Shrine to Murder Read online

  ‘And the murderer, according to you, is one of them, meanwhile they are enjoying three-star accommodation at the expense of the force.’

  ‘I am awaiting a DNA report from Wetherby on hairs found on the body of Luke Redman. I am expecting it to prove which one of the suspects is the murderer.’

  ‘When do you expect it?’

  ‘Monday next.’

  ‘I think that’s about as long as I can afford to support this three-ring circus. You’ve got until Monday, then, to sort something out. I will not sanction any more payment for meals for residents in this police station who are not charged with some offence after Monday. All right?’

  It wasn’t all right, but what could Angel do?

  He came out of Harker’s office and marched down to his own office. He went in and banged the door. Everything seemed to rest upon the DNA of those two hairs found on Redman. He had not taken samples of the DNA from the three suspects for comparison to avoid arousing their suspicions. If they had been asked for swabs, they would surely have become wary. However, there was another aspect of the DNA result that had just come to him. The owner of the two hairs might be on the police national database, and it takes only minutes to get a response from that.

  *

  ‘Mr Lamb,’ Angel said. ‘I thought we’d talk in this interview room, informally; there’s no recording being made. Sorry to keep you waiting.’

  ‘I should think so. I’ve been kept in that cell all night, locked up, like a common criminal.’

  Angel pointed to a chair and then pursed his lips. He wanted to put this man completely at ease, but it was difficult. It wasn’t easy for him to pretend to be convivial to anybody he knew might be a murderer.

  ‘It’s for your own safety, sir. You’re not a prisoner, you know. By the way, this is Detective Sergeant Carter. Police Constable Ahaz you’ve met.’

  Lamb nodded at her across the table. She nodded back. He ignored Ahmed.

  ‘I feel like a prisoner. Who am I being protected against anyway?’

  ‘The murderer of Luke Redman and Ingrid Underwood.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said quickly, ‘but who is he, what’s his name?’

  ‘We’re not sure about that, Mr Lamb. We know that it is one of the survivors of that production of Nero twenty years ago at the Variety Theatre. I hoped you might be able to help us there.’

  Lamb’s mouth dropped open. ‘There can’t be many survivors. A lot of the members were quite old when we tried to stage it then.’

  ‘Which one of them would have a motive?’

  ‘Young Malcolm Malloy,’ Lamb said promptly. ‘But he died. That fire ruined his life. He was a promising actor. We were very lucky - or we thought we were - to get him in the players to play the lead. He had trained at RADA and everybody thought he promised to be the next Kenneth Branagh.’

  Angel nodded. ‘Where did he live?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘What about his family? Was he married?’

  ‘No, but I remember the girls were all over him at rehearsals. He was in great demand.’

  Angel passed his hand through his hair. He didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

  Lamb said, ‘What makes you think that the murderer wants to murder me?’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to tell you that, Mr Lamb, just now. Trust me. I have your best interests at heart.’

  The man frowned. He wasn’t pleased. ‘Whatever do you mean?’ he said.

  Angel looked into his eyes.

  ‘Well,’ Lamb began, ‘who are the others still living? I expect I shall remember them.’

  Angel blew out a small, non-existent candle and said, ‘There’s Angus Peel, Tom Franks and Margaret Ireland. Would any of those have a motive for wanting you dead?’

  Angel noticed the man’s fingers shake very slightly.

  Lamb licked his lips and said, ‘I don’t know, do I?’

  There were a few more fruitless exchanges between the two men before Lamb was shown back to his cell and Angel returned to his office.

  Angel’s phone was ringing as he reached the door. He reached over the desk and snatched it up.

  It was Taylor. ‘Yes, Don?’

  ‘The crane people are worried about the safety of the canal bank, sir. They don’t want their crane sliding or tipping into the water. So the canal bank is going to have to be strengthened with a platform of steel girders. They are also sending for a special crane, which is in a yard in Wolverhampton and is being loaded on to a low-loader as we speak. This will all take time. Looks like thirty-six hours at least.’

  Angel wasn’t pleased. ‘The longer they take the colder the crime scene.’

  ‘Nothing we can do about it, sir,’ Taylor said.

  ‘Right, lad,’ he said and rang off.

  Chapter Ten

  DC Scrivens and WPC Baverstock brought Margaret Ireland from the safe house into Interview Room number 1. She was a tall, lean woman who looked as if she spent all day on exercise machines and only ate chicken and lettuce. In the presence of DS Carter and PC Ahaz, Angel went through an exchange of information with her. Her questions and answers were almost the same as Lamb’s. However, in reply to a question about Malcolm Malloy, she became most animated and said, ‘His stage presence was quite magnetic, Inspector. You knew when he was there even if he hadn’t any lines to say. Also, he was the most handsome man you could ever want to meet. He appealed to women of every age. You couldn’t help but fall for him.’

  ‘Was there any significant woman in his life?’

  She smiled for a moment as she remembered. ‘He seemed pointedly not to get too close to anyone. He was hell bent on being a successful actor…nothing else mattered to him.’

  ‘You knew him well?’

  ‘Oh yes. He played Nero, you know, and I played a young girl, Aristana, who seduced him. He was a thoroughly vile character, who treated her very badly and eventually murdered her in a most revolting way at the end of Act 2, so we spent a lot of time together at rehearsals.’

  ‘Do you know where he lived?’

  ‘Somewhere on Huddersfield Road, I think.’

  ‘What about his parents, his family?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I have no idea.’

  Angel rubbed his chin.

  ‘Look here, Inspector,’ she said. ‘How much longer will I have to stay in police protection?’

  ‘Until Monday, I should think,’ he said. ‘I am awaiting some forensic evidence, Miss Ireland, that should confirm the identity of the murderer. It will be here on Monday.’

  ‘You have a suspect?’

  Angel nodded. ‘And it’s someone directly concerned with that play,’ he said slyly.

  With raised eyebrows, she said, ‘Most of them will have passed on. But I am not the only survivor.’

  ‘No,’ Angel said, wondering how he was going to head off the next question. But he couldn’t.

  ‘Who else is still alive?’

  He wrinkled his nose. ‘Angus Peel, Tom Franks and Kenneth Lamb.’

  The blood drained from her face when she heard the names.

  *

  As Angel drove his BMW down Wakefield Road and turned into Canal Road, he came among a crowd of vehicles parked on the grass verge close to the place where the white van was submerged. There were two police cars, the SOCO van, two Range Rovers with signs on their doors that read ‘Leeds Police Underwater Team’, a lorry loaded with steel girders and at least three other cars. He supposed that the cars belonged to the outside building team that had to be brought in by the SOCO.

  He spotted a suitable place to leave the BMW, turned off the road and parked it on the grass verge behind the SOCO van.

  There were four men Angel didn’t know. They were wearing high-visibility waistcoats and hard hats, and holding measuring tapes stretched across the canal. Also there were two uniformed policemen leaning over the bridge wall watching events, and DS Taylor of SOCO standing at the edge of the water, talking to two men in black diving suits.
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br />   Taylor and the divers broke away when they saw Angel striding over a low, damaged stone wall and making his way up the slope to the bank.

  ‘Have you been down yet,’ Angel said as he reached them.

  ‘Just going, sir,’ DS Maroney said.

  Taylor said, ‘Been waiting for you, sir.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have bothered,’ Angel replied and turned to the other young man in the diving suit. ‘Who is this then?’

  ‘DC Cutts, sir,’ Maroney said. ‘Colin, this is Inspector Angel.’

  Cutts smiled. ‘Pleased to meet you, sir. Heard a lot about you.’

  Angel thought it sounded like a compliment. He was momentarily at a loss for words. ‘Oh? Right, lad,’ he said after a pause. ‘Er…good. Well, carry on, in your own time. This is DS Taylor’s show.’

  Maroney looked at Taylor who nodded and smiled. He then turned to Cutts and said, ‘Right, Colin.’

  The two divers put on their flippers, adjusted clips on their noses, turned on their oxygen bottles, inserted the mouthpieces, jumped into the water and paddled and then swam across to the submerged van.

  As they disappeared from sight, Angel turned to Taylor and said, ‘What exactly have you told them to do?’

  ‘To see if there’s a body there, sir. That’s all we can do, until the van is lifted out of the water.’

  Angel wrinkled his nose. ‘If there is a body down there, I need to know whose it is.’

  ‘It might not be possible without disturbing possible forensic, sir.’

  It was true. But Angel wondered just how much forensic evidence of value in this particular case was likely to survive, being submerged for two days or so in that dirty water. He also thought that the defence barrister would have an easy time discrediting almost any DNA that might have been found in such a contaminated environment, that that principle in these circumstances was valueless.

  He walked round to the bridge past the two constables and leaned over the wall so as to be as near the divers as possible when they surfaced. Taylor followed and stood next to him. Then the two men looked down at the roof of the van still visible under a foot or so of dirty water and tried to see the divers. The water had become muddy and all they managed to make out were a few bubbles and the flash of a flipper from time to time. Suddenly, Cutts’s head came out of the water followed by Maroney’s. The two men were treading water. Maroney looked round, found Angel, took out the mouthpiece and said, ‘There is the body of a man in the co-driver’s seat, sir.’

  ‘Can you describe him,’ Angel said.

  Maroney removed the nose clip and shook his head. ‘No sir. Only to say he has a good head of hair.’

  ‘Can you open the van door?’ Angel said.

  Taylor wasn’t pleased. ‘There’s the possibility of prints on it, sir,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ Angel said then he turned back to Maroney. ‘Disturbing as little as possible, could you open the door, pull back the dead man’s head and take a photograph?’

  Taylor looked away.

  Maroney spat out water running down his cheeks into his mouth. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

  Cutts said, ‘Shall I see if I can open the door first, sir?’ Angel said, ‘Be very careful, lad. Do not touch anything inside. Just see if the door will open.’

  ‘Right, sir,’ Cutts said, and inserting the mouthpiece, he plunged under the water, briefly showed a flipper and then disappeared.

  Out of his eye corner, Angel saw Taylor shaking his head as he walked down the bridge away from him.

  Maroney, still treading water, sensed there was something wrong and said, ‘Is there a problem, sir?’

  Angel promptly said, ‘No.’

  Taylor turned round, came back up to Angel and said ‘With respect, sir. The van is a crime scene and should be sealed off until it is out of the water.’

  Angel sighed, looked back at Maroney and said, ‘Hold it a minute.’ Then he glared at Taylor and said, ‘I know all about procedure and crime scenes, Don. I’ve been spoon-fed with them for years. I had them with my Virol. But I need to know whose body it is down there and how he died, and I simply can’t wait forty-eight hours. It may be that of a victim or of the murderer. There are people up here who are very much alive and I am doing my damnedest to keep them like that, while, at the same time, one of them is doing his damnedest to murder the rest. And I don’t know which is which. Now they are safe at the moment, but the Super insists that I withdraw that guarantee in forty-eight hours. Now, I haven’t the luxury of having time to possibly - only possibly - wait for you to find a giveaway hair or spec of skin in that filthy water that might make a case against one of them that would stick in court. While we are abiding by the rules, somebody else may be getting murdered. So don’t let’s waste any more time.’

  Taylor shrugged and said, ‘Right, sir. You’re the boss.’

  Angel turned back to Maroney.

  ‘We have a camera, heavy duty batteries and underwater light source in the 4 x 4,’ Maroney said.

  Cutts’s head bobbed up out of the water. He removed the oxygen pipe and the nose clip. ‘I’ve managed to open the van door, sir,’ he said brightly.

  Maroney said, ‘Right, sir. What exactly do you want us to do, sir?’

  Angel said, ‘I want a photograph of the face of the character in the van in situ. And I want you to see if there is a wound in the chest. And if there is, the approximate position of it. Can you do that?’

  ‘I think so, sir. We can give it a try,’ Maroney said.

  ‘Disturbing as little as you can?’ Taylor said.

  ‘Of course,’ Maroney said.

  Angel then turned back to Taylor, patted him on the back and said, ‘I leave it to you, Don. Let me know how you get on.

  ‘Right, sir,’ Taylor said.

  Then Angel climbed down the bank to his car and returned to the station.

  He had been in his office, writing up his report about an hour when there was a knock at the door. It was DS Taylor. He hurried in with a wet 7” x 5” photograph in his hand.

  ‘Will you have a look at this, sir?’

  Angel took it and was taken aback. It wasn’t pleasant. The dark photograph, brown almost sepia, showed a distorted face with a huge nose and tiny ears. The features were reproduced adequately, with the eyes closed and the hair flowing as if it was growing out of the head like snakes.

  ‘Because the water was so mucky, Maroney had to stick the camera so close to his face, it has made the photograph distorted,’ Taylor said.

  ‘I can see that, Don, but do you think anyone could identify anybody with certainty from that?’

  Taylor rubbed his chin.

  ‘It’s nearly as obscene as my passport photograph,’ Angel said.

  Taylor hesitated then said, ‘Shall I go back and see if Maroney can find a still moment maybe…for the water to clear and try again?’

  ‘Anything,’ Angel said, passing his hand through his hair impatiently. He pushed the photograph into Taylor’s hand then added, ‘But let’s get this chap identified.’

  Taylor rushed out.

  It was two hours later when he returned.

  ‘I can confirm that the dead man is Angus Peel, sir. DS Maroney managed to get a better photograph of the victim’s head, and I took it to the manager of the shop where he worked and to his next door neighbour and they both agreed it was him.’

  Angel blew out a truncheon’s length of breath.

  ‘Also, Maroney cut open the dead man’s shirt front,’ Taylor said, ‘and found an open wound near the solar plexus.’

  Angel sighed and pursed his lips.

  ‘So we have one more body and one less suspect. We now know the murderer is Tom Franks, Margaret Ireland or Kenneth Lamb. How on earth are we to establish which one? For an alibi, I need to know the time of death. If I asked Mac that, I can just imagine what he would reply…about a body that’s been in water an indeterminate length of time.’

  Taylor smiled.

  Angel
suddenly went quiet. His eyes narrowed. He said, ‘It’s possible that I could work out the time of death.’

  ‘How’s that, sir?’ Taylor said.

  ‘Carter was told by a customer in Mexborough the time that he had left her, having installed a stairlift that day. It was late afternoon sometime, but she had it exactly.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Taylor said.

  ‘And Peel could not have been murdered after the last suspect of the three suspects, Franks, Ireland and Lamb, had been warned and brought here. It had to be…late afternoon, early evening.’

  Taylor’s face brightened. ‘That’s right, sir.’

  Angel reached out for the phone. ‘Ahmed,’ he said into the Mouthpiece. ‘Find DS Carter. And DS Crisp. I want them here, smartly.’ He replaced the phone, turned to Taylor and said, ‘You’d better get back to Canal Road, Don.’

  ‘Right, sir,’ Taylor said and he dashed off.

  Carter was the first to arrive in Angel’s office. Ahmed came in with her.

  ‘DS Crisp is on the way, sir.’

  Angel’s eyes were bright and searching. He looked closely at Carter and said, ‘What time did the woman in Mexborough, who had had her stairlift fitted, say that Angus Peel left her house?’

  ‘Five fifteen that afternoon, sir,’ Carter said.

  Angel nodded. ‘So that’s the last time he was seen alive, wasn’t it?’

  ‘To my knowledge, sir, yes.’

  ‘So 5.16 on Thursday was the earliest that Angus Peel could have been murdered.’

  He turned to Ahmed. ‘And what time did you first make contact with Kenneth Lamb?’

  ‘That was on the phone, sir. That was about 8.30 that evening.’

  Angel glared up at him. ‘Can’t you do any better than that, lad? About? Can’t you be more accurate?’

  Ahmed whipped out his notebook and shuffled back through a couple of pages. ‘Sorry, sir. Yes. It was exactly 8.30, sir.’