Thief Taker

by Alan Scholefield

  Of course he’d been close to Silver before. He’d followed both of them in London. Had stood only yards away from them in the Old Vienna. But that was different. It was part of the game. Now the game had ended and what old Crowhurst had called the nitty gritty had arrived and Ronnie didn’t like it.

  Silver looked so…what the hell was the word…“competent”…? Don’t kid yourself. It wasn’t “competent”. The word was “dangerous”!

  He watched as they crossed the pub car park. Silver walked easily, lightly. He was dressed in black. Darth Vader. The Black Knight. Oh Christ!

  Ronnie fingered the indentation on his cheek. He’d only tangled with Silver once and this is what had happened to him!

  It was one thing lying on your bunk in the nick and planning what you’d do when you came out. Everybody knew that that was what sustained you in there. Kept you going. Kept you sane.

  And at home it’d been the same. He had his “collection” there. That had made a difference. His “exhibitions”. Laying the weapons out on his bed. The death star, the knife, the Browning automatic made in Belgium. I mean, Jesus, just holding the gun made him seem…invincible.

  He’d thought of Silver as the “target”. Somehow that made it seem less dangerous. You shot at targets, they didn’t shoot back. But this target was flesh and blood and was dressed in black and suddenly it wasn’t just some inanimate object.

  He wished he was back at home right now having an exhibition and looking forward to telephoning Barbara. That had been great. Telling her about the gun and everything.

  He was abruptly angry with himself.

  Come on…come on…for Christ’s sake, you’ll never get another chance like this.

  But what if he’s also got a gun?

  But the British police don’t carry guns. Anyway, he’s on bloody holiday.

  Come on…come on…

  He saw the white Golf turn down a side lane.

  Come on!

  He started the car but his hands were so sweaty he could hardly grip the wheel. It’s no good, he told himself. Even if you had them covered you’d probably not be able to hold the gun properly.

  Look, it’s no bloody go. You’re too worked up. Too tense.

  Of course there’d be other times. Maybe he could get her alone some time in London. Wait for her. Follow her from the Underground or from a bus.

  Yeah.

  That was it. This was too dangerous. Who the hell was going to look after his mother anyway if something happened to him?

  It was just bloody irresponsible. He was all she had. He couldn’t go risking himself like this.

  No, better put it off. Wait for a better moment. Plan it better. Practise with the gun. He could afford to shoot off a few bullets…

  You don’t have to do anything!

  You can leave at any time and they won’t even know.

  That gave him a lift. He’d followed them all the way from London and they didn’t even bloody know! The stupid sods!

  Then he had a brilliant idea. A reign of terror. Envelopes and letters. Phone calls in the night. God, he’d make their lives a misery.

  Terrific.

  He’d work it all out on the drive back to London.

  He started the engine and drove past the entrance of the lane that led down into the forest.

  And then he saw a sight that made him change all his plans. Zoe was getting out of the car. Silver was nowhere to be seen. She seemed unsure of herself, unsure whether or not to go down the track.

  Ronnie had no idea what they were doing, only that at this moment she was alone. He turned down the lane and cut the engine.

  *

  “Leo!” Zoe called. “Wait for me!”

  Even as she was locking the car she thought: this is silly. I’m in the country now. But if you lived in London you locked your car and old habits died hard. By the time she had finished he had vanished.

  She knew the direction. It was only a matter of staying with the path. But the path was muddy. It sloped gently downwards and had become a channel for rainwater.

  “Leo!”

  Ugg boots, which were soft sheepskin with the fleece on the inside were more like sloppy slippers, and were not quite as explorer-ish as Leo had thought them. They slipped and slid, absorbed water, became covered in mud, and she was forced to leave the path and look for drier, grassier areas.

  She scrambled down the slope, trying to remain parallel to the path, but in the nature of forests her own line was constantly interrupted by branches or boulders which caused her to make little detours. Soon she could no longer see the path, was no longer quite sure where it was or what her own position was.

  “Leo!” she called.

  The day was dark and the forest smelled of damp leaf-mould. She didn’t like it at all. She decided she had been foolish and that she should go back to the car.

  Then she heard a noise behind her and thought: Leo, you bastardy you’re playing games! She turned. It wasn’t Leo.

  “Zoe!” the man said, softly.

  That took a moment to sink in.

  It was so unexpected that she had not registered her own name for a few seconds.

  “What — ?”

  “Don’t you recognise me?” Ronnie asked.

  “Why should — ?”

  She half turned, looking for Leo, and he grabbed her hair in one hand and she saw the gun for the first time in the other.

  “If you scream I’ll kill you,” he said.

  “You’re hurting!”

  He laughed nervously and dragged her towards a thicket.

  “Don’t

  “You’ll hurt yourself if you struggle.”

  His fingers twisted in her hair and tears started in her eyes. He dragged her into the thicket.

  He threw her to the ground. She fell upon a formation of woven branches and heard them crack.

  “You recognise me now?” he said, pulling the hair away from his face.

  “Yes The terror was there and yet it was not there. This was a dream. Lightning never struck twice in the same place.

  “I’ve been waiting for this,” Ronnie said. “We were rudely interrupted the first time.”

  He was drenched in sweat. It dripped down from his forehead and he could taste the salt as it slid over his lips. The gun felt as though it was covered in oil, which it was. The oil and the sweat were combining to make it slippery.

  “Kneel,” he said.

  “Please…”

  The black-and-white newsreels showed kneeling figures being despatched with single shots in the head then tumbling into communal graves.

  Ronnie saw her terror then. It was what he had been waiting for. He saw it in her eyes and he felt the power.

  He began to unzip his trousers.

  She knew what was about to happen.

  It was the indignity of it that enraged her. The fact that he made her kneel and face him, that he was going to make her give him…her mind veered away from the phrase.

  Anger gripped her.

  She did not see the gun as a threat; it did not have the menace of that earlier knife. It seemed unreal. Instead of kneeling, she launched herself at him clawing and flailing. His hands were occupied. The gun slipped from his fingers and fell on to the grass. Then they were wrestling and twisting and, finally, falling.

  She fought with all her strength, trying to use her nails on his face. He fought back, fear giving him added strength. He was suddenly terrified. This was not meant to be happening! This was not what he had planned for. He wanted to get away from her, to run.

  But she was wiry and strong and moved like lightning. His face was pressed into the leaf-mould. He saw the eye. Only one eye at first. Leaves covered the other. Then the tip of a nose. Black hair. Lips turned back over earthy teeth. He screamed and jerked away. A hand like a claw seemed to grip him. Not Zoe’s, but a hand stained by dirt and rain. The ground under him wobbled. He screamed again and scrambled to his feet, trying not to stand on whatever was the
re.

  He turned to run.

  The figure was black against the sky.

  Darth Vader.

  The Black Knight.

  The light glinted on the axe.

  He bent for the gun. The axe began its descent. He fired once, and then he felt the crushing blow as the blade bit into his collar-bone and ate deeply into his chest.

  The Black Knight was on his knee. Ronnie fired again.

  Rachel fell sideways.

  Ronnie stumbled away into the forest trying to staunch the blood that poured from his terrible wound.

  And Zoe was left with Rachel’s dying body and the face and the nose and the hair that floated in the leaf-mould and the dead eyes that stared up at the rainy sky.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  “But why?” Mrs Healey said, tears streaming down her face. “Why would he kill my Rachel?”

  It was evening in the Welsh border town of Chepstow. A glimmer of late sun on the Severn Estuary and a cold wind blowing.

  But in police headquarters it was almost too warm. Someone had switched on the heating earlier in the day and the air was stale and dry.

  Four people were in interview room number two: Silver, Zoe, Macrae — who had caught up with them late in the afternoon after terrorising the owner of the Paxham Arms and finally locating Silver on the car radio through the local police — and Mrs Healey, who had driven down from London to identify her daughter’s body.

  She was a different person from the one who had identified her husband. Now she was broken, a woman who looked twice her age instead of someone who had never looked as old as she was.

  As Macrae examined her he saw eyes red and puffy from weeping and a face that had grown haggard. He did not think that Harris would be keeping her company much longer.

  His glance touched Zoe, then Silver. Zoe was flushed, but calm. He recalled how panic-stricken she had been the last time and how Silver had had to create a safe world and place her in its centre before she began to throw off the horrors.

  This time the horror had been worse, yet she had come through it better than Silver.

  Macrae was worried about him. His skin was the colour of putty. His eyes were bright, almost glittering. His hands were shaking slightly and he had asked Macrae for a cigar, something he had never done before.

  The long day was coming to an end. They’d got what they could out of Rawley and they had interviewed the woman in the Lexton shop who had sold Rachel the heavy wrench. The only loose end was Purvis. A large force from the local police was at present combing the Forest of Dean for him and road blocks had been set up. They knew he had been badly hurt and Macrae had been told that the dogs had been called in and were probably going into the forest even as they talked.

  Mrs Healey’s question remained hanging in the air. Why did he kill my Rachel?

  It was the word “my” that stuck in Macrae’s throat. Death changed a lot of things, he thought, but it couldn’t change the facts. All it did was produce guilt, oceans of it.

  Earlier he had interviewed Mrs Healey by himself. He hadn’t been rough, there had been no need, because she’d been rough on herself — perhaps for the first time ever.

  He had taken her back to when Rachel was a child and heard about the abuse. For a man with three children, two of them daughters, it came hard to Macrae. He had to control his anger and disgust.

  Only once did he allow his feelings to burst out. “God!” he said, “What sort of man was he? How can a man destroy someone as close to him as his own child?”

  She had said bitterly, “Close? Robson was never close to anyone. He was a stranger to Rachel.”

  They went through it all step by step because it was in Rachel’s childhood that the later tragedies, like the small beginnings of tropical storms, were formed.

  “Was the asthma psychosomatic then?” he said.

  “Probably. But it’s never as clear-cut as that.”

  “But you knew! Couldn’t you have stopped it?”

  “He simply denied it. Said she was lying. Said I was mad.”

  Macrae did not reply and she took this as an accusation — which it was.

  “You never knew him!” she cried.

  She told him of several instances when her husband had used violence against business rivals, burning down their offices, sinking their ships. She told him how he had come down to the cottage and beaten up Collins. He had got his heavies to hold him while he smashed his teeth with a piece of firewood.

  And that was the progression: fear leading to terror, leading to inertia, leading to guilt. And as far as Rachel was concerned: fear leading to illness, leading to madness, leading to murder.

  The actual killing of Robson Healey would never be definitively set down, Macrae knew, because both players were now dead. But as far as the evidence could take them it seemed that Rachel had bought the wrench from the shop in Lex ton, caught a train to London and gone to her father’s house. He’d been expecting Lucy Spilsbury. Had gone up to his bedroom, perhaps to finish dressing. Rachel had accompanied him and killed him.

  But why? That was what Mrs Healey had wanted to know. Why had she left it all this time?

  Silver said, “I think her boyfriend, Chris Mitchell, tried to rape her. That’s what we’ve got out of Rawley and he says she told him. She took him to the grave and she prayed and told him what had happened as a kind of fable. And that’s when he saw Mitchell’s body in the shallow grave and he ran away. And not too long after that we met him in the pub.

  “Rachel and Mitchell had been living together as man and wife, as intimately as any two people could live — except for a sexual relationship. She wouldn’t allow it. And he wouldn’t put up with that indefinitely. So he tried to, or succeeded, in raping her. And she killed him.”

  Suddenly Zoe said, “Chris…Christopher…Aren’t people called Christopher sometimes nicknamed Kit?”

  “Kitten!” Macrae said.

  Mrs Healey looked up, mystified, but Silver went on, “And she must have thought that she would never, never be normal while her father existed because of what he had made her do. So she had to kill him, too!”

  Macrae looked doubtful. He hated psychology. He’d have been much happier if one of his underworld narks had come along and said, Mr Macrae this is how and why it happened…And told him.

  But Silver was developing his theme: “She suffered from a psychosomatic illness as well, don’t forget. I mean, both things could be laid at her father’s door. If he was eliminated, she might achieve normality, both physically and mentally. He was the block. He had to be removed. At least that’s what Rachel’s subconscious might have told her.”

  “Maybe, laddie,” Macrae said. “We’ll never know for certain.”

  They talked on. Darkness came. Statements were taken and signed. Tea and coffee were brought. Macrae found some whisky.

  Finally, at nearly midnight, it was over.

  Mrs Healey left for London. Macrae and Eddie went back to the Forest of Dean to see if Purvis had been taken. Silver had wanted to come too but Macrae had said, “Go fishing. That’s an order.”

  “Come on, darling,” Zoe said, taking his arm as they walked through the deserted streets of the town to pick up their car.

  “I think we’d better go back to London,” Leo said.

  “Why?”

  He didn’t reply but she knew the reason.

  “Look. I’m all right. Nothing happened to me.”

  But he was remembering…He was hearing the shots again…and running…and suddenly coming upon them in the thicket of elder bushes. He’d seen Purvis with blood pouring down his chest…He’d seen Rachel’s body…He’d seen Zoe, dirt-stained, her clothes and hair awry…And he’d seen the horror amid the dead leaves…

  All she had ever asked of him was that he protect her — and he had failed.

  He felt himself begin to shake violently.

  She stopped and took him in her arms.

  “Leo…Leo…They’ll get Purvis.
It’s only a matter of time. Don’t you understand? I’m not frightened anymore.”

  “But I am,” he muttered. “And that’s the problem.”

  As Eddie drove the big Ford towards Lexton, Macrae too was brooding about Silver’s problem. He would have to watch him carefully, for he had seen this kind of thing before. It was called stress.

  Problems! Christ, they all had problems. His own, now that the case was almost closed, came crowding back: Mandy, Artie Gorman — he knew that wasn’t wrapped up as neatly as Artie thought — Scales, Linda…

  After a while he said, “Eddie, it’s just possible I mightn’t be able to keep you as a driver.”

  “What, guv’nor?” The tone was alarmed.

  “I’m not saying I definitely won’t, but the Deputy Commander’s on my back.”

  “Oh.” Then he turned to Macrae and said with a kind of forced optimism, “He won’t worry after this case, guv’nor. Not for a while anyway. When a thief taker’s successful no one’s going to rock the boat. Anyway, think how good it’ll look for him.”

  “Don’t bet on it, Eddie.”

  There’s light at the end of the tunnel.

  It was a phrase his father had often used when Ronnie was small. It was his way of saying, “There’s always a silver lining.”

  It used to make his mother angry.

  “Micawber!” she would shout. “That’s what you are! Always waiting for something to turn up.”

  Light at the end of the tunnel.

  That’s what he was seeing now.

  He’d been unconscious for hours. Now, like a wounded animal, he began to crawl towards the light.

  It was an old-fashioned red telephone box at the side of a forest road. It lit up the darkness.

  He crawled into it and forced himself on to his feet.

  He was dizzy.

  He closed the door behind him. The effort brought a gush of blood from the wound. It ran down his clothes on to the floor.

  He wanted to talk to someone. Just to talk. To say hello. He had money in his pocket. The whole world was at the end of the telephone line.

  But who?

  It took him nearly ten minutes to bring the coins out of his pocket. Slowly he put in enough to phone halfway round the globe.