by Danny Miller
‘I can’t see any shells, he must have collected them up.’
‘I don’t know why he’d bother. The bottles are still here, so it’s obvious what he’s been doing, and I found two well-thumbed gun magazines under his bed. All the same, it would have been useful to find one – to see if they match up with the one fired at Price.’
Clarke looked around, not really knowing what else she expected to see. But just beyond this small clearing where the trees had been felled for logs, the woodland was dense. She traced the supposed direction of Terry Langdon’s aim and some way off found what she was looking for – the white flesh wound of split bark where a stray bullet had hit a tree.
She pointed at it. ‘See over there?’
Hanlon followed her directions and eventually clocked it. ‘You’ve got eagle eyes.’
‘You got a penknife or something to dig it out with?’
Hanlon pulled out a thick red Huntsman Swiss Army Knife with everything apart from the kitchen sink attached to it. He offered it to Clarke.
She pointedly ignored it and headed back to the bungalow. ‘What did your last slave die of, Arthur? The exercise will do you good.’
‘I think she’s hot.’
‘What?’
‘You asked me what I thought and I’m telling you,’ said DS John Waters.
The two detectives were in Waters’ Nissan Maxima, making their way along the scenic B-roads around Denton with Bob Marley’s Exodus playing on the cassette player. Waters usually played his music loud, with the bass turned up as far as it could go so you could see the windows wobble. But bearing in mind the fragility of his passenger, he kept the volume nice and low, which suited the sedate pace they were travelling at. Mainly because they hadn’t actually decided where they were going.
‘To be honest, DS Waters, married man of barely six months, I don’t need your opinion on the delights of Mrs George Price, as they’re on display for the whole world to see. I’m talking about the book, the little black book.’
‘Oh, the book. You really think that’s why you were mugged?’
‘I do. Now, do you think Melody knew about the black book? When I said the names, Socks and Winston, she reacted to it.’
‘I couldn’t see her face – she had her back to us. Anyway, you shouted it out so loud she was bound to react.’ Waters smirked. ‘She thought you said sex, but I have a feeling that’s never far from her mind. That aside, I’m thinking there’s very little George Price does without her knowing about it. She wears the trousers in that house.’
‘What gives you that impression? He’s a formidable bloke, George Price. Not to be messed with, right out of the Harry Baskin charm school.’
‘You can just tell. For example, the way the house is decorated, very feminine, and would you have pictures of your wife with her kit off in the living room for all to drool over?’
‘I would if she looked like that!’
‘No, man, that’s her idea, and she gets what she wants. She’s the younger woman, she’s got the whip hand in that relationship.’
Frost pulled out his crumpled box of Rothmans from his jacket, and managed to find one that was only badly bent out of shape but not completely broken. He cracked open the window, sparked up the coffin nail and enjoyed a long thoughtful drag. He thought about his late wife, Mary. He really couldn’t remember any more – had he worn the trousers at home or had she? She may well have decorated the house the way she wanted it, but that was because it belonged to her parents and, frankly, he trusted her taste and couldn’t be bothered how it was done up. Maybe he should have bothered, and invested far more energy in their relationship and spent less time obsessing over work. Their marriage was over with a whimper, not a bang, and long before the cancer took her. She’d been a seriously good-looking woman, and there must have once been a spark between them for her to leave behind her stolidly middle-class family and take up with a policeman from the wrong part of town, but at some point it had all simply fizzled out.
The radio crackling into action broke his melancholic train of thought. The message came over: a man down in Denton General, PC Simms. Frost and Waters exchanged grave looks. Then came gales of static-filled laughter as everyone in the area with access to a radio got the story of what had happened to PC Simms. It involved a nurse, a bedpan and an assailant armed with a box of chocolates.
When Frost and Waters had recovered their composure and absorbed the finer details of the Denton General debacle, they finally decided on a destination. Twenty minutes later they reached it.
‘Denton’s pre-eminent nightclub for the discerning gentleman with a taste for exotic glamour and an appreciation for the female form of the highest order.’ That was how the Coconut Grove described itself and its entertainment offerings on the flyers distributed around the pubs and other clubs of Denton. And the place was packed. Because on Sunday afternoons, they always had the strippers in, as opposed to just the scantily dressed hostesses and dancers they had every other afternoon.
And as the detectives made their way through the dimly lit club, the first performer, ‘X-rated Sister Sledge’, as she was billed on the board at the entrance, had just taken to the stage and had started to peel off her highly modified PVC nun’s habit.
‘Is nothing sacred?’ asked Waters.
‘Well, it is Sunday, at least she’s made the effort,’ said Frost, distracted as he recognized Michael Hudson, the manager of Bennington’s Bank, sitting at the front nursing a drink. The DI made a mental note to make sure he said hello to him on his way out. It would make an interesting topic of conversation when they talked through the small print on his impending mortgage application in Hudson’s office.
The two men had to go through the kitchen to get to Baskin’s lair. The serving of food was all part of the licensing agreement. There weren’t too many chefs in the kitchen – it was a given that you didn’t really come to the Coconut Grove to eat – just a couple of bouncers in monkey suits eating fish and chips out of newspaper and watching Ski Sunday on the portable. They glanced lazily around at the two coppers and recognized them immediately.
‘All right, Jack?’
‘All right, Taff. How’s your mum?’
‘Oh you know, up and down, now she’s got her new Stannah stairlift. What happened to your bonce? Looks nasty.’
‘I fell off my Stannah stairlift. You want to tell your mum to be careful. Need a word with Harry.’ Frost approached the door marked PRIVATE and knocked three times in quick succession, then entered without waiting for a reply.
Baskin was sitting at his desk, fully absorbed in cooking the books. He didn’t look up as he invited Frost and Waters to take a seat.
In a moderate and measured voice Frost said, ‘Socks and Winston.’
The club-owner stopped running his pencil down a column of figures, and his lips, which usually twitched as he totted up the numbers, stopped twitching. Harry looked up at the two men across from him. He tore off his delicate gold-framed reading spectacles that were perched incongruously on a nose that had been flattened more than once in the boxing rings of Bethnal Green in his youth. His thick brow creased and dipped.
Frost smiled, he knew he was on to something. Nothing much rattled Harry Baskin, and he looked rattled.
‘Tell us about them, Harry, we know you know who they are.’
‘Well, I know what socks are, they’re what you put on your feet before you put your shoes on.’
‘I’m not leaving here till I get some answers.’
‘You better make yourself comfortable, then, because I haven’t got a bleedin’ clue what you’re talking about.’
‘Socks and Winston.’
‘Muppets?’
‘Easy, Harry,’ warned Waters.
‘I wasn’t being rude, but they’ve got a frog called Kermit, so just wondering if they added a Socks and Winston to the line-up of characters. Or maybe it’s those two old duffers who sit up in the box. You know, the ones who—’
&
nbsp; ‘Hurry up, Harry, we wanna get down the pub.’
‘Nothing stopping you, Inspector.’
‘You’re lying – I can see it in your beady little black eyes.’
Harry Baskin leaned forward across his desk for emphasis and said, ‘My missus says my eyes are my best feature, blue as an azure sky, she says. Now, one last time: I haven’t got a bloody clue who they are. Never heard of them!’
Frost met his challenging glare and also leaned across the desk from his side until they were practically nose to nose. You could barely fit a cigarette paper between the two men. ‘And I’m telling you, Harold, I don’t bloody believe you!’
‘OK, OK, gentlemen, time out, time out,’ said Waters, rising to his feet and raising his hands like a boxing referee to separate the two contenders. Both retreated to their respective corners and sat back in their seats.
Frost appreciated the intervention and knew that his colleague was right. It was pointless raising your voice, getting angry or attempting to intimidate a hardened criminal like Baskin. Threats to press charges for not cooperating with an investigation or obstructing the pursuit of justice simply didn’t bother him. Water off a duck’s back … If Harry Baskin didn’t want to talk, he wouldn’t. He didn’t grass. Baskin wasn’t old school – he was the school they knocked down to build the old school.
The DI tried a different tack. ‘OK, Harry. But it strikes me as strange that I come in here, black eye, fat lip and a turban, and you don’t so much as bat an eyelid.’
‘That’s the difference between me and you: if you told me a pigeon fell out of the sky and hit you on the head, I’d leave it at that. None of my business.’
‘Bloody big pigeon.’
‘Like I say, none of my business.’
‘Some things, Harry, you don’t have to say. When I said, “Socks and Winston”, your face was a picture, told its own story.’
‘All right, all right. Stop going on. You’re giving me earache. I’ll tell you what I know. George mentioned them once, but he wouldn’t tell me who they really were. That’s why he used nicknames for them, so no one found out.’
‘Not even his best mate and business partner?’
‘Only in certain things. I stay out of the gambling business, and he stays out of show business.’
Frost and Waters laughed derisively at Harry Baskin’s description of his establishment.
‘Those girls out there show it all every day of the week and twice on Sundays, and they look the business – that’s what I call show business!’ Baskin protested.
They laughed again, and it managed to dispel some of the tension in the room.
‘All George said was that they were a couple of bigwigs that he had on the hook,’ continued the club-owner. ‘They owed him money, a lot of money. More money than a bookie would normally allow on credit. But it wasn’t the money with George, not really.’ Baskin shook his head and looked reflective, as if, like Frost and Waters, he couldn’t quite believe this.
‘Come on, with men like George Price, and you for that matter, it’s always about the money.’
Baskin flipped open the lid of a wooden box to reveal a row of Cuban cigars as big as coppers’ truncheons. He clipped the end of one with a silver cigar-cutter and lit it with a Ronson table-lighter. His fat red cheeks were going in and out like a pair of leather bellows as he puffed away at the Montecristo to maintain its glowing red tip. The whole process took so long that the two detectives exchanged a look of exasperation, and Frost sparked up a Rothmans, his last unbroken one in the pack.
The club-owner then exhaled a heavy plume of smoke in the direction of the yellowed overhead light shade, which looked like it was a frequent target.
‘Granted, with me it’s all about the money, but not so with George. He likes the power. Now, I’m not averse to a bit of that myself, because invariably the money quickly follows. But George likes to hold it over you. When I was doing a five-stretch in the Scrubs many years ago, I did a fair bit of reading. You know, you have to keep your mind active in the slammer. Anyway, one book George recommended to me was The Prince by Machiavelli. Which, of course, is where the phrase—’
‘Come on, Harry!’ demanded Frost, getting impatient again as he watched Baskin relaxing in his chair. ‘Spare us the Bamber Gascoigne routine and get to the point. It’s not bleedin’ University Challenge.’
Baskin smiled. ‘George told me that Socks and Winston could be useful to me and him in the future. But he wouldn’t say how. And he wouldn’t say what they did or who they were. They were his ace in the hole. Yet again, typical George – by not telling me, he had one over me. He had the power. After a while I just thought he was talking bollocks, you know, giving it large, the big one, being flash. So how come you know about them? Wouldn’t have anything to do with you getting a crack on the head, would it?’
‘Didn’t think you were interested in such things.’ Frost stubbed out his barely smoked cigarette in the big crystal ashtray on the desk; his split lip hurt too much and took all the fun out of it. ‘One last thing: how come you’ve got one of your men watching over Melody and another posted at George’s door at the hospital?’
Harry’s big bellowing cheeks had filled the small windowless room with smoke, and with the pine panelling covering the walls, the place now resembled a sauna. ‘Melody asked me, and I thought it was a good idea.’
‘She asked you? It wasn’t your idea?’
Baskin shrugged. ‘Makes sense, happy to help. George is a mate and if Her Majesty’s Constabulary doesn’t have anyone there, what harm can it do?’
‘Yeah, well, the poor sod at the hospital is now in a hospital bed.’
Harry laughed incredulously and shook his head like it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. ‘Bad Manners Bob? He’s as strong as an ox.’
‘A nurse hit him over the head with a metal bedpan. He got in a fight with one of my uniform lads, PC Simms, who was on duty watching over and protecting George Price, and stopped’ – Frost raised his eyes to the heavens at the bruiser’s moniker – ‘Bad Manners Bob from going into George’s room. PC Simms thought he had a gun under his jacket; turned out to be a tin of Quality Street.’
‘That’s right, I told him to take George some for when he wakes up, which’ – Baskin rapped his knuckles on the wooden desk – ‘I’m confident he will. We ate all the good ones, remember?’ He then addressed a confused-looking John Waters. ‘There was only the nut cracknel and the horrible blue ones left; criminal waste of space, they are.’
Baskin blew out a puff of smoke as if sickened at the very thought, and Frost and Waters bestowed little nods of assent to this universally accepted truth.
Sunday (4)
The weekly Denton boot fair and market was packed as usual. Situated on a large plot of land behind the railway station, it had grown in recent times due to the demolition of a small shopping precinct, an early sixties brutalist affair in drab concrete, which had proved so unpopular and so poorly constructed that it had been torn down (or had fallen down) some five years ago. Nothing had replaced it, just car parking, and the boot fair that was held every Sunday.
Over a hundred stalls were offering an impossibly wide range of goods, everything from discounted dishtowels to antique Meissen china. It was a frenzy of tax-free trading. And it was the perfect hunting ground for Detective Inspector Eve Hayward. Dressed in faded jeans, cowboy boots and an olive-green MA-1 bomber jacket, her hair tucked under a black baseball cap with ‘BOY’ emblazoned across it, she was walking the aisles and perusing the stalls for that elusive bargain, just like everyone else.
When Eve Hayward woke up that morning, Sue Clarke was still fast asleep in her hotel room. She didn’t bother waking her and just left a note. Because unlike Superintendent Mullett, she didn’t believe she needed someone from Eagle Lane station escorting her around and showing her the lay of the land, and generally informing the populace, criminal or otherwise, that she was a copper. In fact, being seen with a
nyone from Denton CID was the last thing she needed or wanted. But, of course, she couldn’t tell Mullett or any of Denton CID that because, as far as she was concerned, they were under investigation as much as anyone else.
‘See anything you fancy, darling?’
She kept walking and didn’t even spare a glance for the man who had just sidled up to her. She knew all about him: he was a tall, handsome, flash-looking sod with a blow-dried George Michael haircut replete with blond highlights, and a square jaw that was sprinkled with designer stubble.
Eve Hayward said, ‘No, it’s all cheap tat or knock-off gear, and that goes for the blokes too.’
The man smiled. Even his teeth were fakes, very white and capped to within an inch of their lives. But in all fairness to him, the extensive and expensive dental work he’d undertaken was because he’d had them practically all knocked out with the butt of a sawn-off shotgun whilst trying to stop an armed robbery. ‘That’s what we’re here for, Eve. I’ve been doing a little shopping myself.’
Hayward turned to DI Tony Norton, her colleague from West End Central, and saw that he had a plastic carrier bag with about ten videos in it.
‘All the latest releases,’ said Tony Norton, ‘not on sale yet. Not officially, anyway. And some of them not even released in this country. And I was also offered cartons of cigarettes and crates of booze, all with no British tax on them.’
‘There’s a local bookmaker, George Price, on the critical list in Denton General,’ said Hayward. ‘He was shot on Friday. I’ve got a hunch it might all be connected.’
Tony Norton weighed this up. ‘So we’ve got the gee-gees and gambling, a glut of counterfeit goods hitting town, and our two men from Dublin spotted in the area. It sounds like our intelligence is right: they’ve spread their wings and are on the mainland. Which is a shrewd move, more money over here. Plus the fact things are getting too hot for them over there. They’ve made too many enemies, on both sides of the law. You know what comes next, don’t you?’