good day. Dave and Annette sat him in the front seat of Dave’s car and took him for a ride. He took pride in his work, liked to show off about his nefarious deeds. Put him in the company of an attractive lady and he sang like the Newport Male Voice Choir the time they beat the All Blacks. I didn’t like using Annette that way, didn’t like the thought of his hungry eyes dragging over her contours, stripping her naked, but sometimes I have to act like a grown-up. It’s not easy for me.
“A hundred and nineteen,” she sighed, five fifteen Thursday evening, as she flopped into the spare chair in my office.
“That’ll do,” I told her. “No more days out for Laddo with my glamorous assistant. Do they all check out?”
“The ones we’ve looked at do. He remembers how he got in, what he took, the make of everything and how much he sold it for. A hundred and nineteen householders are going to find out that their burglary — their burglary — has been taken into consideration. All that grief, and he walks. He doesn’t give a toss about any of them. It doesn’t seem fair, Boss.”
She was right. He’d stand trial for the one we caught him for and, if found guilty, the judge would be informed of the other offences. The TICs. They’d make a marginal difference to his sentence, his slate would be wiped clean and our figures would look good. Everybody happy except the victims. But villains don’t commit crimes against individuals, they commit them against society. It might be your house that is burgled, your car that is stolen and torched, but the crime is against the state, so tough luck.
“It’s not fair,” I agreed, “but that’s the law, and our job ends when we nab him and gather the evidence. Don’t worry about it, Annette. If he gets a light sentence and never does another crime, then the system has worked. If he keeps on blagging, we’ll keep on catching him. His cards are well-marked.”
“I suppose so. Sorry to be a moan, Boss.”
“No problem.”
She bent forward, as if to rise from the chair, then stopped. “Um, it’s Thursday, today,” she said, looking me straight in the face.
“Yep, I had noticed.”
“Well, after four days of him I don’t feel like going home and cooking. Fancy a Chinese? I owe you one.”
I pursed my lips, sucked in my cheeks. Anything to look noncommittal. I failed, miserably. “Um, yeah,” I said. “Smashing.”
“What time?” she asked, rising to her feet.
“Er, now?” I wondered, following her up.
She wanted to go home and change, and it wasn’t a bad idea for me to do the same. At seven thirty, clean shaven and crisply attired, I parked outside her downstairs flat on the edge of the town. Annette saw me arrive and came out, wearing jeans and a Berghaus fleece over a T-shirt. Her hair was tied back, where it exploded from out of a black band in an untamed riot. I wanted to sit there and tell her how good she looked, but I didn’t.
I settled for: “Hi Kid, still Chinese?”
“Yes, please.”
“We could have a change, if you’d prefer it.”
“No, Chinese is fine.”
“OK.” I put the car in first gear and eased away from the kerb. “If I remember rightly,” I told her, “it’s my turn to get you drunk.”
Mr Ho wasn’t there, so we didn’t have a cabaret or free tea, but it gave us a chance to talk. The holiday had been good but I gained the distinct impression that something about it wasn’t too brilliant. The company, perhaps? They’d canoed down the river for four days, staying at campsites and imbibing copious amounts of local produce. It sounded heaven to me. She didn’t want to talk about it, and her friend was never mentioned by name. When I ventured to ask if the two girls had enjoyed themselves the first flicker of enthusiasm came into her eyes and she said they had. Inevitably, the conversation found its way back to the job.
“I saw Silkstone this morning,” Annette said, “when he came to sign the bail book. He was larger than life and twice as cheerful.”
“Cocky little sod,” I replied. “I haven’t seen him since he was given bail. Anybody would think he’d won the welterweight championship, the way he was jumping up and down, shaking hands with his brief.”
“He wants to change his day next week, because he’s talking at a sales conference.”
“Has his solicitor applied to the court?”
“Yes. He was asking if we’d had notification.”
“Did they let him?”
“I imagine so.”
“Well they shouldn’t have.” I adopted my stern expression and growled.
“You think he’s got away with it, don’t you, Charlie?”
“I don’t know, Annette. I really don’t know.”
“The famous intuition?”
I shook my head. “No, definitely not. I have no sense of intuition. I study the picture, weigh the facts. All the facts, including the seemingly irrelevant.”
She tipped her head to one side and rested it against her fist. “Such as what?” she asked.
The waiter brought the portion of toffee bananas we’d decided to share and I spooned a helping on to my side plate. “These are delicious,” I told her, passing the remainder across the table.
“Mmm!” she agreed after the first mouthful.
“What do you do with junk mail?” I asked.
“Throw it away, usually,” she replied.
“No. In detail, please. Step by step.”
“Step by step? Well, I look at the envelopes, then usually put it all to one side.”
“So you don’t throw it straight in the bin?”
“Um, no.”
“Go on.”
“It stays on the hall table until I have an idle moment. Then I open it, read it a bit…and…that’s when I chuck it in the bin!”
“What about charity stuff?”
“Charity stuff? That hangs about a bit longer. I usually save it until I have a clear out, then it goes the way of the rest, I’m afraid.”
“Do you reply to any?”
“Not as much as I should. Mum has bad arthritis, and I’m scared of it, so I usually send them something. And children’s charities. One or two others, perhaps, but not very often.”
“I’d say you were a generous, caring person,” I told her. “You probably feel uncomfortable about not helping more, but sometimes resent being blackmailed by the more emotional appeals.”
“Yes, I think I do.”
“There were four items of junk mail in Latham’s dustbin, two of them from charities. He’d opened them all and the return envelope and payment slip from one of the charities — the World Wildlife Fund — was pinned on his kitchen noticeboard. Silkstone, on the other hand, handled things more efficiently. There were two items in his bin, both of them unopened. One of them, from ActionAid, was postmarked the day before the killings, so it had probably only arrived that morning.” I grinned, saying: “Of the two of them, I’d rather pin it on Silkstone. Wouldn’t you?”
She smiled and carefully lifted a spoonful of toffee banana towards her mouth. I watched her lips engulf it and the spoon slide out from between them. “So…” she mumbled, chewing and swallowing, “So…if you were a psychiatrist, doing a profile of whoever had killed Mrs Silkstone, you’d go for the person who dumped his junk mail, unopened.”
“Every time.”
“What about the evidence?”
“We’re just talking profiles. You used the word, I try to avoid it.”
“Why?”
