Some by Fire

by Stuart Pawson

  She took it badly. I told her that I was wasting her time and that it would be better for both of us. I didn’t love her, didn’t think I ever would. She cried a little and her shoulders trembled. I put my arm around them as she dried her eyes.

  ‘Is it because I wouldn’t go to bed with you?’ she asked when she felt better.

  ‘No,’ I answered truthfully. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I would have done, you know. When I was sure.’

  ‘In that case, you were right not to.’

  ‘Would it have made a difference?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. It would just have delayed things, that’s all. This way we can still be friends.’

  Trouble is, I haven’t had much practice at this sort of thing. Mostly, we drift apart. Mutual consent or something. A few women had dumped me, some badly, but this was worse. All we want from life is to be happy. All we do is make each other unhappy. Tomorrow it would be back to chasing villains. You know where you stand with them.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘Have you heard about the woodentops?’ Jeff Caton asked as he joined us in my office on Monday morning.

  ‘What have they done now?’ Nigel enquired.

  ‘Used up this month’s overtime to nab a busker and an old lady collecting for the Sally Army. Apparently they had a crackdown on the unlicensed vendors in the town centre, but unfortunately they appear to have had wind of it. They were all elsewhere and Adey’s furious.’

  Dave said: ‘Charlie buys all his clothes off them, don’t you, boss?’

  ‘Not all,’ I replied. ‘I get some in the market.’

  ‘What, fakes?’ Nigel asked.

  ‘They’re not fakes,’ I told him. ‘They just have different labels. They’re made on the same machines from the same materials to the same patterns as the designer ones that you fashion victims are daft enough to buy.’

  ‘The quality isn’t as good,’ Jeff declared.

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Neither do 1,’ Nigel added.

  ‘Listen,’ I began. ‘How much would you pay for a pair of Levi 501s?’

  ‘About forty quid,’ Jeff said and Nigel nodded.

  ‘Well, I bought a pair in the market last week for fifteen pounds.’

  ‘Genuine 501s?’

  ‘The real thing. They’d just made a slight mistake with the labels and rejected the whole batch.’

  ‘So what did the label say?’

  ‘Elvis 150s.’

  ‘Elvis 150s!’ they scoffed in unison. You try to help them, to pass on the benefits of your accrued wisdom, but they just won’t listen.

  ‘Any chance of talking about work?’ Dave wondered.

  ‘Right!’ I said, clapping my hands together. ‘Enough of the tomfoolery. It’s time to get our act together. Jeff?’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘You may have become aware that Dave and I have been preoccupied with something.’

  ‘I’d noticed you’re never here when I want you.’

  ‘Sorry about that. Nigel will fill you in with the details but you’ll probably see even less of us for a while. I want you to take over the robbery job, with Maggie. Don’t be afraid to give the others plenty to do and let them get on with it. Nigel will oversee the day-to-day stuff but keep up to date with this other job and liaise between us all. You can stay now, if you want, otherwise we’ll have a meeting on Friday afternoon to swap notes. OK?’

  Jeff nodded. ‘Fair enough. I’ll float off, if you don’t mind. I’ve plenty to do.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ Nigel called after him as he closed the door.

  I opened a window to let some fresh air in and gathered the papers on my desk into a tidy pile. ‘We’ll have a quick recap, for your benefit, Nigel,’ I began. ‘Interrupt if you require more detail. If we consider the fire, and forget all the conjecture about Fox and Crosby, we believe that, a) a girl with purple hair possibly marked the house that burnt down, b) Duncan Roberts knew a girl with purple hair, c) Duncan recently confessed to starting the fire, d) a girl with purple hair was on a psychology course at Leeds Uni at the right time. She was called Melissa Youngman.’

  Nigel said: ‘So it looks as if she put him up to it?’

  ‘Mmm,’ I agreed. Turning to Dave I asked: ‘Are you on Melissa’s trail?’

  ‘You bet,’ he replied. ‘Had no luck over the weekend, everywhere was shut, but I’ve sent my feelers out. Should have something later this morning.’

  ‘Great. Let me know as soon as anything comes through. Once we discover who she is we should be up and running.’

  I was downstairs, talking to the beat boys, when the desk sergeant waved to me, his hand over the telephone. ‘Somebody in a callbox, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Asking for you. Won’t give his name.’

  I took the phone from him and made a writing gesture. He pushed a pad under toy hand and pressed a pencil between my fingers. ‘This is DI Priest,’ I said. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘It’s me, Mr Priest. O’Keefe,’ came a gruff voice.

  ‘Hello, O’Keefe,’ I said. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I might ’ave summat for you.’

  ‘Information?’ I asked, just to confirm that he wasn’t talking about a pair of thirty-six-inch inside-leg Wranglers.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Right. Fire away.’

  ‘Not on the phone, and my money’s run out. I’m set up in Halifax.’

  ‘Near the Piece Hall?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘OK. I’ll be with you in half an hour.’ I put the phone down and shoved the pad back across the counter.

  ‘O’Keefe?’ the desk sergeant asked. ‘You mean old Walleye who sells jeans an’ things?’

  ‘His name is Wally,’ I told him.

  ‘Yeah, but everybody pronounces it Wall-eye.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I replied, turning to leave.

  He said: ‘Wait a minute! If he’s working for you… I don’t suppose it was you who…no, you wouldn’t… would you…?’

  But I was halfway up the stairs, going for my jacket, before he synchronised his thoughts and his power of speech, so I never discovered what I might or might not have done.

  On the drive to Halifax I listened to Radio Four and caught a sketch about Groucho Marx trying to buy a wooden Indian. I nearly drove off the road. Halifax is a handsome town with an ugly past. They had the guillotine here long before France adopted it, and at one time the death penalty was administered for stealing a shilling’s worth of wool. Not for nothing did vagrants pray: ‘From Hell, Hull and Halifax may the good Lord deliver us.’ The town is built of stone, out of wool. The fine buildings and institutions hide the fact that it was also built on slavery. Not the African sort, who were transported thousands of miles and sold like cattle. These slaves still retained a fundamental freedom: they could work or starve, the choice was theirs. The mill owner had no investment in them, and no responsibility for their welfare. When they didn’t work, through age or injury, sickness or circumstance, they didn’t get paid. There are no stone monuments to the thousands who died of the diseases of squalor, or who tangled with the newfangled machinery. They grew crooked-boned and bronchitic from sixteen hours a day in the mill, and if they survived all that a new horror awaited them. They developed cancer of the mouth, from ‘kissing the shuttle’.

  The Piece Hall is built around a cobbled quadrangle, with archways to allow one into a scene straight from the past. The building itself is three storeys high and comprised of an endless series of rooms, each big enough, just, to hold a weaver’s loom. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the weavers produced ‘pieces’, hence the name, for display down below. Nowadays it’s a market, selling everything from eyelash curlers to cylinder head gaskets. There’s the odd cabbage and carpet there, too, and it wouldn’t have been a surprise to find a wooden Indian.

  But O’Keefe wasn’t there. He normally
sets up shop outside, safe from the protests of the stallholders who pay dearly for the privilege of being on hallowed ground, but he wasn’t near either entrance. I saw a shady figure selling gold chains from a suitcase but decided not to ask him. I was strolling around the street outside the hall, half looking for him, half admiring the shadows on the stone buildings, when O’Keefe tapped on the window of a café and beckoned me in.

  ‘Thought I’d missed you,’ I said, sitting down.

  ‘Sorry about that, Mr Priest,’ he replied. ‘Sold out. Just waiting for my supplier to make anuvver delivery.’

  A waitress came and I ordered us a tea each with another ham sandwich for O’Keefe to go with the one he was halfway through. ‘Business must be good,’ I told him.

  ‘Yeah, well, you know what I always say. It’s a bit like sex. Even when it’s bad it’s good.’ He laughed just as much as before, giving me another view of his stumps, but this time there were wodges of half-masticated bread and ham clagging the gaps between them and strings of saliva hung down from his top palate. I turned away and gypped.

  ‘So what can you tell me?’ I asked when I dared look back at him.

  He swallowed and scavenged around the recesses of his mouth with his tongue. ‘Mate o’ mine,’ he began, ‘heard a conversation in a pub. Might be interesting.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in a gesture recognised in every market in the world.

  I said: ‘Don’t muck me about, O’Keefe. I saved you losing your stock on Saturday, not to mention appearing before the beak this morning. If you’ve got something for me, let’s have it.’

  ‘Fair enough, Mr Priest. Thought it was worth a try, that’s all. This mate. He was in t’Half a Sixpence, in Dewsbury, about a month ago. He was at t’bar, getting a pint, an’ three blokes were leaning on it.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Two of ’em was rough-looking, he reckoned. Not mucky or owt, but tough. ‘Eavies, you might say. T’other one was a bit of a wide boy. Smart suit, sunglasses, ‘anky in his top pocket.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘I’m coming to it.’ The waitress brought the teas and sandwich. When she’d gone he said: ‘One of the rough ones asked t’toff if there was anything else. He said, no, just the computer, and ‘anded ‘im a bit o’ paper. The rough one looked at it and said no problem. Then one of ’em said: “I don’t suppose you want any elephant, do you?” an’ they all ‘ad a good laugh.’

  ‘Elephant? What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘I dunno. My mate thought it was maybe a drug. Don’t you know?’

  ‘It could be. They have all sorts of different names for them. A computer was bought with the stolen cards from the last robbery, so I’m fairly certain you’re on to something, O’Keefe. You’d better tell me who this mate is.’

  ‘He’s called Collins. “Wilkie” Collins, but he won’t talk to you. He ‘ates cops.’

  ‘Would I know him if I saw him?’

  ‘Doubt it. He only does Dewsbury and Leeds.’

  ‘OK, you’ll have to talk to him for me. Tell him that it’s only a matter of time before somebody dies and he could help prevent it. Maybe that will change his mind. For a start, I want a better description of all three of them. What time of day was it, did he say?’

  ‘Dinner time.’

  ‘Right. You’ve done well for me. Find out what you can and give me a ring. If I don’t hear from you I’ll come looking, eh?’

  ‘Glad to be of assistance, Mr Priest,’ he replied, grinning.

  I left my tea untouched and drove back to Heckley. I skipped lunch. O’Keefe, with his odd eye and bad teeth, had left me without an appetite. He could earn a good living hiring himself out to slimming clubs as an appetite suppressant.

  The outer office was deserted except for Dave, crouched over his desk, telephone to ear. He raised his head and gave me a thumbs-up as I walked through. There was a sheet of A4 on my desk with a message on it to ring DJ Roberts, timed at eleven seventeen, with a number I didn’t recognise. I was staring at it when Dave ambled in.

  ‘Seen this?’ I said, waving the page before his eyes.

  ‘Yeah. One of the girls brought it in and I had a quick look. DJ’s the son, isn’t he?’

  ‘Mmm. Wonder what he wants?’

  ‘Give him a ring.’

  ‘First things first. How’ve you gone on?’

  ‘Pretty good,’ he said, settling on to the spare chair and smoothing a sheet of paper on the desk. ‘Listen to this. Melissa Frances Youngman was born in Anlaby Maternity Home on New Year’s Day 1951. She attended Cathedral Grammar School, Beverley, where she became head girl and passed ten O levels and four A levels. I spoke to the school secretary, she was very helpful. Melissa passed her driving test in 1968 but has never registered a motor vehicle.’

  ‘Probably given driving lessons for doing so well at school,’ I suggested.

  ‘If that’s a dig then I resent it,’ he snarled.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I should think so. In 1969 she enrolled at Essex University to study palaeontology and her mother died shortly afterwards, in August 1970. She was only forty-two.’

  ‘Did you find cause of death?’

  ‘Accidental overdose.’

  ‘That must have been unsettling for Melissa.’

  ‘It must, mustn’t it? Her father, incidentally, died in 1995. Melissa only did one year at Essex, but there’s a note on her record to say she applied to Edinburgh and the Sorbonne for a place there. That’s in Paris.’ He spun the sheet of paper round and pushed it towards me, so I could read his notes for myself.

  ‘I thought it was in Scotland,’ I said, but he ignored me. 1969, Essex, I thought. Then Edinburgh or the Sorbonne, and Leeds in 1975 or 1974. ‘It looks as if she decided to become a professional student,’ I declared, adding: ‘I wonder what her influences were? Why would a small-town girl like that, with a decent intellect, dye her hair purple back in those days, when it was considered pretty outrageous?’

  Dave said: ‘I’m only a couple of years older than her and when I was at school loads of the kids had their heads dyed purple.’

  ‘That was by the Nit Lady,’ I reminded him. ‘You had to have a dose of malt every day, too, for rickets.’

  ‘No, we had some white powder for them.’

  ‘Rickets, not crickets. So what do you think?’

  ‘What do I think?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I think you want me to start all over again at Edinburgh University and the Sorbonne, but you want me to volunteer because you daren’t ask me yourself.’

  ‘That’s about it,’ I admitted. ‘Man with dog never has to bark.’

  ‘I might have to recruit Sophie’s help again with the Sorbonne. She parlais better French than me.’

  ‘So do Interpol,’ I suggested.

  He nodded his agreement. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’

  ‘There’s one thing we could check,’ I said.

  ‘I know! I know! I hadn’t forgotten. Has she any form? I’ll do it now.’ He stood up and went out into the big office, where one or two of the others had returned from wherever they’d been. I looked at my piled-up in-tray, grimaced, and reached for the top item. It was a report predicting the benefits of synchronised traffic lights on road congestion in the town centre. I ticked my name on the distribution list and slung it in the out-tray. If only they could all be so simple.

  Dave was smiling when he came back five minutes later. ‘Two convictions,’ he told me. ‘Possession of a small quantity of a Class B drug, namely cannabis, in 1970, while living in Essex, and possession with intent to supply in 1974, when she was, believe it or not, a student at Durham University.’

  I said: ‘Durham! Jesus! She gets around.’

  ‘Small fine for the first offence. Community service order for the second.’

  ‘That’s been a good day’s work,’ I told him. ‘Well done.’

  ‘Cheers. Have you rung him?’

  ‘Yo
ung Duncan? No, I’ll do it now.’ I found the telephone number and dialled, convinced that the code was one I’d never used before. A girl answered almost immediately.

  ‘Is Duncan there, please?’ I asked.

  ‘Duncan? You mean DJ?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who wants him?’

  ‘He wants me. He left a message.’

  ‘I’ll get him.’

  I put my hand over the mouthpiece and hissed: ‘Woman; she’s fetching him.’ I pointed to a phone in the outer office, and dialled the number to make it a party line. Dave went out and picked it up.

  ‘Is that Inspector Priest?’ said a voice I’d last heard talking about carburettors.

  ‘Yes. How can I help you, DJ?’

  ‘I, er, was just wondering about my Uncle Duncan. My dad told me you came to talk about him, free weeks ago, when I was fixing the bike.’

  ‘That’s right. Did you get it going?’

  ‘Yeah. No problem. It’s just that, I, er, was a bit closer to my uncle than my dad knew, what with being named after him an’ all. Went to see him now and again. I just wondered if you could tell me anyfing about how he died, and why. If you know what I mean.’

  ‘You used to visit him at…his flat?’ I said, narrowly avoiding saying ‘squat’.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I went to have a look for myself, about a week after I saw you. Nice place he had.’

  ‘Yeah, wicked.’

  ‘Mr Wong, the landlord, showed me round,’ I lied.

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Mmm. Right, DJ, I’ll tell you what we know. Your Uncle Duncan telephoned someone just before he died, confessing to starting a fire in Leeds, back in 1975. Eight people died in the fire, and it’s still on our files as an unsolved crime it was arson, started deliberately. I’ve been trying to link your uncle with it but so far can’t find anything at all to suggest he was anywhere near or had anything to do with it. He was a sick man, DJ. Maybe he knew someone who died in the fire, someone he loved, and thought he could have saved them somehow. It might have been preying on his mind all these years. Perhaps, in the phone call, he didn’t say he started the fire, perhaps he said he was to blame for it, and the person he was talking to misinterpreted his words. Do you follow what I’m saying?’