by HRF Keating
‘No, it’s all right, darling. I didn’t really think it might be Graham. Or his ghost or something. No, I knew it was you, but it came as such a surprise. Where are you phoning from? Your bed? Have they brought you one of those trolleys?’
‘Yes. Yes, that’s it. They asked me, now they’re able to hoist me up into some sort of sitting position, if I’d like to call home. But, Mum, I’ve got some even better news.’
‘Yes? Yes, darling?’
‘The great Sir Thing, on his round this morning, told me: guess what.’
‘No, you tell me.’
‘He said he thought it was OK now for them to operate on my worst leg. One of those bits of metal cut right through the tendon that’s meant to keep the knee-cap where it should be. So now it’s going to be hooked into place again. They didn’t like to do it till I was fit enough to have the anaesthetic. It’s only a minor op, actually. That’s if you can believe old Sir. You know what those Lords of Creation are like.’
‘Oh, Malcolm, that’s marvellous. Marvellous. I thought — We thought you might never be able to walk again. But — but this means that you will be? Doesn’t it? Does it?’
‘Well, yes, it looks like that. It’s what Sir Thing — I’ve never been able to twist round enough to see his painted name hanging there over my head after that first time. But he said it is on the cards. That eventually I’ll be walking.’
After news like that there seemed to be little more worth saying. She managed, chatting on for a little and longing to hand over to John, not to talk about the future. The thought of what might go wrong over the operation, minor or not, had begun to loom too heavily. And thoughts of MRSA, scourge of all hospitals, threatened by poor Aunty Beryl, heroic darkness-defying Aunty Beryl, there in her poky flat, not really very urine-smelling.
So, as soon as Malcolm had come to a breathless halt — ‘got to pay for this eventually, you know, costing a fortune’ — she handed the phone to John.
And then she had made her call from her mobile to Mr Brown to tell him what she had just learnt about commanding Gwendoline Tritton.
‘Very good,’ he answered. ‘That settles it. It’s the final piece of evidence we need. That attempt to establish a multiple person alibi — extraordinary thing to do — is just blown away. Good work, Harriet. I’ll get hold of my tame magistrate and ask for a search warrant for tomorrow. I’d prefer to go in there by daylight, too many chances for things to go wrong in the dark. So can you have your team ready for, say, 8 a.m?’
‘Yes, sir. No trouble. They’re all on alert.’
‘Very good. I’ll get the warrant sent round to you straight away.’
*
Harriet, down in Moorfields, tasked her team at 7.30, only just fully light, still cold, but no rain. Vehicles, when they moved off, to be kept well out of sight round the corner from The Willows. The two officers to wait in the back road, in case Miss Tritton did attempt to make a break for it. Task allocated to Searches Team members, DS Jones and DC Emma Hardy, used to working together. Once Tritton had been secured indoors, they could be let in to supervise.
By 07:55 everyone had moved into place, looking in their anti-contamination overalls like creatures from a TV programme for tiny tots. Harriet alone was in uniform. If Gwendoline Tritton was to be impressed with the seriousness of the raid, anything to overawe her was worth doing. The search warrant tucked into her top pocket was all too likely, she thought, to be scorned as a piece of police scheming to frustrate the perfectly proper aims of WAGI.
Harriet, eyes on her watch, at last gave the signal and led the bulk of her team along towards the wide Pargeter Avenue ahead.
Then, as she heard the sound of a noisy vehicle starting up just beyond, she brought them to a halt, her arms held wide to either side.
‘Hang on a sec.’
She crouched well down at the corner of the high wall of the house at the road’s end and peered round. A small car, issuing a great cloud of exhaust fumes, was just buzzing away in the opposite direction.
‘All clear. OK, let’s go.’
They ran forwards now. 08:00 hours precisely.
With a pulsing feeling of success just ahead, Harriet mounted the steps to the broad front door of The Willows and viciously thumbed the fat button of the bell.
Almost immediately the door was swept open wide, and Gwendoline Tritton stood there. A familiar figure, still in the long wool skirt in bold patches of orange and yellow, the dull green jacket buttoned all the way up, the planked-down faded blue trainers.
But her arms were complacently folded across her scrawny chest and on her bony face, behind the huge spectacles, there was, unmistakably, the look of triumph.
Triumph. Why?
Then in Harriet’s head there bloomed, like a swift-unfolding Japanese water flower dropped into a tall glass, an ugly piece of knowledge. The car she had just seen buzzing away along the wide road outside had been painted in bright psychedelic colours. And she had last seen such a vehicle parked outside Christopher Alexander’s flat. And who was Christopher’s girlfriend but Maggie Quirke? Member of Gwendoline Tritton’s selected Council, and young and athletic.
She jumped down the steps from that big front door, tugging out her mobile as she landed.
Jab, jab, jab at the buttons for Mr Brown’s number.
‘Superintendent Martens, sir. Can you get a stop radio-call out to halt a car, a Mini painted in psychedelic colours, green, purple and more. Don’t know the number. It’s probably being driven by one Maggie Quirke. Seen barely two minutes ago, heading along Pargeter Avenue in a — let me see — yes, westerly direction.’
‘Pargeter Avenue, westwards. Very well.’
Five sharp, Scots-accented words, and no more.
*
Harriet climbed, a little leadenly, up the steps to The Willows door again. She took the search warrant from the pocket of her uniform and rang once more at the fat button of the bell. A long-held summons.
All right, it’s almost certain that the CA 534 is no longer inside this monster of a house. It’s been whisked away from under our noses by Maggie Quirke. But if Gwendoline Tritton thinks she’s put one over on Greater Birchester Police, then she’s going to learn that we don’t take that sort of trickery lightly. We’re going to turn this place over from cellars to attics, and leave her to clear up the mess.
And then she asked herself how it could have come about that Miss Tritton had some idea, or premonition, that The Willows was about to be raided and had no doubt summoned Maggie Quirke at some late hour of the night.
At once the likely answer arrived.
That light I saw in the window at the back of the house last night. Miss Tritton, perhaps wandering anxiously about her big empty house, must have heard the same clanking footsteps out at the back as I did, that big, distressed-looking man. And she had flicked on a light and looked out. And just then had seen something. My outline against the narrow gate as I tried it? But that could have been enough.
There was a longer wait now for the front door to be opened, but eventually it was drawn back, though not very far.
Harriet thrust her search warrant in at the gap, careful to keep a tight grip on it.
‘A search warrant?’ Miss Tritton said, pulling the door a little wider open. ‘Very well, conduct your search, though I hardly think you’ll find whatever it is you’re looking for.’
Stony-faced, Harriet pushed her way past her.
‘Bill,’ she said to the DC she had plucked from her old haunt in B Division, ‘ask this lady for the key to the back gate here and let the Searches Team people in would you?’
She saw Miss Tritton deciding whether to make difficulties over the key or not, and thinking in the end that things were going so much her way that any more obstruction would be over-egging the pudding.
She set her searchers methodically to work then, starting from the two cellars, the coal and the wine, both nowadays empty and echoing.
As soon as she could sh
e hunted out Gwendoline Tritton again. A lady more than capable, she thought, if the CA 534 box had not after all been given to Maggie Quirke, of surreptitiously removing it from some hiding place above and replanting it somewhere where she knew the searchers had completed their work. She found her in the big drawing room, now the office of WAGI. She was sitting on a chair from the dining room next door, bolt upright, staring straight ahead through the heavy-rimmed spectacles on her bony nose, that smile of triumph lingering on her face. She did not deign to give even a nod of greeting.
Expecting to be in the place for hours to come, Harriet sought out another chair and sat down. But in a few minutes her mobile warbled.
‘Yes?’
It was Mr Brown.
‘Some good news, I think. A squad car has picked up your psychedelic Mini with the young lady, Maggie Quirke, in it. She’d stopped for petrol at a service station at the city end of University Boulevard. I imagine she was making for the motorway to tuck herself into hiding somewhere in London. Now, the place can’t be all that far from the Meads, so I suggest you go along and assist.’
‘Right. Petrol station at this end of University Boulevard. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
Chapter Seventeen
At the petrol station Harriet found a police vehicle neatly slewed across its exit and two uniformed officers standing looking, po-faced, at the young woman who must be the driver of the psychedelic Mini beside the pumps, Maggie Quirke.
She got out of her car, with DC Emma Hardy whom she had thought worth bringing with her, and walked over.
‘Good morning, Miss Quirke.’
No answer.
‘I am Detective Superintendent Martens, Greater Birchester Police, and this is Detective Constable Hardy. I have reason to believe you may have in your car or on your person a small cardboard box containing a single test tube filled with an oily yellow liquid.’
‘Oh, have you?’
A jaunty look.
Poor pretty-faced Christopher, she thought. He must have caught himself a tiger by the tail here. Unless, of course, she was the one who had decided, dedicated WAGI member as she is, to catch him.
‘Do I take it you deny you are in possession of that test tube?’
‘Of course I do.’
Harriet permitted herself a little smile.
‘I notice,’ she said, ‘you don’t ask what that oil is and why we are anxious to retrieve it.’
‘What if I don’t?’
‘Just that this indicates to me that you do have it and that you know very well what the liquid it contains is.’
‘Find it then.’
‘Very well. First DC Hardy will search you personally, and I should warn you that it will, if necessary, be an intimate procedure.’
A quick glance to see if the implicit threat had produced any reaction.
None.
‘So, come inside, and I’ll ask the people here if there’s an office or a room somewhere that we can make use of.’
She looked back to where the two PCs were waiting beside their vehicle.
‘I think you’d better hang on here,’ she called out. ‘I may have someone for you to take in before much longer.’
She ushered Maggie into the building then. And, yes, the attendant in charge was only too happy to help the police.
‘Got a lot o’ time for the boys in blue. And the girls. You do a night shift here, and you’ll be all the happier to think they come calling every now and again.’
‘I’m glad we’re in your good books.’
So the little office at the back, its grimy whitewashed walls decorated with nudie calendars going back half-a-dozen years, was cleared of the few things the attendant might need and handed over.
Harriet looked round.
‘Just pull that blind down over the window,’ she said to DC Hardy. ‘And I’ll ask to have any customers kept out of the way for the next few minutes.’
A glance at Maggie to see if the promised search of her person had now brought any signs of anxiety. Nil result.
Propping herself against the till then, Harriet watched Emma Hardy put down her heavy black case of search tools on the deeply grease-spotted table in the corner, take from it a pair of dull white surgical gloves and ease each one over her hands.
Still no reaction from Maggie.
Then, first, she was carefully frisked. Next she was asked to remove, piece by piece, each item of her clothes, and Emma’s firm gloved fingers probed every conceivable hiding-place in them. At last came the body search itself, with Emma from time to time giving her subject quiet instructions.
Harriet patted herself on the back now for having, despite some misgivings over the security aspect, taken on her two highly trained Searches Team officers. If the CA 534 was on, or in, Maggie Quirke’s person, it was going to be found. Perhaps at any moment. And if that small reinforced test tube was hidden somewhere among Maggie’s possessions or elsewhere in her psychedelic little car, then it was going to be brought to light.
Or, even if, after all, it’s still somewhere inside The Willows, she thought, DS Jones will lay his hands on it, however tricksy Gwendoline Tritton’s been in concealing it.
Eventually, it seemed that Maggie did not have the tube on her.
Looking at her as she sulkily put her clothes back on, Harriet decided it might be no bad thing to upset her a little more.
‘So you were on your way to London?’ she said.
The casual inquiry did produce, as it was meant to, a flicker of anxious response.
Aha, good sign. We’re definitely on the right track. That box will be somewhere in her car, almost bound to be.
‘Yes, I was going to London. Why shouldn’t I? I’ve turned in my job, so I’m a free agent.’
‘You were on the Chronicle, weren’t you? I wonder why you left. Perhaps they’ll tell me there.’
Show her we know a lot about her and can find out still more. A bit of un-nerving will do no harm.
Yes. Seems my little threat’s done its work. Those gleaming white teeth Tim Patterson went on about have momentarily clamped themselves together.
But she got no more than that one hint of anxiety.
So Emma Hardy’s search moved on to the car in the forecourt. One by one she brought in from it Maggie’s luggage and the other miscellaneous objects that accumulate in a car. She stacked them neatly underneath the rickety-looking, oil-stained table ready to be dealt with.
But when the pile was complete it took much longer than Harriet had hoped to go through it, item by item. Maggie Quirke sat there on an aged typist’s chair and watched as Emma’s neatly moving fingers turned each case, each bulging plastic supermarket bag, inside-out. And gradually a smirk of a smile glinted out from those white teeth. At last it had to be acknowledged that all Emma’s efforts so far had come to nothing. Soon only the psychedelic Mini itself would be left.
Harriet, having watched Emma at work, had no doubts she would be perfectly capable of taking the little car completely to bits if that had to be done. But after almost an hour, with only two or three items of the car clutter remaining, she could keep her patience no longer.
‘Let me deal with a few of these things,’ she said to the probing DC, bent low over the grease-engrained table.
She got a quick assessing look, junior officer to high-up.
‘I think I’d better tackle them myself, ma’am,’ the reply came then. ‘You really need to be specially trained for this sort of work.’
Harriet produced a smile of understanding.
‘I dare say you’re right. But should I phone for more help? No doubt DS Jones could be spared from The Willows now.’
‘As you think fit, ma’am. But often one pair of hands is better than two. Nothing gets missed in error that way. But, if you like, I could go and tackle the car itself. The little that’s left here isn’t actually very likely to yield any treasure.’
‘All right, why don’t you go out and do that? And let’s hope you
find yourself getting lucky at last.’
A pleasure really, Harriet thought, watching her through the office’s smeary window as she stood assessing the old Mini, to see someone so confidently at work at a task they know down to its last detail.
She turned then and gave a quick glance at the girl perched on the battered typist’s chair. But, it appeared, that moment of thought looking out of the window, had lost her the chance of seeing whether her reference to ‘getting lucky’ had produced a reaction. Maggie still had lurking on her lips that smirk of a smile.
Am I wrong, Harriet thought, with a sudden descent from optimism. Have I been wrong all along? Has Gwendoline Tritton never had the CA 534? Was the raid on Heronsgate House organised by some other outfit altogether?
She sat there leaning against the till, battling this onset of drained-away confidence. And before long found herself immersed in that other, and deeper, source of misery.
Graham, Graham, Graham, her mind kept grindingly repeating. Graham, my son, my son in his prime, is dead. Killed. Killed. Killed.
What does all this search nonsense matter set against that one brutal stone block of fact. Graham is dead, dead before his time.
*
Her ever-descending maelstrom of misery and grief was ended by a sudden interruption. She had heard a car drawing up outside, but in her absorption had taken no particular notice. During the time they had been in the little office several dozen drivers had arrived to fill up, and had presented themselves at the till window to pay, the attendant squeezing apologetically in to deal with them. This must be another one.
But now, looking up as the door was vigorously thrust open, she saw none other than Gwendoline Tritton.
Gwendoline Tritton with, in her right hand, a gun.
She rose, a waterspout, to her feet.
‘Stay just where you are.’