The Maggie Murders (7 page)

Sobers had approved of the
service.  It had none of the obvious energy and noise of the ones he’d attended
as a boy in Stockwell. The people who were there sat in pews and responded only
when asked to do so by the vicar. Even as he knelt and prayed for guidance,
Sobers felt at home in this Anglican Church.

Their hymns were more ancient
than modern and he approved of the choices. They had muscular rhythms and the
deep notes of the organ gave them a more powerful resonance than the tunes
played on acoustic guitars and slapped out on tambourines which his family
sang. The sermon had been reflective and also encouraging in its own quiet
simplicity. There had been no Hell Fire, or Brimstone, only a gentle meditation
on what God was asking people to do.

He also liked the sense of
timelessness the building itself seemed to exude. He guessed St Andrew’s Church
was probably only late Victorian, yet compared to the hall where he had
worshipped as a boy, it was as ancient as the Ark. The stained glass window
over the altar depicting Christ and two of his apostles gave a soft and
opalescent light to the service, whilst the altar rail where he knelt was
skilfully carved and planed. The round stone columns ascending to the roof gave
both a coolness and solidity to the structure, whereas the plaques and banners
decorating the walls made him feel he was in a medieval chapel from old
romance.

Yet it was the calmness of the
vicar which filled his heart most with hope. He was able to take Communion not
because he felt he had to (the feeling that he had as a boy that if he remained
seated for more than a second over time, that Auntie Ida’s eyes would skewer
him), but because he wanted to. He did not feel self-conscious when he accepted
the wafer and then sipped from the chalice, instead he felt generally assuaged,
as if the weight he’d been carrying was lifted from his hands.

He was glad he’d put a note on
the collection plate, not just because he’d felt the woman passing it to him
had looked a little worried as if he was preparing to receive from it rather
than give - it was more an offering of thanks for an expiation which reaffirmed
his belief in life. As he walked out into the sunshine, there was a most
distinctive spring in his well-heeled step.

****

Sitting at the telephone desk,
Salmons was bored. He felt he was always being given the most mundane and
routine tasks to perform. Nearly two months after the murder, he was the only
one left manning the three telephone lines they’d had installed to take calls
from the public with information about the crime. The last call had been a
crank two days ago claiming it was God’s will that all homosexuals burned in
the fires of Hell; Salmons hadn’t even bothered noting it in the log – to be
honest he agreed.

With the other PC out buying
fags, his perusal of The News of the World exhausted and not even Sandy’s
shapely bosom to cast not so discreet leers at, he was feeling as flat as the
beer they served down by the docks. And yet he was still a detective, so let
him do some detecting around Sobers’ desk – maybe he’d be lucky and find some
of that whacky baccy all West Indians smoked.

What he did find was even more
incriminating for Sobers, as the Detective Inspector might reasonably have
claimed to have confiscated marijuana in the course of an investigation.
Unfortunately for him, Salmons found the package from Ronnie under the official
papers in his desk drawer. The flimsy lock on the desk drawer proved no match
for Salmons’ skill at lock-picking. Triumph and Disgust vied for supremacy on
the ambitious constable’s face.

****

It was Jane who had finally
managed to track Darren Price down to a gift shop/ cum cafe down by the docks.
It didn’t seem a very touristy area, flanked by the towering silos and
dilapidated, wooden warehouses that surrounded the dock basin. A swing bridge
allowed cars and pedestrians to cross to the ramshackle bungalows which led
down to Shelley Beach on the other side. When the bridge swung to one side it
allowed the coasters to safely navigate the narrow channel leading to the
harbour.

Whilst not in the actual dockyard
itself, Shangri-La’s position below the harbour master’s office was still far
enough from the end of the main beach to make it a place the grockles weren’t
going to find very easily. It probably explained why Darren Price was arguing
with the woman behind the counter about the lack of revenue from the arcade
machine in one corner.

‘Not the best location for you,
Mr Price,’ she sallied as she sat down at a plastic table, which had been
squeezed between a cabinet displaying personalised mugs and the less than clean
window. She was rather startled to note her own name was not present among the
Janets, Jessicas and Julies.

‘And you are?’ a short,
well-built man in his early thirties with a slightly sallow face and eyes
needlessly protected by mirrored shades returned her look. He was dressed like
a parody of a yuppie.

‘Detective Sergeant Hawkins,
Scotland Yard,’ she added playfully.

Price didn’t seem to notice the
joke. He was busily removing his sunglasses, revealing red rimmed eyes which
stared myopically at the well-dressed woman before him.

‘Make mine a black coffee, no
sugar,’ she called to the woman behind the counter and indicated the chair
opposite her for Price to sit in.

She tamped a cigarette on the
white plastic surface of the wonky table and offered the pack to Price.
Somewhat to her surprise he refused and ordered a mineral water.

 ‘We’ve only got tap water,’ came
the reply.

 Price acquiesced and swivelled
on his seat to face Jane.

‘What do you want?’ came out in a
higher pitched register than Jane had been expecting and what with the
ridiculous mirrored shades perched atop his receding hairline, Price was
certainly not the Mr Big of the Exmouth Underworld she had been expecting from
the gossip at the station.

Apart from a few minor traffic
offences, there had only been one failed case brought against him for handling
stolen goods. A few of the lads at the station suspected his amusement arcades
were a front for drug dealing and she knew at least one detective who suspected
him of racketeering, but then she had also been  told that Price was more Del
Boy than Al Capone. Her first impression favoured the former opinion.

‘You’re a hard man to track down,
Mr Price.’

‘I’ve been on holiday, not a
crime is it?’

‘Depends what you were doing on the
Costa Blanca…’

‘Just working on me tan. Better
weather than around here.’

‘Two months is quite a holiday,
my friends in Custom and Excise might be interested in the amount of Duty Free
you brought back…’

Jane knew this to be a shot in
the dark, yet the quick reply from Price told her she had been right to be
suspicious of his protracted absence from these shores.

‘Just catching up with some old
acquaintances. You can’t pin nothin’ on me.’

‘You’re somewhat of an
entrepreneur, aren’t you?’

‘Now don’t you start off with all
that kinky French stuff,’ bristled Price.

‘You’re a local businessman.’

‘Not just local, I’m
investigating investment opportunities in Sidmouth and Dawlish,’ said Price
producing a small box full of business cards and handing one across.

‘The Price Is Right Investments,
Shangri-La, The Pierhead, Exmouth, ‘read Jane, ‘Propriator:  Mr D. Price
esquire.’

‘That’s right, my office is round
the back, it’s, um… being redecorated right now.’

‘I’d check the spelling of
proprietor, if I were you Mr Price.’

‘What do you mean!’ squeaked
Price grabbing back the prized card, ‘I had to pay a small fortune for these.’

‘It’s the same misspelt wording
we found on the card pushed through the letterbox of George Kellow’s shop at
Littleham Cross.’

Jane was pushing her luck here;
however having had a bite about the real purpose of his visit to the Costa Del
Crime, she felt that taking a chance on him having put a card through the
butcher’s door was not unreasonable. The owner of one of the newsagents could
certainly recall being given one and the likelihood that he might have left a
card with Kellow which was either thrown out weeks before the fire, or which
was lost in the fire was not an unreasonable supposition.

Her coffee arrived in a ‘Gift
from Exmouth’ mug.

‘I had nothing to do with that
fire!’

She watched Price take a long
pull from the water glass deposited in front of him. She wondered about the use
of the word ‘that’. Her colleagues who had not written him off as someone
trying to punch above his weight, had had their suspicions about a fire in a
second hand shop off Chapel Hill a few years back. Though nothing had ever come
of them; the site had later become an amusement arcade owned by Price.

‘Yet you’ve got a nice, new
arcade in town now and you’ve been sniffing around Littleham Cross for some
time.’

Price removed his jacket,
revealing a pink shirt with white cuffs and matching collar, it went with his
complexion if nothing else. Yet he sat forward in his seat with a confidence
which was new to the interview.

‘As you said, I’m an
entrepreneur, it’s what we do – look for new investment opportunities. This
town would be dead if it weren’t for people like me. I’ve opened three new
businesses in the last 18 months, helping shed loads of people off the
unemployment figures.’

‘Would you like me to get our
boys to check your financial records, to see how much you’ve been helping
revive the economy? Perhaps we can put you up for local businessman of the
year?’  She felt sure most of the people working for Price were paid cash in
hand and only contributed to the black economy.

Yet Price was not to be put off.

‘I’ve looked at plenty of sites
around here for new ventures. Kellow’s or another one of those shops would have
been available to me in a few more months anyway. To be honest I thought one of
the newsagents would fold first, but it doesn’t matter I’ll put a bid in for
that one now.’

‘You seem pretty certain the
council will license another arcade.’

‘Do I look stupid?’

Jane bit her lip.

‘I’ve done all the checks.
They’ll licence whatever makes money. I might even get away with one of them
Sex Shops if there was any money for that around here,’ leered Price.

It was now Jane’s turn to feel
uncomfortable; the tables had turned pretty quickly on her. She now wished she
hadn’t worn her tight Lycra top that morning.

‘You seem confident there’s money
to be made in these machines, yet this one doesn’t seem to be doing so well,
‘she said indicating the one in the corner.

‘This is not one of my main
revenue streams, ‘he said grandly, ‘the ones on the front make a mint and it’s
not just the teenagers. You should see some of those old dears filling the one
armed bandits like there’s no tomorrow. People love to gamble, ‘specially when
the times are hard. Half my machines are full of people’s benefit payments.’

‘And so where were you on the
night of the fire? Say between midnight and 2 a.m.?’

‘In the flat upstairs celebrating
Maggie’s victory.’

‘Can anyone verify that?’

Price pointed at the women behind
the counter.

‘Come over here Mum, I need
another alibi.’

****

Sobers wondered if he should try
writing to his mum. It had been six months since he had moved down from London
and yet he had only called her twice. Each time she had cut short their
conversations, worrying how much these expensive trunk calls were costing him
and leaving him unable to explain himself in the way he would have liked to. He
began to search the low beamed cottage for some note paper.

The only thing he could find was
a spiral bound notebook he used for shopping lists in the kitchen drawer. He
really needed a pad of proper paper, something like Basildon Bond with a
watermark and one of those underlying sheets helping you keep your lines
straight. The type of thing he’d written thank-you letters on to his aunts and
uncles when a kid. His mum was a sucker for all that posh stuff.

He settled himself down in the
leather armchair which he’d positioned by the ingle-nook fireplace. Photos of
his mum and sisters were positioned either side of a picture of his father
taken during the War. Posing next to a Hurricane, his father stood alongside
fellow members of the West Indian ground crew who had serviced these aircraft
during the Battle of Britain.

His mum had never let him forget
what a hero his father was and how the British should be grateful that there
were men like him willing to join them in their darkest hour. She rarely
mentioned the demons which killed him when still a relatively young man. At the
time he had thought they were literal demons, the ones which Jesus threw out of
possessed people. Only now did he reflect that the demons probably came in a
bottle. He had been just seven when his Dad had died and had spent the rest of
his life trying to live up to his memory. The one encapsulated in the
photograph, not the latter one of a disillusioned man working as a cleaner on
the Northern Line.

Sobers sipped tea from a Charles
and Di mug. There was a slight crack in the gilt rim; his mum would have objected.
Not to their wedding, she loved a wedding and had virtually out flagged the
street when celebrating it; no window had been spared a plastic Union Jack or
picture of the fairy-tale couple. No she would have thought he was letting his
standards slip. She was probably right.

Perhaps he should write to Mary
if he was going to write home? His younger sister had at least understood why
he’d wanted to undergo this Devonian exile. Unlike the rest she had taken to
heart ‘Judge not, that ye be judged’. Outside the bull’s eye glazed windows of
the cottage he could hear the commuter traffic from Exeter easing off as the
rush hour gave way to the evening.