Death of a Cave Dweller (25 page)

“Did he actually steal anythin' from the house?” the chief inspector asked the constable.

“Yes, sir,” the other man replied. “It wasn't actually worth very much, but stealin' is stealin'. What he'd taken was—”

Woodend held up his hand to silence the constable. “Don't tell me, let me guess,” he said. “What he had under his arm when you caught him was a stack of magazines.”

“That's . . . that's right, sir,” the constable said, looking very much as he might have done if he'd been standing on a stage and a magician had pulled an egg out of his ear.

“Do you know somethin', Constable?” Woodend said. “There's more than a fair chance that by this time tomorrow I'll be on a train speedin' back to the bosom of my family.”

Inspector Hopgood sat behind his desk, staring at the man in the hairy sports jacket who was sitting opposite him. He did not look at all pleased to see Woodend back in the station so soon after the chief inspector's last visit.

“I only let you know about Steve Walker's arrest out of professional courtesy, sir,” he said across his desk.

Professional courtesy? Woodend thought. Professional bollocks was more like it! The bastard was just playing it very carefully and making sure that he'd covered his own back.

“But I never for a moment imagined that you'd have any real interest in the arrest,” the inspector continued. “After all, it was just a common-or-garden burglary which can't possibly have anything to do with your case.”

Woodend sighed, and wondered whether any of these provincial police forces would ever assign him a man he could work with as well as he worked with Bob Rutter.

“What magazines did Walker steal?” he asked.

Hopgood consulted the file which was lying on his desk.

“Let me see now,” he said. “There was a
Woman's Weekly
, a
Ladies' Home Journal
, a copy of
John Bull
. . .”

“It's hardly the sort of readin' material you'd think would interest a teenage rock'n'roll singer, is it now?” Woodend asked.

Hopgood laughed patronisingly. “We're assuming for the purposes of our investigation that the magazines in question were the property of Mr an' Mrs Finn, and not of their son,” he said.

“Yes, I should imagine the
Ladies' Home Journal
would be very popular with workin'-class folk livin' in a terraced house,” Woodend said. “Tell me, Inspector, have you asked yourself if it was just a coincidence that Steve Walker should choose to break into the house of a lad he knew well?”

“Not really, but—”

“An' have you stopped for a second to wonder why he should risk goin' to prison just to steal a few magazines?”

“Kids today! Who knows what makes them tick?” Hopgood said, as if he'd provided a watertight and all-encompassing answer.

“There was a stage in this investigation when I might well have agreed with you on that point,” Woodend told him. “For a couple of days, I couldn't understand them either. But do you know what? They might dress differently, they might talk differently an' they might have more money to spend than we did when we were young, but once you get under the surface they're just the same as we are. Steve Walker's taught me that.”

“He has?” Hopgood asked, as if it were the most outrageous statement he'd ever heard.

“Aye,” Woodend said. “An' he did it by actin' just like I would have done at his age.”

“You'd have committed a criminal act! You'd have forced your way into someone else's house!”

“Aye, maybe I would have done – if that's what it took,” Woodend said. “But what I really mean is that if the police didn't seem to be gettin' anywhere with their inquiries, I'd have gone out lookin' for justice myself.”

“I'm afraid I'm not following you, sir,” Hopgood confessed.

“No, I didn't think you would,” the chief inspector said. “Where are these magazines that Steve Walker stole?”

“They've all been placed in the evidence cupboard, just like they're supposed to be.”

Woodend lit up a Capstan Full Strength. “Good. Well, send somebody to fetch them for me, will you?”

The idea seemed to deeply shock Inspector Hopgood. “But they've already been classified and filed.”

Woodend sighed again. “Don't make me go above your head, lad,” he said. “That won't make either of us look particularly good – an' you know that as well as I do.”

Hopgood hesitated for a second, then picked up the phone and barked an order into it. For perhaps two minutes the men sat opposite each other in uncomfortable silence, then a female clerk entered the room with the magazines in a plastic wallet.

Woodend opened the wallet, and took the magazines out. “Be careful of the prints, sir!” Hopgood warned.

“Bugger the prints!” Woodend told him cheerfully. “They'll be so smudged they'll be no good as evidence anyway.” He flipped through the copy of
Woman's Weekly
. “There it is,” he cried triumphantly. “Or rather, to be more accurate, there it isn't.”

“I'm afraid that I don't know what you're talking about, sir,” Inspector Hopgood said.

“Well, that's nothin' new, is it?” Woodend countered. He placed the magazine back on the desk. “I know there's not a great deal of love lost between you an' me, Inspector Hopgood, but in view of what he's done to assist my inquiries, I'd consider it a personal favour if you let Steve Walker go.”

“But he's already been charged!”

Woodend shrugged. “Lose the paperwork – it wouldn't be the first time it's happened.”

“An' there's the Finn family to consider. They'll want to see the man who broke into their house brought to justice.”

“I'll send my sergeant to sort them out,” Woodend said. “He's such a smooth young bugger he could talk an Eskimo into buyin' a fridge. Besides, the Finns will have a lot more to worry about than a busted back door.”

“You've lost me again,” Hopgood confessed.

“If I was them, I'd be more concerned
about the fact that my son had been arrested on suspicion of
murder,” Woodend told him.

T
hey were sitting the same cream and brown interview room in which Woodend had talked to Rick Johnson only a few hours earlier, but the whole atmosphere was very different this time. Johnson had been aggressive and defiant. Mike Finn, on the other hand, was cowed, and even from across the table it was possible to catch the stink of his fear.

“The sooner you've got all the dirty water off your chest, the sooner you're goin' to start feelin' better,” Woodend told Finn. “It might not seem like that from where you're sittin', but believe me, it's perfectly true. I've seen it a hundred times. So why don't you just come clean now, lad?”

Finn twisted nervously in his seat. The chair creaked in protest. “Can I go to the toilet?” he asked.

“Of course you can, lad,” Woodend said benignly. “Just as soon as we've got a statement from you.”

“But I really need to go now.”

“No, you don't,” the chief inspector assured him. “It's just your nerves that make you think you do. An' like I was just tellin', you'll feel much better once you've confessed.”

“But I've got nothin' to confess
to
,” Mike Finn protested. “Honestly I haven't.”

“Do you think I'm totally thick, lad?” Woodend asked. “Do you think I'd pull you in if I couldn't make it stick?”

Mike Finn bowed his head. “I don't know,” he muttered into his chest. “I don't know anythin' anymore.”

“Well, let's look at the evidence. For a start, Inspector Hopgood's got the names of half a dozen witnesses who saw a lad with long blond hair hangin' around near Jack Towers' house the night somebody posted that threatenin' letter through his box,” Woodend lied.

“It wasn't me.”

“We'll soon see about that, won't we? There'll be a line-up, as you must realise, an' I don't reckon that the witnesses will have much trouble pickin' you out.” He paused for effect. “An' even if they did, we don't really need them because there's all the forensic evidence.”

“What forensic evidence?”

“It's all so scientific an' complicated that I don't understand half of what the boffins can do myself,” Woodend admitted. “But I do know that you can't handle a dead rat – especially when you go to all the trouble of puttin' a string noose around its neck – without leavin' some traces of yourself behind. An' then there's your poisonous little
billet doux
to Jack Towers. Do you imagine, even for a second, that you can put together an anonymous letter without some of the sweat from your fingers stickin' to it?”

“But I was wearin' . . .” Finn began, then dried up as he suddenly realised his blunder.

“But you were wearin' gloves,” Woodend supplied. “Yes, I thought that you might have been. So we won't get any sweat samples. But who needs them, when we've got the magazines?”

“You can't use them,” Mike Finn said. “Not unless you had a search warrant to go into my house.”

“Proper little barrack-room lawyer, aren't you?” Woodend said unconcernedly. “An' you'd be quite right if we
had
gone into your house too look for them. But we didn't. Steve Walker removed them, we merely took them off him when he was arrested.”

The chief inspector opened the
Woman's Weekly
. “Bet you got some funny looks from your newsagent when you bought this lot. Or perhaps you didn't buy them from your own newsagent. Maybe you were just smart enough to go somewhere else to buy them. Doesn't really matter. We'll find whichever newsagent you did use, an' I've no doubt he'll remember the transaction well enough.”

Mike Finn licked his dry lips. “I didn't buy no magazines,” he said, but with a total lack of conviction which showed that he'd all but given up trying to defend himself.

Ignoring the comment completely, Woodend continued to flick through the
Woman's Weekly
.

“Here we are,” he said. “Under fashion. The headline reads, ‘ . . . season's frocks'. Funny that, isn't it?”

Mike Finn said nothing.

“Of course, what it should say is ‘
Next
season's frocks',” Woodend continued. “Only the ‘next' has been cut out, because you needed it for the sentence, ‘Which one will die next?' As bobbies are always supposed to say at this point: Give it up, lad. I've got you bang to rights.”

“We really wanted the dinnertime spot at the Cellar Club,” Finn said. “It was our big chance to get noticed.”

“So in order to drive the Seagulls out of Liverpool, you rang up a couple of clubs to cancel their bookin's, you slashed the tyres on their van an' you sent them the dead rat with a noose around its neck? Isn't that right?”

Mike Finn nodded his head despairingly. “I thought it would be all over when Eddie Barnes died,” he said. “An' then the bloody Seagulls went an' got themselves a new guitarist. He wasn't nearly as good as Eddie, but that didn't matter. They'd still have got their dinnertime spot at the Cellar Club back. Mrs Pollard told me as much. So I posted that letter through Jack Towers' box in the hope they'd pack up their things an' move to London.”

“We're gettin' a bit ahead of ourselves, aren't we?” Woodend suggested. “Let's go back to the night Eddie died. You'd tried everythin' you could to get rid of the Seagulls, but nothin' had worked. You were feelin' pretty desperate. Then there was a disturbance after the Cellar Club had closed down for the evenin' – it was a fight, wasn't it . . .?”

“Yes, it was a fight.”

“. . . when everybody else's attention was distracted – and that's when you saw your chance to re-wire Eddie Barnes's amplifier.”

“No!” Mike Finn gasped, almost sobbing. “I couldn't have done it – because I was one of the people who was fightin'.”

Terry Garner was pacing the floor of his small bedsit, as he had been doing since the moment he had double-locked himself safely inside. He had smoked the last of his cigarettes over half an hour earlier, and though he desperately wanted the soothing sensation of nicotine, he knew he wasn't brave enough to leave his refuge in order to buy some more.

He
was out there. Terry knew he was. Watching. Waiting. And while he had no idea who the Watcher was, he was convinced that the man would not be content until the Seagulls had lost another lead guitarist.

All kinds of crazy plans passed through his head. He would put on a disguise, slip out of the city and never return. He would place an advertisement in the
Mersey Sound
which would say that he promised never to play with the Seagulls again, so could whoever was stalking him please leave him alone now. He would commit a crime so the police would lock him somewhere safely away from the menacing presence he felt everywhere he turned.

He heard the sound of heavy footsteps, coming up the stairs. The Watcher? Dear God, let it not be the Watcher!

Why should it be? he asked himself. Why couldn't it be one of the other tenants instead?

He rummaged around in the overflowing ashtray, found a stub and – with trembling hands – placed it in his mouth. He could taste the harsh cigarette ash on his tongue, but that didn't matter because what he needed right at the moment – above anything else in the whole wide world – was the reassuring feeling of smoke curling around his lungs.

The footfalls were getting louder, as the man making them drew ever nearer. Terry opened his box of matches, fumbled them, and watched helplessly as they spilled on to the floor.

“Oh Christ!” he moaned softly, as he bent down and clawed at one of the matches.