there should have been a heap of junk mail impeding it, but there was no mail at all lying there. How many days in the year was there
‘Gas!’ he said as he ran her back down the path. She stumbled because he was pushing her, but he had his arm round her now and bore her up as well as along. Out of the gate, across the pavement. There was a big plane tree growing opposite the next door house, and he pushed her into the shelter of its trunk. ‘Stay there,’ he snapped and flung himself at the boot of his car.
‘Bill! What are you doing?’
He rummaged frantically in his tool kit and found a big screwdriver.
‘Bill!’ Joanna cried, her voice rising in terror as he headed back to the house. ‘Bill, don’t!’
‘Stay there!’ he flung over his shoulder.
Under the small bay window of the sitting-room stood the white meter box. He flung himself to his knees with frantic haste, wrenched open the flap with the screwdriver, and twisted the shut-off lever closed. Then, with the horrid sensation of the sweat of fear in his armpits, he ran back to Joanna, reaching for his mobile.
She was so white he thought she was going to be sick. But her fear turned itself nimbly into anger. ‘How dare you? How dare you risk yourself like that?’
‘I had to turn off the gas,’ he said. ‘Thank God the meter box was outside.’ She began to cry. He conducted her across the road, further from the house. It could still go up, though the worst was averted now the gas was shut off at the main. ‘I have to ring the bomb disposal squad,’ he said. ‘Hush, it’s all right.’ He put his arm round her, and let her cry on his shoulder while he spoke to them. It was just her hormones, he told himself.
The subsequent fuss took a big chunk out of the day. The road had to be sealed off and the house and the ones either side had to be evacuated – though fortunately, because of the time of day, that only involved one old lady and a cat, the rest of the flats being empty. Then the squad went in to do a sweep. There were two triggers, it turned out. One was the light switch by the front door – it was damn lucky, said Cattishall, the head of the squad, that Slider’s reactions had been so fast.
‘It’s lucky I’ve got a good sense of smell,’ Slider countered.
The other trigger was in the kitchen, and was particularly cunning and nasty. It was a friction device fixed in the runner of the sash window, so that if Slider had smelled the gas and come in without using the light, as soon as he pushed up the window – the natural first action – it would have acted like a match striking a matchbox. All the gas taps had been left fully open and there was a considerable volume of gas inside the house.
‘Makes you nostalgic for the old shilling-in-the-meter days,’ Cattishall said. ‘It would have run out before too much harm was done.’
Once everything had been made safe, Slider and Joanna both went in to pack up everything they thought they might need to take with them, before the flat was boarded up completely. Packing a suitcase, Joanna was calm, but unhappy.
‘I hate this. I’m sick of it. How can people be allowed to ruin your life like this? It’s my home! I hate that blasted Bates.’
‘You’re not meant to like him.’
‘Oh, Bill,’ she said tragically, ‘when will it all be over?’
‘When we catch him,’ Slider said.
Seventeen
No Tern Unstoned
The landlord of the Sally identified Thomas Mark from his photograph a little doubtfully, but one of his bar staff said much more definitely that she had served him. She had noticed him because he was talking to Dave Borthwick, who was a regular, and he looked so far out of old Dave’s class that the anomaly had amused her. Not that she said anomaly, of course. She asked Jerry Fathom, who had been doing the asking, what was happening with old Dave.
‘I never would have thought he had the balls to do something like that. He just used to come in here and sit with his couple of pints. He seemed like an ordinary bloke.’ She gave herself a pleasurable shiver. ‘To think all the time I was serving a murderer! Anyway, what’s this bloke got to do with it?’
‘Well, I can’t tell you anything at the moment,’ Fathom said, ‘but when the case is all over, I could tell you all the details, if you’d like to come out with me one night.’
For a moment the thought of being in the know flickered greedily through her eyes, and then she looked properly at Fathom and said scornfully, ‘Get bent!’
The forensic sweep of the black Focus had revealed a number of fingermarks, though none of them belonged to Bates.
‘But they might well belong to Thomas Mark,’ Slider said, when he was back in circulation in the afternoon. ‘We haven’t got his on record to compare them with, but when we find him, it’ll be another nail in his coffin.’
There was also a lot of mud under the wheel arch and a sample was being analysed to see if it matched the mud in the lane where Masseter was killed.
‘But I think we can assume, for working purposes, that it was him who killed Masseter, because otherwise what was he doing up there and why did he take away the papers and computer?’
‘Why did he do that anyway?’ Hart said.
‘Well, let’s come back to Masseter later,’ Slider said, unwittingly driving a thorn in her heart. ‘Let’s look first at what we’ve got linking Bates to the Stonax murder.’ He could call it that with impunity as Emily was out of the room, still beavering away on the computer, with Atherton’s assistance.
‘At about the same time Ed Stonax was killed, the next-door neighbour Mrs Koontz sees a motorbike courier come out of the building with a large Jiffy envelope in his hand. The bike had a white box on the back with a circular logo on it, with, she says, a “little telephone” in it, which is the logo of Ring 4. Also a file was missing from Ed Stonax’s filing system. So it’s a promising inference that the courier was the murderer and that he took away the file.’
‘After smearing oil on the victim’s pockets and cuffs, which he got from Dave Borthwick’s bike, to make it look as if Borthwick did the job,’ Hollis added.
‘And leaving some faint oily smears on the filing cabinet,’ Swilley said.
‘I suspect those weren’t intentional,’ Slider said. ‘The residue left after sullying Stonax. But he won’t have cared much. If the file was that important, presumably he will have thought getting hold of it made him invulnerable. And anyway, it was Dave’s bike’s oil, so if found he knows it goes to Dave’s account.’
‘Yes, but who is “he”, boss?’ Swilley asked. ‘We know Thomas Mark set up the lock disabling, but was he the one that did the murder?’
‘I think the one thing we can be sure of is that he didn’t do the actual killing,’ said Slider. ‘Remember we had the footmark by the filing cabinet, and it was too small to be either Borthwick’s or the victim’s. Now I don’t know Thomas Mark’s shoe size, but he’s a big man and I think we can take it as read that his feet will match the rest of him.’
‘Which leaves – Bates,’ said Swilley.
Slider nodded. He had been coming to this conclusion ever since his talk with Solder Jack, who had reminisced that Bates was a ‘little runt of a man’ with ‘little fingers twinkling away’.
‘Bates is not a tall man,’ he said. ‘He’s quite slight in build, too, though he keeps – or used to keep – himself very fit. And he has small hands – very useful for fiddling about with miniature circuitry – so he probably has small feet as well.’
‘But could a small man have coshed a tall man that easily?’ Fathom asked.
‘I’ve got a picture in my head. Let me run it by you,’ Slider said. ‘The courier lets himself in by the disabled front door, pops down and gets some oil on one of the gloves from Dave’s bike, and goes up to the flat with a large
