Game Over

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘It is about that,’ Slider said, ‘and I was hoping you could help me with one of the minor players. He fixed the security doors of the flat to unlock themselves at a certain time. Used a transistorised timer, maybe Chinese in origin. Know any electronics experts who might do that sort of thing?’

  ‘Not my street, Mr S,’ Tidy said regretfully. ‘I could put you on to someone who might ’elp. Ever ’eard of Jack Bushman?’

  ‘Solder Jack? He’s not still around, is he? I thought he went to Australia.’

  ‘’E did, but ’e’s back. Didn’t like it out there. Been back years. He’s straight now, which is maybe why you ain’t ’eard of him. He’s got a shop, Ladbroke Grove way, on the KPR. He was into all that miniature stuff. You could try him. Otherwise – well, deceased was a nobby bloke, and it sounds like a nobby murder. You need special snouts. Me and mine is no use to you on this one, guv.’

  ‘Thanks, Tidy,’ Slider said, and rang off. He sat thinking for a while, and then, on an impulse, rang his old friend Pauline Smithers. She was Detective Chief Superintendent Smithers now, and back at the Yard after what had seemed to her like an interminable – though successful – stint on child pornography. The trouble with crime like that was that you could never wrap it up and be done with it. As soon as you cleared out one stinking gutter, you’d get word of another. He was glad for Pauly’s sanity that they’d moved her on.

  They had been in uniform together way back when the world was young, and had always had a soft spot for each other. Then she’d got promoted and married the Job and a while later he’d got married to Irene, his first wife, and that had been that. He had often wondered, idly, how things would have turned out if they had hooked up, as had once seemed quite possible, even likely. She had never married, though he was not vain enough to attribute that to a broken heart. For women, the upper echelons of the police force were harder to tackle than Annapurna, and those who made it were rarely able to have emotional lives.

  Which he thought was a shame, because Pauline had been a good egg and a perfectly normal woman.

  He called her number. It rang for a long time before she answered, and when she did, she spoke before he had a chance to. ‘I’m in a meeting,’ she said in a normal, if slightly severe, tone; and then added, very low and urgently, ‘I’ll ring you back. Don’t ring me.’ Then she was gone.

  He had rung her on his mobile. As soon as he rang off, his land line rang.

  ‘Hello, Mr Plod.’

  A weary sort of anger surged through him. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’m just calling to see if you enjoyed my little joke last night,’ said Bates.

  ‘Why do you insist on talking like a villain in a B movie?’

  ‘Oh, dear. You sound a bit tetchy. Head aching?’

  ‘I always hated practical jokes, even when I was a child. For an adult to practise them is contemptible.’

  ‘Contemptible, is it? And there was I trying to be kind to you. I could have killed you, you know. I could have filled the bucket with sand. By the way, are you trying to trace this call?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Slider.

  ‘Well, you might as well amuse yourself, but you’ll never be able to. My skills, small as they are, are sufficient to run rings round your mediaeval tracing capabilities.’

  ‘They didn’t have telephones in mediaeval times. A man of your education ought to know that.’

  He chuckled. ‘Keeping me talking, eh? I don’t mind. Time is not of the essence to me.’

  Slider tired of it. ‘Well, it is to me. What do you want?’

  ‘Just to let you know that if you enjoyed that little joke, you’ll love the next one. Do you like Guy Fawkes Night?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Well, you’ll find my little surprise divine. Divine as in see you in heaven.’

  ‘Or in your case, not,’ said Slider.

  But Bates had gone. McLaren came to the door a few moments later and shook his head. ‘Same story, guv. Bounced round the satellites. Mick Hutton reckons you’d need to keep him talking for fifteen minutes to have a chance of tracing it – and even then, he wouldn’t be there with his stickies on the receiver.’ He eyed Slider sympathetically. ‘What did he want this time?’

  ‘Dear Mr Slider: threat, threat, threat, threat. Yours sincerely.’

  ‘Bloody hypocrite. I’m going to get a sarnie. Can I get you one?’

  ‘God, is it lunch time already?’

  ‘Going down the stall outside the market,’ McLaren said temptingly.

  ‘Go on then. I’ll have a sausage sandwich. With tomato sauce.’

  ‘Got it,’ said McLaren, and wheeled away.

  He passed Atherton coming the other way. ‘Word, guv?’ Atherton asked. Slider nodded him in. ‘Emily’s gone off on her travels. We got her a hired car this morning and she’s gone to see the Ring 4 people. Not,’ he added, ‘that you know that, because she isn’t doing it officially and we’ve no idea where she is.’

  ‘What do we know, officially?’ Slider asked. He heard himself sounding tetchy and reached for the aspirin bottle, before realising he had taken them too recently to take more. His shoulder was aching, too. He rubbed it carefully.

  ‘I’ve been looking up the Sid Andrew business,’ Atherton said. He observed his boss’s actions but guessed sympathy would get his nose bitten off. ‘The girl in the case was called Angela Barlow. She was a junior press officer in the DTI – that’s a civil service appointment, not a political one. Quite a looker, twenty-eight when it all happened, secretarial background, interest in journalism – what bright girl these days doesn’t want to be a journalist? – been in the job just under two years. She seemed to disappear without trace after she got sacked, and with the media interest in her, I thought she probably would have gone to earth. I mean, those pictures were pretty explicit, and the popular press’s appetite for all things salacious being what it is—’

  ‘So where did she go?’ Slider cut in.

  ‘She went home to her parents,’ Atherton said.

  Slider read the bad news in his eyes. ‘And?’

  ‘She’s dead. Committed suicide last January.’

  Slider slammed to his feet. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘We’re going to find out what this whole Sid Andrew thing was about. We’re going to go and see her parents, and then we’re going to and roust him.’

  ‘Maybe it was just shame,’ Atherton said, playing devil’s advocate. ‘We’ve only got the Stonax supporters’ word for it that the thing was a set up.’

  Slider didn’t glance at him as he walked past. ‘We’ll find out,’ he said. ‘And then we’ll know.’

  Twelve

  Thickening

  It didn’t take Emily long to discover the local journalist from the Woburn Courier who had been responsible for the story of Tyler’s escape. She found Chris Fletcher at the magistrates’ court in Milton Keynes, and persuaded him outside for a chat.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt your work,’ she said when they reached the open air.

  ‘Dunt matter,’ he said equably. ‘I was busting for a smoke, anyway. Do you?’ He proffered the pack and she shook her head. ‘Mind if I do?’ He didn’t wait for her reply, but knocked one out, shoved it in his mouth and lit it like a starving man falling on bread. He was young, mid-twenties, she thought, and staggeringly badly dressed, with a tweed jacket that was far too big, a tie that looked as if it might have been used to tie up a dog, a grubby shirt with a crumpled collar, and cheap, scuffed shoes at the end of what looked like his old school trousers. The dress code for the magistrates’ court had evidently fallen hard on him. He had a snubby, rather pallid but not unattractive face, and spiky fair hair ending in an unfashionable mullet. His fingernails were badly bitten and his fingers badly stained with nicotine. Being a journalist at this level must be really stressful, she thought.

  ‘I won’t keep you long,’ she said. ‘I’m just interested in a story you filed back in July about an escaped prison
er—’

  ‘Oh, God, yes, that!’ he jumped in. ‘I thought I’d got it made! Big city here I come! But it all turned out to be rubbish and I got a rocket from my editor. He kicked my bum so hard I couldn’t sit down for a week.’

  ‘Would you tell me what happened?’

  He was so eager to talk she didn’t have to give him a reason for asking. The fact that she was Press seemed to be enough for him.

  ‘Well, it was just luck I came across it, really, because I was going home one evening and there’s this cut through round the back of Apsley Guise – I live in Husborne Crawley?’ She nodded as if she knew what he was talking about so as not to slow him down. ‘Anyway, it’s just a lane and there’s never much traffic on it, so I wasn’t surprised to find myself on my own. Then I come round a bend, and there’s a barrier across the road. I was on my bike – I’ve got this mini Moto. It’s useful for getting about to stories, easier to park than a car – not that I could afford a car anyway on what they pay me.’

  ‘Right. You came across a barrier?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, I didn’t want to go back, so I pushed the bike round it. And round the next corner there’s a local cop I know, Colin Gunter, and he stops me. I look past him and I see a big Ring 4 van and some more police and a couple of patrol cars. So I says, “S’up Col?” and he says, “You can’t come down this way. There’s a prison van been held up.” So then he tells me this prisoner was on the way to Woodhill, the van got held up and he’s on the loose. So I go back and phone the story straight in, and I ring the Telegraph news desk as well. I’ve been doing that for a while, any time I hear anything good, because I’m hoping to make a name with them, and then they’ll give me a job.’

  ‘Why the Telegraph?’ she asked out of idle curiosity.

  ‘It’s what me dad reads. Anyway, the Courier puts my story in, but it’s hardly gone to bed when I get a call from Colin to say it was all a mistake, there was no-one in the van, it just broke down, and someone was having a laugh with him, telling him there was an escaped prisoner. I was well gutted, and the next thing the editor calls me in and chews my arse off. It was too late to stop the story, but nobody else had run it and in the end he just left it, cause he said it would look worse to print a retraction. And that was that. I never heard anything more about it.’

  ‘How did your editor know the story was wrong?’

  ‘Someone rang him from Ring 4 – the controller down in Luton – Trish Holland, I think her name is. Apparently this bloke was going to be moved, and then it was all cancelled at the last minute. That’s why they thought he was in the van, I s’pose. Anyway, it’s a shame, because it would have been a lot of fun if he really was on the run. We had one over the wall last year and we got three days’ front pages out of him before they caught him.’

  ‘The Telegraph didn’t print his name, I notice,’ she said.

  ‘Well, it was only a stop press, and I s’pose they wanted to check it before they ran it properly. Lucky for them they did. Unlucky for me, though – I’ll never get a job there now.’

  She felt rather sorry for him, with his forlorn hopes and his lost scoop. She said, ‘The real news is always local. That’s the news that affects peoples’ lives.’

  ‘Are you local press?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and it was true, though New York was a rather more seething metropolis than Woburn.

  The control centre at Luton was sited in a modern block on a small industrial estate, and Trish Holland was a middle-aged woman with a cosy figure and hard make-up. She allowed Emily into her presence with the ease most people seemed to accord to the press, but she grew defensive when she learned the subject for discussion.

  ‘There never was an escape,’ she said angrily. ‘It was all in the mind of that stupid reporter from Woburn. I suppose he thought he was having a joke. Everyone seems to like poking fun at Ring 4. I’d like to see them do a job like ours.’

  ‘Yes, and I want to do an article exactly on that point,’ Emily said warmly. ‘I want to put Ring 4’s side of things. It’s all too easy to make cheap jokes without knowing the facts.’

  She ceased to bridle. ‘You’re completely right there. Facts were pretty thin on the ground in that story. It wasn’t even one of our vans.’

  ‘The reporter says he saw the Ring 4 logo on it.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. All of our vans were accounted for. And it’s easy enough to hire a suitable van and fake a logo. Film companies do it all the time.’

  ‘That’s true. But you did, in fact, have a movement order for Trevor Bates?’

  ‘Yes, he was going to be moved, to Woodhill, and we had the usual paperwork to collect him from Wormwood Scrubs—’

  ‘The paperwork was all correct?’

  ‘Of course it was. A copy was sent to me and it was completely in order, otherwise I wouldn’t have put it through. Then at the last minute I was notified that he wasn’t being moved after all, so I cancelled the movement, and that was that. Far from having escaped, he was never in transit at all. He’s still in Wormwood Scrubs, as far as I know.’

  ‘Who was it who notified you of the cancellation?’

  ‘One of the directors of Ring 4, Mr Mark. He’d said he’d been notified by the Home Office of the change of plan. He faxed through the paperwork, I stood down the team, and no movement of any sort was made that evening.’

  ‘Well, thank you, that’s all very clear,’ Emily said. ‘I’m certainly glad to have heard your side of the story. Fortunately it never made it to the national press.’

  ‘No, and that boy will be more careful in future, after the wigging I gave his editor. But it’s all of a piece with the general attitude that Ring 4 is fair game.’ She went on to complain at length and in detail about various other bad stories Ring 4 had had told against it, and Emily listened for as long as she could bear it before apologising and extracting herself. She needed to get back to her computer to do some more checking.

  Hart had discovered long ago in the Job that the recently bereaved rarely resent people coming and asking them questions. It accounted for how often people could be seen on television screens talking about their loss at a time when the uninitiated would have expected them to be prostrate, with the curtains closed. The big, savage grief generally held off for some time, and arrived when everyone else had got tired of the subject and gone away, leaving the bereaved unsupported.

  Mrs Masseter lived in a tiny house in a dismal, raw new estate outside Reading. The estate was as featureless as the fields it had replaced, but not nearly so green or pleasant. Each little yellow-brick house had a paved-over front area to make up for the lack of a garage, and the tiny back gardens were mostly still nothing but bumpy developer’s grass between the cheap orange fencing, except where young inmates had already trampled them bare. The approach roads were laid in a series of unnecessary twists and cul-de-sacs, presumably to make the place look friendlier, and here and there along the pavements puny saplings were struggling to survive, shackled like starving prisoners to thick posts. Elsewhere empty holes showed where two out of three had already been uprooted by vandals. You can’t be nice to some people, Hart thought.

  The Masseter house was tiny, the front door leading straight into a single sitting/dining-room with a kitchen alcove off it and French windows leading into the garden. Halfway along one wall an open-plan staircase led up to what could only be, Hart judged from the dimensions and some experience, two tiny bedrooms with a bathroom in between. Mrs Masseter was shapeless, grey-haired and hopeless, though probably only in her late fifties. She was pathetically eager to talk to Hart, and had her sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea listening to her life story before you could say knife.

  Not that there was much to tell. The most important thing that ever seemed to have happened to her was her husband running off with the teller from the Halifax in Castle Street, a dyed blonde divorcée who was fifty-five if she was a day (the age seemed an additional affront to Mrs Masseter, as if she could have bor
ne a twenty-year-old rival much more gracefully). The running off accounted for why she was living in this place, which was all she could afford once the value of the family home was split between her and her husband.

  ‘The law’s a terrible thing,’ she said, ‘when it can turn a person out of her own home just so her husband can buy a place for his fancy woman. The solicitor told me it was because Danny was grown up, so I was only due half the house. I said Danny’s still going to live with me – because there was no way he’d live with his dad and that woman – but they said he was nearly thirty and that’s all that mattered. He counted as a grown-up so he was reckoned to fend for himself. But my Danny’s never been able to look after himself. If it wasn’t for me, he’d never have a clean shirt to his back.’

  The other important thing that had happened in her life was Daniel’s death, but she didn’t seem to be coming to grips with that. She spoke about her son in the present tense, as though death was some kind of trip he had gone off on, and from which he would be returning eventually with a haversack full of dirty clothes for her to wash.

  ‘He’s always going off on his protests,’ she said proudly, when Hart got the conversation round to him. ‘He’s a member of all those things, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and what have you. He really cares about things, animals and the environment and global warming and all that. And unlike some people I could name, he puts his money where his mouth is. His dad’s always griping about him not having a job, but I say to him, our Danny does have a job – saving the planet. And you can’t have a more important job than that, can you?’

  ‘He’s had some trouble with the police in the past, hasn’t he?’ Hart asked.

  The question didn’t seem to bother Mrs Masseter. ‘Well, it’s bound to happen, isn’t it? I mean, the police have got to be on the side of the landowners, stands to reason. I’m not blaming you, dear, because I can see it’s your job. You can’t afford to worry about right and wrong. But Danny has to do what’s right for the planet and that. If it means clashing with the police – well, there you are. More tea? Help yourself to sugar. No, my Danny would never have got into trouble in the normal way. He’s a good boy and he’d never break the law, except in a protest. But he has to do what’s right, and he does, whatever it costs him. He’s that sort of boy.’