by Janet Neel
‘You thought your daughter might have tried to do Alan Fraser harm? She knew if she laced his tea with antihistamine it would make him dizzy, didn’t she? She’d been with Francesca when she’d turned dizzy on only a couple of the same pills.’
Robert Vernon sat back in his chair and glared at him, the colour returning to his face. ‘I’ll have you off this case.’
‘It’s too late for that, Mr Vernon. You can probably get me taken off this case if you complain loud and long enough to enough people, but the information is all on file. There are other Chief Inspectors who’ll take up exactly where I left off, and who’ll feel just the same as I do about people who hide vital evidence.’ In the background he could hear Davidson shifting his chair in warning but he decided he didn’t care. ‘You may even have precipitated a murder by interfering as you did. If I thought that was why you hadn’t been willing to speak up, I’d feel a bit better about you. But as it is I don’t even know why you decided to give us your confidence, and I’ve no idea whether you’re telling the truth.’ He stopped, remembering who and where he was, and glared at the man across the table.
Robert Vernon was red in the face, his mouth a tight slit and his eyes narrowed in temper. The two men confronted one another, and Davidson, fascinated, sat frozen into his posture of dumb recorder.
‘You and Francesca in one day is too bloody much.’ Robert Vernon spoke explosively into the silence and Davidson jumped. ‘All right, Sally wouldn’t have done anything like that – she might have hit him, but she wouldn’t have tried to kill him, and I should have known that. I shouldn’t have interfered, and when I tell Sal I’ll get my character read for the third time today. But, I’ll swear she didn’t know what I’d done. Fraser must have found it difficult, or else he hadn’t had time, but he hadn’t told her.’
McLeish nodded and in the pause remembered that it was Francesca who had somehow persuaded this tough old monster to produce his evidence.
‘What made you tell Francesca?’
Robert Vernon hesitated. ‘She read my mind,’ he said, peering at McLeish to see if this rang any bells. ‘Then she said I had to come and see you.’ He brooded for a moment. ‘I remember her when she was a very pretty baby,’ he said sadly.
Davidson was seized by a fit of coughing and McLeish, taken by surprise, failed to keep his face straight. ‘I know what you mean,’ he managed to say. Robert Vernon grinned reluctantly at him and the atmosphere relaxed.
‘I’m sorry, anyway. I’ll get hell from Dorothy as well as Sally, if it’s any comfort.’
Yes, well … Dorothy, McLeish thought heavily, conscious of her lack of alibi for the critical time last night. Despite his brisk scouting of the idea that the two crimes were necessarily linked, the odds were that they must be. Two separate murderers among the same small group seemed unlikely. And whoever had coshed Nigel Makin had meant to kill him and had not failed by very much, the doctors had made that clear. Indeed it was probably only McLeish’s own arrival that had ensured Makin received treatment in time.
‘Mrs Vernon was out last night, I see from her statement,’ he said neutrally, and Robert Vernon looked at him in amazement.
‘I’ve been married to Dolly for twenty-six years – I really don’t have to wonder whether she’s going to start murdering people. She’s a Methodist.’
McLeish, who had known a multiple murderer who was a respected Congregationalist, forbore to comment.
‘I mean you don’t make that sort of mistake in your line of work, do you?’
‘I hope not.’ McLeish decided he had extracted all he could from this interview and that he would need, desperately, to talk again to Mickey Hamilton. He told Robert Vernon he would have to wait and sign a statement, and was mildly surprised when he accepted this docilely.
‘It gives me a bit more time before I have to talk to Sal,’ Vernon explained, openly considering McLeish. ‘You’re rather like Francesca’s dad, now I come to look at you. He was a big chap too – thinner, of course, because he had what killed him in the end for years before.’
McLeish nodded, receiving confirmation of something he’d half suspected as being the origin of some of his troubles with Francesca. Fathers, by her definition, were much loved but intrinsically unreliable people who were ill at any moment when you really needed them and who died leaving you and the family bereft. He went back to his office, putting these thoughts resolutely from him, and picked up the phone to ring Francesca.
‘I have just interviewed Mr Vernon,’ he said, when he got through.
‘Oh, good. He told you all? I mean, I’m sure you saw it straight away, but if Mickey knew Alan was getting him a place then he didn’t have a motive to kill. Quite the reverse, indeed.’
‘If he knew. Do you have a soft spot for Mickey?’
‘No. Yes. He sings, you see.’
McLeish did see; the eldest sister to four brothers, all of whom sang, would naturally be predisposed in Hamilton’s favour.
‘I had a couple of men at the Savoy,’ he said casually. ‘Did you spot them?’
‘Darling, how good of you. You needn’t have, I was perfectly safe, but that was kind.’
McLeish put down the receiver a minute later, smiling to himself. It occurred to him sharply that she had not answered his question, and at that moment Michaels appeared in his doorway.
‘Did she spot you?’
‘I thought so, sir.’
McLeish sighed, and then brightened as he thought about it again. If the uncompromising Francesca was prepared to accept the police presence gracefully rather than insisting on unmasking it, that was definitely progress.
He realized that Michaels was big with news.
‘Sir, you remember my brother-in-law at CabCall? Well, a driver who was off this morning came in at lunch-time and he was clearing his dockets. Sorry, that’s the name for the procedure. Drivers call in all the jobs they’ve done and they give the destinations and the prices, so that the office can send the vouchers in with the monthly bills. He called in one on the Vernon Engineering account going from Harrods to the Western Underpass site. Mrs Vernon was the passenger: it was called in her name, and in any case he knows her slightly, he’d driven her before. He dropped her about seven-fifteen, the records say. He got to his next job in Notting Hill Gate at seven-thirty.’
McLeish sat and stared at him. ‘She was there at the right time. She could have got on the site, too; the gate wasn’t locked. Well done, Michaels, what a piece of jam! Where’s her statement?’
He pulled it out of the top drawer where he kept the current case folder and found it quickly. ‘Trun … trun, Harrods, trun … trun, left about eight p.m. just before it closed, reached her friend’s house at eight-thirty. No word of a detour to the Western Underpass. Find out where she is, will you Michaels? I must talk to Hamilton, but I’d like to see that good lady, first.’ He thought momentarily of her husband, waiting to sign his statement and dismissively confident that his wife of twenty-six years was not a murderess.
However, Hamilton was available and to hand, remanded to the Scrubs, and interviewing him was the most urgent duty. McLeish called for a car and sat, dictating memos, as he and Davidson worked their way out to West London.
Mickey Hamilton looked terrible – there was no other word for it. His skin was sallow and his bright brown hair dulled; he looked so bad, indeed, that McLeish searched anxiously for signs of physical ill-treatment. ‘They’re looking after you all right here?’ he asked.
‘What would it matter if they weren’t?’ Mickey asked with a momentary flash. ‘How am I going to get to K6? I had that place – they won’t wait for me. I never saw Makin, I had no reason to attack him. When is he going to come round?’
‘No one knows that, and in any case he may well remember nothing at all. Happens with a bang on the head.’
‘Oh God.’ Mickey slumped again, his hands twisting anxiously, while McLeish decided how to begin.
‘You told me that, if he ha
d lived, Fraser was a more likely prospect for that place on K6 than you?’
‘Yes, I did. It’s true, but I didn’t kill him. He was my mate and I miss him.’
‘So you didn’t know that he had an offer of a place?’
Mickey gaped at him. ‘No, I didn’t. When was he offered it?’
‘The day before he died.’
‘The Committee didn’t tell me that. But they wouldn’t, would they? Well, now you know – he was the better prospect. I got offered it because he was gone.’ Mickey looked down at his hands, then suddenly scrubbed at his face. ‘Damn, damn, damn! He was better known, of course.’
‘You would have been very distressed if you had known he had the place?’
‘As you see.’ Mickey considered his hands bleakly. ‘Actually, it doesn’t seem to matter much, now – I mean, he’s dead and I’m here and I’ve got the place.’
‘If I told you that he had insisted that a place be found for you also, you would be surprised?’
He had his answer. Mickey stared at him, searching his face, then started very slowly to weep, his face contracting painfully. McLeish waited while he hunted through his pockets and failed to find a handkerchief, then offered a box of Kleenex.
‘He did that, did he?’ Mickey said, at last, through a faceful of paper handkerchief. ‘But who made the offer?’
‘A prospective sponsor. It was, of course, conditional on the Committee’s being able to find room for you both.’
‘There wouldn’t have been a problem if there was enough cash. Who was the sponsor?’
McLeish did not reply and Mickey watched him for a minute.
‘You’re going to make me guess. Robert Vernon? To get him out of the way?’ He considered McLeish’s professionally unyielding expression. ‘That figures, doesn’t it? That old swine doesn’t put himself at risk, he just pays people to go away. But Alan was going to make him pay for me as well, bless him. God, old Vernon would have hated that. Could he have hated it so much that he killed Alan sooner than pay?’
An interesting hypothesis, McLeish thought behind his dead-pan mask, and not one to which he had given consideration.
‘No,’ Mickey said, answering his own question, ‘he’d still rather pay. He isn’t the type to kill anyone, either.’ He looked at McLeish. ‘You’re not saying much, Chief Inspector.’
‘It doesn’t seem to be necessary,’ McLeish said drily, and a pale smile appeared momentarily.
‘So I had a place, although I didn’t know it?’
‘You really didn’t know it?’
Just for a minute Mickey hesitated, tempted. ‘No, I didn’t. I wish I could tell you I had, because I’d be in the clear, wouldn’t I? But I didn’t.’ He looked over Davidson’s head to the small high window. ‘I must get out of here.’ It was said softly, but he might as well have shrieked aloud.
‘I don’t know enough about Fraser’s death or the attack on Makin to feel comfortable about letting you loose.’ McLeish was equally direct. ‘So what can you tell me? What about the lorry fiddle that Makin told me he had found, both here and at the Barbican?’ Watching Mickey closely, he saw his hands move convulsively. ‘We think that someone bludgeoned Makin to prevent him getting any closer to that fiddle. Maybe Alan was killed for the same reason – that he knew a bit too much?’
McLeish stopped and sweated out the silence as Mickey’s eyes fixed themselves on the tiny grating. Finally he gave a long sigh.
‘Alan was in it. And the Doolans. I wasn’t.’
McLeish sat absolutely still but Mickey had exhausted himself.
‘So how did it work?’
‘I don’t know how it worked on the actual sites. But two flatbeds that were supposed to unload at the Barbican never got there: they came to the Jennings site down the road and Alan and the Doolans unloaded them. They stayed on the Jennings site for a week – they clocked off at the Barbican and gave out they were going to Ireland for the week – and fixed all the steel. They did the same thing again last month, only this time it was RSJs and Alan said they had to work like blue-arsed flies unloading lorries at four different places. They weren’t needed for the fixing at any of those, so they only missed a day at the Underpass. Too bloody tired to go in after that night. Told the GM they’d been on the beer.’
‘It was just the three of them?’
‘Yes. I don’t know how it was worked on the sites – I mean, someone had to sign for the lorries that never got there, and I don’t know who it was. Alan knew, of course: he had to, whoever it was part of the organization. But Alan wouldn’t tell me, he said I didn’t need to know and it was better to leave it that way.’
Typical of that cool, careful customer, McLeish thought, with a pang.
‘What did they get out of it?’
‘The Doolans got three thousand quid each for the Barbican job, and a thousand each for the night’s work they did away from the Underpass.’
‘Not a fortune, was it? Someone must have been making a bit more than that? It cost the firm £300,000 on the Barbican and about the same on the Western Underpass.’
‘Alan got more.’ It was the old, well remembered resentment. ‘He didn’t tell me how much, but he got more. If I knew who it was on site, I’d tell you, wouldn’t I? Whoever it was had a bloody good reason to attack Makin if he thought he was getting close to the truth. Even allowing for the difference between buying and selling, there must have been £200,000 in there for someone.’
McLeish agreed silently that this was sound reasoning. It did not, however, improve Mickey Hamilton’s position, because he simply didn’t believe that Mickey had not been involved. It would have been the end of K6 for both him and Alan Fraser if they had found themselves with a prior engagement in a court of law, charged with theft.
‘We can always find the Doolan brothers, you know, and ask them,’ McLeish warned, and was taken aback to see Mickey look simply amused.
‘That would do you no good. They’d never have met any of us before. It was maybe some cousins from Cork way that we were thinking of, and indeed none of them had been out of Ireland this year. We don’t stamp Irish passports, do we? No, I thought not.’ He looked accusingly at McLeish. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’
It was as bad as having Francesca around, McLeish thought, momentarily unnerved. Perhaps being homosexual gave you the same kind of feminine ability to pick the thought in the mind of the other person out of the air.
‘I don’t operate on belief,’ he said as formidably as he could. ‘You think, Hamilton. Bring to mind everything you know about this theft. If I can prove there’s someone with a better motive than yours then I’ll move in on him, but for the moment you’re it and you’re staying here until I know different.’ He looked at the light fading from the pale face in front of him, and felt a dreadful pang. ‘Any time you think of something, get them to call me or Sergeant Davidson,’ he ended lamely and swept himself and Davidson out of the room with what dignity he could manage.
He packed himself silently into the car, chewing his lower lip as he did when worried. ‘He was in it, you know,’ he said accusingly to Davidson. ‘If we let Mickey out, he might just go and finish off the other link in the chain.’
‘The laddie who organized it all, ye mean?’
The car phone bleeped at them and McLeish snatched it up to hear his secretary telling him that she had a message from the hospital that Makin had recovered consciousness.
‘Message from Constable Woolner?’
‘No, John, from a staff nurse. You had apparently told the Constable he was not to leave the patient under any circumstances, so he had bullied a nurse into ringing me up.’
‘God, I meant to get him relieved,’ McLeish said horrified, and told Davidson, who altered course to go to the hospital without being asked and looked amused.
‘I’m concerned for that laddie. He’ll be full to bursting if he’s not left the patient.’
‘I wonder how he has managed? Borrowed a bedpan
, I suppose.’
Bruce Davidson suggested an alternative expedient and they were both laughing and proposing other outrageous ideas as they reached the hospital, and met DC Woolner, white-faced after a solid eighteen hours with his charge. McLeish apologized and congratulated him, disappointed but not at all surprised to hear that Makin had remembered nothing at all in the brief period before he drifted back to sleep.
‘We’ll get you relieved. Talking of which, Woolner, have you really not left him at all? No? How did you, er …?’
Woolner blushingly indicated the wash-basin in the corner of the room and McLeish, dead-pan, fished in his pocket and handed Davidson a coin.
‘That’s why there should have been two of you here, but you’ve done excellently. You’ll have a relief inside the hour. Write down anything he says, anything at all. We need all the help we can get.’
He was walking down the corridor when he saw Sally Vernon at the other end, looking pale and tired and plain. He went up to her hesitantly, and said he was glad to hear that the news was better.
‘Yes, Dad and Mum are very pleased,’ she said dispassionately, and he considered the firm mouth and chin.
‘How are you?’ he asked, towering over her.
‘About as well as can be expected, I daresay. Do sit down, John – Chief Inspector. There’s too much of you.’
She sat down herself in a chair beside him and he remained silent, waiting for an opening.
‘My father’s just gone. He told me what he had done,’ she said, turning to look at him, pushing back the blonde hair that was falling over one eye.
‘Are you very angry?’
‘Well, if Alan really didn’t want to marry me, it was probably just as well. Dad meant it for the best.’
Her face crumpled and McLeish resisted the urge to put an arm round her as if she were Francesca. He patted her shoulder instead and used the other hand to find the handkerchief he knew she would not have.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, inadequately, ignoring Davidson who had posted himself five yards away in a neat compromise between allowing McLeish to play the scene without interference and providing him with a witness if needed.