The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2) (11 page)

‘There’s no secret about that,’ I said. ‘This is a big city, but I can’t think of six villains in it that would have used a humane killer for a topping job. I’ll go further. Right now I can only think of one, and you may not believe this but fancy, you’re the one.’

‘I don’t even know yet,’ he said, ‘as a matter of interest, how you’re sure it was Hadrill; I saw on telly how he was all boiled away to a mess.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I keep telling people I come across, anybody that’ll listen, how stupid killers are. Particularly when they’re trying to be extra clever – that’s just what drops them in the shit.’

‘None of my business,’ said McGruder, ‘but I think it’d have to be a sight stronger than that.’

‘And it is,’ I said, ‘and it is your business. Because you were seen in the Nine Foot Drop that night. Also there was a man called Edwardes standing next to you for a while at the bar.’

I wished I could find Edwardes; it wasn’t for want of looking.

McGruder shrugged. ‘Look, I was there on the evening of the thirteenth, there’s no secret about it. Tony Williams the governor there put me up – six of us spent all night in his flat upstairs rabbiting and playing cards. So what about it?’

‘If it’s waterproof,’ I said, ‘that’s all about it, Billy. But I’m gnawing at it, and if it isn’t kosher I’ll find where the leak is and when I do, it’s you that’s going to leak, OK?’

‘I don’t believe anyone saw anything,’ said McGruder, ‘I reckon it’s just a blag.’

‘You can believe what you like,’ I said, ‘if I crack you you’ll have all the time in the world to work out where you went wrong. For the time being, I’m working on it, but I find it strange – same pub,
same night, you a convicted killer, and Hadrill vanishes. I find the whole thing a great big coincidence, and I believe in them like I believe in Father Christmas, i.e., not at all, get it?’

‘What I get,’ said McGruder, ‘is that the counsel I can afford, he’d rip it all to pieces if you were daft enough to have a go, you’ve no proof.’

‘It’s early days,’ I said. ‘It isn’t proof yet, but it could easily be evidence, and you might find it will be by the time I’ve finished with it.’

‘You’re trying to fit me up for this, then,’ said McGruder in an easy voice. He kept smiling, even though the smile wasn’t really wanted just then; he had the look of a man, to me, who knew he was in trouble.

‘Yes, I’m going to have a go,’ I said. I stood up. ‘I’ll be in and out, Billy. Bye for now, and happy wanking.’

Next morning, Saturday, I had proof that the body in the bags was Jack Hadrill’s. His boyfriend, who hadn’t been able to get into the Notting Hill pad that he shared with Jack, broke in (he was a tealeaf), and there was a letter on Jack’s bed which he finally brought into us after sweating a lot, hoping to do himself some sort of good. The letter was dated the thirteenth and in it Jack said that he was due to go out that evening – he didn’t say where – but he wondered if the meet wasn’t moody. He added that he’d been offered a deal with a lot of money in it by an anonymous punter. He’d left the flat key under the mat so that the friend could get in anyway, but the latter had been too stupid to look for it there. He was just, I thought when I had had a word with him, one of those people who preferred breaking into a place to using the key.

I had Hadrill’s file in my drawer already – mind, I knew enough about him without it. Now there was a funny man. He’d hardly ever done bird – much too sharp – just three months for whizzing a motor when he was a lad. But he was one of those folk with ears so big for hearing what didn’t concern him, you wouldn’t believe. His mouth in the photograph was correspondingly small, except when you offered it money; then it expanded in an alarming way and a lot of stuff came out of it – big stuff. It was always more than enough to send somebody down for a long while. I hate grasses. I use them because I have to, but I hate them. I had met Hadrill, though he mightn’t have remembered because it wasn’t my case. He’d done well for himself, he thought; he was smug, frightened, gay and a tiny spender. Now, if he were still alive, he mightn’t be sure that he’d done that well. Still, it had been the good life while it lasted – good clothes, food and a bachelor’s pad in W11, though
he’d kicked off, like plenty of other people, in SE12. I’d seen Jack around on his manor up at the Gate; everybody had. He drank over at the Wild Card Club up by the underground, wore a clipper-style cap which was supposed to make you think he was something out of
The Onedin Line
(he sometimes said he was, after his fourth pint) and tight knee-length boots. He probably went to bed in all that and thought he was a fucking Sturmbannführer every time he had a wet dream.

But he was just a grass, and I considered that other interesting thing about him, that he was gay. A gay grass.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘now we know it was Jack Hadrill. We know it two ways – what I got out of this man Smitty and the note.’

‘Yes, when you leave a note like that it makes it almost official. The DPP’ll like that,’ said the voice.

‘Do you remember the last thing Jack did? It made him a lot of taxpayers’ money, but it got him in right shtuck as well.’

‘That was over Pat Hawes, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, we didn’t handle it. Too high-powered for us.’

‘We didn’t handle it, sir.’

‘No, that’s right, we didn’t. Hadrill went to Bowman over it.’

‘Chief Inspector Bowman.’

‘Yes, Bowman, that’s the man, over at Serious Crimes. Jack grassed Hawes over that big wages snatch up north, out York way, and Hawes drew a lot of bird because a security guard was killed and so, what with his form, they threw the book at him, and a good thing too.’

‘You think eight years in Parkhurst or Wakefield will improve his morale, sergeant?’

‘He never had any. If I’d been Serious Crimes I’d have liked to know more about that business with the guard. He was going off shift; he wasn’t even armed, it says in the transcript. Either Hawes was just trigger-happy, or there was more to it, I’d say; I like the second possibility better. Still, having people like Hawes out of
circulation does clear the ground for other business. Mopping up the same old thieves and murderers time after time does get monotonous, you feel you’re getting nowhere.’

‘We’re quite the philosopher today, sergeant, aren’t we? So you still want to get after McGruder, do you?’

‘I’ve started. I want to get after him even harder now, sir.’

‘Good God,’ said the voice, ‘you finally said it. I know I’m only a deputy commander, but I thought you were never going to.’

I imagined he was trying to be funny.

‘Hawes never forgets,’ I said, ‘people like that never do from their viewpoint, why should they? There’s every reason to think he had Hadrill done; he’s got plenty of money available even if he is inside. And Hadrill told Serious Crimes a lot about that raid, you’ll remember, but neither they nor the DPP’s office thought fit to go after it at the time.’

‘No, that was killed from on high,’ said the voice.

‘How high?’

‘High enough. What the mind doesn’t know, the heart doesn’t grieve over, sergeant; you must know that old saying.’

‘I know lots of old sayings,’ I said. ‘One of them is that what’s allowed to go cold can be warmed over. I can’t remember the exact words.’

‘The exact words,
sir.
’

‘That’s it. I can’t remember them.’

‘I don’t give a damn about your memory. This Hadrill business – I want to be kept informed the whole time.’

‘Why?’

‘Because that’s the way I want it, and that’s all you need bother about.’

‘Do you know something about it that I don’t?’

‘I’m not saying that. All I’m saying is, you never know what a case like this can turn into.’

‘What I do know,’ I said, ‘is that if this one gets out of hand it could turn into a bloody nightmare.’

‘What I want you to understand, sergeant,’ said the voice, ‘is that if you disobey my orders it’ll turn into a nightmare for you.’

‘You don’t often give any orders.’

‘No, I know. So that when I do, I want them obeyed.’

He rang off on that.

I put down the phone and looked out of the window at the grey clouds, full of rain, bursting on the roof of Marks & Sparks opposite. I had a sudden dreadful feeling, like the man who realizes too late that he shouldn’t have overtaken on a double bend and sees the accident racing towards him. A mate of mine, a motorcycle patrolman, was crippled for life that way, chasing a souped-up Cortina full of villains through the lanes round Maidstone one Saturday night. It took him six months to get his memory back; then he described it to me when I went to see him in hospital – how the road was slippery after rain and how his bike hit the front of the oncoming van sideways while he was on the wrong side of the road overtaking two other vehicles and trying to brake from ninety: the disbelief, the impact, the nothing. ‘They’ve rechristened me Mr Multiple Fracture,’ he told me, grinning through his smashed teeth. He was retired, of course, and they weren’t generous with him because he had been in the wrong and the van driver had been badly injured.

It didn’t matter that much; he died in hospital three months later.

Now I wondered if something sudden like that was going to happen to me – even down to being in the wrong as well.

‘Can we have a truce?’ I said to Bowman. ‘Now don’t lose your wig – I mean just ten minutes’ worth.’

‘Christ,’ he said, ‘you must be fucking desperate.’

‘Yes, I am,’ I said, ‘I’m anxious for some information. I want to know everything you can tell me about Pat Hawes and that factory up north, that shoe factory that was robbed. You made that arrest, didn’t you?’

‘That’s right,’ said Bowman. ‘I don’t feel like helping you,’ he grumbled, ‘I never feel like helping you.’

‘This is a truce.’

‘Yes, all right. Well, thanks to Jackie Hadrill it was easy, a doddle. Hawes went down hard because he shot that security man. He shot him because the feller caught them at it, and they didn’t expect him, see?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘because I suppose they’d had their card marked that it was OK just to go in.’

‘Right,’ said Bowman, ‘Hadrill had marked it for them, so they didn’t even bother to go in with a balaclava on, so of course the guard could have identified them.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Next – do you know what connection Jackie had with that factory?’

‘No, he wouldn’t tell us, though I asked him, and I didn’t press him. He’d grassed Hawes, which was the deal we’d made, and that was what mattered to us. But he must have been well in there somehow.’

‘You knew he was gay?’

‘Sure.’

‘Did it ever occur to you that he might have had sexual relations
with someone up there and then threaten to blow the whistle on him if he didn’t get certain information?’

‘No, it didn’t,’ said Bowman. ‘Look, I’m not the Branch. My job was to make arrests over that factory rip-off and the death of the guard. And I did, and the DPP was happy with it.’

‘Pity you didn’t push the boat out a little further, just the same,’ I said.

‘Look,’ said Bowman patiently, ‘you can’t twist the arm of a man like that too hard. If you do, you’re liable to lose him. A big grass like that, if you try to get out of him something he doesn’t want to tell you, he’ll just go and find some other officer, more accommodating.’

I sighed. ‘Yes, well, it’s too late now. But I think he was keeping a great deal back.’

‘Why?’

‘First,’ I said, ‘because if it was something really big, let’s say it was security-linked, he’d have ended up having to go to the Branch. And if he’d done that, he’d have had to grass this theoretical boyfriend of his that he was putting the black on. And he might have had reasons for not wanting to do that. Also, take the guard. Come on, let’s speculate – maybe the guard knew about Hadrill and Mr X. He may have been gay himself. He might have got ideas about putting the black on Mr X all on his own, of grassing Hadrill before Hadrill was ready. A horner-in, if you’ll excuse the pun. That guard could have been a thundering nuisance to Hadrill.’

‘You do pick up odd lines on the obvious,’ said Bowman, ‘and put another twist on them, I’ll say that. Mind, gay – it’s no crime to be gay nowadays,’ he added regretfully.

‘No crime – still, it could be awkward for a married man, say, doing top-grade security work in a government establishment. It’s all theory, of course.’

‘You’re a funny man, you are,’ said Bowman, ‘there are times when you really freak me. You’re difficult, cheeky, self-opinionated
–you don’t try and get on in the force at all. Yet some of your theories, seeing this is a truce, well, I like them, I can’t deny it.’

‘You sound to me as if you knew something I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Are you telling me every single thing you know or suspect about this robbery? Come on. Are you?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘no, I’m not. There are certain things I’m not telling you because I haven’t the authority to do it.’

I was truly astonished. ‘Never, never in my life,’ I said, ‘have I ever heard you say a thing like that before.’ I added: ‘What’s the matter with you? Something new on the ministry of defence?’

‘No, Christ, why?’ he shouted. ‘Have you heard something?’

‘No I haven’t, only you look as if you had.’

‘Look,’ he said, grabbing me by the jacket, ‘are you on to someone over this Hadrill killing? Anyone? Come on, speak up, fuck you!’

‘Yes, I may be,’ I said. I shook him loose: ‘It’s a lucky thing I only wear old clothes to work.’

He shrieked: ‘Come on, I haven’t got all day – who are you after for it?’

‘It’s more what my head tells me than anything definite yet.’

‘The name, the name!’ he groaned.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it might ring a bell with you at that. I’m not saying you deserve it, but the name’s Billy McGruder.’

‘Him? Christ! I thought he was in Central America or something.’

‘For your information,’ I said, ‘Central America is now a bus ride from hell – cost you all of eighty pence, a housing estate over at Catford.’