A Very Private Murder

by Stuart Pawson

  ‘Did you know it was Threadneedle at this point?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘No. The name didn’t mean anything to me. But the more I learned the more I decided that Mother wasn’t as blameless as I’d thought. I started writing it all down to give to Dad. Thought it might bring him back and I could live with him. I was learning the guitar, in a bit of a group, but wanted to be a bit more serious, learn the piano. I told Mum and one day she said she’d found me a piano teacher. I didn’t know for quite a while that she was the boyfriend’s – Threadneedle’s – wife, Janet. She let it slip, once or twice, that she was unhappy, but I just thought it was, you know, mid-life blues, or something like that. She was a good teacher. I had one or two lessons a week, was doing reasonably well, until …’

  Until … We all waited, hanging on to his every word.

  ‘Until … one day last summer. It was a hot day and Janet had it all planned. First of all, she spiked my drink. And she’d had one or two herself. She took me upstairs; said I’d never seen the rest of the house, had I? We didn’t make it past the front bedroom; screwed each other brainless on top of the duvet. Afterwards, lying in bed, she told me about Mum and her husband, said they were the reason Dad left. I went mad, started crying. She said not to worry; we could get revenge in our own sweet way.’

  We sat in silence, wondering if he’d finished, until Maggie said: ‘And did you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘Well, she thought so. College was out, so we stepped up the piano lessons to three a week. She had a thing about doing it – sex, I mean – in every room in the house. Said she wouldn’t feel she’d had revenge on her husband until she’d betrayed him in every room in the home he’d bought for them. It’s a big house, but we did it in two days, while he was away on one of his golfing breaks, doing something similar with Mum in one room at the Holiday Inn.’

  All the time he was speaking his eyes were flicking towards the gun, then at his own hands as they gripped the edge of the table. ‘When did you first meet this chappie?’ I asked, giving it a tap with my knuckle. The DS stirred in his chair but remained silent.

  ‘About three weeks ago,’ he replied.

  ‘What were the circumstances?’

  He thought about it: thought about a life sentence; thought about how old he’d be when released; thought about the girls he’d miss; thought about his chances of walking out of court with a non-custodial; thought about everything in a crazy whirlwind of emotions and facts and figures, lies and half-truths, that swirled round in his brain. A snatch of a nonsense poem came into my mind, began to dominate my thoughts. The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things.

  ‘She had it,’ he told us.

  ‘She?’ I queried.

  ‘Janet. Mrs Threadneedle. I was going to the supermarket, early on, and saw her loading the back of her car. I parked next to her, which was about as far away from the doors as you could get. She was excited, glad to see me, kept saying she’d done it, she’d finally done it. ‘Done what?’ I asked, and she told me that she’d shot her husband earlier that morning and he was dead.’

  ‘So what was she doing at the supermarket?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘That’s what I wanted to know. She said she was establishing an alibi and was going to find somewhere to dispose of the clothes she’d worn, and the gun. I told her she’d no chance. The police would find her clothes and arrest her, so I offered to help. We put the bag holding them in my car and I told her to go home, as she normally would have done, and report the murder. I said I’d get rid of everything. I drove to the campus at York and hid them in a dumpster. It was Monday, and they empty them on a Monday.’

  ‘But you missed the collection.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And the following Monday was a bank holiday and the bin men weren’t working.’

  ‘Refuse disposal technicians,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Of course,’ I agreed. ‘The refuse disposal technicians weren’t working, and we eventually got round to examining the dumpsters and found the evidence. So how come you had the gun?’

  ‘I … just kept it. Thought it might come in useful one day, you know …’

  So that was the way he wanted it to go. He’d sold her down the river. Their stories overlapped, but he’d blamed her for doing the deed herself. He was simply the knight in slightly tarnished armour who’d helped out a fair maiden. If the price he had to pay for his gallantry was a small term in custody, so be it.

  Did he keep the gun in case he wanted to top himself? Doctors and farmers have the highest incidence of suicide, simply because they have the means at their disposal. Doctors take a few pills; farmers run over themselves with the muck spreader.

  ‘What are your feelings towards Janet now?’ I asked.

  He hadn’t thought about it, had to have a think. He’d reached the stage where he wanted to talk, but this was a new one. The barriers were down and he held the stage. Unburdening oneself, it’s called, and it really does exist.

  ‘She’s a bit of a nympho,’ he said. ‘A right raver underneath. You wouldn’t think butter would melt in her mouth until you get to know her. If you close your eyes she’s a decent shag.’

  And suddenly the thought of locking away a promising student who’d been let down by his parents didn’t bother me. He could have said she was nice; she’d been kind to him; helped him through a difficult patch. He could have said that she’d loaned him the use of her body, against her instincts and moral code, and he’d always be grateful to her. He could have said she’d given him some of the best times of his life. He could have said nothing. But he didn’t, and I didn’t care if we threw the key away.

  We can’t interview a prisoner once he’s been charged, so we charged Oscar with a lesser crime of assisting an offender, so we could hold him, and passed the tapes to the Crown Prosecution Service. They would decide what we could hit him with.

  While I was trying not to be titillated by Oscar Sidebottom’s confessions, Dave and Serena were hot on the scent of the pit bull gang. ‘We went to see Terry Bratt,’ Serena told me when I’d finished talking to the CPS lawyer who has an office on the premises, ‘and showed him the list of probable pit bulls we’d gathered from the public appeal. I told him that we wouldn’t dream of asking him to grass on a member of his extended family but we were slowly working our way through the list and it might be in his and Bruno’s interest if he could possibly point us in the right direction. He looked at the names and said: “Him. He’s Carl’s nephew. He’s got Bruno’s brother. Nasty piece of work.” I said: “The dog or him?” and he said: “Both of them.”’

  Dave said: ‘It’s Serena’s show but no doubt she’d like you in the team.’

  I looked at her. She said: ‘Let’s go.’

  He worked a scrapyard from a run-down site on the poorer side of town, where the travellers pitched up for the summer when they’d been run off their traditional camping grounds. It was a symbiotic relationship: the tinkers brought in wrecked and abandoned vehicles that they found (and, some would say, occasionally engineered), and he paid them a tenner and separated the wreck into its component materials. The council and the police looked the other way until their collective necks hurt and were grateful that someone was doing the dirty work. He was called Chick Shillito and had a reputation for being an ex-boxer and a hard man. Rumour had it, Dave told me in the car, that he’d fought Richard Dunn, who was later beaten by Muhammad Ali.

  ‘Presumably he lost to Dunn,’ I said, ‘otherwise he’d be the one who fought Ali.’

  ‘Um, yes, I suppose so,’ Dave agreed, but I didn’t feel any happier about it.

  The yard was surrounded by an eight-foot-high galvanised fence topped off with razor wire. Serena wondered what was in the yard that warranted such precautions, but Dave put her straight. ‘Nothing’s safe with that lot living next door,’ he told her. ‘They’d steal the dog, given half a chance. And he probably got a council grant for it.’ He yanked the handbrake on and we climbed
out.

  Fifty or more years of oil drippings and comings and goings had sterilised the surrounding ground into a compacted surface that was waterproof and dust-free. You just left oily footprints wherever you went for the rest of the day. A large wooden structure, reinforced with several assorted doors, appeared to be where the work was carried out, and two windowless ex-British Rail goods vans completed the buildings inventory. A flatbed Ford lorry with a tow hook on the back was ready to go, come nightfall, and a rusting 1989 Range Rover stood with one hub supported on bricks. Several mangled car bodies, unrecognisable to anybody but the most sad enthusiast or a traffic officer, were piled in the far corner. As yards go, and considering the nature of the enterprise, it was reasonably tidy.

  ‘Anybody home?’ Dave shouted, reinforcing his question with a side-footed kick at the wire mesh gate.

  Two and a half seconds later a black and tan ball of spitting fury came skittering round the end of the garage and hurled itself against the fence, inches from Dave. Serena took several steps backwards. I said: ‘Did anybody bring the dog scarer?’

  The man himself wasn’t far behind and was about what we expected. Earring, tattoos too numerous to record, shaved head, dressed by Adidas. He took in the three of us at a glance and realised we weren’t the judges for the Best Garden competition. He said: ‘How can I help you?’ and shouted for the dog – Banjo – to calm down. It settled for snarling at Dave, slavering copiously, with lips curled back to display as fine a set of molars and canines as you’d see anywhere. We flashed our IDs and Serena told Shillito who we were.

  ‘Got a warrant?’ he asked, pulling on his roll-up and flicking the stub into space.

  ‘It’s on its way,’ Dave told him. ‘Tie the dog up and let us in.’ Banjo realised he was being talked about and started barking at Dave again.

  ‘He doesn’t like being tied up.’

  Dave’s hand delved into his jacket. I thought he was putting his ID away but when he pulled it out again he was gripping the nickel-plated 0.38 Webley revolver we’d relieved a Yardie of some months earlier. His arm was straight, pointing the gun down at the dog’s head. ‘I said tie the dog up and let us in or I’ll blow its pea-sized brain out.’

  He was talking Shillito’s language. The man turned on his heels and went to fetch the dog’s chain and the keys to the gate. Dave looked at me, saying: ‘And before you ask, yes, he knows.’

  I said: ‘I would never have thought otherwise, Dave. Not for one minute. Not for a single second. And it worked better than the dog scarer would.’ I telephoned the nick and asked them to organise a search warrant and some assistance, muy pronto. In half an hour we had two pandas, a SOCO, the dog unit and a mechanic armed with a generator and angle grinder, all eager to help. In another fifteen minutes we had the warrant.

  Shillito was swearing that he didn’t know what was in the goods vans. He hired them out as safe storage, that was all. They were solidly constructed of a double layer of hardwood planks, running east to west and then north to south, built to withstand the rigours of a steam-age shunting yard. The big side doors were held closed by a system of sliding rods and levers secured by a pair of massive Chubb padlocks. When the mechanic started the generator and approached the first lock with his angle grinder, the thought of the £100 Chubbs falling uselessly to the ground was more than Shillito could take. He remembered where he kept the spare keys.

  The possibility of a long jail sentence for aggravated burglary helped his amnesia even further. Suddenly it came back to him whom he’d hired the wagon to: Carl and Sean Pickles, his distant relatives. He’d even, on a couple of occasions, allowed them to take Banjo for walkies. They’d borrowed him to try to impregnate a bitch owned by another member of the family but she was never in season. There was good money to be made that way. No, he’d no idea what the overalls, baseball caps and surgical gloves were doing in the wagons, or whom the flat-screen TVs and various other electronic goodies belonged to. Serena arrested and cuffed him, and thoughtfully placed her hand on top of his head so he didn’t hurt himself as he struggled into the back seat of the panda.

  I left them to it. The late nights were catching up on me and I started to recognise the symptoms of sleep deprivation: a nervous tick; nosebleeds; eczema; general weariness; headaches; seeing imaginary things out of the corners of my eyes; making mistakes. OK, so three out of seven might not be life-threatening but I wasn’t at my best. I told Dave that I wasn’t feeling very well; was taking the rest of the afternoon off; would he please let Gilbert know. We’d have a big meeting in the morning, but meanwhile I was off duty.

  When it looked as if I’d be spending more time in East Yorkshire I asked Driffield if they could arrange a bed for me in a spare cell, preferably one unit of comfort higher than that provided for their normal clients. They gladly obliged and I’d thrown my lightweight sleeping bag in the boot just in case the Home Office issue sheets were unappetising. I had loose ends to tidy over there, so I headed east again.

  First call was Driffield nick to confirm my bed for the night and let my opposite number know that the Threadneedle investigation was now in the slippery-fingered hands of the CPS. He’d cooperated without interfering, and I was grateful. I told him as much as I could about the Peccadillo case but he could see no future in pursuing it and was happy to leave it with me. Not in the public’s interest saves us more rainforests than green wheelie bins ever will. We swapped anecdotes about old-timers until we found someone we both knew and I set off on the next leg of my odyssey.

  The combination of rainfall and sunshine over the last month was what my father would have called good growing weather. Unfortunately his love of things herbaceous hadn’t been passed on to his son. All I knew was that I was losing the battle being waged in my little plot.

  It was being lost on the Curzon estate, too, but they were putting up a decent fight. Just beyond the barrier I was stopped by a character clad in safety gear that made him look like a samurai warrior: helmet with wire mesh visor; leather apron; knee pads; gauntlets and big boots. Weapon of choice: the chainsaw. He halted my progress with an extended arm while a tractor crossed my path, then urged me on with a flourish. Blue smoke from a bonfire drifted between the trees and the rise and fall of a chainsaw’s exhaust gnawed into the afternoon.

  I emerged into the car park and the sunshine and made an extravagant turn that brought me to my usual place, facing the house but some distance from it. I locked up and walked towards what I’d come to regard as the tradesmen’s entrance.

  Toby and Aspen were sitting on the steps, backs against the wall, enjoying what was left of the sunshine. Their school rucksacks were lying nearby and they were both reading books. As I approached they lowered their books and gave me a wave. Aspen had her white Goth face on and Toby had borrowed her Moto-X boots.

  ‘Hello, Charlie,’ Toby called to me. ‘Have you come to arrest someone?’ They looked like two clothes-peg dolls propped against the wall, with pipe cleaner legs sticking out.

  ‘Not today. What are you reading?’

  She held the book so the front cover faced me. ‘Dracula. It’s Aspen’s. We’ve swapped books.’

  ‘Are you enjoying it?’

  ‘No. It’s a bit heavy going. She says wearing her boots will help me understand it.’

  I turned to Aspen. ‘And what literary masterpiece has Toby passed on to you?’ She held it towards me and I said: ‘Harry Potter and the Giblets of Fire.’

  Toby fell over sideways, laughing, and Aspen spun the book round in disbelief. ‘It’s “Goblet of Fire”,’ she asserted.

  When Toby had recovered and was back with us, I asked her if her father was at home. She produced a handset from her pocket and said she’d find him.

  ‘This is Mr Curzon’s number one personal assistant,’ she told him when he answered. ‘There’s a Mr Priest to see you. No … No … Yes … No. I haven’t, honest.’ Then, to me: ‘He’s on his way.’

  Curzon shook my hand with vigour and
took me into a room I hadn’t seen before. I’d call it the gentleman’s study. Leather, deep-buttoned easy chairs, a huge desk, more bookshelves than the village library and portraits of ancestors and various other pampered animals on the walls. Only the flat-screen computer monitors added a note of incongruity. He invited me to take one of the easy chairs and I managed to sit down without shooting off its highly polished cushions.

  He told me my visit was an unexpected pleasure and made the usual offer of coffee. I declined, saying I had places to go, had called in to tie up a few loose ends and answer any questions he may have.

  ‘Toby’s in fine fettle,’ I said, ‘back to her old self.’

  ‘For the moment,’ he replied, adding, ‘Aspen has come round for her tea. They make a good double act.’

  ‘I had noticed. Does the CF go into remission or does its severity vary day to day?’ It wasn’t the most diplomatic question I’d ever asked, but hiding from Toby’s illness, as if it didn’t exist, wasn’t doing her any good, and I earned a reaction.

  Curzon sat up straight, folded his arms and planted his feet firmly on the carpet. ‘Yes,’ he replied.

  Yes, what? I thought. Try harder. ‘It goes into remission?’ I suggested.

  ‘It’s difficult to say,’ he told me, relaxing a little. ‘There are so many variables, like pollen count, humidity, cold weather. Even Toby’s state of mind appears to have an effect. It’s a terrible illness, Charlie. Terrible. I wouldn’t wish it upon an enemy.’