Death of a Cave Dweller (26 page)

There was now only silence outside the bedsit. Terry struck the match, and lit the cigarette. He coughed as the acrid smoke hit the back of his mouth, and wished that at that moment he was somewhere else. Anywhere else!

The loud knock on the door made his heart leap into his throat. “Who . . . who is it?” he gasped.

“It's only me,” said a voice.

Terry gasped again, this time with relief. He walked over to the door, drew back the bolt, turned the key in the lock and opened the door.

The visitor had a reassuring grin on his face. “I thought we should have a little talk,” he said. He held up a bottle of scotch. “And I've brought this to keep us company.”

Bob Rutter stood by the duty sergeant's desk, the black Bakelite telephone clenched tightly in his hand.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, trying to mask his concern and make it seem as if it were no more than a casual enquiry.

“I'm fine,” Maria said.

She didn't sound fine, Rutter thought. She sounded anything but fine.

“What's the weather like down there?” he asked, cursing himself for talking in clichés, yet unable to think of anything else to say.

“I heard it raining about an hour ago,” Maria told him. “When are you coming home, Bob?”

“Cloggin'-it Charlie thinks we're getting pretty close to solving the case. In fact, he's interrogating a suspect right now. With any luck, we could be back in London in the next two or three days.”

“That long!”

Alarm bells started to ring inside Bob Rutter's head. He'd offered to go home a couple of days earlier, and that had only served to make his wife angry. Now, though she was trying to sound as casual as he was, it seemed to him that she was practically begging him to catch the next train.

“Are you sure you're all right, darling?” he asked. “Maybe you should go and see a doctor.”

“I've already seen one.”

She'd already seen one!
Rutter felt the panic rising in his throat. “And what did he say?”

Maria laughed, though she didn't sound very amused. “I'm not dying, if that's what you're worried about,” she said. “But we really need to talk.”

“Talk? Talk about what?”

“I can't say over the phone.”

“At least give me a hint,” Rutter pleaded.

“I . . . no, I can't. Tell me you love me.”

“You know I love you.”

“And I love you. I love you perhaps more than you can ever imagine.”

Then the line went dead.

“You'd better tell me how the fight between you an' Steve Walker started,” Woodend said to Mike Finn. “An' don't rush it, lad. I want details, an' I've got all the time in the world.”

“I suppose it all goes back to Hamburg,” Finn told him.

Woodend nodded. “I rather suspected it might.”

“When we were there, we were gettin' maybe three or four hours' sleep a day,” Mike Finn continued, confirming what Billie Simmons had already said to Woodend in the Grapes. “We needed somethin' to keep us goin' when we were on stage. There were these German slimmin' pills . . . an' . . . an' . . .”

“Yes? Spit it out!”

“Preludin was their proper name, but we called them Prellies. They'd keep you awake, all right. We used to eat tubes of the bloody things every night. They made us all feel really great.”

Woodend already had a sense where this story was going. “But you can't get them in England, can you?”

“No, you can't,” Finn agreed. “But Steve had some. I don't know how he got his hands on them – maybe he smuggled them in when he came back after the last time the Seagulls played in Germany. He was dead tight with them. I asked for some – just a few – more than once, but he always said no.”

“An' why do you think that was?”

“His excuse was that if he gave them to me, he'd have to give them to everybody who'd tried them in Hamburg.”

“Go on,” Woodend said.

“The night before Eddie Barnes was killed, I knew Steve had some Prellies on him, because I'd seen him takin' them in the bog. Then, just before he went on stage, he took his jacket off. I waited till the Seagulls had started playin', then I went through his pockets an' found the pills. Leavin' them around like that, he was askin' for it, wasn't he?”

“Of course he was,” Woodend agreed, not even trying to sound convincing. “Make a habit of stealin' other people's property, do you?”

“It wasn't stealin'. I'd have paid him back in the end. Anyway, after the club had closed down for the night, and we were just messin' about – playin' our guitars an' stuff like that – he checked in his jacket an' realised the pills were missin'. He must have remembered I'd asked him for some, because he accused me right away of pinchin' them.”

“An' that's when the fight broke out?”

“No, there wasn't really the space in the dressin' room. We went into the dancin' area. Pete Foster an' a couple of the others tried to calm things down, but Steve was really angry, an' I'd been lookin' for an excuse to take a poke at him for months.”

“How long did this fight last?”

“It couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes. Then Steve got a lucky punch in, an' I went down. He asked me if I'd had enough, I said I had, an' that was it.”

“Why hasn't anybody told me this before?” Woodend demanded, just managing to keep his anger under control.

“We all talked it over, an' there didn't seem to be much point,” Mike Finn said. “I mean, everybody who was there in the club was watchin' the fight, weren't they? Any re-wiring must have been done after we'd gone. Besides,” he continued sheepishly, “we couldn't really tell you about the fight without tellin' you what caused it, an' as far as I know, Prellies are illegal over here.”

“So to save yourselves bein' booked on a minor drugs charge, you were willin' to let a murderer get away scot-free.”

“We were worried you'd close the club down if you knew about the drugs. An' even if you didn't, once Mrs Pollard had found out, she'd have made sure that none of us ever worked there again. But if we'd really thought that tellin' you about it would help catch Eddie's killer, we'd have come clean right away.”

“Bollocks!” Woodend said.

“Am I goin' to be charged with anythin'?” Mike Finn asked.

“There's a lot I
could
charge you with – vandalism, threatenin' behaviour, obstruction of justice – an' that's just the start.”

“But you're not goin' to, are you?” Finn asked, with the first signs of hope in his voice since the interview began.

“No, to tell you the truth, I can't
be bothered with all the paperwork,” Woodend said. Then,
seeing the look of relief on Finn's face, he added,
“But what I will do is tell everybody at the club what a
louse you've been. By this time tomorrow, I'd be
surprised if even your fellow members of the Knockouts will want
to have anythin' to do with you.”

T
here was a thick air of gloom hanging over the corner table in the public bar of the Grapes where the two London detectives were sitting.

“For a while back there, I was so sure Mike Finn was our man,” Woodend said. “Everythin' seemed to be pointin' to him. Maybe
that
should have alerted me to the fact I was on the wrong track – murders hardly ever come in neat packages.”

“Hmm,” Rutter said abstractly.

“But there's no doubt he was involved in the fight,” Woodend continued. “I had a talk with Billie Simmons and Pete Foster ten minutes ago. They weren't exactly eager to come clean about it, but when they realised I knew the story already, they told me exactly the same as Finn did.”

“Hmm,” Rutter said, for a second time, as he stared down at his half-pint of bitter.

Woodend put his pint down on the table. “Is somethin' the matter with you, lad?”

Rutter looked up. “I'm worried about Maria,” the sergeant confessed. “She didn't sound right when I talked to her on the phone. Actually, she's not sounded right all the time we've been in Liverpool. I really think that she might be ill.”

“Then you'd better get yourself off back home right away.”

“I've thought about doing just that. But if I rush back to London every time we have a minor domestic crisis, how will I ever be able to do my job properly?”

“It's a problem,” Woodend agreed. “Why don't you put in for a desk job? I'd be sorry to lose you, but at least that way you could be back home by six o'clock every night.”

“I've thought about that, too. But doing this particular job has become part of what I am. I'd be a different person if I became a pencil-pusher who never left his office – and that wouldn't be the person Maria married.” Rutter lit a cork-tipped cigarette. “How do you manage it, sir?”

Woodend sighed. “I'm from a completely different generation to you, lad,” he said. “Young women were brought up to expect their men when they saw them, back then. An', of course, there was the war – a lot of us were away for five or six years. Still, it hasn't always been easy. I was on a case up in Northumberland the day our Annie was born. I've managed to miss most of her birthday parties an' all.” He paused, to light a cigarette himself. “How does that Gilbert an' Sullivan song go? ‘A policeman's lot is not a happy one'? Isn't that it? But somebody's got to do the job, an' I flatter myself I'm not bad at it.”

Someone coughed discreetly, and looking up they saw Steve Walker standing there, looking uncharacteristically deferential.

“I hear you got that Inspector Hopgood to drop the charges against me,” he said.

“That's right, I did,” Woodend agreed.

“Thank you.”

“It was the least I could do for you, after all you'd done to help me. What put you on to Finn in the first place?”

Walker shrugged. “It was just a feelin' at first. I've known Mike for a long time, an' I could tell from the way he looked at me that he was up to somethin'. Then this mornin' I noticed a stain on his jeans. It looked like the kind of stain we used to get when we did glue an' paper work in school. So I reckoned he must have sent that letter to Jack – which meant that he'd killed Eddie.”

“But he didn't, you know,” Woodend said gently. “The only real chance he'd have to do that was durin' the fight – an' he was too busy gettin' knocked on the floor by you to do it then.”

Walker grinned, but only for a second. “I suppose you're right,” he agreed. “I suppose I've always known it, really. Even when I was tellin' myself that it had to be him, there was a small part of me that couldn't see him havin' enough guts to go through with it.” He reached into his pocket, took out a crumpled piece of paper, and flattened it out on the table. “That's the name an' address of the girl I was with behind the curtain on the night before Eddie died. She'll tell you I never went anywhere near the amp.”

Woodend glanced at the paper. “How did you get this?” he asked.

“I've always known who she was. I just wanted to keep her out of it. But I was wrong to try an' do that. If you're goin' to catch Eddie's killer, you're goin' to need every bit of information you can get.”

“Let me get this straight,” Woodend said suspiciously. “You knew that I suspected you, but you still wouldn't give me the name of the girl who could clear you?”

“Yeah, that's right.”

“Why?”

Walker was beginning to look uncomfortable. “She might be a bit of a scrubber,” he said, “but I didn't want her mum an' dad findin' out what she'd been up to.”

Sitting slumped in one of the bedsit's two battered armchairs, Terry Garner tried to focus his eyes on the whisky bottle. It looked to him as if only a couple of shots had been poured from it, but if he'd had such a small amount to drink, why was he feeling so queasy?

He turned his attention back to the man sitting opposite him. The visitor's face had seemed perfectly normal only a few minutes earlier, but now his features appeared to be constantly changing, so that one moment his nose would be long and thin, and the next it was as round and flat as a squashed tomato. His voice had altered, too. Hearing him talk was like listening to a tape recorder which wasn't playing at quite the right speed.

“I'll poom yooo another drrwink, Twerry,” the visitor said, reaching for the bottle.

But he didn't pour himself another one, Terry Garner's fuzzy thoughts told him. In fact, as far as he could tell, the visitor didn't even appear to have touched his first drink.

A glass of water might help, the young guitarist decided. Water might do just the trick. All he had to do was stand up, and walk over to the sink. It was such an easy thing to do, he told himself. Get up and go over to the sink. Get
up
and go over to the sink. Yet when he tried to rise from his chair, his legs felt as if they were being held down by lead weights.

“It bwon't be long now, Twerry,” said the visitor. “Bwany second now you're going to bwack out.”

Woodend ordered another pint, and took a rumpled copy of the previous Tuesday's
Mersey Sound
out of his jacket pocket.

“Might as well see if flickin' through this gives me any inspiration,” he told his sergeant.

But after all the disappointment earlier in the day, he couldn't really summon much enthusiasm. It looked like this one of those cases he'd told Geoff Platt about, the kind you either solved quickly or not at all. And right at that moment, ‘not at all' seemed like being by far the most probable outcome.

With a sigh, he opened up the
Mersey Sound
. Even a first sweeping glance told him that the newspaper was considerably better organised than Geoff Platt's office had been. True, some of the photographs had come out a little grainy, and occasionally the print was slightly unaligned, but on the whole, it promised to be a clear, informative read.