Murder in Bare Feet

by Roger Silverwood

  Angel rubbed his chin thoughtfully for a few seconds, then his eyelids rose up and then down. ‘So when Charles Pleasant suggested that you gave him Larry Longley’s chopper straight from the position in the shop where he had last put it, you agreed.’

  Hellman’s face went scarlet. ‘I did not agree,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have betrayed an employee like that. It’s disgraceful that you should suggest such a thing. I loved that man.’

  ‘If you didn’t give him the chopper, then you must have been the murderer of Bridie Frazer.’

  ‘I murdered nobody. What are you trying to do to me?’

  ‘Be sensible, Mr Hellman. If you didn’t murder her, then Charles Pleasant must have done. In which case, how did he get hold of the chopper?’

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t. I mean, it was Larry Longley who—’

  ‘You left it somewhere where Charles Pleasant could easily have helped himself to it.’

  ‘This is outrageous! I want my solicitor. I am entitled to have my solicitor present.’

  Angel jumped to his feet. ‘Yes, sir. You are,’ he said. ‘Come with me down to the station. We’ll record all this and we’ll have your solicitor in, and do all this officially … on the record.’

  Hellman looked up at the ceiling and rubbed his chin vigorously. He remained seated and said, ‘I have just remembered; I can’t. I am expecting a big delivery of beef carcasses. I need to check them before they are unloaded.’

  Angel slowly sat down again. ‘Let’s not play games, Mr Hellman. If you didn’t kill Bridie Frazer, you know who did. And it was the person you let have Larry Longley’s chopper.’

  Hellman’s bottom lip quivered.

  Angel stared into his eyes. ‘It was Charles Pleasant, wasn’t it,’ he said.

  Hellman gave the very slightest nod, then quickly turned his bloodshot eyes away from Angel’s penetrating gaze.

  Angel now knew the truth. He licked his lips and said, ‘You must know that the finding of the chopper buried in his own garden with Bridie’s blood still on it proved to be the vital evidence that sealed Larry Longley’s fate.’

  ‘No. I know nothing about it,’ Hellman said weakly.

  ‘After Charles Pleasant had murdered her, he dumped her in the scrapyard, took the chopper from here, hewed her to pieces, then buried the weapon in Larry Longley’s garden. He put her remains in an old oil drum and transported it in one of his lorries down the A1.’

  Hellman covered his face with his handkerchief. ‘I know nothing about it, I tell you,’ he wailed uselessly. ‘I stuck up for Larry in the witness box. I gave him an excellent reference. I even said he wasn’t disposed to any kind of violence. He was a lovely man. Why are you telling all these lies?’

  Angel sighed. He rubbed his chin. It wasn’t difficult to ignore Hellman’s pleas.

  Angel sniffed and then said, ‘After that, blackmail was easy, wasn’t it? The rent is actually disguised blackmail, isn’t it? To buy your silence. £800 a week is outrageous, but the plan was that next year it would have been £1,000 and the year after that £2,000 and so on, ad infinitum. That’s how you planned it to work, didn’t you? What a wickedly cruel, brilliant plan. You’re a blackmailer. It was the formula for a most wonderful pension for you in your old age, wasn’t it? Better than any insurance company could have devised. But, alas, the plan went wrong. Something you never thought of. A real bombshell. The rich sucker was murdered and, sadly for me, I can’t prove one word of your involvement in the wrongful imprisonment of Larry Longley and this subsequent despicable crime. Sadly for you, Mr Hellman, blackmail is not transferable. You will slowly sink in your own mire.’

  The station was hectic when Angel returned. Such a lot of coming and going. Phones were going like voting on The X Factor.

  He put his head into the CID office; Ahmed saw him and came to the door. ‘Did you get hold of DS Crisp, lad?’

  ‘He’s coming in straightaway, sir. And he said to tell you that the woman is Chantelle Moses. She does have a mole on her right temple.’

  Angel frowned. It didn’t seem to matter now. ‘Right. What about everybody else?’

  ‘Everybody should be here, sir. I said ten o’clock. The Operations Room should be empty. DC Scrivens is behind you.’

  Scrivens came running up. His face as sad as a Strangeways dumpling. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said. Then he looked down at the floor.

  Angel got the message. ‘Never mind, lad. So you didn’t find the ambulance. The trouble is, these robbers are far too smart for us. It will have been transformed into a dodgem car and sold on to Alton Towers, I expect, by now. Never mind. Come on. We have other fish to fry.’

  Scrivens looked up and gave a weak smile: the tension had gone.

  Angel bustled down to the Operations Room followed by the other two. He opened the door and looked inside. It was empty.

  ‘This’ll do for us,’ he said.

  It was the size, and similarly arranged to, a school classroom. There were local maps and blackboards on the walls and flip charts on easels and twenty-five or so chairs facing a raised platform.

  Ahmed said, ‘By the way, sir. The number on the fake ambulance was for a bus in Wiltshire. I didn’t pursue it.’

  ‘It’s what I expected. Ta.’

  Gawber joined them. ‘Sit down everybody,’ Angel said.

  There was a knock on the door and Crisp arrived.

  Angel said, ‘Ah. Glad you were following the right woman, lad. Anything new there?’

  ‘She still spending money, sir. Clothes, shoes, hairdos.’

  Angel nodded. ‘Right, Trevor. Take a pew.’

  Angel looked round. All he had summoned were there. ‘I’ve called you all together to see if we can put our communal mind together and make some progress in this bare foot murder business … the murder of Charles Pleasant. I want to put a few facts to you and see if we can make any sense of the thing. Feel free to butt in if anything occurs to you. Now, there are a few unusual factors in this case that I haven’t come across before. One, it seems apparent that Pleasant, although he had a scrap metal business employing one man, Grant Molloy, he was actually making his money through dealing in stolen valuables or works of art … expensive pieces … well, relatively expensive pieces.’

  ‘The jade head was worth millions, sir,’ Gawber said. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Ron. But I shouldn’t think he paid millions for it.’

  ‘No, but couldn’t he have been murdered for it,’ Crisp said.

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought so. A man called Goldstein died for it and it was at any rate returned to its rightful owner, the Empress of somewhere or other. But you have brought me to the point about motive. He was found with £8,000 in notes on him.’

  ‘So he was going to buy something, sir?’ Scrivens said.

  ‘We have to assume that … yes. Whatever it was, I suppose we may never find out. It doesn’t matter anyway. We know that somebody phoned him that Sunday morning, and set up a meeting at the scrapyard, we believe, for 4.30 in the afternoon. Although, as we know, Pleasant arrived early at 4.18 or 4.19, and he was shot dead at about 4.19.’

  ‘Can we not find out who it was from the phones?’ Gawber said.

  ‘Don Taylor’s checked out Jazmin Frazer’s. Come to think, she’d hardly be phoning the man she’s living with. We have had no success there. If we had enough evidence, we could check out the other suspects’ phones. But I expect that a pay-as-you-go mobile was bought specifically for the job. The one call was made and the phone slung into the River Don.

  ‘Now, the caller who set up the meeting would know that Pleasant would have £8,000 on him, but no attempt at robbery was made. His pockets had not been rifled. The money was intact. That indicates that the murderer wasn’t interested primarily in financial gain. This murder was about something else. It has to be revenge or … retaliation or fear. There are a few people who had cause to hate him, but before going there, I’d like to remind you of some of the peculiarit
ies of this case. Firstly, the murderer was bare foot. Secondly, the victim had no shoes on. And thirdly, there are no prints on the car door handle, yet Pleasant wasn’t wearing gloves. Why would he want to wipe it clean of prints if, indeed, he did?’

  The men looked at each other, but nobody made to say anything.

  Angel passed his hand through his hair. ‘Why shoot a man in your bare feet? What’s the point?’

  There were a few mutters of, ‘Don’t know, sir,’ and shaking of heads.

  ‘We don’t seem to know, sir,’ Gawber said.

  Angel nodded. ‘No. And neither do I.’

  He continued. ‘There also seems to be an inconsistency in the information I got from the manager and his wife at the lodging house. One of them happened to mention that they had a dog and a kennel. I looked round there two days ago and there was no sign of either, nor was there any mess in the yard or any giveaway signs of that sort. In itself it’s not at all important, but if there isn’t a dog why lie about it. If there is a dog, where is it? Anyway, next Sunday, I am making a point of being at the scene of crime at the vital time and I’ll take the opportunity of speaking to them about it then … try and clear it up.’

  There were more nods all round.

  ‘Well, let’s move on to the suspects, then,’ Angel said. ‘Let’s see if we can throw any new light there.’

  ‘Grant Molloy is a thoroughly dishonest piece,’ Gawber said.

  ‘He is, but—’ Angel said rubbing his chin.

  ‘There’s Emlyn Jones and his son,’ Crisp said. ‘And Abe Longley. And Jazmin Frazer.’

  ‘Yes,’ Angel said. ‘Yes. And there’s one other. Adolphe Hellman.’

  He reported the interview he’d had with that morning with the butcher and told them in detail about the supplying of the chopper to Pleasant, the murder of Bridie Frazer by Pleasant and the subsequent blackmail by Hellman.

  ‘We can’t get him for the blackmail,’ he said, ‘but thankfully it died when Charles Pleasant died. However, Pleasant was obviously becoming strapped for cash. Hellman and the Frazer women had almost picked him clean. Pleasant could have been desperate, resented paying the blackmail, threatened to expose the big man, who shot him dead to save his own skin. He has no alibi for Sunday afternoon. He was at home by himself, avoiding the sun and trying to keep cool.’

  Angel looked round to see if anybody had any comment to make. There was nothing.

  ‘To sum up then,’ he continued, ‘we know from the footprint that the murderer is a man, so it couldn’t be Jazmin Frazer. Abe Longley has an alibi from three good people. The annoying thing is that I am convinced that Jones and his son Stanley knew the arrangements, the time at least of the murder, yet they seem to have the perfect alibi. We have been unable to break it. That only leaves Adolphe Hellman.’

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  The remainder of that Friday seemed to have been wasted in a morass of pointless paperwork and blind alley inquiries. Angel was glad to get home. It was the weekend. Two days out of the office. There were no fireworks nor interesting or exciting plans to look forward to there, just the humdrum business of living, eating, shopping and keeping house. He dutifully went with Mary to the supermarket on Saturday afternoon and spent Sunday morning and the early afternoon in the garden, cutting the lawn and weeding the borders. At three o’clock, he put the tools away, had a wash and put on his office suit. He came down the stairs through the hall to the kitchen.

  Mary was at the sink filling the kettle. She heard him approaching and turned round. She saw the suit, looked him up and down, pulled a face and said, ‘What’s this then? Going somewhere?’

  He expected a certain amount of disapproval. That’s why he hadn’t mentioned it. Mary believed that he should not be working between 5.30 p.m. on a Friday and 8.30 a.m. on a Monday morning.

  He had other ideas.

  ‘Yes. I’m going up to Sebastopol Terrace. It’s a week today since—’

  ‘I remember,’ she said. ‘It spoiled a most beautiful day. We were in the garden. Quite the sunniest day for years. Ruined.’

  ‘Won’t be long.’

  He escaped without any further censure.

  He parked the BMW outside ‘the rooms to let’ lodging house, next to the hole in the road and facing Charles Pleasant’s scrapyard. Everything looked the same as it had done a week ago. Strange and eerie. He got out of the car and the rowdy racket from that hideous radio met his ears again. His face muscles tightened. After a peaceful day at home he had a great desire to get that teenage girl and her rattle box and throw them both off Flamborough Head into the sea.

  He braced himself, stepped into the lodging house, went up to the counter and pressed the bell. As before, the racket stopped, the door opened and the man with the face of a ferret, Samson Tickle, came out. He needed a shave.

  He looked up at the policeman. The pupils of his eyes grew bigger momentarily. ‘It’s Inspector Angel, isn’t it? What brings you back, Inspector?’ he said, looking away and fidgeting with a book on the counter.

  Angel gave him one of his searching looks. ‘I think you know, Mr Tickle.’

  ‘Ah, well, I didn’t realize that it would matter.’

  Angel frowned. He didn’t know what he was talking about. He stopped frowning but maintained the gaze.

  ‘I mean the working girls round here can’t afford much. When they bring their clients they only take the room for an hour or so, we can’t charge them much, we never thought it mattered. Commercial travellers don’t want their firms knowing they stay here, at a quarter the cost their expense chitties say. But if I was to make a show of booking them in, they would shy away for fear of being caught out fiddling their expenses. That’s the whole point. Their firms think that they’re staying at a much more expensive place. The idea of putting it through the books … why, they would stop coming altogether. Don’t you see that, Inspector?’

  Angel only had a slight grasp on what he was saying. He decided to clear one thing at once. ‘Where is the dog you had last Sunday and where is its kennel?’

  Tickle’s jaw dropped. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Have you a dog in the house?’

  ‘No, sir. No pets allowed in the rooms. No dogs, cats, budgerigars, snakes—’

  ‘Last Sunday you said you had a dog. I thought it was your dog. Somebody mentioned a kennel?’

  Tickle frowned, then he smiled; at least Angel took it for a smile. He was one of the few people in the world, like Gordon Brown, who couldn’t smile. It made him look as if he was about to throw up. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘That was the wife, Inspector.’

  Angel rubbed his forehead gently with two fingers. ‘Please explain.’

  ‘We don’t have no dog. Never had no dog, Inspector. Whenever there’s a puddle of water anywhere, my wife pretends it’s a dog having cocked up its leg when it shouldn’t have. It’s a polite way, she says, of explaining away any water leaks or spillages.’

  Angel’s face brightened. ‘You had some leaks or spillages on the landing, I recall?’

  Tickle looked away quickly.

  ‘How did they get there?’ Angel said.

  ‘There were a few puddles of water on the landing, I believe. Nothing much.’

  ‘How did they get there?’

  ‘All right, Inspector. All right. They were the result of some yob who had left his shower on.’

  ‘But you said you had nobody staying with you.’

  ‘We hadn’t at the time. He had left earlier.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Don’t know. Didn’t see him go. Left the water running. Water running down the chandelier rose in the drawing room.’

  ‘Didn’t you think of reporting it to the police?’

  ‘We’re used to that sort of carry on, Inspector. We can’t do nothing about it. Anyway, what could we possibly have charged him with, wasting water?’

  Angel sighed.

  ‘He even left his underwear,’ Tickle said. �
��Even left his shoes with his socks still stuck in them.’

  Angel’s pulse began thumping. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shoes. And socks. And underwear.’

  Tickle wrinkled his ferret-like nose. ‘Incinerator. They weren’t nice.’

  Angel’s face went scarlet. ‘Show me the room he was in.’

  Tickle went round the counter and up the dark staircase. Angel followed. They passed several doors each side and ended at the last door, which was open.

  Angel followed him into the room. It was clean, basic and altogether satisfactory. It smelled of beeswax. There was a modern power shower in the corner. Clean towel on a towel stand. A window looked out on to the road in front. He looked down at the scrapyard and nodded knowingly.

  ‘The wife’s cleaned it out thoroughly, of course.’

  Angel sniffed. She appeared to have made a good job of it too. He wasn’t pleased.

  They returned downstairs to the counter.

  ‘What did the man look like?’

  ‘I didn’t really notice. Just ordinary. Average, you might say.’

  ‘Had he any distinguishing features? Tattoos? Was he tall, short, fat, thin?’

  ‘Just average, I’d say.’

  ‘Bald, thick head of hair, red, blonde, white?’

  ‘Just average.’

  ‘Would you recognize him if you saw him again? If I showed you photographs—’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so. He kept his head down as he passed his money over.’

  ‘What did he pay?’

  ‘Ten pounds. Everybody pays ten pounds. He paid me with a ten-pound note.’

  ‘Have you still got it?’

  He sniggered. ‘Shouldn’t think so. Money comes and goes, you know.’

  Angel’s jaw stiffened. ‘What time did he arrive?’

  ‘About three o’clock, maybe later. He didn’t stay long.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Just that he’d like to rest a few hours … keep out of the sun. How much? I said ten pounds. Choose any room you like and close the door. That’s what I always say. He paid and went up the stairs. It took less time than I took to tell you. That’s all I know.’