Last Reminder dcp-4

by Stuart Pawson

  ‘Right. Well, it’d be interesting to know why he visited Childs, don’t you think?’

  ‘Mmm, yeah. And you don’t mind if I go along and ask him?’

  ‘Be my guest, Charlie. Nobody else is working on it.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll keep you informed.’

  ‘That’s all we ask.’

  ‘How did the talk go?’

  ‘What talk?’

  ‘Friday, to the City gents.’

  ‘Oh, them. All right, thanks.’

  In other words, not brilliant. I replaced the phone and wondered why talking to Fearnside always made me feel like Hercules couldn’t make it, so could I do his labours for him? Cleaning out the Augean stables is just a euphemism for shovelling shit.

  The phone rang again, but nobody spoke. I dialled 1471, and a pleasant, if stilted, lady’s voice told me that she did not have the caller’s number. It was all the excuse I needed, so I tried Annabelle, but she wasn’t in.

  Next day I took the prayer meeting and wasted the rest of the morning waiting for the CPS to come up with some answers. They eventually rang me back to say they couldn’t see any purpose in charging Mrs Eastwood, but would I still submit the paperwork? They could cocoa. I was wondering what to do about lunch when Nigel breezed into the office, smiling with a mischievous smugness, like a little boy who’d broken his best friend’s Tonka toy. When he saw me he put his hands to his head and yelled, ‘Aaargh!’

  There’s a ritual to go through with Nigel. ‘So?’ I said, inviting him to explain.

  ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’

  ‘The good, please, if it’s not too much trouble.’

  ‘Four years each for the Deans, with eighteen months for the driver.’

  ‘Great,’ I replied. ‘That should keep them out of our hair for a while. And the bad?’

  ‘They’re suing us.’

  ‘Suing us? What for?’

  ‘Would you believe it? Subjecting them to unnecessary danger in the form of liquids that may be of a carcinogenic nature, and exposing them to ultra-violet radiation, which is a proven carcinogen.’

  ‘Are they serious?’

  ‘Mmm. Deadly. Their brief is demanding to see any safety and health guidelines that come with the products.’

  ‘Silly pillocks.’

  I took him across the road for a sandwich and a glass of shandy, and asked him to do some final polishing of arrangements for the rhubarb run.

  ‘And what about the warrant?’ he asked. ‘Does that need collecting?’

  ‘Warrant?’ I echoed. ‘We won’t be using a warrant, Nigel. Warrants is for cissies.’

  Now he looked worried.

  I left him in the pub and drove to my CADs meeting at the Civic Hall. The Community Action against Drugs committee is a new venture, meeting every month or so at the request of various concerned groups, mainly tenants’ associations on the estates. To offset unilateral action by some more militant factions, we’d decided to hold a ‘Shop a Pusher’ campaign. The Gazette would be asked to publish a pro-forma, saying something like ‘The following person has tried to sell me drugs…’ We were meeting to finalise the wording. I suggested that we add a footnote saying that the police would only take action after a person had been named six times from separate sources. The committee talked me down to four, but I didn’t mind. It was only there for reassurance; we’d ignore it if it suited us to.

  Back at the office I typed up the CAD committee decisions and did a report of the previous night’s conversation with Fearnside. As an afterthought I added a note about the two silent phone calls I’d received. I looked at the mess in my office and wondered about putting everything in order, just in case I was told to stay away, after the rhubarb run, but I decided to risk it.

  At home I had a frozen Christmas dinner for one, which was ghastly, and the only phone call was from Mike Freer to wish us luck. I slept like a vulture on a dead tree.

  The dawn chorus on the Sylvan Fields estate is just as likely to be the police helicopter as a vocal blackbird. It’s a busy time there. Some towns have a park ‘n’ ride scheme; on the Sylvan Fields it’s park ‘n’ torch. Clattering overhead, a helicopter would arouse less interest than a three-legged dog peeing against a lamppost.

  As soon as I heard it, I clicked the tit and ordered all units to stand by.

  ‘Sewer Rats in position,’ came back to me, followed by, ‘JCB approaching target, ready when you are,’ and, ‘Zulu Ninety-nine in position.’

  ‘Look at that,’ I said, nudging Sparky and nodding. The clouds had dissolved, and through the windscreen we could see Venus in the pale sky, bright as a daisy in a lawn.

  ‘It’s Venus,’ he confirmed.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.

  ‘Some of us see it every morning. C’mon, let’s go.’

  ‘It might be an omen,’ I told him. ‘Did you know that the Sioux called General Custer the Son of the Morning Star, because he always attacked at dawn?’

  ‘I do now. They’ll be having their breakfasts if we hang about any longer.’

  I raised the radio to my lips. ‘Rhubarb to all units: Tallyho! Tallyho!’

  Sparky leant across and shouted, ‘Scrag the bastards!’ into the instrument.

  Instantly the air was filled with the warbling of sirens, drowning out the chopper. We screeched around the corner and saw the JCB that we’d borrowed from a nearby building site turn to point at the front door of Michael Angelo Watts’ fortress. Cars came from all directions and angled in beside it.

  Police were leaping out on to the pavement, slamming doors and slamming them again just for effect. Curtains were flung back all down the street as bleary-eyed neighbours in their night attire, or lack of it, wondered what the excitement was. Sparky and I strode down the short path, the front of the building illuminated by the chopper’s searchlight.

  ‘What happened to him?’ Sparky said as we reached the front door.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, reaching through the bars.

  ‘General Custer.’

  I glowered at him and beat the door with my fist. ‘Police! Open up!’ I yelled.

  Sparky reached through and thumped harder and yelled louder. We’d have heard feet running up and down the stairs, people shouting and toilet-flushing noises if it hadn’t been for the helicopter.

  He squinted up at it, saying, ‘He’s fading my jacket with that fucking light.’ He only swears when he’s nervous.

  We hammered for nearly five minutes before the door opened as far as a security chain would allow it and a wide-eyed boy aged about twelve peered through the gap. He was wearing a giant-sized T-shirt with a catchy logo, and probably nothing else. ‘Hello, son,’ I said. ‘We’re the police. Is your father in?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Is Michael Angelo Watts in?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then will you please fetch whoever is in charge to the door.’

  He closed it and we heard the latch being applied again. I waved at the JCB driver and he revved the engine and raised the shovel in a menacing gesture. Two minutes later a bare-chested adult with short dreadlocks was addressing us through the gap.

  ‘What the fuck you want?’ he demanded.

  ‘Are you Michael Angelo Watts?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. Whad if I am?’

  ‘We’re looking for a man called Moses Sitole. We believe he’s a friend of yours. Can you tell me if he’s here?’

  ‘I don’t know no Moses Sitole.’

  ‘So he’s not here.’

  ‘Never fuckin’ heard o’ him.’

  ‘Let me show you a picture.’ I removed a carefully cropped photocopy of a Bob Marley album cover from my inside pocket and passed it through the gap to him.

  ‘You a fuckin’ joke, man,’ he assured me.

  ‘So you don’t know this man?’

  ‘I never see him before.’ His teeth were magnificent.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Looks like we’ve been given some ba
d information. Sorry to have troubled you, Mr Watts. Try to have a nice day.’

  As I walked off I heard him call, ‘Hey, you.’

  I turned, but it was Sparky he was talking to. They glared at each other for a second before Watts said, ‘Who the fuck he think he is?’

  ‘We call him Crazy Horse,’ Sparky declared, winking at me as he came away.

  I gave Zulu Ninety-nine a thank-you salute and he lifted effortlessly into the sky. Next time, if there is a next time, that’s the job I want. Sparky went to thank the JCB driver and I walked to the back of the next block, where the Sewer Rats were crouched around a manhole.

  Van Rees’s two assistants were wearing white coats and looked like a pair of earnest sixthformers.

  ‘Any joy?’ I asked.

  They nodded enthusiastically and gestured towards a row of plastic sample bottles, each containing about half a pint of cloudy water. ‘It looks very promising,’ one of them told me.

  It had bloody better be, I thought.

  We drove back in silence, Sparky in his morose Yorkshireman mode. ‘Do you?’ I asked, as we approached the nick.

  ‘Do I what?’

  ‘Call me Crazy Horse?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’ I was disappointed — he was a hero of mine. ‘What do you call me?’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ was all he’d say.

  I rang Van Rees to tell him that the samples were on the way, and Mike Freer to update him.

  ‘You know what they say,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you must be part of the sediment.’

  ‘Yeah, very apt. And people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw orgies.’

  I wrote, ‘If anybody rings for me, I’m at the CADs meeting,’ on a sheet of A4 and Blu-Tacked it to my window. With luck, I’d be able to hold them off until the results came in.

  The clap hit the propeller at about two p.m. A pale-faced DC popped his head round the door and told me that the assistant chief constable wanted me, as soon as possible. ‘He sounded annoyed,’ he added, unnecessarily. I needed a change of scenery. Sparky volunteered to field all my calls and I went for a drive.

  I left the car in the Sculpture Park and took a pleasant stroll towards K. Tom Davis’s mansion, about half a mile away by the lanes, but probably much nearer across the fields. Word would soon be around that Goodrich’s death was from natural causes, so I needed to do as much interviewing as possible while everybody was on the defensive. We didn’t have much to go on, just a garbled boast into Joan Eastwood’s shell-like in a moment of alcohol-induced passion, but murderers have been hanged by less. And Mrs Davis had claimed that her husband went all over the Continent with Justin, although Justin said he never saw him. If he didn’t go with Justin, where did he go?

  It was a long shot, but I like to keep the pressure on. Maybe the bullion robbers had got clean away with it, but I’d like them never to be free of that dread of the early-morning knock on the door. The same goes for war criminals. May they go to the grave expecting every policeman they see to be the one who puts his hand on their shoulder.

  Neither K. Tom nor Mrs Davis was in, which wasn’t my number one preferred case, but I made the best of it. I wandered round, looking in through all the windows, being careful not to trigger the alarm. The conservatory was a beaut. Leisurely afternoons spent inside, catching up on my reading, with an occasional dip in the pool, sounded idyllic. Especially if Annabelle could have been there, too.

  No. Only if she could be there. And if she was there, everything else was secondary. Who needed a swimming pool? Or a conservatory? I didn’t. In fact, I wouldn’t have had a swimming pool and a conservatory given. So stuff ’em!

  Phew! That was a narrow squeak. Sometimes, middle class values sneak up on you.

  I tried the sliding door, not sure what I would do if it opened. But it didn’t. The garage was detached, and designed for two cars, with separate doors that had little diamond-shaped windows in them. I assumed the diamond shapes to be coincidences. Mrs Davis’s VW Golf convertible was inside, but the Range Rover was nowhere to be seen. They were probably out in it.

  There was a side door to the garage. Breaking into the garage wasn’t as serious as breaking into the house, I decided. At this point, according to popular fiction, I should have removed my credit card from my wallet and slid it behind the catch. That only worked on the first day that credit cards were invented. On the second day, every lock in the world was modified to make it credit card proof. Besides, I have difficulty extracting money from a cash dispenser with mine.

  I have a different technique. I stood, gracefully poised on one leg for a moment, and thumped the door good and hard with the sole of my other foot, close to the handle.

  Wood splintered and the door flew open. If doors opened outwards, it would be impossible to do that. Maybe I should tell someone.

  I broke off a few pieces of the shattered frame and carefully closed the door behind me, grateful that no alarm had sounded. It was gloomy in there, but I could see well enough. A sit-upon lawnmower stood in the space for the other car, and there was a workbench, with lots of tools, along the back wall.

  The Golf was locked, so I turned my attentions to the other stuff. In a corner was a big gas-fired barbecue with a butane cylinder beside it that wouldn’t have looked out of place on an oil rig. Maybe he had the contract for feeding Brent Spar. Under the workbench was a rusty iron gas-ring, standing on three legs, with a couple of ladles and some tongs like blacksmiths hold hot horseshoes with. This man took his barbecues deadly seriously. Hanging on a hook were a pair of thick gloves and some dark goggles.

  A motorbike, if you could call it that, leant against the far wall, under a sheet. I uncovered it, revealing a spindly frame and a huge engine, with handlebars that were wider and more threatening than a Texas longhorn. Its smell took me back to when I was a kid, when dope was what you painted model aeroplanes with.

  Tyres scrunched on gravel. I threw the sheet back over the bike and tiptoed over to one of the little windows. A car, only half visible, was parked in front of the house. Someone slammed a door. The Davises had a visitor.

  I stood back from the shaft of light, peeking out, but my view was limited. Surprise, surprise, nobody answered the door to him. After a few minutes he wandered round the side of the house and I saw their visitor for the first time. That was another surprise.

  Spying on people isn’t fair. After a good scout around he relieved himself into a drain, with much shaking-off of droplets, then cross-pollenated his nostrils with an elegantly curled middle finger. He was dressed so cool you could have chilled a sixpack of Mongolian lager on him, but the manner was agitated, restless, which wasn’t really surprising. In a burst of inspiration he removed a portable phone from a pocket and stabbed at the keys. He spoke a few words and looked puzzled, then stared at the instrument and tried again. I’m not the only one who has difficulty with them, I was pleased to see. After another couple of futile attempts he gave that a shake, too, and put it away.

  He opened the passenger door of his car and slid in. Shit, he was waiting. Ah, well, I was wanting to be incommunicado for a few hours — Davis’s garage was as good a place as any. He cranked the seat back a couple of notches and settled down. I perched on the lawnmower, facing the wrong way, and watched.

  It was a short wait. Ten minutes later the Range Rover swung round the end of the house and parked nose-up in front of the garage door, six feet from me. Davis jumped out, apologising for being late. His wife followed him, removing several carrier bags from the back of the vehicle. There must have been big queues at the Sainsbury’s checkouts.

  I watched them move out of sight, towards the front door, and gave them five seconds to unlock it and step inside. When I calculated they’d be there I pulled the garage side door open and left. Keeping as much blank wall as possible between me and them I sneaked down the garden and out through a gate. I crossed the paddo
ck, about a hundred yards long, and climbed a fence. I was in the Sculpture Park. Apart from not having a ticket, I was safe.

  The first one I saw was about fifteen feet high, made of bronze, twisting and writhing towards the sky. Six-inch nails stuck out from it at intervals, like footholds put there for the man who changed the light bulb on top. Except there wasn’t a lightbulb on top, just a round thing a bit like a bicycle wheel. I didn’t rate it.

  The next one, sitting in the middle of the field like something out of The Prisoner, could have been a Moore, but he has many imitators. I strolled towards it in a long arc, to lose the buildings of the local college and the distant motorway from my field of view, and stopped to admire. It was uphill from me, with a line of trees behind, and looked perfectly natural, but like nothing you’d ever seen before. I smiled my approval. When I reached it I saw the little plaque on a post. It said, ‘Henry Moore, Hill Arches, bronze,’ with some dates.

  I was supposed to be working. I passed another couple of pieces on my way back to the car and memorised their names. When I brought Annabelle I’d impress her with my knowledge.

  Nigel and Sparky were in when I rang the nick, and the news was bleak. Assistant Chief Constable Partridge wanted me in his office at ten in the morning, or else. Death was the only excuse.

  The best way to deal with trouble is to charge headlong at it. But only after all else has failed. I went home to bury my head in the sand.

  On the way I called at the supermarket to stock up with comfort food. I still had a sheaf of bullbars posters in the glovebox, so before I went in I wandered round the car park and left five of them behind the windscreen wipers of offending vehicles. I pinned one on the store’s notice board and when I came out I found homes for another two.

  There was an envelope with familiar handwriting waiting on the doormat for me, along with a glossy brochure from the council telling me how lucky I was to live under their protection, a catalogue from a thermal underwear company and the new edition of the Gazette. On the front page of the paper was a photograph from the Lord Mayor’s parade, with the promise of more inside.

  I binned the unsolicited stuff and tore open the envelope. It contained a picture postcard from Annabelle, put there because she’d taken up all the space with writing. I put the kettle on and perched on a stool, reading.