SALFORD MURDERS: The Private Investigator Gus Keane Trilogy

by Bud Craig

  “What kind of car was it?”

  He belched quietly.

  “How should I know? It was a dark colour. Anyway, it might have been a different day.”

  I didn’t think so somehow.

  “Like I said, the cops came to see me,” he went on. “They must have believed me.”

  Especially as they had a strong suspect in Jimmy, someone they knew had gone to Mangall Court at the relevant time.

  * * *

  “How’s the investigation going?” asked Steve in the Park Hotel the following day.

  He had driven over that evening from Dolgellau, where he’d lived since he retired. As he was gasping for a pint when he arrived, I allowed him to drag me straight out to the pub. Now we were ensconced in the watering hole we’d frequented for about forty years, getting stuck into Red Devil bitter. Not for the first time, I wondered if it tasted so good because it was named after Salford’s rugby league club.

  “Not too bad, I suppose,” I said. “I haven’t got Jimmy out of jail yet.”

  He sipped his pint, looking relaxed as ever in his uniform of polo shirt and Chinos, his thinning hair neatly cropped. Despite not seeing eye to eye about his devotion to golf, cars and Maggie Thatcher (particularly the latter), Steve and I were always comfortable together. We had enough in common to overcome our differences. Most importantly, we grew up together in the back streets of Salford.

  “He might have done it.”

  I drank deep before answering.

  “Don’t think I haven’t considered that. Anyway, there have been interesting developments with Vicky Monroe.”

  “Vicky who?”

  “The woman who got her leg over with Tim in Mangall Court,” I explained. “She went missing, remember? I tried to find her and bumped into Debbie Oldham.”

  “Debbie...?

  “A girl I went out with forty years ago.”

  He concentrated hard for about ten seconds.

  “I know the one, fair hair, nice body on her, a bit posh. By our standards anyway.”

  I explained about Debbie living next door to Vicky.

  “What’s she look like these days? Old and grey?”

  Anything but, I thought.

  “I’d say she’s worn well,” I said, “but more importantly she was able to help me with my investigations.”

  “Was she indeed?”

  I told him what Debbie had said and my trip to the Scillies.

  “Bloody hell,’ he said, “somebody’s been up to no good.”

  “Yes, but what exactly have they been up to and why?”

  “I don’t know what to suggest,” said Steve.

  We drank in pensive silence for a while. Then I remembered something else I wanted to ask Steve about.

  “Did you find out anything about Francine Ingleby?”

  “Aye, I did,” he replied. “First some background. Remember a kids’ programme about, ooh, fifteen years ago called Danger Gang?”

  “Vaguely. I’ve got a feeling Danny used to watch it.”

  “It was about a group of teenagers who got into adventures.”

  “And?”

  “Well, Francine Ingleby was in it,” Steve explained. “One of the main characters, she was.”

  He let a silence develop, possibly to build tension or maybe he couldn’t think what to say.

  “Young Francine was a good actress,” Steve continued, “and her future looked bright. Even when Danger Gang came to an end everyone thought she would go from strength to strength.”

  “Go on.” I said after another pause.

  “But she got a bit carried away with all her success. She got into drugs, arrested for possession a few times. So her DNA and fingerprints are on file.”

  I still couldn’t see the connection with Tim.

  “But what’s...”

  “Then she seemed to fade away. Nobody heard much about her for a few years.”

  I waited, knowing there was more.

  “More recently, her name’s cropped up from time to time in a couple of investigations. It looks like she may have taken up a new career.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I suppose you’d call her a confidence trickster.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nothing’s been proved, just...suspicions, I suppose you’d say. The trouble is, a lot of the victims don’t want to press charges.”

  “How come?”

  Steve picked up his glass again.

  “Partly because they don’t want to look idiots,” he explained, before taking a drink. “One or two of the blokes were genuinely in love with her.”

  “Right.”

  “She also befriended vulnerable people who had money in the bank. She offered them care and attention.”

  “Bastard.”

  “You said it, Gus. Some of them were, I dunno, grateful to her.”

  I shook my head sadly.

  “Anyway, a mate of mine has just retired from Lancashire CID,” Steve went on, “and he told me something interesting.”

  Though happy in his retirement, Steve still liked to keep up with his former colleagues.

  “Go on.”

  “A feller called Eliott McIntyre came forward a bit ago. He’d had a relationship with this woman. Thought it was the real thing.”

  I hoped this wasn’t gonna be a Mills and Boon saga.

  “But it wasn’t?”

  Steve took another mouthful and put his glass down.

  “Far from it. She conned him out of a load of money and he hasn’t seen hide nor hair of her since.”

  Poor bugger, I thought.

  “My mate and his team investigated, you know, and found evidence that Francine Ingleby had been in McIntyre’s house.”

  This Francine got about a bit, it seemed.

  “The woman he was involved with went under another name, I can’t remember what it was.”

  “But they think it was really Francine?”

  Steve nodded.

  “Correct. What I can do is put you in touch with the man who was conned.”

  I smiled at my old friend. Was this a sign of progress?

  “Great.”

  As I spoke I noticed out of the corner of my eye a balding man of about my age marching towards us. He stood out as the only bloke in the pub wearing a tie.

  “This McIntyre character can tell you all about it,” said Steve. “As he’s got nowhere through official channels he might be willing to pay you to find the woman who did the dirty on him.”

  “Nice one.”

  The man I had seen a few seconds ago arrived at our table and stood looking at Steve and me.

  “Would one of you be Gus Keane by any chance?” he asked in a southern accent.

  He was about six feet tall, about the same as Steve, wearing a grey suit.

  “That’s me,” I said.

  “I’m Bradley Harton. Any chance of a word? In private.”

  Steve and I looked at one another, both of us wary.

  “It’s not convenient at the moment,” I replied.

  “Not convenient,” he said, as though trying to make sense of the words.

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you wanting to offer Gus some work,” asked Steve.

  This time the man looked even more puzzled.

  “Nothing like that, no.”

  We went quiet until Mr Harton finally spoke.

  “Oh, come on, stop pretending you don’t know who I am.”

  This was getting beyond a joke.

  “I don’t know who you are.”

  “Nor do I,” Steve added.

  He tutted.

  “I’m Louise’s husband.”

  Oh, bugger. What did he want?

  “Brad, of course. Sorry but it’s still inconvenient.”

  He pulled up a chair and sat down.

  “Are you deaf, sunshine?” asked Steve.

  “I don’t think it’s any concern of yours, Mr...”

  “Chief Superintendent Yarnit
zky, Manchester Police,” said Steve.

  As always, he invested his words with great authority. When Steve spoke, people listened. It didn’t matter that he was really an ex-superintendent.

  “I just want to know where she is,” said Brad.

  Well, I didn’t think you’d come to discuss Salford’s prospects in the Super League, I said to myself.

  “I can’t help you with that,” I said.

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  Steve and I exchanged another glance. I took Steve’s expression to say, ‘leave it to me’.

  “We are unable to assist you,” said Steve.

  Ignoring Steve, Brad turned to me.

  “She’s back with you, isn’t she?”

  “What?”

  Alarm ran through me at the thought of Louise moving in with me.

  “She was always going on about you,” he added. “Gus this, Gus that...”

  I didn’t know she cared. He thumped the table.

  “God! It was...God!”

  He gave the table another punch.

  “That’s enough,” said Steve. “Now would you please go? We’re having a quiet drink.”

  Brad sat tensing his muscles.

  “I’m not leaving until I know for certain where she is.”

  Steve sighed.

  “In that case the landlord will make you leave. We’re regulars here, valued customers. He won’t want us upset. You on the other hand, well, he won’t mind losing your custom.”

  Brad didn’t respond. Steve looked over to the bar and beckoned. The landlord came over.

  “Problem, gentlemen?”

  “This feller’s being a pain, Arthur.”

  “Right. Out.”

  Brad turned to Arthur, saw the size of him and got up.

  “You haven’t heard the last of this,” said Brad before he sloped off.

  I was very much afraid he was right. After Brad’s departure, Steve got onto his mate about Eliott McIntyre. I rang Rachel and Danny to warn them about Brad. Rachel agreed to call her mother to tell her about it. I had already arranged for Danny to come and spend the night with me the following day and have a walk the day after. Rachel agreed to come over and have a meal with us to discuss ‘the Brad situation’. We had to devise a plan to prevent him from bothering us.

  Why the bloody hell couldn’t Louise arrange her life better? And if she was going to get married again, couldn’t she have chosen somebody more suitable? It still rankled, I had to admit, that she had preferred that pillock to me. His baldness made things worse somehow, when the only thing I had going for me at my age was a full head of hair. Steve and I talked about Eliott McIntyre a bit more and I was told to expect a phone call from him soon. Then we had another pint.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Maybe I should start by telling you my wife died about six months ago,” said Eliott McIntyre the next morning.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Elliott had phoned the previous night and we’d arranged to meet at the Blackburn Darwen Services at junction 4 on the M65 not far from where he ran the family printing firm. Stocky and about a foot smaller than me, he looked about thirty-five.

  “Thanks. If that hadn’t happened, I would never have met Zena.”

  “Zena?”

  He smiled apologetically, sipping his strong, black coffee.

  “Sorry, Zena is the woman who caused all the trouble. The police thought it was actually Francine Ingleby.”

  I nodded and he went on, having straightened his tie and cleared his throat.

  “When Becky died, well, it was as if my life went on hold for a while. But you know what they say, ‘life goes on’. Friends were saying I should try online dating.”

  Exactly what my daughter had suggested to me when Louise walked out.

  “It seemed...I don’t know, trivial somehow. At the same time, I was lonely.”

  He stopped talking to drink some coffee. He wasn’t finding this easy.

  “To cut a long story short,” he went on, “I signed up to New Life, a site for widows and widowers.”

  I had no idea there was such a thing.

  “I thought it would be good to meet somebody who understood what I had been through.”

  He paused again, picking up the spoon from his saucer.

  “Zena was the third woman I met. It sounds melodramatic to say she swept me off my feet,” he said, “but it’s true.”

  If you say so, I thought, like the old cynic I was.

  “She was so cheerful and up beat. Easy to talk to as well. And sexy too. God was she sexy.”

  Was that what blinded him to her faults? It wouldn’t have been the first time.

  “Our first meeting was in a country house hotel in the Ribble Valley and we ended up spending the night there.”

  He looked into the middle distance, a dreamy expression on his face.

  “The rest of this story is going to make me look a bloody idiot,” he went on. “But I was...it was a time when I was... susceptible, vulnerable.”

  “Sure.”

  “And I thought I could trust her. Famous last words.”

  He took a deep breath and puffed out his cheeks.

  “After we’d been going out together for a few weeks I suggested we go on holiday to Australia and New Zealand together. I’ve got family out there.”

  “I see.”

  “She was all for it,” he went on. “It was her who suggested we went first class all the way.”

  “So she gave the impression of having money herself.”

  “Oh, yes, presumably that was all part of the act.”

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  I knew something had gone wrong, but what?

  “The next time I saw her she said she’d done her research and could get us a good deal if we confirmed by the end of that week.”

  “Right.”

  “She’d pay for it, but she needed a cheque for my share right away.”

  So that was it, I thought.

  “I gave her a cheque for about eleven grand.”

  “And?” I asked, when he paused again.

  He drank more coffee.

  “She told me she was working in London for a few days so she wouldn’t be seeing me until the following week.”

  It was all fitting into place with an awful inevitability.

  “That was the last I saw of her. I’ve still never been to New Zealand.”

  Time to dig a bit deeper.

  “I need to ask a few questions,” I said.

  “There’s more to come.”

  “Go on.”

  “I bought my wife quite a bit of jewellery over the years,” he explained, “It was worth a lot of money.”

  “A lot?”

  “The best part of a hundred grand,’ he said.

  You could call that a lot.

  “I showed it to Zena and told her I was thinking of selling it. I’d never even looked at it since my wife’s death, I couldn’t bear to, for one thing, and kept it in a safe at home. Yet I was reluctant to let it go.”

  “What happened?”

  “Just last week, I opened up the safe. I’d decided I would definitely sell the jewellery. Maybe even spend some of the money on that New Zealand trip.”

  He shook his head disconsolately.

  “When I opened the safe, the jewellery wasn’t there.”

  Bugger. The poor bloke.

  “And you think Zena, or Francine, was responsible?”

  He nodded.

  “Who else could it have been?”

  I knew enough. We needed to be practical.

  “Right,” I said. “Have you got a photograph of this woman?”

  He smiled ruefully.

  “She hated having her picture taken.”

  How convenient. She had it all worked out.

  “What did she look like?”

  “About thirty. Dark hair, brown eyes. A touch taller than me. Slim.”

  Like hundreds of women.

&
nbsp; “Did she tell you much about herself?”

  “Lots, but it was probably all lies.”

  True enough, I thought, but what else did we have to go on?

  “Just go through it.”

  “OK. She said when her husband died she moved in with her mother in Accrington. She had an older sister. Let’s see...she was a set designer for the theatre, worked away a lot.”

  Dutifully I wrote all this down but couldn’t see it getting me anywhere.

  * * *

  At half seven that evening I sat down at my kitchen table with Danny and Rachel. She said when she arrived that she would be going home early as she needed an early night. The reason for that became clear when she told us she was pregnant again. That put us in a good mood, but once I had served up Brazilian Pork Stew, we got onto the unpleasant subject we had to discuss: the Brad situation.

  “I rang mum,” said Rachel as I poured Shiraz for Danny and me.

  Her dark hair was shorter now, with a fringe remarkably like Vicky Monroe’s.

  “She wasn’t pleased,” she added when I asked what Louise had said. “She said she was sorry that he bothered you.”

  “I never trusted that Brad,” said Danny, “too much of a smoothie. And he thought nothing of going off with somebody else’s wife.”

  We were getting on dangerous ground so I brought the conversation back to the point.

  “I just want to make sure he doesn’t bother us again.”

  I was most concerned about my kids. If he could find out where my local was, he was bound to know where they lived even though he had never been to their houses.

  “Is there anything she can do about it,” asked Danny?

  He brushed his hand quickly through his fair hair, a sure sign he was worried.

  “We talked about that,” said his sister. “She’s gonna make an appointment to see a solicitor. Some woman she was at school with, who specialises in this sort of thing.”

  It was good that Louise was taking action. I only hoped it would do some good.

  “She’s worried about grandma and granddad though,” Rachel added.

  “What?”

  I was outraged at the thought he would harass two people in their eighties.

  “He can’t be that bad,” said Danny, obviously sharing my opinion.

  Despite being the only person I knew who was taller than me, my son was a sensitive, gentle soul.

  “Mum says he’ll do anything to get back at her,” said Rachel.