Shooting Elvis (26 page)

I read a number out to them. ‘Is that it?’

‘Yep.’

‘OK. The car’s a ringer. It’s Coombs and his wife. It came to our attention about three weeks ago. Here’s what you do. Park the Transit across their gateway so they can’t get in and all sit in your van.
I’ll send back-up. I want them both arrested as soon as they get back, but he could be dangerous. Leave it to the back-up. Don’t you accost them. Understood?’

‘Right, boss.’

‘And keep me informed. I’m in the office. Which way did they go?’

‘Towards town, so they may have just gone shopping or something.’

It went like a dream. Coombs and his lady friend came back an hour later and stood around, indignant, wondering who had the effrontery to obstruct their driveway. The answer came in the form of the cavalry, charging down the road and blocking it from both directions. They were trapped. Guns were pointed, orders barked, arms raised. I’d instructed that they be immediately separated and she taken to Halifax, he brought to Heckley. Crocodile one gave me a running commentary of the whole thing. Sometimes, now and again, this job is a load of fun.

The arresting officers had the authority to enter and search Coombs’ house, but I told them just to make sure the place was safe and nobody was inside destroying evidence. When they returned to the station that authority passed to me, but first I wanted to interview him.

The clock was running so we gave him twenty minutes with his solicitor while we looked into his
background and set up a formal interview. It was a waste of time. He just sat there, throughout, with a silly grin on his face. Nowadays, silence is not acceptable, but we still have to have a case. The caution makes it clear that if he refuses to answer our questions he can’t come up with the answers at a later date to defend himself, but the burden of proof is still with us.

With one big exception.

‘OK,’ I said to him. ‘Play it your way, but you’re not helping yourself and I’m not convinced you are receiving the best advice.’ It’s just a little quirk I employ: make them wonder if their brief is any good. ‘We now intend to search your house from top to bottom. Is there anything there that you wish to tell us about?’

He spoke for the first time: ‘I want to see your search warrant.’

‘I don’t need one. The process will be videoed but your legal representative is entitled to be there and I’m happy for you to come along, too, in handcuffs. I’m asking you, once again, is there anything at the house that you wish to tell me about?’

‘Yes. There’s some valuable stuff there, and you’ll pay for any damage you do.’

We collected the keys from the custody sergeant and we all decamped to chez Coombs, accompanied by the ARV and a couple of pandas containing our house search experts. I unlocked the gates and the front door and they went to work.

Coombs and I sat in a neat sitting room, with a big comfortable settee and easy chairs covered in a bold floral print, while his brief went off with the search team. The furniture looked antique. It had bowed legs and marquetry, if that means anything. A modest chandelier hung in the middle of the ceiling and a TV peeked out of a reproduction sideboard. A painting of what might have been Coombs himself, standing alongside a Tiger Moth aeroplane, hung over the fireplace and another portrait, not as expertly done, hung on the end wall, this time of his lady friend or wife. It was the room of a man who liked good things, and knew how to get them.

‘If there’s anything here you want us to know about you ought to declare it now,’ I advised him for the third time, but he didn’t reply. He just gave me the superior grin. It said he knew something I didn’t and we’d be off his premises just as soon as he decided. He was in control.

‘Keeping silent isn’t helping your case,’ I said.

‘Uh!’ he snorted. ‘What case?’ Keeping silent isn’t easy. It takes practice, like those Yes/No games they used to play on radio. Now that he’d spoken it would be easier.

‘The murder of Jermaine Lapetite,’ I said. ‘We explained at the station.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘Perhaps he had a street name.’

‘What if he did?’

‘I’m told he owed you money. Did he?’

‘How do I know if I don’t know who he is?’

‘So some people do owe you money?’

‘It’s what I do. I run a credit agency. It’s a legitimate business.’

‘What rate of interest do you charge?’

‘That’s a commercial secret.’

‘I bet it is. How much did Lapetite owe you?’

‘How much did you find?’

‘What do you mean how much did we find?’

‘You heard.’ He switched the grin on again.

‘Where were you on the night of Friday, 28th May?’

‘Wincanton, for the races. We stayed the weekend. Now will you take these off please, and leave me alone.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us that at the station?’

‘Why should I? I haven’t done anything wrong. The onus of proof is on you. Will you unlock these and go, now?’

‘No. There’s still the little matter of the Mercedes.’

‘I bought it in good faith. I was done. Why aren’t you looking for them?’

‘How much did you pay for it?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Or is that another commercial secret? About ten per cent of its market value is the usual rate, I’m told.’

‘Listen,’ he said, leaning forward conspiratorially.
‘What did you say your name was?’

‘Priest.’

‘OK, Mr Priest. You think that I killed this Lapetite character because he owed me money, right?’

‘Or had him killed.’

‘Or had him killed. Fair enough. Would you be kind enough to have a look in the second drawer of the sideboard over there.’ He pointed across the room.

I stood up and walked over to the piece of furniture he indicated. ‘This one?’

‘That’s right. At the back.’

I pulled the drawer all the way open and saw a bundle of twenty-pound notes at the back. ‘There’s some money,’ I said.

‘Could you bring it here, please?’

‘No. You fetch it.’

He struggled to his feet and took the bundle from the back of the drawer. They were twenties, about four or five hundred pounds’ worth. This was getting awkward.

‘Worried about prints, hey?’ he said. ‘Well let me demonstrate something. This is how I count money.’ He removed the rubber band from the bundle and pressed them out flat. The pile was about a centimetre thick. He licked his thumb and peeled the top note off, flicking it with his fingers like a card sharp, to make sure there was only one. ‘Twenty,’ he counted, ‘forty, sixty, eighty, a
hundred, one twenty, one forty…’

I wasn’t sure if I was expected to say ‘when’ at an appropriate amount, so I said, ‘If you think I’m going to salivate at the sight of a couple of hundred pounds you’re sadly mistaken.’

‘And you underestimate me, Mr Priest. What I’m demonstrating is that my prints will be on any money I loaned your Mr Lapetite. On every single note. Did you find any money?’

‘A small amount.’

‘If we’re talking about the same person, I loaned him
£
1,500 a few days before he was murdered. Have you checked his bundle for prints?’

‘We will have done.’

‘There you go, then. Why would I have someone murdered who still had the money I’d loaned him in his pocket? What’s my motive, eh?’

Coombs was the type of person I joined the police to put behind bars. His credit agency was a front for drug dealing, no doubt about it. But he covered his tracks well. He had no contact with the drugs. He just put up the money. They did the dirty work and he charged ten per cent per week interest, at the minimum. Sometimes, when a big deal was going down, he’d make that overnight.

And I was going to have to let him go. It hurt, oh, how it hurt.

One of the searchers poked his head around the door, saying, ‘Come and have a look at this, Mr Priest.’

I asked a uniformed PC to babysit Coombs and followed our man through into a kitchen. The doors of the units were wide open and crockery was piled up on the work surface. The brief was there, and he looked a worried man.

‘Down here, boss,’ the searcher told me and I knelt next to him on the pale wood-laminate floor.

‘See this front row of crockery?’ He picked up a cup and saucer, blue with a white pattern, like Wedgwood, and lifted them out.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, could you pass me a cup from the next row. Please.’

I tried, but couldn’t lift one. ‘It’s stuck down,’ I said.

‘That’s right. It would be such a drag lifting them out every time, so they’re glued down. Now watch this.’

He gripped the woodwork base of the unit and pulled. It came right out, cups and saucers and all, revealing a big hole underneath the units. ‘How’s that for a cubby hole?’ he declared, his face pink with triumph and exertion.

‘And is that what I think it is?’ I asked, looking into the void.

‘If you’re thinking suitcase, yes it is.’

‘Get Coombs in here.’

We lifted the shelf of crockery out of the way and manhandled the suitcase from the hole. It was one of those plastic Samsonite-style ones, in a sickly
lime-green colour, and weighed a ton. Coombs arrived, the PC holding his arm, as we heaved the case out onto the kitchen floor.

‘Key?’ I said, but didn’t get an answer.

‘Somebody pick it,’ I said, and in less than a minute the lid was thrown back to reveal the biggest sum of cash any of us had ever seen in one place. ‘OK, seal it again, and put it in an evidence bag. Let’s do this properly.’ I turned to Coombs’ brief. ‘I’d like you to attend the station when this is counted, sir. In the meantime, perhaps you ought to tell your client all about the Proceeds of Crime Act, 2002. I’m told that a Samsonite suitcase like this can hold about half a million pounds. That should be enough to qualify.’

The Proceeds of Crime Act is the one that puts the onus of proof on the villain. If he has in excess of
£
5,000 and can’t say where it legitimately came from, the balance of probability says it came from crime or was intended for a crime. It’s a civil law so we just sit back and let it take its course.

I reminded Coombs that he was still under caution, to keep his brief happy, and noticed that the grin had vanished. ‘Nice colour,’ I said, patting the lurid suitcase. ‘Matches your complexion.’

Back at the nick I telephoned our Regional Asset Recovery Team to let them know we were doing their job. There’s always a chance that you’ve blundered into a larger enquiry and scuppered the whole thing, but we hadn’t. Coombs was known to
them but they had nothing on him.

It was a result. A good result. Under normal circumstances we’d be cracking open the brown ale and celebrating, but we were on a murder enquiry, and Coombs wasn’t the Executioner, of that I was certain. I looked at my watch and saw that if I hurried I could go for a run with Sonia and take her out for a meal afterwards, but then I remembered it was Tuesday, and her night for the track. I’d picked up the phone, so I put it down again.

Athletics is big up in the north east, building on the popularity of local heroes like Brendan Foster and Steve Cram, who won countless middle distance titles back in the Seventies and Eighties. The Great North Run is the largest sporting event in the world, with over 40,000 entries, and the Gateshead International Stadium hosts regular top-flight meetings, attracting the world’s best to the city. The spectators there are probably the most knowledgeable in the country.

But occasionally there is one who doesn’t understand where adulation ends and obsession begins. Letitia Pringle was the third-fastest female hundred-metre runner the world had ever seen, and she had all the looks and style of a supermodel. Lycra was made for Letitia Pringle, and she used it in ways nobody else imagined. Except, possibly, Norman Easterby.

1999 wasn’t Olympic year, so the athletic
community were free to wander the globe, competing wherever fancy and appearance money took them. Letitia came to Gateshead and hit the headlines as soon as she peeled off her tracksuit. Her right leg was clad in red and white stripes, her left arm in blue with white stars, and there was very little else joining the two. The photographers abandoned the pole vault and jogged across centre field, dodging the javelins to get to her.

She won by a distance, not hampered by her lopsided costume, and the crowd went wild. She accepted the winner’s bouquet, waved to the spectators and turned to shake hands with her fellow competitors. That’s when Norman Easterby could contain himself no longer. He leapt over the barriers, ran forward and threw his arms around the bewildered girl. Afterwards, he said he embraced her; she said he groped her. It was a disappointing end to the day’s festivities.

Five years later the PC – now sergeant – who arrested him saw a familiar face peering up from the papers on the front desk. ‘What’s our Norman been up to now?’ he asked out aloud, as he reached for the photograph taken by the
Heckley Gazette
photographer. He read the accompanying report and request for information, wondered what some men saw in skinny birds, and reached for the telephone.

Emergency 999 calls come through to the switchboard at HQ where they are prioritised. The crank calls are filtered off and the rest designated according to resources. Blues and twos are dispatched where necessary, the rest have to wait. Ten o’clock Wednesday morning is not peak time for triple nines. Drunken slappers have usually made it home by then, so they don’t ring to enquire about late buses; teenage burglars are still curled up in their pits; and suicidal loners are fuelling their depressions with daytime TV. So when the call came through with a message for me, the telephonist passed it on personally.

‘Read it again,’ I said.

‘He said, “Tell DI Priest to get himself to 14 Canalside Gardens, Heckley, as soon as he likes.” I asked his name but he was gone.’

‘And you said the voice was muffled.’

‘That’s right, sir, with a radio playing in the background.’

‘But it’s been recorded.’

‘All calls are recorded.’

‘Of course. Will you bring this to the attention of your supervisor, please, and have the tape taken out of the system and saved. It could be important. Thanks for letting me know, and I’ll get back to you.’