A Death at South Gare Read online

  I rang Bill Peart.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded angrily.

  ‘Steady on, Bill! I’ve been getting on with my life, taking Jac out for a meal. You should do that with your wife sometime. It works wonders.’

  He grunted. He liked Jac. So I was off the hook.

  ‘Anyway, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?’

  ‘The body.’

  ‘Ah! Before you say anything else, I should tell you I’ve been warned off talking about it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘There was a message on my phone when I came in twenty minutes ago. I’ve just been listening to it.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘It’s what it didn’t say that’s worrying.’

  I gave him the gist, glad to have a friendly ear to pour it into.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Bill said with apparent satisfaction when I’d finished my résumé.

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘Not considering who it was that ended up in the sea.’

  ‘So you’ve found and identified the body?’

  He didn’t bother answering that question directly.

  ‘James Campbell,’ he said after a short pause.

  The name seemed familiar, but it was a common enough sort of name. Where had I heard it? One obvious candidate came to mind.

  ‘Not the. . . ?’

  ‘Exactly! The MP.’

  Now it was my turn to pause, and to think.

  ‘I’ll drop by in the morning,’ Bill added. ‘Not a word to anyone about this in the meantime, by the way. There’s an embargo on it.’

  Chapter Three

  She was careful. Always. Something told her she wasn’t safe here. Nothing specific, nothing she could identify and point to, but she wasn’t at ease. The crowds, these people, this. . . .

  What she must avoid at all costs was leading them to where she lived. She was still safe there, if nowhere else.

  She let the door swing shut behind her and slipped out into the street, to mingle with the common people. Wasn’t that what he had called them? She smiled ruefully. He had meant people like her. It was a quaint term, but he had been quite right, as it happened. That’s what she was, and all she wanted to be. He was the one with pretensions.

  He was also the one with money, of course, and power. So she needed to be careful, especially now she had confronted him. She would. She would be careful. She was under no illusions. There was no love lost between them. Never had been. And now there was money at stake. Big money.

  Chapter Four

  The next day started well enough. I got up. I had breakfast and checked the news. No mention of a dead MP having been found anywhere in the United Kingdom. I could have been happy with that if I hadn’t had a threatening phone call the night before. As it was, I was in suspense, waiting for something else to happen.

  To fill the time, I opened yesterday’s mail. Nothing out-standing. So I checked my emails and found one I liked the sound of. Someone representing a major global company contemplating inward investment into the Teesside area would like to speak to me about a job to do with anticipated security issues. The company was called PortPlus. I was invited to phone back. That sounded promising. Checking out their security needs and arrangements was one of the things I did for clients, and right now I was experiencing a fallow period and needed to generate some income.

  Before I could do anything about it, though, I heard the sound of a vehicle drawing up outside. A glance through the window told me it was Bill Peart in his big machine. I went out to meet him.

  ‘You’re up early, Frank.’

  I gave him a stony stare. ‘What do you mean? I’m nearly always up by lunch time.’

  ‘To be self-employed, eh? What it must be like.’

  He was in a good mood. Top of the world.

  ‘Have you ever thought of trying stand-up?’ I asked him.

  ‘Only sometimes, like when the boss wants to see me. Like this morning, actually. He wanted to know what was happening about this dead MP.’

  ‘Already? What did you tell him?’

  ‘What I could. The body had been found and collected. The pathologist would be going to work imminently.’

  ‘That it?’

  ‘More or less. Is that coffee in that pot there?’

  I poured him a mug, and another for myself.

  ‘So what did your boss say?’

  ‘He tut-tutted a bit, and told me how important it was to get it sorted urgently. He didn’t want the media or the new Police Commissioner on his back all day.’

  I could imagine the conversation. Impatience revealing itself already. Chief constables and their senior colleagues are as much politicians as anything else. They have to be, I suppose, but it’s amazing how quickly they seem to forget what it’s like for the troops out in the field.

  What probably made it worse for Bill this time was the fact that the Cleveland Police HQ is only a couple of miles out of Redcar, and hardly any further from the South Gare. So they had a homicide in their own backyard, and it was a tricky one.

  ‘I don’t envy you, Bill.’

  He smiled. ‘Thank you, Frank. That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me for a long time. Now do you want to hear what we’ve found so far?’

  I nodded.

  ‘James Campbell didn’t drown. He was shot dead first, and then chucked in the sea.’

  That took me back a bit. ‘But I saw. . .’

  ‘I know. You told me. But the pathologist says what you saw was just a freak occurrence. It looked like a cry for help, or whatever, but it couldn’t have been. A bullet in the brain had already killed him.’

  ‘And that’s certain?’

  Bill nodded.

  In a way, that let me off the hook. I was almost relieved. There really would have been no point in me jumping in the water yesterday, even if I’d had the inclination.

  ‘Not good, is it?’ I said with a grimace.

  Bill shook his head. ‘It looks like you might have been right about the three tough guys you saw. In fact, it makes me think you were lucky. Instead of letting your tyre down, they could have put a bullet in your head as well.’

  That thought had already occurred to me. It wasn’t comforting.

  ‘Let me hear that message someone left for you?’ Bill suggested.

  I played it for him a few times. Each time it sounded just as threatening.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked me afterwards.

  I shrugged. ‘Not much I can do, is there? I’ll just carry on as normal. The implied threat to Jac worries me a bit, though.’

  ‘I take it you wouldn’t want police protection, or to go to a safe house?’

  I just smiled.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Especially not now,’ I said. ‘There’s the prospect of a bit of business coming my way.’

  I told him about the email.

  ‘Who’s it from?’

  ‘Someone working for something called PortPlus. I haven’t had time to check them out yet, but some new business would be very welcome. The cupboard’s looking a bit bare.’

  He nodded. ‘Good luck with that.’

  ‘Right,’ he added, easing himself out of the chair. ‘I’d better get on. Let me know if anything else comes in from whoever left that voice message. And my advice is to avoid the South Gare for a little while. Do you want me to talk to Jac, by the way?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’ll have a word with her myself. But she’s a busy lady, and I don’t want to disrupt her life.’

  ‘Any more than you have already, you mean?’

  I wasn’t the only one who thought Jac was too good for the likes of me.

  I did some Googling about James Campbell after Bill had gone. There was plenty to read. In his short career as a Member of Parliament, the man had made an impact and ruffled an awful lot of feathers. His re-election prospects looked accordingly good.

  In a constituency like Redcar, as well
as the rest of Teesside, the perennial big issue has always been jobs. No politician has been able to avoid that in my lifetime, or in my father’s, for that matter. I suppose all areas that have developed with a high dependency on heavy industry, like steel and chemicals, are like that. So James Campbell had campaigned long and hard about unemployment levels.

  Surprisingly, the environment also figured prominently on the local political agenda. Perhaps that was because heavy industry does more obvious and visible environmental damage than financial services and banking. So on Teesside there was a sizeable constituency that cared about environmental issues and wanted to repair the damage, and safeguard what was left of the environment. James Campbell was prominent in environmental campaigning.

  He was also busy in relation to child poverty, equal opportunities, better housing, improved education, greater life opportunities for young people, care for the elderly and infirm, and more support for those with learning difficulties. In short, I couldn’t find anything he didn’t support, unless it was tax relief for the super rich. He was impressively progressive. It was difficult to believe a man like him could possibly have any political enemies who were not either oligarchs or simply deranged.

  My Googling didn’t tell me much I didn’t know, although I did now have a better picture of a man in a hurry to get ahead in politics. Even after only three years in Parliament, the call to join the Government front bench couldn’t reasonably be delayed much longer.

  But that was yesterday – before he got shot.

  I found next to nothing about his personal life. In fact, all the press cuttings, talks and PR releases I accessed that first morning seemed to indicate that he didn’t have one. In the old days that would have made me wonder about his sexuality. Now it just left me wondering. Perhaps he was simply too busy.

  In any case, I reminded myself, it was nothing to do with me. Bill Peart would have to look into that. A simple drowning in high seas might not have merited the expenditure of much in the way of police resources, but the shooting dead of a prominent politician certainly would.

  I thought of the threatening phone message, too, and wondered how easy it would be for me to escape the consequences of having visited the South Gare on that fateful afternoon.

  Chapter Five

  ‘You should have been more careful.’

  ‘On a day like that? Nobody there?’

  ‘He was there. The guy. He turned up, didn’t he?’

  Frustrated, the first man shook his head and sighed. He said nothing more. The silence between them grew.

  The man in the suit, the one who was paying the bill, got up and walked over to stare out of the window. He was thinking; it was a mess, a dog’s breakfast.

  He turned and said, ‘We need to keep him quiet.’

  ‘That’s easily done,’ the other man said with a rough chuckle. ‘We don’t want witnesses any more than you do. Take him out.’

  ‘It’s not so easy. He’s very well connected.’

  ‘The bigger they are, the harder they fall – where I come from.’

  ‘What are the options?’ said the man in the suit, ignoring the comment, and pushing himself away from the window. ‘There’s his woman, I suppose. Then there’s the girl,’ he added. ‘Don’t forget her.’

  ‘We’re on it.’

  ‘Good.’

  The man in the suit glanced at his watch and brought the meeting to an end with a curt, ‘See to it.’

  Chapter Six

  I didn’t have to wait long to discover that it wouldn’t be at all easy for me to escape the consequences of having visited the South Gare. After I had closed the computer down, I opened the front door and stepped outside for the first time that morning for a breath of fresh air. I saw it immediately. It was impossible to miss.

  Someone had draped the body of a large dog – a Labrador, it looked like – across the low wall at the front of my cottage. An iron bar, the kind they use to reinforce concrete, had been driven through its throat to pin it to the wall, and before that, perhaps to kill it. Nasty. There was a lot of blood.

  I grimaced and looked round. A big pickup truck straddled the end of the track leading to the road. It looked very like the one I had seen at the South Gare.

  The truck’s engine started up, as if whoever was in it had been waiting for me to appear. I watched as it roared backwards on to the road in a hail of loose gravel and a cloud of dust. A couple of long blasts on the horn, and then it was away. A point had been made. I had been warned – again!

  There was no point trying to follow them, not in my old Land Rover. By the time I got into top gear, they would be out of sight.

  So I buried the dog a little distance away and cleaned up. Then I went back inside, wondering what to do for the best. It was disturbing. What the hell had I run into? Clearly, the message left on my phone had not been an idle threat. These people were psychopaths.

  I wondered if their appearance so soon after Bill Peart had left was a coincidence or if they had been watching me. Probably the latter. They seemed to be very worried about what I had seen at the South Gare, and what I might do about it.

  They had good reason to worry, too, more than ever now. I would have assisted Bill Peart all I could anyway, but this stunt with the dog hadn’t done anything to help their cause.

  First, though, I needed to talk to Jac about her personal security. She had been named in the phone message. So they were aware of her, and her link to me. I grimaced. This wasn’t good for either of us. Much worse for James Campbell, of course.

  I couldn’t get Jac at home, and if she was at work I didn’t want to disrupt her day and upset her with talk of possible threats to her safety. So I left it for the moment. Instead, I phoned the guy from PortPlus who had emailed me. He’d left a direct number, which saved messing about with switchboards and receptionists.

  ‘Mr Rogers?’

  ‘Yeah. How can I help you?’

  ‘Good morning. Frank Doy here. I’m responding to an email you sent me about your company’s plans.’

  ‘Ah, yes! Mr Doy. Thank you for calling. I appreciate it.’

  An American accent. Expansive style. Early middle-aged, I guessed. Management school type. Corporate man, in other words.

  ‘I was interested in what you said.’

  ‘Good. I’d like to meet you, Mr Doy. As soon as possible. What’s your availability like?’

  ‘I’m pretty flexible at the moment. When would suit you?’

  I could have said my flexibility was absolute. There was nothing in my diary for a week or two.

  ‘No time like the present. How about today, this afternoon?’

  So I wasn’t going to be invited to a corporate lunch.

  ‘That’s fine,’ I told him, hiding my disappointment. ‘See you at two this afternoon.’

  So I had lunch with Jac at the usual place, the Italian. She was in a hurry as she was waiting for phone calls from people who had proved hard to get.

  ‘I was just going to have a sandwich,’ she said reprovingly once we were sat down.

  ‘You still can.’

  ‘What – here?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘Luigi would probably sling us out.’

  ‘Probably.’

  I hesitated, being careful, wanting to do this right. I didn’t want to upset her but I did want her to understand the situation.

  ‘That business I was telling you about yesterday? The body in the sea?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ She sat up straight. ‘Go on. What’s happened?’

  ‘They found out who it was. James Campbell, the MP.’

  ‘The local MP?’

  I nodded.

  ‘That’s terrible!’

  All I could do was agree.

  ‘Keep it to yourself for the moment, Jac. The police haven’t announced his death yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I gave a little grimace. ‘It’s not as simple as it might have been. He didn’t drown, appare
ntly. He was shot first.’

  ‘Murdered?’ she asked, wide-eyed.

  I nodded. ‘Bill Peart’s got the case.’

  Luigi arrived with the pasta we had ordered. Mine had bacon and onion in it. Hers had bits of sea creatures. I started eating. Jac started picking at hers.

  ‘There’s more, isn’t there?’ she said thoughtfully. ‘You haven’t told me everything. That’s why you wanted to take me out for lunch – when I was so busy, and had already said no twice!’

  I chuckled and shook my head. ‘Jac Picknett! If you ever get tired of the art business, and are looking for another job, come and see me – please! You’d make a first class private investigator.’

  ‘If I ever get tired of the art business,’ she said, forking a small clam, ‘I’m going back to sea, to do some fishing.’

  ‘Rejoin the family line, eh?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Jac’s family had been fisher folk in Redcar for generations, centuries. Having got out, she was either sensible or a renegade, depending on how you looked at it.

  ‘So?’ she said, putting down her fork and staring at me hard.

  ‘So you were right. There’s more.’ I shrugged. ‘When I got home last night there was a message on my phone.’

  I told her what had been said, including the fact that her name had been mentioned. I hoped she wasn’t too shocked.

  ‘I wanted to warn you,’ I concluded, ‘not frighten you. Just be aware, Jac. That’s all. Bill Peart raised the question of police protection for us. I turned it down. But if you’re interested, we can talk to him again about it.’

  ‘No,’ she said, as I had expected. ‘I don’t want that. It’s not necessary. Someone threatened you and mentioned my name in passing. So what? Neither of us had anything to do with James Campbell, or with his death. It’s tragic, but nothing to do with us. Let’s leave it there.’

  I nodded. ‘My feelings exactly.’

  We got on with our meal. It didn’t take long. Jac was in a hurry.

  I told her about the meeting I was to have that afternoon, to change the subject and lighten the mood as much as anything.

  ‘Any idea what it’s about?’