“The one you mean.”
“How do you know which one I mean?”
“Stands to reason, dunnit? The bloke who got killed.”
“Ah. That’s better, Les. And here was me thinking you weren’t up on current affairs. How did you hear about it?”
“Saw it on the telly, didn’t I? On the news. Someone gets croaked around these parts you can’t help but hear about it somewhere.”
“Good. Now seeing as this Carl Johnson you heard about on the news is the same Carl Johnson you shared a cell with in Armley Jail?”
“I told you, it was a different bloke!”
Banks sighed. “Les, don’t give me this crap. I’m tired and I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten since elevenses, and here I am sticking around out of the goodness of my heart just to talk to you. I’m trying to be very civilized about this. That’s why we’re in my nice comfortable office just having a friendly chat instead of in some smelly interview room. Listen, Les, we’ve got prison records, we’ve got fingerprints, we’ve got warders who remember. Believe me, it was the same person.”
“Well, bugger me!” Les said, sitting up sharply. “What a turn-up for the book. Poor old Carl, eh? And here was me hoping it must have been someone else.”
Banks sighed. “Very touching, Les. When did you last see him?”
“Oh, years ago. How long was it you said? Four years.”
“You haven’t seen him since you came out?”
“No. Why should I?”
“No reason, I suppose. Except maybe that you both live in the same town?”
“Eastvale ain’t that small.”
“Still,” said Banks, “it’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it? He’s been in Eastvale a few months now. It strikes me that, given your records, the two of you might have got together to do a little creative thievery. Like the Fletcher’s warehouse job, for example. I’m sure Carl was versatile enough for that.”
“Now there you go again, accusing me of that. I ain’t done nothing.”
“Les, we could drive down to your house right now, pick up the television and the compact music centre, maybe even the video, too, and likely as not prove they came from that job.”
“Brenda bought those in good faith!”
“Bollocks, Les. What’s it to be?”
Poole licked his lips. “You wouldn’t,” he said. “You wouldn’t dare go and take them away, not after what’s happened to poor Brenda.” A sly smile came to his face. “Think how bad it would look in the papers.”
“Don’t push me, Les.” Banks spoke quietly, but the menace in his voice came through clearly. “What we’re dealing with here is a man who was gutted. Ever been fishing, Les? Ever cleaned a fish? You take one of those sharp knives and slit its gullet open to empty the entrails. Well, someone took a knife like that, someone who must have known Carl Johnson pretty well to get so close to him in such a remote spot, and stuck the knife in just above his balls and dragged it slowly up his guts, sliced his belly button in two, until it got stuck on the chest bone. And Carl’s insides opened up and spilled like a bag of offal, Les. If his jacket hadn’t been zipped up afterwards they’d have spilled all over the bloody dale.” He pointed at Poole’s beer-belly. “Do you know how many
yards of intestine you’ve got in there? Are you seriously telling me that I’ll let a few stolen electrical goods get in the way of my finding out who did that?”
Poole held his stomach and paled. “It wasn’t me, Mr Banks. Honest, it wasn’t. I’ve got to go to the toilet. I need a piss.”
Banks turned away. “Go.”
Poole opened the door, and Banks asked the uniformed PC standing there to escort him to the gents.
Banks turned to Susan. “What do you think?”
“I think he’s close, sir,” she said.
“To what?”
“To telling us what he knows.”
“Mm,” said Banks. “Some of it, maybe. He’s a slippery bugger is Les.”
He lit a cigarette. A short while later, Poole returned and resumed his seat.
“You were saying, Les?”
“That I’d nothing to do with it.”
“No,” said Banks. “I don’t believe you had. For one thing, you haven’t got the bottle. Just for the record, though, where were you last Thursday evening?”
“Thursday? … Let me see. I was helping my mate in his shop on Rampart Street.”
“You seem to spend a lot of time at this place, Les. I never took you for a hard worker before, maybe I was wrong. What do you do there?”
“This and that.”
“Be more specific, Les.”
“I help out, don’t I? Make deliveries, serve customers, lug stuff around.”
