‘I’m wiv Mr Wallenberg now, Mr Crozier.’
‘You’ve betrayed me, Duggie. Betrayed me.’
‘Just get out.’
He swung his legs out and dropped to the ground.
‘That’s it. Now, lean on the bonnet.’ The dapper one, called Dale, spun him round and forced him over the car’s bonnet while Duggie dropped on to his knees.
‘Hey, what y’doing?’
‘We’re taping your ankles together.’
‘What the fuck for?’
‘This tape’s not much good, Mr Wallenberg,’ Duggie said.
‘Just do it. Put plenty round. And now his hands. Put your hands behind your back.’
‘Aw, c’mon, Peter,’ he pleaded. ‘A joke’s a joke. Look, I’ll have another word with the partners. Maybe we can find some middle ground.’
‘I’m not interested in middle ground. Do as you’re told.’
‘You’ll be sorry for this, Pete. Real sorry.’
‘No I won’t. Put plenty round.’
‘Insulation tape would be better, boss,’ Duggie said, anxious to please. ‘This’ll come off in the water.’
The words hit the old man like a ten-ton truck. ‘The water!’ he yelled. ‘Whadya mean, the water! Not the river! No! No! Please don’t put me in the river…’
‘Put some round his mouth, stop him screaming.’
‘No! Don’t! Help! Help me…Aaarg…aaarg.’ His body undulated and twisted like an eel writhing on a fishing line in a desperate attempt to thwart his captors as Dale gripped him in a headlock.
‘More, use more,’ urged the stone-faced one as Duggie wound the tape round and round the old man’s head. ‘That should do. Well done, boys, he’s all yours. Here, Dale. You’d better have this back.’ He handed the gun to the younger man, who put it in his jacket pocket. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
Gurgling noises came from the trussed-up old man as he tried to scream down his nose. Blobs of mucus bubbled out of it and his bowels and bladder released their contents in a last primordial defence.
‘G’night, Mr Wallenberg,’ the dapper one called, softly, to the retreating back of his boss. ‘You take his legs, Duggie.’
‘I got them. You OK wiv ’is shoulders?’
‘Yeah, piece o’ cake.’
Their parcel strained at his bindings, his eyes bulging from their sockets as they flicked from one assailant to the other. He wanted to promise them the world, share his fortune with them, but all means of communication were denied him.
‘After you, that way,’ Duggie directed.
‘Arr! Dropped him. He’s wriggling like a fish.’
‘Shall I fump ’im? That’d quieten ’im?’
‘No. Mr Wallenberg sez there’s to be no marks on him.’
‘Old Hopalong? He didn’t stay long.’
‘He’s OK, a good boss, but don’t ever let him hear you call ’im Hopalong, or you’re one dead person. Careful, don’t bang his head on the edge.’
The old man was weeping now, sobs racking his exhausted body as he gasped for breath. Their pity was his last hope.
‘Right. Fanks for the advice. God, look at that water.’
The river shone back at them like a hole in space. Broken patches of light from the apartments on the opposite bank sat on the water and gently merged into each other and parted again.
‘I can’t see it, just blackness.’
‘It’s down there somewhere. Don’t come too near the edge. Looks like oil, not moving. Rather ’im than me.’
The old man prayed for the first time in his life. Not for rescue or salvation. It was too late for either of those. He had a pain in his chest. He prayed that it was a heart attack, that it would take him before the paralysing shock of the water racked his body and choked his lungs.
‘OK, just roll him off the side.’ They pushed him over the edge as casually as they would drop a bag of rubbish into a dumpster. The lights on the water bobbed and shimmered, and broke up into smaller patches of colour that almost immediately began to reform again. ‘There we go,
just right, hardly a splash, like the boss said.’
‘Can you see him? Is he floating?’ They stood side by side, peering into the blackness.
‘Can’t tell. There’s a few ripples. It’s out of our hands, now.’
‘Phew! I’m out of breff. That’s our first job together, Dale.’
‘Yeah. Pleasure doing business with you, Duggie.’
‘Likewise, Dale. Fuckin likewise.’
‘Right. You put his car back in its normal parking place and we’ll fuck off back to Heckley.’
If I hadn’t decided to go for a jog that morning I wouldn’t have had just one slice of toast for breakfast, and if I hadn’t had just one slice of toast I wouldn’t have made the discovery.
The toaster went
ping!
and the square of bread was hurled completely clear of the machine, falling onto the kitchen carpet. The springs, it would appear, had been chosen for their ability to lift my normal two slices to the optimum level, not one. I threw the sullied portion in the bin, placed a fresh piece in the machine and pushed it further on to the worktop. While waiting for it to cook I had an idea. I placed a book under one edge of the toaster, to give it a pronounced lift, and carefully positioned my plate next to the other side. I stood back and stooped to get a better view, considering the force with which the doomed slice had been ejected, estimating trajectories, and made a slight adjustment.
Ping!
it went again, and one perfectly cooked slice of toast shot from the machine and fell on to my plate, untouched by human hand. The joy that welled up inside me was beyond belief. It was one of those unique occasions, experienced only when momentous discoveries have been made and known only to geniuses like Archimedes, Alexander Fleming, and now me, Charlie Priest. I scraped the last of the margarine across the celebrated slice and poured hot water onto coffee granules.
I was so pleased I decided to reward myself by not going for a jog. I’d settled down with yesterday’s newspaper when the phone rang. The clock on the wall said ten to six.
‘What’s the trouble?’ I asked. ‘At this time in the morning it’s got to be trouble.’
‘Bugger me, Charlie,’ the voice at the other end said, ‘you’re up and about early. Can’t you sleep?’
‘Been for a jog, Arthur,’ I replied. ‘Four miles before breakfast is a great way to start the day.’ No need to explain that it was only in my mind. I’d read a magazine article claiming that thinking about exercise was almost as beneficial as practising it.
‘Blimey. How long have you been doing this for?’
‘Um, well, actually, today was the first time. What’s the problem?’ Arthur is the controller at Heckley nick, I’m in charge of the CID. He wasn’t ringing me to make smalltalk.
‘Rodger’s radioed in, Charlie, from an RTA up
on the high road. It happened about an hour and a half ago. Car gone into a wall at high speed, driver killed. Rodge thinks there’s more to it than meets the eye.’
‘Is he still up there?’
‘Affirmative.’
‘What about a photographer?’
‘He’s already sent for him.’
‘OK, give me the location and I’ll be off.’
Rodger is our night detective. CID work normal office hours, plus or minus a few, but we have a representative on round the clock in case something crops up that needs a CID presence. Rodger is our regular night man. No doubt he would have told Arthur all about it, but I preferred to be up there, learning firsthand. I pulled my clothes on and finished the toast in the car, heading out of town up on to the moors.
It was a cold morning, drizzle and mist combining in a way that’s special to this part of the world. According to the clock the sun should have risen, but it was only half-light and all the signs said that winter wasn’t far away. I switched on the headlamps and wipers and groped my way upwards, wondering about the life that had been snuffed out, wondering who was waiting for him to come home.
The blue lights were visible from a mile away, blurry smears of colour on a grey background. The
first set was a roadblock. Anybody using that route to work on a Thursday morning was going to be late. I lowered my window and the PC recognised me and waved me through. I paused alongside him long enough to say: ‘What’s it look like?’
‘Grim, boss,’ he replied.
Further up the road a cacophony of lights, flickering and dancing across the roofs of the assorted vehicles like static electricity, marked the scene of the crash. Two fire appliances and three police cars were clustered around a mangled wreck that sat in the middle of the road like it had been brought down by enemy fire. A deep muddy scar was gouged across the verge, then dislodged stones and shattered coloured glass marked its progress until it came to a halt, broken and silent, pointing in the direction whence it came. Fifty yards of evidence – one or two seconds of time – that told of the transformation of a technological masterpiece into a pile of scrap, and a living, feeling human being into a piece of carrion. Further away, waiting patiently, were a breakdown truck and a milk-float.
Rodger came to meet me as I took a waterproof coat from the back of the car. He introduced me to the fire chief who said they were going to remove the body, if that was OK. I had no objections if the photographer had finished.
One of the panda cars was from Lancashire Constabulary. We exchanged greetings and they
told me that it had happened about two hundred yards inside East Pennine’s jurisdiction, so it was all mine. I thanked them for their assistance and they went home.
‘What’s the problem, Rodge?’ I asked.
‘The milkman,’ he replied, nodding in the direction of the float. ‘He reported the accident. Apparently he was overtaken by two cars going at what he called lunatic speed.’
‘Racing?’
‘Not directly. They were a minute or two apart. This was down the road, back near Oldfield. Then he came upon this and telephoned us. That’s not all. He says that something similar happened about a month ago. Two cars, a minute or two apart, overtook him at breakneck speed. They were sports cars, not hatches like the two this morning, and he says they were all doing well over the ton.’
‘So you think it’s more than youthful exuberance?’
‘There’s driving fast, Charlie, and there’s racing, and there’s running away from something. This was more than driving fast. I asked the firemen to feel in his pockets for some ID. They didn’t find any but there’s an envelope. It’s stuffed with money. All twenties. A few hundred quid at a guess. I’ve put it in an evidence bag.’
‘That’s interesting. Have you had chance to check if there’s anything on this one?’
‘That’s not all.’
‘Go on.’
‘They found this, too.’ He held a Ziploc bag up in front of my face, containing an automatic pistol. ‘Glock .38, at a guess.’
‘Sheest!’ I exclaimed. ‘That will have to go to the lab for a full inspection. Back to the car. Have you checked it out?’
‘Yes. It’s registered as a blue VW Golf 1.8 GTi, which is what we’ve got, and it’s not reported stolen. The owner is a Jason Smith, age 28, living in Scarborough.’
‘He’s a fair way from home. Any guesses at the age of laddo?’ I asked, nodding towards the wreckage.
‘No, sorry.’
‘Dare we ring him?’ Jason Smith might be at home in bed, or he might not, in which case we’d have some explaining to do.
‘Hmm, I’d rather not.’
‘No, I don’t think I want to, either. Lets see if we can find the VI number and take it from there.’
But we couldn’t. The Vehicle Identity Number is usually on a plate welded on the floor at the side of the driver’s seat, but by the time they’d cut the poor chap from the wreckage there wasn’t much left to look at, and what there was had a liberal coating of blood on it. We arranged to take a full statement from the milkman and sent him on his way.
Couldn’t have the kiddiewinks missing their morning cereals. We dismissed the breakdown truck, too, preferring to have our own take the wreckage to the police compound. It was ten o’clock when the fire brigade hosed the road clean and we opened it for normal business.
We asked Scarborough to do the dirty work and they sent a bobby round to the house where the blue Golf GTi belonging to Jason Smith was registered. If it was still there ours was a stolen car, marked up to look like that one; if it wasn’t there he’d have to break the news that somebody might not be coming home and invite them to make an identification.
There are thousands of people driving round in cars that don’t belong to them. They are stolen to order and passed on at about a tenth of their true value. They steal, say, a black BMW series 3 – it’s usually an upmarket car – and sit at the roadside watching, or wander round supermarket car parks until they find a similar vehicle. They note the number and have identical registration plates made for the stolen one. That’s it. Any perfunctory enquiry from a passing policeman shows it to be what it says it is, and his suspicions are alleviated. The owner of the original vehicle knows nothing about this, except that he receives the occasional summons for speeding in an area where he never goes, or a fixed penalty ticket for driving in the
London congestion charge zone, although he avoids driving in London like a giraffe avoids overhead power-lines.
Scarborough rang back to say that Mr Smith was alive and well, but we’d already discovered that the crashed car was a ringer. The VIN number didn’t tally with the DVLA records. It had been stolen three weeks earlier, from a house in Leeds. Burglars had broken in, found the keys and driven it away. Nothing else was taken. Nowadays, with all the sophisticated alarms and immobilisers on new cars, using the keys is just about the only way of stealing one.
We don’t mourn when a car thief kills himself. Truth is, we all feel a little glow of satisfaction, happy that they haven’t taken anybody else with them. Priority now was his identity, so his next of kin could be informed and the newspapers could announce to the world that justice had been done and the streets were that little bit safer. He’d be buried with all the pomp of a Third World dictator and the
Personal
column would have messages from all his friends and relatives saying what a kind, loving person he’d been. They’d make pilgrimages to the spot where he discovered that VW Golfs can’t fly, and leave extravagant floral tributes and soft toys, to help him in the afterlife. Rodger asked if he could stay with it because he smelt something big underneath it all.
I was happy to close the case and concentrate on the burglaries that make up our daily bread, but I said OK.