Shooting Elvis by Stuart Pawson

Author:Stuart Pawson [Stuart Pawson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780749012014
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2012-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

Brendan and Maggie went to the post-mortem examination while I had a word with the coroner. Sunday afternoon and Monday we had the foot soldiers out learning what they could about the deceased, and it was a sorry tale. He was called Jermaine Lapetite and had a record that wouldn’t have fitted on an old floppy disk. He needed a whole 700Mb CD to himself. We found the mothers of two of his children living nearby, and they described him using words straight off their kids’ birth certificates. He kept a small amount of crack cocaine under his mattress, a few ounces of pot behind a drawer in the kitchen and twelve hundred pounds cash under a loose floorboard.

Les Isles, the chief superintendent standing in for the ACC (Crime), rang and asked if I needed any help. I explained that we hadn’t decided if this was a new enquiry or part of the ongoing one and asked him to hang fire until the reports were in. Before I went along the road linking the two murders I wanted to clear something up about Alfred Armitage. His old sparring partner Eric Smallwood was still in the frame, but I was having my doubts. I needed to see him.

I’d rung him, so he was waiting for me, still jacketed and helmeted as if about to go wobbling off to the library on a bicycle with a basket on the front. He’d have looked more at home in Cambridge, riding down the Backs. He invited me in and gestured for me to sit on a leather armchair while he took the matching chesterfield.

‘What’s it about, Inspector?’ he asked. ‘I thought I answered all your questions the last time we met.’

‘Since then I’ve been to see Mrs Newbold,’ I told him, ‘and now I have a few more.’

‘Josephine? You’ve been to see Josephine?’ He sat up, interested, his guard lowered. ‘How is she?’

‘She’s fine. Asked how you were,’ I lied.

‘And what did you tell her?’

‘I said you were fine, too. That’s all.’ It looked as if Mr Weirdo had a crush on the boss’s wife. And why not? ‘A few things came to light in our discussions about the company,’ I told him. ‘It appears that in the last few years Ellis and Newbold’s was being robbed blind. I want to know what part you and Alfred Armitage had in that.’

Now he looked flustered. ‘I – I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I mean: which of you had his hands in the till?’

‘It wasn’t me. I never had anything from the company that I wasn’t legally entitled to.’

‘That sounds a rather loaded statement, Mr Smallwood,’ I said. ‘I could ask our economic crime unit to come and have a word with you – they know much more about these things than me – but I won’t. It would be a waste of resources. Mrs Newbold wants to wash her hands of the whole thing, not prefer any charges, which lets you nicely off the hook. But there is still the little matter of Alfred’s death.

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