by Simon Brett
But Jane Rudgwick knew the man’s fundamental weakness, and her judgement of his character had proved to be correct. He had fretted and whinged, but stayed around.
Getting him to invite Gina to Henley had been a potential problem, but in the event easily negotiated. It was the threat of Jane not going on her water-colour course and thus preventing him from seeing his mistress at all before her departure for Rome that had clinched it.
Suddenly, mid-afternoon on the Friday, Jane had announced that yes, she felt better and she was going on the course, but she was worried about what Ralph might get up to in her absence, so she would stop every hour or so to phone and check up on him.
A man with any real character would have ignored this, but Ralph was very weak. He still hoped to find some solution to his situation that would combine having Gina with retaining his position in the Keynes Rudgwick Gallery set-up. For that reason he wanted to keep Jane sweet (or at least as sweet as she ever got).
So his only way out had been to do as he had done for most of his married life, and go along with what his wife said.
Jane had timed the announcement that she really was going to the Lake District very carefully. Her rival, she knew, tended to go out to a gym every afternoon between half-past three and five. By choosing quarter-past three as the moment to unleash her decision, Jane was certain that Ralph would try to contact Gina as soon as possible to let her know the change of plan.
She had waited outside his study door until she heard him leave the inevitable message.
Then all she had to do was to tell him to go upstairs to fetch her bag and, once he was in the bedroom, shoot him with his own gun.
That was the bit she had really enjoyed. Three wonderfully satisfying tugs at the trigger. And, on her husband’s face, a very rewarding expression of surprise giving way, first to terror, and then to oblivion.
She had wiped the gun on some of Gina’s tissues, already impregnated with the artist’s perfume, and thrown them into the bathroom waste-bin.
She had turned up the thermostat in the bedroom, having read somewhere that an overheated environment could make it more difficult to establish the exact time of a corpse’s death.
Then she had driven up to Notting Hill Gate. She had time. The difference between the journey to the Lake District by the back routes she said she was using and the motorways she really intended to use was considerable.
She watched her rival leave the apartment block on the abortive journey to Henley, slipped inside the flat, planted the murder weapon in the cistern, and then set off in her car for the motorways leading north.
A pleasant weekend’s water-colouring, and back to Henley on the Sunday evening.
Yes, thought Jane Rudgwick, it really has all been very satisfactory.
Soon I’ll be able to relax completely. But not quite yet. Still have to keep up the appearance of the grieving widow. You never know who might be watching.
So Jane Rudgwick picked up her atomizer of cheap scent and, bracing herself for the pain, once again sprayed it into her open eyes.
THE BATTERED CHERUB
I didn’t invite her to the office. When your office is your bedroom you play these things a bit tactfully. Last thing you want to do is frighten a client off and, though I’m not one of them, there are a lot of funny people about. I don’t know that there are actually more of them in Brighton than anywhere else, but it often seems that way. Maybe it’s an occupational hazard. My line of work means, almost by definition, the only ones I meet are the misfits. The lonely. The sad. And loneliness and sadness can so quickly sour into something nastier.
Or maybe I am drawn to them on the old ‘birds of a feather’ principle. My former wife certainly said as much towards the end, as our marriage spiralled down into insult and recrimination. She said a lot more, too, in those last sick days when every statement of hers was a loaded grenade from which every response of mine seemed to take out the pin.
Anyway, she’s long gone and I’m still in Brighton, still no doubt demonstrating all those negative attributes she catalogued with such relish. Mooching around what the estate agent called a ‘studio flat’, but what ten years ago would have been called a ‘bedsitter’, and what I now have the nerve to call an ‘office’. When there are no jobs you’re qualified for, why not stick a shingle on the door and set up on your own?
Perhaps I disqualified myself from other work. Getting busted for drugs didn’t help. I started on that after my wife walked out. Stupid, stupid, I know, but at least I did manage to crack it in the end. Not before the police had found the stuff on me, unfortunately. And prison records aren’t exactly assets in these days of mass unemployment.
I sometimes think, having got off the drugs, I could get off the vodka too. I will, one day. But I don’t feel quite strong enough yet.
So, anyway, as I say, I had to set up on my own. Can’t lose, really. Even if you don’t get any business at all, you’re no worse off than you were.
Anyway, I do get occasional business. Sad people who think a little information will at least explain their sadness. Frightened people who feel reassured by the illusion of protection. Cowardly or fastidious people who want someone else to perform unpalatable services. Even dying people who think they’ve still got time to tie up the loose ends.
Some I can help. Some know even when they contact me that they’re beyond help. I close my mind to their circumstances and send bills to all of them. They all pay, except for the one or two who don’t survive. I disapprove of sending bills to the recently bereaved.
And the trickle of money that comes in helps to keep me in the manner to which I have accustomed myself: ‘the office’, with its bed, its table, its two chairs, the clothes chest, the vodka-bottle cupboard, the shower, the sink, the microwave and – its one good feature – the long window that ignores the terracing of roofs beneath it and looks straight out to the shifting edge of the gunmetal sea.
I don’t actually have a shingle on the door. People tend to come to me by word of mouth. I’m not in Yellow Pages, either. But I suppose, if I were, my name, B. Cotter, would be listed under ‘Detective Agencies’.
She edged into the pub, as tentative as a kitten testing a duvet for landmines. My first impression was that she was attractive. She recognized me from the description I’d given her, but with some surprise.
‘I didn’t really believe it when you said your hair was bleached.’ She perched a neat but cautious buttock on the chair opposite me.
‘Why not?’
‘Well, for a detective . . . I mean, I’d have thought a detective should melt into the background. Bleached hair does kind of stand out.’
‘You mean I don’t look like your idea of a detective?’
‘No. Not at all.’
‘Seems to answer your objection. Doesn’t matter how much I stand out, so long as no one thinks I look like a detective.’
‘I suppose not,’ she agreed uncertainly.
The bleached hair was another of the personal attributes my former wife had taken against. That and the black clothes. She saw it as a fashion thing. ‘Why do you go round looking like a punk when punks are dead?’ She couldn’t understand it was more habit, more self, than fashion. After she’d gone I stayed the same out of defiance, some kind of ineffectual revenge maybe.
‘Can I get you a drink?’
She asked for a dry white wine. I had a Perrier with ice and lemon in front of me. Didn’t say it was Perrier. Sometimes helped to pretend I was on the vodka and tonic. All depended, really. Wary moments, meeting a client for the first time. Always required a bit of ritual circling, rationing out information, assessing the moment to feed out each new fact.
As I walked back to her, my first impression was reinforced. She was more than attractive. Kind of face a randy Florentine painter might have sneaked into the crowd at a Crucifixion, following some carnal deal with the model. A battered cherub. Brown hair, quite stiff and thick, fringing fanlike over unsettling blue eyes.
They were unsettling partly because everything else in her colouring predicated brown eyes; partly because they held, together with innocence, a knowingness which belied that innocence; and partly because they were beautiful. She had owned the dark grey leather coat long enough for it to take on her imprint, its soft curves ghosting her own. For someone like me, she was trouble.
I gave her the drink and returned to my maybe Perrier. ‘Right, what’s the problem, Mrs McCullough?’
‘Call me Stephanie. I don’t like even being reminded that I’ve got that bastard’s surname.’
I didn’t respond to this, but noted the over-reaction. Premature, I thought. She, like me, should still be at the circling stage of our encounter, and she was feeding out too much information too soon. Had to be a reason for that.
‘All right. Then you’d better call me Bram.’ I got in before she could say it. ‘And I don’t think there are any Dracula jokes I haven’t heard. And in fact it is only short for Abraham. And no, I don’t know why my parents chose it.’
As usual, the speech had the right effect. All she said was, ‘Ah.’
‘So . . . what do you want me to do for you, Stephanie?’
She moved closer. Her pupils dilated. When they did that, the black almost eclipsed the blue, and the eyes’ innocence had the same effect on their knowingness. She looked like something small and fluffy that’d just fallen out of a nest and never heard of pussycats.
‘It’s my husband,’ she murmured.
‘What is he? Unfaithful? Violent? Criminal? Gay? Missing? I may as well tell you now – if it’s infidelity, I tend to think that’s just between the two of you.’
‘It’s not infidelity. Well, I mean, obviously he’s unfaithful,’ she added dismissively, ‘but that’s not why I need your help . . .’
I let her get there in her own time.
‘The fact is . . . Stuart – that’s my husband – is . . . well, I think he’s involved in something . . .’
Still let her ride it out.
‘Something criminal. I mean, he is basically a crook. But this time I think he may have got a bit out of his depth . . .’
The eyes appealed, but got no help from me.
‘Look, all right, normally when Stuart’s on a job, I turn a blind eye – I’m not that interested in what he does these days, anyway – but I can always tell there’s something up because he’s, I don’t know, kind of cocky. This time’s different. This time he’s frightened.’
She petered out. Finally, my cue came.
‘What kind of crime is your husband likely to be involved in?’
‘Robbery. Always is, he’s not bright enough for anything more elaborate. Isolated country houses. Used to all be in Sussex, but the M25 has widened his range a bit.’
‘Just breaking and entering or are we talking robbery with violence?’
‘He’s never looked for violence. Usually tries to do jobs when the owners are away, but, well, occasionally his information isn’t all that hot, so there’s someone there and . . .’ she shrugged, ‘. . . someone gets hurt. But the violence is incidental. Means to an end.’
‘And you reckon he’s just done a job?’
She nodded, her face still disconcertingly close. ‘No question. He’s flush. Just ordered himself a new BMW. Even bought me something.’ She shook a Rolex Oyster out from the shadow of her sleeve. ‘Real thing, not a Hong Kong cheapo.’
‘But you say he’s frightened?’
‘Yes. Jumpy when the phone rings. Not sleeping. I find empty bottles of Scotch in the sitting room in the mornings. He’s certainly scared of something.’
‘Police? Maybe he’s got the wink they’re on to him?’
She shook her head firmly. ‘That wouldn’t frighten Stuart. Always rather relishes a set-to with the cops. Reckons he can run circles round them.’
‘And can he?’
‘Has done so far.’ She looked pensive. When she did that, her top teeth chewed a little on her lower lip. The movement was at least as unsettling as the eyes. I tried not to watch. ‘No, he’s shit-scared of something.’
‘You don’t think he’s ill? Imagining things?’
She let out a little bitter laugh. ‘No way. Stuart wouldn’t know what imagination was if it came up and punched him on the nose.’
‘I see.’ I sipped the Perrier, deciding that the next drink would definitely be a vodka. ‘And you want me to find out what it is that he’s scared of?’
‘No, it’s not that. It’s . . .’
‘What?’
‘Look, I’ve a feeling I do know what it is that he’s scared of.’ Once again, she got no prompts and had to flounder on. ‘I think the last place he hit, big mansion up at Ditchling . . . well, he got a lot of stuff there, but I think the stuff was already nicked.’
‘He cleaned out another villain’s place?’
‘Yes.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Look, it was a big job, no question, fifty grand’s worth at least – I know because of the time he’s spent on the phone trying to offload the stuff – but there hasn’t been a murmur in the press about it.’
‘Ah.’
‘Papers, TV, radio – nothing. Suggests to me that whoever was hit had reasons not to make it public.’
‘I’ll buy that.’
‘Doesn’t want a public investigation, with the police involved . . .’
‘But will probably be organizing a private investigation with a lot of muscle involved.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Which would explain why your husband’s worried.’
She nodded and drew back, satisfied that her point had been made. The pupils contracted and cunning returned to her eyes.
‘And you don’t think he knows who it was he robbed by mistake?’
‘No, I’m sure he doesn’t, but the size of the house and the size of the haul suggest it could be someone pretty big.’
‘Right. And you don’t think the . . . aggrieved party has actually fingered your husband yet?’
‘I think we’ll know pretty quickly when they do identify him.’
‘Yes. Which, given the way news travels in that kind of world, is not going to take too long, is it?’
‘No.’
I drained the Perrier and grimaced, still maintaining the fiction that it might be vodka. ‘What do you want me to do about it, then?’
‘I want you to find out who it was who got robbed and do a deal with them.’
‘To let Stuart off the hook?’
‘Right.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes.’ She grinned her louche cherubic grin. ‘That’s all.’
Considering how quickly I obtained the relevant information, Stuart McCullough was living on borrowed time. It cost me two visits to the right pubs, a couple of rounds of drinks, a couple more rounds of ‘drinks’ in folded form, and I knew the names of the other members of his gang, as well as the identity of the villain they had so incautiously robbed.
If they had been looking for massive contusions and internal bleeding, they could hardly have chosen a quicker route to the supplier. The Ditchling mansion they had so breezily cleaned out belonged to Harry Day, a major London villain, nicknamed ‘Flag’ Day because of the number of charges the law had tried to pin on him. He was a canny operator, though, who, by employing the right solicitors and bunging the right amounts into the right palms at the Yard, had never actually been inside. But his CV was generally agreed to include robbery with violence, protection rackets with violence, a fairly definite couple of murders with violence and – by way of weekend recreation – violence with violence. Not the kind of big boy a little boy like Stuart McCullough ought to be challenging to a game of conkers.
The only surprise about the situation was that Stephanie’s husband wasn’t already a mass of multiple fractures. If an outsider like me could get the information that easily, a man with ‘Flag’ Day’s connections should have been on the ball seconds after the k
ickoff. But apparently he wasn’t; or, if he did know the score, he was taking his time to devise appropriately cruel and unnatural punishments for the perpetrator of this professional insult.
I think actually what was keeping Stuart McCullough out of intensive care was the absence of his accomplices. He’d done the job with two Brighton small-timers who’d taken their cut the next morning and gone straight off to Tenerife with a couple of tarts. If they’d been around, ‘Flag’ Day’s network would have soon been on to them. Stuart on his own was a marginally better security risk. He had every reason to keep quiet about the set-up, and I felt pretty certain I was the only person in whom Stephanie had confided.
I tried not to think about her. When I did, my thoughts kept spreading like cancer cells into bits of me I didn’t want reinfected.
I concentrated on her husband. The thoughts he inspired weren’t pretty ones, but they were more the kind I could cope with.
Clearly, if Stuart McCullough was going to evade the attentions of Harry Day in any long-term sense, something had to happen quickly. Day might not be on to him yet, but it was only a matter of time. Brighton suddenly becomes a very small place when a villain starts buying new BMWs and Rolexes.
I had an arrangement with Stephanie that she’d ring me daily for progress reports and that, if I had to phone her home and got through to her, she wouldn’t recognize me. I needn’t have worried. Stuart snatched up the phone on the first ring as if he were defusing it.
‘Mr McCullough?’ I always use my own voice on this kind of conversation. For one thing, I’m no good at disguising it and, for another, it’s a myth that anyone’s going to recognize a person they’ve never met by the voice heard on a telephone.
‘Yes?’ I could almost hear the sweat popping on his brow.
‘Mr McCullough, I have information that you acquired certain property last Tuesday night . . .’
He didn’t deny it.
‘Now that property belongs to my employer . . .’