‘The chief is a man’s man.’ Barnes smiled.
‘What does that mean?’
‘What the sergeant is saying is the chief is terrified the nice posh lady is going dish him his comeuppance.’
‘Is one due?’
‘Not especially,’ Barnes said, ‘but we’ve been left to our own devices for many a year. All these newfangled things – faxes, computers, “memoranda” about improved communication – are vexing the guv’nor.’
‘You’re not wrong – “communication” to Sparks means Morse code from submarines, and no way does accountability come into it. That’s why we’re seeing him dashing about now.’ Lowry took a long swig of his drink. ‘That and four dead men in as many days, not to mention a ton of space speed on the marshes.’
A clack of balls fired behind. Kenton flicked back his hair and removed his glasses to wipe them. It was hot down here. He sort of got what they were saying. ‘You mean he has to prove himself?’
‘You might say that.’
‘Well –’ Kenton flipped his tie over a lens – ‘he might prove more efficient if he spent less time reading Asterix books.’
‘You’re wrong there, Daniel. We – well, Colchester – are the indomitable village.’
‘He’s right, you know. How’s your potion?’ Barnes pointed to his pint.
‘Ah. That’s where it’s from. I wondered what he was banging on about.’ Kenton had read Asterix but not in ages, and so hadn’t cottoned on. ‘And Colchester being a Roman town and fighting the army, I see . . . How funny.’
‘Talking of potions,’ Lowry said, playing with a cellophane bundle, which he had produced from nowhere. There was a dark glint in his eye that Kenton had not seen before.
‘Wonder what’s really in that stuff?’ he asked.
Lowry seemed lost for a moment, looking intently at the small packet lying on the bar towel in front of him. ‘Good question . . .’ And he removed the small package as deftly as he had produced it. ‘Who’s for another?’
Kenton, who had nothing on that evening, nodded his assent eagerly. Talk continued in a wide and varied way – theories expounded, rumours scotched and personalities assessed. Kenton hungrily took in all that Barnes and Lowry had to say on anything and everything, but before he knew it, it was late and the small bar was laden with pint glasses. Eventually, the young detective exited Queen Street into the cold, shrouded in the warm glow of camaraderie. Swerving up the slippery street, his head swimming, he felt good. He loved his job, the station, Colchester, his boss – everything – but none more so than Jane Gabriel.
8.35 p.m., a boat, Blackwater Estuary
Trish woke feeling woozy. Her head was heavy – very heavy. She must’ve been drugged. Her abductor had urged her to drink something that tasted similar to lemonade before she was gagged and hooded. She recalled him saying it was the last chance she’d have for a drink for a while. And then the hood went on and she was pulled out of the car. Her throat was parched now.
Every limb ached. She was seated, but her hands were cuffed above her, around a pipe, her fingers curled uncomfortably beneath a low ceiling. She was disorientated, and the more she came to, the more nauseous she felt. She kicked out with bound feet but met with resistance before she managed to straighten her legs. Wherever she was being held, it was in a confined space. Kicking out again, her bottom slipped off the chair – or was it a chair? The edge was curved, suggesting a lavatory. Jesus wept, she thought, I’ve been incarcerated in a toilet. And a small one at that. Suddenly, it came to her. A boat. She was on a boat. She could recall clambering up a ladder and smelling the sea. But now all she could make out was the damp-canvas smell of the hood.
She thought back to leaving for work – when? This morning? Yesterday morning? – and the gun behind her head. Why would anyone want to kidnap her? She’d not been harmed, and her kidnapper had not said much, other than encouraging her to drink the drugged lemonade. She could only imagine it had something to do with the fiasco in Greenstead on Saturday night. Maybe whoever it was thought she was a witness . . . God, she wished she’d gone home that night instead of out on the razz with Jacqs – as if they’d not had warning enough. Shit. Shit. Shit. She’d just tell whoever it was she’d not seen anything. For the first time in many months, she thought of her ex-husband, Andrew. Bet he’s snuggled up with that tart he ran off with. Huh. She started to cry. If he could see her here now. Not that she knew where the bloody hell here was.
Thursday, 6 January, 1983
-52-
9 a.m., Thursday, West Mersea
Lowry indicated left and took the next turning, on to an avenue that led to the sea. The overnight snowstorm had passed and the roads had already been cleared, and there were plenty of people about. But Lowry’s mind was not on the state of the roads or the extremities of the weather. Jacqui was bothering him about her pal, Trish – the woman had disappeared, apparently. From where he was standing, this was a blessing, but Jacqui wasn’t having him dismiss it lightly; the woman had not returned to work and was not at her home in the Dutch quarter – he was a policeman, it was his job to do something. Trish had no next of kin to speak of, and Jacqui was worried. Lowry’s anger had simmered silently as he heard her out. He’d decided to let things ride until he got through Greenstead, and said he’d do what he could.
In the meantime, he was keen to find Nugent. Philpott was saying nothing and was, even if proved guilty, unlikely to snitch. He and Kenton had carved up the island and each was searching within their patch. There were only so many streets and, after thirty minutes, Lowry drove past a white XR3 with a roof rack, just as Kenton had described, on an empty avenue leading down to the esplanade. Lowry slowed the Saab to a crawl, and yes, there was his man, hard at work on the upstairs windows of a grand, detached Edwardian house, his shock of blond hair standing out even at a height. A window cleaner driving a boy-racer Escort? Not the most obvious choice of utility vehicle. He parked several doors down and walked slowly back to the house. It was eerily quiet, not a soul in sight.
‘Oi, sunshine, you’ve missed a bit!’ he hollered up towards the man, who was wearing faded denims.
‘Fuck off!’ came the terse reply.
‘Say that again?’ Lowry stepped up to the ladder and gave it a hearty shake.
‘Oi!’ Nugent rattled down the aluminium frame. ‘What d’you think you’re playin’ at?’
‘Remember me?’ Lowry flashed his badge. Nugent paused on the bottom step, water sloshing over the rim of his bucket.
‘Now what?’
‘We just want to chat with you again.’ Lowry turned as an old dear in curlers appeared at the frosted front door, and was just about to reassure her that everything was fine when he was suddenly drenched: lukewarm water gushed down the back of his collar and the inside of the orange plastic bucket obscured his vision. Before he could recover, a violent thump flattened the bucket against his nose, sending him flying backwards into the snow.
‘You all right dear?’ the woman in curlers inquired.
Startled, he sat up and tugged the plastic bucket off his head.
‘Where’d he go?’
She pointed to the white XR3, which at that instant thundered out a belch of exhaust fumes. ‘I won’t be tipping him . . .’ the woman mumbled.
Lowry hurtled towards the car, which surprised him by reversing to meet his charge. Rather than try to evade it, he launched himself at the vehicle’s boot. His sportman’s agility served him well; he leapt on to the car, his toes catching the rear bumper and his hands reaching for the roof-rack bars. Nugent braked abruptly, throwing Lowry forward, his knees catching the spoiler. He managed to scramble further on to the car before it screeched forward.
Nugent swerved erratically up Seaview Avenue, trying to shake Lowry off. If only the fool had slowed down, Lowry would’ve got off gladly, but instinct made him cling on for dear life.
At the top of the avenue, Nugent took a right turn at speed. Lowry was close to being flung off but was still clinging on as the XR3 span out of control, colliding with a VW camper van. Lowry scrambled over the roof and punched Nugent’s windscreen with the base of his fist. The driver’s door opened. Pivoting round, Lowry grabbed the shock of blond hair and yanked upwards, causing Nugent to howl.
‘I haven’t done nothing!’ he rasped.
The oncoming flash of an orange sports car caught the corner of Lowry’s eye as he tightened his grip on the window cleaner’s hair and gazed at the puce face beneath him.
‘No? You left pretty sharpish. What about your ladder?’
Kenton stepped in, pulling Nugent round and pushing his face hard against the windscreen.
Lowry lowered himself off the roof. He brushed his hands and straightened his tie. Reaching for his comb, he turned and was surprised to see a crowd of people of all ages. Where the hell had this lot sprung from?
9.35 a.m., Mersea Police Station, East Road
Nugent’s dramatic reluctance to come quietly and answer a few questions left little doubt in Lowry’s mind as to the man’s guilt in the post-office job: he must have been the one who drove Philpott and Stone back to Colchester. But how he’d managed a double billing as both witness and getaway driver was a detail Lowry was keen to learn. Whether all three of them knew what had been held in the boot of the Cortina, he couldn’t say.
In the first instance, Lowry decided to take Nugent to the local nick on East Road to get any local knowledge Bradley might have on the man, if necessary, before heading to Queen Street.
‘An XR3 seems an odd choice of vehicle for a window cleaner?’ Lowry said, apparently randomly.
Nugent looked suitably put off balance by the question.
‘Missus said you’d been round,’ Bradley added. ‘Ain’t seen you at it before.’
‘I ain’t no winda cleana . . . I’m minding me brother’s business; his patch is north Colchester – New Town. He’s gone to Marbella for a month and asked me to do his round. Busy time of year – lot of people take time off, so you can earn a couple of extra quid in the run-up to Christmas, like. So, as he went in the van, I ’ad to get a roof rack and, as I’d forked out on that, thought I might as well skim round Mersea.’
New Town, Artillery Street, where Stone’s flat was: Lowry remembered the state of the window. ‘Didn’t make a good job of your pal Derek Stone’s windows, did you? All smeary, as I recall. When did you have a crack at them? Surprised you’d have the time, what with turning over the post office.’
‘Look – I didn’t ask for this, you know; it all happened . . . by mistake. Honest.’
‘I can’t wait to hear,’ Bradley said. ‘You’re the bleedin’ witness!’
‘I’m on parole, ain’t I?’ said Nugent, as if this explained everything.
‘What’s that got to do with the price of fish?’ the sergeant spluttered. ‘You damn near ran the inspector over.’
‘So you admit you were a party to the robbery?’
Nugent nodded.
Lowry was relieved the man had the sense to admit defeat on that front, at least. ‘But Ted, how could you be a witness to your own crime?’
‘The post-office clerk said I was the last served, yeah? Which is true, but I was on me way out as the other two came in – right by the door—’
‘So you were keeping an eye out?’
‘Exactly. I’d give ’em both the all-clear as I left, though God know’s what I’d’ve done if I’d seen a rozzer – thrown meself at their mercy, probably. Can I pinch a smoke?’
Lowry slid him the packet.
‘And so I was the first one out the door.’
‘And everyone would be looking for two men, not three.’
‘Now that you mention it . . . yeah.’
‘And this third man, you claim you don’t know him?’
‘Yeah. He slid in the back of the motor.’
‘Weren’t you curious?’ Bradley asked.
‘At first, yeah; once I was in, like, on the job, I wanted to know who I was dealing with.’
‘And what did Stone say?’
‘“Best you don’t know, mate – you know me, and look where it got ya.”’
‘Can’t argue with that,’ Lowry agreed.
‘Look, I didn’t want to get involved in this shit . . . my share’s still in the glove box of the Cortina, if you don’t believe me.’
Ted Nugent’s story was first class. On his first morning minding his brother’s window-cleaning round, he had started on Artillery Road. Armed with a list of regular customers, there was one that particularly attracted him – the hairdressing salon under Derek Stone’s flat, which was full of pretty young girls. He decided to start with this one.
His brother Eddie had passed on little in the way of professional tips, but there was one thing he had said: if it’s a two-storey building, start at the top; that way, if water slops on to the panes beneath, it doesn’t mess up glass that has already been cleaned. But Ted hadn’t realized there was no connection between the salon on the ground floor and the flat on the first floor. Lowry could imagine him now, parking his ladder in front of the salon and grinning at the dolly birds inside, then ascending to the first floor to be faced with a doped-up Derek Stone in the middle of an argument and wielding an automatic pistol.
Stone, spotting Nugent, had gestured with the gun for him to descend and enter the flat. So down he went, ignoring the girls and taking the stairs up, to face a gun barrel and the penalty for stumbling across two men planning an armed robbery. Nugent confessed he knew Stone; if he hadn’t, he’d have made a run for it. It’s a small world, he said dolefully; they both went to the Candyman. The argument Nugent had witnessed from the ladder was about the getaway driver – or the lack of one, until then. Nugent claimed he was coerced into the job but admitted there was a ton in it for him. He claimed to have protested vigorously, terrified of the chance of getting caught, and the threat to his parole.
‘Honest, that’s the way it is,’ Nugent pleaded. ‘Like I said, me spilt’s still in the motor. Have you found the car?’
‘The car.’ Lowry made to get up.
Nugent gazed after him.
‘Yes. Time for you to identify the vehicle, and for us to move you from the island. Lowry nodded to Sergeant Bradley. ‘Dodger, it’s been a pleasure, as always, but I’m afraid it’s time for you to say cheerio to Mr Nugent.’
-53-
10 a.m., Thursday, Queen Street HQ
Gabriel tapped her chipped nails lightly on the worn desk, and looked at her long, thin fingers. The piano – funny, she thought; that was second time this week it had come to mind. Oldham might be slightly terrifying, but he played beautifully. What made him say he thought she would be good? It wasn’t as if he’d any cause to flatter her; on the contrary, to him, she was an annoyance. Maybe she’d get an opportunity to ask him, though. Sparks had just requested she accompany him to the barracks this morning, for what he phrased as a ‘matter of supreme diplomacy’. Whatever that might entail, she had no idea, but as Lowry and Kenton were out already, it would be her going.
She stared, not for the first time, at the photo of Lowry’s wife. She was attractive – too good for him. Lowry, she thought, was plain – neither handsome nor ugly – whereas the woman she saw in the photograph had fine, angular features, not dissimilar to those of Audrey Hepburn. What was it she’d said on the phone? ‘All that’s gone on’? What had she been alluding to?
‘WPC Gabriel.’
She looked up from her desk to see a very young officer, clutching a fax.
‘For you.’ He gingerly handed over the floppy sheets. She laid the papers out before her and flattened them with a wooden rule. The top one was an official HM Forces cover sheet. She looked nervously about her, but of course nobody here wo
uld know or care what she had on her desk.
Before her was a list of individuals who made up Company B, 7th Parachute Regiment. On leaving Oldham’s office, she had asked the man on the desk in the foyer for a full list of men in Jones’s and Daley’s platoon who had seen active service in the summer of 1982. She hadn’t asked Oldham’s permission to request the information but she had relayed the request to the desk corporal as if to suggest the captain had sanctioned it. Sneaky, but not illegal, and why would Captain Oldham withhold such a request anyway, other than purely to be unhelpful?
Besides, the police already had a list of those soldiers who had comprised Company B, provided by the brigadier shortly after the incident at the castle. She had that here in front of her. What she’d now received was an active-service log: the company as it was at the time of the Falklands conflict. The first thing she noticed was that the company had originally been based in West Germany. Not that this held any great significance for her; what she was after was the change in personnel. At the bottom there was an addendum listing the names of those – two of them – killed in action. Private Jones’s friend, who worked in the video store in Crouch Street, had mentioned that some of their close-knit group had since left the army. By comparing the two lists, she would be able to identify the soldiers in question.
The lists were alphabetical: Adams, Allcott, Brookes, Cowley . . . Cowley? Cowley hadn’t been in the army – not their Cowley, in any event. The initial was F, though. Wait, she had Felix’s medical report – it had mentioned a brother as next of kin . . .
12.20 p.m., Abbey Fields, Military Police HQ
‘It means nothing,’ Oldham said calmly. ‘Anyone can access that place, and a fool could work out the flag system – a green flag means no firing, red means duck. There was no firing over the entire Christmas period. It means nothing.’
Sparks followed Oldham’s gaze towards Lane, who was perched on the piano stool. The brigadier was perturbed and in need of reassurance from the MP chief. Sparks was starting to see the Beard in a different light; his reliance on the military police to keep order and control wasn’t something Sparks had fully appreciated until now. Oldham held the real power.