“Five?” I asked.
“Yes please.” He was seriously overweight and appeared to be wearing a skirt over his blue-check trousers. A name badge declared that he was called Gerald Vole.
“Er, napkin,” I whispered, nodding towards his nether regions.
“Oh God!” he exclaimed, snatching it from his belt. He managed a nervous smile, saying: “The service was terrible in the restaurant,” by way of explanation.
“It always is,” I confirmed, airily.
The door pinged and opened, and I gestured him forward. “Enjoying the conference?” I asked.
“Yes, very much. There’s so much to learn, though. Are you with the company?”
“Yes, for my sins,” I lied.
“Sales?”
“Head office,” I told him, adding: “Personnel,” because it felt good.
“Gosh!” he replied, impressed.
“Charlie Priest,” I said, offering him my hand.
“Gerry Vole,” he squeaked as I crushed his clammy fingers. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Welcome to TGF, Gerry,” I said.
The door we entered through was at the back of the room, fortunately. The conference facilities consisted of one side of the whole fifth floor being left empty, the space divided into three by sliding partitions. Trans Global Finance had booked the lot, so all the partitions were retracted. The place was nearly full, but we found chairs on the end of the back row and sat down. Gerry produced a typist’s pad from a pocket and rested it on his knee. I stared at row after row of shaven necks poking from blue suit collars. It could have been a Mormon revivalist meeting. Gerry’s checks and my sports jacket were the only discordant notes. Gerry would have to learn to conform; I make a speciality of not doing so.
The door behind me closed with a bang and I took a sly peep back. A man and woman who would have looked completely at home on local-network breakfast TV were standing there, and he’d pulled the door shut. She had nice knees, and I’d seen her type a hundred times before. Sometimes she, or her sister, was in the precinct, handing out freebies for the local newspaper; other times she was there in her clingy T-shirt and Wonder Bra extolling the virtues of holidays in Cornwall or Tenerife. A promotions girl. Anxious to shake the dust of Heckley from her stilettos but not good looking enough to be a model, not bright enough to be a holiday rep. Promises of riches galore had brought her into the finance industry, and today she was a cheerleader.
“Welcome back!” a voice boomed from the front. The owner had oddly luxuriant grey hair and could easily have done Billy Graham on Stars in Their Eyes. “And now for the session you’re all waiting for,” he proclaimed. “It’s my proud duty to introduce the man we all think of as the Prince of Closing. The man who can, literally, walk on water…”
Boy, this I’ve got to see, I thought. Gerry Vole beside me was wriggling in his seat, trying to make himself taller.
“Ladies and gentlemen…”
“No! No! No!” Silkstone was there, waving his arms as he dashed on to the stage to interrupt the eulogy, but just too late, of course, and the rest of it was drowned by the applause. It started behind me in a burst of small explosions and rattled through the audience like machine gun fire. “Good afternoon!” Silkstone shouted.
“Good afternoon,” we yelled back.
“I didn’t hear you! GOOD AFTERNOON!”
“GOOD AFTERNOON!” This time they heard us in Barnsley.
“Right on!” I added as the reverberations faded away, and nudged Gerry with my elbow.
“Yeah!” he shouted, recovering his balance and punching the air with a podgy fist.
“What is that magical quality that converts a lead into a sale?” Silkstone demanded of us.
“Closing!” The word jumped around the auditorium like a firecracker.
“What are the three golden bullets in the salesman’s armoury?”
“Closing, closing, closing.”
“You don’t seem sure!” he shouted. “So I’ll tell you!” There was a table and chair on the low stage, with a glass and water jug on the table. Silkstone leapt up on to the chair and shouted: “Number one — closing!” Long pause for effect as he made eye contact with the front rows. “Number two — closing!” Another leap took him on to the table. “Number three — CLOSING!”
Gerry, beside me and beside himself, was busy scribbling. He’d written: 3 golden bullets: 1 — closing, 2 — closing, 3 — closing!!!
Silkstone, still up on the table, was launching into an anecdote about how Bill Gates got to be the world’s richest man. Presumably, I thought, because gates are good at closing. After five minutes I’d had enough. I reached out and took Gerry’s pad from him. On it I wrote: 4 — treat every client as if he might be an eccentric millionaire and winked as I passed it back. “I’m off,” I said, rising to my feet. “Good luck.” He read what I’d written and stared at me, eyes wide, mouth open, as if I’d just given him the co-ordinates of the Holy Grail.
I yanked the door open and took a last look at Silkstone. He had one foot on the floor, one on the chair when the movement at the back of the room caught his eye. He froze in mid-stride and fell silent as he recognised me. Other heads turned my way. I stepped out through the opening and closed the door behind me. “That’ll give him something to think about,” I mumbled to myself as I headed towards the lift.
Gwen Rhodes played netball for England and hockey for Kent. I had trials with Halifax Town as a goalkeeper, but wasn’t signed up. I considered myself a sportsman, years ago, although I never reached the heights that Gwen did. We sit on a committee together, and have talked about the value of sport over a cup of coffee in the canteen. These days, the only place you can regularly see honesty, courage, passion is on the playing field. Out there, with the sting of sweat in your eyes and the taste of blood in your mouth, where you come from and who you know is of no help at all.
So when I saw the note on my desk saying that she wanted me to ring her I didn’t wait. “The Governor, please,” I said, when the switchboard at Bentley Prison answered.
“Who wants her, please?”
“Detective Inspector Priest, Heckley CID.”
“One moment.”
I waited for the music, wondering what might be appropriate — Unchained Melody? Please release me, let me go? — but none came. “Hello, Charlie. Thanks for ringing,” Gwen’s plummy voice boomed in my ear.
“My pleasure, Gwen. Long time no see. Shouldn’t we be having a meeting soon, or did you ring to tell me I’d missed it?”
“Between you and me, Charlie, I think that committee has probably quietly faded away. We didn’t achieve much, did we?”
“Lip service, Gwen, that’s what it’s all about. Make it look as if you are doing something. So what can I do for you? I’m available, Saturday morning, if you need a goalie.”
“Oh, those were the days. I may have some information for you, Charlie, but first of all, an apology.”
“Go on.”
“You know that we monitor inmates’ calls, tape-record them for transcription at a later date.”
“Mmm.”
“Well, we’ve rather fallen behind lately, so this weekend I put one of my officers on to them, and he’s come up with something that might be of interest to you.”
“I’m all ears, Gwen.”
“Does the name Chiller mean anything?”
“Chiller?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“You disappoint me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He’s supposed to be the most wanted man in Britain, according to the tabloids.”
“Chiller?”
“That’s his nickname, a contraction.”
I repeated the name softly, to myself: “Chiller- Chiller — Chiller,” until it hit me. “Chilcott!” I pronounced. “Kevin Chilcott!”
“That’s the man.”
“He’s a cop killer,” I said, suddenly alert. “What can you tell me?”
“Just that one of our inmates, a hard case called Paul Mann, telephoned a London number, four weeks ago, asking for a message to be sent to someone called Chiller about ‘a job’. Since then there has been a quantity of rather enigmatic traffic, but the name was never mentioned again. Sums were quoted. There’s lots of other stuff which may or may not be related.”