A Very Private Murder (3 page)

‘What time does this place close?’ I asked.

‘Ten o’clock, sir. Ten ’til ten.’

‘Ten!’ I exclaimed. ‘Jeez!’ It was going to be a long day. ‘So where is everybody?’

‘Down in the CCTV control room.’

‘Where’s that?’

It was in the basement, along a corridor lined with pipes and cables, through a couple of
Staff only
doors. I was the last to arrive. The room was dimly lit with a green light, and one wall was covered with high-definition monitors, some showing the car park, others various views of the interior. A technician sat at a control desk, like the producer of some outside broadcast, except this one lasted all day, every day. I wondered what he did for relaxation in his off periods. Gilbert introduced me to Miss Carol McArdle, the manager of the Centre, who had a surprisingly firm handshake for her size. You have to watch the little ones. She probably developed her assertiveness by giving
full-contact
karate lessons in her spare time. I told her that they looked to be doing good business upstairs and flexed my fingers behind my back.

It was a normal working day for the troops, so the ones who weren’t already mingling with the crowd, looking for terrorists, nutters and overenthusiastic republicans, had descended on the Centre like orphaned schoolkids on a burning sweet shop. I’d like to think it was because of their conscientiousness, but I suspect the chances of meeting the leggy Miss Curzon had more to do with it.

‘Has Miss Curzon left?’ I ventured. It was the most pressing question I could think of.

‘She’s gone off to a civic luncheon at the town hall,’ I was told.

A SOCO had been sent for and he was eager to be let loose on the plaque and try for an adventitious hit. In other words, he’d swab it, willy-nilly, and hope to collect some DNA. I wanted a look at it myself, too, but I didn’t want to wait until ten o’clock.

‘We could do with some screens to put around it,’ Gilbert suggested, looking towards the manager after I’d voiced my feelings.

‘Mr Wood,’ I began. ‘We’re in 2007. The F-word is used on Radio Four almost every day. It’s
spray-painted
on every motorway bridge around town and drawn in the dirt on the back of every white van. I don’t think exposure to it will offend or corrupt any good citizen of Heckley who happens to be shopping here today.’

I got my way and we all moved off towards the scene of the crime. Climbing the stairs I asked Miss McArdle if there was an office we could use as an incident room and she said there was.

The SOCO donned surgeon’s gloves and mask and had first go at the plaque, followed by the photographer and then me. The crowd pressed forward, watching and photographing every move we made, and no doubt a good proportion of them would have letters in the
Gazette
later in the week complaining about the police wasting public money or, alternatively, not devoting sufficient resources to the case. I studied the offending word and wished I’d brought my magnifying glass to put on a show for the audience.

The office was on the upper floor, tagged on to the business suite, as Miss McArdle called it. The shopfitters had been using it as a canteen, so it was well equipped with chairs and a few tables that had been borrowed from the food court. Industrial-size tins of paint were stacked in a corner, mainly in shades of magnolia, and a thin layer of plaster dust covered everything.

‘Will this do?’ Miss McArdle asked.

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘All it needs now is a whiteboard.’ Every incident room has a whiteboard.

‘I’ll fetch one,’ she said, and big Dave Sparkington turned to follow her.

‘Dave’s quiet,’ I said to Jeff Caton. ‘Is he OK?’

‘He thought we were rid of you for a few days, that’s all,’ he replied.

‘This’ll be sorted by tomorrow,’ I assured him. ‘Then you’ll all be able to sit around reading the football pages and swapping boozy stories for the remainder of the week.’

When they returned with the board I asked Miss McArdle and John, the security firm’s superintendent, to stay and started the meeting in the time-honoured way: ‘OK, what have we got?’ I asked, raising the marker pen expectantly.

‘Not much from me,’ the SOCO replied. ‘I’ve no doubt collected a few microscopic samples, but they’re all mixed up and contaminated and it would cost a fortune in time and effort to amplify and separate them. And then what do we compare them with? Anybody who’s been in the mall this morning could have left a sample. DNA will be floating around like snowflakes in a blizzard. So don’t wait for anything from me because you’ll be wasting your time.’

‘Well thanks for being so positive,’ I said, lowering the pen and turning to the photographer. ‘Did you get some decent pictures?’

‘Yes, boss, but I don’t see how they can help with the investigation.’

‘No, they can’t, but they’ll be essential if it ever goes to court. Miss McArdle …’

‘Yes?’

‘When was the last time we can vouch for the offending word not being there?’

While she was thinking about it John of security said: ‘I can answer that, Inspector. Mr Threadneedle was here until about nine o’clock last night, making sure everything was working well. He tried the curtains about a hundred times and then we left the dais roped off with two of my men looking after it with strict instructions not to leave it unattended. Mr Threadneedle was adamant about that.’

‘Threadneedle?’ I queried. ‘Is he the lord mayor?’

‘The mayor. He’s just the mayor,’ somebody told me.

‘That’s him,’ John confirmed.

‘I’m sorry, John, but I don’t know your second name.’

‘It’s Brighouse, sir. John Brighouse.’

‘Call me Charlie. So the offence was committed some time between nine last night and eleven this morning.’ I wrote it on the board. ‘I need some information from either you or Miss McArdle. First of all, a full list of all the names of your security staff, with another list of those who were here between nine last night and eleven this morning. And I’d like another list of all the names of the dignitaries present at the opening ceremony.’ I looked at the manager. ‘Do you think you could do those for me as soon as possible, please?’

She said they could, and the two of them left. I said: ‘Right, so now we’re alone, what do we know about Threadneedle?’

‘He’s a crook,’ big Dave Sparkington replied.

‘He’s a pillar of society,’ someone contradicted.

‘The mayor of our fair town.’

‘The economic crime unit have been trying to get their hands on him for years.’

‘You mean the department formerly known as the fraud squad.’

‘The shiny-trousers branch.’

‘The same.’

I could see a spin-off. We might not catch the phantom painter, but investigating our beloved mayor might turn up a few smelly surprises. ‘What’s he supposed to have done?’ I asked.

‘He’s rich,’ somebody supplied.

‘Believe it or not, that’s still not a crime,’ I said.

‘It is if you were born in a caravan in Ireland, never went to school, earned a living working the lump and now owned a big share of this.’ The speaker wafted a hand around, demonstrating that he was talking about the building we were sitting in.

‘He owns shares in this?’ I asked.

‘Allegedly,’ Brendan, one of my DCs said. Brendan is a collector of conspiracy theories, and prone to go off on uncontrolled tangents. ‘It’s been in the papers, boss. Don’t you read them?’

‘He owns shares in Monkton’s,’ I was told. ‘They were the major contractors. And he owns part of several of the subcontractors. Him being on the approvals committee can’t have prejudiced their chances of lifting the contract.’

‘And he drives a powder-blue Rolls-Royce.’

‘Ooh, powder blue – how
passé
,’ one of the comics commented in an appropriate accent.

‘It’s not that simple, Chas,’ Jeff Caton stated. ‘He has fingers in lots of pies. It’s not subcontractors – more like subcontractors to subcontractors, et cetera. And, of course, his position on the council will have helped push through the necessary compulsory purchase orders. Fraud have looked good and hard at him, but his affairs are labyrinthine. He made a pile as a racehorse owner, which just about excuses him from normal investigation.’

What Jeff meant was that he could claim to have made his money in any number of ways associated with the industry, from gambling to stabling horses and selling bags of manure, without keeping accurate records. We’d have to give him the benefit of any doubts.

‘So how did he get to be the mayor?’

‘He was democratically elected as a councillor, and eventually it was his turn. He said the right things that the tosspots understood, and the rest was due to apathy.’

‘He’s made the buses run on time,’ Brendan told us.

‘Listen,’ I began. ‘I know we all think this is hilarious but the chief constable has his teeth into it and he’ll want me to keep him informed, so let’s cut out the messing about and get on with it. Understood?’

They mumbled their assent and Jeff said: ‘Did you find anything, Chas?’

‘Not much, but I did notice one thing that I thought interesting: it wasn’t done with a spray can. The paint looks like acrylic, as used by some artists, and there were brush marks. I’d say it was applied with a stiff brush.’

‘Was the paint dry?’ asked Maggie Madison, one of the two female officers in the team.

‘Yes, but acrylic dries in a few minutes and sets like concrete. That’s why I never use it. If you don’t clean your brush every two minutes you ruin it, and they don’t come cheap.’

‘What are you supposed to clean them in?’ Brendan wondered.

‘Only water. That’s the main attraction of the paint. What’s uppermost in my mind at the moment is who was the intended target? Who was the painter aiming his offence at?’

Jeff held up a hand and counted them off on his fingers: ‘Miss Curzon – does she have a jilted boyfriend? Threadneedle – he must have dozens of enemies. The Centre in general – there was quite a bit of opposition to it.’

‘Anybody else?’ I invited. Dave Sparkington was sitting with his head bowed, elbows on his knees, doing his impression of Rodin’s
The Thinker
. I said: ‘Come on then, Dave. I can see words of wisdom bubbling up inside you, so let’s have them.’

‘We’re wasting time, aren’t we?’ he pronounced.

‘Go on,’ I invited.

‘It wasn’t aimed at anybody. If it had been, the wassock who did it would have put
Fuck you
, not just
Fuck
. It was some twelve-year-old kid who thinks painting that word is the most daring thing he’s ever done. It could have been any one of the kids from the high school.’

‘Sounds reasonable,’ I agreed. ‘Have a word with any graffiti artists we have on the books. One of them might know who it is, and he won’t be popular with them for drawing the heat their way. In fact, lean on them, hard. Meanwhile, let’s have a brainstorm. I reckon finding the paint is priority. Where do we start looking?’

The ideas came thick and fast. Our starting point was that the culprit remained on the premises after closing time and left whenever he could, probably abandoning the paint and any disguise he’d worn. The finger pointed at an inside job, meaning the security staff or the cleaners who came scrabbling into the place after hours, like the undead hiding from the light.

We went back to the factory and composed a leaflet to distribute to all the shops and businesses in the Centre. It asked them to look anywhere where our culprit could have hidden overnight, and to search for a tin or tube of paint and a brush concealed on their premises. We ran off five hundred copies and I sent the troops back there mob-handed to distribute them and suss out the security in general. While they were doing that I made appointments to see Councillor Arthur George Threadneedle, Mayor of Heckley, and Miss Ghislaine Curzon, Enslaver of Princes. I knew which one I was most looking forward to.

It was easier than we thought. At eight-fifteen Tuesday morning the manageress of Lucy’s Frock Shop rang to say that while putting out a rack of cheesecloth buy-one-get-one-free ra-ra skirts she’d noticed what looked like a tube of paint tucked away underneath one of the marble seats that were a feature of the Centre. I wondered at what stage in their careers manageresses became managers and hotfooted it round there. She was an avid watcher of all the scene of crime TV programmes that flood our late-evening schedules and had done exactly the right thing. She’d cordoned off the seat with a row of chairs and sent for me. The villains watch TV, too, and are becoming more forensically aware, so it’s a pleasant change when it works in our favour. She was probably hoping for George Clooney but didn’t look too disappointed with Charlie Priest.

It was a tube of WHSmith’s own-brand acrylic paint in rose madder, and was half empty. A toothbrush lay alongside of it, the head a blob of hard paint. I put both items in evidence bags and congratulated the manageress on her powers of observation.

The troops were up in the incident room, finishing cups of coffee and sharing out the tasks when I entered, holding the evidence bags high in the air like the executioner with Marie Antoinette’s severed head.

‘Ta-da!’ I called. ‘Charlie does it again.’

Jeff Caton was on the telephone and he waved a hand to tell us to make less noise. ‘How long ago?’ he asked, followed by: ‘Give me the address again.’

‘Robbery,’ he told us as he slipped his phone back in its holster. ‘The pit bull gang strikes again, but this time it’s on our turf.’

There’d been a spate of robberies in Lancashire by a two-man gang armed with a slavering pit bull terrier. They terrorised their victims, threatening to set the dog on any children present, and stealing jewellery, credit cards and cash. And now they were operating on our patch. Either that or we had a copycat.

‘Tell us more,’ I said.

‘Couple with two children. One of them took the wife to the nearest ATM machine and drew six hundred pounds on her two cards. Left them all tied to chairs but they managed to get loose.’

‘I’m supposed to be interviewing Threadneedle shortly, and the Curzons later. You wouldn’t prefer to see them, would you?’