The Eye of the Serpent

by Simon Cheshire

  ‘Better finish my tea, then,’ muttered Jennifer’s mum without the faintest hint of humour, draining her cup.

  ‘Well, first of all,’ I said, ‘I’ve been to see Henry Westwick this morning. He had nothing to do with the robbery. He’s been taking time off from his job recently because he’s been taking extra dance classes.’

  ‘Dance classes?’ said Jennifer. ‘What, Henry Westwick?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He’s also been going to job interviews. He’d been working towards becoming a qualified salsa dance instructor. He’s grown tired of lecturing about the worst aspects of the human mind. Instead, he says he wants to, er, teach the world to boogie.’

  ‘Henry Westwick?’ spluttered Jennifer.

  ‘Yup. He’s been hiding all this from his family because he knew they’d have exactly the same reaction as you. He wanted to wait until everything was set for his change of career before he said anything. He told me that, er, they’d only rain on his parade. You should be pleased for him. He passed his final exams last night. He says he’s ready to chase his dream now.’

  ‘Is this the shock?’ said Jennifer’s mum.

  ‘Er, no,’ I said. ‘The shock involves the person who did commit the robbery. You see, I know exactly who it was.’

  ‘So, who was it?’ said Jennifer.

  ‘It was someone I’d never normally have suspected,’ I said. ‘But this person let something slip, yesterday.’

  I glanced at Jennifer’s mum. She had a steely look on her face, an unreadable expression that made me feel even more nervous than I was already.

  I cleared my throat again.

  ‘As you’ve probably seen,’ I said, ‘news of the robbery has finally hit the headlines this morning. Everyone’s now going to be searching like mad for the Pat the Hat imitator. It’s the only major robbery that’s been reported around here for ages, but this person mentioned it yesterday, when only the police and a handful of others knew about it. It was only a brief comment, but it gave him away. Jennifer, think back to our conversation on the driveway.’

  Jennifer frowned. ‘But, surely, the only person you could be referring to is . . .’

  ‘Mr Santos,’ I said.

  Mr Santos didn’t react. The expression on his face didn’t change. He gently placed his teacup on to the coffee table in front of us.

  ‘But how . . .?’ said Jennifer’s mum. ‘I . . . I can’t believe it!’

  ‘What?’ said Jennifer. ‘Nice old Mr Santos? Well, you were right, Saxby, that’s certainly a shock.’

  ‘Actually, er, that’s not the shock either,’ I said.

  I stood up and walked over to Mr Santos. He glanced up at me. His expression still hadn’t changed. His face barely moved, but somehow he told me to go ahead. He knew the game was up.

  ‘That wasn’t the shock,’ I said. ‘This is.’

  I took hold of his grey hair, and pulled. With a snapping of hairpins, it slid off to reveal a close-cut, reddish fuzz. I took hold of his bulbous nose and pulled it away. I removed his glasses, and peeled off the rubbery appliance that altered the shape of his chin.

  The teacup dropped from Jennifer’s mum’s hand, and smashed on the floor. She gaped at him with a mixture of horror and disbelief, her eyes wide, her mouth shuddering in uncontrollable heartache.

  ‘Pat?’ she gasped. ‘Patrick?’

  ‘Hello,’ said Patrick Bell, in a voice that was totally unlike that of Mr Santos.

  Jennifer’s mum screamed. Loudly. She sat back, shaky hands gripping the edge of the chair.

  Jennifer slid off the sofa and leaned over the coffee table.

  She gazed intently at the face of the stranger in front of her. Her lips struggled to form words, until at last she said, in a feeble whisper, ‘Daddy?’

  Patrick Bell smiled weakly at her. Tears welled up in his eyes. He turned to me. ‘Are you goin’ to tell ’em, or shall I?’ he said.

  ‘I think I can guess most of it,’ I said. ‘You stop me if I go wrong.’

  ‘OK,’ he nodded. He was a distinctive-looking guy, with a heavy brow and a prominent jawline. It was no wonder he’d needed to become so expert at using disguises during his criminal activities.

  ‘You’d had several years as a highly successful thief,’ I said to him, ‘but the security van heist was one in a million. Divided up amongst the gang, it would net you a lot of cash. But kept all to yourself, the loot would set you up for life. You got greedy. You decided to take the risk and double-cross them.

  ‘But pulling it off would mean revealing your secret to your wife. Even though you’d been careful not to allow the gang to know your real name, they’d still be after you. They’d stop at nothing to track you down and get revenge. So you’d need to go into hiding, to keep your wife and daughter safe as well as you.

  ‘However, Jennifer’s mum didn’t take the news well. The gang had got themselves caught, and were under lock and key. You thought you had a little breathing space. But she called the police. You were forced to go on the run. Now, obviously, you weren’t killed in that crash. Am I right in thinking the crash was deliberate?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Patrick Bell. ‘Scotland Yard and the French police were closing in fast. I knew I had no chance, unless they thought I was dead.’

  ‘To convince them you were dead,’ I said, ‘they’d need a body. Or, if not a body, then enough evidence to convince them you’d been blown to bits. I take it you rigged the petrol tank? To make sure there’d be an explosion, and a big one at that?’

  ‘Right,’ said Patrick Bell. ‘I even put a bag full of newspapers on the back seat, to make them think the money had burned up. I guess the bang was so big they couldn’t find any of it.’

  ‘I don’t know how you got out of the car,’ I said.

  Patrick Bell smiled grimly. ‘I wasn’t even in it. I had the thing on a remote control. I was standing halfway up a slope, watching from above.’

  ‘But the ring?’ gasped Jennifer’s mum. ‘The DNA?’

  ‘He knew he’d need some sort of proof left in the car,’ I said. ‘Cuttings from hair or fingernails might not be enough, and might nor survive the explosion anyway. The ring was ideal, though: it was specially made, the diamonds would certainly survive, and it was known that the ring wouldn’t come off his finger. So . . .’

  Jennifer whimpered, shutting her eyes.

  ‘I snipped that finger off with a pair of gardening cutters,’ said Patrick Bell, kneading his hands together as he spoke. ‘It’s amazing what you’ll do when you’re desperate. A finger and a ring wasn’t much, but it would be enough to leave traces, and it’d be enough for the cops, provided they didn’t look too closely. And they didn’t.’

  ‘I expect they were glad to be rid of the Mad Hatter,’ I said. ‘Meanwhile, Jennifer and her mum learned what had happened. Soon after, they left London and came to live here. But the rest of the story isn’t clear to me. Why did you come back to England? I assume you ended up in Spain, as you took on a Spanish disguise when you came back?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Patrick Bell. ‘Once the heat was off, I made my way south. Ended up in Barcelona. I’d taken the proceeds of the robbery with me, o’ course, and I set myself up as a Mr Underhill, retired bank manager. Big house in the country, the lot. For several years, I lived it up. Parties on the beach, boats on the Mediterranean.

  ‘But I was never happy. Not for a minute. I never realised how much I’d miss my little girl. Or her mum. I thought about them all the time. And missing them made me think about how badly I’d treated them, and how badly I’d mucked up my life.

  ‘I could never be off guard. Not ever. The cops might work out what I’d done and come after me again. So might the gang I’d double-crossed. Even from prison they could have had me killed, if I’d been traced.

  ‘Every time the phone rang, every time there was a knock at the door, I’d be terrified. It didn’t matter how many disguises I adopted, or how many times I moved house. Someone, somehow, might catch up
with me.

  ‘It’s a terrible way to live. Terrible. Back in the old days, I used to think that the danger was exciting, glamorous even. But all it does is crush you, slowly. Turns you paranoid and jumpy. It eats you from the inside. It isn’t living, it’s a slow, horrible death.

  ‘I wanted to come home. I wanted to see my little girl, so badly. I was missing her growing up, her first day at school, her first loose tooth. I figured if I had to live in hiding, I could at least be in hiding near my family. So I invented Mr Santos. I could speak fluent Spanish, now I’d been in the country a few years. I could pass myself off as a foreigner back home.

  ‘It cost me an absolute fortune. Fake IDs, untraceable vehicles, all kinds of stuff. But I got here in the end. I got the house right next door. I couldn’t talk to Jennifer much, I couldn’t drop the slightest hint about who I really was, I couldn’t tell her how much I loved her and how sorry I was, but at least I could be near her. At least I could see her, and her mum.’

  ‘But . . .’ whispered Jennifer, wiping her eyes with a tissue, ‘couldn’t you have told us, in secret?’

  ‘I couldn’t take the risk,’ said her father. ‘If the gang ever caught up with me, that would put you in danger too. And besides, the last time I’d seen your mum, she turned me in to the cops. I had no reason to think she wouldn’t do the same again. I thought she might hate me now, for what I did.’

  Jennifer’s mum shook her head tearfully. ‘I didn’t,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t. I wouldn’t have called them.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Patrick Bell quietly.

  ‘But why return to crime?’ I said. ‘That’s the final part of the story I don’t understand.’

  ‘Believe it or not,’ he said, ‘the money was almost gone. I’d bought houses in Spain, even a vineyard, but I had to abandon it all when I came back here. I had to make sure I didn’t leave a trail that someone could follow.

  ‘I thought about simply getting a job. But I couldn’t get a job as my real self, could I? A fake identity wouldn’t stand up to the kinds of security and tax system checks you get these days. Things were looking bad – I was down to a few hundred pounds. But then, a few weeks ago, I discovered that the last member of the gang had died. Suddenly, I realised nobody would be coming to kill me any more. Suddenly, it occurred to me that Pat the Hat could return from the dead. My disguise was intact. The cops would think it was a copycat, long before they suspected the truth.

  ‘So, I thought, one more robbery. Just one. Big enough to let me retreat into my Mr Santos disguise for ever. Mr Clarke, across the road, made a perfect target. It wasn’t hard to work out how to get into that building society, not once I got talking to Mr Clarke at one of the Harrises’s regular get-togethers.

  ‘I shouldn’t have left that hat, should I? But the temptation was just too great. I was too full of myself, all over again. I thought I’d leave the police baffled, and be safe and sound as nice old Mr Santos. With my pretend war wounds and my pretend accent. Perhaps I hadn’t rejected my old life as much as I thought. But then I let one little detail slip, didn’t I? I knew about the robbery too early. And you spotted it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Although, it wasn’t just that. The missing finger gave me the clue to what had happened eleven years ago. But that was after the clue of your shopping bags.’

  ‘My shopping bags?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Santos was a tottery old guy, but he shifted those bulging shopping bags around as if they were weightless. He was suspiciously stronger than he looked. I should have seen it at once, but I only started thinking about other possibilities once Henry Westwick was out of the picture. Silly of me.’

  Patrick Bell, the most ingenious crook of his day, let out a long sigh and smiled at me. ‘I’ve outwitted a lot of cops in my time, but I didn’t outwit you, did I? I must be going soft in the head.’

  ‘Soft in the head is right,’ said Jennifer’s mum shakily. She stood up, and suddenly dragged her not-dead-after-all husband to his feet. For a second, I thought she was going to whap him one across the face. ‘You . . . stupid man!’ she yelled.

  Then she hugged him. Jennifer jumped up and hugged him too. I kept well out of the way.

  And so ended one of the strangest cases I’ve ever investigated. The following day, Patrick Bell walked into the local police station and gave himself up. He’d told Jennifer that he had to come clean, he had to stop running away and face up to what he’d done. He would go to prison, but at least she could visit him, and when he got out, he could make a new start. He could stop being terrified every time the phone rang, or someone knocked on the door, and live a better sort of life.

  I returned to my shed. Something had to be done about the wretched mess I’d left it in! Well, maybe tomorrow . . .

  And so, in the end, there I was, flopped in my Thinking Chair. For ages (as I said at the start of Chapter One) I was mulling over all sorts of horribly difficult questions, such as, ‘Would it have been better if I hadn’t interfered?’, and ‘Have I done a good thing or a bad thing?’ I’d solved the crime. I’d seen justice done. But I’d also turned Jennifer’s life upside down. I’d forced her mum to reveal a painful secret. I’d thrown the pair of them into turmoil. Was it my fault? Could I have acted differently? I still don’t know. What do you think?

  After a while, and after another half a packet of chocolate biscuits, I did come to a conclusion. Sometimes, the truth is painful. But, in the end, it’s usually less painful than lies. Because covering up the truth rarely does anyone any good.

  Case closed.

  EPILOGUE

  READERS OF MY EARLIER CASE FILES may be wondering where my arch enemy that low-down rat Harry Lovecraft, has been hiding for the duration of this book. The truth is, he was keeping his head down, and his nose clean. He was plotting a terrible revenge, as you’ll discover in volume six of my case files, Five Seconds to Doomsday . . .