Souvenirs of Murder (27 page)

‘Do you have any kind of alibi with regard to Hulton's murder?' Rundle asked Patrick, ignoring her suggestion.

‘You haven't told me the approximate time of death.'

‘Answer the question.'

‘Well, I left home at about six thirty last night with Detective Chief Inspector James Carrick of Bath CID – who's a friend of mine – who took me to Bath railway station. I caught the seven forty-two train to London and stayed the night at an officers' club of which I'm still a member. At eight fifteen this morning I asked a member of staff to call a taxi for me and went to the Nightingale Clinic as, the day before, I'd made an emergency appointment to see a specialist, Gordon Lefevre, who originally treated me when I was found unconscious at Park Road. That was at nine. I stayed there for the whole morning, seeing him, waiting around and having tests, returned to the club for lunch as there was someone I wanted to see, and then went to the hotel where I knew Ingrid was staying, arriving there at two thirtyish. There, I had a shower and then a nap and we were both woken by a phone call from Michael Greenway who wanted to know where I was as Hulton had been found hanged and he'd been told I wasn't at home.'

‘Who saw you yesterday after you'd spoken to Ingrid when she told you she'd come upon Hulton and he'd knocked her about?' Here, the DCI's gaze fixed on me for a moment.

‘No one but Carrick. Just before that I'd been with my parents and our two eldest adopted children, Katie and Matthew. We all had tea together. They come over after school.'

‘I'm surprised you didn't drop everything and head here, seeing as your wife had been assaulted.'

‘As soon as I'd spoken to Ingrid I contacted Greenway who organized medical assistance and an area car. He rang me back shortly afterwards to say that Ingrid wasn't badly hurt and had been taken back to her hotel. It was then that I decided to come to London to see the doc and bring Ingrid home, if that's what she wanted. And obviously, I'm still trying to clear my name.'

‘So, if she'd felt up to it, you'd have done a bit more sleuthing, even though I understand you've been forbidden to do so.'

I found myself wondering how closely he had been liaising with Greenway.

‘That's right,' Patrick agreed. ‘Mainly because nobody else bloody well is.'

‘Who did you see at the club who would verify your story, the person you had lunch with?'

‘I met up with Richard Daws, my old boss in MI5. He's now one of those in charge of SOCA.'

‘Hoping he'll protect you from prosecution?'

‘No, not at all.'

‘Are you carrying a weapon?' Rundle asked, seeming to come to a decision.

Patrick looked surprised. ‘Hardly. You should be more than aware that my Glock 18 and my knife are helping you with your enquiries.'

‘I haven't changed my mind. I still think you killed those people, whether you were aware of doing so or not or even intended to commit murder. You also killed Hulton. You knew where he was, he'd hurt your wife and—'

‘But Hulton would hardly have stayed there or gone back later and hung around waiting to be arrested' I butted in furiously. ‘No, someone with whom he was in close contact killed him. Someone who knew where he'd gone to ground. Besides which, Hulton was a heavily-built man. How on earth do you think Patrick could have overpowered him to hang him up in his present state of—'

Rundle impatiently waved me to silence and then I was again forestalled from finishing what I was going to say, by Patrick this time.

To me, he said, ‘We were rudely interrupted back at the hotel when I asked you how you thought we ought to handle this. What do you think?'

‘We did make the decision,' I pointed out.

‘Regrettably . . .' Patrick said to Rundle just before we headed quickly for the door. In the hall he grabbed the back of my jacket as I headed for the front door.

‘Back way,' he hissed.

‘There might not be one,' I observed, no louder, seconds later when we were in the kitchen.

Usefully, or not, a pair of security lights came on as we exited through the back door, illuminating a small garden. There appeared to be no way out of it to the rear and, as we had already seen, the garage was at the side of the house. Then we heard Rundle's voice, shouting somewhere out the front.

‘They're in the garden! Come in through here!'

Rundle had seen us arrive and called for assistance. I heard Patrick swearing under his breath.

There was a plastic compost bin with a lid in an almost screened off corner at the bottom of the left-hand side of the garden and, behind it, the boundary was represented by an untidy conifer hedge. Patrick went straight over to it, climbed on to the bin and then disappeared from sight into the greenery.

‘I'll catch you,' he said from somewhere out of sight on the other side when I was teetering on the top of the bin.

I launched myself through the top of the hedge and was caught, just.

‘You didn't have to go into orbit,' Patrick muttered.

We discovered that we were in a much larger, overgrown garden and swiftly made our way from the sounds of activity behind us. If they had a dog with them we were finished. Moving as silently as possible between shrubs in the near darkness, we bore left, walking through long, sodden grass. Soon, we came to a broken-down wooden fence and squeezed through a small gap in it into what appeared to be a yard to the rear of either shops or a small industrial unit. The area soon proved to be semi-derelict and, thankfully, there were no working security lights here.

Making our way carefully around what appeared to be piles of fly-tipped rubbish, trying to see where we were going in the weak glow from street lights some fifty yards ahead of us, we eventually peered around the corner of the building into what seemed to be a cul-de-sac. Nothing moved but it was crazy to think that they had not fanned out to look for us.

‘What did Daws have to say?' I whispered as we paused there for a few more moments.

‘He wondered when I was going to be able to avoid controversy.'

I supposed the man had a point. I said, ‘But this has hardly been your fault.'

After a short silence Patrick said, ‘Have you still got the Smith and Wesson?'

‘Yes, but—'

‘Keep it with you at all times.'

‘Why? What are you going to do?'

He turned to me. ‘I'm going to give myself up.'

‘But – but you can't! You said—'

‘Think. Soon there'll be dogs, choppers with thermal-imaging cameras and God knows what else hunting me down. I asked Daws to meet me to clarify matters and it's what he told me to do. They're not interested in you. So go. All I ask is that you stay out of danger for the children's sake. It would make me really happy if you went home. I'll do everything I can to get the car back for you – I haven't been using it here in London, after all.'

I flung my arms around him and held him tight.

‘Please go,' he murmured, a break in his voice. ‘Go to the hotel and rest. You don't look very well.'

‘But I'm in this with you,' I protested.

He misunderstood, or might have chosen to do so. ‘No, they're not interested in prosecuting you for helping me resist arrest. Greenway'll pull strings. Daws promised that you'd be protected too.'

Still I held him, appalled that it was all my fault for bringing him here.

‘Please go,' Patrick said again. ‘What you've found out has probably cleared me of everything already.'

I let him go and he kissed me quickly and then went off down that ghastly, blighted dead end back towards the main road, walking tall but limping just a little as he does when he's very tired.

What stopped me from running headlong round to Rundle's house and putting a bullet into his thick, stupid skull?

I still don't know.

EIGHTEEN

I was not permitted to have the car, which was requisitioned as ‘evidence', and succeeded in finding a taxi to take me back to the hotel. As I half expected to find a reception committee in the shape of one of the large coppers I had upended earlier waiting to charge me with ‘perverting the course of justice' or ‘assisting an offender' or some other such codswallop, it went towards lifting my black mood just an iota to encounter nothing of the sort.

The cruel pictures were there, in my imagination: you suffer when you write. They would have made him lie face down in the road before searching him for weapons. They would have handcuffed him where he lay before hauling him to his feet and, because of his service history, he would then have been taken to an extra secure police station, Paddington perhaps, where terrorist suspects are held.

It was all utterly, utterly unbearable.

My phone rang.

‘Yes?' I sort of gasped, realizing that tears were running down my cheeks.

‘The grapevine's in overdrive,' said James Carrick's soft Scottish voice.

‘They've got him,' I sobbed. ‘This fine courageous man who's served his country for most of his life has been carted off like some filthy, murdering yob and . . .' I couldn't speak any more.

James talked to me. I can't really remember what he said, only that the words washed over me like a warm, comforting blanket.

‘But the man's used to this kind of thing,' I do recollect he finished up by saying. ‘All that training for Special Ops; being dragged through the mud and chucked in rivers. D'you want me to come up?'

‘How can you?' I asked, staggered.

‘Easy. I'll throw a sickie again.'

‘Patrick would prefer me to go home.'

‘Well he would. But it's up to you.'

Carrick did not ring me when he arrived at the hotel as it was the early hours of the morning by then as he had driven up. But he did the next morning and we met for breakfast where he bullied me into eating something.

‘As far as I can tell there's been nothing in the media,' he said after dealing briskly with a full English. ‘They're keeping it strictly in-house. So what d'you plan to do? Storm the nick where he's being held?'

This I knew was to make me smile and he succeeded.

‘I just want to wring the neck of whoever committed these murders until he confesses,' I replied. I had brought him up to date with events and showed him the information I had obtained from the Serbian Embassy as he ate, including what Patrick had said to Rundle at the DCI's home.

‘Does Patrick reckon this has anything to do with that shoot-out years ago?'

I shook my head. ‘No, he doesn't think so – but it might.'

‘We still don't know the names of these surveillance people.'

‘I forgot to mention that bit to you. Rundle said he'd emailed them to Greenway.'

‘Then let's go and talk to Greenway.'

‘I think you'll find that he's no longer involved. It's Met business now.'

Carrick brooded. I wondered if he was thinking of the time Patrick had found him when he had been shut up inside an old boiler at a derelict factory and left to die. Patrick had had to fight his way through three of the gang responsible in order to rescue him. And the cases they had worked on together when we had been with MI5, including when Patrick's brother, Larry, had been killed.

‘When you had a snoop round that flat thinking it was where a watch was being kept on the Pangborne place, only it wasn't, and came upon Hulton . . .' he began thoughtfully.

‘The right flat was next door but one,' I said, guessing what his next question would be.

‘Let's go and have a look round that.'

‘Unofficially?'

‘Oh, aye. I'm in bed with the flu. Anyway, bugger the Met.' And, reverting to type, ‘Are ye armed, hen?'

‘Too right.'

‘We haven't discussed that.'

Police vehicles were still parked outside the house where Hulton's body had been found, a wide area cordoned-off with incident tape causing Carrick to leave his car some distance away. A constable standing by the front door was stamping his feet, trying to keep warm.

Next door but one there were curtains at the top window that faced the street, which would have made it easier to observe a property farther along on the other side without being spotted. The front door to this particular house in the terrace was open and we went straight in and up the stairs. An elderly woman was mopping the floor at the top of the first flight.

‘Oo are you?' she demanded to know, straightening her back with a wince.

‘Police,' said Carrick, producing his warrant card but not giving her time to read it. ‘Is anyone living in the top flat now?'

‘Nah, but a bloke's been dossin' there. Gorn now though. Could 'e be the one what done in that bloke in the end house? This place has never seen nuffink like it.'

‘Who was he, do you know?'

‘A rough type. I kept right away from 'im, I tell yer. 'E broke in. Smashed the lock. Someone's supposed to be fixing it. Next Christmas I ‘spect.'

‘This was after the police used the flat for surveillance work?'

‘So that's oo they woz! Ho yus. After that. Just for a coupla days it was.'

We thanked her and went on up, my companion perceptibly fizzing with enthusiasm.

‘Gloves,' Carrick muttered when we were standing outside the damaged door. ‘We don't know who this man was. Do you have any with you?'

‘That's what handbags are for,' I told him, finding just one pair. ‘You have them, you're the professional detective. I won't touch anything.'