‘Yes. I’d thrown them in the bin but they were still there. Do you want them?’
‘When is it?’
‘Let me see…um, next Saturday.’
‘I’ll have them, then. I’d like to see Wallenberg on his own turf first, before I have a really good talk to him.’
‘Is he on your list of suspects?’
I didn’t have a list of suspects. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘not for Krabbe’s murder, but we’ll think of something.’
When John had gone I rang Nigel Newley in Leeds and arranged to meet him for a drink, later that evening. The Halfway House was conveniently situated, approximately equidistant from Leeds and Heckley, so we met there. Big Dave came with me.
‘How’s Sophie?’ I asked on the drive over. ‘I haven’t had chance to ask you.’
‘Alright,’ he replied.
‘Only alright?’
‘I hardly saw her, did I? We were working, remember.’
‘Mmm, sorry about that. Some people are inconsiderate about the timing of their murders. Did she bring the boyfriend with her?’
‘Digby? No, he was playing rugby in France. Usually Shirley’s OK. She knows the score, but this weekend she’s been a pain. And Sophie wasn’t any better. The little I saw of them made me feel like a pariah in my own house. I was glad to get out.’
‘Women,’ I said, as if that explained everything. I knew something Dave didn’t, and thought about ways of changing the subject.
‘Yeah, women,’ he agreed.
Nigel is a great one for shaking hands. He was late, as expected, but bounced in like a Labrador puppy on amphetamines, his arm already extended. I’m not a great shaker, but it’s easier to comply than to make a point. He would have shaken our hands even if we’d spent all day working together, which I consider excessive.
Long time ago I was the youngest inspector ever appointed by East Pennine. Now it’s my proud boast that I’m the longest serving inspector in the history of the police force. I was already in that rank, and had been for a long time, when Nigel joined the department. He was on the fast track, with a degree in law and a naive belief in the innate goodness of everybody he met. Not just the crooks: he believed it about the police, too. How green can you get? They would have made mincemeat out of him, but I took him under my wing, hammered some sense into his receptive brain, and in double quick time he was the same rank as me.
Truth is, I saw a bit of myself in him, and it wasn’t just the boyish good looks. If I’d ever had a son I would have liked him to be like Nigel. He would have stayed in Heckley CID forever, content to work for me, but I kicked him out, made him go for promotion. It was one of the hardest things I ever did.
‘So how’s the courting going?’ Dave asked, when we were seated behind our drinks. Nigel had asked for a pint of lager shandy and I’d joined him. Dave was on the bitter.
‘It isn’t,’ he replied.
‘What happened?’
‘No, you’re supposed to say: ‘What did she do for a living?’
‘OK. What did she do for a living?’
‘She was a chicken sexer.’
‘A chicken sexer? That’s interesting.’
‘No! You say: ‘Where did you meet her?’’
‘Right. I see. So, um, where did you meet this, um, chicken sexer, Nigel?’
‘At a hen party!’
He hooted with laughter while Dave looked at me, blank-faced, and I returned the look. ‘Good one, Nigel,’ I said, eventually.
‘Yeah. A very good one,’ Dave agreed.
After Dave fetched the second round I said: ‘So tell us about your new case, Nigel. This could be your passport to fame.’
‘I knew it,’ he replied. ‘And I thought you’d invited me out for the pleasure of my company.’
‘Well it wasn’t for your sparkling wit,’ Dave told him, unkindly, I thought.
I said: ‘Joe Crozier knew Peter Wallenberg. Wallenberg was some sort of business acquaintance of Tony Krabbe. I don’t believe in coincidences. They were all mixed up in something.’
‘Perhaps we should have a joint meeting, see if it’s worth combining the two enquiries.’
‘It’s a bit early for that,’ I said. ‘For a start, we don’t know if Crozier fell or was pushed, do we?’
‘Ah! The leading question,’ Nigel replied. ‘No, but let me tell you this: Crozier owned a third share in a lap-dancing club called the Painted Pony. It’s in the basement of the apartment block where he lived. The other two shares are held by a pair of accountants who sail close to the wind. We tried to talk to them, of course, but they clammed up. The DS who did the interview said they were scared stiff, but they did admit that they were selling their shares in the club.’
‘Who to, did they say?’
‘Mmm. No point in them denying it. Your friend Peter Wallenberg. He’d made them a good offer.’
‘That they couldn’t refuse,’ Dave added.
‘Crozier,’ I stated, when I’d digested Nigel’s announcement. ‘He was in the water about two weeks. Was death due to drowning?’
‘Yes, and there wasn’t a mark on his body and he still had his wallet in his pocket with £300 in it.’
‘Had he drowned in the Aire?’
‘Yes. The diatom analysis showed he had.’
‘So he could have gone for a walk late one night, after having a bevvy or three too many, and fallen in,’ Dave suggested.
‘It looks like it,’ I agreed, but Nigel remained tight-lipped. I took a sip of my new drink before asking: ‘Is there something you’re not telling us, Nige?’
He took a longer draught of his pint before saying: ‘There was one small indication that his death may not have been accidental.’
‘Which was…’ I prompted.
‘Well, it just so happens that his ankles and wrists were tied with masking tape, and his mouth was covered with it, too.’
I clunked my glass down on the table and a burst of bubbles exploded inside the golden liquid, causing a head of froth to rise and quickly subside again. ‘Well, you kept that quiet,’ I said after a while, feeling slightly annoyed.
‘We decided to,’ he replied. ‘And we still haven’t released it. You can imagine why.’
‘I suppose so,’ I agreed, and at least he’d had the courtesy not to tell us to keep it to ourselves.
‘Did you say masking tape?’ Dave asked.
‘That’s right.’
‘The stuff that decorators use?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s only made of paper, isn’t it? I’d have thought it would go soggy and float off.’
‘We thought the same, so we’re doing some tests. As of this morning, it still hasn’t gone soggy.’
I’d have thought it would soften and float away, too. I’d have gambled money on it. Perhaps the murderer or murderers thought the same thing, but they were too impatient to do the tests. Wrap his hands and feet with the tape, put some round his mouth to stem the screams, and let nature do the rest. It sounded a great idea, but it hadn’t worked. The inquest had been adjourned indefinitely, so this piece of information would be hidden from the public. And from the murderers. They could relax, safe in the knowledge that they’d pulled off the perfect deed, but we knew otherwise. I had to smile: Nigel was thinking like me.
Wednesday I rang Sonia Thornton and went to see her. She worked at a place called High Adventure, but this was her day off because she worked weekends. High Adventure was a new resort, as it liked to call itself, built on an old colliery site outside Oldfield, in Lancashire. Where once had existed slag heaps, a coke works and a hundred years’ of industrial grime, there was now an indoor ski slope, with real snow, and lots of other associated activities. I’d been promising myself a visit since it opened.
Sonia lived in a Victorian terrace, one of the grander ones that had not yet been divided into bedsits, just outside Halifax. Robert, the DC who’d made the initial interview, was tied up with paperwork, so I made the journey the
re alone. I was happy to do so. Sonia Thornton was a dream to any man who liked his women fit and talented, and not looking as if they’d spent six hours applying their makeup. When she opened the door and I saw her for the first time in seven years, I wasn’t disappointed. I extended a hand – it’s only men I object to shaking with – and introduced myself. ‘Charlie Priest,’ I said. ‘DI. Um, Heckley CID.’
She was taller than I expected, probably about five feet ten, and still had the runner’s figure, although the baggy top she wore did its best to disguise it. When we were seated in her front room I smiled and said: ‘You haven’t changed. You look just the same as when I watched you on TV, tearing down the back straight. I expected you to have put on about four stones.’
‘You said it was about Tony,’ she replied.
Ah well, I thought, perhaps some other time. ‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘I understand that you and he were partners for a while. Is that true?’
‘Yes, but not for long.’
‘1989 to 1997. Eight years. That’s a fair length of time.’
‘Not compared with most marriages, Inspector. Even by today’s standards.’
‘But you never married?’
‘No.’
‘Any reason why?’
‘Yes, I suppose so. Tony was in a high-risk occupation, he said. He didn’t want the commitment.’
I noted the he said. It always implies disagreement. ‘What difference does that make?’ I asked. ‘If someone you love gets killed, does it matter if you are married or not?’
‘You should have asked him that,’ she replied. She was quiet for a while but I could see she was wondering whether to say more, choosing her words carefully. ‘At least, if you were married there’d be something to hang on to,’ she added.
‘That’s what I would have thought.’
The room was furnished old-style, with cabinets and a sideboard and a big, soft, three-piece suite like my grandma had. I suspected it had belonged to her parents. One of the cabinets, with a bow front, gleamed with silverware from her athletics days, and there was a picture standing on it of her receiving a medal from some dignitary. I said: ‘Wow! Look at those trophies.’
‘There’s more, upstairs,’ she told me, matter-of-fact, but didn’t invite me to a private show.
‘I have three football medals,’ I confessed, ‘in a drawer somewhere, wrapped in cotton wool, inside a tin box.’
The corners of her mouth lifted into a smile, ever so briefly, and she said: ‘You probably worked just as hard for them as I did for these.’
‘I suppose so,’ I agreed. ‘The only difference is talent. You work at High Adventure, I believe.’
‘That’s right.’
‘What do you do there?’
‘I’m climbing wall manager-cum-instructor. There’s a 20 metre climbing wall. Tony designed it, as a matter of fact.’
‘I didn’t know you’d been a climber.’
‘Yes. I was a climber before I was a runner. I took up running to be fit for rock climbing, and found out I was good at it.’
‘And the rest is history.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Until you had the crash.’
‘Yes.’
‘Tony was with you, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes. We’d been to a fundraising function.’
‘Who was driving?’
‘I was.’
‘Your relationship ended soon after.’
‘Not so soon after. We rumbled along for a couple of years, until he came back from Everest in ‘97, but we didn’t see much of each other. It all ended just after Everest.’
‘Why was that?’
‘I don’t know. It – the accident – just put a strain on us. I missed going to the Olympics and…we’d been drifting apart. He’d achieved his goal, I’d failed at mine. He didn’t seem to understand how I felt.’
‘Where were you on Saturday evening?’
‘Am I a suspect, Inspector?’
‘Ex-partners are always suspects, Miss Thornton.’
‘I was working. I was at High Adventure until after ten o’clock. I came straight home and it’s a 25-minute drive. Will that do?’
‘Sounds watertight to me.’ I looked around the room, patted my hands on the chair arms as if about to rise, then said: ‘Do you know of anyone who might have wanted Tony dead?’
‘No.’
‘How about if I asked you for a list of the names of his friends?’
‘Wouldn’t his enemies be more appropriate?’
‘Did he have enemies?’
‘Not that I know of, but climbing’s a competitive world. It’s not just you against the mountain, you know. It’s you against everybody else. There’s a lot of jealousy.’
‘I need help, Sonia. Can you give me a list?’
‘I have photograph albums, but it’s nearly five years since I saw him.’
‘Can I look at them?’
‘I don’t see why not. They’re upstairs.’ She rose to her feet and moved towards the door. When I didn’t follow her she said: ‘They weigh a ton. You’d better come with me.’
They were in the attic, along with loads of other gear that had belonged to Krabbe. Sonia told me that he left the stuff with her because one day he wanted it putting in a museum. There were climbing jackets made of canvas and oilskin, boots like Captain Scott might have worn, and a mass of complicated devices for climbing up and down ropes, belaying and abseiling. Several ice axes were leaning on the wall. They started with old-fashioned ones, a generation on from the wooden-handled device that killed him, and evolved right through to wicked looking shapes like the beaks of prehistoric birds of prey, designed for hooking into vertical walls of ice.
Everything had a parcel label on it, tied with a piece of string. I read them off: Eiger N Face 1984 one said; Napes Needle 1965; K2 1991 and Weisshorn 1987. On a shelf I saw a bundle bristling with steel teeth and picked it up. It was a pair of crampons, tied together with blue neoprene straps. They were designed for fixing to the climber’s boots, to give him grip on glaciers and ice-encrusted rock faces. Each had a plastic sole, surrounded by twelve wicked teeth, like a crown of thorns. The front two teeth pointed straight forward, so he could tiptoe up vertical walls. Moulded into the sole, put there during the manufacturing process, it said Krabbe Klaw. The ticket read: Everest 1997.
I proffered them to Sonia, indicating the name, and she took them from me. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’d started his own manufacturing company, designing highly technical gear. These were one of his first attempts.’
‘Everest in 1997,’ I said. ‘Is that when he lost his partner?’
‘Jeremy Quigley. Yes, it was. That was a bad time for him.’
‘Did you know Jeremy?’
‘We’d met, but only a couple of times. Jeremy wasn’t a close friend, and not expected to be in the first summit team.’
I said: ‘I suppose reaching the summit was some sort of consolation,’ but she didn’t reply. ‘Was there any criticism of Tony after the incident?’ I asked.
‘Not that I heard. These things happen in climbing.’
‘What did Jeremy’s family and friends think about it?’
‘You’ll have to ask them that.’
‘Was he married?’
‘He had a partner. Gabi – Gabrielle Naylor. I only met her once, at the memorial service. We exchanged phone numbers but never rang each other.’
There were two photo albums, each about six inches thick. Far too many pictures for me to look at there and then and make any sense of. ‘How do you feel about me borrowing these?’ I asked. ‘I’ll really look after them.’
‘Take what you want, Inspector,’ she replied. ‘I long ago learnt the pointlessness of possessions.’
‘Sophie’s pregnant.’ My visitor’s chair creaked as Dave dumped his weight on it, and I groaned inwardly at his announcement. This was the conversation I’d been dreading. ‘Apparently she was sick over the weekend, and eventually confe
ssed to her mother. Shirley told me about it this morning.’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said, even though I’d resolved not to admit it.
‘You know! You know!’ he exploded.
‘Don’t get uppity about it,’ I told him. ‘And calm down. These things happen. Young people have different standards, these days. Her boyfriend’s a good bloke and they’re staying together, which is the way they do things. Two years from now you’ll be buying him football boots and teaching him how to bend free kicks.’
‘So how come you know before I do? I’m only her father, after all.’
‘Sophie rang me.’
‘When was this?’
‘As soon as she knew. She was crying, on the phone. She was upset and scared, didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know what Digby’s reaction would be and she was frightened of telling you. I tried to reassure her. You might be her dad, but I’m her God dad, remember. It’s my job to give spiritual guidance.’ That last sentence was an afterthought, but it sounded good.
‘So you knew before Digby did?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And you say she was scared of telling me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why, for God’s sake?’
‘Because she knew you’d explode. She felt that she’d let you down.’
Dave buried his face in his hands and let out a great sigh. ‘Oh Charlie,’ he groaned, ‘what a mess.’ I sat looking at him for a long minute, wondering if I’d done the right thing. He lifted his face, saying: ‘You say she was frightened of telling me?
‘Yes.’
‘My little girl was frightened of me?’
‘It was bound to be a shock to you, Dave. She didn’t know how you’d take it.’
‘It’s him I’m mad with, not her. So what do I do next time I see him? Punch him on the nose?’
‘No, Dave, not if you don’t want to lose her. You shake his hand and give him a cigar.’ I retrieved the Post-it note Sonia Thornton had given me with Gabrielle Naylor’s name and number on it. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Track her down and make an appointment to see her in the morning. We’ll go together.’
Over the Edge Page 9
