Over the Edge (29 page)

‘Yeah,’ he mumbled.

‘Have you had some breakfast?’

‘Yeah.’

‘A full English?’ I couldn’t resist asking.

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’ I recited the caution and went through the procedure, reminding him of his rights. It always sticks in the craw that we have a criminal justice service and not a victim justice service. He nodded to say he understood and the solicitor stifled a yawn.

‘You are currently on remand charged with being an accessory to the murder of Joe Crozier,’ I said.

‘Yeah, I know.’

The brief sat forward. ‘We will be petitioning for the charge to be reduced to assisting in the disposal of a dead body,’ he stated. ‘My client was under the belief that the victim was already dead.’

Don’t bother, I thought. That was only for starters. I said: ‘Tell us about the car racing, Duggie.’

‘I don’t know noffing about it,’ he replied.

‘You knew Dale was involved, though, didn’t you.’

‘Yeah, I told you that before.’

‘So you did, but you didn’t say that he was working for Peter Wallenberg.’

‘Didn’t know, did I?’

‘Or that you’d taken over Dale’s job after he died.’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘Yeah, well…’

‘Is that what the Jaguars were stolen for? Another race?’

‘No.’

‘Organised by Wallenberg? Mr Wallenberg enjoys sport, he says. Even bought himself a football club. You knew he gambled heavily on the races, didn’t you.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Did you know he had a little side bet on the last race?
£
10,000 that said one of the drivers would be killed. Did you know that?’ I sensed Dave looking across at me. Sometimes, I improvise.

He didn’t answer. It was all too much for him, overloading his puny brain with information. The top of a tattoo was visible poking out from the neck of his prison shirt and I wondered how close to the carotid artery the needle went when you had a tattoo like that. Not close enough. We’d named Wallenberg, but now Duggie was desperately trying to remember if he’d ever acknowledged knowing
him. Being a liar is difficult when your brain cells are outnumbered by your fingers and toes.

Dave said: ‘Who did you prefer working for: Crozier or Wallenberg?’

‘Oh, come on!’ the brief protested. ‘Mr Jones has never said that he worked for this Mr Wallenberg, whoever he might be.’

He’s the person who’s picking up your bill, I thought.

‘Do you know Wallenberg?’ Dave persisted.

‘Yer, a bit,’ Duggie admitted.

‘You know him a bit?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you work for him?’

‘No, not proper. Just a bit.’

‘You drive him, now and again?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Run errands for him?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Do odd jobs for him?’

‘Yeah. Sort of.’

‘Like rolling bodies into rivers?’

‘No. I didn’t know about that. I did that for Dale. It was noffing to do wiv Mr Wallenberg.’

‘Where were you on the night Tony Krabbe was murdered?’

‘I dunno.’

‘It was Saturday, the eighth of November. Five weeks ago.’

‘I dunno.’

I leant forward. ‘Let me jog your memory, Duggie,’ I said. ‘You picked up Mr Wallenberg at his house at about half-past nine, and you returned him home about half-past ten or eleven o’clock. Does that help?’

‘No.’

‘We have a witness who will swear to that.’

The brief said: ‘Can I ask who your witness is?’

‘All in good time,’ I said. ‘Duggie?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘I think you do, Duggie. I think you’ll probably remember that night for as long as you live. The night you took Mr Wallenberg to kill Tony Krabbe.’

‘I must object to the degree of supposition you are inserting into this interview, Inspector,’ his brief said.

‘Then it’s up to Duggie to remove the supposition,’ I replied. ‘Tell us how Krabbe died, Duggie. He was killed by someone who knew him, and there were most likely two people present: one to walk alongside him, engaging him in conversation; one to deliver the blow from directly behind him.’

‘I dunno, do I?’

‘Wallenberg thought his wife was having an affair with Krabbe, didn’t he? But it was Dale she’d been having an affair with. Did you know that? Did it make you smile when you learnt that Krabbe was
taking the blame. Did you think: Good old Dale, even when he’s dead he manages to wriggle out of trouble. Is that what you thought?’

‘No.’

The brief said he’d like to consult his client and Dave stopped the tape.

We went up to the office for a quick coffee. Duggie’s solicitor had a conflict of interests: he could hardly defend Duggie by laying the blame on Wallenberg, his paymaster; but if he sacrificed Duggie, then Duggie might sing like a love-sick tomcat. The CPS had recently opened an office in the nick, so we went down to see them. I outlined the evidence pointing to Wallenberg, but added that the most likely scenario was that Wallenberg walked alongside Krabbe while Duggie hit him from behind. The CPS lawyer agreed to Duggie being charged with murder.

We reconvened in the interview room and Duggie’s brief said that they would strenuously deny any involvement with the murder of Tony Krabbe.

I said: ‘OK, Duggie, so tell us about the foreign girl.’

‘What foreign girl?’

‘The one you raped. The one that you introduced all your friends to. The one that’s just dying to point you out in a line-up.’

‘Don’t know what you mean,’ he replied, but his
body language said otherwise. It was all too much for him. Murder, murder again, and now rape. Where had it all started to go wrong? Things had been looking good. He’d had a sweet little number: plenty of sex; money; fast cars and booze. What more could your average neighbourhood hoodlum ask for? But now it had all gone pear-shaped. He buried his head in his arms and sobbed. He was sorry. Sorrier than he’d ever felt in his life. If the truth were known it was the first time in that life that he’d ever experienced the emotion. But his tears of grief were reserved for one person, and one person only: himself.

The solicitor looked at him and his lip curled back in disgust. I nodded at Dave and he stood up.

‘Douglas Jones,’ he said, ‘I’m arresting you for the murder of Anthony Turnbull Krabbe.

He appeared before a magistrate the following morning and was remanded in custody. We issued a press release saying that a 28-year-old man had been arrested for Krabbe’s murder and I started the paperwork. When I returned to my office after the morning prayer meeting there was an envelope with an Oxford postmark waiting for me. I sliced it open with my paperknife and retrieved the contents: three photographs and a letter. They were the reconstructions of the skull found on Bleak Tor. Body One, as we’d unimaginatively called her.

It was a good face. It looked like someone; someone you thought you’d seen somewhere. When an amateur artist draws a face it always has the right components – two eyes, nose, mouth, etcetera – in all the right places, but it doesn’t necessarily look like anyone. This one did. I don’t know why I was surprised but I was. There was, I had to remind myself, a real skull under all that plasticine. A skull that had once belonged to a real live girl. She’d had her hardships, life hadn’t been kind to her, but the face that gazed blankly at me could have been anyone that I’d seen window shopping in the mall or waiting at the checkout in Sainsbury’s. Except that if we’d ever met, if I’d collided with her and she’d dropped her groceries, I’d have apologised to her but wouldn’t have recognised the language she spoke back to me in. I placed the profile pictures behind the frontal one and leant them against the wall, facing me.

Lorraine rang shortly after. ‘I was just thinking about you,’ I said.

‘In what context?’

‘What you told me. Wondering where we were with it.’

‘She said she’ll talk to you. She didn’t want to, but we’ve persuaded her.’

‘Will she be free from the tranquillisers?’

‘Yes, she’s managing without them. She’s a remarkable girl.’

‘OK, when can I see her, and where?’

‘It’s not that easy.’

‘It is to me. You arrange something and I’ll be there.’

‘She’s in a safe house. It wouldn’t be safe any more if the police knew about it.’

‘So choose a neutral venue.’

‘How do we know you wouldn’t alert your colleagues and have her arrested?’

I said: ‘Perhaps you don’t know, but there’s something called trust, Lorraine. It would be a bleak world if we didn’t have any trust in anyone. I thought that was why you chose to ring me.’

‘The people we deal with, Inspector, have had all the trust knocked out of them. I can take you to meet her but you’ll have to be blindfolded.’

‘Blindfolded,’ I echoed. ‘That sounds drastic. How far away is she?’

‘A fair way.’

‘And you want me to sit in a car with a blindfold around my head? Or do I have to lie in the boot?’

‘We’ve made some spectacles for you to wear. Sunglasses. We’ve painted them so you can’t see through them.’

‘How do you know I won’t take them off when we get there?’

‘If you do we’ll come straight back.’

I didn’t want to go for it, but I looked at the plasticine face staring at me from the photo, I
thought of the two bodies up on Bleak Tor, and I remembered the story Lorraine had told me. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘We’ll do it your way. You don’t trust me but I’ll trust you. When do we do it?’

‘Monday,’ she replied. ‘I’ll ring you Monday morning.’

We had a celebration beverage in the Bailiwick after work. It was Friday, so I stood the troops down for the weekend. When we’d had a couple of drinks, talk moved round to starting the walking club again. It always does. We all have fond memories of the walking club and the exploits we endured. The passage of time enhances the good memories, exaggerates our exploits, and dulls the recollection of the days when the sun never shone and we swished, slopped and dripped round the route in full waterproofs like North Sea fishermen washed up on an alien landscape.

‘We haven’t done Ingleborough for a long time,’ Dave said. Ingleborough isn’t the highest peak in Yorkshire, but it ought to be. It broods like a sleeping lion between the Ribble and the Greta, and is the nearest place we have to a spiritual home. There are the remnants of settlements on top which we like to believe were unconquered by the Romans.

‘We always do Ingleborough,’ Jeff protested. ‘It’s nearly worn out. There are duckboards all the way
up it. They’ll be installing an escalator next. Let’s go down into Derbyshire.’

So on Sunday nine of us in three cars drove south and parked in Edale. Approaching Ladybower reservoir Dave began to quietly whistle the Dambusters’ theme, and, dead on cue, Jeff reminded us for the seven hundredth time that they’d practised there.

We walked to Blackden Edge via Ringing Roger, then past Madwoman’s Stones and down Jaggers Clough. For much of the way we were on peat like that on Bleak Tor, and I wondered how many bodies we walked over. None, probably, but it was easy to imagine they were there. We made it to the Strines Inn before closing time and were back in Heckley for tea. Dave had arranged that I eat with them, so it was a good day out.

Lorraine rang at ten o’clock, Monday morning. ‘Can you be at the corner of the High Street and Westland Road at half-past?’ she said.

‘No problem,’ I replied. It was a five-minute stroll away.

‘And don’t be followed,’ she stressed.

‘I won’t be.’

I made a few notes about what I needed to know, left instructions for the troops and made neat piles of everything on my desk. The photo of the face of Body One was still staring at me. I placed all three
pictures in an envelope with a couple of others and my notebook and thought about taking a tape recorder. I decided that it might be intimidating, so I abandoned the idea. I looked at my watch. I could have used a coffee but didn’t know how long I’d be cooped up in the car. Stopping for a pee, whilst blindfolded, didn’t appeal to me, so I abandoned the coffee idea, too. I placed three fibre-tipped pens in the envelope and pulled my jacket on.

It’s a woman’s privilege to be late, so they took advantage of it. Five minutes isn’t too bad, I suppose. They were probably having me watched or drove by several times. A Ford Fiesta with a noisy exhaust pulled up alongside me and Lorraine jumped out of the passenger’s door. She pulled the seat forward and manoeuvred herself into the back, indicating for me to sit in the front. I was looking for my seatbelt when we moved off.

The driver had a stud in her nose and spiky hair. Lorraine said: ‘This is Charlie Priest, this is Magda,’ and I said: ‘Hello, Magda.’

Magda pulled into a lay-by at 40 miles per hour and hit the brakes. ‘There’s some glasses in there,’ she said, pointing to the glovebox. ‘Put them on.’

They were those big wrap-around ones you see advertised in the Sunday supplements, that can be worn over a pair of spectacles. They were originally designed for welders on the oilrigs, but due to an administrative cock-up too many were manufactured.
They’d painted the inside with black paint to make them totally opaque. I put them on and it was almost like having my eyes closed. I turned to the driver, saying: ‘There we go,’ and she dropped the clutch and we were on our way.

I was sitting with my knees pressed against the dashboard. First thoughts were that I’d count the turns, calculate where we were going, but I soon tired of that. I’d settle for the general impression. We were heading towards the motorway. After five minutes we made a high-speed left turn and I reckoned we’d taken to the slip road, which meant we were heading west. Manchester, probably. The boom of the exhaust and the wind noise confirmed that we were on the motorway, so I rested my head on the window and snoozed.

Twenty minutes later I was leaning into the seatbelt as Magda applied the brakes, then it was another twenty minutes of stop-start motoring until she pulled the handbrake on and announced: ‘This is it.’

I think that’s what she said. Her words were drowned by the noise of the airliner passing overhead on its descent into Manchester airport. When the decibel level was down to something less damaging I said: ‘That sounds like the 11.45 from Dallas.’