Never Go Back (5 page)

Shock sobered Harry up faster than any amount of strong black coffee. His brain might not have snapped into top gear at Dangerfield’s words, but it was at least a forward gear. He listened hard as Dangerfield gave him the few facts he knew on their way to the conference room.

‘Crooked’s body was found on the railway line near Carnoustie late this afternoon. That’s about halfway between Dundee and Arbroath. They traced him here from the copy of my letter he had in his pocket. We’ve got an inspector and a sergeant here from the Tayside Police. Jabber mentioned you were the last to speak to Crooked, so they insisted I wheel you in. Be careful what you say, Ossie. I’m not sure exactly what they’re after.’

‘Are you telling me Peter killed himself, Danger?’

‘Sounds like it.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘Neither can I. But he’s dead all right. We have no choice about believing that.’

—«»—«»—«»—

The conference room was a bare, starkly lit space, the chairs that normally filled it stacked at one end. At the other end, by a broad-topped table positioned in front of a projector screen, stood the inspector and sergeant, who introduced themselves as Geddes and Crawford. Lloyd, who had been supplied with a chair, looked up at Harry with wide-eyed bemusement and stroked his chin fretfully.

Geddes was a short, barrel-chested, shaven-headed man in early middle age, with a stubbly beard and a darting gaze. Crawford was a taller, younger man running to fat, with greasy hair and a conspicuous plaster over one eyebrow. They looked tired and bored and faintly hostile.

‘Take a seat, Mr Barnett,’ said Crawford, pushing a chair into position alongside Lloyd’s. ‘Sorry to be the bearers of bad news about your old comrade. You want to sit down yourself, Mr Dangerfield?’

‘I’ll stand, thanks.’

Harry might have preferred to stand as well, but he could not be sure if further shocks were on the way, so he lowered himself cautiously onto the proffered chair.

‘We gather you had a conversation with Mr Askew at Waverley station, Mr Barnett,’ said Geddes, stifling a smoker’s cough. ‘The last conversation anyone seems to have had with him.’

‘It was a brief chat. Nothing more.’

‘What about?’

‘The reunion. Has Danger—’

‘Aye, aye. We’re in the picture about your fiftieth anniversary get-together. Did Mr Askew say he was looking forward to it?’

‘Not entirely. He told me he was, well, beginning to regret agreeing to come.’

‘That’s really why we assumed he’d got off the train and gone back to London,’ said Dangerfield.

‘Oh, he got off the train, sir,’ said Crawford. ‘No doubt about that.’

‘Do you know… what exactly happened, Inspector?’ Harry asked.

‘Not exactly, no, sir. That’s what we’re trying to establish. Mr Askew’s body was spotted a mile or so north-east of Carnoustie station, lying between the tracks, by the driver of an Aberdeen to Glasgow train a little after half past four this afternoon. There’d been no report of a previous train hitting a pedestrian and his injuries were more consistent with falling from one, rather than walking into it.’

‘What… sort of injuries were they?’

‘Oh, the fatal sort. Mostly to the head. Mr Lloyd’s generously agreed to come down to Dundee tomorrow morning to identify the body, but judging by the photograph in his passport…’

‘He had his passport on him?’

‘You’d be surprised how many Englishmen think they need one to travel to Scotland. Not that we’re complaining. It makes our job a lot easier. No next of kin, you tell me, Mr Lloyd?’

Lloyd shook his head. ‘He said all his family were gone.’

‘So, we come back to his state of mind. Did he seem depressed while you were with him?’

‘Crooked — Peter — was never what you’d call a barrel of laughs, Inspector. But depressed? No. I don’t think so.’

‘Mr Barnett?’

‘He was a bit down. Probably a bit drunk. We all were. It could have turned him maudlin. You know how it takes some people that way.’

‘Aye, I do,’ said Geddes with feeling.

‘But that’s a long way from being… suicidal.’

‘Oh, a very long way indeed.’ Geddes pushed himself away from the desk, against which he had been leaning, and paced out a slow, deliberative circle. ‘And there are other problems with the suicide theory. Practical problems. Throwing yourself from a high-speed train is no easy matter these days. The doors are centrally locked. They can’t be opened when the train’s moving. That leaves us with the windows. The only ones that open are in the doors. But it’d be quite a scramble to climb out. You’d need to be determined as well as desperate. Is that how Mr Askew seemed to you this afternoon, Mr Barnett?’

‘No. He didn’t. But I suppose…’ Harry shrugged. ‘He must have been.’

‘Aye. Him… or someone else.’

‘Someone else?’

‘The inspector means he might have had help,’ said Crawford.

‘You’re not serious?’

‘We’ll know more after the post mortem,’ said Geddes. ‘For the present, I’m just turning possibilities over in my mind. Aside from getting cold feet about your carry-on here, did he … do anything strange during the journey?’

‘He got het up at one point,’ Lloyd responded. ‘For the life of me, I can’t remember what about. Oh, and, er, didn’t you say he seemed out of sorts after taking a phone call during lunch, Ossie?’

Harry nodded. ‘A little, yes.’

‘He had a mobile?’ put in Crawford.

‘Yes. He did.’

‘Interesting,’ murmured Geddes.

‘What is?’ asked Dangerfield.

‘None found on the body, sir,’ said Crawford.

‘Perhaps it dropped out of his pocket while he was, er…’ Dangerfield’s line of reasoning petered out. Then he said, ‘Or he could have left it in his bag. I forgot to tell you, Inspector. We took his bag with us when we left the train. We expected to hear from him, you see, and—’

‘Where is it?’ snapped Geddes.

‘Er, in the minibus.’

Geddes smiled tolerantly. ‘Well, perhaps we could go and take a look at it.’

—«»—«»—«»—

They took the rear exit to the car park. The night was cold and still, though Harry suspected he was shivering for other reasons than the temperature. Dangerfield opened the minibus, turned on the internal light and pulled Askew’s bag out from under the seat where he had left it.

It was a small and clearly very old leather suitcase, much scuffed and scratched around the edges. And it was not locked. Dangerfield released the catches and raised the lid. Inside was a humdrum assortment of clothes and toiletries, including the neatly folded suit Askew had presumably been planning to wear that evening. But no mobile phone.

‘It doesn’t seem to be here, does it?’ growled Geddes.

‘Perhaps it did fall out of his pocket after all,’ said Danger-field. ‘Like you said, it must have been a struggle to climb out of the window.’

Geddes gave a sceptical grunt. ‘Or it could have been taken. From his pocket. Or, later, from this unlocked case.’

‘Now, hold on,’ Dangerfield bridled. ‘If you’re suggesting—’

‘I’m suggesting nothing.’ Geddes sighed and flicked the lid of the case shut. ‘I must thank you all for your co-operation. I may need you to make formal statements about what you know of the circumstances leading up to Mr Askew’s death, but that can wait. First things first. I’ll send a car for you at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, Mr Lloyd. Is that too early for you?’

‘Well…’ Lloyd shrugged. ‘I suppose not.’

‘Good. Let’s go, Sergeant. Give Mr Dangerfield a receipt for the bag. Then we can leave these gentlemen to get some sleep. I’m sure they need it.’

—«»—«»—«»—

They watched Geddes and Crawford climb into their car and drive away. The noise of the engine receded into the night and was swallowed by the prevailing silence. None of them said a word for a minute or more. Then Lloyd coughed, his breath pluming in the still, cold air.

‘Bloody hell, Danger. What do we do now?’

‘Go in and tell the others.’

‘Tell them what, exactly? That Crooked’s topped himself?’

‘Well, he has, hasn’t he?’

‘Geddes isn’t sure,’ said Harry with bleak conviction.

Lloyd stared at him incredulously. ‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying Geddes doesn’t buy the idea of Peter Askew crawling through a window and jumping to his death from the train. And the missing phone’s made him doubly suspicious. It would have revealed where that call Peter took came from. There might have been messages on it as well. Who knows?’

‘No-one,’ said Dangerfield. ‘Now.’

‘Exactly.’

‘You’re the only one who saw the bloody thing, Ossie,’ Lloyd said irritably.

‘Think I imagined it?’

‘No. ‘Course not. But… it’s bloody odd he never used it while he was with me all yesterday and this morning.’

‘You can’t have been with him the whole time.’

‘No. Obviously. But most of it. Apart from when he was asleep. And, er… a few hours yesterday afternoon and evening.’

Despite lingering shock and the onset of bone-deep fatigue, Harry’s curiosity was aroused. ‘How’d that come about?’

‘Oh, well, when we got to Paddington, after leaving you in Swindon, Crooked said he was going to meet a friend and would join me at my daughter’s in Neasden later. He got to her house… about eight o’clock.’

‘What friend was this?’

‘Somebody he’d worked with at London Zoo, he said.’

‘Name?’

‘If he told me, I don’t remember.’

‘And where were they meeting?’

‘Somewhere in the centre. I don’t know.’

‘Did you mention this to Geddes, Jabber?’ asked Danger-field.

‘No. I… never thought to.’

‘Perhaps that’s just as well. Some reunion, hey? This is going to knock them all for six. Do you think I should let Barry know what’s happened?’ (Chipchase’s nickname had evidently deserted Dangerfield at this time of stress.)

‘Have you got a number for him?’ Harry was more than slightly interested in the answer to that question.

‘No. He left in such a rush. I… forgot to ask. But I thought you might…’

“Fraid not.’

A few wordless seconds expanded in the darkness around them. Then Lloyd said, ‘He did have a sister in Manchester, didn’t he, Ossie?’

Harry weighed his answer as carefully as he could. ‘I don’t know. For sure.’

‘A sister anywhere?’

‘If you’d asked me before today… I’d have said no.’

‘Oh, great. Bloody great.’

Dangerfield cleared his throat. ‘Let’s go in.’

And in they went.

Donna’s wake-up call the following morning was literally that, rousing Harry from seldom-plumbed depths of unconsciousness. No-one had hurried to bed after Dangerfield’s announcement of Askew’s death. Reactions had varied from the numb to the disbelieving, but all had taken time to be articulated. Harry had finally reached his room around two o’clock and had been unable to sleep for another hour or so after that.

For reasons he did not completely understand, he failed to pass the news on to Donna. Sparing her unnecessary worry was no longer the point. Now it was necessary worry he was determined not to inflict. She seemed to blame his lack of obvious jollity on a hangover, which strangely he did not have. But he was happy to let her believe he did.

‘You didn’t drink enough water, did you?’

‘Guilty as charged.’

‘Promise me you won’t spend the whole weekend in a dehydrated haze of alcohol.’

‘I promise.’

And somehow he suspected this was a promise he could be confident of keeping.

—«»—«»—«»—

He made himself some coffee, then took a bath and, skipping the communal breakfast, headed out on foot. He needed to think and hoped some bracing lungfuls of Deeside air would aid his efforts. He left the hotel, walked downhill towards the village, then struck out along the footpath behind the church. It had formed part of the cross-country route WO Trench had insisted they flog round twice a week, ‘to stop you going any softer than you already are’. But there was no question of Harry breaking into a commemorative trot. A steady walk would serve his purpose.

The path curved round the hillside ahead of him as he went, the pale trunks and branches of the still leafless silver birches casting an illusion of frost across the surrounding woodland. He tried to recall what Askew had said to him on the platform at Edinburgh and earlier on the train, but could retrieve only snatches of disconnected phrases. He had been anxious about something. That at least was clear. And it concerned Operation Clean Sheet. ‘It depends on how you remember things,’ he had said. Yes. Those had been his very words. ‘And how you forget them.’ What had he meant? What could he have meant?

A figure appeared suddenly on the path ahead, a dark shape moving fast. Harry pulled up in surprise, then recognized Erica Rawson, running lithely towards him in tracksuit and trainers. She smiled and waved, slowing to a halt beside him, where she jogged on the spot, breathing hard, her face flushed, her hair damp with sweat despite the chill of the morning.

‘I’m running off last night’s food and drink,’ she panted. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘OK. I… needed some air myself.’

‘Plenty of it out here.’

‘We used to…’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Never mind.’

‘Thinking about Peter Askew?’

‘Hard not to.’

‘Especially as the last person to speak to him.’

‘Thanks for reminding me.’

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean…’ She stopped jogging. ‘Really. I’m sorry. It was a terrible thing.’

‘We never know what’s going on in someone else’s head, do we? I mean, why come all the way to Scotland just to…’ He looked past her into the ghostly grey depths of the wood. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Everything makes sense, Harry. It’s just that sometimes it takes a while to figure out what the sense is.’

‘Very profound.’

‘No. Just true.’

‘Yeah. I suppose so. Well, you’d better get on. I don’t want you catching cold on my account.’

‘I’ll see you later, then.’

‘OK. ‘Bye.’

She turned and ran on down the slope towards the church. Harry watched her go, then set off slowly in the opposite direction.

—«»—«»—«»—

Erica was right, of course. Everything did make sense. But Harry was a long way from deducing how. When he got back to Kilveen Castle, he found Dangerfield gathering the Clean Sheeters together for the excursion he had planned for them. ‘The show must go on,’ he declared optimistically.

But the cast for the show was undeniably reduced. With Askew dead, Chipchase absent, Lloyd performing his civic duty at a mortuary in Dundee, Dr Starkie opting out for reasons of his own and Erica sending a message to the effect that she did not wish to cramp the boys’ style, just seven were left to embark on Dangerfield’s mystery minibus tour of Deeside.

They had scarcely strayed beyond Lumphanan during Operation Clean Sheet apart from fortnightly excursions into Aberdeen on the train. Their knowledge of Kilveen’s wider surroundings was thus zero. Dangerfield took them on a scenic drive west, up the valley into the foothills of the Cairngorms as far as Braemar, where they sought out the hair-of-the-dog drink that several of them badly needed and Harry bought a postcard to send to Donna and Daisy. On the way back, Tancred specially requested a stop at Crathie, so that he could satisfy his royalist sentiments by gazing at the turret-tops of Balmoral Castle, which was all of the castle he could gaze at above its screen of trees. Dangerfield switched to the south bank of the Dee at Ballater so that he could show them one of his favourite salmon-fishing spots. Then it was on to Aboyne — and lunch at the Boat Inn.

So far, no-one had mentioned what must have been at the forefront of all their thoughts. That changed as they started on the beer, however, and soon theories were being swapped as to how Askew’s suicide could be explained. Since Dangerfield and Wiseman had not actually met him, they had to rely on the others for insights into his state of mind at the time. Judd gave it as his opinion that Askew was exactly as he had always been — subdued, introspective, unpredictable. Tancred, on the other hand, said he was surprised and yet not surprised by what Askew had done. ‘If I’d had to nominate one among us as a suicide risk, it would have been Crooked. There was always something slightly unstable about him.’

Harry sought to avoid putting forward a theory himself. The truth was that he did not have one. He kept trying to imagine Askew pushing down the window in the train door as far as it would go, then heaving himself out into the battering rush of air. But the image would not stick. Another, more macabre yet oddly more plausible version of events intruded. In this, Askew was already unconscious from a blow to the head as an unknown figure pushed the window down and propelled him through the gap to his death on the track below. Put on the spot by Wiseman, however, Harry said nothing of this. ‘I don’t know what happened to him,’ he maintained. ‘I simply don’t know.’

—«»—«»—«»—

Dangerfield’s choice of afternoon destination was Craigievar, the pink-hued masterpiece of Deeside castle-building on which the architects of Kilveen had clearly based their work. Tancred and Wiseman derived more pleasure from a tour of the apartments than the rest, for whom details of Scottish baronial plasterwork held limited appeal. All in all, Harry and the others gave a poor impersonation of historically sensitive tourists, but put away a National Trust tea with gusto.

—«»—«»—«»—

Nobody mentioned Lloyd, but Harry assumed he was not alone in wondering how poor old Jabber’s trip to Dundee had gone. It was only a matter of time before they found out. Back at Kilveen they established that he had returned an hour or so previously, but no-one felt inclined to call up to his room. Harry indeed was glad to retire to his own, in the hope of catching up on some of the sleep he had missed the night before.

He had barely lain down on the bed, however, when there was a knock at the door. Given that he had put out the DO NOT DISTURB sign, this was either exceptionally inconsiderate housekeeping or some kind of emergency. His sleepiness was instantly banished.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Jabber, Ossie. I spotted the minibus coming up the drive. Can I come in?’

Harry got up and opened the door. Lloyd made a heavy-footed, downcast entrance and sank into one of the armchairs flanking the mullioned window.

‘Christ, what a day it’s been.’ He rubbed one hand across his forehead. ‘You see these… drawers they use to store corpses… in cop shows on the telly… but you never think some day you’re going to find yourself watching a real one sliding open… and an old chum’s face staring up at you.’

‘It must have been grim.’

‘And then some.’

‘What sort of injuries…’

‘Nothing too gruesome. They’d cleaned him up quite a bit, I think. Here’ — Lloyd tapped an area above his left eyebrow — ‘was still a mess, though. Must have smacked it on a rail or something. What a way to go, hey?’

‘You said it.’

‘How was your day?’

‘OK. A drive along the valley. Pub lunch. A National Trust castle. Tea and scones. It was fine. Like a regular OAPs’ outing. I’m sorry you couldn’t join us. We all were.’

‘Yeah, well…’ Lloyd coughed. ‘I didn’t come to make you feel guilty for having a nice day, Ossie. After the horror show at the morgue, Geddes had some more questions for me.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Mostly about this.’ Lloyd pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. ‘It’s a photocopy of something they found on Crooked. Geddes wants me to pass it round. See if it rings a bell with anyone. Take a look.’

It was an official notification of some kind; originally enclosed perhaps with a letter. The name that appeared in capitals at the head of the page seized Harry’s attention at once.

CHIPCHASE SHELTERED HOLDINGS LTD

Creditors of and investors in the above-named company, now in receivership, are invited to attend a meeting at the Thistle Hotel, Fry Street, Middlesbrough, at 2.30 p.m. on Saturday 22 February 2003, at which a representative of the officially appointed receivers, Grey & Williamson, chartered accountants, of Marston House, Bright Street, Middlesbrough, will be available to answer questions concerning the company’s remaining assets and outstanding liabilities.

‘I had to tell them Fission was one of us, Ossie,’ said Lloyd, when he had given Harry more than enough time to read and digest the contents. ‘There was no way round it.’

‘Of course not.’

‘I had to tell them he’d high-tailed it off to attend the funeral of his sister as well.’

‘A sister I told you I’d never heard of.’

‘Yeah. Well, I didn’t mention that. Or your garage business. Geddes never asked the right questions. I didn’t want to make trouble for you by volunteering anything.’

‘Thanks. Though where the trouble for me is in this…’

‘Geddes didn’t buy the sister story, Ossie. He assumed Fission vamoosed to avoid meeting Crooked because he was one of his creditors. Matter of fact, that’s what I reckon too.’

‘It certainly looks like it.’

‘Question is, did Fission drag any of us apart from Crooked into… whatever Chipchase Sheltered Holdings was?’

‘Who knows? And what if he did? It’s not the first time one of Barry’s little enterprises has gone bust owing people money. And this was… two years ago. Why was Peter carrying it around with him? What was he planning to do when he met Barry?’

‘Search me.’

‘Did Geddes have any suggestions?’

‘No. None he gave me the benefit of, anyway. But he did ask me a strange question as I was leaving. Bloody strange. It’s been bugging me ever since. I can’t figure out what he was getting at.’

Harry waited for Lloyd to continue, but there was only silence. For several long, slow seconds. Then Harry’s patience snapped. ‘And the question was?’

‘What?’ Lloyd jumped in his seat. ‘Oh, sorry. Of course. Yes. The question. Well, he asked me… how I could be sure Fission wasn’t on the train when it left Dundee.’