A Killing Kindness

The woman answered sneeringly, ‘He’s pure didicoi, not real fair people, don’t like regular work, them. There is a stall, a lot of gypsy tat if you ask me. Over there, by the river. You’re a copper, aren’t you?’

‘No, I’m his rich uncle from Australia,’ said Wield gravely.

The dodgems and the waltzer producing no sign of Lee, he made his way to the stall which did nothing to make him feel the penny-roll woman had been unjust. Even in this temple of tawdriness, this looked extra tawdry and the dark-skinned woman with high, aristocratic cheekbones, one of which was livid with a wide bruise, seemed to be making little effort to entice customers.

‘I’m looking for Dave Lee,’ said Wield.

‘What for? Are you going to arrest the bastard?’ she answered.

‘Just talk.’

‘Pity. Why not put him in jail for a while?’

She seemed sincere.

‘Why? What’s he done?’

‘Him? What hasn’t he?’

Suddenly she seemed to tire of the conversation as if even resentment and hatred could not stimulate her interest for long.

‘He’s not here,’ she said flatly.

‘Where might he be?’

She shrugged. Wield consulted his notebook.

‘You don’t have a trailer here, do you? Could he have gone back to the encampment?’

Another shrug. Wield’s patience began to go.

‘All right. Come on.’

‘Come on where?’

‘To the station.’

‘Me? What have I done?’

The interest had been restimulated.

‘You? What haven’t you?’ mimicked Wield.

She swore. He didn’t understand Romany, but he had no doubt what she was calling him.

‘He went in the van,’ she said, gesticulating at the nearby trailer park. ‘Half an hour. To the camp, perhaps. Does he tell me where he goes? If you see him tell him he can …’

‘What?’ asked Wield.

The woman’s face went sullen, flat, once more. Only the bruise gleamed.

‘Nothing,’ she said.

Wield strolled down to the river’s edge. Boats were in large demand and the isthmus was full of people. For two days as a couple of dozen coppers crawled on their hands and knees from one end to the other, it had been closed to the public. The only result had been the most efficient litter-clearing operation in the city’s history. Now the picnickers were back, their appetites doubtless whetted by the thought that on this very spot perhaps a girl had been done to death. And if they got bored with that, they could stroll a hundred yards or so down the canal bank and peer greedily across at the blank wall of Spinks’ Electrical Depository where earlier the same night a watchman had had his skull fractured for the sake of a few cheap transistor radios made in Hong Kong.

Though typically he kept them to himself, Wield had his own carefully worked out ideas about crime and punishment. They included doling out in exactly measured and scientifically monitored doses the kind of pain to the attacker which he had inflicted on the attacked. Nothing to do with barbarities like chopping off hands or cutting off ears. Just the pain.

Though how to measure the pain of terror which these murdered women must have felt, he did not know. But something was needed, something better than we had.

He went back to Madame Rashid’s tent. The notice was still there. He glanced at his watch. One-thirty. The station? Or could he justify going after Dave Lee? It was just a fifteen-minute drive at the most.

‘Sod it,’ he said and headed for his car.

He drove rapidly and efficiently, roughly following the course of the river out of town till he reached the old airfield which lay to the southeast. There had been a time in the affluent days of Super-Mac at the end of the ’fifties when it had teetered on the edge of development into a full-scale airport. But the moment had passed and now it was two-thirds disused, the remaining one-third being in the hands of the local Aero Club. Occasionally small private planes landed, particularly when there was a big race meeting at the city track, but generally speaking only the breathless swoosh of the gliders disturbed the air. There were a couple up now. Wield watched them, admired their soaring freedom but felt no desire to share it. He was a motor-bike man himself. Black leather and 100 mph up the motorway. Something else he kept quiet about at the station.

The disused section of the airport, where the urgent weeds and grasses had turned the runway into crazy paving and a couple of derelict buildings gaped like dead mouths at the unremembering sky, was now the site of an unofficial/official gypsy encampment.

It was ‘unofficial’ because the local council had been arguing for years about the need to provide an official site in the area; it was ‘official’ because during the hard months of the winter and during the two weeks of the High Fair the council and the police operated a ‘no-hassle’ policy. But come the spring and come the end of fair fortnight, the stand-pipes were turned off and the travelling folk invited to travel. There was a strong lobby in the gliding club which wanted them cleared off permanently, claiming that apart from polluting the nearby river with their sewage, their ponies (the same which had been banned from Charter Park) were a menace to gliders and small aircraft landing only a quarter-mile away. The council had erected a picket fence to prevent the ponies from straying but this was not proving one hundred per cent effective, as Wield realized when he got out of his car close to the gaudily painted caravans.

Normally the arrival of a stranger would have been viewed with close suspicious interest, but at this moment all attention was focused on a noisy and potentially violent confrontation taking place in the middle of the caravan circle.

On the one side was a group of gypsies with Dave Lee at their head. On the other were two men, one slight, blond, wirily built, in slacks and a sports shirt, the other much bulkier and sweating in a thick windcheater and flying helmet. All around them at a discreet distance stood a circle of interested women and kids.

The heavier man was wagging a finger that wouldn’t take much bending to make a fist in Lee’s face.

‘Listen, you,’ he grated in a harsh Yorkshire accent, ‘I see one more bloody pony on the Aero Club’s ground and I’ll shoot it, you hear? And then I’ll come and shoot the bugger who owns it.’

Dave Lee bared brown-stained teeth in a sneer and answered in an unpunctuated and rather high-pitched gabble. ‘Listen mister what’s up here you come here fucking threatening and talking about some pony which pony show us the fucking pony and what do you think anyway that ponies have no fucking sense to get out of the way of those machines more fucking sense than some fucking idiots who go up in them!’

The wagging finger folded. Wield had recognized the face beneath the flying helmet. It was Bernard Middlefield, JP. Not a man he cared for, but not a bad magistrate from a police point of view. At least he jumped hard on first offenders, believed police evidence like Holy Writ, and started from the useful premise that ninety per cent of what most social workers said was crap.

It would be interesting but not diplomatic to witness him thumping the gypsy. The blond man seemed bent on acting as a peacemaker but there was no guarantee of his success.

Wield advanced, warrant card at the ready, and addressed himself to Lee.

‘Mr Lee?’ he said. ‘Can I have a word?’

The big gypsy laughed scornfully and said in the direction of Middlefield, ‘No wonder he wants to fight when already he’s called the cops!’

‘Are you the police?’ said Middlefield. ‘Just in the nick!’

Wield didn’t want to get involved but he had to hear the tale. The blond man was Austin Greenall, Chief Flying Instructor of the Aero Club. He had been manning the launching winch to get Middlefield’s glider airborne when a pony had come wandering across the path of the accelerating aircraft and nearly caused an accident. Middlefield had come straight to the gypsy encampment closely attended by the secretary.

‘Ultimately it’s the council that are responsible, sir,’ said Wield. ‘They own all this land. You lease from them, I believe? So keeping fences in repair is their job.’

‘Thanks for nothing,’ said Middlefield. ‘If I’d got killed, you might have taken heed, is that it? Well, I’ll tell you something, these buggers need sorting out, and I’m the man to do it. They’re anti-social, dirty and dishonest. I’ve got my works on the estate not a quarter-mile from here. When this site’s occupied, I double my security staff. Double it. And that costs brass!’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Wield. ‘Unless there’s been a breach of the law …’