Rules, Regs and Rotten Eggs (A Harriet Martens Thriller Book 7)

by HRF Keating

  But, before I see him, must have another word with HQ. At St Oswald’s there’ll probably not be any stronger police presence than a single bedside detective. And it must be possible that whoever tried to kill Roughouse will make another attempt if, watching from somewhere in the dark here, they’ve seen that ambulance leaving and have realised their attempt failed.

  When she met the Gralethorpe DI, sullen and grudging, she hammered out with him a plan for questioning such curiosity-filled protesters as still remained in the square. One by one then they had them brought under two of the street-lamps to have names and addresses taken and be asked if they had seen ‘anything suspicious’. A question which, Harriet knew, was highly unlikely to be answered in any half-useful way.

  Even when, some half hour later, forensic officers from Birchester arrived with another contingent of detectives she felt no lift of hopefulness. What chance was there that anyone in that crowd concentrating on the figure of Robert Roughouse would have noticed someone take a single backward pace and throw something with all their power? Throw an egg that was neither white nor brown nor speckled but dull purplish metal?

  *

  At last the square was empty of every possible witness. Stretching and yawning, Harriet allowed to enter her head thoughts of home. She longed simply to perform those necessities of existence that hold the world together, the ordinary bedtime tasks of brushing teeth, taking off make-up, putting dirty clothes into the laundry basket.

  She began looking to see if there was anyone near the cars whom she could ask to give her a lift back to Birchester.

  But then, from the deeper darkness at the foot of the old Methodist chapel facing the town hall, she saw emerge a curious-looking individual. Shuffling purposefully, head jutting forward tortoise-like under a jammed-on shapeless soft hat, he was plainly making straight towards the lamp she was standing under.

  ‘You’re a police officer,’ came a yapped-out assertion as he got nearer. ‘The one in charge, it looked to me.’

  An inner groan of dismay.

  ‘Yes, I am the senior investigating officer here. Is there something I can do for you?’

  ‘Pidgeon, Percival. Not Percy. Never, never Percy. Always Percival Pidgeon.’

  Harriet suppressed, in her barely controlled weary mind, a faintly hysterical laugh.

  ‘And there’s something you want to tell me?’ she asked, striving for calm authority. ‘Something about the missile that injured the Hunt speaker?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She got a quick assessing glance.

  ‘You know I am armigerous?’

  This was altogether too much. It was all she could do to bring out a reply even marginally polite.

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’

  ‘I am armigerous. Entitled to bear heraldic insignia. Do you know nothing?’

  She battened down the temper beginning to swell up.

  ‘Yes,’ the old man went on. ‘With canting arms and a pigeon or dove presenting.’

  ‘Very well, Mr Pidgeon,’ Harriet brought herself to answer, just coming to terms with the heraldic jargon. ‘But I am afraid I don’t quite understand the relevance of what you’ve told me.’

  ‘It implies, surely to goodness, that I am a properly responsible person. Why else should I have given you the information?’

  Harriet buckled to once more.

  ‘So, what is it, as a responsible person, that you want to inform me of? It’s getting very late and — and, frankly, I’d like to be on my way.’

  However calm I’m managing to be, she said to herself, when I do get home I’ll have the right — it’s in the unprinted book of rules — to be as irritable with John as I like. Spouse’s privilege.

  ‘I suppose the fact will be of some interest to you that the object sent towards that Hunt gentleman did not come from anyone in the crowd he was addressing.’

  A cantankerous glare.

  ‘Not from the crowd? What exactly do you mean?’

  ‘I mean what I said.’

  But can this absurd old man really be telling me that the purple egg was not thrown by someone in the crowd? Should I just send him off home, here and now?

  She decided to make one more effort to get straight what it was he had claimed.

  ‘Let me be clear. You’re saying the missile was not thrown by anyone in the crowd here in the square?’

  Percival Pidgeon’s turn now to suppress anger, something he seemed to be all but failing to do.

  ‘I cannot have put it more plainly, even to make myself clear to a woman police officer.’

  Harriet ignored the emphasised woman.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘If that egg-like object was not thrown by somebody in the crowd, how did it come to strike the wall within a few inches of Robert Roughouse’s head?’

  ‘There can be only one answer to that.’

  Then a provoking silence.

  Harriet stood there for an instant or two more looking at the old man. Then she settled for what she had thought about him from the beginning, that she had been waylaid by an obsessed idiot living by conventions altogether unconnected to the real world. ‘Well, thank you for your assistance,’ she said.

  She turned and set off towards the Birchester cars.

  But she had gone no more than three or four yards when a new thought entered her numbed brain. A totally unaccountable one. Abruptly she had remembered telling John about the old lady she had once interviewed in Gralethorpe — Miss Abigail Something? — who, bird-sharp, had promptly seen through her attempt to pass herself off as a Council official but had then told her everything she had wanted to know. She had even, it came back now, confessed over tea to a years-ago love life outside the bounds of propriety.

  A lesson to me, as John pointed out. When there’s something that has to be brought to light, you abandon lofty notions.

  She swung round to Percival Pidgeon, still standing, a rigidly angry post, under the lamp where he had produced his unlikely claim.

  ‘Mr Pidgeon, I’m afraid I was a little abrupt just now. Tell me, please, why is it you think that object was not thrown from somewhere in the crowd down here?’

  And he gave her an answer.

  ‘Plain enough, isn’t it? Because, from up there outside the chapel, I heard a sound like a fowling-piece being fired.’

  ‘A shot from up there?’

  ‘That’s what I said, and that’s what I heard. A small report, very like a shotgun’s. I may be eighty-two years of age but I’ve still got my hearing. We Pidgeons have always been noted for our acute ears. Down the generations.’

  Momentarily the weird notion came into Harriet’s head of a set of different heraldic arms for the old man to flaunt. Not a pigeon or dove presenting, but a pair of ears flappant.

  ‘I heard what I did, say what you like,’ he snapped at her now. ‘I was on the point of going up to investigate when that shout of horror from the crowd made me turn to look in the other direction.’

  But, Harriet thought, if he’s right, Mr Never-Percy Pidgeon, he may actually have heard something like a small mortar firing that grenade. And will the person who …? But, no, they’ll have raced off as soon as they saw Pidgeon beginning to head towards where they were hiding.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this at the start?’ she asked, speaking in her flare of excitement more sharply than was sensible.

  ‘Would you have listened?’ Percival Pidgeon shot back. ‘You police are all the same. Go by your set rules, never think that something may be different from what you’ve been taught to expect.’

  Harriet accepted the rebuke, unjust though it might be.

  ‘Very well, Mr Pidgeon,’ she said, ‘shall we go up there and see what we can find?’

  She directed the beam of her torch towards the dark mass of the chapel.

  Percival Pidgeon trotted off ahead, almost too rapidly for her to keep up. They mounted one of the paired flights of stone steps leading to the wide balcony in front of
the chapel doors. And there, at once, they saw what looked as if it must be, precisely, the device that had shot out the missile which had so terribly injured Robert Roughouse.

  ‘Stop. Don’t touch,’ she shouted, as the old man, grinning ferociously, bent down towards it.

  He jumped back upright.

  ‘There may be fingerprints,’ Harriet said. ‘Because, you know, this discovery of yours means only one thing. The grenade that almost killed Mr Roughouse was not thrown by some anti-hunting idiot who scarcely knew what he was doing. I haven’t the least notion why there should have been a deliberate attempt on Roughouse’s life. But one there was. It was an assassination. And it only just failed in its object.’

  Chapter Three

  At home not long before dawn Harriet, in her utter tiredness, was every bit as out of temper as she had thought she might be. Teeth unbrushed, clothes tossed in a jumbled heap on the chair, pants and creased shirt simply dropped on the floor, she turned at last to the bed. For a moment she thought of letting rip her bad temper and accidentally-on-purpose jolting John awake. But she managed, just, to restrain herself and set her alarm for a precise 8 a.m.

  The moment it was practical in the morning she was going to phone her bête-noire the ACC, and tell him that Percival Pidgeon’s evidence clearly pointed to an attempted assassination. Then she would make sure the investigation stayed in her own hands.

  To Hell with thoughts of resignation. There’s a task here I can bring to a result, if anyone can. And I mean to make sure I get it.

  When she made her call, however, she found she had walked into a battle. The ACC, early informed of the events at Gralethorpe, had come to the conclusion that the attack on Robert Roughouse must be the work of Animal Rights activists. He told her brusquely he intended to pass the investigation to the national team set up specifically to combat such militants.

  For a brief moment she tried to make a fair assessment of this theory. But, however far outside the rule of law she knew Animal Rights extremists felt themselves entitled to be, she could not see them going as far as deliberate assassination.

  Nothing for it then but to tell him about the grenade-hurling mechanism Percival Pidgeon had heard being fired. I can only hope it will convince him he’s got it wrong.

  But, even before she began putting forward this evidence, she was struck by a sharply miserable thought. Did the ACC hit on passing the investigation on simply because he wanted to take the case away from me without having to produce any arguments to show I’m not the detective I once was?

  All right, put it to the test.

  ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I discovered last night that the bomb that all but killed Mr Roughouse was not thrown by somebody in the crowd in the square at Gralethorpe. It was propelled from the chapel opposite the town hall using a sophisticated mortar-like device.’

  Will he even listen?

  But, yes, there’s a trace of puzzlement at the other end.

  ‘Sir,’ she went on rapidly, ‘surely this indicates the attack was nothing less than a purposefully attempted assassination. Sir, the device is still where I left it, ready for our own Scene of Crime people to make their daylight assessment.’

  ‘This contraption of yours,’ the ACC said at last. ‘Did you take steps to see it was properly protected? Or has it been left where anybody could come across it?’

  Does he really think I wouldn’t have taken that obvious precaution? Or is he simply implying it’s something any other senior officer would have done but that I am all too likely to have omitted?

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said, in as even a tone as she could manage. ‘I made sure the device would be guarded all night and into today by officers from Gralethorpe. It’s there, untouched, to be examined as soon as practical.’

  ‘But …’

  And then a silence.

  ‘Yes, sir? But you were going to say?’

  Abruptly then the ACC caved in.

  ‘Very well, Mrs Martens. Since you believe the case is most likely to be resolved in Birchester, you had better take charge of it. Set up an incident room at Waterloo Gardens PS, let me know what personnel you think you’ll need — it shouldn’t be all that many, unless Roughouse dies and it becomes a murder case — and carry on from there.’

  Which was precisely what she had wanted. Not that it did not immediately occur to her that an investigation that was unlikely to produce any early result might suit the ACC’s book rather better than not giving it to her at all.

  If 1 fail over this, won’t he have a perfect excuse to get an inefficient officer posted to Traffic, or to anywhere outside the CID?

  *

  Scarcely half an hour after she arrived at her own office at Waterloo Gardens there came a perfunctory knock on her door and she discovered she had been allocated as a ‘bag carrier’, whether wanted or not, one Detective Sergeant Woodcock, an officer she had, as it happened, never worked with before. But she knew about him. From his unswerving determination not to do anything requiring more work than bullying answers out of hapless witnesses he was called by almost everyone ‘Bolshy Bill’.

  At once she wondered whether Bolshy Bill’s sudden arrival was the ACC’s revenge for the way she had stopped him shovelling off to distant London an inquiry likely to be nothing but heavy trouble. Or am I being too sensitive, she promptly asked herself. John would tell me I am. But, no, I don’t think so. Or, anyhow, not much.

  She gave Woodcock a long look. A pale, freckled face stared back at her, blue-grey eyes flicking this way and that. He was wearing, as she recalled now that he invariably did, a grimy black-and-white dogstooth-check sports coat with under it a hideously bright shirt. A red-splotched tie was pulled down by a long inch from its top button. The whole outfit, it seemed, designed to offend every convention, particularly the long-inprint unspecific directive that plain-clothes officers should at all times dress with due respect for public standards.

  Ah, well …

  She set to putting this dubious assistant in the picture.

  ‘OK,’ she concluded. ‘I’m off quite shortly to St Ozzie’s to find out how well Robert Roughouse got through the night. I need to talk to him, of course, as soon as he’s in any way fit. No point in you accompanying me, though. Instead, I’d like you, yes, to do this. Get on the Net and find out as much as you can about Roughouse. Political career, financial circumstances, marital state, address — I think, in fact, he may have a house somewhere in our area — anything and everything you can dig up. All right?’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  Monosyllable acknowledgement somehow made to carry the message Idiot detective superintendent tasking me with idiot inquiries.

  Harriet left him to them and turned to considering the incident room the ACC had instructed her to set up. One thing had already occurred to her. If the personnel needed were to be as few as, plainly, the ACC thought they should be, then it was important to have someone in charge she could absolutely rely on.

  And, damn it, she thought, I know the very man. All right, it’s been a long time since I worked with DS Hapgood, but I haven’t forgotten that, in strong contrast to foisted-on-me Bolshy, he’s not only extremely efficient but that he’s not called ‘Happy’ Hapgood for nothing. His ever-ready geniality, if I can get hold of him, will make sure any outfit he organises will run perfectly smoothly. The essential background mechanism, the filing and cross-filing, the logging and assessing, will go like clockwork and, more important, every man and woman on the team will be willing to work full-out at every hour that’s needed.

  I must get him if I can. In no time at all Happy will organise to the full whatever incident room I get allocated, do everything that’s needed, check the VDUs are in working order, make sure enough phones are connected, see to it that whiteboards and corkboards are cleared of the detritus of their last use, all ready for newly scrawled reminders, newly taken photographs. Whatever’s needed.

  She reached for her phone, and rang B Division where, she supposed, DS Hapgo
od must still be posted.

  He was. And, thank goodness, it appeared not engaged with anything too important not to be put aside.

  Right, a word with Happy and then a quick wrestle with the people in Admin and the barriers of regulations which I’ll be told stand in the way of any transfer.

  *

  It was only when, some twenty minutes later, that Happy Hapgood himself poked his head through her door that doubts came winging across her mind. Oh God, she thought, Happy’s suddenly old. That neatly pointed little beard I remember has gone grey-white, the hair above it is a yet whiter halo. It really has been a long time since I actually saw him. Will he still …?

  ‘Happy,’ she said. ‘Good to see you again. How are things?’

  ‘Fine, fine. Just done my thirty, you know. Three weeks’ leave, starting next Monday, and then it’s feet up for ever.’

  No, she thought with a jolt of dismay. No. He’s here to tell me I’m not getting him. And I really must have him. There’s no one else who’ll take all the paperwork off my hands in the way he used to. God’s sake, I need to be free actively to investigate if I’m to get anywhere. I need to.

  Panicking thoughts rioted through her mind.

  But try …

  ‘I suppose, Happy,’ she ventured, ‘you couldn’t put off your feet-up life just for a week or two, or a bit more? I’ve been tasked with the bomb attack on that man Robert Roughouse — you’ve heard about it? — and I must have someone in my incident room who really knows what they’re about.’

  Happy shook his white-topped head.

  ‘Can’t be done, ma’am. Can’t be. Retirement paperwork’s all but gone through. Much as I’d like working with you one last time, nice end to it all, it’s just not possible.’

  Harriet sighed, all but groaned.

  ‘Well, if you’re aboard that unstoppable train, I suppose —’

  She broke off.

  Into her mind had come, unbidden, a favourite story of John’s, usually trotted out at dinner parties when somebody complained they had bumped up against implacable bureaucracy, whether merely some lowly individual’s intransigence or the full weight of official might.