Napalm Hearts

by Seamus Heffernan

  Copyright © 2018 by Seamus Heffernan

  Cover Image: Adobe Stock © jgolby

  Design: soqoqo

  Editor: Jeff Gardiner

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Crooked Cat Books except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are used fictitiously.

  First Black Line Edition, Crooked Cat Books. 2018

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  and something nice will happen.

  To my parents,

  Gerry and Lorraine.

  Acknowledgements

  I wish to thank Brian Tordiff, Heather McDonald Pullen, Navada Miles, Lesley Breau, Myna James-Bouchard, Martin Castro, Alex Rake and Alisa Mappes for their interest and feedback as this work progressed. I also want to thank Ken Young for his legal advice.

  Finally, I especially thank Chelsey Laird for her kind words, good humour and total faith, in this and everything else.

  About the Author

  As a child, Seamus Heffernan’s parents indulged him far too much in his love of comic books, crime TV and pulp novels, and this is how he has decided to repay them. Prior to his writing career, he worked in education, journalism, marketing and politics, and earned an MA in criminology from the University of the Fraser Valley. Born in St. John’s, Newfoundland, he has called several places home, including a lengthy stint in London, England. He currently resides in British Columbia, where he splits his time between Abbotsford, Mission and Vancouver.

  His short fiction has previously appeared in The Raspberry and Louden Singletree. NAPALM HEARTS is his first book.

  Napalm Hearts

  “I used to advertise my loyalty and I don’t

  believe there is a single person I loved

  that I didn't eventually betray.”

  —Albert Camus, The Fall

  1

  The rain had long since stopped but I was still watching some of the drops work their way down my window as I twisted in my seat, wanting the best view of two people who were, with luck, about to break countless promises of devotion and at least one heart that was waiting anxiously at home. I sipped my coffee. It was still hot.

  Right now, it had been just under an hour sitting in this car since they went into the bar. This was the back door, and based on a tip from a bartender working inside, I was pretty sure this was where they’d end up. I revisited the coffee and re-crossed my legs, drumming my fingers lightly on the camera for a few moments. The music was on low, just enough to keep me company, and I flipped through the channels. My phone buzzed.

  “Hello, Charlie,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said, as breezy and friendly as you like. “How’s your night?”

  “Well, it’s another lovely evening in London’s back streets chronicling wayward hearts.”

  “Same old, then,” she said. I could hear her rustling a bag of sweets.

  “It’s a good living.” This was true, at least. “What are you doing at the office this late?”

  “Studying.” She chewed around the answer, but was at least polite enough to do it quietly.

  “I didn’t know you studied at work.” A shadow passing the window by the back door caught my attention. I reached for the camera. I was just making small talk but should be concentrating a bit more on the task approaching.

  “It’s quiet here. I get lots done.”

  “Mmmmm,” I said. The door shivered a bit, sticking, but then opened with a push. Without even a nervous glance, they’d slipped outside. Both tipsy. It was a bit dark, so l hoped they might lurch into the light a bit.

  “You got an e-mail here, requesting a meeting for tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” I said, bringing the camera to my eye.

  Charlie fell quiet. She’d figured it out.

  The wife in this case was determined not to be determined. She came to me with her suspicions, as they always did. I listened and gave her a decent cup of tea and the now-ubiquitous office tissue box. She said she thought her husband was having an affair, of course. The late nights, the new haircut, the recommitment to the gym. I told her the truth—in 99 percent of these cases, the suspicions were right. She said she wanted the proof. What she really wanted was to be wrong.

  There. He opened his arms. They came together. There was a lone bulb, wrapped in wire grilling over his head, haloing them. They laughed again, some shared moment from before or just the too-sweet feeling of getting carried away and doing something stupid.

  Their lips brushed, tentative at first, but soon with the expected urgency. I steadied the hand cradling the long zoom lens and started shooting. Charlie could hear the camera’s rapid-fire whirr and allowed herself a quick couple of chews.

  Finally, his face turned towards me, enough that his profile was captured. There would be no doubt now.

  I turned off the camera and slid it into its padded bag.

  “Tell me about this e-mail,” I said.

  She did. It was short and to the point: my presence had been requested tomorrow evening to meet a prospective client at his house. No specifics of the case were mentioned, but still my discretion was to be assumed. I didn’t quite twig the name right away, but the address gave me pause.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “You know, you can check your own phone when you’re out for this stuff, and then you wouldn’t need me to read your e-mails when you were out of the office.”

  “Then I might not need a secretary—”

  “Assistant.”

  “And then where would you study?” I wondered if she could hear my slight smile as she sighed, a little dramatically.

  “Did Ruddick call in about his stake-out?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s done. Got the shots, he says.”

  “Good,” I murmured, quickly flicking through the camera’s LCD screen and reviewing my own handiwork. Francis Ruddick, an ex-copper and current freelancer I use from time to time, was on another case, but the subject matter was very much the same.

  “Night, Thad,” she said, resigned to me not being great company right now.

  “Night, miss,” I said. I sat in the car for a while. They were still under the caged light, kissing, stroking faces. It would be bad to pull away too suddenly now, draw any attention to a dark car with tinted windows in a tight corner of Soho. Finally, however, they turned and went inside. He dropped a glove. They stopped to stoop and look, finding it quickly, laughing again as they compared each other’s hands.

  The same gloves. The same style of camel-hair overcoat. Maybe that’s what sparked it, at first. They worked together, of course. But maybe they had just crossed paths outside of it or in the office coffee room. A quick word, with the observation they liked the same clothes, the same shops. Maybe now they spent hours debating where they got their bespoke colognes made or where the best place for a haircut and shave was. The rugby scores. The dead air men fill with chatter about the things they can never control. And from there, they came together.

  I turned the key. The car purred to life.

  Funny old thing, love. It’s the most important thing in the world, the rush of it all. And a lot of hard work for the people it leaves behind.

  2

  Morning at the office, a quiet two-room walk-up in Shoreditch. Charlie was in, already putting together an invoice for last night’s work. I nodded a quick hello and walked into the cramped confines of my own space. The win
dows were streaked grey and yellow from the outside. The room itself was more like a closet, but the two stiff-backed chairs pushed perhaps six inches too close to my desk can lend a meeting that all-important sense of intimacy, trust and privacy. I fired up my laptop.

  Charlie was making herself some tea. “Coffee?” she called out, poking her head into the doorway. I nodded again, waiting for the e-mail to load up.

  And there it appeared. Andrew Claymore, requesting a meeting to discuss a matter of utmost importance. Claymore was a billionaire, the family fortune made through shipping over the past three generations. Now he ran several charities and sat on the boards of a couple more good causes. My quick and cursory online search turned this up but very little in the way of past indiscretions or embarrassing pap photos. Not much of a public figure—the overall vibe seemed to be one of quiet intellectualism and service.

  Charlie brought in the coffee. “You look nice,” she said.

  “Thanks.” This was a long-running joke here at Grayle Investigations between its two in-office employees. I only owned two suits, but I wore them religiously: one herringbone grey and one navy blue chalk stripe; rumpled and long-suffering Savile Row jobs, left behind by my father and preserved by my mother who passed them on many years ago when I moved here. “You too,” I added. She wore a T-shirt and track bottoms. She fanned sarcastically at her throat for a quick moment before getting back to the paperwork.

  Charlie was part-time for me, some admin help that allowed her to earn a few extra pounds while doing her master's at LSE, some program for (I think) social innovation and entrepreneurship. She’s shyly-not-shyly shown me a paper or two of hers, and I was smart enough to know she knew way more about that world than I did. If we didn’t have clients scheduled for in-office meetings, she knew she could dress a little slobby.

  “Do I have anything else going on today?” I asked.

  “You’ve got the wife from last night’s stake-out in at ten. You going to confirm for that thing that came in last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any idea what Claymore wants?”

  I re-read the e-mail again. Claymore and I have never met, and as far as I know our circles have no overlap at all. Normally, I would probably ask Charlie to draft a reply asking for a little background info to make sure neither of us is wasting the other person’s time. But here, I was more than a little intrigued. “None whatsoever,” I said.

  She stepped back into my office. “OK, I’m off to class,” she said, pulling on a coat. “Bills are ready to be posted. Don’t forget rent is due—”

  “End of the week, I know.”

  I tried to craft a response that had a business-first tone while still conveying polite genuine interest. I was still mulling this over a bit when I realised Charlie still stood in my doorway.

  “Yes?” I said, sipping the coffee.

  “Two things.” She drew a breath. “First, your ex-wife called again earlier. She said she wants to talk. It’s important.”

  “It always is.” I added a weary but well-practiced eye-roll. “Did she say anything else?” My ex, Roxanne, still lived in London. The fact I did as well is in part due to a fairly lucrative business I’d managed to build and also the fact my fourteen-year old daughter Amy lived in Roxanne’s Kent Street flat.

  “No,” Charlie said. “I don’t think she likes me.”

  “Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and assure you that is indeed the case,” I said.

  “You’re not much for softening the blows, are you?” she asked.

  “I find we get more done around here if we avoid unnecessary niceties,” I said. “What’s the second thing?”

  “It’s no big deal, but we need to talk later.”

  “What about?” I asked, but she had already turned back towards her desk and grabbed her bag.

  “Nothing major. But if you could make some time tomorrow, that’d be great.”

  I fiddled with my pen for a moment, tapping it against the laptop’s smooth exterior.

  “Why can’t we just talk now?” I called out.

  “Because I have to go,” she shouted over her shoulder. “Have fun at Fancypants Manor.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but I was almost sure she was out of earshot. I was probably more frustrated than I should have been, but it annoyed me that I had two conversations coming up with no idea what either of them might be about.

  At least the Claymore meeting would be about work and, with any luck, be surprise-free. With that thought, I was reminded of my day’s other duties. I stepped out, refilled my coffee, and got last night’s file into final order. I blew some dust off my desk, tucked some of the more cumbersome and ragged file folders out of sight’s way, and re-knotted my tie. By the time the front buzzer went off a little later, I had decided to push one of the chairs in front of my desk another inch or so closer. She was a tiny woman, I remembered, and I didn’t want to have to repeat anything. It would be hard enough. It always was.

  3

  Night time in Chelsea. When I arrived to Claymore’s walk-up, he opened the door himself. I barely had time to shuffle awkwardly as I struck the great teak slab once with the leaden, lion-faced knocker.

  “Mr. Grayle?” he asked. I nodded, and he widened the entrance, steering me in with an unfussy wave of his arm.

  Inside was large enough, but hardly palatial. He was that kind of money I and other interlopers in British society had gleaned the trappings of for ourselves along the way: Old money. Old money in England was not showy money. It was enjoyed quietly, usually in summer homes and tweedy hunting trips, often in fine whiskies but always in the Sloaney lilt of a voice, that Oxbridge sureness. We entered the drawing room, where he motioned me towards an aged leather couch, dark green and supple.

  “Drink?” he asked, stepping towards the bar. I nodded. Without asking for my specifics, he handed me a Talisker, neat. The glass was heavy, crystal. I liked how it tugged at my wrist as I raised it to my mouth for a polite sip. He settled across from me in an old wingback. Straightening his back as I slipped out of my overcoat, he drew a breath, sipped his scotch. And then he asked, “So, you’re a detective?”

  I too sat back, consciously trying to match his posture. “Actually, I just call myself an investigator.”

  “American?” he asked. Claymore’s hair was still a pretty robust brown, parted sharply to the left. It had, however, pushed back from his forehead a bit, making more room for his eyes. His lips were thin, and the chin a bit soft, even if he himself didn’t necessarily come off as such. He was wearing a cable-knit sweater over a button-down shirt and pressed corduroys. I put him in his mid-fifties.

  I nodded. “I was born in Seattle. My mom was from there, my dad from here. He was in the Royal Navy, then Defence Intelligence. We moved around a lot. He passed away a while ago. I had liked it here, so I moved back.” I crossed my leg, letting my left foot dangle off my right knee. “The benefit of a UK passport.”

  He swirled the whisky, once. “How does one, then, become an investigator such as yourself? I’m genuinely curious. You’re the first one I’ve met.”

  “Well, I used to be a school teacher. And a few other things.” When I offered nothing further, he cocked his head a bit, inviting me to go on.

  “I like working for myself,” I said, shrugging. “And it turns out that a bit of snooping here and there and unearthing the more clandestine of people’s undertakings is far more profitable than herding a bunch of rowdy school kids.”

  My attempt at humour hung in the air for a moment. He smiled thinly. “Yes,” he finally said, taking another sip. “Quite.”

  I let the silence stick around for a bit. It wasn’t awkward. Some clients like to get to know you. And some like to know what you’re made of. He was both, apparently.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have much experience in these matters,” he began. “If I’m being completely frank, I simply picked you out of the directory. Yours seemed a smaller operation that might be able to help me wi
th my problem, while also adhering to the highest discretion. I looked—you have some good reviews online. I’m not interested in big firms or multiple associates working this case, as I’m sure will become apparent when I explain where we are and why you’re here.”

  I nodded, swirling my own whisky a bit, letting that old friend Quiet do its part in moving the conversation along. Eventually, Claymore resumed.

  “My wife Lisa has been missing for five days,” he began. “While she has in the past been gone a day or even two without calling, this is now grounds for serious concern. She is, you see, young, beautiful and impetuous. I married late and for the wrong reasons—convenience and beauty. It would now appear I’m paying for that vanity.”

  “Have you called the police?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, that’s out of the question, I’m afraid.”

  “Why?”

  He let his hands open in his lap for a moment and stared down at them, palms flat against the top of his thighs. Finally, he looped his fingers around each other and straightened his chin. “No one can know what it is that I am about to show you.”

  I said nothing.

  “Do we enjoy that confidentiality?” he asked. “Is this a protected relationship?”

  “Well, you’re not a client yet. And even if you were, if you show me something where someone is in danger or is evidence of a significant crime, Scotland Yard might not be too happy with me keeping my mouth shut.”

  He pressed his lips together, tight. He didn’t care for that answer.

  “Mr. Claymore, I’m not a mercenary or even a bully. I can’t be paid to ignore certain things. You were right, however; I am discreet. I typically work alone or with one or two associates who I trust implicitly. I am the only person my clients deal with directly about their concerns when a case has been accepted. So, I’m trusted with a lot of people’s secrets. Possibly even some of your people’s secrets.” I let that sit there between us for a moment. I had put my tumbler down already.