by Paul Charles
As Kennedy left Colette to ponder the mountain she had to climb, he was consoled by the fact that his list of suspects was at least one name shorter.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Honey you’re my one and only
So pay me what you owe me
- Laurie Anderson
At that point in the day Kennedy had decided that he was having a bad day, and not the good day Americans wished the world and his brother. Even his aches were having aches and whenever he sat down, a dreaded stiffness set in. Waking up each morning was going to be joint-creaking agony for a few days. On top of that – if you could get on top of that – his conversation with Colette Farrelly had created another kind of discomfort. The first one wore away within minutes, but now he was conscious, over-conscious, of his relationship with ann rea.
He tried to think whether he had ever been anything less than honest about his feelings, both emotional and physical, for her. He could not recall a time when he had even considered faking it – he’d always been enjoying himself too much. Yet previous girlfriends had often complained that he never really expressed his feelings properly. Too many had claimed that they never really knew where they stood with him, for there not to be at least a hint of truth in the accusation.
Should he change? Could he change? Did he love ann rea enough to change for her? But surely that wasn’t the point. He wouldn’t want her to change, in any way. So the converse must be true. If ann rea loved him, she must also love all the baggage. If you change just to please your lover, perhaps you’ll become someone your lover will no longer find attractive. Nevertheless he did not for one moment suppose this meant you should go around with the blinkered attitude, ‘This is me and if you don’t like the package, eff off.’
He hoped that his physical condition would not ruin the weekend he and ann rea had planned. Both were committed to their respective offices on Saturday morning but the rest of the time they just wanted to slum it, walking around Primrose Hill, Regent’s Park and Camden Town. Camden Town Market on a Sunday morning was a total buzz, the streets packed way past overflowing with locals (not a lot), tourists (hundreds of thousands) and traders (enough).
Kennedy wondered whether Peter O’Browne had ever joined in the Sunday morning mayhem around Camden Lock. Perhaps they had passed within feet (even inches) of each other one such Sunday, as they went about their leisure pursuits.
The local offices were spewing out their respective workforces as Kennedy returned to North Bridge House. By now he had a few additions for his noticeboard and so, via DS James Irvine, he summoned the team to his office for a general update on the case. He was then due to brief Superintendent Thomas Castle before the Super travelled north for a weekend conference in York.
Kennedy did not envy the Super his weekend. Kennedy felt that there were those who did and those who talked about doing, and although the Super was a paid-up member of the latter group, he was always prepared to give Kennedy a free rein (not to mention lots of support) in his endeavours to do.
‘Okay,’ Kennedy began, inviting his team to help themselves to tea, ‘let’s see where we are up to with this one. WPC Coles, will you bring everyone up to date with our adventures with Barney What’s-his-name?’
‘Noble, sir.’
‘The very same.’ Kennedy took his seat behind his desk.
The WPC recalled their adventure with Mr Less-than-Noble. Kennedy wasn’t paying much attention. His shirt had lost its crispness, so he undid the buttons on the cuffs and rolled the cuffs up to his elbows. He also loosened his tie and opened the top button. He arranged papers around his desk and made up some new signs for his noticeboard. When the WPC reached the part of her narrative that dealt with what had been found after he had left, his ears pricked up.
‘As well as thousands of CDs and cassettes, we found a vast quantity of cocaine, pure coke, some of it still packed in music cassette boxes – sealed in plastic bags, of course.’
‘Now we know why Mr Noble was so anxious to get away from us,’ Kennedy offered, feeling the sharp, painful reminders of his encounter with the villain across his chest.
‘Yes. But that’s not all, sir. We found explosives and packaging similar to that used in the device which caused the fire in Peter O’Browne’s house.’
This was a breakthrough. ‘When is Mr Noble due back from the hospital?’
‘I believe they’re bringing him,’ the WPC checked her watch, ‘in about fifteen minutes, sir.’
‘Which means he’ll be here in half an hour. Okay. Irvine, you and I will question him here,’ Kennedy announced. The look in the eyes of DS James Irvine told him that the fun-loving nurse Rose Butler was going to have to start her fun without him tonight. Of this she was more than capable, so Kennedy resolved to try not to keep the DS away too late. Unfortunately, the twenty-four hour ‘clock’ starts running the moment the suspect enters the station, during which time the police have to decide if they are going to charge or release their suspect: on this occasion the ‘armless Barney Noble.
‘So, what about our other suspects?’ Kennedy said as he rose (slowly and painfully) from his chair and wandered over to the noticeboard.
‘Martyn Farrelly has certainly moved up a few positions,’ Kennedy began.
‘If this was the Sunday night pop charts, he’d probably be happier about it,’ remarked DS Irvine dryly.
‘As I was saying, he must move up the list with the news that his wife had been sleeping with the deceased. He now has two motives. One, he feels that Peter shafted him earlier in his career; and two, now he finds out that this same person has stolen his wife, or at least her affections.
‘Moving right along, a new entry, straight in at number four, Barney Noble. I think we’ll have to wait till after our chat with him for an update. Tom Best. Yes… Have we uncovered anything else about him?’
No one spoke.
‘Look, I know we’ve not been on this long, but you know me, I like to cover as much ground as possible in the initial forty-eight hours. Is there anyone else we should be thinking about? Maybe someone we don’t even know yet?’ Kennedy asked.
Again, no one spoke.
‘WPC Coles, before you go off for the evening, could you please have another chat with Mary Jones? Try to get her to give you anything: office gossip, rumours, anything. She produced the Colette and Peter story, so maybe there is more there. She must know all the dark corners in this man’s room. We need to go there, wherever it may be, and have a look.’
‘Okay, sir.’
‘Anything from the SoC people, DS Irvine?’
‘Sorry, sir, not at the moment. They took away a pile of rubbish – you know, the pile that was in the back of the studio – papers, leaves, cartons, cardboard boxes, bits of wood, nails, soap. Just rubbish, lots of it. They are not sure how long it had been there, but they are going to go through it all with the proverbial fine-tooth comb. They’ll give us a shout the minute they come up with anything.’
‘Okay. But don’t forget to keep nudging them,’ Kennedy urged. ‘What about door to door? Anything turn up? What about the chippie?’
‘No, sir, no one seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary,’ PC Allaway volunteered. ‘It’s a vibey village kind of atmosphere and no one can remember anything unusual this week.’ He should know because it had been his feet which had pounded the streets and it had been he who had asked the questions.
‘Then do me a favour. Take WPC West with you and do it again tonight. Perhaps there will be a different group of people on the hill for the weekend. Perhaps they’ll remember something extra. It’s only two days now since a man was taken from their midst and hanged by the neck until he died. Hanged by the neck till he died.’ Kennedy allowed the words to hang in the air as much for himself as for his audience. ‘I wonder if that’s it. I wonder if someone felt they were officially punishing Peter O’Browne for some wrong?’ Kennedy offered.
WPC Coles was the first to reply. ‘Well, that might account for
the way the corpse was laid out, sir.’
‘But then why not leave him hanging for all to see?’ this time the question was posed by DS Irvine.
‘Well,’ Kennedy began slowly, ‘I suppose if Peter had been left hanging, there is a chance it could have been interpreted as a suicide. This way, the executioner left us in no doubt that Peter O’Browne had been hanged by somebody else.’
Kennedy did not feel that he was going to make much, if any, progress with that line of thought at that moment, but he wrote execution in large letters on a sheet of paper and pinned it to his noticeboard. ‘What about Johnny Heart? Should he be in the frame?’
‘Nah, sir I don’t think so,’ said Irvine. ‘From what I can gather he spent all his money on women, booze and drugs.’ After a short pause he added, ‘The rest he wasted. Seriously, though,’ he said above the laughter of his colleagues, ‘from what I’ve been told, he’s a total waster and would not have been capable, physically, or mentally, of carrying out such a crime, any major crime, come to that.’
‘Okay, Sergeant. Look if we finish with Barney Noble early enough you can go and see the delightful Staff Nurse Butler and I’ll see if I can have another chat with Tom Best. That is, unless you would like to do a swap?’ Kennedy smiled.
‘No, sir, that’s fine, perfectly fine. I can live with that deal – I’ll do the same for you some day, sir.’
‘Yes, I’ll bet. Okay let’s get on with it,’ Kennedy announced and they broke off into a few groups ready to get off into the night, and overtime.
CHAPTER FORTY
I met the fools that a young fool meets
- Jackson Browne
Barney Noble looked like that cat in the cat and mouse (and dog) cartoon where the cat always comes off worst. But no matter how pathetic the cat looks following one of its scraps with the dog, all battered and bruised and bandaged, you could never feel sorry for it. Barney Noble was every bit as pathetic as our cat, with both arms and wrists bandaged. He rested both elbows on the table, arms pointing upwards. He was obviously still in some pain but he still had that ‘fuck you’ smirk painted on his face. He was wearing an outrageous suit, a yellow number with black lines, which had clearly left a few Fort Cortina seats uncovered. His hair was shaved down to the skin of his head. However the hair outline betrayed the fact he probably had done so to hide his imminent baldness.
DS James Irvine opened the proceedings. Perhaps it was the lure of Staff Nurse Rose Butler which was putting an inch – at least – to his step, by announcing, for the benefit of the tape recorder, the time, place and names of those present (Noble had refused a solicitor): ‘So, you’ve a few things to tell us, then, Mr Noble.’
‘I’ll tell you shit. I’m in agony. That animal. I’m going to sue you. I’m going to take so much money from the police force. You can’t go round behaving like…’
‘I think you are forgetting who attached whom,’ Kennedy cut in icily, making it clear that he had neither the time nor the patience to go around the houses again on this particular point.
‘Fucking right, I did. I was protecting myself.’
‘Okay, let’s change the record. Here’s the thing. We are here to question you. Now in about half an hour…’ Kennedy checked his watch. ‘Sorry, make that twenty-six minutes, I go off for the weekend. If I don’t make satisfactory progress in this interview with you in the next…’ he looked at his watch again ‘…the next twenty-five and a half minutes, I’ll have to leave the balance of the questions till Monday morning.’
‘You can’t do that. You’ve got to charge me!’ Noble announced smart-arse fashion.
‘Fine, absolutely no problem. Then we’ll charge you with GHB, with obstructing police officers in the execution of their duty. For that you’ll get, with your form, about eighteen months. Not to mention possession of drugs, explosives, la-de-da-de-da. So if that’s what you want we can leave it like that and dump you in the cells for the weekend. Then on Monday morning we’ll start with the really serious stuff, like the murder of Mr Peter O’Browne. We can do it that way or…’ Kennedy paused ‘…or we can talk.’
‘It’s up to you,’ DS Irvine added. ‘Entirely up to you.’
Noble sat in indignant silence.
Kennedy tried a different approach. ‘Why were you blackmailing Peter O’Browne.’
‘Why fucking not?’ Noble spat out in a snigger. ‘He’s no fucking better than me, is he?’
This time Kennedy retained an air of silence.
Unprompted, Barney continued, ‘Well, I mean to say, you know what he was up to. And it wasn’t exactly fucking legal, was it? Come on, you know what I mean.’ He started to lean back in his chair but as his elbows lost the support of the table his arms reminded him he was carrying broken bones. He winced. ‘Was what he was doing legal? I don’t fucking think so! He should have to pay for it or something. But that’s the thing isn’t it?’ he exploded, expecting Kennedy and DS Irvine to read his mind. ‘If I do something illegal and break the law it’s a big thing, and I have to do time, fair e-fucking-nuff. But if the suits bend the law, they’re allowed to hide behind their lawyers and money and get away with it.’
‘So,’ DS Irvine interrupted, ‘you took money from Peter O’Browne to hype his records illegally, and you used that information to extort money from him?’
‘So what?’
‘Really, a fine little firm you’ve got there, Barney. Nice work if you can get it,’ Kennedy laughed.
‘Yeah, but if you two fuckers think you can pin this murder on me, let me tell you, there’s no way. Not my scene, man. You’re not going to hang that one on me.’
‘Look we are getting ahead of ourselves here. Can we stop jumping around so much and go back to the beginning?’ Kennedy sighed.
‘Okay. Look I work for a team. And we have squads of buyers who encourage them up the charts,’ Barney began expansively.
‘Does everyone, record companies I mean, do this?’ DS Irvine inquired.
‘Oh, you’d be surprised how many of them are at it. But they are all idiots, fucking baboons. Even I can see that the more they do it the less effect the hyping has. In fact the only effect it has is to put more money into our pockets. Anyway, I heard that Mr Showbiz, Camden Town was trying to put a deal together to sell part of his company to a major. He’s going to want to keep the deal sweet, isn’t he? He’s not going to want any scandals spoiling his pitch. So, I figured he’d be okay for a hit, a few grand now and again.
‘It was a bit of justice, wasn’t it? I mean, the guy is so fucking stingy he wouldn’t give you the fucking steam from his tea, so I hit him where it hurts: in his pocket.’ Barney Noble obviously took pride in his way of dishing out justice to the ‘suits’.
‘But this was all ages ago, literally ages ago. I’m having a hard time working out why you’d want to firebomb him all this time later,’ Kennedy responded.
‘Well, I just wanted to teach the fucker a lesson. You know, a real lesson. He wouldn’t play ball, he made one measly payment then refused to pay any more. I thought I was on a bit of a winner. I didn’t know whether to go for one payment of ten grad or several small ones, say a couple of grand at a time. I made the wrong decision. The first payment, two and a half grand, he stumped up immediately, cash, all tenners, direct from Lloyds of Camden Town. But then he got cocky and wouldn’t come across with any more.
‘Asshole. I couldn’t believe it. But I’m a patient man. So I wait for a time when it wouldn’t be connected back to me. I also wanted to destroy the two notes I sent him. I didn’t think he’d keep them in his office. So fuck, I was getting my own back and covering my tracks in one hit. But then the asshole has to go and get stiffed at the same time as I’m torching his fucking house. Can you believe that?
‘Then all hell breaks loose! I don’t mind doing time for the drugs and blackmail and shit, but I’m not going to go down for his murder. No fucking way.’
‘Yeah, yeah. How about Wednesday night? What were you doing be
tween seven and midnight?’ DS Irvine inquired, checking his watch.
‘Ha, fucking easy that one, isn’t it, I was with my fucking mates, wasn’t I?’
‘And where would that have been?’ Irvine leaned forward on his folded arms as he spoke.
‘We were all at the Dublin Castle, weren’t we? They’ll all swear to it!’ Barney Noble added defiantly.
Irvine changed tack, ‘So, what other singles did you work on?’
Noble reeled off a list as long as your arm which had both Kennedy and Irvine alternating, ‘Wow, you’re winding us up. That was hyped? I can’t believe that. I bought a copy of it myself!’
Kennedy and DS Irvine left the desk sergeant, Timothy Flynn, to deal with the paperwork. As they parted on the steps of North Bridge House, DS Irvine said, ‘I think our friend Mr Barney Noble practices safe sex.’
‘What?’ said Kennedy buttoning up his overcoat and wondering what his DS was on about.
‘Yeah. I think his problem is he’s been practising too much by himself.’ A roar of Scottish laughter rolled down Parkway.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
If songs were lines
In a conversation
The situation
Would be fine
- Nick Drake
‘Oh God, it’s the police again!’ was the greeting afforded to Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy when he showed his ID to Tom Best.
‘You’d better come in,’ Best continued. ‘But I hope you’re not going to take long. I’m due to pick up my girlfriend for dinner in forty minutes.’
