Thin Men, Paper Suits

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Thin Men, Paper Suits Page 2

by Tin Larrick


  I leaned in towards him.

  “You know you’re not going anywhere until we find him, right? You’ll sit here until we do…”

  There was a sharp knock on the door of the interview room. I cursed under my breath. The door opened behind me. I could hear heavy breathing.

  “I’m in the middle of an interview,” I hissed, not turning around, not taking my eyes from Hippodrome.

  “I know. Sorry. For the benefit of the tape, Sergeant Mike Butcher, custody officer, entering the interview at twelve twenty-seven hours.”

  I shut the tape off.

  “What do you want, Mike?”

  Butcher bent down till he was inches from my ear.

  “Call for you at the bridge, Dan.”

  “Didn’t you tell them I was in interview?”

  “It’s your wife. She sounded upset.”

  *

  jd

  I raced out of the interview room and jogged across the corridor to the custody office. A constable pointed at a phone lying off the hook.

  I snatched it up.

  “Hello? Claire?”

  “At last! I’ve been trying to get hold of you for ages.”

  “I’m in an interview. Honey, what’s the matter?”

  “The shop’s declined my bloody Access card.” Her voice was an indiscreet hiss, trying to contain the conversation from being overheard; her efforts offset by her obvious upset.

  “Oh, shit. Sorry. Are the kids with you?”

  “No, they’re at my mother’s.”

  “Okay, I’ll try to get you some cash on the way home.”

  “Dan, I’m on the payphone in Gateway. I’m at the checkout with a trolley full of shopping that I can’t pay for. The queue behind me is getting longer, and everyone is staring at me…” I heard her voice break and give way to a sob.

  Oh, Christ.

  I pulled my wallet from my pocket and flicked through it. There were four or five credit cards in there, most of them maxed out and useless.

  “Daniel? Are you there?”

  “Just a second, honey…” There! The Diner’s Club might have a few quid left on it. “Claire, get the cashier to come to the phone.”

  The phone was handed over, and I explained the situation. She couldn’t take telephone payment here, she said, but she would take my wife to the customer service desk where they could take the payment – if I would stay on the line they could transfer the call.

  The call remained connected and I heard the ambient sounds of the supermarket – a tannoy announcement, the murmur of voices in public, the incessant blip-blip of barcode readers. I could hear the sympathetic cooing of a supervisor escorting Claire to the customer service desk. I pictured her hot-faced with shame.

  The phone was handed back. I gave the cashier the numbers, and shut my eyes as the transaction went through.

  “That’s all done, sir,” the voice said. I breathed a sigh of relief. “I’ll pass the phone back.”

  “Honey, I’m so sorry. That will never…”

  The ambient sounds ended abruptly as Claire terminated the call.

  “Everything okay?” a voice asked from behind me.

  I turned. Hope was there.

  “Good timing, eh? You were just getting into your stride,” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  “No need to apologise to me. Better to leave him hanging, anyway. Now he knows we know more than we’re letting on. Give him something to think about while he’s moonwalking around his cell.”

  We walked down the corridor to the empty custody staff room and got coffee from the dispenser. I tried not to think of Claire’s face, knowing that she was driving home now, her face set with grim stoicism, her thoughts replaying the whole embarrassing moment over and over again.

  I dug in my pocket, and shut my eyes. Nothing there but lint. Just as I was working out what to say – that I wasn’t thirsty, that I’d forgotten my wallet – Hope handed me a cup.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled.

  “Did you know about this?” Hope asked.

  “Did I know about what?” I said, grateful for the distraction. Hope hadn’t asked any more about what was so urgent it couldn’t have waited until the interview was over, and so I guessed that he had worked out more than I gave him credit for.

  “The arresting officer’s statement makes reference to Hippodrome yelling that he wanted to confess as soon as he was put in the patrol car.”

  “He must have had it planned out from the start.”

  “He’s not that good an actor. That confession was the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard. We should book him for wasting police time.”

  “But why would he give up his cronies?” I said, more to myself than Hope.

  Hope sipped the coffee. “You know the longest shift I ever worked?”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. I was grateful for his earlier discretion, but he was clearly a dinosaur. It appeared that what he lacked in rank he made up for in experience, and I hoped he wasn’t going to take every available opportunity to point out that he had a good fifteen years on me.

  “No. Tell me.”

  “Forty-six hours straight. Armed robbery at Ladbrokes. Two injured. Three in the bin. Then pulled off to go down to Brighton for the Grand bombing.”

  “Impressive.”

  “Paid for my holiday to Skegness that year.”

  “Well, if we end up charging this lot you could break that record.”

  “Best take a leak then.”

  He downed his coffee and tossed the plastic cup in a bin. He left me with my thoughts and the quiet sounds of the ancient television mounted on the wall above my head.

  The staff room was an afterthought – donated sofas were arranged in a square around a chipboard coffee table which was itself strewn with the remnants of Wimpy containers. There were several well-thumbed, glossy magazines featuring outdated tabloid gossip that was now meaningless. The pockmarked plasterboard walls were covered with doodles and irreverence.

  My brain tuned in to the fact that the wall-mounted television had started broadcasting a news item. I stood on a chair and turned up the volume. I stayed on the chair while the headlines were read out.

  I only caught the odd word, but the effect was immediate and obvious – yellow BREAKING NEWS ticker-tape scrolled across the screen; armed officers tooled up to the gills poked around in bushes with rifles and revolvers, flanked by mounted officers, while the helicopter hovered watchfully overhead.

  I squinted at the image. It was a choppy, amateurish video – the operator probably terrified of being shot. The footage changed. The scrolling ticker-tape remained, but the main image was replaced by a head shot of a face I had come to know extremely well.

  “That him?” Hope had reappeared in the doorway.

  I nodded.

  “Evil looking bastard.”

  Just like his dad, I thought.

  The image on the television was one of only a handful of pictures I had seen of him, pictures spread out over the years. He had changed more than most in the transition to adulthood, and was now thick-set, lantern-jawed, and sported a zero-length skinhead. It was a head shot, but the extremely wide neck was just visible and began roughly underneath his earlobes, making it obvious that the physique was huge and muscular.

  But the eyes had not changed. They had seen more than a child’s eyes should have to, but they were still the wide eyes of a boy, the wide eyes of a boy in a red hoody negotiating a climbing frame.

  An idea came to me.

  “Do me a favour,” I said to Hope. “Get one of the engineers. See if they can wire a feed from the TV signal into the interview room.”

  Hope did as he was instructed without question. The man was beginning to grow on me.

  “So who’s next?” Hope asked while the guy in blue overalls fiddled with the cables at the back of the set.

  I got down off the chair and opened the file.

  “John David Burton. ‘JD.’”


  “What do we know about him?”

  “Big guy. Not the sharpest tool in the box. He moved out of the estates. Lives in town now. Works the doors down at Ziggy’s.”

  Hope pushed open the door to the second interview room. John Burton sat facing the door, both palms flat on the table. The paper suit was struggling to contain his bear-like physique, and one or two rips had appeared near the shoulder seams.

  “Thought I’d be hours waiting for you lot,” Burton said, expelling air.

  “No solicitor?” I asked.

  “What do I need one for? I ain’t done nothing.”

  “Then that’s why you’re next in the queue,” Hope said.

  “I’ll remember that next time I’m here.”

  At his own suggestion, Hope was to lead this interview, and he sat opposite JD. I sat next to him, and wedged myself against the stinking beige corduroy that soundproofed the walls.

  “Don’t make a habit of it, will you? Shall we get started?” he asked, unwrapping the tapes.

  Once the tapes were rolling, Hope went through the interview preamble, checking again that JD did not want a solicitor, albeit with a more formal delivery.

  “Why are you into this, JD?” Hope asked, in a hitherto-unheard paternal tone.

  “What do you mean?”

  Hope checked his notes. “Your pals are eighteen, nineteen. You’re twenty-two. You’re the only one with enough nous to leave the estates. The rest of them are all still festering in Shinewater and Winkney and Town Farm and all those other holes. You got your own place in town?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So, you’ve got a real king-of-the-castle Fagin thing going on. You got a steady job. You supply their blow, their beer; you got your own pad while they still dick around on the apron strings. You’re their meal ticket.”

  “Who says I supply blow? Hippodrome?”

  “How do you feel about your little band of groupies?” Hope asked.

  JD shrugged.

  “Ever think they’re taking advantage of you?”

  “Not really.”

  “I would. Bunch of freeloaders, that’s what it looks like to me.”

  JD just shrugged again, but I could see that Hope had planted the seed in that thick head.

  “Let’s talk about what happened,” Hope said.

  JD dropped his hands in his lap. “You tell us. I’m sitting in my flat, chilling, smoking a tab, watching the box – next thing I know I got poliss at me door and yous is lifting us for arson.”

  “Don’t act so surprised, JD.”

  Hope played the CCTV tape.

  “Tell us what you see, JD.”

  JD made an exaggerated show of leaning forward and squinting at the five figures emerging from North Street out onto Pevensey Road – right next to the Cannon.

  “Could be anyone,” JD said. “But yeah, that’s us.”

  “That you at the front, yes? White hoody?”

  “Yeah, that’s us,” he said again.

  “Leader of the gang.”

  JD said nothing.

  “So you five come out from behind the cinema, and disappear down town. Ten minutes later the cinema’s on fire. Two hours later there’s nothing left of it. You’re saying that’s coincidence?”

  “No, I’m saying we didn’t do it. Yeah, we went down there, to get out of the rain. It was pissing it down. We couldn’t even light a tab. The night was a wash-out, so we went down the alley to talk about what to do next.”

  Hope didn’t speak. Neither did I. It was an oft-used trick – employing silence in the hope that your subject would feel the need to fill it.

  JD didn’t.

  “Who’s doing all the larking about?” Hope asked.

  “That’s Mickey.”

  I checked the notes. “Michael Coombes?”

  “Yeah, Michael Coombes,” JD said, mimicking my clipped tones.

  “He the joker of the group?” Hope asked.

  “I suppose so. He can be a div. Got a mouth on him, doesn’t know when to keep quiet. You know the type. Thinks he’s seen it all. Lad’s got a brain on him, though, has he just. Could be anything, that lad, size of that melon.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “What sort of thing is he into? Arts? Engineering?”

  “Nah, he likes his science. Test tubes and that.”

  “Chemistry? Like – what – making explosives?” Hope said.

  JD’s eyes clouded over and his mouth dropped.

  “Fucking pigs,” he muttered.

  I produced my five photographs and placed them on the table for JD, reprising my performance in Hippodrome’s interview.

  “Four down, one to go, JD,” I said, removing all but the photo of the kid in the red hoody.

  I leaned across to the television monitor that had been playing the CCTV tape, and fiddled with the controls until I found a terrestrial news station.

  The headlines were unchanged. The ticker tape banner was still scrolling across the screen. The armed officers were still marauding Ashdown Forest, with their unarmed search colleagues sifting through a copse and the remnants of a makeshift camp.

  “Four out of five, JD. But I’d trade you all in for him.”

  The images changed again, and the head shot of the thick-set man reappeared. JD leaned towards the screen, his features softening in the same way Hippodrome’s had earlier.

  I held up the Polaroid of the kid in the red hoody so it was next to the screen.

  “Changed a lot, hasn’t he? It’s the eyes that get me, though. They haven’t changed.”

  JD touched the picture.

  “JD?”

  He turned to look at me.

  “Tell me where Junior is.”

  *

  mickey

  When Hope and I got to the garage, all the CID cars had been checked out. Automatically, I turned and started heading towards my own car, but then remembered the petrol gauge was flashing empty and that any spare credit to fill the tank had already been spent on Claire’s shopping.

  It was a corker – brand new Vauxhall Cavalier LX in metallic navy blue. Alloy wheels, electric windows, air conditioning, auto-reverse cassette player – but I’d have traded it in for a beige Skoda 105 if it had a full tank of four-star.

  “Pevensey Road isn’t far,” I said to Hope. “You want to walk?”

  He looked incredulous for a moment – it couldn’t have been much above freezing.

  “Come on,” I urged. “I need to smoke.”

  This last part was no lie, and Hope was happy enough when I offered him a tab. I made a mental note to check the bus timetables when we got back to the office.

  “Almost felt sorry for that big lug,” Hope said as we walked up Terminus Road.

  “He’s a manipulator, and he knows the system. You notice the wide-eyed innocence routine?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s got twenty-five convictions spanning five years. He would have had double that, but he’s tried the gentle-giant-with-Bambi-eyes routine with every Youth Court bench he’s been up against.”

  “With a pretty good success rate, it would seem. He almost had me fooled.”

  When we got to Pevensey Road, the fire commander was animated. They’d finally got the blaze out and the scene was safe enough – just about – to have a look at.

  And they’d found what I’d been expecting them to find.

  It was a curious sensation. The interior of the cinema was little more than a shell; despite this, the layout of the auditorium and its original purpose was still evident, with hulks of smoke-blackened seats and the tattered remains of the screen curtain. Above my head, the once-ornate Victorian ceiling rose and cornices looked as if they had been etched in charcoal.

  “Where is it?” I said to the fire commander.

  He didn’t say anything, but pointed to the screen. He’d been reluctant to allow us in for longer than a few minutes, but now we were in, it was our show. This clearly bothered him.

  Hope and I mov
ed towards the screen. I hopped up onto the low stage and moved to the edge. I turned back momentarily, and failed to prevent myself imagining an audience of dead people in the seats.

  The body was immediately behind the screen. It was lying on its back, charred beyond recognition. The smell of burnt pork made my stomach lurch. There was an angry gash on its forehead which looked like a dollop of ketchup on a barbecued sausage.

  The fire commander’s hand went to his mouth.

  “If you’re going to vomit, do it outside,” I hissed. “Hope, help him.”

  Hope put the fire commander’s arm around his shoulders and led him off the stage.

  “Keep to the edge of the auditorium,” I called after them. “This is a homicide enquiry now. We need a common scene route.”

  I stood up. Alive, the guy had been a huge steroid freak, bigger than JD Burton even, but he didn’t look like much now. The now-black gold around his neck and fingers had turned white hot in the fire, and the metal had eaten into his skin. The tattoos were long gone, leaving only the remnants of puckered flesh, hard and ridged like the bark of a tree.

  We would need dental comparisons for the official ID, but it was garnish. A tick-box exercise. I knew who he was.

  *

  It had taken the better qualities of a seminary matriarch to organise the coroner’s officer and forensic pathologist, brief the SIO and set up the basics of a homicide enquiry team. As such, by the time Hope and I got back to Grove Road, it was dark, and the slight warmth brought by the crisp winter sun had disappeared completely. A bitter wind was barrelling up Terminus Road from the Channel, and by the time we returned Hope was chuntering about the decision not to take a car.

  Back in the station, Hope went off to make coffee. I made a quick call to Claire.

  “Hi, honey,” I said.

  “Hello.” Flat. Cold. The effect of the earlier embarrassment was still resonating, and I was clearly to blame. At least, I would be for the next twenty-four hours or so – most of which I planned to spend at work.

  “Honey, I’m some hours away from finishing. Sorry.”

  “Why?” Disinterested.

  “Well, if you switch on the news you’ll see why.”

  “Okay then. Well, I won’t wait up. I’ll leave dinner in the oven.”

 

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