‘The house was called Cherry Lodge when he bought it,’ said Mrs Rathbone. ‘He changed it to Casa Mia. Down at the bridge club we said that Cosa Nostra would have been more appropriate, especially once the Roccas turned up.’
Carlo Rocca had married Maria, the younger and wilder daughter. Even-handedly, the old man had pushed a large chunk of money their way at the same time as he went into the Casa Mia arrangement with the Andovers. Rocca, then a salesman in a hi-fi and television store, had used his expertise and the money to set up his own shop in Luton’s new shopping mall. For a while things had prospered. Then recession began to bite, interest rates went up, sales went down, and six months earlier Rocca had been declared bankrupt.
‘That was it. Everything had to go, the shop, the stock, his car, and of course they had to get out of their flat, I mean, even our crazy social services won’t pay for a luxury apartment, will they? So Maria came to see her father, I think for more money. But he said no, he wasn’t going to chuck good money after bad, but she was family—about family—and she could come to live with them in Casa Mia, and her husband too, if they wanted. So they did. Well, I knew it would lead to trouble. And it has, but what kind of trouble, Mr Doberley? Here am I telling you everything I know, and you’re not telling me anything!’
Her eyes were bright with expectation.
Doberley, perhaps hoping to shock her into brevity, said flatly, ‘I’m afraid there’s been a fatality, ma’am.’
Her eyes went into super-nova.
‘A fatality? You mean he’s killed one of them?’
‘We don’t have any more details, the investigation’s at an early stage …’
‘But it has to be him. Of course it’s him. I saw him!’
‘You saw … what did you see?’ demanded Doberley.
‘I saw Rocca come running out of the house. Earlier this afternoon. I was in my bedroom and you get a good view over the shrubbery to the front of Casa Mia. Rocca came running out of the front door, jumped in the car and took off like one of those joyriders, you know, wheels skidding, gravel flying everywhere. I remember thinking: That will ruin their lawn-mower if they’re not careful. Who’s dead?’
Ignoring the question, Doberley said, ‘You’re sure it was Rocca?’
‘Oh yes. He had his hand up to his face as if he felt he was being watched and was trying to hide, but that ghastly moustache and awful gangster’s hat are unmistakable. Which of them has he killed? His wife? They were always rowing. The poor old mother must be so distressed. Perhaps I ought to go across and see if there’s anything I can do …’
‘I don’t think that would be such a good idea, Mrs Rathbone,’ said Doberley.
‘Why not? Look, I’m not just being nosey, I really like the old lady …’
‘I’m sure. Only she doesn’t need comforting.’
Something in the policeman’s tone got through.
‘You don’t mean … not her too … oh God.’
She had gone quite pale beneath the make-up. Sixsmith waited to see how far Doberley would go with his revelations, but the DC clearly felt he had gone too far already.
He said, ‘I think my superiors would like to talk to you, Mrs Rathbone. Perhaps we could go inside and I’ll contact them on your phone if I may.’
He ushered the woman into the house in front of him, turned to close the door and mouthed, ‘Get lost!’ at Joe.
It seemed like good advice.
Back at the Casa Mia everyone was busy, or looking busy. He looked for Chivers in the hope of getting leave to leave but the Sergeant was nowhere to be seen. In any case, the Morris Oxford was completely boxed in by a fleet of official police vehicles. Untroubled by all this activity, Whitey was fast asleep. It seemed a good idea. Joe slid quietly into the back, closed the door and curled up on the old travelling rug he kept there for warmth on all-night stake-outs.
It was impossible not to think about the killings. From what the nosey neighbour said, it sounded pretty open-and-shut. A house full of tensions, Rocca the wide boy chafing at having to toe the line to get the old man’s charity, his wife perhaps reckoning her sister was getting the better deal from their dad; the old man, dominant, patriarchal; explosive Latin temperaments; exploding Latin rows … no wonder poor old Anglo-Saxon-repressive Andover started having weird dreams!
One thing was sure; there was no case fee in it for J. Sixsmith PI, Inc. And he was glad there wasn’t. Tracking unfaithful wives and credit defaulters might be dull but at least it let you sleep easy.
A wink was as good as a … His eyelids closed … He drifted into a deep dark untroubled sleep …
But there was something in that darkness. Figures seated around a table, mere silhouettes at first, but gradually sharpening, and then their features emerging like a landscape at dawn …
‘Oh shoot!’ said Joe Sixsmith in his sleep. Once more he was looking at the slaughtered quartet, and they were looking back at him, their sightless eyes locking on his, as each in turn raised a lifeless hand first to their bleeding throats as if in hope of staunching the wounds, then higher to cover their mouths as if to hold back their screams of terror and agony.
But there was no holding them back. Out they came, high, piercing, unearthly, and Sixsmith felt a weight pressing on his chest and the scream was so close it seemed to be inside his own head …
He awoke. Whitey was sitting on his chest bellowing into his ear that it was long past his tea-time and what was he going to do about it?
‘Don’t do that!’ snapped Joe, sitting up and precipitating the cat to the floor. But when he looked at his watch he had to admit the beast had the right of it. He got out of the car and stretched.
‘You still here?’ said DCI Woodbine, coming out of the house with Chivers in close attendance.
‘That’s right,’ said Joe mildly. ‘But I would like to go soon if I can. I’ve got a meeting tonight, also my cat’s getting a bit hungry.’
‘Four people dead and all he can think about is his cat,’ sneered Chivers.
‘You got something against cats, Sergeant?’ said Woodbine sharply. ‘I’ve got four Persians and I tell you this, I wouldn’t dare keep them waiting for their dinner. So you push off, Mr Sixsmith, whenever you’re ready.’
He thinks it’s all wrapped up, thought Joe. And so it probably is. Witnesses, motive, and a suspect with an Italian accent and a Mafia moustache driving round in a car whose number will be plastered across the nation’s telly screens tonight.
Woodbine ordered the vehicles blocking his exit out of the way and personally waved him out. Joe almost blew a kiss at Chivers but didn’t quite have the nerve.
‘There you are, Whitey,’ he said as he drove home. ‘There’s no accounting for tastes. Even cops can love cats.’
But Whitey was unimpressed. A deepdown racist, he regarded Persians and all foreign breeds as illegal immigrants, sneaking over here to take English mice out of English mouths. So now he merely sneered and yelled even louder for his tea.
CHAPTER 3
Whenever Joe Sixsmith felt the sharp elbows of Anglo-Saxon attitudes digging in his ribs, he reminded himself that these people had invented the fried breakfast.
He liked the fried breakfast. He liked it so much he often had it for tea too. And sometimes for his dinner.
He’d been warned that addiction to the fried breakfast could kill him.
‘There are worse things to die of,’ said Joe.
Whitey enjoyed the fried breakfast too, which was just as well.
‘No fads and fancies here, man,’ Joe had warned him on first acquaintance. ‘You’ve joined the only true democratic household in Luton. We eat the same, drink the same.’ Which principle was sorely tested the first time Whitey caught a mouse and pushed it invitingly towards him.
They shared half a pound of streaky bacon, three eggs, two tomatoes and a handful of button mushrooms when they got back from Casa Mia. Then they split a pint of hot sweet tea sixty-forty and Joe settled before his twen
ty-six-inch telly to let the early evening news scrape the last traces of the day’s horror from his personal plate into the public trough.
In fact there wasn’t all that much about it. The politician and pony scandal still got main billing, and a crash landing on the A 505 came second. It was only a light plane and there were no fatalities, but a woman trying out her new camcorder had caught the whole drama in wobbly close-up and the resultant images must have been irresistible to the picture-popping TV mind.
If there’d been a camera to record what Joe Sixsmith had seen, he didn’t doubt that the Casa Mia killings would have been top of the pops, but they had to make do with exteriors and a close-up of Willy Woodbine confidently anticipating an early arrest and inviting viewers to look out for, but steer clear of, Carlo Rocca, who could help the police with their inquiries.
There was a photo of Rocca which looked like a fuzzy enlargement from a wedding group. Joe doubted if it would be all that much use except to anyone with a grudge against some fellow with a prominent moustache.
‘Now, sport,’ said the presenter. ‘Luton have made a late change in the team for their key league match tonight …’
Sixsmith sighed and felt his season ticket burning in his wallet. Trust the Major to call a residents’ meeting on a night when Luton were playing at home. That’s what came of being brought up on rugger and polo. Thoughts of truancy drifted through his mind, then drifted out. The Major he could avoid, but not Auntie Mirabelle.
Still he had time for forty winks before he needed to think about going …
He relaxed in his chair, closed his eyes … and was back in Andover’s dream. At least he tried to make himself think of it as Andover’s dream (which meant he knew he was dreaming), only it had his own little variation of the corpses raising their hands to their mouths and screaming … no, not screaming … this time they were making an insistent bell-ringing noise … ah, now they were screaming …
He awoke to find Whitey bellowing in his ear that the phone was ringing and wasn’t he going to answer it?
He yawned and reached for the receiver.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Joe, that you?’ demanded the unmistakable voice of his Aunt Mirabelle.
‘No, Auntie, it’s a burglar,’ said Sixsmith.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me. You play with pitch, you going to get defiled, doesn’t the Good Book tell us so?’
‘Yes, Auntie. And you’ve rung to tell me not to forget I’m due at the Residents’ Action meeting, right?’
‘You so clever, how come you can’t get a proper job?’ she said briskly. ‘The Major says, make sure that nephew of yours shows up on parade. People are starting to think they can’t rely on you, Joe, and that’s bad.’
‘People?’
‘Yes, people. The Rev. Pot just the same. He says: Is that Joe singing in my choir or is he not? This is no public house singalong we’re trying to do, this is Haydn’s Creation. That took the Lord seven days, how many days you think it’s going to take you?’
‘I’ll come to choir practice tomorrow, I promise, Auntie. And I’ll be at the meeting tonight.’
‘See that you are. I got someone I want you to meet.’
Joe groaned inwardly, said, ‘Goodbye, Auntie,’ put the phone down, and groaned outwardly. He loved his aunt dearly but her efforts to direct his life were a trial, particularly since she’d decided that what he needed to get his head right and drop this detective nonsense was the responsibility of marriage. A steam of candidates had been channelled his way, most of them extremely homely and slightly middle-aged. Mirabelle would sing Joe’s praises to anyone, but even a loving aunt reckons a short, balding, unemployed nephew in his late thirties can’t be choosey. The odd ones who were comparatively young and attractive always turned out to have some hidden disadvantage, like a string of kids or convictions for violence.
‘Whitey, you look after the place. Anyone tries to get in, you bark like a dog.’
The cat looked suitably disgusted by the suggestion and snuggled into the cushion made warm by Joe’s behind.
Sixsmith envied him as he stepped out into the shadowy canyons of the estate, specially constructed so that where’er you walked, cool gales fanned your butt. With designs like this, who needed nuclear energy? The meeting was in the community room in one of the newer blocks about half a mile away. Normally he would have walked, but there was rain in the wind so he made for his car.
There were no purpose-built garages at this end of the estate. Back in the ’sixties you weren’t expected to own a car if you lived here. There were a dozen lock-ups available in Lykers Yard, a relict of the old nineteenth-century settlement, most of which had been demolished to make way for the high rises. But these were privately owned and let out at rates almost equalling what the council asked for its flats. Joe valued his old Morris, but not that much. It was not a model greatly in demand by joyriders, so, theorizing that crooks didn’t like a dead end, he usually left it parked on Lykers Lane facing into the exitless yard. So far it had survived unscathed.
On arrival at the community room, he hung around outside till he heard the Major’s unmistakable voice calling the meeting to order. Then he slipped in quietly, hoping thus to avoid the threat of Auntie Mirabelle’s latest introduction. But there was no escape. Seventy-five she might be, overweight and somewhat rheumatic, but she had an eye like a hawk, and she patted a vacant seat next to her with an authority that would have intimidated a cat.
On her other side was a woman Joe didn’t recognize, presumably Mirabelle’s latest candidate. He studied her out of the corner of his eye. She looked to be in her late twenties and had a strong, handsome face, which meant she was either a single parent or a psychopath. Suddenly, as if attracted by his appraisal, she glanced towards him and smiled. Flushing, he turned away and concentrated his attention on the Major who was introducing Sergeant Brightman.
Joe had mixed feelings about Major Sholto Tweedie. In many ways, with his cavalry officer’s bark, his hacking jacket, cravat and shooting stick, his habit of addressing anyone black in Bantu, and his simplified view of life as a chain of command, he was a comic caricature of a dying species. After a lifetime spent pursuing wild beasts and women between Capricorn and Cancer till Britain ran out of Empire and he ran out of money, he’d headed home to die in poverty. Landing in Luton, he’d presented himself to the Housing Department saying he understood they had a statutory duty to provide accommodation for anyone in need. A council official, irritated at being addressed imperiously by his surname, thought to get simultaneous revenge and riddance by offering the Major a one-bed flat in the darkest Rasselas block which was scheduled for demolition as soon as there was enough money available to hire the bulldozers.
It was a monumental tactical error. Instead of curling up or crawling away somewhere else to die, the Major, after sampling the conditions, exploded into life. He mounted an assault on the council, at first on his own behalf, but rapidly on behalf of the whole estate. This was not, Joe surmised, because the man’s politics had been radicalized, but simply because as an old soldier he knew that a general was nothing without troops.
The council had been gingered into doing repairs, improving the lighting and providing this community room, and the residents had been inspired to united resistance against graffiti, vandalism and general criminality.
You couldn’t argue with the results. Sergeant Brightman was reciting statistics to show the continuing decline on Rasselas of break-ins, car thefts, drug-dealing, etcetera. Indeed, by comparison with Hermsprong, its twin estate across the canal, he made Rasselas sound like Utopia.
On the other hand, thought Joe cynically, by comparison with Hermsprong, Sodom and Gomorrah probably came across like Frinton-on-Sea. Nor did he much like the sound of the Major’s latest scheme to organize security patrols to deal with offences like wall-spraying and peeing on the stairs. Tweedie referred to ‘residents’ platoons’ but they still sounded like vigilantes to Sixsmith,
and to Brightman too, who was trying to steer a delicate path between applauding the Major’s leadership and warning him that private armies were against the law.
‘A watching brief is all they’d have,’ Tweedie cut across the policeman’s diplomacy. ‘No harm in that, eh? Call the boys in blue first sign of trouble. Now here’s what I propose. Battalion HQ, for general surveillance and overall control, myself, Sally Firbright, Mr Holmes and Mirabelle Valentine …’
He then ran through a list of sub-groups (which he called ‘sections’), pausing for comment after each area of responsibility and list of names. No one offered either query or objection. He’s got them scared witless, thought Joe with cynical superiority till he heard the Major say, ‘South-Eastern Sector to take in Bog Lane underpass and the Lykers Yard lock-ups, section leader, Joe Sixsmith; assisted by Mr Poulson and Beryl Boddington …’
Joe started angrily in his seat but Auntie Mirabelle’s fingers were round his wrist and she murmured, ‘Congratulations, Joseph,’ as she gave him a smile and a squeeze which defied him to make a fuss.
‘Everyone happy?’ concluded the Major. ‘Good. Section leaders, there’ll be a bit of bumph coming your way. Watch out for it. Thank you, everyone. Dismiss.’
Sixsmith shot up like a man who is late for an urgent appointment, but Mirabelle’s wrist lock was still in place.
‘This your idea, Auntie?’ he said accusingly.
‘I put in a word,’ she admitted. ‘But no need to thank me. I thought, with you so keen to do the policemen’s work for them, this is a good way to get it out of your system. How’re you keeping anyway, Joseph? You look pretty peaky to me. Scruffy too. If your poor dead mother could see you now, the shock would probably kill her. You need someone to take care of you.’
Determined to head off this line of attack, Joe said, ‘Mr Poulson I know. Isn’t he waiting for his Zimmer? Some vigilante. But who’s this Beryl Boddleton?’
‘Boddington,’ said Mirabelle, with a broad smile which warned Joe too late of the trap that she had laid for him. ‘You want to meet her? Why, here she is. Beryl, this here’s my nephew Joseph I’ve told you about. Also your section leader. Joseph, meet your new neighbour and team colleague, Beryl Boddington. Just moved into my block. Beryl’s a nurse at the Infirmary. Good job, regular money, career prospects, more than can be said for some people who should know better!’
Blood Sympathy Page 3