The Pandemic Plot

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Beer is fine,’ Ben replied.

  McAllister’s kitchen was a hard-worked space, cluttered but well organised, with gleaming wood surfaces and copper pots hanging over a range. He yanked open a fridge that was as big as his car, pulled out a couple of bottles and tossed one to Ben, along with an opener.

  ‘Langtree Hundred?’ Ben said, looking at the label.

  ‘Local ale. I order it by the crateload. Couldn’t be without it.’

  ‘I take it there’s no Mrs McAllister.’

  ‘Just me and the dog. If there’s a woman out there who’d put up with a crusty old fart like me, she hasn’t turned up yet.’

  ‘You’re not that old.’

  ‘But definitely crusty.’ McAllister seemed to relish the idea, and so Ben wasn’t about to disabuse him of that notion. The cop was poised to dive back inside the cavernous fridge when his expression suddenly froze to a look of horror. ‘Jesus Christ, I just had a terrible thought. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?’

  ‘If it walks, crawls, swims or flies I’ll eat it.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’ McAllister reached into the fridge and came out with a covered pan. Inside it, two enormous steaks had been marinating in wine with some kind of herb seasoning that smelled so aromatic, Ben could have eaten them raw. ‘Not that I have a problem with it, mind,’ McAllister added. ‘There are oodles of wonderful dishes you can make without meat. It’s not like them Vulcans.’

  ‘Vegans.’

  ‘Whatever. You can’t cook a thing for them. Imagine braised carrots and celery or sautéed potatoes without butter. Or worse, with frigging soya margarine.’

  ‘Unthinkable,’ Ben said.

  ‘Heresy is what it is. You don’t have a soul if you don’t eat proper food. Just my opinion. Not that I give a damn about offending people. I’ve been doing that all my life.’

  Ben smiled. ‘You want some help getting dinner going?’

  ‘Think I’ll manage. Help yourself to another beer. It’s a warm evening. Thought we could eat outside. Okay?’

  Ben hung around in the background and watched as the cop got to work, filled with dynamism. It was clear from the expression of pure contentment that spread over his craggy face that McAllister loved cooking much more than he did his chosen profession. After he’d removed a few more items from the fridge he bustled back outside and over to an adjoining outbuilding, from which he dragged a Texas-style barbecue smoker that was roughly the size and shape of a small steam locomotive, with a tall stove pipe at one end. Next he grabbed a sack of charcoal, which he proudly showed Ben. ‘Make it myself out of oak and hickory. Can’t abide these newfangled gas-fired things.’

  McAllister set about lighting the fire, filling the air with smoke. While he was waiting for the coals to come up to temperature he returned to the kitchen to prepare a salad made up of different varieties of organic lettuce from his vegetable garden. Then, once the barbecue was glowing red, he took the two steaks from their marinade pan and laid them with a flourish on the grill.

  ‘Rib eye cuts,’ he declared, as they began to sizzle and give off a wonderful smell. ‘Best steak in the world for grilling. The marinade’s the secret to making them even more tender. They’ll be ready in no time.’

  When the steaks were done, it was time to get out the wine. McAllister, of course, had a great bottle of red set by, opened well in advance so that the wine could breathe, and at the perfect temperature. They sat down to eat at a trestle table in the cottage garden overlooking the riverside with a view of the old mill. The dog lay happily on the grass nearby. Butterflies fluttered around the wild buddleia and the lazy Thames burbled by in the background. Ben hadn’t thought he would have much of an appetite under the circumstances, but the steaks were unbelievably tender and tasted even better than they looked and smelled. The wine was equally delicious and Ben attacked it with gusto. He needed this. If he was to do battle to help Jude’s predicament, in whatever way he could, then he would need all the energy and strength he could get.

  ‘You eat like this every night?’

  McAllister shrugged. ‘Oh, this is nothing fancy. Sometimes I’ll blag a few hours off in the afternoon and spend some time doing something special. Not that I’m that good, you know?’

  ‘This is good enough.’

  They talked for a while about the old watermill, which McAllister was slowly restoring with the long-term goal of creating his own restaurant, the Three Bay Leaves. ‘Three leaves together like an Irish shamrock, see?’

  ‘I get it. Very artful.’

  ‘It won’t be the biggest or swankiest restaurant in the county. Just the best. We’ll do eighteen to twenty covers a night, tops. When word gets around, you’ll have to book a month in advance.’

  ‘So you mean to quit the force eventually.’

  ‘That’s my dream. But to make it come true is no mean feat, on my salary.’ McAllister was doing all the work himself. An old odd-bod called Sparrowhawk, who lived on a river boat, cruised up now and then to lend a helping hand, but it was slow progress. McAllister didn’t envisage handing in his resignation any time soon. ‘Besides,’ he said through a mouthful of steak, ‘what would they do without me?’

  By the time they’d finished eating and a second bottle of wine was flowing, the conversation drifted back to Jude. ‘I never knew you had kids,’ McAllister said.

  ‘Neither did I, for twenty years.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Like that.’

  ‘No,’ Ben said. ‘Not like that.’

  ‘Let me guess. It’s a long story.’

  Ben said, ‘Tell me more about the witnesses.’

  Chapter 7

  McAllister said, ‘They’re the Heneghan sisters. A couple of old biddies who’ve been living together in the same wee house in Little Denton since about 1947, with a couple dozen moggies. Elsie’s ninety and Maureen’s eighty-four. From what I can gather talking to the locals, they spend their days going around shaking a collection can for animal charities, and woe betide you if you don’t bung them some change when they come a-calling. Seems they were doing their usual rounds of the village early yesterday afternoon when they happened to turn up at the vicarage and heard a load of shouting going on inside. When they peered in the front door, there was your boy Jude having a pretty strong argument with the tenant, Carter Duggan. According to their police statements, which are identical, it was Jude who was doing most of the shouting. They described him as being a lot more aggressive and threatening than Duggan.’

  ‘Threatening in what way?’

  McAllister reached for the wine and topped their glasses up. ‘How about “Shut your mouth or I’ll kill you”? Sounds pretty threatening.’

  Ben was stunned. ‘Jude said that?’

  ‘Each of the Heneghan sisters made an independent statement, and they both reported what he said more or less word for word.’

  ‘Jude’s never threatened anyone in his life before.’

  ‘Well, he has now.’

  ‘Was he drunk?’

  ‘Clean as a whistle. Tested negative for alcohol or drugs on admission to the station.’

  ‘Which has to mean that Duggan provoked him somehow. The guy must have said something really terrible to wind Jude up that much. Shut your mouth about what?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ McAllister replied. ‘Whatever Duggan might have said, the Heneghan sisters got there too late to hear it. And your boy refused to tell the questioning officers anything more. All we know is, he made the threat.’

  Ben swallowed some more wine, along with his frustration, and said grimly, ‘Okay. But the sisters didn’t witness Jude assaulting Duggan in any way.’

  ‘No, their turning up interrupted the argument. At that point Jude pushed past them, went storming out of the vicarage and over to the garage, and took off like a bat out of hell in a silver Toyota. DVLA records show that it’s his own car.’

  Ben asked, ‘How did he get to the vicarage?’

  ‘Local taxi firm picked him
up from Faringdon railway station.’

  ‘So that explains why he was at the vicarage,’ Ben said. ‘He went there to pick up his car. Perfectly innocent thing to do.’

  ‘Fair enough. So why were they arguing?’

  Ben couldn’t answer that. ‘What happened next?’

  McAllister said, ‘We know that he went from there to a hotel in Marcham, and booked a room for the night. CCTV footage shows him leaving the hotel on foot to visit a nearby fish and chip shop early that evening. Didn’t go into any pubs or have anything to drink, as we already know from his test result. Later that evening he drove back to Little Denton, and returned to the vicarage.’

  ‘You don’t have CCTV video of that. There isn’t a camera anywhere in the whole village.’

  ‘No, which makes the timing a little hazy because we don’t know exactly when he got there,’ McAllister said. ‘Here’s what we do know. At eight-twenty that evening the old guy next door was in his garden when he heard what he described as a short, sharp, blood-curdling scream from the vicarage. I love that word, “blood-curdling”. You’d be amazed how often it comes up in police statements.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was a man’s voice screaming. After that, silence. The neighbour was wondering what the hell was up, but he didn’t want to intrude, or maybe he was a bit freaked out by it. So he tried phoning the vicarage’s landline number to ask if everything was okay. No reply. After a few more minutes the old guy goes round there in person to check things out. He notices the silver Toyota in the driveway, which hadn’t been there earlier. Duggan’s car was a black Ford Mondeo, a rental. Anyhow, the old guy knocks on the door. Still no reply, but at this point he notices that the door’s ajar, and he gets a feeling that something’s definitely wrong. He’s a little nervous but does what most folks would do, and goes inside calling “Hello? Hello? Is everything all right?” And that’s when he found the body.’

  ‘In the kitchen,’ Ben said, recalling what Jude had told him.

  McAllister nodded. ‘Lake of blood all over the floor, and there’s Carter Duggan lying in the middle of it, hacked to bits and dead as disco with the knife stuck up to its hilt in his chest.’

  ‘Jude told me he was the one who found Duggan.’

  McAllister made a sceptical snorting noise. ‘Well, I’m not going to say he was the one who found him first. But he was definitely there in the room before the neighbour walked in. The old guy’s police statement describes him standing right over the body, kind of staring at it in fascination. When he noticed the old guy in the doorway, he turned slowly to look at him and just said, “He’s dead.” It was the neighbour who called 999. Your boy was apprehended twenty-two minutes later, when the officers got to the scene.’

  ‘So Jude didn’t try to leave the scene?’

  ‘No, he sat and waited quietly for the police to arrive.’

  ‘And you don’t find that strange, for a guilty man not to run?’

  McAllister made that noncommittal gesture of his. ‘It’s not actually that unusual for killers to let themselves get arrested like that. It’s as if they’ve resigned themselves, knowing that it’ll only make it worse for them if they try to evade capture. If the armed response boys get called in, you’re liable to end up riddled with bullets.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Ben said. ‘Except Jude isn’t a killer.’

  ‘His fingerprints all over the knife say otherwise.’

  ‘Were Jude’s the only prints on it?’

  ‘No, there were two sets. Duggan had been handling the knife, too. Which is pretty unremarkable, seeing as he was living there. Unless you’re going to claim that he stabbed himself?’

  Ben lit a cigarette. The sun was sinking behind the trees, casting a golden light over the river. He said, ‘I still can’t understand why Jude’s prints could have been on the knife.’

  ‘Um, well, there is one fairly obvious explanation,’ McAllister said. ‘Chances are that when you pick up a knife to murder someone, unless you wear gloves, you’ll leave a neat little trail for the forensic guys.’

  ‘Excluding that possibility,’ Ben said, shaking his head. ‘Which I am. Because it’s not possible that it happened that way.’

  McAllister gave him a heavy stare. ‘You really want to believe that, don’t you? Okay, so how else do you explain it?’

  ‘He’s only just come back from the USA and this guy was living in his house. Is it possible that the prints were on the knife the whole time he was away?’

  McAllister considered it briefly. ‘Technically, if they’re not smudged or wiped away, prints can remain on a clean, smooth surface for years. They’re basically oil, so they don’t evaporate. But you’re talking about a key item of kitchen equipment that’s in daily use and washed and dried each time afterwards. How many thousands of times have I cleaned my knives?’

  ‘Not everyone’s a chef like you. Maybe Duggan ate out every night, or lived mostly on takeaways. He might have handled the knife once or twice but never needed to clean it.’

  ‘Possible,’ McAllister said. ‘But answer me this. Suppose there’s a third person involved, this hypothetical mystery killer who managed to sneak into the house, do the dirty and disappear again like a ghost. Why did they just happen to pick up a knife that was already there? If they’d turned up at the house intending to murder Duggan for whatever reason, wouldn’t they have brought their own weapon? What kind of murderer comes unprepared?’

  Ben had already thought about that. ‘Just because the killer used the knife from Jude’s kitchen, it doesn’t mean he came unprepared. He could have been carrying his own knife or any other kind of weapon, but he just didn’t happen to use it.’

  ‘How does that work?’

  ‘Easy. Duggan’s in the kitchen when he hears a noise that alerts him to the presence of an intruder. Feeling threatened, he grabs the knife from the block. Next thing, he’s attacked, tries to defend himself. There’s a struggle, but the intruder gets the better of him and uses the knife against him. The intruder’s wearing gloves, so he leaves no prints on the handle.’

  McAllister looked doubtful. ‘Duggan was an ex-cop and a fairly big, tough guy. He’d know how to take care of himself.’

  ‘He’d been out of the police a long time,’ Ben said. ‘Besides, if we’re honest, how many active police officers do you know who can withstand a serious lethal attack from an expert?’

  ‘So now your hypothetical intruder is some kind of Ninja assassin.’

  Ben said, ‘He got in and out without anyone noticing, and left a dead man in his wake. That takes skill.’

  ‘I see. And all this just happens to take place moments before Jude arrives on the scene. Sorry, I’m not buying it.’

  Ben thought for a moment. ‘Okay. Backtrack. You said that the neighbour tried to phone Duggan after hearing the scream, but then some time went by before they went over to knock on the door. How much of a time interval are we looking at?’

  McAllister said, ‘He was a little vague in his statement. We know the exact time he called next door, and when he dialled 999. It leaves a realistic window of maybe eight to ten minutes.’

  ‘Long enough for the real killer to have disappeared, and for Jude to turn up and find Duggan lying there dead. Next thing, the neighbour walks in and sees him standing over the body.’

  ‘Just by chance. Very convenient.’

  ‘Or very inconvenient for him, if he didn’t do it,’ Ben said. ‘It’s his house. He grew up there. Nothing too amazing about his wanting to hang around the place.’

  ‘Hmm. Technically it was Duggan’s house at the time, being as he had a proper tenancy lease through a rental agency.’

  ‘All the same, there could be a hundred reasons why Jude could have gone back there.’

  ‘The most obvious one being to carry out the murder threat that he’d made earlier the same day, in front of eyewitnesses. That’s how everyone’s going to see it.’

  ‘Then they’d be wrong,’ Ben
said. ‘Did Jude have the victim’s blood on him?’

  ‘On his shoes, plenty of it.’

  ‘That doesn’t prove anything. Sounds like you couldn’t walk into that kitchen without standing in a puddle of blood. What about his hands, his clothes?’

  McAllister hesitated, and said nothing.

  ‘Come on, McAllister. You don’t stab and hack a man to death, up close and personal, without getting covered in blood. Especially if he’s not inclined to just stand there and let you do it. You get it up to your elbows, on your face, in your hair.’

  ‘Speaking from experience, are you?’

  ‘You know what I used to do for a living,’ Ben said. ‘I was trained to neutralise the enemy by whatever means are most appropriate. Knives are silent and effective. It’s an ugly business but that’s how it is.’

  ‘Jeez. The biggest thing I ever carved up was a side of pork. I don’t know, maybe he could have wiped himself clean before the cops arrived.’

  ‘Blood is tacky and sticky. You need a long, hot shower to get it off.’

  ‘Or maybe he just didn’t get any on him.’

  ‘No chance,’ Ben said. ‘There has to be another explanation as to what he was doing there at that moment.’

  ‘But what if there isn’t?’ McAllister countered.

  ‘He didn’t do it.’

  ‘He’s the only one with any motive. He threatened the guy.’

  ‘Duggan was a cop. You make enemies, in that line of work. Someone he put in jail, or a relative.’

  ‘Tell me about it. But I’m presuming his enemies are in Canada. Why would they jump on a plane and come all the way out to a quiet little Oxfordshire village to do the dirty?’

  Ben made no reply.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ McAllister said. ‘Of course you don’t want to believe it. You’re a decent guy. But you’re also sounding like a guy who’s desperately clutching at straws to exonerate his son. Problem is, whichever way you cut it, he looks guilty as hell.’