by J P Lomas
After a cursory examination Sobers felt the need to clear his lungs of the smoke still cloying the air in the flat and led his sergeant back outside. He was wondering what the next step was going to be, when Hawkins informed him of the incident room they’d had set up in the village hall. Mouthing a silent prayer for her intervention he let her lead the way. Now all he had to figure out was whether this was a case of arson in which the butcher had died inadvertently, or whether this really was the first murder investigation he would be leading?
****
Kicking her shoes off at the end of the day ranked as one of Jane’s main pleasures in life. Returning even the most comfortable pair to the shoe rack in their hallway was a daily ritual which signified her return to family life.
‘So what’s he like?’
‘Black! I always have it black! You’ve gone and put milk in it!’ protested Jane as she curled up on the sofa and wondered whether the Artex ceiling needed another coat of paint after all.
‘Sorry, dreadful day, I’m all over the place, Leo’s got a cold and Jen’s been pestering me to buy her an LP. Anyway what’s this City Whizz kid like?’
Tim Hawkins emerged from their open plan kitchen to place a perfunctory kiss on his wife’s cheek and to hand her a replacement coffee.
‘Which LP?’
‘Something by Duran Duran, she’s still got that postal order left over from her birthday.’
‘You mean those good looking guys adorning her bedroom wall?‘ Jane teased as Tim plonked himself down on the end of the sofa.
‘If you mean those effeminate looking mother’s boys without a decent tune among them, then yes I suppose I do, ‘smiled Tim as he pulled off his marigolds and reached for the remote.
‘Hey, don’t you want to talk about my day honey? And anyway I think a bit of make-up can make a man look very attractive, ‘she flashed back.
‘Gene Simmons, maybe, but then those guys can bang out a good tune.’
‘There’s more to music than Heavy Metal.’
‘Don’t even go there! Now you’re stepping on sacred ground!’
‘How’s Leo then?’
Jane could see that Tim was at the limit of his teasing potential and knowing that heavy metal and single malt whisky were potential domestic mine fields, she wisely centred their conversation back on Leo. A name she’d been able to persuade Tim she’d chosen because of their son’s birthday, rather than the influence of her secret crush on Leo Sayer.
‘Still can’t work out if it’s a genuine cold, or a way of avoiding rugby?’
‘Did you send him to school?’
‘Yes, but with a note excusing him from Games.’
Jane shot her husband a quizzical look, although she moderated it from the full interrogative stare which she would deliver to a career criminal in an interview room, to one more suited to the polite questioning of the rich and famous. She had to remember that Tim did the lion’s share of the parenting duties and she had solemnly promised on more than one occasion never to tread on his domestic toes.
‘So, how’s work? You seem to be investing a lot of time in your appearance of late.’
‘Jealous?’
‘Curious.’
‘I’m not going to be running off with Sobers any time soon, ‘she grinned, ‘anyway I think he’s too cool to run anywhere.’
‘A slick, sophisticated metropolitan type then?’ asked Tim as he idly flicked through the four channels in a bid to find something he was interested in watching.
‘If I switch the object of my lust from Paul Newman to Sidney Poitier, then you can start worrying.’
‘Well as long as I’m still allowed my moment with Farah Fawcett when she pops round to borrow some sugar?’
‘That’s a deal, darling,’ answered Jane as the opening titles of Brookside filled the screen.
Chapter 2
Littleham had once been a village in its own right; however like the town’s other former satellites of Withycombe and Brixington, it had been swallowed up by Exmouth’s urban expansion, as the fading seaside resort reinvented itself as a dormitory town for Exeter. An incident room had been set up in the village hall, which stood all alone in a field just down the hill from the holiday camp sprawled out on the red cliffs above. A coastal path would have led the more adventurous holiday maker from the cliffs at one end of Exmouth, along past the caravan park and then onwards to the resorts of Budleigh Salterton and Sidmouth. The only minor hazards for the more intrepid tourists were the crumbling cliffs and occasional herd of cows left to graze the fields.
A few pretty cottages stood opposite the village hall, flanked by a short terrace of pre-War Council houses. A newer development of bungalows for retired people had been built in one of the adjacent fields, just below the ornamental archway signalling entry to the caravan park. Buses, looking like something an NHS ambulance and a Royal Mail van might have crossbred, carried these senior citizens through the village, up to the Cross and then down to Exmouth for their weekly shop.
What remained of the village stood in a small dip between the hill leading up to the cliffs and the hill which led onwards to Littleham Cross. The village’s commercial centre had shrunk to one shop, one pub and a seasonal tea-room close by the Church; making it even smaller than its near neighbour The Cross. Nelson’s wife was buried in the local churchyard, but no-one ever seemed to make a big thing of it. If it had been Britain’s most famous disabled war hero, or even his mistress, it might have been seen worthy of some fuss. A small stream and narrow bridge which might have been thought of as picturesque were in fact perceived by most tourists as a potential hazard to their paintwork. They were more concerned about whether their caravans could pass by safely, without scrapes or dents, than taking time to stop and take a photo. The few businesses in the village survived on scraps from the holiday camp’s high table – most of those who visited lived in a self-catered, self-contained world and if they did venture out, tended to spend their money at places further afield than the ones on their doorstep.
Sobers was interrupted in his musings by the arrival of his sergeant.
‘He made just £1.87 on his final day and had under a tenner in the till. Woman at the bakery said he’d pop in there if he ever needed change. Though she also said he hadn’t done that since before Christmas. Found his accounts in one of those old ledgers in a tin box under his bed. Looks like he’d been making a loss for the last decade. So much for the benefits of joining the Common Market …’
Jane closed her notebook and waited for her new boss to comment.
‘So money wasn’t an immediate motive?’
‘He had just over two grand in the bank - I’ve heard that people have been killed for less.’
‘That’s true,’ Sobers sighed and rocked back in the old wooden chair he’d found in what appeared to be some type of props cupboard for local productions at the back of the village hall they’d been allocated for an incident room. It was at least more comfortable than the dirty orange plastic chairs which had arrived with the battered desks and extra telephone lines. As Sobers snagged one of his long fingers on a splinter in the arm of the chair, he reflected on how these small, rural locations were a world away from the busy and crowded London he had grown up in. And yet he had to keep telling himself that he’d wanted to cut himself off from that world when he’d transferred down here just after New Year.
‘Your first murder case, sir?’
‘Unless we’re ruling out suicide.’
‘You’re not…’ Jane smiled as she realised her boss was being deadpan.
‘Time of death?’
‘The forensic boys put it at between midnight and half past. A good time. Anyone who was up at that time was most probably watching the results come in.’
‘And are you pleased with the results?’
‘Well it’s nice to have a woman in charge for once and I think Mrs Thatcher’s taken the country by the scruff of its neck and given it a well-deserved shaking up. I kno
w it must have been hard for you sir…’
‘Hard?’
‘Well you know, the riots, it can’t have been easy taking sides when your people were, … involved, sir?’
Sobers gave a rare smile –
‘My people, Jane?’
Jane blushed, she had been telling herself all morning not to make an issue of the race thing and here she was, size nines firmly planted in her mouth.
‘Go and find out who benefits from Mr Kellow’s death’.
****
A is for Adultery.
I used to think it was called that because it was something adults did. Well it is something adults do, but the word comes from the Latin and means to make impure.
They used to stone adulterers to death; they were punished more severely than murderers. I wonder how many of my friends and neighbours would be going to jail if it was a crime today? Quite a few, I suspect; myself included.
Do these condoms preserve your purity? They’re trying to make the queers use them. Perhaps you’re still pure if the fluids don’t mix? The Metaphysical Poets used to think it was the mixing of the blood which was sexual; the comingling. They termed sex the little death.
My father used to pore over the respectable newspapers, salaciously reading aloud the details from the divorce cases. Those were the days in which adultery had to be proved, if a divorce was to be granted. People hired private detectives to follow people to hotels. Even the adulterers wanted to be caught at times, if it made their divorce possible.
Daddy would assume I was too young and innocent to follow what he was reading.
I wonder if he ever knew that mummy’s purity wasn’t all that he thought it was?
I heard her making strange noises one day when she thought I was asleep in my room. When I peeked around her bedroom door I saw her ‘in flagrante delicto’ as the newspapers would tactfully term it; or getting her oats as my best friend liked to say. I was worried that she might be in pain and wished Daddy was at home to save her, but I then saw her smiling in a way she never smiled at Daddy and kissing her lover in the way the film stars did. Not in the polite, formal manner she greeted Daddy with.
I think I was old enough to understand that this made Mummy happy and that when she was happier it was better at home. She would always be more affectionate to me afterwards and I’d be bought ice creams, or taken to the cinema. Daddy was away so often that Mummy had seemed very sad before these visits began. It was only that summer she became the Mummy I like to remember. I therefore concluded that getting your oats was a good thing for Mummies. Lily always said her Mummy seemed happier when Uncle Robert called and that she got extra pocket money on those weekends.
My only worry was when the doctor came to the door and I was there to answer it, but then I realised it was only Mummy he wanted to see undressed…
****
House to house enquiries had come up with little information. Most people had simply wanted to know who the black copper was and what he was doing down here. P.C. Mark Salmons felt bound to sympathise, how were he and Cheryl going to afford a home of their own if they gave all the promotions to incomers? Especially if Cheryl got up the duff. Even the D.S. wasn’t a local; Tony had said she’d been brought in from Plymouth. Tony also reckoned she was one of those lesbians the Labour Party had wanted running the force, though to be fair to the D.S., Tony had been calling Kevin Keegan a poof for the last few years simply on the evidence of his bubble perm...
Another factor in Hawkins’ favour was that Salmons quite fancied her and he knew he would never have possessed the bad taste to fancy a dyke. As far as he was concerned, lezzers wore dungarees and/or narrow pencil moustaches. From Salmons’ on-going surveillance of his fellow female officers, he’d give Hawkins a good seven out of ten for her tits and if you liked arses, then she had to be a close second to shapely Sandy Clark. Not of course that he’d place his Cheryl on either scale. Even if he had been known to indulge Tony’s occasional lecherous comments about his fiancée’s vital statistics, he’d always been chivalrous enough to add the warning that his Chezza was ‘off limits’.
Such philosophising had at least made the interminable round of visits to the terraced council houses and old people’s bungalows bearable for the young policeman. It had been one of the last addresses on the estate which Salmons tried that finally gave him a worthwhile bit of information to report, as well as one of the few lookers to interview. Sara Jenkins, as well as giving him a welcome flash of thigh, had seen something suspicious on the night in question. She’d seen a car; she thought it might have been some sort of hatchback, leaving the close with all the old people’s bungalows in it at the bottom of the Cross. Her boyfriend had been caught short and had needed a slash as they cut through the estate along the route of the disused railway line. She’d been surprised as it was usually a fairly quiet spot and if it had been someone with a legitimate reason to be there, she presumed her boyfriend might have got an ear full for peeing over the rhododendrons, but the driver had made a pretty nifty exit.
Salmons had taken down her description of the car, but she’d been unable to recall the registration, or anything useful about the driver except for the fact the figure was Caucasian. To Salmons it seemed she’d been watching too many episodes of Hill Street Blues, though at least he could rule out the DI. If he’d focused less on the revelation that the lovely Sara with the bleached denim mini skirt had a boyfriend, then he might have prompted her to recall more about the driver. As it was his report to Sobers was met with no more than a perfunctory acknowledgement that it needed following up. Salmons’ version of this to Tony and the others in the Lady Nelson that night made it appear he’d found the smoking gun to solve the case and that the one real prejudice in this world was against good, honest coppers on the beat.
****
The main object of Salmons’ rancorous remarks discovered that the crime scene was no less desolate the following Sunday, though it was at least possible for Sobers to see it through eyes which weren’t watering from the smoke. He felt a twinge of conscience for working on the Sabbath, yet the fact that there were no promising leads, alongside the pressure from on high, had made him put his normally deep rooted principles aside. This ‘high flyer from London’, their words and not his, was going to have to pull out all the stops. And so he’d given Hawkins the time to spend with her family whilst he visited the all but closed parade of shops after a less than peaceful communion in Littleham Village’s medieval church.
Littleham Cross had far less of a claim to a separate identity than the village from which it took its name. There was no actual cross there, just a rather ugly, gigantic wooden statue of a beer drinker outside the Cranford Tavern; a great barn of a pub, which seemed far too vast and vulgar for its more genteel surroundings. The pub stood on the junction of the main Exmouth to Budleigh Salterton road and the minor roads which leant to Brixington on the left and ribboned to Littleham Village on the right; though this did nothing to boost its flagging trade. The late George Kellow’s butcher’s shop together with a bakery, a post-office, a fish and chip shop, two newsagents, a small convenience store and a car parts shop lined the road which led down to the village. It was flanked by large detached houses with rambling gardens, many of which stood on the affluent avenues which ambled down to the town. The Cross itself had all but given up its identity as anything more than infill; it was what it had always been, a crossroads on the way to somewhere else.
Sobers looked around the butcher’s living room; he found it difficult to think of the man by name. Perhaps it was because this was his first murder case; well the first he had been in charge of. In London, he’d assisted at an investigation into the death of a night club doorman whose body had been found helping to cultivate the soil of Epping Forest. His D.I. had been very old school and had no time for modern theories about getting beneath the skin of the victim. Hunt had just wanted to nab the bad guys. If that meant threatening to beat the living daylights out of a local
drug dealer to get a name, then so be it. Sobers had admired that simplicity – he wasn’t sure if all this talk about getting to know the deceased was a good idea, yet he had drawn his own personal line at forcing information from people. He couldn’t help but reflect that although a lot of people probably deserved to be fitted up, there were probably quite a few villains out there who had benefitted from other people taking their rap out of fear.
Still, as a newly promoted D.I. he was prepared to learn and who knew what lengths he might have to take to solve his first murder? Still, as he thought of the victim’s body on the slab, he found it difficult to care about the case on anything other than an intellectual level – a puzzle for him to solve. He knew he’d have felt differently if the body had been that of a kid, or a young mum, yet when he had stood in the morgue looking down at Kellow’s body he had felt little affinity with the victim. The butcher had been old, overweight and by all accounts a modern day Scrooge. Every hair might indeed be counted, yet he still found himself wishing for a more purposeful life to investigate; however perverse he knew that desire to be.
The living room itself did nothing to help airbrush a more endearing picture of the late George Kellow. He wondered what Kellow had been like when he was young? The corpse had given him the probably wrong impression that Kellow had been born middle-aged and just got older. He’d only been 67 when he was killed, but Sobers wouldn’t have been surprised at any estimate from 70 to 80. There were no photos in the room of a younger George, or any of children, or grandchildren gazing adorably out of photo frames. Hawkins had found out there was an elder sister in a nursing home in Honiton who was the sole beneficiary of Kellow’s modest will. With less than £2000 in savings, the shop and flat valued at just south of fifty grand were the only things worth killing for. That in itself might be a motive, it was a decent amount of cash, certainly more than Sobers could put together, and some of the neighbouring shopkeepers had said that Darren Price, owner of several local amusement arcades, had been sniffing round the Cross lately looking for a new site to invest in. He’d asked Hawkins to check Price out.
