Never Die in January Read online

“He’s a Ridgeback. They were used for hunting lions in Africa at one time. There’s the ridge.”

  He ran his finger along the ridge of hair which lay along the dog’s spine.

  “He’s beautiful,” she said.

  “Best dog in the world. Anyone lay a finger on me he’d have his arm off. But gentle with kids, aren’t you, old chap?”

  As he spoke she watched him. He was wearing cowboy boots with high heels and designer jeans. With his fair skin and blond moustache he gave the impression of being a kind of albino Swedish cowboy.

  “Nice,” he said, indicating the furnishings.

  “I used to live in Spain.”

  The room was a mixture of the hot reds and yellows of a bullfighter’s cape.

  “I went there a couple of times to shoot partridges. It’s ruined now.”

  “There are still unspoilt places.”

  “Not that I found.”

  She did not want to argue about Spain. She felt defensive about it. Instead she asked him about the estate agency business. Wasn’t it doing badly in the recession?

  Not really. He’d seen it coming and gone heavily into the rental side. So when the selling market went into meltdown he had a large number of rental properties on his books. In a property recession people rented.

  “That was lucky,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t call it luck.” His tone was flat.

  “No, of course not. Forward planning.” She smiled her all-embracing smile. “Isn’t there a Marshall? Marshall and Masters?”

  “Old Marshall started the agency in the fifties. It wasn’t much. Specialized in small shops and down-market properties. When the housing market boomed he couldn’t cope. My mother was working for another agency. She saw what was coming and went to him with a deal.”

  “So Marshall and Masters was born.”

  “It should really be just Masters now. He was supposed to retire a year ago. But he comes into the office all the time. Can’t keep away. So I’ve let him have a desk and he does odds and ends.”

  “What about your father?” she said.

  “He died when I was a child.”

  She waited for him to continue but he remained silent and instead leaned forward and began fondling the dog’s ears.

  This was sticky, she thought, and decided she would get on with discussing the dilapidations after he had finished his drink.

  She felt him studying her. She was wearing a long dark red kaftan with gold strappy sandals. She knew she looked good.

  “I like your car,” she said.

  He glanced up quickly. “You know about cars?”

  “A little.”

  “What d’you drive?”

  “Oh, nothing. Small…French. I’ve always admired Porsches.”

  “I wanted one ever since I was…I don’t know, about twelve or thirteen, I suppose.”

  “It was an amazing sight.”

  “What?”

  “Simba sitting in the front seat.”

  “Where I go he goes. Except the woods. Isn’t that right, old chap?”

  He was waiting for her to ask why, and she did so.

  He said he liked to hunt deer in thick woods. He had this friend in Hampshire with a thousand acres of dense woodland full of fat roe deer. He talked about hunting and she gave him another drink. He settled back in his chair, a faint hush on his face.

  Thick woodland was the only place to hunt, he said. You gave the animal as much chance — more, in fact — than you had yourself.

  But wasn’t hunting, well…?

  He knew what she was going to say. Did she eat meat? Then she was simply shifting the responsibility for killing on to someone else’s shoulders. It was killing by proxy.

  That was an interesting phrase, she said. Killing by proxy. She wondered if it applied to the young woman who had occupied the flat before her.

  How? It was suicide. Said so in the papers.

  But it was caused by something or someone. It didn’t just happen.

  Oh, yes, it did. It was called “while the balance of the mind was disturbed”.

  With all those bruises on her body it would have been surprising if the balance hadn’t been disturbed, didn’t he think?

  He shrugged. “Shall we do the inventory?” he said.

  He followed her round with a small notebook. The dog sat and watched. She was very aware of his closeness.

  “Did you know her?” she said.

  “I rented the place to her. Took her out to lunch a couple of times.”

  “Grace.”

  “That’s right. How do you know?”

  “Junk mail. Miss Grace Davies. It still comes.”

  “You’d better let me have any post.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll send it on.”

  “Who to?”

  “She had a grandmother. I think she gave me her address once.”

  They discussed a damp area below the kitchen sink. He made notes.

  Then she said, “What was she like?”

  He stared at her. “Why are you so interested?”

  “I live in her aura.”

  He blinked. “Aura?”

  “Can’t you feel it?”

  “No. If that’s the lot I should be going. Thanks for the drinks.” At the door she said, “Can I pat Simba?”

  “Sure. Just move slowly.”

  “Good boy.” She scratched Simba’s head.

  “You’ll need to sign the inventory,” he said.

  “I’ll drop by the agency.”

  She went to the pavement, saw him strap the dog into the car. He leaned over the roof. “You’re not married, are you?”

  “Was.”

  “Would you like to go out to dinner sometime?”

  “Why don’t you give me a call?”

  “OK, I’ll do that. Ciao.”

  Then he started the car and the powerful engine rumbled off down the street.

  The village was in darkest Suffolk. Leo Silver found it after becoming lost three times and backtracking twice. He had left the main road in broad daylight but by the time he reached Lupton the roads had given way to lanes and finally the lanes to tracks.

  Eddie Twyford would have hated this, he thought, as the Golf slithered through yet another long, muddy pool. Eddie had never really got on with the countryside.

  Lupton had no proper centre, no pub, no church, no green, no ducking pond, indeed nothing that picturesque villages were supposed to have. It was bloody awful, Leo thought. He stopped at a gingerbread cottage and asked the way. As he waited he half expected a forest troll to answer his knock, but an ordinary housewife — reassuring — pointed the way to Hanger Lane.

  The cottage stood by itself near the edge of a muddy track. Its curtains were half drawn and the light was like a beacon in the growing darkness.

  Leo pushed open the gate and went up the narrow brick-lined path. A young woman with a baby on her arm came to the door. “Are you lost?” she said.

  “I don’t think so. Are you Mrs Waddell?”

  She frowned, suddenly wary. “Why?”

  “I’m looking for Ken.”

  “Why?”

  “Mum!” A child’s voice came from upstairs. “Mum! I’ve got soap in my eyes.”

  “I’m coming, Stephen. Why do you want Ken?”

  “I just want to ask him a couple of questions.”

  “Mum!”

  “What about?”

  “About someone he once knew. I’m a police officer from London.” He showed her his warrant card.

  “You don’t look like a copper.” Her tone was hostile.

  The baby began to sniffle.

  “Can I see Ken?”

  “He isn’t in from work yet.”

  “Mum!” It was a shriek.

  “Oh God. All right! I’m coming! You’d better come in. He’ll be home any minute now.”

  She had been standing with the light behind her and he was able to see her more clearly when he entered. She was p
ale and thin and wore a jersey, skirt, slippers, and an apron.

  “I’m trying to get the kids done before Ken comes home.” Her accent was south-east London and he imagined she had grown up on one of the housing estates like Green Leas. Well, she was in the green and muddy leas now and he wondered how she liked it.

  The cottage was two up and two down but the ground floor had been knocked into one big open-plan room. There was a sitting area and a kitchen/dining area.

  “Sit down while I see to Stephen.”

  Stephen, with soap in his eyes in the bath upstairs, had begun a screeching wail that set Leo’s teeth on edge. His list suddenly expanded: no coffin burials, no living on estates — and no kids. But he wouldn’t tell Zoe. Not that she ever talked about kids. But sometimes there was a broody look about her when he mentioned his little nephew, Stanley. In fact he liked Stanley. Very much. But not too frequently.

  He looked round for somewhere to sit. The three-piece suite was a bilious green and there were stains of dubious origin. So he perched on a corner of the kitchen table while he listened to Stephen being calmed down.

  Then he heard the steady thump, thump, of a powerful motorcycle engine and through the window saw a man come into the back yard on a mud-spattered Honda ATV three-wheeler.

  Ken Waddell was a big man with a big square face. Leo introduced himself while Waddell washed his hands in the kitchen sink.

  “Mud,” he said, letting out the brown water. “Hardly knew what it was when I lived in London, now it’s like a second skin.”

  “Are you farming?” Leo asked.

  “God no. I couldn’t afford land. No, I’m keepering. Learning to anyway. Chap here’s got a pheasant shoot. That’s what I’ve been doing today, putting the pegs in for tomorrow’s shoot and feeding the birds.”

  “The condemned pheasant ate a hearty meal,” Leo said.

  Waddell smiled dutifully as he dried himself on a towel that had gone grey. Leo watched his hands and arms.

  “What’s it all about, then?” Waddell said. “Don’t believe we’ve had a visit from the Met down here. Not since I retired.”

  They sat facing each other on the bilious green moquette. Waddell made no effort to put Leo at ease. He wasn’t hostile as his wife was but he wasn’t friendly either.

  “Stoker,” Leo said.

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What’s he been up to this time?”

  “Well, that’s it. We think he’s involved with a senior officer in the Met.”

  “D’you mean sexually involved?”

  “God, no!” Leo had a sudden vision of Macrae and Stoker in each other’s arms. “No, no, the usual. Backhanders.”

  “What? Stoker? You must be joking! That shit’s never had two pennies to rub together. Where’s he going to get enough bread to bribe a senior officer?”

  “I’ll tell you if you’ll answer a couple of questions first.” Waddell had brought an agricultural air with him compounded of mud, manure, and animal feedstuff. Leo thought the word might be “ripe”.

  “I’ll try. But it was a few years back.”

  Leo got him to repeat what had happened to him the night he was injured. He told it briefly, in clipped sentences, as though giving evidence in court.

  While he was speaking his wife came down the stairs and began clearing up the mess her husband had made at the sink.

  Suddenly she cut across the conversation. “Why are you bringing all this up again? Why don’t you leave us alone?”

  “Forget it, Trudy love,” Waddell said.

  “Forget it? That’s all you ever say about anything. Leave it! Forget it! They trampled all over you, the police did. Now you say forget it!”

  She turned to Leo. “I don’t know what you want with Ken but you’ve no right to ask him anything, no right to expect any cooperation after what your people did to him.”

  “Trudy!”

  “I will speak. I’ve never said anything to anybody in the Force, not all this time. But I’m really disgusted. We both are, only Ken won’t say all he feels. Three years! That’s all that bastard Stoker got. And then it was soft time.”

  “He was only seventeen,” Waddell said. “Youth custody.” “Three years for breaking Ken’s arm and smashing him with a tyre lever.”

  “It was my own fault really, I — ”

  “Don’t go on saying that!”

  “Well, it was. Here was this young bugger piling things into a car at three o’clock in the morning. And when I questioned him he said he and his girlfriend had had a row and she had kicked him out and made him take his belongings. It was possible, you know. Things like that happen. But even so I thought I’d have a bit of a look. He had a painting and some silver and a couple of stereos. Not his sort of gear. Anyway, before I could say anything he came at me.

  “You know as well as I do we’re trained not to do that sort of thing if we’re by ourselves. I should have radioed for backup, that’s what I should have done.”

  “By the book,” Leo said.

  “Yeah, I should’ve done it by the book.”

  His wife laughed harshly. “That’s what they did to you. They stuck you with the book. Look at that arm. Nothing the matter with it. He uses it all day…”

  “That’s true,” Waddell said. “It took a long time to heal but it’s OK now.”

  “But when it mended they’d only offer him clerking. For someone like Ken!”

  “I always wanted to be a beat copper,” Waddell said, “ever since I was a little kid.”

  “It’s the only thing that made him happy. Now look what’s happened. Stuck in this mud trap. I don’t see a living soul from one day to the next.”

  “It’s worse for her,” Waddell said. “She has the kids all day.”

  “And what about you?” Leo asked.

  “It’s not too bad. I’m out of doors. It’s just that I miss the lads in the canteen and in the pub after coming off shift. You know, taking the mickey. And I miss London too. Sometimes I think…well…doesn’t matter now what I think, does it…? So…Your turn.”

  Leo had thought carefully on the way down how he would tell his story. Keep it simple, brief, and don’t lie too much. But it had to be believable. Waddell was no fool. So he told him the truth or as much of it as he could. He didn’t give any names though and placed it in a different Area.

  “Why don’t you leave it to the CIB, that’s their job, isn’t it?”

  “Because he’s the best thief taker we’ve got. Anyway I don’t believe most of it. That’s why I came to see you. Anything you can tell me about Stoker might help. I mean anything you might have known that wasn’t on his record.”

  “What you’re saying is you’ll blackmail him into shutting his face.”

  “Something like that.”

  As he said it Leo realized he was about to cross a line. He hadn’t yet but that’s what he was indicating he was going to do. It was what Macrae would have done. And Leo would have felt contempt for the method. But, he told himself, he didn’t have to do it. It was only talk at this stage. But he knew Waddell was right. If he did get the information he probably would. Probably…possibly…he hung on to their vagueness…

  “You didn’t tell me where Stoker got the money from. Isn’t that where you’d look first to find dirt?”

  “We know. And it doesn’t help.” He told Waddell about Artie Gorman and Molly.

  “The bookie?”

  “That’s him.”

  “I remember Honest Arthur Gorman, the punter’s friend. He had a betting shop in Camden.”

  “He had a chain of betting shops in north London.”

  “Yeah. There was something…” He paused, thinking. “What?”

  “Well, it was just before I resigned. I was doing a turn in Camden. Records clerk. Anyway, they found this body on Primrose Hill. A nasty piece of work called…what the hell was his name? A bird. Sparrow or Pigeon, Thrush…no not thrush…I’ve had thrush…Anyway, a bird
’s name. He’d been battered about the head. They found a tyre lever not too far away, hidden in a holly hedge.”

  “That’s why you remember. The tyre lever.”

  “Exactly. No prints, unfortunately. The word was that this bloke with a bird’s name had got this hands on a lot of bread from a bullion robbery and used it to start gambling operations in Gorman’s patch and Gorman warned him several times and then got someone to give him a stem talking to — just break his arm or a couple of fingers — something like that. But the someone went too far. There were people, me included, who thought that the someone was Stoker.”

  CHAPTER XII

  Macrae stood on the step and pressed the doorbell.

  Mandy Parrish, once the second Mrs Macrae, opened the door as though he was expected.

  “George? What are you doing here?”

  “I was passing.”

  She was wearing a long salmon-pink housecoat — or maybe it was a dressing-gown, he thought. She smelled as though she had just come out of a bath. She was in her thirties, fleshy, with thick black hair and dark eyes that promised things you never read about in books. And, in Macrae’s experience, delivered some of them.

  “You look good,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Thought I’d look in and see how you were. Say hello to the kids.”

  “It’s ten o’clock in the morning, George. The kids are at school.”

  “It’s half-term, isn’t it?”

  “In January? They’ve only just started the new term. Anyway, you get them next weekend.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

  She looked briefly at her watch. “It’ll have to be just for a minute. Then I’ve got an appointment with my osteo.”

  He had only been in the house once or twice. Usually, when he brought the kids back after an outing, he said goodbye to them in the car.

  It was a small semi-detached house in an area of London which had been badly bombed during the war. Many of the new buildings had been built in the 1960s in the stained concrete style of the times which made even brown stucco look good.

  He thought she wasn’t overwhelmed to see him.

  She took him into the living-room which was all shiny veneer and new horse brasses.

  “How’re you keeping?” he said. It sounded false, as though he was talking to someone’s aunt and she didn’t bother to reply. “Passing where to?” she said.