Chill Factor dcp-7

by Stuart Pawson

“No.”

  “Why not?”

  I was tired. I hadn’t thought out my arguments. Or my feelings. “I don’t know. It just wouldn’t,” was the best I could manage.

  The button came off in her fingers and she gave a tiny snort of dismay. “They don’t make them like they used to,” I said.

  “It’s been loose all night,” she replied.

  “You could’ve had that coffee, and I could’ve sewn it back on for you.”

  The smile came back. “Role reversal,” she said. “I’m all in favour of that.”

  “They teach you to sew buttons on in the SAS,” I told her.

  “Were you in the SAS?”

  “Mmm. Under twelve’s branch. They threw me out because I wouldn’t wear the oblong sunglasses.”

  She laughed, just a little, and called me a fool. And Charlie. “You are a fool, Charlie” she said, in the nicest possible way.

  “Thank you for a pleasant evening, ma’am,” I said, opening the door. “Don’t be late, in the morning.”

  “What time do you want picking up?” she asked.

  “God!” I exclaimed, pulling the door closed again. “My car’s still outside the nick, isn’t it. Um, in that case, whenever.”

  “About twenty to eight?”

  “Yeah, that’s fine. If I can get up. I think I’m slightly pissed.”

  I opened the door just enough for the interior light to come on. Annette said: “For the record, yes, he is a good bloke.”

  “Your friend in York?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Does he deserve you?”

  “I think so. He’s a schoolteacher, and has two daughters, seven and nine.”

  “Divorced?”

  “Widower.”

  “Rich?”

  “He’s a schoolteacher.”

  “Right,” I said. “Right.” I felt hollow inside. A schoolteacher I could deal with. I’d ask the local boys to waste him and arrange for the coastguard to drop his weighted body off the edge of the continental shelf. Not the girls, though. I couldn’t be that much of a bastard.

  “Annette…” I began.

  “Mmm.”

  “Would you be willing to…you know…make allowances for my intoxicated state if I…sort of…transgressed, type of thing?”

  “I’m not sure,” she replied, warily. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Um, well, I was just wondering, er, if there was any chance of, um, a goodnight kiss?”

  She leaned over and gave me a loud peck on the cheek, completely catching me off guard. It wasn’t quite what I had in mind, but it was a start. “There,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I told her, pushing the door wide.

  “Charlie…”

  I twisted back to face her. “Mmm.”

  “You should get pissed more often.”

  Friday morning I put eggs, bacon and tomatoes from the fridge out on the worktop, together with corn flakes, bread, marmalade, a tub of Thank Christ It’s Not Butter, the frying pan and the toaster. It was my attempt at humour, but Annette waited in the car for me. I finished my coffee and went out.

  “Another day, another collar,” I said, winding myself into the Fiat’s passenger seat. Italian cars make no concessions towards the different body shapes of their European neighbours. Short legs and long arms — take it or leave it. “Thank you, Ms Brown. The office, please.”

  But there were no collars to feel, that day. Some of the team were out looking at burglary scenes, others, me included, caught up with paperwork and reading. Dave went out for sandwiches at lunchtime, and brought me hot pork in an oven bottom cake, with stuffing. They don’t do them like that in M amp; S. And at a fraction of their price.

  In the afternoon the remains of Jamie Walker, loosely arranged in some sort of order, were buried with full Christian pomp. His mother prostrated herself on the coffin, for the Gazette’s photographer, then repeated the scene, with sound effects, when local TV arrived. Practice makes perfect. He was a good son, she told them: everybody loved him and his mischievous ways. This wouldn’t have happened if the police had been more firm with him, and she was considering taking legal action against them. Nobody from the job went to the funeral, under orders, but we all caught it on TV later that evening.

  Last phone call before I left work was from Bob, the Somerset DS. “We’ve traced Michelle Webster,” he told me. “She married and changed her name, but she’s now divorced and has reverted back to her maiden name.”

  You can’t revert forward, I thought. “Have you spoken to her?” I asked.

  “No, Mr Priest. She’s living in Blackpool, would you believe. Our chief super’s making noises about expenses and thinks there’s no need for us to see her ourselves. He said to let someone local interview her. He wants to wait until after the inquests then issue a statement saying that we are not looking for anybody else, and that would be the Caroline Poole case cleared up.”

  “Which would please the relatives, I suppose.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “How would you feel if someone from here nipped across and had a word with Michelle?”

  “No problem, Mr Priest. That’s partly why I’m ringing you. You’re a couple of hundred miles nearer to her than we are.”

  “Call me Charlie, Bob. Everybody else does.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Give me the address. I’ll try to send someone next week, and let you know the outcome.”

  “We’d appreciate that, Charlie. Thanks for your help.”

  “My pleasure.”

  And it would be, too. Blackpool might be the last resort, but a day there with Annette sounded a good way of adding the finishing touches to the Latham case. I straightened my blotter, washed my mug and went home.

  Jamie’s funeral, on TV, made me angry. “You should get pissed more often,” Annette had told me. No way. I’d staggered down that road a long time ago, and didn’t like the scenery. My Sony rasta-blaster holds three CDs. I chose carefully, then carried it into the garage where the unfinished painting leaned against the wall. I laid the tubes of colour out in the same order I always use and screwed the caps off. Yellow ochre, to start with, I decided. I squeezed a six-inch worm of it onto the palette and dipped a number twelve filbert into the glistening pigment.

  The knock on the garage door came about halfway through the second playing of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. The neighbour was standing there with his little dog. I stared at him, brush in one hand, palette knife in the other.

  “Um, er, your radio’s on a bit loud, Mr Priest, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  It was. That’s how you listen to Mahler. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you could hear it outside.”

  “Well you can, and it’s keeping Elsie awake.”

  “I really am sorry,” I repeated, because I was. I like to consider myself the invisible neighbour. “I was painting. What time is it”

  “About ten to one.”

  “What!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t realise it was so late.”

  “She’s been in bed since just after the play ended. It’s her waterworks, you know.”

  “Really. Well it won’t happen again.” I moved back into the garage and switched off the CD. He stepped into the vacant space in the doorway and his gaze settled on the nearly — finished picture. “It’s supposed to represent China,” I explained, as I wiped away the blob of cerulean blue that I’d accidentally dabbed on the Sony.

  “China?” he repeated.

  “Mmm.”

  “China China?”

  “That’s right.” As opposed to cup-and-saucer china, I think he meant. “That’s the Great Wall, and that’s a panda.” I pointed to the images, some strong, some barely hinted at, and read them off. “The Long March, Tiananmen Square, coolie hats, bonsai, typical scenery, Chairman Mao.”

  “I don’t like this modern stuff,” he declared.

  “This is hardly modern,” I told him. “I don’t like much of the
really modern stuff.” I manoeuvred him outside and walked him towards the gate. “And apologise to your wife about the noise, please. It won’t happen again.”

  “The wife? She’s stone deaf, like me. Neither of us ever hears a thing once we switch off.”

  “Oh. You said, er, Elsie.”

  “Elsie.” He tugged the dog’s lead. “This is Elsie.”

  “Right. Er, right.”

  Next morning at ten a.m. I rang Michelle Webster, provider of alibi for a child murderer, and arranged to see her in the afternoon. Don’t ask me why, but sometimes I feel more at ease when dealing with the criminally insane.

  The rain started as soon as I passed over the tops and began the long descent into Lancashire. Having Annette with me would have been pleasant, but she was in York with her friend, and the thrill of the chase was more than I could resist. I was quite pleased about the rain — maybe it would keep the traffic down. It didn’t, and we had the usual stop-go on the M6. There’s this crackpot idea that the more roads you build, the more traffic you create. It all started after they opened the M25. Two million Londoners apparently said: “Ooh, good, they’ve built a new road. Let’s dash out and buy a car.” It’s now used as an argument for not making new roads or widening existing ones, and the M6 is doomed to permanent gridlock.

  Michelle Webster had given me extremely detailed directions, which I hadn’t listened to, and sounded determined that I shouldn’t get lost. All I recorded was that she was on the south side, but not quite St Anne’s. There’s posh, I thought, as I looked at the map: they’ve retained the apostrophe.

  When I was in the general vicinity I asked, and soon was creeping along a street of respectable, if slightly dilapidated, pre-war semis. They had shingled bay windows and mature trees in the gardens. I saw the number and parked between an ageing Range Rover and a Toyota Celica with a dented corner. Michelle Webster opened her front door before my finger was off the button, halfway through the second bar of Strangers in the Night.

  She looked sixty, pushing nine. Little girls like to dress up in their mother’s clothes, I’m told. This was serious role reversal. She was wearing a pink micro skirt, black silk blouse, black tights and black suede boots that would have come well above her knees had not the tops been turned down, cavalier fashion. I remembered the joke about the woman who went to the doctors complaining of thrush. He gave her a prescription to take to the cobblers, to have two inches taken off the top of her boots.

  “Mrs Michelle Webster?” I asked. I’d done a calculation on the way over and reckoned she’d be in her mid forties.

  “It’s Miss Webster,” came the reply, as she stood to one side to let me through with hardly a glance at my ID. A little dog came yapping towards me out of the gloom of the hallway. Michelle said: “Hush, Trixie,” and picked it up. It had lots of hair, and looked as if it had just escaped from a serious accident with a tumble drier. “There-there darling, it’s only a nice policeman come to see Mummy,” she told it, planting a kiss into the middle of the ball of fur, and for a moment their hair merged like two clouds of noxious gasses after a chemical spillage.

  “So what’s he done now?” Michelle asked with a touch of glee in her voice, when we were seated in her front room, which I suspected was called the parlour. She’d moved a menagerie of fluffy toys to make room for me, and straightened the antimacassars on the chair arms. There were pictures on the walls of various stars of stage and screen, with autographs scrawled across them by a girl with a rubber stamp in an office in Basingstoke.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Greg, my ex. It’s about him. Isn’t it?”

  It wasn’t, but I did some gentle probing. Greg was part owner of a club in town, and into all sorts of wheeling and dealing. She could tell me stuff that would make my hair curl. Mafia? Don’t talk to her about the Mafia.

  So I didn’t. “You were in showbusiness?” I asked, flapping a hand towards the photos and recognising Roy Orbison in a central position amongst all the bouffant hair and gleaming teeth of the ones who didn’t make it to his level.

  “Not on the performing side.” She smiled and crossed her legs, which was difficult with the footwear she had on. “Not enough talent, unfortunately,” she explained with a modest shrug. “No, Greg and I were more into management and promotions.”

  “You were evidently successful at it.” The house was probably hers, and prices in Blackpool are no doubt above average.

  “Oh, we were, we were. They were great days. And then the shit ran off with a dancer from the Tower whose cup size was as far as she ever made it through the alphabet. The fat little cow.”

  “I haven’t come to talk about Greg,” I told her, anxious to steer the conversation back on course. “I want to talk to you about people you knew when you lived in Burdon, back in the Eighties.”

  “Burdon? That was a long time ago.”

  “1984, to be precise. Did you know a man called Peter Latham?”

  She pretended she wasn’t sure — “There were so many, Inspector” — until she realised that I wasn’t going to be more forthcoming. Then she remembered him. I told her that he was dead, as was her friend Margaret Silkstone, nee Bates, under suspicious circumstances, and we’d be very grateful for any help she could give. After a little weep it all came out.

  They were a foursome: she and Peter Latham; Margaret and Tony Silkstone. They met three nights a week at a pub near Frome — the Nelson — where there was music and dancing, and paired off when the alcohol and hormones started to work. Peter, she said, was kind and relaxed. Unlike Silkstone, who was a show-off, always wanting to have more, do better than anyone else. They were married to two sisters, which was why they knew each other. Peter’s wife, Michelle said, was a “hatchet-faced cow, and frigid with it.” I remembered the wedding photo I’d seen, of a tall brittle blonde who towered over him, and decided that the description could be accurate.

  The affair came to an end when Latham was breathalysed and banned from driving. They struggled to meet for a while, playing gooseberry with Silkstone and Margaret, but Michelle came to Blackpool for a holiday and met Greg. End of a beautiful friendship.

  “He was a lovely man,” she sobbed, for the tears had started again. “He knew the names of things. Birds and flowers an’ stuff like that. And poetry. He knew whole poems. Not the ones you did at school. Daft ones, that you can understand, by him from Liverpool. Paul McCartney’s brother.”

  And had a penchant for sex with young girls, I thought.

  “Not like Tony,” she continued. “All he knew was the price of cars.” She sniffed and dabbed her nose with a tissue. “I married Greg because he was a bit in-between, if you follow me. Except with him it was show-biz.”

  I wasn’t sure I did follow, but I skipped asking for an explanation. “You were obviously fond of him,” I said. “I’m sorry I had to bring you bad news.” But now for the bad news. I said: “Do you remember when a girl called Caroline Poole went missing?”

  She did. Nobody who lived in Burdon would ever forget it. “It was the biggest manhunt ever held in Somerset,” I told her. “Everybody was questioned, including Tony and Peter. According to the records they said they were with you and Margaret that night. Do you remember?”

  She pursed her lips and shrugged, warily, and I imagined her growing pale under the makeup. Lipstick was beginning to bleed away from the corners of her mouth like aerial views of the Nile delta. “I never asked you if you’d like a drink!” she exclaimed, pulling herself to her feet. “What must you think of me?” Trixie, who was curled up on her lap, fell to the floor.

  There was a bar in the corner of the room, behind me, with a quilted facade and optics on the mirrored wall. A personal replica of the real thing for those times when you can’t face the world. I twisted in my seat as she poured clear liquid from a decanter. “What would you like, Chief Inspector?” she asked.

  There was no coffee percolator quietly gurgling on the counter. “Not for me, thank you,” I sai
d. Glass clinked against glass, suede swish-swashed against suede and she resumed her seat, slowly easing herself down into it like a forklift truck lowering a crate of eggs. If it was gin she now held in her hand she’d be talking in hieroglyphics before she was halfway through it. “Whose idea was it to lie?” I asked, getting straight to the point.

  She took a long drink, slurped, gurgled and coughed. “I don’t know.” The end of Trixie that didn’t have a curly tail looked up at her, then decided not to bother. The dog sloped off and crashed out on a folded sheepskin rug near the fireplace.

  “Did Peter ask you?”

  “Ask me what?”

  “Did he ask you to say he was with you?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I’d stopped seeing him by then.”

  “By when?”

  “By when the police were asking questions. It was months after the girl was murdered.”

  “Was it Silkstone, then?”

  “I don’t know. It was a long time ago. I used to drink a lot…” She downed half of the tumbler to demonstrate how it was done and re-crossed her legs.

  “Was it Margaret’s idea. Did she persuade you to say that you saw Peter and Tony in the Lord Nelson, that night?”

  “I was never very good at times, and days of the week.”

  “Was it Margaret’s idea?”

  “I think so.”

  “What did she say?”

  She downed the last of whatever it was and stared gloomily at the empty glass. Her legs uncrossed themselves, as if she were about to go for another, but she decided not to and sank back in the chair. There’d be plenty of time for that when the nice policeman had gone.

  “She said that Peter was scared stiff that his wife would find out about, you know, me an’ ’im. We used to go to the Nelson to hear this group. They were called the Donimoes…the Dominoes. Gerry and the Donimoes. They did all Roy’s stuff. When Gerry sang ‘In Dreams’ they used to dim all the lights, an’ the group, they used to turn their backs to the audience, as if to say that this was ’is spot. All ’is.” She closed her eyes and the savage lips melted into a smile.

  “In dreams I walk with you,” she sang, very softly, her head weaving gently from side to side. “In dreams I talk to yo-ou.”