Peter Lovesey - Cop to Corpse

‘It sounds as if he needs help.’

‘Not from his own wife,’ she went and was close to tears.

‘How do you manage for money?’

‘He pays the rent and the main bills. Well, you pay them, in a way, as taxpayers. He’s unemployed now, on the social. I buy the food and my clothes. It works out about right.’

‘You buy his tins?’

‘I know what he eats and drinks.’

‘Speaking of drink …’

‘He’s not alcoholic. He doesn’t touch it at all, or drugs. And there isn’t another woman, I feel sure of that. He’s never been one for playing around.’ She paused and glanced away. ‘Actually he has quite a low sex drive.’

I remembered her wish to have children. Will she ever have any now?

‘Could it be gambling behind this? You can do that alone on the computer.’

‘It crossed my mind, but he pays the bills on time. We don’t get the red ones. There’s something else,’ she added. ‘Sometimes he’ll go out at night. I hear him creep out and lock his bedroom after him. He’s back before dawn. I don’t know what he’s doing.’

‘Have you asked him?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t like to.’

‘Forgive me, Vicky, but are you totally sure there isn’t another woman?’

‘I can’t be a hundred per cent certain, but I think I’d get an inkling and I don’t. All I can feel is the unhappiness coming from him. Bitterness. Not towards me. He ignores me.’

Anita folded her arms and turned to me. ‘You see now why she needs something else to take her out of herself? The sleuthing sisters does it nicely.’

I wasn’t really listening. I knew she wanted to press home how inconsiderate I am, and how Vicky’s situation was heaps worse than my own. That’s Anita’s steam-rollering style, and I don’t blame her for it. No, I was still coming to terms with what I’d been hearing, this sad, dysfunctional marriage and what could lie at the root of such misery.

I probed gently. ‘What was his job?’

Vicky didn’t seem to mind talking now. ‘Originally he was in the army. Ten or eleven years. He got to be a sergeant.’

‘You were an army wife?’

‘Yes, and it worked quite well until he got posted to Iraq. I stayed home, of course. The war changed his feelings about the army. Instead of signing on again, he resigned. With his savings he bought a second-hand car and started up as a taxi-driver in (she mentions another city twenty miles from here), but he lost his licence.’

‘Why? Why did he lose his licence?’

She sighed. ‘It was such a shame. He was doing really well with the taxi business. Working hard and making good money. Then one night he got a call to pick up a group of teenagers from a party at a house somewhere out in the country. When he got there and saw the state of them, he refused. They’d obviously been drinking heavily and were rowdy and abusive and two of them were vomiting. A driver isn’t forced to take people. Tim took a pride in his car and always kept it spotless. He drove off and left them. But something dreadful happened. The sick ones got worse and the others called an ambulance and they were taken to hospital, but one of them died.’

‘Died? How ghastly.’

‘It turned out that the two who were sick had eaten some seafood that caused acute food poisoning. Tim had to give evidence at the inquest and a doctor said they could have saved the girl if she’d been taken to the hospital earlier.’

Anita went, ‘Meaning if Tim had picked them up as planned?’

And I was like, ‘He wasn’t to know that. He wasn’t supposed to be taking them to the hospital.’

‘That’s right,’ Vicky went, ‘but the way it was reported in the press, he was the villain in all this, not the people who served up toxic food or the friends who behaved so unpleasantly. Tim was the scapegoat, the cabdriver who refused to pick up a critically ill young girl. It was written up in the local paper three weeks running on some pretext or another. There was a lot of bad feeling in the city. You see, the girl who died was a policeman’s daughter, only fifteen.’

You’d think the policeman would have picked her up.’

‘He was on duty. Anyway, soon after the inquest was in the papers, Tim started getting stopped by the police for things they never usually check, tyres, emissions, a dodgy brake light, mud covering the number-plate, so-called speeding when he was just on the limit. It became obvious it was a campaign to get his licence taken away. And that’s what happened in quite a short time. We can’t say for certain that some of the things that went wrong — like low tyre pressures — were caused deliberately, but we’re very suspicious. He got in trouble several times over and in the end he lost his licence to drive a taxi.’

‘That’s so unfair. Him an ex-soldier, too.’

‘And people treated us like shit — neighbours, shopkeepers. They’d all read the papers. The only ones who were sympathetic were other cabdrivers. They know it could easily have been them. But they couldn’t do anything to help. We decided to leave. That’s why we moved here.’

‘And he’s been unemployed since?’

‘He had to sell the car, so he can’t do taxi work. He rides a motorbike now.’

Anita gave me a Mother Superior look. ‘Hearing what Vicky goes through puts our little enterprise into perspective.’ She turned back to Vicky. ‘It’s light relief, isn’t it, my pet?’

There was no response from Vicky. I could see it had been a huge effort for her to talk about her problem.

The tension between us was unbearable. I felt it was up to me to end it and I knew how. ‘All right, I’ll tell you the name of Heathrow man. It’s John Smith. And now you know as much as I do.’

Anita began to laugh. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘I checked the invoice book this morning.’

Vicky blinked several times, as if snapping out of a trance. ‘John Smith? That’s amazing. So what are we going to do about him?’

In the morning Peter Diamond put in a later appearance than usual. The word had spread in CID that he’d personally arrested the Somerset Sniper overnight, but it hadn’t been the triumph it might have been. At the scene, the capture had been messy. Back at the nick, he owed the team an apology. Almost every line of enquiry he’d initiated had been shown as mistaken. No one was going to forget that his focus had been closer to home. They hadn’t missed the irony that he, of all people, had nicked a man who by all accounts wasn’t a serving officer, an ex-officer or even a civilian employed by the police.

So it wasn’t going to be a case of round to the pub, lads, we nailed this together. No one knew what the big man’s mood would be.

He looked none the worse for his wrestling match on the riverbank — except for what he was wearing: a houndstooth sports jacket with leather elbow patches, grey flannel trousers and crepe-soled canvas shoes. God only knew where he stored such relics. There was a distinct smell of mothballs. His movement was ponderous, as if every muscle was stiff, yet he wasn’t carrying the stick and the limp had gone as he passed through the CID room on the way to his office.

Actually he sounded energized. ‘Morning, people. Ingeborg and Paul, I need to hear from you about last night.’ He left the door open.

Looks were exchanged. It seemed to be business as usual, regardless that the main suspect was under arrest in the cells downstairs.

‘What did you come up with?’

In his office, Ingeborg played along, assisted by Paul Gilbert, with a short account of their walkthrough of Harry Tasker’s beat, how they’d got the tip that Anderson Jakes might have information and where they’d tracked him down and what he had to tell them about Harry’s possible dealings with Soldier Nuttall’s son, Royston.