‘There must be another shed they used as a garage,’ Gawber said.
Angel rubbed his chin.
Then he saw something shine on the ground near the door. He bent down and picked it up; it was the tracking device. It must have dropped off the Mercedes. Sometimes this happened if the original fitting to the bodywork had not been made between two clean pieces of metal. This had clearly occurred here.
Angel sighed. All that work, time and endurance counted for nothing. The muscles of his jaw tightened. There would be no further signal from the Mercedes. The Glazer gang were free and could now be committing murder and mayhem totally unrestrained. They had to be found and imprisoned quickly. He raced back to the car, unlocked the door, grabbed the mike of the RT and spoke directly to the operations room at Bromersley station. He gave the duty officer a description of Glazer’s Mercedes and index number and told him to circulate all 43 forces with an urgent request for any sighting of it to be made direct back to him on his mobile phone. He added the important warning that Glazer’s gang was in possession of the vehicle, that they were armed and extremely dangerous.
‘What?’ he roared. ‘So you have no idea where they are?’
‘I am afraid not, sir,’ Angel said.
He knew he was going to have to take some stick from Harker.
The superintendent wrinkled his nose and sniffed. ‘You know, I much prefer the one about The Three Bears,’ he growled.
Angel continued unbowed: ‘I’ve had a notice circulated round all 43 forces, sir. Full description and details. Now that Glazer’s gang haven’t a safe haven to flee to, as they spend their funds, they may have to show their hand.’
‘Aye. Probably open an account with the Northern Bank,’ he said. ‘At two o’clock in the morning,’ he added sarcastically. ‘What about Spencer? What sort of shape is he in? Where is he now?’
‘Pretty bad, sir. But he’s in the burns unit at Bromersley General.’
Harker pulled a face that made his big ginger eyebrows bounce up and then down. ‘Are you going to be able to make the case of murder against him stick?’
‘I don’t know, sir. The motive’s strong enough.’
‘What was he doing in Glazer’s gang?’
‘He wasn’t in the gang, sir. He was their prisoner. They must have wanted something from him.’
‘Oh? Information about the bank?’
‘More likely about the two million.’
‘But Spencer didn’t know where Harrison had hidden it.’
‘No, sir, but Glazer didn’t know that.’
Harker rubbed his chin. ‘But how did he know about its existence in the first place?’
‘Could only have been told about it by Harrison or Spencer.’
‘They would have been fools to have told Eddie Glazer.’
‘Harrison would have been too smart to have breathed a word about it. But Spencer was comparatively green. Maybe he was scared. Maybe they scared it out of him. As a matter of fact, Glazer told me that Spencer had confessed to him that he had killed Harrison. Said he’d told him he’d stabbed him five times. Five times. He made a point of saying that.’
Harker blinked. ‘Have you seen Mac’s PM on Harrison? My copy arrived this morning.’
‘Not yet, sir.’
‘Mac does say that there were five separate stabbing wounds to the heart and aorta, delivered in quick succession.’
Angel frowned. ‘That would result in a mighty great surge of blood. That suggests that Glazer did it. I can’t imagine that if Spencer put a knife into a man intending to murder him, that he could take it out in the midst of blood pumping out and insert it again and again and then twice more. It takes a certain callous, hardened character to do that. And then having succeeded with the murder, be able to recall accurately how many stabs he had made.’
‘Hmm. Interesting reasoning, Angel. Reasonable, I suppose. But I fear that wouldn’t be enough for the CPS.’
‘No sir. If I can get supporting evidence, sir … blood on his clothing … DNA … and so on, they would. Anyway, I have it in hand. SOCO are going through the farmhouse where Glazer’s gang were holed up, and which they left in such a hurry.’
Harker nodded. ‘Yes. Yes. All right. Give it a go.’
Angel was surprised to get Harker’s easy accord. He usually went against everything he said. Angel thought Harker must be in a good mood and, unusually, enjoying a good patch with his wife, Morvydd, an unusual woman. Angel had met her once at a Police Federation Dinner. He hadn’t enjoyed the experience. She was almost as objectionable as her husband. He recalled that she had pressed close up to him, smelling of pickled onions, spraying half-chewed Ritz biscuits onto his new dicky, while gushingly insisting that he called her Morvydd. It had taken almost the entire evening to shake her off and get back to the protection of his wife, Mary.
‘I’ve made thorough inquiries along all that end of Wells Street, sir,’ Scrivens said brightly.
Angel looked up from his desk, licked his lips and grunted.
‘I showed a copy of the photograph in the newspaper shop, the butcher’s and the post office nearby, and no one saw anybody that looked like her. They all said that they would have remembered if they had seen anybody like that. A woman in the butcher’s said the dress looked as if it was from the 1920’s. I hung around the steps of the baths, at the critical times of ten minutes to two and eight minutes past three, the times when the taxi driver had collected her and delivered her back, and I showed the photograph to everybody coming through the turnstile, but nobody had seen her. It’s hopeless, sir.’
‘Right lad. Not to worry. I’m beginning to wonder if she existed at all,’ he said, rubbing his chin. ‘Or was she a cardboard cut out like the Cottingley fairies,’ he added quietly.
‘The Cottingley fairies, sir?’ Scrivens said.
‘Oh?’ Angel looked up. He was surprised that Scrivens had heard him. ‘The Cottingley fairies never existed, lad. They were paper cut-outs of fairies that were photographed by two mischievous young ladies from Cottingley – it’s not far away, near Bradford. But they let the world believe they were the real thing.’
‘Fairies, sir?’ He laughed. ‘Who would believe that?’
Angel’s face was as straight as a copper’s truncheon. ‘The photographs fooled several distinguished people at the time.’ He sniffed, then sighed and said: ‘Just like – I do believe – Lady Blessington, whoever she is, is fooling us right now!’
Scrivens frowned.
‘And it’s getting right up my nose,’ Angel added with his lips tightening. ‘And wasting a lot of police time, when I am up to my neck in it.’
Scrivens scratched his head.
‘Yes, sir. Do you want me to do anything else?’
‘Yes, lad. I want you to go to the burns unit at the hospital, and beg, borrow or steal Simon Spencer’s clothes. Don’t take “no” from the hospital staff. If you have to, point out that this is a murder inquiry. I want everything he was wearing when he was admitted yesterday, including his shoes. Put them carefully in an evidence bag, seal it and take it round to Don Taylor at the SOCO office. Tell him I want him to see if there is any DNA of Harry Harrison anywhere on them. I am particularly looking for traces of his blood. If there is anything, then we’ve potentially got Spencer for murder. All right?’
Scriven’s nodded enthusiastically.
‘Right, sir.’
He went out.
Angel looked at the mountain of post, reports and general bumf piled up in front of him and blew out a long sigh. He began fingering through it. He wasn’t looking for anything specific. He was hoping that he could find some inconsequential big lump that he could drop into the wastepaper basket to make the pile instantly smaller. It was not to be. He came across an envelope from the General Hospital, Bromersley. He quickly slit it open. It was Mac’s postmortem on Harry Harrison aka Harry Henderson. He raced through it and noted that the small clumps of hair found on Harrison’s coat were his own and thought to have been pulled out of his scalp in the course of a fight; there were many bruises to his head and chest areas as the result of a number of blows thought to have been delivered by bare knuckles. All the blood samples taken at the scene also belonged to the victim.