The Not Quite Perfect Murderer, page 1
Contents
Cover
Also by Margaret Duffy from Severn House
Title Page
Copyright
He liked to …
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Also by Margaret Duffy from Severn House
TAINTED GROUND
COBWEB
BLOOD SUBSTITUTE
SOUVENIRS OF MURDER
CORPSE IN WAITING
RAT POISON
STEALTH
DARK SIDE
ASHES TO ASHES
DUST TO DUST
MURDERS.COM
STONE COLD, STONE DEAD
GILLARD’S STING
THE NOT QUITE PERFECT MURDERER
Margaret Duffy
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2021
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
This eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House,
an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
severnhouse.com
Copyright © Margaret Duffy, 2021
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Margaret Duffy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-5061-4 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-814-6 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0552-0 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
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He liked to be called Spike, but his contemporaries at school saw no reason to do so, and if they addressed him at all, which wasn’t very often, it was as Goggle on account of his rather expressionless, staring, large blue eyes. His mother, Karley, called him by the name she had given him: Damien. He hated it and didn’t like to ask what his father had thought about it as that subject was taboo. He’d once questioned her about him and the fact that he seemed to be missing, and she’d flown into a temper and hit him. This hadn’t been too much of a shock as she’d always hit him a lot anyway.
Spike, then. He liked that as he spiked up his hair with some gel stuff he’d bought in a chemist’s but only when Karley was out – which was most of the time – as she’d hit him after he’d done that, too. At school, he was bottom of just about every subject but excelled at PE – strange really considering how odd his body was. For Damien was slightly disabled with long arms and big strong hands, and no matter how much help he had had in the past from physiotherapists – when his mother bothered herself with the appointments the doctor had made for him, that is – he still had a unique way of walking, with his head thrust forward. Being thin, probably on account of malnourishment as Karley couldn’t be bothered to feed him properly, meant he had pointy elbows and knees, which didn’t help his image either. Some medic or other had said he was ‘double-jointed’ and that made him feel even more of a freak.
Whatever the truth, it didn’t stop eleven-year-old Damien from going up a climbing wall in the school gym like a gecko. He loved climbing, and when it was dark and he was supposed to be in bed, he escaped from the house through his bedroom window, shinned down a drainpipe almost entirely covered with old ivy and went off exploring the city. Quite often walking for some distance, he climbed trees. There were hundreds of them in the Regency squares and lining the roads, but the plane trees were his favourite. Up there, he was king looking down on everyone else and people never noticed him. Bath had many old stone houses and he discovered that it was quite easy to climb the walls of those as well: they often had cast-iron drainpipes, which were strong and sometimes had his friend, the ivy, growing up them as well. This meant that he could look in the windows. He really enjoyed looking in windows. You never knew what you were going to see, and he was amazed at what people got up to. He abandoned modern brick-built or reproduction stone homes as they were more of a problem and were usually furnished with plastic pipes and gutters which, from his point of view, were useless, if not dangerous. He had had one alarming fall due to those but had luckily landed in a bush so had escaped with a few cuts and bruises. Karley hadn’t noticed.
ONE
Just over a year later
Detective Chief Inspector James Carrick of Bath CID was a happy man. His present sunny and smiling disposition – rare for him as Scots are not normally extravagant with open signs of emotion unless very, very angry – was due to the fact that he had finally caught up with the man who had tried to kill him. There was an underlying suspicion that this afterglow wouldn’t last long, but while it did, he had every intention of enjoying it. Yes, he kept telling himself, ex-DCI Derek Rogers of Dalesland Police, at one time stationed at Wemdale in the north of England, was in custody, the man who a couple of years previously had banged him up in an old factory boiler on a derelict industrial estate and left him to die. Carrick sometimes still had nightmares about it: the hours of trying to kick at the rusting hinges until he had fainted from the pain in his legs, of almost getting jammed as he had tried to turn round inside it in order to tackle the ill-fitting door – daylight cruelly visible round the edges – with his hands. Nothing had worked.
Rogers, together with DS Alan Terrington, had been in association with a criminal by the name of Frank Norris, otherwise known as Smiler, and they had collaborated to their mutual benefit. Everything had then gone wrong when an investigative journalist-cum-film producer, Martin Gilcrist, had made a short series of TV documentaries about police corruption, and in one of them had exposed what was going on in Wemdale. Shortly afterwards, his body had been found on the weir in the River Avon in Bath, not far from where he had lived. He had been murdered – battered to death – and that was when Carrick had become involved.
The fact that he still existed on the planet was due to a friend, Patrick Gillard. Gillard had not only tracked down where he had been incarcerated but fought off sundry lowlife who had been thicker on the ground than the average man would have been able to deal with. But Gillard wasn’t average: a retired army officer, late of MI5 and the National Crime Agency, he was also frighteningly efficient at what Carrick could only describe as filthy fighting, learned in the back streets of God knows where. He had bettered the yobs in the pay of Smiler in a fashion that still gave Carrick, who could take care of himself handsomely if the situation arose, goosebumps when he thought about it. And, just a week previously, in connection with another case entirely, they had caught up with Rogers, and Carrick had arrested him for the three murders he had committed since the Wemdale episode.
But that was in the past and Carrick had to attend to the present. Right now, that entailed finishing his breakfast, two slices of toast and marmalade, as he gathered together various possessions to toss into his document case. Then he downed a mug of black coffee, brushed his teeth, looked in on his little daughter, Iona Flora, who was still sound asleep, waved goodbye to their live-in nanny, Marion, who was in the kitchen making tea, and left the old farmhouse that he and his wife, Joanna, had made their home. Joanna, a constable in Frome, was on duty and he wouldn’t see her until he got home that night. He was using every quiet and unobtrusive means at his disposal to get her transferred to Bath.
Bath Police Station, where, as far as he was concerned, most of the action happened, was now situated at Redbridge House in Midland Road. This was on account of the building housing the original nick having been deemed too large and outdated. It had been sold to the university. As far as the general public was concerned, contact with the police could be made at a One Stop Shop situated not far from its predecessor in Manvers Street, a stone’s throw from the railway station. Carrick wasn’t sure that he liked the new arrangement, and there was no custody suite on site – that was now in Keynsham. One didn’t have to be very
When Carrick got to his office, he quickly discovered that there had been a break-in at a jeweller’s in an arcade off Milsom Street overnight, a gang wielding sledgehammers and crowbars having literally smashed their way into the shop. Lynn Outhwaite, recently promoted to DI, was overseeing the investigation, having got to work early and gone off to the crime scene to see things for herself. Carrick, seating himself behind his desk, quite envied her. He had at least a morning’s work in front of him, writing reports and reading through the stack of official papers that he never seemed to be able to get to the bottom of. But as he worked, just now and then, like a little beam of sunlight, came the memory of the clip to the jaw he had given Rogers, who had been calling himself Kevin Freeman, when the man had hurled himself at him when arrested.
There was a knock at the door and Sergeant Derek Woods, who knew he didn’t have to wait for permission to enter, put his head round it. ‘Got a minute, sir?’
‘Of course. Have a seat,’ Carrick answered. He always had time for Woods and had not been looking forward to the time when the custody officer, as one of his roles had been at Manvers Street, retired. Woods was a walking encyclopaedia on the ungodly, their families, friends, associates and enemies in the city and its environs. He had reached retirement age, but a rare and miraculous bout of thinking had been done by those in authority and he had been asked if he wanted to stay on to undertake general duties. Absolutely: Woods loved his job and had a misery of a wife.
‘How are you now?’ the DCI enquired. The man had had a mild heart attack some months previously.
‘Not too bad at all now, sir, thank you.’
‘So, what’s the problem?’
‘It’s not actually a problem, but I might have some information about that break-in last night,’ said Woods in his soft Somerset burr, having seated himself. ‘I intended to speak to DI Outhwaite but she’s not here.’
‘Information from one of your sources?’
Woods nodded soberly. He had ‘sources’ in all kinds of places, mostly pubs.
‘I’d be very interested to hear it.’
‘Word has it that the Baker gang, who I should imagine are prime suspects for the raid last night as it’s exactly how they operate, have a backer – some kind of rich character who was described to me as being a big cheese but having a screw loose.’
Carrick leaned back in his seat, unable to prevent a smile at the description. ‘How accurate d’you reckon that news is, Derek?’
Wood’s lined face creased even more as he also smiled. ‘That bit of gossip isn’t exactly gold-plated, but there’s something else that is. I have a chum who’s stationed at West End Central in London. We joined this force together here and a couple of years later he asked for a transfer as he married a London girl who had a much higher-paid job than he did. She still does. Lovely girl, too.’
‘Wise man,’ the DCI commented. Woods must never be hurried.
‘Rob – that’s my chum – phoned me this morning. He’s been working on similar cases down there as the one last night – he keeps abreast with what’s happening here – and a few weeks back they succeeded in arresting a gang member who had been knocked down by the getaway car on one of these raids. They’d left him for dead. He did die, unexpectedly, shortly afterwards but not before he’d been identified as Les Baker, wanted by this force for burglary and assault. As you must know, sir, the whole lot were from Shepton Mallet originally and old man Baker – Freddie, I think he was referred to – and several brothers were in the stolen car trade until the law caught up with some of them. He died in prison after being attacked by another inmate, but most of the others are now on the loose again. It’s a big family – at least ten of them, and that includes numerous cousins and hangers-on who hire themselves out to what they regard as the big time as bruisers, yobs for hire – call it what you will. It’s all very vague but the latest is that they’re back – here.’
‘They might have moved back into home territory because it got too hot for them in the capital, then,’ Carrick said. He hadn’t known anything about the ancient history of the Baker gang; what Woods had told him had occurred quite a while before he himself had come to the West Country.
‘That’s possible, but the main point of what I’m telling you, sir, is that Rob’s heard their big sponsor, who’s also originally from this neck of the woods but has a base in London, is now back here as well, either in Bath or the surrounding areas.’
Carrick was beginning to wish that, with so many ears to the ground, Woods worked for CID. ‘OK, thank you. Leave it with me. I’ll inform Lynn and get on to the Met. They might have some more info that’ll help us to track them down.’
Woods got to his feet. ‘Thank you, sir.’ He added, ‘I’m glad you caught up with that bastard who tried to kill you up north.’
‘Does everything get trumpeted around in this place?’ Carrick asked.
‘Probably,’ said Woods as he went out.
At one time, before they were married, Joanna had been Carrick’s sergeant and they had made a good team. Carrick had been married to Katherine at the time and she had been dying, with agonizing slowness, from a rare form of bone cancer. Towards the end, carers had come in several times a day to look after her. Then, one night after a particularly difficult raid on a house where armed criminals were known to be hiding, when Carrick and several members of his team had been slightly hurt, he had driven Joanna home. Everything had got completely out of hand and they had made love right there on her hall carpet. Their affair had continued.
The superintendent of the day, now retired, had received a tip-off from a reporter on the local newspaper, a criminal on the quiet, who had been making it his business to spy on Carrick. The super had hated women in the job and broken rules to remove Joanna from her post. She had been offered a dead-end position. Not the sort of woman to tolerate this kind of treatment, she had resigned from the police. Although he knew that a super wouldn’t be allowed to do what he had now, Carrick still felt horribly guilty, and cowardly, for not having fought for her cause. At the time, he’d only recently been promoted to DI and had felt vulnerable – no excuse, he knew. Now, some years, a wedding and a baby daughter later, Joanna had rejoined the police.
‘You’ll have to get a shift on, James,’ she said, dressed to go out, when Carrick got home a bit later than usual. ‘We’re meeting the Gillards in the Ring o’ Bells for a meal in half an hour.’
Carrick kissed her cheek and went off to have a rapid shower. It was the first he’d heard of it, and right now it seemed as though he was surrounded by people who knew things that he didn’t. Not only that: if there was one thing he hated, it was rolling up late to anything social. But at least the village of Hinton Littlemoor, where the Gillards lived, was only a few miles away.
It was gratifying to discover when they got there that they were the first, but Ingrid, Patrick’s wife, arrived about five minutes later. She told them that Patrick had got home from work later than normal and she had left him in the shower. A dark-haired and attractive woman, once described by a Russian mobster as ‘formidable and beautiful’, she had worked with her husband first for MI5 in a department called D12 and then with the Serious Organised Crime Agency, now absorbed into the National Crime Agency. Both had then been involved with that organization until Patrick officially retired. Only in reality he hadn’t. There were occasional contracts, even though he had taken what he called a ‘day job’ as a claims investigator for a national insurance company.
This fourth member of the group, tall and slim, turned up shortly afterwards, shed his coat and came and sat down. So was it raining or had he forgotten to dry his hair?
‘It’s lashing down,’ he announced, solving the mystery and running his fingers through it, thus sprinkling his wife liberally with water. He picked up his pint of Jail Ale, a ‘visiting’ bitter beer that seemed to be a permanent fixture in the pub these days, thanked Carrick and had an appreciative taste. ‘I hope we’re not going to have a debriefing on what happened in Wemdale,’ he said, all seriousness.
