Death Watch (24 page)
‘Never mind all that. You’re going away! Why did it have to be now, just when I can be with you?’
He went cold as soon as the words were out of his mouth, but, prince of a woman, she didn’t point out the obvious this time, as she might have. ‘Think about me,’ she said, ‘stuck in boring old Germany without you. I hate these short – haul tours – they’re exhausting, too much travelling for too little playing. And it’s yummy music, but with the world’s most hated conductor. If we do well, it’s in spite of him, not because of him.’
‘How can he be that bad? He’s world famous,’ Slider argued. ‘Surely no – one would hire him a second time if he were incompetent?’
‘How little you know!’ He felt her writhe a little with frustration. ‘He’s a box – office draw. The public don’t know any better. They want a show, and since all they see is his back, there’s got to be some spectacular swooping about, or they’d think he wasn’t doing anything. The really good conductors, from our point of view, are nothing to look at, so they hardly ever get famous.’ She sighed. ‘It’s hard not to hate the public sometimes. You have to keep reminding yourself that they’re who we’re doing it all for.’
He smiled unwillingly. ‘That’s exactly how we feel.’
‘I know.’ She pressed herself against him. ‘I told you, musicians and coppers are very alike,’ she said.
His hand lingered on the curve of her buttock, and her breasts were nudging his chest like two friendly angora rabbits. ‘I can think of lots of differences,’ he said.
‘Tell me about them,’ she invited.
WHEN DICKSON BREEZED INTO THE department meeting, Slider stiffened with surprise: his suit was innocent of ash, and he smelled of aftershave. True, it was only Brut or Old Mice, one of those that very old aunts or very young children give you for Christmas because they can’t think of anything else to get, and you put the bottle in the back of the medicine cabinet because you’re too fond of them actually to throw it away. Still, it was definitely aftershave and not whisky; and his nostril hair was freshly trimmed.
‘Morning!’ He flashed his Shanks Armitage smile around the bemused troops, and unbuttoned his jacket. Some of his body took the chance to make a dash for it, and got as far as his shirt buttons before being stopped. ‘Right, Bill, carry on. Let’s hear what you’ve got.’
‘As you know, we’ve been trying to trace the men who were on the same watch as Neal when the Shaftesbury Avenue station was closed in 1974,’ Slider said. ‘We knew it wasn’t going to be easy after a gap of sixteen years, and especially since the men were pretty well scattered to begin with. We started by checking with the Neal paperwork, his itemised calls list, and with Mrs Neal. That was our first surprise: Mrs Neal had no idea her husband had ever been a fireman.’
Dickson stirred a little. ‘Wait a minute – that burn on the back of Neal’s hand. Didn’t she say he got that when a friend of his died in a fire?’
‘That’s right, sir,’ Atherton answered. It had been in the
report of his first interview with Mrs Neal. What a memory the old man had! ‘Apparently, that’s literally all he told her. “A friend of mine was killed in a fire once.” ’
‘He never talked about the past, and she never asked about it,’ Slider said. ‘Not a woman of great curiosity.’
‘I suppose it suited him that way,’ Dickson grunted. ‘Suited ’em both, probably. Go on.’
‘With no help from the Neal end, we thought we’d have to do it the hard way, from the Shaftesbury Avenue end, move by move. But one of the names on the list was unusual – Benjamin Hulfa – and there was only one Hulfa in the London Telephone Directory. We took a shot at it, and it turned out to be Ben Hulfa’s widow.’
‘Widow?’ Dickson glanced behind him for a desk, parked his rump on the edge of it, and folded his arms across his chest, like an old – fashioned housewife by a garden fence.
‘Swilley went round to interview her,’ Slider said, and cued Norma with a glance.
‘Hulfa died last year, sir. He was an insurance investigator, but he’d been off work for almost ten weeks with depression, taking various drugs prescribed by his doctor. Mrs Hulfa was a BT telephonist, doing shift work. She came home one night after the late shift and found all three services outside her house. There’d been a fire, and her husband was dead.’
‘Killed in the fire?’
‘Apparently not, sir. He’d taken a mixture of sleepers and brandy, sitting on the sofa in the living room. He was a heavy smoker, and it was assumed that he’d dropped a lighted cigarette as he grew drowsy, and set light to the upholstery. A passer – by saw the curtains on fire and called the fire brigade. Hulfa was already dead when they got to him, but from respiratory collapse from the drugs rather than smoke inhalation. There was some talk of suicide, but it was eventually brought in as accidental death.’
‘Well?’ Dickson asked, reading her tone of voice. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Only that the post mortem found there was no carbon
at all in the lungs or in the nostrils,’ Norma said. ‘It seemed to me, sir, that if he dropped the cigarette as he grew drowsy, you’d expect him to have breathed in at least some of the smoke before he died. Death from respiratory collapse isn’t instantaneous.’
Dickson gave no encouragement to supposition. ‘You don’t know how rapid the collapse was, or how slow the fire was to start.’
‘No sir,’ Norma said, meaning the opposite.
Slider took the ball back. ‘At all events, that made three dead out of the eight we were interested in. I thought it was worth running the rest of the names through the Cumberland House computer, to see if there were death certificates for any more of them. The results, now they’ve finally come through, are very interesting.’ He gestured behind him towards the whiteboard. ‘Of the eight men of Red Watch, six are dead: five of them violently, and only one from natural causes.’
‘Seventy-five per cent,’ said Dickson. ‘In sixteen years? It’s on the high side of average. Well, let’s have it. Take us through’em, Bill.’
‘In date order of their deaths: first, James Elton Sears of Castlebar Road, Ealing, full – time fireman, died November 1985, age thirty – one. He had his head stoved in by a person or persons unknown as he walked home from the pub one night. No robbery from the person. No witnesses. No arrest was ever made.
‘David Arthur Webb from Harefield, double glazing salesman, murdered April 1987, aged thirty-six. We know about him, of course. Again, not even a suspect.
‘Gary Handsworth, of Aldersbrook Road, Wanstead, chimney sweep, died in August 1988, aged thirty-three. He apparently crashed his car into a tree when he was the worse for drink, and the car caught fire. He had head injuries and a broken neck, either of which could have caused his death. There were no witnesses. It was brought in as accidental death.
‘Benjamin Hulfa, of St George’s Avenue, Tufnell Park, insurance investigator, died January 1990, aged forty-four,
of an overdose. Accidental death, or was it suicide?
‘Then we come to our own Richard Neal from Pinner, security systems salesman, died March 1991, aged fifty, in mysterious circumstances.
‘The sixth member of Red Watch to die was Barry John Lister of Dorking, Surrey, retired builder, aged sixty-six. It turns out that he was “Mouthwash”, as Swilley guessed, and she near as dammit got to speak to him. She finally managed to track him down – he’d moved around a lot – only to discover that he died on Thursday last, of a heart attack.’
‘A real heart attack?’ Dickson asked.
‘It looks that way. He died at home, with his wife present, in his own sitting room, watching
The Bill
on television.’
Dickson nodded. ‘That’d do it.’
‘He had a known heart condition, and his own doctor gave the certificate without any hesitation, so it looks all right. That only leaves two survivors from 1974: John Francis Simpson, age thirty-six, self-employed builder and decorator, with an address in St Albans, and Paul Godwin, age forty-one, who’s still a fireman, and lives in Newcastle.’
‘It certainly looks like a pattern,’ Dickson conceded, ‘and it’s not one out of
Woman’s Weekly
.’
Slider rubbed his hair up the wrong way in frowning thought. ‘Leaving aside Lister, there’s a little over a year separating each of the deaths. All could possibly have been murders, and Webb’s certainly was. All but Sears, the earliest death, involve a fire. Two of the bodies, Neal and Handsworth, were badly burned, but none of the deaths was caused by fire. The two earliest deaths, Sears and Handsworth, involved head injuries. The later three, Webb, Hulfa and Neal, died of suffocation, though the method by which it was induced was different in each case. The same three also had a background of personal problems – money troubles, depression.’ He rubbed his hair back the other way. ‘I’m not sure where that gets us.’
‘Strange, isn’t it,’ Atherton mused, ‘that only two of them stayed in the fire service after Shaftesbury Avenue closed?’
‘I don’t know,’ Slider said. ‘Nobody stays a fireman for ever.’
‘It does seem like rather a large drop-out rate, though.’
Dickson seemed to find this line unhelpful. ‘What about Lister?’ he said. ‘He’s the odd man out, isn’t he? What do you make of him?’
‘It looks as though he may have been onto something. Mrs Hulfa told us that Lister was in fact known as “Mouthwash” when he was in Red Watch. Jacqui Turner said that when she asked Neal who he was going to see on the Saturday, he said “Mouthwash”, though she didn’t realise it was a name, of course. I think we can assume that Lister was the mystery man Neal met in The Wellington.’
‘Well that’s one burning question answered, at least,’ Dickson said ironically.
‘Neal told Jacqui Turner he hadn’t seen the old friend for years, so the meeting wasn’t a matter of course. And Catriona Young said that Neal told her he had met an old friend on the Saturday who had warned him that someone was out to kill him. So it looks as though Lister may have decided for himself that all these deaths were more than coincidence. Presumably he presented Neal with at least some of the same information about his old colleagues that we have here. Exactly what he told Neal – whether he knew more than we do – of course we don’t know. And we don’t know how Neal took it, whether he believed it or not. He doesn’t seem to have said anything to Mrs Neal – but then he doesn’t ever seem to have talked to her much.’
‘What does Lister’s wife say? Presumably if he thought he had a good chance of being rubbed as well, he’d have told her about it,’ Dickson said.
‘We haven’t had a chance to interview her yet, sir. That’s next on our list.’
‘Right, let’s get to it, then. Someone tactful had better go and interview Mrs Lister, seeing she’s so recently bereaved. This is not the moment to get complaints laid against us, even frivolous ones.’
‘Norma, you take it,’ Slider said. ‘You’ve got a nice, kind face.’
‘There’s the two survivors, too,’ Atherton said. ‘Simpson and Godwin. If Lister warned Neal, he may have tried to
warn them as well.’
‘That’s priority,’ Dickson said. They’re also presumably on the hit-list. We want to get to them before the murderer – if any – does. You’d better go and see Simpson yourself, Bill, and send Beevers up to Newcastle.’ He intercepted the disappointed glances of the others and said with spare humour, ‘He’s a Methodist. He can be trusted in a strange town full of pubs.’
‘The rest of you divide up the other deaths between you,’ Slider said, suppressing a smile. ‘Pull the records, go over everything with a toothcomb. If there’s anyone to interview, go and interview them again. These men last worked together in 1974, but the deaths don’t start until 1986. What happened in between? What happened in 1986 to start it all off? Was there any other connection between the men, apart from working together? All right, let’s go.’
Muted conversation broke out as the troops got up from their various relaxed positions and moved away. Dickson, taking his departure, rubbed his hands. ‘We’ll beat that bastard yet!’ he said to no-one in particular.
It was perfectly possible, of course, to assume he meant the murderer by that; but given the aftershave and clothes-brush phenomena, Slider felt inclined to make a different identification.
The little Victorian terraced house within bonging distance of St Albans’ Cathedral yielded up Mrs Simpson, a pretty, harassed, freckle-faced woman. Her hair was tied up into a knot with a piece of string, from which it was escaping, and slipping into her eyes. She was wearing muddy rubber gloves, and there were streaks on her forehead and cheek where she had pushed the hair away without thinking.
‘I’m doing a bit of gardening,’ she explained hastily, seeing the direction of Slider’s eyes. ‘Jack’s up in the attic, doing something to the electrics. Is it trouble? He hasn’t been doing anything he shouldn’t, has he?’ A smile
accompanied the words, and her eyes were limpid with an enviable lack of apprehension.
‘No, nothing like that. I’d like to have a word with him, that’s all,’ said Slider. From beyond her, through the tiny house, came the captive roar of a washing machine in the kitchen, and the high, penetrating voices of two young male children playing in the garden.
‘I’ll go and get him, then,’ she said. ‘Come through to the kitchen, will you? Only if I don’t keep my eye on the boys, they forget and trample on the borders.’
The kitchen was full of sunshine, and beyond the window the dayglo yellow of a forsythia whipped back and forth in the sharp breeze. The washing-machine’s scream reached a peak of agony, and subsided into gurgles and whimpers as it passed from fast spin into second rinse. Outside a boy’s voice pronounced deliberately: ‘This is the goal, between here and here, all right? And I’m Peter Shilton.’
Slider went over to the back door and looked out. It was a tiny garden, with a square of lawn surrounded by crowded but neat borders, bright with genuflecting daffodils. The grim, square tower of the Cathedral rose behind the lace work of trees in the background. The sky was a pale, April blue, and large, leaky-looking clouds were bowling fast across it. England, my England, he thought.
