The Fruit Gum Murders (8 page)

‘We start at the Feathers usually, but I was on my own. I might have done. What's all this about, anyway?'

‘Maybe you
did
start at the Feathers? Who did you see there that you remember?'

‘The Feathers? There's that toffee-nosed bitch behind the bar.'

‘Tell me about her, Thomas.'

Johnson shrugged. ‘She was just … stuck-up. You know.'

‘Did you speak to her?'

‘Only to get a pint, you know. She did it as if I was rubbish, you know.'

‘How much did you have to drink there?'

‘I dunno, do I?'

‘Did you go upstairs?'

‘Might have done.'

‘What did you go upstairs for?'

‘I didn't say I'd been upstairs. I said I
might
have done.'

‘If you
had
been upstairs, what would you go upstairs for?'

‘If I'd had a woman, or I had picked one up. I might have taken her upstairs.'

‘And did you do that on Sunday night?'

‘No. I don't remember anything like that,' he said with a snigger. ‘I would have remembered that, I'm sure I would.'

‘Right, so what did you do next?'

‘I remember coming down the steps and going outside. It was still daylight. There was a taxi in the rank. He brought me home, and I went to bed.'

‘And what time was that?'

‘I dunno. I don't keep count of every minute of what I do. I was out to enjoy myself.'

‘You know when you were upstairs in the Feathers,' Angel said, ‘do you remember going into any of the bedrooms?'

Johnson frowned. ‘No. I don't remember going upstairs,' he said.

‘You said, “when I came down the steps I went outside.” Perhaps you went up in the lift, but walked down, and you forgot?'

‘I s'pose it's possible.'

‘You know, Thomas, it would help if I knew what you went upstairs for. Was it to visit a man or a woman?'

Johnson shook his head. ‘I don't know any women there.'

He stopped fidgeting with his hands. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a small white paper bag. He fumbled in the bag and took out a small sweet and put it in his mouth.

Angel's eyes lit up. ‘What are those?'

Johnson stared at him. ‘Does thar want one?'

Angel leaned forward putting out his hand. Johnson grudgingly held out the bag. Angel dipped into it and took out a fruit gum.

Angel didn't put it into his mouth, instead he looked at it in the palm of his hand then slowly said, ‘You are going to be in need of a solicitor. Do you have one of your own or do you want me to appoint one?'

Johnson's eyes narrowed. ‘You're kidding, aren't you? What would I be wanting a solicitor for?'

‘Is Mr Bloomfield your usual one?'

Suddenly, Johnson's face grew red and his eyes stared angrily at him. ‘Yes, but what are you putting me down for?' he bellowed.

‘I'm going to have to keep you in custody to assist us with our inquiries.'

‘Oh no,' Johnson bellowed. ‘You're friggin' not!'

Then he stood up, clenched his fists and lunged out a mighty right blow at Angel's face, which missed him by a mile. Angel managed to grab his arm and, using the momentum Johnson had created, dragged him flying across the table and onto the floor where he landed gracelessly in the corner of the room.

The ruckus caused the door of the interview room to be opened. PC Donohue stuck his head in. ‘Everything all right, sir?'

Angel pointed with his thumb at Johnson behind him, who was on his knees, getting to his feet, shaking his head, and squeezing and rubbing his right arm. ‘Pick him up and cuff him, Sean.'

It was with some difficulty that PC Donohue, PC Elders and Angel managed to get Thomas Johnson into a cell and then process him. It was necessary for Johnson to put on police-issue denim and remove his own clothes for SOCO to examine them. Again this caused more uproar and resistance.

It was not as if being locked up in a cell was a new experience for Johnson. Although, unusually, he had managed to confound the court on a charge in 2011, nonetheless he had served three months in 2002 for obtaining money with menaces and assaulting a police officer; also six months in 2009 for two offences of obtaining money by deception and assaulting a police officer.

When the three officers had completed these initial measures, Angel instructed the duty jailer that Johnson was to be left alone for the time being to cool off, and to give him the opportunity of recognizing the plight he was in and to come to terms with it. Angel then thanked the two patrolmen and instructed them to report back to their team leader.

He still had Johnson's mobile phone in his hand, so on his way back to his office he called in at the CID room and went across to Ahmed's desk.

‘Check that off, Ahmed, ASAP. It belongs to Thomas Johnson. I've just taken it from his pocket. He's in the cells.'

‘Right, sir,' Ahmed said.

Angel then returned to his own office, where he phoned and instructed Don Taylor to send a team of SOCO to search Johnson's home, 22 Sebastopol Terrace, for the usual things: drugs, firearms, pornography, excesses of jewellery, gold, silver, cash and items reported stolen, and to report back to him ASAP.

As he replaced the phone, it began to ring. He reached out for it. It was DS Flora Carter.

‘I am still going through that CCTV, sir, and I have just come across that man again … leaving the hotel.'

‘Thomas Johnson, Flora?'

‘Oh, you found him?' she said brightly.

‘Great stuff, Flora. What time did he leave?'

‘9.15, sir.'

‘Hmm. He arrived at 8.30 and left at 9.15. That would have given him plenty of time. Tell me, Flora, was Johnson carrying anything, like a bag?'

‘No, sir.' She frowned.

The fact that he wasn't carrying anything worried him.

‘I'm wondering, Flora,' he said. ‘How would he manage to dispose of the two glasses and the bottle? We know they were in Robinson's room at the time of the murder, and that they are not there now.'

‘Can't think, sir. Not just like that.'

‘Right, Flora. Carry on.'

He returned the phone to its cradle.

He couldn't get the matter of the disposing of the glasses and the bottle out of his mind. He leaned back in the swivel chair and looked up at the ceiling. He rubbed the lobe of his ear between finger and thumb. Then it came to him in a flash. Johnson could simply have emptied the glasses and the bottle down the sink, rinsed them out, taken them with him in the lift to the ground floor, and then on his way out he could have dumped them almost anywhere on the floor, windowsill or any convenient ledge, and the busy hotel or bar staff would have collected them, and put the glasses in the washer and the empty bottle in the waste or the returns without hardly thinking about it.

He didn't know what the glasses or the bottle looked like precisely, he only knew the marks they made standing on a surface. Therefore he couldn't see much point in trying to see if any of the items could be located in such a large and busy hotel like the Feathers where there must be thousands of drinking glasses and hundreds of wine bottles. So that was decided upon.

All he had to do now was find a motive. Thomas Johnson's criminal speciality was extracting money by deception with menaces and assault, so one would naturally expect his alcohol-sodden brain to use the same modus operandi in his dealings with Norman Robinson. Maybe he simply tried to terrorize the poor man into parting with whatever money he had? Angel expected it might all be uncovered in the course of his further investigations.

The phone rang.

He leaned forward in the chair and reached out for it. ‘Angel?'

‘This is PC Tomelty at reception, sir. Sorry to bother you, but we've got a small crowd of men … newspaper reporters … there's five of them. They've been asking for you and they're getting difficult and noisy. Will you see them, or shall I report it to the duty sergeant and—'

‘I'll see them,' Angel said. ‘And be nice to them, Tomelty. You don't want to give the station a bad name. Is the interview room up there empty?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Right. Tell them I'm coming straightaway and show them in there.'

‘Right, sir,' Tomelty said.

Angel put down the phone.

He rushed up the corridor to the front security door. He looked through the glass and found the reception area empty. He pressed the button to release the door, went through it, closed it and walked past the reception window to the interview room door. He pushed the door open, and there were the pressmen. He recognized one or two of them.

As he went in, they all rushed up to him and said something.

‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,' he said. ‘What can I do for you?'

All five men continued shouting.

‘
Please!
' Angel called, holding up both hands. ‘One at a time,' he said.

Suddenly there was silence.

Then he looked at a man he knew from the local paper, the
Bromersley Chronicle
. ‘Giles, what is it you want to know?'

‘I think I speak for all of us, Michael. We know a man's body has been found in a bedroom at the Feathers hotel. We understand that he was murdered. Can you confirm that and tell us about it?'

‘I can't tell you much because I don't know much as yet. Tell me, are you all newspapermen?'

Three of the four others rattled off their names and the national papers they represented. The fourth said that he was a freelance stringer for a TV network.

‘Thank you,' Angel said. ‘Yes, there was a dead man found at The Feathers, and we believe that he was murdered.'

He then went on to tell them only facts that were not in doubt, which weren't many. It took only several minutes. At the end, the men asked innumerable questions: many were too intrusive, hypothetical or were not possible to answer. Angel politely declined to answer them and told the questioner the reason. He was very pleased that they didn't ask and he didn't mention anything about the finding of a fruit gum.

The entire process took about fifteen minutes, and he returned to his office a little brighter than before.

Ahmed was standing by his door. His face showed that something was wrong. ‘There you are, sir,' he said.

‘What's the matter, lad?'

‘The super wants you, sir,' Ahmed said. ‘He's had the entire station running up and down looking for you. He said he wants you to go to his office ASAP.'

Angel shook his head. ‘He didn't think to ring reception then, because that's where I was. What's it about?'

‘Don't know, sir. Sounds very urgent.'

Angel pulled a face. ‘Right,' he said.

Interviews with Superintendent Harker were never enjoyable experiences for him. He had to endure them from time to time because he was his boss and he was expected to accept disciplinary direction from his superior in the same way that he doled it out to the ranks below him.

He trudged up the green-painted corridor to Harker's office and tapped on the door. Then he took a deep breath and pushed it open.

‘You wanted me, sir?'

‘Come in. Sit down. Where the hell have you been?' Harker roared.

Angel stared at him. The man standing behind that desk was ugly. He'd always been ugly. He must have been born bald and skinny.

At that time, Angel looked at the superintendent strangely, as if he hadn't seen him before. In fact he saw him almost every working day, sometimes up to ten times a day. But that day was different. The head he could see sticking up through that ill-fitting striped shirt with the limp collar looked just like a skull with big ears and a chin.

‘I've been trying to get hold of you for half an hour or more,' Harker said. ‘Nobody seemed to know where you were. Don't you ever tell anybody where you are?'

‘I was in the reception interview room with five reporters for about fifteen minutes, sir. The lad on reception knew I was there.'

‘Five reporters? I might have known you were wasting time somewhere having your ego massaged.'

He ignored the insult. ‘I wanted the news of the murder of Norman Robinson to be widely circulated. And now I am assured that it will be all over tomorrow's national papers.'

‘What on earth does that matter?'

‘It matters a lot, sir. We have a suspect, but we haven't a motive. There's a story out there that we know very little about. It needs the players to show their hands … to assist us to fill in the blanks. I believe they will come forward. Anyway, the trap is now set.'

‘Supposing you get no response?'

‘I believe we will. If we don't, then we may not be able to solve the murder.'

‘You think you're really smart, don't you? You never utilize the system created by the Home Office, HOLMES 2, specifically created for murder and serious crimes, which is extremely thorough.'

‘It is extremely thorough, but it would be extremely costly to mount. For one thing, the system requires absolutely all persons associated with the victim to be put through the hoop. That's an immense undertaking. We'd need three times the men we have, for a start. More cells. More interview rooms. Bigger forensic department. So far we've managed to detect and bring to justice all our murder and serious cases without incurring that mountain of work.'

Harker knew that was true, and he really didn't want Angel to instigate the HOLMES 2 investigative programme. There wouldn't be any more government funding forthcoming, resulting in other services in the station being seriously curtailed. He liked to introduce the subject when the opportunity presented itself, so that he could enjoy battering Angel round the head with it.

‘You are always singing that song, Angel, but you know that one day it could become compulsory. Then what would you do?'