Unlucky For Some

by Jill McGown

  Gertie’s clicking sound. It was the blind man’s cane on the railings. Good old girl—Gary knew she hadn’t imagined it.

  “He stayed like that for . . . I don’t know . . . maybe half a minute. And then he turned round and came back down to Mafeking Road again. Well, it seemed a bit odd, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time, not really. Then when I heard tonight what had happened, I thought—well, he could have been stabbing him for all I know.”

  The thought had occurred to Gary, too, but then he realized that Gertie had already seen Headless disposing of the weapon by the time she heard the blind man’s cane clicking on the railings. Davy was already dead when the blind man got there.

  “Do you know what time this was?”

  “Oh, yes—like I said, I only had a fifteen-minute break. I got offstage at ten forty-five, and I had to be back on at eleven. I saw the blind guy about five minutes after I came out.”

  “Did you see anyone else approach Davy before or after he did?”

  “No, no one.”

  “What time did you go back in?”

  “I waited until the last minute—literally. About a minute to eleven. It was like walking into a sauna.”

  “Did Davy look any different after this man left him?”

  “Do you mean did he look dead? Well, yes, but he always did, didn’t he, Davy? Even when he was walking about. Did you know him?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “There was never any color in his cheeks, was there? So he looked the same as ever when I saw him to start with, and he didn’t look any different after the blind guy left him, or I would have known something was up.”

  “Did you notice what the blind man was wearing?”

  “Not really. Shirt and trousers, but I don’t remember what color or anything. A light shirt—maybe white.”

  “He wasn’t wearing a jacket?”

  “No. No, he definitely wasn’t wearing a jacket—or a tie, because I was thinking how nice and cool he looked in his shirtsleeves and open neck, and then I realized I was envying a blind man.”

  “Was he carrying anything?”

  “Just his stick.”

  “Which way did he go when he came back down to Mafeking Road?”

  “He turned to my right, his left.” He twisted round. “Walked down past here, on the opposite side of the road,” he said, pointing out of the window. “Past the casino. I got a good look at his face, if you want me to pick him out of a lineup. I’d definitely know him again—I’m good at faces. But not at nondescript clothes.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “He seemed to be about my height—five ten to six feet. Quite erect, but he wasn’t young, I can tell you that. In his seventies at least. Gray hair, brushed back from his forehead, but not a lot of it. A thin face. He was quite skinny. He wore dark glasses.”

  “Did you see anyone in a dinner jacket? Not necessarily approaching Davy—just anyone at all?”

  “No. You’d notice, wouldn’t you? It’s all jeans and T-shirts round here. Though they did have some sort of do on at the casino that was black tie, I think, but I didn’t see anyone come out of there.”

  Gary got a statement form. “I’d like you to make a formal statement,” he said. “Would you like to write it yourself, or do you want me to do it?”

  Eckersley waggled his fingers at Gary, who could see two-inch-long false nails, and the difficulty.

  “I’ll write it for you,” he said.

  Sgt. Hitchin came in while he was doing that, and after William Eckersley had gone, he looked at Gary. “What did Danny La Rue want?” he asked.

  Gary told him. “It looks as though the blind man couldn’t get past Davy. And if the beat men couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead, the blind man certainly couldn’t, could he? When he couldn’t make him move, he just turned round and came back to find some other way to where he was going rather than have to step out into the road.”

  “We’ll have to try to trace him,” said Hitchin. “He might have seen—” He stopped, and hit his head. “No, probably not. He might know something that would help.”

  “I can start asking around now, Sarge.” Gary got to the door, and then realized something else that Dolores had told him. “This puts Stephen Halliday in the clear,” he said. “Because he didn’t leave the bingo club until five to eleven, and Davy was dead by then.”

  Jack and Stephen gave up at about half past nine. The shots, even with the moderators on the rifles, eventually sent all the other predators running for cover. And people tended to complain if you carried on much later than that, though not as many as complained before they were allowed to have the moderators. But they’d got a fox.

  “Do you want to try again on Sunday night?” asked Stephen, as they arrived back at the Tulliver.

  “Yes, why not?” said Jack. “I’ll come in and have a pint before I go home.” He followed Stephen into the small back room, then heard someone ringing the bell and shouting for service. “I don’t think there’s anyone on the bar,” he said.

  Stephen sighed, and handed Jack his rifle. “Lock that up for me, will you, Jack? I’ll go and serve them.”

  Why was there no one on the bar? That wasn’t like Grace at all. No wonder Stephen was a bit fed up. As he turned to put the rifles away, Jack could see Grace with Tony Baker, coming out of the kitchen, laughing.

  “I’m supposed to be serving!” she said. “I’ll have a riot on my hands if I don’t get back to the bar.”

  “Well, Stephen’s back now.” Tony Baker looked across at Jack. “See? Jack’s here.” He walked across the corridor to the doorway. “I take it Stephen’s come back with you,” he said.

  Jack put the rifle back on its rack, and locked up the cabinet. “He’s gone to serve someone,” he said.

  “Good,” said Baker. “That’s what I was going to tell him to do.”

  “Hello, Jack,” said Grace. “Did you have a good night?”

  “Not bad. Got one.”

  He didn’t want to stay now, but Stephen would be expecting him in the bar, and the lad probably needed moral support. He could see what he meant about Baker.

  “I’ll just go through,” he said. “I think Stephen will have pulled me a pint.”

  “Tell him I’ll be through in half an hour,” said Grace. “There’s something on the telly that Tony wants me to watch, and I can, now that Stephen’s back.”

  Of course there was something on that he wanted her to watch. Anything to keep her to himself. Jack went into the bar to find Stephen trying to serve a whole load of hikers who had obviously decided to undo all the good that their day’s hiking had done, and had spent the evening getting merry. Now they wanted the same again all round. He sighed, and lifted the bar flap. “I’ll give you a hand,” he said.

  A grim twosome greeted customers who ventured into the Tulliver Inn that night, and Jack was very aware of the impression they must be giving. Stephen was normally the most amenable of lads, the most easygoing, friendly, cheerful boy you could ask for. Not lately. Not since Tony Baker had come here. And he was blaming his mother, which wasn’t right, and not like him at all. And Jack had always just taken what was handed out to him, which had never been much, but he hadn’t seen any reason to complain, until Baker had come and disrupted what he chose to call his life.

  It wasn’t much of a life, living alone and wishing he didn’t. Mending fruit machines when he was capable of so much more than that. But he’d never had the confidence to make anything of himself. He’d had the nerve to tell Stephen to assert himself—that was a laugh.

  The way Grace had thrown herself at Baker had made him realize just how empty his life was, coming in here night after night just so she would talk to him, happy just to be where she was. She had never once thought of him as anything but a confirmed bachelor who had taken a shine to her son, who liked teaching him how to shoot and fish. She humored him, if she did anything that positive about him at all.

  But then
along came Baker with his tan and his haircut, and she stopped doing even that. He might be the only man in the room for all she cared about anyone else. And Jack remembered those things he’d heard Baker say about her, his frown growing deeper as he thought about them together, thought about Grace, believing Baker actually cared about her. She would regret taking up with him.

  And why had Baker done it, if that was the way he felt about her? Just to make Jack look like the pathetic fool he was? Why snatch away the one thing he had ever really wanted? Why? What difference could it possibly make to him?

  Jack stopped in the middle of pulling a pint, as his eyes widened slightly. It did make a difference to him, he thought. It really did. It all became clear, as he stood there, staring down at the amber liquid in the glass as though he were looking into a crystal ball, and he knew what he had to do.

  “Are you going to pull that or hypnotize it, Jack?”

  Jack snapped back to the here and now, and finished pulling the pint. “Sorry,” he said.

  “You’re miles away.”

  No. He wasn’t miles away. And he wasn’t going to be miles away. He would be right where it mattered, when it mattered, because Tony Baker was never going to take Grace Halliday away from him. Never.

  The psychological profiler had been brought in, and had been studying both the murders and the letters to see if he could narrow their search down. He had been working on the problem for a very short time, but Yardley had persuaded him to give them some of his findings so far, since their one and only suspect had now been cleared.

  Yardley was a product of everything that had gone wrong with policing, in Lloyd’s view. He was a pleasant enough man, but he had whizzed through the ranks, barely stopping long enough to find his feet in one before being promoted to the next one. He was given to using phrases in his memos like “customer interface,” which set Lloyd’s teeth on edge, though at least he didn’t actually speak like that. His latest wheeze was a campaign with the slogan “Give the Fuzz a Buzz,” encouraging people to ring up if they suspected any wrongdoing of any sort—the sort of thing they would once have mentioned to the bobby on the beat, he’d said. Since when?

  He hadn’t immediately e-mailed him back saying that, because Judy had trained him out of opening either his mouth or his e-mail and telling people what he thought of them, especially senior officers. He hadn’t even said anything when Yardley had gone on to call what he was hoping to get from this campaign “popular intelligence input,” and that restraint had been positively manful.

  And as soon as they knew they had a serial killer on the loose, Lloyd could have put money on him wanting to bring in a psychological profiler, a breed for whom he had little time. Now he wasn’t even letting the man do his job properly before demanding results.

  But before that meeting, Judy and Lloyd had been summoned to the ACC’s office, where he and Yardley were waiting for them.

  “As you know,” the ACC said, “there has been considerable press speculation about the appropriateness of Detective Chief Superintendent Yardley’s position as head of this inquiry, in view of the apparent connection between these murders and Waterman Entertainment outlets. Mr. Yardley has this morning told me that he would feel happier if he were to step down from heading the inquiry, and indeed, from actively engaging in it, until such time as the supposed connection is proved or disproved. He will, of course, continue in his normal duties as head of Bartonshire CID, but he will not take any further part in this investigation.”

  Yardley smiled, more than a little ruefully. “I’d much rather not leave you in the lurch,” he said. “But I can’t blame the press for thinking that I’m too close to Mike Waterman—this could turn out to be one of his employees, or could even involve Mike himself in some way, either as an indirect victim or an indirect perpetrator. At least the Chief Constable himself has vouched for the fact that Mike didn’t personally kill Davy Guthrie.” He smiled again. “I’m inclined to the view that someone is deliberately making it look as though Waterman Entertainment is involved. But I wonder if I would be thinking that if I weren’t Mike’s brother-in-law and his friend.”

  The ACC cleared his throat. “If I were to head the inquiry myself, there would be a great deal of background that I would have to be made aware of, and I feel that this would be counterproductive. Therefore it has been decided that for the duration of this inquiry, DCI Hill will take the rank of Acting Detective Superintendent, and will head the inquiry from now on.”

  Lloyd was very, very good at not letting his face slip, and he called on all his acting skills to come to his rescue now as he congratulated Judy. Not that she didn’t deserve this chance to prove herself; she certainly did. But the inconvenient male chauvinism that he tried so hard to keep submerged had bobbed to the surface like the idiotic inflated beach ball that it was. Judy had gone slightly pink, but not so anyone but him would notice.

  “I take it that neither of you will have a problem with that? I do hope I’m right, because I argued very persuasively that you wouldn’t, and that we would be making a little bit of history in a good cause.”

  “No problem whatsoever,” said Lloyd.

  “No,” said Judy. “No problem. I just hope I can justify your faith in me.”

  “No one’s expecting miracles, Judy,” said Yardley. “One would be nice, though.”

  “So what happens if I beat someone up in the cells?” asked Lloyd. “Or sexually harass a WPC?”

  “The complaint will be dealt with by a senior officer to whom you’re not married,” said the ACC.

  That seemed sensible, Lloyd supposed.

  “I expect you’ll want a few minutes to get used to the idea—I’ve asked Dr. Castle to meet with you in fifteen minutes.”

  “So how do you feel about it?” Lloyd asked, as they got back to their office, having walked the short distance in silence.

  “Guilty.”

  Lloyd frowned, and sat on the corner of her desk. “Why?”

  “Because I know you’re having a hard time with it, however much you pretend you’re not. And because it’s all very well having a Chief Constable who wants more women in the senior ranks, but I seem to be the only woman he ever wants there. He keeps handing things to me on a plate.”

  Lloyd snorted. “For one thing, it’s pretty obvious that it was the ACC who pushed this through, despite the Chief Constable’s reservations. And for another, what he’s handed to you on a plate is one very hot potato.”

  “Do you think he’s setting me up to fail?”

  “No—that isn’t what I meant at all! I’m just pointing out that he isn’t handing you this chance because you’re the token female—it’s because he thinks you’ll get things done and say all the right things to the media at one and the same time.” He grinned. “Even though you are the token female,” he added, and got hit.

  “Get off my desk,” she said. “That’s an order.”

  Lloyd smiled, and went back to his own desk.

  “So how hard a time are you having with it?” she asked.

  In a way, he was having a harder time with his reaction to it than to the situation itself. Some rogue gene passed down through generations of male dominance made him feel emasculated because Judy was going to be his boss, and that made him feel ashamed. He had found himself hoping that the press didn’t find out that they were husband and wife, which they hadn’t, so far, but as the ACC had said, they would be making a little bit of history, so he didn’t suppose it would be too long before they did find out.

  “I’ll get used to it.”

  “I’m hoping you don’t have time to get used to it.”

  Keith sat on the edge of the sofa, his fists clenched as if holding reins, as the runners and riders streaked past the camera.

  It turned out that Michelle had indeed arranged for them to go away this weekend, and she had been anything but pleased when he told her he’d agreed to work on the Monday. And he’d no sooner smoothed things over with her about the
day lost from their weekend break than he’d seen the runners and riders for this race. It had seemed like too good an opportunity to let pass, so now their holiday money was galloping toward the finish, and he was wondering why he wanted to live so very dangerously.

  “And it’s Mayday from Baby’s Done It, with One More Time coming up fast on the outside. Still Mayday from Baby’s Done It, Mayday from Baby’s Done It . . . One More Time is challenging hard for second, and it’s Mayday from One More Time now, with Baby’s Done It beginning to lose ground to Jumpandjive. It’s still Mayday, holding off a strong challenge from One More Time, as Jumpandjive moves into third, with Baby’s Done It continuing to lose ground, being caught now by Between the Sticks. And, at the line, it’s the appropriately named favorite Mayday who wins the seventeenth Heaven’s Gate Maiden Handicap, followed by One More Time second, Jumpandjive third, with Between the Sticks just overtaking Baby’s Done It to get fourth place. The favorite, Was She Worth It, is just crossing the line now, in a disappointing sixth place, with Strive'n'strive and When I’m Sixty-Four bringing up the rear. So, to recap, first, Mayday, ridden by . . .”

  Keith smiled, and sat back, his hands behind his head. Perhaps it was an omen, because he was gambling on May Day in more ways than one.

  Tom had been told about Yardley’s departure, and Judy’s promotion, and had passed the news on to the small executive team. Now, he sat round the table with Judy, Lloyd and the profiler, thinking of all the things he could be doing with his time instead of listening to the pedantic Dr. Castle. Like finding out how Lloyd had taken it, for one.

  “I have to stress,” Castle began, “that anything I say now could be contradicted by something that I discover tomorrow. Profiles are arrived at by analyzing the type of crime committed, the method, the areas in which the crimes take place, the actions of the criminal himself, the observations of witnesses and victims, the physical evidence and so on. I have only had time to make what I would hardly dignify by calling even a rough analysis.”