Felix felt Margaret at his shoulder and took a deep breath. It was now or never.
Reggie Cann bent and kissed the cheek of a girl at a table, and Felix turned sharply and hurried away.
The girl was Amanda.
The Big Spender
Calvin drove DCI King to Old Town to check Reggie Cann’s alibi.
CompuWiz was a nondescript shop in a short row opposite the fire station and between the narrow terraced houses. It was a ten-minute drive from Abbotsham – only five from the police station.
A little bell rang as DCI King opened the door, but it still took a few minutes before anyone emerged from the gloomy interior, so she and Calvin had plenty of time to look at the mysterious electronic components in the dusty glass cabinets and the small selection of used laptops in the window.
‘Right?’ said the fifty-something man who finally did appear with stubble, glasses and an Asteroids T-shirt that curved space–time around his belly.
‘Are you Daz?’ King said, showing him her ID.
Daz sneered. ‘I’m always telling you lot, I don’t buy stolen gear, I don’t sell stolen gear.’
‘We’re not here about stolen gear.’
‘Oh,’ said Daz.
‘We’re here about Reggie Cann.’
‘Is he OK? Went to lunch the other day and never came back.’
‘He’s fine.’
‘Oh good,’ Daz said, ‘because he’s in the middle of a Mac and I don’t have a bloody clue about Macs.’
King nodded. ‘What time did he get here on Tuesday?’
‘Tuesday? Um, eight thirty-ish? Usual time, I think.’
‘And what time did he leave for lunch?’
‘About twelve? I’m not a Nazi about it. Is something wrong?’
‘Does he usually go home for lunch?’
‘Yeah. He only lives in Abbotsham and he’s too cheap to buy a pasty. What’s the big deal?’
‘His father died,’ she told him.
Daz frowned. ‘His father’s dead? Are you sure?’
King cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘The doctor seemed sure.’
‘I just mean . . . I thought his grandfather was sick.’
‘He’s sick too,’ King said. ‘They’re both sick. Were both sick. One still is.’
‘Well,’ Daz said, and puffed out his cheeks. ‘That’s a bit shit.’
‘Yes, it is,’ King said. ‘What did Reggie tell you about his grandfather?’
Daz shrugged. ‘Just that he was sick. Cancer, I think, although maybe I’m wrong. Seems like everybody’s got cancer nowadays, don’t they? I’ve probably got it – just don’t know it yet!’ He laughed.
King waited for him to stop. ‘How about his father? Did he talk about him?’
‘Not so much,’ said Daz.
‘Did he ever talk about either of them wanting to die?’
‘To die? No. Not that I can recall. I mean, he’d talk about how hard it is looking after them and all that. The old man, specially. Like, you wouldn’t let a dog suffer that way for so long, would you?’
‘Reggie said that?’
‘No,’ shrugged Daz. ‘I’m just saying – you’d put a dog down, wouldn’t you?’
They thanked him and left – and drove back to the police station in silence.
At lunchtime, Calvin headed up the hill to the bookies. He had had the bitter misfortune to win his first ever bet on the horses. In honour of his younger brother, he’d had a one-pound each-way bet on a 33–1 shot called Lucky Louis at Worcester. The horse had romped home, and Calvin’s fate was sealed. Now, nearly ten years on, he had a flutter almost every day, and it was only his paranoia about getting into debt that kept him from becoming a complete degenerate.
As it was, he spent many a lunchtime at the Ladbrokes on Bideford High Street, frowning at the newspapers tacked to the walls, and scrawling optimistic Yankees on to the little pink slips, then crumpling them up for less heady Trixies, then discarding those for still-dubious doubles, before finally handing over his cash at the counter. That cash was received by Dead Mike, who was so thin and grey that every breath sounded like a resurrection, or by Sylvie, who had worked in the same shop since the early nineties and knew every loser in town by name – and a few by what they liked for breakfast. In a shop full of men, she’d once been an object of some interest, but those days were long gone, and now she wore her red uniform scarf knotted tight under one ear to keep her chins in check. She still flirted occasionally, apparently on the basis of having a monopoly.
Women didn’t come into the bookies.
Bookmakers could sponsor pretty girls in sashes at sporting events until the cows came home, but Calvin had never seen another woman in Ladbrokes apart from Old Greybeard, who sat bundled up in an anorak and wellington boots, come rain or come shine, and never spoke to anyone, except now and then to tell Dead Mike she’d take a price.
Calvin didn’t think she counted.
The core membership of the shop was about a dozen deep. Mostly unemployed or self-employed. A few were actually employed – probably by some poor bastard who fondly imagined they were somewhere else, doing something else. King of the regulars was Dennis Matthews. Den to those who knew him, Denny to those who thought they did. Matthews was six-four and three hundred pounds and never went anywhere without his inflatable haemorrhoids cushion.
Nobody laughed at him.
He had the red face, buggy blue eyes and tight yellow curls of a cherub who’d outdrunk his child-star status. When he sat, he spread his arms and legs to every quarter, so that anyone who found themselves sitting beside him, or behind him, or afore, must give way or risk becoming intimately acquainted with his elbow, or his giant shoulder, or his careless boot. In this way he had created a large Dennis Matthews-shaped space in the bookies, which only he was qualified to fill.
Nobody else sat in his seat. All the regulars knew that Matthews had been behind bars for assault and nobody wanted to be the reason he went back there. They kowtowed to him. They showed him the bets they were having or had had, offered to fetch him coffee from the machine, laughed at his non-jokes, agreed with his rants, and generally did all they could to avoid getting in his bad books. Even Dead Mike let him put bets on past the ‘off’ time. Sometimes two fences past the off . . .
Despite all this, he was an unlucky man. Nobody in the Bideford branch of Ladbrokes could compare to Dennis Matthews when it came to hard luck. When he lost, he would get up and stand in front of the big screen – so close that his nose almost distorted the pixels – and glare at the errant horse/dog/jockey, as if fury itself might turn back time. When that happened, everybody tiptoed around the shop. Many left and came back later when Matthews had gone and they could see the TV again.
Even when he won, he bitched like a loser. He should always have had more on. Or his winnings barely covered what he’d lost on the same horse over the past six months because the trainer was crooked and the jockey was crooked and the horse should be shot. There was never a silver lining around Dennis Matthews’ cloud. At the start of the day he would drop heavily into his seat and grumble, I hope I break even – I could do with the money.
The only person who ever willingly sat beside him was a small, surprised-looking fellow called Shifty Sands.
Of course, he hadn’t been christened Shifty. His parents had named him Simon. But in a town where the tide emptied the river twice a day, having a name like Sands was just asking for trouble. To be fair, he didn’t look shifty. He was about thirty and had the wide eyes and raised brows of a man who was eager to please, although anyone who tried to cadge a fag off him as he puffed industriously in the doorway quickly discovered that that was an illusion.
Shifty smoked forty a day, so was up and down like a yo-yo in a chimney, but when he sat, he and Matthews sat together, cursing fat jockeys and wishing glue on their h
orses. Every four years they also cursed Olympic athletes, swimmers and cyclists, who, it turned out, were all part of the same conspiracy to steal their money. Money that was rarely well-gotten and always tax-free.
Calvin had been raised around men like Matthews – blustery alpha males with chips on their shoulders and dirt under their nails – and his deference to someone bigger and more dangerous was inbred. He and Matthews were not friendly, but they were not unfriendly either. They would nod a surly acknowledgement of each other’s status as regulars, and occasionally bumped elbows at the Racing Post pinned to the wall when they were both considering an investment.
They’d never spoken, though.
Until today.
For some reason, when Calvin joined him to look at the latest Derby betting, Matthews dragged a finger the size and complexion of a raw Lincolnshire sausage down the list of jockeys booked to ride in the Derby.
‘Thieving little pricks,’ he muttered.
Calvin Bridge was an officer of the law, but he had never felt more like a man.
Which was why he made a terrible mistake . . .
The Derby had never been a lucky race for Calvin. He preferred the jumps, where outrageous misfortune occasionally gifted him a long-odds winner that would have been a loser, but for the final fence.
However, back in December he and Jackie Braddick had been called to the rival bookmakers, William Hill, down on the Quay, after one punter had stabbed another – apparently during a heated debate about Strictly Come Dancing.
Calvin had spoken to the alleged victim, Tomas Novak, who’d had two small triangular puncture wounds in his cheek. Bookies’ pens were triangular to stop them rolling off the counters, so it didn’t take Poirot to identify the weapon of choice. Despite the holes in his face, Novak had declined to name his assailant, and the shop had been suspiciously empty by the time they’d arrived, so Calvin and Jackie had deduced that any witnesses to the assault were declining too, and the whole matter had to be dropped there and then.
However, while Calvin was trying to persuade Novak to at least go to hospital, the latter had had a winning forecast on the dogs and they’d both stopped to watch it come in at odds of 26–1. Calvin had shown interest in Novak’s alleged system and – presumably by way of compensation – Novak had looked around furtively, then whispered to him the name of the Derby winner.
This was nothing new. Men in bookies were always whispering winners into each others’ ears. Calvin had done it himself on occasion – murmured the name of a horse he fancied and then, when it didn’t win, he and the man attached to the ear would both pretend he’d never spoken.
But if it did win, then the whisperer was thanked and possibly materially rewarded with a cup of soup from the machine or a Mars bar – and moved a tiny notch up the rankings of regulars.
Calvin wasn’t a William Hill man. He was a Ladbrokes man, so he didn’t know Novak from Adam. Therefore, before he’d joined Jackie in the car, he had surreptitiously checked out the man’s credentials with the manager. They turned out to be impeccable, as Novak’s brother had once ridden in the Pardubice.
The tip’s name was Rumbaba, and Calvin had had fifty quid to win at 20–1. It was a huge bet for him; he usually confined his outlay to a fiver, spread as thin as Marmite over several horses.
In March the horse had won a good mile race on the all-weather and was cut to 10–1 and when the trainer retained the excellent D. Mahony for the Derby ride, the bookies slashed the price to sixes, and then quickly to 9–2, and suddenly Rumbaba was third favourite behind only the usual Ballydoyle hotpot and the winner of the Dewhurst.
Now, with only a few weeks to go to the race, Calvin was in possession of a ticket potentially worth a month’s wages, and could barely sleep. The first thing he did whenever he went into the bookies was check the ante-post Derby betting and shiver at the anticipation of a coup.
And so, when Dennis Matthews deigned to share his opinion on jockeys with him, Calvin’s entire history moved him to reciprocate. And he did so with the only thing he had that might impress the big man.
He tapped Rumbaba’s name and murmured, ‘I’ve got that at twenties.’
Dennis Matthews grunted. His bulging eyes flickered up and down the list, and he pursed his cherubic lips and, after a minute or two, he slid a fresh slip from the well in the nearest counter and picked up a little blue pen and wrote on it in big careful letters:
RUMBABA. DERBY.
Calvin tried not to show how much it meant to have Dennis Matthews give him that affirmation.
But as he watched Matthews complete the slip, he nearly fainted.
£500 WIN.
Calvin went clammy. Five hundred quid? To win? On his say-so? Worse – on the say-so of some William Hill idiot whose brother was a thieving little prick and who didn’t have the good sense to move his face out of the way after the first stab of a bookies’ pen? Calvin felt faint. What if the horse lost? Lost five hundred quid? Of Dennis Matthews’ money! He had to say something. Take it back. Say he’d been joking. But if he did that, and then the horse won, then where did that leave him? Matthews would find out sooner or later that he’d won big on the Derby, and then it would look as if he’d just not wanted Matthews to share in the spoils.
Calvin watched Dennis Matthews hand the slip to Dead Mike with the numb horror he could only imagine feeling while watching his firstborn ride a tricycle off a cliff.
One macho moment, one childish boast and suddenly Rumbaba had to win the Derby, or Calvin Bridge knew he was in serious trouble.
The Set-up
Felix had come up the hill so fast that he could barely breathe.
‘Margaret,’ he panted. ‘I need your help!’
He put one hand on her headstone to steady himself, the other on his heart, which had not stopped racing since he’d lurched away from the café on the quay.
Amanda and Reggie Cann.
What did it mean?
What did it mean?
If only Margaret were here! She would know.
He tried to calm down and think it all through.
If Amanda knew Reggie, then she must have known Albert was not Charles Cann. And if she had known it, then she’d lied to him. Right to his face. She didn’t look like a liar. But what did a liar look like? Felix didn’t know, but felt utterly wounded by betrayal. He’d trusted Amanda and she’d lied to him. She’d told him about her nan dying of cancer. Was that a lie too? Who would lie about such a thing? And when she had wept he’d given her his hanky. She still had it. A liar had his hanky! He had covered for her. Felt sorry for her. Felt connected to her by shared trauma and her mascara on his jacket. But now Felix realized that she was connected to someone else, someway else, and that he really didn’t know her at all.
It was a set-up!
His gut lurched in response to the thought. Felix couldn’t remember the last time he’d known something in his gut – maybe he never had – but it was there now.
If it was a set-up, then Albert Cann’s death was no accident. Somebody had meant to kill him.
And used him to do it.
Felix swayed with horror.
Then he turned away from his wife and his son and stumbled down the hill like a drunk.
The lowering sun was opening long, shadowy graves in the grass that threatened to swallow him as he lurched back to the car. By the time he got there he was shaking so hard he could barely find the lock with the key.
He opened the driver’s door and Mabel jumped out, ready for her walk.
‘No, Mabel, here . . . Stay . . .’
He opened the back door and bent and scooped her into his arms.
The heft was so like that of a child that for one divine moment Felix closed his eyes and wrapped himself around that warm weight, and pressed it to his chest and his cheek and thought of a boy – maybe two, maybe three –
with perfect little teeth, each with a perfect little gap; a boy whose tiny bottom fitted neatly into the crook of his arm; a boy who still smelled like a baby even though he could already say all the important things.
Mummy
Daddy
Foo-ball
Felix breathed deeply.
Mabel smelled like a dog.
He opened his eyes and placed her gently on to her rug on the back seat. As he shut the door, he noticed the broken walking stick. He had forgotten it was there. He reached into the car and picked it up. It was a natural branch of cherrywood, with a pretty grain, and with the knot at the top rubbed shiny by an old man’s grip. About eight inches up from the rubber ferrule at the tip, the stick had snapped.
Felix brought it closer to his face and frowned. The inside of the break was just splinters and strips of bent cherrywood holding things together. But the outside – where the inner wood had been exposed . . . there the break was straight.
Sharp.
Deliberate.
As if somebody had sawn through the stick just enough so that it would break under a load.
The load of Skipper Cann.
Felix stood and stared at the stick for so long that by the time he looked up, the red sun had been torn in half by the trees at the top of the hill.
He got behind the wheel, laid the walking stick on the front seat beside him, and drove home.
Fast.
The Pigeon
Geoffrey Skeet had been in custody now for nearly three days.
Calvin had plugged in the dinosaur in the office, where it had attracted some attention.
Jackie Braddick was younger than him by only four years but had never seen anything like it. When Calvin first put the monitor down on the desk they shared, she thought it was a microwave oven, and visibly recoiled from the dot-matrix display. Tony Coral, on the other hand, put his hand on the nicotine casing as if it were the tousled head of his favourite son and said, Ah, they don’t make ’em like this any more.
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