And at that point, much like the devil of whom people speak, James Kane turned up.
“Monica,” he caressed the back of her neck with hand which, I noticed, trembled slightly.
“Oh,” she focussed on his face, “There you are. Was worried. You met Dan?” she waved a hand as though joining us together.
“Not officially,” Kane smiled at me, though the smile didn’t reach his eyes. He was out of breath, I noticed, and seemed keen to end the conversation and be rid of me.
Which meant, of course, that I stuck around.
“You’re a lawyer,” I prompted, and he smiled another crooked little smile at me.
“Yes,” he admitted, “I’m Olivia’s legal specialist. As I was for her aunt before her. You run this place,” he announced, leaving no room for any confusion over his thoughts on The Marq or on me.
“I try,” I smarmed, wishing Caz were present. She’d know what to say; I was this close to actually apologising for the joint.
“Well, it’s been lovely to meet you,” his smile clicked off, and I was dismissed, as he leaned in, kissing the nape of his drunken girlfriend’s neck. “What say we make a move, Monica? Old Maggie’s well and truly planted, so there’s no need for us to hang around any longer.”
Monica Vale looked up as though just seeing he and I for the first time, and nodded emphatically, which made her wobble precariously on the bar stool. “Wanna go,” she slurred. “need to escape.”
Kane chuckled “Escape’s a bit strong, but I agree, dear, it’s definitely time to head home.” And so saying, he slipped an arm around her, slid her from the stool, and half carried, half supported the wasted artist from the bar.
Ali sidled up to me. “Cheers for that, Danny.” She shook her head sadly. “I’m a barmaid,” she said, forgetting, for a rare moment, that she was a bar manager. “I got no problem doling out booze, but that girl looked heartbroken.”
“You reckon?” I asked. “She just looked wasted to me.”
“Nah,” Ali shook her head. “She looked like the bottom had just fallen out of her world. Speaking of which, let’s hope the rest of them head off soon. I don’t think the plumbing can take the world falling out of their bottoms. Have you got the key for that loo? The queue’s vast, and it looks like whoever’s gone in there has passed out.”
“Key?” I said. “I didn’t even know you could lock it.”
I headed back that way, and wondered, once again, where Caz had got to; it was unlike her to go for a nap when there was a party – and, more importantly, free booze – to be had.
Ali was right about the queue; it seemed like half the pub were stretched along the corridor, lending the whole thing – along with the 90s house music filtering in from the knackered juke box in the bar, and the almost tropical heat, scented with Pineapple, Citrus and Cheese and Onion –the air of a student house party.
“Sorry about this, folks,” I said, walking along the line, and nodding at Desmond Everett and Freddie Rosetti, “Won’t be a moment.”
“They’ve been in there for ages,” Olivia Wright, who’d been giggling somewhat drunkenly with her girlfriend plain Jane Barton announced. “Hope they haven’t used all the paper up,” and she giggled again.
I walked to the top of the line, and knocked on the door.
“Hello!” I called, when no answer came back. “Anyone in there?”
I tried the handle. It was locked from inside, but the door had one of those locks on it that left just a thin line – like a screw head – with which one could unlock the door.
I called again, and when I got no answer, I dipped into my pocket, pulled out a pound coin, tried to slide it into the slot, and, when it wouldn’t work, tried again with a ten pence piece.
It fit perfectly.
“I’m going to open the door,” I called to whoever was inside the loo, hoping that they’d simply passed out, and weren’t in the midst of a bout of dysentery.
I turned the coin, feeling the lock slide slowly backwards. The door popped as it came unlocked.
I pushed the door open, knocking and calling “Hello” again, in a vain hope that – if it was explosive dysentery – the sufferer would at least be able to gurgle a plea for privacy.
But there was no call.
The door stuck on something, and I shoved, finally seeing into the small room. The ceiling sloped sharply down towards the far wall, where the toilet stood, the lid up and two fresh toilet rolls stacked on top of the cistern. To my right was a small hand basin and a hand dryer affixed to the wall.
And sprawled on the floor was something puzzling. It was a pair of black shoes, black trousers, a shirt that began as white and, as it reached the collar, faded to pink then almost fluorescent red. And above the collar was something that used to be human, used to be solid, and used to be recognisable as a head.
Now, it was a darkly glistening mass of hair and flesh and slivered white bone, something viscous still oozing slowly from it and pooling around the neck and shoulders to seep into the grouting between the floor tiles and creep across the floor like some sort of macabre weed.
This man – my brain was beginning to put structure to the horror before me – this man’s arms were thrown forward, as though, at the last minute, he had tried to stop his fall. His jacket sleeves were pulled back, and one of his shirt cuffs had lost the cufflink, and was gaping.
The other cufflink – a small silver stud with a red stone in it – seemed to wink at me.
The back of both hands were covered in a mass of tiny scratches, vivid and pink.
From behind me someone squeaked, someone else gasped, and a short person said “What’s going on? I can’t see!”
I stepped back, swinging the door shut. “Call the police,” I said, though it felt like I’d whispered the words, so I swallowed, took a deep breath, controlled the shaking that had started, and tried again. “Someone call the police!” I said, “Tell them someone’s been murdered.”
I leant against the door frame – as much to keep myself upright as to prevent the rubberneckers from pushing the door open to have a good look. I knew this was a murder – you don’t stove your skull in to the extent I’d just seen by standing up suddenly in a low ceilinged room – and I knew that I was in trouble, for – just before I’d closed the door, I’d followed one of those bloody tendrils across the floor as it’s journey took it closer and closer to the weapon that had been used to smash this person’s skull in.
And recognised the mallet that I had been using all morning to hammer out meat. The same one that – logic said – had to have my fingerprints all over it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The door flew open, slamming against the wall, and making the cheap fan on the table wobble dangerously. “Well, well, well. Here we are again. The gang. All back together. Isn’t this nice?”
A vast round tub of lard slammed its way into the room, the head – like a discount block of cheese on a hundred weight of leftover blubber – wobbling sweatily from side to side in a vaguely menacing fashion, hands rubbing together almost lasciviously.
I’d met this Would-be Kong before. His name was Frank Reid, and I’d outsmarted him the last time he’d tried to fit me up for a murder at The Marq. Then, he’d been, quite frankly, a bastard: Truculent, arrogant, aggressive and desperate to prove me guilty.
Now, he was all of those things, plus, as I quickly gathered, sweaty.
“Gawd, it smells like a bear pit in here. Fisher, can we turn on the aircon?”
Behind him, his DC – the man I liked to call my boyfriend – raised an eyebrow. “There’s no AC, Sarge,” he announced. “cuts.”
“Cuts?” Reid swept an eye over me, the wobbly Pound Land Fan, my somewhat beige legal representative, and puffed out his already well stretched poly cotton shirt.
I glanced nervously at Mrs Dorothy Frost, a short, inconspicuous little woman, who’d reminded me, on first meeting, of a somewhat focussed shrew. I’d since come to see her as something c
loser to a tigress than a shrew, but I was still a little… uncertain.
My fingerprints, after all, had been all over the meat mallet.
Reid smiled, almost jovially, and nodded at Dorothy Frost. “’Ow you doin’, Dot?” He asked in an avuncular tone that made me worry; it felt like the equivalent of an undertaker telling dirty jokes. Reid was supposed to be nasty and mean and spiteful and here he was playing the genial host. I half expected him – at any point – to ask if we preferred lapsang souchong or oolong, and to pass around a plate of bourbon fingers.
“How am I doing? I’m wondering why I’m here,” Dorothy Frost responded.
“More to the point, I’m wondering why Mr Bird is here. Surely, after the shock he had yesterday, he should be in the hospital getting checked out.”
“Well, y’see, Dot,” Reid said as he advanced his bulk into the available space, lowered himself into a chair, lifted his arms and manoeuvred the fan so it was pointing directly up his short sleeves, “Danny,” he poked the recording machine beside him as Nick settled beside him, opened a manila folder, and focussed on the contents.
“I can call you Danny, can’t I mate?”
I glanced at Dorothy Frost.
She nodded.
I nodded.
“Is that a yes? For the tape.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well you see,” Reid grinned at the diminutive figure of Dorothy Frost, “Danny was good enough to confess to the first officers on the scene.”
Dorothy shot me a look. I opened my mouth but no words came out.
“Confess?” Dorothy Frost said.
“Oh, not to the murder. He’s not that stupid; but he did have to admit that the weapon was his, and that we’d find his fingerprints all over it. So I thought it might be worthwhile getting him in here to ask how come his meat mallet ended up being used as a murder weapon.”
“I’ll hazard,” Dorothy responded, “That it was because the murderers own meat mallet was in the cleaners. Is there a reason, Frankie, why you’ve called Mr Bird in to the station today?”
“To take his statement, Dorothy. You know me: thorough to a fault.”
“To a fault, yes. And is there a reason why you couldn’t take his statement at the pub he runs?”
“None, really,” Reid answered, “’Cept I thought he’d maybe remember some more detail away from all the confusion.”
“So, not an attempt to intimidate my client?”
“As if,” he guffawed.
I glanced at Nick, who smiled gently (at Reid’s gag, or as a way of reassuring me?) and wished I had returned his texts the day before.
“Well,” Dorothy Frost turned her eyes to me, “Danny? Do you wish to make a statement at this stage?”
I did, I said so, and I proceeded to tell them all I knew, which wasn’t much.
Reid sat, silently, scratching a few notes on the notepad in front of him, and waited till I’d finished.
“That it, then?” He asked.
I nodded. “I didn’t know him, didn’t know anything about him. If he had enemies, I don’t know who they were.”
“If he had enemies?” Reid snorted. “I doubt very much that a mate of his did this accidentally. His head was smashed in like an egg. This was fury. Panic. Desperation. Sort of thing that someone who’s living on the edge would do. Someone, say, who’s running a shitty boozer for a nasty gangster…”
He let the last sentence – along with the meaty tang of his body odour – hang in the air. Reid knew – but hadn’t yet been able to prove –who the real owner of The Marq was, and it seemed at times as though it was this – his desperate desire to nail Chopper Falzone – that was at the root of his dislike of me.
“I mean,” he went on, “It’s understandable. You must be under an awful strain, trying to make ends meet and still give Chopper his cut. How much is he asking these days, Danny? A quarter? Half?”
“Frank,” Dorothy Frost sighed, “does this train of thought have a final destination?”
“Well,” Reid smiled a thin lipped smile at her, causing all the sweat that had pooled on his top lip to slide down his face, and commence dripping from the first of his several chins, “what with Danny being, you know, one of our more artistic residents, well, highly strung people have a habit of going off, you know…”
“Going off?” Dot Frost raised an eyebrow, glanced at me as though to check I hadn’t fainted away at Reid’s suggestion, and turned back to the Jabba The Hutt of the Met Police, “Are you seriously, Frank, and I mean seriously, suggesting that Mister Bird may have bludgeoned this,” she checked the paperwork in front of her “David Walker to death because Mister Bird was having a bad day? Seriously?”
“I know… I know,” Reid held up his hands in a placatory fashion, and I glanced at Nick, who could be seen to visibly grind his teeth as he stared in obvious mortification at the file in front of him, “But worse things have been done for less believable reasons. I had a woman once who knifed another woman cos she looked like Amanda Holden. Attacker was a fan of Les Dennis, you see. Heat. Does things to people, and you got to agree, Dot, that this is all a bit odd.
“And you know, Dot, the gays are a bit highly strung.”
Dorothy Frost stood and placed a hand on my shoulder. “We’re going,” she said, and, when I looked at her in surprise, added, “You were hauled in here to give a statement. You’ve given it. And now, unless Torquemada here wants to charge you with something more than homosexuality – which, I remind you Mister Reid, hasn’t been a crime in this country since 1967 – we’re off.”
“Aw, now, Dot, don’t be like that,” Reid smirked. “Sit down for a minute. Just one. Please. I’ll play nice.”
Dorothy Frost looked at me. I still hadn’t moved, and so she resumed her seat. “Frank, what do you want?”
“I want to know – from Mister Bird – who he thinks killed David Walker. I know you didn’t know him, Danny, but you were with him for almost the entirety of his last day on earth. And I know – from previous dealings with you – that you’re shall we say, observant. You see things, and you make connections. It’s a skill. And – since you were there, and I wasn’t, I wanted to know if you had any thoughts on who might have wanted to cave Mr Walker’s head in?”
I shook my head again. “I knew nothing about him. I mean, none of this makes any sense.”
“Had he worked for you before?”
“No. I got him through an agency.”
“Name of?”
“Mastercaters,” I said.
Nick cough-choked. Reid shot him the evils. “I beg your pardon?” He addressed me.
“Mastercaters,” I repeated. “They were recommended by a friend of a friend who regularly arranges events.”
“So: No history with Walker? Anyone else seem to be less than friendly with him?”
I thought of Elaine, of her last words to him You’ll be sorry, and of the colleagues he’d referred to as the Himbos. Surely none of that – banter, maybe a little irritation - could have translated into the fury that I had seen in the loo?
“It was a busy day,” I said flatly. “I didn’t see much, but there was nobody in the pub who had a beef with him.”
“You sure? Only, you paused, like you were considering whether to say something or not.”
I paused again. He put himself across as a lumbering boar of a man, but Reid wasn’t that stupid after all. I’d realised some time before that would have been difficult for him to get to where he was if he’d been truly stupid.
“I got to be honest with you Danny: The guy was a middle aged waiter. No money to speak of, no obvious reason for anyone to turn the back of his head into steak tartare. To tell the truth, whoever bumped him off did us a favour. I mean, if it had been one of the guests, I’d be getting all sorts of shit from the muk muks upstairs. You had heiresses, celebrity artists, a couple of minor aristos, and a bloody lawyer,” here he shot a venomous look at Dot Frost, who returned her imitation of a sphinx. �
��But with this one, well, we’ll make a stab, but I’m not sure how far we’re likely to get. He was a nobody, Danny, and people don’t make a fuss about people like him, so unless you have something – no matter how small, this aint gonna go far…”
“Yes,” I finally answered. “I’m sure. There was no obvious sign of anyone with a motive for that.”
“Well,” Dorothy Frost shuffled some papers, “If there’s nothing else…”
Reid glowered resentfully. Nick pursed his lips. They glanced briefly at each other, then turned their full attention back to me.
“Danny?” Reid asked, “You sure there’s nothing else?”
“No.” I answered. “You have my statement.”
This time, Reid paused, glanced again at Nick, then shrugged. “If you say so,” he said. “Interview terminated at 11.52,” he muttered, reached over, and switched off the recorder.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We paused in the hallway outside. Dot placed a parental hand on my arm. “You OK, Danny?”
I shrugged, “As OK as I suppose it’s possible to be having found a corpse – another corpse – in my pub.”
She nodded. “I understand. Lightning’s not supposed to strike twice, is it? But it does, Danny; and more frequently than you’d imagine. I have to say: You don’t seem alright.”
“I’m just tired. I didn’t sleep so well last night.”
“You didn’t stay in the pub?”
“No. Back to my parents again.”
“Tonight?”
“Back to the pub. Life goes on.”
“That it does. But Danny? If you need anything – and I don’t just mean legal help – give me a call. You did great with the whole Lyra thing, but you don’t need to deal with this on your own.”
Behind her, the interview room door opened, and Reid oozed out, Nick behind him. Reid muttered something to Nick, and lumbered off in the opposite direction. Nick hung back, clearly wanting to speak to me.
Dot went to move away, and Nick approached me.
“You O.K?” he asked, and I wished people would stop asking that question. Every time I closed my eyes – even with them open, if I allowed it to come – I could see that image, of Dave Walkers big oblong head, a head that nobody had ever described as pretty, reduced to a bloody pulp. And if I let myself, I could replay every conversation I’d had with him, remember the way I’d begun to see him as a whiny, miserable pain in the arse.
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