Time and Tide: A DC Smith Investigation

by Peter Grainger

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  The two of them were taken back to Barnham Staithe in the same car in the end. Serena Butler had asked Marjorie Harris whether she felt in any danger, and she had answered no – and yes, she had somewhere else to go if necessary, a friend in Wells who would let her use an empty chalet bungalow. Serena, with Smith alongside her, had also spoken to Williams about the same matter, saying that his employee had done nothing other than tell them the simple truth, and that if she had directly incriminated him in any way, he would not be leaving Kings Lake Central as he was about to do. Williams said that he understood what she, Detective Constable Butler was saying, pointedly not looking once in Smith’s direction, and so, when Smith spoke to him, it came as a surprise.

  ‘Mr Williams – telling the simple truth isn’t always easy. We see that every day in our job. It’s invariably the best course of action in the end, though, if only because we’ve got nothing better to do all day than to find out exactly what did happen on that Saturday night. We usually do, and I think we will in this case, too. Is there anything you ought to tell us before you leave this morning?’

  Mark Williams had had enough – his mouth tightened as if he had bitten into a fresh lemon but he said nothing.

  ‘Fair enough, sir. It’s au revoir, then, rather than goodbye.’

  Later, the uniformed officer who drove them back to The Queens Arms reported that as far as she was aware not a word had passed between the manager and his long-suffering employee on the journey.

  Once a case is properly underway, meetings happen all the time. They range from major events planned in advance, at which detective superintendents address the citizens of Rome, to accidental encounters between random pairs of individuals where corridors intersect or in the queues that form in canteens. An impromptu meeting took place around Smith’s desk after lunch – not that anyone ate anything that really justified the term – on that Friday afternoon.

  Present were Smith himself, John Murray, Serena Butler, Chris Waters, Mike Dunn – obviously prepared to risk the wrath of his own sergeant to spend time within touching distance of the already-named female detective constable – and Richard Ford, who that morning had returned from his first induction course on the way to becoming one of them. The meeting had begun more or less in his honour because he had asked about the current case.

  Amongst themselves, detectives talk very frankly. If you have made a statement as a witness, if you have been interviewed as a person of interest or even as a suspect, they will say openly whether they believed you or whether they think you were lying through your teeth. If it is the latter, they will then spend hours speculating about why you might have done so, and how they are going to prove that you did so.

  Seen from a distance, they are entirely unremarkable people; they might be employed in an insurance office, administrators of your local hospital or clerks in a transport warehouse. Some are more smartly dressed than others, some more overweight and out of condition, some look more worn down by life in general than the rest – but listen to them at work in these meetings and you begin to identify certain traits that you won’t find in those other fields of endeavour. There is a doggedness about them – a tenacity, something tireless and indefatigable – a willingness to go over the same ground time and again until the scent is found or re-found, and the hunt can go on.

  And allied with that, though more crucial to the work that they do, is the ability to think in a remorselessly logical way. This is probably innate. It certainly has nothing to do with formal academic achievements – the quality can lurk undiscovered as much in a bored supermarket cashier or an apprentice electrician as it might in a philosophy graduate. It isn’t pure logic, of course – it is the applied variety that is required, the ability to understand the motivations and to rationalise the strange behaviours of others, allied to an apparently infinite capacity for doubt. A born detective never needs to be told that everybody lies – he or she has always known it.

  When recounting Williams’ interview to the informal meeting, Smith did not call him a liar as such, but he made it clear enough that they had not been told the whole truth by him. Serena Butler said that as far as Marjorie Williams was concerned, she thought that they had been told the truth, and that she had no reason to think that the woman was holding anything back – she looked at Smith and he had shrugged in a non-committal fashion. John Murray agreed that he would go back to the mobile provider and see if there was a way of locating Sokoloff’s phone when he made the call to the RAC helpline, and Smith said to him that they might yet need to go back further with Sokoloff’s records, maybe to six months, tracing down everyone that he had spoken to, on the assumption that his visits to Norfolk had not been in any way spontaneous, but quite the reverse. And then there had been a silence, of the ominous sort because there was nothing new – they already seemed to be going over old ground.

  It was Richard Ford who said, eventually, ‘DC?’

  ‘Good God! Is it time for afternoon tea already? A dash of milk in first and no sugar, please.’

  Four more orders followed simultaneously, but Ford had known them all as a uniformed officer at Kings Lake Central, and he would be much more difficult to play than Christopher Waters had been two years ago. Ford waited until they had done, and then he said, ‘I think I heard those times right. If I did, you have to wonder what happened to this Sokoloff bloke’s car, don’t you?’

  ‘Go on – explain yourself.’

  ‘Well, assuming he was telling the truth to the RAC – and I know you’ll say don’t assume that but why would he make it up – assuming he did have his tyres slashed, the RAC man turns up not two hours later and there’s no sign of it. Where did it go? How do you move a big, heavy car with four flat tyres? And how do you arrange to do it as quickly as that, in the middle of the night?’

  Smith’s eyes met those of John Murray, who had yesterday returned to that very question, first raised by the RAC man himself – both of them had since been pre-occupied with other matters. Then he said to Ford, ‘Look, just because you’ve been on one training course, it doesn’t mean you can come in here and start asking very good questions. Got that?’

  ‘Yes, DC.’

  ‘Good. Now let’s hear some answers.’

  Ford said, ‘You couldn’t drive it anywhere unless it had new tyres, and I can’t see a mobile fitting company getting out there at nearly midnight and finishing that job in time. If you had four replacement wheels ready you could do it – but who would have four replacement wheels for a Mercedes handy?’

  As Ford went through those possibilities – and impossibilities – the significance of the original question became apparent to the rest of them. The call to the RAC had been made on Sokoloff’s phone; that did not mean that it been made by Sokoloff – remember the call that paid his hotel bill the following morning? – but what conceivable motive could anyone else have for making a call that falsely claimed his car had been vandalised?

  Smith was writing it down, the idea that had just come to him as a result of Ford’s first contribution to the team – it was possible that the call had been made to make them think that Sokoloff had been outside The Queens Arms on Saturday night, when he was, in reality, somewhere else and perhaps already dead. In which case, Mark Williams had not deserved the going-over that Smith had just given him, and the DI had been right to ask the question that he did…

  ‘Or,’ said John Murray, ‘the Mercedes was towed away. No, not towed if all four tyres had been done. Taken away on a break-down truck.’

  Two or three voices came at once, Ford’s among them, and it was him who said, ‘But it’s the same again – who’s got access to that sort of break-down truck in a matter of minutes? Get it driven out there, get the car onto it and driven away late on a Saturday night?’

  …but, thought Smith, as he listened to them, that would be elaborate work indeed. It’s one thing to pay the hotel bill like that, to make us think Sokoloff had left the a
rea, presuming that because you’d dumped his body at sea there was little chance of it ever being found; but to use the phone to make a bogus call to a breakdown service, trying to get us to think that Sokoloff was outside the pub when he was not? Highly ingenious – but more to the point, what would be the point? He simply could not see one.

  He remained distant from the group of detectives for a few seconds longer, hearing their voices but not what they were saying, seeing the interactions and interruptions as they argued out the questions that Richard Ford had raised. He was already into it, Ford, already fully engaged with the work though he had not met a single one of the characters involved or visited any of the locations – a keen young man at the very beginning of his career. The usual thing would be for him to shadow one of the experienced officers for a few weeks now, and the usual thing would be for Smith to do it. But this time, for obvious reasons, that might not be the most appropriate decision. Murray would be a good choice, a steadying influence if ever there was one.

  Afterwards, when Murray had agreed to that, Smith had asked whether he had had time to look at the pictures of the SUV that Waters had found on the car-park camera at The Royal Victoria. He had – they were of poor quality but he thought he could narrow down the make to one of three, based solely on the shape of the bodywork. Smith had said, ‘Charlie Hills’ boy is a director at that big franchise garage on the West Heath estate. Have a word with him, let him see it. He might know straight away, John.’

  ‘Will do. Fordy made a good start!’

  ‘Yes, he did. Sorry about the car thing – you mentioned it first.’

  ‘I’d forgotten it as well. A lot of loose ends in this one, aren’t there?’

  ‘Just a few. It resembles my old nan’s knitting bag after the cat had been at it for an hour or two. I’m not seeing it yet, not feeling it. You?’

  ‘No… They might have hidden the car. You could have driven it a little way on slashed tyres, just to get it out of sight.’

  Another possibility, another loose end.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Did the RAC man say whether he had a look around? I would have done.’

  ‘He said he couldn’t see it anywhere. We didn’t ask him whether he searched for it. Sorry.’

  ‘Not a problem – we can’t see all the angles, especially before we know they’re even going to be angles. I’ll find Serena and ask her to ring him back, just to clarify that…’

  There were strange silences and interludes in this case – and then Smith realised that they were not in the case at all. They were internal interludes, spaces and silences that were forming as his mind, quite unconsciously, was beginning the process of readjustment to a life not lived like this any more.

  Murray was saying, ‘… at least we’ve all got the weekend off for a change. Are you doing anything? Going up to the coast?’

  ‘I doubt it. Seen enough of it this week, and it’s not the same when you’ve recently seen mangled bodies pulled out of it. If you and Maggie and the baby want the caravan at any time, you know it’s yours for the asking.’

  Then there was some writing to do before he could go home at five o’clock. Ford sat down with John Murray, Waters and Serena Butler worked at their individual screens, and everything would be left tidy for Monday; there would be duty detectives over the weekend who would know the outlines of the case and who to contact if there were unexpected developments, but there would be none of those, not in this one.

  At a quarter to five, Smith made his way up to Detective Inspector Terek’s office because it was the proper thing to do – not to leave without reporting to the line manager. Alison Reeve was there, seated on one of the comfortable chairs that had until a week or two ago been her own. There were two half-empty mugs of coffee on the table, and they had obviously been talking for several minutes.

  Smith stopped in the doorway, apologised for the interruption and was ready to turn away when Reeve called him back – then Terek told him to take one of the other seats. He did so, but couldn’t get over the vague sense that he was intruding.

  Reeve said, ‘I might as well update you too, DC. Superintendent Allen and I have just got back from meeting Brian Elliott’s family in Cromer – this is the possible connection between Elliott and where Bernard Sokoloff met his end? It was all rather embarrassing, as I was explaining to Simon.

  ‘Neal Elliott must be pushing seventy. He’s well off, a retired estate agent, and lives in a huge bungalow with sea-views that must add a hundred thousand to his own place. They moved to Norfolk a long time ago because they have a disabled son, who they wanted to be able to live and work at a colony for artists with disabilities. I’d no idea there was such a place up there.’

  ‘Walcott’s Farm.’

  ‘That’s it. Mr Elliott took us round the bungalow and showed us lots of paintings. Not my kind of thing, but he’s obviously taken seriously, his son. They’re very proud of him, as you would be… But as far as Sokoloff is concerned, I’m sure it’s a dead end.’

  Smith said, ‘And Superintendent Allen?’

  ‘The same. When we mentioned Brian Elliott, a bit of a cloud came down. He’s the black sheep, and I got the impression that they have nothing to do with him. We didn’t get into detailed questions, to be honest – it was simply wrong. You know how it is, sometimes. I’m about to ring the London end of the case and give them the good news.’

  Terek said then, ‘Which will bring the focus around to what your team have been doing, DC. You’ve said from the start that the answer lies up on the coast rather than down south. Any more thoughts since the interviews?’

  Yes, lots of them, but in no fit state to be shared with the management. He needed time to leave those thoughts alone, let them settle into some recognisable shapes and then proceed with them, one at a time – he didn’t need DCI Reeve and DI Terek muddying the water again. The old charge of arrogance? Possibly, but he intended to stick with what had worked for him many times in the past – his way or the highway. Unconsciously, he smiled at the realisation that he would soon be on that highway to a new destination anyway; Terek saw the smile and mistook it for something else.

  ‘You do? Has something come up?’

  ‘Sorry, sir. No. But I’ll give it all some thought over the weekend.’

  ‘You’re not on duty, are you?’

  Terek looked concerned, and his eyes were searching his own desk, probably for the overtime rota.

  ‘No, but I’ll give it some thought anyway. Force of habit…’

  Reeve said, completing one of Smith’s habitual phrases, ‘And a habit of the force!’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  He stood up. The digital clock on the detective inspector’s desk was new, and the time on it now was one minute after five in the afternoon, on Friday the 16th of September. In fourteen weeks’ time, on Friday the 23rd of December, he would be leaving the building for the final time. There would be Christmas cards with rude messages that he would put on the mantelpiece, there would be invitations and promises to always keep in touch, and these would whither slowly away like the holly and the ivy and the mistletoe, as is the way of such things.

  Reeve was watching him as if he might have something more to say, but he did not. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, they were talking again, but he couldn’t hear what it was about.

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Really sorry but we’ve been invited out to dinner by the Simpson half of Simpson and Bellweather tonight. Short notice but you know we’ve been after them forever. Have to cancel today as we need to prepare. I’ll try to call you tomorrow.

  Chris Waters read it over several times, analysing the text as if it was a piece of evidence in an inquiry – which it was, more or less, the inquiry into the slow demise of his relationship with Katherine Diver. The “we’ve” was herself and her brother, Jason, and it was true that Waters knew about Simpson and Bellweather, who would be their first serious corporate client. If Steven Simpson had invited t
hem to dinner on a Saturday night, then it probably was a big deal. The “forever’ was a few weeks, though – Waters had first heard mention of it in July. Did she really need to cancel seeing him, Waters, this afternoon to prepare for eating dinner tonight? Maybe. Professionally speaking, she was ruthless; the clearest evidence of this was that Smith himself had said that a brother and sister, inheriting a run-down private investigations agency in the centre of Kings Lake and with no experience of such a business themselves, wouldn’t last three months. That was a year and a half ago.

  But there was no line with her between the professional and the personal, and Smith had been right about that part – he had hinted more than once that she might find it useful to have a police detective as a boyfriend. Waters had challenged her on this and she had laughed it away, but doubts remained; perhaps he had been less useful than she had imagined and that was why her interest in him was declining. He examined the text once more – “I’ll try to call”? He knew her well enough to know that was her way of saying in advance that she probably wouldn’t do so; she had either forgotten that they were to have Sunday lunch with his parents or she was cancelling that as well by default. And then, finally, at the end of the message there was nothing to indicate affection for him, or sorrow at not seeing him this afternoon – no smiley, no cross for a kiss, just a full stop.

  Then he went back to the other message that he had received this morning, a matter of a few minutes after Katherine’s, and thought, so DC, if that isn’t a coincidence, then what does it mean? No more than ten minutes after being cancelled again, I hear from Janey Cole: So, like I said, back to uni today. For my final year. Eek! Any advice? Anyway, it was nice being investigated by you… And a smiley face.

  She had a Facebook page which he had looked at before – his own account was as anonymous as it could be, with no photographs, no posts and no friends, used only to allow him to access the public pages of others. He had already seen the dangers of a social media presence many times and had no intention of sabotaging his own career with mindless inanities, and links to people that he might have to investigate one fine day.