Death Penalties

by Paula Gosling

  However, he reminded himself, Nightingale had been a late starter in the Job. Before he’d joined the police he’d been at Lloyds, working as a risk assessor, so he was an odds-on, odds-against man. Which meant he’d thought this through before risking a superior officer’s inevitable sarcasm. Even he must have realized how crazy it sounded.

  ‘What bothered you?’ he prompted.

  ‘The conjunction of the mysterious visitor and the unpredicted heart failure—’ Tim began.

  ‘It was probably his chess-playing chum from the day centre,’ Abbott interrupted, impatiently. ‘He came around for a game, Peters told him he wasn’t feeling up to it, which was hardly surprising seeing he was brewing up a heart attack, and so the friend left.’ He saw Nightingale was shaking his head and found himself shaking his own in response. ‘No?’

  ‘No. I checked. He always played with one of two men, either Ralph Gleason or a character called Chatty Corcoran. He’d played Chatty that afternoon, and told him that he was spending the evening in front of the box.’

  ‘Well, then—’

  ‘He also told him why. He said he was frightened to go out at night.’

  ‘He and I, both. Especially in that neighbourhood.’

  ‘It had never bothered him before. He told Chatty he thought he’d “gone too far” about something, and that if he wasn’t careful it was going to come back on him.’

  It was Abbott’s turn to say, ‘Ah.’ He said it despite a growing conviction that he was being sent up, and that Nightingale was either playing an elaborate practical joke on him, which seemed very unlike Nightingale, or was cracking up under the strain of trying to be the new Sherlock Holmes, which was possible and probably an indication that a transfer to Traffic was on Nightingale’s cards. He’d be sorry to see him go.

  ‘And did he say what it was?’ Abbott asked, with some certainty as to what the response would be.

  He was proven correct. ‘No.’

  ‘Inconvenient.’ Abbott looked at his watch.

  ‘But I know what it was.’

  Abbott raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t remember seeing “clairvoyant” on your personnel file.’

  Nightingale grinned. ‘It was under Nosey Parker.’ He shifted forward in his chair. ‘The reason I got on to it was because of what I read in the notebooks,’ he said, rather desperately. He knew he had no case, but he wanted to spell it out and he wanted Abbott to listen – if only, perhaps, to help convince himself that what he suspected was worth going on with. Although he’d only seen him pushing papers around and staring out the window, he believed the gossip about the tall man from the West Country. Abbott was supposed to have cracked some really complicated cases, and they said he had the right instincts about people and their behaviour. Maybe he wasn’t happy here, and functioning through clenched teeth, but to hold his attention at all might prove something.

  ‘What notebooks?’ Abbott demanded.

  ‘On his desk. I looked through a few while I was waiting for them to take the body away,’ Tim confessed.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Abbott said. ‘Invasion of privacy. I am shocked.’

  Nightingale faced him down. ‘And I took three away with me,’ he said.

  Abbott’s expression altered. ‘And that was thieving,’ he snapped.

  Nightingale sighed. ‘I asked the daughter, when she arrived, and she said it was okay.’

  ‘Did you give her an explanation?’

  ‘I said I thought her father had been investigating something criminal, and that I would like to carry on for him.’

  ‘And what did she say to that?

  Nightingale shifted in his chair. ‘She was a little too upset to say much about anything.’

  ‘In other words, you took advantage,’ Abbott said. Now his tone was censorious.

  ‘Only because of what I’d read in the notebooks,’ Nightingale said, defensively. ‘As far as I could tell, he’d always kept private notes of things he worked on when he was on the Force. He kept up a diary of sorts after he retired, too, but it was mostly reflections, observations, that kind of thing. I got the feeling he was always meaning to write his autobiography, but never got around to it.’

  ‘And so say all of us,’ was Abbott’s comment. ‘James Herriot has a lot to answer for.’

  ‘Yes. Well, the last three notebooks were altogether different – closer to those he’d done while working. He was investigating something in his spare time.’

  ‘My God, a kindred spirit. No wonder you got sucked in,’ Abbott said, not unsympathetically.

  Nightingale looked injured, but went on quickly. ‘It all started with that accident Peters witnessed. He wrote it up very carefully, regulation style. He’d been retired for fourteen years, but his instincts were still sound. According to him, the accident was triggered when he inadvertently stepped out in front of a car that was being pursued by another, causing the first car to swerve abruptly, turn over, and hit a tree, killing the driver. He felt responsible in a way, but he said the real culprit was the driver of the second car.’

  ‘Not one of ours in close pursuit?’ Abbott said in an alarmed voice. Recent publicity had left everyone sensitive on that subject.

  ‘No. A Ford Fiesta, dark green.’

  ‘Ah.’ Relieved, Abbott picked up a pencil and began to rotate it between his right and left hands.

  ‘Yes. Peters jumped back, naturally, and tripped over the curb, so at first he heard more than he saw. The second car screeched to a halt – to help, he assumed. But when he stood up he saw that the driver who had been doing the chasing was actually trying to open the boot of the crashed car instead of seeing if he could help the driver. Peters shouted, and the man ducked back into his own car, and drove off.’

  ‘Drove off?’

  ‘That’s right. But Peters got the number, and got an old friend of his in DVL Swansea to put a name to it.’

  ‘Naughty,’ Abbott said, rotating the pencil a little faster.

  ‘It was a hire car.’

  ‘It would be.’ Abbott sighed and put the pencil down.

  ‘And the person who’d rented it had used a false licence naming him as “John Rochester” with an address in Leeds, gave his current address as the Mount Royal Hotel, and never brought the car back. They finally found it abandoned in the Park Lane underground car park. By that time he’d checked out of the hotel, paying his bill in cash. There had never been anyone named “Rochester” living at the address shown on the driving licence.’

  ‘Life is like that,’ Abbott nodded. ‘Look, Tim—’

  ‘But Peters kept on. He felt anybody who’d gone to such lengths to hide his true identity must have had something else to hide, too. He thought maybe this “Rochester” had planned to use some kind of accident to cover up murder from the beginning. Anyway, he had time on his hands, didn’t he? It bothered him. It ate at him. So, he used his old contacts in the Force to get a look at the Accident Reports. They had it down as Reckless Driving, no mention of a pursuit car from any other witness except Peters, who did report it at the scene. The trouble was nobody else was on the street when it happened, and by the time people did come out to see what the noise was, the other car was gone.’

  ‘A lot of people seem to have come and gone in all this,’ Abbott said, standing up and turning his back to look out of the window. On the roof of the next building, a man in a uniform bearing the name of a television rental firm was checking out an aerial. Tor all I know that chap over there is planning to electrocute the next person to turn on his television set. If I ran downstairs and across the street and up the stairs again, he’d be gone, too.’

  ‘Does he look suspicious? Do you think he’s up to something?’ Nightingale demanded.

  Abbott turned. ‘Don’t be daft,’ he said.

  ‘But that’s just it. You have a lot of experience, you’re trained to spot th
e unusual, you’ve developed a sense of what’s normal and what’s suspicious. Peters was the same. And he couldn’t get over the feeling that something was wrong about the accident – he says it again and again in his notebooks. He made a pain of himself at the scene. He made them open the boot, but it was empty. I’ve seen the report myself. The officer who did it said Peters was suffering from shock.’

  ‘He probably was,’ Abbott pointed out.

  ‘Yes. But he was an ex-copper,’ Nightingale stressed. ‘He knew how to cope with shock—’

  ‘He was also seventy-four years old,’ Abbott said, gently. ‘And still sharp enough to play good chess.’

  Abbott shrugged. ‘So? Make your point, Tim, please. My ulcer is getting restless.’

  ‘According to the Forensic report there were no fingerprints in the abandoned car.’

  Abbott’s expression sharpened briefly. ‘None at all?’ ‘None at all.’

  They stared at one another. ‘Go on,’ Abbott said, slowly. Nightingale shrugged. ‘Nobody seemed to think anything of it. The report went into the files as Fraud towards the Avis people – naturally he never paid up – and that’s that. They made a stab at tracking him down, but the car was undamaged and he’d only stuck them for a few days’ rental, less the usual deposit since he didn’t use a credit card. They gave it a try, and then put it in the back of the drawer.’

  ‘You can’t chase ghosts for ever.’

  ‘But Peters did.’

  ‘Tim—’

  ‘He got a look at the reports – he had a lot of friends around here – and he talked to people at the hotel, especially one of the maids who had been friendly beyond the call of duty with this “Rochester”—’

  ‘Tim—’

  Nightingale speeded up his delivery. ‘And she gave him an address, which led to another, and so on. He went on looking, and eventually tracked him down. Then, for some reason, he stopped the whole thing. In the last notebook he says something about “finding out more than he wanted to know”, and being too old, that sort of thing. But he’d gone too far. I think this “Rochester” was alerted, somehow. He tracked Peters down, came to his place and either threatened or frightened him so badly that the old man had a heart attack.’

  ‘Tim.’ Abbott had got his attention at last. He spoke evenly and slowly. ‘Did it ever occur to you that, far from being noble or enterprising, Peters’ interest in this man might have been to blackmail him? And that when “Rochester” refused to pay up, Peters got angry and popped his valves?’

  Nightingale shook his head. ‘No. Never. If you’d read the notebooks, you’d understand. He wasn’t like that at all.’

  ‘I haven’t got time to read the notebooks, or to go on listening to this. Neither do you,’ Abbott said, wearily. ‘In case you have forgotten, we have something called a Priority Points System for ranking this kind of thing – on which I would estimate this whole mess you’ve dreamed up would register as about a Negative Eight. We deal in Serious Crimes here in the CID. Put it down and forget it. I assume you gave a receipt to the daughter for those notebooks you “borrowed”?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Of course. I don’t know why I bothered to ask,’ Abbott told his desk lamp. He looked at Nightingale, and his eyes were sharp and cold. ‘What I will ask is whether this is some kind of bid for attention. Do you want to impress everybody, make some kind of fancy investigation out of nothing because you figure it will look great on your record?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with my “career”,’ Tim said, quietly. ‘And if I messed up, it would hardly look good on my record, would it? I just think that, well, Peters was one of us. I looked into his record while I was at it, and I’ve talked to some of the older officers who worked with him. He was straight and he was smart and he was a good copper. If he had a feeling something was wrong, then I think there was something wrong.’

  ‘So do I,’ Abbott said, wearily. ‘In particular, there’s something wrong with you wasting so much time and energy on a nothing case that’s going nowhere. Give the notebooks back, Tim. Forget it. Let it go. If you think you have so much time to spare from your present assignments, I can give you approximately twelve to fifty other cases that also require attention and energy devoted to them. Old cases, new cases, robberies, murders. You call it and you’re on it.’

  Tim sighed, and looked down at his knees. He folded his hands, inspected his thumbs, measured them one against the other. ‘What do you want me to work on?’ he finally asked.

  The capitulation was complete and, if anything, too fast. Abbott, wrong-footed, looked around his desk for a quick inspiration. ‘You’re on that Primrose Street burglary, aren’t you?’ Nightingale nodded. ‘Well, if you get stopped on that, there was a murder at a disco last night. They’ve got about two hundred suspects to sift through. Check with Detective Inspector Holliman if you want to lend a hand - I have no objection.’

  Nightingale stood up. ‘All right,’ he said, quietly, and went out of the office.

  Abbott watched him close the door, and, after a moment, confided in his desk lamp. ‘He’s not going to offer to help on the murder. And he’s not going to give the notebooks back, either,’ he said, in a resigned tone. ‘He’s going to say he gave them back, but he’s not going to give them back. In two months I’ve learned just one important thing about Tim Nightingale, and that is that when he seems the nicest he’s really planning to do his worst. On that basis, he’ll probably go far. Meanwhile, he’s going to sit at home and look at those bloody notebooks and think about poor old Peters. He’ll read a little Sherlock Holmes or Raymond Chandler before going to sleep, and when he wakes up he’s going to start investigating in his own time. That’s what I would do, which proves that after all these years I haven’t learned a thing.’ The lamp was not much of a conversationalist.

  Two months back in the city and I’m talking to electrical fittings, Abbott thought. Tomorrow during breakfast I will undoubtedly make a serious speech to my toaster concerning the front page news or the state of my shirt-collars.

  He sighed, and thought about Tim Nightingale’s apparently insatiable curiosity about people, his developing instinct for the ‘wrongness’ of things, and the years ahead in which these traits would grow and either drive his superiors crazy, get him killed, or make him a good detective. He considered the abundant energy and the refusal to be daunted that Nightingale displayed, and wondered whether the feeling he had might be envy.

  He hoped not.

  He’d been having enough trouble dealing with boredom.

  ‘What do you fancy tonight?’ he asked the lamp. ‘Chinese or Indian takeaway?’

  SIX

  ‘Probably be one of them weirdos with purple hair and leather trousers, flapping all over the place,’ sniffed Mrs Grimble, making another stab at the sink drain with the plunger. Mrs Grimble and the drains had been waging war on one another ever since she’d first come to work for Tess over ten years before. The sink gave a sulky gurgle, surrendered some discoloured water, and slowly emptied.

  With a triumphant smirk on her face, the old woman smacked the plunger down onto the windowsill and turned to face Tess, who was seated at the big kitchen table, peeling vegetables. She had been late getting home, and had hurriedly tied one of Mrs Grimble’s huge aprons over her dark suit. She was wielding the peeler awkwardly, trying to keep the mess from staining her sleeves. Mrs Grimble picked up a paring knife in one hand and a carrot in the other. Busy hands did not stop her from speaking her mind, however. Very few things did.

  ‘What did you want to say you’d see him for? We don’t want the likes of him living in the house. Waste of time.’

  ‘It’s the least I can do,’ Tess said, standing up and going over to tip the potato peelings into the bin. ‘He’s hardly likely to be weird if he teaches at Cambridge. He’s a lecturer in history, and recently lost his wife.’

 
‘Carelessness or divorce?’

  ‘Neither, he’s a widower.’

  ‘Hmphh. They’re all the same, thinking they’re so wonderful when they can only put their pants on one leg at a time, like anyone else. What you want is a nice little retired lady teacher. Plenty of those around, I’ll wager.’

  Tess ignored this advice and went on, determinedly. ‘Mr Soame is taking a year’s sabbatical to do research for a book on nineteenth-century London and needs a place to live. Anyway, Adrian talked to him —’

  ‘Oh, my gawd, I might have known Fancy Pants was somewheres behind it,’ moaned Mrs Grimble.

  ‘— and Mr Soame is very interested in trading rent for tutoring Max. If we can work out complementary schedules, it should be an ideal arrangement,’ she finished, triumphantly.

  Mrs Grimble looked hard at the cooker in case it, too, decided to do something to make her life miserable. ‘I hope you don’t take it wrong that I can’t help out more,’ she muttered. ‘But what with Walter’s stomach and my back . . .’ she trailed off, meaningfully. Walter Briggs was Mrs Grimble’s younger brother. He’d moved in with her the day after Mr Grimble died, and had remained ever since. According to his sister, Walter was ‘delicate’: particularly, it seemed, on the day he collected his dole money.

  Tess reached out and squeezed Mrs Grimble’s hand. ‘I couldn’t get along without you, but I certainly don’t want to risk your health as well as Max’s, do I? Who’d look after us all, then?’

  The old woman looked at her fondly. ‘You need looking after, you do,’ she said. ‘Too soft, that’s your trouble.’

  The front doorbell rang, startling them both. ‘That must be Mr Soame now,’ Tess said, wiping her hands hurriedly on the apron and then dragging it off over her head, causing her hair to stand up in errant spikes. ‘Do you think you could be a darling and finish the vegetables before you go?’