A Very Private Murder

by Stuart Pawson

  It was to be a short speech. He wasn’t famous for short speeches. Behind his back his fellow councillors referred to him as Gobshite. But he’d taken advice, given it some thought, and today wasn’t a day for a policy statement. The spoken word was ephemeral, wasted on an occasion like this. What mattered was carved in stone behind those curtains. What it said there would be read and noted by visitors to the mall for the next fifty years. Today he’d introduce their distinguished visitor and step aside. She could do the rest.

  The macebearer pounded the floor again and the babble of the crowd fell to a murmur. He half turned and nodded to Threadneedle, inviting him to start the proceedings. Threadneedle cleared his throat and tapped the tiny microphone on the lectern with a fingernail, sending a thousand decibels of electronic noise crackling around the mall like a jet fighter.

  ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, adding ‘and children’ as an afterthought. He congratulated himself for remembering the children and forgot what he’d intended to say next. His mind was blank. Just do it, he thought. Get on with it.

  ‘Today is a great day for Heckley,’ he improvised. ‘Today it’s my pleasure to introduce to you a young lady who has stolen all our hearts …’

  This was better. It was starting to flow, until somebody in the crowd shouted for him to hurry up and he lost it again. Never mind, he thought, it’s my name on the plaque behind those curtains. He looked straight at the YTV camera that was recording the occasion and said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to call on Miss Ghislaine Curzon to open the Curzon Shopping Mall and Conference Centre. Miss Curzon …’ He turned to her, holding out a solicitous arm, and she stepped forward.

  ‘This one?’ she silently mouthed at him, taking hold of the silken rope.

  Threadneedle confirmed it was with a violent nod of the head.

  Ghislaine took hold of the rope and leant forward towards the microphone. ‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely to see you all and thank you for making me so welcome. I know Heckley fairly well because I used to come here walking with my father when I was quite small. You’re so lucky to live in this part of the world. We always had tea and scones in a tea shop in the town. My only hope is that a super new development such as this won’t be to the detriment of small, more traditional businesses in the town centre, such as that tea shop.’

  The smile slipped from Threadneedle’s face. He didn’t know that she’d ever been within twenty miles of Heckley. ‘Sod the tea shop,’ he hissed to himself, ‘just pull the frigging string.’

  ‘So now …’ Ghislaine continued, ‘all that’s left is for me to declare the Centre open … and … pull … like … this …’

  The curtains parted to reveal the legend they were hiding. The crowd stood in shocked silence for a second before exhaling a collective gasp, followed by an explosion of camera flashes. The Curzon Centre was well and truly open.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Fuck?’ I echoed.

  ‘That’s what it said,’ Superintendent Wood repeated.

  ‘In red paint?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘In foot-high letters?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Charlie, how many more times?’

  ‘Ha ha ha ha!’

  ‘It’s not bloody funny.’

  ‘Oh, it is, Gilbert. It certainly is.’ The tears prickling my eyes were confirmation.

  ‘The chief constable was there. Everybody was there, and the TV cameras recorded the whole thing. It’s embarrassing, Charlie. Makes us look like a right bunch of turnips.’

  ‘So what did the glamorous Miss Curzon think of it?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s the worst bit. She had a giggling fit. They’re trying to say she was hysterical, but I’m told it looked more like she thought it hilarious.’

  ‘Ha ha! Good for her. Well thanks for that, Gilbert. I’ll be glued to my television tonight when Look North is on, to see what they make of it.’

  ‘Oh no you won’t, Charlie. You’ll be at the Curzon Centre. The chief constable was adamant: he wants you in charge of the investigation.’

  I was on holiday. My garden was overgrown and I’d had a letter from the council saying that the neighbours were complaining. I’d borrowed a strimmer and had attacked the worst part at the front and was having a well-earned rest and a glass of shandy when I’d heard the phone ringing.

  ‘I’m on leave,’ I protested. ‘And I do murders, not graffiti. Give it to young Caton. He’s a royalist.’

  ‘It’s more serious than graffiti. It was a breach of security. It could have been a bomb. You’re on it, Chas, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘Tell him I’m on leave, paddling a canoe down the Loire Valley.’

  ‘He knows you’re at home, gardening.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘I’ll see you there in an hour.’

  ‘OK. Hey Gilbert …’

  ‘Yes, Charlie.’

  ‘Did he say he wanted Charlie Priest on the job or did he tell you to put your best man on it?’

  ‘Just get your arse down to the Curzon Centre, asap.’

  ‘Right, boss. I’m on my way.’

  I lingered under the shower until I was rid of all the pollen, creepy-crawlies, dead leaves and other items of flora and fauna that had attached themselves to my body parts like burrs to a sheepdog. I dried myself off and finished the shandy that I’d taken in with me. Suddenly, I felt good. I was clean and refreshed and the little bit of gardening I’d managed to complete had raised my pulse rate out of the lethargy zone. The rest of the garden could wait. I pulled on new jeans, white shirt, jacket and leather slip-ons over the socks with little anchors on them. I didn’t want to look as if I was trying too hard, but there was always the chance that Miss Curzon was still around.

  I’d watched the shopping mall and conference centre being built with a mixture of admiration for the vision of the developers and horror at what they were doing to the landscape. This was the first time I’d actually been in the grounds. A big sign welcomed me to the Curzon Centre and another announced that Monkton Civil Engineering were working with the People to build a better Yorkshire. I drove around the perimeter road, past several turn-offs and eventually found a parking space within a reasonable hike of the entrance. I noted the location but had already forgotten it by the time I reached the automatic doors and made my transition into the never-never land of the out-of-town shopping experience.

  The place was throbbing. Steady streams of customers, almost all female, were converging on the exit. They were spilling off the bottom of down escalators, rising out of the floor on up escalators and approaching from three other directions, laden with big bags bearing the names of exotic fashion houses. Well, they were exotic to me. Craghoppers is about as designer as I ever get. An equal number of eager punters, plastic friends burning holes in their handbags, were fighting their way in. When I reached the main hall I took my bearings, consulted a you-are-here plan of the place and headed towards what was grandly called the Atrium, where I imagined the action had taken place.

  The rostrum was cordoned off with police tape and guarded by a uniformed bobby, two female community support officers and four employees of the Centre’s security staff. I pushed my way through the gawpers and showed my ID to the bobby. Halfway up the wall were the curtains that somebody had hastily closed again to hide the forbidden word and I struggled to keep a straight face.

  ‘What time does this place close?’ I asked.

  ‘Ten o’clock, sir. Ten ’til ten.’

  ‘Ten!’ I exclaimed. ‘Jeez!’ It was going to be a long day. ‘So where is everybody?’

  ‘Down in the CCTV control room.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  It was in the basement, along a corridor lined with pipes and cables, through a couple of Staff only doors. I was the last to arrive. The room was dimly lit with a green light, and one wall was covered with high-definition monitors, some showing the car park, others various views of the inter
ior. A technician sat at a control desk, like the producer of some outside broadcast, except this one lasted all day, every day. I wondered what he did for relaxation in his off periods. Gilbert introduced me to Miss Carol McArdle, the manager of the Centre, who had a surprisingly firm handshake for her size. You have to watch the little ones. She probably developed her assertiveness by giving full-contact karate lessons in her spare time. I told her that they looked to be doing good business upstairs and flexed my fingers behind my back.

  It was a normal working day for the troops, so the ones who weren’t already mingling with the crowd, looking for terrorists, nutters and overenthusiastic republicans, had descended on the Centre like orphaned schoolkids on a burning sweet shop. I’d like to think it was because of their conscientiousness, but I suspect the chances of meeting the leggy Miss Curzon had more to do with it.

  ‘Has Miss Curzon left?’ I ventured. It was the most pressing question I could think of.

  ‘She’s gone off to a civic luncheon at the town hall,’ I was told.

  A SOCO had been sent for and he was eager to be let loose on the plaque and try for an adventitious hit. In other words, he’d swab it, willy-nilly, and hope to collect some DNA. I wanted a look at it myself, too, but I didn’t want to wait until ten o’clock.

  ‘We could do with some screens to put around it,’ Gilbert suggested, looking towards the manager after I’d voiced my feelings.

  ‘Mr Wood,’ I began. ‘We’re in 2007. The F-word is used on Radio Four almost every day. It’s spray-painted on every motorway bridge around town and drawn in the dirt on the back of every white van. I don’t think exposure to it will offend or corrupt any good citizen of Heckley who happens to be shopping here today.’

  I got my way and we all moved off towards the scene of the crime. Climbing the stairs I asked Miss McArdle if there was an office we could use as an incident room and she said there was.

  The SOCO donned surgeon’s gloves and mask and had first go at the plaque, followed by the photographer and then me. The crowd pressed forward, watching and photographing every move we made, and no doubt a good proportion of them would have letters in the Gazette later in the week complaining about the police wasting public money or, alternatively, not devoting sufficient resources to the case. I studied the offending word and wished I’d brought my magnifying glass to put on a show for the audience.

  The office was on the upper floor, tagged on to the business suite, as Miss McArdle called it. The shopfitters had been using it as a canteen, so it was well equipped with chairs and a few tables that had been borrowed from the food court. Industrial-size tins of paint were stacked in a corner, mainly in shades of magnolia, and a thin layer of plaster dust covered everything.

  ‘Will this do?’ Miss McArdle asked.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘All it needs now is a whiteboard.’ Every incident room has a whiteboard.

  ‘I’ll fetch one,’ she said, and big Dave Sparkington turned to follow her.

  ‘Dave’s quiet,’ I said to Jeff Caton. ‘Is he OK?’

  ‘He thought we were rid of you for a few days, that’s all,’ he replied.

  ‘This’ll be sorted by tomorrow,’ I assured him. ‘Then you’ll all be able to sit around reading the football pages and swapping boozy stories for the remainder of the week.’

  When they returned with the board I asked Miss McArdle and John, the security firm’s superintendent, to stay and started the meeting in the time-honoured way: ‘OK, what have we got?’ I asked, raising the marker pen expectantly.

  ‘Not much from me,’ the SOCO replied. ‘I’ve no doubt collected a few microscopic samples, but they’re all mixed up and contaminated and it would cost a fortune in time and effort to amplify and separate them. And then what do we compare them with? Anybody who’s been in the mall this morning could have left a sample. DNA will be floating around like snowflakes in a blizzard. So don’t wait for anything from me because you’ll be wasting your time.’

  ‘Well thanks for being so positive,’ I said, lowering the pen and turning to the photographer. ‘Did you get some decent pictures?’

  ‘Yes, boss, but I don’t see how they can help with the investigation.’

  ‘No, they can’t, but they’ll be essential if it ever goes to court. Miss McArdle …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When was the last time we can vouch for the offending word not being there?’

  While she was thinking about it John of security said: ‘I can answer that, Inspector. Mr Threadneedle was here until about nine o’clock last night, making sure everything was working well. He tried the curtains about a hundred times and then we left the dais roped off with two of my men looking after it with strict instructions not to leave it unattended. Mr Threadneedle was adamant about that.’

  ‘Threadneedle?’ I queried. ‘Is he the lord mayor?’

  ‘The mayor. He’s just the mayor,’ somebody told me.

  ‘That’s him,’ John confirmed.

  ‘I’m sorry, John, but I don’t know your second name.’

  ‘It’s Brighouse, sir. John Brighouse.’

  ‘Call me Charlie. So the offence was committed some time between nine last night and eleven this morning.’ I wrote it on the board. ‘I need some information from either you or Miss McArdle. First of all, a full list of all the names of your security staff, with another list of those who were here between nine last night and eleven this morning. And I’d like another list of all the names of the dignitaries present at the opening ceremony.’ I looked at the manager. ‘Do you think you could do those for me as soon as possible, please?’

  She said they could, and the two of them left. I said: ‘Right, so now we’re alone, what do we know about Threadneedle?’

  ‘He’s a crook,’ big Dave Sparkington replied.

  ‘He’s a pillar of society,’ someone contradicted.

  ‘The mayor of our fair town.’

  ‘The economic crime unit have been trying to get their hands on him for years.’

  ‘You mean the department formerly known as the fraud squad.’

  ‘The shiny-trousers branch.’

  ‘The same.’

  I could see a spin-off. We might not catch the phantom painter, but investigating our beloved mayor might turn up a few smelly surprises. ‘What’s he supposed to have done?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s rich,’ somebody supplied.

  ‘Believe it or not, that’s still not a crime,’ I said.

  ‘It is if you were born in a caravan in Ireland, never went to school, earned a living working the lump and now owned a big share of this.’ The speaker wafted a hand around, demonstrating that he was talking about the building we were sitting in.

  ‘He owns shares in this?’ I asked.

  ‘Allegedly,’ Brendan, one of my DCs said. Brendan is a collector of conspiracy theories, and prone to go off on uncontrolled tangents. ‘It’s been in the papers, boss. Don’t you read them?’

  ‘He owns shares in Monkton’s,’ I was told. ‘They were the major contractors. And he owns part of several of the subcontractors. Him being on the approvals committee can’t have prejudiced their chances of lifting the contract.’

  ‘And he drives a powder-blue Rolls-Royce.’

  ‘Ooh, powder blue – how passé,’ one of the comics commented in an appropriate accent.

  ‘It’s not that simple, Chas,’ Jeff Caton stated. ‘He has fingers in lots of pies. It’s not subcontractors – more like subcontractors to subcontractors, et cetera. And, of course, his position on the council will have helped push through the necessary compulsory purchase orders. Fraud have looked good and hard at him, but his affairs are labyrinthine. He made a pile as a racehorse owner, which just about excuses him from normal investigation.’

  What Jeff meant was that he could claim to have made his money in any number of ways associated with the industry, from gambling to stabling horses and selling bags of manure, without keeping accurate records. We’d have to giv
e him the benefit of any doubts.

  ‘So how did he get to be the mayor?’

  ‘He was democratically elected as a councillor, and eventually it was his turn. He said the right things that the tosspots understood, and the rest was due to apathy.’

  ‘He’s made the buses run on time,’ Brendan told us.

  ‘Listen,’ I began. ‘I know we all think this is hilarious but the chief constable has his teeth into it and he’ll want me to keep him informed, so let’s cut out the messing about and get on with it. Understood?’

  They mumbled their assent and Jeff said: ‘Did you find anything, Chas?’

  ‘Not much, but I did notice one thing that I thought interesting: it wasn’t done with a spray can. The paint looks like acrylic, as used by some artists, and there were brush marks. I’d say it was applied with a stiff brush.’

  ‘Was the paint dry?’ asked Maggie Madison, one of the two female officers in the team.

  ‘Yes, but acrylic dries in a few minutes and sets like concrete. That’s why I never use it. If you don’t clean your brush every two minutes you ruin it, and they don’t come cheap.’

  ‘What are you supposed to clean them in?’ Brendan wondered.

  ‘Only water. That’s the main attraction of the paint. What’s uppermost in my mind at the moment is who was the intended target? Who was the painter aiming his offence at?’

  Jeff held up a hand and counted them off on his fingers: ‘Miss Curzon – does she have a jilted boyfriend? Threadneedle – he must have dozens of enemies. The Centre in general – there was quite a bit of opposition to it.’

  ‘Anybody else?’ I invited. Dave Sparkington was sitting with his head bowed, elbows on his knees, doing his impression of Rodin’s The Thinker. I said: ‘Come on then, Dave. I can see words of wisdom bubbling up inside you, so let’s have them.’

  ‘We’re wasting time, aren’t we?’ he pronounced.