Four Below (16 page)

The main routes through the city were cleared now, with long piles of dirty slush refreezing in the gutters and the margins of the pavements. He found a parking space within sight of Wayne
Deeming’s house and sat for a moment, watching the quiet residential street. It looked a depressed, unloved neighbourhood. Snow-capped nests of uncollected rubbish bags sat outside nearly
every house. Some of them had split or been ripped apart by scavengers, spilling their contents on to the pavement, where it got trodden into the snow.

Despite scene-of-crime having long finished with the house, the front door had a police notice stuck to it, warning unauthorized persons to keep out. The blue curtains were still drawn. McLusky
let himself into the cramped hall. When he had first entered the house days ago, the interior had been warm; now the place was as cold and lifeless as its last occupant. It already had an
unlived-in, empty smell, though the furniture and some of Deeming’s personal effects were still here. He lit a cigarette, strictly against protocol, and went upstairs, where he pushed with
his elbow at the half-open door of the main bedroom. There was mess everywhere, much of it created by the SOCO team. The decor was strictly masculine; there were no ornaments at all, and the only
adornment on the walls consisted of two posters for the same violent fantasy movie. Deeming’s mother, who lived in Derby, where Deeming had been born, had been informed. She worked in a
high-street baker’s shop where she made steak and kidney pies and sandwiches for the lunchtime trade. She had entertained different hopes for her son, McLusky had little doubt. While the
causes of crime were complex, drug addiction was naturally the simplest route in. He took a last look around the room, and his eyes rested briefly on the gothic film posters. Wayne had not been an
addict. In his case crime could easily have been a simple lack of imagination.

He couldn’t have said what he was looking for in this house apart from some sort of handle on the man’s death. A few drops of blood on carpet and wall, turned nearly black now and
easily dismissed as dirt, were the only indicators that the occupant had left the house to face a cruel and violent death.

‘Who did you mess with, Wayne?’ he said quietly as he opened the front door to flick his spent cigarette into the snow. On the other side of the thigh-high wall that divided the tiny
front gardens from each other, a young man looked up, startled. He had just produced a key to let himself into the neighbouring house. ‘Hello,’ McLusky said. ‘You live there,
yeah?’

The man looked to be in his early twenties, with a Mediterranean complexion. He wore a bobble hat, scarf, jacket and gloves and appeared to be suffering from a cold. His nasal answer confirmed
it. ‘Yes. Are you the police?’

McLusky recognized the accent as Spanish. He nodded and showed his ID.

The man looked at it without interest. ‘We already had the police here. Nobody saw anything.’ He inserted the key and unlocked the door.

McLusky swung his legs over the wall. ‘So you made a statement? What’s your name?’

Inside the house, a phone began to ring. ‘Michael. Miguel. I was not here when the police came but I did not see anything also. I’ll go and answer the phone now, sorry.’

McLusky reached over the man’s head and pushed the door wider. ‘Would you mind if I came in for a moment? Just one or two questions.’ He could see the man was torn between
arguing and wanting to answer the phone. The phone won and McLusky followed him inside. Miguel rushed to pick up the receiver on the wall in the hall. He talked earnestly in Spanish to the caller
while keeping an eye on McLusky.

A student house. It looked neglected, the paint work faded, the floorboards worn. Years of wheeling bicycles through it had left its mark. McLusky sniffed. He recognized the smell instantly from
his own student days; it smelled of overcrowding, two-in-one oil, bad cooking and, in this case, cannabis. The door to the front room was ajar. He slowly pushed it open and nodded his head towards
it for Miguel’s benefit. The Spaniard became more animated, as he had expected, so he quickly walked in. The cannabis smell was stronger here. Two short sofas and one armchair, none matching,
were grouped around a coffee table buried under ‘what’s on?’ magazines, crockery and ashtrays. Torn Rizla packets, roaches and spent joints identified it as the smoking room. He
picked up an open packet of cigarette papers and fanned the air with it as Miguel came through the door.

‘It has nothing to do with me. I don’t smoke it. I swear it.’

‘I’m not interested in dope smoking. I don’t approve but I’m not interested. Mind you …’ He dropped the cigarette papers back on the table. ‘I could
always develop an interest if I felt people were being less than helpful. So … You naturally don’t smoke, but someone around here does. Would they have bought their weed from the chap
next door, I wonder?’

‘Maybe.’ Miguel folded his arms across his chest and tried to look at ease, leaning against the door frame.

‘But not for a while. Because Mr Weed next door hasn’t been around for a few weeks now. So these other people who smoke the stuff must have a new supplier.’

‘Probably.’

‘And that man has a name?’

‘No.’

‘I can send someone round to ask you that again. Someone with a lot of time to spare.’

‘It’s just another student, I think. At college,’ Miguel added.

‘And does that student offer other drugs besides cannabis?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well, that’s something. Did you notice a van in the street a few weeks back? A van that doesn’t belong to anyone around here? Double-parked, maybe?’

He shrugged, widened his eyes. ‘A few
weeks
back?’

‘What do you study, Miguel?’

‘Tourism.’

‘Nice job if you can get it.’ The next question proved more difficult, considering Miguel’s nationality. Had he seen any foreigners coming and going next door?
‘Non-British people, I mean.’

‘What, people like me?’

‘If you like.’

‘You suspect non-British people have killed Wayne Deeming?’

‘You remember his name.’

‘It’s in the news.’

McLusky nodded. ‘Of course. What’s your name, by the way?’

‘
Mine?
Delrio.’

‘Okay, Mr Delrio. Thanks for your valuable time. Bye for now.’

Outside, he checked his watch; there was still an hour of daylight left, albeit a thin, grey variety that promised more snow. After wiping the condensation from the inside of windscreen and side
window, he inserted the key in the ignition. On the other side of the street, two teenagers were trying to start a clapped-out hatchback, draining the battery until the starter motor stopped
turning over. He watched the driver thump the steering wheel in frustration. It reminded him that he still had no breakdown recovery for his own car. He turned the key and the engine sprang
obediently to life.

Traffic was building up. It took him longer than expected to drive north to Leigh Woods. He left the Mazda on the road, took his torch from the glove box, tested its strength and set off down
the by now familiar track on foot. The dark imprints of many feet ran over and alongside it, some human, some canine. Other tracks, too, were evident, from kids’ sleds to what McLusky assumed
were rabbits, birds and deer, meandering and crossing each other. The snow kept a jumbled record of all the visitors, ever more difficult to untangle. The light was failing fast. By the time he
found himself surrounded by trees, snow had begun to fall again.

This was it. He flicked on the torch. One tree still sported a collar of twisted police tape, yet even without it McLusky believed he would have found the place where Deeming had been murdered.
The ground was covered in snow now, uneven after so much excavation. He stood where he judged Deeming had stood, knowing he was about to die. He was gagged and unable to plead. He must have known
he was in the woods but did not get a last glimpse of the world because it was night and he had a jute bag over his head. McLusky closed his eyes and stood still, facing the woods. Had Deeming been
able to smell anything apart from his own blood pounding sharp as metal in his already broken nose? He kept his eyes closed and breathed in deeply, felt snowflakes land on his face, felt his heart
beating.

A small crackling noise made him open his eyes wide into the darkness. He turned to where he thought the noise had come from, waited a few seconds to listen. Another furtive noise, further to
his left, closer now. He clicked on his torch and with its feeble beam probed the looming dark between the darker boles of trees; it illuminated nothing. He waited. The snuffling of falling snow
was all he heard. With gloved hands he fumbled a cigarette from a pack and lit it with his small silver lighter. Its flame close to his face left him half blind for a moment during which he stood
and smoked greedily. He felt precariously alive in a dead man’s place.

When his eyes returned to normal, he walked back to his car. Someone had scraped half the snow from its roof, perhaps to fashion snowballs with. At the end of the road the brake lights of a dark
van briefly flared, then disappeared. There was no one else to be seen. McLusky started the engine and revved it a few times, just for the noise of it.

Chapter Twelve

‘He’s sent us another one. Did you keep the first one, Phil?’

‘Let’s see it.’ Warren unstuck the first sliver of photograph from where she had Blu-Tacked it to her monitor. ‘And how do you know it’s a
he
who’s
sending them? Scissor-work is quite a female thing.’

‘What, like poisoning is a female method of murder, Miss Marple?’ Ed handed over the narrow strip of photograph paper. ‘Anyway, look at the handwriting. Definitely written by a
bloke, that.’

‘Is there another note, then?’

‘No, it just says “Number two” on the back.’

‘Ah.’ Warren held the two pieces against each other, first on one side, then the other. ‘They don’t match up. They’re not adjacent pieces. That’s no
use.’ She squinted at the new piece. ‘You haven’t got your …’ When Ed produced his magnifying glass from a back pocket, she took it from him without comment.
‘Have you had a look at it already? That’s definitely a car wheel, isn’t it? A posh one, by the looks of it. And that’s the edge of another person. But where is
that?’

‘There’s another edge of a tree. And I think the car’s a Mercedes. From the look of the wheel. It’s very grainy; I could be completely wrong.’

‘It’s possible. So why send us this?’

‘It’ll make sense later, that’s what the man says.’

‘Perhaps we should print it,’ Warren mused. ‘We could make it into a competition: first one to tell us what’s in the picture gets a prize.’

‘Not such a daft idea.’

‘Maybe. Unless he loses interest and doesn’t send the rest, then we’ll look stupid. Let’s wait until we have more of it.’ Warren Blu-Tacked the pieces side-by-side
to the edge of her monitor. ‘Would you mind if I hung on to the magnifying glass for a bit?’

Ed crooked a forefinger at her. ‘I certainly would. Go and get your own.’

‘I need a refill, mind if I use your kettle again?’

‘Go ahead, squeeze round.’ He shuffled his chair forward to allow Austin and his mug access to the secret kettle in the bottom of his desk compartment. It was difficult, because the
DS was wearing his overcoat. McLusky himself was clad in his new winter jacket, with his bright multicoloured scarf wound twice around his neck. The heating had failed completely the previous day,
and since then the last residual heat had been sucked from the building by the night. McLusky thought he could hear the walls around him creak as the frost penetrated the fabric of the station.
‘How’s everyone coping out there?’

Austin snorted. ‘Everyone isn’t. Half the station have found urgent business elsewhere. Those who can’t afford to run away spend most of their time in the canteen. It’s
the only place in here that doesn’t feel sub-zero. Look.’ He rounded his lips and blew. ‘I can see my breath.’

‘What are they doing about it?’

‘The heating engineers have been down there for a couple of hours. I don’t think they know what’s wrong.’

‘Marvellous.’

‘Custody are busy evacuating prisoners to warmer climes, like Trinity Road. They’re threatening to sue over the conditions they were held in.’

‘I might join them. I tried typing with my gloves on, but it can’t be done. Have the posters gone out?’

‘First thing. And it’ll be on all the local news, the BBC Bristol website, the
Herald
is printing the picture and it’s on our own website as well. Someone must recognize
him.’

‘That’s if the techies got the face right.’ The face of the cycle-path body had been too savagely beaten to be photographed. The photographs that technical support produced in
cases like this were based on autopsy pictures, experience and guesswork. Sometimes they got close; sometimes they got nowhere near.

‘We’ve had a couple of responses already; both were duds.’

Appeals to the public invariably produced a flurry of responses, some from cranks but many from well-meaning citizens. Most turned out to be false leads, but all had to be followed up. It was
frustrating and time-consuming, yet sometimes it yielded results, often weeks or months after the appeal had gone out. Weeks or months, however, was not what DSI Denkhaus expected.

‘It’s early days. You have to live a very sad life if no one misses you at all, even if it’s only your … I don’t know, chiropodist or someone like that.’

‘We used to rely on people spotting the milk not being taken inside, but who gets his milk delivered now?’

McLusky spent another hour fighting the urge to set fire to his desk in a bid to keep warm, before he went downstairs to the canteen for a hot meal. The place was busy with refugees from the
frozen offices above. As he contemplated his steaming plate of wrinkly sausage, beans and mash, he idly wondered whether the wrinkliness was inherent in the sausage or a special cooking method
passed down through generations of dinner ladies. He was distracted from this train of thought when he spotted the superintendent on the wrong side of the food counter. The heat lamps obscured the
view, but he distinctly saw Denkhaus handing over a briefcase to one of the female staff before disappearing again. McLusky had no time to spin a delicious story of stewed steak and blackmail,
because DC Dearlove appeared by his side.