Last Reminder

by Stuart Pawson

  Trouble was, they were welded in. The ends fitted into vertical pieces, and a seam of welding locked them in place. It wasn’t good deep welding, though. It was what my mate Jimmy Hoyle would call chicken shit. I wondered if the insurance company had been to look at the Jaguar yet.

  A good shake might have dislodged the tubes, but that would probably trigger the alarm. I picked at the welding with my thumbnail, without success. One time, I never went anywhere without my Swiss Army knife, but they were now considered offensive weapons, so I didn’t even have that. I found a twopence piece in my pocket and attacked the welding with it as best I could.

  A big flake fell away, revealing how the tube was loosely slotted into the uprights. I found the flake on the floor and examined it. Plastic Padding has a thousand uses, and Davis had created another one. It’s good stuff. I spat on the piece and fitted it back where it came from, but you could see the join as a white line where the paint had cracked. It’d have to do.

  A voice shouted, ‘Please your bloody self! I’m washing the car,’ and a door slammed. I forgot my rehearsed lines and bolted round the end of the garage. It was Davis. I couldn’t see a hosepipe at this end, so I might be safe. He wasn’t at the back when I peered round the corner, and when I calculated he was busy I tiptoed down his garden, breaking into a nonchalant stroll as distance gave me confidence. A minute later I was heading across the neat grass of the park, in Annabelle’s wake. With luck, he’d dislodge the piece of Plastic Padding with his brush and think he’d not made a good job of it. With a bit more luck, they’d serve apple pie in the cafe. I deserved a piece.

  *

  On Monday morning I returned Annabelle to the Old Vicarage and still made it to the office before Mr Wood did. It was a pleasant way to start the week.

  My good mood didn’t last long. Gilbert hadn’t read a paper or listened to the radio for two weeks, so news of a murder, the rhubarb run and his senior officer on a fizzer came as a succession of shocks to him. After the early morning briefing we deployed the troops and Inspector Adey and myself returned to Gilbert’s office for a policy discussion. That meant budgets. While we were there the assistant chief constable rang Mr Wood to say that Bramshill had been delighted with my talk.

  ‘He said it was down to earth and provocative,’ Gilbert growled. ‘I bet it was.’

  ‘I want some time to concentrate on Lisa Davis’s murder,’ I told him. ‘I’m sure it’s tied up with the bullion robbery.’

  ‘I thought you said Superintendent Isles had arrested Mr Watts junior,’ he replied.

  ‘He has, but Michael Angelo didn’t do it. I’m sure of that.’

  ‘OK. No doubt Sergeant Newley can cope.’

  ‘Just what I thought.’

  Mr and Mrs Davis were in when I knocked on their door. The Range Rover was in the garage, so I couldn’t see if K. Tom had done a repair job on the Plastic Padding I’d disturbed. He was in his shirt sleeves, spectacles hanging round his neck on a lanyard, and he didn’t look pleased to see me. Not many people are.

  ‘DI Priest,’ I said. ‘Can I have a word?’

  They sat me on the same shiny seat as before, after removing a selection of the morning papers. They had mugs of coffee, the real stuff, liberally dosed with brandy from the smell of it, but they didn’t offer me one. If this was how the wealthy spent a typical Monday morning, it hardly seemed worth the hassle.

  ‘Your sergeant came to see Ruth on Friday,’ K. Tom told me. ‘I’d gone for a round of golf, but I can’t add anything to what she said.’

  ‘Fair enough. Have you heard from Justin?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Davis replied. ‘He arrived back on Thursday, and rang me Friday morning.’

  ‘But you haven’t seen him?’

  ‘No. He said he was spending some time with Lisa’s parents.’

  ‘How did he sound?’

  ‘Shocked. How would you expect him to sound?’

  Her hackles were rising. Good. It’s always more interesting when there’s a note of antagonism in the answers, and it saves a lot of misdirected sympathy. I turned to her husband and said, ‘Mr Davis, do you think I could have a word with your wife in private, and then perhaps the same with you?’

  He looked perplexed for a few seconds, then shrugged and rose to his feet, saying, ‘If it helps. I’ll be in the snooker room, when you want me.’

  As soon as he’d gone I opened with, ‘Why don’t Justin and his stepfather get on with each other, Mrs Davis?’

  She fingered the material of the mohair cardigan she was wearing. ‘They do get on,’ she assured me. ‘There were a few difficulties a while ago, just, like, growing pains, when Justin resented Tom, but they patched it up. Now Tom follows him all over the place. Helps him in his career. He says he’s Justin’s number two fan, after…after…’ Her voice trailed off. She looked pale and upset, but I noticed that she’d been reading Hello! magazine when I came in. It jarred with her apparent demeanour, but I don’t suppose there is a publication called Grieving Mother-in-Law Monthly.

  I said, ‘I believe your husband knew Lisa before Justin did. What exactly was their relationship?’

  ‘You mean did they have an affair?’ she snapped.

  I waved a hand in assent.

  ‘Of course not,’ she retorted. ‘Lisa worked for K. Tom for a while as a temp. She had ideas above her station. He helped her start up in business and she repaid him by trying to wreck our marriage, steal him away. She was a gold digger, but Tom wanted none of it. Then she met Justin and changed her target.’

  ‘So you didn’t approve of her marrying Justin?’

  ‘That’s putting it mildly, Inspector.’ She moved the newspapers again, looking for something. Her handbag was alongside her easy chair. She lifted it on to her knee and found a long, gold cigarette case in it. Her hands were shaking as she lit up and puffed clouds of smoke towards the chandelier.

  ‘When did you last see Lisa?’ I asked.

  ‘July twenty-third.’

  I blinked in surprise. ‘That’s, er, a very precise answer,’ I commented, inviting an explanation.

  ‘It’s my birthday. Justin always buys me a present. They called round with it, stayed about ten minutes. Anything else?’

  ‘No, that’s all for now,’ I said. ‘Which way is the snooker room?’

  K. Tom was crouched over the table when I walked in. He played a shot without looking up and balls clicked against each other. None went down. The table was probably half-size, and there was a bar in the corner of the room, with a proper hand pump. The walls were lined with high chairs, so his cronies could watch the action.

  ‘Nice room,’ I told him, looking round.

  ‘Do you play?’ he asked, wandering round, studying the pattern of the balls.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should try it. It’s a good way of relaxing.’ He saw whatever he was looking for and played another shot. The black ball cannoned into the cushion alongside a pocket and sped away. The white one trickled towards me and fell into the net bag. Even I knew that this was bad. Maybe the gold bracelet was interfering with his swing. I lifted the ball out and placed it on the baize, at my end of the table, to signify that his little game was over. He straightened his back and placed the cue in the rack.

  ‘Did you have an affair with Lisa?’ I asked.

  For a second he did not know how to answer. He reached across and started rubbing the muscle of his left arm, a pained expression on his face. ‘Who told you that?’ he asked.

  ‘I get paid to ask questions.’

  ‘Did Ruth tell you?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No, of course not. What did Ruth say?’

  ‘Same as you.’

  ‘So who told you I’d had an affair with Lisa?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘Lisa? You knew Lisa?’

  Full marks to K. Tom. We were supposing that Lisa told him about me in the second phone call.

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘So why did
she tell you that?’

  ‘Why would she lie? She rang you, twice, the night before she was murdered. What did she want?’

  ‘Just someone to talk to. She was drunk. She said it was about her VAT returns, but that was just a pretext.’

  ‘And the second call?’

  ‘I’d asked her for some figures. She rang me back with them.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I didn’t even write them down. I only said it to get her off the phone. Like I said, she was drunk,’

  ‘So late Friday night this drunk woman finds her accounts books, extracts some figures from them to do with her VAT returns and rings you back with them. Sounds unlikely, to me.’

  He was rubbing his arm again and looking disgruntled. ‘Well, it’s the truth,’ he declared. In other words, prove otherwise, if you can.

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘Months ago. Sometime in the summer.’

  ‘When exactly?’

  He shook his head. ‘Can’t remember.’

  ‘What was the occasion?’

  He picked up a blue ball, rotated it in his fingers and put it down again. ‘That’s right,’ he stated. ‘Ruth’s birthday. They came round with a present for her. So it would be…June…or July.’

  ‘And when did you last see Justin?’

  ‘Same time.’

  ‘And you haven’t seen him since?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought you were his number two fan, his mechanic, followed him all over the Continent.’

  His face turned red and his arm was troubling him again. Some people pull their ear lobes or scratch their heads. He rubbed his upper arm. ‘I, er, might as well tell you,’ he sighed.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘All that…going over to the Continent, with Justin’s bike and some spares. It’s just a ruse. I don’t go to watch him.’

  ‘So why do you go over there?’ I couldn’t believe he was going to tell me about smuggling gold. He didn’t.

  ‘It’s, er, Ruth. We, er, don’t have much of a, er, relationship, you know.’

  ‘You mean, sex.’

  ‘That’s right. I have a friend, in Amsterdam. I go over to see her as often as I can. You’re a man of the world, Inspector. I’m sure you can imagine how it is.’

  Why do they always throw it back at you? I didn’t have a bloody clue how it was to have a street full of friends in Amsterdam. Someone once told me that the tour guides always recommend the girl in number 42 as the most beautiful. Presumably she was the one to avoid, unless you fancied catching the Japanese strain of HIV.

  It was blowing cold outside, threatening rain. I glanced at the garage as I climbed into my car, and wondered about the bullbars. It would be easy enough to raise a search warrant, and that might tell us if he was smuggling gold inside them but we’d not find the rest of it. So far he didn’t know we were interested in the gold, unless Jimmy the Fish or the Wattses had tipped him off. I decided it was best to keep on playing it softly-softly.

  The next call was the one I wasn’t looking forward to. Normally, I don’t hang about when I drive, but everything overtook me as I wound reluctantly up the old back road between Heckley and Oldfield, towards Broadside, home of Justin Davis.

  He was digging the garden, working furiously, oblivious to the knife-edged breeze flattening the cottongrass on the moors. I closed the gate and walked towards him as he straightened up. Long hair blew across his face. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans with ripped knees. I stopped about five yards from him, not sure what to expect. He only stood about five feet six tall, but was wiry with it. Proper muscle, not the false stuff you see on TV freak shows.

  ‘I came to say how sorry I was – about Lisa,’ I shouted to him, across the patch of newly dug earth.

  He placed his foot on the spade and drove it into the ground. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he suggested, and walked towards the house, leaving the spade standing there as if marking a grave.

  ‘Just give me a minute,’ he said, ushering me into the front room. ‘Sit down, please.’

  The parrot wasn’t there. I stood and looked out of the window, down towards the Peak District and what I imagined to be Mam Tor. Big drops of rain dashed on to the glass and slid diagonally away.

  ‘Take a seat,’ he told me when he returned. He’d changed into a clean version of the same outfit, but was barefoot. His hair was back in a ponytail and his face freshly washed.

  ‘Thanks.’ I sat in silence for a long time, looking at some object on the floor, like a Buddhist monk contemplating a candle flame. ‘I rang Lisa, Thursday night,’ I began. ‘I wanted to ask her about K. Tom – your stepfather. There are certain suspicions about him smuggling. Gold, we think. I wondered if your falling out had anything to do with it, so I made an appointment to talk to Lisa Friday morning. That’s why I was here. The papers made it sound… They tried to make something out of it. You know what they’re like.’

  He nodded. His face was white and lined beyond that caused by an unhealthy lifestyle, his eyes bloodshot and twitching. Fifty hours in a jumbo jet wouldn’t have helped. Fingers with chewed-down nails drummed on the arms of his chair and his feet beat a rhythmless tattoo on the carpet. He badly needed another fix of whatever kept him going.

  ‘Has the doctor seen you?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. I think the police must have asked him to call.’

  ‘Did he give you anything?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t like pills. Reality is scary enough. The thought of not being in control terrifies me.’

  ‘That’s a good philosophy,’ I agreed, ‘but the odd pill might help you sleep, or something.’

  ‘No, I’m OK.’

  ‘Is anybody calling to see you? Friends, anybody?’

  ‘Team mates, and their wives. One or two. I guess it’s awkward for them.’

  ‘You’re right. They want to do whatever is best, but don’t know what that is.’

  We chatted on, me letting him do most of it. He suggested coffee and we drifted into the kitchen.

  ‘When will I be able to…?’ he began. ‘When will they let me…?’

  ‘The funeral? When will they let you arrange a funeral?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what I meant.’

  We perched on high stools round what I supposed was a breakfast bar. ‘Usually,’ I said, ‘in a situation like this – a murder case – we have to leave the body in the mortuary after the post-mortem, for the defence to arrange their own PM, if they require it. I can’t see that being necessary. I’ll have a word with the coroner, see what we can do.’

  ‘I’d be very grateful. So would Lisa’s parents.’

  ‘I know.’

  I asked him if he’d go back to Australia, but he hadn’t thought about it. Said he might eventually settle over there, make a fresh start.

  ‘Where’s the bird – Joey?’ I wondered. ‘He’d be some company for you.’

  ‘Lisa’s parents are looking after him. I’ll have a ride over to collect him, this afternoon.’

  ‘I should. He, er, was on the floor, near the front door when I came. I picked him up. It was the bravest thing I’ve ever done in my life.’

  Justin gave the briefest of smiles. ‘He was probably scared. He wouldn’t hurt you.’ He looked in his coffee mug, realised it was empty and reached out for mine. ‘Another coffee?’

  ‘Please.’

  With his back to me, as he waited for the kettle to boil again, he said, ‘Lisa loved Joey. And he loved her. He was a present for her tenth birthday. She used to take Joey in the bath with her. He’d stand on the taps, and after she’d rinsed her hair with the attachment she’d give him a shower. He enjoyed that.’

  ‘He did look a bit straggly,’ I said.

  He slid the full mug across to me and climbed on to his stool. ‘Did Lisa suffer, Charlie? That’s the question I need answering, most of all.’

  I finished stirring in a couple of spoonfuls of sugar, touched the ti
p of the spoon on the surface of the coffee to remove the last droplet and deliberately placed the spoon alongside my mug, equidistant from it and two edges of the tabletop. ‘It was quick,’ I told him. ‘And she didn’t struggle. She had no time to struggle. That’s all I know, but that much, I guarantee.’

  ‘I appreciate what you say. Will you catch…whoever it was?’

  ‘I’ll catch ’em, Justin. That I vow.’

  The visit I’d been scared of making lasted two and a half hours. I promised to call again and told him he could ring me any time, night or day. At the door I said, ‘Sooner or later, Justin, it’s going to occur to you that if I hadn’t been nosing into various people’s affairs, this might not have happened. I’m aware of it, and it bothers me.’

  He shook his head, saying, ‘No. You were only doing your job. Two years ago a rider crashed while trying to get past me. He’s in a wheelchair, now. If I hadn’t been so determined not to let him through he’d still be walking about. I won an extra point and twenty quid. He got that.’

  The car was facing in the wrong direction, but I didn’t bother turning it around. I drove to the highest place on the moors and just sat there for half an hour, safe and warm, with the wind buffeting the car and the view slowly turning to a khaki smudge as a wall of bad weather blew in from the west and the first sleet of the season built up on the windscreen.

  I knew Gilbert wouldn’t be in, so I used the back stairs and sat in his office while I rang Superintendent Isles. He couldn’t see any reason why Lisa’s body shouldn’t be released. Sometimes, with cut throats, great weight is put on the angle of the attack, and whether it was done by a left-or right-handed assailant, but we’d made no conclusions about this. He promised to have a word with the coroner. After that I waited in the gathering gloom until it was time to go home.