“I get you,” said Oddie with a man-to-man smile. “Now, obviously in this sort of enquiry we have to look for enemies of the dead man. Do you know of any?”
“Of course I’ve thought,” said Ferrett, engagingly candid. “Thought all the way here. It’s what first springs to mind, isn’t it? But there’s none I know of in his business life. Why should there be? He was providing a service, and there was nothing to speak of in the way of competition. He’d carved out his own little niche.”
“Clever of him. What about dissatisfied customers?”
Ferrett shook his head confidently.
“It doesn’t do to have dissatisfied customers. If there were any that felt they’d been given bad advice, or hadn’t got their money’s worth, Steve scrapped the bill or sent them a much smaller one. That was only sensible business practice.”
“What about his earlier life?”
“Before he came to Leeds? I’ve no idea. Never discussed it. I think he came from London.”
“But he never mentioned a father or mother? Or other family? Friends from the time before he came to Leeds?”
“Not to me. I’ve always had the impression that both parents were dead.”
“Unusual for a man in his forties.”
“Maybe. Could have been some kind of accident.”
“Of course. But from all we’ve found out Mills seems to have emerged in Leeds like some kind of phoenix from the ashes.”
“If you say so. By the time I met him he was already married to Dorothy and very much part of the family there. He and old Unwin were thick as . . . very close. It never occurred to me to ask about his earlier life.”
For two people who had worked closely for years there seemed to be many subjects they had kept away from.
“We have to ask, though. Somewhere there’s got to be a motive for his murder.”
“You don’t think it could be sexual? That he was murdered by someone he picked up on the way home?”
Oddie shrugged.
“It’s possible. Anything is possible, nothing is ruled out. But if you look at the pattern of that sort of crime you see that homosexuals are sometimes murdered by violent men they’ve picked up, prostitutes likewise. But a prostitute murdering a client? It may happen, but we’d want to find a pretty strong other reason, if you get my meaning.”
“But if she wasn’t a prostitute—say a student, and if he’d forced her . . .” Ferrett saw his mistake immediately. “But of course Steve wouldn’t. It’s inconceivable. Wouldn’t have needed to, quite apart from anything else. And he wasn’t that type at all, not at all.”
He subsided, conscious of having put his foot in it. Charlie left a moment or two before he took up the questioning.
“Do you know of any connection between Mills and a young man who works in Pizza Pronto, on the Ilkley Road—he goes by the name of Silvio, but that probably isn’t his real one.”
Ferrett frowned.
“Never heard of him. Doesn’t sound likely. Our contacts are all with businessmen.”
“What about the vicar of St Saviour’s and his family?”
“Oh, he had lots to do with the Reverend Sheffield. They were both very active in Rotary. And of course old Steve threw himself into parish affairs.”
“What about Sheffield’s family? His daughter, for example?”
“Ah . . . . You mean did she have the hots for him?” Ferrett put on that all-males-together smile again. “There was a time when I thought so. We gave her a bit of typing to do at home, and after that she used that as an excuse for coming to the office whenever she could think of a reason.”
“You don’t know any more than that?”
“I don’t. I’ve told you, that was an area of his life where I didn’t ask questions. There may have been something going on. If so, it didn’t last very long. She went off to college—oh, three years or more ago it must be now.”
It was becoming clear that they weren’t going to get any more out of Brian Ferrett for the time being. When they had shown him out of police headquarters Oddie and Peace turned and looked at each other.
“I don’t—” they began simultaneously, then stopped.
“Trust him an inch?” suggested Charlie.
“Not a centimetre. All that ‘straight as a die, old Steve’ stuff. I never met Mills, but he was employing as his second in command a distinctly dodgy type.”
“And if you take on and promote a dodgy type, the chances are you are a dodgy type yourself, and the business you’re into is dodgy as well.”
“A business that claims to be doing well at the moment has to be suspect.”
“Especially one dealing with Europe, where everyone’s in the doldrums.”
“You don’t trust the people close to Stephen Mills, do you?” Oddie said, looking at his sidekick. “You didn’t trust his wife either, unless I’m mistaken.”
Charlie considered.
“That was different. I didn’t believe the wife. I might have trusted her on other matters, in other circumstances. There’s no way I’d trust this joker on anything.”
“The question is, what was the dodgy business they were both engaged in? And I have a mountain of paper that I’m going to have to go through to try to find out.”
“What’s the drill?” asked Charlie, without enthusiasm. “Do we sit down and go through it all together?”
“I thought about that. It has its advantages, but it leaves the ‘people’ side of the case up in the air. Is there anyone we ought to be talking to now?”
“Ah . . . well, there’s the Sheffield children. They seem to be up for the weekend, so we ought to talk to them as soon as possible. I had a hunch the girl knew something about Mills she wasn’t letting on about, and now we’ve talked to Ferrett it’s pretty obvious what it was.”
“Yes,” said Oddie slowly, adding a caution: “though Ferrett was all the time trying to shift our attention to his private life rather than his business affairs.”
“Right. Even to suggesting that straight as a die old Steve was a rapist. But, whatever the dodgy business they were engaged in, the possibility is still there that he was killed because of something in his private life.”
“Agreed. Anything else?”
“I’d like to track down the other boy who worked in the pizza place. My suspicion is that they’ve both gone missing but that the other one may still be in the Leeds area. If I’m right they were both working here illegally. If that is so, they’d have had a bond, they’d have talked.”
“The priority is to get hold of the boy called Silvio.”
“Of course it is. But what chance, with no name and no photograph?”
“And Mrs Sheffield?”
“Is saying nothing. But there is one possibility—”
“Yes?”
Charlie produced his idea without much hope.
“Bugging the Sheffield phone. I suspect he’s fond of her and will contact her.”
“Put it from your mind. You know it’s out of the question.”
Charlie shook his head regretfully.
“Any villain can walk into a shop and buy the latest hi-tech bugging device and a whole range of things for industrial espionage or any type of private spying. And we have to go to Home Secretary level.”
“But those are the rules. We do. Any evidence we got would be useless if we’d done anything else.”
“It wasn’t so much evidence I wanted to get. Just where this young man is. I suppose the best we’ll have to hope is that once the chap is well out of our reach Mrs Sheffield will come in and tell us what he told her. Whatever that is, it probably won’t be much if he is fond of her and wants her to think well of him.”
“Mike!” Somebody was bustling along with a piece of paper, and handed it over. It was a white-coated man from the mortuary. “Preliminary p.m. report.”
Mike Oddie skimmed through it, then went back and read it through with more care.
“Well?” asked Charlie.
&
nbsp; “Pretty much what we thought. He was attacked, beaten up—there’s some evidence of martial arts techniques, maybe from someone who’d learnt a few blows, basic self-protection stuff. He was stunned, unconscious, when his throat was cut. They’re not going to stick their necks out—of course they’re not going to stick their necks out!—but they say it’s possible he was unconscious for some time before his throat was cut.”
“So, getting fanciful, one of the Sheffields could have beaten him up, gone home for the carving knife, then come back and done him in?”
“Theoretically. It’s not a scenario I’d go for.”
“I wasn’t being serious. On the other hand, if you have a knife and want him dead, why not use it straight away?”
It was something they both pondered as they went their separate ways.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Terrible Good Cause
Charlie thought with satisfaction of the mountains of paper Mike Oddie had taken home with him to get to the bottom of Stephen Mills’s business affairs. By the time he saw them they would have been filleted by an expert hand, and only the ones of possible relevance to the case would need to be read and pondered. All very much to the good. Charlie’s interest in crime was people: faces, attitudes, gestures, signs of hidden woes and hidden passions. The intricacies of financial malpractice could interest him only when they led him to the mind that had conceived them.
And there were other ways of getting into contact with that mind, and other aspects of it that were to him of more interest. As soon as he got to his desk he looked at his watch. It was coming up to half past six. After a moment’s thought he got out his telephone directory and rang the Sheffields.
“Oh, Mrs Sheffield, it’s DC Peace here . . . . Progressing, but a long way from concluded yet. I wondered, Mrs Sheffield, how long your children were going to be there.”
“Oh, Mark is with us till tomorrow evening,” Rosemary said, with no obvious signs of pleasure in her voice. “Janet and Kevin are driving back to London later tonight.”
“Then I wonder if I could talk to Janet, please?”
“Of course.”
There was a pause before she said it, the involuntary giveaway of someone not used to dealing with the police, then a longer pause before her daughter came on the line with a very tentative “Hello?”
“Hello, Miss Sheffield. This is DC Peace—we met earlier. I thought since you’re leaving Leeds tonight we ought to talk about the party last night.”
“Oh, should we? Is there any need? I’ve told you everything I know.”
“It’s perfectly normal,” said Charlie, in his comfortable-copper voice, “just routine. You’re the only person that I know of—you and your boyfriend—who’ll be leaving Leeds . . . . And we need to talk about Stephen Mills generally.”
“Oh.” There was a silence of several seconds, and then he detected a note of relief in her voice when she said, “Yes, I suppose we do. I think I’d prefer to come to you.”
“Excellent. You’ll know the Leeds Police Headquarters, of course. And could you bring—Kevin, is it?—with you?”
“Yes, I suppose so . . . . He doesn’t know anything about Stephen Mills.”
“Just a matter of routine, like I said,” said Charlie smoothly. “I’ll hope to see you in twenty minutes or so.”
They arrived together at the desk, an appealing-looking couple, humorous and warm, with an air of suiting each other. Charlie thought he might have a lot in common with Kevin. But it wasn’t Kevin that was of principal interest, and he resisted the suggestion that he should talk to them together.
“It’s never done,” he said. “But if you’ll wait here, sir, I’ll have a chat with you later.”
It had been Kevin, not Janet, who suggested that he might talk to them together, and Charlie got the impression she felt a sort of relief that he had vetoed the proposal. Once in the interview room she sat forward in her chair opposite him with a nervous expectancy. She was not a beautiful girl, but she was healthy, sharp-eyed, alert. If the word “wholesome” had not been devalued, she would have been that.
Charlie came straight to the point.
“You knew Stephen Mills a lot better than you’ve been letting on, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Who told you, I wonder? Was it that awful Ferrett person? Oh, never mind. Yes, I did know him better than I’ve been letting on.”
“And a lot better than your mother realises, I would guess.”
“Yes, mother never knew anything beyond the fact I’d done some secretarial work for the firm. I’d be glad if you didn’t have to tell her now.”
“I don’t see why I should need to.”
“Good. She loathed him. Somehow I’d feel . . . devalued in her eyes if she found out. In our house he was always ‘Dark Satanic Mills’—an object of suspicion, though I don’t think they ever made up their minds what they suspected him of. I think that probably made him more attractive in my eyes—the Byronic man of mystery, the attractive rotter, that kind of thing.”
“Did he turn out like that on closer acquaintance?”
She frowned.
“You know, in one way he did. In the sense that he must have had a past, like the Byronic hero, but I never found out anything about it beyond dark hints. For example, his speech was very precise, almost old-fashioned, but it told you nothing about where he came from.”
“Did you find out what he did?”
She looked surprised.
“Yes, of course. I thought you must have found out about me from Brian Ferrett. I did typing work for Stephen. His business was facilitating the work of exporters, particularly in Europe—finding markets for people, getting things through all the red tape, making contact for them with people who mattered.”
“And that was all the company did?”
“So far as I know . . . .” She pondered. “I was hardly at the heart of the business, but all the typing I did for him and Brian was about things like that.”
“I suppose it would have been. But your relationship wasn’t just boss-typist, was it?”
“No,” said Janet flatly. “I threw myself at him, to tell you the truth. Quietly, in private—so there was no scandal. I went through a long phase, I suppose it was a kind of prolonged adolescence, of finding dark, Latin, rather oily men attractive. The Valentino type. They all turned out to be rather awful. When they made love they were really making love to themselves. Mills was one of a line.”
“And he was no exception, I suppose.”
“No. If anything an intensification of the tendency.”
“Where did you go?”
“To make love? All sorts of places. Sometimes in the open air—Ilkley Moor, or on the Haworth-Hebden Bridge moors. This was summer, and there were lots of hot days.”
Charlie racked his brains to remember the last hot summer, but failed.
“When would this have been?”
“Five years ago.”
“But when it wasn’t hot?”
“He had a flat—a small, rather insalubrious little place over a shop in the Ilkley Road.”
“What kind of shop?”
“A camera shop—Snaps was the name.”
“Was it just a flat to take girls to?”
“So far as I know. When we went there I felt as if I was one of a long line and was part of a routine.”
She made no effort to keep the distaste and self-loathing out of her voice.
“No signs of business done from there?”
“No. But I wasn’t there much—a quick in and out, you might say.”
“How long did the affair last?”
“Oh, five or six weeks. The length of the school holidays.”
“You were still at school?”
“Yes, coming up to my last year.”
“How did it start?”
“Well, I fancied him. Quite shamelessly, I’m afraid. So as I said, I threw myself at him. To that extent he was blameless. After church one Sunday I went up to
him and asked him if he had any typing or computer work I could do in the holidays. I could see in his eyes that he had something in mind other than typing and that he knew I had too. Humiliating to look back on.”
“So he agreed, and it went on from there.”
“Yes. He gave me some work, bedded me, and I kept on going back on the excuse of wanting more work if it was going. I hate myself for it now.”
“Everyone has one or two big mistakes in that line.”
“I had a whole series.”
“How did it end? Did you just go back to school?”
“Not quite. No, that wouldn’t have ended it . . . .” She thought before she spoke, making Charlie very aware that this was the most difficult part. “I had had the feeling for some time that he was getting bored. If I’d had any savvy I’d have cooled it, played hard to get, but I was very immature. I kept going round there, supposedly to see if he had any jobs, but in reality . . . well, I suppose I don’t need to spell it out. Anyway one day he said ‘OK, there’s a job for you, but we’ll have to fetch it.’ So we got into the car and drove to this large house—”
“In Abbingley?”
“Oh yes. Not far. And he opened the front door with his own key, and I was just realising it was his own house when he took me into the sitting room and introduced me—no, it was more like he was flaunting me—to his wife. He said: ‘Hello, Dottie. You know Janet, don’t you? She’s come round to do something for me.’ And he . . . he leered. And before I knew what he was doing he took me upstairs and into a big double bedroom that I imagine was his and hers, or had been once, and he was stripping off, and stripping me as well and . . . well, I suppose I don’t have to go on.”
“You didn’t resist?”
She stared down at the table, remembering.
“I did . . . but very feebly. Just said things like, ‘Stephen, we can’t.’ Quite useless, really. It was as if he had some kind of power. I suppose girls have said that from time immemorial. I think because I was so young and knew so little, and he was so mature and worldly-wise and—corrupt, that there was a kind of power he had over me and enjoyed. It was like being mesmerised by a snake.”
The Bad Samaritan Page 13
