The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2) (14 page)

Then I went to sleep.

At ten past one I was woken by a call from Serious Crimes, who I’d requested to keep a look-out for Edwardes. His body had been found on some waste ground behind Olympia; he had been shot through the head.

‘Some of his teeth came right out through his earhole,’ said the officer on the phone eagerly. ‘How about that, sarge? Shows what a common-or-garden twelve-bore can do, eh?’

I let that one go.

‘You been over to his place?’

‘We just done it. It wasn’t easy to get the address but we managed. The killer had removed everything he had on him, but we got Edwardes through his prints; he’d done bird. Then we run him through the computer to see what else he’d done. Only took a few seconds.’

‘I don’t like that bloody computer,’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Christ, it does save time.’

‘What are we saving the time for?’ I said. ‘Christmas? You find anything interesting?’

‘No. It was just a flat. Squalid. Letters. Bills – plenty of them. But nothing to make you sit up.’

‘Even so,’ I said, ‘I’m coming over to look at it.’

‘What?’ he said. ‘Now? Can’t it wait till morning?’

‘No it can’t,’ I said. ‘This one, nothing can wait till morning.’

‘You got any idea who it was?’

‘I’ve got one idea that’s so powerful that it practically amounts to a conviction,’ I said, ‘in both senses of the word. It’s the same man who did Hadrill. Be a good lad and send what you’ve got over to me at the Factory, will you?’

‘The chief inspector won’t like that.’

‘Then he can come and see me about it, can’t he?’ I said mildly, reaching for my trousers. ‘And how’s his bank case coming along?’

‘He don’t seem to like talking about it, not at the moment.’

‘That means he’s on the verge of cracking the man,’ I said. ‘And thanks for ringing.’

I doubted if any of Edwardes’s belongings would tell me anything and I was right, they didn’t. But I didn’t care. The fact that he was dead told me a great deal, and I had someone else on tap who could tell me even more.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Me as usual. I’m coming in.’

McGruder opened the door and stood there. I studied my Billy for a moment; I looked at his thoughtful eyes, and at the little ears that stood up like white question marks against his curly hair.

Billy Zero.

I didn’t say anything straight away. I walked past him to the window and stood looking out at the high-rise blocks opposite.

‘You know something?’ he said behind me. ‘I like you.’

‘That’s lucky,’ I said, ‘because we’re going to be having a crunchy conversation.’

‘You’re chancing your arm coming in here alone,’ he said, ‘you realize that.’

‘I’m not a bit worried,’ I said. ‘You’d never do a copper like that with nothing prepared unless you really have gone off your trolley. You’ve got enough on your plate as it is.’

‘Nothing’s proved.’

‘No, but it’s coming along; both of them are. I’ll get the proof.’

‘Both of them? Both of what?’

‘What were you doing last night, Billy, from ten o’clock on?’

‘I was here. A quiet evening I spent on my own.’

‘That could be heavy for you. You know a man called Merrill Edwardes?’

‘Never met him.’

‘Well, you won’t have a chance to now,’ I said, ‘because he’s been topped – half his head blown off with a twelve-bore. You a sporting man, Billy? Got a sawn-off shotgun lying around, recently fired?’

‘No. Course I haven’t.’

‘You know, Billy,’ I said, ‘your major problem is that you were seen the night Jack Hadrill was in the Nine Foot Drop – the night he was killed.’

‘Who says so?’

‘Never mind that. You were in there, Hadrill was in there, and Edwardes was in there. Which mightn’t have been so interesting if Hadrill hadn’t been killed immediately after.’

‘Makes no difference, it’s a coincidence. I don’t know either of these men you’re talking about.’

‘What makes the whole incident even more peculiar,’ I said, ‘was the business with the set of keys. Edwardes left them on the bar, kind of by mistake on purpose, and my witness saw you pick them up. What sort of keys could they have been now, Billy? Car keys?’

He started to shake his head again, but I shook mine first. ‘It won’t do, Billy,’ I said, ‘a mere headshake’s too thin, darling.’

‘You haven’t a thing on me,’ he said easily. ‘No proof at all.’

‘I’m not bad at proving things once I get going,’ I said, ‘and I’ll prove these were keys to a stolen motor. Edwardes stole it, and you used it to take Jack Hadrill over to Rotherhithe, where you and Edwardes murdered him, cooked him and stapled him up in the bags.’

‘You know, you’re pushing me too hard,’ he said, shaking his head and staring at me. ‘You realize that, don’t you? It isn’t safe to do that with me. I’m a private man, noted for it, and I get in a rage if my privacy’s interfered with, anyone could tell you.’

‘As a copper I don’t care about your privacy,’ I said, ‘your rages even less. To me you’re just an operation – find ’em, nail ’em, wheel ’em in!’

‘Must be dull, same operation all the time.’

‘You should know,’ I said, ‘you’re the disease.’

He didn’t like that. There was a rustle in his entire expression, like a striking snake. ‘Face me,’ he said. ‘Come on, turn round and do it.’

‘Wouldn’t you love it if I did?’ I said, with my back to him. I was watching him in the shaving-mirror he had left on the window-sill.

‘That’s what you made the others do.
Turn away. Turn and face me
. Thoughtful expression, kind voice – I’ll bet you leaned over that corporal almost tenderly.’

‘Face me!’ he said. His voice rose a pitch. ‘Go on!’

‘You’re about as funny as Hitler,’ I said, ‘and that’s only part of your trouble, you poor slob.’

He started to take quick breaths; at last I turned round. He had a cut-throat razor in his hand. ‘See this?’

‘I see it,’ I said. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

‘I could take your head off with it!’

‘You could, but you won’t,’ I said. ‘You’re far too clever.’

‘Are you serious,’ he said, ‘I mean about my being clever?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘not in the least.’

‘I am clever, though.’

‘If you hit a single note on a piano very hard,’ I said, ‘you just ruin the sound, also you get the tune wrong. I’ve got my wife in a lunatic asylum, and I hear the patients on the piano every time I go down there, in the day room, doing that. It’s one of the saddest sounds I’ve ever heard. Now put that razor away – and I should look out if I were you, you’ve just cut your finger on it.’

He looked down at his finger, surprised. It was bleeding fast – faster, anyway, than he could lick the blood off.

‘Go and put something on it, Billy,’ I said, ‘park the razor, then come back and we’ll talk some more. There’s lots to say.’

He walked slowly out of the room, looking at his finger. He looked ashamed of what he had done to it. A moment later I could hear him moving about in the bathroom.

When he returned he seemed quite calm; it was an illusion. I looked at him and thought, you’re gone, Billy. They’d never take you back in the red berets now.

‘What did Edwardes do wrong on that job?’ I said.

‘I’m not saying anything.’

‘It’s possible, of course,’ I said, ‘that he just got scared; I’ll bet he never expected the flap that went up over Hadrill’s death. Probably you didn’t either, and I’ll bet that balls-up, leaving the bags in the warehouse like that, didn’t make Edwardes feel any better. And then when the bags were almost immediately found, I daresay that’s what tipped the balance; I think Edwardes said something to you, or gave you the impression, that he was going to grass, and that meant he had to be wasted.’

‘Well, don’t look at me,’ said McGruder, ‘I’d never have made a mess like that of it.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘maybe, only you didn’t have time to plan Edwardes, did you? If he was going to grass you he was going to do it quick; neither of you had any time the way things turned out. It was you or him on the hurry-up; you were up shit creek otherwise.’

‘I’d never have panicked like that if it had been me, I tell you.’

‘No, not normally you wouldn’t,’ I soothed him, ‘but this wasn’t a contract, it was safety-first. If it’d been a contract I agree – you’d have made a lovely clean weird job of it.’

He stood looking at me, pale, fit and crazy. It was early evening, but there were no lights on in the room; the only light was in his eyes, which caught the reflection of the park lights from the window.

‘The best thing you could do, Billy,’ I said, ‘is to confess to these murders, Hadrill and Edwardes. You’re going to have to.’

‘You’re still at square one when it comes to proof,’ said McGruder. ‘A dozen people could have been after Hadrill and Edwardes.’

‘It was handy, though, Edwardes being topped like that just when he was, wasn’t it, Billy?’

He just shook his head slowly, staring at me. ‘That’s no proof,’ he said kindly. ‘That’s just circumstantial.’

I kept my temper all right: I think now because we’d both got into
that cosy kind of chat where we both knew he was guilty. I thought I could probably crack him right now just by taking him down to the Factory and confronting him with Smitty. But the trouble was, I didn’t want to, not yet. For I was in a dilemma. If I pulled McGruder in now, broke him down, say, and then charged him with other officers present, as there would have to be, then I might never find out what else it was that Hadrill had known. I might do a Hawes/Bowman. The Crown might well say, let’s just do him for Hadrill – that puts McGruder away for ten. But I felt sure McGruder knew a lot, if not all, of what Hadrill hadn’t told. Yet on the other hand, if I didn’t pull McGruder in now, or soon, he might disappear, and that would be my head on a platter. I didn’t care, though. It had been on a platter so often that it practically lived on one.

I decided to distribute his photograph to all national points of exit, and have him watched; but behind my thinking was the conviction that the case was getting too big to be dealt with by a department with resources as limited as A14’s.

The time had come to tenderize McGruder again. ‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to do now,’ I said.

‘You’re never going to try and take me in to the Factory.’ He shook his head again. ‘Not on your own, you’re crazy.’

‘Nothing like that,’ I said, ‘not today, anyway.’

‘Not any day.’

‘What we both need is time to think.’ I was aching to ask him some more questions about Hadrill, but I knew it was too soon. ‘Why don’t we just sit down and relax?’ I said. ‘You got anything to drink around the place?’

‘There’s some beer in the fridge.’

‘Get us a couple of cans.’

He came back and poured it carefully into glasses and sat down. I noticed he barely touched his. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘so what are you going to do? Get off my back?’

‘No, we’ve got to go on talking about these killings; I’m going to treat you to a hypothesis.’

‘What the Jesus is that?’ he said warily.

‘It’s when you don’t know the answer to a problem. You construct a set of assumptions for it and test them to see if they work. My first assumption: you did kill Hadrill, also Edwardes. Now why was Hadrill killed? Do you know?’ Inwardly I sighed with frustration. I could see the knowledge there in his brain. But I couldn’t get at it, because McGruder couldn’t give it to me without admitting the murder. There must be a way round the problem, but I just couldn’t see it.

‘If it had been me that had done it,’ said McGruder, ‘I wouldn’t want to bloody know.’

‘Oh yes you would,’ I said. ‘That’s my second assumption. You’d want to know all right if you thought Hadrill knew something that could do you some good. It’d be to do with money, Billy, and everyone knows you’re into that.’

‘You think you’re a smart bastard.’

I said: ‘I’ve got a nickname for you, you know. When I have a nickname for a killer it means I think he’s something special.’

He flushed with pleasure. ‘What’s the nickname?’

‘Billy Zero.’

‘Now that’s amazing!’ he said. ‘That’s what Nacker Harris used to call me.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Man I used to go shooting with in the army. Shooting people,’ he said easily, ‘because that’s what an army’s for.’

‘Where was that, then?’

‘Down in Oman there; Harris was the only mate I had.’

‘You treat him well?’

‘I looked after him. Only man I ever looked after, I was like a mother to him, because he suddenly told me he was afraid; we were in action.’

‘And what did he have to do?’

He sneered at a corner. ‘Let’s say he looked after details. Easy things. Cleaning my gear. Running errands.’

‘You sleep together?’

‘With Nacker? Yes.’ He was still looking away. ‘He’s dead now. He wasn’t right for a soldier nor a villain.’

‘You miss him?’

‘I don’t think about him.’

Yet I was reminded of a poem I had learned at school called ‘Sorrow Lane’: