“Can’t you stop him?” she asked. “Use some of your legendary underhand tactics to rid us of him permanently?”
Blimey, I thought, that was a bit of a turnaround.
“I could always try murdering him.”
“What a great idea,” she said with a laugh.
“But I’ll have to find him first.”
“I’m sure you could do that if you tried hard enough.”
“I do have his cell phone number.”
“Do you, indeed?” Marina said. “That should help.”
“I hope so. I’ll get started on it in the morning.”
“Good boy,” Marina said, cuddling up to me under the bedclothes. “No one messes with our daughter and gets away with it.”
19
First thing on Friday morning, I sat in Charles’s study and used his landline to start pulling in favors from a couple of police acquaintances that I’d helped get out of difficult situations in the past, both of whom were still serving officers.
“Sid, I can’t,” one of them said when I told him what I wanted. “Especially not with your ugly mug splashed all over today’s front pages.”
“Sure you can, Terry,” I replied. “Look it up on the police computer and tell me what it says. Computers these days know everything about everybody, and, if they don’t, you’ll have to contact MI5. I know you have friends there from your time in antiterrorism.”
“But it’s against the law.”
“Come off it! For how long has Terry Glenn been worried about keeping within the law? And, if I remember correctly, it was also against the law for me to get you off the hook during the Stephenson gun-smuggling affair, but I managed it.”
“But that was nearly fifteen years ago.”
“So you owe me for the last fifteen years of your career. What rank are you now? Inspector? On a good salary? With a guaranteed, cost-of-living-adjusted pension? Must be worth at least one little favor for me in return.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said reluctantly.
“Yeah, Terry, you do that.”
Next, I rang the other, a detective serving in the Greater Manchester force, whom I’d known since I’d investigated a stable-lad drug ring for the Jockey Club twelve years previously.
“Hello, Sid,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”
I could detect the worried undertones in his voice as if he was expecting bad news.
“Norman,” I said, “I need a favor.”
“I was afraid of that,” he said in reply.
“It’s not much,” I said. “I want a copy of everything you have on one Billy McCusker of your parish.”
“You must be bloody joking,” Norman said. “I can’t give you that information.”
“Why not?”
“Well, for a start, it’s against the law. But also, have you any idea how much there is of it? We have boxes full of stuff about Billy McCusker.”
“Then why haven’t you locked him up and thrown away the key?”
“It’s not from lack of trying, I can assure you. Somehow he manages to keep one step ahead of us all the time, as if we have a spy in our midst.”
“A mole,” I said. “Probably someone McCusker controls, using threats.”
“You’re most likely right.”
“How about if I promised to serve his head to you on a platter—that’s you, personally? Would you let me at least have a look at the files?”
“I told you, it’s against the law.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but could you fix it?”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“Then send me a summary. I need to know where he lives, what he drives, where he works and who he associates with. It would also be good to know what you thought of his acquisition of Honest Joe Bullen’s betting shops and whether you have opposed Billy McCusker holding a bookmaker’s license.”
“So not very much, then,” Norman said mockingly.
“No, not much, and I’m sure you can fix it,” I said, not rising to his bait.
“Come on, Sid, give me a break. If I’m found out helping you, I’ll lose my job for sure. I’m due to retire next year and I need my pension.”
“Don’t give me all that sob-story stuff,” I said. “I’m not asking you to kill him. I just need some information on his whereabouts.”
“I can’t,” he whined, “especially with all this in the papers today about you and little girls.”
“It’s all lies,” I said. “I’m being framed by Billy Bloody McCusker.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure, but I intend to find out. And you are going to help.”
“I can’t,” he said again.
“Yes, you can, Norman. And you owe me big-time, remember?”
Both he and I were well aware that without my timely intervention with a young drug-crazed and knife-brandishing thug in a disused warehouse in Salford, Detective Inspector Norman Whitby would have been pushing up the daisies for the past twelve years.
Not that I actually enjoyed calling in favors like this. It wasn’t as if I had done what I’d done only to have something in return at a later date. But now I needed help like I’d never needed it before.
“How’s it going?” Marina asked, coming into the study.
“So-so,” I said. “How was Sassy at school?”
Saskia had been determined to go in spite of Marina wanting to keep her away and Saskia had won the argument easily.
“Fine. She didn’t turn a hair. Not quite so good for me, though.”
“In what way?”
“Oh, only the other mothers making snide comments and such. You know what people are like. And I was really upset when Paula treated me as if I wasn’t there.”
“You can’t blame her,” I said. “It’s not every day that the police tell you that your daughter may have been indecently photographed by your best friend’s husband. Just ignoring you seems to be quite mild.”
“I would have liked her to ask me about it directly.”
“Would you if it had been Saskia and Tim?”
“I suppose you’re right.” She came around behind me and ran her fingers through my hair. “You’re always right.”
I wished I were.
I hoped I was right going after McCusker. The safer option may have been to adopt the ostrich pose of head in the sand. But I wasn’t like that, and I couldn’t live like it.
Suddenly, it felt good to be doing again what I’d craved to do for so long. Charles had indeed been correct—Once a detective, always a detective—and now I had the unequivocal support of Marina.
“But you must stay safe,” I said to her. “This man thinks nothing of using violence for the slightest reason. No more walking alone along dark alleys.”
“Or through racetrack parking lots,” Marina said, stroking my face next to my left eye. “It will be just like old times.”
• • •
ONE OF THE major problems of losing one’s cell phone is that you lose your contacts list with it—all those precious telephone numbers on which we rely gone forever, or, in my case, gone until the police saw fit to return my phone.
I had even preempted such a loss by backing up my contacts list on my laptop, but such sensible foresight had been totally undone by the fact that the police had taken my computer as well.
Hence I had to rely on an old, nonelectronic, handwritten address book that Marina had collected from my desk.
I flipped through the pages, trying to find inspiration from the names, and ended up in the Bs.
Barnes. Chico Barnes.
Many years ago, Chico and I had been colleagues at the Hunt Radnor Associates detective agency, and we had been in a few scrapes together, not least when we were almost flayed alive by some particularly nasty villains who were man
ipulating horse-owning syndicates.
We’d been a good team, and I’d been massively disappointed when Chico had decided to retire from investigating to concentrate on his day job, teaching PE and judo to what he always referred to as “a bunch of juvenile delinquents” at a North London high school.
I’d also heard that he had married and settled down to family life. Perhaps a wife had rounded some of his rough edges. Or maybe not.
Boy, could I do with his help now.
I called the number in the address book, wondering if, after so long, it would even be current.
“Hello,” said a female voice.
“Is that Mrs. Barnes?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said tentatively as if expecting the call to be from someone selling something she probably didn’t want.
“Is Mr. Barnes there, Mr. Chico Barnes?”
“No,” she said. “He doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Oh,” I said. “Do you have a telephone number for him?”
She reeled off a cell number so fast that I had to ask her to repeat it.
“Thank you,” I said.
I rang the new number.
“Hello,” said the familiar cockney voice.
“Chico, it’s Sid.”
“Bugger me! Sid Halley! It’s been so quiet, I thought you must be dead.”
That’s also what Paddy O’Fitch had said. Had I seriously been that lifeless over the past six years? Maybe I had.
“How’s the teaching?” I asked.
“Bloody dreadful,” Chico said. “I’m getting too old for this judo lark.”
“You and me both,” I agreed.
“Yeah, but at least you’re not trying to throw classes of overweight adolescents over your shoulders every day. I’m sure they weren’t all this heavy when I started.”
I laughed. “Get the school canteen to serve them fewer fries.”
“So what can I do you for?” Chico asked.
“I was wondering how you were,” I said, “catching up and all that.”
“Don’t bloody piss on me, you liar. You’re after something.”
“Why couldn’t I just be curious as to your present circumstances? Why do you assume that I must be after something?”
“Because I knows you too well, Sid Halley. So what is it?”
“It might be dangerous,” I said.
“Going into my school each day can be effin’ dangerous, let me tell you. We’ve had three stabbings this year already, and one of them was of a member of staff.”
“How about your family?” I asked. “They might disapprove.”
“My family disapprove of most things I do. The wife and I are separated, pending a divorce.”
“Kids?”
“Nah, that’s been the trouble. I wanted, she couldn’t, end of story.”
“So are you willing to help?” I said, hardly daring to believe it.
“Are you sure you’ve not grown too old for all that stuff?”
“I’ve got no choice, mate. Have you seen the papers? I’m being stitched up as a bloody pedophile. If I don’t fight back, I’m a dead man walking anyway.”
“Yeah,” Chico said. “I saw something about you on breakfast TV.”
“You, watching breakfast television? I don’t believe it.”
During the years we had worked together, he’d been out early pounding the streets every morning in his determination to be fit.
“Times have changed,” he said with a laugh. “I’ve grown soft and flabby in my old age.” He was about eight years younger than I, although no one knew for certain how old he really was as he’d been abandoned as a toddler on the steps of a police station in a stroller.
“Does that mean you’d be no use to me?”
“I’m not that soft and flabby,” he said. “What do you need?”
“I think I might need a bloody army,” I said.
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
“Are you paying? Or do we have a sponsor?”
“Me, I’m afraid.”
“That was always your trouble,” he said. “You need to get someone else to pay.”
“So will you help . . . for peanuts?”
“Sure,” he said. “I could do with some excitement.”
I spent the next twenty minutes or so telling him about some of my woes.
“This McCusker chappie definitely needs taking out,” Chico said.
“You’re so right,” I agreed.
“Look, I’ve got to go now and teach a class of little ’ooligans. I’ll call you later and we’ll work out a plan.”
Talking to Chico had raised my spirits. To be working with him again would be fabulous. As Marina had said, it would be just like old times.
• • •
NEXT I CALLED the number printed on Detective Chief Inspector Watkinson’s business card and was pleasantly surprised to get straight through to the man himself.
“Thanks a lot for all your help yesterday,” I said sarcastically. “You could have backed me up a bit.”
“I did,” he said. “Why do you think you’re out on bail and not remanded to custody? But I shouldn’t be talking to you.”
“I need to know who made the complaint against me in the first place,” I said.
“I just told you that I shouldn’t be talking to you.”
“But you are,” I said. “So who was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can’t you find out?” I asked in my best pleading voice. “You know as well as I do that this is all a load of nonsense and that Billy McCusker is behind it.”
“Has he called you again?”
“No,” I said. “Thanks to you, I can’t live in my own house. And you still have my cell phone, so he has no way of calling me.”
It was one of the few advantages of the situation.
“So who was it that complained?” I asked again, bringing him back to the reason for my call. “I need something to use to fight back against him.”
“You should leave that to us,” he said.
“But you’ve been far too busy arresting me instead of him. If I leave it to you, nothing will happen, and we both know it. You have to work within a system that McCusker is well used to exploiting for his own ends. I don’t.”
“OK,” he said. “I’ll see what I can find out. But you must remain within the law.”
“Of course,” I replied.
The law of natural justice.
• • •
FRIDAY AFTERNOON dragged on interminably, and I couldn’t even go to collect Saskia from school as that would knowingly be placing myself within two miles of Annabel Gaucin.
I may have been out of cell number 5 at Oxford police station, but I still felt like a prisoner, albeit in the more comfortable surroundings of Aynsford. But at least there were no more reports about me on the lunchtime television news.
Perhaps, I thought, the story would now fade away to nothing and life would return to normal.
Fat chance.
Sassy came home from school and helped lift me out of my depression, as she danced around Charles’s study, showing me a little doll she’d made in a craft class.
“She’s lovely, darling,” I said. “Does she have a name?”
“Mandy,” Sassy said poignantly. Then she rushed out of the study to take the doll to see Grandpa.
“How was it at the school today?” I asked Marina.
“Pretty awful,” she said. “One of the mothers, of a girl in the year ahead, shouted to her daughter to stay away from Saskia in case she caught something nasty. I ask you, what sort of a person does that?”
“Ignore them,” I said.
“I try, but it’s difficult.”
I gave her a rea
ssuring hug.
“How about you?” Marina said. “Had any luck with the McCusker hunt?”
“Not much, but I’ve put out a few feelers for information. Are you sure you’re happy about this?”
“Absolutely,” she said with passion. “I hate him, hate him, hate him. He kidnapped Saskia, he took and killed Mandy and then he made me question my own husband’s involvement with pornographic photos of children.” She paused. “I want rid of this man. All I ask is that we keep safe. Don’t do anything if it puts us in danger.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”
But did I really mean it? Could I keep that promise even if I wanted to? Had I not put us in potential danger already simply by asking for the information from Norman Whitby?
I remembered the talk about a mole in the detective ranks of the Greater Manchester Police. What if Norman inadvertently informed McCusker of my inquiries by mentioning them to the wrong person? I thought that it was unlikely, but could I be totally sure?
And what if Norman Whitby was himself McCusker’s mole?
It didn’t bear thinking about.
The telephone interrupted my dismal thoughts and, coincidentally, it was Norman Whitby on the line, calling back.
“I’ve got some stuff for you,” he said, barely audibly. “Do you have an e-mail address?”
“Your Thames Valley colleagues have confiscated my computer. Can’t you read it to me?”
“No,” he said, again almost in a whisper. “I’m in the office.”
“Mail it, then,” I said, and I gave him Charles’s address. “It’s safer than e-mailing. There’s no record.”
“I’ll have to print it out.” He clearly wasn’t very happy.
“And, Norman,” I said, “send it first class. I need it tomorrow.”
“I’ll try,” he said quickly and hung up.
If he was the mole, he was a very good actor.
• • •
“SO WHAT’S THE PLAN?” Chico asked, calling back around five o’clock.
“Do you fancy a trip to Manchester?”
“Manchester?”
“I want to see what my enemy looks like.”
“When?”
“When are you free?” I asked.
“Anytime you like. Exams start here on Monday, and they run on for weeks, and there’s no PE ’cos they all take place in the gym.”
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