Last Reminder (13 page)

‘Is – is that of any use to you, Inspector?’ she wondered.

I stroked my lips with the knuckle of my first finger. ‘Nothing else?’ I asked. ‘Did he ever mention it again?’

‘No, never.’

‘Try to think.’

‘I’ve been thinking about it since your first visit. There’s nothing else. How close are you to finding Hartley’s…the person who attacked him?’

I uncrossed my legs and pushed myself more upright in the chair. ‘I thought we were fairly close,’ I told her, grateful that she hadn’t referred to his killer. ‘But this new information widens the field. Now there are a lot more people “in the frame”, as
we say.’ I like to throw in some jargon, people expect it from a cop.

‘So you have… You are, er, following certain lines of enquiry?’

She was better at it than me. ‘Well, I shouldn’t really be telling you this,’ I said, picking my cup up again, ‘but we’ve found a hair at the scene of the crime. As soon as we have a suspect we’ll see if it matches. If it does, they have some explaining to do.’

The tissue fell to pieces in her grasp. It wasn’t Kleenex’s fault, she’d have done the same with a piece of corrugated iron.

‘A hair?’ she whispered.

‘Yes.’ I finished my tea and leant forward. ‘Let me explain how we work, these days,’ I confided. ‘Off the record, of course. We don’t just gather obvious clues, like hairs and fingerprints. We try to analyse the behaviour of the criminal, from all the little, apparently inconsequential things that he does, and from this we build up a portrait of the person we are looking for. In theory we could take a hair sample from everyone in the country, but this way we’ll narrow it down, eventually, to just the one we want.’

‘H-how can you be so sure?’ she asked, white faced.

I wasn’t enjoying this, but I waved a hand expansively, as if I was being matey, revealing little
titbits to a friend. ‘We can’t,’ I admitted, ‘but I’ll tell you what we have so far. This is the picture, as I see it. The attacker arrives Monday morning, say about eight thirty. Picks up a bottle of milk from the doorstep and enters. Either the door is unlocked or he has a key. Mr Goodrich is apparently watching TV, glass of whisky by his side. The attacker hits him on the head with a handy pot plant, Goodrich slumps forward, dead. Fingerprints! thinks our assailant. He then fetches the tea-towel, which he knows is concealed under the work surface, wipes the plant pot clean and replaces the tea towel where it belongs. He is a very tidy person. On the way out he remembers the milk bottle and puts it back on the doorstep, after wiping that, too. I keep saying “he”. It could, of course, be a she. When we find someone who was sufficiently familiar with him and his home to fit in with that little scenario, we’ll just use the hair for confirmation.’

‘I see,’ she said in a very tiny voice, her expression somewhere far away, like Holloway.

I jumped up, looking at my watch, and made a hurried goodbye. ‘Anything else you want to tell me?’ was my parting invitation, but she shook her head. As I left she closed the door behind me and I heard the click of the latch.

I sat in the car for several minutes, wondering and worrying about her. It would have been easy to go back, tell her that Goodrich died of a heart
attack twelve hours before he was hit on the head, but I didn’t. I just placed the key in the ignition and turned it. Nobody had wired half a kilogram of Semtex across the terminals, so the engine started and I drove back to Heckley.

Roland Fearnside is a commander with the National Criminal Intelligence Service. We’ve worked together on a few cases, and I was probably instrumental in giving him a leg-up from being a mere chief superintendent. I normally try to avoid him, because he usually has a dirty job in mind for me, but this time I rang him.

‘I’m afraid Mr Fearnside is busy,’ a plummy voice told me. ‘Please leave me your number and I’ll ask him to contact you.’

‘Convenience busy or really busy?’ I asked.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Tell him you have Charlie Priest on the line and I’d like an urgent word with him.
Please
.’ No point in admitting to being a lowly inspector.

Twenty seconds later he was booming in my ear. ‘Charlie! How are you?’

‘Fine, Mr Fearnside. And you?’

‘Oh, so-so. And Annabelle?’

‘She’s fine, too.’

‘Still got the E-type?’

‘Sure have.’

‘Bloody hell! You’re a lucky bugger, Charlie. To tell the truth, I’d thought about giving you a bell.’

This was what I’d dreaded. ‘Oh, that usually means bad news,’ I declared.

‘No, not at all. I need a joke for an after-dinner speech I’m giving tonight. Thought you might be able to help.’

Typical. I cultivate a contact in N-CIS and he regards me as the force comedian. He probably believed I did the northern club circuit in my spare time. ‘Who’s it to?’ I asked.

‘Accountants. City types. Bunch of bloody deadbeats. Keeping them sweet is all part of the job, I’m afraid. All you have to bother about is collaring villains.’

‘Mmm. Rather you than me. I’ll have to think about it.’

‘If you would, old boy. Now what can I do for you?’

I told him about Goodrich, and the SCTs against his name, and that we now suspected he may have been laundering drugs money by investing it in diamonds. ‘Yesterday,’ I said, ‘I interviewed his girlfriend and she told me that Goodrich was in cahoots with a character called K. Tom Davis, who was MD of the investment diamond company. She
said that Goodrich told her, in a moment of alcohol-induced weakness or high passion, that Davis was involved in the Hartog-Praat bullion robbery.’

I heard Fearnside say, ‘Jeeesus!’ under his breath.

‘So,’ I went on, ‘what can you tell me about the bullion robbery?’

‘Right. Well, it was World War Two gold, recovered from a sunken destroyer – British – by treasure hunters, somewhere in the Baltic, I believe. Hartog-Praat is a Dutch security company, and it was their job to transport the bullion to the assay office in Sheffield. They went for the hush-hush approach, rather than maximum security, but somebody spilt the beans. It was a nasty job. If I remember rightly they doused a guard in petrol and threatened to ignite him. One guard died, but much later.’

‘Was anybody caught?’

‘Ye-es. Can’t remember his name. He was a known bank robber, who handled the actual hijack. Definitely not the brains. He went down for a long time and a couple of minions were given a year or two for allowing their premises to be used, something like that. I’ll have to dig the file out, put you on to the investigating officer.’

‘Was any of the gold recovered?’

‘No, not a bloody sniff of it. Tell you what, Charlie: gold would be a damn sight more
attractive to these drugs dealers than diamonds. Gold can’t tell lies.’

‘Mmm. One of my DSs said exactly the same thing. I’ll be grateful if you could send me anything relevant, soon as pos.’

‘I’ll put someone straight on to it, Charlie. Good luck, and it’s been nice talking to you.’

‘Likewise. Just one last thing, before you go.’

‘Yes?’

‘What’s pink and hard, first thing in the morning?’

‘Ha ha! Go on.’

‘
The Financial Times
crossword.’

‘Hee hee! That’ll do, Charlie. That’ll do.’

Another unwanted reputation reinforced. I replaced the phone and drew a doodle on my pad. It showed a ship, long and lean, with a gun on the front. I added some fish and bubbles, to indicate that it was on the sea-bed. Bits of the story came back to me. There was a big controversy after the wreck was discovered. It was an official war grave, sacred to the memory of the men whose bodies were still down there. But even sanctity has a price, these days, and when the value of the destroyer’s cargo was estimated there were an awful lot of noughts after the pound sign. Had it been Communist gold, coming here to pay for the convoys? Or allied gold, to support the carnage on the Russian front? I didn’t know, but either way, it
was blood money, and no good could come of it.

I drew a line down the middle of the page. At the top of one column I wrote ‘Drugs Dealers’, at the head of the other, ‘Gold’. The drugs dealers were awash with cash. Cash that they needed converting into something more solid, more negotiable across the world. Such as gold.

The bullion men were just the opposite. They needed their collateral converting into something more acceptable in straight society. Cash, for instance.

They needed each other like Yorkshire pudding needs onion gravy. I drew a circle round ‘Drugs Dealers’ and wrote ‘The Jones Boys?’ against it.

But what about the diamonds? The first payments were invested – wrong word – in diamonds. But the diamonds went bust and the payments kept on coming in. So what did the dealers get for that money after that? Gold? When we were role-playing, Jeff Caton said he preferred gold. I pinned the sheet on the wall above my desk, next to the photograph of Shirley Eaton.

Gilbert was clearing his desk, prior to his holiday. ‘Put the kettle on as you pass,’ he greeted me as I walked in.

I tested its weight and clicked the switch. He was rummaging in a filing cabinet so I flopped down into his chair and swung my feet on to the desk. ‘I think I could get used to this,’ I told him.

‘Then go for it,’ he said, lifting a whisky bottle from a drawer.

‘No, the boredom would get me down.’

Gilbert stood the bottle on the cabinet and crouched, squinting at the level, and carefully drew a line on the label.

‘You’re wasting your time,’ I told him. ‘We just widdle in the bottle to bring it back up to the mark.’

‘That I can believe,’ he said, nodding enthusiastically.

We discussed priorities and a couple of low-level meetings he wanted me to attend. I didn’t mention the raid on Michael Angelo’s planned for Wednesday. I would have liked to have grilled him about Dominic Watts, the father, but resisted, in case he asked why I wanted to know.

Nigel was in with several of the other troops when I arrived back in the CID office. We spent an hour discussing ram raids and burglaries, and generally slagging-off some of the problem families that give us most heartache. Sometimes, a programme of selective assassination sounds highly attractive, until you realise where it would lead. Plenty of my colleagues would be prepared to risk it, I’m ashamed to admit. Then we all went home.

Tomorrow was the big day. Once a year, towards the end of his term of office, we have a Lord Mayor’s parade, to raise money for his nominated charity. This time it was for the children’s ward of
Heckley General Hospital. A cavalcade of vehicles would start at the Town Hall at noon and slowly wend its way round the town to the sports field, where there would be various other events taking place. The classic car section of the Police Sports and Social Club would take part in the parade, and I was invited. It was their only event of the year. When I got home, I reversed the E-type out of the garage and gave it a wash and leathering. Then I sat on the wall and just gazed at it until the street lamps came on.

Last year, Annabelle came with me, and we had a good day. This time I’d be on my own, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. I picked up the phone and dialled Sparky’s number. His wife answered.

‘Hiya, Shirl. It’s Charlie,’ I said.

‘He’s out,’ she responded. ‘No, he’s drunk. That’s it: he’s had three pints of home-made lager and is in no fit state to drive, or anything else.’

‘Relax, it’s you I want to talk to.’

‘Oh. In that case, hello, Charlie, how are you?’

‘It’s nice of you to ask, eventually. Look, it’s the Lord Mayor’s parade tomorrow, and I’ve promised to take the Jaguar along. If the kids aren’t doing anything I was wondering if they’d like to come, too?’

‘Oh, that’s nice of you. But won’t Annabelle be going?’

‘Er, no, she’s got something else on.’

‘Right. Hang on, I’ll see if they can be torn away from the television.’

They weren’t doing anything, and they would love to come to the parade with their Uncle Charlie.

Hunger drove me out of bed early Saturday morning. I settled for toast and marmalade for breakfast but decided to treat myself that evening. I trimmed the fat from a couple of pork chops and seared them in the frying pan. I arranged them side-by-side in the slow cooker and covered them with a selection of vegetables and a can of condensed soup. They’d be done to perfection by tea time.

Nigel was in the office when I swung the long nose of the Jag into the super’s place in the car park. We discussed the Dean brothers’ case that was coming to court, and, after great deliberation and much soul-searching, I wrote ‘No further action’ on several documents Gilbert had left for me. The feeling of power made me feel light-headed. At eleven thirty I tore myself away and drove round to Sparky’s.

Daniel hadn’t changed much since I last saw him, just grown a little bigger and cheekier. He was the type of exasperating fourteen-year-old that you curse one moment and then say a little prayer of thanks for. ‘Hi, Uncle Charlie,’ he greeted me as they came down the garden path.

But Sophie had changed. No wonder Sparky’s
grumpier than ever, I thought. In less than a year she’d grown up. She was my god-daughter, and just past her seventeenth birthday. I reluctantly accepted that this was possibly the last time she’d want to be seen out with an old fogey like me. I held the door open and Daniel scrambled into the back. ‘Thank you,’ Sophie said, swinging her legs into the low car as if she’d been doing it for years. I waved to Shirley and slipped into the driving seat.

The parade was fun. Sophie practised her regal wave and Daniel pretended to be manager of Manchester United, back from another triumphant visit to Wembley. At first we were behind a steamroller, but we out-gunned him on the High Street without too much trouble. It was driven by the local scrap dealer, whose skin is the colour of an oily rag and who drives the biggest Mercedes in West Yorkshire.

The rest of the afternoon was a drag. While the kids enjoyed the fun fair and the police dog demonstration, I stayed with the car, and told several hundred people that it did a hundred and fifty miles per hour and nineteen to the gallon. They brought ice-creams back with them and Sophie presented me with a fridge magnet she’d won. It was a little plastic Sherlock Holmes, complete with magnifying glass. Then I left them in charge while I took a stroll round.

They were deep in conversation with an older
boy and girl when I arrived back. ‘We’ve had our pictures taken for the paper,’ Daniel boasted when he saw me.

‘Ask him, he won’t bite,’ Sophie said to the young couple, adding, ‘he’s quite nice, really.’

‘Ask him what?’ I said, giving them a smile.

She was quite bonny, and he looked presentable, with the obligatory earring. ‘It’s a fabulous car,’ the boy said, his expression supporting his words.

‘Thank you. Do you want to buy it?’

‘Uh, chance’d be a fine thing,’ he replied.

‘We were wondering if you did weddings,’ the girl said.

‘Weddings? No. My name is Priest, but I can’t marry people.’

‘No! We meant with the car. Like, a taxi service?’

‘Oh, I see. Well no, not really.’

They looked disappointed. ‘Never mind then,’ the girl replied. ‘I hope you didn’t mind us asking. We wanted a white Rolls-Royce, but we’ve been let down. We just thought you might…you know.’

I tried, but I couldn’t think of a decent reason for not doing it. ‘When do you get married?’ I asked.

‘Next Saturday.’

‘Leaving it a bit late aren’t you? Er, for the taxi, I mean.’

They both blushed, which made three of us.

‘My Uncle George has a Granada,’ she said. ‘We’ll use that if we can’t find anything else.’

‘Which church?’

‘St Bidulph’s.’

‘Oh.’

‘Do you know it?’

‘Yes, I do.’ Annabelle lives in the old vicarage. ‘So where’s the reception?’

She was smiling now. ‘At the Masonic Hall,’ she said.

‘In the town centre?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Right. Give me a number where I can contact you, and I’ll give you a ring through the week. But I’m not making any promises.’

I took the kids for a drive on the M62 to the Birch services, where we had hamburgers and chips. Daniel said, ‘Doctor, Doctor, I keep thinking I’m a pair of curtains.’

‘No wonder you look drawn,’ I replied.

‘No! You should say, “Pull yourself together.”’

Sophie said, ‘I think Uncle Charlie’s answer was best,’ to which Daniel retorted, ‘Well you would, wouldn’t you,’ and poor Sophie blushed like only a seventeen-year-old can. Anybody watching would have thought we were a family.

I was in trouble for feeding them when we arrived back. Shirley, their mother, teaches cookery and had prepared beef stroganoff for us, with jam roly-poly to follow. I wasn’t hungry, but still managed large helpings of each. The pork chops
made a pleasant change for Sunday breakfast, before I went to the office for a couple of hours. Paperwork, like rust, never sleeps.

The Dean brothers were due in court Monday morning. They are considerably brighter than the average tea leaf who passes through our hands. Computers and videos are standard fare for most of them, exchanging hands at about fifteen per cent of their market value. But a young crook can only carry one of each out through the window and up the garden path to his waiting Fiesta, and he looks suspicious with it. The Dean brothers know that it’s the chip, deep within the computer, that gives it its value. And you can carry hundreds of them in your pockets and still have room for a UB40 and a packet of three. They hit the new British Gas offices six months ago at two in the morning. The security videos showed them moving quickly from computer to computer, spinning the screws out with rechargeable drivers and removing the chips and hard-disk drives which represented well over half the value of the machines.