Unlucky For Some

by Jill McGown

  It was after four when they at last came upstairs, and Stephen might have managed to sleep were it not for the fact that the talking continued, now in whispered exchanges, on the landing, and finally in the room next door to his. It was embarrassing, knowing that Tony was with his mother in her bedroom, as it could only mean one thing: she had finally achieved what she had been aiming for ever since Tony Baker had arrived in Stoke Weston. Perhaps Wilma had been right after all; perhaps he was going to get a stepdad. The idea of Tony Baker as stepfather didn’t appeal to Stephen at all.

  It went quiet then, and Stephen tried to go to sleep, but after a little while noises could be heard through the wall that made him blush a painful deep red, as he tried not to imagine what was going on. They weren’t particularly loud, but they were quite unmistakable, and while he could just about take his mother’s union with Baker as an abstract notion, the audible confirmation of it was too much. He buried his head in the pillow, but though that blocked out the sounds, it didn’t block out the images that kept forming in his head whether he wanted them to or not.

  In desperation, he picked up his Walkman, and jammed in the earphones, switching it to radio. Any radio station, any kind of music, anything at all to take his mind off what was happening next door. Music of some sort was playing; he turned the volume up as far as his ears could stand, and lay in the dark, trying to concentrate on the words of the song, to let the images it produced override the ones already in his mind.

  He hung on the DJ’s every word, listened intently to every track, and gave his undivided attention to the six o’clock news when it came on. It was international news first, and Stephen became more aware of the state of the world’s wars and politics than he had ever been. The first item on the home news was also political; Stephen didn’t know what they were talking about, but he listened to the minister for something or other as though his life depended on what she had to say. And then came something in which he really was interested, as everyone in Bartonshire would be, when they awoke to it.

  “Bartonshire police have confirmed that a man found stabbed to death in the center of Barton early this morning is believed to be the third victim of the man they are hunting in connection with the murders of two other people in the county in the last two months. The victim, whose name has not yet been released, is thought to have lived rough in the city for many years, and was found dead shortly after two o’clock this morning.

  “The killer is believed to be the author of anonymous letters being sent to Tony Baker, the journalist and broadcaster who solved the case dubbed the ‘South Coast Murder Mystery’ eighteen years ago, and to the newspaper for which Mr. Baker is a columnist. The most recent letter named Barton as the intended scene of his next murder, and police patrols were stepped up in the city as a result, among other measures. The man leading the murder hunt, Detective Chief Superintendent Yardley, went immediately to the scene of this latest killing, and read this statement to the waiting reporters.

  “ ‘Bartonshire police very much regret that the extra precautions taken in Barton in light of the communication received failed to prevent another murder. Every effort is being made to find the person responsible for these tragic deaths, and we would like to talk to anyone who was in the Mafeking Road area of Barton at any time last night or in the small hours of this morning.'

  “Detective Chief Superintendent Yardley added that the area in which this latest killing took place is very busy at night, having several wine bars and various places of entertainment, and that the police are hopeful of finding witnesses with information that will lead to the capture of whoever is responsible.”

  Stephen switched off the radio, and removed the earphones, relieved to discover that everything was now quiet in the room next door. Finally, at ten past seven in the morning, he fell asleep.

  “There are empty premises on Mafeking Road,” said Yardley. “I’ve arranged for an incident room to be set up.”

  “Hitchin and Sims should be available to man it as soon as it’s ready,” said Judy.

  “Good. Well, now that you and Lloyd are here, I think I’ll get back to HQ—let me know if you get anything worthwhile.” He looked around. “Where is Lloyd?”

  “He’s talking to Freddie.”

  “Oh, right—I just wanted to say that if you need more personnel, let me know. And find out where Tony Baker was last night—if the first two are anything to go by, I don’t suppose he was too far away.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll tell Lloyd when he comes back.”

  “We’ve got to get this man,” Yardley said, looking suddenly haggard. “We can’t go on letting him lead us by the nose like this. He’s getting cocky now—killing someone in a place teeming with people, wrapping up the murder weapon for us. And telling the paper that it was going to be Barton—he didn’t do that last time.”

  Once again, the newspaper had received a letter the day after Baker had received his, and unlike the first one to the paper, it had named the scene of the next murder. Ignoring the gentlemen’s agreement to let the police see any communication from the murderer before going to press, the newspaper had published it in its entirety, so this time, the special measures had had to be taken with the press watching their every move. None of the papers had revealed anything about those measures that they had asked them not to reveal, but it had made their lives a little less easy, nonetheless, to have the press breathing as closely down their necks as they were. But, as Lloyd pointed out, it did mean that the papers knew the limitations of anything they did. They couldn’t, for instance, assume that Barton really would be the scene of the next attempt, so resources were being stretched, even if they were being forewarned.

  Patrols had been stepped up in secluded areas of Barton, which had included the rear of the properties along Mafeking Road, but the patrols couldn’t be in two places at once and it would have been an easy matter to wait until they had passed before carrying out the murder. Warnings had been issued to people not to go out alone in secluded areas day or night, but no amount of warnings could reach someone like this victim.

  Freddie had let them take the body away, and Judy was watching the white-suited scene-of-crime officers remove the pathetic collection of odds and ends that constituted the worldly goods of Davy Guthrie, the vagrant whose life had been ended, not by the cheap alcohol that he had consumed at a frightening rate, not by the many bitter winters that he had endured on the streets of Barton, not by the tobacco that he rolled into the thin, foul-smelling cigarettes that he smoked continually, but by someone with a knife and a desire to kill.

  It had occurred to no one that someone like Davy would be a target, least of all, Judy imagined, to Davy himself. But a target he had been, and the small change that he had begged in order to buy his next day’s supply of cheap booze had been left on his body, sorted into piles of differing coins.

  He had been found by the two police officers part of whose duties included moving on the derelicts who took up residence on the side streets of Mafeking Road at night, most of them having begged money during the day and evening from the people going into the clubs and bars on Mafeking Road itself. Davy was a regular, and this had been his spot. The police would let him sleep off the alcohol and move him on at around two in the morning, to forestall the complaints of those who had to service the streets at night.

  Knowing that he would be wakened at this early hour, Davy, in common with the other street dwellers, had always settled down early. The officers had checked that area at intervals during the night, but by the light of sodium streetlamps Davy dead was indistinguishable from Davy asleep, and it wasn’t until they had tried to rouse him that they had realized what had happened.

  It was entirely understandable if you had ever walked the beat in a city where homeless drifters slept in the street; a tolerant attitude toward them meant that they weren’t harried and shifted when there was no need, because they weren’t actively begging, and they were getting in no one’s way. Compassion rather
than a lack of concern had prompted them to leave Davy alone. But the newspapers wouldn’t see it that way; already the TV crews were unpacking their equipment to film the mean little street in which Davy had made his home. The police had passed by as this man lay dying, that’s what they would say.

  And they would ask the inevitable questions. What were the police doing to catch this man? How many more had to die before they got their act together? Did the murderer have to sell tickets, or what? He told them when and where he was going to do what he did—how much more did they need?

  And Judy wouldn’t blame them for thinking that too little was being done. They didn’t understand about the boxes and boxes of filed statements, about the hours spent poring over them in the hope that one of them contained something that had a bearing on the investigation. They didn’t know about the exhaustive searches into the backgrounds of the victims, of the hundreds of man-hours spent knocking on doors, asking questions to which no one had an answer. They didn’t know about the dozens of cars whose owners were traced, checked, and ultimately eliminated from the inquiry, about the false leads and dead ends, and the endless interviews with likely candidates, all of which came to nothing. This man apparently killed randomly, and for no reason other than to get away with it. And when getting away with it was the motive, then it wasn’t particularly difficult to do just that.

  But this time, things were a little more hopeful. It had been a warm night, unlike the nights on which the other two murders had taken place, so there had been people about on the streets—people who could help them narrow down the time of death, who could describe the others they had seen in the vicinity. There was a camera on one of the buildings, though Judy doubted that this man would make as elementary a mistake as to be caught on it. But perhaps he had.

  And, as Yardley had mentioned, they had found what appeared to be the murder weapon in one of the big industrial-sized bins at the rear of the restaurant on the corner of Mafeking Road and Ladysmith Avenue, the latter being where Davy had chosen to make his sleeping arrangements. It had, for reasons known only to whoever put it in there, been sealed in a padded bag. Perhaps he had thought it would escape detection, but the presence of a brand-new sealed padded bag in a wastebin had naturally excited some interest, so it seemed unlikely that he would have believed that.

  Yardley hadn’t told the papers about the discovery—it still had to be confirmed that the blood on the six-inch blade of the curved, fisherman’s trout-filleting knife was Davy's. But if it wasn’t, Judy thought, they’d better start looking for another body. She doubted that they would find anything as useful as fingerprints on the knife, its sheath or the padded bag, but knives could sometimes be traced.

  Mafeking Road ran for three miles through the center of Barton, and a mile of its length had become known locally as Sunset Strip, because coffee bars, restaurants, wine bars, clubs, amusement arcades and pubs had, over the years, become established. Michael Waterman’s Lucky Seven Casino was about a quarter of a mile away from where Davy’s body was found, and Judy felt that the Waterman connection could no longer be a coincidence.

  The Bull’s Eye bingo club, however, was a fair distance away, so it wasn’t exactly the same setup as before. Even so, they were checking to find out where Stephen Halliday had been working last night. He was their only suspect now, and that on so little evidence as to be laughable, but he had to be checked out.

  Ladysmith Avenue ran off Mafeking Road at a right angle, running down the side of the big corner restaurant called Forty-second Street, and at night served as an unofficial car park to the various businesses on Sunset Strip. Railings separated the pavement from the strip of grass at the side of the building, and it was under these that Davy had bundled himself up for the night in the filthy blanket that the SOCOs were taking away, now stained with blood as well as the many other bodily fluids it had had to absorb over the years.

  Ladysmith Avenue intersected with Kimberley Court, the cul-de-sac onto which the buildings on Mafeking Road backed, where the other down-and-outs slept, then carried on, taking traffic to the ring road that skirted Barton, and out of the city. The chief attraction of Kimberley Court was the refuse bins and the food scraps they contained. As they closed for the night, one or two of the restaurant owners even brought out their surplus food for the human flotsam that fetched up on their doorsteps, despite being asked not to do so by those who seemed to think that living on the street was a soft option.

  No one knew why Davy had remained aloof from the others; he was the only one who chose to sleep round the corner on Ladysmith Avenue, and this had proved to be his undoing, because it had made him the softest target of all. But he slept on the pavement between Kimberley Court and Mafeking Road, so it did mean that two of the buildings across Mafeking Road had a clear view of him. These were the Queen Bee, a gay club, and Chopsticks, a Chinese restaurant. People must have been coming and going from both these establishments, and they were optimistic of getting something positive from one of them.

  Judy heard Freddie’s car take off, and after a moment, Lloyd joined her, shielding his eyes against the morning sun that promised another warm day.

  “He died some time after nine o’clock last night, according to Freddie. He’s doing the postmortem this afternoon. Toss you for it.”

  “He who speaks to pathologist attends autopsy,” she said. “Old Chinese proverb—ask the people in Chopsticks, if you don’t believe me.”

  “That’s not fair. I got Lewis’s.”

  “Life isn’t fair.” She passed on Yardley’s message as they walked down Ladysmith Avenue toward Mafeking Road, where the incident room was already being furnished. When Yardley arranged for something to be done, it obviously got done, Judy thought. That was refreshing, and presumably meant that if they did need more people, they would get them.

  “I’m a bit surprised that Davy had any money on him at all,” Lloyd said. “I’d have thought he would spend the day’s takings before going to sleep.”

  “Does it constitute a little puzzle?”

  “Probably not.”

  They crossed the busy road, and Judy looked down toward the casino as they walked to the incident room. “Another Waterman establishment just five minutes’ walk away from the crime scene,” she said. “Or am I just getting paranoid?”

  “It is beginning to seem relevant,” said Lloyd. “But the last two victims had nothing to do with Waterman that we know of. We might find out that Davy is his long-lost cousin, but I doubt it.” He looked at her. “Since Scopes has been crossed off, am I right in assuming that it’s Waterman himself you’re wondering about?”

  “Frankly, I’m beginning to wonder about you. Anyone. Someone’s killing these people. Why don’t we have a single lead?”

  “Because whoever it is knows what he’s doing.” He shook his head. “And what are we to make of the murder weapon being neatly parcelled up in a padded bag?”

  “God knows. Tom thought they’d stumbled on a blackmail drop—the last thing they expected to find in the envelope was the murder weapon. Yardley thinks the murderer’s just getting cocky.” Judy looked at her watch. “I’ve got the owner of the restaurant coming to let us see his CCTV footage, because that seems to be the only camera that takes in Ladysmith Avenue. And I’d better get back over there. I got the poor man out of bed, so the least I can do is be there when he arrives.”

  “That’s the problem with this area being active at night,” said Lloyd. “People who are working or playing until two and three in the morning aren’t around much during the day. I think the incident room should be manned until about eleven o’clock at night if we’re going to get anything useful. Do you think Yardley will go for that?”

  “I think he’d go for twenty-four-hour manning if he thought it might get a result.”

  Judy hurried back across the street, and was waiting outside the restaurant just in time to see the owner’s car pull up.

  “I’m sorry to have to put you to this inc
onvenience,” she said.

  “No problem,” he said, unlocking the door. “Just go straight on through to the back,” he said, waving her ahead of him as he cancelled the burglar alarm. “I have to warn you that the camera isn’t set up to take in Ladysmith Avenue—I mean, it does, but that’s not what it’s for, really. It’s there so that we can keep an eye on the back court—that’s where we’re vulnerable to break-ins or whatever. And we can watch deliveries being made, and keep an eye on our cars. Most of the staff park in Kimberley Court.”

  There was just one camera, and Judy found to her disappointment, but not to her surprise, that it took in the wrong part of Ladysmith Avenue, the part that carried on away from Mafeking Road after it had passed Kimberley Court. That had seemed likely to be the case when she had looked at its position, but it had been high enough up on the old building to make her believe that it might get the near corner of Kimberley Court and Ladysmith Avenue in the shot. And it would have, but for the sloping roof of an open porch affair that the restaurant had had built onto the exterior of the building. It also obscured the view of the bin in which the weapon had been found. Now, why didn’t that surprise her?

  “Is it possible for customers to see the output from your security camera?” she asked.

  “Yes—they pay at the kiosk, and there’s a screen in there.”

  If he’d said no, they could have looked with some degree of enthusiasm at his staff, but it could just as easily have been a customer who worked out exactly which of Barton’s homeless he could most easily and efficiently eliminate without the camera seeing anything. But the murderer might have walked along that part of Ladysmith Avenue that the camera did pick up, so she asked for the tape.