‘So, before we part company, can I ask you about something?’
They were at a junction in Kings Lake, and Smith spent some time studying it before answering, as if he had never been on this road before.
‘Fire away.’
‘There’s some obvious ill-feeling in the main office. What’s that about?’
‘Straight answer, short version. An important case was badly handled. A couple of witnesses were treated so poorly by us that they withdrew their testimonies and it all fell apart very publicly in the Crown Court. Horrible headlines. Some of us had warned this would happen. Some of us got our knuckles rapped.’
‘You?’
‘No.’
‘Wilson?’
‘I’m not going to name names, Chris. You’ll likely end up working with some of these people and you’ll get a different version of events.’
‘Fair enough. Anyway, it’s been interesting.’
‘What has?’
‘Working with you.’
‘Are you leaving then?’
‘Well, you said…’
Smith switched off the engine and pulled on the handbrake in the station car park.
‘Look, it’s up to you. I am going to be poking around in this for a little while longer. It might all be a dead-end but if someone played a part in Wayne Fletcher’s death, his family and those friends of his deserve to know about it. You’ve already helped out, and I’m grateful. If you want to stick with it, OK, but if you have any doubts at any time, you just bugger off. And if I think it’s – I don’t know – dangerous, well, I’ll just kick you into the long grass where you hide until it’s safe to come out, no questions asked. OK?’
‘Sounds good.’
‘Not that I think it will actually get dangerous. I’m just saying. So what did Barry say yesterday?’
‘I took him a pack of cigarettes, said I’d confiscated them off a ten-year-old. Anyway, he said if necessary he might accidentally make a big hole in one of the other wooden canoes, and then he’d have to burn it.’
‘Barry is my kind of boatman. It probably won’t come to that. Did you call in at the office as well? What? I have to consider the emotional well-being of the younger officers under my command!’
Chapter Twelve
Still nothing from Harrington.
Waters had to find time every day to write up his notes, and to fill in details about the various procedures that made up the daily routine of a station. Smith watched him typing away at the keyboard, his eyes on the screen most of the time rather than the keys themselves – it must come naturally to them now but there was so much expected these days. He had glanced at Waters’ folders and seen it all laid out in units of progression. When it was all done, Waters and his peers would certainly know a great deal about police work – whether they would actually be able to do much of it was a different matter. Inevitably he thought back to his own early days, and how much had changed. All that mattered then was your notebook, it seemed, and that’s when he had developed the duplicate book habit, for fear of losing the only copy. It had served him well on many occasions and the process itself, of writing things out a second time, either later in the day or at home, had clarified his thinking; putting the two notebooks side by side had often revealed small but significant differences as a case had developed.
He opened his phone, found Harrington’s number in contacts and pressed it. The office was almost empty, just Waters still tapping away and O’Leary across the other side, too far away to hear what might be said.
‘Paul?’
‘Hello, DC. I was about to call you. I had to chase it up myself. Encountered a bit of resistance on this one.’
‘Oh. Any idea why? Did you get something?’
‘I’ve got to be in Lake after lunch. We should meet up, if you can make it.’
‘Understood. Where? No pubs, I’ll be asleep by four o’clock.’
‘Me too, doctor’s orders. Anyone would think I was overweight.’
‘I reckon anyone would…’
‘Bollocks. The coffee place on the market square, two o’clock?’
Smith was early. When the girl came over to take his order, he asked her to give it a few minutes as he was meeting someone, and she had smiled – he was more likely to be someone just trying to keep out of the light rain that had been falling for a few minutes. He reached for his phone, thinking that he’d text Harrington, but his pockets were empty – it must still be on the desk in the office. Automatically, he thought about what it contained in terms of recent calls and messages but there was nothing too incriminating, and he’d be back there within the hour.
It was stuffy in the café, humid because although the weather had begun to change, there was still a sort of residual heat lingering on from the summer. He took off his raincoat and thought about the hot afternoon on the river at Vine’s Drove, wondering whether if it had rained instead that day, Wayne Fletcher would still be alive. As he thought, he watched the comings and goings in the café – force of habit, as had been the glance in the rear-view mirror as he left the station car park. The red Octavia VRS that had pulled out from the verge and been behind him all the way into town had carried straight on as he had turned into the multi-storey. It was the kind of car he might have chosen himself – anonymous enough but with plenty underneath if and when it was required. It had been far enough back all the way that he could not see much of the occupants but he thought there were probably two of them. No-one of interest had come into the café yet, and he told himself that it was just a touch of paranoia after hearing Reeve’s story about the mysterious appearance of Dominic Fox at HQ. Dominic Fox - he didn’t even like the name.
Then he saw Harrington approaching across the near-empty market square. For a moment he filled the doorway, puffing a little, blowing out his cheeks, looking around for Smith. When he sat down, he took off his glasses and wiped the rain from them with a damp shirt sleeve, while Smith ordered a latte for the new arrival and an Americano for himself.
‘How’s life in Longmarsh?’
‘Seriously DC, Wilson did me a favour, kicking off like that. When I see him, I’m going to kiss him, tongues and everything.’
‘Make sure I’m not in the building. Have they given you a team yet?’
‘I’ve got a couple, it won’t get up to four, not enough going on out there. I’m viewing it as a way of starting my retirement.’
Harrington was one of the few officers that Smith would trust instinctively; he was always overweight and out of condition, always a bit sweaty on hot days, always inclined to be the last to enter houses with reinforced doors – but he had a streak of common sense that was priceless when young and ambitious DCIs were getting carried away, and he was far too honest ever to have risen above the rank of Detective Inspector.
‘DC, I don’t have much on this character.’
‘Perhaps there isn’t much to get. It’s all been longshots on this one so far.’
‘Like I told you, I had to ring my man back. He asked me why I was interested, which he doesn’t normally do.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘My chap reckons it’s probably a service record that’s had a bit of surgery at some point. I don’t know how he can tell this but if that’s all you do all day… Hamilton, according to the record, was very boring indeed.’
Smith sipped at his coffee and Harrington reached into his pocket, taking out a piece of paper that had been folded two or three times.
‘Does that happen to say where the boring captain spent his boring time in the Army?’
‘It does.’
‘I’ll have one guess, alright?’
Harrington completed opening the paper and nodded.
‘The Balkans, Bosnia, somewhere out that way.’
‘He went out there with the Royal Anglians in ’94 when they relieved the Coldstreams. He did a brief spell with the Royal Regiment of Artillery and then he ends up in the UN public information team – UNPINFO.
I had to look it up.’
Smith half-closed his eyes and pictured the man in his country home, leaning back in the armchair, smiling indulgently at the village policeman.
‘No. I don’t buy any of that, Paul. Bit of tart, wasn’t he, here, there and everywhere? The bloke I met wasn’t some press officer. I think I know what he was.’
‘DC? My contact didn’t say anything outright, you know, but he was definitely a bit nervous about this one. One to be wary of, if you ask me. What’s he up to?’
‘It’s perhaps more about what he did – I don’t know. He might have retired but it looks as if his war isn’t quite over yet.’
‘Well, yours could be. Come out to Longmarsh and catch some illegal cockle pickers.’
Smith looked at his watch, waved to the waitress and ordered two more of the same.
‘I know, this war will never be over. It probably is time to get out. But soon I’ve got to go to the funeral of a young lad I never met. And someone else owes him an explanation as to how he came to be dead. Anyway, what are your girls doing now?’
Hundreds and hundreds of pages about the Balkans. Smith clicked back and forth a few times, looking for the idiot’s guide or the Keystage 3 summary but, just as he had suspected, the internet wasn’t designed with that in mind. Waters came over then, his notes completed for another couple of hours at least, and nodded approvingly.
‘Wiki is a good place to start for most things.’
‘Really? Is that straight down the A10?’
Waters leaned in and studied the pages more closely, realising exactly what Smith was looking at.
‘You’re going to a lot of trouble to reunite that cigarette packet with its owner.’
Smith motioned towards another chair, and Waters sat down.
‘Remember about hiding in the long grass?’
A nod.
‘I was serious, OK? Not joking? But if you’re going to be assisting me in my inquiries for a bit longer, I might as well fill you in. That retired Army officer at Manley Hall, the bloke with all the ex-squaddy security? He served here,’ pointing to the screen. ‘Now, it might be another one of those pesky coincidences that the canoe paddled by someone with an eastern European accent was trashed and burned by the river a few yards from his security fence, and that the cigarette packet just happened to come from where the captain did an extended tour of duty. But…’
Waters shook his head and Smith smiled inwardly. You cannot teach that, the instinctive weighing of odds, the intuitive sense of when something just does not add up. You can teach them a lot but you cannot teach that.
‘So what are you doing here?’
‘It was a long time ago. To be honest, I never took a lot of notice of it, had my hands full in the 1990s. Still had a couple of Army mates who went but that’s about it. I was familiarising myself with what happened but I don’t need all this!’
‘Do you want the straight answer, short version?’
‘You’ve not been here a week and already the cheek has started. What do you know?’
Waters knew a lot. He explained how the fall of the old Soviet bloc had impacted upon the various satellite states, and how Yugoslavia in particular had split into factions divided along old religious and ethnic lines, competing for territory and influence in the power vacuum created by the collapse of the USSR. He talked about the decision to send in UN troops and the declaration of safe areas – which in some cases went on to be the scenes of massacres and atrocities. At the mention of Srebrenica, Smith nodded – everyone had heard of that. Finally, Waters talked about the Dayton Agreement in 1995 which ended the conflict officially, if not effectively. He said that it was still an area of tension and that all those concerned had long memories.
‘Blimey! I’d say you need to get out more but I’ve a feeling you didn’t learn all that off the back of a cornflakes packet. University?’
‘My degree was in Modern European History.’
Smith’s look of surprise brought more explanation from Waters.
‘Everyone assumes it would have been law or criminology but I don’t think that’s necessary – perhaps not even very wise. History teaches you how to find and handle evidence, doesn’t it?’
‘I suppose so. But I don’t give a toss about qualifications in this job anyway, never did. If you can read, write and add up well, you’ve got all you need to get started. But I suppose having a few IT skills helps these days, too. Brilliant that, saved me hours. See if you can find community liaison. I know we had refugees from Bosnia come to Kings Lake; if they’re still around, it might be worth a visit. Our work is taking on an international flavour this week – must find my passport, just in case. Community liaison? It sounds like a department but it’s actually just one person, and I don’t know who’s been lumbered with it this month. You’re on your own with that but always start with Charlie Hills – he hates to be left out of anything.’
No more red Octavia – this time it was a dark blue Golf that pulled out from more or less the same spot in the road outside the station and which followed at a similarly discreet distance for the two miles out to the pleasant suburb of Gorsefields. Smith waited until he was on a straight with no junctions behind him and then he drew in to the nearside without signalling or even slowing down very much; the following car slowed at first but was forced to pass him – it had nowhere else to go. The tinted windows gave little away but although the Golf was by then accelerating again, Smith got a clear look at the number plate. If he was being tailed, and if the people inside were not amateurs, they would recognize the manoeuvre – they would know that he knew.
To Waters, it seemed like slightly erratic driving. He had already wondered whether he should offer to take the wheel occasionally but to do so now might be seen as – patronizing? A little cheeky? Instead, he looked at Googlemaps on his phone and said, ‘We’re not there yet. It’s a left, another couple of hundred yards.’
‘My mistake,’ said Smith, pulling out again. ‘I don’t know why they don’t just put a slot in the dashboard, we stick the phone into it and let it drive the car.’
‘Well, as it happens, DC-’
‘OK, Brains. I’m sure it’s about to happen. You’re too young to remember ‘Thunderbirds’ but if you got some nice square specs…’
Ryburgh Lane had handsomely detached houses, hedges of privet or conifer and short, gravelled drives with spaces for three or four cars. The two of them sat in the Peugeot that looked a little more down-at-heel than usual amongst the Volvos, BMWs and four-wheel drives parked in those spaces.
‘This is nice, isn’t it? I’ll tell you how nice it is – I’ve never been here before.’
‘I think that’s what’s called a good thing.’
‘They’ve done all right for themselves, the ones that live along here. These are half a million apiece or more. You won’t be getting one of these until you’re Chief Constable. Anyway, as you found out, we still have a few of the original refugee families left – this lot, three or four families – and some more over at Headham, which is about half a mile that way. Our man lives at?’
Waters pointed across the road to the most impressive of the houses.
‘And how did we find him? He might ask.’
‘Three names came up in the newspaper records from when the refugees arrived in the early 90s. They acted as spokesmen. It was a big story locally – I was surprised at how well they were received. Photographs in the local press and all that. Mr Subic is the only one of the three I could trace. He’s moved home a couple of times but I think it’s the same man.’
‘No criminal record, obviously.’
‘No, none of them. We did the search by nationality; other than speeding tickets, none of these people have committed an offence since they arrived.’
‘Or been caught.’
Waters nodded, reminding himself that he needed to think sideways a little more. Smith stared at the house for several more seconds and a little more light rain gathered
on the windscreen.
‘Perhaps I imagined it. When we first parked up, I’m sure someone came to that upstairs window on the right and then quickly stepped back. And again, just a moment ago. Still, where would we be without nosey neighbours?’
The front door had panels of stained glass, and through these they could see the figure approaching. The door was on a chain. The woman’s face was half-obscured by shadow – she had not switched on a light despite the afternoon gloom.
‘Good afternoon, madam. I’m Detective Sergeant Smith from Kings Lake police. This is Detective Constable Waters. We’re sorry to disturb you but do we have the right house for Mr Subic, Mr Mirsad Subic? Apologies for my poor pronunciation.’
Smith was holding out his warrant card for the woman’s inspection – Waters reached into his pocket for the same.
The door closed and they heard the chain being taken off.
‘Please come in.’
She switched on the light, and they were standing in a long hallway with what must be the original tiles on the floor, a checkerboard of red and black. Above them, on the high ceiling, original-looking cornices and plaster mouldings. The woman was beckoning them to follow her down the hall as she spoke.
‘My husband is here somewhere. The old house is too big for us now – we cannot find each other sometimes.’
An Accidental Death Page 11
