Four Below

by Peter Helton

  Outside, he checked his watch; there was still an hour of daylight left, albeit a thin, grey variety that promised more snow. After wiping the condensation from the inside of windscreen and side window, he inserted the key in the ignition. On the other side of the street, two teenagers were trying to start a clapped-out hatchback, draining the battery until the starter motor stopped turning over. He watched the driver thump the steering wheel in frustration. It reminded him that he still had no breakdown recovery for his own car. He turned the key and the engine sprang obediently to life.

  Traffic was building up. It took him longer than expected to drive north to Leigh Woods. He left the Mazda on the road, took his torch from the glove box, tested its strength and set off down the by now familiar track on foot. The dark imprints of many feet ran over and alongside it, some human, some canine. Other tracks, too, were evident, from kids’ sleds to what McLusky assumed were rabbits, birds and deer, meandering and crossing each other. The snow kept a jumbled record of all the visitors, ever more difficult to untangle. The light was failing fast. By the time he found himself surrounded by trees, snow had begun to fall again.

  This was it. He flicked on the torch. One tree still sported a collar of twisted police tape, yet even without it McLusky believed he would have found the place where Deeming had been murdered. The ground was covered in snow now, uneven after so much excavation. He stood where he judged Deeming had stood, knowing he was about to die. He was gagged and unable to plead. He must have known he was in the woods but did not get a last glimpse of the world because it was night and he had a jute bag over his head. McLusky closed his eyes and stood still, facing the woods. Had Deeming been able to smell anything apart from his own blood pounding sharp as metal in his already broken nose? He kept his eyes closed and breathed in deeply, felt snowflakes land on his face, felt his heart beating.

  A small crackling noise made him open his eyes wide into the darkness. He turned to where he thought the noise had come from, waited a few seconds to listen. Another furtive noise, further to his left, closer now. He clicked on his torch and with its feeble beam probed the looming dark between the darker boles of trees; it illuminated nothing. He waited. The snuffling of falling snow was all he heard. With gloved hands he fumbled a cigarette from a pack and lit it with his small silver lighter. Its flame close to his face left him half blind for a moment during which he stood and smoked greedily. He felt precariously alive in a dead man’s place.

  When his eyes returned to normal, he walked back to his car. Someone had scraped half the snow from its roof, perhaps to fashion snowballs with. At the end of the road the brake lights of a dark van briefly flared, then disappeared. There was no one else to be seen. McLusky started the engine and revved it a few times, just for the noise of it.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘He’s sent us another one. Did you keep the first one, Phil?’

  ‘Let’s see it.’ Warren unstuck the first sliver of photograph from where she had Blu-Tacked it to her monitor. ‘And how do you know it’s a he who’s sending them? Scissor-work is quite a female thing.’

  ‘What, like poisoning is a female method of murder, Miss Marple?’ Ed handed over the narrow strip of photograph paper. ‘Anyway, look at the handwriting. Definitely written by a bloke, that.’

  ‘Is there another note, then?’

  ‘No, it just says “Number two” on the back.’

  ‘Ah.’ Warren held the two pieces against each other, first on one side, then the other. ‘They don’t match up. They’re not adjacent pieces. That’s no use.’ She squinted at the new piece. ‘You haven’t got your …’ When Ed produced his magnifying glass from a back pocket, she took it from him without comment. ‘Have you had a look at it already? That’s definitely a car wheel, isn’t it? A posh one, by the looks of it. And that’s the edge of another person. But where is that?’

  ‘There’s another edge of a tree. And I think the car’s a Mercedes. From the look of the wheel. It’s very grainy; I could be completely wrong.’

  ‘It’s possible. So why send us this?’

  ‘It’ll make sense later, that’s what the man says.’

  ‘Perhaps we should print it,’ Warren mused. ‘We could make it into a competition: first one to tell us what’s in the picture gets a prize.’

  ‘Not such a daft idea.’

  ‘Maybe. Unless he loses interest and doesn’t send the rest, then we’ll look stupid. Let’s wait until we have more of it.’ Warren Blu-Tacked the pieces side-by-side to the edge of her monitor. ‘Would you mind if I hung on to the magnifying glass for a bit?’

  Ed crooked a forefinger at her. ‘I certainly would. Go and get your own.’

  ‘I need a refill, mind if I use your kettle again?’

  ‘Go ahead, squeeze round.’ He shuffled his chair forward to allow Austin and his mug access to the secret kettle in the bottom of his desk compartment. It was difficult, because the DS was wearing his overcoat. McLusky himself was clad in his new winter jacket, with his bright multicoloured scarf wound twice around his neck. The heating had failed completely the previous day, and since then the last residual heat had been sucked from the building by the night. McLusky thought he could hear the walls around him creak as the frost penetrated the fabric of the station. ‘How’s everyone coping out there?’

  Austin snorted. ‘Everyone isn’t. Half the station have found urgent business elsewhere. Those who can’t afford to run away spend most of their time in the canteen. It’s the only place in here that doesn’t feel sub-zero. Look.’ He rounded his lips and blew. ‘I can see my breath.’

  ‘What are they doing about it?’

  ‘The heating engineers have been down there for a couple of hours. I don’t think they know what’s wrong.’

  ‘Marvellous.’

  ‘Custody are busy evacuating prisoners to warmer climes, like Trinity Road. They’re threatening to sue over the conditions they were held in.’

  ‘I might join them. I tried typing with my gloves on, but it can’t be done. Have the posters gone out?’

  ‘First thing. And it’ll be on all the local news, the BBC Bristol website, the Herald is printing the picture and it’s on our own website as well. Someone must recognize him.’

  ‘That’s if the techies got the face right.’ The face of the cycle-path body had been too savagely beaten to be photographed. The photographs that technical support produced in cases like this were based on autopsy pictures, experience and guesswork. Sometimes they got close; sometimes they got nowhere near.

  ‘We’ve had a couple of responses already; both were duds.’

  Appeals to the public invariably produced a flurry of responses, some from cranks but many from well-meaning citizens. Most turned out to be false leads, but all had to be followed up. It was frustrating and time-consuming, yet sometimes it yielded results, often weeks or months after the appeal had gone out. Weeks or months, however, was not what DSI Denkhaus expected.

  ‘It’s early days. You have to live a very sad life if no one misses you at all, even if it’s only your … I don’t know, chiropodist or someone like that.’

  ‘We used to rely on people spotting the milk not being taken inside, but who gets his milk delivered now?’

  McLusky spent another hour fighting the urge to set fire to his desk in a bid to keep warm, before he went downstairs to the canteen for a hot meal. The place was busy with refugees from the frozen offices above. As he contemplated his steaming plate of wrinkly sausage, beans and mash, he idly wondered whether the wrinkliness was inherent in the sausage or a special cooking method passed down through generations of dinner ladies. He was distracted from this train of thought when he spotted the superintendent on the wrong side of the food counter. The heat lamps obscured the view, but he distinctly saw Denkhaus handing over a briefcase to one of the female staff before disappearing again. McLusky had no time to spin a delicious story of stewed steak and blackmail, because DC Dearlove appeared by his side.


  ‘Sir? Sorry to interrupt your meal. DS Austin thinks we have something solid on the ID of the cycle-path body.’

  McLusky didn’t feel like having Dearlove as an audience to a display of speed-eating so he sent him on his way. ‘I’ll be up in a minute.’

  The sausages were curiously unresisting to his fork as he hacked them into pieces and mixed them with his mash and beans. Then he spent a concentrated two minutes shovelling the resultant mess into his mouth. When he pushed his plate away from him, he realized that a few tables away PC Ellen Purkis was watching him with fascinated disgust. She looked away now and returned to a conversation with her colleagues.

  Upstairs he found Austin on the phone in the incident room. The DS wound up the phone call and hung up. ‘Result, I think.’ He consulted a sheet of handwritten notes. ‘Our cycle-path bod could be a Mike Oatley. His social worker called in, thinks something might have happened to him. No answer at his flat; they had arranged to meet. And he fits the description.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Block of council flats in St Pauls.’

  ‘Okay, get on to the council.’ McLusky paused to burp delicately behind a hand. ‘Tell them to send someone there with a key for the flat, and when you know what time they can make it, ask the social worker to meet us there as well. Tell them not to enter the premises until we get there.’

  An hour later, a dull stomach ache kept McLusky internally occupied while he and Austin waited outside the address for the social worker and key-holder. Both arrived simultaneously in separate cars. Hedges, the social worker, a neat individual with a sensible haircut, repeated his story for them as they climbed the echoing stairs to the first-floor flat. ‘His name is Mike Oatley. He’s an alcoholic, recovering alcoholic, I should say, of course. He’s recently come out of a double helping of residential rehab and was housed here. He’s from Gloucester really, but it would have been a bad idea for him to go back there. His only friends, if you could call them that, were in a similar situation, you might say, heavy drinkers. So they housed him here. Not an ideal area, but there you go.’

  They had arrived at the door to the flat; its colour matched the pale-green PVC handrail of the banister. The man from the council found the right key from a collection of others in a bag. McLusky took it from him, rang the bell below the spyhole, then rapped a flat-handed tattoo for good measure. Only then did he slip on latex gloves and unlock the door. The council man left and Hedges waited outside as instructed while McLusky and Austin entered. The lights were on in the hall and the next room.

  Hedges stood in the doorway, twiddled the buttons of his overcoat and kept talking. ‘It was the lights, you see. He was very careful about electricity, always complained about the price and how he kept running out of credits on the key meter. So when I saw the light on and got no answer, I thought, wait a minute, something’s wrong here.’

  The flat was empty. It was also small, the rooms narrow and ill-proportioned. The two detectives constantly needed to squeeze past each other. ‘Whoever designed this building must have practised on multi-storey car parks,’ McLusky grumbled. To Hedges he called: ‘Okay, you can come in, but don’t touch anything; keep your hands in your pockets. You’re sure from the picture in the news that the dead man is Mike Oatley?’

  ‘Pretty sure, yes. And the clothes, too. The description matched the way he dressed, the black jacket.’

  ‘Good. I’d like you to come and identify the body. Would you mind?’

  Hedges swallowed hard. ‘If it’s necessary.’

  ‘It would be a great help. Are there any relatives?’

  ‘A sister, in London. But they weren’t speaking.’

  ‘Close friends? Any friends?’

  ‘He never mentioned any. He only moved here three months ago.’

  ‘In that case we definitely need you to view the body. In the meantime, have a look around you. Does anything look different from the last time you were here?’

  Hedges turned a hundred and eighty degrees in the sitting room. He pointed to a scatter of papers in front of a rickety shelf unit. ‘It’s definitely messier. He never had things lying on the floor like that when I was here. It all looks a bit … don’t know.’ He searched for the right expression. ‘Out of kilter,’ he decided with a nod.

  ‘Perhaps he used to clear up for you,’ McLusky suggested. ‘Anything obviously missing?’

  ‘Nothing jumps out.’

  ‘Computer? Did he have one?’

  ‘I don’t remember a computer.’

  ‘What about a telly? Hi-fi, radio?’

  ‘Oh yeah, the radio isn’t here. He had a digital one by the window, only place he could get reception. We got that for him through a charity, refurbished. I don’t think he had a telly.’

  ‘Kettle? Would he have had an electric kettle? Because there isn’t one here. Or a toaster?’

  Hedges came to the kitchen door. ‘Definitely a kettle. Not sure about toaster.’

  McLusky opened cupboards at random. They all looked understocked to him: a tin of tomatoes, a half-empty pack of spaghetti, a crumpled pack of sugar. It reminded him of his own kitchen. ‘Well, neither are here now. Could he have sold them to buy drink?’

  ‘A plastic kettle? Anyway, he wasn’t drinking.’

  ‘As far as you know. Okay, thanks. DS Austin will drive you to view the body, or you can follow him in your own car. Best do it now.’ He followed them to the door. ‘One other thing: did he drive?’

  ‘Lost his licence. That’s how he lost his job, too. He used to work for an interior designer, decorating and such. He was about to get fired anyway because he drank, but without a licence he was unemployable.’

  ‘He could have been driving without a licence, of course.’

  ‘Could have done, but he wasn’t like that. Okay, as far as I know, you’re about to say. Anyway, you can’t run a car on Jobseeker’s Allowance. I can barely afford it on my pay.’

  As Austin and Hedges walked down the stairs, talking, McLusky closed the door behind them. Their echoing footsteps and voices came clearly through the flimsy door. In the bathroom, he pulled the grimy cord that hung from the light switch in the ceiling. The claustrophobic shower smelled mouldy; the basin and toilet looked unnaturally small. One splayed toothbrush, supermarket basics toothpaste, a cracked sliver of soap. He took a last look around the rest of the flat. Through the ceiling came the thump of running feet, the muffled shouts of argument; from downstairs the slamming of a door, a child’s whine. It was as though the place had been designed to drive a man to drink.

  When he locked the door of the flat from the outside a black girl in her teens was bumping an empty pushchair up the stairs. He made no attempt to speak to her. She in turn watched him without expression as she disappeared through the door of the flat opposite Oatley’s. It could wait. As soon as there was positive ID, he’d give the word and the police circus would descend on the building, from officers doing door-to-door enquiries to SOCO and forensics.

  His stomach ache had disappeared without him noticing. There would be ample time to warm up at a café before Austin came back with the result. His own flat in Northampton Street wasn’t too far away, but the Bristolian café in Picton Street was even closer. In summer, its cobbled forecourt was full of tables and benches, but now it was covered in snow. The windows in their bright green frames were steamed up, promising warmth, or at the least, steam. He left the car directly outside on double yellow lines, knowing he could keep an eye on it in case a traffic warden took an interest. He ordered a mug of coffee at the counter and compensated for the enforced tobacco abstinence with a doorstep slice of chocolate cake. The place was busy; he would have to share a table. He approached a couple sitting at a round table next to the window. By the time he realized that the woman was Laura, it was too late to back away unnoticed. The man by her side, he saw with dismay, was the same mop-haired twenty-something he had seen her with the other day.

  Laura’s smile came slowly, from somewhere far a
way. ‘Hi, Liam. I was wondering if you ever came in here, since you practically live round the corner.’ She leant back in her chair to clear a line of sight between the two men. ‘Liam, Damian, Damian, Liam.’

  Damian lifted a hand in greeting. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  McLusky nodded at him. ‘Mind if I join you?’

  Laura gestured to an empty chair and picked up her shoulder bag from the floor. ‘Sit down. Actually we were just leaving.’

  Damian looked into his mug of frothy coffee; it was half full. ‘Okay. I’ll just go and use the little boys’ room.’

  McLusky shuffled through to the free chair, dribbling coffee from his mug on to the absurdly cheerful tablecloth. ‘The little boys’ room? Who’s the kid?’ he asked when Damian was nearly out of earshot.

  ‘And it’s good to see you too, Liam. I’m well, thank you. The course is great, I’m really enjoying it, thank you for asking.’

  ‘That’s good.’ McLusky skewered a piece of chocolate cake. ‘So who’s the kid?’

  ‘The kid, as you heard, is Damian. He’s in my year at college, but we met before that, when I volunteered on a dig in the summer.’

  ‘You met.’

  ‘We did. And now we sometimes have coffee together.’

  ‘Marvellous.’

  ‘They’re keeping you busy, I see. And you got into the Herald. Uncaring inspector says let junkies rot, or something to that effect. Is that what you think now?’

  ‘Does it sound like me?’

  ‘People change.’

  ‘Do they? Not much, they don’t.’

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised. But I get the feeling you haven’t.’

  ‘You talk as though we hadn’t seen each other in years.’

  ‘Seems like it, so much has happened since.’

  ‘We must catch up.’

  ‘Yes, we must. Here comes Damian, time we went back. I’ve got a tutorial later.’

  ‘I’ve no idea where you live.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’

  Damian arrived at the table and drained his mug of coffee standing up.