Grave Passion

by Phillip Strang

  Goddard didn’t like the man any more than he disliked him; excessively cordial when they met, buttering up each other, a metaphorical knife poised to inflict the fatal blow.

  Isaac, after Maidstone Prison, had phoned Bridget. It took her no more than ten minutes to find an address and a phone number. If the Robinson patriarch had been in hiding, or just keeping away from his family, he hadn’t done it very well.

  Hector Robinson was not what he had expected. Isaac had tracked him down to the Durham Arms in Canning Town. Isaac rarely visited the area, known for drug gangs and violent crime, so much so that courier companies were refusing to deliver there, and the police entered in groups. The pub was on a corner site; the railway across the other side of the narrow road, a scruffy recycling plant to one side, and on the other side, down Wharf Street, a factory, empty from what Isaac could see. The pub had a website; it was in an industrial estate, make as much noise as you like, don’t worry about the neighbours. Isaac didn’t understand how that concept operated, nor how they had unrestricted hours, and the photo of the pub in better times didn’t match what he saw, a two-storey building, the upstairs painted off-white, the ground floor covered in out-of-date green tiles.

  Robinson sat in one corner; it was four in the afternoon, and the crowds that the barman had said would be in later weren’t even trickling in. There was just Robinson, Isaac and the barman, and two of them didn’t look to be good company, the barman obviously three-quarters of the way to being drunk and the missing father not pleased to see him.

  Isaac regretted that he hadn’t brought support with him. He made a phone call, an inspector at a police station nearby, a colleague from their uniform days.

  ‘You must be mad,’ the inspector had said, colourful expletives included. But that was Bill Ross, a rough knockabout type of guy who had lived up north, run with a gang in his teens, realised the error of his ways, joined the police. As he said when he met with Isaac occasionally, ‘Not much job security running with a gang, although we were mostly harmless, but better money. Now I’ve got the security, a mortgage that kills me, and not much else.’

  It was the way the man spoke, but after he had called Isaac a fool a few more times, he phoned a patrol car to get out to the Durham Arms and make its presence known. It was daylight, they’d do that, but come nightfall, it would be at least six officers and two vehicles, weapons available if needed.

  ‘What do you want?’ Robinson said as he downed his pint, looked over at the barman.

  ‘I’ll pay,’ Isaac said.

  ‘There was never any dispute about that.’

  Isaac could see why Jim, as a youth, hadn’t laid the man out until he had been fourteen. Robinson was not tall, barely to Isaac’s shoulder, but he was broad, with bulging muscles and a nose bent to one side, a street fighter or a one-time boxer.

  ‘We’re investigating a couple of murders.’

  ‘I killed no one. If you’re here about Janice, I’ve heard.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Not from you.’

  ‘We didn’t know where you were.’

  ‘You’ve found me now. What was so hard before?’

  Isaac hadn’t an answer. Robinson hadn’t been in hiding, and with the name of the suburb from Jim, it had been easy enough to find him. If Homicide hadn’t been so busy, and if the father had been regarded as important, it would have been possible to trace him. Even now, he was a person of interest.

  ‘I’m here now.’

  A uniform stuck his head around the door, nodded over at Isaac.

  ‘Back up?’

  ‘I’ve been told it's dangerous.’

  ‘It is. The reason I’ll be making myself scarce after you’ve bought me two more pints.’

  ‘The price of friendship?’

  ‘We’re not friends, not you and I. Brad’s out for a night of fun with some floozy, a good sort is she? And then, Janice is murdered.’

  ‘You seem remarkably well-informed, Mr Robinson.’

  ‘Only people who want money from me call me that. The name’s Hector.’

  ‘In that case, Hector, how come you know so much?’

  ‘Smartphone. I like to keep abreast of what my family’s up to, not that I see them.’

  ‘You had an altercation with Jim?’

  ‘Fancy word for him flattening me, a blow to the chin, another to the stomach. In Maidstone, so I’m told.’

  ‘I’ve been to see him. He gets out in a few months.’

  ‘How’s his mother, still putting it about?’

  ‘Not that we know of. Besides, we’re not investigating the foibles of your family, not unless they’re relevant.’

  Isaac took a sip of his beer; not a connoisseur, not like Larry, but he knew it to be of the worst quality, the reason the pub could keep the prices low.

  ‘We’re not relevant. Janice went bad, but then, that was always going to happen.’

  ‘Because of her mother?’

  ‘She was on the game, not that you’d know it. Back then, when she was young, she was real class, dressed up nice, worked in Mayfair, a posh establishment, influential clientele.’

  ‘She married you.’

  ‘Her selling herself to the toffs didn’t last long, and they always want fresh meat, no shortage of supply. Six months in and she’s damaged goods.’

  ‘You had no issues with your daughter prostituting herself?’

  ‘I did with the drugs, but if she came to no harm.’

  ‘She did. She’s dead, murdered.’

  Robinson was a despicable man who cared little for anyone, let alone his family. They hadn’t fared well without him, but it would have been worse if he had stayed.

  ‘She was pretty, more than her mother when she was young.’

  ‘According to your son, you would get drunk, start hitting your family.’

  ‘That much is true; I couldn’t handle my drink, that’s why I’ll only have three pints.’

  ‘Your wife accused you of ogling your daughter, but Jim said it wasn’t true; that you were fond of her.’

  ‘A good lad, is Jim, not like that hag. My own daughter? What kind of person do you take me for?’

  ‘I don’t take you for anything. I deal in facts. It’s not for me to judge you or anyone else, only to get the truth. Your daughter is murdered, yet you seem unconcerned.’

  ‘I control it better these days. If I got hold of the person who killed her, I’d be swinging on the end of a rope.’

  ‘Capital punishment was abolished in 1969, the last execution in 1964.’

  ‘I’d still kill the bastard.’

  ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You’re looking? What about the men who spent time with your wife, abused Janice?’

  ‘In time.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘In time, that’s what I said. If I find any of those that touched Janice, at the house or that bedsit, they’ll know my wrath.’

  ‘Premeditated murder is a life sentence.’

  ‘Not to me. The heart’s not so good, steroids when I was a serious bodybuilder. And now they tell me there’s cancer.’

  ‘I’d caution you against committing a criminal act.’

  ‘Caution all you want. There’s nothing you can do to me.’

  Chapter 11

  Forensics had taken the box from the cemetery, dried it out, and set up a meeting for eight in the morning. A preliminary report said that it could have been purchased in any hardware store and that it was almost new and had been in the ground for seven to fourteen days.

  ‘It doesn’t help,’ Larry said, the afterglow of his discovery still resonating in Homicide.

  The cemetery employee had given a description of the man who had been seen at plot 15973, and even though it could have been the man in Godstone, the man who had killed the unknown woman, it was inconclusive.

  Slowly, the lab technician lifted the lid of the small metal box. Larry craned his neck to look.
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  ‘It’s an envelope,’ the technician said as he removed it with a pair of tweezers. ‘No water on it.’

  The envelope was placed on his workbench. ‘I’ll need to check it before we open it,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll take the responsibility,’ Isaac said. ‘We need to know the contents.’

  ‘On your head, DCI. There could be fingerprints.’

  ‘They’ll be there after you’ve removed what’s inside.’

  For now, the contents were all-important.

  The letter was laid out on the bench. On it an address.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Isaac asked.

  ‘We’ll check it out,’ Larry said. ‘This is too sophisticated for drug smuggling.’

  Isaac hoped it wasn’t anything to do with the secret service; he’d dealt with them before, and they played dirty. On a previous case, one of the deaths had been an assassination, and he had slept with one of their operatives, only for her to disappear when he started asking questions, then phoning him a year later, wanting to take up where they had left off. He had declined the offer, much as he had liked her initially: too much baggage, too much unknown, too dangerous.

  ***

  Isaac hadn’t gained much from Hector Robinson, other than he was a surly individual who didn’t like the police. Apart from a run-in with the law in his twenties for stealing a car, and later convictions for various offences, he had kept out of prison, something his son hadn’t. His defence for taking the car had been that he was drunk, the keys were in the ignition, and he had thought it was his.

  The judge accepted his version of the truth, as the cars were similar. The arresting officer’s view when he gave evidence was that the man hadn’t been all that drunk, just tipsy, and that his car was in the garage at home, and it was a different make, only the colour was the same.

  It had been put forward by the prosecution that the Robinsons lived a hand-to-mouth existence. With the arrival of a child in the house, Jim, Gladys Robinson wasn’t working, and Hector, the sole breadwinner, was labouring, and had been unable to explain how he could afford a two-year-old four-door saloon car in good condition – his story of a win on the horses wasn’t believed.

  Robinson had walked free, jumped into his car parked down a side street not far from the court, seen the parking ticket, cursed loudly, and headed off to the pub to celebrate.

  Six pints later, as he drove home, a breathalyser, and his driving licence cancelled for one year.

  The story had been told to Isaac by Bill Ross, the inspector at Canning Town. How he came to know about it, Isaac didn’t know, but then, that was Ross’s style, a man who knew the street as well as Larry Hill.

  It was Ross on the phone. ‘You better get over here,’ he said. ‘It’s Hector Robinson; he’s dead.’

  Isaac had been preparing to join Larry and an armed response team on their visit to the address found in the box.

  In Canning Town, two blocks from where Isaac had met Robinson in the pub, a body was slumped up against the old wooden gate of a derelict factory.

  ‘No one took any notice,’ Ross said. The two police officers hadn’t met for over a year, not since Isaac had married Jenny, and the man had changed. Before, strapping with a bright red complexion, a cheery disposition, a beer gut. Isaac did not comment on the man he met: bags under his bloodshot eyes, and the belly, once so prominent, replaced by empty space. Bill Ross looked ill to him.

  ‘They would have thought he was homeless.’ Isaac said.

  ‘Or drunk. Your pub has plenty of them of a night.’

  It wasn’t his pub, but Isaac said nothing in response.

  ‘Staffing levels, that’s why we don’t get down here as much as we should. Up in the town, the hoodies are stealing whatever they can, uneducated most of them, condemned to the street, and then there are the fundamentalists who control half of Canning, and if a woman walks through with bare flesh exposed she gets verbal abuse, a cane around the legs.’

  ‘Not your cup of tea?’

  ‘Nor yours.’

  ‘We don’t have the problem,’ Isaac said. He didn’t want to get into a political or religious debate with Bill Ross, a no-win situation. He was more interested in the slumped body of the man he had met the previous day.

  ‘What’s the situation?’ Isaac said.

  The area around the gate smelled of urine, the patrons at the pub unable to wait for somewhere better or not caring either way; the latter the more likely.

  ‘If anyone saw him last night or this morning, no one contacted us. Not that we’d expect them to. Mind your own business is the best policy; I’d adopt it myself if I lived here. Thankful that I don’t, a three-bedroom house ten miles away. No idea why I don’t get a transfer.’

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘A routine drive through the area by a patrol car, to check the pub and any lingerers. Robinson’s not the first body down here, and there’s often fights, a knife used more often than not.

  ‘Anyway, they were down here at nine this morning, the safest time of the day. The drunks are sleeping it off; the fundamentalists, hooligans from what I can see, are at prayer or whatever they do.’

  Bill Ross was prejudiced, Isaac had known that for a long time. It wasn’t a healthy attitude for a police officer to openly display.

  ‘Time of death?’

  ‘According to the publican, he reckoned that Robinson left the pub fifteen minutes after you; before the heavy drinkers arrived and started causing chaos.’

  ‘Cause of death?’

  ‘Knife, none too subtle. The upper arm, lower torso, close to the heart, and his throat’s been cut. I’d say the throat was cut after death, but I can’t be sure. The CSIs will know better than me, and the pathologist will give you an A to Z, words you would barely understand.’

  ‘It’s your case, not mine. Motive?’

  ‘He had a place not far away, a dive, cheap even for around here.’

  ‘Bill, I need to know facts, not an opinion of the man’s living arrangements.’

  ‘It could be random, but it was early in the night. The worst of them wait for later before venturing out.’

  ‘My visit?’

  ‘It’s the angle I would take, the most logical. I’ll need an update from you.’

  ‘I’ll send you a report. That’ll show you what we’re investigating.’

  ‘Something to go on. It could have been you instead of Robinson if I hadn’t got a car down there to look after you.’

  Isaac shuddered; Ross was right. If Robinson’s death was tied in to his daughter and the Jane Doe, which looked increasingly likely, then those who were killing weren’t the sort of people to draw the line at a police officer.

  ‘Robinson’s daughter was murdered, not sure why, although she was operating out of a bedsit,’ Isaac said.

  ‘Prostitute?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Most of them around here are from the Caribbean, others from China or Vietnam, a few Thais.’

  ‘Voluntary?’

  ‘Those from the Caribbean are, not sure about the others. We do what we can; send a few back to where they came from, but they reappear with increasing regularity. One woman’s been deported two times but ends up back in one brothel or another. It’s hard to imagine why.’

  Isaac thought the man should get out and about, see the rest of the world; come to realise that Canning Town was better than where the women had lived before, and they had been fed the dream, seen the movies, believed it was milk and honey, not sour and definitely not sweet.

  ‘Janice Robinson is murdered, but there’s a twist to the case, not sure what it all means yet.’

  ‘You’ll figure it out.’

  ‘Janice’s brother, before her death, witnessed a murder or nearly did. He briefly saw the murderer, as did his girlfriend.’

  ‘Related?’

  ‘It appears to be. But the Robinsons are not major players, nothing really.’

  ‘Not sorely missed.’
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  ‘They’ve not made their mark.’

  ‘Sometimes, people die due to association, never knowing the reason.’

  ‘That’s why we think it might be professional.’

  ‘Whoever killed Hector Robinson wasn’t.’

  ‘Or doesn’t want it to look as if it was.’

  ‘Leave Robinson to us. I’ll keep you updated and don’t start driving down any back streets, not around here, and don’t go visiting pubs, nor start asking questions.’

  ‘Bill, it’s all yours; you’re welcome to it,’ Isaac said.

  ***

  Larry was waiting at Challis Street for Isaac to return; the address found in the box was under surveillance.

  The armed response team thought it was an overreaction from Homicide, but they were ready to play their part, and they knew DCI Cook from other investigations.

  The raid was to go ahead, although delayed by twenty-five minutes as Isaac had an onerous duty to perform first. Wendy removed Brad Robinson from school and took him to Compton Road.

  At the house, on Isaac’s arrival, Gladys Robinson, Brad and Rose.

  Isaac looked over at Wendy on seeing the young Winston; Wendy lifting her eyes to indicate that the two couldn’t be separated.

  ‘Ask Rose’s mother to come over here,’ Isaac said.

  ‘What is it, Chief Inspector?’ Brad asked.

  ‘I’m afraid your father has died.’

  ‘He died a long time ago when he left us,’ Gladys said.

  The reaction of the mother wasn’t unexpected. Rose went and put her arms around Brad’s mother.

  ‘That’s alright, dear. Nothing lost, not to us.’

  ‘How?’ Brad asked.

  ‘He was killed in Canning Town. We don’t know who or why.’

  ‘Was he living there?’

  ‘I met with him yesterday. Jim had known about Canning Town.’

  ‘Is this to do with the woman in the cemetery?’ Rose asked.

  ‘We have no proof, no reason to think it should be. Canning Town has a bad reputation. It could have just been a gang after his phone or his wallet.’