there was a child involved. But I don’t know any details.’ He listened. ‘Yes, love, I’ll try. And you try not to worry, I think you are fancying things.’
He really believed what he said.
Later that night, John Coffin was still up and reading, when his bell sounded. He listened on the entryphone.
‘Oh, Paul, come on up.’ He released the front door and waited. In a short while he heard feet on the stairs and opened his door. ‘You’re around late.’
Inspector Paul Lane was shorter than the ideal height for a policeman but compensated for it by a solid square frame and hard muscle that made his ability to look after himself never in doubt. He was young for an inspector and wrote a very good report, the product, no doubt, of having taken a sound degree in history at York University. He was reputed to have a very happy marriage, but if so, his wife was a patient woman who made do with not much of his company, because he was always working. As now. This was no casual call.
‘I saw your light was on.’
Since Church Row was not on any route that Paul Lane might have been taking to home or work, there had to be more to it than a social conversation. Coffin waited.
‘Nice to see you. Have a drink? This is whisky, but you could have anything.’ He thought about what he had apart from water and orange juice and probably a can of beer in the refrigerator.
‘Any coffee?’ Lane put down his briefcase.
‘If I open a jar.’
Lane pulled a face. ‘You ought to learn how to cook.’
‘I’ve never been able to notice the difference between one sort of coffee and another.’
‘That’s because you don’t treat the stuff properly. I bet you open a packet and then leave it around going stale for weeks. I’ll take the whisky.’
After a moment of silence, he said, ‘We’ve found a bike. That is, a lad exercising his dog found it dumped in some bushes in a park around an old people’s home in Charlton. It’s always a boy with a dog, isn’t it? He shouldn’t have been there, of course, with his dog and it’s not clear why he was, looking for his grandfather, he says, but his grandfather doesn’t live there, is only thinking he might go in one day. Anyway, the lad found the bike the day before yesterday and told his dad and they went out and wheeled it home. After a close inspection, they decided they didn’t like the look of it and that it might not be the bit of buckshee good luck they’d thought at first. So the man told a pal of his who was a copper. He took it to the local nick. After a bit, it occurred to them there that it might be of interest to us.’ Lane took a long drink. ‘It had a lot of blood on it, you see. All over. The boy had taken it for rust, but the father knew it for what it was.’
‘The blood group?’
‘Same as Egan’s. It has to be his. The killer used the bike to get away.’
‘Could be,’ observed Coffin moderately. ‘They took their time letting us know. Malice deliberate, do you think?’
Lane shrugged. ‘No, just a natural slowness. They don’t love us, though.’
‘I think we were created as a group because someone hated us.’ Coffin was half serious. He had enemies as well as friends. If he failed in what he was doing, bringing up to efficiency this whole sluggish CID area, then his career could be at a dead end. But he had picked his team deliberately and well. ‘Any fingerprints on the bike?’
‘Place is too cunning a bastard for that.’
‘If it is Place that killed Egan.’
But they both thought it was. He had disappeared from public view and his contacts and such friends as he had were keeping silent.
‘Until we are sure let’s call him X,’ said Coffin. ‘Any forensics?’
‘Still waiting. But with my naked eye I saw a bit of cloth caught in the saddle bar. Also a shred of plastic in the handlebars. The killer could have had a bag there, with the knife in it. We haven’t found the knife; he’s probably got it.’
‘Pity he didn’t leave it with the bike,’ said the still sceptical Coffin. ‘If the bike was all over blood he must have been covered with it himself. Quite a sight riding through the streets.’
Paul Lane ignored this sally. ‘It was late at night. And I don’t suppose he went out of his way to meet people. Either coming or going. And we have got a bit from the forensics. About Egan himself. There were shreds of grass on his shoes.’
‘So he walked to his rendezvous in the park. He’d have to do that. Even Egan. Not much of a walker, our William, as I remember.’
‘There were also traces of asphalt, or some sticky, tarry stuff on the soles and uppers of his shoes. It looks as though he’d tried to rub it off with a bit of newspaper and hadn’t succeeded.’
‘Yes, he always was a dressy man. Well, all the pavements around here seem to be under repair.’ Coffin looked down at his own shoes. Even Church Row.
‘Not all, but quite a few around the park,’ said Lane in that reasonable voice that could infuriate his peers. ‘I think he may have walked to his meeting. And if he did that, then he must have been hiding out somewhere not too far away. Not being, as you rightly say, much of a walker.’
‘Could be.’
‘So we might be able to find out where that was.’
There was silence between the two men as they considered William Egan coming out of his hiding place and then walking to meet his death.
‘The time of death has finally been agreed upon as about midnight,’ said Lane, coming across with another piece of information. ‘The medical lot didn’t want to come across with that yet, still doing tests on the gut or something, but I prised it out of them. The park is locked by that time, but I can think of at least three ways of getting in, and if I know them then Egan knew them.’
‘I wonder who issued the invitation to that particular meeting? And how it was set up?’
‘When we know that we will know the lot.’
‘If I know Egan and his son-in-law there was either a woman or money in it.’
‘A bait? Yes. I’d put Egan as the inviter. It has his mark on it somehow. But he walked into something he didn’t expect. He walked and X cycled. That makes them both living locally.’
‘Yes, I can accept that. If the bike is right,’ added Coffin cautiously.
‘This was my patch once, remember,’ said Lane.
‘I know.’ The bright boy from Guildford Grammar School and York University had started his career in the Force in an unsmart part of South London.
‘Where the bike was found is not far from where X’s sister lives.’
‘Why are we still calling him X? We both know we mean Place. I give you best on that. I think you are right,’ said Coffin. ‘But it’s still guessing.’
‘I went to call on his sister. Went to her house in Abinger Road. Just dropped in. I took as much of a look round as I reasonably could. He wasn’t there, of course.’
‘That would have been lucky.’
‘But he had been there. I swear it. I could almost smell him.’
‘Perhaps he was still there.’
‘No, I don’t think so. There’s not many places to hide in those little houses.’
He paused. ‘And there’s something else, something that worries me. His sister was frightened. She’s a tough little body, Roxie Farmer, but she was really scared stiff.’
The two men looked at each other.
‘You’re thinking of the way Egan