Free The Picasso Scam by Stuart Pawson Page A

Hits was still keeping them awake, the neighbours called the police. Playing Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits eight times on the trot is definitely abnormal behaviour – our boys were there in minutes. They pulled the plug on the CD player, then looked for the wife.
    He’d made a good job of her. In the kitchen there was a rack with enough chef’s knives on it to equip the Catering Corps. I’d seen them advertisedin the colour supplements. He’d found a novel use for the cleaver on the end. I drew on my years of police training and told Command and Control to find the husband’s car. A bright constable recognised the number as being involved in an accident he had attended at the beginning of his shift. Our man had gone off the road two miles from home, and was now in the General, waiting to have his broken thigh placed in traction.
    ‘He’s all yours,’ I told DS Willis, ‘and if he won’t confess, swing on his wires. But make sure his solicitor is looking the other way.’
    There was no point in going home, so I hung around the station until the canteen opened. I was snoozing in the office when I received a call from a probation officer called Gav Smith. Could he come round to see me sometime?’
    ‘Come round now and I’ll treat you to a bacon sandwich,’ I said. My stomach hadn’t seen food for twelve hours and was considering suing my mouth for desertion. The popular conception is that we catch criminals and the Probation Service try to get them off. It sometimes seems that way to me, too, but they have an important and difficult job to do. Well, they say they have. I’d met Gavin professionally plenty of times, mainly at various committee meetings, but never socially. I was intrigued to know what he wanted: probation officers have a befriending role with their clients, and no doubt learn lots of stuff we’d find useful.
    I met him at the desk and took him to the canteen. ‘Two bacon sandwiches, please. One with all the fat cut off and cooked till it frizzles, in a toasted bun; the other as it comes. And two teas: one weak, no milk and three sugars; the other as it comes.’
    I joined him at the table. ‘What’s it all about, Gavin?’ I asked. I refused to join the Gav conspiracy.
    ‘I had a client die of a heroin OD at the weekend. There’s aspects of the case that I think the police ought to know.’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘He was a pleasant lad, only seventeen. Brighter than most of our customers; very bright, in fact. He was in trouble for stealing to pay for his habit. An older man, about thirty, had made friends with him and took him to parties and discos. He introduced him to Ecstacy, said he could pay for it later. Jason got hooked on it. We think it must have been laced with something else; you don’t get hooked on E like he was. Then they started chasing the dragon; it still seemed like good fun. Next he was having to inject, but by now he owed several hundred pounds to the pusher. He was caught robbing an old lady who had just collected her pension. In his right mind he wouldn’t have dreamt of doing anything like that. That’s when we got him. I tried to persuade him to grass on the pusher, but he wouldn’t. Then during one of our talks, he let a name slip. Parker, that’s all. He begged me to keep it to myself, and I had to, to maintain my credibility.I was working on ways of letting you know, but on Sunday he died. Massive overdose of uncut heroin. Somebody’s poisoning our kids, Charlie. The streets are flooded with the stuff.’
    The sandwiches arrived; they were both As They Come. Gavin was visibly distressed, but he wolfed his sandwich down; he seemed hungrier than I was. I thought about what he had told me.
    ‘Parker, just Parker?’
    ‘Afraid so. Doesn’t narrow it down much, does it?’
    ‘That’s OK, it’s a starting point.’ Providing it’s not just his pen name. I wrestled with my sandwich and sipped my tea.
    ‘A couple of weeks ago we caught three youths trying to rob