Peter Guttridge - City of Dreadful Night

‘It’s Bob Watts, Ronnie,’ I said when I got through.

Ronnie was the neighbourhood policeman. He was surprised to get a call from me.

‘Hello, sir,’ he said after a moment. ‘How can I help you?’

‘You’ve got a possible homicide on your patch.’ I filled him in on the details.

‘I’ll be right down. Will you wait?’

‘The truth is, Ronnie, my involvement will just cause unnecessary complication. Once you’ve called it in to Division, everybody will be down here. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll go on home – you know where to get me when you need me.’

‘Fair enough, sir.’

I never could get him to call me by my first name. After my disgrace some people cold-shouldered me and others sneered. A minority, like Ronnie, however, thought I’d been treated shabbily, made a scapegoat. They still called me sir because they felt I’d done a good job in the brief time I’d been Chief Constable here.

Molly was standing in our kitchen as I drove by. I gave her a wave I knew she couldn’t see and carried on my way. Two miles further along the road I pulled through the first set of gates into the long gravelled drive of Harlingden Manor.

Whenever I took taxis, the drivers got excited around now, thinking they would be getting a good tip when they caught sight of the big manor house. I drove towards the second set of ornate gates at the entrance to the house then, as usual, turned left and followed the gravel drive round the back to the servants’ quarters.

This bungalow – it used to be the chauffeur’s in the old days – had become vacant just as Molly and I were separating. After my month in my friends’ farmhouse was up I’d moved straight in. It was by no means ideal. Boxes of my things were piled in the hallway, not because I hadn’t got round to emptying them, but because there was nowhere for the contents to go. However, it was all I would allow myself. And it was near Molly if she needed me.

The light was flashing on the phone. Probably Molly, angry that I’d hung up on her. Unsurprisingly, she was angry whenever we spoke these days, masking her hurt with rage. This evening she’d been angry because I’d made the mistake of telling her the truth. I’m a trustworthy man, on the whole, but I still believe truth is sometimes overrated.

‘What do you mean you’re going to go back into the case?’ she had said as I was driving over the Downs after a tense meeting in Brighton.

‘I’m even more convinced now that I was set up. I can’t allow that kind of corruption to flourish.’

‘Can you hear yourself, Mr Knight in Shining Armour? I’m as sorry as you your glittering career ended so abruptly but, Christ, you presided over a massacre that caused two nights of rioting.’

Her voice was venomous.

‘And are you really so arrogant, so egotistical, as to believe that the botched operation and everything that followed was just aimed at ruining you? Get a life, Robert.’

‘I had one. It was taken away from me.’

‘With not a little help from you. Nobody asked you to shag that little tart and wreck your marriage.’

She was right about my one-night stand, but I was convinced that I was briefed against by someone near the top of the political food chain, that the story of my affair was leaked to the papers. And the set-up was real, I was certain of that too.

I do hate corruption. And I do belief in truth in the large sense. I couldn’t bear the thought that there was corruption at the heart of the police force that I had led. But I had to be honest. Sure enough, I wanted to find out what had happened so that the truth would be known.

But most of all I wanted revenge.

I’d been to Chief Superintendent Charlie Foster’s funeral the previous day. It was a small affair. Perhaps the fact of his suicide put some people off. I’d driven over to the crematorium early but had held back until the last minute, then slipped in at the back. Sheena Hewitt was in the front row representing Southern Police and there were a handful of familiar faces from the station. Sheena was now Acting Chief Constable. It should have been my deputy, Philip Macklin, but since his role in the Milldean incident was under investi-gation, the police authority preferred to go with someone uninvolved in – untainted by – that investigation.

Foster’s son, a well-dressed man in his mid-twenties, gave a sombre valediction, although he did give a wan smile as he recalled his father’s passion for trad jazz. I left as the coffin went through the doors and into the flames to the jaunty sound of Acker Bilk playing some New Orleans strut.

A man called after me as I crunched over the gravel back to my car. I turned. Bill Munro was hurrying towards me, puffing as he came. I hadn’t noticed him in the chapel.

‘Didn’t expect to see you here,’ I said as we shook hands.

‘Nor me you,’ he said. ‘But you’ve saved me a trip. Have you time for a drink in half an hour or so?’

We met in the Fortunes of War on the beachfront. It was a pub dating back to the twenties, set in the arches, cramped and with a low ceiling. I figured nobody would see us there. It was quiet – no people, no piped music.

We sat upstairs by an open window and looked out to sea as we talked in low voices.

‘Did Foster leave a note?’ I said.

‘None that we’ve found. You know what happened? His wife didn’t know where he was and couldn’t get him on his mobile so she went down to their beach hut. It was locked from the inside but she could see blood coming under the door so she called us and an ambulance.’ He shook his head. ‘Poor woman.’

‘You’re assuming it was guilt over his responsibility for the raid going wrong.’

Munro sighed.

‘He did more than that. He buggered up the return of the guns to the armoury after the incident. He immediately got the weapons handed back, right enough, but he didn’t tag which weapon had been in the keeping of which officer. That went for the snipers’ rifles too. Everyone’s DNA will be over everything. He compromised the investigation before it even got started.’

‘Stupidity or cunning?’

Munro shrugged and reached for his beer.

‘Did you have more to tell me?’

He looked into his glass a moment.

‘This would go down better with a couple of bags of crisps. Hang on a jiffy.’

I watched the people wandering by below until he sat heavily down, dropping two packets of crisps on the table.

‘Cheese and onion and salt and vinegar.’ He tore both packets open. ‘Help yourself.’

Then, through a mouthful of crisps, he told me the investigation had stalled.

‘Nobody who was upstairs will say what happened. Nobody. Not Connolly, White, Philippa Franks or Potter. None of the snipers will admit to firing the shot that killed the man coming out of the back door.

‘We have the rifle that was used for that but we don’t know who signed it out and checked it back in. Same goes for the other weapons. Since they were all discharged, we don’t know who did what to whom.’

‘And John Finch?’

‘Finch has disappeared. No sign of him packing at his flat, no movement on his credit cards or his bank account since he went AWOL.’

I sipped my wine.

‘Do you think he’s harmed himself?’

‘Or somebody has harmed him,’ Munro said, scooping up crisps with his fat fingers. He shook his head. ‘But why would anybody?’

‘This is a murky business, Bill, I’ve said that from the start. Nothing really makes sense. Is DC Edwards, whose grass started all this, still on the missing list?’

‘He’s done a runner, looks like. He was due leave starting the next day, true enough, but he’s not answering his mobile and it’s turned off so we can’t track him through it. Credit card used in Dieppe the day after the incident, then points south – petrol and cheap restaurants – all the way to the Pyrenees. After that, nothing.’