The Vacant Casualty (18 page)

‘At two a.m. it is, when you’ve got the raging munchies.’

‘But haven’t you got . . . well, a staff of about two hundred and twelve in your house?’

‘Quite possibly. But I’m not waking cook up in the middle of the night, Sam. It’s so bloody uncouth.’

‘And you can’t knock something up yourself?’

‘Naturally, I bloody can! They had me on that
Master Celebritychef
thingy last year. The Aussie declared my smoked ham and puréed pea ravioli to die for. But the big bald one
and I didn’t get on.’

The aristocrat, although he spoke with the fluency that his very expensive education had instilled in him, betrayed all the other signs of being insensibly stoned – once a pause of more
than a second descended on their conversation, his attention wandered away so that Sam was able to watch, amused, as Horace’s mind flitted from wonderment and absorption in the posters and
menus printed on the wall, to skulking, paranoid glances at the other diners.

At last it seemed that Bradley was finished on the phone, because now he turned a face towards Sam that was beaming with pride.

‘It’s all sorted,’ he said.

‘What is?’ asked Sam suspiciously. ‘What have you done? I thought we were halfway through a conversation.’

Bradley shrugged this off. ‘Percival arranged it for me. The butlers,’ he explained. ‘I’ve had them all brought in.’

L
OTS OF QUESTIONS
filled Sam’s mind, but the first of them to find voice was: ‘How the hell long was I in the loo for?’

‘Quite a while, actually. A good hour. I did begin to wonder what was going on. Did you fall asleep or something?’

‘That’s not important,’ said Sam. ‘Why have you arrested all the – and, wait a minute, what do you mean by “all the butlers”, anyway? Who actually
has
butlers?’

‘Oh, quite a lot round here. Lord Selvington has at least two. The mayor lives in a huge house, owned by his wife, and he has one. Judge Barnstable . . .’

Sam was about to insist that he let them go at once, but Bradley’s radio crackled with a question from Percival. ‘That’s right, Sergeant. Hose them down!’

‘Let’s get back there at once,’ said Sam.

‘Damn right,’ said Bradley. ‘I’m going to nail this mother!’

They ran out into the street in time to see Horace reversing his open-top 1930s sports car clean onto the pavement and then screech off down the road in an S-shape before bursting onto the local
green, skirting a pond and diving over a hill out of sight. Bradley and Sam ran as fast as they could to the police station.

When they got there, they sprinted straight through to the cells at the back of the building. There were around twenty butlers of all different ages, shapes and sizes, but right now they had one
thing in common: rather than place them in individual holding cells, Sergeant Percival had instead lined them up along the back wall, forced them to strip to their underwear and was training the
thick unflinching jet of a fire hose upon them.

With deep alarm, Sam was taking in the personage of Sergeant Percival for the first time. He was tall and lean, with dark brown eyes that showed a fixed satisfaction in his task, and a mouth set
in a grim half-smile. Here, Sam could tell, was someone who truly loved being a policeman.

‘Um, excuse me,’ said Sam, tapping him on the shoulder. Percival looked askance at this interloper who would interrupt his enjoyment, and evaluated him coolly up and down, quite
obviously wondering whether there was a pretext under which he could throw him in with the butlers. ‘I think you’re drowning that one,’ said Sam, pointing to a fat old man in the
corner, who was lying on his side, eyes bulging open, his mouth hanging wide as twenty gallons of water splashed into it each second. Percival did not respond for a moment or so, then reluctantly
turned the hose to the others, some of whom looked like they were starting to get too dry. The noise in the room was a kind of constant roaring above which the screams and imprecations of the
butlers could hardly be heard.

‘Good work, Percival!’ said Bradley, clapping him on the shoulder. ‘Remarkable work. As efficient as ever.’ Percival nodded thanks towards his superior without taking his
eyes off the victims.

‘Can I have a word with you?’ asked Sam.

Bradley led him into a nearby open cell, where the noise was less deafening. He was still as wide-eyed and keyed-up as before, and clearly excited about undertaking his first interrogation. In
fact, he was rubbing the knuckles of one of his hands in preparation.

‘What the
fuck
have you done this for?’ Sam begged him. ‘I was only telling you a
list
of potential candidates. Didn’t you realize?’

Bradley stared at him, showing no signs of comprehension. Sam thought back to a doubt that had first occurred to him in the KFC bathroom an hour before, and began to wonder about something.

‘You haven’t searched my pockets, have you?’

‘I had to. You’re not a policeman. You turned up on the very day that Fairbreath was reported missing. I had to regard you as a suspect.’

‘Okay,’ admitted Sam. ‘That is good police work. But you didn’t . . .
take
anything that you found there, did you?’

Bradley’s look changed to one of smug amusement. ‘I’m doing it, you see?’ he said. ‘I’m really becoming the cop you told me to be. I’m drunk, and now
I’m on drugs!’

‘Oh my God!’ said Sam, putting a hand to his face. ‘The butlers
didn’t
do it,’ he said as slowly and loudly as he could, staring straight into
Bradley’s eyes. ‘You have to release them at once. Then let’s go upstairs and drink lots of water, have some coffee and I’ll explain.’

Bradley seemed to understand there might be some bad implications for him in all this, but was still clearly buzzing as he went back out and switched off the emergency fire hose at the source.
Percival turned round, enraged, and was visibly disappointed to see it was his boss who had turned it off.

‘Send them home, Percival,’ said Bradley. ‘The butlers are to be released without charge.’ Percival’s face dropped, and he started ordering the soaked men to fetch
their clothes back from the pile where they had been left in one of the cells.

‘You’re in
deep
trouble!’ one of the men was shouting. ‘I told you quite clearly, I’m not even a butler. My name is Butler.
Jon
Butler! And I’m
a big deal round here. You’ll regret this, mark my words!’

‘Get them in the van as quick as possible, Percival,’ said Bradley. ‘But don’t use the hose again, just the stick will do. So, explain,’ he said, turning back to
Sam. ‘I thought the butler did it.’

‘
No
! Listen. That’s only one of many scenarios. I was starting with the least likely – I didn’t think there were any butlers any more. The next surprise solution
for any crime novel is that the policeman did it.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Bradley, nodding.

‘You see? I’m just running you through the possibilities. Now, let me fetch that coffee and we’ll sit down and talk this through further. I don’t want to get you into
more trouble.’

Sam wandered wearily upstairs and, eschewing the poisonous coffee machine in the corridor, found some dregs of instant in the bottom of a jar at the back of a cupboard. He boiled the kettle and
made two cups of strong black coffee, tipped a small landslide of sugar into each, stirred and carried them back downstairs, thinking how cross he was that above everything else, Bradley had taken
some of his mystery drugs.

At the bottom of the stairs, silence greeted him.

He stood in the middle of the carpet holding the two Styrofoam cups and looking around. There was not a whisper. He didn’t doubt Percival’s ability to get the thirty soaked,
humiliated and outraged men dressed and into the back of a van in under five minutes. But there had been several other cops milling about – the desk sergeant, the superintendent and
Brautigan, to name only a few. He walked forward into the cells and heard nothing but the dripping of water from fittings that had been splashed.

No one.

Then he noticed that something
was
different. All the cell doors were closed. And here were the keys, in the nearest door. He walked to it and looked in. There was Bradley, busy
handcuffing himself.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Sam.

‘Just what you said.’

‘That’s
not
what I said, you drugged-up lunatic! That’s specifically
not
what I bloody said.’

‘Just turn the keys in the lock, if you will,’ said Bradley in a tone of saint-like humility. ‘I’ll do my time. I understand how these things work – at least, I
think I do. I did the murder myself and the others have been covering it up for me . . .’

A thought struck Sam as he wandered back out, and he went over to another cell door, popped open the peephole and saw what he had feared. Brautigan was in there, brooding with incredible
intensity, like a bull about to pounce or an avalanche before it falls. Before Sam could move away, he leapt forward, reached his hand through the hole and clasped Sam’s head in a pincer grip
between forefinger and thumb, crushing his brain.

‘You better let me out of here,’ he growled, ‘or I’ll pull you in through this letterbox and turn you into dog food.’

‘Understood, Mr Brautigan, sir,’ said Sam. ‘I’m working on it. Just give me another moment or two!’

The grip released him and he fell to the floor, from whence he got back to his feet, returned to Bradley’s cell and made his feelings very clear: that Bradley was to release all his
colleagues.

‘I can’t do that,’ Bradley said. ‘I’m a policeman, and it’s my duty to detain myself and my colleagues if we’re guilty.’

‘But you’re
not
bloody guilty!’ Sam shouted. ‘Well, you are, of many things, but not of murder. Or not of
this
murder. So go and unlock the other cells
right this damn instant! I’ll be outside until Brautigan has had time to calm down, and you’ve explained yourself to your other officers.’

Sam walked outside and sat on a wall, partly to enjoy his coffee in peace, partly to intercept anyone who tried to come into the police station in the next five minutes so he could detain them
for a while as things were being sorted out, and finally, also to get some cool air to his head after its assault by Detective Brautigan.

The light was beginning to show in the eastern sky when Bradley found him again and invited him back inside.

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I’ve been overzealous. I’ve talked things over with the superintendent, and I’ve got search warrants for the properties of all the
old grannies, and warrants for their arrest, all getting ready right now – I just need their names. I want you to finish telling me your plan as we drive over there, and I’ll be making
enquiries as to their identities.’

‘Okay, no problem,’ said Sam as they went through to the car park and got into a new car assigned to Bradley. He was starting to feel tiredness weigh on him. ‘Look, shall we
finish this stuff off?’ he suggested. ‘In for a penny, after all.’

‘Right on, brother,’ said Bradley, as he took the packet, squeezed it in the crook of his hand so it popped open, lowered a nostril to it and took a long deep lungful. A huge pile of
white powder disappeared – Sam would have complained, but it was too late, and he didn’t know if he was that concerned anyway. He winced, coughed, wiped his nose, popped on the stereo
and, feeding a CD into it, pressed play. The relaxed funk of Curtis Mayfield filled the car, playing ‘Pusherman’. Sam guzzled the rest as Bradley gunned the engine.

‘How did Brautigan take it?’

‘That guy?’ said Bradley as the drugs set in. ‘He was okay.’

‘Really? He didn’t try to kill you for locking him up?’

‘
Him
? No way! He’s crippled by guilt for all the years of bad things he’s done.’

‘He didn’t seem that way to me,’ said Sam, feeling his temples. ‘He seemed pretty angry.’

‘He just needed the law laid down to him. That punk just needs treating with a firm hand.’

‘You’re getting into this, aren’t you?’

‘Damn right I am,’ said Bradley. ‘Besides, Brautigan?’ He shook his head. ‘A ticking time bomb.’

‘He certainly is that.’

‘No, I mean that thing on the corner of his desk. It’s literally a ticking time bomb – that’s his lazy approach to dealing with evidence for you. He hasn’t even
looked at it yet – could go off at any second.’

As he said this there was an enormous booming explosion above them. All the windows on the first floor blew out, and flames licked the side of the building as debris fell all around them.

‘You see?’ said Bradley. ‘I tried to warn him.’

The detective put the car into gear and pulled away quickly, avoiding bricks and falling masonry that crushed a hole in the tarmac behind them. He turned into the street at fifty miles an hour
and tossed a police radio into Sam’s lap.

‘Shouldn’t we do something?’ the writer asked.

‘That’s a case for the fire department,’ said Bradley. ‘And nothing’s getting in the way of me solving this case right now. Use that, call the ambulance and fire
engine to get over here. That button on the bottom right gets you through to regional emergency services.’

Sam did so at once, then rang off as they were reaching the edge of town and asked, ‘Is there a twenty-four-hour booze place round here?’

‘In a town like this? No way! Look under your seat, motherfucker,’ said Bradley.

Sam looked puzzled as he rummaged around and then adopted a look of awe as he pulled out a bottle of rum.

‘Confiscated it from the evidence locker,’ said Bradley.

Sam cracked it open, took a swig and offered one to the detective, who drank deeply and then gave the bottle back.

‘An honour to work with you, Detective,’ he said. They were now speeding through the dawn countryside; the hills, the fields, the waterways and woods lit up by the copper sunlight of
very early morning. The effect was enhanced, of course, by the fact that they were now both buzzing so hard that their very vision shimmered before them.