The Murder House (27 page)

‘No, stay where you are,' instructed Jeeves. ‘Paul Franklin will pick you up in two minutes. There's a fire in one of the old warehouses near the harbour and I need you both there to set up a traffic diversion.'

‘He's here now,' I said as the patrol car appeared around the corner.

I spent the next two hours establishing road blocks around a building that belched clouds of white smoke. Later, Paul offered to hold the fort for ten minutes while I got a drink from a mobile café that was parked up on the harbour front. I bought a cup of bitter coffee, then walked behind the van and stared at the murky green waters of the harbour. I looked around carefully, but I was alone.

I took the stone I'd used to kill Wright and dropped it in the water. It sank without trace.

The paperwork was mounting up on Oakley's desk but the case had made scant headway. More than a week had passed since the body had been found – and the victim had now been dead for about three weeks – but Oakley felt no closer to finding the culprit than he had on the first day. The team was still working furiously, throwing every ounce of energy into the enquiry, but he knew that would change if their efforts didn't take them somewhere soon.

Evans was following the lead about the woman in the headscarf, juggling it with the black plastic enquiry. FSS had come through on the partial fingerprints at last, and had provided a long list of possible matches. These were prints that were too smudged or fragmented to provide a positive match, but that had a few points in common with prints on record. Merrick was working through them. All needed to be checked and eliminated with alibis. In his spare time he was still trying to identify the man who had been with Paxton in the gay bar. Davis had told him scornfully that that line of enquiry was dead, but he'd started, and a streak of obstinacy in him made him reluctant to give up. Davis was learning more than she ever wanted to know about nanotechnology and trying to liaise with the unreliable and bureaucratic Albanians. Taylor was keeping the media at bay.

Meanwhile, door-to-door enquiries were continuing, although these were yielding little of value, and the British Embassy in Saudi Arabia was contacting the Harton family. Oakley was in charge of coordinating it all, and was also pursuing the anonymous note, albeit without Taylor's blessing – and the superintendent had certainly not bothered to mention the one he'd trashed.

Oakley concentrated from six until ten on the mass of reports, and managed to plough through a quarter of them. Because it was in a basement and windowless, the room soon became stuffy, and after four hours his head ached. He rubbed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.

He'd been reading an account of Kovac from the Albanian police, which had been translated by Professor Jinic. Kovac was a minor celebrity in his country, often invited on national television to talk about subjects as diverse as the Hubble telescope, global warming and dinosaur extinction. His achievements in nanotechnology seemed to warrant less publicity.

Why? Because the public was more interested in ‘popular' science? Because Kovac wanted to keep his research secret? Or just because Albanian television had yet to make a documentary on theoretical physics?

Oakley had also learned that Kovac had been arrested in his youth for subversion, although there was nothing to suggest he'd done anything more serious than sit with like-minded students in smoky cafes to discuss politics. His ‘insurgency' couldn't have been too bad, because he'd been allowed to travel once he became a professor, and he had made regular trips not only to Britain, but to the United States.

Oakley called for Evans, and pointed out that if Kovac had been arrested in his radical youth, there should be records of his fingerprints, so why weren't they with the information that had been sent? Evans explained that after the collapse of the Albanian communist regime a number of government buildings had been set alight. It was possible that Kovac's records were already lost. He agreed to follow up, but clearly thought it was a waste of time.

‘So we're just waiting,' said Oakley, dispirited. ‘Waiting to see if Merrick can link a partial print to a viable suspect; waiting for Tirana to be more helpful; waiting for something to turn up from the black plastic enquiry; waiting for our body to be matched to a missing person; waiting for FSS to analyse the saliva on our anonymous letter; waiting for a witness to remember something to tell us.'

‘We've got the scarf enquiry,' said Evans, irked that his ‘baby' had not been mentioned in Oakley's list. ‘I've got an artist's impression and I was going to hawk it around Orchard Street this afternoon to see if it jogs anyone's memory.'

He rifled among some papers and produced a rather attractive picture, more like art than evidence. It showed a slim woman wearing a calf-length dark coat with a scarf tied at the back of her neck. She was looking down, her face in shadow. Her hands were in her pockets, and her posture was rather furtive. Oakley thought she looked like a Second World War heroine, about to give vital information against the Germans.

‘Is that how your witness recalls the scarf being tied?' he asked, thinking about his conversation with Anderson. ‘The ends linked together at the back? Not knotted under the chin?'

‘Both witnesses say it was like this,' said Evans. ‘Besides, what woman would tie a scarf under her chin these days?'

‘It's good,' conceded Oakley. ‘Get a copy put up in the reception area, too. Who knows? It might prompt someone. She's too young for that look, anyway.'

‘This is a woman in her twenties or early thirties,' agreed Evans.

‘I don't think you can go that far,' cautioned Oakley. ‘But it's not a pensioner. It could be someone of sixty. It could be Maureen Paxton.'

‘Yeah,' nodded Evans. ‘I bet
she's
got headscarves.'

‘This could be our best way forward,' said Oakley, sensing there might be some mileage in the lead after all. ‘If anyone in Orchard Street is out when you call today, make sure you get them tomorrow.'

‘How's the note business going?' asked Evans.

‘Nowhere – until FSS gets back to us about the stamp. But I think I'll speak to Yorke's little brother this afternoon. Why not? We've nothing to lose.'

‘Want me to come?'

‘No, you work on the scarf. I'll take Dave instead. It's about time he met the Yorke clan, and it might be a good idea to have some fresh eyes looking at them. We've known them too long.'

‘Give me a mysterious woman over an interview with Michael Yorke any day,' said Evans vehemently. ‘He threatened us the last time we met, remember?'

‘It was just sabre rattling.' Oakley didn't mention his second encounter with Michael, when the man had again indicated that he thought the police had something to do with Paxton's sudden disappearance.

‘You look tired, Guv. You should get a strong coffee before you see Yorke. You need to be at your best or he'll make mincemeat of you.'

Oakley knew he looked seedy. His relationship with Catherine was at the stage where they wanted to spend a lot of time together – preferably awake – and he'd had less than three hours sleep the previous night. She'd gone to work at five so he'd driven her to the hospital, then come to the station. Now he was wondering if it would have been wiser to have stayed in bed. Still, he intended to take Sunday off, when he would doubtless exhaust himself further with Catherine. He hoped she'd be free.

He went to the men's toilet and splashed cold water over his face, then decided to go to Orchard Street to look around again. It would give him a break before seeing Yorke, and might even inspire him to new solutions. The investigation already felt stale.

Merrick arrived, looking fresh, neat and cool in a loose cotton shirt and neatly pressed chinos, and offered to go with him. They had a late breakfast first, ordering the ‘station special': fried eggs, greasy sausages, flaccid bacon, black pudding and tinned tomatoes. Two cups of tea washed it down, leaving Oakley overloaded and slightly queasy. He nearly always felt ill after a station special, and wondered why he never learned to stick to the toast.

It was a hot day, and the city was busy with folk out shopping or seeking cool breezes around the waterfront. There were sun umbrellas everywhere, and those cafes with tables and chairs outside were enjoying a roaring trade. Traffic fumes hung in the air like poison, mixed with the sulphurous odour from the harbour. Oakley saw a child sucking desperately on an asthma inhaler while her parents crouched next to her in mute concern. Nearby, two mothers with prams stood chatting as a bus belched exhaust over them all.

Orchard Street seemed pleasantly quiet after the bustle of the city centre. Curtains were drawn to keep out the sun, while gardens wilted in the heat, their lawns yellow-brown.

‘Oh, shit,' said Oakley as they pulled up at the house. ‘I forgot to bring the keys.'

Merrick jangled them jauntily. ‘I didn't. We normally lock them in the filing cabinet, but someone had accidentally left them on the windowsill instead. I happened to spot them as we left, and thought we might need them.'

‘We're slipping,' said Oakley disapprovingly. ‘I'll have a word about security at tonight's briefing. Come on. Let's see what brilliant insights come to us by revisiting the crime scene.' He stopped dead. ‘Where's the guard?'

‘Uniform pulled out because they're busy. It's been unguarded since about eleven last night.'

Oakley sighed. ‘They should have told us.'

‘They did – DI Davis – but there wasn't much she could do about it. If uniform doesn't have the manpower, it doesn't have the manpower.'

Shaking his head, Oakley slipped the key into the lock and opened the door. In the distance, the cathedral bells were chiming twelve o'clock. Oakley walked straight to the kitchen, while Merrick went into the lounge.

‘Guv! In here! Quick!'

The suspicious death of a police officer warranted some very specific procedures. The duty superintendent, SOCO and police surgeon were all immediately contacted, and all available officers were assigned to initial house-to-house enquiries – but the investigation into Wright's death would be headed by another station, to eliminate mistakes made by anyone emotionally involved.

The first thing Oakley and Merrick did was make sure there was no one hiding in the house – Wright clearly hadn't been dead long because the blood was still wet. Then they began calling for the long list of services they knew they would need. An ambulance was not among them.

Before they left the house to senior officers and SOCO, Oakley stood over Wright and stared down at the body. As he would not be investigating the murder, it would be the only opportunity he would have, so he tried to fix every detail in his mind. Wright had probably been kneeling when he had been attacked, because both blows seemed to have been delivered from above. There was a piece of paper poking from underneath him: a betting slip.

What had Wright been doing there? Was the betting slip relevant? Did he have a gambling problem? He earned a respectable salary as sergeant, but his clothes were cheap. Did that mean his debts had left him short of money? And if so, had someone at Urvine and Brotherton homed in on it and paid him to photograph confidential police files? Worse, had he accepted money to gossip to them about Butterworth's Blunder? Wright had always been in the frame for that, as far as Oakley was concerned.

He and Merrick were taken back to the station in separate cars and interviewed at length by senior officers from Professional Standards. As the person who ‘finds' a murder victim is often also the killer, the visiting superintendents were interested to hear that Oakley had a history of disagreements with Wright. Oakley was grateful that Merrick had been with him.

The death of Wright overshadowed everything else that day. The police surgeon estimated the time of death as between five thirty and seven o'clock that morning, while the cause was two blows to the head from a heavy blunt instrument. It wasn't yet known whether any of the ornamental stones along the mantelpiece were missing but they had been photographed for the first murder, so it was only a matter of time before that was resolved.

Policemen talked, and the death of someone they'd known was inevitably going to be the subject of rumours. There was a short-lived one that Oakley had done it, but it was quickly established that he had alibis at the hospital and then at the station, and the time he'd taken to drive between the two – quickly, because it had been too early for traffic – wouldn't have allowed for a detour to Orchard Street.

Davis was another brief suspect, but she had alibis in her husband and three daughters – a problem with a pet duck had seen them all together from three that morning onwards, huddled worriedly over a basket. Helen Anderson also came under suspicion, but it was quickly established that she hadn't had access to the house keys, and there was no evidence that the lock on Orchard Street had been forced. Moreover, a number of grateful residents were willing to attest that she was innocent of any wrong-doing. They'd seen the patrol car drop her off at number nine, after which she'd gone to help with the lorry. One witness even claimed that she hadn't been out of his sight from the moment she'd arrived – he'd been angry that the police were guarding the house, but hadn't responded to his complaint about the lorry.

So, the rumour-makers decided that the original murderer had sneaked back to the scene of his crime while it was left unguarded for the first time in a week. Wright had caught him and had died fighting him. But there was one question that no one could answer: why had Wright been there in the first place?

For the first time since joining the force, I was given a taste of what it felt like to be on the other side of the table. The three superintendents from Professional Standards were grim, hatchet-faced men, who clearly intended to put the fear of God into me. I knew I'd have to be careful. They introduced themselves. The skinny, bald one with the big hands was Sampson, the short one with the glasses was Parker, and the one with the deep tan and the wrinkles was Kidmore.