Four Below (18 page)

First the legs, then the rest of DC Dearlove appeared on the stairs from above. He checked back over his shoulder before speaking in a low voice. ‘I’ve just been in the flat
upstairs, the one right above Oatley’s. Young couple, but only the chap is in. She’s at her mother’s. Place is a tip. Anyway, he says he didn’t hear or see anything. Only,
did you mention a digital radio missing?’

‘Yes, but we don’t know which make. He’s got one, has he? Did you ask him about it?’

‘No. Lots of people have digital radios these days, but I got a feeling. I don’t know why, but he just didn’t seem the type.’

‘Not the digital type, eh? We’d best have a casual word with him, then.’ McLusky took a last drag from his cigarette, thumbed the glow off the end and put the filter stub in
his pocket. In answer to Austin’s raised eyebrows, he hooked a thumb at the forensics technicians in the flat. ‘Never leave your DNA around when that lot are about. You can’t
trust ’em.’

Upstairs, he rapped on the door. After a long pause it reluctantly opened on the face of a black man in his mid-twenties, with close-cropped hair. He wore black jeans, black trainers and a
shapeless blue and grey top. Behind him rushed the sound of a cistern refilling. Warm air streamed through the gap in the door. ‘Yeah, what is it now?’

McLusky held up his ID. ‘Can we come in a minute?’

‘Look, man, I just chatted with the other guy. I told him I didn’t see a thing, didn’t hear a thing.’

‘I won’t take up much of your time,’ McLusky insisted.

‘Oh, man, I was on my way out, innit. I have stuff to do, I can’t stop here all day chattin’, you know what I’m sayin’?’ Even while he was speaking he
retreated back inside, leaving the door undefended. They followed him in.

‘We’ll be quick. What’s your name?’

‘Milton.’

‘That’s your first name?’

‘Yeah. Milton Christiani.’

The flat was an exact copy of Oatley’s below, though only as far as the layout went. Unlike Oatley’s, it was crammed with furniture, all of which looked too large to have made it
through the narrow doors. It was messy and smelled aggressively of cooking-spice and deodorant. The sitting room was dominated by a large hi-fi system on a set of shelves crammed with CDs.

‘So,’ McLusky started, ‘were you friendly with Mr Oatley?’

‘I just said all that to the other copper; what’s the matter with you? I didn’t even know his name was Oatley.’

‘You’re into rap, then? Hip-hop …’ He slid a few CDs off the shelf, pretended to read the backs of them, wasted some time.

‘Yeah, what, it’s not a crime, is it? What do you want from me?’

‘So you wouldn’t have any reason to have visited his flat, then?’

‘No.’

‘And you never have.’

‘No again.’

‘And he wouldn’t come upstairs to this place?’

‘Look, how many times, I didn’t know that man. I mean, I’m sorry he’s dead and all that, but that’s it.’

‘Your girlfriend, perhaps?’

‘What is it you is sayin’? Look, he was an ancient white man and we had nothin’ to do with him.’

The chunky digital radio Dearlove had mentioned stood between two piles of CDs on a shelf above the CD player. ‘Listen to the radio much?’

‘Some.’

McLusky pressed the on button. Radio Bristol blared into the room. He turned it down. Then he pressed the first of the pre-set buttons. The Radio 3 lunchtime concert had just started.
‘Shostakovich, I think. Or is it Prokofiev? I’m never quite certain.’ He tapped a fingernail against the speaker grille. ‘I bought one of these but I’ve never worked
out how to programme these pre-set buttons.’ He tried the next pre-set; it was Classic FM. ‘Ah, I’m sure we all recognize this one,’ said McLusky, who had no idea what he
was hearing. He tried for an angelic smile and pressed the next button, which conjured up Radio 4. ‘… talks to the author Simon Brett about his ubiquitous …’ He flicked
off the radio and turned to Austin. ‘Mr Christiani here has catholic tastes.’

‘So what? You sayin’ I shouldn’t be listenin’ to that stuff?’ Christiani crossed his arms. His eyes strayed to the window, as though looking for escape.

‘Had the radio long?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Do you think we could borrow it?’ Christiani opened his mouth to protest, but McLusky carried on. ‘Because if you never visited him, and Mr Oatley didn’t visit you up
here, then naturally there wouldn’t be any of his fingerprints on this radio, would there?’ He could see Christiani’s mind racing and his body stiffen. He nodded to Austin, who
put on gloves and freed the radio from a spaghetti junction of cables. ‘And of course there wouldn’t be any of your fingerprints in the flat downstairs, either. So I’ll also send
someone up to take your prints, just for elimination purposes. When do you expect your girlfriend back?’

Christiani held up his hands. ‘Okay.
All right
. I took the damn radio. It’s hardly the crime of the century.’

‘The century is still young. We can discuss it down the station.’

‘And he’s known to us?’ DSI Denkhaus swivelled in his chair to move his feet closer to the halogen heater by his desk. The heating engineers were still no
closer to finding the cause of the problem. Denkhaus had bought the heater from an electrical shop across the road and smuggled it in discreetly. He had called headquarters about the heating
problem at the station and been told categorically that bringing in electric heaters for everyone would be out of the question; the forty-year-old wiring simply would not stand it. And after all,
how long could the repairs take? With the heater tuned to its highest setting, the temperature in the spacious office was only just tolerable.

Little enough of it percolated as far as McLusky’s chair. ‘Only petty stuff. Traffic picked him up a while back, no MOT, and a roadside cannabis warning. He’s on the dole but
had a job in a nightclub until recently.’

‘So how did he get hold of the dead man’s radio?’

‘It seems Mr Christiani is an opportunist thief. According to him, he saw the door to Oatley’s flat ajar when he went out to the shops in Ashley Road. This was yesterday. But he met
someone so didn’t get back until over an hour later. Then he found the door open even further and got curious. He went in – out of concern for Mr Oatley’s welfare, according to
his solicitor – and couldn’t resist stealing the radio, he says. But he didn’t take anything else. He didn’t steal the kettle or the toaster. It looks like he wasn’t
the only one going through Oatley’s flat.’

‘Presumably we’re looking for a DNA match to link him to Oatley’s death?’

‘Of course, though I wouldn’t hold my breath. We’re taking DNA samples from all his neighbours. No sign of anyone having a surplus kettle, but they may of course have chucked
their old one, so that’s a dead end, I think. I don’t see any connections yet. We know Oatley wasn’t killed at his flat, and I suspect more than one person was involved. He
wasn’t killed for his kettle and his radio.’

‘So you’re letting this chap go? Seems a shame.’

‘Already have done, sir. We’ve charged him with the theft, but he’s co-operating and we’ve nothing else on him.’

‘Yes. But having someone in custody would have given us a breathing space with the press, even if we have to let him go eventually. After your disastrous gaffe with the
Herald
reporter, it would have been something, at least. So what kind of person
are
we looking for?’ Denkhaus demanded to know.

Outside, snow was falling again and so was the temperature. Back in his frozen office, McLusky contemplated that same question with his hands cradling his umpteenth mug of tea,
made purely for the warmth it provided. The problem was that Oatley’s existence appeared to have no real substance. There was no computer and no internet service provider. He also had no
mobile phone or landline. There were no phone records to check, no emails to read or browsing history to examine. They had found no personal letters, nothing that didn’t come from the
benefits agency or the council. None of his neighbours owned up to knowing him, no friends had come forward. Oatley had made himself small, simply surviving. In the end he hadn’t managed even
that.

He knew it couldn’t be a mugging. He had seen the photographs, read the autopsy report, and the conclusion was obvious: someone had taken his time murdering Mike Oatley. Someone who
enjoyed his work, too.

Austin came in, looking glum.

‘I saw the super,’ McLusky told him. ‘He’d rather we could have held on to Christiani to get the press off his back, but there you go. Oh yes, and about the heating, not
to worry, everything is fine. He found himself an electric heater to sit next to, one of those bright orange swivelling ones. It makes him look quite demonic. And you look constipated. What is
it?’

Austin nodded towards the side of the desk. ‘Do you still have some of that single malt left?’

A few months ago, a flustered suspect had left behind a litre bottle of Glenmorangie. McLusky kept it in the bottom of his desk along with a couple of glasses on permanent loan from the
canteen.

‘A bit early for that, Jane?’

‘It’s not for me. It’s for you. You’ll need it.’

‘Let me be the judge of that. Out with it.’

‘The partial hand that led us to Deeming’s body.’

‘What about it?’

‘It’s not his hand. It’s someone else’s.’

‘What? Whose?’

‘No one knows.’

McLusky blinked a couple of times, then reached for the Glenmorangie.

Chapter Thirteen

He slammed the door of his car with greater force than necessary. The sound of it was followed by a weaker echo of Austin closing the door on his Nissan. Snow was falling
lightly but steadily and had done so in Leigh Woods for hours.

Austin called across. ‘Did you hear on the news this morning? It’s the coldest weather and earliest snowfall this far south since—’

McLusky cut him off. ‘Three out of ten, seven out of six, spare me statistics, Jane, whenever possible. I can’t wrap my head round it and I always get the feeling I’m being
lied to somehow. No offence. Let’s just call it
bloody freezing
.’

‘It’s four below up here.’

‘How do you know?’

‘My car tells me.’

McLusky looked peevishly at the other vehicles already assembled in the winter landscape. Two police transport vans, patrol cars and several others. ‘Your car? Perhaps your clever car can
tell us how we’re going to find a body up here under five inches of snow?’

‘I know, it’s mad.’

Yes, it was mad. McLusky had discussed it with DSI Denkhaus earlier. It was bad enough trying to find a live avalanche victim under fresh snow; there, you had something to work with. Resistance
under the snow could be detected with rods, and new technologies were being developed all the time. But a frozen body in frozen ground would feel to the prodding stick of a police officer much like
the surrounding area. Hard. All depended on how much of it had been disturbed by animal activity. Naturally, not ‘mad’ but ‘challenging’ was the official line.

‘We’ll have to try, at least,’ McLusky added. ‘Or as Denkhaus put it more precisely,
be seen to try
.’

Ahead of them a sergeant was giving instructions and a pep talk to sixeteen officers who would attempt a frozen fingertip search of the area most likely to contain the handless body.
‘It’s pure guesswork, of course,’ the sergeant said, ‘but it makes sense to start around the area where the hand was found. Then again, a fox could have carried his prize
several hundred yards at a gallop, especially if he was being chased by a bloody dog.’ The officers formed into one long line, starkly black and yellow against the snow. At a quiet command
from the sergeant, they set off. Each carried a rod with which to probe the ground for anything unusual. To McLusky they looked like a platoon of blind men.

‘At least it’s not foggy any more,’ he conceded.

‘I do wish they’d twigged that the hand had a different owner earlier, before all this stuff came down.’ Austin kicked with his heavy police boots at the snow. ‘Much as I
like the look of it. I’ve missed snow, you know, living down here in the south.’

‘I’m happy for you. Pity we can’t just wait until the stuff melts and the ground’s no longer frozen. Makes no difference to Mr Hands, I’m sure.’ But it
couldn’t be done. Especially not with part of a body found, foul play almost certain and without a suspect in custody. Every day they lost put more distance between the murder and its
perpetrator, perhaps even literally.

Soon a flock of press photographers and reporters descended. ‘Like carrion birds,’ McLusky observed when the search team stopped for a rest. Everyone had long run out of hand jokes,
especially after the sergeant warned them that DSI Denkhaus would personally slaughter anyone who let himself be photographed laughing while looking for a dead body. Officers were drinking tea and
hot soup from flasks, eating sandwiches, or discreetly smoking behind trees, out of sight of the camera lenses trained on them. McLusky didn’t join them, knowing that the presence of a CID
officer would probably ruin their break, cramp their style. Instead he walked for a bit down the track until he could no longer hear any voices and there smoked a solitary cigarette, cupping the
glowing end of it with his hands for the illusion of warmth it offered. The search had been postponed from yesterday until this morning, and they had been here for two hours now. His feet were
numb, his ears so cold it hurt to touch them. The search team had managed to cover a large area already, now trampled by their heavy boots, a shambles compared with the untouched, snow-blanketed
surroundings. Murder somehow managed to turn everything ugly, though to McLusky the scene before him also had its own special aesthetic: police officers, their liveried cars and uniforms, the
purposefulness of it, the exclusivity of it, set apart from civilian life.

With the break over, the line was re-forming just as the dog handler arrived in his van. ‘How do you expect the dog to find anything if you systematically trample all over the search
area?’ he asked the sergeant.