Death of a Cave Dweller Read online

  The four young men climbed up on to the stage. Ron Clarke nodded to them, then retreated into the dressing room. Billie Simmons got behind his drum kit, and the rest of the group picked up their instruments.

  The record which had been playing came to an end. There was a click as the needle navigated its way through the empty groove, then another hiss from the tannoy system. The uncomfortable seats were all occupied, and most of the girls who’d been dancing in the third tunnel now stood in the archways, craning their necks to get a good view of the stage.

  From the cramped space in front of his record player, Ron Clarke made his announcement. “Put your hands together, boys and girls, and give a big welcome to one of Liverpool’s greatest groups – the Seagulls!”

  The young men just stood there while the applause filled the air. “Never start playing until the clapping’s begun to fade,” Jack Towers had told them more than once – and in this matter, at least, Steve Walker was prepared to follow the manager’s instructions.

  It was perhaps a minute before the applause did start to die down. Steve Walker and Pete Foster quickly stepped forward, but it was Steve who won the race to the microphone.

  “Are you feelin’ good?” he asked his audience.

  A couple of hundred voices screamed back that they were.

  Walker stamped his left foot on the ground, then dragged his heel a few inches, so that the metal studs imbedded in it threw up sparks. Make a show, they’d been told in Germany. Well, didn’t he always? And with the lads behind him, there was none better.

  “I mean, are you feelin’ really good?” he yelled at the girls.

  The screaming got louder.

  Behind him, Steve could sense Pete’s growing resentment that he was hogging the limelight. “This first number we’d like to do for you is one written by our lead guitarist, Eddie,” he said. “It’s called ‘Lime Street Rock’.”

  He took a couple of steps backwards, to allow the pale young guitarist to take the central stage. Over his shoulder, he heard Billie Simmons start the introductory beat. Eddie lifted his pick to play the opening chords.

  Instead of the frenetic explosion of sound which had been expected, there was nothing more than a weak ‘plink’. Eddie shrugged his shoulders in disgust, then stepped back, turned, and bent over the crude amplifier, as he had done so often in the past. This time, however, it was different. This time, the moment his slim fingers touched the bass control, he began to writhe like a maniac. The fans turned to look at each other – puzzled expressions on their faces. They were used to Steve and Pete playing the wild man during the act – but Eddie was always the intense one, concentrating on the music as if each note was a huge effort. Later, of course, when those same fans were recounting the incident to friends who hadn’t been there, they would say that they’d known something was wrong right from the start. Some of them would even claim that they’d been able to smell the burning flesh.

  Two

  The murder of Eddie Barnes had been splashed across the front page of the Liverpool Echo in screaming headlines, but even before the paper came out, news of the young guitarist’s tragic death had spread across the city by word of mouth. A small crowd had gathered outside the Cellar Club within a couple of hours, and had not dispersed until late in the evening. Another crowd – though perhaps not the same people – had appeared the following morning, and by eight thirty there were more than fifty onlookers standing in the street.

  Not that there was much for them to see. True, five police cars were parked near the club door, making it almost impossible for lorries to make their deliveries to the warehouses. And true, behind the heavy wood and metal police barriers which sealed off the club were half a dozen uniformed constables who frowned at anyone who seemed likely to put even a foot inside the restricted area. But the spectators could only guess at the atmosphere inside the club itself. Still, when they did eventually begin to drift away, it was with the feeling that however far the investigation had progressed, it was at least steaming ahead purposefully.

  There was very little sense of purpose in the two men who stood on the stage of the club, looking aimlessly into the cramped dressing room.

  The elder of the two, a superintendent, glanced down at his watch. “It’s now just over twenty hours since this Eddie Barnes kid got himself fried,” he said. “An’ what do we know now that we didn’t know at the start of this case, Frank? I’ll tell you. Absolutely bugger all!”

  “It’s early days yet, guv,” said his sergeant.

  “An’ furthermore, I don’t see how we’re ever goin’ to find out anythin’,” the superintendent continued, as if his bagman hadn’t spoken the reassuring words which bagmen are always supposed to speak. “Look at the case usin’ the standard procedural guidelines – means, motive and opportunity.” He held out three fingers. “Means,” he touched the first finger with his other hand. “Anybody who knew a little bit about electrical wirin’ had that. Opportunity,” he struck the second finger. “A lot of fellers had the opportunity – a bloody sight too many for my likin’. An’ motive?” He brushed the third finger. “There isn’t one! Eddie Barnes, accordin’ to everybody we’ve spoken to, was a little saint. An’ if all that’s not enough to make you despair, there’s the fact that the murderer didn’t even have to be here when Barnes died.”

  “Point taken, sir,” the sergeant said. “It’s goin’ to be a very tough case to crack.”

  “Tough!” the superintendent repeated scornfully. “It’s goin’ to be more than tough – it’s goin’ to be bloody impossible.”

  “So what are you goin’ to do, sir?” the sergeant asked, picking his words carefully. “I mean, we can’t just give up on it, can we?”

  “I already have. That’s why I’m goin’ to tell the Chief Constable that we need outside help.”

  “Scotland Yard? You’re callin’ in Scotland Yard!”

  “Who else?” The superintendent gave his sergeant a piercing stare. “You don’t seem very keen on the idea, Frank.”

  “I’m not,” the sergeant admitted. “To tell you the truth, I don’t like the thought of somebody from London invadin’ our patch – an’ neither will most of the rest of the lads on the case.”

  “I’m not over the moon about it either,” the superintendent told him. “But look at it this way. We’ve got two choices. We can fail to solve the murder ourselves, or we can let the Yard fail to solve it. If we do the second, then the moment they’ve gone back to London with their tails between their legs, we can start droppin’ hints to the local press that without fancy detectives from London buggerin’ it up, we’d have had the case cracked within the week.”

  “An’ if they do crack it?”

  “Then we let the local reporters know that we did most of the work. Either way, we can’t lose.”

  “Even so . . .” the sergeant said dubiously.

  “You talk about them invadin’ our patch, but they won’t be,” the superintendent argued. “They’ll be dealin’ with a liaison officer who I’ll have hand-picked. They’ll be usin’ my lads for their footwork, and they’ll be workin’ out of the local nick. Bloody hell, Frank, we’ll have them under our thumb from the moment they get here.”

  “That might be true of most of them, sir,” the sergeant said, with doubt still evident in his voice. “But what if they send us Mr Woodend? An’ it’s very likely that they will, because from what I’ve heard, the top brass at the Yard are never happier than when he’s workin’ a couple of hundred miles away from them.”

  The superintendent grinned. “You’re right, they’ll use pretty much any excuse to get him out of their hair,” he agreed. “But I’m not a complete idiot, Frank. As soon as I got the idea of callin’ in the Yard, I was on the phone to a mate of mine in administration. I asked exactly where Woodend was at the moment, an’ it turns out that Cloggin’-it Charlie is up to his neck in a double murder in Birmingham. My mate doesn’t think he’ll be able to untangle himself from that mess until
much before this side of Christmas.”

  Detective Sergeant Bob Rutter lay on his back in bed, smoking a cigarette and listening to his wife’s slow, careful footsteps as she made her way up the stairs. She would be carrying a cup of tea in one hand, he thought – a cup of tea it had taken her at least ten minutes to produce.

  He could picture her making that tea; counting slowly after she’d turned on the tap, so she knew when the kettle was full enough; positioning the tea pot in exactly the right spot on the work surface, so that when she poured the boiling water it wouldn’t spill everywhere; feeling around with her left hand because the sugar bowl wasn’t quite where she remembered leaving it . . .

  He had watched her go through the same motions on hundreds of occasions in the previous few months, and sometimes it almost broke his heart. Yet even though he always longed to offer his help, he forced himself to keep quiet because he knew that his offer would at best cause resentment, and at worst, rage.

  And who could blame her for that? he asked himself. Who could wonder that she felt the need to demonstrate her independence after the terrible tragedy which had befallen her?

  The bedroom door opened, and Maria stepped into the room. As usual, her appearance caused Rutter’s heart to give a little flutter. As usual, he was mildly surprised that he seemed to have forgotten just how stunning her dark Spanish beauty was.

  Maria walked over to the bedside table, and placed the cup on it. It was almost as if she could see again, Rutter thought. But she couldn’t. It was simply that she had practised this movement, just as she had practised her walk down the aisle in the church where they had been married.

  “So you finally have a day off,” Maria said, with just the slightest trace of a foreign accent in her voice. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Haven’t really given it much thought,” Rutter told her.

  It was quite true. He’d expected to be stuck in Birmingham for at least a couple more weeks, but then his boss, Chief Inspector Woodend, had made one of his famous – some said infamous – imaginative leaps, and the case had been wrapped up at breakneck speed.

  “It’s nice to be home again,” he continued. “Maybe I’ll just potter round the house today.”

  “You don’t have to stay in,” Maria said, almost defensively. “I have plenty to keep me occupied.”

  “I thought I might help you.”

  “There’s no one here to help me when you’re out on a case,” Maria reminded him. “And I manage perfectly well then.”

  “Perhaps I want to stay in,” Rutter said, a defensiveness now creeping into his own voice.

  “You used to play tennis nearly every day,” Maria said, “but it’s months since you even picked up a racket.”

  I used to play tennis with you, Rutter thought. Can’t you see how painful it is for me now to play against someone else?

  “I will not be treated like a child,” Maria complained.

  Rutter reached out, and gently pulled her on to the bed beside him. “Is that how I treat you?” he asked. “Like a child?”

  “Sometimes.”

  He brushed his lips against hers. “Am I treating you like an adult now?” he asked.

  “You’re starting to,” she admitted.

  He reached up and caressed her right breast. “And now?”

  “Your tea will go cold,” she warned him.

  “To hell with my tea,” he said, starting to unbutton her housecoat.

  Billie Simmons and Pete Foster sat opposite each other in the Casablanca Coffee Bar, just off Cook Street. In front of them were two untouched cups of cappuccino, which had been steaming when they’d first got them, but now were lukewarm. Neither the slightly plump bass guitarist nor the normally placid drummer looked at all happy.

  “This thing with Eddie couldn’t have happened at a worse time,” Pete Foster said, lighting up a Woodbine.

  “Oh, so there’s a good time to be electrocuted on stage, is there?” Billie Simmons asked.

  Pete jerked his head, as if he’d suddenly received a slight electric shock himself. “No, of course there isn’t,” he said hurriedly. He held his hands out, palms upwards. “Look, I’m as sorry about Eddie’s death as the rest of you. I mean, he was my mate as well.”

  “He was Steve’s mate,” Billie corrected him. “As far as Eddie was concerned, you an’ me were just the other fellers in the group.”

  “The point is,” Pete persisted, “Eddie’s death leaves a big gap in the band – my mum was sayin’ the same thing just this mornin’ – an’ that’s just what we can’t afford right now.”

  “Why right now?” Billie asked, picking up on the last two words. “Do you know somethin’ I don’t?”

  “How could I?” Pete asked, avoiding the question. “All I meant was, after all the work we’ve put in we’re finally startin’ to make a name for ourselves, and losin’ Eddie is a big setback.”

  He was lying, Billie decided. Pete and Jack Towers were as thick as two thieves, and if the manager had any news to give them, Pete always got it first. But whatever the secret was that he was hiding, there was no way it could pried out of him now.

  “When you asked me to come out for a coffee, you said you were worried about two things,” the drummer said. “So what’s the other?”

  Pete Foster puffed nervously on his cigarette. “I’m scared, Billie,” he admitted. “Really scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of what?” Pete repeated. “Isn’t it bloody obvious? I mean, it’s not as if Eddie’s death came completely out of the blue, is it? There’s been all the other stuff – like the dead rat.”

  “That didn’t have anythin’ to do with Eddie gettin’ killed,” Billie said dismissively.

  “Didn’t it?” Pete replied, a hysterical edge creeping into his voice. “How can you be so sure of that? Are you an expert on murders, all of a sudden?”

  “There’s a big difference between bein’ willin’ to play a few dirty tricks an’ bein’ willin’ to take somebody’s life,” Billie argued. “The joker an’ the killer just have to be two different people.”

  “When I was a kid, there was an old feller lived on his own at the end of our street,” Pete said. “He was a right loonie – always shoutin’ at us, an’ wavin’ his fist. Well, we began playin’ this game with his front door. When it first started, the rule was that all you had to do was run up to the door an’ touch it. But after a bit, that got borin’. So we said that from then on, you had to knock on the door as loud as you could. Finally, you had to knock on the door, an’ actually wait there until he started to open it.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “That’s what this feels like to me,” Pete said. “First there were the phone calls, then the rat, now Eddie. Whoever’s doin’ this is gettin’ more an’ more extreme every time.”

  “You can’t get more extreme than murder,” Billie pointed out.

  “Can’t you?” Pete asked, nervously lighting a new cigarette from the stub of his old one. “Well, what about two murders?”

  “You’ve got a screw loose,” the drummer told him.

  “I don’t think I have,” Pete countered. “It seems to me that somebody’s got it in for the Seagulls – an’ I don’t want to be the next one to end up dead.”

  Rutter lay back contentedly, his wife’s head buried in his chest. There were a few difficulties in their situation, he thought. More than a few. But not for a second did he regret marrying his beautiful, blind wife.

  The nagging ring of the telephone in the hall cut into his thoughts. “Damn!” he said.

  “You don’t have to answer it,” Maria murmured sleepily.

  “If I don’t, he’ll only ring back in five minutes.”

  “You can’t be sure it’s Mr Woodend.”

  “Oh yes I can. I don’t know how he does it, but nobody can make the telephone bell ring like Cloggin’-it Charlie.”

  Maria sighed, and shifted her position so that Rutter could
swing his body off the bed. Perhaps he was right. The telephone did seem to have a more insistent ring whenever the caller was Charlie Woodend.

  Rutter made his way quickly down the stairs. They’d get a phone extension put in the bedroom, he decided. That way, when Maria was upstairs when it rang, she’d have time to answer the phone herself – before the caller hung up in exasperation.

  He lifted the receiver. “Hello, sir.”

  The man on the other end of the line chuckled. “We’ll make a detective of you yet,” he said.

  The voice sounded like the man himself, Rutter thought. Big and square and dependable. He remembered the first time he had met Woodend, on Euston railway station, and how shocked he’d been that a chief inspector should be dressed in a hairy sports coat, cavalry twill trousers and scuffed suede shoes. With the arrogance of youth, he’d assumed that Woodend’s wife was to blame for his scruffy appearance. Now he knew better. Joan Woodend had tried for years to smarten her husband up, but though she could usually bend most people to her will, she’d had no success with her Charlie.

  “Got any plans for your unexpected day off?” the chief inspector asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Very wise,” Woodend said. “A bobby should never count on havin’ any free time.”

  “Where are we being sent?”

  “Nowhere yet. But from what I’ve just read in the papers, I shouldn’t be surprised if we get a call to say we’re wanted in Liverpool.”

  Rutter nodded at himself in the mirror. If there were a case in Liverpool, it would almost definitely be theirs. “So what’s the job?” he asked. “Does it sound interesting?”

  Woodend chuckled again. “Oh, it sounds interestin’ enough,” he said. “An’ it should be right up your street, an’ all.”