by David Field
‘Sounds as if it might be, why?’
‘They had a terrible flood sometime in the fifties. I was a mere infant then, of course, but ten or so years later we dropped in to take a look on our way back from a fortnight in Newquay, and I can still remember the scenes of devastation, even after all that time had passed. Wouldn’t mind going back for another look, and I might even pick up some stuff for my Social History course next year.’
Late on the Saturday evening, installed in the ‘Smugglers Cove Hotel’ overlooking Lynmouth harbour, Mike stared dismally out at the drizzle.
‘I imagine there’s a great view out there occasionally,’ he grumbled, ‘but the car’s not going to enjoy going up and down that hill every day.’
‘I was hoping you’d enjoy the view in here instead,’ Alison replied coyly as she lifted a short blue negligee from their suitcase and laid it on the bed. Mike smiled back.
‘You make a better overnight companion than Geoff Keating, that’s a fact. And at least you snore in a feminine key.’
‘I do not snore,’ Alison objected. ‘At least, you’re the first of many men to tell me that I do.’
‘I must take you away with me on more business trips,’ Mike grinned, ‘since it seems to bring out the truth in you – not to mention your sexier side.’
‘The left one, you mean?’ Alison asked as she turned sidewise and unzipped her skirt, letting it slip down to the carpet.
‘Good job they serve dinner ’til late,’ Mike growled as he walked round the bed to meet her.
After a ‘healthy’ Sunday exploring the harbour and enjoying the vertiginous delights of the funicular cliff ride, Mike left Alison to explore the local newspaper office and souvenir shops on Monday morning for material for her upcoming university course, and eased the family car in low gear up the challenging slope back into Lynton, then across the cliff tops and south to Barnstaple, where in due course he found the small publishing house on the upper floor of the quaint old building overlooking the Clock Tower.
‘You found us OK, then?’ Tanya Pickering smiled as she rose from her desk to greet him.
‘Your directions were perfect,’ Mike smiled back, ‘although that clock tower out there’s a bit hard to miss.’
‘Do sit down,’ Tanya invited him, ‘and how do you take your coffee?’
‘I’m sorry to have to resurrect bad memories,’ Mike told her after brushing the Coconut Cookie crumbs off his jacket and putting the coffee cup down, ‘and I’m not here to bring you any new information about how your parents died. It’s just that they may have fallen foul of some people who don’t take kindly to rejection.’
Tanya smiled.
‘I’m a publisher,’ she reminded him, ‘and so were my parents. They founded the business I’m now running. Over in the far corner of the room, under the window bay there, is what we all call “the slush pile”. Unsolicited manuscripts from wannabe authors, all of whom think they’re the next J. K. Rowling. Believe me, I’ve seen every sort or reaction from those we reject, which is about ninety-eight per cent of them. However, I’ve never had any death threats, and so far as I know, neither did Mum and Dad.’
‘Do you happen to know what they were working on when they died?’
‘The usual – modern religious works. Before they broke into publishing, Dad was training for the Church ministry, and Mum was a sociologist. They founded the company to provide an outlet for progressive works on modern religion, and financed it by publishing the usual fictional potboilers. After they died, taking their expertise with them, I concentrated on the fiction which I’d been doing for them, and then I discovered Beverley Strange, whose bodice-ripping novellas set in upper-class Georgian society have since kept me in the lifestyle that just funded your coffee and biscuits.’
‘Anything to do with Islam?’ Mike enquired eagerly.
‘Sort of, and then no,’ Tanya replied enigmatically. ‘They were offered something on the role of the Koranic principles in modern English life, which they rejected on the ground that it was potentially too controversial. I remember that, because they left me to field the barrage of phone calls that came in after that rejection, from some guy who sounded like the Ayatollah Khomeini himself, and who was assuring me that we’d suffer the fate of all infidels if we ignored the word of God – that sort of stuff.’
Mike smiled as sympathetically as he could.
‘I thought you said they’d never had death threats?’
‘Well they didn’t – not directly. The calls were all diverted to me.’
‘So they never spoke to him, and as far as you know he never knew who exactly had turned down the book?’
‘It wasn’t so much a book as a sort of guide to living according to the word of Allah in our Godless society.’
Mike smiled again.
‘I can see why it wouldn’t have been a best seller. But apart from rejecting the book, they did nothing else in what you probably call “the Moslem market”?’
‘Not until they were offered the Salman Rushdie expose, no.’
‘Again?’
‘You remember him, of course? He seriously pissed off a group of Iranian extremists a few years back, and although he’s somewhere in the US now, my parents were offered a manuscript which, it was promised, would reveal the real life of the man who’d turned his back on Islam in order to lead a wickedly carnal life. Or something like that. They were due to collect the manuscript on their way to the West Midlands Book Fair the day they died. They were quite excited about it – thought it might be a best seller, given the fame enjoyed by Rushdie himself.’
‘You’ve no idea where exactly they were going to be handed this manuscript?’
‘Haven’t a clue, but I always assumed that was why they deviated round the coast route to Minehead, instead of taking the usual route through Taunton. As it turned out, they didn’t even make it to Minehead, of course, before the car blew up when it went into a ditch.’
‘Didn’t you think it was strange at the time, that they apparently just veered off the road?’
‘Of course. Dad was a careful driver, and they knew the road pretty well. The car was serviced just before they left, and I just couldn’t understand it. But then accidents do happen, don’t they? I just assumed Dad fell asleep at the wheel or something.’
‘Thankyou very much, Miss Pickering,’ Mike said as he rose to leave and held out his hand. ‘You’ve been a great help, and I’ll obviously be in touch if we have any further information we can give you about how your parents died.’
‘I was hoping to take you to lunch,’ Tanya pouted. ‘To be honest, I was hoping to persuade you to write something for us about life in the modern police force.’
‘Didn’t realise you published horror stories as well,’ Mike joked. ‘Thank you anyway, but after what you’ve been able to tell me, I need to speak fairly urgently with someone else – assuming he’s still alive.’
Back at the car, Mike consulted, first the file that Cathy had made up for him before he left, then the tourist map they’d picked up in Minehead on the way down. Just under two hours later, he knocked on the front door of the whitewashed cottage that opened straight onto the side street in Parracombe. A dog began barking at the first knock, and Mike heard a sharp yell of command before the door opened, and an elderly man opened it. The long-haired terrier rushed frenziedly around Mike’s ankles until the man called him off.
‘Here, Rusty – heel!’
The dog slunk back to his master’s feet and Mike held up his warrant card.
‘Mr Westaway?’
‘That’s me. Is it about Rusty here? He can get a bit noisy, I know, but he’s never bitten anybody.’
‘No,’ Mike smiled reassuringly. ‘It’s about something you witnessed a few years ago now – 2005, to be precise. You gave a statement to the police at the time, remember?’
‘That hitchhiker?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘You’d better come in.’
‘It was out on the main road, back there. The one you presumably came in on. Ted and me – that was my last dog – always used to walk down Church Lane to the main road. It was usually quiet enough to let Ted off his lead until we got to the main road, only that day he got into a fight with the butcher’s collie.’
‘What did you see, exactly?’
‘Well, this here car stopped further up the road, back towards Barbrook way, and this hitchhiker got out of the back seat, then crossed the road as if they were intending to go back the other way – the way they’d come, like. Then this estate wagon – silver it was – came up the road from Kentisbury direction, and the hitchhiker held out their hand, and the silver car stopped to give them a ride.’
‘Can you describe this hitchhiker in more detail?’
‘Not really, because I wasn’t paying much attention, to be honest. I think it must have been a girl, because whoever it was seemed to be small and thin. But they were wearing one of those anorak thingies, and it seemed to almost drown them. It was raining, so that made sense, but I couldn’t see who was inside it.’
‘What about the car that dropped them off, before they flagged down the silver car?’
‘That was black, a bit unusual for round here, like one of those chauffeur-driven limos you see film stars getting in and out of. I thought it was all a bit odd, her – or him – coming from one direction in a limo, then hitching a ride back the other way in an ordinary car like we normally see tourists driving around in.’
‘And the hitchhiker definitely got into the silver car?’ Mike pressed him. Westaway screwed his face up in concentration as he relived the moment.
‘I can’t be certain of that, to tell you the honest truth. I didn’t actually see that, because that was when the butcher’s dog came running down Leys Lane, and he and Ted started going for each other. He never liked Ted, that mongrel. Anyway, by the time I had them sorted out, the silver car had driven off.’
‘And you didn’t see if the hitchhiker was in it, or where they’d got to?’
‘No, to be honest.’
‘Thanks, Mr Westaway, and here’s my card. If you remember anything else – or if the local police give you any hassle about your dog – just give me a ring.’
‘Yeah, OK, thanks. I’ll see you out.’
Mike parked the car the other side of Lynton, high on the cliff top where he hoped the reception would be better, and selected the well-used number on the speed-dial of his mobile phone.
‘DC Norman, Homicide 2.’
‘Happy Valley Dairy here,’ Mike joked. ‘Just confirming your somewhat unusual order for five gross of cannabis flavoured yoghurts.’
‘Hello, sir,’ Cathy responded enthusiastically. ‘How’s it going in the West Country?’
‘I think we can safely conclude, thanks to the painstaking initial work you did on this file, that the Pickerings were the victim of a car bomb delivered in a package that they were conned into collecting at the roadside, about twenty minutes before it went off.’
‘Brilliant!’ Cathy enthused. ‘Got a call from Geoff half an hour ago, and he reckons he’s got a similar sort of lead in Chesterfield.’
‘Where’s DI Petrie?’ Mike enquired, glancing at his wristwatch.
‘Out visiting florists, I believe, sir. He’s really taking this wedding business seriously.’
‘Marriage should never be taken lightly, young lady. Talking of which, time I returned to our holiday hideaway in order to breathe some more life back into mine. I should be back at sparrows on Wednesday.’
‘I’ll order you a peach flavour,’ Cathy promised as she discontinued the call.
Chapter Sixteen
‘Could you contrive to say only nice things about me in your best man’s speech?’ Dave asked, an almost pleading look on his face as he stood in Mike’s office doorway shortly after eight-thirty on Wednesday morning.
‘If you’re happy to settle for a very short speech,’ Mike teased him, before realising that the man was serious.
‘It’s just that ... well, before you came back into Brampton, our only dealings had been short and – “disappointing”, shall we say?’
‘Never mind, Dave – since I’ve been back, they’ve been long and disappointing,’ Mike persisted. ‘Unless, of course, you’ve solved this entire Giles murder single-handed in my absence.’
‘Funny you should mention that,’ Dave grinned triumphantly, ‘and this is why I thought it was a good time to extract some sort of promise from you, before I handed over what I’ve got.’
‘You know the penalty for withholding evidence as well as I do,’ Mike reminded him. ‘So what have you got, exactly? And come in and sit down before you get blown over by the draught from that outside corridor. Joy not feeding you, or what?’
‘Far too well, by most people’s standards, but I seem to burn it up as fast as I eat it.’
‘Wish I could say the same,’ Mike grumbled. “Anyway, what have you got? The suspense is killing me.’
With a smile of satisfaction, Dave walked in, sat down in the visitor’s chair and placed the file on the desk in front of him.
‘You may recall that when you departed for Exmoor, you left me the El Zarw personnel file, so that I could check out his dabs?’
‘That’s easy to remember, since it’s all I left you to do, bearing in mind how your impending wedding seems to be engaging all your attention these days.’
‘Well, we got a positive match. Not to El Zarw – he’s officially clean, at least under that name . But he must have acquired his fingerprints from a man called Hassan Hadad, and he’s well known to our computer for extortion and robbery.’
‘So this Hadad character bought himself an identity transplant when he got the security job with Bramptonshire Council?’
‘So it would seem,’ Dave confirmed.
‘And have you broken the news to your fiancée that the vetting procedures relied upon by her employers allowed a man with a criminal record to get a job inside their security operations, blatantly using fingerprints that any first-year police recruit could have checked out, had they bothered?’
‘Haven’t got around to that yet – she’s already having a hernia over the reception menus.’
‘But at least I begin to see why he might have been interested in Troy Lesley’s USB,’ Mike mused. ‘It also tells me that whatever was on that USB may have related to Mr. Hadad’s latest business venture.’
‘There’s more,’ Dave grinned.
‘Be still my beating heart,’ Mike grinned back as Dave opened the file and extracted a sheet of paper on which were printed two addresses.
‘Hadad’s form sheet also came up with a home address, which looked very familiar to someone with the highly trained nose of a bloodhound.’
‘And the face that comes with it.’
‘Seriously – take a look at those two addresses, and tell me what’s remarkable about them.’
Mike glanced down at the sheet, then looked back up disdainfully.
‘I hope they’re all this easy at the next Divisional Trivia Night. They’re the same address, obviously – so what?’
‘The one on the top is Hassan Hadad. The one underneath it is Imran El Hashem.’
‘The same man?’
‘Brothers – separated by twenty years or so. Their father must have kept his wedding tackle in fine fettle – or maybe it’s all those figs. Anyway, that set me thinking ...’
‘That was an achievement in itself.’
‘Very funny. As I said, I thought I’d try a bit more black magic, and I managed, with a little assistance from the love of my life, to hook Brandon Tait into the Housing Department’s computer. The whole family got decanted from Unswell Green at the time of the Great Exodus to the greener pastures
of the Carswell, but the forwarding address for the two brothers was the much more salubrious one they’re occupying now, according to what Uniforms confirmed.’
‘Where does that take us?’
‘When they were still in Unswell Green, there was a sister. There isn’t now.’
Mike sat back and gazed at the ceiling. Then he held his hands together in mock prayer, and asked
‘Jasmin Ballantyne?’
‘The very same. Aka Johara Begum. Her age puts her a few years behind big brother Hassan, and a whole lot of years ahead of Imran, who turns up on your schoolboy list from Lancaster.’
‘It can’t have been cheap to have him boarding away while he attended a very ordinary comprehensive school over the Pennines. Why send him away, and where was the money coming from?’
‘As to the first, no idea, unless he was becoming an embarrassment to the family after his public order convictions as a mere juvenile. But with regard to the second, his big sister was on the game, and his big brother was into extortion. And wait until you see the new house – more than we can afford, anyway.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Denman. Collingwood Street. Three storied Edwardian conversions, many of them now student flats. But not number 14, which is where the Forty Thieves are currently resident.’
‘Just round the corner from Jeremy Giles,’ Mike mused aloud.
‘“No shit, Sherlock”, as you recently said to me. But no evidence that they actually knew each other.’
‘Unless Hadad or Imran are gay.’
‘The penalty for that under Sharia law – insofar as I’m led to believe – is a hasty loss of the goolies. Camels don’t count, apparently.’
‘How serendipitous it is to have the biggest racist on the force notionally in charge of this aspect of the operation,’ Mike chortled. ‘So where to from here?’
‘There’s more, I’m afraid.’
‘If it’s as good as the last lot, what are you afraid of?’
‘When I clocked on Hassan, I hit a red flag, but persevered using your override.’
Mike sighed.
‘Does that mean another visit from the dusky-hued one from F9? Please tell me it doesn’t!’