Game Over

Eleven

Fainting in Coils

‘Why didn’t you call me?’ Atherton demanded, the next morning.

‘I thought about it, but I didn’t want to disturb Emily with more tales of violence,’ Slider said. He felt as if he hadn’t slept for a week.

‘She’s going to find out anyway,’ Atherton pointed out.

‘Better to hear about it in daylight than in the middle of the night,’ Slider said from experience.

‘Well, you can’t stay there now, anyway. Who knows what he’ll do next? You’d better come and stay at my place tonight.’

‘And interrupt love’s young dream?’

‘Facetiousness is my thing. It doesn’t work for you,’ Atherton informed him. ‘If you’re worried about the proprieties you can have my room and I’ll sleep on the sofa.’ And, of course, creep up to Emily in the spare room once the lights were out.

Slider couldn’t bear to argue any more. His head hurt too much. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll come, just for tonight.’ When Joanna got back he’d have to think of something else. But at least he’d get one evening of Atherton’s cooking. Those fish and chips had given him heartburn, though that probably wasn’t their fault, but a result of the subsequent dramas. As a long-serving policeman, he didn’t usually have any difficulty digesting grease. ‘It’s Porson I feel sorry for,’ he said, to turn the attention away from himself. ‘The old boy really feels it.’

He had reported in to Porson as soon as he arrived, and found the super pale and shaken.

‘I’m just about sick of this,’ he said once he had ascertained that Slider was not seriously hurt. ‘They’ve tied me up hand and foot. Bates is SOCA business now, and you know what these SO units are like. Jealous as fishwives, and if you tread on their toes, you’re in all sorts of grief. I’ve been told categorically not to pursue him, and my pension’s on the line, laddie, as you well know. But I’m not having my officers put in jeopardy and do nothing. What are SOCA doing? Sitting round scratching their targets. So you can go after him with my blessing, and anything you want, just ask. If it costs me my pension, well, that’s not an absorbent price in the scheme of things. Only,’ he had added, rather spoiling the magnificent defiance, ‘don’t let the Stonax case slip, will you?’

‘No, sir.’ Slider hesitated, wondering whether to voice any of Emily’s and Atherton’s conspiracy theories. He was beginning to have a suspicion of his own, though against his will. Why had the Stonax murder been left with him? Usually high-profile cases were whisked away to the specialist units for the greater glory of some desk jockey with a degree in looking good. He had been led by the nose to conclude that Borthwick had done it, but what if it was not the villains who were doing the leading, but the ‘them’ of Atherton’s paranoia?

But if the idea that such things could be would make him sick, they’d make Porson sicker. He had become, since his wife died, something of a shabby tiger, but he was not yet tamed. Slider decided to say nothing, at least yet, and to ask instead for something deliverable.

‘Could you get the traffic unit to find that Focus as a matter of urgency? I’ve got another reg number for it, so the likelihood is that they’re going to change it again, but there aren’t that many black Focuses with the same dint in the same place. I’m pretty sure it’s one of Bates’s close cronies driving it around, and if we get him, we might get a lead on Bates.’

‘Consider it done,’ Porson said. ‘I’ll sit on them and put a rocket under their arses, don’t you worry. Anything else?’

‘I can’t think of anything at the moment,’ Slider said.

‘Come to me if you do. Now, what are we going to do about Borthwick?’

‘The report on the oil marks was waiting on my desk when I got in,’ Slider said. That was another surprise, that it should have come through so quickly. Conspiracy was like oranges – once you got the smell in your nose, you couldn’t get it out.

Porson evidently agreed. ‘They must have priorised it,’ he said. ‘You don’t normally get presidents for non-human fluids. So what was the result?’

‘It’s a match for the sample taken from Borthwick’s bike,’ Slider said. ‘He says he’s never been in the flat at all, so that, plus the victim’s watch, make a pretty firm basis for a charge.’

‘Yes,’ Porson said, starting his lope up and down in the space between his desk and the window. ‘And then you’d have to try to trace the movements of that motorbike the old dear saw, which means watching endless CCTV tapes, and God knows what else besides trying to prove he did it when we know he didn’t. Which all adds up to a lot of running around with our heads up our blue-arsed flies.’

‘Displacement activity,’ Slider said, as Porson continued to pace.

‘We’ve got to do it, and we’ve got to make it look good,’ Porson decided. ‘It’s a pity that oil report came so quickly. But we can hold him pending more evidence. I’ll think of something to tell the muppets. He’s still co-operating?’

‘Yes, sir. I think he’s quite enjoying it. Bit of a holiday for him. He likes the food.’

‘The man’s sick! He hasn’t asked for a solicitor? He’ll have to have one, otherwise the press’ll cotton on and start moaning about human rights. But it’s got to be one we can trust.’

‘I’ll find one, sir.’

‘And get him what he likes to eat, and whatever he likes to read. Keep him happy. Meanwhile find out who did do it. What lines have you got to follow?’

‘We’re trying to trace and interview people who were in the pub the night Borthwick says he met the man, Patrick Steel.’

‘No luck on the name, I suppose?’

‘No, sir, but I don’t want to waste too much time on it because it’s almost certainly a false name.’

‘I’ll get one of Carver’s firm to chase it up, take it off your books. Go on.’

‘We’re looking into Stonax’s past life, and talking to friends and colleagues to try to find what he was busy with recently. It seems likely his death was connected with one or the other.’

‘Or both. Could be two halves of the same coin. Well, get on with it, then. And let me know if you get anything on Bates.’

Joanna rang him from the hotel room at half past nine. ‘I’ve just had an enormous breakfast,’ she said. ‘Egg, bacon, black pudding, the lot. I shall have to play standing up. There’s not room in there for breakfast and the baby if I sit down.’

‘How is baby Derek?’

‘Oh don’t! If we start calling him that it’ll stick.’

‘Only if the wind changes.’

‘Don’t talk to me about wind! You were right about the curry yesterday. Derek-stroke-Gladys is fine. Listen, about tonight – I can’t see the point in staying in a hotel. I’d much sooner come home after the concert.’

‘No, I don’t want you to do that,’ Slider said, wishing he didn’t have to tell her, and wondering how shocked she would be.

‘I know you think I’m made of tissue paper,’ she said, ‘but Huddersfield isn’t that far, and the traffic will be light that time of night, and I’m used to driving back after concerts. I’d just sooner sleep in my own bed.’

‘Well, I’m afraid that’s not possible anyway,’ he began, trying to assemble the right words.

She jumped right in. ‘Oh God, something’s happened! What is it? Tell me. Are you all right?’

‘I’m all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. Remember the baby and try to take this calmly.’

‘You’re making me more nervous telling me to be calm. What happened?’

‘Someone broke into the house yesterday and set up a booby trap, which I sprang when I went home. It was the old schoolboy trick, a bucket balanced on the top of a door.’

‘For God’s sake,’ she said, sounding more bewildered than anything.

‘I don’t think it was meant to hurt me seriously. I got a cut on my head and a bruise on my shoulder but I’m all right, apart from a headache.’

‘Oh, Bill!’

‘Please don’t cry. I’m all right.’

‘I have to cry, it’s my hormones. Was it Bates?’

‘I suppose so. It’s his sort of speed. He likes making a fool of me and wants to scare me.’

‘Well, he’s scaring me, so tell him he’s succeeded and he can stop.’

‘Anyway, you can see why I don’t want you to come home tonight. I’m going to stay the night at Atherton’s, so you’ll be better off at a nice, comfortable hotel. Then tomorrow come here when you get back and we’ll decide what to do. We might have caught him by then, you never know,’ he added in the vain hope of cheering her up.

But she was a sensible woman, he thanked heaven, and did not waste more time on useless remonstrance. ‘All right, if it will take a weight off your mind, I’ll stay. Oh, Bill, I do miss you! Please be careful.’

‘I am being. Truly. That’s why I’m not sleeping at home tonight.’

‘I have to go. Rehearsal starts at ten thirty.’

‘Drive carefully,’ he said.

‘That’s the least of my worries,’ she said.

The preliminary report came in from the electronics expert, Phil Lavery, on the security door at Valancy House. He had found a device, and it was, he said, a straightforward timer which caused a short-circuit at the desired time, disengaging the locks as would happen normally during a power cut. The interesting thing about it was the timer itself, which was a tiny transistorised thing not much bigger than a watch battery.

I have not come across one like it before, he wrote, and suspect it may be of Far Eastern origin. I do not recognise the handwork signature, but I will research further on both that and the timer, and report as soon as I have more information.

It was not much help, Slider thought. Most new electronic stuff did come from the Far East these days. The hope was that someone in the trade would recognise the handwork, because people who put together devices like that all had their own way of doing it, and it was generally as personal as a signature. Unless the ‘bloke in the van’ was clever enough to disguise his work. It sounded as though ‘Patrick Steel’ was clever enough, but he’d had to hire someone to do the actual work and it was possible that man was not. Get him, get to Patrick Steel. Was he the brains behind the thing or was he fronting for someone else? What they didn’t know was legion. No, they needed to find the reason for all this. Find the why and you find the who.

Hart came in with papers under her arm and a cup of tea in her hand. ‘Brought you this, guv,’ she said, setting the cup and saucer down. She reached into her pocket, and placed a bottle of aspirin beside it. ‘And Norma sent you these. She reckoned you might need ’em by now.’

‘You’re very kind,’ Slider said. His head was aching again. ‘And thank Norma for me.’

‘We don’t reckon you shoulda come in today,’ Hart said, eyeing him in a motherly way. ‘You look pale. You musta been concussed, and concussion’s not something to mess around with.’

‘It’s all right,’ Slider reassured her. ‘I’m not messing around with it, I’m having it properly.’ There had been a time when, according to Joanna, Hart had fancied him and hoped to get off with him. He’d never seen it himself, but he didn’t want to encourage anything. ‘What have you got there?’ he asked briskly.

‘Stonax’s diary,’ she said, drawing it out from under her arm. ‘I was working backwards, and then it occurred to me to go forwards a bit, and I found he had an appointment today with a “DM”. Look, here, DM at half twelve.’

‘So why hasn’t DM come forward to tell us that?’ Slider said. ‘He must have seen on the news or in the papers that Stonax is dead.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Hart. ‘Unless he was some kind of crim, but it didn’t seem likely, with Stonax being such a Boy Scout. So I looked back and found a meeting with a Daniel Masseter a couple of months back, beginning of July. I done a bit of a trawl through the files and everything, but I couldn’t find any reference to Daniel Masseter anywhere, not so much as an address or phone number. If Stonax kept any info on him, it was either in that file we think’s gone missing—’

‘Or it’s in the encrypted part of the computer,’ Slider said.

‘Or both. Anyway, I thought it was worth a bit of a goosey, so I put him in the computer and started searching. Luck would have it, I started with police records and found he’d been in trouble a couple of times doing environmental protests – Hartlepool, the Able UK ship recycling thing?’

‘Yes, I remember. The company that got the contract to break up US naval derelicts.’

‘Yeah. Well, he chained himself to some gates, apparently, and when they cut him loose he threw a brick and smashed someone’s windscreen, so they nicked him. And he was nicked for obstruction in that Essex oil refinery protest. And quite a bit in between.’

‘But those were both years ago,’ Slider said. ‘The Hartlepool thing must be – what – four years ago? And Jaywick two years ago.’

‘Yeah, so what’s he been up to since then? That’s what I wondered.’

‘Maybe it would explain, if he’d had trouble with the police in the past, why he didn’t come forward to say he had an appointment with Stonax.’

‘Maybe. But a more compelling reason, I reckon, is that he’s dead.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. I wanted to see if he’d been visible recently, so I put him in a news filter, and up he come straight away. Reading Observer, local lad killed in an RTA. He was apparently knocked off his motorbike on a country road near Pangbourne – it’s a sort of cut-through to the A4. Locals say people use it as a rat run and drive too fast – it’s only really a country lane and some of it’s single track with passing places. Anyway, he was found by a woman going to work early morning two weeks ago. Him and the bike was in a ditch, there was skid marks across the road, and his neck was broken. Local police reckon from the damage to the bike he must have been sideswiped by a car. They put it down as a hit-and-run driver.’

‘And it could have been,’ said Slider.

‘That’s the beauty of it. Reading Evening Post did quite a bit on it, tragedy of young life cut short, blah de blah – I printed it out in case you want it – and made out he was some kind of planet-saving hero because of his “well known environmental activities”. Then the next day the Observer come up with his police record and they dropped him pretty sharpish.’

‘I think,’ Slider said, ‘we need to have a word with his nearest and dearest. Have you found out who they are?’

‘Yeah, his nearest, anyway. He lived with his mum on a housing estate in Reading. Don’t know if she’s his dearest – news reports don’t mention if he had a girlfriend.’

‘Well, you’d better go and find out, then,’ he said, and was rewarded with a wide grin.

‘Thanks, guv. I won’t let you down.’

Slider drank his tea, swallowed two of the aspirin, thought for a bit, and then rang his best snout, Tidy Barnett. Tidy’s sepulchral tones answered at the second ring. ‘’Ang on a minute, Mr S. Someone ’ere. We ain’t secure.’ There were various indeterminate sounds as Tidy removed himself to a more secluded spot, and then he was back on. ‘What can I do you for? I ’ope it’s not about this big business in ’Ammersmith, cause I’m not up to all that. I’ve ’ad me ear out for you, naturally, but nobody don’t know nothing about it.’

‘It is about that,’ Slider said, ‘and I was hoping you could help me with one of the minor players. He fixed the security doors of the flat to unlock themselves at a certain time. Used a transistorised timer, maybe Chinese in origin. Know any electronics experts who might do that sort of thing?’

‘Not my street, Mr S,’ Tidy said regretfully. ‘I could put you on to someone who might ’elp. Ever ’eard of Jack Bushman?’

‘Solder Jack? He’s not still around, is he? I thought he went to Australia.’

‘’E did, but ’e’s back. Didn’t like it out there. Been back years. He’s straight now, which is maybe why you ain’t ’eard of him. He’s got a shop, Ladbroke Grove way, on the KPR. He was into all that miniature stuff. You could try him. Otherwise – well, deceased was a nobby bloke, and it sounds like a nobby murder. You need special snouts. Me and mine is no use to you on this one, guv.’

‘Thanks, Tidy,’ Slider said, and rang off. He sat thinking for a while, and then, on an impulse, rang his old friend Pauline Smithers. She was Detective Chief Superintendent Smithers now, and back at the Yard after what had seemed to her like an interminable – though successful – stint on child pornography. The trouble with crime like that was that you could never wrap it up and be done with it. As soon as you cleared out one stinking gutter, you’d get word of another. He was glad for Pauly’s sanity that they’d moved her on.

They had been in uniform together way back when the world was young, and had always had a soft spot for each other. Then she’d got promoted and married the Job and a while later he’d got married to Irene, his first wife, and that had been that. He had often wondered, idly, how things would have turned out if they had hooked up, as had once seemed quite possible, even likely. She had never married, though he was not vain enough to attribute that to a broken heart. For women, the upper echelons of the police force were harder to tackle than Annapurna, and those who made it were rarely able to have emotional lives.

Which he thought was a shame, because Pauline had been a good egg and a perfectly normal woman.

He called her number. It rang for a long time before she answered, and when she did, she spoke before he had a chance to. ‘I’m in a meeting,’ she said in a normal, if slightly severe, tone; and then added, very low and urgently, ‘I’ll ring you back. Don’t ring me.’ Then she was gone.

He had rung her on his mobile. As soon as he rang off, his land line rang.

‘Hello, Mr Plod.’

A weary sort of anger surged through him. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m just calling to see if you enjoyed my little joke last night,’ said Bates.

‘Why do you insist on talking like a villain in a B movie?’

‘Oh, dear. You sound a bit tetchy. Head aching?’

‘I always hated practical jokes, even when I was a child. For an adult to practise them is contemptible.’

‘Contemptible, is it? And there was I trying to be kind to you. I could have killed you, you know. I could have filled the bucket with sand. By the way, are you trying to trace this call?’

‘Of course,’ said Slider.

‘Well, you might as well amuse yourself, but you’ll never be able to. My skills, small as they are, are sufficient to run rings round your mediaeval tracing capabilities.’

‘They didn’t have telephones in mediaeval times. A man of your education ought to know that.’

He chuckled. ‘Keeping me talking, eh? I don’t mind. Time is not of the essence to me.’

Slider tired of it. ‘Well, it is to me. What do you want?’

‘Just to let you know that if you enjoyed that little joke, you’ll love the next one. Do you like Guy Fawkes Night?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Well, you’ll find my little surprise divine. Divine as in see you in heaven.’

‘Or in your case, not,’ said Slider.

But Bates had gone. McLaren came to the door a few moments later and shook his head. ‘Same story, guv. Bounced round the satellites. Mick Hutton reckons you’d need to keep him talking for fifteen minutes to have a chance of tracing it – and even then, he wouldn’t be there with his stickies on the receiver.’ He eyed Slider sympathetically. ‘What did he want this time?’

‘Dear Mr Slider: threat, threat, threat, threat. Yours sincerely.’

‘Bloody hypocrite. I’m going to get a sarnie. Can I get you one?’

‘God, is it lunch time already?’

‘Going down the stall outside the market,’ McLaren said temptingly.

‘Go on then. I’ll have a sausage sandwich. With tomato sauce.’

‘Got it,’ said McLaren, and wheeled away.

He passed Atherton coming the other way. ‘Word, guv?’ Atherton asked. Slider nodded him in. ‘Emily’s gone off on her travels. We got her a hired car this morning and she’s gone to see the Ring 4 people. Not,’ he added, ‘that you know that, because she isn’t doing it officially and we’ve no idea where she is.’

‘What do we know, officially?’ Slider asked. He heard himself sounding tetchy and reached for the aspirin bottle, before realising he had taken them too recently to take more. His shoulder was aching, too. He rubbed it carefully.

‘I’ve been looking up the Sid Andrew business,’ Atherton said. He observed his boss’s actions but guessed sympathy would get his nose bitten off. ‘The girl in the case was called Angela Barlow. She was a junior press officer in the DTI – that’s a civil service appointment, not a political one. Quite a looker, twenty-eight when it all happened, secretarial background, interest in journalism – what bright girl these days doesn’t want to be a journalist? – been in the job just under two years. She seemed to disappear without trace after she got sacked, and with the media interest in her, I thought she probably would have gone to earth. I mean, those pictures were pretty explicit, and the popular press’s appetite for all things salacious being what it is—’

‘So where did she go?’ Slider cut in.

‘She went home to her parents,’ Atherton said.

Slider read the bad news in his eyes. ‘And?’

‘She’s dead. Committed suicide last January.’

Slider slammed to his feet. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘We’re going to find out what this whole Sid Andrew thing was about. We’re going to go and see her parents, and then we’re going to and roust him.’

‘Maybe it was just shame,’ Atherton said, playing devil’s advocate. ‘We’ve only got the Stonax supporters’ word for it that the thing was a set up.’

Slider didn’t glance at him as he walked past. ‘We’ll find out,’ he said. ‘And then we’ll know.’