Some By Fire dcp-6 Read online

  His elbows were on the table, his fingers interlocked and both thumb-nails between his teeth. He chewed away for nearly a minute, then looked straight at me and said: "I found it. If I'm lying may my little lad be dead when I go 'ome."

  It's always someone else they want dead. "He might be," I replied. "Of old age."

  I pulled into the nick car park and suggested we have a fairly early night. Dave said: "I could do another window frame round at the mother-in-law's, or I could cut the grass."

  "You're spoilt for choices," I commented.

  "Or…" he began,"… or I could nip into Leeds after tea and talk to Mr. Alderdice, former student at Leeds University and erstwhile friend of Duncan Roberts."

  "Uh-uh," I said, shaking my head.

  "Why not?"

  "Because I don't want your Shirley blaming me for you never being there."

  "I can handle her. I'd like to find out about this punk bird, fast as possIt's niggling me."

  "I know what you mean," I replied. "Fair enough, you see Alderdice and I'll have a word with Mr. Pretty. That'll be two names fewer to investigate. Do you want to meet in a pub afterwards and compare notes?"

  "Er, no, if you don't mind. I know I said I could handle her, but there are limits."

  When he'd driven away I locked the car and walked into the town centre and had a teatime special in the Chinese restaurant. I enjoyed it, all by myself, with no one to entertain or worry about. Maybe this was my natural state, I thought.

  But I didn't really believe it. Back in the car I rang Jacquie and told her I was on my way to a meeting. We could grab a quick drink later, if she wanted. I moaned about my midge bites and she said:

  "Lavender oil."

  "Lavender oil," I repeated. "What will that do?"

  "It's aroma therapy Lavender oil will cool you down and de-stress you, then you need aloe vera to soothe the damaged tissue. I'll show you, when you come round."

  "Ooh! I can hardly wait," I said.

  Watson Pretty lived on the edge of Huddersfield town centre, not far from where I did my probationary training. Not much had changed. The main difference was that now both sides of every street were lined with cars; some worth much more than the houses they stood outside, some rusting wrecks standing on bricks, awaiting the invention of the wheel.

  The doctor's surgery was in the same place, but with wire mesh over the windows, and the greengrocer's was now a mini-market. I smiled at the memories and checked the street names.

  He invited me in, speaking very softly, and told me to sit down. He was wearing pantaloons, a T-shirt with a meaningless message emblazoned across it and modest dreadlocks. He must have been fifty, but was refusing to grow up. The room was overfurnished with stuffed cushions and frills, and primitive paintings of Caribbean scenes on the walls.

  At a guess, it had belonged to his mother. He was out on licence, so I knew he'd be no trouble. One word out of place and he could be back inside to serve the rest of his sentence. Well, that's what we tell them.

  "I'm looking for a girl," I began. "A white girl with purple hair."

  "I know no such girl," he replied.

  "How about back in 1975? Did you know her then?"

  "No, I not know her."

  "You had a girlfriend called Daphne Turnbull."

  "Yes."

  "She died in a fire."

  "Yes."

  "And you didn't know a girl with purple hair?"

  "Who is she, this girl?"

  "That's what I'm trying to find out. You remember the fire?"

  "I hear about the fire, but I live in Halifax at the time."

  He was a founder member of the Campaign for Simplified English. The first rule is that you only speak in the present tense. "With Daphne?"

  I asked.

  "We live together for a while, but she leave me."

  "Why did she leave you?"

  He shrugged and half-smiled. "Women?"

  "Was her daughter, Jasmine, yours?"

  "No."

  I'd read the interviews with him and knew he had a good alibi, but he could have hired someone to start the blaze. At the time he'd been my definite number-one suspect, although I'd never met him. Now I wanted to eliminate him, but I still wasn't sure. I rarely have hunches and don't trust my feelings about people. Evidence is what counts. I quizzed him about his relationship with Daphne and kept returning to the girl with purple hair, but he was adamant that he didn't know her.

  Talking about the fire didn't disturb him at all. It was just history to him.

  I thanked him for his help and left. I'd parked at the top of his street and as I neared the car a woman came round the corner. There are some women you see and you think: Corf She's beautiful; and there are others who deprive you of even that simple ability. You gawp, slack-jawed, and realise you are flat lining but don't care, because this would be as good a time and place as any to drop down dead. Her hair shone like spun anthracite and she wore a white dress with buttons down the front. It was short, above her knees, and the seamstress had been very economical with the buttons. She turned to wait and a little girl with braided hair and a matching dress followed her round the corner, gravely avoiding the cracks between the flagstones.

  I mumbled something original and amusing, like: "Lovely morning," and was rewarded with a smile that kicked my cardiac system back into action. In the car I gazed at the digital clock and wondered if there was any hope for me. It was seven forty-three in the evening. I sat for a few seconds, deciding whether to go through the town centre or do a detour, and started the engine. Neither. I did a left down the street parallel to the one Pretty lived in and a left and another left at the bottom of the hill. I pulled across the road and parked.

  The woman and her little girl were now coming down towards me. Mum was tiring of the slow progress so she took her daughter's hand and led her for a while. They passed a few gateways then turned into one and mounted the steps. She knocked, the door opened almost immediately and mother and daughter disappeared inside. I stared at the door for a couple of minutes, long enough for a welcoming kiss and for her to settle in the easy chair I'd just left, and pointed the car homewards.

  Oh dear, I thought. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

  What would I do without Jacquie to come back to? She smiled and kissed me in a mirror-image of the scene I'd imagined forty minutes earlier.

  We had coffee and shop-bought cake and talked about our days. One of her assistants was causing trouble and the rents in the mall were going up. I rambled meaninglessly about what went off behind closed doors in this wicked world we lived in.

  "You're stressed out," she told me.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm not very good company."

  "How are the midge bites?"

  "Agonising." I smiled as I said it.

  She went away for a while and returned carrying a box filled with coloured bottles, like a paintbox. She placed it on the coffee table alongside me and drew a chair up directly in front of mine. "Prince Charles swears by lavender oil," she said.

  "Right," I replied. "Right." If it was good enough for him it was good enough for Charlie Priest.

  She lit three small porcelain burners about the room and turned the lights low. I relaxed. I had a feeling I was in for a treat. Jacquie sat facing me and took my hand. "First the lavender, to absorb all your stresses," she whispered. I watched her long fingers caress my wrists, her scarlet nails skimming my skin but not touching it. She did my fingers, one by one, and I discovered things about myself that I'd never imagined.

  "And now the aloe vera," she said.

  I breathed deeply and closed my eyes, and wished this could go on forever. She removed my shoes and socks and stroked my feet, fingertips and exotic oils mingling together so I couldn't tell touch from smell, pleasure from torture, arousal from relaxation. I stopped trying.

  "This is where the problem is," Jacquie told me. She was massaging my neck now, harder than before, her thumbs probing muscle, searching for knots. "Yo
u're tight here." I let my head loll up and down in agreement. It could have been the most magical evening of my life, but it wasn't. She cured the itching and the stress; all I had now was confusion and frustration.

  It was the hottest night of the year, which didn't help. I lay on my bed with just a sheet over me and the window open. When the blackbird on the roof started singing at about three thirty I got up and read a book. I don't mind him singing, but he will insist on tapping time with his foot, and he has no sense of rhythm. At seven I went to work.

  Terence John Alderdice, Dave told me, remembered Duncan Roberts but was mystified about the girl. "He reckoned Duncan was. a right plonker,"

  Dave said. "He was quite friendly with him the first year. They became mates on day one and were in the same tutorial group, whatever that means, then drifted apart as they found more kindred spirits, as you do. He said Duncan developed some repulsive habits. They were in a hall of residence, and Duncan took great pleasure in never washing his plate or coffee mug. He just used them over and over again."

  "Sounds delightful," I said.

  "In the second year," he continued, "Alderdice said Duncan just gave up studying. He lost interest and moved into a squat with a bunch of other dead-beats. Alderdice didn't see much of him again and never saw him with a girl and doesn't remember ever seeing one with purple hair.

  So there. How did you go on?"

  "Similar. Waste of time. Except that the cycle is repeating itself. I saw Pretty's girlfriend come to visit, just as I left. Black girl, early twenties, with a little daughter, 'bout five."

  Dave said: "Number three lining up for the chop. What can we do about it?"

  "Not much. I'll have a word with his probation officer, see if he's any suggestions. She was gorgeous."

  "The little girl?"

  "No, turnip brain, the mother. The little girl was… little."

  Chapter 6

  The high pressure moved around a bit, bringing breezes from the north.

  The nights were clear and cold and early-morning mists rolled off the hills, causing havoc on the roads. Two people were killed in a fifteen-vehicle pile-up on the M62 and a golfer was struck by lightning in Brighouse. We made ten more contacts, some by telephone. It's all right having carte blanche with expenses, but driving a hundred miles for an interview takes a big chunk out of the working day. And although Nigel was running the big show there were some jobs I had to attend to myself and some I wanted to. Arresting Peter Mark Handley was one of the latter.

  Handley was forty-four years old and taught physical development at Heckley High School, the local comprehensive. When I was a pupil there it was called the Grammar School and we learned PT. Because of financial constraints there was no games mistress as such for the girls, just a reluctant succession of uninterested teachers seconded to take a lesson when they could. The net ball and hockey teams suffered, as did a group of girls who showed promise as swimmers. To prevent a further slide in the school's fortunes Handley had volunteered to take over as their coach, too.

  We'd heard via an older girl who spent a week with us on a job awareness programme that he subscribed to the touchy-feely training method. We held off while the school was in session to avoid rumours spreading, but as soon as the summer holiday came we put him under observation and started interviewing specially selected pupils. Another girl, called Grace and wise beyond her years, said he would give them group talks before a match, extolling the virtues of the East German training methods. He showed them videos of the 1936 Berlin Olympics and modern ones of powerful Teutonic maidens out-sprinting, out-throwing and out-swimming their mortal competitors. Winning was all, he exhorted. Any means of achieving victory was acceptable, and "Simply the Best' became the unofficial team song.

  Later, after the game, when senses were heightened and bodies pleasantly tired, he would offer a lift home to his current favourite.

  Let's have a McDonald's he'd insist. In the restaurant he'd tell her more about East German training methods. They had relied heavily on the administration of huge amounts of the male hormone testosterone. It was a wonder drug for female athletes, and drastically cut down on the amount of training required to achieve international status. There could be problems, of course, if the dosage wasn't carefully controlled. He' dlaugh, and suggest that some of the women shot-putters who'd taken massive doses now left the seat upright when they came out of the toilet. What it did for their sex lives he couldn't imagine, he said, studying the girl's reaction as he broached the subject.

  In the car, near the end of her street, he'd park while talking about the game to hold her attention. His arm would reach across the back of the seat and his fingers caress her hair. There were other methods, he'd say. She was special. She could make it, right to the top. The coach-and-athlete relationship was like no other. The other way, his way, was the loving way. There were no tests for it, and anyway, it wasn't against the rules. His way of administering the male hormone brought only happiness and contentment, plus improved performance. And there were no unwelcome side effects. He didn't mention pregnancy.

  Grace told him to go play with himself and slammed the car door so hard the mirror fell off. He never spoke to her again but she thought the next girl he approached fell for it. Two others gave us the same story but different names of girls they thought had had affairs with him.

  Three refusals, three successes, not a bad score line A female DC had a quiet word with the girls we'd been told about and two of them admitted it. The other one told her to mind her own business.

  Trouble was, they were over sixteen. A schoolteacher is in loco parentis, and is not expected to seduce his charges, but it ain't illegal. We could get him sacked, but that looked like all we could do. Then one of the girls mentioned the magazines he'd shown her and that was all we needed.

  The good news was that his wife had left him about a month earlier.

  Whether it was related we didn't know, but she'd packed two suitcases and decamped to her mother's in Wombwell, near Barnsley. We have to tread delicately in cases like this, but with her out of the way we had a free hand to go round and put the shits up him. Thursday morning, nine a.m." me, Maggie Madison, Sparky and Annette Brown swung into the street of mock-Georgian link-detached dwellings and knocked on his door. The neighbour's sprinkler was drenching the shared lawn and a sun bed was deployed, all ready for duty. The forecast said thunder and a few big cumulus clouds were sailing overhead, but it looked unlikely.

  Mrs. Handley opened the door, which wasn't in the script. I stumbled through the introductions and suggested she let us in. Her husband was in the back garden, tinkering with a lawnmower.

  "Peter Mark Handley?" I asked.

  "Yes. Why?" He placed a screwdriver back in its toolbox and rose to his feet. He didn't look like a PT instructor. He didn't look much like anything right then, except a man whose past has caught up with him. Mrs. Handley looked at us in disbelief and didn't even ask if we'd like a cup of tea.

  "We have a warrant to search your house," I said, holding the printed side towards him.

  There was a green plastic picnic table nearby, with four matching chairs around it. He reached out like a blind man, feeling for a chair. When he located one he fumbled with it and lowered himself down. "Search the house?" he repeated.

  "Yes." I turned to his wife. "Would you like to accompany my officers while they conduct the search?" I said.

  She ignored my question. "What are you looking for?"

  "We're acting on information suggesting that your husband may be in possession of pornographic material." I nodded to the other three to get on with it and invited her to accompany them again.

  "What's all this about, Peter?" she asked.

  "I… I don't know, love."

  "I'm not leaving you alone with my husband," she said. "I want to know what this is about." We sat down. Pornography is a vague definition.

  The tabloids and most women's magazines overstep the boundaries that our parents would h
ave laid down. I'd wanted to have a chat with him, perhaps suggest he quietly hand in his resignation and take up welding or tyre-fitting. Something that wouldn't surround him with nubile young ladies. I couldn't have done his job. I wouldn't have fallen to temptation, like him, but I'd have slowly gone blind and mad.

  "We didn't expect you to be here, Mrs. Handley," I said.

  "I came back last night."

  "Why did you leave?"

  "Is that relevant?"

  "I don't know. Is it?"

  "You tell me. My mother suffers from Alzheimer's, with other complications. The doctor wanted to put her in a nursing home. One for geriatrics. She has four daughters, so we decided we could look after her ourselves, staying with her for a few weeks at a time. I've just done my first stint. At a guess I'll have one more to do. I can't see her lasting much longer than that."

  "I'm very sorry," I said. It wasn't much to offer, but I meant it.

  "Boss." I looked round and saw Maggie standing in the doorway. I walked over to her and she whispered: "Upstairs."

  "Go sit with them," I told her, and went inside.

  The loft ladder was down, with Dave leaning on a rung and Annette standing nearby. "Up there," she said. It was his den. His private world, his space, his fantasy land that nobody else was allowed to enter. I couldn't stand upright, even in the middle, but there was room for a cheap desk and chair, with a TV and VCR.

  Mr. Handley liked pictures of young girls. Without their clothes on.

  He liked to see them posing. He liked to see them struggling. But most of all he liked to see them suffering. At a guess he downloaded stuff from the Internet and dealt in imported magazines. I looked at just enough to satisfy myself it was illegal and went outside, to the real world, where the sun still shone. President Truman was right: sunshine is the best disinfectant.

  His head was in his hands. Normally I would have invited Annette to launch her career with his arrest, but I didn't. "Peter Mark Handley,"