Shooting Elvis

by Stuart Pawson

  She pulled open the drawer to the left of the kneehole, idly, almost uninterested, and noted the contents. Paperclips, staples, notelets, Pritt Stick, Scotch tape, an assortment of pens and pencils. The usual items found in any office. She closed the drawer and pulled open the one to her right.

  There was a newspaper stuffed into this one. It was the Sunday Times from the previous day. She pulled it out and read the headlines. Inside, there was an article about a man who’d murdered his ex-girlfriend after being released from jail for assaulting her on an earlier occasion. He’d already served a term for the manslaughter of a previous girlfriend. There was a box carefully drawn around the article with an orange highlighter, which is what had drawn her attention to it. She carefully folded the paper exactly as she’d found it and had started to place it back in the drawer when she saw the mobile phone.

  It wasn’t her husband’s fancy one, with the built-in camera and Internet access. This was a basic model like hers. She lifted it out of the drawer but the display was dead. Then she noticed that the little cover at the back was not in place. She found it in the drawer, with the phone’s battery and SIM card lying next to it. She knew about phones and SIM cards because she’d damaged her phone once and they’d transferred the card to a new phone so she didn’t have to change her number. Her husband insisted that she take it with her at all times. Presumably this one was faulty and he’d been trying to fix it.

  The side of her face had started to hurt because her tongue kept returning to the jagged edge of her broken tooth. She winced with pain and tried to hold her tongue away from the problem. Without thinking about what she was doing she fitted the SIM card into its socket, clicked the battery in place and re-fitted the back cover. She held down the button with the red phone on it and Eureka! It worked. The display sprang into life. It showed the T-Mobile logo, in colour, and a few seconds later came up with the message: Please confirm switch on. She pressed the OK button and the screen told her to wait.

  ‘Well that’s that repaired,’ she said out loud with a giggle, and immediately regretted it because the raw side of her tongue caught the sharp edge of the tooth and a stab of pain shot through her jaw. She was prising off the cover again, to remove the evidence of her snooping, but the discomfort persuaded her to have another attempt at the dentist. The number was still written on the back of her hand. She typed it into the phone, puckering her eyes to read the figures on the tiny keyboard, and pressed the button with the green telephone on it, same as she would do with her own. This time she was rewarded by the ringing tone, and a few seconds later one of the receptionists answered.

  ‘Oh, good morning,’ the wife of the man with shiny shoes said with obvious relief. ‘Will it be possible for me to arrange for some emergency treatment?’

  Chapter Twelve

  Terry Hyson was in bed with Angie. When he didn’t answer to several hammers on the door they put the ram against it and burst in. It’s what they like doing. Terry was upstairs, pulling his jeans on. She was sitting up in bed with the mascara running down her cheeks like the tailings from a coalmine, and her hair looking as if it had just gone through the spin cycle. Monday was her day off. From hairdressing, that is.

  Heckley nick was nearest so that’s where we took him. The duty solicitor was already there. The Super was going on holiday later in the week and he wanted the case sewn up before he went, so he’d jumped a few fences before he reached them. Terry was cautioned and told his PACE rights. He was given a mug of tea and his clothes taken from him. The clock was running and Les was impatient. I said I knew Terry, had dealt with him before and he trusted me. I felt that he might be more open with an officer he knew and trusted than with a stranger. ‘Fair enough,’ Les said. ‘We’ll interview him together.’

  ‘Where were you on the evening of May the ninth?’ Les opened with.

  Terry looked bewildered. An hour ago he’d been relaxing in a post-coital glow and the next thing he knew he was wearing paper overalls, sitting in interview room number one at Heckley nick with the Neal recorder running and a high window casting a patch of sunshine on him.

  Terry blinked in disbelief. ‘No idea,’ he said.

  ‘It was a Sunday, if that helps.’

  ‘No. It doesn’t.’

  ‘What about the evening of Friday the twenty-eighth?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Or the morning of Wednesday, the sixteenth of June?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. What do you think I am? I was probably at home. I go to the pub. Go clubbing at the weekend. Stay at home. That’s all.’

  The brief sat forward. ‘Superintendent,’ he began. ‘What my client is trying to say is that he leads a lifestyle that doesn’t demand that he keep a record of his movements. He doesn’t keep a diary.’

  Les said, ‘In that case perhaps you should point out to your client that he has some very serious charges hanging over him and it might be to his advantage to remember where he was on those dates.’

  I nodded my approval. Well said, I thought.

  ‘How well did you know Jermaine Lapetite?’ Les demanded.

  ‘Superintendent!’ the Brief interjected before Terry could reply. ‘You’re jumping to conclusions. I can’t allow that.’

  ‘I’ll put it another way, then. Did you know Jermaine Lapetite, Terry?’

  ‘No. Never heard of him.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Well I didn’t.’

  ‘What about John Williamson, known as Doctor Bones?’

  ‘Doctor Bones?’ Terry repeated, his voice high with incredulity. ‘I’ve never heard of anybody called Doctor Bones.’

  Les kept it up for over an hour, getting nowhere. I watched the patch of sunshine move across the desk, and the tapes in the recorder implacably noting every word. Soon we’ll be doing this on CDs, I thought, when tapes are no longer available. We wouldn’t have to turn them over every forty-five minutes, but with a bit of luck I’d be gone by then. I wondered what Sonia had planned for the evening, then remembered I had a date at the shooting range. I needed to tell her.

  ‘What were you doing at 14 Canalside Gardens on June the sixteenth?’ Les was asking. The brief didn’t bother to object, this time.

  Terry didn’t answer immediately. He was growing tired and upset. His hands were on the table top, the fingernails bitten down and ingrained grease highlighting the creases in his skin. I remembered that he dabbled with cars.

  ‘I don’t know where Canalside Gardens is,’ he replied, slowly and deliberately. ‘And I’ve never been there.’

  ‘How do you know you’ve never been there if you don’t know where it is?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you believe me?’

  ‘Because we have proof you were there, Terry. Proof. One hundred per cent. So why don’t you come clean and make it easy for yourself? You’re in deep trouble, and the more you lie, the deeper it gets. C’mon, Terry. What were you doing there?’

  The brief had been listening but when he realised Les was wasting his time he sat back and relaxed. Now he leaned forward again, saying, ‘Might I ask the nature of this so-called proof, Superintendent?’

  Les said ‘A cigarette butt was found upstairs at 14 Canalside Gardens on the day of the murder. DNA was found on it and the genetic fingerprint sent to the data bank. It was found to match samples taken from your client when he was arrested on a previous occasion.’

  Terry sat up as if electrified. ‘Well that proves it, dunnit!’ he proclaimed. ‘That proves it wasn’t me. I don’t smoke. I gave it up, just over seventeen and a half months ago. Christmas, 2002, it was. I haven’t smoked since, so it can’t have been me, can it?’

  The brief smiled and made a gesture that implied nothing but made it look as if he still was on the case. I hadn’t spoken, so far, but decided it was about time I earned my corn.

  ‘That’s not quite true, Terry,’ I said. ‘When you were in here, in this very interview room, last month, about the vandalising
of Angie’s sign, I offered you a cigarette and you smoked it.’

  He glared at me and a muscle twitched in his neck. For a moment I thought we had him, then he said, ‘You gave it me. It was the first fag I’d had in over a year. I smoked it and stubbed it in this ashtray.’ He swiped the back of his hand against the tin lid that served as an ashtray and it rattled onto the floor. ‘That’s the only fag I’ve had. I swear it.’ Enlightenment struck him. ‘It was you,’ he snarled, straight at me and rising to his feet. ‘It was you, wasn’t it? You planted it. You set me up, you bastard. You fucking bastard. You set me up.’

  I leaned back and flicked the panic strip with a knuckle. In a few seconds the desk sergeant arrived. ‘Take Mr Hyson to his room, please,’ I told him. ‘We’ve finished for now.’

  When they’d gone Les said, ‘Well, so much for having someone you know and trust in on the interview.’

  As I passed through the foyer Dave came in carrying a sandwich bag. ‘Have you brought me one?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I thought you’d eaten.’

  ‘You ate half of it for me.’

  ‘Fair enough. I’ll share. I’ve just been shopping.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘A pair of those sandals with the Velcro straps. Apparently it’s going to be a long hot summer and Shirl said I needed some for our holidays.’

  ‘I’ve got some. They’re good.’

  ‘I know. I’ve seen you in them. How did the interview go?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in my office. What make did you get?’

  ‘Berghaus. What are yours?’

  ‘Brashers, I think. Put the kettle on.’

  He made two teas and brought the sandwich into my office. It was cheese and pickle and we cut it in half with the office knife. I retrieved two KitKats from my drawer.

  ‘So how did it go?’ he asked again, using the knife to spread the Branston more evenly in his half of the sandwich.

  I said, ‘Did you know that they do Branston with small chunks, now, specially for sandwiches?’

  ‘So I’ve heard, but I prefer it crunchy.’

  ‘I thought you would. How did the interview go?’ I couldn’t help a smile. ‘I think Mr Isles will be displeased with my performance.’ I told Dave about the cigarette I’d given Terry Hyson in the interview room a month ago, and about his claim that he’d stopped smoking and that it was the only one he’d had in seventeen and a half months. He’d left the stub in the ashtray in the interview room.

  ‘And he’s claiming that you planted it at the doc’s house?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘It certainly looked like a plant.’

  ‘It did, didn’t it?’

  ‘Do you believe Hyson?’

  ‘I don’t believe he’s the Executioner,’ I said.

  ‘So who planted the fag end? Who has access to the interview rooms?’

  ‘All of us.’

  We finished the sandwich and Dave dusted the crumbs off my desk. He crumpled the wrapper into a ball and tossed it into my waste paper bin. ‘I’ll ring the Met about the phone calls,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the KitKat, I’ll have it later.’

  As he opened the door I said, ‘Oh, a word of warning about those sandals.’

  He stopped and half-closed the door again. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Umm, be careful if you walk through any long grass in them late at night.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Well, last time I did it, when I arrived home I had two hedgehogs stuck to the Velcro.’

  I ate my KitKat right then, with my feet on the cold radiator. Pigeons were cooing on the ledge under my window and the sky was unbroken blue. I went back in time, twenty-four days according to my diary, to the day I’d talked to Terry Hyson about Angie’s sex shop. That was a warm day, too. He’d been wearing a Lacoste T-shirt, with a V-neck. When the T-shirt market was saturated and sales had collapsed, they invented the one with a V-neck, paid a few celebrities to wear them and started all over again. I remembered what we said, visualised that first, long, satisfying draw he took and the plume of blue smoke he sent spiralling up towards the extraction fan.

  ‘You owe me one,’ I told him. I often say it. Most of our decent information comes from informers. Then we walked together towards the foyer. He thanked me, and smoke was drifting out of his nostrils as he said it. I could see the smoke, almost smell it. He’d had two cigarettes while he was in the nick. There’d been two in the packet, and he was smoking the second one as he left the police station. I was sure of it. Anybody could have followed him, but I was thinking the unbelievable.

  I spent the afternoon going through the list of names that our geographic scan had thrown up. We’d widened the search from half a mile radius to a mile. That’s a lot of people. Every male on the electoral roll aged between eighteen and fifty-five was fed into the police national computer and a file created for everyone with a criminal record. Then they were sorted according to the nature of their offences, with violence gaining extra brownie points, and the number of offences. The only people we’d interviewed in the course of the investigation who were discovered in the trawl were Terry Hyson and Donovan Bender, who’d robbed a bank while armed with a carrot. Statistically, it was one of them, but according to statistics the universe is uninhabited. According to statistics, your chances of winning the lottery are the same whether you buy a ticket or not. I typed link words into the computer, like child abuse, decapitation, racial, and it produced the relevant files, but there was nothing enlightening there. Then I started working my way through them looking for a series of crimes that might be considered a learning curve. The offences had occurred indoors, which meant that our man might have started his criminal career as a burglar. He knew about electrics and roof joists, but not much about anatomy. He was strong. He drove a white van. He knew about mobile phones. He knew about forensic science. He knew an awful lot about forensic science. He knew that it was possible to find DNA on a cigarette butt.

  I rang High Adventure, where Sonia worked, but they told me that she’d slipped out for a few minutes. There was a hesitant tap on the glass of my door and I saw a female silhouette standing there, shorter and less slim than Sonia.

  ‘Come in,’ I said, and the door opened. It was one of the civilian secretaries that I’d noticed a few times but never spoken to.

  ‘Mr Priest?’ she enquired.

  ‘That’s me,’ I confirmed with a grin. I thought about adding that everybody called me Charlie, but decided it sounded a bit cheesy, so I didn’t. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘A message for you. He said your phone was permanently engaged.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’ve only been on it for about ten seconds.’ She handed me a sheet of A4 with three lines of typing on it. They read:

  Mr Priest

  See you at 5. Bring a gun, please.

  PC Lord, Firearms Instructor

  ‘Right, thank you,’ I said, and she left, giving her bottom an exaggerated wiggle as she walked away. I could have invited her to have a coffee and a biscuit before descending back to the depths of the pool, but her perfume was a bit strong and besides, I’m not in the market. I read the note again, threw it in the bin and dialled Gilbert.

  ‘It’s Charlie,’ I said when he answered. ‘I told you that I was applying for my firearms authorisation.’

  ‘You did. You must be mad,’ he told me.

  ‘It’s only for the sake of morale,’ I replied. ‘I’ve little intention of ever carrying a gun in anger. I’m going to the range for some practice. Can you authorise a Glock 17 for me, please?’

  ‘From here?’ he said. ‘I thought they had their own guns.’

  ‘So did I, but I’ve received a message telling me to take one. All theirs must be out on a job, or something.’

  ‘Fair enough. I’ll make it out and ring Arthur. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot.’

  The troops were filtering b
ack and the office grew noisy with their chatter. Nobody had any revelations to make. A couple of ounces of cannabis had been found, plus some stolen property, but nothing relating to the Executioner had come to light. They’d been investigating the names on the list in a process we call Trace, Interview, Eliminate, or TIE. I suppose it’s politically incorrect, but I prefer to call it TIN, for Trace, Interview and Nail the bugger.

  It was Dave who saved the day. ‘It’s me, Chas,’ he said when I answered the phone. ‘We’ve got him! We’ve got him!’

  ‘Calm down, sunshine,’ I said, hardly able to contain myself. ‘Tell me all about it.’

  ‘I’m down in the incident room. The telephone people – they messed up, to start with. Somebody made a call from the mobile, but they didn’t manage to scan it for location. Something went wrong. They’re blaming the computer.’

  ‘Oh God, that’s all we need. Go on.’

  ‘But they got the number it rang.’

  ‘You mean we know the number that somebody tried to contact on the Executioner’s mobile?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Great. Fantastic. Have you identified them, yet?’

  ‘’Course I have. It’s a dentist in Heckley. I’m going there now to see who’s rung them today. This could be what we’re looking for. I’ll wait for you.’

  ‘A dentist?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘I’ve arranged to be at the shooting range at five.’