I rang my opposite number in Somerset. His euphoria evaporated when I told him that Latham was dead, so there was little point in coming to Yorkshire to interview him. However, we did have the man who killed Latham in our cells, and the two of them went back a long time. Maybe he could throw some candle power on Latham’s movements at the time of Caroline’s death. It had been a big hunt. Caroline had grown into a beauty, as predicted, and her face had captured the public’s imagination. We all remembered her when we saw the later picture that they’d used during the search.
Two detectives from Somerset said they would drive up and interview Silkstone some time on Wednesday. Wednesday morning they rang to say that they’d been delayed and they’d now be with us on Thursday. They confirmed that Latham did not appear to be related to Caroline in any way. Late Wednesday afternoon they said they were on their way and could we have Silkstone and his brief primed for a ten a.m. interview. They sounded keen.
Trouble was, Thursday morning I’d been requested to attend a high-power committee meeting, about catching murderers, chaired by the Deputy Chief Constable. I insisted that someone from Heckley sit-in on the Silkstone interview, and nominated Dave Sparkington.
The DCC considers himself an expert at murder enquiries. Early in his career he arrested a drunken husband who’d stabbed his wife to death in the middle of a bus queue, and that became the launch pad for his rise to fame. Fact is, the best collar he’s felt in the last twenty-five years is on his dinner jacket. He’d resigned himself to never having the top job, so he wanted to make his mark by creating the definitive programme for a murder enquiry. Something that would bear his name and be used by police forces world-wide as a template — his word — in their quests to solve the most dastardly crimes of all. His name — Pritchard — would be in all the textbooks, alongside those of Bertillon, Jeffreys and Kojak. And he wanted me to help put it there.
They’d been meeting for months, unknown to me, and had commissioned a video showing how to examine the crime scene during those first, crucial minutes. It was good, which wasn’t surprising considering that the combined salaries of those involved would have paid for a battleship. They’d watched a lot of television, and remembered or made notes on how it was done. I couldn’t fault it.
“You all know Charlie,” the DCC told them. “Charlie has caught more murderers than anyone in the division, and I’m sure you’ll all be interested to know what he thinks of our little enterprise. Over to you, Charlie. What have we forgotten?”
I stood up, mumbling something, and told them how impressed I was with the film. As Mr Pritchard had said, those first few minutes were crucial and recording evidence without destroying other evidence was the essence of the early enquiry. “I thought the way the film demonstrated the importance of reading the complete crime scene, the overall picture, was particularly well demonstrated,” I told them, and the collective glow they radiated nearly ignited my shirt. “However,” I continued, “perhaps there is one small point that you’ve overlooked,” and they shuffled in their seats. All I needed now was to think of one.
I wasn’t knocking them. Some of us like to be out on the streets, some of us are more suited to administrative jobs. He couldn’t have done mine as effectively as I do, and I couldn’t have done his. Put me in charge of discipline and complaints and anarchy would reign. Give me the budget and we’d be bankrupt in a month.
“Context,” I said.
“Context?” the DCC murmured, his head tipped to one side, one finger pressed to his chin.
“Mmm, context,” I repeated. While we were watching their film I’d been thinking about the space video young Daniel had loaned me, and it had come to my rescue. “The first men on the moon,” I began, “stuffed their pockets with the first rocks they found and brought them home. Frankly, they were a bit of a disappointment. On the last expedition, Apollo 17, they sent a geologist. He looked for rocks that were out of context, and found some interesting stuff. If you are looking for meteorites, here on earth, you don’t look on a beach. You’d never recognise them amongst all those different stones. You go to one of the big deserts, or better still, Antarctica, and set up your stall there. If you find a rock in the middle of an ice field it is out of context, and chances are it came from outer space.” I swept my gaze across them, one by one. Eye contact, that’s what it’s all about. They were all listening.
“In a murder enquiry,” I continued, “we do something similar. We look for the unusual, the everyday item that is in the wrong place. If you look in the dead man’s shoe cupboard — or the accused’s shoe cupboard — and find shoes, no problem. If you look in his shirt cupboard, and there’s a pair of shoes tucked under there, start asking questions. One of the suspects in the case I’m on at the moment is as bald as a coot. If I’d found a comb in his pocket I’d have wanted to know about it.”
“For his eyebrows?” someone suggested and everybody roared with laughter.
“I’d’ve accepted that,” I replied, nodding, and they laughed even more.
It was the buzzword they were looking for. “Context,” they mumbled as we gathered our papers and prepared to leave. “Context,” “Context,” “Context.”
Bollocks, I thought.
“Charlie.”
It was the DCC. “Yes, Boss,” I replied.
“Any chance of you giving me a lift to Heckley? My car’s in for a service.”
“Sure, no problem. What have we done to deserve a visit?” As if I didn’t know.
“I’m wearing my D and C hat, seeing those two prats who got the car stuck between the bollards. Lockwood and Smiles, isn’t it? He won’t be smiling when I’ve finished with him, I’ll tell you that much.”
“Stiles,” I told him. “Lockwood and Stiles.”
“Is it? Oh.”
I opened his door but didn’t wait to close it behind him, and threw my briefcase on the back seat. On the bypass a speed limit sign went by at well over the stated figure and I eased off the accelerator. If you think being followed by a police car is bad, you should try having the Deputy Chief Constable sitting in your passenger seat with his discipline and complaints hat on. I said: “Bit over the top, isn’t it, Sir, suspending them and you handling it personally?”
“High profile, Charlie,” he explained. “The media are involved. Made a laughing stock of the whole force. I’m seeing them at two.”
“Right,” I said, nodding in slow motion to indicate how I understood his position.
To change the subject I told him about the Latham case and how young Caroline Poole had suddenly come into the picture, complicating things. He saw it as two clear-ups, with a possible third. We’re very extravagant with our clearup figures. Jamie Walker’s death would allow us to put every stolen car for the period he was out of detention down to him, and therefore solved. We’d just have to be careful not to have him doing two at the same time, in different parts of town. Perhaps we’d be able to put Caroline’s murder down to Latham. Somerset would close the file, issue a statement saying that they were not looking for anybody else. There might even be a crumb of comfort in it for her parents.
After a silence Pritchard said: “Never took you for an astronomer, Charlie. Interested in that Star Trek stuff, are you?”
“No, that’s fantasy,” I replied. “I’m more interested in the real thing. Science in general, I suppose. Sometimes it comes in useful, like today.”
“I’m sure you’re right, I’m sure you’re right. And it’s good to have an outside interest. Too much work, and all that.”
“Yep. That’s what I think.”
Another long silence, then I decided to give him the works. I said: “Back in the early Seventies, when the space race was in full flow, the Americans sent an unmanned craft to Mars and took a few photographs so the Russians, determined to match or outdo the Yanks, decided to send one to Venus. Unfortunately for them the atmosphere was so hot that the lens cap melted on the front of the camera, and they didn’t get any pictures.”
“Ah! Serves the buggers right,” he commented.
“Being Russians,” I continued, “they announced it as a glorious triumph for the Soviet people and vowed to continue the exploration of space on their behalf. The scientists involved were invited to sit on Lenin’s tomb for the next May Day parade. The following year they sent another probe up, at a cost of a few more zillion roubles, but this time with a high melting-point lens cap on the camera. It also carried a device to scoop up some soil from the surface of Venus and analyse it.”
“Clever stuff,” the DCC said. “Marvellous what they can do, these days.”
“It is, isn’t it. And this time, everything worked perfectly. The lens cap flew off and the camera took a photo of Venus’s soil, which looked very much like any other soil. Then the arm stretched out and the scoop picked up a sample and brought it back on board for analysis.” I paused to let the pictures form in his mind, then went on: “Trouble was, the scoop had picked up the lens cap. They spent all that money, travelled a hundred million miles, to analyse something they took with them.”
He looked across at me. “You’re kidding!” he scoffed.
“According to the telly,” I replied.
“The daft buggers.”
“It was hailed as another Soviet success story,” I told him, “and the scientists were awarded the Order of Lenin and given free holidays on the Black Sea.” We’d arrived at the nick. I freewheeled into my space and yanked the handbrake on.
“Ha ha,” he chuckled. “That’s a good story, Charlie. A good story. With a moral in it, too. Learn from other people’s mistakes, eh.”
“That’s right, Mr Pritchard,” I said, adding: “And you’ve got to admit, it makes writing-off a Ford Escort sound small beer, don’t you think?”
He called me a devious sod, but he was grinning as he said it. I hoped I’d done Big Jim and Martin a favour, but I wasn’t sure.
Dave and the two tec’s from Somerset were in Gilbert’s office, waiting for me. They were a DI and a DS, and were a little taken aback when I introduced Pritchard to them. He’d insisted on being present and they weren’t used to their top brass being so accessible. After handshakes all round and mugs of tea for me and the DCC, Gilbert said: “Apparently, Charlie, Latham is totally unrelated to Caroline Poole and there is no obvious reason why he should have that photograph of her.”
Dave said: “The picture came from the Burdon and Frome Express, as we know, but they have no record of the buyer. If it was paid for in cash, in advance, and collected in person, they wouldn’t have.”
“Or he could have used a false name,” the DCC suggested, eager to help, but failing.
“So what does Silkstone have to say?” I asked.
The DI was a huge man in a light grey suit, with a clipped moustache and nicotine-stained fingers. He said: “We’ll start before that, if you don’t mind. The reason that we decided not to come up yesterday morning was because we’d done some preliminary investigations in the Caroline Poole files. Or, to be more precise, Bob here had.”
Bob, the DS, nodded.
“Bob discovered that the names Latham and Silkstone were in there, would you believe.”
“Go on,” I invited. It had been a big case, and probably every male in Somerset was in there.
“A car was seen in the vicinity of the last sighting of Caroline. A dark one, British Leyland, possibly a Maestro. In the next three months the owners of eighteen thousand dark Maestros were interviewed, without any success. Two of them belonged to Latham and Silkstone. Or, to be more accurate, to the company they worked for: Burdon Home Improvements.”
When we talk to people in large numbers like that, there’s not a great deal you can ask. “Where were you on…” is about it. We insist on an answer, and then ask if anyone was with them, to confirm the story. If there was, and they do, that person is eliminated from enquiries, as we professionals say.
“This is where it gets interesting,” the DI was saying.
“Just one thing,” the DCC interrupted, to prove he was awake, and interested, and really on top of things. “Are the files computerised?”
“After a fashion,” Bob replied. “It’s an ancient system, from before the mouse was invented, but it works, once you find someone who knows about these things. At the moment, because it was an unsolved case, it’s all being updated to the latest HOLMES standard.”
“Good, good. Sorry to chip in.”
“That’s OK, Sir. Like I was saying, this is where it gets interesting. Caroline was last seen walking home from a school play, at about nine fifteen. Latham said he was in a pub at the time in question, twenty miles away. He gives one Tony Silkstone as his alibi, plus two women they just happened to talk to. When Silkstone was interviewed he gave Latham’s name, plus the two women.”
“Were the women traced?” I asked.
“Yep. It’s all here.” He rattled his knuckles against the file on the desk.
“But you won’t have had time to find them again?”
The DI shook his head but didn’t speak.
“Right. So what does Silkstone say now?”
“Silkstone says,” he began, “that he was out with his current girlfriend at the time in question, a lady called Margaret Bates. He was a married man, and this was an illicit affair. He later left his wife and married Margaret. She became the late Mrs Silkstone.”
“Cherchez la femme,” the DCC mumbled, nodding as if everything was suddenly clear. I was beginning to wish I hadn’t brought him. Gilbert caught my eye and winked.
“Meanwhile Latham, we are informed, was playing fast and loose with another woman, called Michelle Webster, who was a friend of Margaret Bates. According to Silkstone he was terrified that his wife would find out, but Michelle was his only alibi for the night Caroline disappeared. He asked Silkstone to say that he was with him, and that they just happened to meet two women in a pub outside Frome, The Lord Nelson. Silkstone agreed, he says, and persuaded the two women to say that they’d all met, briefly, at the pub.”
Dave said: “They were married to two sisters, weren’t they?”
“Yes,” the DI confirmed.
“And then they were knocking off two mates?”
“That’s right.”
“It all sounds a bit cosy.”
“It does, doesn’t it? But the important thing is that Silkstone’s story tallies with what’s in the files. He was with Latham, Latham was with him, in the Lord Nelson. The two women confirmed seeing them there. Bingo — eliminated from enquiries, even though it’s a pack of lies.”
“Margaret Silkstone’s dead,” I said. “What about the other one?”
“Michelle Webster?” Bob replied. “We haven’t found her yet, but she’s our next priority.”
“It’ll be interesting to hear what she has to say,” I stated.
“Ye-es, very interesting,” the DCC agreed.
It was Iqbal’s last day with us, Allah be praised, and Annette came to tell me that the troops were meeting in the Bailiwick at home time, to give him a send-off. I told her to make two coffees for us, and bring herself back to my office. Maybe she’d appreciate the assertive approach.
When she was seated opposite me I told her all about the Silkstone interview. She listened gravely, and offered the opinion that lack of alibi and possession of a photograph was hardly enough to convict a man for murder.
“Except that he went on to kill again,” I said.
“That’s not evidence,” she stated.
“No,” I agreed, “but the Somerset boys can go back and look at the case again, with Latham in mind. We haven’t seen the file. There might be a load of stuff in there that will all fall into place, now.”
Annette was right, though. We have to be careful. You can’t arrest a man because he has a scar on his cheek, and then announce to the court that he has a scar on his cheek, just like the witness said. Latham was only in the frame for Caroline because he possessed her photograph. We couldn’t then use that piece of non-evidence to clinch his guilt. I heaved a big sigh and took a bite of chocolate biscuit.
“You look tired, Charlie,” she observed.
“Yeah, a bit.”
“So where does all this leave us?”
“Us?” I queried.
“I meant the Latham case. Our Latham case.”
“Everybody agrees that it’s sewn up,” I told her. “Latham killed Mrs S. Mr S came home and found her, then he killed Latham. Balance of mind, manslaughter, three years top whack, free in one.”
“I thought you weren’t happy about it.”
“I’m happy,” I protested. “The evidence is good. Why does everybody want me to be out of line?”
Her face lit up in a smile. “Because that’s where you belong,” she said.
We sipped our coffee in silence for a few moments, her left hand absentmindedly straightening the papers near the corner of my desk until they were exactly parallel to the edges. “Do you think of Georgina Dewhurst very often?” she asked.
I wasn’t expecting it, and it took me a few moments to reply. Georgina was a little girl, murdered by her stepfather. “Yes,” I admitted. “Probably more often than is healthy.”
“I was a WPC on that case,” Annette told me.
“I know. You were with the Child Protection Unit.”
“Good grief!” she exclaimed. “I’m amazed you noticed.”
I grinned, saying: “As SIO, it was part of my remit to keep a fatherly eye on all the young WPCs.”
Her smile was warm and comfortable, the best I’d ever seen her give. “That’s when I decided I wanted to be a detective,” she said. “Not just be a detective, I wanted…well…oh, never mind.”
“Wanted what?”
Her smile was still there, fighting to be seen through the blush that crept over her face like a desert sunset. “Oh, nothing,” she said.
I didn’t insist on an answer. People with red hair and freckles blush easily, but it was strange that she never did when answering questions about our clients that some people would find embarrassing. Then, she was totally professional. It was only when…Ah, well, it was something for me to ponder over.
“Tonight,” I began, “after we’ve given Iqbal a send-off. We could go for a Chinese again, if you’ve nothing on. Or a curry. I’m just as well-known in the Last Viceroy as I am in the Bamboo Curtain. You missed a good steak on Saturday, by the way.”
She nodded and said: “Right. See you in the pub.”
I did paperwork and made phone calls until after half-past six, then walked over the road to the Bailiwick. The lab had done a micro-analysis of various samples taken from the Silkstone bedroom and their report was in the post. Expecting me to wait for it was like asking a child to wait until Easter for his Christmas presents. I asked for a condensed version over the phone.
They’d found skin flakes from all three involved, but not too many from Tony Silkstone. The sheet and duvet cover were probably clean on that day, which had made things easier. The footprint scans were relatively straightforward, too, as the whole house had been thoroughly vacuumed. All three of the protagonists had climbed up and down the stairs a couple of times, and last one down was Silkstone himself. No signs of a struggle, no tracks left by trailing heels. All good stuff, which led us nowhere. Mrs Silkstone liked a tidy house and clean sheets for when her lover called, and that was about it. The jammy sod, I thought. Pity about the dagger in the heart.
Jeff and Iqbal were sitting in a corner, behind half-empty glasses, the barman was reading the Mirror and the cat was asleep on the jukebox. All-day opening has closed more pubs than any temperance society ever did.
“Ah, Inspector Charlie!” Iqbal exclaimed as I entered. “What can I purchase for you?”
“Oh, a pint of lager would go down nicely, please,” I replied, and Iqbal went over to the bar.
“Where is everybody?” I whispered to Jeff.
“Dunno. Playing hard to get, by the look of it.”
“Annette said she’d be here.”
“I saw her leave, in her car.”
“Oh.” I tried not to sound disappointed.
Iqbal returned with my drink. He placed it carefully in front of me, saying: “Jeffrey was just explaining how the legal system in your country, and therefore in mine also, dates back to the twelfth century, and that there are still several anomalies in the statutes book that have no relevance to the modern world.”
“So they say, Iqbal,” I replied, adding: “Cheers,” and taking a long sip of Holland’s major contribution to international goodwill. It was an old chestnut that poor Jeff had dug up to keep the conversation flowing.
“For instance,” he continued, “Jeffrey tells me that it is still permissible, due to an oversight or perhaps lack of time in Parliament, for the driver of a vehicle who is taken short to urinate against the front offside wheel of the aforementioned vehicle. Is that really so?”
“Not quite,” I told him. “It’s the front nearside wheel.”
“Offside,” Jeff asserted.
“Nearside,” I argued.
“Offside.”
“Uh-uh. Nearside.”
“It’s the offside. I looked it up.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Oh heck. No wonder I got some funny looks in the High Street this morning.” One or two of the others arrived, so Iqbal’s send-off wasn’t a complete disaster. I was just starting my third pint, which is about double my normal intake, these days, when Annette arrived. She was wearing a blue pinstripe suit with a shortish skirt and high heels. I smiled at her and moved along to make some room, but didn’t speak. I wasn’t sure I could control what might come out if I tried to talk. Someone fetched her an orange juice.
At half past eight people started to make excuses and drift away. We all shook hands with Iqbal, telling him what a delight his stay with us had been, wishing him well for the future. I pointedly asked Annette if she’d like a Chinese, and she said: “What a good idea.”
I opened the invitation to the others but they all politely declined. Dave had eaten, he said; some had meals waiting for them, and Jeff had defrosted a vegetarian lasagne for himself and Iqbal. “Just us, then,” I told Annette, and our ears were burning like stubble fires as we walked away from them all.
“Your reputation is now in tatters, you know,” I said as I fastened my seatbelt in her Fiat.
“That’s what reputations are for,” she replied, clunking the car into first gear.
We went through the menu and had fun. I introduced Annette to wontons and Mr Ho introduced both of us to various other delicacies he kept bringing from the kitchen. “Umm, delicious, what is it?” Annette would giggle, and he would reply in Chinese.
“What’s that in English?” she’d demand.
“You no rike if I tell you in Engrish,” he’d laugh.
I grabbed the bill when it came. “This was my idea, and I earn more than you,” I told her, not allowing her the chance to object.
“Oh, er, right, thanks,” she said.
“My pleasure. Any chance of a lift home?”
She wouldn’t come in for coffee. We were sitting outside my house with the car’s headlights still on and the engine running. Switching off, stopping the engine, would have been a statement of intent. It didn’t come.
“At the risk of being politically incorrect,” I began, “you look stunning, Annette.”
“Oh, I can take political incorrectness like that,” she replied with a smile.
“Good. I’ve enjoyed tonight.”
“Mmm, me too.”
After a silence I said: “Are you going away this weekend?”
The smile slipped away and she fiddled with a button on the front of her jacket. “Yes,” she replied, very softly.
One of the neighbours came walking down the pavement with his little dog on a lead, returning from its evening crap at the other end of the street. I have very considerate neighbours. “Is he a good bloke?” I asked.
Annette turned to face me. “How do you know it’s a bloke?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t, but it usually is.”
“Normally. You mean normally.”
“Usually, normally. They’re just words.”
“I’m the station dyke, Charlie,” she replied. “Surely you know that.”
“You’re a great police officer and I’m very fond of you. That’s all I know.”
“Would it bother you if I were?”
“What? Gay?”
“Mmm.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I was tired. I hadn’t thought out my arguments. Or my feelings. “I don’t know. It just wouldn’t,” was the best I could manage.
The button came off in her fingers and she gave a tiny snort of dismay. “They don’t make them like they used to,” I said.
“It’s been loose all night,” she replied.
“You could’ve had that coffee, and I could’ve sewn it back on for you.”
The smile came back. “Role reversal,” she said. “I’m all in favour of that.”
“They teach you to sew buttons on in the SAS,” I told her.
“Were you in the SAS?”
“Mmm. Under twelve’s branch. They threw me out because I wouldn’t wear the oblong sunglasses.”
She laughed, just a little, and called me a fool. And Charlie. “You are a fool, Charlie” she said, in the nicest possible way.
“Thank you for a pleasant evening, ma’am,” I said, opening the door. “Don’t be late, in the morning.”
“What time do you want picking up?” she asked.
“God!” I exclaimed, pulling the door closed again. “My car’s still outside the nick, isn’t it. Um, in that case, whenever.”
“About twenty to eight?”
“Yeah, that’s fine. If I can get up. I think I’m slightly pissed.”
I opened the door just enough for the interior light to come on. Annette said: “For the record, yes, he is a good bloke.”
“Your friend in York?”
“Mmm.”
“Does he deserve you?”
“I think so. He’s a schoolteacher, and has two daughters, seven and nine.”
“Divorced?”
“Widower.”
“Rich?”
“He’s a schoolteacher.”
“Right,” I said. “Right.” I felt hollow inside. A schoolteacher I could deal with. I’d ask the local boys to waste him and arrange for the coastguard to drop his weighted body off the edge of the continental shelf. Not the girls, though. I couldn’t be that much of a bastard.
“Annette…” I began.
“Mmm.”
“Would you be willing to…you know…make allowances for my intoxicated state if I…sort of…transgressed, type of thing?”
“I’m not sure,” she replied, warily. “What do you have in mind?”
“Um, well, I was just wondering, er, if there was any chance of, um, a goodnight kiss?”
She leaned over and gave me a loud peck on the cheek, completely catching me off guard. It wasn’t quite what I had in mind, but it was a start. “There,” she said.
“Thank you,” I told her, pushing the door wide.
“Charlie…”
I twisted back to face her. “Mmm.”
“You should get pissed more often.”
Friday morning I put eggs, bacon and tomatoes from the fridge out on the worktop, together with corn flakes, bread, marmalade, a tub of Thank Christ It’s Not Butter, the frying pan and the toaster. It was my attempt at humour, but Annette waited in the car for me. I finished my coffee and went out.
“Another day, another collar,” I said, winding myself into the Fiat’s passenger seat. Italian cars make no concessions towards the different body shapes of their European neighbours. Short legs and long arms — take it or leave it. “Thank you, Ms Brown. The office, please.”
But there were no collars to feel, that day. Some of the team were out looking at burglary scenes, others, me included, caught up with paperwork and reading. Dave went out for sandwiches at lunchtime, and brought me hot pork in an oven bottom cake, with stuffing. They don’t do them like that in M amp; S. And at a fraction of their price.
In the afternoon the remains of Jamie Walker, loosely arranged in some sort of order, were buried with full Christian pomp. His mother prostrated herself on the coffin, for the Gazette’s photographer, then repeated the scene, with sound effects, when local TV arrived. Practice makes perfect. He was a good son, she told them: everybody loved him and his mischievous ways. This wouldn’t have happened if the police had been more firm with him, and she was considering taking legal action against them. Nobody from the job went to the funeral, under orders, but we all caught it on TV later that evening.
Last phone call before I left work was from Bob, the Somerset DS. “We’ve traced Michelle Webster,” he told me. “She married and changed her name, but she’s now divorced and has reverted back to her maiden name.”
You can’t revert forward, I thought. “Have you spoken to her?” I asked.
“No, Mr Priest. She’s living in Blackpool, would you believe. Our chief super’s making noises about expenses and thinks there’s no need for us to see her ourselves. He said to let someone local interview her. He wants to wait until after the inquests then issue a statement saying that we are not looking for anybody else, and that would be the Caroline Poole case cleared up.”
“Which would please the relatives, I suppose.”
“That’s what he said.”
“How would you feel if someone from here nipped across and had a word with Michelle?”
“No problem, Mr Priest. That’s partly why I’m ringing you. You’re a couple of hundred miles nearer to her than we are.”
“Call me Charlie, Bob. Everybody else does.”
“Oh, right.”
“Give me the address. I’ll try to send someone next week, and let you know the outcome.”
“We’d appreciate that, Charlie. Thanks for your help.”
“My pleasure.”
And it would be, too. Blackpool might be the last resort, but a day there with Annette sounded a good way of adding the finishing touches to the Latham case. I straightened my blotter, washed my mug and went home.
Jamie’s funeral, on TV, made me angry. “You should get pissed more often,” Annette had told me. No way. I’d staggered down that road a long time ago, and didn’t like the scenery. My Sony rasta-blaster holds three CDs. I chose carefully, then carried it into the garage where the unfinished painting leaned against the wall. I laid the tubes of colour out in the same order I always use and screwed the caps off. Yellow ochre, to start with, I decided. I squeezed a six-inch worm of it onto the palette and dipped a number twelve filbert into the glistening pigment.
The knock on the garage door came about halfway through the second playing of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. The neighbour was standing there with his little dog. I stared at him, brush in one hand, palette knife in the other.
“Um, er, your radio’s on a bit loud, Mr Priest, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
It was. That’s how you listen to Mahler. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you could hear it outside.”
“Well you can, and it’s keeping Elsie awake.”
“I really am sorry,” I repeated, because I was. I like to consider myself the invisible neighbour. “I was painting. What time is it”
“About ten to one.”
“What!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t realise it was so late.”
“She’s been in bed since just after the play ended. It’s her waterworks, you know.”
“Really. Well it won’t happen again.” I moved back into the garage and switched off the CD. He stepped into the vacant space in the doorway and his gaze settled on the nearly — finished picture. “It’s supposed to represent China,” I explained, as I wiped away the blob of cerulean blue that I’d accidentally dabbed on the Sony.
“China?” he repeated.
“Mmm.”
“China China?”
“That’s right.” As opposed to cup-and-saucer china, I think he meant. “That’s the Great Wall, and that’s a panda.” I pointed to the images, some strong, some barely hinted at, and read them off. “The Long March, Tiananmen Square, coolie hats, bonsai, typical scenery, Chairman Mao.”
“I don’t like this modern stuff,” he declared.
“This is hardly modern,” I told him. “I don’t like much of the really modern stuff.” I manoeuvred him outside and walked him towards the gate. “And apologise to your wife about the noise, please. It won’t happen again.”
“The wife? She’s stone deaf, like me. Neither of us ever hears a thing once we switch off.”
“Oh. You said, er, Elsie.”
“Elsie.” He tugged the dog’s lead. “This is Elsie.”
“Right. Er, right.”
Next morning at ten a.m. I rang Michelle Webster, provider of alibi for a child murderer, and arranged to see her in the afternoon. Don’t ask me why, but sometimes I feel more at ease when dealing with the criminally insane.
The rain started as soon as I passed over the tops and began the long descent into Lancashire. Having Annette with me would have been pleasant, but she was in York with her friend, and the thrill of the chase was more than I could resist. I was quite pleased about the rain — maybe it would keep the traffic down. It didn’t, and we had the usual stop-go on the M6. There’s this crackpot idea that the more roads you build, the more traffic you create. It all started after they opened the M25. Two million Londoners apparently said: “Ooh, good, they’ve built a new road. Let’s dash out and buy a car.” It’s now used as an argument for not making new roads or widening existing ones, and the M6 is doomed to permanent gridlock.
Michelle Webster had given me extremely detailed directions, which I hadn’t listened to, and sounded determined that I shouldn’t get lost. All I recorded was that she was on the south side, but not quite St Anne’s. There’s posh, I thought, as I looked at the map: they’ve retained the apostrophe.
When I was in the general vicinity I asked, and soon was creeping along a street of respectable, if slightly dilapidated, pre-war semis. They had shingled bay windows and mature trees in the gardens. I saw the number and parked between an ageing Range Rover and a Toyota Celica with a dented corner. Michelle Webster opened her front door before my finger was off the button, halfway through the second bar of Strangers in the Night.
She looked sixty, pushing nine. Little girls like to dress up in their mother’s clothes, I’m told. This was serious role reversal. She was wearing a pink micro skirt, black silk blouse, black tights and black suede boots that would have come well above her knees had not the tops been turned down, cavalier fashion. I remembered the joke about the woman who went to the doctors complaining of thrush. He gave her a prescription to take to the cobblers, to have two inches taken off the top of her boots.
“Mrs Michelle Webster?” I asked. I’d done a calculation on the way over and reckoned she’d be in her mid forties.
“It’s Miss Webster,” came the reply, as she stood to one side to let me through with hardly a glance at my ID. A little dog came yapping towards me out of the gloom of the hallway. Michelle said: “Hush, Trixie,” and picked it up. It had lots of hair, and looked as if it had just escaped from a serious accident with a tumble drier. “There-there darling, it’s only a nice policeman come to see Mummy,” she told it, planting a kiss into the middle of the ball of fur, and for a moment their hair merged like two clouds of noxious gasses after a chemical spillage.
“So what’s he done now?” Michelle asked with a touch of glee in her voice, when we were seated in her front room, which I suspected was called the parlour. She’d moved a menagerie of fluffy toys to make room for me, and straightened the antimacassars on the chair arms. There were pictures on the walls of various stars of stage and screen, with autographs scrawled across them by a girl with a rubber stamp in an office in Basingstoke.
“Who?” I asked.
“Greg, my ex. It’s about him. Isn’t it?”
It wasn’t, but I did some gentle probing. Greg was part owner of a club in town, and into all sorts of wheeling and dealing. She could tell me stuff that would make my hair curl. Mafia? Don’t talk to her about the Mafia.
So I didn’t. “You were in showbusiness?” I asked, flapping a hand towards the photos and recognising Roy Orbison in a central position amongst all the bouffant hair and gleaming teeth of the ones who didn’t make it to his level.
“Not on the performing side.” She smiled and crossed her legs, which was difficult with the footwear she had on. “Not enough talent, unfortunately,” she explained with a modest shrug. “No, Greg and I were more into management and promotions.”
“You were evidently successful at it.” The house was probably hers, and prices in Blackpool are no doubt above average.
“Oh, we were, we were. They were great days. And then the shit ran off with a dancer from the Tower whose cup size was as far as she ever made it through the alphabet. The fat little cow.”
“I haven’t come to talk about Greg,” I told her, anxious to steer the conversation back on course. “I want to talk to you about people you knew when you lived in Burdon, back in the Eighties.”
“Burdon? That was a long time ago.”
“1984, to be precise. Did you know a man called Peter Latham?”
She pretended she wasn’t sure — “There were so many, Inspector” — until she realised that I wasn’t going to be more forthcoming. Then she remembered him. I told her that he was dead, as was her friend Margaret Silkstone, nee Bates, under suspicious circumstances, and we’d be very grateful for any help she could give. After a little weep it all came out.
They were a foursome: she and Peter Latham; Margaret and Tony Silkstone. They met three nights a week at a pub near Frome — the Nelson — where there was music and dancing, and paired off when the alcohol and hormones started to work. Peter, she said, was kind and relaxed. Unlike Silkstone, who was a show-off, always wanting to have more, do better than anyone else. They were married to two sisters, which was why they knew each other. Peter’s wife, Michelle said, was a “hatchet-faced cow, and frigid with it.” I remembered the wedding photo I’d seen, of a tall brittle blonde who towered over him, and decided that the description could be accurate.
The affair came to an end when Latham was breathalysed and banned from driving. They struggled to meet for a while, playing gooseberry with Silkstone and Margaret, but Michelle came to Blackpool for a holiday and met Greg. End of a beautiful friendship.
“He was a lovely man,” she sobbed, for the tears had started again. “He knew the names of things. Birds and flowers an’ stuff like that. And poetry. He knew whole poems. Not the ones you did at school. Daft ones, that you can understand, by him from Liverpool. Paul McCartney’s brother.”
And had a penchant for sex with young girls, I thought.
“Not like Tony,” she continued. “All he knew was the price of cars.” She sniffed and dabbed her nose with a tissue. “I married Greg because he was a bit in-between, if you follow me. Except with him it was show-biz.”
I wasn’t sure I did follow, but I skipped asking for an explanation. “You were obviously fond of him,” I said. “I’m sorry I had to bring you bad news.” But now for the bad news. I said: “Do you remember when a girl called Caroline Poole went missing?”
She did. Nobody who lived in Burdon would ever forget it. “It was the biggest manhunt ever held in Somerset,” I told her. “Everybody was questioned, including Tony and Peter. According to the records they said they were with you and Margaret that night. Do you remember?”
She pursed her lips and shrugged, warily, and I imagined her growing pale under the makeup. Lipstick was beginning to bleed away from the corners of her mouth like aerial views of the Nile delta. “I never asked you if you’d like a drink!” she exclaimed, pulling herself to her feet. “What must you think of me?” Trixie, who was curled up on her lap, fell to the floor.
There was a bar in the corner of the room, behind me, with a quilted facade and optics on the mirrored wall. A personal replica of the real thing for those times when you can’t face the world. I twisted in my seat as she poured clear liquid from a decanter. “What would you like, Chief Inspector?” she asked.
There was no coffee percolator quietly gurgling on the counter. “Not for me, thank you,” I said. Glass clinked against glass, suede swish-swashed against suede and she resumed her seat, slowly easing herself down into it like a forklift truck lowering a crate of eggs. If it was gin she now held in her hand she’d be talking in hieroglyphics before she was halfway through it. “Whose idea was it to lie?” I asked, getting straight to the point.
She took a long drink, slurped, gurgled and coughed. “I don’t know.” The end of Trixie that didn’t have a curly tail looked up at her, then decided not to bother. The dog sloped off and crashed out on a folded sheepskin rug near the fireplace.
“Did Peter ask you?”
“Ask me what?”
“Did he ask you to say he was with you?”
“No. I don’t think so. I’d stopped seeing him by then.”
“By when?”
“By when the police were asking questions. It was months after the girl was murdered.”
“Was it Silkstone, then?”
“I don’t know. It was a long time ago. I used to drink a lot…” She downed half of the tumbler to demonstrate how it was done and re-crossed her legs.
“Was it Margaret’s idea. Did she persuade you to say that you saw Peter and Tony in the Lord Nelson, that night?”
“I was never very good at times, and days of the week.”
“Was it Margaret’s idea?”
“I think so.”
“What did she say?”
She downed the last of whatever it was and stared gloomily at the empty glass. Her legs uncrossed themselves, as if she were about to go for another, but she decided not to and sank back in the chair. There’d be plenty of time for that when the nice policeman had gone.
“She said that Peter was scared stiff that his wife would find out about, you know, me an’ ’im. We used to go to the Nelson to hear this group. They were called the Donimoes…the Dominoes. Gerry and the Donimoes. They did all Roy’s stuff. When Gerry sang ‘In Dreams’ they used to dim all the lights, an’ the group, they used to turn their backs to the audience, as if to say that this was ’is spot. All ’is.” She closed her eyes and the savage lips melted into a smile.
“In dreams I walk with you,” she sang, very softly, her head weaving gently from side to side. “In dreams I talk to yo-ou.”
“It’s a lovely song,” I said.
“Do you like it?”
“Mmm. You were telling me what Margaret said to you?”
She looked at the glass, realised it was still empty and leaned forward to place it on the coffee table. Her fingers fumbled, lost their grip, and it rolled on to the floor. It was a heavy tumbler, cut glass, and the rug was luxurious, so it didn’t break. I picked it up and placed it just out of her reach.
“What did she say?”
“She shaid…she said…that Peter had told Tony that he didn’t ’ave a…a…a nalibi for the night that little girl went missing. He was wiv me, she shaid, she…said, bur ’e couldn’t tell the police that, cos ’is wife would find out.”
“What did she tell you to do?”
“Just that we saw ’em in the pub. The Nelson. I was wiv Margaret, an’ we saw these two blokes, called Peter and Tony. They dint buy us a drink or anything, but we spoke to them. If the police came and asked where I was on that Wednesday night, I’d to say I was in the Nelson, wiv ’er.”
“And did they?”
“Did what?”
“Did the police ask you where you were?”
“Yes, but ages after. I could ’ardly remember.”
“And was Peter with you, that Wednesday night?”
“That’s the funny fing. I didn’t realise until I fought about it. We went to the Nelson free times a week, when the Donimoes…the Dominoes…were playing. But they were on a Sunday and on a Tuesday and on Thursday nights. Not We’nsdays. We never went on We’nsdays. It was old time dancing on We’nsdays.”
I made her a black coffee, but I couldn’t do much about the brewery in the corner. Leaving her alone with her real or imagined memories, a CD of Roy Orbison’s greatest breakdowns and a gallon of spirits was like playing Russian Roulette with her, but I didn’t see what else I could do. Hopefully she’d collapse and sleep it off. She must have been half cut when I arrived, so she knew the score.
The rain drove all the day-trippers away early, so it was a twenty-minute crawl to reach the motorway. I stopped at the Birch services for a meal but changed my mind when I saw the prices. I always do. Instead it was a trout from Sainsbury’s, with Kenyan green beans and new potatoes, followed by half a pint of strawberry Angel Delight. I did the trout under the grill, with lashings of butter, and it was delicious.
I hadn’t lied to Michelle. I saw Roy Orbison, once, at Batley Variety Club, and he was brilliant. I took Vanessa, my wife, soon to be ex-wife. He sounded exactly the same live as he did on record, which is more than you can say for most of them. I went upstairs to the spare bedroom, humming Pretty Woman, and logged on to the computer that lives in there.
“Michelle Webster admitted that she lied when asked by the investigating officer if Peter Latham was with her on the night Caroline Poole disappeared,” I typed. I expanded the story, with all the dates and legal-speak to make it sound professional. As an afterthought, I added that she was totally kettled when I interviewed her, and was an unreliable witness, open to manipulation. When it was finished I ran off two copies and deleted the file.
Monday morning I’d post it to Somerset, augmented with a phone call. They’d use the information to pin a sixteen — year-old girl’s murder on Latham, and close the case. It wasn’t much, but he had, after all, gone on to commit another murder up in Yorkshire, hadn’t he?
Meanwhile, we’d reinforce our case against the man by regarding him as someone who had killed before, down in Somerset. It wasn’t what might be called a Catch 22, but there ought to be a name for it. Ah well, I thought, the coroners will have to sort that one out.
Latham did leave his sperm all over Margaret Silkstone’s thighs, I remembered as I logged off, and felt happier. Were he still alive he’d be having difficulties arguing that small fact away. Thank God for sperm samples — where would we all be without them? Jeff Caton had loaned me the video of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, with Harrison Ford, and I watched it while sipping lager I’d brought from the supermarket. It was the later version, the director’s cut, with the voice-over removed. Sorry, Mr Scott, but you ruined it. Sometimes, the man in charge just doesn’t know best. You can be so close to something that you don’t see the wet fish coming until it slaps you in the chops.
Monday morning I followed a double-decker bus all the way into town. Since the buses were regulated — or was it de- regulated? — they’ve started painting them in fancy colours and allowing different companies to sponsor individual buses. Sometimes you don’t know if it’s the one you want coming down the road or a bunch of New Age travellers. On the back of most of them, covering the panel that conceals the engine, it states: Bus advertising works. You’re reading this, aren’t you?
Dave’s and Annette’s cars were already in their places when I swung into the station yard. Latham’s ex-wife, who lives in Pontefract, started work at the local hospital at ten a.m., and they’d arranged to drive over and catch her early. I filled them in with my weekend discoveries but suggested they concentrate initially on our enquiry, not Somerset’s. The Caroline Poole case was muddying the waters, and it wasn’t fair to Latham to use it to pre-judge him.
Dave said: “Where’s our rock, then?” to change the subject. What he meant was don’t tell your grandma how to suck eggs.
“What rock?”
“Our Blackpool rock. You had a day at the seaside and you didn’t bring us any rock back?”
“It was raining. I didn’t hang about.”
He turned to Annette. “Shows how much he thinks of us.”
Annette looked thoughtful. She said: “So Latham didn’t have an alibi for the Caroline Poole job.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Which means, of course, that Silkstone probably didn’t have one, either.”
“Yes, Annette,” I agreed. “That thought had occurred to me, too.”
“Unless he was alone with Margaret at the time,” Dave suggested.
“But she’s dead,” Annette and I replied, simultaneously.
They went off to Pontefract and I went upstairs for the morning prayer meeting. Gilbert huffed and puffed and thought I was wasting time on details when the big picture was as plain as a gravy stain. The Caroline Poole case wasn’t ours. End of story. Latham killed Margaret. Silkstone killed Latham. End of story.
“But we don’t know that Silkstone wasn’t involved with Margaret’s death,” I argued.
“Well if he was he’s got away with it. Good luck to the bloke, we can’t win ’em all, Charlie.”
Gareth Adey offered his considered opinion, which agreed with Gilbert’s. It always does. “I think Mr Wood is right, Charlie,” he told me. “Good grief, two murders cleared up is pretty good going by anybody’s standards. Well done, I say, and I bet the Chief Constable is thinking the same way. Now, can we talk about the new CCTV in the market place?”
So we did. Three minutes about two murders, half an hour about his poxy TV cameras. “Well done, Charlie. Two murders cleared up. Maybe you’ll get a commendation.” And what about frigging justice, I thought?
I rang Michelle Webster when I was back in my office, to satisfy myself that she was OK. “I was worried about you,” I told her, after the formalities. “That was rather a large G and T you made yourself.” She giggled, saying that there was no T in it, and hoped that she had behaved herself. We chatted for a while, had a laugh and said goodbye. She never asked about Latham or his funeral, never mentioned the man who killed him, never asked how her friend Margaret had died. I replaced the phone and wondered why I’d bothered.
Somerset were more interested, when I rang them, and thanked me for my efforts. As Gilbert said, they were regarding it as a clear-up. In the middle of our conversation someone in the big office held up a phone and mouthed: “For you,” at me, through the glass. I shook my head and waved the one I was holding.
He took a message then came to deliver it, leaning in the doorway of my little office until I’d finished. “That was the Jeff from the court,” he said. “The magistrate has remanded Silkstone in custody and he’s been taken to Bentley. His solicitor has intimated that they’ll be pleading guilty to manslaughter, with provocation and lashings of mitigating circumstances.”
“Hey, that’s good news,” I said. “I expected him to be let loose. Good for the CPS, for once.”
“A short, sharp shock,” he replied. “Teach him what he’s in for. They’ll free him next time.”
“Yep,” I agreed.
We had a loose-ends meeting at four o’clock. Annette placed a huge bag of Pontefract cakes and one of all-sorts on the table in front of me. “Where did you get these?” I asked.
“Pontefract.”
“They do sell them in the supermarket,” I argued.
“Not fresh ones, straight from the oven.”
I found a coconut mushroom and popped it into my mouth, saying: “Dese are by faborites,” as I passed the bag across the table.
“There’s a castle there,” Dave said.
“Where Richard the Second was murdered,” Annette added.
“It’s an interesting place.”
“And stinks of liquorice.”
“But it’s quite a pleasant smell, really.”
“And every other building is a pub.”
“OK, OK, spare me the travelogue,” I protested as I sucked a piece of coconut from between my teeth. “Next weekend we’ll all have a day out in Pontefract. Now can we talk about you-know-what, please.”
Other information had come in and been collated. Most significant were the facts that Silkstone and his wife had blazing rows and were in severe financial difficulties. The car was leased and he’d slipped behind a couple of times with his mortgage payments. His salary, we discovered, was quite modest, and the hefty commissions that he was used to weren’t coming his way. Margaret’s death had given him a timely leg-up out of the shit creek.
Neighbours confirmed that Latham was a regular Wednesday afternoon visitor. No bedroom curtains were pulled across after he arrived, but it wasn’t possible for anyone to see into the room.
“Actually,” Dave confided, “between us and these four walls, it’s quite pleasant in the afternoon, with the curtains open.”
“Put that in your report,” I told him. The phone in my office rang and I went to answer it. It was the CPS solicitor to ask if I’d received the news about Silkstone. I said I had and congratulated him on a minor victory. I suspected that was what he wanted to hear. When I went back into the main office Dave was in full swing.
“…and my dad told me to keep a big sweet jar under the bed,” he was saying, “and to put a dried pea in it every time we made love. And then, after I was forty, to take one out every time we made love. He said that nobody ever emptied the jar.”
“Subject normal,” Annette explained as I resumed my seat.
“And have you emptied it?” somebody asked.
“Not yet,” I interrupted, “but I’m helping him. Where were we?”
Latham’s wife had married, and divorced, for a second time. Silkstone had given her husband a job as a salesman, first in double glazing, then in the financial sector, but he did it very reluctantly. It just wasn’t his scene, she’d said, but the money was good. Apparently his affable manner took punters by surprise, and they trusted him, so he did reasonably well without trying too hard. Silkstone came north because of the job, and Latham followed him, but his marriage failed soon after.
“What went wrong?” I asked.
“Partly boredom, partly the affair,” Annette replied. “She was attracted to him because of his laid back approach to life, but it quickly paled. At first she couldn’t believe that he’d had enough go in him to have an affair. Coming up here was a fresh start, but it didn’t work out.”
“And what about Caroline Poole? Did you get round to her?”
“Yes, Boss. She remembered, with a bit of prompting, that Peter’s car was the same type that we were looking for. She thinks she mentioned it to him and he just shrugged it off. They never discussed it again.”
“But Latham wasn’t at home with her on the night in question?”
“She doesn’t think so, and he didn’t ask her for an alibi. It was all a non-event as far as she was concerned.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. She doesn’t believe that he killed Margaret. He was the least-violent person imaginable, she said.”
“She couldn’t believe he was having an affair, either,” I pointed out.
“I know,” Annette agreed, with a shrug.
Dave said: “I reckon that’s about as far as we can go with this, Chas. We’ve done our bit.”
“Yep,” I replied, “that just about sews it up. Now answer me this. If bus advertising works, why do they have to advertise it on the backs of all the buses?”
Dave said: “Eh?” and Annette’s expression implied something similar.
“Why,” I repeated, “do they have to advertise bus advertising? It obviously doesn’t work, otherwise they’d advertise something that pays them, like Coca-Cola or Fenning’s Fever Cure, wouldn’t they?”
“Is that what you’ve been thinking about all day?” Dave grumbled.
“It was just a thought, troubling my enquiring mind,” I replied, but neither of them looked convinced. “OK,” I continued, clapping my hands briskly, “reports on my desk by nine in the morning, please. Then we can concentrate on keeping the streets of Heckley safe for the good burghers of this town. Mr Wood wants us to restore the times when you could drop your wage packet on the pavement and it would still be there when you went back for it.”
“It would now,” Dave said. “Lost in all the rubbish. And nobody would recognise a wage packet, these days.”
“What’s Fenning’s Fever Cure?” Annette asked.