Chapter Fifteen
On the Friday afternoon, Waters realised that no one from the squad was officially on duty over the coming weekend. Either Cara Freeman had made a mistake or she thought the ‘officially’ part was an irrelevance once you were a member of her team – either way, after five o’clock they could, in theory, all go home and stay there until eight-thirty on Monday morning.
There had been two days of good routine investigation. Wortley had owned a Vauxhall Corsa 5-door saloon for three years but unfortunately he had omitted to update his address or addresses with the DVLA and it was still registered to his quarters on the Army base in Suffolk, as was his driving licence. But ‘still registered’ was technically incorrect. It can take a while to get to speak to a human being in Swansea – by which we mean the huge bureaucracy known as the Driver Vehicle and Licensing Agency rather than the town in Wales – but when they finally managed to do so they were told the Corsa in question now existed only as a digital record. The DVLA had been informed by the Norfolk constabulary’s traffic division that the car had been abandoned in the city of Norwich and classified as a K3. What’s that, Murray had asked, and the woman at the other end of the line had laughed in a very Welsh way and said she wasn’t sure but the K probably stood for “knackered” – and if it wasn’t when the police found it, it was by now because there was a crushing order attached to the record.
John Murray had followed the trail back to the police station in Norwich. The car had been reported by the fire service who were on the scene and extinguishing the blaze – the number plates were about the only things still recognisable, according to the patrol officer who attended the scene. Murray spoke to him directly and made a note of the date and the exact location of the incident – the night of April 22nd, an area of waste ground off Lisle Lane. Murray found it on the Ordnance Survey website and wrote down the coordinates.
In less than twenty-four hours, Michael Wortley’s car had been burned out and he had sent for a taxi in his final call on the mobile phone. When Waters had begun to make a case for visiting the city of Norwich in person as soon as possible, he’d managed no more than two sentences before Freeman cut him off with ‘You should be halfway there already – don’t waste time asking on stuff like that. We need two pairs of eyes on it, so take someone with you.’
Murray drove, and they went first to Lisle Lane using the location he’d put into his satnav. The things we’ve taken for granted so quickly, that a satellite orbiting the Earth can guide you to a point on the planet within a matter of inches. And more eerily still, when they got out of Murray’s car, they could see the rectangle of scorched ground where the Corsa had burned. They walked over to it and found crystals of laminated glass where the windscreen and windows had shattered in the heat.
Murray had stared for a few seconds before saying, ‘Could be a coincidence.’
It was a standing joke that only three members of the new squad would ever appreciate. Waters gave it the customary nod and squatted down as if there might be other clues hidden there among the scorched grass, though patches of green were already appearing. He picked up a few pieces of the glass, little cubes that glittered under the grey September sky.
Murray looked around and said, ‘Not overlooked at all. It’s the sort of place you’d bring a motor if you intended to torch it.’
Waters stood up and photographed the burned ground with his phone. Then he took a short video, panning around to show the nature of the location. When Murray asked, Waters told him it was for the detective inspector. Murray had said, ‘I’d say he’s the business as far as records are concerned. A while ago I happened to be speaking to someone I know at the Long Sutton station, and they knew Tom Greene. Did you ever meet Dave Harrington? Anyway, he said it took a while but Greene had built up quite a reputation by the time he left. He’s a bit of an oddball but Peterborough tried to hold onto him.’
The conversation Murray had described wouldn’t have been that long ago, of course, and it would not have happened by accident; Waters had no doubt that Murray had done some asking around after being asked to join Freeman’s team.
Waters said, ‘Terek wasn’t too happy about you going either, was he?’
Murray shrugged it off and said, ‘Course, we don’t know it was Wortley who burned the car.’
‘And we don’t know for certain it was him who called the taxi company either. If someone was out to lay a trail for us, it’s something they might do.’
Murray hadn’t got as far as that, and he looked surprised as he said, ‘Seriously? You think he was involved in something that iffy?’
‘I’m thinking we can’t rule it out. We don’t know much about it yet but there’s something odd about his story. In fact, there’s more than one thing odd about it. We’re done here, John. Silver Star Taxis.’
On more than one occasion, Waters had visited ABC Taxis in Kings Lake in the company of Smith. The owner and manager, a large Greek lady called Dolores Argyris, had conflicted feelings about the detective sergeant – she disliked him as a policeman but found him very interesting as a man, and she was unconcerned about letting the world know all this. Her amorous overtures were a little embarrassing for the fresh-faced rookie but Smith reassured him, and said it was something he would get used to. And then added by way of explanation that it was Smith’s strange attractiveness to many members of the opposite gender that Waters would get used to, not to being as attractive to them in his own regard. It was one of the many crosses that he, Smith, had to bear in this life.
ABC was a yard in a backstreet, with the office at the top of a flight of stairs. It smelled of cigarettes and stale cigars, Dolly’s eau de Cologne and diesel fumes, and had a seedy charm all its own. Silver Star, in contrast, was a modern, single-storey premises on a commercial estate. There was a receptionist, who listened and then took them through to Mr Cross, the operations manager.
Mr Cross wore hearing aids. Waters showed his ID and explained the purpose of their visit once more. The operations manager looked entirely blank as if he hadn’t heard a word – which was, in fact, the case; he removed a tiny USB device from the desktop in front of him and said it was a direct link which over-rode the external input of the aids in his ear. Waters explained again. Mr Cross understood and was busy at the keyboard then. Waters thought how much better it was to lose the sense of hearing than the sense of sight.
Using the date and the mobile number, Cross had located the call in a matter of seconds. He asked how much detail they required and whether he should print out the page from the database; Murray, in return, asked whether that mobile phone had ever been used to book a taxi from Silver Star before April 23rd, and the answer, after a couple more strokes on the keyboard, was no, it had not.
Waters thanked the manager, said they’d have a print-out but as they were talking to a man with more local knowledge of the city’s roads than just about anyone else they were likely to meet – and Mr Cross liked that, of course – could he show them on a map the location of the pick-up and the destination of that particular job? Instead of using the monitor screen, Cross got out of his seat and went to a huge map of Norwich that covered most of one wall of his office. He pointed and said, ‘The pick-up was here. On the corner of Heath Crescent and Fifer’s Lane.’
A street corner – no address, no house number? Cross returned to his database and checked, but no, the pick-up had taken place exactly where he had said. Murray asked the next obvious question, and the answer was, ‘Surrey Street. It’s the central bus station.’
Murray had looked askance at Waters and said, ‘He caught a bus?’
Mr Cross was by now thoroughly enjoying his part in the investigation – ‘There isn’t really any other reason to go to Surrey Street, I’m afraid to say.’
Waters said he was sorry to be a further nuisance but they needed to speak to the driver, and Cross was back at another screen and another map, a digital one with points of light superimposed on the streets and byway
s of the city. Cross said, ‘You’re in luck. Ray is on duty this morning. He’s on the way back from a drop at City Airport. I’ll message him. It’ll be about a fifteen-minute wait for you.’
Murray took out his phone and said to Cross, ‘Could you show us where this place is on the big map?’
“This place” was the OS coordinates they had used to find the spot where the Corsa had been destroyed. Cross typed them in, looked at the result, returned to the map on the wall and pointed. Waters said, ‘That’s not far from where your driver collected his passenger, is it?’
‘A few minutes’ walk,’ Cross said.
Ray was the antithesis of your fat cabbie. He was tall and gaunt, with the hollow, haunted eyes of a man who hasn’t slept well in ten years. They spoke to him in the drivers’ rest-room, which had vending machines and the plastic furniture of a factory canteen – the two detectives felt almost at home.
The driver’s first reaction hadn’t been promising.
‘Five months ago? You must be ‘avin a laugh, mate! I do a hundred pick-ups a week!’
Waters said, ‘We appreciate that. Anything you can remember would be helpful. It was a Tuesday morning. The call went into the office here at 09.21, and the job shows as complete on your manager’s database at 10.05.’
‘All right… Not a pre-booked, then. But I work all the hours God sends, and then I nick a few off him as well. The bus station ain’t exactly an unusual drop-off, neither. Sorry.’
Waters had signalled and Murray took out the photograph of Michael Wortley.
‘No. Don’t get many soldiers, so I might ‘ave remembered him.’
Murray said, ‘He won’t have been in uniform. What about the face?’
The driver reached out and took the picture. He stared at it for what seemed like a long time. These are the little, tense moments when you pray for a break, for a light to come on somewhere, anywhere, in the darkness. Sometimes all you can do is wait and hope.
Then Ray said slowly, ‘I ’ad to pull up over the kerb, onto the pavement – it’s a busy corner. I got out and opened the boot, told ’im to put his bag in but he said no. He put it in the back seat. Never said another word. Gave me fifteen quid for an eleven-quid job and didn’t wait for no change.’
Murray said, ‘Just one bag? What sort?’
‘Christ, mate! You don’t want a lot, do you?’ at which Murray smiled and said he’d already been a great help to the investigation but…
‘Weren’t a suitcase, I know that. Some sort of a holdall, I reckon. More like what a soldier would ’ave, I s’pose. What’s ’e done then, this bloke? Is ’e a wrong ’un?’
Waters had answered, nothing as far as they knew, apart from disappearing. They thanked Ray and Mr Cross, leaving things tidy because you never know when you’ll need to return and ask another question. When they got back to the car, Murray said, ‘Bus station?’ and Waters nodded.
The summer bus timetables had begun a week before the taxi had dropped off its passenger at the terminus, and they were in operation for two more weeks. There were no paper copies available and so Murray took pictures of the display board on his mobile. In the hour after 10.05, there would have been seven D route departures, the ones that involved longer distance journeys to other destinations in the county and beyond; they had to assume for now that Wortley would not have taken a taxi to the main bus station in order to get a ride into the city centre. Kings Lake was one of the seven destinations, with a coach leaving at 10.30 and arriving at 11.57, with six stops along the route. The Surrey Street waiting area had CCTV but the security officer told them it was on a fifteen-day delete.
On the drive back to Lake, they’d talked it over from as many angles as possible. Murray said, ‘Logically, there’s only a one in seven chance he got on a bus to Lake, but…’ and Waters continued with, ‘…but that’s where his ID card showed up on a murder victim. That somewhat shortens the odds, John. About three weeks after Wortley’s Corsa went up in flames in Norwich, Neville Murfitt is pretending to be him on Eden Street in Lake. We could call DC and ask him if he thinks that’s an acceptable coincidence.’
Murray said, ‘You can if you like. I’m not calling him, he’ll just remind me again that he was right about William. He said he was considering doing a distance-learning qualification in child psychology, in his spare time.’
Waters said, ‘But why was the car burned out? Was that Wortley or did he disappear because someone else torched his car? We have to assume he was living somewhere in that area. Why get the taxi to pick him up on a street corner? I can only think of one reason.’
Murray said, ‘Because he didn’t want to leave an address behind for anyone to visit – maybe someone like us, maybe someone else entirely. He seems to have been covering his tracks, and that fits in with his mobile going silent. Just one bag which he wouldn’t let out of his sight? I’d guess all his worldly goods were in it.’
With two days off, Monday morning would mark the one-week milestone in this investigation. As a rule, murders tend to be solved quickly, within two or three days, or a considerable time after that – months and years later. Not many fall into the space in between. They had some lines of inquiry into the death of Neville Murfitt but still seemed to be finding more questions than answers.
Minutes after Waters and Murray had arrived back from Norwich, Denise and her team reappeared in the office, fresh from showing the new pictures of Murfitt in the Eden Street and Kingsgate areas. They had had several hits – people recognising the images and saying, yeah, that’s Michael, definitely, before he started growing the beard. As a result, a clearer picture of his habits and movements was beginning to form. More than one person said they thought he had a pad somewhere because he didn’t always sleep rough on the streets, or if he did, they didn’t know where. He had another begging pitch inside the Kingsgate shopping arcade and seemed to move between the two on a regular basis.
In the general conversation, Denise Sterling turned to Waters and said, ‘So we went all over Eden Street again as we had new pics. People were asking after you.’
In a roomful of people who investigate for a living, there is no place to hide – Waters had realised that a long time ago – but that doesn’t mean you have to wander tamely into the spotlight, either. Waters simply waited, resigned to his fate.
‘Which place was it?’ Sterling said to Clive Betts, as if she really couldn’t remember.
‘I think it was the florist’s, ma’am.’
‘That’s it. One of the women in the florist’s shop was asking after you. I think she was a bit disappointed we’d turned up instead of her regular policeman.’
Let your waiting have the quality of nothingness in circumstances like these…
Murray said – and it could have been in all innocence – ‘Which one was it?’
Denise Sterling still seemed to have difficulty recalling the details.
‘I can’t remember her name…’
And despite himself, Waters was a little surprised that Miriam Josephs would have committed even a tiny indiscretion. He hadn’t called her since she had found a way to give him her mobile number, but the thought had been on his mind – something half-jokingly connected with the case just to see how she might react. It had been on his mind to do so this weekend, but now?
Sterling mused on, ‘Late thirties or early forties, a little bit on the plump side. I think her name might’ve been Patsy.’
Serena said, ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s his type every time,’ and it was impossible to say whether she was mocking Waters, Denise or the pair of them simultaneously, but the mood in the room remained good-natured. Serena looked around and said, ‘You’ll get used to it. He leaves a trail of broken hearts wherever he goes.’
Freeman had entered the room, carrying an A4 sheet in front of her and reading it as she did her usual thing and perched on a desk instead of sitting in a chair. It didn’t seem to make any difference whose desk it was.
She said, �
�All right, we’re nearly done for this week. Good progress, you can all come back on Monday. I’m about to brief the weekend cover team but if there are developments don’t wait until Monday to tell me. If someone calls you back or even if you just have a brainwave, call me. In the unlikely event that I’m having so much fun I won’t answer the phone, call Tom.’
Freeman waved the piece of paper and said, ‘I’m still negotiating shift patterns and payment for when we’re under pressure and we need someone here at weekends, so be prepared for news on that front. My guess is we should hear something in, say, February? March? Who knows. In the meantime, enjoy your weekend. Briefing on Monday, eight thirty sharp.’
Sitting in traffic on the way home, Waters thought over his side of the investigation. He thought it over quite thoroughly and then switched to another mode – putting aside all the facts and the logic, he asked himself whether Michael Wortley was still here in Kings Lake. What’s your hunch, he said to himself, what’s your gut instinct telling you? He could remember such conversations with DC. It was, of course, just another way of accessing the same database but sometimes the reasoning process gets you lost in the minutiae – you can see all sorts of trees, twigs and leaves, and the closer you get the more fascinating the patterns in the bark become. But you cannot see the wood if you’re deep inside it – you have to find some means of stepping away, of getting outside it.
And the answer he came up with was, no, Michael Wortley isn’t here – we’re not going to find him in Kings Lake. He was here, he got off that bus on April 23rd, somehow he came into contact with Neville Murfitt, but he’s long gone.
When his mobile began to ring, he answered it through the dashboard. The estate agent had arranged the first viewing of the flat for ten o’clock tomorrow morning, and was calling to make sure that was suitable. It was, and when he ended the call, Waters thought, if they want it, if someone says they’ll buy the flat, that’s a big moment. I’ll need to find somewhere else and I haven’t really started looking.
On Eden Street Page 15