Sally Purdy stood there in an old air force jacket that smelled of port wine and a dress that swept the floor when she walked, hiding old tennis shoes on her feet. Sally, certain that if she could just get a decent TV into the place she was squatting, that’d make all the difference, fuck all this time spent sitting out with a lot of old alkies on benches, she was going to get to grips with herself start a new life.
Only without a poll-tax form or something similar to verify her address, hire purchase was out of the question; she knew enough people out there on the street who would get her a set cheap, but it wasn’t going to be one like this.
Sally saw herself sitting round all summer, watching Wimbledon and Ascot in all their glory, those hats they got themselves up in at Ascot, Ladies’ Day, something to dream about. And musicals, she loved musicals, the old ones, not rubbish like Grease, but really old: How to Marry a Millionaire, It’s Always Fair Weather. She was sure she’d got the signature right, times she’d practiced it, over and bloody over.
“Yes, madam.” Bloke returning now, suit and striped shirt, staff tie, all smiles. “Please accept my apologies for the delay.” Smarmy bastard, Sally thought. “Now, if I can explain how to get to our Despatch department in the basement, by the time you’ve collected your car and driven round there, your set will be packed up and ready for you to take.”
Car? What fucking car was this? “I thought,” Sally said, “you’d deliver it, right?”
“Certainly, madam. That would be Tuesday or Thursday of next week.”
No way, Jose! “How about this,” she said, “a cab. I’ll get a cab, take it home in that. Easy, right?”
“Absolutely.” Smiling his unctuous smile, he gave her the directions to Despatch.
The extra time it took Sally Purdy to walk to the nearest rank, meant that by the time she drove up to the door marked Despatch the two uniformed officers were waiting for her inside.
“Sorry, mate,” one of them said to the cab driver, while his oppo was hauling a reluctant Sally to the marked car, “want to collect on your fare, you’ll need to nip over to the station, fill in a voucher.”
When they were booking her, Sally Purdy cursed them all from there to perdition, the custody sergeant downwards.
It was the sergeant, going through Sally’s possessions, in particular the small pile of credit cards she’d been carrying in a purse velcroed to the inside of her dress, who had spotted the name and signature of William Aston on one of them.
Lynn Kellogg picked up the call. Inside fifteen minutes she and Kevin Naylor had Sally sitting across from them in an interview room, tapes identified and rolling, stolen credit cards spread out before them like a hand of patience.
“This one, Sally,” Lynn said. “Aston. Tell us where you got that, we might go easy on you for the rest.”
“How easy?”
“Easier,” Naylor said, “than you deserve.”
She didn’t have to think about it for too long. “Shane. I got it offve Shane.”
“Shane Snape?” Lynn asked, almost unable to believe her luck.
“No. Alan fucking Ladd, who d’you think?”
Forty-one
“This interview,” Resnick stated, “timed at five twenty-seven.”
They had picked up Shane a couple of streets from his home, winnings that he’d collected from the bookies stuffing out his back pocket. “One lucky lad, Shane, and no mistake,” the man behind the counter had said, smiling grimly as he counted out the notes. “One lucky bastard.”
Divine and Naylor had been in the lead car, Millington with Carl Vincent fifty yards behind. Two squad cars were waiting at the house, a couple of uniformed officers in the alley out back. Norma Snape on the front step, cursing them out to the world.
Shane had slammed his bag into Naylor’s chest, Naylor staggering back winded against a garden wall, while Divine moved in close, hands outstretched. “Come on, then, pal. You want to try it? Come on.” Fingers beckoning him, let’s go for it. Divine so clearly wanting it: the pair of them about equal height, Divine maybe an inch taller, certainly heavier; Shane probably the fitter, despite another season for Divine in and out of the first fifteen.
“Don’t be daft, lad.” Millington from the edge of the curb. “Look about you. You’ll not get anywhere but hurt.” A third squad car was arriving fast from the opposite end of the street, siren wailing.
And Shane had stood there, not ever really taking his eyes from Divine, thinking about it, wanting it too, but feeling that first rush of adrenaline start to drain out of him, knowing that he could have taken him, cocky bastard, that someday he would, he’d have him right enough, he was certain of that, but knowing that moment wasn’t now.
The instant he had lowered his hands towards his sides, Divine had been in on him fast, spinning him round, cuffs at the ready, propelling him hard towards the side of the nearest car.
“Together, behind your back! Hands together!”
“Fuck you!”
“Now! Do it now!” Divine bending him forward over the car roof, while Naylor, recovered and standing alongside, read Shane his rights.
The metal of the cuffs was biting into Shane’s wrists, yet somehow he managed to twist the upper half of his body until his face was inches from Divine’s, eyes brittle as ice glaring into his face. “One of these days, I’ll fuckin’ kill you!” Spittle lacing Divine’s mouth and cheek.
“Mark!” Millington in fast, seizing Divine’s shoulder seconds before Divine would have head-butted Shane in the face.
“Mark, leave it. Let it be.”
And Divine, with a final stare, had stepped away. Millington had pushed Shane into the back of the car between Naylor and himself and ordered Vincent to drive off sharpish. Divine could follow on his own.
“I hear,” the solicitor’s clerk on call said wearily, “my client was subject to physical intimidation in the course of his arrest.”
“Your client,” Millington told him, face close enough for the clerk to smell peppermint fresh on the sergeant’s breath, “came within a virgin’s tit of being charged with assaulting a police officer in the course of his duty. Maybe you should suck on that.”
Resnick and Millington would handle the questioning, interview room A. The same scratched table scored with cigarette burns, the same stale smoke lingering in corners, the stickiness of the floor that tugged at the soles of your shoes, the faint crackle of thin cellophane as it slipped reluctantly from around the pair of audio cassettes: the words, the same or similar. “This interview …”
Just over an hour in, the solicitor’s clerk leaned forward and asked for a break. “My client …”
“Not now.”
“My client …”
“Not yet.” Resnick’s voice raised to the edge of irritable, weary of Shane’s persistent stonewalling.
“Where did you get the card?”
“I don’t know what you’re on about, which card?”
“Inspector Aston’s credit card. Sally Purdy says she bought it from you in the back room of a pub on the Boulevard.”
“Well, she’s mistaken. Either that, or she’s lying.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Slag. It’s what she does.”
“What?”
“Look at her, the state of her. Pissed out of her brain. Wouldn’t know the truth if it crawled out of her arse.”
“Not like you, then, Shane, eh?” Millington taking over from Resnick, lighting another Lambert and Butler and leaning towards Shane, almost smiling, a definite twinkle in his eye. “Expert on the truth.”
Shane looking back at him, defiant. Where were we going now?
“Two Saturdays ago, for instance, you and your pal, Gerry. All cozy at home with your old lady and her fancy man, watching videos and kicking the family cat.”
“What about it?”
“Pack of lies.”
Sneering, Shane turned his face away.
“Lies, Shane, beginning to end.” Millington grinned. “Pork Farm pies.”
“Bollocks.”
“Exactly.” Millington triumphant.
“Where you were, Shane,” Resnick said forcefully, “that Saturday, was out drinking with Gerry Hovenden and some of his dubious friends. Doing the pubs between London Road and the bridge, already a bit of excitement on the way, few fists flying, and then on the Embankment, pissed the lot of you, that’s where you came across Inspector Aston, out walking his dogs, and you went for him. The pack of you. Stole his wallet, cash, credit cards, this credit card, and left him for dead. That’s where you were on that Saturday night.”
Unblinking, Shane stared Resnick square in the eye. “Bollocks,” he said quietly.
“For someone who’s not exactly an idiot,” Millington said, “your conversation tends towards the boring.”
“Then why not stop all this crap and let me go? I don’t know nothing about any credit card, nothing about no bloke beaten up on the Embankment, nothing about any of it, right?”
“My client …”
“All right.” Resnick quickly to his feet. “Twenty minutes. No more.”
“Surely he’s entitled to a meal?”
“Half an hour.”
“This interview,” Millington said, “suspended at six thirty-nine.”
“You think he’s lying, Charlie?” Skelton was pacing the length of his office between door and desk, conscious of being harassed from above, harassed from below, the local media, national press.
“Sure of it,” Resnick said. “But I’m not sure about what.”
“Christ, Charlie, don’t play games. What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Resnick was standing also, conscious he had already been sitting too long and likely would do again. “I put it to him straight, the whole business, Aston, everything. He never as much as blinked. I know he’s cool; one of those as can hold it all in tight until something goes and he explodes. But a dead copper, he must know we’re not going to mess around. But Shane, he could’ve been holding a razor blade to his own throat and there’d not have been as much as a nick.”
“Then why’s he lying?”
“I don’t know.”
“This credit card business, we’ve enough to charge him?”
Resnick looked doubtful.
“We could stand the woman up in court, sworn statement, her word against his.”
“With Purdy’s record they’d not believe the day of the week, even if it was staring at them off the calendar. And Shane knows it.”
“He’ll bluff it out, then.”
“He’ll try. But I’d like to hang onto him a while longer. If he wasn’t there when Aston was killed, likely he knows somebody who was.”
“So he’s covering for somebody else?” Skelton was round behind his desk, swiveling his chair so he could lean against the back, hands gripping its sides.
“Could be.”
“This pal of his, then … Hovenden?”
Resnick nodded.
“Let’s have him in. If we can’t budge the one, let’s try the other.”
But Resnick was already shaking his head. “What I’d sooner do, as long as you’re agreed, is make sure Hovenden knows we’re holding Shane. Let him stew a while. More reason then for him to wonder exactly what his mate Shane has said. If we finesse it right, maybe we can persuade him it’s more than it is.”
“No chance of him doing a runner?”
“I doubt it. Must know that’d draw attention to himself quicker than anything else. But we can always keep an eye.”
Skelton levered himself away from the chair. “Play it your way, then, Charlie. But only for now. Twenty-four hours tops.”
Resnick nodded and moved towards the door. Now that he had some food inside him, Shane might be feeling more amicable: he’d give it another shot.
“She’s got something against you, Shane, has she, Sally Purdy? Something personal?”
Shane glanced at Resnick and shook his head.
“Your family, then? Her and Norma, maybe? Argument of some kind, goes back a long while?”
“My mum wouldn’t pass wind on her, never mind the time of day.”
“What is it, then? Some kind of death wish?”
How d’you mean?”
Resnick straightened his back, hands flat near the table’s edge. “I mean, why you? When she gets picked up and she’s got to give a name and it’s not going to be the truth, wouldn’t she have to be stupid pointing at you? I mean, of all the names she could choose. What did she think you were going to do? Next time you see her, slip a fiver into her hand? Thanks for thinking of me when you were talking to the law.” Resnick shook his head in disbelief. “No, Shane, the only way she’d give you up is if it were true.”
A smile now, wavering about the corners of Shane’s eyes, beginning to think, they’ve got nothing, really nothing, what I can do, relax and enjoy this a bit.
“Mr. Resnick,” he said, polite as could be.
“Yes?”
“Prove it.”
They tried. Questions about how Shane put money in his pockets (the horses); where he got the cash from to make his bets (stand in line at the post office and cash me giro check like everyone else); about his relationship with Gerry Hovenden (mates, we work out together, down the gym); about Gerry’s right-wing connections (politics, no, we never talk about it, what’s the point, Labour, Tory, they’re all the same); what they were doing the night Bill Aston was killed (round my place watching some videos, how many more times).
Not many.
When the solicitor’s clerk asked for a meal break for his client and the chance of a rest, Resnick readily agreed. Lynn Kellogg had phoned in by then: she and Kevin Naylor had spoken to Hovenden and told him the police were holding Shane; nervous, it looked as if Hovenden was about to make some kind of move. All right, Resnick had said, stick close, observe. Anything urgent, you can reach me at home.
When finally they kicked Shane free with a warning they’d be speaking to him again, chance brought Shane and Divine onto the stairs at the same time. Shane walking down with Millington as escort, Divine on his way up to CID.
“Remember,” Shane said softly as they passed, “me and you, some time soon.”
“Yes,” Divine said. “In your dreams.”