“I can’t tell you anything.”
“I think you can,” said Harry.
Tony Gallimore laughed sourly. “Elizabeth used to talk about you. She said you were sharp enough on the surface, but that crazy obsessions would take hold of you, then you became unreasonable. I hope I’m not going to be one of those obsessions.”
“She seems to have spent most of her time discussing me with her fancy men,” said Harry wearily.
Gallimore started to rise from his chair. “I don’t mean anything to you, Mr. Devlin. The one link between us has gone. Now why don’t you go home and start putting your life back together again? That’s something we all need to do.”
“Sit down.”
Harry took the gun from his jacket. It was a 9mm Mauser automatic, short-barrelled but, Peanuts confirmed, effective enough at short range. Harry had pressured the pimp first to admit that he still kept an unlicensed firearm as a souvenir of his days as a hard man who handled tricky jobs for the proprietor of a Caribbean night spot, then to lend it to him for the night.
Peanuts had been reluctant. “Man, you don’t know the damage this thing can do. Okay, people call it a ladies’ gun, but you can bet it’ll still cut a big man down. And if you open up some guy’s stomach, I sure as hell ain’t gonna help you beat the rap.” But Harry had persisted, calling in all his owed favours, and at length his client had given in and handed over the gun. “You going to use this, man?” Peanuts asked after showing how to cock the pistol. Harry had said simply, “I need to be prepared.”
So now he was prepared and Tony Gallimore sat down again, mesmerised by the Mauser. Slivers of sweat shone on his forehead.
“Okay, let’s hear it. When did you first meet Liz?”
Gallimore kept the Mauser under an unwavering gaze. He was breath|ng rapidly. “Three months ago. She was here one night alone. Coghlan had disappeared somewhere, up to no good as usual. Some men were bothering her. I sorted the problem out, the lads on the door made sure their feet never touched the ground. We got talking. That’s how it began.”
“And you became lovers “ Harry squeezed every last trace of emotion out of his voice. He might have been a newscaster on Radio 4.
That night. I simply couldn’t get enough of her. She was beautiful, warm, vivacious. Not like some of the plastic dolls we get here. She was a real woman.”
“And Coghlan?”
“He terrified her,” said Gallimore, still watching the gun. “I told her not to worry - I had some connections. You don’t survive in this business without knowing one or two rough people. But it wasn’t a straightforward situation. There was my wife, too. She’s a jealous woman. I told Elizabeth we had to be careful, for both our sakes. It was our secret. Elizabeth liked that, it seemed to add to the excitement for her. She took a job at the shop where she used to work in town, it was handy for lunchtimes and gave her an excuse to be out if Coghlan ever got nosey. We moved round the hotel circuit.”
“When did you decide to make it permanent?”
“There were difficulties,” said Gallimore. He twisted a little in his chair, as if to illustrate what he was saying. “I needed her, of course I did. But I didn’t want to leave my wife, nor the club. I’m not a rich man, and Elizabeth had no money of her own. Coghlan had a tight grip on the purse-strings. She had found out that he was short of ready cash. The money that went on his gambling was criminal, she used to say.”
He mustered a wry grin, his first attempt to try on Harry the charm-the-pants-off-you style that Trisha had said was his stock-in-trade. Harry tapped the Mauser impatiently on the surface of the desk. Running the tip of his tongue over his lips, Gallimore continued, “I asked her about divorcing you, but she said you couldn’t afford heavy alimony. Besides,” - again a hint of a winning smile- “whoever made money out of suing a solicitor? She said you weren’t a fat cat, more like Robin Hood in an old suit from C & A. All the same, she kept pressing me to make something happen. That was how she came to cut her wrist.”
Harry leaned forward. “Tell me.”
“I’d arranged to meet her, we’d booked a room at the North Atlantic. She was just getting into the bath. She’d already sliced through one wrist, there was blood all over the carpet.” He half-closed his eyes. “Fortunately, there wasn’t much damage done. I got her to a doctor who was able to stitch her up without asking too many difficult questions. She spun some cock-and-bull story to Coghlan, although she said he was so bound up in his own affairs that he hardly noticed. She thought he had another woman. And she said she’d tried to kill herself because she couldn’t see us ever getting together. Said she was depressed and couldn’t carry on. She was trying to push me into a corner, force me to leave my wife. Oh, yes, I understood how her mind worked. But I didn’t intend to lose her.”
“No?” Harry didn’t bother to hide his disbelief.
“No. Whatever you may think, Mr. Devlin, we cared deeply for each other. And in any case, we were overtaken by events.”
“She announced her pregnancy?”
“Yes. At first, I wondered whether I should believe her. She might have been making it up, I wouldn’t have put it past her. But she showed me the confirmation from the testing centre. Admitted she’d been careless, hadn’t taken proper precautions. So, you see, I had to make up my mind and choose.”
“And?”
“And I chose Elizabeth,” said Gallimore. “She was wild, unreliable, at times untruthful - I don’t have to tell you that. But she was everything a woman should be. God forgive me, I had to have her. Somehow I broke the news to my wife. It’s the worst task I’ve ever had to undertake. If I hadn’t loved Elizabeth so much, I could never have hardened my heart to resist the tears, the pleading in her voice.” A remote look, another excerpt from his seductive repertoire, came over the tanned, blemish-free face. “You may think you loved your wife, Mr. Devlin, but I - I worshipped her.”
What chilled Harry most was the memory of how heavily Liz had fallen for this man, with his soap opera rhetoric and over-rehearsed mannerisms. He skewered Gallimore with his gaze. “Did you know she was being followed?”
“You heard about that? Yes, she told me. I found it hard to understand. God forgive me, to begin with I thought she might have invented it, perhaps she hadn’t believed me when I said we would soon be together and she would be free of Coghlan. She told me he’d put one of his men on to her, she was sure that he’d realised she was seeing someone else and was determined to get the proof. I tried to reassure her. If he had a new girlfriend of his own, why would he bother? It didn’t make sense to me. Again I couldn’t be sure she was telling the truth. But I knew she was afraid of him, said how ruthless he could be if someone got in his way.”
A security guard in East London had discovered that to his cost, thought Harry. “Did she recognise the man who followed her?” he asked.
“No. He wasn’t one of Coghlan’s usual hangers-on, she said. Eventually she caught the man off guard and came close enough to see that he’d been in a fight recently. His cheek had been badly scratched. When I learned about that, I knew who the man was.”
Gripping the Mauser tightly, Harry said, “Go on.”
Gallimore waved at their surroundings. The happy faces of the artistes in the photographs beamed back at him. “One of the regular punters here. He was always hanging around backstage as well, though I’d noticed he took care to shift whenever I came anywhere near. A hard man. People called him Joe. I never heard his second name.”
“Rourke.”
“Is that it?”
“So what did you do?”
The reply was a non-commital movement of the shoulders. Gallimore was beginning to relax. Perhaps he had decided that Harry would never use the gun. “I told her not to worry. I didn’t believe anything would come of it. It isn’t unknown for men to follow attractive women around. Perhaps he had a thing for her, I didn’t know. She thought he’d been sent by Mick Coghlan to spy on her, but I couldn’t see that. What wou
ld have been the point? Coghlan wasn’t short of female company by all accounts. I said she was working herself into a lather over nothing.”
“What happened after that?”
“I had to go to Birmingham. We were negotiating a fresh loan from the brewery, re-financing this place. I had a couple of long meetings. All Wednesday and most of Thursday I was hammering out the deal. I promised Elizabeth that when I got back, I would sort everything out. We’d soon be together. She was panicking, Coghlan was down in London, also on some kind of business, but she didn’t dare go back to their house. She was convinced he was going to harm her. God forgive me, I thought she was being childish.”
“When were you due back in Liverpool?”
“She said she’d meet me at Lime Street. If the train was on time, we would have an hour or so together before I had to be back here. I’d booked a room for us at a place up in Mount Pleasant.”
“Train?” asked Harry. “Why not drive? It isn’t far.”
“I’m banned from driving,” said Gallimore. “One of the penalties of being in this trade, I suppose. They picked me up on the M62 last Easter, I was twice over the limit, got a twelve months’ ban. My lawyer’s Pike, you must know him, he said I got off lightly.”
“So did you meet her at the station?”
“Of course not. The train was on time for once, but she wasn’t there. I waited for twenty minutes until it was obvious that she wasn’t going to show. I couldn’t understand it. I called the hotel, but they hadn’t seen her or taken a message. So I came back here.”
Harry recalled the man’s abstracted manner on the night of Liz’s murder. His story explained that, but it was still worth digging deeper.
“Carry on.”
Still looking at the gun, Gallimore said, “There’s nothing much more I can add. Until I read the papers the following day, I had no idea about what had happened. I couldn’t believe it. She was so alive, so . . .”
“You weren’t sufficiently shocked to volunteer a statement to the police,” interrupted Harry. “Why not?”
“What could I say? I was in a difficult position, I . . .”
The self-justifications went on for over a minute. Harry barely listened. Beneath the glossy looks and fluent line in chat was jelly. But might Gallimore yet prove to be a murderer? Now was the moment to find out.
Without warning, Harry raised the pistol and pointed it at Gallimore’s forehead.
“Are you quite sure you don’t know Joe Rourke, Tony? Wasn’t he the man you hired to kill my wife? Didn’t the pressure get too much for you?” He watched the dark eyes glaze over as Gallimore stared in mixed horror and fascination at the Mauser. “Liz pestered you, didn’t she? You had a nice set-up, it suited you to have a mistress, but you weren’t so keen on a change of wife and all that maintenance pay. Liz had threatened to kill herself, now she was expecting a kid. Where would it end? You had the idea of getting rid of her. What better idea than to pay a yobbo you’d met in the Ferry to do the necessary while you were nicely alibied, tucking into a sandwich on British Rail? I’m sure the train times will stand up, the story tripped so easily off your tongue. You’ve obviously been practising just in case the police got a whiff of your identity. But I’m not fooled, Tony.”
Gallimore’s hands shook as if he had Parkinson’s disease. The temperature in the room seemed to have dropped below zero as Harry slowly rolled out the final question.
“How much did you pay Rourke?”
It was a credible theory, soundly reasoned. Harry had been building up towards it for several days now. So many of the pieces fitted if Joe Rourke was a hired killer, Tony Gallimore his paymaster. The motive was there, so too plenty of circumstantial evidence. Rourke’s sudden access to liquid cash, the photograph to help him identify the victim, the clumsy attempts to keep Liz under surveillance whilst waiting for the right moment to strike. And afterwards, Rourke’s conversation in the club with Froggy, who must have stumbled onto the truth on the very night of the murder, a conversation which Marilyn had interrupted in front of Harry’s own eyes.
But even as he watched the man his wife had loved squirm at the sight of the gun poised to blow his good looks away for ever, Harry became conscious of an agonising wrench inside his stomach, more acute than ever before. At once he realised that it was a physical sign of how wrong he had been.
Fragments of conversation came back to mind. Put together, they pointed away from Gallimore’s guilt and towards a different culprit. Liz herself had told him all he should have needed to understand; on the night he had found her in his flat in the Empire Dock. And this very day a chance remark from Brenda Rixton should have helped him to work out what had really happened.
With infinite care, as Gallimore watched in bafflement and held his breath, Harry laid the Mauser down upon the desk. Now, at last, he knew the truth.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
At the other end of a crackling telephone line, Quentin Pike was saying, “You realise I shouldn’t be telling you this?”
“Sure,” said Harry. His thoughts were racing and the offhand way in which he spoke failed to convey his gratitude to the man who had helped to fill in most of the gaps in his knowledge. With little more than a mild grumble, Pike had answered questions which Harry had not dared to put to Tony Gallimore.
Time was short, Harry was certain of that. The murder of Froggy Evison had been a panic move. Before long, the police would be on the trail. Yet Harry still had the desperate urge to be there before them. He didn’t know why confronting the murderer was so important to him. Did the primitive thirst for vengeance still rule him or was there buried within his heart and mind some subtler need, the nature of which he could not understand?
“Where is this place, Quentin?”
“Woolton. It’s called Paradise Found, would you believe?” Pike clucked his tongue in deprecation of the nouveau riche and their lack of taste, then explained how to get there.
It was eight o’clock. Miracle of miracles, Harry had found a public phone box in working order in the city centre within five minutes of leaving Gallimore at the Ferry. The club manager - he was not after all, Pike confirmed, legally its owner - had appeared bemused by Harry’s sudden change of manner and mood. Without waiting for a reply to his accusation of murder, Harry had asked another question to which Gallimore said at once: “Yes, of course, didn’t you know? But what has that got to do with - what you were talking about?” Harry hadn’t trusted himself to answer; instead he stuffed the Mauser into its protective chamois and cursed his own stupidity.
“I don’t suppose,” said Quentin Pike sadly, “that you are going to tell me what this is all about? But answer this - am I going to lose a client?”
“Don’t worry,” said Harry soberly, “clearing this mess up will probably keep you in business till retirement. Thanks anyway.”
He hung up and strode to the M.G. Despite the purpose-fulness with which he moved, he had no clear idea of what he should or would do. All he knew was that there was no possibility this time that he might be mistaken. He understood why Liz had had to die. Strangely, he had felt a sudden spurt of pity on realising what had happened, but he had striven to banish any emotion which might cause him to waver at this late hour. One day, perhaps, he would feel differently, but tonight was not the time to sympathise with murder.
As he drove, an unbidden image of Liz leapt to the forefront of his mind. He remembered her in the flat at Empire Dock, saying: “I won’t give you any hassle. I’ll be out of your hair soon, I promise.” Harry pressed down on the accelerator. Would he ever be free of her, ever be able to start again? Or would she continue to haunt him - would he be unable to recall the provocative twist of her lips as she smiled without this wrenching, futile sense of having abandoned her to death?
Headlights flashed at him in furious remonstrance as he overtook a slow-moving van on a bend, and a warning blast on the horn of a passing Sierra reminded him to concentrate oh the road. Rain was beginning to
fall and his wipers scratched the windscreen noisily, blurring everything in sight. As urban sprawl gave way to suburban dwellings of increasing opulence, he eased his speed and peered around in search of the avenue that, according to Quentin, led to his destination in Freshfield Close. Eventually he spotted it and, braking sharply, he took two sharp turns, bringing him into the boulevard where
he meant to confront the creator of his past week’s agonies.
Tall conifers obscured the house, but looking down the drive, Harry saw a lamp burning above the porch and another light behind a curtained first floor window. Outside a front gate which bore a slate sign inscribed paradise found, someone was parking a Citroen hatchback. Harry slowed, straining through the darkness to identify the figure clambering out from the driver’s seat and slamming the car door. The figure moved beneath a street lamp: a man, black-haired and strongly built, wearing a navy’s jacket and jeans.
Harry pulled up behind the Citroen. The man had been about to walk up the drive of the house; now he looked back over his shoulder. Harry opened the door of the M.G. and the man spun round. Harry took a couple of paces forward. The rear quarterlight of the Citroen was shattered and he caught sight of a dark shape on the back seat of the car. Easy to guess it was a shotgun from which the barrels had been sawn off and that the car had been stolen by the man at the house gates. From fifteen yards away, Harry could feel the violence in the stranger: it sparked in the air like electricity.
“Rourke?”
In the clear evening air Harry’s voice sounded unnaturally loud. He was cold and tense and the Mauser was rubbing painfully against his chest.
“Who’s that?” The tone was threatening, but perhaps it carried a hint of fear as well. The two syllables were all Harry needed to confirm that this was the man who had attacked him outside the Empire Dock. And, for sure, stabbed Liz to death in Leeming Street.
Harry advanced. Twelve yards between them now. Ten. Eight. Rourke’s hand slipped inside his jacket, a reflex action. Harry wondered if the knife was there.
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