by John Eider
The Inspector woke to a dull repetitive thudding, that in his dream had been his friend and landlord of the Young Prince Hal Tavern, Bill Blunt, banging tankards down along the bar; but upon waking was discovered to be insistent fists against his front door. He instinctively looked for the mobile phone he knew would be on the bedside table, only to see it instead on the floor and broken into three pieces. He looked to the bedside clock but there wasn’t even the light to illuminate the hands clearly.
He jumped up and, pausing only to grab his dressing down, rushed down to speak to the colleague he knew it must be waking him at such an hour – for it was still pitch black outside.
‘Sir, sorry for waking you up like this.’ The Constable seemed as apologetic as he did agitated. ‘We couldn’t raise you on your mobile.’
‘My phone fell on the floor; it’s in bits. What’s up?’
‘There’s been developments at the Cedars, a man called Charlie Prove is dead.’
Grey looked at the clock in the hall, that caught the light of the streetlamp coming through the open door – it was only one a.m.
‘Wait inside while I dress, make yourself a drink.’
‘Did you leave it on silent, sir?’ asked the practically minded Constable from down in the hall. ‘They can sometimes vibrate themselves off the edge of a flat surface.’
Grey had left it on silent, after quietening it for the interview at Tudor Oak School.
Ready in five minutes, he was driven the short distance not to the Cedars but to an area in the Hills estates, where already there were cordons, crowds and harsh artificial light. Superintendent Rose met him sombrely. The Inspector had telephoned him only a few hours before, to report on much background information but no motive or suspect as of yet. Now the case was blown wide open.
‘It’s an ugly business, Grey,’ began his superior. ‘Charlie Prove, you met him earlier?’
‘We hadn’t a chance: he was under sedation.’
‘Well he seems to have come out from under it some time after midnight, to come dashing out in this direction, where someone stove the back of his head in with a heavy instrument.’
‘Any witnesses?’
‘No. He was found by a resident of the flats he was left outside as she came back from work; though others we’ve spoken to have reported a commotion outside just before then – she must have been seconds from seeing the killer.’
‘Where’s Cori?’
‘She’s been directed straight to the Cedars, to manage things there. She’ll be going through his room, I expect.’
Grey’s mind was working now, recalling, ‘You know sir, another resident told me Charlie came from somewhere on the Hills, before living in the Cedars.’
‘We’ll know for sure by morning.’
‘And he had a daughter, sir, who died here.’
‘Eunice – I recognised the surname.’
‘Sarah was finding me the file out.’
‘I’ll re-read it once I’ve spoken to the Chief Constable’s office.’
‘Trouble?’
‘No; but you can see why they’re eager for updates – two murders in two days…’
‘We can solve this, sir.’
‘I know, and that’s what I’ll be telling them.’
Though Southney was a fair sized settlement in itself and had all the amenities the modern British citizen would expect, the fact remained it was a town ringed at arm’s length by major cities, all with much larger forces. The town’s police were always under pressure to show they could handle the big cases.
The Super said with a start, ‘Well, I’m getting back to the station. I don’t think any of us will be getting much sleep tonight.’
So much for recharging batteries. With a hand on his shoulder, Grey was left to gather, collate and manage the activity on the site. Under the watchful eye of maybe thirty local people, he walked over to where the white tent was being unfolded. The site was something like a tarmacked square beneath the blank wall of an apartment block, the windows evidently facing out from other sides – in short one of those civic spaces owned by everyone and no one, and so where no one kept watch. He spoke to the officers there,
‘What’s the light like here, without our floodlights?’
‘Jet black, sir. You’ll see the streetlight’s out.’
‘The victim?’
‘Dead when they found him, though still warm.’
‘Show me.’
The team moved apart to show the slumped form of a big man, the garish light catching red splashes across the back of his light pyjama jacket and on the tarmac besides. The victim had had brown hair, which was now dark crimson. The whole scene stunned him,
‘Pyjamas?’
‘And slippers too, sir.’
‘One blow, do you think?’
‘It looks that way, sir, though the doctor’s on his way.’
Grey was confident that that man would have an easy job.
‘Anything else done to the body?’
‘No, sir, though the killer might have been disturbed moments after first hitting him.’
‘Charlie Prove.’ Grey shook his head in disbelief. ‘Who ID’d him?’
‘I saw him yesterday when we were taking statements at the Cedars, a few of us did. We’ll need to get a relative in to identify him formally, of course.’
‘So what was he doing out here?’
‘A couple of the people we’ve spoken to in the building recognised his name, but no one’s seen him here for years.’
‘Anything else found?’
‘No, sir. We’re doing a fingertip search of the square.’
‘Though the murder weapon was quite large, it seems.’
‘If it’s here we’ll find it, sir.’
‘I know you will.’
Grey spoke then to a neighbour woken by a disturbance shortly after half-past midnight, and then to the woman still tearful who had stumbled – almost literally so – upon Charlie as she came home from her late-evening shift as a packer in a warehouse in the town’s industrial district. Neither were sure if they knew the victim, though neither would either have been very old at the time he lived there.
Taking the scene in, Grey looked at the buildings around him, and at the faces looking back from behind the cordon. All towns had a “bad estate”, and it was not these people’s fault that in Southney it was theirs. He scanned the crowd, who showed no sign of returning to bed even on a worknight; and a lot of them were workers, not all claimants or layabouts as the residents of such areas were often stigmatised; and what’s more the work they did was often of the worst sort, the least secure and poorest paid.
Grey could be honest with himself though: he wouldn’t want to live here, nor could he just ignore the trouble that his uniformed colleagues habitually had in these parts, for this was a place not immune to depressing behaviour and rumbling civil unrest. Yet the people standing beyond the cordon that night were entitled to answers; for whatever trouble they and their children may at different times have gotten into, this act – the slaying of a man and the dumping of him on their doorstep – was of quite another order. Perhaps they were worried their sons would get the blame, perhaps that the crime would become associated with them and further tarnish their area’s name.
Grey decided he must trust them, speaking to the crowd as his colleagues worked behind him,
‘Hello, I’m Inspector Rase, some of you may know me. You’ll know a man was murdered here tonight. His name was Mr Charlie Prove. We believe he may have lived in the area once. If any of you knew him, or know why he might have come this way tonight, then please speak to one of us here, we would be very grateful.’
‘It’s different when it’s an outsider, isn’t it.’
Grey spun around to face the woman’s voice.
‘If it was someone from around here you wouldn’t give a hoot.’
‘We don’t know that he is an outsider. It’s true he doesn’t live here now, but…’ Grey was fumbling.
&nbs
p; ‘You’re asking a lot aren’t you, asking us to help you?’ This was a different voice. ‘You’re normally only around here to arrest one of us.’
As Grey turned to meet this second speaker he feared he had made a mistake and would now be called to answer for all manner of ills real or imagined. Yet a third voice saved him, a baritone, its accent formed in warmer climes, a voice that sounded to silence all others as its owner let himself beneath the cordon,
‘I knew Charlie Prove,’ the man continued, ‘and I knew Eunice Prove. Is there somewhere we could talk?’
The only private place in that odd location proved to be a standing police car in which the heater had thankfully been left on. Once both were sat inside, the man began,
‘Campbell Leigh,’ he introduced himself. ‘Before we start, I should say that I am here both for myself and also representing the H.E.C.F.’
Grey knew that Inspector Glass, his uniformed counterpart, and his men would have had frequent dealings with the Hills Estates Community Forum; however the lack of any really serious crimes in the area for a while had meant that he himself had not met the Forum’s leader before.
‘They all knew Charlie,’ Leigh began, gesturing back to those still behind the cordon, ‘and they’d have said so once they’d got a few things out of their systems. Fifteen years is the blink of an eye to those who’ve spent a lifetime here.’
‘You knew him well?’
‘Charlie was my predecessor as Forum leader, and would have been still had not the death of his daughter undone him as I’ve seen no man undone before or since.’
The man’s every word was emphasised and powerful, Grey appreciating the effect he’d have in his role as public speaker.
‘His family were Scottish Catholics, who came to England to find work. Mine came from Trinidad for much the same reason. I must have first met him, oh, way back in the Sixties. There were jobs here then, industry.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘We were roommates, Inspector, before he got married.’
‘And this was nearby?’
‘Probably not a stone’s throw away, though I couldn’t take you there now.’
‘Oh?’
‘This was before the Hills were even built, before they were ever conceived of.’
‘And so that’s not where he was running to this evening?’
Leigh shook his head with sadness, ‘He was running to where he’d lived with Eunice; and had nearly got there too.’
‘How do you know that’s the direction he was moving in?’
‘He was coming from the Cedars, wasn’t he?’
‘So, please continue: when you knew Charlie…’
The man began a narrative that didn’t immediately address the question,
‘You’re too young to remember the old Coalville Road. It ran somewhere under where Coalville Lane runs now,’ he describing what Grey knew to be the crooked spine of this part of the estate, ‘and all around here and under our feet leading off it were slums, Inspector, Victorian slums. This town had grown, expanded, opened factories, and yet the workers were clustered up in these same old streets.
‘We formed a group, with Charlie as our driving force, the Coalville Road Residents Association, calling for tenants’ rights and better housing.’
‘Which led to the Hills being built?’
‘Though not without a fight. We got Charlie elected to the Town Council, and from there he could take on the Council itself, challenge them on housing policy.’
‘And they agreed to pay for all this construction work, taking up the whole streetplan?’
‘Charlie was clever: he challenged them on economic grounds, asking how the town’s businesses could expand when there was nowhere for new workers to live?’ The man gave a hollow laugh, ‘Of course, we couldn’t know then that in a manufacturing regard the town was already at its peak.
‘And then of course there were the conservationists: people from nice areas, who didn’t want the buildings torn down.’
‘Why wouldn’t they?’
‘Because the Coalville Road was historic, they said, pre-dated the Industrial Revolution, they said, had some of the oldest buildings in the town. Well, Charlie said to them, if they cared so much then why didn’t they spend more money looking after these building and the people in them.’
‘When was all this?’
‘Oh, it went on for years, Inspector, with campaigns on both sides. We had Labour MPs taking our case to Parliament; while they had a famous writer from London writing impassioned articles, he even claiming one of the houses had been rented by William Ruskin! Well, who could argue with that?’ Campbell Leigh fell back into his car seat laughing.
‘Sorry,’ he eventually said, ‘but I recall those times with joy, Inspector; and I recall my friend with Joy.’ He composed himself. ‘You want to know the year? The vote was passed by the Town Council in Nineteen Seventy-four; Her Highness Princess Anne opened the first part of the new estate in Nineteen Seventy-eight, as evidenced by our plaque you’ll see in daylight; and I am proud to say I’ve lived here since the first flats were finished.’
‘Seventy-four? So what swung it?’
‘Well, she left the Council didn’t she?’
‘Who left?’
‘Well, your Stella Dunbar, or Councillor Mrs Stella Mars as she was then, she who’d been so opposed.’
Grey did a double-take: Mars had been muted as Stella’s name as some point in her life.
‘You say my Stella Dunbar, so you know we’re investigating her death too?’
‘Yes, I saw it in the evening paper. I was going to go to the Cedars in the morning and offer my condolences.’
‘So you knew she lived there?’
‘I saw her when I first went to visit Charlie there. “So this is who is helping you?” I asked him. I was incredulous – of course we knew someone was doing this for him, as he couldn’t have afforded to move there alone; but her, of all people.’
‘You were surprised because they’d been opposed on the Town Council?’
‘They weren’t just opposed, Inspector, not just Councillors arguing rival points: these pair were implacable. They blocked and counter-blocked every move the other tried to make for years. In Charlie’s eyes Councillor Mrs Mars was delaying the very evolution of his town, harming its working people’s quality of life; while to her Mr Prove, sir as she called him – I can still hear her as if on the floor and I up in the Stranger’s Gallery – Mr Prove, sir was the man who wished no less than to tear out her town’s very heart and history.’
Grey was agog at just how much there was to learn here,
‘There’s so much I need to ask you, Mr Leigh; but I’m mindful of the hour. I don’t want to keep you up any longer, if…’
‘Please, Inspector, at my age I get by on four hours’ sleep – like Margaret Thatcher.’ Again his laughter filled the car. ‘And I will help you,’ he said suddenly serious, ‘if it means I don’t sleep for a week.’
‘Why did Stella leave the council in Seventy-four?’
At this the man’s face stiffened in way Grey could not at first read,
‘You understand, it was always going to have to be that way. Neither one of them would have ever backed down, one would always have to break.’
‘Break?’
‘It was an unpleasant business, and I can only repeat the rumours we all heard at the time.’
‘Please, I need to hear everything.’
He shook his head at the thought of them, ‘There was talk of her marriage breaking down; of her standing in the street with her clothes being thrown out at her; of her son in tears, not being picked up from school one day, and she not being seen by the other mothers at the gate ever again.’
‘Who was her husband?’
‘I couldn’t claim to know much of him, only that he was an older man, a sailor I heard, or was it a soldier?’
‘Do you know his name, where they married, where they lived?’
/> But the man just shook his head, ‘I knew her in the Council Chamber – outside of there she was a mystery to me. In fact, we used to wonder where such a woman came from. I used to think we’d never defeat her.’
‘So she had support among the other Councillors?’
‘They were terrified of her, those respectable men with their pipes and War records, passing the gold chains around once a year, everyone given a go at Mayor. They knew how things ought to be run – this was hardly the era yet of community action. Then suddenly, here were Stella and Charlie, these two young, young people telling – simply instructing – them in their opposite ways of how things were going to be – and the rest hadn’t a clue of where to go. The Council would be deadlocked, till one of them broke.’
‘And it was Stella.’
Again that unreadable look, that Grey began to see as shame, ‘I remember the night it was read out that she’d resigned. We’d been waiting so long; we forced the vote through that session. The first diggers came within the year.’
‘Did you hear any more of her after?’
‘I confess, no.’
‘Yet stories were circulating…’
‘And we did nothing. I admit, we did nothing. We got our vote through, we were very busy then. People do drop out of public life.’
‘But not so notably.’
‘Am I proud of not looking her up, checking if things were bad for her? Probably not. But she’d fought us tooth and nail.’
‘In the political sphere, not the public.’
‘You didn’t know her in a fury, didn’t have those eyes bear down on you.’
No, thought Grey, but he was beginning to get an idea of what it might have felt like from the people he’d been talking to those last few hours.
‘A strong woman in politics can paralyse weak men. We all saw that a few years after.’
‘And then the shock of seeing her all those years later, at Charlie’s new flat.’
‘It was a shock, I didn’t even know she still lived in the area.’
‘She hadn’t for a while before coming to the Cedars. She was paying Charlie’s way there.’
‘I guessed as much.’
‘How did it go?’
‘She walked in as we were talking – he always kept an open door. “Mrs Mars,” I said, as polite as you like.’
‘“I don’t go by that name anymore,” she replied. She said no more to me. I think she asked to borrow a book, and that was that.’
‘You didn’t see her again?’
‘I didn’t go there so often, after those early times.’
‘So what did you make of it all?’
‘He did tell me she’d been kind to him, though he’d gone so placid by then that you couldn’t always tell what he meant.’
Grey pondered. ‘Well, thank you, you’ve taken our knowledge of Stella back a good few years.’
‘And what of your knowledge of Charlie?’
‘We’ve only just learnt that there was anything we needed to know of him beyond what linked to Stella.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘No; and I’m afraid events caught up with me before I’d had a chance to speak to him yesterday.’
‘Did you know of Eunice?’
‘I know of her – the Superintendent is reviewing her file as we speak.’
‘You weren’t on the case?’
‘I moved around a few divisions before I settled here.’
‘It was a Scottish lad who done for her, Oscar Skellet – I won’t forget that name. He was a friend of a friend from Glasgow who Charlie agreed to put up when he came this way looking for work. That was the kind of thing he did.’
‘Eunice fell for him?’
Leigh nodded.
‘How did she die?’
‘Pummelled, beaten like an animal. She never regained consciousness.’
‘He fled, I believe, this Skellet?’
‘Was gone the next morning.’
‘Charlie found her?’
‘I pray it had been me.’
‘You say it changed him?’
‘Changed him? It ended him, Inspector. There was more of Charlie lost that night than there was left to lose here this evening. He uncoiled, became hysterical, a different man.’
‘I think I’ve heard that man described.’
‘He was taken in for shock, was as good as kept under for a week, then taken to a psychiatric ward – as strong a man as I’ve known, reduced to that.’
‘It must have been tough for you to see.’
‘Then the nurses told us he’d been discharged, and that he’d found a new flat. He took some tracking down, but he never came back to the Hills from that day.’
Until tonight, thought Grey.
‘And then there was his seat on the Town Council. After three months we knew he wasn’t coming back. I handled it; they let me make a statement on the floor. He received a round of applause.’
‘He must have put in some service by then.’
‘Thirty-one years a Councillor. I was elected to the seat the next year.’
The man paused before uttering, ‘In absentia.’
‘Sorry?’ asked Grey.
‘They both left the Council in absentia, if you read the records. It’s a legal term, it means not there. I think Charlie left the Hills, his home, his friends, his whole life in absentia – he was not there from the day he found his daughter.’
Grey was set to leave, though hopefully to speak to Campbell Leigh again some at some point; yet something niggled, something that he couldn’t leave without somehow broaching. He began,
‘Thank you Mr Leigh, you’ve been very helpful; but, I can’t help wondering… all your and Charlie’s work over the years, your efforts on behalf of your community, your striving to build better housing…’
‘All that, for this?’
‘Well…’
‘You see the Hills as a failure?’
Grey knew at that moment that he had said the wrong thing; but the man wasn’t really asking his opinion,
‘People criticise this area, but you should’ve seen what the Hills replaced. That’s what no one understands, Inspector, that we are proud of our community, proud of our estate that others in this town who don’t ever have to set foot in seem so ashamed of. You don’t have the right to tell us whether we should be abashed of ourselves.’
‘Oh, I wasn’t saying…’
‘That was a collective “You”.’
‘Of course.’
He was a big man to be declaimed at in the confines of a parked car.
‘Here is my constituency office card, call the top number any time. Good luck with your enquiries.’
‘Thank you.’
Grey was left amazed and saddened at the recent social history he had been unaware of.
Chapter 9 – Panic