by Faith Martin
‘Mr Higgs,’ Hillary said pleasantly. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Greene. I’m currently in charge of the Florence Jenkins murder inquiry.’ She let the last two words, unstressed though they were, speak for themselves, and saw him instantly pale. His nose was slightly red and broken-veined, either the sign of a drinker, or someone who liked to be outdoors a lot. Now it stood out as the only piece of colour on his face.
‘Murder? I don’t have anything to do with that sort of thing,’ he spluttered indignantly, as if selling Ecstasy to ravers never resulted in the death of a teenager, or selling horse to a 28-year-old party girl who should know better, never led to death from disease, malnutrition, or overdose, six years down the line.
Hillary smiled grimly. ‘But I believe a client of yours might be. Name of Dylan Hodge.’
The really quite beautiful blue eyes blinked at the mention of the name, and lily-white hands spread in an appeasing gesture. ‘Mr Hodge? No, I know a Hodgkins – he ordered several hundred weight of copy paper from us just last week. But Dylan Hodge doesn’t ring a bell.’
Hillary smiled again. ‘I’m talking about your other clients, Mr Higgs. The kind who like buying powder.’
‘Printing powder for photocopiers, you mean? No, I don’t think so. But I can have my secretary check our back orders.’
Hillary sighed heavily, and beside her Janine tapped her pen on her notepad in a rat-a-tat gesture of impatience. No doubt she was thinking the same thing as herself. Everyday you had to go through the same old rigmarole. It would be nice and refreshing if once, just once, someone would put their hands up to it, and admit to being a money-grabbing, conscienceless chancer.
‘I was talking about white powder, Mr Higgs,’ Hillary corrected, her tone of voice never varying. ‘You remember? You served eight years for supplying it not that long ago.’
Higgs flushed. ‘That was a mistake. It was one of my staff who stashed that gear. I knew nothing about it.’
‘Your fingerprints were found on the polythene covers, Mr Higgs,’ Hillary said, then leaned forward, allowing a tight smile to stretch across her face. ‘Look, let’s cut out the song and dance, shall we? All I want to know, pure and simple, is if you sold Dylan Hodge more than his usual amount of junk in the last two days. Then you can walk. Understand?’
Higgs licked his lips and darted a glance at Janine, but there was no help there. The pretty blonde woman looked as if she was miles away. Hillary leaned back in her chair, and could almost hear the wheels turning in his head. Could it be true? Was it a trick? Could he be out of here, no harm, no foul, if he told them what they wanted to hear? Or was this a trick? ‘I ain’t falling for no entrapment,’ he said sharply, and Hillary smiled ruefully.
‘Do you even know the rules governing entrapment, Mr Higgs?’ Hillary questioned, cocking her head to one side. ‘Because I’m not sure I do.’ She looked across to Janine. ‘Do you, sergeant?’
‘Can’t say as I do, boss,’ Janine said promptly on cue.
‘As a copper, I know all about PACE and what have you, but even the lawyers twist themselves up into knots when it comes to what constitutes entrapment and what doesn’t.’ Hillary carried on in her same, flat, cordial manner. ‘The Department of Public Prosecutions wet themselves when a case even smells of it. Isn’t that right, sergeant?’
Janine grinned savagely. ‘Won’t touch it, boss,’ she agreed.
‘See, Benny,’ Hillary said, leaning forward once more. ‘We’re working a killing here. We’re not interested in faffing about. We’ve only got so much time, so much funding, so many days we can keep up a full squad, before the big bad budget starts to bite, and we get scaled down. Now, why would I want to go wasting any effort in trying to set up a small fry like you?’
Higgs didn’t seem to take offence at being relegated to the small time. Instead a look of what passed for animal cunning spread over his face.
Hillary didn’t hold her breath. Higgs got caught regularly, and wasn’t exactly known for his genius. She doubted that whatever cunning plan he’d just come up with would seriously worry anyone.
‘Let’s talk hypothetically then,’ Higgs said, and beside her Janine snorted.
Hillary nodded wearily. Anything to get the ball rolling. ‘All right, let’s.’
‘Let’s say I knew what you were talking about. Let’s say I know this chap called Hodge. Just for the sake of argument, like.’ He cast a beautiful blue eye at the silently turning tape. ‘I’m not admitting I do, mind.’
Hillary flapped her hand in a yeah-yeah-yeah, get-on-with-it gesture.
‘Let’s say he likes some uppers. Mostly a bit of crack, when he’s flush. Nothing big time. Know what I mean?’
Hillary nodded encouragement.
‘And two nights ago, about 10, 10.30, say, he approaches one of my … er … members of staff, who happened to be working late in the office …’ He paused, because now he’d realized he was well off into the realms of fantasy land.
Hillary rolled her eyes. For ‘member of staff’ she read one of his army of juvenile runners, and for ‘working late in the office’ she knew he meant where one of his pushers hung out nearby teenage hang-outs. A pub that was currently ‘in’. A café that had become that month’s flavour of the moment. Cinemas, schools, anywhere where the young and vulnerable with money to spend could be shanghaied. ‘OK, OK.’ Hillary sighed heavily. ‘Let’s just say, hypothetically speaking, Mr Hodge found himself in desperate need of some staples, pens, and a cartridge or two of ink pellets. Did he buy more than his usual quota two nights ago?’
‘Oh yes,’ Benny admitted, almost amiably now. ‘Much more than usual. I, that is, my member of staff was quite surprised.’
‘How much more did he spend?’ Hillary asked abruptly.
‘Well now, his, er, stationery bill, usually came to something like twenty, twenty-five pounds. This time he spent more than double that.’
Janine scribbled something down in her notebook, and Benny Higgs suddenly looked nervous again.
‘I don’t suppose he said how he came to be so flush?’ Hillary asked, without much hope.
Benny shrugged, suppressing a laugh. ‘People don’t tend to talk much.’
Hillary guessed that was something of an understatement. You don’t buy drugs whilst standing on a cold December street corner, and then hang around swapping anecdotes. She didn’t bother to ask if Benny still had the ten or twenty pound notes that Dylan Hodge had used to pay for his skank. Even if he could remember exactly which ones were which, there was no way the Post Office would have kept records of the serial numbers on notes handed out to old-age pensioners. Why would they?
Which meant they had nothing by way of solid proof. Common sense said that Dylan Hodge had almost certainly used his grandmother’s entire pension to feed his habit, but common sense had surprisingly little place in a court of British law.
‘All right, Mr Higgs. Thank you for your co-operation,’ Hillary said. This case was turning into something of a bugger. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d worked a serious inquiry that turned up so little by way of forensic evidence to help them out.
‘I can go?’ Benny sounded quite surprised, almost as if he’d resigned himself to being a victim of entrapment after all.
‘Yes,’ Hillary said sourly. ‘You can go.’
She watched the good-looking, well-dressed man leave, and vowed to have a word with Mike about him the next time they met up. As a man with pull in Vice, he could sign off on a watch-and-grab offensive. Higgs might be small time, but he got her goat. It was about time he was back in jail, where he belonged.
She sighed, and glanced across at Janine. ‘Looks more and more as if our boy Dylan was spending his granny’s pension money.’
Janine nodded. ‘But according to our wits, Flo was determined to hang on to it for once and have a good birthday bash with it.’
Hillary nodded, but didn’t speak. Surprised, Janine pressed on, ‘So Dylan goes round there, is spotte
d by Barrington’s witnesses, and cuts up rough when granny, for once, won’t cough up the dough. He must know about the paperknife, is probably either high or coming on with the DTs, whichever, and loses his head. Stabs her, grabs the cash, and legs it. Goes straight to his nearest candy man and buys some goodies. It all fits, boss.’
Hillary sighed. Yeah it all fit. So why wasn’t she more happy about it? She was old enough, and wise enough, not to look a gift horse in the mouth. And ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the obvious answer was the right one. So was she just being dog-in-the-manger because she didn’t want to sign off on her murder case so easily?
‘You don’t like it,’ Janine said flatly, and Hillary stirred.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ she said cautiously. ‘We need to get Hodge in and really press him. But there were no fingerprints on the handle of the knife. If Hodge was so off his head that he flipped and stabbed Flo, we can’t then turn around and say he suddenly got clear-headed enough to wipe his prints off the handle. Junkies, as a rule, don’t think that clearly.’
‘So he always meant to do it.’ Janine played devil’s advocate without really thinking about it. ‘He wasn’t that high, or wasn’t hurting too bad, and did it in cold blood.’
‘Why though?’ Hillary shot back, enjoying, as always, bouncing her ideas off her subordinates. It always helped clear her mind. ‘He was killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.’
Janine shrugged. ‘Maybe he was tired of getting the cash in dribs and drabs. Perhaps, as his nearest and dearest, Flo had always promised to leave him everything in her will?’
Hillary laughed. ‘What’s everything? The house is rented, she doesn’t own a car, her electrical appliances could have come off the ark. Her furniture wouldn’t make fifty quid at a car boot sale. And I’ve seen her bank balance. It wouldn’t keep Hodge high for more than a week. No. There’s the smell of something else going on here. I just can’t seem to get a handle on it.’
Janine shrugged. She’d seen Hillary pull enough rabbits out of the hat in her time to ever bet against her being right. ‘Well, we’ll have a better idea once we have another go at Hodge,’ she said philosophically.
But that, as it turned out, wasn’t going to be so easy. Back in the office, Keith gave her a message from Frank. Hodge wasn’t at the squat and nobody, including his girlfriend, knew where he was. His gear, such as it was, was gone. Frank had also checked in all his old familiar haunts, but there was no sign of him. Dylan Hodge, for the moment, was in the wind.
Hillary turned on the anglepoise lamp over her desk and scowled down at her watch. Only ten past three and already the light was failing. Outside, a darkening, grey, rain-spattered day scowled back, as if to tell her to get used to it.
As if in defiance of the gloom, somebody had hung gaudy red, blue, gold, silver and green tinsel around the ‘Most Wanted’ posters, whilst another joker had hung tinsel ‘chandeliers’ from several of the ceiling lights. As if in cahoots, a radio was playing softly somewhere, a brass band rendition of ‘God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen’.
Hillary hadn’t even thought about Christmas yet, although she noticed that some of the shops had started touting it at the end of October. Every year the celebrations seemed to start earlier and earlier. Before long they’d be advertising it along with bloody Easter eggs.
‘You look like you could kick a dog,’ a cheerful voice said, making her look up, and Hillary’s scowl instantly turned into a smile.
‘Doc,’ she acknowledged cheerfully, pushing a chair with her foot towards him. ‘Have a seat. Not often we see you here.’ Like most police surgeons, he tended to hang out at the morgue, the path labs, or a pub.
‘Just finished with your old lady. Flo Jenkins,’ Steven Partridge said, by way of explanation.
Hillary blinked. ‘I didn’t realize you’d got around to her. Shit, I didn’t assign an officer.’ Normally, at least one member of the investigative team was obliged to attend the autopsy of a murder victim. You needed to get the information quick, first hand, and accurately. Vital clues were often forthcoming from the post-mortem, and she felt momentarily wrong-footed. ‘Didn’t you let us know? I’d have sent the new boy over. He has to be “bloodied” sometime.’
Steven looked at her curiously. ‘Of course I let you know,’ he said, with just a hint of reproach. ‘In fact I spoke to the head honcho himself, the walking Adonis.’
Hillary blinked, momentarily puzzled, then grinned. ‘Ah, Danvers.’
‘That’s right, your DCI. In fact, it was DCI Danvers himself who came to observe.’
Again Hillary had to blink. Nobody liked post-mortems, and by the time you got to the rank of DCI it was almost unheard of that you’d attend one yourself.
‘I know,’ Steven said, clearly reading her mind. ‘You could have knocked me down with the proverbial feather. Must have been years since he last stood behind the ME trying not to be sick. But he was very stalwart. No passing out, not even any retching. He even asked a few good questions. Not everybody can take it when the old buzz-saw comes out.’
Hillary nodded, telling herself not to think about it. Pointless, of course, because the moment she told herself that, she instantly pictured the old lady spread out on Steven’s stainless-steel table. Naked and without dignity, being cut, probed and inspected.
‘He must be one of those who likes to keep in touch with the grass roots,’ Steven Partridge mused, and the scent of Old Spice wafted across the table towards her. Today, he was wearing a pair of spotless cream slacks and what looked like a boating blazer. Gold cufflinks shone at his wrists, and his too-dark hair gleamed in the overhead lighting with some kind of expensive hair oil.
Pushing aside speculation as to why Danvers had attended the autopsy, she focused her attention on the medico. ‘Anything interesting?’ she asked, but by now it was rhetorical. Partridge wouldn’t have called by in person if everything had been strictly routine. She nodded to Keith Barrington, who was blatantly listening, and pointed at his notebook. Instantly, he grabbed it and wheeled his chair quickly over. ‘By the way, this is Detective Constable Keith Barrington, my new DC. Keith, this is Steven Partridge, one of our police surgeons, and the best of the bunch.’
Steven reached across and shook hands casually. To those who didn’t know him, the medical man was often mistaken for being gay. But Steven had a very wealthy, very lovely wife, whom he delighted in taking out and about to the opera, and dining with in ‘the city’.
Barrington nodded politely.
‘So, doc, what can you tell us about our victim?’
‘Well, no surprises about cause of death,’ he began, speaking slowly and clearly so Barrington could take notes. ‘The knife wound was the direct cause of death. It nicked her aorta, causing the left heart chamber to fill with blood, and thus stop beating.’
‘Would it have taken long?’ Hillary asked curiously.
‘No. Less than a minute, probably.’
Hillary felt herself sigh with relief. At least the poor old soul hadn’t suffered too much. ‘Any signs of a struggle?’
‘Not one. No bruising, except for around the knife wound itself, caused by the handle of the knife pressing into her flesh. No defence wounds, nothing under nails. I suspect the lady was simply sitting in her chair and somebody just stabbed her before she could react. The angle is confirmed by the way. She was already seated.’
Hillary nodded. No help there then. ‘And time of death?’
Steven looked pained. ‘About what we thought, I’d say.’
Hillary nodded and raised an eyebrow. ‘And now, on to the interesting bit?’
Steven grinned. ‘You know me so well,’ he drawled, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Keith Barrington look up quickly, sensing that the banter might just have a bit of a flirtatious edge to it. It probably did, but Hillary knew it was harmless. Steven was a one-woman man.
‘She was already dying,’ Partridge said flatly.
Hillary started up in her chair.
‘What? You mean she’d been attacked earlier? Or poisoned?’
Steven shook his head. ‘No, no, I don’t mean literally dying, right at that moment. I mean she had advanced cancer in her pancreas, which was spreading towards her stomach and lower intestine. Inoperable, invasive, deadly. She was riddled with it, poor old girl. No wonder she had such a cornucopia of pills. Pain management alone must have been a nightmare.’
Hillary nodded, and before she could stop herself, heard herself saying, ‘I knew she didn’t look well.’
Partridge nodded. ‘She wasn’t. And she didn’t have long left, either.’
Hillary glanced at him sharply. ‘Just how long did she have? It would have been her birthday in just a day or two. And she was looking forward to Christmas, so all her friends said.’
‘Oh, she’d have made her birthday,’ Partridge said at once. ‘Christmas? I don’t know. A bit iffy.’
‘So she’d have been dead within a matter of weeks?’ Hillary said, talking almost to herself by now. ‘Who the hell would want to kill a dying woman?’
‘Someone who might not have known she was dying, guv?’ Keith queried, then wondered if he was going to get his head bitten off for stating the obvious. If he’d been back at Blacklock he would have. His old sergeant never missed a trick to do him down.
Hillary Greene said nothing for a moment, but simply frowned. ‘A stranger?’ she mused softly. Was it possible? But a stranger wouldn’t know about the lethally sharp murder weapon. Or that Flo lived alone. Besides, why would someone just randomly go to an old woman’s house and knife her to death?
‘Doesn’t fit, does it?’ she said at last, then glanced across at Partridge once more as an idea hit her. ‘She must have known how bad it was?’ she said, expecting a firm yes, and was surprised when Partridge hesitated. Catching it, he shrugged.