Dying Fall (14 page)

Pogo nodded. ‘And you?'

The other man shook his head. ‘Too young. They called me up
after
the War, but then they decided that they didn't want me.' He grinned again, revealing a mouth full of rotting teeth, and tapped his head with his index finger. ‘I've got mental problems, you see.'

‘Too bad,' Pogo said sympathetically.

‘Not bad at all,' the other man contradicted him. ‘I never wanted to be a soldier anyway.' He paused. ‘Did you ever kill anybody?'

Too many to count, Pogo thought.
Far
too many to count.

But aloud, he said, ‘Not as far as I know.'

‘I once knew a killer,' the other tramp said softly, as if he were revealing a great secret.

‘Did you now?' Pogo asked, trying to sound interested. ‘What kind of killer was he?'

‘A very bad one. But he didn't go to jail.'

‘Why not?'

‘I forget,' the other tramp said, seeming to lose interest in the subject. ‘It was all a very long time ago.'

‘Have the police questioned you?' Pogo asked.

‘They did. I talked to a big bastard in a sports coat.'

Monika's boss, Pogo thought. ‘Did you tell him anything?' he asked.

The other tramp shook his head. ‘Didn't have anything to tell.'

‘So you haven't noticed any suspicious characters hanging around?'

‘No. Have you?'

‘None at all,' Pogo said.

‘Shall we be pals?' the other tramp asked unexpectedly.

Pals! It was a long time since he'd had pals, Pogo thought.

And those last pals of his had done something so utterly unspeakable that he still had nightmares about it.

‘Yes, we can be pals, if you like,' he heard himself say. ‘But if that's what we're going to be, you really should tell me your name.'

‘You can call me Brian,' the other tramp replied. ‘But that's not my real name. I don't like my real name.'

‘Why not?'

‘It carries too much responsibility with it.'

‘How can a name carry responsibility with it?' Pogo wondered.

‘My real name,' said Brian, with a great deal of pomp and circumstance, ‘is Brunel.'

There's no wonder the army turned you down, Pogo thought.

The vagrant's name was Terry Dodd, and he was sitting on a bench in the Corporation Park when he saw the uniformed police constable approaching him.

Dodd thought quickly. There were two ways to handle the situation, he calculated. He could either pretend to be asleep, or he could look in the opposite direction. And since the bobby himself had probably already seen that he
wasn't
asleep, looking away was definitely the best option.

He turned creakily, and fixed his eyes firmly on a yew tree in the distance. Behind him he could hear the sound of the policeman's footfalls drawing ever closer.

The constable stopped walking, and the tramp felt a slight tap on his shoulder.

Reluctantly, Dodd turned around and said, ‘I haven't done anything wrong.'

Crabtree smiled. ‘Nobody said you had,' he replied re­assuringly. ‘But I'd still like you to come with me.'

‘I don't
want
to go to the police station,' Dodd whined.

‘And I have no intention of taking you there,' Crabtree replied.

‘Then where
do
you want to take me?'

‘To the off-licence,' Crabtree told him. ‘I'm going to buy you a bottle of cheap wine. Or, if you prefer it, you can have cider.'

‘What's the catch?' the tramp asked.

‘No catch,' Crabtree lied uneasily.

Rutter was sitting in the living room of a modest semi-detached house in one of the outer suburbs of Manchester, looking across the coffee table at a man who'd appeared to be around forty-five when he'd answered the door, but now seemed much, much older.

Finding Henry Turner hadn't been difficult. In fact, as was so often the case when tracking down members of the respectable working class, it had been an absolute doddle, involving no more than a few phone calls to the relevant government and local council offices.

On the other hand, breaking the bad news of his brother's death to him hadn't been easy at all.

It never was.

‘I've been expecting to hear that our Phil was dead for years,' Turner said dully. ‘With the kind of life he led, he was never going to make old bones. But to have gone like
that
!'

Rutter nodded sympathetically. ‘Did he have any other relatives?'

‘There was Edith, his wife, of course, but she was run over by a corporation bus. Broke his heart, it did. It was straight after her funeral that he started hitting the bottle. He never recovered from it.'

‘When did he first become a tramp?' Rutter asked.

Turner's eyes hardened. ‘Our Phil was never a tramp!' he said with feeling. ‘He might have lived a bit rough from time to time, but that didn't make him a
tramp
!'

Didn't it? Rutter asked himself. Then what
did
it make him?

‘What would you prefer me to call him?' he asked.

‘He was a traveller,' Henry Turner said firmly, ‘looking for the peace of mind on the road that he could never have found living in the city where his darling Edith died.'

‘Of course, a traveller,' Rutter agreed hastily. ‘So how long was he a traveller?'

‘Must be eight years now,' Henry Turner guessed. ‘For the first two or three, he used to send me postcards from the places he visited – Cardiff, Newcastle, Glasgow – but then even that stopped.'

‘Can you think of any old enemies he might have had?' Rutter asked, suspecting, even as he spoke, that it was a pointless question to put.

‘Phil wasn't the sort to make enemies, and even if he had any, how would they find him when even his own brother didn't know where he was?' Turner replied, confirming the suspicion. Then he looked Rutter straight in the eyes, and said, ‘Who do
you
think killed him? And
why
did he kill him?'

‘We don't know,' Rutter admitted. ‘Our best guess at the moment is that it was a random act of violence. Somebody wanted to kill a tram— a traveller, and your brother just happened to be the victim he lighted on.'

Turner shook his head. ‘It seems such a waste,' he said. ‘Can I claim the body?'

‘Of course,' Rutter agreed. ‘I'll put the wheels in motion as soon as I get back to Whitebridge.'

‘I'd like to see him properly buried. It's the least I can do for him.' Turner hesitated for a second, then added, ‘I suppose it'll have to be a closed coffin?'

‘I'm afraid so,' Rutter agreed. He looked around the living room, at the beautifully polished display cabinets and the framed pictures on the walls, then added, ‘Do you happen to have a photograph of your brother? Preferably one that was taken not too long before he started travelling?'

Turner walked over to the display cabinet like an old man, and returned with a photograph in a silver frame. Two people smiled out of it – a woman who could not be called pretty but looked very pleasant, and a man who bore a close resemblance to Henry Turner.

‘That's the most recent one I have,' Turner said. ‘It was taken about three years before he went away.'

‘Can I borrow it?' Rutter asked. ‘You'll get it back when we've copied it.'

‘Will it help you to catch the man who did this terrible thing to him?' Turner asked.

Probably not, Rutter thought, but aloud he said, ‘In an investigation like this one, every single piece of additional information we get can be a help.'

‘Then take it,' Turner said. ‘Take it with my blessing.'

Though he'd been dying to do so for some time, it was not until he was out on the street again that Rutter looked at his watch.

He was running late again, and for a moment he almost abandoned his plan to do a bit of shopping away from the watchful eyes of his colleagues. Then he told himself that the purchase was important to him, and if his colleagues didn't like it, they could bloody well lump it.

Elizabeth Driver thought quickly on her feet, but even better when she was behind the wheel of her Jaguar, which was why, for the previous hour or so, she had been driving around the Whitebridge area with no particular destination in mind.

The book was going well, she told herself, as she slotted another piece of its venom mentally into place. Better than well – it was going bloody marvellously.

The town would never be the same again after her book came out. It would do its best to prove her wrong, but the corruption she would expose – some of it, no doubt, true – would leave a stink that would cling to the place like sprayed-on cow piss.

The book would also, of course, make her a figure of hatred in the town, but that wouldn't bother her – not when all she had to do was take the money and run.

She had just turned on to Hardcastle Street when she noticed the big police van. It was parked in front of an off-licence, and though there was nothing at all unusual about that, the behaviour of the uniformed constable standing by the double doors at the back of the van immediately aroused her interest.

She pulled into the kerbside and switched off her engine. She was probably wasting her time, she told herself, but even as her brain was processing the thought, her reporter's instinct was bringing a tingle to the back of her neck.

The back doors of the van were open, and the constable was having a heated discussion with a couple of rough-looking men who looked like tramps. The tramps, it appeared from their gestures, wanted to get out of the van, and the constable was intent on persuading them to stay in.

It was the
persuasive
element of the encounter that interested Elizabeth Driver. If the tramps had been arrested, she argued, persuasion wouldn't have come into it. And if they
hadn't
been arrested, what were they doing in the back of the van, and why was the bobby so keen to keep them there?

The door of the off-licence opened, and another constable stepped out on to the pavement. He had a carrier bag in his hand, and when the tramps saw it, they became even more agitated. And not only them, but the tramps behind them – because it now became apparent that there were at least half a dozen of them inside the vehicle.

The constable with the carrier bag had arrived back at the van, and when his colleague had stood aside, he reached into the bag and produced a bottle of cider. Several hands made a lunge for it, but the constable brushed most of them aside and handed it to a youngish man wearing a threadbare fawn overcoat, who, once having a firm grip on his prize, dis­appeared into the bowels of the van.

The next bottle the constable produced was sherry, and once again he seemed to know exactly who it was intended for. A bottle of red wine followed the sherry, and a bottle of white wine came after that. Soon, all the tramps had been issued with a bottle of something or other, and had retreated into the van. Once they were gone, the constable closed – and locked – the doors.

He's not only bought all them a drink, he's done it to order, Driver thought incredulously.

The two constables climbed into the front of the vehicle, and the van pulled off.

Driver waited until they were almost at the end of the street and then set off in pursuit.

You never know what's going to happen to you, Bob Rutter thought, as he stood at the counter of a very expensive shop in the centre of Manchester.

Take Philip Turner's case, for example. One minute he was a happily married man – as was obvious from the silver-framed photograph – and the next his wife had been run over by a corporation bus.

Take his
own
case. He
hadn't
been happily married – the guilt he felt over his affair with Monika Paniatowski had ensured that – but he had loved Maria, and he had been devastated when she was murdered.

So what was the moral to be learned from all this?

Simple! When you wanted something that you thought would make your stay on earth a little more bearable, you grabbed it immediately.

Because if you stopped to think about it – even for a second – it might well be gone.

‘Can I help you, sir?' asked the cashmere-clad assistant.

‘Yes, you can,' Rutter replied. ‘I'd like to buy an engagement ring.'

What Constables Warner and Crabtree really wanted, when they'd finished the task that Henry Marlowe had assigned to them, was a good strong drink – or
several
good strong drinks – but they were still in their uniforms, so they settled for large mugs of tea in the nearest cafe.

The tea helped soothe them – but only a little.

‘I just can't help thinking we've done the wrong thing,' Crabtree said worriedly, as he sipped at the dark sweet liquid.

‘What choice did we have?' Warner countered. ‘When the chief constable says, “Jump!” all we can ask is, “How high, sir?” That's the way things are in this world.”

‘I know that. But did it feel
right
to you?' Crabtree persisted.

‘No,' Warner said gloomily. ‘It didn't feel right at all. I knew when I joined the police that there'd be lots of things I'd have to do that I wouldn't like doing, but I
never
expected I'd—'

‘Mind if I join you?' asked a voice.

They looked up, and saw a woman standing over them. Crabtree noticed that she was in her late twenties, and rather smartly dressed to be in a place like this scruffy cafe. Warner noticed that she had long black hair and breasts you could drown in. Both wondered why she wanted to waste her time sitting with them.

The woman sat down anyway, without waiting for the invitation.

‘I'm Elizabeth Driver,' she announced. ‘I'm a reporter for the
Gazette
. You may have read some of my stuff.'