Souvenirs of Murder (20 page)

‘Sitting up in bed doing the
Telegraph
crozzy. Mother's arranged it so they eat their dinner in here with me. I've told Dad it doesn't bother me if he has a tot as long as he doesn't breathe all over me afterwards. Oh, and the two older kids come straight over here after school – the bus stops by the church – and have their tea in here with me. I'm worried about the extra work for Elspeth really.'

‘I'm sure she's revelling in it,' I said. ‘But I can come home at weekends if there's nothing doing here and help.'

‘I'd like that. But I'm very boring, I tend to sleep most of the time.'

Having, reluctantly, rung off – there was really nothing else to say – I found myself staring at the screen of Greenway's iMac. It was switched on and very quietly humming away, the screen saver rather mesmerizing brightly coloured swirls of light. Heart thumping, I touched the space bar to bring it back to life and was rewarded by a mass of crime statistics. Hoping that this meant I was viewing a restricted access Crime Records Bureau website I tapped in the name Jethro Hulton. Simply not daring to print the facts that followed I tried to remember as much as possible – there were also several mugshots of him bearded and clean-shaven – and then quickly returned to the previous page and put the machine ‘back to sleep'. With not a moment to spare.

‘Patrick's just rung,' I reported to explain my presence at his desk.

‘Is he coping?' Greenway enquired, mind obviously mostly on work.

‘Seems to be. Even if he doesn't actually stay in bed for a week he'll only be pottering into his parents' living room for a change of scenery.'

He gazed at me with a small frown creasing his brow.

‘You don't know what to do with me, do you?' I said.

‘You could come and meet the team.'

He had obviously forgotten that I already had, with Patrick. On my own they would no doubt regard me as a passenger, be incredibly polite but tell me nothing interesting. I said, ‘I'd love to but first I'd like to have another look at the crime scene. I tend to get most of my good ideas by tacking the facts of the case on to what I can see and hear.'

If he thought this a bit off the wall he showed no sign of it. ‘Of course. There's no need to get Rundle involved this time as I've managed to get hold of a set of keys to the place. And Ingrid . . .'

‘Don't go knocking on the front doors of any big-time crooks?'

He gave me the keys, together with a big smile.

As Patrick had told us, Hulton had been born in 1970, was five feet nine inches in height, thickset in build, had brown eyes, a swarthy complexion, was usually heavily bearded and known to grow his hair long. In his youth he had served three years of a life sentence for murder in Mexico but had been broken out of a prison van taking him to another jail by accomplices and fled to Europe. The man was involved in all kinds of rackets but getting charges to stick was difficult due to threats to witnesses. My eyes had skipped this old news on the computer screen, together with the information that the man had been seen in a nightclub in Acton and followed to Chiswick tube station where he had been lost, which I also already knew. My good memory had then recorded that the nightclub was called The Last Gasp and there had been a subsequent sighting of him in a pub, The Cricketers, in Muswell Hill.

Muswell Hill? The scene of the murders.

So was this man a clever professional criminal who ran rings around the police or was Patrick's opinion correct and he was merely a stupid grown-up yob who had been sheltering in the organization of a clever woman? Given this new information I tended to agree with Patrick, unless of course, the man seen was someone else entirely.

I took myself off to Muswell Hill.

Nothing seemed to have changed in the place since my last visit except now there was no fire filling the sky with black smoke. Otherwise the clouds were still grey and the rain, sleety this time, bucketed down. After I had parked, luckily finding a space close by, I accessed the secure cubby box in the Range Rover – one has to enter a code number on a tiny key pad – removed the Smith and Wesson that Patrick has never quite got round to returning to MI5 that was concealed there and put it in my bag. If Hulton had been spotted nearby I was not taking any chances. Perhaps Greenway had not seen the latest intelligence update; if he had he might not have allowed me to revisit the crime scene alone.

First of all I wanted to retrace, as far as was practically possible, Patrick's journeys that morning of the killings and the previous night. So, before I went indoors I would walk to where his digs had been and then back. The exact time when he had actually set off from the house in Park Road to go home would probably never be known but obviously it would have been after dark so questioning people I met now was not likely to be rewarded with any valuable information.

I huddled deeper into my Dartmoor anorak against the wet and cold and set off, trying to imagine what it must have been like for someone who had probably had his drink spiked. He had said he had fixed himself an orange juice so could hardly have been drunk, a bad professional lapse anyway and not one he would have made.

It was a ten- to fifteen-minute walk, I was already aware; a second turning left from the house into a road that curved until it ran roughly parallel to the first and then one bore right where it split, carried on for another quarter of a mile or so and then the house with the digs was situated down a side street off to the left with a shop on the corner. It was the usual newsagents cum sweet shop and tobacconists, I saw when I went in, with a section devoted to groceries, mostly Asian. I picked up a few mammoth heads of garlic and went to pay.

‘Are you open during the night?' I asked the venerable Indian man behind the counter.

‘On Fridays and Saturdays only,' he informed me. ‘People run out of food for their parties.'

‘So you close at . . . ?'

‘When I get fed up with them,' he said with a tired smile. ‘Perhaps at around three.'

‘Do you remember the night before all those people were killed in the house opposite the park?'

‘Yes, truly. The fridge went bang and my young nephew Rakshee hit his head on a shelf in his fright and almost knocked himself out. Indeed, he did knock himself out for a moment and I was just about to ring 999 when he woke up and begged me not to send him to hospital in case they killed him with MRSA. The boy is fine now.'

‘What time was this?'

‘At just after twenty minutes past midnight. All the lights went out, you see, and I remember looking at the clock just before it happened.'

‘I'm trying to trace a person's movements that night who came from the house where the murders took place and walked to where he was living. Did you see anyone or did anyone come in the shop who you thought might have been drunk?'

‘All the time,' he answered with a big smile.

‘No, please think. It's really important.'

He gave me a quizzical look. ‘Are you from the police?'

I showed him my SOCA ID card.

‘Not in the shop, not before the fuses went,' the man replied after due thought. After that . . .' He shook his head. ‘Until my brother fixed the electric, we could see nothing. My fear was that bad youths would run in and steal so I stood by the door with a big, heavy torch. There were a few people around but . . .' A shrug.

‘What about the next morning? Did you see anyone then who was behaving strangely?'

‘A man?'

‘Yes, a man.'

‘I saw a man . . . probably at a little before ten. He was dancing. But not happy dancing. Dancing in pain. A junkie, I thought.'

‘What did he look like?'

‘He was white, tall, a slim man. Not seeming to be the type of person to do that normally. I was cleaning the shop front and went to him. But he did not see me, in a different world, you understand, and upset. Then he said something but I could hardly hear him.'

‘Can you recollect any of it?'

‘It was something like “Hutton's raving mad”. He said it over and over again. It made no sense to me. Len Hutton's dead, isn't he?'

‘Could he have said Hulton?'

‘Perhaps.'

‘Is there anything else you can remember about him?'

‘No, he went off, still dancing. But in a hurry, you understand. Two steps forward, one step back.'

‘Which way?'

He indicated the way I had just come. I made a note of his name, having to ask him to spell it, thanked him and left.

Dancing in pain. Tears pricked my eyes.

There was nothing to see outside the house where Patrick had had the bedsit so I turned and made my way back trying to replicate the mindset of someone I knew so well and see as he had seen. He had been drugged, he was hallucinating, he was armed, he was focused on rescuing the child. What did he do?

The rain had eased off a little when I got back to the house. All exterior signs of what had taken place here had been removed; no seals on the front door, no incident tape. I let myself in, quietly, and then closed the door securely behind me, standing still for a moment. There was complete silence and the smell of stale blood had coarsened into that of putrefaction. It caught at my throat and I retched.

Another smell, no, a scent, a perfume, something utterly alien to this place somehow reached me, possibly borne on a faint draught coming down the hall from the rear of the house. I took the gun from my bag, placed the latter on the floor and followed my nose towards the kitchen, moving as silently as possible, finally diving to one side and through the door, the weapon two-handed just the way I had been taught.

‘Good morning,' said Richard Daws, one-time head of D12, fourteenth Earl of Hartwood, tall, steel-blue eyes, faded fair hair damp from the rain, back leaning against the worktop, arms crossed, not remotely alarmed.

I lowered the gun, a bit lost for words.

‘I opened the window,' he said. ‘You must have heard me.'

‘No, it was your Ralph Lauren aftershave,' I told him. ‘Never smell of anything if you want to stay undetected. You should know that.'

We both laughed and then he said, ‘Mike told me you were on your way here so I thought it a good idea to catch up on all the news.'

I was not fooled by this; the man probably knew what colour lipstick I had on and the size of clothes I wore. I went back into the hall to retrieve my bag and returned the gun to it. Most of my bags smell of gun oil.

‘So what do you think happened here?' he asked when we were both standing in the room where the murders had taken place.

‘If you mean who killed these people I don't know,' I said. ‘Otherwise my view is that what occurred is the same as the account that Patrick has given minus the bits he can't remember. I've just spoken to someone in a shop near here who saw a man who answers Patrick's description making his way, with difficulty, in this direction just before ten on the morning of the murders. That would tie in with the time I spoke to him in his digs when he'd just come round and was throwing up. The missing bit is the period of time from when the child was shot in his arms until he was found in the access lane at the end of the garden.'

‘With his gun in his hand, the weapon having been used to kill several people.'

‘Right,' I acknowledged evenly. ‘The Glock had been wiped of fingerprints except for one clear set of his own. Which rather destroys any theory that he'd used it as he'd hardly wipe it clean and then pick it up again.'

‘Unless he was forced to for some reason. Unless he simply didn't know what he was doing. Unless someone overpowered him at that point and then left him, unconscious, out the back.'

‘But it was still Patrick's gun that was the murder weapon. He can't have been too gaga not to have known that that fact would incriminate him so why go to the bother of wiping his prints off it? And, for God's sake, if he really was away with the birds would he have been able to shoot so many people so accurately?'

‘You don't think he did it? Not in your heart of hearts, ignoring all personal feelings?'

‘No. He'd have easily,
easily
shot Hulton after what he told him he was going to do with Leanne. But not the others.'

‘No, nor do I,' said Daws after a short silence. ‘The problem is I'm not too sure why I think that, but nevertheless, I do. But I have to say that if the cleaner had whispered to him that Hulton was in the house, as Patrick insists she did, then I would have gone after the man first and saved the child afterwards.'

‘Leanne came out of her room though, didn't she?'

‘Yes, and we can't pretend that Patrick's judgement wasn't affected by what had happened to him. The big question is, by how much? And please bear in mind that at the moment we can't discount the version of events given to us by the cleaning woman.'

A feeling of despair and helplessness washed over me.

‘I'm prepared to give Patrick every support,' Daws went on. ‘But there has to be answers to several very important questions before we can move on from this – and, it goes without saying, the real killer must be found.' He took a card from the top pocket of his suit jacket and held it out for me to take. ‘I have a new contact number. For emergencies only, you understand. Now, can I give you a lift anywhere or do you have your own transport?'

I wondered why he had come here for, obviously, Greenway had told him I was on my way. To see if I had any amazing theories or just to offer his physical protection?

This consultant had no theories whatsoever.