Читать книгу The Chapter of St Cloud - Marcus Attwater - Страница 11

Detective Inspector Collins stared at the whiteboard in his office. He hated the thing. It had photos of the murder victim stuck to it with little magnets, and his name in a big red circle in the centre. There were arrows to various other names. There were a lot of questions marks, in blue. The whiteboard was there to help him 'visualise connections and think things through spatially, as it were'. Or some such crap. Apparently they needed that, now practically all information came in electronically and nobody used old-fashioned notebooks anymore. The things were all over CID. But there was nothing on the whiteboard that he couldn't just as easily remember. Other people had pictures of their family in the office. He had a boy in a blood-soaked T-shirt.

The reason that he was looking at it anyway was that he was, as they put it so nicely in the local paper, baffled. Sean Whiteside, twenty years old, chemistry student, barman of the Hollow Crown, had been found dead in his room by his father, shot through the heart. No witnesses, no suspects. No enemies. Apparently he had been popular, but not so popular as to raise deadly jealousies. He left one devastated girlfriend, two heart-broken parents. And one police inspector at a loss. It was an odd crime. Not, by CID standards, very violent. Just one shot, precise and lethal. There seemed to have been no struggle, no drama. Not in Sean Whiteside's death, and little in his life. His parents had told him he was a hard-working student, a scholarship boy of which they were rightly proud. Even allowing for the rosy view fond parents tended to take of their children, Whiteside's life did not appear to have invited danger.

His phone rang. DS Walter. 'Yes?'

'Sir? We have a lead.'

He almost admired the man for the way he could make 'sir' sound insubordinate. Sergeant Walter was having a hard time getting over the fact that his younger colleague had jumped ahead in the promotion stakes.

'Yes?' he said again, neutrally. He had promised himself never, ever, to lose his temper with Walter.

'You'll love this. The kid was pushing Oblivion.'

'Right. That changes things. How did you find out?'

'Fellow student of his told me. Bought some of the stuff off him a month back. Couldn't tell me where he got it from, though.'

'We'll find out. Thanks, Walter. I'll contact the boys in Narcotics.'

If Whiteside had been a dealer, things were suddenly looking a lot more messy than the whiteboard suggested. Collins didn't like this at all. There wasn't much drug-related crime on his patch, but there was always some, of course. And things tended to get confused pretty quickly when dealing with it. Organised crime didn't stay neatly within CID approved boundaries. He tried to reassure himself that Sean Whiteside couldn't have been a big-time dealer, otherwise Narcotics would have contacted him by now. Wouldn't they? The name had been all over the papers. Yes, surely even those dopes would have made the connection. He called his opposite number in the drug squad and asked for a list of all sources of Oblivion in the neighbourhood.

'Nasty stuff that, Oblivion. Remember the Miller girl?' Jim said, 'Your dead boy a user?'

'Dealer. Nothing big, I think.' Meaning: nothing for you to worry your pretty head about.

'I'll email you a list. But I would appreciate it if you'd give us a heads up before talking to any of them. We've got some delicate operations running.'

'Of course. Thanks, Jim.'

He got up, selected a purple marker, and wrote 'Oblivion' in capitals on the shiny white surface. He looked at it, his head to one side, and decided to add a small question mark.

'Sir?'

DC Holmes was hovering in his doorway, looking like she was trying hard not to laugh.

'What is it, Sally?' He usually addressed his team by their last names, but he never called her Holmes, for fear she would start calling him Watson.

'There's a Mr Walsingham to see you, sir. Says he has an appointment.'

Of course, the distraught academic. Collins looked around his office. Better than an interview room? Or worse?

'Give me two minutes. Then show him up here.'

'Will do.'

'Cheers, Sally.'

He did a little futile tidying, shrugged on the jacket of his suit and made another call. He thought he'd better give that list to Sergeant Walter to pursue. Meanwhile, he would get on to his own contact in the world of small-time dealers. Someone who Jim in Narcotics, with any luck, didn't know anything about.