It looked to me as if the person lying dead on the kitchen floor had lived here, and the one in the other room with Gilbert was a visitor. It takes years of experience to make deductions like that.
The PC came to join me standing in the doorway to the kitchen. “Shall I take over outside, Mr Priest?” he asked.
“Oh, er, hello Martin,” I replied. “Yes, if you will please. How much has laddo told you?” I took three careful steps across the kitchen and turned the gas off.
“Not a great deal. His opening words were: ‘I killed him,’ but since then he’s clammed up, refused to answer any questions.”
I backed out again, trying to place my feet on the same brown squares. “Right. I’ll radio for the team if you’ll take up station on the gate and log all visitors, please. There might be someone – family – coming home from work anytime, so watch out for them and don’t let them in.”
“So will you do a full enquiry?” he asked.
“We’ll have to,” I told him.
“What? SOCOs and all that?”
“You bet.”
“Even though you know who did it?”
I tapped my nose with a finger and said: “Something’s fishy.”
“Blimey,” he replied, and went outside.
When I stepped into the front room Gilbert looked up at me and shook his head. “This is Detective Inspector Priest,” he said to the man, enunciating the words as if he were addressing a foreigner. “Perhaps you would like to talk to him.”
It looked to me as if the chief suspect was playing dumb. “Maybe we should let Sam have a look at him,” I suggested. Sam Evans is the police surgeon, and we needed him to certify the victim dead, but when a witness or suspect is in any sort of a state it’s always useful to have a medical opinion, if only for self-defence at a later date.
“Good idea,” Gilbert said, rising to his feet. “I’ll send for him while you…” he gestured towards the man, “…try to have a word.”
“I haven’t sent for the team, yet,” I said to his back.
“I’ll do it,” he replied.
The team was comprised of the collection of experts we had on duty round the clock, plus a few others that we always called in for a murder enquiry. They’d be at home now, tucking into their fish fingers and chips or playing with the kids, but they’d grab their jackets with unseemly haste and be out of the door before their wives could ask what time they’d be back. We needed SOCOs and a photographer to record the murder scene before anything was moved, exhibits and statements officers, and sundry door-knockers. Then there was the duty DCS at region, the coroner and the pathologist to inform. I dredged up the checklist from the recesses of my mind and ticked off the procedures.
The man was smartly dressed, with slip-on shoes that gleamed and a gaudy silk tie dangling between his knees. The top of his head was facing me and he was completely bald, his scalp as shiny as his shoes. I placed my hands on his lapels and eased him upright.
“Could you just sit up please,” I said to him, “so I can see you.”
He didn’t resist, and flopped against the chair back. His eyes were red, as if he’d been crying, or rubbing his knuckles into them, and there was blood on his fingers.
“That’s better,” I said. There were stains on the front of his jacket, too, but I couldn’t be sure what they were. “Like my superintendent told you,” I began, “I’m DI Priest from Heckley CID. Now could you please tell me who you are?”
He didn’t reply, and the corner of his mouth began to curl into the beginnings of a sneer. He shook his head, ever so slightly, and leaned back, staring up at the ceiling.
“Your name, sir,” I tried. “Who are you?”
He mumbled something I couldn’t catch.
“Could you repeat that?” I asked.
He looked at me and said: “It doesn’t matter.”
“What doesn’t matter?”
“All of this. Who I am. It doesn’t matter.”
Before he could protest I reached forward, pulled his jacket open and whipped his wallet from his inside pocket. The secret is to make sure you go for the correct side. He made a half-hearted attempt to grab it back, then resumed his slumped position in the chair.
It was just a thin notecase, intended for credit cards and a few tenners for emergencies. I didn’t count them but there looked to be about ten. I read the name on a Royal Bank of Scotland gold card and checked it against the others. They were all the same.
“Anthony Silkstone,” I said. “Is that you?”
He didn’t answer at first, just sat there, looking at me with a dazed, slightly contemptuous expression. I didn’t read anything into it; I’m not sure what the correct expression is for when you’ve just impaled someone with the big one out of a set of chef ’s knives.
“I killed him,” he mumbled.
Well that was easy, I thought. Let’s just have it in writing and we can all go home. “You killed the man in the kitchen?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “I told the others. How many times do I have to say it.”
“Just once more, for the record. And your name is Anthony Silkstone?”
He gave a little nod of the head. I handed him his wallet back and said: “Stand up, Mr Silkstone. We’re taking you down to the station.” He placed it back in his pocket and rose shakily to his feet.
I held his arm and guided him down the driveway and out into the street. A small crowd had gathered but Martin was doing sterling work holding them back. I sat Silkstone in the back of the police car and gestured for Martin to join me.
“Anthony Silkstone,” I began, “I am arresting you for the murder of a person so far unknown…” He sat expressionless through the caution and obligingly offered his wrists when I produced the handcuffs. “Take him in as soon as some help arrives,” I told Martin. “I’ll tell the custody sergeant to expect you.”
At the station they’d read him his rights and find him a solicitor. Then they would take all his clothes and possessions and label them as evidence. Even his socks and underpants. Fingerprints and DNA samples would follow until the poor sod didn’t know if he was a murder suspect or a rat in a laboratory experiment. He’d undress, sit down, stand up, say “Yes” at the appropriate times and meekly allow samples of his person to be taken. Then, dressed like a clown in a village play, he’d be locked in a cell for several hours while other people determined his fate and came to peep at him every fifteen minutes.
Gilbert and Jim joined me on the driveway. “You’ve arrested him,” Gilbert commented.
“It’s a start,” I said, turning to Jim. “Any luck?”
“Yes, Boss,” he replied. “A bloke called Peter Latham lives here. He’s single, lives alone, and works as some sort insurance agent. Average height, thin build, dark hair. Sounds like the man on the floor.”
“He does, doesn’t he. Single. Thank God for that.”
“Somebody’ll love him,” Gilbert reminded us as his mobile phone chirruped into life. He placed it to his ear and introduced himself. After a few seconds of subservience from the super I deduced that it was the coroner on the phone. Gilbert outlined what we’d found, told him I was on the job and nodded his agreement at whatever the coroner was saying. Probably something along the lines of: “Well for God’s sake don’t let Charlie touch anything.” Gilbert closed his phone and told us: “We can move the body when we’re ready.”
“We haven’t certified the poor bloke dead yet,” I informed him.
“Well he’d just better be,” he replied.
A white van swung into the street, at the head of a convoy. “Here come the cavalry,” I said. “In the nick of time, as always.”
As soon as Sam Evans, the doctor, confirmed that the man on the kitchen floor was indeed dead, and had been so for about an hour, we let the photographer and scene of crime loose in the place. They tut-tutted and shook their heads disapprovingly when I confessed to turning off the gas ring. Sam’s opinion, only given when re
quested, was that death was possibly induced by the dagger sticking out of the deceased’s heart. Police doctors and pathologists are not famed for their impetuous conclusions.
I asked Sam if he’d go to the station and give an opinion about the state of mind of Anthony Silkstone, the chief suspect, and he agreed to. The doc’s an old pal of mine. I’ve plenty of old pals. In this job you gather them like burrs. Some stick, some irritate, most of them fall off after a while.
As we hadn’t set up an incident room we had our initial team meeting with lowered voices in the late Mr Latham’s back garden. I sent the enquiry team, all three of them, knocking on doors to find out what they could about the dead man. Except that they wouldn’t have to knock on any doors because everybody was outside, standing around in curious groups, wondering if this was worth missing Coronation Street for or if it was too late to light the barbecue. We wanted to know if anybody had seen anything within the last three or four hours, the background of the deceased, and anything about his lifestyle. Visitors, girlfriends, boyfriends, that sort of thing. I was assuming that the dead man was the householder. As soon as someone emerged who was more than just a neighbour I’d ask them to identify the body.
We knew that Silkstone had the opportunity, now we needed a motive and forensic evidence. He might retract his confession, say he called in to see an old friend and found him dead. Maybe he did, so if he wasn’t the murderer we needed to know, fast. Gilbert went back to the station to set up all the control staff functions: property book, diary, statement reader, etcetera, plus vitally important stuff like overtime records, while I stayed on the scene to glean what I could about a man who aroused passions sufficiently to bring about his elimination.
The SOCO was doing an ESFLA scan on the kitchen floor, looking for latent footprints, so I had a look around the upstairs rooms. It was a disappointment. There was nothing to indicate that he was anything other than a normal, heterosexual bloke living on his own. No gay literature, no porn, no inflatable life-size replicas of Michelangelo’s David. Except that the bed was made. His duvet was from Marks and Spencer and his wallpaper and curtains probably were too. It all looked depressingly familiar. I promised myself that from now on I’d lead a tidier life, just in case, and dispose of the three thousand back issues of Big Wimmin that were under my bed.
There were ten suits in his wardrobe. “That’s nine more than in mine,” I said to myself, slightly relieved to discover a discrepancy in our lifestyles. And he had more decent shirts than me. The loo could have been cleaner but wasn’t too bad, and the toilet paper matched the tiles. He’d changed his underpants recently, because the old ones were lying on the bathroom floor, with a short-sleeved shirt. There was a sprinkling of water in the bottom of the bath, and the towel hanging over the cold radiator was damp. At a guess he’d showered and changed before meeting his maker, which would be a small comfort to his mother. In his bathroom cabinet I found Bonjela, Rennies and haemorrhoid cream. Poor sod didn’t have much luck with his digestive tract, I thought.
I gravitated back into the master bedroom. That’s where the clues to Mr Peter Latham’s way of living and dying lay, I was sure. Find the lady, I was taught, and there were framed photographs of two of them on a chest of drawers, opposite the foot of the bed. I stood in the window and looked down on the scene outside. Blue and white tape was now ringing the garden and the street was blocked with haphazardly parked vehicles. Neighbours coming home from work were having to leave their cars in the next street and Jim, the PC, was having words with a man carrying a briefcase who didn’t think a mere death should come between him and his castle. I gave a little involuntary smile: he’d get no change out of Jim.
The first photograph standing on the chest of drawers in a gilt frame was one of those wedding pictures you drag out, years afterwards, to amuse the kids. It was done by a socalled professional, outside a church in fading colour. The bride was taller than the groom, with her hair piled up to accentuate the difference. She looked good, as all brides should. This was her day. Wedding dresses don’t date, but men’s suits do, which is what the kids find so funny. His was grey, with black edging to the floppy lapels of his frock coat. The photographer had asked him to turn in towards his new wife, in a pose that nature never intended, and we could see the flare of his trousers and the Cuban heels. Dark hair fell over his collar in undulating cascades. He’d have got by in a low budget production of Pride and Prejudice. It wouldn’t have stood as a positive ID but I was reasonably confident that the groom and the man lying on the kitchen floor were one and the same. So where was she, I wondered? The second picture was smaller, black and white, in a simple wooden frame. It showed a young girl in a pair of knickers and a vest, taken at a school sports day. She’d be ten or twelve, at a guess, but I’m a novice in that department. Some men would find it sexy, I knew that much. Her knickers were tight fitting and of a clingy material, with moderately high cut legs; and a paper letter B pinned to her vest underlined the beginnings of her breasts. It was innocent enough, I decided, but she’d be breaking hearts in four or five years, that was for sure. Maybe a niece or daughter. At either side of her you could just see the elbows and legs of two other girls, and I reckoned that she’d been cut from a group photograph. A relay team, perhaps. As with the other picture, I wondered if this young lady might come bounding up the garden path anytime now.
“Boss?”
I turned round to see the SOCO who was standing in the bedroom doorway, still dressed in his paper coveralls. I hadn’t put mine on, because the case had looked cut and dried.
“Yes!” I replied, smartly.
“We’ve finished in the kitchen,” he said. “We just need the knife retrieving.”
“I’ll have a look before anybody touches it,” I told him.
“Oh. We, er, were hoping that you’d, er, do it.”
“Do what?”
“Well, retrieve it.”
“You mean…pull it out?”
“Mmm.”
“That’s the pathologist’s job. He’ll want to do it himself.”
“Ah. We have a small problem there. He’s on his way back from London and his relief is nowhere to be found, but he’s spoken to Mr Wood and he’s happy for you to do it if we take a full record of everything.”
“I see. What does it look like for prints.”
“At a guess, covered in ’em.”
“Good. What do you make of those?” I asked, nodding towards the photographs.
“The pictures?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“It looks like their wedding day.”
“I’d gathered that. Do you think it’s him?”
“Um, could be.” He looked more closely, adding: “Yeah, I’d say it was.”
“Good. What about the other?”
“The girl? Could be their daughter,” he replied. “The hair colour’s similar, and they both look tall and thin.”
“Or the bride as a schoolgirl,” I suggested.
The SOCO bent down to peer at the picture. After a few seconds he said: “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because the timing’s wrong.”
“You’ve lost me,” I told him.
“Can’t be sure,” he went on, “but they both look as if they were taken around the same time. About fifteen or twenty years ago, at a guess. Maybe a bit less for that one.” He pointed towards the schoolgirl.
“How do you work that out,” I asked, bemused.
“The knickers,” he replied. “Long time ago they’d be cut straight across. Now they wear them cut higher. These are in-between.”
“I take it you have daughters,” I said.
“Yep. Two.”
“Some men would find a picture like that provocative,” I told him.
“I know,” he replied. “And you can see why, can’t you?”
I suppose that was as close as we’d ever get to admitting that it was a sexy image. “I don’t find it sexy,” we’d say
, “but I can understand how some men might.”
“Why,” I asked him, “do the knicker manufacturers make them with high-cut legs when they know that they are intended for children who haven’t reached puberty yet?”
“Because that’s what the kids want. There’s a demand for them.”
“But why?”
“So they can be like their mothers.”
“Oh.”
All knowledge is useful. Knowledge catches crooks, I tell the troops. But there are vast landscapes, whole prairies and Mongolian plains, which are a foreign territory to me. They’re the bits surrounding families and children and relationships that have stood the test of time. My speciality, my chosen subject, is ones that have gone wrong. Never mind, I consoled myself; loving families don’t usually murder each other.
We went downstairs into the kitchen. Peter Latham hadn’t moved, but there was a thin coating of the fingerprint boys’ ally powder over all his possessions. “We decided not to do the knife in situ,” one of them told me.
“So you want me to pull it out?”
“Please.”
“Great.”
“But don’t let your hands slip up the handle.”
“Maybe we should use pliers,” I suggested, but they just shrugged their shoulders and pulled faces.
“Have we got photos of it?” I asked. We had.
“And measurements?” We had.
“Right, let’s have a look, then.”
Sometimes, you just have to bite the bullet. Or knife, in this case. I stood astride the body and bent down towards the sightless face with its expression cut off at the height of its surprise, a snapshot of the moment of death. Early detectives believed that the eyes of the deceased would capture an image of the murderer, and all you had to do was find a way to develop it.
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