Charisma

by Jo Bannister

  In fact no one saw anything. Of the twenty-eight houses, six had no one at home when the police called. At three, all the residents had been in bed at eight o’clock. Nine of the households ate breakfast in the kitchen at the back of the house and didn’t finish until after eight-fifteen. Of the remainder, two were eating in a morning-room at the front of the house between seven-forty-five and five past eight, and eight went out to their cars in the same period. They saw nothing either.

  Or rather, nothing that advanced the investigation. Five of them remembered the child on the white pony coming down from the council yard, both at about the same time Arnie Sedgewick saw her. Nothing happened in the few seconds they had her in view. Three of them noticed Sedgewick’s van. That was all.

  Gradually Liz became aware that no one seemed to have seen something that should have been visible to anyone moving about at that time, something that would have been part of the park scenery for two or three times as long as Sedgewick’s van. No one remembered seeing Carver ride his bicycle up the lane. A man on a bicycle wasn’t so remarkable a sight as to remain indelibly in the memory of anyone who saw it, but then neither was a council van, and three people saw Sedgewick arriving for work. Why had nobody seen Carver?

  She turned over the notes she made while talking with the groundsmen. Ray Carver, she read, 15 Coronation Row. She frowned: it was time she knew this town better than she did. ‘Coronation Row?’ she mused aloud.

  DC Stewart was passing close enough to hear. ‘That’s one of the Victorian terraces at the back of Brick Lane.’

  Liz was aware of the nearness of something important. Groping as if through mist she hazarded, ‘Near Jubilee Terrace?’

  Untroubled by presentiment, the constable nodded. ‘Just round the corner,’ he said cheerfully.

  II

  1

  Liz took the stairs two at a time and ran along the corridor. She rapped on Shapiro’s door but didn’t wait for an answer before throwing it open. ‘I’ve got a suspect.’

  Shapiro caught the suppressed excitement in her voice and his eyes left Donovan and shot to the door. ‘A real one?’ But he was already talking to her departing shadow and the swift tap of her heels on the linoleum.

  Momentarily torn, he wondered if it was more important to persevere with the odd tale Donovan was telling him in the hope of making some sense of it, or to see what Inspector Graham had that had brought her back to Queen’s Street when experience told him the house-to-house couldn’t be more than half done. But he didn’t waver long. Jabbing a thick finger in Donovan’s direction he said, ‘Don’t go anywhere, Sergeant, you and I aren’t finished yet.’ Then he thrust his chair out from his desk and set off after Liz at a sturdy jog.

  He caught up with her outside the interview room. ‘Who? Why? How? Are you serious about this?’

  Her eyes sparked indignantly at him. ‘Of course I’m serious! I don’t haul people in here to interrogate them about multiple murders on a whim. It’s one of the gardeners. His story doesn’t add up. He wasn’t where he says he was when Alice Elton was killed.’

  ‘What have you got so far?’

  ‘He’d been in the park for a while. If he’d arrived when he said someone would have seen him and no one did. But he only clocked on after the girl was dead. Also, he knew Charisma. He lives round the corner from her.’

  Shapiro sucked air between pursed lips. His eyes were cautiously optimistic. ‘Do you want to talk to him alone, or—?’ It was as far as he would go towards taking over the interview.

  Liz smiled. ‘I’d be glad of your help, sir.’

  It took no stretch of the imagination to picture Ray Carver as a murderer; more than that, as a man who cut throats. Hunched sullenly over the desk in the interview room, the black hair hanging lank in his face, dark eyes smouldering on his arms crossed in front of him, he looked like a gypsy about to be hanged for stealing the proverbial sheep. He was twenty-five though he looked older. He’d worked as a groundsman at Belvedere Park for three years. He wasn’t tall – about five foot eight – but well muscled under the rough work-clothes and anyway tall enough to kill the two girls in the way they had been killed.

  Shapiro was unhappy that he’d been in Castlemere a minimum of three years. After two killings in quick succession he was sure in his own mind that the man they were looking for must have attacked before. But if he’d done it here Shapiro would have known. ‘Where did you work before that?’

  Carver muttered into his sleeve. ‘Sorry?’ said Shapiro.

  The man straightened abruptly, his eyes flaring like coals. ‘I said,’ he said loudly, ‘I didn’t work for eighteen months. Before that I was an apprentice mechanic at Cooney’s but the garage went bust.’ So he’d been in Castlemere for something over five years, and not far away for longer: he spoke with a local accent.

  ‘How long have you lived at Coronation Row?’

  ‘I was born there.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Shapiro.

  Liz looked at him sharply, not appreciating the significance. She took up the questioning. ‘About this morning. Why did you lie about the time you got to work?’

  Carver’s gaze returned to his sleeve. ‘Who says I lied?’

  ‘I do,’ she said firmly. ‘If you’d been riding your bike through the park at the time you say I’d have had half a dozen witnesses. But nobody saw you, Ray. Nobody. That means you weren’t there.’

  He lifted the muscular shoulders in a heavy shrug. ‘So maybe I got the time a bit wrong. I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe,’ agreed Liz. ‘But you couldn’t have been much later because we know what time you clocked in. And if you were earlier, why didn’t you clock on earlier and claim the extra money?’

  She got no reply beyond another shrug.

  ‘So then we have to wonder what might have been worth more to you than a few extra quid in your pay-packet.’

  ‘I didn’t kill her,’ he shouted. ‘I didn’t touch her.’

  ‘You said you didn’t see her.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Then where were you? Everybody else in the area at that time saw her.’

  Again the powerful body hunched up as if around a secret. Liz tried a change of direction. ‘You knew Charlene Pierce, too, didn’t you?’

  ‘Everybody knew her,’ he growled.

  ‘In the biblical sense?’ asked Shapiro. Carver didn’t understand. ‘Did you sleep with her?’

  ‘No.’ Then he seemed to think better of it. ‘I have done. Not recently.’ He looked up. ‘She was a hooker, she did it for money.’

  ‘You paid her?’

  He laughed at that, a hoarse angry laugh. ‘What, you think she took one look at me and begged for it? Of course I paid her.’

  ‘When was the last time?’

  ‘Three, four months ago – something like that.’

  ‘You must have known her all her life,’ said Shapiro.

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘And you paid to sleep with a sixteen-year-old girl you’d known since she was a child?’

  The quick temper flared again. ‘She hadn’t been no child for a long time. It’s what she did, it’s what she was: she went with men for money. If it hadn’t been me it’d have been someone else. I never hurt her neither.’

  ‘What were you doing Friday night and Saturday night?’

  ‘Friday night I were out drinking. Saturday night I stayed in and watched the telly.’

  ‘Where did you drink?’

  ‘A few places. The Fen Tiger, The Ginger Pig – there were a bunch of us, we moved around.’

  ‘Will they vouch for you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What happened at closing time?’

  ‘We had a carry-out. When that was finished we went home.’

  ‘So you were alone from, say, midnight?’

  ‘Maybe a bit after; yes.’

  ‘And Saturday?’

  ‘I live alone. Mostly I watch telly alone too.’

  ‘What
you’re telling us,’ Liz spelled out, ‘is that nobody can vouch for your whereabouts during the hours when Charlene Pierce was killed, when she was put in the canal, or when someone dragged Alice Elton off her pony and cut her throat.’

  Carver rounded on her furiously. ‘All them hours, and a whole lot more besides. I’m on my own, see? There used to be my mam and me, now there’s just me. Apart from working hours and Friday nights, you can pin any crime in your book on me if I need witnesses to prove I didn’t do it.’

  ‘Do you use a knife in the course of your work?’ asked Shapiro.

  “Course I do. For pruning, grafting, cutting twine – all that stuff. Every gardener uses a knife: you’d take all day with bloody scissors.’

  ‘You have a knife of your own? Where is it?’

  ‘In the house. I don’t take it to work with me, I use one from the tool-box. If I took my own I wouldn’t have it five minutes. Load of bloody thieves up there, they are.’

  Liz said quietly, ‘Surely you have some friends among your workmates? A lot of people work at the Town Hall – you must have some friends.’

  ‘Arnie Sedgewick’s all right,’ he conceded. Some impulse of humour tugged at the corner of his mouth. ‘Arnie and me, we—’ He stopped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s all right, that’s all.’

  It was like drawing teeth. After a little more of the same Liz and her chief conferred outside.

  ‘Gut feeling?’ asked Shapiro.

  Liz hesitated, then committed herself. ‘That he could have done it but he probably didn’t.’

  ‘Then why is he lying?’

  She gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘If we knew that we’d know everything.’

  ‘Then why do you think he didn’t do it?’

  ‘Because he’s told the truth about the things that matter. All right, he couldn’t have denied knowing Charisma but he could have denied sleeping with her. We have no witnesses to that. He could have invented an alibi for one of the two nights we asked about – he must have a mate somewhere who’d lie for him. He could have said he saw Alice at the same time everyone else did; we’d have believed that. I think he’s being straight with us, except for this one thing that he won’t tell us about. But I don’t think it’s that he murdered anyone.’

  ‘Do you want to let him go?’

  ‘Not yet. Not till he tells me what he was doing when he should have been cycling through the park.’

  Shapiro left her to it then and returned upstairs. Donovan was on the phone again. There was no one else in the CID room so Shapiro perched on a desk and waited for him to finish. ‘Any progress?’

  Donovan regarded his notes pensively. ‘Well – maybe.’

  ‘Really? When?’

  ‘August of last year. Another young girl – nineteen. Another hooker: amateur, thinking of turning pro was what the investigating officer said. Throat cut back to the spine, probably by somebody standing behind her.’

  Shapiro let out a thin whistle. ‘That’s him, isn’t it? Where was this?’

  ‘Dover.’

  ‘Dover?’ Then Shapiro understood his sergeant’s lack of enthusiasm. ‘Oh, that’s great, isn’t it? Now all I’ve got to find is someone who’s been to Dover. Like, half the bloody population.’

  Donovan tried to look on the bright side. ‘They probably weren’t all there last August.’

  Shapiro glowered. ‘Have you ever been in Dover in August? It seems as if half the population’s there, setting off on its holidays or getting back with its Duty Free.’

  Donovan nodded wordlessly.

  After glowering a little longer Shapiro said suddenly, ‘How tall was she?’

  Donovan was surprised. ‘I didn’t ask.’

  ‘Find out, will you? Our two have both been particularly short. If this girl was too, maybe it means our man is either short or not particularly strong himself.’

  ‘Or just that he likes an easy life.’

  ‘Or nothing at all,’ admitted Shapiro. ‘Still, find out.’ Then he said, ‘What’s this you had to tell me about Joseph Bailie?’

  Donovan leaned back in his chair, tapping with a pencil and eyeing his chief speculatively. ‘What I have to tell you,’ he said carefully, ‘is that I made a mistake. It’s been a lot of years since Liam Brady was a big man in Glencurran: last night I bumped into Bailie, accidentally, on the tow-path and I realized it wasn’t the same man.

  ‘What I’m not supposed to tell you is that he broke into my boat while I was asleep, held a knife at my throat and threatened to carve me if I didn’t put him in the clear.’

  Shapiro’s eyes saucered. Like Liz, he’d put his faith in Special Branch records and dismissed Donovan’s insistence that they were wrong as paranoia. ‘What did you tell him?’

  Donovan’s glance was scathing. ‘With his knife in my jugular, what do you think I told him? I told him I’d do it. I let him think he’d scared the shit out of me. It wasn’t that difficult.’

  Shapiro had known Donovan for five years. He had seen him afraid. Fear acted on him like alcohol, making him querulous and bloody-minded. Knuckling under might have been the sensible thing to do, at least until Brady took his knife away, but for Donovan to do it he must have thought there was more than his skin at stake. ‘Then too,’ he said slowly, ‘if he thinks you’re shielding him he can carry on with whatever it is he came here for and we can have him for more than threatening a police officer.’

  Donovan gave his saturnine grin. ‘It occurred to me.’ One of the advantages of working for Frank Shapiro was that a man didn’t have to spell out his thinking. This was also one of the disadvantages.

  ‘What do you want to do? We could have him for assault.’

  ‘Save it,’ said Donovan, ‘in case we need it later. Let him think I’m playing along. He’s up to something. Give me a couple of days, see what I can sniff out. He isn’t going anywhere – not while the daft bugger in the white suit thinks there’s souls to save in Castlemere.’

  Shapiro smiled. ‘Don’t you believe in the power of prayer, Sergeant?’

  ‘If prayers were worth the breath it takes to speak them,’ Donovan said darkly, ‘a lot of dead men would be alive and a lot of living men would be dead.’

  Shapiro was heading back to the interview room when a call came through from the front desk saying a Mrs June May from the Town Hall wanted to see the person handling the murder investigation. He asked for her to be shown up.

  ‘Mrs May?’ he said pensively, mostly to himself. ‘What on earth can the Town Hall caretaker’s wife know about the murder of Alice Elton?’

  Donovan looked up with an interest that was not quite wholesome. ‘Have you met her?’

  Shapiro knew Davy May well enough, caretaker by name but more of a butler by nature, a dapper, fussy little man of middle age who wore blazers with the municipal arms on the pocket and shoes polished enough to make a sergeant major cry. He couldn’t bring Mrs May to mind. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You wouldn’t forget. She’s ten years younger than Davy. She thinks people take her for his daughter. You know what they call them up at the Town Hall? – Daisy May and June Certainly Will.’

  So it was with an inkling of what she had to tell him that Shapiro greeted Mrs May at his door and showed her to a chair.

  Davy May had needed a wife to take on the job of Town Hall major-domo. June Coates had needed a husband to escape the grinding routine of caring for seven younger siblings and an unappreciative father. You had to know that to make any sense of their otherwise incomprehensible union: the fastidious Mr May and his busty, blousy little wife with her fondness for high heels and low necklines.

  It was nobody’s idea of a match made in heaven. Where Davy cherished order, June craved spontaneity; where he worshipped routine she adored surprises; Davy believed that discretion was the mark of a gentleman while June thought it diagnostic of brain death. They had two things in common. One was a talent for cheerful hard work, the other a fondnes
s for being at the centre of things. Davy’s job enabled him to feel that all the business of the Town Hall and thus of Castlemere revolved around him. June achieved the same feeling from constant flirtations and a succession of light-hearted affairs.

  As she explained, with a deeply unconvincing essay at remorse, ‘I never mean no harm, sir.’ She didn’t even put it in the past tense. ‘I just get carried away. A girl’s got to have a bit of fun before she dries up and blows away.’

  Shapiro smiled encouragingly. ‘And Mr Carver—?’

  She smiled too, cheekily, as if at a memory. Then she remembered why she was here. ‘It was only a bit of a lark. We never meant anything by it. Only my Davy starts work at seven, and Ray don’t start till eight. So sometimes he comes by early and we – well, we have a bit of fun together.’ She tried to blush, with no discernible success.

  ‘This morning?’

  ‘He come in by the side door about ten past seven. We had a bit of fun. It was quarter past eight before he left. So you see, he couldn’t have seen that girl. He was with me until after she was found.’

  Shapiro frowned. ‘But, Mrs May, he clocked in for work at three minutes past eight. Ah.’ Understanding dawned. ‘Mr Sedgewick?’

  She beamed, like Barbara Wodehouse finally getting through to a particularly dim dog. ‘Arnie and Ray are mates, see. Arnie covers for Ray when he’s with me, and Ray covers for Arnie if he wants to knock off early. Fair’s fair,’ she said virtuously. ‘You’d understand that, sir, you being a policeman.’

  When it was put to him, Carver agreed that that was how it had been. He was clearly relieved to have it out in the open. ‘I wouldn’t have told you. Arnie’s been a good mate to me, I wouldn’t have shopped him for doing something they could sack him for. But yes, that’s what we did. When I’m up at the Town Hall I can’t leave till Daisy ain’t around. So Arnie clocks me in a couple of minutes after he’s punched his own card.