Drakeshill reached for the crisp packet and ripped it open. The whole thing fell apart and the contents shot out in all directions, covering the table and falling into both men’s laps. Spinel started to shovel together the crisps on the table.
‘Leave it, Bal.’ Drakeshill’s voice was edgy and rough. ‘And tell me, why’d a scrawny bitch called Sarah Tisbury be sneaking round my place asking questions?’
‘Who?’ Spinel abandoned the crisps and, feeling foam on his lip, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
‘Sarah Tisbury. She was round at my place today asking cheeky questions about log books and registration documents.’
‘Doesn’t ring any bells with me. Sarah Tisbury? What’s she look like?’
‘I told you. Scrawny. Five ten or eleven, thin, dark hair sticking up all over her head. Pleased with herself. Fucking pleased with herself. Poncy voice. Not the sort to buy cars from a place like mine. She’s a snooper for sure. The question is, Bal, what sort of snooper?’
‘I haven’t a clue. The Revenue? The VAT? Could be anyone. Or no one. Are you sure she wasn’t just trying to buy a car?’
‘Yeah. She said she’d been sent by someone from the council.’
‘Did she? Then it must be Trading Standards after you for selling dodgy motors.’
‘Why? I’ve been in the game thirty years and more. Why’d they want to have a crack at me now?’
‘How should I know?’
‘Well, find out. And get it stopped whatever it is. OK?’
It was odd how dangerous Drakeshill could sound, Spinel thought. He’d better get him to cool it.
‘Come on, Marty, it could be anything that’s triggered an investigation. Half of Kingsford must’ve heard what happens to customers who complain too loudly when their new car’s died on them and, these days, most of them know it’s not worth trying to get you into court.’
Drakeshill’s face softened, and he punched Spinel on the shoulder.
‘Yeah, that’s one of the better things you’ve done for me, Barry-boy, getting that GBH case dropped. Saved me a lot of bother one way and another.’
Spinel looked around to make sure they weren’t being overheard, but there was no one within earshot who wasn’t absorbed in his own conversation. ‘Cheap at the price, Marty,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose. ‘Even the DI could see the point of keeping you on the street just then. That was a spectacular bust you gave us that time.’
Drakeshill grinned. ‘You can tell him there’ll be plenty more where that came from if you find out what this Tisbury bitch wanted and get it stopped.’
‘I’ll do my best, Marty.’
‘You better.’ Drakeshill laughed suddenly. ‘Whoever she was, she made a piss-poor fist of her cover story. She tried to make me believe she wanted a two-grand max automatic mini-hatchback for her mother, when she was flashing a Coutts diary and driving an Audi herself.’
‘So what? Just because she can afford an expensive bank account and a decent motor for herself, that doesn’t mean she has to buy one for her mother as well. She could’ve been kosher.’
‘Then why’d she take such care to park a good mile and a half away from my place? I sent Chompie after her when she left, and he had to track her right down the High Street to Sainsbury’s.’
‘Why’d you do that, Marty?’ Spinel drank some more of the surprisingly robust beer. ‘Just because you thought she came from the council?’
‘Partly. And then, like I say, she was asking cheeky questions about log books and service histories. But it was when she started taking down registration numbers, bold as brass, that I knew she had to be a snooper. I don’t like to see that sort of thing, Barry. That’s pushing it, that is.’
‘It’s Trading Standards, Marty. It must be.’ Unless it’s the crime squad, taking this route because I stopped them having him arrested. I’ll break their sodding necks if it is. And the DI’s.
‘Anyway, the boy got her registration number.’ Drakeshill handed over a folded piece of paper. ‘Like I say, I want you to find out who she is and where she comes from and stop it. I don’t want any nosy parkers around the place just now. OK?’
‘Sure.’ Watching Drakeshill’s face as he tasted the beer, Spinel grinned and raised his own glass. ‘I know. Amazing, isn’t it? We should come here more often.’
Drakeshill settled himself more comfortably against the padded chair back and stretched his legs as though to signal that business was over.
‘Maybe, old son. It’s certainly better than that horse-piss you made me drink the other day. So, how’s your murder coming along?’
Spinel shrugged. ‘They’re killing themselves with overtime and crashing every budget in the place, but so far they’ve got a whole lot of nothing.’
‘Who’re the suspects?’
‘Far as I know, most money’s on the old Kingsford Rapist, with an outside each-way bet on some new man in Huggate’s life who was playing copy-cat.’
‘Oh?’ Drakeshill looked intrigued. ‘Who’s the new bloke, then? I saw a photo of her in the paper. She was no oil painting, was she? Was he blind?’
‘They don’t know anything yet.’
‘Piss-poor work, if you ask me. They’ve had how many days?’
‘Seven.’
‘Hopeless, the whole mob of you, Bal. How can it take seven days to pin down one murdering bastard?’ Drakeshill laughed and drank some more, practically smacking his lips before he wiped off the foam.
‘So, what’s the news on the street, then, Marty? Anything for me to feed the DI with?’
‘Funny you should ask that. I did hear a handy whisper the other day.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘Yeah. Another load’s due to be delivered to our friends the week after next. They say this lot is coming in a container of rugs from the east somewhere. Want me to find out more?’
‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’
Barry Spinel spent the drive back to the nick trying to remember whether he had ever heard the name of Drakeshill’s snooper before, but he couldn’t place it.
The only person in the office when he got back there was Doughface, looking as dull as ever. He asked her if she had ever heard of anyone called Tisbury. Her mind worked in its usual laborious fashion. He could almost hear the wheels cranking.
‘No, Sarge. Can’t say I have. While you’re here, you wanted a report on all the successful drugs busts in schools last year.’
Was she stupid or did she do it to bug him? He looked at her fat face and saw that there was nothing behind her eyes. Not deliberate, then. Still, it made him want to hit her. At least she’d have to react if he did that. His fists tingled. ‘I asked for the names of all known school-age dealers, Cloth Ears. Don’t you ever listen?’
Still she didn’t react. All she did was say calmly, ‘You didn’t, actually. You asked for the figures I’ve produced. If you want the names of the dealers, I can abstract them for you. It won’t take long.’
Abstract them, indeed!
‘Well, get on with it, then. You must’ve known that’s what I wanted from the reports. TITS, Cloth Ears.’ At that moment he wasn’t trying to wind her up, but suddenly it seemed a good idea so he said it again: ‘TITS, Betsy. Becky. Whatever your name is. TITS. You know what I’m talking about?’
‘Think it through, Sunshine,’ she said, as calm as if she was asking for a pound of potatoes. ‘And my name is Bethany, Sarge.’
He couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d taken her clothes off. Looking into her eyes again, he saw something moving, like a camera lens had suddenly opened. And it wasn’t machinery he could see either. It was laughter. If he’d been a man to feel uncomfortable, it would have happened then. As it was, he stood back on his heels and looked her up and down as though she was a prize heifer.
‘Well, well, well …’
‘Said the policeman to the man with three heads.’
He snapped his mouth shut. A moment later he laughed alou
d. ‘Talk about finding a gold nugget in a load of ball-bearings! You do surprise me, Bethany. Bethany? I can’t use a name like that. Anyone ever call you Beth?’
‘No,’ she said, with a coolness that made his eyes open even wider. ‘Cloth Ears will do fine, though, Sarge. Or Doughface.’
Once again he had trouble keeping his teeth together. He was back at his desk before he realised how much more fun it was going to be winding her up now that he knew she had balls. At last life was looking up.
Refreshed, he thought he’d better check out the owner of the Audi for Drakeshill before he did anything else. It was never a good idea to keep the man waiting when he was angry. He reached for the phone.
Chapter Seventeen
Back in her flat, Trish was still trying to decide what to do about Collons. The trip to Kingsford hadn’t really helped. She’d learned nothing about Martin Drakeshill, except that his manner and appearance fitted the picture she’d already got of him.
It was easy to imagine the man she’d met beating up someone who’d crossed him then wriggling out of the charge by trading favours with the police, but she still couldn’t see him as the influential conspirator of Collons’s terrors. On the other hand, she had no difficulty whatsoever in seeing Collons as the furtive, scuttling watcher in Kara’s garden on the night she was murdered.
Almost irresistibly tempted to phone the police, Trish made herself reread Kara’s letter. By the end, she knew she had to go on until she had something concrete to prove to herself that Collons’s stories were as mad as they seemed. Then she’d be justified in reporting what she suspected.
His main contention was that Kara had died because of the questions they had both been asking about the contaminated land on which the council’s social housing was to be built. It should be easy enough to find out more about that.
Trish rang round her contacts in the environmental pressure groups and was eventually given the number of a small outfit called the Kingsford Green Brotherhood, who might be able to help.
‘KGB. Roger here. How may I help you?’ said a brisk young voice over the phone. It sounded amused enough to suggest that the name had been no accident.
Trish sat more easily in her chair. ‘With a bit of information, I hope. If the KGB ever hands that out.’ Roger laughed. ‘This version does. It’s what we’re here for. What is it you want to know?’
‘I heard a rumour about some land plumb in the middle of Kingsford, which the council is going to use for housing dysfunctional children. I’ve been told that it’s poisoned with chemical residues of some kind. Can that possibly be right? As a site for children?’
‘It’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Though we were worried, too, when we first heard about the scheme, given that so many behavioural problems are caused by environmental pollutants. Or food additives. Did you know …?’
‘So it is true.’ Trish did not want to hear again about E numbers or particulates or benzene derivatives. She wanted as much real information as she could get and as quickly as possible.
‘In a way. But we’ve been assured by the council’s planners that the land will be fully decontaminated before any building starts. Before the foundations are dug, in fact.’
‘And d’you believe them?’
‘On balance, yes.’ Roger’s voice had lost its laughter, but Trish couldn’t hear any doubt in it, just concern and calculation. ‘They’ve promised to allow us to take soil samples before they bring in the diggers for the foundations. There’d be no point in offering that if they were lying.’
Trish thought of Drakeshill’s saying that it would be fine for her to bring in the AA to check one of his cars if she wanted, even though he thought she’d be wasting her money. Kingsford Council could easily be playing a similar game with the KGB on the assumption that giving them permission to take samples would persuade them that they didn’t have to do it.
‘And will you take the samples?’
‘Of course. And we won’t let them get away with any lick-and-a-promise kind of clean-up, I can assure you.’
Trish wished that she had a videophone. She wanted to know what Roger looked like. He sounded as though he could not be more than about twenty-five, and yet ‘lick and a promise’was the kind of phrase her grandmother would have used. It seemed an odd choice for a young man, even for someone who enjoyed calling his green pressure group after one of the most repressive organisations on earth.
‘And in any case,’ he was saying, ‘they’ve accepted Flower Brothers’ tender for the decontamination work.’
The admiration in his voice seemed to invite a response. Trish wasn’t sure exactly what it should be. ‘And they’re good, are they?’ she said at last.
There was a short pause, then Roger said, ‘Who exactly are you?’
So, it had been the wrong response. Trish decided to lie. If by any remote chance there turned out to be something in Collons’s wilder suspicions, she would not want her name linked to any questions about the decontaminated land.
‘Oh, my name’s Sarah Tisbury. I’m a freelance journalist looking into contaminated-land scandals for a possible article.’
‘You should have said before, and I needn’t have wasted your phone bill. There’s no scandal about the chemical contamination.’
‘You sure about that, Roger?’
‘Positive. The scandal’s in the damage to King’s Park, and the fact that Goodbuy’s were ever given permission to build a megastore there.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You haven’t been doing your homework, have you, Sarah? Goodbuy’s, the supermarket chain.’
‘Look, I know who Goodbuy’s are.’
‘Well, that’s a relief. OK. So, Goodbuy’s owned the contaminated land and they gave it to Kingsford Council in return for permission to build on part of King’s Park.’
‘Oh, planning gain, you mean. Isn’t that fairly normal?’
‘Planning gain, indeed.’ Roger sounded outraged. ‘It’s corruption, that’s what it is. Not at all pure but very, very simple. And very, very nasty. Goodbuy’s, who already make gigantic profits, are so greedy they want more every year. There’s no point in trying to build in the middle of a place like Kingsford, these days – no room for container lorries or a big car park for the customers, and there are too many listed buildings all around for the kind of demolition they’d need to make it work.’
‘I see. So where’s this King’s Park, then?’
‘Just on the edge of the borough. Although it’s called a park, it’s mainly trees and scrub now, what’s left of the original sixteenth-century deer park. There’s never been any restricted access so we always assumed it was common land, but it isn’t. It stayed in the royal family until Charles II left it to one of his bastards. Now it belongs to someone who lives in Argentina, and he couldn’t care less about flogging off a couple of acres to Goodbuy’s.’
The outrage in his voice sounded a bit exaggerated and so Trish said, ‘But that seems fair enough. If he owned it, I mean. Why should he keep it for public access when it was his?’
‘Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with that. Just with Goodbuy’s getting permission to build. They’d never have got it if they hadn’t bought off the planning department. And since even Kingsford Council wouldn’t accept cold cash – too obvious – and they already have all the swimming pools and libraries they can use …’
‘They’re unique, then.’
‘All the swimming pools and libraries they can afford to keep open,’ Roger amended, with the laugh back in his voice. ‘So Goodbuy’s had to think a bit more laterally and discovered that they did have one asset the council needed. They knew of the plans for the new social-housing unit, and that the council didn’t have the necessary land. Goodbuy’s had owned the site in the centre of the borough for years, knew they couldn’t use it themselves and offered it.’
‘So everyone was happy,’ Trish said, thinking that whoever had brokered the deal had been pretty pragmatic and not
done too bad a job. But perhaps there was just enough nefariousness about it to have given Collons the idea of a hidden scandal to use for his own fantasies. Or perhaps as a smokescreen for what he had done to Kara.
‘Everyone at the council and Goodbuy’s might have been happy,’ Roger was saying, ‘but it’s a disaster for the borough. If the building goes ahead, and we won’t be able to stop it for much longer, Kingsford will lose a lot of its one naturally wild space. Trees will be felled, there’ll be even more pollution, greatly increased traffic, more high street shops going to the wall, and the end of all the small food retailers. Can you think of anything much worse?’
‘I’m new to the subject.’ Trish made herself sound humble. ‘I can see I’ve a lot to learn.’
‘You’re telling me, Sarah. But you will write it up, won’t you? The more people who get to hear about this sort of sleaze the better.’
The word ‘sleaze’ made Trish wonder for a second whether Collons could have been right. But it seemed impossible. No one was going to set out to kill Kara to stop her talking about a deal that wasn’t really even corrupt.
‘Are you still there, Sarah?’
‘Yes, yes, I am. I was just thinking about the best way to go on from here.’
‘Well, do your best for us,’ said Roger. ‘We can do with all the publicity we can get. There’ll be plenty once they send the bailiffs in, but by then it won’t do us any good.’
‘Bailiffs?’
‘Yeah. We’ve got people in the trees already in King’s Park, and the contractors will need to get them shifted before they start felling. That’ll get on the TV news, but it’s always too late at that stage. Look at Newbury.’ Roger’s voice was roughening, perhaps with suspicion. ‘What did you say your surname was?’
‘Tisbury.’ Trish assumed that as soon as she got off the line he would be checking with Goodbuy’s head office – or Kingsford Council – to find out whether they had employed the mythical Sarah Tisbury to ferret out details of the KGB’s plans to disrupt the building work. She was quite glad she had lied about her name.
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