Some by Fire (26 page)

The Transit drove about a quarter of a mile and turned up a gravel track. ‘They probably stopped to put their masks on,’ Dave suggested.

‘Zulu ninety-nine, we have them. T2 out of vehicle, opening gate to a house. Suggest you go-go-go.’

Accelerators were flat to the floor, tyres were squealing, but we could see none of it. ‘Zulu
ninety-nine
, T2 has seen us. He’s back in the van and they’re aborting.’

‘Lima Mike, I’m turning into the lane, Lima Oscar behind me. We’ll block the lane.’ A silence, then: ‘Lima Mike, they’re out and running. Giving chase.’

We all laughed and relaxed. Gilbert went up
to his office and I rang Annette at home, in case she’d forgotten what day it was. Five minutes later a breathless Maggie panted: ‘Lima Mike to XL.’

‘Go ahead, Maggie,’ the controller told her.

‘We have a ten twelve. Will bring Tl and T2 to Heckley, out.’

Jeff came on, saying: ‘All units ten three. Thank you and good morning.’

‘Let’s go,’ I said to Dave. ‘We can’t stand here all day listening to them playing cowboys and Indians. What’s all this ten twenty stuff?’

They were half an hour late. Annette brought them in, apologising, and Dave set eyes on Melissa for the first time. She was wearing no make-up, which was a shock, and her cheeks were swollen. I suspected that the dark glasses were to hide black eyes. Nigel’s wisdom teeth had been removed, and he said it gave your face quite a hammering. Jade Slade was with her, wearing an embroidered shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, like he was expecting line dancing. The duty solicitor looked a treat, as always, in his blue suit and regimental tie.

‘Are you fit enough to answer questions?’ I asked, because I was concerned about the quality of her answers, not her health.

‘Let’s get on with it,’ she said.

‘Okey-dokey.’ I set the tape running and did the
spiel and asked everyone to introduce themselves. Dave and I were at one side of the table, Melissa and the solicitor at the other, with Slade rocked back against the wall near the video player I’d asked for. He was holding one of our polystyrene beakers, and at first I thought he’d bought a coffee from the machine. When I saw him lift it towards his mouth and spit into it I thought: It’s not that bad. When he did it again, a few moments later, I realised he was chewing tobacco.

‘Mrs Slade,’ I began, ‘did you attend Essex University in 1969?’

‘Yes.’

‘And after that did you attend Paris, Edinburgh, Manchester, Los Angeles, Durham and Leeds universities?’

‘If you say so.’

‘What do you say?’

‘I say this has fuck-all to do with why I’m here.’

‘Did you meet a lecturer called Nick Kingston at Essex?’

‘I might have done.’

‘Did you?’

‘I don’t remember. I met him somewhere.’

‘But you already knew him when you moved to Leeds?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was the nature of your relationship?’

‘Were we fucking, you mean? Of course we were.’

Dave shuffled. When he was settled again I said: ‘Have you contacted Kingston during this visit?’

She looked uneasy and turned to the solicitor. He shrugged, not knowing if this was relevant to anything. Slade said: ‘Is this part of the deal?’

‘What deal?’ I asked.

‘You know, the fuckin’
deal
.’

I turned to Melissa. ‘Mrs Slade, to have it on the record, could you tell us what you are expecting from this meeting.’

‘I’ll tell you what she’s expecting,’ Slade shouted. ‘She puts the finger on this Kingston, and you give her immunity from prosecution. That’s the fuckin’ deal, ain’t it?’

I told Slade that we’d make better progress if he let his wife answer the questions. We weren’t interested in his comments or opinions. She smiled at him and he spat into the cup and let his chair plop down on to all four legs.

‘What are you expecting, Mrs Slade?’ I asked again.

‘What he said,’ she replied. ‘I tell you about Kingston and you let me go.’

‘I have no power to grant you immunity from prosecution,’ I explained. ‘Nobody has. However, I can assure you that this force and two others involved with the Kingston case will not actively
pursue any charges against you or follow up any evidence relating to these offences that may implicate you. Is that clear?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you like your solicitor to discuss it with you?’

‘No.’

‘Very well, what can you tell us about Nick Kingston?’

‘I’ve got a statement,’ Melissa said, bringing a page of Station Hotel notepaper from the inside pocket of her jacket. She unfolded it and we sat back, listening.

‘In June or July 1975,’ she began, ‘I was having a sexual relationship with a university lecturer called Nick Kingston. I was infatuated with him and completely under his spell. He was a very charismatic man. He told me that he was renting a house in Chapeltown, Leeds, to use as a postal address for a mail order business he was just starting. The number on the house had worn off, so he asked me to write it on again, in chalk, so the postman would find it when the orders started coming in. He said he couldn’t do neat numbers. He took me there one evening and I wrote the number thirty-two on the wall. A few days later he asked me to show a boy where it was. He was going to work for Nick, pick up the orders, or something. About a week after that the house was burnt down and some people lost
their lives.’ She refolded the paper and slid it across the table towards me.

I placed my pen on it and pushed it back, saying: ‘Could you sign it, please.’

She unfolded the statement, took the pen in her left hand and scrawled her signature across the bottom. I didn’t look but I just knew that Dave’s eyes had flickered my way.

We sat in silence for a while, then I said: ‘What colour was your hair then?’

She looked flustered, and turned to her solicitor. He decided it must be a leading question and came out with the usual is-it-relevant response.

‘I’d like to know,’ I replied.

‘I can’t remember,’ she said.

‘Was it purple?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was the boy you took to the house Duncan Roberts?’

‘I’m not sure. Duncan rings a bell, but I never heard his surname.’

‘Are you sure he wasn’t your boyfriend?’

‘Positive.’

‘You didn’t have an affair with him?’

‘Not that one, but I had lots of boyfriends. It was never a problem for me.’

I wanted to grill her about her relationship with Duncan, but managed to hold off. She’d already
been threatened with the little we knew, when Piers and Graham saw her in America. That’s why she was here, and I didn’t want to reveal how fragile our case against her was. I asked Dave to start the video and explained to the tape recorder what we were doing.

The first image appeared, a still taken by a CCTV camera, with the number 1 in the corner. ‘If you recognise Kingston please say the number,’ I told her.

‘That’s him,’ she said, after a while.

‘Number?’

‘Eight.’

There were sixty-five pictures, and seven of them were Kingston. She got all seven.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I think that’s everything. We’ll try to get you on a flight on Wednesday, if that suits you.’

‘The sooner the fuckin’ better,’ Slade said, and flung his cup of spit into the waste bin.

Annette was waiting upstairs. Dave went to put the kettle on and I told her that Bonnie and Clyde were finding their own way back to the hotel. She was relieved of babysitting duties. ‘Thank God for that,’ she sighed. ‘They’re the most thoroughly disagreeable couple I’ve ever met. Give me the Sylvan Fields lot any day.’

‘What did you find out about the telephone?’ I asked. We were paying their bill, so the hotel had no
qualms about feeding us the information.

‘Ah! You’re not going to like this. They’ve spent every waking hour on the phone. Several calls to Directory Enquiries, but we can’t tell who they asked for; more to various parts of England, as if she’s been renewing acquaintances; and several long calls to the USA. I’ve asked for a printout. It’s as if they’ve deliberately run up the bill, because we’re paying.’

‘They’re anarchists, Annette,’ I said. ‘That’s what anarchists do. They’ll probably put the plugs in and leave the taps running when they check out. I’d better have a word with BT.’

Dave shouted: ‘How many sugars, Annette?’

‘None, thank you,’ she called back.

‘Listen, Annette,’ I said, quietly. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t ask you to sit in on the interview, but Dave’s been in on this since 1975. It’s personal.’

‘That’s OK, Mr Priest,’ she replied.

I’m growing to like Annette. She’s a good sport and has a pleasant nature. That
Mr Priest
never fails to put me in my place, though. Dave came in, carrying three teas, which says a lot for my department. I found some custard creams and we told Annette all about Kermit Shermit and his filthy habits.

The others came filtering back, high on adrenalin and braggadocio. Maggie had socked one of the Nelson brothers and the other had fallen into a stream.
Good living in Tenerife had not equipped them for cross-country running. Masks and baseball bats were recovered from the Transit and a hand-drawn map was found showing directions to the house they’d intended to rob. Somebody was doing the leg work for them. Jeff sent the map to fingerprints.

We all shared in the success, and a bonus was that I didn’t have to do the paperwork. In the middle of all the laughing I heard my phone ringing.

‘CID, Call It Done,’ I said into it.

‘Is that Inspector Priest?’

‘Yes.’

‘’Morning, Mr Priest. It’s Sergeant Watson from Division. As you know, the ACC leaves at the end of the week, and there’s a presentation to him on Thursday night. I understand that you sometimes do cartoons for these events, and was wondering if you could knock one up for him?’

‘Gosh, that’s three whole days away,’ I replied. ‘I would think I could knock one up in that time. I could probably knock up a Sistine Chapel ceiling in three days.’

‘Oh, right, Mr Priest. You’ll send it over, will you?’

‘Will do.’

I looked in my drawer to make sure the one I’d done three weeks earlier was still there. I didn’t particularly like the ACC, so this had been a good opportunity
to embarrass him. Not many people knew this, but a long time ago, when he was a humble superintendent in another division several hundred miles away, he had too much to drink at a chief constable’s leaving bash and messed his trousers. He rang his wife to ask her to bring him a spare pair and skulked in the car park until she arrived with them. He took them from her, thanked her profusely, and sneaked back into the toilets to change. He took off the offending garment, stuffed it out of the window and removed the new one from the bag his good lady had handed him. It was a skirt she’d collected from the cleaner earlier in the day. My drawing recaptured the incident in all its bladder-wrenching humiliation.

It also reminded me that I needed two frames for the abstracts I’d done. One of our uniformed PCs is a dab hand at woodwork and has a nice little sideline turning out doorstops and wooden apples that he sells for charity. No wooden Indians, though. I rang him and he promised to make the frames for me. He pointed out that the exhibition was next Sunday and I’d left it a bit late. I’d thought it was weeks away.

We had a debriefing in the afternoon, eating ice creams that we’d sent out for. Barry and Len Nelson had been interviewed and fed into the sausage machine for processing. They were looking at twenty years each. I deflated the euphoria by saying that we’d missed a vital opening. The bar they part-owned
was called the Pigeon Pie. ‘And the yob we arrested for using Joe McLelland’s credit card was wearing a Pigeon Pie T-shirt.’ I said. ‘We should have asked him about it.’

‘T-shirts from pubs in Tenerife are ten-a-penny,’ someone stated.

‘Fair enough,’ I agreed, licking the runny bits from round the edges, ‘but it was still a link, and we missed it.’

Jeff said: ‘Ah, but with luck like yours, boss, we can afford the odd mistake.’ He pulled the chocolate flake out and used it as a spoon.

‘What do you mean, luck?’ I demanded, with mock affront.

‘Going to the rhubarb sheds like you did. That was dead jammy.’

‘Luck had nothing to do with it. Good detective work, that’s what it was. Right, Dave?’

‘Right, Charlie,’ he mumbled with his mouth full.

‘So how did you know to look there?’ Jeff asked.

‘In the rhubarb sheds?’

‘Mmm.’

‘I’ll tell you. Remember what O’Keefe said about elephant?’

‘Mmm.’

‘So what did we call rhubarb when we were kids?’

‘Tusky,’ someone chipped in.

‘There you go, then.’

Jeff shook his head in disbelief.

Later, as we left for home, Dave said: ‘You didn’t
really
make the link between tusky and elephant, did you?’

We were in the car park. I looked over my shoulder, then under my car and behind his. When I was absolutely sure we were alone I leant closer and said: ‘I might have done.’

I called in the supermarket for some ready meals and filled up with petrol. It’s over three pounds a gallon now. That’s something else not many people know. My favourite checkout girl was there but I went to someone else just in case she’s beginning to wonder about me. Three times in a month is stalker territory.

The council had written to me to ask my address and if I still lived alone. I put
Yes No Yes No Yes
No. An insurance company reminded me that I was at a dangerous age and somebody else thought that I’d benefit from listening to the best bits of every piece of classical music ever recorded. Nearly two years of it, for only £149.99. No postcards. I had chicken korma, a currant square and tea, followed by a short snooze in an armchair.

Action is the best antidote for lethargy so I washed the car. The next-door neighbour couldn’t believe his eyes and sent for his wife to come and see. ‘There’s no
hosepipe ban, then?’ he whined.

It’s odd numbers this week,’ I explained.