Death of a Cave Dweller (6 page)

The record was a little less noisy than the live group had been, and Woodend was now fairly sure that the buzzing in his ears would go away eventually. He kept his eyes on the stage. The drummer and the two guitarists ducked under an archway at the side and disappeared from sight, but the lead singer, a tall, slim boy with blond hair which spilled well over his collar, climbed down the steps and was heading through the tunnel towards the snack bar.

The boy looked at him at him with the same surprise as everyone else in the club had. “Bit old for this, aren't you, grandad?” he said.

Well, at least he didn't ask me if I was expectin' to see a stripper, Woodend thought.

“I suppose I am a bit old for it,” he admitted, “but I liked your set, anyway. Would you like a drink?”

Suspicion flared up in the boy's eyes. “You're not a poof out on pick-up, are you?” he demanded.

“No,” Woodend said, pulling out his warrant card for the third time. “I'm a bobby.”

The boy did not examine the card closely, as Rick Johnson had done. Instead he simply said, “You're here lookin' for Eddie Barnes's murderer, are you?”

“That's right, I am,” Woodend agreed. “That drink's still on offer if you want it.”

“I'll have a Coke,” the boy said.

A Coke! Woodend thought. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned lemonade? Was there suddenly something wrong with dandelion and burdock?

“You must be Mickey Finn,” he said, laying some coins on the counter. “Is that your real name?”

“I was christened Michael Finn,” the boy said. “Most of the lads I knock around with call me Mike.”

“Did you know Eddie Barnes well, Mike?”

Finn shrugged. “Depends what you mean by well. He wasn't a close wacker of mine, if that's what you're askin', but I did know him. Most of the lads who are in groups know each other. We're always performin' in the same places, you see. We help each other out. We cadge lifts in each other's vans. An' we lend each other guitarists or drummers when the feller who's supposed to be playin' has got to work late, or has been kept in by his dad.”

Woodend forced himself to suppress a smile. Kept in by their dads! You saw these big lads strutting about on the stage and you got the illusion they were grown up. But they weren't. Come Friday night, they'd be handing their pay packets over to their mums and getting pocket money back in return. And as for having their own keys to the front door – well, that would have to wait until they turned twenty-one!

“Did Eddie Barnes ever play with the Knockouts?” Woodend asked the young singer.

“A couple of times.”

“An' was he any good?”

“Not as good as our regular lead guitarist,” Finn said proprietarily, and this time Woodend did grin.

Finn's band had re-emerged from the dressing room, and were picking up their instruments.

“I think you're wanted on stage,” the chief inspector said.

“Yeah, I'd better go,” Finn agreed. “Mrs Pollard likes to get value for her money.”

Woodend watched the young man weave his way back through the audience. Mike Finn had seemed quite open, and what he had said could possibly turn out to be useful. Yet the chief inspector couldn't suppress a feeling that, if the singer had known there was a policeman standing at the bar, he would have stayed well away from it.

A man wearing a cord jacket and grey flannel trousers emerged from the dressing room, dismounted the steps, and made his way towards the snack bar. He had thinning brown hair and a totally unprepossessing appearance. He was, Woodend guessed, around thirty-five – which probably made him the third-oldest person in the club.

The man reached the bar. “Give me a glass of cold milk as quick as you like, Doreen,” he said in a squeaky voice to the girl behind the counter. “I'm so dry I'm spittin' feathers.”

He knocked back half the milk in a single gulp, then turned to Woodend. “You'll be a policeman, will you?”

“That's right,” Woodend agreed. “And you'd be . . .?”

“I'm Ron Clarke, the resident DJ.”

“Is that right?” Woodend asked, finding it hard to reconcile the washed-out little man standing next to him with the powerful, excited voice which had blasted its way out of the tannoy.

Clarke read his thoughts, and grinned. “I'm a different person with a mike in front of me gob,” he said. “So how's the investigation goin'?”

“As far as I'm concerned, it's only just startin',” Woodend told him. “You must have known Eddie Barnes quite well, workin' at the club.”

Clarke nodded. “Oh, I knew Eddie all right.”

“An' what did you make of him?”

“Make of him?” Clarke took a reflective sip of his milk. “Serious,” he said finally. “Very serious.”

“About his music?”

“About life, really. He wasn't like the other Seagulls. You'd see the four of them in the pub when they had money – all gettin' pissed – but you could tell just by lookin' at him that Eddie would rather have been at home watchin' the telly if he'd had any choice.”

“‘If he'd had any choice'?” Woodend repeated. “You mean someone was forcin' him to be there?”

“Maybe I'm puttin' it badly,” Clarke admitted. “It wasn't really a question of force. He was there because Steve Walker
wanted
him to be there.”

“And what Steve Walker says, goes, as far as the rest of the Seagulls are concerned?”

“Not for all of them – Billie an' Pete can be quite independent when they want to be – but it did as far as Eddie Barnes was concerned. Anyway, that's how it looked to me.”

“An' there was never any sign of the worm turnin'?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You never got the impression that Eddie resented bein' bossed around by Steve?”

Ron Clarke shook his head firmly. “I really must be makin' a mess of explainin' myself,” he said. “It wasn't like Steve was the boss an' Eddie was his slave. It was more like Steve was Eddie's big brother. Steve's a couple of years older than Eddie is . . . was. I think that made a difference.”

“So Steve Walker must be really cut up about Eddie's death?” Woodend suggested.

“That's puttin' it mildly,” Clarke replied. “He's devastated – totally devastated. I think, if he'd been given the choice, he'd have preferred it to be him what got electrocuted.”

Mickey Finn was singing about some other guy
who'd taken his girl away from him. Woodend glanced down at
his watch, and wondered whether he should stay until the end of
the show. On reflection, he didn't think he would.
He'd probably learned as much as he could from one session,
and besides, the heat in the place was making his armpits
itch.

R
ick Johnson was no longer maintaining a lonely vigil at the club door. He had been joined by a slim pretty girl, with long dark hair. She reminded Woodend of his own daughter, Annie, who, at that time of day, would be in school. He wondered why this girl wasn't sitting at her desk, too.

“So you've seen enough of the club already, have you?” Johnson said aggressively.

Woodend gave the girl a friendly smile, then turned his attention back on the doorman.

“Is this one of those difficult customers that Mrs Pollard pays you to keep out?” he asked.

“She's my wife!” Johnson said, scowling.

Jesus Christ, Woodend thought. His wife!

She had to be older than she looked, but even so, she could barely be of marriageable age. The chief inspector found himself wondering exactly what set of circumstances would make a sweet little kid like her end up married to a bruiser like Rick Johnson.

“How do you do, Mrs Johnson? I'm very pleased to meet you,” he said.

Instead of answering, the girl looked down at the ground. Her long dark hair now obscured her face, but Woodend would have been prepared to bet that she was blushing.

“My wife doesn't talk to strangers,” Rick Johnson said, as if she weren't really there at all.

“Very wise,” Woodend said. “An' you should tell her not to take toffees from them, either. That's what I've always told my little girl.”

Without waiting for a reply, he turned on his heel, and strode across the road. Whatever had made her marry Johnson, a man with a criminal record? he asked himself for a second time.

It was only a few short steps to the Grapes, the pub where he had told Rutter and Inspector Hopgood to wait for him. Woodend pushed open the door, stepped inside and took a look around him. The bar had a wooden floor and scrubbed wooden tables. Many of the customers seemed to be off-duty postmen, but there was also a smattering of young lads, some of them with guitar cases propped up next to them. So this place was the watering hole of the kids who played in the Cellar Club, the chief inspector thought. That was a very useful thing to know.

The two policemen were sitting at a table by the window. Both looked as if they had run out of things to say to each other long ago. Woodend bought a pint of best bitter at the bar, then walked over to them and eased his large frame into a free chair.

“I've been telling your sergeant here that I've fixed you up with a nice big office back at the station, sir,” Hopgood said.

“That's very kind of you, Inspector,” Woodend replied, “an' I'll make sure that word of how helpful you've been to us gets back to your bosses.” He paused for a second. “But there's no point in wastin' much space on us, because we'll hardly ever be there.”

“I'm afraid I don't quite follow you, sir,” Hopgood said. “If you're going to conduct a murder inquiry, you'll surely need—”

“While I get some ale down me, why don't you explain to the inspector how we work, Sergeant,” Woodend interrupted.

Rutter sighed softly to himself. Breaking in the new help was always a tedious business, which was why the chief inspector was leaving it up to him. Still, he supposed that was what a bagman was for – to do the tedious business.

“Mr Woodend doesn't like to get too far away from the scene of the crime,” he said.

“Meaning what, exactly?” Hopgood asked.

“Meaning he doesn't have much use for police stations.”

Doesn't have much use for police stations? The idea of not basing things at the local nick was inconceivable to Hopgood.

“So where exactly
will
he be conducting his investigation from?” the inspector asked.

Rutter looked across at Woodend questioningly.

“Where would
you
guess I'll be conductin' my investigations from, Bob?” the chief inspector asked.

It wasn't very hard to work out the answer, Rutter thought – not when you knew Woodend as well as he did.

“You'll probably be running it from inside the club itself, won't you, sir?” he asked.

“Spot on,” Woodend agreed.

“But . . . but at midday and during the evening, it's full of teenagers,” Hopgood pointed out.

Woodend grinned. “Quite right. An' by some happy coincidence, those are just the times that this hostelry – which you can see for yourself is so convenient for the crime scene – is open.”

“You can't run an murder investigation from a pub,” Hopgood said, clearly outraged.

“Not only could I, but I have done on a number of occasions, Inspector,” Woodend replied mildly. “You can learn a hell of a sight more sittin' in a pub – right in the middle of things – than you ever would behind the closed doors of the local cop shop.”

“But that's just not the way things are done in Liverpool, sir,” Hopgood protested.

“Maybe it isn't – but it's the way I do 'em.”

Hopgood took a deep breath. “You're here as guests of the Liverpool Police,” he said, “and I'm afraid that my superiors are going to insist that you observe the proper form.”

Woodend sighed, not softly as his sergeant had earlier, but with all the exasperation of a man who has obviously played this same scene through dozens of times before.

“How many murders do you reckon we've worked on together, Bob?” he asked Rutter.

“Six,” the sergeant replied. “Starting with the case of that young girl in Salton and—”

“Forget the details,” Woodend said airily. “An' of those six, how many times have we caught the killer?”

“Six,” Rutter said, doing his best to hide his smile.

“Six out of six,” Woodend said musingly. “Not a bad record, all in all.” He took another sip of his pint of bitter. “Am I makin' my point clearly enough for you, Inspector?”

Hopgood flushed. “Your methods are unorthodox, but you usually get results?”

“Nearly right,” Woodend agreed. “My methods are unorthodox, and since I've had this bright grammar-school lad workin' with me, I've
always
got results. So you can just relax, Inspector. Leave us to do things our way, an' we'll find your killer for you.”

Hopgood stood up. “If you'll excuse me, sir, I have to go and make a phone call,” he said.

“I'm sure you do,” Woodend agreed. “An' while you're talkin' to your boss, tell him that if he's not happy with the way I'm conductin' my inquiries, I'm more than willin' to catch the next train back to London. My roses'll appreciate me gettin' back, even if no bugger else does.”

Rutter grinned as he watched the inspector make his way hurriedly towards the pay phone in the corridor next to the toilets.

“You don't have any roses, sir,” he pointed out.

“No, I don't. But then again, they're not goin' to send us back to London, either.”

“You're sure of that?”

“Oh yes. They need somebody to take the blame for not comin' up with a murderer, an' we're the lucky devils who've drawn the short straw.”