Busy Body

by Raymond Flynn

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

Someone disliked Eddathorpe's distinguished industrialist Sir Jeremy Blatt enough to bash him on the head, pack him into a lorry and despatch him on a North Sea ferry... Detective Chief Inspector Robert Graham has too many suspects: several wives, one of them Sir Jeremy's own; the exploited employees of his frozen- chicken empire; a son who despised him; even a policeman...And that is without taking into account the animal rights protests and the unwanted help from Ron Hacker, Graham's favourite ex-detective superintendent, newly installed as Blatt's security chief. Graham picks his way through a sorry story of cold-blooded murder, warm blooded love and unchecked greed to uncover a solution that surprises even him.

Release date: November 21, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 232

Sample

It sounded like a fire bell, the last trump and the call to arms combined, and I was out of bed and halfway across the room before I recognised it for what it was: that blasted telephone again, the volume turned up high. Pitch black outside; definitely the middle of the night.

However often I try to minimise the noise, however frequently, however forcefully, I try to point out to my wife that her diligence with a duster is likely to earn her a long, unhappy widowhood, she still manages to polish me into a potential heart attack two or three times a month. Anybody would think that a sound moderator on a phone was an unheard-of technological refinement in this neck of the woods. Nineteen years’ police service, and I still achieve maximum lift-off with about half a pint of adrenalin pumping around in my system by the second ring.

It’s not even as if she ever wakes up herself. The most she ever manages is a luxurious feminine grunt as she gathers up the whole of the duvet and ensures my attention to duty by leaving me pyjama’d and shivering in the dark.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘DCI Graham?’ asked a wary voice at the other end of the line. Wary was definitely appropriate. I’d found the switch to my bedside light; it was twenty minutes to four.

‘Yes; who’s that?’

‘Inspector Rodway, sir.’ Oh God; my newish detective inspector. The guardian of law and decency over heaven knows how many square miles of mud and fen, and stationed on an insignificant bump on the ground next to an estuary, a good twenty miles away. Please, please let this be something we could deal with over the wire.

‘Sorry to disturb you, sir.’ Two sirs in ten seconds. That probably meant that he wasn’t sorry at all. Ripping a senior officer out of bed in the middle of the night used to count for twenty-five canteen chuckle-points when I was a junior plod. Fifty if there was a frost on the ground.

‘I wouldn’t have,’ he assured me, ‘but it’s a suspected arson. One of Blatt’s battery houses has been burnt down.’

‘Battery as in hens?’

‘Yessir.’

‘You woke me up,’ I said slowly, ‘at three-forty a.m. precisely, because somebody’s torched a hen-coop? Believe me, Derek, this had better be good.’

‘It’s a big battery house, boss.’ The voice acquired something of a defensive whine.

‘How big?’

‘About fifty metres long.’

‘Lots of roast chicken, eh?’ Just to show that I too could be callous and macho, whatever the state of the clock.

‘No, boss. It had just been cleaned out. It was empty at the time.’

‘OK.’

‘It’s just that it’s worth about thirty or forty thousand quid, give or take. And Blatt …’

‘Sir Jeremy Blatt?’

‘Yes, boss, he—’

‘Used to be a county councillor,’ I finished. ‘Closely associated, if not friendly with, the Chief. You’d better give me some directions, then, hadn’t you? Or do I just follow the glow in the night sky?’

Cheap, very cheap; but you can’t expect even your most caring, sharing senior officer to empathise much with his staff when he’s dragged out of his pit on the dim and dusky side of 4 a.m. Besides, it was February, the central heating didn’t come on until seven, and there was an especially hard frost. A steal at fifty points; a hundred as soon as all those sniggering wooden-tops got around to revising the rules.

‘Are you awake?’ I said to Angela, using one of the most irritating phrases known to man.

‘No.’

‘I’ve got to go out.’

‘Take care; don’t wake the baby.’ Was that an expression of general concern for my welfare, plus a gentle reminder; or all part of a specific instruction relating entirely to seven-month-old Laura, sleeping in the next room? Opting for the personally flattering interpretation, I kissed Angie on the forehead and struggled into my clothes.

‘Take your sheepskin,’ she muttered. ‘I think there’s a bit of a frost.’ Very perceptive, but I’ve already covered that.

As for the sheepskin, it had been a Christmas present from Angie; expensive, and I’d suggested it too. The trouble is, I’m now having second thoughts. Would you, I keep asking myself, fancy being arrested by a man in a coat like that? Besides, I was going to the scene of an arson; floaters from a dead chicken house were unlikely to enhance the so far immaculate pile. I selected an ancient gor-blimey cap, a thick scarf and my old, heavily lined Barbour instead.

Angela peered at me through reluctant, screwed-up eyes. ‘You look like a rat-catcher. Or a criminal,’ she said.

I was outside, starting the engine of my elderly Volvo, against the background cacophony of imprisoned terrier dog, before I got the cream of the joke. This was Saturday morning; I was not on call. This was supposed to be my weekend off; Headquarters cover had been arranged.

Derek Rodway, I promised, this one had better be really, really good.

The notice was encouraging:

DAISY DEW FARM EGGS LTD

A Division Of The Daisy Dew Group

Lowbarrack Farm

 

But that was only the beginning of my troubles; there was an open gate, a cattle grid and a concreted strip masquerading as a road winding around the side of a wood, but that was about all. No immediate sign of my destination, let alone a fire.

The concrete strip soon deteriorated into a narrow semi-metalled track gouged with ruts which wandered excitingly from verge to soggy verge. The Fire Brigade, I hazarded, had recently passed this way. I slowed down to something less than ten miles an hour, and concentrated on keeping my wheels out of the ploughed-up mud, listening to the occasional music of tailpipe against stone. The firemen had probably deployed some imaginative language on the subject of their current call. Apart from a vague glow in the distance it was very, very dark.

Eventually, I saw the lights and four squat shapes like low-slung aircraft hangars picked out in the distance, with a smaller building which I took to be a packing shed set close by. A cottage of some sort, well lit up, stood about a hundred and fifty yards away. Vehicles, lights, voices, an all-pervasive stink of steam and burning, but no remaining fire.

Fifty yards from the poultry units a proper road reasserted itself, and I pulled into a big concrete yard. Sodium lights surrounded the buildings, and the Fire Brigade, vehicle doors swinging, radios blaring and vehicle spotlights trained on the blackened hulk of a half-demolished hangar, were still merrily squirting their hoses on a fire that to my untrained eye appeared to be well and truly out.

I stopped well clear of the two appliances, thanked heavens for foresight, opened the driver’s door and swung my legs out before changing my shoes for a pair of green wellies. Cap, Barbour, green wellies; and why not? These days, I flatter myself, I’ve definitely joined the rural elite. Two whole divisions to supervise; call-outs in the middle of the night. In any case, the centre of the yard was inches deep in water; enthusiasts had been at work.

Derek Rodway, shortish, stoutish, overcoated, with ruined shoes and soaking trouser bottoms, appeared as if by magic accompanied by two detective constables. They all gazed enviously at the wellies; they didn’t seem all that chuffed. So much more satisfactory when the chiefs have to suffer the same discomforts as the Indians on the ground.

‘Sorry to drag you out,’ muttered Rodway insincerely, ‘but it’s arson all right.’

‘How do they know?’ I choked back the immediate query that came to mind. Why hadn’t the control room checked the duty rota? Why hadn’t he called out the listed victim instead of me?

‘Paraffin,’ he said succinctly. ‘Whole place reeks of it; the station officer reckons they probably climbed on to the roof and poured it through the ventilators; then they threw down the tins.’ He looked at me squarely; that, he was implying, is what they call a clue. I was not alone in resenting being roused in the middle of the night.

‘Seems a bit extreme; climbing up on the roof, I mean,’ I added hastily.

‘They’ve been locking the doors lately,’ one of the anonymous detective constables said. ‘Animal rights.’

‘Trouble?’

‘Bit of graffiti, that’s all.’ Rodway was dismissive. ‘Painted a slogan or two a couple of weeks ago. Nothing heavy.’

‘Reported?’

‘Yeah, to the local rural man. He’s around, somewhere. I called Scenes of Crime as well, but the Fire Brigade say there’s nothing much anybody can do till it’s daylight. They’re bringing in a fire investigation team of their own.’

If I get out of bed, everybody gets out of bed. The Derek Rodway philosophy at work.

‘You didn’t fetch the Chief Constable out, by any chance?’

‘Eh?’ The two DCs grinned; their detective inspector was obviously a man on whom irony was a waste of time.

‘Nothing much to go on,’ Rodway hastened on. ‘The manager reckons he heard the sound of an engine just after two. Motorbike, he thought. The dog barked, but it was a fairish way off and he didn’t go out. He woke up again half an hour later, looked out of the window and saw flames bursting through the roof.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Called the Brigade, and shot out to turn off the ventilation systems in the other battery houses in case a hundred and fifty thousand chickens choked to death in the smoke.’

‘How many?’

‘That’s what I thought, but he reckons it’s true. Standing room only in those ruddy huts; enough to put you off your bit of bacon and two fried, innit?’

I looked at the blackened hulk of the half-collapsed building, at the gaping hole replacing roughly forty per cent of the roof, and made the obvious remark. ‘Insulated wooden walls with a corrugated roof,’ I said, surprised. ‘It’s a wonder there’s anything left. Says something for the Toytown Fire Brigade, does that.’

‘Don’t let their station officer hear you, boss,’ murmured one of the DCs. ‘The farm manager’s already made a funny about the local fire service. We’ve witnessed one serious sense of humour failure tonight.’

‘This, er, manager: he’s taking it well, then, I assume?’

‘Paul Kinsley? I wouldn’t say that.’ Rodway looked sour. ‘It wasn’t so much a joke, more a nasty remark about the time it took ’em to get here.’

‘From the state of the building, I’d say they’d done pretty well.’

‘Not them, not us, according to Kinsley. We should have prevented it in the first place, and the firemen should have been psychic and had an appliance ready at the end of the road in case of emergency; that’s his line.’

‘One of those.’

‘Yep, one of those.’ For the first time Rodway allowed himself a bit of a grin. ‘Personally, I think he’s shit-scared he’s going to lose his job, once the Chief Chicken finds out.’

‘Blatt? He can hardly blame his manager for the ways of nutters with paraffin cans, surely?’

‘You’ve never met Sir Jeremy, huh? In comparison with him, the late Robert Maxwell was a pussycat boss. And just to make things perfect, Lowbarrack is the apple of the old bastard’s eye. This is where he started out, thirty-odd years ago.’

‘The beginning of the empire, eh? In that case you’d think he’d have built a proper road to the place, and replaced these old buildings with something modern by now.’

‘His manager says he likes to come and look at it,’ said Derek Rodway. ‘Likes it just as it is – was. Apart from that, he never spends a quid without kissing the coin goodbye. He’s about as willing to put his hand in his pockets as a Glaswegian with amputated arms.’

One of the detective constables choked; the other gazed dreamily over my head, searching, apparently, for non-existent stars. Silence fell. Their immediate superior looked puzzled; a close observer could almost have seen the wheels turning. Then he caught on.

‘Oh yeah, sorry. Graham’s a Scottish name, innit?’ He did his best to look repentant. ‘Always thought of you as English, myself,’ he added generously. ‘Right, well; present company excepted, boss.’

The assembled peasantry shuffled in an anticipatory sort of way. Worthwhile, after all, all this cold and misery and fire stink; all this night and wet. Their faces brightened: any moment now.

‘I think I’ll go and have a word with that rural constable,’ I said equably. Two eager faces fell.

Time to lumber off, splash through the deeper puddles and give those nice watertight wellingtons an airing. Whatever my ethnic shortcomings, I, at least was weatherproof, waterproof and warm.

They call it a harbour, although it’s four miles inland. In reality Aylfleet possesses a single concrete dock, an ageing ferry terminal, three or four grain silos and a couple of cranes. The basin is just wide enough for a smallish cargo ship to swing round to enable it to pass between the mud banks on either side of the river and so back to the sea. Constant dredging keeps the passage open and Aylfleet limps along, making some sort of living as an East Coast port.

The continental ferry service, such as it is, grubs for a living in competition with smarter, better-financed outfits to both the north and south. If it wasn’t for the low-grade commercial traffic passing through the port, the whole place would curl up and die.

Not that the locals see it that way, of course. They are the citizens of an ancient, proud, dynamic working town. They have seamen in their pubs, for heaven’s sake! Do not on any account confuse them with that louche gang of Johnny-come-latelies with their sandcastles, amusement arcades and fat, half-naked tourists a few miles up the coast. Aylfleet hates Eddathorpe, and Eddathorpe hates Aylfleet. As Superintendent Teddy Baring would say, a great gap is set between them and us. Fond of the occasional biblical outburst is the Eddathorpe boss.

Unfortunate, then, that police reorganisation has resulted in this mutual exclusivity being spoiled. Eddathorpe and its surrounding area make up a complete division of the force. Aylfleet, roughly two-thirds of its size, but with better communications and surrounded by a massive hinterland of agriculturally rich reclaimed fen, makes another. As the detective chief inspector for the whole area, I’ve been left to wander uneasily between the two. Nobody at Headquarters had taken this into account when the powers that be reorganised the DCI’s job description into an ersatz detective superintendent’s post. All the kicks and only a few of the halfpence; that was me.

The moment I got promoted Teddy’s piratical instincts came into play. He promptly appropriated Robert Graham as an extra Eddathorpe body, his very own DCI. On the other side of the estuary. Superintendent Dorothea Spinks, whose elevation to the rank Teddy contemplated with an incredulity approaching total disbelief, didn’t see matters in quite the same light. A DCI, she figured, would nicely make up for perceived deficiencies in her own CID personnel. As the meat in their political sandwich, I was currently being alternately chewed and buttered up by both sides.

Ten o’clock on the Saturday morning, and it was still my weekend off.

‘Sorry,’ said Thea sweetly, ‘to drag you in; but it’s partly your own fault. You should have told that idiot Rodway to get stuffed, the moment he tried to get you out of bed.’ That’s Thea, about as subtle as a Chieftain tank, but she knew all about the mix-up with the duty rota, of course.

An odd diminutive, Thea; a kind of tribute to her personality, I suppose. Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever dared call her ‘Dotty’. Few, according to canteen gossip, would care to mess her about.

I smiled my accommodating Foreign Office smile; then I gave her both barrels, straight between the eyes. The way I saw it, if I rolled over now, I’d be rolling over for ever more.

‘Derek Rodway,’ I said, doing my best to coat the pill, ‘is a good DI. Not, I admit, the most diplomatic man who ever lived, but he’s well capable of investigating a malicious fire. I’ll give it a couple of hours, make sure everything’s running smoothly, and then I’m going home.’

‘Mr Graham; Bob …’ She was changing tactics in midstream already. ‘As divisional commander, I have the final say on the deployment of resources in my division.’

‘Miss Spinks’ – time for a gentle counter-prod – ‘ma’am. You are the divisional commander, as you so rightly say, and I wouldn’t deny your right for a moment. I am not, however, a divisional resource. I am answerable directly to the head of CID.’

Awaiting the reaction, I watched her face. Big, bold, handsome once, and on the wrong side of fifty, she started by trying to stare me down. Then she placed both elbows on the table, leant forward and scowled, giving me a view of what it was like to be a six-foot female, cross and fourteen stone. Throwing the hammer for the former Soviet Union, that was the style.

‘Is this,’ she said, ‘Teddy Baring’s doing? The Eddathorpe way?’

‘No, ma’am; it’s likely that Superintendent Baring and I are also going to have to come to an understanding.’

‘He used to be your immediate boss, but times and circumstances change, eh?’

‘I’ve now got two divisions to cover; I’ve got two competent inspectors, Paula Baily at Eddathorpe and Derek here. I intend to do my job, but there are only so many hours in a day.’

‘You intend to tell that to Teddy?’

‘Given a similar opportunity, yes.’

‘Good grief!’ As suddenly as the thunderclouds had rolled over, the sun came out. ‘I hope you’re going to sell tickets to that one: may I be there to see!’

‘Mr Baring,’ I said hypocritically, ‘can be a very reasonable man.’

‘So could Attila the Hun,’ she replied. And what’s all this about senior management presenting a united front? ‘No, sorry; forget I said that.’

I could save that up for future reference. In the meantime, I ought to deploy a spot of tact. She was either genuinely open to persuasion, or awaiting a battle on ground of her own choosing.

‘You’d like me to sort out this egg man, Paul Kinsley?’

‘Derek Rodway seems to think there’s some sort of undercurrent there.’

‘Kinsley’s worried; he thinks he might lose his job.’

‘Exactly. Blatt’s been chewing up the phone already this morning, or haven’t you heard?’ She waited for my reaction and, getting none, she added, ‘Do you know Jeremy Blatt at all, come to that?’

‘No.’

‘Lucky you. Lost his seat, you know,’ she said with unconcealed satisfaction, ‘at the last county council elections. He’s now the chairman of what he calls the Conservative shadow opposition group, whatever that’s supposed to mean.’

‘I’d heard that much,’ I said cautiously, unwilling to take sides too soon. The shadow anything group sounded ominous. A gang of self-selected busybodies, probably, all whistling in the wind.

‘Did you also hear about his knighthood?’

‘No, ma’am.’ Scandal was in the air.

‘We-ll, I’m not repeating this just out of malice, you understand.’

‘Of course not.’ Mere malice? Perish the thought!

‘Just to give you some idea of what he’s like.’

‘Yes.’

‘Our Jeremy,’ she said, ‘got his knighthood in the birthday honours last year, at the same time as the Chief. Anyway, Jeremy being Jeremy, and wanting to suck up to anybody in authority, he invited him out to lunch on the big day. It was a very long lunch.’

She paused significantly. Point taken. One new knight, at least, had got well and truly smashed.

‘While they were out together his wife telephoned our switchboard and asked where her husband and the Chief Constable were having lunch. This young girl in our control room took the call and said, “Sorry, Mrs Blatt, I don’t know. I’ll find out and get him to give you a ring.”

‘About an hour later, Jeremy telephones the control room inspector and starts bawling and swearing down the phone. When he eventually manages to disentangle the message, poor feller, he discovers that Mrs Blatt is not Mrs Blatt, any more. She’s Lady Blatt, and don’t you lot forget it!’

‘And the Chief?’

‘Relations,’ said Thea dreamily, ‘have not been quite the same since.’

It did, I silently agreed, tend to put our little professional disagreements into perspective. And Thea sounded as though she was biding her time, awaiting a suitable opportunity for well and truly blighting the life of one Jeremy Blatt, Kt. I was a lucky, lucky man, I decided. Backbiting Eddathorpe as well as feud-infested Aylfleet, both on the same CID patch.

Paul Kinsley; not what you would call a happy man. He’d come off his high horse, nevertheless.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered to Derek Rodway, ‘about last night. Bit of a shock.’

‘That’s OK.’

No need to apologise to me; we’d scarcely exchanged more than a couple of dozen words at the scene. He’d been scooting in and out of the remaining battery houses like a demented fox the night before, and I’d had no intention of following him around. Not with the overpowering stench of ammonia and chicken shit emanating from the three remaining sheds.

Come to think of it, there was something slightly foxy about the man sat in front of us at Aylfleet nick. Somewhere between thirty-five and forty, brushed-back sandy hair. Not furtive, not bad-looking in an anorexic sort of way. But nervous, very nervous: incapable of keeping still.

‘Are we going to be long?’

‘I hope not, Mr Kinsley. A few questions, then we can take a statement, OK?’ A spot of reassurance; no need to get his back up right from the start. A good job he’d started with the apology, all the same; what did he expect, a witness statement drafted via telepathy, no time wasted, no trouble for him?

‘It’s definitely arson, I suppose?’

‘Definitely. Surely you could smell the paraffin yourself?’ I glanced across at Derek Rodway, who lifted his eyes heavenwards in exasperation, and gave an infinitesimal shrug. A variant on his original opinion; we’ve got a right one here.
. . .