Blood on the tongue bcadf-3

by Stephen Booth

  ‘And who’s the lady?’ said DCI Kessen suddenly, tvervone looked round at the door, wondering who had walked into the room. But there was no one there. Cooper kept his eyes straight ahead and saw DCI Tailbv’s jaw tense. 1 here was only one woman in the room this afternoon, and she was no lady — she was Diane Pry. Eventually, a few officers managed to follow Kessen’s gaze and realized who he was looking at. He was

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  smiling, and he had raised one eyebrow at a jaunty angle, a mannerism he must have practised while watching Scan Connery videos.

  It was Fry herself who answered him. She got out of her chair and stood up to speak. Nobody else ever bothered doing that during a meeting.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Diane Fry, sir.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Diane. And what are you working on?’

  ‘DS Fry is one of my best officers,’ said Tailby, his expression tightening ominously.

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  ‘I’m sure she is. She looks it. But I rather think she’s one of my officers now, Stewart.’

  ‘We’ve circulated a description of the man to all the media and have appealed for information,’ said Fry coolly. ‘We’ve also had officers out at checkpoints on the A57, stopping motorists in the vicinity who might have seen something. We are also seeking sighting of a four-wheel drive vehicle in the area around the time that the body was dumped. And, naturally, we’re following up leads from the man’s physical appearance, his clothing and his possessions. His clothing seems to offer us the best chance at the moment.’

  DCI Kessen nodded and smiled approvingly.

  ‘We also have a small tattoo on the left forearm of the body,’ said Fry. ‘A dagger and a snake. It’s a common motif, but it might help identification/

  ‘I’m sure you’ll do an excellent job, Detective Sergeant Fry,’ said Kessen. ‘An excellent job.’

  ‘Shall we move on?’ said Tailby. ‘There’s a lot to do today.’

  Fry turned round so that she could see Cooper and Murfin. They were careful not to smile.

  ‘Explain the timing for us again,’ said Tailby.

  Frv set out the time line the narrow window in which the

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  killer or killers had the opportunity to dump the body on the Snake Pass without being seen.

  ‘So we’re looking for a four-wheel drive vehicle, almost certainly,’ she said.

  ‘There arc lots of those around.’

  ‘Eddie Kemp has one, for a start,’ said Murhn.

  ‘Who?’ said Tailby.

  ‘The bloke that we had in on suspicion for the double assault.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Do we have a suspect in custody?’ asked Kessen. ‘I didn’t know this. Whose arrest was it?’

  ‘Mine,’ said Cooper. ‘But it was a completely different incident.’

  ‘Are we sure of that?’

  ‘It happened the same night,’ said Murfin.

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  Cooper hesitated. ‘There’s no obvious link. Except (or the timing/

  ‘He has an Lsu/.u Trooper. I’ve seen it parked outside when he’s been doing the windows.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘He’s a window cleaner,’ said Murfin. ‘Gut anyway, he isn’t in custody any more — he’s been sent home. He’s had his twenty-four hours.’

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  Tailby pulled a face. Too often it had been known for the police to have a suspect in their custody, only to release him before the crucial evidence turned up to justify a charge. ‘We’d better be absolutely sure there’s no link,’ he said. ‘Someone check that out.’

  Cooper realized he was the one the DCI was looking at. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

  DI Hitchens interrupted. ‘We’re currently tracking down some CCTV footage. In view of the location of the assault, we’re hoping either the suspects or the victims might have been caught by one of the town centre cameras.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Tailbv. ‘Now let’s have some attention on

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  identifying the Snowman. It’s going to be a long haul. Without an ID, we’re in difficulties. We need to get assistance from the public, of course. But since he’s probably not from this area, that’s going to take some time. That means there are plenty of jobs to do. Mr Kcssen thinks everything is under control, so let’s not disappoint him.’

  Diane Fry looked distracted. Ren Cooper leaned over towards her as the meeting broke up.

  ‘Whoever killed the Snowman, it sounds as though we’re looking for amateurs anyway,’ he said. ‘They weren’t thinking things through properly. There’s no logic to what they did. No system, no planning. That’s good, isn’t it? It means they’ll be worrying now about what traces they left behind.’

  Fry shrugged. ‘ That’s not quite true. The timing of it looks planned. Somebody thought that through, all right.’

  ‘Unless they were just luckv.

  ‘There’s not much we can do about luck, Ben.’

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  ‘Yes, there is,’ said Cooper.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We ran get lucky ourselves.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  But Ben Cooper believed in lurk. lie believed that, if you worked hard enough and long enough at something, then eventually luck would start to operate in your favour.

  What Cooper failed to reali/e was that he had already been given the most important piece of luck he would get that week.

  Alter the enquiry teams had been hastily assembled, Cooper walked back from the incident room with Diane Fry and Gavin Murlm. The only sound between them was Murfin humming to himself. Cooper listened, trying to identify the tune. It sounded like an old Eagles song, ‘New Kid in Town’.

  ‘Well, a new broom sweeps clean,’ said Murfin as he reached his desk and began to hunt through his drawers. ‘So my old mum used to say, like.’

  Cooper saw that Pry couldn’t bring herself to say anything. She was pale and held herself rigidly, as if she were free/ing cold. And it n-flv cold in the incident room, too. You could have broken up the air with an ice axe.

  ‘Always the optimist, aren’t you, Ben?’ she said. ‘You talked about getting lucky. Well, take a look around you. We’re at rock bottom for resources and we have an unidentified body on top of all our other enquiries. We have a new DCI, the Chief Super is cracking up, and Gavin here is our number one asset. Even the weather is against us. Does it look as though we’re likelv to get lucky?’

  ‘Well, you never know.’

  ‘Do you think we could persuade Mr I ailbv to stay on?’ said Murfin.

  “I don’t think it would take much to persuade him,’ said Cooper. ‘lie’s not really all that keen on the HQ job.’

  ‘He’s even less keen on the new DCI.’

  ‘Mr Kessen will settle down, Gavin.’

  ‘It could take time, I reckon. I don’t know, Ben they call

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  sonic of us old coppers dinosaurs. But it’s like a proper JurassicPark on the lop corridor sometimes.’

  ‘So why did you bring up Eddie Kemp? Trying to score some points with the new DCI? Kemp has nothing to do with it, has he? What have you got against him?’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t clean my windows properly,’ said Murfin. ‘Well, I don’t know. Kemp and his mates might have been cruising for victims. Got the taste for it with the other two, then nicked some poor bugger up at the roadside out of town.’

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  ‘I talked to Kemp’s wife,’ said Cooper. ‘According to her, he didn’t come home at all that night,’ said Cooper, ‘lie went to the pub at eight o’clock and she knew nothing until she got a call next morning to tell her he was in custody. She also says the Isu/u was gone all night. According to her story, somebody brought it back earlv next morning and put the keys through the door.’

  ‘One of Kemp’s associates, presumably, since he was in custody at the time,’ said Fry.

  ‘Presumably. But we ought to check.’

  ‘Does Mrs Kemp k
now her husband’s friends?’

  ‘Knows them, but doesn’t want to, I’d saw.’

  ‘No names supplied?’

  ‘No. She’s not happy, but she’s not giving evidence against her husband. The two victims might be more help when ve can get full statements from them, but I doubt it. They’re part of the Devonshire Estate gang — they think talking to the police is

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  like committing suicide. So all we have against Eddie Kemp is the identification of the old couple who looked out of the window and say they recogni/ed him as part of the group. You know how reliable witness identifications are in those circumstances. Eddie himself savs it he hit anybody, he was acting in self-defence.’ ‘I don’t suppose1 he’s identified the other three?’ ‘Are you kidding? Somebody is going to have to enquire into his associates.’

  ‘God knows who,’ said Fry. ‘And God knows when.’ ‘I bet it’ll be me,’ said Cooper. ‘I seem to have got Kcmp’s car on my list.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Murfin, ‘did you realize that the new DCT’s

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  name is Oliver?’ He held up the rubber lobster of the same name.

  ‘Are you telling us it’s a coincidence, Gavin?’

  Diane Fry had been tapping her finders on her desk. Now she seemed to make a decision, shake her head and vas suddenly her proper self.

  ‘You’d better go and take a look at his car, then, Hen,’ she said. ‘And take Gavin with you.

  ‘I’m on missing persons,’ said Murfin.

  ‘Let the allocator know where you’re up to, then you’ll have to leave it for an hour or two. Ben can’t go to see Kcmp on his own. He’s doing enough solos as it is.’

  Murfin left, grumbling all the way. With a spasm of concern, Cooper watched Fry as she stared out of the window for a while, the muscles at the side of her mouth tight with tension. She fiddled at a strand of her fair hair in an uncharacteristically uncertain gesture. Her hand was pale and slender, with tendons that he could have traced with his finger.

  ‘A new broom sweeps clean?’ she said. ‘I’ll stick a broom up his arse.’

  Cooper nodded. He didn’t think she was talking about Gavin Murfin.

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  1 he Buttcrcross area of Old Edcnclalc had its own personality, its own picturesque gloss, which had been carefully polished and maintained over the years for the benefit of visitors. It was here that the town’s antique shops clustered, some of them stuffed with gleaming mahogany furniture and brassware, but others dim and dusty, with nothing in their windows but a few coloured bottles and a Queen Victoria diamond jubilee biscuit tin.

  There were shops here that Ben Cooper had never seen open, not in all his life spent in and around Edcndale. Today, as usual, the ‘closed’ signs hung on their doors, with no indication of when their owners would be available to do business. Maybe they only appeared on special occasions, such as bank holiday weekends, when tourists thronged the Buttcrcross with money to spend. Maybe the dealers sold enough bottles and biscuit tins on those davs to see them through the rest of the vcar. On

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  the other hand, maybe they all had proper jobs to do.

  The Buttcrcross certainly lived up to the tourist brochure image this afternoon. The lying snow and the weathered stone and mullioned windows of the buildings hit just the right Dickensian note to set off the antique furniture. Sadly, there were no tourists in January to appreciate it.

  Between two of the shops, a narrow street lurched suddenly uphill. There were steel handrails set into high limestone walls on either side for pedestrians, but no pavements to separate them from any cars that might scrape their way round the corner. The walls had been the traditional dry stone when they were first built. But now they were held together by mortar, and they had periwinkles growing out of their cracks - forlorn green strands encased in frozen snow.

  Gavin Murfin swayed against the side of Cooper’s Toyota as they bumped over the cobbles, took a sharp turn and then made another steep climb to emerge into the Underbank area. The streets here were even narrower, and the doors of the houses

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  had tiny knockers shaped like owls or loxes, with their numbers pieked out in coloured tiles set into the stonework. Further up the hill, a set of three-storey Regency houses stood near a vouth hostel. Several of the houses had been converted into (lats, hut one at the tar end looked empty and uncared for. A broken window on the first floor had been left unrepaired.

  Beelev Street was hardly more than an alley, with an unmade surface just wide enough for one vehicle to pass. Cooper

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  and Murfin walked up the-street and crossed a patch of snowcovered grass.

  ‘Well, that’s Fddie Kemp’s car,’ said Murfin. ‘I’ve seen it many a time at West Street.’

  It was a silver Isu/u Trooper with a set of ladders clipped to its roof rack, and it was parked on a raised concrete platform in front of Kemp’s house, with its headlights looking down the street towards the Buttercross. The-council binmcn had left a new plastic refuse sack wedged behind a downspout near the front door. They wouldn’t be coming up here again with their wagon soon, though, unless the snow cleared.

  Fddie Kemp himself emerged from the house when they knocked.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘I’ve answered all the questions I’m going to.’

  ‘Is this your car, sir?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Are you deaf? I just said I’ve answered all the questions I’m going to.’

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  ‘It won’t take a minute to check with the DVFC if you’re the registered owner.’

  ‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’ said Kemp.

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Is there something wrong with it? Would you like us to have a look while we’re here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a nice motor,’ said Murtin cheerfully. ‘It looks really useful, like.’

  ‘Well, you know damn well it’s mine anyway,’ said Kemp. ‘All you coppers know. I park it up at your place regularly when I’m doing the windows.’

  ‘Four-wheel drive, isn’t it?’ said Cooper.

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  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Good in snow?’

  ‘It has to he.’

  ‘Were you driving this car on Monday night, sir?’

  ‘It was parked here.’

  ‘From what time?’

  ‘Has somebody said they saw me in it?’

  ‘That isn’t an answer.’

  Murfin leaned against the concrete platform. ‘You ought to answer DC Cooper/ he said. ‘If he gets annoyed, he stops calling you “sir”. That can he very nasty.’ Cooper stepped up on to the platform and looked at the tyres of the Isuzu. They wouldn’t tell him anything at all, hut Kemp didn’t know that.

  ‘What time do you finish work, sir?’ he said.

  ‘When it starts going dark.’

  ‘About quarter past four, then, at the moment. Did you come straight home from work on Monday night/

  ‘I’ve got a wife and a kid,’ said Kemp. ‘They expect to see me occasionally.’

  I’ll take that as a “yes”, shall I?’

  ‘You can take it as what the hell you like. What are you

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  looking for?’

  Murfin pointed down the street towards the Ruttercross. ‘I had a girlfriend who lived around here once. I seem to

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  recall there was a little Indian takeaway on the corner, near the hairdresser’s. Is it still there?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Kemp.

  ‘What time does it open?’

  ‘Hov the hell should I know?’

  There was mud on the tyres of the Isuxu and small stones embedded in the tread. Streaks of brown grit ran along the sides of the vehicle. Cooper worked round the back and looked in through the tailgate.

  ‘What time did you go out again on Monday, sir?’ said Cooper.

  ‘I went to the pub
for a bit,’ said Kemp. ‘What are you looking for?’

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  ‘Which pub?’

  ‘The Vine. I told them all this yesterday.’

  ‘Is that where you met your mates?’

  ‘I’ve got a lot of mates/ said Kemp.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘And some of them drink at the Vine.’

  ‘Do they serve food at this pub?’ said Murrin.

  Kemp came up on to the platform and stood next to Cooper, though it was more in an effort to get away from Murfin than a desire for companionship. Kemp was an inch or two shorter than Cooper, hut he was powerlullv huilt. They both looked through the tailgate at the contents of the Isuzu. There were buckets, sponges, plastic trays of cloths and wash leathers. There were also two rolls of stiff blue plastic sheeting, each about four feet long, with mud stains on their outer surfaces.

  ‘What do you use the plastic sheets (or?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Standing the ladders on, so they don’t make marks on anvbody s fancy paving, and such.’

  ‘What time did you get home from the pub on Mondav?’

  ‘When it shut. I said all this.’

  ‘Did you go out in the car again?’

  Kemp said nothing. Cooper could see fresh grazes on his knuckles when he leaned on the car. He was also standing quite close now, and the freezing cold air did wonders for clearing the sinuses and sharpening the sense of smell. Cooper thought of the people who claimed to be able to see auras. Was it possible to 5mc/7 auras, as well as to see them? If he could see Eddie Kemp’s aura, it would be a sort of bilious green, shot through with yellow streaks, like pea soup flavoured with cinnamon.

  ‘Did you decide to drive up the A57 with your mates?’ said Cooper.

  Kemp still said nothing.

  ‘Which of your mates were with you? The same ones you met in the Vine? Did you find more than two victims that night? Did

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  something go wrong?’

  Kemp began to walk back to his house.