Shooting Elvis

by Stuart Pawson

  ‘Nineteen days.’

  ‘He won’t wait that long, this time.’

  ‘So there’ll be a next time.’

  ‘Bet your life on it. And guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Next time he’ll be prepared. He won’t be extemporising his ritual – he’ll have it all worked out in advance.’

  ‘Thanks a bunch.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure. Anything else I can help you with?’

  ‘Mmm. How do you tell if a chicken’s cooked?’

  ‘How do you tell if a chicken’s cooked?’ he echoed. ‘They come cooked, don’t they? What other sort is there?’

  The man with shiny shoes gave them a final buff with a yellow duster and placed them on the rack inside the porch. He pulled his leather slippers on and went upstairs to the tiny spare bedroom that had been furnished as his office. He switched on the light and the small fan heater and pulled his typist’s chair close up to the desk, pushing the computer’s keyboard out of the way. A pile of newspapers was in a wire tray at the right-hand side of his desk. He retrieved them, one at a time, and leafed through each until he found the report on the Lapetite killing. He snipped the articles out and placed them in the matching tray at the left-hand side of his desk. The remains of the papers were dropped in a neat pile on the floor.

  He stood up to reach for his current scrapbook on a shelf and sat down again. The book was nearly full, but there was still room for this week’s harvest of cuttings. He took a tube of PrittStick and a roll of Scotch magic tape from a drawer and started positioning the cuttings on the page, moving them around until they fitted neatly, with no empty spaces. The photos taken at the Heckley Rotary Club ball posed a minor problem. Should he stick the whole half-page in his book or just the relevant ones? He cut around the photo of Charlie Priest and his woman and placed it in the top right corner of a new page, then he cut one other picture out and placed it alongside. That would do.

  Priest was smiling, he noticed. A smug, self-satisfied smile. He was in his element, in the middle of a high profile murder case with all the kudos that that brought, plus having a beautiful girl on his arm. Well, he wouldn’t be smiling for much longer, that was for sure.

  Chapter Eight

  Sometimes we get it wrong and sometimes we get it right but for all the wrong reasons. Jeff came into my office and sat down with a weariness that looked as if he were laden down with the cares of the world. He placed his chin on his fist and stared at me until I finished my phone call.

  ‘Yes, Mr Caton,’ I said, briskly. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Um, well, stop collecting car numbers, for a start.’

  ‘Explain, please.’

  ‘The odd couple in the fancy Jaguar. Ebony and ivory. They just happen to be the adopted children of the owner of the City Lights shopping centre outside Oldfield. The car is registered to their mother. Their own vehicles are more modest hot hatches, so they came out in mummy’s convertible because the weather was warm.’

  ‘Oops!’ I said. ‘Sorry about that. Have we upset them?’ Something like this could have repercussions: accusations of racism and a chop suey of other implications. Careers were destroyed by less. We’re often accused of picking on stereotypes and figures are thrown about to back this up, but nobody ever quotes the percentage of times we get it right.

  ‘Nah, don’t worry about it. When we saw who it was I asked the local collator. They’re well known and respected locally. We kept it in-house.’

  ‘Thank goodness for that, Jeff. And thanks for looking into it.’

  ‘Do you want to know about the other one?’

  ‘What other one?’

  ‘The elegant piece in the Mercedes.’

  ‘Um, no, Jeff. I think we’d better draw a discreet veil over that one.’

  ‘Fair enough. It’s just that a silver SLK 320 with that number is registered to a bookmaker down in Eastbourne, who swears he’s never been anywhere near Heckley and the car has never been further than Brighton.’

  This was more like it. ‘You mean, it’s a ringer?’

  ‘No doubt about it, unless you were in a state of high agitation and copied the number down wrongly.’

  ‘A strong possibility. Have you found it, yet?’

  ‘No, but we’re looking.’

  ‘Let me know when you do.’

  The killer’s shoes were size nine and he used black Cherry Blossom polish. The Pathfinder electrostatic lifting apparatus – ESLA – picks up dust from the carpet using electrostatic attraction. In other words, a voltage is applied to a sheet of special lifting film and any loose dust is attracted to it. Ionising filters work on the same principle, I believe. Dust particles that have been compressed down into the ground or the carpet by a shoe are not lifted, so a negative of the shoe sole pattern is made. Except in this case there was no pattern. The curve of the front of the heel was detected but anything else was outside the capabilities of the apparatus. It would have been useful to say that he was lame in his left leg, weighed seventeen stones and carried too much loose change in his trouser pockets, but we couldn’t.

  I rang Sonia at the sports centre where she works and told her not to wait for me – I had work to do. She wasn’t going to the track so she said she’d drive to the golf course and do two laps there on her own. Later, we’d have a takeaway.

  After everybody had left I spent an hour looking through reports. The report reader prepares a summary for me but I like to have a closer look at what the troops are uncovering. Rarely anything leaps up and slaps me in the face, but I feel as if I’m doing what they pay me for. They report the facts, but I like to look for the story behind them. Feelings, opinions, judgements all have a part to play, especially when you’re floundering. At half-past six I washed my coffee mug and closed the shop for the day.

  I drove to the bottom end of the Sylvan Fields estate, where Jermaine Lapetite lived. The Sylvan Fields were built in the Thirties, when Britain was supposed to be a land fit for heroes. It was a happy place for many years, giving young couples the home that they’d dreamed about. Big Dave was a product of the Fields, as were several others at the nick. The decline was slow to begin with – nobody could put an exact date on the start of it – but once it was underway it was unstoppable. What was once a community became a sink estate, where the council dumped undesirable families, single parents, the dispossessed and the deranged. It’s a common story, enacted around every city in the country, and nobody knows the solution. The bottom end, as we called it, was the leper colony. You don’t go there unless you have to.

  But it was changing, I discovered, as I drove slowly down the Avenue towards where Lapetite had lived, past the Windermeres, the Wordsworths and the Shelleys, where only the dogs outnumbered the satellite dishes.

  It was changing because the bulldozers had moved in. The empty, vandalised tenements were being demolished, leaving only the occupied ones standing. It was a drastic but effective solution, and meant that there were big gaps between the house numbers. Saturday night I’d found the house I wanted because a police car was standing outside it. When the killer came, Friday, he wouldn’t have had that luxury. He’d have had to use his eyes, read off the numbers, make deductions to allow for the gaps. The number 133 was displayed at the side of Lapetite’s front door, in small painted figures, not easy to see. The killer could have been an acquaintance who had been before, but I didn’t think he was. Let’s assume he was a stranger, I thought, who came looking.

  Did he come by car or by other means? The pins in the map often give this away – did he kill near bus stops and railway stations, or were the killings in remote places miles apart? – but we had only two pins. He could have walked between victims. I’d go for the most likely, that he came by car. And a white van had been seen near Alfred’s place. Maybe he came by white van. A purple Porsche would have been more useful to me, but white van it was.

  Would he park outside, once he’d identified the house? No. The vehicle would b
e seen. A strange car would stand out like a wooden leg on a parrot. He parked nearby, where suspicions wouldn’t be raised, and walked the last bit.

  Number 133 was still cordoned off with scene of crime tape and a panda stood outside. We were giving it twenty-four hour protection until we were certain we couldn’t glean another speck of information from the place. Then, as soon as we withdrew, the vultures would descend and tear it apart. I nodded to the driver of the panda and made a U-turn, trying to decide where I’d leave my car if I were on a similar errand to the killer.

  Right on the edge of the estate is the Mitre hotel. It’s a big, run-down, pre-war pub but is surviving because of its position. It has a good regular clientele from the estate and also attracts passing lunchtime trade. Heavy metal and Country and Western nights help boost the profits, and the landlord probably takes a cut from the teenage prostitutes and dealers who use the premises. It’s called diversification, and is to be applauded. The car park is not too big, but the road outside is wide and free from yellow lines. That’s where I would park, I decided, were I on a murder mission. I pulled the handbrake on and killed the engine.

  I crossed the road and stopped to gather my bearings. I was probably about half a mile from the house, and could go there a number of ways. The estate was laid out in a grid pattern, so I could either walk in a series of left and rights, or do one long leg in one direction, turn left and do another long leg down the Avenue, the way I’d driven. I opted for the series of left and rights, on the grounds that the scenery would be more varied.

  The houses looked good at this end. They had clean windows, tidy gardens, and efforts at individuality were apparent. Some looked a bit naff, like the ornamental lych-gate, but people were trying, and deserved to be congratulated for that. An old man with a walking stick, making slow progress in the opposite direction, probably going for his nightly brown ale, said ‘’Ow do,’ to me.

  It soon changed. Big gaps appeared where the houses had been cleared. Some school kids, five of them, aged about twelve, were kicking a ball about on a triangular patch of grass, two sticks marking a goal. One of them took a shot, the goalie missed it and the ball came bouncing across the street to me. I flicked it up and booted it back. He missed that one, too.

  ‘Thanks, mister,’ one of them shouted, followed by, ‘Want a game?’

  I waved a hand and pressed on.

  A youth came by in a Ford Fiesta with a door that didn’t match and a faulty exhaust. He slowed down to look at me, but when I stared back, clocking him, he tore off with more noise than speed. He was wearing a Burberry baseball cap. If ever a company sold its soul for a mess of pottage, it was Burberry.

  Most estates like this are littered with house bricks lying in the road, abandoned shopping trolleys and cars on blocks. A big Vauxhall stood on the verge with its bonnet raised, a gaping cavern where the engine should have been. The owner came out of his garden carrying a spare part and a socket wrench, the front of his overalls the colour of burnt crème caramel.

  ‘Sorted it?’ I asked as I strode by and he rolled his eyes and grinned in reply.

  I passed through that zone until I was at the bottom end, where Lapetite had lived. Here, anything metal has been sold to the scrappies and the dogs are too wary to come sniffing. A burnt-out shell of a house looked as if it belonged in a Middle East newsreel. The PC in the panda saw me coming and reached across to open the passenger’s door. I slid in alongside him.

  ‘Any problems?’ I asked.

  He had none. A few sightseers came, now and again, then left. Some spoke to him hoping for a titbit of information that would give them status in the eyes of their friends, and a few took photographs. Good riddance was the general attitude, but none wanted to enlarge on that. The press had long gone, concerned more with the England captain’s possible affairs than with the actual death of a drug dealer. Reality TV sells more papers than reality. I told him to stay loose and walked up the garden path towards the house. The key fitted and I was inside.

  The wallpaper was still a shock. It gave fallen off the back of a lorry a bad name. The next blow was the smell, but I couldn’t do much about that. I set my breathing control to shallow and wandered round downstairs, room to room, opening cupboards and drawers, not expecting to find anything. He had a settee that probably harboured more wildlife than the rainforest, a couple of non-matching hard chairs and a rickety table. The floor was partly covered with worn lino, but the troops had lifted it and not bothered returning it to its previous pristine state, which didn’t help. He still had floorboards, though. At the bottom end, floorboards are a luxury. They’d be the first things to go, after any remaining copper piping.

  In the kitchen a stub of a lead pipe coming out of the floor marked where the gas stove had once stood. It had been flattened to seal it, but they needn’t have bothered: the meter was missing and all the pipes ripped out. The gas had been turned off months ago. I wondered if the water supply to all the houses was through lead pipes. It probably was, which could explain a lot. There was a grease-covered microwave on the work surface, in case he ever invited any of his girlfriends around for a bite, and a few items of cutlery in a drawer. The soft bloom of the aluminium powder used by the fingerprint boys covered everything and added to the squalor.

  It was the same depressing scene upstairs. He slept on a mattress on the floor, in a sleeping bag. It had been thrown to one side when the room was searched and lay there in a huddled heap. There had been clothes in a closet but these had been taken away. I found a few CDs but resisted the temptation to borrow them. I didn’t think Benzino, Chilli Dog and C-Bo would be to my taste.

  Downstairs, I sat on one of the hard chairs and reminded myself why I was there. This was a murder scene. The boys had done the usual good job, so I knew there was nothing left for me to uncover, but a house has an ambience. There’s something there intangible, something that you can’t measure or put a name to. Well, there usually is. I tried to visualise how anybody could live in a place like this, but failed completely. It wasn’t fit for a pig. This was a squat, a last resort, a desperate refuge. Lapetite didn’t live here, nobody did. He lived on the streets, on his wits, slipping from friend to friend, woman to woman, like a virus flits between victims or a feral cat between dustbins. He was the registered owner, placed there by a council obliged to give him a dwelling, but it was never his home. It was his mail box, that’s all.

  We’d do a reconstruction. Friday evening we’d place a white van up near the Mitre and see if it jogged anybody’s memory. We’d invade the pub, take the name of everybody present and interview them individually the following week. ‘Did you see this van?’ ‘Did you see any strangers that night or any other time?’ ‘Did you know Jermaine Lapetite?’ Criminals hang around near their crime scenes before doing the deed. They look out for things, check the possibilities, pluck up courage, and someone always sees them. We’d talk to everybody on the estate, concentrating on the route I’d taken, and collate their answers. But I wasn’t optimistic. ‘No’, ‘no’ and ‘never heard of him’ could be pre-printed on the forms to speed things up.

  It was dark when I went outside, so the kids wouldn’t still be playing football. I wouldn’t have minded a kickabout with them. I said goodnight to the PC, declined a lift back to my car and went the other way, up the Avenue and turned right at the end. The Mitre car park was almost empty and mine was the only vehicle in the road. Tonight evidently wasn’t music night. I drove home slowly, enveloped in an emotional cocoon that I didn’t understand at first. I was strangely on edge, but content at the same time. Then I realised what it was: gratitude. Plain and simple, straightforward gratitude. Whether to my parents, or some god, or my friends, I didn’t know. But it was gratitude for the life I led. That’s all.

  Sonia didn’t train Friday or Saturday, resting before Sunday’s race, but I was working so couldn’t spend much time with her. The reconstruction went off reasonably OK but the usual wall of silence descended when we asked t
he drinkers in the pub about Lapetite’s acquaintances. He was Mr Invisible. Nobody knew anything about him and nobody mourned his demise. We took names and addresses and asked if they’d been in the Mitre the previous Friday. If they hadn’t, we wanted to know where they had been. A few punters finished their drinks and tried to fade away when we announced our presence, nine o’clock sharp, but we had the place surrounded and they didn’t get far. The sniffer dog gave a positive response to two of them and they were handcuffed and put in the van. I stood on the stage where a Kenny Rogers tribute act was about to do his stuff and explained to the audience that we were investigating the unfortunate killing of Jermaine Lapetite and wouldn’t keep them a moment longer than was necessary. I thanked them in advance for their cooperation and hoped we hadn’t spoiled their evening. It’s a balancing act, and I’m the chief juggler.

  We took 139 names and addresses, including the ersatz Kenny Rogers, whose Barnsley accent didn’t go with the stetson, and on Saturday morning started visiting them for a more substantive interview. I stayed in the office, dishing out the work, waiting for the phone call from one of the troops saying that he was onto something, but it never came. At three o’clock I rang Sonia to say I was tearing myself away.

  The race was another 10K, this time in County Durham. Sonia had booked a room for herself at a Travelodge and I went with her. We had a pasta meal before we left and took sandwiches and breakfast cereals and bananas with us. Energy food. There was a video in the room and Sonia had brought Finding Nemo. We watched it sitting up in bed, sipping cocoa and eating bananas, listening to the rain.

  Sunday morning Sonia woke up complaining that she had a headache and a cold, possibly caused by the air conditioning being set too warm. I gave her some aspirin and opened the window. ‘That’s the trouble with thoroughbreds,’ I told her, ‘you’re too prone to infection, not to mention the temperament.’