Shooting Elvis (17 page)

Sonia filled her plate with salad, rice and various coleslaws. We found a corner near the big fireplace and stood there eating, our drinks on the mantelpiece, until Mark Stanwick found us.

‘Charlie!’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise you were coming. This must be…’

‘Sonia Thornton,’ I told him, and to her, ‘Mark Stanwick.’ If he thought I was going to introduce him as superintendent he was mistaken.

A woman I took to be his wife was a couple of steps behind him. ‘Lovely to meet you,’ he said. ‘Can I introduce you to my wife, Dorothea.’

We shook hands. ‘Hello Dorothea,’ I said. ‘It’s nice to meet you.’ I meant it. She had the face of someone who does kind acts and a smile that reached her eyes.

They apologised for interrupting us while we ate and went off to grab some food for themselves. Later, after more Abba and a tribute to Nat King Cole by the band, they rejoined us. A photographer from the
Heckley Gazette
was circulating and he took a photograph of the four of us. The band was playing ‘Unchained Melody’.

Stanwick coughed and said, ‘This is a favourite of mine. Unfortunately Dorothea is nursing a sprained ankle. Would you mind if I asked Sonia for a dance, Charlie?’

I gave an approving face-pull and looked at her. Sonia smiled and turned towards the dance floor, Stanwick following like an eager pup.

‘How did you sprain your ankle, Dorothea?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I fell down the steps at Heckley General. I do voluntary work there.’

‘That’s as good a place as any to sprain an ankle. Did they fast-track you through A and E?’

She laughed. ‘Yes, I’m ashamed to admit that I did receive preferential treatment. We bypassed A and E.’

‘And why not? Does your work there take up much time?’

‘You know how it is, Charlie. I’m supposed to do two mornings and two evenings, but it works out at nearly a full-time job. I don’t mind, I love it, but we’re lucky that Mark can keep reasonable hours, otherwise we’d never see each other. He brings lots of work home with him, but he’s fortunate in having men like you to take the pressure off him. He really appreciates you.’

‘Right,’ I said. He was in charge of career development and I specialised in feeling collars. I wasn’t aware of having ever taken any pressure off him. I wondered what line he’d spun the gullible Dorothea about his role in Her Majesty’s Police Force, but acknowledged that he wasn’t the first to glamorise his role, and he wouldn’t be the last. While we were talking I noticed John Williamson, aka Dr Bones, with his wife, looking for somewhere to sit and eat. She didn’t know me but I caught her attention and introduced myself and Dorothea. The doc shook my hand and slapped my shoulder. I told him that Sonia was dancing.

‘I hope she saves enough energy for one with me,’ he said. ‘Dancing is the only athletic pursuit I can fully compete in. Wait until you see my tango.’

They came back from the dance floor and it was handshakes all round again. Sonia told Stanwick that the doc was a magician and had saved her career, and Stanwick said that it must have given
him a great deal of satisfaction. A couple sitting at a table noticed that the doc was blind and gave up their chairs, and we left them tucking into the buffet. Sonia put her arm around me, just to confirm whom she was with. I liked the feel of it and placed my hand in the small of her back, stroking it lightly with my fingertips.

At functions like this the ‘Last Waltz’ can never come soon enough for me. We did one circuit of the floor and I steered Sonia towards the cloakrooms. As we walked across the lawn towards the car park the wavering chords of the National Anthem came drifting through the open windows. They like to do things properly at the Rotary Club. No doubt Stanwick would be standing to attention, fist pressed to his heart. Twenty minutes later Sonia and I were in my kitchen, holding each other. I was leaning back against the work surface, with my jacket still on, waiting for the kettle to boil; Sonia was pressed against me, her arms under my jacket, head on my shoulder. We decided not to bother with a bedtime drink, so I turned off the kettle and led the way upstairs.

I was cleaning my teeth when the phone rang. I screamed, ‘Don’t answer it!’ through a mouthful of Colgate foam, but my shout was muffled and I nearly choked. By the time I’d rinsed it away and stopped spluttering Sonia was telling someone that she’d get me for him. It was one-thirty. At
one-thirty
it wasn’t a social call or someone selling
timeshare. I went into the bedroom and she handed me the phone.

‘Priest,’ I said into it.

‘Sorry, boss,’ someone said. ‘I’m not disturbing you, am I?’

‘Get on with it,’ I growled as I struggled to pull my shirt back on.

They’d told me that it was number 133, but the parked police car gave it away. Three-quarters of the houses had been demolished, the survivors standing like mesas in a western desert. The moon had risen and a few spots of rain dashed against the windscreen. A dog loomed into the headlights, standing its ground stoically as I swerved around it to park behind the panda.

‘What have we got?’ I asked the sergeant who climbed out to meet me.

‘Hello, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Black guy. Murder, if you ask me, but I think you’d better look for yourself.’

‘How did it come in?’

‘Anonymous tip-off, three nines.’

‘That’s a big help. Right, point me towards him.’

The door was unlocked. ‘Was it unlocked when you came?’ I asked, and the Sergeant told me it was. ‘OK. Wait there and I’ll find my own way.’ I
found a light switch with my torch beam and switched it on. The wallpaper was straight out of somebody’s impression of a migraine attack.

‘Upstairs, did you say?’ I shouted back.

‘Yes, boss.’

‘Which side did you walk on?’

‘Hard over to the left.’

‘Cheers.’ I have them all trained to be forensically aware. These days, we can identify a footprint on a carpet or a flake of dandruff from a slaphead. It’s just a matter of time and money. I found another light switch and turned it on. When I made my report I’d say that the lights were off. It usually doesn’t matter, but sometime it might. It’s all about attention to detail.

He was in the bathroom, hanging upside down from a ceiling joist with his head in the toilet. A few drips of blood from a wound to his head had made pink clouds in the water in the bowl.

Yep, I thought, that’s murder, and made my way back downstairs.

I handed the whole thing over to the geeks. They turned their ESLA equipment loose on the stair carpet to establish who’d been up and down them; sprayed luminol all over the place looking for blood; dusted everywhere for fingerprints and dabbed Sellotape on all the surfaces to collect fibres. The pathologist arrived at seven and spent twenty minutes with the body before we cut it down.

‘Are you doing these yourself, Charlie,’ he asked me as we sat in his car sharing his flask of coffee, ‘to brighten up an otherwise dull life?’

‘It looks a bit like that,’ I admitted. ‘We’ve certainly upped the weirdness quotient with these last two.’

‘Do you think they’re linked?’

‘I don’t know, yet.’

‘Or is this one black on black?’

Black on black killings are almost always associated with drug dealing. We’re accused of not paying them much attention, and there may be some truth in that, but we have our reasons. The Yardies have some misplaced creed about only living until they are thirty. Anything beyond that is a bonus. And they don’t cooperate with the police. This is not to be confused with grassing. They’ll grass on their mothers to save their own skins, but anything else is just not done. A wall of silence descends that we can’t penetrate.

So we leave them to it, with perhaps just a little interference. Drugs multiply several-fold in price at every stage of the dealing. When a newspaper report says that a million pounds’ worth of marijuana has been seized, someone somewhere has had to pay for it. Say a hundred thousand pounds’. That would be a thousand per cent mark-up; not bad, except the Mr Big can’t sell it in one deal for a million. He divides it into smaller lots, dilutes it with milk powder or Polyfilla if it’s heroin, and sells
it to his own network of smaller dealers. They take the drugs on a
high now
,
pay later
basis.

That’s where we come in. Every time we seize a consignment someone is in deep shit, and the higher up the line we can intervene, the deeper the shit. Mr Big wants his money. He’s delivered the goods and now it’s payback time. If little Winston or Kevin on the street corner loses his stash before he can sell it on, and therefore can’t pay for it, he has the life expectancy of a kamikaze pilot. We find him with a bullet in his neck and shake our heads sadly for the press whilst rubbing our hands behind our backs.

So was this a black on black?

‘No, I don’t think so, prof,’ I replied. ‘They don’t mess about.’ I made a gun with my forefinger and thumb. ‘Bang, you’re dead. That’s good enough for them.’

‘Sounds as if this is one for Dr Foulkes.’

‘I know. I’ll ring him as soon as the streets are aired.’ Adrian Foulkes is head of clinical psychiatry at Heckley General, and a so-called expert on psychological profiling. He’s as mad as a hatter, and I’m not a great believer in what is a rather inexact science, but it’s always good to have a second opinion.

‘Well,’ the professor went on, ‘for what it’s worth the blow to the head was probably the cause of death and ToD was sometime Friday evening. PM Monday morning, if you can wait until then?’

‘Yeah, that’s fine,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the coffee.’

It was nearly ten when I arrived home, and Sonia wasn’t there. I found her note saying that she’d gone for a run pinned to the fridge door. ‘Back about ten-thirty,’ it said.

I was whacked. All that dancing was too much for me. I had a shower, towelled myself nearly dry and crawled into bed. I was running over things in my mind when the door banged. I imagined Sonia pouring herself an orange juice and gulping it down, before sitting on the stool in the kitchen and removing her trainers. She came to the bottom of the stairs and shouted, ‘Are you back?’

As my car was on the drive it was a reasonable deduction. I’ll make a detective of you yet, I thought, and shouted, ‘In bed,’ down at her.

She came in, looking pink and sweaty, her hair sticking to her head and dark stains of perspiration soaking through her vest.

‘Good run?’ I asked as she sat on the edge of the bed.

‘Mmm. And you? Have you been in long?’

‘No, not long.’

‘Was it a murder?’

‘Yes.’

She put her fingers on my forehead and rubbed it. ‘Poor thing,’ she said. ‘You must be worn out.’

‘I am.’

‘Do you want something to eat?’

‘No.’

‘Shall I leave you alone?’

‘No.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to come to bed.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes. Desperately.’

She looked at me for a long while, then her eyes crinkled into a little smile and she said, ‘OK.’

Brendan and Maggie went to the post-mortem examination while I had a word with the coroner. Sunday afternoon and Monday we had the foot soldiers out learning what they could about the deceased, and it was a sorry tale. He was called Jermaine Lapetite and had a record that wouldn’t have fitted on an old floppy disk. He needed a whole 700Mb CD to himself. We found the mothers of two of his children living nearby, and they described him using words straight off their kids’ birth certificates. He kept a small amount of crack cocaine under his mattress, a few ounces of pot behind a drawer in the kitchen and twelve hundred pounds cash under a loose floorboard.

Les Isles, the chief superintendent standing in for the ACC (Crime), rang and asked if I needed any help. I explained that we hadn’t decided if this was a new enquiry or part of the ongoing one and asked him to hang fire until the reports were in. Before I went along the road linking the two murders I wanted to clear something up about Alfred Armitage. His old sparring partner Eric Smallwood
was still in the frame, but I was having my doubts. I needed to see him.

I’d rung him, so he was waiting for me, still jacketed and helmeted as if about to go wobbling off to the library on a bicycle with a basket on the front. He’d have looked more at home in Cambridge, riding down the Backs. He invited me in and gestured for me to sit on a leather armchair while he took the matching chesterfield.

‘What’s it about, Inspector?’ he asked. ‘I thought I answered all your questions the last time we met.’

‘Since then I’ve been to see Mrs Newbold,’ I told him, ‘and now I have a few more.’

‘Josephine? You’ve been to see Josephine?’ He sat up, interested, his guard lowered. ‘How is she?’

‘She’s fine. Asked how you were,’ I lied.

‘And what did you tell her?’

‘I said you were fine, too. That’s all.’ It looked as if Mr Weirdo had a crush on the boss’s wife. And why not? ‘A few things came to light in our discussions about the company,’ I told him. ‘It appears that in the last few years Ellis and Newbold’s was being robbed blind. I want to know what part you and Alfred Armitage had in that.’

Now he looked flustered. ‘I – I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I mean: which of you had his hands in the till?’

‘It wasn’t me. I never had anything from the company that I wasn’t legally entitled to.’

‘That sounds a rather loaded statement, Mr
Smallwood,’ I said. ‘I could ask our economic crime unit to come and have a word with you – they know much more about these things than me – but I won’t. It would be a waste of resources. Mrs Newbold wants to wash her hands of the whole thing, not prefer any charges, which lets you nicely off the hook. But there is still the little matter of Alfred’s death. That won’t go away so easily. If you weren’t robbing the company, it must have been him.’

He shuffled in his seat and his little pink tongue licked his top lip. He was realising that he was in the clear. ‘I, er, had my suspicions,’ he said.

‘Go on.’