Four Below (12 page)

The wind was colder than he had expected. Snow was still falling, but more lightly now, whipped along the street by the icy wind. The van opposite the house hadn’t moved, still standing at
a shallow angle by the side of the road. The driver sat huddled, motionless. Perhaps he was too scared to continue driving in these conditions. Mike set off, stomping his feet in the snow, enjoying
the crunch it produced. He’d like to find an expanse of pristine snow to photograph, without footprints or tyre marks, something that suggested calmness or purity. He thought he knew where he
might find something like it, but it was quite a hike from here.

Traffic was light at this time of night. Many people had probably decided to stay at home in front of the telly. He stepped into the road to cross. Just then the van driver decided to move on.
Mike slowed in the street to let him pass, but the van stopped right beside him with its side door sliding open. The man who jumped out drove his fist into Mike’s windpipe, then pushed him
inside.

Chapter Nine

Evidence of dealing had been discovered at Deeming’s house but no significant amounts of drugs. Forensic analysis had thrown up a dizzying number of fingerprints, none of
which looked promising. Some were of known drug-users, one or two of lowlifes who McLusky knew dealt small-time to finance other unsavoury habits. All of it was pond life that Deeming, who had been
six foot tall and no slouch in dishing out violence, would hardly have been scared of. No matter, they still had to find them, pull them in, interview them.

In the small, drab interview room, McLusky was sitting opposite one of them now, a creature by the name of Gareth Keep. Not a junkie, but a thief with a weed and alcohol habit and, as McLusky
suspected, very few brain cells to spare for the toll that it was taking on them. He was twenty-six and still only managed to grow an unconvincing line of fluff above his upper lip, making him look
like a teenager trying to look older. He was clad in a blue tracksuit with double white stripes and an imitation leather jacket that was patently too large for him. The hapless punter had been
scooped up in a supermarket car park after he’d been seen shoplifting CDs. He was unperturbed at having been arrested. He had been pulled in by the police and then let go by the courts so
many times that now it hardly registered. In court he had a good line in contrition and promises of reforming, and he knew that the most he could expect to be handed by the magistrate was a few
hours’ community service, for which he rarely showed up anyway. When he did, he was usually stoned.

McLusky had teamed up with DC French for this interview. As with the last lowlife they had pulled, he was happy to let her do most of the questioning. He was really there to take a sniff at the
punters and pounce should he get the slightest whiff that the specimen in front of them might be involved.

‘No comment,’ was how Gareth answered most questions, watched over by his brief, who appeared equally bored by the occasion. Things got more animated when McLusky sprung the news on
him of Deeming’s death.

‘Murder? Now you’re accusing me of murder? You’re mad.’

‘Your prints were found in Deeming’s hall. His blood was on the ground and on the wall. You were there.’

‘No comment.’

The solicitor instantly protested about the unexpected turn of events and demanded to speak with his client alone. McLusky was glad. He felt his energy was being drained by the necessity and
futility of spending time with these drifters. Gareth might quite conceivably one day break someone’s skull, stab someone in an argument or strangle his girlfriend, but McLusky found it hard
to believe that he had snatched Deeming from his house, tied him up, put a bag over his head, driven him to Leigh Woods and there beaten him to death. Not unless he was taking some very strange
drugs at the time.

In the corridor, he handed Gareth Keep’s file to French. ‘He’s yours. Get all you can out of him about who else he saw at Deeming’s house, how often he used to go there
et cetera. Oh yes, and charge him with theft for lifting the CDs, of course.’

With a hardening heart, French watched DI McLusky walk off down the corridor. If ever she nursed doubts about being a police officer, it was at moments like this. She flicked the cover of the
file with a fingernail. ‘No comment.’

McLusky stuck his head in at the incident room. Dearlove sat at a computer, concentrating hard on reading the back of a crisp packet. No sign of Austin.

‘He’s just popped downstairs to dump some files,’ Dearlove told him through a mouthful of crisps.

‘When he gets back, tell him I’m in my office.’

McLusky’s earlier plans had been interrupted; now he was going to set them in motion. His office was far too small to install an espresso machine, however compact. There was such a dearth
of surfaces, there wouldn’t even be enough space to set one down. This morning he had smuggled in a tiny electric travel kettle, which he hid in the bottom compartment of his desk, connected
by an extension lead. How the mighty had fallen, he thought, as he stirred whitener into his instant coffee. He knew that according to Sod’s Law, someone would knock on his door as soon as he
lit a cigarette. Naturally this never worked when you wanted someone to turn up, so perhaps by wishing someone to knock on the door he could prevent it? A kind of reverse superstition. He opened
the window for ventilation and reached for his pack of Extra Lights. The knock on the door was Austin’s.

‘I’ve been looking up and down the station for you,’ he complained.

‘Keep you fit.’ McLusky lit a cigarette.

‘Don’t for one moment think you can’t smell that outside, Liam, because you can.’

‘My predecessor smoked a lot. The smell never goes away.’

‘Aye, they’ll believe that.’

‘Did we get anything from the house-to-house around Deeming’s address? Is it too much to hope that someone saw a man being led away against his will? Possibly with a bloody bag on
his head?’

‘I think it might be.’

‘Naturally. Every day the emergency lines are jammed with idiots calling about their pizzas being late or their budgie having hiccoughs, but no one in this town takes any notice of what
happens to other people.’

‘People opposite saw a van, double-parked, about a month ago. It was double-parked and annoyed them, that’s how they remember.’

‘Did they see anyone associated with the van?’

‘Nope.’

‘Of course not. A van. What kind of van? Camper van, delivery van?’

‘Just a van. Blue or grey.’

‘Blue or grey? It’ll turn out to be red, then. Great. Is that it? Well tell them an arrest will be imminent.’

There was a knock on the door and Austin opened it. DC Dearlove had added tiny specks of potato crisp to the array of cat hair on his suit jacket. ‘Call from area control, sirs. Suspicious
death, male body found by the river. I’ve got the details here.’ He handed the note to Austin.

‘Marvellous.’ McLusky nodded to Austin and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Okay. You drive.’

Austin got stuck in traffic twice, which meant they were the last to arrive. On the Ashton to Pill cycle path, just north of the Avon Bridge, two inches of snow had
accumulated, now trampled into a brown mulch by many cold feet. There were several bicycle tracks too, running close to the body. People had cycled along the river without giving the dead man under
the snow blanket a second glance.

‘Just a lump under the snow. It was probably the black nylon jacket,’ Austin speculated. ‘At least two people came past here on bicycles but probably thought it was bin liners
full of rubbish dumped under the bushes. With all that snow on top of the body, it was hard to make out.’

The PC standing guard at the river’s edge spoke up. ‘Just recently there’s been a lot of fly-tipping along here.’

McLusky whisked round. ‘Yes, thank you, Constable, you can update us on the local rubbish problems later.’ He turned to Coulthart, who puffed loudly through his face mask as he
examined the body. ‘Killed here or dumped here, Doctor?’

‘Deposition site. Killed elsewhere. And brutally so. The face is … well, you can see.’

McLusky could see. The face was a bloodied, broken mess.

‘I’m sure I’d be able to tell you more if you cared to join me at the post-mortem, Detective Inspector.’ Coulthart tried to make it seductive, being well aware of
McLusky’s aversion to post-mortem examinations.

‘Thanks, I’ll wait.’

‘You may well have to. These are busy times at the mortuary. Death rates rise rapidly in these weather conditions. How the human race ever survived the ice age is a miracle.’

‘We went south for the duration, I expect.’

‘And a good thing, too. That’s exactly what I have planned myself. Though regrettably not until after Christmas.’

‘What’s his age?’ From where McLusky was standing, and despite having looked closely at the man’s face, he found it impossible to tell.

‘Late fifties, I’d say, perhaps early sixties.’

‘No ID on him, of course? Wallet? Library card?’

‘I went through his clothing,’ said a SOCO waiting nearby. ‘No ID, no car keys or house keys. Some small change and a packet of mints.’

‘Mints.’ McLusky turned back to Coulthart. ‘Cause of death?’

‘Not mints, Inspector. I couldn’t say.’

‘How long?’

Coulthart stood up, signalling to the SOCOs that he had finished his examination. ‘How long has he been dead, or how long has he been here?’

‘Either. I mean both.’

‘Difficult to say with any degree of confidence because of the frozen conditions. But he hasn’t been lying here for long.’

A SOCO stopped his quiet cursing of the muddled footprints long enough to add his observations. ‘He had about an inch of snow on him. There’s a little bit of shelter here from the
bushes, but that’s about the amount that’s fallen since three in the morning.’

‘So to have an inch on him, he would have to have been here since the middle of the night.’

‘Correct.’ The SOCO, who had an encyclopaedic memory of local weather conditions, returned to the puzzle of footprints and began brushing at the snow.

Well away from the deposition site, McLusky lit a cigarette and looked around him. As a dumping ground this was pretty perfect. There was access from the A369 a few yards from where the body had
been found. Austin stood next to him, sniffing nostalgically at the cigarette smoke and stomping his feet to keep them from going numb. McLusky could no longer feel his. He’d buy winter boots
at the first opportunity. ‘First impressions, Jane?’

‘Shame about the footprints.’

‘It’s a SOCO nightmare. They’re hoping to find some under the snow. Or in between layers. But it’s pretty much buggered. The couple who found the body trod all over the
site, then an ambulance crew, then a couple of constables, then the rest of us.’

‘There’s no CCTV here and no one about at night. Yet it’s very close to the city. Couldn’t be better, could it? Dumping a body is always a risky business, so this place
is quite convenient.’

‘Yes, but leaving a body lying about where it can easily be found is also a risky business. It’s ten feet from the river. Why leave him here if you can simply tip him into the water?
Even without being weighed down, he’d likely drift a bit and give us a headache.’

‘Perhaps they thought someone might hear the splash. Or they meant to chuck the body in and someone came along and interrupted them. Along the path or by boat. So they dumped it and legged
it.’

‘Boat. Good thinking, Jane. Make sure someone does a house-to-house, or boat-to-boat rather, in the harbour and the moorings on this side, too. Establish if anyone came by here at night
and saw anything.’

‘There’s not a great deal of boat traffic at this time of the year. Even less at night.’

‘I know that.’ McLusky flicked his cigarette butt towards the slow-moving water, where he instantly lost sight of it. ‘I still think the river is a missed opportunity if you
want to get rid of a body.’

Fairfield shoved the tiny cup under the nozzle, pressed the button and watched the evil-looking liquid dribble from the machine. Espresso was the one other vice she admitted
to, and she tried to keep her daily total to fewer than five. Last night she had felt the need to open a second bottle of wine; consequently she needed all the caffeine she could get today. Why had
it unsettled her so much? There were photographs of two dead people on her desk, both of whom she had also seen in the flesh, yet none of it had unsettled her as much as Paul’s voice on the
phone, even down a bad line. It had been her who had finished the relationship, because of his constant absences due to his job, their rows about when to have children, whether to have children,
his career, her career. Why now, she had asked him, why divorce now after three years of separation? She had guessed the answer all along. Paul was thinking of getting married to his current
girlfriend, also an electrical engineer. How quaint. Lots to talk about there then, she was sure. They could engineer a wonderful life together for themselves. Paul and Carrie.

She took a sip from the cup and found she had a slight tremor. Last one for today, she vowed silently. She pulled a stack of forms towards her and started reading.

Divorce
. Her thoughts kept coming back to it despite her best efforts to get some paperwork done. Uncontested divorce. It was so easy now. He’d already initiated it; all he wanted
now was for her to sign some papers. Or was it? She had told him to put them in the post, but he had said something about being between addresses and she had ended up arranging to see him on
Sunday. They were meeting at the Nova Scotia, for a drink and a quick divorce. She had agreed and now she couldn’t stop thinking about it. When the phone on her desk rang, she was grateful to
hear she had business out on the streets.

‘Number three.’ Sorbie stepped out of the way to let the photographer take pictures of the car from all angles. The dead junkie was barely visible through the
windows of the clapped-out Renault. The snow had covered the windscreen and part of the rear window and there was frozen condensation on the side windows. The body had only been discovered because
the car was illegally parked in a narrow residential street off Ashley Down Road, and a traffic warden had raised the alarm, saying he could not wake the person lying across the rear seats. At
first it had been thought the man had simply frozen to death, but the duty doctor’s suspicions had been aroused when he saw the lesions on the dead man’s arms, something he had been
told to watch out for.