Chill Factor

by Stuart Pawson

  “In dreams I walk with you,” she sang, very softly, her head weaving gently from side to side. “In dreams I talk to yo-ou.”

  “It’s a lovely song,” I said.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Mmm. You were telling me what Margaret said to you?”

  She looked at the glass, realised it was still empty and leaned forward to place it on the coffee table. Her fingers fumbled, lost their grip, and it rolled on to the floor. It was a heavy tumbler, cut glass, and the rug was luxurious, so it didn’t break. I picked it up and placed it just out of her reach.

  “What did she say?”

  “She shaid…she said…that Peter had told Tony that he didn’t ’ave a…a…a nalibi for the night that little girl went missing. He was wiv me, she shaid, she…said, bur ’e couldn’t tell the police that, cos ’is wife would find out.”

  “What did she tell you to do?”

  “Just that we saw ’em in the pub. The Nelson. I was wiv Margaret, an’ we saw these two blokes, called Peter and Tony. They dint buy us a drink or anything, but we spoke to them. If the police came and asked where I was on that Wednesday night, I’d to say I was in the Nelson, wiv ’er.”

  “And did they?”

  “Did what?”

  “Did the police ask you where you were?”

  “Yes, but ages after. I could ’ardly remember.”

  “And was Peter with you, that Wednesday night?”

  “That’s the funny fing. I didn’t realise until I fought about it. We went to the Nelson free times a week, when the Donimoes…the Dominoes…were playing. But they were on a Sunday and on a Tuesday and on Thursday nights. Not We’nsdays. We never went on We’nsdays. It was old time dancing on We’nsdays.”

  I made her a black coffee, but I couldn’t do much about the brewery in the corner. Leaving her alone with her real or imagined memories, a CD of Roy Orbison’s greatest breakdowns and a gallon of spirits was like playing Russian Roulette with her, but I didn’t see what else I could do. Hopefully she’d collapse and sleep it off. She must have been half cut when I arrived, so she knew the score.

  The rain drove all the day-trippers away early, so it was a twenty-minute crawl to reach the motorway. I stopped at the Birch services for a meal but changed my mind when I saw the prices. I always do. Instead it was a trout from Sainsbury’s, with Kenyan green beans and new potatoes, followed by half a pint of strawberry Angel Delight. I did the trout under the grill, with lashings of butter, and it was delicious.

  I hadn’t lied to Michelle. I saw Roy Orbison, once, at Batley Variety Club, and he was brilliant. I took Vanessa, my wife, soon to be ex-wife. He sounded exactly the same live as he did on record, which is more than you can say for most of them. I went upstairs to the spare bedroom, humming Pretty Woman, and logged on to the computer that lives in there.

  “Michelle Webster admitted that she lied when asked by the investigating officer if Peter Latham was with her on the night Caroline Poole disappeared,” I typed. I expanded the story, with all the dates and legal-speak to make it sound professional. As an afterthought, I added that she was totally kettled when I interviewed her, and was an unreliable witness, open to manipulation. When it was finished I ran off two copies and deleted the file.

  Monday morning I’d post it to Somerset, augmented with a phone call. They’d use the information to pin a sixteen-year-old girl’s murder on Latham, and close the case. It wasn’t much, but he had, after all, gone on to commit another murder up in Yorkshire, hadn’t he?

  Meanwhile, we’d reinforce our case against the man by regarding him as someone who had killed before, down in Somerset. It wasn’t what might be called a Catch 22, but there ought to be a name for it. Ah well, I thought, the coroners will have to sort that one out.

  Latham did leave his sperm all over Margaret Silkstone’s thighs, I remembered as I logged off, and felt happier. Were he still alive he’d be having difficulties arguing that small fact away. Thank God for sperm samples – where would we all be without them? Jeff Caton had loaned me the video of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, with Harrison Ford, and I watched it while sipping lager I’d brought from the supermarket. It was the later version, the director’s cut, with the voice-over removed. Sorry, Mr Scott, but you ruined it. Sometimes, the man in charge just doesn’t know best. You can be so close to something that you don’t see the wet fish coming until it slaps you in the chops.

  Monday morning I followed a double-decker bus all the way into town. Since the buses were regulated – or was it de-regulated? – they’ve started painting them in fancy colours and allowing different companies to sponsor individual buses. Sometimes you don’t know if it’s the one you want coming down the road or a bunch of New Age travellers. On the back of most of them, covering the panel that conceals the engine, it states: Bus advertising works. You’re reading this, aren’t you?

  Dave’s and Annette’s cars were already in their places when I swung into the station yard. Latham’s ex-wife, who lives in Pontefract, started work at the local hospital at ten a.m., and they’d arranged to drive over and catch her early. I filled them in with my weekend discoveries but suggested they concentrate initially on our enquiry, not Somerset’s. The Caroline Poole case was muddying the waters, and it wasn’t fair to Latham to use it to pre-judge him.

  Dave said: “Where’s our rock, then?” to change the subject. What he meant was don’t tell your grandma how to suck eggs.

  “What rock?”

  “Our Blackpool rock. You had a day at the seaside and you didn’t bring us any rock back?”

  “It was raining. I didn’t hang about.”

  He turned to Annette. “Shows how much he thinks of us.”

  Annette looked thoughtful. She said: “So Latham didn’t have an alibi for the Caroline Poole job.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Which means, of course, that Silkstone probably didn’t have one, either.”

  “Yes, Annette,” I agreed. “That thought had occurred to me, too.”

  “Unless he was alone with Margaret at the time,” Dave suggested.

  “But she’s dead,” Annette and I replied, simultaneously.

  They went off to Pontefract and I went upstairs for the morning prayer meeting. Gilbert huffed and puffed and thought I was wasting time on details when the big picture was as plain as a gravy stain. The Caroline Poole case wasn’t ours. End of story. Latham killed Margaret. Silkstone killed Latham. End of story.

  “But we don’t know that Silkstone wasn’t involved with Margaret’s death,” I argued.

  “Well if he was he’s got away with it. Good luck to the bloke, we can’t win ’em all, Charlie.”

  Gareth Adey offered his considered opinion, which agreed with Gilbert’s. It always does. “I think Mr Wood is right, Charlie,” he told me. “Good grief, two murders cleared up is pretty good going by anybody’s standards. Well done, I say, and I bet the Chief Constable is thinking the same way. Now, can we talk about the new CCTV in the market place?”

  So we did. Three minutes about two murders, half an hour about his poxy TV cameras. “Well done, Charlie. Two murders cleared up. Maybe you’ll get a commendation.” And what about frigging justice, I thought?

  I rang Michelle Webster when I was back in my office, to satisfy myself that she was OK. “I was worried about you,” I told her, after the formalities. “That was rather a large G and T you made yourself.” She giggled, saying that there was no T in it, and hoped that she had behaved herself. We chatted for a while, had a laugh and said goodbye. She never asked about Latham or his funeral, never mentioned the man who killed him, never asked how her friend Margaret had died. I replaced the phone and wondered why I’d bothered.

  Somerset were more interested, when I rang them, and thanked me for my efforts. As Gilbert said, they were regarding it as a clearup. In the middle of our conversation someone in the big office held up a phone and mouthed: “For you,” at me, through the glass. I shook my head and waved
the one I was holding.

  He took a message then came to deliver it, leaning in the doorway of my little office until I’d finished. “That was the Jeff from the court,” he said. “The magistrate has remanded Silkstone in custody and he’s been taken to Bentley. His solicitor has intimated that they’ll be pleading guilty to manslaughter, with provocation and lashings of mitigating circumstances.”

  “Hey, that’s good news,” I said. “I expected him to be let loose. Good for the CPS, for once.”

  “A short, sharp shock,” he replied. “Teach him what he’s in for. They’ll free him next time.”

  “Yep,” I agreed.

  We had a loose-ends meeting at four o’clock. Annette placed a huge bag of Pontefract cakes and one of all-sorts on the table in front of me. “Where did you get these?” I asked.

  “Pontefract.”

  “They do sell them in the supermarket,” I argued.

  “Not fresh ones, straight from the oven.”

  I found a coconut mushroom and popped it into my mouth, saying: “Dese are by faborites,” as I passed the bag across the table.

  “There’s a castle there,” Dave said.

  “Where Richard the Second was murdered,” Annette added.

  “It’s an interesting place.”

  “And stinks of liquorice.”

  “But it’s quite a pleasant smell, really.”

  “And every other building is a pub.”

  “OK, OK, spare me the travelogue,” I protested as I sucked a piece of coconut from between my teeth. “Next weekend we’ll all have a day out in Pontefract. Now can we talk about you-know-what, please.”

  Other information had come in and been collated. Most significant were the facts that Silkstone and his wife had blazing rows and were in severe financial difficulties. The car was leased and he’d slipped behind a couple of times with his mortgage payments. His salary, we discovered, was quite modest, and the hefty commissions that he was used to weren’t coming his way. Margaret’s death had given him a timely leg-up out of the shit creek.

  Neighbours confirmed that Latham was a regular Wednesday afternoon visitor. No bedroom curtains were pulled across after he arrived, but it wasn’t possible for anyone to see into the room.

  “Actually,” Dave confided, “between us and these four walls, it’s quite pleasant in the afternoon, with the curtains open.”

  “Put that in your report,” I told him. The phone in my office rang and I went to answer it. It was the CPS solicitor to ask if I’d received the news about Silkstone. I said I had and congratulated him on a minor victory. I suspected that was what he wanted to hear. When I went back into the main office Dave was in full swing.

  “…and my dad told me to keep a big sweet jar under the bed,” he was saying, “and to put a dried pea in it every time we made love. And then, after I was forty, to take one out every time we made love. He said that nobody ever emptied the jar.”

  “Subject normal,” Annette explained as I resumed my seat.

  “And have you emptied it?” somebody asked.

  “Not yet,” I interrupted, “but I’m helping him. Where were we?”

  Latham’s wife had married, and divorced, for a second time. Silkstone had given her husband a job as a salesman, first in double glazing, then in the financial sector, but he did it very reluctantly. It just wasn’t his scene, she’d said, but the money was good. Apparently his affable manner took punters by surprise, and they trusted him, so he did reasonably well without trying too hard. Silkstone came north because of the job, and Latham followed him, but his marriage failed soon after.

  “What went wrong?” I asked.

  “Partly boredom, partly the affair,” Annette replied. “She was attracted to him because of his laid back approach to life, but it quickly paled. At first she couldn’t believe that he’d had enough go in him to have an affair. Coming up here was a fresh start, but it didn’t work out.”

  “And what about Caroline Poole? Did you get round to her?”

  “Yes, Boss. She remembered, with a bit of prompting, that Peter’s car was the same type that we were looking for. She thinks she mentioned it to him and he just shrugged it off. They never discussed it again.”

  “But Latham wasn’t at home with her on the night in question?”

  “She doesn’t think so, and he didn’t ask her for an alibi. It was all a non-event as far as she was concerned.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes. She doesn’t believe that he killed Margaret. He was the least-violent person imaginable, she said.”

  “She couldn’t believe he was having an affair, either,” I pointed out.

  “I know,” Annette agreed, with a shrug.

  Dave said: “I reckon that’s about as far as we can go with this, Chas. We’ve done our bit.”

  “Yep,” I replied, “that just about sews it up. Now answer me this. If bus advertising works, why do they have to advertise it on the backs of all the buses?”

  Dave said: “Eh?” and Annette’s expression implied something similar.

  “Why,” I repeated, “do they have to advertise bus advertising? It obviously doesn’t work, otherwise they’d advertise something that pays them, like Coca-Cola or Fenning’s Fever Cure, wouldn’t they?”

  “Is that what you’ve been thinking about all day?” Dave grumbled.

  “It was just a thought, troubling my enquiring mind,” I replied, but neither of them looked convinced. “OK,” I continued, clapping my hands briskly, “reports on my desk by nine in the morning, please. Then we can concentrate on keeping the streets of Heckley safe for the good burghers of this town. Mr Wood wants us to restore the times when you could drop your wage packet on the pavement and it would still be there when you went back for it.”

  “It would now,” Dave said. “Lost in all the rubbish. And nobody would recognise a wage packet, these days.”

  “What’s Fenning’s Fever Cure?” Annette asked.

  Chapter Seven

  A couple of years ago Annabelle and I had a lightning drive down to London to see an exhibition of Pissarro’s work at the Barbican. I like him, the reviews were good, and it was an excuse for a day out. On the way home, late that night, Annabelle was making conversation to keep me awake. “If you could have one painting,” she began, “just one, to hang above your fireplace, which would it be?”

  “Of Pissarro’s?” I asked.

  “No. Anybody’s.”

  “Oh, in that case, a Picasso. Any Picasso.”

  “Except him.” She knew I was a Picasso freak.

  “Right.” I gave it a long thought. We were approaching Leicester Forest services and I asked if she wanted to stop. She didn’t. “I think it would be a Gauguin,” I told her.

  “A Gauguin? I’ve never heard you championing him before.”

  “Oh, I’m very fond of him,” I said, “but there’s one in particular that gets me.” I thumped my chest for emphasis, saying: “Right here.”

  “I know!” she exclaimed. “One with lots of nubile South Sea Islanders showing their breasts.”

  “Where do you get these ideas about me?” I protested. “Actually, it’s a self portrait. Gauguin is just coming home from a walk, and his landlady is greeting him at the garden gate. It’s called Bonjour, Monsieur Gauguin. He captures the moment beautifully. Haven’t you ever seen it?”

  “No, I don’t think I have.”

  “You’ll like it. The colours glow like a stained glass window. I have it in a book somewhere.”

  The conversation was preserved in my mind with almost every other word that passed between us, but I hadn’t expected it to be recalled in this way. The Bart Simpson fridge magnet was drawing my thoughts back to Peter Latham’s house, or, more precisely, to the postcard that it pinned against the cold metal. It was the same picture as I’d told Annabelle I’d like to have on my wall, before all others: Gauguin’s self portrait, Bonjour, Monsieur Gauguin.

  There was no message written on th
e back, no pinhole through it. It was as blank as a juror’s expression. Cards like that are only available in galleries. Had Latham bought it for himself, because he liked it above all the other offerings on show? That was something for me to ponder over.

  Tuesday morning we hit the headlines. The UK News, Britain’s foremost tabloid, written for Britons by Britons, with lots of white British bosoms for red-blooded British men, carried yet another world exclusive. Yesterday it had been the convent schoolgirl with the fifty-two inch bust – Only another seven days to her sweet sixteenth, then all will be revealed! – today it was: Why is this man in jail? above a near life-size photograph of a tearful Tony Silkstone.

  Silkstone, we were told when we turned to page five, was living in a prison hell because he had rid the world of a scumbag. Latham was a child killer and rapist who had gone on to kill Silkstone’s wife. Cue blurred holiday snap of Margaret, wearing a bikini. Silkstone had done what any good citizen would have done – what the courts should have done years ago – and made sure Latham wouldn’t be raping or murdering anybody else. Good riddance to him, but meanwhile poor Silkstone had to wait in an overcrowded prison, three to a cell, while the geriatric legal system, aided and abetted by a police force only interested in statistics, argued what to do with him. Give him a medal, says the UK News! On the next page was a picture of Caroline Poole – not the sports day one, thank God – and all the gory details of how her violated young body was found, back in 1984.

  Prendergast! I thought. Bloody Prendergast! The courts are supposed to be isolated from public opinion, but if you believe that you probably still think that Christmas is the time of goodwill to all men. And why shouldn’t the public have their say, you may argue: it’s the public’s law, after all. And while we are at it, let’s bring back lynching.

  Wednesday I went to the Spinners with Dave and we had a good chinwag. We’ve lapsed a few times, lately. Thursday night I ate at home, alone. I didn’t have the opportunity to ask Annette if she fancied a Chinese, and I didn’t go looking for her. No point in appearing eager.