What Would Wimsey Do?

by Guy Fraser-Sampson

  “Thank you very much.” Having smoothed it flat, Metcalfe snapped the piece of paper carefully underneath the band securing his notebook.

  “Now then,” said Allen briskly, “tell me about the forensic report.”

  Metcalfe sat up straight. “Sorry,” he said stiffly. “No can do.”

  “What do you mean? Fair exchange is no robbery. I’ve given you some information you wanted. The least you can do is return the favour.”

  “Sorry,” Metcalfe said again. “It doesn’t work like that. You know the rules. I can’t discuss the case with someone who isn’t a current member of the team.”

  Allen stared hard at him. “How long have we known each other, Bob?”

  “Don’t do that,” Metcalfe responded. “Just don’t, all right? You know the rules as well as I do. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  He stared back at Allen. “Look, guv,” he went on more gently. “Why not just give it up? Go on leave, like they want you to. Properly on leave, not hanging round Hampstead like a ghost or something.”

  “A pretty useful ghost, wouldn’t you say?” Allen said with a sour smile.

  “I’m very grateful to you for what you’ve done. That goes without saying. I’m sure we all are. But you’re off the case now. Please just accept it and move on—for your own sake.”

  Allen looked off into the distance for a moment and seemed to relax a little.

  “I know you have my best interests at heart, Bob,” he said quietly, “but I can’t let this go. There’s a nutter out there somewhere who’s been getting the better of me for a long time. I can’t have that. I can’t let him beat me.”

  “When we get him, and we will get him, it’ll be largely down to you and all the work you’ve already put in on the investigation. I’m sure DS Collison will give you credit for that. He’s a big admirer of yours, you know.”

  “Is he now?” Allen drank some coffee and seemed to be getting ready to go, or maybe he was just shifting his weight in his chair. Abruptly he shifted it back again. “I hear you’re getting a profiler,” he said innocently.

  Again his companion could only gape in astonishment. “How the hell do you know that?”

  Allen ignored the question. “So it’s true, then?”

  “I’m not going to comment one way or the other,” Metcalfe said primly, feeling suddenly like a politician who has been put on the spot by an unexpected question during a live interview.

  “Oh—‘I can neither confirm or deny,’ is it?” Allen was obviously thinking along similar lines. “I know they give you lessons in PR in the Met these days, Bob. I think yours are paying off.”

  Metcalfe made up his mind and stood up, putting a five-pound note on the table as he did so.

  “I’m ending this conversation right now,” he said. “There’s only one way you could possibly know what you’ve just mentioned, and that’s from a member of the team.”

  Allen said nothing, but looked mutinous.

  “You must realise, guv, that I’m going to have to report this conversation to DS Collison, that you could be causing huge problems for whoever your source is, maybe even ending their career?”

  Another thought struck him, with anger. “And that I’m going to be the prime suspect?”

  “Oh, come on, Bob,” Allen began, but Metcalfe cut him off.

  “No,” he said simply.

  They looked at each other for a moment, a long moment in which, and they both felt it, something died between them.

  “Please don’t contact me again,” Metcalfe said quietly, hoping that the tremble that he felt did not show in his voice. “Not until after the case is over, anyway.”

  He walked away down the hill towards the pedestrian crossing. He didn’t look back.

  Metcalfe was surprised to find the incident room empty when he walked in. There was supposed to be one officer there at all times over the weekend to field telephone calls. Puzzled, he rang the front desk.

  “DI Metcalfe,” he said curtly when they answered. “Who’s supposed to be on duty in the incident room? I’ve just got here and the place is empty.”

  “PC Wilkinson, sir. If you’ll just hang on a minute I’ll check to see where he is.”

  After a while the desk sergeant came on the line. “You looking for Wilkinson, sir? The computer is showing that he swiped in at 0856, and he hasn’t swiped out again, so he must be somewhere in the station. I’m sure he’ll turn up again in a minute.”

  “Right then, thanks.”

  He checked his watch. It was now just after 10.45. He went downstairs to the men’s toilets. The stalls were all open and clearly unoccupied. He went into the locker room and then checked the canteen. It was empty apart from two uniforms, one man and one woman. He didn’t recognise either of them but he needed to make sure.

  “Excuse me disturbing you on your break,” he said as they both looked at him, “but have you seen Wilkinson anywhere in the last few minutes?”

  They shook their heads.

  As he headed back upstairs he caught a glimpse of a blue uniform slipping through the door of the incident room. By the time he came back into the room himself, a face he did recognise, and with which he could dimly associate the name Wilkinson, was sitting at a table next to a phone with an open notebook ready beside him.

  “Wilkinson?” asked Metcalfe.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where the hell have you been? You’re supposed to be on duty in here.”

  “So I am, sir,” the constable replied uneasily. “I just had to nip down to the bog for a minute.”

  “Strange, that,” Metcalfe said sarcastically. “I just checked down there and there was no sign of you. And we didn’t pass on the stairs either.”

  He waited for a response, but none was forthcoming. Suddenly he felt all the pent-up rage within him swell and burst out. Rage at Tom Allen for being stupid and risking both their careers. Rage at the team for not being able to find the killer. Rage with this idiot for jeopardising the investigation should an important call have come through while he was skiving. Even as he felt his face flush he knew that a lot of this rage was actually targeted at himself, but that realisation did not calm him. Rather, it shamed him and made him all the angrier.

  “Don’t play the bloody fool with me!” he shouted abruptly, loudly, much more loudly than he had intended and more loudly perhaps than he had believed himself capable of shouting. “I know exactly what’s been going on.”

  He took a deep breath and continued, more quietly but still with an intense anger. “You slipped out through the door into the reception area without swiping your card, and then after you’d been for your coffee or whatever it was, you got your mate on the desk to let you back in again through the same door. That way it looks on the system as though you’ve never left the building.”

  Wilkinson’s silence was as eloquent as a confession.

  “Well, I have news for you,” Metcalfe went on. “This is a murder enquiry, sonny, and when you are in sole charge of manning the phones, that is what you do. You do not slip out whenever you like just because it happens to be a Sunday morning and you don’t think anyone from CID is going to be here.”

  “I’m very sorry, sir,” Wilkinson said at last. “It won’t happen again.”

  “Too bloody right, it won’t.” Metcalfe picked up the phone again and, when the constable answered, asked for the desk sergeant to come up to the incident room immediately.

  “Sergeant,” he said when the man arrived. “At the end of this shift you will place PC Wilkinson on a disciplinary charge of being absent from duty without permission.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the sergeant woodenly. He was glaring at Wilkinson but Metcalfe knew that this was at least as much due to him letting the side down by getting caught as to him having been swanning around in Hampstead when he was officially on duty in the station. Uniform stuck up for each other, and could usually get away with something like this. They would view it as unfortunate that Me
tcalfe had come into work at that time on a Sunday morning; the luck of the draw.

  The sergeant stood and looked at him, though whether waiting for him to say something else or not Metcalfe was unsure.

  “That’s all, Sergeant,” he said calmly.

  He waited for him to leave, and then pulled the crumpled betting slip out of his pocket. The taxi driver was apparently called Ronnie Hazel. He ran the telephone number through the police database and found that it was indeed registered to a “Hazel, R.” at an address in Kentish Town. He cross-checked the name against Criminal Records, and came up blank. “Of course,” he told himself, “if he’d had any form he wouldn’t have been accepted as a black-cab driver.”

  He rang the number and after some time it was answered, somewhat drowsily, by a woman. She seemed unimpressed when she heard who was calling, saying only that Ronnie was out in the cab. He arranged for him to call in at the station at 11 a.m. the next morning, stressing that this was urgent and part of a murder investigation. He rang off feeling strangely unfulfilled and more than a little anxious.

  It wasn’t that Hazel might prove uncooperative. The Metropolitan police effectively acted as the licensing authority for London’s black cabs through the Hackney Carriage office at New Scotland Yard. Unsurprisingly, therefore, they usually took every possible step to remain on good terms with ‘the law.’ But he was far from convinced that his interlocutor had fully appreciated what he was saying, or even that she would remember to pass the message on, despite him having asked her to be sure to write it down.

  He sat gazing into space rather moodily, wondering what to do next. He had been intending to spend the rest of the day ploughing through the phone lists of taxi drivers, but obviously that would no longer be necessary. He found himself wondering what Karen might be doing right now. Preparing lunch, perhaps?

  He uttered a sigh of exasperation at being unable to discipline his thoughts sufficiently to keep her out of them. Then he realised that Wilkinson might think this was some further criticism aimed at him. He looked round, but the constable was staring fixedly into a computer screen and ignored him.

  Without any clear idea of where he was going, he stood up and went downstairs. His life seemed to be falling into a pattern of random wanderings whenever he was not at work. He would decide on a destination, but no sooner would he get there than restlessness would overtake him once more, coupled with an intense irritation at his own feebleness of purpose. What was wrong with him?

  He stopped in the downstairs reception area and turned to face the desk sergeant, who looked back at him impassively.

  “About Wilkinson,” he said.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You can forget the charge.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said the sergeant, visibly relaxing. “I’m sure it’ll be much appreciated.”

  Then, as the door closed behind him, he turned and stuck his head back through into the police station.

  “But give him a bloody good bollocking,” he said viciously.

  Chapter Six

  Metcalfe buttonholed Collison as soon as the latter arrived on Monday morning. “Sir,” he said urgently, “I need a word in private.”

  “In here,” replied the other, leading them both into an empty office.

  Metcalfe shut the door behind him. “I almost phoned you at home about this yesterday, but in the end I decided not to disturb you. I hope I did the right thing.”

  “Well,” Collison said calmly. “Once you tell me, doubtless I’ll be able to venture an opinion.”

  “Sorry,” said Metcalfe quickly, “it’s about Tom Allen, well partly, anyway.”

  “Go on.”

  “I ran into him yesterday morning, here in Hampstead. I was on the way in to work, actually. I know you said not to—” He broke off and looked guiltily at the Superintendent.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Collison reassured him. “Just tell me whatever it is I need to know.”

  “Well, it’s good news, bad news, really, sir.”

  Collison raised his eyebrows.

  “Let me tell you the good news straight away. The taxi driver has been identified and will hopefully be here for an interview in a couple of hours.”

  “Why, that’s not good news at all, Bob,” Collison said with delight. “It’s great news—well done.”

  “Ah,” said Metcalfe unhappily, “not exactly. You see it wasn’t me who found him—it was Tom Allen.”

  Collison looked dumbfounded. “How did that happen?”

  “My fault, I’m afraid. He did exactly what I should have thought to do.”

  “Which was what, exactly?”

  “Spread the word in the cabbies’ caffs and shelters—you know those green huts you see at the side of the road. The stupid thing is that it did occur to me, but too late. I jogged past one of their caffs in Belsize Park on Sunday morning and got the idea then, but within a few hours Tom Allen was passing me the name and phone number.”

  “I don’t see how that’s your fault at all,” said Collison after a moment’s reflection. “If you should have thought of it, then so should I. If anything, it just shows what a first class copper Tom is. Here we are taking days to go through phone lists and he beats us to the draw with a bit of good, old-fashioned police work.”

  “I suppose so,” Metcalfe said dubiously.

  “Well,” said Collison clapping his hands together, “if that’s all that’s bothering you, Bob, forget about it. We’ve got a result, that’s all that matters. Remember to buy Tom a drink the next time you see him, with my compliments.”

  “I don’t think I will be seeing him for a long time, guv,” Metcalfe said, in such a strained tone that Collison stopped and stared at him.

  “You see,” he went on very deliberately, “Tom Allen knows we’ve hired a profiler.”

  Collison’s jaw dropped. “But there’s only one place that information could have come from…”

  “I know. From within the team.”

  There was silence.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Bob,” Collison said finally. “But you’re one of Tom’s closest friends and colleagues…”

  “I know,” Metcalfe repeated angrily. “That’s why I won’t be seeing him for a long time. He’s dropped me right in it.”

  “Only if it was you who told him,” Collison replied evenly.

  “That’s what everyone will think, isn’t it?”

  Collison looked at him levelly. “Did you tell him?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well,” said Collison, “then that defines our problem, doesn’t it? We need to find the source of the leak, if we can. We need to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. We need to make sure no blame attaches to you.

  “But not necessarily in that order,” he finished, with a smile.

  “You mean you believe me?”

  “Of course I believe you. I’ve no reason not to, and anyway you’re far too good a copper to do a stupid thing like that.”

  “Thank you,” Metcalfe said, feeling suddenly close to tears. “Thank you. That’s a great relief. I—” He stopped, unable to go on.

  “I think on balance you should have called me yesterday,” his boss said briskly. “At least I could have put your mind at rest about this and saved you some worry.”

  He patted the other man on the shoulder. “Come on, Bob,” he said, “let’s go and talk to the troops.”

  As they went into the incident room it fell quiet. It may have had something to do with the expression on Collison’s face.

  “Good morning,” he said routinely. There was not even a mumbled response. It was obvious that he had a great deal more to say. “I am afraid that I have some grave news,” he went on. “It appears that, despite my clear warning to the contrary, a member of this team has breached security and disclosed a key piece of information to an outsider. I am going to give that individual one opportunity, and one opportunity only, to own up. If they do, I will take that into
account in deciding how to proceed further.”

  He stopped, and his gaze swept around the room, looking each person in turn squarely in the eye. “Does anyone wish to tell me anything?” he asked finally. There was no response. “Very well,” he continued levelly. “This is now a serious disciplinary matter. It may be that I will ask for an internal enquiry, but enough of that for the moment. DI Metcalfe will give us an update on the case. As you will see, there has been at least one encouraging development. Bob?”

  Metcalfe stepped forward. “Good news, everybody. Over the course of the weekend we identified our taxi driver and I hope that he will be with us a little later today for an interview. So that’s one thing crossed off our list. As to the rest, we are still waiting for a report from Forensics on the mysterious powder found on our last victim.”

  “Thank you, Bob,” Collison acknowledged. “What about our profiler, Karen? When does Peter think he may have something for us?”

  “He’s been working on it all weekend, guv,” she replied. “I think he’d be happy to come in any time. This afternoon, if you like.”

  Collison reflected briefly. “Better make it tomorrow morning. If that’s convenient for him, of course. With a bit of luck, we may have some leads to follow up from our taxi driver this afternoon.”

  The bit of luck was not to be forthcoming, however.

  When Ronnie Hazel finally put in an appearance, twenty minutes late, he was surly and uncooperative. His answers were, so far as possible, monosyllabic. It was only when prompted with a photograph of Katherine Barker that he grudgingly acknowledged that he remembered her at all. He was hazy both about exactly where he had dropped her off, and when. It was almost as if time itself was an alien concept to him. At last, they were able to agree on a location somewhere on Wood Green High Street at some time around midnight.

  Collison and Metcalfe, who had interviewed him together, saw him off the premises with barely concealed irritation and went back to the incident room to report to the team.

  “Anything useful, guv?” asked Andrews, speaking for them all.