6

When I got back into my car and checked my mobile which I had left in the glove compartment.  I had two missed calls from a number I didn’t immediately recognise.  I removed Sir Gerard’s business card and compared the two numbers.  They were the same.  I dialled it immediately.

“I’ve had another blackmail letter,” he said as soon as he answered.

“I’ll be right over.”

*

Sir Gerard Seymour Hornby lived in Oxmarket Castle on the northern outskirts of the town.  In fact it was the only castle for miles and during the summer it was open to the public.  Zoë and I had spent a lovely sunny day here a couple of years ago.  We had brought a hamper and devoured its contents in the picnic area before spending the whole afternoon exploring the breathtaking surroundings.

Despite its crenallated battlements, round towers and embrasures, it did not begin to rank with the Windsor’s and Balmorals of this world.  A pocket castle, but the east side had the Windsor’s and Balmorals whacked to the wide.  It grew straight out of the top of a hundred and fifty foot cliff and if you leaned too far out of your bedroom window the first thing to stop your fall would be the rocks a long way down.  You wouldn’t even bounce once.  

Below the castle and a fair way to the right of it, a cliff-fall belonging to some bygone age, had created an artificial foreshore some thirty yards wide.  From this, obviously at the cost of immense labour, an artificial harbour had been scooped out, the boulders and rubble having been used for the construction of a horseshoe breakwater with an entrance of not more than six or seven yards in width.  At the inner end of this harbour a boathouse, no wider than the harbour entrance and less than twenty feet in length, had been constructed against the cliff face.  A boathouse to berth a good-sized rowboat, nothing more.

The castle itself was built in the form of a hollow square, and the seaward side was dominated by two crenallated towers, one topped by a twenty-foot flagpole and flag, the other by a satellite dish.  Surprisingly the castle was not as remote as it had appeared from the road.  Beginning some distance from the castle and extending clear to the cliff-bound northern shore of the town ran a two hundred metre wide stretch of what seemed to be flat smooth turf, not the bowling green standard but undoubtedly grass of the genuine variety as testified by the heads down position of a handful of goats that browsed close to the castle.

After pulling through the stone gates, travelling up a long drive lined with Cyprus trees, I parked my car on the eastern lee of the castle. I got out, keeping a wary eye on the goats, and was rounding the landward corner of the castle when I almost literally bumped into Sir Gerard Seymour Hornby.

“Glad you could come so quickly, Mr Handful.”  He looked every inch the country gent, with his grey deerstalker and hawthorn stick in his hand.  “The organisers of the castle shoot will be here soon.  Then it will be absolute chaos.”

“When does that take place?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”  He said.  “Over there.”  He waved towards the stretch of green turf running to the Northern cliffs.

“It’s a wonderful spot for it.”  I said. 

“Yes, it is.”  He smiled but not with his eyes.

“Have you got that letter, Sir Gerard?”

“Yes, yes of course.”  He removed a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to me.

The paper was of slightly different quality, better if anything and he had used a different font. Arial this time.  Like Times New Roman, standard Microsoft but definitely different. I read it carefully:

DON’T FORGET - HALF A MIILION - GAMEKEEPER’S HUT

OXMARKET WOODS – SEVEN O’CLOCK – FRIDAY NIGHT

NO POLICE

“Can I take this with me?”

“Of course, of course.”  Again the mirthless smile.  “I am willing to pay you know.  My niece’s and my family’s reputation is very dear to me.”

“I understand,” I said.  “But I don’t want you to do anything yet.  Give me until lunchtime tomorrow.”

“That won’t leave me much time to organise the money.”

“Hopefully, you won’t need to worry about that.”

“Thank you, Mr Handful.”  He shook my hand and turned away and I walked back to my car with absolutely no idea how I was going to prevent Sir Gerard Seymour Hornby parting with half a million pounds.  

*

The tiny Oxmarket Police Station was the work place for three people.  Sergeant Pat Higgins, a tall, sun tanned burly individual in his late forties with the most sarcastic sense of humour I had ever come across.  Melanie Softly.  A pretty blonde haired WPC with the wildest greenest eyes I had ever seen and of course DI Paul Silver, whose cramped office is at the back of the building.

My friend’s office has no photographs.  No certificates.  No trophies.  Instead there are files stacked against every wall and perched on the windowsill was a small James Bond Aston Martin DB5, a five and half inch Cyberman from the TV series Doctor Who, and a limited edition hardback copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Varied interests indeed.

  Sitting at his desk, he is squinting as he is reading a statement.  He needs glasses but won’t get his eyes tested because he refuses to succumb to any sign of diminishing faculties.

He looked up at me and smiled, placing the statement in front of him on his desk, face down, so that I couldn’t read it.  “Hello, John.  And what can I do you for?”

“John Knightley.”

“What about him?”  His smile disappeared.

“His name has come up in a case I’m working on.”

Paul raised a quizzical eyebrow.  “Do I need to know about this case?”

“Not at the moment,” I said.  “Client confidentiality and all that.”

“But?”  He pressed me.

“I’ve just got a bad feeling about it,” I said, raising and lowering my shoulders.  “Things just don’t seem right.”

“Do you want to share your concerns with me?”

“As I said, not yet,” I replied.  “I just want you tell me about John Knightley.”

“He’s what you would call a chancer,” he said.  “Predatory with the local teenage girls.  Always with one girl or another.  Got a bit of form.  Nothing major.  Petty theft.  Receiving.  Done a bit of community service.  He’s more of a bloody nuisance than anything else.  Can’t help but like the lad though.  Just a bit of a twat.”

I smiled at Paul’s description of him.  Basic and to the point as always.

“What about blackmail?”

“He’s crafty enough, definitely.”  He paused and then asked the obvious question.  “Who’s he blackmailing?”

“Can’t tell you,” I replied with a smile.  “But if I think there’s more to this than just blackmail, I’ll be in touch.”

“Make sure you do,” Paul said firmly.  “I don’t want WPC Softly pulling you in for withholding evidence.”

“I could think of worse persons to arrest me,” I joked.

“I’m sure you can.”

“What about friends?”

“He’s got quite a wide circle in Oxmarket,” Paul replied.  “But I would say his best friend is probably Two-tone.”

“Two-tone?”

“Real name is Chris Garrett.”

“What’s he like?”

“Trouble.”

“Have you got an address?”

“I’m not supposed to give away that sort of information,” Paul told me.

“But you will,” I told him.  “Because you never know when you might need me.”

Paul stood up from behind his desk and went to one of the stacks of files and said with a mischievous grin on his face, “You know me too well, Mr Handful.” 

*

I had left my mobile charging in the car and saw that I had a message.  It was from Kimberley Ashlyn Gere:

“Hi John, its Kimberley.”  She left a long thought-organising pause.  “I had a nice time the other week.  I hope you did too.  I was thinking about cooking dinner tonight.  Seven thirty or earlier.  You choose.  Let me know if you can’t make it.”

I rang her back immediately to confirm that I could make it.

*

Chris Garrett lived in Crescent Road.  A development built in the 1960s, apparently from papier-mâché and balsa wood.  Walls so thin you could hear the neighbours cutting their toenails and smell their dinner on the stove.  Embellishments of graffiti tried to disguise the patches of damp that bloomed on the grey concrete walls.

I drove slowly passed a small paper shop, which had resorted to metal grilles on its windows and doors, not even bothering to remove them during opening hours.  This place was definitely not shown on the postcards of Oxmarket that were sold in the better parts of the town.

I parked outside 104 and walked up the litter strewn path to the front door and I knocked loudly.  A girl of about nineteen with tousled hair peered round the partially opened door.  She was wearing a rugby jumper and a pair of cotton briefs.  A tattoo peeped from beneath the waistband.

“Yeah?”

“Chris Garrett?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I do.”

“And who the f**k are you?”

“Your worst nightmare if you don’t let me in.”

Obviously the angry expression on my face and the tone of my voice was enough to suggest to the girl that I meant what I said.  She unlocked the chain and I followed her down the hallway, trying not to pay too much attention to the lovely swaying arse.

Two more girls were asleep on the floor wrapped in each other’s arms. Someone else of indeterminate sex was cocooned in a duvet on the sofa.  The air stank of hash and stale cigarette smoke.

“Heavy night?”

“You could say that,” she said.  “Who are you?”

“I’m a private detective,” I replied.  “I need to speak to Chris Garrett about John Knightley.”

“He’s upstairs.”

She sat on a dining chair and rested her bare foot on the table to pick at a scab on her knee.

“Well, maybe you’d like to go and tell him that I’d like a word,” I suggested.

The girl pondered this and then slid her foot off the table.  She made the stairs seem very steep.  The dining room was plastered with cheap flyers for pub bands including my favourite Turntable, and there was a padded bench in the corner beneath a bar and weights.  Through the door into the kitchen I saw the previous night’s takeaway curry spilling out of a pedal bin.

The girl returned.  “Two-tone said he’ll be down in a minute.”

She went into the bathroom and, without bothering fully to close the door, sat on the toilet and urinated.  After finishing she cleaned her teeth, while watching me in the mirror.  Another toilet flushed upstairs, followed by the sound of a window opening.  A few seconds later a figure dropped past the kitchen window and landed in the garden.

I caught a glimpse of Chris Garrett’s face and saw pure unadulterated fear in his eyes.          

By the time I reached the back door he had vaulted the fence and was sprinting up the rear lane.  He was barefoot, wearing a cotton vest and faded tracksuit bottoms.

I did a stomach roll over the fence and landed heavily on cobblestones.  He was twenty metres ahead of me already, heading for a gate.  I knew I could catch him.

Garrett leapt the gate almost without breaking his stride.  My approach was to demolish it because it was slippery underfoot and I couldn’t stop in time.  He turned left, dodged an overflowing skip and crossed the road, leaping a hedge as he cut the corner of an adjoining road.

I kept running, catching him with every stride.

A British Gas crew were digging a trench down one side of the street.  The red clay was piled up next to the open pit.  Garrett made the jump easily enough, but he hadn’t looked for traffic.  It was the silence of the electric motor that had obviously deceived him.  The milk float had pulled out of a parking space and was only travelling at a few miles per hour, but he was in full flight and still in midair when it clipped him with the front corner nearside mudguard and he ended up in a heap on the tarmac.   

I ran towards him as he was dragging himself to his feet.

“Are you okay?”

Garrett was on his haunches, trying to stand as I approached.  He was bigger than I had first thought.  Six one and about sixteen stone.

“I want to ask you some questions about your friend, John Knightley.”

He looked directly at me.  A strange noise, an animal sound came from deep inside him as he came at me.  The sheer unexpectedness of it had caught me momentarily off guard and the knife that had suddenly appeared in his left hand curving upwards in a wicked arc and aimed for a point just below my breastbone.  Normally, he would have done a nice job of carving me up but the circumstances were abnormal:  his timing and reactions were gone from drug and alcohol abuse.  I caught and clamped his knife wrist with both hands, threw myself backwards, straightened a leg under him as I jerked him down and sent him catapulting over me.  I twisted and got to my feet in one motion but the need for haste was gone.

What happened next I had only done once before a long time ago in a seedy bar in Berlin.  It had worked then and it definitely worked again. Before Garrett had time to recover, I had lifted him to his feet, gripped him by the neck with one hand as the other holding the discarded knife, pressed the stiletto tip into his throat.

I could have killed him there and then.  It would have been so easy.  I could just push the knife a little bit harder.  What if he died?  It would be no great loss to humanity.  There wouldn’t be any grand achievements left unfulfilled or prizes unclaimed.  The only mark that Chris ‘Two-tone’ Garret was ever likely to leave on the world was a bloodstain.

Behind me, the milkman and gas board workers were transfixed, standing there watching as if suddenly turned to stone.

Ignoring them, I calmly whispered into his ear.  “Where is your mate, John Knightley?”

A thin trickle of blood ran down Chris Garrett’s neck, over his Adam’s apple, which was rising and falling as he swallowed.  Another liquid trickled over his bare feet and on to the pavement.

“I don’t know, man.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, man.  He said he had a big job on. Bring in a load of money.  He was always promising things man, but never delivered. Said I could have some.  But I haven’t seen or heard from him since last Friday.”

“He didn’t tell you any more than that?”

“No, man, I swear.”

“Okay.”  My voice remained calm.  “Now you’re not too mention this to anyone and I won’t tell your friends that you pissed yourself.  Is that understood?”

He gave a nod of millimetric proportions, forgetting there were witnesses to his embarrassment, watching from no more than fifty metres away.

“Good,” I said.  “Then we understand each other.” 

*

Kimberley Ashlyn Gere resided in a listed Georgian terrace that had been converted into six flats and backed onto the Oxmarket marshes.

As I approached the door, I heard a desperate scratching, whimpering and groaning from inside.

“Stop that, Charlie,” I heard her say as she fiddled with the lock.  The door opened and a black apparition flew at me.       

Charlie was the loveliest black cocker spaniel I had ever seen with a nature to match and once I had gone through the emotional welcome he allowed me into his domain.

“Oh Charlie,” Kimberley said in an exasperated tone.

He looked up at his master, wagging his tail frantically.

Kimberley looked at me a little embarrassed.  “I had everything perfect and then I went upstairs to freshen up and he gets into one of the cupboards.  Bloody dog!”

Charlie had done what all spaniels do when they are not getting the necessary attention: he had found something mischievous to do.  In this case it was to pull a box of porridge oats out of a kitchen cupboard and scatter oats and fragments of box throughout the living room.

She gave me a kiss that was a promise of things to come and I said, breathlessly: “Come on, it will only take us a few minutes to clear this up.”

I picked up the fragments of the box while Kimberley took out the vacuum cleaner and in a few minutes the room was as it should have been.  I fed Charlie, not that he needed much feeding, full as he was of oats and cardboard.   

Kimberley busied herself in the kitchen, preparing a quick meal while I went and sat with the dog, sipping a glass of Calvors Amber Lager that she had got in especially for the occasion and listening to a CD of The Carpenters.

Dinner was a wonderful mixture of Chicken, Chorizo sausage, spinach and pasta which she washed down with a glass of red wine and I had another Calvors. We ate it on trays on our knees while Charlie was banished outside and it was delicious. She kept apologising about the dog’s behaviour and we finished our drinks with a rich chocolate mousse and coffee and then went straight to bed.

Initially I was fearful and wary, but my fears were unfounded.  We slipped delightedly into each other’s arms between the sheets and for the first time in months all the loneliness and thoughts of Zoë temporarily left my memory.  It was a voyage of discovery that was jointly satisfying, culminating in us drifting off to sleep still entwined.   

I woke up early, like I always did and left Kimberley asleep, breathing softly, one arm covering her eyes. I noticed two tiny moles each side of her neck; her upper lip slightly more prominent than the lower; her nicely shaped eyebrows and that she made a soft humming noise as she slept.

I crept through the flat and dressed quietly, letting the dog in and letting myself out.  It felt odd, having slept with someone other than Zoë, to have touched another woman for the first time since she had died.  I felt strange.  I felt relief, guilt, happiness and loss, all at the same time.   

*

Dawn was breaking when I got back to my flat and the police were waiting for me in the shape of WPC Melanie Softly.

“Good morning,” I said politely.  “Been waiting long?”

“Morning, sir. No, I haven’t, sir.”  She said officiously.  “DI Silver told me to come and collect you, sir.”

“What for?”

“I’m to take you to a crime scene, sir.”

“At this time of the morning,” I protested.

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you sure it’s me that he wanted?”

“Positive, sir.”  She said firmly.  “He was most insistent, sir.”

“Well, all right.  Give me a minute while I go and freshen up.”

WPC Softly is not the most social of women, which could have something to do with her low regard for people and even lower expectations.  Most of her life is a mystery, I knew she was briefly married and had a young son who was looked after by her parents when she is at work.  She didn’t hide the fact that she was gay, but it is never open for discussion.  I suspected there had been women in her life that got under her skin and into her heart, but nowadays she is a closed book focusing on her work and her offspring and is only happy when she is with the latter.

She drove out of Oxmarket on her gears which I found tiring.  It did not take long to reach Oxmarket woods and we were met at a crossroads by Sergeant Pat Higgins on a motorcycle, and followed him down a twisting secondary road.  The wood stretched away all round, bare-branched and mournful in the grey damp morning.

Round the bend we came to a row of two cars and a van, parked.  Sergeant Higgins stopped and dismounted and the WPC and I got out.

“You’re late,” Sergeant Higgins said looking at his watch, after removing his helmet.

“Had to wait for lover boy to come home,” the WPC said defensively.

“Morning, John,” the Sergeant said to me with the usual derisive grin on his face.

“Morning, Pat,” I said.  “What’s this all about?”

He looked over me without haste and the grin if anything widened.  “Walk this way and I’ll show you.”

Sergeant Higgins was DI Silver’s right hand man.  He derived a conclusion very quickly and I had not seen anyone with faster physical reactions.  Over six foot, judo and wrestling were his hobbies, and along with the regular throws and holds he had been taught some strikingly dirty tricks.  His calm demeanour bore no relation to how he could handle himself in a dangerous situation.  I was glad to have him on my side than against me.

He led us down a barely perceptible track into the wood.  We walked on dead brown leaves, rustling.  After about half a mile we came to where some crime-scene tape blocked our progress.  Police photographers were gathering evidence, vying for space with the forensic team round a large white screen.  They were dressed in white overalls, heads covered.  From this group a familiar face walked towards.

“Morning, John,” DI Paul Silver smiled at me.

“Morning, Paul.”

“Sorry to get you out of bed so early . . .”

“He wasn’t in bed, sir,” WPC Softly interrupted.  “He wasn’t home when I first got there.”

“Really?”  Paul looked at me searching for an answer.

“I had dinner with Kimberley Ashlyn Gere from Bio-Preparation,” I said quickly.  “I had too much wine and fell asleep on the sofa.  Okay?”     

“Yeah, course you did,” Paul acknowledged, grinning from ear to ear.  “Anyway, the reason I brought you here is to show you a body.  I will warn you, it’s a pretty horrible sight.”  He gave a very human shudder.

“Who is it?”  I asked.

“John Knightley,” he said handing me a pair of white overalls.  “Put these on.  Don’t want you contaminating the evidence now do we?”

He showed me round the screen.

It was definitely John Knightley and he had been dead a while. The Oxmarket wood scavengers had started to find him quite tasty and I’m glad I saw him in situ.  He was going to fall to pieces as soon as they moved him. 

“How long has he been dead?”  I asked.

“About a week.”

“Who found him?”  I asked.

“Some boys.  It’s usually some boys who find bodies.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

“You don’t know how he died?”  I asked.

“No, not yet.  But I think you had better tell me why you were looking for him?”

We went out from behind the screen and some of the other men went in with a stretcher.  I didn’t envy them.

DI Paul Silver turned to walk back to the road with me, WPC Softly and Sergeant Higgins following at a short distance.  We went fairly slowly, talking about the case but it seemed more like eight miles than eight hundred metres.  After seeing a young man’s body in that sort of state, I wasn’t really ready for a jolly country ramble.

As we reached the cars he asked me whether I was going to be dropping the case.

I shook my head without explanation. 

“Be careful though, John,” Paul advised. “Whoever killed John Knightley, didn’t want him found.  I don’t want to find you in that state.”

“You know me, I’m always careful.”

“By the way,” Paul said suddenly.  “I’ve had reports of a man matching your description threatening Chris ‘Two-tone’ Garrett with a knife, yesterday.  Would you like to enlighten me?”

“Just a case of mistaken identity,” I said.

*