Authors: Richard Haley
‘Frank!’ He jumped to his feet. ‘Let me get you a drink. This is Frank Crane, folks, and we’re helping each other on a piece of work. What are you drinking, pal?’
He went off to the bar and the others smiled and nodded. Crane recognized one or two of the faces from the little photos that went with their bylines at the top of articles on education and entertainment and community affairs.
‘Your face rings some kind of a bell.’ It was the woman with the black curly hair Crane had seen earlier. The seat he’d taken was next to hers.
‘I’m ex-police,’ he told her, ‘and now working as a PI. I’ve been involved in a recent high profile case that got my face in your paper, though I try very hard to keep it out.’
‘I see. I’m Carol. What are you two cooperating on?’
‘Donna Jackson, yes? Her people have hired me to see if I can turn up anything new on the killer. Geoff has a lot of useful information.’
She sighed, her eyes leaving Crane’s to rest on Anderson’s lean form where he stood at the bar. ‘I might have known.’ She looked back at him. ‘They’ve all got one, you know,’ she said ruefully. ‘Crime reporters. An outsize bee in the bonnet. There’s always one that’s insoluble and causes a hell of a stir that they’ll never let go. There are crime reporters with grey hair and paunches who are still hell-bent on tracing Lord Lucan, for God’s sake, and he’s been declared officially
dead
.’
Crane shrugged. ‘I’m sure you’re right, but his information is valuable to me if he’s willing to share it.’
‘Oh, Donna
Jackson
…’
Crane seemed to hear an echo of Patsy’s voice when they’d sat in his car. Maybe Anderson had given so much time to the story that Carol had begun to feel very neglected. Assuming she was his girlfriend.
Then she gave him a little impish grin. ‘You’ll have to watch him, you know, our Geoff. He’s a great guy, but he
tends to take over and run things. He’s also got a clever line in implying his information gathering was more than useful in bringing certain villains to a court room.’
He watched her. None of that worried him much. He’d be working alone on the Jackson case, whatever Anderson imagined, with this single exception of going with him to see Mahon. He’d already sensed his nuisance value, having had experience of handling reporters from his days in the force, when flawed reporting at the wrong moment could damage a sensitive investigation. All he wanted from Anderson was what he knew, and as far as he was concerned, if Donna’s killer was ever found, the reporter could then claim all the glory going. Crane was a man who’s anonymity was crucial to the work he did.
He knew Anderson was back by the way Carol’s grin suddenly ignited into a warm smile. ‘There you go, Frank,’ Anderson said, putting down a gin and tonic in front of him. ‘Any amusing deaths, you guys, as Bowra used to say?’ he said to the others. ‘Any juicy bits of scandal among the city fathers? I’m picking up a rumour from a London chum who reckons a heavily married Blair Babe is finding her way to the pied-à-terre of a heavily married junior minister on a career path. He thinks they sit in the dark when they’re not playing gee-gees in the dark. Now who does that remind you of?’
Fifteen minutes passed, with Anderson’s rapid delivery keeping them amused and intrigued by turns. Apart from being attractive to women he seemed also to be very much a man’s man. It was the engaging smile, the hand that briefly touched an arm. He was also a good listener, despite being so irrepressible himself. He had charm in spades. Crane distrusted charm, as it could have an ugly
side when it didn’t work, but he had to admit that in Anderson’s game it was virtually essential.
‘Are you free tonight, Geoff?’ Carol said, at a brief pause in the animated chat. ‘There’s
The Constant Gardener
showing at the Odeon. Fancy a bite at Frère Antoine’s and catching the second house?’
‘Carol, beloved, I should have explained. I’m going on somewhere from here with Frank. Another night, yes?’
‘Right you are,’ she said, with a brightness that didn’t quite cover what Crane could tell was intense disappointment.
‘Let’s go then, Frank. Chummy should now be ensconced. My car’s in Vicar Lane so I’ll see you up there in about fifteen, OK?’
The Goose and Guinea had been built when the Willows was being developed in the late 1930s. It ran catty-cornered to the main road and at the end of the estate’s principal drive. Apart from being dated it also had no style. Built of shiny, yellowish brick, it had a flat roof, odd, rounded corners and long, narrow, metal-framed windows. It had a dubious reputation but was well run, mainly because the landlord was built like a
medium-sized
wardrobe.
They went in and Crane bought drinks. The pub was open-plan, with an annexe at the rear in which a few young T-shirted men played pool. Another man sat watching them gloomily.
‘Mahon’s the one sitting. Must have been played out. That’s handy. Let’s go sit with him.’
Crane followed him across the main room, quiet at present, to the banquette seating beyond the table.
‘Hello, Bobby. Thought I might find you here. Mind if we join you for a few minutes? How are you doing these days, old son?’
Crane had to hand it to him, his manner with a possible killer was exactly as warm as it had been with his colleagues at the Glass-house. Mahon peered slightly in the gloom that surrounded the sharp even glare of the pool table’s canopied lamps.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said flatly.
‘This is Frank Crane, Bobby. He’s a very skilled private investigator. Malc and Connie have engaged him to see if he can throw any light on Donna’s murder, seeing as the police have got nowhere.’
Mahon gave an indifferent nod. ‘So ’e can try and prove it was me?’ he muttered. ‘That’s why they’ve taken ’im on. Malc and Connie never thought it was no one else.’
‘I’ve got an open mind, Bobby,’ Crane said quietly. ‘I doubt there’ll be much the police missed. I’m just going to take a fresh look and talk to the people who knew her.’
‘No good talking to me, mister. I don’t know
nothing
about that murder. I only wish I did. The police never stopped trying to pin it on me, even though I were sat at ’ome with me mates.’
On an instinct, both Crane and Anderson let the silence roll, in the hope that it might encourage Mahon to say something, anything else that might give them a lead. But Mahon seemed sunk in apathy. He had pale blue eyes and thick fair hair scraped back from his forehead in the
ponytail
Donna had been so scathing about. It was knotted by a narrow blue ribbon, a grotesquely demure touch. He had a broad nose and thick lips that gave him a slightly feral appearance, though it didn’t detract from his roughish
good looks. He was strongly built and wore a T-shirt of an unattractive shade of green, faded jeans and black moccasin boots. He had what the police tended to call a ‘building site’ tan.
Finally breaking the silence, he said in a low voice, ‘You don’t know what it’s like.’
‘What’s that, Bobby?’ Anderson asked in a kindly tone.
‘No fucker believing you. Not just the police, they never believe no one. It’s Connie and Malc and them.’
‘It can be very upsetting. I’ve talked to an awful lot of people who’ve had the same problem. They’ve got a perfectly honest alibi but because they knew the victim so well it gets the Chinese whispers going.’
‘I didn’t
feel
good that night, Geoff. I wasn’t up for it, getting a few down in ’ere and then doing the clubs. I’d come over all shivery. I told the lads I was ’aving a night in, so they said they’d ’ave one as well, we’d play some poker.’
Mahon’s words sounded rehearsed even now, a year on. Crane wondered how many times he’d recited them to the police. He found it impossible to believe that the sort of men Mahon knocked about with would sacrifice a Saturday night out because a mate had come over all shivery.
Crane spoke in as sympathetic a tone as Anderson’s. ‘These things happen, Bobby. I don’t suppose it helped much that your mum and dad had decided to stay in too that night.’
‘Me mam were worried about me! I’m never sick. I only wish they ’ad gone out. Folk wouldn’t keep saying we’d all ’ad our ’eads together.’
Crane had expected to find a Mahon who’d be intensely
guarded, if not hostile, but he seemed to want to talk, if only to justify himself. His friends would have heard enough, months ago, about the Donna killing, and
probably
wouldn’t listen any more. And maybe Mahon still wanted to talk so compulsively he was even ready to make do with him and Anderson.
‘Look, Bobby,’ Crane said, ‘I’d be really grateful for any help you could give me. You know who Donna’s contacts were. You must have your own suspicions?’
His pale blue eyes moodily met Crane’s. ‘Never trusted that arsehole she worked for. Leaf and Petal bloke. Seemed fond to me, know what I mean? Kept ’er on that winter. I thought aye aye, ’cause she knew fuck all about plants and that. They ’ad a Christmas do and I picked ’er up. Didn’t like the way ’e was eyeballing ’er in that tight dress. Fond. I could ’ave flattened the bugger.’
‘You think he might have been trying to get off with her?’
‘Sure of it. Mind you,’ he said dolefully, ‘who wasn’t with Donna?’ His eyes had a haunted look in the smoky dimness.
‘Trouble is, Bobby, Joe Hellewell’s alibi’s rock solid, just like yours,’ Anderson pointed out in his friendly way.
‘Fletcher then. I told ’er time and again not to ’ave nothing to do with the slimy sod.’
‘Same problem there, old son. The police cleared him.’
Crane said, ‘Bobby, I don’t want to upset you more than I have to, but do you think it’s possible Donna
was
seeing someone else on a regular basis? She was quite young, wasn’t she? Maybe she didn’t feel ready for a settled
relationship
.’
‘That’s what all the bother were about, weren’t it?’ he
broke out. ‘Er seeing other blokes behind me back. All right, I ’ad a one-night-stand now and then, didn’t I, but that’s different, innit?’
Crane knew it was, in the male dinosaur climate of the Willows. ‘Do you know who any of these blokes might have been? It could be very important.’
‘She’d never let on to me, mister. She were always so close. She thought I’d go and put ’em in ’ospital. Too right.’
‘It must have made you very cross, Bobby,’ Anderson said mildly, in his deceptively leading way.
Mahon looked irritably from one to the other of them. ‘I didn’t ’it ’er ’cause of that,’ he said shortly. ‘That’s what
they
tried to make out, that I knocked ’er about ’cause of the two-timing. Well, I never. I only ’it ’er two or three times and that was ’cause she wound me up rotten. You don’t know what she could be like: said I weren’t going nowhere and me family were crap and me wheels should be on the tip and … and …’ He broke off, reddening. Crane guessed she’d probably jeered at his sexual
technique
too. If she’d slept around she’d be able to make value judgements. He felt no sympathy for a man who’d knock a woman about, but Mahon was only saying what Patsy had said, that Donna had had a fatal instinct for picking on all those things about yourself you least wanted to hear.
He caught Anderson’s eye, shrugged. They were getting nowhere. Crane didn’t even have an instinct about Mahon’s innocence or guilt. Bobby came from a criminal background, that was the trouble. It put him ahead of the game when it came to lying his way out of things, including murder. Yet for once in a blue moon he just
could have been at home on a Saturday night and had the bad luck to choose a blue moon night when his girlfriend’s body was hitting the bottom of a reservoir.
‘Well, thanks for your help, Bobby,’ he said politely. ‘And I really am very sorry about Donna.’
‘We’ll let you get on with your pool,’ Anderson added. ‘Where’s Cliff, by the way? Unusual not to see you two together.’
That seemed to leave him even more depressed. ‘Don’t know,’ he muttered. ‘’aven’t seen ’im in weeks.’
‘Don’t say you’ve had a bust up with your best friend on top of everything else?’
Mahon took out a cigarette and lit it from a disposable lighter with a trembling hand. He sat slumped on the banquette, gazing with unfocused eyes over the pool table, where the others were chalking the tips of their cues and sipping from fresh pints.
‘Coming in, Bobby mate?’
He shook his head. ‘Next frame, Heppo.’
As the balls began clicking again, he suddenly started to cry, the tears rapidly welling and trickling down his tanned cheeks. He looked to be in a state of total despair, and maybe he was, but Crane knew from long experience that guilty men could weep just as bitterly as the
innocent
.
‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ he said once more, in a thin mewing tone. ‘All of ’em, the ’ole bleeding Willows, looking at you like you was shit. Crossing the street when they see you coming. Reckoning you’re not there. People you’ve known all your fucking life. Mrs Bateson … she were like a nana to me once, last week she
spit
at me! None of the totty’ll go near me, I’m that bad news. It gets round
the clubs and them bitches won’t even
dance
with me, let alone …’
Crane thought, who could blame them? The story would be about that if you glanced at another man Bobby gave you a mouthful of signet rings and if you went out with one he topped you. And this would have gone on since Donna’s body had been winched up nine months ago. No wonder he seemed near-suicidal.
Anderson touched Mahon’s arm. ‘We know how you’re feeling, Bobby. We’ve seen it all. People can be very unfair. The police have cleared you, why won’t they accept it? In Australia the Aborigines call it pointing the bone. If they decide someone’s done something really bad in one of their little communities they actually point a bone at him, and after that no one will have anything to do with him. He’s out of it. They sometimes go off and die because they’re so unhappy. It’s a lousy deal, being cut off by your own people and that’s what they’re doing to you on the Willows. They’re not even
trying
to give you a fair shake and it’s just not on.’