More Deaths Than One (16 page)

All was tidy now at the back of the building. Ron Prosser had evidently finished his work, his building tackle had been taken away, so Lili Anand would have something to be pleased about, at any rate. There was nothing now to be seen except a rough scaly patch in one corner where cement had been mixed. The dim light shone on the water-steps where boats could tie up. He fancied for a moment he saw something which stirred the glimmerings of an idea in his mind, an idea which grew, exciting him. No, it wouldn't work, not single-handed. Or would it? He walked down the steps of the terrace and onto the walkway alongside the river, towards the water-steps, and once there got down on his knees. He stood up and thought about it for a long time. The idea, bizarre as it seemed, wouldn't go away.

“Beware of applying logic and common sense to a situation where logic and common sense don't exist,” a senior colleague had told him once when he was a very young P.C. And he'd been right. Neither quality had got them very far in this case up to the moment, where neither quality seemed to apply. Right, then. Maybe it was time to see what a bit of intuition and gut feeling could do ...

“So here's an undertaking well accomplished!”

THE LOCAL WEEKLY PAPER, the
Advertiser,
came out on Friday, but it was Monday morning before Kite got around to seeing it. He buried his head in it over breakfast while all around him seethed the usual commotion of his family getting ready for the day.

“Mum, you haven't done it yet!” came in an accusing voice from Davey.

Sheila said, “Now, Davey,” and grabbed a piece of toast on her way to the bottom of the stairs. “Hurry
up,
Daniel!” she yelled. “Mrs. Barlow'll be here in a couple of minutes.” She was still in her dressing gown but her face was made up, her curly brown hair brushed and combed so that she'd be ready to leave for the office in ten minutes flat after the boys had left.

“I can't find my swimming things,” Daniel wailed back.

Sheila raced up the stairs. It wasn't her turn to ferry the neighbourhood children to school, or she'd have made Daniel look for them, but as it was it was quicker to go and look herself.

Davey was whingeing on, “Dad, she hasn't written my note yet!” Kite lowered his paper. “What's the matter with your tie?” he asked, seeing one end somewhere near Davey's right ear, the other by his left knee.

“It doesn't fit me.”

“Doesn't
what?
Here, let's have a look.” Kite grinned and re-tied the offending garment. “Hopeless, you are, my lad, did you know? And what's all this about a note?”

“For not doing my homework yesterday.”

“Oh? And
why
didn't you do your homework yesterday?”

“I was sick.”

“You don't look sick to me.”

“I'm not now.”

Kite regarded the insouciant face of his son and sighed. “Pass me that pad. Is there a pen anywhere?”

“Thanks, Dad, that's brilliant,” Davey beamed, while Kite scribbled the note, reproaching himself, not for the first time, for being so little involved in his kids' lives that he didn't even know when they'd been sick. A motor horn sounded outside, there was a last-minute scramble before the boys at last were off, Sheila came back and began to clear the table around him. Kite put his paper down again.

“Leave that, love, I'll do it. Sit down and finish your coffee.”

She perched for a token moment on the edge of the chair and took a gulp of coffee before jumping up again. “Must get ready.”

“I wrote Davey's note.”

“Oh, you did, did you?” she said, pausing. “And you the great detective! Don't you recognise a malingerer when you see one? I told him he'd have to confess to Mrs. Pound himself, Martin.”

In that case, Kite was rather glad he'd saved his son an ordeal he wouldn't have wanted to face himself. But in all honesty he had to admit he'd maybe given in too easily. It wasn't an attitude Mrs. Pound herself would have called “supportive.” He was a rotten parent, he told himself, and Sheila often had more than her share to put up with, though she rarely complained. “I'm sorry, love.” He reached for her hand, drew her down and gave her a kiss. “All the same, I wouldn't wish one of Jennifer Pound's ‘little talks' on my worst enemy.”

“Oh, you're as bad as Davey!” Sheila said, but he saw he was forgiven. Passing his chair, she bent and rested her cheek briefly on his head. “Bye, love. You'll be gone when I get down, I expect.” The headlines on the paper he'd put down stared up at her. “Poor Georgina. What a ghastly thing, Martin.”

The murder was, of course, splashed all over the front page. Kite said, “You know Georgina Fleming?”

“Knew her at school, only she was Georgina Culver then.”

“You never told me.”

“Yes, I did, the other day at breakfast, only you weren't listening.”

“How can anybody listen to anything in this morning madhouse?”

Kite demanded. “What was she like then? She's a pretty cool character now.”

“Martin Kite, do you seriously think I can sit down,
now
at ten past eight, oh God, nearly twenty past, and discuss something you've had plenty of opportunity to ask about before? I've a job to go to, remember? Not one whose hours I can change to suit myself. Sorry, must go and dress. Talk to you about it tonight – if you're in.”

Kite's attitude, when Mayo told him of the theory he'd formulated at the back of the Gaiety the previous night, was frankly sceptical, though he didn't actually say so, and he left willingly enough to see Ron Prosser (Lavenstock) Ltd. Albeit with an air of “well, you're the boss!” about him.

Prosser's yard proved to be a space at the side of his house, which was a between-the-wars brick-built semi, the end one of three pairs wedged in between a terrace of Edwardian stucco and a new shopping parade. A dish aerial for Sky Television was set on the house roof; the latest Volvo stood on a short concrete drive. It was another windy day and over the back-garden fence Kite could see washing blowing on the line. Pushing open a pair of double wooden gates with Prosser's name painted across them, he picked his way across a lunar landscape of heaped red sand, used bricks and piles of reclaimed timber. A chipped enamel bath lay on its side, several battered stainless steel sinks propped against it. Steel scaffolding pipes lay about to trip the unwary, and under a corrugated roof rolls of wire netting, roofing felt and cement in bags were untidily housed. Skirting a cement mixer, standing like some asteroid about to stride forward, Kite made for the office, ramshackle affair in the corner, with Prosser's pick-up truck outside. As he approached, a Rottweiler appeared from nowhere and, making no sound, walked alongside him with the sleek heavy grace of a prize-fighter, sidling inside with him when he obeyed the instructions to open the door and enter.

The small room was so cluttered with an old-fashioned safe, a battered desk and filing cabinets that there was scarcely room to get inside. Samples of building materials stood around on every surface, including the floor. The temperature was tropical from an electric fire turned up to full blast, and heavy with smoke from the latest cigarettes of the three occupants – a woman clerk, Prosser himself and the peroxided Jason.

“Seen you somewhere before, haven't I, squire?” Prosser greeted Kite, and before he could answer, “What can I do you for?”

“Police,” Kite said, and Prosser raised his eyebrows.

“Oh, so you've finally got round to doing summat about me complaint, then?”

“Coffee, m'duck?” the woman enquired of Kite. “Kettle's just boiled.”

“If it's not too much trouble, thanks.”

Crossing to a corner where an electric kettle stood on a shelf, she spooned coffee granules and dried milk powder into a generous-sized mug, added hot water and, without asking, three spoonfuls of sugar from a bag. She was of generous proportions herself, big and comfortable, with Dame Edna spectacles and an easy smile. Kite accepted the coffee from her and sipped, trying to ignore the undissolved milk particles. Leaning against the desk, there being no vacant seat, he slipped his hand into his pocket for his notebook and looked for a space on the desk to put the mug while keeping a wary eye on the dog.

“Careful of the Amstrad,” Prosser said, “but you don't have to bother none about the dog. Soft as a boiled swede, he is. Wouldn't harm nobody, would you Fritz?”

“Only if he smells bad meat,” Jason put in, sniggering at his own unfunny joke.

“Watch your lip, lad,” Kite returned, without looking at him. “Mr. Prosser, about those things of yours that went missing. Could you give me a few more details?”

“How many more times do I have to go through it? I already told your lot when I reported it.”

“So tell me again. I only want confirmation. What day and so forth.”

Prosser assumed an air of resignation. “When was it, Noreen?”

Noreen said promptly, “Over the weekend when they took the ladder, Tuesday morning when you found the roofing felt and the gas bottle'd gone, wasn't it?”

“That's right, one after t'other. I reported me ladder missing Monday morning to that there Cockayne. Did he care? Not bleedin' likely! There's that gate round to the back as should be kept locked but never is, and when I told him so he said I should take me tackle home every night, silly sod. We had a big argument about it but I wasn't having no Jessie like him telling me what to do, so I jacked it in for a day or two. Tell you the truth, I thought stuff it, if you're not bothered about locking up, why should I sweat me guts out finishing your piddling little roof job? I'd somebody breathing down me neck to do a garridge job and we went on to that. Somebody what pays prompt, not like the bleedin' Council, six months later.”

“That's his problem, see,” Noreen intervened, when he stopped for breath. “Too blessed independent, always was.”

Prosser said, “One-man business like I am – well, one man and a lad, not forgetting the wife here, you might say – I can't afford
not
to be. I have me expenses – you have to keep up with the times or you get left behind.” His wide gesture was appropriate for the brand-new word processor on the desk, but nothing else in the office that Kite could see.

“What size of gas bottle was it, Mr. Prosser?”

“Same size as them out there.”

“Pretty heavy to handle, by the looks of them.”

“One man can manage easy, if he goes about it the right way.”

“Let's have a look at 'em more closely, d'you mind?”

They got to work and within half an hour Kite, having decided that he had time to make another call before lunch, was back in the town centre, walking down the street in the older, lower part of the town where T. H. Perryman's, the gent's outfitters, still plied their trade. It wasn't a shop much patronised by Kite. To him a suit was a suit was a suit, to be picked up from a chain store when you had the time. His father, on the other hand, was a regular customer of Perryman's, forever going on about how they'd supplied him with his first school blazer fifty years ago, and how he still went there to be measured for all his suits. It was that sort of place.

This was where Greg Foster, he who played de Flores in
The Changeling,
worked. More specifically, where he ran the business for his father-in-law, the present Thomas Perryman, in the confident expectation that it would in due season fall like a ripe plum into his ready and waiting hands.

He'd just finished a tasteful and cunning arrangement of goods in the window, whereby the male population of Lavenstock could, when reluctantly buying that new shirt the wife insisted they needed, see by happy chance the correctly matching tie, slacks and sweater displayed with it and be persuaded into buying the lot. Hey presto, no sweat! No disastrous colour combinations that would send the wife into giggles, and all good business for Perryman's. Greg himself never had any trouble with his clothes, but a lot of his customers were clueless about that sort of thing. He always knew what to wear and when and how, that he must avoid pink shirts like the plague with his reddish brown hair, and how to hide that teeny-weeny tummy bulge which had just begun to appear. It was an instinct. Thoughtfully, he placed a pair of polished olivewood cufflinks in a box on top of the sweater and stood back to admire the effect.

It was then that he noticed the police sergeant who'd been down at the Gaiety on Saturday with his hand on the shop door and knew that Fleming was still haunting him.

“All right, Sandy,” he said to his young assistant, “you can get off for your lunch now. Take an extra hour. You did very well deputising for me on Saturday afternoon. Jacket? Of course, sir.”

As he showed Kite the rad where a selection of jackets hung Greg relaxed, realising he might have a genuine customer after all, whole Kite flicked through them, thinking they all looked very much the same, until he came to one which was very different from the rest. It appeared to him identical with that which Fleming had worn, only this one was in tan suede, not grey, as his had been. It gave him the opening he needed. “Nice quality,” he began.

“I can see you have very good taste,” Foster said, so Kite knew it would be expensive. But two hundred and forty-five quid! Even allowing for inflation. His last suit had cost just over a hundred and he'd thought that was going over the top.

“They come from Italy,” Foster explained reverentially, sliding the jacket off the hanger and holding it out. “We've only had two. The other one –” He stopped in some confusion, remembering to whom the other one had been sold.

“That's all right, sir, I know who bought the other one,” Kite said, producing his warrant card. “I'm here to ask you about him.”