Wearing Purple (Oz Blackstone Mystery)
Page 25
There was only one answer to that, of course: someone had broken in and retrieved them. But when? I reached across and picked up Jan’s lap-top - we each had one - and switched it on. It was powerful and booted up quickly. I selected her electronic diary and opened it at the date in question.
The only entry for Friday read, ‘Work at home’. Saturday’s listed priorities were ‘Hairdresser’, ten am, and ‘Watch BattleGround’ at nine-thirty pm. From the Sunday entry, she’d decided to go to Anstruther; only for her, Sunday had never happened.
As I looked at the page, the thing that had been working its way through my cluttered brain finally broke surface; my wife spoke to me again, inside my head. Our last conversation, the last time I had ever heard her voice: on the mobile phone, me in the chaotic restaurant in bloody Barcelona, Jan sitting opposite where I sat now, working.
‘I suppose so,’ she had said. ‘I’ve got the hairdresser in the morning, and I’m shopping in the afternoon, but I can always work in the evening, before your show.’ I strained to remember what she had said after that, as I had strained to hear her words against the Spanish shouts all around me. ‘I’m getting there, Oz. I’ll let you see what I’ve found when you get home.’
Of course she hadn’t taken those papers back to The Gantry Group office. She’d been keeping them to show to me.
There could only be one answer to the riddle: someone had been watching the flat on Saturday morning, had seen her drive away, and had made an unnoticed entry to recover the files, which I knew would have been tidied away by then. Jan and I had a strict rule; we never allowed our jobs to mess up our home, outside working hours.
Of course, this led on to a further conclusion. Whoever broke into our flat would have had ample time to roll out the washing machine and fit a booby-trap device, just as the manufacturer’s ‘impartial’ experts had suggested.
And who, apart from me, knew that Jan was working on those papers, and about the thing which she had been anxious not to discuss across the dinner table under the ears of Detective Inspector Mike Dylan? Only Miss Susie Gantry, that’s all.
Chapter 48
When I sat down and thought about the situation rationally, Susie Gantry made no sense at all as a suspect. She had hired Jan in the first place and had asked her to research the profitability of the business.
Unless of course my wife had been a far better accountant than she expected. What if, I asked myself, Susie had simply expected Jan to give the business a clean bill of health then pick up the reins from old Joseph Donn? What if Jan had stumbled on something that was buried really deep, something that she was never meant to find?
What if she had signed her own death warrant by dropping that hint to Susie across our dinner table?
‘No way, Oz!’ I said aloud, as Jan would have. ‘Trust your judgement on this. Susie Gantry is not the sort of person who sends people to break into houses and rig deadly devices. No fucking way!’
‘But someone did,’ I shot back at myself. ‘Even if the accident was just that, a fatal one in a million fault, someone took those papers and put them back in the Gantry files. Somewhere in the Gantry office there’s someone who didn’t want Jan to find whatever was hidden in those records.’
It was as if she was there with me; the other half of my brain, as she had become, slipping in points to the argument. ‘So why did that someone take the chance of putting those papers back into the files, having taken them, and the notes, from our place?’
‘Because if they knew that you were dead, Jan,’ I whispered, ‘there would be no threat. The Gantry Group is a private company, but the records of the business have to be kept for Inland Revenue purposes. There would have been an element of danger in simply throwing those files away. So whatever this deadly secret is, it must be there still, buried deep in the books, where only a clever girl like you could work it out.
‘But now that Mr Joseph Donn and his nephew are back in control of the company accounts, there won’t be any more clever girls looking them over, will there.’
I felt my eyes narrow as the cold anger which had overwhelmed me in Barcelona took hold of me once more.
‘Time to talk to the police, Osbert Blackstone,’ I said, in that voice of someone else’s. ‘Even though you’ll be putting the policeman in question right on the spot.’
Chapter 49
I had arranged with Everett that I would meet him at midday on Monday to discuss how to protect the pay-per-view event, but before I left home, I called Greg McPhillips.
‘Hi Oz,’ he greeted me, affable as ever. ‘Have you had a chance to think rationally about taking action against the Germans? I’ll tell you now; you don’t need the money.
‘I’ve sorted out all Jan’s insurance policies: your mortgage, such as it was, is paid off automatically, there’s an additional endowment policy that pays eighty grand in the event of accidental death, a death in service arrangement as part of her pension plan, the fund value itself, and a straight life policy. There’s a lot of cash there - I’m not going to say how much over the phone - but the tax planning was done very well, so you should be exempt from estate duty.’
It went straight over my head. ‘You’re not going to give me back my wife though, are you, Greg?’
‘No, pal. That I can’t do.’
‘Well in that case you just sort everything out, pay all the funeral expenses, take your own fee, and put the balance in some sort of account. Tell me when it’s all done, ’cause right now, I don’t give a shit.
‘As for the Germans, I want another week to think about that. If I do take action against them, it won’t be about money, believe me.’
‘No, of course it won’t, Oz. I shouldn’t have said that.’
I couldn’t help but laugh at his contrition, since I’d heard it so often before. ‘Greg, my dear old friend, a list of all the things you shouldn’t have said would stretch from here to Edinburgh and back.’
I hung up and headed across the river to the GWA headquarters, where Everett was waiting for me with fresh coffee in the pot. I welcomed it; I was still cold with anger from the aftermath of my conversation with Susie, and was having trouble switching my attention to my client’s business.
He offered me a doughnut from a plate piled high before him. I took two, and left the rest for him.
‘I just checked with the networks; our advance booking figures for the pay-per-view have set a new record in Europe for any event. Counting the UK, Germany, Holland, Poland, Italy, France and Spain we have three and a half million buys.’
‘What’s that in cash?’ I asked him.
‘Seventy-two million dollars, my man, of which sum a shade over twenty-five million comes to the Global Wrestling Alliance.’
I stared at him; for all the weeks I had been working for Everett, I had no idea that his business could generate that sort of cash.
‘Taken together, the European market’s still not as big as America. Now you understand what Tony Reilly has to lose?’
For the first time, I did. ‘With that at stake,’ I said, ‘whatever it takes to protect this event, you do it.’
‘And what do you say that is, Mr Detective?’ he growled, guessing my answer in advance.
‘First, we tell the police what’s been happening. Either you agree to that or I’m out the door now. I’ve been playing hide and seek with the law on this assignment for long enough. I know a guy on the Serious Crimes Squad - Mike Dylan, Susie Gantry’s boyfriend. I’m seeing him tonight, and I want your authority to tell him what’s been happening.’
He looked at me doubtfully. ‘I mean it, Everett,’ I told him. ‘You let me tell Mike or you’re getting yourself a new announcer for Wednesday.’
He shrugged those great shoulders. ‘Fair enough,’ I said. I stood up, turned and walked to the door. I was in the act of turning the handle, when I heard him sigh behind me.
‘Yeah, okay,’ he conceded. ‘You can talk to him. But ask him to be discreet, please.’
‘Hell yes! We sold out this one a month in advance. This Ingliston place ain’t the biggest arena, but it’ll look great on screen.’
‘That’s good. Third, every piece of equipment that’s going to be used on Wednesday has to be checked personally by you. No more lethal turn-buckle pads, please.’
He shook his head. ‘No, that I guarantee. I’ll go over everything with Alex Kruger, the special effects controller.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘You never seen him? He works for our television contractor; it’s his job to make sure all the whiz-bangs go off exactly on time. Our road crew install them, he fires them with remote devices.’
I frowned at him. ‘Are you sure he’s okay?’
‘Yeah, no doubt about it. He couldn’t possibly have had access to the barrier that hurt Liam, or to the turn-buckle pad. Don’t worry about him.’
‘Listen mate,’ I told him, ‘until this show’s over on Wednesday, you should worry about everyone.’
Chapter 50
The Horseshoe Bar is one of the last great unreconstructed pubs in Glasgow; not a plastic saloon with a list of designer beers and no draught worth the name, not a surplus-to-requirements banking hall staffed by smart young people in suits. No, the Horseshoe is a genuine, well maintained boozer with a polished wooden bar-top, a ripping good pint of lager and the best pie, beans and chips in town.
Dylan was there before me; ten minutes before me, he complained, but I had seen him stepping through the door as I turned the corner out of Renfield Street. No matter; since he was there first I let him buy the first round.
It being early on a Monday evening, the place was nothing like busy, but I took my lager nonetheless and motioned Mike to follow me to a table in a quiet corner near the door. ‘You changed your habits?’ he said. ‘I thought you were a stand-at-the-bar type.’
‘So I am,’ I told him. ‘But I want to talk to you, professional-like, and I don’t want anyone ear-holing us.’
He looked at me, suddenly suspicious. ‘Professionally? I can’t talk to you about my job, Oz. You know that.’
‘No, Michael,’ I said patiently. ‘I talk, you listen. Got it?’ Mollified, he nodded.
‘Good. What I have to say to you is on behalf of my client Everett Davis. I’ve been working for him undercover for the last few weeks. That’s what the ring announcer stuff has been all about.’
Dylan stared at me, in a mixture of mock amazement and outrage. ‘Have you been playing coppers again?’ he asked. It was surprisingly near the mark for him. A few weeks before I would have joked along with him, but I didn’t have the patience any more.
‘Don’t be fucking stupid, man,’ I snapped at him. ‘I’ve been working on a confidential basis, trying to determine whether certain suspicions which Everett had were justified. There’s no longer any doubt that they are, and so, acting on my advice, my client has now agreed that I should tell you, as a member of the Serious Crimes Squad, what’s been going on.’
I paused. ‘That’s how your report will begin, right?’ He smiled gently and nodded.
‘Okay, here’s the position. Everett is convinced that an American rival,Tony Reilly, of an organisation called Championship Wrestling Incorporated, has suborned someone in his employ to sabotage GWA shows and ruin his relationship with the television networks which are his customers.
‘There have been four incidents in all; two of them deliberate acts beyond doubt.’ I described the incidents in detail, from the rigged tape cassettes to Jerry Gradi’s near-fatal shooting in the ring in Barcelona, leaving nothing out, not even Prim’s sudden life-saving appearance.
All the flippancy had gone from my friend by the time I had finished. ‘Didn’t the Spanish police react?’ he asked.
‘I thought they would, but the ambulance crew told the surgeons that it was a wrestling injury. No one thought to take it further.’
‘It’s been a few weeks since then, though. Big Daze has been a bit backward in coming forward - and so have you, mate.’
I shot him a look that would have cut steel. ‘Sorry, Oz,’ he said at once. ‘You’ve had other things on your mind.’
‘Of which more later,’ I grunted. ‘Everett is very sensitive about this. His business is high-risk, but it generates millions of whatever currency you’d like to name, and billions of some of them. For a while we thought we were going to be able to hand you the whole thing on a plate.
‘I was in the States last week checking out our prime suspect, but we were wrong. It wasn’t him.’ I told him about Sonny Leonard and my trip to St Louis. ‘The guy is off the list, Mike. It just wasn’t him.
‘Which means,’ I concluded, ‘that we’re scratching around for a culprit. Everett’s convinced that it’s an American.’
‘And you?’ asked Dylan, ‘What do you think?’
‘It’s not me, that I can tell you. And it’s not Everett, or Jerry Gradi, or Liam Matthews - or Sally Crockett. Other than that, to be honest, I haven’t a clue. The only things I do know are that we’ve got a fully live event coming up on Wednesday evening and that the person behind these four incidents is still out there.’
The detective nodded. ‘Yes, and we also know that he’s got some skill with firearms, as well as access to a nasty wee piece of hardware. There are far more of these mini-pistols in circulation than you’ll ever hear us admit.’
He looked at me, suddenly sharper and more serious than I had ever seen him. ‘What does Everett want from us, Oz?’
‘The ball’s in your court,’ I told him. ‘I’ve told you about the situation; you’re the copper.’
‘Okay,’ said Dylan. ‘Suppose I go in tomorrow and tell my boss all about this. Has it occurred to you that there’s a possibility that he might have the Wednesday event called off?’
‘No it hasn’t. Why would he do that?’
‘Threat to public safety.’
‘But there hasn’t been a threat to the public.’
‘Jesus, you’ve had a guy shot in the ring. That sounds threatening enough to me.’
‘Mike, they have sold seventy million dollars’ worth of pay-per-view subscriptions so far. If this show is called off Everett is a dead man with the television networks, and GWA is bust. Whoever’s been out to get him, that person will have won, thanks to you. Do you want to explain that to Everett’s pal, Lord Provost Gantry - or his daughter?’
He gulped; a quick swallow of air. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe not.’
I seized an advantage. ‘Look, we’re hiring extra security for Wednesday, specifically to protect the public. You tell your boss, of course, and have a presence there, but don’t let him or anyone else dream of calling the thing off.
‘Try this one on. If I gave you details of everyone on the GWA payroll, could you feed them into the police national computer and see what it tells you?’
Dylan nodded. ‘Name, date and place or country of birth, National Insurance number, passport numbers for the foreigners: give me that sort of stuff and I should be able to come up with something.’
‘Now we’re talking. I’ll speak to Everett and get as much as we have to you as soon as possible.’
I finished my lager, walked over to the bar and ordered another round. Mike was grinning when I got back to the table. ‘I knew you were up to something with the big man. Ring announcer, my arse.’
I decided to wipe the smile off his face. ‘Since you’re the great detective, Michael,’ I said, ‘try this one on.
‘The night before she died, my wife was working on papers from the files of The Gantry Group; health care division. I know this because she told me when I phoned her from Barcelona. It was the last thing she ever told me in fact.’ I watched his face, saw m
y voice slice into him.
‘Next morning, she went to the hairdresser’s, as she usually did every second Saturday. Afterwards she went shopping; for Jan, that would mean the St Enoch Centre, a bit of lunch, Princes Square, maybe Habitat or somewhere else for household stuff - an afternoon’s worth.
‘Then she came home, and she was killed. She switched on the fucking washing machine and she was killed. You with me so far?’
‘Yes, Oz,’ he whispered, discomfort all over his coupon.
‘That’s good. In that case, I’d like your help with something. I’d like you to tell me who took the Gantry papers from Jan’s filing drawer and put them back into the company records, and who took her notes on the health care division and made them disappear. Because I didn’t, and I know Jan didn’t.
‘While you’re working that out, maybe your experts can have another look at that bloody appliance, and tell you whether they agree with the manufacturer that it could have been rigged to kill my wife the moment she went to empty it.’
Dylan looked at me. He tried to speak, but went into a fit of coughing and spluttering. ‘Do you realise what you’re saying?’ he asked me.
‘Yes Mike. I’m saying there’s a chance that my wife was murdered because she had found out about something that’s going on within The Gantry Group - the company your girlfriend runs.
‘The company where Mr Joseph Donn has just been reinstalled as Finance Director,’ I took a deep breath, and stared at him, ‘over Jan’s dead body, you might say.’
I was an expert in the task of breaking bad news, so putting my friendly detective inspector on the spot didn’t bother me one bit.
For a few seconds he was absolutely speechless. ‘You’re not saying Susie’s involved, are you?’ he gasped, as he began to recover himself.
‘Not for one minute, Mike. But someone in her company is, of that I’m certain. Also, I would love to know what our friend Joe Donn was doing on the weekend Jan died.’