I shrugged. The idea of killing bodyguards didn’t bother me either. I knew it could be done. I could also see that Elaine was now coming round to the idea. We both sat looking at each other for a few moments, each of us wondering how far we were really going to go.
‘I hate that bastard for what he’s just done to me,’ she said eventually, ‘but I don’t want to do anything that’s going to make things worse for you and for us. Do you know what I mean?’
But the thing was, I’d made up my mind. ‘He’s going to have to die, Elaine,’ I said simply.
She took a drag on her cigarette and eyed me closely through the bluish haze of smoke. Then, for the first time since returning that night, her gloom seemed to lift. ‘There’s a better way,’ she said.
Gallan
Berrin remained off sick on Monday. The flu, or whatever it was, had supposedly got worse. If the truth be told, he’d picked a good day to be absent. It was another stinking hot one and tempers in CID were frayed. Knox chaired the meeting of the Shaun Matthews murder squad, during which the events of the weekend, including the death of the possible witness McBride, were discussed, but there remained a feeling that everything had ground to a halt on the inquiry, and Knox was preoccupied by other events. A thirteen-year-old girl, just one year older than my daughter, had been dragged onto wasteground in broad daylight by a man in his thirties while walking home from the park, and violently sexually assaulted. The ordeal had lasted as long as half an hour and the attacker had also slashed her arm with a knife or a razor, even though she’d made no move to resist him. This was a particularly nasty type of crime, one that upset the public, and therefore one that upset the Brass. Which meant immediate pressure to get it solved. By nine-thirty that morning, there’d also been two missing persons reports, one of them a teenage schoolgirl, and Knox was being pushed from above to reorganize his resources. This meant cutting the size of the Matthews murder squad. With the case nine days old, and other business piling up all over the place, Knox reduced it to himself, Capper, DC Hunsdon, myself and Berrin (whenever he turned up for work again). However, due to further staff shortages within CID, I was informed that I was also going to have to work the other missing persons case, that of a fifty-three-year-old ex-con and former soldier named Eric Horne, who’d been missing since the previous Thursday.
At this point, the meeting became heated, and I’d pressed, with a lot less diplomacy than I usually exhibit in front of the boss, for far more serious efforts to be made in tracking down Jean Tanner since if she was alive she at least might be able to help. I also brought up the Neil Vamen angle, undeterred by how it had all gone the previous day, and suggested that he too might have had some involvement. ‘And surely, if we’ve got the opportunity, we want to put someone like him behind bars?’
Knox attempted to answer my concerns as thoroughly as possible, explaining that he would speak to his counterpart on the McBride case straight away, and get what details he could, although he added that the hunt for Miss Tanner was not our responsibility since McBride had not died on our patch. We would, said Knox, continue to look at the possibility of Neil Vamen’s own possible motives, but he suggested that, with the death of the one person who’d mentioned his name in connection with the case, it was going to be extremely difficult to prove any involvement on his part, if indeed there’d been any. I think I must have pulled a face because Knox shot me one of his trademark dirty looks reserved only for people who really pissed him off, but I was past caring. In my opinion, the whole thing was becoming a whitewash. If the Matthews case had been a straightforward one, like most murders, and hadn’t had any connections to the complicated morass of organized crime, then Knox would have been a lot more interested. Instead, he’d clearly decided that it was more hassle than it was worth, that the chances of a conviction were too negligible to waste time on. These days it was all about performance league tables. Something like this, particularly when the corpse belonged to a lowlife like Shaun Matthews, was always going to be put on the back-burner if there were other, easier crimes coming along that could be solved. That was the long and the short of it.
The meeting broke up at ten past ten and Knox, after doling out orders to various individuals and trying to solve a couple of minor grievances, one involving Boyd and Capper and an alleged sexist comment, called me into his office. Neither of us was in the best of moods and the sweltering heat in the office did little to help matters. Knox had two desk fans blasting away but all they did was push the hot air around the confines of the room.
‘Look, John, I know you’re pissed off because you don’t think things are moving as quickly as you’d like on this case, but you know how things are.’ I didn’t say anything. ‘I’m going to speak to DCI Peppard, DI Burley’s boss, later this morning to see what information we can get from them. If they pick up Jean Tanner, I’ll make sure we get the opportunity to question her about Matthews, and see what she may or may not know. We’ll also chase them to find out how McBride died and whether they’ve got any leads on who may have killed him.’
‘DI Burley wasn’t exactly helpful, sir.’
‘He can be very brash, I admit.’
‘He treated me like a criminal. We’re meant to be on the same side.’
Knox’s face reddened. He had the look of a man who’s been given the job of counsellor without actually wanting it. ‘It’s not like that. Burley’s territorial. He doesn’t like people, even fellow officers, muscling in on his patch.’
‘I was hardly muscling in. I was actually trying to help him.’
‘I’m sure you were, it’s just that that’s not how he interprets it. He’s not very good sometimes around younger officers. I think he thinks they’re upstarts.’ He gave a reassuring and vaguely patronizing smile as he said this — not that I thought there was anything particularly amusing about it. I continued to look at him stony-faced.
Seeing that he didn’t seem to be making much of an impression on his disgruntled charge, Knox changed tack. ‘Whichever way we look at it, Roy Fowler still remains for me the prime suspect. He of all people had a motive. Now, I’m not letting this inquiry go, no way. What we need to do is to look into Fowler’s background much more deeply because he is most definitely the key to all this.’ Warming to his theme in a way that had been conspicuously absent in the meeting earlier, he continued, occasionally banging his fist on the desk for emphasis. ‘He and Matthews were definitely involved in the drug dealing. It’s a lucrative business. I’m sure they fell out about it, and it’s very likely that that fall-out somehow led to his death. Why else would Fowler have disappeared? Unless he’s got something to hide. He’s been gone, what? Three, four days now. Which I would describe as highly irregular. And didn’t you and Berrin tell him not to go anywhere during the course of the inquiry?’ I told him we had. ‘So let’s concentrate on him. I want you to review the case notes, go back and talk to his associates, particularly staff members at the Arcadia, and Capper and Hunsdon are going to dig deeper into what he’s been up to in the past. What scams he was involved in, particularly this brothel business. This Heavenly Girls. That might give us some ideas. It’s time for some lateral thinking.’
‘My lateral thinking would be helped a great deal, sir, if I didn’t have to worry about a missing persons case as well.’
Knox sighed. ‘I know it’s not ideal, but you know the problems we’ve got with manpower. I’ve got to put bodies on that indecent assault yesterday. The media are already sniffing around. She’s a very pretty girl, and, worse than that, her parents are high-band council taxpayers with a lot of clout, so we’re going to need a fast result. No one wants an animal like that running loose, particularly when he’s doing everything possible to make his crime as high-profile as possible, so we’re going to have to show plenty of faces. I’ve also got the Drugs Squad breathing down my neck for help on some major surveillance they’re running. Operation Swift Strike it’s called, though swift it most certainly ain’t, and it’s likely to take people out of the loop for the next three or four days. You see what I’m saying?’