Four Below

by Peter Helton

  ‘All that means is that they prefer murdering to digging holes,’ Denkhaus said. ‘Shame it doesn’t get us very far.’ McLusky hoped it might, but having nothing more than a vague feeling about it made no comment. Denkhaus went on: ‘Moving on to the cycle-path murder …’ He reached behind him to tap against Mike Oatley’s reconstructed photo on the picture board. ‘We’re still no further. We don’t even know where he was murdered, and forensics are dragging their feet in the snow.’

  ‘House-to-house enquiries came up with nothing,’ French supplied. ‘We spoke to everyone we could find who uses that stretch of the river, and everyone on this side of the river. We posted incident boards at both ends of the deposition site. Plus your own appeal for info on Points West two days ago. Nothing useful so far.’ In fact Denkhaus had done appeals on two local TV news programmes, as well as Radio Bristol. He enjoyed it and he was good at it.

  ‘Right, we need to dig further into Oatley’s background, his activities. Interview the social worker again. Anyone in his building friendly with him?’

  ‘Only friendly enough to go through his flat when the door was left open and make off with whatever they fancied.’

  When the meeting broke up, McLusky, instead of turning left towards his cubbyhole office, turned right along the corridor to the CID room in order to make himself some coffee with the help of the reinstated kettle. The steam of his own little kettle inside the bottom compartment of his desk had managed to warp the wood to such an extent that the door now refused to open. It had trapped his coffee mug inside and, tragically, also held the bottle of Glenmorangie hostage. There were no spare mugs to be had in the CID room, so he clattered downstairs to the canteen. He bought a clingfilm-wrapped chocolate brownie, and while he paid for it with one hand, he stole one of the canteen mugs from the counter with the other.

  ‘Hey, I saw that,’ said the girl who gave him change.

  ‘Someone will be along later to take a statement,’ he promised and made off with it.

  Back in his office, he stared down glumly at a mug of instant that had brown bits of undissolved granules and white bits of undissolved whitener floating on top. ‘Looks more like soup,’ he told Austin. ‘You’d get better coffee on a building site, I’m sure.’ He suddenly felt a stab of nostalgia for the freshly roasted coffee Fishlock had served him in his caravan, out in the clean woodland air. He opened the window behind him and lit a cigarette from his pack of Extra Mild. ‘How’s the no-smoking going, Jane?’

  ‘Better if I don’t talk about it. Or breathe yours.’

  ‘Did you find out what Donald Bice was living off since he stopped skippering for Fenton?’

  ‘Yeah, he’d been claiming unemployment benefit since the trial.’

  ‘No way. He had a freezer full of high-end ready meals and a leg of lamb and other stuff, and a couple of bottles of bubbly in the fridge. He wasn’t going to toast the arrival of his dole cheque with it. What’s the status of the flat?’

  ‘Mortgaged and in the name of the son.’

  ‘And the holy ghost. Bank accounts?’

  ‘They haven’t sent the details yet, but the man Deedee talked to told him there were no significant outgoings apart from a few credit-card transactions at petrol stations and a couple of standing orders. Credit activities ceased around the time of his death. Looks like Coulthart’s estimate was spot on.’

  ‘Bice must have had some other income. And it would have been cash.’

  ‘The stuff in the freezer could all be left over from when he still worked for Fenton.’

  ‘True. I didn’t check the use-by date on the ready meals. Should have done. If he bought them when he was still working, then they’d be out of date now. But then again, if he lived on benefits, he’d have eaten them by now. Surely. No, it stinks,’ McLusky decided. ‘So no transactions apart from petrol stations … what car did he drive?’

  ‘VW Passat.’

  ‘How sensible. And presumably nothing interesting turned up in there either?’

  Austin shuffled a few papers in the file. ‘Erm, no, since, erm, we never found the car.’

  ‘What?’

  Austin looked apologetic, though he didn’t know what he was apologizing about, he was sure. It hadn’t been his case and Bice had been considered a minor figure, a sideshow. ‘I’ve no idea why his car never figured back then, I suppose they had everything they wanted and the main man was Fenton, after all. We’re looking for it now, of course.’

  ‘I should think so. Are there garages at his place?’

  ‘No, dedicated parking spaces.’

  His phone rang and he snatched it up. ‘McLusky.’

  It was DC Dearlove. ‘Donald Bice had a regular cleaner. She does several flats in the building. She’s there now.’

  A small metal disc nailed to a wooden post and rammed into a narrow bed of struggling vegetation proclaimed that the parking space belonged to Flat 5, which was Bice’s, or rather his son’s, as McLusky reminded himself when he parked the Mazda there. He rode the lift up to Flat 3, even though it was on the first floor. There’d been quite enough walking recently, for his taste. The door was answered by an attractive woman in her early thirties. She wore a grey tracksuit, a white T-shirt and white training shoes, and had her hair tied in a ponytail. Tiny studs sparkled in her ear lobes. In the background he could hear classical music, something he recognized but couldn’t place. ‘I’m looking for Julie Milne.’

  ‘You found her,’ she said, when he showed his ID.

  ‘You’re Julie Milne? Sorry. It’s just you don’t look like my idea of a cleaner.’

  ‘Who did you expect, Mrs Mop? Come in if you must, but take your shoes off. Unless you have smelly socks like the PC who was here earlier, then I’d rather you stayed in the hall. With your shoes on. I don’t want you transferring odours into the carpets.’

  ‘You’re certainly looking after your client’s property.’

  ‘They pay me a lot of money for it and I do it well.’

  ‘I know,’ said McLusky, now shoeless and relieved to see no holes in his socks. ‘I’ve admired your work upstairs, in Mr Bice’s flat.’

  ‘Yes, I do that. It’s what you’ve come about, is it? Shame about Donald. Shocking, really. He was okay, and I like the place.’

  ‘Easy to clean?’

  She managed a smile. ‘Yeah, that too.’

  Flat 3 could not have been more different to the flat of the same layout above. Floral upholstery on a traditional three-piece suite matched the rest of the dark-wood furniture and dark-red carpet. Here, combing straight the tassels on the Persian rugs and runners alone had to consume masses of time. Ornaments abounded.

  Julie Milne crossed to the hi-fi and turned off the CD. ‘So what can you ask me that the other officer didn’t?’

  ‘You said shame about Donald. How well did you know him?’

  ‘Not well. He was pleasant, that’s all I meant. Not all my clients are; some are never satisfied or want you to do the impossible but not pay for the hours. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Yes, you get people like that in policing.’

  ‘I’ve been cleaning his flat and all the time he was dead. And I had no idea.’

  ‘You must have noticed the place wasn’t being used.’

  ‘Of course. But it still needed cleaning; dust still falls, and actually it’s a good opportunity to get things done you normally have to put off to clean up the mess your clients make.’

  ‘I thought most people cleaned up the day before the cleaner comes, out of embarrassment. It hadn’t worried you that your employer didn’t seem to be using the flat?’

  ‘He wasn’t my employer, he was a client. But no, not at all. He’s often away; was, I should say. Captaining yachts. Though not so much recently.’

  McLusky picked up a figurine from a group of china ornaments on a shelf and sensed Julie Milne tensing. He pretended to examine the maker’s stamp, then set it back on the shelf, not quite where it had been. ‘So it was you
who cleaned out the fridge.’

  ‘Yeah. Not that there was so much, but I chucked all of that last time I cleaned.’

  ‘How long have you worked for him?’

  ‘A couple of years.’

  ‘Did you notice any change recently?’

  She briefly considered this while lifting her eyes to a gilt-framed reproduction of The Hay Wain above the fireplace. ‘Not really. You mean in himself?’

  McLusky ran a finger over a high shelf, then inspected it as though checking for dust. ‘Anything.’

  ‘Well, he spent more time at home than he used to. And I think he had more money.’

  ‘More money? What makes you say that?’

  ‘I don’t know. He spent more on food and drank posher wines, that sort of thing. Not really top-end wines, but mid-range, I’d say.’

  ‘You know your wine, then?’

  ‘You’d be surprised what you can learn from other people’s kitchens.’

  McLusky thought that, being a police officer, he probably wouldn’t be, but kept that to himself. He crossed the room to the balcony door, which gave a view very similar to the one upstairs, only the sea appeared more distant today. He could see his own car parked below, the road and the nearby industrial estate, and a few buildings of the same development. ‘Did he always park his car in the car park?’

  ‘Yes, mostly.’

  ‘Mostly.’

  She joined him by the window. In her trainers she was nearly as tall as McLusky in his stockinged feet. ‘Well, yeah. He’s got his own space, erm … on the left somewhere.’

  ‘I know, I’m parked in it. You said mostly.’

  ‘Yes. Only I did notice that a couple of times he was here but his car wasn’t. And once I saw him drive out of the parking lot and turn right instead of left. Then half an hour or so later he came back without his car. On foot.’

  ‘Where does that lead to? When you turn right?’

  ‘Well nowhere, that’s the thing. It’s just the industrial estate, but the back of it. The front entrance is on the main road on the other side. The rest is just waste ground back there; they’re thinking of developing that as well. Same as this, I think.’

  ‘Right.’ He was already on his way back towards the hall, where he had parked his boots. ‘Do you have any police officers as your clients?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘I was just wondering if I could afford your services.’

  While he struggled into his boots, she bent over a handbag on the hall table and produced a card. Prestige Domestic Services. Daily, weekly, monthly, one-off cleaning. She handed it over once he was booted. ‘Where is your home?’

  ‘Montpelier.’

  ‘That’s quite far. Not really worth my while travelling all the way there unless it’s a big job. It’s the petrol cost.’

  ‘Thanks, anyway.’ With any luck, Julie Milne had already made it worth his while travelling all the way here.

  The lift was busy; he took the stairs. Fine snow was dancing in the air outside as he pulled out of the car park and turned right.

  Chapter Seventeen

  What had been dancing flurries only minutes ago had now thickened into dense snowfall, driven westward by a squall from the estuary. Within moments the road, which had only had a single lane cleared, was covered with a fresh blanket of white in which McLusky’s Mazda left the only tyre marks visible. On his right, the housing development had fallen behind, giving way to waste ground and scrubland, prettified by the snow. On his left, the industrial park could never be prettified. The wall that surrounded it occasionally gave way to chain-link fence or the backs of solid sheds and low buildings, only to pick up again further along. The day was darkening and the snowfall was so dense that it wasn’t until he was right in front of it that he spotted the iron gate in the wall. A few yards further on, the road simply ended, a fact advertised by three snow-hooded concrete bollards big enough to stop a truck. Street lamps had abandoned this dead end a while back, but there was lighting in the yard beyond the gate, and he could hear a heavy engine revving somewhere nearby.

  Leaving his car running, he got out and approached the gate. It was made from welded box section, wide enough to let through heavy goods vehicles, and topped with barbed wire. It was locked. Set into the wall beside it was a rusting box with a speaker grille and a button below. It looked as though someone had once tried to set fire to it. He pressed the button for a few seconds with little confidence that it was still attached to anything meaningful. A full minute passed before it crackled. ‘Hello?’ The voice sounded far away and doubtful.

  ‘Police. Would you open the gate, please?’

  ‘Police? Yeah, okay. It’ll take a minute, mind.’ The loudspeaker emitted a hollow crackle before returning to silence.

  It took several minutes, during which the snowfall had time to diminish, before a middle-aged man in a donkey jacket, scarf and baseball cap appeared at the gate and swung it back. McLusky drove in, stopped level with the man and showed his ID. He was waved on. ‘Park over there if you want.’ He pointed to the lee of the nearest unlit building. McLusky did as suggested. As he got out of the car, the snow abruptly stopped falling, apart from a tardy flake here and there.

  The man had caught up with him. ‘We don’t normally let people in by that gate.’

  ‘Then why do you have an intercom out there?’

  For idiots like you, the man’s look seemed to say. ‘That used to be the main entrance but they made them change it to the other side since they built those houses, to stop all the traffic going past there. Is anything the matter?’

  ‘No, I just have a few questions, routine enquiries. Does no one use that gate, then?’

  ‘Erm, can we walk while we talk? I need to get back across. It’s easiest if you leave that way too when you’re done.’

  ‘Sure.’ They fell into step. ‘You’re the caretaker here?’

  ‘That’s me. Though I only just started the job, so go easy on me.’

  ‘Okay. Tell me, does anyone use that back gate?’

  ‘Well, apparently most people know to use the other side now. That’s been the main entrance for years. Of course people can if they want to, but no one has buzzed that gate since I started here last week. The sat nav takes you to the other side, anyhow. And the big artics must have hated that entrance; it’s just not built for it.’

  ‘Okay, that’s most people. But people do still use it.’

  ‘Some people have a key, I know that much, and if they want to they can.’

  ‘What about Donald Bice? Does he have a key?’

  ‘I’m not familiar with the name, but we’ll soon find out for you.’

  The industrial park consisted of several units that looked like warehouses, with rows of delivery vans parked in lines outside, and a few older, smaller units with corrugated roofs, that seemed to have grown up more haphazardly over many years. Between them lived mountains of palettes, tyres or plastic barrels, now disappearing under snow. For all that apparent industry, the place felt quiet, apart from the occasional engine noise of vans coming and going.

  The generously heated Portakabin that served as a gatehouse looked like it had been installed in the seventies, along with its fittings. A row of three black-and-white six-inch monitors served the CCTV. Filing cabinets were covered in papers, tea stains and empty takeaway containers. Prestige Domestic Services would throw a fit in here. The large ashtray on the desk was full. The place smelled strongly of cigarettes and faintly of pizza. The caretaker keyed the name into his old-fashioned desktop PC on a much-abused keyboard.

  ‘Yes, we got him.’

  ‘Donald?’

  ‘Says D., seems likely. What’s he done?’

  ‘It’s just part of a larger inquiry. But I do need to take a look at the place. What kind of unit is it?’

  ‘It’s in one of the old buildings at the back; they’re divided into lockups inside.’ He pointed to a yellowing site plan on the wall. ‘It’s in A3. You can’t
miss it; it’s the oldest building and your car’s parked next to it. I’ll get you the keys. But won’t you need a search warrant?’

  ‘Donald Bice is dead. He was murdered.’

  ‘Oh, was he one of the dead people found in the woods in Bristol?’

  ‘I think it may turn out to be that D. Bice. I’m here to find out.’

  ‘Blimey.’ After some rummaging in the bottom drawer of a metal filing cabinet, the caretaker handed over three large keys tied to a wooden block. A3 and the Roman numeral II had been burnt into the wood.

  McLusky thanked him. ‘Is this a set of keys or the set of keys?’

  ‘Oh, that’s just our set. They have keys themselves, of course.’

  ‘I’ll lock up again, but I want to hang on to this key to make sure any evidence remains secure in there.’

  ‘Fine with me. But you might want to borrow this or you won’t see much.’ He produced a long rubberized torch from a desk drawer. ‘Make sure you bring that back, though. I’m buggered without it.’

  ‘No lights?’

  ‘In the entrance bit. But not in the lockups themselves. Leccy not included.’

  Outside in the yard, the lighting was just about adequate, McLusky thought, at least if you knew your way around. He did see several lamps that weren’t lit on his way to unit A3, either from economy or neglect. He spotted his car and found the building. It was weathered red brick and had once had a tiled roof that had long been replaced with what looked to him like well-worn corrugated asbestos. The high windows were covered in wire mesh. The entrance was a large wooden double door painted wine red, high and wide enough to let in a lorry. Inset on the right-hand leaf was a smaller door for foot traffic. It reminded McLusky of a prison gate. Very unlike a prison gate, the door was ajar and light showed in the gap. He stepped inside and called: ‘Anybody home?’

  It took him a moment to make out what he was looking at. The entrance hall was feebly lit by a single naked energy-saving bulb that would have struggled to illuminate a broom cupboard. This space was perhaps twenty-five feet deep and twenty high and had a perished concrete floor. He could just see the two further wooden doors either side of the central partition through all the clutter piled high in front. Palettes loaded with boxes and cellophane-wrapped bundles of what looked like piping or metal rods had been dumped haphazardly and stacked high, right in the centre, as though whoever delivered it hadn’t been sure which lockup they were destined for. McLusky squeezed between piles of boxes into the space in front of lockup II. The Roman numerals had been rendered in black paint on the red doors. It was dark enough in this canyon for him to switch on the torch. All three keys were of similar size. He chose one at random and stopped dead.