Soft Summer Blood

by Peter Helton

  McLusky, who did not care for dogs, felt relieved but tried not to show it as he sat down in the other armchair, an unsociable twelve feet away from Hotchkiss. ‘Good of you to see me.’

  ‘Not at all, not at all. I like to show an interest in young, up-and-coming police officers. Of course, I am also curious to learn in what way I can be, erm, of assistance to a detective inspector hunting a killer.’

  When he had made the appointment, McLusky had been at pains to avoid the phrase ‘helping with our inquiries’, the stock police euphemism for ‘being interrogated’. Before he could answer, Alvis appeared with a tray of refreshments, coffee in an ornate silver pot, fine china cups and a large box of dark chocolates. While Alvis poured, McLusky took out his cigarettes. ‘I’m sure you don’t mind …’

  ‘Put that filthy stuff away, McLusky, and smoke something decent. Alvis? Get the man a cigar. A Don Ramos, I think – one of the Petit Coronas.’

  Alvis obliged by walking across to a tall mahogany humidor that reminded McLusky of a gun locker and returning to offer him a cigar from a box of twenty-five. When McLusky had managed to get it lit, he tried not to cough as he enveloped himself in a blue cloud of Honduran tobacco smoke.

  ‘Yes,’ Hotchkiss continued, ‘always happy to assist in any way I can. I know young DIs are always under pressure to perform and get results, and, of course, the pay is quite appalling – wouldn’t you agree?’

  McLusky would and did but wasn’t prepared to admit it. ‘I assure you it’s quite adequate.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ He pointed an accusing finger at him. ‘I know what you earn. And let me tell you, this year alone I spent more money on a new car than you will earn over the next ten years of slogging police work. So I’m always glad to help out hard-up police officers.’

  ‘And how many police officers are … receiving your assistance?’

  ‘Over the years I have been able to ease a lot of hardship.’ He smiled benignly. ‘At the moment only three or four of your colleagues are receiving regular assistance to make ends meet.’

  The candid admission that Hotchkiss was bribing officers on his own force was irking McLusky, but he treated it as mere conversation, smoked his cigar and drank the excellent coffee. It was pointless to antagonize the man when he was here to enlist his help.

  ‘So how can I help, Liam? You don’t mind if I call you Liam? You can call me Roy.’

  ‘I’m here because we two have something in common.’

  ‘You and I? I didn’t get that impression the last time we met.’

  ‘That’s because we were talking about an extortion racket that had left two Indian restaurants in ruins and one Bangladeshi cook with ten broken fingers.’

  ‘Which you never managed to connect me to, however hard you tried.’

  ‘We’ll have better luck next time.’

  ‘I doubt it. And what is it that you and I supposedly have in common?’

  ‘I hate guns. You hate guns.’ McLusky knew that Hotchkiss had a passionate dislike of firearms, never used them and never allowed his men to use them, relying instead on old-fashioned muscle and cricket bats.

  ‘That is true. I’ve always hated them, though I hate them for entirely different reasons. You think only you lot should be allowed to run around with guns. I believe nobody should be allowed guns. Using guns is against nature.’

  ‘Against nature?’ McLusky leant forward with interest. This brought him within striking distance of the chocolates. He picked one, then read the legend on the box. ‘Hotel Chocolat. Did you pinch these?’

  ‘Don’t be daft; it’s the name of the brand.’

  McLusky popped one in his mouth. ‘Why have I never heard of them?’

  ‘Because you couldn’t afford them.’

  ‘Mmm, very nice. You were saying? Guns are against nature? How?’

  ‘Guns are counter-evolutionary, a fudge. Evolution is based on the survival of the fittest – am I right? So the strong get all the best stuff, the best food, the best shags and hence the best chances for their offspring, and eventually only the strong and healthy go forward. Right? In comes a moron with a gun. He’s a weedy little scrote and not very bright, but the gun gives him power over those brighter and stronger and more deserving than him. The gun stopped evolution.’

  ‘Interesting theory.’

  ‘It’s not a theory, McLusky. If a five-year-old came through that door and pointed a loaded gun at your head, you would do exactly as he told you, no matter how crazy his demands. Such is the power of the things.’ He blew a large, satisfied plume of smoke towards the ceiling. ‘All over the world, decrepit, demented, psychotic dictators oppress billions of people through the power of the gun. Without the gun they would long have been hacked to death and fed to the crows.’

  ‘We can’t turn the clock back. You can’t uninvent the gun.’

  ‘But you can clean up your own house. You can keep them out of your sphere of influence. Which is what I have done.’

  ‘And it hasn’t put you at a disadvantage?’

  ‘Not very often. Guns are used by morons, and morons I can deal with. If not today, then some other day, if you know what I mean. I don’t deal in drugs; you know that. That’s where you find guns.’

  ‘I need to find a gun.’

  Hotchkiss smiled. ‘Not for personal use.’

  McLusky, the Snake Slayer heavy in his pocket, ignored the question. ‘I need to find the thirty-eight that killed both victims. I believe it’s a rented gun.’ He told him about the two incidents at which it had previously been fired.

  Hotchkiss had listened with interest. ‘Leave it with me, Liam. I’ll get my boys to show an interest. Naturally, I expect a favour to be repaid in kind. I suggest you get your boys to show less of an interest.’

  ‘Naturally,’ McLusky said neutrally. ‘I shan’t forget.’ He scrabbled another chocolate from the box in front of him and quickly popped it in his mouth.

  ‘Make sure you don’t.’ Hotchkiss levered himself off the chair and went to the humidor. He slid three Petit Coronas into a leather cigar case and handed them to McLusky who took them reluctantly. ‘Take it, take it, Liam. They suit you. And they will remind you of all that was said in this room,’ Hotchkiss said pointedly.

  As he drove back towards the front gate which opened for him as he approached, he was no longer sure that going to Hotchkiss had been such a good idea. He had, of course, expected that Hotchkiss would have his man record the conversation, just as he himself had recorded it on his mobile. He played it to himself on his way back to Bristol, checking that nothing he had said could be used to blackmail him.

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘All of them,’ said Coulthart, waving a scalpel at the computer screens on the wall which showed two groups of X-rays of Bethany Hall’s body. ‘All the injuries you see are post-mortem, Inspector.’

  ‘But there are so many of them,’ said Fairfield. She was surprised by the number of breaks and cracks in the victim’s bones and the general state of her body, which now lay grey and bloodless on the table in front of Coulthart.

  ‘Whoever manhandled her body treated her like a sack of potatoes. No, that is not true; you would not treat a sack of potatoes this badly. This body has been dragged about, bumped over things, probably flung into the boot of a car or the floor of a van, then heaved over the parapet of the flyover. It hit the railway line with all the force of its dead weight and that broke the larger bones, but someone stood on her left hand at some stage and that broke three of her fingers.’

  ‘And what killed her?’

  ‘Almost certainly heart failure.’

  ‘What? She had a heart attack? Natural causes?’

  ‘Heart attack brought on by electrocution.’

  ‘Electrocution,’ Fairfield echoed.

  ‘Yes. Both palms of her hands show signs that they grasped something with a high current running through it.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘That I can’t say. But it was a su
bstantial object, perhaps an inch or more in diameter. Not a thin cable. And she grasped it with both hands. Whether voluntarily, I can’t say, of course; neither can I pronounce on whether her killing was unlawful or accidental.’

  ‘One does not necessarily exclude the other.’

  ‘I can safely leave that for your legal mind to ponder. But there are no signs that she had been restrained. Her clothes went off to forensics first thing; perhaps they can tell us something about where she might have been. You never know, you might get lucky.’

  Kat Fairfield did not think of herself as the lucky type – not lucky in love or at cards. Did she have a murder case or not? Here was her chance to shine; with DCI Gaunt still being delayed in Spain and McLusky busy with two shootings, the super had given the case to her. Standing in the car park at Flax Bourton mortuary, she lit a small cigar and squinted into the sunshine. Was it unethical of her to stand here and hope that Bethany Hall had been murdered, that Fulvia Lamberti was not just a missing person, so she might head up her own murder investigation?

  Back at Albany Road, Sorbie displayed no such qualms. ‘Let’s hope it’s murder,’ he said simply. ‘We could do with something decent to do around here while McLusky vacuums up all the interesting stuff. But electrocution? I don’t know. If she was clambering all over derelict places and into empty houses, she could have electrocuted herself, touching stuff she shouldn’t have.’

  ‘And then presumably threw herself on the railway line afterwards.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right.’

  ‘I know. Where’s my tenner?’

  Sorbie reluctantly handed over two limp and sweaty-looking fivers which Fairfield stuffed into a pocket of her charcoal-grey business suit. She had worn it to attend the post-mortem, now regretting the impracticality of it. The answers to Bethany Hall’s death might well lie somewhere in the rubble of a derelict house.

  ‘Are we going for lunch?’

  Fairfield would use her lunch break to drive home and change. ‘You can. I have got things to do.’

  Sorbie looked after her as she marched down the corridor. ‘Not a diet,’ he muttered. ‘Please don’t let her be on a fucking diet.’

  Having spent his lunch break shopping for cigarettes and drinking cappuccino in Park Street, McLusky made a decision. It was as sudden an impulse as the one that had resulted in him buying the huge and hugely impractical Mercedes. Instead of looking for a new place to live, he would buy the one he already lived in. He liked the area. He liked living above the Rossis’ grocer’s shop, where herbs stood in buckets of water and olives of all shades lived in old washing-up bowls where you served yourself. He liked the sign telling customers not to spit olive stones on to the floor. Anyway, it was high time he sorted out some of his finances with his building society and he’d make an appointment with a mortgage advisor while he was there.

  Every time he went into the branch for any reason, staff pointed out to him that his savings account was very old-fashioned and earned him practically no interest. The compensation payment for the ‘incident’ – as he referred to the attempt made on his life two years earlier – had swelled his already healthy finances to the extent that a deposit on his flat would leave him with plenty of money to spare for improving it. His branch was a few minutes’ walk from the station, which gave him time to smoke one cigarette and eat one of the sticky Danish pastries he had bought to get him through the afternoon. McLusky did not walk much, and never for pleasure, which meant he felt virtuous at the end of his twelve-hundred-yard stroll. The building society was a small branch in a narrow building. Only one counter was open and there was one customer in front of him. When McLusky looked up from the papers he had extracted from his jacket, he noticed that, unusually, the man was wearing a balaclava.

  ‘You! Stand against the counter.’ The robber waved a black semi-automatic at him. McLusky obliged, staring into the eyes of the gunman. Pale blue, almost grey. Accent local. A stray blonde hair protruding from the balaclava. Synthetic material. Hands not gloved, nails longer on one hand than the other: probably played the guitar. The details barely penetrated McLusky’s consciousness, but all of it would be there later. The man’s voice sounded firm but his eyes were panicked. The woman behind the counter also looked terrified when the muzzle was once more pointed at her. Was it a real gun? That was the important question here. Still not a foregone conclusion, even today. Several replica guns had been confiscated in the city only last week.

  ‘And you!’ the man shouted at the woman who had frozen. ‘Stop fucking me about and open the till!’

  ‘I can’t!’ she pleaded.

  McLusky thought of the Derringer in his pocket, then of being thrown off the force for illegally carrying a weapon, and decided to try another tack. He tried to sound casual, despite his heart hammering in his chest. ‘She’s right, you know?’

  ‘And who asked you, fuckwit?’ The gun now pointed at him once more.

  ‘It’s new regulations. She is not allowed to hand over money unless you can prove it’s a real gun. You’re supposed to shoot at the ceiling.’ McLusky pointed upwards. The gun hand of the robber seemed to sag a little. He pointed it at the woman behind the counter. The woman nodded. She also pointed at the ceiling, playing McLusky’s game. The door opened and a middle-aged woman walked in, one hand rummaging in her handbag for her credit cards. She saw the balaclava and the gun, froze and let out a strangled cry.

  ‘Out of the fucking way!’ The irate bank robber shouldered past her and stormed out of the door, pulling his balaclava off as he disappeared from view. McLusky caught a glimpse of blonde hair, thought for a split second about giving chase, then decided against it. The woman behind the counter, whose name badge said S. Lovelace, sat, hand on heart, breathing heavily but managing a wan smile. ‘I’ve been scared of that happening for years and now it’s happened!’ she said, getting some of her colour back. ‘I pressed the panic button earlier; the police should be here soon. I wasn’t sure if it was a real gun, either. That was a great idea, telling him to prove it.’ Relief made her gush. ‘Just as well it wasn’t a real one; there’s people upstairs and it’s a wooden ceiling.’

  McLusky swallowed hard. He had never thought of that; a nine-millimetre bullet would easily have gone through it. ‘Well done for playing along,’ he said on his way to the door. ‘I think I’ll come back some other time, though; you’ll be busy, I expect.’ He nodded as he passed the other customer and left, walking swiftly away once outside. Seconds later, first one and then two more police cars sped past him. He knew he would have been tied up for hours giving statements had he hung around. Of course, if he hadn’t left his pepper spray, speed cuffs and airwave radio at the station, the suspect might now be in custody. As his colleagues would be quick to point out. He had been stupid, of course; you had to give guns the same respect whether you thought they were real or not, because it was hard to tell the difference. What the morons who used fake guns didn’t realize was that using a replica in a robbery would get them a mandatory custodial sentence, even if they had carved it out of a banana.

  TEN

  A deadly car accident on the A4, a simultaneous robbery at a jeweller’s and a break-in at a pharmacy slowed services down to a crawl. Police and forensics had always been thin on the ground; now the thin blue line was broken in many places and investigations crawled along. Unlike in TV imaginings, real forensic investigation was notoriously slow. It took weeks for results to come back to the investigating officers. Fingerprinting was now done ‘in-house’, by police officers themselves, but anything more than that involved the slow and costly services of the privatized forensics industry.

  Investigations were even slower, Fairfield thought resentfully, when they weren’t started at all. She was standing on the upstairs landing in the house Bethany Hall had shared with Marcus Catlin. The girl’s room had been sealed up until a forensics team was available. Now it was being opened and two technicians entered, with Fairfield, also wearing a blue scene suit
, following hard on their heels. Not very far, however, since the room was small and cramped. One of the technicians stepped outside again to let her have a look around. ‘Could you live like that, Inspector? What’s all this stuff supposed to be?’

  The eight-by-ten-foot room housed only a narrow bed and small child’s desk, yet there was virtually nowhere for her to set her feet without treading on something. The bed was covered in piles of multicoloured clothes, some of them knitted and crocheted, much of it dyed in pinks and purples. More clothes lived in sagging bin liners against the wall. The floor was littered with more clothes, papers, drawings, books, pizza cartons and assorted junk, tangles of galvanized wire, tins of all sizes, defunct-looking electrical items: a toaster, a blender without a goblet, three electric kettles and a microwave with a damaged door.

  The technician at the back of the room followed tangles of cable to see what, if any of it, was plugged into the mains. ‘Did you say she electrocuted herself?’

  ‘I said nothing about her doing it herself.’

  ‘None of this is plugged in. In fact, the only socket I can see is by the head of the bed. We’ll bag all this up and test it, see if any of it was capable of electrocuting her. What do you think she wanted with all of this stuff?’

  ‘She was studying sculpture.’

  ‘Really.’

  Fairfield squeezed out of the room and knocked on the door opposite. A pale girl opened it and gave her a doubtful look. She was slight, neatly dressed, kept her hair in a ponytail and wore a silver crucifix at her neck. Her name, Fairfield knew, was Lauren, the only resident of the house not studying art. She kept her thumb in the book she had been reading, entitled Problems in Ancient History. ‘Could you have a look in Bethany’s room for us? But don’t go inside, please.’ The girl shrugged and, without putting down her book, crossed the landing. ‘Do you see anything unusual here?’