‘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?’