The Last Straw (26 page)

“Probably about twenty, average height.” She shook her head. “That’s all, sorry.” Warren smiled encouragingly as he handed her his card. “Thank you. If you remember anything else at all, no matter how trivial, please call me.”

As Kel returned to work Stribling reappeared, followed by a young lad of about seventeen, presumably ‘Dazza’. The lad was pale and pimply, with a spectacular case of bed-head. The T-shirt he wore above the tracksuit bottoms had clearly been slept in and was somewhat vintage, judging by the smell. The logo proclaimed that the owner was experiencing the same shit but on a different day.

“This is my Darren. We call him ‘Dazza’ or ‘Daz’, like the washing powder. We was gonna call him Ariel but that’s a girl’s name.” The pause for a laugh stretched uncomfortably.

“I suppose you could have named him Percival and called him Percil for short,” suggested Warren, unable to help himself. Everyone looked at him blankly. Warren decided not to comment that it was a ‘Bold’ choice of name for someone so unused to a washing machine.

Stribling continued, “He helps us out if it’s busy — just collecting glasses, of course,” he added hastily. Warren pushed the photo across.

“Oh, yeah, I remember him. Sat on his own all night before some bird suddenly appeared out of nowhere and before you know it they was off in the corner and getting all cosy.” Dazza had clearly been impressed by Severino’s quick work.

“Can you remember anything about the woman?”

Dazza didn’t even pause. “Oh, yeah, she was well fit. I served her a couple of times.” Warren pretended not to notice the lad’s slip-up, although the glare from his father suggested that words would be had about what not to say in front of police officers. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember specifics, although he was fairly confident that he’d remember her if he saw her again. None of the bar staff knew her name or could remember seeing her before that night or since. The bar didn’t have CCTV, although there were some council-owned cameras further up the street that might have caught an image.

Thanking them for their time, Warren headed for the front door, before pausing briefly.

“Oh, by the way. You might want to deal with that sooner rather than later.” He pointed to the smoking bar towel covering the smouldering ashtray, which had now caught alight.

Chapter 27

The next stop for Warren was Mr G’s nightclub. Warren had secured a good parking space near to the White Bear, so he decided to stretch his legs and walk to the club. At a brisk pace, he was there in just over five minutes. Even allowing for a slow, drunken stagger, it was obvious that the club was within reasonable walking distance from the pub.

Mr G’s was set slightly back off a side street and took up two floors. The ground-floor bar was already open, although the half-dozen customers visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows were sitting at small, round metal tables drinking coffee rather than beer. The neon ‘Mr G’s’ sign above the door was turned off and, instead, wooden chalk-boards advertising the soup-of-the-day and the lunch-time special flanked the entrance.

Stepping inside, Warren introduced himself to the young woman serving behind the bar and asked to see the manager. A few moments later, a youthful-looking man in a pair of light chino trousers and a pale-blue short-sleeved shirt came down the stairs. Walking briskly over to Warren without any hesitation, he stuck his hand out and introduced himself as Jack Baker. Responding to Warren’s request for a private word, he led the way up the stairs to the main club.

There was something not quite right about an empty nightclub, with the lights on in the middle of the day, Warren reflected. It seemed empty and lifeless. It reminded him of the times he’d visited Susan’s school after home-time or during the holidays. Without the crackle and fizzle of youthful energy, the building seemed almost lonely. Of course, more than one teacher had commented that the school ran a lot more efficiently without the pupils getting in the way and interrupting the paperwork.

The club was fairly straightforward and unpretentious. Most of the floor-space was given over to a large, square, empty dance floor, surrounded on three sides by a raised dais with tables and chairs. A boxed-in DJ booth faced the bar, now shuttered, that took up most of the fourth side. The room smelt faintly of stale beer and air-freshener. An elderly lady in an apron was mopping the floor by the DJ’s box.

Flanking the bar were two doors. One with a toilet sign, the other with ‘Staff Only’. Leading Warren through the second door, Baker turned right and entered an office. Much to Warren’s surprise, the office was light and airy with large windows overlooking a generously sized pub garden. Two desks that wouldn’t be out of place in a bank or a solicitor’s office occupied most of the floor-space. In the farthest corner from the door a large, steel safe, the size of a king-size refrigerator, dominated the wall. To Warren’s astonishment, the closed door of the safe was adorned with hand-painted children’s pictures and the artist responsible for the masterpieces was sitting in the corner on several sheets of newspaper cheerfully splattering paint all over another sheet of A4.

Baker smiled at Warren’s look of surprise. “Not quite what you were expecting, Detective Chief Inspector?”

Regaining his composure, Warren shook his head. “I have to say, Mr Baker, that I have been in the back offices of many pubs and clubs in my time and the word that usually springs to mind is ‘dingy’. This is somewhat different.”

Baker laughed good-naturedly. “I should hope so. I’m a businessman first and foremost, not a publican. I have a degree in business and law and spent most of the first ten years after university working for blue-chip companies in London. I’ve tried to bring some of that ethos with me to Mr G’s.”

“So how does a London businessman end up in the middle of Hertfordshire, running a nightclub?” asked Warren curiously.

Baker waved a hand vaguely in the air. “Sometimes life just leads you where you least expect it to. In London I had my own office and secretary and a view of the river, but I wasn’t really enjoying myself. My Dad, George — that’s where the ‘Mr G’ came from — ran this place for thirty years and it was just like you’d expect. Dingy. I never thought I’d ever have anything to do with it. Anyway, he dropped dead of a heart attack about five years ago and I inherited the place, just as I was starting to fall out of love with London. I was worried about Mum being all alone and I’d been rekindling an old friendship from my childhood, so I decided to jack the job in in London and come back here to run this place. I married the friend and decided I didn’t want to move away from where I grew up.

“To be honest, for the first twelve-months this place was a bloody mill-stone around my neck and I hated it. The books were a mess, the place was a dive with a real reputation as a Friday-night meat market. We had drug problems and frankly it was the sort of nightclub you’d have had to drag me kicking and screaming to on a night out normally.

“In the end, I decided enough was enough and I closed us down for two months. I sacked the door staff, who were responsible for half the drug-dealing anyway, and turned downstairs into a nice, decent bar suitable for a quiet drink or a coffee at lunchtime and a meeting place in the evening. Upstairs, I just decided to go back to basics, making the dance-floor as big as possible and concentrating on giving people what they want: decent music to dance to on the weekend and live music and comedy to listen to during the week.

“As you can see, I run this place as I would any other business. The one thing I was missing about working in London was my office. So I gutted the old office, painted the walls white instead of black, got rid of the topless calendar on the back of the door and entered the twenty-first century.” He nodded towards the toddler in the corner. “I even bring my daughter to work a couple of days a week to save on childcare. Marlene, who sits over there, was my dad’s assistant for years and I kept her on. She treats Isla here like another grandkid.” At the mention of her name, the little girl looked over and gave a big, gap-toothed smile, before resuming her painting. “I don’t think anyone expected me to succeed, to be honest, even my mum. But last year we turned a profit for the first time in nearly a decade. By the end of this year, the club will have made enough to pay off the second mortgage Dad took out on his and Mum’s house to keep this bloody place open.”

Warren was impressed and said so, before getting down to business. The contrast with Larry Stribling couldn’t have been greater. Without even being asked, Baker offered to call up the security footage of the night in question.

“One of the things I decided to change was the club’s relationship with the police. I’m not saying my old man was a crook, but he skirted the law and regarded the police as something of a hindrance rather than a partner. As a club we have a proactive approach: drug dealers are shopped immediately; under-age drinkers are photographed and banned and they can’t come back until they have proof of age; and we keep our eyes and ears open for any dodgy booze and fags and report it to the police. We’re also helping set up a zero-tolerance zone with other pubs and entertainment venues like the cinema — anybody banned from one place has their photo taken and it’s immediately circulated around everywhere else. We’ve got about two dozen people who can’t get served in any of the pubs in the scheme. Our goal is to extend the system across the town centre.”

Watching the footage was just a question of accessing the digital video files held on the club’s computer system. They kept footage for the previous month, before archiving it. As Baker pointed out, the cost of storing digital imagery was so low these days, they might as well. You never knew when it might be useful.

The club had a number of different cameras, including wide-angled cameras above both bars and the beer garden, the front door and the staff-only areas. The footage Warren was most interested in was that from the camera mounted over the main door.

Severino had been vague as to what time he and the mysterious young woman arrived at the club, but Warren doubted it could have been earlier than about ten p.m. The digital video footage was surprisingly easy to manipulate and, after a few moments of tutorial, Baker left Warren to get on with watching the video. He soon got into the rhythm of fast-forwarding the video at eight-times normal speed, then hitting the slow button as customers came through the door to get a good look at them. After a few false starts, Warren finally got what he was looking for. According to the time stamp on the bottom of the screen, Severino appeared, mystery woman in tow, at eleven fifty-two p.m. The camera showed a clear black and white image of Severino’s darkly handsome features. Even on the slowed-down video feed it was clear that Severino was very drunk; it took him a couple of attempts to get his wallet out of his pocket and he swayed as he did so.

Unfortunately, the young woman was hanging off his arm, her face half turned towards him as he fumbled in his pocket for the entrance money. Warren slowed the video down again and replayed it, hissing in frustration. At no point did the young woman look at the camera directly. The best that Warren could make out was that she was of average size, wearing a light, probably pink top. Her hair was cut to a medium length and appeared blonde on the black and white image.

Seeing that Warren had hit a brick wall, Baker returned to his side.

“You are welcome to look at the footage from the other cameras and see if she looks towards the camera. If she got served, we probably have a good shot, but it was a busy night and you could spend a lot of time finding the image.”

Warren nodded his agreement. It was frustrating, however; he was now convinced at least that Severino had met some mysterious woman in a bar. But it still left many unanswered questions: did this woman go back to Severino’s and take his swipe card and clothes? And if that was the case, who was she?

Chapter 28

After taking a copy of the footage that Baker had given him from the nightclub’s video feeds, Warren headed back to the station. He popped the USB memory stick containing the video footage into a Jiffy bag, addressed it to the Image Analysis department and slipped it into the internal mail. Then, to ensure that it didn’t go missing, he logged the request into the computer system and emailed the department to be on the lookout for its arrival.

Warren spent the remainder of the afternoon shuffling paper, before deciding that, in view of the hours he’d already put in over the weekend, leaving work at a decent-ish hour wouldn’t be unreasonable. It would certainly stand him in good-stead with Susan and the in-laws. Nevertheless, before going home, Warren decided to try his luck with some more of Tunbridge’s acquaintances.

Using the directions given by Annabel Tunbridge, Jones pulled into the car park at the Middlesbury Sports Centre. Getting out of the car, he locked up and looked around. Straight ahead of him was a wide-open cricket pitch. A half-dozen teenage boys dressed in shorts and T-shirts were playing catch with a cricket ball under the watchful eye of a middle-aged man. Two more sat on the ground tying on pads. The fresh scent of newly mown grass hung in the still air. To the right, a small pavilion with a canvas awning was home to a dozen or so folded plastic chairs and a handful of circular metal tables. Behind, a long, flat-roofed single-storey brick building bore the signs ‘Changing Rooms’ and ‘Clubhouse’. A large pair of padlocked double doors was flanked by a handful of metal beer barrels, presumably empty, awaiting pickup by the brewery.

To the left of the cricket pitch another clubhouse, this one wooden and in need of a lick of paint, sat looking over a large square of tightly mown grass. On the grass seven or eight older men were playing bowls. The green was slightly sunken, surrounded by a gravel ditch with lane markers planted in it. Making his way across the car park to the bowls club, Warren stepped onto the concrete verge surrounding the grass. To his right a robust man, anywhere between the ages of fifty-five and seventy-five, was watching a pair of bowlers intently.