Rat Poison by Margaret Duffy

out.’
    â€˜He’s next to useless,’ Patrick said. ‘As well as being on the booze for most of the time the man is genuinely mentally impaired. He forgets just about everything he’s told about five minutes afterwards. In my opinion he’s on the way to some kind of alcohol-induced early-onset dementia. All I really got out of him was where Gill’s living, which he has written down on a piece of paper and keeps in his wallet. He has to remind himself of the address every time he goes there. There was fear there too, not necessarily of me – just fear.’
    â€˜Yet he can still drive a car.’
    â€˜Sort of.’
    â€˜Did it cross your mind that he was pretending to be stupid?’
    â€˜Only to begin with. Then he muttered something about being out in Iraq. He’s probably an ex-squaddie – with his mind affected by what he’s seen and done.’
    We met Matthew in the hall.
    â€˜This is the job, Matthew,’ Patrick said, referring to his state of dishevelment before wearily making his way upstairs for a shower and some sleep. ‘Still want it?’
    He did not see the boy’s reaction but I did.
    Oh, brother. Oh, yes. The black jeans and matching leather jacket. That belt, the grinning skull, its red shining eyes. Wow!
    Before making a move, and cautious as ever, Carrick had put a watch on Charlie Gill’s house, which was in Twerton. Nothing moved. No one went in or out. Then, getting impatient, he sent his temporary sergeant, Frank Keen, and a constable to have a quiet snoop around the exterior. They found an ‘open’ window and got in. The place was deserted but a TV was switched on and, in the kitchen, food had been removed from the fridge to prepare a meal. In the living room a coffee table had been knocked over and although these combined factors were not particularly sinister in themselves they did suggest that Gill had left in a hurry.
    I was still carrying on liaising between SOCA and Bath and Bristol CID departments. Patrick had contacted Commander Greenway who said he was content, for the present, for the local police to get on with their investigations with us present if needed. Patrick, meanwhile, was finding out all he could about Colin Andrews, the manager of the Ring o’ Bells.
    As predicted, Carrick got almost nowhere with Matlock in connection with the various charges against him, which were mostly of the oaf-in-attendance at beatings and assaults variety, and he was put on remand with a request for urgent psychiatric reports. Despite Patrick’s comments to the contrary the DCI was of the opinion that his suspect was playing dumb. Carrick had already had another setback when the medic at the remand centre had contacted him to tell him that Derek Jessop’s condition was no longer considered good enough for him to be interrogated as he had developed a temperature and an infection was feared.
    Five days later Charlie Gill’s bloated body was fished out of the River Avon. Under the gaze of an audience of tourists who watched avidly from the perfect viewpoint near Pulteney Bridge, the police had removed it, with difficulty, from where it had become jammed on the weir a short distance downstream. After being carried, with even more difficulty, up the narrow steps to road level the corpse was taken away in a plain van.

SEVEN
    G ill had been killed with a single shot to the head but not before being subjected to a savage beating.
    â€˜We need to know exactly what you did to the man to enable us to know what someone else did to him afterwards,’ Carrick said, pausing in a whirlwind progress through the nick when he saw Patrick and me.
    â€˜Nothing,’ Patrick answered in surprise. ‘I told you I didn’t.’
    â€˜But look, Gill didn’t let you tie a rope around his ankles and hang him from a beam without some kind of struggle!’
    â€˜Yes, he did. I said I’d been ordered to put him in