Unlucky For Some (15 page)

“I don’t know, Tom. All right, there might be something in that—but that’s a long way from our murder inquiry, if we can’t show any evidence of a personal connection between the victim and Waterman. And we’ve no evidence that this job—whatever it was—was criminal at all, so it’s really none of our business.”

Tom wanted to do
something,
and he was in no mood to be told that he couldn’t. “Are you wary of talking to him because he’s Yardley’s brother-in-law?”

Every now and then, even though they had become close friends, he overstepped the mark with Judy, and this was one time. She didn’t say anything—just looked at him with those dark brown eyes until he felt about two feet tall. He knew her far better than that. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Good. I’m wary of looking desperate. Michael Waterman has been entirely cooperative with this investigation, he’s gone to some expense to put in his own security measures in his clubs, and he seemed sincerely upset about Mrs. Fenton’s death. We can’t start accusing everyone who happened to be in the vicinity.”

Oh, well. At least it was Friday, and he had the weekend off from going through the second wave of so-called sightings of Mrs. Fenton, prompted by a rerun of the TV reconstruction. Tom was of the opinion that if you put a phone number on a television screen, approximately five hundred people in any given TV area rang it for no reason other than the joy of ringing it. And they were having to check them all out.

“Fair enough, guv,” he said. “Have a nice weekend.” He turned to go.

“However.”

He turned back, grinning.

“This inquiry is getting nowhere, and it’s true that Michael Waterman did something out of the ordinary that night, and we haven’t checked it out. So all right—but be diplomatic, Tom, and do try to make it sound as routine as you can. In fact—maybe you should send Gary.”

“Gary? Why?”

“Because he’s a trainee, and gets sent on routine jobs. You can go with him and wait in the car so you’re on the spot if Waterman doesn’t give a satisfactory answer.”

It was a compromise, but Tom would take it. He went back along to the CID room. “Come on, Gary,” he said. “I’ve got a job for you. And bring your diplomatic hat with you.”

Gary rang first, to make sure Waterman was home from work, and Waterman agreed to be interviewed. The cover story was that they were checking the movements of every male person who had been at the bingo club—believable because the huge majority of people at the bingo club were female, so checking out the males wouldn’t be an enormous task. In fact, Tom was going to do just that if this didn’t get them anywhere.

Tom waited impatiently on the road outside the Grange while Gary was inside, putting to Waterman the questions they had worked out between them.

At last he came back, and got into the car.

“Well?”

“Sorry I was so long, sir, but he gave me tea and biscuits. He says that he went to the club because his son had gone back to university that evening, and he felt a bit lonely. He knew Tony Baker would be there, and thought they could have a drink together, but as it turned out Baker was just leaving. He’d told Jack Shaw he’d be there until about ten, and Shaw had gone off somewhere, so Mr. Waterman stayed and chatted with the staff.”

“Mm.” It sounded plausible enough, Tom supposed. “Why was he using his mobile phone?”

“He wasn’t. At least, he says he doesn’t remember calling anyone. He thinks he was probably putting Mr. Baker’s mobile number into his phone’s memory.”

He could check that with Baker. “How well did he know Mrs. Fenton?”

“He didn’t. He doesn’t have much to do with the bingo halls, so he doesn’t know the customers personally, not like at the casino.”

It might be the truth, thought Tom. At any rate, it was credible enough for it to be another dead end, at least for the moment. “Let’s go then,” he said. “I expect you’d like to knock off for the day.” Gary didn’t have the weekend off, so it would hardly be fair to keep him hanging about much longer.

But Gary was going to be at work for some time yet, as things turned out. As they drove back out of Stoke Weston, Tom saw Keith Scopes coming out of the news agent’s, and pointed him out to Gary. “There’s our chief suspect,” he said. “One thing about this inquiry—it’s very handy having all your suspects living in the same village.”

He heard his voice going into what seemed like a void, and glanced at Gary, who was twisted round in the seat, looking back at Scopes.

“What’s up?”

Gary turned back. “If that’s Keith Scopes, sir, he isn’t our chief suspect anymore.”

Tom frowned. “Why?”

“Because I know exactly where he was when Mrs. Fenton was killed, sir. I was taking a video of him at the time.”

“What was all the police activity at your place this morning?”

It was Saturday morning, and Keith had been summoned to the Grange as soon as he’d got back from Barton. Mr. Waterman never missed a thing that went on in the village. Now, he was in Mr. Waterman’s study, thankful that the police had got to him too late, because Mr. Waterman had very strong views on drugs, and if he’d been caught with the stuff on him, he wouldn’t just have gone to prison, he would have been out of a job when he got out.

The police had arrived about three hours after he had gone to bed, waving a search warrant in Michelle’s face when she answered the door. At least they hadn’t broken the door down, so Keith might conceivably hear the end of it one day. But it wouldn’t be one day soon, and he had willingly gone with the cops when they said they wanted him for questioning. Anything was better than Michelle with her rag up. Even this.

“Just a misunderstanding, Mr. Waterman.”

They had found nothing in the house—Keith had sold it all before he’d ever left Barton. Besides, he wasn’t stupid enough ever to bring stuff home. Michelle thought he’d had a win on the horses—if she knew where the money had really come from for the three-week skiing holiday from which they had returned last Sunday, she would be off like a shot, and he liked having her around. Apart from anything else, she had made the house look really good; she watched all those makeover programs, and she was brilliant at DIY. To Keith, a toolbox was merely an emergency arsenal.

They had got video of him giving money to Cox, and police videos had improved in the five years since Keith had last been in trouble. There was no way he could deny that it was him, but he had insisted that he had owed Cox the money he gave him, and that the package was one that Cox had asked him to put in the postbox for him, which he had done. He had no idea what was in it, and he didn’t look at the name and address.

“I expect it was wedding cake,” Sergeant Kelly had said. It seemed to be some sort of private joke, because the young trainee had laughed.

They knew he was lying, obviously, but they couldn’t prove anything, so they had to let him go. He had almost got away with it altogether—the photograph of him the police had on file was from when he was sixteen, and before he’d started the body-building that had completely altered his physique, so no one had recognized him on the video. But it seemed that the trainee had taken the video, and had spotted him in the street.

He realized that Mr. Waterman hadn’t spoken, was waiting for him to say more. “It was nothing, Mr. Waterman, honest.”

Mr. Waterman continued to look at him for a long time before he spoke. “I know exactly what the police had on you,” he said. “So I know where you were, and I know what you were doing. You got away with it because they couldn’t prove you were buying drugs, that’s all.”

Keith swallowed. Maybe he had lost his job.

“I’ll let it pass this time, Keith. But if I ever—
ever
—hear that you’re dealing in drugs again, it won’t be the police you have to reckon with, it’ll be me. And I don’t have to follow the rules. Have you got that?”

“Yes, Mr. Waterman.”

That morning, Robert Lewis had been found in one of Stansfield town center’s service areas, lying beside his car, by the manager of the card and gift shop next door to the bank where Lewis had presumably intended using the night safe.

Lloyd arrived at the scene, his heart heavy. The bitterly cold wind was blowing flurries of snow into the corners of the service area, tugging at the blue and white ribbon, making it dance and snap. The body lay hidden by a hastily erected tent of blue plastic sheeting to protect it from the elements and prying eyes, awaiting Freddie’s arrival. As Lloyd walked over to it, a small crowd was beginning to gather, and the uniforms were trying to move them on.

DC Alan Marshall, Scottish, methodical, and permanently anxious, was standing by the body. “Ghouls,” he said, his polite Glasgow drawl making them seem even more ghoulish. “Mrs. Harrison—that’s the lady who found the body—is in her shop, sir. She’s very shaken up. And you’ll want to see this.” He carefully lifted up a corner of the tent, and Lloyd didn’t have to be a pathologist to see that the man had been strangled. As the blue plastic was pulled farther back, he saw the banknotes spread on the body, weighted down with a polythene bag full of coins.

“His takings, I suppose,” said Marshall, letting the sheet fall back. “He owns the BBQ Burger Bar on Oak Street. It looks like the notes were removed from the bag, and placed on the body. We haven’t checked yet whether any of it’s missing.”

“It won’t be,” said Lloyd. “Whoever this is doesn’t want the money.” Oak Street, he thought, was where the Bull’s Eye bingo club was. And they had had officers in there, while someone was following this man to the night safe, and killing him. He had known it would be like this.

“The FME says he’s been dead less than twelve hours, but not much less,” said Marshall. “We think it happened shortly after ten-thirty last night, because the burger bar closes at half past ten.”

Lloyd nodded. “How come he wasn’t missed last night?”

“As far as we can gather, his wife was away somewhere with the children, so there was no one at home to miss him. His next-door neighbor noticed that his car wasn’t there, but she didn’t think anything of it, because she thought he was away, too.”

Lloyd went to see if the card shop lady had recovered enough to talk to him, and she had, but she couldn’t tell him anything that he hadn’t seen for himself. Soon, everyone involved in the grim aftermath of a murder was there. The white-suited SOCOs, Freddie, the photographer, the video unit, the rubberneckers, still there despite the efforts to disperse them. But after Freddie had had the body taken away, fewer people wanted to stand around in the raw wind than had before. Alan Marshall was right, thought Lloyd. They were ghouls.

The car was taken away for forensic examination, and everything found at the scene was carefully bagged and marked. Dozens of people were already looking for the man’s family, questioning his neighbors and employees, collecting evidence from the service area, the burger bar, the man’s car. Yet more people would examine that evidence, see what story it had to tell. Freddie would examine the victim, and find whatever there was to find about his assailant. The murder weapon, a dog-chain by the look of it, still tight around the victim’s neck, would be examined and its provenance traced if possible. All that evidence would go through to the manager of the incident room, who would assess its importance, log it, keep it under constant review. The statements would be read, the information contained in them collated and acted on.

Lloyd’s job was to piece it all together, to narrow the search down, to find in among the general confusion specifics that would channel the effort of his detectives in the right direction. To make some sense of it all, in other words. And he wasn’t at all sure that he could. Judy had been trying for over a month to do that with Mrs. Fenton, with no success.

Lloyd had informed both DCS Yardley and Judy, and they arrived with the ACC to visit the scene before all four went back to Lloyd’s office in order for the strategy—already worked out in anticipation of the event—to be unveiled.

Yardley’s job was even less enviable; they had a serial killer on their hands, and they had no idea even what his hang-up was, never mind who he was. Yardley had to coordinate a major, force-wide manhunt; he had to ensure that the back-up services were available when needed, that as much reassurance as possible was given to the public, that the press was kept informed, and—as the ACC would put it—on the team. The last thing anyone needed was a press that felt it was being excluded, because that way lay accusations of indifference and incompetence as the weeks rolled by without an arrest being made, which they would. No one thought they were going to solve this one any day soon.

“The bulk of the inquiry team will be working at HQ,” Yardley said. “We have to assume that he will try again, and that could be anywhere—Barton HQ seems the most sensible place to coordinate operations, and of course, we have a brand-new purpose-built major incident room there. I’ll be heading the inquiry, and I will continue to liaise with the press, who will no doubt be back in force. Nothing has changed in regard to the media.”

“You’ll have gathered,” said the ACC, “that I want both of you on this inquiry, since both of your divisions are involved. Besides, you’ve proved a formidable combination in the past, and I’m hoping that by putting your not inconsiderable talents together, you’ll bring this to as speedy a conclusion as possible.”

Lloyd smiled. “We’ll be working together even though we’re a married couple?” he said. “You’re not worried that we might put the inquiry on hold in order to throw plates at each other?”

“I have every faith in your joint ability to save plate-throwing for your leisure hours,” said the ACC. “You always managed before. Besides, the Chief Constable believes that married couples should be encouraged to work together even on a regular basis, so this should prove him right or wrong.” He smiled. “You and your team will also be based at HQ, and will be accommodated in a small suite of offices which is being made ready as we speak.” The ACC stood up. “Now, I’ll leave you in the Chief Superintendent’s capable hands.”