More Deaths Than One (15 page)

There were plenty of ifs and buts, Mayo agreed, and skirmishing around them like this was apt to make him impatient. It did no harm to bat theories around, though. That way they might hit on a possibility no one had thought of before. At the moment, however, nobody was scoring bull's-eyes.

“Never mind the details at this stage,” he said. “Let's concentrate on the broad outline.” He leafed through the sheaf of notes in his hand. It appeared that although Cockayne had apparently taken nothing else at all with him, he
had
taken his car from the bit of vacant ground behind The Leasowes where he kept it.

“He could be halfway to outer space by now,” someone muttered gloomily.

“Not if he's gone in
that
car,” Kite said. “It's a beat-up old S Reg VW Beetle and he hasn't driven it for months until now. Didn't pass its last M.O.T. and was hardly worth the cost of repairing. We'll soon have it picked up.”

“Who checked that coppice just off the road?” Mayo asked. “Where that footpath from Scotley Beeches leads to? Wasn't it you, Farrar?”

“Yes, sir,” Farrar said. “Me and Deeley. You could park a car there, no problem, there's a little clearing behind some bushes. But there was no hope of finding any traces. Some sort of heavy machinery, probably a farm tractor or something like that, had recently turned round in the gateway and it was like a ploughed field. It's in my report, sir,” he added with as much reproof in his tone as he dared, reminding Mayo of the pile of other reports on his desk, waiting to be read.

“Pity.”

If this had been a murder deliberated on by Cockayne, not a spur-of-the-moment killing, he must surely have made provision for getting away, left his car stashed away somewhere ready to pick up, and that had been the obvious place. There could be others, but few as convenient. Otherwise he would have been obliged to walk home via the main road, back to pick up his car. Maybe seven or eight miles, a couple of miles less as the crow flew. But Cockayne didn't have wings and in direct line there would have been farmers' fields and woods, muddy streams, a stretch of electrified railway line and then suburban gardens to negotiate. No, if he'd walked, unlikely as it seemed, it would have been via the road.

“Keep looking out for any other place he might've parked, lads. And put out a call for anyone who saw a man walking on the Lavenstock Road that night, George,” he said to Atkins. “Somebody must have seen him if he walked, maybe even given him a lift. It's only a minor road but a lot of drivers use it as a short cut to the main Stratford Road.”

He broke the meeting up shortly after that, removing himself from the scene and going upstairs, through the busy, orderly incident room with the jangling telephones and the flashing screens of the word processors, the clacking typewriters and the constant comings and goings of shirt-sleeved officers. There was work a-plenty to be done while Cockayne was located.

The Stockwell was a longish river, if you added its length to the Avon, which it joined after about thirty miles, but if Cockayne's body was in it, it should turn up, sooner or later. Why, though, the Stockwell? Any old river would have done just as well to drown in. Or any canal, pond, lake or reservoir, anywhere in the country, come to that.
If he
had drowned himself. He didn't have to have done away with himself that way. He didn't have to be dead.

And yet ...

Lili was sure that Cockayne was no longer alive. She had a shrewd intelligence, plus intuition, and never mind the Tarot cards, he wasn't inclined to dismiss the idea out of hand. Police work was ninety-nine percent hard slog, leg-work, method and routine, but intuition played its part occasionally and you ignored it at your peril. His sceptical policeman's mind rejected the idea as a total solution, however. And life, he'd found, when it came to the crunch, was precious, even to a murderer, even to an Ashleigh Cockayne. “If ever that would happen to me,” Cockayne had said to Lili, perhaps subconsciously admitting that enough violence was contained within himself to enable such a possibility to exist. If ever that should happen, he'd sworn to kill himself ... though not apparently through remorse, or from sorrow that he should have taken another human life, but simply because he couldn't bear the thought of his own personal freedom being curtailed through long, mournful years. That he might have had second thoughts, when it came to the moment of truth, Mayo thought entirely possible.

But if Lili
was
right, and he
had
committed suicide, his reasons for killing Fleming might never be revealed, and Fleming's demise might well go down as one of the unsolved murders of our time. It could happen, but it wasn't a possibility Mayo was going to admit until he had to. Meanwhile, the big question was: where was he – or his body?

Kite was bogged down, still making telephone calls, when Mayo stopped for lunch, so he took himself down to the Saracen's Head for a solitary ploughman's, using the time for some constructive thought. When he'd finished, he made a circuitous route back to Milford Road, by way of the Gaiety.

“Community Arts Director?” Ernest Underwood said, stacking black plastic bags full of Saturday night's rubbish outside the budding's back door. “Wouldn't pay him in washers, I wouldn't!”

What exactly his qualifications were for making such a sweeping statement wasn't clear. He was a short, muscular man of about sixty-five, with a bald head, a small moustache and a disagreeable air of self-importance. He wore a short brown holland smock over a pair of black dress trousers, a Viyella check shirt and a Lavenstock College tie to which he was almost certainly not entitled.

Mayo said, “I believe it's Mr. Cockayne's practice to collect the keys from you at night before you go home, and to see to the final locking up himself?”

“Sometimes he does, sometimes he don't.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Depends on whether he remembers or not. Careless he is. All the same, these actor types. Airy fairy.”

“You mean that sometimes doors are left unlocked all night?”

“No, I don't!” Underwood replied, scandalised. “Locked every night, they are, because I lock 'em meself. It's my responsibility. I said to him only last week, ‘Look 'ere,' I said, ‘who's responsible for this place at night, you or me? If it's you, fair enough. But if it's me, I want everybody out before I lock up and go home, and that includes you.' He knew what I meant.” He spun one of the bags expertly round and tightly secured the resultant twist with a knot. “Excuse me, got to get these outside.”

The Council wouldn't be coming to collect rubbish on a Sunday afternoon, for sure, but Ernest Underwood didn't appear to be the man to leave undone today what he could eastly do tomorrow.

“Come on, Mr. Underwood, you can't expect
me
to know what he meant,” Mayo said patiently. “Be a bit clearer, won't you?”

“He wouldn't have that, oh no, wouldn't want me hanging around waiting until he decides to go home. Does he think I don't know what's going on when he's here till all hours, and not by hisself, neither? Does he think I go round with me eyes closed? Does he think I was born yesterday?” Evidently none of these questions required an answer. “ ‘You just lock up every night and give me the keys and your responsibility's over,' he says, but it don't work like that. All that fuss last week about that builder's stuff what went missing ... well, it was
me
your lot questioned about it, not him, and I take a dim view of that. I take a very dim view.”

Sunday or not, there were plenty of activities going on at the Community Centre. A game of Ping-Pong was in process in one of the rooms; from somewhere in the distance the peculiarly tuneless singing of very young children could be heard, accompanied by a piano, some sort of Sunday school class, perhaps.

“So I decided after that,” Underwood went on self-importantly, as the children reached an uncoordinated end, “that however long Mr. Cocky Cockayne decided to stay of a night, I'd still be here. I'd give him the keys and tell him I was off home, but I wouldn't go, not me. Not until after he did, any road, and I'd checked everything was safe. I have me little cubby-hole to stay in and I have me pass keys, so that's what I did.”

Ernest Underwood was that type of person who takes pleasure in thwarting anybody who stands in higher authority than he does himself. Ashleigh Cockayne would have done better to have kept on the right side of him. A dangerous little man, thought Mayo, not by any means convinced by the reasons Underwood had given for staying on. Men like him didn't put in voluntary unpaid overtime, not unless they had cogent reasons for doing so – like doing a little bit more snooping on his own account, for instance.

“What was going on then, after the rehearsals?”

“Hanky-panky,” Underwood declared, but by the way he blustered when pressed to be more explicit, Mayo knew the caretaker had no real idea.

“All right, if you'd decided to stay behind, you must still have been here on Monday night when Mr. Cockayne left?”

Underwood nodded. “And Fleming. Waited till I saw 'em drive off together in that there red Porsche. Put the light off in me cubbyhole and watched them. Ten past eleven it was. I remember thinking good job I'd brought me bike, 'cos I'd missed the last bus while they was upstairs knocking it back, though they wasn't as late as usual.”

“Been drinking, had they? Sure about that?”

Underwood gave him a pitying smile. “Very fond of a drop, our Mr. Ashleigh, always keeps a bottle of Scotch in his cupboard.” So Cockayne was a heavy drinker, was he? This would explain, perhaps, what Lili had meant about not needing sleeping pills. “Besides,” Underwood went on, “they was none too steady on their feet, neither of 'em, when they crossed the car park, I can tell you. Couldn't hardly stand up.”

“And you didn't feel you ought to try and stop them driving?”

“Not up to me,” said Underwood.

Fleming, of course, was unused to drink in any quantity, never mind laced with barbiturates, so because he was probably already incapable, Cockayne would have been staggering too as he supported him to the car, before taking the wheel and driving him out to Scotley Beeches. This still left open a large query as to why Cockayne should just happened to have had those sleeping pills handy – not to mention a shotgun. Moreover, there hadn't been any whisky in Cockayne's office when it was searched, and Mayo told Underwood so.

“Because I'd thrown the empty bottle away, hadn't I?” Underwood retorted, a malicious light of triumph in his eyes. “No use keeping empty bottles. It's my job to see everything's cleaned up and left nice and tidy. I do the office meself, can't trust these women. Lick and a promise, that's all they're up to. I threw it in his waste basket before it was emptied, washed the glasses up and took them back.”

Mayo gave up for the time being. He wasn't going to get anything more out of Underwood. He knew what he'd seen, and what he thought about it, and you'd never get him to go back on that, even if he were proved wrong. You couldn't tell a man like this anything. He'd continue to believe that the bomb would never drop, and know that everyone else was wrong, while the crack of doom sounded and the world collapsed around him.

Mayo spent the rest of the day cramped up over his desk, sifting through the reports, going back over the evidence, and when eventually, at nigh on midnight, he was ready to call it a day, he decided to stretch his legs and expand his mind and lungs with a brisk walk home. He could leave the car in the car park and walk back again in the morning, thereby doubling the benefits. It was a goodish way, through the town and up to the summit of the hill where his flat was situated, although worth it when you got there for the view from his top-floor window, right across the town and the opposite hills beyond. But tonight, instead of going straight home to be met by the companionable ticking of his clocks – seven at the last count, with another spread out in the process of repair, which would make eight if he could find room for it – he found his long strides taking him in the opposite direction, through the meanly terraced streets and back alleys that made up the lower town.

Any passing police patrol would have recognised him; they were used to coming across him at all hours by now. It was a thing he'd begun when he was new to Lavenstock, prowling the night streets like a tom cat, staking out his territory, getting to know it, until now every nook and cranny was as familiar to him as the map of his own face.

Here, where he walked now, small factories and dwelling houses and the occasional corner shop run by Asians existed cheek by jowl. Back entries and closed factory gates interrupted the rows of grimy houses. Some of the areas were scheduled for demolition and there were gaps in the streets that showed backyards and neglected garden plots and vacant lots. Dustbins stood on the kerbside and a forsaken air of dereliction prevailed, though here and there was the occasional house with shining windows and bricks painted in colours to bring back reminders of Caribbean sunshine. In the distance the gaunt tower blocks of the Somerville Estate – contemporary successors of the old brick mill chimneys – rose dark and black, punctured here and there with the floating golden squares of lighted windows, indicating the presence of other night birds like himself.

Leaving the canal behind him, he turned sharply, leaning into the cold east wind and crossing the bridge over the river and on to Stockwell Street and the beginnings of the smarter part of the town. For the second time that day Mayo found himself outside the Community Centre. It stood in darkness, now closed, its bulky presence dwarfing the row of small shops and the wine bar next to it, also shut.

Darkness at the back of the building too, except for one small, dim night-lamp that lit the narrow cantilevered terrace jutting out over the river, where on clement summer evenings a few tables and chairs were set out for drinks. He climbed the half-dozen steps to the terrace, resting his elbows on the railings and looking out over the water. The river flowed swiftly, darkly; the sound of the weir came like distant music.
Did
death come peacefully by drowning? Who could know, except the dead? Ashleigh Cockayne, for instance. Impatiently, symbolically rejecting an idea that he was afraid might easily become an obsession, he turned his back on the dark water and leaned against the railings, facing the theatre.