Death of a Cave Dweller (16 page)

What were the chances that a man in overalls would even think of trying to get into a club like the Cellar? Woodend wondered. Very slight. Rick Johnson, Woodend decided, wasn't a very good liar – or, at least, he wasn't making a very good job of it on this particular occasion.

“There's a question I've been meanin' to ask you, Mr Johnson,” the chief inspector said.

“Look,” Johnson snarled, “I've told you until I'm sick of bloody tellin' you that I know bugger all about Eddie Barnes's murder.”

“It's not Eddie's
murder
I want to know about. Tell me about the fight you had with him a month ago.”

“What fight?”

Woodend sighed. “That bright young sergeant of mine has been down at the local nick an' had a good look at your sheet. It's all down there in black an' white. So why don't you co-operate, Mr Johnson? All I want to know is what the fight was about.”

“We . . . er . . . well, we had a bit of a disagreement, you see,” Johnson said reluctantly.

“Aye, people who end up in fights normally do,” Woodend said dryly. “What I really want to know is who disagreed with who about what, an' which of you threw the first punch.”

Rick Johnson looked down at the ground. “I can't remember now,” he muttered.

“You've forgotten all about an incident which could have had you back inside?” Woodend asked incredulously. “An incident which happened only last month? Come on, lad, stop pullin' my leg.”

Johnson's chin was set at a stubborn angle. “I've told you, I don't remember,” he said.

“Do you know how it looks to me?” Woodend asked.

He allowed a short pause for Rick Johnson to speak, but the doorman was clearly set on saying nothing.

“It looks to me as if you had a pretty big grudge against Eddie Barnes,” he continued. “At first, you thought you could settle it in your usual way – with your fists. But after the fight you found that whatever he'd done to make you upset was still eatin' away at you.”

“I never—” Johnson interrupted.

“I haven't finished,” Woodend told him. “It was then that you must have realised you were goin' to have to do somethin' more if you were ever to get rid of the achin' in your guts. So on the night before Eddie died, you waited until all the others had gone home, then you went into the dressin' room an' you re-wired Eddie's equipment.”

“You don't really believe that,” Rick Johnson said.

“You're right,” Woodend admitted. “I don't. Even if you did hate Eddie badly enough to want to kill him, electrocution just wouldn't be your style. But I'm not the only bobby workin' on this case, you know, an' there's others who might take a completely different view to mine. So what you should be really doin', lad, is makin' every possible effort to clear your name. An' you could start by tellin' me about the fight.”

Rick Johnson's gaze was still fixed firmly on the pavement. “I've got nothin' more to say,” he grunted.

Woodend shrugged. “Well, I've given you your chance,” he said. “If you don't choose to take it, then it's your own funeral.”

The lunchtime session of the Cellar Club presented the chief inspector with no surprises. From half-way down the stairs he could see the army of beehive hairdos bobbing up and down in uneasy harmony with the rhythm which vibrated through the walls and the brick floor. At the bottom of the steps he passed a group of young men who were smoking, digging each other in the ribs, and assessing their chances of making a dinnertime pick-up.

If the lads really wanted to get off with the crumpet, Woodend thought as he made his way to the snack bar, they should learn to play an instrument and join a group.

“Tea?” mouthed the girl behind the counter, the actual word drowned out by the sound of Mickey Finn and the Knockouts' loud rendition of ‘The Hippy Hippy Shake'.

“Tea,” Woodend agreed.

There was no puzzled expression on the girl's face, as there'd been the first time she saw him, Woodend thought. Now she accepted him in just the same way as she probably accepted her own parents – an inevitable feature in her world, but not really of it.

He shook his head, and lit up a Capstan Full Strength. On none of his other cases had he ever felt so out of his depth, and it didn't exactly help to realise that Bob Rutter – who was supposed to be his
protégeé
– was becoming more and more comfortable in this environment which he himself found so alien. He was still a few weeks short of his fiftieth birthday, he reminded himself, but already there were so many options which had closed to him, whether he liked it or not.

He couldn't go up in a rocket, because, unlike the Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, he wasn't twenty-seven any more. His chances of playing professional football for Accrington Stanley were long since passed, too, as was the possibility that he might learn to play the trumpet and start his own jazz band. The only thing he had to look forward to was grandchildren – and if that wasn't an old man's thought, what was? Maybe it was time to stop the world and get off. Perhaps his best course would be to take whatever pension he was entitled to, and settle down in a nice cosy environment he would understand, like that of private security.

The group finished playing, and Mickey Finn made his way towards the snack bar. He was half-way down the tunnel when he noticed Woodend standing there, and the chief inspector was sure that, for the moment, the young singer was tempted to turn around. But he didn't, and by the time he reached the snack bar he had even managed to force a friendly smile on to his face.

“I've got a couple more questions that I'd like to ask you, Mr Finn,” Woodend said.

“Oh yeah?” Finn replied cautiously.

“I want to know what happened in the dressing room the night before Eddie Barnes died.”

“Happened?” Finn said, turning away. “What do you mean? Happened? I've no idea what you're talkin' about.”

Woodend lit up another Capstan Full Strength from the butt of his first. “Somethin' occurred which distracted everybody's attention while the murderer re-wired the amp,” he explained.

“You don't know that for a fact,” Finn replied, still not looking at him. “It could have been done after we all left.”

“I'll tell you something else,” Woodend said, ignoring both the comment and the possibility. “I think that whatever caused the disturbance, it was connected in some way with Hamburg.”

Even looking at him almost sideways on, the chief inspector could not miss the look of surprise – or maybe even shock – which crossed the young singer's face.

“Last time we spoke, didn't you tell me that you an' the Knockouts had played in Hamburg, Mr Finn?” Woodend continued.

“There's any number of groups from Liverpool who've played in Hamburg,” Finn muttered.

“But how many of those groups were in this club that night?” Woodend countered.

“Only the Knockouts an' the Seagulls,” Finn admitted.

“An' you're still denyin' that anythin' unusual happened?”

“Steve Walker had a girl with him on the sofa behind the curtain,” Finn told him.

If he thinks he can distract me into talkin' about Steve Walker's bit of fluff, Woodend told himself, he's got another think comin'.

“I know all about the girl,” he said, “an' I'm not interested in her. Steve Walker's love-life is nobody's business but his own. All I want to do is catch myself a murderer.”

“You're missin' the point,” Mickey Finn said.

“An' just what point might that be?”

“You've been into the dressin' room, haven't you?”

“Yes.”

“So you've seen for yourself how most of the equipment gets stacked up next to the curtain.”

“Go on.”

“When one of the lads is ‘on the job', the rest of us move to the other end of the room, to give him a bit of privacy, like. An' the last thing we want to do is look towards the curtain. I mean, it'd be a bit embarrassin' really.”

The chief inspector nodded. “Spell the rest of it out.”

“I don't want to get anybody in trouble,” Mike Finn told him, “but just how difficult do you think it would have been for Steve to slip his hand through the curtain an' do whatever he had to?”

“Let's review what we have so far,” Woodend said, taking a sip of the pint of best that Rutter had just bought him. “One: Eddie Barnes was a nice quiet lad who only ever went out on the town when that was what Steve Walker wanted him to do. He may, or may not, have had a girlfriend. His mother says she thinks he did, both because of the aftershave and because of the way he'd started actin', but his best mate is adamant that he didn't.”

“And which of them is more likely to know the truth of the matter?” Rutter pondered.

“Buggered if I know,” Woodend confessed. “Two: the Seagulls – an' in particular Eddie Barnes – have been the victims of a series of unpleasant jokes, endin' up with an anonymous letter which was pushed through Jack Towers' letterbox, a few days after Eddie's death.”

“Which could have been pasted together by the killer or might just be the work of a crank,” Rutter pointed out.

“True,” Woodend agreed. “Three: we have the editor of the
Mersey Sound
tellin' me that he's sure Eddie was plannin' to leave the group, but he can't remember where he got the information from. Now that raises a number of questions, doesn't it?
Was
he plannin' to leave the group, an' if he was,
why
was he? If he was goin' to leave, did Steve Walker know about it? An' if Walker did know, what action would he have been likely to take?”

“Are you saying that Steve Walker could have killed his best friend?” Rutter asked, astonished.

“It might sound incredible at first, but when love turns to hate, it's often the strongest hate of them all,” Woodend said. “Anyroad, let's follow this thought through. Steve Walker finds out Eddie Barnes is goin' to leave without tellin' him, an' he sees it as the worst kind of betrayal. He decides that Eddie will have to pay the maximum price for his treachery.”

“He'll have to die.”

“Exactly. An' because Steve Walker's got a bit of a poetic nature, he decides to kill him on stage. Why not? Eddie's crime was wantin' to leave the group – well, he can, but not in the way he intended.”

“If what you're guessing is true, Steve Walker's a bloody good actor,” Rutter said.

“It wouldn't be the first time we've come up against bloody good actors, now would it?”

Rutter knocked back what was left of his half of bitter. “Does that mean we're going to target our investigation solely on Walker?”

Woodend shook his head. “We can't afford to do that, if only because even if Steve Walker is guilty, as things stand I've no idea how we're ever goin' to prove it. So what we're forced into is tryin' to approach the problem from a completely new angle.”

“And what angle would that be, sir?”

“We have to
cherchez la femme
, as they say in the pictures.”

“Which particular woman will we be looking for?”

“Two possibilities,” Woodend said. “The first is this lass Steve Walker was behind the curtain with. She should be able to confirm whether or not Walker just took her there for a quick rattle, or whether he used her just as an excuse to get close to Eddie Barnes's amp. Enough people saw her for us to come up with a decent description. Have some identikit pictures drawn up, and give 'em to Inspector Hopgood's lads.”

“Should I tell them why we're looking for her, sir?”

“Tell them she was in the club an' might be a witness. No harm in that. But skip the bit about the sofa – there's no point in gettin' Mrs Pollard in trouble with the local bobbies unnecessarily.”

“Who's the second woman we're looking for?”

“That's a bit more difficult,” Woodend conceded, “because we're not even sure that she exists. It's this lass of Eddie Barnes's. If she is real, she might be able to give us the answers to a lot of questions – like, for example, whether he was plannin' to leave the group or not.”

“But how can we find her when we don't even know what she looks like?” Rutter asked.

“We know what Eddie Barnes looked like, don't we? We'll find her through him.”

“You've lost me,” Rutter confessed.

“They had to meet somewhere,” Woodend explained. “Where would that somewhere be likely to have been?”

Rutter shrugged. “Cinemas. Coffee bars. Pubs. All the usual sort of places boys meet girls.”

“Exactly. But they can't have been the cinemas, coffee bars and pubs that any of their mates used, or the rest of the Seagulls would have soon known about it, wouldn't they?”

“So the first thing to do is to find out where Eddie's mates hung out . . .” Rutter began.

“Hung out?” Woodend repeated, puzzled. “What does that mean?”

“Where they spent time with their chums,” Rutter elucidated. “And once we know where they are, we can cross them off our list. Because if Eddie
was
seeing a girl, he'd never have taken her to any of those places.”

“Now you're with me,” Woodend said. “Which only leaves the places Eddie an' his mates
didn't
go to. An' in a city of this size, there can't be more than a few thousand of them.”

“You wouldn't like Inspector Hopgood's lads to handle the footwork on this, would you?” Rutter asked hopefully.

“No, I bloody wouldn't,” the chief inspector said. He smiled. “It's a bit more subtle than the other inquiry, an' I'd be much happier if it was handled by an ambitious young sergeant who knows the only way he's goin' to get promotion is through results.”