The Hireling's Tale Read online

  Toomes sniffed. He was a sturdy middle-aged individual with the beer belly that’s an occupational hazard. Apart from the people he worked for and the company he kept, Donovan didn’t have much on him. A bit of handling, a bit of aiding and abetting, it was probably better not to enquire where the venison sandwiches came from, but nothing that entitled the man to wear the hunt button of the Castlemere Mafia. Only habit kept him from answering fully and frankly.

  ‘If you’ve any complaints about us not closing on time, Mr Donovan,’ he said stolidly, ‘you’d better take them up with the management.’

  ‘Give me any of your nonsense,’ growled Donovan, ‘and I’ll sick the VAT inspectors on them.’ With the end of transportation and public flogging, this was about the direst threat that a public servant could legally issue.

  Donny Toomes recognized the fact. He had nothing to hide, and knew he wouldn’t be thanked for holding out any longer. ‘OK, OK,’ he grumbled. ‘Yes, I was here. What do you want to know?’

  ‘There was an incident on the dock. Did anybody see anything?’

  ‘What sort of an incident?’

  Donovan bared his teeth in a feral grin. ‘The sort of incident where somebody ends up dead, Donny. A girl - blonde, about twenty-five, not wearing a lot in the way of clothes. Anybody see her?’

  Toomes began to look interested. ‘How little in the way of clothes?’

  ‘To the nearest round figure? - none. So if you saw her you’d tend to remember. I take it you didn’t?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone did,’ said Toomes regretfully. ‘They’d have mentioned it if they had. Where was all this going on, then?’ He craned his neck, looking out of the window as if there was a chance of a repeat performance.

  The Fen Tiger enjoyed perhaps the best location in Castlemere, with a street entrance just off Castle Place and a rear entrance, one storey down, on to Mere Basin. The lounge bar was upstairs; down here was where the hard cases drank. It wasn’t the view that attracted them so much as the fact that if someone you didn’t want to meet came in one way you could always leave by the other.

  Hire boats mostly moored on the north side of the basin. Donovan pointed with his nose. ‘Over there somewhere. On a boat - the Guelder Rose, black hull, blue and cream upper-works. Did you see her?’

  Toomes nodded. ‘I saw them tying up - about eight, eight-thirty? Man and a couple of kids. Didn’t see no twenty-five-year-old blonde.’

  ‘Did you see anyone else on the boat, a bit later? A couple of drunks, maybe - one wrapped up in a coat or something?’

  But if Toomes had missed a naked twenty-five-year-old blonde he wasn’t much interested in anything else he might have seen. He shook his head glumly.

  Donovan turned to face the room, meaning to repeat the question for general consumption. But the bar was empty. He gave a snort of scornful amusement. ‘Jesus, Donny, your customers are a shy lot. Anybody’d think they’d been up to no good.’

  Toomes sighed. ‘Listen, Mr Donovan, don’t take this the wrong way but … You come swanning in here with your threats and your questions, you’d be sensible to bring somebody with you. To watch your back.’

  Donovan’s dark eyes rounded in astonished indignation. ‘Are you telling me I’m not safe in here? Are you telling me this dive is some sort of a no-go area?’

  ‘I’m not telling you any such thing,’ said Toomes wearily. ‘These are properly conducted licensed premises: you’re welcome to drink here, or to ask questions. You’re as safe here as anywhere in Castlemere. What I can’t vouch for is what happens after you leave. I wouldn’t like to think of you turning up face-down in the canal one night.’

  ‘Your concern’s downright touching,’ sneered Donovan. ‘This place has obviously changed since Jack Carney went down.’ The Fen Tiger never officially belonged to the old thug: it was held in his wife’s name. These days it officially belonged to the wife of a second cousin of Carney’s; but the only thing that had actually changed was the name above the door.

  Toomes sniffed and said no more. His concern was genuine but not altogether altruistic. Odd jobs were always the preserve of the potman, and getting blood off wrought-iron railings was a bugger.

  Donovan had one last question before he left. ‘So where did they tie up the Guelder Rose?’

  Toomes stumped to the door and pointed. ‘There, in front of The Lock & Quay.’ It used to be Gossick’s Chandlers: folksy names came in with the redevelopment and the toy-town paintwork.

  An arched ironwork bridge spanned the basin: Donovan preferred its old livery of black and rust to the council’s colour scheme of dark green and gold. But time heals all ills: he noted with satisfaction that the rust was beginning to make a comeback.

  Tonight there would be another hire boat tied inexpertly to the bollards outside The Lock & Quay, but for the moment the bit of dockside where the Laceys spent last night was vacant. Donovan took his time looking round but although it was now midday and the spring sunlight was pouring through the well of the buildings he could see nothing suggestive of a struggle, of an accident, of anything out of the ordinary. There was nothing that looked like blood, and no one had tossed a blanket into the deep shadows of the car park between the stilts of The Barbican.

  When he had done with looking around, he went back to the quayside and looked up.

  ‘She didn’t fall through the hatch of the Guelder Rose,’ he explained, a thread of electric satisfaction running through his voice. ‘At least she did, but she wasn’t on the boat at the time. She fell off the roof of The Barbican.’

  ‘The roof?’ echoed Liz faintly.

  ‘Six storeys up,’ nodded Donovan. ‘She didn’t fall eight feet, she fell about eighty - of course she smashed her skull.’

  ‘Have you been up there?’ asked Shapiro.

  ‘Yeah, just to make sure. Then I called for a PC to preserve the scene. Immediately above where the boat was tied up, something’s been rested on the parapet. There’s a load of junk up there - dirt, bird shit, the lot. But not right there. SOCO’s on his way up there, but I’ll stake my reputation that’s where she came from.’

  ‘Then it really was murder,’ said Shapiro pensively. ‘She didn’t get herself up there, not in that state. Someone took her and threw her. She was meant to die.’ He stood up and reached for his coat. ‘I’d better get down there. Come with me, Donovan, show me what you found. What about you, Liz?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m seeing the toms.’ Castlemere didn’t have a red-light district as such: they’d arranged to meet, somewhat incongruously, in the Tudor Tea-rooms.

  The three of them went downstairs together. When they parted at the top of Queen’s Street Liz murmured after Donovan, ‘You haven’t got a reputation to stake.’

  He looked back with a grin. They’d known each other long enough to enjoy the privilege of a friendly insult. ‘Then I’ll stake your reputation,’ he said.

  The local prostitutes may not have had a trade union as such, but they certainly had a self-help network. Girls who got little support from anyone else had to be able to depend on each other. So while Dawn and Zara avoided contact with the police in most circumstances, to help find the killer of a fellow working-girl they were prepared to break the habit of a lifetime.

  If she was a fellow-worker. The two women pored over the photograph Liz put on the table, took the time to picture her alive, and in the end were sure they’d never seen her before.

  Liz frowned. ‘She isn’t a local girl? The pathologist who did the post mortem reckoned she was on the game.’

  Dawn, who was the older of the two, shrugged. ‘I’m telling you what I know. She doesn’t work in this town.’

  ‘Could she be - I don’t know - an enthusiastic amateur?’

  Dawn shook her head, a mass of coal-black curls dancing on her shoulders. ‘If she was enthusiastic enough for it to show up at the autopsy, we’d know her. I’m telling you: that’s not a local girl. She was brought in. Maybe for a special. They
do that sometimes, if there’s a big conference or something.’

  ‘Conference?’ The Barbican Hotel was big enough for the conference trade.

  Zara sniffed. ‘Think themselves a bit sophisticated, the conference trade do. A cut above the local talent. They come down from London in a coach.’

  Liz blinked. But the principles of business are much the same whatever business you’re in: if you want work you have to put yourself in its way. ‘Are they in town at the moment?’

  Dawn shook her head again. ‘We’d know if they were. There was some sort of a gathering at The Barbican this weekend - a few of us met up with guys there - but there wasn’t anything laid on in the way of entertainment. People were making their own arrangements.’

  ‘Maybe she knew one of the guests personally,’ Liz speculated. ‘Does that happen - a man calls a particular girl to meet him somewhere?’

  ‘Honey,’ said Dawn heavily, ‘in this business everything happens. Sure he could have called her. He’d got away from the wife for a long weekend, he had his own little friend, he told her where to come and they spent a few days together instead of the usual hour-and-a-bit. That way we wouldn’t even have known she was in town.’

  ‘He went to that much trouble so he could kill her?’ said Zara doubtfully. She had warm café-au-lait skin and blonde streaks dyed through her dark hair.

  ‘Maybe she threatened to tell his wife,’ hazarded Liz.

  But Dawn wasn’t buying that. ‘No way. Not if she was a pro - it’s the one thing you never do. For one thing, you don’t want them to leave their wives. You don’t want to live with them, for Chrissake! - you want them safe at home, just restless enough to pick up the phone from time to time. If the wife chucked them out, they might shack up with someone who’d keep them happy, and that’s bad for business.’

  Liz thanked them for their time and paid the bill. She didn’t envy these women their lifestyle but she didn’t condemn it either. She wished there was a way of keeping them safer, but suspected that, however liberal the law became, a working prostitute would always find herself beyond its protection. Not because she wanted it that way but because the clients did.

  ‘OK. Well, thanks for your help. And go carefully, won’t you? - till either we’ve got this man or we’re sure he’s left town. Just in case it wasn’t personal, and beating up on girls is how he gets his kicks.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be the first one,’ grunted Dawn. With a hand decorated with blood-red talons she waved a cheery farewell to an outraged waitress as they left.

  The Guelder Rose had been tied along the north wharf, under the angle of the northern and eastern blocks of The Barbican. The four buildings framed a great atrium with Mere Basin in the well, springing across the four canals on massive brick arches. They were built as warehouses when this was a main commercial artery: now they were shops and restaurants at ground level, businesses above, flats above that.

  And The Barbican Hotel, which occupied the eastern block. Anyone staying in the hotel would have access to the roof. Shapiro filed that interesting fact away for further consideration.

  Donovan took him to the spot he’d found where years of airborne pollution had been swept from the parapet. The roofs ran together in a continuous concrete span, so the fact that the girl had gone off the northern building didn’t mean that’s where she’d come from. The spot was chosen simply because there was a kind of concrete step against the wall which would have made it easier to lift someone over.

  ‘I wonder if he knew there was a boat there,’ said Shapiro. ‘Maybe he meant her to go in the canal.’

  ‘Better for him if she landed on something solid,’ grunted Donovan. ‘He may have thought her injuries would cover up the beating he’d given her.’

  The superintendent nodded slowly. ‘I suppose it was meant to look like suicide. Or an accident. If he’d fed her a bit less cocaine it might have done. She got high, she was prancing around up here in the buff, she lost her balance and fell. Only we know she wasn’t prancing anywhere. She couldn’t have walked, let alone climbed the parapet.’

  ‘At least we know now why nobody saw anything. Unless you were looking at precisely the right moment, there was nothing to see. First she was up here, out of sight; five seconds later she was dead in the bottom of the boat. Doped up like that she wouldn’t even have yelled.’

  Shapiro looked around. The concrete desert was interrupted by various outcrops: water-tanks, gear-houses for the lifts, doors that led by way of stairs into the buildings below. When The Barbican was redeveloped from the old warehouses the architects had it in mind that a very pleasant roof-garden could have been created up here. But somehow roof-gardens weren’t very Castlemere. Even after the council had done its best it remained a working town rather than a bastion of middle-class gentility. If they’d done the redevelopment ten years earlier people would have strung washing-lines up here.

  ‘Has anybody tried the doors?’ he said. ‘To see which open and which are locked?’

  Donovan tried them now. There were eight in all, two on each building. Only two opened from the outside: one each on the north and east wings. ‘Doesn’t mean they won’t open from the inside. They might have to, as part of the fire regulations.’

  So it proved. Shapiro sighed. ‘So he could have come from any door in any building, walked round till he found a handy spot and pushed the poor girl over, and unless he was unlucky enough to bump into a late-patrolling caretaker there was next to no chance of him being seen. Get hold of the caretakers, make sure they really didn’t see anyone at the top of the stairs, then meet me in the hotel foyer.’

  ‘They could as easily have come from one of the flats,’ objected Donovan.

  ‘Of course they could,’ agreed Shapiro. ‘But the hotel will have a much bigger turnover. Plus, if you were planning on killing a girl you probably wouldn’t want to chuck her off your own roof and have her found still pointing an accusing finger at your bedroom window. It’s different for hotel guests: they could be miles away before she was found.’

  ‘But she died last night,’ said Donovan. ‘Whoever killed her was here last night.’

  ‘So our prime suspect is someone who was staying in the hotel but left last night or first thing this morning.’

  That narrowed it down, but not very much. When he went down to The Barbican Hotel Shapiro discovered what Liz had just learned: that a conference booking had occupied some forty rooms, some of them doubles, from Friday evening until Monday morning. Of the sixty-three delegates, forty-eight were men. None had their wives with them. Most had left before Tom Lacey noticed the split in the canvas.

  ‘I’m going to need names and addresses for all of them,’ said Shapiro wearily. ‘And since crime is an equal opportunities employer, you’d better give me the women as well.’

  ‘We have the names, of course,’ said the manager. ‘But you might get a more comprehensive list from Mr Kendall. He organized the conference and he made a block booking for rooms and other facilities.’

  Shapiro raised an eyebrow and the manager replied with an angry blush. ‘I didn’t mean girls. I meant the jacuzzi.’

  ‘Where would I find Mr Kendall?’

  ‘As a matter of fact he’s here at the moment, settling the bill.’

  Shapiro joined him in the manager’s office. It was by no means clear that the dead girl was ever in the hotel, and even if she was neither her activities in life nor the manner of her death could fairly be blamed on the management. He saw no need to conduct his investigation publicly in the foyer.

  He’d met Philip Kendall before, at Chamber of Commerce dinners or the Civic Ball. He was senior sales executive at Bespoke Engineering, one of Castlemere’s major employers. They custom-made machinery for clients throughout the world in a high-tech plant with a lot of smoked glass off the ring road.

  He was a man in his mid-forties, strong open face, hair on the cusp of going grey. He looked up as Shapiro entered, surprised but not initially troubled. Then
the awareness of something wrong - the knowledge that senior detectives don’t walk in on you for no particular reason - grew in his eyes and his brows gathered uneasily. ‘Superintendent. Is something wrong?’

  Shapiro nodded soberly. ‘I’m afraid so, Mr Kendall. A girl died here last night. We think she was a prostitute, we think she may have been visiting one of your delegates.’

  He had a photograph of the girl in his pocket-book. Mr Coren, the hotel manager, didn’t remember seeing her, neither did Kendall. Coren took the photo out to reception but none of his staff had seen her either.

  He returned it with an apologetic shake of the head. ‘I don’t think she was staying here. She just might have been visiting a guest. Unless he brought her through the foyer wearing thigh-boots and carrying a cash-box, I couldn’t guarantee we’d have spotted them.’

  That was realistic. No respectable hotel likes its guests bringing in prostitutes; most of them accept that they can’t prevent it.

  ‘We don’t know how she was dressed,’ said Shapiro. ‘That’s something you might look out for: a bundle of women’s clothes. In the meantime, Mr Kendall, I’m going to need a full list of the names and addresses of your conference delegates.’

  Mechanical engineering is a precise business: not very much happens that’s seriously unexpected. Shock had run like a wave through Kendall’s expression: when it reached his knees they went weak and he’d sat down abruptly. He was still struggling to come to terms with this. ‘My God. You think one of my delegates … ?’

  Shapiro was not an unkind man. ‘We don’t know. But it’s a possibility we have to look into. Fifty strange men in town and a prostitute ends up dead? - we can’t assume that’s a coincidence.’

  As the first horror passed, so Kendall’s concern became focused on his own interests. ‘You’re going to contact my customers and ask if they had a prostitute in their hotel room? Superintendent, I brought them here to try and sell our services to them. This was our major marketing ploy for the year. And you’re going to tell them they’re suspects in a murder investigation? What’s that going to do for our sales figures?’