Murder in Adland (24 page)

‘I thought
you had to look after your Dad tonight?’

‘Time
enough to buy you a drink – you were brilliant, Guv.’

Skelgill
had grinned ruefully.

‘If I could
do that on purpose I’d be playing for England.’

*

Thus it was
that Skelgill subsequently finds himself, several pints later, perched at the
bar and alone with his thoughts.  DS Jones has duly purchased a
celebratory round as promised, departing shortly after the presentations by the
Chief, including the Man-of-the-Match award to a bashful Skelgill, for his haul
of 7 wickets for 18 runs in 4.2 overs – a record in the long and
illustrious history of the Blencathra Shield.

But it is
not upon his wizardry with the ball that he now reflects, nor the Chief’s public
words of congratulation.  A little later – before taking her leave
– she had motioned him aside to impart the disconcerting news that his
time was running out; she referred to the murder of Ivan Tregilgis.  She needs
a result, and if – just like this evening – it requires a change of
bowling (so to speak) to bring that about – then so be it.  DI Smart
will be taking over the case unless there is significant progress by close of
play on Monday.

Skelgill
sighs and slips off the barstool.  Leaving his pint and his trophy where
they stand, he casually makes his way through a door marked for the gents. 
They are situated across a yard at the back of the pub.  But Skelgill is
merely using this route to make an inconspicuous exit.  A ginnel leads
from the yard into the main street, and from there he can pick up a taxi. 
But, just as he passes the door of the toilets, out stumbles the wag, more than
a little the worse for wear – though jubilant, nonetheless.

‘Skel,
marra – yer won it off yer own back!’

‘Aye,
thanks – it’s
bat
, isn’t it?’

Skelgill,
en route to the office on Friday morning, becomes diverted by an ‘all-cars’
emergency call following a bizarre incident on the northbound M6. 
Evidently, a hostile convoy of animal-rights protestors and ramshackle hippies’
charabancs has been shadowing a travelling circus.  As they neared
junction 41 these wacky races had abruptly halted owing to a sizeable and
probably mutually intentional coming together of those in the van.  The
entire carriageway was blocked by debris, a minor pitched battle broke out
between the opposing forces, and assorted exotic species of animals were
reported to be roaming southbound and in adjacent fields (although this proved
to be somewhat exaggerated).  By the time Skelgill reaches the scene,
however, things have cooled down, and several of the protagonists (all of the
hairy variety, it seems) are being led away towards a fleet of brightly marked
police patrol cars.  Skelgill makes himself useful by circulating among
the smouldering groups and unceremoniously snuffing out any remaining flickers
of enmity with a few well-chosen words of Anglo-Saxon wisdom.  This action
ultimately wins him the respect of the parties, and in no time he is enjoying
strong tea and home-made rock cakes inside an immaculate gipsy caravan with a
trio of exceedingly attractive female acrobats (although he half suspects this is
a ploy to keep his policeman’s nose from poking where it isn’t wanted). 
Thankfully nobody has been seriously injured in the confrontation, which was
more handbags than handguns, and the vehicles are soon safely lined up on the
hard shoulder.  The circus elders opt to continue their journey towards
Scotland, and not press charges (and, yes, they’ll go right now, thanks, and
– no thanks – they won’t need an escort) in return for the police
sending back the new age travellers whence they came.  Skelgill is later
amused to hear of a twist in the tale, concerning a pair of enthusiastic
constables who radioed to say they had cornered a group of escaped llamas,
while simultaneously a farmer’s wife was telephoning to report that strange men
in black were rustling her valuable rare-breed wool-alpaca flock.

*

When,
finally, he does arrive at Penrith, shortly before lunchtime, Skelgill finds
himself shaking his head and wondering if he has imagined the whole
affair.  The same goes for the bewildering events of the previous evening,
until he notices a neat display of objects on his cabinet: his forsaken
Man-of-the-Match trophy, a cheap gold-effect winner’s medal in a flip-up black
plastic display case and – touchingly – what appears to be the
bruised and scuffed match ball.  He phones George at the front desk.

‘Hey up,
George.’

‘Skelly
– didn’t see you come in.  Hear the clowns were out in force on the
M6 this morning.’

‘Aye, very
good, George – and that was just our lot.’

‘What can I
do you for?’

‘I just
wanted to say thanks – I presume it was you who put this cricket stuff in
my office?’

‘No
problem, lad.’

‘I was a
bit distracted last night.’

‘I hear the
Chief’s given you forty-eight hours.’

Skelgill
makes a hissing sound.

‘How come
that’s got out?’

‘You know
how word gets around.  Apparently Smart’s been putting it about that it’s his
case, all bar the shouting.’

*

Skelgill’s
strategy for this stage of the process owes something to DS Jones’s supportive
remark along the lines of good old-fashioned police work.  No great reader
unless he has an angling or climbing magazine to hand – or one of his
beloved
Wainwrights
– Skelgill generally relies upon his
subordinates to do the leg-work when it comes to analysing the great mass of
information that can accumulate during an investigation.  Today, however,
he has determined to put his nose to the grindstone and catch up with some of
the details, and he begins with a series of reports that relate to the more
peripheral characters.  DS Jones has compiled these, and she has headed
each with a short note that highlights the most salient aspect.  The first
concerns the hotelier, Mrs Groteneus, and carries the emboldened legend,
“No
trace of Groteneus spouse.”

According
to Mrs Groteneus, her husband had left her some ten years earlier to return to
his native South Africa, to Johannesburg.  It appears that technically
they are still married, though she has lost touch with him and claims not to
have heard from him since.  Nor, it seems, has anyone else, as the Jo’burg
cops can find no record of such a person.  Of course, the man could have
gone somewhere different altogether, and Mrs Groteneus would be none the
wiser.  Skelgill toys with the idea of Mr Groteneus having never left the
premises (or, at least, the grounds) – which would provide an explanation
for the hotelier’s anxiety in the presence of the police search unit. 
And, certainly, if anyone knew how to creep undetected around the hotel it
would be her.  There was also the mysterious episode with the missing
master key.

‘Come off
it, Skelgill.’  He turns the page with a certain finality.

“Drugs suspect.”
  The
next report concerns the shady Ron Bunce.  It seems DS Jones’s hunch is
correct.  While Ron Bunce has no criminal record to speak of (although two
dubious acquittals for alleged grievous bodily harm), there is an official file
being kept, since he is suspected of trafficking drugs out of Africa and into
Europe via the British colony of Gibraltar.  But Skelgill has already
pointed out to DS Jones his difficulties with the hitman-theory, and the notion
that a drugs connection would somehow extend to Ivan Tregilgis seems improbably
tenuous.  Yes, there is a possible legal action – the threat of
which does not appear to be giving Bunce any sleepless nights – and in
any event Tregilgis’s death would not make that go away.

“Smith
trail cold.”
  Thus is headed the third report.  Background
investigations centred on Grendon Smith have so far drawn a blank.  Nobody
as yet has been forthcoming from the companies suspected of involvement in his
alleged ‘cash-for-projects’ scheme, nor has anything turned up amidst Ivan
Tregilgis’s admin that indicates Smith had been formally put on notice of legal
action.  The only fingerprints on the blackmail letter received by Krista
Morocco belong to her, a PC from Charing Cross (who’d sheepishly warned them in
advance that he’d been eating his morning bacon roll at the time she’d handed
it in), and Skelgill.  A survey of staff in the London office of
Goldsmith-Tregilgis & Associates has concluded that there has been no contact
with Smith since he left.  And at the present time his home telephone is
disconnected for non-payment, and his mobile is diverting to voicemail.

Skelgill sits
back and consults his watch.  One o’clock.  He stands up, extracts
his wallet and car keys from his jacket, hoists up the venetian blind and
promptly climbs out of his already-open office window.  Under normal
circumstances, as the newly installed saviour of the station’s honour for his
exploits on the cricket field, he would take the long route to the canteen to
bask with ingenuous modesty in the many rays of adulation that will surely be
directed his way.  But today that prospect is heavily overshadowed by the prospect
of staring eyes that know he is to be removed from the Bewaldeth case.

He drives
the short distance into the centre of Penrith and parks at a small supermarket.
 Inside he buys a sandwich, which he quickly dispatches while heading on
foot to his favoured fishing-tackle shop.  The sounds of radios playing
and occasional voices drift from open windows of the small houses that crowd
the kerb.  The sun is cracking the cobbles and melting the tarmac.  But
to Skelgill’s trained weather eye a change is clearly in the air.  High up
in the blue, great swirling mares’ tails of cirrus are sliding in from the
west: an innocuous-looking advance cavalry, but harbingers nonetheless of a
glowering legion of great grey clouds that will inevitably follow.  The
forecasters have got it right.

The
consensus in the tackle shop is that the rain will come by midday
tomorrow.  The mother of all depressions is whipping itself into a frenzy over
the Atlantic, in preparation for a charge at Britain: it is predicted to rout
the prevailing anticyclone.  Skelgill points out that he will be enjoying
pie and chips and ale in his local by then, given that he plans to be out on
Bass Lake well before dawn.

His spirits
buoyed by this thought, he purchases some treble-hooks and a couple of wire
traces, and even contemplates buying a mean-looking plastic plug, the type of lure
that imitates an injured fish when retrieved jerkily through the water.  Generally
he manufactures his own plugs; indeed his two most successful models started
their lives as a pool cue and a paintbrush handle respectively.  The
latter has been particularly prolific through the winter months, but has
suffered a loss of form more recently – hence Skelgill’s musings over an
eleventh-hour substitution. In the event, after some deliberation, he decides
to stick with his tried and trusted rig.

Retracing
his steps he returns to his desk by the same clandestine means he left it, only
to find that without the protective blind in place his office has filled up
with flies.  Now he spends the next ten minutes variously swatting and
shepherding them out, according to his prejudices about their habits or value
as bait.  For blowflies and clegs the outlook is not good, whereas
craneflies and lacewings can have greater cause for optimism unless they behave
with singular stupidity and refuse to go quietly.

Aerial
distractions eliminated, Skelgill settles down for an afternoon of further
reading.  He purses his lips in an act of concentration.  Some years
back he attended an NLP training course, and had been classified as a ‘visual’
person.  This had delighted him, confirming a phobia that had begun at
school with an aversion to essays and comprehension, and which continues to
this day with a dread of challenges such as he faces now.  He gathers himself,
pen poised – and then gets up and digs in his pocket for change for the hot
drinks machine.

*

It is just
after three-thirty p.m. when DI Smart’s weaselly countenance insinuates itself
into the narrow gap between Skelgill’s door and the jamb.

‘Alright,
Skel?’

Skelgill
looks up, squinting, his expression darkening.  He doesn’t consider DI Smart
a friend, and is clearly not endeared by his use of the familiar.  DI
Smart is undeterred.

‘Hear you
were cock of the walk last night.  Nice one.’

Skelgill
shrugs.

‘Didn’t see
you there.’

‘Leave.’ 
Smart sidles uninvited into the office and rests an elbow upon Skelgill’s
cabinet.  ‘Went for a meal in Manchester.  New afro-asian fusion restaurant. 
First outside London.’

Skelgill,
still unsmiling, gives a faint nod of disinterest.  DI Smart might remind
him of Dermott Goldsmith – both carrying a weighty chip on their shoulder
– in Smart’s case concerning all things Mancunian.

DI Smart’s
eyes rove hungrily around Skelgill’s office, like a shoplifter casing a new
store.  He picks up the cricket ball and weighs it in his hand, as if he
knows what he doing.  But then he makes a clumsy attempt to flip it, and
it falls with a clunk and rolls obligingly towards Skelgill’s desk, affording
him the opportunity to make further ground.

‘How’s the
case going?’

He reaches
out casually to pick up one of DS Jones’s reports that lies on Skelgill’s in-tray. 
But Skelgill is too quick for him and slaps a proprietorial hand on the item in
question.

‘Between
you and me, Smart,’ (Skelgill lowers his voice to the level of the conspiratorial)
‘I’ve cracked it.  Have it all tied up by Monday morning.’

DI Smart
jerks back, his cadaverous features becoming even more pallid than their usual
lifeless hue.

‘Right. 
Nice one.’

His left
eye seems to develop a tic.

Skelgill
stares implacably.

‘Was there
something?’

‘Er –
no.  I just, er – came to say well done.’

He replaces
the ball beside Skelgill’s trophies, and then gestures towards the pile of
admin.

‘'I’ll
leave you to it.  Nice one.’

He backs
out of the office with a curt nod.

Skelgill takes
a deep breath and releases it slowly.  He gazes for a moment into space,
his expression becoming troubled.  Then he turns back to the hopeless task
that lies before him.