by Clare Curzon
She couldn’t miss the smug tone. He couldn’t bear her not to know he was way ahead of her on this one. And apparently Yeadings had been informed; had sanctioned this new angle. ‘Let’s hope it works,’ she said. Forewarned, she felt a niggling doubt about the approaching interview with Allbright and his brief.
As they gathered across the fixed steel table in Interview Room I Salmon nodded to her to set up the recording. She switched on, inserted the two tapes, gave date and time, introduced the suspect and his solicitor, then herself. Salmon snarled his rank and name before starting a frontal attack.
‘I want to volunteer a statement,’ Allbright interrupted him. His face was white and taut. His cuboid figure seemed somehow less substantial. The solicitor gave him a reassuring nod.
So they had it set up. Z’s premonition strengthened that the case against the man was going to fall apart. Allbright could slip out of the frame.
‘It’s about my chatline friendship with Micky Kane. That’s all it was. Nothing nasty in it. It’s just terrible what happened to the poor kid. If I’d ever dreamed …it could end up like it did …’ His voice was choked with emotion.
‘You’d what?’ Salmon demanded. ‘Have slugged him less hard? Have packed him off home to his mother?’
‘DI Salmon,’ the lawyer warned, ‘this is a voluntary statement. Let my client continue. I must ask you to refrain from questioning him at this point.’
Allbright closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. ‘I’d never have got in touch. Never said anything about the Harley. God, it makes me sick to think what …’
Z was already convinced. He’s going to get away with it. We’ve got the wrong man.
‘It’s my hobby, see? Well, more than that, I suppose. There’s something very special about a Harley. You’ve only got to say the name …It’s sort of magic. There’s other owners feel the same way. We meet up, talk bikes, go runs together. Only they’re already – already there, if you know what I mean …I needed to tell someone else, someone new.’ His voice changed, grew awed. ‘Sort of spread the gospel.’
‘Wanted to brag,’ Salmon muttered under his breath, earning a hard stare from the brief.
Allbright seemed not to have heard. He continued. ‘There are these chat lines. Well, you know all about them. I got linked up with this kid. He seemed kind of lonely, bored out of his mind at home. And enthusiastic. I wanted to show him. He was keen to ride. We arranged to meet up. It meant he’d have to skive off school. I was to pick him up on his way there. I’d got a spare skid-lid and leathers for him. He changed in the WCs near the town hall and we did the M4, M25, M1, hit over a ton and got pretty high on it.’
He stopped, suddenly aware of his audience. ‘It was mad, I know. But it was like we had something between us. Like he was me, only younger, with it all yet to come. I wanted everything good for him and he really seemed to like me, thought I was the goods.’
He sighed, slumped over the table. ‘We came back here and I dropped him in the town, while I went home to fix us a meal. He had my debit card to get some money for the train journey home. I really meant him to be all right with his folks.
‘Only that’s when it all went wrong. I waited, and waited, only he never turned up. I thought maybe he’d cleared off with my money, and I got really mad. So I went out to find him. He wasn’ t at the station and I thought he’d gone. But it wasn’t like that. He was really sick. I found him down by the river, lost and half out of his mind. He said he’d snorted some angel dust he bought off a man near the bank. I guess he’d been watched at the cashpoint and looked an easy target. They’d have leaned on him to try it. Maybe he thought it would round off a perfect day.’ By now Allbright was close to tears.
‘Can we take a break there?’ the solicitor asked. ‘My client is fatigued. Perhaps a hot drink would be in order.’
‘I’ll see to it,’ Z offered, noted the time and stopped the tapes. Salmon said nothing, glaring, frustrated, at the two opposite him.
When they resumed, Allbright shook his head. ‘What could I have done? He couldn’t travel home in that state. I was due at work later and I didn’t dare leave him alone in my house. If he got rowdy he might do anything. The neighbours could get to hear him. He could run amok and set fire to himself. Drunks I can cope with, but with someone like that …
‘So I took him by car out to my workshop. You’ve seen it. He was all right there, locked in. It’s got heating and water. There’s some food in a fridge and a divan bed with a sleeping bag, because I sometimes stay over, making adjustments to the bike or surfing the net.’
He paused, biting at his lower lip. ‘I’d missed out on my day sleep, so I was exhausted when I got off work next morning. I went home for a bite to eat and I fell asleep over the table. I meant to go and see how he was, but I got scared because I couldn’t see how all this was going to end. His folks would have panicked when he didn’t come home from school the day before, and by that point he’d been away overnight. I didn’t know their address or his real name; only what he’d called himself on line: Explorer. Just as he called me Hutch.
‘I had a drink to make me feel better. And another, and so on. I was still starved of sleep from the previous day and in the end I just crawled off to bed. There wasn’t time to go out and see him before I was due again at work. By next morning I guessed he’d be well over the worst of the drugs, and I went straight up there.’
Again he paused, covering his face with his hands. Then he leaned back, face drawn and a little tic quivering under one eye. ‘The boy seemed quite different, older and – harsh somehow. He said let them worry. His parents, he meant. They’d never made any attempt to understand him, and maybe the shock would bring them round. That’s what people did when they thought their kids had been abducted or run away: went all lovey-dovey and swore everything would be different from then on. So he was staying on and they could just wait on his pleasure.’
Allbright looked in appeal to the two detectives. ‘Bravado, see? Not a bad boy, but he felt hard done by. It was his first taste of freedom. Of rebellion. He’d got over being sick from the drugging, and he saw himself in a position to make demands. I tried to make him see sense, but …’ He shook his head. ‘It went on for another coupla days. Then, next time I went up there, he was gone. He’d broken out.
He appealed to them, pleading damp-eyed, ‘I never meant any harm to come to the poor kid. It wasn’t abduction, see? It started with him skiving, and then he just insisted on staying on. A friendly arrangement that just went wrong.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Beaumont left the squad car halfway down the alley. Overhead there was a distinct line of grey cloud moving in from the west. Little warm flurries plucked at discarded food wrappers dropped in the gutters. A white plastic carrier escaped to go cartwheeling down towards the river, frisky as a Jack Russell pup. Rain on the wind. The cold spell was finally breaking up. Now they’d be in for days of drenching Atlantic weather.
He walked back up the cobbled way to where the fence slats hung loose, moved three aside and squeezed through into the wasteland of rubble. By daylight the place looked even more derelict. And the same went for its human life.
Among the collection of cardboard cartons huddled in the corner by the shack, one or two still had lumpy figures curled in them under old blankets and waterproofs. The others had lost their owners to pavement corners where they’d staked out their begging territory. He doubted that any of these here were fit to recognize him as their drop-in of last night. The stolen watchman’s brazier they’d sat around held cold embers now, the scent of wood smoke no longer covering the stench of unwashed bodies and the aftermath of raw spirits.
He pulled aside the double sacking curtain of the shack and went in, stepping gingerly between the three bodies and their stacked possessions. ‘Wakey, wakey!’ he shouted and kicked at a zinc bucket to get his message across.
A stream of curses came from one corner.
‘Oh, steady on,’
quavered an older voice. ‘No need to get unpleasant.’
That would be the old queen they called Fanny. Beaumont crouched beside him. ‘Thought you might be on for breakfast, mate,’ he told him. ‘Bangers and beans and sunny-side eggs with slabs of bacon and crisp, fried bread. How about it then?’
‘Bubble and squeak,’ said the old man wistfully. ‘They don’t seem to make that any more.’
‘Might do, if they’ve got the right leftovers. How about we try?’
The white-whiskered man struggled to sit up. ‘Who are you, friend? Sally Army, is it?’
‘Nuh. Just another empty belly. Only there’s this place I know, see? They’ll let me bring one mate in.’
He was being regarded by faded blue eyes with faint memory stirring behind them. ‘Do I know you?’ And then dawning suspicion. ‘I’ve nothing worth taking.’
Beaumont placed a hand on his bony old shoulder. ‘Pass up the offer if you want. I was here last night, remember?’
‘Thought I knew your voice. Can’t see a lot, though.’
‘So, hungry enough to believe me?’
‘Ah, there’s some good people left in the world. Help me up, eh?’ The old man dragged on his arm and they rose together. There was muttering from the far corner. Beaumont caaught the tail end – ‘ …to bad rubbish. Sodding old queer.’
They went out into the muted light of day. ‘Gonna rain soon,’ Beaumont offered. ‘Let’s get inside before it does.’
As they emerged into the alley a uniform officer fell in to either side of them.
‘Nicked?’ quavered the old man.
‘Just a few questions.’
‘But breakfast?’
‘Definitely,’ Beaumont promised, ‘with all the trimmings. Only talk to me first.’
Ramón finished dressing and looked at himself in the long mirror behind the door. He was wearing the new (new to him) outfit from the charity shop and wasn’t displeased with what he saw. He wasn’t on duty until after lunch but he knocked on Emily’s door and looked in to wish her good morning. Alyson was bent over her, wiping some slop off the old lady’s chin with a napkin and smiled back at him. Emily’s smile was slower and lasted longer. She gurgled something throatily. Her voice hadn’t yet got going for the day.
‘You’ll see him later, Emily,’ the girl promised. ‘Let him go and have breakfast now.’
He made fresh toast and helped himself from the cafetière, waiting for Alyson to reappear. He had made up his mind he must tell her, wasn’t sure how much would have to come out, but knew the coat had to be produced. Sooner or later she would come across it, and nobody would ever imagine such a fashion item had belonged to Sheena.
When Alyson sat down to her own breakfast, across the bar from him, he asked, ‘I show you something, yes?’
She looked up from sorting the post he’d brought up earlier. ‘Show me what, Ramón?’
He rose. ‘I get it.’
She heard his trainers squeak across the polished wood of the hall floor, and then a sharp click as he opened the airing cupboard used for a cloakroom. When he came back he laid a bundle of supple black leather and fox fur on the bench beside her. Puzzled, she opened it out.
‘Ramón, where did you get this? It’s beautiful.’
‘Belonging,’ he said, ‘to lady visit Emily. I remember.’
‘Yes, of course. Emily’s granddaughter, Rachel Howard. She wore it on the following day when she came to see me. But I don’t understand. She certainly had it on when I saw her out.’
‘Perhaps she come again, leave coat.’
‘And went off without it? In all that cold? I don’t think so.’ He left it to her to work out.
‘Has this something to do with Sheena? Did Rachel give her – no, surely not. And then Sheena disappearing. Was that when …?’
It was really weird. The coat must have cost an awful lot. Designer label, beautifully cut, lined with pure silk. If she put it on it would reach almost to the floor. But then Rachel Howard had been taller than herself. It was undoubtedly hers. So why was it here, and why hadn’t she sent for it?
‘I think,’ Alyson said, ‘something’s very wrong.’ She didn’t want to call Fitt and burden him further when he was already worried over Emily’s affairs. Perhaps it was a police matter, if only as found lost-property. She recalled the woman detective who’d been interested in the OD boy in hospital. Sergeant Rosemary Zyczynski. She would certainly know what to do. She’d actually been here when Rachel Howard called that second time. Her card with a phone number was still tucked into Alyson’s daybook.
‘Who’s Beaumont’s fragrant friend?’ DC Silver asked, passing Z as she burst from the CID office.
‘Who? Where?’
‘In the canteen, glugging tea by the bucketful. He didn’t tell you? Seems some old tramp he’s brought in.’
Tramp? And last time she’d seen Beaumont he was grinning like the Cheshire cat over going to visit derelicts down past the Odeon. So he was on to something. She was torn between following that up and passing on the puzzle that Alyson Orme had just dropped on her: the fashionable, arrogant Rachel Howard from Edinburgh turning up again at the penthouse, then going out into freezing wind with no coat on? And while Z hung on at the phone, Alyson had checked that no other outdoor clothes were missing.
You could almost suspect the woman was still there in the apartment, hidden away somewhere.
DI Salmon was in one of the interview rooms and couldn’t be approached. He wouldn’t welcome any interruption to what he so clearly saw as man’s work.
Just suppose …a striking, thin, dark-haired woman unaccountably gone missing. Then the unidentified body Beaumont had been called to at the college … Similar age and appearance, according to him. So, the same woman?
As Z weighed the connection Yeadings turned the corner in the corridor and was ambling towards her. ‘Sir,’ she called, ‘I think I’ve got a name for the murdered woman.’
‘Lost your little lad, wasn’t it?’ The queer they’d called Fanny raised his beaky nose from the mug of hot tea. Fascinated, Beaumont watched the transparent drop of liquid hang on its sharp end, wobble an instant, fall and become unidentifiable in the dark, steaming brew.
‘Name of Micky. Thirteen years old.’
‘Don’t know what they called him.’ He raised the mug in both hands, warming them through, and drank thirstily.
‘They. Who’d that be then?’
‘Two men. None of us.’
‘They didn’t doss down at your camp? Had you seen them before?’
‘No. On the street. Separate. Selling stuff.’
Hanging around near the banks, Beaumont guessed; watching who used the cash dispensers. Looking for custom. That’s when one of them had seen Micky Kane flush with Allbright’s handout, and on a sudden fancy he’d handed some over for a final kick. ‘These guys were dealing?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He managed to sound offended.
‘Oh yes you do, you old fraud. What was it they gave Micky? You saw.’
Fanny looked wildly around, decided there was no way out, and hung on to the promise of breakfast. The delectable smells escaping through the kitchen hatch confirmed everything the detective had promised.
The old tramp sniffed. ‘Little packets. Could have been anything.’
‘And then what?
‘Then they went away.’
‘Taking the boy?’
Fanny looked uncomfortable. ‘There were two of them. Young, tough.’ His voice was plaintive. He had guessed what they wanted of the boy. It was a world he’d grown up and grown old in, and he’d no illusions. He’d seen it all before: kids snatched to make into call-boys, child prostitutes, street dealers.
‘I’m not blaming you,’ Beaumont told him. ‘There was little you could do. But the boy had spirit, at some point must have tried to get away. So he ended up dead, with his head bashed in and thrown into the river. You could have been quicker telling me what happened.’
The old man stared down into his empty mug. ‘You’re a copper,’ he excused himself.
‘Yeah. I get to clean up the messes. Can you write? Because you haven’t quite finished yet. I want it all down on paper before you get a bite to eat.’
Of course he could write. The man had obviously been educated and had a career of sorts at some time. Beaumont had come across his kind before, inadequates who finally couldn’t face up to being rubbished by others walking a straighter route. So they gave up and joined the garbage they were condemned as.
‘Let’s get upstairs and find you a pen,’ he offered.
‘You’ll discover I’m a bit shaky. I’d do better with a typewriter.’ He was clinging to remnants of dignity.
‘Ever tried a computer keyboard?’ Beaumont asked, almost matily. ‘No? Well, now’s the time to try. Then I’ll print it out and you can sign it.’
Fanny got shakily to his feet. ‘It’s some time since I did that. Let’s hope I can remember who I am.’ But he was weakly smiling.
Zyczynski and Beaumont had joined the Boss in his office for coffee. ‘The DI has reported a negative interview with Mr Allbright,’ he told them. ‘And Beaumont’s statement from Arthur Goodenough, aka “Fanny”, has confirmed that we’ve little enough to hold our Harley biker on. Encouraging a minor to skip school, and failing to report a runaway aren’t major crimes. It’s well short of abduction, and Crown Prosecution would never look at it. The disruption at the warehouse and blame arising from it are probably punishment enough to make Allbright wiser in the future.’
‘The DI …?’ Beaumont ventured.
Yeadings busied himself over the filter to hide an appearance of smiling. ‘Is far from gruntled. He’d had high hopes of putting Allbright in the dock for the Micky Kane murder. He’s with uniform branch at present, organizing a sweep to pick up the dealers, if they haven’t fled the scene. Mr Goodenough, despite claiming poor eyesight, gave a very useful description of the two who took Micky away. As local distributors they’ll have more important connections, which Drugs branch have doubtless been surveying. This may signal the end of their Nelson’s eye policy on the small fry involved.’