Strict and Peculiar (The Falconer Files Book 7)

by Andrea Frazer

  ‘I’ll just have a half of best. I’m a bit bilious tonight. Must ’ave been the old lady’s rotten cookin’ again.’

  Again, Carmichael was momentarily startled by the change in the inspector’s accent, but coped well, and was soon returning to the table with a half-pint glass in each hand.

  The pub was quite empty so early in the evening, so Falconer had been able to grab a table beside the small window from which he could easily see anything that was going on across the road.

  They stuck doggedly to their table, stringing out their halves of bitter like a couple of old ladies on the breadline with their halves of milk stout, in the past. By a quarter-past ten, it was much busier, and neither of them dared to move to get another drink in case their chair was requisitioned.

  Across the road, in the workshop, a light sprung up inside, and the doors were opened to allow access. About five minutes later the ice-cream van drove in, followed, within a few minutes, by the white van, and Falconer was up and out of his seat before Carmichael realised what was going on.

  Outside, the inspector concealed himself in the shadow of a neighbouring doorway and made a call on his mobile phone, keeping his voice as low as he could, but no one from opposite could have heard him. There was too much going on inside for anyone in there to be bothered with what was going on outside.

  Carmichael approached him and was told that back-up had been requested. ‘I’ve said we’ll stay here until they arrive, unless anything starts to happen to let them get away. If it does, I’ve told them we’ll go in and cause a ruckus to delay them, all right?’

  ‘Thanks a bundle, sir. I guess I must be fonder of my face than you are of yours.’ Carmichael was definitely rattled.

  ‘We’ll just pretend to be a couple of drunks who have wandered in. There’s no need to go in there brandishing our warrant cards and yelling that we’re police, is there?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that one, sir. Well done. Look! Someone’s getting into the driver’s seat of the van.’

  ‘Come on, man, let’s get across that entrance and make like we’re off our faces!’ ordered Falconer, who was first away from the starting blocks.

  He shot across the road in the obscurity of shadow, then staggered across the access to the workshop, and pretended to lose his balance, rolling around on his back, and singing loudly and tunelessly. Carmichael followed, and made a fine job of not being able to lift him up, eventually joining him on the ground, laughing hysterically at the sort of nothing that drunks habitually laugh at. Maybe they’d learnt something from Amy Littlemore, after all.

  There was a shout inside the workshop, and the person who had got into the van, got out again, and walked towards the two figures rolling around on the ground out on the pavement. Whoever was on the inside stayed put and left it for the driver of the van to deal with. There must be at least two other people inside, given that one person had opened the doors, and two others had driven in.

  So concentrated was the driver on the laughing and singing coming from the two drunks, it wasn’t until it was too late that he became aware of sirens and two patrol cars, one to the right, and one to the left of the doors, skidding to a halt. They had entered the road from opposite ends and, therefore, had both directions covered. Uniformed officers were out of them in a split-second and onto him, others running helter-skelter inside to apprehend whoever was in there too.

  Three men were led from the scene in handcuffs, and Falconer was not surprised to see Daniel Burrows and the large, muscular figure of Aaron Trussler, amongst them. The other man, older than the students, managed to still his progress as he got to Falconer’s side, and hissed, ‘I’ll come for you when you’re sleeping. Don’t expect to wake up! And your mate, over there!’ indicating Carmichael, who was talking to one of the uniformed men.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Thursday 11th November

  First thing the next morning a warrant was sworn for the arrest of Jocasta Gray, and PCs Merv Green and ‘Twinkle’ Starr were sent out to serve it, calling firstly at the college, and secondly on her home address, where she was apprehended and brought in for questioning.

  When she arrived at the station, Falconer left her stewing in an interview room until he was good and ready to talk to her. ‘I can’t believe that she’s behind this drugs thing: that she’s actually Mr Spliffy,’ he said to Carmichael, while he was consciously wasting time; making her wait until he was prepared to give her some of his.

  ‘Neither can I, sir, but I suppose that’s where she got the skunk for the group to smoke,’ replied Carmichael.

  ‘Yes; no doubt telling them that it would put them in touch with their spiritual selves, or some such guff!’ Falconer was angry.

  ‘Why are people so gullible when it comes to things religious?’ the sergeant asked, genuinely perplexed.

  ‘Because they desperately want to believe that ‘this’ isn’t it. They need to know that, when they die, they’re not going to simply cease to exist. They want there to be something else ahead of them, so if someone tells them there is, and it’s put to them in a way that catches at their imagination, they’ll go along with anything, not to have to believe that after death, that’s it, forever,’ Falconer explained.

  He had not told Carmichael about what had been hissed in his ear the night before. It would probably give him nightmares, but there was no need for it to do the same to the unexpectedly sensitive Carmichael.

  ‘But that’s why you’ve got to make the best of what you’ve got, sir. Because this is it,’ replied Carmichael.

  ‘That’s right, Sergeant, and anything else would be a bonus. Life is the performance, not just the dress rehearsal. Live every day as if it were your last, because one day you’ll be right!’

  ‘Blimey! That’s a good one, sir.’

  ‘And I know that you do – live every day as enthusiastically as you can – Carmichael. You’ve got the right idea.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ replied Carmichael, somewhat nonplussed by this unexpected praise.

  ‘Now come on; we’ve got someone quite evil to interview, and I want her nailed for everything she’s done, whatever it turns out to be. I don’t care if we have to add ‘not displaying a valid road tax disc’ to her charge-sheet; I just want it to be as long as it possibly can be.’

  ‘This isn’t like you, sir.’

  ‘She fooled with young minds, and that’s unforgiveable. Those memories will be with those students forever. There’s no way she can atone for the twisting she’s done with their thoughts and beliefs.’

  Jocasta Gray sat in the drab interview room with only a uniformed constable by the door across the room from her for company. Although the building had been newly refurbished to serve as a larger police station for Market Darley, rooms like this one had been painted in the same old depressing colours, for no one wanted a suspect to feel comfortable while being interviewed.

  While she waited, she went over in her mind her transition from prostitute to spiritual guru. It had been good while it lasted, and would make a good story to relate to the police now that it seemed to be over.

  The two policemen entered the room, duly set up the recording device, and the interview commenced. Some old biddy from a church had ‘saved’ her, when she was living rough, and had found her temporary accommodation and rehabilitation, and this she now related to Falconer and Carmichael, Carmichael taking notes even though the interview was being recorded, such a habit had it become.

  She had instantly seen the prospects of using religion to cover more nefarious activities, and had gone along with all the help offered her, responding with the expected gratitude, and supposed change of ways.

  She’d always indulged in a little dope, and made contact with her old dealer (Gary Stockman, the man who had been arrested alongside Trussler and Burrows) with a plan not just to get herself a little group of gullible people to hang on her every word (this was part of her character, she said, and nothing to do with dealing), but to ‘
suffer the little children’, as it were: to sell drugs from an innocent vehicle like an ice-cream van. That was the way to make money. She didn’t want to do the prostitution thing any more, lying on her back and thinking of a better life.

  At this point in her life story Carmichael was so startled that he drew an unintentional line off the edge of the page of his notebook and right across his trouser leg, and a muffled ‘oh heck!’ was unintentionally recorded on the tape.

  ‘I got into the Strict and Particular cult thing more or less by accident. It was part of my subject – such as it was – by then, having hustled myself into the college as a tutor, and the old members of it began to intrigue me. I could understand the way they controlled their lives and their families, having harsh rules, the breaking of which brought punishment down on their heads from within the chapel members.

  ‘It was Elspeth who first drew me out on the subject, and she was immediately mesmerised by how they had lived, and suggested that we should revive it in some way, perhaps using the students at the college as a base. It was more her idea than mine, but I went along with it, because I had become a bit of a control freak, and liked the idea of – I don’t know – perhaps the power, and a little adulation.

  ‘Before I knew what was happening, she had got a few people together and we formed the discussion group. I had enough to do with working with my old dealer, and I could see that some of the recruits weren’t exactly enthralled, so I approached the ones I thought might be useful for the other side of my business – that’s where Aaron and Daniel came in – and got the inner circle going in the old chapel.

  ‘As for the lads, Aaron knew a bit about vehicle maintenance, and could keep the old van running, and change the number plates, and Daniel was hungry to experience everything in life that he could. The fact that they felt like this was a bonus, because I was only really looking for someone to relieve my partner on the rounds, but they did all that, and went along to the drug handovers.

  ‘Everything was going very smoothly, until, one night, we really got a bit too doped, and I put that writing on the wall of the chapel. Hubris! Arrogance! And the next thing I knew there was a dead body in there, and I began to get a little rattled.

  ‘Of course, I told the inner circle that God had smitten him down because he was a sinner. I did the same when the man who turned out to be one of your lot got beaten so badly. By the way, I haven’t the faintest idea who painted the second and third messages on the chapel wall, but I kept quiet about that, even apologising for having to use black paint when we had our last meeting.

  ‘And then there was another death, and I began to think it might be time to move on, but the van was doing so well, and my savings were swelling like they never had done before, so I chickened out of disentangling myself, and just suggested that maybe the van ought to move on to pastures new.

  ‘That was only a couple of days ago, and now it’s too late, and I’ve got to do what I’ve been telling silly gullible kids to do; take my punishment. After all that control at being the pale, skinny leader, I began to lose weight because of fear of punishment. Will I get a long sentence?’

  ‘Yes,’ was Falconer’s bleak reply. ‘What about the murders and the attempted murder?’

  ‘That was absolutely nothing to do with me. I’ll put my hands up for defacing a chapel, but that was only the Greek, done in red paint, because that was the colour that Aaron happened to have with him in his van, but I had nothing to do with murdering or beating anybody. I know absolutely nothing about those incidents, and can only advise you that there may be a psychopath in my inner circle, and I haven’t the faintest idea who it might be.’

  ‘Interview suspended at 9.45 a.m.,’ Falconer intoned for the recording, reached over to switch it off, then said, ‘OK, we’ll leave it for now. We’ll speak to you again later, Ms Gray,’ and swept out of the room, Carmichael in his wake, asking the officer who had been in the room with them to escort Ms Gray back to her cell.

  Back in the office he sat down at his desk and put his head in his hands. ‘What’s up, sir?’ asked Carmichael, taking his own seat. ‘We’ve got Mr Spliffy locked up, only he turned out to be a girl, and her partners-in-crime too. And that’s got to be a good thing, getting all those drugs off the streets. They were being sold on a daily basis, so that’s a lot of drugs, when you add it all up.’

  ‘I know, but it doesn’t leave us any further forward with our other case, does it?’

  ‘I think it does, sir. So it wasn’t Ms Gray. She said herself that it was more than likely to be someone from her inner circle, and I believe she’s right. Who else would have been able to get keys, and actually to know that anything was going on there? After all, who, apart from the people in the village, would have known about the writing on the chapel wall? It was hardly front page news, was it, sir?’

  ‘You’re right, Carmichael! It must be someone from within that group. I mean, this case involved, as you said, getting access to the keys and the cloaks, if any of our witnesses are to be believed. How could someone from outside the inner circle have accomplished that? We’ve got to look at the group members again: interview them until one of them squeals.

  ‘We’ve got Trussler and Burrows in custody, so we might as well start with them, and get warrants for wherever they live. I don’t think it’s likely to be that Stockman – he’s a menacing so-and-so all right, but he’s probably only interested where his business is concerned. That baseball bat’s got to be somewhere, and if it’s not in that workshop, then someone is hiding it, and that’s not on. There will be evidence of blood on that weapon, and, no doubt fingerprints. Oh, yes, that baseball bat is a very incriminating item.’

  Aaron Trussler was the first of the two students to be brought in for interview, and denied any knowledge whatsoever of a baseball bat. The only one he had ever seen in the flesh – or the wood, to be more precise – had belonged to a friend of his older brother, back home in Devon.

  Not in the mood to give up so easily, Falconer asked him about his whereabouts, first on the late evening of Monday the first of November. This produced an initial reaction of, ‘Obviously not where you think I was,’ followed by a period of what passed for deep thought.

  ‘Got it!’ he finally yelled in triumph. I was over at a mates putting in a new clutch for him. That’s one of the reasons I’m doing the car maintenance course, so I can earn a bit of money on the side, to help finance my time at college. How could I have forgotten that! He gave me a couple of beers afterwards, well, quite a few, really, and I crashed on his sofa, because I was over the limit. There you go, Mr Plod. That’s strike one to me! What else have you got?’

  Falconer looked at him, his fine physique, and his well-muscled frame. He was certainly a good candidate for wielding a baseball bat, or whatever had killed Steven Warwick. If his alibi could be proved, that was another suspect gone up in smoke.

  ‘Where were you on the night of Wednesday the third of November, then?’ Falconer asked, hoping to catch him out. Maybe he’d only cooked up one alibi, and he could catch him out with the other two dates.

  ‘That’s an easy one. We had a meeting – the inner circle, that is, but I expect you know about that already. I was there till late, and I have quite a few witnesses who will verify that.’

  ‘Damn! Of course that had been the night of the inner circle meeting, because it was after that that DC Roberts had received his near-fatal beating.

  ‘Who left first?’ Maybe this was the way to trap him, and he could check what he said with the other members about the order of leaving.

  ‘I had to go first. If you must know, I had to get to the workshop that night, to change the number plate on the van again. I was getting terribly fed up with that, but at least it paid, and getting through college isn’t easy these days, you know, what with tuition fees and no grants.’

  ‘You’ll have plenty of time to study in prison, Mr Trussler,’ Falconer informed him, and watched as his face fell, and he realise
d he would be tried and, no doubt, convicted for his part in distributing drugs via an ice-cream van, of all unlikely vehicles. That was probably why it had been chosen: because it reeked of innocence and children.

  This though, could also be verified, unfortunately. Just for the hell of it, Falconer produced his third question. ‘What about the night of Friday the fifth of November?’ It was his last chance, before he moved on to Burrows, and he had little hope of anything incriminating.

  His hopes were immediately dashed. ‘I was at a mate’s house. He had a firework party, and we started about eight o’clock. We had a bonfire and a load of fireworks, and then, because it was Saturday the next day, we made a bit of a night of it. I knew I had my course the next day, but if I didn’t go overboard, and stayed over at his, I knew I’d be all right.’

  ‘You’ve got an answer for everything, haven’t you, Mr Trussler?’ barked Falconer, his mood plummeting.

  ‘I’ve got an alibi for everything, you mean. You’ll have to do me for that other thing, but I had nothing to do with them three attacks. That’s not my style. Violence to others, and the taking of human life, are the most damning of sins, and I wouldn’t condemn my immortal soul for that.’

  Golly, he may be a bit of a rogue, but Jocasta had certainly got to him, at some level.

  Daniel Burrows proved to be a very different sort of suspect to interview, requesting at the very beginning to be asked questions that he need answer only with yes or no, but that didn’t suit Falconer’s bill at all, and he told him so, in no uncertain manner.

  ‘Young man, you are already under arrest for being an active participant in a drug distribution gang in Market Darley. You will be tried for this, and will, no doubt, go to prison.

  ‘At the moment, however, I have asked for you to be in this room so that I can ask you about your involvement in two murders, and a third attempted murder. We have all the evidence we need for the drugs charges. This is a much more serious matter, and carries a life sentence, should a judge see fit to award it.’