First Fix Your Alibi

by Bill James

  ‘Possibly traitorous.’

  ‘Those who hired him … all right, Harpur, if they hired him, if they did, they will not feel good about his being grilled by police.’

  ‘Grilled? He’s only a witness to a student death. He’s not accused, sir.’

  ‘Yes, that’s how it might start – a witness interview. But he’s going to be asked why these kids dismissed his warning – what they meant when a couple of them bellowed about the treachery.’

  ‘Possible treachery.’

  ‘This is the kind of interview liable to go off in any direction, Col. It can start about one, specific, apparently limited topic, but follow new revelations that arise totally unplanned. That risk of fresh disclosures would be enough to scare the big-timer he acted for – the major schemer somewhere, who ordered the ambush to get rid of Shale so as to grab his firm, but in fact got rid of Mrs Shale and Laurent, through ghastly error.’

  Harpur said, ‘You think Waverton’s in danger because of the Binnacle and media publicity? You believe someone will want to make sure he doesn’t talk about those other, wider matters when interviewed?’

  ‘Possibly, Col, if I might pinch one of your theme words, yours personally, not Shakespeare’s. Those “other wider matters” are what intrigue me, Naomi and Laurent Shale murdered in the Jag are “those other wider matters”, Harpur. I don’t want Waverton dead before he has a chance to do some divulging.’

  ‘He might not have anything to divulge about those other, wider matters, sir. His walk-on part at the Binnacle might be his total role.’

  ‘Two “mights” and I’ll add another, Col, and a “maybe”. That “might be” his total role, yes. Or maybe not.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Rose Waverton, watched the morning TV news bulletin after seeing Olive off on the school bus. Rose felt uneasy. ‘We will be talking to Mr Waverton and others.’ She didn’t like this final reply to the reporter from a top-rank cop in charge of the Binnacle aftermath. In fact, she’d disliked, also, what went before it in the channel’s account of the violence: those chatty prats playing about carelessly, vindictively with Frank’s name. ‘Waverton? Frank Waverton?’ ‘Yes, Waverton.’ Her surname, too, of course: she felt as though she’d been edged into something foul.

  The pay-off line really troubled her. She heard a threat there: ‘We will be talking to Mr Waverton.’ It came over as a sort of crowing: ‘Oh, yes, indeed, we’ll certainly be talking to Mr Waverton!’ Forget the ‘and others’. The lawman seemed to promise a spotlight especially for Frank. Rose considered this unwanted, and possibly dangerous.

  Frank had been late home and was still in bed asleep. This gave her time to think about the possible results of the Binnacle disaster, and, above all, about the possible results of media publicity, national and local; that deeply inconvenient, intrusive spotlight.

  For God’s sake, why did Frank have to get himself entangled in those grotesque hostilities? Had he switched off his brain, his instinct for self-preservation? It sounded as though he thought the quarrel might badly affect business that night at the hotel. Well, business wasn’t something holy and due continuous protection. He could have – should have – stayed out of the sick brawling. She rethought this. The kind of business he was in could definitely not be regarded as holy. But it did require protection. What he did at the Binnacle, though, wasn’t the way to give it that protection.

  The point was, wasn’t it, that if Frank had helped set up a catastrophic ambush at Sandicott Terrace, the people who’d recruited him to do it, persuaded him, purchased him, would not wish to have Frank under intensive questioning by police now. ‘We will be talking to Mr Waverton.’ What that meant, though, was: ‘We will be listening to Mr Waverton. We will be digging in deep to Mr Waverton.’

  On the face of it, those discussions would concern a fatal quarrel at the Binnacle rave, with Frank as simply a witness, a well-intentioned, peace-loving witness, who’d done a sort of policing job. Yes, on the face of it. But there could be an alarming link now between that killing and the chaotic deaths of Manse Shale’s second wife and son. This was how Frank had come to feature in the early section of the TV news item, those reported shouted comments by some of the ravers. Would Olive get rough, snide questions at school about her father, now his name had been broadcast as part of that very unpleasant tale?

  Rose had still never asked Frank head-on whether the rumours about his role in the cruel Sandicott mess-up were accurate. She didn’t want to provoke lies from him – a version of the Kay and Michael Godfather confrontation. Sometimes Rose considered life imitated films, not the other way about. A big lie, if one day exposed, would taint their marriage for as long as the marriage lasted. The suspicion that he might be lying was already threatening her feelings for him.

  And what if Frank admitted involvement in the Sandicott attack? Oh, God, that would bring an appalling truth for her to swallow: her husband had helped engineer the deaths of two innocents, a woman and a child. OK, they were executed by mistake. But if he’d helped create the conditions for that mistake she would surely find it monstrous, unforgivable, as though he’d gone into partnership with a frighteningly twisted, malignant Fate. He’d be ghastly evidence that men and women might scheme and plan but unscheduled events could make all their effort null and preposterous. It would gravely diminish him in her eyes; he wasn’t only traitorous, he was abominably jinxed, a pathetic, accidental blight.

  Did that mean she could have tolerated his treachery if it had led to the slaughter of the right person, Manse Shale, not his wife and son? This idea disturbed her badly. How could she believe betrayal was OK as long as it worked efficiently? Hell!

  And now another seemingly unrelated crisis might reach out and put a further curse on Frank – the Binnacle, and a death wholly unconnected to him except that loud-mouth druggies at the Binnacle had enforced the connection. ‘Waverton? Frank Waverton?’ ‘Yes, Waverton.’ He had actually tried to stop the feuding that produced an awful finale, yet it was this unnecessary, foolish intervention that put his name on show, perhaps turned himself into a target.

  Rose had done some reading and thought these sorts of random setbacks and unexpected perils amounted to what one set of philosophers used to call the ‘absurd’. As she judged it, for them this word had signified more than idiotic and daft. It suggested that apparently haphazard incidents were always liable to barge in and casually smash men’s arrangements, show them to be laughably doomed.

  The so-called existentialist thinkers were supposed to combat this terrible, malign chanciness by doggedly accepting responsibility for their own individual lives. Fight back! Rose had never been able to understand this last bit. You could accept responsibility for your selfhood, yes, but then get clobbered and clobbered again by the endless ‘absurdities’ of the world, so that accepting responsibility became a kind of self-cancelling nonsense, because it was obvious you couldn’t be responsible. Life’s contrariwise, vindictively mischievous elements stifled that hope. No wonder someone said the only credible ploy to counter the world’s cavalier, heartless hostilities was suicide. She thought this kind of constant, predatory, destructive absurdity had made Frank a special victim, and she wasn’t confident he could handle it well, or at all.

  But Rose wasn’t a philosopher and knew it. She could get lost in that hocus pocus fog. In any case, there would usually come a time in Rose’s reading and thinking when she’d get fed up with the waffle and flannel shipped to her mind by books, and she would long for something concrete, definite, non-intellectual, anti-intellectual, straightforward, simple, physically touchable.

  Sandicott Terrace would do. She drove there, but en route still thinking hard. She knew she read a lot, without any system or special purpose and picked up plenty of ideas, some of them possibly all right, some of them possibly not. She’d discovered recently that her kind of slapdash approach to reading could be called ‘desultory’. And, during her desultory reading she’d come across an essay by Cha
rles Lamb about the pleasures of desultory reading, and so her desultory reading had guided her somehow to a term for what she was up to in her desultory fashion without actually knowing it was desultory.

  Yes, some of what she read could be correct, some not. And what she made of it could, similarly, be correct or not. For instance, what she read could be out of date. Perhaps current philosophers would find totally absurd that notion of the absurd.

  Rose had thought of taking a photograph of Frank with her to Sandicott Terrace, but then decided against. It would seem like pre-judging him. Her aim was to talk to some householders there and ask if, shortly before the blasting of the Jaguar, they saw anyone carrying out some sort of survey of the location, particularly the junction of Sandicott Terrace and Landau Road.

  Naturally, she realized the police had probably made those sorts of inquiry immediately after the shootings. Naturally, she also knew that if someone wanted to pick a good spot for an interception there would be no need actually to go there. This could probably be better done from a street map. But she needed contact with the bricks and mortar facts, and with the ordinary, alert, observant people of the neighbourhood.

  As far as she could remember from gossip and media coverage, the Jaguar, with Naomi Shale at the wheel, had lurched up on to the pavement in Sandicott Terrace when she was shot and lost control. The car knocked down a stretch of low wall around the front garden of one of the houses and then stopped. The damage had been repaired now but she could identify the house from a slight difference in the colour of the brickwork halfway along. This was what a mind ought to do – distinguish between different stretches of brick, very touchable brick, not flap about with existentialism.

  She’d left her car about a hundred metres back and walked past the house and up to the junction with the wider Landau Road, a main drag. She had to wonder if she was traipsing over ground that Frank might have traipsed over, but with sharper purpose: a reconnaissance ahead of murder.

  Rose thought she could see why someone might fancy this spot as ideal for an ambush. The Jaguar coming along Sandicott Terrace must have been slowing as it approached the junction. For several seconds, while Naomi and the children passed, the Jag would have been very close to any vehicle parked on the left side of the terrace, just before the stop sign at the join with Landau. It had been close enough for the gunman to riddle the Jaguar, but apparently not close enough for him to see he had the wrong target or targets.

  The jumpiness, the tension, must have shoved him into deciding he’d been clearly and specifically ordered to hit a Jaguar at about this spot and this time, so he’d hit a Jaguar, never mind who was in it. Maybe he was a novice at car murder, lacking cool, too hasty for precision. She remembered, didn’t she, that he’d been operating from a silver Mondeo? He was killed not very long afterwards and before he could tell who sent him.1

  An elderly woman came out from the house with the reconstituted wall and stood on the small slice of lawn behind.

  ‘Hello there, m’dear, you seem uncertain – pacing about. But, yes, this is, indeed, the location,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve heard about it. I came out of interest,’ Rose replied.

  ‘Are you more police? I don’t think so. It’s too long after now, isn’t it? What’s left to discover?’

  ‘Just out of interest,’ Rose said.

  ‘Many an officer we had here and hereabouts then, some in uniform, some plain clothes. This was a considerable incident. Sandicott debouching into Landau became what might be called a nexus.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Not minor police. As I said, considerable. Very fine smooth uniform, one of them. Iles. He was here several times. That kind of high-quality cloth speaks of leadership, of command, Underlings recognize this, respond to it, in automatic obeisance. That kind of cloth is of a similarity with Napoleon’s famous three-cornered hat denoting supremo status.’

  ‘I think I’ve heard of Iles.’

  ‘Any roosts to be ruled he rules them. That’s what my hubby says about him. But Iles could be civil with it now and then. He saw to the wall. Quite spontaneous.’

  ‘The replacement?’

  ‘This wall has a message for us, being struck by the Jaguar when bullets had finished off proper steering, no blame to the lady driver whatsoever. This wall halted the Jaguar, but also some of it collapsed. Civilization is similarly fragile. On the other hand some walls definitely should come down, such as the one between West and East Germany. This was a wall whose removal enhanced civilization.

  ‘But most probably you’ll be thinking of the Psalmist, “By my God have I leaped over a wall.”’ She had a small chuckle and gave a couple of nods, as if to agree with Rose’s unspoken Bible reference. ‘Well, the Jaguar couldn’t do that, of course, but the harm wasn’t serious. Iles gave immediate instructions as to rebuilding. I’ll ask you to inspect it.’

  Perhaps she recognized Rose’s need. ‘It’s an exemplary wall,’ she said. She bent and passed her hand over part of it. Touchable bricks, no question, she thought.

  ‘The wall is as good as new,’ the woman said. ‘Well, better than, since some of it has suffered no wear and tear. That’s not to say we didn’t worry about the deaths. No muttering to ourselves “it’s an ill wind”, a maxim. A bit of wall is nothing compared to all the blood and pain. That Iles panjandrum, already mentioned, could not have been more upset. Usually, looking at him, his face and so on, you might get the notion he didn’t give a monkey’s about anyone, dead or alive. This is the kind of face they’re taught in the top police colleges to have, known as judicial. Most probably they’d have lectures with mirrors in front of them learning how to look like eternal frost.

  ‘But Iles could also manage something different. He had his head in through the broken window of that Jag, obviously stricken by the awful awfulness of it, and the little girl cowering yet brave. If you come across him when he’s not in the gorgeous blue uniform but civvy garb, you’ll be able tell him from his Adam’s apple. Prominent. Mountainous.’

  ‘I thought to myself as I stepped towards the stop sign that this must have been a carefully chosen piece of ground for the attack,’ Rose said. ‘There are geographical and architectural pluses.’

  ‘You said you were not police, did you?’

  ‘Yes. I’m not police.’

  ‘That was a police sort of question – about the chosen ground, regarding tactical features.’

  ‘It was simply a thought that came at me out of nowhere, as it were, when I stood at the junction.’

  ‘The junction was important, no doubt of it. A traffic confluence as is generally the case with junctions. “This junction has capabilities”, as that famous garden expert in the eighteenth century might have said.’

  ‘It’s the choice of it that fascinates me,’ Rose replied. ‘The opting.’

  ‘But why, if you’re not police?’

  ‘Curiosity, I suppose.’

  ‘People do get like that about crimes – curiosity. It’s a sign of interest in how the crooked mind works, because, inherently, of course, we’re all human and might be capable of the same kind of lawlessness if we didn’t keep the, so to speak, lid on it. No harm in wondering about this. You and I, we might look at a junction and see a mere junction, whereas the villain would possibly regard it as a kind of no-man’s land, to be utilized for an advantage.’ She was short, sturdy, cheerful looking and Rose would guess in her seventies. She wore a turquoise cardigan over a floral-print dress.

  A man of about her age and height came out and stood with her on the grass, like a couple advertising joyfully comfortable retirement homes. He was long-faced, thin-to-spare, tame-voiced. He had on what seemed to be trousers from a navy, pinstripe suit and a black crew-neck sweater.

  ‘I guessed you were having one of your al fresco conversations, love,’ he said, ‘apropos the incident of less than blessed memory.’

  ‘This lady has been re-living the moments out of plain, general curiosity, not fo
rensically,’ the woman said. ‘I’ve mentioned the nexus, debouching and the confluence.’

  ‘We’re used to such visitors, aren’t we, Doreen?’ he said. ‘This property has come to resemble a depot or a hide for discreetly observing wild life. Perhaps she’d like to come in for a cup of tea, iced or conventional. We are very aware of preferences, respect them. A choice between iced tea and conventional might seem a trivial distinction and in some senses it certainly is, but we’d rather regard it as typifying Choice with a capital C signalling a general climate of free will.’

  ‘Thank you, but I must be getting along,’ Rose said. ‘However, what I wondered, as a way of understanding this violence, was whether you had noted anyone pre the attack sort of mentally mapping the set-up here, the potential of the locale to become an execution scene.’

  ‘Many have asked us that I think it’s fair to report, isn’t it, Doreen, amateur and professional?’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ Doreen said. ‘The nexus aspect.’

  ‘This is a kind of hindsight question, if I might use that term,’ he told Rose. ‘It’s the answer we’ve always given when similarly asked, so don’t feel offended or brushed off, please. Glancing from the window into Sandicott and up to Landau one might have seen folk going this way or that on foot, but they wouldn’t really be of note at that time – not until the shooting had taken place and caused the area and those moving about in it to become of possible importance, a post hoc judgement rather than pre. This is why I name your line of thought “hindsight”. It would be very strange and presumptuous to glance at one of these people as he, or indeed she, walked through Sandicott to Landau or vice versa and decide this was clearly a person preparing things for a fusillade against a top-of-the-range Jag. Nobody was going to produce a gun and practise some pop-shotting. The time in question is so far back now that the pre-assault scene or scenes, is or are an unrecoverable entity or entities. To my way of thinking, that is.’