Game Over

‘That’s the least of my worries,’ she said.

The preliminary report came in from the electronics expert, Phil Lavery, on the security door at Valancy House. He had found a device, and it was, he said, a straightforward timer which caused a short-circuit at the desired time, disengaging the locks as would happen normally during a power cut. The interesting thing about it was the timer itself, which was a tiny transistorised thing not much bigger than a watch battery.

I have not come across one like it before, he wrote, and suspect it may be of Far Eastern origin. I do not recognise the handwork signature, but I will research further on both that and the timer, and report as soon as I have more information.

It was not much help, Slider thought. Most new electronic stuff did come from the Far East these days. The hope was that someone in the trade would recognise the handwork, because people who put together devices like that all had their own way of doing it, and it was generally as personal as a signature. Unless the ‘bloke in the van’ was clever enough to disguise his work. It sounded as though ‘Patrick Steel’ was clever enough, but he’d had to hire someone to do the actual work and it was possible that man was not. Get him, get to Patrick Steel. Was he the brains behind the thing or was he fronting for someone else? What they didn’t know was legion. No, they needed to find the reason for all this. Find the why and you find the who.

Hart came in with papers under her arm and a cup of tea in her hand. ‘Brought you this, guv,’ she said, setting the cup and saucer down. She reached into her pocket, and placed a bottle of aspirin beside it. ‘And Norma sent you these. She reckoned you might need ’em by now.’

‘You’re very kind,’ Slider said. His head was aching again. ‘And thank Norma for me.’

‘We don’t reckon you shoulda come in today,’ Hart said, eyeing him in a motherly way. ‘You look pale. You musta been concussed, and concussion’s not something to mess around with.’

‘It’s all right,’ Slider reassured her. ‘I’m not messing around with it, I’m having it properly.’ There had been a time when, according to Joanna, Hart had fancied him and hoped to get off with him. He’d never seen it himself, but he didn’t want to encourage anything. ‘What have you got there?’ he asked briskly.

‘Stonax’s diary,’ she said, drawing it out from under her arm. ‘I was working backwards, and then it occurred to me to go forwards a bit, and I found he had an appointment today with a “DM”. Look, here, DM at half twelve.’

‘So why hasn’t DM come forward to tell us that?’ Slider said. ‘He must have seen on the news or in the papers that Stonax is dead.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Hart. ‘Unless he was some kind of crim, but it didn’t seem likely, with Stonax being such a Boy Scout. So I looked back and found a meeting with a Daniel Masseter a couple of months back, beginning of July. I done a bit of a trawl through the files and everything, but I couldn’t find any reference to Daniel Masseter anywhere, not so much as an address or phone number. If Stonax kept any info on him, it was either in that file we think’s gone missing—’

‘Or it’s in the encrypted part of the computer,’ Slider said.

‘Or both. Anyway, I thought it was worth a bit of a goosey, so I put him in the computer and started searching. Luck would have it, I started with police records and found he’d been in trouble a couple of times doing environmental protests – Hartlepool, the Able UK ship recycling thing?’

‘Yes, I remember. The company that got the contract to break up US naval derelicts.’

‘Yeah. Well, he chained himself to some gates, apparently, and when they cut him loose he threw a brick and smashed someone’s windscreen, so they nicked him. And he was nicked for obstruction in that Essex oil refinery protest. And quite a bit in between.’

‘But those were both years ago,’ Slider said. ‘The Hartlepool thing must be – what – four years ago? And Jaywick two years ago.’

‘Yeah, so what’s he been up to since then? That’s what I wondered.’

‘Maybe it would explain, if he’d had trouble with the police in the past, why he didn’t come forward to say he had an appointment with Stonax.’

‘Maybe. But a more compelling reason, I reckon, is that he’s dead.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. I wanted to see if he’d been visible recently, so I put him in a news filter, and up he come straight away. Reading Observer, local lad killed in an RTA. He was apparently knocked off his motorbike on a country road near Pangbourne – it’s a sort of cut-through to the A4. Locals say people use it as a rat run and drive too fast – it’s only really a country lane and some of it’s single track with passing places. Anyway, he was found by a woman going to work early morning two weeks ago. Him and the bike was in a ditch, there was skid marks across the road, and his neck was broken. Local police reckon from the damage to the bike he must have been sideswiped by a car. They put it down as a hit-and-run driver.’

‘And it could have been,’ said Slider.

‘That’s the beauty of it. Reading Evening Post did quite a bit on it, tragedy of young life cut short, blah de blah – I printed it out in case you want it – and made out he was some kind of planet-saving hero because of his “well known environmental activities”. Then the next day the Observer come up with his police record and they dropped him pretty sharpish.’

‘I think,’ Slider said, ‘we need to have a word with his nearest and dearest. Have you found out who they are?’

‘Yeah, his nearest, anyway. He lived with his mum on a housing estate in Reading. Don’t know if she’s his dearest – news reports don’t mention if he had a girlfriend.’

‘Well, you’d better go and find out, then,’ he said, and was rewarded with a wide grin.

‘Thanks, guv. I won’t let you down.’

Slider drank his tea, swallowed two of the aspirin, thought for a bit, and then rang his best snout, Tidy Barnett. Tidy’s sepulchral tones answered at the second ring. ‘’Ang on a minute, Mr S. Someone ’ere. We ain’t secure.’ There were various indeterminate sounds as Tidy removed himself to a more secluded spot, and then he was back on. ‘What can I do you for? I ’ope it’s not about this big business in ’Ammersmith, cause I’m not up to all that. I’ve ’ad me ear out for you, naturally, but nobody don’t know nothing about it.’

‘It is about that,’ Slider said, ‘and I was hoping you could help me with one of the minor players. He fixed the security doors of the flat to unlock themselves at a certain time. Used a transistorised timer, maybe Chinese in origin. Know any electronics experts who might do that sort of thing?’

‘Not my street, Mr S,’ Tidy said regretfully. ‘I could put you on to someone who might ’elp. Ever ’eard of Jack Bushman?’

‘Solder Jack? He’s not still around, is he? I thought he went to Australia.’

‘’E did, but ’e’s back. Didn’t like it out there. Been back years. He’s straight now, which is maybe why you ain’t ’eard of him. He’s got a shop, Ladbroke Grove way, on the KPR. He was into all that miniature stuff. You could try him. Otherwise – well, deceased was a nobby bloke, and it sounds like a nobby murder. You need special snouts. Me and mine is no use to you on this one, guv.’

‘Thanks, Tidy,’ Slider said, and rang off. He sat thinking for a while, and then, on an impulse, rang his old friend Pauline Smithers. She was Detective Chief Superintendent Smithers now, and back at the Yard after what had seemed to her like an interminable – though successful – stint on child pornography. The trouble with crime like that was that you could never wrap it up and be done with it. As soon as you cleared out one stinking gutter, you’d get word of another. He was glad for Pauly’s sanity that they’d moved her on.

They had been in uniform together way back when the world was young, and had always had a soft spot for each other. Then she’d got promoted and married the Job and a while later he’d got married to Irene, his first wife, and that had been that. He had often wondered, idly, how things would have turned out if they had hooked up, as had once seemed quite possible, even likely. She had never married, though he was not vain enough to attribute that to a broken heart. For women, the upper echelons of the police force were harder to tackle than Annapurna, and those who made it were rarely able to have emotional lives.

Which he thought was a shame, because Pauline had been a good egg and a perfectly normal woman.

He called her number. It rang for a long time before she answered, and when she did, she spoke before he had a chance to. ‘I’m in a meeting,’ she said in a normal, if slightly severe, tone; and then added, very low and urgently, ‘I’ll ring you back. Don’t ring me.’ Then she was gone.

He had rung her on his mobile. As soon as he rang off, his land line rang.

‘Hello, Mr Plod.’