hoping to Christ he wasn’t about to cover the same ground as his boss.
‘Well, that’s a relief. I didn’t fancy a second excursion into the wilder reaches of my sex life. So, how can I help you, Detective?’
‘Back in February, you wrote an email to Robbie about some guy that was bothering you. Turning up to gigs. Minor stalker stuff. Do you remember?’
Bindie groaned. ‘Do I remember? It would be hard to forget.’
‘Can you tell me a bit more about what happened?’
‘You can’t think this has anything to do with Robbie’s death? This was a pathetic little no-mark, not some criminal mastermind.’
‘I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if I didn’t check out every possibility,’ Sam said. ‘So tell me all about this guy.’
‘It started off with letters, cards, flowers, that sort of thing. And then he began to turn up when I was DJ’ing at clubs. Mostly, they wouldn’t let him in because he looked too geeky or freaky or whatever. But sometimes he would get in and he’d hang around the stage or the booth, trying to talk to me, or have his picture taken with me. It was irritating, but it felt pretty harmless. Then Robbie and I had a bit of a bust-up in public one night. You know how it is. A few drinks, things get a little out of hand? We ended up having a screaming match outside a club. The paparazzi picked it up, it was all over the papers and the mags. I mean, we’d made up by the time the pictures hit the streets, but it’s breaking up, not making up that gets the headlines.’ He heard her light a cigarette and waited for her to continue. Waiting. A trick he’d learned from Paula.
‘So this geezer takes it upon himself to defend my honour against this evil boyfriend who is not treating me as he should. He confronts Robbie as he’s leaving the team hotel in Birmingham. Starts reading the riot act. Nothing violent, just loud and a bit embarrassing, according to Robbie. Though of course, Robbie was the last man alive to admit to being scared. Anyway, the police were called, the geezer got carted off to the cells. Turns out that was just the wake-up call he needed. According to the cop I spoke to, once the potential consequences of his behaviour were explained to him, he saw the light. Desperately sorry, realized he’d got things out of proportion. And of course he would leave me and Robbie alone in future. So they let him off with a caution. And in fairness, I haven’t heard anything from him since. And that’s all I can tell you.’
Somehow, it all sounded too pat to Sam. From what he knew about stalkers, they didn’t just pack up and go home when somebody rattled their cage. If they were stupid, they kept on doing the same kind of thing only more so till they eventually got locked up for it. And by that stage, there was often blood and teeth on the carpet. If they were smart, they either found another object for their warped affections or they became more subtle. And the smart ones often ended up causing even more blood and teeth on the carpet. Ask Yoko Ono about that. ‘You’ve really not heard from him since?’
‘Nope. Not even a sympathy card about Robbie.’
‘Have you had many of those?’ Sam asked.
‘Forty-seven delivered by hand yesterday at the BBC. I expect there’ll be more in the post today.’
‘We might want to have a look at those.’
Bindie made an exasperated noise. ‘She was right, your boss. Nothing’s private in a murder investigation. What do you want me to do? Bag them up and post them to you?’
‘If you could bag them up, I’ll have somebody collect them. At your convenience, obviously. If we could just backtrack…’
‘His name was Rhys Butler. He lived in Birmingham. That’s all I can tell you. I gave all the letters and cards to the Brummie cops. Just in case he went off on one again.’
‘Thank you. You read my mind.’
Bindie snorted. ‘Hardly a Booker prize-winner, Detective.’
Sam hated witnesses who thought they were cleverer than the cops. ‘The name of the officer who dealt with you would also be helpful,’ he said, working at keeping the sarcasm out of his voice.
‘Hang on a minute, I’ve got his details somewhere…’ The sound of movement, a drawer being opened, another cigarette lit. At last, she came up with the information. ‘DC Jonty Singh. God, it’s so beautiful, what’s happened to names in this country. Jonty Singh. What a fab name. I love that cricket, the most English thing in the world, has Ramprakash and Panesar alongside Trescothick and Strauss. I adore the way we went from empire to multi-culti in the space of fifty years. Doesn’t that bring a smile to your face, Sam?’
He didn’t much care, All that mattered was that Jonty Singh was the sort of name it wouldn’t be hard to track down in a big force like the West Midlands Police. He also noticed she had gone from ‘detective’ to ‘Sam’ and wondered if she was flirting. It was hard to tell, given her on-air personality. And even if she was, it wasn’t something he wanted to pursue. Didn’t want to be her next bit of rough. ‘Thanks for your time,’ he said.
‘I don’t mind,’ she said, suddenly serious again. ‘It’s all I can do for him now. I really cared about him, you know.’
‘I know,’ Sam said, desperate now to get off the phone and get cracking on his lead. ‘We’ll be in touch.’ He ended the call abruptly. Now, if only he had a computer in his car like the uniformed patrol guys. He’d be well away, fingers flying, carrying him on the next step of his journey. Instead, he’d have to go back to his desk and hope that Stacey wasn’t watching his every keystroke. He was on to something and he was damned if he was going to give anyone else a look in.
He was on tenterhooks waiting for her arrival, but still Tony didn’t announce his discovery the moment Carol walked in. He wanted to savour the anticipation. Besides, he had to admit there was something gratifying about her concern for his welfare. All the ebb and flow of pain and danger that had infiltrated their relationship had left little room for something as simple as sitting around being kind to each other. He knew she’d experienced that-still experienced it, for all he knew–with her family, but it had never been something he’d known. Kindness had always been viewed as weakness in his family. So even though he didn’t entirely know what to do with it, he wasn’t about to sacrifice a moment of their closeness to the demands of work. They’d get to that soon enough.
It was, he recognized, a reordering of his priorities. The part of himself that viewed his own reactions as a perpetual experiment was intrigued to see whether it would last and what it would mean. But to his surprise, there was another part that was happy just to go with the flow.
