SALFORD MURDERS: The Private Investigator Gus Keane Trilogy Read online

  The tables in the pub garden were packed with drinkers enjoying a day off. One family group covered three generations from six months to sixty odd and I tried to picture myself with Rachel and Danny with their kids in a few years’ time. Not that Danny showed much sign of becoming a father just yet.

  “Hard to say.”

  “It could have been a burglar,” Marti went on.

  “At seven in the morning? That would be strange.”

  “It would at that. Maybe it was someone she knew.”

  I drank my pint and pondered this.

  “You know,” Marti continued. “A conspiracy theorist would think it strange that two managers from the same department have been killed within a few weeks of each other.”

  “There surely can’t be any other connection between the two deaths,” I said.

  “Strange coincidence though.”

  I drank some beer and thought about this.

  “When you think about it, life’s full of coincidences, isn’t it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like when you meet someone from your home town on holiday abroad.”

  She nodded, picking up her glass of wine.

  “Even so they were killed several miles apart,” I continued. “One at work, the other at home.”

  “Fair enough,” agreed Marti, sprinkling more vinegar on her chips. “Somebody killed poor Pam. The question is who?”

  “If it was someone she knows,” I said, “he or she must have either been staying at her place overnight…”

  Family, friend, boyfriend? I asked myself.

  “Or someone who knew she’d be at home at that hour. On a bank holiday Monday”

  “They’d also need to be sure they could get in the house without being seen,” said Marti. “Or if they were seen, without being recognized.”

  How the hell would they do that?

  “That rules out anyone staying the night,” I said. “One of the neighbours would be bound to see him or her.”

  Marti nodded. I carried on with my meal. The police would no doubt sort it out. At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen next.

  * * *

  The next morning as I was in the middle of my second cup of tea, a loud rap at the door frightened the life out of me. I wished, not for the first time, that the postman wouldn’t bang so hard. My nerves were quite fragile enough as it was.

  I opened the door with more force than was strictly necessary.

  “Hello, Gus,” said DI Ellerton.

  ‘Gus’ is it now, I asked myself, as I took in her denim jacket and blue jeans.

  “Oh,” I said, taken aback not just by seeing her instead of the postman, but by the clothes, the hair hanging loose and the smile.

  “Any chance of a word?”

  “Yeah,” I said, composing myself and ushering her in.

  I waved her to a seat at the kitchen table and sat down. I picked up my mug, while I waited for her.

  “Fancy a cup,” I asked, gesturing towards the pot.

  “That would be nice,” she said, smiling again.

  As I got a mug, filled it and offered milk and sugar, she looked around the room with apparent interest, saying how nice it was.

  “It’s about Pam Agnew,” she said, after taking her first sip of tea.

  I nodded. In spite of her casual attire and attempts at friendliness, I didn’t think it would be a social visit.

  “I can now tell you she was shot.”

  “What!”

  She nodded, while I wondered how the head of Children’s Services, how someone I knew, had managed to get herself shot.

  “That’s a bolt from the blue,” I said. “Anyway how can I help you?”

  “We’re talking to everyone in her contacts list.”

  “Contacts list?”

  “You know, mobile phone. Perhaps you could explain how you came to be in hers.”

  I drank more tea and put the mug down. It seemed a silly question but I supposed I’d better answer it. I dismissed the idea of saying, ‘so she could ring me’ as too flippant.

  “She would occasionally ring me or text, you know.”

  “Occasionally? What does that mean exactly?”

  “Well,” I began, “not that often, I suppose. Sometimes it would be months between contacts.”

  She had taken a notebook out of her bag by this time, signalling, I thought, the passage from informal to formal.

  “Just recently, though, there have been quite a few texts and calls.”

  What was all this about?

  “Yes, about the barbecue. You know, confirming arrangements.”

  “You told me she was involved with a married man?”

  “Yes,” I replied, wondering why she was changing the subject.

  She looked at me over the rim of her mug.

  “You’re married.”

  So that was it. I had always thought social work warped the mind, but the same must apply to the police.

  “True, though separated.”

  “I think you know what I’m getting at, Gus.”

  I was still ‘Gus’ then, rather than Mr Keane.

  “Of course, Sarita. Though it seems a bit of a roundabout way to tell you I was having an affair with her.”

  She drained her mug before speaking again.

  “You couldn’t very well come right out with it while Marti was there.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. I was supposed to be some sort of Lothario. I had many faults but thinking I was God’s gift to women wasn’t one of them. I could never quite imagine a long line of them wanting to drag me into bed. Although, come to think of it, it was a nice fantasy.

  “I thought you seemed, well, unduly upset about Pam’s death,” the inspector went on.

  “I don’t know what ‘unduly’ means in this context. Of course I was upset. Pam was a good friend for over twenty years.”

  “Just good friends then?”

  I sighed. I’d been through this with Marti.

  “Yes. Nothing sexual, romantic, whatever you want to call it.”

  To my simple mind that was that. I just wanted her to go and leave me alone. No such luck.

  “It seems strange you should keep in touch with a woman for so long,” she went on, “if she was just a friend.”

  Another sigh. I was beginning to think I had better things to do: sitting in a bowl of sick, counting the leeks on my dad’s allotment, something like that. “You seem to find a lot of things strange, Sarita,” I answered.

  Well, we were on first name terms, it seemed.

  “Do you do much exercise, Gus,” she asked.

  Was she changing the subject again? She had donned casual gear, adopted a friendly demeanour and tried to lull me into a false sense of security. Clutching at straws sprang to mind. The trouble was I recognised what she was doing all too easily. I’d tried those tricks in my social work career. And I could see something similar on telly any night of the week.

  “A fair bit.”

  “Jogging?”

  “No, walking and swimming. Why do you ask?”

  “A jogger was seen near Pam’s house early in the morning of her death.”

  Was he now? I was tempted to ask. I decided against it.

  “And did he look like me?”

  “The description was a bit vague.”

  “And I never run because of dodgy knees. Plus, I find it boring.”

  “Just wondered,” she said.

  And that seemed to be that.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I looked at my watch, thinking it must be well past time to go home. Ten past six, I was right. I needed to have my report for court done though. I’d have to take it by hand tomorrow to get it in on time. Paperwork was a necessary evil as far as I was concerned. I didn’t find it difficult, just didn’t like doing it. That was why I left things until the last minute. However, ten minutes later I had finished the report and was waiting for it to print out. I picked up the copy of the
Manchester Evening News Don had dropped on my desk as he was leaving. Pam’s death had a reasonable amount of coverage on an inside page. Even in a limited amount of space, there was plenty of speculation. The ‘mysterious deaths of two social services bosses’ led to unanswerable questions: were the killings linked; was a group of disgruntled clients at work; was Salford council somehow cursed? The usual bollocks, in other words.

  Putting the pages of my report into a neat pile I slid it into an envelope, wondering what had happened to Ania. She would usually have been in and out by now. As if she had read my thoughts, Polly came in, dragging her Hoover behind her and grinning at me. The grin was more or less permanent. At sixty odd, she had an appetite for life suitable for someone half her age. I knew if I didn’t get away soon, she’d tell me about her internet dating adventures. I bet she’d described herself as cuddly and bubbly.

  “Hiya, Gus,” she said. “You wanna get yourself home.”

  “Just leaving, Polly. Where’s Ania tonight?”

  She screwed her eyes up.

  “That’s the funny thing. I don’t know where she is. I thought I’d better do this floor anyway.”

  “Has she not phoned?”

  “No. It’s not like her.”

  Polly was about to plug the vacuum in when her mobile phone went. She took it out of her overall pocket and answered it. She listened intently to the person at the other end. A look of anxiety gradually replaced her chirpiness.

  “Never,” she said.

  Her face went white.

  “That’s terrible…you’re not safe on the streets these days…I wondered why she hadn’t been in…such a nice girl too…yeah, I know…I hope she’ll be all right…right, I’ll just write that down…”

  She made a writing motion and I passed her a pen and tore a sheet of paper form my notebook. Leaning on the desk, she wrote as she continued her conversation.

  “Right, got that…OK…tara.”

  She put the phone back in her pocket and turned to me.

  “That was my manager. She’s had the police round at her house.”

  Sitting down with a bump, she cleared her throat.

  “I can’t believe it. Ania’s been shot.”

  “What?”

  Polly took half a dozen breaths, shaking her head from side to side.

  “She was on the way here about an hour ago,” she said. “Someone took a shot at her as she came out of her house.”

  “Is she going to be all right?”

  “Too early to say. She’s alive, that’s the main thing. In Hope Hospital. I’ve wrote down the ward she’s on and the phone number.”

  She picked up the bit of paper and handed it to me.

  “She’s not allowed visitors. We can phone tomorrow.”

  I nodded, thinking of Ania’s family in Poland. They’d have a police officer at their door. I could picture the panic-stricken attempt to get on a flight to Manchester. Another shooting, I thought.

  Two days later I walked down a seemingly endless corridor, clutching a bunch of spring flowers. I looked up at a confusion of signs I hoped would lead me in the fullness of time to the right ward. A motley collection of people – the expression ‘all colours and creeds’ sprang to mind – hurried in every direction as though they, unlike me, knew where they were going. Finding the lifts after only two wrong turns I went up to the fifth floor, wondering how Ania was and what had happened to her. She was allowed to see visitors; that must be a good thing, mustn’t it? There’d been a piece in the Salford Advertiser, hinting that she had got caught up in gang warfare. Anyone less likely to be in a gang was hard to imagine.

  I walked into the ward and scanned the beds lined along either wall. The patients practically glowed with well-being; their visitors perched uncomfortably on bedside chairs showed more signs of ill-health. I walked to the far end, where Ania sat up in a baggy Winnie the Pooh t-shirt, her left arm in a sling. She was reading a Kindle. Not for the first time I pondered the wisdom of getting one. It would be handy on journeys and holidays, I supposed. And if I ever happened to have my arm in a sling. I stood at the end of the bed for a few seconds before Ania noticed I was there.

  “Gus!”

  She grinned with delight. Her hair was tied back in a blue ribbon, her face scrubbed clean. She looked younger without make-up but there were lines of pain round her eyes.

  “Nice to see you in one piece,” I said, leaning over to give her a kiss on the cheek and hand over the flowers.

  “Thank you, they’re lovely.”

  She gave me the flowers back and I put them on the bedside table. There were already two vases full and six or eight get well cards. When I asked how she was she insisted she was fine.

  “I can go home tomorrow,” she said. “The bullet went through my shoulder and managed to miss anything important.”

  “That’s a relief,” I said. “We’ve all been worried about you. Who’s going to look after you when you get home?”

  “My mum of course. She and Dad got the first flight out when she heard. He’s hoping to get tickets for Man U. They are in element. Is that right?”

  “In their element,” I said, as her unofficial English teacher.

  “I will remember that.”

  “Have the police found out who did it yet?”

  “No. It was weird. I came out of my house to get the bus to work”

  “Yeah?”

  “I live in Walkden,” she added, pronouncing the ‘l’. “I must have passed out. My neighbour phoned the ambulance.”

  “Did you see anything? Or anyone?”

  She shrugged then winced in pain.

  “I was looking in my handbag to make sure I had everything. Then I took my keys out to lock the door.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I dropped them on the pavement. I bent down to pick them up.”

  She swallowed.

  “All of a sudden I heard a noise, like a bang. I felt a pain just here.”

  She pointed to her shoulder where the sling was tied.

  “Bloody hell.”

  Dropping her keys must have saved her life. But who would want to shoot someone as unassuming and, well, nice as Ania?

  “Then I had to be questioned by the police again, just like with poor Bill. They asked me if I was on drugs.”

  I shook my head in disbelief.

  “Then they said I must be a prostitute. I nearly told them to eff off.”

  I smiled at the thought.

  “They thought I’d been, you know, what’s the word?”

  She screwed her face up in concentration.

  “I forget the word. It means forced to become a prostitute.”

  “Trafficked?”

  “That’s it. They said maybe I had upset my pimp.”

  I supposed the police had to ask these questions. Gun crime was usually associated with organised crime. They had no idea what Ania was like.

  “One thing they asked me was very strange,” Ania went on.

  “What was that?”

  “They wanted to know if I knew Pam Agnew.”

  “Pam?”

  “Yes, I didn’t know who they meant at first. They told me she was the Director who got killed.”

  What possible connection could there be between Pam and Ania? They worked for the same department but the Director would hardly socialise with the cleaner. I doubt if she had known Ania’s name. They’d both been shot. That was a pretty strong connection. If you wanted to stretch things even further there was a link between the two women victims of gun crime and Bill Copelaw. I was buggered if I knew what it was. Anyway, the police had charged someone for Bill’s murder. Askey could hardly have shot Ania and Pam from his prison cell.

  * * *

  The next day, just as I was immersed in Simon Brett’s latest, I had another visit from Sarita Ellerton. I had been half expecting it. At least this time I had finished breakfast so the teapot was empty. Her dress – business suit and polished black ankle boots – and manner w
ere more business-like. To add to the effect her hair was tied up.

  “I wanted to ask you about Ania Bolek.”

  I realised I had never known her surname.

  “Yes.”

  “As with Pam Agnew, your name was in her contact list.”

  What now? I asked myself.

  “In fact you’re the only person who is on the list of both women.”

  I put a tram ticket on page 93 to act as a bookmark. I closed the book. Sarita ploughed on.

  “In fact I could almost say you were the only link between the two women.”

  Apart from them working for the same organisation, I thought. They must know some of the same people from Children’s Services apart from me. They were both women, that was a link. Lived in the same city. Neither was married. I should offer to take over the investigation. Then I picked up on a word she had used.

  “Almost?”

  “There is another link but I’m not at liberty to reveal it.”

  I shrugged as she went on.

  “Why would a cleaner have your number, Gus?”

  “She and her boyfriend did some work for me.”

  “Work?”

  “Yes. I’d had a lot of work done on the flat – new kitchen and things – and I must have mentioned I needed someone to decorate.”

  “You don’t do your own decorating?”

  “Not if I can help it,” I said, wondering what it had to do with her. “But as I was saying…”

  “Sorry.”

  “She said she and Darren would do it cheap. And she would clean the place afterwards.”

  “So it was a business relationship? You weren’t friends or anything?”

  There was no need to ask what ‘or anything’ meant.

  “We’re friendly enough when we meet,” I said. “She’s a nice girl. But we didn’t socialise. I’m old enough to be her dad - granddad even.”

  “Do you own a gun,” she said, seemingly ignoring my words.

  “No,” I replied with a certain emphasis. “Why?”

  “Just routine, you know, background.”

  Just routine, I said to myself. A likely story.

  “I don’t own a gun,” I said. May as well emphasise the point.

  “And you had no reason to kill Pam or Ania?”