by Susan Moody
Thoughts of women, good or bad, took him inevitably back to Kate Fullerton. Last time he’d casually walked past the travel-agency, he had seen that she was not there and so carried on down the High Street, past the bookshop next door (not in there either), stopping in at the little café round the corner for a coffee (and in the hope that she might be taking her lunch-break there) and then strolling equally casually back, to find that she was still not around.
Kate
Twenty
Good news can usually wait for a while. Bad news can’t. Nobody is going to call you in the middle of the night to tell you they’ve just got engaged or they won a Pulitzer Prize or the Lottery, at least nobody Kate could think of, including herself, but bad news doesn’t keep, so when the phone rang just after midnight – green seconds folding over in front of her as she reached for the handset – Kate knew something terrible had happened. She dragged herself out of sleep (‘I’m going to have an early night’), still dripping dreams, to lift the receiver, her heart banging around in her chest like a trapped rat.
‘Kate, I’m so, so sorry . . .’
‘What’s happened?’ But she already knew the answer.
‘You won’t believe this but he – he’s out.’ It was Lucy’s voice, wandering the octaves, close to tears. ‘Robbie rang from work to tell me.’
‘How long ago?’
‘Three or four hours. He faked pains that sounded as though he’d got acute appendicitis. The prison hospital’s been closed down for refurbishment, so they rushed him to the local hospital.’ A blown breath. ‘Kate, what will you do?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t – damn . . . I thought I was safe.’
‘They’ll be looking for him. Robbie says he fractured the skull of the ambulance attendant and then beat up an officer. They don’t stand for that, not when it’s one of their own.’
As Lucy talked, Kate was thinking, thinking, options rattling round her head like a stick run along the railings of a cage. She felt like a rat in a trap. A bird in a net. ‘He fractured someone’s skull? Doesn’t sound very much like him.’ He was stupid, he could be violent when manipulated into it (as she suspected Mick had manipulated him into her abduction) but she wouldn’t have put him down as murderous.
‘Robbie says he definitely had help, both inside and out. Robbie says he’s connected. Take care, Kate.’
‘I’ll do my best. Thanks, Lucy.’ Kate hung up. Her hand trembled.
So he was out. And probably heading straight for her, a raptor plummeting from the sky. He was coming for her and he would be thirsting for revenge for the fact that she had fooled him, made an idiot of him.
If his ‘connections’ had engineered the escape, would they have been following the ambulance transporting him to hospital, ready to pick him up? They must have been. If not, he’d have to find a car, get to a railway station, get some money; he’d be without cash, credit cards, clothes other than those he was standing up in. He wasn’t a criminal in the sense that he had lock-picking, car-breaking skills, nor would he want to draw attention to himself by carjacking. On the other hand . . . Kate shivered. He might well force his way into a car and coerce some hapless car-owner into driving him to the town, or getting her to take him to an ATM so she could draw money out – though if he’d had help, none of those logistical problems would exist.
By now he was probably on the way. He could be turning the corner at the end of the street at this very moment; he might be watching the building, he could already be standing outside the front door, waiting for her to emerge. And then what? Would he use a knife, a gun, a ligature? Would he overpower her, drag her downstairs, bundle her into his stolen car and take her somewhere to enjoy his revenge, or worse still, would he call in his mate, Mick (if he knew where Mick was) and let him kill her slowly and painfully?
She woke Janine to explain, called Magnus, and, stopping only to throw a few items into suitcases, the two women drove to her brother’s house to spend the rest of the night there.
‘The police know, I assume,’ Magnus said, pouring hot chocolate from a copper-bottomed saucepan into three mugs.
‘They must do.’
‘I think you ought to call them and tell them you’re here,’ Janine said. ‘If they come round to my – our – place and there’s nobody home, they won’t know what to do.’
‘This is very true.’ Magnus made a call to the station. ‘They know all about him getting away,’ he said, returning to the table. ‘They’ll be in touch with you in the morning, Kate. Said not to worry, he won’t get far – and that it’s quite possible he won’t even try to come up here, he might prefer to get out of the country, go back to wherever he came from.’
She thought of Stefan’s swagger and self-conceit. ‘I wish I could believe you.’
‘Mrs Fullerton?’ The couple followed her into the little café round the corner from TaylorMade, where she had gone for her lunch break, and stood at the end of the booth where she was sitting.
‘Yes?’ Who were they, what did they want?
‘We’re from CID.’
‘CID?’
‘I’m Detective Sergeant Tessa Faber and this is Detective Constable Jack Prince. May we sit down?’ When Kate nodded, they eased themselves into the bench opposite her, the woman first, sliding along the slippery red vinyl until they were both snugly seated. They both brought out badges and showed them to her, something she’d thought only happened in American TV series. ‘Didn’t want to come into your place of work,’ one of them said. ‘Less obvious if we talk to you here.’
‘What’s this about?’ she asked. Less obvious? Every customer in the place could see they were cops.
‘Do you know a place called Plan A?’
‘I used to work there.’
‘And Alfredo Lucanelli, the manager?’
‘Yes – though I only knew him as Fredo.’ What had Fredo done, to have the police conducting enquiries about him?
The woman – DS Faber – pulled out a photograph and slid it across the table towards her. ‘Do you recognize this man?’
Kate stared down at the features she’d come to know and hate. Stefan looked strangely remote, as though he was thinking of something, somewhere quite different from the camera he was facing. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do.’
‘Do you know his name?’
‘He went by the name of Stefan or Stefano Michaels.’
‘I understand from our colleagues here that you are aware that he escaped yesterday evening from the prison officers escorting him to hospital.’
‘Yes. A friend of mine telephoned me as soon as her partner heard – he’s a prison officer himself.’
‘Did you also know that Stefan Michaels’ body was found round the back of Plan A early this morning?’
Kate’s eyes widened in shock. ‘Did you say his body?’
‘That’s right.’
Stefan was dead? That vile creature was dead . . .
‘Someone hit him hard across the back of the head several times and dumped him there,’ DC Prince said.
‘Very hard,’ said DS Faber.
‘Didn’t stand a chance.’
‘Are you sure?’ What she meant was, are you absolutely certain that he’s dead, that he can never come back into my life again, that I am safe, at least from him?
‘Reasonably, given that you’ve just identified him, Mrs Fullerton.’
Repulsed by the realization that she had probably been gazing at a photograph of a corpse, Kate pushed the photograph away from her across the table. ‘I hate to say this, but I wish I could feel sorry for him.’ The news had filled her with a distasteful, despicable elation. ‘Any idea who did it?’
‘That’s what we want to ask you.’
The Detective Sergeant added, ‘Just a formality, but where were you last night, between ten-thirty when he first escaped, and five-thirty this morning, when he was found?’
‘I was at home. First in the flat I share with a friend, then, after I heard th
at he was out of prison, round at my brother’s house.’
‘And where’s that?’
Kate gave them the address of Janine’s flat and Magnus’s house.
‘They’ll both vouch for you?’
‘I’m sure they will.’
‘How did you feel when you heard that he was no longer safely tucked away in prison?’
‘Dead scared. I was convinced he was coming straight after me.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘Because he’s an insane, conceited . . .’ She gulped coffee-flavoured air. ‘Because he wants – wanted – revenge . . . I was the one responsible for having him arrested; I managed to get away from him and his friend and set the police on him. I made him look like the moron he is – was. And if he was found right here in town, wouldn’t it kind of prove I’m right?’
The DC nodded.
Kate looked from one to the other, then laughed. ‘You can’t seriously imagine that I did it, can you? I didn’t know he was going to escape, and even if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have been hanging around outside Plan A in the middle of the night on the off-chance he’d show up there, why would I? As for beating his brains out . . .’
Neither of the officers laughed back at her. ‘Unlikely, I admit,’ said the DS, ‘but stranger things have happened.’
‘The . . . erm . . . body was found just after three this morning,’ said DC Prince, looking down at his notebook, ‘by the said Alfredo Lucanelli, who came out of the back door of the wine bar when he’d shut the place up for the night, in order to put out a saucer of milk—’
‘Fredo likes cats.’
‘—which is when he noticed the . . . erm . . .’
‘Body,’ the DS said.
‘Getting back to who might have wanted to get rid of him,’ said DC Prince. ‘Do you have any suggestions, Mrs Fullerton, as to who might have had it in for Mr Michaels badly enough to attack him with a blunt instrument?’
‘Quite a few, actually. Starting with me, closely followed by the family of a girl who used to work at Plan A, Lindsay Bennett, any one of whom would be happy to dispatch him, given half a chance, but if that half involved hanging about outside Plan A in case he managed to get out of jail, it was one they were extremely unlikely to take, quite apart from the fact that they had no real proof, beyond what I told them myself, that Stefan was in any way involved with the fatal hit-and-run of their daughter. But in any case, none of us are the sort to take the law into our own hands, however much we might want to.’
‘What about the other man who helped Michaels to pull you off the street?’
‘Mick?’
They both sat to attention, looked at each other and back at her. ‘Did you say Mick?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Would you have a surname to go with that?’ DC Faber asked carefully.
‘No.’
‘Ever hear him called anything other than Mick?’
‘No.’
‘Could you describe him?’
‘I should bloody hope so, after . . .’ Almost choking, Kate gave them a brief description of Mick.
‘Remind you of anyone?’ DS Faber said to her colleague.
‘Definitely.’
‘It’s got to be him, hasn’t it?’
‘No question. Our Mel always was a scumbag.’
‘Mel?’ Kate looked from one to the other.
‘Mel, Melvin, Mick, whatever.’
DC Prince chuckled. ‘It was Martin once, wasn’t it, Sarge?’
‘That’s right. Martyn, with a “y”, thought it would look classier.’
‘Our Mel, classy? That’s a laugh.’
‘Do you think he had something to do with . . . with this murder?’ Kate jerked her chin at the photograph still lying on the table, remembered the disdain with which Mick (Mel) had spoken to Stefan and his warning that the police were keeping an eye on them. She wished they had kept a closer eye than they obviously had, so that she might have escaped them much earlier. She wondered why she found the very idea of him so terrifying; she’d only really seen him once, at Plan A, yet what and who he was seemed lucidly clear. Behind the two officers, she could see the café owner watching her, a striped linen tea towel in his hand, the avid expression of the waitress, the rigid way in which those with their backs to her table sat with ears quivering, so as to miss as little of possible of what was going on at her table.
‘Possibly,’ said DC Prince. ‘No honour among thieves and all that.’
‘More than likely,’ said Faber. ‘If we could lay our hands on him, we’d ask him, but we still have no idea of his whereabouts. Over the years, he’s been responsible for half the crime in the area—’
‘Not exactly half, Sarge.’
‘A good percentage then – but we’ve never been able to touch him for any of it.’
‘Except the one time . . .’
‘That was way back when. He’s got the contacts now.’ DS Faber looked wistful. ‘If only we could lay our hands on the men behind him, the connections.’
‘Red letter day down the nick, that would be,’ said DC Prince. ‘Break out the champagne, we would – I’d pay for it myself.’
‘If it wasn’t this Mick, Mel, whatever, who killed Stefan, what about the man he and Stefan worked for?’ asked Kate. She could hardly believe she was sitting there, calmly discussing murder like a witness in a cops-and-robbers programme on TV, a pretty poor one at that. At the same time, the strengthening knowledge that Stefan could never harm her again – and she had no doubt that he would have tried – was like draining an industrial-strength elixir (‘Will restore you to life’). ‘Maybe he saw Stefan as a threat in some way.’
‘Our colleagues at the Met are interviewing the other members of Stefan’s family, the father and brother, that is,’ explained DS Faber.
‘If you want my opinion, I don’t think either of them had anything to do with this murder,’ said DC Prince. ‘According to the London guys, Don Carlos seemed genuinely upset to hear the news, actually cried real tears in front of them.’
‘Aaah, poor baby,’ said DS Faber. ‘You’re too kind-hearted for your own good, you are.’
‘What about you, Sarge, made of stone or something?’
‘No, Jack, I’ve just seen more of these villains than you have. But I agree it’s unlikely that he was responsible for bumping off his own son.’ She turned back to Kate. ‘They won’t be able to hold them for anything, of course. They’ve had their eye on the father for quite some time, as a matter of fact, a really nasty bit of work, but they haven’t wanted to pull him because both the Met and we are hoping that eventually he’ll lead us to the Big Boss.’
Kate thought of the Clooney-clone, the man she’d seen one evening with Stefan. ‘The father’s a criminal too?’
‘Long-time. Always manages to wriggle out of things, always acts respectable, got himself way up the food-chain, nice house in Bishop’s Avenue, respected businessman, all that crap, retains top defence lawyers when things start to look dicey for him, just like our local snot-rag, Martyn-with-a-Y.’
‘And of course Don Quixote can always go back where he came from, if he wants,’ said DC Prince.
‘If he dares. Far as I’m aware, he’s got a record as long as your arm, plus being wanted on suspicion of several murders out there.’
‘Out where?’ Kate asked.
‘Colombia, Ecuador, somewhere like that.’
‘Ecuador?’ It seemed as though all roads led inexorably to Ecuador.
‘Not that they’d ever indict him; way I’ve heard it the police there are as corrupt as they come.’
‘Cross their palms with silver and they’ll follow you anywhere,’ murmured the DC. ‘Not to mention let you off a murder charge.’
‘Just a minute, are you saying that Stefan Michaels’ father is a murderer?’ He’d looked ‘nice’, the only time she’d seen him, a nice man with a kind face. But didn’t people always say, when someone’s been caught for a string of
hideous crimes, ‘ooh, he was ever so nice, kept himself to himself, but always had a kind word for the kiddies, we thought he was really nice, whoever would have thought it?’ (Though later, they were perfectly ready to believe the worst, however nice they’d considered him at the time, always thought there was something a bit off about him, ‘know what I mean, wouldn’t look you in the eye, didn’t I always say so, dear?’).
‘Murder’s only part of it. Charlie Lyons, or Carl Peters, or Don Carlos Pedro de Something-or-other y Léon, to give him his full name, is into everything – extortion, blackmail, prostitutes, gun-running, smuggling, nicking top-of-the-range cars, etc, etc, how long have you got?’ said DS Faber.
‘Him and his boss,’ chimed in DC Prince.
‘Look at it this way, Mrs Fullerton, at least we know for sure that one of your assailants has had his comeuppance. All we have to do now is find the other, young Mick.’
‘Eliminate him from our enquiries.’
‘Or not, as the case may be.’
‘I expect his mother loves him,’ said DS Faber. She laughed cynically. ‘There’s rumours coming through the grapevine that he’s trying to go straight, trying to set himself up as a bit of a gent, going all posh on us. That’ll be the day.’
‘Give a dog a bad name,’ the DC said.
‘This particular dog chose his name for himself.’
‘Of course we knew him back when he still called himself by his given name, but that was several changes ago.’