Game Over

A weary sort of anger surged through him. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m just calling to see if you enjoyed my little joke last night,’ said Bates.

‘Why do you insist on talking like a villain in a B movie?’

‘Oh, dear. You sound a bit tetchy. Head aching?’

‘I always hated practical jokes, even when I was a child. For an adult to practise them is contemptible.’

‘Contemptible, is it? And there was I trying to be kind to you. I could have killed you, you know. I could have filled the bucket with sand. By the way, are you trying to trace this call?’

‘Of course,’ said Slider.

‘Well, you might as well amuse yourself, but you’ll never be able to. My skills, small as they are, are sufficient to run rings round your mediaeval tracing capabilities.’

‘They didn’t have telephones in mediaeval times. A man of your education ought to know that.’

He chuckled. ‘Keeping me talking, eh? I don’t mind. Time is not of the essence to me.’

Slider tired of it. ‘Well, it is to me. What do you want?’

‘Just to let you know that if you enjoyed that little joke, you’ll love the next one. Do you like Guy Fawkes Night?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Well, you’ll find my little surprise divine. Divine as in see you in heaven.’

‘Or in your case, not,’ said Slider.

But Bates had gone. McLaren came to the door a few moments later and shook his head. ‘Same story, guv. Bounced round the satellites. Mick Hutton reckons you’d need to keep him talking for fifteen minutes to have a chance of tracing it – and even then, he wouldn’t be there with his stickies on the receiver.’ He eyed Slider sympathetically. ‘What did he want this time?’

‘Dear Mr Slider: threat, threat, threat, threat. Yours sincerely.’

‘Bloody hypocrite. I’m going to get a sarnie. Can I get you one?’

‘God, is it lunch time already?’

‘Going down the stall outside the market,’ McLaren said temptingly.

‘Go on then. I’ll have a sausage sandwich. With tomato sauce.’

‘Got it,’ said McLaren, and wheeled away.

He passed Atherton coming the other way. ‘Word, guv?’ Atherton asked. Slider nodded him in. ‘Emily’s gone off on her travels. We got her a hired car this morning and she’s gone to see the Ring 4 people. Not,’ he added, ‘that you know that, because she isn’t doing it officially and we’ve no idea where she is.’

‘What do we know, officially?’ Slider asked. He heard himself sounding tetchy and reached for the aspirin bottle, before realising he had taken them too recently to take more. His shoulder was aching, too. He rubbed it carefully.

‘I’ve been looking up the Sid Andrew business,’ Atherton said. He observed his boss’s actions but guessed sympathy would get his nose bitten off. ‘The girl in the case was called Angela Barlow. She was a junior press officer in the DTI – that’s a civil service appointment, not a political one. Quite a looker, twenty-eight when it all happened, secretarial background, interest in journalism – what bright girl these days doesn’t want to be a journalist? – been in the job just under two years. She seemed to disappear without trace after she got sacked, and with the media interest in her, I thought she probably would have gone to earth. I mean, those pictures were pretty explicit, and the popular press’s appetite for all things salacious being what it is—’

‘So where did she go?’ Slider cut in.

‘She went home to her parents,’ Atherton said.

Slider read the bad news in his eyes. ‘And?’

‘She’s dead. Committed suicide last January.’

Slider slammed to his feet. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘We’re going to find out what this whole Sid Andrew thing was about. We’re going to go and see her parents, and then we’re going to and roust him.’

‘Maybe it was just shame,’ Atherton said, playing devil’s advocate. ‘We’ve only got the Stonax supporters’ word for it that the thing was a set up.’

Slider didn’t glance at him as he walked past. ‘We’ll find out,’ he said. ‘And then we’ll know.’

Twelve

Thickening

It didn’t take Emily long to discover the local journalist from the Woburn Courier who had been responsible for the story of Tyler’s escape. She found Chris Fletcher at the magistrates’ court in Milton Keynes, and persuaded him outside for a chat.

‘I’m sorry to interrupt your work,’ she said when they reached the open air.

‘Dunt matter,’ he said equably. ‘I was busting for a smoke, anyway. Do you?’ He proffered the pack and she shook her head. ‘Mind if I do?’ He didn’t wait for her reply, but knocked one out, shoved it in his mouth and lit it like a starving man falling on bread. He was young, mid-twenties, she thought, and staggeringly badly dressed, with a tweed jacket that was far too big, a tie that looked as if it might have been used to tie up a dog, a grubby shirt with a crumpled collar, and cheap, scuffed shoes at the end of what looked like his old school trousers. The dress code for the magistrates’ court had evidently fallen hard on him. He had a snubby, rather pallid but not unattractive face, and spiky fair hair ending in an unfashionable mullet. His fingernails were badly bitten and his fingers badly stained with nicotine. Being a journalist at this level must be really stressful, she thought.

‘I won’t keep you long,’ she said. ‘I’m just interested in a story you filed back in July about an escaped prisoner—’

‘Oh, God, yes, that!’ he jumped in. ‘I thought I’d got it made! Big city here I come! But it all turned out to be rubbish and I got a rocket from my editor. He kicked my bum so hard I couldn’t sit down for a week.’

‘Would you tell me what happened?’

He was so eager to talk she didn’t have to give him a reason for asking. The fact that she was Press seemed to be enough for him.

‘Well, it was just luck I came across it, really, because I was going home one evening and there’s this cut through round the back of Apsley Guise – I live in Husborne Crawley?’ She nodded as if she knew what he was talking about so as not to slow him down. ‘Anyway, it’s just a lane and there’s never much traffic on it, so I wasn’t surprised to find myself on my own. Then I come round a bend, and there’s a barrier across the road. I was on my bike – I’ve got this mini Moto. It’s useful for getting about to stories, easier to park than a car – not that I could afford a car anyway on what they pay me.’

‘Right. You came across a barrier?’

‘Yeah. Well, I didn’t want to go back, so I pushed the bike round it. And round the next corner there’s a local cop I know, Colin Gunter, and he stops me. I look past him and I see a big Ring 4 van and some more police and a couple of patrol cars. So I says, “S’up Col?” and he says, “You can’t come down this way. There’s a prison van been held up.” So then he tells me this prisoner was on the way to Woodhill, the van got held up and he’s on the loose. So I go back and phone the story straight in, and I ring the Telegraph news desk as well. I’ve been doing that for a while, any time I hear anything good, because I’m hoping to make a name with them, and then they’ll give me a job.’

‘Why the Telegraph?’ she asked out of idle curiosity.

‘It’s what me dad reads. Anyway, the Courier puts my story in, but it’s hardly gone to bed when I get a call from Colin to say it was all a mistake, there was no-one in the van, it just broke down, and someone was having a laugh with him, telling him there was an escaped prisoner. I was well gutted, and the next thing the editor calls me in and chews my arse off. It was too late to stop the story, but nobody else had run it and in the end he just left it, cause he said it would look worse to print a retraction. And that was that. I never heard anything more about it.’

‘How did your editor know the story was wrong?’

‘Someone rang him from Ring 4 – the controller down in Luton – Trish Holland, I think her name is.