Some by Fire (4 page)

‘We’ve got to catch them, Nigel,’ I said softly. ‘Before they kill someone.’

‘How do we know they haven’t?’ he replied, coming to stand next to me. ‘All it takes is for someone not to pass on the message. Somewhere,
two people might be sitting in chairs like these…’

‘In that case,’ I interrupted him, ‘we’d better give it all we’ve got. Why isn’t that bloody SOCO here yet?’

Maggie Madison, one of my DCs, had no luck at the hospital. Audrey and Joe were sedated and in no condition to speak. ‘Perhaps,’ the doctor told her, ‘after a good night’s sleep…’ At least it looked as if they’d survive. They had friction burns from the string on their ankles and wrists, and bruises on their arms from manhandling, but no other damage. No other physical damage. I dismissed the troops and arranged for a full meeting at eight a.m. On my way home I stopped at the fish and chip shop, but it was closing. I settled for a bowl of cornflakes and went to bed.

The meeting was informal, in the CID office, with me at the blackboard making notes on it and everyone else sitting around in rapt attention. SOCO had found a tyreprint where a vehicle had turned round in the drive and run on to the garden. So far all we knew was that it wasn’t from Mr McLelland’s elderly Rover which stood in their garage. He’d collected a few fingerprints but it was looking as if they all belonged to the householders. We hadn’t expected it to be otherwise. ‘The string used to tie them,’ he informed us, ‘is the same gardening twine as from the Woods End robbery, and the knots were simple
overhands, three or four on top of each other, as at Woods End.’

‘They used clothesline at the first four,’ I added, ‘but the knots were the same.’

‘They ran out of clothesline?’ someone suggested.

‘Probably,’ I agreed. ‘The point is, we can assume it’s the same gang.’ I turned to DC Madison. ‘Hospital duties for you, Maggie. Ask if there’s any next-of-kin they’d like informed, then if they saw the vehicle. Most importantly, what time did the villains leave and who do the McLellands bank with? Take one of those consent forms with you that we created after the last job, so we can talk to their bank. Find out what you can, but let me know if either of them is fit enough for a proper statement.’

‘I’m on my way.’

‘Jeff,’ I said, looking at Jeff Caton, another of my sergeants. ‘Liaise with our neighbours, let them know we’ve had another and keep them informed. Tell them about the tyreprint – one was found at the Oldham job, I believe. Collect whatever videotapes Traffic have to offer and have someone look at them. Maggie’ll let you know the time frame. It’s a pound to a pinch of snuff they use the motorway.’ So did seventy thousand other vehicles, every day, but what the hell.

‘It was Oldham,’ the SOCO confirmed, referring to the tyreprint.

‘Have you done a comparison?’

‘No. We don’t have the file.’

‘Fair enough, but let’s have it done.’ I dispatched people to talk to the neighbours and a couple of DCs agreed to have a word with local likely lads on the estates who might have heard something on the jungle drums. They have a system of communication that doesn’t rely on wires or radio waves or satellites. It’s a hotchpotch of rumour, gossip, lies, wishful thinking and wild imaginings. It spreads like chickenpox through an infant school but sometimes, just sometimes, there’s a kernel of truth in it. It’s a bit like satellite news.

‘And you and me, sunshine,’ I said, turning to Sparky as the others grabbed jackets and notebooks and filed out, ‘we’ll have a pleasant morning talking to the usual suspects.’

We blinked into the daylight and I wondered if some decent shades would help my image. ‘We ought to be having the day off somewhere,’ Dave said as we walked to his car.

‘When we sort this,’ I said. ‘Big day out. Ingleborough, Hill Inn for a few bevvies, Chinky in Skipton. We’ll hire a bus. Long time since we did something like that.’

‘It’ll probably be raining tomorrow.’

‘Nuh-uh.’ I shook my head. ‘It’s set fair for
the foreseeable future. High pressure over North Outsera.’

‘Day after tomorrow, then.’

We placed our coats on the back seat and I wound my window down. Dave started the engine. ‘Tony’s Antiques?’ he suggested.

‘Good a place as any,’ I agreed.

But Tony had nothing to offer us. These days, he claimed, he’d lost contact with the old gang. Things were not the same; no honour any more; too much violence. He was respectable; all his mistakes were behind him; little woman saw to that. Just like he’d told us the last time.

‘Sell many of these, Tony?’ I asked, turning a twelve-inch bowie knife with a serrated blade in my hands. I held it to the light and saw
Made in East Germany
etched into the steel.

‘Not many, Mr Priest,’ he answered. ‘One or two, to collectors. And ‘unters, sometimes.’

‘Hunters? What do they hunt?’

‘Rabbits, that sort of thing. There’s a fishing line in the ‘andle.’

I pulled the end of the hilt and two yards of tightly coiled nylon line sprang out, thick enough to restrain a playful corgi. I imagined one of Tony’s
shaven-headed
, pot-bellied customers chasing a rabbit across the moors, and concluded that Benjamin Bunny and his friends were not in danger.

‘You’ll be sure to let us know if you hear anything,’ Sparky said, pushing his face close to Tony’s. ‘Won’t you?’

‘Er, yeah, ‘course I will,’ Tony promised, leaning away, his eyes flicking between us.

We were at the less prosperous end of town, where the mills and workers’ cottages – better described as slums – once stood. Now it’s a junction on the bypass, with a few run-down terraces left clinging to streets that terminate abruptly against the guard rail and don’t figure in the council’s road-sweeping plans. We came outside, squinting against the glare and the traffic-borne dust. An old man shuffled by using a Zimmer frame, slippers on his feet. He’d probably lived all his life within a hundred yards of that spot, in one of the few houses left standing. When he died, they’d knock it down and go back to their offices to wait for the next one. It’s development by attrition.

‘How’s he supposed to cross the road?’ Sparky wondered as we watched him dodder away.

‘Cross the road?’ I replied. ‘Cross the road? Why would he want to cross the road? Roads are for cars.’

‘Right. So where next?’

‘Well, as we’re talking about cars, let’s go kick a few tyres.’

‘Good idea. And why don’t we walk?’

‘Good idea.’

It’s funny how second-hand car showrooms cluster
together, challenging the would-be customer to find a better deal. There are three on the road out of town and over the years we’d had dealings with all of them. The dazzle as we approached the first one hurt the brain. A Ford Escort convertible, the hood invitingly down, stood temptingly in front of all the others, bait for the impulse buyer.
Car of the Week
was emblazoned across its windscreen.

‘Why doesn’t mine shine like this?’ I asked the proprietor when he swam out from under his stone.

‘I don’t know what you drive, sir,’ he replied. ‘But these are all quality motors, and that’s reflected in the paintwork. Reflected in the paintwork! That’s a good one, eh? Are you particularly interested in a cabriolet?’

‘No, not really.’

‘So did you have anything in mind?’

‘All of them,’ I said, showing my ID. ‘Do you have papers for them all?’

His expression fell quicker than a politician’s trousers. ‘P-papers?’ he stuttered. ‘Papers? Er, yes, in the office. Is there…is there a problem, Officer?’

‘Not at all, sir,’ I replied, smiling like the same politician when he realises it’s only the wife who’s caught him, and she’s not going to derail the gravy train. ‘I’m sure everything’s in order. We’d like a word with you about another matter, though, in the office, if you don’t mind.’

We were wasting our time, and the other two dealers were no help. They hadn’t made any big cash sales recently, and nobody had offered them goods in kind or suggested any sort of dodgy deal. Business was steady and wholesome, even though customers these days knew every trick in the book and were determined to rip them off.

‘My heart’s bleeding,’ I said as we walked back to the car.

‘You were too easy on them,’ Dave admonished.

‘I think they got the message,’ I replied. ‘If they don’t know anything they don’t know anything.’

‘Everyone knows something. We should turn one of them over, then ask again.’

‘Sadly, it’s not that easy, and you know it. Where next?’

‘The tattoo parlour, then the Golde and Silver Shoppe in the town centre.’

‘Right. I might have a discreet boudoir scene done on my left thigh while we’re there.’

Unfortunately the tattooist was busy, so it would have to be another day. We dragged him away from the young girl who was having an iguana added to the menagerie on her scapula, but he didn’t know anything, ‘know what I mean?’ The manageress of Ye Olde Golde and Silver Shoppe used language that would make a Cub Scout blush and threatened to report us to the Council for Civil Liberties. You’d
never have believed her old man was doing four years for receiving.

We lunched on a bench in the square. Every town should have a square, a focal point. Ours has just been refurbished at monstrous cost, but it looks good and the office workers and shoppers certainly enjoy it when the weather’s fine. We had ham sandwiches in
oven-bottom
cakes, and tea from polystyrene beakers.

A girl, about six feet two, clomped by on platform soles. She had the longest legs, the briefest mini and the skimpiest top I could imagine. Well, not quite imagine, but the longest, briefest and skimpiest I’d seen in a while. I turned my head to follow her, sandwich poised before my open mouth.

‘You’ll go blind,’ Sparky warned.

‘It’s this warm weather,’ I complained. ‘It makes me feel poorly.’

‘It certainly brings them out. What do you think of them?’ He nodded towards the statue in the middle of the square.

It was a bronze, about half life-size, showing two doctors dressed rather differently; one Victorian, one Edwardian. JH Bell and FW Eurich lived in Bradford, when the woollen industry was at its height and employed hundreds of thousands of people. Of all the afflictions that beset them, woolsorters’ disease was the most feared. A man might go to work perfectly healthy in the morning and be dead from
it by supper-time. The French called it
la maladie de Bradford
. Dr Bell reckoned it was caused by imported fleeces and was a form of anthrax. Eurich took up the Petri dish and confirmed the link. He devised a way of treating the fleeces and the disease was eradicated. Pasteur was lauded for discovering how to protect animals against the disease, but the good doctors had gone unrecognised for their work with humans until Heckley decided to honour them.

‘It’s somewhere for the pigeons to sit,’ I said.

‘Did you vote?’ Dave asked. The local paper, the
Gazette
, had conducted a referendum on who should grace the new square.

‘Mmm.’ I finished my sandwich and rolled the paper into a ball, trying to wipe my hands on it.

‘Who for?’

‘Them.’ I nodded towards the doctors.

‘Really? I’d never heard of them.’

‘Neither had I until someone nominated them. Who did you vote for?’

‘Denis Law.’

‘Denis Law! A footballer, I should have known.’

‘He gave pleasure to millions,’ he retorted, primly.

‘He was the best, but he didn’t save any lives.’

Dave took my empty cup and wrapper and walked over to a bin with them. When he was seated again he said: ‘Do you think we’ll catch them, Charlie?’

The pigeons that had been strutting round our feet like battery-driven toys waddled over to the next bench to see if the pickings were any better there. ‘We’ve got to, Dave,’ I answered. ‘Nigel thinks that someone might already be dead, sitting tied in their chairs because the message wasn’t passed on.’

‘I’ve thought the same,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should put out an appeal.
Check your neighbours, if you haven’t seen them for a while
. Something like that.’

‘I’ll mention it to Gilbert. I’ll have to get back, make some calls. Are you all right for seeing a few more miscreants?’

‘I’ve a long list, but I’m not hopeful. This morning’s been a waste of time.’

‘So what do you conclude from that?’ I asked him.

‘Dunno,’ he replied. ‘They could be new boys in town. Or new to the job but clever with it. Or everybody’s scared of them. Or maybe they’re from way outside the area.’

‘All the jobs are centred on Heckley,’ I said.

‘What’s fifty miles these days? They could be from the Midlands, travelling north for every job. Or from the north-east. It’s probably too hot for them up there. Who knows?’

‘Like I said, I’ll do some ringing round.’ I stood up and swung my jacket over my shoulder.

‘Want a lift back?’

‘No, I’ll walk. Let’s see what’s happening.’ I unclipped my mobile phone. ‘Oops,’ I said. ‘Switched off. No wonder we’ve had a quiet morning.’ I pushed the slider across to the red dot and pressed a memory button.

‘It’s Charlie,’ I said. ‘Anything happening?’ There was a message for me. ‘Did he say what he wanted?’ He hadn’t. ‘Right,’ I said, ‘I’ll ring him when I get back.’

I must have looked thoughtful as I clipped the phone back on my belt. ‘Problems?’ Dave asked.

‘I don’t know. Someone called Keith Crosby wants me to give him a ring.’

‘The MP?’ he asked, his eyes wide.

‘Ex-MP. I’m not sure.’

‘Bloody ‘ell. It’s been a long time since we saw him.’

‘Hasn’t it? I wonder what he wants.’

I was deep in thought as I walked back to the office. Keith Crosby had fallen from grace twenty-odd years earlier, and I’d been at the centre of things. The tall girl stepped out of Topshop right in front of me and I banged into her. She told me to look where I was going and I said sorry. The tune blasting from within was Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’, number one in 1969, and for a few seconds I lost track of time and place. It had been a long time ago, and was still unfinished business.