The Operator (Bruce and Bennett Crime Thriller 2) (7 page)

‘Course I am love. Don’t get your leotard in a
knot! But you’re not News, you’re features, and very nice they are too
sweetheart!’

‘You...’

‘Gary’s a newshound to the bone. He’s got the
instincts.’

‘Of a plague germ.’

‘Gary’s done it as an interview with you, so all your
stuff’s in there but as you answering him, so you see I did use your piece.’

‘Plundered it you mean!’

‘You’ll love it me dear. We’ve put in a lovely
photo of you. It’s twice, no, four times the size of the usual one!’

So much to say, so little time, so much
justification for manslaughter. ‘You’ve put Gary’s byline over MY story? How
could you! Chopping up MY story and letting HIM have it as HIS fucking
interview!’

‘Calm down darlin, look, I know you do a good job
on the page. I appreciate it, I really do. I know a lot of readers love it,
bunch of hypochondriacs most of them, but it’s a case of the right man for the
job. That’s why I’m the editor, and you’re not. Don’t worry, it’ll do you a lot
of good. The press exposure. The bigger picture! They’ll be queuing up for your
pills and potions now!’

‘Thank you so much,’ she snarled. ‘That’s just the
advertising gimmick I need - for people to associate me with dead bodies. Every
therapist’s dream.’

‘Wait till you see it... that Gary will go far.’

‘Sooner the better.’

‘Just bash out an obit for us. We’ll put it on
your health page instead of on our usual ‘dead page’. Bye beautiful!’

He had wiped the floor with her. As per usual.

Will had interviewed Tessa
Kingston with Sally, thinking a WDC was appropriate. There was quite a lot of
oestrogen in the room as it turned out, and Will wished he’d stuck with Hassan.
Tessa had turned up with a female solicitor, who protected her fiercely from
any kind of attempt to suggest she’d been involved.

‘If only we’d managed to have a friendly chat with
her alone,’ lamented Will to Hassan, after giving him a brief account of their
sparring match. Sally Banner and Tessa Kingston had been little more than an
audience, their heads swinging left, right, left like Wimbledon spectators
while Will tried to break through the legal barbed wire entanglement thrown
around Tessa by her brief.

‘What did you make of her, Will? The ex-ish wife.’

‘Attractive in a girly-girl way, expensively
dressed, claiming to be horrified, whether by the murder of her old man or
being in a stinky interview room with no soft furnishings or posh coffee, I’m
not sure. Bit of a WAG type by the look of her. Oh I’m probably being unfair.’

‘We’ve got no evidence against her have we? Only
motive. That stuff I found out about his assets, he’s pretty well off. The
proceeds of not just one but two expensive houses, let alone other dosh.’

‘Yes the sale of his old mum’s house certainly
fattened his bank balance. Not much progress on that motive-wise though.
Because she’s started divorce proceedings, her solicitor was already on the
case. Wouldn’t let her answer anything much just yet. Clearly trying to find
out if we did have anything on her client. So we couldn’t even find out why
Tessa left Kingston, if indeed she did - he could have chucked her out for all
we know. Hard to work out her feelings about him. She just hid her eyes in a
tissue and said nothing.’ Will’s hair was vertical with frustration.

‘So I hear. Sally mentioned when she came out to
get coffee that things weren’t going so well. So I had a quick skim through the
neighbours’ statements the house to house crew collected, in case any of them
knew the grisly details of the split.’

‘Great, Hassan! You’re a star! And?’ He started
flattening his black hair again.

‘Nowt.’

‘Shit!’

‘Sorry. Everyone who mentioned her at all said
they’d seemed happy enough and then she just wasn’t there, they weren’t even
sure when she moved out. It was only sixteen days ago as far as I can tell but
that’s from her and her brief. Kingston was very private about his private life.
Some neighbours thought she’d had some kind of illness or breakdown and had
gone off for a cure.’

‘Hm, maybe rehab? Expensive addiction?’

‘Surely she can’t keep fending us off. Did you get
fingerprints? For ‘elimination purposes’?’

‘Yes we did get those. Not DNA though. And the
solicitor grabbed Tessa’s coffee cup before we could get any off that. Smart
woman. She and Tessa are obviously close, very different types but blood’s even
thicker than legal ethics.’

‘Blood?’

‘Oh yes I’ve kept the best till last for you mate.
They’re only bloody sisters! Tessa and Tara. Sounds like a burlesque act. She’s
staying with Tara at the mo, so there’s no chance of getting her alone.’

‘Wonder why this Tara’s so keen to keep Tessa from
saying anything about the split? I wonder if Tara’s sure she’s innocent, or
knows she’s guilty, or is worried she might have done it.’

‘If we had some actual evidence stronger than
tired old Golden Boy’s tired old theorising... Tara was at pains to point out
that Kingston changed the locks after Tessa did a runner. She doesn’t have a
key, allegedly. In other words she couldn’t have let herself in.’

‘Even if we find traces of her in the house, it’s
going to be hard to prove anything. She did live there after all. Traces might
have survived the cleaner’s efforts.’

‘She admitted to going back after the split a few
times, to pick up stuff. And get this, Tara and Tessa gave us this much - they
both went round there the afternoon of the night Kingston was killed, to pick
up some family photos and personal jewellery apparently. Tara drove her there,
so they can alibi each other. They saw him, he had to be there to let them in and
no doubt make sure wifey didn’t nick anything of his. Besides, that woman two
doors down saw Kingston alive later than they claim to have left, so it’s not
much use except to muddle up the forensics.’

‘And Johnstone put TOD at 11-3am, most likely towards
the earlier time limit. Anyway I’ll check that out, see if anyone saw Tara’s
car and when it was there. They might have gone later. Or she might have made
it up to explain any of her prints being in the house since cleaning. It’s a
quiet street though, and the houses are well detached from each other,
neighbours not likely to see cars without looking for them.’

‘Great, though I doubt we’ll make much of a hole
in their story. Get forensics to double check for traces of her anywhere
suspicious. But if Tara’s stopping her from committing herself to anything more
right now, it leaves us wide open, if we do find anything she can just say it’s
from their visit earlier.’

It was as bad as Erica had
feared. She got home to find the early edition on the mat and herself described
as a ‘slim, petite blonde new age therapist’ next to a photo which made her
look completely gormless. Worse, she’d given her supposed answers to Gary in a ‘shaken
voice’ while her ‘trembling hands clutched a mug of sweet tea, her swimming
eyes huge in her pale face’ as he’d ‘encouraged her to face her dreadful
experience’.
Sweet
tea! As if.

The police had given him some official guff about
ongoing enquiries, tragic case, worst seen in a long career etc, and the
neighbours said the usual belatedly complimentary things similar to those she’d
heard on local TV news. ‘You don’t expect that kind of thing to happen here,’
and ‘This is a quiet, respectable neighbourhood’. Nothing from the estranged
wife; presumably Gary hadn’t been able to get to the new widow yet. Erica
wished she could get to Gary and write
his
obituary.

Erica had had enough for
one day. She felt tense and her shoulders were tight. She put on her running
gear and set out to work it all off. The tide would be still pretty far out,
plenty of damp firm sand to run on. As she jogged slowly at first, warming up,
down to the sea front and then gaining speed along the beach, the moon was up
already, a pale translucent jellyfish swimming in the still-light sky. The
slow, slushing sound of the sea as ever had a calming effect on her spirit. She
turned inland again before the track to the lighthouse at the north end of
Wydsand bay and ran back alongside the cemetery.

She often took this route because it made a
circuit, along the sea front, looping back past the cemetery and along a wooded
track by the golf course. It just so happened that it would take her past
Kingston’s house, which backed onto the golf course, separated from it by a muddy
worn track. She felt an urge, like a criminal, to return to the scene of the
crime.

She reached the end of the asphalt path at the
corner of the cemetery. The crematorium, grey stone mock-gothic, stood silent,
the chimney smokeless. No risk today of inhaling somebody’s mortal remains as
they puffed out of the chimney straight into her lungs, as had happened
disconcertingly before. She thought of them still in there, rising and falling
with her breath, embedded in her lungs, living on in her body.

She turned in again to run alongside the cemetery
where it ran at right angles to the asphalt track. The ground now was dirt
track fringed by long grass, dock leaves, cow parsley, edged with elder,
hawthorn and poplars, the golf course on her right. Where the cemetery had been
on her left were now the backs of large detached houses, sixties built, their
back fences having gates onto the path. Towards the end of the path, before she
turned down a snicket back onto the streets that would lead her home, was
Kingston’s house. She was right behind it. Well how about that.

She stepped back almost into the twiggy hawthorn bushes
against the golf course boundary to see what she could of the house above its
high, solidly built back fence. Kingston’s house itself looked just like an
expensive, respectable house - there was nothing to say a murder had been
committed there, apart from some sadly dangling crime scene tape across his
back gate. Taking a side step, Erica felt her trainer skid on something. She
looked down and found an empty quarter vodka bottle of a cheap brand keeping
company with a couple of crushed beer cans and a cigarette packet, also empty.
A few fag ends lay around as a garnish.

Obviously the local youths hung about here. She
had seen similar caches among the newer but equally affluent clumps of houses
in the area. Kids with nowhere to go. The police called their little refuges ‘drinking
dens’, which sounded much more exciting, more reminiscent of prohibition era
America with its speakeasies, bathtub gin and tommy guns than the pathetic
reality of damp bus shelters or, as here, hollowed out hawthorn thickets
forming scant shelter over a fence to perch their bony bums on.

There’d been a campaign backed by the local press
including Dunne’s papers which tried to keep in with the mayor and council, to
stop outdoor drinking, and byelaws had been hastily passed. The police could
show they were doing something about youth crime by stopping party-going
youngsters and confiscating their bottles of Irish cider or cheap wine, pouring
the contents sadistically on the ground heedless of the effort entailed in
obtaining them – the careful coaching of older relatives, the threatening of
older-looking friends, the labour of constructing fake ID with attention to
detail of which their teachers would not believe them capable. Middle class
youngsters could spice up their evenings, as not only were they now hunted and
possibly beaten up by ‘charvas’, their natural enemies, but they had the added
thrill of smuggling nicked bottles of chardonnay from their parents’ stash,
hiding them in shrubbery and over random garden walls at the first sign or
siren from the boys and girls in blue of a Friday night.

Meanwhile, normally law-abiding adults found they
were now unable to have a glass of wine at a beach picnic or technically, even
carry a bottle of immaculate vintage on public transport to a dinner party,
without risking criminalisation. Erica pondered this, moving the detritus about
with her toe. Sad, the driving underground of alcohol, a proud part of her
Anglo-Saxon culture. After all, she could and did assert as a scientist, booze
was totally devoid of calories, enabling her to get ratted while clubbing
without the usual agonies of guilt caused by ingesting anything more calorific
than celery. She looked up towards the house again, and tried jumping up to see
over the fence, though the light was fading fast.

‘Hey! What are you up to?’

A man, late middle aged, wearing light slacks,
what looked like a cream polo shirt and a powder blue golf sweater was standing
in the open back doorway of the next house, illuminated by his kitchen light.
He had quite thin legs, but his broad shoulders testified to years of
perfecting his swing.

‘I saw you from the upstairs window,’ he said
triumphantly, as if this had required hours of surveillance and cunning. ‘What
do you think you’re doing?’

‘I was just looking,’ she began, when he jumped
in.

‘Well clear off! It’s bad enough around here with
all the local riffraff hanging about at all hours, damned hoodies, say anything
to them and all you get’s a mouthful of abuse, the police can’t seem to do
anything, and now we’ve got passers-by rubbernecking! The street’s a byword, well
at least the police can be bothered to turn out for a murder, but the area’s
going downhill fast, young lady.’

‘It was erm, me, who found Kingston,’ she said,
feeling that the more correct ‘it was I’ sounded too pompous. ‘I’m a reporter
for the
Evening Guardian
.’

‘Fearful rag!’ he spluttered. ‘Had the damn nerve
to call me an ‘elderly neighbour!’ Common little chap they sent too. You can
tell them from me I want a printed apology.’

‘Ah that sounds like Gary Thomas. I’ll mention it
to the editor.’

‘You don’t look like a reporter. You look like a
jogger. No sign of a notebook, or anything.’

‘I am a jogger. Multitasking you know. Just
thought I’d check the place out while I do my run, come back tomorrow looking
more like a reporter. Though I tend to use a digital voice recorder, or this.’
She produced her phone. ‘I can record on here. Make sure I get exact quotes and
don’t make any mistakes. And if you still have doubts, you can look in the
Daily
Courier
today, or on the website, you’ll see my picture.’ Next to Gary’s
byline. ‘Or the
Guardian
website. Health page. Hence the jogging, you
see.’

‘Hm. I see. But I shall be checking!’ He pushed
back a thin strand of grey hair which had come adrift in the breeze.

Erica was quick to take advantage of his mollified
tone. ‘What you said before. About the police. ‘At least they can be bothered
to turn out for a murder.’ Implying they don’t normally turn out here? I’m
surprised they’d ever be needed. Such a salubrious area. Nice houses, nice
class of person.’ She dredged up more encouraging language she remembered from
various older patients and relatives. ‘What you’d call really decent types. Law
abiding.’ She ostentatiously put her phone on ‘voice record’ and held it
towards him in a business-like manner.

‘Oh yes, absolutely! I mean, you do expect the odd
golf ball against the windows, or through the greenhouse, living here; we don’t
mind that too much, most of us play the game. That’s why we live here, to be
near the club. It’s just a short stroll to the clubhouse - handy for dodging
the breathalyser! But we get youths hanging about... we can’t seem to get shot
of the little bastards. Bloody neck-ends! We’ve tried all sorts. I’ve tried. Kingston
himself was out here chasing them off numerous times. Even with his connections
he couldn’t seem to get anything done. Few times the police did send a bloke,
they made off across the course. Back the next night! Kingston thought they put
off his patients, though you can’t see anything from the front of the house.
But you could hear them all right. Shocking language. I told the police, that’s
where you should be looking for your suspect. Look, that’s where the stone came
from that the buggers used to kill Kingston. Right next to the den!’

He waved a long arm toward the bushes further
along. A pile of hefty sandstone chunks lay there, dumped by some gardener
tired of his or her rockery. They were filmed with green, and weeds and garden
escapees like honesty’s pale sad satin windows had sprouted among them. One
stone was plainly missing. Its place was marked by an impression in the ground,
lined with bleached, flattened grass.

‘Yes, that’s where the murder weapon came from
alright! Some scruffy young constable was round here checking to see if it fit.
He didn’t look much different to the yobbos, if you ask me. ‘

Erica wondered just how much time the old boy
spent at his upstairs window. ‘I’m surprised they didn’t take these cans and fag
ends and stuff. To test for DNA.’

‘They did. These have just appeared! Tonight!’

‘Bit early isn’t it?’

‘Police have been patrolling every so often,
looking out for anyone who might have seen anything. Bloody hoodies waited til
coast clear, dumped an empty bottle and fag ends and scarpered!’

‘You mean sort of reclaiming their bit of
territory? Quite sad really when you think about it.’

‘Sad! Yes it’s sad, you scrimp and save, you work
hard, you make something of yourself, you buy a house by the golf course, and
those little vandals…! They want stringing up. Thumbing their filthy
cocaine-stuffed noses at authority. Every damned night... little buggers...
they could do with some army discipline.’

‘I’m not sure training them to kill would help.’

He went crimson in the face and started to swell
up for another explosion so Erica hurried on, before she got hypothermia
standing about in a lycra vest.

 ‘So I expect the police asked you if you saw
anything.’ She rubbed her arms which were rough with goose pimples. ‘Did you?’

‘Not a thing. They asked me about the early
morning and the late night before. Well I went to bed early, and I normally sit
in my breakfast room at the front of the house in the mornings to catch the
sun, when there is any. So I wouldn’t have seen anything. I didn’t need to! All
they’ve got to do is put a man on watch up one of these trees, they’d soon
catch the young sods.’

The thought of long-limbed Will Bennett perched in
a small bushy tree all night had its attractions, though no doubt it would be
one of the young officers who copped that particular bit of surveillance.

‘It might be difficult to prove they had anything
to do with the murder,’ she pointed out, jogging on the spot to keep warm and
save herself from stiffening up. She crossed her arms and rubbed her shoulders,
shifting from foot to foot. ‘After all, anyone could have picked up that rock
and used it.’

‘Hardly!’ he barked. ‘Most of the people who walk
along here aren’t the type at all. Not like those thugs...’

‘Well, thanks for showing me where the murder
weapon came from, Mr er.’

‘Archer. Harold Archer. Esquire.’

Erica solemnly switched off her phone, thanked him
and jogged off.

It was true, anyone could have used that stone. The
use of something that just happened to be lying around suggested an impulsive
crime rather than premeditation. But then anyone who regularly walked that path,
the hoodies, dogwalkers, golfers retrieving their balls, gardeners dumping
cuttings, kids taking short cuts, might know those rocks were there, ready to
hand, a safe weapon that could not be traced back to them. Even if they’d
picked up the rock before putting on surgical gloves - which they surely must
have unless they were stupid beyond belief - they’d have cleaned it up somehow.
If fingerprints would show on rough damp sandstone in the first place.

Erica always liked getting back to her flat, in an
old black and white mews which had been part of a coaching inn, historic and a
bit tatty, her first proper home after the years of flat-sharing at university.
She had a hot shower and made herself a quick dinner, sweet potato cooked whole
in the microwave with no fat, and an omelette with minimum oil, plenty of
chilli and mushrooms. She opened a bottle of St Emilion. It takes nerve to open
a bottle of wine on your own without feeling like a lush. But the flowery,
vanilla-scented wine was delicious. She allowed herself another glass.

The research she’d done for
the interview came in useful for Kingston’s obituary. Impressive career
tragically cut short at only 43; his work as an orthopaedic consultant at the
Wydsand General Hospital, his private practice including spells of working in
Arab countries treating rich patients who’d crashed their Mercs and Porsches...
put more tactfully of course. She included his undoubted successes in surgery,
his churchgoing, and being a leading light, in fact a past Captain, of Wydsand
Golf Club. She didn’t mention that his widow, 30 year-old Tessa, was living
separately at his death, or any other controversial subjects. Not the time or
place.

She wondered why his wife had left him. A guy with
plenty of money, lots of status, lauded to the skies by all and sundry....maybe
he shagged nurses, regarded them as his due? She wondered how he had felt about
being left. Can’t have made him look good to his work and golf cronies. He’d
struck her as unattractively arrogant though presumably Mrs Kingston must have
known him better than Erica did on the basis of their one phone conversation
setting up the interview. Perhaps he was charming in private.