The Ninth Step - John Milton #8 (John Milton Thrillers) Read online

  The room fell silent. Milton stared dead ahead, unable to concentrate. His mind was spinning. Dead? He immediately flashed back to the conversation that they had had in the shelter. Eddie had reached out for help. He had reached out to him. Why, then, after they had agreed on a way forward, had he done something as stupid—something as final—as this? He reached back, trying to remember the way that he had looked and the words that he had used. Had he been suicidal? Milton didn’t think so. He was going to see his sister. He looked frightened, but not resigned. There was a world of difference.

  The meeting continued. The share was from a man who said that he worked in the film industry, but Milton didn’t hear a word of it. He thought about Eddie and what he had said to him and what could possibly have happened between him leaving the shelter and what had come next.

  #

  MILTON WOULD normally have left the meeting as soon as it was finished. He had to get to the shelter to relieve Cathy for the night, and it was a reasonable walk from here. But he waited in the church lobby as the others filed out. Harry was still in the meeting room, tidying away the posters and rolling up the scroll so that it could be slipped back into its cardboard case.

  Milton cleared his throat. “Could I have a word?”

  Harry looked up. “Hello, John. What’s on your mind?”

  “It’s Eddie.”

  “Awful,” Harry said. “It’s horrible.”

  “You said you didn’t know whether he asked for help.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He did. He came to see me.”

  “Really?”

  “The same night.”

  “And?”

  “And he didn’t seem suicidal. I wondered if you knew anything else?”

  Harry laid a hand on Milton’s arm. “If you stay in these rooms as long as I have, you’ll see this again. I know that’s no consolation. You know what we say about our disease: it is cunning, baffling and powerful. Eddie wouldn’t be the first to hide how he was really feeling, and he won’t be the last.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Milton said quietly, his mind starting to turn over again.

  Harry continued, but Milton didn’t hear him.

  “John,” he repeated.

  “Sorry.”

  “You know you’ll have to go to the police.”

  “What?” Milton said vaguely.

  “The police. Eddie came to see you. You’ll have to tell them about what Eddie said to you.”

  Milton hadn’t thought of that. “Yes,” he said. “You’re right.”

  “They’ll have questions for you.”

  “Do you know where he was found?”

  “In his taxi. He’d driven out into the countryside. I think it was near Oxford. Littleton? Littleworth? I can’t remember.”

  “Do you know how?”

  “They’re saying he gassed himself in his car.”

  They continued for a moment or two longer, the usual platitudes that Milton was able to recite without really concentrating on what was being said.

  “I better be going,” he said at last.

  “You mustn’t blame yourself. It’s not your fault.”

  Milton thanked him, but he wasn’t sure whether he agreed with him.

  #

  IT WAS A FORTY-MINUTE walk from the Bank of England to Russell Square. The rain was coming down more heavily now, and Milton would usually have taken a bus or the tube to Oxford Circus. He waited at the entrance to the underground for a moment, watching the men and women waiting patiently to file down the stairs into the steamy interior, and decided against it. He wanted to clear his head, and it would be easier to do that with a little exercise.

  He set off to the east, passing St Paul’s Cathedral and following Newgate Street until it ran into Holborn. The traffic passed by, headlights reaching out into the gloom, red taillights refracting against the wet asphalt. The rain fell more heavily now, soaking his hair and running down into his eyes and mouth. He wiped it away, pulled up his collar and kept going.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about Eddie. The more he thought about it, the less he could accept that he had killed himself. It was true what Harry had said: alcoholism was a cunning disease, and alcoholics made for skilful dissemblers. But Milton was a good judge of character. He had been in situations where he had needed to read people, often instantly, and he always backed his intuition. Nothing about their meeting had given him anything to think that the man might not have been truthful with him or that he was hiding his real feelings. The idea that he had killed himself just felt wrong.

  He turned onto Southampton Row and headed north. It was another half a mile and, by the time he reached the shelter, he was wet through. There were a couple of cabs parked outside and a third just pulling away. The driver, an Arsenal fan called Bob, sounded the horn as he saw Milton jog across the road and Milton raised his hand in greeting. He opened the door and stepped inside. Two cabbies were sitting on either side of the shelter, both of them working through bacon sandwiches and mugs of tea. The stove was lit and pumping heat around the small room. It was warm, almost stifling, and Milton was glad of it as he took off his coat and hung it on one of the hooks.

  “Look at the state of you,” Cathy said. “You’re soaked through.”

  “I’ll dry soon enough,” he said.

  She gave him a dishcloth and he used it to scrub his scalp until his hair was dry.

  “Are you all right, love?”

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “You look preoccupied.”

  “There’s a driver comes in here,” he said. “His name’s Eddie. Do you know him?”

  “I can think of a couple,” she said.

  One of the other men looked up. “You mean Eddie Fabian?”

  “I don’t know his second name.”

  “The bloke who topped himself?”

  “Yes,” Milton replied. “Do you know him?”

  “Well enough to pass the time of day with. He was a quiet bloke most of the time. Kept himself to himself. Terrible what happened, though.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “I was speaking to a couple of the other blokes this afternoon. They said they found him in his cab out in the countryside. Parked up, put a hose on his exhaust and gassed himself. Bloody awful.”

  Milton went through into the kitchen. There was barely enough space for him and Cathy.

  “Did you know him?” she asked quietly.

  “Not really,” Milton said. He wasn’t about to tell her about AA. She seemed as if she was a broad-minded woman, but you never really knew, and Milton did not want to risk losing his job so soon after he had started it. AA was anonymous. And there was a duty of confidence, too. It was not his place to tell anyone else about Eddie’s problems.

  “I’ve got to get going, love,” she said. “Off to the pictures tonight. It’s our anniversary. The old man will kill me if I’m late.”

  He waited until she had left and then brought the cabbie who knew Eddie another cup of tea.

  “Do you know where they found the cab?” Milton asked him.

  “If you said the name, I might,” the man said, screwing up his face as he tried to recall it. “It was on the news.”

  “Littleworth?”

  “Could be that. Rings a bell.”

  Milton thanked him.

  The shelter emptied out as the night went on, and Milton found that he had a little time to himself. He took out his phone, plugged it in to charge, and opened the map application. He entered Littleworth into the search bar and watched as the screen scrolled to the left until the sprawl of Oxford filled most of the screen. The location marker was planted between the villages of Horspath and Wheatley, the terrain around Littleworth marked out as farmland and the village itself not much more than a collection of houses gathered around a tangle of streets. There was nothing there that looked remarkable, no reason apparent why Eddie would have chosen it as the location to kill himself save that his sis
ter lived there.

  That was worth investigating, Milton thought. The sister. What did she know?

  He would finish his shift, get a little sleep, and then pay her a visit.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  MILTON HAD bought a car a few weeks earlier. It was an old Volkswagen Polo that he had found on AutoTrader.com. It was ten years old with ninety thousand miles on the clock and he had paid five hundred pounds for it. It was scruffy and scuffed, there was a dent in the driver’s door and the windscreen bore a crack that meant it would fail its next MOT, but Milton was happy enough with it. It was reasonably clean and the engine was in decent condition. Milton wasn’t an extravagant man, and, even if he had more money, he would not have been tempted to exchange it for something flashy. No-one was going to notice the car, and anonymity was important to him. Ostentation went against habits that had been ingrained over the course of the last fifteen years.

  It was fifty miles from London to Littleworth. Milton followed the M40 north-west, driving under the cowl of a slate grey sky that promised more rain. He passed Beaconsfield and High Wycombe, his phone directing him to Wheatley services. He turned off and followed London Road as it tracked the motorway, passing through Wheatley until he reached the turning for Old Road. It was a narrow one-lane road, little more than a track. There was a collection of farm buildings just before the turning, and Milton had to slow to let a large tractor exit. He drove west, passing a large pink house hemmed in by a high hedge, and kept going. The landscape quickly became bleak and exposed. A telegraph wire ran along the left of the road and pools of standing water had gathered from the recent storms. He passed under the wires suspended between tall electricity pylons and continued on. The fields to his left were planted with rape. The view to the right was obscured by a hawthorn hedge.

  Eventually, he came to another house. He slowed and stopped, took out his phone, and looked again at the photograph on the local BBC News report for the suicide. He was in the right place. He was almost at the end of the lane, so he continued on until he reached the junction with the Oxford bypass to make sure that there was nothing else that might be of interest. He did not find anything, so he turned the car and drove back to the turning. He stopped twenty feet away, pulled to the side and got out of the car. Rain started to fall almost at once. He drew his coat around him and approached the house.

  It was unremarkable. A short drive led from the lane for six feet until it terminated in a cast-iron gate. The pillars were surmounted by decorative lions, and beyond the gate was a parking area and then the house itself. Milton took out his phone once more, wiped the rain from the screen and looked at the photograph again. The taxi had been parked off the road, inside the property, the gates open.

  Milton put the phone away and looked around. It was quiet and still, with almost no noise save for the rain drumming on the roof of the parked car and the mournful cawing of a crow as it flapped overhead.

  The gates were closed now. An intercom was set into the right-hand pillar. Milton pressed the button to speak. He heard the buzz as the intercom announced his presence to the house, but there was no response. He waited for a moment and then pressed the button again. Still nothing.

  Milton stepped into the middle of the drive and peered through the gates. The house was a large bungalow, constructed with two wings that sprouted from a central hub. The curtains had not been drawn, but Milton could see no signs of occupation. He pushed the gates, but they were sturdy and did not give. He looked up: the gate was six feet high, and he could have scaled it easily, and probably without being seen, but he didn’t think that he would find anything of interest. The house looked empty; most likely it was.

  He wanted to speak to Eddie’s sister, but it wouldn’t be today.

  He drew his coat around him and hurried through the rain back to his car.

  #

  THAMES VALLEY POLICE had responsibility for Littleworth. They were based in Oxford, just seven miles to the west. Milton followed the bypass and arrived at the constabulary headquarters thirty minutes later. The building was on St Aldate’s, opposite the Crown Court, and Milton parked his car in the car park. It was a beautiful Georgian building made from warm limestone, three storeys tall and with plentiful wide, generous windows. Milton went to the entrance and made his way inside.

  “Hello, sir,” said the clerk behind the desk.

  “There was a death,” he said. “At Littleworth. A cabbie killed himself in his car.”

  The woman nodded her recognition. “That’s right. How can I help you, love?”

  “I’ve got some information that might be useful. I was hoping I could speak to the investigating officer.”

  “Let me see who’s dealing with that.” The woman turned to her computer and brought up the information she needed. “You need Detective Inspector Bruce. Let me see if he’s around. What’s your name?”

  “Smith.”

  “Take a seat, love.”

  There was a row of plastic chairs lined up against the wall, and Milton did as he was told. He watched the woman speaking on the telephone and noticed her eyes as they glanced up from the screen to take him in. He looked away. He wasn’t fond of police stations. They had the same smell the world over: disinfectant and sweat. The walls were painted green, the same shade that you always seemed to find in municipal buildings, and a cork board had been festooned with leaflets on crime prevention and posters of men and women wanted for questioning. There were two other people waiting. One, an older man, was anxiously massaging his hands. The other, a woman—the man’s wife, perhaps—was staring at the posters on the wall with an expression of quiet anger fixed to her face.

  Milton looked at his watch. Ten minutes had passed. He could have telephoned, but he knew that he would be able to derive more information on the investigation if he spoke to the officer responsible for it in person.

  A young boy was led into the waiting area by a uniformed officer. The man and woman stood. The man looked relieved. The woman went over to the boy, who couldn’t have been much older than twelve, and grabbed him around the bicep.

  “Ow,” he complained, “that hurts.”

  “We haven’t even started yet,” she said in a voice that was loud enough for Milton, the officer and the receptionist to hear.

  The woman hauled the boy to the exit. The man apologised, thanked the officer, and followed in his wife’s wake.

  “Mr. Smith?”

  Milton looked up. The man who had addressed him was older, mid-fifties, and wearing a cheap suit that had started to shine a little at the shoulders, elbows and knees. His face was wrinkled, his teeth had been yellowed by nicotine, and his hair, or what was left of it, had been swept across his balding scalp.

  “Sir? I’m Detective Inspector Bruce.”

  Milton stood. “Hello, Detective Inspector. Thanks for seeing me.”

  “You have information on the suicide out at Littleworth?”

  “I might. Maybe.”

  “Well, we can certainly have a chat about it. Would you come this way, please?”

  Bruce led Milton along a corridor. There were two doors on either side; Milton guessed that they were interview rooms. Bruce tried one, saw that it was occupied and apologised to the people inside, tried a second and held the door open so that Milton could go through. It was a small room with a table and four chairs. The table was too small for all of the chairs to fit around it, so two of them were angled toward it; Bruce folded them up and put them to one side. There was a digital recorder on the table. The single window, which was large, was covered by a plastic blind that absorbed the dull sunlight from outside.

  “Take a seat, please, Mr. Smith.”

  Milton sat in the seat farthest from the door with his back to the wall. He liked to be able to see all of the room. It was force of habit; he didn’t even realise that he had done it.

  Bruce sat down in the other chair and smiled at Milton. The policeman’s face was marked by a scattering of old acne scars fro
m his youth, and his eyes glittered with a shrewdness that put Milton on edge.

  “Are you the investigating officer?”

  “I am.”

  “CID are handling it?”

  “That’s right. Why is that surprising?”

  “Is there anything suspicious about it?”

  Bruce shook his head. “No, Mr. Smith, not really.”

  “And you’re a detective inspector?”

  “Yes. What’s your point?”

  “I’ve never heard of a D.I. being put on a suicide.”

  “Are you an expert on police matters, Mr Smith?”

  “Wouldn’t it normally be a detective constable?”

  Bruce noticed that Milton was the one who was asking questions and shook his head, moving the conversation back in his direction. “Look, I can’t say too much, Mr. Smith. The investigation is still ongoing.”

  “But?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you came here to say?”

  Milton nodded. “It’s Eddie Fabian, isn’t it? The dead man?”

  “Yes, sir. Did you know him?”

  “A little.”

  “Can I ask how?”

  Milton paused. He was reluctant to say, but he knew that he would have to, eventually. “We both have—had—a problem with alcohol. I met him at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that I go to.”

  “I see. Did you know him well?”

  “Not very. But I did see him on the evening he died. I think it’s possible that I might have been one of the last people to see him alive.”

  “Where was this?”

  Milton explained about the shelter and how Eddie had come in search of a conversation.

  “And how was he?”