Fifth Member

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Margaret Chalice, Julie Bentley, Dave Bannen,’ Rupert said. ‘Let’s hear from you, Bannen, first.’

  Gus looked a touch irritated, George thought. He wanted it to be Julie first so that he could catch her not being here, and catch me out in a lie. She knew it as certainly as she knew she was sitting on the edge of the table, her hands clasped tightly between her knees to stop them shaking. Oh, but he’s getting his own back, she thought. And what a row we’ve got brewing …

  PC Bannen reported clearly and concisely about the three Committees he’d been investigating. ‘The Building Regulations one had all of them on it except Scroop. Officially they were on it, that is, but as far as I could tell, the Bishop hardly ever attended the meetings. The others did, but apparently it was a pretty dull business. They were trying to match up our Building Regulations with those of Europe, you know the sort of thing.’

  ‘We know,’ someone muttered from the back of the room. ‘If they had their bloody way they’d match us up too and we’ll all be wearing flat-topped caps and shouting “ooh là là!” at the Toms when we arrest ’em.’

  ‘Get on with it,’ Dudley growled. ‘Or we’ll be here all night.’ He glared at the grumbler. ‘What about the other Committees, Bannen?’

  ‘Drugs used in the NHS and the import thereof.’ Bannen consulted his notebook. ‘Here again, this one had CWG on it and the Bishop – he used to be a doctor, didn’t he? I s’pose that was why – and Sam Diamond. It was a tricky one – rows kept on breaking out, especially between CWG and Diamond. CWG wanted all drugs to be on the NHS list however much they cost, and wanted the doctors to decide who should have what, and the Bishop agreed with him. Diamond said that cost too much and –’

  ‘We don’t need the politics, thank you,’ Dudley said. ‘And the other one?’

  ‘The House of Lords one?’ Bannen riffled the pages of his notebook. ‘Here we are. This one is chaired by – was chaired by Lord Durleigh and included his brother. That got a bit of publicity when it was first announced because there was another relative on it too – CWG’s brother-in-law, Lord Hinckley. He’s got a huge estate in Yorkshire. His sister Marietta is CWG’s wife – widow, I mean. And there are three other lords on it, as well as the Bishop of Droitwich.’

  ‘Very cosy,’ Dudley said. ‘I can’t see many changes being made when they’ve got so many of the people with vested interests on the Committee.’

  ‘There are lots of others from the House of Commons,’ Bannen said. ‘I can tell you which they are.’

  ‘Not now, thanks,’ Gus said quickly. ‘We can check on all of ’em tomorrow. OK, that’s the Committee news. There are clearly areas here where our victims overlap. We’ll need a lot more investigation into all the members in every one of those groups so that we can see if there’s a logical link between any of them and the five victims.’

  ‘Four,’ Bannen said. ‘Lord Scroop wasn’t active on any of them. He was listed on the Building Regs. seeing he was once a trade union bod, but –’

  ‘Like I said, tomorrow.’ Gus rode over him. ‘Now, who’s next?’ He bent his head to look at the list he was holding in his hand. ‘Ah! Julie and Margaret to report.’ He looked up and round the room. ‘Now, where –’

  ‘Here, sir.’ Margaret Chalice bobbed up from her seat. ‘I’ve been working with Dave on that stuff. He’s reported for both of us really. But I’ve also been helping Julie with the constituency searches – seeing what we could find on each of their patches. We checked on all the local agents and the canvassers and so forth for the Members of the House of Commons; for the ones from the Lords, we checked on their local areas, if you see what I mean. They don’t have to have agents or anything. They just do what they like really. But we collected a bit of stuff on Durleigh in Warwickshire and on Droitwich and –’

  ‘Julie worked on that, did she?’ Gus sounded cheerful. ‘OK, Julie, what have you to report?’ He lifted his chin to stare round the room and George looked down at her clasped hand and tried to remember to breathe.

  ‘Quite a lot really, Guv.’ Julie’s voice came out of the crowd in a slightly breathless rush and George lifted her head and stared.

  At the far side of the room, near the door, Julie was standing with her face flushed and her hair rather rumpled, but otherwise she looked as she should, her uniform neatly buttoned and her collar and chequered necktie perfectly arranged. She caught George’s eye and grinned broadly and George positively beamed back. Gus turned his head to look at George, and at once she tried to compose her face, but it wasn’t easy.

  ‘Well,’ Gus said. ‘Quite a lot, you say?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I discovered that Alice Diamond has another shop. Not just the one in Sloane Street, but another one.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure that’s all that important,’ Dudley began.

  ‘Oh, sir, it is!’ Julie interrupted. ‘She’s kept very quiet about it, hasn’t she? And that’s funny for a start. But it’s not just that. She owns it, but it’s run in someone else’s name. And the best bit is’ – she paused for effect – ‘it’s in Durleighton in Warwickshire.’

  There was a little buzz of interest. ‘A close link between Sam Diamond and Lord Durleigh?’ someone said ‘That’s a breakthrough, ’n’t it?’

  ‘Why?’ someone else jumped in. ‘Unless you mean it was Alice Diamond what did both of them for some reason – the old man and the local Lord of the Manor – but what about the other three? Why should she go for them? That’s the real –’

  Gus held up both hands and shouted for silence. ‘All right, all right, you lot. We’ll have to digest that and get over to Durleighton and have a look round. Nice work, Julie. How’d you get hold of that?’

  Julie looked back at him limpidly and George thought, she got that from prowling round the office at Wembley. Oh, hell, how’s she going to get out of this one?

  ‘A hunch, sir,’ Julie said brightly. ‘I thought, if a woman has one shop, she might have another. So in every place I was looking, I checked on local dress shops and who owned them. And I found this one in Durleighton.’

  ‘A hunch,’ Gus said softly. ‘Well, well, a hunch. Well done, Julie.’ He grinned at her, a wide rather mirthless look, then said over his shoulder at George, ‘Nice work, hmm?’

  ‘Very,’ George said. ‘Great. But I’m not surprised. It’s the sort of thing a woman would think of. We do have our uses, don’t we?’

  Gus stared at her expressionlessly. ‘I suppose you do,’ he said, still softly. ‘I suppose you do. Sometimes.’ And turned back to the room to finish his round-up. Somehow, George thought, he’s lost some of his excitement, and she could have hugged Julie. How she had managed to get out and back here George had no idea; but thank whoever it was one had to thank for such events for it. The ice had been horribly thin there for a while.

  As soon as the round-up was finished she slid to her feet. ‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ she murmured at Gus and escaped to the ladies’ room. Not surprisingly, Julie followed her. Gus stared after them for a moment and then went back to his office to check the remaining documents he hadn’t had a chance to go through.

  ‘Tell the rest of them they can go, Roop,’ he said. ‘And go home again yourself, do me a favour. Tomorrow’s also a day and I want you all as fresh as it’s possible for you to be, seein’ how overworked we all are. I’ll see to the last crackin’s here.’

  ‘I don’t mind finishing off,’ Dudley said and Gus shook his head.

  ‘Do me a favour, mate, go home already.’ And he sounded so weary that Dudley didn’t argue. Nor did anyone else. The big incident room emptied rapidly.

  When George came back into the room she looked round, surprised, and then saw Gus at his desk. She made her way across the paper-littered floor and pushed back chairs to reach him. He looked up as she came in.

  ‘You are going to go right over the precipice one of these days, my duck.’ He said it in a conversational tone. ‘It’s not so bad when you get yourself in stück, b
ut do me a favour, will you? Keep my people out of it.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re –’ George began but he shook his head.

  ‘I’m not as daft as I look. I know Julie was out and about this afternoon when she shouldn’t have been. And it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know she was with you when you look the way you do when you’re caught. This is me, remember? Old Gus. I can read your face like a bleedin’ book. So don’t try it on with me.’

  She capitulated. ‘I’m sorry, Gus. You’re right. I shouldn’t involve other police people. But to tell the truth –’

  ‘The less I know the better,’ he said wearily. ‘Just give me the stuff you’ve collected and we’ll say no more. But tell your friend Miss Bentley that she’ll ruin her chances if she doesn’t watch it. She’s a bright girl and I’ve been keeping an eye on her. She’ll make a good detective yet, but she has to do her slogging first. If you interfere you’ll give her silly notions, understand?’

  ‘Understood.’ She sat down. ‘So now what?’

  ‘Where’s Julie?’

  ‘She’ll be out of the loo in a minute.’

  ‘I’ll have to put a CCTV camera in there, I swear it,’ he muttered. ‘The way you females plot. Ah, here she is.’ He got to his feet and went to the door as Julie, whistling between her teeth, came back into the incident room. ‘As you can see, Policewoman Bentley,’ he called, ‘your colleagues have gone home exhausted by a hard day at the computer and on the phone, don’t you know.’

  ‘Me too, Guv.’ Julie smiled at him, her eyes bright. That she was pleased with herself was undoubted. She seemed to shine.

  ‘As I say, they were on the computers. But let that go. If you’re tired, you’d better go home as well. But let me just say this, missy. I’m not as green as I’m cabbage-looking, as my old granny used to say. I know what’s what, and I don’t like being taken for an idiot, you understand me? This time you’ve got away with it. Another, you won’t. Now hop off home and come in tomorrow ready to sit at that desk and really work. OK?’

  ‘Sir,’ said Julie in a small voice. She ducked her head and picked up her bag from her desk and then almost scuttled out of the room.

  ‘Now we can talk,’ he said as he came back to the desk. Let me have it all. And this time all of it.

  When she had finished he nodded. ‘So, when we get the warrant we’ll have to check the office particularly well. Did Julie take anything away?’

  George shook her head almost indignantly. ‘Of course not, Gus! She told me in the loo. Everything was left exactly as she found it. She copied out the information she thought’d be useful. There was a list of customers on the computer there it seems, and she rolled through and spotted one called Sloane’s in Durleighton, and that made her think. As she said, Alice mightn’t be able to use her own name on this shop for some reason, but she’d still want to put her mark on it. And naming it after the place where her other shop is –’

  ‘Tell me, when you girls go to the loo, do you do anything apart from talk?’ Gus growled.

  ‘Not a lot,’ George said. ‘And I have to say we spend at least as much time talking about men as you do talking about us in your john. It’s what people use johns for. Gus, I’m sorry I misbehaved, but I’m not sorry we got what we found out. Are you?’

  ‘Of course not. But we’d have got it just the same, you know. When we got a warrant and searched the place.’

  ‘But when would you have got it? When would you have looked? Not yet, I’ll bet. Everyone thought the van had just been used opportunistically and that this chap Max Hazell had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘He can’t have had much to do with it,’ Gus pointed out. ‘Seeing he’s dead.’

  ‘I wouldn’t even believe that for sure if I were you,’ she retorted. ‘That really is one hell of an operation they’ve got going on there. It must handle vast sums. Who knows what else they might be up to? When people have a good smuggling operation going they don’t usually confine themselves to one sort of goods, do they? For all you know they might be bringing in all sorts of other stuff.’

  ‘Now you really are running away with your imagination,’ he said. ‘I’ll grant you you uncovered this earlier than we would have done. Now no more searching over dead ground. Let’s plan tomorrow.’

  She lifted her chin and looked at him hopefully, and he managed a grimace which was half grin, half frown.

  ‘It’d be safer for me to take you along, I think, rather than to let you wander around loose. We’ll go to Durleighton, see what’s what there; I’ll leave the rest of it here in London to Dudley. It’s all straightforward routine and he’s very good at that.’

  ‘Listen, Gus, I may step over your rules sometimes but that doesn’t mean you have to treat me like a child! Telling me you’ll take me with you to keep me out of trouble – Jesus, man, I’m supposed to be helpful! And I thought I was!’

  He gave up. ‘Of course you are. Bloody helpful. It’s only that sometimes you just don’t stop to think. OK, we’ll go to Durleighton together not just so’s I can keep an eye on you but also because I’d value your input. And your hunches. All right?’

  She smiled, completely disarmed. ‘All right. Thank you, Gus. And I’m sorry too. I’ll try to behave like a policeman, I promise.’

  ‘Heaven forbid,’ he said. ‘A policeman is the last person I want to go into the country with. Because we’ll go up tonight, stay over and be ready to start first thing. So go home and get our gear. By the time you get back here, I’ll be ready. Hop it.’

  22

  In other circumstances Durleighton was the sort of small town in which they might have spent a long weekend, doing the things that visitors do in attractive small towns: wandering round the antique shops and secondhand bookshops, of which there were a surprisingly large number; taking morning coffee and afternoon tea in impossibly bucolic tea shops run by intense middle-aged women with a penchant for vegetarianism, alternative therapies and animal welfare (going by the noticeboards they displayed over their arrangements of home-baked scones and fruit loaves); and generally behaving like tourists. As it was, there was no time for such pleasures.

  They took a room in a hotel-cum-pub in the middle of the town which prided itself on its long history and exposed oak beams but which provided a lumpy bed and decidedly inadequate bathroom arrangements. George, however, was so pleased to be with Gus as his partner in investigation that she made not a murmur of complaint about either, a fact which amused Gus greatly. He said as much over breakfast.

  ‘Usually by this time you’d be groaning about your bruises from that bed. How come you’re so quiet about it this morning?’

  ‘Because I’ve other things to think about.’ She bit into the rather soggy toast which formed the centrepiece of their meal. ‘We’re here for work, not fun. So, is there a plan of action?’

  He laughed. ‘Is this my George?’ he asked the ceiling. ‘Putting her creature comforts so far down the list? Who’d ha’ thought it? OK. First thing is to find a better place to stay, because if you’re not in the mood to complain, I am. And then –’

  ‘Oh, Gus, stop it. This’ll do well enough. Talk to them and ask for a different room with a firmer bed, if you must, but let’s not waste time. I want to start looking around.’

  ‘OK, OK, I’ll suffer for my work. You want a plan of action? First off, I want to talk to the local nick. See if there’s anything I can pick up from them. You never know. Then –’

  ‘Well, I can’t do that with you, can I?’ She pushed aside her plate and set her elbows on the table. ‘I’ll tell you what. Let me go and look at the shops, hmm? I’ll find this place Sloane’s and wander in and see what’s what. It makes sense for a woman to do that, anyway. Maybe I’ll be able to dig out things that an interrogation, police-style, won’t.’

  He thought about that for a moment, sipping his coffee and looking at her owlishly over the rim of his cup. Then he put the cup down and nodded. ‘Why not? I’ve got you here, so I m
ight as well make the best use of you I can. Now, please, George, no going off half cocked. I don’t want you discussing the case or giving any hint of why we’re here. Not till I’m ready for that.’

  ‘As if I would!’ She was indignant. ‘You know I pride myself on being discreet.’

  ‘Discreet?’ He laughed. ‘You’re as discreet as a pimple on a bald head. A bloody gifted liar, but discreet? Never. And that’s the next thing. Don’t get involved in too complicated a set of taradiddles, will you? Sometimes it’s useful – I remember the way you made yourself into a gambling expert from Las Vegas when you were investigating those betting shops in Shadwell. It helped get me out of trouble, I won’t deny, but was altogether too clever by half.’

  ‘What a Brit you are, Gus!’ She got to her feet. ‘No American would ever say a person was too clever. We admire smart people. You’ll just have to trust me. I’ll be on my way then. Where shall we meet?’

  He looked over his shoulder to the dining-room window, looking out into the main square of the town, which was beginning to play host to the cars parking on its ancient central cobbles. Durleighton was coming to life for the day, blinking in the late autumn sunshine of the morning like a tired old spaniel, but still with some life left in its old bones. He watched people greeting each other and standing to gossip for a few moments before bustling off about their business, and sighed. George could almost feel the moment of wistfulness in him, so common to city-bred people when confronted with the charms of a small town. Gus wouldn’t leave his beloved London for anywhere else in the world, but he wasn’t immune to Durleighton’s peace and security.

  Now he gave his head a sharp little shake and went on, ‘I doubt we need to make any special arrangements. This place is so small, we’ll hardly lose each other. I’ll find you when I’m ready. Good luck and, sweetheart, be careful. There’ve been five killings in this case. There’s a real danger. It’s not just a fun game of spot-the-villain or a particularly devilish crossword.’