Angel Hunt (6 page)

I licked a forefinger and made a ‘nice one' stroke in the air. He was okay, but (Rule of Life No 38) the time to start worrying was when the policemen got nicer.

It's not that I have anything against them
per se
,
of course. It's just I like to know where I stand and which bit of me to tense up before the rubber truncheon lands. It's the same in power politics. The Russians would much rather deal with a right-wing conservative any day, because they know where they stand, rather than a left-wing liberal who might do something off-the-wall, like act on principle, for heaven's sake. I had the feeling that Prentice was out to kill me with kindness, or at least make me put my hands up to something I hadn't done. But what?

‘Look, Sergeant, what's the deal? I recognised Billy Tuckett from way back and thought I'd save you guys some time by giving you his name. I could have kept the lip zippered. I don't know this Lucy Scarrott female and I don't know what Billy was doing on the roof. What can I tell you?'

‘Maybe nothing,' he shrugged. ‘But I'd value your input.'

‘You're not thinking of opening a sperm bank, are you?'

‘Sorry,' he laughed. ‘Got to watch the jargon.'

‘You probably use a lot down Wanstead nick.'

‘I don't work out of Wanstead,' he said carefully, but went no further.

‘So what exactly do you want from me?'

‘I want you to come with me to Mr Sunil's house and let me show you what I think happened to Billy Tuckett.'

‘What good would that do?'

‘I'm not sure, but you might be able to fill in the odd gap.'

I shook my head in despair.

‘How many times? I haven't seen Billy in years and I don't know why he decided to have a night on the tiles on Sunday. Why don't you try this Lucy Scarrott bird?'

‘We can't find her. Bit embarrassing, really; she's supposed to be on probation, but her probation officer sort of lost her about a year ago.'

‘And I'm the next best thing?'

‘The only lead to Billy we have, and, I admit, a pretty slim one.'

‘As long as we understand each other on that score, fair enough.' Going along with him seemed to be the best way of getting rid of him. ‘But I have to ask, though I think I might regret it, what is Lucy Scarrott on probation for?'

‘Breaking into an animal research centre.'

Oh-oh. Animals again.

 

I followed Prentice's Escort over to Leytonstone in Armstrong. I told him I wanted to go on to work afterwards, but really I needed thinking time to try and figure him out.

We turned into Dwyer Street and I still hadn't made any headway. Then I realised he wasn't stopping outside Sunil's house, but carrying on to the other end of the road. He parked ten yards or so after the last house, outside a wire-mesh fence in front of a late 1950s prefabricated school. There was a handkerchief-size tarmac playground in front and a wooden sign, which somebody had tried to set fire to, saying Dwyer Street Infants' School.

Prentice got out of his Escort and locked it, then pointed to the gate of the school yard. I pulled Armstrong in behind his car, got out and joined him by the gate. There was no padlock on it, and it squealed as Prentice pushed it open.

‘Your motor?' he nodded towards Armstrong.

‘Yeah, and it's taxed.'

‘You can pick up second-hand Metrocabs now, you know.'

‘Wouldn't have one given,' I said firmly.

‘Why? Not as economical on the fuel?'

‘No, just no character.'

He gave me a quizzical look, then indicated to the left side of the school.

‘Come round the side,' he said, and I followed him down the tarmac path, which was about a yard wide, between the school building and a six-foot wooden fence that isolated the first house in the terrace.

‘It's not a school any more,' he said over his shoulder.

‘Well, they have to hide the Cruise missiles somewhere,' I said, zipping up my fleece-lined leather jacket against the rain, which had started coming down in ominous big spits.

I had a sudden pang of conscience about the hole in Sunil's roof where the skylight had been. But it was only a brief pang.

Prentice was ignoring my backchat.

‘It's a local community centre, Scout hut, adult education centre and crèche. In fact, it's probably used more now than it was when it was a school.'

He'd stopped in front of the side door, a flimsy hardboard affair with a Yale lock, distinguished by a fist-sized hole to the side of the metal keyhole.

‘Now who do you think would want to do that?'

Prentice put his left hand through the hole and flicked the lock from the inside.

‘Someone who wanted to do what you've just done,' I said as I followed him inside. ‘But they had a sledgehammer, not a key.'

We were in a kitchen of sorts. I presumed it had once been the school's dinner ladies' empire, and there was still a stove and tea-making gear but not much else except a funny smell. It was musty and earthy and oaty all at once.

Prentice was watching me. He didn't say anything, just nodded towards the big enamel sink, which had a single cold water tap and a rickety hot water geyser above it. (These ‘butler's pantry' sinks are worth a few bob these days, either to the dockland Yuppies doing up houses Jack the Ripper wouldn't have been seen dead in, or to amateur photographers who use them in their darkrooms. I'm not sure what for.)

To the side of the sink, under the draining-board, were half-empty sacks and bags that contained cereals, wood shavings and what looked like the sort of seeds you feed to birds rather than the ones you roll with tobacco.

‘Either school dinners have really gone downhill, or there's one hell of a big parrot on the loose round here.'

‘You're getting warm,' Prentice said. ‘Come here.'

He opened a door into a corridor, and I followed him down it. The doors of the classrooms along it had handwritten cards drawing-pinned to them saying things like ‘Course 21B: Italian' or ‘Over 60s Metalworking,' and one that said ‘Blue Tit Patrol' pinned high enough up to avoid any graffiti. At the end was a fire door with a push bar. Prentice opened it and wedged it open with a rusted chunk of iron left there for that purpose.

We were in a small courtyard into which had been crammed half a dozen hutches and garden-shed-type constructions. There was also a ten-foot square pen of some sort like a small corral, made out of odd bits of timber, and in one corner, a pile of what was unmistakably manure.

‘It's a frigging zoo,' I said.

‘Got it in one,' said Prentice smugly.

‘Now hold it a minute,' I said, holding my hands up. ‘Are you telling me Billy was here Sunday night, and it had something to do with animals. These –? There aren't any fucking animals here!'

‘The place is closed for the Christmas holidays, and the RSPCA takes care of the livestock until January. It started when it was a school. You know the score; give the urban kids a slice of country life. Some teacher must have found out that most of his class had never seen a duck before, so they started an urban zoo. There were quite a few of them back in the ‘70s. When the school closed, they kept the animals on for the toddlers in the local playgroups. They use the place most mornings. And the old caretaker lives next door, so he feeds them and mucks out. It was no big deal; just a few chickens, a couple of rabbits, hamsters, gerbils and a donkey.'

‘A donkey?'

‘Yes. Early retirement from Southend beach, I understand.'

‘Strewth, they're even laying the donkeys off now. Times must be hard.'

‘It's the cuts,' he said, playing along.

‘And you're fingering Billy to have been here on Sunday on some sort of animal liberation commando raid?'

‘If that's what it was, they were too late. The animals were shipped out on Friday, but maybe they didn't know that. And yes, I think your mate Billy was here … broke in here ... on Sunday. Didn't you say he was keen on animal rights when he was a student with you?'

‘No, I don't think I did,' I said, looking him in the eye. ‘And anyway, how did he get up on the roof?'

‘I'll show you; but first, look inside the huts.'

‘Which one?'

‘Any of them.'

I opened the door of the nearest one, but gingerly in case there was a puma or something the RSPCA had forgotten. The interior stank of wet fur, and there was dirty, dried straw on the floor. It was ten seconds or so before I realised I was supposed to be looking at the inside of the wooden door. Someone had spray-painted, about a foot high, in bright red, ‘AAAA,' so the letters overlapped.

‘Aaaarg?' I asked Prentice, but this time he didn't smile.

‘The four As. Sometimes they just put figure 4 and capital A. It stands for Action Against Animal Abuse.'

‘So we are talking animal libbers.'

‘Not your average flag-day collectors or the sort who give out leaflets on market day. These are the animal fundamentalists organised into hit squads. The SAS of the animal rights movement. Let's get inside, the rain's set in for the day.'

Prentice kicked the iron block away so the fire door slammed behind us. He motioned towards the classroom door with the ‘Blue Tit Patrol' sign.

‘Look in here.'

I went in first, and all I saw was a standard classroom with a blackboard down one wall, two lines of plain tables and some wooden chairs. A broken chair lay on its side in the far corner, its two front legs about a yard away.

‘So?' I shrugged.

‘The caretaker swears blind that there were no broken chairs in here on Friday.'

‘You've lost me,' I said truthfully, parking my bum on the edge of a table.

Prentice pulled out a chair and sat down.

‘I think your friend Billy and his fellow commandos were a bit peeved to find themselves here after the horse had bolted, so to speak.'

‘Or the donkey,' I added helpfully. He ignored me.

‘I think there's a good chance that Billy was brought in here and asked a few nasty questions by his fellow liberationists, and maybe there was a fight.' He stood up and picked up his chair in a sweeping movement.

‘I think Billy might just have been desperate enough to smash that chair over somebody's head so he could make a run for it.'

‘Hang on a minute. Just rewind that, would you. Why should Billy's Action Man friends take it out on him – unless they thought he'd set them up?' I was getting a bad feeling deep down about what I was saying. ‘Unless they thought he was a plant or a snitch?'

‘You've been watching too much
Hill Street Blues
,' he said. ‘We still call them grasses over here. And yes, Billy was contemplating becoming my grass.'

‘You make it sound like a mid-life career move. Does it come with a personal pension plan?'

‘Billy was into some serious shit with these loonies. It sounds trivial – what's a bit of spray-painting? Who would notice? But believe me, whatever they had really intended to do here was just the opening shot in their Christmas campaign nationally.'

‘And they aim to be in Paris by spring?' I did my ‘Let's invade Poland' impersonation, which isn't very funny at the best of times. It didn't impress Prentice one bit.

‘Don't underestimate these people,' he said seriously.

‘Why should I?' I asked, meaning: what business is it of mine?

He didn't answer, and I should have walked away then and there. If I'm not more careful, I won't live to see 30.

Again.

 

‘I figure he went over the fence here,' said Prentice when we were outside in the rain once more.

‘Why not go out the front gate, the way they came in?'

‘Perhaps there was somebody on lookout in a car or something. They must have had transport. I found some fibres here.' Prentice pointed to the top of the fence. ‘Almost certainly from Billy's jeans. And there was a rubber skid mark from his shoes.'

‘And then where?' I asked, adding: ‘Not that I'm interested, but you're going to tell me.'

‘Take a look.'

I grabbed the top of the fence and pulled myself up until I could rest my forearms there, keeping myself about a foot off the ground by skidding the toes of my trainers – only cleaned the previous week as well – into the wet wood.

On the other side was the back door of the first house in the Dwyer Street terrace, which ended down the road with Sunil's at No 16. Although probably built as a row by some Victorian property magnate, all the houses were slightly different from the front and all had been built on to or extended differently at the back. This first one would be No 2, with odd-numbered houses on the other side of the road. Somebody at some time had converted the scullery and outside privy into a modern, one-storey kitchen. I leaned further over until I could see down the line of houses. Most of them had similar extensions.