In Vino Veritas

by Peter Turnbull

  David Davy raised his eyebrows in despair at Brunnie’s cynicism. ‘You know, I read once that Charles Dickens was doing his prison visiting and observed the food served in London’s prisons was up to the standard of the food served in the best hotels. Don’t know whether that meant the food in the hotels was awful or the grub in the prisons was good, but he wouldn’t be saying that today. I’ll take your advice, Mr Brunnie – I’ll complain to the management and I’ll ask for a refund. I’ll even threaten to take my custom elsewhere – that’ll make the kitchen staff shake-up its ideas. I also don’t like the view I’ve got from my room. I’ll ask for a room with a sea view.’

  ‘Good idea, Davy.’ Brunnie glanced around the agent’s room. He saw the carpetless floor, white tiles three-quarters of the way up the wall, cream-painted plaster above that and a cream-painted ceiling above that. A single fluorescent bulb behind a Perspex screen provided the illumination. ‘I mean, you might as well get the most out of your stay.’ Brunnie paused. ‘Anyway, let’s get this show on the road. Myself and Mr Swannell here, well, we had a very interesting chat yesterday.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ Victor Swannell added.

  ‘Who with? That Cragg geezer?’ David Davy sneered. ‘I bet it was with big Cragg.’

  ‘We can’t tell you.’ Swannell smiled firmly. ‘That is for us to know and you to assume or guess at … but we, Mr Brunnie and I, we’ve both been doing this job for a long time, haven’t we, Frankie?’

  ‘Oh, yes …’ Brunnie nodded. ‘Between the two of us, me and Mr Swannell have got a fair few years in … a fair few … more than halfway to the pension now.’

  ‘The point is, Davy,’ Swannell continued, ‘that both of us can tell when a person we are talking to is going to turn Queen’s Evidence and request protected person status … it’s always very obvious.’

  ‘It’s as plain as the old nose on your old boat race,’ Brunnie added.

  ‘You see, if we are talking about Cragg, then right now he’s looking at five years for being an accessory after the fact, but, unlike you, he doesn’t relish the thought of prison food each day and clean sheets once a week.’ Swannell took his ballpoint pen from his pocket. ‘He’s not looking forward to it at all. We’ll let him have a night or two in prison to help him focus his mind, although it seems that it is already focusing quite nicely, thank you very much.’ Swannell paused. ‘You’ll go down, he’ll be a protected person … a new name, a new start in life … He’ll be enjoying liberty while you’ll be composing letters of complaint to the governor of whichever prison you’re in. Cragg will go to the pub each evening; you’ll sit down in front of the TV with forty or fifty other lags watching the programme they want to watch.’

  ‘Or,’ Brunnie smiled, ‘you could take a leaf out of his left hook.’

  ‘So we know about the murdered girl, the woman you and Cragg drove from a lock-up in the East End to the allotments in New Cross. We also know about the bits of bodies which you removed and put in the river … once the geezer you worked for had sawn them off the corpse.’

  ‘Cragg!’ Danby exploded angrily. ‘I knew it was Cragg. He’s grassing me up; he could never keep his north and south shut, the huge toe rag that he is.’

  ‘Whether it’s Andrew Cragg or not, Davy,’ Swannell explained in a calming manner, ‘we are not allowed to confirm or deny either way.’

  ‘It’s him.’ Danby sighed. ‘It’s Cragg you’ve been chatting to. I mean, who else could it be?’

  ‘So, tell us, Davy,’ Brunnie pressed, ‘about the woman. Why was it that the geezer who you worked for wore a mask when he shot her? Why didn’t he want her to see that it was him who was offing her? And why wasn’t her old body chopped up like all the others … Why did she get special treatment?’

  Danby lowered his head. ‘I don’t know the answer to any of those questions.’

  ‘Implying very neatly and very nicely that Cragg, if it was him we were talking to,’ Brunnie continued, ‘was being truthful when he told us of all the other murder victims being chopped up … so they’ll only ever be “missing persons” and no one can be charged with their murder. No body means no murder conviction. It’s not wholly true but it’s a rule of thumb you can work with.’

  ‘No comment,’ Danby sneered.

  ‘That’s interesting.’ Swannell leaned forward. ‘No comment cowboys are always guilty. Otherwise they would not say “no comment” all the time.’

  ‘You think?’ Danby sneered once more. ‘That’s your homespun philosophy, is it?’

  ‘We know it’s the case,’ Brunnie replied in an icy voice. ‘All the experience we have just mentioned – remember, we’re more than halfway to the pension.’

  ‘Early retirement with an inflation-proof pension.’ Danby once again lowered his head. ‘Yes, I remember. Can’t be bad.’

  ‘You made your life choices, Davy,’ Swannell offered. ‘And we – me and Mr Brunnie – we made ours.’

  ‘So let’s not beat about the bush, Davy.’ Brunnie leaned forward. ‘Let’s dive straight in. Tell us all you know about the old geezer you worked for from time to time … or still work for, but going by the state of your drum, I’ll say you haven’t worked for him for some time. Your gambling habit can’t explain that pigsty you live in. That sort of living is a gambling habit plus no income to speak of.’

  ‘Yes.’ Danby nodded. ‘That’s true, I haven’t worked for a long time … just cheap crookin’ like shoplifting and bag snatching but no proper work. I’m past it … But, unlike you, I don’t get no pension to see me out.’

  ‘So tell us who you worked for. Who was the geezer that shot the victims who were brought to him, and who chopped them up once their blood had solidified?’

  ‘They were brought to him,’ Danby replied quietly, ‘I can tell you that. He had a team of four or five heavies: they collected the victims, grabbed them off the street, bundled them into a van and brought them to the lock-up alive and kicking. I don’t mind telling you that. They grabbed the girl on the Big Man’s orders, I can also tell you that … but as to who he is … I wouldn’t tell you if I knew.’

  ‘So you just got a phone call?’ Swannell pressed. ‘Come round with your van … I’ve got a mess that needs tidying. Is that how it worked?’

  ‘No comment.’ Danby glanced up at the ceiling.

  ‘And sometimes you hired someone to help you … big lumps of brain-dead nothings like Andrew Cragg? Andrew-I-may-not-be-very-clever-but-I-can-lift-things-Cragg?’

  Brunnie leaned back in his chair. ‘You’re a refuse man, aren’t you, Davy? A refuse collector. I’m right, aren’t I? You are a refuse disposal engineer, a garbage man; you clean up after organized crime have done the business. It’s you that sets fire to buildings once they’re no longer needed as a safe house to destroy any evidence which might have been left there, and you collect bits of chopped-up body parts and drop them off a bridge into the Old Father … or leave them at the water’s edge at low tide …’

  ‘And sometimes … sometimes,’ Swannell added, ‘you dump them whole in shallow graves.’

  ‘No comment.’ Danby continued to look up at the cream-painted ceiling and the shimmering florescent light bulb.

  ‘We know the type, Davy.’ Brunnie spoke calmly. ‘Gangland bosses have their “enforcers” who “encourage” people to cooperate. They have their “minders” to protect them, their “wheelmen” to drive the getaway cars and they have their “dustbin” men, their refuse collectors who ensure dead bodies vanish, never to be seen again, and you, Davy, are a “dustbin” man – you dump bits of body into the river, you burn the cloth the victim’s body was laid on to be sawn up. You’re in pretty deep, Davy.’

  ‘Help yourself, Davy,’ Swannell urged, but he also spoke calmly. ‘We need to know who this “Mr Big” is, the “Big Man”, the geezer who is hired to snuff out a life … in this case the geezer who shot the girl whose body you dropped into a hole in the ground on an allotment in New Cross.’

&nb
sp; ‘What will we find when we turn over your drum, Davy?’ Brunnie asked.

  A sudden look of fear crossed David Danby’s eyes.

  ‘So there is something in that tip you call a home you don’t want us to find?’ Swannell smiled.

  ‘No comment.’ Danby’s reply was short and curt.

  ‘So the hitman with the pig’s face mask, Davy.’ Brunnie picked up the questioning. ‘Is he an independent operator or is he on the payroll?’

  ‘No comment.’ Danby spat his reply. ‘No comment. No comment. No comment. Understand …’ he snarled, ‘no comment. Clear enough?’

  ‘As a bell, Davy.’ Swannell leaned back in his chair. ‘But it’s your funeral. We gave you every chance. You can’t say we didn’t.’

  ‘It was the shoes.’ Gillian Keynes sat in a resigned attitude in the armchair of her living room. ‘Just there.’ She pointed to the middle of the floor of her living room. ‘I knew Timmy would tell us.’

  ‘We’ve moved them now,’ Eric Keynes added. ‘We’ve put them back in the shoe rack by the front door.’

  ‘We got up this morning … well, I got up,’ Gillian Keynes continued. ‘I walked past the front door to get to the kitchen. I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary at first; I suppose I was a bit blurry-eyed. I put the kettle on to boil and while the water was heating up I began to open the house curtains … just the normal morning routine …’

  ‘It’s a bit like that every morning,’ Eric Keynes added in a dull monotone, and quite needlessly, thought Tom Ainsclough, who fully understood what ‘morning routine’ meant.

  ‘I came into this room and found that all the shoes had been removed from the shoe rack, which is by the front door, and brought into here.’ Once again Gillian Keynes pointed to the living-room carpet. ‘It was Timmy. It’s just the sort of thing he’d do.’

  ‘The poltergeist you mentioned?’ Penny Yewdall clarified. ‘The spirit of the little ten-year-old who was very happy when he lived here?’

  ‘Yes … him,’ Gillian Keynes replied in an absentminded manner, as if her thoughts were elsewhere, and quite understandably, thought Penny Yewdall. ‘Whenever that might have been, but yes, that is who I mean. So this morning I found our shoes had been arranged on the carpet. Eric’s shoes were all jumbled up in a pile in the middle of the floor but mine were placed neatly in pairs around Eric’s shoes and pointing outwards, so that if I was standing in any pair of my shoes I would be standing with my back towards Eric’s shoes. It seemed to me like Timmy was trying to tell us something … but anyway, we knew then that he was preparing us for you calling on us to tell us that the remains found were those of Victoria … they have been positively identified, but also he was telling us something else, but that something is …’ Her voice tailed off and she fell silent.

  ‘Yes, as I said, the positive identification was made by using dental records. The results came in overnight and were waiting in my tray this morning.’ Penny Yewdall spoke softly. ‘Again, I am so very sorry.’

  Earlier that morning Penny Yewdall and Tom Ainsclough had tapped reverentially on the front door of the Keynes’s bungalow and, when the door was opened by Gillian Keynes, she looked at Yewdall and Ainsclough and nodded. ‘Eric and I have been expecting you.’ She had then beckoned the officers into the house and led them into the living room where she had slumped, Ainsclough thought, rather than sat, in one of the armchairs, pointed to the floor and said, ‘It was the shoes.’

  ‘But at least we know now,’ Eric Keynes mumbled. ‘We’ll have a funeral and a grave to visit. We’ll at least have that, and that is better than not knowing.’

  ‘Yes, there is that,’ Gillian Keynes replied abstractly. ‘We can have a grave to visit. We’ll choose a nice headstone with a sensible inscription … she would have liked that.’

  ‘We just called to notify you.’ Penny Yewdall stood. Tom Ainsclough did likewise. ‘It’s not the sort of thing we can tell someone over the phone.’

  ‘No … no, of course not.’ Gillian Keynes forced a weak smile. ‘Thank you, we appreciate the sensitivity, but Timmy forewarned us. It softened the blow.’

  ‘We can arrange for a grief counsellor to call,’ Ainsclough offered, ‘or ask a neighbour to call and sit with you if you are close to any particular neighbour?’

  ‘No, thank you, to both offers,’ Gillian Keynes replied. ‘We’ll cope … we just need each other.’

  ‘Have you made any progress?’ Eric Keynes asked.

  ‘A little,’ Yewdall told him, and she then also noticed the cold look in the man’s eyes. ‘But it is still very, very early days yet.’

  ‘We’ll be calling on Victoria’s friends and we’ll visit her husband,’ Ainsclough explained. ‘It’s a slow but sure step-by-step approach, as they say … softly, softly, catchee monkey.’

  Swannell and Brunnie returned to ‘Chinese Geordie Davy’ Danby’s address in Raul Road, Peckham. They forced the door gingerly and entered the flat, pointedly leaving the door open so as to allow plentiful ingress of breathable air.

  ‘We make our life choices,’ Swannell remarked. ‘As you said to Danby, he made his.’

  ‘Actually, it was you that said it.’ Brunnie grinned as he pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

  ‘Blimey,’ Swannell groaned as he also pushed his hands into latex gloves. ‘I’m losing it already … all my old marbles are going.’

  In the event, the thorough search of Danby’s living space resulted in the finding of only one item of promising interest in the form of a rental agreement in respect of ‘business premises’ in Leyton.

  ‘This arouses my interest.’ Brunnie tapped the rent book. ‘Regular payments, and all up to date … and he’s been renting those business premises over in Leyton for fifteen years. So what does a washed-up old gambling addict who hasn’t worked for years and who lives like this want to keep business premises for … the same premises for that amount of time and pay a not unhefty rent for said premises?’ He handed the book to Ainsclough, who read the address.

  ‘That,’ Ainsclough replied, ‘is what we must find out. Nuffield Road, Leyton.’

  ‘She was very angry, she was a livid woman. Totally livid.’ Dorothy Parker chose to sit cross-legged on the floor of the front room of her home in Samos Road, Anerley, SE20, but she invited Tom Ainsclough and Penny Yewdall to sit on the settee facing her and the fireplace. The floor of the living room consisted of floorboards covered by a dark shade of varnish, while dried reeds protruded from a tall jar on the other side of the fireplace where Dorothy Parker sat. Dorothy Parker wore a full-length flower-patterned ‘hippy girl’ dress and her feet stopped in a pair of faded and much-worn moccasins. She wore her black hair long and centre parted so it hung either side of her head and down either side of her shoulders, almost to her waist. The dress and hairstyle might have looked fetching on a twenty-year-old, but both Ainsclough and Yewdall felt that Dorothy Parker, in her mid-to-late thirties, was struggling to carry off the image of youth to which she was clearly so desperately clinging. ‘She really was the woman scorned, burning up with resentment and anger. She had been married for only two years, possibly even less, and he was already being unfaithful. She had found out that he was seeing someone else so she walked out on him and started divorce proceedings. She had promised that she would fleece him, really take him to the cleaners. I never knew that she could be so embittered.’ She reached for a tobacco tin of green and gold, prised open the lid and took out a skin of cigarette paper and a pinch of hand-rolling tobacco and rolled a cigarette with practised and consummate ease. She lit the cigarette with a blue disposable lighter and inhaled deeply, exhaling the smoke in two long plumes through her nostrils. ‘Ye olde scorned woman, as I said … I mean, imagine her with a machine gun in her hands. It just doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  ‘A machine gun,’ Tom Ainsclough repeated. ‘Did she have one of those things?’

  ‘No …’ Dorothy Parker flicked ash from the end of her cigarette into the empty fire
grate behind and beside her. ‘No … no …’ She smiled. ‘You see, my husband is fascinated by military history and he once told me that during the Second World War the Yugoslav partisans recruited women as much as they recruited men, but their practise was to keep the young and attractive ones out of harm’s way and made them aide-de-camps of the Partisan leaders. The older and less attractive women they issued with machine guns and told them to go and kill Nazis. Imagine that, will you? Scorn a woman because of her looks or age, or both, and then give her a machine gun … but this is apparently what they did. That would make for a formidable killing machine, totally without mercy. But that’s what Victoria was like in those last days of her life. I tell you, if she had a machine gun the streets of London town would be strewn with male corpses.’

  ‘We understand that she was staying here with you after she left her husband?’ Tom Ainsclough asked.

  ‘Yes. Yes, she was. She occupied the small box room above the front door.’ Dorothy Parker drew deeply on the cigarette and held the smoke in her lungs before finally exhaling, once again through her nostrils. ‘Pretty well all her possessions and all of her valuables she took to her parents’ house. All she kept here were a few items of clothing, sufficient for a week and then a weekly wash. That’s all she kept here … and her wristwatch. She always wore that.’

  ‘So how long was she here before she vanished?’ Penny Yewdall glanced through the net curtains of the house at the houses on the opposite side of Samos Road, noting them to be well-maintained, late-Victorian terraced developments on three levels from the ground upwards. The houses did not appear to her to have cellars.

  ‘A few weeks.’ Dorothy Parker examined the glowing tip of the cigarette. ‘My husband was getting irritated with her even though she was an excellent guest. She kept her head down and herself out of the way, helped a lot around the house, always picked up after herself. Often you would not know that she was there, but my husband started to ask me when she’d be leaving.’ She pulled on the cigarette once more. ‘But she wasn’t allowing herself to get comfortable … she was possibly on her way to being, but she had a long way to go before she was settled in. Eventually she moved back to her parents’ house, although she kept visiting me and other friends.’