appearances.
The building was in a quiet but far from mean street within walking distance of Harrogate’s Majestic Hotel. A nervous client could take tea or something stronger there, then stroll round for his consultation without much fear of drawing attention. All the spaces in front of the elegant four-storey terrace had been taken, so Wield had parked the Thunderbird illegally on the other side of the road. Removing his helmet, he identified the door with Gallipot’s number on it and let his gaze drift up the facade. It looked freshly painted and well maintained. He caught a shadow behind the Venetian blind in one of the top-floor windows. He hoped it wasn’t Gallipot. This was meant to be a surprise.
And now he was where the flow had brought him, feeling it was probably a complete waste of time and glad that with luck he’d only have to explain it to Pascoe and not to the Fat Man.
Tucking his helmet underneath his arm, he walked across the road.
A column of plaques by the front door confirmed that Jake was keeping very respectable company. Insurance Broker, Catering Supplies, Secretarial Agency, Marine Engineer. Not a Personal Masseuse or French Tutor in sight, though maybe, as there couldn’t be much call for marine engineering in Harrogate, that was a cover for some other activity popular amongst mariners.
Gallipot’s shingle simply read GALLIPOT (Top Floor), nothing about investigations or enquiries. Very discreet.
Wield pushed open the door and stepped into a small but well-lit hallway which offered the choice of lift or steep stairs. The lift looked antique. Wield chose the stairs.
Arriving at the top floor only very slightly out of breath, he found himself facing a door with JAKE GALLIPOT stencilled in gold across the glass panel. He tapped on the glass. There was no reply, so he pressed the handle and pushed the door open.
It was a small but very smart modern office, light years away from the studied untidiness of the traditional hard-nosed private eye’s den. Jake had been a hi-tech cop before many senior officers had learned how to use the redial button on their telephones. It was reported that when a search was made of his flat after his initial suspension, they’d found a computer system that made the one down the nick look antique. It was also reported they’d found nothing remotely incriminating on it, not even a bit of straight porn.
Here in his office, a fully-kitted work station occupying half the left wall confirmed he was still at the cutting edge. Only two things disturbed the reassuring impression of order and efficiency.
One was the fact that the computer tower was twisted round with its rear panel unscrewed.
And the other was the presence on the floor alongside the tower of the body of a man.
Neither the passage of years nor the angle of view prevented Wield from instantly recognizing Jake Gallipot. Even supine and unmoving, with his lips set in a grimace that revealed perfect white teeth, he still looked solid and dependable, a man you could safely buy a used car or a used alibi from.
In his outstretched right hand he held a screwdriver with its end melted by heat.
Pausing only to check that it was no longer in contact with any part of the computer, Wield knelt down and checked for a pulse. There was none. Immediately he went into the resuscitation procedure. His mind ticking off seconds and counting sequences of fifteen chest presses and two mouth-to-mouths. After four sequences, he checked the carotid pulse again. Still nothing. Another four sequences. Still nothing. Another four.
Nothing.
He stood upright, took his mobile from his pocket, dialled 999 and asked for the ambulance service and the police.
An hour later he was standing in the empty office with DI Collaboy.
Gallipot had been rushed off to hospital in an ambulance but Wield knew that not even the wonders of modern technology could bring him back to life.
“So what’s this all about, Wieldy?” said the DI.
“What’s it look like to you, Jim?”
“Looks like Jake decided to change the hard drive on his computer, got careless, and forgot to switch off at the mains.”
They had found the packaging for a new hard drive in the waste bin.
“That’s how it looks to me, too.”
“But?”
“You’ll recall Jake and computers. He were playing around with them when folk like Andy Dalziel still thought the abacus was a tool of the devil.”
“Familiarity breeds carelessness,” said Collaboy.
“Where’s the old drive, the one he were replacing?” asked Wield.
“Packed up, got wiped, so he took it out to have a look, decided it were knackered and dumped it when he went to buy a new one.”
“Then where’s his back-up disks? You knew Jake. He’d have everything backed up.”
“Could be anywhere,” said Collaboy, looking round the office.
“Let’s look, shall we?”
It was a pointless search as Wield had looked already. In the drawers and cupboards he’d found all the tools of Gallipot’s trade-various bugging devices, a digital camera, a set of pick-locks, a bunch of dodgy-looking keys, a collection of business cards with a variety of names and businesses-but no trace of any back-up disks. He’d also checked the filing cabinet. There was a wallet marked Maciver. It was empty.
“I think you’d best tell me what this is all about, Wieldy.”
Wield looked at the DI. Time had not been kind to him. Since last they met, his hairline had receded and turned grey in retreat, while his face had-in one of the phrases Andy Dalziel claimed to have learned from his old Scots grandma-enough wrinkles to make a cuddy a new arsehole.
He told him the story, explaining his own presence there by the truth, more or less.
“I didn’t think he was being straight with me,” he concluded.
“Because he talked to you like you were his best friend in the world?” said Collaboy sceptically. “You know Jake. That’s how he talked to everybody! The bugger still used to ask me for favours long after I’d made it clear I didn’t want owt more to do with him. Come to think of it, you mentioning the name Maciver reminds me, long time back, can’t have been long after he got his cards, he asked me if I’d give him a reference for a job on the security team at some outfit in your neck of the woods that had Maciver in its name…”
“Ashur-Proffitt-Maciver’s?” asked Wield.
“That could have been it. Any connection with this dead guy?”
“It was the family firm till it got took over. Did you give him the reference?”
“Aye, I did, oddly. Just said he’d been a serving cop for however long it were and that he’d retired as a sergeant. Don’t know why I bothered… no, that’s a lie. I knew he’d set up as a PI and I thought this meant he hadn’t made a go of it and I’ve got to admit the thought of Jake wearing a peaked cap and wandering round a factory site in the early hours of a winter morning didn’t displease me. Looks like I were wrong, but. Bit of money went into this set-up.”
The two men looked around the office, both of them perhaps wondering what the future held for them when their time came to hand in the badges.
“Right,” said Collaboy. “I’ll need a statement, Wieldy, and I’ll get a SOCO team in here just in case, but unless they or the medics come up with something significant, I can’t see I’m going to be able to tell my boss this is anything but accidental death. Not unless you’ve not told me everything you know?”
This is what working on a hunch gets you into, thought Wield.
He said, “I can just give you the facts as I know them, Jim. How you move forward from there is down to you. Anything else comes up, you’ll be the first to know.”
He hoped he sounded sincere.
Back in the Penetralium of Mid-Yorkshire CID, Dalziel stood by his window apparently staring out into the bright spring air, but it might as well have been a-swirl with smoke for all that his unblinking gaze was seeing.
