by Ford, P. F.
‘What a waste of bloody time that was, Norm,’ he said as they headed back towards their car. ‘Maybe I’m losing my touch. I can’t even remember who that bloke was in church doing all the singing.’
‘Fred Green,’ said Norman. ‘He owns the greengrocer’s in town. He used to deliver to Mr Winter every week, had done for years.’
‘Ah, that’s it! I knew his face but I just couldn’t think who he was or where I knew him from.’
‘And it definitely wasn’t a waste of time,’ said Norman, smugly.
‘It was for me,’ Slater said, sighing. ‘She looked like some old bag lady or something, but I got the feeling she knew Mr Winter. Then when I went to talk to her, she just seemed to vanish into thin air. Did you manage to catch up with the guy who was hiding in the shadows?’
Norman shook his head.
‘He was way too quick for me,’ he said.
‘Bugger!’ said Slater, vehemently. ‘What a bloody useless pair we are. But then I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It’s not as if it’s an ongoing investigation.’
‘Speak for yourself.’ Norman waved his mobile phone at Slater. ‘I got a good photograph, and I got his car registration too!’
‘Well done, Sherlock,’ Slater said, smiling at the smug look on Norman’s face. ‘But you really ought to delete them. This is not a case we’re working on.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ Norman shrugged, chuckling. ‘It doesn’t hurt to practise though, right?’
Chapter 5
It was late on Wednesday morning, two days since Mr Winter’s funeral. Jolly was supposed to be heading back to the station, but she had chosen to take a diversion which took her down Canal Street. Despite her best efforts, and making the RSPCA aware of the lost dog, there had been no sign of him anywhere. She was reluctant to give up on the dog and still felt it was somehow her responsibility to find him. Deep inside, though, she knew there wasn’t much chance of finding him now.
She pulled up outside the little house and stared up at the windows. Quite why she felt so sad about, and responsible for, this particular little old man dying, she couldn’t say. He wasn’t the first old person she had found dead in their home, and she very much doubted he would be the last.
As she closed the car door and turned to walk down the side path, she noticed the gate was wide open. She had left it propped ajar in case the dog came home, but now it was completely open. It was one of those gates that dragged on the ground, so it had to have been pushed. She quickened her pace, hoping the little dog was going to be waiting at the back door and pleased to see someone at last. To her disappointment, there was no dog waiting to greet her. She stopped to look in through the kitchen window, just in case it had somehow got inside. As she peered in the window, her heart leapt as a movement behind her own reflection made her jump.
She spun round to see a gate at the bottom of the garden – some hundred feet away – slamming shut. She sprinted down the garden, cursing herself for those wasted few seconds squinting into the dark kitchen.
She threw the gate open and ran out onto the towpath, but she had no idea which way the culprit had gone. She stared around wildly but there was no sign of anyone in either direction. She thought about starting a search, but she wasn’t even supposed to be here, so she couldn’t really justify wasting time on what was likely to be a fruitless exercise. Annoyed with herself, she made her way back into the garden, making sure to close the gate and put the bolt across. It wasn’t going to stop anyone who was determined to get in but it was the best she could do for now.
She hadn’t been down this end of the garden before, and for the first time she became aware of a tiny shed hidden away behind a small, weather-worn greenhouse. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed it before, then realised it would be hidden from view to anyone looking from the house. There was a small padlock on the shed door, but it was broken, and on closer inspection, Jolly thought it had been broken very recently.
As she pulled the door open, she could see there was hardly anything in the shed, and she wondered why anyone would have wanted to break in. She thought this was probably the work of some junkie looking to pinch a lawnmower or something similar – they’d do anything to make a few quid to help feed a drug habit these days. With a sigh, she made her way back up the garden to the house.
Again, she glanced through the kitchen window. She could see through the kitchen door and on into the hall. Everything looked neat and tidy, just as she’d left it. She had already turned away and taken a couple of steps towards the gate before the realisation struck her – she had closed all the doors inside the house, including the kitchen door. Someone had been inside the house after she had locked up.
Slater turned into Canal Street and made his way slowly towards the two patrol cars and the SOCO’s transit van that were parked outside the crime scene, making it impossible for him to park anywhere close by. Grumbling quietly to himself, he found a space a few houses down and walked the last few yards.
He stopped in the street and looked the house up and down. The houses the Night Caller had robbed so far were all pretty big and expensive. This was a tiny two up, two down. He thought they could probably rule him out as a suspect before they even started.
‘Hi, Jane,’ he said to the waiting PC Jolly as he approached the front door. ‘I didn’t think I’d be coming back to this house any time soon.’
‘It’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’ she said, with a grim smile. ‘But I think we can rule out the Night Caller for this one.’
‘It’s certainly not his preferred size of house, that’s for sure.’
‘I said there was something funny about his death,’ Jolly said, sounding slightly smug.
‘Now let’s not jump to any conclusions,’ he said. ‘It’s probably just kids taking advantage of an empty house. What does it look like?’
‘Imagine a bomb going off in a house this small, but without the fire, and you’ll have a pretty good idea. Come round this way and I’ll show you.’
She led him down the side of the house and around to the back, stopping to indicate the kitchen window. Slater peered through the kitchen and on into the hall.
‘The kitchen’s still neat and tidy,’ said Jolly. ‘The mess is in all the other rooms.’
As Slater looked through the window, a blue figure walked from left to right beyond the doorway.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘Is that a smurf in there?’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ Jolly said, laughing. ‘It’s the SOCOs in their new paper overalls. Apparently white’s no longer the in colour. It seems this season it’s all about blue.’
‘I think pink would have been far more fetching,’ Slater said. ‘I hope that’s not going to affect their performance.’
‘To be fair,’ said Jolly, ‘they’re all over it, but so far they’ve found nothing obviously useful. They’re hopeful there might be some good fingerprints.’
‘Let’s keep our fingers crossed.’ Slater scanned his surroundings. ‘Any sign of a break-in?’
‘No,’ she said, pointedly. ‘But then, if whoever did this has got the spare key that was under the doormat they wouldn’t have needed to break in, would they?’
Slater accepted the implied criticism without response. This was no time to get into an argument about interpretation of facts and the value of hindsight. He still thought he had made the right call based on the available evidence at the time they had found Mr Winter’s body.
‘Have you any idea what’s missing?’ he asked.
‘As I recall, there wasn’t anything worth stealing, but I haven’t had a chance to look around yet. I thought it would be better to let this lot do their thing first, but they did tell me there’s a mark on the wall in the living room where something used to hang. I seem to recall that was a print of some old landscape painting. It won’t have been worth much, although the frame might have been worth a few quid.’
‘This doesn’t make sense at all,�
� said Slater. ‘It has to be kids.’
‘There’s something else. When I got here earlier I just missed someone leaving by the back gate.’
‘Did you see who it was?’
‘No, sorry,’ Jolly said, sighing. ‘Whoever it was had a head start. By the time I got to the gate they’d had plenty of time to get away.’
‘Never mind, Jane,’ said Slater, with an ironic smile. ‘Welcome to the world of sod’s law.’
‘But it’s not all bad news,’ said Jolly, perking up. ‘There was a nice, fresh footprint just inside the gate. They’ve made a cast of it, so at least we’ve got something. And I thought it might be a good idea to make a list of all the car registration numbers that were out in the street at the time. It’s a long shot, but I’ll do a check when I get back. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find one that doesn’t belong to a resident.’
‘Now that’s smart thinking,’ said Slater, approvingly.
Chapter 6
Slater was busy staring into space when the phone extension on his desk began to ring.
‘Chief Smurf here,’ said a familiar voice in his ear. It was Ian Becks, Tinton’s forensic wizard.
‘Ha! So even you admit those new suits make you look like smurfs,’ Slater said, laughing down the phone.
‘I’ll have you know they’re the very latest thing,’ replied Becks. ‘Very high-tech, no fibre shed-’
‘Yes,’ interrupted Slater, ‘and extremely smurf-like. You’ve just admitted it.’
‘Only because I know you lot aren’t going to stop taking the piss. It doesn’t mean I agree with you. Anyway, I didn’t call to ask your opinion about the new suits. I have some news for you about the break-in at Canal Street.’
‘Ah! Right,’ said Slater. ‘I’m all ears.’
‘Okay,’ said Becks. ‘First of all, the footprint we found out in the garden is from a man’s size ten trainer.’
‘So it could be teenagers?’
‘Well, it’s possible there were kids in the garden and Jolly disturbed them. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t kids who broke in just to trash the place. It might be someone trying to make us think it was kids, but this person was too careful for that, but then in another way they weren’t careful enough.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve actually got some evidence this time,’ said Slater.
‘Oh, yes indeed. We have fingerprints.’ Becks sounded proud.
‘Have you managed to match them to any of our regular house breaking guys?’ asked Slater, optimistically.
‘It’s definitely not one of our regulars.’
‘Why not?’
‘I won’t bore you with the science,’ said Becks. ‘But going by the ridge density, the prints we have are those of a woman, and none of our regulars are women.’
‘A woman?’ repeated Slater, in surprise. ‘They’re not Jane Jolly’s, are they?’
‘Wow!’ said Becks, his voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘We’re so thick down here we didn’t think to check.’
‘Err, I’m sorry.’ Slater knew the way he questioned every finding irritated Becks but he couldn’t help himself. He just liked to be thorough. ‘Of course you would have checked. I was just thinking out loud.’
‘Apology accepted. We’ve only found three sets of prints in the whole house. Of course, Mr Winter’s prints are everywhere, and we’ve found the milkman’s in the kitchen, but that’s consistent with him calling in two or three times a week for a cup of tea. But then there’s this third set we can’t account for. They’re in the kitchen and the living room and, weirdly, the face of that grandfather clock is covered in them.’
‘So, do you think it was a woman who broke in and stole the picture from the living room?’ asked Slater.
‘Speculation is your job, mate,’ said Becks. ‘We smurfs just do the clever science stuff. It’s up to you to work out if it’s relevant to your enquiries.’
‘Yeah, right. Thanks, Becksy.’
‘However,’ continued Becks, ‘I will offer a couple of pointers. For a start, you need to remember there hasn’t actually been a break-in. Whoever was in that house had a key to get in.’
‘You can be so pedantic at times,’ said Slater.
‘That’s the scientist in me.’
‘You said a couple of pointers,’ Slater reminded him.
‘Oh yeah. If I was a gambling man, I might put my money on something odd going on in that house.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘We found some tiny paint flecks and dust particles on the old guy’s desk. The paint is from the PC in the room and the dust is the sort that collects inside a PC.’
‘Is there a point to this?’ asked Slater, his patience wearing thin. Becks liked to go all round the houses rather than coming straight to the point.
‘Well, the thing is, the PC lives on the floor so for the paint and dust to get on the desk it would have to be lifted up there and opened up.’
‘So, you’ve done that, and?’
‘We found there was no hard drive in the PC, and the insides have been effectively destroyed.’
‘What’s the use of a PC with no hard disk?’ asked Slater. ‘And why would you keep a PC that didn’t work?’
‘It’s been removed and destroyed very recently,’ said Becks. ‘I’d guess within the last week or two.’
‘Could it have been an accident?’ asked Slater, immediately wishing he hadn’t asked such a stupid question.
‘You can’t accidentally remove a hard disk,’ said Becks, slowly and patiently, as if he were explaining something really complicated to an idiot.
‘But why would anyone do that?’ said Slater, thinking aloud.
‘I can only think of two reasons. First off, you might take it out for repairs or replacement, but then why would you smash up the rest of the computer? However, if there was some information on that computer that you wanted suppressed…’
He left the sentence unfinished and there was a silence as Slater considered the implications of this latest find.
‘But this was just a little old man,’ he said eventually.
‘I’m just putting forward a couple of ideas,’ said Becks. ‘I have no idea if they’re right or wrong, that’s your job.’
‘And it was all put back together?’ asked Slater.
‘Oh yes. You couldn’t tell from just looking at it. If we hadn’t been called in I don’t suppose anyone would have realised unless they’d tried to use it.’
‘Do you think an old guy could do that?’
‘If he knew what he was doing, yes,’ said Becks. ‘But why would he want to? And if he really wanted to destroy his PC, why would he keep it there? Why not just get rid of it?’
Slater’s mind was racing away with him now, and he was wondering what on earth was going on. What at first had seemed to be a sad case of accidental death had suddenly opened up a can of worms.
‘Are you still there?’ asked Becks.
‘Err, yes. Sorry,’ said Slater. ‘My brain’s gone into overdrive.’
‘So you think it’s important, then?’ said Becks, sounding very satisfied with himself.
‘I don’t know,’ mused Slater. ‘I thought we had a simple accidental death followed by the trashing of an empty house. Now I’m not sure what to think. Why is it you manage to complicate things so often?’
‘Smurfy’s law?’ Becks laughed uproariously at his own joke. ‘You’d get bored if it was all straightforward. I’m here to ensure a regular supply of spanners get thrown into the works. It keeps you lot on your toes and stops your brains from rotting.’
‘Right, yes. Thanks for that,’ said Slater, his mind racing off again. ‘Can you be more exact about when it happened?’
‘Sorry mate, you’ve already had my best guess. What’s your point?’
‘Whoever trashed that house last night didn’t care how much mess they made. Does it seem likely that same person would take the trouble to destroy the PC and then put it back together?’
‘It does seem unlikely, doesn’t it? Why not just smash it up like so much of the other stuff was?’
‘Exactly,’ agreed Slater. ‘When do I get the full report, Ian?’
‘I’ll send it through before the end of the day. I’ll bring it up the three flights of stairs myself. I could do with the exercise.’
Slater put the phone in its cradle, but kept his hand on it. He was getting a bad feeling about this. What if Jolly had been right and he’d been too quick to put Mr Winter’s death down to an accident? He raised the phone back to his ear and began tapping in another number.
‘I must admit I was a bit surprised by your call,’ said Dr Eamon Murphy, the resident pathologist at Tinton hospital, as he led Slater into the morgue. ‘When I did the post-mortem I was under the impression there was nothing suspicious and it was an unfortunate accident. Under those circumstances there was no reason to send you a copy of the report.’
‘You’re quite right. We all thought it was an accident,’ said Slater. ‘And that may well be the case still, but there are one or two things that have happened since that make me think we should maybe look again just to be sure.’
Dr Murphy looked doubtful.
‘You do realise this man’s been cremated, don’t you?’ he said, his voice clipped. ‘So if you’re not happy with my results, you can’t have another PM to prove me wrong.’
‘Honestly,’ Slater said, trying to pacify the doctor, ‘I haven’t even seen the PM results, and I’m not here to challenge you. I trust your findings, I just want to see if it’s possible to put another interpretation on them. I mean, you were looking for evidence of a fall, right?’
Murphy still looked a little doubtful but he led Slater over to a desk where a stack of folders leaned precariously towards the edge.
‘There it is on top.’ Murphy pointed to the folders. ‘Help yourself.’
‘Can you talk me through it?’ asked Slater.