Maxwell's Ride by M.J. Trow

Author:M.J. Trow [Trow, M.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

‘He wasn’t killed here,’ DCI Ian Gallagher was emphatic about that. He hadn’t shaved that morning, nor the morning before and he was beyond tiredness. Alongside Henry Hall he was a lump of a man, an unmade bed, John Prescott to Hall’s Tony Blair.

‘Ah.’ Gallagher broke the silence as a constable walked in ‘Coffee. Thanks, Des. You people take sugar?’

Jacquie Carpenter shook her head, praying that nobody would say ‘She’s sweet enough.’ Nobody did. They were coppers. The rather dishy uniform put the tray down and swept out.

‘Two, please,’ Frank Bartholomew said and realising nobody was going to do it for him, helped himself.

‘So . . . er . . . Henry,’ Gallagher eased himself into the well-worn plastic of the chair behind the desk at the fourth building in turn to take the name Scotland Yard. ‘Tell me all about Christopher Logan.’

‘We haven’t got much,’ Hall adjusted his glasses and took the folder that Jacquie slipped across to him. ‘Working-class kid made good. Went to the local comprehensive in Leighford. Then to Salford University.’

‘Graduates!’ snarled Gallagher, slurping his coffee. ‘Can’t stick ’em myself.’

Jacquie and Bartholomew looked at Hall, the graduate. He ignored them all and carried on. ‘Worked on the local paper there for a time, then on the Sun.’

‘I didn’t know the Sun employed graduates,’ Gallagher frowned, reaching for a digestive to dunk. That was the way with Ian Gallagher — you took ’em or left ’em; please yourself.

‘He was there for . . . what . . . three years. Then came back to work on the Leighford Advertiser.’

‘Now, then,’ Gallagher leaned back in his chair. He’d been in the business longer than Hall, the last of his breed, a dinosaur. Jacquie reflected for a moment how well he and Maxwell would have got on. ‘Tell me, since I know Jack Shit about the Advertiser — is that promotion or demotion, after the Sun?’

‘We could ask the editors,’ Bartholomew suggested.

Both DCIs looked at him, but it was Gallagher, playing host at the Yard that wet Thursday morning, who answered him. ‘Never ask an editor of a newspaper anything, son. You tell ’em. And if they ask you anything, well, that’s when you stop telling ’em. Married?’

‘Sorry?’ Hall was losing the thread of this.

‘Christopher Logan. Was he married?’

‘No. We’re trying to contact parents, but they moved away from Leighford some time ago.’

Gallagher was tapping a yet-undunked biscuit on the rim of his cup, narrowing his options, looking for jigsaw pieces in a shattered life. ‘Anything known? Drugs? Sex? Money worries?’

‘We haven’t had much time on this.’ Hall felt the need to defend his team, and himself. ‘It’ll take a while. What about the area?’

‘Where the body was found? It used to be part of the Maryannes’ Mile.’ He leaned forward to Jacquie. ‘For the benefit of you young people, that’s an area frequented by homosexuals.’

Jacquie managed a smile that was only marginally weaker than the coffee.

‘But that’s a long time ago. Sort of thing you’d find on the eighth floor.

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