Hunting for Crows

by Iain Cameron

  To Derek’s knowledge, two on the list still bore a grudge and said as much whenever reporters asked them about him, but Paterson was emphatic, there was nothing to worry about. The ‘easy’ ones took an hour and depleted his store of emotional capital, but alas, it was but the warm-up for the ‘difficult’ pile. He ordered a fresh pot of coffee and biscuits and after the tray arrived, Paterson opened the first file.

  ‘Dave Manson, a former roadie for the Crows.’

  ‘Ok.’

  Known to all as Smelly Dave, Derek tried to picture him. An image came into his mind of a big, grizzly bloke with long black hair, pock-marked face, four days’ growth, toothy smile and a fat gut. As a consequence of his copious beer and curry consumption, he was a contaminated individual to sit beside in the confines of a Transit van or a bus. His continual farting, burping and rancid body odour made the journey from London to Dusseldorf, and even shorter hops like London to Northampton, unbearable.

  ‘He was sacked from the band in 1987,’ Paterson said, ‘for stealing two amps and a speaker cabinet. He denied the charges at the time but in his defence, admitted he couldn’t remember much about the incident as he was drunk.’

  ‘Yeah, sounds about right. He was forever pissed.’

  ‘When I met him he was living in a refuge for recovering addicts. He weighs about eight stone now and looks well, if a bit frail, but the light that still shines bright is he hates your guts. He says he never recovered from his sacking from the band, which was his dream job, and hasn’t held down a proper job since. This led him into a cycle of drug taking and stealing, he lost his house, his wife, and doesn’t see his kids. He blames the band, you in particular, for sacking him, and Eric for starting him on the sauce.’

  ‘Bollocks, he took drugs before he joined the band. Bloody hell, he still remembers this after all those years? There’s fuck-all wrong with his brain cells.’

  ‘As I said, he’s in this recovery place and says he’s feeling healthier and fitter than he’s done for a while, but he could have fooled me. I’ve seen dead people in better shape.’

  ‘Could it be him?’

  ‘Possible, as he’s mobile, he’s got access to a car belonging to one of the aids, he seems to have a lot of mates in the place and his hate burns bright as the sunshine.’

  ‘That might account for the twenty-plus-years delay, him just getting back on his feet.’

  Paterson nodded. ‘I think so too. It’s been a long downward spiral, but he’s past the worst, in my opinion.’

  Derek thought for a moment. It was one thing to talk about airy-fairy things like curses and hoodoos, but it was another to hear a name and see the face of the person who might have killed his friends. A man who might soon be coming after him. It shook him.

  ‘Are you all right, Derek? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘No, I’m fine. This stuff is getting to me, that’s all.’

  ‘What I suggest we do, is put the ones we think have a valid grudge, and we can see reason why they might wait twenty-plus years to take revenge, into a ‘possible’ pile. Later on we can decide what to do about them.’

  ‘Yeah, good idea. Who do we have next?’

  ‘Annaleise Quinlan.’

  ‘Shit.’ He’d been caught in two minds about even including this one, as the memory still made him squirm, like peeling a sticking plaster back from an aching sore. If the story had any foundation, re-opening it could give the press a field day and wreck his newly acquired public persona and the groundwork done on his political ambitions, but he could see no other option.

  He’d met Annaleise in a hotel corridor in Leeds just after a gig, he high on adrenaline and she high on drink or drugs. Soon, she was all over him like a rash. Rather than go back to his room as the others were congregating there, he’d pulled her into a laundry cupboard where they’d had raw, hungry sex. If his memory served him right, it included a liberal dose of biting, slapping and scratching.

  ‘She’s a primary teacher at a school in Cambridge. By all accounts she’s good at her job and well-liked by her pupils.’

  ‘Maybe, but back then she was a groupie.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right but cries of rape were treated very different in 1986 to how they are now. You said you weren’t charged?’

  ‘Nope, it didn’t go so far, just an interview with a spotty oik of a sergeant in Leeds Central and nothing was put in a file. Her word against mine, the copper said.’

  ‘Mind you, in a crowd it would be hard to differentiate those who were groupies, itching for a screw with a rock star, and those who were star-struck teenagers looking for nothing more serious than a flash of your pen.’

  ‘Too true, especially when you’ve just come off stage and feeling like you could walk on air. We’d grab the nearest couple of birds and head upstairs.’ He paused for a moment, a part of his mind awakened by a number of memories of the time, most of which were good.

  ‘So what are you thinking, Bill? Why are you thinking she’s a difficult case if it was done and dusted all those years ago?’

  ‘At first she looked like any other settled middle-aged teacher who does a side-line in tutoring seven-year-olds in the rudiments of dance, but then I met her husband. He’s a big brute of a bloke, a lorry driver with arms twice the size of mine, and when she was back in the kitchen making tea, he told me she suffers from uncontrollable bouts of crying, anger outbursts and bad headaches because of it.’

  ‘How is he taking it?’

  ‘He’s very angry, like a bull at the gate.’

  ‘I see. Why would he leave such a long time before attacking us?’

  ‘He hasn’t been on the scene long. They married nine months ago and he only met her four months before.’

  ‘Oh. Why is the band being targeted and not just me?’

  ‘Maybe he blames the band for the lifestyle, or maybe he’s saving you for last, hoping you’ll suffer.’

  Derek shot him a look, daring him to smile, but the expression was the same, impassive and ugly, a face only a mother could love. ‘I’m suffering all right. She and her husband belong on the same pile as Smelly Dave.’

  ‘I think so too. Don’t look so down Derek, there's only one more to go. It’s your old mate Mathew Street.’

  Mathew Street; he toyed with the memory. Street was like Paterson, a man who never smiled but he could lay his hands on anything, magazines, a little flick knife he carried in his trouser pocket, cartons of cigarettes, bottles of booze, clothes, all manner of stuff, all knocked off with no questions asked.

  ‘He’s an easy man to find as he’s got plenty of form, but a hard man to see. I needed to put on my ‘Paterson from the Met’ hat to get in the door.’

  He then trotted out a long list of thefts, assaults, robberies and jail-time stretching from detention centres as a teenager to his release from prison only six months previously.

  ‘Give me the last one again.’

  ‘Street was sent away for twelve for a post office robbery. While he was inside, they found new evidence linking him to the AeroSwiss robbery at Gatwick Airport in 1989. He was given another fifteen to add to his sentence. He’s been inside over twenty-five-years.’

  ‘It’s still a big whack for stealing some money.’

  ‘It is, but like the Great Train Robbers way back then, the judge wanted to make an example of them because they came tooled up and they shot and wounded a security guard. It wasn’t only Street, the whole gang copped it. Plus, when inside, he was involved in the stabbing of some guy and it wiped out any parole he had coming.’

  ‘What did he say when you spoke to him?’

  ‘Not much, in fact it was a bloody waste of time. It was more the things he didn’t say that interested me. He told me the fall-out with you was all a misunderstanding. How come you were hanging about with scum-bags like him?’

  ‘He was useful to have around, he could get us all sorts of things and fix broken gear, but as you said, he’s a man who robs security v
ans for a living. He’s not likely to take the loss of cash, no matter how small, lightly.’

  ‘What was the story, you guys wanted all this stuff and when he came up with the goods you couldn’t pay him?’

  ‘We were temporarily strapped for cash. Frannie Copeland, our manager kept us on a tight leash, to keep the band lean and hungry, according to him. Meanwhile, you could find him swanning around London in a smart car and chomping on those bloody fat cigars he liked to smoke. We told Street we would pay him when Frannie gave us some more money, but he got the hump and refused to leave the goods. He tried to get rid them but couldn’t as they were hot and in the end, he dumped the whole lot in a skip, the pig-headed sod. I think he lost a couple of grand.’

  ‘When I talked to him,’ Paterson said, ‘he laughed the incident off as one of the pitfalls of selling knocked-off gear. Like I said, it wasn’t what he said I didn't like, it’s what he didn’t say. When he told me he still liked you guys and didn’t bear a grudge, his body language and the tight expression on his face expressed something else. Derek, I was in the force for thirty years and I can spot a liar at fifty feet. He was boiling inside, but could I get the old fucker to say anything about what was bothering him? No sodding way.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘Is there something you’re not telling me? Did something else go down between you guys and him, other than the loss of a couple of grand? He might be a criminal and willing to do anything for money, but I don’t see him holding a grudge for over twenty years about a measly two grand.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ He sat back, thinking. ‘No, there’s nothing else I can think of. You didn’t find out if he was maybe the uncle or godfather of Danny Winter, a relative still grieving over the death of his favourite boy?’

  ‘I didn’t explore the point and Street didn’t say anything about him, plus I didn’t see any pictures around his house of a young lad in his first school uniform or a guy playing keyboards in a band. Is there any significance in Street being put away for his long stretch only a few months after the Crazy Crows split up?’

  ‘Not that I can think of. What’s on your mind?’

  ‘I don’t know Derek, I’m fishing. It’s what we cops, or should I say what we ex-cops do.’

  ‘There was no official connection between Street and the band. We knew him as a contract roadie, a guy who joined up for the big tours and buggered off when they were finished.’

  ‘I understand, Derek, but were you or the other guys responsible in some way for sending him back to prison for twenty-odd years? I know if someone did that to me, it wouldn’t be a serious fucking grudge I would hold, I wouldn’t be happy until I had their bollocks locked in a vice and my hand on a blazing-hot blowtorch.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  DI Henderson turned off the A27 and headed towards Eastbourne. It was a fine sunny day with clear views across the Channel, but the biting wind was forcing dog-owners to walk with their heads down and jackets fastened. Shame, the dogs seemed happy enough to be out.

  ‘There it is,’ DS Walters said from the passenger seat, looking out of the window at the tops of buildings and over to a murky sea, ‘God’s Waiting Room.’

  ‘You and your cynical brethren might not be aware, but the number of elderly people in Brighton is much higher than here in Eastbourne.’

  ‘You’re kidding me. All I see outside Churchill Square are gangs of young girls, and groups of young lads hanging around the pubs in the Lanes. Any time I go to Eastbourne, the only gangs I see are made up of old folk heading down to the seafront for a snooze on one of the benches along the esplanade.’

  ‘It’s true. Brighton has nearly three times the number of over-eighties as Eastbourne, but because it’s bigger, there are more places for them to go, and with all the universities and numerous language schools around the place, the youngsters keep the town looking young.’

  Derek Crow’s friend from the criminal side of life, Mathew Street, lived in Belmore Road, a street not gifted with much greenery, except a skimpy smattering of small privet hedges. He proved a hard man to track down, not because he jetted across the country doing important work or led a hectic social life, but because he wouldn’t answer the phone. When he did, he made it plain he didn’t like the police and proved reluctant to help them. Walters was forced to apply a little pressure by reminding him they were conducting a murder investigation and if he wouldn’t see them in Eastbourne they would drag him to Brighton instead.

  The house looked comfortably furnished, if a little on the old-fashioned side for Henderson’s tastes, but it was tidy and had recently been cleaned. The man himself was ensconced in his favourite chair with a whisky, watching horse racing on television. He had a thin, wiry face with so many lines and crevices an astronomer could mistake it for the surface of a new planet and sparse almost non-existent grey hair. His skin was dull and sallow, a bad reflection on Eastbourne’s claim to be one of the sunniest places in the UK.

  ‘I wanna see what happens in this race, ok?’

  It was a statement, not a question, and he didn’t look around to see if they were put out, which they weren’t. In truth, Henderson loathed horse racing and any form of gambling, as in his experience it wasted lives and destroyed marriages, witnessed at first hand with two uncles in Scotland and a couple of coppers he knew on the Sussex force.

  The room may have looked neat and tidy but there was no disguising the reek of cigarette smoke, and even though the window was open as it was a bright, sunny day, he was puffing away as if his life depended on it. He was either addicted to the nasty white sticks or watching the gee-gees made him nervous, as no sooner did he finish one than he lit up another.

  From a brief introduction, Henderson detected no respiratory problems nor any issue with his mobility, and he didn’t see any walking sticks or his pet hate, oxygen cylinders, in the hall. It was a sad reflection on the lottery of life when Frannie Copeland’s only guilty pleasure was tugging away on the odd cigar and yet he would spend the rest of his life moving around like a cripple, while the man sitting here, doing a fair impression of the Flying Scotsman emerging from Stowe Hill Tunnel, seemed to be in full possession of his faculties.

  In a noisy climax both on the box and in the room, the race ended with his horse, Bonny Lad, falling at the last hurdle. In response, this particular Eastbourne punter leapt from his chair with surprising agility for a man over sixty, and using more force than necessary, switched the television off.

  ‘Fucking nags, they never do what you want,’ he said to the room. ‘I should pack it in and take up hill walking. Ha, ha, fat chance.’ He spoke with a London twang in deep, guttural tones, not surprising if he always smoked his cigarettes in such an enthusiastic fashion.

  ‘As Sergeant Walters said to you on the phone, Mr Street–’

  ‘Call me Mat, everybody else does.’

  ‘Well, Mat, as my sergeant no doubt told you, we are in the process of investigating the deaths of three members of the Crazy Crows rock band.’

  ‘What the hell’s it got to do with me?’

  ‘Nothing, as far as we know. Your name has come up in enquiries, that’s all. Tell me, how did you first get involved with the band?’

  He ran long fingers through wisps of hair, or what was left of it. ‘I was doing some joinery work at the Hammersmith Apollo, fixing the broken seating and re-fitting cracked banisters and handrails after the fans of some boy band trashed the place. I got talking to them when they came in for rehearsals. It developed from there and I joined them whenever they went on tour.’

  ‘What was the attraction for you working for them?’ Walters asked.

  ‘It wasn’t the bloody music that’s for sure, the stuff they played was just a load of fucking noise. I like to listen to country and western myself, there’s always a nice melody and I can hear the words, not a load of mumbles over a noisy guitar.’

  ‘If not the music, then what?’

  ‘The job involved a lot of traveling and I wa
s getting fed up with London, too much heat, if you know what I mean.’

  Henderson did know what he meant. With any new security van robbery, bank heist or payroll stick-up, a man like Street would be one of the first suspects to be wheeled into a police station ‘to help them with their enquiries.’

  ‘What did you do for the band?’ Henderson asked.

  ‘I started off as a roadie, but because I could do carpentry as well I also got involved in building stands and rigs for the stage, that kind of thing.’

  ‘How did you get along together?’

  ‘I suppose I got on best with Eric Hannah. I come from the East End and he came from south London. I found out he liked gangster movies and guns, so I got him magazines from the US and took him down to my local boozer in Plaistow and introduced him to some people I knew. He was over the moon, star struck. I thought it was meant to be the other way round,’ he said, laughing at a joke Henderson was sure he’d cracked many times.

  ‘So you became good mates with the boys in the band?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say best mates, but they could always find me when they wanted summat.’

  ‘According to Frannie Copeland you were around quite a lot.’

  ‘Is the old fucker still alive, well blow me? I thought that ignorant bastard would have died a long ago. Weak lungs you see, he got TB as a kid. He hated me being there as he said it undermined his authority or some shite or other. I think it was because I didn’t like him and Frannie only likes people who like him. Weird init?’