upstairs in the HQ CID office and I had his latest address. Middleton, South Leeds. I thanked everyone for their help, flirted briefly with a rather attractive sergeant and left. Carter lived in a cottage along a dirt track near the golf course. It sounds nice, but a burnt-out shell of a Fiesta reminded me that just down the road was a rambling estate where middle-class meant having floorboards, and quiche was the plural of cosh.
He was in the garden, hacking at a grass jungle with a bargain-store sickle. A golf club would have done more good. His hedges were overgrown, heavy with honeysuckle and wild roses. It was a cottage garden gone mad, and it reinforced my belief that there is no such thing as a labour-saving garden. He looked up and demanded: 'Who are you?' the sickle held handy to deliver a forearm volley. I told him.
I'd decided that his wife had left him long before he poured it out.
The garden; the state of his front room; having to wash two cups before he could offer me a coffee; they were all clues. I lived like that, once, before I reformed. Carter was wearing grey slacks, a striped cream shirt with the cuffs and neck fastened, and black brogues. His only concession to the weather had been to remove his tie. He told me he'd retired early and spent his time working for a Third World charity and trying to write a textbook on Roman England. He believed that Roman values were lacking in certain elements of our present-day society, and a return to them would be for the good.
Crucifixion? I thought.
He'd missed the fire, of course. First he knew of it was when he saw the boarded-up holes and smoke- streaked brickwork. He'd been shocked to learn that they'd all been killed, and disturbed by the matter-of-fact acceptance of it by his neighbours. They'd had a month to get used to the idea, and it's amazing how the human mind can accommodate disaster when it happens to someone else.
'It was twenty-three years ago,' I reminded him. 'Can you remember the girl you saw?'
'Oh yes, Inspector. I've thought about it so many times.'
'You said in your statement that she may have put something through the letter box?'
He looked uncomfortable. 'I know I did. She walked to the front door so purposefully, paused for a few seconds much longer than it would have taken to put a letter through and turned and left, equally purposefully.'
'Maybe she was checking the address on the envelope,' I suggested.
'I thought of that. It's possible, but her actions weren't right. I went through all this with the detective, you know.'
'OK,' I said, 'how does this sound? The woman walked up to the front door with a piece of chalk in her hand. The house was number thirty-two but the painted number had weathered away. She wrote thirty-two on the wall and left. Could that have been it?'
His eyes widened slightly and he nodded. His skin was sallow and hung in folds around his neck. He wasn't eating properly since she left. I didn't get this bad, did I? 'Do you know, Inspector, I believe you could be right.' He stood up and faced an imaginary door. 'The numbers were painted about here,' he said, raising his left hand to shoulder height. 'At least, mine was.' He went through the motions and said: 'Did she write it at this side?'
'Yes.'
'In that case, she'd have to lean over if she were right-handed, which she didn't. It would make more sense if she were left-handed.'
'We'll make a detective of you yet, Mr. Carter,' I said. 'I'd come to that conclusion myself. Now what about her description? Do you think you can give me one?'
'Wasn't it on the file?'
'No, I didn't find it.'
'Well, I told the detective who interviewed me. It's a bit late, if you don't mind me saying so. It's lost its impact.'
'We appreciate that she'll be much older now,' I said.
'It's not just that. Punk was just starting, and now every other young person you meet has purple hair, but up to then I'd only seen it on television.'
I was up six times through the night. My neck itched, my wrists itched and my ankles itched. Big lumps came up in all these places. Now I knew why Carter kept his shirt tightly buttoned; he wasn't as dumb as I'd thought. I searched the bathroom cabinet for soothing gels but all I could find was some body lotion pour hommes that Nigel had told me contained pheromones and drove women wild. It didn't work, and wasn't any better on midge bites. I showered, dressed, wrecked the spider's web on the car door with great relish and went to work.
Sparky wanted to know all about it, and was as chuffed as a cock robin when I told him about the left-handed girl with purple hair.
'That's what we said,' he reminded me. 'When we found the chalk. How tall did he say she was?'
'About five feet, five-two.'
'Bloody 'ell! We ought to be detectives.'
'We are detectives.'
'So Carter saw this punk bird mark the house and Duncan told his brother he was going out with someone with purple hair? It's got to be the same one.'
'I'd have thought so. When did punk start?' I asked him.
'Umm, about 1980?' he suggested. 'Bit before, maybe.'
'Mid-seventies, according to the library. Their gazetteer says it 'exploded' in 1976 and that's the year the Sex Pistols released 'Anarchy in the UK'. Never Mind the Bollocks was in '77. There can't have been too many of them around in '75 'specially in the provinces.
Maybe she was before her time, like me. How do you fancy a day on the telephone?'
'Er, I don't,' he replied glumly, anticipating what I had in mind.
'But David,' I began, 'it's essential work, which may lead to the apprehension of a vicious criminal. It's not just the glamorous jobs, such as mine, that bring results. They also serve who sit in the office all day drinking vast quantities of machine coffee.'
'Gimme t'list,' he said, reaching for it.
If you go into any high street shop and buy something, a vacuum cleaner for example, the pimply assistant manager who takes your order will punch your name and post code into his terminal and say: 'Is that Mr.
Windsor of Buckingham Palace Road?' and you say it is and your full name and address is printed on the invoice. Our system is nearly as good. If you have ever bought anything on credit, taken out a driving licence, voted in an election or owned a telephone, we have you on record. Or maybe you've joined a motoring organisation, a book club or the Mormons. Most of these sell each other volumes of names and addresses, and we're on the circulation list. When we get really desperate we consult Somerset House. If you've been born, married or died they'll know all about it. I gave Dave the three pages of names and addresses that Jeremy had sent me from the university.
'These are Duncan Roberts's classmates,' I told him, 'with their parents' addresses. It might be easier to see if mum and dad still live in the same place and ask them. Otherwise…' '… otherwise, consult the oracle,' Dave finished for me.
'That's it, sunshine. And these…' I passed him another sheet, '… are names I extracted from the file yesterday. The three with the asterisks are the boyfriends of the women who died in the fire. Let's not lose sight of the fact that one of them might have started it. And then there are the names on the report that Crosby gave us. It wouldn't hurt to have a word with that lot.
I'll sort them out. If all else fails with the students, there's a department at the university called the alumni relations' office. Old boys' club to you. They might be able to help.' His hangdog expression gave me a pain in the left ventricle that I couldn't ignore.
I said: 'You could, of course, give Annette a crash course in the system and leave her to it.' Annette Brown was a DC who'd been with us for a fortnight and had already fallen under Nigel's protective arm.
'I was going to ask you,' he replied, 'but it'll upset Goldenballs.'
'He'll recover. Anything else?'
'No. Where will you be if I need you?'
'Chemist's, to start with.'
'Chemist's? What for?'
'Something for bloody midge bites.'
