‘Did he have enemies?’ Heap said.
‘Not to my knowledge, but clearly my knowledge of him was entirely partial.’
Gilchrist stood.
‘We’ll need the contact details of your friends in Paris. And we’d like to take a DNA swab.’ She gestured to Heap. ‘The detective sergeant here has the kit.’
‘You take it from saliva, don’t you?’
Gilchrist nodded. Stanhope opened her mouth scarcely at all, as if any wider would be indelicate.
‘As long as you leave me enough to spit on his grave.’
Gilchrist and Heap left soon after. They exchanged glances when they saw their car had a parking ticket.
As Heap was putting the car in gear, Gilchrist said:
‘I suppose you knew the difference between a paedophile and a paederast, Bellamy.’
‘I even know what a mulierast is, ma’am.’
‘You do?’
‘I am one, ma’am.’
Gilchrist looked at Heap sharply.
‘Am I prepared for this confession, detective sergeant? It sounds horribly … bestial.’
The corner of Heap’s mouth twitched.
‘It’s a joke term, coined by a friend of Oscar Wilde. It’s the opposite of paederast – it refers to a man who is interested only in women.’
Gilchrist smiled back, then frowned.
‘Tamsin Stanhope – a woman scorned, eh?’
‘She reminded me of that politician’s wife who took revenge on her husband when he left her for a younger woman. You know, she told the newspaper she’d taken his penalty points for a driving offence?’
‘And they both ended up in jail,’ Gilchrist said as Heap took them out of town. ‘Where’s your house, by the way, Bellamy?’
‘Over the top end – near the prison, ma’am.’
She smiled. ‘Can’t leave work behind, eh?’
‘It would appear not, ma’am. But going back to Ms Stanhope – if you’re comparing her to the “hell hath no fury” woman, then you’re actually saying she was capable of killing him.’
‘Capable but absent when it happened,’ Gilchrist said.
‘Apparently. A hit man?’
‘Would you know how to hire a hit man, Bellamy? I’m not sure I would, even with all my privileged knowledge. How would an ordinary woman know? Especially in Lewes. An extremist animal rights activist capable of any atrocity against humans to protect badgers and toads wouldn’t be hard to find. But Stanhope would have to do a damn good spin job to get him or her to kill her husband.’
Heap smiled. ‘I’d like to talk some more to Mrs Medavoy. And see what else the phone records come up with. DC Sylvia Wade back in the office is working through those.’
‘Fine,’ Gilchrist said, a little distracted.
‘You have a better idea, ma’am?’
‘No, no – I was just thinking that, actually, it wouldn’t be entirely implausible for one of the more sociopathic activists to commit a murder if there were the right lever. Perhaps we should do more research on Tamsin Stanhope to see who her known associates past and present are. Get Sylvia to start by seeing if she was part of the anti-fracking demonstrations. Oh, and get her to talk to whoever was supposed to have been on security duty at the lido that night. Find out why he wasn’t and more generally if there are any names of regular troublemakers we should be following up.’
She stifled a yawn.
‘How are you getting on with tracking down Philip Coates?’
‘He’s proving unresponsive so far. He works from home so I’ve left messages on his voicemail, both his landline and mobile.’
‘OK – well, let’s see what the staff at the David Lloyd centre can tell us.’
Bob Watts was in the outdoor pool at his gym the morning after he brought Kate Simpson back from Coniston. He liked to go during what he called the ‘sweet hour’, that time after all the eager beavers wanting to do their pre-work exercise had gone and before the pensioners came in and clogged up the lanes.
He did an hour of front crawl and treated himself to ten minutes of back crawl at the end. He took his goggles off for this so he could enjoy the clouds unhindered drifting across the morning sky and the silvery planes from Gatwick leaving vapour trails in their wake.
The water felt uncomfortably warm by the end since his body had begun to adapt to the colder water he’d been swimming in. Even so, after he’d showered he sat in the sauna for five minutes. He wasn’t big on saunas. He wasn’t patient enough to sit and do nothing. However, his muscles ached from the previous day’s long swim so he wanted to soothe them.
He was sitting in the café with a pint of orange juice when he saw Sarah Gilchrist and Bellamy Heap come into the foyer. He saw them flash their warrant cards at reception then step away. Gilchrist looked around and spotted him. He gave a little wave and Gilchrist leaned down to say something to Heap then both of them walked over.
‘Good morning, Bob,’ Gilchrist said. ‘I forgot this was your gym.’
‘My pool, really,’ Watts said, nodding at Heap. ‘Morning, detective sergeant.’
‘Morning, sir. Congratulations on your time yesterday in Coniston.’
Gilchrist looked quizzical.
‘Kate and I swam the length of Lake Coniston yesterday,’ Watts explained. He turned to Heap. ‘Kate did a good job too. Very impressive.’
‘She’s really stiff this morning,’ Heap said. ‘And she said somebody died during the swim.’
‘Yeah. It can happen – not to Kate, Bellamy. This guy was much older. Friend of the organizers actually so that was a bit of a downer all round. But onwards and upward, eh?’
‘Bob,’ Gilchrist said, trying not to sound impatient, ‘don’t suppose you’ve come across a swimmer called Roland Gulliver in the pool? Maybe doing butterfly?’
‘No butterfly swum in the pool at the time I’m there,’ he said. ‘But Roland Gulliver – don’t know the name. What’s he look like?’
As Heap described him, Gilchrist glanced back towards the reception desk. A tanned young woman, smartly dressed in a navy-blue fitted suit, was walking towards them, her pony tail swishing.
Watts was shaking his head. ‘Doesn’t spring to mind. What’s he done?’
‘Got himself murdered,’ Gilchrist said as she turned to the young woman. ‘Let’s catch up later, Bob.’
Kate had been badly shaken by her horrible encounter with the feral teenagers but it wasn’t long before anger replaced the shock. The next day she had begun her research and she had proposed a documentary to Southern Shores Radio about crime committed by delinquent teens in Brighton. To her surprise, they’d gone for it.
Delinquent. It was an old word she’d latched onto because she liked the sound of it but she couldn’t quite see how it had come to be used in the first place. She knew it was from the Latin – her parents had at least sent her to a good school, though most of it hadn’t taken – but she didn’t know why. The literal translation was to leave completely which sort of made sense but only sort of. It was almost the same as to relinquish.
She noted that the term juvenile delinquency was rarely used in these days of ASBOs. Then she smiled at herself as she realized this was all Bellamy. This was the kind of stuff he wondered about and explored and now he’d got her doing it.
There were two main youth gangs in Brighton: Milldean Muscle and the Avengers. They shoplifted, mugged, attacked gays and transgender people, foreign students and asylum seekers. She’d asked her friend, Sarah Gilchrist, about them. Over a glass of wine, naturally.
‘We’ve always had teen gangs of some sort,’ Gilchrist said. ‘You go back to the teddy boys in the late fifties. Then the mods and rockers. Then the skinheads. And it all comes out of the same thing: poverty. The same housing estates, the same families. Generations of criminals.’ She shook her head. ‘This town.’
‘Yes but not this young,’ Kate protested. ‘You didn’t have twelve-year-old teddy boys.’
‘But that’
s just a reflection of the way kids are growing up quicker these days.’
‘I contacted your special task force about what happened to me,’ Kate said.
‘And?’
‘They were sympathetic but not much help. Told me other stories. Yob behaviour on the top deck of buses was the least of it, although their rampaging through a bus could be terrifying. They attacked innocent shoppers in the city centre, goaded commuters in Hove.’
Kate had the name of a gang member. Darrel Jones. She phoned his mother now.
‘He don’t do nothing wrong,’ she squawled. In the background Kate could hear the 16-year-old boy raging. His mother insisted her son didn’t cause trouble or commit crimes. Kate insisted he had been identified as one of the ringleaders by the police. His mother swore he was being picked on by the police. Darrel came on the phone.
‘You put my name in the paper, you stupid bitch, I’ll go fucking mad, you mug. And plus I’m not allowed my name in paper. I’m too young, you silly fucking cow.’
‘I work for the radio,’ Kate said calmly. Not adding ‘you moron’, though she wanted to. ‘So you’re a member of which gang?’
‘Gang? Int no gang. Just friends, right? Hang out together. Nuffin wrong with that.’
‘Are you Milldean Muscle or the Avengers?’
‘Neither – I ain’t no fucking bum bandit like those pussies. Wouldn’t have nothing to do with them, you cow.’
‘Can your mother hear you address another woman like that?’
‘Address what? I ain’t addressing nothing. What – I’m talking to the Post Office now? Fucking stupid bitch.’
‘Could you put your mother back on?’
The line went dead.
Gilchrist and Heap were sitting with Constable Sylvia Wade back at the station. The duty manager of the pool had had little information of use to them. Heap had phoned a couple of days before so that all the staff could be asked about Gulliver’s acquaintances and the man in the sauna. Gulliver didn’t seem to hang out with anyone in particular there and the description Bilson had given of the man he’d met in the sauna had drawn blanks.
‘Security at the Lido that night was supposed to be a man called Terry Dean who called in sick,’ Sylvia Wade said to Gilchrist and Heap. ‘He works for the council as a lifeguard for his day job, usually down by the West Pier.’
‘What was wrong with him?’ Gilchrist said.
‘Hangover, he said, but probably drunk or still drinking. It had been his day off and he’d been drinking with his mates – someone’s birthday – in HA! HA! at lunchtime then they’d gone on a bit of a bar crawl along the boardwalk.’
‘Did he have anything of interest to say?’
‘Quite a bit actually, though only some of it might actually be useful. He said the deceased banged on a lot about the broken window theory, ma’am. Which I had to look up.’
‘I’d be the same, Sylvia,’ Gilchrist said. She glanced at Heap. ‘Big Brain, on the other hand …’
‘Before all our times, ma’am, but we did cover it in training and it certainly would have application in somewhere like Milldean. I believe it was used for a while as the basis for a policing policy adopted by the chief constable who preceded Bob Watts.’
‘And?’
Heap glanced at Sylvia Wade who nodded for him to continue.
‘It has been around since the early 1980s. It’s about norm-setting. It looks at the consequences of minor disorder and vandalism on additional crime and anti-social behaviour. If you keep the urban environment in a well-ordered condition, there won’t be an escalation into further vandalism or more serious crime.’
‘I remember,’ Gilchrist said. ‘You come down hard on litter-dropping so you don’t have knifings?’
‘Somewhat crude, if I may say, ma’am, but yes. Fix problems when they are small to stop them getting bigger. Replace the broken windows quickly and vandals won’t break more. And, yes, sort that litter every day and it won’t accumulate.’
‘Gulliver was quite evangelical about it, apparently,’ Wade said.
‘Yet he had no police background,’ Gilchrist mused.
‘He was approaching it from the opposite end. He recognized that the police can’t do that alone. It requires the participation of the community. According to Dean, he banged on about people feeling a sense of ownership and responsibility towards an area. If a community doesn’t care about broken windows and vandalism, if it accepts disorder, then there’s little the police can do.’
‘That kind of makes sense, and I suppose is the thinking behind the multi-agency approach we’ve all been stuck with lately,’ Gilchrist said. ‘But I’m not sure I believe major crimes will be prevented if minor ones are dealt with quickly.’
‘There are correlations though, ma’am,’ Heap said. ‘On the roads, a good percentage of those drivers without insurance are involved in other crime.’
‘But for a community to get involved policing itself in some way is a stepping stone to vigilantism,’ Gilchrist said.
‘Gulliver talked in terms of community watchmen and women,’ Wade said.
‘Patrolling the streets?’ Gilchrist said.
‘No, just keeping a lookout. Local businesses, institutions, twenty-four-hour shops give a sense of having “eyes on the street”. And, with reference to the lido, keeping a watch on the building.’
‘The theory went out of favour as I recall,’ Heap said. ‘Local residents often felt that it wasn’t their responsibility – they paid their council tax for someone else to do it. We know that people often refuse to go to someone’s help not out of selfishness or lack of concern but because they can’t think of a plausible reason for accepting personal responsibility. Others, quite understandably, just don’t want to put themselves in harm’s way. But the main reason it went out of favour was that critics said correlation and causality were not the same and the relationship between minor and major crime was minimal.’
‘Was there a specific reason Gulliver organized the security for the lido or was it in response to trouble?’ Gilchrist asked Wade.
‘Couple of break-ins and graffiti.’
‘Local kids?’
‘That was the assumption. Or one of the street gangs.’
‘Dean has come across them?’ Gilchrist said.
‘He has and says they are a real pain because, of course, they are under age so normal rules of control don’t apply – as we well know, ma’am.’
‘Anyone we’ve been looking at?’
‘I’m investigating that,’ Wade said.
‘Have we still got a police presence at the crime scene?’ Gilchrist asked Heap.
‘I believe so, ma’am.’
‘Find out from whoever has been down there if any kids have been hanging around. Get names and details. Milldean Muscle or the Avengers, for instance?’
‘Will do, ma’am.’
She looked around the table.
‘Kids and knives, boys and girls, kids and knives.’
EIGHT
Margaret Lively was sitting on a stool at a high table in a first-floor bar and grill at Victoria when Watts met her again. He still hadn’t figured out a way to say something clever about her last name.
The table was beside a long window that looked down on the busy concourse. Watts looked out of the window before kissing her on the cheek.
‘Great location,’ he said as he took another stool.
‘I spied on you as you came across the concourse with your friend,’ she said with a smile.
‘His name is Jimmy Tingley,’ Watts said. ‘We travelled up together. He’s an old friend.’
‘He looked … compact,’ she said.
Watts laughed. ‘That’s a very good description of him,’ he said. ‘Unobtrusive too – that’s his stock in trade.’ He saw her puzzled look. ‘In the kind of work he does.’
‘And what kind of work is that?’ she said cautiously.
Watts spread his hands. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not house-t
rained. We didn’t talk about what I do the other day and I’m sounding horribly cloak-and-dagger and that’s just awful.’
She sat back. ‘You are sounding a bit suspicious.’
‘Well, I’m a police commissioner and my friend Jimmy works a lot with government agencies.’
She looked at him for a long moment.
‘I have no idea where to go with that information,’ she eventually said.
Watts grinned and ordered a large glass of Malbec. She already had a smaller white wine in front her.
‘Sauvignon blanc,’ she said when she saw him look.
As the waitress walked away Watts examined Lively’s face. He wasn’t exactly sure why he was here. She wasn’t as young as he’d thought – she was twenty-eight – but even so that made her almost twenty years younger than him. However, they’d had a pleasant breakfast together and she was easy company.
When his wine came they chinked glasses and she began to tell him about a swimming holiday she had booked with Dolphin Smile for a month’s time on an island off Thailand.
Watts smiled and nodded but he was distracted by memories of his conversation with Tingley on the train up from Brighton. Tingley too had been talking Thailand.
‘Going for a month,’ he said as the train passed over the high viaduct spanning the valley at Ardingly. Both men looked down on Ardingly College to their right.
‘Work?’ Watts said.
‘Some but mostly pleasure.’
‘You’re not still on your journey?’ Watts said. A few months earlier Tingley had been in Vietnam and Cambodia on a kind of remembrance trail for the Cambodian wife of his youth. He had been drawn into a conflict with criminals and artefact smugglers that had ended bloodily.
Tingley shook his head. ‘That’s all done with. But you know me, Bob, I get restless if there’s nothing going on.’
True enough, Watts thought.
‘You should come,’ Lively was saying now, touching his hand with hers. ‘Sounds fantastic.’
Watts shook his head. ‘Tempting as it is,’ he said, ‘swimming in warm water would wreck my training schedule for the Channel. I have to build up resistance to the cold.’
Lively shook her head.
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