by Trevor Hoyle
‘Different places. Bed and breakfasts.’
‘In town?’
‘Yes.’
There seemed no point at all in dragging Diane Locke into it. And I couldn’t be sure that Inspector Blend wasn’t a bosom drinking crony of Benson’s, and that anything I told Blend wouldn’t reach Benson via the Masonic hotline.
‘And living rough by the look of it.’ The faded brown eyes watched me. ‘Why hang around if there’s no work?’
‘I was going to try the processing station.’
‘What as, apprentice nuclear physicist?’
I didn’t smile and neither did he. ‘Somebody told me they took on labourers. I thought I’d have a go. It employs a lot of people in the area.’
‘Loaders, labourers – come off it, Peter, you’re no more a manual worker than I am. Or Detective-Sergeant Dimelow. You wouldn’t last two days with a shovel in your hand.’ He glanced down at the sheet, shaking his heavy head. ‘No settled address, no record of employment, not registered for welfare … and here you are, in Brickton, which isn’t on the way to anywhere, where the climate is lousy, the unemployment rate is over twenty per cent, you don’t know a living soul in the area … or do you?’
Again the question slipped gently in, an afterthought, of minor consequence. I shook my head.
‘So then?’ Blend asked, raising his shaggy eyebrows. ‘Why here, the arse-end of the universe?’
‘I hitched a ride on the motorway and the lorry happened to be coming here. In fact – I remember now – it was the driver who told me they might be looking for loaders.’
‘Was it a B-H Haulage lorry?’
‘No.’
‘Whose was it?’
‘I forget.’
‘Excuse me, sir.’ Dimelow tapped his watch.
‘Right. Yes.’ Blend flipped the file shut and heaved himself up. He handed the file to Dimelow, who tucked it under his arm and opened the door. Blend went ahead. Dimelow jerked his head brusquely at me. The three of us went downstairs in single file and walked across the car park in bright sunshine to a brand-new dark-blue 3-litre Rover, nothing to identify it as a police vehicle. The sergeant got behind the wheel while I sat in the back with Inspector Blend. In answer to my question Blend said, ‘Just somebody to take a look at you.’
The police station was built on a slight rise, modular cubes of grey concrete and tinted glass on a green contoured backcloth with here and there clumps of young saplings, positioned as in an artist’s impression, but paltry and threadbare, adding to the starkness rather than alleviating it. The town was below us, slate roofs falling crookedly away from the high street, a church steeple, the mock-gothic tower of the town hall, the silted-up harbour just glimpsed beyond: in the hard light the town gave the impression of being exposed and unreal, a place which only felt at ease with itself when clothed in dank sea-mist and sweeping radioactive drizzle. We drove in the opposite direction, towards Granthelme. Inspector Blend yawned once or twice and spent the time turning back and forth over the well-thumbed pages of a fat appointments diary, the overlapping folds of his chin resting on his collar.
I tried to feel outrage, to manufacture it, but I couldn’t: how did innocent people behave? I didn’t know the lines. Blend and Dimelow had scripts for their performances, they were word-perfect. They need do nothing but watch and wait for the ham actor to miss his cue.
We passed by a high granite wall and swung in through some iron gates. It was a hospital. We entered by the main door and Dimelow inquired at a glass hatch reinforced with steel mesh and was given directions.
A sister in a blue uniform and white starched cap was waiting for us outside the ward. She and Inspector Blend strolled a little way along the corridor, out of my hearing, and spoke for a minute or two. They came back, and I was conscious that she was deliberately avoiding looking at me, as if I were morally unclean, a paedophile or something. Blend nodded to her and she pushed through the double doors into the ward, leaving the three of us outside.
‘Now Mr Holford,’ Blend said, looming over me, gazing down into my face, ‘I’d like you to accompany the sergeant into the ward and stand where he tells you to stand. You’re to say nothing unless he asks you a direct question. When he’s ready he’ll touch you on the shoulder and you’ll come out. Understand? We’d also like you to cover your hair with something …’ He glanced over my shoulder at Dimelow. A signal passed between them. He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Okay?’
‘Yes. All right.’
We went into the ward. It was small, containing eight beds, all of them masked off by curtains. It was absolutely silent, so that when something metallic clinked in the far corner it had the effect of a gunshot. I had smelled death before, but not like this. This kind of death hung clammily to the skin and seeped into the pores. It was like being in a Turkish bath of putrefaction. Dimelow took my arm and led me forward. Blend had disappeared somewhere. We halted before a curtain. The sister’s bare dimpled arm came sexily through the curtain and she slipped out. She handed a round paper hat to Dimelow, pale green, of the disposable type surgeons wear, which he fitted onto my head. It came down to within an inch above my eyebrows.
‘Are we ready, Sister?’
She drew back the curtain. Under the pressure of Dimelow’s hand I moved up until I was standing at the bed rail, looking at a hairless knob of bone covered in brown waxpaper with two shiny orbs resembling the glass marbles they use for dolls’ eyes. The brown torso was bare to the waist, the breastbone and narrow ribcage almost showing white, like those of a starving African child on TV. There were two ridges in the covers, not much thicker than tent-poles, extending towards the foot of the bed and ending in feet. I hardly recognised it but I knew it was Mr Patundi’s sick son.
I remembered his name. Kamal.
Next to his head on the pillow lay a stuffed brown elephant with a curled-up trunk and crinkled ears.
The curtain to my left drifted slightly in what I thought was a draught, even though the room was humid and airless. Then I glimpsed Inspector Blend’s weary eye observing the child through a slit, watching for a flicker of expression in those shiny too-brightly staring orbs trapped in the wasting piece of tissue.
For perhaps two minutes I stood motionless under the child’s scrutiny. The sister’s hand rested lightly on the banked pillows above his head, as if to reinforce her role and duty as protector. She didn’t look at me; I was, it seemed, condemned already as the killer of the boy’s father.
‘He can hear everything we say?’ Dimelow asked the sister. ‘And understand?’
‘Yes, he understands. He knows everything that’s going on. His mind’s still active.’
‘Did the man you saw in the shop say anything to you?’ Dimelow asked the child. ‘Did you hear him speak?’
The tiny brown fists curled up. The boy nodded.
‘Tell him your name, where you were born and the date,’ Dimelow said to me.
‘My name is Peter Holford.’ I tried to speak normally, though to my ears it sounded stilted and unfamiliar, the voice of a stranger. ‘I was born in Chesterfield on the twenty-fifth of February, 1950.’
‘Read this.’ Dimelow took out some papers from his inside pocket, sorted through them and shoved a leaflet into my hand.
‘“For those researching their family tree, all three Collections contain much useful information, including the Census Returns, Parish Registers, Non-Conformist Registers, Directories, Electoral Rolls and many more. A full list of holdings is available for consultation in the Local Studies section.’”
Dimelow plucked the leaflet from my hand. He touched me on the shoulder and we came away. The air in the corridor felt like an icy blast, and I could feel cold trickles of sweat on my cheeks and neck. I wiped my forehead with my handkerchief and found I was still wearing the paper hat. Dimelow crumpled it in his freckled fist.
It was ten minutes before Blend emerged. His face gave nothing away. Whatever Patundi’s son had or hadn’t told him, w
hether he was triumphant or dismayed or merely disappointed, there was no trace, nor was his manner towards me any different.
In the car park Blend said, ‘Do you know who that was?’
‘The shopkeeper’s son.’
Blend nodded. He glanced sideways at me, his eyes hooded. ‘You assumed that … of course.’
‘Yes. Who else could it be?’
Sergeant Dimelow opened the door for the Inspector.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ I asked.
‘Leukaemia,’ Inspector Blend grunted as he curled himself up to squeeze into the back seat. ‘They say he’s got three months, poor little bugger, though he could be dead tomorrow.’
4
The young constable who had brought me up from the cells set down a tray with tea things and a plate of biscuits. Sergeant Dimelow poured out three cups. He added sugar to his and stood up while he drank it, awkwardly feeding himself a digestive from the hand that held the saucer. He was very careful not to get any crumbs on his suit.
There was a strange mood of cosy unreality in the room. It struck me that they had gathered the evidence, fitted the pieces neatly and satisfyingly together to make a watertight case, and now that the strain of confrontation was over and done with, the shifty game of question and answer ended, they could relax in my presence, as if there was a natural complicity between the accusers and the condemned.
Returning to the police station, Inspector Blend and the sergeant had gone away for half-an-hour. I sat and waited in the interview room, watched over by the young sweet-smelling constable, unable to erase the wasted, withering body and the glassily bright doll’s eyes staring out from the knob of bone. A cause of leukaemia in children was exposure to radiation. Were the remaining seven beds in the ward occupied by dying children? The town was a dumping ground for radiocative sludge, Benson and his lucrative haulage contract had seen to that. Schoolchildren were probably taken to the local baths, whose heating costs – thanks to enlightened and prudent civic house-keeping – were virtually nil. Benson had the town sewn up tight. Brickton was his private profit-lode. He had made only one mistake, which he might yet live to regret: by not trusting Russell Rhodes, and scheming that something in addition to money might be necessary to secure his loyalty and silence, Benson had made a tape-recording.
It would be a weird and cruel quirk of justice, I thought, if the Patundi child was to be the instrument which would bring about the destruction of the one person who might avenge his death.
I stirred my tea and waited for the Inspector to sort out his papers. Was this how such matters as murder and culpability, crime and punishment, were dealt with – over tea and biscuits?
‘We’d like you to sign a couple of forms before you go,’ Blend said, shuffling paperwork. ‘Just to say you were treated fairly and courteously during questioning, placed under no duress, and that you have no complaint to make against the police authority in regard to this matter.’
I swallowed some hot tea and managed not to choke or splutter.
‘You have no objection to signing?’
‘No, none at all.’ I put the cup down quickly so that it wouldn’t rattle against the saucer. ‘You’re finished with me? I mean your inquiries are – completed?’
‘We still have an unsolved murder, Mr Holford,’ Inspector Blend said gloomily. He sighed into his cup and drank his tea. ‘Committed by a person or persons unknown, without apparent motive. Nothing was taken from the shop, the safe wasn’t tampered with. We do know that somebody stayed in the room above the shop – we have a good set of prints – and that’s the person we’re anxious to interview. He could be an outsider, like yourself, or a local man. Frankly we don’t know.’
‘The child – the boy,’ I said ‘– he could identify this person?’
‘Possibly. He certainly saw him. But the lad is seriously ill, and children’s evidence is very difficult to assess anyway. To them, all adults, unless they’re extremely old, appear to be the same age. He thinks this man was about the same age as his father, but …’ Blend smiled and shrugged.
‘How old was his father?’
‘Forty-three.’
‘That’s my age,’ I said.
Blend nodded. ‘That didn’t escape us. It was one of the first links we made between yourself and the man we wish to interview. But the child is certain, so he says, that he’s never set eyes on you before.’ He pushed two printed forms across the desk and laid his pen on top of them. ‘And even if he had made a positive identification we would have reasons to doubt it.’
‘What reasons?’ It was curiosity and astonishment that made me blurt it out.
‘You have a right to know, I suppose. We were unable to obtain a match with your prints and those found in the room where the man stayed, that’s number one – would you mind signing those?’
I picked up the pen. I had to summon up all my powers of concentration to sign my name. Had someone else, another person, been in that room and obliterated all signs of my presence, wiped every surface and object clean? It seemed not only unlikely, but impossible. I wanted to protest, You’ve made a mistake – of course they’re my fingerprints! Search again! Double-check! Computers aren’t infallible. Take me back to the hospital and let me convince the boy that I’m the man he saw …
I laid the pen down. ‘Was that all?’
‘What?’
‘You said reasons.’
Blend slid a manilla envelope from underneath the blue folder, inserted two blunt fingers inside the flap and pushed a ten-by-eight black-and-white photograph across the desk. I was aware that he was watching me, waiting for my reaction.
‘We think there’s a possibility that this could be the man.’
The camera’s flashlight had whitened the already fair skin so that the body looked bleached and bloated, lying there on a metal table with drainage channels leading to sluice holes in the corners which reminded me of the pockets on a snooker table. The damp black hair was brushed straight back, the lips pale and puckered through the tangle of dark beard. The photograph showed him from the waist up, revealed the faint bruising on his upper arms and shoulders.
Blend leaned forward on his elbows. ‘You’re not in the habit of making anonymous phone calls to the police, are you, Mr Holford?’
I shook my head.
‘Somebody did. That’s how we came to find him in the harbour.’
‘Drowned?’
‘No, he didn’t drown.’
‘Who is he?’
‘You don’t recognise him?’
‘No,’ I said steadily. ‘Why should I?’
My reaction – or lack of it – must have satisfied him, because Inspector Blend slid the print back in the envelope. He said, ‘We have reason to believe it’s the body of a man named Smith who absconded from a mental institution in Cheshire about a week ago. Though we’ve yet to have the identification confirmed.’
‘What about his fingerprints? Did they match those you found in the shop?’
Inspector Blend gave a weary smile. ‘That would have been easy, wouldn’t it? Too easy – if he had any fingerprints. They’ve been burned off with some kind of acidic solution.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘You know, Mr Holford, by dyeing your hair and growing a beard there’s a pretty close resemblance between the two of you. You were lucky not to involve yourself in a lot of trouble.’
‘I realise that now,’ I said.
‘Yes, well, if you wouldn’t mind,’ he said, glancing at his watch, ‘we’ve got other things to do. We won’t detain you any further.’
‘There’s something else,’ I blurted out, surprising myself. ‘It’s to do with Benson.’
‘Benson? Who’s that?’
It was as I’d thought. If Blend had been a local man he’d have known at once about Mr Big of Brickton, town councillor and businessman, but the name meant nothing to him.
‘He runs B-H Haulage.’
Inspector Blend drummed on the desk. ‘I haven’t the time,
nor the inclination, to concern myself with your petty personal problems, Mr Holford.’ He slipped the forms into the folder and flipped it shut. ‘I don’t fancy opening another can of worms.’
‘What do you mean?’
The faded brown eyes were pained, faintly irritable. ‘You’ve already told us that you went along to Benson’s firm for a job and were turned down. Frankly, I’m not interested in any grudge you might have against him, or any disagreements between you.’ Blend finished his tea and pushed his chair back. ‘As long as your difference of opinion doesn’t involve homicide, Mr Holford, I really couldn’t care less …’
‘What if it does?’
Blend held out the folder to Dimelow, who took it from him. He said, ‘I already have four murder inquiries on the go; I can well do without another.’
‘But …’
‘Yes?’
‘The boy in the hospital.’ I swallowed and gulped out, ‘That’s murder.’
‘Leukaemia isn’t murder, Mr Holford.’ Blend spoke to Sergeant Dimelow: ‘Clear those with the Super and make copies, would you?’ Dimelow went out.
‘This is important. I have to tell you.’ I didn’t like the sound of my voice, the thin note of pleading in it, but I couldn’t restrain it. ‘Benson’s firm has been dumping radiocative waste here. He’s poisoning the town for profit. Those children in the hospital—’
‘Benson’s the ogre, is he?’
I gripped the edge of the desk. ‘He’s paying off one of the managers at the Station – a man called Rhodes. They’re both involved in a scheme to pipe hot water to the local swimming baths, which is supposed to save the council thousands of pounds a year.’
Inspector Blend leaned his elbow on the back of the chair, toying with the lobe of his ear. ‘I get it. It’s a conspiracy, right? The Station, the council, Benson, this chap Rhodes, they’re all up to their necks in this scheme and it so happens that you’re the one person to have tumbled to it.’
‘Benson and Rhodes are involved but I don’t know who else.’