by Jean Chapman
‘Thanks for telling us,’ Liz said.
‘We’re also looking for a woman in her thirties with her son, a thirteen-year-old….’ Cannon said and the woman’s attitude changed.
She merely shook her head. ‘You can get out by that door there,’ she said, ‘saves going all the way back to reception, but you can’t get back in that way.’
They nodded their thanks and left. ‘A question too far,’ Liz said, ‘she’ll be worrying now she’s said too much.’
‘She thinks we’re police,’ Cannon guessed, ‘but I think we can take it none of them are here.’
‘So where, and what do we do next?’
‘We should check the car parks for Maddern’s car before we leave.’
After they had walked every rank of cars and found one blue Peugeot but not Maddern’s, Liz said, ‘I could do with a cup of tea and a bun.’
Cannon blew out his lips in despair. ‘Feel I should neither eat nor drink till we’ve found them.’
‘You don’t function well without regular food,’ she said with certainty, ‘and there’s Austin coming crack of dawn.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘I should make a few notes before he arrives, don’t want to dither about.’
‘And tell all?’ she asked.
‘Yes, it’s time, gone time, for some proper action this end,’ he said and, picking up a tray, banged it decisively on the end of the counter rails. A middle-aged woman, smartly dressed, complete with brown tweed trilby-type hat, turned and glared at him, looked his jogging outfit up and down, tipped her head up and away in some distaste and tried to hurry her husband along.
To add to their mutual discomfort a table for four emptied as they approached the crowded restaurant area and they found themselves sharing the same table.
Liz was too grateful for the tea and intake of sugar in the shape of an iced bun to care. Cannon sat where he could see the length of the concourse and stared resolutely out of the window. He held his mug of hot chocolate to his lips, sipping slowly, resisting the impulse to do so as noisily as possible.
It was the approach of four men, two from each end of the walkway – each pair having seemingly consulted with a third, better-dressed colleague – that drew his attention. The better-dressed went their ways, the four met at the doorway of the restaurant and conferred, their presence holding the automatic doors open as they stood gazing all around. The woman with the tweed hat turned round sharply as the draught caught her, but as she opened her mouth to reprimand the men, obviously having had enough of this place and its dodgy customers, Cannon touched her foot with his muddy trainer. When she swung sharply back towards him he shook his head minimally. She opened her mouth to reprimand him, but Liz pushed the assortment of sugars and sweetener packets over to her and said, ‘Please, have sugar.’
The woman’s mouth opened, but something in the manner of the two who shared their table made her do as she was told. Cannon went on looking over the top of his mug and Liz engaged the woman and her husband in conversation.
Cannon had seen men like this almost every other day when he worked in London, either when he was investigating gangland territory, as they were hauled in and on their way to the cells, or later in smarter gear as they attended the courts. However old they were, they never lost that teenage swagger.
Even from the doorway they made their presence felt and, for a moment, conversation levels dropped as they split and went different ways right through the restaurant, this time examining every individual.
As with many who had spent hours under the tattooists’ needles – their arms were bare – looked more blue than flesh-coloured and the one who passed nearest to their table had ‘FAIMA’ tattooed down his right cheek.
Chapter 14
Cannon did not mince his words. ‘I think you have a corrupt officer at this end.’
Austin had arrived at 7 a.m. looking every inch a Metropolitan Chief Inspector. A powerfully built man, he was an imposing figure in full uniform. ‘Meeting at nine,’ he explained the full dress after the initial greetings. They were all so pleased to see each other again, the grins had been wide, the hugs fierce and getting down to the pressing business in hand had needed willpower.
‘Lounge or kitchen?’ Austin asked.
‘Lounge,’ Cannon replied, ‘I’ve made a few notes.’
‘In the usual format, I hope,’ Austin said.
‘Clear and in full colour, you’ll see.’ Cannon led the way, carrying the breakfast tray Liz had prepared for them all.
‘Ah!’ Austin exclaimed as he walked into the lounge. ‘The old logic bubbles. I miss them and I still miss you, old boy.’ With all the disarming charm of his French mother and tact of his barrister father, he added, ‘I miss you both, of course.’
He went to stand in front of the series of cards Cannon had laid out on the table, looking like the spread of a family tree.
‘Red bubbles for certainties,’ Austin said as he approached the table and then fell silent. ‘So what’s this about Jones’s dog and Sergeant Maddern’s phone found in a lane, and he with …’ Austin looked up incredulously, ‘the wife and son of one of the Jakeses missing together?’
‘Coffee?’ Liz asked and poured without waiting for an answer.
‘And,’ Austin exclaimed, ‘a policeman’s house trashed? There’s a lot of certainties here I’ve heard nothing about. Why Maddern? He seems to be being targeted.’
The smell of hot, strong, filter coffee pervaded the room and Cannon breathed a sigh of relief. At last someone had grasped the nub of the case, the centre of his concern.
‘Because,’ Liz said, ‘he recognized a local family face in the features of his newspaper delivery boy. His name is Danny Smithson, but his father was a Jakes.’ She straightened from pouring her own coffee. ‘Oh!’ she said turning to Cannon, ‘I remember, I think,’ and began to quote:
‘“I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon …”’
As she stalled Austin took up the poem:
‘“And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance – that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.’”
‘Thomas Hardy, of course!’ Liz exclaimed, ‘I remember now.’
‘Heredity,’ Austin added the title, putting his cap on the table and unbuttoning his jacket.
‘And that was the beginning of the Maddern family’s troubles,’ Cannon said, pointing along the line of interlinked red circles detailing the newspaper cuttings, the photographing of the sergeant’s younger daughters, the threats to the eldest, the hearse, the wreath, the murder in the Leicester park. Keeping his finger on the word Leicester he added, ‘Where Jim Maddern and I witnessed the old man Jakes met out of prison by a stretch limo.’
‘You’d better tell me all,’ Austin said, taking his jacket off and hanging it on the back of a chair before helping himself to croissants, jam and butter.
The coffee was gone and the mood of the room sombre when Cannon had told all he knew for certain – all he had done – and handed over the ring surrendered to him by Carol Smithson. When he rose and went back to the table, Austin followed. ‘Now,’ Cannon said, pointing to the cards with the green-circled information, ‘we come to the suppositions.’
Austin touched the name featured in several of these cards. ‘Hoskins,’ he said. ‘I remember him well, he’s still pretty sharp, judging by how you say he reacted to your trauma and body in your cellar.’
‘Yes,’ Cannon agreed, ‘and like Maddern and the neighbour, Thompson, whose body was found on the Wash,’ Cannon stabbed back to a red circle, ‘all have tried to tell Jones that the Jakeses were back and that it meant big trouble.’
‘So,’ Austi
n said, watching his old boss steadily for reaction as he went on, ‘your assumption that Jones is a wrong-un is mainly the dog left tied up, and his wife then searching for it, and finding the neighbour’s body. In which case the body was deliberately taken there to throw us off the scent. The other thing of course is that now the stolen goods have been moved, Jones – if he is implicated – will know where they are, and be very anxious to keep them on his own radar. But—’
‘—If you move too quickly you could lose the lot – the loot, possibly the lives of Maddern, Carol Smithson and her son….’ Cannon said.
‘I want to avoid the possibility of local mayhem when the two gangs finally clash,’ Austin said, ‘which they will. It was perhaps a blessing that Maddern and his charges were not there at that service station.’
‘But where are they?’ Cannon asked. ‘Maddern’s not a man to lose his phone. I think he managed to drop it from his pocket as he was hustled from his own car to another – so where is his car?’
‘I’ll put out a general call, observation only if it’s on the move,’ Austin stated, then looked down again at the green circled information. ‘The suppositions about motor cruisers? Is this a separate money-laundering affair do you think?’
‘It could be, but I could find out more about the men who sold their cruisers from Hoskins,’ Cannon suggested. ‘There’s something about the neighbour’s body on the coast, the Faima watching the motorways, and men buying boats for cash that makes me uneasy. The Jakeses are local. The old man in particular would have grown up here – he’d know the waterways.’
‘I must go,’ Austin said, ‘but I guess you’ll see Hoskins today.’
Cannon nodded and Austin left with the promise to try to be back, or in touch, later in the day.
He was in touch within the half hour. Maddern’s car had not been found but there were reports of a similar vehicle being seen not far from where Thompson’s body had lain at the edge of the tide.
‘So are they expecting to find evidence that Thompson’s body was …’ Liz said, abruptly aware that whatever she said at that moment her partner would not hear. He was standing as if turned to stone, eyes open but not seeing, and she knew an idea, probably an outrageous idea, was circling his brain. ‘John?’ she queried, but gently, recognizing what she had come to know as one of his moments of epiphany, when he seemed to see more than was obvious.
‘No, not Maddern’s, that’s a red herring,’ he murmured, unable to drag himself from the image of that decent old man lying on a cold, desolate beach. Death would have drained his great red nose of colour.
He remembered the blood in the back of the abandoned white van, then the police car going the opposite way – and Maddern saying Jones had arrived home in a police car. Had the inspector ‘rectified’ a mistake being made by the Jakeses? Had they been going to dump the body at a place which might have given a clue to where they and the loot were being reassembled for a final getaway? If so, that would mean Jones had used a police vehicle to move a murder victim.
‘Hmm,’ he said again but this time he looked at her.
‘What have you decided to do?’ she asked with some trepidation.
‘Go with Hoskins to see these people who have sold boats for cash.’
He and Hoskins left in the jeep after the morning pub opening hours. ‘We shouldn’t be too long,’ he said.
‘I was a bit worried about it, have to say, but …’ the man who had sold his two-berth cabin cruiser for cash, said, ‘I’d had it for sale for a couple of years and my wife was getting worse. Now I can get extra help without filling in any more forms or answering more questions,’ he added with distaste. ‘We’ve always been independent and I’m going to see that the rest of my Viv’s life is a bit more comfortable from now on.’
Hoskins had said he knew their cherished motor cruiser had been up for sale for ten thousand pounds. There would have been questions asked by any bank or building society if he’d arrived with that much cash. Cannon wondered where the pensioner had stashed the money. He didn’t ask. The approach had been careful, through Hoskins, an old acquaintance, and based on the man’s assumption that Cannon had a similar boat for sale. When they were leaving he said he’d noticed the local boatyard had several empty spaces where motor cruisers had stood for some time. ‘So it seems boats are suddenly selling – you might be lucky.’
‘Next stop the boatyard, then,’ Cannon said as they climbed back into the jeep. ‘You know it?’
‘Aye, and the owner. Now there’s a chap who wouldn’t turn a hair at any amount of cash as long as he was doing a deal.’
‘So how do we approach this one?’
‘As a customer,’ Hoskins said immediately. ‘You’ll get nothing out of Mr Slingsby unless he thinks he’s going to get something out of you.’
The bungalow on the small neat estate was a world away from the boatyard complex, which must have covered quite a few acres, consisted of many sheds, many boats in all stages of dismantling or repair, and even in one corner of complete dereliction.
A young man in navy overalls came striding over to them. ‘Hello, Mr Hoskins, how are y’doing? Not come to buy a boat, ’ave you?’
Hoskins chuckled, greeted the young man with enthusiasm. ‘Not on the profits you lot pay for my rabbits, young Callum.’ By a suggestive nod, he implied that Cannon might be in the market.
‘Another customer; old Slingsby’ll be beside himself, three cruisers gone out recently,’ Callum told them, dropping his voice as a burly man in very clean overalls walked towards them. He held his shoulders back and his arms slightly out to his sides as if he was about to star in a wrestling match. His hair was silver, his complexion ruddy and his eyes small and sharp. Cannon thought his overalls looked as if he handled nothing dirtier than money.
‘Mr Slingsby,’ Callum introduced.
‘Looking for me?’ the man questioned and while he obviously knew Alan Hoskins he neither looked at him nor spoke to him.
‘You deal in motor-cruisers….’ Cannon began.
‘I do. You interested?’
‘Very,’ he answered just as shortly, ‘but I’m in a hurry.’
Slingsby glanced at him more sharply. ‘To purchase?’
‘Price and condition important. What’ve you got?’ Two, he thought, can play at this monosyllabic conversation game.
‘How many berths?’ Slingsby asked, turning to lead the way further into the yard.
‘See you, Mr Hoskins,’ Callum said, touched his baseball cap and turned away, grinning.
‘Three, possibly four,’ Cannon said. ‘What have you got?’
‘Not as many as you had when I was last by,’ Hoskins said.
‘Spring coming, sales always pick up,’ he replied brusquely, leading the way to where two partly restored and repainted cruisers rested on wooden cradles next to the water.
‘Do you deliver by road as well as on the water?’ Cannon asked.
‘Hardly ever, most customers take delivery from the yard in the water,’ Slingsby said, mellowing now the talk was of delivery. ‘One of our boys goes with them for half an hour or so; every boat is a little bit different.’
‘That’s good, so when will work be finished on these?’ he asked as they walked around the cradled cruisers.
‘If you’re interested and don’t want a lot of internal extras, pay a deposit and I’ll have either of these in the water within a week.’
Cannon walked to the edge of the creek, which formed an extension to the River Witham. ‘I’m curious,’ he said. ‘Just how far can you get on these waterways?’
Slingsby led him to a map on the wall. ‘The Inland Waterways of England,’ he said. ‘Broad canals in red – they’re over seven feet wide. Narrow canals – approximately seven feet wide, in purple, navigable rivers in blue.’
‘So, looking at the possibilities from here, it is possible to go to the midlands, Rugby, Banbury, Oxford, London even.’
‘And north, some good wide canals
up around Liverpool and Leeds,’ Slingsby added. ‘Never been that far myself, but some spend their lives on the canals and rivers.’
Hoskins had wandered over to where his young friend was rigging a mast for a sailing boat and they looked deep in conversation. Cannon forced himself to go back to examine the cruisers again to give them more time.
‘I’ll have to consult my partner,’ he said after Slingsby had talked about possible extras and prices, ‘but if you had a copy of that waterways map….’
Slingsby walked over to his office and took a map from a rack of brochures, shook Cannon’s hand and said he hoped to hear from him. Outside, Hoskins moved not towards the jeep but towards the small marina belonging to the yard.
‘What did you find out?’ he asked.
‘Walk along a bit,’ Hoskins said, leading the way past the moored boats and on towards the old towpath. ‘Young Callum’s going to meet us around the first bend. I want you to hear what he has to say.’
They walked in silence, their footsteps muffled by the growth of grasses either side of this ancient track. In no time it felt as if they had left the world far behind. Cold February desolation cloaked them and the landscape. He looked along the river. On the opposite bank, the black, bare branches of overhanging trees trailed in the water, which ran slowly, almost secretively, between them. The first cold mists of the evening were gathering on the surface of the water and seemed to be rolling slowly but irrevocably towards them. Thinking of Jim Maddern, Carol Smithson and young Danny – taken God knows where – he felt a first shiver become a full-blown shudder.
It was a relief to round a bend and see the young man, leaning back on a stile, cigarette in hand, blowing the smoke up above his head and watching it twirl in the air. He greeted them both heartily. ‘I thought you’d like to know I don’t think old Slingsby’ll be in the market for any low offers. He’s just sold three in quick time for ready money, and one of the boys in the yard said the same big bloke had been back and bought an old two-berth for cash, though what he wanted that old tub for no one knows. It was only just sound.’