Death of a Cave Dweller Read online

Woodend thought of his own daughter again, and felt a sudden anger rising from the pit of his stomach.

  “Have you been knockin’ your wife about, Mr Johnson?” he demanded roughly.

  “What’s that got to do with you?” Rick Johnson said, jumping to his feet and thrusting out his chin aggressively.

  “Go on, take a swing at me,” Woodend said softly. “I’d really like you to do that.”

  “Why? So you can summons me for assault?”

  Woodend shook his head. “No. Because it’ll give me just the excuse I’m lookin’ for to knock you flat on your arse.”

  “You an’ whose army?” Johnson sneered.

  “Sir . . .” Rutter said, putting his hand on Woodend’s arm.

  The chief inspector brushed the hand away. “You stay out of this, Bob,” he warned. “This is between him an’ me.” He turned his attention back to the doorman. “I’ll tell you somethin’ for nothin’, Johnson. You might get the better of me, but you won’t find it as easy as beatin’ up a kid like her.”

  The two men stood glaring at each other, Johnson with his fists bunched, Woodend watchful and tensed. It seemed as if they would be like that for ever – until, perhaps, they had turned into stone – then Lucy Johnson said, “Rick didn’t hit me. I walked into a door.”

  Woodend was struck by how vulnerable her voice sounded. It was almost, he thought, like the cry of an injured kitten.

  “You heard her!” Rick Johnson said. “I didn’t hit her. She walked into a door.”

  “Well, you’d better make sure she doesn’t walk into any more,” Woodend told him. He forced his body to relax. “But to get back to the other matter, I’m goin’ to have to insist you leave the club now. I’ll square it with Mrs Pollard.”

  Johnson looked down at his wife, then put his hand on her arm and half-assisted, half-pulled her to her feet.

  “Half an hour,” he grunted. “That’s how long we’ve got to be out of the club, isn’t it?”

  “Half an hour,” Woodend agreed.

  He watched them head for the stairs, Johnson with his arm around his wife’s shoulders, then he and his sergeant made their way across to the snack bar. The four people waiting for them there were the three surviving members of the Seagulls and their manager, Jack Towers. The manager was wearing a blue suit, but the group members, he noted, were all dressed in black turtle-necked sweaters, imported American bluejeans – and brown boots with metal studs in the heels.

  “It was good of you all to make the time to see me at such short notice,” Woodend said.

  One of the Seagulls, the one with the sharp features and quick, intelligent eyes, snorted.

  “I don’t know how things work down in London, but up here in Liverpool, when you’re told the filth want to see you, you always manage to find the time,” he said. “Unless, of course, you talk with a posh accent or live in one of them big houses in Blundellsands. Then, for some strange reason, the police don’t seem to bother you at all.”

  “Aye, they do say posh people can get away with murder, don’t they?” Woodend replied. “But it’s not true. Nobody gets away with murder. Not if I can help it.”

  “Well, I’m sure that’s a great comfort to us all. But it won’t bring Eddie back, will it?”

  The young man was angry, Woodend thought, but beneath that anger lay a deeper pain. “I don’t think I caught your name,” he said.

  “That’s probably because I never told it to you.”

  “Would you like to tell me now?” asked the chief inspector, refusing to be rattled.

  “It’s Walker. Steve Walker.”

  The one who called the shots, Woodend reminded himself – the one who’d taken young Eddie Barnes out drinking with him whether the dead guitarist had wanted to go or not.

  “Would the rest of you mind telling me who you are?” the chief inspector asked.

  “I’m Jack Towers, the manager,” said the man in the suit.

  He was maybe twenty-five or twenty-six, Woodend decided. He was tall and skinny, wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses, and had pale sensitive features. He probably found the abrasive Steve Walker very hard to handle at times.

  “You’re a shippin’ clerk, aren’t you, Mr Towers?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Jack Towers agreed reluctantly, almost as though he considered working in a shipping office some kind of crime. “But that’s only temporary. As soon as the boys take off . . .”

  “So were you workin’ at your desk at the time that Eddie Barnes was murdered?”

  “No,” the manager said. “I was right here. I always try to catch the boys’ performances.”

  “Jack thinks if he’s not there to watch over us, we’ll fall apart,” Steve Walker sneered.

  “We need Jack,” said another member of the group, a boy who was probably the same age as Walker, but had not yet quite lost his puppy fat. “He stops us from goin’ off the deep end.”

  Towers rewarded the young man’s support with a short, nervous smile. “Thank you, Pete.”

  This was Pete Foster, then, which meant that the third member of the group, who had a dour expression which was almost comical, had to be Billie Simmons, the drummer.

  “There’s two things I’d really like to know,” Woodend said. “The first is why Eddie didn’t get a shock the second he plugged his amplifier in.”

  Steve Walker shook his head almost despairingly. “The only thing that was live was the bass control,” he said. “An’ Eddie had no need to touch that until somethin’ went wrong, did he?”

  “Didn’t he?”

  “Of course not. It was already set at the right level.”

  “All right, I can see that now,” Woodend said. “So let’s go on to my second question – when could the amplifier have been tampered with?”

  “This is a waste of time. We’ve already told the local bluebottles everythin’ we know,” Steve Walker said.

  “I’m sure you have,” Woodend replied. “An’ I’ll be lookin’ at their reports – when I get round to it. But me, I’m the sort of feller who likes to get everythin’ straight from the horse’s mouth. I expect that you’re a bit that way inclined yourself, Mr Walker.”

  Steve Walker did not deny it. Instead, he lit a Woodbine, took a deep drag on it, and said, “The equipment was workin’ perfectly when we played our gig the night before.”

  “And where did you play this gig?”

  “Here. In the Cellar Club. It was what Mrs Pollard calls ‘The Battle of the Bands Night’.”

  “The Battle of the Bands Night,” Woodend repeated. “So you weren’t the only ones performin’?”

  Walker shook his head. “No. There were three other groups on with us – Len Tooley an’ the Aces, The Fantastics, an’ Mickey Finn an’ the Knockouts,” he said. “We were the ones who closed the show,” he added, with just a hint of pride.

  That would explain all the people down on Inspector Hopgood’s list, Woodend thought. Four groups. That meant at least sixteen people who had access to the dressing room. But wait! Eddie Barnes’s equipment couldn’t have been tampered with until after he played the last set, and if the other groups had already buggered off by then . . .

  “Did you all leave the club at the same time?” he asked.

  “More or less. Apart from Rick an’ Lucy Johnson. They stayed behind to lock up.”

  “An’ what time would that be?”

  “About half-past one.”

  Woodend whistled softly. “Clubs in Liverpool do seem to keep pretty late hours.”

  “The club closed at eleven,” Steve Walker said disdainfully, as if he thought Woodend should already have known that. “But that wasn’t your question, was it? You asked what time we left, an’ I told you that was around half one.”

  “What were you doin’ in those two an’ a half hours?”

  Steve Walker shrugged. “Messin’ around with the other groups, like we always do on Battle of the Bands Night.”

  Damn, Woodend thought. “So the other g
roups stayed on when they’d finished their sets?” he said.

  “I would have thought that was pretty obvious, even to you,” Steve Walker replied.

  “Would you care to be a little more specific about what you mean by messin’ around?” Woodend asked, ignoring Walker’s tone.

  “We chewed the fat for a while, told a few jokes, then a few of us had a jam session.”

  “Was Eddie Barnes part of the jam session?”

  “Not that night.”

  “But on other nights?”

  “Eddie used to join in,” Pete Foster said, “but for the last couple of weeks he’s been . . .”

  “Been what?”

  “It’s hard to say exactly. He was still serious about his music, but he didn’t seem to be enjoyin’ it as much.”

  Now that was interesting, Woodend thought, filing it in his mind as something to come back to later.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “The equipment couldn’t have been tampered with until after you finished playin’ at eleven, so the murderer had to get at it either before you left the club at half-past one or in the mornin’. Who’s here in the mornin’s?”

  “Wouldn’t know about that – you see I’m usually in bed until about eleven thirty,” Steve Walker said, with a grin which showed another side of his character. “You’d better ask Rick.”

  Yes, Woodend thought. There were a number of things he’d like to ask Mr Rick Johnson about, when he got the chance.

  “Do you know if anyone had threatened Eddie Barnes?” he asked.

  The four young men exchanged rapid, uneasy glances. “Not exactly threatened him, as such,” said Jack Towers, regaining the initiative which he had earlier lost to Steve.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, a few nasty things have been happening recently, but they’ve been directed against the whole group, rather than just Eddie.”

  “Such as?”

  Towers took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and handed them around. His hand was trembling, Woodend noted.

  “It was just annoying little things, really,” the manager said, as if he now wished he’d never brought the matter up. “Somebody – and we’ve no idea who it was – rang one of the venues I’d booked, pretended to be me, and said we couldn’t make it that night. When we turned up, we’d already been replaced by another group. Another night we came out of a club in Birkenhead and found all the tyres on the van had been slashed.”

  “Tell him about the rat,” Steve Walker said.

  Towers sighed. “A few days ago, Eddie found a dead rat in his guitar case,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “But it wasn’t just dead, was it?” Walker persisted.

  “No, it wasn’t just dead,” Towers admitted. “It had a string noose tied around its neck.”

  “A noose!” Woodend repeated. “And what do you think was the point of that?”

  “I don’t really know,” Towers said. “Somebody’s idea of a sick joke? An attempt at revenge?”

  “Revenge for what?”

  From the unhappy expression on his face, it was obviously a question Towers would rather not have answered.

  “The lads are . . . er . . . very popular in Liverpool, especially with the girls,” he said. “I suppose it’s possible that one of those girls’ boyfriends might have misunderstood the situation.”

  “Or understood it only too well,” Walker said, and the other two Seagulls sniggered.

  “So Eddie Barnes was a bit of a one for chasin’ the girls, was he?” Woodend asked.

  “No, he wasn’t,” Steve Walker said hotly. “The rest of us will poke anythin’ that’s willin’, but Eddie wasn’t like that. He was a romantic. He believed in true love, an’ he was waitin’ for the right girl to come along. A lot of good it did him! At least when I die, I won’t go out a virgin.”

  “Is that what Eddie did?” Woodend asked. “Go out as a virgin? Are you sure?”

  Walker’s anger, which seemed never to be very far below the surface, burst forth again. “Of course I’m bloody sure,” he said. “He was my best mate. We didn’t have any secrets from each other.”

  “Steve’s right,” said Pete Foster, who Woodend had already marked down as the peacemaker of the group. “If Eddie had been goin’ out with any girls, we’d have known about it.”

  The interview was somehow losing its momentum, Woodend thought. It was time to put the cat among the pigeons and see who flew where.

  “So what happens now?” he asked innocently.

  “Now?” Towers repeated, as if he had no idea what the chief inspector was talking about.

  “With the group,” Woodend explained. “I mean, you’re goin’ to need a new lead guitarist, aren’t you?”

  Billie Simmons and Pete Foster exchanged another hurried glance, but, Woodend noticed, Steve Walker had his eyes fixed, firmly and intently, on their manager.

  Towers shifted awkwardly. “I’ve . . . I’ve already put an advertisement in the newspaper,” he admitted.

  “You’ve done what?” Steve Walker demanded, his voice so high that he was almost screaming.

  The manager held out his hands in what was either a gesture of supplication or helplessness.

  “It had to be done,” he said feebly. “The group has to have a lead guitarist, Steve.”

  “I know we need a new lead guitarist,” Steve Walker said. “But we don’t have to have one yet. Not before Eddie’s even cold in his grave. Don’t you have any respect?”

  Jack Towers puffed nervously on his cigarette. “I’m sorry that Eddie’s dead,” he said. “Really sorry. But we have to be practical. We’ve been cancelling gigs all over the place. Everybody understands us doing that for a few days, but it can’t go on indefinitely, or all we’ve worked for will have gone down the drain.”

  It was evident from the look on Steve Walker’s face that that had been the wrong thing to say.

  “All we’ve worked for!” he repeated. “What have you done? We’re the ones who’ve written the songs. We’re the ones who get up on the stage night after night – singin’ till we’re hoarse, playin’ our instruments till we’ve got blisters on our fingers. All you have to do as our manager, Jack, is pick up the phone an’ make a few calls.”

  “You’re not bein’ fair to the man, Steve,” Pete Foster said.

  Another bad move, Woodend thought. But with Walker in the mood he evidently was in, was there any such thing as a good move?

  “So, you think I’m not bein’ fair, do you?” Walker ranted. “Well, let me tell you somethin’, Pete – it’s not a fair world. If it was, Eddie would be standin’ with us right now.”

  “Look, Steve,” Jack Towers said, “I was keeping it as a surprise, but I suppose you’d better know now – I’ve managed to get you an audition with a record company in London, two weeks from today.”

  Woodend quickly glanced from face to face. Billie Simmons’ expression told him that the announcement came as news to the drummer, but Pete Foster’s look said that he had known about the audition for a while.

  As for Steve Walker, his face was still blazing with anger. “How long have you known about this?” he demanded.

  Towers shrugged. “A few days.”

  “And why the bloody hell didn’t you tell me about it?”

  “I was going to – but what with Eddie dying like that . . .”

  He’d been holding it back as a surprise, Woodend thought. Waiting for the right moment to produce it like a rabbit out of a hat – the right moment to show Steve Walker just what a good manager he really was. “Anyway, the fact is that you have an audition with a record company,” Jack Towers continued. “Now do you see why we need a new guitarist as soon as possible?”

  “There was a time when I’d have been over the moon to get news like that,” Steve Walker told him. “An’ do you know what it means to me now? Absolutely nothin’! Bugger all! In case you three have forgotten it, Eddie was our mate. We went through a lot together.
An’ now, even though he’s only been dead a couple of days, you’re all acting as if he never existed.”

  “We can’t throw away the group’s chances just because Eddie’s dead,” Pete Foster said quietly.

  “Can’t we?” Steve Walker screamed back at him. “Well, maybe you can’t, Pete, but just watch me.”

  Elbowing his way between the others, he strode furiously across the room and disappeared through the archway. Those who remained were silent for some seconds, then Pete Foster said, “He’ll be back.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Jack Towers said worriedly.

  “The Seagulls are the best chance any of us have of ever bein’ famous,” Pete told him. “Steve knows that as well as I do, an’ he wants to be a success – perhaps more than any of us.”

  Woodend lit a cigarette, more to be doing something than because he needed a smoke. He knew that the scene he had just deliberately engineered would have been bound to happen sooner or later anyway, but now, looking at the expression of devastation on Jack Towers’ face, he couldn’t help but feel guilty.

  Seven

  The black police Humber, which was parked in the canyon between the two blocks of tall Victorian warehouses, seemed almost as if it had strayed into the area by mistake, but the uniformed inspector standing next to it – and watching Woodend’s approach with something very much akin to suspicion – looked as if he were on familiar territory.

  “Aye, an’ that’s the trouble – whatever else is wrong with him, he does know his patch,” the chief inspector muttered to himself as he approached Hopgood. “An’ though I don’t want to use the bugger – it’d be like usin’ a sledge hammer to crack a walnut – I may not have any choice.”

  With what looked like a considerable effort on his part, Hopgood forced a half-smile to his face. “Did you learn anything interesting from talking to the Seagulls, sir?” he asked.

  “Oh, I learned a hell of a lot that was interestin’,” the chief inspector told him. “I’m just not sure yet whether I’ve learned anythin’ which might help me to solve this case.”

  “And now you want to go and see Eddie Barnes’s parents?”

  “That’s right.”