by M. J. Trow
‘Yes, of course, Mr Diamond,’ she said and made her exit.
Diamond flicked an intercom switch. ‘Bernard, get in here, will you? We’ve got to find John Fry before the Press get hold of things. No. No. I’m not talking about the Choker girl, dammit. I’m talking about Fry’s wife. She’s killed herself.’
Chapter Seven
Tam Fraser’s nose was buried in a sheaf of geophys reports. Around him stood his team, Douglas Russell to the fore. He looked up in the weird, distorted sunlight of the main tent.
‘People.’ The man with the lion’s mane of snow white hair cleared his throat and expected the world to grind to a halt. ‘I’m Professor Fraser of the University of Wessex. I’d like you to have my condolences over poor David. He may have been your boss, but he was my friend. The university thought the simplest solution to this situation was for me to fill the breach, however temporarily. What’s this?’ He pointed to a page.
‘Er…findings of the resistivity gauge, professor,’ the lanky geophysicist behind him thought it rather an odd question.
‘Mr…Russell, is it?’
The man nodded.
‘You’re in charge of geophys?’
‘That’s right,’ Russell wasn’t on. ‘As you see, we’ve got clear activity down here, near the old riverbed. I was wondering whether now wouldn’t be the time to start…’
‘The thing about geophysics,’ Fraser smiled at them all, cutting his man dead, ‘is that it highlights anomalies, but doesn’t actually tell you a damn thing. Have you tried bosing?’
‘Bosing?’ Russell didn’t believe what he was hearing. Some sort of echo-sounding from the Dark Ages?
Fraser looked at him. ‘The old ways are best, Mr Russell,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose. ‘Believe me, I know. Who are you?’
‘Helen Reader.’ Charlie Buttock was owning up to her real name at last.
‘Are you a professional or are you just along for the ride?’ Fraser could smell an amateur a mile away.
‘Well, I…I worked on the Seahenge project. Last year I was at Silbury…’
‘Yes,’ Fraser nodded. ‘Rather like the young people being at Glastonbury, isn’t it? Do we have any other trained archaeologists here?’
Two hands went up.
‘You are…?’ the great man moved to face the first.
‘Derek Latymer. Southampton. Class of ’98.’
The man was young, certainly, scrawny, but with the muscle that comes from eight years at the trench-face. He hauled the broad-brimmed hat from his head.
‘More importantly,’ Fraser said, ‘class of degree?’
‘First.’
The professor nodded. ‘Masters?’
‘Ethnoarchaeology. The Pacific Rim.’
‘Hmm,’ Fraser commented. ‘Useful here, then. You?’
‘Robin Edwards,’ the second hand stepped forward. The man was the heavier of the two, stolid even, with a thatch of blonde hair and a complexion made all the ruddier by his days under the sun on the slope of Staple Hill. ‘University of Lancaster. I have a Two One in…’
Fraser’s hand was in the air, stopping him right there. ‘Right, laddie,’ he winked at him, ‘You make the tea, will you? Mr Russell and I have a little re-grouping to do.’
‘Jesus,’ whistled Helen Reader as she trooped out into the sun for another gruelling day at the clay face, clapping the wide hat over her headscarf. A great believer in protection, was Helen Reader. ‘What a bastard!’
Latymer chuckled. ‘That he may be,’ he said, ‘but in his day, there was no one to touch him.’
‘In his day?’ she hauled on her gloves and collected her bucket. She pointed to the yawning graves. ‘He must have known some of these people personally. And what is bosing exactly?’
‘Bosing,’ Latymer told her, ‘is a technique Heinrich Schliemann probably used at Troy. You bash the ground with a wooden mallet or a lead-filled canister and listen for the pitch of the echo.’
The woman rocked on her heels in the little pit she’d made her own over the last fortnight. ‘You’ll forgive me for saying this, Derek,’ she said, ‘but you might as well piss into the wind.’
He leaned over her. ‘Don’t knock it, Helen, until you’ve tried it. At least he didn’t ask you to make the tea! Now, that’s progress!’
Reports came in sporadically throughout Wednesday. A man matching the description of John Fry had been seen getting on a plane at Heathrow. Almost simultaneously, he was serving himself petrol at services on the M6. An hour later, he was getting off a bus at Heanton Punchardon in Devon. There was no doubt about it, the mobile phone was a godsend to the serial nosy person and the weirdo who wanted their fifteen minutes of fame. Manning it all, with arms flailing like a demented windmill, Alison McCormick was at breaking point by lunchtime.
There is no time in a busy nick for pity, for dwelling on what might have been, for analysing the what ifs. Henry Hall’s team had a murder enquiry in their laps, trying to piece together the shattered life of David Radley. They had a schoolgirl somewhere out there in a naughty world, with or without the sicko who may have abducted her. Now, in the cold, dead form of Eleanor Fry, they had a suicide too. But looming over it all, the smiling face of Martin Toogood – a colleague, a mate. That got under all their skins, the members of Hall’s team, as they made endless phone calls, cross-referenced hundreds of facts, fought off the press.
At lunchtime, the DCI held his first conference with the ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate. It was the usual circus. Thirty or so of the guardians of the peoples’ morals, defenders of the right to know, champions of the morbidly curious, were crowded into Hall’s police station, trying to read reports upside down, craning their necks to catch computer screens. All babbling together in a cacophony of noisiness. Hall was calm, unflappable, an enigma behind his blank glasses, sitting square and ready behind his blank desk. Jacquie Carpenter was the acceptable face of policing, sitting, appropriately, on the man’s right hand, her lower half tucked well out of sight of the Daily Sport man who might be able to snap her getting out of her chair and superimpose somebody else’s bum on the photo. ‘Copper in naked love-romp.’ Brilliant.
‘Now it’s one of your own, Chief Inspector,’ the Guardian called, ‘I expect everything else is on hold, is it?’ The political envy of the left was apparent in every syllable.
‘Not at all,’ Hall told him, knowing perfectly well that every other copper in the room wanted to punch the man on the nose. ‘Can I remind you, ladies and gentlemen, that this meeting has been called in connection with the death of Dr David Radley.’ It wasn’t a question; it was a statement.
‘Are you saying there’s no connection with DS Toogood?’ the Telegraph wanted to know, believing in its heart of hearts that there was some ghastly underground conspiracy to decimate the country’s police force.
‘We have no reason to make such a connection at this stage,’ Hall said. He’d done conferences like this without number. The ladies and gentlemen of the Press were today’s sounding board, the nation’s social conscience, the judge, the jury, and even, half of them wished, the executioner.
There were moans and whistles all round. ‘We already know somebody tampered with your boy’s brakes,’ the Leighford Advertiser cut to the chase. This man was either a kid on the make, anxious to prove to the big boys of Fleet Street that he was a rising star, or else he was an old hack on his way down, out to prove he still had what it took to be a thoroughly obnoxious bastard. He could have been any age, really. ‘Do you believe in the laws of coincidence, Chief Inspector?’
‘I believe in being given time to get on with my job,’ Hall silenced the hubbub with a harsher line than usual. Jacquie was impressed with that. But then Jacquie was usually impressed by Henry Hall; he knew his job. Martin Toogood had been his colleague, his mate too. ‘That’s all for now.’
Slowly, as the minutes of the afternoon ticked away, they pieced together the last days of the life of Detective
Sergeant Martin Jonathan Toogood. Henry Hall sat slumped in his shirt-sleeves, sticky in the suddenly fierce heat of late May. Jacquie Carpenter had the floor, pointing to the whiteboard behind her, directing operations. In front of her, burly coppers sat quietly, smoke curling up from half-smoked ciggies. Unusually, in a murder enquiry, there was no photo of the deceased on the wall. Everybody knew what Martin Toogood looked like – his face was etched in all their minds. And nobody in that tense, tired room wanted to see a photo of him dead.
‘According to Martin’s log, he went to Petworth on Saturday morning. Talked to a Professor Fraser at the university. That interview finished at…’ she checked her notes, ‘eleven forty. Then he went to Brighton, to the Camdens Leisure Centre, to talk to another of David Radley’s colleagues, a Dr Samantha Welland. He grabbed lunch in the town and made some phone calls. We’ve traced these. One to his mum and dad – apparently he rang them every Saturday. One here to the nick. One – and this is interesting – to his garage.’
‘Who’s been on to them?’ Hall asked.
‘I have, guv.’ A thick-set West Indian’s hand was in the air. ‘If he thought there was something wrong with the car, he didn’t tell the garage.’
‘Where is this, Jimmy?’
‘Braddocks in Westbridge Road.’
Hall nodded. He’d used them himself. Careful people. Good track record.
‘No,’ Jimmy went on. ‘He was just booking in an MOT for the end of the month. Routine stuff.’
‘All right. Jacquie?’
‘We don’t know exactly where he was in the afternoon of Saturday, but he’d already arranged to meet with Radley’s widow, Susan, in the evening. That interview lasted a little under an hour. He left her at…eight twenty-three.’
‘What about Sunday?’ Hall moved them all on, anxious to avoid silences. Keep them busy, keep them working. Everybody would feel better for that.
‘Day off,’ Jacquie said. There were some people in the room who vaguely remembered those. ‘As far as we know, Martin collected his papers from the shop at sometime during the middle of the morning. They had weekend staff on and the kid was a bit daffy, so he wasn’t quite sure Remembered a man vaguely answering his description, but if it was Martin, he didn’t pay his outstanding paper bill – that’s still on their books. He had lunch at the Pilgrims, with Tony.’
Tony Campbell shifted in his seat. He was Toogood’s age, but without Toogood’s ambition. There was nothing remotely fast-track about Tony Campbell. He knew it and that was fine. Police forces needed Indians too. It was just an ordinary Sunday, the day before Toogood died, but one Tony Campbell would remember for the rest of his life.
‘Martin rang me about ten,’ he said. ‘Asked if I could come out to play.’
There were a few smiles in the semi-darkness of the room. No one could quite manage a laugh.
‘Anything relevant?’ Hall asked. ‘Over lunch, I mean?’
‘You know what it’s like, guv,’ Campbell said. ‘Trying to remember inconsequentials. Sure, we talked about the Radley case. Shop, you know.’
Everyone knew. It went with the job. They weren’t supposed to do it, of course, off duty and in public like that, but what the hey…
‘But we talked about other things too – you know, putting the world to rights. Martin had got this holiday planned…’
Everybody shifted uneasily. Unfinished business, plans that would never happen. A career ended. A life cut short. It was all so bloody painful; so bloody pointless.
‘Monday,’ Hall moved them on again.
‘Martin came on duty at nine sharp,’ Jacquie took up the narrative. ‘He worked on various leads all morning here at his desk, went over to the lab early afternoon.’
‘Anybody see him in the canteen?’
‘Said he’d grab something on the hoof, guv.’ Tony Campbell had waved to the man the last time he’d seen him, on the last day of his life.
‘He was a Cornish pastie man,’ somebody said.
‘Ginsters. Loved them,’ somebody else echoed.
‘All right, people,’ Hall said softly, keeping them on track, away from the memories, the folk tales. He’d be St Martin by nightfall and they all had a job to do. ‘We know he left at eleven forty-eight. That’s too long.’ He was tapping a pencil on a notepad. ‘Too long a day.’
‘He was the best bloody driver I knew,’ Tony Campbell said, defending his friend to the last, looking wildly around with tears in his eyes, challenging anybody to say otherwise.
‘We know, Tony,’ Hall looked at the man. ‘We know.’
The silence they’d all been dreading fell at last. It felt like a dead weight, suffocating, choking. It made your skin crawl and your throat tighten.
‘Right,’ Hall broke it, bringing the coup de grâce; just one of the jobs you do when you’re in charge and everybody’s looking at you for results. Somehow, somehow, to make everything all right. ‘To cases. Tony, you knew Martin better than any of us.’
‘Best man at my wedding,’ Campbell confirmed, clearing his throat, welling down.
‘That’s what his wife’s always said,’ somebody shouted. Great. It broke the ice and people laughed for the first time that day, Tony Campbell among them. Hall reminded himself to find the joker and give the man a medal.
‘Anybody bear him a grudge?’ Hall let the ripples die away before he posed the question.
‘He put away his fair share of villains, guv,’ Campbell said. ‘But we’re not aware of anybody in particular. No overt threats. Nothing out of the ordinary.’
That wasn’t helpful. But it didn’t surprise the DCI. In his experience, most ‘honest’ crooks didn’t bear grudges. Everybody inside was innocent, of course, framed not so much by bent coppers, but by the bent system; the laws that were framed by the rich for the rich, the them-and-us mentality of Tony Blair’s Britain. And anyway, the opprobrium of villains was usually levelled at DIs and above, the heads of investigations whose profiles were high, not the underlings who were clearly, like the Nazis of yesteryear, merely obeying orders.
‘This case, then,’ he said. ‘Who has Martin seen, except for this Professor Fraser, Dr Welland and Radley’s wife?’
‘He interviewed a number of people at the site, guv,’ Jacquie told him, ‘when the body was found.’
‘Who’s got the list?’
‘Guv,’ Tony Campbell passed the sheet of names forward.
‘Four. We’ll need to see all those again. This Douglas Russell; is he running the dig now?’
‘Er…we don’t know, guv,’ somebody said.
‘Right. Back to basics. Jacquie, you and Tony get out there later today. I want each of those four quizzed. And I mean quizzed. I want to know what they’ve all had for breakfast for the past week. Jimmy,’ he glanced at the West Indian, ‘get yourself over to the Quinton, calling at the magistrates’ offices on the way. I want a warrant to search the rooms of any of these diggers staying there. Start with Russell.’
‘Yes, guv.’
‘Now – anything of note on Martin’s computer?’
‘The affairs of men,’ Jacquie’s voice was a little broken up on her end of the phone.
‘Who’s been talking?’ Peter Maxwell wanted to know, perched on his office desk at Leighford High, that great centre of academe for the sons and daughters of gentlefolk. ‘Dierdre Lessing and I are merely colleagues. And as for Sally Greenhow, I was just whispering in her mouth,’ his Harpo Marx was a little lost without the actions to go with it but if you were a certain age, it was unmistakeable for all that. Had Harpo ever spoken on celluloid, he would, of course, have sounded just like the Groucho Maxwell was doing now.
‘Seriously though, Max,’ she said.
‘Sorry, darling heart. Say on.’
‘It was the last thing Martin Toogood wrote on his computer on Monday night. Mean anything to you.’
‘Julius Caesar,’ Maxwell said, dredging it up from the deepest fathoms of his brain, ‘by a little-known playwri
ght called William Shakespeare.’
‘That would make sense,’ Jacquie was scrabbling around her end in the nick for a bit of paper. ‘Say on.’
‘Ooh, it’s been a long time since I wrestled with the Bard of Avon.’ Maxwell screwed up his face in an attempt to remember. ‘Um… “The enemy increaseth every day;
We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound by shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures…”
Or something like that!’
‘You shit!’ she smiled. ‘How did I know you’d know that word for bloody word?’
‘I phoned a friend,’ he explained, giving her his best Chris Tarrant. He tapped on the window of his office and the snotty urchins up to no good on the ground below him vanished like ice in sunshine. ‘If memory serves – and I think you know it does – it’s dear old Brutus talking to Cassius. They’ve just killed a pretty decent bloke – Caesar – for all the wrong reasons, and they’ve realized their number’s probably up. What’s the link?’
‘I wish I knew,’ she sighed. ‘Martin certainly lost his ventures, didn’t he?’
‘He did that,’ Maxwell agreed, dropping back into his chair. ‘You didn’t tell me Martin was the poetic sort.’
‘Well, he did read English at university.’
‘Yes, I know. History would have been better, of course… Are you all right, Jacquie?’ She’d gone very quiet.
‘Yes,’ she nuzzled her head into the phone, as well as she could in a frantic Incident Room. ‘Yes, I’m fine. See you later.’
The bell was ringing at Leighford High, summoning the faithful and the not-so-faithful to Lesson Five. Perhaps in Faith Schools, they had a peal of the things chiming out Old Tom Oojah; it would certainly make the day go with a swing. Why was it, Peter Maxwell wondered, that three quarters of the way through the academic year, he still had no clear indication of who the hell he was teaching next? He checked the timetable on the wall, that great Behemoth that ruled everyone’s life. God, yes, Thirteen Ay Two – the last lesson before they vanished into that glad goodnight that was Study Leave. How could he have forgotten? Maxwell’s Own. Time for the pep talk, the last words of wisdom. The if-you-can-keep-your-head speech.