I thought about going out in a blaze of glory. They’d have put it down to post-traumatic stress, or something, and given me a full pension. And it would certainly have made good television, as I demonstrated how to reshape the front of an MG by battering it with a journalist’s head. They might even have given me my own chat show. Instead, I just turned away and took a few deep breaths. I’m growing either old or soft, or both.
Burgess-Jones stepped forward again and the grinder in his hands leapt from zero to three thousand revs per minute with a yelp like a kicked dog. “About there,” Denver instructed him, pointing to a spot just behind the MG badge. I walked forward to have a closer look.
He moved the spinning wheel across the pristine surface, barely skimming the top layer away. We smelt burning paint and saw flakes of it melt and then fly off. He gradually enlarged the patch, revealing the grey undercoat and a darker primer edging the scar, like woodgrain, or an aerial view of a coastline.
Sparks flew when he touched metal. The patch of bare metal grew as he moved the wheel across it. Silver steel, that’s all. “Back a bit,” I shouted to Burgess-Jones above the whine of the grinder, and he expanded the area he was attacking. The patch grew longer, but it was blank and inviolate.
There was one aesthetically pleasing spot where you could fix the jaguar, and we’d covered that. Anywhere else and it would have looked wrong. Too far forward and the cat would have been leaping downhill, too far back and it would cease to be a bonnet mascot. But Silkstone knew nothing about aesthetics, and I clung to that fact.
“Keep going,” I said.
Denver gestured to Grateful Dead for him to move in with the camera and get a good close-up of the metal. Burgess-Jones was nearly halfway back to the windscreen when I saw him tense and stoop more closely over the car. “There’s something here!” he cried.
There it was. A dissimilar metal, to borrow a phrase from my schooldays, peering out from under the paint and growing by the second. First one brass-coloured disc was revealed, then another an inch behind it, like twin suns blazing in the silver sky of a distant planet. Burgess-Jones enlarged the sky, gave it a neat finish, then stepped proudly back.
“You did it,” I said to him. “You did it. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
“My pleasure,” he replied, a big smile across his face.
Denver looked at where the holes had been, before some craftsman had filled them with braze and made the bonnet as good as new. “Are they the right size?” he asked.
“Yes,” Burgess-Jones told him. “About a quarter inch diameter at one inch centres. Exactly right, I’d say.”
“Wow!” Denver exclaimed, recovering his equilibrium and doing a U-turn that would have overturned a Ferrari but didn’t make his conscience even wobble. “Wow! Do I have a story! Do I have a fuckin’ story!” He patted his pockets, feeling for his phone, then remembered it was in his car, being recharged.
Grateful Dead zoomed in at my watch and asked me if that would do. I nodded and he said: “Cut!” and stopped the camera.
Denver was heading towards the cars, so I followed him. When I arrived he was emptying his pockets, piling coins and mints and tissues on the roof of his Ford. Everything but keys. I unlocked mine and reached into the glove box for my mobile phone. “I’ve lost my keys,” Denver muttered. “I’ve lost my keys.”
I tapped out the Heckley nick number and pointed inside his car, asking: “Are they them?”
Denver stooped to look inside, pulling at the door handle. “Aw fuck!” he cursed. “I’ve locked them in. I’ve fuckin’ locked them in. How’d I do that? I thought it was impossible. How’d I do that?”
“It’s DI Priest,” I said into the phone. “I want you to do two things for me. First of all I want an all ports warning issuing for the arrest of Tony Silkstone, and then I want to talk to the press department. I want a story circulating to Reuters and Associated Press, as soon as possible.”
Denver had decided to enlist help. “Mr Burgess-Jones!” he called, turning and jogging back to the others. “Mr Burgess-Jones, can you help me, please?”
A voice on the phone said: “Heckley police station, how can I help you?”
“Hello George,” I replied. “Where’ve you been? I’ve been talking to myself.”
“Feeding the cat, Charlie. Where are you? That’s more to the point.”
“I’m down in Lincolnshire.”
“It’s all right for some.”
“Work, George, work. Listen, there’s two things. First of all I want an APW issuing for Tony Silkstone, and then I want to speak to the press officer.”
“Silkstone?” George replied. “You got enough on him, have you?”
“Yes, George, I think we have. I really think we have.”
After that, I got mean. I made Denver sit in my car and when Prendergast started making objections I reminded him that he represented nobody there and threatened to chuck him in the duckpond, whereupon he made an excuse and left. Burgess-Jones thought it all a hoot. I rang the local CID and eventually handed everything over to them, including Denver. The AA arrived with a set of Slim Jims, as used by the more professional car thieves, and opened Denver’s car. Inside it we found the record card for Silkstone’s MG, as made out by Smith Brothers and showing that it had been sold to Mr Burgess-Jones, so the chain was complete.
All the papers carried the story next day, but the UK News still claimed it as a world exclusive, even though we gave some of the best bits to the others. Lincolnshire police let Denver go, on their bail, and a week later he was given an official caution. No chance there of him claiming that we were heavy-handed with him.
Silkstone had made a run for it, as we thought. He panicked, and followed an elaborate plan to make it look as if he’d killed himself by driving the Audi over Bempton cliffs. Unfortunately several eye-witnesses and a few second’s video footage revealed that he’d driven his late wife’s Suzuki Vitara to York, travelled back to Heckley by train, taken the Audi to Bempton where he’d sent it over the edge, and then found his way back to York again and, he hoped, freedom. We picked him up two days later, lying low at a caravan site near Skegness. Dave and I went to fetch him — sometimes, I indulge myself.
Afterwards, in the in-between hours which are neither night nor day, I thought that perhaps it might not stick. A clever brief might cast doubts on my methodology, declare some evidence inadmissible, get him off. It would all be down to the jury, but I didn’t care. The first time DNA profiling was used in a murder case it indicated that the person under arrest was innocent, even though he had made a full confession. The local police were outraged and Alec Jeffreys, the scientist who developed the technique, must have been devastated. But he stuck to his guns, had faith in the system, and eventually the real murderer was caught.
Looking back on it, freeing that innocent man must give Sir Alec much more satisfaction than pointing the finger at a guilty one. About a fortnight after Silkstone was committed for trial I received a letter from Jean Hullah, matron of the Pentland Court Retirement Home. She said that Mrs Grace Latham, mother of Peter, had died, but she was aware that her son had been cleared of suspicion of murdering Mrs Silkstone and had wanted to write and thank me. And young Jason Lee Gelder was off the hook too. He was too dense to realise how close he’d been, but now he was free to earn his living skinning dead cows and spend his earnings on evenings of passion in the brickyard. Even if Silkstone walked, and I didn’t think he would, it was still a result.
I was sitting at my desk, feet on it, reading a report from Germany about how changing the diet of the inmates of a children’s home from cola drinks and fish fingers to organically grown sauerkraut transformed them all from rebellious louts into adorable little cherubs when there was a knock at the door and Annette came in. I let my chair flop onto all four feet and smiled at her.
“Oh, I thought you’d brought me a coffee,” I said, noticing that she was empty-handed and pushing the spare chair towards her.
“No,” she replied, without returning the smile. “I brought you this. I thought you ought to be the first to know.” It was a long white envelope, addressed to me.
I took it from her and turned it in my fingers. “Is it what I think it is?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I hoped it wouldn’t come to this,” I told her, and she shrugged her shoulders. I placed it on my desk, propped against a box of paperclips, and looked at it. “You’ve some holiday to come,” I stated.
“Three weeks,” she confirmed.
“So you could be gone by the end of next week.”
