By now I was familiar enough with the geography of the town to know that the harbour lay on my left, the streets with their rows of dilapidated houses and derelict shops straight ahead and to the right, and instinct or something else made me veer in that direction. It was the desire to be hidden, no doubt; and perhaps I felt the harbour was too exposed, and I was also afraid of getting bogged down there.
I didn’t look behind me; there was no need when I could hear one of them clomping down the hill, getting louder, gaining. The other would be on the radio, calling for reinforcements. Block Nile Street at the junction with Aboukir Street. Send somebody to seal off Trafalgar Street, and make sure he doesn’t cross the footbridge over the river leading to the old iron foundry …
The names didn’t matter, they were always the same in these sorts of towns. Did the police know who they were looking for? Was it a routine alert, ‘vagrant acting suspiciously – hold for questioning,’ or a jubilant ‘it’s definitely him, Super, the Asian’s killer?’ What a stroke of luck for them that I’d walked down the high street in broad daylight and accomodatingly lingered in a phone box for ten minutes so they could study me at leisure. It was a red-letter day right enough. A triumph for police vigilance, initiative, sharp thinking. Citations and commendations all around. Drinks on the chief.
The pavement suddenly gave out and I stumbled over a scrubby patch of dirt and grass and yellowing dog turds. It was a small piece of common ground strewn with black plastic bags of rubbish, an enamel bath still with its old-fashioned taps, the stripped shell of a car, and a couple of soggy half-burnt mattresses. The end of a street and two alleys met up here, at differing angles. I made a diagonal run to get out of his line of sight, did an L-turn and dived for the nearest corner. I’d reached it and ducked into the alleyway as his footsteps came pounding up the pavement. It seemed that I’d made the right decision for once: there was dirt underfoot, not cobblestones, which muffled the thump of my boots. Now if I could only get to the next corner before he found the right alleyway there was a better than evens chance that I might shake him off. Some of the backyard gates were broken, a few hanging on one hinge; one leap and I could be inside. It was worth the risk. I hesitated, glanced behind, saw a broken gate coming up, and ran past it. The fear of being trapped, with no means of escape, between a locked back door, an outside lavatory and two walls overcame me: at least out here I could run, and keep on running, even if it killed me.
This wasn’t a figure of speech, it was a real possibility. I knew it for certain as I staggered on, dragging my leaden boots in a parody of a deep-sea diver on the ocean floor. I knew I couldn’t keep running for much longer, the blood was screaming in my head so that I was nearly deafened by it, and my lungs were being sandpapered. The corner I longed for to conceal me, and another identical cobbled street to disappear down, were not half-a-dozen steps away when I heard him behind me. I’d gained perhaps a dozen yards but he was still there, and still young, still fit.
In my blind panic I missed the alleyway I was aiming for, skidding on the wet cobblestones as I tried to make the turn, regained my footing and carried on to the next. In a straight chase without obstacles he would have easily caught up with me over thirty yards. My only real chance was to jink and twist through every back alley, turn every corner I came to, gradually lose myself in the labyrinth of crumbling red brick. I had to get just far enough ahead to be out of his vision for a few precious seconds. Give him the dilemma of two or three alternatives to choose from, left, right, straight on … his youth and fitness wouldn’t help him there. He would have to guess, and the more he guessed, the better my chances.
The alley sloped inwards to a central channel, inches deep in standing, stagnant water. I sloshed through it, not having the energy to take the few extra steps round it. My heavy overcoat was sodden, and my trousers flapped like wet washing, clinging to my ankles. The rain streamed steadily down, unrelenting. I screwed up my eyes, cursing it, and yet of course it was as much of a hindrance to him as it was to me.
He was shouting something, wasting breath I hoped. I caught the word ‘bastard’ and some garbled expletives. Then he cried out with real murderous venom. I took a quick look back to see him sprawled full-length in the grey sheet of water. He was on his feet almost as fast as he fell, streaks of dirt on his face, mouth working under the gingerish moustache, spitting out the foul taste.
When I turned back to run on I got a horrible shock. Ten yards in front of me – invisible through the rain till now – was a blank brick wall. I’d chosen my own trap, chased myself into a dead end. I ran harder, judging the leap, not knowing if I had the strength or the belief to make it. Even then he’d be up to me, grab my flailing legs and claw a handful of wet overcoat before I could swing over the top. I gathered myself, altering my pace the final few yards to rapid half-steps to get the distance right, tightening every muscle for maximum effort, and then saw in the last second, tucked in a corner at right-angles to the wall, a dark narrow arched tunnel which cut through the terraced row to the street. It was hardly wide enough to run down without cannoning from side to side. I emerged into the street with bruised shoulders and elbows, did an acute right turn, and ran on, desperate for the next corner, the next alleyway. I had to leave him behind for those few vital seconds – force him to make a blind guess as to which way I’d gone, and hope to God he guessed wrong.
The rain had eased off to a slanting drizzle. The street was level here, though to the right it rose steeply, which told me that the centre of town lay in that direction. I crossed over, went the opposite way. There was a tall, stout fence of sharpened railway sleepers, and through the gaps I could see a garden allotment, bamboo canes stuck in the ridged earth, and a greenhouse with a squeaking metal weather-vane. A path of beaten cinders went alongside the fence. I turned onto it, ran a few paces, walked a few, tried to run a few more. The path petered out. Facing me were the backs of some houses which idiotically seemed familiar, as if anyone who hadn’t been born, lived and died here could possibly tell the difference between one terraced row and another. Somebody had done himself proud with a new bathroom: a tangle of plastic pipes like fat green worms writhing down the wall.
It was hiding time. My options were reduced to one. I didn’t have it in me to run another thirty yards before I slumped to the ground in a quivering, nauseous heap.
I avoided the one with new plumbing and limped to another further along with unwashed windows and grimy lace curtains. Carefully, with a great expenditure of effort, I lifted the backyard gate so that it wouldn’t scrape on the flagstones, closed it the same way. There was a latch, but the iron bar to lock the gate was missing. There was nowhere left to run to now, even had I possessed a few lingering shreds of strength to try.
The wall was a little above my height. I crouched down below it and doubled myself up in the corner, clutching my knees. I closed my eyes and leaned the side of my head against the damp, pitted brickwork. My chest was heaving and shuddering. I tried to take long slow gasps of air rather than short explosive ones, but these too sounded raucous and deafening. Then I caught my breath, held it locked tight in my chest as I heard the thudding beat of footsteps on the cinder path.
The young policeman came to a stop, faced as I had been by the back of a row of houses, their slate roofs shining after the downpour. His feet scuffled as he turned to look one way and then the other. He was close enough for me to hear him muttering angrily to himself, probably still cursing, under his sharp, rapid panting. This was the decisive moment. Would he continue on, to the bottom of the row, in the belief that I had been far enough ahead to get out of sight? Or would he calculate that I couldn’t possibly, in my failing condition, have done a forty-odd yard dash to vanish round the gable end before his arrival? He had to make a judgement, here and now, this instant.
I waited, head sunk, elbows pressed against my chest, breathing shallowly into my cupped hands.
The footsteps moved on, and my shoulders involuntarily sagged with relief. But then my spine went rigid. He was walking, not running, pacing outside the backyard walls. He had made his decision. The middle-aged man in the heavy overcoat and clodhopper boots was in no shape to have covered the forty-odd yards and got clean away: he had to be somewhere near, gone to ground, skulking like a cornered rat.
Which is precisely what I am, I thought. And with no way out of the rat-hole. I jumped with shock as a backyard gate crashed, kicked open with a viciousness that was probably due to fear as much as anything. Another slamming kick and a splintering of rotten timber as he worked his way along. Yet again – crash – and this one no more than three doors away – and he moved swiftly on to the next.
Bent at the knees I scuttled over the flagstones to the back door, a mottled blue, the paint bubbled and flaking off in long strips. Yet even before I reached up to grasp the handle, hope shrivelled inside me. Not surprisingly the owner shared Mr Patundi’s obsession with locks and bars: the door had been fitted with a new stainless steel mortice lock. Weakly, without conviction, I pushed against it, and then I heard the backyard gate scrape over the flagstones and slam back on its hinges.
Everything was shiny and new in Brickton police station. There was the smell of fresh paint and new timber and pine disinfectant; the walls were clean (no grey smears from passing shoulders), the composition floors squeaky and unscuffed. The blankets I slept under were stiff and sharp-creased with newness, their neat labels not puckered by repeated laundering. Money had been found from somewhere, quite a lot of money, to build and equip these modern two-storey cube-like premises with their closed-circuit TV monitoring system and electrically-operated cell doors. Even the pastel blue cup and saucer and plate which the young constable brought in on a tray, serving my morning tea and toast, hadn’t a single crack or chip. He said, ‘When you’ve finished that, a quick wash and brush-up. Ten minutes?’
I ate the two slices of toast and drank the tea and was ready when he came back. He escorted me to the washroom, six basins with a wall mirror set above each one, three showers in white-tiled enclosures, and handed me a disposable razor in a sealed plastic pack. ‘There’s no foam, you’ll have to use soap. And don’t cut yourself, will you? Some try it and claim they’ve been coerced.’ He stood by the door, arms folded, making a dry soft whistling sound through his pursed lips.
As we were going back to the cell for my jacket, he said, ‘Done a bit of tramping, have we?’ He was referring to the dried mud on my trousers and shoes. And when I put my jacket on: ‘Christ, where’d you get that suit from? The Ark?’
We walked along a corridor, the outer wall made of glass, the day outside, like the police station, bright and clean. The sky was high and blue, with just a vapour trail being scribed by an invisible hand across the empty void. I went first through a door, up a flight of stairs which bent back on itself, and the young constable surged ahead to show me into a room which, through glass panels to waist height, gave a view of a large, open-plan area with perhaps a dozen people working at desks. It might have been an insurance broker’s or an architect’s office.
‘You can smoke if you want to,’ the young constable said. He had neatly-trimmed sideburns and exuded a powerful scent of after-shave.
I sat in a tubular steel chair with green leatherette arms in front of a metal desk with nothing on it except a grey plastic trimphone. There were two other identical chairs, a metal waste bin, and a calendar with a colour photograph of shire horses.
The constable, sucking his lips and day-dreaming, sprang forward to open the door. The large, broad-shouldered man in dark suit and striped tie immediately filled the room not only with his size but with charged momentum: a brisk, bustling yet abstracted air as if he were mentally dealing with a dozen separate strands of thought at once. A younger man with lank fair hair and pale blue eyes followed him in, dismissed the constable and closed the door, then stood with hands clasped behind his back next to the shire horses. His dark grey suit was beautifully cut, a deep red handkerchief of what looked like silk flowing from his breast pocket. His cream shirt even had stitching along the collar. I hadn’t realised that policemen, even senior ones, these days had the money as well as the taste to indulge in fine tailoring.
‘Detective-Inspector Blend, Cumbrian Regional Serious Crimes Squad,’ the large man said. He sat down opposite me and opened the blue folder he had brought in. He waved his blunt-fingered hand, the nails cut short and square. ‘This is Detective-Sergeant Dimelow.’ He started to read the form in front of him, which I could see had typewritten entries. ‘You gave your name as Peter Holford.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve nothing to identify yourself?’
‘No, I—’
‘Where do you live?’
‘I don’t have a permanent address.’
Inspector Blend took out a ballpoint pen and wrote something down in tiny, precisely-formed letters. His wrists were as thick as my forearms. His face was large and square, pouchy cheeks with a maze of broken purple blood vessels under the skin, his jawline softening into his neck under a fold of flesh.
He laid the pen down and interlocked his meaty fingers, now looking at me with faded brown eyes. He must have looked at thousands of people that way, his eyes becoming a little more faded each time.
‘How long have you been in Brickton?’
‘Just a few days.’
‘Three, four, five …?’
‘About a week.’
‘Is that your natural hair colour?’
The question took me by surprise, which was obviously what he intended. I hesitated and then shook my head.
‘When did you dye it?’
‘Well, it must have been … I really had no idea.’
‘Since you came to Brickton?’
I nodded.
‘Why did you come here?’
‘Work,’ I said, having prepared my answer. ‘I was hoping to get a job.’
Inspector Blend smiled, or at least the corners of his mouth curled up slightly. ‘You were hoping to find a job,’ he said gravely, ‘in Brickton?’
‘Somebody told me there was work here,’ I said. ‘Loaders at B-H Haulage.’ I’d rehearsed that too, in what I knew was a fawning desire to make the details sound convincing.
‘You were misinformed, I take it?’
‘Yes.’ I nodded glumly.
‘You applied for a job at B-H Haulage and they turned you down. Is that right?’
‘Yes. I saw a woman in the office, a Mrs Crompton, but there was nothing going.’ It was unlikely that high-ranking officers from the Serious Crimes Squad were local men. These two had made a special journey to be here, possibly from Carlisle. I cleared my throat. ‘I’m pretty sure she’ll remember me.’
‘I’m positive she will,’ Inspector Blend agreed. ‘Somebody who looks less like a loader I’ve yet to see. What made you dye your hair? Were they looking for younger men?’
In another’s mouth it would have sounded clever and cutting, but coming from him it didn’t. He had the trick, or perhaps it was a natural gift, of making sarcastic remarks without causing offence.
I said, ‘Look, I know I got involved in causing a disturbance. That’s why I ran off when the policeman asked me to stop. I mean, is that it? What exactly are you accusing me of?’ I hoped this was what an innocent man would have said, and sounded like.
As if I hadn’t spoken, the Inspector said, ‘Dimelow, would you take Mr Holford through and have him fingerprinted.’ Then to me: ‘You’ve no objection to having your fingerprints taken?’
‘Well, no—’
‘Good.’
Dimelow had opened the door. I got up. The halting clatter of a typewriter, operated by someone who couldn’t type, sailed in from the main office. A woman laughed. I stood by the corner of the desk. ‘I’m prepared to do this but I don’t understand why it’s necessary.’ I tried out a shrug. ‘I got involved. I admit it.’
‘What disturbance?’
‘A night or two ago. At the town hall. They were protesting about the Station and I got mixed up in it.’
‘We’re not concerned with that,’ Inspector Blend said shortly. His head was bent, jotting something down. ‘We’re investigating the murder of Rakesh Patundi, an Asian shopkeeper, found strangled on waste ground near his premises.’ He looked up at me. ‘We believe you may be able to help us with our inquiries, Mr Holford. Dimelow, take him through.’
In the outer office Detective-Sergeant Dimelow pressed my fingers onto an inked pad and carefully rolled each one into a numbered box on a sheet of paper with a faintly glossy texture. He slid the sheet under a desk-top magnifying lens and examined the prints. Apparently satisfied, he handed the sheet to a uniformed woman police officer. ‘Run this. C.R.S.C.S. Patundi investigation.’ It was the first time I had heard him speak: his voice jarred with his groomed and tailored appearance, for he had a strong north country accent, which even as a career policeman he hadn’t bothered to modify or soften. Somehow this made him seem more formidable: a man whose appearance and accent, taken separately, might lead you to underestimate him, yet together they suggested an intelligence that was keen and uncompromising.
I cleaned my hands with tissues and a bottle of clear solution that smelled of pear drops, watching the woman police officer place the sheet on a ground glass screen under a strong light. She adjusted the focus and start tapping on a keyboard. Numbers flashed up on the monitor of a computer terminal.
Dimelow touched my elbow. I dropped the used tissues into a waste bin. ‘I need to use the toilet.’
He took me along the corridor and waited inside the door while I pretended to relieve myself. What I really needed was time to think. Several random thoughts – niggling, disturbing, confusing – jostled all together in my head. The first was that my fingerprints were all over the room above the shop. I’d even left a bundle of odds and ends, socks, underclothes. But not the diary, thank God. Then I wondered: how did you prove that one person had strangled another – or that he hadn’t? There was no weapon to find, no gun or knife, no blunt instrument with blood and matted hair. There would be no fingerprints on the neck either, just bruise marks. Such lack of evidence could clear a person, but it could convict him also, by sheer weight of circumstance. It would be too neat an irony, I thought, and found myself smiling rather bitterly, to be charged with a murder I hadn’t committed.
‘Something strike you as funny?’ Dimelow asked me as I turned and stepped down, buttoning my jacket. His pale blue eyes bored right through me.
I wiped the smile away. ‘No. Nothing.’
‘Nothing,’ he said with a sardonic twist of the lips. ‘You want to watch that. Round here we put people away who laugh at nothing.’
‘What makes you think I had anything to do with the murder of the shopkeeper?’
‘Well,’ Dimelow said, opening the door; he reminded me of a salesman, slick in every sense of the word, waiting for a client to pass through, ‘he didn’t strangle himself now, did he? Crafty bastards, these Pakis, but not that clever.’
It might have been a deliberate mistake, casually dropped in, hoping that I’d correct him on Mr Patundi’s nationality; or it might have been that Dimelow thought that everyone with a brown skin was a Paki.
Inspector Blend looked at his watch. He said to Dimelow: ‘What time are they expecting us?’
‘Anytime after ten-thirty.’
‘It’s nearly ten now. How far away is it?’
‘Oh – fifteen minutes. If that.’
‘Right.’ He pulled at his fleshy nose and sniffed once or twice. He fiddled with the pen, which seemed child-size in his large hands. The room felt almost cramped with him in it. ‘One or two questions and then we’ll get along. I’ve got a bloody meeting at four,’ he grumbled. ‘Divisional re-allocation of resources, which is code for cutbacks. Where have you been staying in Brickton, Peter?’
So this was his method: appearing abstracted, his mind busy elsewhere on more important matters – and then dropping in a question out of the blue. Switching casually to first names so you were kept on the hop, never sure from one minute to the next whether this was an interrogation or just a friendly chat.
‘Different places. Bed and breakfasts.’
‘In town?’
‘Yes.’
There seemed no point at all in dragging Diane Locke into it. And I couldn’t be sure that Inspector Blend wasn’t a bosom drinking crony of Benson’s, and that anything I told Blend wouldn’t reach Benson via the Masonic hotline.
‘And living rough by the look of it.’ The faded brown eyes watched me. ‘Why hang around if there’s no work?’
‘I was going to try the processing station.’
‘What as, apprentice nuclear physicist?’
I didn’t smile and neither did he. ‘Somebody told me they took on labourers. I thought I’d have a go. It employs a lot of people in the area.’
‘Loaders, labourers – come off it, Peter, you’re no more a manual worker than I am. Or Detective-Sergeant Dimelow. You wouldn’t last two days with a shovel in your hand.’ He glanced down at the sheet, shaking his heavy head. ‘No settled address, no record of employment, not registered for welfare … and here you are, in Brickton, which isn’t on the way to anywhere, where the climate is lousy, the unemployment rate is over twenty per cent, you don’t know a living soul in the area … or do you?’
Again the question slipped gently in, an afterthought, of minor consequence. I shook my head.
‘So then?’ Blend asked, raising his shaggy eyebrows. ‘Why here, the arse-end of the universe?’
‘I hitched a ride on the motorway and the lorry happened to be coming here. In fact – I remember now – it was the driver who told me they might be looking for loaders.’
‘Was it a B-H Haulage lorry?’
‘No.’
‘Whose was it?’
‘I forget.’
‘Excuse me, sir.’ Dimelow tapped his watch.
‘Right. Yes.’ Blend flipped the file shut and heaved himself up. He handed the file to Dimelow, who tucked it under his arm and opened the door. Blend went ahead. Dimelow jerked his head brusquely at me. The three of us went downstairs in single file and walked across the car park in bright sunshine to a brand-new dark-blue 3-litre Rover, nothing to identify it as a police vehicle. The sergeant got behind the wheel while I sat in the back with Inspector Blend. In answer to my question Blend said, ‘Just somebody to take a look at you.’
The police station was built on a slight rise, modular cubes of grey concrete and tinted glass on a green contoured backcloth with here and there clumps of young saplings, positioned as in an artist’s impression, but paltry and threadbare, adding to the starkness rather than alleviating it. The town was below us, slate roofs falling crookedly away from the high street, a church steeple, the mock-gothic tower of the town hall, the silted-up harbour just glimpsed beyond: in the hard light the town gave the impression of being exposed and unreal, a place which only felt at ease with itself when clothed in dank sea-mist and sweeping radioactive drizzle. We drove in the opposite direction, towards Granthelme. Inspector Blend yawned once or twice and spent the time turning back and forth over the well-thumbed pages of a fat appointments diary, the overlapping folds of his chin resting on his collar.
I tried to feel outrage, to manufacture it, but I couldn’t: how did innocent people behave? I didn’t know the lines. Blend and Dimelow had scripts for their performances, they were word-perfect. They need do nothing but watch and wait for the ham actor to miss his cue.
We passed by a high granite wall and swung in through some iron gates. It was a hospital. We entered by the main door and Dimelow inquired at a glass hatch reinforced with steel mesh and was given directions.
A sister in a blue uniform and white starched cap was waiting for us outside the ward. She and Inspector Blend strolled a little way along the corridor, out of my hearing, and spoke for a minute or two. They came back, and I was conscious that she was deliberately avoiding looking at me, as if I were morally unclean, a paedophile or something. Blend nodded to her and she pushed through the double doors into the ward, leaving the three of us outside.
‘Now Mr Holford,’ Blend said, looming over me, gazing down into my face, ‘I’d like you to accompany the sergeant into the ward and stand where he tells you to stand. You’re to say nothing unless he asks you a direct question. When he’s ready he’ll touch you on the shoulder and you’ll come out. Understand? We’d also like you to cover your hair with something …’ He glanced over my shoulder at Dimelow. A signal passed between them. He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Okay?’
‘Yes. All right.’
We went into the ward. It was small, containing eight beds, all of them masked off by curtains. It was absolutely silent, so that when something metallic clinked in the far corner it had the effect of a gunshot. I had smelled death before, but not like this. This kind of death hung clammily to the skin and seeped into the pores. It was like being in a Turkish bath of putrefaction. Dimelow took my arm and led me forward. Blend had disappeared somewhere. We halted before a curtain. The sister’s bare dimpled arm came sexily through the curtain and she slipped out. She handed a round paper hat to Dimelow, pale green, of the disposable type surgeons wear, which he fitted onto my head. It came down to within an inch above my eyebrows.
‘Are we ready, Sister?’
She drew back the curtain. Under the pressure of Dimelow’s hand I moved up until I was standing at the bed rail, looking at a hairless knob of bone covered in brown waxpaper with two shiny orbs resembling the glass marbles they use for dolls’ eyes. The brown torso was bare to the waist, the breastbone and narrow ribcage almost showing white, like those of a starving African child on TV. There were two ridges in the covers, not much thicker than tent-poles, extending towards the foot of the bed and ending in feet. I hardly recognised it but I knew it was Mr Patundi’s sick son.
I remembered his name. Kamal.
Next to his head on the pillow lay a stuffed brown elephant with a curled-up trunk and crinkled ears.
The curtain to my left drifted slightly in what I thought was a draught, even though the room was humid and airless. Then I glimpsed Inspector Blend’s weary eye observing the child through a slit, watching for a flicker of expression in those shiny too-brightly staring orbs trapped in the wasting piece of tissue.
For perhaps two minutes I stood motionless under the child’s scrutiny. The sister’s hand rested lightly on the banked pillows above his head, as if to reinforce her role and duty as protector. She didn’t look at me; I was, it seemed, condemned already as the killer of the boy’s father.
‘He can hear everything we say?’ Dimelow asked the sister. ‘And understand?’
‘Yes, he understands. He knows everything that’s going on. His mind’s still active.’
‘Did the man you saw in the shop say anything to you?’ Dimelow asked the child. ‘Did you hear him speak?’
The tiny brown fists curled up. The boy nodded.
‘Tell him your name, where you were born and the date,’ Dimelow said to me.
‘My name is Peter Holford.’ I tried to speak normally, though to my ears it sounded stilted and unfamiliar, the voice of a stranger. ‘I was born in Chesterfield on the twenty-fifth of February, 1950.’
‘Read this.’ Dimelow took out some papers from his inside pocket, sorted through them and shoved a leaflet into my hand.
‘“For those researching their family tree, all three Collections contain much useful information, including the Census Returns, Parish Registers, Non-Conformist Registers, Directories, Electoral Rolls and many more. A full list of holdings is available for consultation in the Local Studies section.’”
Dimelow plucked the leaflet from my hand. He touched me on the shoulder and we came away. The air in the corridor felt like an icy blast, and I could feel cold trickles of sweat on my cheeks and neck. I wiped my forehead with my handkerchief and found I was still wearing the paper hat. Dimelow crumpled it in his freckled fist.
It was ten minutes before Blend emerged. His face gave nothing away. Whatever Patundi’s son had or hadn’t told him, whether he was triumphant or dismayed or merely disappointed, there was no trace, nor was his manner towards me any different.
In the car park Blend said, ‘Do you know who that was?’
‘The shopkeeper’s son.’
Blend nodded. He glanced sideways at me, his eyes hooded. ‘You assumed that … of course.’
‘Yes. Who else could it be?’
Sergeant Dimelow opened the door for the Inspector.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ I asked.
‘Leukaemia,’ Inspector Blend grunted as he curled himself up to squeeze into the back seat. ‘They say he’s got three months, poor little bugger, though he could be dead tomorrow.’
The young constable who had brought me up from the cells set down a tray with tea things and a plate of biscuits. Sergeant Dimelow poured out three cups. He added sugar to his and stood up while he drank it, awkwardly feeding himself a digestive from the hand that held the saucer. He was very careful not to get any crumbs on his suit.
There was a strange mood of cosy unreality in the room. It struck me that they had gathered the evidence, fitted the pieces neatly and satisfyingly together to make a watertight case, and now that the strain of confrontation was over and done with, the shifty game of question and answer ended, they could relax in my presence, as if there was a natural complicity between the accusers and the condemned.
Returning to the police station, Inspector Blend and the sergeant had gone away for half-an-hour. I sat and waited in the interview room, watched over by the young sweet-smelling constable, unable to erase the wasted, withering body and the glassily bright doll’s eyes staring out from the knob of bone. A cause of leukaemia in children was exposure to radiation. Were the remaining seven beds in the ward occupied by dying children? The town was a dumping ground for radiocative sludge, Benson and his lucrative haulage contract had seen to that. Schoolchildren were probably taken to the local baths, whose heating costs – thanks to enlightened and prudent civic house-keeping – were virtually nil. Benson had the town sewn up tight. Brickton was his private profit-lode. He had made only one mistake, which he might yet live to regret: by not trusting Russell Rhodes, and scheming that something in addition to money might be necessary to secure his loyalty and silence, Benson had made a tape-recording.
It would be a weird and cruel quirk of justice, I thought, if the Patundi child was to be the instrument which would bring about the destruction of the one person who might avenge his death.
I stirred my tea and waited for the Inspector to sort out his papers. Was this how such matters as murder and culpability, crime and punishment, were dealt with – over tea and biscuits?
‘We’d like you to sign a couple of forms before you go,’ Blend said, shuffling paperwork. ‘Just to say you were treated fairly and courteously during questioning, placed under no duress, and that you have no complaint to make against the police authority in regard to this matter.’
I swallowed some hot tea and managed not to choke or splutter.
‘You have no objection to signing?’
‘No, none at all.’ I put the cup down quickly so that it wouldn’t rattle against the saucer. ‘You’re finished with me? I mean your inquiries are – completed?’
‘We still have an unsolved murder, Mr Holford,’ Inspector Blend said gloomily. He sighed into his cup and drank his tea. ‘Committed by a person or persons unknown, without apparent motive. Nothing was taken from the shop, the safe wasn’t tampered with. We do know that somebody stayed in the room above the shop – we have a good set of prints – and that’s the person we’re anxious to interview. He could be an outsider, like yourself, or a local man. Frankly we don’t know.’
‘The child – the boy,’ I said ‘– he could identify this person?’
‘Possibly. He certainly saw him. But the lad is seriously ill, and children’s evidence is very difficult to assess anyway. To them, all adults, unless they’re extremely old, appear to be the same age. He thinks this man was about the same age as his father, but …’ Blend smiled and shrugged.
‘How old was his father?’
‘Forty-three.’
‘That’s my age,’ I said.
Blend nodded. ‘That didn’t escape us. It was one of the first links we made between yourself and the man we wish to interview. But the child is certain, so he says, that he’s never set eyes on you before.’ He pushed two printed forms across the desk and laid his pen on top of them. ‘And even if he had made a positive identification we would have reasons to doubt it.’
‘What reasons?’ It was curiosity and astonishment that made me blurt it out.
‘You have a right to know, I suppose. We were unable to obtain a match with your prints and those found in the room where the man stayed, that’s number one – would you mind signing those?’
I picked up the pen. I had to summon up all my powers of concentration to sign my name. Had someone else, another person, been in that room and obliterated all signs of my presence, wiped every surface and object clean? It seemed not only unlikely, but impossible. I wanted to protest, You’ve made a mistake – of course they’re my fingerprints! Search again! Double-check! Computers aren’t infallible. Take me back to the hospital and let me convince the boy that I’m the man he saw …
I laid the pen down. ‘Was that all?’
‘What?’
‘You said reasons.’
Blend slid a manilla envelope from underneath the blue folder, inserted two blunt fingers inside the flap and pushed a ten-by-eight black-and-white photograph across the desk. I was aware that he was watching me, waiting for my reaction.
‘We think there’s a possibility that this could be the man.’
The camera’s flashlight had whitened the already fair skin so that the body looked bleached and bloated, lying there on a metal table with drainage channels leading to sluice holes in the corners which reminded me of the pockets on a snooker table. The damp black hair was brushed straight back, the lips pale and puckered through the tangle of dark beard. The photograph showed him from the waist up, revealed the faint bruising on his upper arms and shoulders.
Blend leaned forward on his elbows. ‘You’re not in the habit of making anonymous phone calls to the police, are you, Mr Holford?’
I shook my head.
‘Somebody did. That’s how we came to find him in the harbour.’
‘Drowned?’
‘No, he didn’t drown.’
‘Who is he?’
‘You don’t recognise him?’
‘No,’ I said steadily. ‘Why should I?’
My reaction – or lack of it – must have satisfied him, because Inspector Blend slid the print back in the envelope. He said, ‘We have reason to believe it’s the body of a man named Smith who absconded from a mental institution in Cheshire about a week ago. Though we’ve yet to have the identification confirmed.’
‘What about his fingerprints? Did they match those you found in the shop?’
Inspector Blend gave a weary smile. ‘That would have been easy, wouldn’t it? Too easy – if he had any fingerprints. They’ve been burned off with some kind of acidic solution.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘You know, Mr Holford, by dyeing your hair and growing a beard there’s a pretty close resemblance between the two of you. You were lucky not to involve yourself in a lot of trouble.’
‘I realise that now,’ I said.
‘Yes, well, if you wouldn’t mind,’ he said, glancing at his watch, ‘we’ve got other things to do. We won’t detain you any further.’
‘There’s something else,’ I blurted out, surprising myself. ‘It’s to do with Benson.’
‘Benson? Who’s that?’
It was as I’d thought. If Blend had been a local man he’d have known at once about Mr Big of Brickton, town councillor and businessman, but the name meant nothing to him.
‘He runs B-H Haulage.’
Inspector Blend drummed on the desk. ‘I haven’t the time, nor the inclination, to concern myself with your petty personal problems, Mr Holford.’ He slipped the forms into the folder and flipped it shut. ‘I don’t fancy opening another can of worms.’
‘What do you mean?’
The faded brown eyes were pained, faintly irritable. ‘You’ve already told us that you went along to Benson’s firm for a job and were turned down. Frankly, I’m not interested in any grudge you might have against him, or any disagreements between you.’ Blend finished his tea and pushed his chair back. ‘As long as your difference of opinion doesn’t involve homicide, Mr Holford, I really couldn’t care less …’
‘What if it does?’
Blend held out the folder to Dimelow, who took it from him. He said, ‘I already have four murder inquiries on the go; I can well do without another.’
‘But …’
‘Yes?’
‘The boy in the hospital.’ I swallowed and gulped out, ‘That’s murder.’
‘Leukaemia isn’t murder, Mr Holford.’ Blend spoke to Sergeant Dimelow: ‘Clear those with the Super and make copies, would you?’ Dimelow went out.
‘This is important. I have to tell you.’ I didn’t like the sound of my voice, the thin note of pleading in it, but I couldn’t restrain it. ‘Benson’s firm has been dumping radiocative waste here. He’s poisoning the town for profit. Those children in the hospital—’
‘Benson’s the ogre, is he?’
I gripped the edge of the desk. ‘He’s paying off one of the managers at the Station – a man called Rhodes. They’re both involved in a scheme to pipe hot water to the local swimming baths, which is supposed to save the council thousands of pounds a year.’
Inspector Blend leaned his elbow on the back of the chair, toying with the lobe of his ear. ‘I get it. It’s a conspiracy, right? The Station, the council, Benson, this chap Rhodes, they’re all up to their necks in this scheme and it so happens that you’re the one person to have tumbled to it.’
‘Benson and Rhodes are involved but I don’t know who else.’
‘Sure it’s not the Mafia?’
Dimelow came back in, leaving the door open. The young constable hovered alertly outside.
Blend stood up, buttoning his jacket, huge and still solid under the slack of advancing years. As a young copper he would have pounded the beat, knocking heads together, settling family disputes, never having to deal with a murder from one year’s end to the next. Now he had four on his plate, meetings chaired by the chief constable to sit through, and a shabby itinerant with a personal vendetta babbling on about piped hot water and radioactive waste.
‘I can’t face shepherd’s pie and rhubarb tart in the canteen; we’ll stop for lunch on the way.’
Sergeant Dimelow smiled. ‘Right, sir.’
‘Mr Holford was just telling me an interesting story,’ Blend said, poker-faced.
‘It isn’t a story,’ I said. ‘It’s true. I can prove it.’
‘Oh yes?’ Blend stopped at the door, glancing back at me over his shoulder. ‘How?’
‘There’s a tape. I stole it from his car.’
‘Whose car?’
‘Benson’s car.’
Even as I was saying this, blabbing it almost in desperation, something was bothering me, something vital that I’d forgotten.
‘You stole this tape from Benson’s car,’ Blend said pedantically.
‘Yes! It’s a conversation he had with Rhodes about the money he was paying him – five thousand pounds – to keep his mouth shut.’
What the hell was it, the niggling thing? Something to do with the tape … or something on tape? What was this unknown, forgotten thing that sent the fear of God through me?
‘I don’t recall any tape.’ Blend glanced inquiringly at Dimelow. ‘Was there a tape listed among Mr Holford’s belongings? No, I didn’t think there was.’
This was impossible, like trying to give the answers to someone filling in a crossword puzzle without them knowing what the clues were. What did I have to do to convince Blend that …
Then it hit me. The unknown, forgotten, frightening thing.
I remembered.
I remembered Benson’s voice on the tape saying Wayne will see to Holford. He’ll be dumped with the next load from the Station …
That would intrigue Inspector Blend: he would wonder about it. He would puzzle over the fact that only recently he had interrogated this man Holford whose body Benson had planned to have dumped in the harbour. Next question. If the body lying on the mortuary slab was actually that of Holford, not Smith, then who was the person he had eliminated from his inquiries into the Patundi murder? If not Peter Holford, as he claimed to be, then who was he?
That was the dangerous question all right. Who was he?
‘So where is it, then, this tape you say you stole from Benson’s car?’
I found myself staring at the crease in Sergeant Dimelow’s trousers; you could have sliced cheese with it. I shook my head slowly. ‘I’ve forgotten.’
‘You’ve forgotten. Unfortunate.’
‘I think I must have lost it.’
‘Careless of you,’ Blend said, not at all unkindly. He said, ‘Look here, there are other jobs, Mr Holford. Don’t take it too hard. I don’t suppose Benson meant it personally when he wouldn’t take you on. Try somewhere else. Your luck might change.’
Dimelow followed him out.