A Love to Kill For

by Conor Corderoy

  He couldn’t say it so I helped him, “Heir. He told you that you were his heir, as his own son would have been. Because he loved you like a son and, as his sister’s boy, he made you his heir.”

  He stared at me with huge eyes, like he was astonished that I too should think so.

  “Well… Well…y-y-y—”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes…”

  “But?”

  “But, well, the thing is… We had this holiday home in Spain. It’s pretty remote, you know, Çalares in Andalusia. Wild goats, deer, eagles… There are even chameleons.”

  “I get the idea.”

  Russell piped in, “While Rupert was at university, Hugo started going out there quite often alone. Met some people out there…”

  I said, “Goat people?”

  Rupert nodded, then shook his head. “Perfectly nice people. Really. Perfectly…you know…”

  “Nice. So what’s wrong with them?”

  Russell cut in, wiping his mouth with his napkin, “What Rupert is trying to say, Liam, is that these people turned out to belong to a cult.”

  I was getting interested. I was beginning to see, and I said so. “So your uncle Hugo was drawn into this cult. He was brainwashed.”

  But Russell was shaking his head, swirling his wine around his glass. “It isn’t quite as easy as what you are thinking.”

  I said, “What am I thinking?”

  He drained his glass and reached for the decanter. While he poured he said, “You’re assuming that after joining the cult, Hugo cut Rupert out of his inheritance. He didn’t—not entirely—and there is much more to it than that.”

  I turned to Rupert, who was staring at Russell as though he had only just found out that he’d been cut out of his inheritance.

  “What is it then?” I asked him. He turned to me. I said, “What is there more, Rupert?”

  He pushed his meat about his plate with his fork for a minute. “My uncle was a very, truly brilliant man, Liam, and about ten years ago, he established a company to develop a revolutionary design in nuclear reactors.” He sighed gently. “Of course, the Holy Grail in nuclear energy is the fusion reactor, but, until now, they have proved impossible to build and the risk element attached to them has been humungous.”

  “Humungous?”

  He glanced at me. “Absolutely. A Chernobyl with a fusion reactor would have wiped out half the population of Earth.”

  “But your uncle was working on a design that would make them feasible and safe?”

  “That’s right. He’d assembled a team of very talented people, and the initial results were very promising. It seemed that within five to ten years, it was possible to develop the blueprints of a functional, safe fusion reactor.”

  I refilled my glass and watched my wine for a moment, considering the implications of what he had just told me. The table was very quiet. Eventually I asked him, “How? How could he do that?”

  Russell barked a laugh. “That information he guarded very jealously indeed. He didn’t even tell me. The research was more than top secret. It was known to the team and to a few very select government officials.”

  I looked at Russell for a long time. We’d finished eating so I pulled my Camels from my pocket and lit up. I was about to speak but he spoke my thoughts for me.

  “The implications are immense, Liam. World changing. We are talking about perhaps half a dozen stations providing all the energy the world could possibly need, at practically no cost, for thousands of years to come. Think what that would mean for the government who got hold of that design.”

  “I am,” I said and watched the smoke stretch out in the candlelight. I turned to Rupert again. “So what happened?”

  He shrugged. “Uncle Hugo had told me many times that he wanted me to inherit his shares in the company—forty-five percent—not quite a controlling share, but unless you had an outright mutiny on your hands, you could be sure of winning any important vote by the board. But, when he died, I was truly shocked. He had left all his shares to this cult…” He gave another deep sigh, raised his eyebrows then went on, “But not only that. He also left half his money to them and practically all his properties, including the house in Çalares.” He flushed. There was a moment’s silence, then Russell said, heavily, “They have named it the Abbey of Thelema.”

  “The Abbey of what?”

  “Thelema. Aleister Crowley had a villa in Cefalù, in Sicily. He used it as a temple for his rituals. He called it the Abbey of Thelema. This cult has named Hugo’s house after that abbey.”

  Rupert did the eyebrow thing, staring at his glass, and said, “He left me half his money in trust and the house I live in. I’m not complaining. I shall live well. Really, I just miss Mary-Jane. I want Mary-Jane back, Liam.”

  I winced. Russell coughed and shook his head. “That isn’t the point.” I turned to look at him. “They took him over somehow. Hypnotized him. Brainwashed him. They must have. Somehow they took control of his mind and they may even have killed him, Liam. He would never, never in his right mind, have left his company—put so much potential power—in the hands of this cult! It’s madness!”

  I nodded. I knew Russell was trying to make me see something, and I confess I was intrigued. I was also intoxicated by the kind of money that was not being mentioned around the table. I said, “Obviously you’ve talked to a lawyer.”

  “I’ve talked to five.” It was Rupert. “One of them is a High Court judge, a cousin on my father’s side. They all agree that what Hugo did was perfectly legal under English law.”

  “So what do you want me to do? How do you think I can help?”

  Russell said, “I was hoping you could tell us, actually, Liam. You have a way of finding things out, of getting things done. I’d rather not know how you do it, if you don’t mind, but it does seem that in this case the law is on the side of the Devil. If you could snoop around, find out something about this cult, you never know, we might find something we can use.”

  I frowned. “You want me to lean on these people? Russell, do you realize how high the stakes are in this?”

  He flashed a look at me and his eyes were sparkling. “Of course I do! I wonder if you do, fully.” He placed his hands on the table and leaned forward, as though about to get up, but paused. “Take a trip out to Andalusia. Have a little holiday. Take in the sights and see what you can find out about them. Nothing more. Rupert will cover your expenses and give you something for your time.”

  Rupert looked anxious. “Naturally! Goes without saying. But… You know my real interest. Can you help me to find Mary-Jane?”

  Before I could answer, Russell stood. “Time for some whiskey. What do you say?”

  I agreed it was time for whiskey, and he went to an ancient oak dresser for a bottle and some glasses. As he was pouring, he said, “Of course there is probably absolutely no connection with Mary-Jane’s disappearance or abduction, and it would be a huge relief for Rupert if you could find her somewhere. Who knows? She might be with her family…in Andalusia.” He smiled as he handed me a glass. “All roads, it seems, lead to Andalusia.”

  I sipped the twenty-five-year-old Bushmills and said, “Okay, I take your point, Russell. All roads lead to the brand new Independent Republic of Andalusia.” I set my glass down and asked, “But who runs this cult? Is there a leader? A name?”

  Russell grunted at his whiskey. “There seems to be some shadowy creature that only Hugo had ever met. Some enlightened goatherd of some sort.” After a moment he looked at me. He said, “The cult is called La Hermandad de la Cabra, The Brotherhood of the Goat.”

  * * * *

  I drove back to London the next morning through warm, misty rain after a breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, mushrooms and deviled kidneys. As I drove, I thought to myself that on the face of it, Russell was making a big deal out of not very much. On the one hand, it was yet another case of a woman suckering a naïve guy with too much money and not enough sense. On the other, it was the sad old
story of a multimillionaire hitting his midlife crisis with a need to give spiritual meaning to his life, and a strong appetite for kinky ritual sex. Unfortunately, this middle-aged millionaire happened to have developed fusion reactors, but I wondered if the enlightened goatherd from Andalusia actually realized what he’d inherited.

  As far as Mary-Jane was concerned, Rupert had been pretty adamant that nothing had gone missing when she’d disappeared, but two got you twenty she’d fleeced him for several grand in pretty rocks before she left. The windshield wipers wagged their wet fingers at me, like they knew something I didn’t.

  Rupert had given me Mary-Jane’s address in Whitechapel as Seven Sidney Square. She was on the third floor. I found it easily, let myself in the street door with a skeleton key, shook the water from my hat and coat and climbed the narrow staircase to the third floor. Hers was the only apartment and I opened that door easily too. I stepped inside and closed it quietly behind me.

  It was awful still. There was a short hall that opened out into the living room. When I stepped in, the wet, gray light from the windows added gloom to that anonymous look that all furnished apartments have. The carpet was gray. There was a sofa, a coffee table and two armchairs. They were all unremarkable. I stood looking around but I couldn’t find any trace of the Mary-Jane Carter that Rupert had been telling me about. There were no paintings, photographs or ornaments—no vases with flowers, no plants. It wasn’t particularly dirty, but it wasn’t particularly clean, either. It was just a furnished apartment with nobody living in it.

  I went to stand at the window, turning a Camel over in my fingers and looking down at my car in the rain below. Then I opened a few drawers and cupboards. There was nothing there to show anybody had ever lived there, except for a few scuff marks in the dust that had settled on the furniture. The bathroom told pretty much the same story, except there was a tube of toothpaste on a glass shelf and there was a pack of ibuprofen in the cabinet. There was also a towel on the rail.

  I wandered into the bedroom. Here there were more signs that somebody had been there, but not many. I looked in the closet and all the clothes were gone. There was a chest of drawers and a couple of the drawers had been left half open. They were all empty too, except that one of them still held a single silk stocking in it. The bed hadn’t been slept in, but there was a depression, like somebody had sat on it or placed a heavy case on it.

  I poked the cigarette in my mouth, lit it and strolled into the kitchen. There was some stale bread in the bread bin, a couple of tins of tuna in the cupboard, a stack of dirty dishes, pots and pans by the sink and a couple of beers and a moldy lettuce in the fridge. The fridge was still turned on. Outside I could hear the steady drip of water on the windowsill. It sounded like a clock.

  I cracked one of the beers and leaned against the kitchen table, drinking from the bottle, smoking and listening to the rain. Mary-Jane Carter had lived here all right—just—and Wednesday night she’d packed and left. But it hadn’t been the careful packing of a woman who is moving into her new home with her new partner. Mary-Jane Carter had packed like a woman who was leaving in a hurry.

  In my experience, most of the time in life you get what you want by being careful and planning it right. Sometimes, though—just sometimes—you get lucky. Usually you get lucky when somebody else gets careless. And usually they do that when they are in a hurry—like Mary-Jane Carter.

  I saw it as my eyes were drifting over the surface between the cooker and the sink. It was white, the same color as the plates, and that’s why I hadn’t seen it before. But then it clicked. It was an envelope. I stepped over and slipped it out from under the dishes. There was no name and address on it, so I guessed it had been delivered by hand, probably slipped under the door. Inside there was a single sheet of paper. It was written in a rough, unformed hand with a pencil. It read—

  Hi, babe,

  It’s all fixed like you wanted. Hury over tonite. I can tell you rite now I’m sick of watching you with that fucking sissy. I cudna taken much more. I can’t wait to getcha all to myself agen.

  Pete

  Life’s a bitch, then you die. I read it twice and felt twice as depressed the second time. Love. Poets have sung its praises through the ages. But every damn poet I ever heard of was either tragically on his own, or mad, bad and dangerous to know. In the real world, anyone who has his head screwed on knows that love is a loser’s game, where the bank takes all. And the bank is always the dame. Rupert was about to find that out—the hard way.

  I folded the note and slipped it back in the envelope. Then I put the envelope in my breast pocket. I went back down to the street, wondering how much they had taken Rupert for. I ducked through the rain, climbed into my TVR and headed back toward Noddy’s Diner on Portobello Road. I had a nasty, sick feeling in my gut and I was in need of a drink and a steak, rare. I didn’t particularly like Rupert. I don’t particularly like people who get everything for nothing and feel entitled to buy whatever and whomever they don’t get for free. But still, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the schmuck.

  By the time I got to Noddy’s, the rain had thinned to a steady drizzle. I’d arrived before the lunch crowd, so I ordered a Martini dry and sat at the bar. While he was putting it together, I asked, “Noddy, what makes a woman who is about to marry a guy with a stash of money suddenly up and leave him for no apparent reason and with no explanation?”

  He pulled a face, dropped an olive in my drink then slid it across the bar to me. “Maybe she clocks to the fact he’s shaggin’ another bird.”

  I shook my head. “Uh-uh. Our man is crazy about his fiancée.”

  He leaned back against the shelves, crossed his massive tattooed arms over his chest, and smiled. “As the big day approaches, she realizes, right? Even though this geezer is swimmin’ in filthy lucre, she just ain’t in love with him.”

  I nodded at my olive. “Yeah, except this lady is the original all singing, all dancing gold-digger. All the signs point to her being after his money.”

  He pulled another face and stared at the beer pumps. “Some birds just like to be independent, Liam. Maybe she just wanted enough dosh out of him to set herself up, but she didn’t want to sell herself completely. Free spirit. Bit of an anarchist, not unlike myself.”

  I glanced at him then sat dunking my olive up and down in the Martini. Another customer had come in and Noddy moved off to pull him a beer. After a while he came back and pointed at me with one of those things he called fingers.

  “Or,” he said, “most likely, right? She’s got another bloke on the side. Knowin’ women—and I do know women—he’s some poncey loser and she’s gaga for ’im. He’s a bum, and she’s takin’ all this bloke’s hard-earned spondulicks to give it to her feller. Tha’s women, see? Completely illogical. Ruled by their ’ormones.” He spread his hands. “QED, mate. That means, quod erat demonstrandum. It’s Latin.” And he walked away to pull another pint. And I watched him, wondering at the miracle of the London Cockney. The worst thing was that he was generalizing and apparently getting it right on the money. It was depressing. I drank my Martini and thanked whatever gods are responsible for these things, that whatever problems I had, love of a woman was not one of them.

  Chapter Four

  I had my steak sandwich and figured I’d go talk to Pete Strickland and his gold-digging girl in Kensal Rise. The address Rupert had given me was north of the Grand Union Canal, down a couple of back streets in a five-story, purpose-built block of seedy apartments. By the time I got there the drizzle had stopped and a cool blue sky was breaking through massive meringues of damp, water-colored cloud. There were a couple of Rastas sitting on the step outside, smoking spliffs. As I stepped across the wet asphalt, they were nodding a lot, real slow, as if they had been agreeing about something for a long time, and now they couldn’t remember what it was they had agreed about.

  Strickland’s place was on the fifth floor, so I went in and climbed the stairs, picking my way through trash and w
hat looked like human feces. The graffiti was pretty inspired and invited me to do things with myself that seemed anatomically impossible. On the fifth floor, there were three doors—A, B and C. I knew his was C, so I knocked loudly. Door A down the hall opened a crack and I could see a dark eye peering at me. I was having trouble imagining the golden, sparkling Mary-Jane Carter shacking up in a dump like this, no matter how much she loved her bum. I knocked again and listened. The only thing inside was silence, so I took out my magic key and opened sesame. I stepped in and closed the door behind me.

  It was one room with a bed, a bedside table and a two-ring cooker. There was a bathroom with a warped door and there was mold on the walls, and peeling paper from the damp. On the ceiling there were patches where the plaster had fallen away. There was a chair by the window with a pair of pants dumped on it and an ‘I Love LA’ sweatshirt over the back. Through the window I could see slate-gray rooftops and chimney stacks under the whipped-cream skies, and in the distance, the cool green of Wormwood Scrubs Common.

  Against the wall on my left there was an iron-frame double bed. I figured the guy in the bed was probably Pete Strickland. He looked as if he’d been asleep when whoever it was had shot him through the head. He’d never even woken up. There was a nice, neat hole right between his eyes. When I stepped over to have a closer look, I saw that his eyebrows and the skin on his nose and his forehead were singed, and the pillow behind his head was red and still damp. He’d been shot point-blank. Somebody had wanted to make sure he was really dead.

  A quick look in the drawer of his bedside table revealed a US passport in the name of Peter Augustus Strickland. The picture showed what he had looked like alive. Death wasn’t much of an improvement.