Stuart Pawson - Some By Fire

It was a dewy morning, the air as cool as that first sip of a well-earned pint. The blackbirds were singing and my pet blue tits were already scurrying between feeding ground and nest, their beaks stuffed with caterpillars and their feathers growing raggy with the non-stop effort. I brushed a spider's web off my face and wrecked the one adorning the wing mirror of my car, but not before' the perpetrator had dashed for shelter behind the glass. "I'll get you," I murmured to it.

Early-morning driving can be fun, before twenty million bleary-eyed commuters stagger to their garages and swamp the roads. I did the first hundred miles in ninety minutes and at six twenty-five pressed the button on the radio, just in time to catch up with the sport and the news headlines.

Big deal. Manchester United had lost and there was a bomb scare at Mount Pleasant sorting office, two streets away from the SFO. Traffic chaos was expected, and we were advised to travel in by public transport. I took the sissy's way out and abandoned the car at Cockfosters, not far from where I'd met Fearnside one week ago, and caught the tube.

"Ah!" said the receptionist, when I introduced myself to her at precisely eight fifty-eight. As Miss Jean Brodie said, I didn't wish to appear intimidated by being late, or early. She found a message in her log book and told me that the meeting had been put back one hour.

"It's due to the bomb scare," she explained.

"Bomb scare? What bomb scare?" I replied.

I went for a walk and tried again at ten o'clock. This time they were in. Fearnside introduced me to Chief Superintendent Tregellis, who sat behind a huge oak desk and looked like all top cops should look. His fierceness was enhanced by a deep cleft that ran from the middle of his cheek down past the corner of his mouth, like a duelling scar, except that there was a matching one at the other side and he didn't look the type to turn the other cheek. He was big and angular, with a shock of spiky black hair, his rolled-up sleeves giving him an air of no-nonsense efficiency. We did our best to break each other's fingers as we shook hands, and he invited me to sit down.

"Two hundred miles you've had to come, Charlie," he said, 'and you beat us here. We are duly chastened."

"And quite rightly," I replied.

He picked up a phone and dialled three numbers. "Get yourself in here and bring some coffee with you," he said into it.

Fearnside was hovering. "I'll leave you with Mr. Tregellis, if you don't mind, Charlie. I think he'll be very interested in what you have to say." I jumped to my feet and shook his hand while wishing him a happy retirement and saying how much I'd enjoyed working with him. The poor bloke looked choked and we agreed to talk on the phone when this was all over, neither of us believing it.

When he'd gone Tregellis said: "Bout time the old bugger was put out to grass. He's been cruising these last three years."

"He's helped me a lot in the past," I stated, matter of fact. If he thought I was going to start slagging Fearnside off he was wrong. The door opened and two men came in: a lanky one in a power shirt, bow tie and blue braces, and a dumpy skinhead. Dumpy was carrying a tray filled with jugs and cups; his pal looked as if he'd refuse to carry anything heavier than a figure on a balance sheet. Tregellis's desk was equipped with enough chairs for mini-conferences and they both sat on my right, with their backs to the window. I pulled a brand-new typist's pad from my briefcase and when Tregellis introduced us I wrote their names down. Dumpy was a DS and Lord Peter Wimsey was from the legal department.

"Right, Charlie," Tregellis began when the coffee was poured. "Tell us what you've got."

It didn't take long and I only had one copy of the file to offer them.

Dumpy took it to someone to get more. They were good listeners, I'll give them that. As I spoke Tregellis rubbed the blunt end of his pencil up and down the groove in his right cheek. I half-expected him to dislodge a couple of acorns, but he didn't. "That's more or less it," I concluded. "If you tell me that Crosby's paranoid I'll believe you and drop the whole thing."

Lord Wimsey's real name was Piers Forrester and that was as good a reason as any for hating him. "Mr. Crosby isn't paranoid," he announced. "J. J. Fox is as nasty a piece of shite as you'll ever step in. What you have here, Priest, is confirmation of what we already know but it doesn't give us any more in the way of evidence."

Tregellis glanced at him in a way that spoke volumes and leaned forward. There was a faded tattoo on his forearm that could have been an anchor. "J. J. Fox owns SWTV, as you know," he told me. "He put in the highest bid when the franchise was offered, back in 1985, and because of his media experience his offer was accepted. Nothing wrong with that, you might say." I nodded my agreement. "The second highest bid was from a consortium of established media figures. Fox's bid, which beat the deadline by minutes, was one million pounds above theirs. All the other bids were miles away. Mary Perigo was secretary for the consortium. Spinster, fifty years old, but not bad-looking.

While the bids were being calculated she found herself a boyfriend.

Called himself Rodger Wakefield. Rodger with a "d" in the middle, she stressed, when she told a girlfriend all about him. This friend said he sounded urbane, suave and generous with his money. Two days after it was announced that Fox had won the franchise she was found dead in her car on the top floor of a multi storey The car was burnt out."

"Was thej any evidence that she'd leaked information?" I asked.

"There were six in the consortium," Tregellis continued. "Some businessmen, some from the bright side of the footlights. They all knew the size of the bid, of course, as did Miss Perigo. Then they had partners, wives and mistresses, not to mention pals at the club, accountants, bank managers and the girl who typed the letter. We looked, Charlie, believe me we looked, but anyone could have leaked that figure."

"Was she murdered?"

"Cause of death was never established, but the car had been torched deliberately."

"What did Rodger Wakefield have to say?"

"We never found him. She'd told her friend his name, but otherwise was very coy about him. The friend had wondered if he was married. They were seen together at a charity "do" she'd help organise, in Newbury, and she'd named him as her guest, but according to acquaintances Mr.

Wakefield was unusually camera-shy. The Berkshire Life photographer was there, snapping away, but Wakefield only appears in the background of someone else's picture, a three-quarters rear view, I'm afraid.

Several people saw him, however, and say they'd recognise him again."

"Did he have an accent?"

"Public school northern, educated southern; take your pick."

"How hard have you looked for him?"

"We haven't. Met CID circulated an E-fit. The usual; he was a murder suspect."

"What's the state of play at the moment?"

"With Mary Perigo or J. J. Fox?"

"Fox."

"There isn't one. What with bent pension funds and NHS scams and computer fraud we're up to here." He waved a hand above his head.

"We've nobody working on it. Now and again someone writes us a letter and we put it on the file. Crosby isn't the only enemy that Fox has; five years ago the War Crimes Bureau contacted us and asked if we had anything on him. That's about it."

"Did you help them?"

He looked grim. "I suspect a copy of what we had may have fallen into their hands. Up to then we had never suspected that he wasn't a Jew.

Crosby's story corroborates that."

"Maybe Crosby was the one who tipped them off," I suggested.

Tregellis pointed a finger at his head, as if shooting himself, and said: "Of course."