‘It’s my birthday. Justin always buys me a present. They called round with it, stayed about ten minutes. Anything else?’
‘No, that’s all for now,’ I said. ‘Which way is the snooker room?’
K. Tom was crouched over the table when I walked in. He played a shot without looking up and balls clicked against each other. None went down. The table was probably half-size, and there was a bar in the corner of the room, with a proper hand pump. The walls were lined with high chairs, so his cronies could watch the action.
‘Nice room,’ I told him, looking round.
‘Do you play?’ he asked, wandering round, studying the pattern of the balls.
‘No.’
‘You should try it. It’s a good way of relaxing.’ He saw whatever he was looking for and played another shot. The black ball cannoned into the cushion alongside a pocket and sped away. The white one trickled towards me and fell into the net bag. Even I knew that this was bad. Maybe the gold bracelet was interfering with his swing. I lifted the ball out and placed it on the baize, at my end of the table, to signify that his little game was over. He straightened his back and placed the cue in the rack.
‘Did you have an affair with Lisa?’ I asked.
For a second he did not know how to answer. He reached across and started rubbing the muscle of his left arm, a pained expression on his face. ‘Who told you that?’ he asked.
‘I get paid to ask questions.’
‘Did Ruth tell you?’
‘Did you?’
‘No, of course not. What did Ruth say?’
‘Same as you.’
‘So who told you I’d had an affair with Lisa?’
‘She did.’
‘Lisa? You knew Lisa?’
Full marks to K. Tom. We were supposing that Lisa told him about me in the second phone call.
‘Mmm.’
‘So why did she tell you that?’
‘Why would she lie? She rang you, twice, the night before she was murdered. What did she want?’
‘Just someone to talk to. She was drunk. She said it was about her VAT returns, but that was just a pretext.’
‘And the second call?’
‘I’d asked her for some figures. She rang me back with them.’
‘What were they?’
‘I don’t remember. I didn’t even write them down. I only said it to get her off the phone. Like I said, she was drunk,’
‘So late Friday night this drunk woman finds her accounts books, extracts some figures from them to do with her VAT returns and rings you back with them. Sounds unlikely, to me.’
He was rubbing his arm again and looking disgruntled. ‘Well, it’s the truth,’ he declared. In other words, prove otherwise, if you can.
‘When did you last see her?’
‘Months ago. Sometime in the summer.’
‘When exactly?’
He shook his head. ‘Can’t remember.’
‘What was the occasion?’
He picked up a blue ball, rotated it in his fingers and put it down again. ‘That’s right,’ he stated. ‘Ruth’s birthday. They came round with a present for her. So it would be…June…or July.’
‘And when did you last see Justin?’
‘Same time.’
‘And you haven’t seen him since?’
‘No.’
‘I thought you were his number two fan, his mechanic, followed him all over the Continent.’
His face turned red and his arm was troubling him again. Some people pull their ear lobes or scratch their heads. He rubbed his upper arm. ‘I, er, might as well tell you,’ he sighed.
‘Go on.’
‘All that…going over to the Continent, with Justin’s bike and some spares. It’s just a ruse. I don’t go to watch him.’
‘So why do you go over there?’ I couldn’t believe he was going to tell me about smuggling gold. He didn’t.
‘It’s, er, Ruth. We, er, don’t have much of a, er, relationship, you know.’
‘You mean, sex.’
‘That’s right. I have a friend, in Amsterdam. I go over to see her as often as I can. You’re a man of the world, Inspector. I’m sure you can imagine how it is.’
Why do they always throw it back at you? I didn’t have a bloody clue how it was to have a street full of friends in Amsterdam. Someone once told me that the tour guides always recommend the girl in number 42 as the most beautiful. Presumably she was the one to avoid, unless you fancied catching the Japanese strain of HIV.
It was blowing cold outside, threatening rain. I glanced at the garage as I climbed into my car, and wondered about the bullbars. It would be easy enough to raise a search warrant, and that might tell us if he was smuggling gold inside them but we’d not find the rest of it. So far he didn’t know we were interested in the gold, unless Jimmy the Fish or the Wattses had tipped him off. I decided it was best to keep on playing it softly-softly.
The next call was the one I wasn’t looking forward to. Normally, I don’t hang about when I drive, but everything overtook me as I wound reluctantly up the old back road between Heckley and Oldfield, towards Broadside, home of Justin Davis.
He was digging the garden, working furiously, oblivious to the knife-edged breeze flattening the cottongrass on the moors. I closed the gate and walked towards him as he straightened up. Long hair blew across his face. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans with ripped knees. I stopped about five yards from him, not sure what to expect. He only stood about five feet six tall, but was wiry with it. Proper muscle, not the false stuff you see on TV freak shows.
‘I came to say how sorry I was — about Lisa,’ I shouted to him, across the patch of newly dug earth.
He placed his foot on the spade and drove it into the ground. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he suggested, and walked towards the house, leaving the spade standing there as if marking a grave.
‘Just give me a minute,’ he said, ushering me into the front room. ‘Sit down, please.’
The parrot wasn’t there. I stood and looked out of the window, down towards the Peak District and what I imagined to be Mam Tor. Big drops of rain dashed on to the glass and slid diagonally away.
‘Take a seat,’ he told me when he returned. He’d changed into a clean version of the same outfit, but was barefoot. His hair was back in a ponytail and his face freshly washed.
‘Thanks.’ I sat in silence for a long time, looking at some object on the floor, like a Buddhist monk contemplating a candle flame. ‘I rang Lisa, Thursday night,’ I began. ‘I wanted to ask her about K. Tom — your stepfather. There are certain suspicions about him smuggling. Gold, we think. I wondered if your falling out had anything to do with it, so I made an appointment to talk to Lisa Friday morning. That’s why I was here. The papers made it sound… They tried to make something out of it. You know what they’re like.’
He nodded. His face was white and lined beyond that caused by an unhealthy lifestyle, his eyes bloodshot and twitching. Fifty hours in a jumbo jet wouldn’t have helped. Fingers with chewed-down nails drummed on the arms of his chair and his feet beat a rhythmless tattoo on the carpet. He badly needed another fix of whatever kept him going.
‘Has the doctor seen you?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. I think the police must have asked him to call.’
‘Did he give you anything?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t like pills. Reality is scary enough. The thought of not being in control terrifies
