Hunting for Crows (7 page)

‘Take the stuff out and we’ll let Bobby sniff around.’

‘For fuck’s sake mate, it’ll take hours,’ Eddie said.

‘Less of the mate. Just do it and shut up.’

Eric went over to help. Ten minutes later and with most of the large gear removed and piled up against the side of the van, the dog was let loose.

He cringed as the dog did its stuff, sniffing and moving around like a mad, wind-up toy. It was ten, half-ten in the morning and it looked like a nice sunny June day was in prospect but he was sweating as if standing in the middle of the Arizona Desert, his shirt sticking to his back, his eyes clouded in moisture like he was crying.

He was lost in a cloud of fear and anxiety, not for the shame he would bring on his parents or his vilification in the press, as they were constantly out to get him, but his inability to play guitar and hear the crowd roaring his name.

He was so engrossed in the melancholy of his own thoughts that he failed to hear the Customs guy say, ‘On your way.’ It was only when Eddie slapped him on the back and said, ‘Told you so mate, now come on and give me a bloody hand,’ did he realise they were free to go.

He was walking down the road as if looking for an address, and after spotting a house with no one at home, turned into the driveway. He continued to walk as if he knew where he was going, but as soon as he was enveloped in darkness by the shadow of the house, he stopped and listened.

He was listening for the sound of Neighbourhood Watch opening their doors and switching on torches, or passing around the matches and lighting them, knowing this area. Instead, the only noise breaking the night’s silence was an owl hooting in the trees. He flicked the toothpick over with his tongue in one movement; five minutes one way, five minutes the other.

It wasn’t this house he was interested in, but another a few doors along, and so he made his way to the back of the garden and began climbing over neighbouring fences. The gardens of these houses were extraordinarily long, no doubt the reason why properties around here were so expensive. Personally he hated gardens and gardening, many years in prison saw to that, but they provided good cover for him just in case someone decided to take a look out of their back window.

When he reached the house he wanted, he headed straight for the back door. The target would be in his garage pumping iron, as it wasn’t yet time for bed. He quietly lifted the small sturdy table at the side of the barbeque and positioned it under the kitchen window. He placed a long screwdriver under the hole he’d cut a few days ago and popped the lever holding the window closed. A minute or so later, he was standing in the kitchen.

He made his way to the hall and then towards the integral garage; he knew the way. Peter Grant lived alone now; even if he hadn’t known, it would have been easy to tell as there were gaps on the walls where pictures were once hung, indentations on the carpet where heavy furniture had once stood and several rooms were devoid of the soft, frilly touches a woman usually brought to a house. Mind you, what did he know about women? He couldn’t go out with a girl without giving her a black eye or something worse, and his mother before she died, was a drug addict. The closest she ever got to decorating was barfing on the walls and pissing on the carpet.

Standing at the door of the garage he could hear loud music. He didn’t know much about anything, but music was his thing and without hearing the track too distinctly, he knew it was
Street Fighting Man
by the Rolling Stones. In prison, he liked quiz nights. They were designed to be a bit of light entertainment for the boys, but often led to serious punch-ups with simmering recriminations.

He pushed open the door just a sliver and peered in. The target was at the start of his routine, lying on his back on the bench and lifting a heavy bar which was usually fifty kilos to start and progressively increased to eighty or ninety, or if he was feeling especially manly, one hundred. He waited until he dipped the bar and it began moving on its journey up towards the rest, his grunts almost drowning out the next track, Bad Company and
Can’t Get Enough
, before stepping up behind him. Gripping the bar with both hands, he pushed it back down.

The sap was so surprised to find someone standing there, he lost concentration and his arms buckled. The bar, 60 kilos of solid metal, fell against his chest with a deep thump. Not allowing him the time to appreciate what was happening and give him a chance to offer resistance, he pulled it up towards his throat.

‘Stop it, you bastard! I can’t...breathe. Who...the fuck are you?’ he said, gasping for air.

Frantically his fingers were clutching at the bar, trying to move it away from his throat, but the angle wasn’t good for the man on the bench and his assailant’s grip was strong. If Grant wasn't panicking so much he might have noticed that his attacker was standing in a position where his balls were within easy reach of a good punch; good job as anyone who could potentially lift one hundred kilos could pack quite a thump.

‘What’s the combination of the safe?’

‘How…how do you know...I’ve got a safe?’

‘Call it a lucky guess.’ He pressed the bar down harder on his throat.

‘Ahhh. Stop it!’

Momentarily he eased back; the man needed to speak. ‘I won't say it again, the combination of the safe?’

‘653...ah, ah 425.’

‘653425?’

‘Yes.’

He applied more pressure, and soon Peter Grant struggled no more.

What a morning. It took until ten-thirty before householders stopped reporting false alarms at houses in the Elm Grove area, temporarily incapacitated by a power cut, and then they had to return to Churchill Square to pick up yet another shoplifter. To cap off a lousy start to this week’s shift, the intruder they caught climbing through a kitchen window in Patcham was only the son of the stone-deaf woman inside who couldn’t hear him knock and didn’t see the bell alert on her visual display. All PC Cindy Longhurst wanted to do now was get back to John Street nick and enjoy a well-earned mug of Rosie Lea.

The patrol car turned into Kingswood Street and they were close enough to John Street nick for Cindy to almost taste the heavy aroma of a hot Tetley brew. Just then, Telepathic Tina, otherwise known as TT, the masochistic controller who possessed an uncanny sense of knowing when they weren’t busy or were making their way back to the station for a break, came on the squawk box and sent them to Hove. Cindy’s driver, Dave Gosling executed an angry U-turn, causing a mini-hold-up behind and giving pleasure to the twisted bastard, as his face creased into the first smile of the day as they roared off in the opposite direction.

Cindy was new to Traffic, a welcome relief from pounding the beat which she’d done for four years, but she’d always liked cars and helping people and so far the job had lived up to her expectations. This was in spite of the behaviour and attitude of her ill-mannered and all-round misogynist companion, a twenty-two-year veteran who was passed-over, pissed-on and more often than not, passed-out. In fact, he didn’t believe women should be in the force at all, but stuck at home doing his washing and ironing, and in such a comment lay the reason why no one had volunteered to marry the cranky sod.

‘When TT said this bloke didn’t turn up for work yesterday, did she say if anybody had made any attempt to contact him because if they haven’t–’

‘Yep, she did,’ Cindy said glancing at her notes and heading off another moan at Gosling Pass. ‘Friends tried his mobile and the home phone but they didn’t receive a reply. He might be inside and incapacitated in some way.’

‘How do we get in? I know the Woodland Drive area, my uncle used to live there, it’s full of big houses with smart-arsed alarm systems and big dogs. I don’t want to be the one standing there for the third time this morning with my dick in my mouth while this screeching thing wakes the whole neighbourhood, and then having to face an angry Alsatian, spitting venom because its master’s gone and tripped down the bloody stairs.’

‘Don’t wind me up Dave, you know how I hate dogs. TT said a neighbour, a Mr Charles Whiting, has the key and he’ll be there to meet us.'

‘He better be because...’

She tuned out. Life as a new-minted Traffic cop began in the enclosed space of a police squad car five weeks ago, and in this short time she now knew his views on politics, football and women. It varied little, from ‘string 'em up’, ‘they’re rubbish’ to ‘they should all be at home’ and talk of his impending retirement only made matters worse. She couldn't wait until the spring really kicked in, as he was a keen gardener and he could then bore her rigid about flies on his fruit trees and slugs on the lettuce.

They turned into Woodland Drive and about a hundred yards down, into a driveway, and parked behind a pristine BMW Six Series. She knew it was the owner’s car, but it didn’t half make their grubby Mondeo patrol car look old and shabby.

‘Nice set of wheels,’ Dave said after easing his beer-bloated frame out of the door and stretching, as if at the end of a long journey and not a couple of miles between two adjoining towns. ‘I might buy one of them when I retire.’

‘I don’t know what sort of package you’ve been promised, from what I hear you’ll be lucky to afford a well-used pool car.’

‘I wouldn't touch a heap of crap like this if you–’

‘Good morning officers.’

Cindy turned and came face to face with a small, elderly man with thinning grey hair, clad in an ill-fitting cardigan, either his wife’s first attempt at knitting or the poor man needed to use his glasses whenever he went shopping. They didn’t hear his approach as the daft old goat was still wearing his slippers, despite the presence of many puddles from an overnight deluge, leaving drains in the road gurgling with running water.

‘I have the keys,’ he said, before turning and heading towards the house.

The door opened without drama and the piece of paper clutched in Mr Whiting’s bony fingers containing the alarm code jotted down in neat blue writing was not needed, as there was no ominous countdown and no wailing siren to spin the wheels of PC Dave Gosling’s moan-meter. Mr Whiting was standing in the hall waiting to follow them, but Dave placed a firm hand on his elbow and steered him back the way he came. ‘Sorry sir, but you’ll have to wait outside,’ he said. ‘Thank you for opening the door but this is police business.’

He closed the door on the crestfallen old-timer. No doubt he was a fan of cop shows like
CSI
and Scandinavian murder mysteries like
The Bridge
, and was gung-ho to discover his first pool of blood, a bashed-in skull or God-forbid, a dead body. With four years under her slowly expanding belt, Cindy still found the sight of a corpse disturbing, and with Mr Whiting on the wrong side of seventy, she doubted if his heart could stand the shock of finding his neighbour lying at the bottom of the stairs or impaled on the tines of a garden fork.

‘You take down, I’ll do up,’ Dave said, his foot on the first step effectively ending any discussion.

She had no choice and nodded in agreement, but she made a face behind his back. For once, she would like to take a look at the places where other people slept, and find out what clothes they owned and what toiletries they used. Dave did it, he said, as it required more detective work than looking at a cooker and the contents of the fridge, but she suspected he wanted to take a look through the wife’s underwear drawers. She didn’t have the heart to tell the big, sad lump that if he listened to TT a bit more carefully instead of sounding off about being sent to Hove and missing his morning cuppa, he would realise the man of the house was divorced and lived alone.

The kitchen was big, much too big for a single man who, in her experience, ate mostly take-aways and drank beer straight from the tin and whose idea of home cooking was an M&S meal for one. The oven was clean and looked unused, and despite the presence of a dishwasher, numerous dirty dishes were lying on work surfaces.

The downstairs loo and study were small, making it obvious the master of the house was not lying inside and so with little enthusiasm, she walked into the lounge. It was a large, L-shaped room, light and airy and it was clear the current owner, or the previous one, had knocked down a few walls to create the space, as a couple of big RSJs crossed the ceiling. The furniture was a bit minimalist for her taste with two settees, a few chairs and a flat screen TV, but she assumed the lack of it was more likely a consequence of a family break-up than any strict adherence to the principles of feng shui.

If the furniture was a little on the sparse side, the hi-fi kit looked full-on, the shelving occupying a sizeable section of wall. There were CDs, hundreds of LPs and cassettes and all the equipment to play them on, including an amplifier, tuner and CD player, most of which looked top-notch stuff, although she couldn't believe anyone still owned a turntable. The only people she had seen using one of those were DJs in nightclubs down on the seafront.

The other thing to catch her eye were two paintings on the wall. At first she thought they were copies of one another, but on closer examination she spotted a few differences. She liked art, a fact she didn’t mention to any of her colleagues. Coppers were a funny bunch when it came to stuff like art, poetry and reading and before she could say, ‘heterosexual’ or ‘I like men,’ she would be branded a dyke and the moniker would stick for evermore.

Both were signed ‘Joaquin’ and although not a name familiar to her, she would look him up as she liked what he was trying to do. Most visitors to art galleries spent no more than a couple of seconds gazing at each painting, but with these two the artist was encouraging them to spend a bit more time looking at his pictures by inviting them to participate in an adult version of ‘spot the difference.’ You had to admire the man for his cheek.

She left the lounge and opened the door to the room next door. It was another sitting room with a settee and coffee table, but no television or music, a ‘parlour’ as her granny would have called it. Like the room in her granny’s house in Bodmin, it smelled musty and looked unused. She closed the door and opened the door to the garage.

She didn’t receive a blast of cold air, often the result of opening an integral garage door, and it didn’t take the skills of a seasoned detective to understand why. The garage had been converted into a gym, and a sophisticated air conditioning/heating system hung from the ceiling.

She shut the door behind her and walked in. It was perhaps the way the light was shining from the large windows, dotted all around the room, but at first she didn’t realise someone else was in there too. It was the owner, Mr Peter Grant. She knew what he looked like, as his picture had been in
The Argus
and there’d been a short piece about him on Southern Television the other day when he’d talked about the new superstore his fitness business had opened in Croydon.

The reason she didn’t spot him at first was he was lying on the exercise bench, his face as pale as snow, the weight of a 60 kilo barbell pressing down on his neck.