by Peter Helton
He escaped south-west out of the city in playfully dancing snow, with the heating in the Alfa on high. Driving with a redundant left foot was a novelty; so was the effortlessness with which the car dialled up and down through the gears. It kept him amused until he got to the large roundabout and turned off towards Keynsham.
He spotted the cake shop only after his second pass of the high street. Back at Albany Road, he had fondly imagined that he could take a picture of James Boyce from the comfort of his hire car, but that seemed unlikely now. The window of Keynsham Cake Craft was impenetrably overstuffed with cakes: children’s birthday cakes, 70 Today cakes, Happy Retirement cakes. The centre of the display was taken up by a multi-tiered nightmare of a wedding cake, slowly rotating on a glass stand. The space between cakes was taken up by the arcane paraphernalia of cake decorating. None of it made McLusky want to eat cake. A horn bleated behind him – he was holding up the traffic again. He drove on until he found a space on a single yellow in a side street, and swung on his crutches back to Keynsham Cake Craft. His plan B had always been to go and unnerve Boyce in his shop.
McLusky liked the old-fashioned shop bell set off by the door sweeping against it, but that was the last thing he enjoyed in there. The small part of the shop devoted to sales was unconvincingly old-fashioned. He had probably expected it to smell like a patisserie, darkly of chocolate, vanilla and coffee, but the place had no particular smell apart from a vague sweetness in the air. The grey-haired woman behind the counter wore a pink-and-white apron and looked up from studying papers in a ring binder. ‘How can I help?’
He swung close to the counter so he could lean on it. ‘Is James about?’
The woman looked at him first puzzled, then with suspicion. I know all my son’s friends, and you’re not one of them, her look seemed to say. ‘May I enquire who is asking?’
‘Liam. Liam McLusky. Bristol CID.’ He held open his ID wallet for inspection.
‘Oh, it’s about his father. I’ll get him for you.’ The woman’s complexion, as pale as her son’s, didn’t alter, but she looked almost relieved. ‘Will you be all right there on your crutches? Do you want me to bring you a chair?’
‘Very kind, but I’ll manage.’ While the woman disappeared through a half-glazed door, McLusky primed his mobile. He had practised covert photography with his phone, and now considered himself a dab hand at pretending to make a call while actually taking pictures. He propped himself against the counter, pointed his right ear in the direction Boyce would appear from and started taking pictures as soon as he did. His mother followed close behind. ‘Aha … aha … yes …’ He spoke into the silent mobile, then mouthed Be right with you at James, who looked less relaxed than his mother. McLusky pretended to terminate the call, then quickly checked his display to see if it had worked. Cakes, bits of counter, the dado rail on the wall. No James. Had to be the crutches that had put him off his aim. The shop door tinkled open and a woman with two young children entered, directly followed by an elderly man. Suddenly the tiny shop was crowded and noisy.
‘Is there somewhere we can have a quick chat, Mr Boyce?’
Boyce looked at his mother, but she was busy attending customers. ‘I’m fairly busy right now.’
‘How about in the back?’ McLusky suggested, making ready to swing behind the counter.
Boyce fluttered his hands between them. ‘It’s a food preparation area, I can’t let you in there.’
McLusky jerked his head. ‘Okay, outside.’ Once on the slushy pavement, with the door closed behind them, he brought out his mobile and turned the camera on. ‘Say cheese.’ He took a picture and, as arranged the day before, sent it via text message to Roddy Gow.
‘Hang on, what are you doing?’ Boyce coloured rapidly. ‘You can’t take a picture of me without my consent!’
‘You’re in a public place; here I can take all the pictures I want.’ He pocketed his mobile, leaned close to Boyce and planted the tip of the left crutch firmly on the other man’s foot, then leant all his weight on it.
‘Hey, you’re on my …’ Boyce stopped himself, swallowed hard. His foot hurt like hell. He tried to pull it back, but the infuriating man had it pinned to the pavement.
‘You were saying?’ McLusky watched Boyce fumble; he looked to be in genuine pain. Good. Not so good if he had the wrong man, of course, but he didn’t think a wholly innocent one would put up with this treatment. He bounced a couple of times on the crutch for emphasis.
‘Ow! Okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d get hurt. I just panicked. I thought it would help me get away. I had no idea it would put you on crutches. I’m really sorry. Ow!’ McLusky taking the crutch off his foot sent another jab of pain through it. Now freed, he lifted it off the pavement and gently shook it from side to side. ‘I’m in trouble, aren’t I?’ He glanced over his shoulder towards the door.
‘I’d say so. Assaulting a police officer, withholding evidence, obstructing a murder investigation. Excuse me.’ His mobile chimed an alert. He checked the text from Roddy Gow: That’s him. Despite having been almost certain before, McLusky felt relieved.
‘How did you know?’ Boyce asked.
‘I didn’t know. But we checked CCTV footage, and your car showed up.’
Boyce pulled a pained face. ‘The shop’s not doing well; we have debts up to here …’
‘You can sell the flat your father lived in. There’ll be plenty of money to go around.’
‘Perhaps not as much as you think. This place was expensive, smack in the high street.’
‘You live over the shop?’ A nod. ‘With your mother?’
‘She doesn’t know anything about it, the lockup or anything. I thought I could keep it to myself. Keep the money to myself, I mean. I thought I could get out. Set her up right and get out into something else, something of my own.’
‘Even though you knew the money had almost certainly come from drugs? And that your father might have died for it? You changed your name to distance yourself from your father, but you’re quite happy to walk away with his money.’
Boyce shrugged impatiently and lifted his aching foot again, rubbed a thumb over the scuff mark on his shoe. ‘It’s money. It’s just money, it looks like any other. It was an opportunity.’
McLusky was getting tired of standing around on crutches in the cold. ‘Not so much, as it turns out. Okay, where is it now?’
‘It’s just in there,’ Boyce said, deflated. He pointed at the shop window.
‘Where “in there”?’
Boyce tapped the window. ‘It’s in that one.’ He indicated a garish child’s birthday cake covered in bright red marzipan, chased with multicoloured sweets and the piped greeting Happy 14th Birthday on top.
‘You baked it into a cake?’
‘No,’ Boyce said impatiently. ‘They’re not real, are they? They’re display cakes. Cardboard covered with marzipan.’
‘Is it all in there?’ A reluctant nod from Boyce. ‘How much?’
‘A hundred and ten. There was a bit more; I spent some.’
A hundred and ten thousand pounds. With the cake in a gift box inside a carrier bag dangling from his arm as he swung along the high street back to his car, McLusky thought that people, and that included police officers, had been tempted off the straight and narrow by less than that. He stuffed the bag behind the driver’s seat, stowed the crutches and was reaching for the ignition when his mobile rang. It was Austin. He listened, keeping his side of the conversation short.
‘What? Where? Oh shit, that’s all we bloody need.’
Chapter Eighteen
All the way back up to Bristol he had driven into worsening snow. While Keynsham had received picture-book flurries, dirty grey clouds had dumped a heavy load of it on the city, bringing visibility down to a few yards and slowing traffic to a crawl. On the car radio, McLusky listened to talk of closing more schools and to announcements of cancellations of trains and buses. Bristol Airport was closed due to fog.
W
hen eventually he crawled up the A360 to the bottom of Rownham Hill, found a gap in the traffic and crossed over on to the grass verge, he seemed to be the last to arrive. He left the Alfa at the end of a row of police vehicles. His crutches earned him curious looks from a couple of constables but no comment.
When he rounded the corner on to the familiar cycle path, he stopped and glared with a feeling akin to hatred. Here he stood again, and the victim, surrounded by SOCOs and attended to by Dr Coulthart, lay, as far as he could make out, just where the body of Mike Oatley had been found. Cables were still being run and more arc lights set up, which was just as well. It was dark now, visibility was bad and it would have been all too easy to walk straight into the black, icy river.
Austin spotted him and came towards him, but McLusky moved forward to meet the DS halfway. He didn’t want to give the impression that he needed special treatment. Before each swing he jabbed the crutches hard into the snow to make sure they didn’t slip. ‘They really did dump her in the same place,’ he said with disgust.
‘Yes, pretty much. Right in the middle of the path this time, but otherwise, same place.’
‘Tell me it wasn’t the same damn cyclist who found her, Jane, because if it was, then I’m going to have him.’
‘No, a couple of kids, ten-year-olds, came down here to smoke.’
‘That’s a fag they won’t forget in a hurry. I suppose they trampled all over the bloody locus.’
‘They did a bit. No more than anyone would have done, though.’ It was obvious the DI was in a foul mood. ‘Is your foot playing up?’
Throbbing was the word. ‘Just a bit. Painkillers must have worn off. Hang on.’ He reached into his pocket, found the bubble pack of painkillers and pressed two pills into his hand, then another one for good measure, and popped them into his mouth. He turned the crutch upside down and with the ring of the armrest scooped up a clean-looking dollop of snow, which he stuffed in his mouth to wash down the acrid pills.
‘You really have done this before,’ Austin said, almost impressed.
‘Too right. But tell me it doesn’t feel déjà-bloody-vu to you too.’ He swung forward a pace and called to the group around the body: ‘Okay to come closer?’
One SOCO looked back. ‘Fine. Come along the corridor, gents.’
McLusky travelled along the marked-out corridor to the deposition site, where an upbeat Dr Coulthart waited for them. ‘Good afternoon, Inspector. You’re handling those crutches like Long John Silver. Injured in the line of duty, I hear. I wish you a speedy recovery.’
‘Thanks, Doc.’ He nodded at the body. ‘Not killed here, then. Enlighten me: same place, same method, same killer?’
At their feet in eight inches of snow lay the body of a woman with mid-length brown hair, now caked with dried blood. Her features were unrecognizable, a puckered mess of black and blue, swollen and in places ruptured. The body was clothed in a pink and white jumper, shortish blue skirt, opaque black tights and walking boots. The tights were torn just above the boots. Her clothes were filthy and bloody.
‘You don’t really expect an answer to that here and now, do you? There are a couple of differences, however, that might puncture that theory straight away.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘The victim is female.’
‘I’m glad you are here to point this stuff out.’
Coulthart ignored it. ‘And she was strangled. Manual strangulation marks; you can just make them out there.’ He pointed to the dark bruising on the side of her neck. ‘I’m not sure that’s what killed her yet, but there you go. That’s two differences. We might find more.’
‘By all means make our lives as difficult as you can, Doctor.’ Austin had caught some of McLusky’s gloom.
McLusky, however, appeared to lighten up. ‘No, DS Austin. We want the good doctor to tell us categorically that this can’t be the same perpetrator, because then we can simply hand it over to Trinity Road and be on our way. We couldn’t possibly be asked to work on two separate murder inquiries.’
‘But we already are. The Leigh Woods murders and now these two.’
‘Same perpetrators.’
‘We’ve no real evidence for that yet.’ He turned towards Coulthart, looking for support.
‘Don’t look at me; it’s forensics who are dragging their feet.’
‘But surely … Both Deeming and Bice were involved in drugs. There isn’t the slightest indication that Mike Oatley was. Then we have two different ways of getting rid of the bodies for starters. And both Deeming and Bice had been tied up. Not Mike Oatley.’
‘Because he was already too beaten up to run.’ McLusky stomped a crutch for emphasis. ‘One of his knees was shattered.’ He had already had this argument with Denkhaus. Same perpetrators. He’d been as stubborn as a child about it, without any real evidence to back it up. In the end, the super had relented, probably because he didn’t want it to be two separate investigations either.
‘Any sign at all that this one was tied up?’ Austin asked Coulthart.
‘Yes, there are signs that her arms were tied with tape. I think we may find that her legs were as well. She was probably gagged with tape too.’
‘Okay, I give you that,’ Austin said. ‘But it’s a different method of tying up and gagging.’
‘You’re nit-picking now,’ McLusky said.
‘At least admit there are nits to pick.’
‘Not on me. But maybe, yeah. Time of death, Doc?’
‘Oh, sometime during the night, perhaps, though that’s merely a guess at this stage,’ Coulthart said. For once the pathologist looked genuinely uncertain rather than deliberately vague. By now McLusky had learnt to tell the two states apart. ‘We’ve no way of knowing what the temperatures were like in whatever place she was before. And it’s sub-zero out here.’
‘How long do we think she’s been lying here?’
‘SOCO think about an hour before they got here, which makes it about four.’
‘What?’ McLusky looked about him as though searching for the originator of this wild theory. ‘You’re telling me they dumped her here in broad daylight? And no one saw a thing?’
‘Hardly broad daylight. It was already quite dark then. There was a heavy snowfall, heavier than now, and look …’
McLusky did. He couldn’t see far in any direction, and the opposite side of the river was completely obscured. He went rhetorical. ‘Still. Look at it. This is the nearest access point, so they probably stopped out there rather than carry the body along the path. But that road must have been hellishly busy at four. And for what? I can’t see anything special about this place. And if it isn’t special, then there’s another reason for dumping them here.’
Coulthart picked up his case. ‘I’ll leave you to your musings, gentlemen.’
McLusky watched him go, remembering the doctor’s perishable soul and briefl y wondering what soulful delights he might be travelling towards tonight. Then other matters claimed his attention. He found the senior SOCO. It was the same man who had predicted the time of deposition of Mike Oatley’s body. ‘You think she was dumped here an hour before she was found?’
‘That’s our estimate, and we don’t think we’re out much either way.’
‘No chance of footprints, I guess? Or better still, tyre marks?’
‘I think we might be lucky with both. We’ve been digging out quite a few, last time as well. The footprint compacts the snow, then snow falls on top, but its infill has a different density. We dig around it, take away the whole thing, stick it in a box and keep it sub-zero. We won’t get much of a tread pattern, but size and shape definitely. Same with tyre marks.’
‘Is that what all the digging was back there?’
‘Yes. We might get lucky. If I’m right, then I think it’s a van rather than a car.’
‘Interesting.’
‘Yes, a red one, we think.’
‘Very funny.’ SOCO humour. McLusky could do without it today.
It w
as after one in the morning when he got away from the site and drove home. He liked driving in the city at night: there was space and air to move about in; you could look further than the nearest car. He could hear sirens close by as he turned into Stokes Croft. Checking his mirrors, he saw two fire engines following. He pulled over and waited for the heavy diesel engines to growl past, then followed in their wake. When it looked as though they were going his way, turning into Ashley Road, he did a quick mental check of his kitchen: yes, he had turned the gas off this morning. The fire engines carried on down Ashley Road. Just out of sight around the next bend, he could see the bright glow of a fire and black smoke billowing skywards. Instead of turning off, and purely for sightseeing purposes, he drove along until he got to the site of the fire.
When he got there, he saw Constable Pym standing in the middle of the road, signalling him to stop. Flames roared behind two first-floor windows of a 1960s three-storey building. He was in time to see the well-rehearsed routine of the firefighters connecting and rolling out hoses. A small crowd had gathered on the pavement opposite, being shouted at to move further away from the engines. McLusky got out of the car. He was instantly hit by the heat of the fire, even at this distance. He could hear its dark roar too, until the noise from the pumps drowned it out. The flames soon collapsed as jets from two hoses pumped through the shattered windows on to the flames. Pym stopped another car, which then started a laborious U-turn. McLusky swung on his crutches to the constable.
Pym brightened up. ‘It’s you, sir, I didn’t recognize your car. Did they call you out for this?’
‘I was on my way home. I live round the corner.’
‘Seriously? Well I thought I was on my way home too. Then this cropped up.’
