‘So where was your Ronnie on Sunday, then, ma? This Sunday just gone.’
‘Out. He was out,’ she said quickly. ‘He weren’t here.’
‘Oh, so you can’t vouch for him, then?’ Hollis said innocently. ‘Can’t give him an alibi?’
She looked dumbfounded, but recovered to say, ‘No, that’s right, he was here all day. I ’member now. He never went out at all. He was watching telly all day, and – and – I give him fish and chips for his tea.’
Hollis was impressed with this piece of invention from a woman who was so dense that light bent round her. He needed to disarm her and get her to talk. He wished he could sit down, but he was afraid for his sanity. Instead he moved a little way from her and leaned against the wall, folding his arms, and said benignly, ‘Come on, ma, you can tell me. If he’s in trouble again, I can help you. You don’t want this to get out of hand, do you?’
She stared at him anxiously. ‘He’s a good boy, really,’ she said. ‘He never meant to hurt nobody. It was them girls that led him on. They was bad girls. Especially that last one, that Wanda. She was the one got him into trouble that last time. He’d never have thought of a thing like that. It was her what told him to do it. My Ronnie’s a good boy. It wasn’t true what they said about him in the papers.’
‘I’m sure it wasn’t,’ he said soothingly.
‘I kept ’em all,’ she said proudly, short-circuiting herself. ‘Every one what had his name in. Pages and pages there was about him. Pictures, too.’ Her eyes clouded. ‘The pictures wasn’t good of him, though. Not one good one in the ’ole lot. Wouldn’t you think newspapers could take a better picture ’n that?’
‘It’s a shame,’ Hollis said. ‘So he went out Sunday lunchtime, did he?’ It was just a guess, but it primed her all right.
‘Went down the pub for his lunch,’ she agreed, ‘but he come back after and we watched telly, and then he went off out again.’
‘Went to the fair, did he?’
‘I dunno. I dunno where he went.’
‘I heard he likes fairs.’
‘Yeah, he does. Likes the lights and the noise and all that. Waste o’ money, I call ’em. But Ronnie likes ’em. I spec he did go to the fair. Never come in till late, any ’ow, that I do know.’ In her confusion, she seemed now to think it was a good thing for him to have been out, the longer the better.
‘What time did he come home, then?’
‘I ain’t got a clock,’ she said simply. Then, ‘I was in bed.’
‘Right,’ Hollis said. From memory, she stayed up watching the television until all hours, so this wasn’t much help, except that it suggested it was well after midnight. Mind you, the old bat was so wonky she wasn’t to be trusted on anything, and it could just as well have been Monday night he was out, or a fortnight-last-Whitsun. You could never use her in court. Still, she might be right on this occasion. And if Ronnie was out Sunday night, it led to a promising area of speculation, especially as a strange-looking man had been seen wandering around the area.
He was working out his next question when there was the sound of a key in the lock and the hair stood up on the back of his neck. Ronnie had been too dopey to be dangerous the last time Hollis had seen him, but that was before he had done a stretch as a sex-offender among the high-powered criminals in Wormwood Scrubs. There was no knowing what he might have learned in there.
The door opened and he slouched in, flinging a newspaper down on the nearest surface before he registered that there was a strange man in the room with his mother. His jaw dropped, and he stared, trying to work it out.
‘Hello, Ronnie, remember me? I just dropped in to have a little chat,’ Hollis said as unalarmingly as possible.
Ronnie Oates, the Acton Strangler, was undersized and thin – though he had put on a bit more flesh with good prison feeding – and his head looked slightly too big for him. He had large, pale-blue eyes etched about with a mass of fine lines, while the rest of his face was quite smooth, which gave him the curiously old-young look which was the hint to the wary that he was of limited mental acuity. In fact, his record gave his age as thirty-four. His hair was straight, limp, and fair, but thinning on the top. His hands, like his head, seemed over-large, and hung rather uselessly at the end of his arms. He was wearing the jacket of a dark-blue suit with trousers of buff cotton, a blue T-shirt and plastic sandals. Just a glance at his clothes would tell you he wasn’t dealing from the full deck; but in fact, since he combined the IQ of a glass of water with strong sexual urges and – according to the various female victims he’d exposed himself to over the years – a johnson the size of a Lyon’s family Swiss roll, he was not quite as harmless as he looked.
‘Sergeant Hollis, Shepherd’s Bush,’ Hollis helped him out, smiling comfortably. ‘Just popped in to see how you’re getting on.’
You could almost hear the gears grinding inside Ronnie’s skull; faint wisps of blue smoke from the burning oil drifted from his ears. ‘I never done nothing,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t me this time.’
‘Not you this time?’ Hollis said encouragingly.
‘It weren’t my fault. She wanted me to do it.’
‘Who did?’
‘That Wanda. She wouldn’t leave me alone. Kept asking me and asking me. She made me do it, Mum,’ he flung at his mother, who was watching the exchanges with her mouth partly open, like someone at a ping-pong tournament.
‘You gave her money to let you do it, Ronnie,’ Hollis reminded him.
‘She asked me for it. She asked me for money.’
Wanda Lempowski had been a prostitute, so Hollis didn’t doubt that. ‘But you shouldn’t have strangled her,’ he pointed out.
‘She said I could. She liked it. I asked her and she said I could squeeze her neck.’
‘Not as hard as that, though.’
‘I never meant to. She said she wanted it, then she started screaming, so I pressed a bit harder to stop her, and then she hit me. She hit me hard. It really hurt,’ he complained.
‘She was scared, that’s all,’ Hollis said soothingly.
‘Anyway,’ Oates said sulkily, ‘my mum said I wasn’t to do that no more.’
‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Oates, ‘and he won’t. He promised. You won’t, will you, Ronnie? I told him he wasn’t to get it out no more, never again.’
‘That’s right, Ronnie,’ Hollis said. ‘Not unless you’re on your own in the bathroom.’
He stuck his lip out. ‘It don’t hurt ’em just showing it to ’em.’
‘But the probation man said you’re not to, Ron, never no more,’ Mrs Oates said anxiously.
‘All right, mum,’ he said irritably, and turned to Hollis. ‘Anyway, I never hurt her.’
‘Who’s that, Ron?’ Hollis asked, catching the change of tone with a quiver of interest.
‘The other night.’ He lowered his voice to keep it from his mother. ‘I was going to show her my porker. She was lying down. Maybe she was asleep, so it wouldn’t have mattered. She wouldn’t have minded if she was asleep. I wanted to show it her. But then I never.’
‘Why not?’
‘I thought someone might come. And I’m not supposed to get it out no more.’
‘That’s right,’ Hollis said. ‘So was that on the Scrubs? By the railway embankment?’
‘Yeah, in the bushes. People go there to do it, y’know. All sorts. I like watching. I bet that’s why she was there. Like that Wanda. They’re all scrubbers, all them girls. Teasing and asking for it and making you, and then screaming.’
‘But if you squeeze their necks hard enough they can’t scream, can they?’
‘She never screamed,’ Ronnie admitted. ‘She never made a sound.’
‘I’m going to have to ask you to come with me, Ronnie,’ Hollis said gently. ‘Just to have a little chat and write down what you’ve told me.’
He looked alarmed. ‘I never done nothing! I never hurt that girl.’
‘No, of course not. I just want to have a c
hat where it’s comfortable, and write down what you’ve told me. Tell you what, I’ll ring the station and they can send a proper police car. You’d like a ride in a police car, wouldn’t you? With the lights and the siren going? You like the lights, don’t you?’
‘Can I ride in the front?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘We’ll see. And when we get there, you can have a nice cup of tea and some biscuits.’
‘Cake,’ he stipulated, playing hard ball.
‘All right, cake.’
‘A lot.’
‘As much as you want.’
‘Fruit cake,’ Ronnie said firmly.
You said it, Hollis thought.
When Oates had been removed, Hollis was free to search his room, loath as he was to disturb any layers in there. Apart from the signature dirty clothes, crockery, food waste and general rubbish, Ronnie’s interior decorating style was eclectic, gathering souvenirs from wherever he went. Anything he came across in the street during his wanderings was grist to his mill. Bits of wood, half a broken nameplate from someone’s front gate, several hubcaps, a washing-up bowl with a hole in the bottom, a garden gnome with a chipped nose, a cracked tea plate decorated with violets, a set of pram wheels, an umbrella whose fabric had parted from half its spokes, a wire supermarket basket, a split cricket bat. In a cardboard box in one corner there was a whole collection of bits of broken glass that had once been part of headlights and tail lights of cars that had been in collision – he must have picked them up out of the road, along with the hubcaps, from the scenes of accidents. In another box was an amazing assortment of plastic cutlery of various sizes and styles. Perhaps more sinister was a box full of Barbie dolls, every one of them damaged, some with missing arms or legs, some with missing heads, some bald, all of them battered, dirty and naked. He must have gleaned them from dustbins or perhaps rubbish tips. They lay tumbled together staring up from their box in a way that, Hollis decided in the end, was more pathetic than sinister after all.
Overall it was a weird and far from wonderful collection but there was nothing helpful there, except insofar as it confirmed that the lad had the intellect of someone who bungee jumps off low bridges. Hollis left the bed until last, from an unwillingness to discover what it was like. When finally he turned over the sheets, he found they were not only dirty but suspiciously stiff. Ronnie had evidently used a generous interpretation of the word ‘bathroom’. But reward was there for the dedicated archaeologist, for underneath the pillow he discovered a female’s handbag, pink fabric with shiny threads woven through it, small and oblong, with a thin shoulder-strap.
‘Oh, Ronnie,’ he said aloud, shaking his head in disappointment. ‘You daft pillock. It’s just no fun at all if you make it too easy.’
NINE
From Bad to Verse
Slider went downstairs while they were processing Ronnie, and the sergeant on duty, O’Flaherty, stepped away to talk to him. He was a vast and beefy man whom copious pints of the Guinness and his wife’s traditional cooking maintained at a glossy peak of solidity, like a prize breeding bull. He, Slider and Nicholls had known each other a lifetime, and had seen each other through various vicissitudes – many involving top brass, pointless changes in working practices, and mad political directives descending from on high like the proverbial brown shower. O’Flaherty, whose nickname of Flatulent Fergus was both true and affectionate, had often said that coppers at the sharp end coped with crime in spite of, not with the help of, their seniors. Like Slider, he approved of Porson, who got them left alone to a remarkable degree.
‘Dis is a bad business, Billy,’ he said, unusually serious for him. ‘I always thought Ronnie was going to escalate one day, but I didn’t think it would be this soon. Mind you, I wasn’t in favour of him going down for that Wanda Lempowski thing. She was a nasty piece o’ the divil-in-a-skirt, and I don’t doubt she pushed him in the hope of getting more money out of him. In th’end she hurt him more than he hurt her. She’s twice his size, and she packs a punch like an army mule.’
‘That’s not really the point, is it?’ Slider said, a faint smile twitching his lips.
‘Ah, sure, I know that. But psychiatric was what he needed, not a spell inside learnin’ to be brutal.’
‘Well, he’ll get it this time,’ Slider said. ‘If he’s found guilty his brief will plead insanity and he’ll be locked up at Her Majesty’s pleasure. And that’ll be that.’
Fergus cocked an eye at him. ‘What’s up wit’ you? Don’t tell me you’re developing a liking for smelly little flashers who go on to murder?’
‘God, no! It’s just so depressing. And what’ll happen to his mother?’
‘Ah, don’t you worry about her. She’s too t’ick even to realize he’s gone. Are you going to interview him yourself?’
‘No, I think we should let him settle in first. Get him comfortable, get some good grub inside him.’
‘So he’ll sing like a contented canary?’
‘Right. One thing with Ronnie, you don’t have to worry that he’s using the time to think up answers. He couldn’t make up a story if he used both hands and a tool kit.’
‘Well, we’ll be a while processing him anyway, so by the time he’s had his supper he’ll be ready for bed. You can safely leave him till the morning. And I bet he’ll sleep better than you.’
‘I don’t doubt it. Thanks, Fergus.’
‘How’s your wee boy?’ O’Flaherty asked as he was turning away.
‘I wish I knew,’ Slider said.
Porson called him in as he passed his room. The television was on in the corner.
‘Look at this!’ he barked. ‘Have you seen this?’
Slider looked. It was the twenty-four-hour news channel. The sound was turned down, but the newscaster was mouthing to a background piece of film of the Oates house in East Acton with the squad car parked in front of it, its light revolving, and Ronnie coming out walking between two uniformed officers. The rolling ribbon at the bottom of the screen said: ‘Breaking news – police make arrest in Zellah Wilding case. Ronnie Oates, the Acton Strangler, taken into custody.’
‘How the hell did this get out?’ Porson demanded.
‘From the quality of the film, and the angle, I’d say it was a neighbour using a camera-phone leaning out of a window,’ Slider said. ‘I suppose there must have been neighbours who knew who Mrs Oates was, and knew Ronnie was back.’
‘Well, we can’t deny it now,’ Porson said. ‘And the vultures’ll have a field day with this. It’ll be all over the evening papers. “Acton Strangler strikes again.” I’ve had to ask for more uniform to guard that old bat as well. Why couldn’t you take him quietly? What’d you have to send a squad car for?’
‘Ronnie likes riding in them. He likes the lights. It was a way to get him in without a fuss.’
‘It was a way to alert the world and his wife that we were there!’ Porson stared at the screen in disgust for a long moment, and then straightened his shoulders. ‘Well, we might as well get all the queue-doughs we can out of getting a quick result. There’s no other pleasure catching a nasty little Herbert like him. He’s a sausage roll short of a picnic, that one, and the press are going to go to town on why he was wandering the streets in the first place.’
‘It wasn’t our fault he was let out,’ Slider pointed out.
‘Maybe not, but the public thinks we ought to be watching all these nonces all the time. It’ll be our fault he was let to kill again.’
‘He’s never killed before.’
‘Are you just going to stand there correcting me? Go and put a case together. He was seen in the area, he does it with tights, and you’ve got the handbag. What more do you need?’
The old man was unusually irritable, Slider thought as he escaped – but he took little pleasure in catching a brainless, hopeless, useless little git like Ronnie either.
He went the short way to his room through the CID room, entering in time to hear McLaren say to Connolly, ‘Here, Rita, here�
�s a good one – what do you call that useless piece of flesh at the end of a penis? Ronnie Oates.’
Connolly didn’t react. She was on the telephone, and looked up as Slider appeared and said, ‘He’s just come in. Sir, it’s Sergeant Atherton for you.’
‘I’ll take it in my room. McLaren, get me a cup of tea, will you?’
‘Anything with it? They got bread pudden up there today.’
Slider’s stomach groaned. It was a long time since the sausage sandwich. ‘All right, I’ll take a slab. Thanks.’ He looked at Connolly. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Going through the canvasses again, for anything that could be Oates, sir.’
‘Good. Find out who the Oateses’ neighbours are. They’ll have to be interviewed, in case they saw him go out or come in. One of them filmed him being arrested, so we can assume an interest.’
‘Right, sir.’
Atherton sounded elated. ‘Well, we found it, and it wasn’t easy. When Chloë Paulson said Ladbroke Grove, obviously she was talking generically about the area, not the road itself. There was one likely shop on Ladbroke Grove, right opposite the station, but the flat above it was untenanted. We asked the proprietor about other similar shops nearby, and she said there was one in Portobello Road, so we went down there. In fact there were three operating in the general area of retailing mystic crap to mugs, but it wasn’t any of them. Finally we found it on the KPR near the junction of Talbot Road. Man in the shop recognised the photo, and the second-floor tenant confirmed the bloke in the flat below was called Mike, and nodded to the photo as well. But there was no answer from his door – of course.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘Outside. I came out to ring you. We saw on the pub television that you’ve arrested Ronnie Oates.’
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