Unlucky For Some

by Jill McGown

  She smiled, entirely aware of what Hitchin was doing. “I’d be delighted to take them off your hands,” she said. “Thank you, dear.”

  With that, she pushed her pram back out into Mafeking Road, and walked briskly off.

  “Gary—go and get us some sandwiches.”

  Keith opened his eyes, aware that somewhere there was a tune playing incessantly. It took his sleep-clouded mind a moment or two to realize that it was his mobile phone, and he sat up on one elbow while he tried to work out which of the things on the bedside table his mobile phone actually was.

  “Keith Scopes,” he said, his voice heavy.

  “Rise and shine, Keith—it’s your boss.”

  “Oh, Mr. Waterman. Er . . . yes. What time is it?”

  “One o’clock.”

  “Oh, right. Time I was up anyway.”

  Keith felt aggrieved, since he’d been working until after two o’clock in the morning, but then he remembered that Mr. Waterman had, too. At least he’d been entertaining his guests until then, if that counted as working, and Keith supposed that it did. How come he was so bright and breezy?

  “I just wondered if you fancied working the May Day bank holiday.”

  Keith was still trying to work out what day this was, and he was talking about a bank holiday that wasn’t for . . . well, a long time. But he wasn’t going anywhere, as far as he could remember. Wasn’t May Day that weird one that came between Easter and the spring bank holiday? No one went away for it, did they? Michelle wouldn’t have arranged for them to go anywhere.

  “Sure. Where?”

  “My place. Stoke Weston is having its May Day celebrations there this year.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Keith. “They’ve nicked the village green, haven’t they?”

  “It’s going to be a great day. And I want you to be the chief security officer. I’m rounding up a few others, but you’ll be in charge.”

  “Great. When is May Day?”

  “Oddly enough, it’s on the first of May this year.”

  “Well,” said Keith defensively. “I didn’t know if that was always the day we got off for it.”

  “No—I wasn’t being sarcastic. It isn’t usually. It’s usually the first Monday in May. But this year the first Monday in May is the first of May. So I’m pushing the boat out a bit to celebrate May Day being on May Day, if you see what I mean.”

  “Right. Good—yes, I’ll do that.”

  “Good. Don’t go back to sleep—you said it was time you were up.”

  “No. Thanks, Mr. Waterman. See you.”

  He lay back on the pillow. Chief security officer—that sounded good. He stumbled out of bed before he fell asleep again, and went downstairs, automatically switching on the TV as he passed it. It was the regional lunchtime news, and he stopped to watch.

  “. . . forty-three-year-old Davy Guthrie was a well-known figure in Barton, and many people were shocked to hear of his murder. Police believe he was stabbed while he slept, in a side street off the area known as Sunset Strip to Barton’s clubbers . . .”

  “So when did you get back here?” asked Tom. He already knew the answer—Stephen’s bike arriving in the village was something the neighbors noticed, and one of them had already mentioned what time Stephen got back.

  Stephen Halliday sighed. “About half past eleven,” he said. “My bike broke down, and it took me about a quarter of an hour to get it started again.”

  “Oh? What’s wrong with it?”

  “I don’t know—I’ve had it fixed once. Well, I thought I had. But it’s doing the same thing again. If I stall it, I can’t start it again.”

  “So what made you stall it?”

  “Something ran out on the road. A rabbit, or something. I braked, and stalled the engine.”

  Tom wanted to believe him, but it was beginning to look a bit dodgy for Stephen Halliday. According to Waterman Entertainment, he had only ever worked at the Barton bingo club once before last night, so the coincidence factor that had been present at Stansfield didn’t apply. He had, according to the staff at the club, left the building at five minutes to eleven, and it was a twenty-minute journey to Stoke Weston. Fifteen minutes gave him plenty of time in which he could have driven to Sunset Strip and stabbed Davy Guthrie. But he still couldn’t see it himself, and they were very far short of having any evidence against him.

  “I thought you shot rabbits. But you braked to avoid this one?”

  “I do shoot them—that doesn’t mean I want to run them over. Anyway—it could have been a cat, or anything. I don’t know what it was.”

  “Can I see the clothes you were wearing last night?”

  “If you want. Do you want to take them away again?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Well, it’s my night off tonight, but is there any chance of letting me have them back tomorrow? Last time I had to borrow someone else’s blazer, and it didn’t really fit me.”

  Tom could see how that would upset Stephen, just as it would upset Bobby. “Well—I kind of doubt that they’ll be that quick. Sorry.” It would be a waste of time, Tom knew. There was a slight chance that the assailant had got blood on his clothes, but it was more likely that he hadn’t.

  And a less likely serial killer than the patient, obliging, slightly baffled Stephen Halliday he had yet to meet. If only he would tell them what he was doing the night Mrs. Fenton died, they could stop bothering him.

  “Ben! I don’t often get a call from you.” Michael suddenly realized that he didn’t ever get a call from his son. “What’s happened? Is something wrong?”

  “No, nothing like that. But I’ve been hearing about the May Day festivities at the Grange—I thought I might make a flying visit. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I thought you’d go on about me being Lord Bountiful.”

  “No—it sounds like fun. I don’t think I’ve ever seen maypole dancing.”

  “Well—no,” said Michael. “I mean—if your mum had been around, maybe, but it’s not the sort of thing a man and his son would go to, is it?”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  There was an awkward silence, generated, Michael knew, by his embarrassment, not Ben's.

  “Well—that was all, really. I don’t think I’ll get down before then, so I’ll see you on May Day.”

  “Oh—you can’t make a weekend of it?”

  “No, I wish I could, but we’ve got someone coming that weekend to give us extracurricular talks, and I’m expected to attend. I’ll get the train down on Sunday evening, and go back on Monday evening.”

  “Well, if you think you can do that.”

  “Oh, yes. I sleep like a log on trains. I’ll see you then. ’Bye.”

  Well, that was something, Ben making a special trip like that to see him. Michael didn’t suppose it was really the May Day shindig that was bringing him home. Of course, his twenty-first was on May 8, so perhaps he wanted to talk to him about the money, and how best to invest it. But whatever the reason, Michael was very pleased that he was coming.

  His secretary came in then and told him that there was a police officer waiting to speak to him.

  “Show him in,” he said.

  “Her,” said his secretary.

  His next assumption was also wrong, because it wasn’t the uniformed constable he had been expecting, but the very Detective Chief Inspector Judy Hill that Ray had told him about. He was right; she was attractive, and was managing somehow to look cool and smart despite the mini–heat wave, which was more than could be said for him. His suit had started crumpling the moment he’d sat in the car that morning.

  Once he’d got her seated and established that she didn’t want a cold drink, despite the warmth of the day, he asked how he could help.

  “We have a witness who saw a man in a dinner jacket behaving a little oddly in Kimberley Court last night. And I think that your casino is probably the only place in the area that would have customers wearing dinner jackets. Might some o
f your customers have been wearing dinner jackets last night?”

  Michael bit his lip. “I’m afraid they were all wearing dinner jackets,” he said.

  Her eyes widened. “All? Do you insist on it?”

  “No. The casino was host to a charity boxing program—formal dress, four hundred pounds a table. We did very well indeed—made thousands for the charity.”

  Judy Hill closed her eyes. “I hardly dare ask this,” she said. “About how many were there?”

  “About three hundred and fifty. It’s a big place, Chief Inspector.”

  “If it was an all-ticket evening, I take it you’ll have their names and addresses?”

  “Oh, yes.” Michael smiled. “Maybe I can be a bit more help than that, though—about what time was this man seen behaving oddly?”

  “That’s just it, I’m afraid. We don’t know. But if you have anything that might help . . .”

  “No—it was just that I don’t think anyone left until some time after dinner—I can’t be certain, of course, but the earliest to leave the top table went at about half past ten or so. If you’d said it was any earlier than that, then it might have been quite easy to ask around about who went out. But if it was after half ten . . . well, people did start drifting away, except the hard core ones who stayed until two a.m. And even they went out occasionally for a breath of air—it was extremely warm.”

  “And there were presumably about . . . what? Ninety tables?”

  “Eighty-five. There must have been, because it came to seven dozen bottles of sparkling wine, plus a few bottles of the real thing for the top table.”

  She smiled.

  “And for all I know their occupants all nipped out at one point and behaved oddly.”

  “Did you, by any chance?” she asked, smiling.

  The smile didn’t fool him. She wanted to know. They’d already checked up on his movements with the first two, so he had been expecting this.

  “No—I was at the table throughout, except for two visits to the gents’, which didn’t necessitate leaving the building. I’ve got witnesses who can confirm that was where I went, and your own chief constable will confirm that I was at the table all the rest of the time. Will you be interviewing him?”

  “I will,” she said crisply. “Well, thank you, Mr. Waterman. If you can let us have the list of guests, we’ll do the rest.”

  “We’re looking for a man of regular build between five foot seven and six feet or so,” said Yardley. “Who was wearing a plain white shirt, and a dark suit. He wore a traditional, dark bow tie, which might have been a clip-on, and he drives a car—the color is fluid, but it’s more likely to be dark than light. So there’s no point in talking to a five-foot-two ex-jockey with a pronounced paunch. And be polite. These people paid a hundred pounds a ticket, so just make sure that they are approached with tact and diplomacy.”

  They were assembled for the evening briefing, and Judy could feel Lloyd wanting to point out that he didn’t reserve tact and diplomacy for people who could fork out a hundred pounds for a seat at a boxing do, but even he knew better than to criticize a chief superintendent in a briefing.

  “Do you mean don’t go accusing them of being the Headless Assassin, sir?” asked one of the DCs, with a laugh.

  That was how he had immediately become known once Gary had told his story.

  “I wouldn’t put it past this man to have worn a dinner jacket just so that we’d suspect someone from the casino,” Tom said.

  “Good point,” said Yardley. “It seems obvious that he knew exactly which bin wasn’t overlooked by that camera, and exactly which person he could murder without too much difficulty, so the evening clothes could have been deliberate. But we have to start somewhere.”

  They did indeed. Her friend the restaurant owner had said that none of his diners had been wearing formal dress, so the casino was, as Tom had said, the only game in town.

  “Would he know that Gertie couldn’t see his face?” asked Lloyd.

  “I don’t think he’d even know she was there, sir,” said Gary. “I met her later in the afternoon, and she insisted on showing me where she sleeps. She’s behind all those empty cardboard boxes that they store in that shelter thing—she disappears.”

  “What do we think about the car?” asked Yardley. “Was it parked there all along, or did its arrival wake Gertie?”

  “Chances are it was parked there all along, sir,” said Alan Marshall. “Both sides of that road are chockablock at night, which is how Headless could keep out of sight of the patrols. I can’t see him being lucky enough to find a parking space convenient to the murder location.”

  “Good point,” said Yardley again. “So we’re saying that Headless was in the vicinity all evening, and at some time after nine, he stabbed Davy Guthrie to death, put the knife in the bin, first popping it in a Jiffy bag, and drove off toward Mafeking Road.”

  “Which could mean that he actually lives in Barton, sir,” said Gary.

  “Well,” said Yardley, “I don’t think we should read too much into which way he went, because I’m sure he would know that he would be picked up by the restaurant camera if he went toward the ring road.”

  “But if we can get a time,” said Lloyd, “he will have been picked up by the traffic cameras on Mafeking Road itself. We’ll check both sets of lights, obviously. But Alan would stand a better chance of picking out his car if we could find out roughly when all this took place.”

  Everyone laughed. Alan Marshall was always first choice for jobs requiring dogged diligence.

  It was such a relief to be in a briefing where people were able to offer suggestions and produce queries—it seemed to Judy that they had spent weeks contemplating their navels until now. A real witness, with real information was just what they needed. And Tom had cheered up on hearing about Gertie’s encounter with Headless—it considerably lengthened the odds on Stephen Halliday, who would have had to change into and out of full evening dress as well as doing away with Davy in the fifteen minutes at his disposal. Possible, but extremely unlikely. And he would have had to get rid of the outfit, because it wasn’t in his wardrobe—Tom had checked. It could, in a pinch, have been hired and taken back this morning. But Stephen was a very long shot now.

  “And what about this clicking sound?” said Yardley. “Any ideas?”

  A silence descended.

  “A clock?” someone suggested after a moment.

  “That would be a ticking sound, not a clicking sound,” someone else objected.

  “Dolphins make a clicking sound, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, good thinking—maybe she heard a dolphin. They’re a real problem round there. Worse than pigeons.”

  “Or a death-watch beetle,” said someone else. “They click.”

  “And there’s that tribe in Africa that talk in clicks. Maybe it was two of them she heard having a conversation.”

  “Or just one of them, on a mobile phone.”

  “All right, all right,” said Yardley. “Any sensible suggestions?”

  There were, it seemed, no sensible suggestions. The ongoing inquiries into all three murders were discussed and updated, tomorrow’s tasks given out, and the briefing was over.

  Yardley waited until everyone but Lloyd and Judy had gone, then sat down at one of the tables, beckoning them over.

  “I’ve decided to bring in a psychological profiler,” he said. “All right—maybe Gertie’s got us on the right track at last, but maybe she hasn’t. She’s an alcoholic who lives on the streets, and who knows what her mind conjures up when she’s asleep. We don’t know if she saw any of that. It sounds to me like she was dreaming about the Invisible Man.”

  “Gary Sims says she knows how many beans make five,” said Lloyd. “He knew her quite well when he was on the beat here, and I trust his judgment.”

  “Good. But a lot of booze has flowed down Gertie’s throat in the last couple of years. So let’s get someone in to give us some indication of who we’re look
ing for—someone who isn’t a suspect himself.”

  This was a dig at Lloyd for talking to Tony Baker, which had not gone down too well with Yardley. It turned out that Tony Baker had been a guest at the boxing evening, so he remained a suspect. Of course, it was equally possible that the letter writer was killing where he did purely because of Tony Baker’s presence in the area, as Gary Sims had suggested.

  And Lloyd’s action in consulting him wasn’t so terrible; he had told him nothing he didn’t already know, and they were desperate for any sort of lead. They all knew how Yardley felt, however. There was something about Tony Baker’s account of that night in the alleyway that didn’t ring true, which was another reason that Stephen Halliday remained a suspect, however unlikely, because Baker might be trying to protect him.

  She would doubtless be treated to Lloyd’s views on psychological profilers when they got home. How wonderful. But it would at least make a change from the loft conversion.

  The little pub had the usual crowd in when Jack went for his evening pint, hopeful that last night had put him on a different footing with Grace, but it was Stephen who was behind the bar.

  “Is it your night off from the bingo?” he asked.

  “Yes—I’m having a wonderful time. I’m stuck behind the bar, I’ve had that detective inspector round here wanting to know where I went when I left the bingo club last night, and my bike’s died altogether now. Best birthday I ever had.”

  Oh, dear. Jack wasn’t sure what to say. It wasn’t like Stephen to be like this, even if he had had a rotten birthday. “I’ll have a pint, please. What did the inspector want with you this time?”

  “He took my clothes away again, but then he brought them back and wanted to know if I had a dinner jacket. I had to take him upstairs and let him look in my wardrobe.”

  “Couldn’t you have refused?”

  “What would be the point? I don’t have a dinner jacket.”

  True. All the same, Stephen was a lot more accommodating than Jack would be in his position. He was surprised Grace wasn’t here shouting about harassment. “Where’s your mum?”