‘Just needed a word, sir.’
‘Well, sit down. Sit down. Make it quick, lad. I’m up to my eyes.’
The clinging smell of TCP saturated the air.
Angel said, ‘I am worried about the statement you made that Haydn King asked you to see him specifically to tell you about that recurring nightmare, and I wondered—’
Harker’s jaw muscles tightened. His face went as white as the lavatory walls in Strangeways. ‘Just a moment, Detective Inspector Angel,’ he said. ‘I have recorded full details of the interview in my deposition. It is correct and complete, and you have a copy. What’s the difficulty? Who are you to doubt what I say?’
‘I just need confirmation, sir, that’s all.’
‘Confirmation? What’s the matter with you, lad? I have had at least ten years more experience than you have, and I am a superintendent and senior to you. Why can’t you accept the fact?’
‘I do accept the fact, sir.’
Angel saw that Harker’s left hand was trembling.
‘But you don’t accept the fact. You don’t accept any facts. That’s your trouble. For example, take this Haydn King case, your report clearly states that all the windows and doors in the house were responsibly locked that night and were in sound condition the following morning. So obviously no intruder had entered the place, therefore King’s death must have been suicide or an accident. But instead of accepting that, which is precisely in line with what I said, and moving on to other cases beckoning your attention, such as finding the Chameleon, recovering that Rosary, unravelling the mystery of the man in the canal, solving the business of the woman’s body missing from the back of the King George Hotel, etcetera, etcetera, you have the effrontery to come in here challenging the veracity of my statement.’
‘I’m not challenging its veracity, sir. All I want to hear, from your own lips, is confirmation that it was the evening of Tuesday 6 December that Haydn King told you about the nightmares he had been experiencing of being found dead, floating in his own swimming pool. That’s all.’
Harker rose to his feet. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ he said. Then he suddenly put a hand on his chest and began to look around his desk apparently searching for something. ‘I will do nothing of the sort,’ he continued. ‘Read my deposition. It’s all in there. Complete and correct. Now get out. I have a lot to do.’
He began to cough.
Angel hesitated.
The coughing worsened.
He was not sure he should leave him.
Harker looked up. ‘Go on,’ he spluttered and waved a hand in the direction of the door. ‘Get out.’
Angel had no option. He turned, and from behind, he heard the sound of a throat spray being used, followed by a sigh.
He closed the door, stomped down the corridor back to his office, silently swearing. He used every swear word he knew, and there were quite a lot. He slammed the door, slumped into the chair and began to wade through the big pile of papers, files and paperwork that always seemed to be on his desk. He found what he was looking for: a yellow file labelled, ‘Copy of Deposition of Detective Superintendent Harker – 9 December 2011’. He opened it and began to scrutinize it. He had to find something wrong, illogical or incongruous somewhere down the line. He pored over it very carefully and slowly. He did this three times. But he could find nothing.
He leaned back in the chair and rubbed his chin.
If the deposition had been anyone else’s, Angel might have doubted the truthfulness of it. However, he had known the superintendent all his working life. Horace Harker had been a sergeant at Bromersley when Angel joined as a cadet. He couldn’t imagine him putting his career on the line by inventing such a story. And what could possibly have been his motive?
Angel now knew he would have to try to solve Haydn King’s murder from a different angle.
The phone rang. Angel reached out for it.
It was Mac. ‘I’ve finished the post-mortem on Haydn King, Michael,’ he said.
Angel sensed from the way he spoke that the doctor had something interesting to report.
‘Great,’ Angel said, ‘What have you got?’
‘Well, following on your thoughts about the possibility of King being under the influence of drugs, I am sorry to say, Michael, that I found no needle marks on the body, and no sedative or hypnotic drug residues in his blood.’
Angel ran his hand through his hair. ‘So you don’t think that there were any issues of mind control in this case.’
‘I didn’t say that. I am just reporting what I found. But you know drugs are not always used to induce a hypnotic state. For instance, stage hypnotists never use them.’
Angel sighed. ‘Mmm. You are eliminating some of my options Mac, I hope you realize that.’
‘Aye, but I do have something that may prove useful.’
‘I need all the help I can get.’
‘Well, you will no doubt want to know that the poor man died of a severe injury to the brain caused by a single blow to the head. He was dead before he hit the water. In fact, he was dead at least twenty seconds before he hit the water… could have been longer, a lot longer. So, as we thought, I can now say positively that he was murdered.’
Angel was pleased that Mac’s findings now confirmed the assumption.
‘Thank you, Mac. Anything else? Have you any idea of the weapon used?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said. There was a sound of triumph in his voice. ‘I found minuscule traces of a compound of silica, alumina, lime, iron oxide and magnesia in the skull. The compound was at the deepest point of the wound, and would have been deposited there from the weapon at the time of the assault. I use the word “weapon” loosely because it is something unusual.’
‘And what’s that all add up to?’ Angel said.
‘I’m not at all sure, Michael,’ he said. ‘I am still working on it. I can tell you that the wound was V-shaped, because it was made by a weapon with an edge of more than 60 degrees or so. Could be even 90 degrees. The weapon must have been very heavy, or the blow delivered with very great force. I have never come across a wound of this shape. It’s not been made by a conventional weapon, that’s for sure.’
‘We’ll find it, Mac.’
‘Over the years, I’ve come across some very strange murder weapons … such as a wee candlestick, a boiling pan of chip oil, the leg of a chair, a billiard ball in a sock, the side of a bairn’s cot, a sheet of corrugated steel … I could go on. I’ve come across all of those in my time. No. This is something very unusual.’
‘Well, thank you, Mac,’ Angel said thoughtfully. ‘I must find the weapon. I’ll have another look round Haydn King’s place. There might be something there.’
‘Aye,’ Mac said. ‘Before you do that, I have something else to tell you that you will want to know … something perhaps even more critical to solving the case than knowing the murder weapon … and even more curious.’
‘Well, stop teasing me then, you old haggis-eater, and tell me.’
‘When I was transcribing these notes and I came to the cause of death, I realized that the wound on King’s head had superficial similarities to that on the body of the man brought in here this morning, so I had the body brought out onto the table. I examined it, and I can confirm that the wound is the same shape – and delivered with approximately the same force. I fished around in the man’s brain for anything left by the weapon and found several particles which appear to be the same compound I found in Haydn King’s skull.’
Angel was astounded.
‘So whoever murdered Haydn King,’ he said, ‘also murdered the man brought out of the canal.’
‘Exactly so.’
Angel’s heart began to thump as if it was trying to break out through his shirt. The hot tremor in his stomach spread rapidly up to his chest.
This information was much more important than knowing why and how the poor man had received the cuts to his face.
TWELVE
There was a knoc
k on the door.
‘Come in,’ Angel called.
It was Ahmed waving a sheet of A4. ‘I’ve had a result from the CRO about the fingerprints of the man pulled out of the canal, sir.’
Angel looked up. He was all ears.
‘Records advise that his name was Reuben Paschal, age 50, sir. Came out of Senford Open Prison in August last. Before that he was in Lincoln. Small-time thief and confidence trickster.’
Angel screwed up his eyebrows. ‘Any address?’
‘No fixed abode. There is an address. It’s his sister’s. He was staying with her temporarily.’
‘Right. Find Trevor Crisp for me right away. Anything else?’
‘Had an email back from the Met, sir. It’s a reply to our request to them to check on the addresses of Charles Domino and Joseph Memoré, who were staying at the King George Hotel the night the blonde woman’s body disappeared and then re-appeared alive, if you know what I mean. And, as you thought, sir, the addresses were false.’
‘Huh. Well, surprise, surprise! Anyway, things are moving a bit now, lad. Ask Don Taylor to come down to see me. I’ve got to keep all the balls in the air, lad. And I mustn’t let anything slip me by.’
‘Right, sir,’ Ahmed said with a smile. He was thinking that it was highly unlikely that that would happen.
He went out.
Minutes later, Don Taylor came in. He was carrying an A4 loose-leaf file. ‘You wanted me, sir? I hope you are not going to bawl me out because we are so far behind with everything?’
Angel knew that he had rather overwhelmed SOCO in the past few days. He was also snowed under with work, so he understood.
‘No, Don,’ Angel said, ‘but investigations have to go on and we have to keep up.’
‘Yes, sir. Well, the searches and analyses were all done at the time. It’s just that they haven’t been collated in sequence, put into good English and written up.’
‘That’s all right. You can do all that later, maybe, when there isn’t as much going on. In the meantime, can you tell me what you found in the rooms on the top floor and on the second floor at the King George Hotel.’
‘Both rooms had been cleaned and vacuumed by hotel staff when we arrived there, sir,’ Taylor said as he opened the file. ‘There were no recent prints in either room.’
Angel nodded and rubbed his chin. ‘Anything else?’ he said.
‘No. The wastepaper baskets had been emptied, and we found nothing out of the ordinary in our vacuuming.’
‘What about Haydn King’s house?’ Angel said. ‘Now you were looking for prints that didn’t belong to King, Fleming or any member of the staff.’
‘We didn’t find any prints of strangers, sir, on doorknobs, handles, light switches, push-buttons, ledges and the like. And, as you know, King’s bedroom had been thoroughly vacuumed, dusted and polished before we arrived. Even the bed linen had been changed.’
Angel’s face muscles tightened. He knew it was true. ‘Yes. So you found nothing?’
‘We found a tiny amount of red dust in the bottom of the bag after vacuuming King’s bedroom. We couldn’t identify it though, and it was such an insignificant sample that I didn’t think to mention it at the time. But it was unusual.’
‘Mmm,’ Angel said. He agreed. ‘Is it hard or soft?’
‘It’s hard, sir. Like grit. I have saved it on sticky tape.’ He opened the file and put the piece of transparent adhesive tape on the desk on top of a white envelope.
Angel picked it up and held it to the light. Then he dug a thumbnail into it. It was hard, very hard.
‘It’s like builder’s dust. Where did you find it?’
‘Under the bed. About twelve inches from the wall.’
Angel agreed it didn’t seem significant, but he always wanted to know about anything that could be evidence. ‘I can’t think what it is, but I’ll keep it in mind,’ he said as he handed it back.
‘I think the only other matter we haven’t discussed is about the place where Reuben Paschal was pulled out of the canal earlier this morning.’
Taylor took a memory stick out of his pocket. ‘We took a lot of photographs of the area, sir. You can see them on your laptop now if you want to.’
Angel turned round to the table behind him and brought the computer across to the desk and raised the lid. A minute later they were looking at the photographs taken earlier that morning on the laptop monitor.
Taylor clicked the photographs through quickly, stopping sometimes to point out matters of interest.
‘The body was snagged in those bulrushes,’ Taylor said. ‘There was a lager can and a small, plastic tub, floating by his head. That was about all.’
‘So he wasn’t totally submerged, then?’
‘No, sir. When we found him he was partly under water. I don’t think he could have moved far from where he was dumped because he was snagged in the bulrushes. There was a fresh bicycle tyre mark in the mud on the bank. Look, there’s a better pic of it somewhere. We have taken a mould of it.’
Angel looked thoughtful. ‘Good. Although we don’t know anybody in this case who has a bicycle.’
They finished reviewing the pics. There was very little reliable evidence from that scene.
Angel wasn’t pleased. He wrinkled his nose.
‘You didn’t want a diver to go in, did you, sir?’ Taylor said.
‘We don’t know what we are looking for lad, do we? Only something associated with him … and we wouldn’t know if it was.’
There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ Angel called.
It was Crisp. ‘You wanted me, sir?’
Angel’s eyes flashed. ‘Aye, come in lad,’ he said, then he turned back to Taylor. ‘I think we’ve about done, Don, haven’t we?’
Taylor nodded, then stood up, made for the door and went out.
Angel looked up at Crisp.
Crisp grinned back at him.
Angel’s lips tightened back against his teeth. He shook his head patiently and said, ‘Where have you been, lad? I asked Ahmed to find you ages ago.’
‘Ah, well, sir,’ he began, ‘Vera Winstone has been in—’
‘Not that woman from Vera’s again, that posh dress shop?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Angel’s fists tightened. ‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘How is it that whenever you are missing there’s always a woman involved?’
‘I’ve not been missing, sir.’
‘Well it must be half an hour since I asked Ahmed to find you. And that woman is never away from the station. What’s the matter with her now? Is she chasing you, or are you chasing her?’
‘No, sir. It’s not like that. You always say things like that. She wants the robber who broke her shop window, and stole that stuff to be caught and all her things returned.’
‘Well, perfectly understandable. We all want that. Has she come with some new evidence, then?’
His eyebrows dropped. His eyes were almost closed. He hesitated. ‘No, sir,’ he said. He rubbed his chin. ‘No. I think she thinks that the more she pesters us the more likely we are to catch him.’
‘Huh. I think she must have taken a fancy to you, lad.’
‘No, sir. It’s not like that.’
‘Well, if you’re sure you can tear yourself away from her, I want you to go to Nottingham and interview Reuben Paschal’s sister. She’s a married woman, so there’s no need to wine her, dine her and … anything else that might come into your mind. You just have to ask her questions, that’s all. We have his record coming from the CRO, so you don’t need to ask her about that. What I want you to find out is when she last saw him alive, if he had any plans to go anywhere, who his associates were, particularly since August, when he was released, and what work he managed to get recently, if any. I also want to know where he was living, if he wasn’t living with her. Oh yes, and somebody will have to identify his body. She’s the obvious one. That’s not nice. But you’ll have to put that to her. You can get her full name and ad
dress from Ahmed. All right?’
Crisp looked at his watch then at Angel and said, ‘It’s gone two o’clock, sir. I’d better go tomorrow.’
‘No,’ Angel said. ‘It’s only an hour and ten minutes on the motorway. You can be there by quarter past three. Bags of time. Go on. Hop it. Tell me all about it in the morning.’
Crisp screwed up his face. He wasn’t happy. ‘Right, sir,’ he said as he went out.
Angel looked across his desk, trying to decide his next priority. These murders were getting too frequent … he wondered what was happening out there … whatever it was, everything was happening at once.
The phone rang. He glared at it then snatched it up. It was Ahmed.
‘What is it, lad,’ he said.
‘I thought you’d want to know that there have been several calls for you from the Bromersley Chronicle, the Daily Telegraph, The Sun and ITV news. The switchboard put them through to the CID office because your line was busy. They weren’t pleased when I said that your phone was engaged. When I tell them that, they start asking me questions.’
‘What do you say?’
‘I always say I don’t know, sir, which is usually true anyway.’
‘That’s right. Good lad. What were they asking about?’
‘They’re mostly asking about Queen Mary’s Rosary, sir … whether it’s been found … and about the murder of Haydn King and the other murders … and has anybody been charged … and so on. And they want to know when you’ll be available to speak to them, and if you’re having a press conference. The man from the Telegraph said that the people are concerned about these matters and are entitled to be told, and he said that there is a definite feeling of fear among some members of the community.’
Angel agreed that facts that could be told should be told, but he would not have admitted it to the pressmen. And although it was always uncomfortable to know that a murderer was roaming around free, he didn’t think that there was any need yet for the public to panic.
He sighed. ‘Right, lad. I’ll deal with it.’
He replaced the phone, then ran his hand hard across his chin. The current situation in all truth was that he didn’t have time to give press conferences and interviews. In any case, he reckoned that his job was to gather information, not dispense it. However, he knew he couldn’t hold the media back for ever and that he might soon simply have to make the time.
The Diamond Rosary Murders Page 13
