Driving into Darkness (DI Angus Henderson 2) (20 page)

James Nash’s house in Potters Lane, Burgess Hill was of modern brick construction, semi-detached with white wood cladding. The small garden looked neat and tidy with mature bushes along one edge but the carport at the side of the house had a plastic roof, which in his experience deafened all those living nearby during a heavy downpour.

It was early evening in late spring, and even though streetlights were on, it was not yet dark. It felt good to be moving into summer, as he hated winter with its short days and dull, dappled light, a haven for crooks who could set about their business without impediment and a bind for people like him who never saw daylight, except when working. He rang the doorbell.

A diminutive middle-aged woman with auburn-coloured hair answered. Dressed in an old cardigan and loose fitting tracksuit bottoms that did nothing to flatter her slim figure, and only reinforcing his view that she had not been expecting visitors. He did not explain his reasons for being there, instead calling it a routine enquiry and asked to speak to her son.

‘You better come in, I suppose,’ she said.

She stood at the foot of the stairs and hollered, ‘James! There’s someone here to see you!’ For such a diminutive person, she had a loud voice, no doubt the result of living with a son, as they all seemed to go through a ‘deaf’ phase, particularly in their teenage years. She turned to Henderson. ‘He spends all his time in his room, doing God-knows what but nothing to interest you lot, he’s a good boy.’

A bedroom door upstairs opened and another voice said, ‘yeah what is it?’

‘He’s awake at least.’ she said. ‘Go on up if you like.’

Henderson climbed the stairs as Nash’s mother walked back into the living room. Seated inside he could see a bald-headed man watching a crime drama on a widescreen television. If either of them took the trouble to come upstairs, they could have a dose of the real thing in their son’s bedroom, although he suspected the interview with James would involve a lot less action than what appeared on their television screens.

A tousled haired young man wearing jeans and t-shirt stood on the landing, his face bland and impassive. From the DOB on his personnel record at Markham, Henderson knew he was 23 but he looked as fresh-faced as any 17-year-old he had ever come across.

‘Hello James, I’m Detective Inspector Angus Henderson from Sussex Police, I would like to have a word with you.’

‘Is it about my mountain bike?’

‘What happened to it?’

‘It got nicked outside Costa Coffee in town.’

Henderson shook his head. ‘No, I’m not here about the bike. This is something more serious.’

He shrugged his shoulders in a ‘what the hell,’ gesture and walked into his bedroom.

There were two chairs, a low-set, fabric-covered recliner and a leather swivel chair in front of a desk. In order not to intimidate him, as some of his colleagues might be tempted to do, Henderson ignored the swivel chair beside the desk and opted for the ugly recliner, which proved to be surprisingly comfortable.

The room was square and small, much as he would expect in a modern house, but tidy. On the wall, there were no pictures of sexy models, Star Wars characters, or the music industry’s latest sensation, unless a poster of U2 at Glastonbury could be included.

The room was dominated by the biggest desk possible within the space available, and upon it sat two computer screens and several pale cream boxes, glowing with green and red lights. From his vantage position in the low seat, Henderson could see a myriad of black cables underneath as they curled and twisted like a bowl of spaghetti, with a bundle leading over to a small storage unit in the corner, housing a laser printer and sound system, through which James Blunt or Jack Johnston played.

‘You've got an impressive pile of kit there. What do you use it for?’

‘I’m a freelance software designer,’ he said sitting down.

‘What does that mean to a layman like me?’

‘It means I work for myself designing whatever software is needed by small businesses and individuals.’

‘Such as?’

‘I get involved in website design, software installation, modification of computer code, sorting out pc problems, the works. I’ve just designed a web site for a hardware shop in Brighton. They’ve been going for a hundred and twenty years and only now, if you can believe it, have they decided to join the world of on-line commerce. It involved a fair amount of training as well.’

‘It sounds like interesting work.’

‘Not really.’

‘Is it not that challenging?’

‘It has its moments.’

‘You’re a fan of the Seagulls, I see,’ he said nodding towards a neat pile of football programmes, lying close to the window.

‘Yeah, I’ve got a season ticket and I go to some away matches as well. Do you follow football?’

‘Yes. I sometimes get to a match but more often than not I’m working Saturdays and so I don’t get over there as much as I’d like.’

‘Bad luck because they’ve been good to watch these last few weeks. I'm mean, we had a terrible start when a pub team could have beaten us and I thought we were certainties for relegation, but they turned it around and there’s been some cracking games these last few weeks.’

‘So I’ve heard. The reason I’m here, James is because as you’re probably aware, Sir Mathew Markham was murdered in April and I’m in charge of the investigation into his death.’

To his surprise, the inevitable, ‘I thought the carjackers did it,’ didn’t come.

Nash nodded. ‘Yeah, I remember hearing about it, but I didn’t follow the story. You probably know that I used to work there and left in what might be called acrimonious circumstances and so I don’t go out of my way to find out what’s going on.’

‘Yes, I knew that you did. Tell me what happened when you were there.’

He swivelled in the chair from side to side as if dealing with difficult memories. ‘I wasn’t long out of university and this was my first job so I was hot on the theory but light on the practicalities. In a way, I was a glorified gopher for Gary, he was the brains of the outfit.’

‘How far did you take it? The idea, I mean.’

‘You’ve heard about it?’

‘Yep.’

‘Did they got it to work?’

Henderson hesitated, remembering his promise to Lawton but Nash of all people, deserved to know. ‘I’m told they now have a working prototype.’

‘Bloody hell, I’m amazed but I knew it would work in the end.’

‘Tell me about you and Gary.’

‘Gary’s a good computer programmer but a genius with radio and like many geniuses, he’s great at generating ideas but crap at implementing them. He couldn’t even be bothered doing a mock-up to show the bosses what we had achieved and given that they paid for it all, it really pissed them off.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Half the time, I didn’t have a clue what he was on about and so in the end, when I thought we were close and we could save our jobs by demonstrating how smart we were, it was a shock to find we didn’t even get to base camp.’

‘Did your sacking come as a surprise? Do you think it was fair?’

He smiled weakly and shrugged. ‘Define fair. In legal terms, I suppose it was, as Lawton had the best lawyers behind him, but morally it wasn’t. At the time, I felt bitter and cheated, we both did, particularly at the way Lawton handled it. We thought he was trying to keep all our ideas for himself.’

‘What do you think about it now?’

‘Ha. It was stupid. I suppose we were behaving like a couple of Billy Bunter’s, let loose in our own sweet shop and starting to piss-off the rest of the staff. In a way, it was Lawton’s fault for giving us so much rope and Gary’s for demanding it, when what we needed was more direction. Gary, you see, was too much of an obsessive to ask for help and too disorganised to use it.’

‘What’s he like as a person?’

‘What, Gary or Lawton?’

‘Gary.’

‘He can be bold, imaginative and clever but when something doesn’t please him, he starts mouthing off like an ancient Roman emperor and demanding everything. He annoyed a good number of people at the company, including the chairman’s son, Jackson and so when the dope and women thing went down, there was no more slack in the rope and out the door we went.’

‘Did you keep copies of the designs?’

He shot Henderson a look.

‘Don’t worry I won’t tell the lawyers.’

‘I don’t know why I’m bothered being so secretive as they’re obsolete now. We weren’t supposed to keep copies but we did, and me and Gary tried to build a prototype. Despite blowing a load of our severance cash on computers, testing gear, circuit designing software, and spending three solid months cooped up in a rented workshop,’ he said shaking his head, ‘we still couldn’t get the thing to work. You’d think because we were using our own money, we would be better organised and focused but no, if anything Gary was worse. It was a bad time for me, for both of us and I’m glad to be out and doing something more mundane.’

‘What did you mean when you said Gary got worse?’

‘Well you know, when it wouldn’t work it made him more morose and somehow it added to the feeling that he’d been cheated. He was supposed to take medicine for a bi-polar condition but he stopped and started doing more dope instead, so his mood swings were,’ he sighed, ‘at times volcanic.’

‘Does he still hate the company and the people in it?’

He hesitated. ‘It’s not my place to speak for him and I wouldn’t want to drop him in it. You’ll need to ask him yourself.’

Henderson asked a few more questions but soon drew a halt as he’d probably got everything James Nash had to offer. He eased himself from the chair with some difficulty as it seemed to have moulded itself to his shape. ‘I've enjoyed talking to you, James. Here’s my card, if you think of anything else in the meantime, I’d appreciate a call.’

He walked to the door and stepped out, but stopped and turned. James had turned to face the computer and was tapping away on the keyboard with all the finesse of a skilled typist.

‘Do you still keep in touch with Gary?’

‘Nah. I haven’t spoken to him for about six months, maybe more. Last I heard, at the start of this year he got a job in the IT department of some financial services company in Brighton. Boring as hell, he says but it pays the bills. Now he’s bought himself a boat and spends all his spare time down at the marina.’

It was a short drive from Burgess Hill to Haywards Heath but long enough for Henderson to mull over his conversation with James Nash. Two things stood out. It was Lawton, not Markham who was the subject of their ire, as at the time Sir Mathew was semi-retired and William Lawton would have been responsible for all day-to-day decisions.

It was Lawton who pulled them up about their bad-boy behaviour and Lawton’s name that appeared on their termination letters. So if they were targeting the business, why did they kill Sir Mathew Markham and not William Lawton? Was he an easy target, an old man who rarely ventured out, or were they saving Lawton for last and making him sweat, much as Jamil suggested?

Another question annoyed him, why did James Nash lie? When he asked him if he still kept in contact with Larner, he said he didn’t but what he
actually
said was, he knew Larner didn’t like the job and only did it to pay the bills, indicating that he had spoken to him since he started work. In another conversation he might have put it down to semantics or the inelegant phrasing of a young and inarticulate lad, but Nash wasn’t young and he wasn’t inarticulate.

Haywards Heath was a much larger town than Burgess Hill with its own mainline station and in close proximity to the A23. Over the years, it had shed its ‘dormitory town’ tag and was now home to a number of insurance and financial services companies and with a good selection of night-time entertainment in the form of dozens of pubs and restaurants.

A few minutes later, he turned into Bolnore Road, a leafy area of large and small individual detached houses in marked contrast to the regimented and standardised semi-detached estate he left behind in Burgess Hill. Amidst mock-Tudor mini-castles, five-bedroom ‘executive’ retreats and small houses, extended so many times they had forfeited the right to be called a ‘cottage’, stood Larner’s place.

He parked across the street. The house was small in comparison to many of its neighbours and looked as though the exterior had not been improved in decades, with an abundance of old and paint-flaked sash windows, an original but bowed roof, and a driveway dotted with many clumps of grass and weeds that if left untended a while longer, would soon become incorporated into the untidy garden.

He walked over to the driveway, his presence now shielded from neighbours by a rampant laurel hedge blocking out much of the light from nearby street lamps and giving the house a black, forlorn look.

The windows were in darkness with the curtains open, suggesting there was no one at home, but he knocked on the door all the same. In his experience, IT people were a strange bunch and he wouldn’t be at all surprised to find Larner inside, tapping away on his keyboard in a darkened back room and wearing nothing but a old straw boater and flip-flops.

He knocked again, louder this time, the sound reverberating around the empty hallway, but still came no reply. The house, the encroaching garden, the stillness of the night, reminded him of a poem he first learned in school by Walter De La Mare, called The Listeners. He could still recall his favourite stanza.

‘But no one descended to the Traveller

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.’

The poem was a metaphor for a dying man knocking on death’s door and as the traveller received no reply to his knock, it meant his time on earth wasn't yet over. He liked the poem, but hoped its sudden appearance in his mind and its preoccupation with death was in no way prescient.

He walked back to the driveway and after making sure he wasn’t being watched by a vigilante dog walker or the Neighbourhood Watch coordinator out for an evening patrol, as it wouldn’t do to try and explain his presence here to a couple of plods from Haywards Heath Station, he disappeared around the side of the house and into the shadows.

When his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could see he was standing in front of a gate and over to the right, and blocking the way into the rear garden, the doors of a garage. The gate looked old and a good kick would most likely open it, but he was glad he didn’t because when he turned the handle, he found it wasn’t locked. He pushed it open and could see why. Either through settlement in the house or warping of the wood, the gate had shifted a couple of inches away from where the hasp met the corresponding staple on the gate post, and so it couldn’t be locked even if Larner wanted to.

He carefully walked past the windows at the back of the house, but his caution was unnecessary as he couldn't detect the slightest chink of light inside, no ghostly flicker of a television, no tinny prattle from a portable radio, nothing to indicate the presence of anyone. The moon was casting light on the garden but it was Blackpool Illuminations next door, with a light blazing in every room, no doubt the refuge of a posse of teenagers, too lazy to switch anything off. The house was far enough away not to bother him and it was separated from Larner’s with another tall and untidy hedge.

Before tackling the back door, he decided to take a look in the garage. In his experience, crooks often hid incriminating things inside sheds and garages, things they didn’t want the casual house visitor to spot, and it was often the place where tools were stored and where he might find something useful to open the back door or a window without causing too much damage.

The side door to the garage looked as old and dilapidated as the gate, and this time the weakness lay in a rattling, loose-fitting lock. It was a disappointing discovery as he fancied a challenge, but instead he dug his fingers into the space between the door edge and its frame and eased the door closer to the hinges. It opened with an unoiled creak, a piece of cake for him or any neighbourhood lawnmower thief.

He had investigated many old garden sheds and garages over the years, in search of drugs or guns, and knew to blunder inside without looking was a mistake of the naïve and foolhardy. Any number of calamities were lying in wait, such as a smack on the head from a low hanging plank, to bruising an ankle on a discarded spade, but more painful in his personal experience, was tripping over a rake and falling headlong into a bundle of barbed wire. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his battered and trusty Maglite, which repaid his faith yet again, when it switched on first time.

In contrast to the neglect evident all around the house, the inside of the garage was tidy and all tools and implements had been put out of harm’s way on shelves and brackets leaving a broad open space for him to walk around in, either that or he didn't own much stuff. Not having tended a garden for many years, he wasn’t tempted to have a poke inside a small box containing seed packets or to take a look along the shelves at boxes of fertiliser or weed killer to see what he had been missing, because whenever he saw anyone mowing the lawn with a grumpy expression on their face, it simply re-affirmed his resolution to live in a flat.

He looked around for a few minutes but finding nothing of interest, he turned to walk outside, when the torch illuminated a large cardboard box in the corner, nestling under two rolls of netting. Propping the Maglite on a shelf, he carefully removed the rolls. They were large and bulky and looked heavy but when he tried to lift one, it weighed next to nothing.

He opened the box expecting to find a stash of beer or well-thumbed porno magazines, a discovery which never failed to lighten up many a boring drugs search, but felt slightly cheated to find it contained only clothes. Slowly, as he didn’t want to be assailed by a squadron of moths or have his face covered in dust, he removed a black balaclava, fleece and trousers. He grabbed the torch and aimed it inside. There were three sets of each. His heart skipped a beat. There had been three men at Mathew Markham’s house and Suki described clothing similar to this.

His mind began racing but like the waves at Brighton Beach, no sooner did the excitement rise, when seconds later it receded. The might well be the clothes of criminals but equally, they could be gardening clothes, building clothes, or the clothes Larner used when he cleaned his boat. They were simply clothes and unless a fragment found at Markham’s house could be matched to anything in this pile, it would prove nothing and even then, a clever lawyer would be able to pick holes bigger than any moth.

The logical part of his brain said 'no,' this is nothing, but his intuition was screaming and demanding his attention, it was too big a coincidence to ignore. He spent a few more minutes searching the rest of the box but found nothing more and so he replaced the rolls of plastic sheeting back on top and walked over to the back door of the house, more convinced than ever that he was on the right track.

The neighbours had settled down for the evening to watch television and the teenagers had gone out, as all the upstairs lights were off. If Larner’s house was as modern as those in Burgess Hill, the back door would be made from uPVC, be double-glazed, and fitted with a multiple locking system, nigh-on impossible to open without a hammer and an arrest warrant, but this one wasn’t.

It was made of wood with a large window at the top and an inset panel at the bottom. This offered a few choices, none of which were unpalatable or difficult for a burglar or a curious copper. He could smash the window or less messy, kick in the bottom panel, which was in all likelihood made from something no thicker than plywood and crawl through the gap His personal favourite was to open the door with the key, which he could see through the window, hanging from a peg close to the door.

He went back to the garage and removed a long screwdriver, used by handymen to work in those tight, inaccessible places where a hand and a smaller tool wouldn’t fit, but the rust on the blade suggested it hadn’t been out of the tool box for a while. In his other hand, he carried a wooden stepladder and a piece of wire.

Balancing on the steps, he used the tip of the screwdriver to cut away a small section of wood from the bottom of the frame of the little window above the main kitchen window, and eased the screwdriver into the gap. After a bit of wriggling about, trying to get the angle right, he pushed it under the window handle. After checking to make sure the ladder was still on a sound footing, he gave the base of the screwdriver a sharp smack with his hand and he was pleased to see the handle jump from its rest.

Holding the little window open with his shoulder, he leaned inside the kitchen and hooked the loop he made at the end of the wire over the handle of the main window and pulled it open. A few minutes later, he inserted the key into the lock and opened the door.