Chill Factor (29 page)

“We didn’t ’ave a pen,” he told me.

“Well you wouldn’t have, would you?” I replied with uncharacteristic understanding. With a combined IQ that was lower than the number of left legs at an amputees ball, it was unlikely that either of them would want to scribble down a sonnet, or even a haiku or two, after a moonlit shag in a Ford Fiesta. I waited for someone else to speak and wondered what to have for lunch.

“It wasn’t then…” Jason began.

“Wasn’t when?” I interrupted.

“Then. When I dropped her off. It was before that, at the brickyard, just after, you know…”

“Just after you’d had it?” My mind kept returning to the two of them bonking like a pair of ferrets in the front seat of his car. It was worrying.

“Yeah, then,” he confirmed. “She told me ’er number and I asked ’er to write it down, on a parking ticket. Not a
parking
ticket, one from a machine, you know.”

“A pay and display ticket,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s right. Pay an’ display. But she didn’t ’ave a pen.”

“And you didn’t, either.”

“No. So she wrote it on the win’screen, with ’er finger. Up at the top. It was steamed up, y’know. Then she pulled the sun flap down, ‘To protect it,’ she said. I’d forgotten all about it.”

“Alle-flippin’-luia,” I sighed, burying my head in my hand.

Jason’s car was still in our garage at Halifax, emblazoned with stickers saying that it was evidence and not to be touched. Fingerprints had found the last three digits of the number on the windscreen when they gave it a good
going-over
, hoping to find evidence that Marie-Claire had been in there. The numbers were meaningless, so no action was taken on them. “It’s a phone number for someone who lives in the Sylvan Fields,” I told Les Isles, over a coffee in his office.

“So it probably starts with eight-three, followed by an unknown number,” he stated.

“Which narrows it down to ten possibilities.”

An hour later BT had furnished me with five names and addresses, and after fifteen minutes with the electoral roll I found myself drawing a big circle around 53, Bunyan Avenue; home of Edward and Vera Jackson, and their
daughter
Dionne.

I rang the number, but it was engaged. Les had left me to have a meeting with somebody, so I wrote him a note and headed for the exit. They have a visitors’ signing in and out book at HQ and a young man in a Gore-Tex waterproof was bent over it. He looked at his watch and entered his leaving time in the appropriate column.

“Could Mr Isles help you, Mr Hollingbrook?” the desk sergeant asked him.

“Not really,” he replied. “he was very kind, as always, but said that all he could do was have a word with the coroner. He has to make the decision.”

He slid the book towards me and I put ditto marks under the time he’d written.

“I’m afraid that’s always the case,” the desk sergeant
stated
. “But the coroner’s a reasonable man, and I’m sure he’ll do what he can. I’d have liked to organise a lift back for you, but everybody’s out at the moment.”

The visitor was Marie-Claire’s husband, I gathered, come in to ask about the release of his young wife’s body for burial. He only looked about twenty. I caught the sergeant’s eye and said: “I’ll give Mr Hollingbrook a lift, Arthur. No problem.”

“There you are, then,” he said, and introduced me to the visitor. We shook hands without smiling and I opened the door for him.

His first name was Angus. He was twenty-four years old and a student of civil engineering at Huddersfield University, sponsored by one of the large groups that specialise in
motorways
and bridges. Marie-Claire had died on the Saturday or Sunday of the holiday weekend, while he was seconded to Sunderland to help in the replacement of an old stone bridge over a railway line by a modern pre-stressed concrete
structure
. He’d come home on Wednesday and found her body. I told him that I wasn’t on the case, but I was interested because the assault was similar to the one on Margaret Silkstone at Heckley, back in June. I explained that we had somebody else for that murder, but there was a possibility that Marie-Claire’s was a copycat killing. That was the official line, so I stayed with it. No point in stirring up the gravel with my own private paddle just yet. There’d be plenty of time for that: there’s no statute of limitations on murder.

“Lousy weather,” I said as the windscreen wipers slapped from side to side.

“Mmm,” he replied, not caring about it, his thoughts with the beautiful girl he’d loved, wondering if he’d ever forget her or find her like again.

“It’s next left, please,” he said.

I slowed for the turn, then stopped to allow a bus out. It said
Heckley
on its destination board. The driver waved his thanks to me and when he was out of the way I turned into Angus’s street.

“It’s the last house on the left,” he told me.

They were Victorian monoliths in freshly sand-blasted Yorkshire stone, with bay windows and stained-glass doors,
built for the middle-management of the day but now
converted
into flats or lived-in by extended families. The street was lined both sides with parked cars, because, like the
pocket
calculator, nobody predicted the advent of the automobile.

“This is rather grand,” I said, parking in the middle of the road.

“It is, isn’t it. We just have the top floor. Marie loved it. Great big rooms and high ceilings. Lots of room for her hangings – she was in textile design – but a devil to heat. We…” He let it hang there, realising that there was no
we
anymore.

“Will you stay?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, no way. Our lease runs out at Christmas but I don’t think I could stay that long. We’d wondered about buying it, but it didn’t come off. Fortunately, now, I suppose.”

A car tried to turn into the street, but couldn’t because I had it blocked. Angus opened the door and thanked me for the lift. “No problem,” I replied, and drove round the
corner
, out of everybody’s way.

John Bunyan would have loved the avenue they named after him on the Sylvan Fields estate, although the satellite dishes would have had him guessing. He’d have called it the Valley of Despondency, or some such, and had Giant Despair knocking seven bells out of Christian and Hope all along the length of it. I trickled along in second gear, weaving between the broken bricks, sleeping dogs and abandoned baby-
buggies
until I found number 53. At least the rain had stopped.

The front garden looked as if it had hosted a ploughing match lately, but the car that evidently parked there was not to be seen. I took the path to the side door and knocked. The woman who answered it almost instantly had an
expectant
look on her face and a Kookai carrier bag in her hand. She wore a tight leather jacket with leggings, and her halo of hair faded from platinum blonde through radioactive red to
dish-water grey.

“Mrs Jackson?” I asked, holding my ID at arms length, more for the benefit of the neighbours and my reputation than the woman in front of me. I had a strong suspicion that male visitors were quite common at this house.

“Er, yes,” she replied, adding, as she recovered from her initial disappointment: “’Ave you come about the fine?”

“No,” I replied, “I haven’t come about a fine. I believe you have a daughter called Dionne.”

“Yes,” she said. “What’s she done?”

“Nothing,” I told her, “but we believe she may have recently witnessed something that will help us with certain enquiries. When will it be possible for me to speak to her?”

“You say she ’asn’t done nowt? She’s just a witness?”

“That’s right. She may be able to clear something up for us. When will she be in?”

Mrs Jackson turned, shouting: “Dionne! Somebody to see you,” into the gloom of the house, and stepped out on to the path. “She’ll be up in a minute,” she told me. “I ’ave to go to work.”

“Well,” I began, “I would like to talk to your daughter on her own, but because of her age she is entitled to have a
parent
with her.”

“But I don’t ’ave to be, do I?”

“No, not really.”

“Right, I’ll leave you to it, then. Bye.” She staggered off down the path, her litter-spike heels clicking and scraping on the concrete.

When daughter Dionne appeared she was wearing a tank top whose shoulder straps didn’t quite line up with those of her bra and the ubiquitous black leggings. She was
whey-faced
, her hair hastily pulled together and held by a rubber band so it sprouted from the side of her head like a bunch of carrot tops. Hardly the sex bomb I’d expected. Her
expression
changed from expectancy to nervousness as I
introduced
myself.

“May I come in?” I asked, and she moved aside to let me through. I took a gulp of the chip-fat laden atmosphere and explained that she was entitled to have a parent present but as my questions were of a personal nature she might prefer to be alone. The carpet clung to my feet as I walked into the front room and looked for a safe place to sit. The gas fire was churning out more heat than an F14 Tomcat on afterburner and in the corner a grizzly bear was laying about a moose with a chainsaw, courtesy of the 24-hour cartoon channel. Dionne curled up on the settee as I gritted my teeth and
settled
for an easy chair. There was a plate on the table, with a kipper bone and skin laid across it.

“Kipper for breakfast,” I said, brightly. “Smells good.”

“No,” she replied, her attention half on me, half on the moose who was now minus his antlers, “that was me mam’s tea, last night.”

I decided to axe the preliminaries. “Right. Your mother said she was off to work. Where’s that?” I asked.

“Friday she cleans for someone,” Dionne replied. The moose was fighting back, holding his severed antlers in his front feet.

“What else does she do?”

Dionne wrenched her attention from the screen and faced me. “I don’t know what they get up to, do I?” she protested.

“I meant on other days,” I explained. “Does she have a job for the rest of the week?”

“Yeah, ’course she ’as. She cleans for a few people. Well, that’s what she calls it. Posh people. A doctor an’ a s’licitor, an’ some others.”

I looked around the room, taking in the beer rings on every horizontal surface and the window that barely
transmitted
light, and tried to recall the proverb about the
cobbler’s
children being the worst-shod in the village. “And what about your dad, Dionne?” I asked. “Where’s he?”

“’E left us, ’bout two weeks ago.”

“Oh, I am sorry.”

“Don’t be. ’E’ll be back, soon as ’is new woman finds out what ’e’s like.” The moose had gained the initiative and the bear was in full flight.

“Can we have the telly off, please,” I said, and she found the remote control somewhere in the sticky recesses of the settee and killed the picture.

“Thank you. Four weeks ago,” I said, “On the Friday night of the holiday weekend, you were out with a boy. He says you can give him an alibi for that night. Can you?”

“Dunno,” she replied. “What was ’e called?”

“I was hoping you would tell me. You met him at the Aspidistra Lounge, and he brought you home.” She looked vacant, so I added: “You called at the brickyard on the way,” not sure if that would narrow the field.

“Friday? Of the ’oliday weekend?”

“That’s right.”

“Does ’e look a bit like Ronan in Boyzone?” she asked. “Y’know, dead dishy?”

“He’s a good looking lad,” I admitted.

“Yeah, I remember ’im. ’E’s called Jason. I can give ’im a nalibi for Friday night, if that’s what you mean.”

“Good, thank you. Did you arrange to see him again?”

“Yeah, but ’e ’asn’t rung me.”

“You gave him your phone number?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you write it down for him?”

“No, well, yeah. We didn’t ’ave a pen, so I writ it on the front window of ’is car, in the steam. Mebbe it got rubbed off.”

“Perhaps it did. When you were talking to Jason did you mention your father at all?”

“No,” she replied. “Why should I?”

“I thought you might have mentioned, for some reason, that your father was a policeman. Did you?”

Her podgy face turned the colour of my white socks after
I washed them with my goalie sweater, and one hand went to her mouth to have its nails nibbled.

“It’s not a crime, Dionne,” I assured her. “You’re not in trouble for it, but I’d like to know what you told him.”

“’E’s a bit dense, isn’t ’e,” she stated. “Jason? Yes,” I agreed, “he does have a few problems in the brain department, like not being able to find one. Go on, please.”

“Well, it were like this. We were just passing ’Eckley nick – the cop station – an I said: ‘Me dad’s in there.’ Someone, a cop, ’ad rung me mam, earlier that night to say that ’e’d been done again for drunk and disorderly an’ they were keeping ’im in t’cells until ’e sobered up. ’E was jumping up an’ down in t’fountain, or summat, but I didn’t tell ’im that.”

“And what did Jason have to say?”

“’E got right excited, daft sod. ‘What, your dad’s a cop?’ ’e said. ‘Yeah,’ I told ’im. ‘’E’s a detective.’ ‘Blimey!’ ’e said. That’s all. I think it…you know.”

“Know what?”

“Nowt.”

She clammed up, and I knew she’d reached some
indeterminate
limit that I wouldn’t push her past no matter how hard I tried. Everybody has one. I could only guess what she’d been about to say. That Jason became excited at the thought of shagging a detective’s daughter? Probably.

“That’s very useful, Dionne,” I told her. “And then you went to the brickyard, I believe.”

“Yeah.”

“Right. Now this is where it gets a bit personal, I’m afraid. Not to put too fine a point on it, Dionne, and not wanting to pry into your private life, I have to ask you this: did the two of you make love that night, at the brickyard?”

“Yeah,” she replied, as readily as she might admit to sneaking an extra chocolate biscuit. “We did it in the front of ’is car.”

“Right,” I said, nodding my approval at her answer, if not
her morals. “Good. And can I ask you if he wore a
condom
?”

“Yeah, I made sure of that.”

“Good. I don’t suppose you remember if you did it more than once, do you?”

“Yeah, we did it twice. ’E was dead eager.” I swear she blushed again at the memory, or maybe the gas fire was reaching her.

“And he had two condoms with him, had he?”

“No just one, but I ’ad one. We used mine the second time.”

“Very wise of you to carry one,” I told her. “You can’t be too careful, these days.”

“You’re telling me,” she said, swinging her legs off the settee and facing me. “You won’t catch me risking it. Did you know,” she asked, “that when you ’ave sex with
someone
it’s like ’aving contact with everyone that they’d ever ’ad sex with? Miss Coward told us that in social health
education
. Put the wind up me, it did. So if you ’ave sex with, say, ten people, its like you’ve really ’ad it with a ’undred.”

“Gosh!” I exclaimed.

“An worse than that, if you did it with twenty, that’s like doing it with four ’undred. Four ’undred! In one go! Can you believe that?”

“No,” I admitted. “It’s frightening. But I’ll say this, Dionne: you’re good at maths.”