Mrs Heller raised her eyebrows. ‘I don’t pay staff to watch empty rooms, and they know it. Also, the next entry has the same timing. A noisy party in Number One. He’d accept that somebody had slammed the door, and switch straight over.’
‘The porter doesn’t have an indicator to show which doors are open and which are closed?’
‘Why the hell should he?’
‘No reason,’ Keith said. ‘So there we have one possible scenario, as they say on the box. He shoots. The system comes on. By luck, or because he knows to listen for the hum, he stays out of sight until it goes off again. His ex-friend is dead or dying. He lugs him outside. There are no bloodstains on the way so presumably he was dead by then. Next he – I’m back to the live one again – fetches the bowl from the kitchen and uses the chairback thing to mop up as much as he can of the blood, and chucks it into the back of the car – with the body, if that’s where it is.
‘Then, with some idea of confusing things and covering his tracks, he swaps the damaged chair over to his own chalet, Sixteen. But he makes one mistake. If he’d left two chairbacks in Sixteen and the missing one in Fifteen, the hole in the chair and the bloodstains might have gone unnoticed for long enough and we’d have had Hell’s own job to work out when it had happened.
‘All that was left to do was to shut the door and scram. That was . . . what time did you say?’
‘11.48. One man alone in the white estate-car.’
‘And that didn’t make the porter think?’
‘Why should it? I’m surprised that he noted it down at all Men often arrive with one friend and leave with another. Dammit, the system’s only designed as a check on customers’ accounts, and on the staff doing their jobs.’
Mrs Heller’s manner was beginning to show irritation, and Keith realised that, under the calm and commanding exterior, she was feeling the pressure. Anyone else he would have recommended not to get their knickers twisted, but somehow the words died unspoken. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘an estate-car isn’t ideal for hiding a body in.’
‘D-down behind the front seat with an old coat over it,’ Wallace said.
‘Or not,’ said Mrs Heller thoughtfully. ‘I think I’ll have a search made of the grounds. And the roof-spaces of the two chalets.’
‘Good idea,’ Keith said. ‘Better idea, leave it to the police. It may not all have happened just as I said, but something happened. You’ve got reason to believe that a serious crime was committed. You’re obliged to call the fuzz.’
‘Definitely no,’ Mrs Heller said.
‘Then I’ll have to.’
‘You came here in confidence,’ Wallace said.
‘Look, we’re past that point,’ Keith said. ‘There’s no doubt a serious crime was committed. All right, there is just the faintest possibility that the whole thing’s a frame-up, but that in itself would be a crime. Anyway, a bookie would give you a thousand to one against a frame-up. Somebody got shot, and if I sit on that sort of information I could be put out of business.’
Mrs Heller sighed. ‘So could we,’ she said. ‘We have enemies in authority who’d like fine to close us down. But we have friends as well. If we go to the fuzz with vague theories there’ll be a long investigation and we’re finished; but if we can go to them with a complete case and with proof that’ll stand up in court, we can get it handled discreetly. We’re popular with the fiscal’s office. And don’t look smug,’ she added. ‘It’s not what you think. We’ve been able to help them a lot in the past. The girls get pillow talk. And, once, we let the police listen in when the cash from a robbery was being divvied up in one of our chalets. So if it’s quick and simple we can survive. That’s why I want a degree of proof that’ll satisfy the law before I’ll go running to it.’
Keith set his jaw stubbornly. ‘I can’t go along with suppression of evidence about murder by gunshot,’ he said. Even to himself, his voice sounded high-pitched and querulous. ‘I’m a registered dealer in firearms and my living depends on my remaining that way. So does yours,’ he added to Wallace.
Mrs Heller and Wallace exchanged a long look. ‘Have you explained to him?’ she asked.
‘Not yet.’
‘I don’t want to know,’ Keith said. ‘I’ve been here long enough. I’ve things to do. And I’m hungry. Call the police, or I will.’
Mrs Heller looked at her watch and pulled a menu out of her drawer. ‘Dinner should be on now,’ she said. ‘Order what you like, it’s on the house. Just listen a little longer.’
Keith’s head was beginning to throb and a great lethargy was creeping over him, along with a continuing sense of unreality. He was about to refuse and leave, but he took a glance at the menu. It was an exceptionally good menu. The horrific prices in the margin made it more rather than less attractive. ‘Pâté,’ he said weakly. ‘Dover sole, strawberries and cream, cheeseboard, coffee and a cigar.’
‘And to drink?’
‘Pint of Guinness from the pub in the village, and a Grand Marnier to follow.’
Mrs Heller suppressed a ladylike shudder. ‘Certainly,’ she said. She pressed the lever on her intercom and commanded that a dining table be brought in.
‘I think I’ll just have an omelette,’ Wallace said.
‘I’d better phone my wife,’ Keith said. ‘I think she’s cooking up something special for me tonight.’
‘We can give you just as good a meal as she can.’
‘I didn’t mean food. On second thoughts,’ Keith said, ‘let Wallace do the phoning. If he speaks for me, she’ll know I’m not somewhere I shouldn’t be.’
*
The pâté was real foie gras, the toast crisp and hot. ‘All right,’ Keith said with his cheek full. ‘You talk, I’ll listen. Then we’ll decide which of us calls the police.’
‘I doubt it,’ Wallace said. ‘You’d take in what I’m going to say more easily if you’d seen the place at a weekend, or at any other time than a Tuesday afternoon at a time of year when most of the moneyed are away abroad. These girls make money. And the original objective of this place was, and still is, to protect the girls’ earnings so that they can keep what they make and retire before the life kills them or some man takes it off them.’
Keith pointed his knife at Wallace. ‘A Co-op. That’s what you’ve started,’ he said. ‘Are you affiliated to the Movement?’
Wallace had taken the opportunity to grab a hasty bite of his omelette. He chewed quickly and swallowed. ‘A Co-op, if you like. But it’s a Co-op that grosses over a million a year. Any girl that doesn’t pull in a hundred grand asks her best friend what she’s doing wrong. About half of that stays available for reinvestment.’
‘And you’ve been going how long?’
‘Eight years, four months,’ said Mrs Heller.
‘Don’t bother trying to do any sums,’ Wallace said. ‘We don’t put the money in a piggy-bank, we put it to work. Mostly, we’ve been buying up run-down businesses and revitalising them, selling and starting again. But we’ll tackle any investment that looks profitable. We’ve backed inventions, and several of them have paid off And if one of the girls wants to retire as proprietor of some particular type of business – one of them wanted a greyhound stadium, would you believe? – we buy it and let her share the running of it so that she knows what she’s doing before she takes over. One of our retired ladies owns and runs the best hotel in – but I’d better not say where. I tell you, Keith, a girl can work here for three years – and that’s about as long as they last – and retire rich, but rich.’
‘I was wrong,’ Keith said. ‘It’s not a Co-op. You’ve launched a bloody female Mafia on an unsuspecting world.’
‘You’re not far wrong,’ Mrs Heller said. ‘And the money side of it we owe to Wal. He has a genius for making money turn over.’
Keith just nodded. Since Wallace had joined his business, the turnover and the profits had trebled.
‘Laundrettes, boutiques, even a finance house,’ Wallace said. ‘But the biggest o
f all is property. We got hooked up with a small contractor. He’d been successful in getting a housing contract but the bank wouldn’t back him any more. We backed him and made a nice profit. He was a bad manager and made damn-all. So we took him over and went in for up-market speculative housing.’
Keith flushed the last of the pâté out of his mouth with a draught of the Guinness. ‘With one of your girls as manager?’ he asked.
‘As chairperson. We’ve got a damn good surveyor to manage the operation. If you can find the right sites it’s money for old rope. Finding sites can be a problem. But one of the new towns had a proposition. They wanted a golf course and weren’t allowed the money to pay for it. So they made up a package, and we came in with the best tender. We provided the golf course, paid them a correspondingly reduced capital sum, and surrounded the golf course with top quality private housing for sale. Everybody wants to live next door to a golf course within easy commuting distance of a city. Then we sold off a package for a hotel complex and conference centre. We came out nearly a million quid ahead of the game.’
Keith started on his sole. ‘None of this seems relevant,’ he said, ‘but I’ll listen for just as long as you feed me.’
‘It’s relevant all right.’ Wallace was lagging behind. He bolted a few mouthfuls and set off again. ‘Came the day when the decision was taken to bring a pipeline ashore at Firth Bay, only a mile or two from where the rig-building yard had suddenly gained orders for a steady supply of oil platforms. Suddenly a small town was having to grow to accommodate a large number of managerial types and very highly paid workers. It also happens to be in an area with outstanding recreational possibilities, and not too inaccessible from the centres of population given some expenditure on roads.
‘Trouble was, the whole thing coincided with a government squeeze on public investment.
‘So we contacted the various local authorities and made a proposition, much on the lines of the new town one but expanded out of recognition. We would finance the whole package except for what grants and loans they could get from the Scottish Office. They’d get their town to a high standard, including marina, with golf courses and so on and so forth to a standard that’d attract national competitions. Of course, their piggy eyes lit up immediately, because the rating income alone will enable them to clear every slum in their combined territories and give every councillor a chauffeured Jag.
‘Our profit was to come out of the private housing again, and our share of the equity of sites for the shopping centre and offices. And we were reckoning on getting that money in without too much of a time-lag.
‘So we went ahead with our share of the infrastructure and started on the house-building.
‘Next thing we know, the government’s toughened its squeeze, there’s what amounts to a ban on mortgages, the pipeline’s hit a technical snag and the whole project’s gone slow because of political and contractual in-fighting.
‘We’d already made a start to building our houses. Now we had to make a decision. Stopping could be damned expensive – unfinished work and unbuilt materials rotting or being vandalised, workforce scattered, subcontracts lapsing with entitlement to compensation and so on. On the other hand, at a time of roaring inflation it could be a good investment to keep on building. The houses’d be worth half as much again by the time we sold them. The extra cost of a few watchmen was trifling.
‘The snag, of course, was the drain on capital. We pledged everything that we could, and it wasn’t going to be enough. So we decided to go public.’
Keith dropped his knife and fork, and his voice went squeaky with horror. ‘Wal,’ he said, ‘not even you could get away with offering shares on the Stock Exchange in a brothel.’
‘We’re not offering shares in any such thing,’ Wallace said patiently. ‘We’re offering shares in a sound and substantial group of companies. No company in the world can afford to be fussy about the possible origins of all its capital. I dare say that some of the investors will be the real Mafia.’
‘The male one,’ said Mrs Heller. ‘The point is that shares go on the market in three weeks time. If anything rocks the boat we have a financial disaster on our hands.’
Keith finished his sole and sighed. It had been delicious. ‘The sudden revelation that the headquarters and foundation of the group of companies was a knocking-shop would rock the boat all right,’ Keith said. ‘And a murder thrown in for good measure wouldn’t help a lot. But it’s your financial disaster. My heart bleeds for all the young ladies who’ll lose their dowries, but you’ve shown me no good reason why I should get my neck in a sling with the fuzz by compounding a felony.’
‘Then,’ Wallace said, ‘here it comes. We’re making a good living out of the business, you and I, but nothing like enough to support the investment in what you call stock and what we both know is your private collection of ancient armaments at several thousand quid each.’
‘Only for the best pieces,’ Keith said. ‘And you know it’s money well invested.’
‘Considering the rate that you borrowed it at, yes. You may recall that I negotiated very favourable loans for you, even considering the low rate then prevailing, both for the business and for your loan on Briesland House, repayment period unspecified.’
The first strawberries turned to dust and ashes in Keith’s mouth. ‘That wasn’t –?’
‘That was our finance house,’ Mrs Heller said. ‘We agreed to it as a favour to Wal. The finance house is backing the development business. If the shit hits the fan, we’ll let those two go to the wall and save the rest.’
‘The liquidator,’ Wallace said, ‘will undoubtedly call in all outstanding loans. You’ll have to sell your whole collection or borrow again, and the present interest rate is an all-time high.’
Keith did a few sums in his head and disliked the answers intensely. He glared at his partner. ‘You’re the capo of a female Mafia,’ he said, ‘and I don’t believe this is really happening.’
Wallace helped himself to biscuits and Cheddar. He always favoured the harder cheeses although his missing fingers made the holding of a cheese-knife difficult. ‘You’d better believe it,’ he said. ‘Only I’m not the capo, Debbie is. I’m only their financial adviser. And yours. And I’m advising you very strongly to play along.’
Debbie Heller smiled angelically. ‘I’m told that you’re quite an investigator where guns and shooting are concerned. If you help us out by investigating this . . . this suspected crime, and we can thereby save our bacon, you can forget your loans and we’ll pay for your time on top, plus a bonus.’
There was a lengthening silence. Keith popped another strawberry into his mouth. It tasted much better. He washed it down with the last of his Guinness. Marvellous. ‘I wouldn’t expect to work for a lesser hourly rate than one of your girls would charge me,’ he said.
Wallace whistled, but Mrs Heller only raised her charming eyebrows. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Why should you, as long as you put the same dedication into it?’
‘You may not like what I uncover.’
‘And I may love it. You may find two old friends walking around, one of them with his arm in a sling.’
‘What,’ Keith asked, ‘would you consider a reasonable bonus if I did save your bacon?’
‘What would you?’
‘The Ferguson rifle out of that chalet.’
Wallace choked on his coffee. ‘Now just a holy minute,’ he said.
‘Let him have it,’ Mrs Heller said. ‘It’s just an old gun.’
‘It’s a bloody valuable old gun,’ Wallace said. ‘It’s a piece of history and a collector’s dream. There were only about a hundred made, and they went out to America during the War of Independence. God alone knows what happened to most of the rest of them but there’s one in a museum in New Jersey. Keith, I told you what we paid for those guns. Without the Ferguson, would you pay us our money back for the rest of them?’
Keith crossed his fingers under the table. ‘Certainly,’ h
e said.
‘Well all right. But, Debbie, I’ve a feeling you’re being conned.’
‘If we are,’ Mrs Heller said, ‘you share in the profits. And it’s worth it if we can only find out. So don’t get your balls in an uproar.’
Keith attacked the cheese and biscuits with enthusiasm. Of recent years he had come to appreciate a good meal. He never put on an ounce of weight. Molly, however, had put on a pound or two since the baby was born, and when Molly went on a diet everybody did the same. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I can’t guarantee that you’ll like the answer.’
‘Just get me the answer and leave the bacon-saving to me.’
When the table had been removed, Keith took a pull at his cigar and burped politely. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘So I don’t go running to Chief Inspector Munro. You believe that the whole thing might be a frame-up, or a relatively harmless mishap. Why not let the sleeping dog lie?’
Mrs Heller shook her head vehemently. The glasses slid down her nose and she pushed them back with an impatient finger. ‘Bugger that,’ she said. The words sounded almost ladylike on her lips. ‘I want to know. There may be a wave of events about to break over us. And if there’s been a murder done . . .’
‘What, then?’ Keith asked.
‘Then I’ll have a bloody difficult decision to make.’
Keith looked at her. She meant it. ‘We’ve got two lines of enquiry,’ he said. ‘The first starts inside here. We need a detailed examination of who did what, where and when. We need everything anyone can remember. We need a list of all the times and events in your log-book and so on. And we need a detailed examination of the chalets, waste-bins, contents of vacuum cleaners, what’s missing, that sort of thing.’
‘I’ll see to that,’ Mrs Heller said. ‘I’m not having outsiders trampling around, barging in on couples and frightening the clients. You’ll get everything gathered up for you. And I’ll get all that she can remember out of Annette as soon as she gets back.’
‘Is she included in your security clamp-down, or could she be saying the wrong thing?’
The Game Page 5