Game Over (21 page)

‘Stonax’s diary,’ she said, drawing it out from under her arm. ‘I was working backwards, and then it occurred to me to go forwards a bit, and I found he had an appointment today with a “DM”. Look, here, DM at half twelve.’

‘So why hasn’t DM come forward to tell us that?’ Slider said. ‘He must have seen on the news or in the papers that Stonax is dead.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Hart. ‘Unless he was some kind of crim, but it didn’t seem likely, with Stonax being such a Boy Scout. So I looked back and found a meeting with a Daniel Masseter a couple of months back, beginning of July. I done a bit of a trawl through the files and everything, but I couldn’t find any reference to Daniel Masseter anywhere, not so much as an address or phone number. If Stonax kept any info on him, it was either in that file we think’s gone missing—’

‘Or it’s in the encrypted part of the computer,’ Slider said.

‘Or both. Anyway, I thought it was worth a bit of a goosey, so I put him in the computer and started searching. Luck would have it, I started with police records and found he’d been in trouble a couple of times doing environmental protests – Hartlepool, the Able UK ship recycling thing?’

‘Yes, I remember. The company that got the contract to break up US naval derelicts.’

‘Yeah. Well, he chained himself to some gates, apparently, and when they cut him loose he threw a brick and smashed someone’s windscreen, so they nicked him. And he was nicked for obstruction in that Essex oil refinery protest. And quite a bit in between.’

‘But those were both years ago,’ Slider said. ‘The Hartlepool thing must be – what – four years ago? And Jaywick two years ago.’

‘Yeah, so what’s he been up to since then? That’s what I wondered.’

‘Maybe it would explain, if he’d had trouble with the police in the past, why he didn’t come forward to say he had an appointment with Stonax.’

‘Maybe. But a more compelling reason, I reckon, is that he’s dead.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. I wanted to see if he’d been visible recently, so I put him in a news filter, and up he come straight away.
Reading Observer
, local lad killed in an RTA. He was apparently knocked off his motorbike on a country road near Pangbourne – it’s a sort of cut-through to the A4. Locals say people use it as a rat run and drive too fast – it’s only really a country lane and some of it’s single track with passing places. Anyway, he was found by a woman going to work early morning two weeks ago. Him and the bike was in a ditch, there was skid marks across the road, and his neck was broken. Local police reckon from the damage to the bike he must have been sideswiped by a car. They put it down as a hit-and-run driver.’

‘And it could have been,’ said Slider.

‘That’s the beauty of it.
Reading Evening Post
did quite a bit on it, tragedy of young life cut short, blah de blah – I printed it out in case you want it – and made out he was some kind of planet-saving hero because of his “well known environmental activities”. Then the next day the
Observer
come up with his police record and they dropped him pretty sharpish.’

‘I think,’ Slider said, ‘we need to have a word with his nearest and dearest. Have you found out who they are?’

‘Yeah, his nearest, anyway. He lived with his mum on a housing estate in Reading. Don’t know if she’s his dearest – news reports don’t mention if he had a girlfriend.’

‘Well, you’d better go and find out, then,’ he said, and was rewarded with a wide grin.

‘Thanks, guv. I won’t let you down.’

Slider drank his tea, swallowed two of the aspirin, thought for a bit, and then rang his best snout, Tidy Barnett. Tidy’s sepulchral tones answered at the second ring. ‘’Ang on a minute, Mr S. Someone ’ere. We ain’t secure.’ There were various indeterminate sounds as Tidy removed himself to a more secluded spot, and then he was back on. ‘What can I do you for? I ’ope it’s not about this big business in ’Ammersmith, cause I’m not up to all that. I’ve ’ad me ear out for you, naturally, but nobody don’t know nothing about it.’

‘It is about that,’ Slider said, ‘and I was hoping you could help me with one of the minor players. He fixed the security doors of the flat to unlock themselves at a certain time. Used a transistorised timer, maybe Chinese in origin. Know any electronics experts who might do that sort of thing?’

‘Not my street, Mr S,’ Tidy said regretfully. ‘I could put you on to someone who might ’elp. Ever ’eard of Jack Bushman?’

‘Solder Jack? He’s not still around, is he? I thought he went to Australia.’

‘’E did, but ’e’s back. Didn’t like it out there. Been back years. He’s straight now, which is maybe why you ain’t ’eard of him. He’s got a shop, Ladbroke Grove way, on the KPR. He was into all that miniature stuff. You could try him. Otherwise – well, deceased was a nobby bloke, and it sounds like a nobby murder. You need special snouts. Me and mine is no use to you on this one, guv.’

‘Thanks, Tidy,’ Slider said, and rang off. He sat thinking for a while, and then, on an impulse, rang his old friend Pauline Smithers. She was Detective Chief Superintendent Smithers now, and back at the Yard after what had seemed to her like an interminable – though successful – stint on child pornography. The trouble with crime like that was that you could never wrap it up and be done with it. As soon as you cleared out one stinking gutter, you’d get word of another. He was glad for Pauly’s sanity that they’d moved her on.

They had been in uniform together way back when the world was young, and had always had a soft spot for each other. Then she’d got promoted and married the Job and a while later he’d got married to Irene, his first wife, and that had been that. He had often wondered, idly, how things would have turned out if they had hooked up, as had once seemed quite possible, even likely. She had never married, though he was not vain enough to attribute that to a broken heart. For women, the upper echelons of the police force were harder to tackle than Annapurna, and those who made it were rarely able to have emotional lives.

Which he thought was a shame, because Pauline had been a good egg and a perfectly normal woman.

He called her number. It rang for a long time before she answered, and when she did, she spoke before he had a chance to. ‘I’m in a meeting,’ she said in a normal, if slightly severe, tone; and then added, very low and urgently, ‘I’ll ring you back.
Don’t
ring me.’ Then she was gone.

He had rung her on his mobile. As soon as he rang off, his land line rang.

‘Hello, Mr Plod.’

A weary sort of anger surged through him. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m just calling to see if you enjoyed my little joke last night,’ said Bates.

‘Why do you insist on talking like a villain in a B movie?’

‘Oh, dear. You sound a bit tetchy. Head aching?’

‘I always hated practical jokes, even when I was a child. For an adult to practise them is contemptible.’

‘Contemptible, is it? And there was I trying to be kind to you. I could have killed you, you know. I could have filled the bucket with sand. By the way, are you trying to trace this call?’

‘Of course,’ said Slider.

‘Well, you might as well amuse yourself, but you’ll never be able to. My skills, small as they are, are sufficient to run rings round your mediaeval tracing capabilities.’

‘They didn’t have telephones in mediaeval times. A man of your education ought to know that.’

He chuckled. ‘Keeping me talking, eh? I don’t mind. Time is not of the essence to me.’

Slider tired of it. ‘Well, it is to me. What do you want?’

‘Just to let you know that if you enjoyed that little joke, you’ll love the next one. Do you like Guy Fawkes Night?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Well, you’ll find my little surprise
divine
. Divine as in see you in heaven.’

‘Or in your case, not,’ said Slider.

But Bates had gone. McLaren came to the door a few moments later and shook his head. ‘Same story, guv. Bounced round the satellites. Mick Hutton reckons you’d need to keep him talking for fifteen minutes to have a chance of tracing it – and even then, he wouldn’t be there with his stickies on the receiver.’ He eyed Slider sympathetically. ‘What did he want this time?’

‘Dear Mr Slider: threat, threat, threat, threat. Yours sincerely.’

‘Bloody hypocrite. I’m going to get a sarnie. Can I get you one?’

‘God, is it lunch time already?’

‘Going down the stall outside the market,’ McLaren said temptingly.

‘Go on then. I’ll have a sausage sandwich. With tomato sauce.’

‘Got it,’ said McLaren, and wheeled away.

He passed Atherton coming the other way. ‘Word, guv?’ Atherton asked. Slider nodded him in. ‘Emily’s gone off on her travels. We got her a hired car this morning and she’s gone to see the Ring 4 people. Not,’ he added, ‘that you know that, because she isn’t doing it officially and we’ve no idea where she is.’

‘What
do
we know, officially?’ Slider asked. He heard himself sounding tetchy and reached for the aspirin bottle, before realising he had taken them too recently to take more. His shoulder was aching, too. He rubbed it carefully.

‘I’ve been looking up the Sid Andrew business,’ Atherton said. He observed his boss’s actions but guessed sympathy would get his nose bitten off. ‘The girl in the case was called Angela Barlow. She was a junior press officer in the DTI – that’s a civil service appointment, not a political one. Quite a looker, twenty-eight when it all happened, secretarial background, interest in journalism – what bright girl these days
doesn’t
want to be a journalist? – been in the job just under two years. She seemed to disappear without trace after she got sacked, and with the media interest in her, I thought she probably would have gone to earth. I mean, those pictures were pretty explicit, and the popular press’s appetite for all things salacious being what it is—’

‘So where did she go?’ Slider cut in.

‘She went home to her parents,’ Atherton said.

Slider read the bad news in his eyes. ‘And?’

‘She’s dead. Committed suicide last January.’

Slider slammed to his feet. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘We’re going to find out what this whole Sid Andrew thing was about. We’re going to go and see her parents, and then we’re going to and roust him.’

‘Maybe it was just shame,’ Atherton said, playing devil’s advocate. ‘We’ve only got the Stonax supporters’ word for it that the thing was a set up.’

Slider didn’t glance at him as he walked past. ‘We’ll find out,’ he said. ‘And then we’ll know.’

Twelve

Thickening

I
t didn’t take Emily long to discover the local journalist from the
Woburn Courier
who had been responsible for the story of Tyler’s escape. She found Chris Fletcher at the magistrates’ court in Milton Keynes, and persuaded him outside for a chat.

‘I’m sorry to interrupt your work,’ she said when they reached the open air.

‘Dunt matter,’ he said equably. ‘I was busting for a smoke, anyway. Do you?’ He proffered the pack and she shook her head. ‘Mind if I do?’ He didn’t wait for her reply, but knocked one out, shoved it in his mouth and lit it like a starving man falling on bread. He was young, mid-twenties, she thought, and staggeringly badly dressed, with a tweed jacket that was far too big, a tie that looked as if it might have been used to tie up a dog, a grubby shirt with a crumpled collar, and cheap, scuffed shoes at the end of what looked like his old school trousers. The dress code for the magistrates’ court had evidently fallen hard on him. He had a snubby, rather pallid but not unattractive face, and spiky fair hair ending in an unfashionable mullet. His fingernails were badly bitten and his fingers badly stained with nicotine. Being a journalist at this level must be really stressful, she thought.

‘I won’t keep you long,’ she said. ‘I’m just interested in a story you filed back in July about an escaped prisoner—’

‘Oh, God, yes, that!’ he jumped in. ‘I thought I’d got it made! Big city here I come! But it all turned out to be rubbish and I got a rocket from my editor. He kicked my bum so hard I couldn’t sit down for a week.’

‘Would you tell me what happened?’

He was so eager to talk she didn’t have to give him a reason for asking. The fact that she was Press seemed to be enough for him.

‘Well, it was just luck I came across it, really, because I was going home one evening and there’s this cut through round the back of Apsley Guise – I live in Husborne Crawley?’ She nodded as if she knew what he was talking about so as not to slow him down. ‘Anyway, it’s just a lane and there’s never much traffic on it, so I wasn’t surprised to find myself on my own. Then I come round a bend, and there’s a barrier across the road. I was on my bike – I’ve got this mini Moto. It’s useful for getting about to stories, easier to park than a car – not that I could afford a car anyway on what they pay me.’

‘Right. You came across a barrier?’

‘Yeah. Well, I didn’t want to go back, so I pushed the bike round it. And round the next corner there’s a local cop I know, Colin Gunter, and he stops me. I look past him and I see a big Ring 4 van and some more police and a couple of patrol cars. So I says, “S’up Col?” and he says, “You can’t come down this way. There’s a prison van been held up.” So then he tells me this prisoner was on the way to Woodhill, the van got held up and he’s on the loose. So I go back and phone the story straight in, and I ring the
Telegraph
news desk as well. I’ve been doing that for a while, any time I hear anything good, because I’m hoping to make a name with them, and then they’ll give me a job.’