Death Row - Mark Pearson [103]
Mrs Blaylock looked down at the picture and shook her head. ‘I don’t know, I’m sorry. ‘
‘You absolutely sure?’
‘Yes. Sorry.’ She handed the photo back to Delaney. ‘What does it all mean?’
‘We don’t know, Mrs Blaylock.’
‘But you think it might be one of those men who have taken my brother’s grandson?’
‘Maybe,’ said Sergeant Halliday.
‘Well, it can’t be Peter Garnier or my brother.’
‘You sure you can’t remember the fisherman’s name?’
‘Sorry, no. It’s so long ago now. I just knew him as Bill, I never really spoke to him. I was never front of house much – that was Gerald’s area.’
‘Gerald?’ asked Delaney.
‘My dad,’ said Terry Blaylock.
Mrs Blaylock threw him another critical look. ‘A proper publican!’
Delaney looked over at the tall sergeant. ‘Fancy a trip out to Harrow School, Inspector?’ he said.
She was about to say, ‘Sir,’ but caught herself and grinned instead. ‘Can I borrow your DC?’ she asked.
Delaney nodded. ‘I want her back, mind.’
*
An hour later and Delaney was standing with Kate at the burger stand around the corner from the station. Kate pulled the zipper of her jacket up to her neck and threw Delaney what he thought of as an old-fashioned look.
‘Couldn’t we have gone to a proper restaurant for a change? A pub at least? Somewhere inside. You know, a place with four walls … and heat.’
‘I needed to think, Kate.’ Delaney shrugged apologetically. ‘And sometimes only Roy’s bacon sarnies can help.’
‘Right,’ said Kate, resigned.
Roy flipped some rashers of bacon on the griddle. Then he put on a pair of catering gloves and started buttering some bread. Delaney smiled to himself: he was pretty sure he had never seen the man wearing catering gloves before and he was also pretty sure that the reason Roy was wearing them now was all to do with Kate Walker. Roy was one of the most irritating men he knew at times, with absolutely no respect for authority, but he seemed to scamper around Kate like a puppy dog wagging its tail.
Delaney winked at her. ‘If you play nicely, I’ll get Roy to fry you an egg to go with your sandwich.’
‘And you can do one of those for me too while you’re at it,’ said Sergeant Halliday as she walked up with Sally Cartwright to join them.
Roy lifted his eyebrows as his gaze rose from Emma’s flat-soled shoes to the top of her head, all six foot two of her. He pursed his lips as if to whistle but Delaney gave him a shake of his head.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said.
‘Another bacon sarnie it is, then.’
‘Good call,’ said the sergeant, smiling.
‘Any sign of Bennett yet?’ Kate asked Sally.
‘No. And he’s not answering his calls.’
Delaney turned to Sally Cartwright. ‘How did it go at the school?’
Sally shook her head. ‘Not good, sir. Apparently.’
‘What happened?’
‘Somebody got there before us. A long time before us,’ Emma Halliday said.
‘He’s dead?’
Sally grimaced. ‘You could say that.’
‘Someone tied him kneeling to his bed, stuck a single-barrelled shotgun up his arse and pulled the trigger,’ Emma Halliday said bluntly.
Delaney frowned. ‘And nobody noticed? Nobody heard anything?’
The tall sergeant shook her head. ‘His body acted like a silencer, I guess.’
Roy handed a sandwich to Delaney, who took a big bite of it. He realised that Kate was staring unbelievingly at him. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘I can’t believe you’re eating that,’ she said.
‘I told you. I need to think.’
He looked over at Roy as the burger man flipped the bacon again and cracked an egg on the griddle plate. Delaney turned to Sally again. ‘You know those pictures of the staircases going up and down? You look at them one way and they are going up, you look again and it seems they are going down, or outside and inside. And you follow a straight path but at the end they’ve dropped several levels. Like optical illusions. Can’t remember the artist.’
‘M.C. Escher, sir. Dutch,’ Sally said.
Delaney waved his hand dismissively. ‘Whatever. The point is, we’ve been looking at this all the wrong way, whether the stairs are going up and down.’
‘And