“Christ, Frank, leggo!” Tears in his eyes already. “It’s nothin’ like that, honest.”
“It better not fuckin’ be.”
“Be what?” Shane asked, leaning against the doorway, three cans of Special Brew balanced on two hands.
“Never you fucking mind.”
Shane stared at him, Miller staring back. You fat bastard, Shane was thinking, you reckon I’m afraid of you like all the rest. And one of these days you’re going to have to learn it just ain’t true.
“You got a problem,” Miller asked, half a pace towards him.
“Maybe, yeah?”
“What’s that, then?”
“That,” Shane said, nodding towards the speakers. “It’s a fuckin’ row.”
“No.” Miller laughed. “That’s Saxon. They’re the best.” But he turned it down some more and Shane tossed him a beer and all three of them drank and started to chat and for now everything was cool.
Thirty-four
Days into the inquiry, the photographs of Bill Aston’s beaten body had been in danger of becoming little more than part of the incident room decor, scarcely deserving a second glance. But now with some concrete information from Special Branch and the Football Intelligence Unit to work on, potential suspects to target, the adrenaline was pumping again, spirits were high, voices boisterous and loud. Aside from the regular squad assigned to the murder inquiry, there were six officers from Special Branch, a further six from the Support Department, a dozen more drafted in from other duties-among these, two out of Vice, one of them Sharon Garnett.
The map showing a thirty-mile radius out from the city had been newly marked with pins in three distinct colors: blue for the Mansfield area to the north, green for Ilkeston to the west, red for addresses within the city boundary itself. Along with Lynn Kellogg, Sharon would be working with Reg Cossall in the green team, Graham Millington was supervising red; Chesney Woolmer, invited in by Resnick to assist with the briefing, would be running blue.
“Some of these people we’re going to interview,” Woolmer said, “may surprise you. Some will look like nice law-abiding insurance salesmen with a wife who works part-time and the regulation two point-whatever kids. Likely not what you’re expecting at all. That doesn’t mean they haven’t got regular subscriptions to a magazine with step-by-step instructions on how to construct a letter bomb and ideas of where to send it. Other times, you’ll open the door to three bloody great Alsatians and a bloke with a tattooed beer-gut hanging over his jeans and you’ll think, okay, stupid fat sod, I know where I am here. Don’t be fooled. These are people-some of them-capable of running a network of like-minded souls that takes in not just this country, but most of mainland Europe as well. Don’t underestimate them. And don’t turn your back on the sodding dogs.”
Resnick stepped forward into the ensuing laughter. “Remember we haven’t got warrants here, we’re not going barging in. What we’re doing is asking questions, establishing links-where were they the night of Aston’s murder, where did they go drinking, where were their mates?”
“But if you do get inside,” Woolmer again. “If you are invited in, be aware, keep your eyes skinned, anything that might be of potential interest to the Branch, I want to know.”
“All right,” said Resnick, “any more questions?”
There were none: within three minutes the room had cleared. What questions there were snagged in Resnick’s mind: he knew much of the circumstantial evidence pointed to a vicious, random attack-the spiraling pattern of footprints, the nature of the blows-and it seemed certain there had been a gang of probably drunken, possibly violent youths in the vicinity at the appropriate time, and yet … And yet … he could not let go of the idea that what had happened to Bill Aston had its roots in something more specific, more personal than a random attack in which he was a victim solely by chance and circumstance.
Resnick looked again at the blurred black-and-white images on the wall. Was it only a kind of sentimentality that urged him to see Aston’s death as having had reason and purpose, that and nothing more? He looked at his watch: Khan and Naylor should be making contact with Paul Matthews at any time. There were other avenues still open.
Khan and Naylor had spent the night in a B amp;B in Swansea, close by the old docks, now a smart new marina surrounded by brightly painted rows of flats and a heritage trail. Their landlady had insisted on serving them eggs and bacon accompanied by lava bread. “It’s a delicacy, see. Local.” Whatever it was, Kevin Naylor thought, it wasn’t bread. Black and somewhat slimy, it tasted suspiciously of whelks. As soon as they stepped outside the front door into the bright spring day, they could clearly see both hills and sea. Rhossili Bay was little more than fifteen miles along the Gower Peninsula.
Paul Matthews’s aunt didn’t disappoint. Her cottage was at the end of a rutted lane outside Llangennith, on the north edge of the Rhossili Downs. Two rusted cars lay on their sides, the new year’s nettles growing up around them. A van, unlicensed, but apparently still running, sat by the side gate, a black-and-white collie growling at the two detectives through bared teeth.
The aunt walked out into the yard, scattering chickens from around her slippered feet. Face brown and lined beyond her years, hair falling thinly away from a wispy bun, she was wearing an apron with a small floral print and muttering in Welsh.
“It’s not lost you are, is it?” she asked, lapsing into English.
When they assured her they were far from lost and explained why they were there, she insisted on sitting them down and making them tea. Paul, she said, had gone off early, down towards the bay most likely; that was what he’d done most days since he’d come.
“Something wrong with that boy,” she told them. “Not right in the head. Oh, I don’t mean he’s crazy, mind. Not like that. But troubled.” She smiled at them hopefully. “Anything you can do now, to ease his mind.”
They found him on a high reach of cliff, gulls riding the currents above his head and wheeling down to where they were nesting on the almost sheer face of rock.
For a fearful moment Naylor thought that he was poised to jump, but he was simply standing, staring out at the dark smudge of a tanker slow-sliding down the horizon, north to south.
“Mr. Matthews,” Khan said, speaking quietly, not wishing to startle. “Paul.”
He didn’t seem surprised to see Khan there, simply nodded towards him and Naylor and went back to looking out to sea. The wind was beginning to whip the tops of the waves into crescents of foam. On the horizon, the ship seemed scarcely to have moved.
“Paul? Paul, this is my colleague, Detective Constable Naylor. We need to talk.”
“But we’ve already …”
“We need to talk some more.”
“About Nicky?”
“Yes.”
Matthews looked out beyond the cliff edge towards the pencil-thin line bisecting sea and sky. “Mr. Jardine, does he know?”
“That we’re here?”
Matthews nodded.
“No. Anything you say, it’s just between us. You have my word.”
“Because he warned me, all of us, we weren’t to say anything, anything at all, not without him or a solicitor being there. He …”
“But he’s not here, Paul,” Khan said reassuringly. “Look around you. He need never know.”
Mathews took them to a place that stood alone, with white peeling paint, little more than a hut, an owner who had retired there from southeast London, Camberwell, and now sold cans of drink with names neither Naylor nor Khan had ever heard of, and tea from a large and battered silver pot.
They sat outside on rickety bench seats, sheltering from the freshness of the wind.
“I can’t stop thinking about him,” Matthews said. “Seeing him everywhere I look.”
“Nicky, you mean? Nicky Snape.”
“I found him, you see. It was me, I was the one.”