The wrong hands, p.8
The Wrong Hands, page 8
‘I don’t know how you do it,’ Gloria said. ‘Deal with hoodlums like that every day.’
Miller grinned, because calling Wayne Cutler a ‘hoodlum’ was like saying Elon Musk was ‘comfortably off’. ‘What can I tell you? I’m incredibly brave. Not to mention witty and handsome.’ He waited, looking from one member of the group to another. ‘You can mention it, obviously.’
Mary smiled sympathetically and leaned across to poke Miller’s arm.
‘Right then,’ Howard said. ‘I’ll get ’em in . . . ’
FIFTEEN
Knowing that punctuality (alongside a frankly baffling compulsion to tell the truth, a hair-trigger temper and a strange aversion to jokes) was a key facet of Xiu’s psychological make-up, Miller wasn’t surprised to hear her motorbike pull up at one minute to nine. Now, ten minutes later, she was sitting next to him on his sofa staring at Fred and Ginger’s playpen as if they might escape at any moment and go for her throat.
‘Why don’t I just take one of them out for a bit of a cuddle?’ Miller asked.
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
‘They’ve got very soft fur, you know.’ He made as if to stand up.
Xiu immediately let out an involuntary yelp and pulled her feet up onto the sofa.
‘I’m kidding. Blimey . . . ’
Xiu scowled at him. There was a slight twitch around her right eye, which was rarely a good sign. ‘Isn’t there anything you’re afraid of, Miller?’
‘Well, not “afraid” as such, but there’s plenty of things I’m not awfully fond of. The sea, for a kick-off . . . being in as opposed to looking at.’
‘So, there you go—’
‘Pan pipes, caravans, baked beans in a ramekin, idiots who say they don’t like the Beatles . . . ’ Miller paused for breath. ‘Electric scooters, non-electric scooters, that opera singer in the Go Compare adverts, anyone at a call centre who says “yourself” when they mean “you”, and people who put little dogs in pushchairs.’
‘OK . . . ’
‘Oh, and I do suffer from hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, which ironically is an irrational fear of long words.’
‘Hippo . . . what?’
Miller put his head in his hands. ‘Please don’t make me say it again.’
Xiu shook her head, ignoring the joke or not getting it; Miller couldn’t always tell the difference. He sat back and chugged at the beer he’d produced when Xiu had arrived. ‘Long day.’
Xiu took a drink of her own. ‘A damn sight longer for Natalie Bagnall.’
‘I know.’ Miller glanced across at the photograph of Alex next to the TV. The woman herself hadn’t put in an appearance, but that was no surprise because she knew why Miller had asked Xiu to come round. Putting that off for as long as possible, he shared his worry about the likelihood that Draper was in possession of Andy Bagnall’s phone. The advantage he had over them.
‘Let’s see what we get from the hospital’s CCTV,’ Xiu said. ‘See if he still has the advantage then.’
‘Positive thinking, I like that.’ Miller hoped his partner would still be thinking positively when she’d seen what he had to show her.
‘I know it’s a long shot,’ Xiu said, ‘but if there’s no evidence tying Cutler directly to Panaides’s murder, might he not just decide to give Draper up?’
‘I’d say that wasn’t so much positive thinking as pie in the sky. A really massive magic pie made of wishes and dreams. A unicorn pie.’
‘I don’t see why.’ Xiu leaned towards him. ‘We’ll get enough forensics from the briefcase and from the hands to charge Draper with killing Panaides and there’ll be more than enough at the crime scene to do him for Bagnall’s murder too.’
‘So?’
‘So, Cutler might think he’s safe and decide to do us a favour.’
‘Wayne Cutler isn’t in the business of doing favours for the likes of us, especially when us includes me. Besides, even though money never changed hands for the contract he put out on Panaides, Cutler can’t be sure Draper doesn’t have something on him. Messages, recorded phone conversations, whatever. I don’t think Draper’s stupid, even if he was distracted by a dick at a crucial moment.’
‘Yeah, well, we’ve all been there,’ Xiu said.
Miller sat up straight. ‘Ooh, spill the beans, Posh.’
‘No chance.’
‘Tell me or I’ll set a rat on you!’
Xiu gave him a thin, ‘not in a million years’ smile. ‘Wasn’t there something you wanted me to look at?’
Miller sighed and stood up. Wanted was putting it a bit strongly.
He led Xiu across to the table where his laptop was already open and asked her to sit down. A video had been lined up and the cursor hovered over the play symbol. ‘This arrived not long after those photos that Chesshead sent me. Alex and some bloke.’
‘Arrived how?’
‘They broke in and trashed the place, but that was all just for show. They wanted me to see this.’
‘They being . . . ?’
‘Chesshead was working for Ralph Massey at the time, so I always presumed he was the one that had the photos taken. He’s probably behind this as well, but I can’t swear to it.’
‘You thinking about what he said this morning? Him knowing something about what happened to your wife.’
‘I haven’t stopped thinking about it.’ Miller leaned down to press PLAY then went back to the sofa. ‘Just watch it.’
It was no more than fifteen seconds long and Miller had always thought it was a clip from something longer. Alex and the same man she’d been with in the photographs. The man stayed in the shadows as far as possible and Miller had thought it was because he had known he was being filmed, but now he was no longer sure. Whatever had brought Alex and this stranger together, the action was easy enough to follow.
The man handed Alex an envelope, then waited.
Alex opened it.
She took out the money that was inside.
When Xiu had finished watching, she turned to look at Miller.
‘Watch it again,’ he said.
When she had done as Miller asked, Xiu walked back across and sat down next to him. She thought for a few seconds. She said, ‘Your wife was an experienced officer with an impeccable record. She sometimes worked undercover.’ She nodded across to the laptop on the table. ‘It could be a lot of things.’
‘I know all the things it could be.’
‘Right, and the thing you don’t want it to be is only one of them.’ She looked at him. ‘I take it you’ve never shown this to Lindsey Forgeham.’
‘Just you,’ Miller said.
‘So you don’t think I’ll go straight to Lindsey Forgeham? You know, the officer who’s actually in charge of investigating Alex’s death?’
‘I’m hoping you don’t,’ Miller said. ‘You know as well as I do that, for whatever reason, that investigation’s going backwards.’
Xiu thought about it some more. ‘So, when do you think that video was taken?’
Miller turned to look at her. He was as sure as he could be that she was on board, or seriously considering coming on board; that she wouldn’t go behind his back, at any rate. ‘Alex had her hair cut about a week before she died and you can see how short it is in that video. It can’t have been more than a day or two before she was killed.’
‘What about the man with the envelope?’
‘I haven’t got the first idea,’ Miller said. ‘But there’s something about him that’s niggling at me. Has done ever since I first saw it. Something that’s familiar. Something he does . . . ’
They sat in silence for a minute or two more while Fred and Ginger chased each other noisily around the playpen. Xiu seemed oddly unconcerned, her mind elsewhere.
‘I need to go,’ she said eventually.
Miller walked her to the door. ‘I didn’t mean to put you in an awkward position,’ he said.
‘It’s fine.’
‘I was just trying to be upfront with you.’
‘My place next time though,’ Xiu said.
Miller watched the motorbike roar away, closed the door then turned to see Alex, head down in one of her favourite hidey-holes. The small gap between the edge of the sofa and the wall into which she squeezed herself at awkward moments.
‘You trust her, don’t you? Xiu?’
‘Of course I trust her.’
‘And you trust me, right . . . ?’
‘I’m going to bed,’ Miller said.
Alex looked up with an attempt at a playful expression that she wasn’t quite pulling off. ‘You don’t hate caravans, Miller. Or scooters. You were just showing off.’
Miller turned off the light and walked upstairs.
SIXTEEN
It took DI Tim Sullivan a few minutes to make sure that everything was as it should be for the morning briefing. That the PowerPoint presentation was cued up correctly, that his iPad was fully charged with the appropriate applications ready and that his flies weren’t undone. While others around the table looked at their phones or pretended to leaf through the briefing notes in advance, Miller spent the time mentally re-casting James Bond films using actors from the Carry-On series.
Sid James as 007, obviously. Babs Windsor as Pussy Galore and Charles Hawtrey as Goldfinger, which Miller decided was a creative stroke of near genius. ‘Oh, hellooo, Mr Bond!’
‘Right then,’ Sullivan said.
Would it be wrong, Miller wondered – in these days of cultural appropriation and gender warfare – to cast Hattie Jacques as Oddjob . . . ?
Sullivan stabbed at his iPad and a picture of Andy Bagnall appeared on the screen behind him. He spent the next ten minutes running through the basics. Cause and approximate time of death, the ongoing forensic examination of the crime scene and the last known movements of the victim.
‘For reasons that will become obvious, I’ve been liaising closely with DCI Perks from Serious and Organised. He has been able to ascertain that our victim was, in fact, one of the two individuals who stole a briefcase during the abortive S&O operation at the railway station the day before yesterday.’
‘Blimey,’ Tony Clough said, which for him was a remarkably perceptive comment.
Miller could not resist asking a question to which he himself – though Sullivan could not possibly know that – was the answer. ‘How exactly was DCI Perks able to . . . ascertain this?’
Sullivan produced a thin smile. ‘That’s a little above my pay grade, DS Miller.’
‘Of course.’ Miller thought that directing kiddie-cars was above Sullivan’s paygrade, but nodded like he was satisfied.
‘I do know that DCI Perks has also managed to recover the missing briefcase, but – before DS Miller asks – I have no details on that, either.’
‘The whole pay grade thing again?’
‘Correct,’ Sullivan said.
Miller had no idea how Bob Perks had explained away the sudden reappearance of the stolen briefcase and its grisly contents, which was probably for the best. He also decided, in the interests of muddying the waters a little, that he would nip into TK Maxx first chance he got and buy himself a briefcase as similar to the one in question as he could find. Bringing that into work for a while should stop the desk sergeant and anyone else who’d seen him with the actual case the previous day putting two and two together and making a shedload of trouble.
‘So, we can leave our colleagues in S&O to get on with their own investigation, while we concentrate on this homicide.’ Sullivan nodded and brought up another image. ‘After all, that’s what it says on our door, right?’
One or two newbies actually turned to look. There wasn’t anything written on the door to their office. There were one or two things scribbled on the back of the toilet door, but Miller didn’t think that Tim Sullivan would want to know about them.
‘Again, thanks to DCI Perks, we know that as far as the murder of Andrew Bagnall goes, this man is most definitely a person of interest.’ He turned to point at one of the blurry photographs that Bob Perks had shown Miller the day before. ‘Dennis Draper is already wanted in connection to another murder and we have good reason to believe he is a known and recent associate of Wayne Cutler.’
‘That’s why Cutler was at the railway station.’ Andrea Fuller nodded to one or two of her colleagues at the table.
‘There’s little to be gained by speculating at this stage,’ Sullivan said. ‘But Mr Cutler is definitely someone we should be talking to.’ He looked at Miller. ‘DS Miller? You’ve had the most dealings with him, so . . . ?’
‘Happy to, sir. Myself and DS Xiu?’ He looked across at Xiu. They had not spoken since the night before, but she seemed happy enough.
‘Fine with me,’ Xiu said.
‘No, let’s mix things up,’ Sullivan said, nodding enthusiastically, like he was Simon Cowell changing the line-up of a boyband. ‘Sara, could you get down and have a look at the station CCTV, see what you can find?’
‘No problem . . . and then the hospital, right?’
‘Oh, are you not feeling OK?’
‘Draper was treated at the hospital, sir. Hopefully we can get footage from there, too.’
‘Yes, but we still don’t really know what Draper looks like,’ Sullivan said. ‘So how will we know who we’re trying to get footage of?’
‘Well, we know roughly what time he was admitted and there can’t be too many people who were taken to hospital by uniformed officers.’
‘Certainly not with . . . that kind of injury,’ Miller said.
Clough sniggered, then cleared his throat because his moment had come at last. ‘I got my penis caught in a zip once.’ He grinned. ‘That’s the last time my wife asks me to do her dress up.’ It got a big laugh, but only from Clough himself.
‘There’s every chance we’ll finally get a picture of him,’ Xiu said.
‘Yes, of course.’ Sullivan fiddled with his iPad while he gathered what few thoughts he had. ‘Get down to the hospital and if you do get a decent picture let’s get it sent to every officer in town. This is a very dangerous individual.’ He turned again, but his fiddling had somehow managed to replace the photo of Draper with one of himself wearing an unwisely tight T-shirt. He quickly rectified his error.
‘You been working out, sir?’ Fuller asked.
Sullivan pointed to her. ‘Why don’t you go with DS Miller to interview Wayne Cutler?’
‘Really, sir?’
‘If he’s that keen for some company.’
‘I’m not,’ Miller said.
Fuller shrugged. ‘Well, I can, but there’s plenty of other things I could do with getting on with.’
Miller could not understand why Andrea Fuller wasn’t gagging to tag along with him. Perhaps she was still smarting after their argument a couple of days earlier. Hands for feet! It was always going to be hands for feet.
‘I’m sure DS Miller will be fine on his own.’ Fuller looked across at him and winked. ‘I know you like to think of yourself as a bit of a lone wolf, Dec.’
Miller saw Xiu smile but chose to ignore it. ‘I don’t care either way, Andrea,’ he said. ‘I actually prefer to think of myself more as a curious and free-thinking wolf with a small group of close friends, but it’s up to you.’
Sullivan clapped his hands. ‘OK, whatever, people . . . let’s just get on with it.’
Miller left the room in an upbeat mood. He decided he would take the moped. It was a nice enough day, chilly but mercifully dry, and the ride across to Cutler’s place wasn’t unpleasant. He might also have just enough time to scribble something else on that toilet door before he left.
SEVENTEEN
To say that Jacqui Cutler welcomed Miller into her home would have been an overstatement, but at least she wasn’t abusive. She certainly didn’t question the marital status of his parents, which she’d done on many previous occasions. Hell, since Miller had caught the person responsible for the death of her son Adrian a few months earlier, they were virtually besties.
She showed him through to a living room which was a shrine to Swarovski and Leatherworld, where her husband sat staring at a TV screen that would not have disgraced a small cinema. On her way out she asked if anyone wanted tea. Miller was about to say, ‘Yes please, and a biscuit would be nice’ when Wayne barked a ‘No’ and the offer swiftly dematerialised.
‘I’ll be upstairs,’ Jacqui said, before she closed the door. Miller presumed the information wasn’t meant for him.
They weren’t that friendly.
Miller dropped into an armchair and nodded at the screen. ‘Anything good on?’
Cutler didn’t even turn round. ‘Police, Camera, Action.’
‘Oh, is it one you’re in?’
Cutler pointed the remote and turned the TV off. ‘Was there something you actually wanted?’ He was wearing tracksuit bottoms and an Armani T-shirt. Miller had worked that out because it said Armani in very big letters on the front. His new teeth (rumours suggested many thousands of pounds’ worth) still looked as though they didn’t fit properly and the dressing on the top of his head was doing a far better job of disguising the hair loss than the combover ever had. He might have been the boss of a feared criminal organisation, but to Miller he always looked rather more like a second-hand car salesman or the manager of a lower league football team.
‘Why were you at the railway station three days ago?’
‘I haven’t got the foggiest,’ Cutler said. ‘Maybe I fancied an hour or two’s trainspotting.’
‘In the toilets?’
‘I must have been caught short . . . I really can’t remember.’
