Time and Tide

by Peter Grainger

  ‘In my desk.’

  ‘I could set it up for you again.’

  ‘Not much point. By the time I’d learned how to switch it on and off, I’d be gone. What do we do now? Take Mr Williams outside and beat him around the head with this register?’

  That was what Waters would have done not so long ago. Now he thought about his answer.

  ‘No. He’s anxious about us having it here – have you seen how he keeps looking over? He’s wondering whether we’ve noticed anything, which suggests that he’s well aware of the altered page, but he’ll have a story ready by now. Someone spilt a drink on it or something… It isn’t evidence but it might be intelligence. We should hand it back and say everything is fine. He’ll be so relieved, he’ll believe us.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘We check out these dates against what Sokoloff was doing at that time.’

  ‘How?’

  Waters had made a point of closing the register and pushing it away from him, as if it was no longer of the slightest interest.

  ‘With his partner, and his business. Give them to Serena and see if there is anything in his bank statements that could tie in to that period. And his phone records, when we get them. His car will have some sophisticated electronics. I don’t know if one can use that to back-track its movements yet, but I was reading that-’

  ‘Alright, point made! That’s what I would do, just about word for word, apart from the car thing which I reckon is science fiction. Take it back, tell him lunch was excellent and fetch me another glass of lemonade. I’ll even buy you another coke as you’ve done so well. We’ll sit here a few more minutes and look not threatening…’

  Smith watched Waters at the bar. He was confident, chatty with Williams as he handed over the register and ordered the drinks, and the barman even managed a smile. Relief, just as Waters had predicted. An odd feeling, isn’t it, Smith? Pride that he is that good because of you, tinged with a little regret that he is so good now he probably doesn’t need you any longer. The moment would come soon when you might even be holding him back a little, and that must be avoided. At all costs.

  Waters had the honour of driving the car again because, said Smith, he needed the practice. On the way back to the town there were two large pubs close to the road, both with signs offering bed and breakfast accommodation. Waters pulled into the car-parks of both and watched as Smith went inside, pursuing their inquiries. No-one recognised the photograph or remembered the name, which was exactly what Smith expected to hear, but it was the answers to the final question he asked that interested him – has anyone else called today or yesterday, asking similar questions? The answer to that was also ‘No’ in both cases.

  Back in the car, Smith said, ‘It was worth asking, even though we knew the answer.’

  Waters said, ‘Did we?’

  ‘Yes, I think we did. If those two southern chaps had been searching the area for signs of their mate Bernie, just going over it looking for clues because they had no idea, they’d call into places like this, wouldn’t they? Stands to reason, and that’s no different to what we would do. But they don’t appear to have been doing that, at least not in The Wheatsheaf and The White Lion. I doubt whether they’ve called at any other pubs at all. Why not?’

  Waters pulled up at the T junction on the edge of Wells and waited; the strong sunshine had brought new day-trippers to the coast, anxious to get onto the beach for the afternoon.

  He said, ‘If the rest of your theory is right, they only called at The Queens Arms because they already knew that’s where he had been. And they weren’t trying to find out what had happened to him because they already knew. The more you think about it, the more it doesn’t look good for Owen Williams, does it? If you’re right about even some of this.’

  ‘Do you mean what he’s been getting up to, or what else might befall him in the future?’

  ‘Both?’

  Finally, Waters was able to get them moving again, but the traffic was heavy in the narrow streets that had hardly widened since the late Victorians had discovered the Norfolk coast with their railways and horses and coaches. Some cases are easy, with a trail of evidence as incontrovertible as droplets of fresh blood, with opportunities and motives self-evident for the least inspired of detectives to be able to stitch them together into a case that will hold water – and then there are cases like this one. Later this afternoon, back in Kings Lake, they might hear that there had been developments, that the answer after all lay in Sokoloff’s life in London, and that Smith had been wrong about that. But even then, why had Bernard Sokoloff been here at all? If we knew that… And then Waters remembered that Smith himself had said the very same thing three days ago.

  As they drew into the car-park behind The Royal Victoria, Smith continued the conversation.

  ‘As far as Mr Williams is concerned, he hasn’t committed any offence of which we are aware, other than maybe falsifying a register – for which he could come up with a feasible explanation. I cannot see Detective Inspector Terek awarding us the Arrest of the Month trophy for that one, can you? It isn’t an offence to forget the name of a guest in your establishment-’

  ‘But technically it’s an offence to say you’ve forgotten if you haven’t.’

  ‘True, but how do you prove that one? You can’t – all you can do is put the probabilities in front of the jury and ask them what they think. We need to be able to put Sokoloff there, at The Queens Arms, and then we can lean on Williams a bit.’

  ‘You think he was involved? I know he wasn’t being exactly cooperative, but that’s not unusual for us, is it? We see it every day. Some people won’t tell us the truth even when they’re perfectly innocent!’

  Smith was thinking now, and not necessarily about the conversation. Then it turned into some serious thinking – he reached into the glove compartment and took out the half a packet of Polo mints. There had only ever been half a packet of Polo mints in that glove compartment, Waters realised, and he had no idea what the fate of the first half of all those packets might have been.

  Smith said, ‘I don’t know about Mr Williams yet, but I can’t get past the way those two there just before us behaved. That doesn’t make sense at all unless they believed he did know something, does it?’

  Waters was getting out of the car as he said, ‘As you say – true. But we only have Williams’ word for that as well, don’t we, how they behaved? Things might have happened quite differently to what he told us, DC.’

  ‘Yes, I know. And no-one else was saying a word about it, were they?’

  Smith stood in the car-park again, just as he had before they left, looking from the entrance back to the rear of the hotel and the camera mounted on the wall. Then he said, ‘Come on, then. Download this footage from the other camera or whatever it is you’ve got to do. Then we’ll go back to Kings Lake. For all we know, they’ve wrapped this up and are down the The Bell celebrating by now. I think I can guarantee we’d be the last to know.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Charlie Hills was on the reception desk when Smith went in on the Thursday morning, which meant that he should be there for the next few days; Charlie’s shift patterns were something of a mystery to all concerned, not least the uniformed superintendent of the station. Charlie explained this to Smith by saying that a moving target is harder to hit, to which Smith invariably responded by saying that though this was true, the really remarkable thing about the desk sergeant’s modus operandi was just how little he seemed to move at all, whether or not he was hit.

  Charlie’s opening salvo on the Thursday was, ‘So, you’ve finally gone and done it.’

  ‘Yes, Charlie. I’ve got religion at last. It was all that time I spent with the Brothers up at Abbeyfields. All I need now is someone to pray for, and that’s why I’ve called in here this morning. You don’t need to do anything other than try to be saved by me.’

  Charlie had gone into his hidey-hole behind the reception desk, and Smith heard the sounds of th
e kettle being filled and switched on. This meant that Charlie either had things he wanted to say or things he wanted to know. The briefing upstairs was due to begin in twenty minutes, and Smith should be up there preparing for it – on the other hand, after yesterday afternoon’s performances when he and Waters got back from the coast, he was in no particular hurry to get into another meeting. Quite suddenly, it seemed, everything had gone to pieces.

  Charlie reappeared and lifted the flap in the counter. As Smith went through, Charlie said, ‘Remember that girl who was here with me a couple of days? The one in the head-dress?’

  Smith looked about as if he needed to confirm that they were alone before he responded.

  ‘Charlie, if you’re not careful you’ll be going for some retraining or reprogramming or something. You must be referring to the young woman who assisted you while wearing the hijab. What about her?’

  Charlie Hills had been stirring the contents of the mugs in an agitated fashion but one must never do this when making tea in the mug directly; if one must make tea in this way, in the absence of a pot, leave it to brew for no longer than thirty seconds and then carefully lift out the bag. What Charlie was now concocting would soon be strong enough to paint onto the underside of the Peugeot as a weather seal. Smith took the mug that must be his and removed the teabag with his fingers before the situation got any worse, as if it could – next there would be powdered milk.

  ‘I think she’ll soon be back, DC. They’re going to do it. All this will be ripped out. We’ll have screens and security doors, and we’ll be talking to people through a microphone. There’ll be cameras…’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry. You won’t be here to see it. Spring of next year, March or April they reckon. You’re getting out just in time.’

  ‘You say that, Charlie, but this will affect me personally. A key part of my retirement plan is to drop in here more or less daily when you’re on duty and report trivial offences in person. Now I’m going to be speaking into a microphone while I’m reading a poster about how to get in touch with the modern, caring police service, who are hiding on the other side of a sheet of one-way, reinforced security glass. If only I’d known all this before I handed my letter in…’

  They stared at the wooden counter, and Smith took a cautious sip of the tea. It was awful, and he realised then how much he was going to miss it, the tea. There would come a Monday when Charlie was here, screen or no screen, and Smith would be somewhere else. Yes, he would be drinking English Breakfast loose-leaf, brewed for four minutes in a Whittards ceramic pot, but he would be drinking it alone.

  Charlie said, ‘So, how did they take it?’

  The ‘they’ meant everyone, of course – everyone who had been told about Smith’s resignation.

  ‘There has been no wailing and gnashing of teeth, Charlie. At least, not in my presence. A bit of surprise maybe, but I don’t understand why. I only stayed on this long to be awkward. The real surprise should be that anyone would do this job a day longer than necessary nowadays.’

  Sergeant Charles Hills, however, wasn’t easily fooled, particularly by someone he knew as well as Smith.

  ‘Christmas was what I heard. What are you going to do with yourself? Not much gardening to do until the spring… What are you going to do all day without people like me around to wind up? No more taking afternoon tea with the likes of Ma Budge unless she becomes a member of your social circle.’

  Charlie was not simply pointing out the obvious or trying to make Smith have second thoughts; he wanted to know, and Smith could guess why. That redesigning of the reception area nonsense was about more than finding a way to spend the annual capital budget – it was intended to design out of the system the old-fashioned, subjective, personal sort of contact between the police force and the public – the kind of unprofessionalism that people like Charlie Hills excelled in. Charlie was old-school and out of date, therefore. Charlie Hills would not be far behind him now in the retirement stakes.

  ‘Charlie, the offers are already pouring in. Only this week I was asked if I’d like to join the coastguard.’

  As if to confirm Smith’s suspicions, Charlie said, ‘Nice. How many are they looking for?’

  Outside in the reception area, a door creaked open. Detective Inspector Terek appeared, crossing left to right, going out towards the car park. He glanced through into Charlie’s room, saw Smith and went to speak before changing his mind and heading out of the building.

  Smith said, ‘He’ll be back in a minute. What’s the betting he can’t walk by twice without saying something?’

  ‘One packet of biscuits.’

  ‘Rich Tea or Malted Milk?’

  ‘Your call…’

  Charlie had lost count of the daft bets and the number of times he had lost them but it didn’t matter – they wouldn’t be doing it many more times.

  Charlie said, ‘I hear it’s going well upstairs.’

  ‘Swimmingly.’

  ‘This bloke who washed up in Barnham. Officially a murder as of yesterday afternoon, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it? I was in late yesterday afternoon but nobody actually said. Waters and I came back with a load of stuff that needs going through – you know, just the unimportant little things like what had the deceased been doing in his last forty eight hours – but Murray and Butler had been commandeered, too busy to help out.’

  They were both watching the reception foyer, and waiting.

  Charlie added, after a respectful silence, ‘Wilson must be loving that.’

  Smith didn’t answer, and then Charlie said, ‘So, what did you find up on the coast? Anything useful?’

  Smith had told him almost all of the story before Terek reappeared, this time with a briefcase. Terek looked in again, and when he saw that Smith was still in there, he came up to the counter, looking for all the world like a stationery rep after an appointment with the station’s office manager. Charlie Hills stepped over to the counter and said, with a perfectly straight face, ‘Good morning, sir. How can I be of assistance?’

  Terek looked past him at Smith and said, ‘DC? Meeting in ten minutes?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I hadn’t forgotten.’

  ‘Only Detective Superintendent Allen will be …’

  ‘Taking the meeting?’

  ‘Yes. Quite. So…’

  ‘Absolutely, sir. I understand that we’re now officially treating it as a murder. Sergeant Hills here just informed me of that.’

  Terek blinked behind the spectacles.

  ‘Yes, we are. Yesterday afternoon. I thought that everyone…’

  ‘I’ll be along in a couple of minutes, sir.’

  The detective inspector left the scene but Charlie continued to stare at the empty space he had left behind. Then he said, ‘That man has trouble finishing his sentences.’

  Smith went out through the gap in the counter and lowered the flap. He ran fingers over the smooth, golden-yellow wood – oak unless he was much mistaken – and said to Charlie, ‘I hope you’re going to keep polishing this until the day they tear it out and burn it.’

  Charlie Hills nodded, and Smith headed upstairs for the meeting.

  Christopher Waters watched Smith, and thought that he was uncharacteristically quiet; not that Smith ever made a lot of noise, but there would usually be sharp questions that showed he was paying close attention to anything that interested him in a briefing. Perhaps, like Waters himself, he was hoping that this wouldn’t last too much longer as they had plenty of work to do on the material from the cameras, and it wasn’t at all certain now that Serena and John Murray would have the time to assist. It wasn’t really a team any more, not like it used to be when he first arrived at Kings Lake.

  Superintendent Allen’s introduction was mercifully brief, and within a couple of minutes Serena Butler was summarising what Dr Robinson would be putting into his final report on the post-mortem for Bernard Sokoloff. The man had drowned, comprehensively and probably quite quickly. The
lungs and the stomach contained quantities of water that was most likely, in view of the samples for comparison taken by the away team, water from the open sea rather than brackish water from the creeks and estuaries. The algae beneath the fingernails was also consistent with the samples taken from the jetties – this might imply that at some point before he died Sokoloff had either been clinging to or had been dragged over a similar structure.

  Both legs had been broken prior to Sokoloff’s death. The nature and severity of the breaks suggested that they had been the result of a collision with a fast-moving vehicle, and that the impact had probably been from slightly behind on the man’s left-hand side. It was possible that the vehicle involved was not a typical family saloon or estate; careful measurements seemed to indicate that if he had been struck by a vehicle’s bumper, this had been several inches higher than on such vehicles. Officers might like to investigate the bumper heights of, say, various four-wheel drive and utility makes.

  The stomach and gut contents were consistent with what Sokoloff had eaten at The Royal Victoria Hotel – this had to be Serena’s own contribution to the summary, thought Waters, as Dr Robinson would not need to have been in possession of that information.

  Finally, the head-wound, which was more consistent with the body being dragged during the vehicle impact than with the usual deep impact from a weapon, contained a quantity of coarse sand and grit. Samples had been retained, and if required a match could be attempted with any brought in by officers from locations that might be of interest during the investigation.

  Waters had watched DI Terek nodding encouragement throughout the summary, and at the end the inspector said, ‘Great work, Serena. I draw to everyone’s attention the fact that the summary, along with some more technical data, is already available on the central database. As of this morning, we now have the phone records and Sokoloff’s personal bank data. Serena, if you could move onto the phone, and John, take over the bank records from Serena.’