‘Our murder board,’ Dylan answered. ‘There are so many players in this game, we need something to keep all the information straight. This way we can jot things down as we discover them. Cops do it all the time.’
With a black marker, the board on the left-hand side had been divided up into columns with the heading, People of Interest. The names Jason Gates, Andrew Gates, Ragged Racing and HM Customs topped each of the columns. The right-hand board was, as yet, untouched.
‘Who came up with this?’ I asked.
‘Your man there,’ Steve said pointing a thumb at Dylan.
‘It’s cool, right?’ Dylan said.
It was. I liked this. With so much happening, the murder board helped put the chaos in order.
‘And it’s not staying,’ Steve said. ‘Because I want this room back.’
Dylan waved Steve’s objection away. ‘He’s got a thorn up his arse because he didn’t think of it.’
‘Thorn or no thorn, can we get on with this?’ Steve said. He tossed a marker at me. ‘You want to take us through this? We’ve been waiting for you to come back.’
I pulled a red pen from the pack and wrote Victim under Jason’s name. That stopped the banter flying around the room.
Now that I had their attention, I talked as I wrote. ‘Jason worked for Ragged Racing for three years, then left the team a year ago to join Townsend Motorsport. He then digs into Ragged’s affairs, but not straight away. Whatever he was investigating was dangerous enough for him to dump his girlfriend, Carrie Russell, three months ago. After his death, someone ransacked his place, destroying everything he’d gotten on Ragged.’
‘Why was Jason investigating the team?’ Dylan asked.
I wrote a question mark. ‘Customs says it’s drugs and Townsend Motorsport says it’s cheating.’
‘Maybe one led to the other?’ Steve suggested.
Under Ragged Racing, I wrote: Suspect.
‘Who?’ Dylan asked. ‘Rags or the whole team?’
I wrote another question mark. ‘I don’t know. It could just be Rags or it could be all or none of them. But here are a few items of interest. The whole team was at a restaurant just a few streets from where Jason was killed, which gives everyone access. Jason was killed with a fine-edged blade and Kurt Haulk carries a flick knife, which he says is a product of a misspent youth. And Jason had a set of Ragged Racing keys on him when he was killed. Someone gave them to him.’
‘But you don’t know who?’ Steve said.
I shook my head.
‘Which means you can’t trust any of them. That’s not a good situation. You could be working with a killer, or working for one.’
It was a thought I’d already had and one I was trying to ignore. ‘So what are you saying — I should quit the team?’
Steve shrugged.
Steve’s point was a good one, but it needled me. Ragged Racing was my big break. How could I contemplate giving it up, despite the dangers? I tried diluting that bitter pill with the fact I was involved in a sport where getting killed was always a potential outcome. There was danger on the track and off it. I could live with both eventualities. For now.
‘What you need is someone watching your back,’ Steve said.
‘How can he when any one of them could be the killer?’ Dylan asked.
I saw the answer immediately. ‘So we go with an inside man.’
Steve smiled and turned to Dylan.
Dylan pointed to himself. ‘Me?’
‘You said you wanted a job at Ragged,’ I said.
‘That’s before I knew it was a den of potential thieves and killers.’
‘It’s a tough economy. Beggars can’t be choosers.’
‘Nice.’ Dylan was silent for a long moment. ‘Do you think you can get me in?’
‘I think I can sell it. Put it this way, I have a really big incentive to sell it.’
‘Woohoo. Lucky me. Can we move on to someone else, like the wanker who slashed my tyres?’
I wrote: Dominic Crichlow. Heavy for Andrew Gates and wanker who slashed Dylan’s tyres.
‘The more interesting person here is this guy,’ I said and tapped the Andrew Gates heading with my pen, then wrote: Jason’s brother and loan shark.
‘Shouldn’t that be ex-loan shark?’ Dylan suggested.
I shrugged. ‘We’ve only got his word for that.’
‘I know someone who we can talk to on that front,’ Steve said. ‘Give me a day to look into that.’
Steve and loan sharks? I waited for him to explain, but he just stared at me.
‘Move on, son. It’s been a long day.’
In the column for Customs, I wrote Barrington’s name with the suffix: also a wanker. ‘Barrington says he has someone working undercover in the ESCC. I’m hoping this person can help us, although I get the feeling that relationship is supposed to be reversed.’
I added entries for Townsend Motorsport and Carrie Russell, under the classification of useful sources. The three of us then drew links between the various pieces of information we’d learned.
Dylan took a pen from the pack and added an additional column. At the top, he wrote: Woman in the Renault. He tapped the title with his pen. ‘How’s this woman feature in all this? I find it curious that your problems with her started up just after Jason’s murder.’
I frowned. ‘For what purpose?’
‘It’s a distraction. It gets you out of the way.’
I wasn’t sure if I bought that story, but Miss Angry Renault was staying on the board for now.
‘That’s a whole lot of stuff up there, but I’m not sure what it all means,’ Steve said.
‘We have a handful of pieces to the puzzle, possibly to a number of puzzles,’ I said. ‘We need to be aware of them and focus on what we do know.’
‘Which is what?’ Steve said.
‘Jason was murdered. Motives and reasons will reveal themselves if we can establish why Jason was poking around Ragged’s transporter that night.’
I shifted over to the second board and drew a horizontal line. At the top of the board I wrote: Timeline.
‘Where was everyone when Jason was killed?’ I said.
At the centre of the line, I wrote the time and date Jason was killed. Working backward from Jason’s time of death, I added a milestone for the approximate time the team had left the restaurant. Then I added milestones for three months ago and twelve months ago and wrote: Breaks off his relationship with Carrie and leaves Ragged Racing. I drew a separate line connecting these two times and wrote: Somewhere Jason starts investigating Ragged’s affairs. And close to the start of the timeline, I wrote: Four years ago, Jason starts working for Ragged Racing.
‘Now, there are things that will need to be added to the timeline, but the questions right now are: why did Jason leave the team and when and why did he start digging into their activities? If we start adding everyone else’s activities to this timeline, we’ll know who killed Jason and why.’
‘And how do you suggest we do that?’ Steve asked.
‘By asking some questions that are bound to annoy quite a few of these people,’ I said, pointing to the people listed on the murder board.
‘I’ve got a lot of time on my hands at the moment,’ Dylan said. ‘I’ll Google Ragged Racing, its history and its drivers and see if anything interesting falls out.’
‘I think we’ve got a plan, gents,’ I said.
Music from the Jumping Bean Mexican Cantina next door was filtering through the thick brick wall that separated it from Archway. The happy hour crowd had moved in.
‘Dinner’s on me.’
While we waited to be shown to our table, Dylan said, ‘You realize that you’re following in Jason’s footsteps, don’t you?’