Murder in Bare Feet (2 page)

‘A beer would have been better.’ He slowly dragged the paper away from his face. ‘Have you no consideration? Don’t you know, I was almost asleep,’ he said. ‘I was drifting beautifully. You woke me up.’

‘I said, are you going to cut the lawn?’ Mary said, stressing each word.

‘It’s too hot,’ he said reaching out for the beaker. ‘Thank you, love.’

She smiled and sat down beside him. She picked up a magazine and took out a pen from her handbag.

He looked up and took a squinting look at the clear blue sky.

‘Beautiful.’

It had been a dreadful summer … all those floods. The sun was a long-awaited relief.

The only sound was the chime of the church clock.

They sipped the tea. He squinted down at the newspaper. In the corner of a page was a big colour photograph of the representation of a man’s head in glowing green. The head was the shape of a football. It had thick lips and slit eyes; it had a short fat neck and the whole thing was set on a wooden plinth.

She looked up from the magazine and saw it.

‘Whatever’s that?’ Mary said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said and read out the headline. ‘Jade head of Hang Mung Cheng missing.’ Then he went on to say, ‘It’s the life-size representation of him, found in Xingtunanistan, a small, remote country on the northern borders of China, where he was Emperor in 600 BC. Stolen in 2001. It has been traced to London and the Empress of Xingtunanistan, Louise Elizabeth Mung Cheng, has arrived at Heathrow to speak to the Home Secretary to see if he can use his influence to find the jade head and have it returned to Xingtunanistan. It’s two thousand years old.’

‘Mmm,’ Mary said, ‘it looks ugly … but a piece of carved jade that age and size must be worth a fortune.’

‘Priceless, it says here,’ he added, shaking the newspaper. ‘Good luck to her, I say. She’ll need it.’

They both returned to sipping the tea.

Mary gripped the magazine tightly, then buried her head in it, pen in hand.

Angel turned the page of the newspaper and was scanning the page for interesting items.

Suddenly Mary said: ‘What’s the capital of Turkey?’

‘Ankara,’ he said almost without thinking.

‘That’s it,’ she whooped.

He looked up at her with a frown.

She smiled at him. ‘It’s for a competition.’ She made the entry on the magazine page.

He wrinkled his nose. She was always doing pointless competitions.

Then she went on: ‘Mmm. Name three soft cheeses.’

‘Brie,’ he said. He might have known another two, but there was the intruding sound of a mobile phone.

Mary sighed, looked at him and pulled a disagreeable face.

He frowned. ‘Might be nothing,’ he said as he dipped into his shirt pocket, found the phone, opened it and pressed a button.

‘Angel.’

It was Inspector Asquith, duty officer at Bromersley police station. ‘Sorry to bother you, Michael. There’s a triple nine. Man shot dead on Sebastopol Terrace. In a car. Slumped over the wheel. Outside a scrapmetal dealer’s.’

Angel leaned forward in the deck chair. ‘Right, Alan.’

‘I’ve informed SOCO and Mac. There’s patrol car Foxtrot Tango One attending.’

‘Right.’

‘Have you informed the super?’

‘He doesn’t want to know. He said direct any CID emergencies to you. He’s gone to a champagne reception to mark the opening of new offices of Councillor Potts of Potts Security.’

Angel nodded. ‘Hope he enjoys himself,’ he said unconvincingly. ‘Who rang in?’

‘Didn’t leave his name. The usual.’

Mary knew from her husband’s side of the conversation what the call was about and what was going to happen to the rest of their afternoon. She pulled a face and said, ‘Oh really!’

Angel waved a hand at her not to speak.

‘Yes, right. I’ll deal with it,’ he said and closed the phone.

S
ebastopol Terrace was one of four dark, parallel streets consisting of small Victorian terraced houses of identical design, to provide cheap rented accommodation for worker’s at the town’s coalmine. Today they were mostly owned by the occupiers and their building societies, and provided convenient accommodation for those who wanted to be near employment in the town or close to the bus station from where they could be conveyed to jobs at factories on the outskirts of the town.

The burning August Sunday sun had tempted many of the cramped residents to the parks and countryside; the poorer and older residents stayed inside the tiny rooms to keep cool behind lace curtains and shades, leaving the gloomy quiet streets unusually deserted.

Disturbing the quiet and peace, an ice cream van came rattling round the street corner playing its inane chime of ‘half a pound of two-penny rice, half a pound of treacle’, unsettling those who had settled into a warm sweaty snooze. It stopped a while, served a small queue of customers then dashed off to another street where the electronic chime was heard again.

Sebastopol Terrace was a cul-de-sac, and at the end on the site where two houses had been demolished after a gas explosion in the seventies, was a scrapdealer’s yard enclosed by high steel railings with big iron gates with barbed wire stretched across the top. There was a big sign in white paint on black, attached to the gate. It read: ‘Charles Pleasant, scrapmetal dealer. Buyer of ferrous and non-ferrous metals. Best prices paid.’

Crowding the open gates of the scrapyard was an assortment of police vehicles. Some of them had blue lights rotating on top of them. A big black Bentley car was positioned across the pavement facing the entrance to the yard. Six police personnel, four in white disposable paper suits, boots and hats, and two in patrol car uniforms, were assembling a small white marquee around it.

Edging ever closer to the scene were about thirty men, women and boys; they stood there, muttering. The men and boys were mostly white, hands in pockets and naked from the waist up, some with blue tattoos. Several wore grubby vests. The women in twos and threes were stood there with fat arms folded, watching as if it was a street entertainment.

Angel turned the BMW round the corner of Sebastopol Terrace, put his foot down on the accelerator and rocked his way along the uneven road up to the big white SOCO van and parked his car behind it. Then he made his way towards the crowd of rubberneckers to get to the centre of the activity. As he pushed his way through, his lips tightened back against his teeth. When he finally arrived at the DO NOT CROSS tape and dodged underneath it, he sighed and leaned over to one of the patrolmen, PC Donohue, and whispered something in his ear.

The policeman nodded knowingly. He turned, took the notebook out of his breast pocket and looked at the nearest of the young men and said, ‘Now then son. What’s your name and address?’

The young man shrugged, then turned away and kicked an invisible ball casually along the road.

‘Did you see what happened?’ Donohue said, following behind him.

The young man walked more quickly, then took his hands out of pockets and began to run down the street.

Donohue turned to the next young man. ‘And what did you see?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What’s your name, sonny?’

He also shrugged, turned away, took his hands out of his pockets and began to run. Some of the others heard and saw what had taken place and also turned away and began to drift slowly away. Donohue approached a man in his twenties and said, ‘Did you see what happened, sir?’

The young man pulled in his stomach, stuck out his chest and with his eyes half closed, looked down at the flagstones and said, ‘No. I didn’t see nuthin’.’

‘Do you know the man?’

‘It’s old man Pleasant, isn’t it?’

‘What’s his first name?’

The man nodded in the direction of the sign. ‘It’s up there. Charles Pleasant.’

Donohue nodded. ‘You could do an official identification of the body then, for us, down at the station, couldn’t you?’

‘S’pose.’

‘Right. What’s your name and address, sir?’

There was a thoughtful pause. The young man shrugged. ‘Naw. It’s all right,’ he muttered, then he turned and walked slowly away. When he was about thirty yards up the road, he also began to run.

Donohue turned back to another group of four. As he approached them, they turned and walked off. The other lookers also walked away.

Angel noticed, caught Donohue’s eye, nodded approvingly and turned back to check over the dead man in the driver’s seat. There was a spray of blood on the windscreen and an oval hole in the glass, reasonable to assume it was made with a gun. The dead man had dark hair with speckles of grey. Angel thought he might be in his fifties. The hair was sticking up in places, as if it was soaked in brilliantine.

The SOCO team finished securing the marquee, which completely covered the Bentley. It had a flap that was temporarily fastened open with ties to the scrapyard railings. The arrangement provided a shield from prying eyes whilst still permitting the team access, especially convenient when carrying anything. They set up powerful lights inside, and after the SOCO photographer had completed all his work and had withdrawn, Angel went into the marquee.

Dr Mac, the pathologist, was still examining the head and shoulders of the body through the driver’s window, which he had apparently found in the lowered position.

Angel pushed up to him. ‘What you got, Mac?’

‘Nothing very helpful, Michael. Only what you see,’ he said, and with a gloved hand, he gently took hold of the dead man’s hair, pulled his head upwards and backwards for him to see the face.

Angel had seen plenty of bodies in his time; each one was different. It was never pleasant. In this instance, the mouth was turned down, the eyes fully open, staring as if still alive.

It sent a tingle down his back.

Angel nodded and Mac let go of the head. It flopped as relaxed as a puppet down across the steering wheel.

Angel pursed his lips. He thought that the face was hard, important looking and brutally handsome. The face of a thinking, intelligent man, not necessarily a good man; definitely not the face of a backstreet scrapdealer.

‘I have found four bullet holes. Two in the head, then one in the arm and one in the chest. No powder burns, so the gun was fired well back. More than eight or ten feet, probably much further.’

‘Can you work out the projectile path?’

He nodded. ‘At a rough guess, I’d say they all came from somewhere over there.’

He pointed to a small roadworks site about sixty feet away from the scrapyard gates.

Angel nodded and noted the spot.

‘Time of death, Mac?’

‘Not long. Not long at all. Minutes. Less than an hour.’

Angel nodded.

‘There might be a lot more info when we open the car door.’

A car arrived.

It was DS Gawber. Angel had phoned him to meet him here before he had changed into his suit.

Gawber took in the scene, saw Angel at the marquee entrance and made straight across to him.

‘Sorry to drag you out, lad, on a day like this,’ Angel said.

‘Don’t mind, sir. Brother-in-law and his wife for lunch. And their noisy kids. Went on a bit. Glad to get away from them.’

Angel smiled briefly then pointed at the corpse. ‘Seems that the driver was coming into these premises. That’s why the car is across the pavement at this oblique angle. The gate’s probably locked. In which case he would have stopped the car, got out, unlocked the gates, returned to the car, got in it and before he re-started the engine, he got a shower of bullets.’

‘A shower, sir?’

‘Mac says at least four. The shots came from the general direction of the roadworks site over there.’

Angel walked over to a hole at the side of the road. There was a ‘Road up’ sign. Eight cones surrounded a hole about four feet square by four feet deep with a black gas pipe with some small apparatus with a dial on it showing. Next to the hole were a concrete mixer and a heap of the earth that had recently been excavated. The small site had red and white barriers and stood surrounded on three sides of it.

He stood on the pavement, looked across at the white marquee over the Bentley, and tried to align himself to where the gunman probably stood.

‘About here, Ron?’ Angel called.

Gawber looked in both directions then held up two thumbs.

Angel looked downwards. To his right, on the road he saw a cluster of spent handgun shells, and in front of him something that really surprised him. He crouched down and peered at it open mouthed.

Gawber saw that he had spotted something interesting. He went over and looked down to where Angel was looking. ‘What is it, sir?’

Angel pointed into the brown and yellow soil. ‘A footprint, a footprint of a bare right foot,’ he said. ‘Our murderer was bare footed.’

The footprint was clear in the small pile of clayey soil. The shape was unmistakable; it was certainly that of a bare right foot, distinctly showing the toes and an impression that included the heel.

The two men looked at each other. It was hard to believe. Neither could find anything to say.

Angel wrinkled his nose. He stood up and looked around him. ‘Tape this area off, Ron. This entire street end should have been given crime scene status.’

‘We need more men, sir.’

‘Aye. Tell that to the super. He’s out, being wined and dined.’ He pointed to the marquee. ‘Tell Don Taylor I want him urgently.’

Angel quickly directed DS Taylor, who was in charge of SOCO at Bromersley, to take an appropriate cast of the foot with plaster of Paris, while Gawber had the end of the cul-de-sac taped off with DO NOT CROSS – CRIME SCENE tape closing off that section of the street.

Angel and Gawber began the important business of the door-to-door. They each took one side of the road up to about ten houses along. This was a job usually allocated to more junior members of the force but was an important part of the investigation. Angel took the side of the street where the road had been excavated and where the footprint and the gun shells had been found.

The end building next door to the scrapyard was an old lumbering place that looked as if it had been a public house many years ago. It had a dusty, lop-sided cardboard sign, black on white, in one of the front downstairs windows. It read: ‘Rooms to let’.

Angel pushed his way through the central double doors, which were unlocked, and led up to a counter of shiny aluminium and Formica plastic panels, like a fish and chip shop. The deafening racket of banging drums, raucous shouting and the battering of various stringed instruments blared out from some loudspeaker located behind a door at the end of the hall. The din caused Angel to screw up his face in pain. Opposite the counter was a steep, narrow staircase leading up the stairs.

Angel pressed the illuminated plastic bell push on the counter and heard an electronic ding dong sound somewhere in the back. The place smelled of microwaved fluff and wet dogs drying out in front of a radiator. He looked around at the fading green walls, dark painted woodwork, worn carpet, dark staircase, plastic-faced counter top and wondered why anyone would want to hire a room in that place.

The racket was suddenly turned off and, at the same moment, a small, bald man, skinnier than a Strangeways rat, showing braces over a once white shirt and wearing crumpled trousers, opened the door at the end of the end of the hall, looked surprised, then scurried up the hallway and took up a position behind the counter.

He stared up at Angel with tiny eyes through dusty spectacles, fingered a book on the shelf under the counter, and said, ‘Is it for a single, sir?’ He spoke in a nervous, high-pitched voice.

Angel sniffed. The man obviously thought he wanted to stay in the place. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Angel,’ he said quickly.

The man’s left eye twitched.

‘I’m making inquiries about an incident that happened outside here less than an hour ago. Are you the proprietor?’

The raucous music started again at perhaps even louder volume.

Angel’s eyebrows shot up. He blew out an impatient sigh.

The man’s jaw muscles tightened, his eyes narrowed; he looked in the direction of the door. His ratty face looked even rattier. He looked back at Angel. ‘Yes, Inspector,’ he shouted. ‘I am the proprietor. Samson Tickle at your service. What sort of an incident?’

‘A man was shot dead. At least four gunshots.’

The racket from the other side of the door was making the cobwebby glass lampshade suspended over the counter dance.

‘What did you say?’ the man called.

‘A man shot dead,’ Angel bellowed.

Tickle’s eyebrows shot up. He looked away at the door, hesitated, then said, ‘Just a minute, Inspector, please.’ He scurried down the hall to the door. The noise blared more loudly as he opened it. A few seconds later it stopped.

The silence was exquisite.

Angel blew out a sigh.

He heard the little man shout irritably. ‘I can’t hear myself think, Marcia. For god’s sake. I’ve got a copper out there.’

Some high-pitched female voice screamed something in reply.

He slammed the door and came back. His hands were shaking, his pasty face was now red and his mean, thin lips blue.

‘Sorry about that, Inspector. Now where was we? Did you say that somebody was shot dead?’

‘I did,’ Angel said.

His jaw dropped. ‘No. I didn’t hear no shots. Where was this?’

‘In a car at the entrance to Pleasant’s scrapyard.’

His little eyes flashed. ‘Didn’t hear a thing, Inspector. Honest.’

‘Did anything unusual happen round here this afternoon?’

‘No. Nothing. I thought the scrapyard didn’t open on a Sunday. Who was shot dead then?’

Suddenly there was a scream from somewhere. It was a woman’s voice. ‘Samson! Samson! Who are you talking to? Do you know there’s a puddle of water on the landing? Have you let that dog in again?’