Ahmed gave a little gasp. ‘Oh, yes, sir. Good morning, sir. Are you all right? Did you have a good night?’
‘Yes. Yes. Of course I’m all right. I want Ron Gawber urgently.’
‘He’s not about, sir. He’s not in here. I’ll see if I can find him. There was a bit of a do down at that deserted warehouse on Canal Road. He might be down there. You might get him on his mobile. Or I could phone him and get him to phone you.’
Angel said: ‘What happened? What happened?’
‘Don’t know, sir.’
Angel sighed. ‘I want to know what happened. I haven’t got Ron Gawber’s number and I haven’t got a mobile.’
‘I could get him to phone you, sir. What’s your number?’
‘This phone doesn’t accept incoming calls.’
Angel heard a click in the earpiece followed by a high-pitched whining note. His lips tightened. He slammed down the handset, swung his legs out of bed and sat on the edge, then began looking down for something to put on his feet.
A sister pushed open the door and stood in front of it. ‘You’ve a visitor,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit early, but seeing as though your temperature is normal, you can go home, if you take things easy. But you need to rest for seven days. And you’ll need some antibiotics. Then you come back here for a dressing tomorrow. All right?’
Angel beamed. ‘Yeah. Great. Where’s my clothes?’
‘You have to come back tomorrow. Tomorrow, do you hear me?’
‘Yes,’ he bawled. ‘I speakee de Englaisais.’
She shook her head disapprovingly. She went out and the door slammed.
A moment later Gawber came in.
Angel looked up optimistically. ‘Well, what happened?’ He pointed to the chair by the bed.
‘Are you all right, sir?’
‘Yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘What happened then?’
‘Somebody from Sebastopol Terrace rang in at 2.15 this morning and said they’d heard gunshots being fired from the warehouse on Canal Road. They heard about ten shots in all.’
Angel looked serious and intent. He rubbed his chin.
‘DI Asquith was on duty,’ Gawber said. ‘He turned out the FSU. He rang me to represent Bromersley CID. We went down together to Canal Road. Got there about four o’clock. Dead quiet. We waited thirty minutes.’
‘Yes. Yes. Any girls around?’
Gawber shook his head. ‘I think the gunshots had frightened them off.’
‘Thank God for that. Go on.’
‘The men from the FSU found a dead body. Four bullets in him.’
‘Well, whose was it?’
‘It was Charlie Drumme.’
Angel sighed. He wrinkled his nose. He felt uncomfortable.
Gawber noticed and said, ‘He had it coming to him.’
Angel rubbed his hand across his mouth. ‘Did you find…anybody else?’
Gawber shook his head.
Angel’s eyebrows shot up.
‘There was a trail of blood. He must have been wounded. The dogs picked it up…out on to Canal Road, where he must have parked his car.’
‘They might get his DNA,’ he bawled.
Gawber nodded. ‘A sample is on its way to Wetherby.’
‘Ah!’ Angel said, his eyes twinkling.
The two men were quiet for a few moments, then Gawber said, ‘How did you manage to see Charlie Drumme and kid him on about the so-called meeting with the Corbetts?’
‘I didn’t. I had intended to, of course, but when I got here and enquired, I discovered he had been discharged yesterday morning.’
Angel and Gawber looked at each other with jaws dropped.
‘Well, who told him, then?’
‘It couldn’t have been the Corbetts, Cecil Moss or Laura,’ Gawber said. ‘They were down in our cells. Nobody else knew.’
Angel’s head came up. ‘Except… Aaron Moss. He might have worked it out if he had been trying to contact Cecil or he had seen any activity at the farm.’
Gawber frowned. ‘Aaron Moss?’
‘There’s nobody else,’ Angel said. ‘It was no secret that he didn’t get on with Drumme. No point in wasting The Fixer’s talent. That must be it,’ he added with a smile. He was much relieved and nodded with satisfaction.
‘Come in. Sit down. Got a doctor’s note saying you wouldn’t be back for another week,’ Harker said, with all the charm of a prison cook emptying the slop bins into the pig-swill lorry in the quadrangle at Strangeways.
Angel nodded courteously. He suspected that the prune and cod liver oil extract with the nuts and oats and straw he had had for breakfast was still occupying a position high on his chest instead of being kneaded comfortably in his small, mean, over-acidic stomach.
‘Anyway, good. Good,’ he said with a sniff. He looked down at his desk and picked up some papers secured at the corner with a paper clip. ‘James and Lloyd Corbett and Cecil Moss were promptly recovered by the FSU in that barn where you had left them, and those three villains together with that woman, Laura something or other, have been to court and sent on remand to Doncaster. Also, in your absence, Gawber has done a comprehensively sound job in assembling the many charges against the four of them. The CPS seems content. So the Corbett gang seems to be entirely satisfactorily dealt with and needs no more attention until the Crown Court later on this year.’
Angel nodded. "Yes, sir. I understand that.’
Harker reached forward for a pink A5-size paper with till receipts, bills, vouchers, et cetera stapled to it. He wrinkled his nose. ‘Now, there’s a matter of your expenses.’
Angel frowned. Harker always found something wrong with them. He licked his lips.
"There’s this ten pounds. It says "ten pounds paid to woman". It doesn’t give her name.’
‘No. Well, I didn’t know her name, sir.’
‘Well, what did you give her the money for?’
‘It could easily have been as much as a hundred pounds, sir.’
‘A hundred pounds? What do you mean? What was it for?’
Angel licked his lips. ‘You could say ‘services rendered’, I suppose.’
‘What services? What does she do?’
‘She’s a prostitute on Canal Road, sir.’
Harker stared at him, jaw dropped, mouth open and speechless.
Angel realized what Harker had made of it. ‘No, sir,’ he said quickly. ‘She didn’t — It wasn’t — It was for tipping me off, sir.’
His face went scarlet. ‘For tipping you off?’ he bawled.
Angel sighed. ‘I gave her the ten pounds to phone me on her mobile when big Laura appeared on the scene. That’s all, sir. Perfectly innocent, I assure you.’
Harker put a big pen stroke through the amount. ‘Can’t pay for expenses without a chitty or alternatively a traditional accepted disbursement that cannot be accounted for by a chitty or receipt.’
Angel’s head came up. His fists clenched. ‘It was for information that led to the arrest of the Corbett gang.’
‘No, lad. No, it was not. The consequence of that tip-off was a bullet wound which resulted in you claiming a new suit and shirt, four days’ pay while you were off work, and the capital cost to the force of a new car to replace the two-year-old one that was torched and burnt to a cinder on The Fisherman’s Rest car park on Sebastopol Terrace.’
It was Angel’s turn to look amazed.
The interview was curtly terminated and Angel stormed down the corridor to his office and slammed the door. He tried to busy himself with the post, but he was so angry he couldn’t concentrate. Businessmen, salesmen and even MPs were supposed to be able to fiddle their expenses, whereas he’d never even been successful in achieving full repayment for all that he had paid out. It was costing him to work!
The phone rang.
Angel glared at it, then he reached out and snatched it up. It was Harker. He began speaking before Angel could say a word.
‘Just got a triple nine. A body has been brought out of We
ntworth Dam wired to a pair of steps. Get out there.’
Angel’s stomach bounced up to his throat then subsided to his chest. That always happened when a dead body was found in suspicious circumstances.
‘Uniformed are already there,’ Harker said. ‘I’ve informed SOCO and Dr Mac.’
‘Right, sir,’ he said and replaced the phone. His heart was thumping. His mind was automatically running down a checklist.
He picked up the phone and tapped in a number. Ahmed answered.
‘I am going to Wentworth Dam,’ Angel said. ‘It’s possibly a murder case. Tell Ron Gawber and Trevor Crisp to join me there immediately.’
‘Right, sir,’ Ahmed said.
As Angel had been speaking, he had reached into a lower drawer of his desk, taken out a thin cream-coloured envelope containing rubber gloves, and stuffed it into his pocket. He stood up and made for the door.
Angel arrived at the crime scene, which was on the road bridge over Wentworth Dam, a small expanse of water two miles from Bromersley town centre. The road bridge had been closed to traffic since the floods two weeks ago, and a dirty big crane located in the middle of the bridge was dredging the area in front of the sluice gates to allow easy passage of the water and eliminate the floods. The crane driver had been loading debris and junk into a skip positioned on the road. There was the usual fleet of police vehicles including Dr Mac’s car, SOCO’s van and the mortuary van, with the obligatory flashing blue lights.
A PC lifted the blue and white tape for Angel. ‘This your case, sir?’
‘Aye. What exactly has happened? Do you know?’
‘As I understand it, sir…a crane driver removing debris from the escape gates of the sluice has lifted a pair of aluminium steps with a woman’s body tied to it by electrical wire. That man in the orange dayglo coat is the crane driver.’
‘Thank you, Constable.’ He approached the man. ‘Excuse me, sir. I’m DI Angel. I’m in charge of this case. You are the crane driver? Do you mind telling me what happened?’
‘It was awful,’ the man said. ‘I didn’t know what it was at first. I thought it was a big doll or something. There’s all sorts of queer people out there. How was I to know what it was — that it was a real human being? Anyway as I lifted and held it, all the slush drained off of it — I could see it had been something human, so I lowered it on the pavement. I put the brake on and went over to take a closer look.’
‘You didn’t touch it,’ Angel said.
He pulled a distasteful face and shook his head. ‘No. I pulled out my mobile and tapped out for you fellas.’
‘Thanks very much,’ Angel said.
Gawber appeared through the gathering. ‘Is it a murder, sir?’
‘Dead woman tied by electric flex to a pair of steps. What do you think?’
Gawber nodded.
As Angel made his way nearer to the white tent, he saw Dr Mac. ‘What you got, Mac?’
‘Nothing much. Female. Looks older than seventeen, but not sixty. Severe blow to back of head. Smashed skull.’
‘How long has she been in the water?’
‘There’s cutis anserina on the hands, of course. A week or a fortnight. Something like that.’
‘Thank you, Mac.’
‘I’m finished here, Michael. Will you see to releasing the body from the steps?’
‘I’ll get SOCO to do it.’ He turned to Gawber. ‘Where’s DS Taylor?’
Gawber looked over the small crowd of police and vehicles on the dam bridge.
‘Can’t see him.’
‘Get me some cutters. To cut through the flex. I’ll do it.’
Angel turned to Dr Mac. ‘You push off, Mac, if you want. SOCO and I will have a shufti at the body and then your men can have it. Phone you later.’
‘All right, Michael.’
Gawber said: ‘What’s cutis anserina, sir?’
‘Eh? What? It’s Latin. Mac showing off It’s the wrinkly washerwoman effect of the skin found on feet and hands when a person or dead body has been in water too long.’
A uniformed constable came up to Angel. ‘Excuse me, sir. The crane driver wants to go home. He feels sick. Is that all right?’
Angel nodded. ‘Get his name and address and phone number.’
‘Right, sir.’
Gawber said: ‘Don Taylor’s here, sir.’
‘You want me? Been taking samples of the dam water for comparison, sir.’
‘Have you finished going over the body?’ Angel said.
‘Yes, sir. There was nothing. Can’t rely on the origin of any foreign hair or dust particle on the corpse.’
He nodded. ‘That’s right. Mac thinks she’s been in the water one or two weeks.’
‘And it’s been running, fresh, changing water,’ Taylor said.
‘Aye,’ Angel said, rubbing his chin.
They moved inside a tiny white tent erected over a portable ambulance table. A body wearing a heavy coat over other layers of clothes lay indecorously on top of a pair of steps, typically used by electricians, painters and decorators and workmen of all sorts. The body was fastened at the ankles, wrists, neck and waist by black plastic-covered three-core thirteen-amp electric cable.
The face skin was mostly light purple with brown patches, the hair black, straggly all over and partly over the face.
One of SOCO’s team arrived with heavy scissors. Taylor said: ‘Cut them at the back. Save all the knots.’
Angel stood by, watching. ‘What colour are her eyes?’
Taylor moved up her eyelid with a thumb and said, ‘Brown, sir.’
Angel nodded then stepped closer to the table and leaned forward. He looked at the body’s hands, wrists and under the chin. Then he looked at Gawber and said, ‘Look, Ron. No jewellery.’
Gawber raised his head and looked at him. ‘Oh?’
Angel sighed then pointed to the corpse and said, ‘It’s Selina Line.’
Chapter Fifteen
Don’t know if it matters now, sir.’
‘What?’ Angel said, looking across his desk.
‘I spoke to each of the tellers who actually paid out the cash to Selina Line,’ Gawber said, ‘both at her bank and her building society, and in each case they confirmed that she was alone. They certainly thought it was unusual, but as she had fulfilled all the rules of proving her identity and, in the case of the building society, had applied the statutory time ahead, they were each obligated to pay out her funds in cash. They recall that there was very little social chitchat. She gave no indication as to her plans. When she had received the money, in each case, she didn’t hang around.’
‘Maybe he was waiting outside,’ Angel said, then he sniffed. ‘That gets us absolutely nowhere then, Ron. We’ve searched Dennis Schuster’s house; we really need an excuse to search Laurence Potter’s house. There might be something.’
‘He seems to have kept himself clean since he came out in January 2007.’
‘But he doesn’t work. He’s always in. And he’s not on the breadline. He can afford champagne and home-visiting working girls. Neither comes cheap.’
‘He has nowhere near the charm of oily Schuster, though, sir.’
‘I agree, but he’s another possibility. He lives nearer that phone box in Victoria Road.’
‘Is that all we’ve got on him?’
‘That’s all we had on Schuster at the beginning, Ron, but I have since found a copy of Lady and Home magazine in his dustbin at home.’
Gawber blinked. ‘His wife could have —’
‘I had it checked out and it is covered in his prints and nobody else’s. I know it doesn’t prove anything.’
‘You could ask him about it, sir.’
‘He’d lie and say that his wife liked reading about country life and so on.’
‘You could point out what a liar he is, sir. Be the start of breaking him down.’
‘I know. I know. But Schuster, I know a bit about. And we’ve got him on police bail. We’d soon know if he ran o
ff. If he murdered Selina Line, he’d not get far. But it’s Potter I need to examine. I haven’t quite got the measure of that man yet. And I haven’t anything on him either. I haven’t even a feeling about him.’
‘Shall I see if I can bring him in, sir? For a casual chat with you?’
Angel rubbed his chin for a few moments. He always liked to plan his strategy. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But if he’ll come, don’t tell him what it’s about. Just tell him it’s a general chat. That might even kindle his curiosity.’
Gawber rushed off.
Angel picked up the phone. ‘Ahmed, do you know where DS Crisp is?’
‘He’s here, sir. At his desk.’
Angel’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Tell him I want to see him in here, now.’
A minute later Crisp arrived.
‘I’ve been looking out for you, sir,’ he began.
Angel’s jaw tightened. ‘You didn’t have to look very far.’
‘Heard you’d been shot at.’
‘It was nothing. Before all that, I set you on looking for Selina Line’s jewellery?’
‘No joy, sir. I did all the shops, auctioneers…even went round the flea market on Saturday. But I couldn’t report to you. You weren’t here.’
Angel wasn’t pleased. He ran his hand through his hair. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘and what are you busy with now?’
‘Old lady being scammed on her doorstep by Carl Exley. Acting the part of being a solicitor, telling her she’s been left a fortune, but needs fees paying up front. You know the sort of thing.’
Angel nodded then the corners of his mouth turned down. ‘Everything going all right?’
‘Going to bring him in now.’
‘Right. Good luck. Get back to it.’
Crisp rushed out.
Exley had worked up a regular line in playing honest, respectable characters such as solicitors, vicars and policemen. People were so honest and trusting, particularly old people, that Exley was easily able to trick them out of thousands. He was remembering a constable had caught him in the market a few years ago collecting for a non-existent charity. He wished Crisp well with his case against him.
Missing, Presumed... (An Inspector Angel Mystery) Page 17