Dirty Weekend (Macrae and Silver Book 1)

by Alan Scholefield

  ‘And?’

  ‘And so he burnt it. And the classroom went up. And the books and desks. It’s a miracle the school didn’t burn down.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He disappeared. We told Social Services and they went to see his mother. Something of a case, I hear. And that’s that.’

  ‘What d’you mean, that’s that?’ Silver said.

  ‘I mean that’s it. Finished. As far as I’m concerned anyway.’

  ‘When do you leave?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Thank God! One thing: I didn’t realise the police spent as much time as this on a missing person. I thought you just wrote it down in a book and that was that.’

  ‘Everything’s pretty much that’s that with you, isn’t it, sir?’ Macrae said. The ‘sir’ was like an expletive. ‘Well, now you know. You better give me your private address.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘In case we need to interview you again.’

  *

  By the time they got back to Cannon Row the weather was beginning to clear. It was still cold but there was blue sky over London and the old brick glowed.

  Macrae stuck his head into the Incident Room. Because of the victim’s high profile it and several other rooms were full of detectives manning the phones, interviewing members of the public who thought they had vital pieces of evidence, and writing reports. All the media pressure, and it was considerable, was handled by the press room in Scotland Yard. Detective Sergeant Laker, who was in charge, came to the door.

  ‘How’s it going, Harry?’ Macrae said.

  ‘Like bloody Bedlam, guv’nor.’

  ‘All right, fill me in.’

  Macrae went to his own office, followed by Laker. There was a pile of official message sheets on his desk and he began to leaf through them as Laker talked.

  ‘He’s been sighted all over the place,’ Laker said. ‘We’ve had calls from bloody Scotland. Even Ireland. ’Course, everybody wears a green hat there, or so they tell me.’

  ‘Always happens when we release details to the media.’

  ‘There’s some punter in Liverpool says he’s caught him and locked him in his garage. But we’ve checked with the local lads and they say he’s round the bend.’

  ‘Forensic?’

  ‘Should be there, guv’nor,’ Laker said, pointing to the message sheets. ‘There it is. Anyway, they found nothing but Foster’s prints.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘The Coroner’s office has been on. PM’s tomorrow afternoon.’

  Macrae was looking at a sheet of ordinary paper with a personal message. It had not been logged and read simply: ‘Mrs Macrae phoned. Says will you phone her back?’

  Laker said, ‘And the Chief wants to see you, guv’nor.’

  ‘I haven’t had my bloody lunch yet. See if you can find Silver. Tell him to eat something now. We’re not going to have too much time.’

  Macrae stood alone in his office for a few moments. He always cut an old-fashioned figure next to Silver. In fact, he did so next to most officers. The bomber jacket was very much the style among the young DCs and sergeants, but Macrae tended to wear more formal dress. He was wearing a heavy black and grey tweed overcoat with the collar turned up. It made him seem even bigger. He got an outside line and dialled his ex-wife’s number.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Terry stood at the bedroom window staring down at the mews. By adjusting the venetian blinds he could look out without being seen. He had never been in a mews until the night before. He thought it looked pretty. It was cobbled and each little house was painted a different colour, most were pale pink or pale green. Many still had garages on the ground floor with notices asking people not to park in front of them.

  There were several cars in the mews. They looked expensive and well-kept. On the opposite side, a few doors away, a man was working on a large Toyota station wagon. The bonnet was up and he was leaning into the engine.

  Suddenly, Terry was back on the Douglas Garden Estate, looking down from the apartment window, watching his grandfather work on his car.

  In his inner ear he could hear his mother come up behind him and say, ‘I’m expectin’ company. Go down and help your grampa.’

  That’s how he had first come to know what she was doing. That and the rows between her and his grandfather. They were extensions of the rows his mother and father used to have.

  He couldn’t remember his father clearly. He had left some years before. If the truth were known, Terry hadn’t cared much one way or the other. His father was a long-distance truck driver and most of the time he was on the road. Sometimes, late at night or early in the morning, the door would open and he would come in. And it seemed to Terry that almost from the moment he set foot in the flat the rows would start.

  And then one week he simply hadn’t come home and they never saw nor heard from him again. Instead, Garner Maitland had come to occupy the sofa in the sitting-room and Terry’s life had changed.

  The rows went on, but unlike those between his parents these did not carry a sense of danger. They just went on and on in a low-key, hopeless kind of way.

  They argued about everything, money, food, TV, the children’s upbringing, until finally Garner Maitland seemed to give up and accept the status quo.

  What Terry had never been able to understand was how a man like his grandfather, a famous four-hundred-metre runner, a man who had just missed selection for the Jamaican relay team in the 1948 Olympics – the strongest team in the world – how a man like that could have worked for the London Underground.

  Terry had seen black people in the underground stations and they always seemed to be doing menial work, cleaning and sweeping.

  One day he had asked his grandfather and the old man had paused while he gave the question some thought and had then said softly, ‘We all has to work somewheres. I likes trains.’

  Then he had retired and his pension was small and that was another subject on which he and his daughter would argue. He wasn’t giving her enough for his board and lodging, she said. She accused him of spending more on his old car than he gave her.

  It was true, he did lavish money on the car. He loved that car. It was a little Morris Minor. He had owned it since before they became collectors’ items. He worked on it every day, cleaning and polishing, and tuning the engine. It had furry seat covers and special mats and extra lights in the rear window that came on when you braked. It had a steering wheel cover and a special aerial and a host of other knick-knacks.

  Terry had never seen a car that shone like it. Even the outside of the tyres was blackened so that they looked new.

  Because of the dangers of leaving it outside, the old man used part of his pension to rent garage space. One night the garage was broken into, the car was stolen and the police found it across the river in Rotherhithe. There was almost nothing left of it except the chassis. The wheels were gone, the body panels had been removed, the radio had been ripped out and even the engine had been stolen. That was the end of Garner Maitland’s life as a car owner.

  But they still had to keep out of the flat so they started to go to the park. At the beginning it had just been a place to go to. And then one day the old man had tied a piece of string to a tree and held the other end and said to Terry, ‘See if you can jump over it, mon.’

  And that’s how Terry became the world’s greatest athlete. Well, second greatest athlete. Only Daley was better.

  He became tired of watching the man in the mews work on the car and lay down on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. He stared up for a long time thinking of Gail, wondering where she was, what she was doing. He wished she was with him. This is what they had always wanted, what they had talked about.

  But the man had come between them. The man and the knife. He felt tears come to his eyes then. He hadn’t wanted to harm him. It wasn’t his fault. And yet, who would believe him? Finally exhaustion overtook him and he slept.

  *

  ‘One lamb tikk
a,’ Macrae said to the waiter. ‘One beef Madras. Two pilau rice. Two chappatis.’ He looked across at his former wife. ‘Poppadums?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Two poppadums. Onion bhajee. Mixed vegetables. And some mango chutney and lime pickle and—’

  ‘I am bringing you all the condiments, sir,’ the waiter said.

  He ordered a glass of white wine for Linda and a lager with a whisky on the side for himself and then, as the waiter was turning away, he said, ‘Oh, and bring me a little bowl of chilli sauce as well.’

  Linda Macrae had watched this with the slight feeling of nervousness she always felt when George took her out to a restaurant. He was such a big man and he was so firm that the waiters were usually in awe of him. He didn’t mean anything by it, it was just his way. But she was always relieved when the waiter smiled and went off to the kitchen.

  ‘Well . . .’ she said, looking down at her hands and wishing she had her glass of wine to fiddle with.

  Macrae lit a thin panatella and drew in the smoke hungrily. ‘How long has it been?’ he said.

  ‘You mean since we saw each other or had a meal together?’

  ‘I don’t know. Either.’

  ‘We haven’t seen each other for a year and we haven’t had a meal together since God knows when.’

  They were in a small Indian restaurant on the borders of Battersea. She had recently bought a flat in Clapham. ‘So we’re neighbours,’ she said. ‘I never thought I’d live as close in to the West End again.’

  She and her daughter had been living out at Tooting, but since Susan had left home to stay with her boyfriend, Linda had become restless.

  ‘You’re better off in a smaller place,’ he said.

  ‘That wasn’t why I bought it.’

  She looked very good, he thought. Like some of those women you see in the West End coming out of offices about six o’clock in the evening. Well-dressed. Well-groomed. Smart. Christ, who’d have thought that Linda would have turned into this?

  ‘You’ve put on weight,’ she said. He opened his mouth and she stopped him. ‘Oh, I know. So have I.’

  ‘It suits you.’

  ‘Thank you, but I’d be happier if I shed ten pounds.’ It did suit her, he thought. She had been thin when they’d married. And then put on weight when she was pregnant. He recalled her face then. Not quite plump, but smoothly radiant. And then she’d lost it again. Especially over the period of the divorce. Then she had become quite haggard. Now, she was just about right.

  She was of medium height with light brown hair and a face that had once been soft and pretty and which was still attractive, but not soft any more. It was a lived-in face. Her breasts, he had noted when he helped her off with her coat, were fuller than he remembered and her legs were still good. He had to tell himself that she was forty-three and not thirty-three and that she had a daughter of twenty-one.

  ‘Why did you?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Buy a new flat if the other place wasn’t too big?’

  ‘I thought I needed a change.’ He looked surprised. ‘Well, Susan’s gone.’ She smiled tightly at him. ‘Flown the nest.’

  The waiter brought the drinks and she took up her glass of wine. She wouldn’t have known what a glass of wine was when they were married, Macrae thought. She had a glass of sherry at Christmas and that was about it. God, the times he’d taken her to office parties and she’d just sat there sipping an orange juice and lemonade while the young PCs tried to look up her skirt. It was something to smile about: Macrae the tough thief-taker and his innocent little wife. Now here she was drinking dry white wine.

  He had noted her clothes. She was wearing a skirt and blouse. The blouse looked like silk and the skirt one of those you saw in the windows of Simpsons in Piccadilly. She was probably earning bloody good money, he thought. He’d heard that managing directors’ PAs were well looked after. He wondered if she let the boss get his leg over and felt a momentary pang of . . . what? Envy? Jealousy?

  ‘You said on the phone you wanted to talk about Susan,’ he said. ‘Bad news?’

  ‘No. Not really. You want to talk about it now?’

  ‘Let’s eat first.’

  ‘Anyway, that’s why I bought the new place. New life. New phase of it anyway. It’s like a face-lift.’

  ‘You’re going to miss her.’

  ‘I do. You think that when you have the place to yourself, when you don’t have to wash their dirty dishes and pick up their dirty clothes, you think life will get a little easier. But then, after a while, you start missing it. Now the place is squeaky clean.’

  ‘You always kept a clean and tidy house,’ Macrae said. ‘You were the world’s number one nest builder.’

  The food came and they helped themselves and he spooned some of the chilli sauce over his rice. Within a minute or two he started to sweat below the eyes. He ordered another round of drinks and gave his attention to the food. He ate quickly. The chilli sauce poured on to his stomach lining like Greek fire.

  ‘I don’t know how you can eat that stuff,’ she said.

  ‘I’m supposed to be near the end of something called the curry cycle. Next time I explode.’

  She smiled. He didn’t often make jokes.

  He finished long before she did and sat looking broodingly at his empty plate. To make conversation she said, ‘What are you on?’

  ‘A murder.’

  ‘Not the TV one?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I might have guessed. You were always working on holiday weekends. And Christmas. You remember that Christmas when the three of us were going to the Holiday Inn? Where was it? I can’t remember.’

  ‘Portsmouth.’

  ‘That’s right. And we’d packed our suitcases. Susan and I were just about to get the train. You were meeting us down there. And then you phoned that something had come up.’

  He drew hard on the cigar and inhaled the smoke. He remembered very well. He’d been on the Flying Squad then. They’d had a tip that some villains were going to tunnel through a dry cleaning shop near King’s Cross Station into the bank next door. They’d had the dry cleaners under surveillance for more than forty-eight hours. The villains were supposed to go in on the evening of Christmas Eve. So he’d phoned Linda and told her. Then, almost immediately, their informant was on the blower to say the job had been called off.

  They’d gone back to Scotland Yard and had a few drinks and it had turned into a Christmas party and he and Mandy had ended up in a hotel that night. He’d gone home the following day about noon.

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ he said.

  He ordered coffee and asked her if she wanted another drink and she shook her head. He ordered a large brandy for himself then said, ‘Come on. Have a liqueur. It isn’t every night we go out to dinner.’

  ‘That’s true. I’ll have a Calvados.’

  His heavy eyebrows shot up. He looked at the waiter. ‘You have Calvados?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  When the waiter had gone he said, ‘Since when did you start drinking Calvados?’

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me, George.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘I suppose in a way we’ll always be little Linda Brown and big George Macrae to each other. I’ve never told you this, but I never liked you at school.’

  ‘You hardly knew me. I was a couple of years ahead of you.’

  ‘We still talked about you. You were known as the bruiser, because you boxed. Some of the girls didn’t like boxing much.’

  ‘Some did.’

  ‘Boxing was all part of it, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Part of what?’

  ‘What you had to get out of yourself.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  They both knew what she was talking about.

  ‘It certainly came out of me the night you found me,’ he said. ‘Not the way it was supposed to either.’

  By that time he had left school and he was bo
xing for a club. Some said he might be the next light heavyweight champion of England. He’d won a narrow points decision against the champion of a club in Hackney and some of the local lads didn’t fancy George, or the decision, and they’d beaten him up and dumped him on the pavement near his own house. That’s where Linda had found him.

  ‘I nearly didn’t take you in that night,’ she said. ‘I hardly recognised you your face was so swollen.’

  ‘I learned a lot of things that night.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘When you fight, you fight to win. Doesn’t matter if it’s clean or not. Your father wouldn’t have liked that, would he? I mean, me saying it.’

  She sipped the Calvados. He wasn’t ageing well, she thought. There was a kind of seediness about him, a quality she had recognised in other men without women. Half the police force seemed to have been divorced.

  ‘No. He wouldn’t.’

  She’d been living with her father then. He had recently been invalided out of the police. By the time George met him he was dying. White hair and white beard and looking like an Old Testament prophet. He’d seen something in George and George had found something to respond to in him that he’d never found in his own father. He was only a sergeant. He’d never wanted to go further. Sergeant Joseph Brown. He’d been the one who had influenced Macrae into going into the police.

  Several times he had said, ‘You only need to remember two words. Self-discipline and self-respect. Remember them and you’ll not go far wrong.’

  In those days Macrae was working in a bank and he used to come round to see Linda and her father in the evenings. They would talk about the police. The old man liked to reminisce. Linda would always be doing something: mending for her two brothers, preparing meals, washing up. Then there had been all the added work when her father became bedridden.

  Self-discipline. Self-respect. Both had been abandoned with all the other luggage of his life, Macrae thought.

  ‘You know George, I’ve never told you this but when you le— When we split up . . . I thought my life was over . . .’