by Iain Cameron
‘You take down, I’ll do up,’ Dave said, his foot on the first step effectively ending any discussion.
She had no choice and nodded in agreement, but she made a face behind his back. For once, she would like to take a look at the places where other people slept, and find out what clothes they owned and what toiletries they used. Dave did it, he said, as it required more detective work than looking at a cooker and the contents of the fridge, but she suspected he wanted to take a look through the wife’s underwear drawers. She didn’t have the heart to tell the big, sad lump that if he listened to TT a bit more carefully instead of sounding off about being sent to Hove and missing his morning cuppa, he would realise the man of the house was divorced and lived alone.
The kitchen was big, much too big for a single man who, in her experience, ate mostly take-aways and drank beer straight from the tin and whose idea of home cooking was an M&S meal for one. The oven was clean and looked unused, and despite the presence of a dishwasher, numerous dirty dishes were lying on work surfaces.
The downstairs loo and study were small, making it obvious the master of the house was not lying inside and so with little enthusiasm, she walked into the lounge. It was a large, L-shaped room, light and airy and it was clear the current owner, or the previous one, had knocked down a few walls to create the space, as a couple of big RSJs crossed the ceiling. The furniture was a bit minimalist for her taste with two settees, a few chairs and a flat screen TV, but she assumed the lack of it was more likely a consequence of a family break-up than any strict adherence to the principles of feng shui.
If the furniture was a little on the sparse side, the hi-fi kit looked full-on, the shelving occupying a sizeable section of wall. There were CDs, hundreds of LPs and cassettes and all the equipment to play them on, including an amplifier, tuner and CD player, most of which looked top-notch stuff, although she couldn't believe anyone still owned a turntable. The only people she had seen using one of those were DJs in nightclubs down on the seafront.
The other thing to catch her eye were two paintings on the wall. At first she thought they were copies of one another, but on closer examination she spotted a few differences. She liked art, a fact she didn’t mention to any of her colleagues. Coppers were a funny bunch when it came to stuff like art, poetry and reading and before she could say, ‘heterosexual’ or ‘I like men,’ she would be branded a dyke and the moniker would stick for evermore.
Both were signed ‘Joaquin’ and although not a name familiar to her, she would look him up as she liked what he was trying to do. Most visitors to art galleries spent no more than a couple of seconds gazing at each painting, but with these two the artist was encouraging them to spend a bit more time looking at his pictures by inviting them to participate in an adult version of ‘spot the difference.’ You had to admire the man for his cheek.
She left the lounge and opened the door to the room next door. It was another sitting room with a settee and coffee table, but no television or music, a ‘parlour’ as her granny would have called it. Like the room in her granny’s house in Bodmin, it smelled musty and looked unused. She closed the door and opened the door to the garage.
She didn’t receive a blast of cold air, often the result of opening an integral garage door, and it didn’t take the skills of a seasoned detective to understand why. The garage had been converted into a gym, and a sophisticated air conditioning/heating system hung from the ceiling.
She shut the door behind her and walked in. It was perhaps the way the light was shining from the large windows, dotted all around the room, but at first she didn’t realise someone else was in there too. It was the owner, Mr Peter Grant. She knew what he looked like, as his picture had been in The Argus and there’d been a short piece about him on Southern Television the other day when he’d talked about the new superstore his fitness business had opened in Croydon.
The reason she didn’t spot him at first was he was lying on the exercise bench, his face as pale as snow, the weight of a 60 kilo barbell pressing down on his neck.
FIFTEEN
DI Henderson headed back to Sussex House after attending the site of a stabbing in Southwick. He was driving slowly along the Old Shoreham Road due to heavy traffic when he heard the news about Peter Grant’s death on Southern FM. He changed direction and headed for Woodland Drive. In a way, he was more shocked now than when he had heard about the death of Barry Crow, not because Peter was the second of the Crazy Crows to die, but because he knew him. He wouldn’t class him as a close friend, but whenever they saw one another on the street they would always stop for a chat. In fact, he last spoke to him the previous week when he visited him in his Brighton shop.
He drove slowly along Woodland Road, in part due to road calming measures designed to slow commuters, keen to make their way to the A23 link road at the top of the rise, but also as a result of the melee outside Peter Grant’s house. The house was surrounded by incident tape and on the roadside he could see a number of cars and vans, reporters, neighbours, and a crew from the local television station. He walked towards the constable guarding the front door and flashed his ID.
‘Who’s the SIO?’ Henderson asked.
‘DS Hawkins. He’s inside.’
‘First name?’
He looked confused. ‘What?’
‘Of DS Hawkins.’
‘Oh, I see, sorry sir. Denis.’
He stepped inside. Most of the noise seemed to be coming from behind a door at the end of the hall which he assumed to be the garage. Henderson headed there. A small crowd were gathered inside, a few cops, detectives, the pathologist and a photographer. He approached the crumpled figure in the dark sports jacket, pens sticking out of his top pocket, looking more like a local government official here to talk about planning permission than a detective.
‘DS Hawkins?’
‘Who wants to know? If you’re a reporter I want to know how you got in here.’
‘I’m DI Henderson.’
‘Ah, right, sorry sir. You’re in the Major Crime Team over at Sussex House?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘What brings you here, then? From what the doc tells me our man here took too much drugs and booze, did a workout and got out of his depth and Bang!’ he said thumping his fist into his open palm, ‘the bar fell on his throat and he couldn’t get it off.’
Hawkins was around forty with thinning grey hair, a podgy face and a podgy frame, suggesting this was probably the closest he’d ever come to standing in a gym. He was a detective from John Street nick, more used to dealing with burglaries and shop thefts than dead bodies, so he could be forgiven for being too irreverent in the presence of the dead. If he worked for Henderson on one of his murder investigations, he would now be outside helping the young officer outside to maintain order.
‘I’m not here in any investigative capacity. I knew the victim.’
‘Well, perhaps you can tell me if he was in the habit of drinking before starting a workout.’
Henderson walked towards the pathologist. ‘I don’t know but I do know you won’t find the answer standing around here.’
He bent down beside the body. He could see it was Peter Grant. He was dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, displaying the muscles that had once made him such a fine drummer.
‘Still got the Healey, Grafton? I didn’t see it sitting outside.’
‘I left it further up the road,’ the pathologist said, ‘as these TV crews and reporters can be a bit careless. When they come out of their vans carrying all manner of cameras and recording equipment, they only have eyes for the story.’
Grafton Rawlings was in his late-twenties but drove an old car, wore old-fashioned tweed jackets and sensible shoes, and if he possessed a mobile phone it would either be a brick or a tiny un-smart unit, only able to make calls.
‘There’s no need for me to ask you the cause of death,’ Henderson said, ‘as I can see the heavy bar, but DS Hawkins mentioned something about booze and drugs.’
> ‘Yes, there’s an empty wine bottle in the kitchen and a half-empty glass in here, and what I believe from a cursory sniff is the remains of a joint in the ashtray. It’s purely speculation at this stage, as I won’t know if my supposition is correct until the post-mortem and we’ve analysed his blood and stomach contents.’
‘I’ll try and come along to the post-mortem.’
‘Please do so, you’re welcome. Why the big ballyhoo outside? Is he a celebrity or some sort of television actor? I don’t watch much television, so I wouldn’t know.’
‘I suppose him being a local businessman is the angle they’re interested in. He owns Grant’s Fitness Emporium, based out in Woodingdean.’
‘Oh yes, I know it. They’ve got a shop in the mall.’
‘They do and also, he used to be the drummer in a rock band called the Crazy Crows but I expect you’ve never heard of them, as they were a bit before your time.’
‘You’re right, I haven’t heard of them, but then I do only listen to opera and on occasion, Radio 4. Ah here’s the ambulance crew.’
Henderson stood back as two male paramedics brought a stretcher into the room. They were both a bit porky and out of condition and it made him smile as they tried to lift the heavy barbell and return it to its rest. It took the intervention of slightly-built Rawlings to prevent it crashing to the ground.
Ten minutes later, the gym now devoid of people, Henderson wandered through the house. It was a big place with four bedrooms, two sitting rooms and a large garden out back; too big for one man. If Henderson lived here, he would have moved when he finally realised the marriage was over.
He returned to the gym. His vision of a garage-cum-gym was of whitewashed breeze-block walls, shelves of paint and tools, with a myriad of bikes, mattresses and children’s toys stacked in a heap at the back of the room, leaving barely enough space for a few weights and a dusty bench. Now that he had a chance to take a proper look, he could see this place was the polar opposite.
The walls were painted a cool blue, and if constructed from breeze-block, he couldn’t see the joins. The windows were fitted with vertical blinds in a shade to match the walls, the room was lit by dozens of recessed LCD down-lighters and the polished wooden floor had a gentle spring he could feel as he walked.
He had seen less equipment in many hotel gyms. There was an exercise bike, running machine, a huge multi-gym with a range of attachments and handles, and smack-bang in the middle of the room, a padded bench with a built-in aluminium stand, upon which rested the barbell which had killed Peter Grant. There was little sign to indicate something tragic had happened here; no incident tape, no body outline in chalk, no photographic markers and no blood. With everybody gone, it now looked all set-up and ready for another keen amateur to use.
On a shelving unit with a cupboard underneath, he found a selection of nutrition bars bearing the GFE logo, weightlifting gloves and those strange hand tensioning grips which he assumed weightlifters squeezed while watching TV or reading a muscle-man magazine. Nearby, a small fridge looked to be well-stocked with a variety of GFE energy drinks, some of which were of unusual colours, making him think they would have greater appeal to children than body-builders.
A well-thumbed notebook with a sticker on the front which warned, ‘Not To Be Removed From Gym’ caught his eye. He flicked through the record of the dead man’s progress on various machines. In columns, he’d recorded the date, the machine used and the level achieved. The entries for the bike and the running machine were old, as if he no longer worked out on them, while the dates for the bench press were current and marked until the end of last week, presumably the last time he completed an exercise routine.
It took a few seconds to realise what the little book was telling him: Peter was killed lifting sixty kilos but he often lifted in excess of this. In fact, most days, he lifted seventy and seventy-six kilos and on a couple of occasions, eighty. Had he felt tired, or as DS Hawkins would be saying to the press in a few days’ time, had he been so drunk or stoned that his judgement was impaired? It certainly looked that way.
Henderson drove to Sussex House with the radio playing loud, trying to drown out the two voices vying for attention in his head. The first one saying how terrible it was for two members of the same band to die within weeks of one another, and the second one warning him something didn’t look right.
*
The door to Chief Inspector Lisa Edwards’ office was open. There was no one sitting inside occupying the visitor’s chair and no one standing out in the corridor waiting to see her, so he knocked and walked in.
‘Hello, Angus. Give me a tick, I just need to finish this.’
CI Edwards returned to reading a report she had annotated copiously with her big, black pen. This report was one of dozens landing on her desk throughout the day, everything from information about a new forensic test to the overtime analysis of all the officers under her command. The climb up the police promotion ladder inevitably meant more pay, but with it came additional paperwork and way more hassle. The administrative workload increased all the way up to the ACC level, a man who rarely shifted from his desk except to make a speech at the Women’s Institute or attend a lunch hosted by the Lord Mayor.
‘Right, it’s done,’ she said. ‘How did you get on at Southwick?’
‘The stab victim is now in a coma, but his injuries are not thought to be life threatening. A witness who didn’t want to be named fingered the perpetrator, and myself and two officers went to his house. His mother let us in, we headed upstairs to his room and kicked in the door. We found a blood-stained fleece and a knife in a plastic carrier bag, all ready to be taken to the dump. I arrested him, charged him with attempted murder and possession of a weapon, and later today it will be sent for testing.’
‘A serious case wrapped up in a morning? Good work.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Keep me posted on any developments. I want to see scum like him, who would take a life for the cost of a bicycle, locked up. I don’t want him walking free on a technicality.’
‘Don’t worry, it won’t happen.’
She lifted her pen, ready to attack another report.
‘There’s something else.’
Henderson explained about the drowning of Barry Crow in Arundel and now Peter Grant’s death at his gym in Hove, and his suspicions, as yet unfounded, that both deaths might be related. Even as he said the words, he could hear how unconvincing the story sounded and he wouldn’t blame Edwards for telling him that conspiracy theories were for journalists and to come back and see her when he had some solid facts.
‘Two members of the same band?’
He nodded. ‘Two out of four.’
‘Were they popular? The reason I ask is, if this is one of those cases where their deaths will upset a lot of fans, the press and social media will be on my case every day, demanding a result.’
‘No, you don’t have to worry on that score. They were popular at the time, but it was over thirty years ago. Their fans are all middle-aged and would worry more about their expanding waistlines and moss on the lawn than the death of a couple of former rock musicians.’
‘Thank goodness it’s not One Direction or someone as popular, I don’t think I could cope.’
‘I didn’t know you were one of their fans.’
‘I’m not, but my daughter is and she would be devastated if one them died. If it was two, I can’t imagine the grief it would cause.’
She paused, thinking, and he knew not to say anything if he didn’t want his ear chewed off.
‘I can see why something like this would bother an inquisitive copper like yourself,’ she said. ‘The odds against losing fifty per cent of the surviving band members in the space of two weeks are high, but–’
‘Before you say ‘no’, and tell me about all the other stuff we’ve got on, which is more important than this, I’m not talking about a staffed-up murder investigation…’
‘I sincerely hope not.�
��
‘No, I was thinking more about a low-key enquiry. I’ll talk to the surviving members and people associated with the band and find out if someone has got it in for them, or if we’re looking at something more innocent.’
‘You’re not selling it to me, Angus.’
‘The lead singer of the Crazy Crows was Derek Crow, the tanker fleet owner and a man hailed by the new Labour Prime Minister as the saviour of British industry when he averted the recent nationwide fuel strike. What if there is something going on with the band and he becomes the next victim?’
‘The same Derek Crow? Well, blow me, I would never put that pugnacious growler down as a former rock musician. I don’t want him or anyone else to die, if that’s what you’re suggesting, but I don’t see how this is a vendetta against the Crazy Crows. From what I’ve read about the cases, both men were killed in two separate and unfortunate accidents.’
Henderson didn’t say any more. He’d made the case and if she wasn’t buying, he didn’t have anything else to add.
‘Knowing you,’ she said after a few moments, ‘you’ll investigate this case even if I forbid it, so here’s the deal. You can investigate both accidents and interview surviving members of the band but no more. I want to see a report on my desk in two weeks’ time which I’ll assume will close the case once and for all, and while you’re about it, I don’t want any of your current work to fall behind.’
‘You drive a hard bargain, Chief Inspector, but I accept.’ He stood and made to go.
‘One other thing, Angus, under no circumstances is this to be called a murder investigation.’
‘Credit me with a bit of sense.’
