by Neal Bircher
The members of the former group were basically hopeless. There were twenty-eight on duty in and around Norling that evening, as far as Ferriby and Brooks could establish, and whilst several had indeed passed the Haystack pub at or around the estimated time of the murder, not one claimed to have remembered seeing anything or anyone of interest. The detectives’ task was further hampered by the language difficulties presented through almost half of their interviewees having no more than a basic grasp of English.
The latter group were smaller in number – just two so far – and made up of classic plebs, in the form of 57-year-old local Douglas Hoyle, and 49-year-old Ukrainian Harry Kernovski.
Douglas Hoyle was first up, and he did not look a well man. A lifetime of heavy smoking had taken its toll on his now pallid and lined facial features. And his slightly-too-long lank white-grey hair bore an accompanying ingrained yellow hue. Likewise, the nearly thirty years he’d spent as a removals man – until giving up through ill-health – had done his posture no favours. Nor could his chosen “retirement” occupation of late night budget minicab driver have contributed greatly to his all-round mental and physical well-being.
He wheezed as he introduced himself, partly through the exertion of climbing eight steps to the front door of the police station, and partly through his nervousness and excitement at the prospect of an interaction with authority.
The interview was conducted in the station’s custody suite. This was quite a common practice, due to a shortage of interview rooms. Ferriby also preferred using the cells: they gave an interview an edginess that the bland office-like rooms could not. He’d liked them even more in the pre-smoking-ban days when he could smoke to his heart’s discontent and, just as importantly, put “customers” at ease by allowing them to do likewise.
Ferriby introduced Hoyle to Gary Brooks and showed him into an interview room. Hoyle declined the offer of a coffee, almost apologetically.
Nervously at first he began a description of the Saturday evening nine days previously. He had started later than usual – about nine o’clock instead of seven – on account of having to take his wife, Irene, over to Ilford as her mother was unwell. “She’s not getting any younger you see … be 92 this next July … or it might even be 93. Anyway, so it had been a quiet night early on and… ”
Ferriby suggested that he might move on to a little later in the evening, say eleven thirty.
“Oh, yes, sorry … sorry … of course.”
And then Ferriby and Brooks got to hear more about how he’d picked up sandwiches from the Esso garage near the M4. His wife normally made them for him but because she had had to go away there hadn’t really been time… Well, whilst in the garage he happened to notice that the time on the wall clock was just coming up to twelve; he didn’t know why he had particularly noticed that, just one of those things he supposed… Anyway, after the garage he was going to return to his base office in nearby Duxton, when he was called to pick up a customer from Harrow. He didn’t normally like going to Harrow but…
Ferriby interjected again. “Yes, Mr Hoyle, do you think you could tell us what you saw on Dray’s Bridge?”
“Oh, yes, of course, sorry, yes, yes.”
“Go on…”
“I, er, you wouldn’t mind if I had one of those coffees after all, would you?”
An exasperated Ferriby glanced at Brooks and rolled his eyes. “No, no, of course not. Take this one: I haven’t touched it … white with sugar OK?”
It was, and Hoyle sipped at it shakily before slumping back into his seat, looking marginally more composed than he had been.
Ferriby spoke again. “You were saying … about Dray’s Bridge.”
“Yes, yes. Well it was raining, you see, so there weren’t many people about. But I saw them on the bridge and they had jackets on and that but I thought ‘Wonder what they’re doing standing around in this weather, what with…’ ”
“‘They’, you say? Who were they?”
“Oh, well, there were three of them: two blokes and a bird.”
So at last he’d said something interesting. And it got better, because although he wasn’t able to say too much about two of the people he’d seen – one was a man, probably dressed in dark clothes, the other was a woman, probably with long dark hair and possibly dark clothes – his description of the other was much clearer.
“He was quite big – tall and, you know, kind of broad, you might say – and he had a bald head. About 40 I should think, and he had a black shiny jacket on. I saw him clear as day because I caught him in my headlights. I thought he looked a bit tasty. You know – a bit of a bruiser.”
Bingo: A pretty accurate description of Barry Timson.
“And this was definitely the Saturday night, quite soon after midnight?”
“Oh yes, because I was picking this bloke up from Harrow ... or, no, was it Ruislip? No, no, that was the Friday night because … No! Yes, definitely the Saturday night. Wouldn’t bet my life on it but …”
Ferriby quickly curtailed the conversation before it rambled on much further, and asked Brooks to see Mr Hoyle to the door, giving himself a few minutes to note down the descriptions of the three people that Hoyle had seen – well, had possibly seen – just before Barry Timson’s murder. That information could actually turn out to be a key clue, but on the other hand, given Hoyle’s vagueness, it could well turn out to be a distracting red herring. He hoped, rather than expected, that the next witness might be better.
Harry Kernovski had been travelling in the opposite direction to Douglas Hoyle when he’d passed the Haystack about five or ten minutes after midnight. He was a different kettle of fish altogether from Douglas Hoyle, with no signs of reticence, even if his command of English – his second language – was a little short of masterful.
“No, please, please, Mister Ferriby, call me ‘Harry’.”
“OK, then, Harry. Tell me about these guys you saw on Dray’s Bridge.”
It seemed that there were two of them and he was fairly sure that they were arguing, and that one was bigger than the other one, and that they were both wearing dark clothing.
“Are you absolutely sure that there were only two … not, say, three?”
“Oh no, I see two men for sure. OK, maybe three, but I think no. But maybe one of them take a pee or something, or could he be hiding – in the shadow.”
“No, Harry, I’m not saying that therewere three, I just wanted to know that you were sure it was two.”
“Yes, I am sure it was two. Maybe three, but I think two for sure.”
Ferriby sighed. “And they were definitely all men? … No women?”
“Oh no! Harry remembers seeing the girls. No ladies, only geezers this time.”
“OK, thank you ... And Harry, were there any other cars in the area at that time?”
“Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know, Mister Ferriby, I see a lot of cars.”
A few more notes later and this time Ferriby took the guest to the front door.
“Thank you Harry, you’ve been very helpful.”
And to an extent he had been. Between these two men Ferriby and Brooks had gleaned that one man, or possibly two men, and probably a woman, had been talking to, and probably arguing with, somebody who might well have been Barry Timson, at around or slightly before the likely time of his death. Not much maybe, but they’d known worse, and now at least they had something of a starting point.
Ferriby and Brooks then retired to the pub to contemplate the next move, over seven or eight rounds of Stella Artois.
Robbery
Noddy had not enjoyed the most scintillating of evenings. He had slowly drunk just two pints of bitter – financial constraints limiting serious drinking to weekends and special occasions – and his new housemates had confirmed his suspicions of their nerdy leanings by loudly reciting Monty Python scenes word for word in a very quiet and unpopulated pub where the only other customers were playing darts. No wonder all the locals thought that students we
re wankers. But at least Herbie and FT had made an effort to be sociable by inviting him along. He thought about that, and then he wondered for a moment what their real names were, and then he wondered too why so many male students, himself included, seemed only to be known by nicknames. He was snapped out of his thoughts when FT, for whom he and Herbie had been waiting to finish his beer, banged his empty thick glass tankard down on their wobbly little table. Scraping their chairs back on the pub’s lino floor, the students stood up and then shuffled their way outside, their leaving unacknowledged by the barman or any of the remaining locals.
The lack of integration of students with local people frustrated Noddy. Back home he’d mixed with everybody and anybody in his regular pubs, and he hadn’t stopped being a pleasant and sociable person just because he’d gone into higher education. All the same, he could understand the resistance of locals in the run-down working class areas where student accommodation tended to be located. His two companions for the evening – neither of whom he knew very well yet, as he’d only a week before relocated to their shared house after vacating the over-priced stifling box that had been his room in the high-rise college halls of residence – were typical in that they, consciously or otherwise, looked down their noses at their less-educated neighbours, and were both incompetent at and largely uninterested in mixing with them. It must have been irritating for people working to scrape a living and probably seeing the students as snobbish layabouts blowing hand-out grant money on booze and cigarettes for three years before walking into overpaid middle-class management jobs, where they could further sneer at their less-fortunate former neighbours.
So Noddy could understand it, but it still frustrated him. He wanted to shake some of these people and shout that “we are all in this together!” However, he would take the indifference of the drinkers in the pub that night over some of the more hostile reactions. Violence against students was commonplace in the city. Gangs of youths were targeting them in the same way that other gangs – or quite probably the same ones – were taking out their frustrations on members of Leicester’s growing ethnic population. A friend of Noddy’s matched the criteria of both target groups, being a student and of Sri Lankan descent, and he’d been beaten up whilst walking home from college in broad daylight. That sort of behaviour angered and depressed Noddy; he’d come away to college partly to escape that kind of thing.
The students’ route home was not long: no more than a ten minute walk at post-pub pace. It snaked through an echoing series of near-identical terraced-house-flanked streets before winding up at a narrow alleyway that opened out right opposite their little red brick home. The journey’s only landmark was a small, brightly lit, fish & chip shop on the corner of a pair of the terraced streets. There were six people in there: a thin bored-looking man and a fat and bored-looking woman behind the counter, and four hooded youths on the customer side. The three students paused outside of it but decided, largely due to the same financial constraints that had limited their beer consumption, to carry on their journey home, chipless.
“Did you see the oiks in there?” quipped Herbie. “No wonder they’re all so spotty; that’s probably all they ever eat. Fucking yobs.”
Noddy observed that the overweight FT didn’t answer, possibly due to him having something of penchant for greasy food himself. And, as Noddy chose not to get into that conversation either, the next minute or so was sound-tracked not by conversation, but by the distant rush of late night traffic, and, some way behind them, by the footsteps and muffled voices of Herbie’s small party of “fucking yobs”, once they had left the chip shop.
The students came to enter the alleyway that was their final straight. Each of them had become aware that the youths were quickly gaining ground on them, although none felt it to be a matter of enough concern to qualify as a conversation topic. But that quickly changed when Herbie was struck on the back by a flying piece of brick, and several other little missiles scuttled past along the alleyway’s bumpy tarmac. The three of them turned in unison to see the outline of the huddle of teenagers some thirty yards away. Two stooped to pick up more missiles which were then dispatched, one catching FT in the large target that was his stomach.
Good advice to the students at that point would probably have been to run as fast as they could to the safety of their home, especially as it was only a matter of yards away. Lanky ten-stone weakling Herbie took a different tack.
“Fuck off, you tossers! Just fucking try that again if you’re feeling brave enough!”
Theywere feeling brave enough, and they did try it again.
A hail of missiles ensued, and then the three studentsdid beat a retreat. Noddy arrived at their front door first and reached for his keys. Then Herbie arrived alongside him.
“What are you doing?” Herbie yelled. “They’ll put the fucking windows in. Come on!”
He grabbed Noddy’s arm to pull him from the door, before carrying on up the street, with the overweight FT thundering along behind him. Meanwhile the shadowy gang emerged from the alleyway, running. In the confused second that Noddy had to make a decision, he made one that he would very quickly regret: Showing solidarity with his new associates, he went with them, rather than defying Herbie and opening the door to their home.
Herbie led, with FT rapidly losing ground. Noddy caught up and stayed with FT at his pace, which was a lot slower than the pace of the gang, who had enough in surplus to be able to call out as they ran.
“Fucking student wankers! You’re fucking dead, Fatso!”
Herbie then completed a rapid hat-trick of poor decisions when at the end of their row of terraces he took a left turn onto an unlit patch of debris-strewn bumpy waste ground. Inevitably one of the students fell over straight away, and almost just as inevitably, it was FT. Noddy stopped to help him get up from a muddy hole, but in the seconds that that took the two of them – along with Herbie who had reluctantly turned back to help out too – they were “surrounded” by four pasty youths … each of whom was brandishing a shiny king-sized sheath knife. Herbie had been right about their complexion: none of them looked well. One who assumed the stance of leader suffered a particularly acned appearance.
“One of you pushed into me in the chip shop. Which one was it?” he enquired.
Somebody had to answer.
“We didn’t go in there tonight; it wasn’t any of us,” responded a nervous, but unusually garrulous FT.
And then he went very quiet as the tip of a big sharp blade was squeezed against the thin skin of his Adam’s apple.
“Are you calling me a liar, Fatty? You pushed into me in the chip shop, didn’t you, you fat cunt?”
FT’s expression was of frozen fear. This time he didn’t answer his assailant.
“I bet you wankers are all students, aren’t you? What poncey course are you on, Fatty?”
A long pause followed, while FT opened his mouth but failed to emit any sound.
“Answer me, Fatty – you fat fucker!”
He kneed FT hard in the groin, and FT doubled up in pain. Noddy, and to an extent Herbie, turned to defend him, but were discouraged by large knives being thrust against their chests.
“Get up you fat twat!” And with that the spotty youth kneed FT in the face.
FT’s mouth and nose started gushing blood, but the seriousness of the situation also spurred him into gushing words.
“I, I don’t work. I’m not a student; I’m unemployed… I’m on the dole.”
It was true. FT had failed the first year of his economics degree and was taking a year out before re-sitting his exams.
“You’d better not be lying to me, you fat fucker,” said the spotty youth. “And what do you do, Goldilocks?”
Noddy had his answer ready, and he attempted to deliver it with conviction. “I work in a record shop.”
The spotty one eyed him suspiciously. “Yeah? Which one?”
Noddy swallowed before answering. “Street Sounds … in Market Parade.”
&n
bsp; It was a small independent shop that sold mainly second-hand stuff and specialised in rock music, particularly punk. It was real, and it was very popular with students. Noddy was familiar enough with the shop to talk knowledgeably if pressed, and he was confident that his inquisitor wouldn’t know it well himself. But he was also aware that his tone had developed a note of pleading that was only likely to get worse if had had to talk any more.
The youth moved his nose close to Noddy’s. His breath smelled of bad diet and cigarettes.
“You fucking better work there,” he spat. Then he turned his blade to Herbie, “And what about you, lanky cunt?”
The encounter between the two groups of young men had not gone well to this point, and it was about to take a turn for the worse. Herbie glared back defiantly for a moment as if about to respond, “None of your business you spotty little shit.” But he felt the blade twist a little into his throat and then, inspired by a gripping fear, blurted out something much worse: the truth.
“I…, I’m at college. I’m studying for a degree in Computer Science.”
A very long pause followed, accompanied by a big spotty smile.
“He’s a fucking arsehole student!” The smile broke into a huge grin, and the spotty one eyed each of his cohorts.
“We hate students, don’t we?”
They murmured agreement.
“And we really fucking hate the Polytechnic rugby club! Are you in the rugby club, Lanky?”
Herbie shook his head mechanically, the knife pinching into the skin of his throat.
“I bet … you … are.” He traced the tip of his blade up through Herbie’s chin, across his lips, and up to the bridge of his nose. He pushed into that soft tissue, forcing Herbie’s head back, and drawing a trickle of blood.