Backhand Smash Read online

  Younis Hafeez was aware by now that Mrs Crawshaw was one of his few enemies in the club. He had nothing tangible to go on, but he had noted her attitude towards him when her youngsters were around. She wasn’t dangerous, in the greater scheme of things, because he had far more power than she had and next year he planned to have much more. She was a troublesome wasp, to be swatted away when the time was right. To switch his metaphors, he had bigger fish to fry tonight.

  He took care to dance with the right people. He was a good dancer, in this decadent Western mode. He could twitch his face and flick out his arms and shift his feet with the most nimble and most degenerate of them. The women were flashing their thighs and twitching their buttocks in varying lengths of skirts and in high heels, but for tonight he pretended not to notice. He did his version of the perfect English gentleman, which he thought he had mastered over the years.

  It was in fact a trifle smarmy, too universally affable to be genuine, but it was enough for most women. His smooth good looks were grafted on to his smooth good manners, and the combination sufficed for most of the passing and superficial contacts he had to make tonight. He was gathering votes for next year’s elections. The process amused him: it was a relief from the darker concerns that had dominated much of his week.

  The other man with an interest in the future domination of the club did not appear until late in the evening. Jason Fitton chose his moment carefully. He left the casino he owned in the centre of the town when business was at its briskest, then drove to Birch Fields to present himself at the summer ball at precisely ten thirty. He was immaculately dressed as usual, the only man in the place to be clad in a genuine Savile Row suit. His tailoring was important to him, as was his education and his money. The combination gave him confidence, made him feel that he could run rings round these northern yobs. When he was in this mood, he conveniently forgot that he was a native of Brunton himself.

  He danced with various attractive women, choosing only those dances when he could display affability and graceful movement without losing dignity. Jason was a man intensely conscious of appearances. He had advanced in life by making the right public impressions, and he wasn’t going to change now. How he behaved privately, and particularly in one-to-one situations, might be quite different. But his real self was not for public display. He might be a womanizer and all kinds of other things when it suited him, but on this public occasion he had decided to be a model of relaxed charm.

  The summer ball became more boisterous as the hours passed and the drinks were downed and the decibel levels of conversation and music rose. Arthur Swarbrick had had enough by midnight, but he knew he must stay until the end, to safeguard his interests as well as to be on public display for his members. His wife was dispatched home with a neighbour at twelve, as the three of them had previously agreed. This wasn’t really Shirley Swarbrick’s scene any more and she had attended only to give loyal support to her husband, an impulse she had rather regretted after his public attempt to snub the new black member. Whatever you felt about black men, you couldn’t do that nowadays. She would take him to task the next day over it: Arthur was his own worst enemy at times.

  Arthur was aware of Jason Fitton and of Younis Hafeez in the last hectic hour of the ball. He had leisure to observe, because he did not dance himself in those last sixty minutes. He was an expert in the realities of club politics by now. He had worked to attain office; he had worked to gain the committee support that had made him chairman; he had worked to get the right people on the committee and sub-committees in the last few years to maintain and strengthen his position as chairman. He had grown used to spotting future rivals. He noted Fitton and Hafeez now as two men who might have ambitions towards his office. He noted Olive Crawshaw also as an enemy, but not as an aspirant to the chairmanship. She would never be a supporter of his, but neither would she be a rival for the highest office of all, as far as he could see. There was no woman in sight yet with aspirations to the chair; thank God for that at least, thought Arthur Swarbrick.

  He was almost sorry when the summer ball was over. He had enjoyed the last hour, when he had been able to watch from the sidelines as others performed. It enhanced your feeling of power when you felt that you were an informed and advantaged spectator, watching others jockeying ineffectively for position. He mustn’t allow himself to become complacent, but he felt secure as chairman for another year or two yet. Longer, if he played his cards right. He’d have to strike the right course between being the bastion of conservatism he had been until now and the enlightened elder statesman who could lead the club into new pastures and new prosperity. He knew he was the man to do that: it was merely a matter of convincing other, less clear-sighted people of his worth to Birch Fields.

  The band packed their instruments into cars and departed swiftly after the one o’clock conclusion to the ball. A fleet of taxis picked up many of the participants. Some drove themselves and full quotas of passengers away, after noisy leave-takings and noisy injunctions to drive carefully. Assignations for future meetings and future games rang across the Tarmac from car to car as the park gradually emptied and silence dropped back beneath the stars.

  One car remained at Birch Fields when all the other vehicles had gone at two o’clock. It was there even three hours later, as the first grey streaks of the new day crept slowly into the eastern sky.

  It had the corpse of a dead man in the driving seat.

  SEVEN

  Clyde Northcott did not go to bed immediately when he paid off the taxi outside his flat. It was late, but he was preoccupied with many things. He sat in his armchair and reviewed the evening.

  This wonderful girl seemed to be taking him quite seriously. He’d been on his best behaviour so far. When Elaine saw the worst of him, would the scales drop away from her eyes? Would she still need him, would she still want his company, when she was established in the police service and making the rapid progress expected of a graduate entry? What would her family think of him? What did they think of the little bit of him they had already seen? Would they forbid her to see him again, or at least to have any lasting association with him? How would that feisty girl react if they gave her injunctions like that?

  It was surely impossible that the two of them could construct anything serious, with backgrounds as different as theirs were. She’d been a star at the local comprehensive and then gone on to a good university and got a good degree. That’s what he’d been told at the station, though he wasn’t even quite sure what exactly constituted a good degree. He’d been brought up in Bolton – they called it Greater Manchester now, but he never used that. If you were black, people automatically assumed Greater Manchester meant that you’d been reared in the violent criminal underworld of Moss Side, where even coppers feared to venture and the criminal barons held their violent sway.

  Clyde couldn’t remember anything of his dad, who’d departed when he was three and never returned. His mother had been good to him when she was around, in her slapdash, erratic way. She hadn’t been much more than a kid herself when he was born, but he hadn’t realized that at the time. He’d relied mostly on his gran, who’d usually been there when he got home from school – not that there’d been a lot of school in his later years. His gran was the one person he’d really loved. He’d like to be able to take Elaine to meet her now, he thought, but she’d died last year. It was the first time he had endured such bittersweet nostalgia. He seemed to have spent a lot of his life guarding against loving anyone other than his gran.

  The years from sixteen to twenty-one, which Elaine had spent in the sixth form and at university, were his black years. He’d learned to fight, in all sorts of ways: he’d had to do that to survive. He’d used drugs and begun to deal in them. He’d been a suspect in a murder case, and if someone other than Percy Peach had been in charge of it, he might have been arrested, charged, perhaps even convicted. People of his background weren’t usually given the benefit of the doubt. All this had made him in the end a bett
er copper; he was certain of that now. Poachers turned gamekeepers knew more than others and could look after themselves, Percy Peach said. He wondered if Elaine knew that he’d been Percy’s best man at his wedding to Lucy Blake. That must surely impress her; he must feed that fact in at the right moment, as Percy always did when he was interrogating people. But station gossip being what it was, she probably already knew.

  But whilst he had been going through what some called the university of life and others just called a criminal phase, Elaine had been a pillar of rectitude. She came from a model middle-class family, who had no doubt watched over her education and her development as assiduously as virtuous and educated parents should do. Her mum and her dad had been polite, even friendly, tonight, but what would they think if they discovered the full details of his adolescence and his pre-police days? Apart from that, would they even consider any policeman a suitable companion for her? Elaine said they disapproved strongly of her choice of the police as a career, so they were hardly likely to approve a large black policeman as a consort for her.

  Clyde wasn’t sure exactly what a consort was, except that he knew Prince Albert had been one for Victoria. He had an obscure feeling that Elaine would have found the idea of himself as a consort quite hilarious. He liked the sound of her laughter; he decided that he would now go to bed on the thought of Elaine Brockman’s laughter. It was always genuine and always generous. She liked him, even if she found him amusing. At ten past three, he put his head down, switched off the light and finally fell into a contented sleep.

  His mobile phone wasn’t far from his bedside, but it rang several times before his ears worked and his brain stirred into reluctant life. ‘Clyde Northcott!’ he snarled into the mouthpiece, as if his name was some sort of rebuke. The illuminated digits on the phone told him that it was seven fifty-five.

  ‘We have a suspicious death.’ Percy Peach’s voice; Clyde struggled and managed to lift his head and shoulders from the bed. That was the equivalent of standing to attention when you were roused in your pit from the deep sleep of the just.

  ‘You’re almost an eyewitness.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ He scratched his head, feeling like Stan Laurel in those old pictures he had once watched with his gran. It was too early in the day for him to keep up with Percy’s badinage.

  ‘That posh tennis club you joined, when you decided to become upwardly mobile.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘That’s where the murder was. I’m sure that’s what this death will turn out to be.’

  ‘I was there last night,’ said Clyde dully.

  ‘That’s almost certainly when the poor bugger was killed. You’re not offering me a confession, are you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You pissed, DS Northcott?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Clyde tried hard to shake himself into life.

  ‘Hangover, is it?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Clyde swung his feet on to the floor and felt almost human. ‘Just lack of sleep. I was rather late to bed.’

  ‘Dirty bugger.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘PC Brockman isn’t there with you, then?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Losing your touch, are you?’

  ‘PC Brockman isn’t here, sir. She’s never been here.’

  ‘Pity. Most women seem to like big tough buggers like you. Today might have been useful experience for her, as a graduate entry. We might have to let her tag along to learn from the expert and the hard bastard. Might even arrange for her to attend her first post-mortem examination, in due course.’ New coppers were expected to throw up at the sights and smells of their first PM. It was one of the clichés of police life.

  ‘Do you want me to join you, sir?’

  ‘I suppose so. You’ll be bugger all use, I expect. You’ve got some sort of hangover – probably drank too much when you didn’t get our new graduate entry into your bed. I can tell that from the number of “sirs” you’re sprinkling around.’ Percy didn’t like the acknowledgement of his rank to be too frequent. He said undue deference was a substitute for clear thinking. Only wankers like Tommy Bloody Tucker were keen to hear the perpetual iteration of their seniority.

  ‘Is it a member of the tennis club who’s been killed, sir?’

  ‘You’re expecting it to be, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. That would be logical, even if only statistically.’

  ‘You’re right. You’re beginning to think at last. It was a prominent member of the club – a man you already know.’

  Clyde’s mind flashed back to the previous evening and to Arthur Swarbrick circling the room to greet his members at the summer ball. He could see the chairman now, being scrupulously polite and friendly to Elaine, whom he had known since she was a child, in order to set up the snub he was about to deliver to his new black member. A man who behaved like that made plenty of enemies. He wondered which one had seen fit to end his days. This case might not take long and he might have a leading role in finding the solution. He felt his first real excitement as he sat on the edge of the bed and sleep finally dropped away from him. ‘Was it the chairman, sir?’

  ‘You’re “sirring” again. And no, it wasn’t. You’re our favoured inside source here, big man, so come up with the goods.’

  ‘I’ve only just joined Birch Fields.’ Clyde narrowly prevented himself from adding a defensive ‘sir’. ‘I don’t know many important members. There was Younis Hafeez, I suppose. He was mounting a charm offensive during the busiest part of the evening.’

  ‘It wasn’t him.’

  ‘Then I’m lost. You said it was someone I knew, But—’

  ‘You knew this bugger, Clyde. It was Jason Fitton. I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes.’

  The tennis courts were open at Birch Fields and a few people were playing. They had to walk much further than usual before they could begin. The whole of the car park was surrounded by the ribbons denoting a crime scene.

  Peach and Northcott donned plastic footwear covers and took the designated path towards the point furthest from the clubhouse, where a square of high fencing provided the final privacy to Jason Fitton and the vehicle in which he had died. The Bentley gleamed in the bright morning sunlight. From any distance, the figure in the driving seat seemed just another manifestation of modern affluence. It was a tribute to Savile Row that even in death Fitton looked from the rear to be in tune with the quality of his vehicle.

  Death compels a sort of respect, even in policemen who have seen it many times. Fitton was a known villain, whom Brunton CID and both of these men had been pursuing for years. Yet now he was inanimate and powerless before them; what remained of him was beginning the process of deterioration that would reduce to mere matter what last night had been human. What had been mortal and individual and flawed, with the potential for good or evil actions, was now but seventy kilograms of decaying matter. The abruptness and finality of the transition from life to death compels a moment’s pause for thought even in policemen.

  Jack Chadwick had been a policeman for many years. He was now a civilian in charge of the scene-of-crime team. He was as efficient as any man around in this office; before nine o’clock on a Sunday morning he had somehow managed to assemble the varied team of civilian specialists appropriate for this task. There were only two police officers present. Two constables in uniform, one male and one female, had drawn the short straws. They were stooping low as they moved around the car park, gathering with tweezers any detritus that might have even the most tenuous connection with what had happened to that still form in the Bentley.

  The driver’s door was wide open. The photographer was taking pictures of the corpse in situ from every angle he could contrive before it was removed for its inevitable dissection in the pathology laboratories. The immaculate material of the suit was largely creaseless and undefiled. But the cause of death was clear enough and the instrument of that death
was still in place. Fitton’s head was slumped forward, but the cord that had destroyed him by biting deep into his throat was still visible at the sides and rear of his neck. The loose ends, which had most surely been twisted and tightened, now hung limply at the back of his jacket where the killer had dropped them.

  Jack Chadwick, who had known Peach for years, materialized silently at his side to answer the questions the DCI scarcely needed to speak. ‘Someone directly behind him tightened that. He was garrotted. He didn’t stand a chance. He raised his hands to that cord, but he didn’t even get his fingers between cord and neck. I doubt the whole thing took more than thirty seconds.’

  ‘Swift and efficient. A man?’

  ‘Not necessarily. Anyone attacking from behind could have twisted the cord fiercely enough to do the job. No great strength is needed, once you have the advantage of surprise. And probably a real measure of hate to make you that ruthless, but that’s speculation.’

  Peach grinned ruefully. ‘There are a lot of people around here with reason to hate Fitton. He’ll be no loss to humanity. There’ll be a few coppers glad to see him gone, Jack.’

  ‘Including one DCI Peach.’

  ‘No comment. You know the score as well as I do. This is still murder, the same as it would have been with an innocent old lady. The difference is that we’ll find there are a lot more candidates for this one.’