Unlucky For Some (8 page)

“It’s unlikely,” Judy said. “The nightclub customers either park in the same car park as you did or come by taxi—they don’t use the alleyway coming to the club. They use it leaving, when most of the taxi customers walk to the taxi rank rather than wait at the club for taxis that might not turn up.”

Baker shook his head. “So the alleyway’s deserted most of the evening? That practically invites muggers to do their worst.”

Judy nodded her agreement. Maybe Murchison Place and its alleyways would get cameras now—too late, as usual. “You left the car intending to go back to the bingo club. What time would this be?”

“A few minutes to nine, I believe. About two minutes before I rang the police—and you’ll have a record of when that was. When I got to the alley, I could see two people—a man and a woman—having some sort of argument, then I saw her fall to the ground. He dropped to his knees beside her. At first I thought he was trying to loosen her clothing or something.”

“So he was bending over her?”

“Yes. He certainly seemed to be doing something.” He raised his eyebrows slightly. “Arranging the banknotes, perhaps?”

Judy didn’t respond, and Baker carried on.

“But when he heard my footsteps, he got up and ran away toward Murchison Place. All I can tell you about him is that he was wearing dark clothing. I went to see if I could help the woman, but . . .”

“Did you touch anything, Mr. Baker?”

“No. I felt for a pulse, that was all. Then I used my mobile to phone the police, and—very commendably, I have to say—they arrived within minutes and began sealing off the area.”

Judy smiled. “I’m glad we meet with your approval,” she said.

“I was very impressed with the young detective sergeant—Hitchin, is it? He was on top of things as soon as he arrived.”

Judy moved on to the next item on her list. “I understand that you knew Wilma Fenton—did you know her well?”

He looked amused. “Hardly,” he said. “But I’ve interviewed a number of people in some depth, and Wilma was one of them. I saw her in her flat, which is how I knew she lived there.”

“Oh, I see. Was that a television interview?”

“No. I talk to hundreds of people when I do research. Sometimes I use what they tell me in the books, and at the same time I’m assessing their potential as TV interviewees. Then, when the filming starts, I know exactly what and who we want to see on the screen.”

Judy felt a little as though she was interviewing Baker on TV; something about his manner, about his way of answering a question, that sounded very different from the hundreds of other interviews she had conducted.

“Do you often work in your car?”

“No. I usually go back to the office I’ve rented in Stansfield, and put my impressions on the computer. I can e-mail any photographs I’ve taken to my colleague in London, and she can produce a first draft of the script for that particular segment. But I was anxious to set down my feelings as soon as I could, as I said, so I used the laptop.”

“Did anyone else leave the bingo club at the interval?”

Judy had had a call from Michael Waterman that morning telling her that Stephen Halliday had left the bingo club at the interval, and had run after and caught up with Mrs. Fenton, going into the alleyway with her. They already knew he had been in the alley with her, but what they hadn’t known was that he normally worked until half past ten, and had asked if he might leave early just before he made the payouts to Mrs. Fenton and Mr. Baker. They would be talking to young Mr. Halliday. But the part that interested her most was that he lived at the Tulliver Inn. His mother was Tony Baker’s landlady. And Waterman had been with Baker when he saw Halliday.

“You’ve already asked me that twice.”

Judy didn’t say anything. She just waited.

Baker sighed. “Stephen left at the interval,” he said. “Stephen Halliday—he’s a steward at the club.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that the first time I asked? And why didn’t you tell DI Finch that last night?”

“I can’t claim to know Stephen all that well, but I’m staying with the Hallidays, and I didn’t want to drag his name into it, because I found her half an hour after Stephen had left the club. I had no reason to think that he had anything to tell you.”

Judy concluded the interview then, feeling much as Tom had. She didn’t know what to make of Tony Baker. As they left the interview room, she discovered that a Mr. Shaw was there in response to their appeals to anyone who was in the area, and since everyone else was busy, she saw him herself, leaving someone else to show Tony Baker out.

“I went through that alley not long before it happened,” Shaw said once they were seated. “I heard her behind me, talking.”

“Did you know who she was talking to?”

“Young Stephen Halliday. He’s a steward at the bingo club.”

“Do you know Stephen Halliday well?”

“Yes—him and his mum. I work for Waterman Entertainment, servicing the fruit machines. Mr. Waterman supplied one to the Tulliver Inn, and I service it, too. I got to know Stephen first, really. His dad left not long after they arrived in Stoke Weston, and I kind of . . . well, took him under my wing, I suppose. They’ve been there almost seven years now.”

“Could you hear what Stephen and Mrs. Fenton were saying?”

“They were talking about her win. She was excited about it. Stephen was saying it was a pity she’d had to share the prize with Tony Baker—that sort of thing.”

“It was quite amicable?”

“Oh, goodness me, yes. Stephen’s a very nice lad.” He frowned. “You surely don’t think he had anything to do with it, do you?”

“We don’t know who did or didn’t have anything to do with it, Mr. Shaw,” said Judy. “That’s what we’re trying to find out. Did you see anyone else in the alley?”

“No. Mind, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t someone else there—you can stay out of sight if you want to.”

“Yes,” said Judy. “In fact, we’ve been told that you stopped in the shadows for a few moments—is that right?”

Shaw looked slightly alarmed. “Well . . . yes. I was waiting for Stephen, really, but then he stood talking to the lady, so I just carried on.” He frowned. “Who told you that?”

Judy smiled, and moved on to her next question. “Did you see Stephen again last night?” she asked.

“Yes—I went to see Jerry Wheelan at the nightclub, and we were standing in the doorway when Stephen ran past us and across the road.”

“Do you know when that would have been?”

“Only a couple of minutes after I got there, because after that I sat inside the door to the reception area, out of the cold. It would have been between half past eight and twenty-five to nine, I think.”

“So you wouldn’t know if and when Stephen came back?”

“No.”

Judy made a note. “Can you tell me why you were there?”

“Yes—I was driving Mr. Waterman. He’d been drinking in the early evening, and he won’t drive if he’s had anything to drink—he lost his wife because of a drunk driver. He wanted me to take him to the bingo club in Malworth and take him home again at ten.”

“Did he say why?”

“No. It was odd, because he never works on Sundays. Nothing religious—just that he likes his game of golf and to wind down. I thought he must be doing a surprise spot check or something, so I went over to warn the lads at the nightclub.”

Mr. Shaw, having taken refuge from the weather in the nightclub’s reception area, hadn’t been in a position to see anyone else coming or going along Waring Road. Judy thanked him, and he left.

“Stephen, it’ll be lunchtime before you get there at this rate! What are you doing up there?”

Stephen had spent a long time in the bathroom, getting himself ready. He’d feel better able to face the police if he looked good. Now back in his bedroom, he was surveying his wardrobe—not extensive, but expensive. He never bought anything that didn’t have a designer label. That wasn’t easy to do on a steward’s salary, but he worked part-time in the bar, and saved up. Eventually, he decided on smart casual.

“You’re not going on the bike,” his mother said, when he got downstairs. “The snow’s frozen hard—it would be far too dangerous. Do you want me to take you in?”

Oh God, no. Turning up with his mother—no, he didn’t think so. “I’ll get a taxi,” he said.

But, he discovered, when his mother answered the knock at the door, he didn’t have to get a taxi, because the police had come for him.

Keith stumbled downstairs, having pulled on Michelle’s bathrobe, and opened the door to the postman, who handed him a pile of stuff done up in two rubber bands.

“Thanks, mate,” he said, closing the door and pulling the paper from the letter box. Michelle got mad about that—the boy never put it all the way through. But now that she had a new job she left the house long before it came, so the boy didn’t get into trouble so much these days. Keith rarely read it, but he glanced at it as he went into the living room just in case there was anything interesting in it.

The headline was some lame story about a soap star Keith had never heard of being refused a flight because he was drunk, but the column down the side of the front page made Keith’s eyes, still half-shut with sleep, open wide. It was all about how Tony Baker, their very own columnist, “the man who in the eighties put the combined might of four police forces to shame,” had witnessed a mugger fleeing the scene of what turned out to be not just a brutal assault, but a cold-blooded murder.

Keith put the mail down on the table, and sat down, turning to the promised full story inside.

The double-page spread wasn’t, of course, about what had happened last night; there had been no time for them to get much detail about that. It was about how Tony Baker had succeeded where the police had failed, almost twenty years ago. Facsimiles of their own headlines, photographs of a young Tony Baker, of his wife, who had left him during “his relentless pursuit of the truth behind the South Coast murders,” were splashed across the pages. Keith had never even heard of the man before yesterday, but then he hadn’t been born when these murders had begun.

And now, the paper said, their man had been the sole witness to another murder. According to the paper, Wilma Fenton had been to her regular bingo game, and for the first time in her life she had won a decent amount of money—over four hundred pounds. The murder had happened right outside the street door to the flats where she lived, a door reached via a grim, damp, badly lit alleyway. She had been just moments away from safety when she met her death at the hands of someone lurking in the dank and dismal passageway.

And it happened as Tony Baker had entered that same alleyway; he had seen the victim fall to the ground, had seen the killer flee the scene, had tried to help the victim, but was too late.

An incident that could have happened in any street in any town in Britain, the article went on. An incident that would have made the local paper and the local news, because it was of no great interest to anyone else. But this time, the nation’s most outspoken newspaper would be watching to see how the police handled it.

Because their man Baker was troubled—not just because an inoffensive, middle-aged widow had been so brutally slain on a night when she should have been celebrating her good luck, but because it didn’t make sense. If Wilma’s callous killer was after her winnings, the paper said, he didn’t get them. The winnings were left behind, intact. What sort of mugger left his takings behind? Had he ever intended stealing the money? Was there more to this murder than met the eye? That, it said, was what Tony Baker was asking himself, what this newspaper was asking itself, and what the editor hoped the police were asking themselves.

And now, as he laid the paper down with a puzzled frown, it was what Keith Scopes was asking himself. He wanted to know more about these South Coast murders. He went over to the computer, and switched it on. There was bound to be stuff about them on the Web.

“How was Freddie?” Judy asked, when Tom got back to the station.

“Very pleased with himself,” said Tom. “Wilma Fenton did indeed have an unusually thin skull. The blow would have been very unlikely to have proved fatal had it been inflicted on someone else. ‘Simply a mugging that went all wrong’ was how he described it.”

“Did he have any idea what the murder weapon could have been?”

“The best he could say was that it had no sharp edges. The indentation suggests something rounded, so I asked if a crash helmet could have done it, but he said no, it was something smaller and much heavier than that. Small, heavy and round.”

“Like a large pebble, maybe?” said Judy.

“Could be. The alleyway’s cobbled—if one had worked loose, her assailant might have picked it up—” He scratched his head. “But that doesn’t explain the half hour, guv. I think someone must have been in the flat with her, and picked something up in there.”

Judy nodded. “We’ll see what the SOCOs come up with. But if he was in the flat with her, and did it in there, why would she still have all her outdoor clothes on? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Nothing makes sense,” said Tom. “If they weren’t in the flat, where were they?”

Judy’s phone rang, and she picked it up. “Right,” she said, hanging up again. “Halliday’s here,” she said. “Jack Shaw has confirmed that he was the young man Jerry Wheelan saw, so unless he came back, I doubt that he’s our man, but let’s see what he has to say for himself.”

“He’s got no record,” said Tom. “But he holds a firearms certificate.”

Judy smiled. “It isn’t a crime, Tom.”

“Well, you know what I feel about guns. If you want to own one, you’re not a fit person to do so.”

“But you’re not one to make sweeping statements.”

Tom fought his corner. “It’s for a Winchester bolt-action rifle. And the cartridges he uses are the same as the 5.56 NATO cartridges, according to the bloke I spoke to in ballistics.”

“5.56 NATO cartridges being what, exactly?”

Tom frowned.

Judy grinned. “You haven’t the faintest idea, have you?”

“I might not know what 5.56 means, but they fire the bullets soldiers use, so I know they don’t put them in peashooters. That’s a serious weapon he’s got.”