Never Go Back (13 page)

When Chipchase discovered that their destination was the Caledonian Hotel, he expressed the candid view that Harry was mad.

‘Ferguson will have given Lloyd’s widow and daughter the clear impression we sabotaged Wiseman’s motor. How do you think they’ll react to us popping in for a cup of tea and a chat?’

‘Danger was going to assure them of our innocence.’

‘Yeah, but look what happened to him.’

‘We have to make them understand how absurd that whole idea is, Barry.’

‘Easier said than done.’

‘And the daughter can tell us more about what happened during Askew’s overnight stay at her house in London.’

‘Did anything happen?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what we’re going to find out.’

—«»—«»—«»—

It was, however, as Chipchase had pointed out, easier said than done. The receptionist at the Caledonian informed them that Mrs Lloyd and Mrs Morrison, her daughter, were both out. This was no real surprise, given why the pair had come to Aberdeen in the first place.

Harry retreated to a table in the foyer to record a message for Mrs Morrison on a sheet of hotel writing paper. It was hard to know how to word it and harder still to concentrate on the task with Chipchase craning over his shoulder. But he persevered.

Dear Mrs Morrison,

I hope you do not feel we are intruding on your grief. Please accept our condolences. Your father was a good man. The police are mishandling their enquiries into his death. We only want to learn the truth. I am sure you do too. Could we meet to discuss what happened? It might be helpful for all of us. You can contact us on—

He broke off to remind himself of Shona’s phone number. But, as he was delving into his pocket, Chipchase said, ‘You can give her my mobile number, if you like.’

Harry stared at him in amazement. ‘You’ve got a mobile?’

‘Certainly.’ Chipchase plucked a smart-looking model from inside his coat. ‘You should get up to speed with the communications revolution yourself.’

‘But… you let me troop off to the payphone in the pub. You even directed me to it.’

‘A man in my straitened financial circumstances has to watch his budget. This is a strictly pay-as-you-go jobby. I can’t have you holding rambling conversaziones on it. You’ll be dialling the delectable Donna before I know it. But for receiving calls, in an emergency, which I suppose this counts as, well…’ Infuriatingly, Chipchase smiled. ‘Be my guest.’

—«»—«»—«»—

Harry finished the note and delivered it to the receptionist; then, with a sarcastic excess of politeness, he asked if he might possibly make brief use of Chipchase’s mobile. He rang Erica, who was still incommunicado, but this time he was able to leave a message complete with a number to call back on.

—«»—«»—«»—

After a late and hurried pizza-parlour lunch, they took a taxi out to Torry and kept it waiting while Chipchase fetched his passport. Shona was wherever her Tuesday afternoon cleaning duties took her and Benjy mercifully absent. The house was small and cramped, a Victorian dockworker’s dwelling not dissimilar to 37 Falmouth Street, Swindon, but more fashionably furnished. Chipchase spared a moment to draw Harry’s attention to the convertible sofa he was destined to spend the night on — ‘Looks like a real back-breaker, doesn’t it?’ — before they left.

Next stop was Legg, Stevenson, MacLean, where Chipchase left Harry to pay the taxi driver, arguing that the fare could be offset against future phone usage. It had not taken long, Harry reflected, for his former partner to revert to freeloading type.

—«»—«»—«»—

Kylie Sinclair was in clinically efficient mode, relieving Chipchase of his passport and making a note of their address in Torry before giving them an unvarnished assessment of their situation.

‘What happens when you return to the police station next week depends entirely on what Chief Inspector Ferguson and his team learn in the interim. If there’s anything to your disadvantage you think they might learn, you should tell me about it now. Forewarned, gentlemen, is forearmed.’

‘There’s nothing,’ said Harry.

‘Less than nothing,’ added Chipchase. ‘Ferguson’s barking up the wrong baobab.’

Miss Sinclair puzzled for no more than a fraction of a second over Chipchase’s weakness for colourfully customized metaphors. ‘I need to know any and all relevant information. You do understand that, don’t you?’

‘We do,’ Harry responded. ‘And we’re being completely open with you.’

‘Good.’

‘What really worries me, though, is what I pointed out in my interview. By concentrating on us, the police are giving the real murderer ample opportunity to cover his tracks.’

‘Or hers,’ Chipchase chimed in unhelpfully.

‘Quite,’ said Miss Sinclair. ‘Well, that really is their problem, isn’t—’

‘Excuse me,’ Chipchase interrupted. ‘It’s our bloody problem if we’re next for the chop.’

‘Are you genuinely concerned about such a possibility?’ The expression on Miss Sinclair’s face suggested it had simply not occurred to her until now that they might be.

‘Of course we are. Wouldn’t you be? Say, if several of the legal eagles who qualified at the same time as you started turning up dead in suspicious circumstances.’

‘It’s an unlikely scenario.’

‘Well, it’s the scenario we happen to be in, unlikely or not.’

‘Perhaps. But I don’t see—’

‘We’ve thought of checking out a few possibilities ourselves,’ Harry cut in. ‘You know? Ask some of the questions we reckon the police should be asking but aren’t.’

‘That would be most unwise. Chief Inspector Ferguson could interpret such behaviour as interference in his conduct of the case and hence a breach of your bail conditions.’

‘A complete no-no, then?’ asked Chipchase.

‘Absolutely.’

‘Despite—’ An electronic travesty of the theme music to The Great Escape suddenly started jingling inside Chipchase’s coat. ‘Sorry,’ he said, pulling out his mobile. ‘I should have… Hello? … Ah, yes. Of course. Hi. Er, good of you to…’ He rolled his eyes meaningfully at Harry. ‘Yes. Well, it’s, er…’

‘If we’re barred from taking any action ourselves, Miss Sinclair,’ Harry said, speaking loudly enough to distract her attention from Chipchase’s burblings and improvising as he went, ‘are we also barred from taking ourselves off to what we think might be a safer location? My mother’s house in Swindon, for instance. We could stay there until next week, couldn’t we? We can’t flee the country without our passports, so what would be the objection to us getting out of Aberdeen for a few days? I mean, it’s not as if—’

Harry broke off as Chipchase ended his conversation with the words, ‘See you then,’ and sheepishly tucked his phone back into his pocket. ‘Sorry,’ he said, grinning apologetically. ‘Mrs McMullen. Checking up … on our whereabouts. Where, er, were we?’

‘Discussing the possibility of you spending the period between now and your appointment at the police station next Tuesday in Swindon,’ said Miss Sinclair.

‘Ah. Right. Excellento. Swindon-by-the-Sea. The Wiltshire Riviera. Can’t beat it.’

Once again, Miss Sinclair was only momentarily bemused by Chipchase’s badinage. ‘Well, I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t base yourselves there in the interim. Citing a concern for your safety could even make a favourable impression. Chief Inspector Ferguson might ask you to report to the police in Swindon while you’re there, but he has no justification for vetoing the trip. If you give me the address… I’ll run it past him.’

‘Fine,’ said Harry.

‘Great,’ said Chipchase.

There was a pause. Miss Sinclair looked at them expectantly. ‘So, do you have any other questions?’

—«»—«»—«»—

A few minutes later, they were walking away from the practice’s imposing Georgian front door.

‘That thing we assured Smiley Kylie we wouldn’t do,’ said Chipchase. ‘You remember? Interfering in the case, sticking our noses in where they aren’t wanted.’

‘I remember,’ said Harry.

‘We start doing it in half an hour. Helen Morrison’s agreed to speak to us.’

Helen Morrison was a pear-shaped, middle-aged woman with frizzed hair and a moon face, the skin around her eyes red and puffy from recent shedding of tears. The dark suit she was wearing looked to have been bought when she was at least one dress size smaller. This, together with the nervous tremor in her hands, made Harry want to comfort her with a hug. But bland words were all that he felt able to offer.

‘It’s good of you to see us, Mrs Morrison,’ he said, as he and Chipchase settled in their chairs round the corner table where they had found her waiting for them in the bar of the Caledonian Hotel. ‘Jabber — your father — was a good friend to us back in our National Service days. His death’s a real tragedy.’

‘But we didn’t have anything to do with it,’ said Chipchase, his bluntness causing Harry to suppress a wince. ‘The police have got it all wrong.’

‘I know,’ said Mrs Morrison.

‘You do?’ Harry could hardly disguise his surprise.

‘That’s why I’m, well, glad you phoned. I haven’t told Mum, by the way. Arranging for Dad’s body to be flown back to Cardiff is as much as she can cope with at the moment. As for this… murder business… well, she can’t really get her head round it.’

‘The police are trying to connect the deaths with a company I used to run,’ said Chipchase, in a tone that implied it could have been ICI.

‘So they said. But that doesn’t make sense.’

‘Delighted you realize that, Mrs Morrison.’

‘What makes you so sure it doesn’t?’ asked Harry, catching but ignoring a glare from Chipchase.

‘Well, for a start Dad never invested in… whatever it was called.’

‘No. But—’

‘And then there was the chat I had with him over the phone Saturday evening. Real worried, he was, after what had happened to Peter Askew; Crooked, as he called him. He wanted me to check the room Crooked had slept in Thursday night. See if he’d left anything there. Well, he hadn’t, unless you count the contents of the wastepaper basket. I’d emptied it by then, of course, but Dad wanted me to fish through the rubbish to see what there was. I told him not to be so daft, but he sounded that worried I promised to do it. I went through it with a fine-tooth comb. There was nothing there. Nothing at all. I phoned Dad later and told him so.’

‘How did he take the news?’

‘He seemed… disappointed. I asked him what he’d been hoping for. And he said: “Something linking this with the other deaths.” Those were his exact words. “Something linking this with the other deaths.”’

‘You repeated that to Chief Inspector Ferguson?’

‘Oh yes. And the other thing Dad said. The last thing, before he rang off. The last thing he ever said to me, apart from ‘“Bye, love”. “Ossie doesn’t see it. But I do.”’

‘“Ossie doesn’t see it,”’ Harry echoed under this breath. ‘“But I do.”’

‘You’re Ossie, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s what convinced me you couldn’t have… well, killed anyone.’

‘It doesn’t seem to have convinced Ferguson,’ said Chipchase.

‘No, well, he never stopped going on about that company of yours. Fraudulent, he called it.’

‘He would.’

‘When I told him what Dad had said about “other deaths”, he said to his sergeant, “We’ll have to trawl through all the investors.” I took him to mean he thought some more of them might have… been killed.’

‘Bloody hell. Doesn’t he ever give up?’

‘But I don’t think those could have been the deaths Dad meant. I don’t think that’s what he had in mind at all.’

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘I don’t think so either.’

—«»—«»—«»—

Helen Morrison asked two favours of them as they were leaving. ‘Please don’t come to the funeral. My brothers are hot-headed and don’t think straight at the best of times. I’ll have to tell them what the police have said about you two in case they get to hear about it some other way and think I’m holding out on them. There might be trouble. And Mum couldn’t take that. But if you find out what really happened — why Dad was killed — you will call me, won’t you? I want to know. Whatever it is. Good or bad. I want to know.’

—«»—«»—«»—

They retreated to the Prince of Wales to talk over what they had learned. To Harry’s surprise, Chipchase did not dispute which deaths Lloyd must have been referring to, especially after he had heard more about the Welshman’s behaviour during the reception on the castle roof.

‘It’s got to be the Clean Sheeters who have died over the years, hasn’t it?’

Harry nodded. ‘Reckon so.’

‘Have you still got Danger’s round-up of who’s done what and where?’

‘Right here.’ Harry pulled out his by now seriously crumpled copy of Dangerfield’s letter and smoothed it flat as best he could. ‘Four dead’uns and one as good as.’ He ran his finger down the names. ‘Babcock: stroke; Maynard: AIDS; Nixon: drowned; Smith: heart attack; Yardley: motorbike crash.’ The recital of the names stirred a recent memory. ‘Askew talked abut Nixon’s death on the train. I’ve just remembered. He asked me if I thought Nixon might have been murdered.’

‘And Lloyd heard him ask?’

‘He’d have been bound to.’

‘Did Askew mention the others?’

‘No. There was some … joke running. Yardley came into it. I… can’t quite recall.’

‘Pie-eyed by that stage, were you?’

‘We all were. Except Askew. He’d drunk a good bit, but he seemed… horribly sober, now I look back. I didn’t take what he said seriously. Well, why would I? But now…’

‘Victims of AIDS, a stroke and a heart attack we can forget about. I actually spoke to Maynard’s old boyfriend when I called round to try and solicit an investment in Chipchase Sheltered Holdings. He gave me a graphic account of how the poor bugger had died. Not a diddy doubt about the nature of his demise, I think we can safely say.’

‘Nor Smith’s, I imagine.’

‘Right. A motorbike crash and a drowning, on the other hand, could be iffy.’

‘But they’re both so long ago. Forty years in Yardley’s case. Twenty in Nixon’s.’

‘Maybe the murderer’s operating on a long cycle. You know, like a comet.’

‘A comet?’

‘There was this book on astronomy I read while I was in …’ Chipchase studied Harry’s bemused expression. ‘Forget it. You’re right. They are a long time ago. Too long for us to go ferreting after the facts.’

‘Not necessarily. Danger doesn’t spell out how he got all his information. But for Nixon — and for Smith, I see — he gives a widow’s address, in case we might want to send them our condolences.’

Chipchase sighed. ‘One of the best, Danger. Always… doing the right thing.’

‘So he was.’ Harry examined the note about Nixon with heightened concentration. ‘This phrase he used to describe Nixon’s drowning. “Circumstances unknown.” That’s odd, isn’t it, if he’d spoken to the widow? Surely she must know how her husband came to drown.’

‘Perhaps she didn’t want to talk about it.’

‘Yeah? Well, perhaps it’s time she was persuaded to. You know what they say. It’s good to talk.’