More Deaths Than One (24 page)

“Come on then, where's the rest?”

“What rest? I don't know nothink about no rest.”

Wayne scratched his spots, stuck his hands into the pockets of his dirty green overalls and lounged against the rusty body of a Ford Transit van, affecting nonchalance. Farrar looked at him with distaste. “I'm waiting.”

“What for?”

Farrar said nothing, but a gleam appeared in his eye that Wayne thought best not to ignore. “S'right, whether you believe me or not,” he protested indignantly. “Shoved out the way under the seat of a clapped-out old VW, it was, in an 'Arrods bag. Didn't think much to it, only a tatty old teapot, but I've seen things like that down the market, so I reckoned I might get a couple of nicker for it.”

“That tatty old teapot was worth nearly a grand,” Farrar said, exaggerating, though not very much, in the interests of getting this over with. “And it was only part of what was in that Harrods bag. If you can't produce the rest, and quick, you're in dead schtuck, sunshine.”

Wayne went as green as his overalls, whether from chagrin at having let the teapot go for a rotten thirty-five nicker or fear that he might be wading in deeper waters than he'd thought, it wasn't possible to say, but that was all one to Farrar.

“Well,” the youth said, after some painful wrestling with his natural reluctance to give anything away to the fuzz, “they might still be in the office,” jerking his head towards the corrugated-roofed edifice in the corner.

“That's better. We'll have a shufty in a minute, but before we do you can tell me about this Volkswagen and where it came from. Still got it, have you?”

“You must be joking. Went under the crusher same day as it come in,” Wayne averred. A clapped-out old Beetle it'd been and no, he neither knew nor bloody cared who'd brought it in or where it had come from. The old man'd know, but he wasn't in just now. There were no licence plates on it and the tax disc had been removed. He'd seen it in the yard and given it the once-over as he always did before letting any car go under the crusher. You'd never believe what you found sometimes, what some daft nerks left in their cars. Things worth more than the car. Radios, clocks, cigarettes, cassettes in the glove box ... they'd once found a case of malt whisky in the boot.

“Same way you just
found
that Coalport teapot and the other stuff.”

“I did, yeah, if that's what you call it, and if I hadn't, they'd have gone the same way as the body! Why shouldn't I keep what I found there? Nobody else was wanting the bloody things,” Wayne protested, but tokenly, his vocabulary as limited as his intelligence. He knew he hadn't a chance, and when Farrar questioned him about what else had been in the car, he admitted there might've been a holdall – with some gear in it, shirts and stuff, straight gear, he sniffed, when pressed, evidently so far beneath his notice that he'd left the bag where it was in the boot, along with a briefcase with papers in it that held no interest for him.

“You've forgotten the typewriter.”

“No I haven't, there wasn't no typewriter.”

“Do me a favour! You've flogged that as well, haven't you, you little toerag?”

Wayne had always been one to know when he was beaten. He might have argued that appropriating the articles was one of the perks of his trade, but he gave in and admitted that he'd sold the typewriter at another market stall and that he still had the residue of what had been found in the plastic bag. Skirting the piles of car engines that lay about in black, shining, oily clusters, he led Farrar towards the shed in the corner that they called the office. They were almost there when a silver-coloured Mercedes bumped across the uneven dirt surface of the yard and out of it climbed the older, even fatter version of Wayne who was Sampson senior.

“Well, if it isn't Mr. Farrar!” Wayne's parent said, his eyes going from his unlovely son to the detective, quickly calculating which direction the trouble might spring from. “Can I help you?”

“Hello, Joey. Yes, I rather think you might. It's a little matter of a grey S Reg Volkswagen. Let's be having a dekko at your records. For your sake, I hope they're all nice and up-to-date.”

“Who did you say?” Kite said incredulously into the phone. “You sure? All right, all right. Thanks anyway, Keith. Get yourself back here. That was Farrar,” he relayed unnecessarily, putting the phone down. “He says it wasn't Culver who had the Beetle taken into the scrapyard.”

“I don't think he's going to be too difficult,” Mayo remarked, looking out of the small rear window in his office and watching Tim Salisbury cross the car park. “I know his type – all wind and puff.”

He came into Mayo's office wearing a tweed cap pulled well down and a supercilious expression underneath it. He also had on a green padded sleeveless jacket over a thick sweater. It was very cold outside and rain threatened again.

“Good of you to come, Mr. Salisbury,” Mayo began courteously, pretending an assumption that Salisbury had any option in the matter.

“I was coming into the bank, anyway,” Salisbury said expansively, but with an equal pretence of not otherwise being prepared to put himself out. Mayo smiled, allowing him his illusions, and invited him to take a chair. A cup of tea was offered and with a barely repressed shudder almost refused, but then, with something like condescension, accepted. When the tea appeared Salisbury took one sip and left it alone. “What is it you want?”

“I won't beat about the bush. First, I'd like to know why you arranged for an S Registration Volkswagen to be towed into Sampson's breaker's yard on the fifteenth of March.”

A lengthy pause ensued before Salisbury consented to answer. The thin veneer of his affability had already worn through. “Should've thought that was obvious. I reserve the right to dispose of derelict cars – or anything else for that matter – dumped on my land without my permission, without having to explain why. It's not an Irish tinker's scrapyard, you know.”

“Who said the car was derelict?”

“Since it was practically falling to pieces, and nobody was claiming it, I assumed it was.”

“Wasn't it rather high-handed of you to dispose of it without trying to find its owner? Why didn't you report it to us and let us sort it out?” Salisbury shrugged, deigning to reply. “And perhaps you'd care to tell me why you first removed the licence plates, and the tax disc?”

Salisbury's eyes flickered. “Who says I did that?”

“They weren't there when the car was towed into the scrapyard. Nor was the log book, for that matter.” Pity he hadn't checked the boot too, but Mayo didn't feel it necessary to say so. “What happened to them?”

“I don't have to answer these questions.”

“It would be in your own interests to do so.”

“I think I may be the best judge of that.”

“Do you? I don't believe you are, you know. Perfectly reasonable questions, Mr. Salisbury. But since you won't answer, you'll have to allow us to put our own construction on events. I suggest you had the vehicle towed away because you knew who'd left it there, first removing the identification because you'd very good reasons indeed for not wanting it to be known who it belonged to.”

“I refuse to be badgered like this!”

“Nobody's badgering you, sir, and you're quite at liberty to refuse to answer, but the owner of that car has been murdered, and like it or not you're involved in the enquiries, if only as a result of your having his car towed away.”

Salisbury had removed his cap on entering the room and now he undid the zip on his jacket. Perspiration stood on his forehead and his colour was high, his pale, prominent eyes bulging like marbles. He pulled out his handkerchief, wiped off the sweat. “Is that who it belonged to, that man Cockayne?”

“Are you telling me you didn't know that?”

A telephone rang insistently in the distance. No one answered it for some time. “I didn't
know,
” Salisbury admitted at last. “But I suppose I guessed it did.”

“Does that mean you're prepared to make a statement?”

“I'm prepared to tell you what I know, if that's what you mean.” Mayo gave the go-ahead to Jenny Platt, whom he had asked to be present with her notebook, sitting in a corner by the window. She was an expert shorthand writer, far speedier and more accurate than Kite, who sometimes had trouble deciphering his own cryptic notations.

“Go on, Mr. Salisbury. Just tell me in your own words what happened.”

Salisbury fidgeted for a while, gaining time, and then said, “Well, I was coming home that evening –”

“Which evening are we talking about?”

“The Monday evening, as I recall, the night before you came to the farm. I'd been to an N.F.U. meeting, as I told you then, which had gone on rather late, and I'd stayed on, talking to friends –”

“Just a minute. Let's be clear about the time.”

“It was well after midnight, I suppose, I wouldn't like to swear to the exact time.”

“All right, carry on.”

“I was just coming out of the corner round by the lower coppice, going slowly because I was tired and the roads were icing over – you remember how frosty it was that night – when my headlights showed somebody moving about in the corner of the field, just behind the trees. I thought it was somebody poaching. We've had a lot of trouble lately, so I took my gun and got out to see. It was Fleming. Actually, 1 didn't recognise him at first, I hardly knew him and it must've been twelve months since I'd last seen him anyway, but he recognised me, immediately I think. He said, ‘What the hell d'you think you're doing with that gun? Put it down for Christ's sake, it might go off.' ” He paused to mop his forehead again.

“You look warm, Mr. Salisbury. Why not take your jacket off?” He didn't appear to have heard, but put his handkerchief away and carried on. “I asked him what the hell
he
thought he was doing on my land, which was more to the point.”

“And what did he say to that?”

“He laughed and said he'd be only too happy to get off it if he could get the damn car started and then he said, very offensively I thought, ‘Why don't you see if you can help instead of just standing there?' I told him I was no mechanic, cleaning the plugs is about my limit, and actually it was such a pathetic old wreck it looked as though it'd never start again, anyway. So I suggested he leave it and come up to the house to ring for a taxi, which I thought was pretty generous in the circumstances, considering his tone.”

“Did he accept?”

“He did not! He'd the blasted cheek to say he'd a better idea ... why didn't I push off and leave him alone if that was the best I could do. He actually,” Salisbury went on, his face becoming so suffused that his collar looked tight, “put his hand on my shoulder and shoved so that I staggered backwards.”

“Then what happened?”

“Nothing happened, except that I did just that,” Salisbury said shortly. “I pushed off and left him to it.”

“Really? Are you quite sure that's all you did?”

Salisbury looked down his patrician nose. “You can please yourself whether you believe me or not, I've told you what happened,” he said coldly.

Mayo considered him. “You just walked away. Now I wonder why?” He didn't think Salisbury in the least likely to take kindly to having his offer of help thrown back in his face. To shrug off the snub and simply walk away in circumstances like that was out of character.

“I'll tell you why,” Salisbury said suddenly, leaning forward. “He looked bloody dangerous, that's why. It wasn't a suggestion he made, it was a threat. If I'd refused, he was just as likely to have knocked me down and made off with the Range Rover. I've a wife and children, Mr. Mayo, I'd no right to start thinking of playing the jolly old hero. And besides, strange as it may seem, I value my own skin. I think even you might have thought twice about arguing with him.”

Mayo listened to this and felt that if this was the true reason, he was inclined to like Salisbury better for it than at any time during their short acquaintance. “So, what happened next?”

“What happened next was that Susan found him dead in his car the following day, in case you've forgotten.”

“No, I'm not likely to have forgotten that,” Mayo answered evenly. “I'm sorry for it, finding a body isn't a very pleasant experience, one I wouldn't wish on anyone, but it's somewhat beside the point at the moment. Why didn't you mention what had happened between you and Fleming when we spoke to you that night?”

“I panicked, like anybody else would. Wouldn't have looked very good if I'd said we'd quarrelled just before he was murdered, would it? While we were arguing, at least two cars passed and I was afraid their headlights might've picked us out. I was holding my shotgun, remember? And Fleming had pushed me so that I staggered.”

Mayo considered him. “But you know by now that it wasn't Fleming who was murdered.”

“Yes,” Salisbury said shortly, “and I think myself lucky not to have met the same fate, all things considered.”

“All right, but when you first heard about Fleming's death, when you thought he'd committed suicide in Scotley Beeches, apparently shortly after you'd encountered him with the Volkswagen, you must surely have thought that very odd. What did you think had happened?”

“My God, what a question! I didn't know what to think, except that he must've gone back into the forest for some reason after I'd spoken to him. There's a footpath that would've taken him there in about fifteen minutes – and I assumed that's what he'd done.”

“What did you think he'd been doing with the Volkswagen?”

“I don't know, I didn't
want
to know. All that bothered me was to get it off my land, pronto, and that's what I told her ...”