Chill Factor

by Stuart Pawson

  Chapter Nine

  Four days is the magic figure. The chopper clocked the Land Rover entering the multi-storey carpark in Heckley and that was as much as they could do. It was later found neatly parked on the next-to-top floor, with the doors unlocked. It had, needless to say, been stolen two weeks earlier. From the carpark there are covered walkways leading to the shopping mall and the old town area, and other exits at street level. He could have taken any one of them. Within minutes the place was flooded with Heckley’s finest, all twelve of them, but Mr Chilcott had vanished. We suspect he had a safe house somewhere, and was holed-up in that.

  Back at the farm I’d requested assistance from Heckley nick, which didn’t come because they were busy, and from the scenes of crime people, who never have anything better to do on a Saturday lunchtime. Having a fatwa on me earned a certain amount of respect from the RCS team, so when I ordered them all out of the farmhouse they did as they were told. They piled into their vehicles and hot-footed it to Heckley, desperate to salvage some credibility. I stayed behind and they kindly left a car and three men with me, just in case. We stoked the fire and made coffee.

  Four days is the time a terrorist on the run is trained to stay concealed. The police employ psychologists who have worked out that a fugitive would stay underground for three days before making his bid for freedom. After that time, we assume we’ve lost him. So the terrorists enlist more expensive psychologists who tell them to hide for four days before legging it. Fortunately our anti-terrorist people have become wise to this, and they brought it to our attention. OK, Chilcott wasn’t a terrorist, but they all download the same manuals.

  Nigel extended his hands towards me so that I could extricate my new pint from between his fingertips. He placed another in front of Dave and an orange juice and soda on his own beer mat.

  “Cheers,” we said.

  “Cheers,” he replied, taking a sip. As Chilcott was still on the run and appeared to have a reasonable working knowledge of my movements, we had forsaken the Spinners and were having our Wednesday night meeting in the Bailiwick. “So what time were you there until?” Nigel asked.

  “Seven o’clock.” I said. “We were stuck at Ne’er Do Well Farm until after seven. The SOCOs had left about four.”

  “We were running about like blue-arsed flies,” Dave said.

  “Flashing blue-arsed flies?” I suggested.

  “And them.”

  “Do you think he’s still in Heckley?”

  “God knows.”

  “It’s four days today. SB said he’d lie low for four days.”

  “Don’t remind us.”

  I took a sip of beer and said: “Well it proves one thing.”

  “What’s that?” they asked.

  “That I’m not paranoid.”

  “Just because someone is trying to kill you doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid,” Dave argued.

  “Of course it does.”

  “No it doesn’t. He’s only one man. It’s not a conspiracy.”

  “Of course it’s a conspiracy.”

  “No, it’s not. He was doing it for money. It’s not personal.”

  “What difference does that make? The whole thing is one big conspiracy.”

  “Against you? One big conspiracy against you?”

  “Against everyone.”

  “So someone’s out to kill Nigel, too. And me. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I might be.”

  “You definitely are paranoid.”

  “Is that what you think? Is that what you really think?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right,” I said. “Right. Let me tell you something. You see this place?” I gestured towards the ceiling and they nodded. “Good. And you see the names on all those labels behind the bar?” I read them off: “Tetley’s, Black Sheep, Bell’s, Guinness, Foster’s, and so on, and so on?”

  “Ye-es,” they agreed.

  “OK. Now let’s look at what’s outside. There’s the Halifax opposite, and Barclays, and the NatWest. Further down there’s Burger King and Pizza Hut. There are jewellers, clothes shops galore, snack bars and…oh, you name it and there’s one out there.”

  “So what’s the point of all this?” Dave asked. Nigel grinned and took another sip of orange juice.

  “The point is,” I told him, “that it’s all a big conspiracy. Why do all these companies exist? Go on, tell me that.”

  “To do what they do,” he replied. “To make beer or whatever, to provide a service, to employ people and to make a profit for their shareholders.”

  “No they don’t.”

  “Well go on, then, clever clogs. You tell us why they exist.”

  “They exist, every one of them, for one sole purpose.”

  “Which is…?”

  “Which is…to convert my money into their money. That’s what it’s all about.”

  “So that’s why you’re so reluctant to go to the bar,” Nigel commented.

  “Cheeky sod!” I retorted.

  “You are paranoid,” Dave concluded.

  Shirley came to take us home and Dave bought her a tonic water. We were finishing our drinks when a familiar warbling tone came from somewhere on Nigel’s person. “Oooh, oooh,” we groaned, expressing our disapproval. Mobile phones are verboten on walks and in the pub. Nigel blushed and retrieved it from his pocket.

  “Nigel Newley,” he said. I drained my glass and Dave did the same. “Hello, Les.” Sounded like it was Les Isles, his boss. “Hey! That’s brilliant!” Good news. Lucky for some. “Where does he live?” Sounded like Nigel had some work to do. “Right. In the morning? Right. See you then. Thanks for ringing.” It would be an early alarm call for someone. He closed the phone and replaced it in his pocket, his face pink with enthusiasm.

  “Guess what?” he said, “We’ve had a match. One of the donated samples matches the DNA in the semen we found on Marie-Claire Hollingbrook. We’re bringing him in first thing.”

  “That was quick,” Dave said.

  “It was, wasn’t it.”

  “So, er, where does he live?” I asked.

  “Um, Heckley. He lives in Heckley.”

  “Really? In that case he’s one of ours, isn’t he?”

  “Oh no he isn’t,” Nigel assured me. “Oh no he isn’t.”

  I had a bodyguard, of course. It was all over the papers that we’d let Chilcott, Enemy Number One, slip through our fingers; if he still managed to complete his mission we’d really have egg on our faces. Well, they would; I’d have something else on mine. The two of them, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, sat patiently in the pub, backs to the wall, sipping soft drinks, while we tried to ignore them. I didn’t like it, but knew better than to object. Shirley took me home first and they followed. I handed my keys over and one of them entered the house, casually, without making a drama out of it. “You know where everything is,” I said when I was allowed in, waving towards the coffee ingredients, videos and sleeping bags that had accumulated in my front room. “Make yourselves at home, gentlemen, I’m off to bed.”

  “I’ve brought Terminator Two,” one of them told me as he filled the kettle.

  “Seen it,” I lied. “Early night for me. Keep it low.”

  “Right. Tea?”

  “Yes please. Will you bring it up?”

  “No chance, you can wait.”

  I felt like a guest in my own home. An unwelcome one at that. I took the mug of tea and trudged up the stairs to bed. Drinking doesn’t suit me, and lately it had been creeping up a bit. I’d been thinking a lot, also, and the conclusions weren’t good. I was at a funny age. From now on, it wasn’t going to get much better. The good years, or what should have been the good years, were all in the past. Friday teatime Chilcott had gone on a dummy run, Superintendent Cox had said. I disagreed. I’d been up on the moors, watching the farm. Chilcott had come to Heckley looking for me, and he could have been out of the country again by the morning. Detectives are supposed to work regular hours, and o
n a Friday the whole world tries to get off home on time. It was his first opportunity to do the job, but my car hadn’t been outside the nick, so he’d had to abort. A bullet through the brain, while I was sitting at the traffic lights; or here at home, sleeping, didn’t sound too bad. I could live with that. It’s all the alternatives that terrify me.

  Annette took it badly. She’d sat there, white faced, when I’d announced that I was Chilcott’s intended target. Afterwards she came into my office and asked what I was going to do. She thought I’d move away, stay in the country until things blew over, but I explained that it wasn’t necessary. I had my minders, and Chilcott’s number one priority, now, was making his escape. Even if he’d been paid in advance, nailing me would be off his agenda. I tried to sound as if I knew what I was talking about, as if the inner workings of an assassin’s mind were my workaday fodder, but I don’t think she believed me. I played safe and didn’t suggest we go for a meal, that week.

  Nigel and Les Isles arrested Jason Lee Gelder and charged him with the murder of Marie-Claire Hollingbrook. He’d walked into the caravan in Heckley market place, large as life, and donated six hairs and his name and address. Science did the rest. An arcane test, discovered by a professor at Leicester university as recently as 1984, reduced the DNA in Gelder’s hair roots to a pattern of parallel lines on a piece of film that exactly matched the lines produced from the semen left on Marie-Claire’s thighs. It was his, as sure as hedgehogs haven’t grasped the Green Cross Code. It made the local news on Thursday evening and the nationals the next day. The people of the East Pennine division probably slept a little more contentedly in their beds, that weekend, knowing that a sex killer was safely behind bars.

  “That was quick,” I said, when I spoke to Superintendent Isles on the telephone.

  “I think he wanted catching,” he admitted. “He was hanging around as they set-up the caravan. He went for a burger then came back and made a donation. Wanted to know what it was all about. It was only about the fifteenth they’d taken at that point.”

  Sometimes they do it to taunt the police, or to make the stakes higher. Ted Bundy killed more than thirty women across the USA. He moved to Florida because they had the death penalty. Trying to figure out why is like asking why a flock of birds turned left at that particular place in the sky, and not right. Nobody knows. Maybe tomorrow they’ll go straight ahead. We do tests to see if these people are sane: ask them questions; show them pictures; gauge their reactions. A man kills thirty women and they show him inkblots to decide if he’s sane. Someone needs their head examining.

  “So he’s coughing, is he?” I asked.

  “Oh no, he’s not making it that easy for us,” Les replied. “Say’s he didn’t do it; was nowhere near where she lived and has never been there.”

  “Alibi?”

  “Watching videos. He’s classic material, Charlie, believe me. We’re waiting for the lab to do another test, the full DNA fingerprint job, but I haven’t cancelled my holiday.”

  “I’d like a word with him, Les,” I said.

  “I thought you might. Why?”

  “To see if there’s anything to be learned about the way we handled the Margaret Silkstone case.”

  “You mean, is this a copycat?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Has young Newley been talking to you? If he has, I’ll have his bollocks for a door knocker.”

  “So when can I see him?” I asked. Not: “Can I see him?” but: “When can I see him?” It’s what salesmen call closing. When I went to that sales conference I’d really listened.

  “Give us two or three days for the reports,” Les said, “then you can have a go at him.”

  “Thanks. And he’s called Gelder?”

  “That’s right. Jason Lee Gelder.”

  “In olden times a gelder was a person who earned a living by cutting horse’s testicles off,” I told him.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s a pity someone didn’t cut his off.”

  If you really want to ingratiate yourself with someone, you let them get the punch line in. I put the phone down and wondered what to have for tea.

  The Regional Crime Squad paid renewed interest in the tapes Bentley prison had recorded of the conversations that led, we believed, to Chilcott being hired. Someone was willing to pay £50,000 to have me bumped off and they wanted to know who. We had the name of the people on both ends of the line, but it wasn’t a big help. They were real nasties: professionals who’d tell you less than the Chancellor does on the eve of the budget. Except they’d do it belligerently, in language politicians only use when it slips out.

  I had a passing interest myself in who was behind it all, so I made my own enquiries. I started by telephoning Gwen Rhodes, Governor of HMP Bentley. It took me all day to track her down, but she was duly shocked when she learned what it was about, and gave me the freedom of her computer terminal, plus a crash course in using it.

  On the morning I was there they turned the key on eight hundred and two inmates. That’s screw-speak for the number of prisoners they had. In addition, a further one hundred and sixty-eight had passed through in the period I was interested in. Some had been released, some moved to less secure units, one or two possibly found not guilty. I printed out lists of their names and highlighted the ones that I thought I knew. One in particular leapt straight off the page at me.

  “When you had Tony Silkstone,” I began, on one of the occasions when Gwen came back into the office, “I don’t suppose he could have had any contact with Paul Mann, could he?” It was Mann’s phone calls that started the whole thing.

  “Not at all,” Gwen assured me. “Silkstone was on remand, Mann in A-wing, and never the twain shall meet. However,” she continued, “you know how it is in places like this. Jungle drums, telepathy, call it what you will, but word gets around.”

  “Who would Silkstone meet during association?”

  “Fellow remandees. That’s all.”

  “What about the rehabilitation classes that Silkstone took? Who might he meet there?”

  “Ah,” she sighed, and I swear she blushed slightly.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Mainly cat C, with a few cat B. The ones making good progress, who we felt would benefit.”

  “Is there always a warder present?”

  “Yes. Always.”

  “But he might have the opportunity to talk with them.”

  “I doubt it, Charlie, but what might happen is this: he discusses his case with a fellow remandee, one who is about to go for trial and knows he’ll be coming back. He leaves D-wing in the morning to go to court, but has a good idea that he’ll be back in A-or B-wing by the evening. He could offer to have a word with someone he knows in there.”

  I said: “Not to put too fine a point on it, Gwen, the system’s leaky.”

  “Leaky!” she snorted. “Of course it’s leaky. We can’t prevent them from talking amongst themselves. What sort of a place do you think this is?”

  “It wasn’t meant to be a criticism,” I replied.

  I’d underlined four names, and we printed hard copies of their notes. Gwen showed me another file which showed who Silkstone had shared a cell with, and I printed their names and files, too.

  Two of them were still there. Gwen used her authority and they both found they had a surprise visitor that afternoon. It cost me the price of four teas and four KitKats from the WVS stall to learn that Silkstone was a twat who never stopped complaining. He’d “done over” a nonce, they said, and that made him all right, but half the time they hadn’t known what he was talking about. He had big ideas and never stopped bragging about what he’d do when he was freed. They were both looking at a long time inside, and soon tired of him. I thanked Gwen for her assistance and went home.

  One of the other names was Vince Halliwell, who I’d put in the dock eight years ago. According to Gwen’s computer he’d attended the same rehabilitation classes as Silkstone and had recently been transferred to E
boracum open prison, near York. He was nearing the end of his sentence, and considered a low risk, even though he was doing time for aggravated burglary. Halliwell was a hard case, but I remembered that there was something about him that I’d almost admired. He was tall, with wide bony shoulders and high cheeks, and blond hair swept back into a ponytail. I think it was the ponytail I envied. He had problems. All his life he’d lived in some sort of institution, and he had a record of binge drinking, paid for by thieving. The aggravated burglary – armed with a weapon – that we did him for was an escalation in his MO.

  At first I hadn’t considered talking to him, but that evening I started to change my mind. He’d refused to cooperate when he was arrested, but became garrulous when interviewed for psychiatric, social enquiry and pre-sentencing reports. They made sad reading, and he had a chip the size and shape of a policeman on his shoulder. It was hard to blame him. I rang Gwen at home and asked her to oil the wheels for me at HMP Eboracum. Next morning she rang me and said the Governor there was willing to play ball.

  It was the probation officer I spoke to. She wasn’t too keen on the idea, but the Governor was the boss…I assured her that Halliwell was a model prisoner, unlikely to blot his record at this late stage in his sentence, and I’d take responsibility if it all went pear-shaped. We settled for Friday morning.

  When long-stay inmates are nearing the end of their sentences the prison authorities like to gradually re-introduce them to life on the outside; to give them a taste of freedom, in small doses. One way is by home visits, another is by what are called town visits. Vince Halliwell had no home to go to, so it would have to be a town visit. I knew he wouldn’t talk to me in jail – somebody always knows it’s a cop who’s called to see you – but he might if I met him on neutral territory, away from screws and inmates and the gossip of a closed community.

  The probation officer gave him strict instructions and a ten-pound note. It was a tough test. He had to catch the ten o’clock bus from the prison gates into York, walk to the Tesco supermarket, buy himself a pair of socks there, have a cup of coffee in the restaurant and catch the next bus back to the jail. He’d have to walk past all those pubs, all those shelves stocked with whisky and rum and beer from places he’d never heard of, with money jangling in his pockets. Anything less than superhuman effort and he’d be back at Bentley, category A again. At eight thirty, nice and early, I started the car engine and headed towards the Minster City.