When Slider arrived at the much becreepered house, he found Seedy was expecting him.
‘Come in, sir,’ he said, holding the door wide. ‘Mr O’Flaherty said you was coming, and I was to tell you what you want to know. Mr O’Flaherty’s done me and mine a lot of favours over the years, and what he says goes with me.’
He closed the door and led Slider through into the lounge – a bright and cheerful room with a cherry-red carpet, wallpaper patterned with large orange circles, an imitation red-brick fireplace housing the electric fire, and the largest collection of brass ornaments and horse-brasses Slider had ever seen. There was a magnificent new three-piece suite in emerald green cut moquette, and in pride of place on the wall behind the sofa was a framed reproduction of the Chinese lady with the green face.
‘Sit down, then, sir,’ Seedy said kindly, gesturing towards the sofa. Slider sat obediently, facing the brasses. There was a hatch in the wall to his right, and through it he glimpsed a fluorescent-lit kitchen and a woman tracking in and out of sight. There was an agreeable smell of boiling potatoes. ‘My wife,’ Seedy said, seeing the direction of his glance. ‘We have our tea early, I’m afraid.’
‘I won’t keep you very long. I don’t want to disturb your meal.’
‘That’s all right, sir. Stay and eat with us. There’s plenty.
‘Oh no, really, thanks—’
‘It’s no trouble.’ Seedy cocked a knowing eye at him. ‘Mr O’Flaherty said I was to look after you. Said you probably hadn’t eaten all day. P’raps you’d like to join us.’ Without waiting for Slider to answer, he stood up and moved towards the hatch. ‘Nice bit of boiled bacon, pease pudding and potatoes, how about it?’
‘No, thank you. Really. I’ve still got a lot to get through tonight. Thanks all the same.’
‘Up to you,’ Seedy said, gently closed the sliding door of the hatch and returned to sit in the chair diagonally opposite Slider, and said, ‘All right then, what did you want to know? Tea’ll be ten minutes, more or less.’
Slider nodded. ‘It’s about Jimmy Cole. I understand you know him?’
‘Knew him before and after. Knew him when he was a kid, and I was sorry to see him get himself into trouble. He was a nice enough boy, but impressionable. Well, he paid dear for it, and I hope he’s going to go straight from now on. I’ve told him I’ll help him get a job. I’ve got plenty of contacts in the nursery business, and there’s nothing better than an outdoor life when you’ve just spent ten years inside.’
‘Ten years isn’t much for killing a policeman,’ Slider said neutrally.
Seedy eyed him sharply. ‘It wouldn’t be. And I’ve no time for that sort of thing, I’ll tell you straight. I’ve done me crime and I’ve done me time but I never held with violence, and if I thought Jimmy had anything to do with shooting those two coppers, I wouldn’t give him the time of day now. But the fact is everyone knows Jimmy never went near a gun in his life, never mind pull the trigger. It was that scumbag Blackburn done the job. Jimmy never even knew he had the shooter on him, I’d bet my life on that.’
‘What do you know about that business?’ Slider asked. ‘There was something funny going on, wasn’t there? I mean, what were Cole and Blackburn doing there anyway? I don’t believe they were just having a drink.’
‘Well, sir, from what I heard there were two jobs going on in the Carlisle that night. There was the regular drugs dealing, which the Bill were onto; and there was something else going down which nobody knew about except Jimmy and Derek Blackburn. But something went wrong, and instead of being out and away before the Bill turned up, Jimmy and Blackburn got caught up in the raid, and that’s how come the shots got fired. Blackburn afterwards always swore he’d been fitted up, though, and he went on yelling double-cross until someone closed his mouth for him, permanent.’
‘I thought he died in a brawl inside?’ Slider said.
‘That’s the way it was,’ Seedy said enigmatically. ‘He’d only served three months. He was never a popular man – a foul mouthed, violent bastard if ever there was one. Well, three inches through the liver was enough to cure him of that. And there was more than one person interested in shutting him up. Word was someone was paid to do it, but no-one ever owned up.’
The hatch was pulled back. ‘On the table!’ a woman’s voice called from within the kitchen.
‘Sure you won’t stay?’ Seedy asked, standing up. ‘There’s plenty.’
‘No thanks. I want to go and see Jimmy Cole now.’
‘As you please. You’ll want his address.’ He walked out into the tiny hall and bent over the telephone table to write on the message pad, ‘Tell him I say he’s to tell you what you want to know. And tell him I’ll be in touch with him in a day or two about that job. It’s time he got himself something to do. Satan finds, as they say.’
‘Thanks. I’ll tell him.’
‘I’ll see you out,’ said Seedy, a statement of undoubted fact since the hall was only two-foot-six wide and five foot long. Slider squeezed past him to the door, and Seedy added, ‘He’s gone back to live with his mum since he came out. No need to worry her with all this. Best take him down the pub if you want to ask him questions.’
*
Jimmy Cole’s mum lived in Shirland Road, which was less than a mile from Atherton’s house. Slider decided to go there first and put his American enquiries in hand, seeing he didn’t know how long the next interview would take him. He had had a spare key to Atherton’s house for two years now, and regarded it – rightly – as a very great gesture of affection and trust on Atherton’s part. He wished he could have reciprocated, but Atherton had never been popular with Irene; and besides, he could think of no possible reason why Atherton would ever have wanted to go out to Ruislip, which agreeable suburb probably ranked in Atherton’s estimation with the ditch he wouldn’t be found dead in.
Slider let himself in, returned Oedipus’s greeting, and fell in with his loud insistence that they retire together to the kitchen. Oedipus trotted ahead of him, tail straight up like a lightning rod, led him to the fridge, and then sat down and stared hard and meaningfully at its closed door. And they say cats don’t communicate, Slider thought. He opened the fridge and found an opened tin of catfood, removed the front end of Oedipus from the lower shelf where it was investigating a hunk of pate wrapped in clingfilm, closed the fridge door, found a fork in the cutlery drawer and transferred the Kit-e-Kat to Oedipus’s bowl. Oedipus sniffed it, gave him a hurt look, and then settled down resignedly to eat.
In Atherton’s neat, elegant drawing-room, which smelled faintly of pot-pourri and rather more definitely of damp, Slider sat on the sofa, drew the telephone towards him across the coffee table, and laid his notebook beside it. He opened it at the page where he had copied in the names and numbers of Lee Chang’s employer, landlord, and next-of-kin (a sister in Washington – both parents were apparently dead, and he had not married). He checked the time again by his watch, and began dialling.
Jimmy Cole’s local pub turned out to be another Watney’s house, and Slider sighed as he stood at the bar and watched two pints of the fizzy being drawn. Why didn’t his investigations ever take him where they sold Charles Wells or Shepherd Neame?
Cole sat in a corner seat, smoking phlegmatically. He was an undersized creature with a bad complexion, thin, greasy hair, and a vacant look, and Slider had struggled to see in him the nice enough lad that Seedy Barry had mourned. But he had accepted Slider’s arrival on his doorstep with docility, and when Slider brought the pints back and settled down to question him, he answered willingly. Slider got the impression he was glad of the attention. Jimmy Cole’s one claim to fame was that he had once been on trial for murder, even if in the end he had gone down for nothing more than aiding and abetting.
Derek Blackburn, Slider gathered, was Cole’s hero. They had lived in the same street, gone to the same school – though Cole was younger by four years – and Blackburn had gone out with Cole’s older sister Pamela, on an o
n-off basis, for several years.
Blackburn had begun his life of crime virtually as soon as he could walk by stealing sweets from the corner shop. By the age of nine he had graduated to stealing car stereos, and thence to housebreaking where people were obliging enough to leave a window open. He specialised in old people’s flats and bungalows, and was not averse to a bit of violence, as long as his victim was unlikely to fight back.
Amongst his peers he gained a reputation for violent temper, and for being quick to take offence and start a fight. He also slapped girls around – ‘took no nonsense from them’ was the way he put it himself – an attitude which was admired by his acolytes but not much emulated, since the girls in their group tended to slap right back. Pamela Cole broke finally with Blackburn after he blacked her eye outside a pub, but they remained on civil terms, and Blackburn continued to visit the Cole house as Jimmy’s friend.
In April 1982 Blackburn came to call, took Jimmy up to his bedroom, and asked if he would be interested in working with him. He had a job on, he said, working for someone he called the Big Man, and he needed a driver. Blackburn, oddly enough, had never learned to drive, not even unofficially. There was something wrong with his coordination, and TDA remained the one common crime it was impossible for him to commit.
Jimmy, on the other hand, though he could barely read and write, had been able to drive anything of which he could reach the pedals for as long as he remembered. Blackburn would pay Jimmy out of what he made. He had already done one job for the Big Man, and he paid really well. Jimmy wouldn’t regret it. Slider gathered that Jimmy would have worked for nothing, just for the glory of being Derek’s partner.
‘And what was the job?’ Slider asked.
‘We had to collect some stuff from this pub and like drive it to this other place right out in the country. Easy job, Derek said – walk in, walk out.’
‘What stuff was it?’
‘I dunno. Derek never said. Just a box of stuff.’
‘What size box?’
‘I dunno. The way it turned out, I never saw it.’
‘All right, tell me what happened.’
‘Well, we like nicked this car and left it round the corner. Then we went in the pub and this bloke was s’posed to like give us the stuff but he never shows. Well, we been waiting hours, and Derek’s getting antsy. Then the phone goes and—’
‘You mean the pay phone on the wall by the bar?’
‘Yeah. Well, the barman goes and answers it and he goes to Derek, “It’s for you.” He was like pissed off about it, the barman, ‘cause he don’t reckon people getting calls, ‘cause he don’t like having to answer it. But like Derek takes the call, and then he comes back and says we gotter go.’
‘Who was the call from?’
‘He never said. Anyway we goes out, like, as if we was going to the bogs, but there’s another door there marked private, what goes out into the back way.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Well, Derek, he says the Bill’s all round the place and there’s gonner be a raid any minute, only he’s had the tip-off, right? And there’s this storeroom just inside the back door, and we’ve got to get in there, and when we hear the raid starting, we wait exactly one minute and then make a run for it, and there won’t be no-one covering the back door. Then we gotter climb over the garridge roof and down the wall the other side and we’re clear.’
Slider was silent, deep in thought. Cate had changed Barrington’s orders at the last minute, told him to wait thirty seconds then go in at the back door and straight to the bar, which would have left the back door unguarded. What was going on here? How could that have been coincidence? Who knew about the change of orders in time to tip off Derek Blackburn?
‘Go on.’
‘Well, we goes into the storeroom, and we hadn’t hardly shut the door when the noise starts out the front, like in the pub, shouting and breaking glass and all stuff like that. So Derek starts counting—’
‘Counting?’
‘Well, it’s dark in there, he can’t see his watch. So he goes I’ll count up to sixty, and that’ll be like a minute. Well, he ain’t finished when we hear the back door bust open, and all these people go running past. Then it goes quiet and he finishes counting and he reckons they’ve gone, so he says come on, and we gets out.’
He paused, not from any narrative genius but because he was not used to talking so much and his mouth had become dry. He took a swig of his beer and lit another cigarette from the butt of the last one.
‘Go on. What happened?’ Slider prompted when he had finished this ritual.
‘I ferget where I was,’ Jimmy confessed.
‘You and Derek came out of the storeroom into the corridor.’
‘Oh yeah. Well, it was quiet out there, and we thought there was no-one around. But when we come out we see these two coppers standing in the passage by the door.’
‘Were they in uniform?’
‘No, ornry close. But we knew they was coppers. Anyway someone shouts out behind us, and we looks round and there’s another of ‘em just up the stairs. I was so scared I just stood there, but Derek grabs me arm and shouts come on, and then there was this bang and flash and the coppers in front of us fall down.’
‘Just a minute – how many bangs?’
‘I dunno. Two or three. It all happened so fast. I was that bloody scared I nearly shat meself. I never had nothing to do with no shooters before. So when them coppers go down me and Derek runs for it, out the back door, and over the garridge roof like we was told. Then we gets back to the car and I drives back to Derek’s.’
‘All right, let’s just go back to the gunshots for a moment,’ Slider said. ‘When you and Derek came out of the storeroom, it was dark in the passage, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah. Not pitch black, like, but dark.’
‘And you were looking at the two detectives anyway, so you didn’t see Derek put his hand in his pocket and bring out the gun.’ Cole stared uncomprehendingly. Slider went on, ‘He grabbed your arm and shouted “Let’s get out of here”, and the shots were fired and the two detectives fell to the ground. Derek fired the shots so that you could escape.’
‘Derek never had no gun,’ Cole said.
‘The gun was found in his room the next day.’
‘It was the cops put that there when they come to search, Derek said. He said he never had no gun. He was fitted up.’
‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’
Jimmy Cole stared in silence, his face working painfully as he struggled with the unaccustomed effort of thought. ‘Yeah,’ he said suddenly, the blockage clearing with a rush. ‘But I know he never fired them shots. I know because they come from behind me.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah,’ he said with growing confidence, ‘’cause I felt one come past me, like, right past me ear. It kind of buzzed like a fly or sunnink right past me ear.’
‘Came past you? Are you sure?’
‘Yeah, course I’m sure.’
‘What did Derek say about it?’
‘He never said nothing about it.’
‘You didn’t discuss the shooting with him? Even though you saw two policemen gunned down?’
‘I was like upset, and Derek, he was white as a sheet. But he never said nothing, not while I was driving him home.’
‘What happened when you got back to his house? Did you go in?’
‘No. He got out, and he said to me to go home, and he said to me, he said not to worry, everything would be all right. He said nobody had nothing on us, and if anyone was to ask, we’d gone to the Carlisle for a drink, and then run out the back when the Bill bust in, and that’s all.’
That, Slider thought, was the oddest thing of all. If Blackburn had shot two policemen, he ought to have been working out some kind of story with Cole, or else to have been planning to make a run for it. On the other hand, if Blackburn hadn’t fired the shots, it was surely beyond belief that he would not discuss it with Col
e. Above all, when they were arrested, why did neither of them mention this strange story?
‘You didn’t say anything about this to the police,’ Slider said at last. ‘About the shots being fired from behind you.’ Cole shook his head. ‘Why was that? You were arrested for shooting the two policemen—’
‘I told you,’ Cole interrupted, ‘Derek says to me to say nothing. See, after I went home, like, that night, Derek phones me up and he says it’s all taken care of. We got to say we was having a quiet drink, and we don’t know nothing about no shooting, and he says no matter what they ask you, you just keep saying that, and it’ll all be taken care of.’
‘Taken care of by whom?’
Cole shrugged. ‘Derek says everything’ll be all right as long as we don’t say nothing.’
And what Derek said was plainly law. ‘But it wasn’t all right, was it? You did ten years. And Derek got life.’
Cole struggled with the logic, but it was beyond him. ‘I never had nothing to do with no shooting. I just said what Derek said to say. And he said we’d be took care of all right as long as we kept our mouths shut.’
‘But Derek didn’t keep his mouth shut, did he?’ Slider asked. ‘When he was in the Scrubs, he started to complain that he’d been fitted up.’
‘Yeah,’ said Cole.
‘And now he’s dead.’
‘Yeah.’ The thought seemed to depress him. ‘Maybe that’s why—’
‘Yes?’ Slider encouraged.
Cole struggled again, mouth open. ‘Maybe with him complaining and that, maybe they reckoned we hadn’t, like, done what we was supposed to. Maybe that’s why I done ten years.’
‘You think that if he’d kept his mouth shut, you’d have got out sooner?’
‘Well, he said we’d be took care of,’ Cole said simply. ‘Maybe like Derek messed it up for me. I never thought of that before.’
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