Four Below (17 page)

‘Sir? Sorry to interrupt your meal. DS Austin thinks we have something solid on the ID of the cycle-path body.’

McLusky didn’t feel like having Dearlove as an audience to a display of speed-eating so he sent him on his way. ‘I’ll be up in a minute.’

The sausages were curiously unresisting to his fork as he hacked them into pieces and mixed them with his mash and beans. Then he spent a concentrated two minutes shovelling the resultant mess
into his mouth. When he pushed his plate away from him, he realized that a few tables away PC Ellen Purkis was watching him with fascinated disgust. She looked away now and returned to a
conversation with her colleagues.

Upstairs he found Austin on the phone in the incident room. The DS wound up the phone call and hung up. ‘Result, I think.’ He consulted a sheet of handwritten notes. ‘Our
cycle-path bod could be a Mike Oatley. His social worker called in, thinks something might have happened to him. No answer at his flat; they had arranged to meet. And he fits the
description.’

‘Where?’

‘Block of council flats in St Pauls.’

‘Okay, get on to the council.’ McLusky paused to burp delicately behind a hand. ‘Tell them to send someone there with a key for the flat, and when you know what time they can
make it, ask the social worker to meet us there as well. Tell them not to enter the premises until we get there.’

An hour later, a dull stomach ache kept McLusky internally occupied while he and Austin waited outside the address for the social worker and key-holder. Both arrived simultaneously in separate
cars. Hedges, the social worker, a neat individual with a sensible haircut, repeated his story for them as they climbed the echoing stairs to the first-floor flat. ‘His name is Mike Oatley.
He’s an alcoholic, recovering alcoholic, I should say, of course. He’s recently come out of a double helping of residential rehab and was housed here. He’s from Gloucester really,
but it would have been a bad idea for him to go back there. His only friends, if you could call them that, were in a similar situation, you might say, heavy drinkers. So they housed him here. Not
an ideal area, but there you go.’

They had arrived at the door to the flat; its colour matched the pale-green PVC handrail of the banister. The man from the council found the right key from a collection of others in a bag.
McLusky took it from him, rang the bell below the spyhole, then rapped a flat-handed tattoo for good measure. Only then did he slip on latex gloves and unlock the door. The council man left and
Hedges waited outside as instructed while McLusky and Austin entered. The lights were on in the hall and the next room.

Hedges stood in the doorway, twiddled the buttons of his overcoat and kept talking. ‘It was the lights, you see. He was very careful about electricity, always complained about the price
and how he kept running out of credits on the key meter. So when I saw the light on and got no answer, I thought, wait a minute, something’s wrong here.’

The flat was empty. It was also small, the rooms narrow and ill-proportioned. The two detectives constantly needed to squeeze past each other. ‘Whoever designed this building must have
practised on multi-storey car parks,’ McLusky grumbled. To Hedges he called: ‘Okay, you can come in, but don’t touch anything; keep your hands in your pockets. You’re sure
from the picture in the news that the dead man is Mike Oatley?’

‘Pretty sure, yes. And the clothes, too. The description matched the way he dressed, the black jacket.’

‘Good. I’d like you to come and identify the body. Would you mind?’

Hedges swallowed hard. ‘If it’s necessary.’

‘It would be a great help. Are there any relatives?’

‘A sister, in London. But they weren’t speaking.’

‘Close friends?
Any
friends?’

‘He never mentioned any. He only moved here three months ago.’

‘In that case we definitely need you to view the body. In the meantime, have a look around you. Does anything look different from the last time you were here?’

Hedges turned a hundred and eighty degrees in the sitting room. He pointed to a scatter of papers in front of a rickety shelf unit. ‘It’s definitely messier. He never had things
lying on the floor like that when I was here. It all looks a bit … don’t know.’ He searched for the right expression. ‘Out of kilter,’ he decided with a nod.

‘Perhaps he used to clear up for you,’ McLusky suggested. ‘Anything obviously missing?’

‘Nothing jumps out.’

‘Computer? Did he have one?’

‘I don’t remember a computer.’

‘What about a telly? Hi-fi, radio?’

‘Oh yeah, the radio isn’t here. He had a digital one by the window, only place he could get reception. We got that for him through a charity, refurbished. I don’t think he had
a telly.’

‘Kettle? Would he have had an electric kettle? Because there isn’t one here. Or a toaster?’

Hedges came to the kitchen door. ‘Definitely a kettle. Not sure about toaster.’

McLusky opened cupboards at random. They all looked understocked to him: a tin of tomatoes, a half-empty pack of spaghetti, a crumpled pack of sugar. It reminded him of his own kitchen.
‘Well, neither are here now. Could he have sold them to buy drink?’

‘A plastic kettle? Anyway, he wasn’t drinking.’

‘As far as you know. Okay, thanks. DS Austin will drive you to view the body, or you can follow him in your own car. Best do it now.’ He followed them to the door. ‘One other
thing: did he drive?’

‘Lost his licence. That’s how he lost his job, too. He used to work for an interior designer, decorating and such. He was about to get fired anyway because he drank, but without a
licence he was unemployable.’

‘He could have been driving without a licence, of course.’

‘Could have done, but he wasn’t like that. Okay,
as far as I know
, you’re about to say. Anyway, you can’t run a car on Jobseeker’s Allowance. I can barely
afford it on my pay.’

As Austin and Hedges walked down the stairs, talking, McLusky closed the door behind them. Their echoing footsteps and voices came clearly through the flimsy door. In the bathroom, he pulled the
grimy cord that hung from the light switch in the ceiling. The claustrophobic shower smelled mouldy; the basin and toilet looked unnaturally small. One splayed toothbrush, supermarket basics
toothpaste, a cracked sliver of soap. He took a last look around the rest of the flat. Through the ceiling came the thump of running feet, the muffled shouts of argument; from downstairs the
slamming of a door, a child’s whine. It was as though the place had been designed to drive a man to drink.

When he locked the door of the flat from the outside a black girl in her teens was bumping an empty pushchair up the stairs. He made no attempt to speak to her. She in turn watched him without
expression as she disappeared through the door of the flat opposite Oatley’s. It could wait. As soon as there was positive ID, he’d give the word and the police circus would descend on
the building, from officers doing door-to-door enquiries to SOCO and forensics.

His stomach ache had disappeared without him noticing. There would be ample time to warm up at a café before Austin came back with the result. His own flat in Northampton Street
wasn’t too far away, but the Bristolian café in Picton Street was even closer. In summer, its cobbled forecourt was full of tables and benches, but now it was covered in snow. The
windows in their bright green frames were steamed up, promising warmth, or at the least, steam. He left the car directly outside on double yellow lines, knowing he could keep an eye on it in case a
traffic warden took an interest. He ordered a mug of coffee at the counter and compensated for the enforced tobacco abstinence with a doorstep slice of chocolate cake. The place was busy; he would
have to share a table. He approached a couple sitting at a round table next to the window. By the time he realized that the woman was Laura, it was too late to back away unnoticed. The man by her
side, he saw with dismay, was the same mop-haired twenty-something he had seen her with the other day.

Laura’s smile came slowly, from somewhere far away. ‘Hi, Liam. I was wondering if you ever came in here, since you practically live round the corner.’ She leant back in her
chair to clear a line of sight between the two men. ‘Liam, Damian, Damian, Liam.’

Damian lifted a hand in greeting. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

McLusky nodded at him. ‘Mind if I join you?’

Laura gestured to an empty chair and picked up her shoulder bag from the floor. ‘Sit down. Actually we were just leaving.’

Damian looked into his mug of frothy coffee; it was half full. ‘
Okay
. I’ll just go and use the little boys’ room.’

McLusky shuffled through to the free chair, dribbling coffee from his mug on to the absurdly cheerful tablecloth. ‘
The little boys’ room?
Who’s the kid?’ he asked
when Damian was nearly out of earshot.

‘And it’s good to see you too, Liam. I’m well, thank you. The course is great, I’m really enjoying it, thank you for asking.’

‘That’s good.’ McLusky skewered a piece of chocolate cake. ‘So who’s the kid?’

‘The kid, as you heard, is Damian. He’s in my year at college, but we met before that, when I volunteered on a dig in the summer.’

‘You
met
.’

‘We did. And now we sometimes have coffee together.’

‘Marvellous.’

‘They’re keeping you busy, I see. And you got into the
Herald
. Uncaring inspector says let junkies rot, or something to that effect. Is that what you think now?’

‘Does it sound like me?’

‘People change.’

‘Do they? Not much, they don’t.’

‘Oh, you’d be surprised. But I get the feeling you haven’t.’

‘You talk as though we hadn’t seen each other in years.’

‘Seems like it, so much has happened since.’

‘We must catch up.’

‘Yes, we must. Here comes Damian, time we went back. I’ve got a tutorial later.’

‘I’ve no idea where you live.’

‘No.’

‘Are you going to tell me?’

Damian arrived at the table and drained his mug of coffee standing up.

‘I’ll give you my mobile number,’ Laura said, spooling through the display on her phone. ‘If I can find it. Oh yeah …’ She waited while he added the number
to the list on his phone.

‘Hang on, let me try it, see if I got it right.’ He dialled, while Laura sighed and smiled apologetically at her companion. Her phone chimed the beginning of a pop song McLusky
didn’t recognize. Kids’ stuff.

‘I’ll call you sometime, then.’

‘Sure.’

He cleared a patch of condensation on the window and watched them walk away, looking for any signs that might point beyond coffee drinking. They turned the corner, Laura talking. Thin,
washing-powder snow had started to fall. The traffic warden had finished the paperwork and snapped the plastic-sheathed parking fine under the Mazda’s windscreen wiper.

The social worker had made a positive ID. ‘Michael Oatley, age fifty-six, born in Gloucester, murdered in Bristol,’ Austin recited as they stood outside the St
Pauls flat, letting SOCOs and their equipment pass.

McLusky listened to uniformed officers talking to the few residents who had opened their doors. Most needed very persistent knocking and the promise that the enquiry was about a neighbour before
they decided it was safe to answer. For many people the St Pauls riots had moved from memory into folklore, but the relationship between residents and the police had never recovered.

‘According to the social worker, he was lucky to get this place. He said, with his addiction and without any friends, he was one drink away from a cardboard box,’ said one resident.
‘The state his liver was in, he was a couple of drinks away from a wooden one. Now it looks like he won’t even get that.’

‘How do you mean?’ Austin asked.

‘A pauper’s funeral for Mr Oatley, unless the sister he’s not on speaking terms with feels like shelling out.’

‘Then perhaps it’s a cardboard box after all.’

They followed a SOCO into the flat but stayed in the hall. McLusky went rhetorical, as Austin called it. ‘Okay, what have we got? A recovering alcoholic, friendless, new in town, in a
soulless council place. He’s got nothing to do except listen to the radio all day. He’s on the dole. He’s piss-poor. And it certainly wasn’t a mugging. What they did to him
was systematic, it took time. They didn’t do it on the cycle path; they just found it convenient to dump him there. And they didn’t do it here either, unless they did a blinding
clean-up job.’

‘Inspector?’ A paper-suited SOCO appeared at the kitchen door. From his extended forefinger dangled a set of house keys. ‘In the pedal bin with the rubbish.’

‘On the top, in the middle, where?’ McLusky wanted to know.

‘Right on top, f ist thing I saw,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Two Yale keys. Could be front door and flat key.’

‘Okay, eagle-eyes. Do you think you can try them on the door without damaging any fingerprints on it?’

‘I think I can manage that. Excuse me.’ He squeezed past them. The first key he tried fitted. He dropped them into an evidence bag.

‘So, he didn’t have any keys on him when he was found. They could of course be his spare set, but I doubt it. Because why throw them away?’

‘Whoever killed him used the keys to let himself in here.’ Austin continued the thought. ‘In order to do what?’

‘To steal a second-hand radio and a plastic kettle. People get murdered for less, but it’s not really worth the bus fare from Ashton to St Pauls, is it? His social worker thought the
place looked “out of kilter”. Perhaps someone did search the place.’

‘But what’s an unemployed recovering alkie got? That he needs killing for? And they didn’t exactly turn the place over, did they?’ Austin objected.

McLusky shrugged. ‘Because they found what they were looking for straight away.’ He stepped outside on to the landing and shook a cigarette from a pack of twenty. The place was so
cold, he keenly felt the heat from the lighter’s flame as he touched it to the end of his cigarette. The last time he’d felt warm was at the Bristolian, and he sincerely hoped they had
managed to restore heat to Albany Road by now, since his own flat was not exactly tropical either.