Dispossession

by Chaz Brenchley

  We looked at each other across the bar-top there, and now it was me that wanted the mute reassurance of a hug. She didn’t give me that, though. Instead she gave me words, the same words that were in my own head that I didn’t want said out loud.

  “Luke,” she said. “It was Luke, wasn’t it? They let her go, like you said they would, and it was Luke who killed her.”

  “We don’t know that,” I said weakly, “we can’t be sure.” But I was horribly afraid that we could. Trees were Luke all over, we’d seen already today how he liked to tree his victims. And that made better sense than the alternative, that Dean had killed her after all. At least, if you could look at the world through Luke’s cold eyes, it made sense. She was a tree-killer, therefore he killed her. But before she died—as he dragged her up the tree, perhaps, as she desperately pleaded for her life—she would have said, “Not me, it wasn’t me, they made me do it. It was that man, that Dean. They took me to this place, Arlen Bank it was called, and they did, they did such things to me, Luke, I couldn’t help it, I’d have done anything to make them stop...”

  But nothing stopped Luke. He took her up the tree, and dropped her down; and then he came looking for Arlen Bank, for Dean. And I took him there, and I brought them together. I even yelled out Dean’s name, to give Luke the identification he needed; and how much responsibility, how many deaths could one man carry on inadequate shoulders...?

  o0o

  The item about Suzie’s brother was the last on the file. Put it all together, it seemed little enough to have cost Vernon Deverill so much money. A slim collection of hints and implications, and none of them backed up with any semblance of proof. Not so much use after all, not at all what I’d been hoping for. Without the disciplines of the office, where paperwork was essential, I must have been falling back on old habits from school and college: starting a project with brilliant intentions but very quickly losing track, starting to keep information in my so-trustworthy head to save the effort of typing it all up, knowing my ever-dependable memory would never let me down...

  o0o

  “Come upstairs?” Suzie said. “Please?”

  “Two minutes, love.”

  Two minutes was all it took to leave another copy of the SUSI file on the computer’s hard disk, hidden behind another name and another password, and then to delete all the other software I’d installed. Call me paranoid, but if they came back one more time I wanted as much protection as I could manage, for what little information that file held. Could be that it would fall to someone else to follow it up, in the long run. I pictured myself whispering instructions on my death-bed, where to find the first clues that would lead to a trail of murder and corruption, starring myself as only the latest corpse...

  What the hell, I’d seldom had the chance to be paranoid before; now here it was, and I intended to enjoy it.

  o0o

  Not much fun to be had up in the flat, in the mess with Suzie. We phoned for the locksmith and while we were waiting, as we trudged around making vague efforts to sort the mess, she looked up from where she was trying to sponge blood off the carpet and said, “What’s it all about, then, Jonty? Have you figured it out yet?”

  Not did the computer tell you, please note. I loved that girl, just then.

  “I guess,” I said. “Sort of. Mrs Tuck runs SUSI, and she’s using it as cover for a whole series of scams. I came across one of them by chance, because it involved a client of mine; and I think either your brother spotted another when he was in the church one day, or they were just afraid that he might. The kind of club he was planning, he’d be open all hours; and the way that place overlooked their compound, anything they were doing there, they were going to be seriously restricted.”

  She went very still for a minute. Then, “You mean that’s why he died? They killed him just because he might see something, sometime in the future?”

  “Or because they’d have to stop doing some things, just in case he did. I’m only guessing,” I added, trying to temporise; but I’d always hated dishonesty, and I couldn’t keep it up now. “I think that’s it, though. That or something like it. I think that’s the sort of people they are. They tried to buy the place out from under him, but when that didn’t work they just wiped him out.”

  Her head was bowed so that I couldn’t see her face, but her voice was thick and almost unrecognisable as she said, “They could, they could just have shot him or something. Couldn’t they? They didn’t need to, to do what they did.”

  No, they didn’t need to do that. And I was only guessing again as I said, “I think that was for misdirection, love. Being so extreme, it couldn’t possibly have been anything to do with a business deal going bad, now could it? It had the police looking for Triads, remember.”

  She seemed to nod, a little. Then she scrubbed a little, and I didn’t say a word about how scrubbing that hard would only work the stain further into the carpet, not lift it out at all; and then she said, “What about Nolan, then? And your mum?”

  “I don’t know.” Still didn’t know, despite the hints I’d thrown myself. Talking through what I did know, though, “Nolan computerised all Deverill’s businesses. That’s on the file. Which presumably means that he computerised Scimitar, before Deverill gave it to Mrs Tuck in the divorce.”

  “Did he?” Suzie hadn’t read back that far in the file; hadn’t read anything, most likely, except the bit where her brother’s name had caught her eye.

  “Yeah, he did. So, Nolan knew SUSI’s computer system; and Mum said he hated to let things go. And he’d be dying to know how well Mrs Tuck was actually doing with the company, or maybe how she was managing to do so well with something that had been pretty minor when they let it go. She’d have changed all the passwords first thing if she had any sense, but I bet he still had a way in. He built the system, after all; and computer nerds are like that, they leave themselves secret ways in and out as a matter of course, almost. Just to prove to themselves how clever they are.”

  “Uh-huh?” She glanced up at me, and I blushed. Stupidly. Passwords were very different, passwords were necessary protection and nothing more...

  “So say Nolan takes a sly butcher’s at SUSI’s accounts,” I went on quickly, still thinking on my feet, extemporising but liking the sound of it, “and he finds, what, that they’re making a lot more money than they should be?”

  “Well, so what if they are?” Suzie challenged. “This man works for Deverill, for God’s sake! He’d be pleased and proud, wouldn’t he? That she’d learned her lessons so well?”

  “Yeah, logically he would. And he’s in no position to blackmail her...” Shit, and it had felt so right. Still did, though, it just needed to go one level deeper. “Okay, it’s not the money. It’s the way they’re making the money, the things they’re doing to get it. Deverill’s bent as a corkscrew, and he’s a hard man running a bastard organisation; but there are things he wouldn’t do, maybe. He wouldn’t murder, to make a deal work.” Maybe.

  “What about... oh. No,” and she shook her head, and I could read her mind exactly. What about that girl? she’d been going to say; and No, you’re right, he didn’t have her killed, did he? That was your friend Luke did that.

  “He was going to let her go,” I said softly, to let her know how closely we were tracking, and also that I hadn’t forgotten. I wasn’t running away from Luke, only putting him aside to be confronted later. “And he wouldn’t have killed your brother; he’d have bought him off, or moved his own business if necessary. And he wouldn’t have killed some kid at random just to get my client out, either.”

  “Sorry?”

  I explained; she whistled softly. “Jesus. They do go for it, don’t they? Tell you what, if I was Nolan and I did know something they didn’t want me to know, I think maybe I’d be quite glad to be in jail in Spain. At least it’s safe.”

  “Yeah. I’m quite glad my mother’s heading that way. I don’t suppose they’ll put her in jail when she arrives—more’s the pity, it
’d do her no end of good—but at least she’s out of the way for a while.”

  “They think she’s still here,” Suzie said. “Those men who beat Lee up, they were looking for her.”

  “Her, and my computer.” And they wanted my mother for what Nolan might or might not have told her, though according to her and my own notes, he hadn’t told her a thing about SUSI; and Mrs Tuck had seen my computer this morning and sent her men to collect it and my mother both, to find out how much we’d figured out or dug up between us. If they cracked the password and read the file, then the answer to that was probably too much. If they didn’t, if they couldn’t find out what I knew—well, I was pretty sure they’d murdered Jacky just in case, at a time when in fact he knew nothing at all...

  Suzie was getting slowly to her feet, leaving bowl and cloth and bloodstain just where they were. Her eyes were fixed on mine, and again our minds were tracking each other’s uncomfortably closely.

  “Me working for Deverill protects us,” I said slowly. “That’s probably the only thing that does. If I get rubbed out now, he’ll want to know why; and what I found out, a real PI could find out too. Enough of it, anyway. Enough to point the finger at her.” So could my mother, of course. Which was why I’d told her so little, except get out now.

  “Maybe. But if we died in a car smash, say, and it all looked dead accidental, she could work on him, couldn’t she? Tell him you’d just been ripping him off, you didn’t really know a thing, there wasn’t really a story at all. Or she could plant stuff, make it look like you were chasing a whole different story. She could do what she likes right now, he wouldn’t know any better.”

  “Come on, let’s get out of here,” just like my mother and never mind the locksmith or the flat or anything. Right now it was saving her life that counted, hers and my own and nothing more than that.

  o0o

  It felt a lot safer, simply to be in the car and moving. Me, I would have been content with that; but Suzie not, she had to go on asking questions.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know. Nowhere.”

  “Unh?”

  “Nowhere she’ll think to look for us. Not your parents’ house, not any of your friends or mine. She’s probably got a list, all the places we like to hang around in.”

  “Can’t we go to the takeaway? Dad’ll be there, and he could use a hand, with Mum at the hospital.”

  “No, be real. That’s about the fourth place they’ll look.”

  “Dad’s dead mean with a cleaver,” she said, almost hopefully. “And we owe them one, for Lee.”

  “Suppose they come with guns?”

  She grunted. “Well, where, then?”

  “Just drive.” I almost said go around the ring road, and stopped myself just in time. They’d taken her brother around the ring road.

  With no place particular to head for, she started coming up with questions again instead. “How come you didn’t tell Deverill about her?”

  I don’t know, I wasn’t there. In a manner of speaking, at any rate. I could guess, though. Why not? Looked like guessing was all I’d ever do, about that missing time.

  “She’s his ex-wife,” I said, “and his best friend too, as far as I can see. He trusts people exactly as far as he can buy them, and not a fraction further; but he trusts her. And what, I’m supposed to go waltzing in to this scary guy who doesn’t trust me an inch, and tell him that I can’t prove a damn thing, I can’t even offer him a convincing argument, but I know anyway that it’s somehow because of her that his man Nolan is languishing in jail in Spain? I don’t think so.”

  “Well, if you put it like that...”

  “No other way to put it. That’s our ammunition, and it’s so damp it’s oozing. I guess I was playing for time, trying to find some proof that I could show him; and meanwhile pretending that I really didn’t know anything. So long as that was what was coming back to her, I’d be safe, I suppose. She wouldn’t want to bump me off without due cause, in case he got suspicious.”

  “Unh. Tell you what I hate most about all this?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you never told me what was going on. You were playing for your bloody life, and you never said a word.”

  Ah. I had a theory about that; but, “If I had done, that would’ve put you in danger too.”

  “Bullshit, Jonty. I was in danger anyway, just from being your wife. They wouldn’t stop to find out what you’d told me and what you hadn’t. Why bother? Two people die as cheaply as one.”

  “Okay, so maybe I was just a secretive bastard. How would I know? I don’t remember.”

  She gave me a suspicious sideways glance, as if our thoughts were tracking one more time and she didn’t like the direction one bit; but she let it go.

  We were down by the river now, pubs and offices and new developments on the left, bollards and chains and water on the right. As safe as anywhere, I supposed. As deadly as anywhere. Suzie twitched the wheel, bumped us up onto broad flagstones and killed the engine.

  “What?”

  “I don’t like driving in circles.”

  She got out, slammed the door, walked over to stand barely this side of the bollards and chains, her toes almost overhanging the edge. Too close; I followed her hastily, stood behind and put both my arms around her.

  She twisted her head around and up, scowling. “What?”

  “You be careful. If you fell...”

  “Jonty, I’m not going to fall. Besides, so what if I did? I can swim.”

  “Not in there. That stuff’ll poison you before you drown. And anyone can fall, if they stand too close to a drop.” Look at Luke. “I mean, one touch of vertigo, and you’re gone...”

  “I don’t get vertigo.”

  “Why take chances?”

  “Jesus...”

  She turned, inside the circle of my arms; looped her own around my neck; pulled my head down and kissed me.

  “Is this what it’s going to be like?” she demanded. “You being fussy and over-protective, all our goddamn lives?”

  I nodded. “Next car I buy’s another Volvo.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” this warm and supple body, these too-fragile bones broken beyond repair. That was me all over, all through: frantic to see them safe, all the people I loved.

  “You’re not closeting me,” she said. I thought perhaps she meant ‘cosseting’, but I didn’t like to say. Besides, she was kissing me at the time, and I couldn’t have got my lips around it.

  Then, taking my hand and tugging me for a walk along the quayside, “I still don’t see how you got to Nolan. Or how you got Deverill to cough up all that money, or why you’d want him to, come to that.”

  Me neither. “Because I had to look corrupt, I told him. But I must’ve known that would get straight back to Mrs Tuck. I wasn’t fooling her, so—”

  “Yes, you were,” Suzie said suddenly. “That’s exactly what you were doing. If she knows that you’re setting yourself up to look like a corrupt lawyer so that some Mr X will bite when you make your move, whatever that is, then she knows you’re off on some totally false trail and not at all after her. Doesn’t she?”

  “Does she?”

  “Sure she does. And that suits her fine, she’s not going to bother you as long as you’re so obviously wrong about everything.”

  I shook my head. These were deep waters, deep and muddy. Lies within lies, it was all so complicated; I turned to look into the deep and muddy waters of the river, and Suzie said, “That still doesn’t explain what led you to Nolan in the first place.”

  “No. But look, I was after Scimitar, yes? I knew they’d sprung my client, and murdered some other kid to do it. It wouldn’t have taken much for me to find out they were providing security on Deverill’s roads; and I already knew that Luke was involved in the protests over there. So I go to see Luke and his friends”—wrong word, maybe, even I wouldn’t choose to call
myself a friend of his, only that I’d never found a better—“and talk to them, spy on the compounds a bit, find out about the foreign work-gangs. And while I’m over that side of the country, of course I go to see my mother.”

  “But she didn’t know about SUS— about Scimitar. She didn’t.”

  “No. But I knew there was a connection between Deverill and Scimitar, and everyone knew about Deverill and Nolan. He’d been in the papers, remember, he was a big story and they’d all run features. So my mother tells me she’s been working on Deverill, she tells me about her and Nolan because she’s like that, she’s always been very upfront with me about the stuff she gets up to, she used to love to shock me; and something clicks, something connects somewhere. Don’t know what, but it doesn’t matter right now. I realise that she’s in danger if Mrs Tuck ever finds out about the Journal or simply decides that Nolan told her what he knew. So I tell her to cut and run, tell her just enough so she knows who to be scared of but no more, because if I told her any more she’d decide to investigate Mrs Tuck instead and likely get her throat cut; and then I’m on my way back to town when I have the accident.”

  That wasn’t right, quite, I’d been heading the other way when I crashed. Heading back to Luke, perhaps, to warn him too? No, Mrs Tuck’s whole organisation was no danger to Luke, that was foolish. Something, though, something had turned me around and taken me back. Still, never mind that for now.

  “So where do we go from here?” Suzie demanded.

  I looked at her, she looked at me; she nodded first. Two minds on but a single track.

  “Deverill,” she said. “We’ve got to. Proof or no proof.”

  Luke or no Luke. Deverill wasn’t likely to be in the mood to see us, with his main man tree’d and skinned, but I didn’t want to remind her of that. Besides, she was right. One way or another, we had to make him see us.

  o0o

  He travels fastest who travels alone, maybe; but he travels a hell of a lot faster in a car than he does on foot, even if someone else is doing the driving. It had taken us an hour and a half the first time we went that way that day, following Luke to guide him. Second time, we’d pretty much done it in ten minutes. We were just coming up to the village when we saw the big limousine with the black windows coming from the other direction.