‘Butcher!’ yelled Sixsmith. ‘Stop acting like this is LA Law. This is all so simple it’s stupid. I went to bed with a thirty-year-old woman who was ready, willing and able, and Dildo here is trying to tell me she’s under age and didn’t want it! All you’ve got to do is look at her …’
‘Yes, I’d like to do that? What do you say, Detective-Constable? Any chance of a quick glance at this—’ she looked down at the sheet of paper she was holding—‘Suzie Sickert?’
‘Come off it. The girl’s in shock. I can’t just parade her around like a show dog,’ protested Doberley.
‘Who the hell’s Suzie Sickert?’ said Joe Sixsmith.
Butcher said, ‘What?’
‘I said who the hell—’
‘I heard you. You mean this thirty-year-old you made it with isn’t called Suzie Sickert?’
‘No. Her name’s—’
‘Shut up, Joe. Mr Doberley, can I have a word with you outside?’
They went out. After about ten minutes, Butcher returned.
‘What’s going on?’ said Sixsmith wearily.
Butcher sat down and said, ‘About an hour and a half ago, a girl, Suzie Sickert, was brought in by her boyfriend, Glen Lewis. She claimed that some time last night she was walking along near Canal Street when a car pulled up alongside her, a man reached out and dragged her in, then drove off to a dark side street where he assaulted her. Eventually she managed to struggle free and went home in a distressed condition. There was no one there; she lives on Hermsprong with her mother who’s in the entertainment business and works nights. The boyfriend called on the girl later. After some time he got the story out of her and finally persuaded her that she had to tell the police.’
‘It’s all crap!’ exclaimed Sixsmith. ‘What made them pick on me?’
‘She said you were black and going bald. She described the car and she’d got most of the number. And she said that when you tore her pants off in your mad passion, you must have broken a silver bracelet she wears round her left ankle.’
‘So?’
‘So they’ve found the bracelet under the seat of your car, Joe. Also some bits of thread which match her torn clothing. Also some traces of her make-up on the upholstery.’
Sixsmith shook his head in bewilderment.
‘This is crazy.’
‘Crazy perhaps. Not so crazy as you shouting off your mouth that she was willing.’
‘But I thought they were talking about—’
‘Try to stop thinking, Sixsmith,’ she said kindly. ‘It could seriously damage both our healths. Just tell me about your lady friend.’
Sixsmith told her everything that had happened since they parted in the Tea-Room.
She said, ‘Wow. So we’ve got an alibi for all yesterday evening. Great.’
Sixsmith said, ‘I don’t know …’
‘You’re not going to go chivalrous on me?’ she said in alarm. ‘Protecting the lady’s good name, that sort of thing?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Sixsmith. ‘All I meant was, I’m not sure she’ll be all that keen on letting it be generally known she was screwing me last night. Not on such short acquaintance.’
‘She will after I talk to her,’ said Butcher with certainty. ‘Now this other business with the two heavies, have you told the police about that?’
‘Not yet. I didn’t want to complicate matters,’ said Sixsmith.
‘Then keep quiet, could you? At least about the missing heroin. The alleged missing heroin.’
Sixsmith said, ‘But why …? Hey, Butcher, I’m with you. You don’t want me giving the Customs anything to hit your client, Mr Bannerjee, with! You’re not trying to pervert the course of justice, are you? Or do you just not want to offend nice Mr Herringshaw from Birmingham who’s paying your fee?’
It was just his fatigue and general irritation talking, but she gave him another of her funny looks.
Then she said, ‘All I mean is, Bannerjee’s got a nice wife and family. I don’t want to see them suffering. Just keep quiet till I have the chance of talking to him again, OK?’
‘OK,’ said Sixsmith reluctantly. ‘But I don’t like the idea of that Spanish bull wandering round with a bellyful of scag maybe. That could cause serious environmental damage.’
The door opened and Doberley came in.
‘We’re not quite finished,’ said Butcher coolly.
‘No? Well here’s something else you and your client might like to talk about.’
Doberley dropped Meg Merchison’s cameo locket on to the table.
‘Perhaps you’d like to tell us where you got that, Mr Sixsmith,’ he said.
Butcher said, ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell us why you’re asking.’
‘Certainly,’ said Doberley. ‘It was found in your client’s pocket when he was searched on arrival here. It rang a bell with the duty sergeant, and soon as he had a moment, he checked it out. This locket was in a list of items stolen from the home of a Mr Collister-Cook about three months ago. Got another plausible explanation, Joe? Yes, Miss Butcher, I know. You’d like to talk to your client.’
Smiling, he left.
Sixsmith said, ‘Oh hell, I forgot to tell you about the locket.’
Butcher listened in silence. Then she sighed and said, ‘Oh, Sixsmith, why didn’t I tell you to stick your redundancy money in the building society?’
‘Too late now,’ said Sixsmith. ‘So what do I say? If I tell them the whole truth, they’ll really think I’m mad. If I tell them simply that I picked it up by accident at Meg’s house, they’ll stir things up between her and the Hyphen, not to mention pulling him in for attempted insurance fraud. And I don’t expect your mate, Baker, would be too pleased, which could mean she won’t pay me. Which would mean, incidentally, I shouldn’t be able to pay you.’
‘Takes you a long time to get to the real crux, doesn’t it, Sixsmith?’ said Butcher.
She frowned and went on, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have a system where the law was so humane and citizen centred, you could afford to tell the police everything?’
‘It would put me out of business,’ said Sixsmith.
Her face crinkled into an incredulous smile.
‘You think you’re in business, Sixsmith?’
‘At least if someone’s paying for my advice, I give it to them.’
‘All right. Tell them you found the locket in the public library and forgot to hand it in. They won’t believe you, but so what? They won’t believe you when you tell the truth either.’
‘But Baker and the Hyphen—’
‘Gerald can react any which way he likes, up to him. As for Gwen, it’s not the locket, it’s what it contains she’s after, right?’
She prised the locket open with her thumbnail.
‘Yuk,’ she said, tipping what looked like a lump of putty with various scraps of hair and material embedded in it. ‘If this is what she wants, this is what she shall have.’
She wrapped it in a tissue and placed it in the belt pouch she used in lieu of a handbag.
‘You can collect it from me when you get out of here.’
‘When’s that going to be?’
‘That depends. This other business, this kid’s trying to fit you up. Why should she do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Sixsmith. ‘Unless she’s about five foot three, with blonde hair razored off except for a narrow crest, and probably with a bit of sticking plaster on her arm.’
‘Oh God. You do know her. Amaze me some more, Sixsmith.’
Sixsmith told her about Mr Nayyar’s fire.
‘So Suzie and her boyfriend saw me talking to the cops outside Nayyar’s shop, reckoned I’d be pointing the finger their way and decided to get their retaliation in first,’ he concluded.
‘By fitting you up on a rape charge?’
‘By doing anything that would make it look like I was trying to fit them up on an arson charge. Black man, under-age white girl. Racist cops. It’s a powerful mixture, isn’t i
t?’
‘Come on, Sixsmith,’ protested Butcher. ‘This is Luton, not Alabama.’
‘How many pubs you think you’d need to advertise in round here to get yourself a nice little lynch mob?’ retorted Sixsmith.
‘All right, point taken. So we tell Doberley, he checks with Mr Nayyar, the arson team take a close look at these kids …’
‘Pointless,’ said Sixsmith, who was having a bad attack of the three a.m. blues. ‘Nayyar’s probably too scared to say anything. And show me a cop who’s going to bother about a white arsonist in the bush when he’s got a black rapist in the nick.’
The door opened and Doberley came in. He was carrying a large plastic bag in one hand and a cup of tea in the other.
‘OK, Joe?’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you some char. Also your bits and pieces. Sorry we had to take them just to eliminate you. Good of you to cooperate. So get yourself dressed soon as you like, then maybe we can all go home and get some sleep.’
He let out a rather stagey laugh as Butcher and Sixsmith exchanged glances.
‘What about the charges?’
‘What charges? You haven’t been charged with anything, have you, Joe? Just helping with inquiries.’
‘Come on, Dildo, what’s going on?’ demanded Joe.
‘Just normal good police work, nothing to get your knickers in a twist about, begging your pardon, ma’am,’ said Dildo. ‘One of our car lads, the one who talked to you at the fire …’
‘Forton, you mean?’ interrupted Joe. ‘Short fat fellow? Acts like he was a supervisor on a plantation?’
‘He’s not very house-trained,’ admitted Doberley. ‘But you’re lucky it was him who was there. Seems he leaned on this Brit biker he knows who owes him a favour. Got a whisper that some kid called Glen Lewis might be in the frame for firing Nayyar’s shop. He goes looking for Lewis but can’t find him. Then he hears that the lad is down here at the nick holding his girlfriend Suzie Sickert’s hand, while she cries rape against you. Now he mayn’t be Einstein, Dean Forton, but he’s not daft. He goes back to see Nayyar who’s still drying out his premises and twists his arm till he comes clean about the trouble this morning. He keeps it vague as he can, but the descriptions fit, and when the lad working on your car reported the lock had been forced—’
‘I knew I’d locked it,’ interrupted Sixsmith.
‘—so I got to wondering about that anklet and the threads we found inside. Also the doc who looked at Suzie Sickert said there was no sign of forced entry, so to speak. Also nothing under her nails to match them scratches on your back and bum which in any case looked more likely to be the result of enthusiastic cooperation rather than resistance …’
‘That was another expert opinion, was it, Constable?’ said Butcher.
‘You could call it that,’ said Doberley, grinning. ‘Must be hot stuff this lady friend of yours, Joe. What did you say her name was?’
‘He didn’t,’ said Butcher. ‘And he won’t. So, you’re admitting this has all been a mistake, that my client should never have been arrested?’
‘Arrested?’ said Doberley innocently. ‘I don’t think he was actually arrested as such …’
‘Arrested,’ said Butcher firmly. ‘And cautioned. It’ll be in the arresting officer’s notes, I’m sure. So: false arrest, personal humiliation and inconvenience; professional reputation damaged …’
She was laying it on just a touch thick, thought Sixsmith. But Doberley was up to dealing with the situation.
‘Any official complaint will of course be noted,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile the possibility of other charges is still under consideration.’
‘Other charges?’
‘Failure to report a crime; to wit shoplifting. Possession of stolen property—’
‘This locket, you mean. Mr Sixsmith found it in the public library and was of course going to hand it in at the earliest opportunity.’
‘Only he forgot? An honest mistake, eh, Joe? We can all live with each other’s honest mistakes, can’t we?’
The two men looked at each other for a moment, then Sixsmith said, ‘Yeah, sure, I’m the local expert on honest mistakes. Now if you’ll both excuse me, I’d like to get my clothes on so I can go home and get them off.’
Outside, he said to Butcher, ‘Thanks for turning out.’
She shrugged and said, ‘What did I do? It’s your racist cop and terrified Pakky shopkeeper you should be thanking. By the way, I noticed you didn’t mention the break-in at your flat.’
‘And be kept hanging around here another two hours? No, thanks. My home may be a wreck but that’s where I want to be.’
‘What about the heavies? I think you really ought to tell the police—’
‘You weren’t so keen when you first heard, in case it dropped your client in deeper trouble.’
Butcher frowned and said, ‘That was in there with the lights on. I just don’t like the thought of you wandering around with a pair of thugs like that gunning for you.’
Sixsmith said, ‘I could come home with you, I suppose,’ then laughed when he saw her face. ‘It’s all right, Butcher. I’ve got Whitey to take care of me. And anyway, I think those guys are long gone. They still think the cops were coming to my rescue, remember? I’ll be in touch.’
He waved a cheerful good night and headed round to the police car pound to collect the Morris.
As he re-entered his dark flat he felt less cheerful. But there was no one there but Whitey to greet him.
The devastation didn’t look any less devastated but at least it was home.
He bolted the door, dragged a table and a bureau across it, took the phone off the hook, thrust as much of the stuffing as possible back into his mattress, crawled on top of it and plunged into deep black sleep.
He surfaced briefly, thinking a light had shone in his eyes, then realized it was just a rare flash of logic.
The Spanish bull stuffed with heroin had vanished from his car.
The terrible teenies, Suzie and Glen, had broken into his car to plant the rape evidence.
So it was probably one of them who’d nicked the bull.
‘Sixsmith, you’re a genius,’ he said.
And fell back into sleep.
CHAPTER 12
Next morning, late, Sixsmith got down to some serious tidying.
His radio was tuned to the local channel and as he worked he got an update on both the fire and the Casa Mia case.
A local youth was helping police with their inquiries into the arson. And the police were investigating about five thousand reports of sightings of Carlo Rocca and/or the blue Fiesta. This reminded Sixsmith that one good effect of his long hard night had been that he’d slept without being disturbed by the Casa Mia dream. Which in turn reminded him that he had been woken by his deduction that either Sickert or Lewis had stolen the bull.
Unlike most nocturnal inspirations, this one stood the test of daylight. The girl seemed the most likely culprit. OK, she was a thief, an arsonist and an embryonic slag, but mostly she was a kid, and the tawdry gaiety of a cuddly toy could still appeal. But getting it back without involving the law wasn’t going to be easy.
He asked himself why he didn’t want to involve the law but his question fell on deaf ears.
He was finding it hard to tidy up and think at the same time. One of them had to go. He tossed a mental double-headed coin, and took Whitey down to the Glit for a drink and a think.
Mr Nayyar’s shop was open for business as usual, but Joe still felt some residual resentment that the shopkeeper had needed his arm twisted to bail him out of the Hermsprong kids’ rape charge, so he didn’t stop.
In the Glit, the eponymous Gary was singing Frontier of Style. The barman, who had neither the panache nor the figure to carry off tight trousers and a lurex shirt, said, ‘Hello, Joe, how’ve you been?’
His name was Eric. At the age of sixteen he’d started as an office boy at Robco Engineering. Instead of the promotion he’d been promised on his eighteenth
birthday, he’d been made redundant. There followed a year on the dole till he got an office management diploma course at the Tech, which was fine except that his grant blocked his dole, despite coming to less. It was Joe Sixsmith who’d got him the job at the Glit to help make ends meet. Who Eric told about his cash-in-hand wages was his own business. The only advice Joe felt he had to give him was to conceal his distaste for most music later than Beethoven’s late quartets.
Sixsmith replied, ‘How’ve I been? Terrible. Usual.’
Eric drew a pint of Guinness and filled a clean ashtray for Whitey.
‘Merv’s in the lounge. He was asking after you,’ he said.
‘Was he?’ said Sixsmith, recalling that it was Merv’s attempt at a good deed that had dumped the Bannerjees and all their attendant crap on his doorstep. ‘I expect he wants to apologize.’
But it was accusation not apology that greeted him when he joined the philanthropic cabbie.
‘You been hiding or what, Joe?’ he cried. ‘Not that you ain’t got good reason. What you been doing?’
Mervyn Golightly, six foot six and stringy as a stick of ancient celery, was the most irrepressibly cheerful man Joe had ever met. Neither funerals nor failure, personal tragedy nor national disaster, could depress him for long. Cheerfulness would come bubbling through. On the day the news of the Robco redundancies broke, Merv’s response had been to organize a fork-lift truck relay race around the plant.
‘Always wanted to do that,’ he declared. ‘Only I never dared in case the buggers sacked me.’
‘The buggers have sacked you!’ retorted Joe angrily.
‘No! This way round, they’ve just given me an opportunity!’
Today in the Glit, he sounded almost serious.
‘What have I been doing?’ said Sixsmith. ‘Cleaning up after you, like always.’
‘Oh yeah? Then how come it’s me the police have been hassling, not to mention your two little friends with gable-end faces.’
Sixsmith had no difficulty recognizing Grey and Blue.
‘What did they want?’ he asked anxiously.
‘Cops wanted to know why I took the dusky lass to you. Was it planned? Did we have some special arrangement, nudge, nudge.’
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