ELLIS TURNED THE BBC radio news off as they turned into the one-way street. ‘The main story,’ he said. ‘And I think it’s going to get bigger, once the media know they can milk it for what it’s worth; like they did in the Madeleine McCann case.’
‘I wonder if McNeil will have heard it,’ Wallace said.
‘We’ll soon find out.’
Wallace found a parking space right outside the shabby house with ‘SCUM’ daubed on the front door, as if nobody wanted to park there for fear of being associated with the building or its occupant.
The young detective constable stared through his open window at the door. ‘I can’t say as I blame them, not wanting to live near one of those bastards.’
Ellis sighed resignedly. ‘I know it must be hard living in close proximity to a convicted paedophile, but common sense tells us that if we know where they are we can keep an eye on them. Drive them underground and who knows what they’re getting up to. Come on! Let’s see how active a vigilante this McNeil is.’
As they approached McNeil’s house, they saw the Renault Clio parked on the paved-over area where the garden had been, and exchanged glances. The front door of the building needed attention, the wood was exposed where the dirty green paint had flaked over the years, but the house number was carved on a smart slate plaque attached to the brick wall, probably a recent acquisition from a gift shop. There was no doorbell, so Ellis gave a hefty couple of knocks on the iron knocker.
After a moment they heard footsteps coming along the hall. The door opened to reveal a woman in her early fifties, short and slim in skintight denims and a bright orange T-shirt, and a wrinkled face with a tan that looked like it came from a bottle.
Ellis showed her his warrant card as he announced, ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Ellis and this is DC Wallace. Would you mind if we have a few words with your husband?’
Without batting an eyelid, the woman turned her head and yelled in a broad Valleys dialect, ‘Norm! There’s two coppers wanna talk to you.’
McNeil’s muffled Glaswegian reply was hard to understand. His wife waited a moment before calling over her shoulder, ‘Norm!’
The door of the front room opened and McNeil, purple in face and wheezing heavily, said, ‘Am about to have ma tea, but you can come in for a wee while.’
The woman stood aside as they entered and they were shown into the living room by McNeil. The room was crowded with furniture, in a variety of styles, some of it old fashioned, some of it Swedish modern. A wide-screen television set dominated the room and was showing the regional news with the sound turned low.
Ellis and Wallace sat next to each other on a modern sofa upholstered in bright red with tubular steel arms, and McNeil sank into an old beige Parker Knoll easy chair opposite them, while his wife hovered near the door.
‘Mr McNeil,’ Ellis began, while Wallace took out a notebook and pen, ‘you spoke with our detective inspector earlier on. Have you any idea why he was searching Titmus’s house?’
McNeil glanced up at the ceiling before replying. ‘I hadn’t a clue. At first I thought he must be another one of those perverts, a friend of his. When he told me he was a detective, I just thought he must have been searching the house cos the bastard had been up to his filthy tricks again. I had no idea the bastard was dead.’
‘So you heard it on the news.’
‘It were on the telly.’
‘And how did you feel about it?’
‘I was just saying to Jackie.’ McNeil turned to look at his wife. ‘Wasn’t I? Shame we’ve got no champagne in the house. We coulda cracked open a bottle.’
She nodded vigorously and shouted, ‘Good bloody riddance to him!’ She seemed embarrassed by her outburst, so she leant across the back of her husband’s chair, patting him reassuringly on the shoulder, and softened her voice. ‘Would you two boys like a nice cuppa?’
‘No thanks,’ Ellis said, then turned his attention to the husband. ‘You probably saw that he was murdered on his boat in the marina. Did you know he had a boat?’
‘Of course not. Why would I know that?’
‘Well, you might just have spotted him there. Do you ever visit the marina?’
‘We go down to Sainsbury’s for our shopping. Apart from that …’ McNeil shrugged, indicating the marina was of no interest to him, apart from the supermarket trip.
Wallace laboriously wrote down McNeil’s answers, his handwriting a scrawl which only he could decipher.
Ellis continued. ‘The supermarket’s only a short distance from where the victim’s boat was moored. Is there any chance you might have seen him?’
‘I’m telling you, I didn’t know he had a boat at the marina. First I knew of it was on the telly fifteen minutes ago.’
‘You’re sure about that, Mr McNeil?’
‘Of course I’m sure,’ McNeil replied, a surge of anger darkening the purple hue of his complexion. ‘What are you suggesting? That I killed him?’
Ellis smiled reassuringly. ‘Sorry, Mr McNeil, I’m not suggesting any such thing. It’s just that – I know I’ve done this myself – sometimes you see someone you think you recognize. Later on you might tell someone about it. “Guess who I saw”, that sort of thing. A little bit of gossip can sometimes spread a long way and—’
McNeil interrupted belligerently. ‘Look, I’ve already told you, I didn’t see the bastard at the marina.’
‘If you didn’t see him at the marina, did you ever bump into him in this district?’
McNeil took his time answering and Ellis watched as he stuck a thumb in a nostril and rummaged around for a moment.
‘We hadn’t seen the bastard for ages, had we, Jackie?’
Mrs McNeil, posing supportively behind and to the side of her husband, like a Victorian photograph, put her fingers to her chin in an absurdly theatrical way. ‘We hadn’t seen him since we had our demonstration against him living here. But we knew he was coming back here from time to time.’
‘If you didn’t see him, how could you tell?’
McNeil, irritated by Ellis’s question, scowled. ‘You can always tell when someone’s at home at night. Occasionally there was a light on. Or his car might be parked nearby.’
‘What sort of car did he drive?’
‘I’m not too sure.’
‘But you said he parked it nearby. So you must have recognized it as his.’
‘I think it was a Vauxhall. Something like a Cavalier or a Vectra.’
‘What about your neighbours?’
‘What about them?’
‘How did they feel about having a man like that living in their street?’
‘Same as we did. Angry. They wanted to get rid of him.’
Ellis smiled grimly. ‘And someone has. Is there anyone round here you think might be capable of such an act?’
McNeil laughed. ‘Nearly everyone round here would have liked to do it. Might have fantasized about it.’
‘Norm’s right,’ Mrs McNeil broke in. ‘I killed him loads of times in my mind.’
Ignoring her, McNeil continued. ‘To actually do something like that takes guts. And the residents of this street might have been angry, but we had our own way of dealing with it.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘We formed a committee, and wrote to our MP. We even got banners made and got the press and TV down here.’
‘How many of you are on this committee?’
‘Most of the people in this street and the one that backs onto us.’
‘So there’d be maybe fifty or sixty people, would you say?’
‘Easily.’
Ellis felt a tightening in his stomach as he considered how many potential enemies these hated men had, and that was just the neighbours. There were probably as many child abuse victims, many from the youth custody centre, each with a motive. It meant a great deal of hard graft, starting with the process of eliminating all those who had an alibi that could be corroborated.
‘Thank you for answering my questions, sir,’ Ellis said, and looked up at the man’s wife. ‘And, Mrs McNeil, just one last question. Does your committee have a name, headed notepaper, that sort of thing?’
McNeil jerked a thumb at his wife. ‘Missus does all the stationery and letters on the computer upstairs.’
‘An’ we’ve gorra name,’ his wife added proudly. ‘We have a – oh, what the bloody hell’s it called?’ She prodded her husband.
‘Acronym.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘PASO. That stands for Parents Against Sex Offenders.’
Ellis frowned thoughtfully and tilted his head upwards. ‘So I guess your children are quietly doing their homework.’
Mrs McNeil laughed. ‘Don’t be daft. Kids are all grown up. But my daughter’s about to give birth. So we’re almost grandparents.’
‘Which is another reason,’ McNeil growled, ‘for not wanting that bastard in our street.’
Ellis stood up, followed by Wallace, who put his notebook away. The sergeant thanked the couple and apologized for taking up too much of their time. Now it was up to the young DC to ask the casual, conversational questions.
‘This case is going to keep us busy,’ Wallace began. ‘It’s an early start for us – and on a Saturday too. You got tomorrow off, sir?’
‘I’m unemployed.’
‘He’s on incapacity benefit,’ Mrs McNeil said. ‘Bad back.’
‘Oh, sorry to hear that, sir. What line of business were you in?’
‘I used to work for my brother-in-law.’
‘Doing what, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘He had a small factory.’
As they walked out of the living room into the hallway, still keeping his voice light and casual, Wallace said, ‘Not much light industry left these days. And difficult times economically. What did he manufacture?’
A slight pause before McNeil answered, ‘Fertilizer.’
A small chuckle from Wallace, making a joke of it. ‘Always plenty of demand from the farmers, I suppose. A sort of growth industry.’
McNeil stared at him unsmilingly.
‘Right, well, thank you for your time.’
Watched by the couple from their doorway, the two detectives headed back to their car. As Wallace slid into the driver’s seat, he saw McNeil waving his arms about, remonstrating with his wife.
‘Looks like the start of a domestic,’ he said.
Ellis chuckled. ‘I hope that’s not our fault.’
Then McNeil suddenly went off up the road, probably back to the pub, and his wife went inside and slammed the door.
Wallace turned to Ellis and raised two questioning eyebrows. ‘Fertilizer, eh?’
‘With sulphuric acid as an ingredient,’ Ellis said. ‘And the news gave details of the victim being bludgeoned to death with no mention of acid on the bollocks. So McNeil wouldn’t have known that.’
‘But did you notice the hesitation before he mentioned fertilizer?’
Ellis’s gave his colleague a lopsided smile. ‘Notice it? It was a thundering silence! And I’ll tell you something else, Kevin.’ He paused dramatically.
‘What’s that, Sergeant?’
Ellis looked at his watch. ‘Ten minutes from now there’s going to be another murder.’
Wallace grinned as he turned the ignition. ‘You’re going to show me how you can murder a pint. I’ve never heard that one before.’