by JOHN STANLEY
THE NUMBERS GAME
John Stanley
Published by Not So Noble Books, London 2013
© John Stanley
And I feel like a number
Feel like a number
Feel like a stranger
A stranger in this land
I feel like a number
I'm not a number
I'm not a number
Dammit, I'm a man
I said I'm a man
Bob Seger
Feel Like a Number (1978)
Table of Contents
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty one
Chapter twenty two
Chapter twenty three
Chapter twenty four
Chapter twenty five
Chapter twenty six
Chapter twenty seven
Chapter twenty eight
Chapter twenty nine
Chapter thirty
Chapter thirty one
Chapter thirty two
Chapter one
Alma Street is still and graveyard-hushed tonight, the terraces standing like headstones, silent and cold behind boarded-up windows. No one lives here now…
He is here, of course. He is always here. This is his hunting ground.
However, though the people are long gone, the houses still have life. Peek into one of the bedrooms and see hanging on the wall a painting of a seaside scene, brightly coloured boats bobbing in the harbour, fishermen pipe-smoking in the noonday sun and seagulls wheeling high above the choppy waters. In the roaring silence of the night, you can almost hear the screeching of the birds and taste the salt air, acrid and herring-sharp at the back of your throat. It is all but a second’s illusion; the bedroom is empty and dark and the blooms on the faded yellow wallpaper have wilted.
He, of course, has no time for such imagery. The only colour he sees is red.
The air in the houses is musty with neglect; a rat scuffles and snouts across bare floorboards which creak in the cheerless chill. Yet but a few months before, these were bustling homes filled with frying bacon and steaming irons, whistling kettles and banging doors. The houses witnessed all these scenes, as they had for more than 150 years. Behind their hide-all curtains were enacted a thousand stories of people’s lives: of young couples lying at dead of night in the inner worlds of each other’s arms, protected from today and hoping tomorrow never comes, of small children squabbling and teenagers concealing fears behind curled lips and of couples growing old together in the embrace of a love as comfortable as a favourite old slipper. Here was hope and disappointment, happiness and tragedy, love and hatred.
Little remains now to say that the people were ever there. In one front room stands a worn easy chair, one raggy arm stained brown with a lifetime of coffee mugs, in another a faded lampshade on a bedroom floor, in a third an encrusted plate on a dusty draining board. And in one weed-infested back yard lies a bedraggled doll, arms outstretched for an embrace that can never come, a much-loved companion dropped by a small child in that final tear-filled departure.
Where once was life, now there is only death and it is Alma Street that is dying. Its houses stand tired and peeling-paint sad, condemned by a stroke of the bureaucratic pen as part of ‘greater things’, standing in the way of the council’s Grand Design. Tomorrow, it will be the last of the area’s streets to come down to make way for the Green Trees leisure complex, all glass frontages, fast food joints and neon signs. Some call it progress, regeneration, rebirth. Many people call it other things.
They certainly called it other things when the developer’s proposals to flatten seventeen terraced streets were presented to councillors. Not that the residents were allowed to address the planning meeting during which, below them, safe amid the plush red leather seats of the debating chamber, the ruling Labour members upheld democracy by doing what they were told to do by their group leaders. And when they left City Hall, it was with eyes staring hard at the floor lest they meet the pained and angry expressions of the people who had gathered in betrayed silence outside. Someone shouted ‘shame on you’ but the councillors did not seem to hear. Did not want to hear. Did not dare to hear. Were not allowed to hear by their political masters; the developer was prepared to invest millions in the site and the people simply could play the numbers game.
That was a year ago and Alma Street’s neighbours are already rubble. Only Alma Street remains, home to vandals, arsonists, graffiti artists and down-and-outs. But even the troublemakers’ time is running out; at 9am, the bulldozers will move in. Most former residents have already had their time, coming back to the roped-off street to pay their last respects, standing quietly amid the wasteland and saying fond farewells to Memory Lane. To them, progress seems a hollow concept.
Now, as misty night wraps the street in its death-shroud, just one figure remains, standing solemn and silent outside the boarded-up general store half way down the street. He does not stir as the city centre clock chimes one … two … three … four. As the hours pass, still he still stands. Watching, watching, ever watching. For he knows his time has come.
‘So, what do we know about the dead guy?’ asked Danny Radford, approaching number 51 Alma Street.
‘Warm,’ said Michael Gaines, who was standing on the doorstep and viewing his approaching detective chief inspector without much enthusiasm.
‘I thought he was killed a while ago?’
‘I am referring to Corfu,’ said the detective sergeant. ‘This is where you do your caring boss act and ask me if I had a nice holiday.’
‘Right,’ said Radford, peering over the sergeant’s shoulder into the darkened house.
Don’t fuck me about, Gainesy boy. Just don’t. Not on a morning like this.
‘So where is the body this time?’ he asked.
‘Back bedroom.’
Gaines swallowed the rest of his chocolate bar, rammed the wrapper into his jacket pocket and led the way into the hallway. Radford followed him, wrinkling his nose at the musty atmosphere of a property that had stood empty for several months. In the oppressive silence, the officers could almost hear silverfish scuttling across the bare boards.
‘So did you have a nice holiday?’ asked the chief inspector as he followed Gaines up the narrow stairs, instinctively reaching for the handrail to steady himself in the darkness.
I guess I have to ask but like I care.
‘He’s in here.’
As Radford crouched to examine the body, Gaines stared moodily at the wall. It was Monday morning and the job was his first since he had returned. The last thing he wanted was to deal with a murder. Just 36 hours previously, he and his wife Pam had been sitting at a little seafront bar, sipping red wine and watching the sun setting over the shimmering waters of the Mediterranean. Now, standing in a gloom broken only by wan daylight filtering through chinks in the boards across the window, Gaines wished he were back there.
‘Just concentrate on the job,’ said Radford curtly, hearing him sigh.
Reluctantly, Gaines returned his gaze to the corpse. Dressed in tattered jeans and a torn gree
n Parka coat, the dead man was unshaven, his greying hair was lank and unkempt and he had the emaciated look of someone who had not looked after himself properly for a long time. In his condition, it was difficult to assess his age but Gaines guessed it was little more than fifty. Lying awkwardly in a corner of the room, one leg twisted and buckled beneath him, the man appeared to have been there for some time. Cause of death was the metal spike rammed into his chest and a pool of dried blood had seeped from the wound and stained the floorboards. In the corner of the room lay an empty cider bottle which looked as if the man had dropped it. Maybe there had been a struggle.
Radford walked over to the window and peered through one of the cracks in the boarding. It made bleak viewing; where once had stood terraced houses and alleyways, now there was bricks, timber and shattered glass. Radford recalled the small knot of protestors gathered by the barriers at the bottom of the street when he arrived. Presumably, their homes were the ones that had been demolished.
‘So we’ve absolutely no idea who he is?’ he asked.
‘Not yet but what’s more important, surely, is that we have to be dealing with another…?’
‘For the moment,’ interrupted Radford quickly. ‘I do not think we can say anything for definite.’
‘Oh, come on, it’s exactly like the last one.’
‘Maybe.’
Maybe definitely.
A few months previously, just after the last of the residents had been bustled out of Alma Street, another down-and-out had been found in one of the bedrooms, also stabbed to death with a metal spike. Gaines led the inquiry and was able to establish that the victim was 54-year-old former secondary school assistant head teacher Desmond Creeley, who had lost his job after striking a 15-year-old pupil. Finding himself unemployable, Creeley drifted from casual job to casual job over the years and eventually fell on hard times as alcohol took over his life.
Knowing that Creeley had taken to living on the streets, the sergeant spent many hours talking to the city’s winos. They revealed that he had been involved in a number of drunken altercations with fellow down-and-outs and Gaines concluded that his death probably came in another such fight. Nevertheless, attempts to track down the killer had failed and there was always the niggling concern that he had been murdered because he was a soft target - and that it could happen again. Such considerations were the main reason the sergeant had called in the chief inspector this time.
But he did it reluctantly. They say opposites attract. Well they didn’t when it came to Radford and Gaines. Aged in his mid-thirties, the DCI was shaven-headed, keen-eyed and broad-chested, his custom-made grey suit tailored to show off the muscular physique that came from a lifetime’s devotion to the gym. He was a man on the up and everything about him said sharp, sharp, sharp. Nothing about Gaines said sharp, sharp, sharp. Older by more than a decade, and already with thoughts turning towards retirement, his face was craggy and lined, the eyes grey, his dark suit sitting uneasily on his paunchy frame with its drooping shoulders. Gaines had had enough of the job and he didn’t care who knew it. Including Radford. Particularly Radford.
The chief inspector glanced down at the body again and tutted as he noticed the dust on his sharply-pressed trousers.
‘So how did he get in?’ he asked, reaching down to brush it off with his hand.
‘Through the back door.’
‘I thought the developer was supposed to secure all these houses?’
‘The board had been pulled off. He wouldn’t have been the first, would he?’
‘Not really.’
Both officers knew the trouble the area had experienced with vagrants breaking into the derelict houses.
‘But we’ve absolutely no idea who this one is?’
‘I’ve got Perlow checking the local offies to see if anyone remembers him.’
‘Bit early for him, isn’t it?’ said Radford, peering at his watch in the darkness. ‘Was he out of bed when you rang?’
‘Yes - just not sure whose.’
‘That barmaid from The Nag’s Head, I guess,’ said Radford, trying to give the pretence of being up to date with his younger officers’ private lives.
‘He finished with her three weeks ago. Last I heard, he was going out with her sister.’
‘Bloody hell, has the man no pride?’ said Radford with a shake of the head, then looked back at the corpse. ‘So, who found chummy?’
‘One of the demolition workers. Sooner these places are flattened the better.’
He noticed the hesitation.
‘You disagree?’ An edge to his voice.
‘These streets are part of the city’s history,’ said Radford. ‘You’d think somebody could have done something to save them.’
‘Yeah, but they’re old wrecks.’
‘But they weren’t, though, were they?’ said Radford, suddenly animated. ‘They were people’s homes and now someone is going to knock them down. And for what?’
‘For a bowling alley.’
‘A bowling alley,’ said Radford scornfully as he walked out of the room. ‘How fucking naff is that?’
There was no reply and moments later, the detectives emerged out into the street.
‘So what do we think?’ asked Radford.
‘You know what I think.’
Radford lapsed into silence. He glanced to the top of the street and eyed the boarded-up pub; someone had spray-painted the word “RONNY” in large, crooked black letters. The chief inspector let his eyes stray to the wasteland beyond and his thoughts turned to the Green Trees project.
‘You do know, I take it,’ he said at length, ‘that this will bring a lorry-load of crap down on our heads? This is all very political.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Gaines. ‘I got enough shit after Creeley was murdered. There’s too many people trying to score points out of this, if you ask me. You’d think the sodding Queen had been murdered.’
‘Sometimes I wonder why I bother,’ sighed Radford.
‘Sometimes,’ murmured Gaines gloomily, his mind turning to balmy Mediterranean evenings, ‘so do I.’
Chapter two
It was not out of the question that the deaths were unconnected; that was Radford’s main thought later that afternoon as he put down the file he was reading and stared out of his office window at Read Street Police Station. It was, admittedly, a hopeful thought but one he was prepared to cling to because experience taught him that the rules changed when serial killers were involved. Suddenly, everyone wanted their say and the last thing Danny Radford needed was a circus on his patch, especially so soon after making DCI.
It also threatened to drag him into a delicate political situation that he had managed to avoid since returning to the city centre division two months previously. Ever since the residents had been evicted, the empty houses had become a magnet for local kids who broke in to start fires, teenage heroin addicts and winos drinking themselves towards their own form of urban dereliction. The situation had brought intense pressure from City Hall and Radford’s thoughts turned to Jason de Vere.
The previous year had seen the Liberal Democrat administration trounced in the polls, victim of an astute New Labour campaign masterminded by the suave 35-year-old lawyer, a slick and ruthless operator who had re-invented the party in Leyton, purging it of its more traditional northern elements. De Vere, who liked to present a tough public image and had pledged to rid the streets of down-and-outs, could spot a bandwagon a mile off; he would be loving this, thought Radford.
The inspector sighed and looked up hopefully as Gaines poked his head round the office door.
‘Anything?’ asked Radford.
‘No.’
‘But surely one of the winos must know something?’
‘Sorry.’ The sergeant sat down heavily in a chair. ‘Unless they really don’t know anything.’
‘Meaning?’
Go on, Gainesy, spit it out.
‘Maybe it was not a wino who killed them.’
; ‘OK, OK,’ sighed Radford, ‘we’ve danced around this one too long; is there a serial killer out there?’
‘Got to be a possibility. And you won’t be able to keep out of it this time.’
‘Mind, we shouldn’t automatically assume it’s the same killer,’ said the chief inspector. ‘The winos seem to spend all their time knocking seven shades of shite out of each other.’
‘Possibly but you can’t duck this one.’
There was a knock on the door and Detective Constable Gerry Perlow walked into the office. Radford eyed him dubiously. A few years younger than the DCI, Perlow was a stocky man with fleshy cheeks, a shock of tousled black hair and a hangdog appearance. His dark suit was crumpled, the jacket flecked with crumbs from his lunch and the knees of his trousers stained brown with mud after he had slipped while searching the wasteland near Alma Street.
‘I hope you have brought some good news,’ grunted Gaines, ‘because that will stop me thinking about your sodding love life. Have you really copped off with that barmaid’s sister?’
‘Careful, you’re talking about the woman I,’ began Perlow, then paused and grinned, ‘copped off with after four pints of Stella.’
‘Have you got anything for us?’ asked Radford.
‘Yeah, an ID on the guy in Alma Street. One of the winos told us who he was. Bloke called Bob Garnett.’
‘Not the Bob Garnett?’ exclaimed Radford, sitting forward, eyes gleaming.
‘Well a Bob Garnett.’
‘No wonder I didn’t recognise him. He’d changed so much.’
‘The wino reckoned he’d been on the streets for at least three years,’ said Perlow, sitting down on the chair by the window. ‘That would change anyone. How did you know him?’
‘Heard him give a talk a few years ago. He was a city council planner. In fact, he came up with the idea of demolishing all the old houses.’
‘That’s one heck of a coincidence,’ said Gaines, interest suddenly aroused. ‘Bloke found dead in the street he wanted to demolish. It’s a nice twist. Beats scumbags stiffing each other after a night on the sauce.’