Hunting for Crows (19 page)

‘I couldn’t. I love the Crows. It’s my life.’

‘I can’t help you there. My decision is made and I’m not changing it.’

‘What am I gonna do?’

‘Join another band or try your hand at something else.’

‘Like what? The only thing I know is playing the guitar.’

‘The criminal roadie you’re always hanging about with could get you a job as a getaway driver on a bank robbery or something. No, forget it, you’d fall asleep at the wheel.’

‘You can laugh all you like,’ he said, his bloodied face now firm and resolute, ‘but maybe I will. He did a big job a couple of days ago and I know where he hid the loot.’

CI Bill Paterson (ret) lounged on the leather sofa in Derek Crow’s office as if he owned it. In the Met, he’d worked Vice, and at times he’d no doubt felt there wasn’t a business, house or shop premises where he couldn’t barge in and shake-down the occupants, making him feel like he ruled the world, or at least his small part of it.

Following the deaths of Barry and Pete, Derek Crow had asked Paterson to review both accidents and examine the police investigation, and assess their verdicts. In his report back, Paterson told him he had no issues with the police investigations and considered their judgement sound. Now with the death of Eric Hannah, the reassurance of propriety from Paterson would no longer wash. Something or someone was killing his friends and Derek needed to find out quickly and stop them or he would be next.

Paterson had suggested the compilation of a ‘hate’ list, the names of anyone with a serious grievance against the band. Paterson had done this as much to line his own pockets as to help him, but he didn’t mind as he liked the former copper’s direct approach, and Crow never did believe the solution lay with warlocks, curses or karma. In Paterson’s mind it was simple. If the lads didn’t die in accidents or commit suicide, someone had killed them.

If deciding the way ahead was easy, compiling the list was not, as it had opened a host of old sores and wounds and railed against his philosophy of never looking back. There were many things in his past of which he was proud, and in some cases, worked hard to replicate, but like many people he knew, he’d made mistakes too. The difference between him and others was he refused to dwell there, feeding on former glories and replaying the misery of historical failures like a stuck LP.

Bill Paterson was a fat, serious man with thinning grey hair and a heavy, jowly face. Beneath these undistinguished features lurked a shrewd, analytical mind, coupled with an aggressive streak. He thought nothing of breaking the arms, noses and bollocks of unhelpful suspects. He was dressed in a cheap suit, crumpled shirt frayed at the cuffs and the scruffy tyke couldn’t knot a tie.

Paterson lifted his tea, Yorkshire, strong with milk and three sugars, and took a long, loud slurp. He opened his report.

‘Are you ready for this Derek? A rake through the old coals of a sordid, self-indulgent past might be a bit of a sobering experience for some.’

‘Yeah, go ahead,’ he said with a confidence he didn’t feel. He wasn’t ready for this, he could never be ready, but fear drove him on.

Paterson dealt with what he called the ‘easy’ ones first. Kingsley Dass, the band’s self-proclaimed champion at the record company had been sacked when the Crows split up. He didn’t find a new job for two years and during this time his wife sued him for divorce, resulting in an acrimonious court battle, played out in the tabloids. Boz Strider, a session guitarist, had been hospitalised after taking a pop at Eric. Simon Rother, religious zealot, had not been best pleased when Derek tipped him and all his pamphlets into a fountain in the centre of Manchester. Lindsay Tremain, a new-age author, had claimed her books were being plagiarised in the lyrics of their songs. After each name, Paterson replied ‘forgotten about’, ‘no problem’ or ‘annoyed at the time but they’re over it.’

To Derek’s knowledge, two on the list still bore a grudge and said as much whenever reporters asked them about him, but Paterson was emphatic, there was nothing to worry about. The ‘easy’ ones took an hour and depleted his store of emotional capital, but alas, it was but the warm-up for the ‘difficult’ pile. He ordered a fresh pot of coffee and biscuits and after the tray arrived, Paterson opened the first file.

‘Dave Manson, a former roadie for the Crows.’

‘Ok.’

Known to all as Smelly Dave, Derek tried to picture him. An image came into his mind of a big, grizzly bloke with long black hair, pock-marked face, four days’ growth, toothy smile and a fat gut. As a consequence of his copious beer and curry consumption, he was a contaminated individual to sit beside in the confines of a Transit van or a bus. His continual farting, burping and rancid body odour made the journey from London to Dusseldorf, and even shorter hops like London to Northampton, unbearable.

‘He was sacked from the band in 1987,’ Paterson said, ‘for stealing two amps and a speaker cabinet. He denied the charges at the time but in his defence, admitted he couldn’t remember much about the incident as he was drunk.’

‘Yeah, sounds about right. He was forever pissed.’

‘When I met him he was living in a refuge for recovering addicts. He weighs about eight stone now and looks well, if a bit frail, but the light that still shines bright is he hates your guts. He says he never recovered from his sacking from the band, which was his dream job, and hasn’t held down a proper job since. This led him into a cycle of drug taking and stealing, he lost his house, his wife, and doesn’t see his kids. He blames the band, you in particular, for sacking him, and Eric for starting him on the sauce.’

‘Bollocks, he took drugs before he joined the band. Bloody hell, he still remembers this after all those years? There’s fuck-all wrong with his brain cells.’

‘As I said, he’s in this recovery place and says he’s feeling healthier and fitter than he’s done for a while, but he could have fooled me. I’ve seen dead people in better shape.’

‘Could it be him?’

‘Possible, as he’s mobile, he’s got access to a car belonging to one of the aids, he seems to have a lot of mates in the place and his hate burns bright as the sunshine.’

‘That might account for the twenty-plus-years delay, him just getting back on his feet.’

Paterson nodded. ‘I think so too. It’s been a long downward spiral, but he’s past the worst, in my opinion.’

Derek thought for a moment. It was one thing to talk about airy-fairy things like curses and hoodoos, but it was another to hear a name and see the face of the person who might have killed his friends. A man who might soon be coming after him. It shook him.

‘Are you all right, Derek? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘No, I’m fine. This stuff is getting to me, that’s all.’

‘What I suggest we do, is put the ones we think have a valid grudge, and we can see reason why they might wait twenty-plus years to take revenge, into a ‘possible’ pile. Later on we can decide what to do about them.’

‘Yeah, good idea. Who do we have next?’

‘Annaleise Quinlan.’

‘Shit.’ He’d been caught in two minds about even including this one, as the memory still made him squirm, like peeling a sticking plaster back from an aching sore. If the story had any foundation, re-opening it could give the press a field day and wreck his newly acquired public persona and the groundwork done on his political ambitions, but he could see no other option.

He’d met Annaleise in a hotel corridor in Leeds just after a gig, he high on adrenaline and she high on drink or drugs. Soon, she was all over him like a rash. Rather than go back to his room as the others were congregating there, he’d pulled her into a laundry cupboard where they’d had raw, hungry sex. If his memory served him right, it included a liberal dose of biting, slapping and scratching.

‘She’s a primary teacher at a school in Cambridge. By all accounts she’s good at her job and well-liked by her pupils.’

‘Maybe, but back then she was a groupie.’

‘I’m sure you’re right but cries of rape were treated very different in 1986 to how they are now. You said you weren’t charged?’

‘Nope, it didn’t go so far, just an interview with a spotty oik of a sergeant in Leeds Central and nothing was put in a file. Her word against mine, the copper said.’

‘Mind you, in a crowd it would be hard to differentiate those who were groupies, itching for a screw with a rock star, and those who were star-struck teenagers looking for nothing more serious than a flash of your pen.’

‘Too true, especially when you’ve just come off stage and feeling like you could walk on air. We’d grab the nearest couple of birds and head upstairs.’ He paused for a moment, a part of his mind awakened by a number of memories of the time, most of which were good.

‘So what are you thinking, Bill? Why are you thinking she’s a difficult case if it was done and dusted all those years ago?’

‘At first she looked like any other settled middle-aged teacher who does a side-line in tutoring seven-year-olds in the rudiments of dance, but then I met her husband. He’s a big brute of a bloke, a lorry driver with arms twice the size of mine, and when she was back in the kitchen making tea, he told me she suffers from uncontrollable bouts of crying, anger outbursts and bad headaches because of it.’

‘How is he taking it?’

‘He’s very angry, like a bull at the gate.’

‘I see. Why would he leave such a long time before attacking us?’

‘He hasn’t been on the scene long. They married nine months ago and he only met her four months before.’

‘Oh. Why is the band being targeted and not just me?’

‘Maybe he blames the band for the lifestyle, or maybe he’s saving you for last, hoping you’ll suffer.’

Derek shot him a look, daring him to smile, but the expression was the same, impassive and ugly, a face only a mother could love. ‘I’m suffering all right. She and her husband belong on the same pile as Smelly Dave.’

‘I think so too. Don’t look so down Derek, there's only one more to go. It’s your old mate Mathew Street.’

Mathew Street; he toyed with the memory. Street was like Paterson, a man who never smiled but he could lay his hands on anything, magazines, a little flick knife he carried in his trouser pocket, cartons of cigarettes, bottles of booze, clothes, all manner of stuff, all knocked off with no questions asked.

‘He’s an easy man to find as he’s got plenty of form, but a hard man to see. I needed to put on my ‘Paterson from the Met’ hat to get in the door.’

He then trotted out a long list of thefts, assaults, robberies and jail-time stretching from detention centres as a teenager to his release from prison only six months previously.

‘Give me the last one again.’

‘Street was sent away for twelve for a post office robbery. While he was inside, they found new evidence linking him to the AeroSwiss robbery at Gatwick Airport in 1989. He was given another fifteen to add to his sentence. He’s been inside over twenty-five-years.’

‘It’s still a big whack for stealing some money.’

‘It is, but like the Great Train Robbers way back then, the judge wanted to make an example of them because they came tooled up and they shot and wounded a security guard. It wasn’t only Street, the whole gang copped it. Plus, when inside, he was involved in the stabbing of some guy and it wiped out any parole he had coming.’

‘What did he say when you spoke to him?’

‘Not much, in fact it was a bloody waste of time. It was more the things he didn’t say that interested me. He told me the fall-out with you was all a misunderstanding. How come you were hanging about with scum-bags like him?’

‘He was useful to have around, he could get us all sorts of things and fix broken gear, but as you said, he’s a man who robs security vans for a living. He’s not likely to take the loss of cash, no matter how small, lightly.’

‘What was the story, you guys wanted all this stuff and when he came up with the goods you couldn’t pay him?’

‘We were temporarily strapped for cash. Frannie Copeland, our manager kept us on a tight leash, to keep the band lean and hungry, according to him. Meanwhile, you could find him swanning around London in a smart car and chomping on those bloody fat cigars he liked to smoke. We told Street we would pay him when Frannie gave us some more money, but he got the hump and refused to leave the goods. He tried to get rid them but couldn’t as they were hot and in the end, he dumped the whole lot in a skip, the pig-headed sod. I think he lost a couple of grand.’

‘When I talked to him,’ Paterson said, ‘he laughed the incident off as one of the pitfalls of selling knocked-off gear. Like I said, it wasn’t what he said I didn't like, it’s what he didn’t say. When he told me he still liked you guys and didn’t bear a grudge, his body language and the tight expression on his face expressed something else. Derek, I was in the force for thirty years and I can spot a liar at fifty feet. He was boiling inside, but could I get the old fucker to say anything about what was bothering him? No sodding way.’

‘Pity.’

‘Is there something you’re not telling me? Did something else go down between you guys and him, other than the loss of a couple of grand? He might be a criminal and willing to do anything for money, but I don’t see him holding a grudge for over twenty years about a measly two grand.’

‘I suppose not.’ He sat back, thinking. ‘No, there’s nothing else I can think of. You didn’t find out if he was maybe the uncle or godfather of Danny Winter, a relative still grieving over the death of his favourite boy?’

‘I didn’t explore the point and Street didn’t say anything about him, plus I didn’t see any pictures around his house of a young lad in his first school uniform or a guy playing keyboards in a band. Is there any significance in Street being put away for his long stretch only a few months after the Crazy Crows split up?’

‘Not that I can think of. What’s on your mind?’