That was the question I was still struggling to find an answer to. Never mind. When in doubt, barge straight in and give things a shake.
“We know that the late Peter Dawson was lobbying for a change in the zoning status of Castlehill Golf Club. We know he approached many councillors in the hope of securing their votes for the designation change. We know that he was not above offering donations to secure those votes to any councillor who showed willing. And we know that the last person on earth who would ordinarily have accepted such a bribe was Joseph Williamson. Yet the Guards claim to have found a substantial cash sum on his body. A sum the press are now describing as a bribe.”
James Kearney chewed his sandwich, washed it down with a mouthful of tea and, without lifting his gaze from the surface of the table, said, “When you say ‘we,’ who else, exactly, do you mean?”
“The councillor’s widow. Mrs. Williamson.”
“Ah. Yes. Go on.”
I took the brown envelope of cash out of my breast pocket and set it on the table. Kearney’s eyes locked onto it instantly.
“Now, I’m sure we’re both realists. We know how wheels need to be greased in order to get things to happen. It’s how the world works, everyone does it, and there’s no need to get rigid about it. You might think the late councillor was something of a moral grandstander. But that was who he was, that was who Aileen married, that’s how she wants him to be remembered. Now I want you to level with me—and I know you’ll know, everyone has told me, there isn’t much that gets past Jim Kearney—we know that Councillors O’Driscoll and Wall accepted so-called corrupt payments from Dawson—did Joe Williamson take one too? Because if he didn’t, we’d be anxious to return the money to its rightful owner.”
I picked up the envelope, opened it so that the stack of notes were visible and tapped it against the palm of my hand.
“Obviously this isn’t the identical money, the Guards are holding on to that as evidence. But it’s the equivalent, twenty grand in cash. If the family could learn that there was a perfectly innocent explanation for how that money came to be on the body, it would be a great strain lifted.”
Kearney shifted in his chair. His remaining sandwiches lay forgotten, and a film of grease rippled across the surface of his cup of tea. His tongue slid between his parted lips as he gazed at the brown envelope, his eyes widening in a leer of avarice.
“Well,” he said, wresting his eyes away from the money, “we all know Jack Parland of course, by reputation at any rate. Helped set this country on its feet. Cut through all the red tape that was holding us back. Man of vision. It’s not going too far to describe him as a great man. Yes, a great man.”
“I’m sure he believes he still is,” I said.
“Oh, he is for sure and certain. But you won’t find many to agree with me, I’m sorry to say, in these days where people expect business to be run like a, like a teddy bear’s picnic. Openness and transparency and codology! As if…you know the kind of men I’m talking about, of course you do, you’re your father’s son. If you bog these fellas down with rules and regulations and what have you, they’ll just tell you to shag off. And right they are.”
Kearney jammed a hunk of sandwich into his mouth. Egg spilled onto his chin as his eyes locked onto the brown envelope once more, and sweat glistened on his brow.
“Right they are! Pygmies do not make the rules for giants! Am I right, Mr. Parland?”
He was shouting now, frosting the glass tabletop with crumbs of ham and egg. I assured him that he was absolutely right. I had a flash of Kearney and myself as the pygmies, high above the city, with the giant cranes advancing, angry and baying for blood. Kearney nodded in agreement with himself, drained his mug of tea, replaced the cap on top of his flask and cleared his throat.
“Now, about this money. I did, in fact, in…point of fact, have a number of financial dealings myself with Councillor MacLiam.”
“You did?”
“Indeed and I did. He recommended a, several times to me indeed, a, how do you put it, an ethical investment fund, something his wife dealt in, and I asked him if he was willing to invest a sum of money…on my behalf.”
“A sum of money?”
I wondered if he’d try for the whole twenty.
“Yes, fif—In fact, twenty thousand was the sum.”
A falter, but he made it. Rory Dagg had been right.
“It seems a very large amount to have given him in cash.”
Kearney’s eyes flickered with suspicion, and he stared at me through a cloud of it. I’d shown an unhealthy sympathy with the pygmies’ side of the argument.
The telephone rang. He crossed the room to his desk and took the call with his back to me. He listened for a while, then said: “Thank you, as ever, Mrs. McEvoy,” and hung up. When he turned around, he looked more like a national schoolteacher than ever before, the kind who was looking for someone to make an example of.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “All the things we know, what? About golf clubs and councillors and Jack Parland and so on. But what we don’t know is, who the hell are you? Because Mrs. McEvoy informs me Jack Parland may have been married four times, but his only son is fifty-eight.”
I furrowed my brow, as if that might add the necessary years to it.
“And completely bald,” Kearney said. “And based in Hong Kong. So now. Maybe we’ll see what the Guards have to say about all this.”
I smiled and nodded my head in agreement.
“Good idea,” I said. “When in doubt, get the Guards in.”
I waved the envelope of cash in the air. Kearney held the telephone receiver for a moment longer, then replaced it.
“You misrepresented yourself.”
“I could be waiting out there yet if I hadn’t. Anyway, I never said I was Jack Parland’s son.”
“You were announced as Mr. Parland.”
“That was down to Mrs. McEvoy. With some assistance from the receptionist downstairs. I said I was working for Aileen Williamson on a family matter. Between them, they made two and two equal seven. Of course, my suggestion that there might be a sweetener involved might have helped to force their hands.”
Kearney sucked in his lips and crinkled his eyes up, like an animal shrinking from a sudden blast of light.
“A journalist, is it?” he said, investing “journalist” with an impressive degree of disdain.
I told him who I was, and that I was investigating Councillor MacLiam’s death on behalf of his widow.
“And what were you hoping? That you’d catch me out taking the money?”
“How do you think we were getting on with that?” I said. “You were in the process of remembering some kind of investment you asked the councillor to make for you.”
He took one last, lingering look at the cash, then shook his head.
“No,” he said.
“No?”
“Don’t remember any such transaction. And I’m pretty certain I have no record of it anywhere.”
Kearney grinned at me suddenly. He was a piece of work, and easy with it.
“Don’t follow much of the rest of your chat either,” he said. “Corrupt payments to councillors, for example. And Peter Dawson being responsible for them. Far as the record goes, an outfit called Courtney Estates owns Castlehill Golf Club, and has applied for the rezoning. The named directors of Courtney Estates are Kenneth Courtney and Gemma Grand. So unless you can tell me how they might be connected to the Dawson family, I don’t know how what you’re saying even begins to add up.”
Kearney snapped the lid shut on his Tupperware sandwich box, picked up his flask, and brought them both back to his desk.
“All we have here is a young man, a self-styled ‘private detective,’ attempting to bribe a council official,” he announced to the space above my head, as if a barrage of television cameras had suddenly arrived in his office for an impromptu press conference. “Grief-stricken client, perhaps understandable they should stoop to desperate measur
es. In the circumstances, probably best to draw a veil over the whole shabby business.”
And James Kearney was seated behind his desk once more, uncapping a fountain pen, poring over planning applications, every inch the diligent public servant. Out past Seafield Harbour a crane turned suddenly, bisecting the sky with its dark steel limbs. A deafening barrage of drilling broke out in the basement, and the building seemed to shake to its foundations. James Kearney turned from his desk and examined a section of the map of the county that hung on the wall behind him, tapping at it with his pen, master of all he surveyed. Business as usual at the County Hall.
Fourteen
TO THE REAR OF THE ROYAL SEAFIELD YACHT CLUB, THE dock area is enclosed by high walls topped with four feet of spiked iron fencing. Access is through a heavy metal security gate, which has a smart-card-and-keypad-code-style lock system, the details of which Linda Dawson hadn’t given me. I tried to get in when a couple of wet-haired yachtsmen came out, but they blocked my way and pushed the door closed. They were big wide-necked rugby-looking guys, so when one of them said, “If you don’t have your card”—he pronounced it cord—“go in around the front, yeah?” I pretended to do as I was told. But I didn’t want to go in around the front. I didn’t want any more grief from Cyril Lampkin, entertaining though it would undeniably have been. Most of all, I didn’t want Colm the boatman to know I was coming: Colm who had let the Guards think I might have shot Peter Dawson on his boat while he waited a few feet away, Colm whom I’d seen greeting George Halligan in Hennessy’s, Colm who, at very least, knew a hell of a lot more than he was telling.
A guy in blue-and-white-checked chef’s trousers and a white T-shirt was unloading kitchen supplies from the back of a navy Volkswagen Estate and lugging them through the entrance hall of the club: catering drums of ketchup and mayonnaise, giant slabs of cheese, jumbo cans of oil and tomatoes. Once he had vanished for a second time, I walked across and inspected the remaining contents of the boot. There were four crates of “sports” drinks, so I hoisted one on my shoulder, cut briskly back around the side and banged on the security door. A tall old man in royal blue naval-style trousers and matching shirt with a white beard that I guess you’d have to describe as nautical and a pair of field binoculars hanging around his neck opened the door. His face was pale and drawn, his eyes heavy-lidded and cloudy.
“Delivery for you,” I grunted, head down, leading with the crate. He turned his melancholy face away, stood to one side and let me through. To my left lay slipways and moorings, to my right a boathouse. I went straight on toward what looked like the changing rooms and showers, made a show of easing the crate down to the ground and turned around. The old man had vanished, and there was no one else to be seen. Just inside the door of the changing rooms there was a soft-drinks vending machine. I slid the crate in against it and headed toward the slipways.
Seafield Harbour looked like it had just run a very successful closing-down sale: apart from a few bulky cabin cruisers and a couple of ramshackle old trawlers, there wasn’t a boat within its walls. The sun was at its height now, all haze burned away; the bay was a blue and white mosaic of sails and sea and spray; varnished by the sun, it glittered like crystal. The old man with the nautical beard patrolled the slipways and inspected the vacant moorings, his arms folded behind his back. He didn’t have much in the way of company; on the terrace above us, a party of orange-faced blondes with skinny arms and false red nails sucked prawns and crayfish from their shells and swilled white wine; there was no one else about. I went over to the old man and asked him if he’d seen Colm the boatman that day. His thin face looked bewildered with grief, and I thought he was going to start crying. Instead, he peered through his binoculars and then pointed toward the pier, which was thronged with people. I followed the line of his arm but couldn’t make anything out much beyond an old Victorian shelter with a pale blue iron roof, so he passed me the binoculars. With them, I was able to discern Colm sitting on a pale blue bench in the shelter. He was smoking a cigarette and talking on a mobile phone. He looked at his watch like he was waiting for someone. I gave the old man back his binoculars. He nodded, and gave a slight bow, and resumed his patrolling, his lost eyes casting regular trawls across the lapping surface of the water.
I turned to go, and gave a start; Cyril Lampkin was standing behind me, an anxious smile on his plump pink face. He was wearing a fawn cotton drill safari suit and a mustard-colored ascot, and looked, as before, like he was costumed for the stage. But he was playing a different part from the first time I met him.
“Mr. Loy. The Royal Seafield extends its regrets…deepest sympathy and support for the work you have done,” he said, or garbled, in an unctuous, priest-in-the-parlor kind of tone. “If we had any inkling that day of what was to happen, or had just happened…that such a thing should occur at all…not in the collective memory of the Royal Seafield…any way I can now be of assistance to you or indeed to the Dawson family…this very sad time…” he continued, punctuating his broken phrases with a great deal of plaintive simpering and batting of his carrot-colored eyelashes.
“Where’s Peter’s boat?” I said.
“In the boathouse. Once the Guards had finished their…technical inspection, we thought it best to…withdraw it from sight…always the danger of ghouls…prurient interest…”
“Who’s that?” I said, pointing at the old man in the royal blue uniform, who had now come to rest at the waterline, hunkered down by the vacant moorings, staring out to sea.
Cyril Lampkin’s face instantly retrieved the combination of superciliousness and martyrdom that was native to it; he sneered and rolled his eyes at the same time.
“He’s known as the Ghost Captain. He’s the longest-serving member, can’t get rid of him now. You’d have thought he’d get over it after all these years. But if anything, it seems to have become more real to him. Still, at least he only comes around once a year now, on the anniversary.”
“The anniversary of what?”
“His brother drowned. Fell overboard. Both drunk, I think, late at night, shouldn’t have been out at all. Twins, it was their twenty-first birthday, they’d been given the boat as a gift. Just after the war, they’d both been Royal Navy. One was too drunk to swim, and drowned, the other was too drunk to save him, and survived. Mummy told me all about it. How he was jealous of his brother’s fiancée, so he pushed him overboard, then impersonated his twin to marry the girl. And then she found out, and a year later, to the day, she took the boat out at high tide, to search for her lost love, Mummy said. Neither body was ever recovered. The boat vanished too. Not so much as driftwood.”
“So he comes here every year to…what?”
“He used to come here every day. But yes, to what? To search for them? Is it remorse, or jealousy that drives him? Because after all, he’s alone, and they are reunited in death. And what about the binoculars? Does he really believe he’ll spot them on the horizon, sailing home together, brother and wife come to forgive him?”
Lampkin’s tone was hushed and tremulous, as if he were reciting the lyrics of his favorite aria.
“And if he did, what would he do? Welcome them, or murder them again?”
“Don’t say murder, Mr. Loy. There were never any prosecutions. And Mummy is such a gossip, she and her sewing circle may have made most of it up. But I suppose every great institution should have a dark secret, and the Ghost Captain is ours.”
“He certainly seems haunted by it,” I said.
“Yes. Well. It’s all very sad, I suppose.”
Cyril Lampkin shook his head abruptly, as if sadness was a luxury busy people simply couldn’t afford. The orange-faced blondes shrieked like a squall of gulls, their shrill laughter scrawling across the afternoon sky like nails against a blackboard. The Ghost Captain looked up at them in sudden fright, then turned back to his solitary vigil, his face staring down into the water now. I wondered whose face he saw reflected back at him, his brother’s or his own. Maybe he coul
dn’t remember which one he was anymore.
Colm the boatman’s name was Colm Hyland, I learned from Cyril Lampkin. He was still in the pale blue shelter on Seafield Pier when I left the yacht club. By the time I reached the pier, he had gone, but he hadn’t gone far. I climbed the wall that ran along the upper pier and spotted him walking toward the road. I followed, closing the distance between us to about fifteen yards. At first I thought he was going back to work, but he continued on past the Royal Seafield for maybe a quarter of a mile and turned right down toward the sea, crossing the railway bridge and descending to the entrance for the new ferry terminal, a sleek plate glass structure I had never seen before. Taking another right turn, he cut down a lane to a deserted road that had patches of grass and weeds growing in its cracks. A disused railway line lay to one side, behind a low granite wall; beyond the tracks stood a higher wall; beyond that, the harbor. Up ahead by the west pier, I could see the flat-roofed semicircular ferry-house I remembered from years before, and the derelict terminal buildings stretching out on the dock behind it. A white van was parked outside, and as Hyland approached it, two men got out. One of them was carrying two full shopping bags and a two-liter plastic bottle of water. I vaulted the low wall and watched from the overgrown track as the three men knocked on the door of the ferry-house. A security guard in a navy uniform opened the door and let the men in. I moved on down the warped and mangled track, working my way between bramble and nettle, through clumps of ferns and crackling gorse, until I was at the mouth to a blocked-up tunnel: the ferry-bound train used to run the passengers right down to the old terminal itself. I was about twenty yards from the ferry-house door now. I hunkered down behind the wall, batted some wasps away and settled in to wait. It didn’t take long; maybe fifteen minutes later, Hyland emerged with the two men. I thought I recognized one of the men by his blue baseball cap; then he turned around and I could see his face was bruised and his nose heavily bandaged. It was one of Podge Halligan’s crew; the last time I’d seen him was in Hennessy’s, when I broke his nose and he suggested that they should do me in the car park.
The Wrong Kind of Blood (Ed Loy PI) Page 15