It was six o’clock. Angel looked up from his desk. He arched his back then straightened up and stretched it. He sighed. It had been one of those days. He usually finished at five, but there was so much paperwork. He didn’t want to be suffocated in the stuff. He wanted to clear his desk so that he could give full attention to the Pleasant case. He gathered the remaining papers on his desk into a pile and slipped them into the top drawer and locked it. He closed the office door, tramped down the quiet green-painted corridor, past the empty cells and out of the rear door. He got in the BMW and had intended going straight home but as he reached the station car park entrance, he slowed the car. He recalled that he had not yet seen Stanley Jones. He had hoped to question him the day previous, but there had not been time. He had also wanted to interview him away from the influence of his father. He knew how inhibiting Emlyn Jones could be; he didn’t want him nodding and winking at his son behind his back, and interrupting and prompting the young man at every twist and turn of the questioning. But he was tired. He had had a long day; nevertheless, he made the decision to call on him. He had the address on the back of an envelope in his pocket, so he stopped the car and consulted it: ‘Flat 14, Council Close, Potts New Estate, Bromersley.’
He pressed the indicator to the left and let in the clutch.
It was in the better class of council estates on the outskirts of Bromersley; the flats had not been up for very long. Number fourteen was on the ground floor. He rang the bell and waited.
An athletic young man in a vest, jogging trousers and trainers pulled open the door. He had a long nose and sharp chin like a boxer and his hair was shiny black and flat as if it had been stuck down with Cherry Blossom. He spoke with a slight touch of a Welsh accent, boyo, and he stuck out his chin challengingly when he spoke.
‘Yes? Oh it’s you. Detective Inspector Angel. I remember you. Tried to get me on a shoplifting charge years ago, but you couldn’t make it stick. Short on evidence, weren’t you? What do you want? My father said you would call. Something to do with my mother’s fancy piece, Charles Pleasant. Or should I say ex-fancy piece?’
‘Not entirely,’ Angel said. ‘May I come in? Can we talk somewhere quietly?’
A woman’s voice from the inside of the house yelled, ‘Stanley! Whoever it is, get shut of them. Your dinner’s ready.’
Jones glanced behind him, tightened his lips then said, ‘Can’t see you now.’
Angel’s head came up. His muscles tightened. ‘It’s very important,’ he said. ‘We are talking about the death of a man.’
‘Won’t it do tomorrow?’
Angel licked his lips. ‘I can come back in a hour, I suppose.’
Jones hesitated. He looked back along the hall and then at Angel. ‘Well, better get it over with, I suppose. Come in,’ he snapped.
The house was a jumble of furniture old and new with no special style or care about it at all. He showed Angel into the front room and pointed at a dusty upholstered chair. ‘Sit there.’ He touched his nose with his forefinger and said, ‘I remember, I have just to get something.’
Jones went back out into the hall.
Angel looked round the small room. It was overfull with furniture, three easy chairs, all odd, a TV with a huge screen, and a piano across the back wall with lots of women’s clothes draped untidily over it. On top of the clothes bizarrely he saw a solitary parsnip. He stood up, picked it up and looked closely at it to make sure that, indeed, that’s what it was. It was a long root. It had been scrubbed clean but not peeled and its top had been neatly cut off. He remembered he had seen a bunch of parsnips, but unwashed and unprepared complete with their green tops, incongruously on the cupboard in his father’s, Emlyn Jones’s, office. He frowned and then smiled as he wondered if raw parsnips were used in some ritual that he had not yet heard of … something peculiar to the Welsh?
Suddenly he heard banter between Jones and a squawky female. His voice was getting louder. He was coming back.
Angel gasped, quickly banged the parsnip down exactly where he had found it on top of the woman’s coat on the piano, and returned to the chair.
Jones came through the door and eyed Angel uncertainly. He was carrying what looked like a sheet of A4 paper with some heavy colouring on the reverse side. He kept it close to his chest turned away so that Angel couldn’t see the picture.
‘She’s a bit upset. Dinner’s spoiling. Let’s get it over with. What do you want?’
Angel nodded. ‘As you obviously know by now, Charles Pleasant was shot dead at his scrapyard on Sunday afternoon. I need to know where your father was at the time.’
Jones’s lips curled downwards. ‘It was my mother put you up to this wasn’t it?’
‘An accusation has been made,’ he replied trying to stay cool. ‘I just have the job of following it up, that’s all.’
‘My mother has put you up to this though, hasn’t she?’
‘I don’t need or want to get into any of your family disputes, Mr Jones. They are not my business. If you know where your father was on Sunday afternoon, just tell me.’
Stanley Jones turned the A4 sheet of paper over and held it in front of Angel’s eyes. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take a good look at that. Take it.’
Angel took the sheet of paper. On it was printed a photograph. It was in colour and it showed the head and shoulders close-up of two men, taken from a low angle. Behind them was a clock hanging high up on a wall that showed the time to be 4.30 exactly, and a banner underneath it that read: ‘Congratulations to Potts for 20 years security’.
‘That was taken at The Feathers Hotel last Sunday afternoon.’
Angel recognized the hotel ballroom. He had been in there many a time. The Police Federation held local meetings there, and he’d been there as a wedding guest not long since. His eyebrows shot up when he saw that the two men, standing side by side, raising champagne glasses, were Emlyn Jones and Detective Superintendent Harker.
Angel stared at the photograph and noted thankfully that Harker was in civvies, and not in uniform, even though it looked like he was wearing an ill fitting dark suit that he had seen him wear sometimes in the office that had been his grandfather’s.
‘I took that photograph,’ Jones said, sticking his chin out. ‘Got the original on my computer.’ He put his finger on the Superintendent and said, ‘And he’s one of yours.’ He forced a smile and a snigger. ‘I spoke to him. He spoke back to me. Not very bright for a copper, though.’
Angel didn’t comment. He peered closely at the photograph again. It was printed on regular computer photocopier paper and certainly seemed to be the genuine article.
‘Take it. It’s yours,’ Jones said and ran his hand over his shiny black hair. ‘I can give you as many copies of it as you like. Anything else you want to know, Inspector?’ he said cockily.
It certainly seemed to be conclusive. It needed checking out with the Superintendent, of course. If it was as genuine as it seemed, neither Emlyn Jones nor his son, Stanley, could have murdered Charles Pleasant.
Holding the paper, Angel stood up. ‘That’s fine for now,’ he said. ‘Thank you. That’s all I wanted to know.’
Jones smiled at him with his mouth but not with his steely black eyes. He crossed the little room, grabbed hold of the knob and pulled the door open widely.
Angel nodded, slowly crossed over to the doorway and turned.
‘Anything else?’ Jones snarled.
‘No,’ Angel said. ‘Thank you.’ As he spoke, he noticed out of his eye corner that the parsnip that had been on top of the coat on the piano was no longer there. It had mysteriously disappeared. His eyebrows shot up uncontrollably.
It was seven o’clock when Angel arrived home.
Mary Angel was not in her usual pleasant frame of mind.
‘I hope you’re not going to start coming home at this ridiculous time on a regular basis again,’ she said, whilst banging pans, rattling pots and jangling cutlery as if to emphasize her mood. ‘Sit down. I couldn’t possibly keep your dinner from shrivelling up.’
Angel poured himself a cold German beer straight from the fridge. Then he pulled out a chair and sat down at the kitchen table.
‘Couldn’t be helped, love.’
‘That’s what you always say.’
She dropped something dark brown and solid on to a plate.
He thought it clattered on to it like a pair of handcuffs.
‘If you can’t eat it, I suppose I can do you some eggs.’
He looked at it quizzically. ‘It’ll be fine.’
She turned back to the oven top and took off a pan lid. She looked inside. ‘You wouldn’t think so to look at them, but these were boiled potatoes.’ She slapped the mush on to his plate. Then returned to the oven top for another pan. She slapped something out of that pan on to his plate.
‘What’s this?’
‘Parsnips.’
He smiled. ‘Parsnips!’ He shook his head and said, ‘I knew it would be.’
‘What do you mean? I thought you liked parsnips?’
‘I do. I do.’
‘Gravy?’
‘Ta, love.’
He dug into the meal. The vegetables and gravy were tolerably edible, but the handcuffs were too tough to cut through.
She sat at the table with him sipping a glass of tonic water.
He told her about seeing the bunch of parsnips in Emlyn Jones’s office, and the single one in his son Stanley’s house, and how in both instances the men had promptly hidden them away from him as if, in some way, they were an illegal substance.
‘Maybe they were a bit self-conscious, and thought that it was wrong to have vegetables anywhere but in the kitchen.’
He wrinkled his nose. He didn’t think that was the explanation at all.
‘Is there anything else useful you can do with a parsnip besides eating it?’ he said.
‘There’s parsnip wine.’
‘Ah yes. Potent too, I believe,’ he said. But that wasn’t the explanation either. He knew human nature. There was something more significant that that.
‘Parsnips are not involved in the preparation of medicines are they?’
‘I don’t imagine so.’
‘Or poisons? They don’t represent a particular symbol of anything to gypsies or witches or the occult? There are lots of young lasses running round with crystals and amethysts and candles, making all sorts of smells and weird claims. There’s apple bobbing—’
Mary looked at him and smiled. ‘Michael. A parsnip is simply a vegetable. That’s all.’
‘I know. I know.’
‘I seem to remember something about cutting up carrots and boiling them in water for a long time … six hours, I think,’ she said.
Angel pulled a face.
‘You were supposed to drink it … as a protection against the plague.’
‘Yes, but that was carrots and four or five hundred years ago,’ he said.
‘Well I have no other suggestions, Michael. As I said, a parsnip is simply a vegetable. That’s all.’
He nodded but he wasn’t convinced. ‘The Joneses were up to something, Mary. They may have murdered Pleasant, or they may not. Whatever they were up to somehow, somewhere, in some way, it involved parsnips, or why would they attempt to hide them from me?’
Mary Angel was bored with the subject. She picked up the magazine with the quiz in it.
‘There’s one I can’t do, Michael. You might know it.’
‘Yes?’
‘What’s the collective word for a gathering of crows or ravens?
He knew this from way back. ‘A murder,’ he said.
Her face brightened.
‘That’s what I thought,’ she said, digging her ballpoint into the magazine.
‘What’s that all about?’
‘It’s a quiz in this magazine. The first prize is £50,000.’
He sniffed. ‘It would pay the gas bill, anyway.’
‘And get me a new coat.’
‘And pay the council tax.’
‘Dream on.’
Angel arrived at the station the following morning at 8.28 a.m. and went straight up to Superintendent Harker’s office, handed him the computer-printed photograph and asked for confirmation that it was indeed a true picture of him standing next to Emlyn Jones.
Harker stared at the picture for a full half minute, while, at the same time sticking a white menthol inhaler up his nostril and sniffing. At length he said: ‘Yes. That’s Emlyn Jones and that’s me, but I hardly exchanged six words with the man throughout the entire afternoon. That photograph must have been taken by young Jones without my noticing. He was flying around the room all the time with a camera, I remember.’
Angel sniffed.
‘The Chief Constable thought that someone should accept the invitation from Councillor Potts and attend as an observer,’ Harker continued. ‘It’s as well to know what’s going on in the town. I didn’t attend Potts’s function to be seen to approve or support his business or his friends in any way, you know. I really have no idea how effective Potts’s company is. All I know is that I see his annoying little advertising signs of a man in a quasi-police uniform with a German Shepherd dog next to him, fastened to fences and hammered on to doors and gates all over the place.’
‘As evidence, it really is quite significant, sir,’ Angel said. ‘Charles Pleasant’s partner, Jazmin, is the mother of Stanley and was once the wife of Emlyn Jones.’
‘Mmm. I see the clock shows 1630 hours. The anonymous phone call was timed in at 1625 hours, so the actual moment of death was obviously even earlier than that.’
‘Mac was very quickly on the scene. Blood from some of the wounds was not congealed. He agrees the time was around or even a little before 1620.’
‘That’s near enough. There’s no question of Jones, or his son, being able to be at the scrapyard on Sebastopol Terrace at 1620 hours and then back at The Feathers at 1630.’
‘No, sir. But I will check up on the accuracy of that ballroom clock.’
Harker’s head came up. ‘Why?’
‘Jones had a powerful motive. I’d like to be absolutely certain. If the clock has been interfered with, it would invalidate Jones’s photograph as an alibi, wouldn’t it?’
Harker looked up at Angel and blinked. ‘Yes, of course.’