Grief Encounters (8 page)

I jumped out, rubbed off the surplus moisture, and spoke into the phone: ‘Some pubs are far away, some pubs are near. If you’re offering to take me to one I might even buy you a beer.’

‘Evening Charlie,’ the duty sergeant replied. ‘I take it you were expecting somebody else.’

‘Oh, hello Arthur. I thought it might be Sparky offering to take me out. Go on, what have we got?’

‘Sorry to bother you but it’s a bit garbled and Davy Rose is attending a burglary at Sylvan Fields. A GP in the Westwood estate received an emergency call about a woman having an asthma attack. She went off in an ambulance but he’s rung us to say that there were signs of violence in the room where he found her.’

‘Does the woman have a husband?’ It’s usually the husband.

‘He was miles away but he raised the alarm. I think the woman must have managed to ring him.’

It wasn’t the husband. ‘OK. Give me the address. You got me out of the shower so I’ll pull some clothes on and ring you from the car in about three minutes. See what else you can find out.’

I dressed again in the clothes I’d worn all day and gave a hungry look at the takeaway menu as I left home. The duty sergeant didn’t have anything to add to what he’d already told me except that the woman was called Johnson, her three-year-old daughter was with her and her husband was on his way to Heckley General, where she’d been taken. I rang Maggie Madison and asked her to go there and handle that end. There’s a law against using the phone whilst driving, but what the heck, everybody does it and it makes you feel clever and important.

The sun had set but there was no cloud cover and the sky was still light when I arrived. It was a tidy, detached house on the edge of the estate. One of our panda cars had made the initial response to the call, and they were waiting for me. A neighbour had explained what Mr Johnson did for a living and told them that it looked as though his Subaru Impreza had been stolen. I glanced through the open door and saw the damage inside. It looked senseless, but it wasn’t. They’d done it to instil terror in the poor woman, make her compliant. They wanted the keys to the car, not a conversation. A quick glance around supported my initial conclusions: none of the other rooms had been turned over and it wasn’t the sort of house that would have a Turner hanging on the kitchen wall or a few emeralds in a drawer. Their most expensive possession was the car, and it had gone.

Motive: theft of motor vehicle. I was sure of it. It happens all the time. I rang Maggie at the hospital and she had to come outside to use her phone.

‘Ask Mr Johnson if there should be a Subaru standing on the drive, Maggie.’

‘He’s here,’ Maggie replied, ‘outside the hospital. His daughter is with him so he’s had to bring her out. Hang on, I’ll ask him.’

There was a long silence, then: ‘Are you there, boss?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Affirmative the car. Looks like they stole it.’

‘It’s a vehicle theft, then. How’s Mrs Johnson?’

‘She’s in a bad way, in intensive care.’

‘Right. I’ll protect the scene, then, just in case. Can you ask Mr Johnson if his car is fitted with a Tracker, please?’
Just in case
meant just in case she dies. If she did, I’d launch a murder enquiry and the purse strings would be loosened. We’d test for footprints, DNA, fibres and anything else we could think of. Much of the testing for DNA would be speculative, because you can’t see the stuff. Swabs would be taken in likely places and all the tests run on them. Most, nearly all, would be a waste of time, but sometimes you get lucky. For a simple car theft the SOCO would fit the case into his workload and come along when he had the chance. He’d dust around for fingerprints and that would be it. Except…

‘Boss…’

‘I’m here.’

‘Negative, no Tracker fitted.’

‘Thanks. That means we’ll have to find it the hard way. Ask him the number.’

I telephoned HQ and had an APB put out for the Subaru and asked for all units to look for it. It could have been stolen to order, in which case it would be spirited far away, as fast as possible, or it could have been taken to use on a job. If the villains were planning a job, we were in with a chance. That was the
except
.

I found a fish and chip shop open and had a special and chips, washed down with Tango. I ate them from the paper, sitting on a wall outside the chippy as it grew dark around me. As soon as reinforcements arrived to preserve the crime scene I went home. It had been a long day.

Through the night they stabilised Mrs Johnson’s breathing and took her off the critical list. They increased her medication but decided to keep her for another day as a precaution. Half an hour after starting work, the six-to-two shift found the Subaru parked innocently in a street of domestics just outside the double-yellow zone, barely a mile from the Westwoods. It was in the end parking place, ready for a quick getaway. I learnt all this as I hobbled into the station at seven, the night before’s jogging making itself felt.

‘It’s all yours, then, Jeff,’ I told Jeff Caton, up in the office, trying to hide my reluctance to hand the case over. Mrs Johnson’s recovery had taken the pressure off me, but the Magdalena murder was bogged down and the thought of dashing all over town after more obvious criminals had great appeal. ‘Let me know if you need any help,’ I added as I accepted a mug of coffee from Maggie.

‘Ooh, I think we’ll be able to manage,’ he replied with a grin, reading my mind.

‘So what’s a corgi fitter?’ somebody asked.

‘They work for the gas board. Everything you have done to your gas has to be done by a corgi fitter.’

‘So what’s corgis to do with it?’

‘It’s like canaries down a coalmine,’ Brendan explained. ‘Every gas fitter has a corgi in a little basket. If there’s a gas leak it keels over.’

‘It stands for something…something…Registered Gas Installer,’ Dave informed us.

‘
Council of
Registered Gas Installers,’ another added. Individually we might be rubbish, but between us we know everything.

‘So why did they name a dog after a company that looks for gas leaks?’ Maggie asked.

‘Because the Queen keeps corgis,’ Brendan informed us. ‘They used to be called something else, but one day there was a massive gas leak in Buckingham Palace and this brave little dog dashed into the State Room, where the Queen was about to give somebody a knighthood, and grabbed the train of her frock and started to drag her towards the door. The Queen didn’t realise what it was all about and, as she just happened to be holding a sword in her hand, she chopped off the dog’s head. “There, you little bugger,” she told it, “that’ll learn you,” but then she smelt gas and realised what the dog had been trying to tell her. On the spot she decreed that they be known as corgis for ever after.’

‘And she vowed never to smile again,’ Jeff added.

‘Oh aye. I forgot that bit.’

I shook my head and stood up.

Villains are unable to tell if a car has a Tracker device fitted, so they can’t take it to a secure hideout in case it has. They just leave it at the side of the road and wait. If we don’t collect it within hours they assume it’s safe, and pick it up at their convenience. Jeff would have the Subaru watched all day. They didn’t steal it to save a mile walk home. He’d also ask the mobiles not to stray too far away from Heckley, and ask for the chopper to be standing by with full tanks. We both had a feeling about the car, suspected it was all part of a bigger plan.

Maggie and Dave joined me in my office. They were about halfway through the Popes who lived within East Pennine division, and Leeds were similarly placed. We were having to ask neighbouring divisions to help in the trace, interview and eliminate process because we didn’t have the manpower and my HMET authority cut across boundaries.

When we’d finished discussing the case Dave said: ‘Did you hear about DCS Swainby?’ It had been exactly a week since he dropped his bombshell at the meeting and the rumour machine had been as quiet as a dead sheep on valium.

‘No.’

‘Well, it appears that vice have taken an interest as his name came up in the Operation Swampland disclosures. They’ve found thousands of obscene images on his computer.’

Maggie said: ‘Swampland? That was the paedophilia enquiry, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s right,’ Dave replied. ‘They busted a major player and came up with all these names, and vice are slowly working their way through our quota.’

I remembered what Swainby had told us. ‘When I saw him at his meeting he said we’d hear rumours. He asked us to give him the benefit of the doubt; claimed they were without foundation.’

‘I bet he did.’

‘Well I’ll not be listening to them. So what are we doing?’

‘More Popes,’ Maggie said.

‘Right. Keep at it. Any worth me doing a
follow-up
on?’

There were, so that’s what I did, but it was a waste of time. There was a couple who had convictions for receiving stolen property, one burglar with a single conviction eight years previously and one who had defrauded the DSS of several thousand pounds until an investigator caught him on video laying a block paving drive for a neighbour. None of them appeared to be related, all had wives who gave them alibis, none knew of anybody with that name who had been away from Heckley for several years. It wasn’t conclusive, but the slippers by the hearth, the half-finished ship in the bottle and the racing pigeons down on the allotment all conspired to tell me I could be better employed. Mid-afternoon I called it a day and went back to the nick. The temperature had dropped and thunder clouds were building up in the west.

Jeff was all alone there, at his desk, waiting for the phone call. He hadn’t learnt that it never rings when you’re waiting for it. You should immerse yourself in something fascinating, or put a pan of milk on.
Then
it rings.

‘Any action?’ I asked, after I’d made us both a coffee and collected two KitKats from my private stash. Before I sat down I walked over to the door and switched on the office lights. All over town people were doing the same thing, lighted windows spreading like a rash ahead of the storm.

He shook his head. ‘And you?’

‘Nope.’

‘Perhaps we’ll be lucky and have a quiet weekend.’

We both took big bites of the biscuits, and that’s when the phone rang. Jeff swallowed first. ‘DS Caton,’ he spluttered into it as the first flurry of rain rattled against the glass.

They’d knocked over a security man delivering cash for the ATMs in the wall of the supermarket just off the town centre, and escaped with two cash boxes of money. He’d been bashed on the helmet with an iron bar, and one of the robbers may have been armed. He had something ‘like a shotgun’ wrapped in a plastic bag and they both wore stocking masks. They’d driven off in a dark blue saloon, possibly a Ford Escort. The standard procedure is to flee from the scene in one vehicle, which will probably be seen by witnesses, and switch to a waiting vehicle that has been left somewhere quiet, like in the middle of a housing estate. We went downstairs to the control room and the duty sergeant handed Jeff a headset.

They were amateurs, or thick. Professionals would have done the deed in the highly recognisable Subaru and had the innocuous Ford waiting nearby for their ultimate getaway. But because of its superior performance and reputation as a rally car the ringleader no doubt had romantic notions about outrunning any pursuers, but not many cars can outpace a 170mph Eurocopter or jump roadblocks.

Jeff told the cars ringing the Subaru to stand by.

‘It’s howling down with rain,’ came the reply. ‘I’m having to use my wipers, which gives the game away, somewhat. Otherwise I can’t see out of the windows.’

‘Blimey, we have a cloudburst,’ someone added.

‘It’ll be the same for them,’ Jeff said.

‘Headlights approaching from behind. Coming past. It’s a Ford Escort. Dark blue, must be them.’

‘You’re in control,’ Jeff told the sergeant on the scene. ‘Repeat: you’re in control.’

‘Understood.’

There was a silence as we imagined the Ford pulling in behind the parked Subaru, then: ‘Roadblocks go for it. Moving in. Go! Go! Go!’

‘Jesus! It’s a monsoon.’

‘They’re legging it.’

‘Which way?’

‘Through the gardens.’

‘Towards you.’

‘We’ve lost them.’

‘No we haven’t.’

Garbled messages came through, interspersed with bursts of static as the thunderstorm passed over, followed by a long silence. We waited.

Nearly ten minutes later a voice said: ‘Two suspects arrested; bringing them in,’ and we breathed again.

Saturday morning we caught up with the Popes who had been unavailable through the week. I went to see one in Marsden who kept koi carp, or living jewels, as he called them. Fish should be silver and slick, I thought, not bedecked like the flag of an African republic, but he obviously disagreed. The sky was clear as I drove up there, and the moors steamed like smouldering leaves.

The would-be robbers were called Wayne Rodway and Joseph Clark, both aged twenty-two, and early Sunday morning we had to let them go. After a chase through several gardens they’d been arrested in the house of Clark’s ex-wife, sitting watching
Ready Steady Cook
on TV with their hair plastered to their heads and pools of water forming around their feet. They’d been there for at least an hour, they claimed, and the ex-wife’s flaxen locks nodded in confirmation.

We needed forensic evidence to put them in either of the cars, but the Subaru’s doors had been left wide open and the downpour had done a decent job of sluicing out the interior. They’d worn cotton gloves, which they’d thrown off as they fled, but the masks weren’t found. They must have discarded them earlier. All the money was retrieved, which was little consolation. After thirty-six hours it was muck or nettles. Jeff had to either charge them or let them go. It was no big deal. They were released on police bail but we knew where to find them and we’d be keeping an eye on their movements.

I made myself a chicken sandwich and flask of coffee and went for a walk up Signal Hill. It’s about three miles to the top but I followed the canal for a while to lengthen the walk. The fishermen were out in force, their poles impossibly long as they screwed extra sections on to them, reaching out across the water to where they hoped the fish were waiting. Some nodded a hello, most were too absorbed to notice me. Mr Wood is a fisherman, but he prefers to go for salmon or trout, not what are known as coarse fish. There’s a pecking order amongst anglers as with everything else. A heron flapped over, wings like barn doors, looking down in dismay at the crowded towpath. He’d probably go hungry today, I thought.