Laughing Boy (10 page)

I splashed cold water against my face in the bathroom and found an old pair of jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt. It’s about a mile around the estate where I live, perhaps a
little
less. I did some stretching exercises in the hallway before plunging out into the grey morning. It felt good. Slightly foolish, but good.

I took it slowly, knowing how easy it is to damage your Achilles or strain a thigh when you haven’t run for a while. If you look down you see your feet reaching forward,
left-right-left-right
, eating up the distance with the ground a blur beneath them, and you feel great, almost invincible. This would have to become a regular part of my regime, I decided, if I was hoping to climb those three damn mountains.

Mostly, we hold meetings. There is already a computer
program
with all the formal meetings on it, so that the ACC isn’t at a divisional budget meeting when he should be handing out certificates at the training college or chairing a
discussion with the Police Complaints Authority. Somebody must have worked it all out before it went on the computer. Interested parties, or their secretaries, must have sat down with the appropriate diaries and decided who should be where and at what time. They must have held a meeting about holding meetings.

The best ones aren’t planned, they just happen. I was
sitting
in the big office, at Jeff Caton’s desk, on Friday
afternoon
as the troops began to filter back, hoping to sew up the day’s work and leave on time. We were talking about the foot-and-mouth epidemic, which had topped five hundred cases. A farmer near Howarth had died of heart failure after it was confirmed among his cattle. As each officer took off his jacket I gave an enquiring look but was only rewarded by shakes of the head. Nobody had struck gold. Jeff brought me a mug of tea and found himself another chair.

The early morning jog had given me a self-righteous
feeling
and an appetite, but I’d only grabbed a sausage roll and an Eccles cake for lunch. Dave came in and joined us,
followed
by Maggie.

“How is she?” I asked.

“Not too good,” Maggie replied. “Worrying about the funeral. The money that was to put Colinette through
college
will now be used to bury her. Any ideas when the body will be released?”

“I’ll have a word with the coroner. Any biscuits, Jeff?”

“Bottom drawer.”

I reached down and pulled the drawer open. There was a book in there and a half-eaten packet of fig biscuits. “Custard creams,” I said. “I don’t like these, I prefer custard creams.”

“That’s why I bring figs,” he replied.

“
The Beast Must Die
,” I read from the cover of the book. “What’s this? Looking for inspiration?”

“Catching up on the classics, Charlie. Have you read it?”

“Mmm, long time ago. By Nicholas Blake, aka CS Lewis.”

“C Day Lewis.”

“Near enough. I’ll borrow it when you’ve finished.”

He reached out and took it from me, saying: “Here, let me read you a piece.” It was the first page and he soon found it. “Here we go:
Every criminal needs a confidante…Sooner or later he will blurt it all out…Or, if his will stands firm, his superego betrays him…forcing the criminal into slips of the tongue
, and so on.”

“Those were the days,” Dave said, “when you could nail someone on a slip of the tongue. Nowadays a signed
confession
isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

“Ah!” I said. “But we have video evidence now. Show a young thug a blurred video of someone in a hooded top holding up a corner shop and he’ll say: ‘Yeah, it’s me, bang to rights.’ He’s on TV, man, this is his moment of fame.” I finished my tea and placed the mug on Jeff’s blotter. “Right, what have we?” I asked, “and don’t all speak at once.”

We’d interviewed everyone who used the shop this week, everyone within quarter of a mile of it and everyone who used the road poor Colinette walked down and the lane where she was found. We’d had roadblocks out, knocked on doors and had a caravan near the shop. People came forward in their hundreds, mostly to say what a wonderful girl Colinette was, but nobody added to our sum of knowledge about her death. We’d even taken the names off the pile of wreaths and sprays of flowers that had accumulated outside the recreation ground, at the spot where we suspected she was accosted, and we’d relocated a CCTV camera to watch everybody who visited the place.

Late Thursday night, I was told, a brick was hurled through Mr Naseen’s shop window and we were having to give him round-the-clock protection.

“We can’t afford to let this become racial,” I told them. “Anything like that needs squashing from the outset. Do we know who threw it?”

“The brick’s gone to fingerprints.”

“Fat lot of good that’ll do.” I looked at the DC who’d raised the subject. “Stay with it, please,” I said. “Find out where the brick came from, who laid it, anything you can. Let it be known that we’re not taking it lightly.”

Peter Goodfellow, one of my more polite DSs, raised a finger as if to ask permission to speak. “Yes, Pete,” I said.

“Um, I was just wondering, Charlie, have we considered that this murder might be linked to Mrs Heeley’s?”

“Let’s consider it now,” I invited. “In what way are they similar?”

“Well, for a start, they are both murders,” he began.

“There was the Robshaw case down in Doncaster about five years ago, when he murdered his ex-wife with rat poison and then killed her lover with a meat cleaver. It wasn’t until a neighbour remembered that he used to chop logs with…”

“One of ours was a stabbing, one was strangled,”
someone
interrupted. Pete might be polite and reticent, but once you launch him he’s difficult to stop.

“Fair enough,” Pete replied, “but they both ended up dead, for no apparent reason. Who’s to say that our man didn’t do the deeds in the way that was most expedient at the time, like Robshaw did. One night he just happened to have…”

“Let’s not dwell on what might have happened, Pete,” I suggested. “There could easily be a link. For a start both crimes are apparently without motive.”

“As was young Robin Gillespie,” Dave interrupted, “over in Lancashire, a fortnight before Mrs Heeley.”

“OK,” I said. “Let me tell you what we’ve done about it.” I explained Dave’s misgivings about Robin’s murder and told them about my contact with NCIS. They were
supposed
to be looking into other apparently random murders for us. Initially, I said, we’d have to investigate Colinette’s death as if it were a one-off, which it was. All murders which involve only one victim are one-offs. It’s just that several of them may be committed by the same person. It didn’t
matter
which you caught them for. As we were drawing a blank
in our enquiries, now might be the time to consider possible links with other crimes, but whether that would open new avenues of enquiry was doubtful.

“It’ll give us an insight into his mind,” someone offered.

“True,” I conceded, “but I’d prefer an insight into his address book.”

“We need a reconstruction,” one of the others suggested.

“You’re right,” I told him and turned to the sergeant who has the expertise to arrange one. “Any chance for next Wednesday?” I asked.

“No problem,” he replied. “I’ll start auditioning in the morning.”

Tomorrow was Saturday, so I told them to be in the office at nine and sent them all home. In my own office I found an artist’s A3 pad and a fibre-tipped pen and started drawing. From the window you can see the rooftops of Heckley, with the fells rising like a wall beyond them. I sketched it with hardly a look, from memory, with my chair twisted round and the pad on my knee. Somewhere up there, I thought, blowing about in the wind, are viruses that latch on to
animals
so that men with guns have to come and shoot them all. And was there someone out there with a virus of his own, that caused him to go out with murder in his heart? Or was he suffering from a mutant speck of DNA, one renegade base pair among three billions, that tipped him over the edge? I ripped the sketch off the pad and scrunched it up into a ball. It bounced off the wall and fell into my bin like they always do. Practise makes perfect. I pulled the chair up to the desk and started to write.

I looked out of the window. Lights were going out in offices all over town, but were coming on in homes at the foot of
the fells. The outer office door opened and the two cleaning ladies came in.

The cleaning lady popped her head round the door and asked if she could do my office. I said: “Sure,” and moved out. I stood looking out of the window as she hoovered the floor and dusted the radiator. The road outside was jammed with traffic whilst an articulated delivery lorry attempted an impossible manoeuvre into Marks and Spencer’s loading bay. One of my sergeants came in with a sandwich and said he wanted to do a report and some studying while things were quiet. Mr Wood looked in to say goodnight on his way downstairs, told us not to stay too long.
11
, I wrote, but I couldn’t think of an eleventh.

I logged on, typed it out and ran-off ten copies. I wrote a brief note, put it in an envelope with one of the copies and addressed it to Dr Adrian Foulkes, Department of Psychology, Heckley General Hospital. The note ended with the words:
Are the murders linked and if so, will he kill again?
Even as I sealed the envelope I knew that the answer to both questions was “Yes”.

On the way home I called in the supermarket to buy a curry from their oriental counter. They have them loose and you choose any combination you like, with different rices and
naan bread. I’d decided to have chicken jalfrezi, but the
container
was nearly empty and definitely lacking in chicken. “Do you have any more jalfrezi?” I asked the big fair-haired girl whose nametag told me was called Julie.

“No problem,” she said with a smile that was over and above that required by her employer. “I’ll fetch some; won’t be a sec.”

She vanished backstage and returned almost immediately carrying a huge plastic box of the stuff. It had sticky address labels on the side with the name of the store and bar codes and the logo of one of those express delivery companies that you see hurtling up and down the motorway.

It was a revelation. I’d always thought that there was a
little
Indian or Bangladeshi chef in the back, a headband
stopping
the sweat running into his eyes, as he toiled away
chopping
meat and vegetables and carefully weighing out all the spices for the different flavours.

I hadn’t appreciated the scale of the enterprise, but it
suddenly
hit me. This supermarket had about a thousand branches. Somewhere there must be a giant curry factory sending its wares to every city and town in the country. In Europe, possibly. Lorry loads of the stuff would be
departing
every minute of every day and night in the impossible task of alleviating our craving for spicy food. Huge tankers, labelled in some esoteric code only understood by
supermarket
managers and firemen, were at this very moment rumbling outwards to the distant corners of the land. That’s what those orange stickers were on the backs of lorries. The Hazardous Chemicals code. When it said
Hazchem
code 1234
, it probably meant that it was carrying vindaloo, so watch out.

And the opposite would be true. A similar number of articulated lorries, and probably trains, too, would be converging on the factory from all directions, bringing chickens and lambs on their final journey, together with onions, tomatoes, peppers and more exotic vegetables. Smaller,
faster lorries, the equivalent of the old tea clippers, would race to bring spices and herbs from the far-flung outposts of the globe. They would carry cardamom from Cordoba, paprika from Papua, turmeric from Turkistan and basil from…Basildon.

Julie handed me the goods with another smile and I rewarded her with my best lopsided one. I collected a
sixpack
of Sam Smith’s from the beer shelves and went home. That was Friday night catered for.

“Can I have a word, Charlie?” Pete Goodfellow asked as I poured hot water on to my Nescafé. “I’ve been thinking about the crimes again, if they are linked.”

Pete never comes forward if he thinks somebody else has covered the ground, but he’s knowledgeable and thorough, and has a near-photographic memory for trivia. We walked downstairs to the incident room, carrying our coffees, and he told me all about it. And I mean
all
about it.

Superintendent Gilbert Wood, my boss, was at the
meeting
, and so was Detective Superintendent Les Isles from HQ. He was the official senior investigating officer, keeping an overview in case I made a boo-boo. We talked about what we had done in the hunt for Colinette’s killer and Les asked questions and made a few suggestions. We’d already covered most of them, but we agreed to have another look at one or two people. The only decision we made was to hold a press conference on Monday and a reconstruction on Wednesday. It’s what we do when we’re running out of ideas.

I then suggested that we look at the other two murders and consider if there were any similarities. I put my efforts of the night before on the overhead projector and invited comments.