A Private Investigation

by Peter Grainger

  Fifty miles an hour, never any faster, and the time was 17.44. Smith settled back for the fifteen-minute drive and then something caught his eye, something white over the verge of the road to his left. A Barn Owl flapping its way towards him before suddenly veering up and away over the hedge. Eerie, ghostly things, owls. Are they lucky or unlucky? He couldn’t remember. Must mention it to Jo tomorrow.

  After that, the road seemed deserted, just the lights of Harris’s van up ahead. Let us go then, you and I, through certain half-deserted streets… But that was Sheila, not Jo, and wouldn’t she be impressed that he had remembered those lines?

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The first stop was the usual one, Arches Way behind the old railway station, which was only a matter of yards from the new platform where Smith would be catching a train in not much more than twelve hours’ time. Plenty of the little retail units built into the arches of the original Victorian station were open late for Christmas, and Harris was soon busy. Even from a distance it was plain that Harris had built up a regular clientele and that he could put on a convincing chatty front as a fast-food entrepreneur going places. And he probably could, too – Harris was intelligent and had already been a success in one career. He could develop this, get more vans and employ people, buy some proper premises and make himself some real money. Andretti had been the same. Our prisons are not full of men of unusual abilities. Prisons are mostly occupied by the inadequate, the addicted and the mentally ill, but amongst them are people of great talent and enterprise. Remember Billy Slater in HMP Littlemoor? At his last trial, the judge had said that Billy was a sad loss to the effort to improve the nation’s balance of payments before sentencing him to twelve more years for exporting millions of pounds’ worth of stolen farm machinery to the Far East.

  Smith thought about the burgers, too. He wasn’t averse to an occasional trans-fat treat and he had caught a whiff of these several times tonight. The previous two evenings he had been prepared with a flask and a couple of home-made rolls but not tonight because he hadn’t planned this, hadn’t decided to watch one more time until the last moment. His shift had ended at five pm; officially he was then an officer of the law until midnight. The temptation had been there, to say that’s enough, because for two nights Harris had done only what Murray had described for the previous three; doubts had crept in that he, Smith, was wrong, wildly wrong – that Harris was simply a sick-minded individual who might have sent the anonymous note because a girl had disappeared, an individual who enjoyed being interviewed by the police but who had nothing of importance to say. Smith even began to wonder whether he’d been wrong too, about Harris’s involvement in the last of Andretti’s crimes. When you sit alone in a stationary car for hours on end, doubt becomes a rat that scuttles around in the darkness, gnawing at everything you thought was safe from it.

  Sitting there now, he thought, why not wander over and order one of those burgers with onions and watch him cooking it for me? Let him see my face, and let me see his reaction. We haven’t done that since this business began, and maybe we should have. After all, who else was he asking Charlie Hills about? But then, tonight, hadn’t Harris done something different? Why that standing outside his house in the streetlight? Wasn’t that, perhaps, a way of saying here I am? Isn’t it time?

  The second stop was usually a commercial drivers’ layby and unofficial car park on the way out to the by-pass, but Harris stayed longer than usual at Arches Way with so many customers, and when they finally set off it was clear he had decided to miss out the layby tonight and go straight to The Crescent – another change in routine. Smith parked even closer this time, in the taxi rank, ready to show his ID for what would almost certainly be the last time, should an angry driver decide to complain. It would be hilarious if it was one was of Dolly Argyris’s boys. The van was across the road from him, no more than thirty yards away.

  It was odd being back here. Of course, it was logical that they would be, but even so… Smith remembered the night he had walked down from the playpark and stood at the end of the path looking into The Crescent. That point was about eighty yards from where he was now sitting. In front and to the left, Mehmet Sadik’s kebab shop – there he is behind the steamed-up glass, still looking glum and a bit lost, still not very busy. And probably still on Wilson’s hit-list for the girl’s disappearance. Parked in front a little way, two taxis but Smith couldn’t see whether Albert King was in one of them. He might be, taxi men have their own favourite waiting places.

  Smith tried to visualise Zoe coming out of the footpath and into The Crescent. She went into the kebab shop and performed the ritual humiliation of Mr Sadik; he must have watched the video a dozen times now. Then she went across the road to the opposition, the burger van parked over to his right, and she ordered her supper, and it began to rain, and two girls from her school saw her there. After that, Paul Harrison said something like, you’re getting wet, wait in here until it stops, and Zoe, flattered, her name being woman, Zoe went into the van. And has never been seen since. Maybe she was in there only for the ten minutes Harrison had claimed. Maybe.

  It occurred to Smith then that as things stood, the record would be incomplete – he had written nothing down all day. To have one day missing from approximately nine thousand would be a calamity. He reached inside for the Alwych and found something else in the pocket first. It was the card that Waters had given him at four o’clock that afternoon. A small card, pushed into the inside pocket with a promise to open it later. Honestly Waters, we’re policemen, we don’t give each other Christmas cards!

  But it wasn’t a Christmas card. A square of thick, cream-coloured paper, a hand-made effort – but not by Waters himself, thank God – bought from a little shop somewhere that sold quality, artisan-type things. On the front, printed in simple block capitals in black ink were the words “Thank You”, and then inside, in identical fashion, “For Everything”, and underneath, Waters’ Christian name in full. That was all.

  Silly boy. That first morning, when he found Waters standing at the counter with Charlie Hills, and Smith saying “Sonny, if you’ve come to report your lost tricycle, shouldn’t you be standing this side?” A couple of weeks later he’d got his nose broken confronting Captain Jonathan Hamilton’s thugs outside the house where Hanna Subic was hiding her cousin, Petar. After that, as Smith had pointed out on many occasions, it had all been downhill. But, of course, it had not been – Waters had proved himself time and again, despite being several inches taller than his sergeant and peculiarly attractive to female witnesses. Waters was going to make his father proud, and then the pain again – the pain because if it had been done at all, it could only have been Detective Sergeant Douglas Waters who put somewhere in Marco Andretti’s house a folded piece of paper with the names of two girls written on it – two girls whose bodies had been found in the Norfolk dunes. The handwriting was a good match but Andretti had always insisted that it was not his; he would have been convicted anyway, but that detail had enraged him.

  Smith put the card back into its envelope, the envelope back into the pocket, and took out the notebook and pencil. Be funny, wouldn’t it, if after all these years, that was still what was bugging Andretti? If that was why he had used his younger cousin like a remote-controlled device to set this up – if he, Smith, was sitting here tonight because of that? Because as well as his son, Dougie Waters had three young daughters, the same age as Andretti’s victims, and he wanted just a little bit of insurance that the monster never walked the streets of Kings Lake again?

  In the Alwych, Smith made a few cursory notes about the times and places he had watched the suspect this evening. It all seemed superfluous but when he had finished he looked up and across the road, and Harris looked quickly away. He had been watching Smith, and that was the first time he had shown any awareness that he was under observation. Smith kept his eyes fixed on Harris then but the look never returned. Someone else came to the van and he was occupied again.

 
; 21.52 – in a few minutes they would be off to the market square where Harris could catch the trade from the pubs and clubs. There would be Christmas parties, works do’s and more inebriated hunger than usual tonight and Harris might decide to stay longer; if Smith were to remain with it to the bitter end, his time as a policeman might end with him sitting in the old Peugeot and eating a stale Polo mint. The car might turn into a pumpkin and Smith might discover whom he really was after living this fairy-tale life for so many years.

  Harris pulled the sliding window across at 22.00, got into the driver’s seat and started up. Smith had parked facing in the same direction as the van, ready to follow it into the town, and so he was genuinely surprised to see it move forward and then swing around one hundred and eighty degrees, passing within feet of his own vehicle before heading back the way they had come about an hour ago. Wherever they were going, it was not the market square. Smith turned the key and the old engine caught first time, faithful to the last.

  Harris had driven straight back to his home but a little more briskly than usual, and then he had pulled front first into the drive instead of reversing as he had done on previous nights. He seemed to be slightly hurried, as if something had happened but Smith hadn’t seen him take a call or look at his phone once in the evening. Every change from the routine felt significant, increasingly so, and there was the familiar push of adrenaline through the system as the senses go to full alert.

  Smith had carried on past the house as one would in any normal surveillance – the road looped around through the small estate, enabling him to get back to the position where he had been parked earlier in the evening. The house had been out of view for no more than two minutes. There was a light on downstairs, front right, which Smith knew was the lounge – Murray had given him the basic layout from his visit weeks ago. But Harris should be outside the Coruba Club now, flipping burgers underneath the flashing yellow palm tree sign.

  It was a tense three or four minutes. Maybe he had a party to go to himself, though Shona Benson and Terri Reed couldn’t have given better descriptions of a loner if they had tried. Maybe he was unwell. Maybe – maybe that’s him coming out of the front door. Of course it is – nobody else lives here. Harris had put on a heavier, dark-coloured jacket with a hood which he had not pulled up despite the cold. He closed the door and walked along the path that led onto the pavement, and Smith had the sudden thought that this was it, the moment of confrontation. His left hand felt for the phone in his pocket. Would there be time to send a message to Murray after all?

  Instead, Harris turned left and walked briskly away along the pavement by the road that Smith had just driven down, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched a little. Where was he going? Nothing there but houses like his own, the road circling back into the one where the Peugeot was parked; if Harris kept walking he would come up behind Smith but that seemed an unnecessarily elaborate plan if it was the intention; he could have crossed the road and been here in ten seconds.

  Moments like this one arise in many surveillances. Does one get out and follow on foot or wait at the place to which you know they must return? As the figure grew smaller and more indistinct, Smith made the calculations. Nothing there but houses, but maybe, in one of those houses, a captive girl? Andretti might have the keys to another property, or there might be someone else involved after all, someone the police had never imagined. Maybe Harris takes a constitutional every Friday evening; they had assumed he worked every weekday night but this was the first Friday anyone had followed him. Maybe he had a woman tucked away up there, and had other things entirely on his mind.

  Then the figure had gone into the darkness beyond another streetlamp, and so had the opportunity. Harris couldn’t go far on foot, and beyond the housing estate was open farmland. He could always suggest to someone that a door-to-door next week might be worthwhile but that would be a heck of a thing to organise in the days between Christmas and New Year, and Wilson would say it was Smith’s idea of one last joke.

  Go home now, or wait and see what time he gets back? The latter might improve the intelligence a little. He took out the notebook again and added the latest details. Fingers a little numb with the cold, and he could hardly feel his feet. And if he stayed away from his bed past midnight, he’d have a headache tomorrow, more than likely. That’s what you’ve got at the end of the day – a pain behind the eyes.

  Car headlights appeared from the right, coming around the bend. Smith tried to use the beams to see if anyone was there on the pavement, but then it pulled up outside Harris’s front gate, a silver Vauxhall estate. It was Harris who got out, leaving the engine running, and went back inside the house. Another light, downstairs on the left, the dining room, and then Harris was back out and heading for the car, moving with a sense of purpose.

  Smith swore quietly, his right finger and thumb already at the ignition key – another vehicle. He’d said that weeks ago, so why hadn’t it shown up? Who had carried out that particular check? Not that it mattered much now. Maybe it was registered to Paolo Harris and not to Paul Harrison – would anyone have considered that? There it had been, parked up in the estate, and Smith must have driven past it four times already this week. Harris had been watched on five occasions and had made no move to go near it, and now it was passing the T junction, heading back towards the roundabout on the Hunston to Kings Lake road. Smith turned the key once more, the cold forgotten.

  Hunston is an odd little town. The oldest part is on the slope that runs down towards the sea, a cluster of rather narrow streets close to where there was once a Victorian pier, and some of the old, three-storey buildings are even now guest-houses and bed and breakfast emporiums, with landladies and lace curtains, box hedges, stairs too steep for suitcases and still the faint air of 1950s disapproval of the young and the unmarried. Then, on the southern edge, the caravans came in their hundreds, laid out in rows like gravestones, the pricey ones closest to the sea wall, sharing the toilet and shower blocks, crossing the wet grass in slippers on cold summer mornings. After that, retirement beckoned, and scores of chalet bungalows built on the memories, the best ones with a sea-view, if only from one back bedroom window. The town has too many fish and chip and novelty shops for its size but the day-trippers come back each year with the sun and the wind, keeping them going, and there is a fun fair where only the young children have much fun, and a shabby amusement arcade where nobody seems to be amused for very long.

  Away from all this, on the eastern edge of the town, attempts have been made to broaden the economic base of the town – earnest Conservative councillors must have used such phrases in local district planning meetings – and there are little industrial estates and business parks, small starter units with single-storey brick buildings, asbestos roofs, wire-mesh fences and faded signs pointing to a future that hasn’t happened yet, or they wouldn’t still be here.

  Harris had not taken the most direct route to the Sandy Lane Trading Estate, and the most likely reason for that was to check whether he was being followed. Smith had kept his distance but by now the idea had to be considered that Harris was checking he was being followed rather than that he was not. There had been headlights behind him since just before six o’clock in the evening – he couldn’t have missed them.

  Nevertheless, when the Vauxhall finally turned into Sandy Lane, Smith turned off his lights before continuing to follow. He knew this road for some reason though he could recall no case that had brought him here. Occasional sodium lamps cast a yellow glow as the road wound through the various premises, and the red rear lights of Harris’s car disappeared around bends a couple of times but that didn’t matter because this road was a dead end; one had to turn around to get out, back the way one had come.

  And then, after what Smith believed to be the final bend, he could see the rear lights ahead, the car pulled up in front of a gate about a hundred yards away. The air was cold now, and there were exhaust fumes in the red glow of the tail-lights. Those had to be the las
t buildings on the estate.

  Smith pulled into the side and switched off the engine. He couldn’t see Harris but something was happening. Then the Vauxhall pulled forward through the gates and turned ninety degrees to the right. The headlights lit up the front of a single-storey building briefly, and then they were turned off. There was a figure, someone closing the gates but he couldn’t see whether it was Harris himself. Maybe the flash of a torch as someone – the same someone? – went from the car to the building but it was too dark to be sure, and too far away. And then nothing.

  After a few seconds, you become aware of your own breathing again. Then you become aware of the decision that must be made. He had options. The night crew would be in place at Central but it was the Friday night before Christmas, and that meant there would have been some sort of action in town. In fact, glancing at the watch, at 22.58, the action in town was only just beginning. There would not be people at their desks just waiting for his call. He could perhaps get a patrol car, if there was one in the area, to swing around to Sandy Lane and help him take a look around, but at what exactly? Harris was a businessman and these were small business premises; all this could be perfectly legitimate and Harris had been under no obligation to tell them what else he was involved in. Waters would have checked company records most likely, but…

  But he, Smith, needed more than this to call in uniforms. And there was only one way to get that, so he pulled the keys from the ignition, got out and locked the car. He checked his pockets – force of habit, habit of the force – and found the phone, the notebook and the little LED torch he had got as a free gift for patronising his local petrol station. The powerful lamp had been put on charge at home and forgotten. Ahead of him was one more streetlight on the other side of the road. He moved over to the left, walking close to the fence, keeping out of its pool of amber light, and went quietly down towards where Harris had parked his car.