Then we’d go looking ourselves.
I wasn’t happy with the subterfuge – some of the team knowing the full extent of the case, most of them not – so I told Jeff Caton and Pete Goodfellow to meet me and Dave and Maggie in my office, after I’d had my morning meeting with Mr Wood.
When I returned Dave was in full flow, relating a story about the time he went to Boots to buy a deodorant. “…so the girl behind the counter said: ‘Do you want the ball type, Sir?’ and I said: ‘No, it’s for under my arms.’”
Thanks, Dave, it was the first smile I’d had all week. I told Maggie why I’d invited Jeff and Pete, and asked her to fill them in with details of the other murders. They sat in silence until she’d finished, ten minutes later.
“So it’s seven?” Jeff said. “Not four, seven.”
“Christ!” Pete added.
“No wonder you’re so crotchety.”
“It doesn’t seem right, lumbering us with it.”
“Well, they’ve hardly lumbered us with it. He’s still murdered three on our patch.”
“All the same…”
That’s when the phone rang. Dave picked it up, listened for a few seconds then handed it to me.
“It’s Arthur, Charlie,” the desk sergeant informed me. “There’s another letter. It’s addressed to you and it looks just like the first one.”
“Right,” I said. “Don’t touch it again, I’m on my way down.”
I drove straight to the Home Office lab at Wetherton with the unopened letter sealed in an evidence bag. What it said in words was irrelevant compared with what it might tell us in other ways. I had a coffee with my old buddy Professor van Rees who is senior scientist there, and told him all about it while his staff worked their alchemy on the envelope and its contents. If the sender had a recent criminal conviction they’d be able to convert a speck of spittle or a drop of sweat into a name and address. If he didn’t have a conviction they’d still be able to label him in such a way that if he ever came to our notice we’d have him.
The prof is a busy man but courteous to a fault. I finished my coffee and told him that I’d wait in the canteen rather than take up more of his time. I was sitting in there, reading a magazine article about exons, introns and codons that went completely over my head, when the same scientist who’d opened the first letter came through the door. She gave me a smile of recognition and came over, carrying a single sheet of A4 paper.
“This is a hand-written copy I made,” she said, placing it in front of me. “We didn’t want to put the original through the copier. Does it make any sense to you?”
“Presumably the original was typed,” I said.
“Yes, same as the other.”
She’d written:
Old Holborn! Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
The Property Developer. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
“Does it make sense?”
I shook my head.
“It’s tobacco, isn’t it, Old Holborn?”
“Yes, and the last victim was called Norma Holborn. He seems to find that amusing.” I stared blankly at the paper for a few moments, then said: “I don’t think it’s pipe tobacco, though. I think it’s roll-your-own stuff. There was an advert for it on TV, long before your time. ‘Why do I smoke Old Holborn?’ or something. Can’t remember what the answer was. ‘Because I want to catch cancer,’ probably.” My father was a heavy smoker, and for a few days after every budget he would experiment with rolling his own, to try save a few pence.
“I smoke Old Holborn because…it keeps hands that do dishes as soft as your face?” She was blushing slightly from the compliment I’d paid her.
I gave her the weary smile. “Yes, that’s it. Well done.”
“I’d better do some work,” she said. “Sorry I can’t help you with the jingle. It will be a couple of days before we know if there’s anything on the letter, I’m afraid.”
“I know you’ll do your best, and thanks for this.” I tapped the note with my knuckle and watched her walk towards the exit, white-coated, her sensible shoes not making a sound on the tiled floor.
The M62 snakes across England like a blood vessel. If the M1 is the country’s aorta, then the M62 is the jugular vein. It stretches from Hull to Liverpool, dividing the country in half. Five miles south of Leeds it crosses the M1 at what must be a contender for the title Crossroads of England. In America it would have a name. In America two imaginary lines, state borders, cross at right angles at a spot they call Four Corners. It’s in the middle of a God-forsaken desert, miles from anywhere, but a whole industry has sprung up around a map-making curiosity. The place where the M62 crosses the M1 is known as just that – the place where the M62 crosses the M1, but the distribution companies, hard nosed and unromantic, have not been slow to recognise the importance of the location. They’ve built their warehouses there, windowless, functional shelters that shadow the road like hyenas following a herd of wildebeest. I was driving fast but I could read their names out of the corner of my eye: Pioneer, Argos, Asda, Wicks, Royal Mail. Brand names, the new currency.
Fifteen minutes and twenty miles later I’d reached my exit, but I kept going. Off J22 there’s an old-fashioned transport cafe that all the truckers use. The portions are generous, the quality high and the prices reasonable. If I had a decent lunch I wouldn’t have to cook in the evening, and the menu was more comprehensive than at home. The route took me over the Scammonden Dam. After the dam two great bulwarks of rock rear up at either side of the road, with the bridge a delicate arch linking them, a hundred and fifty feet high. All the foot-and-mouth outbreaks in Yorkshire had been to the north of the motorway. It occurred to me that it was a cordon sanitaire, splitting the county in half, with the bridges the only weak spot, like aneurysms. I have these fanciful thoughts when I’m driving, but I usually keep them to myself.
It was going to be the steak and kidney pie, with garden peas and new potatoes, but when it was my turn to be served I didn’t have the appetite. I settled for apple pie and custard, with a mug of strong tea, and that was enough for me. A quick look at the girlies in the paper, a visit to the loo – spotless – and then it was back to the station, although a nap in the car would have been nice.
“He’s taking the piss,” Dave declared when he read the note. “I’d like to stuff an ounce of Old Holborn up his nose and light it with a blow torch.”
“Why did we smoke Old Holborn?” I asked.
“Because it would make us sick if we ate it,” Pete Goodfellow suggested.
“Does it help you work, rest and play?” Maggie asked.
“That’s a Mars bar, Dumbo.”
“Only trying to be helpful.”
“OK,” I went on. “Which of you knew it was roll-up tobacco and not pipe tobacco?”
Maggie didn’t know the difference but both Pete and Dave knew you had to wrap it in a piece of paper before you put it in your mouth and ignited it.
“He obviously thinks it’s pipe tobacco,” Pete said.
“So according to our highly scientific straw poll, he is a woman,” Dave told us.
“Or maybe he’s too young to remember the adverts.”
“Or he never watches TV.”
I stood up and walked across to the window. A light drizzle was falling and the evening rush, such as we have in Heckley, was tapering off. Shop girls and office managers, the last to leave, were making their way to the bus stops, the station and the multi-storey.
Dave came and joined me, leaning against the cold radiator, reading my thoughts. After about a minute he said: “He’s out there, somewhere, Charlie. Watching us, watching them.” We scanned the rooftops, acres of ornate brickwork and glistening slate, as if we might see the flash of light on binoculars marking his presence.
“Yeah,” I said, “and all we can come up with is that he might be under thirty and he might not watch TV.”
“Maybe forensic will find someth
ing.”
“That’s right.” I repeated his words like a zombie. “Maybe forensic will find something.”
I dressed accordingly and went into town. Black jeans, black polo-necked, leather jacket and trainers. I thought about boot-polish stripes across my face, diagonally to break up the shape, but decided it was unnecessary. I’d rearranged the shifts, brought some of them on late, split others in two, so we could cover the evenings. He was out there, all right, looking for his next victim, and I had to do everything in my power to stop him.
The women’s groups had organised transport for late night revellers and most of the town’s employers had identified vulnerable workers and arranged transport for them. But there were plenty who disregarded our advice. Heckley has more than its share of sweatshops, employing young Asian girls, whose owners didn’t give a toss about them. They worked long hours, often late into the night, so we were giving them special attention. And there were others, the stupid ones who did nothing, who believed that when your number was up, your number was up. As if God had decreed that a certain number of young women were destined to die of lung cancer or be strangled by a maniac and there was nothing anyone could do about it, so they smoked like kipper factories and wandered alone down dark streets. I parked on the edge of town and walked over the bridge, into the centre.
Heckley in the evening does not have the air of menace that the big cities have. We have our muggers and nutters, spoiling for a fight, just like they do, but the overall level of aggression is much lower. The gang of youths spilling out of the pub are more likely to apologise for knocking you over than steal your wallet. I walked towards the precinct, noting the places that were still open, looking at closing times, assessing the gender of the staff.
The rain had stopped but the pavement was still wet, reflecting the lights, reducing the noise of passing cars to a soft swish. A knot of people, all young, stood at the cash machine outside Barclays. Burger King was full, a kids’ party taking up one end of the place. They wore funny hats and painted faces, and were having a whale of a time. Kids and junk food. Brand loyalty. Get them young. I looked at my watch, then remembered it was the school holidays. A little girl with a tiger face waved at me through the window and I wiggled my fingers back at her.
All the aluminium chairs had been removed from outside the coffee shops in the precinct. What might appear cool on the Left Bank was downright frigid in Yorkshire. I looked up into the night, into the blackness above the lighted windows, trying to see into the shadows. If I were in his shoes where would I go, where would I look? That’s what we’re supposed to do, isn’t it? Put ourselves in his shoes.
It was late night opening at the library. Late night is a relative expression, and in library usage it meant nine thirty. I like libraries. And librarians. There’s something otherworldly about them, a throwback to an age when people spoke softly and cared about the way we interact with each other. I’ve never been called to a punch-up in a library. I walked round the block on the other side of the road and when I was back where I started the big lights went out in the library, leaving only a few fluorescent tubes casting a suspicious glow on the shelves, to deter any local thieves with literary tastes. I slipped into the doorway of a solicitors’ office and stood in the shadow, watching.
The library door opened and two women came outside and waited. In a few seconds they were joined by a third who presumably had just set the burglar alarm. She pulled the door shut and locked it. Two of them unfurled umbrellas before realising it had stopped raining and collapsing them again. They set off walking and I followed.
At the entrance to the multi-storey car park they stopped for a few moments, saying their goodnights, and two of them went inside. I followed the third, all the way to the station, and watched her board a train that would stop at Huddersfield, Oldfield and Manchester. Eight other passengers boarded it at Heckley: two couples, two other women and two men. The two men carried briefcases, and somehow I thought that our man wouldn’t. I terminated the chase at Heckley, on the grounds that I’m not good at trains and I couldn’t be sure of catching one back at that time of night. Tomorrow I’d put someone on to it. Leads are like decent TV programmes. You wait weeks for one and then two or three come along at the same time. I was under my desk, looking for something that I saw scurry across it, when the phone rang. I’d been sitting there, reading a report from one of the DCs, when I glimpsed it out of the corner of my eye. Nothing distinct but more than a shadow. It ran, or possibly flew, towards the far right-hand corner of my desk top. I stood up and grabbed the pile of papers that live there. Nothing. I looked on the floor, moved the waste paper bin, lifted a box filled with files that needed to go back to the registry. Nothing.
“Priest,” I said into the phone. At least I could still remember my name.
“It’s Rod, Boss,” a familiar voice informed me. It was the DC whose report I’d just been reading.
“Hi, Rod,” I said. “Just been reading your reports. Your spelling doesn’t improve.”
“Ah, but the content’s first class.”
“Presentation, Rod. Presentation is all. What can I do for you?”
“Neville Ferriby. He’s up to something. I don’t know what but it looks like no-good.”
When we run out of lines to follow we don’t admit that we’ve nothing to do and sit back, waiting for someone high up to disband the team. We run round like scalded cats, finding jobs, however improbable, to keep the team together and focused for when the break comes. I’d decided to have all the leading players followed, low key, low grade, learning how they lived. If we had any of them in again we’d put the frighteners on, know more about their movements than they did themselves. Get them talking about everyday stuff, then prove they’re lying – that’s how to do it. Rod and his partner had been given the task of building a dossier on the fishy Mr Ferriby, neighbour of Colinette’s boyfriend.
“Tell me about it,” I said, pulling my chair back up to the desk, the real or imaginary furry intruder forgotten.
“He’s been on the move all morning. First he visited the Halifax in the precinct, followed by Jessops, and then he drove out to Sheepstone. We’re there now. He parked the car and walked into the cemetery, carrying this holdall. He’s ensconced in some bushes at the old end of the graveyard with a packet of sandwiches and a flask and he’s spying on the houses at the other side of the valley. He has a camera with a lens on it like a bloody bazooka.”
“Interesting,” I agreed. “What’s in his sandwiches.”
“Tuna.”
“Very nice. He probably bought a film in Jessops. Something high speed. Did you know he was a camera buff?”
“Yeah, I read it in the file.”
“OK. Stay with him until he moves, then find the addresses of the houses he’s watching and check the electoral roll for who lives there. You know the form.”
“Right, Boss.”
“Oh, and one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Remember that you’re on hallowed ground, so don’t go peeing behind the gravestones.”
At that very moment the second lead was click-clacking on high heels up the steps and through the front door of the nick. I put the phone down and wondered about Neville Ferriby. He wasn’t what I’d call a suspect, not for the murders, but he knew something about Graham Allen, of that I was sure.
We get circulars, dozens of them. The registry pins a distribution list to each and every one and sends them upstairs. Some are about possible terrorist attacks, some are to say that the laws relating to lights on bicycles have been relaxed. Every summer we receive one to say that uniform branch can now wear their short-sleeved shirts and occasionally we are told that standards of tidiness are falling, particularly with regard to the length of certain officers’ hair. Gilbert always draws a triple circle round DI on the distribution list for that one and sends it straight to me.
The collection had built up over the last few weeks and there was quite
a bunch of them, so some creativity was called for. I ticked all the boxes and wrote suitable dates alongside them, so it looked as if Gareth Adey, my uniformed counterpart, had hung on to the documents and only passed them on in the last week or so. I was checking in my diary that he hadn’t been on leave when the phone rang. It was the front desk.
“Inspector Priest, there’s nobody in the incident room and I’ve a lady here saying she thinks she’s being followed. Is there anybody can see her?”
“Compos mentis?” I asked in a soft voice. We were having a steady procession of potential witnesses through the nick, a large percentage of who were one or two cogs short in the gearbox department.
“Yes, Sir, I’d say so.”
“I’ll come down.”
Bugger. I’d just been thinking that I’d hotfoot round to Neville Ferriby’s place to meet him when he came home. I’d quiz him about his whereabouts and maybe bring him in. And I’d confiscate the film from his camera. Contrary to popular belief we don’t have an anti-stalking law, but we do have the Harassment Act, and conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace is a good catch-all.
She was about forty, slim, with straight hair and stiletto heels. I don’t pay too much attention to my own personal appearance, and consequently, I am not all that bothered about that of any woman I happen to be friendly with. I like to think that they have other values that transcend good dress sense. But Caitlin Jordan-Keedy was a mess. Nature had been kind to her, her clothes looked expensive, but she was still a mess. Her hair was lank because, I suspected, she’d had a shower and not bothered to dry it. It was held off her face by an old-fashioned hair slide. Her long black skirt was crumpled, the grey jacket didn’t go with it and her blouse hadn’t seen an iron this side of wash day. Arthur, behind the desk, introduced us and I pointed her in the direction of one of the interview rooms.
Laughing Boy Page 20