Eight
While Miller was waiting for his visitor to be brought upstairs, he grabbed his phone to check in with the ‘Dance -Buddies’ – a WhatsApp group set up by a seventy-four-year-old ex-copper named Mary in order to wrangle the motley crew of Ballroom enthusiasts of which she was certainly the most organised.
Which essentially meant the bossiest. As Miller had fully expected, their great leader had posted to remind everyone, again, about that evening’s session.
She strongly encouraged everyone to be prompt.
Following what she described as the ‘dirty sweatshirt’ debacle, she fully expected everyone to be wearing appropriate clothing and reminded them to warm up thoroughly to avoid a repeat of the previous week’s groin strain.
She was keen to see the results of the practice that people had done at home and was very much hoping there would be a lot less of the ‘messing around’ that had been an unwelcome feature of recent practices.
Miller loved Mary to bits, but she could be a tad tyrannical.
‘NAMING NO NAMES,’ she’d added.
As ever, Mary was liberal in her use of capitals, even though Nathan – by far the youngest of the group – had once pointed out that, for him and others classified as Gen Z, this amounted to shouting. Mary had smiled politely, then told him that she was from Gen COULDN’T GIVE A STUFF!
Nathan hadn’t been quite so cocky after that.
Miller knew that her remarks about taking things less than seriously were largely aimed at him, and to a degree at Nathan, on whom Miller could be something of a disruptive influence.
He promised himself that he would try to behave later on.
The weekly Ballroom sessions, and most especially his fellow -dancers, were an important part of Miller’s life, so he would do his best to curb what Mary’s husband, Howard – another former copper and notoriously blunt speaker – called his ‘tendency to tit about’.
There’d been rather more of that since Alex had died, of course, because he’d only ever been able to dance seriously when she was his partner, and whether they were dancing or not Miller’s wife had curbed those titting-about tendencies better than anyone.
Alex had done everything better.
Looking up to see Imran being escorted into the incident room, Miller put the phone away and stood to greet his friend, who also happened – as things stood – to be their best and only hope of making progress on the Ezra Simmons investigation.
‘Nice!’ Imran said, looking around as he approached Miller’s desk. ‘I did think there’d be one of them boards up on the wall, though. Like on the TV, with names of witnesses and suspects in felt-tip pen, and gory photos and stuff. If there was, you might have to put my name up there.’
The cheerful tone, on top of the fact that Imran was beaming and brandishing what looked very much like a memory stick, suggested that he’d brought the evidence Miller had been banking on with him.
‘That what I think it is?’
‘Well, I haven’t just rocked up with me holiday snaps, have I? Oh, and before I forget, you’re not the only one who’s interested in this. Some Scottish bloke collared me in the park, asked if I knew what had happened with the body in the lake and if there was any CCTV footage.’
‘Scottish?’ Miller considered that for a few moments and decided there was only really one contender. He pointed to a chair and held his hand out for the flash drive. ‘Right, plant your fat arse down there and let’s have a look at what you’ve got.’
‘Oh.’ Imran drew back his hand. ‘You want to do it here?’
‘Well, we could nip into the toilets to watch it if you want, but I think people might talk.’ Miller heard DC Tony Clough snort from an adjacent desk, so he raised his voice accordingly.
‘Actually, we can’t do that anyway because there’s a big queue of blokes waiting to get in there and see Tony Clough’s mum. ’
Imran was looking crestfallen. ‘I thought we could do this proper, like. I was hoping you’d talk to me in an interview room or whatever. The “box” – that’s what they call it on the telly, isn’t it?’
‘There’s really no need for that.’ Miller reached out for the memory stick. ‘I just need to see the footage.’
‘I let you ride on the big mower,’ Imran said.
‘Yes you did, but—’
‘Loads of times.’
Miller couldn’t bear the look of abject disappointment on his friend’s face any longer.
More importantly, he couldn’t risk jeopardising his chances of another ride on the big mower; the possibility that Imran might even let him drive it one day.
‘For God’s sake.’ He picked up his laptop and got to his feet. ‘Come on, then …’
Imran brightened up immediately and followed Miller as he walked towards the door. ‘If you brought someone else in, you could do the whole “good cop, bad cop” thing.’
‘No need,’ Miller said. ‘I’ll just be one really bad cop.’
As soon as they were seated in the interview room, Miller plugged the memory stick into his laptop and waited for the footage to download.
‘Took me a while to find this,’ Imran said. ‘I think it’ll help, though.’ Looking altogether more comfortable than Barry Cheshire had a few hours earlier, he ran his hands across the metal desktop and smiled happily up at the camera in the corner.
Miller reached to press PLAY. ‘Here we go, then—’
‘Hang on.’ Imran nodded towards the twin cassette recorder built into the wall. ‘I thought we were doing this properly.’
‘I don’t actually need to interview you,’ Miller said.
‘I always make sure everything’s done properly when we’re on the mower.’
Miller sighed heavily, took a few seconds, then lowered his voice. ‘I want to drive it.’
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
‘Drive the big mower?’
‘That’s the deal. Take it or—’
‘Fine, you can drive it,’ Imran said.
Miller reached across to press the button on the recorder, waited for the long tone to finish and leaned over.
‘Detective Sergeant Declan Miller interviewing Mr Imran Mirza. The time is … three twenty-eight p.m. and we’re about to review the footage from a CCTV camera mounted by Mr Mirza on his equipment shed in Claremont Park. ’ He looked at Imran. ‘Happy?’
Imran nodded, serious.
Wondering how happy his friend would be if he knew there was no tape in the machine, Miller pressed PLAY on the laptop and turned it so that they could look at the footage together.
The action was distant and far from crystal clear.
There was no sound and the movements of the two men and the various dogs were blurry and partially masked by trees, but Miller could see enough to tell that it corroborated Barry Cheshire’s description of events: the doggy dust-up and the subsequent confrontation between the owners …
He pressed the pause button and pointed at the screen. ‘Look at that.’
Imran stared. ‘At what?’
The playback had stopped at the moment when the owner of the Bullies was standing at Barry Cheshire’s shoulder. ‘That’s classic shadow position, that is,’ Miller said. ‘Standing behind and slightly off to the side of your partner, like you’re their shadow.’
‘Partner?’
‘It’s a dance thing, so probably not something that crops up a lot in parks maintenance. You see shadow steps all the time in Ballroom, in the cha-cha and the rumba especially. Me and Alex had it down to a T.’
Clearly not knowing what to say, Imran just nodded.
Miller took a few seconds. He let memories that were as painful as they were pleasant play themselves out, then restarted the footage and leaned in to continue watching: the stumble and the accidental push, and the Poundshop Pablo Escobar falling backwards over his dog into the lake, which Miller could not help finding enormously funny.
They immediately watched it again.
‘If that show was still on,’ Imran said, ‘we could get fifty quid for this. Funniest Home Videos or whatever it was.’
Add on a Swanee whistle and a ‘ker-splash’, Miller thought, and Imran was probably right.
He took out the flash drive and handed it back.
‘That was really helpful,’ he said. ‘I owe you one. Well, actually I don’t any more, do I?
You’re now the one that owes me. One drive of the big mower, duration to be determined, on a date of my choosing. ’
Imran held up the memory stick. ‘There’s a lot more on here, you know?’
‘Really?’ Miller wasn’t sure what else of interest there could possibly be, unless person or persons unknown were to suddenly appear from nowhere, drag Ezra Simmons out of the water, cave his head in and then toss him back again.
‘I told you, Dec, all the stuff that’s been stolen out of my shed. For when you want to open an investigation. You’ve got time to catch the thieving little toerags now you know this wasn’t actually a murder.’
‘We’ll see,’ Miller said.
‘So much stuff, I tell you.’ Imran began to count the items off on his fingers. ‘A brand new strimmer, my best pole pruner, two cordless brushcutters—’
Miller reached across to stab at the button on the recorder. ‘Interview terminated at three thirty-six p.m.’
—‘chain oil, mulch plugs, battery chargers … any number of sodding hoses and most recently a large Tupperware lunch box containing two vegetable samosas and a packet of Frazzles.’
‘That’s horrible.’
‘I know. I swear, if it’s not chained down, they’ll nick it.’
‘No, I meant Frazzles with your lunch. Monster Munch are way nicer.’
‘What can I tell you, Declan? I’m a free spirit.’