On Eden Street

by Peter Grainger

  Smith had told them much more – the story of the man who had built up and run his own specialist medical supplies company, and who had, to save the jobs of twenty people, become a little too creative with the accounts at just the wrong moment. A conviction for fraud, a spell in prison, the customary collapsed marriage and then months living on the streets before a priest he had never met invited him into a seamen’s mission for a cup of tea.

  They all heard a door creaking out in the hall. Joe got off the desk and said, ‘Won’t keep you a moment’ before he left them alone in the office. Then they heard his voice saying, ‘Hello, Ali. Who’s your friend?’

  The reply was indistinct. They heard Joe’s footsteps walking across the hall and a distant conversation. Serena looked around the office, searching the desk with her eyes. Then she said to Waters, ‘Well?’

  ‘He’s being careful.’

  They could hear Joe Ritz returning. He resumed his position on the desk and said, ‘As I was saying we’re a night shelter but if people wander in during the day, what can you do? We don’t lock our doors.’

  Waters said, ‘How bad is the situation in Kings Lake? Is it getting worse?’

  Joe folded his arms, frowned as if he might not know the answer to that one and then said, looking directly at the young man who had asked the question, ‘I don’t know whether you’re interested or just making conversation to be polite. Officialdom pays us an occasional visit and then buggers off. Sorry, but that’s my experience.’

  Honesty would be the best policy – it wasn’t hard to see why Smith and Joe Ritz had made some sort of connection. Waters said, ‘I’ve learned something about homelessness over the past few days. As you know, a man was murdered while sleeping on the streets a week ago. Catching whoever did that might make things a little safer for the rest. Any context you can give us might be useful.’

  Joe said, ‘Oh, it’s a bit of context you’re after? That’s an academic’s word, isn’t it?’

  Waters looked at his detective constable and caught the smile disappearing. Then he looked back at Joe, just a level, steady look, and waited.

  ‘The last national survey reckoned there were just under four and a half thousand rough sleepers in the UK. That’s out of nearly sixty million people. The government admitted it might be an underestimate. Meanwhile, back in Kings Lake, it varies. We get a seasonal effect being close to the coast. People tend to drift up here over the summer and numbers rise. On a typical night…’

  Joe Ritz shrugged as he considered it, and then said, ‘Somewhere between five and twenty a night over the summer months, and a hard core of local regulars the rest of the year. Maybe five or six of those.’

  ‘And these are people sleeping in doorways and cardboard boxes?’

  Joe was warming to the subject, despite his initial wariness.

  ‘Well, that’s a problem straight away. If you’ve no place of your own but a sympathetic soul lets you sleep on their sofa for a few nights, are you homeless? If someone stays overnight here at The Wesleyan, do they count in the official statistics? If you pay an unscrupulous landlord cash by the night to stay somewhere you have no legal rights, does that count as a home?’

  Waters nodded his understanding, and Joe said, ‘It would take me an hour to explain all the ways a person can be homeless but not appear in Home Office datasets.’

  ‘What sort of people are they?’

  Even as he asked that, Waters knew it was a careless question, and he wasn’t surprised by the answer.

  ‘What sort of people? Well, they’re very much like you and me.’

  ‘I should have said, do they have things in common? Are there certain triggers or situations that lead to them being on the streets?’

  Joe Ritz didn’t respond immediately. He stood up and walked around the desk, pulled open a drawer and took out a black, hard-backed A4 notebook. He placed this on the desk and resumed his seat.

  ‘Family conflict and breakdown – that’s more than fifty per cent of the time, I’d say. Mental health issues, which are often related to family breakdown. Substance abuse, alcohol being the most common. Financial problems. A high proportion have been in local authority care when younger, which says a lot for that service, doesn’t it? And more than half have been in prison or in young offenders’ institutes. The number of migrants and refugees on the streets is creeping up. They don’t go straight into it but the application for asylum system breaks down more often than not nowadays, and they’re left in limbo.’

  Serena spoke for the first time. She said. ‘That’s a lot of ways to become homeless. How do they get out of it? How can you help?’

  ‘Here at The Wesleyan? We keep them warm and dry for a night or two. We give them bread rolls and soup, donated by local businesses. In case you’re wondering, I don’t preach any sermons – there’s none of that. We talk to them and we listen to them, which is probably the single most important thing we do. Sometimes these are people no one has listened to for years.’

  As police officers, you become hardened over time – you must do so to survive in the job – but there was something about Joe Ritz that made you take notice and think about what he was telling you. Perhaps it was the knowledge that he hadn’t learned all this by doing a master’s degree in social science. He had been the man asleep under a heap of cardboard boxes, and he had found a way back.

  Joe went on, ‘And there are different street lifestyles, they’re not a homogeneous group. Some of them live lives centred around the alcohol – they have what they call drinking schools. Most of those are full-time on the streets, but other drugs, contrary to what the public imagines, are uncommon. Some focus on the begging business, and some of those will pay for sub-standard accommodation with the proceeds.’

  Neville Murfitt, thought Waters, that was his situation.

  ‘And the women are often involved in some sort of sex work. We don’t often have females full-time on the streets here in Lake, but there are plenty surviving just above that line.’

  And that is April Kennedy – Joe Ritz knows his street people. Waters decided this was the moment to move things on. He asked whether they had many ex-forces personnel turning up as homeless in Kings Lake. If Joe didn’t react to that, perhaps he wasn’t going to provide them with many answers, after all.

  Joe picked up the notebook and let it fall open in front of him, but they couldn’t see what was on the page. Then he looked up and said to Serena, ‘I’m thinking it was you who left the photographs?’

  She nodded, and said, ‘One of them.’

  Joe took one out of the book and held it so the face was towards them; ‘This is the one who was stabbed, isn’t it?’

  It was Neville Murfitt’s picture.

  Joe Ritz went on, ‘OK. He turned up a few months ago, and someone directed him to this place. He was here a couple of nights and then he moved on into the town centre. I don’t know anything about him after that. We talked a bit. He’d had a decent job but the business went under, so we had something in common. I offered to put him in touch with a couple of employers but he never took it up. I doubt if he was ever in the Army, though.’

  That was a question, and Waters answered it – ‘As far as we know, he never was, you’re right.’

  Serena said, ‘At least, not officially.’

  Joe laid that photograph on the desk and took out another from the notebook. It was the picture of Michael Wortley.

  ‘This man,’ said Joe, ‘was a different kettle of fish. We don’t get many like him through here. He had a kind of kitbag with him. The sort a soldier might carry.’

  Waters said, ‘When was this, Mr Ritz?’

  That brought what was almost certainly the first genuine smile from Joe.

  ‘Mr Ritz! That takes me back! I’m either ‘Joe’ or ‘Brother’ or ‘Friar’, and sometimes I’m all three. Bless you for that! This man,’ holding up Wortley’s image again, ‘was also here a few months ago.’

  Exactly the same phrase and Jo
e knew it – he was waiting for Waters’ next question.

  ‘Were the two of them here at the same time?’

  ‘Yes. We keep a log, and people sign in every day, so we know how many there are in the building overnight. This keeps the fire service happy. They’re just names and dates. You don’t get a name and address, for obvious reasons, and you don’t get phone numbers. But I’ve found those two in the book here. Sometimes people don’t use their actual names, but I expect you’re used to dealing with that.’

  Serena said, ‘We are recently.’

  Joe turned the book around and handed it to Waters, keeping a finger in place until the detective could see the entries in question. Neville Murfitt had written his own name – “N. Murfitt” – and a date, “22nd April”, followed by a similar entry for the next two nights. On the 23rd, there were two additional names. Waters placed a finger underneath them and read out to Serena ‘Alan Johnson and M Yates on the twenty-third of April.’

  She laughed and said, ‘Nice! He has a sense of humour, anyway.’

  Waters said to Joe Ritz, ‘I take it you’re holding up the photo of M Yates?’

  ‘Yes. He told me his name was Michael Yates.’

  You develop the habit of telling people only what they need to know, and Joe didn’t need to be told that Wortley had used the name of his former senior officer. But he had kept his Christian name, which isn’t unusual.

  Serena said, ‘What else did he tell you – Mr Ritz?’

  Another brief smile, perhaps at the memory of other flirtatious young women he had known, before he answered, ‘Ah, well. That’s where it gets a little awkward for me…’

  Christopher Waters waited then, just as he had been taught to do. After several seconds, Joe said, ‘Sergeant Smith… Detective Sergeant Smith, was your old boss, wasn’t he?’

  Waters said, ‘Yes. We were both in his team.’

  ‘OK. When I phoned him, I didn’t tell him all the details, but I told him something. And he said that I could trust you two, that you’d know how to deal with it.’

  Waters looked at Serena before he responded, ‘I can speak for both of us when I say that we would say the same about Detective Sergeant Smith, Joe.’

  A few more seconds passed while the man in the vest, the man with tattoos on his forearms who put out the bins at the night shelter and yet who was the friar of Abbeyfields, a spiritual leader in the Third Order of St Francis, while this man considered questions of trust and duty. Then he said, ‘As you can see, Michael Yates stayed here for three nights. On Thursdays, I’m here, it’s my regular turn to stay overnight in the shelter. And on that night, it was just the two of us – you’ll see his is the only name in the book. We sat in here, and talked – he sat, Detective Sergeant, in the very chair you’re in now. I didn’t think he was homeless, but he was a man who needed a breathing space. Time to get his bearings. On that Thursday night, he told me a little about how he came to be here.’

  Chapter Twenty

  When they were back in her car, Serena said, ‘So, I know the drill, don’t worry. I’ll drive back to Central while you sit in silence and work out what that all means.’

  Waters said, ‘Sounds good to me.’

  ‘Charming! You know, sir, there are times when-’

  ‘Can we start straight away?’

  They had worked together for too long for her to take offence, but neither did Serena argue. It had taken a while but her former, and it had often seemed junior, colleague was developing a bit of an edge when he needed it. Maybe Waters wasn’t born to lead – to some extent it had been thrust upon him – but there were signs now he might achieve something. And when she examined her own feelings about the matter, Detective Constable Butler was pleased to discover she didn’t resent this at all.

  Waters took out his phone to check for missed calls or messages from Central but there was nothing. Then he looked again at the messages he had received from Miriam. The first one had arrived yesterday while he sat next to her on a stack of dry birch logs at the edge of a wood on Roydon Common. When she said the new phone technology had liberated blind people, that her iPhone was her most important virtual assistant and friend, he’d said to her, ‘I know something about Siri, though I don’t use it much. If you wanted to send me a text, how would you do it?’

  She frowned – he had seen this several times now and thought it a very fetching frown – and said, ‘Well. First, I would ask for your number because I haven’t added it yet…’

  He sent it as a simple message, and then watched as she told her phone to add Christopher to her contacts. And then she simply told her phone to send the following message to Chris, dictating the words she wanted to say – “It really is this easy.” Before she sent it, he said, ‘Impressive. What about text speak? Abbreviations? Emojis?’

  In answer, her fingers moved so quickly over the screen, combining double and triple taps, that he couldn’t follow, and the phone’s voice itself seemed to be hurrying to keep up. Before he realised she had pressed send, his own iPhone buzzed with the arrival of the message with, at the end, a funny little representation of her own frown.

  It had been a quiet, autumnal afternoon. Behind them in the wood, a robin had sung its plaintive, half-whispered song of summer’s ending, and rooks had cawed out over the common. They had watched Ben exploring the bracken and the long grass, or rather he had watched and described what the dog was doing, and Miriam had smiled and said this was something the dog couldn’t do when they were alone, something she felt guilty about sometimes. Waters had asked her then, whether she often went out into the countryside and she said, ‘Not often. We’re limited to public transport obviously, and at this time of year, when it’s getting dark early…’

  He was silent and she laughed, guessing what he might be thinking.

  ‘I know that sounds ridiculous! Why would I be concerned about the dark? But it makes you a little more vulnerable. During the day, other people can see you and help if you’re in trouble. And they do, most people are kind. But at night? Well, you’re more alone. Of course, I still have Ben to look after me. We go out into the town at night, sometimes.’

  ‘Where do you go? What do you do?’

  There were a thousand questions to ask, and he was doing his best not to sound like a policeman interviewing a suspect. But she didn’t seem to mind talking about herself, and the tiny ironic space she had kept between them in the shop had disappeared – not least because when Ben had been let off the lead, she asked if she could take his arm.

  She said, ‘We have our regular routes, Ben knows them. Sometimes we have a burger or a proper sit-down meal. We have a few friends we visit.’

  A few friends, but no boyfriend – Waters was certain of that now. He looked at her secretly in the soft, flat light of the September afternoon and was mystified. Intuition told him then simply to ask the question. Miriam smiled as if she’d been expecting it sooner or later, and said, ‘How long have you got?’

  He said, ‘I’m not on shift until eight tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Is Ben still all right?’

  ‘Yes, I can see him. He keeps looking back to make sure you’re still here.’

  She was creating a space in which to make up her mind. And then she had told him a story, a true story which astonished him.

  The mobile was ringing in his hand. He looked down as if bemused, and Serena said, ‘It’s Murray. You might want to answer that.’

  ‘John. What’s up?’

  Murray said, ‘Are you still at the shelter?’

  ‘No, on our way back. Why? Just a minute, I’ll put you on speaker so Serena can hear.’

  Waters did so – it was a way to save time and build trust in the team.

  Murray continued, ‘We’ve got a couple of developments. First, we’ve had a hit on Wortley’s bank account. For the past few weeks he’s been making cash withdrawals, about once a week.’

  Waters said simply, ‘Where?’

  It was the key ques
tion. If the answer was Birmingham or Plymouth or some such place, they had effectively lost the initiative; another team would find Wortley and interview first, perhaps even caution him. He might refuse to return to Kings Lake, and he would be within his rights unless he was under arrest. By the time the murder squad got to him, there could be all sorts of additional barriers to hearing what had taken place when he met Neville Murfitt at The Wesleyan night shelter, and why someone had killed Murfitt, thinking they were murdering Michael Wortley. There was no longer any doubt in Waters’ mind that was what had happened.

  ‘Hunston.’

  Waters heard Serena hiss a ‘Yess!’

  ‘Good. What do we know, John?’

  ‘He’s been using a cash machine, taking more or less the same amount each week. I was told on the phone that there’s little other activity on the account – two regular payments in and this money going out.’

  Waters said, ‘How much going out?’

  ‘A few hundred quid. Enough to live on, pay rent and such, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s my guess he’s been settled in Hunston for several weeks. Always assuming it is Wortley, of course, and that someone hasn’t nicked his card.’

  Waters considered that, weighed it up and didn’t fancy it. He said, ‘What are the payments in, John?’

  ‘We’re waiting for that to come back. The DI had a word with a manager somewhere and they’ve agreed to send it all in an email with attachments of his statements. They reckon it will be today.’

  This was Freeman’s leap forward – there was no doubt about it – but the last thing anyone needed was a stake-out on a cash machine. If one of those payments in was from an employer, if Wortley was working, they had a line to him now.

  Waters said, ‘A couple of developments? What’s the other one?’

  Murray answered, ‘Right. The boss is on her way back from a management meeting. She’s spoken to the DI and he says we all need to be in the building by half past twelve.’