by P. F. Ford
‘So what have you done this morning?’ asked Slater. ‘You seem to be looking rather pleased with yourself.’
Norman looked suitable abashed. ‘Well, I went a little off track this morning. There was something that had bothered me right from when you first told me about this case, and this morning, when I woke up, I knew what it was so I had to check it out. I didn’t tell you because it might have been a waste of time. Anyway, the thing is, I know the registration number of the bike the mystery courier used.’
Slater looked impressed. ‘How did you do that?’ he asked. ‘They told me it was covered in black tape and there was no way of reading it.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t tell me that,’ said Norman, ‘or I might never have looked at it. But I have to admit I got a bit lucky. When I blew up the images of the number plate, I realised there was a shop name across the bottom of the plate. It just so happens I busted the owner about twelve months ago for an assortment of charges, one of which was illegally selling number plates. I went over there and leaned all over him this morning and he coughed up the full registration number.’
‘That’s what’s missing at Tinton right now,’ said Slater. ‘There’s no one left with enough experience to listen to their hunches and then act upon them like that. That’s why we made a pretty good team: if one of us left a gap, the other one would usually fill it.’
Norman smiled. ‘Yeah, it did seem to work that way. Unfortunately, though, just like you, I’m human and I cock things up almost as often as I succeed.’
‘Yeah, well, none of us is perfect, Norm. I’ve had my own fair share of cock-ups you’ve had to dig me out of, so I’m not going to make a big deal out of it. Anyway, where are you with the registration number?’
‘Well, here’s where it gets confusing,’ said Norman. ‘The DVLA database has that number allocated to a Suzuki motorcycle, registered in the name of Jimmy Huston.’
‘But Goodnews reckons he’s got a cast-iron alibi,’ said Slater, ‘and his bike is a Yamaha. So he must have two bikes.’
‘If only it were that simple.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Just bear with me for a few minutes before you rush off and arrest him,’ said Norman. ‘I’ve been going back over my earlier search into Huston. When I first checked him out, I just did a cursory search to see if there was anything obvious we should know about. I wasn’t looking back far, just to see if he had any convictions, stuff like that. It was only later I found out about the name change. That’s where I became very unprofessional and jumped the gun, subsequently dropping you in the shit with your girlfriend.’
‘Yeah, well don’t worry about that. She still needs to apologise about that,’ said Slater. ‘And she’s not my girlfriend.’
‘Well, whatever she is,’ said Norman, ‘I think you might have a long wait for an apology. In fact, I think she had good reason to explode, and you probably need to apologise to her.’
‘Why?’ asked Slater, indignantly.
‘I told you James Radford had disappeared, right? The thing is, he didn’t disappear, he went to Australia and he’s still there. If I had done my job properly and found all this out at the time, I could have saved you both a lot of hassle.’
Slater was getting confused.
‘Hang on, Norm, I’m getting lost here. If he’s in Australia, what was he doing changing his name here? And where’s this all going?’
‘James Radford hasn’t changed his name,’ explained Norman. ‘He’s still James Radford, and he’s still in Australia. Jimmy Huston has always been Jimmy Huston. What we have is two Jimmy Hustons, but one of them ain’t a real person.’
Slater sighed and rubbed his eyes. Now he really was confused. ‘Am I stupid, or what?’ he asked, ‘because you’ve lost me.’
‘Let me make it simple,’ said Norman, ‘although it’s anything but. It looks to me like someone has cloned James Radford’s identity and used it to change his name to Jimmy Huston. That person has then cloned the real Jimmy Huston’s identity and added it to his fake Jimmy Huston to create a second version. He, or she, has used it to make us think the real Jimmy Huston killed Ian Becks. But I don’t think Jimmy Huston is our killer, and I’m quite sure he’s being framed. The real killer is the person who created the fake ID.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Slater.
‘I can show you the trail if you wanna check, and I wouldn’t blame you if you did, after last time,’ said Norman.
‘I don’t need to check up on you, Norm,’ said Slater. ‘If you’ve gone that far into it and you say it’s right, then that’s good enough for me.’
He paced up and down as he thought about what Norman had just told him. ‘Nothing’s ever bloody simple, is it?’ he said. ‘Whatever happened to good old-fashioned murder? Now we’ve got a villain who doesn’t even exist in the real world. How the hell are we going to catch that?’
‘The same way we ever did,’ said Norman. ‘Except now we’re not looking for who killed Becksy, but who created the fake Jimmy Huston.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Slater. ‘The question is, who are our suspects? I’m still not convinced Jimmy Huston’s not involved in some way. Maybe he’s created a fake Jimmy just to confuse us. And then there’s this supposed boyfriend. Where is he? Why hasn’t he come forward?’
‘Yeah,’ said Norman. ‘He’s the one that interests me. You’d think if he cared, he would have shown his face somewhere along the line.’
‘What about the guy who bought the motorcycle number plates?’ asked Slater. ‘Did you get a description?’
‘Of sorts,’ said Norman. ‘Georgie’s not the most reliable, or helpful, witness. According to him, the guy was some sort of pansy, very clean, neat, and tidy. Mind you, a tramp would look clean and tidy if you put him up against Georgie. He also said the guy has funny eyes that don’t look in the same direction, but I’d take that with a pinch of salt.’
‘Can we actually believe anything he said?’ asked Slater.
‘I think it would be fair to say he can be flexible with the truth,’ said Norman. ‘He would have told me it was a six-foot bunny rabbit if he thought he could have got away with it.’
‘Right then,’ said Slater. ‘In that case I think we should go back to Dickie’s Bar and see if we can find this boyfriend.’
‘Come on then. There’s no time like the present, and that young barman did say lunchtime was a good time to go if we wanted to ask questions. I have to say, the lunchtime menu looked pretty good too.’
Slater gave him a disapproving look.
‘What?’ said Norman, innocently. ‘Let’s be honest, it would be a shame to miss an opportunity to sample it.’
As Norman had hoped, they did learn the food at Dickie’s Bar was excellent, but apart from that, they were left with pretty mean pickings. The only thing Nico could remember that he hadn’t already told them was that whoever Ian Becks’ boyfriend was, he always wore dark glasses.
‘That wasn’t much help really, was it?’ asked Slater when they were back in the car. ‘We’re not really any further forward than we were.’
‘Yeah, but on the bright side, at least we’re not hungry,’ said Norman.
‘Oh, well, that’s alright then,’ said Slater, his voice laden with irony.
‘Hey, you have to eat,’ said Norman. ‘I don’t know about you, but I think better when I’m not hungry.’
‘Well, I hope you do,’ said Slater, ‘because we need something right now, and it doesn’t seem to be coming from my brain.’
‘Okay,’ said Norman. ‘So let’s just focus on this supposed boyfriend for a minute. We’ve got no reason to think this Nico, the barman guy, is giving us a load of crap, right?’
Slater nodded. ‘Not so far at any rate.’
‘Okay, in that case, we know the guy’s about your size, looks a bit like Cary Grant, and is vain enough to bleach his hair and look after himself. And now we know he wears dark glasses.’
‘Right,’ agreed Slater, patiently.
‘Do we know why he wears dark glasses?’
Slater sighed. ‘How could we?’ he asked.
‘Bear with me,’ said Norman, picking up on Slater’s impatience. ‘I’m not just rambling here, I am going somewhere with this. So why would someone wear dark glasses? Some people do it for effect, right? Or, it could be because they have some sort of vanity issue, like maybe they have some sort of eye problem they want to hide.’
‘You’re sure this is going somewhere, are you?’ asked Slater.
Norman gave him an indulgent smile. ‘Have faith,’ he said. ‘Remember my biker friend, Georgie? He told me the guy who wanted the number plates made up had funny eyes, right? Wouldn’t that be a possible reason to wear dark glasses?’
‘So why wasn’t he wearing them when he bought the number plates?’ asked Slater.
‘How many reasons d’you want?’ asked Norman. ‘Maybe he broke ’em. Maybe he can’t wear them with a tinted visor on his crash helmet because it makes it too dark. Maybe he just wants to make sure different people give different descriptions. Shall I go on?’
‘So you think the boyfriend is the same guy who paid for the number plates?’
‘It’s gotta be a possibility, hasn’t it?’ said Norman. ‘You have to ask why hasn’t this guy come forward? It could be that he’s not come out yet, or maybe he’s just a coward—’
‘Or maybe he never was a boyfriend, but was someone just trying to gain Ian’s confidence,’ finished Slater.
‘Exactly. It makes sense when you think about it.’
‘But if we’re going along with the revenge theory, and this guy isn’t James Radford, what’s his motive?’
‘Heck, I don’t have all the answers,’ said Norman, laughing. ‘Maybe we can ask him when we catch him.’
Slater started the car and began to head for home. Something was nagging away at the back of his brain, but he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Norman had known Slater long enough to recognise when he was deep in thought, so he kept quiet on the short journey back to Slater’s house. It was only as Slater pulled on the handbrake outside his house and switched off the engine that the penny dropped and he realised what had been troubling him. He turned to Norman.
‘You have that glint in your eye,’ said Norman, ‘and I’m sure it’s not because you fancy me. You’ve just joined some dots, right?’
‘We’re agreed this guy wears dark glasses, right?’ asked Slater.
‘It looks that way,’ said Norman.
‘But we think it’s unlikely it’s James Radford trying to avenge Adam Radford’s death.’
‘From Australia? He’d need an accomplice,’ said Norman.
‘Agreed,’ said Slater. ‘You were bullied as a kid, weren’t you?’
‘All the fat kids were,’ said Norman. ‘I was just lucky I could make enough jokes to keep the bullies amused most of the time. But one or two of the others had their lives made a misery.’
‘If you were one of those other kids, how long do you think you’d feel resentment towards your bullies?’
‘That would depend on how bad they had affected me,’ said Norman, ‘I’m sure some would spend the rest of their lives wanting to get their own back. What’s that got to do with this anyway?’
‘Malcolm Jennings, the dentist,’ said Slater. ‘He wears dark glasses. He says he has a condition that makes his eyes sensitive to bright lights, but I’ve only got his word for it.’
‘And he was bullied at school by Ian Becks and his pals,’ added Norman. ‘Why not? He’s as good a suspect as we have.’
‘Fancy a trip to Winchester?’ asked Slater.
‘Sure,’ said Norman. ‘It’s a nice afternoon for a drive.’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
On the way down to Winchester, Norman called Malcolm Jennings’ dentist surgery on the pretext of needing some dental work done urgently.
‘I’ve been told Mr Jennings is brilliant,’ he told the receptionist. ‘Is there any chance he could fit me in? I don’t mind waiting until the end of the day.’
He listened to the receptionist’s reply, and then ended the call.
‘Crap,’ he said. ‘This is a wasted journey. She says he’s taken the afternoon off.’
‘We’ll just have to pay him a visit at home then,’ said Slater.
‘You have his address?’
‘Oh, yeah. When I spoke to him before, I asked if it was okay to come back if I thought of anything else. He said he’d rather I came to his home, and he gave me the address.’
‘Is it right?’
Slater nodded. ‘I didn’t think he would give me a false address when I knew where he worked, but I checked just in case.’
‘Well in that case, he must be pretty confident we’re not going to think it’s him,’ said Norman.
‘Or he’s got nothing to hide.’
‘I suppose there is that possibility, but my gut’s telling me different.’
‘Are you sure your gut’s not just telling you you’ve eaten too much again?’
‘Trust me,’ said Norman, not rising to the bait. ‘I’m not wrong about this.’
Iverton was a small village about five miles south of Winchester. As they drove slowly along the one narrow road through the village, it was easy to see there was no shortage of money out here. Slater reckoned the smaller houses would cost in the region of half a million, and he had no doubt many were well about the one million mark. When they finally found Malcolm Jennings’ house, Applegate, it was obviously one of those.
Slater turned off the road and the car crunched its way up the short gravel driveway to the house. He parked the car and they climbed out.
‘It’s very quiet,’ said Norman. ‘You’d have thought anyone inside would have heard us crunching our way up that drive and be looking to see who it was. It’ll be just our luck if he’s out.’
‘Let’s find out,’ said Slater. He marched up to the front door, rang the bell, and waited. ‘Looks like there’s no one in,’ he said, and rang the bell again.
They waited another minute, but still there was no sign of life. Slater bent down, lifted the letterbox, and peered inside. Faint music seemed to be coming from somewhere deep inside the house, but there were no other sounds. He let go of the letterbox and straightened up.
‘I can hear music,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’re out the back.’
Norman wandered off to the right-hand side, looking for a way around to the back of the house. A double garage had been built alongside the house, but there was a passageway between the two.
‘Round here,’ he called to Slater. ‘There’s a back gate.’
Slater followed Norman round the side of the house and through the gate. An enormous paved area stretched all the way across the back of the house, past a stable door at the near end and two sets of French doors further along.
‘Nice,’ observed Norman, ‘but I don’t think my pension would stretch quite this far. Jeez, how much does a dentist make?’
‘Yeah, it’s pretty tasty,’ agreed Slater.
He walked across to the stable door and knocked. Again, there was no answer. There was a small window to one side, and then on the other side, a much larger window. He looked through the larger window into a spacious kitchen. Everything was neat and tidy. It certainly looked as if no one was home. He thought perhaps they’d gone out and left the radio on.
While Slater was peering in the window, Norman was trying to imagine how much money this guy must have and was wondering what sort of car he might drive. A side door opened into the garage from the patio and there was a small window alongside it. He put his face to the window, and using his hand to create some shade, he looked inside.
‘Come take look at this,’ he called to Slater.
Slater walked over and took Norman’s place at the window.
‘What’s your gut telling you now?’ asked Slater.
‘It’s a bit of a coincidence, right?
’ said Norman. ‘I mean, we’re looking for a Suzuki with black tape on the number plate, right? And we’re also looking for Becksy’s bike. And what do we see right here in this garage?’
‘I can’t believe he’d be so stupid as to leave it all here for us to find,’ said Slater.
‘Overconfidence,’ said Norman. ‘That’s what this is. He’s probably so convinced we’d believe it was Jimmy Huston, he hasn’t cleaned up behind him properly.’
‘I suppose I ought to call my boss. Perhaps she’ll listen to me and follow this up now we’ve got some concrete evidence.’
‘We’re not gonna go off and leave this, are we?’ asked Norman. ‘For all we know the guy’s figured out we’re on to him and he’s about to do a runner. Why don’t we just wait for him and bust him ourselves?’
‘We can wait down the road,’ said Slater. ‘If he comes back, we can maybe stop him leaving again.’
‘This isn’t really you talking, is it?’ asked Norman. ‘Only it doesn’t sound like you. What’s going on?’
‘I just think I’d rather hand it over. Goodnews needs this more than we do.’
‘Really?’ said an amazed Norman. ‘After that bust-up yesterday? You really have gone soft on her.’
‘It’s complicated,’ said Slater. ‘She has her back against the wall getting a load of shit she doesn’t deserve. She needs all the help she can get right now.’
‘Okay. I won’t say I understand, because I don’t really, but you’re the boss, and it’s your call.’
They got back in their car
‘I’d better make that call,’ said Slater awkwardly.
‘Go ahead,’ said Norman. ‘Don’t mind me.’
Slater glowered at him but Norman just looked away and whistled a jaunty little tune. Eventually, he heaved a sigh.
‘Fine, I’ll leave you to it,’ he said and climbed from the car.
The sun had decided to put in an appearance, so Norman ambled round to the front of the car and leaned against the bonnet to enjoy its warmth while he waited.
After about ten minutes, Slater wound down his window. ‘It’s okay, you can get back in now.’
