ruthless and clear-sighted.

He had been toying with the idea of going into the club at Bristol to see Murray. Now he decided that his authority had been effectively asserted through the more impersonal medium of his car phone. So he stayed on the M4 and paid the toll to swing between the high towers of the Severn Bridge. The tide was in and he caught the twinkle of lights on the estuary far below him. For a moment, he wondered about all those different lives in that watery world of which he was so totally ignorant.

Then he swung the car on to the A48, catching a glimpse of the massive walls of Chepstow Castle against the clear night sky as he skirted the town and moved to the north. Soon he would be in Oldford. The small market town was a suitably sleepy hideaway for a man who operated the businesses that brought in his money. And it was, after all, where his roots lay. There had been Berridges here for over two centuries, since his ancestors had moved in to work in the small mines of the Forest of Dean. Respectable men, who had accumulated a little capital and moved up in the world. Now the latest Berridge was putting those inherited resources to darker, much more lucrative uses.

It was nearly midnight now, and the main shopping street was deserted as the light-blue BMW moved almost silently along it. He had time to glance up at the old-fashioned façade with its suits and sweaters behind the plate-glass windows and the elaborate raised gold letters over the top that spelled out ‘Jas Berridge and Sons’.

There was another, slightly bigger version of this shop in Gloucester. His grandfather had bought the premises in the dark days of 1930, and his father had built the business to a modest prosperity in the palmy days after Hitler’s war. For the latest James Berridge in his BMW, the shops were no more than a respectable frontage for the more dubious dealings and establishments where he made his real money. Money his ancestors would never have dreamed of. From activities which would have appalled them.

He had managers in these two shops, and he scarcely ever interfered with them. When he made suggestions, they came with the half-apologetic air and the obsolete courtesy which the latest James Berridge thought might have come from his father or grandfather. He saw himself as a man of many roles, and this one amused him hugely, so that he gave full attention to the part and studied with interest the effects he was making as he delivered his lines. There was no doubt that he was successful in it. The local community thought of him as highly respectable. Those of them who paused to think were sometimes surprised that there was such money to be made from old-fashioned gents’ outfitting in this competitive age; but someone would always offer the suggestion of ‘private money’, that mysterious and wholly satisfactory source of affluence that was otherwise without explanation.

Berridge’s wife must have brought him money, they said. She had the cut-glass accent and the wardrobe to support that view. They were not to know that she was from an ancient but impecunious family, which had been quite relieved to consign her to the persistent and agreeably wealthy young man who had arrived among their set after a short-service commission in the Royal Horse Artillery.

That had been twenty years and more ago, and Gabrielle, like her family, knew much more about James Berridge now. But at least the affluence they had anticipated had continued. Indeed, it had developed quite remarkably. Gabrielle, whatever her unhappiness, had never been short of money and the trappings it could bring.

The name ‘Old Mead Park’, picked out in raised gold lettering on the dark green board by the entrance, was merely the developer’s acknowledgement of the fine old mansion he had demolished. The four-storey block of flats which had replaced it was the most luxurious new building in the Oldford area. And the spacious penthouse which occupied half of the top storey was the most opulent unit in the whole complex. It was important to its owner that it was conspicuously the best: it established the position Berridge wished to assert for himself in his local context, without bringing the attention which an older building like a stately home might have attracted.

He had other images in other places. The London flat by Regent’s Park where he entertained a succession of mistresses was in a Nash terrace, more expensive but more discreet than this one. And the small house in the centre of Amsterdam was totally anonymous, purely a residence for the questionable business which he conducted from time to time within it.

The garage door beneath the flats rose quietly at the command of Berridge’s electronic control. He rolled the BMW to a halt and did not trouble to set the alarm as the door shut behind him. There was no porter here at this hour, but the lift carried him silently up to the top storey. Gabrielle’s room, as he had expected, was in darkness; he rarely told her nowadays when she might expect him home.

He went out through the patio doors to look for a moment at the night and the blue-black universe outside. Some day he might fulfil the fancy of many years and build himself an observatory. Not here; somewhere more private, with gardens and ancient trees around him. The dome and the telescope would need to be somewhere isolated. It would not be until he was finished with all this and retired, a respected figure, offering no threat to anyone. Some day…

He left the cool peace of the April night and went into his study. He put the documents he had brought from the car into the bottom drawer of the desk and relocked it carefully, as he always did. Something about the papers on the top of the desk struck him as he was about to move out. He turned them over cautiously. Nothing was missing. But they had been rearranged, as if someone had looked through them in search of interesting material, and put them back in a slightly different manner. Jim Berridge was a methodical man, and he was sure of it.

Not Gabrielle, he thought. She made a point of her contemptuous ignorance of his dealings; and she knew well enough that nothing of great interest would be left available to prying eyes. And not the cleaner: she had strict instructions that she was not even to set foot in this room, and she was too well paid to ignore them. Who, then?

Jim Berridge sat at his desk and gave careful consideration to the possibilities. Then he went to bed and was asleep within minutes.

3

Christine Lambert watched her husband surreptitiously at the breakfast table. He had protested about the muesli when she had switched him to it; now he ate it each morning with some relish. She had too much sense and experience to point that out to him, for she knew that he would merely reply dolefully that you could get used to anything, then embark on a eulogy for his departed eggs and bacon.

Usually he was out of the house before she left for her school. When he was not, she found herself running unexpectedly late. It was so this morning. She was studying the advance of grey hairs into his still plentiful crop as it bent over the newspaper when she realized the time; she flew to her Fiesta with her briefcase still unfastened and books threatening to spew from it. John came and opened the gates for her and waved her off, enjoying the moment of unaccustomed domesticity and the illusion that he was behaving like an orthodox young husband.

Then he went back into the trim bungalow, made a phone call to Rushton in the CID section, washed the few breakfast dishes, and read again the note by the phone in Christine’s writing, recording that his daughter Caroline would be here at the weekend with her husband and the children. It would be good to see them, he told himself conventionally. It would also be a noisy and boisterous time in the normally quiet bungalow. Well, there was always the golf club—or he could take the golden retriever which would arrive with the rest of the family for a walk: he always liked doing that. He must be getting old.

He went into the garden, enjoying the bright, crisp morning, inspecting the promising red shoots of foliage on the neatly pruned roses, assessing the chances that a late frost might set them back. Retired policemen traditionally grew roses. Well, he might as well get ready for it; retirement was something he’d have to contemplate, in a few years. He left it vaguely at that ‘few years’, though precision was one of the necessities of his working life.

Against his will, he fell again to wondering about Charlie Pegg. Perhaps he should have pushed him harder last night, but his instincts had told him the little snout would come up with something more tangible in a few days. He felt the old surge of impatience that he had known twenty years and more ago as a young detective constable when a case hung fire. He was counting no chickens, but it would raise the morale of the whole CID section if they could pin down Jim Berridge.

He sniffed the invigorating morning air like an animal in search of its prey. There was plenty of the hunter left beneath Superintendent Lambert’s grey hairs.

***

Detective Inspector Christopher Rushton set about his task with relish. It would help to show the chief the value of modern technology.

Old John Lambert had his virtues, of course he had. He was a shrewd, intuitive detective, a thief-taker of the old school. More crucially for Chris Rushton, he was almost unique among modern superintendents in conducting his investigations in the field rather than from the incident room. That had allowed Rushton the opportunity to act as data coordinator in the solving of several serious crimes, and he was grateful for that. It was the man bringing things together in the incident room who drew the attention of the top brass most easily. But Lambert could be scathing about the computers which were so important in keeping up with the increasing subtlety of contemporary criminal techniques. This assignment would show him how useful electronic filing and searching could be in the hands of a skilled operator.

After two hours, the stream of Rushton’s enthusiasm was running less strongly. Even in the violent nineties, the number of unsolved killings which were quietly pigeonholed (the official line was that the files were never closed) as police failures was not as large as the public chose to think. The national list was now readily available on Rushton’s computer, but there were few of them with local connections, and none involving the particular people he was seeking to link up with them.

There was another, longer group of violent crimes, which had to be registered officially as unsolved, though that adjective riled the CID. These were the ones where there was reasonable certainty about the perpetrator, but insufficient evidence to bring a case to court. Sometimes the police themselves reluctantly acknowledged that fact — as they had been forced to do at least twice in the case of James Berridge. Sometimes there were bitter arguments between CID men who had worked long and hard to bring villains to justice and the Crown Prosecution Service, who claimed from their more objective viewpoint that what had been presented to them was not the material for a case they could expect to win.

Rushton flashed these infuriating files up successively on his screen. Some of the local ones he already knew, of course, but he went further afield, looking painstakingly for connections between any violent deaths in the south of England and the men who interested him on the patch of Oldford CID. Any policeman worth his salt was eager to find the key piece of evidence which could convert these ‘nearly’ cases into prosecutions and imprisonments. This was the area where detection became a personal battle, with enemies who could be identified, defeated and put away for lengthy terms. These were the criminals who thumbed their metaphoric noses at the forces of order, the ones it always gave most satisfaction to confound.

But the DI drew the blank he had been half-expecting. It would be good if Lambert’s snout came up with the missing piece in the legal jigsaw, but if he did, he would probably have to go into court as a prosecution witness. That was the point where things usually fell down: whatever the assurances of police protection, both the informer and those who sought to preserve him knew that no one could be guarded indefinitely against the violent retribution which was the inevitable reaction of the criminal world to grasses.

Rushton turned in desperation to those cases which the law had defined to its own satisfaction as manslaughter or suicide, but which the CID had found in some way more suspicious. These were inevitably local, for such suspicions were usually confined to word-of-mouth speculation, were sometimes, indeed, no more than the gossip of the section — for policemen in the canteen prattle and bitch about their work as intensively as those who follow other, less dramatic callings.

When Lambert arrived, he found his DI not staring at his computer but on the phone to a detective sergeant about a man who had fallen to his death from a warehouse platform in Tewkesbury some six months earlier. Rushton put down the phone so dolefully that there was no need to check that he had drawn yet another blank. Lambert tried not to sound smug as he said, with a glance at the shimmering green print on the computer monitor screen, ‘So you haven’t turned anything up yet, Chris?’

‘Early days yet, sir.’ But Rushton knew it was not. Three hours’ concentrated effort had turned up nothing that he could even suggest might be significant. He acknowledged as much by giving Lambert a swift verbal summary of his morning’s efforts. Even now, when he had worked with Lambert for four years and the brittle early days of that working relationship were far behind them, he felt a need to explain himself, to demonstrate how diligently and efficiently he had followed instructions, to justify himself and his early promotion to the rank of detective inspector.

Lambert looked quickly round the small modern office, hardly hearing Rushton’s account of his morning: he took his industry and competence in such matters for granted nowadays. He was merely checking that he was alone before he said, ‘Any further developments with Anne?’

Rushton, caught off guard by the personal question, looked up at him sharply. For an instant, his face had the openness and vulnerability of a child’s. Then the sharp features closed again just as suddenly and he said, ‘No, sir. The divorce is going ahead as agreed, I’m afraid.’ There was a sudden shaft of pain, a flick of a cheek muscle as he said, ‘We’re just negotiating my access to Kirstie, now. They say it’s better to get it agreed in advance than argue it out in court.’

‘I suppose so.’ Lambert thought of his own two-year-old grandchild, of what it would have meant to him all those years ago to lose his wife and his own toddlers, as he had so nearly done. His sudden sympathy for this man with whom he had so little in common was searing.

He said awkwardly, ‘Perhaps it’s all for the best, Chris, in the long run.’ Why did platitudes always take over when the heart was gripped by real emotion?

‘So everyone keeps telling me. It’s a great consolation.’ The bitter sarcasm was as close as this conventional officer would ever come to insubordination.

‘There’s still time to begin again with someone else, you know.’ Lambert knew as soon as he had said it that others must have already expressed the same unhelpful thought.

‘Except that I don’t want to.’ The pain came out as almost a snarl, but Rushton did not apologize: perhaps he did not even notice. He took a deep breath, gestured angrily at the computer screen, and said, ‘I’ve been over the usual ground without throwing up anything. Do you want me to start on the missing persons?’

Lambert thought for a moment about the vast, vague roll of those who for a thousand different reasons had left the ten thousand different environments which passed for ‘home’ at the end of this frenetic century. ‘No. Not yet: there are far too many of them. I’ll have to get more information out of Charlie Pegg, that’s all. Always assuming he has it to give.’

It was the qualification an officer always made about his snouts: it was not unknown for CID men to initiate embarrassing wild goose chases on the basis of information which proved false. it was something every young DC feared, bringing upon him the wrath of a superior who was trying to control a budget and keep his men fresh for the real action. Lambert was long past that stage of his career, but old habits die hard. Perhaps also he wanted to show that as a superintendent he still thought and felt like the men he directed in major investigations.

But he was confident that Pegg knew something important. Over the years, he had developed a sort of trust with the little snout. The relationship between such a man and his detective contact must always be a peculiar one, with a streak of contempt as well as distrust involved. No one really admired a traitor, even when those he betrayed warranted no loyalty. But an understanding had built up over the years between the two of them, as information from the informant proved reliable and the discretion with which Lambert handled it maintained Pegg’s security. Lambert had dealt intermittently with Pegg over ten years; there was now a sort of affection between them, though each still knew where he stood in this world of dangerous exchanges.

Lambert offered two thoughts before he left the room. ‘I’ll get on to the serious fraud office and find out if they’re pursuing anything of interest on our local villains. And you’d better see if the drug squad at Bristol think any of our entrepreneurs are expanding into that field.’

It was no more than a slightly desperate attempt to supplement and complete Rushton’s routine checking of the computerized information. There was no way he could have known at the time that this would lead to a man’s death.