Chapter 4
I walked across the car park with him to his battered Volvo — made in Sweden, the Land of Eternal Sidelights and agreed to read his notes and have a think about what he'd told me. He shook my hand as if I'd promised to buy the vehicle from him and I said I'd be in touch.
I didn't mow the lawn. Closer inspection showed it would last another week, and it's not good to cut grass during a dry spell. Well, that's what my father taught me. I opened a can of lager, spread myself out on the garden seat and listened to the world turning on its axis.
I don't see much of Jacquie at weekends. She stays in on Saturday nights, doing her books, her hair and everything else that beautiful ladies do that we men know nothing about. Sundays, when possible, I like to go walking. Once, I'd suggested she come with me and you'd have thought I'd asked her to pose naked for the Police Review.
'Walking?' she'd queried. 'You mean… up hills? For fun?'
So I went on my own. This particular Sunday dawned blue-skied and filled with promise, and I watched a golden sunrise through my rearview mirrors as I headed towards the Lake District. I beat the crowds and found a parking place in the little park just outside Braithwaite. The Coledale Round is a tough walk and you're straight into it. You put the car keys in a safe pocket, hitch up your shorts, step over the stile and start climbing. The path stretches straight and true before you, to the summit of Grisedale Pike two miles away and 2,000 feet higher.
It's good thinking time. You stare down at the path six feet ahead of your boots and let your mind wander. Anything will do, as long as it takes it off the burning sensation in your chest and the wobbles in your legs. After twenty minutes I stopped and turned around to see how far I'd come. The village was like Toytown down below and beyond it the classically proportioned Skiddaw was bathed in sunlight. I took a few deep breaths, eased the straps on my shoulders and told my feet to get moving.
The whole Round was a bit too much for me on such a hot day. One of the pieces of knowledge that comes with the passing of the years is when to say: 'Enough!' I ate my sandwiches on a flat rock under Hopegill Head, sunbathed for an hour then dropped into the valley and followed the miners' road back to the car. It was a good day out. I didn't come to any conclusions about Crosby and Fox, but my legs were definitely a shade browner. Perhaps I'd go to work in my shorts tomorrow.
In the cold light of a Heckley Monday it didn't seem such a good idea, so it was back to the grown-up trousers. We'd had a fracas in the town centre after evensong, so all the cells were filled with rebellious D and Ds demanding their rights prior to appearing before the beak. It's the communion wine that does it. Nothing to do with CID, thank goodness, except that it had taken a big chunk out of the overtime budget. Maggie and Nigel went to circulate the list of property stolen from the McLellands while Jeff and Sparky went to talk to the travel agency managers and collect the names of any customers who'd been booking holidays when the raids took place. I spread the papers Keith Crosby had given me across my desk and started to read.
Everything was on a diskette, but he'd told me he used Apple Mac while I was strictly Microsoft. It didn't matter, as he'd provided hard copies of the important stuff and there wasn't much of it. Nigel was an Apple Mac man, so I'd ask him to run off the full story. The main item was a list of about fifty companies that had fallen on difficult times and crashed in value. Fox had stepped in and bought low, which ain't a crime, and soon afterwards, miraculously, they all appeared to be doing quite nicely. Crosby had listed them in date order, with share price or company value fluctuations over the relevant period and number of shares bought by Fox. Other information was patchy. Against some he'd typed details of the troubles they'd been beset by, and occasionally there was a name. The first on the list was a small chain of betting shops that had suffered a couple of fires and a disastrous loss on the 1970 Grand National when the telephone lines went dead and they couldn't lay off some large bets. Gay Trip had cost them a fortune. Last on it was the Tipley Valley Water Company. It made interesting reading, very interesting, but I couldn't put it much stronger than that. Accidents happen, and anybody could have bought shares in the companies, though when Fox did it was usually enough to take control. I made a few notes, read the letter from Andrew Roberts again and extracted my road atlas from the bottom drawer. It was eight years old; I really ought to bring a new one in. Welwyn Garden City is nearer to London than I thought. I looked in my diary for a number and wrote it on my pad. Directory Enquiries gave me Andrew Roberts's, no problem. Just for the hell of it I did a person check on him and discovered he'd never come to our attention. There must be millions out there like that. I opened my diary at the week ahead and rang Gilbert on the internal.
'Are you likely to need me tomorrow?' I asked him.
'Umm, no, I don't think so,' he replied. 'Anything special?'
'I want to nip down to see Commander Fearnside.'
'Your friend at N-CIS?'
'Mmm.'
'Not going to accept that job he keeps offering you, I hope.'
'That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me, Gilbert. How could I possibly leave after that? No, I've a load of stuff I want to talk to him about. It might be something big, but it's more likely to be a waste of time. He sees the big picture, though. He'll give it a fair hearing.'
'OK. I'll be in most of the week. Arrange it to suit yourself and let me know what he says about it.'
'Cheers, boss.' I clicked the cradle and dialled again.
'Charlie!' Fearnside boomed after I'd manipulated my way past several flunkies. 'Long time no see. How are you, old boy?'
'Fine, Mr. Fearnside. And you?'
'Counting the days, Charlie. Counting the days.'
'Aren't we all. I want an hour of your time, if you don't mind, soon as possible, about a long-running saga that's not going to go away.
It's too big for me to handle without some authority from on high, but its source is an ex-MP, so I've got to take it seriously.'
'Right, Charlie. The wife's got tickets for the ballet tonight, but I could always tell her that something's…'
'Er, not that soon,' I interrupted. 'How about tomorrow?'
He sounded disappointed, but agreed to meet me at the Happy Burger on the M25, near Waltham Cross. He has a thing about their pancakes and likes to escape from the office whenever possible. Clandestine meetings at motorway services made him feel important, but we'd worked on a couple of big jobs together and I trusted him to know if Crosby was being paranoid or if there really was a case. I placed the phone back and wandered into the open-plan, feeling suddenly restless. The wheels were in motion. There was nobody to talk to, so I filled the kettle and switched it on. Somebody's tabloid was lying there. I looked at the ladies' bosoms, the front page and the sport, in that order. Rebecca, on page three, was studying law. A barrister's wig was perched on her head, improving her posture wonderfully, and the caption read: All stand for the judge. She was beautiful, as they always are. Humiliating the plain ones isn't any fun. Silly girl, I thought. Thumbing through the rest I came across the horoscopes and scanned the dates. July 23 to August 23, that was me. Leo, would you believe it. It said that I was drifting aimlessly, and ought to try harder to create an impression. I knew I should have come in my shorts.
'How much is on it?' Nigel asked much later after he'd listened to the story, turning the diskette in his fingers as if he'd never seen one before.
'Not sure,' I replied. 'Just do one copy to start with, please, for me to give to Fearnside. Then, if there's not too much of it, do another couple. Put something on your FIN33 to cover it.'
Sparky was sitting on the edge of my desk, perusing the list Crosby had given me. 'Bloody hell,' he concluded, offering it back to me.
'Is that your considered opinion?' I asked.
'I knew there was more to that fire than everybody thought,' he replied.
'Are you sure he's not a nutter?' Nigel asked. 'When we lived in Virginia Water we had a neighbour who claimed to be the last descendant of Walter Raleigh. Spent the family fortune trying to prove it and finished up in a mental hospital.'
'No, I'm not sure at all,' I replied.
