MURDER ON THE OXFORD CANAL

by Faith Martin

  She stopped herself. Shit. She sounded like every whingeing divorcee friend of her mother’s that she’d ever met.

  ‘Is this relevant to a corruption investigation?’ she asked coldly.

  ‘It might be,’ said Paul Danvers. ‘If Ronnie Greene had been the kind of man to include his missus in a get-rich-slowly scheme.’ ‘Well, he wasn’t,’ Hillary said flatly. ‘Ronnie didn’t trust women. I’m not sure he even liked them much. Just needed them. If you want to find out who he might have brought in, ask . . .’

  But she didn’t say it. She was no fink.

  But then it didn’t need saying, did it?

  ‘Oh, we’ve already talked to DS Ross,’ Curtis said mildly.

  Hillary smiled. ‘Charming, isn’t he?’ she said sweetly. And looked at her watch. ‘Next question, please. As DCI Mallow said, I am senior investigating officer on a suspicious death case. Time’s a wasting.’

  Curtis Smith leaned back and folded his arms over his chest. ‘We have plenty of time, DI Greene.’ He didn’t even bother to emphasise the ‘we.’

  Cocky sod, thought Hillary.

  She looked at the other one, surprising him. He flushed. He actually flushed.

  Oh shit, Hillary thought.

  Someone get me the hell out of here.

  CHAPTER 5

  Tommy printed off the info and read it with a whistle. The mugshot certainly looked like their corpse all right. He emailed his thanks to his opposite number in one of Birmingham’s cop shops, and looked around to Hillary’s desk.

  He was going to enjoy this. His first chance to show Hillary what he could do. But he had to get it right. No swagger, no excitement. Professional, that was it. Like the lady herself.

  ‘Guv? Might have something here.’ He walked towards her, paper in hand. He noticed both Janine Tyler and Frank Ross look up from their desks with interest, and felt a flush of pride. All those years in uniform were paying off. For the first time Tommy felt like one of the elite. A detective.

  Hillary, too, lifted her head, and he noticed again the dark shadows under her eyes. The eyes themselves, though, were the usual snapping brown. Obviously her brush with the Yorkie Bars hadn’t got her down too much, and he felt like grinning in silent applause.

  He didn’t, of course.

  ‘Cop shop up in Birmingham. Does this look like our chap to you?’ he asked casually.

  Janine was already sidling across to get a look, but Frank Ross, sneering slightly, sat tight at his desk.

  Hillary gave it a few seconds’ perusal. ‘Yes, it does.’ She leaned back in her chair, which stretched her blouse tighter across her breasts. Tommy was careful not to look.

  ‘David Pitman, known as Dave, aka “The Pits.”’ Hillary read the file out loud. ‘Because, it says here, that’s what he’s generally thought to be. Oh, very droll. One conviction for rape, but two other cases never made it to court. Served five years, and another four later on for GBH. Charming chap.’ She sat forward, frowning. ‘Lives locally now, but . . .’

  ‘The Pits,’ Frank interrupted from his desk, his loud voice cutting across the room. All three heads turned his way. Hillary thoughtfully, Tommy with apprehension, Janine with carefully disguised disrespect.

  ‘Well, well, who’d have thought it,’ Frank went on, obviously pleased that he had the floor now. He twiddled a pen playfully.

  ‘Care to share, Frank?’ Hillary asked. She knew the sod wouldn’t give out unless she asked.

  ‘He’s only one of Luke Fletcher’s boys, ain’t he?’ Frank laughed softly. ‘As you’d know if you’d been around as long as I have.’

  Hillary smiled. ‘Nobody’s been around as long as you have, Frank.’ She managed to make it sound like an insult. ‘Tommy, give fingerprints a boot up the backside. Now we have a possible name, it won’t take two secs to confirm.’

  ‘Right, guv.’ Tommy moved away to make the call.

  ‘Janine, look out the relevant files on Luke Fletcher, and everything you can get on our friend Dave.’ She handed the print-out to Janine, who glanced at the arrest sheet and mugshot with a grimace.

  ‘I reckon “The Pits” is right,’ she muttered, and returned to her computer.

  Suddenly, the atmosphere in the room was charged. They’d gone from a suspicious but almost certainly accidental death to the big time in a matter of seconds. Luke Fletcher was everybody’s flavour of the month at the Big House. A big-time drug dealer, extortionist and pimp, rumour even had it that he ran some gambling joints from a fleet of lorries, always on the move and decked out like something from Las Vegas. Hillary suspected that last little morsel owed more to urban legend than feasibility. Still, no doubt about it, Luke Fletcher was a thorn in the side of the Thames Valley force that everyone would dearly love to extract. To see Mr Fletcher residing at Her Majesty’s pleasure was the source of many a copper’s wet dream, from the assistant chief constable down to the humblest uniform driving a patrol car.

  And Hillary felt no different.

  Frank began to speak, and since he had a voice like a foghorn when he wanted, no one had much choice except to listen.

  ‘Fletcher’s a nasty bastard. I remember the time he had that poor Greek geezer beaten up so badly he still walks with crutches.’

  ‘Wasn’t he trying to take over some girls from Fletcher’s stable?’ Hillary put in, just to show Frank, and the others, that he wasn’t the only one who knew about the real lowlifes that inhabited the city of dreaming spires. Including the local prostitution rackets.

  Frank shot her a furious glare. ‘S’right,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Course, his main trade is still in drugs — ask anybody from the toffee-nosed students of Brasenose to the ram-raiders in the Leys. Fletcher’s the man if you want anything to snort, sniff, shoot or chew. And one of his own has just turned up dead. I wonder how.’

  Hillary was way ahead of him, not that Frank would ever believe it. She’d already asked herself the number one question. Namely, had Luke ordered it for some reason, or was he still in happy ignorance?

  Most likely Fletcher had ordered a severe beating and one of his lackeys had, in some way, overstepped the mark. Although some of the higher-ups assumed Fletcher might have actually ordered up to three actual hits, they’d never got anywhere near laying a charge of first-degree murder against him. It was bad for business getting the cops too riled up, so it would make sense for The Pits to be a beating-gone-wrong death rather than a deliberate murder or hit.

  Unless.

  Unless, of course, Dave Pitman had been doing something so bad that a very firm lesson needed to be taught.

  Frank reached for the phone and Hillary wondered what unfortunate stoolie was about to get his ear twisted. Of course, he could be calling in a favour from somebody else on the force, although those had to be few and far between. Nobody liked owing Frank Ross favours — especially now his bigger and better buddy, Ronnie Greene, was no longer around to protect him.

  ‘Guv, we should hear back in ten minutes or so.’ Tommy broke into her reverie. ‘From fingerprints,’ he added, when she gave him a rather vacant stare.

  ‘Oh.’ Hillary nodded. ‘What do you know about narrowboats, Tommy?’ She noticed his surprised glance. It took her a moment or two to work it out, and then she smiled.

  It lit up her face, and Tommy beamed.

  ‘No, it’s not a trick question,’ she said. ‘I know I probably know more about the bloody things than most. I meant, what comes into your mind when you think of them?’

  Tommy sat down slowly, was quiet for a while, and then shrugged. ‘I dunno, boss. Just . . . holidays, I guess. Taking it slow and easy. The countryside, ducks, foreigners, an alternative to the seaside, or going abroad. Sort of for the middle class. Messing about on the water. That sort of thing.’

  Hillary nodded. It was a disjointed list, but it about summed it up. You thought of narrowboats and you thought of an extended nuclear family — mum, dad, kiddies, the dog, an aunt or uncle — taking to the canal, runnin
g into the bank, having fun pretending to be Captain Pugwash, and talking pretentiously about how nice it was not to have the car, the phone, the telly, and getting back to nature and taking the stress out of life.

  It was all bollocks of course. Everyone took their mobile phone with them, every hire boat came with a television aerial, and Hillary, since living on the canal, had seen nearly as many instances of boat rage as she had road rage. ‘They aren’t the first thing you think of when you imagine drug-running for instance, are they, DC Lynch?’ Tommy stared at her for a moment, and she saw his eyes narrow. ‘No, guv, it ain’t.’

  ‘But why not?’ Hillary said.

  ‘Well, it’s not fast, is it?’ Tommy said. ‘Four miles an hour limit on the water? It would take weeks to get from one end of the country to the other — probably months. And yet . . .’

  Hillary nodded. ‘Slow but sure. And just think how much stuff you could store in a narrowboat. Take the flooring out, install some cargo boxes, and you’ve got no end of square feet of space.’

  ‘Not to mention storing it under bunkbeds, in lockers, in wardrobes . . .’

  ‘And who’d think of raiding a narrowboat?’ Hillary mused, keeping her voice down and a watchful eye on Frank who was sitting hunchbacked over the telephone, protectively guarding his own secrets.

  Janine, at her terminal, was happily sending the printer off on its merry way.

  ‘But still, it’s slow,’ Tommy said. ‘I don’t, somehow, equate drug dealers with patience, guv.’

  ‘Why not? Luke Fletcher, for a start, is a canny bastard, or we’d have banged him up long since. The man must have something up here,’ she tapped her forehead, ‘to keep on the outside of a cell for so long. Why shouldn’t patience be one of his virtues? And remember, the canal network links up most of Britain — the London to Birmingham run alone takes in Oxford, Stratford and all sorts of goodies in between.’

  People tended to think only lower-class, poverty-stricken minorities made up the bulk of drug addicts. Cops knew better.

  ‘Right,’ said Tommy. ‘And I suppose, if you had enough boats, and they set off at, say, one week intervals, within a few months you’d have a regular network with a guaranteed supply all set up.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘Like I said, when you think of a narrowboat, you think of holidaymakers. You don’t think drugs. When was the last time you heard of a raid on the canal?’

  Tommy, who’d been in the police force less than five years, couldn’t remember any. Hillary, who’d been in the force nearly twenty years, couldn’t either. She tried to rein in her exuberance. After all, one dead associate of Luke Fletcher’s in the Dashwood Lock did not make a major drugs-related bust inevitable. He might simply have been dumped in the lock after a beating. The speeding canal narrowboat seen by some witnesses on the evening of the death might be nothing more than some juiced-up teenagers bored with barge living and having a high old time.

  And yet . . .

  She tensed as Frank Ross hung up the phone and started to get up. At the same time, Janine came back with a sheaf of papers.

  ‘Boss,’ Janine said, beating Frank to the punch. ‘This is interesting. Apparently Vice busted a couple of lorries last year, containing over twenty kilos each of grass, nearly a gross of ecstasy and related disco poppers, and a smaller quantity of cocaine, which they thought belonged to a haulage firm of Luke Fletcher’s, but they couldn’t trace the paperwork back to him.’

  Hillary met Tommy’s eye and gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head. She knew what he was thinking because she was thinking it too. If Luke Fletcher had got his fingers that badly burned last year, then it made it all the more likely that he’d use alternative transport routes. Obviously, now that Vice had the bit between their teeth, lorries were out.

  She didn’t want the relatively new and green DC spilling the beans within range of Frank’s hot little ears. She reached for her sergeant’s papers, noticing with relief that Tommy Lynch’s amiable features hadn’t changed.

  ‘Seems Fletcher has a pub up Osney way,’ Frank broke in. ‘Called the Fluke.’ He folded his hands across his podgy chest and leaned a thigh against Hillary’s desk. She looked at it with distaste. ‘Luke’s Fluke. Very original. Anyway, it seems our lad Dave was a regular there, till he dropped out of sight a couple of weeks back.’

  ‘I can’t see The Pits giving up his free beer for anything less than a royal command,’ Janine said. ‘I wonder what Fletcher had him down for?’

  Hillary raised a hand. ‘Hold up a minute. Let’s not get carried away. We don’t know for a fact that he was doing a job for Luke Fletcher. We don’t even know for a fact that his death was anything other than an accident.’

  Janine all but snorted, but held off. Frank Ross wondered how to make capital out of this latest development. And Tommy Lynch was still thinking about how much crack, heroin, cocaine and other assorted goodies you could store on a fifty-foot barge.

  Hillary was thinking something else entirely.

  Hillary was wondering how the hell she could keep this from Mel Mallow. A suspicious death, one that was almost certainly accidental, was vastly different from a case involving a possibly murdered minion of their local bad boy. And sure as eggs were eggs, as soon as Mel heard about this her days as SIO would be over.

  Unfortunately for her, Frank Ross was thinking the exact same thing.

  ‘Right, Tommy, get on to the doc, see if he can push our corpse to the top of the waiting list. Don’t give out any details, but tell him he’s suddenly become more popular around here. Janine, I need a proper in-depth lowdown on The Pits. Friends, family, did he have a habit, a cat, a favourite eating place, you name it.’

  Janine sighed, but nodded.

  Frank had already taken himself away from Hillary’s desk, but not back to his own. Hillary looked around the office, but there was no sign of him.

  She felt sick.

  * * *

  Philip Mallow heard a knock on his door, followed two seconds later by DS Ross. He initialled the bottom page of the report he was reading and looked up. ‘Frank. I heard you’d been in with the Yorkie Bars. Any problems?’

  Frank looked astonished. ‘No, guv. No problems.’

  Philip smiled, looking his most mellow. ‘Good. Didn’t think there would be. Something up?’

  Frank closed the door behind him. A look of acute distaste flickered across Mel’s face and was gone.

  Whenever Ross looked furtive, Mel Mallow grew uneasy.

  ‘It’s this body in the lock case, sir. Something’s come up.’

  Mel’s heart sank even further.

  * * *

  Janine looked up in surprise as Mel walked towards her desk.

  ‘Janine,’ Mel said, glancing down at the pile of paperwork on her desk. He, like many another on their way to superintendency, had long since learned to read upside down, and had no difficulty picking out the dossiers on Dave Pitman, Luke Fletcher et al.

  Shit. The tattling little jerk Ross had been right.

  ‘Fancy going to the cinema sometime?’ Mel asked, surprising himself far more than Janine, who nevertheless gave a little jerk in her chair.

  ‘Huh? Yeah, sure,’ she managed to blurt out.

  Mel nodded, quickly getting back on an even keel. ‘What do you like? Action, comedy, horror or romance?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind action flicks,’ Janine said. ‘If they’ve got one of those Hollywood hunks in them. But you pick, sir.’

  Mel, appreciating spirit when he stumbled across it, smiled a rather leading-Hollywood-actor smile himself, and nodded. ‘OK. Tomorrow night, then. I think there’s something with George Clooney in it.’ It seemed a safe bet. There usually was something with George Clooney in it, he’d noticed. ‘Do you want to meet in George Street, or shall I pick you up?’

  ‘I’ll see you there, sir, shall I?’ Janine said firmly.

  Frank Ross was sitting back at his desk, looking half impatient and half smug. Like the cat that had had
the canary but wasn’t getting the satisfaction of the aftertaste yet.

  ‘Right. Seven thirty, then?’

  ‘Sir,’ she said.

  Mel walked away, but not towards his office. Instead he veered towards Hillary’s desk.

  ‘DI Greene, a word,’ Mel said. Tommy Lynch’s dark head turned quickly from his computer screen. Hillary Greene got up and followed Mel back to his cubbyhole. As she passed Janine’s desk, their eyes met.

  Janine grimaced, and then glanced meaningfully at Frank Ross.

  ‘Grassing dickhead,’ she muttered under her breath.

  Ross, aware of a chill at his back, looked around and found that big ape Tommy Lynch staring at him.

  ‘What?’ he said aggressively, fully expecting Tommy Lynch, Detective Constable Tommy Lynch, to look away immediately. That’s what constables did when sergeants challenged them. Instead, Tommy continued to stare at him for another long moment before very deliberately turning his back.

  Ross flushed. His rage swelled, then ebbed, leaving him feeling vicious. He’d get him. Just give him time. The big, stupid, black bastard would soon learn who was really running this nick.

  As, no doubt, Hillary Greene was learning at this very moment.

  He shot a smug glance at Mel Mallow’s closed office door and smiled.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Janine Tyler give him the finger.

  ‘And just when were you going to tell me?’ Mel said, his voice a good couple of tones lower than usual. It was, as everybody knew, the only way Mellow Mallow ever showed his anger. His open displays of rage and bad language were so rare as to have fallen into the mists of legend.

  ‘Sir, with respect, I’ve only just learned of the body’s identity myself. What? Ten minutes ago?’

  It was a lie, of course. She’d known about it for at least an hour. Big bloody deal. A whole hour.

  True, during that hour she’d been conniving ways and means of keeping the knowledge from Mel and holding onto her case as long as possible, but he wasn’t to know that.