Close Call

by J M Gregson

  How direct the man was! Almost insolent in his intensity. ‘I’m sure Jason was never involved in anything like that.’ But Lisa was aware that she didn’t sound very sure at all.

  Just when she was focussed absolutely upon the superintendent, it was Hook who said quietly, almost persuasively, ‘You think Jason Ritchie might have gone back out of your house on Saturday night to meet Robin Durkin, don’t you, Lisa?’

  It seemed to her more shocking that her worst nightmare should be voiced now by this rubicund, unthreatening figure. ‘No. Well, I recognize that it would have been possible. I’d drunk quite a bit and I went out like a light after we’d made love. I told you that. But the fact that it’s possible doesn’t mean that I think it actually happened.’

  But all three of them in the room knew that she wouldn’t have been there if she didn’t think it was a possibility.

  Watson felt very cool, even on a day when there seemed to be not a breath of air in the stifling city. Adrenaline had that effect upon him.

  It had always been one of his strengths that he grew calmer as the pressure increased. He had fought as a mercenary in settings as diverse as tropical jungles and the frozen foot-lands of great mountain ranges. It was in these places that he had discovered that it was when the bullets were flying and danger was at its greatest that his brain functioned with an almost unnatural coolness. Not all men were like that. The discovery of that fact was one of the things which had made him determined to operate alone.

  There were twenty minutes yet before he needed to be in position. It was a mark of the amateur to be there too early, attracting attention. Watson turned the car off his route, cruised alongside one of the canals which had been prettified in the last two years. There was a greater mileage of canals in Birmingham than in Venice now, he’d read. Fortunately, you didn’t have to make your getaway by water in Birmingham.

  He watched scantily-clad girls drinking wine with bare-chested men on barges, opened his car window a fraction to hear the sounds of innocent voices and high-pitched laughter. For a moment, he speculated about those other, innocuous, unremarkable lives, which he would glimpse in passing but never enter. There was a band playing somewhere beyond a high building, a brassy, unthreatening, cheerful sound, which said that some sections at least of the city were at play and beginning the weekend early. Watson drove towards the music but decided not to reach it. He pressed the button and put the windows up, switched on the air conditioning, and isolated himself again within his cocoon of concentration.

  It was time to focus again upon the business of the day.

  The warehouses were high here, cutting out most of the sky even in this brilliant weather. Many of them had changed their functions with the decline of manufacturing industry. Some of them dealt in less honest trades than in Birmingham’s heyday; some of them housed much more dubious goods and much more dubious traders than had been here when these high, blank brick walls had been constructed. It was not a place where you would willingly come alone at night, even if you were as well equipped to protect yourself as Anthony David Watson.

  But the place which he had chosen operated within the law. It was a quarter of a mile from the last of the warehouses, on the fringe of the area which was formerly dominated by those small manufacturing businesses which were the foundation of Birmingham’s prosperity and reputation. What had once been a toolmaker’s busy works had lain derelict for ten years before it had been converted into a gaming club.

  Gambling has been one of the growth industries of twenty-first century Britain. And crime follows economic growth. The men who were already big in the underworld had long seen the possibilities of gaming clubs and betting shops, not just as lucrative enterprises in themselves, but as vehicles for laundering money acquired by other and more devious means. Now the government had seen the revenue possibilities of the nation’s taste for gambling and announced the licensing of casinos. The stakes were going up, for the criminal fraternity as well as for the punters in their clubs.

  One of the owners was getting far too big for his expensive leather shoes. It wasn’t good for you to get ideas above your station in the undefined but clearly understood hierarchy of the underworld. Those people who didn’t appreciate that truth had to learn it the hard way. And their fate would be a stern example to a host of other, lesser people, whose ambitions might also be in danger of outstripping their functions.

  Watson was here to implement this necessary and educative adjustment.

  He eased the Vauxhall out of the side street and into the exact position he needed, twenty yards from the entrance to the club. It would be crowded round here in the evenings, but there was no difficulty with parking in the afternoon, when the roulette wheels were stilled and the cards locked away in the steel cabinets. He had even thought that his presence might be too obvious in the almost-deserted street. But there was a white Transit van, which was obviously the property of some workman operating within the club, a perfect screen for a killer. He pulled in four yards behind it, with his front wheels turned outwards for the getaway.

  Seven minutes, if the target came when he should. Watson could feel the tension at last. He forced himself to stare at the bonnet of the car and muse on how perfect the grey Vauxhall was for his needs. Not too new, not too remarkable. Almost anonymous among flashier and more expensive wheels. But absolutely reliable, and deceptively fast when it needed to be.

  The target arrived in one of those more luxurious and noticeable cars. Watson’s lips twisted into an unconscious smile as he watched the big silver Mercedes turn into the street. He watched it until it disappeared behind the van in front of him. Then he slid silently from the seat of the Vauxhall and pressed himself against the rear doors of the Transit.

  He heard the target speaking, caught a few words of his flat Brummagen accent as he gave orders to the men beside him. Watson heard the voices moving away from him before he risked putting an eye round the corner of his white metal cover.

  The men with his target were squat and powerful. But they were club bouncers, not a professional bodyguard: Watson would have known them if they had been professionals. These men would be handy enough with their fists, but they probably weren’t even tooled up. He wouldn’t underestimate them: he never did that. But he could see nothing very threatening here.

  As if to confirm his assessment, the men moved into the club ahead of their boss when he told them to. No professional minder would have done that. The target reached into the back of the Mercedes and picked up his briefcase, looked automatically but unseeingly up and down the street, and followed them towards the door of the club.

  Watson moved after him on silent, rubber-soled feet. The man in the tailored shirt did not even hear him. His first intimation that he had company was the pressure of the silencer at his temple. It was possible that he did not even have time to anticipate the shot which blew half of his head away.

  Watson knew there was no need for a second shot. Not at that range, when you had picked the exact point of entry to the head. He did not even pause to study the effects of his work: that would have been unprofessional.

  He was in the driving seat of the car by the time he heard the first shouts of alarm from the doorway of the club. The Vauxhall was at the end of the street before anyone even thought of pursuit. Probably no one would have even noted the number on the false plates – not that anyone in these circles would be invoking the police. His lips curled now into a wider and more deliberate smile at the thought of how ridiculous that would be.

  Once he was clear of the immediate area of the club, with no sign of any vehicle behind him, he slowed to thirty. No sense in risking the traffic cops when you had just fried a much bigger fish and got away with it. There was no one around the lock-up garages at this time on a Friday afternoon. Nevertheless, he pulled down the up-and-over door before he moved the old carpet aside and took the cover off the servicing pit beneath the concrete floor. He stowed away the Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum pistol
carefully in the secret chamber at the base of the cavity, then set the boards back precisely before dropping the rags and the car tools he never used on top of them.

  He enjoyed the walk home in sun and dappled shade along the edge of the park. Schoolchildren, released for the weekend, were playing noisy games away to his left. Mothers with toddlers in pushchairs were conversing near the gates. He wondered why their conversations never seemed to dry up. He was a man who had little time for words himself. The ones he used were mainly functional; he couldn’t imagine the kind of desultory exchanges these young women pursued, where the words were an unimportant vehicle for the kind of social exchange he had long since abandoned.

  Once he was back within the familiar walls of the flat, he poured himself a stiff whisky, topping it with plenty of water. He scarcely drank at all nowadays, but you had to allow yourself a small celebration of a job well done. It was one of the few conventions he preserved from that earlier life of his, which seemed now to have been lived by a different person.

  He rang the number he had been given, waited for the connection, said carefully and clearly, ‘The fish has been filleted,’ and put the phone down without waiting for any response. These codes always felt ridiculous, but it was what the man had directed him to say. And he who paid the piper so handsomely had the right to call the tune.

  He decided he wouldn’t eat until much later. He wasn’t at all hungry at the moment, and he could easily microwave one of the meals from the freezer whenever it suited him. Life was much easier and more comfortable here than in those places in his past, where he had operated in temperatures of over a hundred or under zero whilst living under canvas. And you didn’t need to keep your eyes on the actions of the shady people who served alongside you, in whatever cause was paying the wages this month. Being your own boss had a lot of advantages, whatever trade you were working in.

  Watson enjoyed the process of winding down after a job, of gradually relaxing that intense concentration he assumed as naturally as the appropriate clothing for the task. By six o’clock, he was almost asleep in his armchair, with the book closing itself unnoticed on his lap. He never actually went to sleep: the habits he had developed as a younger man did not allow that. At a quarter to eight, he felt perfectly relaxed, as distanced from the events of the afternoon as if they had happened weeks earlier. In a moment, he would go into the kitchen and get himself something to eat.

  That was when the knock came at the door of the flat.

  He was instantly as alert as a wild animal, his hair prickling as his pulse raced, his fingers coiling around the arms of the chair as he sprang upright. It couldn’t be anything to do with what had happened this afternoon, surely? He had reconnoitred the ground as efficiently as ever, and the operation had gone like clockwork.

  He put his eye cautiously to the spy-hole in the door and saw two men in jackets standing outside, making no attempt to move to one side and conceal themselves. A tall man in his fifties, with a lined face and grizzled hair, and a man probably at least twenty years younger, with dark hair and a handsome profile.

  Rozzers! What the hell did they want? They couldn’t be on to him about this afternoon’s job, surely? The pigs weren’t that good, and certainly not that quick. And he was sure he’d left nothing behind to identify himself. They were flying a kite, whatever this was about. If he gave them nothing, they’d be on their way in ten minutes, and none the wiser. If he kept his nerve, he told himself firmly, there was nothing at all to fear here. And keeping his nerve was what he was good at.

  He opened the door carefully, gave them a guarded smile, even managed to look surprised at these strangers on his threshold.

  It was the taller, older man who spoke. He said, ‘Are you Anthony David Watson?’

  He didn’t like the use of his full name, and still less that it was the filth pronouncing it. He said ‘That is I,’ enjoying his correct and sententious use of the pronoun. Such precision would show them from the start that he did not feel threatened.

  The man had never taken his eyes from Watson’s face. He said calmly, ‘I am Detective Chief Superintendent Lambert. This is Detective Inspector Rushton. We’d like a few words with you, Mr Watson.’

  Nineteen

  The Governors’Meeting of the junior school was conducted with brisk efficiency. That was normal, with Rosemary Lennox in the chair.

  The news was generally good, she reported. The intake for the coming September was now finalized, and numbers would be up, for the third year in succession. The number of pupils was important, because there had been a threat to the future of the school a few years ago, when many of the villages of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire had lost the schools at the hearts of their communities as falling rolls in the classrooms took their toll.

  This one had acquired a new, enthusiastic head teacher and Rosemary Lennox as chairman of its governing body at the same time, and had never looked back. The reputation of the school was now such that parents from the whole of the surrounding area wanted to send their children here, and the problems were bulging classrooms and crowded play areas rather than threatened closure. But the problems of expansion were always easier than those of decline, as Rosemary and the head constantly reminded staff and parents. The numbers next year would probably justify another extra teacher, with all the advantages that would bring.

  The teacher-governors on the committee were glad that the meeting was swift and optimistic, for they had just concluded a busy working week. They appreciated the competence of the woman chairing the meeting and the way she constantly supported their popular head. Once the business of the day was concluded with the agreement of a date for the next meeting in October, the teachers departed swiftly to their weekend concerns, as did most of the other governors.

  Rosemary Lennox was left chatting with her new neighbour, Carol Smart, who was also a governor of the school, and who seemed to share most of her own views. ‘Thanks for supporting me on the employment of a music teacher,’ said Rosemary.

  ‘No problem. I’m glad the success of the school means that we have the resources available. We need things like music to develop the souls of the little hooligans! My own daughters missed out on things like that. I can see the need for minimum standards all over the country, but I sometimes think the National Curriculum seems to squeeze out things like music and drama.’

  Carol hoped she didn’t sound sycophantic. She was still a little in awe of Rosemary Lennox’s grasp of educational issues and clear-sighted pursuit of excellence. But she was getting to know her new neighbour better day by day. She liked what she saw and heard. Rosemary was not stuffy, as she had feared she might be when they moved into Gurney Close; indeed, she had a quite impish sense of humour, on occasions. Carol Smart said, ‘I suppose it helps you with this, your husband being a teacher.’

  Rosemary grinned. ‘Ex-teacher, now. And I’m not sure working in the upper echelons of a comprehensive school, with fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds, has much relevance to the problems of a junior school.’ Her punctilious and slightly pompous husband was good with committed six-formers; less so, she fancied, with boisterous eight-year-olds. He had even seemed a little diffident and awkward with their own son when Andy had been that age, though there had never been any doubt that Ron loved the boy dearly.

  Neither woman voiced the thought which had occurred to both of them during the afternoon. It was surely ridiculous that two such competent but unremarkable women, one a slim, healthy, grey-haired lady in her early sixties and the other a comely and intelligent forty-three year-old, should be involved in the investigation of a violent killing. That two of the governors of this lively and successful primary school should be murder suspects.

  Rosemary was gathering her papers from the meeting together and preparing to leave when the head teacher returned to the room, looking surprisingly embarrassed within her own school. ‘There’s a Chief Superintendent Lambert just arrived. He says he’d like to speak to you, when you’ve finished her
e.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Mrs Lennox. ‘We’ve had a murder among our neighbours, you know, Mrs Smart and I. I expect he wants to clear up a few details with us.’ She spoke as if murder was just one more thing to be dealt with in a busy working week, no more disturbing than rotas for hospital visiting or rebates on council tax for charity shops.

  ‘There are two of them, actually,’ said the head. ‘And it’s Mrs Smart they say they want to speak to.’

  ‘I’ll be on my way, then,’ said Rosemary Lennox, sliding her papers into her bulging brief-case. She tried not to show the relief she felt that it should be Carol Smart rather than her that the law wanted to speak with.

  Jason Ritchie had never been afraid of hard physical work. Whenever he was confused about other things in his life, he positively exulted in toil that would have put lesser men on their backs for a week. Whilst Anthony Watson was despatching his target into eternity in Birmingham, Ritchie was engaged in more honest and innocent work.

  Even a little later, at five o’clock on a roasting Friday afternoon, when most people would have been happy to stop work and declare the weekend had commenced, Jason worked steadily on, feeling the sweat pouring in rivulets down his back and occasionally into his eyes, lifting the mixture of sand and cement and swinging the shovel with steady, rhythmic movements. This shifting of heavy loads with the wheelbarrow was how he had begun the day; this is how he had occupied himself for almost eight hours of it; this is how he would finish his working week. If it took him another hour, even two hours, to complete the job, then so be it.

  He was completing the base for a double garage: undemanding work as far as the mental side of it went, but enough to test the strength and the stamina of anyone labouring alone. He was proud of the fact that he was working at the same pace as he had used at nine in the morning, after all these hours when the sun seemed to blaze ever more fiercely. Many men would have been content to stop after the initial preparation, to make two days’ work or more out of this. But Jason had worked out his timetable and was sticking to it. It was a hard day, but not an unrealistic one, for a strong man in the prime of life. Jason was delighted to be demonstrating just that, to himself and to anyone else who cared to observe.