Rat Poison (18 page)

‘In Bath?' I ventured.

‘When we're through here I'll phone Carrick about Mick the Kick. I'm warming to your idea. I'm convinced that Bath is where all this will end.'

He got the tips of his fingers under the edge of the window and pulled. It opened with a jerk, the opening adjuster at the bottom inside knocking something off the ledge into the kitchen sink. We froze, listening, and I glanced fearfully over my shoulder. But all there was to be seen was the back of a derelict factory with equally disused rusting railway lines running along at the rear of it.

‘I think you ought to remain out here,' Patrick said, preparing to climb in.

‘And I think two pairs of eyes are better than one.'

We stared at one another for couple of seconds then he gave me a leg-up and I wriggled in, removing a couple of other items from the window ledge as I did so and placing them out of the way on an adjacent worktop. Not many moments later we were both standing, a little surprised, in an immaculate minimalist and mostly stainless steel kitchen. The first thing I noticed were the two sets of top-of-the-range knives sort of staring at me from the other side of the room.

Patrick noticed them too but made no comment, motioning to me to stay where I was and moving over towards the door. I gazed carefully around every inch of the room. Everything was sparkling and clean, almost as though no one had ever cooked a meal here. These were hardly the original units installed when the building was new but why have expensive replacements fitted if you didn't intend to use them? I assumed the properties were rented so there was no point in adding to the flat's value.

‘It's like a professional chef's kitchen,' I commented.

Patrick had cautiously opened the door. ‘Perhaps she likes her food.'

‘It's almost  . . . forensic.'

‘That too would figure.'

I shivered.

He went from my sight and there was a nerve-jangling silence. Then I heard a muttered exclamation.

‘What?' I said from the kitchen doorway.

‘Have a look at this.'

I went into a passageway. The first door on the left appeared to lead into a living room and when I entered the dingy interior I too exclaimed.

‘She's removed nearly all the interior walls,' Patrick said.

Some of which, presumably the weight-bearing ones, had been replaced by planks supported by adjustable steel props. The room was still very dusty from this demolition and there were small piles of rubble in corners. The large space created, which was partly partitioned around two thirds of the way down and probably originally four rooms in all, had been turned into a bizarre shooting gallery. There were cardboard targets strung around, most of which were in tatters, some home-made, a few similar to those used on military ranges, the only items not shot to bits an expensive music system just behind the door and speakers high on the wall above our heads. The partition, a piece of wall that had been left standing – all the walls were pockmarked with bullet holes – concealed whatever was down there around the ‘corner'.

Patrick was surveying his surroundings. There appeared to be no infrared intruder detectors but as far as trip wires went the room was too gloomy to be able to see any easily. It was then that I noticed that the windows had been painted over with a ghastly brownish-red paint, the colour of dried blood. Some appeared to have been spilt, or smeared, on the wooden floor.

I jumped violently when the cardboard figures suddenly started to move in a jerking nightmarish way but it was only Patrick pulling on a length of string.

‘You might mention next time that you're going to set everything going,' I whispered, heart pounding. But I might as well have been talking to myself.

He set off down the room, utilizing the illumination from his little torch to reflect off any trip wires which may or may not be connected to booby-trap devices. There did not appear to be any and he reached the partitioned area.

‘Anything interesting?' I asked when he had taken a look around the jagged edge of the wall.

‘Oh, yes,' he whispered, stepping back to look at something.

I went down there.

‘I know exactly what I'm going to do now,' Patrick said quietly when we were standing, side by side, looking at what was on the wall that hitherto had been out of sight.

It was a very large photograph of the pair of us taken on our wedding day – our first wedding that is, Patrick then an army captain. Happy, laughing, carefree: all those things and more. The image had been shot to bits and more of the blood-coloured paint splattered over it.

We were intended to see this.

After taking some photographs with my phone and examining the rest of the flat, we left. The bathroom, dirty, had been left intact together with a very small bedroom that contained a mattress and sleeping bag thrown down on to the floor. Also in the room were a microwave cooker and a plastic carrier bag containing the stinking remains of instant meals and used plastic cutlery. There were no personal effects, nothing that hinted where this woman might be living now, no further clues whatsoever as to her involvement with crime. The general squalor of her living arrangements led me to think that the kitchen had been installed by a previous tenant and the woman had probably hardly ever entered it.

‘But the knives  . . .' I mused aloud.

‘She likes knives – might even fantasize about cutting people up in there,' Patrick responded when we were back outside. He pushed shut the window having inserted the piece of newspaper to keep it in place, then turned to me. ‘I hope what we found hasn't upset you too much.'

‘She's very dangerous,' I said. I could still see the images, the holes where our eyes had been.

‘That mindset has weaknesses.'

It did not seem like any kind of weakness to me.

We seemed to keep running into a wall. On contacting Bath CID Patrick was told by DS Keen that he would find out the latest on Mick the Kick from Bristol CID but had received no word personally that the man had been located. There was no better luck in reporting to Mike Greenway, his second-in-command Andrew Bayley saying that he was ‘out of the office for the day'.

‘He's gone walkabout,' Patrick said, spooning sugar into his coffee. ‘You know what that means, don't you?'

I did. Periodically, and sometimes in response to an out-of-the-blue prompting by ex-colleages in the Met who thought he might learn something useful, he visited old haunts, spoke to present or one-time informers, loafed in pubs in the part of London that he still regarded as his patch and generally kept his ears to the ground. He had once told us that apart from acquiring knowledge it was how he escaped for a short while from the stress of his job. I also thought it was the way this career policeman recaptured a little of past excitements when he chatted to contacts in much the same fashion that military people attend reunions. Our problem was that for perhaps as much as twenty-four hours he insisted on a communications silence unless there was a real emergency. That meant something along the lines of the start of World War Three.

‘I shall have to get his permission before I talk to Mick,' Patrick went on, stirring morosely.

‘Which might not be forthcoming.'

‘I'll go ahead anyway.'

‘Sorry, I really think you need to have him on board.'

This was the hardest part of leaving MI5; he had been his own boss in those days.

I had taken my work laptop into the coffee bar and wrote a concise report of our findings, emailing it to Bayley together with the photographs. There was not a lot more we could do just then and I felt Patrick's discontentment.

‘I wonder how accurate Derek Jessop's description of this woman was,' I said.

‘I've seen a couple of old mugshots but surprise, surprise she changes her appearance all the time,' Patrick said.

‘Criminals often do but she can't do much about her height and build.'

I rang Lynn Outhwaite. The DS was mobile, of sorts, shopping on crutches in Bristol with her boyfriend and in a much better mood than when I had last spoken to her. She told me that on the night when she had seen Murphy in the restaurant the woman had had medium length blonde hair, although following Jessop's description it was probably a wig. Her eyes were brown and she was quite slim but with muscular shoulders ‘like an Olympic rower'. She would be around five feet eight inches tall without the very high-heeled shoes she had been wearing.

I asked Lynn if there was anything else she could remember that might be of significance.

‘Perhaps not particularly significant but her voice is the one thing I really remember about her,' said Carrick's assistant. ‘Husky like a heavy smoker's or a man's. And loud, interrupting people all the time. She acts tough; might be a lesbian. Even if I hadn't had a good idea who she was with I'd have hated her almost on sight. I got the impression she'd do just about anything to get her own way or her hands on money.'

TWELVE

D
etective Sergeant Keen still had no updates on Mick the Kick but was able to tell us that Billy Jessop was at last fit to be questioned. Keen was in close touch with the DCI, who would be returning to work the next day, but meanwhile Carrick was happy for Patrick to talk to Jessop, who was still in the city's Royal United Hospital under arrest. Also under guard, it transpired when we were required to show our credentials.

Jessop's wan appearance confirmed that he had been seriously ill and we were only permitted to talk to him for about ten minutes. He lay, propped up on pillows and resembled, frankly, a wraith with spots. Even his untidy lank hair was fair, almost white, and I saw that when he turned to stare at his visitors that his eyes were a very pale blue. He looked absolutely nothing like his brother.

‘More cops?' he greeted us with weakly.

Patrick introduced us, as was our practice not giving my name, and drew up two chairs.

‘I don't want to talk to you,' said Jessop. ‘Sod off.'

‘Well, sorry, but we need to talk to you,' Patrick said patiently. ‘You see, now that Derek has admitted that not only were the pair of you in Bath taking part in the turf war and gunning for Mick from Bristol and his mob that night, but you also shot and killed a couple of his gang after they were cornered in Abbey Churchyard. That's history and you're both going to be charged with murder but—'

‘Is that what the stupid git said?' Billy raged. ‘Well, he's lyin'.'

‘Look, Billy, everything's gone well beyond the
denying
stage,' he was gently informed. ‘My job is to help catch the bastards who conned you into doing the job in the first place. Any help you can give me will help you in turn.'

‘I still don't believe ya.'

‘Shall I go and fetch Derek so he can tell you the score himself? Incidentally, if he hadn't told us where you were hiding out you'd be nailed down in a long wooden box by now.'

There was a meaningful silence.

Then, ‘I've never seen folk like that London mob,' Billy whispered. ‘I've bin thinkin' about it, you know,' he said defiantly as though we would imagine him incapable of such an activity. ‘I mean, there's rough boys round and about. Micky's got a few screws loose as well but those mobsters from London  . . .'

‘You'd be putty in the hands of evil lunatics like that,' I said soothingly and was given a disconcerting stare.

‘Yes, you're quite right, Mrs Cop. It was exactly like that. We was conned by madmen who didn't care whether we lived or died. They said, like, all we want is for you to be there with us, armed, to scare 'em off with a big show of numbers. Nothin' about runnin' battles. And Derek said it'd be all right and we'd get paid and come straight 'ome again. But those  . . .' Staring at the bedcovers he mumbled obscenities and then lapsed into silence again.

‘Did you see the boss man in his car?' Patrick asked.

‘That twisted poser? Yeah, at the end it was parked down at the bottom of Southgate. That and a coupla others had been driven all through the pedestrian bit.'

‘I'm guessing you knew it was his car but you couldn't see who was in it because of the tinted glass.'

‘No, 'cos I'd seen 'im stop part of the way down. He got out and shouted at the woman to get in. Just after that was when Derek and me got shot. She came over, grabbed my gun and our wallets – the bitch kicked me in the ribs and laughed – then ran to the car. Give me a bit of rope an' I'd string 'er up right now.'

‘Any idea why she didn't get Derek's gun?'

‘He was lyin' on it.'

‘Did the boss man call her by name?'

‘Yes, Joy. That's a real joke, 'er name.'

‘What did she call him?'

‘Fred, sometimes Brad  . . . or darlin'.' Jessop's thin face assumed an expression of disgust. ‘I ask ya. The likes of 'im – darlin'.'

‘Would you know him again?'

‘Piggy eyes an' all, too right. Look  . . .'

‘Yes?' Patrick encouraged when the other faltered.

‘I'm not just tellin' ya this just 'cos of what you said about it 'elpin' me. I think it was that cow what shot us.'

‘But you were working for
her
.'

‘To get us out the way, like, and get their gun and the money back – we got half before and was promised the rest afterwards. It follers, dunnit? She was somewhere behind us when it happened over near where the two was that we  . . .'

‘Murdered,' Patrick said when he stopped speaking.

‘She said do it! Screamed at us. Then she—'

‘Knifed them so their guts fell out.'

Jessop retched, grabbed a corner of the sheet and slammed it over his mouth. For a moment I thought he might vomit. Then, when he could speak, he said, ‘Look, the worst thing I'd ever done before that was get in fights at football matches. I didn't even know 'ow to put ammo in the gun but they didn't give us no more so it didn't matter.'