‘No.’ Archie Young was sombre. ‘Wait till he gets back.’
5
Twice that day on which the Chief Commander had gone off to Coventry, Inspector Devlin had sat in her car in the school car park to watch the school bus first deliver the pupils who travelled on it, and then at the end of the day to pack in the homegoers and drive off.
Each time Sergeant Tony Tittleton had done his part of following behind the bus.
Earlier that day they had interviewed Louie, grandson of Max, known to them both because of his good food, about this story that he had seen Dick Neville going off with a policeman.
No, he had not recognized the man, he was too far away.
Why did he think it was a policeman?
The boy thought, and, perhaps pushed too hard by Devlin, said after a pause that perhaps it was the uniform, or someone might have told him.
‘You mean you knew the man?’ Just from a back view, said a sceptical voice inside her head.
The boy just shook his head and smiled, and murmured that he looked like a policeman. Perhaps it was the hat.
‘And it was Dick Neville with him?’
A vigorous nodding of the head. Yes, he knew Dick.
‘Right, thank you,’ Inspector Paddy Devlin had said to him and his mother. ‘Good boy.’
‘He has been helpful?’ asked his pretty, anxious mother. ‘My father told me I must tell Mr Coffin … he has been such a friend, and his wife, oh, I admire her. And these poor boys, if we could help …’ Her voice trailed off.
‘Oh yes, very helpful,’ Devlin had answered, admitting to herself that she had pushed too hard. ‘Let me know if he says anything else.’ Well, the uniform had been a help. Who have we got who wears a uniform? There was something interesting about this child, but she could not identify what her feeling was.
‘I don’t know if we were wasting our time or not,’ she said to Tittleton over a drink that evening. ‘I just wanted to see how the school run works out.’
‘And the driver does have a uniform.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it works just as you’d think it would.’ The sergeant chewed on a ham sandwich. ‘He collects the kids at two meeting places, drives to the school, and the same in reverse in the evening. He’s careful, I noticed that, checks the kids in both times. They seem to like him and trust him.’
‘Peter Perry.’ Devlin was thoughtful. ‘He was one of us, uniformed, never progressed far, but he was popular and liked. And he does wear a uniform.’
‘It’s a two-man firm, his brother is the other partner and they have two buses and a run-down backup for when a van breaks down, but the brother is a good mechanic so nothing ever does break down. Or not for long. They are not making a fortune between them, but they do various odd weekend trips with football teams and dancers off to a festival and skaters off to a competition. Oh, and he takes a school party off to the ice rink once a week.’
‘What do we know about the two Perrys?’
Tittleton shrugged. ‘Not very much, I asked around among some of the people who served with him, he was well liked, as I said. Not a great brain but thought to be a decent sort. Both brothers live quiet lives. Peter is a widower, his wife died just about the time he took early retirement, but he has a much younger girlfriend. His brother George is married, lives in apparent peace with his wife.’
‘Children?’
‘Peter has none, George has three, all grown up and living away from home. He’s been away sick, hip operation, so Peter has been carrying the team. I didn’t speak to Peter. He knew I was there, though.’
‘He hasn’t been questioned about the four boys yet, but he must guess he will be … he certainly knew them, they all four used his bus. But let’s leave him for a bit. He’ll keep.’
There were plenty of other names on her list: four sets of parents, all manifesting grief and anger in different ways, all of whom had to be questioned with care, delicacy and also with a sharp questioning eye.
Because, alas, you never knew.
She ran over the interviews with the four families:
Dr Chinner, whom she knew, and whom she handled with great care; he was in shock.
Mr and Mrs Baker, Sergeant Eddy Baker, CID, Spinnergate, this hobbled her a bit, he was a colleague, but he was going to take leave. Wisest.
Rosy Neville and her partner Andrew Carmichael … he was the boy’s father and it appeared a stable relationship. Rosy worked on the catering of the police kitchen at headquarters in Leathergate. Andrew was not working, but as a young actor this not unusual. He might land a job tomorrow … probably would now, he’d be offered something in the latest crime drama. If he could bear to take it.
Sylvia Rick and Phil Rick. A nice family, two other children, they seemed happy but she thought they might shout at each other a bit when alone. The neighbours said so. Phil was a detective constable in Spinnergate.
One way and another they were all connected with the Second City police. That wasn’t to say that they all knew each other, but they might have rubbed shoulders.
Also, Spinnergate seemed to come into the story quite a lot. Four children from families with connections with the police and Spinnergate.
You always start with the family, she told herself, but four families? Still, a first short interview had been inflicted on each set of parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents where available.
But she had also made contact with PETS, the ironically named unit set up to list all known paedophiles, with starred references to those known to be violent. She already knew those living in the Second City, but PETS could tell her if any from outside were coming her way.
But she had the feeling that this killer was a home-grown, Second-City product.
Bad old world.
Peter Perry was aware that he was being watched. He was unsurprised. ‘Would have done the same myself.’ He drove with special care since he was being observed. In any case, he was a careful driver, always conscious of his cargo of young hopefuls whom he had long since learned to control with the threat that if they didn’t behave they would never get on his bus again and could walk to school. He allowed himself more latitude when he took the weekly late-afternoon trip to the East Hythe swimming pool and ice rink, but he felt this was legitimate since he made a very small charge to what he called ‘the lads and lassies’, and felt he was off duty. He liked a swim and a sauna himself, and even the occasional twirl on the ice where the skating coach was an old friend. Oliver Deccon’s wife was dead, and Perry had heard he hadn’t treated her very well: he’d always been out skating or training skaters or judging skaters. His sister, Edie, had known Maggie Deccon, though, and had said she was happy enough with her husband. Peter was so very much older than Edie, they had never been close and he could not claim to understand her. George, the other driver in this coach business, had been more Edie’s pal. But then, he wasn’t always that close to George, but what he did know was that George was a good driver and a better mechanic. You needed that in this business. He would be glad when George was back.
It was the afternoon, end of the school day run, he achieved it neatly and on time, not even bothering to put his head out and wave to Tony Tittleton following at a remote but steady distance. He had meant to wave, but hell, why bother, the chap probably knew he knew.
He was not followed to the garage where the two coaches were kept, although without doubt, Sergeant Tittleton knew where it was, and might even have had a look round. Not inside though, because Perry, the ex-copper, kept a tight security lock on the place. It was a run down old tin shed of some size which had once housed a small factory, the bins and cupboards lining the walls remained. Not a place of beauty it was more convenient than it looked. At night he removed an essential part of the engine from both coaches which he took home with him, so they could not be stolen, although they could be vandalized. Hence the expensive lock and alarms.
He parked the coach, got out of his uniform, which he hung in the
small cloakroom and lavatory before going home. His brother should have been doing the driving tomorrow, they took turn and turn about. As a rule, although George was always shifting days around and sometimes getting more than his free time. Like now, having extra time off because of his hip. It was rotten being the eldest of the family, you got exploited.
He patted his uniform as he hung it up, he felt at home in it, part of his past. It gave him authority too, and a presence. A good one, he hoped.
Sergeant Tony Tittleton thought Perry had a good presence too, and his record in the Second City uniformed force had been checked and found straightforward: not a great brain, but no fool and had been commended for bravery when tackling a killer with a knife. Broke the chap’s jaw, although stabbed in the arm himself.
None of this would have ruled Peter Perry out as a suspect, although you could call it a good character reference. No one could connect him, except for this story retailed by a small boy of Dick Neville going off with a man who was a policeman.
Inspector and sergeant sat companionably over their drinks. ‘I hate this business sometimes,’ Paddy Devlin said. ‘But at least we have some guidelines to follow, they give us rails to hold on to. So you run your eye over all our local sex offenders, and see how they measure up. None of them so far have looked like killers, but you can never tell … they could change.’
‘I have started thinking about our locals. Arthur Willows has always had a touch of violence.’
‘Well, check on him.’
‘Could be a woman … not likely, I know, but not impossible. We won’t know about body fluids and so on until the autopsies are done.’
‘I can get on to Bickley, see what he’s got. And Big Jim is on the job too, that pair won’t miss anything.’
‘I’m glad I haven’t got any kids,’ said Tony. ‘They’d have a terrible life with me, I’d probably keep them chained to me as a security measure.’
Paddy Devlin kept silent; she had a much-loved child, a daughter, but the girl had moved out when she went to university and had not come back. She was not lost, she kept in touch with her mother, but at a distance. Her other parent, an academic, lived in America. She did not like her mother’s profession, trade, she called it, but her father lectured on English literature so he was pleasantly out of touch with the world. All the same, relations were strained there too.
‘Whatever you do, you get it wrong,’ he muttered after a while. ‘I don’t see myself having any kids. My wife’s not keen, and I don’t see it as fair to inflict pregnancy and childbirth on a woman just to satisfy your own ego.’
‘It’s a bit more complicated than that … there are pleasures as well.’ She didn’t know much about Kate, his wife, or about his marriage, but she wouldn’t mind betting that sooner or later they would part and then there would be a second Mrs Tittleton.
‘She’s very ambitious. Good at her job, clever.’ Kate was a teacher. ‘She teaches history at Queen’s Acre.’ This was the big, expensive, private school across the river in Blackheath. ‘I never took much interest in the past before, but I am learning quite a lot about medieval England. I like the old Anglo-Saxons better though. I think I come from the Anglo-Saxon side. Kate says there weren’t many Normans really, most of the country was still full of the English, and that’s why we talk English, and not a kind of bastard Norman-French.’
‘You went to university yourself.’
‘Yes, sure. But I was science and maths … not all that good at either.’
‘Have you found them useful in the police?’
‘Yeah, I have. A bit, anyway. I can add up, that helps, and I usually know when people are lying. I suppose that’s a legacy from being a questioning scientist, putting things to the test … you are supposed to do that.’
‘I didn’t want to go to the university myself … wanted to go straight into the police. My father was a copper. “Go in and best them, girl,” he said to me. “But get a degree first. It carries weight these days, especially for a woman. Go for the top.” So I did.’
Tony looked a bit daunted at her words, so she gave him her best smile, one that was, she hoped, friendly and not too alarming.
‘My father is a surgeon, and he said, “Keep away from medicine, you haven’t got the mind for it.” I thought it was cheek, but I guess he was right.’
‘You’re not too old to try if you want to, Tony.’
‘Heaven forbid … here, you’re not telling me to hand in my resignation?’
‘Of course not. You are doing well.’
‘Am I?’ A smile lightened his face. ‘Good-oh … That’s made me feel thirsty.’
Tony got up to get them each another drink, although both were drinking fruit juice, not his favourite tipple, but on the job, especially this job, you kept sober. You couldn’t go breathing gin over desperate parents. Or frightened kids to whom something horrible had happened.
As he came back with the drinks, bringing a packet of crisps and some nuts as well, he said: ‘What do you make of this kid’s story that he saw the Neville lad going off with a policeman?’
‘Not a lot at the moment. Louie seemed bright enough, but the person with him at the time … he has a sort of walker, a nice fat woman called Rose, to take him out, they were going shopping, and she didn’t see anything, so there’s no back-up.’
‘You think he’s making it up?’
Paddy frowned. ‘No, no, I don’t think that. But I shall want to talk to him again.’ She finished her drink and stood up. ‘Well, I’m going back, I have some work to finish. Thanks for the lemonade.’
‘It was orange juice.’
‘I never had any taste,’ she said sadly.
They walked slowly, side by side, to the police centre in East Hythe where their incident room was placed. Two men, detective constables of equal rank and more or less the same age, were working at computers. At intervals a telephone would ring and be answered tersely. It seemed to make no difference to the world ticking on all around them. Perhaps they were just getting a time-check or the latest football score.
Paddy Devlin stood there looking at them in silence. There they were, her team, and she wasn’t sure how well they were going to do with this case.
The sergeant began a quiet conversation with one of the other detectives.
The fax beeped, announcing that it was about to utter. Paddy walked across to read what was coming.
Oh, hell.’
Sergeant Tittleton saw her reading and grimacing and came across to see. ‘What is it?’
‘The postmortem report. A joint effort from Bickley and Big Jim. The Neville boy was killed first, Archie Chinner’ – she paused – ‘as we guessed, he was the last killed. The other two, Charles Rick and Matthew Baker, seemed to have been killed soon after they went missing.’
‘And whose leg was it?’
Inspector Devlin took a deep breath: ‘It wasn’t their bloody leg.’ She was angry. ‘It’s a stranger’s leg. It did not come from any of the boys.’ She looked him in the eyes, still angry. ‘It was the leg of an adult female … I suppose we should have been sharp-eyed enough to notice. I didn’t, for which I don’t praise myself.’
‘I don’t know about you, but I took a quick look at the first boy’s body, just enough to see what it was, and the same with the leg. I knew that pathologists and the forensic boys would do the close work.’
‘Thanks for the support.’ Paddy Devlin turned aside. ‘It wasn’t a pretty sight, but it was my job. And I didn’t do it.’
Fatigue was making her drive the knife into herself. ‘Damn.’
Then she laughed at herself: ‘Shut up, Devlin, and stop taking yourself so seriously.’ And she turned to the report again.
‘The boys were all killed in the same way: strangled. Abused in the same way.’
‘Blood?’ queried the sergeant, recalling the two blood types on Archie Chinner, the boy’s own and one other.
‘One set of stains matches the blood on the Chinner bo
y’s clothes.’
‘Not that they were his clothes,’ put in the sergeant. Thank God, she’s got her mind back and working, he thought.
‘No, not his clothes. None of the clothes seem to be a match with the dead boy.’
‘Stripped and then dressed in anything to hand.’
‘Looks like it. And the blood on Chinner, a rare type, does not match any of the boys.’
‘From the killer?’
She shrugged. ‘Who knows? There may have been more than one person involved.’
‘A sort of paedophiles killing party.’ He was not joking.
‘Do you think invitations were sent out? Yes, I think so: Drop in for a drink and a little light killing. I wonder how the invitations go out: by the post or word of mouth? And how many accept?’
Tittleton was relieved, he liked his boss to be bubbly, energetic and cracking jokes. Not that they were good jokes, still you could get a laugh. But she was given to great dips into gloom. It’s the Irish in her, he told himself.
‘Got a queue waiting, I expect.’
‘Yes, and it’s for us to locate that queue and nail the party host.’ She spoke the word nail with force as if she was hammering nails into hands, wrists and ankles. She shuffled the file of papers together. ‘I think there is a copy of this for you over there on the desk – I asked for two, it’s probably come through. Start reading it and see what ideas you get. Then go out on the streets and see the locals. Try Arthur Willows; even if he is in the clear himself, he may have ideas. Get him to utter. And go to the swimming pool, that and the skating rink interest me, people go there for other things than swimming … I fancied Joe Partoni myself, I’ve put him away once and suggested castration, but he seems to have drowned himself. Maybe it was guilt. He had plenty to feel guilty about, even if not murder. He used to swim a bit. He called it that, anyway. So try the games and leisure centre on Drake Street. See what you can find out. He may have some pals there. You never know.’
‘I go there myself,’ said Tittleton, hurt.
A Grave Coffin Page 9
