Laughing Boy

by Stuart Pawson

  “And what happens to naughty girls?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do know, so tell me.”

  “They get punished.”

  “And do you think I should punish you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you deserve it?”

  She nodded.

  “And how do we punish naughty girls in this house?” he asked.

  “With…”

  “Go on.”

  “With…the strap.”

  “And where is the strap?”

  “Down here.” Her hand fell to his waist.

  “You’d better fetch it then, hadn’t you?”

  She slowly lowered herself to her knees in front of him. Her fingers unfastened the big aluminium buckle of his belt and began to carefully unthread it from the loops of his Versace jeans.

  Chapter Two

  I pushed the possibilities out of my mind. Speculation is pointless when you are on your way to the scene. Go through the checklist, think about what you could have done better last time, try to put your mind into a higher gear. Some times, faced with a suspicious death, you need to act fast and decisively; others demand that you move with the deliberation of a chameleon stalking a fly. The trick is to know the difference. Everywhere we go we leave something behind, take something of that place with us. The molecule of spittle he breathed out or the single fibre that he picked up from a chair may be the only clues to link a killer with his crime, and it’s my job to find them. Mine and the team of experts I have, a phone-call away.

  The three of us piled into the back of the patrol car and Dave rang Shirley to tell her that we wouldn’t need a lift, because “something has come up.” The words are written in burnt dinners and disappointed children’s faces across the life of every policeman’s wife.

  Big Geordie filled us in with the details. A motorcyclist on his way home from the wire works at Oldfield had stopped to shelter under a tree when the rain suddenly became much worse. He saw a girl’s body lying at the side of the road and rang for an ambulance and the police. He’d felt for a pulse and said that she was still warm, but he’d thought she was dead. We dropped Dave off at the General Hospital, where the woman had been taken, and the rest of us continued to the crime scene.

  There are not many trees in this part of the world. The sheep eat the ones that survive the winters and most of those that achieved a decent size have long gone to the chipboard factory. This one was a chestnut, in full leaf, at the side of the road where a kink in the wall to accommodate the tree had created an unofficial lay-by. Another patrol car was parked nearby, behind a little Honda motorbike.

  By the light of the car’s headlights the motorcyclist showed me the exact spot where her body had lain. The rain had turned the roadside into a quagmire, but the area under the tree was still quite firm, with lots of tyre marks. Big drops from the leaves pocked the surface as I looked at it, indicating that we hadn’t any time to lose.

  “Quick,” I said. “Find something to cover the ground with, before it gets washed away.” We spread their waterproof coats over the tyre prints, and radioed in for a tent.

  I’d just sent the motorcyclist on his way when Dave phoned me. He confirmed that the girl was dead, and by the marks on her neck she’d been strangled. I clicked my phone off and turned to the four PCs. “It’s official,” I told them. “This is now a murder hunt.”

  “Timothy…Tim…” she whispered.

  “Mmm.”

  “The music’s stopped.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Are you asleep?”

  “I was.”

  They were lying on the floor, under a duvet, with the gas fire turned down low. He tugged the duvet to cover their bare shoulders and extricated his arm from under her head. She turned on her side and wriggled backwards until they were fitted together like two garden chairs. He flexed his fingers to revive the circulation and reached around her, feeling for her tiny breasts.

  “Shall I put it on again?”

  “Yes, I think you’d better.”

  “Tonight…” she began.

  “What about it?”

  “Tonight…It was the best ever, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah. Definitely.”

  “I was…I was touching her.”

  “I know you were. Was it good?”

  “It was fantastic. I’ve never experienced anything like it. I was holding her, you know, down there, and she just, like, faded away. And, and, it was like, electric. It was, like, power, coming to me. I could feel it, coming up my arm. Like, power.”

  “I told you what it could be like. Now do you believe me?”

  “I’ve always believed you, Tim. You’re so clever. And I love you.”

  “And I love you.”

  “When can we do it again?”

  He propped himself up on his elbow. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Doing two in Heckley was clever. They weren’t expecting that. Now they’ll realise that they are up against someone special, if they’ve made the connection, yet. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “When we do,” she began, “can we, do you think we could, you know, spend more time with…them?”

  “With the target, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been wondering about that myself. It’d be good, no doubt about it. Lift us on to another level. We’d have to bring them back here.”

  “Would it be too dangerous?”

  “No, not if we’re careful. Leave it to me. I have an idea, but it will mean some heavy work. And I’ve a couple of targets picked out already. I think you’ll like them.”

  She wriggled her bottom against his loins to show her approval, and felt him harden. “I thought you were putting the music on,” he reminded her. She reached out and pressed the play button. After a few moments a simple rhythm filled the room, tapped out on a cowbell and soon joined by a bass guitar and keyboard. She turned to embrace him and he pulled the duvet over their heads as a thin, piping voice leaked from the speakers. “This is the eye of the storm,” it sang. “Watch out for that needle, Son, ’cos this is the eye of the storm.”

  One of the important pieces of information we lacked was the identity of the victim. They went through her pockets at the hospital without finding anything, and we did a torchlight search of the edge of the field where she’d been found, in case her handbag had been hurled over the wall. Negative. Dave phoned me with a brief description and said she was aged about twenty. Same as his daughter, Sophie, I thought, and wished I’d sent somebody else to the hospital.

  I went back to the station to check the missing persons’ file, knowing it was a waste of time. My feet and shoulders were wet but the heating in the offices was off, so I found a portable fan heater that we’re not supposed to have and plugged it in. Gilbert Wood, my superintendent, arrived, shaking his head and making sympathetic noises, and I rang a few other people to tell them to be at the station early in the morning.

  “What do you reckon, then?” Gilbert asked. “Is it another?”

  “It’s another murder,” I replied. “Whether it’s another murderer is a different question.” I’ve never understood the dread that people have that a series of deaths may be the work of the same person. Surely having one twisted hospital worker going round the wards turning off the oxygen is preferable to having a whole bunch of them who just do it once, for a kick? For the time being we’d treat this as a one-off, and do everything we could to find the perpetrator. If we were successful and could pin the other two deaths on him, so much the better. If we didn’t catch him, we’d have to take a long and careful look at all the circumstances.

  “Need any help from HQ?”

  “Not at the moment, Gilbert. Let’s wait until we know who she is. Somebody might leap into the frame.”

  Who she was, her last movements, who she was with. Often, with attractive young women, that was all we needed to know. Young blokes, and sometimes not-so-young ones, get ideas, bu
ild up fantasies. Magazines and daytime-TV soaps reinforce the idea that romance, perfect romance, is everybody’s right. You see the girl of your dreams, she looks across and the feeling is reciprocated, as if love was some force of nature like gravity or magnetism, that obeyed rules laid down when the universe was formed. But it’s not like that, and when we learn the truth it can be painful. Most of us just go home to play the Janis Ian records and sob into our cocoa. A few of us turn violent, and this looked like one of those.

  The phone rang. “Priest,” I said into it.

  “It’s the front desk, Charlie,” I was told. “I’ve a woman on the outside line, saying she’s worried about her daughter. She didn’t come home from work tonight.”

  “Right,” I sighed, composing myself for something that no amount of training or experience can prepare you for. “Right. What is she called?”

  “Mrs Jones.”

  “OK. Put her through.” I covered the mouthpiece and whispered: “This could be it,” to the super. After a click and a silence I said: “Mrs Jones?”

  “Yes,” a quavery voice replied.

  “I’m Detective Inspector Priest, Mrs Jones. You told the sergeant that your daughter hasn’t come home from work.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Could you give me your address, please.” I wrote it down. “And what is your daughter called, Mrs Jones?”

  “Colinette.”

  “And what time were you expecting her?”

  “About ten past seven. She rang me at half past six to say she was finishing at seven, but she never came home.”

  “And how old is Colinette?”

  “Twenty-two. It was her birthday on Sunday.”

  “And where did she work?”

  At a nearby corner shop. It wasn’t a proper job, just something to pass time until she went to college. No, she’d never done anything like this before. Her supper was ruined and she didn’t have a boyfriend. I wrote the responses down, trying to ignore the knot that was tying itself in my groin. “She’s dead!” I wanted to scream. “Your lovely daughter, the best daughter anybody ever had, is dead.”

  “Is there a Mr Jones?” I asked.

  “No, Inspector. I lost my husband four years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He was killed in an industrial accident. That’s why…”

  “Why what?”

  “That’s why Colinette wouldn’t do anything like this unless…unless…”

  “I’ll have to come round and take a statement from you, Mrs Jones,” I interrupted, cutting her off from speculation about her daughter’s fate. The truth would be far more horrifying. “I’ll be about…twenty minutes, half an hour. I’ll…take a statement.”

  I replaced the phone and looked at Mr Wood. “Colinette Jones,” I told him. “Aged twenty-two. What time is it?”

  “Twenty-five to eleven.”

  “Maggie won’t be in bed yet. I’ll take her.”

  “Tell her I’ll pick her up,” he said. “I’ll break the news to Mrs Jones, Charlie. Noblesse oblige, and all that balderdash. You get yourself home.”

  I dialled Maggie’s number and didn’t argue with him.

  Colinette had phoned her mother at about six thirty, and left the shop a couple of minutes after seven. The three-nines call for an ambulance was timed at seven fifty-two and the body was found five miles from the corner shop. Around midnight Mrs Jones confirmed that it was her daughter.

  We sent the team out, bright and early, knocking on doors, talking to concern. Mr Naseen at the corner shop confirmed that Colinette left on time and expressed his concern for her mother. Later that morning we spoke to a couple of Colinette’s friends who were not too complimentary about her employer, so we brought him in.

  “How long had Colinette worked for you, Mr Naseen?” I asked, as we sat in interview room number one. Dave was with me but the tape wasn’t running.

  “She didn’t work for me.”

  “So what was she doing at your shop?”

  “She just helped out, sometimes.”

  “That’s not what her mother says.”

  “I don’t know what she has told her mother, Inspector.”

  “Her mother says she has worked for you for over a year.”

  “No, it is not true.”

  “She just helps out?”

  “Yes, Inspector, as I said.”

  “You call eight hours a day and four on Saturdays just helping out?”

  “It is nothing like that Inspector. My wife assists me, and Colinette sometimes calls in to help her with the children. Perhaps my wife pays her for that. I don’t know.”

  We’d come up against the Rice Curtain. It’s an occupational hazard in this part of the world. I leaned forward over the little table until I was as close to his face as I could get. He’d had curry the night before, but I didn’t mind – so had I. “Mr Naseen,” I began. “We are investigating a murder. The fact that you employed Colinette Jones on a casual basis, paying no National Insurance fees on her behalf, or deducting no Pay As You Earn, is irrelevant to this enquiry. At the moment.” I loaded the last sentence with meaning, to show that we’d keep it on the file if he didn’t cooperate. “We’ve also spoken to two girls who had the job before Colinette did. Two girls who didn’t stay with you for too long. Now, Mr Naseen, can we start again? How long did Colinette work for you?”

  The expression on his face indicated that he’d got the message. “As Mrs Jones told you,” he replied, very softly, “Colinette had assisted in my shop for about one year. You must realise, Inspector, that the shop is in a very poor area. My turnover does not allow me to employ full-time assistance and I have a wife and four very young children to support.”

  “Not to mention a Series Seven BMW,” I added.

  After that he began to cooperate. He confirmed that she’d left just after seven, in the rain, and told us what she’d been wearing.

  “Was she carrying a handbag?” I asked.

  “No, Inspector, an umbrella.”

  “But no handbag?”

  “No. She very rarely carried one, unless she was going straight out with her friends.”

  “Did you fancy her?”

  “What do you mean by that, Inspector?”

  “I mean, Mr Naseen, did it ever enter your head that a more intimate relationship, even a sexual one, with Colinette would be very desirable?”

  He sat back in his chair, one arm extended, resting on the table, almost as if he were enjoying himself. “She was a modern young woman, Inspector. Had lots of boyfriends like western girls of her age do. She was attractive and dressed in a very provocative way. Yes, I fancied her, as you put it. I fancied her to distraction, but I never did anything about it. I’m a middle-aged man, as you are, and feelings like these are part of the growing old process, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

  “That’s not what the other two girls say.”

  “What do they say?”

  “They say you propositioned them constantly, until they had to leave.”

  “They were not very nice girls, Inspector. I caught them stealing. It is only natural that they would try to blacken my character.”

  “So where were you between seven and seven thirty last night?”

  “In my shop.”

  “Can anyone support you in that?”

  “I would imagine so, Inspector. I had a steady stream of customers and a couple of them paid their newspaper bills. I can furnish you with their names and the till receipts, which will bear the exact time that they paid. Will that be sufficient?”

  I glanced across at Dave, who looked as if his strangulated hernia were playing up. “Yes Mr Naseen,” I replied. “That should be quite sufficient.”

  “Bugger!” I exclaimed when we were back in my office.

  “He’s not exactly love’s young dream, is he,” Dave said.

  “No, and I bet he runs close to the edge of the sexual harassment laws, but he’s in the clear, if his story checks out
.”

  “It will do.”

  “Mmm, I think you’re right.”

  “Do you want a coffee?”

  “No, we haven’t time. I wonder how long Maggie will be?” I’d asked Maggie Maddison to attend the post-mortem because she’d be liaising with Mrs Jones throughout the enquiry, and there might be a flake of comfort for Colinette’s mother in knowing that a female officer was present when they cut her open.

  “A while yet,” Dave replied. “They weren’t starting until nine.”

  “OK. So you go round to Mr Naseen’s and check his story. I’ll report upstairs then see how the fingertip boys are doing.”

  The task force do the fingertip searches. Shoulder to shoulder, down on their knees, they miss nothing. It was nearly half a mile from the corner shop to 44 Burntcastle Avenue, where Colinette had lived. Ten minutes maximum, although she was wearing high heels. A long stretch of her route was on an unlit road past a recreation ground, and that’s where we had started the search.

  Usually it’s a weapon we’re looking for. If anyone finds anything they raise a hand and the line comes to a halt. The sergeant in charge has a look and assesses the find. He might decide to photograph it in situ or just make a note of the place and bag it for later examination. When I arrived the sergeant was lying on his stomach, peering at something, and the rest of the line were sitting back on their heels. “What is it?” I asked as I crouched down beside him. The grass was wet and they were all wearing wellies and waterproof trousers.

  “Hello, Boss,” he said, pushing himself upright and extending his hand towards me. “A ring, possibly engagement.”

  I studied it without taking it from him. It was a thin gold band with a tiny diamond between two even smaller rubies, but it would have cost somebody all they had to offer, financially and emotionally. “Mmm,” I mumbled, not knowing what else to say.

  “Been here a while, unfortunately,” the sergeant told me. “Grass growing through it. Nothing to do with us, I’m afraid.”

  “Right,” I said. If you keep quiet somebody always jumps in with an answer. “Anything else?”

  “Not really. Usual rubbish, but no handbag. We’ve had a good look right along her route, but haven’t found it.”