Four Below

by Peter Helton

  ‘Quite possibly.’

  ‘Deeming was a small-time drug-dealer. And user. Any sign of drug use here?’

  ‘None at all. He carried a bit too much weight round the middle, so probably liked a drink.’

  ‘All his teeth were bashed in; is it possible that they did that to make identification more difficult? From dental records?’

  ‘I doubt it. He swallowed half of them. And he was buried with his hands, remember? They wouldn’t have left those if they were trying to conceal his identity. If they were, they’ve been very incompetent.’

  ‘Perhaps they are. The burials weren’t very good. Not deep enough for a start, especially the first one. A bit sloppy, if you ask me. You go through all the trouble of grabbing someone, taking him to a dark spot and murdering him, and then you can’t be bothered to dig a decent grave.’

  It was getting dark fast when McLusky drove away from the mortuary. He hadn’t learnt much about the victim, but he had come away with that one new thought: taking Deeming from his house to Leigh Woods and killing him had been an effort. So presumably had been the murder of the second victim. But the graves had been shoddily dug. There was more than one person involved, that was almost certain.

  And the one with the shovel was a lazy sod.

  The concrete jungle thing, there was some truth to it. The thing about the jungle was that it was full of stuff. One thing growing through another and on top of the next. The city streets were like snakes or vines: too many houses meant you couldn’t see very far; people crawled all over the place like ants. You had to decide what kind of jungle animal you wanted to be. In the jungle it was eat or be eaten. Well, come to think of it, it was really eat and be eaten. Eventually. And the eventually made all the difference.

  The important thing was a safe burrow. If you were rich, you made yourself one your enemies couldn’t get into. If you were poor, you made one they couldn’t find. He had slimmed down his possessions, had made himself light on his feet; he had moved to this obscure place, a bedsit next to a hardware store on a non-descript road. It was noisy and the stairwell smelled damp, but he was allowed to park his van out of sight behind the hardware store, and when the big man paid up, as he would have to, he’d soon find himself more salubrious digs. It would have to be far away, of course. Might even have to be Spain. The big man wouldn’t pay up and forget about it; he’d hunt him for ever. He would have to disappear; he’d be an obvious suspect, even though he was in hospital when the photograph was taken. He had found the date on the file information. But alibis would not cut any ice. The big man would send Ilkin to strike first and ask questions later. And Ilkin’s kind of methods often meant that questions were left unanswered.

  He had sent narrow strips of the picture to the big man’s house. He had added a printed note, telling him that identical strips would go to the Bristol Herald. He had made no demands yet. Let him wonder about it, let him worry about it. Let him have sleepless nights about it. He could take his time. Safe in his new burrow, he could let his plan ripen.

  The dangerous bit, the part that gave him the biggest headache, was the handover. That was where they would try to get at him. He had made a list of possibilities and scenarios, and every day he thought about it for hours. There was no point in making a move until he had sorted it out, found a foolproof one. Yet one by one they revealed their flaws. He couldn’t afford any flaws. Even the tiniest would prove fatal.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘They think they’ve done it,’ was how Sergeant Hayes greeted him as McLusky carried his custard Danish past the front desk. Hayes, whose double layer of thermal underwear was straining his uniform buttons, tried to look convinced, but McLusky knew bad acting when he saw it.

  ‘Then why can I see my breath in the lobby? We’re staying open for business, then?’

  ‘Looks like we got a reprieve.’ It hadn’t taken long for the rumour to spring up that the latest round of cuts in police funding meant that Albany Road station, which was crumbling and in need of constant repair, would not reopen once they had closed it down because of the broken heating. It sounded far-fetched to McLusky, but there was no doubt that many police stations around the country would close and not reopen.

  Coats, scarves, gloves and an assortment of hats were worn by everyone in the building not in direct contact with the public. The hot-drinks machines at the ends of the corridors had run dry and not been refilled. The kettles, deemed by health and safety to be too dangerous for police officers not trained in their use, had made a comeback everywhere and were being kept busy. The temperature on McLusky’s floor still appeared the same, but he noticed that the mere promise of warmth and the reappearance of the kettles had lifted the mood. He had planned to breakfast on coffee and Danish in his office before tackling anything else, but a bellowing sneeze as he passed the CID room made him stop in the doorway. Austin was at his desk, wiping the sneeze off his monitor with a crumpled tissue.

  ‘I thought you were bedridden,’ McLusky said by way of greeting.

  Austin’s nose was red and flaking from constant tissue use. He looked like the ‘before’ shot of a flu remedy commercial. ‘Much better, thanks,’ he said snottily. ‘Couldn’t face another day in bed.’

  ‘Sneeze in my direction next,’ called French. ‘I could do with a day off.’

  ‘You don’t want what I got,’ Austin complained.

  McLusky walked out. ‘I certainly don’t. I’ll be in my office. Hiding from all your germs.’

  He spent the morning making phone calls and working at the computer while Albany Road’s central heating tuned up. The frequent metallic clanging that for days had echoed through the building had ceased. It had given way to a deeper, infrequent rumbling and foghorning. From time to time the radiator at his back emitted additional sharp popping noises that made him jump and curse. Each time, he stretched out a hopeful hand to feel for heat, and eventually there it was. Not warm, exactly, but no longer icy. McLusky sighed with anticipation. The banging was replaced by a metallic groaning that reminded him of submarine movies. Any moment now Albany Road would start popping its rivets.

  At midday a heating engineer in a suspiciously clean boiler suit knocked on his door. ‘Are we sinking?’ McLusky asked him.

  ‘Come to bleed your radiator. Cor, this is small. I think it’s the smallest office I’ve seen so far. You’ll have to come out, sir, so I can get at it.’

  McLusky flicked off the monitor and closed any open files. As he squeezed out into the corridor, Austin came walking up, carrying his notepad. Before he reached McLusky, he turned around again to let off a sneeze in the direction of the CID room, then carried on as before. ‘We got a DNA match for the second Leigh Woods body.’

  ‘The whole corridor’s got your DNA now.’ McLusky looked over his shoulder at the engineer, squatting by the radiator. He closed the door. ‘We know him, then?’

  ‘Donald Bice.’ Austin saw McLusky frown, and elaborated. ‘He was the skipper of Fenton’s multimillion-quid yacht.’

  ‘So he was. The one that slipped away.’

  Behind him, the door opened and the engineer emerged. ‘Should warm up a treat for you soon, sirs.’ He walked off along the corridor, looking for more bleeding work.

  In his office, McLusky felt the radiator. It was getting warm. ‘The patient is recovering. Close that door, I’m keeping this heat for myself. Every therm of it. Bice was acquitted, wasn’t he?’

  ‘We got him for obstruction and petty stuff. Cleared of all the major charges. By then, he’d spent so much time in remand, he was out again in days.’

  ‘In time to get himself murdered.’

  ‘I wonder why. He convinced the jury he had no idea how Fenton made his money and that all he was responsible for was captaining the boat and hiring the rest of the crew.’

  McLusky, who hadn’t transferred to Bristol when the arrests were made, narrowed his eyes. ‘Rest of the crew? Just how big was Fenton’s bloody boat?’

  ‘
Huge.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘There was only a cook at the time of the arrest, and he wasn’t involved.’

  ‘Do we have an address for Captain Bice?’

  ‘He owned a flat in Portishead. I seem to remember it was in his son’s name, though.’

  ‘In case Assets Recovery tried to take it off him. What’s the son do, fly seaplanes for drug-runners?’

  ‘No, apparently he’s totally straight and a landlubber.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘He owns a cake shop in Keynsham.’

  ‘That’s quite straight,’ McLusky admitted. ‘And where’s the yacht now?’

  ‘It’s still in Portishead marina, where it was moored when Fenton had her. Impounded, of course, proceeds of crime, but hasn’t sold yet.’

  ‘Who’s handling the sale?’

  ‘London company. But they have an agent in Portishead.’

  ‘Get someone to go break the evil news to Bice’s son. Find out if he has a key to his father’s flat so we don’t have to get the locksmith out. Then tell the brokers handling the yacht sale that we need to look over the boat again.’

  ‘We do? What are we hoping to find?’

  ‘Oh, erm, barnacles.’ McLusky couldn’t have said what he hoped to find. He had stood in the dark place where Donald Bice had been murdered; now he wanted to stand in the bright place that had given him the suntan the pathologist had mentioned. ‘Nothing at all, I expect.’

  After the arrest of his father, James Bice had changed his name by deed poll to Boyce. James Boyce handed over the keys in the car park of the building where his father had lived in a third-floor flat. He had been told not to enter it. If he had spent the night grieving, then it had left no visible marks. He was a soft-fleshed man of about thirty. His eyes were a clear pale blue, his hair a dusty blond and his skin made McLusky think of marzipan. He gave the impression he had never been exposed to sunlight. He looked uncomfortable standing in the slushy snow by his car, in a grey overcoat, squinting up at the building. It was a fairly new development, not all that far from the marina, but its nearest neighbour was a business park with a jumble of warehouses. McLusky had come with Austin in the Mazda. He asked Boyce to take a seat in the back of the car for a few routine questions.

  The man obliged, looking bemused, as though unsure of what to say, or perhaps what to feel. ‘His death came as a surprise, though it wasn’t that great a shock,’ he explained. ‘The kind of people he chose to work for … criminals, drug-dealers … I often thought he’d simply disappear at sea one day. How was he killed? The officers who brought us the news didn’t seem to know. Or pretended not to know.’

  ‘He … died from a head trauma,’ McLusky said. Boyce would eventually get to know all the grisly details of his father’s demise, but no matter how unshocked the man professed to be, McLusky didn’t feel like telling him in the back of his car.

  ‘What will you be looking for?’ Boyce asked, nodding towards the balcony of the flat above.

  ‘We don’t know; it could be a crime scene, but it’s actually routine. A forensics team will enter the flat soon and make a thorough search. You didn’t go up, as we asked you?’ The man shook his head. ‘When did you last see your father?’

  ‘About a year ago.’

  ‘You didn’t go to the trial?’

  ‘No.’

  McLusky glanced at Austin, who was in the passenger seat, looking straight ahead. Austin pushed his lower lip out and nodded imperceptibly, meaning he hadn’t seen Boyce at the trial. ‘Why not?’ McLusky asked. ‘He was your father, after all. Did you not care what would happen to him?’

  ‘Not particularly. We didn’t get on very well. My parents split up. My father left on my fourteenth birthday. I stayed with my mother. We live quite a different life from the one my father chose.’

  ‘A cake shop?’

  ‘Yes. Cake craft.’

  McLusky wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but he let it pass. ‘Yet this flat. It’s in your name. Why?’

  Boyce hesitated and looked out of the side window, as though asking himself the same question. He sighed. ‘Because he asked me to. He said it would help him, something to do with tax. And it would also mean I’d definitely inherit something.’

  ‘In case his assets were seized?’

  ‘In case it all just … disappeared. Like he always did.’

  ‘When were you last here?’

  ‘Not since he signed the place over to me, nearly two years ago.’

  ‘Had he always been a skipper for large yachts?’

  ‘God, no. He’d done all sorts, though mostly to do with boats in one way or another. He did have all the licences and certificates. But not million-pound yachts. How he landed that job, I don’t know. I suppose only a drug-dealer would have looked at his work record and given him the keys to his pride and joy.’

  There was a pause, and Austin asked: ‘How often would you say you saw your father in the last few years?’

  Boyce snorted joylessly and stared out of the window at nothing. ‘Once every couple of years. It would usually be him, calling us, on the phone, quite drunk, you could tell. Gone sentimental. Wanting to meet. To see me, not my mother. We’d agree to meet and half of the time he wouldn’t even show. Something would come up. Something always came up,’ he added sharply.

  McLusky felt Boyce was probably talking about his childhood now. He had no idea where his own father was. He’d already left school when his parents finally went their separate ways. When his mother died, his father didn’t make it to the funeral. No explanation was offered. The next time he tried first his father’s number, then his address, he had drawn a blank. And he’d let it slide, not looked further. Things had come up then too, like university exams, like entering police college, which took him away from Devon to Hampshire.

  Through the rear window he saw the van of the forensics team, the driver going slowly, looking for a police presence to confirm his sat nav had taken him to the right location. McLusky wound his window down and waved, and the van pulled into the car park. ‘Thanks for coming all the way out here,’ he said to Boyce. ‘We should have told the officers who spoke to you at your home to get a key from you, but it was good to be able to talk to you in person. Thanks again,’ he said as Boyce quit the car. He had wanted the man to be there when they entered the flat, but if what he said was true and he hadn’t seen his father for that long, he’d be of little help. And if he was lying, then he would be worse than useless. When Boyce reversed his Vauxhall out of the parking space, McLusky gave him a wave, which Boyce either didn’t see or chose to ignore.

  Forensics, a team of four, followed them into the building, carrying their gear. McLusky and Austin left them to take the lift, which they would fill to capacity, and walked up. ‘Did you believe him?’ McLusky asked.

  ‘Seemed genuine. You didn’t want him coming up to the flat, then?’

  ‘No point. Strange character. I can see him in a cake shop. Can’t see him on a boat at all.’

  ‘He didn’t murder his dad for the flat, then?’

  ‘It’s a good enough motive.’

  ‘Yes, it’s paid for.’

  ‘Not by Boycey’s father, I’m sure.’ McLusky took a five-second pause, then carried on climbing. He thought he was doing far too much exercise lately, and wished he’d waited for the lift to come down again.

  ‘Not by him, why?’

  ‘I’m sure it was one of Fenton’s many money-laundering schemes. Putting it in his son’s name was shrewd of Bice. I’m sure Fenton would have tried to reclaim it once he got out. Not so easy now, I should think.’ McLusky stopped again, out of breath.

  Austin didn’t seem at all affected by their climb. ‘Perhaps Bice expected Fenton to be arrested. I wonder if the drug squad got any anonymous tip-offs …’

  ‘Oh, I see your scenario. Boycey knows his father’s boss is a big drug-dealer, talks his father into signing the flat over to him, then makes sure Fent
on and his dad get arrested, and when he sees his dad get off scot free, he kills him.’

  ‘And changes his name.’

  ‘You know, I’d have bought that as a million-to-one chance if only we’d found Bice with his head in the gas oven or drowned in cake mix. But not the way he was killed. Not unless cake man is one hell of a psycho and his mom helped him do it.’

  They arrived at the right floor. The forensics team were squatting and leaning around Bice’s door like moody teenagers, posing as though they’d been waiting there for hours. McLusky unlocked the door for them and they entered the flat while he and Austin suited up. Not that either of them expected the place to be the scene of Donald Bice’s murder. With his injuries he’d have screamed the entire house down. But he might have been snatched from here, and there could be evidence of a struggle.

  The two-bedroom flat was one of two on the floor. It was what estate agents would call well appointed, but it lacked anything McLusky would call soul. There was CCTV for the lobby entrance door, laminated wood floors, a plasma screen, a wood and brushed-steel kitchen. There were quite a few pictures, all nautical, nearly all showing Donald Bice himself, on boats, in front of boats, climbing from a glittering sea on board a boat. Beds in both master and second bedroom were made.

  McLusky opened the wardrobe in the main bedroom, searched through clothing hanging up – two suits, one sporting an anchor motif on its silver buttons. He searched the pockets, found nothing. ‘Not even fluff! I want the name of his dry cleaner’s; they check for fluff.’ The rest of the wardrobe was unremarkable apart from a whole pile of knitted sweaters, most of them cream or blue. He pushed the door shut.

  While the place had certainly been lived in, it was obvious that Bice had not cared much for lubbing on land. Even in the bedroom McLusky found a picture frame containing four small colour photographs, three of which showed Bice in front of a wooden sailing boat called Beatrice. The third just showed the vessel, in some kind of boatyard. There were no pictures of his family. McLusky set the frame back on the substantial bedside cabinet and searched through the drawer. Painkillers, antacid tablets, nail clippers, sweet wrappers. He slammed the drawer shut. Coffee-table books on nautical subjects in the space below the drawer, Ultimate Yachting, Classic Motor Yachts, glossy yachting yearbooks. ‘Marvellous.’