Shooting Elvis Read online

  ‘Oh, hello. You’re acting for a bungalow that’s for sale on the Hebden Bridge road, just outside Heckley. How much is it please?’ He pulled a face and asked how many bedrooms it had. ‘OK, thanks a lot. No, I’ll call into your office for the details. Thanks. Bye.’

  He switched the phone off, saying, ‘£349,995 for a quick sale. Cheap at half the price, I’d say.’

  ‘And vital information. C’mon, let’s see what the man has to say.’

  The drive was block-paved with no weeds or moss growing in the cracks. I wondered how he managed it. Block paving is not as labour saving as I’d hoped it would be. The garage door was closed and no car stood on the drive. Dave pressed the button on the white PVC doorframe and within seconds the front door opened. Even his bell worked. This man was too good to be true.

  Mr Smallwood was wearing a tweed jacket, with shirt and tie, and cavalry twill trousers, with turn-ups. He was tall and slightly stooped, and on his head was a black and silver helmet, as worn by cyclists.

  ‘Mr Smallwood?’ Dave asked.

  ‘Er, yes.’ He sounded furtive and stepped across the threshold, pulling the door half-closed behind him. ‘Who are you? I was just going out.’

  ‘DS Sparkington and DI Priest, from Heckley CID. Could we have a word, please?’

  ‘Well, um, it’s very inconvenient. What’s it about?’

  ‘We’re making enquiries into the background of Alfred Armitage. You may have read that he was found dead a few days ago. We understand you used to work with Mr Armitage at Ellis and Newbolds.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, but I don’t see how I can help.’

  ‘You probably can’t, sir, but we have to follow every avenue. You were chief accountant there, I believe. For how long did you know Alfred?’

  ‘Actually I was company secretary. The accounts were just a part of my remit. How long did I know Alf for? I’m not sure. I worked there from July 1969 until we closed in October 1998. Twenty-nine years. Alf started before me and retired about 1996, I think, so I must have known him for, what, twenty-seven years?’

  I took his word for it. All those dates were making my head buzz. I glanced down at his feet and noticed that he wasn’t wearing bicycle clips. Very suspicious.

  ‘Can we sit down somewhere, please?’ Dave asked. ‘We still have a few more questions to ask.’

  Smallwood looked uncomfortable and pulled the door closed. ‘Um, yes,’ he replied. ‘We can sit round there.’

  He led us round the corner to where a hardwood table and two chairs stood on a small patio. He took one chair, me the other, and Dave perched on the corner of a low wall that enclosed a rockery. The sun was shining and a peacock butterfly settled on a sedum plant, flicking its wings closed then slowly lowering them in some ritual designed to repel predators. A glass of lager would have gone down well, but Smallwood wasn’t offering. His helmet was one of those streamlined ones that project at the back. It said JetPro on the side, and was fastened with a clasp under his chin.

  ‘Did Mr Armitage have any special friends at Ellis and Newbold’s?’ Dave was asking. A blue tit landed on the fence, looked at us and flew off in a huff. Someone nearby was cooking bacon.

  Alfred, it appeared, was an insular sod who never spoke to anybody if he could help it.

  ‘So why did Ellis and Newbold’s close after all those years?’

  Smallwood shuffled in his seat. ‘Various reasons,’ he replied. ‘Cheap imports from the Far East. To start with they were counterfeiting our products, right down to the packaging. Mr Newbold tried to take action: spoke with the Department of Trade; various politicians; but to no avail. Then they started to undercut us on the open market. There’s not much you can do about that.’

  ‘Was there ever any suspicion of any irregularities at the factory?’ Dave asked.

  ‘Irregularities? What do you mean: irregularities?’

  ‘You tell me. I’m not an accountant, but it occurs to me that Mr Newbold could have been siphoning off excess profits, or Alfred could have been diverting valuable non-ferrous metal to friends in the scrap trade. In your position as chief accountant did you ever suspect anything like that?’

  Negative. The firm had gone into steady decline, caused by unfair competition, and, in spite of attempts to diversify, the writing had been on the wall for the final few years. Say it, Dave, I thought. Ask him if he had his neatly manicured fingers in the till. Instead he asked for the names of other workers at the factory, and Smallwood offered to make a comprehensive list over the weekend.

  ‘Anything to add, Chas?’ he asked, turning to me.

  ‘No,’ I replied in my best bedside voice. ‘I think you covered everything. Thanks for your cooperation, Mr Smallwood, and we apologise for disturbing you.’ I rose to my feet and they did the same, Dave brushing a hand across the seat of his pants.

  As we walked round to the front I said, ‘I take it you’re a keen cyclist, Mr Smallwood.’

  He shook his head and looked puzzled. ‘A cyclist? No. What made you think that?’

  ‘Oh, sorry. The helmet. I assumed you were about to go for a ride. It’s a lovely day for one.’

  He reached up and touched the helmet. ‘Oh, this. No, I wear it for medical reasons.’

  ‘Medical reasons?’ I echoed, instantly regretting the incredulity in my voice.

  ‘Yes. The hospital suggested I wear one. I had a scan a few years ago and they discovered that my skull is paper-thin. Thinner than an egg shell. Any simple knock could prove fatal.’

  I hoped I wasn’t smiling as I asked, ‘And they suggested you wear it all the time?’

  ‘Well, actually, I asked if it would be a good idea and they said it would.’

  I wanted to know more but couldn’t trust myself. Dave does deadpan better than me. I heard him say, ‘What do you do at night? If you fell out of bed it could be nasty, but you couldn’t sleep in that thing. You’d never get comfortable.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Smallwood replied. ‘I have another for in bed. One without the streamlined back.’

  ‘A good idea. Well, thanks for your time, Mr Smallwood.’ Dave probably offered a handshake but I was facing the other way, heading down the drive back to the car, so Smallwood couldn’t see the tears trickling down my cheeks. I held on to my composure as we drove off, but seconds later I pulled into the side and we both lost it completely.

  The troops were massed in the office when I came down from my Monday morning meeting with the Super. I was in a good mood. The force was in the process of creating dedicated teams for investigating murders, and, trying to keep ahead of the game, the ACC wanted me to head a pilot scheme in East Pennine. It doesn’t exist if it hasn’t an acronym, so I was now surrogate chief honcho of the local Homicide and Major Enquiry Team, known as HMET. I had no illusions – they wanted me to catch the flak and do the dirty work of splitting up a winning team until someone with a higher rank could take over – but I didn’t mind: they were offering me Acting DCI, and I’d only be doing what I was already doing, so I pretended to be surprised and grateful and said ‘Thank you’ like a good little boy.

  There’d been the usual quota of drunks, thefts and assaults over the weekend, but apart from two burglaries there was nothing to interfere with the silky-smooth running of the CID. Jeff Caton, one of my sergeants, had sat in on the meeting with Mr Wood and he would oversee the everyday stuff while I concentrated on the Alfred Armitage job.

  Another of my sergeants, Eddie Carmichael, was holding court, some of the younger DCs grinning widely at his comments. ‘That’s right, guv, isn’t it?’ I heard him say as I approached.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘I was just saying: the only problem with an inflatable woman is that she can’t help you change the duvet cover.’

  ‘Leave me out of it,’ I replied.

  ‘But that’s only twice a year,’ someone said.

  ‘OK, listen up,’ I told them. ‘Jeff is doing the everyday stuff. Pick your team, Jeff. Meanwhile,
anybody who’s never done a murder enquiry but would like to, raise your hand.’

  A couple of hands went up. ‘I thought it was a suspicious death?’ one of the owners asked.

  ‘It is, but we treat it like a murder enquiry until we are convinced otherwise. OK, we want follow-up interviews with people we’ve already seen, we have a list of drinking acquaintances to talk to, and later this morning we should have a list of just about everybody who worked at Ellis and Newbold’s. A Mr Smallwood is preparing that for us. Could you collect it, please, Eddie, and you might like to do a follow-up while you’re there. I think you’ll find him an interesting character. See Dave’s report for further details.’

  Dave stirred as I mentioned his name but didn’t speak.

  ‘Anybody anything to add?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ John Rose replied. ‘Alfred died sometime on Sunday, but the landlords in the two pubs he called his locals say they hadn’t seen him for several days, which was unusual. I was wondering about widening the search, seeing if he’d found a new watering hole and maybe a new audience.’

  ‘Yep, do it,’ I said. Maggie Madison was staying silent, so I brought her into the discussion. ‘Maggie. I’d like you to talk to his neighbours again, but first see if you can track down the owners of the company. Apparently Mr Newbold lived in Spain, but I don’t know if he’s still alive.’

  People were standing up, scraping chairs, pulling jackets on. ‘One last thing,’ I shouted above the noise. ‘And I’m disappointed to have to say this.’ All faces turned to me. ‘Last week a photograph of poor Alfred Armitage appeared in some of the tabloids. It was of his death mask, taken by our own photographic department for use in the investigation. At least a hundred people have access to that picture, and one of them leaked it to the press. It’s not the sort of behaviour expected of professionals, and whoever leaked it will be out on his neck if we find out who it was. That’s all.’

  Off they went, every one of them hurt by my comments. Except for the one who took the pieces of silver. We’d had a good run at Heckley, with the best team in the business, but time was catching up with us. Some of my top officers had moved on, and I hadn’t always had a say in their replacements. I held no truck with prejudices of any kind, but political correctness, carried to its extremes, was just as damaging. Policemen – and women – were individuals, with different strengths, priorities and abilities. If you were backs to the wall in a city pub with a bunch of yobbos facing you down, you didn’t want to be with the fast-track graduate with the Bachelor of Law degree, unless he was also a black belt in tai kwando, or whatever. In a good team you need a spread of talents and you deploy them appropriately. That had been my strength, and it worked. We had the best clear-up rate in the division.

  Dave Sparkington followed me to my office and sat in the spare chair, slumped forward, elbows on knees. I pinned the jobs priority chart on the board, tore Saturday and Sunday off my calendar and read the day’s homily out loud: ‘It is a curious subject of observation and enquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom’.

  ‘Who said that?’ he asked, without looking up.

  ‘Erm, let me see… Nathaniel Hawthorne.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘He was a biologist, I think. They named a bush after him.’

  ‘Did they? I wish I’d gone to grammar school. We never learned useful stuff like that at the sec. mod.’

  ‘You’d have looked silly in the cap.’

  ‘I know. God, how we pitied you lot having to wear one of those.’

  ‘So what’s bothering you?’

  ‘Nothing. Did you go jogging over the weekend?’

  ‘No, we went running. We’re runners, not joggers. You were invited, you could have joined us.’

  ‘What, with you and Gazelle? No, you’ve left me behind, I’m afraid. So why was he sent to us?’

  ‘Who?’ As if I didn’t know.

  ‘Eddie the Lip.’

  ‘You mean DS Carmichael. Career development, I’m told.’

  ‘Uh! He needs career development like I need breast implants.’

  ‘What’s he done now?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. He was sounding off about unmarried mothers, that’s all. He has strong feelings on the subject.’

  ‘I don’t think Sophie comes into that category, Dave. They’ll get married, as soon as the studying’s over.’

  ‘It was all for my benefit, no doubt about it.’

  ‘Well, keep your hands off him.’

  ‘I’ll try, but listen – I’ve been thinking about Ellis and Newbold’s and I reckon someone was ripping them off. They made things out of brass, and brass is valuable. Alfred was probably in a position to augment his wages by siphoning off some of it to the friendly neighbourhood scrap dealer. On the other hand, Smallwood could have been cooking the books. Or, third alternative, they could have been in it together.’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I wouldn’t mind talking to the local scrappies, looking at their books, but it’s been a long time. What did you think of Smallwood?’

  ‘Ah!’ I grinned at the memory. ‘He’s weird, that’s for sure, but I think we were probably unkind to him. If he has a paper-thin skull, wearing a helmet is a sensible precaution.’

  ‘If he has one.’

  ‘Mmm. OK, you talk to the scrappies. I’m having a couple of hours on reports and paperwork. Maybe we can get out somewhere later.’

  Dave went off and I wondered about what he’d said. He was right about one thing: DS Carmichael had been foisted on me by HQ. Every month I’d report that I was short-handed, and every month nothing would happen, until last month when Eddie was seconded to me. I got straight on to the Chief Superintendent and asked what it was about. CID sergeants are not moved sideways for nothing.

  Eddie had had a chequered career. He’d started in East Pennine and made it to sergeant, then made the big jump to the Met to get into plain clothes. Unfortunately a fracas with a suspect saw him busted back to uniform and he eventually came back north. At HQ a female in the case building unit had accused him of harassment after she’d spurned his overtures, which had led to him being moved to Heckley under a ‘leave it with me’ agreement.

  ‘You can sort him out, Charlie,’ the chief had told me. ‘He has some old-fashioned ideas, that’s all. Nothing you can’t deal with.’

  His record didn’t bother me. If he was a good copper I could forgive him the odd transgression, but I wasn’t happy about Dave’s attitude towards him. We weren’t bobbies anymore, we were a human resource, trained to salivate when required, to run and fetch on demand, and to turn the other cheek when some thieving little rat-fink with the IQ of a sausage gave us two fingers as he walked free. Clear-up figures were the Holy Grail; putting bodies in front of judges and convicting them counted for little. The old order was changing, and it hurt, but there was nothing we could do about it. Sometimes, I thought, we needed more officers with old-fashioned ideas.

  I’d met him before, I remembered. It had been bugging me but suddenly it all came back. The Old Mother Twanky case, we called it. Edith Tweddle lived all alone in sheltered housing, never bothering a soul, until one evening she became over-excited while watching an old Cary Grant film and spontaneously combusted. I was duty inspector for the first time in my burgeoning career, and the green-eared PC who called me out was the one and only Eddie Carmichael.

  The postman had smelled smoke and sent for the police and fire brigade. All we found of Mrs Tweddle and the easy chair she’d been sitting in was a pile of ash, a right foot and a left hand. She was identified by her wedding ring.

  It made the nationals as another example of the mysterious phenomenon known as spontaneous human combustion. The papers were full of it, and the more lurid ones showed pictures of the poor woman’s remains. Eddie and his sergeant were interviewed by the press and credited with extravagant descriptions of the scene. They made great capital out of relating that one fo
ot, one hand and the rest of the room were completely untouched by the conflagration, as if that were proof of strange forces at work.

  I had a word with the fire chief and learned differently. In every recorded case of supposed spontaneous human combustion there has been a possible source of ignition close to the body – usually a cigarette or an electric fire. Mrs Tweddle was a smoker, and there was a three-kilowatt electric fire blazing away eighteen inches from her remains.

  And, the fire chief told me, we are composed largely of fat. Particularly elderly women. Once ignited, we burn like a candle. Light a fire, he said, and let it burn out – doesn’t matter if it’s a bonfire or a campfire – when it is dead there will be the unburned ends of pieces of wood surrounding the ashes, just like Mrs Tweddle’s hand and foot. I made a statement at a press conference, expounding my newly found knowledge and pooh-poohing the spontaneous combustionists, and it was shown on Look North.

  I found an Argos catalogue in Jeff’s drawer and looked at the price of mountain bikes. They were cheaper than I expected. Sonia was in a different league to me when we went out jogging. Sunday morning we’d driven to the park and I’d accompanied her on one three-mile circuit; then she’d done another one, much faster, while I waited in the car. Afterwards she’d suggested that in future she might even run the two miles back home. She’d bought a ledger and started entering her times and distances in it. Maybe a mountain bike would give me an edge, I thought.

  John Rose and Dave came in together just as I finished the reports. We always appoint a report reader to scrutinise them and extract possible pertinent details, but I like to go through them myself, when I have a chance. We call it gatekeeping. They brought chicken and stuffing sandwiches in with them, and we had a picnic in the big office.

  ‘Find anything?’ I asked Dave after he’d supplied me with a mug of tea.

  ‘Not much. Jeb Smith and Son is now run by the son, Jeb junior, who just happens to have a degree in physics. And it’s a recycling centre, not a scrap yard. He’d just started working for his dad back in the early Nineties, and he couldn’t be sure but he suspects that they were taking stuff from Ellis and Newbold’s. He certainly remembers the company, but no names. He admits that things were a bit shady in those days. Unfortunately his father is dead, so we can’t ask him, but it did mean that young Jeb spoke more freely.’