Death of a Cave Dweller Page 4

  “You won’t need to walk, sir,” Hopgood pointed out. “You’ll have a car and driver at your disposal.”

  “An’ sometimes I might actually use them,” Woodend countered. “But you don’t solve murders by lookin’ out through the windows of a police Bentley. You have to clog it around. Get a taste of the place. Feel the pulse of it through the soles of your feet. So I’ll ask you again, Inspector. Can I get from the hotel to the scene of the crime in fifteen minutes?”

  “I should think so,” said Hopgood, who had pretty much given up walking anywhere since he’d been promoted out of foot patrol.

  “It’ll do champion then,” Woodend said. “Have our suitcases sent up there, will you?”

  “Won’t you be going there yourself, sir?” Hopgood asked.

  “I’ve never really felt comfortable in posh hotel bars.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “It’s thirsty work, travellin’,” Woodend told him. “So where’s the nearest ordinary, decent pub?”

  Four

  Inspector Hopgood – who didn’t approve of drinking in the middle of the day, but in the few short minutes he’d known Woodend had already learned better than to protest – tried to steer the London men into the lounge of the Chandler’s Arms, only to find that he himself was being skilfully manoeuvred into the public bar by the big detective in the hairy sports coat.

  “I don’t like pub lounges,” Woodend said, running his eyes approvingly over the sawdust-covered floor of the bar. “Somehow the ale doesn’t taste the same when the room’s carpeted.”

  It was all Hopgood could do to avoid shaking his head bemusedly. Senior policemen, in his experience, didn’t mix with the riff-raff when they went for a drink, and he couldn’t quite work out what game Woodend was playing.

  He cleared his throat. “Uh . . . what are you having, sir?”

  Woodend patted him on the shoulder. “Nay, lad,” he said. “I’m the one on the big wage. I’ll get ’em in. You go an’ sit over there, an’ get to know my sergeant a little bit better.”

  The arrival of two men in suits, accompanied by another in a police uniform, had unsettled the other customers in the bar, who were mainly merchant seamen and dockers. Woodend had already noticed several hands being shoved into pockets as shady deals were rapidly postponed. He grinned to himself, and wondered how many stolen watches, illicit bottles of whisky and contraband cigarettes he could find in this pub if he really tried.

  He bought the beer, and took it over to a cast-iron table in the corner of the bar where Hopgood and Rutter were sitting.

  “So the murder victim’s a teenager,” he said, as he made himself comfortable on the cracked leather settle. “There were no such things as teenagers when I was growin’ up. You were either a kid or you were an adult.” He clicked his fingers. “The change happened just like that. You went straight from short pants an’ comics to dressin’ an’ thinkin’ just like your dad.”

  “Times change, sir,” said Hopgood, who had little patience with anything which smelled of philosophical musing.

  “Aye, times do change,” Woodend agreed. “An’ it’s a damn good thing, in my opinion. I think teenagers are a fine idea. You might as well have your fun while you’re young, because there’s no bloody time for it later on.” He took a sip of his pint, and smacked his lips with satisfaction. “Course, there are always some little pleasures left, however long in the tooth you’re gettin’.”

  Faced with the choice of disagreeing with the Scotland Yard man or changing the subject, Inspector Hopgood reached into his briefcase and pulled out a typewritten sheet of paper.

  “This is a list of all the people who had access to Eddie Barnes’s amplifier between the last time he used it and the moment he was killed,” he said crisply. “It includes their names, full addresses and – where applicable – their telephone numbers.”

  Woodend scanned the list. There seemed to be at least twenty names on it. He folded it roughly, and stuck it in the pocket of his sports jacket.

  “Well, that’ll give us plenty to go at,” he said. “Now why don’t you tell me a little bit about the band Eddie Barnes belonged to – the Albatrosses, isn’t it?”

  Hopgood frowned. “I think you mean, the Seagulls, sir.”

  “That’s right,” Woodend admitted, winking surreptitiously at his sergeant. “I suppose I do.”

  The inspector’s frown deepened as perplexity set in. Why the bloody hell should Woodend want to know about the band?

  How would that help him get to bottom of the murder?

  “What exactly would you like to know, sir?” he asked.

  “Anythin’ and everythin’ would be a good start.”

  Suppressing his own view that the Seagulls – like all the other bands of scruffy youths who made jungle music – should be banned from playing in public for ever, and possibly locked up, Hopgood searched his mind for some scrap of information which might keep Woodend happy.

  “I believe they’re quite a popular band,” he said finally, “but they haven’t got half the following of the Beatles.”

  “The Beetles?” Woodend repeated. “As in Colorado beetles – the marrow grower’s worst nightmare, the Ghenghis Khans of the cabbage patch?”

  If there was a joke in there somewhere Hopgood couldn’t see it, and merely shook his head.

  “Not beetles like that, sir,” he said. “Beatles – with an ‘a’. They’re the real stars around Liverpool, but they’re away performing somewhere in Germany at the moment.”

  Woodend turned to his sergeant. “Should I have heard of these Beatles, Bob?” he asked.

  Rutter shrugged. “Probably not, sir. It’s certainly a new name to me.”

  Woodend took another sip of his drink. “Is this club . . . this Cellar place . . . open again now?” he asked Hopgood.

  “Yes, sir. Forensics gave it the all clear yesterday.”

  “Then I think I’ll go have a look at it.”

  Hopgood glanced down at his wristwatch. “It’d be better to leave it for an hour or two, sir.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “It’s dinnertime. The place’ll be full of kids right now.”

  “Then I’d say right now is exactly the right time to pay it a visit,” Woodend told him.

  Looking up, Woodend could see the tops of the grim Victorian warehouses, their brickwork blackened by a hundred years of industrial soot, their iron pulleys hanging from upper-storey doors like sinister gibbets. Looking down he could see the cobbles, worn smooth and shiny, first by horses’ hooves, and then by pneumatic tyres. This street would have looked exactly the same in Charles Dickens’ time, he thought, and maybe the great man had actually walked along it while the plot for one of his magnificent novels was still buzzing around in his head. It made the chief inspector shiver just to think about it.

  Outside the door he was heading for stood a young man in a cheap suit. He was around twenty-four, Woodend guessed. He had the body of a weightlifter, and the look of a man who would never knowingly walk away from a fight. He showed no interest in the chief inspector until it became obvious that Woodend was intending to enter the club, then he took two steps to the left to bar the way.

  “This is a private club,” Rick Johnson said. He sneered. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be of any interest to an old feller like you. I mean, there aren’t any strippers or mucky goin’s on.”

  Always nice to get off on the right foot with somebody, Woodend thought. He put his hand in his pocket, and pulled out his warrant card.

  Johnson examined it suspiciously. “You don’t look like a chief inspector,” he said.

  “An’ you don’t look like the kind of door keeper you’d usually find outside a nice little dance club like this,” Woodend countered. “Have a lot of trouble in there, do you?”

  “Nah,” Johnson said dismissively. “I have to tell somebody to leave once in a while, but it never gets as far as throwin’ punches. Most of the customers are girls anyway, an�
� what lads we do get are pencil pushers from the shippin’ companies, an’ couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag.”

  “So why you?” Woodend asked.

  “You what?”

  “Why employ a heavy when one isn’t needed?”

  The question seemed to embarrass Rick Johnson, and for a few seconds he groped for an answer. Then he said, “I asked Mrs Pollard for the job, an’ she gave it to me.”

  “An’ what were you doin’ before that?”

  “You ask a lot of questions,” Johnson said aggressively.

  “I know,” Woodend agreed. “It’s what I get paid for.” He pulled out his packet of Capstan Full Strength, and offered one to Johnson, who refused. “If you were to ask me to take a guess,” he continued, “I’d say you’d been in one of Her Majesty’s rent-free boardin’ houses.”

  “Yeah, I was inside,” Johnson admitted. “What of it?”

  “GBH?” Woodend asked.

  “Look, I got into a fight,” Johnson said. “I didn’t start it, but the old fool of a judge wouldn’t believe that, so while the other feller got off scot-free, I served eighteen months.”

  “So when Mrs Pollard was lookin’ for a nice, diplomatic lad to stand on the door, you must have seemed like a gift from heaven,” Woodend mused. “It’s been nice talkin’ to you, Mr . . .?”

  “Rick Johnson.”

  “. . . Mr Johnson, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to go inside now.”

  “Would it really matter if I did mind?” Johnson asked, stepping aside.

  “Probably not,” Woodend told him. “But I like to get the co-operation of the general public whenever possible.”

  He stepped through the doorway, and began to descend the steep stairs into the Cellar Club. Even at street level, the noise of the music was almost deafening, but by the time he had reached the cellar floor he felt as if his eardrums were about to explode. He began to notice the heat, too, and to regret the fact that he was wearing his heavy sports jacket.

  There was a rickety table at the bottom of the stairs, and the old man sitting at it had a wooden bowl of coins in front of him. Woodend produced his warrant card again.

  “We’ve been expectin’ you,” the old man said, “only I’d have thought you’d have come at a quieter time.”

  “The murder doesn’t seem to have done business any harm,” Woodend bawled over the noise of the music.

  “Where else would they go at dinnertime if they didn’t come here?” the old man shouted back.

  “Got a register of guests, have you?”

  The old man slid a cardboard ledger across to him. Woodend scanned the list of signatures. ‘Les Bee-Anne’, ‘Michael Mouse’, ‘Elvis Presley’ . . .

  “You’re not too particular who you let in, are you?” he asked.

  “They’re only kids,” the old man answered. “There’s no harm in any of ’em.”

  Maybe not, Woodend thought. Then again, maybe one of the people in the club right at that moment was a cold-blooded killer.

  “How the hell do you manage to sit through this din for hours at a stretch?” he shouted.

  The old man grinned. “I turn my deaf-aid off, don’t I?”

  Woodend made his way to the back of the tunnel. On the tiny stage were three young guitarists and a drummer, just as there had been at the same time a couple of days earlier. But this was not the Seagulls. According to the crayoned sign which had been hanging outside the club, this particular bunch called themselves Mickey Finn and the Knockouts.

  A few of the girls standing in the far tunnel had noticed him, and were nudging each other, pointing to him and giggling. He couldn’t blame them, he supposed. He didn’t consider himself old – he was still a few months off fifty – but to them he must have seemed like a dinosaur.

  He stripped off his jacket, loosened his tie, and wished he hadn’t put on his string vest that morning. Suddenly aware of the fact that his mouth was parched, he made his way over to the small snack bar.

  “Could I have a cup of tea, please?” he mouthed at the young girl behind the counter.

  The girl gave him an odd look – but no odder than the others he’d been getting – then shrugged and went over to the large enamel teapot which was resting on a portable hotplate.

  Woodend turned around again to face the stage. The singer – presumably Mickey Finn himself – was lamenting the fact that his baby had left him and never said a word. Woodend tried to tune his mind into the song. It wasn’t anything like jazz, he decided. There was none the subtlety of a King Oliver, or the professional musicianship of a Jack Teagarten. Yet it had something – there was a raw energy and enthusiasm to the music which was not to be lightly dismissed.

  “Yer tea!” shouted a thin voice just behind him. “That’ll be fourpence ha’penny, please.”

  Woodend paid the money and took a sip of his tea. It was hot and wet – but that was all that could be said for it. On stage, the group reached the end of the number, and the audience applauded.

  “Mickey an’ the fellers will be back in a few minutes,” the DJ said over the tannoy. “In the meantime, let’s listen to a bit of good old rock’n’roll from Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. It’s a little song they had a hit with a while back, an’ it’s called, ‘Shakin’ All Over’.”

  The record was a little less noisy than the live group had been, and Woodend was now fairly sure that the buzzing in his ears would go away eventually. He kept his eyes on the stage. The drummer and the two guitarists ducked under an archway at the side and disappeared from sight, but the lead singer, a tall, slim boy with blond hair which spilled well over his collar, climbed down the steps and was heading through the tunnel towards the snack bar.

  The boy looked at him at him with the same surprise as everyone else in the club had. “Bit old for this, aren’t you, grandad?” he said.

  Well, at least he didn’t ask me if I was expectin’ to see a stripper, Woodend thought.

  “I suppose I am a bit old for it,” he admitted, “but I liked your set, anyway. Would you like a drink?”

  Suspicion flared up in the boy’s eyes. “You’re not a poof out on pick-up, are you?” he demanded.

  “No,” Woodend said, pulling out his warrant card for the third time. “I’m a bobby.”

  The boy did not examine the card closely, as Rick Johnson had done. Instead he simply said, “You’re here lookin’ for Eddie Barnes’s murderer, are you?”

  “That’s right, I am,” Woodend agreed. “That drink’s still on offer if you want it.”

  “I’ll have a Coke,” the boy said.

  A Coke! Woodend thought. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned lemonade? Was there suddenly something wrong with dandelion and burdock?

  “You must be Mickey Finn,” he said, laying some coins on the counter. “Is that your real name?”

  “I was christened Michael Finn,” the boy said. “Most of the lads I knock around with call me Mike.”

  “Did you know Eddie Barnes well, Mike?”

  Finn shrugged. “Depends what you mean by well. He wasn’t a close wacker of mine, if that’s what you’re askin’, but I did know him. Most of the lads who are in groups know each other. We’re always performin’ in the same places, you see. We help each other out. We cadge lifts in each other’s vans. An’ we lend each other guitarists or drummers when the feller who’s supposed to be playin’ has got to work late, or has been kept in by his dad.”

  Woodend forced himself to suppress a smile. Kept in by their dads! You saw these big lads strutting about on the stage and you got the illusion they were grown up. But they weren’t. Come Friday night, they’d be handing their pay packets over to their mums and getting pocket money back in return. And as for having their own keys to the front door – well, that would have to wait until they turned twenty-one!

  “Did Eddie Barnes ever play with the Knockouts?” Woodend asked the young singer.

  “A couple of times.”

  “An’ was he any g
ood?”

  “Not as good as our regular lead guitarist,” Finn said proprietarily, and this time Woodend did grin.

  Finn’s band had re-emerged from the dressing room, and were picking up their instruments.

  “I think you’re wanted on stage,” the chief inspector said.

  “Yeah, I’d better go,” Finn agreed. “Mrs Pollard likes to get value for her money.”

  Woodend watched the young man weave his way back through the audience. Mike Finn had seemed quite open, and what he had said could possibly turn out to be useful. Yet the chief inspector couldn’t suppress a feeling that, if the singer had known there was a policeman standing at the bar, he would have stayed well away from it.

  A man wearing a cord jacket and grey flannel trousers emerged from the dressing room, dismounted the steps, and made his way towards the snack bar. He had thinning brown hair and a totally unprepossessing appearance. He was, Woodend guessed, around thirty-five – which probably made him the third-oldest person in the club.

  The man reached the bar. “Give me a glass of cold milk as quick as you like, Doreen,” he said in a squeaky voice to the girl behind the counter. “I’m so dry I’m spittin’ feathers.”

  He knocked back half the milk in a single gulp, then turned to Woodend. “You’ll be a policeman, will you?”

  “That’s right,” Woodend agreed. “And you’d be . . .?”

  “I’m Ron Clarke, the resident DJ.”

  “Is that right?” Woodend asked, finding it hard to reconcile the washed-out little man standing next to him with the powerful, excited voice which had blasted its way out of the tannoy.

  Clarke read his thoughts, and grinned. “I’m a different person with a mike in front of me gob,” he said. “So how’s the investigation goin’?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, it’s only just startin’,” Woodend told him. “You must have known Eddie Barnes quite well, workin’ at the club.”

  Clarke nodded. “Oh, I knew Eddie all right.”

  “An’ what did you make of him?”

  “Make of him?” Clarke took a reflective sip of his milk. “Serious,” he said finally. “Very serious.”