Shooting Elvis (21 page)

It was the same depressing scene upstairs. He slept on a mattress on the floor, in a sleeping bag. It had been thrown to one side when the room was searched and lay there in a huddled heap. There had been clothes in a closet but these had been taken away. I found a few CDs but resisted the temptation to borrow them. I didn’t think Benzino, Chilli Dog and C-Bo would be to my taste.

Downstairs, I sat on one of the hard chairs and reminded myself why I was there. This was a murder scene. The boys had done the usual good job, so I knew there was nothing left for me to uncover, but a house has an ambience. There’s something there intangible, something that you can’t measure or put a name to. Well, there usually is. I tried to visualise how anybody could live in a place like this, but failed completely. It wasn’t fit for a pig. This was a squat, a last resort, a desperate refuge. Lapetite didn’t live here, nobody did. He lived on the streets, on his wits, slipping from friend to friend, woman to woman, like a virus flits between victims or a feral cat between dustbins. He was the registered owner, placed there by a council obliged to give him a dwelling, but it was never his home. It was his mail box, that’s all.

We’d do a reconstruction. Friday evening we’d place a white van up near the Mitre and see if it jogged anybody’s memory. We’d invade the pub, take the name of everybody present and interview them individually the following week. ‘Did you see this van?’ ‘Did you see any strangers that night or any other time?’ ‘Did you know Jermaine Lapetite?’ Criminals hang around near their crime scenes before doing the deed. They look out for things, check the possibilities, pluck up courage, and someone always sees them. We’d talk to everybody on the estate, concentrating on the route I’d taken, and collate their answers. But I wasn’t optimistic.
‘No’, ‘no’ and ‘never heard of him’ could be
pre-printed
on the forms to speed things up.

It was dark when I went outside, so the kids wouldn’t still be playing football. I wouldn’t have minded a kickabout with them. I said goodnight to the PC, declined a lift back to my car and went the other way, up the Avenue and turned right at the end. The Mitre car park was almost empty and mine was the only vehicle in the road. Tonight evidently wasn’t music night. I drove home slowly, enveloped in an emotional cocoon that I didn’t understand at first. I was strangely on edge, but content at the same time. Then I realised what it was: gratitude. Plain and simple, straightforward gratitude. Whether to my parents, or some god, or my friends, I didn’t know. But it was gratitude for the life I led. That’s all.

Sonia didn’t train Friday or Saturday, resting before Sunday’s race, but I was working so couldn’t spend much time with her. The reconstruction went off reasonably OK but the usual wall of silence descended when we asked the drinkers in the pub about Lapetite’s acquaintances. He was Mr Invisible. Nobody knew anything about him and nobody mourned his demise. We took names and addresses and asked if they’d been in the Mitre the previous Friday. If they hadn’t, we wanted to know where they had been. A few punters finished their drinks and tried to fade away when we announced
our presence, nine o’clock sharp, but we had the place surrounded and they didn’t get far. The sniffer dog gave a positive response to two of them and they were handcuffed and put in the van. I stood on the stage where a Kenny Rogers tribute act was about to do his stuff and explained to the audience that we were investigating the unfortunate killing of Jermaine Lapetite and wouldn’t keep them a moment longer than was necessary. I thanked them in advance for their cooperation and hoped we hadn’t spoiled their evening. It’s a balancing act, and I’m the chief juggler.

We took 139 names and addresses, including the ersatz Kenny Rogers, whose Barnsley accent didn’t go with the stetson, and on Saturday morning started visiting them for a more substantive interview. I stayed in the office, dishing out the work, waiting for the phone call from one of the troops saying that he was onto something, but it never came. At three o’clock I rang Sonia to say I was tearing myself away.

The race was another 10K, this time in County Durham. Sonia had booked a room for herself at a Travelodge and I went with her. We had a pasta meal before we left and took sandwiches and breakfast cereals and bananas with us. Energy food. There was a video in the room and Sonia had brought
Finding
Nemo
. We watched it sitting up in bed, sipping cocoa and eating bananas, listening to the rain.

Sunday morning Sonia woke up complaining that she had a headache and a cold, possibly caused
by the air conditioning being set too warm. I gave her some aspirin and opened the window. ‘That’s the trouble with thoroughbreds,’ I told her, ‘you’re too prone to infection, not to mention the temperament.’

The rain had stopped. I suggested that she withdraw if she wasn’t feeling good, but she said she was better. She dressed carefully in her neatly pressed kit, her number sewn on the front of her vest. It was a double-figure number, showing her to be among the elite. Two tracksuits, towel around her neck, water bottle, comfy trainers on her feet, the lightweight ones for the race in a bag that I carried. We parked the car where we could and made our way to the start.

Sonia finished tenth, bless her. From the start she didn’t latch on to the leading group and allowed a gap to open. At the halfway mark she broke away from the main pack but couldn’t make any headway on the leaders, so she had to run the final 5K on her lonesome ownsome. Her finishing time was half a minute slower than at Oldfield.

I gave her a peck on the cheek and draped the towel across her shoulders. She wasn’t disappointed. It was a classier field and a tough course, and she’d done her best. We skipped the presentation and went looking for a motorway services that had shower facilities for lady lorry drivers.

All the names from the Mitre were put through the PNC to check on backgrounds, and we scored hits with twenty-nine of them. Offences were evenly spread between drunk and disorderly, drink driving, receiving, theft and possession of class C drugs. We had odd hits for more serious drugs offences, burglary and GBH. Three girls were under age, one being only fifteen, and they were dressed like whores from the cheap end of Marseilles docks. The DC who spoke to them thought they were on the game. I detailed Maggie to have a word with whatever parents they had.

I had egg and chips in the café over the road and went to see the GBH offender. He lived in the twilight zone, where I’d seen the kids playing football, with a woman who wasn’t his wife and her two sons. He’d beaten up a previous girlfriend, a long time ago, and put the man she’d been having an affair with in intensive care, for which he’d received four years.

He sat me down and his lady friend made herself scarce.

‘How’s things, Malc?’ I said.

‘Not bad, Mr Priest,’ he replied. ‘I’m settled, these days. Not much money, what with t’kids, but we get by.’ I knew he was on sickness benefits because of epilepsy and asthma, and was on constant medication.

‘You’ve put weight on,’ I told him.

He laughed and tugged at the waistband of his
trousers. ‘I know. Rich living, not ’elped by the steroids. What about you? You look like a whippet.

I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s pencil.’ ‘Stress, Malc. Pure stress. What can you tell me about Jermaine Lapetite?’

‘Stress! You? Pull the other one. He was a nasty piece of work, that’s for sure. Not what you’d call real evil, if you know what I mean, but bad.’

I said, ‘No, I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘Well, you know, he wasn’t mixed up with the ’eavy boys, didn’t get people whacked, anything like that. He was small-time, but he ’ad about ten kids all over the estate. That can’t be right, can it? He poked the womenfolk of Heckley as casually as the rest of us poke the fire. It was what proved him a man, he thought. He used to come into t’Mitre dripping in gold, dressed up like Tommy Ward’s donkey, and t’young birds were attracted to him like moths to a candle. Mind you, way they dress, these days, they’re asking for it. If it’s not on offer they shouldn’t put it in t’shop window, that’s what I say.’

‘So he had enemies?’

‘I suppose so. How would you feel if your fifteen-year-old pride an’ joy, the apple of your eye, suddenly presented you with a little curly headed piccaninny? Some’d call it a killing offence, don’t you think? An’ that chopping his dick off and sticking it in ’is mouth… It all fits, dunnit?’

‘I suppose so,’ I agreed, not bothering to put him
straight. We chatted for another fifteen minutes but I didn’t learn anything. Malc had stepped out of line just once, but big time. He’d done his bird and settled down. Sometimes, now and again, the system works. I thanked him for his help, wished him all the best, and left.

Sonia rang me on my mobile, so I pulled off the road.

‘Heckley Help the Aged,’ I said.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, I must have…’

‘It’s me, dumbo!’

‘Is that you, Charlie?’

‘Of course it is.’

‘What are you doing in Help the Aged?’

‘I’m not in Help the Aged. I’m in my car.’

‘Were you having me on?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry. I’ve had a stressful day and had to take it out on somebody.’ It wasn’t true but I thought it might placate her. Sonia isn’t slow, but she is naïve. She believes everything she’s told, trusts everyone. It had hurt her in the past and it could hurt her again, but it was one of the qualities that made her so loveable. ‘I’m missing you,’ I said. ‘What time will you be home?’

‘I should be early,’ she replied. ‘Are you coming for a run?’

‘I don’t think I’ll be finished in time. Why don’t you give yourself a rest day? You had a hard day yesterday.’

‘Discipline, Chas. Start knocking the sessions out
and soon you’re missing more than you’re doing.’

‘Nobody would know.’

‘I’d know. It’s all psychology at the top. You’ve got to convince yourself that you’ve done everything possible. Some go out on Christmas day, because one day, when they’re battling for a place, if they’ve missed a session for Christmas they know it and it eats away at their confidence. I’ll just do a couple of steady laps at the golf course to keep loose.’

‘OK. You’ve convinced me. I’ll be home as soon as I can. What’s for tea?’

‘Um, I’m not sure. Any chance of you calling in Marks and Sparks for something quick?’

‘Can do, but I get to choose.’

‘Fair enough.’

I was back at the office, reading somebody’s
Daily Express,
when Maggie walked in. I watched her hang her coat on the back of a chair and lift her hair from under the collar of her blouse. As she walked over to the table in the corner where we keep the electric kettle I poked my head out of my office and shouted, ‘No sugar in mine, please.’ She flapped a hand to say she’d heard me and I pulled a chair across to the end of her desk.

‘Any joy?’ I asked, when she brought the coffees and sat down.

‘I’ve been to talk to the underage girls. Who said they were on the game?’

‘I’ve forgotten. They certainly looked as if they were on the game.’

‘Blame Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears for that. It’s what they wear, these days. If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Subtlety isn’t in the vocabulary.’

‘You can say that again. I wouldn’t let my daughter, if I had one, go out looking like that.’

‘But Charlie,’ she began, ‘you haven’t seen their mothers. You can’t always go on appearances, you know.’

‘Don’t remind me,’ I told her, remembering the two posh cars. ‘Did they have anything to say about Lapetite?’

‘One of them thought he was wonderful, the other two said he was a creep. Take your pick. I suspect he was shagging one of them and had turned down or finished with the other two. He was good fun; always had some pot; never tried them with anything harder.’ Pink spots appeared on her cheeks as she added, ‘Drugs, that is.’

I said, ‘Maggie, you blushed.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I didn’t know you had a blush in you.’

‘Neither did I. They think Jermaine was killed by a jealous boyfriend.’

The door banged and there was a burst of voices as Eddie, George and Brendan came in. They hung up their coats, complained that the kettle was empty, scraped chairs and said their hellos. When they were settled I asked if they had anything interesting to report, but the question was
answered with headshakes. ‘You find anything, guv?’ Eddie asked.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘General consensus is that young Jermaine was a human sex machine with the morality of a goat, and that’s what got him topped. Except, of course, the local populace doesn’t know that we are linking his murder with that of Alfred Armitage.’

‘You mean, they were both executions,’ Eddie said.

‘That’s right.’

Dave came in, saw us in a cluster, and sat down at his own desk, yards away. George asked Eddie what his wife had thought of the T-shirt from the Harley shop.

Eddie laughed. ‘She’s threatened to cut it up if I ever wear it.’

George said, ‘One day she’ll cut you up.’

‘Nah,’ Eddie assured him. ‘She knows which side her bread’s buttered on.’

Brendan turned to me, asking, ‘Did the psychiatrist have anything to say, boss?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, he’s convinced both murders were done by the same person, and he said he’ll kill again. According to Adrian, the killer – the Executioner – is getting his act in order and next time it will be a bit special.’

‘Special? What did he mean by that?’

‘I dread to think.’

‘We’ll catch him then.’

‘I wish I had your faith.’

I picked up my mug and walked over to my office. ‘A word, Dave,’ I said as I passed his desk, and he followed me. I closed the door.

‘Fancy a pint, later?’ I asked him.

‘Mmm, could do. How did the race go?’

‘She finished tenth. Poor thing woke up with a cold, didn’t feel too good. She did well. I notice that you studiously didn’t join us, just now.’

‘Nothing personal, Chas. I prefer not to be in the company of that arrogant sod if I can help it.’

‘Any more poodle drawings?’