The Truth About Murder

by Chris Collett

  There had been a short pause while Jake deciphered what I’d said, always harder on the phone.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he’d replied eventually. ‘But he was a twat.’

  Just a few minutes after I was installed behind my desk, Plum sauntered in and was equally surprised to see me, a reaction she did nothing to hide. Despite having been with us a couple of years now, we all still referred to Plum as the ‘work experience girl’, because that was how she’d started, Jake doing a favour to his ex-wife, who counselled at a local rehabilitation centre. At the time, it was a gamble. All we had known about Victoria, as she was known then, was that she’d run away from home aged thirteen and spent a couple of years on the streets with her new best friends — industrial strength cider and skunk — before the project had taken her in.

  You’d think that I of all people would have given the kid a break, but when she walked in on her first day, all dreadlocks and piercings, I’d inwardly recoiled, same as everyone else. Maybe it was the boots she wore, which would have looked more at home on a deep-sea diver, and reminded me uncomfortably of my Piedros, the orthopaedic shoes I’d been forced to wear as a kid.

  A pale wisp of a thing, Plum’s eternally surly expression came with an attitude to match. I’d come across the term ‘emo’, of course, but this was my first real-life encounter with one. Plum had clearly never come across anyone like me before either. After all, freak shows went out of fashion years ago. Consequently, for the first few days, as we carefully stepped around each other, I was subjected to intense and uninhibited scrutiny, while she chomped down on an ever-present blob of chewing gum. Whenever we were in the same room, Plum seemed to be watching me. After a while it got tiresome, even for me, so I began glaring back, but she remained totally unfazed. Then it dawned on me that life was going more smoothly. After the first couple of days, I rarely had to repeat myself to her and, without being told, Plum delivered my coffee in a large mug, to the right side of my desk and never more than two-thirds full. When I went through the post, I began to find the envelopes discreetly slit open, the contents intact.

  ‘Did you get her to do that?’ I asked Barbara. But she hadn’t.

  Over time, I found that I only ever had to say something to Plum once and it was done. To begin with, Jake put her on basic office junior stuff — filing, the post run and making tea, but despite a somewhat unhurried approach, Plum tackled everything she was required to do with the same level of quiet commitment. I remarked on this once to Barbara.

  ‘Of course she does,’ she chuckled. ‘She’s got a crush.’

  I followed her gaze through to Jake’s office, where he was talking Plum through some kind of admin task. The two of them stood so close that her arm brushed against his, and plainly she was hanging on his every word. It was obvious, now that it was pointed out.

  When it became apparent that Plum’s two-fingered typing was also accurate, she progressed to taking on the occasional correspondence when Barbara was overloaded. Then, one lunch time, I came out to ask Barbara to make a phone call for me, a sensitive call to someone I’d never met. I didn’t want to risk any misunderstandings. But Barbara had gone out to do some shopping.

  ‘I could do it for you,’ Plum offered, the indifferent shrug clearly anticipating polite rejection. But then I thought about it. What was the worst that could happen? Carefully primed and prompted by me as she went along, she did it pretty much to perfection. And gradually, Plum had slipped into the role of my personal assistant.

  Although there had been a brief fad at the start of the century for celebrities naming their offspring after random pieces of fruit, Plum was just a nickname, for which I had to take full responsibility. Victoria somehow seemed altogether too decorous for this pragmatic girl. Plus, even after years of speech therapy, I’ve never held much affection for the labiodental fricative. The first time I called her Plum I was tired, it was shorthand and it was a pathetic joke, but she hadn’t seemed to mind, so it stuck. Lately, she’d even started to match her lipstick, thickly applied, with the name.

  Today she was back to close scrutiny again, her masticating jaw reduced to slow motion, the gum languishing in the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Christ, look at the state of your face.’

  ‘Memorise the details,’ I said, turning my attention to what had dropped into my in-tray over the last few days. ‘I’m going to test you on it later.’

  I looked up to see her tilting her head and squinting at me. ‘Isle of Skye,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Isle of Skye.’ She raised her thumbs and index fingers in front of her face, framing my left cheek like a film director might. ‘If you discount that straggly bit at the bottom.’

  ‘Yes. Thanks. How about we get down to some work now?’ A name sprang out at me from my diary. ‘Do you know what happened with Rita Todd? She was meant to come in and see me on Wednesday. Did Jake talk to her?’

  ‘Nah. He told me to cancel, so I left a message on her answer machine. She didn’t show, so I guess she must have picked it up. You want to reschedule?’

  ‘Yeah. I feel bad — I don’t think I exactly gave her my full attention last time she was here. Let’s find out if she wants our help or not.’

  Plum punched in the number. ‘Not answering,’ she said, after a couple of minutes. ‘Shall I leave another message?’

  ‘Yes. She must be expecting to hear from us at some point.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  When I arrived at Fulford Road on Thursday morning, Denny was closeted with the Chief Superintendent again. Well, stuff him. I didn’t have to agree with him about Bostwick. The guy looked like a thug, exactly the kind of thug who would get a buzz out of beating up someone who couldn’t defend himself, especially for material gain. If he was prone to the short fuse, having a bit of an off day was probably all it would take. Also, despite what Denny had said, Davey’s supermarket wasn’t that far away from the Flatwood estate, and like everyone else, Bostwick would have seen the posters advertising the recent lottery winners. If the reputation of the shop had spread, people like him would travel much greater distances to increase the odds of buying a winning ticket. Whatever Denny’s opinion might be, there was nothing to stop me pursuing that particular line of enquiry until it ran out of steam.

  To get to the Flatwood I had to drive across town and, in doing so, it occurred to me (as it had done on many occasions) that Sonia was right: we could have ended up in worse places. In the national economic dip that had characterised the end of the twentieth century there were towns like this all over Britain that had lost their core manufacturing base — carpets, shoes or whatever the commodity might be. Rapid decline had followed as the population deserted, followed by the businesses, leaving run-down husks where the rich stayed rich — usually by commuting to lucrative jobs elsewhere — and the poor remained poor, materially and in aspiration, barred from all but the most meagre opportunities from the start. Charnford somehow seemed to have avoided that for the most part and was a tidy town, with a growing population of about 15,000. It had originally developed from the merger of a number of smaller communities and had somehow retained that rural backwater feel. It wasn’t exactly small enough that everyone knew everyone else, but it was underpinned by connecting relationships, large enough for anyone to remain anonymous if they wanted to, but small enough to navigate easily after only a few days. The geography of the place helped with that, bisected as the town was by the River Charn that cut through the centre, delineating the social mix as well as the landscape. The most desirable dwellings in the town were the riverside properties, from the converted mill in the centre with its luxury apartment balconies, to the larger detached houses towards the outskirts of the town that spread out to the north.

  South of the river, the Flatwood estate, comprising about two hundred social housing dwellings, lacked such genteel charm and retained a slightly menacing feel, despite the recent efforts at regeneration whereby some of the social housing had
been replaced with buildings owned by a private association. In one corner next to Millpool Primary School, there was a small, spanking new development that included housing for newly arrived refugees. Elsewhere, however, the rebuild was a cut-and-paste job. Squat maisonette blocks had been pulled down and replaced with three-storey townhouses in red brick and stucco with tiny wrought-iron balconies, which continued to rub shoulders with the seedy-looking older generation terraced and semi-detached brick and clapboard houses, which you just knew would be plagued inside with damp.

  It was in one of these that the Bostwick family lived, situated opposite an abandoned kids’ playground in the smaller of the town’s two parks, made even more dismal today by the nondescript weather. The curtains of number thirty-five Talbot Way were closed upstairs and yellowing nets obscured the ground-floor room. As there was no doorbell on the mud-stained UPVC door, I knocked as hard as I could on the glass, bruising my knuckles in the process. From somewhere at the back of the house came the gruff bark of a large dog, but otherwise there was no response. Repeating the exercise was no more productive, nor were there any friendly neighbours on hand to discuss the matter with, so with a backward glance at the first-floor windows, I headed back to my car.

  The estate where Evan Phelps lived was about as far from the Flatwood as it was possible to get, both geographically and aesthetically. North of the river, sprawled over a rise, these private houses languished at the end of fifty-metre front drives, concealed in the main by mature trees and hedges.

  Fourteen High Close was a half-hearted attempt at a mock Tudor with a double garage, its condition as immaculate as the properties on either side, but with a ‘For Sale’ sign planted in the front garden. Phelps didn’t, on the face of it, look quite as desperate for a lottery win as Bostwick might be.

  The Mini and the souped-up Corsa parked on the drive were encouraging, and this time when I rang the bell, a figure appeared almost immediately behind the frosted glass door. The girl who opened it could have been anything from late teens to mid-twenties and the familial resemblance in her skin and hair colour told me this was Evan Phelps’ sister. The family would have stood out in this town, as the children were clearly mixed heritage and therefore a rarity.

  Seeing the uniform, the girl was immediately cagey, the door inching back just a little, which made me wonder if she was used to visits from the police or maybe just Jehovah’s Witnesses. I switched on my broadest smile.

  ‘Hi, I’m PC Mick Fraser.’ I held up my warrant card for her to see. ‘I wondered if Evan Phelps was at home. I’d like to have a word.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘I just want to ask him a couple of questions. Is he here?’ I glanced behind her into the empty hall.

  ‘Questions about what?’

  ‘It’s all right, Billie.’ Over her shoulder, I saw a lanky figure descending the staircase. ‘You can leave this to me. Go back to your revision.’

  Billie did as she was told, but not without an anxious glance towards her brother, who took her place in the doorway. A slim and healthy-looking six feet tall, his hair cut close to his scalp, Phelps wore a loose T-shirt and sweatpants and leaned on the door frame, his arms folded, the picture of relaxation. It didn’t look as if I was going to be invited in, but I could live with that. I guessed the parents were out at work.

  ‘So, how can I help you?’ Phelps asked, with just the right tone of polite deference. The carefully modulated voice spoke to me of a private education.

  ‘Where were you last Friday night, between ten and eleven p.m.?’ I asked.

  Pursing his lips, his eyebrows drew together in a frown while he considered the question. Smart move to think about it before answering. The mistake most guilty people make is to answer straight away — usually untruthfully. It was further demonstration that he wasn’t perhaps entirely new to this situation.

  ‘Ten and eleven on a Friday night? I’d have been at the Drum and Monkey.’ I recognised the name, a pub-turned-bar a little way out on this side of town.

  ‘And you’re sure about that particular Friday?’

  ‘Yeah, been going there most weeks for ever.’

  ‘And you were there all evening?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘There are people who can vouch for you?’

  ‘Loads.’ He brightened suddenly. ‘I’ll tell you what, a couple of your brothers were there. A bit of a scuffle kicked off and two officers came in to sort it. I spoke to one of them, so he might remember me.’

  Shit. So that would appear to be that. I’d ask some questions to check it out back at the station, but that would be a pretty stupid thing to lie about. I took my final weapon out of my pocket and held it out to him.

  ‘Do you know this man at all?’

  He studied the photo of Sam Bostwick coolly, before slowly shaking his head. ‘No, don’t think so.’ Again, he was nice and casual, not too eager. ‘Just so that you know, I’m clean. Haven’t touched the stuff for years. Learned my lesson you might say.’ The assured smile almost had me convinced.

  I had nothing left. ‘OK, thanks for your time, Mr Phelps. You’ve been very helpful.’

  ‘No probs.’ He allowed himself a smile. I turned and walked back down the drive. There was one interesting thing, though. He hadn’t apparently been curious enough about my visit to ask why I was so interested in his whereabouts on Friday night.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It wasn’t until the next morning that I managed to track him down, but when I caught up with Sam Bostwick, I had to seriously reconsider whether Denny might have been right about him and Phelps. What had been hinted at by their places of residence was thrown into stark relief face to face. Chalk and cheese didn’t even begin to describe the differences between the two men Davey had identified. Bostwick was a whippet to Evan Phelps’ elegant Weimaraner, and not a very well kept one at that. It was hard to believe that Phelps was the younger of the two by several years. Small and under-nourished, Bostwick was a bundle of nervous tension, his pale, washed-out eyes never lingering on anything for long. His bitten-down nails were grimy, and faded homemade tattoos across the knuckles of both hands (I eventually figured out) spelled ‘immortal’. Looking at the state of him, I wouldn’t be placing any bets on that being true. The aroma surrounding him was organic and slightly unwashed. Another equally faded tattoo to the left of his prominent Adam’s apple indicated an allegiance, some decades too late, to the Waffen SS. That kind of affiliation would surely put Bostwick and Phelps on opposite sides of the fence.

  We were sitting in a lounge, ten by ten at most, and crammed with a cheap leather sofa, fifty-inch flat screen TV and assorted junk, including, incongruously, a crate stuffed full of what appeared to be children’s toys. The air was stale, and the windows looked as if they hadn’t been opened in a long time. The dog that had sounded so fierce the first time I’d rung the bell turned out to be a soft old Staffie bitch with sagging teats and kept coming to nuzzle my leg. Bostwick eventually managed to tear himself away from the video game he was playing, but he also had an alibi of sorts for the Friday night.

  ‘I was babysitting,’ he said, when he finally dragged his attention from the screen, where the image of a warrior being blown to pieces was frozen mid-air. ‘I fetched a takeaway for me and the wife to have before she went on her night shift, then I stopped in with the kids and sank a few cans.’

  When I showed him the picture of Phelps, though, he blinked hard at it, before denying all knowledge of him.

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ I persisted.

  He gave it another cursory glance. ‘Yes,’ he said, but he squirmed as he said it.

  Something on the sofa crackled and a baby monitor came to life with the grizzling of an infant. Bostwick threw down the controller and got to his feet. I heard him climb the stairs and his voice in the distance. When he re-entered the room, it was with a small baby in his arms.

  ‘Sorry, I’ve got to get the oldest one from nursery in twenty
minutes,’ he said, glancing at the clock. ‘And this one wants changing, as you’ll soon find out.’ He gave the baby a tender smile and rubbed noses, to make it giggle.

  I saw myself out, though the dog waddled hopefully with me to the front door, and on the way back down the footpath a scrap of coloured paper caught my eye — a spent lottery ticket. I picked it up.

  By now I had also checked out Phelps’ story with the beat officers who’d attended the incident at the Drum and Monkey on the Friday night. When I’d showed them the picture, one of them categorically remembered having a conversation with Phelps.

  ‘Seemed a pleasant sort of lad,’ he’d said. ‘He certainly did everything he could to co-operate. What’s he done?’

  ‘Probably nothing,’ I’d said, miserably.

  I considered what I’d learned about Bostwick and Phelps. The only thing that might possibly bring them together could be drugs. Illegal substances have a way of crossing boundaries in a way that any amount of multicultural awareness doesn’t. The officer who’d dealt with Phelps’ little drug misadventure was Sergeant Sharon Petrowlski, back when she was still a PC. Friendly in a practical kind of way, Petrowlski had a reputation for being a safe pair of hands. An experienced officer in her forties, she gave off an aura of dependability, and whenever we’d spoken she’d demonstrated an encyclopaedic knowledge of current cases. I’d hoped that this extended to past ones too and she didn’t let me down. Sharon had investigated the burglary at the Phelps address.

  ‘I didn’t have to look far,’ she’d said. ‘Within five minutes, Mr Phelps senior had told me that his son was responsible and offered up items from the boy’s room for fingerprinting purposes. Phelps himself never denied it.’

  ‘But his father pressed charges?’

  ‘Insisted on it. Was hoping to teach the boy a lesson, I think, and it seemed to work. It scared the crap out of him. He was given a caution and as far as I know, he hasn’t been in trouble since.’