Chill Factor

by Stuart Pawson

  Summer fell on the third of July. Otherwise, it slipped by in the usual mixture of showers and mild days. As the saying goes: If you don’t like the English weather, just wait ten minutes. I did some walking, finished the painting and one Saturday, in an unprecedented burst of enthusiasm, dug all the shrubs out of the garden. They weren’t as labour-saving as I’d planned, so I decided to sow annuals from now on.

  It was the silly season. A family in Kent – Mum, Dad and two kids – changed their names so that their initials matched the numberplate on their Mitsubishi Shogun. It was easier and cheaper than doing things the other way round. Heckley’s first space probe exploded on the launch pad up on the moors, and a man was drowned trying to sail across the Channel in a shopping trolley.

  In the job, we had the opportunity to catch up with burglaries and muggings, and made a few good arrests. A female drug dealer whose home we were raiding one morning drove over Dave’s foot while trying to escape. There were all the usual “hopping mad” jokes, and for a few days he came to work with it heavily bandaged, minus shoe. I appointed him office boy, and the troops started calling him Big Foot behind his back. The new CCTV cameras were installed in the market place and soon earned their keep, and the chief constable’s daughter was fined and banned for driving while pissed. That cheered everybody up.

  Annette took two weeks’ leave. I didn’t ask her if she was going away, but a card from the Dordogne appeared on the office notice board. The day she was due back I booked into my favourite boarding house in the Lakes. The weather stayed fine, sharpened by the first suggestions of an early autumn, and I bagged a few good peaks.

  “Nice holiday?” I asked, when I saw her again.

  “Mmm,” she nodded, without too much enthusiasm. Ah well, I thought, she has been back at work for a whole week. “And you?” she asked.

  “Mmm,” I echoed, adding: “You caught the sun.” Her freckles were in full flush against a background hue several shades deeper than usual.

  She blushed, adding to the rainbow effect. “I try to stay out of it,” she said, “but you caught it, too.”

  “The weather,” I explained. “I caught the weather.”

  On August 19th Sophie learned that she’d earned three straight As, and the following day a magistrate allowed Tony Silkstone out on bail. Swings and roundabouts. We knew he was likely to be released but we’d opposed it, and I’d gone to court in case the magistrates had any questions. They didn’t. Silkstone was unlikely to abscond as he’d phoned the police himself to confess, and psychiatric reports were available which said that he was sane and unlikely to offend again. Coming home twice to find your wife murdered and raped by your best friend would be downright bad luck. What probably clinched it was the fact that he had a job to go to. Heckley magistrates’ court hadn’t tried anyone with a job for nearly two years. Silkstone had been inside on remand for eight weeks, which would be deducted from any sentence he was given, and there were conditions to his bail. He had to surrender his passport, reside at The Garth, Mountain Meadows, and report to Heckley nick twice per week. We wouldn’t be inviting him to stay for tea and biscuits.

  While I was slogging up Dollywagon Pike, sweating off a hangover, the troops had collared a burglar who put his hand up to just about every outstanding blag on our books. I saw it as making the citizens of Heckley safer in their beds at night, to Gilbert it was an opportunity to make our clearup figures look better than Olga Korbut’s on a good day. Dave and Annette sat him in the front seat of Dave’s car and took him for a ride. He took pride in his work, liked to show off about his nefarious deeds. Put him in the company of an attractive lady and he sang like the Newport Male Voice Choir the time they beat the All Blacks. I didn’t like using Annette that way, didn’t like the thought of his hungry eyes dragging over her contours, stripping her naked, but sometimes I have to act like a grown-up. It’s not easy for me.

  “A hundred and nineteen,” she sighed, five fifteen Thursday evening, as she flopped into the spare chair in my office.

  “That’ll do,” I told her. “No more days out for Laddo with my glamorous assistant. Do they all check out?”

  “The ones we’ve looked at do. He remembers how he got in, what he took, the make of everything and how much he sold it for. A hundred and nineteen householders are going to find out that their burglary – their burglary – has been taken into consideration. All that grief, and he walks. He doesn’t give a toss about any of them. It doesn’t seem fair, Boss.”

  She was right. He’d stand trial for the one we caught him for and, if found guilty, the judge would be informed of the other offences. The TICs. They’d make a marginal difference to his sentence, his slate would be wiped clean and our figures would look good. Everybody happy except the victims. But villains don’t commit crimes against individuals, they commit them against society. It might be your house that is burgled, your car that is stolen and torched, but the crime is against the state, so tough luck.

  “It’s not fair,” I agreed, “but that’s the law, and our job ends when we nab him and gather the evidence. Don’t worry about it, Annette. If he gets a light sentence and never does another crime, then the system has worked. If he keeps on blagging, we’ll keep on catching him. His cards are well-marked.”

  “I suppose so. Sorry to be a moan, Boss.”

  “No problem.”

  She bent forward, as if to rise from the chair, then stopped. “Um, it’s Thursday, today,” she said, looking me straight in the face.

  “Yep, I had noticed.”

  “Well, after four days of him I don’t feel like going home and cooking. Fancy a Chinese? I owe you one.”

  I pursed my lips, sucked in my cheeks. Anything to look noncommittal. I failed, miserably. “Um, yeah,” I said. “Smashing.”

  “What time?” she asked, rising to her feet.

  “Er, now?” I wondered, following her up.

  She wanted to go home and change, and it wasn’t a bad idea for me to do the same. At seven thirty, clean shaven and crisply attired, I parked outside her downstairs flat on the edge of the town. Annette saw me arrive and came out, wearing jeans and a Berghaus fleece over a T-shirt. Her hair was tied back, where it exploded from out of a black band in an untamed riot. I wanted to sit there and tell her how good she looked, but I didn’t.

  I settled for: “Hi Kid, still Chinese?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “We could have a change, if you’d prefer it.”

  “No, Chinese is fine.”

  “OK.” I put the car in first gear and eased away from the kerb. “If I remember rightly,” I told her, “it’s my turn to get you drunk.”

  Mr Ho wasn’t there, so we didn’t have a cabaret or free tea, but it gave us a chance to talk. The holiday had been good but I gained the distinct impression that something about it wasn’t too brilliant. The company, perhaps? They’d canoed down the river for four days, staying at campsites and imbibing copious amounts of local produce. It sounded heaven to me. She didn’t want to talk about it, and her friend was never mentioned by name. When I ventured to ask if the two girls had enjoyed themselves the first flicker of enthusiasm came into her eyes and she said they had. Inevitably, the conversation found its way back to the job.

  “I saw Silkstone this morning,” Annette said, “when he came to sign the bail book. He was larger than life and twice as cheerful.”

  “Cocky little sod,” I replied. “I haven’t seen him since he was given bail. Anybody would think he’d won the welterweight championship, the way he was jumping up and down, shaking hands with his brief.”

  “He wants to change his day next week, because he’s talking at a sales conference.”

  “Has his solicitor applied to the court?”

  “Yes. He was asking if we’d had notification.”

  “Did they let him?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “Well they shouldn’t have.” I adopted my stern expression and growled.

  “You
think he’s got away with it, don’t you, Charlie?”

  “I don’t know, Annette. I really don’t know.”

  “The famous intuition?”

  I shook my head. “No, definitely not. I have no sense of intuition. I study the picture, weigh the facts. All the facts, including the seemingly irrelevant.”

  She tipped her head to one side and rested it against her fist. “Such as what?” she asked.

  The waiter brought the portion of toffee bananas we’d decided to share and I spooned a helping on to my side plate. “These are delicious,” I told her, passing the remainder across the table.

  “Mmm!” she agreed after the first mouthful.

  “What do you do with junk mail?” I asked.

  “Throw it away, usually,” she replied.

  “No. In detail, please. Step by step.”

  “Step by step? Well, I look at the envelopes, then usually put it all to one side.”

  “So you don’t throw it straight in the bin?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Go on.”

  “It stays on the hall table until I have an idle moment. Then I open it, read it a bit…and…that’s when I chuck it in the bin!”

  “What about charity stuff?”

  “Charity stuff? That hangs about a bit longer. I usually save it until I have a clear out, then it goes the way of the rest, I’m afraid.”

  “Do you reply to any?”

  “Not as much as I should. Mum has bad arthritis, and I’m scared of it, so I usually send them something. And children’s charities. One or two others, perhaps, but not very often.”

  “I’d say you were a generous, caring person,” I told her. “You probably feel uncomfortable about not helping more, but sometimes resent being blackmailed by the more emotional appeals.”

  “Yes, I think I do.”

  “There were four items of junk mail in Latham’s dustbin, two of them from charities. He’d opened them all and the return envelope and payment slip from one of the charities – the World Wildlife Fund – was pinned on his kitchen noticeboard. Silkstone, on the other hand, handled things more efficiently. There were two items in his bin, both of them unopened. One of them, from ActionAid, was postmarked the day before the killings, so it had probably only arrived that morning.” I grinned, saying: “Of the two of them, I’d rather pin it on Silkstone. Wouldn’t you?”

  She smiled and carefully lifted a spoonful of toffee banana towards her mouth. I watched her lips engulf it and the spoon slide out from between them. “So…” she mumbled, chewing and swallowing, “So…if you were a psychiatrist, doing a profile of whoever had killed Mrs Silkstone, you’d go for the person who dumped his junk mail, unopened.”

  “Every time.”

  “What about the evidence?”

  “We’re just talking profiles. You used the word, I try to avoid it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because most of it is common sense. I don’t need a psychiatrist on seventy grand to pinpoint crime scenes on a map for me and say: ‘He lives somewhere there.’”

  “It might be common sense to you, Charlie. It’s mumbo-jumbo to most of us.”

  “It’ll come. There’s no substitute for experience.”

  “So how did Latham’s semen get to be all over Mrs Silkstone?” Annette asked.

  I shrugged and flapped a hand. I suspect I blushed, too. “In the usual manner?” I suggested.

  “So he was there when she died?”

  “It looks like it.”

  “But you think Silkstone was with him?”

  “I don’t know, Annette,” I sighed. “What do some people get up to behind their curtains? It’s all a mystery to me. Profiling isn’t evidence. It should be used to indicate a line of enquiry, and you should always bear in mind that it might be the wrong line. When you do it backwards, like we’ve done, it’s next to worthless.”

  She smiled, saying: “That was interesting. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, ma’am.” A waiter placed the bill in front of me but Annette’s arm reached out like a striking rattlesnake and grabbed it.

  “My treat,” she said.

  Light rain was falling when we hit the street, and I guided Annette under the shelter of the shop canopies, my hand in the small of her back. “Shall we have a drink somewhere?” I asked.

  “Mmm. Where?”

  “Dunno.” I was out of touch with the town-centre pubs. Most of them were good, once, but yoof culture had taken them over and the music made thinking, never mind conversation, impossible. Annette might not mind that, I thought, and something gurgled in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t have a calculator in my pocket, but elementary mental arithmetic said she was nineteen years younger than me. Nowhere would that gap be more evident than in a town-centre pub.

  Across the road there blinked the neon sign of the Aspidistra Lounge, Heckley’s major nightspot. Formerly the Copper Banana, formerly Luigi’s Nite Scene, formerly Mad John’s Fashion Emporium, formerly the Regal Kinema. The later two of these enterprises were run by Georgie Casanove, formerly George Hardwick. Georgie was our town’s answer to Pete Stringfellow, but without the finesse.

  “We could try there,” I said, nodding towards the lights.

  “The Aspidistra Lounge?”

  “Mmm. We could call it work, claim on our expenses. Georgie, the proprietor, isn’t exactly a Mr Big, but I think he could finger a few people for us, if he were so inclined. Let’s put some pressure on him.”

  “Right!” she said. “I’m game.”

  We dashed across the road, avoiding the puddles, and stepped through the open doorway of the disco. A bouncer with a shaven head and Buddy Holly spectacles was leaning on the front desk, chatting to the gum-chewing ticket girl. He straightened up and stepped to one side, taken off-guard by the sudden rush of customers, and tried to look menacing. I’ve seen more menace on the back of a cornflakes box.

  “Two, please,” I said to the girl, not sure whether to speak under, over or through the armoured glass that surrounded her. We could have flashed our IDs like TV cops would have done, and they would have let us in, but I preferred it this way.

  The words: “Ladies are free before ten,” came out of her mouth in a haze of peppermint that evaporated in the air somewhere between her and the bouncer, who she was gazing towards.

  “Oh, I’ll take three, then,” I answered.

  “That’ll be seven pounds fifty.”

  I pushed a tenner towards her and she slid my change and two cloakroom tickets under the window. “Thank you.” The bouncer strode over to a door and yanked it open. I ushered Annette forward and said: “Cheers,” to him. We were in.

  I know one tune that’s been written in the last ten years by any of the socalled Brit-Pop stars I see on the front pages of the tabloids, and the DJ was playing it.

  I leaned towards Annette and said: “Verve,” into her ear. She stared at me, her eyes wide. “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” I added, determined to exploit my sole opportunity to swank. It’s a simple catchy rhythm, repeated ad nauseum. I nodded my head in time with it: Dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum. Once heard, it’s ringing through your brain for days, a bit like Canon in D.

  “I’m amazed!” she gasped, and I rewarded her with a wink.

  Our brains slowly modified our senses to accommodate the sudden change in environment. Irises widened to dispel the jungle gloom and nerves in our ears adjusted their sensitivity to just below the pain barrier. Noses twitched, seeking out pheromones from anyone of the opposite sex who was ripe for mating. Four million years of evolution, and this was what it was all leading to.

  “It’s a bit quiet,” I shouted above the battery of chords bouncing through my body.

  “It’s early,” Annette yelled back at me, in explanation.

  It was the same as every other disco I remembered from my younger days. A bright, small dance floor; bored DJ sorting records behind a console straight from NASA; pulsating lights and lots
of red velvet. OK, so we didn’t have lasers and dry ice then, but they’re no big deal. Still permeating everything was that same old feeling of despair. These places always look a dump when you see them with the house lights up. This looked a dump in semi-darkness. When I was a kid we called it the Bug Hutch, and came every Saturday to catch up with Flash Gordon’s latest adventures.

  Georgie himself was behind the bar, attired like a cross between Bette Davis on a bad night and Conan the Barbarian. “It wouldn’t cost much to convert this back to a cinema, George,” I told him, flapping a hand in the direction of the auditorium.

  “Hello, Mr Priest,” he growled, managing to sound threatening and limp simultaneously. “Not expecting any trouble, are we?”

  “Who could cause trouble in an empty house?”

  “It’s early. We’ll fill up, soon as the pubs close.”

  “Two beers, please.” The locks on his head were platinum blond, but those cascading through the slashed front of his satin shirt were grey.

  “What sort?”

  I looked at Annette and she leaned over the bar, examining the wares. “Foster’s Ice, please,” she said.

  “Two,” I repeated.

  He popped the caps and placed the bottles on the counter. “That’ll be four pounds fifty,” he told me.

  I passed him another tenner, asking: “How much is there back on the bottles?”

  “Isn’t he a caution,” he said to Annette as he handed me my change.

  We walked uphill, away from the bar and the speakers, feeling our way between the empty tables to where the rear stalls once were. It was much quieter back there, and a few other people were sitting in scattered groups, arranged according to some logic based on personal territory. As the place filled territories would shrink and a pecking order emerge. There were two couples, three men presumably from out of town, and a group of girls. We looked for a table equidistant from the girls and the couples, but before we could sit down one of the girls waved to me.