Laughing Boy (29 page)

So Graham Allen was in the counterfeit jeans racket. Big deal. A fine, maybe community service, and a short jail
sentence
for Cole, who had previous. There’s no such thing as victimless crime, they say, but counterfeit clothing must come close. The jeans are made in sweatshops in the Far East, paying pennies to kids who are little more than slaves.

The big names pass them on at several thousand percent mark-up and the people who buy them can’t tell the
difference
between the eighty quid ones and the fifteen quid ones, apart from the label. I wouldn’t be shedding tears for them.

“Nice business associate you have,” I said to Graham.

He looked up at me but didn’t answer.

“Did he set this up?” I hoped he would agree with me,
accept the lifeline and tell me all about it, but he still didn’t answer.

“I was talking to Monica Ferriby yesterday,” I told him, “and I know all about her husband’s little problem. You could help yourself by telling us where to find whatever it is we’re looking for.”

He said: “I am not saying anything until I have spoken to a solicitor.” The words came out all wrong, as if it were the first rehearsal of a Shakespearean play. He wasn’t as well versed as his partner in crime, but he’d learn. I was about to tell him to have it his way when Delilah started barking.

OK, I admit it. I have a thing about designer labels. I also have a thing about the type of training shoe that is
categorised
as
air
. Put them together – designer air shoes – and I go into a tizzy.

When you pay a lot of money for a pair of trainers, what you are buying is lightness. That’s fair enough. Exotic
materials
used in the construction of shoes are light but they are also expensive. Hence the price hike. But air is free. And it’s light, too. “Why not,” Mr Heap Big Trainer Manufacturer said, “simply hollow out the soles and heels and let air do the work? We could even put the price up a bit for the
innovation
.” So that’s what they did.

“She’s found something,” the dog handler said, diving into the pile of boxes after her. “Find it, girl! Find it!”

We gathered round and after a few seconds he emerged holding a shoe box. It said: ‘Top Speed Air training shoes’ on the side, with a logo of a sprinter in full flight. Delilah was jumping around, yelping with excitement. He patted her head and gave her a biscuit from his pocket. The shoes inside the box were wrapped in tissue paper. Delilah’s handler
lifted
one out and turned it over in his hands, carefully sniffing it. He held it down for the dog and she looked up at him and barked again, as if to say: “I’ve told you once.”

I wanted to say something, but decided that they were the experts and besides, it was probably obvious. The
heroin
was in the air space. This time the trainers really did
warrant
their price. I looked across to see Graham’s reaction but his head was in his hands.

It was a result, of sorts, and would let the ACC know that we weren’t sleeping on the job. Sunday I was invited round to Dave’s for lunch. We went for a brisk walk along the road to the top of the fell and back via the Ancient Shepherd, where we stayed a little too long, but not long enough to spoil the Yorkshire puddings.

The ACC wasn’t impressed, and invited me to HQ for a review meeting, ten fifteen Friday morning. He might not have been impressed but Dave, Maggie and Pete were, Monday morning, when I put the phone down and told them.

“Ten
fifteen
,” Pete said. “That sounds serious.”

“They’ll take it off us,” Maggie added.

“They’ll bring in some mutton-head from another
division
, who’ll rake over everything we’ve done and come up with nowt,” Dave asserted.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s go over it again. What have we
forgotten
?”

That evening I had another long telephone conversation with Dr Foulkes, but nothing new came out of it. Sex offenders were not his main speciality but he agreed to talk to someone in that field. It might be possible to type-cast our man, find someone who’d done something similar and use him as a template. Meanwhile, we’d continue monitoring everybody who’d ever wiggled their winky in the park who happened to live within twenty miles of Heckley. None of them had ever lived in North London – we’d already checked that.

Afterwards I did the town again. It was raining, so I put on my Gore-Tex coat and hung around the hospital
watching
the visitors. People came and went, carrying their
burdens
: nervous husbands, chain smoking, sprays of carnations
held at an awkward angle; women with umbrellas and
carrier
bags of goodies; Asian taxi drivers who deposited whole families right in the doorway. It’s not easy to be invisible, to hang around for half an hour or more without being noticed, but that’s what Laddo must have done as he selected his
victims
. Mrs Jordan-Keedy and a few others had claimed that they were being stalked, but apart from Mrs J-K these had been investigated and dismissed. One woman who
contacted
us in a state of high agitation had been followed on three successive nights from her place of employment at the DSS offices in Huddersfield all the way to her home in Church Grove, Heckley. On the fourth night we nabbed him and discovered that he was an auditor with the DSS, currently working in Huddersfield and living in Church Grove, Heckley.

A thin woman in a plastic mac walked straight past the bus stops and headed towards town. There’s a dark stretch of road where it passes the cemetery, so I followed her. At the edge of town she went into a pub called the Marquis which is frequented by city workers during the day and gays late at night. In between times, you might be standing next to a barrister having a swift one before retreating to his New York-style loft apartment or an out-of-work choreographer soaking up local colour. I went in and saw her approach a man in a Greenwoods jacket and a cap with fur earflaps, turned up. He was sipping a pint and a glass of dark liquid stood on the table, waiting for her. I decided I didn’t need a drink but as I turned to leave I saw a figure I recognised hunched at a table, deep in conversation with somebody else I knew. They didn’t see me so I sneaked out and fetched the car.

I parked about fifty yards down the road and waited. Their glasses had been nearly empty and I didn’t think they’d be staying for a session. After a few minutes I saw Tony Madison, Maggie’s husband, appear in the doorway. He paused to look at the weather, turned up the collar of his coat
and stepped into the road. I drove past him and stopped, reaching across to open the passenger side door. He looked inside, saying: “Hello, Charlie,” as he recognised me.

“Get in,” I said. “I want to talk.”

Halfway back to his house I pulled into a lay-by. “What was it tonight?” I asked. “Night class?”

“Yeah. Spanish for beginners. How to say five pints please, with egg and chips, in twelve easy lessons.”

“I’d have thought you’d’ve had enough of it through the day.”

“I know, but I’m being unkind. The night classes are a joy, Charlie, believe me, a joy. And the money’s welcome. It’s the days that are the problem. We start again on Wednesday and I’ve already got the twitch back. What do you want to talk about?”

“I’m displeased, Tony, to put it mildly.”

“What about?”

“About the company you keep.”

“What company?”

“Arnie Vernon. He’s a hack of the worst kind. To call Vernon a journalist would be an insult to the profession. Apart from being a sot he is an unscrupulous liar who would sell his sister to the Mujahedeen if there was a by-line in it. Somebody’s been running to the press agencies with tit-bits of information, for money of course, because somebody else has leaked it to them. First of all they knew we were linking the murders, then they knew that the assistant chief
constable
wanted to call in the LeStrang woman. Nothing
important
, as it happens, but it could have jeopardised the enquiry.”

His shoulders slumped and his head fell forward. I went on: “This is a murder hunt, Tony. A big one. People have died in extremely unpleasant ways and it’s not over yet. I can’t afford to have anybody on the team who isn’t with us one hundred and twenty per cent. If you’d seen them, poor Colinette Jones and the others, you wouldn’t be as eager to
talk to Vernon and his likes.”

Tony reached out and placed one hand on the dash, then twisted in his seat to face me. “It’s not Maggie,” he said. “She doesn’t come home and blabber on about everything that has happened. She just sometimes lets a little bit slip, when she’s frustrated. She knows I’m having a rough time – we have the OFSTED inspectors in next week – so she might tell me about her day, to make me feel involved. That’s all, and I don’t ask about it. She’s never in when I come home, you see more of her than I do, so I started to call in the Marquis of an evening. That’s how I met Vernon.”

“What did he do – knock your drink over?”

“No, not quite, but I see what you mean.”

We sat in silence for a few seconds. The rain had built up on the windscreen so I pressed the wiper lever down and they swept it clear. A vehicle going in the opposite direction kept his headlights on main beam as he passed us, flooding the car interior with light. Probably thought we were a
couple
of faggots having a tiff.

“She’ll leave me,” Tony said.

I didn’t comment.

“She loves working for you, Charlie,” he continued. “She’d walk to the ends of the Earth on broken glass for you. It’s my fault, not hers. I know you’ve got pressure on you, but you’re not the only ones, you know. And I’m sure you have your good times, your successes. They’re few and far between in the classroom these days, believe me. Sometimes …sometimes…” He gave a big sigh and left it at that.

I kept quiet, aware of the awkwardness, waiting for it to wear him down. After about an age he said: “My dad was a miner. Did you know?”

I didn’t.

“Well he was. The pits this way on weren’t much good. Thin and wet, with lots of faults. He was crippled with rheumatism. They were always on the point of closing,
losing
money, limping from one crisis to the next. And, of
course, the miners took the blame. Dad used to say that it wasn’t their fault: good coal made good colliers and bad coal made bad colliers. It’s the same with schools, Charlie. These days it’s all league tables, performance assessment, but it’s good kids who make good schools and bad kids who make bad schools. Teachers can only do so much.”

“Maggie’s a good officer,” I said. “And a good friend. You both are, and I don’t want to lose either. This job puts a strain on marriages, God knows I learnt that the hard way, but that’s the price we pay. We’ve just got to pull together and try to understand.”

“We’ve been having it rough lately, Charlie,” he admitted. “I think you sensed that when you came last week. This could finish us. Maggie tries, but I’ve been depressed, lately. I’ve just lost it, somehow. Lost my grip on things.”

“Talking to Vernon’s not the answer,” I said. “If you need to talk to someone talk to me or Maggie.”

“What will you say to her?”

“Maggie? I don’t know. Nothing, probably. I don’t think it’ll be necessary, do you? Anyway, we have a review meeting on Friday. They’ll probably appoint someone over my head and disband my team, so we should all have a bit more time after that.”

He gave a little snuffle of a laugh but didn’t speak.

“What?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing.”

“Go on.”

“Bad taste joke of the week. I was going to say can I quote you on that?”

I gave him a half smile and put the car in gear. As we moved off he mumbled something about appreciating it, said it wouldn’t happen again. I wondered if I was growing soft.

They found half a pound of heroin concealed in the soles of the trainers, with a street value of about a quarter of a
million
pounds after it had been diluted with powdered milk
and divided into individual hits. It would have cost about ten grand to buy, which made it, as Dave said, a nice little
earner
. Becky, Graham’s model-girl partner, was inconsolable when the news was broken to her, but there’d be no
shortage
of volunteers wanting to try. His parents doused the
barbecue
over on the Costa and caught the next flight home. We’d wondered if they’d dabbled themselves, but they appeared genuinely shocked when we eventually met them. Another supply line had been closed off which would be reflected in a small blip in the street price, and the hapless Neville Ferriby would have to either go cold turkey or
wander
round the pubs of Heckley clutching his money, looking for another source.

Monday and Tuesday Caitlin Jordan-Keedy made it to work and back home again without let or hindrance. The only figure she might have seen furtively dodging between shop doorways, the collar of his dirty mac turned up against the rain, was Peter Goodfellow. I talked to her on the phone, reassured her that we were watching, trying to convince her that we were taking her story seriously. She’d never know how badly I wanted it to be true, how much danger I
wanted
her to be in.

“Just the man,” someone said as I walked into the office and checked the kettle.

“Empty again,” I snapped, half-heartedly. “What’s the golden rule? If you empty it, you fill it.”

There were about ten of them sitting round in the office, with Sparky the centre of attraction, as usual. The only uniform was Geordie Farrell, a white mug looking like an egg cup in his fist. Someone jumped up and took the kettle from me.

Dave said: “Jeff’s been telling us about the latest drugs craze that’s sweeping the county.”

“What’s that?” I asked, turning to Jeff.

“Oh, the kids have started injecting themselves in the
mouth with ecstasy,” he replied.

I grimaced. “In the mouth?”