The Bad Samaritan

by Robert Barnard

  “No. Silvio is off today. That boy I have on loan from the Trattoria Aliberti.”

  “I see. You normally have two boys, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Is both off duty today.”

  “Ah . . . . Right. Well, I’ll come round and hope to see him tomorrow.”

  Hesitantly, uncertainly, Signor Gabrielli said, “Of course. Yes. All right. I’ll tell him.”

  Thoughtfully Charlie walked back to his car. He very much doubted that he was going to be talking to Silvio in the near future. It might be that some kind of alert would have to be put out, though they would need more hard evidence that there was a connection with the dead man. It could be, he thought, that they could use more subtle methods. He looked at his watch. One fifteen. Service at St Saviour’s would be long over. However, he drove towards it and cruised along the road that it stood on. The church was a large Victorian construction, abounding in knobs and small spires. He had read a smart journalistic piece once saying how much better Victorian Gothic was than the real thing. He didn’t think the author could have been thinking of St Saviour’s.

  He was just about to speed up towards the vicarage when he saw the door open at the Five Hundred pub, a short way away, and a family group emerge. He pulled his car up beside the kerb and watched them in the mirror as they came in his direction. It was the conventional enough family group—father, mother, daughter, daughter’s boyfriend, son—yet somehow ill-assorted: or rather, with one discordant element, one cuckoo in the nest. The one whom he identified as the son seemed not to walk or talk or behave generally in the natural way the others had. It was as if he was conscious of being, or had persuaded himself that he was, on show.

  Charlie got out of the car as they approached.

  “Hello,” he said to Rosemary.

  “Hello.” He was unsure how much welcome there was in the greeting. She turned to her family. “This is one of the detectives on the Mills case. I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “DC Peace.”

  “Peace be with you,” said the son, and let out a laugh like the last of the bathwater escaping. He laughed alone. Charlie behaved as people do when they have heard every possible joke on their name.

  “This is Mark,” said Rosemary, in a voice pregnant with meaning. “Janet and her boyfriend Kevin. And my husband Paul.”

  “I’ll probably want to talk to all of you before long—me or my boss. It was just you I wanted to ask about something at the moment,” he added, turning to Rosemary. She nodded, though Charlie felt she was suppressing anxiety. They let the others walk on, then followed at some distance behind.

  “I’m trying to get something straight about the party last night,” Charlie began. “You said you were behind the table that the food was to be served from, and Mills was one of a little group standing about nearby, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Tell me what happened when the food arrived.”

  “I thought I had done. Let me see . . . .” Rosemary’s voice had been edgy. Now she put on an air of trying to visualise the scene. Charlie was sure that she had thought about it all too often since their earlier talk. “The deliveryman from Pizza Pronto came in, bang on the dot when we had arranged. He had a pile of pizzas up to his chin. He put them down in front of us on the table, then I and the other ladies each took one out of its carton and started cutting them up.”

  “And the deliveryman?”

  “He left, of course.”

  “There was no . . . confrontation, episode of some kind, between him and Mills?”

  “Not that I noticed. I was busy slicing pizzas. It’s not that easy if they have a crispy bottom.”

  “There was no question of the man from Pizza Pronto helping you?”

  Rosemary made gestures of just having remembered.

  “Ah—that’s right. I’d forgotten that. I asked him if he’d like to help—him being so much quicker and better than us, probably—and he started round, then remembered they were very busy at the takeaway and said he’d better not be away too long.”

  Rosemary was a guileless liar, Charlie decided, but hardly a wise one: she must surely realise that parish gossip about her and the Pizza Pronto boy would get to the police before long. Then a thought struck him: probably she was lying to give the boy time to get away. When she was sure he had, she would come clean. He could of course have challenged her version of events and of the situation, but he preferred to give the appearance of accepting it, if only on the well-worn principle of giving someone enough rope. He smiled down at her.

  “Well, that clears that up,” he said. They had finished up outside the vicarage. “Are you going to eat straight away? I wondered if I might pop in and have a word with your family. They were all at the party, weren’t they?”

  “Yes, they were. You won’t want me, will you? I’ve all sorts of little things to do in the kitchen.”

  The Sheffield family were assembled in the dining room, talking and laughing. They were apparently unconcerned by Mills’s death, and by the reappearance of the policeman investigating it. When Charlie asked if they had talked to Mills at the party they all shook their heads.

  “He was talking to local businessmen,” said Paul Sheffield, who seemed, of them all, the most at ease. “He tended to. If there was no woman he was interested in, he liked to be polishing up his contacts.”

  “De mortuis nil nisi bonum” said Mark. He considerately turned to Charlie and translated in a kindly tone. “One should only speak good of the dead.”

  “That would make murder investigations practically impossible,” said Charlie.

  “I’ve always thought that a silly injunction,” said Paul. “Surely it should be while they’re living that you shouldn’t speak ill of people.”

  “So none of you had anything to do with him last night?” Charlie asked. He saw a flash of something pass over the daughter’s eyes, but her boyfriend jumped in.

  “I don’t even know which one he was. It’s very frustrating. Towards the end of the evening Janet introduced me to Mrs Harridance, and the rest of the time passed like a blur.”

  “I believe he’s been a member of the St Saviour’s congregation for some time,” said Charlie, turning to Paul.

  “Oh yes, quite a while. Since my time here, but it must be something like . . . oh, twelve years or more.”

  “Do you remember how or why he started coming?”

  “I can’t say. I suppose he’d just moved here—that is the usual reason.” He paused, as his wife came into the room. “Do you remember how Dark Satanic—how Stephen Mills started coming to St Saviour’s?”

  His question had been drowned in a gale of laughter from his wife and daughter.

  “Really, Father, you’ve given the policeman a totally false impression of the man!” protested Mark.

  “Not so bloody false,” muttered his sister.

  “Right,” said Rosemary, becoming businesslike again. “How did Dark Satanic Mills come to be a member of St Saviour’s congregation? I’ve asked myself often enough why he was a member at all . . . . I somehow associate him with old Mr Unwin. That’s his father-in-law. He was much spryer then, of course, and in complete control. I seem to think either he brought him along, or they were often together.”

  “He and Dorothy weren’t married then, though,” put in Paul. “And Mr Unwin wasn’t a member of our church. He was a red-hot Evangelical. I married Stephen and Dorothy—what?—about ten or more years ago.”

  “I rather think that marriage to Dorothy sprang from his friendship with her father,” said Rosemary. “Odd way round, that.”

  “You said to me that you didn’t think Dorothy Mills was a very important element in Stephen Mills’s life,” said Charlie. “What was it that made you think that?”

  “It was only an impression,” said Rosemary thoughtfully. “It’s just that you don’t see them around together much. Oh, occasionally she’d come to church, or to one of our do’s, but it was occasionally. I
f we were at a concert or the theatre in Leeds you might see Stephen, but to my recollection we hardly every saw him and his wife together.”

  “If you had to make any sort of date or arrangement with him,” said her husband, “he’d take out his diary and consult it, but he’d never say he’d have to ask his wife. Most men do these days—as a sort of sop, I suppose—but he never did.”

  “And you implied there were other women,” Charlie pressed him.

  “That was certainly the impression given. I wouldn’t be able to name any names.”

  Mark nodded wisely, as if his previous strictures had been justified. Charlie could imagine Mark being exceedingly irritating. He turned to Rosemary.

  “Could you name any names?”

  “No, I couldn’t. You might say that if there weren’t he should have been sued for false pretences. It was really a question of manner. He exuded confidence in his powers of attraction. If any woman gave the slightest sign of responding he was in there pressing his advantage home. But as to evidence of his sleeping with any of them—no, I’m afraid I have none.”

  “Isn’t that odd?” Charlie asked.

  “Maybe,” said Rosemary, not seeming convinced. “But maybe he took care to keep that side of himself away from the congregation. I’ve certainly seen him emerging from a pretty sleazy massage parlour in town—The Sinful Sunbed, in Potter Street. He just grinned, quite unembarrassed. So perhaps he didn’t want to compromise his position at St Saviour’s.”

  “That suggests his position there was important to him,” said Charlie.

  “Though there’s also the possibility that the ladies there are just not very tempting.”

  Once again Charlie could have sworn that a shadow passed over Rosemary’s daughter’s face.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Partners

  On his way back to base Charlie dropped in at the flat he shared with his girlfriend Felicity. It was a one-bedroom affair, but with a large living room they had already made cheerful and personal by their own choice of pictures and bits and pieces of furniture. Felicity was surrounded by books and was hunched over a blank writing pad.

  “So what made them summon you early?” she asked.

  “It’s a murder.”

  “It’s lovely being a policeman’s partner,” commented Felicity. “You have such lovely casual conversations about perfectly horrible things.”

  “I’m surprised none of your ghoulish university friends have rung to tell you.”

  “They know I’m supposed to be writing an essay. Who was it?”

  “Know a man called Stephen Mills?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Ask around of your friends—particularly women.”

  “Particularly a certain sort of woman student, I suppose.”

  “Yes . . . . Felicity, you go to Pizza Pronto more often than I do.”

  “Don’t I ever! All those nights when you say you’ll be home and then ring to say you’re working late.”

  “Would you recognise the boys who work there?”

  She frowned, sidetracked.

  “The boys? Is it all right to call them ‘boys,’ I wonder?”

  “Spare me the intricacies of political correctness. Would you know them?”

  “It’s only recently that there’s been two. I’ve only seen the new one once, and there was nothing very remarkable about him.”

  “And the other?”

  “Oh yes, I’ve seen him often. The proprietor speaks to him in Italian, but I don’t think he is. Maybe North African.”

  “Both the boys have scarpered, or so I suspect. The new one won’t be in the Leeds area, if he knows what’s good for him, but the other one may be. Neither of them has a work permit, if my guess is right.”

  “You’re not harassing illegal immigrants, are you, Charlie?”

  “In my job I do what I’m told to do,” said Charlie impatiently. It was an old argument. “But no—the new one is involved somehow in the murder, and I’d like to know if he said anything to the other that might throw light on it. He’s quite likely to have gone to some other pizzeria in town. Could you alert some of your student friends to look out for him?”

  Felicity thought, then shook her head.

  “I doubt that would work. He’s probably gone to a quite different area of Leeds, hasn’t he?”

  “Probably.”

  “Students change digs, but they don’t often move right across town. You hear of something going in your area and you snap it up . . . . Quite apart from the question of whether they want to help the police . . . Wouldn’t it be better to drive around and look?”

  “When we have a spare week, I suppose.”

  “It wouldn’t take that long,” said Felicity confidently. “I’ll look in the Yellow Pages for likely places and map out a route. I could cruise around myself, just look through the windows. You won’t need the car, I suppose?”

  “I’ll be working all the hours God sends, and then some.”

  When Charlie got back to headquarters he was told that Oddie had just come in with a witness. He found them in a corridor on the way to an interview room and was introduced to Brian Ferrett. He was a chunky, slightly chubby young man, with thick brown curls framing a moonlike face and a manner that would have been encouraging on a school playing field—cheery, a little too loud. If he showed signs of nervousness, that was to be discounted; it was one of the most common reactions to murder, among the innocent as much as among the guilty.

  “It’s just incredible,” he said to Charlie when they had been introduced. “Mind-blowing. I mean, you couldn’t meet a more decent bloke than old Steve. And so full of life.”

  That was as of yesterday, Charlie felt like saying. But he held his peace and, with Oddie, ushered him through to the interview room.

  When the formalities had been gone through, it was Oddie who started the questioning.

  “You were Stephen Mills’s—partner, was it? Or second in command?”

  “Second in command,” Ferrett said, readily and unresentfully. “Though he treated me more like a partner. I’d practically worked my way up from office boy.”

  “In how many years was that?”

  “I’d been with him eight years. The business had been going nearly a year when he took me on.”

  “And I gather you do—you’ve been doing—a lot of the travelling involved in recent times.”

  “Yes, I do a lot of that. Stephen still had his places where he had a special expertise, good contacts he wanted to maintain. But yes—a lot of it I’d been getting to do, and developed my own contacts and expertise. Due off tomorrow, as a matter of fact—” He saw something in Oddie’s face and said hurriedly, “Nothing that can’t be put off.”

  “How did you come to get the job?”

  He leaned back in his chair confidently.

  “He wanted someone good with languages. It’s something I’ve never found a problem. I graduated in Russian, but there were no jobs around. I had French and German as well, to Advanced level. Stephen saw that there was use for Russian in all the Eastern bloc countries where it was taught, and when he realised I was very fast at learning new languages he took me on. He was tremendously farsighted: he could see that things were loosening up in Eastern Europe. Hungary, Bulgaria, then gradually the rest—like the old domino theory in the Far East, only in reverse. Steve was just waiting for it to happen, then going in to see how he could help.”

  “Help?”

  “Do business with them. That is helping them. We had what they need—taught them the skills they need.”

  “Is it in Eastern Europe where most of your business lies?”

  “Oh no. But it’s the developing part of our business. The bulk occurs in the Common Market countries. That’s where the money is. In spite of all the processes of standardisation, each country has its peculiarities and quirks, its little hurdles you have to jump. It’s those we can advise customers about, as well as putting them in touch with in
dividual firms with marketing interests that coincide with their own.”

  “I see. And is business flourishing?”

  “Oh yes!” he said, with positively boyish enthusiasm. “Brilliant. Of course we were hit by the recession, especially when it really started biting on the Continent as well. But we’ve weathered it—and now things are picking up in a big way.”

  It was the first time Charlie had heard anyone outside government claim that things were picking up.

  “So you were both busy?”

  “No question of that. Still, we’re used to it. There was a time when Steve was running his father-in-law’s business as well. That really took twenty-five hours a day!”

  “Not much time for personal life, when you’re working that hard,” said Oddie neutrally. Ferrett shot him a glance, markedly less confident.

  “Well, Steve was more or less only doing it as a favour to his wife’s father.”

  “Somebody commented that Dorothy Mills was something of an irrelevance in her husband’s life,” put in Charlie. Brian Ferrett spread out his hands in a gesture of coming clean.

  “Look, he was a bloke in a thousand. Straight as a die, old Steve. He’d never willingly have hurt Dottie. But maybe—and it is maybe, because we didn’t discuss it—maybe he realised early on that he’d made the wrong choice. She’s a nice enough lady, but she’s got no class, to put it bluntly. She’s not sexy or elegant, and she was no use at all in the business. Stephen was no monk. Maybe—again, maybe—he got what he wanted elsewhere. But he stayed with her, had her dad living with them, and I never heard him give her a cross word. Not every wife could say the same. Fair’s fair. He did his duty to her.”

  It was a long speech, but Oddie didn’t find it an entirely convincing one. He certainly didn’t believe this was a subject they had never discussed.

  “Where was the ‘elsewhere’ where he got what he needed?” asked Oddie. Ferrett shrugged.

  “Search me. It wasn’t something we talked about, like I said. I only know there were times when I didn’t ask him where he’d been, know what I mean? My impression is that there may have been one or two affairs, but that mostly he got what he wanted by paying for it, if you get me.”