The Morals of a Murderer

by Roger Silverwood

Harker pulled out an invisible nail from between teeth at the side of his mouth.

  ‘That’s what we are waiting for, lad,’ he said drily.

  The commander, looking like a patient in a dentist’s waiting room who has just heard the drill, slowly turned to look at him.

  ‘Well, there’s nothing known, sir,’ Angel said.

  ‘Oh?’ Boodle sniffed then pulled a disagreeable face. ‘Well, what sort of a man is he, this Evan Jones?’

  ‘He’s a Welshman, sir. He’s — ’

  ‘Evan Jones is a Welshman. That’s not really a big surprise, laddie!’

  Angel’s fists tightened.

  Then Boodle said rapidly: ‘What level would you put on his intelligence? How well do you think he was educated? How quickly does he reply to questions? How well do you think he runs his business? Is his business legitimate?’

  Angel looked him straight in the eye and responded with equal pace.

  ‘He is bright-eyed, competent, and I think adequately educated. His replies are prompt. I have no idea how well he runs his business, but he seems efficient and committed to it, sir.’

  Boodle smiled like Caligula smiled to the gods.

  Angel licked his lips. He was determined not to let this smart-arse from the city get one over on him.

  ‘As to his business ability, there’s not been time to get a report from the Inland Revenue.’

  Boodle grimaced knowingly and half-closed his eyes.

  ‘Done that. Nothing there,’ he said. He shook his head, then went on: ‘What else did you find out?’

  ‘He is divorced and lives alone. He’s a keep-fit fanatic, likes the ladies, and from all accounts they like him. Recently moved into a detached house he bought for four hundred thousand pounds. He was married to an Amy Jones for ten years. No children. She’s served six months for fraud. He divorced her after she went to prison. She was released very recently.’

  ‘Ah. Wife' Boodle’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Fraud, eh? Now she sounds interesting. Have you interviewed her?’

  ‘We don’t know where she is, sir.’

  ‘You could try the probation service,’ Boodle said drily. Angel replied, trying to keep his voice even.

  ‘I haven’t had the opportunity. I am in the middle of a murder case.’

  The super looked up and sniffed.

  ‘Ay. And you’d better get back to it, if the commander has finished with you.’ He looked down at Boodle, who nodded and waved a hand to signify his accord.

  Angel was glad to leave. He turned and reached for the doorknob.

  ‘Oh, Inspector,’ Harker called grandly. ‘Organize a car and driver to take us to The Feathers, and bring us back here for 2.30, and then take the commander straight to the airport for the 3.50 shuttle, will you?’

  ‘Right, sir,’ Angel said. He could see what the game was. They were going out for a liquid lunch. He hoped it would choke them both. He closed the door and charged up the corridor to the CID office.

  A man in blue overalls, a cap and red rubber gloves came backwards out of the gents’ toilet carrying a yellow plastic bucket, a squeegee and a plunger. The smell wasn’t pleasant. Angel bumped into him.

  The man turned round. He had a wet unlit cigarette-end hanging off his bottom lip.

  ‘Here. Steady on,’ he grumbled.

  ‘Sorry, lad,’ Angel said. ‘What you doing anyway?’

  ‘I’m the plumber.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘The gents’ lav is blocked.’

  ‘Oh? Have you fixed it?’

  ‘I’ve only just come,’ said the plumber indignantly. He turned away and wandered up the corridor, muttering.

  Angel reached the CID office and saw Cadet Ahaz at a computer.

  ‘Ahmed, find out who has the duty car, and tell him to report to the super’s office. Then ring up the probation office in King’s Cross. Get the address of Amy Jones. She was released from Holloway about a week ago. And then find DS Gawber and DS Crisp pronto. I want them both, urgently.’

  ‘Right, sir.’

  Angel went into his office and slumped down in the swivel-chair. He gazed up at the ceiling and closed his eyes. It must have been twenty years since Bromersley nick was invaded by Special Branch; they weren’t often here, but when they did come, they were always full of their own importance. He remembered that they had been looking into the chief players and background to the miners’ strike to see if there was any foreign political involvement. Angel remembered the arrival of the commander of that team. He had been an ex chief constable who headed a team of two very young DIs and half a dozen DSs, who swanned around, running their investigation in secrecy, making use of the local force without any briefing, behaving as if the station was a pub and treating senior officers, including himself, no better than waiters. The super had always expected him to kowtow to them and offer the visitors the very best courtesy and hospitality. He suspected that the super privately thought he had the chance of being awarded the police medal or even an MBE. He shook his head and smiled as he recalled it all.

  There was a knock at the door.

  The smile died. He opened his eyes and pressed the chair downwards.

  ‘Come in.’

  It was DS Gawber.

  ‘You wanted me, sir?’

  ‘Yes, Ron. I want you to get in touch with Bow Street and get them to put a security ring around Duncan McFee’s flat in Kensington until Mac and his team can get there. Ahmed’s got the address.’

  ‘Right, sir.’

  ‘And I want you to go to the distillery at Slogmarrow, sus it out and organize shifts round the clock to secure the crime scene, the office in that building and any other area Duncan McFee visited in the last twenty-four hours of his life. Speak to a man called Peter Fleming. He’s the boss there. Then get a good night’s kip and I’ll see you back there first thing in the morning. All right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And have you seen Crisp?’

  ‘I’m here, sir,’ the sergeant said, coming through the open door, breathing heavily.

  ‘Ah. Right. And I want you to put a personal dawn ’til dusk watch on Evan Jones. Better take Scrivens with you.’

  ‘Yes sir. For how long?’

  ‘Till I tell you to knock off!’ Angel barked.

  *

  Angel had had enough of Tuesday. He didn’t leave the station until seven o’clock, and even when he was sitting at home in his sitting-room, in his shirt-sleeves with a can of German lager in his hand, awaiting the call from the kitchen from his patient wife, Mary, that his dinner was ready, his mind was still at Bromersley nick. He was gawping at the television screen, but he didn’t see or hear the skinny girl with the lisp and the hairdo like a pineapple, reading the news. He had the murder in the distillery up at Slogmarrow on his mind. There weren’t any obvious clues, suspects or motives. It was looking decidedly tricky. And he’d hardly started the investigation, when he had been abruptly summoned from the scene to act as skivvy to Special Branch. He sniffed. He didn’t care for that man, Boodle. He had sat in the superintendent’s office like an orangutang with toothache. Angel was pleased his visit had been only brief, and he hoped he might find enough evidence to keep him at bay. He wanted to get to that murder. Tomorrow, he must whip Gawber and Crisp into line. Gawber was always dependable, but Crisp was hard work. The lad simply hadn’t the drive to work unsupervised, to sniff out evidence, find a suspect, pin-point a criminal and get him put away. He was far more interested in trying to get WPC Leisha Baverstock into a dark corner in the locker room. If his father had been gunned down by a thug while chasing him over the roof of a warehouse in Leeds, and he’d then seen him deteriorate in hospital and eventually die from a gunshot wound to his aorta, as Angel had experienced ten years ago, his attitude might be very different. ‘Did you hear that, Michael?’

  Angel came out of his reverie and looked round at Mary. She was standing at the door with a big spoon in her hand and staring at the TV.

  ‘M
ichael!’ she said urgently.

  ‘What’s that, love?’

  She nodded knowingly. ‘I thought so. You were asleep. You weren’t taking a scrap of notice of it, were you?’

  ‘What?’ he said irritably.

  She smiled. ‘You were nodding.’

  ‘No. What is it?’ he replied looking back at the screen.

  ‘A plane crashed in heavy rain during the night. Three men, two passengers and the pilot, died.’

  He nodded knowingly. ‘It’s happening all the time.’

  ‘Listen,’ Mary said persistently. ‘She said it was on a moor on the Yorkshire Pennines, two miles north of Tunistone.’ Angel leaned forward, open-mouthed and stared at the screen. The newsreader had moved on to an item about the Dow Jones.

  ‘That’s only seven miles from here,’ he said. His face changed. ‘Oh. That’s very close to Mrs Buller-Price’s farm!’

  ‘And your dinner’s on your plate.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, trying to sound interested.

  *

  Next morning Angel went straight to the Imperial distillery at Slogmarrow to the ageing-room entrance. After some protracted knocking the outside door was opened and a uniformed constable peered out.

  ‘What’s up, lad? Have I woken you up?’

  The PC grinned. ‘Oh it’s you, sir. Good morning.’

  ‘Quiet night?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Dr Mac arrived yet?’

  ‘No sir’

  ‘Has he finished upstairs, do you know?’

  ‘He finished up there last night, sir.’

  The door opened behind him. It was DS Gawber. ‘Morning, sir.’

  ‘Oh. There you are, Ron. Let’s have a look upstairs.’

  They climbed the stone steps in single file, and passed through a door into a long narrow room that was obviously used as an office and storeroom. There was a desk and chair by the middle window, with the usual potpourri of office furniture and effects. On a wall and a bench at the back were various tools of the trade: copper ladles, filters, thermometers, funnels and various lengths of stainless-steel tubing, taps and spanners. Angel looked down and observed that the internal windows all along one side gave a bird’s eye view of the cone-covered ageing-vats and the track, chain, hook and heavy motor of the overhead crane which traversed and operated across the entire ground-floor area. In the days when the building had been used as a mill, the supervisor would have overseen the workers at the looms from those windows.

  It was then that Angel noticed an unusual smell. He sniffed. ‘Hey, Ron. Come here.’

  Gawber came to the window. ‘What?’

  ‘Can you smell anything?’

  ‘Juniper berries, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. Just here.’

  Gawber screwed up his nose. ‘Yes. Mint. Mint, sir?’

  ‘Ay. That’s what I can smell. You wouldn’t expect to smell mint in a distillery, now would you?’ Angel released a window catch and pushed open the frame.

  ‘No.’

  Angel put his head out through the window. ‘I couldn’t smell it when I was downstairs.’

  ‘No. Nor could I. Just that sickly sweet pong.’

  Angel closed the window and wrinkled his nose.

  ‘That smell is in here, in this office. Somewhere round this desk. Have a look.’

  Gawber pulled open drawers and his fingers scrambled quickly through papers, letters and files, while Angel sauntered over to the bench and glanced at a thermometer surrounded with cork to float in liquid, copper ladles and stainless-steel piping and taps on the floor. He poked behind a filing cabinet, then, finding nothing, he came back to the desk, and fished through a waste-paper basket under the kneehole. Neither man found anything to explain the smell. The office door opened behind them. Angel turned. It was Dr Mac.

  ‘There you are, Mike. Where did you disappear to yesterday? Just as we were heaving the man out of the tank; it was the highlight of the day.’

  DS Gawber took the opportunity of the intrusion to write up his notes. He stood by the wall with his notebook in his hand.

  Angel pulled a face. ‘Ah. The super wanted me.’ He turned to the desk. ‘Can you smell mint?’

  ‘No,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Come over here. By this desk. Now, can you smell it?’

  Dr Mac looked surprised. ‘Yes. Yes I can.’

  ‘We’ve been trying to find where it comes from. There’s nothing in the desk.’

  Mac shrugged. ‘It’s not important, is it? Ask that Angus Leitch chap. It’s his office. He probably chews gum.’

  ‘Ay. I will. I thought you would know.’

  ‘I’m a pathologist, not a herbalist,’ the little man said with a grin and turned to leave. Angel stopped him.

  ‘Ay. Well, what did McFee die of, then?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t done the PM yet,’ Mac said patiently, ‘but he has a mighty fracture to the back of the head, which has made a hole in his skull I can put my fingers through.’

  ‘I thought he had drowned.’

  ‘I’ll know tomorrow.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Ay. There’s a spanner downstairs you might be interested in.’ ‘Ah. The murder weapon?’

  ‘It’s not heavy enough. It’s from up here.’

  Angel raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh?’

  Angus Leitch came through the door; his jaw dropped when he saw the three men in his office. He eyed all three, one after the other, as he slowly took off his coat. Mac nodded towards the newcomer.

  ‘Mr Leitch will show you where the spanner came from, won’t you, sir.’

  Angel said: ‘Has it been dusted?’

  ‘Nothing on it.’

  ‘Photographed?’

  ‘Ay. I’m going to carry on,’ Mac said, then he went out and closed the door.

  Leitch looked round uncertainly as he hung his coat behind the door.

  Angel pointed to the desk.

  ‘What’s this smell over here, sir?’ he asked.

  Leitch crossed to his desk. He sniffed a couple of times. ‘Mmm. I don’t know. Ay. It’s sort of the smell of humbugs. I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Humbugs? Is anything that smells like that used in the course of distilling and bottling gin?’

  ‘Certainly not, Inspector.’

  Angel sniffed. ‘Why is that smell just here?’ Leitch shook his head and pulled open the middle drawer of the desk.

  ‘Hey, look at this, Inspector.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This handle’s not right. It wasn’t like this. It’s been strained or pulled or something.’

  Angel looked at the handle. ‘I can’t see anything.’

  ‘It always swung loose. Now it’s tight. Somebody’s given it a thump or something.’

  Angel rubbed his chin. ‘Looks all right to me.’

  ‘It is all right, but something’s happened to it. It’s not like it was. I know it isn’t. I sit at this desk every day. Somebody’s been messing around.’

  ‘Look in the drawer. What do you keep there?’

  ‘Just stock-sheets and records of the batches.’

  ‘See what’s missing.’

  Angus Leitch riffled quickly through the papers.

  ‘It looks OK.’

  ‘Well, if you find anything missing, let me know.’

  ‘I will. I will.’

  ‘Right, well, what’s this spanner Dr Mac was talking about?’ ‘Oh yes. It’s down the stairs. On the shop-floor, Inspector.’ Leitch made for the door. Angel followed, then he turned to Gawber who was still writing up his notes.

  ‘We’re going downstairs, Ron.’

  ‘Right, sir.’

  Leitch led the two policemen down the steps, round the back of the vat in which McFee had been found, which was directly under the middle window of the office above, and pointed to a spanner on the brick floor inside a blue-chalked circle.

  ‘That was on the bench upstairs with the other tools,’ he said.

 
; Angel stared down at it. There was nothing else near the spanner; it was between the white-painted wall on the one side and the vat on the other.

  He leaned over it to note exactly how it was positioned and then picked it up. It was a steel, one-ended ring spanner ten inches long, and would fit a three-quarter-inch nut. He gripped it tightly. It certainly would have made a sort of weapon. He loosened his grip and shook it loosely in his hand.

  He supposed it weighed about twelve ounces. He certainly wouldn’t have wanted to confront a man intent on belting him with it, but Mac said it was not heavy enough to have been used as the weapon that killed Duncan McFee, and in his experience Mac was never wrong. He turned to Gawber and handed him the spanner. The sergeant turned it over and went through the same routine.

  ‘What do think?’ Angel said.

  ‘Dunno.’ Gawber held it up to his eyes and read the moulding. It simply said: SUPERIOR SHEFFIELD STEEL, 3/4 INS. He passed it back to Angel. The inspector turned to Leitch.

  ‘What does this spanner fit?’

  ‘I never use it. I believe it fits the brackets holding the radiators to the wall. But the radiators are not in use. We never have any heating on in here. It makes the spirit evaporate. Even one degree could amount to thousands of pounds. The spirit arrives direct from a still by those overhead pipes, and it is still tepid. It’s my job to get it cool, as soon as possible. I’ve never had to use that spanner.’

  Angel nodded. He could understand that.

  ‘Does it fit anything else?’

  ‘Not in here.’

  Angel turned to Gawber. ‘See if any of the radiators have been touched.’

  The sergeant pocketed the notebook and began a tour round the perimeter of the shop-floor. There were twenty big cast iron radiators located against the walls.

  Angel looked down at the place where the spanner had been.

  ‘Wonder how it got there?’ he murmured. He looked up at the office window and then back down at the floor again. If it had been thrown or dropped out of the window, it might have chipped the brick floor. He leaned over the floor area where the spanner had been found. There were no fresh chips. He scrutinized the spanner. There were no bright scratches on that either. So it didn’t appear to have been thrown. He stood up and rubbed his chin. His lips tightened. He wished he hadn’t been called away by the super: the crime scene was cold.