'It wasn't an old man,' I replied. 'It was an old English Sheepdog.'
'Ah! Then that explains why you were in the City Square toilets.'
'Precisely. Is somebody trying to sully my reputation?'
'Don't worry about it. In twenty years it will be considered perfectly normal behaviour. You're just ahead of your time.'
He could go on for ever; I'd had enough. 'Listen, Fungus, I need your help. When can I see you?'
'Soon as you like.'
'Tonight?'
'Sure, where?'
'My place, about seven. You know I'm back at my mother's house now?'
'Yes, I'm sorry about her. She was a grand lady, I thought a lot of her.'
'Thanks,' I said, 'and now I've got some information for you.' I told him all about Parker.
'Parker? It could be his pen name,' he suggested. He was stealing my material.
'In that case, he's a pen pusher I countered.
'Well let's see if we can pension him off.'
'To the penitentiary?'
'Pentonville, of course.'
'Let's make that the penultimate comment.'
'Thank God for that. Will your boy give evidence?'
'No way, Pedro!'
'Have you been bending the rules, Charlie?'
'Mmm, massaging them, a little.'
'Listen, Charlie; listen to Uncle Mike. It's not worth it, there's too much at stake. The days have gone when you could give them a clip round the ear and they'd say, 'Thank you sir, I deserved that,' and send you a Christmas card.'
'Ah, those were the days. You're right, but it's good info. However, whatever you do, keep it to yourself as much as possible somebody in the Force is involved.' No need to tell him just yet that it's only our Chief Constable.
Mike's voice fell an octave. 'Oh dear, are you sure?'
'That's why I want to see you tonight. Then, when we've sorted that lot out, I'll take you to Kim Limbert's promotion bash. She's coming to the city.'
'So I've heard. Actually I'm supposed to be going to a do over here.
One of our number has just become a dad after trying for fifteen years, so we're wetting the baby's head.'
'Lovely. What did they do change their milkman?'
'Probably,' Mike replied. 'I've only to throw my shirt on the bed and the wife's pregnant. He's got a little girl, so they're calling her Mira.'
'Myra? After the Pontefract Poisoner?'
'No, after the electric shower manufacturers. Apparently she was conceived under one of their products.'
We drove up towards the Coiners in my car, out of the decent weather into the perpetual rain of the high moorlands. Every schoolboy learns that Lancashire got the cotton because of the damp atmosphere on their side of the hill, whilst we got the wool due to the softness of the water in our streams. Nobody mentions the slave trade, of course. We weren't taught about the merchants from Liverpool and Manchester who financed slave ships to plunder Africa. They carried their wretched cargo to America and returned laden with cotton for their almost-as- wretched mills. The merchants grew fat and wealthy, gave their names to various philanthropic projects and bought respectability.
'We could have a pudding while we're here,' said Mike, with the enthusiasm of the ill-fed, when he saw the sign.
'No way,' I stated.
I led him through a stile in the dry-stone wall at the back of the car park, and paced out twenty-five steps along the wall side. 'There it is,' I told him, pointing at the white package, still wedged between the stones where I had concealed it the night before. Mike fished it out, holding a corner between finger and thumb, and dropped it into a plastic bag.
'Fraid I handled it quite a bit,' I confessed, then asked: 'Any guesses what it is?'
'No, not yet, but it looks interesting. I'll have it analysed in the morning.'
We drove down the hill in silence for a while. Eventually Mike said:
'How do you want us to play this, Charlie?'
I'd filled him in on the background on the way up. 'Softly-softly, if possible. Somebody's out to nail me, so I'd like to keep it under wraps. Let them have to try again. If that stuff's self-raising flour there's no harm done. If it's something else, we've a problem.'
'Thanks for the 'we'. I think we can both kiss goodbye to our night on the tiles. I'll go straight in with this, see if I can raise a friendly expert; and I don't want it hanging around me for too long.
You'd better get something down on paper: if we're keeping quiet we'd best cover our backs.'
I'd been looking forward to seeing Kim again, but never mind it gave me an excuse to call her sometime in the future. I set to work on the word processor in the spare bedroom-cum-office and put down for posterity the events subsequent to the mysterious phone call. Then, because I felt wide awake, I typed out the story of my trip to ABC House, and the visitation of Chief Constable Hilditch. I ran off three copies and sealed them in separate envelopes.
Seven a.m. the phone rang. It was Mike Freer. I'd forgotten that the Drug Squad are night owls. He sounded agitated. 'It's heroin. I had half a gram analysed. The Professor said it's the purest he's ever seen.'
'So where does that leave us?'
'Easy on the 'us', Super Sleuth. It leaves you with half a kilogram of Bogota's best; street value about two hundred thousand quid.'
'Jesus! I'll take it. Where is it now?'
'It's sealed in a jiffy bag with my name on it and in our safe. It should be okay there. Trouble is, your story is that it was planted on you to incriminate you; our story, if we tell it, is that it's the biggest individual haul we've ever had. Over the top's hardly the word.'
'You mean nobody would believe me.'
'Somebody decided to make you a rich man, because they had a grudge against you? Would you believe it?'
'No. They must be swimming in the stuff, whoever they are.'
'And they're clever. What's your next move?'
'I've written three reports,' I told him. 'I'll lodge one with Gilbert Wood this morning. Hopefully that will keep us in the clear. I don't want to go public yet, if that's okay with you. Somebody's invested a lot in me, let's see what their next move is.'
'Anything you say, Sheepshagger. Are you sending me a copy?'
'In the post this morning. Thanks for your help, Mike, I appreciate it.'
'No problem. Meanwhile, we'll have a look for your Parker friend. Who knows, you could qualify for a transfer to the Drug Squad yet.'
As soon as the morning's formalities were over I collared Gilbert Wood in his office. I asked him to sign and date one of the envelopes across the flap, and gave it to him for safekeeping. Next, when he was sitting comfortably, cup of decaffeinated in hand, I told him the full story.
Gilbert looked grave and thoughtful. 'Jesus Christ, Charlie, you've poked a gorilla in the arse with a sharp stick this time. When do you get your twenty-six and a half years in? Is it before me?'
'We don't qualify for good behaviour or ill-health, Gilbert, we're both full-termers.'
'I'm working on it. We've probably enough to bring Cakebread in and spin his premises. It's not very satisfactory, though, and we'd not root out the Force connection. Let's just clarify what we've got so far.'
Gilbert pulled an easel out of the corner of his office, with a large flip-chart on it. The first pen he tried didn't
