Shooting Elvis Read online

  So we leave them to it, with perhaps just a little interference. Drugs multiply several-fold in price at every stage of the dealing. When a newspaper report says that a million pounds’ worth of marijuana has been seized, someone somewhere has had to pay for it. Say a hundred thousand pounds’. That would be a thousand per cent mark-up; not bad, except the Mr Big can’t sell it in one deal for a million. He divides it into smaller lots, dilutes it with milk powder or Polyfilla if it’s heroin, and sells it to his own network of smaller dealers. They take the drugs on a high now, pay later basis.

  That’s where we come in. Every time we seize a consignment someone is in deep shit, and the higher up the line we can intervene, the deeper the shit. Mr Big wants his money. He’s delivered the goods and now it’s payback time. If little Winston or Kevin on the street corner loses his stash before he can sell it on, and therefore can’t pay for it, he has the life expectancy of a kamikaze pilot. We find him with a bullet in his neck and shake our heads sadly for the press whilst rubbing our hands behind our backs.

  So was this a black on black?

  ‘No, I don’t think so, prof,’ I replied. ‘They don’t mess about.’ I made a gun with my forefinger and thumb. ‘Bang, you’re dead. That’s good enough for them.’

  ‘Sounds as if this is one for Dr Foulkes.’

  ‘I know. I’ll ring him as soon as the streets are aired.’ Adrian Foulkes is head of clinical psychiatry at Heckley General, and a so-called expert on psychological profiling. He’s as mad as a hatter, and I’m not a great believer in what is a rather inexact science, but it’s always good to have a second opinion.

  ‘Well,’ the professor went on, ‘for what it’s worth the blow to the head was probably the cause of death and ToD was sometime Friday evening. PM Monday morning, if you can wait until then?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s fine,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the coffee.’

  It was nearly ten when I arrived home, and Sonia wasn’t there. I found her note saying that she’d gone for a run pinned to the fridge door. ‘Back about ten-thirty,’ it said.

  I was whacked. All that dancing was too much for me. I had a shower, towelled myself nearly dry and crawled into bed. I was running over things in my mind when the door banged. I imagined Sonia pouring herself an orange juice and gulping it down, before sitting on the stool in the kitchen and removing her trainers. She came to the bottom of the stairs and shouted, ‘Are you back?’

  As my car was on the drive it was a reasonable deduction. I’ll make a detective of you yet, I thought, and shouted, ‘In bed,’ down at her.

  She came in, looking pink and sweaty, her hair sticking to her head and dark stains of perspiration soaking through her vest.

  ‘Good run?’ I asked as she sat on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Mmm. And you? Have you been in long?’

  ‘No, not long.’

  ‘Was it a murder?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She put her fingers on my forehead and rubbed it. ‘Poor thing,’ she said. ‘You must be worn out.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Do you want something to eat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shall I leave you alone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want you to come to bed.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes. Desperately.’

  She looked at me for a long while, then her eyes crinkled into a little smile and she said, ‘OK.’

  Brendan and Maggie went to the post-mortem examination while I had a word with the coroner. Sunday afternoon and Monday we had the foot soldiers out learning what they could about the deceased, and it was a sorry tale. He was called Jermaine Lapetite and had a record that wouldn’t have fitted on an old floppy disk. He needed a whole 700Mb CD to himself. We found the mothers of two of his children living nearby, and they described him using words straight off their kids’ birth certificates. He kept a small amount of crack cocaine under his mattress, a few ounces of pot behind a drawer in the kitchen and twelve hundred pounds cash under a loose floorboard.

  Les Isles, the chief superintendent standing in for the ACC (Crime), rang and asked if I needed any help. I explained that we hadn’t decided if this was a new enquiry or part of the ongoing one and asked him to hang fire until the reports were in. Before I went along the road linking the two murders I wanted to clear something up about Alfred Armitage. His old sparring partner Eric Smallwood was still in the frame, but I was having my doubts. I needed to see him.

  I’d rung him, so he was waiting for me, still jacketed and helmeted as if about to go wobbling off to the library on a bicycle with a basket on the front. He’d have looked more at home in Cambridge, riding down the Backs. He invited me in and gestured for me to sit on a leather armchair while he took the matching chesterfield.

  ‘What’s it about, Inspector?’ he asked. ‘I thought I answered all your questions the last time we met.’

  ‘Since then I’ve been to see Mrs Newbold,’ I told him, ‘and now I have a few more.’

  ‘Josephine? You’ve been to see Josephine?’ He sat up, interested, his guard lowered. ‘How is she?’

  ‘She’s fine. Asked how you were,’ I lied.

  ‘And what did you tell her?’

  ‘I said you were fine, too. That’s all.’ It looked as if Mr Weirdo had a crush on the boss’s wife. And why not? ‘A few things came to light in our discussions about the company,’ I told him. ‘It appears that in the last few years Ellis and Newbold’s was being robbed blind. I want to know what part you and Alfred Armitage had in that.’

  Now he looked flustered. ‘I – I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘I mean: which of you had his hands in the till?’

  ‘It wasn’t me. I never had anything from the company that I wasn’t legally entitled to.’

  ‘That sounds a rather loaded statement, Mr Smallwood,’ I said. ‘I could ask our economic crime unit to come and have a word with you – they know much more about these things than me – but I won’t. It would be a waste of resources. Mrs Newbold wants to wash her hands of the whole thing, not prefer any charges, which lets you nicely off the hook. But there is still the little matter of Alfred’s death. That won’t go away so easily. If you weren’t robbing the company, it must have been him.’

  He shuffled in his seat and his little pink tongue licked his top lip. He was realising that he was in the clear. ‘I, er, had my suspicions,’ he said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, one day, back in about ’93, I caught Alfred doing some photocopying. Order lists, sales projections, that sort of thing. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted them for at first, then I realised: he was passing information about our customers over to our rivals.’

  ‘So you reported him to the boss.’

  ‘Um, no.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I was going to, but he threatened me.’

  ‘What with?’

  He ignored the question, found something outside to attract his attention and looked towards the window.

  ‘Violence?’ I suggested, but he still didn’t answer. ‘Or did he threaten to expose your own little scam, Mr Smallwood, whatever it was?’

  Smallwood stood up and straightened the Shepherd print hanging above the fireplace. ‘I didn’t do anything. I told you that.’

  ‘I know, but I don’t believe you. What were your feelings about Alfred?’ I asked.

  He turned to face me. ‘My feelings?’

  ‘Mmm. Did you like him, hate him, think he was alright, or what?’

  ‘None of those. He did his job and I did mine. We didn’t socialise, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘You were indifferent towards him?’

  ‘Yes. Indifferent.’

  ‘So you didn’t compare notes. You just both kept robbing the company in your separate ways.’

  ‘No. I never took anything. It was only Alfred.’

  ‘And you didn’t kill him?’
r />   Panic flared in his face. ‘No. No. Of course not. Is that what you think?’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ I said, pushing myself up from the chair. ‘Don’t leave the country, will you?’

  But it wasn’t a possibility. It takes certain qualities to get somebody drunk, wire him to the mains and put the power on. I don’t know what the qualities are, but I was convinced that Smallwood didn’t possess them.

  Back at the station there were more loose ends to clear up. Lincoln had been talking to the Hell’s Angels and Bousfield’s alibi was as tight as a 747’s wheelnuts, with just enough slack in there to make it believable.

  The economic crime unit were more cooperative after a word from the boss, and had discovered that after leaving Ellis and Newbold’s Alfred had gone to work for their rivals, AJK. They, in turn, had sacked him during a period of belt-tightening after that company started going down the tube. As Alfred had probably been selling their secrets, there was a certain irony there. He’d left with a stainless reputation after less than a year in office, and his bank deposits had quickly dried up after that. There was nothing to suggest that his paymasters put any pressure on him: he hadn’t paid any money back, changed accounts or moved house.

  I was cutting corners, painting with a broad brush, but decisions had to be made. If Alfred wasn’t killed because of his industrial espionage links, and if the Angels and Bousfield were in the clear, we were swimming in treacle.

  But was Alfred the intended victim or was he killed because of his unfortunate similarity to Terence Paul Hutchinson, the Midnight Strangler? Hutchinson and Jermaine Lapetite both came from the shallow end of the gene pool, so were they both murdered because someone was doing unofficial pool maintenance? It was a strong possibility.

  I went down to the incident room and did a big chart on the whiteboard, linking all the scenarios. After a few seconds admiring it I reached out and erased Smallwood’s name. I was about to do the same with Bousfield but hesitated. Instead I left it there but drew a line through it, so it wasn’t gone completely.

  Sonia had developed a routine with the training. Mondays and Wednesdays, if I was home in time, we’d drive to the golf club and do our laps; Tuesdays and perhaps Thursday she’d go to the track for some serious stuff against the clock; Saturday and Sunday mornings we’d go for a jog from home. My presence was optional, but I was there when I could manage it. Her next race was another 10K, in Durham at the weekend.

  On this Monday I couldn’t face it. I arrived home just as Sonia was about to leave, so I drove her to the golf club and sent her off on her own. The lady with the dog returned from her walk shortly after Sonia started her second lap and mouthed hello to me as I sat in the car, making notes, with Vaughan Williams on the CD player. I smiled and waved back. She walked to her car, opened the back door so the little dog could leap inside, and came back to me. I wound the window down and rolled the volume right off.

  ‘Has Miss Thornton gone off running without you?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘She’s too fast for me so I decided to have a rest.’

  ‘She’s a wonderful athlete,’ she told me, as if I didn’t know. ‘I told you I saw her win a race at Roundhay Park, in Leeds. I used to run there myself, many years ago, on Children’s Day. Just the hundred yards sprint. I never won, but I’ve loved athletics ever since. I was so disappointed when Sonia didn’t go to Atlanta.’

  ‘A lot of people were.’

  ‘Is she fit again, now?’

  ‘She’s getting there.’

  ‘I have my camera in the car,’ she said. ‘Do you think she’d let me take her photograph?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think she’d mind. She’s quite shy, but I suppose she’d be flattered.’

  ‘Oh, good. Shall I wait for her to get back, or would she prefer it some other evening? She might be upset to have it dropped on her, so to speak.’

  ‘Might as well wait,’ I replied, ‘if you have the time.’

  She went to sit in her car and wait, and ten minutes later Sonia came steaming up the hill for the second time. I jumped out with a towel and a drink and told her, nodding in the appropriate direction, about the lady with the Scottie. As predicted, she turned a pale beetroot colour.

  ‘Me?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A photograph?’

  ‘Yes. She’s a fan.’ I waved to the woman and she came across to us.

  ‘Do you mind?’ she asked.

  Sonia laughed, still blushing. ‘No, of course not.’

  The woman produced a small digital camera and spent several seconds making adjustments until things were to her liking. Finally she gave the ‘smile’ command and pressed the button.

  ‘Let me take one of the two of you,’ I said, and reached for the camera. Sonia posed next to the woman, although posed is hardly the word. She stood like a prize fighter, feet slightly apart, whereas a model would have placed one ankle neatly behind the other to produce a tapering effect. The sun was low, casting the yellow light that photographers love. I repositioned myself so it was illuminating their faces and squatted down, one knee on the ground. By now their smiles had slipped and the two of them looked as if they were up for execution.

  ‘For God’s sake SMILE!’ I shouted, they laughed and I pressed the button.

  The woman took her camera back with profuse thank you’s, and I drove Sonia home. ‘There,’ I said as I buckled my seatbelt, ‘that’s two people you’ve made happy today.’

  Tuesday morning we had a big meeting in the Portakabin we were using as an improvised incident room. Professor Foulkes was one of the first to arrive and we asked each other about our love lives. His was going through an extended rocky patch; I reported that mine was doing quite nicely, thank you.

  ‘And what does it feel like to be a celebrity?’ he asked. ‘You know that it’s a drug, don’t you? The more publicity you attract, the more you want.’

  ‘Don’t you start, Adrian,’ I said. ‘It’s all uninvited, I assure you.’

  ‘Ah, you say that,’ he went on, ‘but would the delightful – and she is truly delightful – Miss Thornton, aka La Gazelle, still find you attractive if you were a nonentity?’

  ‘That’s the least of my worries.’

  ‘Is it? So what is the most of your worries?’

  I laughed out loud. ‘Good try, prof, but mind your own business. I’m not on your couch.’ It was the twenty-year age gap, and no amount of psychobabble could alter that.

  ‘Just warming up my finely tuned analytical muscles, Charlie. But if you ever do happen to fall out with her, remember an old friend, won’t you? What time does this meeting start?’

  It started then. While we talked the team, plus extras, had drifted in, armed with notebooks and beakers of coffee from the machine. I’d brought us two from the office, made with real Nescafé. Chairs scraped as they were manoeuvred into position and everyone made themselves comfortable. Dave came in and headed for me, a folded newspaper in his hand.

  ‘Have you seen this, Charlie?’ he asked.

  ‘No. What is it?’

  ‘UK News. You’d better read it.’

  I took the tabloid from him. It was supposedly a report about the finding of Jermaine Lapetite’s body, but the headline read: Dead druggy’s penis amputated.

  I turned the page towards Adrian so he could read it.

  ‘Amputated,’ he said. ‘That’s a big word for the UK News. Is it true?’

  ‘Not that I know,’ I told him. ‘I never looked. It’s not the sort of thing I do.’

  ‘Does it say it was stuffed in his mouth?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dave replied. ‘Lower down.’

  ‘Even you would have noticed that, Charlie,’ Adrian said.

  ‘I’d have thought so,’ I agreed.

  ‘Maybe old sawbones will know if it was chopped off,’ he suggested.

  ‘The pathologist? He’s not coming but I have his report here. He doesn’t mention it.’

  ‘H
mm. I imagine it’s the sort of thing he would mention. Sounds like poetic licence to me. Or wishful thinking. It’s the sort of rough justice that would appeal to a UK News reader.’

  ‘Let’s hope you’re right.’ I turned to Dave. ‘Ring the paper, Dave,’ I said. ‘See where they got it from.’

  ‘Can I tell them it’s not true?’

  ‘No problem. Let’s get on with it.’

  I jumped up onto the little stage and everybody stopped talking. ‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘This won’t take long. First of all can I introduce Professor Adrian Foulkes, from the psychology department at Heckley General. He’s here for background knowledge and then he will hopefully look into the parts we mortals can’t reach. If you’re very good he’ll make his bow tie rotate.’ Adrian gave a languid wave of acknowledgement. ‘The pathologist can’t be with us, unfortunately,’ I continued, ‘but I have his report here.’ I gazed down at the front row and picked on Brendan. ‘Here you are, Brendan,’ I said, handing him the folder, ‘this morning you can be the patho. Read that and be ready to answer questions.’

  ‘We’re here to discuss the death of Jermaine Lapetite,’ I told them. ‘As you know, he was found suspended upside down from a roof joist. Two holes had been knocked through the plasterboard ceiling to access the joist. We haven’t found the tool that did it and one would expect the perpetrator to be covered in plaster. The victim was hanging by an old clothes line, knotted around his feet with the other end around the toilet overflow pipe.’

  ‘Have you seen this morning’s UK News, boss?’ somebody asked.

  ‘I have. Dave brought it in.’

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘No, apart from the bang to his head there was no sign of mutilation. Maybe this is a good time to hear what the PM disclosed. Brendan, it’s your stage.’ He stood up and half-turned towards his audience. ‘Just the relevant stuff,’ I said.