The Bright Face of Danger Page 4

  In that case, you’d think he would get a job on a farm. There were plenty of farms around there; the house he lived in was a farm cottage, which he was renting. He now lived alone, a half mile from his nearest neighbour, who would be Jonas Fletcher, along a minor road that carried hardly any traffic.

  ‘I suppose they say that Collis could’ve taken a short cut along here,’ I said conversationally. ‘From the motorway.’

  ‘The best way to Collis’s place — it’s four miles from here — would be from junction 7. But I suppose he could have used junction 6, and cut through Allesley and Lower Boreton.’

  ‘But you’re not convinced?’

  ‘If I had been, I’d have killed him. Wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Would you?’

  I considered him doubtfully. He was in his early twenties, not more than five feet seven and lightly-built with it. He had a long face, his mouth all teeth, his eyes that roe deer brown, soft and inoffensive. He appeared nervous, his hands moving all the while. I had not yet seen him at the Crown, amongst our tormentors.

  ‘Would you?’ I repeated, and he shook his head, baffled, doubting his ability. What worried me was that he could not have doubted it unless he had considered it, and such a person, giving calm thought to such a possible action, is infinitely more dangerous than a wild and unmotivated ruffian. He saw I had realised this, and gave a twisted grimace before he went on:

  ‘When she died — when they came and told me — I was wild then. I could have done anything to the swine who’d done that to her, if he’d been in front of me, and I’d got my hands on him. The thing was outside control. That was then, for an hour, for a day, perhaps a week. After that — you know — it goes. The fury and the...the distress.’ He threw the rag away from him. ‘They’re saying I’m a coward, because I didn’t go to him, to Collis, like Fletcher did, and even Goldwater, and shout filthy words and threats in his face. He was in custody then. It’s easy with a copper holding each arm, and if you’re so sure you’re right.’

  ‘But you’re not sure?’

  ‘Not sure enough to blow his head off with a shotgun, say.’

  ‘He could’ve come past here. It was late...ten-ish...and the time fitted. He didn’t get home before one...’

  ‘Where was he in between?’

  ‘Driving, perhaps, recovering until he was fit enough to be seen by his wife. Wives are apt to see things.’

  ‘I know. My wife did. Things that weren’t there.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘What the hell’s that mean? Ah! What wonderful thing’ve I admitted? That my wife thought I was having an affair — so what? She wanted us to leave here — this cottage. But I like it here. There’s plenty of air. Not much of anything else...no mains water for instance, and no phone...but she wanted to go and live with her mother. Apron strings complex, and she’d row about anything to try and push the issue on. Then, when they moved the offices, that was a thing she could throw at me, my extra journey. And her mother lives only about a mile from the new offices.’

  ‘Why’re you telling me this?’

  ‘Because you’re working round to asking what she was doing out on a quiet side road like this, with only a mac over her pyjamas and dressing-gown.’

  ‘I wasn’t. But it’s something that’s never been fully explained.’

  ‘She was going to the phone box on the Lower Boreton road, to call her mother. We’d had another row, all evening, and I went to bed early for some peace. But no, she’d got to come after me, and so’s not to encourage her, I pretended to be asleep, and off she went to phone mommy.’

  ‘And you didn’t go after her?’

  ‘Hell no! Any row we had, and it was always dash off and phone mommy. Anyway, I’d pretended so hard, that I really was asleep. It was the copper at the door who woke me up.’

  ‘And Collis, taking his short cut from junction 6, came across her, all alone, in her nightwear? It sounds very feasible.’

  ‘It’s too late to collect evidence against him now.’

  ‘I was looking for something in his favour.’

  ‘You won’t get it from me.’

  ‘But I have, you know. Perhaps you patched up the quarrel before you went off to sleep.’

  ‘I don’t get your point.’

  ‘Think about it.’

  I left him to his thinking. He got it as I shut the gate behind me.

  ‘You lousy bastard!’ he shouted, and he threw a spanner at me.

  That was all I had time for that day. Back to the Crown, a change and a quick meal, a quiet hour, then it was out to join George at Firbelow. The night was bitter and there was cloud massing on the far horizon. Snow, I thought, just what we need!

  Now there was only the taint of hatred in the trees. The cold was winning the battle for Collis.

  It was my turn to pick him up the next morning. At seven I was there, invited in, as usual, for ten minutes in his workroom, and then away. He could have told me where it was to be that day, but we had to have the old cloak and dagger game. This time it was a simple sketch of a fir tree. Intriguing.

  ‘Why the devil can’t you say...’

  He grinned at me. In the past few days he had grown more confident, quiet with it, his eyes steady. Delia was a passive shadow in the background. Major barely moved from her side during daylight. There had been a few minutes with her while he changed his tie, or something.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to let him down,’ she said quietly.

  ‘We don’t intend to.’

  ‘Since you came, he’s been...well, changed. As though he knows there’s an end in sight.’

  I kept the chill from my voice. ‘It’s very flattering.’

  ‘He’s withdrawing even more, though. Never notices anything. He hasn’t asked where Smoke has gone.’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  She lifted her hand in apology. ‘You wouldn’t know, of course. We had a grey, short-haired tom that we called Smoke. The day Major came, he disappeared. I think the dog’s eaten him.’

  I grimaced. There had been a flat, accepting tone to her voice. She had been battered beyond feeling. ‘I doubt that. He’ll have gone into hiding.’

  ‘I was devoted to Smoke.’

  ‘But now you have Major.’

  She pulled his ear. ‘It’s not the same. I’ve got Adrian back, but he’s not the same.’ And she turned away as Collis appeared.

  I followed him, as before, to his office, and sat an hour in Plummer’s parking space, and then we set out to solve the fir clue. It was simply a visit to the half-finished log house he had been building for the Forestry Commission. In effect, we were re-tracing our journey, though this site, although within the boundaries of the Chase, was a good ten miles from Firbelow, way up on the slopes of the opposite side of the valley.

  I got out to follow him around. He permitted that, as the place was so deserted. It was up one of the Rides, which would have been impossible if the ground had not been hard with frost. He was lyrical over the design, and wistful over the possibility of re-commencing work on it. But the financial climate was not too encouraging. I couldn’t see why we had come.

  Half was fully constructed — a normal brick structure with half-log cladding to give the effect.

  ‘You could’ve come up here,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ He stopped, turned, and stared at me.

  ‘In each case, all three murders, you got home very late, two or three hours after the estimated time of death.’

  ‘Are you interrogating me?’

  ‘Trying to clear my conscience.’

  He gave a twisted smile. ‘I’m employing you to clear mine.’

  ‘You know about your own.’

  He was disappointed in me. ‘I was playing with words.’

  ‘You’re playing with me, avoiding it. I said: you could’ve come up here. To recover. To clean yourself up.’

  ‘There was no blood,’ he said in an even voice. ‘In none of the murders was there any s
ign of that sort of violence.’

  ‘Only strangulation — and sex. You’re arguing against yourself. All right, so you wouldn’t need to clean up. But what does it do to a man, that sort of thing? Or don’t you know? But there’d be a need of time to become normal again. Normal enough to face a wife.’

  ‘And you think I brought you here for that, to show you where I might have come to recover?’

  ‘Your attitude has been strange.’

  ‘Perhaps I was testing your loyalty.’

  There was a bit of a snap in my voice. ‘You might expect blind loyalty from your wife, Mr. Collis. But you won’t get it from us. Not for money. We need something better than that.’

  ‘And there was I, convinced I’d persuaded you.’

  ‘Intrigued, not persuaded.’

  ‘I thought you chaps did anything for money.’

  It was the same attitude as Andy’s. ‘We spend a lot of time trapping the people who do.’

  ‘Always with success, I hope.’

  ‘Not always, even though greed’s a simple motive to detect. Sex is rather more difficult. It’s so very private.’

  I saw I had destroyed some of his confidence in me. I was supposed to do things, but not ask why.

  ‘We’ll go back the other way,’ he said, dismissing me from his calculations. Then he threw up his head challengingly. ‘The other way! It can lead us past Goldwater’s place, past Fletcher’s, even past Andy Partridge’s. Now...doesn’t that give you ideas, Mallin?’

  I was walking away. I paused, hands deep in the pockets of my motoring coat. ‘It makes me think you might just have been insane enough.’

  He laughed, and we drove away.

  I told George about it, late that night at the Crown. He just grunted. George was becoming impatient with it all.

  ‘I told you not to do any digging,’ he said. Which, it turned out, was a little hypocritical of him.

  I had seen Jonas Fletcher quite a few times at the Crown, but I wanted him alone. I hadn’t been far wrong about the bricklaying. He was employed at a brickworks, a relic of the old East No. 6 Colliery, where they’d made bricks originally from the pit waste. I cornered him behind one of the kilns.

  ‘What’s it to you?’ he demanded. ‘Why’d you have to get in the way?’

  ‘We’re being paid to get in the way. And if you mean that if we weren’t, you’re going to lynch him — you and your mates — then I just don’t believe it.’

  ‘What ya on about?’

  ‘The intentions you might have in mind.’

  He frowned. Inferences were not his strong point. He shook his head. ‘Who’s said about lynchin’? That’s plain daft.’

  ‘But one night, when you’ve got enough beer in you, you’re going to march up to that place of his and do something violent. Because that’s what you are, Fletcher, a violent man.’

  It inflamed him. ‘Yeah...and so what! What’d you do, if she’d been your kid?’

  ‘Tina wasn’t your child. She was your step-daughter.’

  ‘To me...after her mother died...there was only us two. Tina was five, then. My kid, I tell ya. It’s how she was to me. I treated her as a daughter.’

  ‘Brought her up right, I bet. Taught her how to behave. Gave her the strap when she deserved it. Good old-fashioned discipline.’

  ‘She wunna goin’ to bring nothin’ into my house.’

  ‘Such as disgrace, I suppose. Was that likely?’

  He stood, baffled, unable to control the conversation. ‘We’re good people round here, mister.’

  ‘Of course you are. No scandal. So...there was a boyfriend, was there?’

  ‘She was only sixteen, damn you!’ he shouted. ‘What ya think?’

  ‘I think there’d be a boyfriend. It’s a classical situation. The bullying and unimaginative father; the frightened child with a growing awareness of her sexuality.’ He was frowning, turning his bull-head sideways to consider me. ‘She’d have to have some relief.’

  ‘I’d’ve killed her.’

  ‘Then why was she out on a dark February night — a year ago almost exactly? Tell me that.’

  ‘What’re y’ sayin?’

  ‘That you might have been using some of your discipline. That she’d run out of the house, frightened, and simply walked...anywhere.’

  And he said something I did not understand, in a tone almost of triumph. ‘But she’d be back.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  He tapped the side of his nose knowingly. ‘She didn’t get the chance to come back,’ I said, annoyed.

  Not my fault.’

  ‘For God’s sake, man!’

  ‘It was his fault, that Collis bleeder. But I’ll get him. You just tell that big bloody mate o’ yours, I’ll still get him, gun or no gun.’

  ‘Wow what do you mean?’

  ‘Come round to my place, bold as you like, chucking his questions around. Thinks he’s tough, that un. Tried to push me around. On about why’d she go out, like I was her keeper or summat. I told him to clear off. Stuck me shotgun under his nose.’

  ‘Then what’d he do?’

  He wagged his huge hands. ‘Took me by surprise. Grabbed it off me. And laughed.’

  George would. I could see him doing it. I asked George about it the first opportunity I got, and he was big enough to look embarrassed. He was struggling into the shroud he calls his pyjamas.

  ‘No investigation!’ I mocked him. ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Well...I got to thinking.’

  ‘You always do, given time.’

  ‘I’m not too old to push that grin off your face, Dave.’

  ‘I’m not going to dispute that. And have you seen Goldwater, too?’

  ‘Start a thing, you’ve got to finish it.’

  ‘Nothing about all this on tape, George.’

  ‘This was for me, mate. Just because it’s me who’s uneasy.’

  ‘And me, George. Tell me about Madge Goldwater.’

  He looked grave, this being a general lowering of the jowls.

  ‘The first one, as you know. The most natural, really. She’s the only one with any sort of reason for being out when she was. The father thinks there was a boyfriend, but he’s the sort that doesn’t know anything about his family, and couldn’t care less. The mother...’

  ‘There’s a mother?’ I really shouldn’t have assumed otherwise.

  ‘That’s right, you haven’t even heard of her. She’s that sort...negative. Goldwater’s a natural coward, but he could terrify his womenfolk to his heart’s content. You seen where they live? No? He’s a farmworker, living half-way up the farm drive in an ancient tied cottage. Quiet there. Madge could’ve walked down to the road to meet anybody. Probably did. Met somebody she perhaps knew but didn’t expect. It suits Goldwater to assume it was Collis. Then he can point his nasty muck-stained finger at somebody, and go along with the herd. But he won’t do anything, Dave. He’s too scared.’

  ‘Scared of what?’

  He shrugged. I’d never seen him so depressed.

  ‘I tell you, Dave, I want to get out of this business. Collis fits — fits every way you look at it. And what are we supposed to be doing? Protecting? From what? There was a bit of mob frightening, but that’s dropped off. And three bereaved heroes! My God — look at ‘em. Jonas Fletcher, there’s a tough type for you, but he’s got to have the right backing, and the right opportunity, and the right amount of beer in him.’

  ‘And a weapon,’ I said quietly.

  He went on as though I had not spoken. ‘And Reuben Goldwater, scared of his own shadow. No danger there. Andy Partridge? He’s too thoughtful and too quiet, and too undecided.’

  ‘He could make up his mind.’

  ‘What’re you splitting hairs for, Dave! You know the conclusion we’ve got to come to.’

  ‘You’re saying that we’re wasting our time as protectors.’

  ‘Well then.’

  ‘But what of the other, eh George?�
��

  ‘It’s what I mean!’ he said violently. ‘Another sex assault and murder. That’s a nice thing to sit and wait for. It’s making my guts ache. I feel old and useless and bloody feeble.’ He changed his tone abruptly. ‘Did you know we’re being followed?’

  ‘We are?’

  ‘Or him.’

  ‘I’ve seen nothing. The police...’

  ‘No. I’d know, in that case. This is just a feeling. No specific car. It’s weird. Perhaps I’m not up to this, Dave. I want to pack it in.’

  This was bad. I didn’t look at him. ‘If we go, it would still happen. The only difference’d be that we wouldn’t be involved. That wouldn’t be much comfort.’

  ‘It’s the waiting.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘If he does it again...and we’re around, that’d be...’

  ‘The end of the waiting, George. And this time we’d nail him good and proper.’

  He stared at me. ‘I envy you, Dave.’ He punched his pillow into submission.

  It was my turn to lie in. George got out of the room with his usual attempt at silence, leaving me dozing and worried, and I was even later than I’d arranged with the landlord for my breakfast. It was well after ten when the phone rang behind the bar.

  ‘It’s your mate.’

  I was round there fast. It had not previously been necessary to phone in.

  ‘George?’

  ‘Dave, I need your help.’

  He could have reached through and hit me in the face. It was his tone, the utter despair and self-condemnation.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve lost him. So help me, it’s happened.’

  But this time it was different. It was early morning, with many hours to darkness. Time to find him again.

  ‘Where are you?’ I said, and, strangely for George, he was for a moment confused.

  ‘The phone box says Filsby 73.’

  ‘Where George? You must know.’

  There was a pause. His voice was low. ‘I’m lost. Somewhere on the Chase. Ring the Post Office, they’ll tell you. But get out here fast, Dave.’

  ‘I will.’ I hung up. The landlord was staring at me. ‘Is there somewhere called Filsby?’

  His eyes switched to the glass he was polishing. ‘You don’t want to be going there. It’s where they found little Tina.’