He had a warm feeling of compassion towards Larry Longley, as well as the heady feeling of playing a leading role in the beginning of the restoration of justice to him and the ill-fated Longley family. The emotion was still with him as he arrived home, closed the back door and turned the key.
He was greeted by the satisfying smell of sizzling beef fat and the sound of bubbling from vegetable pans on the oven top.
Mary was by the sink, rinsing a serving spoon under the tap. She turned when she heard the door close. ‘You’re early.’
He stepped past the steamy oven, leaned over and gave her a peck on the cheek.
She smiled then blinked. ‘You’ve got the murderer.’
‘No,’ he said as opened the fridge and took out a beer.
She frowned. ‘You’ve arrested the gang that robbed the bank,’ she said, passing him a glass tumbler from the drainer on the worktop.
‘No.’ He poured out the beer.
She looked at him with her lips half formed into a smile. ‘Harker’s taken a job in … Tasmania?’
He knew Mary was ribbing him, but he couldn’t smile. There was nothing funny about Horace Harker. He took a trial sip of the beer, swallowed it, then took a good swig.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m going to get an innocent man out of prison.’
She turned to face him square on, opened her eyes widely and said, ‘Really?’
He told her about the interview and the facts that led up to the voluntary statement from Jazmin Frazer. She was impressed and pleased, and listened to the details. They chatted through the meal about the consequences and change to the status quo and then she said, ‘But will her evidence assist you in finding Charles Pleasant’s murderer?’
He frowned then said, ‘It might highlight the suspects.’
She thought for a moment as she swallowed to clear her mouth. Then she said, ‘Well, who are they?’
Angel looked up from an enticing piece of beef that wouldn’t come away from the bone, wondering if she was really serious.
‘The prime suspect would be Emlyn Jones, wouldn’t it?’ she said. ‘When Bridie Longley was murdered, her sister, Jazmin Jones, as she was known at the time, left Emlyn and moved in with Pleasant. He would be bound to hate Pleasant as a consequence.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But he’s got a 24-carat alibi: the photograph with the super, taken by his son, Stanley.’
‘And the clock showing the time at 4.30.’
‘The clock at 4.30. His son, Stanley, would have been a suspect too. He wouldn’t have liked his mother hopping off to Charles Pleasant, would he? And it was Stanley who took the photograph, so he couldn’t have shot him either. The super saw him and positively confirms it.’
‘Who else? What about Abe Longley? He was Bridie and Larry Longley’s son, wasn’t he?’
‘He would be the next most likely suspect, but I’ve just seen him. He’s got a watertight alibi. He was with his girlfriend and her parents at the time of the murder. Then there’s Grant Molloy. The man who worked for Pleasant. He was fiddling Pleasant. I don’t know if Pleasant knew about it, or what their relationship was like. But he was downright dishonest. He even found his way into Pleasant’s hidden safe.’
‘He stole the jade head, didn’t he?’
‘Well, yes, he did, but he couldn’t have murdered Pleasant either. His foot didn’t fit the plaster cast.’
‘Oh.’ She was quiet for a moment as she cut away a mouthful of apple pie with her fork and spoon.
‘Mmmm. Who else?’
Angel had just pushed in a large spoonful of the apple pie and was trying to chew it out of the way so that he could reply.
‘There’s Jazmin herself,’ Mary said.
His eyebrows shot up. They came down slowly and turned into a frown. He chewed quickly and swallowed. ‘Couldn’t be her,’ he said. ‘Her foot wouldn’t fit the plaster cast.’
He put the spoon and fork in the dish and pushed it away.
They had finished the meal. Mary poured the coffee thoughtfully and they carried it through to the sitting room.
When they were settled she said, ‘Michael, are you sure about that footprint? Are you sure it is the murderer’s?’
‘I’m sure of nothing, love, but the range and direction of the bullets fired at Pleasant fit; the used shells ejected from the gun were found on the soft earth of the dug up road, exactly in the place where they would have fallen if a right-handed man in his bare feet had been standing there and had fired a handgun.’
‘So you know the murderer was right-handed?’
‘He must have been.’
She frowned. ‘You keep saying “he”.’
‘Because the plaster cast is of a man’s foot.’
‘Oh. I see.’
They drank the coffee in silence for a few moments, then Mary said, ‘I’ve been thinking.’
Angel wrinkled his nose.
‘If Larry Longley didn’t murder his wife,’ she said, ‘how did that chopper come to be found buried in his garden?’
‘Obviously it was planted there. Expecting the police to find it. That was the crux of the whole case. That’s what finally made the jury bring in a guilty verdict.’
‘Well, how did it get there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If you find that out, you’re one step nearer to finding out who murdered Charles Pleasant, aren’t you?’
Angel frowned. He was thinking about what Mary had said.
‘Well,’ she said impatiently. ‘What do you think?’
‘I was thinking … is there any more apple pie?’
It was 8.35 on Friday the 10th when Angel pulled up at Hellman’s giant butcher shop on St George’s Road. He stepped inside the brightly illuminated, mirror, glass, chrome and white ceramic emporium, where meat of every shape and texture was displayed seductively under gleaming clear glass. Fifteen men and women dressed in white overalls and hats ran hither and thither up to the long counter and back to the huge cutting and refrigeration area under the watchful eye of a big man seated at a high desk in a glass case strategically placed at the far end of the uncommonly long counter.
Customers were efficiently and pleasantly served and for them, there was no hanging around.
Angel showed his identity to one of the young men in white, who tracked down and along behind the long counter to the end to consult with the big man in the glass case. He looked over the half glasses at Angel who stood patiently amid animated customers, mostly women, thrusting, pointing and questioning the long-suffering and hygienically attired men and women in white.
The young man returned and directed Angel out of the shop door and up the outside of the building to a side door that was opened as he arrived by the big man himself.
‘Inspector Angel?’ he said, red faced and breathing heavily. ‘You want to see me? Come on through.’
He led the way into a small but impressive-looking office. He slumped into a big chair behind a desk and pointed to a chair facing him.
Angel began speaking as soon as he sat down. ‘You’re Adolphe Hellman. You have two shops, a stall in the market, you sell fresh meat to most of the schools in Bromersley, and pre-packed sandwiches and some prepared meals to the Cheapo chain of supermarkets.’
‘That’s right,’ Hellman said.
‘You import tinned and fresh meat products as well as salad items from abroad.’
‘Huh,’ he snorted. ‘You have been through my books.’
‘No, but I’ve been through Charles Pleasant’s books,’ Angel said looking straight into the bloodshot eyes.
‘Oh?’ Hellman said. He didn’t look pleased. His thick eyebrows lowered and he took out a big spotless handkerchief and wiped it across his forehead.
‘Also, you used to employ Larry Longley?’
‘I did.’
‘And you came to his defence when he was accused of murdering his wife, Bridie, when things looked very black for him.’
‘I did. Indeed, I did. By the way, Inspector, I should say that figures alone do not tell the complete story.’
‘And it was from your shop that he took the chopper that he used to hack Bridie Frazer’s body to pieces.’
‘Apparently. Yes. He must have done.’
‘No, he didn’t,’ Angel said.
Hellman’s head came up. His jaw dropped. He blinked, held up his hands then frowned.
‘Now, you own Charles Pleasant’s house,’ Angel said. ‘The Hacienda.’
‘I do. What are you getting at, Inspector?’
‘For which you paid only £50,000.’
‘Ah. Yes.’ He held up a finger quickly and added, ‘But there’s a reason for that.’
‘What is it?’
‘He was extremely short of money.’
‘That doesn’t make sense. You owed him a fortune, for the transport of your imported goods, from London to here. You didn’t pay him for months. It added up to a pretty figure.’
‘I owed everybody. It is difficult making a profit in the butchering business, Inspector. Staff wages. Competition from the multiples. Health and Safety regulations. Ministry of this, that and the other. Foot and mouth. It’s hell, I tell you.’
‘At the same time as you owed him all this money, the Frazer sisters were milking him at a colossal rate.’
He shook his head. He didn’t know what to say. He waved the handkerchief at him. ‘I’m not responsible for what the Frazer girls got up to.’
‘He was paying you eight hundred pounds a week. What was that for?’
His jaw stiffened. He clenched his hands. ‘Look, I don’t have to answer these questions. I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘If you refuse to answer I can arrest you for obstructing police with their inquiries.’
He groaned. ‘Rent. Rent on The Hacienda.’
‘Eight hundred pounds a week?’
‘Yes. I own it. It’s worth it. I am entitled to ask whatever rent I like.’
‘But you only paid £50,000 for the house. Laughably, the surviving Frazer sister, Jazmin, will be the one paying you the outrageous sum of eight hundred a week for the privilege of living in what she currently believes is her house. She doesn’t know that Charles Pleasant sold it from under her nose and that you are her landlord. Wait till she finds that out!’
Hellman held his hands in the air. ‘One has to do one’s best.’
‘I suppose that amounts to taking advantage of a man in financial difficulty.’
‘I was the one in financial difficulty, Inspector Angel. Me. Adolphe Hellman! Charles Pleasant? No. Never. His father left him a thriving metal retrieving business, and he sold his own transport business for a seven-figure sum, I believe. I bought the house to help him out. We both had cashflow problems. The butchering business … I have told you, it is difficult to make a profit. I still have a cash flow problem. Even now. Yes. A big cash flow problem. Do you know what the total council tax bill is for my properties?’
‘You owed Charles Pleasant so much money for transporting your stuff from the London docks and Smithfield market that he could have bankrupted you if he had issued a writ for the money you owed him?’
‘Yes. Well, at the time, maybe,’ he said as he wiped his fat red neck with the sticky handkerchief. ‘I wouldn’t want the world to know that. It is not good for business.’
Angel rubbed his chin thoughtfully for a few seconds, then his eyelids rose up and then down. ‘So when Charles Pleasant suggested that you gave him Larry Longley’s chopper straight from the position in the shop where he had last put it, you agreed.’
Hellman’s face went scarlet. ‘I did not agree,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have betrayed an employee like that. It’s disgraceful that you should suggest such a thing. I loved that man.’
‘If you didn’t give him the chopper, then you must have been the murderer of Bridie Frazer.’
‘I murdered nobody. What are you trying to do to me?’
‘Be sensible, Mr Hellman. If you didn’t murder her, then Charles Pleasant must have done. In which case, how did he get hold of the chopper?’
‘I don’t know. He didn’t. I mean, it was Larry Longley who—’
‘You left it somewhere where Charles Pleasant could easily have helped himself to it.’
‘This is outrageous! I want my solicitor. I am entitled to have my solicitor present.’
Angel jumped to his feet. ‘Yes, sir. You are,’ he said. ‘Come with me down to the station. We’ll record all this and we’ll have your solicitor in, and do all this officially … on the record.’
Hellman looked up at the ceiling and rubbed his chin vigorously. He remained seated and said, ‘I have just remembered; I can’t. I am expecting a big delivery of beef carcasses. I need to check them before they are unloaded.’
Angel slowly sat down again. ‘Let’s not play games, Mr Hellman. If you didn’t kill Bridie Frazer, you know who did. And it was the person you let have Larry Longley’s chopper.’
Hellman’s bottom lip quivered.
Angel stared into his eyes. ‘It was Charles Pleasant, wasn’t it,’ he said.
Hellman gave the very slightest nod, then quickly turned his bloodshot eyes away from Angel’s penetrating gaze.
Angel now knew the truth. He licked his lips and said, ‘You must know that the finding of the chopper buried in his own garden with Bridie’s blood still on it proved to be the vital evidence that sealed Larry Longley’s fate.’
‘No. I know nothing about it,’ Hellman said weakly.
‘After Charles Pleasant had murdered her, he dumped her in the scrapyard, took the chopper from here, hewed her to pieces, then buried the weapon in Larry Longley’s garden. He put her remains in an old oil drum and transported it in one of his lorries down the A1.’
Hellman covered his face with his handkerchief. ‘I know nothing about it, I tell you,’ he wailed uselessly. ‘I stuck up for Larry in the witness box. I gave him an excellent reference. I even said he wasn’t disposed to any kind of violence. He was a lovely man. Why are you telling all these lies?’
Angel sighed. He rubbed his chin. It wasn’t difficult to ignore Hellman’s pleas.
Angel sniffed and then said, ‘After that, blackmail was easy, wasn’t it? The rent is actually disguised blackmail, isn’t it? To buy your silence. £800 a week is outrageous, but the plan was that next year it would have been £1,000 and the year after that £2,000 and so on, ad infinitum. That’s how you planned it to work, didn’t you? What a wickedly cruel, brilliant plan. You’re a blackmailer. It was the formula for a most wonderful pension for you in your old age, wasn’t it? Better than any insurance company could have devised. But, alas, the plan went wrong. Something you never thought of. A real bombshell. The rich sucker was murdered and, sadly for me, I can’t prove one word of your involvement in the wrongful imprisonment of Larry Longley and this subsequent despicable crime. Sadly for you, Mr Hellman, blackmail is not transferable. You will slowly sink in your own mire.’
The station was hectic when Angel returned. Such a lot of coming and going. Phones were going like voting on The X Factor.
He put his head into the CID office; Ahmed saw him and came to the door. ‘Did you get hold of DS Crisp, lad?’
‘He’s coming in straightaway, sir. And he said to tell you that the woman is Chantelle Moses. She does have a mole on her right temple.’
Angel frowned. It didn’t seem to matter now. ‘Right. What about everybody else?’
‘Everybody should be here, sir. I said ten o’clock. The Operations Room should be empty. DC Scrivens is behind you.’
Scrivens came running up. His face as sad as a Strangeways dumpling. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said. Then he looked down at the floor.
Angel got the message. ‘Never mind, lad. So you didn’t find the ambulance. The trouble is, these robbers are far too smart for us. It will have been transformed into a dodgem car and sold on to Alton Towers, I expect, by now. Never mind. Come on. We have other fish to fry.’
Scrivens looked up and gave a weak smile: the tension had gone.
Angel bustled down to the Operations Room followed by the other two. He opened the door and looked inside. It was empty.
‘This’ll do for us,’ he said.
It was the size, and similarly arranged to, a school classroom. There were local maps and blackboards on the walls and flip charts on easels and twenty-five or so chairs facing a raised platform.
Ahmed said, ‘By the way, sir. The number on the fake ambulance was for a bus in Wiltshire. I didn’t pursue it.’
‘It’s what I expected. Ta.’
Gawber joined them. ‘Sit down everybody,’ Angel said.
There was a knock on the door and Crisp arrived.
Angel said, ‘Ah. Glad you were following the right woman, lad. Anything new there?’
‘She still spending money, sir. Clothes, shoes, hairdos.’
Angel nodded. ‘Right, Trevor. Take a pew.’
Angel looked round. All he had summoned were there. ‘I’ve called you all together to see if we can put our communal mind together and make some progress in this bare foot murder business … the murder of Charles Pleasant. I want to put a few facts to you and see if we can make any sense of the thing. Feel free to butt in if anything occurs to you. Now, there are a few unusual factors in this case that I haven’t come across before. One, it seems apparent that Pleasant, although he had a scrap metal business employing one man, Grant Molloy, he was actually making his money through dealing in stolen valuables or works of art … expensive pieces … well, relatively expensive pieces.’
‘The jade head was worth millions, sir,’ Gawber said. ‘Wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, Ron. But I shouldn’t think he paid millions for it.’
‘No, but couldn’t he have been murdered for it,’ Crisp said.
‘I shouldn’t have thought so. A man called Goldstein died for it and it was at any rate returned to its rightful owner, the Empress of somewhere or other. But you have brought me to the point about motive. He was found with £8,000 in notes on him.’
‘So he was going to buy something, sir?’ Scrivens said.
‘We have to assume that … yes. Whatever it was, I suppose we may never find out. It doesn’t matter anyway. We know that somebody phoned him that Sunday morning, and set up a meeting at the scrapyard, we believe, for 4.30 in the afternoon. Although, as we know, Pleasant arrived early at 4.18 or 4.19, and he was shot dead at about 4.19.’
‘Can we not find out who it was from the phones?’ Gawber said.
‘Don Taylor’s checked out Jazmin Frazer’s. Come to think, she’d hardly be phoning the man she’s living with. We have had no success there. If we had enough evidence, we could check out the other suspects’ phones. But I expect that a pay-as-you-go mobile was bought specifically for the job. The one call was made and the phone slung into the River Don.
‘Now, the caller who set up the meeting would know that Pleasant would have £8,000 on him, but no attempt at robbery was made. His pockets had not been rifled. The money was intact. That indicates that the murderer wasn’t interested primarily in financial gain. This murder was about something else. It has to be revenge or … retaliation or fear. There are a few people who had cause to hate him, but before going there, I’d like to remind you of some of the peculiarities of this case. Firstly, the murderer was bare foot. Secondly, the victim had no shoes on. And thirdly, there are no prints on the car door handle, yet Pleasant wasn’t wearing gloves. Why would he want to wipe it clean of prints if, indeed, he did?’
The men looked at each other, but nobody made to say anything.
Angel passed his hand through his hair. ‘Why shoot a man in your bare feet? What’s the point?’
There were a few mutters of, ‘Don’t know, sir,’ and shaking of heads.
‘We don’t seem to know, sir,’ Gawber said.
Angel nodded. ‘No. And neither do I.’
He continued. ‘There also seems to be an inconsistency in the information I got from the manager and his wife at the lodging house. One of them happened to mention that they had a dog and a kennel. I looked round there two days ago and there was no sign of either, nor was there any mess in the yard or any giveaway signs of that sort. In itself it’s not at all important, but if there isn’t a dog why lie about it. If there is a dog, where is it? Anyway, next Sunday, I am making a point of being at the scene of crime at the vital time and I’ll take the opportunity of speaking to them about it then … try and clear it up.’
There were more nods all round.
‘Well, let’s move on to the suspects, then,’ Angel said. ‘Let’s see if we can throw any new light there.’
‘Grant Molloy is a thoroughly dishonest piece,’ Gawber said.
‘He is, but—’ Angel said rubbing his chin.
‘There’s Emlyn Jones and his son,’ Crisp said. ‘And Abe Longley. And Jazmin Frazer.’
‘Yes,’ Angel said. ‘Yes. And there’s one other. Adolphe Hellman.’
He reported the interview he’d had with that morning with the butcher and told them in detail about the supplying of the chopper to Pleasant, the murder of Bridie Frazer by Pleasant and the subsequent blackmail by Hellman.
‘We can’t get him for the blackmail,’ he said, ‘but thankfully it died when Charles Pleasant died. However, Pleasant was obviously becoming strapped for cash. Hellman and the Frazer women had almost picked him clean. Pleasant could have been desperate, resented paying the blackmail, threatened to expose the big man, who shot him dead to save his own skin. He has no alibi for Sunday afternoon. He was at home by himself, avoiding the sun and trying to keep cool.’
Angel looked round to see if anybody had any comment to make. There was nothing.
‘To sum up then,’ he continued, ‘we know from the footprint that the murderer is a man, so it couldn’t be Jazmin Frazer. Abe Longley has an alibi from three good people. The annoying thing is that I am convinced that Jones and his son Stanley knew the arrangements, the time at least of the murder, yet they seem to have the perfect alibi. We have been unable to break it. That only leaves Adolphe Hellman.’