The Burning Man Page 16

  He looked down into the front garden, remembering he’d promised to prune the roses. He made a mental note to get a new pair of secateurs. The ones that lay on the shelf on the back porch were old, rusty, and blunt. He turned away, went into the bathroom showered, dressed, and then went down for breakfast.

  ****

  While Bob Carter was sitting down to his breakfast of eggs and bacon, PCs Alan Hobson and Andy Miller were walking down the driveway of number nineteen, Spring Garden, a large newly built house on the edge of the Green Hills Estate.

  Hobson repeatedly rapped on the glass front door and stood back. The door opened instantly.

  It was like the owner had been standing on the other side waiting for them.

  The woman who opened the door looked to Hobson to be about thirty years old. On closer inspection, and seeing the amount of makeup she had on, he quickly revised it upwards to seventy plus. The colour of her lipstick reminded him of the red traffic lights in Market Square. She’d overdone the eye makeup. Her eyelashes were long and curled. It looked as if each lash had been neatly picked out with black mascara. She wore a short tartan skirt with black stockings. Around her neck hung an expensive pearl necklace. She had earrings to match. PC Hobson ran his eyes up and down her, quickly summing her up. An old cow trying to look like a young calf. She wouldn’t look out-of-place under a streetlight, swinging her handbag and looking for a bull.

  It was Andy Miller who broke who the silence. ‘Mrs, Archer. Mrs Gloria Archer? It’s PCs Miller and Hobson. Last night, you reported a theft.’ he said, peering over Hobson’s shoulder.

  She looked in horror at the patrol car parked out on the road. ‘Why did they send you? The constable who I spoke to on the phone last night said they were sending detectives first thing in the morning. I was expecting detectives in a plain car, not this. Why didn’t they come?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I really couldn’t say. But I think that all the officers in CID were out on other jobs, ma’am. We’ve had a busy weekend,’ said Hobson. It sounded more of an excuse than a statement.

  She smoothed down the sides of her skirt, sighed and said, ‘Oh well. You’d better come in then.’ She looked down at their shoes. ‘And don’t forget to wipe your feet.’ Taking off their caps, they entered, wiping their feet as they did so. Before shutting the front door, Mrs Archer went and peered up and down the street to see if any neighbours were watching. She closed the door.

  ‘Follow me,’ she barked. It was an order, not a request.

  Miller’s rubber-soled shoes squeaked as he walked over the highly polished wooden floor.

  She led them into a room that looked as if it had come straight from the pages of the Ideal Homes magazine. Miller, being a bit of an antique buff, was impressed by what he saw. Most of the room had been taken over by a large six-legged Elizabethan oak dining table. The six chairs on either side of the table had ornate, carved backs. He remembered seeing one very similar on the antique road show a few weeks before. At the far end of the room, with splendidly proportioned cabriole legs, sat a mahogany writing desk. A glass-fronted cabinet made of polished cherrywood took up half of one wall.

  ‘Sit,’ she said. Not thinking she was talking to them, Hobson immediately looked around for the dog. There wasn’t one.

  ‘What exactly is missing?’ said Miller, pulling out a chair and sitting. He put his cap on the table and opened his clipboard folder. Hobson decided he’d remain standing.

  ‘I told all that to that fellow last night. It was a brand new sixty-inch television and a brand-new Panasonic hi-fi system. I only brought them on Friday afternoon. I had a man coming in tomorrow to install them.’

  ‘When did you notice they were missing?’ asked Hobson politely.

  ‘It was when I went to put the car away in the garage last night. That’s when I noticed all the boxes had gone. They were there when I left in the morning. I’d been away all day at my friend’s place down in Canterbury.’

  ‘Have you seen anyone suspicious hanging around lately; anyone you don’t recognise, a door-to-door salesman, that kind of thing?’

  ‘We had only moved in here last week. We don’t know too many of the people. I was led to believe that this was a safe, close-knit community. The estate agent told my husband that they had a very active Neighbourhood Watch. That was the reason why we chose to live here.’ she answered.

  ‘And where is your husband now?’ queried Miller, looking around.

  ‘He’s in Brussels at the moment. Should be back mid-week. He has a part-time job as policy advisor to the European Pet Food Industry Federation. He’s a retired vet.’

  ‘Oh.’ It was all Miller could say.

  ‘You say you bought these items Friday. Did you bring them back or have them delivered?’ asked Hobson.

  ‘I brought them back, put them in the garage and locked it. I rang the installer that same afternoon.’

  ‘Who recommended him?’

  ‘The manager of the store. The Discount Warehouse at the mall. They gave me his card.’

  ‘What was the name of this installer?’ Hobson asked.

  She looked over at Hobson. He stood legs apart, capped tucked under his arm. ‘Constable, you can sit.’

  ‘No, that’s fine, ma’am. I’m quite happy standing, thanks.’

  ‘Can you give us a description of these items? Makes, serial numbers? It will help us to identify them later, should we retrieve them,’ continued Miller. He doubted if they would ever come to light. The chances of finding them were slim. By now they’d have been sold, and the proceeds would have gone up some crackhead’s nose.

  ‘I have all the receipts. All the details should be on them.’ She went over to the writing desk and brought them back along with the installer’s card. Miller copied down the details, gave her a loss report number for her insurance and then closed the folder.

  As they drove back to Kent Street, Miller turned to Hobson and said, ‘This is the second lot that’s gone missing this weekend, and they both bought stuff from the mall. I think, maybe, it’s time we checked out the others to see where they brought their stuff from.’

  ‘Yes, it sounds good. Just one more question. What the hell is the European Pet Food Industry Federation when it’s at home?’ asked Hobson. ‘Any idea?’

  ‘I believe it’s to do with pet nutrition and things,’ answered Miller. ‘Sounds riveting stuff.’

  ****

  Carter walked into his office and was just taking off his coat when Marcia Kirby knocked on his door.

  ‘Good morning, sir. We’ve had word from Dover.’ She opened the file she was carrying. ‘They’ve got the registration of the red pickup.’ She sounded breathless, as if she’d been running, and her face was a little flushed.

  ‘Morning, Marcia.’ He hung up his coat, then went around his desk and sat down. ‘I assume that was DS Penrose you were just talking to on the phone when I came in?’

  ‘Yes, it was. Dave, that is Sergeant Penrose, emailed me earlier. They’ve had the place under surveillance yesterday and got lucky. They managed to get the registration of both the pickup and the bike. The pickup came out with the bike on the back. The pickup belongs to a company called Compton Furniture which we know is owned by Garcia and the bike is registered to a Martin Kelly, aged forty-two, born in 1969 in County Galway. He has an address just outside of Hawkinge. He’s got a record as long as your arm. Been in trouble with the law ever since he was a teenager.’ She paused.

  Carter had a feeling there was more to come. ‘And… once he had a name, he started to do some digging.’ She held up a printout. ‘Kelly was an active member of the IRA. Before joining them, he spent six months in a psychiatric hospital. He was a bomb maker. They found what they thought was his factory in a County Cavan farmhouse. It was being used to manufacture incendiary bombs and timer-power units for larger bombs. Some under-car booby trap and homemade bombs were also found along with Mark 6 rockets, the type that was used in the mortar attack on Heathrow Airport in
‘94. He evaded capture for a long time, but they eventually got him, and he was arrested in ‘96.’

  Carter listened slowly nodding his head as she continued.

  ‘In ‘97, he went down for five years. Released in September 2002. It says here he was a model prisoner. The security service suspected him of being involved in the bombing of the Royal Marine barracks at Deal in ‘89, but nothing was ever proven. After his release in 2002, he disappeared off the radar.’

  Carted rubbed his chin, thinking, then said, ‘So that firebomb at Chalk Lane Farm was one of his little concoctions?’

  ‘Has to be. Kelly was also suspected of drug running, but again nothing could be proved. They couldn’t make anything stick. It also says here that after his release, an Inspector Carver had him flagged. I assume that’s now DCI Carver from over at Organised Crimes. Are we going to pass this on to him and let him know Kelly’s active again and where he is?’

  ‘No, Marcia, this one is our baby. We’ll leave him out of it. You know what they say about too many cooks. We want Kelly in our pot.’

  ‘Can’t we pull him in on suspicion?’

  ‘No — think about it. What have we got? We got bugger all. Not even a print. It’s going to take more than just a few tire tracks to get him into court, and, at the moment, that’s all we got. He’d walk away laughing. It went out on the news again last night.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I saw it.’

  ‘We need this watertight. Let’s hope that Kelly takes the bait. If not, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Bring the others up to speed, will you please, Marcia?’ He slapped both palms down on the desk and stood up. ‘Right now, Marcia, I need a strong coffee.’

  ****

  It was close in midday when PC Alan Hobson put down the phone and, turning to his partner, said ‘Well, according to the mall manager, they keep their security videos for two months before they re-use them.’

  ‘That’s a bloody lot of footage to troll through. It’ll take days,’ said Andy Miller, putting down two mugs of tea on the desk.

  ‘Cheers, mate,’ said Hobson. He took a sip and grimaced. ‘You forgot the bleeding sugar again.’

  ‘Sorry, mate, keep forgetting you take sugar,’ Miller said, slumping down in the chair next to him.

  ‘Forget it. Anyway, if my theory is right, we won’t need to go through all that footage.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ queried Miller.

  ‘Because of these.’ He picked up the bundle of crime reports from the desk and waved them in the air. ‘All the stuff here that’s nicked always came from these two places — the Discount Store and Gresham’s Electrics, both in the mall. Everybody,’ he said, tapping the crime reports, ‘brought their stuff from them on a Friday. So, I think what we need to do now is to find out what times they made their purchases, then view the footage from outside the store and see if any familiar faces pop up. Could we get lucky? What do you reckon?’

  Miller pulled himself upright in the chair and leaned forward. ‘Well, I must admit it sounds plausible. There’s a snag though?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘McPhee. I can’t see the inspector letting us off normal duties to chase this up. You know the station’s short-handed as it is. He’s always banging on about not having enough crews out on the streets. He’ll tell us to hand it over to the CID and let them get on with it and send us back out.’

  ‘What if we could get ourselves seconded to CID for a couple of days?’

  ‘And how would you go about that?’ asked Miller, staring him in the face.

  ‘We make ourselves indispensable, that’s how. Where’s Luke Hollingsworth?’

  Miller looked at his watch and said. ‘Twelve thirty. He won’t be upstairs, that’s for sure. He’ll be in the cafeteria.’

  Luke Hollingsworth plunged his fork deep into the last bit of pork sausage and popped it into his mouth. He put the knife and fork onto the plate, pushed it to one side, then picked up the napkin and wiped his mouth. All the time Hobson had been talking, Hollingsworth had sat listening and eating not saying a word. He now looked across the table at the two constables and, breaking his silence, burped and said, ‘It’s worth a shot. It’ll save us a bit of time and legwork. I’ll have to run it past the DCI first.’

  ‘That’s what we thought,’ said Andy Miller, turning to look at his partner.

  Hollingsworth stirred his tea and looked around at the other tables. Only three were unoccupied. ‘Okay, look. Leave it with me for the time being. The boss is out at the moment. Said he had some shopping to do. I’ll have a word with him as soon as he gets back in.’

  He raised the cup to his lips and took a mouthful of coffee. ‘In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to go over to the mall and get those videos. We’re going to need them anyway. I don’t think we’ll need a warrant. See the manager over there. Just explain the situation to them. Tell him it’s material evidence because we believe crimes are being committed on his premises. I’m sure he’ll co-operate. It’s in his interest. Remind me? When did all this start?’

  ‘Three months ago. First Friday of August. That was the first one. The latest one was number ten,’ said Hobson.

  ‘It’s just the Friday tapes we want. Car park and shops. All their cameras record onto separate discs. Each of those disc records for fourteen days. Make sure you get the right ones. The ones from the first Friday in August until this Friday.’ Hollingsworth counted out on his fingers. ‘If I’m right, that would be about, err, six or seven discs. Yes?’ He looked at the other two for confirmation. All he got where two pairs of raised eyebrows.

  ‘Okay. We’ll leave it to you,’ said Miller. The pair rose from their chairs and walked off.

  Hollingsworth looked at the dessert menu on the chalkboard. The chocolate-sauced pudding held his gaze. Without hesitating, he picked up his cup and plate and headed to the counter.

  ****

  When Carter came out of Hardwick, the jewellers, a gentle drizzle had started to fall. He stood for a few moments under the shop awning and looked up and down the street, thinking. Carter patted the purchase that lay snugly in his pocket, then, weaving in and out of the lunchtime shoppers, hurried along the pavement to the café. A quick bite of lunch then back to Kent Street to finish off that paperwork, he thought. After waiting for the traffic to stop at the lights, he hurried across the Market Square.

  As Carter walked along the wet pavement, he had time to reflect on the information he’d received earlier that morning from Interpol. He’d got a call from an Inspector Matias Perez from Rafael Garcia’s own town. Perez had told him that he knew Garcia and had known him for many years and that he was a well-known, well-respected member of the community.

  Matias told Carter that he’d served on three of the town committees and once served as Deputy Mayor. By the end of the conversation, Carter had no doubt Garcia was innocent and that he didn’t even know Kelly was the number one suspect in a murder investigation, or even that he knew about a possible clandestine drugs lab. For the time being, Carter suggested to Inspector Perez, it should be kept that way until he had positive proof.

  Walking through Kent Street Memorial Park, he drew near the duck pond. As he did so, the drizzle intensified, then turned into a solid downpour. Thunder rolled across the sky.

  Making a quick decision, he headed for the shelter of the old bandstand.

  No music ever came from here now. These days it’s all bloody woofers, tweeters and nightclubs, Carter thought, as he stood under the shelter of the roof. The rain started coming down heavily, and soon it was flowing off it and forming large puddles out on the grass.

  Only lovers and crackheads shooting up after dark would use the place. The odd prostitute was known to use it. They’d bring their client here for a quickie up against the wall. Now, it was rundown and decrepit. No longer did the summer swallows nest beneath its domed roof. When the music stopped, so did the swallows. The paint was peeling, and the boards beneath his feet sagged and groaned. The ba
ndstand should have been demolished and a new one erected years ago.

  He stood leaning on the rail watching the rain. As he patted the small box tucked securely in his pocket, a vision came floating back. Reflections. Back then, Kingsport was a different town. A different world altogether with a different love — his first one. He remembered how he and his wife, June, would sometimes come down here on summer evenings and sit on a blanket, listening to the band.

  He looked out across the park. The rain had started to let up. He stood for a few more minutes, and, as he prepared to walk down the bandstand steps, a man, head down, came hurrying past him, rain dripping from his baseball cap and his trainers swishing through the wet grass. He barely gave Carter a glance as he hurried across the lawn onto the path, turned towards the park gates and disappeared from view.

  As Carter came down the steps and headed towards the café, the pages of his mental photo album started turning. He had seen that face somewhere before — but where?

  ****

  Detective Constable Bill Turner leaned across his desk and picked up the phone. ‘DC Turner.’

  ‘Constable Turner, I don’t know if you remember me. It’s Martin Jones from the Oare development site?’

  ‘Ahh. Yes, Mr Jones. I do remember you very well. How are things going?’

  ‘Thank you. Everything is fine. I’m calling about the discovery over at the excavation site. There was a small article in this morning’s Herald saying that it may have been an airman from the First World War? Apart from the possibility that it said you hope to find living relatives, it gave no further details. It didn’t even give the man’s name.’