me see the body?’ and he grew progressively more irritated each time Wield steered him away from the topic.
He was seated in the caravan, Wield facing him, his back to the window, which any fan of crime fiction knows is the approved interrogation set-up with the interrogator’s face in shadow and the light streaming into the interrogatee’s eyes.
It has the disadvantage that the latter can see out of the window while the former can’t. So it was that over the sergeant’s shoulder, Watkins saw an ambulance arrive and two paramedics enter the building, bearing a stretcher.
He stood up, saying, ‘I need a breath of air,’ went to the door, jumped down from the caravan, and then he was off and running towards the Villas.
Wield was fit and had the high muscular tone of a sprinter, but even moving at full speed he didn’t get the man in his sights till he burst through on to the second floor and saw him vanishing into his apartment behind the stretcher bearers.
Jennison was inside, holding the door open, so he couldn’t be blamed for not bringing Watkins to a halt. But once in the room, no human agency was needed.
The sight of the near faceless body lying on the floor stopped him in his tracks.
‘Oh Christ,’ he said. ‘Oh Christ.’
His legs were buckling and Wield and Jennison had to practically carry him back down the stairs and out into the open air, which he drew into his lungs in great rasping gulps.
A constable came hurrying from the caravan.
‘Sarge,’ he said, ‘there’s a TV crew turned up at the barrier.’
It was bound to happen sooner or later, thought Wield. Sooner, if Mrs Dutta had anything to do with it. Thank God he’d ordered the tape to be replaced by a metal barrier and removed Hector from duty. He’d have probably waved the TV van through!
But even from a distance their cameras would be nosing up close.
He said, ‘Let’s get you back into the caravan, sir. What you need is a cup of hot sweet tea. Give him a hand, lad.’
By the time Pascoe arrived a few minutes later, the Welshman was looking a lot better, but he hadn’t spoken another word. Wield had seen this kind of reaction before-imminence to tragedy triggering logorrhoea, sight of a bloody corpse producing lingual paralysis. But Wield’s skill at plucking relevant facts from a flood of verbiage meant he already had plenty of information to offer the DCI.
The two policemen stood outside the caravan. It had a door at the back as well as at the side, so they were able to descend unseen by the inquisitive media cameras. Sunset was over an hour away, but the day was clearly in decline. A light mist rising from the river turned the derelict mills on the far side into romantic ruins. The air still retained something of its earlier warmth but there was in it a hint of a chilly night to come.
Pascoe said, ‘Right, Wieldy, so now it looks like we’ve got ourselves a dead journalist. Let’s have the grisly detail.’
Wield said, ‘Like I told you, the guy in the caravan is this Alun Gruffud Watkins the Duttas told us about. Age twenty-three, he works as a rep for Infield-Centurion, the agricultural supplies company. The dead man, subject to forensic confirmation, seems likely to be Gareth Jones, nineteen, a reporter with the Mid-Wales Examiner. He has been staying with Mr Watkins since Friday last.’
He paused, seeing that Pascoe had a question. He knew what the question was going to be, but he also knew that, whether dealing with superiors or suspects, it generally paid to give the impression of genuine dialogue.
Pascoe said, ‘This Watkins, how’s he look?’
Not an enquiry after the man’s health but his status. Witness or suspect.
Wield said, ‘Mr Watkins has been working this weekend. He left on Friday lunchtime and has not been back since. I have the address of the farm he claims to have been visiting this afternoon. It’s just south of Darlington. I’ve got the locals taking a statement, but a telephone call has confirmed Mr Watkins’ story that he was there from two until four thirty, which takes him out of the frame.
‘He was here when Jones arrived on Friday morning. The young man’s old banger just made it and Watkins got a local garage to send someone round to check it. They took one look and said they would need to take it in, start work on it straight away and hopefully finish on Monday morning. Mr Watkins didn’t want to leave his friend without transport so he offered him the use of the Yamaha which he normally takes with him in the back of his van on his trips.’
‘So we’ve got Watkins out of the frame,’ said Pascoe. ‘And we know how Jones came to be riding his bike. But why, if his friend was coming for the weekend, did Watkins take off and leave him?’
‘Because Jones invited himself,’ said the sergeant. ‘He rang up mid-week to say he had to be in Mid-Yorkshire at the weekend and asked if he could doss down on Watkins’s floor. Watkins said he could do better than that, Jones was welcome to his bed as he was going to be away. I asked him if he knew why his friend was coming here. He said Jones indicated he was working on a story. No details and he didn’t press.’
Pascoe said sceptically, ‘Didn’t press? And him an old mate?’
Wield said, ‘Seems that Jones’s older brother, Gwyn, is an investigative reporter…’
He paused to see if this rang a bell.
Pascoe said, ‘Gwyn Jones, you mean, on the Daily Messenger?’
‘That’s the one,’ said Wield. ‘Mr Watkins knows the Jones family well, he’s from the same village, three years younger than Gwyn and the same older than Gareth. When Gwyn started in journalism, he was always quoting some famous reporter who said, Never tell your story till it’s ready to be told. That became Gareth’s motto too when he started following in big brother’s footsteps. So Watkins reckoned asking questions was pointless. Also, he was in a hurry.’
‘Does he work a lot at weekends then?’ asked Pascoe.
‘Business and pleasure, I gathered. Farming’s a seven-day job, so the farmers don’t mind. And I’d guess he’s got at least a couple of girlfriends scattered around the county that he likes to keep happy. He’s a bit of a chancer, I’d say. That so-called apartment’s pretty basic, and he’s got a camp bed in the back of his van. But when I was checking his laptop, I found he’d got templates for the letterheads and account invoices of good class hotels all over the North, plus several local garages. Looking at the expense claims he makes to Infield-Centurion could be instructive.’
‘Perhaps, but not to us. Not unless we need something to put a bit of pressure on the guy,’ said Pascoe. ‘Let’s concentrate on making sense of what we’ve got, which appears to be a young journalist come all the way from Wales to snoop around this woman, Gina Wolfe. Does that make sense to you?’
‘Mebbe. Snooping around’s what journalists do, isn’t it?’ said Wield.
‘I can’t see how there’s anything here to interest the readers of the Mid-Wales Examiner,’ retorted Pascoe.
‘What if he weren’t working for his local rag? What if he were doing a bit of moonlighting on brother Gwyn’s behalf?’ said Wield. ‘Something to do with the Gidmans, for instance? That would really get the Messenger’s sensors twitching.’
‘Maybe,’ said Pascoe thoughtfully. ‘I’ve got a feeling we need to tread carefully here, Wieldy.’
‘Not worried about treading on someone’s toes, are you?’ said the sergeant, regarding him doubtfully.
‘No, but I’m worried about being warned off anyone’s toes before I’ve had the chance to give them a good treading,’ grinned Pascoe. ‘Didn’t you say that when you started digging for info about Macavity, you felt things had been very carefully tidied up? From what I’ve read about him, this Goldie Gidman wields a lot of influence now. Any whiff of a scandal touching him, them buggers in London will be covering themselves like tarts in a raided brothel!’
Wield hid a smile. There were times when Pete sounded so like the Fat Man it was hard to tell the difference.
‘What?’ demanded Pascoe, eyeing him sharply.
This was another area where they’d grown together, thought the sergeant. Was a time when only Dalziel came close to being able to read his face, but now the DCI was starting to get the knack.
As he opened his mouth to prevaricate, the caravan door burst open and DC Bowler jumped down the steps, his face split by a huge smile.
‘Just had a bulletin from the hospital, sir. Seems Shirley’s woken up and they say she knows who she is and
