The Graves at Angel Brook (Quigg Book 3)

by Tim Ellis

  ‘You mentioned a Father Paidraig,’ Emma Potter said. ‘Why did you consult a Priest?’

  That bloody Emma Potter again, he thought. Trust her to notice that he’d slipped in his thanks to Father Paidraig. ‘Miss Potter, I’m glad that you reminded me about Father Paidraig. He helped us with the biblical references that Ruben Andrews left on each child. Together, the references formed a personal message to his sister, Rose.’

  ‘Why weren’t the press informed about these biblical references before, Inspector?’

  ‘I would have thought that was obvious, Miss Potter.’ He stood up. ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the press, thank you for coming. There will, of course, be an official press release later today.’

  Walsh rushed to the toilet. He leaned against the wall, closed his eyes and concentrated on bringing his heart rate down. When he opened them again, Emma Potter was standing watching him.

  ‘You’re in a restricted area, Miss Potter.’

  ‘I wanted to show you something, Inspector.’

  ‘Whatever it is, you could have shown me in the briefing room.’

  ‘I don’t think you would have wanted me to do that, Inspector.’

  ‘Oh and why not?’

  She pulled a brown envelope from her bag. ‘I’ve been following you.’

  ‘That must have been illuminating.’

  ‘It was - very illuminating.’ She passed him the envelope. ‘There is a photograph in there. Take a look.’

  He pulled the photograph out of the envelope. It was a grainy black and white picture of a man in shadow, dressed in black.

  ‘Very interesting - a man in black. Anything to do with aliens, Miss Potter?’

  ‘Not only was I following you, but he was as well.’

  ‘I’m obviously a popular copper.’

  ‘Once I stopped following you, I followed him. He reported to someone we both know.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Sir Peter Langham, the Chairman of the Police Complaints Committee. What I’d like to know, Inspector, is why such a powerful man has someone following you and reporting back to him?’

  ‘As would I, Miss Potter. Let me show you where the door is.’ He escorted her back through the press briefing room and into the reception area.

  ‘I’ll ask Sir Peter then should I, Inspector? See what he has to say about it all.’

  Bloody Emma Potter! He took hold of her arm and pushed her away from the reception desk, and the old woman waiting to be seen. ‘Trust me when I say, Miss Potter, that if you do that you’re likely to end up dead.’

  She shook herself free and said, ‘Dead? Wha...?’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ he hissed.

  Lowering her voice, she continued. ‘What do you mean dead?

  ‘You have no idea what you’ve stumbled into.’

  ‘So tell me.’

  Shit, what else could he do? If he didn’t take her into his confidence he’d end up investigating her mysterious death, and he would be to blame. ‘Meet me on Tuesday at the Hammersmith Ram on King Street for lunch; you’re buying. In the meantime, don’t go doing anything stupid.’

  ‘Define stupid, Inspector.’

  ‘An intelligent person like you should be able to work out that stupid equals death, Miss Potter.’ He left her with a worried look on her face.

  ***

  ‘Isn’t it your turn to make the coffee, Walsh?’ he said when they arrived back in the squad room.

  ‘I’m going to spit in yours, Sir,’ Walsh said, pushing herself up from her desk.

  ‘That’s not very ladylike, Walsh.’

  As he was writing his email report to the Chief at DS Jones’ desk, the extension rang. He picked it up, but waited for the caller to speak first.

  You’re meant to say, "Hello, how can I help you?" Quigg.

  ‘Hi Chief. I’m always wary about who’s on the other end, especially as it’s Saturday.’

  I saw your press briefing just now - bloody excellent. It was a bit iffy about using civilians, but it seems to have turned out okay. I’ve spoken to the Chief Constable and I’m going to put you forward for a commendation.

  ‘Only if Walsh gets one as well, Sir.’

  Walsh as well, Quigg; write something up for me.

  ‘What about Perkins, Sir? Can civilians get commendations?’

  Put it on paper, Quigg. I’ll see what I can do.

  ‘And…’

  Don’t push it, Quigg.

  ‘Okay, Sir. How’s your fantastically long extended Christmas holiday going?’

  Happy New Year, Quigg, I’ll see you Monday.

  Walsh came back with the coffees.

  ‘That was the Chief, Walsh, I’m getting a commendation.’

  ‘Very nice for you, Sir.’

  ‘But what’s more important, Walsh… is that so are you, as well.’

  ‘Me, Sir?’

  ‘Yes, you, Walsh.’

  She put her coffee down, took his face in her hands and kissed him on the lips. ‘Thank you, Sir. I was only joking before when I said I’d have to make a list about being your partner.’

  ‘Yeah, I bet.’ He picked up his mug of coffee.

  ‘Oh! Don’t drink that, Sir.’

  ‘Why not, Walsh? You didn’t…?’

  ‘No, of course not, Sir… It’s just that… Well, it’s probably cold by now, that’s all. I’ll make you a fresh one.’ She snatched the mug from him and rushed off with it.

  Once they’d finalised the paperwork, it was ten past five. Quigg said, ‘Let’s go home, Walsh. You’ll need time to make yourself beautiful, won’t you?’

  ‘Sometimes, Sir, I think you’re like a robot infected with a virus, bumping into things because your programming has gone haywire.’

  ‘I was going to say take tomorrow off, Walsh, but maybe I should make you work.’

  ‘It’s Sunday, Sir. The case is solved. I was going to take tomorrow off, whether you liked it or not. We’ve been working non-stop since last Monday.’

  ‘I’ll expect to hear all the sordid details on Monday, Walsh.’

  ‘As if,’ she said as she wandered towards the stairs. ‘Just before she left, she said, ‘Did you remember to phone Mave, Sir?’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ he said and pulled out his phone.

  ‘What is it, Duffy?’

  I just wanted to tell you that we’ve moved as well.

  ‘Moved where?’

  To St Thomas’ church - that’s our new home now.

  ‘But… I don’t even know where it is.’

  That’s why I’m ringing you, to give you the postcode for your satnav.

  ‘Are we doing the right thing, Duffy?’

  Of course we are, Sir. It’ll be lovely, you’ll see.

  She gave him the postcode and he wrote it down on a Post-It note.

  ‘I’ll see you soon, Duffy.’

  As he was putting his coat on to leave, Inspector Threadneedle appeared from nowhere.

  ‘Ah, Quigg, I’ve been looking for you.’

  ‘I’ve been rather busy, you know.’

  ‘I do watch the news, like normal people, Quigg.’

  ‘Is it payback time?’

  She smiled like a rattlesnake with indigestion. ‘It certainly is, Quigg.’

  He knew he wasn’t going to like what she had in mind, and prayed it wasn’t sex.

  ‘You’ll need to take next Wednesday as a holiday.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I have a ten year old niece who is coming to stay with me, and I want you to accompany us to Legoland in Windsor.’

  ‘That’s a strange payback, Pricilla.’

  ‘I know you have a daughter, and I hate kids. Well, actually, they hate me.’

  ‘You’ll pay?’

  ‘I’ll pay.’

  ‘You have yourself a chaperone, Pricilla. Discuss the details on Tuesday?’

  ‘Okay, thanks, Quigg. I didn’t think you’d be such a nice guy about it.’

  ‘You’re making me blush, Pricilla.
’

  ***

  He arrived at St Thomas’s Church on Godolphin Road in Shepherd’s Bush at six fifteen and was sitting there wondering what he had to do to get in. The steel gates were twelve feet high and electronically controlled, but who was controlling them? He’d have to submit a change of address to personnel. What would he put? St Thomas’s Church? They’d think he’d turned religious. How could he tell people he lived in a church? He’d have to change his business cards, have a little church put on them with Brother Quigg.

  He climbed out of the car and began to walk towards the gates just as they opened inwards. He could see a beautiful, dark-haired Duffy through the crack. She still had on her police blouse, that always looked two sizes too small over her breasts, and her dark blue skirt, which seemed to be straining at the waist. He wondered how long it would be before she began to show, and then felt a stirring between his legs.

  ‘What do you think, Sir?’

  ‘I think we should find the bedroom immediately, Duffy.’

  ‘I mean about the church?’

  ‘I feel like a drug baron about to enter his hideaway.’

  ‘Wait ‘til you see inside, Sir. It’s nothing like a church.’

  He drove his car in and parked up. There was a little security building to the left side of the gate, and enough spaces in the car park for seven cars. There was a large garden with ancient oak trees either side of a cobble path leading to the church. To his right was a small building, which he guessed must be Lucy’s chapel.

  ‘Are you going to give me the guided tour, Duffy?’

  She took his arm. ‘Ruth’s inside. We’ll both do it. We saw you on the news; you deserve a reward, Sir.’

  ‘Yes, I do, Duffy - substantial reward that involves lots of sex and chocolate ice cream.’

  She laughed. ‘It’s a bit cold for ice cream, Sir.’

  ‘Cold is my middle name, Duffy.’

  ‘You haven’t even got a first name, so how can you have a middle name?’

  ‘I’ve got a first name, but if you ever find out what it is I’ll have to kill you, Duffy.’

  ‘Okay, Sir.’

  On the outside, the church was still a church. In the centre was a tower with a clock, two circular windows, and a solid wooden entrance door that swung open to reveal a glowing Ruth, hot and panting from unpacking. On either side of the tower, at ninety-degree angles, identical single-storey buildings extended outwards at least forty feet. The slate roof was sloped, the walls whitewashed, and the large arched windows filled with stained glass.

  ‘Hello, Quigg,’ Ruth said. ‘We want you - hurry up.’

  He strolled inside a small anteroom before he came out into a strange-shaped room, but he didn’t get chance to look at it in detail because he was dragged to the left through two large rooms and into a huge bedroom. There was a king-size bed against the far wall, but it hadn’t been made. The two women took his clothes off, Ruth at the top, Duffy at the bottom, and threw them on the floor. He didn’t notice them take their own clothes off, but suddenly they were all naked and leading him into another room. His mouth dropped open like a drawbridge when he saw the circular jacuzzi, full of hot bubbling water.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘I’ve died and gone to heaven, haven’t I?’

  ‘You will think you have by the time we’ve finished with you, Quigg,’ Ruth said, climbing in and easing herself down into the steaming water.

  ‘I bloody knew I was missing something,’ Lucy said, coming into the room, laughing and stripping off her clothes. Before she held her nose and dived under the water, she said, ‘If I’m not back in an hour, send a rescue party.’

  Quigg wondered whether he would need rescuing.

  ***

  He’d never been in a jacuzzi before and wondered if they all came with three female demonstrators. It was twenty to nine by the time they climbed out of the hot water and dried themselves.

  ‘I could eat half a horse,’ Lucy said.

  ‘And I’ll have the other half,’ Quigg offered.

  ‘We have to eat properly now, Quigg,’ Ruth said.

  ‘Properly! Is that a herb, like mint?’ Lucy asked.

  Quigg laughed. ‘Good one, Lucy.’

  ‘We haven’t got any food in,’ Duffy said.

  ‘That settles it, then,’ Quigg said. ‘We’ll have to get a takeaway. I saw an Indian on Goldhawk Road. Everybody okay with Indian?’

  They all looked at each other and nodded.

  ‘I’ll get a meal for four,’ he said.

  ‘Get a mountain of Bombay potatoes,’ Lucy said. ‘I love those.’

  Ruth: ‘…and some mango chutney.’

  Duffy: ‘…and some onion bhajiis.’

  Lucy: ‘and some garlic naan.’

  Ruth: ‘…and…’

  ‘I’ll just buy the whole menu, should I?’

  He had to put on his old clothes that were scattered about the bedroom floor and decided to walk to the takeaway. The Cuban man in the security building spoke enough English to understand that he’d be back in about half an hour, and told him to press the button on the intercom outside when he returned.

  The round trip took him forty-five minutes. It was a lot farther than he’d imagined. He’d helped himself to a couple of menus, so in future he’d ring and get the food delivered.

  After they’d eaten, the three women completed the guided tour. Duffy’s half of the church was a mirror image of Ruth’s, including the jacuzzi. The room in the centre was shaped like the head of an arrow, with a passageway that led into a semi-circular kitchen comprising everything a chef could wish for. Quigg realised that he was going to be very happy here.

  ‘Come on, then, Lucy - where’s the secret tunnel?’

  ‘Guess, Quigg.’

  He hunted all over for the entrance.

  ‘It’s not in the kitchen or either half of the church,’ Duffy said.

  ‘Well, that only leaves this room and the entranceway.’

  ‘It is not in the entranceway,’ Ruth said.

  The three women were sitting on a small ledge that jutted out at right angles from the wall. Quigg was sure he could see a resemblance to the three little pigs.

  ‘Okay, I give up.’

  Lucy was sitting on her hands, squirming like an excited child who knew where the chocolate was hidden. ‘You’re not much of a detective, are you, Quigg,’ she teased him.

  Laughing, he said, ‘No, not at this time of night.’

  Lucy stood up and pressed one of the larger ornamental metal butterflies towards the outer circle of a spiral of butterflies made from recycled cans on the left wall behind where they were sitting.

  He heard a thunk, and stepped back as a block of four tiled squares sank into the floor, disappeared and revealed a hole with a set of concrete steps, large enough for a person to walk down.

  ‘I would never have found that,’ Quigg said.

  Lucy grabbed his hand, dragged him down the steps and along a dimly lit tunnel.

  ‘Don’t be long,’ Ruth called after them.

  At the other end, another set of steps led up to the chapel that he had seen from outside. On the wall above the trapdoor there was a similar spiral of bats made out of empty beer cans.

  ‘This is my work and living room,’ Lucy said. It was a large oblong room. The windows, like those in the church, were tall, arched and made from stained glass. Along the whole length of the far wall a worktop had been fixed at waist height, upon which stood a keyboard and an enormous monitor.

  ‘This all looks very nice,’ Quigg said.

  Lucy stared at him as if he were the goo of a crustacean she’d accidentally trod on. ‘Very nice? Let me tell you what we’ve got here, Quigg.’ She pointed to the three servers beneath the worktop. ‘Down there we have a print server, a mirrored server, and this baby,’ she stroked the jet black casing of the server in the centre, ‘has an Intel 6GigaHerz E6850 Quad Core Processor, with 10Gigabytes of DDR 2 memory running at 2Gigahertz. It’s als
o got a 1Terabyte hard drive, and a dual Blu-Ray/HD DVD drive. I won’t bother fuddling you with the amount of cache and the ultra fast graphics card it’s got.’

  ‘Can you drive it?’

  ‘0 to 60 in twenty-three seconds,’ she said.

  ‘Does it make coffee?’

  ‘You’re a dork, Quigg.’ She touched the monitor gently with a finger. ‘And will you feel this 24-inch, 1920 x 1200 native resolution monitor. I get orgasms just looking at it.’

  Quigg squeezed her shoulder. ‘There’s something I want you to do for me, Lucy.’

  ‘Again? I knew once you’d tasted me you’d want some more.’

  ‘No, not that. I want you to hack into somewhere and sort something out for me.’

  She sat down in front of the monitor. ‘I’ve got every piece of hacking software known to woman on here, Quigg.’

  ‘Now, no one’s going to be able to trace you like last time, are they?’

  ‘Not a chance. I’ve got a piece of software called Bounce. It’s called that because it bounces every one of my communications all over the web through a million proxy servers. A sniffer dog with a bionic nose couldn’t track me now, Quigg. Name?’

  ‘The Merry Widows Mutual.’

  Her fingers glided over the keyboard. ‘I’m in.’

  ‘Bloody hell - that was quick.’

  ‘Hey, I’m a professional, Quigg. This is what I do.’

  ‘You’ve changed your online name, haven’t you?’

  ‘Of course. I’ve told the people that matter that I’m now Tornado Jane. So, come on, Quigg, I’m bloody tired after you screwed me stupid. I need lots of sleep.’

  ‘Find my file.’

  ‘Okay. It says here that you’ve got a claim in for your mother’s house burning down. It also says that they’re not going to pay out on the claim because nobody told them a policeman was living there. Also, the emails sent between the boss, a Mr Paul Mulrooney, and the account manager, Alastair Tooley, are having a laugh at your expense.’

  ‘The bastards. Can you…’

  ‘Of course I can. A cheque has been authorised for £400,000. Where do you want it sent?’