Game Over (29 page)

‘And what about Danny Masseter?’ asked Hart, who had come to feel rather proprietorial about him. ‘Where does he fit into it?’

‘And why was Bates sprung – if he was sprung?’ Hollis asked. ‘Couldn’t be just to enjoy the fruits of his labours, could it?’

‘He was a friend of Tyler’s – isn’t that enough?’ Atherton said.

‘I wouldn’t have thought Tyler had any friends,’ Slider said. ‘Not of the sentimental sort. But you’re right, Norma – this doesn’t tie up all the ends. In fact, it leaves me with just as many questions as I started with.’

Hart’s phone rang, and she went over to answer it. She came back smiling. ‘That was Reading,’ she said. ‘Mrs Masseter recognised Mark from the photograph as the bogus Inspector Steel.’

‘Good,’ Slider said. ‘So we’ve got him for impersonating a police officer, obstructing the course, and burglary, just for starters. Get his description and photograph out to all units. He’s to be arrested on sight.’

‘And if the car damage matches the motorbike,’ Hart said happily, ‘we can have him for murder.’

‘You’ve got to link him with the car first,’ Mackay reminded her.

‘We’ll do it. Poor old Danny,’ she said. ‘By Grabthar’s hammer, I will avenge you.’

‘By what?’ Slider said.

‘Best not to ask,’ said Joanna, who had seen the film.

‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this,’ Joanna said when she and Slider were alone, ‘but I have to have some more clothes. I didn’t pack all that much because it was only two days. I have to go back to the flat.’

‘Not on your own,’ Slider said.

‘You went on your own,’ she reminded him.

‘And look what happened to me.’

‘Yes. You didn’t manage to avoid it, so how will your coming with me make things better?’

‘I saw the warning signs, without which I could have been much worse hurt.’

Joanna looked anxious. ‘It’s not that dangerous, is it? It was only a prank – the bucket? Painful for you, but not life-threatening.’

‘His threats have escalated,’ Slider said, choosing his words carefully. ‘I don’t know, I’ve never known, how seriously he means them, but I can’t take chances, especially not with you. If you tell me what you want, I’ll go and get it.’

‘Not on your own, to quote somebody I know and love,’ Joanna said. ‘You’d never find half what I want, and you’d get the wrong things. Besides, the whole thing about threats is that they are blackmail, and you don’t give in to blackmail. It’s my flat and I won’t be kept out of it by some creep of a criminal.’

‘Bravely spoken,’ Slider said, but he didn’t smile. ‘All right, we’ll both go – but you’re to do exactly as I say, if anything happens.’

‘OK,’ Joanna said, making certain mental reservations. Probably he could read her mind – they had been together a long time – but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

Slider drove by a roundabout route, and this, and his constant checking in the mirrors, began to work on Joanna’s nerves. He had been hurt before – the memory of it chilled her – and Atherton had been seriously wounded some years back, so badly wounded that his nerve almost went and he was on the verge of leaving the Job. Being pregnant made you feel differently about all sorts of hazards. She had never given a thought to the hazards of falling over until the baby started to show. Now being at the top of a flight of stairs gave her pause. She didn’t let it stop her using stairs, but she
thought
about it. She wondered suddenly if, once the baby arrived, she would ever feel the same again about ponds, electrical sockets, bleach bottles, large dogs and any number of other pieces of previously ignorable life furniture. She had given a hostage to fortune in loving Bill, but it was the baby that had made her realise all the ways in which the ransom could be levied.

But you can’t give in to it, she thought, otherwise there was no point in being alive at all. She wondered, though, how often Bill had been afraid for her, how often he was afraid for his other children. He never spoke of it, but that would be Bill anyway. Men’s courage was different from women’s. What they had decided to put up with come what may, they didn’t see the need to talk about. She reached across and laid a hand on his thigh as a huge gust of love went through her. He took his hand briefly from the wheel and laid it on hers in acknowledgement.

There was a parking space right in front of the house, for once in a blue moon, and for a moment he wondered if that was ominous. Then he told himself not to be a fool; and not to appear one, either, by driving past it and parking further away, which was what he would have done had he been alone. But after all, if they were following him, they knew by now where he was going – would have known it as soon as he turned into the road. He parked, told Joanna not to get out until he opened the door, checked all the mirrors minutely, then got out and went round to her side. The day-empty street mocked his precautions. A car went past and he tensed, but it was a silver Peugeot with a young woman driving it.

‘OK,’ he said, letting Joanna out. He helped her to her feet, and as her face reached a level with his, he saw that she was nervous now. ‘This is silly,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy you some new clothes.’

‘You will not,’ she said. ‘
That
would be silly.’

He walked up the path with Joanna behind him, scanning the house for any signs of change, scanning the path for any hint that anyone else had been there. He got the key out, inspected the lock and the door, turned it cautiously, and let himself in.

The door opened without resistance, and a tiny alarm bell rang in his head before he realised what it was: there should have been a heap of junk mail impeding it, but there was no mail at all lying there. How many days in the year was there
nothing
in the post? He couldn’t remember a single one, except for bank holidays. He had stepped in as he thought this. The windowless hall passage was always dark, and Joanna, stepping in behind him, reached automatically for the light switch, just at the instant that his nose and brain, working separately, suddenly joined forces in a flash of horror. His hand shot out, grasping her wrist, and he turned her with its leverage and pushed her with his whole body back out of the door.

‘Gas!’ he said as he ran her back down the path. She stumbled because he was pushing her, but he had his arm round her now and bore her up as well as along. Out of the gate, across the pavement. There was a big plane tree growing opposite the next door house, and he pushed her into the shelter of its trunk. ‘Stay there,’ he snapped and flung himself at the boot of his car.

‘Bill! What are you doing?’

He rummaged frantically in his tool kit and found a big screwdriver.

‘Bill!’ Joanna cried, her voice rising in terror as he headed back to the house. ‘Bill, don’t!’

‘Stay there!’ he flung over his shoulder.

Under the small bay window of the sitting-room stood the white meter box. He flung himself to his knees with frantic haste, wrenched open the flap with the screwdriver, and twisted the shut-off lever closed. Then, with the horrid sensation of the sweat of fear in his armpits, he ran back to Joanna, reaching for his mobile.

She was so white he thought she was going to be sick. But her fear turned itself nimbly into anger. ‘How dare you? How dare you risk yourself like that?’

‘I had to turn off the gas,’ he said. ‘Thank God the meter box was outside.’ She began to cry. He conducted her across the road, further from the house. It could still go up, though the worst was averted now the gas was shut off at the main. ‘I have to ring the bomb disposal squad,’ he said. ‘Hush, it’s all right.’ He put his arm round her, and let her cry on his shoulder while he spoke to them. It was just her hormones, he told himself.

The subsequent fuss took a big chunk out of the day. The road had to be sealed off and the house and the ones either side had to be evacuated – though fortunately, because of the time of day, that only involved one old lady and a cat, the rest of the flats being empty. Then the squad went in to do a sweep. There were two triggers, it turned out. One was the light switch by the front door – it was damn lucky, said Cattishall, the head of the squad, that Slider’s reactions had been so fast.

‘It’s lucky I’ve got a good sense of smell,’ Slider countered.

The other trigger was in the kitchen, and was particularly cunning and nasty. It was a friction device fixed in the runner of the sash window, so that if Slider had smelled the gas and come in without using the light, as soon as he pushed up the window – the natural first action – it would have acted like a match striking a matchbox. All the gas taps had been left fully open and there was a considerable volume of gas inside the house.

‘Makes you nostalgic for the old shilling-in-the-meter days,’ Cattishall said. ‘It would have run out before too much harm was done.’

Once everything had been made safe, Slider and Joanna both went in to pack up everything they thought they might need to take with them, before the flat was boarded up completely. Packing a suitcase, Joanna was calm, but unhappy.

‘I hate this. I’m sick of it. How can people be allowed to ruin your life like this? It’s my home! I hate that blasted Bates.’

‘You’re not meant to like him.’

‘Oh, Bill,’ she said tragically, ‘when will it all be over?’

‘When we catch him,’ Slider said.

Seventeen

No Tern Unstoned

T
he landlord of the Sally identified Thomas Mark from his photograph a little doubtfully, but one of his bar staff said much more definitely that she had served him. She had noticed him because he was talking to Dave Borthwick, who was a regular, and he looked so far out of old Dave’s class that the anomaly had amused her. Not that she said anomaly, of course. She asked Jerry Fathom, who had been doing the asking, what was happening with old Dave.

‘I never would have thought he had the balls to do something like that. He just used to come in here and sit with his couple of pints. He seemed like an ordinary bloke.’ She gave herself a pleasurable shiver. ‘To think all the time I was serving a murderer! Anyway, what’s this bloke got to do with it?’

‘Well, I can’t tell you anything at the moment,’ Fathom said, ‘but when the case is all over, I could tell you all the details, if you’d like to come out with me one night.’

For a moment the thought of being in the know flickered greedily through her eyes, and then she looked properly at Fathom and said scornfully, ‘Get bent!’

The forensic sweep of the black Focus had revealed a number of fingermarks, though none of them belonged to Bates.

‘But they might well belong to Thomas Mark,’ Slider said, when he was back in circulation in the afternoon. ‘We haven’t got his on record to compare them with, but when we find him, it’ll be another nail in his coffin.’

There was also a lot of mud under the wheel arch and a sample was being analysed to see if it matched the mud in the lane where Masseter was killed.

‘But I think we can assume, for working purposes, that it was him who killed Masseter, because otherwise what was he doing up there and why did he take away the papers and computer?’

‘Why did he do that anyway?’ Hart said.

‘Well, let’s come back to Masseter later,’ Slider said, unwittingly driving a thorn in her heart. ‘Let’s look first at what we’ve got linking Bates to the Stonax murder.’ He could call it that with impunity as Emily was out of the room, still beavering away on the computer, with Atherton’s assistance.

‘At about the same time Ed Stonax was killed, the next-door neighbour Mrs Koontz sees a motorbike courier come out of the building with a large Jiffy envelope in his hand. The bike had a white box on the back with a circular logo on it, with, she says, a “little telephone” in it, which is the logo of Ring 4. Also a file was missing from Ed Stonax’s filing system. So it’s a promising inference that the courier was the murderer and that he took away the file.’

‘After smearing oil on the victim’s pockets and cuffs, which he got from Dave Borthwick’s bike, to make it look as if Borthwick did the job,’ Hollis added.

‘And leaving some faint oily smears on the filing cabinet,’ Swilley said.

‘I suspect those weren’t intentional,’ Slider said. ‘The residue left after sullying Stonax. But he won’t have cared much. If the file was that important, presumably he will have thought getting hold of it made him invulnerable. And anyway, it was Dave’s bike’s oil, so if found he knows it goes to Dave’s account.’

‘Yes, but who is “he”, boss?’ Swilley asked. ‘We know Thomas Mark set up the lock disabling, but was he the one that did the murder?’

‘I think the one thing we can be sure of is that he didn’t do the actual killing,’ said Slider. ‘Remember we had the footmark by the filing cabinet, and it was too small to be either Borthwick’s or the victim’s. Now I don’t know Thomas Mark’s shoe size, but he’s a big man and I think we can take it as read that his feet will match the rest of him.’

‘Which leaves – Bates,’ said Swilley.

Slider nodded. He had been coming to this conclusion ever since his talk with Solder Jack, who had reminisced that Bates was a ‘little runt of a man’ with ‘little fingers twinkling away’.

‘Bates is not a tall man,’ he said. ‘He’s quite slight in build, too, though he keeps – or used to keep – himself very fit. And he has small hands – very useful for fiddling about with miniature circuitry – so he probably has small feet as well.’