‘But they might well belong to Thomas Mark,’ Slider said, when he was back in circulation in the afternoon. ‘We haven’t got his on record to compare them with, but when we find him, it’ll be another nail in his coffin.’
There was also a lot of mud under the wheel arch and a sample was being analysed to see if it matched the mud in the lane where Masseter was killed.
‘But I think we can assume, for working purposes, that it was him who killed Masseter, because otherwise what was he doing up there and why did he take away the papers and computer?’
‘Why did he do that anyway?’ Hart said.
‘Well, let’s come back to Masseter later,’ Slider said, unwittingly driving a thorn in her heart. ‘Let’s look first at what we’ve got linking Bates to the Stonax murder.’ He could call it that with impunity as Emily was out of the room, still beavering away on the computer, with Atherton’s assistance.
‘At about the same time Ed Stonax was killed, the next-door neighbour Mrs Koontz sees a motorbike courier come out of the building with a large Jiffy envelope in his hand. The bike had a white box on the back with a circular logo on it, with, she says, a “little telephone” in it, which is the logo of Ring 4. Also a file was missing from Ed Stonax’s filing system. So it’s a promising inference that the courier was the murderer and that he took away the file.’
‘After smearing oil on the victim’s pockets and cuffs, which he got from Dave Borthwick’s bike, to make it look as if Borthwick did the job,’ Hollis added.
‘And leaving some faint oily smears on the filing cabinet,’ Swilley said.
‘I suspect those weren’t intentional,’ Slider said. ‘The residue left after sullying Stonax. But he won’t have cared much. If the file was that important, presumably he will have thought getting hold of it made him invulnerable. And anyway, it was Dave’s bike’s oil, so if found he knows it goes to Dave’s account.’
‘Yes, but who is “he”, boss?’ Swilley asked. ‘We know Thomas Mark set up the lock disabling, but was he the one that did the murder?’
‘I think the one thing we can be sure of is that he didn’t do the actual killing,’ said Slider. ‘Remember we had the footmark by the filing cabinet, and it was too small to be either Borthwick’s or the victim’s. Now I don’t know Thomas Mark’s shoe size, but he’s a big man and I think we can take it as read that his feet will match the rest of him.’
‘Which leaves – Bates,’ said Swilley.
Slider nodded. He had been coming to this conclusion ever since his talk with Solder Jack, who had reminisced that Bates was a ‘little runt of a man’ with ‘little fingers twinkling away’.
‘Bates is not a tall man,’ he said. ‘He’s quite slight in build, too, though he keeps – or used to keep – himself very fit. And he has small hands – very useful for fiddling about with miniature circuitry – so he probably has small feet as well.’
‘But could a small man have coshed a tall man that easily?’ Fathom asked.
‘I’ve got a picture in my head. Let me run it by you,’ Slider said. ‘The courier lets himself in by the disabled front door, pops down and gets some oil on one of the gloves from Dave’s bike, and goes up to the flat with a large envelope and a clipboard. He rings the doorbell. Stonax answers it. “Could you sign for this please?” says the courier. He hands over the clipboard, and then says, “Oh, I’m sorry, I seem to have mislaid my pen. Have you got one?” Stonax turns back into the flat to get one. As soon as he’s taken a step away from the door, courier says, “Oh, it’s OK, here it is,” and takes a step forward himself to hand it to Stonax. Stonax bends his head over the clipboard—’
‘Right!’ said Swilley. ‘That’s how you get him to put his head within reach! And when the courier whacks him he drops the pen and then falls on top of it.’
‘But why all the pen malarkey anyway?’ Hart said.
‘The courier needs to get him to step away from the door. If he fells him actually in the doorway, he won’t be able to get the door closed without moving him, and that will take time and make noise. The courier’s purpose is to get in and out as fast as possible without alerting anyone. It takes just seconds to empty his pockets and take the watch, and a few seconds more to find the right file. He stood still by the filing cabinet just long enough to leave his impression in the thick-pile carpet. The hall carpet outside the front door was far too thin and old, and the vestibule has a tiled floor, and he didn’t stand still anywhere else.’
‘Then he pops Stonax’s watch in an envelope and puts it under Borthwick’s door, shoves everything else in the Jiffy bag, and walks calmly out to his bike,’ said Hart.
‘To be seen by Mrs Koontz,’ said Mackay, ‘which is no bad thing, really, because Borthwick has leathers and a helmet with a dark visor, so it helps shove it on him.’
‘So you think the courier was Bates, then, boss?’ Swilley said.
‘There’s been a car and a motorbike all the way through,’ Slider said, ‘and it seems logical that if Thomas Mark was driving the car, Bates must have been on the bike. He was careful not to be seen by Borthwick, or to leave any fingerprints, because he’s on our files and Mark isn’t. But Jack Bushman instantly thought of Bates as being the likely manufacturer of the device that disabled the Valancy House door.’
‘Likely manufacturer,’ Hollis said. ‘It seems to me that while we’ve got a lot of supposition that fits the facts, and we’ve got Mark definitely implicated, we can’t actually prove Bates was there at all. He’s worked it out right well.’
‘I know,’ said Slider. ‘That’s the problem. We need to know what was in that file. That’s probably where all our evidence is. If we knew why Stonax died, we might be able to prove who did it. Because at the moment we can’t connect Bates with Stonax at all.’
‘Unless we can get Mark to roll over,’ Hollis said. ‘And given that Bates has put him in the shite up to his oxters, he might well do that.’
‘But we’ve got to find him first,’ said Hart.
There was a gloomy moment of silence.
‘What about Bates’s escape?’ Mackay said.
‘What about it?’ Slider said.
‘Well, he had to have had someone on the inside. What if that someone was Tyler, and offing Stonax was the quid pro quo?’
‘You’re saying he got Bates out of jail to do it?’ said Hollis. ‘It’s an idea.’
‘Why wouldn’t Tyler do it himself?’ Swilley said. ‘We know he’s willing to kill, and to do it with his own hands.’
‘But he wouldn’t do Stonax himself,’ Mackay said. ‘Too risky. He’s got too much to lose now, and he can’t hope to be let get away with it again.’
‘And he’s out of the country,’ Hart added.
‘No, he isn’t,’ Swilley said. ‘I came across it on a website when I was checking Bates’s contacts. He doesn’t take up his new appointment until October, but he came back in July. There was a photograph of him attending a performance at the Royal Opera House.’
‘He could have been just visiting,’ Hart said.
‘But his term in Brussels ended in July, and he’d want to get himself set up, find somewhere to live and everything,’ Norma said.
‘Find out,’ Slider said. ‘Find out if he’s here, when he came, and where he’s living. If he did come back in July, it makes a lot more sense.’
Atherton had gone through page after page of Waverley B references without gaining any insights, except that it confirmed what Sid Andrew had said, that it was an unlucky site. Industrial relations seemed to have been particularly bad, and there were stoppages and strikes as well as an unusually high absentee rate. He was staring at the screen in frustration when all the hairs stood up on the back of his neck and his nostrils twitched as he caught Emily’s scent. She had come up behind him, and now leaned lightly on his shoulder to look at the notes he had made, which were lying on the desk beside him.