First Fix Your Alibi
Page 17
Harpur thought it might be gangland, too. He could see that neither of the Vaughans felt sure how to deal with Iles. If it was fact that they had been shipped off to a safe house in Wales five years or so ago, they might not realize that the secrecy of the move would be absolute – no general notification to all police forces. One force, the host, would have to be told and only top people there. Nobody else. The Vaughans might think Iles was merely toying with them for his own purposes, already knew all the answers to his questions. In some ways they would be right, Harpur decided. Iles had cracked the security barrier.
‘And talking of schools, the one at Brecon must have some top-rate teachers,’ Iles said. ‘Wyn Normanton would need very good grades to get into university here. It’s not Oxford or Cambridge, admittedly, but is well regarded, entry requirements high. Perhaps, though, it’s unfair to give all the credit to the Brecon sixth form. He must already have had a very sound earlier education.’
Again Iles waited for some confirming detail. This time Gareth Leo did respond. But he must have had practice in some of that blankness the ACC encountered during his researches. ‘Oh, yes,’ Vaughan said. Nothing more. He’d be about the same age as Catrin, very solidly made, just under six feet tall, maybe puzzled by Iles’s persistent fishing about his and the family’s past, but strong enough in the head, and determined enough, to block inconvenient questions. Harpur could imagine him doing the same under formal police interrogation. Did Vaughan have experience of that, though not as Gareth Leo Vaughan? Perhaps he had resisted so well at one of those sessions – the last, most likely – as his way to a bargaining situation: a new, hideaway life for him and his family in return for the kind of information his interrogators wanted.
His fair hair was in what could be fast retreat but the remainder he kept long and brushed back hard in thick swathes over his ears. He wore a cream-coloured, two-piece summer suit and white, open-necked shirt. They looked fine, despite the long flight. Maybe he’d had time to change. He had what Harpur’s mother would have called an ‘aristocratic face’, meaning a mildly ridged, Roman nose. His jaw was slabby, his blue eyes defiant and wily and, of course, sad now.
Harpur could imagine him as part of a crooked outfit – drugs, and/or protection, and/or top class robbery somewhere around those south London districts named by Iles; but could imagine him also realizing that this time the case, cases, against him looked too much to get away with and therefore willing to do a super-grass deal. There was a famous, popular Welsh song that went something like: ‘We’ll keep a welcome in the hillside, we’ll keep a welcome in the vales’. Vaughan, or whatever he was called then, might have been ready to accept that welcome and move away to Brecon.
‘As we understand from the media, Wyn got into some kind of disturbance at a late-night hotel do, but it seemed to have been calmed down by a pusher there,’ Vaughan said.
‘A Frank Waverton,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Garland said, ‘that’s how it seems to have started – some alleged trouble about a girl. We had trouble tracing her. She tells us the incident was very badly misinterpreted.’
‘So who is he?’ Vaughan said.
‘Waverton? He operates in one of the city’s bigger businesses,’ Garland said. ‘Married, thirties, keeps trim hill jogging near their house in Viaduct Avenue, the old Heritage viaduct site, new Merc, smart dresser, no off-the-peg, daughter, Olive, at a comp, good swimmer.’
‘What kind of business?’ she asked.
Iles said, ‘We have a policy of toleration here.’
‘A drugs firm?’ Vaughan asked.
Harpur could sense him focusing very hard on Waverton. Crooks, ex-crooks could be like that. They needed an objective, one objective only, and they put all their attention on it. ‘He has a middle-management role,’ Harpur said.
‘And from the reports we gather he had something … well, something sort of shameful in his past,’ Catrin said.
Harpur found it odd to hear her talk like that when Iles had just been trying to discover whether they had something shameful in their past, when they were not called Vaughan. It continued to amaze him how apparently very separate events and situations suddenly became linked with other very separate events and situations.
‘Could Wyn have been caught up in some sort of turf war?’ Vaughan asked. ‘Had he become a user?’
‘I’ve explained, we don’t have turf wars,’ Iles said. ‘Tolerance.’
‘But you do have fatal knifings,’ Catrin said.
‘This guy, Waverton, is obviously at the hotel do to sell stuff,’ Vaughan said. Harpur thought he sounded familiar with that kind of commerce. ‘There’s a fracas. He comes over immediately and gets involved.’
‘Not really involved,’ Garland said. ‘Our information is that he tried to quell the trouble then withdrew.’
‘Your information might not be complete, though, might it?’
‘In which aspect?’ Iles said.
‘The squabble – it could have been about a girl. It could have been about something else,’ Vaughan said. ‘This kind of rave, there can be all kinds of aggro and threats.’ Once more he spoke like someone who had often seen such tensions and hates. ‘Maybe this guy knew Waverton, had some kind of business connection with him.’
‘Which guy?’ Harpur said.
‘The one who did Wyn, of course,’ Catrin Vaughan said.
‘You two have obviously discussed the accounts of the tragedy, and that’s only natural,’ Iles said. ‘But you mustn’t take speculation as fact.’
‘The fact is that when Waverton goes, as you think, to restore a bit of order he’s dealing with what seems to be a simple punch-up – fists and shoving, nothing worse. It happens all the time at raves,’ Vaughan said. ‘He leaves them and suddenly we find one of the crowd now has a knife.’ He lowered his head. Then he added, matter-of-factly, almost: ‘And he uses it on Wyn,’ like polishing off an equation.
Iles gave one of his grunts. It could be surprise. It could signal he’d been granted a revelation.
‘What are you saying?’ Garland asked. ‘That Waverton on the quiet passed the knife to the assailant. We’ve nothing at all to that effect. He has been interviewed but only as a witness.’
‘He’s not going to tell you he provided a mate with a knife that’s going to kill someone only minutes later, is he?’ Catrin replied.
‘Mr Iles, you say there are no turf wars here, and you might believe it,’ Vaughan said, ‘but where there are drugs there is envy and suspicion and jockeying and attempts to colonize. The girl might have next to nothing to do with this.’
‘You know about these things?’ Iles said.
‘Perhaps you think if you don’t have any outright battles, any blood on the pavement, your tolerance policy is working fine,’ Vaughan said. ‘The violence and jostling for control can still go on out of sight, though. There’s a lad under a sheet in that other room to prove it, wounds tactfully patched.’
‘Yes, the girl contacted us, very distressed at having, as she put it, “caused the death”,’ Garland said. ‘She’s eighteen, a literature undergraduate. She had come to the party with the man we’re holding. But in one of the band’s rest spells she’d heard your lad, Wyn, talking to someone else and thought she recognized his accent – south London, Lewisham way? She comes from that area herself. She wanted to swap stuff with him about streets and shops and schools, the way people do when away from home.
‘But the music started banging again and it became crazy to be discussing fine points about accents, so they went for a few minutes into the toilets – what she called “the stinking Augean toilets” – but he told her he wasn’t from her part of the world at all. “Brecon”, he said. She couldn’t believe it, kept on at him, but he stuck to that –“Brecon”.’
‘Well, of course he would,’ Gareth Leo Vaughan said. ‘She’d got that very wrong, hadn’t she?’
‘Obviously,’ Iles said, ‘she must have imagined the resemblance.’
‘And then comes that other misunderstanding, does it?’ Vaughan said. ‘Waverton thinks it’s a drugs dispute and comes over and passes the knife to someone who presumably had a dealing connection with him.’
‘We don’t know that,’ Garland said. ‘And, clearly, the girl said nothing along those lines. Just confusion over the accents.’
The mortuary man came back and approached Vaughan with identification statements to be signed. ‘Catrin can do it,’ he said. To Harpur it sounded as though Vaughan himself didn’t want closure yet, and completing the papers might be mistaken for that.
The Vaughans left. They’d come in their car parked long-term at Heathrow while they were in Australia. Iles, Harpur and Francis Garland went back to police headquarters and Iles came to Harpur’s room again. He wanted to see the witness statement taken by a detective sergeant from Waverton.
Harpur screened it. He’d read the statement before and considered there was not much more there than had appeared in the media. Waverton told the sergeant that he was at the Binnacle that night and at one point had noticed some kind of altercation among a group of young men and women. He’d regarded this as nothing unusual at raves but kept an eye. It had seemed to get worse, out of control. He’d feared that this would break out into serious violence and had crossed the dance floor to try to ‘nip the quarrel in the bud’. He said he’d felt a duty, being older than these kids, more responsible.
And he thought he had quietened things and returned to his original spot near the main doors. The sergeant hadn’t pressed for an explanation of why he was at the hotel. Waverton was adult, entitled to stay up late and go where he wished. He lived in a tolerant realm. True, the rave might be illegal and involve trespass, but Waverton hadn’t organized it.
In his statement Waverton said that to his astonishment when he looked back towards the group he’d recently been talking to the fighting had begun again and he saw one of the young men fall and not get up. Waverton said he thought the man might have been struck with an object, not by a punch. The fighting stopped, as though people had come to realize something serious had happened. Several of the group seemed to get down and try to give first aid, possibly with kiss of life. Waverton didn’t feel he could help any further and hadn’t intervened again.
The sergeant asked whether Waverton had heard any shouting, possibly referring to him and in an unfavourable tone. ‘There might have been shouting,’ Waverton replied, ‘but not audible from where I was, because the music continued to drown out any other sound for at least another couple of minutes. I couldn’t say whether there were remarks about me. I suppose some of the group thought I had no business intruding on them.’
‘That was the gist of the shouting we’re told, but more particular, more specific, than because of simple annoyance at getting told off by you,’ the sergeant said.
‘No, can’t help you on that,’ Waverton replied.
Harpur saw deep frustration in Iles. He was sitting on an ordinary straight-backed wooden chair, not in his usual spot on Harpur’s desk. He crouched forward, staring at the screen even when the statement had finished. More of that blankness he seemed dogged by had moved in on him. Sight of his legs and shoes could no longer bring balm.
Harpur tried to guess at the ACC’s thinking now. He seemed conscious of a gravely dire network of troubles, none of which he could annihilate. There was this slippery figure, Waverton, perhaps as elegantly clothed as Iles himself, and fine shoes, stepping into prominence, possibly even showing some public spirit; and yet Iles would still want to know whether he set up the Sandicott murders.
And then came the Vaughans with their closed-off, expertly expunged background and possible infinitely awful link to Waverton. Iles, unrelaxed, miserable, multi-thwarted on that basic piece of furniture looked as though he knew defeat, and could not see how to recover from it. He must fear that management of the situation, the situations, was slipping away from him; or had already slipped away from him. That notion would mash his ego. That notion would delight his enemies. ‘I think I’ll have to talk to Waverton myself, Harpur.’
This might be a sign of the turmoil he was suffering: assistant chiefs didn’t normally interview witnesses, especially when one of his officers had already done that job.
‘The sergeant questioned Waverton well enough, but he didn’t have the full picture, did he? How could he?’ Iles said.
‘What is the full picture, sir?’ Harpur asked.
‘Quite, Col,’ Iles replied.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Ralph Ember liked to be at the club he owned in Shield Terrace a little while before it opened at lunchtime and then again late at night and into the small hours when it was busiest. He went through something of a ritual at close-down of the Monty. First, he’d bag the day’s takings for dropping off in the bank’s wall safe on the way home. Then he’d do a careful check around the outside of the building for possible delayed action fire bombs left by business rivals and/ or folk he’d crossed, though he tried unflinchingly to abide by a rule he’d made for himself, namely, not to shag any member’s wife or girlfriend, no matter how persuasively some women came on to him. Those who brushed their hand across his trousers in the groin area probably imagined they were giving him a treat and a taster whereas Ralph found such behaviour totally out of harmony with the elite character he sought for the club. Ralph thought that in the Monty the word ‘member’ should have only the one, obvious meaning, a paid-up customer of the club.
The afternoons he tried to reserve for a sleep and general relaxation at Low Pastures, his manor house on a hillock overlooking the city. He had taken up archery not long ago and was practising today in one of the paddocks after his nap. The children were at their private school and Ralph’s wife, Margaret, had gone to her regular watercolour class. Ralph approved of this as a hobby for her and, although he didn’t think much of the stuff she did, he insisted on having some of the pictures framed and hung in the hall of Low Pastures, properly lit. He considered it would be rude and very hurtful to let her see his real opinion. Elsewhere in the house he had some genuine art on the walls, several of the works quite possibly valuable and not fakes.
The afternoon weather was excellent for archery, a helpful breeze coming from behind him and good visibility for the divisions of the target. It greatly pleased Ralph to feel he was in touch with history through his bow and arrows. Of course, he had a fairly frequent reminder of that history when at one of those combined company dinners in the Agincourt. Victory over the French so many years ago was commemorated in that name, and had been secured by skilled use of the longbow, despite our side being outnumbered.
Ralph couldn’t remember ever reading whether those British archers had the luck of the wind helping their arrows along, but he felt certain they’d have done OK anyway. He thought that as he improved he would set up a practising session when the wind came head-on and powerful. This would help put him in better touch with those old valiant and skillful warriors. He tried never to molly-coddle himself. If there was a similarity between him and Henry V’s troops, Ralph wanted it to be authentic. He felt very certain that suppose he’d been alive in those days he would have been one of Henry’s troops, possibly with an officer rank.
He was walking forward to recover a batch of arrows in or near the target when he heard someone call his name. Actually, he realized he’d automatically fallen into a military style of moving as he thought of the battle, and it was more like a brisk march as he went to collect the arrows.
He turned and saw Manse Shale pushing a mountain bike. On his visit to the rectory, Ralph had noticed several bicycles, including an ancient Humber with chain guard that he used around the town. He had on a helmet, black, below-the-knee Lycra shorts, and a striped green and beige sports shirt. ‘Just
out for a country trundle, Ralph, and suddenly realized I was passing the barns of Apsley Farm and therefore must be very near your place. Thought I’d chance it and look in,’ Shale said.
Manse was clearly trying to make it sound casual, an accident. Ralph reckoned it must have been carefully planned, though, Shale probably knew he’d be home most afternoons. Manse might want a confidential chat and feel the Monty was too crowded and obvious. But he would also know that Ralph did everything he could to keep his home and family entirely separate from his business life. So, Manse would sneak in like this, pretend it was an offshoot of a Lycra spin.
It infuriated Ralph to hear Shale speak of ‘your place’, meaning Low Pastures, as if it was some council flat or dismal semi. And he resented hearing Apsley Farm described as being ‘very near’ Low Pastures. Not even remotely true: Low Pastures stood very much alone, with excellent views in all directions, and not hemmed in by any other workaday buildings, such as Apsley’s barns. Shale’s absurd comments were clearly his attempt to downgrade Ralph’s property and estate, turn it into the sort of ordinary residence someone taking a bike ride might feel like dropping in on, offering no forewarning, and certainly without an invitation.
Here he was in that fucking ridiculous gear, obviously intending to discuss Waverton and his removal. He couldn’t risk possible phone taps, or a conversation at the club. His hamster face, but with ferrety eyes, resembled a hamster’s even more strongly under his gaudy crimson and blue helmet. Ralph couldn’t understand why that was the case. After all, a cycling helmet had no hamster qualities. But that’s how it was for Ralph. Manse should be in one of those two-tier cages, not trying to bike his way into a distinguished country house. To come out here on a bike, and in that farcical outfit, to discuss an impending death seemed to Ralph a total disregard for tone. Surely some respect should be shown towards the prospective corpse.