Death of a Cave Dweller Read online

  “What can I say without it soundin’ all wrong?” Steve Walker asked, puffing on his cigarette. “If I tell you we’re gettin’ on fine with Terry as our new lead guitar, it’ll make me sound like a heartless bastard who never really cared about his mate Eddie. On the other hand, if I say that things are goin’ really crappily, I won’t be tellin’ the truth.”

  “But you’ll be ready for the big audition down in London the week after next?”

  Walker nodded. “We’ll be ready. Jack doesn’t think that we will – but then Jack’s not a musician.”

  “Meanin’ he doesn’t have any real idea of what it takes to get an act together?”

  “Exactly,” Steve Walker agreed. “Listen, there’ve been times – when one of us hasn’t been able to play a gig for some reason – that we haven’t found a replacement until five or ten minutes before we went on stage. But that’s no problem for us. No problem at all. You bring me any guitarist in Liverpool, an’ I’ll guarantee that we’ll know enough of the same songs to be able to put on a show.”

  “So you’re sayin’ that you’d only need to meet a new Seagulls guitarist five or ten minutes before you walked into the audition studio?”

  Walker grinned. “No. I don’t mean that at all. There’s a big difference between playin’ to a crowd of kids in some fifth-rate club and performin’ in a studio in front of some record-company bosses. For the audition, we’d need two or three days to get ready. But we’ve got nearly two weeks – an’ Jack’s still so worried he’s runnin’ around like a headless chicken.”

  “He only wants you to do well,” Woodend pointed out.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Walker asked, with a sudden, unexpected aggressiveness.

  “It means exactly what it says. He’s your manager. He wants to see the Seagulls doin’ well.”

  Walker relaxed again. “Yeah, I suppose he does,” he admitted. He looked at his watch. “Listen, I’ve got a rehearsal with the other lads in half an hour. Can I go now?”

  “Yes, I think you an’ me have talked enough for today,” Woodend said. “Send me one of the others over, will you?”

  From the sound of his rich baritone voice, Maria Rutter imagined the doctor to be somewhere between the ages of thirty and forty, and probably quite tall and slim. She also thought he was probably a kind man who had the best interests of his patients at heart. But how much easier it would have been to judge him if she could have seen the expression on his face.

  “Do you have anyone waiting for you outside, Mrs Rutter?” the doctor asked softly.

  That was a bad sign, Maria thought. A very bad sign. He was as good as saying that he didn’t think she could cope with the news on her own.

  “No, I’ve come alone,” she said, trying her best to stop her voice from cracking.

  “I see.” The doctor paused for a few seconds, then he said, “Perhaps it might be better to leave the matter until tomorrow, when you can come back with your husband.”

  “My husband’s away in Liverpool.”

  “A short business trip perhaps?”

  “He’s a policeman. He’s investigating a murder.”

  “So you . . . er . . . don’t know when he’ll be coming back to London?”

  “No, I don’t. It could be tomorrow, or it could be three or four weeks from now.”

  There was another slight pause before the doctor said, “If you were to ring him and explain the situation . . .”

  How could she do that? After she’d told him at least a dozen times that she wasn’t a child and she wanted to be treated like any normal woman, how could she pick up the phone and ask him to come running back to London?

  “My husband doesn’t need to be here,” she said. “I came for the results of my tests, and I’d be grateful if you’d give them to me.”

  The doctor sighed. “Very well. If you insist. They were positive.”

  Maria took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes, I thought they might be.”

  “If you are to undergo the necessary surgical procedure – and that decision is entirely up to you and your husband – it would be best to have it as quickly as possible,” the doctor told her. “You do understand that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I understand,” Maria replied, and she was thinking, I understand only too well.

  “So if you could ring your husband . . .”

  “I’ll talk to him just as soon as the investigation is over,” Maria said firmly. She took hold of her white stick, and rose to her feet. “Thank you for your time, doctor.”

  “If you’d like me to, I could ring up for an ambulance to take you back home.”

  Why had he suggested that? Because of what the tests had shown? Or because she was blind?

  “I don’t need you to call anyone,” she said. “I arrived here under my own steam, and nothing has happened since then to prevent me going back the same way.”

  The boy in the battered leather jacket stood awkwardly in front of Woodend’s rickety table, almost like a defiant – yet frightened – schoolboy who had been summoned to see the headmaster.

  “I’m tellin’ you right now, I don’t know nothin’ about Eddie’s murder,” he said.

  “Why don’t you take a seat, lad?” Woodend suggested.

  “I’ll stand.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake sit down an’ stop makin’ the place look untidy,” Woodend said exasperatedly.

  Putting on a great show of his reluctance, the boy lowered himself on to the chair.

  “I still don’t know nothin’,” he said sullenly.

  “What’s your name?” Woodend demanded.

  “Tim O’Donnell.”

  Woodend looked down at the typewritten list Inspector Hopgood had given him, and put a tick by the boy’s name.

  “It says here you’re a member of the Knockouts. Is that right?”

  “I’m the lead guitarist of the Knockouts,” O’Donnell said, as if he wished to make a clear distinction between himself and the rest of the group.

  “That’s interestin’. Did you happen to audition to fill Eddie Barnes’s place in the Seagulls?”

  The boy shook his head. “No, I certainly bloody didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m already in a group – a good group.”

  That might be one of his reasons for not auditioning, Woodend thought, but he could see from the look on the lad’s face that it wasn’t his only reason.

  “The Knockouts might be a good group,” the chief inspector said, “but they’re not a group which has the chance of gettin’ a recording contract in the foreseeable future, whereas the Seagulls definitely have. Surely you must have at least considered tryin’ out for them?”

  “What? An’ end up like Eddie?”

  “So you think that the reason he was killed was because he was the lead guitarist, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” O’Donnell admitted. “Nobody knows, do they? But I wasn’t prepared to take the chance. Anyway, everybody knew the job would go to one of Steve Walker’s mates.”

  Walker certainly seemed to have a reputation, Woodend thought.

  “Let’s get on to the night before Eddie died,” he suggested. “You would have spent quite a lot of time backstage that night, wouldn’t you?”

  “A fair amount.”

  “So were you there when the fight broke out?”

  It had been a guess – a shot in the dark – but from the shocked look which came to the young man’s face, it had obviously been right on target.

  “Well, were you there?” Woodend repeated.

  “There wasn’t any fight that I saw,” O’Donnell said, weakly.

  “Maybe you were in the bog when it happened, or had stepped out on to the street for a breath of fresh air,” Woodend speculated. “But even if that were the case, you’d have heard all about it when you got back to the dressing room, now wouldn’t you?”

  “Nobody said anythin’ about no fight to me,” the guitarist repli
ed unconvincingly.

  Woodend leant forward slightly. “Do you really want to find yourself an accessory to murder, lad?” he asked.

  A look of indecision flickered briefly across the young guitarist’s face, but it was soon replaced by an expression of childlike stubbornness.

  “I didn’t hear nothin’ about no fight – an’ you can’t prove that I did,” O’Donnell told him.

  Nor could he, Woodend thought regretfully.

  “All right, you can go – at least for the moment,” he said. “I’ll see your bass guitarist next. Maybe he’ll be a little bit more helpful. Maybe he’ll want to see whoever murdered Eddie Barnes safely locked up.”

  If it was any appeal to make him change his mind, it had no effect on Tim O’Donnell. Instead of replying, the young man merely stood up, walked across the tunnel to the hard seats and tapped another lad – presumably the bassist – on the shoulder.

  Woodend talked to them all – the drummers and the guitarists, the hangers-on and the managers. Yes, they had been in the dressing room at one time or another, they admitted. No, they hadn’t seen anything unusual, and if there’d been a fight, they’d been somewhere else, and hadn’t heard anything about it.

  What about the girl who had gone behind the curtain for a quickie with Steve Walker? Woodend had asked.

  They’d seen her around the club a few times, they agreed, but she hadn’t put in an appearance since the place had re-opened after the murder. She was called Mavis – or it might have been Elaine – and her hair colouring was described as everything from nearly black to dark blonde.

  By the time the chief inspector climbed the twenty steps which took him to street level, the pubs were already open – which was just as well because the way he was feeling, he would have battered down a closed pub’s door if that was the only way to get a drink.

  He had a pocket full of scribbled notes in his hairy sports coat, and a raging ache in his skull. He didn’t understand these kids at all, he told himself, and if it had been revealed to him that they had all conspired together to kill Eddie Barnes à la Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, he would no longer have been the least bit surprised.

  He entered the Grapes, negotiated his way past the shipping clerks who had just left off work, and ordered his first pint of the evening at the bar. He’d been intending to drink it standing up, but he suddenly felt so weary that he took it over to the nearest free table.

  Would Bob Rutter, so much closer in age to the kids than he was, have been any more successful with the interrogations? Would it be better if Bob took over the whole investigation, while he contented himself with doing his sergeant’s legwork?

  But his legs were too old for that kind of work. He was the controlling brain – or he was nothing.

  He took a grateful swig of his pint. It was still only half-past six in the evening, but he was already feeling ready for his bed. A cushy security job at probably twice the salary he was earning as a chief inspector was starting to look very appealing.

  Thirteen

  Night had fallen over the city. At first, the darkness was broken up by spots of twinkling light. But the later it grew, the more of those lights went out, so that by the time midnight had come and gone there were only the street lamps left to cast a watery glow over Liverpool.

  There was a street lamp on the road where the bundle lay, but it wasn’t working. The bundle itself, from a distance, could have been mistaken for a heap of old rags, thrown casually to the ground. Then it moved and groaned, and anyone watching would have realised that it was not rags at all, it was a man. But there was no one watching, because that part of the docklands, an hour after the pubs had closed, was as empty as a Lancashire mill town during Wakes Week.

  The man climbed slowly and painfully to his feet. His ribs hurt with even the slightest movement, and his head felt as if it were being trampled underfoot by a herd of wild horses.

  You’ve been a fool, he thought, when the pain retreated for long enough to allow him the luxury of thinking at all. A complete bloody fool! You could have been killed! Do your realise that? Right now, you could be bloody dead!

  He was now standing as upright as his battered body would allow him to. He put one foot in front of the other, and a fresh wave of agony shot up his leg. He forced himself to take a step forward. Then another. Then another.

  He could see the bright red telephone box at the end of the street. He could ring for help from there – if vandals hadn’t ripped the phone out!

  The road was swirling before his eyes. Even if the phone was still working, he was not sure that he had the strength left to get to it. It was then that he saw the figure turn the corner. At first he was afraid it was his attacker, come back to finish off the job, but as the figure got closer to the phone box, he could see that it was wearing a pointed blue helmet.

  The injured man gasped with relief. “Help me!” he shouted, as loud as he could.

  The constable heard no more than a croak, but that was enough to tell him that whoever had made it was in trouble. He sprinted towards the injured man, and reached him just in time to catch him as he collapsed.

  Woodend’s subconscious mind tried to ignore the sound of the shrill bell at first, but when it persisted he groaned, rolled over towards the bedside table, and switched on the light.

  He glanced at the clock through bleary eyes. “You stupid bastard!” he growled. “What the bloody hell are you doin’ ringin’ now? Don’t you know it’s half-past one in the bloody morning!”

  But it wasn’t the clock making the noise, he realised – it was the phone.

  The chief inspector picked it up. “Woodend,” he barked into the offending instrument.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour, sir,” said the calm, soothing voice of the hotel switchboard operator, “but I have an Inspector Hopgood on the line, and he says it’s important he speak to you right away.”

  “Then you’d better put him through,” Woodend told her, as he reached automatically for his cigarettes.

  “Sorry to disturb you, sir—” Hopgood began.

  “Yes, yes, I’ve been through all that already with the operator,” Woodend said impatiently. “Just tell me what’s happened.”

  “I don’t know whether this has anything to do your case or not,” Inspector Hopgood said, “but I’ve just received a report from one of my lads that Jack Towers has been beaten up.”

  Bloody hell fire!

  “How bad is it?” Woodend asked, remembering Towers’ request for police protection – and fearing it could be very bad indeed.

  “They’re not sure of the extent of Mr Towers’ injuries yet, but at least he’s conscious.”

  “When, exactly, did this beatin’ up occur?” demanded Woodend, now wide awake.

  “About an hour ago. Down by Dukes’ Dock.”

  “Where’s the poor bugger now?”

  “In the University Hospital.”

  “Send a car round to the hotel as soon as you can,” Woodend said. “I think I’d better go an’ pay our Mr Towers a bedside visit.”

  There was something about hospitals that was anathema to the northern working-class male, Woodend thought as he followed the pretty Jamaican nurse, who said her name was Sister Holmes, down the perfectly sterile, brightly lit corridor. He’d fought side by side in the war with men who’d never flinched in the face of a hail of German machine-gun bullets, yet had blanched at the idea of going in for a blood test. Fought with them? Hell, if he was going to be honest, he was a prime example of one himself. When he had a pain, his natural reaction – like that of his father before him – was simply to grimace and hope that, in time, it would go away.

  Northern working-class women, on the other hand, were an entirely different story. For them, operations held more fascination than the FA Cup Final did for their husbands, and while talk of the surgeon’s knife might put most men off their dinners, it only seemed to stimulate their wives’ appetites – both for more fo
od and more bloodthirsty details.

  The sister came to a halt beside a door which looked just as anonymous as every other door they had passed.

  “This is the doctors’ lounge,” she said. “Do you want me to come in with you?”

  “Nay, lass,” Woodend said, smiling. “I’m quite sure you’ve got much more important things to do with your time than shepherdin’ me around.”

  The sister smiled back at him, giving him a brief glimpse of her perfect white teeth. “Ain’t that the truth,” she agreed. “Just knock on the door, and then go straight in. The doctors here are used to being interrupted.”

  Woodend watched her walk down the corridor. If he was ever sick, he decided, he could only hope he’d be looked after by someone as obviously caring as Sister Holmes. He knocked on the door, as instructed, and entered the lounge. The only person inside the room was reading a newspaper, and when he lowered it, Woodend was surprised to find that he already knew him.

  “It’s Doctor Atkinson, isn’t it?” the chief inspector said. “We met this mornin’, over at the Mersey Sound office.”

  “That’s right, we did,” the doctor agreed.

  “Well, what a coincidence,” Woodend said. “I’m in a strange city, an’ twice, within a matter of hours, I run into the same man. What do you reckon are the chances of that?”

  “In this job, you come across so many coincidences that you start to take them for granted,” the doctor said tiredly. “I take it you’re here to ask about Jack Towers.”

  “Yes, I am. How is he?”

  “It could have turned out a lot worse than it has, to be honest. Some of the kicks he took in his ribs could just as easily have connected to his head – and if they had, I’ve no doubt they would have caused brain damage.”

  “So he’ll be all right, will he?”

  “He should be quite stiff for a few days,” the doctor said, “but there’s certainly no reason to keep him in here beyond tomorrow morning.”

  “If he’s awake, I’d like to see him now,” Woodend said. “As long as it wouldn’t be disturbin’ the other patients, that is.”

  “Oh, it won’t disturb them,” the doctor assured him. “I’ve put Mr Towers in a single room.”