Four Below (25 page)

Sitting in a freezing car, staring at a barely functional phone box, waiting to scoop up small-fry drug-dealers and their pathetic clientele was not what she should be doing at this stage in her
career. Even the thought of returning to her warm office and her cappuccino maker failed to cheer her. It wasn’t really the cold that affected her; it was the endless hours of darkness that
got her down. It made everything else weigh heavier, look dingier, feel harsher than necessary. How did people up in the north of Scotland cope, or the Orkneys even? But then, of course,
they’d have the compensation of all that extra daylight in the summer.

Summer
. She wanted to be teleported back to long, light, balmy evenings, spent at home in the communal gardens behind her house with a book and a glass of wine. How many of those evenings
had she managed to enjoy this year? She couldn’t remember more than two. Not much to show for a whole year of work if that was your idea of reward.

Her radio came to life and she answered it.

‘We have a drug death reported in your area; officers attending suspect a heroin overdose. You said you wanted to know. The suspicion is that it’s pure heroin again.’

Fairfield tried to summon up some enthusiasm. ‘Yes, thanks.’

‘There is a witness who’s given a description of the person she thinks is the supplier.’

She sat up straighter. ‘Are they still at the address?’

‘She’s been detained for the purpose of a drugs search.’

‘Albany Road?’ Control confirmed it. ‘Thanks, control.’ She elbowed Sorbie into action. ‘Jack? Home!’

Snowing again, bloo-dy hell. Where did it all come from? Who needed it? Still, not quite as depressing as rain would be, but look at it: wind and ice and snow and slush. The
real problem was that the few decent clothes she had were summer clothes. It had been warm enough at the pub, but she now had to stagger home for miles with no money for a taxi. All because Ali
insisted she meet her halfway, so they’d ended up at the Old Fish Market. A bit too glossy for her. She’d rather have gone to a local pub and Ali could have kipped at her place, now
that Gary was gone. Hurrah hurrah hurrah.

With all the layers she had on over her dress and her old clompy boots, she looked like a frump. And winter had only just started, yuck. Soon, though, she might have enough money for taxis.
Well, not to take them everywhere, natch, but to get home after a night out. And she might get more nights out too, because – ta-daa – she had found a job. A shit job, Ali had called
it. Ha-ha. Not because it was crap, though she hadn’t started it yet; could still turn out to be crap. Laboratory technician. At the Bristol Royal Infirmary. They were paying her while she
was training, how good was that. Yeah, to look at poo, Ali had said. It wouldn’t
all
be poo. Yeah, some of it’s going to be piss, Ali had said. Well, she’d get used to it.
Otherwise she’d wear a clothes peg on her nose, there, sorted. Whoops, bloody icy here, she thought they’d gritted all that. Because that was what it was all in aid of, celebrating
getting a shit job and getting rid of a shit boyfriend. A double celebration. After four months of Gary-the-dickhead cluttering up her flat, not even looking for a job, and her being jobless
herself for over a year. At least she’d gone out looking, and found stuff to do outside the flat, while he had basically set up camp in front of the telly. Watching crap or playing martial
arts games on his Xbox. She hated that Xbox, it was so pointless.

She crossed the street. Short cut between the houses here. She shouldn’t go through little alleys like this, not alone, not at night, but it saved time and she was freezing her butt off,
woolly tights or no. Anyway, her own neighbourhood. Where could you walk and feel safe? If she hadn’t given Gary the push, he’d have kept sitting there and started spending her money.
The money from the poo job.

Nearly home. Starting Monday. Not that it was much money while she was being trained, but hey, it was more than the dole, and training was only three months, and after that it went up a bit
immediately … Bloody hell, what a way to park a van, halfway across the pavement. Whoever did that was either drunk or else had no consideration for others. Thanks a bunch.

She was too surprised to scream. The side door of the van slid open next to her; a hand shot out and dragged her inside by the hair. A punch to the stomach winded her, made her want to throw up.
The door slammed shut behind her. She was on the floor; he forced sticky tape across her mouth, and then it went dark and she couldn’t breathe. There was a bag over her head. The van was
moving, driving away, driving her into the darkness.
And no one had seen. No one. I bet no one saw a fucking thing.

Denkhaus promised he would keep the case conference short but not sweet. He congratulated the team on being the only one in the building where no officer was off sick with the
dreaded lurgy. Austin supplied an explosive sneeze at that precise moment, drawing laughter even from the super. A couple of civilian operators still hadn’t returned to work, but Denkhaus
appeared not to count them in. That was all the congratulations they were going to get. No real progress had been made, no arrests, no suspects, even.

It was the MO that set the Leigh Woods murders apart from all the drugs violence dealt out in the city, before and since Fenton’s conviction.

‘Could it be revenge of some sort? Could Fenton be directing it from inside?’ DS French wondered.

Fenton was presently doing time at Whitemoor, a Category A prison in Cambridgeshire. ‘He’s being closely monitored. Three of his associates are also doing time, all are in different
prisons. We’re not giving him the chance,’ Denkhaus said. ‘Donald Bice was of course an ex-associate, though we couldn’t prove his direct involvement. But Deeming was just a
small-time dealer. We never connected him with Fenton before. And Fenton had different methods. We may not have managed to connect him to any murders, but three Yardies disappeared, and the general
opinion is that it was Fenton who disappeared them.’

‘Yes,’ McLusky agreed. ‘And they stayed disappeared, which is usually what happens. Someone disappearing is a lot scarier for your adversaries than finding them dead. It has
that added spookiness that makes you feel unsafe.’

‘Indeed,’ Denkhaus went on. ‘The power to make you disappear without trace is more feared than any drive-by shooting.’

‘The thought had struck me before. The bodies were hidden, but really not very well. The graves simply weren’t deep enough. Both Deeming and Bice were killed slowly. They took their
time killing them, but then hurried the burial.’

‘All that means is that they prefer murdering to digging holes,’ Denkhaus said. ‘Shame it doesn’t get us very far.’ McLusky hoped it might, but having nothing more
than a vague feeling about it made no comment. Denkhaus went on: ‘Moving on to the cycle-path murder …’ He reached behind him to tap against Mike Oatley’s reconstructed
photo on the picture board. ‘We’re still no further. We don’t even know where he was murdered, and forensics are dragging their feet in the snow.’

‘House-to-house enquiries came up with nothing,’ French supplied. ‘We spoke to everyone we could find who uses that stretch of the river, and everyone on this side of the
river. We posted incident boards at both ends of the deposition site. Plus your own appeal for info on
Points West
two days ago. Nothing useful so far.’ In fact Denkhaus had done
appeals on two local TV news programmes, as well as Radio Bristol. He enjoyed it and he was good at it.

‘Right, we need to dig further into Oatley’s background, his activities. Interview the social worker again. Anyone in his building friendly with him?’

‘Only friendly enough to go through his flat when the door was left open and make off with whatever they fancied.’

When the meeting broke up, McLusky, instead of turning left towards his cubbyhole office, turned right along the corridor to the CID room in order to make himself some coffee
with the help of the reinstated kettle. The steam of his own little kettle inside the bottom compartment of his desk had managed to warp the wood to such an extent that the door now refused to
open. It had trapped his coffee mug inside and, tragically, also held the bottle of Glenmorangie hostage. There were no spare mugs to be had in the CID room, so he clattered downstairs to the
canteen. He bought a clingfilm-wrapped chocolate brownie, and while he paid for it with one hand, he stole one of the canteen mugs from the counter with the other.

‘Hey, I saw that,’ said the girl who gave him change.

‘Someone will be along later to take a statement,’ he promised and made off with it.

Back in his office, he stared down glumly at a mug of instant that had brown bits of undissolved granules and white bits of undissolved whitener floating on top. ‘Looks more like
soup,’ he told Austin. ‘You’d get better coffee on a building site, I’m sure.’ He suddenly felt a stab of nostalgia for the freshly roasted coffee Fishlock had served
him in his caravan, out in the clean woodland air. He opened the window behind him and lit a cigarette from his pack of Extra Mild. ‘How’s the no-smoking going, Jane?’

‘Better if I don’t talk about it. Or breathe yours.’

‘Did you find out what Donald Bice was living off since he stopped skippering for Fenton?’

‘Yeah, he’d been claiming unemployment benefit since the trial.’

‘No way. He had a freezer full of high-end ready meals and a leg of lamb and other stuff, and a couple of bottles of bubbly in the fridge. He wasn’t going to toast the arrival of his
dole cheque with it. What’s the status of the flat?’

‘Mortgaged and in the name of the son.’

‘And the holy ghost. Bank accounts?’

‘They haven’t sent the details yet, but the man Deedee talked to told him there were no significant outgoings apart from a few credit-card transactions at petrol stations and a
couple of standing orders. Credit activities ceased around the time of his death. Looks like Coulthart’s estimate was spot on.’

‘Bice must have had some other income. And it would have been cash.’

‘The stuff in the freezer could all be left over from when he still worked for Fenton.’

‘True. I didn’t check the use-by date on the ready meals. Should have done. If he bought them when he was still working, then they’d be out of date now. But then again, if he
lived on benefits, he’d have eaten them by now. Surely. No, it stinks,’ McLusky decided. ‘So no transactions apart from petrol stations … what car did he drive?’

‘VW Passat.’

‘How sensible. And presumably nothing interesting turned up in there either?’

Austin shuffled a few papers in the file. ‘Erm, no, since, erm, we never found the car.’

‘What?’

Austin looked apologetic, though he didn’t know what he was apologizing about, he was sure. It hadn’t been his case and Bice had been considered a minor figure, a sideshow.
‘I’ve no idea why his car never figured back then, I suppose they had everything they wanted and the main man was Fenton, after all. We’re looking for it now, of
course.’

‘I should think so. Are there garages at his place?’

‘No, dedicated parking spaces.’

His phone rang and he snatched it up. ‘McLusky.’

It was DC Dearlove. ‘Donald Bice had a regular cleaner. She does several flats in the building. She’s there now.’

A small metal disc nailed to a wooden post and rammed into a narrow bed of struggling vegetation proclaimed that the parking space belonged to Flat 5, which was Bice’s,
or rather his son’s, as McLusky reminded himself when he parked the Mazda there. He rode the lift up to Flat 3, even though it was on the first floor. There’d been quite enough walking
recently, for his taste. The door was answered by an attractive woman in her early thirties. She wore a grey tracksuit, a white T-shirt and white training shoes, and had her hair tied in a
ponytail. Tiny studs sparkled in her ear lobes. In the background he could hear classical music, something he recognized but couldn’t place. ‘I’m looking for Julie
Milne.’

‘You found her,’ she said, when he showed his ID.

‘You’re Julie Milne? Sorry. It’s just you don’t look like my idea of a cleaner.’

‘Who did you expect, Mrs Mop? Come in if you must, but take your shoes off. Unless you have smelly socks like the PC who was here earlier, then I’d rather you stayed in the hall.
With your shoes on. I don’t want you transferring odours into the carpets.’

‘You’re certainly looking after your client’s property.’

‘They pay me a lot of money for it and I do it well.’

‘I know,’ said McLusky, now shoeless and relieved to see no holes in his socks. ‘I’ve admired your work upstairs, in Mr Bice’s flat.’

‘Yes, I do that. It’s what you’ve come about, is it? Shame about Donald. Shocking, really. He was okay, and I like the place.’

‘Easy to clean?’

She managed a smile. ‘Yeah, that too.’

Flat 3 could not have been more different to the flat of the same layout above. Floral upholstery on a traditional three-piece suite matched the rest of the dark-wood furniture and dark-red
carpet. Here, combing straight the tassels on the Persian rugs and runners alone had to consume masses of time. Ornaments abounded.

Julie Milne crossed to the hi-fi and turned off the CD. ‘So what can you ask me that the other officer didn’t?’

‘You said
shame about Donald
. How well did you know him?’

‘Not well. He was pleasant, that’s all I meant. Not all my clients are; some are never satisfied or want you to do the impossible but not pay for the hours. That sort of
thing.’

‘Yes, you get people like that in policing.’

‘I’ve been cleaning his flat and all the time he was dead. And I had no idea.’

‘You must have noticed the place wasn’t being used.’

‘Of course. But it still needed cleaning; dust still falls, and actually it’s a good opportunity to get things done you normally have to put off to clean up the mess your clients
make.’

‘I thought most people cleaned up the day before the cleaner comes, out of embarrassment. It hadn’t worried you that your employer didn’t seem to be using the flat?’