by L M Krier
‘You and I need to talk some more.’
‘And we will, sir, very soon. But now, if you want me to make some progress on this case, as I’ve just promised on camera, don’t you think it’s about time I went and did some proper police work?
Quite how he removed himself so effortlessly from the grip, Marston was not sure. One minute he was holding him by the arm, the next Ted was on his way out of the door.
Jo was holding the fort when Ted got back. Jezza was at her desk working, she told him, on her proposal for going after the happy slappers. Océane was helping her, looking for local incidents on any online sites. Ted asked Jo to join him in his office to bring him up to date. He was in serious need of green tea after the morning’s ordeal.
‘Boss, I’ve got some of the team tracking down friends and neighbours of the deceased and talking to them. We’re trying to find out if, by any chance, she confided in anyone about what was going on. The rest are out and about round the café where we know she met Kateb, just in case anyone saw someone else, perhaps with Kateb before or after they met up.
‘The CSOs are helping with putting up posters around both locations, with the photo and details of Mrs Ashworth and the e-fit of Kateb. I can’t think of anything else we can usefully be doing at the moment, unless you can? I’m going through all the CCTV from around the scene again.’
Ted made drinks for them both and put them on the desk, sitting down opposite Jo.
‘Let’s check CCTV from near where she lives, too, to see if we can pick up her trail going to Wilmslow. I think it’s unlikely but we could just get lucky and spot someone tailing her. Have you heard from Magnus how they’re getting on over there?’
‘They’re still looking at all the footage they’ve got and doing the same as us, putting up posters to see if anyone saw anything. Nothing so far, though. This is going to be a tough one, I imagine. So how did the press conference go, boss?’
Ted made a face as he took a drink of his tea.
‘The strangely upbeat me you will see on the screen is not necessarily representative of my levels of optimism on this case, at this stage. Not that I don’t have confidence in the team,’ he put in hastily. ‘It’s just that we really are starting out from nothing on this one. I would feel happier if I didn’t keep get hauled off to fairly pointless briefings all the time, but that’s between you and me.’
Jo nodded his understanding as he finished his coffee and left the boss to it.
If Ted hated appearing on television, his aversion to watching himself there was even stronger. He was even more disconcerted to be summoned to the Ice Queen’s office to watch the lunchtime local news with her to see his performance. Watching himself, he decided he didn’t believe a word he was saying, any more than he expected most viewers would.
‘Well, that was very ...’ the Super hesitated over an appropriate word, then finished, ‘optimistic.’
‘Not quite how I would have preferred to play it, as you can imagine, but I was under instructions. What I’d really like would be more time to get on with being a copper and less on attending briefings.’
‘It goes with the rank, unfortunately, Chief Inspector,’ she responded dryly.
They were interrupted by Ted’s mobile.
‘It’s Jim Baker. Would you mind if I took it in my office?’
When she nodded, Ted left the office and picked up the call as he headed for the stairs.
‘Who are you and what have you done with Ted Darling?’ the Big Boss’s voice rumbled in his ear. ‘What on earth was all that bollocks about being optimistic and hopeful? Not like you at all. Am I to assume that you were merely a glove puppet spouting someone else’s words? And that’s not bloody like you either. What’s wrong?’
‘You noticed, then?’
‘Of course I noticed. I’m a bloody copper. Certainly not a line dancer.’
‘I was following a script. And that was after I’d watered it down from what I was supposed to be saying.’
‘For God’s sake be careful, Ted. You’re playing with a shark there. I know there’s history between you and Marston but he’s a clever man, powerful and ruthless. And he always covers his arse.’
‘He certainly does when he’s around me,’ Ted retorted with a hollow laugh.
There was an awkward silence. Jim Baker always became embarrassed when Ted alluded to anything to do with his sexuality. They were great friends but Jim’s beliefs made it difficult for him at times. Ted decided to fill the moment, asking how Jim was and apologising for not visiting him.
‘Don’t be daft. I know what it’s like with a case like this and I don’t envy you. It’s not going to be easy, unless someone gives you a tip-off or you get a breakthrough from forensics. Anyway, they say they’re going to kick me out before the weekend so at least I’ll be back home, where Bella can look after me. She’s mortified about the whole thing. Thinks it’s all her fault. At least she won’t want to take me dancing again, that’s something.’
After he ended the call, Ted read through all the notes on his desk to catch up with events. He would need to eat at some point. He was looking for an excuse to take him out of the office for a while. He needed to be doing some hands-on policing, to touch base with the enquiry, instead of the endless round of briefings and meetings. He found what he was looking for by way of a good excuse and went to find Jo again.
‘Jo, this friend of Mrs Ashworth, Malcolm Worrall. Has anyone been there yet? If not, can you show me as attending, please? If I don’t get out into the real world soon I’m going to go crazy.’
Jo scanned the lists on his desk to check, then added Ted’s name alongside that of Malcolm Worrall. He’d been identified as a close friend of the deceased.
‘All yours, boss. If anyone’s looking for you, do you want me to cover for you?’
‘If you can. If I’m going up to Marple anyway, I’d quite like to drop in on Bill again, if only for ten minutes. But I’m on the mobile if you or anyone else needs me urgently. And can you get everyone together for a catch up at the end of the day? Just so we know where we’re up to with everything before the weekend.’
Ted went via the nearest bakers. He knew there was no point offering Bill his own favourite, smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel. But he wanted to make sure he was eating something hot and filling, being stuck on his own, so he picked up a hot meat and potato pie for each of them. He’d give himself ten minutes to eat it with Bill before going on to interview Mrs Ashworth’s friend.
As Ted had suspected, Bill hadn’t eaten and there was no sign of any food preparation happening. He did look and sound better, though, and was clearly itching to be back at work. Ted devoured his pie as fast as the heat would allow. He wished he could have stayed longer. He knew how much Bill needed company. But he had a murder case to solve and the pressure was on.
Ted’s own car was back from its repairs so he’d taken that, rather than his official car. Parking wasn’t always easy close to Bill’s house and he’d had to leave it on the opposite side of the road, further down. Just as Ted was stepping cautiously out from between two parked cars to cross the road, a black VW came roaring round the corner and shot past, close to where Ted had been seconds earlier, before his martial arts instincts made him leap back to the safety of the pavement.
It was gone in a flash, before he could see anything but the first two letters of the registration number, either MM or MN, it was impossible to tell. It didn’t advance him much anyway, as both were Greater Manchester. The make and colour of the car could have been mere coincidence. Ted’s instincts told him it was more than that. It worried him that the car had obviously been tailing him again, without him noticing. His current situation with Marston was distracting him too much. He desperately needed some Krav Maga sessions. Nothing sharpened him up as much as that. It was just a matter of finding the time.
He didn’t have far to go to the home of Malcolm Worrall, the friend of their victim, Vera Ashworth. As soon as Ted pulled
up outside the small but neat and pleasant semi-detached bungalow, he could see the adapted entrance, with the wheelchair ramp. It reminded him of his father’s place, the one that was found for him after he broke his back and was paralysed in a mining accident. Ted really didn’t want any more reminders of his last years with his father right now. He was not proud of himself over how he’d behaved towards him at the end. But this was work and he was a police officer, who’d asked for this interview. So he would go in and get on with it.
He rang the doorbell, his police card in his hand. The door opened to reveal a well-dressed man in a motorised wheelchair which he operated with the fingers of one hand.
‘Mr Worrall? I’m Detective Chief Inspector Darling.’
‘I saw you earlier, on the television. Do please come in. It’s about Vera, I take it? Please come through to the kitchen. I was just making myself a cup of tea, if you’d like one?’
Ted had only had chance to gulp half a cup with Bill so he accepted gladly and sat down at the kitchen table as instructed. Worrall’s hand and arm were the only parts of him which appeared to work efficiently but he was clearly adept at coping so Ted didn’t patronise him by offering to help. He knew how independent his father had been earlier on after his accident, before the drink ruined him, and how he would have hated any such presumption.
While Worrall was busying himself with the kettle, an enormous long-haired cat sauntered into the room, eyeing Ted up suspiciously. Worrall noticed and told him, ‘Maximus is very wary of strangers so he probably won’t stay, but please don’t take it personally.’
‘He’s magnificent. Is he a Norwegian Forest or a Maine Coone? I’m never sure.’
Worrall put an adapted tray across the arms of his wheelchair, with the two mugs on it, expertly manoeuvred his chair and delivered them to the table.
‘I see you’re knowledgeable on cats. He’s Norwegian. And he seems to have accepted you readily enough, so I’m assuming you have cats of your own?’
‘Six,’ Ted smiled. ‘Just moggies though, nothing pedigree. So, Mr Worrall, you were a friend of Mrs Ashcroft. What can you tell me about her, please?’
‘We used to play chess and Scrabble together regularly. We met through work, before she retired and I had the stroke which reduced me to what you see before you. What I can tell you is that she was an intelligent and sensible woman. Quite the tactician at chess. I would suggest that whoever successfully managed to draw her into this type of a scam, as I saw outlined in the televised press conference earlier, must have been extremely plausible and convincing. I wish you luck in tracking them down, Chief Inspector.’
Chapter Nine
Ted was much more alert on the drive back to the station, constantly checking his rear view mirror and looking all round for any further sign of the black VW. He didn’t notice it again, but when he got back, he went straight to Kevin Turner’s office, to see what the chances were of tracing it.
When he went in, Kevin stood up and approached him, went round behind him, made a show of lifting the back of his jacket, then looking him over.
‘What are you doing, you idiot?’ Ted asked good naturedly as he sat down.
‘I’m wondering where the ventriloquist had his arm during that press conference. It may have been your mouth moving but it certainly wasn’t your usual words coming out. And what was with all these pleasant looks to camera? You usually look as if you want to kill all those present.’
‘I was under orders,’ Ted said tersely, not wanting to go into detail.
‘Seriously, though, Ted, are you getting anywhere so soon?’
‘Seriously? No. I’ve just been talking to a friend of the victim who said that if she was conned then it was a very sophisticated operation. He told me she was an intelligent woman, not easy to take in. I’m hoping some of the team may at least have a few leads, but I’m not getting my hopes up yet. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.’
He explained about his latest encounter with a black VW and gave Kevin the few details he had.
‘Not a lot to go on, but I’ll ask around and put in a call to Traffic in case it’s shown up anywhere else. Any ideas who might be behind it?’
‘The team and I have had some good arrests lately, so I suspect there’s a few people who’ve crossed me off their Christmas card list. It could be to do with the Sabden House case. I imagine the dodgy councillor has plenty of even more dubious friends, and we’re still working on building a case against him. Perhaps he thinks trying to put the frighteners on me might deter me. If so, he doesn’t know me at all.’
‘Just watch your back, Ted. In both instances. You may be annoying at times, but at least I’m used to you and your funny little ways. I don’t want to have to break in someone new in CID.’
When he went back to his office, Ted found Jezza’s report on her findings about the happy slappers waiting for him on his desk. It was, as he would have expected from her, a detailed and thorough presentation. He didn’t have time to look at it yet, so he put it in his briefcase to take with him. He’d go through it when he got home, or over the weekend, which he was likely to have to spend at his desk.
The rest of the team members were drifting back in for the planned briefing to round off the week. Ted fervently hoped at least one of them would have something positive to report.
‘Before we start, can I just ask if any of you have spotted a black VW which looked as if it might be tailing you, or observing you? You know I was run off the road by what I thought was probably a boy racer. I spotted what appeared to be the same car again today. I had to jump out of its way pretty sharpish when I was trying to cross the road.
‘You all know I hate assumptions but I’m going on the basis that this might be someone connected to a recent case. They may be targeting me specifically but there’s always a chance any of you could also be on the list. So watch yourselves, please. Report anything unusual as soon as you see it. No heroics, from any of you. And before any of you say anything, I include myself in that.’
It raised a smile from everyone, at least. Ted could sense that the team members were feeling dispirited with no real direction to go in yet.
‘Right, I’ve been talking to Mrs Ashworth’s friend, Malcolm Worrall. He tells me she was intelligent, not easily taken in. She would often joke with him about the latest Nigerian email scams she’d received. You all know the type. “My late husband left me several million pounds and if you help me recover it I will give you half”.
‘She hadn’t told him anything at all about this one. I think we can safely assume that she was sworn to secrecy by Kateb as Inspector Galton. Some story about not jeopardising the enquiry, I imagine. She does mention in her diary that she was looking forward to telling Malcolm a bit about it when it was all over, although it was all confidential. All she did tell him beforehand was that she was going to see someone about some problem with one of her cards, but she didn’t tell him which one. He told me he assumed it was her bank card and she was going to the bank, since you can’t normally visit credit card providers, as far as I’m aware.
‘So, where are we up to on known associates of Kateb? How has this gang gone from successful and lucrative scams to a murder like this? Jo, what news from the post-mortem? Was Professor Nelson able to give us anything useful from the knife wound?’
‘Boss, the PM confirmed a single penetrating wound to the abdomen causing catastrophic blood loss. Professor Nelson said it would inevitably have been fatal without prompt medical attention and there appears to have been a delay between her being stabbed and anyone coming to her aid.
‘I’ve circulated details, including the dimensions of the knife. Professor Nelson says it could well be a flick knife with a long, thin blade. It’s what she described as a typical stab and run wound. Just a single blow, designed to cause maximum damage, allowing the attacker time to get away. And as no mobile phone was found at the scene, it’s likely the attacker took it with him, preventing Mrs Ashworth f
rom calling for assistance herself.’
‘Right, known associates? Who’s on that?’
‘Me, boss,’ Maurice Brown told him. ‘But can I just ask something first. At the press conference you were sounding as if we were getting somewhere. Do you know something about the case you’re not sharing with the rest of us, for some reason?’
Ted sighed to himself. It was a reasonable question. He could see how it would look that way.
‘The top brass move in a mysterious way, Maurice, their wonders to perform. I hope you know by now that I keep all of you in the loop at all times, unless there are special circumstances which prevent me from doing so.’
‘Fair enough, boss. Negative on all known associates so far, and I have checked them all. None of them with any record or even suspicion of anything like this.’
‘One possible slight lead from Inspector Pierson in Wilmslow though, boss,’ Rob O’Connell put in. ‘Someone has come forward to say they saw a car pulling out very fast from the car park where Mrs Ashworth was found. From the time and the make, a dark blue Peugeot, it’s almost certainly her car. There’s only a vague description of the driver. The witness saw it turn right and drive off at speed. They just walked on past as they were heading for another car park so they didn’t actually see Mrs Ashworth lying on the floor.
‘Inspector Pierson’s team now have a bit more to go on, as they know the direction it left in, so they can try to track it on the way to where it was first picked up on CCTV and we may get something more from that.’
‘Good, that’s something. Right, we need as many people as possible working on this case over the weekend. Perhaps half on and half off each day?’
‘I’ve already sorted the rotas, boss,’ Rob told him. He was proving to be an excellent DS.
‘Boss, I put my proposal on your desk ...’
‘I saw that, Jezza, thanks. I’ll take it home with me tonight and let you have my decision as soon as I can find the time to read it.’
