The Picasso Scam (7 page)

‘You mean grass? You want me to grass?’

Sometimes I think they absorb the prison culture with the food. ‘The rubbish in here call it grassing, Lee, I call it curing a disease. A few years ago there was a disease called smallpox; killed millions. Then they found a cure for it and thought they’d stamped it out. A couple of years later somebody in Africa said: “Hey! There’s a feller in our village still got it.” So the doctors moved in and cured him. Now he can’t give it to anyone else. The man who spoke out wasn’t grassing – he did a public service. You could do the same.’

‘They’d kill me.’ He looked scared.

‘No they wouldn’t,’ I assured him, without conviction. ‘They wouldn’t know where the information came from. Besides, I thought the younger generation wanted some excitement in their lives. They’ve wanted to kill me for years, I can live with it.’

He could have stood up and walked out. An old lag would have done, but he still had a residue of polite behaviour in him, and I hadn’t said he could go.

‘What’s the grub like?’ I asked.

He almost smiled; either with relief at the change of subject or at the thought of the next culinary extravaganza. ‘Rubbish,’ he answered.

I small-talked with him for twenty minutes, asking him about how he was finding it inside, his family,
how he’d done at school, anything I could think of. He opened up a little about playing football, but most of the time it was a questions-and-answers session. It usually is with teenagers. After a while I took a long look at my watch.

‘Well, I’ll have to go, Lee. It’s been nice talking to you. I have to ask you once again, though, do you want to become a crime-fighter, or would you rather play all your football against a twenty-foot wall?’

He stared at me across the table with something like contempt in his gaze. ‘You don’t understand, do you?’ he declared.

‘Understand what?’ I replied, quizzically.

‘Drugs,’ he answered. ‘Drugs are all right. As soon as I get out I’ll start taking them again. What else is there?’

‘I’m sorry you feel that way, Lee. Drugs are a
one-way
ride to an early grave or the mental hospital, and it’s all downhill.’

I stood up to leave, but as I reached the door of our little cubicle I turned back to him. ‘Oh, I forgot to give you these; you have to have a copy.’ I reached into my inside pocket for the two sheets of foolscap and laid them on the table in front of him.

He gazed at them for a few seconds, then up at me. ‘What are they?’ he demanded.

‘Your new deps,’ I told him.

‘I’ve got my deps.’

‘You’re not listening, Lee. I said your new deps.’

He looked bewildered, so I spelt it out for him: ‘We’ve got you down as a nonce now, Lee, with a special liking for small boys. Should make a good-looking lad like you very popular in here. I’ll organise you some new room-mates on my way out.’

The newly acquired colour drained from his face and he swayed in his chair. I re-took my seat opposite him.

‘You couldn’t do it,’ he said defiantly.

I pointed at the papers. ‘Read ’em. Do you want to risk it?’ I placed my ball-pen across the sheets in front of him. ‘All I’m asking you to do, Lee,’ I said softly, ‘is turn the sheet over and write a name on the back. I guarantee that nobody will ever know where it came from.’ A white-knuckled fist moved a couple of inches towards the pen, hesitated, and then withdrew. His eyes were glistening with tears. He sniffed and shook his head.

‘No. I can’t,’ he mumbled.

‘A name, Lee.’

‘No.’

‘One little name, and I’ll go away and take the deps with me and no one will ever know I’ve been.’

He shook his head. I reached across and turned the top sheet over. Across the middle it said ‘Parker’. The effect was electric.

‘I didn’t write that!’ he exclaimed.

‘Thanks, Lee, that should do nicely.’ I took the fake depositions back and put them in my pocket. ‘You won’t be needing these any more,’ I explained.

‘I didn’t write it, I didn’t write anything.’ He wiped his nose on his sleeve.

‘Of course you didn’t, but your face told me what I wanted to know. Don’t worry about it, Lee, we’ve had his name from several sources, I just wanted confirmation.’

His agitation died down when he realised that we already knew the name. What he didn’t know was how useless that piece of information was to us.

‘This Parker …’ I tossed the question in as casually as tossing a cigarette butt into a fire, ‘is he black or white?’

No harm in answering that; it only narrows the field down to half of the world’s population.

‘White,’ he said, gazing at the table like a
shell-shocked
survivor. The dam was cracking. Some judicious leverage could give us a torrent.

‘Do you fancy another tea?’

He nodded. I fetched the same again and we sipped and munched in silence for a while. ‘Big money in dealing,’ I stated. ‘What’s he drive – BMW? Merc? Porsche?’

‘A Porsche.’

‘Fabulous. A black one, no doubt.’

‘Yeah, how did you know?’

‘Just a guess, black ones look best.’

If it really was a black Porsche we probably had enough to pin him down; on the other hand Lee could be smarter than the average junky. Might as well go for gold. ‘Where does he hang out, Lee?’

‘All over. Sometimes in the Penalty Spot, sometimes in the Fireplace.’ The Penalty Spot was the pub outside the football ground, the Fireplace was a nightclub of some repute.

‘On match days?’ I asked.

‘I think so.’

‘You think so. Don’t you deal with him?’

‘No.’

‘Then who do you get your works from?’ He looked down at the table. He’d clammed up again.

‘Lee, look at me. Are you telling me that Parker is the big fish, the pusher who supplies your dealer.’ He lifted his head and nodded. ‘Any idea where he comes from?’

‘Manchester, I think.’

‘Thanks, Lee. I’ll see what I can do for you.’

The drug network is long and tortuous. Between the hill farmers and chemists who produce the stuff and the street-corner dealers who peddle it are chains of middlemen, each raking off a percentage of the final price. What starts out measured in tons, selling for peanuts, finally lands on the streets in twists of foil selling at twenty-five pounds a go. At each transaction the quantities are divided into smaller units, and the price increases by two or three hundred percent.

A heroin junky needs between one and two hundred pounds every day to pay for his habit. The easiest way to get this sort of money is to become a dealer. He’ll buy an ounce at a time and sell individual doses of half
a gram, probably diluted with something like baking soda. He’s a victim, dealing to pay for the crocodile in his head that needs constant feeding. The people he buys from don’t touch the stuff. They haven’t got long hair; they wear blue suits, not Funky Junky T-shirts, and do their deals via mobile telephones in their upmarket cars. The more middlemen they can bypass, the bigger the profit. But that makes the risks greater, too.

Where Parker fitted in I didn’t know, but I was sure of one thing – he’d been very careless. 

I was struggling to write a letter to the Crown Prosecution Service in an attempt to obtain light sentences for the Mountain Bike Gang, on the grounds that they had proffered valuable information, but I kept being interrupted. First it was Sparky.

‘Are there two ns in fornication?’

‘Only if they’re lesbian ’ens, usually it’s just one ‘en and a cockerel.’

‘Cheers.’

‘You’re welcome.’ Then it was Mike Freer, at last, on the telephone. ‘Shagnasty! How y’doin’?’ he boomed in my ear. There was a ritual to be gone through before we got down to business.

‘Not bad, Fungus Features, how’re you?’ I replied.

‘Oh, fare to Midlands. Listen, Super Sleuth, I want you to know that we’re ignoring the rumours and we’re all standing by you in spite of everything.’

‘Gee, I’m … I’m really choked. I don’t deserve friends like you.’

‘Just tell me one thing,’ he went on, ‘was it a very old man?’

‘It wasn’t an old man,’ I replied. ‘It was an old English Sheepdog.’

‘Ah! Then that explains why you were in the City Square toilets.’

‘Precisely. Is somebody trying to sully my reputation?’

‘Don’t worry about it. In twenty years it will be considered perfectly normal behaviour. You’re just ahead of your time.’

He could go on for ever; I’d had enough. ‘Listen, Fungus, I need your help. When can I see you?’

‘Soon as you like.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Sure, where?’

‘My place, about seven. You know I’m back at my mother’s house now?’

‘Yes, I’m sorry about her. She was a grand lady, I thought a lot of her.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘and now I’ve got some information for you.’ I told him all about Parker.

‘Parker? It could be his pen name,’ he suggested. He was stealing my material.

‘In that case, he’s a penpusher,’ I countered.

‘Well let’s see if we can pension him off.’

‘To the penitentiary?’

‘Pentonville, of course.’

‘Let’s make that the penultimate comment.’

‘Thank God for that. Will your boy give evidence?’

‘No way, Pedro!’

‘Have you been bending the rules, Charlie?’

‘Mmm, massaging them, a little.’

‘Listen, Charlie; listen to Uncle Mike. It’s not worth it, there’s too much at stake. The days have gone when you could give them a clip round the ear and they’d say, “Thank you sir, I deserved that,” and send you a Christmas card.’

‘Ah, those were the days. You’re right, but it’s good info. However, whatever you do, keep it to yourself as much as possible – somebody in the Force is involved.’ No need to tell him just yet that it’s only our Chief Constable.

Mike’s voice fell an octave. ‘Oh dear, are you sure?’

‘That’s why I want to see you tonight. Then, when we’ve sorted that lot out, I’ll take you to Kim Limbert’s promotion bash. She’s coming to the city.’

‘So I’ve heard. Actually I’m supposed to be going to a do over here. One of our number has just become a dad after trying for fifteen years, so we’re wetting the baby’s head.’

‘Lovely. What did they do, change their milkman?’

‘Probably,’ Mike replied. ‘I’ve only to throw my shirt
on the bed and the wife’s pregnant. He’s got a little girl, so they’re calling her Mira.’

‘Myra? After the Pontefract Poisoner?’

‘No, after the electric shower manufacturers. Apparently she was conceived under one of their products.’

We drove up towards the Coiners in my car, out of the decent weather into the perpetual rain of the high moorlands. Every schoolboy learns that Lancashire got the cotton because of the damp atmosphere on their side of the hill, whilst we got the wool due to the softness of the water in our streams. Nobody mentions the slave trade, of course. We weren’t taught about the merchants from Liverpool and Manchester who financed slave ships to plunder Africa. They carried their wretched cargo to America and returned laden with cotton for their almost-as-wretched mills. The merchants grew fat and wealthy, gave their names to various philanthropic projects and bought respectability.

‘We could have a pudding while we’re here,’ said Mike, with the enthusiasm of the ill-fed, when he saw the sign.

‘No way,’ I stated.

I led him through a stile in the dry-stone wall at the back of the car park, and paced out twenty-five steps along the wall side. ‘There it is,’ I told him, pointing at the white package, still wedged between the stones
where I had concealed it the night before. Mike fished it out, holding a corner between finger and thumb, and dropped it into a plastic bag.

‘’Fraid I handled it quite a bit,’ I confessed, then asked: ‘Any guesses what it is?’

‘No, not yet, but it looks interesting. I’ll have it analysed in the morning.’

We drove down the hill in silence for a while. Eventually Mike said: ‘How do you want us to play this, Charlie?’

I’d filled him in on the background on the way up. ‘Softly-softly, if possible. Somebody’s out to nail me, so I’d like to keep it under wraps. Let them have to try again. If that stuff’s self-raising flour there’s no harm done. If it’s something else, we’ve a problem.’

‘Thanks for the “we”. I think we can both kiss goodbye to our night on the tiles. I’ll go straight in with this, see if I can raise a friendly expert; and I don’t want it hanging around me for too long. You’d better get something down on paper: if we’re keeping quiet we’d best cover our backs.’

I’d been looking forward to seeing Kim again, but never mind – it gave me an excuse to call her sometime in the future. I set to work on the word processor in the spare bedroom-cum-office and put down for posterity the events subsequent to the mysterious phone call. Then, because I felt wide awake, I typed out the story of my trip to ABC House, and the visitation of Chief Constable Hilditch. I ran off three
copies and sealed them in separate envelopes.

Seven a.m. the phone rang. It was Mike Freer. I’d forgotten that the Drug Squad are night owls. He sounded agitated. ‘It’s heroin. I had half a gram analysed. The Professor said it’s the purest he’s ever seen.’

‘So where does that leave us?’

‘Easy on the “us”, Super Sleuth. It leaves you with half a kilogram of Bogota’s best; street value about two hundred thousand quid.’

‘Jesus! I’ll take it. Where is it now?’

‘It’s sealed in a jiffy bag with my name on it and in our safe. It should be OK there. Trouble is, your story is that it was planted on you to incriminate you; our story, if we tell it, is that it’s the biggest individual haul we’ve ever had. Over the top’s hardly the word.’

‘You mean nobody would believe me.’

‘Somebody decided to make you a rich man, because they had a grudge against you? Would you believe it?’

‘No. They must be swimming in the stuff, whoever they are.’

‘And they’re clever. What’s your next move?’

‘I’ve written three reports,’ I told him. ‘I’ll lodge one with Gilbert Wood this morning. Hopefully that will keep us in the clear. I don’t want to go public yet, if that’s OK with you. Somebody’s invested a lot in me, let’s see what their next move is.’

‘Anything you say, Sheepshagger. Are you sending me a copy?’

‘In the post this morning. Thanks for your help, Mike, I appreciate it.’

‘No problem. Meanwhile, we’ll have a look for your Parker friend. Who knows, you could qualify for a transfer to the Drug Squad yet.’

As soon as the morning’s formalities were over I collared Gilbert Wood in his office. I asked him to sign and date one of the envelopes across the flap, and gave it to him for safekeeping. Next, when he was sitting comfortably, cup of decaffeinated in hand, I told him the full story.

Gilbert looked grave and thoughtful. ‘Jesus Christ, Charlie, you’ve poked a gorilla in the arse with a sharp stick this time. When do you get your twenty-six and a half years in? Is it before me?’

‘We don’t qualify for good behaviour or ill-health, Gilbert, we’re both full-termers.’

‘I’m working on it. We’ve probably enough to bring Cakebread in and spin his premises. It’s not very satisfactory, though, and we’d not root out the Force connection. Let’s just clarify what we’ve got so far.’

Gilbert pulled an easel out of the corner of his office, with a large flip-chart on it. The first pen he tried didn’t work. He put it back on the ledge and selected one that did. He wrote:

Then he added:

‘Hilditch knows Cakebread,’ I suggested. Gilbert wrote:

‘What next?’ he asked.

‘Why do you save the pens that don’t work? Why not sling them in the bin?’

‘It might start working again. What next?’

‘CC knows Charlie’s on his tail,’ I told him. He put:

I wasn’t happy about the ambiguity, but I let it go. In a sudden burst of inspiration Gilbert added:

We stood back and admired his handiwork. Gilbert selected a different-coloured pen and drew arrows
on the chart. ‘We’ve established links there, there and there,’ he said, indicating the top four lines, ‘but we’ve nothing to show that, the drugs are part of the same scam. They might be totally unrelated. I hate to be the one to tell you this, Charlie, but there’s other people around who don’t like you.’

‘Mmm, I know, that’s what I’ve been thinking. Heroin is a highly marketable commodity, though. Which is easier to get rid of: three paintings or fifty million quid’s worth of smack?’

‘You mean they stole the paintings and traded them for the drugs.’

‘That’s the theory,’ I stated, ‘except that maybe they didn’t steal the paintings. Maybe they just traded the forgeries.’

‘Jesus Christ, no wonder Truscott sounded scared when you talked to him. Drug barons are not the people to meddle with.’

I gazed at Gilbert with my brow furrowed and a deadpan expression on my face, trying hard not to smile. ‘Gilbert,’ I said, ‘do you have to keep using our Saviour’s name as an expletive? Some people might find it offensive. In fact, I believe I do. Why can’t you just use plain old Anglo-Saxon like everybody else?’

‘Oh no!’ He put his hands to his head in exasperation. ‘Don’t tell me: my DI’s found God!’

‘No I haven’t!’ I declared.

‘Then it’s a woman,’ he stated triumphantly, stabbing
a forefinger at me. ‘You’ve found a woman and she’s found God.’

‘Rubbish. Anyway there’s something else to add to the chart.’

‘You’re blushing! I’ve never seen you blush before.’

‘No I’m not. Truscott …’

‘Yes you are. Hey! It’s the lady in the video, isn’t it? She looked all right, definitely too good for you. What about Truscott?’

I was relieved to get back to business. I had a feeling that I’d lost that little skirmish. ‘The conversation I had with him at Beamish,’ I began. ‘I’ve been over and over it in my mind, and I’m certain he said that the Picasso was damaged and he didn’t think it had been switched. He pretended he didn’t know, as if the pictures had passed on from him. But then he bequeaths me the Picasso, real or forged, in his will.’

Gilbert thought about it. ‘Which proves what?’ he asked.

‘Just that Truscott is a liar,’ I stated. ‘He knew all along where the Picasso was. He had it himself.’

Gilbert added to the chart.

‘And there’s another thing you ought to know,’ I said.

‘Too late, the sheet’s full.’ He pulled it off the pad
and started to tear it into shreds which fell into his bin.

‘Cakebread’s just flown off on his hols in his own plane.’

‘Where to?’ Gilbert asked wearily.

‘The Costa del Crime,’ I answered.

His eyebrows popped up. ‘Think he might be collecting another payment?’

‘Who knows?’ I watched the last few strips fall into the bin. ‘I’d like to leave things a while, see what their next move is, if that’s all right with you.’

‘There’s not much else we can do,’ he stated, stroking his chin, ‘but it could be dangerous. They may not be so subtle next time.’

‘If I broke my legs tonight, would you manage without me?’

‘It would be a struggle at first,’ he admitted, ‘but by ten o’clock we’d be saying, “Charlie who?”’

‘Well in that case, can I have the next two weeks off on leave?’

Gilbert gave one of his all-the-cares-of-the-world sighs. After considering for a few seconds what I’d asked he said: ‘If you want to take your lady friend studying ecclesiastical architecture in the Cotswolds – yes. If you’re thinking of buggering off to Spain looking for Cakebread – no.’

I didn’t say anything, just thought about the options he’d given, and a wave of melancholy swept over me. I could immerse myself in police work and enjoy the
banter and the adventure of it; I even enjoyed the long, boring shifts waiting in the car in some alley, watching for something to happen. But the endless shifts always did come to an end. Gilbert had been dismissive of the holiday in the Cotswolds, with ‘your lady friend’, but his throwaway line expressed an unattainable dream for me. I must be growing sensitive.

The office felt claustrophobic, I needed some fresh air. I delegated a few jobs, then told Tony and Dave that I was going to sort out a few things for the Jaguar. I paused in the exit from the car park. Turning right would take me up towards the moors, past St Bidulph’s and the Old Vicarage. ‘Not just yet,’ she had told me, but when was ‘yet’, and how would I know? I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, consumed with doubt and indecision. A patrol car waiting behind me gave a gentle toot on its horn. I waved an apology, signalled left and started down the hill into town.

I’d had a message from Jimmy Hoyle, the mechanic, that the wheels were ready, so I thought I would collect them and fit them in the evening. On the way, as an afterthought, I called in to a travel agency that most of the troops used because it gave a discount to Federation members. There were three girls in varying degrees of desirability behind the counter, and a youth with a ponytail and earrings.