‘If your name was Rodney, I’d call you a plonker even more often than I do. What else?’
Waters had found the key that could accelerate the images into a blur. He stopped several times until he was at the point he wanted to show Smith.
‘It’s two twenty in the morning. The space where the Mercedes was, if it was, is still empty – it never comes back, we know. But if you look there, beyond the entrance,’ pointing with his index finger, ‘you can see out into the road behind the hotel. It’s called Lighterman Street. There must be a street-lamp just out of view because it’s better lit than the car park. OK?’
‘Yes, I’ve managed to keep up so far.’
‘So, at 02.20 hours it looks like this,’ and then after a click, ‘whereas at 02.30 hours, it looks like this.’
Now it was Smith’s turn to get closer and peer at the screen. Through the car-park’s entrance it was possible to see that a vehicle had been parked out in the street at some point between the two images – not a car but some sort of four by four, a large one with a covered back, what our friends across the water call an SUV.
‘How long was it there for?’
Waters pressed a key, and said, ‘02.40, still there,’ and then again, ’02.50, still there.’ A final press of the key brought up the image taken at 03.00, and the vehicle had gone. Smith asked him to repeat the process slowly from the beginning.
‘How the hell did you notice that?’
‘I don’t know, really. I was focused on the car park but realised that something else had changed. I kept going over these frames and that was it. What do you think?’
Smith didn’t answer immediately. He took out his Alwych and wrote down the details of the times on the screen, frowning as he did so, which was always a good sign as far as Waters was concerned.
‘So, if that thing was parked there just after 02.20, and left just before 03.00, the driver and whoever was with him, if anyone was, had a maximum of almost forty minutes. All of this might mean bugger all, obviously… But that would be time enough, wouldn’t it, to go up to room 8, get everything into a bag and leave? More than enough time. Thoughts?’
Waters had his iPad busy now. As he worked, he said, ‘I don’t understand how you can get 3G more often up here than you can get a phone signal. Here we are – this is the satellite view of the hotel and that’s Lighterman Street.’
‘Why are we looking at this? Are you hoping the satellite took a picture last Saturday night and we’ll see the truck on it?’
Waters had to check – Smith’s ineptitude with the new technology was well-known, but so was his ability to keep a straight face when he asked apparently inane questions.
‘No. I wanted to see what’s on Lighterman Street. Is it houses, businesses? There might be some innocent reason why the vehicle would park up there for half an hour in the middle of the night.’
Smith straightened up and said, ‘Well, it’s just over there. We could walk out the back and have a look. There’s no need to go four thousand miles through a satellite.’
‘Yes, but… Never mind. My thoughts, you said. Someone could have come into the hotel and gone to Sokoloff’s room at that time in the night, but one, they risked getting caught on the camera as they did so. At one frame every ten minutes, it wasn’t a big risk, admittedly, so they didn’t need a lot of luck to avoid that.’
‘Maybe they didn’t need any luck.’
‘Why?’
‘If it was someone who knew how often the pictures are taken, and at what times. What else?’
That was a something that Waters hadn’t considered, and he took a moment to do so.
‘Right. Two – they would need a key. The rear door locks behind you when you go out that way, even during the day – I did check that this morning. Depending on what happened, of course, they might have had Sokoloff’s key.’
‘Or one of their own.’
‘Another guest?’
‘Or?’
‘A member of staff. Someone who knew about the camera? Do you seriously think it could have been someone who worked here who was involved, DC?’
Smith had been making notes all the way through this conversation. He closed the little black book now, and put it into the inside pocket of his jacket.
‘What I seriously think is that we can’t rule it out just yet. Maybe that Mr D’Olivera has a thing for Gina Clarke. She tells him what Mr Sokoloff was up to during dinner on Friday night, and he decides to sort him out and it turns nasty. The night manager of this hotel is bound to know someone with a boat, isn’t he? Don’t leave that disc anywhere but your pocket, by the way. Bring it with you now.’
They went out through the back door of the Victoria, examining the lock on the way. As they crossed the car park, heading for the entrance that led onto Lighterman Street, Waters said, ‘And once inside, they had to find Sokoloff’s room. The number would have been on his key. But they had to get in and out without being seen by anyone on duty. We need the names of everyone who was on duty that night.’
‘Or maybe they didn’t have to worry about being seen because…’
‘They work here. So they would know about the cameras, and they’d have a key, and know where the room was. And then, Sokoloff’s key was found hanging up on the correct peg behind the reception desk. It does make sense – an inside job.’
Smith stopped midway between the camera on the back wall and the entrance to the carpark, and he looked back and forth between the two several times.
He said, ‘It’s one possibility. When I said this case was a belter, I wasn’t kidding. You can spot them after a while. Yes, Sokoloff might have annoyed somebody here enough to get into something that went horribly wrong – you cannot rule that out yet. But what are the chances that it happened to a character like him? A big bloke, an ex-boxer who wasn’t so old that he couldn’t knock that Mr D’Olivera into the middle of next week. A big bloke who until about ten years ago, according to the Met, was involved in some fairly serious thuggery. A big bloke who turns up here on his birthday for no good reason whatsoever that we can see… If we can find out why he was here, it’s my hunch that we’ll then be on the right track.’
Satisfied with whatever it was he was doing looking from the camera to the street, Smith began walking again.
‘Come on. I know Lighterman Street but you might as well see it for yourself, unless you want to save a few steps and view it from outer space again…’
‘I shouldn’t have sent that, should I? I shouldn’t have said that I’d never forgive him, John.’
Murray had completed the account of the previous day’s work, and he was now reading through the shared investigation files on his desktop. He paused, looked at Serena Butler and said, ‘I know I should break this to you in a more sensitive way but I think he’s probably got over the shock already.’
‘I was just… I mean, it was the surprise. Were you surprised when he told you?’
‘No.’
‘It’s the new DI, isn’t it, and Alison’s promotion. Too much change too quickly, older people can’t cope with it. I was reading that in a magazine.’
Murray nodded slowly and said, ‘Yes, that’ll be it. Tell him all that when you see him next – he’ll be relieved that someone understands why he’s had to go.’
Serena thought, John Murray isn’t easy to read – his sense of humour isn’t dissimilar to Smith’s but somehow it’s even more dry and difficult to detect much of the time. He’s definitely taking the mickey now.
‘So why is he going, then? He’s told you if he’s told anyone.’
Murray saw Detective Superintendent Allen walk into the room. There was an air of quiet, purposeful activity and no-one else seemed to have noticed him, but Allen said to no-one in particular that they should not mind him, they should carry on with what they were doing. Then he made his way across to where Alison Reeve and Simon Terek were seated together, not far from Murray’s own desk.
‘He’s been considering
it on and off for the past two years. He’s done his thirty and more now, so he gets the full pension – when he moved down the ladder, he was smart enough to get them to agree to protecting his DCI’s entitlement, so he’s going to be more than comfortable.’
Serena was waiting for more. When it didn’t come, she said, ‘But it’s not just about money, is it? The job – it’s his life, isn’t it? He’s on his own, as well. There isn’t anyone is there, not since his wife died?’
Murray didn’t answer but his face was saying something.
‘Is there? Who is she? Tell me everything!’
‘I’m saying nothing more than this. There’s someone he talks to regularly, and they’ve met up a few times. That’s it. If you want to know more, ask him yourself and let me know how you get on.’
Butler was in full investigative mode now, talking it through with herself while Murray was trying to listen in to what Superintendent Allen was saying – so Murray heard for a moment a garbled conversation that included ‘…you said they talk a lot but only meet occasionally…’ and ‘…been suggested to me this morning that this could be a gang-land killing…’ followed by ‘…probably means she doesn’t live locally…’ and then ‘…I don’t want the press getting ahead of us on this and putting out that sort of headline…’
Then the superintendent was leaving room 17, and Detective Inspector Terek was at Murray’s desk. He said to them both, ‘All OK? Are we keeping DC and Chris up to speed?’
Serena said, ‘Yes, sir. Chris has been on the hotel’s wi-fi, so it hasn’t been too bad this morning.’
‘Getting anything back from them?’
Murray answered, ‘They might have Sokoloff’s car on CCTV, which could give us a time at which he left the hotel on Saturday.’
‘Might have?’
‘Not the clearest of images – they’ll bring it in this afternoon. And we now know that Sokoloff ate in the hotel early on Saturday evening.’
‘Good – narrowing things down. And the bank?’
This was directly to Serena.
‘They’ve said by the end of the day, sir. The lady I’ve dealt with was very cooperative. I asked for six months’ figures. She was waiting for an authorisation code but said that at first glance there was no unusual activity that she could see. He has a current account with them and various savings, ISAs and such. I got the feeling he’s not short of money, sir.’
‘No business accounts?’
‘Not with that bank, sir.’
Terek seemed to find that significant.
‘I’ve just been told by Superintendent Allen that there might be some sort of gang-related dimension to what happened to Sokoloff. Make sure that DC hears that, will you. I don’t want anyone left out of the loop in this case.’
‘Yes, I will, sir.’
Terek was heading back towards DCI Reeve then, and she was looking back directly at John Murray. When Terek was a safe distance away, Murray said to Serena Butler, ‘Someone’s definitely had a word.’
‘Or a crab sandwich, maybe. Have you had proper crab, caught the same morning? Don’t forget to keep the revs up. You’re driving a proper car now, with a classic engine.’
Waters had been given the rare privilege of chauffeuring Smith in the Peugeot. Compared to his own, eighteen-month-old Corsa Sri, this one handled like an ancient tugboat in a force seven; the point about the revs was entirely correct, and if they fell too low, as on that last bend, for example, the old diesel began to stagger a little. He dropped back into third, and miraculously the car began to pull away again – miraculously, in Waters’ opinion, because, as Smith never tired of telling him, the old girl had done almost one hundred and fifty thousand miles.
There were lots of other bends in the road that wound its way across the saltmarshes at Overy, and they were bends difficult to account for because surely there never had been objects or features in this level landscape that needed to be wound around in this way. At first, on both sides of the narrow road, there were extensive grazing marshes dissected by many reed-fringed dykes but as the car approached the great hills of shingle that are this coastline’s final defence against the sea beyond, the land became less tame, and brackish marshes surrounded by great beds of reeds and thickets of sallow bushes took it over entirely. And yet, thanks to a slight natural rise in the ground, there was a hamlet of sorts here, and a little quay - a few flint and sandstone cottages huddled in the lee of the shingle bank, and the public house, The Queens Arms, held court over them.
Smith hadn’t been here since Sheila died but as far as he could tell from his first distant glimpse, little if anything had changed. Still the same old-fashioned sign that creaked in the wind and blistered in the sun, the white-washed walls, the low, crooked roof of red pantiles and still, as he would have described it if you had asked him, a garden full of hollyhocks and red geraniums.
Waters swung into another bend and the pub disappeared. A car was approaching, not at high speed but still somewhat too fast for the road it was on. Waters slowed, dropped the gear to second and went close to the verge, but the oncoming vehicle made no move to reciprocate – it held to the centre of the road as if the Peugeot simply wasn’t there. It was a black Lexus saloon, the windows tinted down to the legal limit, and so it wasn’t until the vehicles were passing each other, with Waters having driven almost entirely onto the sand and marram grass of the verge, that Smith was able to get a glimpse of the occupants. Two men, the driver wearing sunglasses and staring straight ahead, while the passenger glared at Smith as if the entire near-miss had been his sole responsibility. Then the car was disappearing around the bend, and although Smith turned quickly in his seat, he couldn’t get the number plate in time.
In braking the car, Waters had stalled it. Now he sat with two hands on the wheel, recovering himself. Smith wound down his window, leaned out and checked that the front wheel wasn’t so deep in the sand that it wouldn’t drive out. A gust of warm wind circled the vehicle, lifting the dry sand into late-summer dust, and there was a skylark singing somewhere over the marsh.
Then Smith said pleasantly, ‘You see? That’s what happens when you don’t keep the revs up.’
Chapter Sixteen
The Queens Arms seemed to have no clearly defined, official car-park. Waters pulled into a space to the right-hand side of it that had once been tarmac but which was now more shingle and sand. There were half a dozen vehicles in a loose line to their left, and Smith’s first thought was that he expected the pub to be busier than this on a lunchtime, with the weather still being so good.
Away to their right was the saltmarsh creek and the quay that Murray and Serena had visited a day or two ago, and the local authority car-park; the old dear was visible in her cubicle just as Serena had described, and Smith concluded that her assessment had been correct. Anyone turning up here in the middle of the night with a badly injured seventeen stone man, intent on getting him into one of those small boats out on the creek, would have had to park their vehicle in view of the pub itself if the car-park was locked, as it almost certainly would have been. Then they would have had to manoeuvre him some sixty or seventy yards to reach the nearest boat, and that would include getting him over or under the gate, although it was likely that boat-owners would have their own keys. Still, out here in this remote place, the sound of such goings-on would surely have been heard by someone inside the public house. Perhaps, after all, Deepford was the most likely point of departure. Nevertheless, it was here that Gina Clarke thought Sokoloff had stayed on his previous visit.
They got out and Waters locked the car, handing Smith the keys. They were halfway to the entrance when Smith said, ‘Not in my usual seat, was I? I’ve left my wallet in the car. Go and order a couple of drinks. I’ll have half a pint of lemonade – no ice, and a slice if they ask.’
He went back and found his wallet in the driver’s side door pocket. He stood for a few moments, perhaps as long as a minute, looking at the scene again, trying to make it
fit the most likely scenarios, and not really succeeding. Then he headed for the pub, taking off his jacket as he walked and hooking his thumb through the loop so that he could carry it one-handed over his shoulder.
As he opened the door, Smith’s eyes told him that the place had hardly altered since he was here several years ago, but his ears were telling him that something was wrong – a raised voice, an angry man telling someone to get out of this effing place now, and if they didn’t do so there would be dire consequences for certain parts of their anatomy. To Smith’s left he could see two couples at separate tables – they had food in front of them but were not eating. They were staring at the scene of the disturbance which must be around to his right somewhere.
Smith stepped further into the pub, and there was the angry man, still behind the bar but opening the old-fashioned flap that would give him access to the public space with one hand, while in the other he held what appeared to be a rounders bat. Not a big man, about Smith’s own height, but at least as wide as the proverbial brick building, red-faced and still muttering those threats as he advanced upon the tall, thin and slightly bemused-looking figure of Detective Constable Christopher Waters.
Smith probably muttered a ‘Dear me’ as he went into action – what he certainly thought was that this was the second time in what was it, three days, that he had had to rescue Kings Lake Central personnel from irate natives. Perhaps they don’t teach the diplomacy module at the academy any more.
‘Excuse me, sir. Please put down the offensive weapon.’
The bartender, for at the very least he must be that, turned to look at Smith as he continued his progress out from behind the bar. He planted himself firmly in front of the opening, and he was now within swinging distance of Waters, who, it must be said, had not given any ground himself.
‘Another bastard, is it? Well come on, I don’t care how many of you there effing are. You go out vertical or you go out horizontal. It’s all the same to me, boys.’
Time and Tide: A DC Smith Investigation Page 14