The Vacant Casualty Page 14

  The powder was kicking in, too. There seemed a small chance that (back pain aside) in fifteen minutes’ time he might start to feel all right. Bradley was still muttering away on his phone, and Sam felt no immediate need to interrupt him, so he glanced around, and after spotting a familiar face not two tables away, had to do a movie-style double-take.

  ‘Good Lord! Literally. It’s Lord Ickham.’

  Without raising himself from his hunched position over a paper plate of rapidly disappearing spicy wings, Horace glanced up from a nearby table and looked urgently around the room with a hunted expression, apparently unsure of what he had heard. Then his eyes fell on Sam, and his unease vanished at once.

  ‘Dear boy,’ he said, smiling as he wiped his mouth with a napkin. ‘You remembered the old moniker. No longer accurate, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh dear. They haven’t stripped you of it already?’ Sam had a sudden worrying vision of a highly publicized drugs scandal on the benches of the House of Lords.

  ‘Good heavens, no! They don’t actually do that, do they? No, quite the reverse. Another promotion, as you would put it.’

  ‘Blimey, well done!’ Sam said. ‘What are you up to now?’

  ‘Earl of Cheltenham. Poor old Chummy Rawlinson, my cousin, was the last Earl. He passed away.’

  ‘Your cousin,’ said Sam, feeling this warranted more gravity than a great-uncle of 107. ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Well, you needn’t be. I never met the man – he moved to Brooklyn after that Profumo thing blew up. When I say “poor old Chummy”, I mean just that – he was very poor and very old, so I can’t see that we would have exactly got on like a house on fire. Which is, ironically, how he died – smoking in bed.’

  ‘A dreadful habit. I smoke in the bath, because that doesn’t seem quite as dangerous.’

  ‘I quite agree. Hey, by the way, are you okay for, er . . .’

  ‘Naughty salt?’ said Sam, breaking out what he had once heard was the posh phrase for cocaine, and then immediately realizing he was a suck-up of the worst kind. ‘You’re very generous,’ he said, ‘but I just had some. Is this your usual sort of joint?’

  ‘At two a.m. it is, when you’ve got the raging munchies.’

  ‘But haven’t you got . . . well, a staff of about two hundred and twelve in your house?’

  ‘Quite possibly. But I’m not waking cook up in the middle of the night, Sam. It’s so bloody uncouth.’

  ‘And you can’t knock something up yourself?’

  ‘Naturally, I bloody can! They had me on that Master Celebritychef thingy last year. The Aussie declared my smoked ham and puréed pea ravioli to die for. But the big bald one and I didn’t get on.’

  The aristocrat, although he spoke with the fluency that his very expensive education had instilled in him, betrayed all the other signs of being insensibly stoned – once a pause of more than a second descended on their conversation, his attention wandered away so that Sam was able to watch, amused, as Horace’s mind flitted from wonderment and absorption in the posters and menus printed on the wall, to skulking, paranoid glances at the other diners.

  At last it seemed that Bradley was finished on the phone, because now he turned a face towards Sam that was beaming with pride.

  ‘It’s all sorted,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’ asked Sam suspiciously. ‘What have you done? I thought we were halfway through a conversation.’

  Bradley shrugged this off. ‘Percival arranged it for me. The butlers,’ he explained. ‘I’ve had them all brought in.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  LOTS OF QUESTIONS filled Sam’s mind, but the first of them to find voice was: ‘How the hell long was I in the loo for?’

  ‘Quite a while, actually. A good hour. I did begin to wonder what was going on. Did you fall asleep or something?’

  ‘That’s not important,’ said Sam. ‘Why have you arrested all the – and, wait a minute, what do you mean by “all the butlers”, anyway? Who actually has butlers?’

  ‘Oh, quite a lot round here. Lord Selvington has at least two. The mayor lives in a huge house, owned by his wife, and he has one. Judge Barnstable . . .’

  Sam was about to insist that he let them go at once, but Bradley’s radio crackled with a question from Percival. ‘That’s right, Sergeant. Hose them down!’

  ‘Let’s get back there at once,’ said Sam.

  ‘Damn right,’ said Bradley. ‘I’m going to nail this mother!’

  They ran out into the street in time to see Horace reversing his open-top 1930s sports car clean onto the pavement and then screech off down the road in an S-shape before bursting onto the local green, skirting a pond and diving over a hill out of sight. Bradley and Sam ran as fast as they could to the police station.

  When they got there, they sprinted straight through to the cells at the back of the building. There were around twenty butlers of all different ages, shapes and sizes, but right now they had one thing in common: rather than place them in individual holding cells, Sergeant Percival had instead lined them up along the back wall, forced them to strip to their underwear and was training the thick unflinching jet of a fire hose upon them.

  With deep alarm, Sam was taking in the personage of Sergeant Percival for the first time. He was tall and lean, with dark brown eyes that showed a fixed satisfaction in his task, and a mouth set in a grim half-smile. Here, Sam could tell, was someone who truly loved being a policeman.

  ‘Um, excuse me,’ said Sam, tapping him on the shoulder. Percival looked askance at this interloper who would interrupt his enjoyment, and evaluated him coolly up and down, quite obviously wondering whether there was a pretext under which he could throw him in with the butlers. ‘I think you’re drowning that one,’ said Sam, pointing to a fat old man in the corner, who was lying on his side, eyes bulging open, his mouth hanging wide as twenty gallons of water splashed into it each second. Percival did not respond for a moment or so, then reluctantly turned the hose to the others, some of whom looked like they were starting to get too dry. The noise in the room was a kind of constant roaring above which the screams and imprecations of the butlers could hardly be heard.

  ‘Good work, Percival!’ said Bradley, clapping him on the shoulder. ‘Remarkable work. As efficient as ever.’ Percival nodded thanks towards his superior without taking his eyes off the victims.

  ‘Can I have a word with you?’ asked Sam.

  Bradley led him into a nearby open cell, where the noise was less deafening. He was still as wide-eyed and keyed-up as before, and clearly excited about undertaking his first interrogation. In fact, he was rubbing the knuckles of one of his hands in preparation.

  ‘What the fuck have you done this for?’ Sam begged him. ‘I was only telling you a list of potential candidates. Didn’t you realize?’

  Bradley stared at him, showing no signs of comprehension. Sam thought back to a doubt that had first occurred to him in the KFC bathroom an hour before, and began to wonder about something.

  ‘You haven’t searched my pockets, have you?’

  ‘I had to. You’re not a policeman. You turned up on the very day that Fairbreath was reported missing. I had to regard you as a suspect.’

  ‘Okay,’ admitted Sam. ‘That is good police work. But you didn’t . . . take anything that you found there, did you?’

  Bradley’s look changed to one of smug amusement. ‘I’m doing it, you see?’ he said. ‘I’m really becoming the cop you told me to be. I’m drunk, and now I’m on drugs!’

  ‘Oh my God!’ said Sam, putting a hand to his face. ‘The butlers didn’t do it,’ he said as slowly and loudly as he could, staring straight into Bradley’s eyes. ‘You have to release them at once. Then let’s go upstairs and drink lots of water, have some coffee and I’ll explain.’

  Bradley seemed to understand there might be some bad implications for him in all this, but was still clearly buzzing as he went back out and switched off the emergency fire hose at the source. Percival turned round, enrag
ed, and was visibly disappointed to see it was his boss who had turned it off.

  ‘Send them home, Percival,’ said Bradley. ‘The butlers are to be released without charge.’ Percival’s face dropped, and he started ordering the soaked men to fetch their clothes back from the pile where they had been left in one of the cells.

  ‘You’re in deep trouble!’ one of the men was shouting. ‘I told you quite clearly, I’m not even a butler. My name is Butler. Jon Butler! And I’m a big deal round here. You’ll regret this, mark my words!’

  ‘Get them in the van as quick as possible, Percival,’ said Bradley. ‘But don’t use the hose again, just the stick will do. So, explain,’ he said, turning back to Sam. ‘I thought the butler did it.’

  ‘No! Listen. That’s only one of many scenarios. I was starting with the least likely – I didn’t think there were any butlers any more. The next surprise solution for any crime novel is that the policeman did it.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Bradley, nodding.

  ‘You see? I’m just running you through the possibilities. Now, let me fetch that coffee and we’ll sit down and talk this through further. I don’t want to get you into more trouble.’

  Sam wandered wearily upstairs and, eschewing the poisonous coffee machine in the corridor, found some dregs of instant in the bottom of a jar at the back of a cupboard. He boiled the kettle and made two cups of strong black coffee, tipped a small landslide of sugar into each, stirred and carried them back downstairs, thinking how cross he was that above everything else, Bradley had taken some of his mystery drugs.

  At the bottom of the stairs, silence greeted him.

  He stood in the middle of the carpet holding the two Styrofoam cups and looking around. There was not a whisper. He didn’t doubt Percival’s ability to get the thirty soaked, humiliated and outraged men dressed and into the back of a van in under five minutes. But there had been several other cops milling about – the desk sergeant, the superintendent and Brautigan, to name only a few. He walked forward into the cells and heard nothing but the dripping of water from fittings that had been splashed.

  No one.

  Then he noticed that something was different. All the cell doors were closed. And here were the keys, in the nearest door. He walked to it and looked in. There was Bradley, busy handcuffing himself.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Sam.

  ‘Just what you said.’

  ‘That’s not what I said, you drugged-up lunatic! That’s specifically not what I bloody said.’

  ‘Just turn the keys in the lock, if you will,’ said Bradley in a tone of saint-like humility. ‘I’ll do my time. I understand how these things work – at least, I think I do. I did the murder myself and the others have been covering it up for me . . .’

  A thought struck Sam as he wandered back out, and he went over to another cell door, popped open the peephole and saw what he had feared. Brautigan was in there, brooding with incredible intensity, like a bull about to pounce or an avalanche before it falls. Before Sam could move away, he leapt forward, reached his hand through the hole and clasped Sam’s head in a pincer grip between forefinger and thumb, crushing his brain.

  ‘You better let me out of here,’ he growled, ‘or I’ll pull you in through this letterbox and turn you into dog food.’

  ‘Understood, Mr Brautigan, sir,’ said Sam. ‘I’m working on it. Just give me another moment or two!’

  The grip released him and he fell to the floor, from whence he got back to his feet, returned to Bradley’s cell and made his feelings very clear: that Bradley was to release all his colleagues.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ Bradley said. ‘I’m a policeman, and it’s my duty to detain myself and my colleagues if we’re guilty.’

  ‘But you’re not bloody guilty!’ Sam shouted. ‘Well, you are, of many things, but not of murder. Or not of this murder. So go and unlock the other cells right this damn instant! I’ll be outside until Brautigan has had time to calm down, and you’ve explained yourself to your other officers.’

  Sam walked outside and sat on a wall, partly to enjoy his coffee in peace, partly to intercept anyone who tried to come into the police station in the next five minutes so he could detain them for a while as things were being sorted out, and finally, also to get some cool air to his head after its assault by Detective Brautigan.

  The light was beginning to show in the eastern sky when Bradley found him again and invited him back inside.

  ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I’ve been overzealous. I’ve talked things over with the superintendent, and I’ve got search warrants for the properties of all the old grannies, and warrants for their arrest, all getting ready right now – I just need their names. I want you to finish telling me your plan as we drive over there, and I’ll be making enquiries as to their identities.’

  ‘Okay, no problem,’ said Sam as they went through to the car park and got into a new car assigned to Bradley. He was starting to feel tiredness weigh on him. ‘Look, shall we finish this stuff off?’ he suggested. ‘In for a penny, after all.’

  ‘Right on, brother,’ said Bradley, as he took the packet, squeezed it in the crook of his hand so it popped open, lowered a nostril to it and took a long deep lungful. A huge pile of white powder disappeared – Sam would have complained, but it was too late, and he didn’t know if he was that concerned anyway. He winced, coughed, wiped his nose, popped on the stereo and, feeding a CD into it, pressed play. The relaxed funk of Curtis Mayfield filled the car, playing ‘Pusherman’. Sam guzzled the rest as Bradley gunned the engine.

  ‘How did Brautigan take it?’

  ‘That guy?’ said Bradley as the drugs set in. ‘He was okay.’

  ‘Really? He didn’t try to kill you for locking him up?’

  ‘Him? No way! He’s crippled by guilt for all the years of bad things he’s done.’

  ‘He didn’t seem that way to me,’ said Sam, feeling his temples. ‘He seemed pretty angry.’

  ‘He just needed the law laid down to him. That punk just needs treating with a firm hand.’

  ‘You’re getting into this, aren’t you?’

  ‘Damn right I am,’ said Bradley. ‘Besides, Brautigan?’ He shook his head. ‘A ticking time bomb.’

  ‘He certainly is that.’

  ‘No, I mean that thing on the corner of his desk. It’s literally a ticking time bomb – that’s his lazy approach to dealing with evidence for you. He hasn’t even looked at it yet – could go off at any second.’

  As he said this there was an enormous booming explosion above them. All the windows on the first floor blew out, and flames licked the side of the building as debris fell all around them.

  ‘You see?’ said Bradley. ‘I tried to warn him.’

  The detective put the car into gear and pulled away quickly, avoiding bricks and falling masonry that crushed a hole in the tarmac behind them. He turned into the street at fifty miles an hour and tossed a police radio into Sam’s lap.

  ‘Shouldn’t we do something?’ the writer asked.

  ‘That’s a case for the fire department,’ said Bradley. ‘And nothing’s getting in the way of me solving this case right now. Use that, call the ambulance and fire engine to get over here. That button on the bottom right gets you through to regional emergency services.’

  Sam did so at once, then rang off as they were reaching the edge of town and asked, ‘Is there a twenty-four-hour booze place round here?’

  ‘In a town like this? No way! Look under your seat, motherfucker,’ said Bradley.

  Sam looked puzzled as he rummaged around and then adopted a look of awe as he pulled out a bottle of rum.

  ‘Confiscated it from the evidence locker,’ said Bradley.

  Sam cracked it open, took a swig and offered one to the detective, who drank deeply and then gave the bottle back.

  ‘An honour to work with you, Detective,’ he said. They were now speeding through the dawn countryside; the hills, the fields, the waterways and woods lit up b
y the copper sunlight of very early morning. The effect was enhanced, of course, by the fact that they were now both buzzing so hard that their very vision shimmered before them.

  ‘That stuff’s good,’ said Bradley.

  ‘Yeah, man,’ said Sam.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Bradley.

  ‘So let me tell you how it works, then,’ said Sam, feeling garrulous. ‘I’ve given you two classic endings – the butler did it, the detective did it. The next one in line is, everyone did it.’

  They were doing about eighty when they neared the turning for Mumford, and Bradley hardly slowed as he hit the corner and scorched up the hill towards town.

  ‘That’s a very good hypothesis,’ said Bradley.

  ‘It’s not one. How many times do I have to say? Hey, who the hell’s that coming up behind us?’

  ‘The grannies, the Parish Council, the librarian . . . They’ve all got something to hide,’ said Bradley, looking determined.

  ‘You’re not to take this as your new theory,’ warned Sam. But the car behind had taken up all of their attention. It was approaching them fast – and they were doing almost ninety miles an hour. Now it began to weave from side to side, nudging ahead, then revving its engine and swerving to the other side to get through. Bradley made no evasive manoeuvres, but his necessary movement in the narrow, tree-shrouded, winding lane made it appear he was deliberately blocking its passage, and the other driver became more dangerous and erratic as his speed grew.

  ‘What’s he playing at?’ said Bradley. ‘He must be one of them, trying to stop us . . .’

  ‘No . . .’ warned Sam. They were nearly at the little town’s main street now, and neither car had slowed down. Bradley picked up his radio.