With a Narrow Blade (8 page)

That was the thing about murder cases. It didn’t only ruin the lives of the victim and the immediate family. It could have all sorts of dire ramifications for anyone on the periphery as well. Like a disease, it spread ever outwards, causing misery and disruption to people’s lives.

Hillary hated killers.

‘Have you thought of anything else that could help us, Mrs Weekes? Anything about Flo, or that morning you found her. Or the night before?’

Caroline Weekes shook her head helplessly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said miserably. ‘I’ve thought about it, the Lord knows. I lay awake all last night thinking about it. But there’s nothing. Flo was a good woman. A nice woman. I miss her already.’

Hillary nodded and put away her notebook. This wasn’t getting either of them anywhere.

Outside, Janine Tyler passed a young constable who was coming down the garden path of the house beside her, and nodded. Follow-up interviews were well under way, since witnesses sometimes came up with something new after they’d had a day or so to think about things. Normally this was a job for uniform, but it was one of Hillary Greene’s quirks that she liked her team, and sometimes even herself, to take part. Tiresome as this was, more often than not it had paid off and Janine couldn’t really object to doing her share.

Janine saw the young lad meet up with another older man in uniform, and froze when she heard them laugh. She turned sharply, expecting them to be looking at her, but neither was.

With her marriage to Mel only two days away, she was getting hypersensitive. There was no reason on earth to think that the two men were talking about her behind her back. Shit! This was getting ridiculous. The arsehole who’d slashed her tyres was really beginning to get to her.

She shook her head and moved on to the next house, but when nobody answered, and she came away, she looked at the two chatting constables closely. One of them could be him. She had no way of knowing. The sooner she was restationed at Witney the better she’d like it. She didn’t let herself wonder what she’d do if the harassment continued even there.

It simply didn’t bear thinking about.

Back at HQ again, Hillary found the new boy up to his ears in polythene bags. ‘Those the contents of Flo’s house?’

‘Yes guv. At least, those that forensics and the evidence officer thought you might find interesting.’

Hillary nodded. Barrington was going through them, checking the itemizing and making notes. ‘Give us a box, then,’ she said, making him almost fall off his chair in surprise. No doubt he’d never known an SIO so hands-on and willing to do scut work. ‘I like to get a feel for the victim,’ she explained, as he reached for a box hesitantly, as if still unsure he’d heard what she said correctly. ‘It helps,’ she added softly. ‘Something you might like to bear in mind.’

‘Yes guv,’ Barrington said, handing a large cardboard box over.

‘Especially in cases like this one, where the motive isn’t clear.’ She poured out the slither of envelopes onto her desk. ‘As you know, according to British law, a prosecution case doesn’t have to produce motive in a murder enquiry. But I’ve never seen one yet that didn’t. Juries need to know whydunnit, just as much as whodunnit.’

Barrington nodded. ‘Right guv.’

Hillary spent the next hour looking at old postcards from friends called May, Danny, Milly and Jean, who seemed to favour the Spanish costas. She read old letters from years ago, kept because of news about family now long since dead, or for their feel-good notes of thanks or cheerful optimism. She saw from the sheaf of knitting patterns that Flo had once knitted her grandson SuperTed jumpers, or V-necked pullovers with a tractor or mini on them. She had kept an old button tin, and a sewing box that had seen better years. All the usual, sad, personal, precious detritus of a life now gone.

Hillary was leaning back, looking through an old photograph album when Frank Ross came in. ‘Nobody burgled our vic’s house, guv, I’ll stake my life on it,’ Ross said, pulling out his chair and sitting down heavily. ‘But I reckon somebody’s been selling a lot of gear this last day or two to our lad Hodge. Got a toerag who hangs out with a junkie runner for Benny Higgs to admit to snaffling some crack from Hodge last night.’

Hillary nodded. ‘Find Higgs and lean on him hard. Bring him in if you have to.’

‘Already got feelers out for him, guv,’ Ross said, and began, in a desultory way, to sift through his mail.

She sighed, and turned back to the photo album. In some of the old, black and white ones, Flo Jenkins was almost unrecognizable as a young, svelte, rather pretty girl, with big brown curls and a cute, chipmunk-like face. Some of the people in the snapshots were repeated in different times, different places – a man and woman who were obviously her parents, a sister and brother-in-law maybe, growing older in years as the album progressed.

She turned a page and spotted a photograph that had come loose from the old, yellowing Sellotape Flo had used to keep it in place. It wasn’t a face she’d seen before that belonged to a young man, looking self-conscious in a darkish suit and tie. A quiff of wayward dark hair, and a shy smile, spoke of a much younger, innocent age. She turned it over, and had to squint to make out the line of faded blue ink handwritten on the back: ‘
R.G. 1945. Walking wounded
?’ It was probably in Flo’s handwriting, although it was so faded it was hard to tell.

Who was RG? An old boyfriend maybe. And 1945 was right at the end of the war. The young man had probably only been old enough to serve in the last one or two years of it at least, but that had probably been long enough for it to leave its mark – hence the walking wounded reference. But why put the question mark after it? Didn’t Florence know?

Hillary frowned at the photograph thoughtfully. It was probably nothing. But Flo had kept it and written that cryptic remark on the back.

‘Frank, I want you to see if you can trace this man.’ She handed over the photograph, and grimaced as Frank snorted. ‘Yes, I know it’s a long shot. No name, and he might be long dead.’

‘Bloody waste of time, guv,’ Frank moaned. ‘I’m telling you, it’s gonna be Hodge. Junkie bastard ripped off his grandma for the cost of a fix.’

‘Keith, want to give it a go?’ Hillary said, and wasn’t surprised when Ross all but the threw the photograph his way. Normally Frank Ross wouldn’t have trusted a newcomer with making his coffee, but he obviously considered this assignment so pointless that the boy from the Smoke couldn’t possibly screw it up.

Keith caught the photograph and studied it thoughtfully. ‘Looks like it was taken in front of a house. Maybe somebody would recognize it. Might be worth talking to the county council planning officer. They have records going back to then, I dare say.’

Ross snorted. ‘If it was even taken in Bicester.’ He poured cold water over the suggestion gleefully.

Hillary ignored Ross. ‘Good idea,’ she said. ‘Give it some more thought – but chase it up only when you’ve got less urgent work to do. Think of it as an ongoing project.’ She doubted as much as Frank that it would come to anything, but the case so far wasn’t exactly swimming in clues that they could afford to overlook even a long shot. ‘By the way, any luck with searching the house for Flo’s pension money?’ she added.

‘No guv,’ Barrington said. ‘I’d swear there was nothing there. I found a hidey-hole in the airing cupboard, but it was for a small bottle of gin.’

Hillary laughed. ‘I dare say, with all the pills she was on, her doctors had forbidden her any of the hard stuff. She probably kept it hidden so her grandson didn’t get his hot little hands on it. Speaking of the devil,’ Hillary said sharply, ‘how did you get on at the squat?’

Barrington reached for his notebook, but didn’t really need it to refresh his memory. The details were all clear in his head. ‘When I got there, I found three people in residence. A woman, who gave her name as Phoebe Cole, someone called Rainman who refused to give a proper name, and another male known as Bas Q. Again refused to give a last name.’

Ross laughed. ‘I’d have got it out of ’em. You’re too damned soft. You won’t last long on this squad, mate, if you can’t get the job done.’

Hillary sighed very loudly. Ross shot her a sideways look and went back to reading his mail.

‘Phoebe admitted to being Dylan’s girlfriend. Claimed he was with her all that night “the old lady got it”, to quote her verbatim.’ Barrington went on as if Frank hadn’t spoken. ‘But since she didn’t seem to know which night that even was, I don’t think it means much, guv.’

Hillary rubbed a hand across her forehead. Damn, she was getting a headache. ‘Go on.’

‘Bas Q is an old bloke, a real derelict. It was hard getting a coherent sentence out of him.’

‘And this Rainman character?’

‘Bit more fly, guv,’ Barrington said thoughtfully. ‘According to him, he’s been at the squat the last three nights running. Bit under the weather. Says how Phoebe and Dylan have the front upstairs bedroom and heard them “scuttling about like rats” late at night, but not a peep from either of them in the earlier part of the evening.’

‘Out scoring, I expect,’ Ross snorted. ‘Or thieving, or mugging, or selling their arses to a discerning public. Gets dark quick this time of year. Gives them plenty of scope to get up to mischief.’

‘Right, let’s get Hodge back,’ Hillary said. ‘Really push him as to his whereabouts. The fact that he was in this morning, only to be pulled back so soon might catch him on the hop. Frank, I want you to do the pulling. Scare him a bit. Keith, I want a search warrant to search that squat. Ask Janine for details about the best way of going about it.’

Suddenly galvanized, the two men left the room. Hillary glanced at her watch. Just gone two. She could nip up to the canteen for a late lunch.

But better not.

Now she had even more reason to try and keep the weight off. She wasn’t sure Mike Regis was the type who fancied love handles.

B
enny Higgs wasn’t hard to find, but he wasn’t happy to be paying a visit to Thames Valley HQ. He was a small, smartly dressed, nervous-looking individual, with a shock of pure white hair and very blue eyes. If you went by looks alone, he should have been a busy dentist, a successful school teacher or even one of those shoe salesmen who can take one look at a little old lady’s bunions and know exactly what pair would fit and be comfortable to wear to the shops.

As she sat across the table from him, Hillary could imagine even the most streetwise and hardened of urchins accepting a Werther’s Original from him without a qualm. He simply didn’t look, act, or talk like a small-time drug dealer.

Officially, of course, he ran a small office supplies warehouse located in Bicester’s small industrial estate off the Launton Road. He was still whining about being taken out of his office even as Janine went through the motions for the tape. The fact that this was a full-blown interview, under caution, took a little of the wind from Benny’s sails. But not much. After all, it wasn’t as if this was the first time he’d had his collar felt.

‘Mr Higgs,’ Hillary said pleasantly. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Greene. I’m currently in charge of the Florence Jenkins murder inquiry.’ She let the last two words, unstressed though they were, speak for themselves, and saw him instantly pale. His nose was slightly red and broken-veined, either the sign of a drinker, or someone who liked to be outdoors a lot. Now it stood out as the only piece of colour on his face.

‘Murder? I don’t have anything to do with that sort of thing,’ he spluttered indignantly, as if selling Ecstasy to ravers never resulted in the death of a teenager, or selling horse to a 28-year-old party girl who should know better, never led to death from disease, malnutrition, or overdose, six years down the line.

Hillary smiled grimly. ‘But I believe a client of yours might be. Name of Dylan Hodge.’

The really quite beautiful blue eyes blinked at the mention of the name, and lily-white hands spread in an appeasing gesture. ‘Mr Hodge? No, I know a Hodgkins – he ordered several hundred weight of copy paper from us just last week. But Dylan Hodge doesn’t ring a bell.’

Hillary smiled again. ‘I’m talking about your other clients, Mr Higgs. The kind who like buying powder.’

‘Printing powder for photocopiers, you mean? No, I don’t think so. But I can have my secretary check our back orders.’

Hillary sighed heavily, and beside her Janine tapped her pen on her notepad in a rat-a-tat gesture of impatience. No doubt she was thinking the same thing as herself. Everyday you had to go through the same old rigmarole. It would be nice and refreshing if once, just once, someone would put their hands up to it, and admit to being a money-grabbing, conscienceless chancer.

‘I was talking about white powder, Mr Higgs,’ Hillary corrected, her tone of voice never varying. ‘You remember? You served eight years for supplying it not that long ago.’

Higgs flushed. ‘That was a mistake. It was one of my staff who stashed that gear. I knew nothing about it.’

‘Your fingerprints were found on the polythene covers, Mr Higgs,’ Hillary said, then leaned forward, allowing a tight smile to stretch across her face. ‘Look, let’s cut out the song and dance, shall we? All I want to know, pure and simple, is if you sold Dylan Hodge more than his usual amount of junk in the last two days. Then you can walk. Understand?’

Higgs licked his lips and darted a glance at Janine, but there was no help there. The pretty blonde woman looked as if she was miles away. Hillary leaned back in her chair, and could almost hear the wheels turning in his head. Could it be true? Was it a trick? Could he be out of here, no harm, no foul, if he told them what they wanted to hear? Or was this a trick? ‘I ain’t falling for no entrapment,’ he said sharply, and Hillary smiled ruefully.

‘Do you even know the rules governing entrapment, Mr Higgs?’ Hillary questioned, cocking her head to one side. ‘Because I’m not sure I do.’ She looked across to Janine. ‘Do you, sergeant?’

‘Can’t say as I do, boss,’ Janine said promptly on cue.

‘As a copper, I know all about PACE and what have you, but even the lawyers twist themselves up into knots when it comes to what constitutes entrapment and what doesn’t.’ Hillary carried on in her same, flat, cordial manner. ‘The Department of Public Prosecutions wet themselves when a case even smells of it. Isn’t that right, sergeant?’

Janine grinned savagely. ‘Won’t touch it, boss,’ she agreed.

‘See, Benny,’ Hillary said, leaning forward once more. ‘We’re working a killing here. We’re not interested in faffing about. We’ve only got so much time, so much funding, so many days we can keep up a full squad, before the big bad budget starts to bite, and we get scaled down. Now, why would I want to go wasting any effort in trying to set up a small fry like you?’

Higgs didn’t seem to take offence at being relegated to the small time. Instead a look of what passed for animal cunning spread over his face.

Hillary didn’t hold her breath. Higgs got caught regularly, and wasn’t exactly known for his genius. She doubted that whatever cunning plan he’d just come up with would seriously worry anyone.

‘Let’s talk hypothetically then,’ Higgs said, and beside her Janine snorted.

Hillary nodded wearily. Anything to get the ball rolling. ‘All right, let’s.’

‘Let’s say I knew what you were talking about. Let’s say I know this chap called Hodge. Just for the sake of argument, like.’ He cast a beautiful blue eye at the silently turning tape. ‘I’m not admitting I do, mind.’

Hillary flapped her hand in a yeah-yeah-yeah, get-on-with-it gesture.

‘Let’s say he likes some uppers. Mostly a bit of crack, when he’s flush. Nothing big time. Know what I mean?’

Hillary nodded encouragement.

‘And two nights ago, about 10, 10.30, say, he approaches one of my … er … members of staff, who happened to be working late in the office …’ He paused, because now he’d realized he was well off into the realms of fantasy land.

Hillary rolled her eyes. For ‘member of staff’ she read one of his army of juvenile runners, and for ‘working late in the office’ she knew he meant where one of his pushers hung out nearby teenage hang-outs. A pub that was currently ‘in’. A café that had become that month’s flavour of the moment. Cinemas, schools, anywhere where the young and vulnerable with money to spend could be shanghaied. ‘OK, OK.’ Hillary sighed heavily. ‘Let’s just say, hypothetically speaking, Mr Hodge found himself in desperate need of some staples, pens, and a cartridge or two of ink pellets. Did he buy more than his usual quota two nights ago?’

‘Oh yes,’ Benny admitted, almost amiably now. ‘Much more than usual. I, that is, my member of staff was quite surprised.’

‘How much more did he spend?’ Hillary asked abruptly.

‘Well now, his, er, stationery bill, usually came to something like twenty, twenty-five pounds. This time he spent more than double that.’

Janine scribbled something down in her notebook, and Benny Higgs suddenly looked nervous again.

‘I don’t suppose he said how he came to be so flush?’ Hillary asked, without much hope.

Benny shrugged, suppressing a laugh. ‘People don’t tend to talk much.’

Hillary guessed that was something of an understatement. You don’t buy drugs whilst standing on a cold December street corner, and then hang around swapping anecdotes. She didn’t bother to ask if Benny still had the ten or twenty pound notes that Dylan Hodge had used to pay for his skank. Even if he could remember exactly which ones were which, there was no way the Post Office would have kept records of the serial numbers on notes handed out to old-age pensioners. Why would they?

Which meant they had nothing by way of solid proof. Common sense said that Dylan Hodge had almost certainly used his grandmother’s entire pension to feed his habit, but common sense had surprisingly little place in a court of British law.

‘All right, Mr Higgs. Thank you for your co-operation,’ Hillary said. This case was turning into something of a bugger. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d worked a serious inquiry that turned up so little by way of forensic evidence to help them out.

‘I can go?’ Benny sounded quite surprised, almost as if he’d resigned himself to being a victim of entrapment after all.

‘Yes,’ Hillary said sourly. ‘You can go.’

She watched the good-looking, well-dressed man leave, and vowed to have a word with Mike about him the next time they met up. As a man with pull in Vice, he could sign off on a watch-and-grab offensive. Higgs might be small time, but he got her goat. It was about time he was back in jail, where he belonged.

She sighed, and glanced across at Janine. ‘Looks more and more as if our boy Dylan was spending his granny’s pension money.’

Janine nodded. ‘But according to our wits, Flo was determined to hang on to it for once and have a good birthday bash with it.’

Hillary nodded, but didn’t speak. Surprised, Janine pressed on, ‘So Dylan goes round there, is spotted by Barrington’s witnesses, and cuts up rough when granny, for once, won’t cough up the dough. He must know about the paperknife, is probably either high or coming on with the DTs, whichever, and loses his head. Stabs her, grabs the cash, and legs it. Goes straight to his nearest candy man and buys some goodies. It all fits, boss.’

Hillary sighed. Yeah it all fit. So why wasn’t she more happy about it? She was old enough, and wise enough, not to look a gift horse in the mouth. And ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the obvious answer was the right one. So was she just being dog-in-the-manger because she didn’t want to sign off on her murder case so easily?

‘You don’t like it,’ Janine said flatly, and Hillary stirred.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ she said cautiously. ‘We need to get Hodge in and really press him. But there were no fingerprints on the handle of the knife. If Hodge was so off his head that he flipped and stabbed Flo, we can’t then turn around and say he suddenly got clear-headed enough to wipe his prints off the handle. Junkies, as a rule, don’t think that clearly.’

‘So he always meant to do it.’ Janine played devil’s advocate without really thinking about it. ‘He wasn’t that high, or wasn’t hurting too bad, and did it in cold blood.’

‘Why though?’ Hillary shot back, enjoying, as always, bouncing her ideas off her subordinates. It always helped clear her mind. ‘He was killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.’

Janine shrugged. ‘Maybe he was tired of getting the cash in dribs and drabs. Perhaps, as his nearest and dearest, Flo had always promised to leave him everything in her will?’

Hillary laughed. ‘What’s everything? The house is rented, she doesn’t own a car, her electrical appliances could have come off the ark. Her furniture wouldn’t make fifty quid at a car boot sale. And I’ve seen her bank balance. It wouldn’t keep Hodge high for more than a week. No. There’s the smell of something else going on here. I just can’t seem to get a handle on it.’

Janine shrugged. She’d seen Hillary pull enough rabbits out of the hat in her time to ever bet against her being right. ‘Well, we’ll have a better idea once we have another go at Hodge,’ she said philosophically.

But that, as it turned out, wasn’t going to be so easy. Back in the office, Keith gave her a message from Frank. Hodge wasn’t at the squat and nobody, including his girlfriend, knew where he was. His gear, such as it was, was gone. Frank had also checked in all his old familiar haunts, but there was no sign of him. Dylan Hodge, for the moment, was in the wind.

Hillary turned on the anglepoise lamp over her desk and scowled down at her watch. Only ten past three and already the light was failing. Outside, a darkening, grey, rain-spattered day scowled back, as if to tell her to get used to it.

As if in defiance of the gloom, somebody had hung gaudy red, blue, gold, silver and green tinsel around the ‘Most Wanted’ posters, whilst another joker had hung tinsel ‘chandeliers’ from several of the ceiling lights. As if in cahoots, a radio was playing softly somewhere, a brass band rendition of ‘God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen’.

Hillary hadn’t even thought about Christmas yet, although she noticed that some of the shops had started touting it at the end of October. Every year the celebrations seemed to start earlier and earlier. Before long they’d be advertising it along with bloody Easter eggs.

‘You look like you could kick a dog,’ a cheerful voice said, making her look up, and Hillary’s scowl instantly turned into a smile.

‘Doc,’ she acknowledged cheerfully, pushing a chair with her foot towards him. ‘Have a seat. Not often we see you here.’ Like most police surgeons, he tended to hang out at the morgue, the path labs, or a pub.

‘Just finished with your old lady. Flo Jenkins,’ Steven Partridge said, by way of explanation.

Hillary blinked. ‘I didn’t realize you’d got around to her. Shit, I didn’t assign an officer.’ Normally, at least one member of the investigative team was obliged to attend the autopsy of a murder victim. You needed to get the information quick, first hand, and accurately. Vital clues were often forthcoming from the post-mortem, and she felt momentarily wrong-footed. ‘Didn’t you let us know? I’d have sent the new boy over. He has to be “bloodied” sometime.’

Steven looked at her curiously. ‘Of course I let you know,’ he said, with just a hint of reproach. ‘In fact I spoke to the head honcho himself, the walking Adonis.’

Hillary blinked, momentarily puzzled, then grinned. ‘Ah, Danvers.’

‘That’s right, your DCI. In fact, it was DCI Danvers himself who came to observe.’

Again Hillary had to blink. Nobody liked post-mortems, and by the time you got to the rank of DCI it was almost unheard of that you’d attend one yourself.

‘I know,’ Steven said, clearly reading her mind. ‘You could have knocked me down with the proverbial feather. Must have been years since he last stood behind the ME trying not to be sick. But he was very stalwart. No passing out, not even any retching. He even asked a few good questions. Not everybody can take it when the old buzz-saw comes out.’