‘And Tony was one of the worst.’
‘Yes.’
‘So it was just Krabbe and yourself. When he begged you to say you were driving he talked you out of a fortune. And you went along with him.’
She nodded her head, studying the plastic coffee container she was holding. I went on: ‘If you’d told the truth, that Krabbe was driving, you’d have been eligible for a third party insurance claim. You could have sued him, in effect. It’s routine, happens all the time. Put your contracts on the table and you might have received your money without having to break into a sweat for it.’
‘Yep,’ she said. ‘You sussed it right, Charlie. Five seconds’ stupidity, protecting the man I thought I loved, and that was the cost. He went to his precious Everest with his reputation intact, came home the conquering hero, and I ended up working here for peanuts. He wanted me to make a claim against the non-existent youths in the non-existent other car. Apparently the insurance companies have some sort of contingency fund for uninsured cases, but I couldn’t do anything like that. We had some colossal rows about it.’
I took a sip of the hot milky liquid and placed the beaker back on the counter. She looked at me, made a ‘huh’ noise and gave me a wry smile. Her hair was short and fair and she had tiny diamond studs in her ears. I said: ‘You made a balls of it, Sonia.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed with a nod. ‘I think that’s an accurate assessment. I made a balls of it.’
* * *
I’d had a good day. The search for Krabbe’s killer had progressed not one jot, but Sonia Thornton had turned out to be something other than the cold, aloof figure I’d first encountered. She’d been warm and charming, and we’d even shared a joke. Sitting in a queue of traffic on the M62 I remembered the first time I saw her on television. It was the AAA championships and several guest runners from overseas were competing in the 5,000 metres. In the preliminaries the young Yorkshire lass, Sonia Thornton, was hardly mentioned, but by the end of the race we had a new golden girl. She took the lead with a lap and a half to go and elegantly eased away from her rivals. She had a high, prancing style of running, her head held high, and the tabloids quickly dubbed her The Gazelle.
After supper I decided to ring Rosie and tell her about my adventures on the climbing wall.
‘It’s me,’ I said, when she answered the phone. ‘How’s things?’
‘Oh, um, I’m alright, thank you.’
‘Are you sure? You sound doubtful.’
‘Of course I’m sure.’
‘Good. What sort of a day have you had?’
‘Charlie…’
‘Mmm.’
‘I’m not in the mood for small-talk. Can we just…call the whole thing off, please?’
‘Oh. What do you mean by the whole thing?’
‘Me and you. Us. Except there is no us.’
‘OK, if that’s what you want. I’m sorry if I’ve been a nuisance. It’s just that I’m fond of you and care about you. I worry about you.’
‘I know you mean well but I don’t want you to be fond of me or worry about me. I just want some time to myself. Don’t you see?’
‘You’re going through a bad patch, Rosie,’ I said. ‘It’ll pass, but you mustn’t give in to it. How did the class go today?’
‘What if it’s not a bad patch, Charlie. What if this is the real bit?’
‘Happiness is a natural state,’ I argued. ‘Think about good things; all that travelling you have to do.’
‘I don’t want to do any travelling. I want to be left alone. Don’t you ever wonder what the purpose of it all is, why we bother?’
‘No, not really,’ I said, although it was a feeling I knew all too well.
‘Well I do. Goodbye, Charlie.’
‘Right, well, there’s nothing more to say, is there?’
‘No, there’s nothing more to say.’
‘If that’s what you want…’
‘It is.’
‘Goodbye, then.’
I’m not sure which of us put the receiver down first, but it didn’t matter. What was certain was that I’d been dumped. I’d been dumped before, but never quite like that. I wondered which part of the cycle of moods that ruled her life she was on, or if she was under the influence of medication, but dumped is dumped, whatever the provocation. I could take it, but I was still concerned about her.
‘You must be mad,’ Dave declared when I told him of my exploits. ‘How did you know it wasn’t a set-up?’
‘He rang from a Dales pub,’ I said. ‘Live music on a Friday night. You could hear the crunch of sawdust underfoot and the slurp of hand-pulled Black Sheep being poured. It was obviously one of the outdoor fraternity who rang me, not one of Wallenberg’s cronies.’
‘You still should have told me.’
‘I thought about it, decided not to bother you.’
‘So he’s a suspect, this brother?’
‘He’s got the motive. Could’ve worked an opportunity. But I can’t see it.’
‘And what about Miss Thornton?’
‘The climbing wall’s terrific,’ I said. ‘We’ll all have to go, sometime. It’s great fun.’
‘And the instructress?’
‘Well, since you’ve asked, she was a little more responsive than on my first visit.’
‘Is she a suspect?’
‘Motive by the bucketful; and like Quigley, she could have arranged an opportunity. But nah, she didn’t do it. Neither of them did.’
‘This is the famous Charlie Priest intuition at work, is it?’
‘They both had feelings towards him bordering on hatred, that’s for sure.’
There’s a well-known adage that the first two days are the most important in a murder enquiry. After that, if you haven’t caught your man – or woman – it could be a long haul. We’d had seventeen days and questions were being asked.
But I don’t wake up every day and wonder if we’ll catch the culprit today. I believe in gathering evidence, talking to people, studying relationships and, sometimes, stirring things up. Then, when we’ve gathered all we can, I stick it in the computer called my brain and start asking it questions. Sometimes, hopefully, one name keeps popping up more than any other. Statistics are important but not gospel. One says that in 80 per cent of murders the killer is known to us in seven days. It’s just a matter of eliminating all the others.
The path round the house where Krabbe had lived was made of gravel. We’d returned to it several times, in all weathers, and it was impossible to sneak up behind someone on it. Of that we were sure. We’d checked, and there was nothing wrong with his hearing, so Krabbe, it would appear, knew his assailant. He died from a single blow, but a fine spray of blood and brain was ejected from the wound and deposited on the ground around him. And, we hoped, on his killer’s clothes.
The phone rang and Dave picked it up. He listened for a moment, pulled a face at me that suggested it could be interesting and started making notes. ‘Is he talking?’ I heard him say. ‘Any form?’ He wrote the answer down. ‘Keep hold of him. We’ll be straight over.’ I didn’t say anything, just spun my chair round and waited for him to fill me in.
‘They’ve arrested someone in Halifax for attempted car theft. He tried to hijack a Jaguar XK8, but came unstuck. The computer has thrown up a match: a similar Jag was stolen from a house in Bradford last week.’
Since the crash involving the Golf, which we believed had been racing another Golf, and the apparent race between the two MGs, we’d had the DVLA computer looking for thefts of matching sports cars anywhere in West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester, and it looked as if it had come up with the goods.
‘What are we waiting for?’ I said, reaching for my jacket.
The Jag belonged to a female estate agent whose name graced boards dotted randomly all over the district. It was a symbol of her success, a talisman for an ever-burgeoning property market. Mess with it at your peril.
‘She does three hours at the Halifax office ev
ery morning,’ the arresting officer told us, ‘then leaves at eleven-thirty, regular as clockwork, to go to the Elland office.’
‘A creature of habit,’ I said.
‘That’s right. But ever since the Sally Wilcox case she’s carried a pepper spray with her. Laddo got into the car alongside her as she started the engine and told her to drive. She pulled the spray from her bag and gave him a dose. He rolled out on to the ground. She jumped out, ran round the car and emptied the lot in his face. Nearly blinded the poor sod.’
‘Is he alright now?’
‘Just about. We’ve given him a pair of shades.’
‘And he says he’s called Douglas Jones?’
‘Yep. Aged 28, hails from Leeds and his form is longer than a self-assessment tax return. Nearly all car related. He was twock-ing at thirteen and has appeared in the dock more times than the QE2. He was done for GBH on a punter whilst working as a nightclub bouncer, did fifteen months, but has been clean for the last two years.’ He handed me the sheaf of photocopies listing all the previous convictions, and took us to meet him.
They clone them, I’m sure they do. Nightclub bouncers. Somewhere there’s a factory turning them out. I’m not certain if they are born to a woman in the normal way, or if they fertilise the cell in a test tube and all the development takes place in a tank of proteins, but there’s definitely a set procedure. Then it’s years of workouts in a stuffy gym, with ample doses of steroids between meals rich in red meat. The Victorians put miscreants in the treadmill; nowadays their descendants pay a health club 30 a month for the privilege. The lack of oxygen in the gymnasium gives them brain damage, and the steroids cause them to develop buttresses on their shoulders, to hold their shaven heads in position.
Douglas Jones was the Mark I, standard issue model, but without the optional skull decorations. I wasn’t sure that the shades were a good idea: they gave him a certain cachet. The tapes were running and I was in the chair.
‘How are your eyes?’ I asked.
‘Sore. ‘Ow do you fink they are?’
Correction. He was the Mark II model, with the inbuilt speech impediment.
‘Has the doctor seen you?’
‘You know ‘e has.’
‘And he gave you those drops.’
‘Yeah.’ Jones was holding a tiny plastic bottle of Optrex.
‘You’re entitled to have a solicitor present.’
‘Don’t want no s’licitor.’
‘OK. And you’ve been given a copy of your rights under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.’
‘Yeah, yeah. I know.’
‘So why were you trying to steal the Jaguar?’
‘Why do you fink?’
‘I’m asking you.’
‘It’s a nice motor, innit.’
‘What were you going to do with it?’
‘Dunno. Just ’ave a drive, that’s all.’
Dave was sitting alongside me, casually perusing Jones’s record. ‘Who did you steal it for?’ I asked.
‘Myself.’
‘I don’t think you did.’
No answer.
‘Where were you going to take it?’
‘For a ride. That’s all.’
‘A car like that’s worth, what, about five or six thousand on the black market, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Don’t know, Guv. You know more about it than me.’
‘What did you do with the other one? The one you stole in Leeds?’
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Had there been the slightest hesitation before he answered? I wasn’t sure. ‘Tell me about the racing,’ I said.
‘What racing?’
‘You know what racing.’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dave sit up. I didn’t hear Jones’s reply because Dave had taken the top off his pen and was underlining something on the list of papers he was holding. He passed it to me.
The paper was the top sheet of Jones’s record of offences. I’ve read thousands of them. Sometimes they make you angry, sometimes they’re sad, and often they’re funny. Dave had underlined the words Painted Pony, which I knew to be the nightclub Wallenberg had supposedly bought from Joe Crozier’s partners. I read the rest of the summary and saw that Jones was working there when he assaulted the customer.
‘A word,’ Dave said to me when I’d finished reading, and rose to his feet. We left a big PC babysitting Jones while we went for a walk towards the front desk. There was the drinks machine blinking in the corner and Dave fed coins into it and handed me a can of Fanta. It gave a satisfying pssssst when I lifted the pull, and aggravated my fillings when I took a swig.
‘So he may have worked for Crozier,’ I said, not really knowing what to make of it. It was unlikely to be a coincidence but the nightclub world is a small one.
‘You haven’t twigged, have you?’ Dave commented.
‘No.’
‘C’mon, think about it. It’s an unforgettable face. Looks like it’s been set on fire and put out with a shovel.’
‘I’ve seen a thousand like him.’
‘If I said Dale Dobson’s funeral?’
‘God, you’re right!’ I exclaimed. ‘He read the eulogy, that poem. I am not dead, just sleeping, or something. Jesus, where does that leave us?’
We sat on the bench normally reserved for anxious parents and cantankerous girlfriends and sipped our drinks. I took out my diary and found a clean page. ‘Let’s get the timing sorted,’ I suggested. ‘It’s not very clear to me what came first.’ I found the calendar at the front, next to the other essential information like lighting up times and phases of the moon, and held the place with a finger.
‘Crozier went into the river in the early hours of the 21st of October,’ Dave told me, and I wrote it down. ‘So when was the Dale Dobson crash?’
I turned a few pages. ‘Here we are,’ I said. ‘Thursday morning, the 23rd. That’s two days later.’
‘And Dobson’s funeral was on bonfire night, the fifth of November, nearly two weeks later.’
‘So that’s what the fireworks were for.’
‘How do you want to play it?’ Dave asked.
‘Let’s go look at the photos,’ I suggested. ‘See what they tell us, and then have another go at him.’
We collected sandwiches from Greggs and ate them in the incident room. Jones featured in several of the photographs, we were pleased to find, and Wallenberg was often in the same frame. When we looked at the pictures of Wallenberg, Jones was usually hovering in the background.
‘He’s Wallenberg’s minder,’ Dave declared.
‘Chauffeur handyman,’ I said.
‘Doer of dirty work.’
‘Mmm. I wonder if that extends to murder?’
‘I think you’d better tell Nigel.’
‘I think you’re right.’
‘So he used to work for Crozier and now he appears to work for Wallenberg,’ Nigel summarised, after we’d filled him in. We were sitting in the canteen of Halifax nick, awaiting the duty solicitor to arrive. When the message came through that he was waiting for us we trooped off to the interview room again.
This time Dave didn’t sit in. Nigel and myself were seated at one side of the table, Jones and the solicitor at the other. The uniformed PC detailed to prevent us administering lighted matches under the prisoners fingernails started the tape and I did the introductions. Jones was reminded that he was still under caution.
‘Joe Crozier spoke very highly of you, Duggie,’ Nigel said.
‘Did he?’
Good one, I thought. He’s admitted knowing Crozier, straight off.
‘Very highly. It must have been a shock when you heard that he’d died.’
‘Yeah, it was.’
‘When did you hear?’
‘’Bout free weeks ago. Heard it on Radio Leeds, didn’t I.’
‘And when did you last see him?’
‘God, I don’t know. About a munf earlier.’
‘Wh
at do you think happened to him?’
‘Fell in the river, didn’t he.’
‘How often did you speak to him?’
‘Not very often. Just said goodnight, that sort offing.’
‘So what was your job?’
‘Doorman. I was on the door at the Painted Pony.’
‘And that’s all?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s not what I’ve heard. According to Mr Crozier’s business partners you were his right-hand man.’
‘Nah, not me. I just drove ’im, sometimes. That’s all.’
‘Ah! So you were a little more than just a doorman?’
‘No, not really. If he’d had a drop too much he might ring me and ask me to pick ’im up. That’s all. I wasn’t no right-hand man or noffing.’
‘You were his driver?’
‘Yeah. I suppose so. Sometimes.’
‘You like driving?’
‘Yeah. Love it.’
‘What sort of car did he have?’
‘A Lexus. Lovely motor.’
‘Did you drive Mr Crozier over to Heckley on Monday the twentieth of October?’
He thought about it, or pretended to, although pretending to think could have been beyond his intellectual capabilities. Duggie’s problem was that he was thick. Nigel was teasing some good stuff from him, and we still had Dobson and Wallenberg to hit him with. I decided that we’d keep the Wallenberg connection under wraps for a while longer. Duggie was digging a hole for himself and we were at the top, looking down, so as long as those shovelfuls of soil kept landing on our feet we’d let him keep going.
‘No, I don’t fink so,’ he eventually decided.
‘You didn’t take him to a restaurant called L’Autre Place, in the town square?’
‘No, not me.’
‘Let me try to jog your memory: this was the night Mr Crozier died. Does that help?’
He shuffled in his seat, looking uncomfortable, and glanced at the duty solicitor, but he found no help there. ‘No, I don’t know noffing about that,’ he replied. ‘I never took ’im to Heckley. Not ever.’
The duty solicitor came to the rescue. ‘It’s been a long day,’ he said. ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’
Over the Edge Page 15
