Deadheads

11

From the top floor of the car park, Shaheed Singh had a splendid view over the city. The morning sun etched in every detail and he amused himself by picking out familiar landmarks from this unfamiliar viewpoint.

Not in fact that it was totally unfamiliar. The city's main bus station lay at the foot of the multi-storey. From it a pedestrian underpass ran beneath the busy ring road to the town centre, on the fringe of which stood the comprehensive where Singh had been educated. Sometimes for a change he and his mates had eschewed the underpass and ridden the elevators to this top level, walked thence across the bridge to the shopping precinct roof-top car park and descended into one of the big stores. There had of course been delays for skylarking, rarely anything more serious than leaning over the bridge parapet and gobbing spit balls on to the cars far below, though occasionally a breakaway group had headed for Woolworths for a spot of shoplifting. Usually Singh had opted out of this, not so much on moral grounds as because, in a city which didn't have a huge Asian community, he always felt he was the one likely to be spotted and remembered.

When he'd joined the police cadets he'd felt at first that this quality of easy distinction might work to his advantage, but he'd soon changed his mind. The instinctive prejudice and the sheer bloody ignorance he’d encountered had shaken him deeply. On several occasions only his deep-rooted stubbornness had kept him going, the same stubbornness which had resisted all his father's attempts to persuade him to work in the family business. Now it had become focused on Sergeant Wield. The CID were an enviable elite. The unspeakable Dalziel and the high-flying Pascoe were probably hardly aware of his existence. But Wield was, and Wield obviously rated him as useless. His coldly scornful attitude when he took him along to Rosemont, and indeed on every occasion that they met, made this quite clear. To make Wield admit he was wrong had become the boy's main ambition.

And this was why he was here now when he should have been with PC Wedderburn learning the arts of traffic control. The good-natured Wedderburn had readily let him beg off for fifteen minutes on personal grounds, but the fifteen minutes were already up and his clever idea had come to nothing. There'd been a couple of kids who'd got out of the lift five minutes before, but they hadn't dallied as they made their way across the bridge to the precinct roof-top car park which already looked half full. The multi-storey on the other hand filled from the bottom up and on the top floor there were still only about ten cars parked.

Singh glanced at his watch. He was late already. He was going to have to salve PC Wedderburn's ire with gallons of tea and acres of bacon butties. So much for self-promotion to the CID.

At this moment the lift doors clanged open and debouched five youths in a cacophony of laughter and football supporters' cries. Singh had plenty of time to recognize two of them as old schoolmates of his, now on the dole, before they spotted him. One of them was a slight thin-faced lad called Mick Feaver, whose uncertainty of demeanour always gave him a not altogether false look of slyness. He had been something of a butt at school and tended to tag along with Jonty Marsh for protection. Marsh was even smaller than Mick Feaver but he had all the swagger of a banty-cock. He was a bold and lively extrovert, always the leader in any chosen activity and with a considerable contempt for the law. So far, he had narrowly avoided serious trouble himself, but took pleasure in boasting how others of his family, notably his elder brother, Arthur, had done time. Typically it was Marsh who spotted Singh first and, equally typically, his reaction was direct and uncomplicated.

'Hey, there's old Shady!' he cried.

He walked up to Singh, with Mick Feaver in his usual pet-dog position a couple of feet behind. The other three, whom Singh only knew by sight, hung a little further back, regarding him suspiciously.

'What're you doing here, Shady?' said Marsh. 'What's going off?'

Singh nodded a greeting and said tersely. 'Stake out.'

Marsh let out a huge bellow of laughter.

'What're you staking out then, Shady?' he demanded.

Singh mixed truth with fiction and replied. 'There's been some mucking about with cars up here, so CID have put a watch on every morning.'

'But you're not CID,' protested Marsh, who was no fool. 'And it's a daft spot to be standing if you're supposed to be out of sight!'

Shaheed Singh smiled, he hoped inscrutably, and improvised wildly.

'Of course I'm not CID, you daft bugger!' he said in a friendlier voice. 'I'm just along with them as part of my training. When we saw you lot in the lift, I said I knew you and Mick, so they told me to have a word with you. Saves them breaking cover.'

Marsh looked doubtful but Mick Feaver clearly swallowed this farrago of nonsense completely and stared around in anxious search of the hidden watchers while the other three, now within earshot, shifted uneasily and muttered among themselves.

Singh, all too familiar with the symptoms of teenage guilt, exulted behind his superior smile. He'd guessed right! It had been this lot, or some of them at least. The seeds of the idea had been sown when he'd had that embarrassing encounter with his old schoolmates outside the Job Centre. And it had paid off!

Then suddenly his triumph faded and he felt properly like a policeman for the very first time, as for the very first time he experienced the tension between the private man and the public servant, between the past and the present. It would be great to make his first nick, but it would be an agony he wasn't yet prepared for to make it at the expense of Jonty and Mick.

Why was he doing this anyway? It wasn't as if the vandalization had been the crime of the century! The truth was he just wanted to impress Sergeant Wield. And Sergeant Wield, he'd worked out, wasn't interested in kids scratching cars, but in Mrs Aldermann herself.

He thought he saw a way of side-stepping his problem without too much conscience-bending.

'Do you come this way every morning?' he asked.

'Nah,' said Marsh vigorously. 'We don't go into the centre every morning. Anyway usually we use the under-pass, isn't that right, lads?'

The others, now hunched up close, chorused their agreement.

'Thing is,' said Singh, becoming confidential, 'CID's not really interested in whoever scratched them cars last Monday. In fact, whoever scratched them might've done us a favour. It's a car-stealing ring they're after. One of the cars they're interested in got its paintwork done over that morning. It was a VW Polo, light green. Likely there was a woman driving. Now, you didn't happen to notice that car up here last Monday, did you?'

If they'd simply denied being up on the top storey any time the previous week, Singh would have been happy to let it rest there, and to hell with his certainty that they were responsible. But they hesitated, and looked at each other, and Singh, now well worked into his role, said in a bored voice, 'Look, if you did see owt, lads, it could be helpful. Like, what time the car was here? Did you see the driver? What was she wearing? Was she carrying anything? Which way did she go? You scratch our backs, we'll scratch yours.'

He felt at the same time proud and ashamed of his performance. When it won a prize, he was amazed.

Mick Feaver said, 'Yeah, we did see her. I mean, I think I saw her.'

He looked around at the others apologetically, offering them the path of non-involvement by his correction. But the bait of police favours and the natural human instinct to seek star-witness status combined to make his friends resent rather than be grateful for his attempt to exclude them. Rapidly progressing from a trickle to a torrent, the information came.

'Yeah, a green Polo. Nice little car.'

'About ten past nine. We were just going by when it parked.'

'Tall blonde bit. Middle-aged. Big teeth.'

'No, she was better than that. Quite tasty really.'

'You like 'em old, don't you? I've seen you looking at his mam!'

'My mam's not old. Not that old.'

'She was about thirty, this tart. She was smart. Not with it smart, but smart like the nobs are smart.'

'That's right. She looked a right stuck-up cow.'

'She had a little handbag. Nothing else.'

'We thought there was something funny when she got in the other car.'

'Not funny. We thought she was going for a bit of umpty.'

'Yeah, wham! bang! on the back seat. She didn't look like a crook.'

'What do you think a crook looks like, you silly bugger!'

Here the torrent was interrupted by an energetic scuffle.

Singh said, 'You mean she got into another car?'

'That's right,' said Jonty, as eager as any of the others to be a star-witness. 'She parked next to it and got out of hers and straight into his.'

'His? You saw the driver?'

'Not really. There was tinted windows. I hadn't even noticed him sitting at the wheel till she got in and he drove off right away.'

'Right away?'

'That's right. He must have started the engine soon as he saw her.'

'What kind of car was it?'

'Audi.'

'Volvo.'

'No, it wasn't a Volvo, they have their lights on all the time.'

'It was a BMW 528i.'

The speaker was Mick Feaver, and he spoke with a note of authority so authentic that no one challenged him with further alternatives.

'You didn't get the number, did you?' said Singh hopefully.

They shook their heads, except Mick Feaver who tentatively suggested an X registration with a 9 before it.

Now Singh really did feel triumphant. This was something to toss casually before Sergeant Wield. He racked his brains in search of any other information he might possibly squeeze out of these eager witnesses. It struck him that this gang were not likely to have been inconspicuous, yet Mrs Aldermann had denied seeing anyone suspicious. That could be very significant.

'Did she see you?' he asked.

'Probably. She drove right by us,' said Jonty.

'Yeah. And you were playing the fool,' guffawed one of the others.

'What did you do?' asked Singh.

For answer, Marsh made an obscene gesture with his right forearm and clenched fist.

'Well, I thought she was off on the job,' he explained. 'Randy old cow!'

And that was how it had started, thought Singh with a sudden flash of insight. Perhaps the first intention had been to write something rude on the dust on the Polo, but its shining bright paintwork hadn't provided the looked-for slate. So the knife had come out and, once started, the enthusiasm had spread. But he didn't want to know about that.

'Thanks a lot, lads,' he said, glancing at his watch and working out that PC Wedderburn would now be in the Market Caff, probably starting on his second cup of tea and growing steadily more furious. 'I'll pass this on. It could be very helpful. See you around.'

'Yeah. Right. Sure. Great. See you.'

Dismissed, the youngsters walked out away towards the bridge leading to the shoppers' car park. They had emerged from the lift as criminal suspects. They were now moving on as police witnesses. Singh dimly apprehended that it was an evolutionary process he might become very familiar with in his police career.

But his mind was more concerned with the immediate future, balancing Wedderburn's certain wrath against Wield's notional admiration, as he entered the lift and stabbed at the button to take him down.