‘But, damn it,’ she snapped. ‘Christmas is not so far away now. So let’s have some suggestions that lead somewhere.’
‘Well, ma’am,’ placid Sgt Wintercombe boomed. ‘The trouble is we’re no longer getting the co-operation we might from other forces. There’s an e-mail I was looking at last week, one from someone who at least doesn’t sound like a teenager. So it could be our man. No proper name, of course, only some silly nickname, but your electronic wizards in Birchester, if I may say so, have done nothing so far about tracing him. At the start of it all they were getting back to us over an inquiry like that within twenty-four hours.’
‘Very good, Sergeant. I’ll personally put a bomb under them. Anything else?’
‘Ma’am,’ WDC Johnson said. ‘There’s this chap Brewer, the roofer. We have made some progress there.’
‘So I understand from Mr Brent. Any more come in since first thing this morning?
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Yes. Good. Let’s hear.’
‘Well, ma’am, after Brewer’s foreman eventually told us about him suddenly quitting his job, where incidentally he was getting high wages — he’s fearless on heights, they told me — inquiries since have turned up an odd fact. A pretty suspicious one, in fact. You see, Brewer, who, the foreman said, was a bit of a loner, had been due to go to Spain on holiday in the second week in July, all paid for and booked. But on the afternoon of the murder, not next day as we first thought, he turned up at the travel agency wanting to transfer his booking to the first available flight. When they told him the sort of fare he was on didn’t allow for that he tried to cancel. But he was on a cheapo flight and wasn’t allowed to hand it in so near the departure date. So then he simply let that go, and booked whatever flight they had, leaving at once. And in fact on June the twenty-first he left.’
‘Never to return?’
‘Oh, no, ma’am. Eventually he came back, flat broke, to Birchester, and yesterday through a Job Centre we traced him.’
‘He’s still in Birchester now, far as you know?’
‘He is, ma’am. He’s got a new job, on another roof, and he’s back in his old digs. I went there and made a few discreet inquiries. He seemed to be well settled in, so I didn’t do any more. But I did make a PNC check.’
‘And what did that magical national computer have to tell you?’
‘One conviction, ma’am. Indecent assault, three years ago.’
‘Yes, not much necessarily. But all the same, it makes him look worthwhile, perhaps more than worthwhile. Where can we find him now? Does anybody know?’
Again it was WDC Johnson who answered.
‘Yes, ma’am. He should be in Birchester, up on the roof of a building going up in the Moorfields area.’
‘Right. We’ll go and see him straight away. Let’s have some action.’
*
The Hard Detective went across to Birchester accompanied by DI Brent. Little though either of us, she had decided, will welcome the other’s proximity. But, if Anselm is to be broken from his bondage at all, it has to be by thrusting him, however painfully, into a situation of normality between us or at least of outward normality.
So she had him there in the car, sitting in front of her, next to WDC Johnson, who was driving. To sit within touching distance, she felt, would be asking too much of herself. But she permitted no brooding silences to fall.
‘You’ve neither of you spoken to this man Brewer?’
‘No, ma’am.’ Johnson answered promptly. ‘He was in Spain when we got to hear about him.’
‘And you, Mr Brent? You don’t know him, know of him, as a local?’
A moment’s pause before an answer came.
‘He’s not a local to me. From Birchester, they say.’
‘Did either of you talk to that foreman of his who reported him going off like that?’
‘He went to his local PS in Birchester, ma’am, whichever was nearest to the building being put up in Chapeltown,’ Johnson said. ‘I understand Mr Anderson went over and saw him afterwards. But I never heard what he found out, if anything.’
‘And you, Mr Brent?’
Again a tiny pause before he brought himself to speak.
‘I was on leave, ma’am.’ Another pause. ‘As you may recall.’
She did not let the half-hidden resentment affect her. Relentlessly she went on forcing him to answer whatever questions she could think of. As well as making hapless WDC Johnson provide more snippets of almost useless information.
It had begun gently to rain, the first signs perhaps of autumn. Behind her jerkily forced questions and comments she heard the swish of their tyres as an increasingly obtrusive background.
Then at last Johnson pulled the car up.
‘This should be it, ma’am.’
‘Right, you’d better stay here. Mr Brent, I’d like you to come with me.’
Face thunderous, Anselm opened the far-side door, stepped out into the damply wetting drizzle.
Yes, she thought, he knows damn well what I’m doing, and he’s hating it. But I’m going to go on doing it. Being hard with him. Being hard with myself. Fighting off, if it can be fought off, the sullen cloud above us. As sullen — she glanced upwards — as the actual rain-cloud there.
The building, apparently yet another office block, was only three-parts finished. Inside, she found a carpenter at work and learnt that there were men on the roof and that Grant Brewer was one of them.
‘Can they carry on in this weather?’ she asked, by way of thanking the man for his help.
He laughed.
‘Well, they do. But I’m glad I’m a chippie, that’s all.’
They went on, up flights of bare concrete stairs, following his directions. Eventually they came to the top floors where the outer walls had not yet been put in place. A chilly wind blew in a little of the fine rain.
‘Must be almost there,’ Harriet said.
Anselm grunted.
Should I stop here while we can, she asked herself. Have it out with him again?
No, it’d be no use.
‘Right, up we go.’
In a minute more they had emerged through a small doorless doorway on to the roof itself. In front of her, blurred in the misty rain, Harriet saw a panorama far down below of a large part of the city. She felt a lurch of disquiet. Heights never much to her taste.
Quickly she looked round at her immediate surroundings. They were on a narrow area of the freshly installed leads. Behind them there rose up bright new, yellowy-brown unweathered timbers, awaiting their covering, in row after row reaching to the peak of the future roof. Perched at intervals at the very top were three men hammering home the remaining crossbeams.
She turned to Anselm.
‘Which one’s Brewer? Do you know?’
‘No idea.’ Two sulky words.
‘Right, we’ll find out soon enough.’
She lifted her head and called up.
‘Grant Brewer? Mr Brewer, we’re police. We’d like a word.’
None of the hammering men appeared to have heard.
‘Too windy, I suppose,’ she said to Anselm. ‘We’ll just have to climb up nearer.’
For a moment she had considered sending him up on his own. But her long-engrained habit of never as a woman officer failing to do what was asked of a male officer prevailed.
It was not really difficult to use the cross-bars of the unclad parts of the roof as a sort of ladder, although from time to time as she somewhat laboriously climbed she felt one or other of her feet slip on the rain-wet wood.
Half-way up, with Anselm sullenly following her a foot or so below, she paused and thought of calling upwards again. But it seemed pointless. They could hardly talk to Brewer, let alone subject him to questioning, leaning as they were against the slope of the unfinished roof.
She drew in a long breath and started off again. Nearing the crest she saw that the three roofers were now looking down at them. But she waited until she had ma
naged to get astride the heavy top beam, finding herself next to two of the roofers who were working close together, with the third some fifteen feet away at the far end of the long ridgepiece.
Damn this skirt, she thought savagely as she made efforts to hoick it up enough to be able to sit in reasonable comfort, though she had to take care not for an instant to look downwards.
‘Which of you is Grant Brewer?’ she said as soon as she was settled.
For a short time, perhaps only ten or twenty seconds, there was no answer. Then the man nearest her replied.
‘That’s him. Along at the end. Grant, you silly bugger, answer the lady, whoever she is. She’s come all the way up for a chat, you cunt.’
‘I’m police,’ Harriet said briskly, adding as Anselm came scrambling on to the ridgepiece in front of her. ‘Detective Superintendent Martens, and this is Detective Inspector Brent.’
‘The law, is it? What you done, Grantie?’
From the far end of the wooden structure that was to be the roof chubby-faced, curls-crowned, vacant-looking Grant Brewer produced a few strangulated words.
‘It wasn’t me. It wasn’t. I never.’
‘Talk to him, Mr Brent,’ Harriet said to Anselm. ‘Shove yourself along towards him. I can’t even see his face properly with you between us.’
Anselm, after a moment, began to move forward along the ridgepiece. And at once, from the awkwardness with which he set about it, Harriet realized that, if she was unhappy about heights, he was yet more so.
She felt an upsurge of the feeling for him she had tried so hard to suppress.
Tell him to stay where he is? Try to get myself past him and along to that damn idiot at the end there? But, no. If I have my duty, Anselm equally has his.
She watched him shuffle himself bit by bit onwards, and concentrated with all her force on stopping the physical fluttering of her stomach muscles.
At last he got to within four or five feet of the curly-haired silent youngster at the far end of the roof, leaning easily forward with his feet on a cross-bar. The picture of outward confidence. But then suddenly, as Anselm slowly shuffled nearer, he shot bolt upright and stood there swaying from side to side.
‘No,’ he screamed.
He turned and looked down at the streets far below, and Harriet at once knew what he was intending to do.
‘Catch him, hold him,’ she yelled.
Grant Brewer began to launch himself forward, a chubby balloon. Anselm took a desperate lunge in his direction, foot slipping and scrabbling on the wet wood of the beams.
He was in time.
For a little the two of them wrestled together, Anselm with one hand round the would-be suicide’s leg, the other clutching scrabblingly at one of the half-installed timbers. Abruptly losing all fear, Harriet swung herself along towards them, reached high and gripped Brewer by the sleeve of his leather jacket. Digging her fingers fiercely in, she hauled him back.
Chapter Seventeen
With the aid of Grant Brewer’s two fellow workers, they succeeded in getting him to the ground, a hopeless, quivering jelly. Bundled into the back of the car, with this time DI Brent in the rear seat, they drove at speed back to Levenham. Beyond the purr of the engine and the swish-swish of the tyres as the rain still steadily soaked down, only Grant Brewer’s occasional sobs or snorts broke a long silence.
When they arrived Harriet was not surprised to see a long trail of snot hanging down from the boy’s right nostril.
‘Take him to Interview Room One,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there in five minutes.’
Five minutes she still needed to sort herself out. However much in the car she had tried to think, she had been defeated in part by Brewer’s sobbing and even more by Anselm’s stubborn, folded-in refusal to open his mouth.
She ran up to her office, turned her key in the door, ignored the pile of messages on the desk and plunged her head into her hands. Fiercely she tried to work out whether her decision about Anselm had been in any way altered by the danger she had put him in there on the roof, by his sudden courage in overcoming it.
Oh, God, she found herself thinking, it has, it has. How could I have pretended, deceiving myself even, that I would be able to thrust aside love. Love infusing me, infusing him with its all-powerful — what?
But, when she tried to think just what it was she felt occupying every cubic centimetre of her body, every cell in her brain, all she could label it as was fumes.
Yes, I’m poisoned by love’s fumes. And Anselm is equally poisoned. Think what happened in this very room when I tried to tell him, half-persuading myself it was the truth, that a few days in brash, busy America had brought me to my senses.
And then ... then Anselm spat out those bitter words, It’s love. Fucking love ... I’m in love with you, Harriet. And I knew, I felt, he was as gripped in every way as I was. Yes, oh, yes, I knew what you’d been feeling, my darling, my darling, my own darling.
At last, heaving herself upright with hands spread wide on the surface of the desk in front of her, careless whether their sweat would mark the papers under them, not knowing even whether she was pressing down on papers or on scattered paper-clips or ballpoints, she made for the door.
I said I’d be down in Interview Room One in five minutes, and I shall be. I shall.
But she had to hold on to the stair-rail as she made her way below.
*
Interview Room One, where she had questioned Old Rowley and later Prudence Mackintosh, was occupied. Two Leven Vale officers were there, dealing with a youth who had committed the decent, ordinary crime of taking and driving away. Grant Brewer, who was awaiting interrogation about a crime, wholly, she thought with a jet of bitterness, in the dark realm of Eros, she found in Interview Room Two.
At its door she gave herself a moment to take a good look at him. Still pale as could be under his damply curling crown of black hair, he was looking now a little more composed. No longer was he shivering and sobbing as he had been in the car, nor was that trail of snot stuck to his right cheek.
Did he recover enough to wipe it away, she wondered. Or did WDC Johnson provide in womanly fashion a tissue? Certainly Anselm did not look as if he had come to the snotty young man’s rescue. Where, when questioning Old Rowley back in June, he had leant forward and by his look alone impressed on the aged layabout that no lies, no slippery evasions, would help him, now he was just sitting there, an inert presence.
Yes, she said to herself. Yes, I can pull him out of that sink of despair now. And how easy it could be. Give him the least flicker of a sign that all my stiffness and withdrawnness was mere pretence, and in an instant, like some tropical plant touched by the first rains, he’ll be back to his old self. I know it. Whatever difficulties he may see in our path, they’ll look like so many red-and-white plastic traffic cones to be knocked over and left uselessly rolling.
And, yes, yes, yes, I feel that, too.
She pulled back her shoulders, went across and took the chair between Anselm and Johnson, looking at neither of them even for a moment but straight ahead at wretched Grant Brewer.
‘Right, Mr Brewer,’ she said, once the preliminaries for the tapes had been gone through, and the dopey young roofer had shown awareness enough to decline the offer of a solicitor’s presence, ‘tell me, why did you go back to work at all on that morning of June the twentieth?’
The unexpectedness of the question plainly sent a judder of confusion through the fat, pale-faced man-boy. As she had intended it should.
‘I — I didn’t.’
‘For God’s sake, man, don’t think it’s going to help you to talk nonsense like that. Your foreman on that Chapeltown job told us just what time it was when you upped and left. It was after your meal-break, about midday. You’d been working there all morning.’
No answer.
‘Mr Brewer, I’m asking you again. Why did you stay on that job until after you’d heard the news on the radio of Bubbles Xingara’s murder?’
&nbs
p; She thought she was still going to be faced with blank, uncomprehending silence. But before she put her question for a third time the chubby young roofer muttered a reply.
‘Knew what they’d think.’
‘What they’d think? And what was that?’
‘That I’d done it. Killed her. Because of what happened that once. What they called indecent assault.’
‘Well, now, Mr Brewer, I’m going to ask you straight out: did you on that day in June, the twentieth, assault Bubbles Xingara, take a javelin and jab it into her neck?’
Grant Brewer slowly shook his head from side to side. There was in his big, soft brown eyes a look of some animal, a cow perhaps, faced with an object it was unable to get its brain round.
‘Javelin,’ he said at last. ‘I been wondering ... Please, what’s a javelin?’
Christ, no, Harriet said to herself. First Cacoyannis makes out he didn’t know what a javelin was, though he soon enough agreed he did, and now this clumpy fellow’s making the same claim.
‘What is a javelin?’ she echoed him. ‘You’re actually asking me what a javelin is?’
But could this be the clever answer of a clever murderer? Was this apparently dully podgy youth capable of rapidly winding back down the trail of logic? Of working out that, if he could convincingly claim not to know what a javelin was, he could not possibly have used one to kill Bubbles Xingara?
But, no. No. All my training tells me I’m dealing with someone who, if he uses logic at all, uses it only to plot out his existence one or two steps ahead.
‘So you didn’t know that what you took to Adam and Eve House that day was something called a javelin?’ she said. ‘Javelins were spears back in the Roman times. Now they’re just thrown in athletics, to see who can make them go furthest. But you, you didn’t have to throw the one you’d got hold of, did you?’
‘But I didn’t do it. I didn’t.’
‘We think you did.’
Suddenly she thought of the piece of evidence, or of semi-evidence, hearsay, that she had extracted from Fiona Diplock when at Adam and Eve House she had taken her out down by the boathouse. There had been little to it. Just that Fiona under pressure had recalled something more than Handy Andy had learnt about her half-forgotten conversation with Bubbles. Bubbles, she had said at last, had gone as far as to knock down, or kick over, the person, male or female never actually specified, who had angered her.
A Detective in Love Page 17