A Matter of Time continued

 The assorted rank and file of cops and community support officers had failed to find anything except statements from people in the vicinity of the robbery and so it fell to the CID to delve further. Harton and his colleagues began the probably pointless task of reading through every statement from everyone questioned. Out of the twenty statements Harton decided that three people must have seen more than they were letting on, and he went to see them. Later on, hauled in front of the Superintendent he admitted that frustration had got the better of him. Anyway, how was he to know that the woman’s sister was a magistrate? In the old days it was standard practice if people would not talk. You nabbed them and locked them up for obstruction. All Harton had done was the same as he had been doing for years. But that was apparently not the done thing anymore. Harton was just as his type of cop was portrayed on the telly. A dinosaur.
And so, whilst not actually suspended, Harton was sat looking at the old files. Just to give him something to do.

In Mike Harton’s mind he was right. He was a cop, a detective, and it was his job to get to the bottom of the case. To solve it. No matter what. He respected the guv that binned him actually. Like Harton he was an old Sunderland hand and knew the place well. He was also extremely supportive of his officers but he worked in the realms of what was nowadays called ‘management’ and had his hands not tied, but handcuffed. A bit like the bloody woman that got Harton into this mess. She’d been handcuffed too. Sod it. If ‘cold cases’ were good enough for the television then they were good enough for Mike Harton.

This one went back to 1976; one of Sunderland’s few unsolved killings. Three years after the lads solitary FA Cup triumph and one of the hottest summers on record. But this one took place in March, long before the heat arrived, even in the north east. A summer that John McCallum would never see. Harton did some rapid arithmetic, had he lived McCallum would be sixty three this year. As it was, after the night of his thirtieth birthday he was found lying in a pool of his own blood next to one of the pillars of the Alexandra Bridge.
Pathology put the time of death at half past midnight. And they were very precise about it. Certain in fact. McCallums watch, broken it was assumed in the struggle that led to his death, had stopped at 12.34 and that seemed to corroborate the path report. The cause of death was a stab wound to the heart, but the evidence pointed to a fight. A fight to the death.
McCallums knuckles were torn and bloodied, two of his teeth were missing and the incisors loosened. Sure signs that he had been fighting. The scrape marks on the shoes evidenced that he had been dumped at the foot of the bridge rather than killed there. Or so the SOCO, or whatever they were called then, had said.
Statements from McCallums friends and relatives pointed out that he was going through a messy divorce but that for his birthday his ex had tried to put their differences aside, she said for the sake of their three year old son, and had put on a party tea like you would for a kid. McCallum had loved it but with a couple of bottles of Maxim inside him had become too flirty with his ex and she had asked him to leave. It had got acrimonious and McCallum had stormed off in a temper. That was at about six thirty in the evening.

Later, witness statements put him in a number of pubs in the Roker and Seaburn area of the City. McCallum was quite well known in the area, the home of the ‘Casuals’ the ‘firm’ of Sunderland football hooligans. Here Harton allowed himself a wry smile. Quite a few years after McCallums death he was a young uniformed copper and his dealings with the Seaburn Casuals were all about both ‘sides’ letting off steam, with fists and truncheons, planks, bottles and knuckle-dusters. And although after a scrap the two sides would never exactly sit down over a pint, there was a bit of respect. All long gone now. The Casuals of those days were now well into middle age, just like Harton.
By the simple expedient of counting the drinks from the statements, Harton calculated that McCallum had drunk about eight to ten pints. Enough to make him a bit unsteady then, but by no means enough to incapacitate him.
As for enemies, there were a few people that McCallum had rubbed up the wrong way but none that bore him a real grudge. None that would surely deliberately kill.
But then McCallums death could not have been an accident. The pathology report not only described the fatal would as a stab, but even went on to give the opinion that the murder weapon was a bread knife or similar long-bladed kitchen knife.

Harton trawled on into the statements, getting deeper and deeper into the case. That he had no real empathy with McCallum was not important. McCallum was a case, and cases needed answers. Harton was a cop, and cops found answers.
The file contained fifteen statements from observation witnesses; Harton discarded those from earlier in the evening drinking session and concentrated on the five statements taken from drinkers in the Blue Bell at Fulwell where McCallum was eventually ejected from a lock-in at 11:30. According to the landlord, McCallum had been getting more and more morose and aggressive, snapping and snarling at people until he was causing a disturbance. Out he went, according to the landlord, walking slightly unsteadily towards the town centre.
And that was the last anyone apart from the killer, saw of John McCallum alive.

Harton went back to the ex-wife’s statement and began noting a list of questions. Why had they split up? Who decided that the marriage was at an end? Was she still alive and what had happened to the kid? Taking an A4 pad he began to make notes and by the time he had finished the daylight had long since gone and it was time to call it a day and go home.