Killing Me Softly (25 page)

‘What's this dealer's name?' she asked, but that was going too far. It scared them, and rightly so. You didn't mess around where drugs were concerned. Look where interference had got Nick. That was a thought to choke on, though even harder to take was the fact that he'd been willing to be bought for keeping schtum about this in the first place. Nobody knew better than a policeman – even an ex-policeman – the havoc and horror drugs could wreak in young lives. But analysing Nick's actions would have to wait until she was in a frame of mind to see them in a more compassionate light.

‘Would you recognise him again?' Brother and sister exchanged glances, then nodded. ‘And where can I find him?' she asked Richie.

‘Dunno.'

‘Nicola Blake, who is she?'

‘Just a girl I know.'

‘Where does she contact him?'

‘He contacts her.'

‘You realize I shall need to see her?'

He went very red. ‘She won't tell you anything.'

‘Never mind, we'll find him.'

Richie capitulated suddenly. ‘His name's Morgan,' he said, without looking at his sister.

Back in her car, Abigail rang Skellen on her mobile phone.

‘Frank, I think it would be a good idea if you came into the station.' She gave the Drugs Squad inspector a quick run-through of what she'd just learned. ‘Looks as though we've got him!'

There was silence at the other end of the line, then a few mutters. He didn't sound as excited as he ought to have done. ‘Did you hear me? His name's Morgan.'

‘I heard,' Skellen said. ‘Morgan William Finch, known to all as just Morgan, like a bloody bishop. He lives at the Bagots. He's a low-life we've been trying to nail down for yonks.'

Skellen was worse than Mayo, when it came to taking the wind out of your sails. ‘So now you've got him – and his supplier.'

‘What use is
he,
dead?' Skellen sounded morose. ‘You can back this up?'

‘Not yet. We need to talk to this Morgan. It's odds on he killed Spalding, too – or had him killed, which comes to the same thing.'

‘OK, be with you in half an hour.'

‘So Wishart picked the drugs up when he went on these sailing trips – and Morgan did the dealing?' Mayo asked. ‘Where did they meet? What linked them?'

Skellen said, ‘Wishart was hardly a major league trafficker. NCIS has nothing on him, nor has anyone else, he must've been small beer, whichever way you twist it. Obviously, he got the great idea of peddling dope to get himself out of a financial hole, is my guess, starting with a few snorts of coke for his mates, maybe. It happens.'

Abigail had questions of her own. ‘Well, OK, selling a few grams of coke to his cronies wouldn't be a problem, but anything else, finding a dealer, say – that'd be a different ball game, wouldn't it? As you say, he was no professional.'

‘Hell, that's no problem. A word in somebody's ear, pubs, clubs – it'd go round like wildfire.' Skellen shrugged. ‘But he was playing at it, in professional terms, although I'm not saying it would have stopped at that, once he'd got used to the idea of easy money. But that sort of amateur operation, dabbling, that's what brings trouble.'

‘It brought him trouble,' Abigail said.

‘Right. Organized traffickers aren't keen, somehow, on the idea of anybody homing in on their operations! No second chances there. Zap out the competition, just like that. I'd go for that rather than this idea of Morgan – a dealer killing his supplier. No way.' Skellen pushed out his lips. ‘If it had been the other way round, now, for fear Morgan would rat on him ...'

‘Where does Pardoe fit into this?' Abigail asked. ‘He had to have known what was going on, on his own boat.'

‘If he did, he'll deny it, and who can prove it?'

‘He'll have difficulty in explaining Neptune Holdings,' Mayo said, with satisfaction. He wasn't surprised to learn that Pardoe had been under investigation for some time. He now had on his desk a detailed report of the Neptune and other companies which Pardoe had set up to launder money illegally entering the system.

He explained: ‘Basically, it worked something like this: Pardoe lends Wishart the original money to buy the drugs, taking his cut, of course, then sets up the company to launder the profits – making a non-existent loan to explain the cash Wishart has suddenly come by -'

‘The interest being his cut for setting it up, of course,' Abigail said. She thought about it for a moment. ‘Wishart was owing Pardoe when he was killed. He wouldn't say how much, but I'd say it was no mean sum.'

‘Well, the lad had recently cleaned himself out paying off his creditors, you say. He'd have needed more money for his last consignment – presumably he did a repeat deal with Pardoe – but since he was killed before he'd any chance to sell, Pardoe lost out. He won't be acting the old pal again so easily, I'll bet, seeing Wishart's little enterprise finally fouled things up for him.'

Abigail doodled around with her pencil. Nick's murder, and Wishart's. The violent manner of Nick's death was the penalty for interfering in the dangerous world of drugs; Wishart's own death, too, could be explained in the same way. Except that something about Wishart's murder didn't fit.

Skellen wasn't looking too satisfied on his part, either. Supplier and dealer might have been identified, but the link with the source was gone. He had lines of weariness etched on his face, but he seemed resigned. In his job, it was one step forward, two back. He leaned back and said, ‘All right, I guess we'll have to pull Morgan in now – and the rest of them down at the Bagots.'

Mayo's hand was half-way to the telephone to issue the necessary orders, when Skellen stopped him. ‘First thing tomorrow'd be better. More likely they'll all be there. Surprise ‘em out of their beauty sleep.'

This time, Mayo didn't object. ‘I'll be guided by you.'

Skellen, after all, Abigail thought, had a feel for this sort of operation. He did what he was best at, what he believed in, it was why he'd chosen to remain with the Drugs Squad when he could have moved on, and up. He had his own motivations. She suddenly remembered the rumour that Skellen's own son had OD'd on heroin, and believed it.

The raid was a doddle, after all.

‘In and out as soon as possible,' was the instruction from the beefy uniformed sergeant in charge of the half-dozen lads and lasses from the divisional support team. Skellen and Sergeant Tillotson were armed with a drugs warrant to search the premises, plus a black labrador bitch called Ebony and a hydraulic pump to bust the door open, which in the end wasn't needed.

The old front door of number six, the Bagots, wasn't even locked, and the occupants, five of them in all, four young men and a girl, strewn around the various rooms, were too befuddled with sleep or otherwise to put up much of a resistance. There was more danger, as Skellen later said, in breathing the air, which smelled as if something had been dug up that had been left underground for a long, long time.

Nevertheless, although the house was taken apart, the results were not overwhelming. No more than a negligible quantity of cannabis, plus a gram of heroin and some needles, recovered from the bedroom the ginger-haired Scot and his girl shared. Skellen forbore to say ‘I told you so.' He hadn't allowed himself to hope they'd get lucky enough to find a safe house for the handover of drugs, so he wasn't disappointed.

‘You squatting here?' inquired Tillotson, as he prised Jem out of the kitchen and rolled his eyes at the mushrooms on the ceiling.

Jem was indignant. He protested that the house belonged legally to Luce, that it had been left to her by her grandfather.

‘Well, bully for Luce, whoever she is! She won't be so chuffed, mate, when she's done for allowing her premises to be used.'

Jem said, ‘Luce isn't like that, she –'

‘Save it. Save it for Mr Mayo. He likes fairy stories.'

The lot of them were bundled into the van and taken across to Milford Road station.

The redheaded Scot with track marks all the way up both arms was dealt with first: Jimmy McKeogh, the one they called Ginge, who lived there with his girl, Sheena. ‘Ge' offa ma back,' he ground out in a Glasgow accent that was thicker than his skinny, undernourished frame. ‘I havenae done nothin' but –'

‘Shut up and answer the questions,' Skellen said. ‘We've already charged you with possession. You know you can get big time for that. Good for seven years, anyway. Life, maybe, if we can prove intent to supply.'

McKeogh's skin turned a sickly greenish colour under the harsh fluorescent lights of the interview room as he protested he'd never in his life done any dealing ... He was shaking, he badly needed his next hit.

‘Who's your dealer, then? Morgan, is it?'

He looked stubborn, with a stubbornness and distrust of the police born out of the Glasgow tenements. And scared. ‘Are you crazy? Expecting me to grass? I'm no' ready tae die yet!' At the rate he was travelling, he was likely to be disappointed, said Skellen's glance. They went on questioning him, but he wouldn't be moved. Not yet; maybe later, when he was desperate enough.

His partner, Sheena Grant, was brought in. ‘Won't get much out of her,' Farrar, who'd booked her in, warned. ‘Not stoned, not at the moment anyway, but she's all the same on another planet.'

A small girl with a cloud of dark hair, she had an innocent, heart-shaped face and a sweet, lost, spaced-out smile ... What made her feel she
needed
drugs when being like this was her natural condition? Not over-bright, perhaps, a simple, pretty girl who seemed to inhabit a world of her own, just having an inborn reluctance to be part of the human race.

Farrar was right, as usual. It was no use questioning her, she only smiled.

The 999 had come in just before midnight. Two old ladies had been burgled, one had been attacked with a knife and was in a serious condition. The attacker had escaped. The injured woman was taken to hospital, with two uniformed police officers following the wailing ambulance in the hopes of a statement. They arrived just too late. Sybil Wishart had died a few minutes before.

WPC Carol Busfield, who had eventually brought Rula home from the hospital, was sitting with her when Carmody arrived at Sybil's Edgbaston flat the next morning, and was immediately despatched to make tea by the old lady. She raised an eyebrow at Carmody, but smiled placidly and did as she was bid. A steady lass.

Miss Brinsley was not above five foot tall, with a small monkey face equipped with outsize spectacles, behind which a pair of sharp eyes gleamed. Her iron-grey hair was cut in a no-nonsense fashion. She was dressed in a plaid skirt and jumper, sensible shoes, and the only sign that anything untoward had happened was that her hands shook slightly as she soothed in her arms the bad-tempered, elderly Yorkshire terrier who'd gone for Carmody's ankles as he entered, and was still glaring out at him from under its blond fringe.

The old lady studied Carmody's big, doleful face for several moments and evidently decided he would do. ‘Sit down and listen to what I have to say, then,' she commanded.

Size had nothing to do with it, he thought, amused, towering fifteen inches above her. She indicated a slippery satin chair and took the opposite one herself.

‘It was Tyke who woke me,' she said, ‘didn't you, my clever darling?'

If Tyke had kept quiet maybe the burglar would have got what he wanted and gone away without having to resort to violence, but Carmody didn't intend to upset his mistress by saying so.

Hearing his name, the terrier started up his shrill barking again. ‘He's quite harmless,' Miss Brinsley reassured the big detective, ‘just upset, he'll be quiet in a minute.'

The dog did presently shut up, but continued to glare at Carmody, looking as if it would like to bite. The feeling was mutual. Carmody, sliding his behind back to get a better grip on the satin seat, averted his gaze. ‘If you could just tell me what happened, ma'am.'

Tyke had wakened her, she repeated, with a proud pat on her darling's head. She'd immediately been aware of someone moving about in the flat. At first, she had thought it was Sybil, but when she went out into the corridor, she'd heard her – well, snoring. Her friend had been a little – how shall we put it? under the weather – before she went to bed. Pissed, silently amended Carmody, who'd boned up on Sybil with George Atkins before he came.

Rula had managed to waken her. The noise seemed to be coming from the kitchen-diner, and since the only telephone was in the sitting-room, they'd gone in there together to try and ring the police.

But the intruder had come out of the adjoining kitchen just as they got into the room – and then, all hell had been let loose. The dog had bitten the burglar on the ankle, Sybil had gone for his face with her nails, and Rula had picked up a silver candlestick and hit him on the head. ‘He was wearing one of those woolly caps, however,' she said regretfully, ‘so I'm afraid that didn't do much good.' But the burglar had panicked and got out of the flat as quick as he could. Not, however, without consequences. During the struggle, he'd pulled a knife and stabbed poor Sybil.

Bloody hell, thought Carmody. Who wouldn't have panicked, after an attack like that? They were gutsy, these old girls – and lucky, too, that only one of them had been knifed.

‘He'll be well marked, then. He'll have a dog bite and scratches on his face, probably a lump on his head.'

‘Yes,' she agreed with a satisfaction that soon died. ‘If you find him, that is.' She had no more faith in the police than many more. Her face was suddenly drained of animation. She looked what she was, an old lady who had suffered terrible shock and bereavement. She said, her voice shaking a little, ‘I've known Sybil for seventy years, ever since we were born. Our mothers were bosom friends and I suppose we were, too. When you think, it might just as easily have been me.' She blew her nose with determination. ‘Well, that's enough of that. I'm fortunate it wasn't. And I've just thought of something. I can draw his face for you.'