Blind Needle Read online

  This wasn’t a figure of speech, it was a real possibility. I knew it for certain as I staggered on, dragging my leaden boots in a parody of a deep-sea diver on the ocean floor. I knew I couldn’t keep running for much longer, the blood was screaming in my head so that I was nearly deafened by it, and my lungs were being sandpapered. The corner I longed for to conceal me, and another identical cobbled street to disappear down, were not half-a-dozen steps away when I heard him behind me. I’d gained perhaps a dozen yards but he was still there, and still young, still fit.

  In my blind panic I missed the alleyway I was aiming for, skidding on the wet cobblestones as I tried to make the turn, regained my footing and carried on to the next. In a straight chase without obstacles he would have easily caught up with me over thirty yards. My only real chance was to jink and twist through every back alley, turn every corner I came to, gradually lose myself in the labyrinth of crumbling red brick. I had to get just far enough ahead to be out of his vision for a few precious seconds. Give him the dilemma of two or three alternatives to choose from, left, right, straight on … his youth and fitness wouldn’t help him there. He would have to guess, and the more he guessed, the better my chances.

  The alley sloped inwards to a central channel, inches deep in standing, stagnant water. I sloshed through it, not having the energy to take the few extra steps round it. My heavy overcoat was sodden, and my trousers flapped like wet washing, clinging to my ankles. The rain streamed steadily down, unrelenting. I screwed up my eyes, cursing it, and yet of course it was as much of a hindrance to him as it was to me.

  He was shouting something, wasting breath I hoped. I caught the word ‘bastard’ and some garbled expletives. Then he cried out with real murderous venom. I took a quick look back to see him sprawled full-length in the grey sheet of water. He was on his feet almost as fast as he fell, streaks of dirt on his face, mouth working under the gingerish moustache, spitting out the foul taste.

  When I turned back to run on I got a horrible shock. Ten yards in front of me – invisible through the rain till now – was a blank brick wall. I’d chosen my own trap, chased myself into a dead end. I ran harder, judging the leap, not knowing if I had the strength or the belief to make it. Even then he’d be up to me, grab my flailing legs and claw a handful of wet overcoat before I could swing over the top. I gathered myself, altering my pace the final few yards to rapid half-steps to get the distance right, tightening every muscle for maximum effort, and then saw in the last second, tucked in a corner at right-angles to the wall, a dark narrow arched tunnel which cut through the terraced row to the street. It was hardly wide enough to run down without cannoning from side to side. I emerged into the street with bruised shoulders and elbows, did an acute right turn, and ran on, desperate for the next corner, the next alleyway. I had to leave him behind for those few vital seconds – force him to make a blind guess as to which way I’d gone, and hope to God he guessed wrong.

  The rain had eased off to a slanting drizzle. The street was level here, though to the right it rose steeply, which told me that the centre of town lay in that direction. I crossed over, went the opposite way. There was a tall, stout fence of sharpened railway sleepers, and through the gaps I could see a garden allotment, bamboo canes stuck in the ridged earth, and a greenhouse with a squeaking metal weather-vane. A path of beaten cinders went alongside the fence. I turned onto it, ran a few paces, walked a few, tried to run a few more. The path petered out. Facing me were the backs of some houses which idiotically seemed familiar, as if anyone who hadn’t been born, lived and died here could possibly tell the difference between one terraced row and another. Somebody had done himself proud with a new bathroom: a tangle of plastic pipes like fat green worms writhing down the wall.

  It was hiding time. My options were reduced to one. I didn’t have it in me to run another thirty yards before I slumped to the ground in a quivering, nauseous heap.

  I avoided the one with new plumbing and limped to another further along with unwashed windows and grimy lace curtains. Carefully, with a great expenditure of effort, I lifted the backyard gate so that it wouldn’t scrape on the flagstones, closed it the same way. There was a latch, but the iron bar to lock the gate was missing. There was nowhere left to run to now, even had I possessed a few lingering shreds of strength to try.

  The wall was a little above my height. I crouched down below it and doubled myself up in the corner, clutching my knees. I closed my eyes and leaned the side of my head against the damp, pitted brickwork. My chest was heaving and shuddering. I tried to take long slow gasps of air rather than short explosive ones, but these too sounded raucous and deafening. Then I caught my breath, held it locked tight in my chest as I heard the thudding beat of footsteps on the cinder path.

  The young policeman came to a stop, faced as I had been by the back of a row of houses, their slate roofs shining after the downpour. His feet scuffled as he turned to look one way and then the other. He was close enough for me to hear him muttering angrily to himself, probably still cursing, under his sharp, rapid panting. This was the decisive moment. Would he continue on, to the bottom of the row, in the belief that I had been far enough ahead to get out of sight? Or would he calculate that I couldn’t possibly, in my failing condition, have done a forty-odd yard dash to vanish round the gable end before his arrival? He had to make a judgement, here and now, this instant.

  I waited, head sunk, elbows pressed against my chest, breathing shallowly into my cupped hands.

  The footsteps moved on, and my shoulders involuntarily sagged with relief. But then my spine went rigid. He was walking, not running, pacing outside the backyard walls. He had made his decision. The middle-aged man in the heavy overcoat and clodhopper boots was in no shape to have covered the forty-odd yards and got clean away: he had to be somewhere near, gone to ground, skulking like a cornered rat.

  Which is precisely what I am, I thought. And with no way out of the rat-hole. I jumped with shock as a backyard gate crashed, kicked open with a viciousness that was probably due to fear as much as anything. Another slamming kick and a splintering of rotten timber as he worked his way along. Yet again – crash – and this one no more than three doors away – and he moved swiftly on to the next.

  Bent at the knees I scuttled over the flagstones to the back door, a mottled blue, the paint bubbled and flaking off in long strips. Yet even before I reached up to grasp the handle, hope shrivelled inside me. Not surprisingly the owner shared Mr Patundi’s obsession with locks and bars: the door had been fitted with a new stainless steel mortice lock. Weakly, without conviction, I pushed against it, and then I heard the backyard gate scrape over the flagstones and slam back on its hinges.

  2

  Everything was shiny and new in Brickton police station. There was the smell of fresh paint and new timber and pine disinfectant; the walls were clean (no grey smears from passing shoulders), the composition floors squeaky and unscuffed. The blankets I slept under were stiff and sharp-creased with newness, their neat labels not puckered by repeated laundering. Money had been found from somewhere, quite a lot of money, to build and equip these modern two-storey cube-like premises with their closed-circuit TV monitoring system and electrically-operated cell doors. Even the pastel blue cup and saucer and plate which the young constable brought in on a tray, serving my morning tea and toast, hadn’t a single crack or chip. He said, ‘When you’ve finished that, a quick wash and brush-up. Ten minutes?’

  I ate the two slices of toast and drank the tea and was ready when he came back. He escorted me to the washroom, six basins with a wall mirror set above each one, three showers in white-tiled enclosures, and handed me a disposable razor in a sealed plastic pack. ‘There’s no foam, you’ll have to use soap. And don’t cut yourself, will you? Some try it and claim they’ve been coerced.’ He stood by the door, arms folded, making a dry soft whistling sound through his pursed lips.

  As we were going back to the cell for my jacket, he said, ‘Done a bit of tram
ping, have we?’ He was referring to the dried mud on my trousers and shoes. And when I put my jacket on: ‘Christ, where’d you get that suit from? The Ark?’

  We walked along a corridor, the outer wall made of glass, the day outside, like the police station, bright and clean. The sky was high and blue, with just a vapour trail being scribed by an invisible hand across the empty void. I went first through a door, up a flight of stairs which bent back on itself, and the young constable surged ahead to show me into a room which, through glass panels to waist height, gave a view of a large, open-plan area with perhaps a dozen people working at desks. It might have been an insurance broker’s or an architect’s office.

  ‘You can smoke if you want to,’ the young constable said. He had neatly-trimmed sideburns and exuded a powerful scent of after-shave.

  I sat in a tubular steel chair with green leatherette arms in front of a metal desk with nothing on it except a grey plastic trimphone. There were two other identical chairs, a metal waste bin, and a calendar with a colour photograph of shire horses.

  The constable, sucking his lips and day-dreaming, sprang forward to open the door. The large, broad-shouldered man in dark suit and striped tie immediately filled the room not only with his size but with charged momentum: a brisk, bustling yet abstracted air as if he were mentally dealing with a dozen separate strands of thought at once. A younger man with lank fair hair and pale blue eyes followed him in, dismissed the constable and closed the door, then stood with hands clasped behind his back next to the shire horses. His dark grey suit was beautifully cut, a deep red handkerchief of what looked like silk flowing from his breast pocket. His cream shirt even had stitching along the collar. I hadn’t realised that policemen, even senior ones, these days had the money as well as the taste to indulge in fine tailoring.

  ‘Detective-Inspector Blend, Cumbrian Regional Serious Crimes Squad,’ the large man said. He sat down opposite me and opened the blue folder he had brought in. He waved his blunt-fingered hand, the nails cut short and square. ‘This is Detective-Sergeant Dimelow.’ He started to read the form in front of him, which I could see had typewritten entries. ‘You gave your name as Peter Holford.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve nothing to identify yourself?’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘I don’t have a permanent address.’

  Inspector Blend took out a ballpoint pen and wrote something down in tiny, precisely-formed letters. His wrists were as thick as my forearms. His face was large and square, pouchy cheeks with a maze of broken purple blood vessels under the skin, his jawline softening into his neck under a fold of flesh.

  He laid the pen down and interlocked his meaty fingers, now looking at me with faded brown eyes. He must have looked at thousands of people that way, his eyes becoming a little more faded each time.

  ‘How long have you been in Brickton?’

  ‘Just a few days.’

  ‘Three, four, five …?’

  ‘About a week.’

  ‘Is that your natural hair colour?’

  The question took me by surprise, which was obviously what he intended. I hesitated and then shook my head.

  ‘When did you dye it?’

  ‘Well, it must have been … I really had no idea.’

  ‘Since you came to Brickton?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘Work,’ I said, having prepared my answer. ‘I was hoping to get a job.’

  Inspector Blend smiled, or at least the corners of his mouth curled up slightly. ‘You were hoping to find a job,’ he said gravely, ‘in Brickton?’

  ‘Somebody told me there was work here,’ I said. ‘Loaders at B-H Haulage.’ I’d rehearsed that too, in what I knew was a fawning desire to make the details sound convincing.

  ‘You were misinformed, I take it?’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded glumly.

  ‘You applied for a job at B-H Haulage and they turned you down. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. I saw a woman in the office, a Mrs Crompton, but there was nothing going.’ It was unlikely that high-ranking officers from the Serious Crimes Squad were local men. These two had made a special journey to be here, possibly from Carlisle. I cleared my throat. ‘I’m pretty sure she’ll remember me.’

  ‘I’m positive she will,’ Inspector Blend agreed. ‘Somebody who looks less like a loader I’ve yet to see. What made you dye your hair? Were they looking for younger men?’

  In another’s mouth it would have sounded clever and cutting, but coming from him it didn’t. He had the trick, or perhaps it was a natural gift, of making sarcastic remarks without causing offence.

  I said, ‘Look, I know I got involved in causing a disturbance. That’s why I ran off when the policeman asked me to stop. I mean, is that it? What exactly are you accusing me of?’ I hoped this was what an innocent man would have said, and sounded like.

  As if I hadn’t spoken, the Inspector said, ‘Dimelow, would you take Mr Holford through and have him fingerprinted.’ Then to me: ‘You’ve no objection to having your fingerprints taken?’

  ‘Well, no—’

  ‘Good.’

  Dimelow had opened the door. I got up. The halting clatter of a typewriter, operated by someone who couldn’t type, sailed in from the main office. A woman laughed. I stood by the corner of the desk. ‘I’m prepared to do this but I don’t understand why it’s necessary.’ I tried out a shrug. ‘I got involved. I admit it.’

  ‘What disturbance?’

  ‘A night or two ago. At the town hall. They were protesting about the Station and I got mixed up in it.’

  ‘We’re not concerned with that,’ Inspector Blend said shortly. His head was bent, jotting something down. ‘We’re investigating the murder of Rakesh Patundi, an Asian shopkeeper, found strangled on waste ground near his premises.’ He looked up at me. ‘We believe you may be able to help us with our inquiries, Mr Holford. Dimelow, take him through.’

  In the outer office Detective-Sergeant Dimelow pressed my fingers onto an inked pad and carefully rolled each one into a numbered box on a sheet of paper with a faintly glossy texture. He slid the sheet under a desk-top magnifying lens and examined the prints. Apparently satisfied, he handed the sheet to a uniformed woman police officer. ‘Run this. C.R.S.C.S. Patundi investigation.’ It was the first time I had heard him speak: his voice jarred with his groomed and tailored appearance, for he had a strong north country accent, which even as a career policeman he hadn’t bothered to modify or soften. Somehow this made him seem more formidable: a man whose appearance and accent, taken separately, might lead you to underestimate him, yet together they suggested an intelligence that was keen and uncompromising.

  I cleaned my hands with tissues and a bottle of clear solution that smelled of pear drops, watching the woman police officer place the sheet on a ground glass screen under a strong light. She adjusted the focus and start tapping on a keyboard. Numbers flashed up on the monitor of a computer terminal.

  Dimelow touched my elbow. I dropped the used tissues into a waste bin. ‘I need to use the toilet.’

  He took me along the corridor and waited inside the door while I pretended to relieve myself. What I really needed was time to think. Several random thoughts – niggling, disturbing, confusing – jostled all together in my head. The first was that my fingerprints were all over the room above the shop. I’d even left a bundle of odds and ends, socks, underclothes. But not the diary, thank God. Then I wondered: how did you prove that one person had strangled another – or that he hadn’t? There was no weapon to find, no gun or knife, no blunt instrument with blood and matted hair. There would be no fingerprints on the neck either, just bruise marks. Such lack of evidence could clear a person, but it could convict him also, by sheer weight of circumstance. It would be too neat an irony, I thought, and found myself smiling rather bitterly, to be charged with a murder I hadn’t committed.

  ‘Something strike
you as funny?’ Dimelow asked me as I turned and stepped down, buttoning my jacket. His pale blue eyes bored right through me.

  I wiped the smile away. ‘No. Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said with a sardonic twist of the lips. ‘You want to watch that. Round here we put people away who laugh at nothing.’

  ‘What makes you think I had anything to do with the murder of the shopkeeper?’

  ‘Well,’ Dimelow said, opening the door; he reminded me of a salesman, slick in every sense of the word, waiting for a client to pass through, ‘he didn’t strangle himself now, did he? Crafty bastards, these Pakis, but not that clever.’

  It might have been a deliberate mistake, casually dropped in, hoping that I’d correct him on Mr Patundi’s nationality; or it might have been that Dimelow thought that everyone with a brown skin was a Paki.

  3

  Inspector Blend looked at his watch. He said to Dimelow: ‘What time are they expecting us?’

  ‘Anytime after ten-thirty.’

  ‘It’s nearly ten now. How far away is it?’

  ‘Oh – fifteen minutes. If that.’

  ‘Right.’ He pulled at his fleshy nose and sniffed once or twice. He fiddled with the pen, which seemed child-size in his large hands. The room felt almost cramped with him in it. ‘One or two questions and then we’ll get along. I’ve got a bloody meeting at four,’ he grumbled. ‘Divisional re-allocation of resources, which is code for cutbacks. Where have you been staying in Brickton, Peter?’

  So this was his method: appearing abstracted, his mind busy elsewhere on more important matters – and then dropping in a question out of the blue. Switching casually to first names so you were kept on the hop, never sure from one minute to the next whether this was an interrogation or just a friendly chat.