Scar Tissue

by Judith Cutler

  The guy’s eyebrows told me he needed a better description than that.

  I smiled slowly, though my brain felt very noisy. Coins were dropping all over the place. ‘In fact, you’ll find a lot of skinny folk in the kitchen. But he’s the only Western European one. And I’ve never seen an English face doing any of the service jobs, you know, cleaning and serving in the restaurant.’

  ‘Most hotels depend on overseas staff.’

  ‘They don’t usually pretend to be anything else. One of them does, at least. There’s a bloke on reception with an excruciating French accent. You know, officer, it might pay you to go in mob-handed when you return that bike – so you can check the papers of all the poor sods working there. And I don’t suppose you’ll find a legal migrant amongst the lot of them. Amongst the shreds,’ I added, ‘you’ll probably find some photos of some tired and miserable young men being loaded into a van. I was sorry for them, thinking they’d probably got miles to travel. I’m still sorry for them, but I’ll bet their destination was just down the road – the hotel where Mr Moffatt put me up. He wasn’t so much protecting me as keeping an eye on me, maybe. And charging it to the account of poor Police Constable Tadeuzs Moscicki.’

  He looked across at Jan. ‘He’s the young man who accompanied you when you made your complaint.’

  ‘Yes. I was proud of him, risking his career like that.’ She smiled at me but I didn’t respond.

  Instead I looked at my watch. ‘The bike,’ I murmured.

  ‘And Todd,’ added Jan.

  Eventually, the top lawyers agreed that Jan no longer needed their support and remembered that they had lucrative court cases the following day. With courteous farewells all round, they headed back to London. Meanwhile, Todd, Jan and I trooped across to the County Hotel, tired out. Todd, who’d spent a tedious hour in a cell, for God’s sake, and Jan were no spring chickens, after all, and I’d had very little sleep the previous night and a very long, hard day. We scarcely noticed what accommodation we were offered or the fact the staff were bent almost double in their anxiety to treat a Celebrity as he deserved.

  Any chance of oversleeping was ruined by Ashford’s efficient street-cleaners, who were busy hoovering at about seven. We had a hearty breakfast, attended by a no doubt specially wakened maitre d’ and a team of adoring acolytes. When Jan started muttering to Todd ominous words about cholesterol and weight, he gave me an enormous wink and her a guilty smile. We soon returned to the police station, to be accorded the best of VIP treatment there, too. Todd soon excused himself, saying he could be more usefully employed elsewhere, but Jan promised to stay with me to make sure I wasn’t brow-beaten in any way,

  ‘Brow-beaten?’ Gates repeated when she told him. He looked as if he’d worked through the night.

  ‘How about lied to and betrayed?’ I suggested. ‘Look, wouldn’t it save everyone a lot of bother if I just told my story all over again? Starting with the body I found at Crabton Manor and my conversation with your Sergeant Marsh? That’ll mean –’

  ‘Body at Crabton Manor? I don’t think I know about this.’ He sat down at a desk that was until recently someone else’s, I suspect, his shoulders looking wider than ever. For the first time I noticed his eyes, so grey they looked as hard as flint. I was glad that fundamentally he was on my side. With him taking notes, I began my story.

  ‘You took photos?’ he recapped at last.

  ‘Not of the body, I’m afraid. Of the dents left in the duvet it had been dumped on. And we retrieved some fibres from the rope that had throttled him.’

  ‘“We” will be you and your boss? Paula Farmer?’

  ‘Yes. For some reason she didn’t hand all the copies to Taz – the ones that I presume are now destroyed?’

  He didn’t take the hint.

  I added, ‘When I got back – after DS Marsh had accused me of wasting police time – I did search the grounds in case van der Poele had simply buried him. Nothing. But I’ve not checked recently – he’s got these really vicious dogs.’

  ‘Would you excuse me a second?’

  Before I could scream that this was what had happened before, he simply picked up the phone and dialled, using the word ‘Mispa’ to the person the other end. A Missing Persons check, then. He seemed to be transferred a couple of times, but finally got whom he wanted, repeating my description of a heavily built man with a lot of rings on his fingers and marks of strangulation about his neck. ‘Ah,’ he said at last. ‘That sounds very interesting. I’ll ask our witness if she’d mind identifying him.’

  There was a squawk from the other end. Gates fixed those granite eyes on me. ‘She’ll cope,’ he said, overriding what sounded like a stream of protests. ‘Won’t you?’ He smiled at me.

  ‘You don’t have to and you’re not going to,’ I told Jan firmly, when she wanted to come into the morgue with me. The smell, for a start. Not to mention what I was going to have to look at. I wasn’t new to it, my friends having been in the same profession as me, and running the same risks. Some far worse risks, with literally fatal results. A few years back I’d rather thought the next time I was in a morgue I’d be in the starring role, as it were, but thanks to Taz I’d been spared that. So far, at least.

  Nothing prepared me for the sight of a corpse that had been in water as long as this, though, and water with crabs in it to boot. Jesus. I was hard put not to deposit all that wonderful English breakfast on the pristine tiles of the floor.

  ‘With so little face left it’s hard to tell,’ I said, trying to sound judicious. ‘Though that does look like a nasty bit of bruising on his neck.’ That was about all I could manage. I’d reeled out to the waiting area before my brain clicked in again. ‘What about his rings? Great big things?’

  The WPC with us grinned. ‘Would you rather see the photos?’

  ‘Much rather.’

  This time I did judicious much better. ‘Yes, I’d say that those were the same rings or very similar. And I’d be prepared to say so in court.’

  ‘Very similar isn’t really good enough for a court.’

  ‘You’ll have lots of other stuff to ID him, though, won’t you? Dental records, DNA – I’m sure you’re like the TV cops.’

  ‘Smaller budgets,’ she said.

  As an expert on small budgets, I didn’t argue.

  Whether Paula had had a disappointing date, or whether she was being wisely uncooperative, she certainly didn’t sound keen on bringing over the photos and rope fibres. Well, who could blame her? Apart from anything else, it was the perfect day for painting, warm and dry but overcast, with hardly a breath of wind. Van der Poele still owed us a lot of money which she could only get out of him when the job was finished. Unless, of course, he was arrested first. Hell, what’d happen to our money if he ended in the clink? The RSPCA would no doubt deal with his pooches – but who’d make sure we got paid? I knew the police could confiscate criminals’ money, but would they feel they had to share the spoils?

  ‘How do you know this cop’s genuine?’ Paula demanded.

  ‘I don’t. Except they took me to see the corpse of that stiff I found. Very dead.’

  ‘You’re sure it was him?’

  ‘Fairly. Tell me, the bedroom we photographed – has van der Poele stripped it? Or has he left it was it was?’

  ‘He’s stripped the bed. But you can tell this latest plod the curtains and carpet are still there.’

  ‘He’s not a plod at all, Paula – he’s really so bright he’s quite scary.’ Damn, he came into the room just as I said that. I cut the call, flushing.

  ‘It’s OK.’ He smiled, rather surprising me how attractive he could look. ‘I like being bright and scary when it comes to being part of the Rubber Heel squad. Squashing bent cops,’ he explained. ‘I like a bit of law and order, Ms Tyler, and I don’t like it when people lie and cheat and kill, especially when they’re police officers.’

  That was one thing we agreed on, anyway.

  ‘I’m afraid my boss doesn’t want
to hand over her bits and pieces.’

  ‘We can subpoena her if absolutely necessary. But I’d rather convince her we were decent, honest cops.’

  ‘So would I.’

  ‘Any idea how we can regain her trust – and yours, of course?’

  ‘The thing is, Mr Gates, I gave Moffatt and Co a lot of information. They appeared to give me a lot back. Moffatt listed all the people and organisations he’d got on the parcel bomb case. MI5, would you believe? Well, I did at the time. But I’m not sure now. Have you got time to sit down and tell me and Jan what’s going on? And I mean truthfully.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I wonder when the last person spoke to him like that, somebody ordinary like me, not another senior officer or a lawyer. He looked completely taken aback.

  After a swift gasp, Jan sat back quietly to await developments.

  ‘I’m still trying to separate fact from fiction,’ he said. ‘The fact that neither Marsh nor Moffatt has uttered a word since they were cautioned doesn’t help. And, of course, we know that there must be other officers involved – a regular chain of command.’

  ‘Or irregular, as the case may be,’ I chipped in.

  ‘Actually, yes – I can’t imagine they follow the approved police hierarchy, can you?’ He flashed an impish smile. I was beginning to like him. ‘You listed groups of people that Moffatt told you were involved with your case, one of them being us. Well, he was lying about that, no doubt about it. And about the involvement of the Human Smuggling Unit and Immigration.’

  ‘No National Crime Squad?’

  ‘Only when we bring them in. Which will be pretty soon, I should imagine. The only people who seem to have been the genuine article were the ones who destroyed the letter bomb. We’ve got a great deal of unravelling still to do, as you can see.’

  ‘At least you have hard evidence in the form of the corpse Caffy identified. And harder, if we can persuade Paula to produce the items she’s holding.’ Jan sounded very lawyerly.

  ‘There may be something else your SOCO teams could find,’ I added. ‘We may not have photos of those poor devils being loaded into a bread van, but I can show you where it was parked. And you know the van exists, and the removal lorry that collected them the first time I saw them. The men were walked along the canal bank – they may have dropped fag ends or something as they walked. The reeds may have caught bits of clothing. And you may find some of the workers at the hotel ready to talk.’

  For some reason his laugh sounded a bit forced. Ah. I must be slipping: he was probably the sort of man who liked having ideas first.

  To be fair, he recovered quickly. ‘There should be some preliminary reports from the team out at the Mondiale. Excuse me.’ He picked up the phone.

  At last, it was clear that what Gates called honest, decent painstaking police work was going to take some time. Someone had to persuade Paula to hand over the photos, and who better than me? But it wasn’t just the thought of the dogs that made me reluctant to go back to Crabton Manor. It was one thing playing schoolgirl detectives hunting for clues about van der Poele: it was another to have the theories taken dead seriously – with, of course, a corpse to substantiate them.

  Jan agreed.

  ‘Surely you could phone Ms Farmer,’ Gates said. ‘There’s no need for you to see her at all.’

  ‘One, it’s a mobile black spot –’

  ‘Ah. So we should have landline records of phone calls.’

  ‘Unless Moffatt got there first.’

  ‘You told him? Don’t look like that, Caffy. The whole idea of police officers is that you can trust them.’

  I nodded. Then I said slowly, ‘Two, I have a living to earn, and Paula has a business to run. Crabton Manor is where I ought to be.’

  He shook his head sharply, then paused. ‘I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to pull in van der Poele for preliminary questioning.’

  Jan said sharply, ‘So long as you can keep him in. I wouldn’t give this much for Caffy’s chances if he thought she’d grassed him up.’ She snapped her fingers impressively. Years of practice clicking in rhythm with Todd, maybe.

  ‘He wouldn’t suspect anything if I was just out there in my dungarees painting away as usual.’ I didn’t sound very convincing to my own ears.

  ‘Dogs,’ Jan said tersely.

  I shut up. Briefly. ‘What about doing some preparation at Fullers? Goodness knows there’s enough to be done.’

  Gates managed a chilly laugh. ‘Swarming with our people. Genuine ones.’

  Jan said sharply, ‘It’s a listed building, not to mention a very lovely one. I don’t want a load of macho lads hunting hidey-holes with axes and rams.’

  ‘Point taken. Now, Caffy, you might be useful there. You and your friend Paula. Looking for further hidden spaces. We’d pay a fee,’ he added, before I could say a word. ‘For professional services. And we might be a better bet than Mr van der Poele: people of the criminal fraternity don’t always pay their debts.’

  ‘It’d bankrupt Paula if she didn’t get paid! Or if she had to go through some long legal battle to get money off him while he was in jail.’

  ‘You forget you have a tame legal adviser,’ Jan smiled. ‘We’ll make sure you all get your money somehow or other. James is very good too –’

  ‘But his fee –’

  ‘Would be paid by van der Poele if the court awarded costs – which I’m sure they would,’ Gates smiled.

  ‘It mustn’t come to that! It’s all very well for someone like you with a guaranteed monthly salary to talk about litigation. Paula doesn’t have that luxury. We don’t have that luxury. Jan, can you make him understand?’

  ‘We’ll bankroll you ourselves if needs be.’

  ‘Don’t you think I know that? You’re the loveliest and best and most generous people on God’s earth, but you shouldn’t have to, not if this is done properly.’ I think I even stamped my foot in frustration.

  Gates coughed gently and gave the sort of smile designed to wrap up a meeting. However, I still had one or two other things to ask first. ‘We had a sort of minder, who painted with us till he got housemaid’s knee. Sid. He dropped a pen in my bag, which turned out to hide a bug. I suppose there’s no chance he was a decent undercover cop?’

  Gates made a note.

  ‘Last seen at the William Harvey Hospital down the road. I suppose he might have had to give a name and address to them?’

  ‘Which will almost certainly be false. But it’s a lead. Thanks.’ This time he tidied his desk before standing.

  ‘And Taz – my friend Taz. He won’t have to pick up the tab for my stay at the Mondiale, will he? And he won’t be disciplined for having dealings with Moffatt?’

  This time his face was visibly patient, which meant I’d really irritated him. Still, none of this would have been uncovered but for Paula and me, and Taz had done his best to help too. ‘The only thing Constable Moscicki is likely to get is a pat on the back. Tell him that if he finds things on his credit card that shouldn’t be there, he should come direct to me.’

  I would if I ever saw him again. ‘Thanks. Just one tiny thing – sorry, I know you’re busy, but when you do a job like mine you think of details – you’ll send an unmarked car for Paula, won’t you? After all, it’s not just her and me at risk if van der Poele gets nasty, it’s Meg and Helen too. And they’ve done nothing except work long hours for little pay.’

  He held up his hands in surrender, crow’s feet dancing round his eyes.

  I grinned, a big matey grin. ‘Yes, I know I’m a bossy boots. My…my pimp used to tell me I’d make a wonderful dominatrix.’

  ‘There has to be another way from here,’ Paula said, squatting beside the gaping priest hole in the library, ‘not just down to the canal but also up to your eyrie.’

  ‘That’s what we reckon,’ said a young woman my age and build wearing a paper suit. ‘But we can’t investigate further from this end till we’ve finished our examination of the tunnel.’ She
gestured at lighting cables and polythene bags and all the things my TV watching demanded.

  I nodded. ‘Let’s think their way. If you know about the priest hole, you’re going to make sure you exploit all its possibilities. Those men we assume were illegal immigrants – I suppose they couldn’t have come up to the house before Jan and Todd bought it? It’d be easier to collect them from a house than from the roadside. You never know, the builders who did the roof and other structural repairs might have seen something.’ I’d ask Jan to look out their names and addresses for the police – always assuming they hadn’t thought of that already.

  ‘So we’d better go up to the eyrie,’ Paula said, leading the way via the intervening landing, the end wall of which looked and sounded unremittingly solid. But she’d stopped in the entrance hall to pick up her rucksack, now bulging more than it usually did. Only then had she headed for the stairs, running her hand up that lovely banister as Todd and I had done. Which brought me by a very strange association of ideas to her date the previous evening.

  ‘It was fine, thanks,’ she said, dumping the rucksack and opening it.

  She must have heard the clunk of my brain cells as I worked on a gender-free way of expressing what I really wanted to ask. ‘The late meal didn’t pose too many problems?’

  She smiled as she shook her head. ‘Leslie was very understanding.’ Or did she say, Lesley? He or she? Before I could ask, she continued, thrusting a paper suit at me. ‘Here, no reason why we should contaminate a possible scene of crime just because the police forget to equip us properly. The girls send their love, by the way. I reckon they should finish today, weather permitting. Be nice to have it all done and dusted before the weekend. I’ve got the bill all ready to plonk in his little hot hand.’

  ‘You’ve got that far even without me and Sid?’

  ‘Well, he chipped in. But I hope his knees play him up for weeks.’