Free A Meeting of Minds by Clare Curzon Page A

career; end of your newfound liberty.’
    He pointed a finger. ‘You couldn’t afford to let her live. So you finished her off.’
    Childe rose out of his seat, pushed the desk bodily away from between them and loomed over the shorter man, fists bunched, face now flaming. ‘You ain’t gonna get away with this!’
    â€˜Ain’t I?’ – goading him to violence: possibly assault on a police officer. Just let him try!
    Childe made a supreme effort to contain his anger. ‘You’re fishing. You haven’t got anything on me or there’d be two of you here. You’d have to read me my rights.’
    The trouble was, Beaumont brooded, that nowadays the villains swotted up on PACE better than the coppers themselves. They used the Police and Criminal Evidence Act to shackle the legitimate guardians of the peace. In this unfair world law-makers and law-breakers played a screwy kind of ball-game together; but the police were hobbled, reduced to pig-in-the-middle.
    â€˜Perhaps not today,’ he mocked, ‘but I’ll be back. You can bet on it. So have a better story ready. Meanwhile try to remember, if you can, exactly where you were yesterday evening.’
    â€˜I went out clubbing,’ snarled Childe. ‘And before you ask me, yes, I was alone. I don’t have an alibi because I bloody well don’t need one!’

    Belting himself into his car Beaumont reflected ruefully that he hadn’t got anything on Childe, apart from a probable lie about going teetotal. But that was no reason why he couldn’t enjoy taking a rise out of the vermin. It hadn’t gone too badly for a start. With luck Childe would go haring around to set up an alibi for too narrow a period.
    Sheila Winter’s body had been ‘cold as a slabba marble’, to quote the unfortunate potman who’d found her this morning. Littlejohn had yet to work it out exactly from heat loss and rigor, but the clientele of the Bat and Ball wouldn’t have ignored a fur-coated doll sitting alone in her car. She was certainly dumped there after closing time, but the killing had taken place earlier and elsewhere, with the pub car park a random choice for disposal, to divert suspicion from the actual murder scene.
    He called Control with a message for Superintendent Yeadings who would have left for home.
    â€˜What’s wrong with your radio?’ the duty sergeant asked sourly. ‘Try switching it on sometimes. We’ve been calling you for near on an hour. Mr Yeadings wants all you lot in his office in seven minutes. You’ll need to be near to make it on time.’
    So something urgent had come up to curtail the Boss’s wining and dining of Littlejohn. As he drove, Beaumont sorted his report for a debriefing. They’d need a warrant to search the garden centre. There was CCTV at the entrance, in the car park and at several points inside the complex, although not in the office. That last might have struck clerical staff as a bit too much of the Big Brother treatment. Even without it, there could be a comprehensive record of who came closest to the dead woman at work, and with luck it might throw up some very personal contacts.
    He wanted to commandeer those films before Childe beat him to them. And the sooner the Fraud experts went over the last quarter’s accounts, the sooner he could start to take Barry Childe apart and make him sweat some more. Not that he was a medal-winner in the brains department, so scarcely
likely to start up as a swindler. By nature Childe was more of a vicious thug, but there was no guessing what other courses than agriculture he’d been taking in the Institute of Felonry.
    The Boss might need some persuading that they had enough on the man to justify a search warrant, but ownership of the Vectra and his connection with the dead woman’s business could be reason enough for some magistrates he knew. They wouldn’t hesitate to produce