Rainstone Fall by Peter Helton Read Free Book Online Page A

injuries. And died quite some time later. Enough time to move about and lose a considerable amount of blood. That’s all I’m going to say at this stage.’ He nodded to us. ‘Gentlemen.’ Then he took off down the hill, swinging his aluminium case like a schoolboy on a field trip.
    ‘Right,’ Needham said. ‘Who is he, Chris? Don’t touch the car.’
    I bent down, hands on my knees for support, and took a long look at the dead guy. Even before his accident or fateful meeting with the Gobi he’d been no oil painting. He had large fleshy ears, now looking waxy, practically no lips and false teeth. I knew this because his mouth hung open and the upper plate of his dentures had fallen down, giving him a double row of shark’s teeth at the bottom. His sparse, bloody hair still had some dark in it. He wore a cream weatherproof jacket and olive green, well-worn cords, now half pulled down after Meyers had taken the rectal temperature. Accident or murder, there was no dignity in the man’s death.
    I shook my head. ‘Never . . .’
    ‘. . . seen him before in your life,’ Needham finished for me. ‘All right, let’s go and we’ll have a nice long chat down the station.’
    The Bath cop shop is a no-frills concrete lump of ugliness, sitting shamelessly between St John’s and the Manvers Street Baptist Church. No amount of flowerpots on the outside or corporate colour scheming on the inside was going to dispel the air of architectural depression that the concrete walls sweated out. Even the Superintendent seemed heavier, slower, unhappier when walking its hard-wearing carpets and looked gloomier than ever once we had all settled in a cheerless interview room. Deeks was there too. After he had done the preliminaries with the tape – time, date, who was there and the fact that I’d waived my right to have a solicitor present at this stage – Needham began to patiently ask me the same damn questions over and over. How come my keys were missing? When had I first noticed I’d lost them? When could they have been stolen? Who was the dead guy, where had I met him, did we have an argument, what did I hit him with, did I run over him? Perhaps I was going to drive him to hospital and he died on the way and I panicked? Completely understandable, he assured me. Best come clean now, save us all a lot of bother. Or did I find him already hurt and then decide to give him a lift? Did I crash through the gate then bail out when I found he had croaked on the back seat? Deeks supplied the odd question but mainly it was the good old Needham–Honeysett ding-dong. Cop-shop tea arrived and was drunk – Needham produced a plastic dispenser of sweeteners from his pocket and stirred in a hailstorm of them with his biro – while my stomach rumbled indelicately in protest and then it all started again from the beginning with exactly the same questions. Their patience and capacity for going over the same ground for hours and hours always astounded me and drove me up the wall. Which is of course where they wanted me. There was no way Needham thought even for one minute that I had bashed the guy’s head in, then stuffed him in the back of my car and parked it in the middle of a field for someone to find. If he did then police would be swarming all over Mill House by now and I’d be wearing paper clothes while all my gear was on its way to a forensics lab in Chepstow to be analysed for traces of blood. But of course he still had to do the due process and good copper thing and I was all he had so we spent the afternoon angry and bored at the same time, with rumbling sour stomachs from too much tepid quick-brew while futility filled the space between us like a fog.
    All this was eventually followed by a written statement. I hung around for another half-hour waiting to sign the printed version. Needham grabbed it from under my biro almost before I’d finished my signature. We were all as irritated as each other. ‘Right, you can go. We’ll