Four Below

by Peter Helton

  ‘I’ll give you my mobile number,’ Laura said, spooling through the display on her phone. ‘If I can find it. Oh yeah …’ She waited while he added the number to the list on his phone.

  ‘Hang on, let me try it, see if I got it right.’ He dialled, while Laura sighed and smiled apologetically at her companion. Her phone chimed the beginning of a pop song McLusky didn’t recognize. Kids’ stuff.

  ‘I’ll call you sometime, then.’

  ‘Sure.’

  He cleared a patch of condensation on the window and watched them walk away, looking for any signs that might point beyond coffee drinking. They turned the corner, Laura talking. Thin, washing-powder snow had started to fall. The traffic warden had finished the paperwork and snapped the plastic-sheathed parking fine under the Mazda’s windscreen wiper.

  The social worker had made a positive ID. ‘Michael Oatley, age fifty-six, born in Gloucester, murdered in Bristol,’ Austin recited as they stood outside the St Pauls flat, letting SOCOs and their equipment pass.

  McLusky listened to uniformed officers talking to the few residents who had opened their doors. Most needed very persistent knocking and the promise that the enquiry was about a neighbour before they decided it was safe to answer. For many people the St Pauls riots had moved from memory into folklore, but the relationship between residents and the police had never recovered.

  ‘According to the social worker, he was lucky to get this place. He said, with his addiction and without any friends, he was one drink away from a cardboard box,’ said one resident. ‘The state his liver was in, he was a couple of drinks away from a wooden one. Now it looks like he won’t even get that.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Austin asked.

  ‘A pauper’s funeral for Mr Oatley, unless the sister he’s not on speaking terms with feels like shelling out.’

  ‘Then perhaps it’s a cardboard box after all.’

  They followed a SOCO into the flat but stayed in the hall. McLusky went rhetorical, as Austin called it. ‘Okay, what have we got? A recovering alcoholic, friendless, new in town, in a soulless council place. He’s got nothing to do except listen to the radio all day. He’s on the dole. He’s piss-poor. And it certainly wasn’t a mugging. What they did to him was systematic, it took time. They didn’t do it on the cycle path; they just found it convenient to dump him there. And they didn’t do it here either, unless they did a blinding clean-up job.’

  ‘Inspector?’ A paper-suited SOCO appeared at the kitchen door. From his extended forefinger dangled a set of house keys. ‘In the pedal bin with the rubbish.’

  ‘On the top, in the middle, where?’ McLusky wanted to know.

  ‘Right on top, f ist thing I saw,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Two Yale keys. Could be front door and flat key.’

  ‘Okay, eagle-eyes. Do you think you can try them on the door without damaging any fingerprints on it?’

  ‘I think I can manage that. Excuse me.’ He squeezed past them. The first key he tried fitted. He dropped them into an evidence bag.

  ‘So, he didn’t have any keys on him when he was found. They could of course be his spare set, but I doubt it. Because why throw them away?’

  ‘Whoever killed him used the keys to let himself in here.’ Austin continued the thought. ‘In order to do what?’

  ‘To steal a second-hand radio and a plastic kettle. People get murdered for less, but it’s not really worth the bus fare from Ashton to St Pauls, is it? His social worker thought the place looked “out of kilter”. Perhaps someone did search the place.’

  ‘But what’s an unemployed recovering alkie got? That he needs killing for? And they didn’t exactly turn the place over, did they?’ Austin objected.

  McLusky shrugged. ‘Because they found what they were looking for straight away.’ He stepped outside on to the landing and shook a cigarette from a pack of twenty. The place was so cold, he keenly felt the heat from the lighter’s flame as he touched it to the end of his cigarette. The last time he’d felt warm was at the Bristolian, and he sincerely hoped they had managed to restore heat to Albany Road by now, since his own flat was not exactly tropical either.

  First the legs, then the rest of DC Dearlove appeared on the stairs from above. He checked back over his shoulder before speaking in a low voice. ‘I’ve just been in the flat upstairs, the one right above Oatley’s. Young couple, but only the chap is in. She’s at her mother’s. Place is a tip. Anyway, he says he didn’t hear or see anything. Only, did you mention a digital radio missing?’

  ‘Yes, but we don’t know which make. He’s got one, has he? Did you ask him about it?’

  ‘No. Lots of people have digital radios these days, but I got a feeling. I don’t know why, but he just didn’t seem the type.’

  ‘Not the digital type, eh? We’d best have a casual word with him, then.’ McLusky took a last drag from his cigarette, thumbed the glow off the end and put the filter stub in his pocket. In answer to Austin’s raised eyebrows, he hooked a thumb at the forensics technicians in the flat. ‘Never leave your DNA around when that lot are about. You can’t trust ’em.’

  Upstairs, he rapped on the door. After a long pause it reluctantly opened on the face of a black man in his mid-twenties, with close-cropped hair. He wore black jeans, black trainers and a shapeless blue and grey top. Behind him rushed the sound of a cistern refilling. Warm air streamed through the gap in the door. ‘Yeah, what is it now?’

  McLusky held up his ID. ‘Can we come in a minute?’

  ‘Look, man, I just chatted with the other guy. I told him I didn’t see a thing, didn’t hear a thing.’

  ‘I won’t take up much of your time,’ McLusky insisted.

  ‘Oh, man, I was on my way out, innit. I have stuff to do, I can’t stop here all day chattin’, you know what I’m sayin’?’ Even while he was speaking he retreated back inside, leaving the door undefended. They followed him in.

  ‘We’ll be quick. What’s your name?’

  ‘Milton.’

  ‘That’s your first name?’

  ‘Yeah. Milton Christiani.’

  The flat was an exact copy of Oatley’s below, though only as far as the layout went. Unlike Oatley’s, it was crammed with furniture, all of which looked too large to have made it through the narrow doors. It was messy and smelled aggressively of cooking-spice and deodorant. The sitting room was dominated by a large hi-fi system on a set of shelves crammed with CDs.

  ‘So,’ McLusky started, ‘were you friendly with Mr Oatley?’

  ‘I just said all that to the other copper; what’s the matter with you? I didn’t even know his name was Oatley.’

  ‘You’re into rap, then? Hip-hop …’ He slid a few CDs off the shelf, pretended to read the backs of them, wasted some time.

  ‘Yeah, what, it’s not a crime, is it? What do you want from me?’

  ‘So you wouldn’t have any reason to have visited his flat, then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you never have.’

  ‘No again.’

  ‘And he wouldn’t come upstairs to this place?’

  ‘Look, how many times, I didn’t know that man. I mean, I’m sorry he’s dead and all that, but that’s it.’

  ‘Your girlfriend, perhaps?’

  ‘What is it you is sayin’? Look, he was an ancient white man and we had nothin’ to do with him.’

  The chunky digital radio Dearlove had mentioned stood between two piles of CDs on a shelf above the CD player. ‘Listen to the radio much?’

  ‘Some.’

  McLusky pressed the on button. Radio Bristol blared into the room. He turned it down. Then he pressed the first of the pre-set buttons. The Radio 3 lunchtime concert had just started. ‘Shostakovich, I think. Or is it Prokofiev? I’m never quite certain.’ He tapped a fingernail against the speaker grille. ‘I bought one of these but I’ve never worked out how to programme these pre-set buttons.’ He tried the next pre-set; it was Classic FM. ‘Ah, I’m sure we all recognize this one,’ sai
d McLusky, who had no idea what he was hearing. He tried for an angelic smile and pressed the next button, which conjured up Radio 4. ‘… talks to the author Simon Brett about his ubiquitous …’ He flicked off the radio and turned to Austin. ‘Mr Christiani here has catholic tastes.’

  ‘So what? You sayin’ I shouldn’t be listenin’ to that stuff?’ Christiani crossed his arms. His eyes strayed to the window, as though looking for escape.

  ‘Had the radio long?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Do you think we could borrow it?’ Christiani opened his mouth to protest, but McLusky carried on. ‘Because if you never visited him, and Mr Oatley didn’t visit you up here, then naturally there wouldn’t be any of his fingerprints on this radio, would there?’ He could see Christiani’s mind racing and his body stiffen. He nodded to Austin, who put on gloves and freed the radio from a spaghetti junction of cables. ‘And of course there wouldn’t be any of your fingerprints in the flat downstairs, either. So I’ll also send someone up to take your prints, just for elimination purposes. When do you expect your girlfriend back?’

  Christiani held up his hands. ‘Okay. All right. I took the damn radio. It’s hardly the crime of the century.’

  ‘The century is still young. We can discuss it down the station.’

  ‘And he’s known to us?’ DSI Denkhaus swivelled in his chair to move his feet closer to the halogen heater by his desk. The heating engineers were still no closer to finding the cause of the problem. Denkhaus had bought the heater from an electrical shop across the road and smuggled it in discreetly. He had called headquarters about the heating problem at the station and been told categorically that bringing in electric heaters for everyone would be out of the question; the forty-year-old wiring simply would not stand it. And after all, how long could the repairs take? With the heater tuned to its highest setting, the temperature in the spacious office was only just tolerable.

  Little enough of it percolated as far as McLusky’s chair. ‘Only petty stuff. Traffic picked him up a while back, no MOT, and a roadside cannabis warning. He’s on the dole but had a job in a nightclub until recently.’

  ‘So how did he get hold of the dead man’s radio?’

  ‘It seems Mr Christiani is an opportunist thief. According to him, he saw the door to Oatley’s flat ajar when he went out to the shops in Ashley Road. This was yesterday. But he met someone so didn’t get back until over an hour later. Then he found the door open even further and got curious. He went in – out of concern for Mr Oatley’s welfare, according to his solicitor – and couldn’t resist stealing the radio, he says. But he didn’t take anything else. He didn’t steal the kettle or the toaster. It looks like he wasn’t the only one going through Oatley’s flat.’

  ‘Presumably we’re looking for a DNA match to link him to Oatley’s death?’

  ‘Of course, though I wouldn’t hold my breath. We’re taking DNA samples from all his neighbours. No sign of anyone having a surplus kettle, but they may of course have chucked their old one, so that’s a dead end, I think. I don’t see any connections yet. We know Oatley wasn’t killed at his flat, and I suspect more than one person was involved. He wasn’t killed for his kettle and his radio.’

  ‘So you’re letting this chap go? Seems a shame.’

  ‘Already have done, sir. We’ve charged him with the theft, but he’s co-operating and we’ve nothing else on him.’

  ‘Yes. But having someone in custody would have given us a breathing space with the press, even if we have to let him go eventually. After your disastrous gaffe with the Herald reporter, it would have been something, at least. So what kind of person are we looking for?’ Denkhaus demanded to know.

  Outside, snow was falling again and so was the temperature. Back in his frozen office, McLusky contemplated that same question with his hands cradling his umpteenth mug of tea, made purely for the warmth it provided. The problem was that Oatley’s existence appeared to have no real substance. There was no computer and no internet service provider. He also had no mobile phone or landline. There were no phone records to check, no emails to read or browsing history to examine. They had found no personal letters, nothing that didn’t come from the benefits agency or the council. None of his neighbours owned up to knowing him, no friends had come forward. Oatley had made himself small, simply surviving. In the end he hadn’t managed even that.

  He knew it couldn’t be a mugging. He had seen the photographs, read the autopsy report, and the conclusion was obvious: someone had taken his time murdering Mike Oatley. Someone who enjoyed his work, too.

  Austin came in, looking glum.

  ‘I saw the super,’ McLusky told him. ‘He’d rather we could have held on to Christiani to get the press off his back, but there you go. Oh yes, and about the heating, not to worry, everything is fine. He found himself an electric heater to sit next to, one of those bright orange swivelling ones. It makes him look quite demonic. And you look constipated. What is it?’

  Austin nodded towards the side of the desk. ‘Do you still have some of that single malt left?’

  A few months ago, a flustered suspect had left behind a litre bottle of Glenmorangie. McLusky kept it in the bottom of his desk along with a couple of glasses on permanent loan from the canteen.

  ‘A bit early for that, Jane?’

  ‘It’s not for me. It’s for you. You’ll need it.’

  ‘Let me be the judge of that. Out with it.’

  ‘The partial hand that led us to Deeming’s body.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s not his hand. It’s someone else’s.’

  ‘What? Whose?’

  ‘No one knows.’

  McLusky blinked a couple of times, then reached for the Glenmorangie.

  Chapter Thirteen

  He slammed the door of his car with greater force than necessary. The sound of it was followed by a weaker echo of Austin closing the door on his Nissan. Snow was falling lightly but steadily and had done so in Leigh Woods for hours.

  Austin called across. ‘Did you hear on the news this morning? It’s the coldest weather and earliest snowfall this far south since—’

  McLusky cut him off. ‘Three out of ten, seven out of six, spare me statistics, Jane, whenever possible. I can’t wrap my head round it and I always get the feeling I’m being lied to somehow. No offence. Let’s just call it bloody freezing.’

  ‘It’s four below up here.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘My car tells me.’

  McLusky looked peevishly at the other vehicles already assembled in the winter landscape. Two police transport vans, patrol cars and several others. ‘Your car? Perhaps your clever car can tell us how we’re going to find a body up here under five inches of snow?’

  ‘I know, it’s mad.’

  Yes, it was mad. McLusky had discussed it with DSI Denkhaus earlier. It was bad enough trying to find a live avalanche victim under fresh snow; there, you had something to work with. Resistance under the snow could be detected with rods, and new technologies were being developed all the time. But a frozen body in frozen ground would feel to the prodding stick of a police officer much like the surrounding area. Hard. All depended on how much of it had been disturbed by animal activity. Naturally, not ‘mad’ but ‘challenging’ was the official line.

  ‘We’ll have to try, at least,’ McLusky added. ‘Or as Denkhaus put it more precisely, be seen to try.’

  Ahead of them a sergeant was giving instructions and a pep talk to sixeteen officers who would attempt a frozen fingertip search of the area most likely to contain the handless body. ‘It’s pure guesswork, of course,’ the sergeant said, ‘but it makes sense to start around the area where the hand was found. Then again, a fox could have carried his prize several hundred yards at a gallop, especially if he was being chased by a bloody dog.’ The officers formed into one long line, starkly black and yellow against the snow. At a quiet command from the sergeant, they set off. Each carri
ed a rod with which to probe the ground for anything unusual. To McLusky they looked like a platoon of blind men.

  ‘At least it’s not foggy any more,’ he conceded.

  ‘I do wish they’d twigged that the hand had a different owner earlier, before all this stuff came down.’ Austin kicked with his heavy police boots at the snow. ‘Much as I like the look of it. I’ve missed snow, you know, living down here in the south.’

  ‘I’m happy for you. Pity we can’t just wait until the stuff melts and the ground’s no longer frozen. Makes no difference to Mr Hands, I’m sure.’ But it couldn’t be done. Especially not with part of a body found, foul play almost certain and without a suspect in custody. Every day they lost put more distance between the murder and its perpetrator, perhaps even literally.

  Soon a flock of press photographers and reporters descended. ‘Like carrion birds,’ McLusky observed when the search team stopped for a rest. Everyone had long run out of hand jokes, especially after the sergeant warned them that DSI Denkhaus would personally slaughter anyone who let himself be photographed laughing while looking for a dead body. Officers were drinking tea and hot soup from flasks, eating sandwiches, or discreetly smoking behind trees, out of sight of the camera lenses trained on them. McLusky didn’t join them, knowing that the presence of a CID officer would probably ruin their break, cramp their style. Instead he walked for a bit down the track until he could no longer hear any voices and there smoked a solitary cigarette, cupping the glowing end of it with his hands for the illusion of warmth it offered. The search had been postponed from yesterday until this morning, and they had been here for two hours now. His feet were numb, his ears so cold it hurt to touch them. The search team had managed to cover a large area already, now trampled by their heavy boots, a shambles compared with the untouched, snow-blanketed surroundings. Murder somehow managed to turn everything ugly, though to McLusky the scene before him also had its own special aesthetic: police officers, their liveried cars and uniforms, the purposefulness of it, the exclusivity of it, set apart from civilian life.