‘I take a young DC and a set of jump leads with me.’
Fergus shook his head. ‘I could never be bothered with that malarky. Sure God, there’s a lot to be said for starin’ at the same face across the cornflakes every day.’
‘Cereal monogamy?’
‘It’s dull, but it’s restful.’ He eased one huge buttock upwards and aired a nostalgic memory of a steak and onion pie, not lost but gone before. ‘But then,’ he added succinctly, as the song reminded him, ‘my owl woman can cook. So what did you want to talk to me about?’
‘Did you ever hear of a man called Cate?’ Slider began.
‘A man called Kate? You don’t mean that cross-dresser, what was his name, Beefy Baverstock? He used to call himself Kate, or Kathy. Used to pose as the Avon lady. Did the old ding-dong, got himself invited in, then lifted the cash and jewellery while the woman o’ th’house was makin’ a cuppa tea. He came out about four years ago, but the last I heard he was goin’ straight – or as straight as any man can go, wearin’ a black suspender belt an’ a Playtex trainin’ bra.’
‘No, no, not him. This bloke was a copper, apparently. Colin Cate.’
‘Christ, everyone’s heard of him,’ Fergus said simply.
‘Tell me about him,’ Slider invited. ‘What’s he like?’
‘Overpaid and underscrupulous, like any successful businessman.’
‘You don’t like him?’
‘I don’t like ex-coppers,’ Fergus said. ‘If you get out, you should get out, not hang around interferin’, lookin’ over people’s shoulders and makin’ suggestions you’d never have made when you were in the Job.’
‘But he’s done well since he left?’
‘Oh, he’s pots a money. Smart as a rat. Owns property and shops all over the place. He’s a big house in Chorleywood looks like a Hollywood ranch – swimmin’ pool and the lot.’
‘Apparently, he owns Dave’s Fish Bar,’ Slider said ruefully.
Fergus whistled soundlessly. ‘Izzat so? Well now, who’d a thought it?’
‘Barrington seems to think we should have.’
‘Well he does own several fish bars, that’s true,’ Fergus said. ‘But then he has that computer retail chain too –Compucate’s?’
‘Oh, yes. I know. That’s his?’
‘Yeah. I’d have connected him in me mind with computers sooner than battered fish, but there y’are. We’re supposed to know everything, aren’t we?’
‘So why is Barrington so keen on this Cate bloke, anyway? He was practically having an orgasm telling me how important and influential he is.’
‘Ah well, him and Cate go back a bit. Our Mr Dickson too. Did you not know that? They were all together at Notting Hill at the time of the shootin’.’
Slider frowned. ‘Do you mean that incident in, when was it, 1982? When two DCs were shot?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘I read about it at the time, but I don’t remember the detail. Tell me about it.’
O’Flaherty eyed the level in his glass. ‘This’ll never last. It’s a full pint story.’
Slider fetched another pint of Guinness, and Fergus began.
‘Well, now, at the time yer man Cate was the DCS, and Barrington and our Mr Dickson were Dis down at Notting Hill nick. The Area team had been investigatin’ a drugs network for a long time, under cover, and now at last it was all comin’ good. So they set up this big operation, a raid on the pub where it was all happening – the Carlisle in Ladbroke Grove—’
‘Yes, I know it.’
‘The Notting Hill lads have still got their eye on it to this day. Funny how some places attract that sort o’ thing. Anyway, it was all set up, huge operation, a hundred men or something of that order. It was all worked out in advance like a military campaign, and kept dead secret. Mr Cate was to be the man in charge on the ground, but even he didn’t know until the last minute exactly when it was coming off.’
He took a drink, eased his position in the chair, and went on. ‘Only come the night somethin’ goes wrong. Our Mr Dickson was out in the road at the side of the pub with orders to stay outside so as to catch anyone who might slip the net. Well, in go the troops and there’s all the noise and rumpus. Dickson’s standing around waiting—’
‘Not relishing it very much, I shouldn’t think,’ Slider put in.
‘That’s right. Always a man of action, our Mr Dickson. Anyway, suddenly he sees that there’s apparently nobody covering the yard at the side where there’s a fire door leading out of the function room. So he uses his initiative, grabs these two DCs, Field and Wilson, and goes in there, sees the fire door open, and goes for it.’
He removed his hand from his glass to curl it into a fist and thump the table softly.
‘Shots were fired. Field was killed, and Wilson was wounded and spent three months in hospital.’
‘Yes,’ Slider said thoughtfully. ‘I remember reading about it. They got someone for the shooting, though, didn’t they?’
‘Jimmy Cole and Derek Blackburn. They went down for it. They always swore they didn’t do it, though.’
‘Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?’
O’Flaherty nodded. ‘Blackburn was a scummy little villain, kill his own grandmother for the gold in her teeth. He’s dead now – got killed in a brawl inside, to nobody’s disappointment. Jimmy Cole, now – he musta come out six-eight weeks ago, f’what I was hearin’ from Seedy Barry.’
‘Who’s Seedy Barry?’
‘Him as runs that garden centre th’ back o’ Brunei Road. Little fella, th’ spit o’ Leslie Howard.’
‘Leslie Howard?’
‘Gone Wit’ the Wind,’ Fergus said patiently, and then clasped his hands under his chin, batted his eyelids and slid into an indescribable falsetto. ‘Oh Ashley!’
‘Now I’ve lost track. How did we get on to Scarlett O’Hara?’
‘I was tellin’ you, Seedy Barry’s set himself up in business within sight of the Scrubs – says he misses the place when he can’t see the old ivory towers. He’s been goin’ straight fifteen years now, but he keeps up with all the comin’s and goin’s, does a lot of work for the rehabilitation services. He was sayin’ the other day that Jimmy Cole went down very well with the parole board and they let him out a sadder and wiser man. But I was surprised meself at the time that he was mixed up in the shootin’. We’d had him over on our ground enough times before that, and I wouldn’t a put him in that league. Strictly a small-time villain. I’d never known him carry a shooter. But Seedy was sayin’ over the bedders the other day that the word always was it was Blackburn did the job, and took Cole down with him.’
‘So what happened afterwards?’ Slider asked. ‘From our point of view, I mean. I suppose there was an enquiry?’
‘Must a been. But there were no disciplinary actions. Cate left the Job not long afterwards, but he wasn’t required to resign or anything o’ the sort. He was only second-in-command, but he was the man on the spot. The Commander was co-ordinatin’ back at the ranch.’
‘I suppose no-one likes to lose men,’ Slider mused.
‘If you’re thinkin’ he left a broken man, you can think again. He’s gone from strength to strength since he went private.’
‘And what about Dickson and Barrington?’
‘Dickson transferred, just in the natural course o’ things. I think that was when he went to Vine Street. Barrington stayed at Notting Hill as far as I know. Why d’you ask?’
‘I keep getting the impression Barrington didn’t like Dickson, and I wondered if it could be anything to do with that incident.’
Fergus shrugged. ‘It might. I’ve never heard Dickson talk about it – but then he doesn’t talk about himself, does he?’
‘Not any more.’
‘Sure God, I was forgetting. I can’t think of him dead, can you?’ He eyed Slider curiously. ‘If you want to know more about it, why don’t you ask his missus? You’ve met her, haven’t you?’
‘Yes
, once or twice – and at the funeral, of course. I think perhaps I will, if I can find time.’
‘I expect she’d like a visit. She must be lonely. They were devoted, y’know.’ He sighed sentimentally. ‘Sure, isn’t it a grand thing to know, that there’s someone for everyone, however unlikely it may seem?’
‘It’s a comforting thought,’ said Slider.
CHAPTER 8
Hand in Glove
ANY MAN WHO HAS WORKED in a modern police station is likely to feel at home in a modern golf clubhouse: the decor and the assumptions about life are much the same in either.
The lounge to which Slider was directed in his search for Colin Cate had all the true transcontinental glamour of the Manhattan Bar of a Ramada Inn on the ring-road of a North Midlands town. Cate was leaning against the bar laughing loudly with some friends, and he carried on the chaff just a little after he had seen Slider at the door simply to emphasise the difference between them as the detective inspector began the long plod across the stretch of crimson carpet that separated them.
Cate was a tall man beginning to go soft in the middle, but his clothes were too expensive for that to matter. He was subtly resplendent in a light grey Austin Reed suit, an Aquascrotum shirt of broad blue and white stripes, and a dark blue silk tie with a tiny, discreet logo on it – so tiny that its decorative value was nil, so its function must have been to make the onlooker who did not know what it represented feel equally small. His plain onyx and gold cufflinks were large in exactly the same way that the tie-logo wasn’t, his watch was a Rolex Oyster, and on the bar next to his drink was a hefty portable telephone and a bunch of keys with a BMW tag. Since the two other men he was standing with had been turned out by the same firm, by the time Slider reached them he felt like a crumpled tourist on a long-haul flight who had wandered accidentally into club-class while looking for the lav.
‘Ah, yes, you must be Bill Slider!’ Cate hailed him cheerily. Slider agreed, sadly, that he must be. ‘What’ll you have?’ Slider protested mildly about being on duty, but Cate overrode him with the sort of outsize bonhomie men use when they are trying to convince an inferior that they look on him as an equal. ‘Bollocks, you must have something! What’ll it be? Whisky, brandy, anything you like. Christ, you don’t have to put on a show for me – I used to be a copper myself, y’know. Don’t worry, I won’t tell your boss on you!’
Slider thanked him and asked for a gin and tonic, which gave him the opportunity, while Cate was dealing with the order – ‘Same again for you blokes, I suppose? All right, you drunken bastards! Christ knows how you ever manage to run a business,’ and so on – to study him. Cate was one of those men who gave the impression of being handsome, though when you examined his face carefully there wasn’t a good feature in it: the nose was too narrow and too small, the mouth too soft, the chin too large and long, the cheekbones too wide. He had carefully-styled, silver-white hair which looked as though it had been specially selected by a top-price designer to go with his Playa de las Americas tan. Cate must have been late fifties at least, but the effect of the contrast was to make him look much younger.
It was only when you studied him closely that you could see the slackness of the face muscles, the tell-tale tiny pouches over the cheekbones, the tiredness of the skin – and there would be few enough people who would ever do that. The hearty palliness was there to keep at bay as much as to put at ease, and the eyes that were screwed up in constant smiles were grey and keen behind the concealing lids. Slider had known policemen like him, and they were often the most successful ones; businessmen too, though the style had so many imitators in commercial life that the real goods like Cate could hide up in a herd of prats and go unnoticed for as long as it was to his advantage.
Having secured the drinks, Cate ushered Slider away from his friends. ‘Excuse us, lads – a bit of business to discuss. I’ll catch you later. Oh yes I will – it’s your round, you tight-fisted sod! No, seriously, I’ll only be about half an hour, all right? Cheers, then.’
He led the way across the room to one of those round bar tables which are too low and too small to be of any use other than to catch you in the knees every time you shift position and make you spill your drink. Cate settled himself, and rested his right hand on the table top beside his drink. It was very brown, and Slider noticed he was wearing a ring on the third finger in the shape of a skull: heavy gold, beautifully wrought, expensive and ugly – a strange thing, he thought, to go with the aforesaid suit, shirt and tie. If it had been silver instead of gold, and much more crude, it might have been a biker’s ring. But maybe it was meant simply to surprise – and to warn the business contact that this was not just a rich man, but a tough bastard too.
Cate surveyed Slider’s face and slipped into serious man-to-man mode.
‘All right, tell me about it. The lad Ronnie’s got himself into trouble, has he?’
Slider told him briefly the history of the case. ‘He told us that it was his shop, and there seemed no particular reason to doubt him. If anything, it would have been in his interest to make us think there was someone else to suspect’
The eyes crinkled merrily. ‘You’re not suspecting me, I hope?’
‘No sir,’ Slider said solidly. ‘I’m just explaining why we didn’t doubt he was the owner of the shop.’
Serious mode again. ‘It’s all right, Bill – I may call you Bill?’
Slider toyed with ‘No,’ even as his lips were sneaking in with a cowardly ‘Yes, of course.’
‘Well, Bill, I understand perfectly, of course. I was a bit annoyed at first, I don’t mind telling you, that nobody had bothered to let me know. But I know how many things there are to check up on at the beginning of a case. I shan’t say any more about it. And I’ll make it all right with your Guv’nor.’
He paused for Slider’s murmur of gratitude.
‘I’m pretty shocked that one of my shops should have been involved in that way, but the public being what they are, it may turn out to bring them in rather than put them off. People can be rotten ghouls. Good for business, you know what I mean? Time will tell. And who is it that Ronnie murdered? One of his boyfriends, I suppose?’
‘You knew he was homosexual?’
Cate raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh come on!’
‘He seems to hope he can hide it from the world,’ Slider said neutrally.
‘I knew he was an iron as soon as I saw him, but it didn’t bother me. It’s not illegal, and I’ve got no prejudices. What mattered to me was that he knew how to run a fish and chip shop.’
‘How did you come to employ him in the first place?’ Slider asked.
‘He answered an advertisement I put in the local rag for a manager. I could tell he wasn’t very bright, but he’d been in the trade since he was fourteen, so there wasn’t much he didn’t know about it. He’s turned out to be a good worker, anyway. He never took time off – except occasionally shutting up early if it was quiet – and he never tried to rob me. I shall be sorry to lose him.’
‘I’m afraid you’ll be losing more than just him. The man he murdered was also one of your employees.’
‘Oh?’ The grey eyes became serious. ‘Who?’
‘The man who helped out in the fish bar at weekends –Peter Leman. Did you know him?’
Was there the tiniest of hesitations? No, it must be just inferiority-induced paranoia.
‘I didn’t know him, as such –I left it to Ronnie to sort out his own helpers – but I think I saw him in the shop once or twice. He seemed like a nice lad. You’re not telling me that he and Ronnie—?’ He paused suggestively, eyebrows raised.
‘It seems so. Certainly the night Leman was killed he met Slaughter and went home with him. They quarrelled about something—’
‘Well, that doesn’t surprise me! If ever there was a case of beauty and the beast. Still, it sounds as if you’ve got it all wrapped up. That’s quick work. I’m sure Ian will be pleased with you. It looks good in the figures to get it cleared up
so fast’
‘Ian?’
‘Barrington. DS Barrington,’ Cate explained. ‘He’s an old mate of mine. Didn’t you know his name was Ian?’
‘No sir. Only his initials.’
‘He’s a good man,’ Cate said seriously. ‘Sound. He can be a bit of a martinet, I know, but he’s a good copper. He gets the job done, and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?’
Slider took this as a hint, and eased his notebook out of his pocket. ‘I hope you won’t mind if I ask you a few routine questions, just to clear up one or two points?’
Cate crinkled a smile. ‘Not at all. Nice to see you being thorough. What d’you want to know?’
‘How often do you visit the Fish Bar?’
‘That particular one, not very often. Twice a month maybe, at most. Ronnie’s a good manager – or he was, I should say. I just used to pop in when I was passing on the odd occasion to see that everything was all right. I never give my businesses warning that I’m coming – keeps ‘em on their toes.’
‘Do you remember when you were there last?’
He frowned in thought. ‘Hard to remember. Three weeks ago, maybe. About that, anyway.’
‘You have a key to the shop, of course? Where do you keep it?’
Cate lifted his hands and laid them on the table on either side of his glass. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t. I did have one, but I lost it – oh, must be two months ago. I was having my office at home redecorated, so I had to clear everything out of it. All the keys were on hooks on a peg-board on the wall by my desk, so of course it had to come down. I put it with the rest of the office gear in a spare bedroom, but when I came to put everything back afterwards, that particular key was missing.’
Slider felt a sinking sensation. If there were a missing key sculling about the universe, it put paid to half the case.
‘Could it have been stolen, do you suppose?’
‘Well, I suppose it could have. The decorators were in and out of the house and one of them could have gone upstairs when no-one was looking. But I’ve known ‘em for years, and I trust ‘em. I don’t think they’d steal anything – if I did, I wouldn’t employ ‘em. And besides, it’s hard to see why anyone would take that one key and no other No, I think it must have just fallen off in the spare room and got lost.’
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