The Curious Mind of Inspector Angel (7 page)

‘Yes, sir. And very thoroughly too … it was a real mess.’

‘Professional job?’

‘No, shouldn’t think so, sir.’

Gawber coughed, then coughed again. Angel stared at him across his desk, waiting for him to stop.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said. He turned away.

The coughing continued.

He took the little bottle out of his pocket, unscrewed the top and took a sip. He let it run to the back of his throat. The coughing stopped.

Angel watched him. He looked concerned. ‘Why won’t you go and see your doctor, Ron? Get you some proper jollop.’

‘I’m all right, sir. My wife swears by this.’ He took another sip, screwed the top back on and pocketed the bottle.

‘I’m sure I can find a better use for that paint stripper or whatever it is.’

‘It’s all right, really.’

Angel sighed. ‘You were telling me about Johannson’s hotel bedroom.’

‘Yes, sir. His hotel bedroom and sitting room were an absolute mess, sir. Everything had been turned out. We’ve brought all his clothes and stuff back in my car.’

‘I’ll want to go through it with you, sometime soon.’

‘I spoke to the manager, the hall porter and the chambermaid, who was on room service some of the time. Nobody saw a stranger go into Johannson’s room any time yesterday, but in the course of conversation the chambermaid told me that she had seen a young woman knocking on his door and being admitted on at least two occasions. She didn’t see her leave … she had no idea if she stayed all night or not.’

Angel pulled a face like he was standing over the drains in Armley jail. ‘A girl on the game?’

‘Couldn’t be sure, she said. Tidy black hair. Medium height. Classy black dress. Unusual tattoo of a spider on her right ankle. A tarantula.’

Angel sighed. ‘A tarantula? Whatever next?’ he said, then his eyes narrowed and he pointed a finger at him. ‘We’ve got to find her, Ron. If she’s been in his company these past few days, she could be very valuable to us. That’s a job for Trevor Crisp.’ His lips suddenly tightened. He looked up. ‘Have you seen that lad anywhere?’ he bawled.

‘No, sir.’

‘I don’t know where the hell he gets to.’

‘Here are the statements, sir,’ Gawber said quietly, and placed a file he’d been holding on the desk. ‘We spoke to everybody. Well, everybody on Sean Tattersall’s list. Convivial lot, those film people. On the bottle, partying and eating all hours. All of them had alibis and had others to support them, all except one – the cameraman, Harry Lee.’

Angel’s ears pricked up like a terrier hearing the opening of a packet of digestives. ‘Hmm. What did he have to say for himself?’

‘That he left the set at about five o’clock and drove his own car from the farm back to The Feathers. He had an early dinner on his own, went back to his room and didn’t see anybody until breakfast this morning.’

‘Hmm. Right. That simplifies things. There are only two of that lot that haven’t got an alibi, and they are Otis Stroom and Harry Lee.’

Gawber raised his eyebrows. ‘I know the murderer is likely to be a man, sir, but has Nanette Quadrette got a rock-solid alibi? She’s noted to be a bit of a firecracker.’

‘Looks like it. She was with her boyfriend all night – or that’s what she
says
. And that’s what
he
says.’

Gawber thought for a moment. ‘That means you don’t believe them?’

‘I’ll have to think about it,’ he said wiping his hand across his mouth.

‘Before all this, sir, I was trying to ID that dead tramp. Do you want me to get back to that?’

‘No. Get Scrivens to sort that out. It’ll be good practice for him. I want you to look into the background of Otis Stroom and Harry Lee. They’re our priority now.’

There was a knock at the door.

‘Come in,’ he called.

It was a smiling Crisp who came bouncing in. He was a thirty-year-old handsome man in a suit as sharp as a newly stropped razor. He was popular with the girls, but not always popular with his superiors.

‘Been looking for me, sir?’ he said flashing a smile.

Angel’s eyes glowed like searchlights on Strangeways tower. His cheeks went the colour of a judge’s robe. He turned to Gawber and through tightened lips, said, ‘Push off, Ron. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Gawber knew the score. He glanced at Crisp and then back at Angel as he closed the door.

Angel looked up at Crisp. He didn’t know where to start.

‘I know you’ve been trying to get in touch with me, sir,’ Crisp began lamely.

‘What’s the matter with that bloody phone of yours?’ Angel bawled.

‘Nothing, sir.’ The pupils of Crisp’s eyes slid from left to right and back again. He knew he was in trouble.

‘Well, why the hell was it switched off?’

Crisp reached into his pocket and took the mobile out. ‘Was it? I don’t know.’ He looked at the LCD screen. ‘Well, it’s switched on now, sir.’

‘If that phone isn’t reliable, ditch it and get a new one,’ he bawled. ‘And tell Ahmed the new number so that we can keep in touch.’

‘It works all right, sir.
Really
,’ he added with as much earnestness as he could muster. ‘I must have been in a bad reception area. Or it was the atmospherics.’

‘Atmospherics!’ Angel bawled. ‘I’ll give you bloody atmospherics. Yesterday, I sent you to find out about the occupant of Number 2, Creeford Road. Then you disappeared. Where did you go to, that’s what I’d like to know?’

‘Only making enquiries, sir. That’s all. When you start from scratch it takes time. Now can I tell you what I found out?’

It was useless. Angel could not sustain antagonism with the lad at that level. ‘It’d better be good,’ he growled.

Crisp opened his notebook. ‘Number 2, Creeford Road is occupied by a Richard Mace, aged fifty-seven. Born 6 April 1950. The town hall records show he’s lived there a long time, over twenty years. Paid his community charge as regular as clockwork. The Inland Revenue say that on their books, he’s down as divorced two years ago, one daughter, not now dependent on him. Doesn’t pay any tax. He’s not a cleric, according to Crockfords, and he’s not registered with the medical council, so he isn’t a medic. He’s not a member of Whites, Annabels or Heneberrys; the others wouldn’t tell me. His doctor said he hardly ever sees him. Not disabled or ill. Nothing unusual there. Has a full, clean driving licence. Running a new four by four Range Rover. That’s about it, sir. Oh, I nearly forgot. There’s nothing known about him on the PNC.’

Angel rubbed his chin. He had to allow, it was a pretty good result. ‘What did he do before he retired?’

‘I couldn’t find that out, sir. The Inland Revenue said that their records on him didn’t go that far back because for the last eight years he had not been in a tax paying bracket. They’ve got him down as “consultant,” but they didn’t know in what particular business.’

‘Right. Now that’s what makes it dead fishy. If he really was a consultant, in most any job, he’d have been earning a taxable income. And what’s he living on now? What’s consultant mean anyway? You could be a consultant anything.’

‘Do you want me to stick with it, sir? Might be able to ferret it out.’

‘No. I’ve got another job for you. More in your line. You know the Imperial Grand Hotel in Leeds?’

His face brightened. ‘Yes, sir. Very posh place.’

‘There’s a girl. In her twenties. Tidy black hair. Medium height. Classy black dress. With a tattoo of a tarantula on her right ankle.’

Angel arrived at his desk at 8.28 a.m. as bright and shiny as the Chief Constable’s MBE. He’d slept the sleep of the innocent and was ready for battle. He pulled his chair up to the desk to attend to the accumulation of letters and reports awaiting his attention. On top of the pile was a booklet with the words: ‘Home Office Publication’ on the cover. When he spotted it, his nose curled up. Part of the battle against crime was the requirement for him to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest this sort of printed porridge. He picked it up, noted it had sixty-four pages, and read the title: ‘Revised rules and estimated costs for the cancellation of the recent proposal to amalgamate the police forces of North Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.’

He opened it up to pages two and three. Glanced at it, sniffed, then turned back to the front cover.

‘Good. The answer, my dear Watson, is in the title,’ he muttered then tossed the booklet into the waste-paper basket in the knee hole of his desk and returned to fingering the remaining letters and papers in the pile.

The phone rang. It was only 8.30 a.m. It was early. He reached out for it.

‘Angel.’

From all the coughing and wheezing, he recognized the caller was Harker. His lungs made more animal noises than the boiler in Strangeways kitchen.

‘Come down here,’ Harker spluttered and banged down the phone.

Angel turned up his nose. He wondered what the Yeti wanted. He could hardly be expecting a result on the Johannson murder. The body was only found yesterday morning: he thought he had done pretty well. The other murder investigation into the tramp wasn’t progressing quickly, admittedly, but he
was
on top of it. He was still awaiting SOCO’s findings. And he had already applied for a search warrant for 2 Creeford Road following the funny business with Richard Mace, the householder and the girl thief dropping the candle-snuffer.

Angel knocked on the door and pushed it open.

There was more coughing from ‘Mr Mean’. His face was buried in a handkerchief but he pointed to a chair and Angel sat down. A wave of TCP drifted past him.

‘You wanted me, sir?’

‘Yes,’ Harker said with a sniff. ‘I most certainly do.’ He put the handkerchief away and picked up a sheet of A4 by the corner and waved it at him. ‘What’s this? What’s this?’ he said impatiently.

Angel peered at it. He thought he could see perfectly well what it was. It was his application for a warrant to search Number 2, Creeford Road.

‘What’s the matter with it, sir? I have set it up for later this morning.’

Harker shook his head. ‘You can’t do
that
! There’s not enough justification.’

Angel’s eyebrows shot up. ‘The householder has no visible means of support, sir!’

‘Have you any evidence that he’s robbing banks or knocking over security vans or something?’

‘That’s what I want to find out, sir.’

‘Have you some evidence that he’s committed an offence?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Is he a past offender, then?’

‘No. But there’s the business of the girl coming over the wall with the stolen candle-snuffer.’

‘You know it’s stolen, do you? You’ve seen it on some missing list somewhere, have you?’

Angel’s pulse was racing. ‘Not exactly, sir.’

‘Isn’t Mace disowning it?’

‘The girl dropped it, and when it was recovered and taken round to him, he said it was his, then changed his mind when my wife told him I was on the force.’

‘Yes. I’ve read all that. I read all your reports. They’re better than Hans Christian Anderson. Perhaps he made a mistake.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t?’ Angel said angrily.

Harker glared at him. ‘You can’t keep poking into people’s houses on some flimsy suspicion. We don’t want a reputation for unnecessary aggressive policing. I know that you think that you have some special gift for solving difficult murder cases. And you have had some … small successes in the past, but you mustn’t think that you are some superior body that can sniff out a criminal, like a talented water diviner can find a new underground source.’

Angel wondered if there was some praise in there somewhere. The Yeti must be slipping; he might say something complimentary if he wasn’t careful.

‘I don’t think that at all, sir.’

‘I should think not. Haven’t you got plenty to do with those two murder cases? Shouldn’t you be looking for the girl with the tattoo on her ankle?’

‘Yes, I have plenty to do, sir. Plenty,’ he said quietly.

‘Right,’ Harker said with a sickly smile. ‘And so have I. You’d better get on with it.’

Angel could see that whatever he said, Harker had dug his heels in and was not going to sanction the warrant. It was frustrating that his efforts should be hindered in this way. He should be getting support not obstruction, but it had always been the same with King Kong.

He looked up and saw him screw up the application for the warrant and triumphantly throw it at the wicker waste-paper basket in the corner of the room.

Angel’s blood pressure was up. He could hear his heart banging under his shirt. He went out and closed the door. That wasn’t the end of the matter. Oh no. There was some mystery concealed inside Number 2, Creeford Road and he was determined to get inside the big house and find out what it was.

Angel opened the door, and the shop bell rang out.

Ahmed followed him inside, took off his helmet and stepped down into the little, low-ceilinged shop. He gazed round in surprise at the tightly packed mishmash of furniture, pictures, clobber and rubbish in Mr Schuster’s little emporium.

David Schuster shuffled through the bead curtain in a cloud of cigarette smoke. When he saw Angel and Ahmed, he smiled, ‘Ah. Inspector Angel, with reinforcements, I see, this time,’ he said with a grin. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘This is Police Constable Ahaz,’ he said turning round to Ahmed. ‘Mr Schuster.’

They exchanged nods.

‘I am glad you have called in, Inspector. I have remembered something about that candle-snuffer. The hands at the end of the blades. They are praying hands. It was something unique to a particular part of the low countries, many, many years ago. Of course the area was overrun by the Germans in 1939. Churches were looted. Church valuables were scattered all over.’

‘I know that now,’ Angel said.

Schuster looked surprised. ‘Who told you that? There are not many people out of that part of Europe who would know about the praying hands, Inspector.’

‘Who have you been telling about this candle-snuffer, Mr Schuster?’

‘Nobody, Inspector. Nobody. Knowledge is money. I don’t give information away lightly.’

Angel didn’t believe him. ‘I need to know,’ he said commandingly.

‘I didn’t tell anybody,’ Schuster said reaching for the burning cigarette he had placed there and taking a drag. ‘That info didn’t come from me. Must have been somebody else.’