“Silkstone,” she repeated, downbeat. “Tony Silkstone?”
“That’s the man.”
“Killed his wife’s murderer?”
“That’s him. Anything to report about his behaviour?”
“I read about him in the papers but I didn’t realise he was one of yours, Charlie. Knew we had him, and he certainly didn’t cause any problems. Let’s see what the oracle says…” I heard the patter of keys as she consulted the computer terminal that sat on her desk, followed by a soft: “Here we are,” to herself, and a long silence.
“Gosh,” she said when she came back on the line. “You can send us as many like him as you can find, Charlie. A golden prisoner by any standards.”
“Oh,” I said. “What did he do?”
“It’s all here. First of all the other inmates, the remandees that is, regarded him as some sort of folk hero. It explains that the person Silkstone killed had murdered his — Silkstone’s — wife and was also a sex offender. Is that true? Was he a sex offender?”
“Um, it looks like it.”
“So that gave him a big pile of kudos, in their eyes. You know what they all think of nonces. It goes on to say that Silkstone took an active part in the retraining programme we’re conducting, and became a popular lecturer in salesmanship. He even promised one or two of them an interview with his company, when they were all released. We need more like him, Charlie. Send us more, please.”
“That sounds like my man. He’s a little treasure, no mistake.”
“He certainly is. Anything else you’d like to ask?”
Dinner? The theatre? “No, Gwen,” I replied, “but thanks a lot.”
Wednesday morning Sophie Sparkington received a letter from the admissions tutor at St John’s College, Cambridge, where she would be reading history, and I received one from the matron of the Pentland Court Retirement Home, Chipping Sodbury.
Mine was handwritten on headed paper, and was addressed to the senior detective at Heckley Police Station. It said:
Dear Sir
One of our clients, Mrs Grace Latham, who is elderly and frail, dictated this letter to me and asked for it to be forwarded to you. If you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact me.
Yours faithfully
Jean Hullah (Mrs)(Matron)
Stapled behind it was another sheet of the same paper, with the same handwriting. This one read:
Dear Sir,
My name is Grace Latham and I am the mother of Peter John Latham who was murdered. Now that he is dead the papers are saying terrible things about him. These are not true but he cannot defend himself. Peter was a good son and I know he could not have done these terrible things. He was kind and gentle, and wouldn’t hurt a fly, and was always good to me. Please catch the proper murderer and prove that my son, Peter, did not do it.
Yours faithfully
Jean Hullah (Mrs)(Matron) p.p. Grace Latham
Dave came in and I handed him the letters. He read them in silence and shrugged his shoulders.
“Mothers,” I said.
“Yeah,” he replied.
“Which would you rather be: the murderer’s parent or the victim’s parent?”
“Don’t ask me. I wonder if Hitler’s mother said that she always knew he’d turn out to be a bastard, or if she loved him right to the end. What do you want to do with it?”
“Drop her a reply, please. Not the card. Make it a letter, in my name. Then show it to Annette and stick it in the file.”
“OK. Nigel rang,” Dave said. “Wants to know if we’re going to the Spinners tonight. He says long-time-no-see.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Eight thirty.”
“Looks like we are, then.”
“Oh, and he says not to laugh, but he’s grown a moustache.”
“A moustache?”
“That’s what he says.”
“Nigel?”
“Mmm.”
“This I’ve got to see.”
But I didn’t, because he never came. We’ve developed a new routine for our Wednesdays out. The Spinners is about two miles from each of our houses, so we walk there. It’s a half-hour power walk and that first pint slides down like snow off a roof when you stroll into the pub and lean on the bar. Towards closing time Dave’s wife, Shirley, comes in the car for an orange juice and takes us home.
Dave had arrived first and was sitting in our usual corner. I collected the pint he’d paid for and joined him.
“Sophie heard from Cambridge this morning,” he told me before I was seated. “We’re going down at the weekend to look at her accommodation.”
“Fantastic. I’ll have to buy her a present. Don’t suppose there’s any point in asking you what she might want.”
He looked glum. “Just about everything. Pots, pans, microwave. You name it, she needs it. Then there’s a small matter of books, tuition fees, meals, rent. It’s never-ending.”
“That’s the price of having brainy kids,” I said.
“Brainy kid. Daniel wants to be a footballer or snooker star.”
“He could be in for a rude awakening,” I warned.
“He’ll take it in his stride. We did.”
“That’s true.” We were both failed footballers. Dave had his trial with Halifax Town the same time as me, with a similar result: don’t call us, we’ll call you.
“This beer’s on form,” I said, enjoying a long sip.
“It is, isn’t it.”
“So where’s Golden Balls with this flippin’ moustache?”
But at that very moment Detective Sergeant Nigel Newley’s full attention was elsewhere. He was gazing into the green eyes of Marie-Claire Hollingbrook, her face framed by the riot of golden hair heaped upon her pillow, her full lips parted and her naked body languidly spread-eagled across the bed. They were the first green eyes Nigel had ever seen, and he was stunned by their beauty. They were unable to return his gaze, because Marie-Claire had been strangled, several hours earlier.
“Do you ever regret not making it as a footballer?” Dave asked me.
“Nah,” I replied. “This is a lot better. Do you? They’d have taken you on if you hadn’t fluffed that goal.”
“No, I don’t think so. Can’t imagine how I missed it though. An open goalmouth in front of me, and I kicked it over the bar.”
“As I remember it, you kicked it over the grandstand.”
“It was a wormcast. The ball hit a wormcast and bobbed up, just as I toe-ended it. The rest, as they say, is history.”
“Sentenced to a lifetime of ignominy by a wormcast.” I said.
“I know,” he replied, glumly raising his glass and draining it.
“Just think,” I continued. “Of all the millions of worms in the world, if that one particular specimen hadn’t crapped on that one particular square centimetre of grass on that one particular day, you might have married one of the Beverly sisters.”
“Blimey. Frightenin’, innit?” he replied.
“Innit just. Same again?”
“Please.”
“Pork scratchings?”
“Cheese and onion crisps.”
I went to the bar to fetch them.
The phone call we were hoping for but not expecting came next morning, just as I was having my elevenses. I went downstairs to control, to catch the action. Arthur, a wily old sergeant, was in the hot seat. He slid a filled-in message form towards me as I moved a spare chair alongside him.
“Anything come in about the dead girl in Halifax?” I asked. There’d been a report about it on the local news.
“Just the bare details, pulled off the computer. We haven’t been asked to assist, yet.”
“Our young Mr Newley will be up to his neck in that one,” I said, secretly wishing that I was there, too.
“Ah! Nigel’ll find ’em.”
“So what have we here?”
“From the Met Regional Crime Squad,” he said as I read. “One of their men thinks he’
s seen Kevin Chilcott at the Portsmouth ferry terminal. He rang in from a phone box and is now trying to follow him. Last report came from the arrivals concourse at 10:37 hours.”
“So what do they expect us to do?” I asked.
“Be alert, that’s all. He could be going anywhere.”
I explained to Arthur that we were responsible for raising the APW on Chilcott, because of the messages from Bentley prison, but the phonecalls were to London, and that was probably where he was heading. “Stay with it,” I told him, “and keep me informed. I’ll be in the office.”
I went back upstairs and finished my coffee. One by one, for no reason that I could think of, I rang Dave, Annette, Jeff and three others on their mobiles and told them what was happening. “Keep in touch,” I told them, “he might be coming this way.”
The super was unimpressed when I told him. “He’ll be heading for London,” he declared, dismissively.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I agreed.
But he wasn’t. Arthur rang me on the internal at 14:20 hours, saying that Chilcott, with the RCS chief inspector tagging along behind him, had boarded the 13:30 express from Kings Cross to Leeds. I went downstairs again and spoke directly to the RCS control, in London. Their man, I was told, was starting his holiday, but had found his way into the arrivals section hoping to meet his parents, who were coming home. He’d seen Chilcott come off the boat and followed him. They caught the train to Waterloo and transferred to Kings Cross, where Chilcott had purchased a single to Leeds. The DCI was unable to communicate from the Portsmouth train, but he could from this one. He was, they said, wearing holiday clothes, which made him somewhat conspicuous.
Our own Regional Crime Squad, based in Leeds, went on to full alert, borrowing our ARVs and booking the chopper for the rest of the day. They made arrangements to evacuate the station minutes before the London train arrived and dressed several officers in natty Railtrack uniforms. Marksmen were positioned around the adjacent platforms and steps taken to block-off all the exits and roads. ETA was 16:01, and Chilcott’s feet wouldn’t touch the ground.
At 15:06 the express stopped at Doncaster and Chilcott left it. The RCS detective got off, too, but had to hide behind a wall until Chilcott boarded the 15:40 to Manchester. That arrived at 17:00 hours and Chilcott and his faithful shadow then boarded the 17:12, Manchester Piccadilly to Newcastle.
“Could be Leeds, after all,” the super stated. He’d joined me in control when he realised that this one wasn’t going away. Dave wandered in and I told him to collect as many bodies as he could, urgently.
“No, Boss,” I told Mr Wood. “If there’s one place he isn’t going, it’s Leeds. He could have stayed on the Kings Cross train if he was going to Leeds.”
The Met’s RCS control room had managed to find someone in the railway business with the authority to spend some time talking to them, and were now being relayed times and destinations. “That train stops at Heckley,” I told my contact. “Where else does it stop?”
I wrote them down as he read them off. Oldfield, Huddersfield, then Heckley, Leeds, York and Newcastle.
“What time at Heckley?”
“17:54.”
“Six minutes to six. Struth, any chance of delaying it? I think he could be coming here and we’re a bit depleted.”
They said they’d do what they could.
I sent someone to Heckley station to arrange things there. We needed parking spaces and easy access. Mr Wood rang the Assistant Chief Constable to organise the issuing of weapons. Our ARVs were in Leeds, so we improvised, borrowing two off-duty officers from the tactical firearms unit who’d missed the shout to dash to Leeds, in their own cars.
“Just the man,” I said when Jeff Caton wandered in. “Did I see your crash helmet in the office, this morning?”
“I’ve come on the bike, if that’s what you mean,” he replied.
“Good.” I turned to Mr Wood. “Can we have a word, Boss?” I asked. He adopted his worried look and the three of us moved outside, into the corridor.
“So far,” I said, “all we are concentrating on is lifting Chilcott. What I’d really like to know is: what is he doing over here? If he’s up to something on my patch, I want to know what it is.”
“What are you suggesting, Charlie?” Mr Wood demanded wearily.
“Just that we don’t arrest him straight away. I think we should follow him for a bit longer, find out who he’s working for.”
“No,” Mr Wood stated. “Definitely not.”
“He’s been tailed for three hundred miles. Another twenty won’t hurt.”
“I said no.”
I turned to DS Caton. “What do you think, Jeff?”
He shrugged, embarrassed by the position I’d placed him in. “Mr Wood’s the boss,” he said.
“But could you do it, on the bike, working with someone in a car?”
“Yeah, no problem.”
“No, Charlie,” Mr Wood said. “If he gets off at Heckley, you arrest him. And that’s my last word.”
“It seems a shame, though, doesn’t it?”
Gilbert heaved a sigh that would have blown a small galleon off the rocks. “Just…just make it look good,” he said.
“Right,” I replied. “Right.” I looked at my watch. It was
17:33. Twenty-one minutes to go.
We had a lightning rehearsal in the briefing room, with me drawing a plan of the station and slashing arrows across it. I designated who would ride with whom and appointed Annette as my driver.
“Code names?” someone asked.
“They’re Batman and Robin,” I replied.
“Da-da da-da, da-da da-da,” they all chanted.
“Who’s who?”
“Chilcott’s Robin. Put my phone number in your memories, but we’ll use the radio when the action starts, switched to talk-through but no chit-chat. OK?”
“OK,” they replied.
“And no heroics. He’s dangerous, so don’t forget it. There’s enough widows in Heckley already.”
They strode out, talking too loudly and fooling around, but I hung back as Jeff zipped up his leather jacket and pulled his helmet on. Two others joined us and then Annette came over. “What do you think, Jeff?” I asked.
“Always obey the last order, that’s my motto,” he replied.
“And you two?”
“We’re game,” one of them replied.
“OK,” I said. “Nothing’s decided, yet. We’ll play it by ear if he gets off the train. Just listen for my instructions.”
“Of course,” one of them said, “there’s always the possibility that he has already jumped off, or he stays on it, isn’t there.”
“He’ll get off,” Jeff stated, his voice muffled by the gaudy helmet. “I can feel it in my water.”
“What was all that about?” Annette asked as she jerked my car seat forward. The clock on the dashboard said 17:41.
I told her briefly what I had in mind.
“Does Mr Wood know?” she asked.
“Um, partly.”
“And he agrees?”
“Yes. Well, no, not really.”
“Oh, Charlie!”
I rang the RCS control on my mobile and gave them my number. Batman had commandeered a phone from a fellow passenger and was in regular communication with them. All along the line itchy-fingered policemen were assembling outside the railway stations, wondering if the nation’s most wanted criminal was going to grace their gunsights with his presence. The possible receptions varied. In some places he would be discreetly followed, in others shot on sight. We, I hoped, were doing it properly. As the train left each station Batman would pass a message back to the RCS and they would alert whoever was in charge at the next one down the line. At Heckley, that was me.
The train station is just down the road from the nick, so we made it with minutes to spare. A uniformed PC was at the coned-off entrance to the car-park, supervising a man in overalls who was working on the barrier. I than
ked them both and told them to go for a cup of tea. We spread ourselves out, enjoying the luxury of all those parking places. Other cars, frustrated by having to drive round the block, started to fill the remainder.
“Presumably,” Annette said, “if he is getting off here somebody will be meeting him. Taking a taxi would be risky.”
“Good point,” I agreed. We sat in silence for a few seconds, until I asked her if she was going away for the weekend. My mobile rang before she could reply, but her expression and the hesitation told me the answer. “Heckley,” I said into the phone.
“Leaving Huddersfield,” the RCS controller told me. “Still on-board.”
“Understood. Out.”
I turned to Annette. “They’ve left Huddersfield. We’re next.” I clicked the transmit button on the radio I was holding in the other hand and said a terse: “Stand by, we’re next,” into it. You can never be too sure who’s listening to radio traffic.
“There’s an interesting BMW just pulled in,” Annette told me.
“Where?”
“Behind us.”
I adjusted the wing mirror with the remote control, so I could see it without turning my head. It was R registered, silver, with four headlights. “Looks expensive,” I remarked as I made a note of the number.
“Series seven,” Annette stated. It sounded about right to me but cars aren’t my strong point. She produced a tube of mints and offered me one. I shook my head. The clock changed from 17:50 to 17:51.
“Let’s have some music,” she said, pushing the radio power button. A politician was sounding off about something or other. He used the expressions spin doctor and mind set in the same sentence, and would probably have slipped in a sea change had Annette not hit a station button. Two more tries and she was rewarded with Scott Walker’s warm tones. “That’s better,” she said.
“We haven’t been for a meal for a while,” I remarked.
“No,” she agreed.
“It’s Thursday.”
“So it is.”
“If Chilcott’s not on this train we could go for one.”
“A girl’s got to eat,” she declared, throwing me a big grin.
I smiled at her and started to say: “You should laugh more often. It suits you,” but the phone started warbling somewhere in the middle of it.
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