by J M Gregson
The man gave him a different sort of smile, with narrowed eyes and a sly connivance. ‘Now that’s not legal. That will cost you.’
‘I can pay.’
‘I have to narrow the barrel. Insert a metal rod.’
‘Whatever. I know you can do it. That’s why I came to the best.’
This bit of shameless flattery amused the man in the leather apron, who picked up the new weapon and examined it, though he did not need to do so. ‘Two hundred pounds.’
‘It’s half an hour’s work. One hundred.’
The man laughed. ‘It’s skilled work and it’s illegal. I’m taking a harmless pistol from you and putting a lethal weapon back in your hands. I’ll do it for one fifty for you, for old time’s sake. It’ll be a good job. I’m off the sauce now.’
‘Done.’ Darren stretched out his hand impulsively and grasped the much stronger paw of the man who was to give him protection against future beatings. The gesture felt odd but uplifting. He had never shaken hands on a deal before.
‘I’ll do it whilst you wait, if you want that. All part of the service, like our MOTs in the garage. You’d better go to our waiting room, though. I don’t let people watch me working - might make me nervous, and we wouldn’t want that, would we, on a precision job like this?’
Darren went obediently back through the garage and thence through a small door into a carpeted office area. There was a coffee machine in the comer. A woman secretary came out and asked him what sort of coffee he wanted. He ordered a cappuccino with as much aplomb as he could muster and she put in a coin and brought it over to him with a practised, professional smile. ‘It’s free to customers.’
He sat with his hands round the coffee, thrusting his back against the armchair, managing not to wince as the posture gave him a sharp twinge of pain in his bruised side. It was good to be treated as a valued customer. He patted the money in his anorak pocket and listened contentedly to the sharp sounds of metal work from the room behind the garage area.
Twelve
Saturday evening. The end of a windless, humid day, with the temperature in the eighties and everyone telling one another what wonderful weather this is, whilst they sweat uncomfortably and find breathing difficult. Don’t grumble, be British. We don’t get many periods of sustained high temperatures and plentiful sun, so don’t complain. It’s your duty to enjoy this weather.
But by ten o’clock, with darkness dropping in on the ancient city and, the atmosphere still oppressive, the weather is taking its toll. In taverns, ancient and modern, the sales of alcohol and beer to the males and white wine to the females are reaching record levels. The streets are full of noisy revellers, and in the hours to come women will become more provocative as well as more attractive, men more argumentative as well as more hilarious, and trouble will follow. There will be the tiresome squalor of vomit, the repetitive obscenities of challenge, the rising tide of aggression.
The Gloucestershire police have seen it all before, but that does not make their task on this sweltering night less tedious, less challenging, or less dangerous. They will try to keep rival gangs apart, to relax tensions rather than encourage them. Contrary to the popular view amongst the young people here, the police, most of whom are scarcely older than those they are attempting to control, are not looking for arrests. They would rather send the inebriated home to peaceful beds and morning hangovers than carry them away to a night in the cells and the ensuing paperwork of minor charges.
The police in the centre of Gloucester are fully occupied with preventing the escalation of violence and with trying to preserve the law against the binge drinkers. But outside the city centre, there is plenty of scope for the quieter sort of criminal activity.
In the area where Darren Chivers rents his flat, there are lights behind curtained windows, but otherwise no signs of human presence. People here keep themselves to themselves; most of them do not move outside their residences after dark unless they have to. Many people live in the block which contains Chivers’s flat. Yet there is no observer of the presence which steals softly into the building and up to the door of that flat.
The person who gains entry here has done this sort of thing before. The worn Yale lock is little protection against the credit card in expert hands. With scarcely a sound in the quiet corridor, the intruder is inside the flat and the door is shut again. There is no need for a torch. A little fumbling finds the switch by the door. After the darkness outside, the light shed by the single, shadeless bulb seems dazzling for a moment or two.
The interloper is in no hurry. It will not take long to search these two small rooms and there is little fear of interruption. Darren Chivers has taken no real precautions against snoopers; the danger of anyone coming into his lair had seemed minimal. There are no large metal filing cabinets here; indeed, there is not even a locked drawer.
On the table, there is a box with a life-sized illustration of the Brocock ME 38 air pistol on its lid, which the interloper notes but does not touch. A swift, efficient examination of the battered kitchen cabinet and the sideboard with the damaged mirror reveals nothing. In the tiny bedroom with its shut curtains, the infiltrator pauses for an instant in surprise before the lurid framed picture of the Sacred Heart, surrounded by flames on the breast of Christ, wondering whether this is a relic of a Catholic upbringing in the occupant or just a picture which came with the furnishings of this mean little pad.
The material this uninvited visitor wants is discovered in the chest of drawers beside the narrow bed. The top two drawers reveal nothing, but in the bottom one, beneath two threadbare shirts and an unworn sweater, is a small one-drawer filing cabinet with the key in the lock. It contains a collection of documents, accompanied by pages of notes compiled by Darren Chivers in a small, surprisingly neat, hand. The interloper sits for a moment on the edge of the bed, examining what has been unearthed, checking swiftly but efficiently through the sheets of paper. The material which prompted this intrusion has been found.
One section in particular gets more attention than the rest. It is stowed away carefully into the large plastic bag which is the burglar’s only baggage. The raider returns the other material to the cabinet, then, on second thoughts, retrieves it and puts in the plastic bag with the rest. The shirts and sweater are folded neatly, then returned to the drawer by the gloved hands, which slide it softly shut.
Two minutes later, after a final check to ensure that there are no other papers of interest here, the light by the door of Chivers’s apartment is switched off as quietly as it was activated. The whole process of search and removal has taken no more than a quarter of an hour. The door is opened an inch; the raider checks that all is silent and unsuspecting in this rabbit-warren of a building.
Then the intruder slips quietly away into the warm, oppressive darkness.
Thirteen
Monday morning again, and Chief Superintendent Lambert was on the prowl around the CID section of his police station.
His paperwork was up to date, he had checked his overtime budget and found there was money to spare, and the meeting he should have had with the Chief Constable at ten o’clock had been cancelled because of a conference of the top brass in Oxford. Bert Hook found him flicking through the Missing Persons pages on the computer which was usually the preserve of DI Rushton.
‘Every one of these represents a personal heartbreak for someone,’ John Lambert said to his detective sergeant, without taking his eyes from the screen. ‘And all we do is register the names and details and hope they choose to get in touch.’
‘You know the argument. . . we’re police officers, not social workers.’
‘I know.’ John Lambert logged off carefully. ‘I’d be saying the same thing myself if anyone challenged me with neglect. I know MISPAs are far too numerous for us to do much about them. But when you see how young a lot of them are, you wonder what domestic tragedies lie behind the statistics on that screen.’ He sighed. ‘I have the old-fashioned view that we’re a publi
c service, needing the public’s support and providing them with solid value in return. It makes you feel very helpless, when you look at those details.’
It was at that moment that the young officer on the switchboard put the call through to his office and Lambert arrived there a little breathless to receive it. ‘A suspicious death, sir. Outskirts of Highnam.'
‘Has the Scene of Crime team been sent in?’
‘Yes, sir. It’s the SOCO officer who said you should be alerted.’
‘Tell him DS Hook and I will be there in a quarter of an hour.’
He and Hook were in his car and reversing out of his space within two minutes. They had the faces of men who already had the scent of the chase in their nostrils. The rest of the station relaxed a little with their departure. Keep the old bugger out of their hair, a decent murder would, they thought. Let’s hope it’s not a simple domestic, with an arrest made within hours.
There was little prospect of that. The man who lay behind the hawthorn hedge in that quiet spot had long since ceased to have any family around him.
The area was already cordoned off with the plastic ribbons which denoted a scene of crime site. This was an isolated place, so that there was no sign yet of the ghoulish curiosity which often assembled round the place of a suspicious death.
But the area had to be isolated and defined, so that whatever clues lay within it would not be contaminated by any unofficial presence. A bicycle lay with its wheels in the air in the brambles on the far side of the clearing, as if a rough attempt had been made at concealment.
Lambert and Hook donned the paper overalls and plastic foot covers and followed the path designated by markers to the centre of this quiet scene of tragedy. The civilian Scene of Crime officer knew Lambert well enough. He nodded toward the corpse which lay face down in the undergrowth. ‘Suspicious, all right. Possible suicide, but almost certainly murder, in my view.’
Lambert walked around the corpse, stooped a little stiffly towards it and smiled grimly at his informant. ‘A bullet through the head is pretty conclusive.’ He brushed impatiently at the flies he had disturbed as they rose round the damaged head. ‘How long has he been here?’
The SOCO shrugged. ‘A day or two at least, I’d say. But I’ll leave that to the pathologist. Probably not long enough for the labs to play their delightful little games with maggots.’ When corpses had lain undiscovered for a week or two, the scientists could pinpoint the time of death fairly accurately by the state of development of the larvae upon the corpse. Lambert, despite many years of experience, had never developed the iron stomach which would have been useful at times like this. He said firmly, ‘He doesn’t smell to me like a man who’s been here that long.’ He glanced down at the lank hair above the bloodstained temple. ‘It is a he, I suppose?’ You could never be sure, these days. They had questioned the grubby inhabitants of a squat a few days earlier. Gender had not been apparent until they spoke.
‘Yes. Not a prime specimen, but certainly male.’
Bert Hook stooped on one knee beside the corpse, as if genuflecting in the face of death. He put his face almost at ground level, so as to stare into the features of the cadaver without disturbing it. He stood up heavily. ‘This is Darren Chivers. Small-time drug dealer. DI Rushton and I had him in for questioning a couple of weeks ago. I thought we’d warned him off. It appears not.’
The SOCO said, ‘This might not be drugs-related. We haven’t found anything illegal in his pockets.’
Lambert nodded. ‘Forensics will test that anorak for drug traces. Whoever did this might have taken the drugs and fled, if it was a meet for an illegal transaction.’
‘But why kill him?’
‘Because the user didn’t have the money for drugs? Because a minor disagreement transformed itself suddenly into a life and death struggle? Heroin addicts are notoriously unpredictable. All that matters is the next fix, especially when it’s overdue. They’ll sacrifice anything for it then, including a man’s life, if he’s holding back what they want. But all that is speculation. Hopefully the autopsy will give us more information. What have you found around here?’
He looked round at the crime scene. It had been a lonely place for a man to meet his death. The spot was no more than two miles from the centre of Gloucester, but it looked much more remote. They were on a country lane five hundred yards outside the village of Highnam, in a small clearing behind a six feet high hawthorn hedge. A picnic spot, perhaps, in happier times. The wood beside them cut off all views to the west and the Welsh hills, but when you looked the other way you could see the top of Gloucester Cathedral, looking deceptively close with nothing visible in between.
The SOCO officer looked at the woman and two men who were systematically searching the site they had cordoned off, working outwards from the body in the centre of it, then shook his head. ‘Nothing which seems significant so far, Mr Lambert. We’re bagging anything and everything found here, as per usual, but most of it will prove to have no connection with this crime. That includes a used contraceptive and a hair slide.’ He shook his head with distaste. ‘Couples, or at least one couple, obviously use this site for other purposes than murder. We’ve got a couple of fag ends, both of which look to me weeks old and equally useless as clues to your killer.’
Lambert stooped over the corpse. He was tempted to investigate the pockets of the navy anorak and the jeans beneath it, but until the pathologist had done his preliminary investigation at the scene, it was better to disturb nothing. Contamination of evidence at a scene of death had destroyed prosecution cases in court too often for him to take risks. He looked again at what had once been Darren Chivers. ‘Did he die here?’
‘I would say yes. We can’t be certain yet, but my feeling is that the PM will establish that he did. We haven’t found any evidence of a vehicle bringing a body here, but it’s been so dry over the last three days that you wouldn’t expect tyre marks. I suppose it’s possible that he could have been killed on the other side of the hedge and dragged through to prevent more immediate discovery, but there’s no damage to the hedge evident; you’d expect at least a few leaves to have been dislodged. He might have been dragged through the gap where all of us came in, but in that case you’d expect there to be blood or fibres from his clothes there. We haven’t found either.’ It was at this moment that they heard a cry of excitement from a woman who was working her meticulous way along the base of the hedge which formed the boundary of the crime site. They went over and looked down at what she had found in the brambles which grew alongside the hedge, on the side away from the road. The sight of the thing she was preparing to extract with pliers and deposit delicately in a plastic bag stilled all of them for a moment.
Then Lambert said softly, ‘It looks as if we have our murder weapon.’
The young woman who was so pleased with her find said reluctantly, ‘It’s only an air pistol, isn’t it?’
Bert Hook smiled grimly. ‘That’s a Brocock ME 38. It not only looks and feels like a real gun in the hand, but a gunsmith can convert it to fire genuine rounds in twenty minutes by narrowing the barrel. I’d give long odds that it killed the man lying over there. If I’m right, that’s a real bonus for us. When firearms are involved, it’s not often we find the murder weapon at the site of the killing.’
The pathologist arrived as they spoke and began the process of recording information at the site. He took rectal temperatures, checked the degree of rigor mortis, and offered the opinion that death had occurred at least two days earlier. He promised that the post-mortem on this murder victim would be given priority at the Home Office forensic laboratory at Chepstow.
As they journeyed back to the station in Lambert’s old Vauxhall Senator, both Chief Superintendent and DS felt elation at the discovery, at the very outset of the investigation, of what appeared to be the murder weapon. But years of experience temper optimism with a professional caution. The unspoken question both of them were wrestling with was why a killer should choose to le
ave this key evidence behind so conveniently for them.
The Reverend Peter Lynch arrived at the breakfast table on Tuesday morning to find his wife in a state of suppressed excitement.
‘There’s been a suspicious death,’ said Karen.
‘Anyone we know?’ said Peter.
He was being flippant, but she took him seriously. ‘The radio didn’t give a name at eight o’clock. It was in Highnam. Put Radio Gloucester on. We might get more details there.’
Peter switched the local radio programme on and they carried on a muted conversation about the day ahead, whilst the resolutely cheerful announcer gave the forecast for the day’s weather and details of local traffic hold-ups between the inane lyrics of the latest pop music. Peter noticed that the normally voracious Karen seemed to be toying with her cereal.
When the time came for the news bulletin, Karen reached across and turned up the volume. The announcer adopted the solemn tone appropriate for tragedy, though he could not prevent the excitement which accompanied a local scoop from creeping in as the item proceeded. ‘Police have revealed that the body of a local man was discovered by a dog-walker early yesterday morning on the outskirts of Highnam. Radio Gloucester can reveal that in the last few minutes the identity of the deceased man has been released. He was Darren Christopher Chivers, a resident of Gloucester. Police are treating the death as suspicious. Anyone who has any information is asked to contact Oldford CID section as a matter of urgency.’
Peter Lynch tried to sound casual in the face of his wife’s obvious intensity. ‘He wasn’t a parishioner. I didn’t expect him to be - it’s a relief in a way. Though I suppose I should be hoping that the poor man made what my mother used to call “a good death”.’