by John Dean
When Thornycroft arrived home, the house had been in darkness, as he had guessed it would be – his wife always turned in early – so he had sat and downed the entire contents of the bottle. As he sat in the semi-lit living room, his mind had been in turmoil but, as he drank and thought, he had resolved not to do what he had done in Bolton. No, this time he would stay, would face whatever was coming. There would be no running this time. Besides, where was there to run? Into the arms of Gerry Radford and his accomplices? Or the RSPCA and that Maynard fellow who seemed determined to link him to the dog fights? Thornycroft knew co-operating with law enforcement was not an option: he knew that he would not cope well with prison, certainly not given Radford’s connections on the inside, but he was even more frightened of the gangster’s connections on the outside should word leak out of his involvement. After all, look at what happened to Trevor Meredith, he had reminded himself. Not that he needed reminding. Thornycroft had felt a sudden stab of guilt, knew that he would have to live with Meredith’s death on his conscience until he breathed his last. Eventually, after drinking far too much, he had gone to bed where he lay in the darkness, mind still turning things over and over and over, until he finally drifted off to a disturbed sleep.
Now, he sat in his kitchen and stared out of the window, oblivious to the bright summer sunshine which had bathed his back garden in golden light. He had been sitting there for ten minutes, sipping his water and wishing that his head would stop throbbing, when the phone rang. Still moving slowly, he walked into the hallway and picked up the receiver.
‘Mr Thornycroft?’ said a voice.
‘Hello, Janice.’
‘I am sorry to ring you – I know your wife said you were ill – but Mrs Burns wants to rearrange her appointment and she is most insistent.’
‘Tell the old bag to sod off.’
There was a silence at the other end of the phone.
‘Tomorrow,’ said James Thornycroft, ‘Tell her I will be back tomorrow.’
He replaced the receiver and walked back into the kitchen. No running, not this time. Even if it was true that a man could never forget his past, he could at least destroy the evidence that it had ever existed. Thank God for the delete button, thought James Thornycroft. Filled with a fresh purpose, he made himself a cup of strong black coffee and walked upstairs, where he brought down the ladder leading to the loft. Climbing into the darkness, he fumbled for the pull-string to turn on the light. Once he could see where he was going, he walked over to reach behind the water pipes and produced a large box. Opening the lid, Thornycoft brought out a laptop computer and took it down the ladder and into his study in the spare room.
Once the machine had booted up, he searched through his images folder for several moments then pulled up a picture depicting a group of men standing in two rows in front of a veranda, on the edge of jungle. Among the black faces were several white men and, thoughtfully, James Thornycroft stared at his younger self standing next to a bearded Trevor Meredith.
‘I tried to warn you, Robert,’ he sighed.
Finger hovering over the delete button, Thornycroft hesitated then, with sudden resolve, pressed down. He opened other files, revealing different images, and started to delete them from the hard drive, stomach churning images of horribly injured dogs, grainy pictures shot in the half-light of deserted old warehouses and sheds, images of men exulting in the triumph of their combatants and the suffering of the defeated, pictures which would send James Thornycroft to prison if they fell into the wrong hands. Or see him face down in a ditch if Gerry Radford and his acolytes realized that he still had them. Until now, they had been his insurance policy, now, after what had happened to Meredith, they felt more like a death sentence.
‘Should have done this a long time ago,’ he said as he watched the pictures being swallowed up.
An hour and a half later, the computer was still deleting the files when the front-door bell rang.
As Jack Harris and Alison Butterfield emerged from the RSPCA meeting shortly before noon, the inspector was already on the mobile phone, talking to his detective inspector back at Levton Bridge Police Station.
‘How you getting on, Gillian?’ he asked.
‘Making decent progress,’ said the DI’s voice. ‘We’ve already talked to a couple of the names on the poker list – the guy who runs the corner shop in Eden Street and that young trainee accountant at the council offices.’
‘Anything useful?’ asked the inspector, as he and Butterfield started walking down the terraced street towards the direction of the town centre.
‘They had been waiting for us to turn up. They were really worried: I thought the accountant was going to collapse. Had to get him a glass of water.’ Roberts chuckled. ‘Old woman.’
‘But did they say anything of use?’
‘Confirmed your chap’s story really. There has certainly been tension over the money being lost. I reckon it got totally out of hand.’
‘Which is why we are going to stop it. Did you get anywhere with checks into this chap Bowes?’
‘No one seems to know much about him. What’s more – and this is a bit funny – I did all the usual checks but can’t find any record of him. Odd really, it’s like he never existed before he came here.’
‘Just like Trevor Meredith,’ said Harris, pointing Butterfield in the direction of an alleyway that cut through into Roxham’s main shopping street.
‘Maybe so, but I’m still not convinced that any of them would kill over a game of cards, guv,’ said Roberts.
‘I just want to eliminate people, Gillian. Talking of eliminating people, did you come up with anything on Jane Porter?’
‘A totally unspectacular woman, guv. Been at the sanctuary for years, no criminal record, no soft intelligence. Unmarried, no skeletons that we can find. Another non-person really.’
‘No one is a non-person,’ said the DCI, looking over at Butterfield. ‘There you are, Constable, your second lesson today from the Book of Jack Harris.’
‘You doing your father figure thing again?’ said Roberts.
‘Something like that. I know you are busy but will you do me a favour?’
‘Sure.’
‘I know I asked you to leave the Thornycroft interview for us, but from what the RSPCA have just said, he was in deeper than we thought,’ said the inspector as the detectives emerged on to the shopping street. ‘Seems like he might have some distinctly unpleasant little friends. Can you make up some spurious excuse and go and see if he is OK?’
‘He in danger?’
‘They got to Trevor Meredith.’
‘OK, I’ll look in on him,’ said Roberts. ‘What you going to do?’
‘Get some breakfast.’
‘Ah, the pressures of life at the top,’ said Roberts.
As he walked down the hallway, James Thornycroft felt his heart pounding. Trying desperately to make out the figure through the frosted glass of the front door, he hesitated, wondering whether or not to turn and escape out of the back of the house.
‘Pull yourself together, you daft bastard,’ he murmured. ‘It’s probably only the gas man.’
Partially reassured by the thought, he opened the front door.
‘What the—?’ he exclaimed as a fist snapped out and caught him full on the face.
Staggering backwards, and before he could react further, Thornycroft was pushed violently into the hallway, his knees buckling as he collided with the telephone stand. As the intruder slammed the door and walked towards his victim, James Thornycroft instinctively threw up an arm to protect himself. He was too late: the man’s boot slammed into his gut, knocking the wind out of him. Gasping for breath, Thornycroft sprawled across the floor.
‘Please God, no!’ he cried. ‘I did as you said.’
‘Gerry reckons you been talking too much to the police.’
With a cry, Thornycroft struggled to his feet and turned to run into the living room. As he did, he stumbled over the cardboard box again,
fell forward and hit his head against the edge of the doorframe.
The intruder stared down at his lifeless body.
‘Shit,’ he said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Harris and Butterfield sat in the greasy spoon café in a side street off Roxham’s main shopping drag, cradling mugs of tea and looking across the table at Matty Gallagher.
‘You ordered?’ asked Harris.
‘Yeah, got the usual,’ nodded the sergeant then looked at the inspector with a worried expression on his face. ‘Look, level with me, will you, guv? How much trouble I am in over this Farmwatch thing?’
‘Curtis was not desperately impressed – with either of us.’
Gallagher nodded glumly.
‘So what do I do?’ he asked.
‘You? You keep your head down. The only real problem will come if Curtis decides that this is a way of getting me out.’
‘Surely it’s not that bad? Not after last Friday? I mean, all that good publicity.’
‘Who knows what goes on in the addled brain of Philip Curtis?’ shrugged the inspector. ‘If he reckons that he has to sacrifice someone for the sake of his career he’s capable of doing anything. One thing is for sure, if either of the lads had been killed last night, you and me would be doing school crossing patrol now.’
‘Whatever happens,’ said Gallagher, ‘thank you for trying.’
‘No problem.’ Harris reached out and lightly touched his sergeant’s hand. ‘I can’t afford to lose good officers even if they are Cockney wide-boys. Anyway, enough of this sentimental shite – tell me about the PM. I take it that Trevor Meredith did not fall on his penknife?’
‘Certainly didn’t,’ said Gallagher, relieved that the conversation had moved on: despite his desire to get to know his chief inspector better it always felt uncomfortable when it happened.
‘So what did the good doctor say? He able to manage without the expert guidance of young Butterfield here?’
Gallagher chuckled: Butterfield looked gloomily at the chief inspector.
‘Reckons the knife had a serrated edge. Thinks it might be a kitchen knife of some kind.’ The sergeant glanced under the table, to where Scoot was sitting. ‘Hardly the kind of thing you would take with you when out walking the dog.’
‘Indeed not,’ said Harris. ‘So have we got a time of death?’
‘Best he can say is mid to late morning yesterday. You were right, the doc says that it is possible that he lived for up to half an hour after the attack. Bled out, the poor bastard. The doc says that the fact that it was cold and wet makes it difficult to be more precise about these things, though.’
‘That fits with what we know anyway.’ Harris took a sip of his tea and looked at the detectives. ‘Not that we know much, mind. However, it does all rather point away from your roving lunatic theory, Matty lad, and towards my hunch that this was a premeditated murder.’
‘Maybe,’ said Gallagher.
Butterfield’s mobile phone rang and she excused herself and went to stand in the doorway. Within a couple of minutes, she was back just as three cooked breakfasts were being delivered to the table.
‘So, come on, where are we with all of this?’ asked Harris, reaching for the ketchup bottle as the constable took her seat again. ‘Is any of this making sense?’
‘Not yet,’ said Gallagher, through a mouth of bacon.
‘Then maybe I can help,’ said Butterfield, picking up her cutlery. ‘That call was a friend of mine. Anyone want my black pudding?’
Gallagher reached over.
‘So who is this friend?’ asked Harris.
‘He runs the vet’s down in Ramsay, it’s the one my dad uses. My friend says that customers had been deserting Thornycroft’s place in droves. Not exactly Mr Popular was James Thornycroft. What’s more, my friend reckons that his business was in deep trouble.’
‘And men in deep trouble,’ said Harris, ‘will do anything to get out of it.’
‘Exactly,’ said Butterfield.
It did not take Gillian Roberts long to drive the short distance to the housing estate on which James Thornycroft lived. She was thoroughly enjoying herself. The previous day, when she had been on a training course at headquarters in Carlisle, she had listened with mounting frustration to the bulletins coming through about the death of Trevor Meredith, desperate to be involved. She had protested when Curtis had informed her the previous week that she had to attend the event and saw the murder of Trevor Meredith as the ideal get-out clause. However, her arguments that she was needed back at Levton Bridge were rebuffed by the fresh-faced instructor: a sulking Roberts guessed he was one of these fast-track university types who had never even done a foot patrol in his life. At one point, he had even suggested that she was ‘poisoning the banquet’ with her continuous objections. Roberts had given a derisory snort.
The residential course was supposed to run into a second day but that morning, she had got up early and rung Harris, pleading to be released. Harris, who had little time for such activities anyway and had protested when Curtis informed him that he was losing his detective inspector for two days, had readily sanctioned her departure. Roberts had taken great delight in telling the young instructor where he could stick his course. Now, as she cut the Renault’s engine outside the detached house, Gillian Roberts was delighted to be involved in the case at last. A mother of two in her early fifties, she affected a somewhat matronly demeanour, but behind the avuncular façade was an officer as tough and sharp as they came, one who thrived on the challenges of the job. She had once said that having two teenage boys meant that everyday police crises paled into insignificance compared with the challenges presented by her offspring.
She got out of the car and looked at the house. Which was when she noticed that the front door was ajar.
‘So what was Thornycroft doing wrong?’ asked Gallagher, chasing a piece of fried bread round the plate. ‘How come he was losing all those punters?’
‘Well,’ said Butterfield, ‘the first thing he did when he took over was push up his prices and put a lid on all the free little jobs that the previous guy did. That’s why he and Meredith fell out, if you recall.’
The others nodded.
‘What also pissed people off,’ continued the constable, ‘and this will be no surprise to you, guv, is that people simply don’t like James Thornycroft.’
Gallagher looked at her quizzically.
‘Thornycroft called him Hawk,’ explained Butterfield.
The sergeant winced.
‘Ouch,’ he said.
‘Not everyone dislikes him, though,’ said the inspector, taking a sip of tea. ‘Curtis thinks the sun shines out of his backside.’
‘That’s part of the problem,’ said Butterfield.
‘Curtis is all of the problem, Constable,’ said the inspector. ‘If I teach you nothing else, let me teach you that.’
Gallagher laughed out loud.
‘What I mean,’ said Butterfield with a smile, ‘is that Thornycroft gives the impression that he is something special, kow-tows to people he thinks are influential but makes no effort with ordinary folks.’
‘Oooh,’ said Gallagher, with a sly look at the others, ‘airs and graces. That’s enough to get a man killed Oop North.’
Harris scowled. Gallagher chuckled and shovelled scrambled egg into his mouth.
As they talked, none of the detectives noticed the young woman walking quickly past the window, the tears streaming down her cheeks. Or the man who followed a few seconds later.
*
Feeling her heart pounding, Gillian Roberts walked up the drive towards the front door of James Thornycroft’s house. Instincts screaming out that something was wrong, she wondered whether or not to call for back-up and wait for its arrival before entering the property. With a shake of the head, she dismissed the idea and pushed open the door.
‘Mr Thornycroft?’ she shouted into the deserted hallway. ‘Are you OK, Mr Thornycroft?’
‘How
ever,’ said Harris, taking a gulp of tea, ‘for all James Thornycroft might be a dodgy so-and-so, none of this makes him a killer, surely?’
‘I hate to agree but I can’t see it either,’ said Butterfield, reaching for a piece of toast. ‘I still reckon that if we find the lads who shot at the farmers then we will be pretty damned close to who killed Trevor Meredith.’
‘Which brings us back to the dog fighting,’ said Harris.
‘Or guys casing out farms to nick stuff,’ said Gallagher.
‘More likely, given their reaction, that they were friends of Gerry Radford,’ said Harris. ‘Maybe they were up here casing out Jenner’s Farm. The farmers were parked on Jenner’s land, remember. Maybe Trevor Meredith set something up after all.’
‘They certainly didn’t mess around when the Farmwatch lads clocked them,’ nodded Matty Gallagher, hitting the bottom of the ketchup bottle and dropping a ridiculously large dollop on to the remains of his meal. ‘Damn it, why does that always happen?’
The others chuckled and watched in silent fascination for a few moments as he tried to extricate his food from the morass.
‘Bloody Southerners,’ said Harris.
Gillian Roberts stood in the living room and stared down at the motionless man lying in front of her, one leg twisted behind his body, an arm hanging limp and his features battered and bloodied.
‘Shit,’ she muttered. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’
*
‘So,’ said Gallagher, wiping round his plate with a piece of bread, ‘if you are right, guv, might it not be time to pay a visit to your Mr Radford?’
‘Already in hand,’ said the inspector enigmatically. ‘Already in hand, Matty lad. Just got to play a bit of politics, first.’
‘Brilliant,’ breathed Butterfield, eyes bright. ‘Absolutely bloody brilliant.’
‘Does that mean—?’ began Gallagher.
‘All in good time. Come on,’ said Harris, draining the last of his tea and getting to his feet, ‘let’s get back up to Levton Bridge.’
