‘You’re Mr—?’ Vaguely he recalled having seen the West Indian before, but where? Hadn’t he been a prosecution witness in that hit-and-run traffic case? Not one of his, but he had been at the magistrate’s court that day. Was that it?
‘My name’s Palmer, Mr Evans, so don’t try denying you’ve got my son in there.’
Evan saw light.
‘Jesus, is Byron Palmer still here?’ he exploded, all the fury of his Welshness breaking through. ‘You’re Mr Palmer, are you? Well, just sit down, Mr Palmer, while I check what’s going on.’
He strode back along the corridor to the interview room, where he found the black teenager who had rescued Archer still sitting at the table coolly checking through his statement. The detective-constable stood at his shoulder.
‘OK, lad?’ he was demanding aggressively as Evans went in. ‘That’s the story you’re sticking to, is it?’
This young DC was lining himself up for a stinking bad report, Evans promised himself sourly. He had disliked the man from the first moment he set eyes on that cropped blond hair and leering, surly face. Nothing in the intervening months had persuaded him to change his mind.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Lord Byron here refused to sign the first statement. Wasn’t good enough for him.’
‘What was wrong with it, Byron?’
‘They weren’t my words,’ the boy said reasonably. ‘What I said had been paraphrased. I didn’t feel I could sign it.’
The DC began to protest but Evan stopped him. The lad was trying it on, seeing how far he could get; as he was still at school studying for A levels it was not surprising he should react this way to the DC’s bullying. And he was a witness after all, not a suspect.
‘Let’s have a look at your statement, Byron,’ he requested.
The lad gave it to him and he skimmed quickly through it. At least his handwriting was clear and easy to read. In all important respects it agreed with what the girl had told them.
‘He still won’t say why he took the girl into the school in the first place,’ the DC pointed out.
Byron’s face darkened.
‘Well, he wasn’t looking for the crown jewels, that’s for sure,’ Evan commented sarcastically, feeling his aversion to the man growing with every minute that passed. He handed the statement back. ‘Just sign it, Byron, will you, then run along. You’ll find your father waiting outside.’
‘And another thing,’ the DC insisted as they stood watching the lad meticulously signing and dating every sheet. ‘How come these beetles didn’t attack you?’
‘They ran off, didn’t they. Like cockroaches run off if you tread near them.’ He didn’t even bother to look up from his writing as he answered. ‘All ’cept a few that were on this guy, an’ they’d gone too by the time we’d got him out from under that joist. One o’ them nipped me, though.’
He pushed his statement over to Evan, stood up and rolled his sock down to reveal a Band-Aid on the brown skin of his ankle.
‘Nipped me through the sock,’ he explained. ‘It bloody hurt. Like sharp scissors.’
‘OK,’ Evan said, getting tired of all this stuff about beetles. There was enough unsolved crime on the books without having to hunt killer insects into the bargain. ‘Cut along, will you, and go gently on your father. He’s worried. If there’s anything more we want to know we’ll be in touch. You’ll probably be called to give evidence at the inquest too, so be ready for it.’
‘And Sharon?’ Byron asked.
‘Any reason why she shouldn’t?’
‘No.’
‘OK, then.’
Impatiently, Evan jammed his foot down on the accelerator and twisted the wheel to shoot into a gap in the increasing traffic. There was an angry trumpeting protest from the car he had so rudely overtaken but he ignored it. He pulled across to the nearside lane and turned into the residential street which led to the disused school.
Beetles! he thought, disgusted.
More to the point, he had to discover how the tramp had died. Natural causes was the obvious explanation. He visualised him crawling into the old school simply to find a corner where he could be ill without interference from any of the local do-gooders. From time to time several people had tried to help him but all he had ever wanted was to be left alone. He would carry his things around in those plastic shopping bags, heading for the warmth of the tube station in winter, or a cool spot in the shade during the hot summer, moving on without a murmur when he was told, no bother to anyone.
Never been seen begging, either. And if some good soul offered him anything, the most he had been known to accept was a hot drink or a couple of fags.
He had never looked well, so his death came as no surprise to Evan when he was called to the school the previous night. Not a pretty sight, those tiny white maggots, pale as tripe, feeding on him like so much carrion, yet his first hunch was that it was probably a natural death. There was no feeling of violence about the way the body lay; if anything, he seemed totally at peace.
Of course, hunches were not enough. Evan could already hear the scorn in his inspector’s voice as he demanded if they were being favoured with more of his famous Welsh second sight. No, he would need more evidence than that. But —
The problem with hunches, he decided as he changed down, was that however groundless they might be, they still nagged away at you like a sore tooth. You could not ignore them.
He left his car on the street at the top of the cul-de-sac, not wishing to risk his tyres driving over all that debris. The panda car was already there — he could see it parked some way down — and behind it were a battered white van and contractors’ lorry, near which half a dozen workmen stood idly smoking while one of them handed round mugs of tea poured from a Thermos.
A cluster of women — one with a pram — turned to stare at Evan curiously as he skirted the lorry and made for the school gate where he stopped for a brief word with the uniformed constable. It seemed the workmen were refusing to set foot in the building until something was done about the beetles.
‘Has the borough engineer arrived? A Mr Simpkins?’ ‘The bloke with glasses,’ the constable pointed out. ‘Third time here this morning. Local residents are up in arms, worried about their kids. It’s eight years, they tell me, since the council decided to knock this place down.’ Simpkins, an earnest-looking man of about fifty, was in deep discussion with a small group of colleagues in the schoolyard. Earlier on, they had probably taken a look inside, for all wore white safety helmets. As far as Evan could judge, some sort of argument was going on and they must have been piling on the pressure, if Simpkins’ expression was anything to go by. He broke away with obvious relief the moment he saw Evan approaching.
‘I’m Detective-Sergeant Evans, Worth Road CID,’ he introduced himself. ‘Good of you to meet me down here, Mr Simpkins.’
Soft soap never hurt, he thought cynically as he watched the man’s face.
‘Glad to see you, sergeant.’ Simpkins’ voice was dry and brittle. ‘We’ve something here which may interest you. Tony, bring that section of timber across, will you?’ ‘Right!’ Tony called back cheerfully.
Tony was a young, bearded man in working clothes which bore traces of sawdust, no doubt from the freshly sawn edges of the length of old beam which he carried over. It was riddled with worm holes.
‘You see the state it’s in?’ he commented, shaking his head. ‘It’s a miracle the school’s still standing.’
Two other people from the group came over to join them: a brisk, impatient man in a shabby sports jacket with a cluster of pens and pencils in the breast pocket, and an attractive woman in her thirties whose strictly-tailored navy-blue costume made her seem out of place among all the rubble.