The Garden Party Page 8

  ‘I see.’ Vicary clasped his hands behind his head. ‘You’re right, can’t deny him early parole for what his mates might do. Who are his mates, do we know?’

  ‘He has one previous for armed robbery – collected five years for that – and he was one of a gang of four, which probably means a gang of ten or twelve.’

  ‘Yes.’ Vicary nodded. ‘Chiefs above them and gofers below them.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Yewdall continued to read the file. ‘All four of them went down at Southwark Crown Court.’ She reached for other files on her desk. ‘The three others were Fergus McAlpine—’

  ‘A Scotsman?’

  Penny Yewdall grinned broadly. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you, boss? I mean, with a name like that you’d think he had come from north of the border, but in fact, according to this file, he was born in Dartford.’

  Vicary laughed. ‘Probably has Scottish parents, dare say I should have seen that coming, though.’

  ‘The second man in the gang was one Clive Allison, also born in Dartford.’

  ‘School chums?’ Vicary proposed.

  ‘Possibly, boss, no indication of that here, but they were all very good at keeping their heads below the parapet. Nothing since they came out after five years in the slammer. And the third geezer, he’s the exception, he’s a bloke called Charlie Magg; he alone of the gang of four is presently a guest of Her Majesty.’

  ‘He is?’ Vicary beamed.

  ‘Brixton, sir, on remand, he’s awaiting trial for Grievous Bodily Harm and he has much previous for East End sort of villainy – burglary, car theft, a few GBHs – so he seems to be a bit of a hard man; then he teamed up with Arnie Rainbird’s mob and also managed to keep his head down after his release, but only until a couple of months ago when he was arrested and remanded.’ Yewdall put the file down on her desktop.

  ‘And you think that they all might have been at the house party?’ Vicary asked.

  ‘It seems likely, sir,’ Yewdall agreed, ‘they seem to be good mates. They’d be wanting to throw a party for Rainbird’s release, and what a party it seems to have been. Whatever happened shook up Desmond Holst quite badly, to the extent that five or so years after the party he was still shaken by it.’

  ‘The bodies were in some mess,’ Vicary spoke slowly, ‘I haven’t got Mr Shaftoe’s report yet, too early to expect it and there are still tests to be done, but he said it was like the two men had been broken on the wheel.’

  ‘What does that mean, sir?’ Yewdall asked.

  Vicary explained what was meant by being ‘broken on the wheel’ and watched the colour drain from Yewdall’s face as he did so. ‘All he could say was that the injuries and the scorching of the bones were peri-mortem, and that he could not identify a conclusive cause of death.’

  ‘The old “Mile End Road Retribution Foxtrot”, you think, sir?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘Possibly . . . and we also don’t know whether the murder of the two men happened at the week long party given for Rainbird’s release or whether it was another unconnected incident that traumatized Desmond Holst, and terrified twenty plus streetwise women into silence.’ Vicary paused. ‘You know if we can find just one of those women, just one, then one will lead to two and two to three, and if one, just one, will talk . . . Do we know any of their names?’

  ‘Not yet, sir.’ Yewdall’s voice had a strong note of determination. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Good for you, Penny, good for you. And the next step, apart from tracking down as many of those girls as you can, is . . .?’

  ‘We – me and Tom here – are going to pay a call on Charlie Magg in Brixton.’

  ‘For?’

  ‘Just a chat, sir, just to take the measure of him. If he’s on remand he’ll be looking at going back to prison for a while . . . See what response we get.’

  ‘Very well.’ Vicary nodded his agreement. ‘Tom? Anything to add?’

  ‘We also thought we would contact all the prisons Arnie Rainbird has been in; see if he had any consistent visitors in those ten years.’

  ‘Good.’ Vicary stood. ‘That’ll keep you two busy tomorrow, but of those tasks, identifying as many of the girls as you can, that is the most important; that and the identity of the woman who controlled them.’

  An observer would have seen a short, rotund man dressed in a lightweight summer jacket with baggy corduroy trousers. The man would be carrying a khaki-coloured canvas knapsack over his right shoulder. The man would have been observed leaving the Royal London Hospital by a small door in the side of the building and then walking away with head down, shuffling gait, keeping himself closer to the walls of the buildings than to the road, and always, always being the one to move to one side when another foot passenger approached him. The observer would watch as the man halted outside the entrance to the public bar of a public house as if pondering whether to call in for a beer or two, and then, as if thinking the better of it, continued to shuffle along the pavement. By now the observer would think he was looking at a working man, unskilled or perhaps semi-skilled, who was making his way home after a day’s work. In fact, the observer would be looking at John Shaftoe, MD MRCP FRCPath.

  Shaftoe took the tube from Aldgate East to King’s Cross St Pancras and from there he took the overground suburban service to Brookmans Park. From Brookmans Park he walked from the railway station, over the railway bridge, passed the Brookman Pub and Restaurant on his left-hand side, a 1930s red brick roadhouse with a parade of shops to his right. He ambled into Bradmore Green and the beginning of leafy suburbia and put himself at the steady climb to take him into Brookmans Avenue, which was lined with detached houses, often with twin garages, and wide U-shaped ‘in-and-out’ driveways. He continued walking up the road noticing again how the homeowners’ cars, the Rolls-Royces, the Mercedes-Benzes, Porsches and Audis, were parked in the driveways of the houses and the more lowly cars of the domestic help, the Toyotas and the small Fords, were parked in the roadway. It was just not done for a home help to park their car in their employer’s driveway, but this was Brookmans Park, where even the domestics travel to work by car. Shaftoe followed the road as it bent round to the right and walked until he was near the top of the lane, whereupon he turned into a gravel-surfaced U-shaped driveway and let himself through the front door of the house. He was warmly greeted by his wife who told him she had prepared a cold supper for him, given the weather, to which he replied, ‘Champion, pet, just champion.’

  After a supper taken in the early evening, as was the custom in the north of England, John and Linda Shaftoe, both from Thurnscoe, pronounced, ‘Thurns-ku’, near Barnsley, and both children of Yorkshire coal miners, and both uncomfortable in well-set Hertfordshire, settled down for a quiet evening at home, enjoying each other’s warm company and speaking only to plan their next ‘base-touching trip’.

  ‘Londoners are requested to make only essential use of water.’ The mantra, repeated frequently on the radio, ran through Penny Yewdall’s mind as she stood in the street outside her house cleaning her car; her small, red Vauxhall which she often said was ‘good enough for London but not any further’. She cleaned the lights and the windscreen, windows and the outside mirrors, but allowed the bodywork to remain unwashed. She stood back from the car as the sun settled and looked up and down Tusker Road and noted with pleasure that all the other motor cars parked in the street had the same badge of good citizenship displayed by their owners, not one being sparkling clean. She carried the soapy water back into her house and poured it on the small lawn at the rear of the building. Plants, she knew, did not like soapy water, but it was better than no water at all.

  THREE

  The two-tone grey phone on Harry Vicary’s desk warbled softly. He glanced out of his office window and the summer sky over London that morning as he let the phone ring twice before he picked it up leisurely.

  ‘Detective Inspector Vicary, Murder and Serious Crime Unit,’ he said in a calm voice.

  ‘Lady on the phone for you, sir; l
ady member of the public.’ The voice of the switchboard operator had a nervous tone to it, and Vicary thought he was probably newly appointed. ‘She is responding to the E-fits printed in today’s Standard. She says that she thinks she knows the two men.’

  ‘I see.’ Vicary reached instinctively for his notepad and pen. ‘Put her through, please.’

  The line clicked and a querulous female voice said, ‘Hello?’

  ‘DI Vicary.’

  ‘I may know the men in today’s paper, in the Standard.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Yes. Would one of them have a scar on his cheek? He said he was attacked when he was in prison, you see.’

  Vicary smiled to himself. ‘Well, madam, the prints, the images in the paper, are E-fits; they are only an impression of what they might have looked like. So one may indeed have had a scar but we don’t know that, not for sure.’

  ‘Well, if it is the one I think it is he had a scar on his cheek . . . he did . . . on his right cheek.’ The voice seemed to grow in confidence as Vicary identified an East London accent. ‘And it said one was short and the other was tall?’

  ‘Yes, there is a distinct height difference.’

  ‘That’s what the paper said, and they went missing five years ago?’

  ‘More than five,’ Vicary corrected her, ‘we don’t know how much more than five though.’

  ‘Sounds like those two . . . only they left a lot of their stuff behind you see.’

  ‘I understand,’ Vicary replied. ‘They were lodgers?’

  ‘Lodgers, yes, they were lodgers in the basement. I let out rooms, do you see? I’ve been letting out rooms since my old man went before; he’s in a better place anyway, God rest his old soul. He was an awkward old geezer but God rest him just the same . . . but he was an awkward old man at the end.’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  ‘But I don’t like doing it, renting out. I don’t like having strangers in my house but I can’t make ends meet no other way.’

  ‘Yes, madam. So, madam, you are where?’

  ‘Stepney, darling. I’m in Stepney, good old, sunny Stepney.’

  ‘Can I please take your name, madam?’ Vicary asked.

  ‘Me, darling, I am old Violet . . . old Violet they call me. Violet Mayfield is my name.’

  ‘Violet Mayfield.’ Vicary wrote the name on his notepad. ‘What’s your address in Stepney, Mrs Mayfield?’

  ‘Ninety-four Matlock Street, darling,’ the woman replied, ‘top end, near White Horse Road. If you’re coming by tube you need to get off at Stepney East.’

  ‘Stepney East,’ Vicary echoed, though he knew his officers would be making the journey by car.

  ‘Yes, darling, short walk after that.’

  ‘Yes. Will you be at home for the rest of the morning, Mrs Mayfield?’ Vicary asked.

  ‘Rest of the old day, more like it,’ Violet Mayfield replied, ‘I have no need to go out anywhere until bingo at seven o’clock this evening, darling.’

  ‘Good, good.’ Vicary ran his hands through his hair. ‘I will send two of my officers round to see you,’ he advised. ‘They will be with you later this morning.’

  ‘Two?’ Violet Mayfield allowed a note of surprise to enter her voice. ‘You need two?’

  Vicary smiled. ‘Oh, yes. We like to go in pairs in case we get lost.’

  ‘Oh . . . really?’ Violet Mayfield sounded surprised. ‘Well I never. That’s a good idea. What happens if you do get lost?’

  ‘We ask a policeman.’ Vicary grinned, though he spoke without a trace of humour in his voice. ‘But thank you for phoning us, Mrs Mayfield, we do appreciate it.’ He replaced the telephone handset, gently so.

  Harry Vicary stood, tearing off the top page from his notepad as he did so, and strode down the CID corridor to the office occupied by DS Victor Swannell. He stood in the doorway of Swannell’s office. ‘Busy, Victor?’

  Victor Swannell looked up at Vicary and then indicated the mass of paper on his desktop, ‘Me, sir? Always busy, that’s me, boss. Never enough hours in the day,’ Swannell replied with a broad grin. ‘But for you, boss, I am at your service, ready, willing and able.’

  ‘Good man, Victor.’ Vicary held up the sheet of paper he had torn from his notepad. ‘Name and address of a lady who has just phoned, she seems to think that she might recognize the two E-fits in today’s Standard.’

  ‘The Evening Standard which comes out in the morning?’ Swannell stood as Vicary approached his desk and handed him the sheet of paper.

  ‘Yes, as you say,’ Vicary replied, ‘they don’t hang about; they like to hit the street as soon as. But this lady sounds promising; she sounds very interesting indeed. If she is right, at least one of the bodies was that of a jailbird; he’s got form, and one had a scar which will probably help aid identification. Anyway, Penny Yewdall and Tom Ainsclough are chasing up a lead; they’re south of the river in Brixton Prison. Can you visit this address and talk to this lady, Mrs Mayfield? Take Frankie Brunnie with you.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘See what you see.’ Vicary smiled. ‘Find what you find.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’ Swannell reached for his jacket. ‘I’m on it.’

  ‘You know that he’s still on a life-support machine, Charlie. You know the sketch; breathing and gurgling into tubes, wired up to a monitor, his face still looking like a massive beetroot. You know, don’t you?’ Penny Yewdall spoke calmly but looked intently at Charlie Magg.

  ‘And that, Charlie,’ Tom Ainsclough added, ‘is after ten weeks, still no improvement. It’s touch and go, Charlie, touch and go, and you know very well what that means.’ Charlie Magg remained steadfastly silent. His face and eyes were devoid of any emotion that either Ainsclough or Yewdall could detect. Charlie Magg eyed Ainsclough and Yewdall with cold, steely blue eyes. He had a narrow face, with long, golden hair combed back over his head down to the collar of the blue-and-white striped, prison issue shirt he wore. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up neatly, cuff over cuff, thus revealing massively tattooed and powerfully muscular forearms. The back of his hands and his fingers were stained with clumsy, self-inflicted tattoos which spoke of borstal training before he was twenty-one years old, and before he graduated to adult prisons. He was strongly built and stood about six feet tall, so far as Ainsclough could estimate, and was not the sort of man anyone with any sense, he thought, would want to get into a rumble with. It was, Ainsclough pondered, little wonder that his victim, his latest known victim, was still in a coma, with his face looking like a large beetroot, two and a half months after Charlie Magg had ‘given him a little slap for being out of order’.

  ‘So, with that in mind, we thought we’d pay a call on you, Charlie,’ Yewdall continued, ‘see if we can work something out for you. You help us, we help you.’

  Charlie Magg still remained silent. He smelled strongly of body odour, clearly indicating his weekly shower and change of clothing was due. He fixed Yewdall with expressionless eye contact. He wasn’t going to give anything away.

  ‘If the hospital . . . if the doctors switch off the life-support machine the Crown Prosecution Service will be charging you with murder, Charlie,’ Ainsclough quietly explained, ‘and I can tell you that they want to do that, they badly want to do that, they really want you put away for a very long time. Not just for this of course, but for other things they haven’t been able to pin on you. The CPS want you away for twenty years . . . at least. If the life-support machine is unplugged . . . and your victim begins the big sleep . . .’ Ainsclough shrugged. ‘Well, that is a mandatory life sentence for you, Charlie. You won’t get out for at least twenty years and no one can survive more than ten years in maximum security. After ten years in a Category A prison institutionalization sets in. After ten years of high security life you get more comfortable on the inside and you get frightened of the outside. But you don’t need me to tell you that, Charlie, you’ve seen broken blaggers struggling to get by after ten or fifteen years inside; their way o
f calling everybody “sir” and wanting to be told which brand of toothpaste to buy.’

  Still Magg remained silent. Both officers thought that his massive, brooding presence made the agent’s room in Brixton Prison seem small, cramped and overcrowded. Then, just then, there was a brief flicker of Magg’s eyelids; his defences were weakening; what Tom Ainsclough had just said appeared to have reached him.

  ‘We are in a position to help you, Charlie.’ Yewdall was quick to exploit the apparent evaporating of Charlie Magg’s resolve. ‘That’s why we are here, like we said. You know, Charlie, looking at you I can see you’re a manly man,’ Yewdall continued, ‘you like the ladies; you’ve got an eye for the ladies, I’ll bet. I’ll lay good money that you have got a good eye for all those young female joggers in tight pants that jog round the parks in fair London Town, all those slender young things that sun themselves in their bikinis on the beaches on the south coast . . . or in the London parks. Those decorative girls who can brighten any man’s day. You think, Charlie, if they take your victim off life support, and not because he’s recovering, but because he’s in a persistent vegetative state, then there won’t be any eye feasting for you for twenty years. You’ll see females during visiting hours and they won’t be young and fit and there’ll be no touching . . . and the young cons you see in the showers, well they will begin to look inviting.’

  Charlie Magg’s head sagged slightly.

  ‘That’s not a clever prospect, Charlie,’ Tom Ainsclough promptly added, ‘that’s not a clever prospect at all.’ Ainsclough glanced round the agent’s room: plaster over brick walls, painted in two shades of blue, light above dark. A massive lump of opaque glass set high in the wall provided the only source of natural light; the illumination of the room being that from a filament bulb behind a Perspex cover attached to the ceiling. The white-painted metal door was fastened shut, but behind it, in the corridor, stood two prison officers, for whose presence both officers were deeply grateful, because Charlie Magg was known to be prone to ‘kicking off’ at any time.