David Trevellyan 03 -More Harm Than Good (22 page)

       
“I did too, and that’s
the second time I’d heard it. What’s
interesting,
is
he does make it sound like it all happened by accident. The way the one guy was
yelling at the other, like he hadn’t known to stay away from the door.”

       
“True. But there
are any number
of explanations for that. We should have
known better than to rely on a witness.”

       
“I was hoping he’d have
remembered something, like a mark on the fireman’s suit or a scratch on his
helmet. Some useful detail we could have narrowed the field with.”

       
“That would have been
excellent. No such luck, though.”

       
“We shouldn’t complain.
At least he didn’t break into song.”

       
“You’re right. But it
was a good idea, bringing him here. I bet we wouldn’t have got a word out of
him in the back of that police car. I wonder though, whether you’d have been so
hospitable, if you’d known about the other thing.”

       
“What thing?” I said.

       
“Remember your boots?”
she said. “The original
ones, that
were stolen?”

       
“Of course,” I said.

       
“Elvis had them.”

       
“Are you sure?”

       
“Absolutely.”

       
“I mean, are you sure
they’re mine?”

       
“I’m certain. I know the
make, size,
colour
, everything, remember.”

       
“So, seriously? Elvis is
the boot thief?”

       
“I’m afraid so.”

       
“Those poor boots. They
didn’t deserve that. He wasn’t wearing them, was he?”

       
“No.”

       
“Thank goodness. Now,
just tell me one more thing. Please. He didn’t have them with him in his sex hovel,
did he?”

       
“No. It’s OK. They were
in another room, nearby.”

       
“How do you know it was
Elvis who took them, then?”

       
“He confessed. The
police say they might never have found the stash, otherwise.”

       
“He had a whole stash?
What else was there?”

       
“It was amazing,
apparently. Piled high, like
his own
private bank
vault. He had all kinds of things. I’ve seen a preliminary list. Stuff he’d
taken from the hospital.
Pieces of furniture.
Blankets. Crockery.
Doctors’ coats.
Nurses’
uniforms.
Medical things, like crutches. Bandages. Medicines. Office
supplies.
Boxes of paper.
Old files. A photocopier.
Pieces of wood.
Rocks. A lawnmower. Things that had fallen
off cars, like door mirrors and radio aerials. Pretty much anything you can
think of.”

       
“Including my boots.”

       
“Yes. They were there,
near the door. Under a hazmat suit he must have somehow pinched from the
emergency crew.”

Chapter Eighteen

Melissa kicked off the next morning’s work by dividing the stack of
papers she was holding into three and sharing them out between Jones, herself,
and me.

       
“Do you know how Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle defined genius?” she said, as she straightened the piles.

       
Jones shook his head.

       
“I have no idea,” I
said, although I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with paperwork.

       
“He thought it was an
infinite capacity for taking pains,” Melissa said. “And boys, I know this isn’t
going to be fun. These interview summaries aren’t light reading. The Met aren’t
famed for the tightness of their prose style, and from the ones I’ve seen the
fire brigade aren’t very original with their answers. I’m sorry about that. But
if it helps to look at it this way, what I need from you today is a big dose of
genius.”

       
“No problem,” Jones
said. “Painstaking is my middle name. One thing I’m not sure about, though -
what do you
expect
us to find that’s been missed
before?”

       
“Anything that doesn’t
ring true,” Melissa said. “Any contradictions. Discrepancies. Anything we know
can’t be true. We’re running out of options, and if our fresh eyes could just
spot something - one single clue - to help us find who caused the original
damage to that door, it would be huge.”

       
The whole exercise
smacked of desperation to me, whether it was aimed at finding a gem hidden in
the reports, or preventing us from pursuing more fruitful avenues elsewhere. At
best it seemed like a fool’s errand, but I told myself that wasn’t my problem.
I concentrated on what my control had been at such pains to spell out. My job
was to look for signs of guilt.
But to focus on the people
inside the room.
Not outside, in the fire brigade or the police.
Specially bearing in mind Melissa’s unexplained absence, yesterday.

       
Jones scooped up his
allocation of papers and took them to the far corner of the long rectangle of
desks that filled the meeting room Melissa had requisitioned for us. He sat
down and started working his way straight through from top to bottom, keeping
up a steady pace. He certainly looked conscientious, but I noticed he couldn’t
keep his gaze from wandering to the window in between pages.

       
Melissa took a seat at
the
centre
of one of the rectangle’s long sides and
spread her copies out in front of her, face down, like a child shuffling cards.
She picked them up to read, one at a time, apparently at random. Then she
started to form a series of piles, some separate, some overlapping. I was
curious to understand her method - unless she was just trying to create the
appearance of a system - but before I could reach a conclusion her phone rang.
She talked for just over two minutes, standing up half way through and nodding
as she listened. Then she hung up and turned to look at us, her head tipped to
one side and a half curious, half suspicious expression on her face.

       
“OK, hands up,” she
said. “Which one of you was it?”

       
“Which one of us, what?”
I said.

       
“Which one of you prayed
for a miracle?” she said. “Because it looks like we might have come across one.
From a most unlikely source.”

       
“Excellent,” I said.
“You can’t beat a spot of divine intervention in a case like this. Who was it?
And what did they tell you?”

       
“It was Stan
Leckie
.
Head of Hospital Security.
He just took a call from one of his old snouts.
One from way
back, when he used to work here.
The guy has something that could help
us, apparently.”

       
“Can we trust him?”

       
“
Leckie
?
I think so. We’ve re-done all the background checks. And he’s doing the right
thing, passing this on to us. As for the snout, your guess is as good as mine.
But for what it’s worth,
Leckie’s
sure the guy is who
he claims to be. He says his material was always A1 in the past. And the group
he was embedded in
have
the capability to handle
something like this. Or did, when
Leckie
was running
this guy.”

       
“Why did he contact
Leckie
?”

       
“
Leckie
recruited him. When
Leckie
moved on, the guy dropped
out of sight. Some snouts are like that. They don’t like being passed to a new
handler.”

       
“And he’s just
resurfaced now?”

       
“Yes.”

       
“Why?”

       
“Because he found out
something too important to ignore. I hope.”

       
“Sounds interesting.”

       
“Who knows? It might
come to nothing. But it’s better than a poke in the eye.
Leckie’s
putting together a meet,
right now.
You guys pound through a few more of those forms. I need to
dig up some old files. I have a feeling our morning’s about to get a whole lot
brighter.”

It turned out Melissa hadn’t contented herself with running
background checks. She’d also snagged us a car. By the time we stepped outside
thirty minutes later a black Range Rover was already sitting at the
kerb
, waiting for us, with its engine running. The driver was
standing next to it, ready to shake hands. Bright blue eyes scanned us from
beneath bushy eyebrows, and between his neatly combed fair hair and pinstriped
blue suit, he looked every inch a banker or stockbroker. I wondered if he
picked the outfit to match the car, or if he dressed like that out of choice. I
also wondered if he’d be open to the idea of stopping at the nearest Starbucks.

       
“Pleased to meet you
all,” he said, climbing back in behind the wheel. Melissa took the passenger
seat, and Jones and I slid into the back. “My name’s Pearson. Nigel. Thanks for
getting me out of the office, today.”

       
“We’ll get you out
whenever you want, if you help us get a result today,” Melissa said.

       
Pearson smiled, and was
silent for a moment as he squeezed the Range Rover between two black cabs. From
the general direction he was taking, I guessed we were heading for the start of
the M1. I felt a surge of nostalgia for the area, involuntarily thinking back
to all the times my father took me to the RAF Museum in Hendon when I was a
kid. But this was quickly replaced by other memories, less wholesome, of my
various visits to the police training college just down the road.

       
“Do you know much about
this place we’re heading for?” Melissa said.

       
“A little,” he said.
“You?”

       
“Not much, beyond the
address.”

       
“Well, if it was a
private party, I wouldn’t be fighting you for tickets. In terms of location,
it’s awful. But then, it’s in
Luton
. What more can
you say?”

       
I’d been to
Luton
many times as a kid and a teenager, and under normal
circumstances it wouldn’t be high on my list of places to revisit, either.

       
“Whereabouts in
Luton
?” I said.

       
“A horrible, decrepit
part, about four miles north of the city,” he said. “An industrial suburb
called Frankston. Ever heard of it?”

       
“I’ve heard of it. I’ve
never been there, though.”

       
“You’ve not missed much.
The specific place we’re going to started life as a workhouse. It would have
been grim enough in the 1840s. And it’s worse, these days.”

       
“Most of those places have
been turned into apartments, by now.”

       
“Right. And if this one
hasn’t, what does that tell you?”

       
“What size of place is
it?”

       
Pearson rummaged in his
door pocket and pulled out a piece of office paper. He passed it to me, and I
saw it was a poor photocopy of a hand drawn building plan.

       
“Here,” he said. “Have a
look for yourself.”

The main part of the complex looked like a letter E, with three
parallel wings stretching back from a broad central block. It was connected to
the road by a formal driveway at the front, and an apparently random selection
of outbuildings was scattered throughout the rest of the site.

       
“Such was the civic duty
of our Victorian forefathers,” Pearson said. “They did a good job though, I
suppose, from a constructional point of view. Most of that big main building is
still standing. The other odds and sods are mainly gone, though. A stray bomb
took out several of them back in ‘42, and the local vandals, junkies, and care
in the community victims have accounted for the rest.”

       
“Which part are we
meeting this guy in?” I said to Melissa.

       
“We’ll find out the
exact spot when we get there,” she said. “
Leckie’ll
be there. He’ll show us.”

       
“
Leckie’s
coming with us?”