Chill Factor

by Stuart Pawson

  The forecast for the weekend was good so I told the troops that we’d have a meeting about the murders on Monday. Most of them said they’d pop in Saturday morning, for the results. I still do a few paintings, when the mood takes me or someone commissions one. I only charge for materials. Mr Ho at the Bamboo Curtain had asked for one, for on his staircase, so I decided to make a start on it. It was going to be six feet by four feet six inches, abstract but with a Chinese theme. On the way home I called in the library and borrowed a book on Chinese art.

  I had a trout for tea, with microwave oven chips and peas. Not bad. Chinese art is big on impossible cliffs and bonsai trees. I hinted at a few terracotta warriors and coolie hats, for the human touch, and a couple of tanks to show where the power lay. By midnight I’d done the underpainting and it was looking good. What a way to spend Friday night, but better than cleaning the oven. The next part, laying on the colour straight out of the tubes, was the best bit. Therapeutic. I had a shower and went to bed.

  I couldn’t sleep. Maybe it was the trout, maybe it was the enquiry. If the DNA results were as expected we’d have that sewn up tomorrow, so no problem there. Maybe I was thinking about the sad life I was drifting into. Maybe I was thinking about a woman. Maybe I should set it to music.

  I listened to the World Service for a while, then switched to the local station. There’d been a bad accident on the Heckley bypass, something about a jack-knifed lorry, and traffic disruption was expected to last into the morning. Six o’clock I went downstairs and made some tea.

  I was lying on the settee using the remote control to pick out my favourite tracks on The Bootleg Series when the phone rang, right in the middle of Blind Willie McTell. Anybody who interrupts Blind Willie had better have a good reason.

  It was the night tec’. “Sorry to ring you at this time, Charlie,” he began.

  “No problem, Rodger.” He doesn’t telephone me lightly and his voice was strained. “What’ve you got?”

  “There’s been a bad RTA on the bypass.”

  “I know. I’m up and heard it on the radio. What happened?”

  “Head on, between a Mini and a milk tanker. The Mini’s jammed underneath.”

  “God, that sounds nasty.” I visualised the carnage. “How many in the Mini?”

  “Just one, as far as we can tell. I’m pretty sure it’s Jamie Walker.”

  I didn’t speak for a while. “You still there, Charlie?” Rodger asked.

  “Yeah, I’m still here,” I replied. “Dead, I assume?”

  “Instantly.”

  “Was he being chased?”

  “No. We didn’t even know he was in the area.”

  “Thank God for that. You got some help?”

  “Everybody and his dog’s here. Just thought you’d like to know.”

  “Right. Thanks for ringing, Rodge, and stay with it, please.”

  Jamie Walker, aged fourteen, wouldn’t be stealing any more cars, and our figures would resume their steady downward path after the recent hiatus. Jamie Walker, who I hated, was eliminated from the equation. I had cornflakes and toast for breakfast and went into the garage to look at the painting. It looked as good as I remembered. At seven, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I drove to the nick.

  By the time the troops arrived at our office on the first floor they’d all heard about Jamie. It was mainly smiles all round, because Jamie had killed himself. All too often it’s someone completely innocent who pays the price. Rodger came in, looking completely shagged out, and told us the details. Jamie had come round a bend on the wrong side of the road and hit the tanker at a combined speed of about a hundred and ten. The tanker driver was unhurt but in hospital under sedation.

  “He’d stolen the Mini from the bloke who lives next door to where he was staying,” Rodger told us. “This bloke works for a security firm, on about eighty quid a week. He has two daughters who are asthmatic, and he runs the car so he can take them to the coast every weekend. Someone told him sea air would do them good. Don’t ask me to weep for Jamie Walker, because I can’t. Good riddance to the little bastard, I say.”

  “Go home, Rodger,” I said. “You’ve had a tough night. Take whatever it is that makes you sleep and snuggle up to your Rosie.” But I doubted if there’d be any sleep for him today, or tomorrow, or even the next day. He walked away, jacket slung over his shoulder, and we looked at our watches, waiting for the mail to arrive.

  Gilbert rang from home, asking for news, and I promised to let him know as soon as we had anything. Annette came in, wearing a shortish skirt and high heels, which was unusual. Her working clothes are practical, and she only wears a skirt for court appearances. I gave her a wink and was rewarded with a smile. At five past ten a traffic car arrived, with the report. I opened the envelope and read the resume that preceded the detailed stuff.

  “What does it say?” someone asked.

  “Wait,” I told them, reading.

  “They close at four,” someone complained.

  “Shurrup!”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right. OK, it’s as we expected.” I handed the report to Annette, who was sitting directly in front of me. “The semen samples are all from Peter Latham. Hairs were found in the bed from all three of them.”

  “Which isn’t surprising, as it was Silkstone’s bed,” Dave told us.

  “Pubic hair, in this case, I presume,” someone added.

  “Yes,” I agreed, “It does say that.” They started chattering between themselves, so I hushed them, saying: “There is just one more thing.” When they were silent I told them: “According to the lab, traces of a spermicidal lubricant, as used on condoms, were also found in Mrs Silkstone. That’s something for us to think about.”

  “In where? Does it say?” someone asked.

  “Not sure,” I replied, looking at Annette. She thumbed through the pages, there were about ten, scanning each briefly as she shook her hair away from her face.

  “Can you find it?”

  “Yes, it’s here. It says: ‘Traces of a spermicidal lubricant, of a type commonly used on condoms, were found in the anus and rectum.’”

  “Does it say if any was found on Latham’s dick?”

  Annette turned the pages back, looking for the information.

  “Is it there?”

  “Yes, I think this is it.” She studied the report for a few seconds then read out aloud: “A spermicidal lubricant of a similar type as that found in the female body was found on the subject’s penis.”

  I thanked her, saying to the rest of them: “If any of you has a theory about how all this came about, I’ll treat the information in the strictest confidence. Meanwhile, we’ll prepare a condensed version and do the necessary. Any questions that won’t wait until Monday?”

  Nobody had one, so I thanked them for coming in and telephoned Gilbert.

  “So Silkstone’s story holds water,” he concluded, when I finished.

  “It looks like it,” I admitted.

  “Good. Let’s have it sewn up, then. And young Walker won’t be causing us any more trouble, I hear.”

  “Unless his mother sues us for not arresting him.”

  “Bah! Bloody likely, too. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Meanwhile, I’m off for an hour’s fishing. Fancy coming, Charlie? Do you good.”

  “No thanks, Gilbert. Sticking a hook through a small creature’s nose is not my idea of entertainment.”

  “You wouldn’t catch anything!” Gilbert retorted. “What makes you think you’d catch anything?”

  “I meant the maggots,” I replied. “Maggots have feelings, too.”

  I would have fallen hopelessly, crazily, desperately in love with Sophie as soon as I saw her, except that I already was. She was wearing a blue silk dress and her hair was piled up in a sophisticated style that I’d never seen her wear before. “You look sensational,” I said, pecking her on the cheek. “Cambridge won’t know what’s hit them.”


  “She’s gonna be a spy,” her younger brother, Daniel, informed me. “That’s where they train them all.”

  “Well that’s better than being a traitor,” she retorted, referring to Danny’s ambition to play football for Manchester United and not Halifax Town.

  We went in my car. I’d have to drive home afterwards, so this meant that Dave could have a few drinks. His wife, Shirley, said: “Hey, this is all right, being chauffeured about by the boss.”

  “Let’s get one thing clear,” I told her as we set off. “Tonight I am taking my favourite goddaughter out for a meal. You three are just hangers-on.”

  “I’m your only goddaughter, Uncle Charles,” Sophie reminded me, and her brother jumped straight in with: “You don’t think you’d be his favourite if there was another, do you?”

  “It’s going to be one of those evenings,” Shirley remarked.

  I’d made a bit of an effort with my appearance, for once, and was glad I had. Blue jacket with a black check, black trousers, blue shirt and contrasting tie. Dark clothes suit me and add to that air of mystery. I’d even put some aftershave on.

  “You look handsome tonight,” Shirley had told me when I arrived. “Dave said you might bring a friend.”

  “He speak with forked tongue,” I’d replied.

  “Annette Brown. He reckons she has the hots for you. She’s a lovely girl.”

  “Tomorrow, he die.” I explained that she wasn’t my type; I didn’t want to be involved with another officer and as far as I knew she was already in a perfectly happy relationship.

  “So you asked her.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  Four of us had fillet steak and Dave had the speciality mixed grill, which includes a steak and just about every other bovine organ known to science. Two bottles of a Banrock Shiraz helped it down quite nicely. We talked about Jamie Walker and the Silkstone case, without being too explicit, and I had my favourite apple pie for pudding. I asked Sophie why she’d chosen Cambridge and not Oxford, and she said: “Everybody goes to Oxford.”

  We had more coffee back at their house and sat talking until midnight, when the kids went to bed. Dave fell asleep on the settee, snoring with his mouth wide open, which I took as a good time to leave. It was a warm evening, and Shirley walked out to the car with me.

  “Thanks for inviting me, Shirley,” I said. “It was considerate of you.”

  “You’re part of the family, Charlie,” she replied. “You were married to Dave before I was.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite like that, but I appreciate it.”

  At the gate I said: “He was quiet tonight. Not his usual self.”

  “No,” she replied, “he wasn’t, was he?”

  “Has the Jamie Walker business upset him?”

  “A little, perhaps. Daniel was that age not too long ago, but I think it’s mainly because of Sophie.”

  “Sophie?”

  “Mmm. Going to university, leaving the nest and all that. If it’s not Cambridge it will be somewhere else. She’s just finished with her first boyfriend, but there’ll be more. Danny was always my son, but Sophie is Dave’s daughter, and he’s losing her. It hurts. You worry about them, Charlie. The temptations, the pressures, the mistakes they’ll make. You want to live their lives for them, but you can’t. You have to step back and let them do it their way, and sometimes it’s painful.”

  “It’s called love,” I told her.

  “Yes, it is.”

  We kissed cheeks and said goodnight.

  At home I cleaned my teeth and hung up my clothes. I poured a glass of the plonk that was open, to catch up with the others, put Vaughan Williams on the CD and went to bed with the curtains open, so I could watch the clouds drifting past the window, like the backdrop of a silent movie. There was a new moon, and it and Thomas Tallis gave magic to the night. The wine and my thoughts probably helped.

  But there’s a dark side to the moon, and clouds are fickle. New faces came to me, pushing aside the ones I cherished. Young Jamie Walker was dead, and I didn’t care. His death had lifted a weight off me, eased the tourniquet that tightened around my spleen whenever I’d heard his name. Monday morning someone would come out with a Jamie Walker joke – “What does Jamie Walker have on his cornflakes?” – and I’d laugh with the rest of them. I didn’t hate him for being a thief. I didn’t hate him for the grief and misery he caused people who were as poorly off as he was. I didn’t give a shit about our crime figures. I hated him for making me not care about his death. For doing that to me, I could never forgive him.

  Sunday I gave the microwave a wash and brush-up. The fine spell was holding and the weather forecasters were predicting a good summer because the swallows were flying high and the grasshoppers were wearing Ray-Bans. I went to the garden centre to buy some new blades for the hover mower and had to park in the next field. Forget banks, knock-off a garden centre.

  In the evening I watched a video about the space race that Daniel had loaned me. Apparently the USA bagged Mars first, so Russia decided to concentrate on Venus. They didn’t know until they sent the first probe there that the atmosphere was comprised largely of sulphuric acid. As my mother used to say; “There’s always someone worse off than yourself.” Danny is envious that his dad’s generation witnessed the moon landings, as they happened. To him it’s just another event in history, like World War II or the Battle of Hastings. I’m eternally grateful to the Americans for taking a television camera on the trip. OK, they did it for self-publicity, because they needed public approval for all that expenditure, but it was a brave thing to do. It could have all gone dreadfully wrong.

  I have a photograph of Daniel and Sophie, standing alongside my old E-type. It was taken at Heckley Gala a couple of summers ago, after we’d taken part in the grand cavalcade, and published in the Heckley Gazette. I knew roughly where it was and soon found it. Sophie was all legs, posing elegantly with one hand on the car door, and Danny was wearing his trademark grin. The photo was in black and white, ten by eight, and slightly over-exposed. I turned it over and looked at the Gazette’s rubber stamp mark on the back. The copyright was theirs and a serial number was written in ink in the appropriate box. The date space was empty. I propped it against the clock and wondered about framing it.

  Margaret Silkstone had consenting sex with Peter Latham on her marital bed. He wore a condom initially but removed it later. A disagreement arose between them and he strangled her. That was about as much as we could be sure of.

  “Maybe she objected to him removing the condom,” Gilbert suggested.

  “Or to his, er, sexual proclivities,” the CPS lawyer said, adding, “putting it another way, she didn’t want it up her bum.”

  “Why does other people’s love-making always sound so bloody sordid?” I asked.

  “Because you’re not getting any,” Gilbert stated.

  “Putting it another way! I like that,” the lawyer chuckled. He was young and bulky, in a charcoal suit that bulged and gaped like the wrapping of a badly made, slightly leaky, parcel. Prendergast would eat him for breakfast, but he was the best we had. I looked at him and wondered who the anonymous genius was who coined the phrase big girl’s blouse.

  “Whichever it was,” Gilbert stated, “we’ll never know. But it does look as if Peter Latham murdered Margaret Silkstone. All agreed?”

  “Yes, I think we can be certain about that,” the lawyer replied.

  Gilbert was looking at me over his spectacles, defying me to launch into a conspiracy theory. “Yep, the evidence points that way,” I concurred.

  “Good. Now what about Tony Silkstone?”

  “We have one witness, namely Silkstone himself, and some forensic,” the lawyer told us, “and all the forensic indicates that he is telling the truth. Have you anything to the contrary, Mr Priest?”

  I shook my head. “Nope.”

  “So we go for manslaughter.”

  “Except I don’t believe it,” I said.

 
“What you believe, Charlie,” Gilbert snapped, “is neither here nor there. It’s evidence that sways a court.”

  “Evidence,” I repeated. “Evidence. I wish I’d known that. I’d have brought some along.”

  “What makes you think it’s murder?” the lawyer asked.

  For murder we needed to prove a degree of premeditation, or an intention to kill. Silkstone had almost admitted that he thought his wife might be having an affair, during that first interview when he was trying to show us what a forthright fellow he was, but his brief would have soon made him aware of that folly. I thought about him, images from the little I knew about the man lining up for inspection and moving on as the next one popped up. All that surfaced was that he had a photograph of Nigel Mansell on his wall. Hardly damning. “Nothing,” I replied. “Let’s go for manslaughter.”

  “Oppose bail?” the lawyer asked.

  “Definitely,” I insisted, as if the alternative were unthinkable.

  “On what grounds?”

  Bail is rarely granted in murder cases, but is fairly common for manslaughter. The accused has to show the court that he is unlikely to abscond, interfere with the course of justice or commit another crime. As Silkstone had a clean record up to now, was in gainful employment and could reside in the area once we had deemed his house no longer a crime scene, he’d probably be granted it.

  “Psychiatric reports,” I said. “He’s pleading some sort of mental aberration, red mist and all that rubbish. Of a temporary nature, of course, from which he has now miraculously recovered. We need to show that either he never had it or it’s still there. I don’t mind which.”

  “Our expert witness will be a registrar from the General on a flat fee,” the lawyer told me. “His will be a whiz kid from Harley Street who lights his cigars with ten-pound notes.” His tie had little Mickey Mouses on it, and a faded patch where he’d removed a stain.

  “But Silkstone has killed someone,” I said. “Sticking a knife in somebody’s heart takes a lot of explaining away. They’ll let him out eventually, but let’s hold him for as long as we can.”