by William Paul
‘Seems he didn’t have blood on his conscience then,’ Fyfe said.
‘No,’ Brother Patrick replied. ‘There must be another sinner loose in this world.’
When the conversation was over Fyfe adjusted his shoulders to bear the weight of the new monkey on his back. He imagined Brother Patrick putting down the phone, sliding his hands into his sleeves and padding off in air-cushioned silence.
43
‘Come down now, Angela darling.’ Barrie’s voice spoke over the bedroom intercom, competing with the jabbering television. ‘We’re waiting for you in the games room.’
Angela had dried her hair in the bedroom and painted on a face: dark eyes, highlighted cheekbones, wet scarlet lips. She took her time because she wanted to look her best. This moment had been a long time coming. Once it was over maybe Mike would finally be laid to rest and she could get away and get on with her life.
She found the dress she was looking for in one of her suitcases. It was made from clinging crushed velvet, black and short with a low-cut neck, and gave the desired spray-paint effect. She didn’t bother with underwear. She admired herself in the full-length mirror, smoothing the dress over her thighs and puffing out her chest so that her nipples were clearly defined. ‘Knock them dead, girl,’ she told herself. ‘Knock them dead.’
Her stiletto heels clicked sharply on the parquet floors of the curving corridor and down the ringing cast iron of the spiral staircase. The glass walls of the games room were blanked out by the reflection of the water in the swimming pool. Somebody, a distorted shape, was moving behind it. Two people? Two shapes? No. Three shapes? A fourth? Or maybe it was all a trick of the light.
It was a shame the pleasurable fantasy about the pot of gold at the end of the memory rainbow was about to end. For nine years she had lived with the dream that she only had to reach back to collect what was rightfully hers. She had never believed it, the same way she had never believed Mike was actually dead. Nine years was an eternity to keep a simple hope alive but she had managed it because there had been no one to deny it entirely. It had been her escape route all this time. The pension fund nobody back in Spain knew about. The non-existent fund she had been counting on all these years. A pleasing fantasy it had been. She would almost have preferred to continue with it rather than have it killed stone dead.
Too late for such faint-heartedness now. Gus had promised her a surprise. She hesitated at the threshold, smoothed out her dress for a final time. The truth was about to crawl out from under its stone. ‘Gentlemen,’ she said. ‘I believe you have something to tell me.’
Gus Barrie went over to her and took her by the hand. He led her forward to the snooker table where three black plastic sacks were stacked together among the scattered balls. On the opposite side Billy Jones was licking the cube of blue chalk. His brother Sandy was standing further apart, lifting weights on the multi-gym. Angela could just see his hands and waist through the gap between the table and the fringed hanging light canopy. The table surface was in dark shadow. She reached out and touched the neck of one of the sacks.
Barrie introduced the Jones brothers by name. They nodded and stared openly at her. Sandy sneezed. John Adamson was introduced and smiled pathetically. Angela did not recognise him. He had aged too much. He looked nothing like the ferret-faced person she vaguely remembered. ‘Mr Adamson has brought this present for you, Angela,’ Barrie said. ‘Haven’t you, John?’
Adamson was standing sideways on to the table, his shoulder against the canopy, making it sway slightly. He held out his hand uncertainly but she did not take it. His fingers dropped down to drum silently on the end of a cue lying on the green baize surface. Lizard-like, his eyes darted from side to side.
Angela stared at the bulging sacks. Excitement gagged in her throat. Could it be that Gus had been telling the truth all along? The money did exist? Her money? She was suddenly homesick for the sunshine and security of Spain.
‘Jad, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I remember you well, Jad. You and Mike were friends.’
‘Friends and colleagues,’ he replied.
‘You killed him.’
Adamson’s jaw fell and his hands shot up like someone offering to surrender. ‘No. No. I was there when he shot himself. I didn’t shoot him.’
‘That’s what I meant.’
Angela gained a little satisfaction from Adamson’s discomfiture, a minuscule piece of revenge for Mike’s death. She felt supremely confident and totally in control with the eyes of all four men roaming over her tightly wrapped body. She was in her element but it was obvious Adamson was not present in the room from his own free will. There was a bruise on the side of his head and his top lip was slightly swollen. Gus had something planned and she could guess exactly what it was. It was so unnecessary, so wasteful. Just like Mike’s death in the first place. Somehow it was also appropriate.
‘I didn’t kill him,’ Adamson insisted.
‘I believe you,’ she said quietly, almost apologetically. She smoothed her dress over her hips and wished she had put on underwear. She was not properly dressed for the occasion.
‘Why don’t you show Angela what’s in here, Jad?’ Barrie said. ‘Billy, lights, please.’
The black sacks and the green baize and the scatter of coloured balls became bathed in white light. Barrie punched the side of a sack as if it was somebody’s cheek.
‘Of course, of course,’ Adamson said. He quickly tore open the neck of the sack nearest to him and bundles of banknotes poured out on to the table. The snooker balls clicked together as they were disturbed.
‘It’s all there, Angela,’ Barrie said eagerly. ‘All the money Mike stole, every last fiver of it. Jad showed us where it was hidden. Didn’t you, Jad?’
‘Yes. I did.’
‘It wasn’t destroyed at all. It was a trick to fool the police and the bank. It worked. Everybody believed for these last nine years that it went up in smoke. But here it is and it’s yours, just like I promised. Didn’t I tell you I would look after you, Angela? Didn’t I tell you?’
Angela stared at the brown and purple avalanche of banknotes. Then at Adamson. Then at Barrie. It couldn’t be true. There had to be some catch to this. And yet the evidence was in front of her eyes, crisp and bright. After nine years shouldn’t the colours have faded a bit? Her mind seized on the doubt.
‘Tell her, Jad,’ Barrie ordered.
‘This is your money, Mrs Barrie,’ Adamson said, nodding frantically. ‘I hid it away. I didn’t tell anyone. I kept it a secret until I was out of prison and now I’ve collected it and brought it back for you.’
‘Isn’t that nice of him, Angela?’ Barrie said. ‘He’s brought it back for you. It didn’t even occur to him to keep it for himself.’
Adamson’s nodding turned into a confirmatory shaking of the head. The hanging canopy over the snooker table swung as he kept bumping it with his shoulder. There was a pause, a moment of utter stillness. A chill entered the atmosphere, freezing the air the way water is transformed from a liquid to a solid and becomes ice. Adamson shivered. The canopy swung.
‘Actually it did occur to the conniving bastard,’ Barrie said. ‘In fact, if we hadn’t found him I’m sure he would have tried to protect his little secret. If we hadn’t found him he would never have thought of returning the money to its rightful owner.’
Adamson kept shaking his head. Sandy Jones had left the weights and was moving round the table. The leather handles on the razor wire were wound round his fists. Adamson hadn’t seen him. Barrie pulled on her elbow and Angela took a step backwards.
‘He wasn’t going to bring the money back for you, Angela,’ Barrie said, his voice rising. ‘He was going to keep Mike’s money for himself. He had been planning it for nine years. But it didn’t work. Oh no. I stopped him. I got your money back for you, Angela. I kept my promise to you.’
Adamson was beginning to crouch over like an athlete at the start of a race. The bombs were screaming about his head, about to
explode. Barrie’s nostrils were twitching furiously. There were little patches of foam at the corners of his mouth. Angela took another step backwards.
‘Now you can have the head of John Adamson,’ Barrie shouted. ‘Do it.’
44
The joke about priests falling from grace wasn’t funny after a while. When Mark Munro got back and learned that the sad-faced Father Quinn had gone to meet his maker the first thing he did was crack the joke. No one laughed. He was disappointed when Fyfe told him the monks would swear Quinn never left home.
Fyfe had battered most of the information from criminal records into the new computer file. Most of it was available by electronic transfer from the force’s mainframe so it did not take long. Most of it was probably unhelpful but could not be ignored at such an early stage. Fyfe’s hardest job was to think of a codename for the inquiry file. After ten minutes of pen chewing and his thoughts wandering abstractly over Sylvia climbing on top of him in the fireside chair and Jill and Number Five sleeping peacefully on the sofa he came up with Sleeping Dogs. He typed it into the identification panel and hoped nobody would ask why.
Pete Crichton squeezed into the office and offered the first scrap of real information supplied by a batty old dear on the ground floor who kept lists of the numbers of every car parked in the street she didn’t recognise.
‘She said it would come in useful some day,’ Crichton said, taking pleasure in describing her as an old white-haired witch with twinkling eyes and a constant dribble of saliva on to her chin. ‘Very public-spirited she is.’
‘A neighbourhood watch freak and a half,’ Fyfe said. ‘I’ll bet most of them are illicit leg-over situations.’
The list had only four numbers on it. Fyfe typed them into the terminal and asked for the owners’ names and addresses but there was some kind of hitch with the linkup to Swansea. The machine kept asking him to try again. He still hadn’t made contact by two o’clock when Munro called everyone together in an empty seminar room on the first floor. There were about forty people and half that number of seats. Munro stood up front, Sir Duncan and Ronnie McGregor sat on opposite edges of the table like book-ends. Fyfe stood at the back, leaning against the wall.
A roll call of the dead had been compiled on the display board. Photographs, full frontal and profile, had been culled from criminal records and blown up to just short of life size. Ross Sorley appeared at one end of the row. Then there was Georgie Craig, looking mean and butch, and a distinctly effeminate Michael Ellis. All three had convictions for possession of and dealing in Class A controlled drugs. The redhead had been identified as Lillian Sherwin, born in Glasgow, two convictions for possession of hard drugs and one for dealing cannabis. Her unflattering likeness, sunken eyes and hair scraped back, had been dug out of the files too and was pinned beside a smiling head and shoulders of Father Byrne provided by the Church. John Adamson was given pride of place on a level of his own above the rogues’ gallery. Only Father Quinn remained anonymous. As an afterthought, Munro drew a matchstick man on a sheet of white paper and added him to the side.
‘We have a prime suspect,’ Munro said.
He reached up to touch Adamson’s face on the board and left a black mark on one cheek. He rehearsed the histories of each victim, the Church funds fiddle, and the connections which linked all five. Circumstantial evidence comprehensively damned Adamson for the murders of Byrne and the redhead but cleared him on the first three charges. Father Quinn was a wild card.
‘Drugs are involved in this somewhere,’ Munro said. ‘The razor wire neck-ties are an unsubtle tribal war-cry. The word from the streets through our usual contacts is confused as yet but no doubt it will get clearer. Until then I intend to concentrate on finding Adamson. We find him and hopefully we find the key to the truth. There is a weird logic in all this, if no sense. Let’s treat it like a cryptic crossword clue. It will be so simple once the code is broken and the correct answer revealed. We’ll toss Adamson’s name into the pool and see what ripples it makes.’
There was no applause after the pep-talk, just a few raised eyebrows at the flowery language. Munro had always been a bit of a showman in his own laid-back fashion. The meeting had lasted half an hour. It broke up with everybody speculating freely about randy priests, sexy redheads, and crazed stranglers. Senior officers at DCI level and above remained, gathering in front of the photographs on the wall like visitors at an art gallery.
‘Do you think the dead priest was crooked?’ Munro asked Fyfe.
‘Which one?’
‘Why does Adamson do him and the woman, that’s what I’d like to know.’ Munro was talking to himself.
‘A jealous love rival?’ Fyfe suggested. ‘If the bastard was fiddling the money, it seems reasonable he could just as easily have been fiddling the women. But then I’m getting my priests mixed up. Quinn was the guilty one. Byrne turned him in and has the Archbishop’s blessing.’
‘Some blessing, a shattered skull.’
‘Mysterious ways, Mark. Mysterious ways.’
‘Anyway, any hard information come in yet, Coordinator?’
‘Just the disk in the computer,’ Fyfe replied. ‘That’s the hardest thing in this investigation so far.’
The room emptied. Fyfe got back to his cubby-hole just as the direct line rang. He grabbed it, sat down, and set the computer searching for the list of car numbers in one movement. Sylvia was on the other end. The smile that jumped on to his face was entirely spontaneous. Dead bodies fled his consciousness to be replaced by warm-blooded living ones.
‘It won’t work, Dave,’ Sylvia said.
‘What won’t?’
‘You and me. The arrangement we talked about. It won’t work. I think we should finish it here and now.’
Fyfe took a set of house keys from his pocket and tumbled them over and over between his fingers. His smile slowly dissolved. The terminal asked him to try again. He thumped the keyboard.
‘It was your idea, Sylvia,’ he said.
‘Yes, I know and it was a mistake. It won’t work. It can’t work. I’m sorry but I should never have bothered you.’
‘Bothered me. Is that what you call it?’
‘Like I said, we should have let sleeping dogs lie.’
‘Should we?’ He frowned at the title of the inquiry file flashing on the screen in front of him.
‘Don’t make this difficult for me, Dave. I should never have… We should never have… It was a daft idea. I’m sorry.’
‘I thought you’d talked it over with Lord Graeme?’
‘I had.’
‘And again? This change of mind, have you talked that over with him?’
‘No. I’ve decided I don’t want to have an affair with you. Not again. I just want to be friends. We have empathy, you and I. Why do we need sex?’
Fyfe suppressed a hysterical impulse to bawl down the phone to show Sylvia how funny he found everything. But laughter sneaked out, spilling like crumbs of food from an over-full mouth. He sat up straight, composing himself, swallowing his pride and his laughter.
‘I rather fancied the idea of another steamy affair with you,’ he said. ‘Especially after last night. I enjoyed that. Didn’t you?’
‘It was crazy.’
‘I enjoyed it anyway.’
‘You’re making this hard for me, Dave. Please don’t turn up at the party tonight.’
‘Okay. I know when I’m not wanted.’
‘Thanks. I’ve got to go, Dave.’ She was suddenly impatient. ‘I’ll speak to you soon. I do want to be friends. I don’t want to lose you.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Fyfe said, instantly regretting the words, desperate to retract them. ‘I mean, I don’t understand. See you sometime.’
Fyfe threw down the phone and rocked back in his chair. The world was going mad around him. He thought of Donald Byrne falling down a cliff face, followed by Richard Quinn, and saw himself falling after them. A list of four names and addresses scrolled down the screen. Three meant
nothing to him, the fourth was the owner of a Ford Transit van. Windfall Construction. Who owned Windfall Construction? Gus Barrie. Inappropriate laughter threatened to overwhelm Fyfe once more. It was all so inevitable. He covered his face with his hands. He was angry, depressed, disappointed and confused.
The walls of the tiny cubicle quivered as Mark Munro pushed the door open and stood blocking the doorway. Fyfe looked out from between his fingers.
‘Ready for the fray?’ Munro asked. ‘The media are waiting. Let’s do it to them before they do it to us.’
45
Adamson could see what was intended from the moment Barrie started spouting the fantasy about the money being reincarnated. He was as mad as his brother had been, only Mike was the self-destructive type. Gus Barrie took out his frustrations on other people.
Adamson put on a genuine show of nervousness, playing along with Barrie’s sick game, but all the time he was assessing the options open to him. They thought he was a lamb to the slaughter, a helpless sacrificial victim who would not put up a fight when he was dispatched in front of a honey blonde with a blood red mouth and a slinky black dress. Well, he was no victim. He was a killer like them. Only last night he had killed a man. He could kill plenty more.
It was dark outside. He had guessed it was about six in the evening when the skinhead brothers marched him up the driveway through an avenue of trees. He had been locked in a bathroom after Barrie’s lecture on how to behave. All he could hear were the sounds of the pigeons scratching and strutting above him and one of the brothers sniffing and sneezing on the other side of the door.