The Murder House (22 page)

‘Like Paxton?' asked Oakley.

‘Perhaps. We don't vet those who come in. It's a low-key place. Folk often pop in and leave again without ever even suspecting that it's different.'

‘So, what happened? Did you see Paxton browsing through holiday brochures?'

‘No. He was with someone, though. No one I've seen before. He and Paxton sat together drinking. I finished my beer and left as fast as I could.'

‘Why?'

Merrick sighed. ‘Why do you think, Guv? The last thing I need is for a defence lawyer to see me in a gay bar. What if he brings it up in court? What if he uses it to blackmail me? My personal life is my affair, and I don't want it bandied about. Life's hard enough, and if I decide to come out, then I'll do it on
my
terms, not some slimy lawyer's.'

‘So he didn't see you?'

‘Damn right he didn't! I was on the other side of the room and he was deep in conversation. It was an amiable discussion though – they were both laughing and nodding, and each seemed interested in what the other was saying.'

‘Like a date?' asked Oakley, thinking about Catherine.

‘Possibly. But I'd put my money on the holiday theory before him going to some slum house in the city and getting himself topped.'

‘Your story fits what Farnaby said. He didn't know the man Paxton met either, so we can assume it wasn't a colleague.'

‘I can make a few discreet enquiries,' offered Merrick. ‘Tim Hillier – Paxton's only friend at Urvine and Brotherton – was helpful with letting us see Paxton's email. I'll ask him for another look, and see if I can spot anything.'

‘Go ahead. Meanwhile, I'll get Graham to take Paxton's dental records to the mortuary. At least she'll know he's not dead.'

‘She might prefer it if he were,' said Merrick softly. ‘She doesn't look like the kind of woman who'd be supportive of a homosexual son.'

The post had arrived by the time that Oakley finished his discussion with Merrick. He flicked through it quickly, making sure there was nothing urgent before he returned to his paperwork. The cheap brown envelope was sandwiched between two larger ones. From the look of it, it had been kicking around the sorting office for a while, because there was a large footprint on the front. He tore it open and read the message inside with raised eyebrows. He dropped it on the table, not wanting to sully it any further with his fingerprints.

He read it again. Clearly Yorke wasn't involved in the Orchard Street death because he'd been in prison when it happened, but his gang – ‘goons' as the note called them – had been free. What sort of word was ‘goon'? And to what did ‘false confessions' allude? Yorke hadn't made any confession at all.

He was tempted to throw the note away, sensing it was no more than spite, but instead he put it and the envelope into separate evidence bags, then made copies of the message. The original was logged in the evidence book and placed in a box for delivery to Solihull. The whole thing was probably a hoax, but there was no harm in being careful. He pinned one copy on the bulletin board and put another in a filing tray to be scanned and added to the HOLMES database.

He was about to return to paperwork when he saw the dental notes and realized he'd forgotten to give them to Evans. He snatched them up and dashed up the stairs towards the car park, but Evans' blue Volvo had gone. He swore under his breath, then spotted Helen Anderson.

‘Busy?' he asked casually.

‘We're pretty quiet at the moment, but there's no car for me, so I'm on foot patrol.'

‘Anywhere in particular?'

‘Nowhere exciting – the lower end of Gloucester Road. How's the investigation?'

He hesitated, unused to giving confidential details to people outside CID, but then carried on. She had found the murder weapon, after all, and deserved something for the contributions she had made. Besides, it would annoy Wright if he confided in her. ‘We're not much further forward than we were a week ago. The Albanian police aren't very helpful, and don't understand that all we want is his DNA or fingerprints.'

‘They won't go to his house in Tirana?'

‘Oh, they've done that, but the family has gone to some unspecified seaside campsite for the summer. No one's seen Kovac since he left for England in early July.'

‘Kovac won't have gone camping,' she said with conviction. ‘At least not straight away.'

‘Why not?' asked Oakley, puzzled.

‘Because he just spent three weeks working really hard. He won't take his precious data to the seaside. He'll go home to make sure it's all backed up on the computer or wherever.
Then
he'd go on holiday.'

‘Well, no one's seen him there.'

‘Then his disappearance is ominous, I'd say.'

‘That's what Clare thinks,' said Oakley. ‘She believes he's our killer.'

‘Not the victim?'

‘She doesn't think his research was important enough to see him killed.'

‘I thought he was involved in something that might generate lots of money. You can't get a better motive for murder than that.'

‘Perhaps. But I think that if Kovac really was on the brink of something big, some company would have made him an offer he couldn't refuse – and I don't mean in the Mafia sense. But this whole case has a peculiar feel to it. There's something we're missing, but I can't pinpoint what.'

‘Did you get much response from the press conference?' she asked, changing the subject rather abruptly. ‘Any new witnesses or leads?'

‘Not really. All we've got is this woman in the scarf seen by Mrs Greaves, which is probably nothing, and the usual hoax confessions and bogus scraps of information.'

‘Such as what?'

He shrugged. ‘Weird notes, people phoning to tell us their husband, father or son is responsible. Most are rubbish, but you never know, so we've got to look into them all.'

‘Weird notes?'

‘I had one just this morning, saying that Billy Yorke knows something about the murder. It's on the bulletin board. Go read it. But before you do, I was wondering if you could help us.'

She looked at him suspiciously and he laughed as he handed her the keys to an unmarked Ford Fiesta in the CID car pool.

‘Run this down to the mortuary. It's all right – I'll clear it with Wright.'

‘What is it?'

‘Dental records. It's unlikely to be this particular man, but I promised I'd get it checked out.' He regarded her thoughtfully. ‘But you knew him, didn't you? James Paxton.'

She blanched, but he was looking at Clare Davis arriving after more interviews at the university, and was wondering if she'd managed to find anything new.

‘What do you mean?' asked Helen sharply.

‘You met him at the Noble trial.' Davis was searching for somewhere to park, so Oakley waved to where Evans' car had been. ‘His mother reckons he might be our Orchard Street victim, so we'll run it through the system, just to put her mind at rest. Hand them to Graham Evans at the mortuary, then come back here to let me know you did it.'

Anderson took the records and walked towards the CID car while Oakley went to tell Wright that he'd taken the liberty of commandeering one of his officers. The sergeant was in the radio room, burly arms resting on the top of a computer console. He was telling Jeeves a story, chuckling as he did so, and Oakley distinctly heard ‘thieving niggers' in the muttered confidence. Oakley stood quietly until they saw him, at which point Jeeves promptly began to take an intense interest in the notes that were scattered across his desk. Wright showed no such discomfiture and merely eyed the inspector with disdainful defiance, returning to his tale.

‘A word, Barry,' said Oakley shortly.

Wright ignored him. ‘Well, you can imagine what I said to that.' He chortled again. ‘I mean, what would you have done? There he was, black as the bloody ace of spades, telling
me
that—'

‘Sarge,' interrupted Jeeves, desperately trying to stop him before he landed them in more trouble. ‘Can you get the duty rosters? I need someone to take a domestic in Kingswood Road.'

‘Send Anderson,' suggested Wright. ‘She's doing bugger all, as usual.'

‘I want to talk to you
now
, sergeant,' snapped Oakley, walking towards one of the small interview rooms. It was a couple of minutes before Wright deigned to appear, and by then Oakley was fuming. Oakley did not lose his temper very often, but Wright had gone too far. He closed the door with a bang.

‘Two things,' he snapped. ‘First, I sent Anderson to the mortuary with urgent paperwork for the pathologist.
I
told her to go; she didn't volunteer. If you have a problem with that, take it up with me. Second, it may have escaped your notice, but racism is a sackable offence.'

Wright leaned insolently against the wall. ‘Racism? Me?'

‘If I hear you use offensive language one more time, I'm going to lodge an official complaint. You're lucky I'm busy or I'd do it now.'

‘You wouldn't report me,' said Wright confidently, piggy eyes glittering with malice. ‘And even if you did, no one would believe you.'

‘No?' asked Oakley coldly, fixing him with an icy glare. ‘Let's see whether you're right, then, shall we?'

He hauled open the door and left, knowing that walking away before Wright had had his say would annoy him.

‘Fuckin' Paki,' came Wright's furious voice. ‘Go back to the jungle where you came from.'

‘Were you talking to me, Sergeant?' asked Clare Davis, who happened to be passing. Oakley kept walking, wondering whether Wright was worth the bother of the paperwork that would follow. ‘Or was some other officer the target of your eloquence?'

‘Fuck off,' stormed Wright, pushing past her and heading back to the radio room.

With great deliberation, Davis made a note of the encounter in her pocket book, and asked the two CID men who were with her to sign the account as a record of what they had heard. The younger one took the pen without hesitation, despising the sort of officer who gave the force a bad name. The older signed with misgivings. He'd known Wright for a long time, and personally thought Davis was over-reacting.

In the radio room Jeeves pretended to be too busy to talk to Wright. The radioman liked Oakley but Wright was his shift sergeant and he owed him his loyalty. He didn't know what he'd do if Oakley did make a complaint and he was called to testify, but he certainly wished Wright would go away at the moment.

Meanwhile, Wright railed and fumed, enraged by the fact that officers he considered inferior imagined they had a right to tell
him
what to do. He'd been on the streets for twenty-five years, and knew more about policing than any minority or any woman could ever hope to know. If the country wanted its streets to be safe, they should get rid of the do-gooders and let solid men like him get on with it. And CID had no right to take his officers without permission either. Oakley might outrank Wright, but he had no right to use uniform to run CID's errands.

‘Recall Anderson,' he ordered furiously. ‘Now. I want her here right
now
. I don't care what she's doing for bloody CID. Now, Jeeves.'

Jeeves did as he was told, fervently hoping that Anderson wouldn't argue or say that she'd oblige in five minutes after she'd completed whatever Oakley had asked her to do. He heaved a sigh of relief when she merely informed him that she was turning around immediately. From the resigned tone of her voice he could tell she anticipated trouble, and felt sorry for her.

‘We'll see about this,' Wright hissed. ‘I'm going to make a complaint. Harassment.'

Jeeves blinked. ‘A complaint about who, Sarge?'

‘Bloody Oakley,' snapped Wright. ‘And bloody Davis. They've been after me for months, and I'm going to report them to Taylor. He'll get the bastards off my back.'

Jeeves pretended to busy himself again, wondering how Wright could possibly see himself as the victim in the unpleasant scene that had unfolded. When Wright eventually left, Jeeves dialled Oakley's extension and told him how Wright had started talking to him, not forgetting to mention that he hadn't been comfortable with Wright's stories, but what could he do? He was a sitting duck in the radio room, where anyone could come in and rant – it wasn't as if he could walk away. And Wright was a sergeant. Constables didn't tell sergeants what they could and couldn't talk about. But Jeeves didn't approve at all.
He
wasn't like Wright.

‘Now, where have I heard
that
before?' Oakley muttered as he put down the phone.

Dave Merrick sat in the incident room and pondered who Paxton might have been meeting in the Clifton bar. A lover? A friend? A client? He hoped it wasn't a client, given what Paxton did for a living – he didn't want criminals to frequent a place he'd grown to think of as a safe haven. The possibility nagged at him though, and he decided he wanted to know – for his own peace of mind as much as anything else.

Because he was new in Bristol he didn't know many local villains, and to find out if the man with Paxton had been a criminal would mean hours on the computer. Merrick figured he'd be wasting his time, but aimed to try anyway. He suspected Taylor would disapprove of him going off on a tangent when there was work to be done on the Orchard Street case, but a hunch was a hunch, and Merrick decided to follow his gut instinct, which also told him to start with Yorke and his associates. He logged in and entered Yorke's name, scrolling down the list of known associates. There were quite a few, although the most relevant were his brother and his ‘business partner', David Randal.

Merrick looked at Randal first, but the thick-featured face that glowered out at him from the screen wasn't the man in the bar, nor was young Michael, who was nothing like the handsome man who'd been with Paxton. Curiously, he clicked the ‘more information' button, to see why there was almost twenty years between the brothers' dates of birth. The answer was that their father had taken a second wife, resulting in a baby just as his first son was graduating from juvenile detention centres to adult prisons.