by Susan Moody
‘Yes – maybe I’d better have the bucket again. It’s all so utterly, terribly awful.’ She pressed her palms against her stomach, shuddering as she tried to marshal her thoughts.
Finally, as they sat over coffee, Magnus said, ‘OK . . . we’re listening.’
Kate nodded, swallowed. Her throat was sore, her eyes felt like craters, her mouth seemed raw, as though the words she was about to utter were made of broken glass. She stared bleakly at her brother. ‘I don’t know what brought it all back – you talking about family, I think, or the police talking about Stefan Michaels’ father being a criminal, but I suddenly remembered where I’d . . . It was him, you see, the man who killed Dad, not just Dad but all of them, Annie and . . . He was the one who caused the accident, not Dad’s driving; he shot them, he fired directly at Ms Bailey, he’s Stefan’s father, if you can believe it.’
‘Who is?’
‘The man who killed them all in the accident, all except me, he’s Stefan’s father, he was younger then, of course, he’s hardly changed at all, just a bit greyer . . .’
‘I’m getting lost,’ Janine said. ‘Are you still talking about the George Clooney man?’
Kate gulped in a deep breath, pressed her palms together. ‘Sorry . . .’ Tears began to roll down her face and she shivered. ‘He came into the wine bar, into Plan A, one night, with his two sons, and I was sure I’d seen him before somewhere, but because he’s handsome, and the same colouring, I just thought it must be because he reminded me of George Clooney.’
Magnus cleared his throat. ‘Uh . . . do I know this Clooney?’
‘For God’s sake, Magnus!’ Kate said forcefully. ‘Get a life!’
‘He’s a film star, famous,’ Janine said, smiling at him. ‘Ocean’s Eleven.’ Words which left Magnus almost as mystified as Jefferson Andrewes’ remark about taupe sofas (taupe sofas – could he have misheard?). Sometimes he worried about early onset Alzheimer’s, he seemed to live in a different world from most people, and he thought how much clearer things had been in pre-revolutionary Russia, how much more certain the uncertainties were then; no global warming to worry about, for instance, or the rights and wrongs of turning off gas-flows in the Ukraine or invasions in the Middle East, nor, indeed, parents driving over a cliff and burning to death.
‘Magnus, everyone knows George Clooney.’
‘Except me.’
‘You need to get out more.’ Kate thumbed tears from beneath her eyes, and she shivered, let them fall. ‘Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that today, two police officers interviewed me while I was having lunch, and if you can believe this, they said this guy, him and his sons, they’re career criminals – he came from Ecuador with his family years ago, is heavily involved in half a dozen businesses, all highly illegal, and the only reason he’s still out on the streets is because they’re hoping he’ll lead them to the big boss, the guy behind these so-called companies, who is a real badass.’ She swallowed hard. ‘It’s his son – the George Clooney guy’s son, I mean – is Stefan Michaels, who . . . who . . . you know.’
Magnus looked puzzled, as well he might. ‘Let me get this quite straight. You’re saying that as well as Michaels fils . . . doing what he did, Michaels père also killed Dad and Luisa and Annie, all those years ago?’
‘Yes, yes I am. Looking back, putting two and two together, I’m pretty certain. I saw this man, you see, step forward with a gun in his hand, that little boy was right about the shots, and aim right at us. And his name isn’t Michaels.’
‘Didn’t you say he was Stefan Michaels’ father?’ said Janine.
‘Yes, but they all seem to change their names all the time, anglicize them; they all come from Latin America, you see, the names are too difficult, all those Ramirezes and Fernandezes, this guy’s called – um – Carlos Pedro de Something de Léon, near as I can remember, too big a mouthful for the British criminal fraternity to handle.’
‘And is this Mr Big also from Ecuador?’
‘The police seem to think he’s actually English. George Clooney and his sons all work for him, as does horrible Mick – whose name isn’t actually Mick at all.’
‘So it’s not just guys with difficult names who change them!’ Janine said.
‘I gather his was pretty difficult, actually! Anyway, the police told me that he, the Clooney character, I mean, was wanted for murder, back in Ecuador. And it was definitely him who fired those shots at the car; I know it was, I can see his face clearly in my mind.’
‘You said it was Ms Bailey he fired at,’ said Magnus.
‘I think so, not Dad, at least not to start with. It’s all coming back to me. She said something like “I knew it,” and then . . . then . . . God, it was all so dreadful, I almost wish I hadn’t remembered.’
‘But why would anyone want to kill her?’ asked Janine.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did I tell you, by the way,’ Magnus continued, suddenly remembering, ‘who Ms Bailey is, or was – or would be if she were still alive?’
‘Dad’s summer assistant,’ Kate said impatiently.
‘Yes, but she is – was – also the mother of your friend Jefferson Andrewes!’
‘My friend . . . I hardly know him.’
The two women goggled at him, eyes wide, phrases like ‘small world’, ‘I can’t believe this’, ‘weird’, ‘how strange is that?’ drifting behind their eyes, but remaining unvoiced until finally Magnus said, ‘Yes, I thought you’d find that interesting.’
‘This is all too much of a coincidence,’ Kate said slowly. ‘It’s practically incestuous. I don’t think I can believe it.’
‘I’m beginning to. I went down with Jefferson Andrewes – nice chap – to meet his stepdad – the man married to Ms Bailey – the other day,’ Magnus said. ‘Apparently this man – Gordon Campbell – had been sent a report from the local police in Ecuador when his wife was killed in the accident, along with Dad and the others, but now he can’t find it and he’s afraid he may have thrown it out. But he seemed adamant that it contained no mention of gunfire. So in one way, we’re no further on.’
‘I saw him with a gun,’ Kate said. ‘And the little boy, hiding behind the wall of a house.’
‘So where did he go?’
‘Apparently he was sent away to the city and no-one seems to have seen him since,’ Magnus said.
‘But what you’re saying, Kate, about hearing shots and seeing a man firing at the car, that backs the boy up, doesn’t it?’ asked Janine.
‘It certainly seems to.’
‘Which implies that the police were lying,’ Magnus said slowly. He spoke to Janine. ‘Everything was cleared away so quickly after the accident that there wasn’t time for any independent person to check the bodies, even if there was enough left – sorry, ladies – to check.’ Kate paled, moved closer to the plastic pail, sat with eyes and jaw clenched shut. ‘Andrewes told me that Dad had been involved with some altercation with the local bad guys,’ Magnus continued. ‘Some juicy little racket involving sea-cucumbers.’
‘Sorry to be flippant,’ Janine shuddered, ‘but please don’t put “sea-cucumbers” and “juicy” in the same sentence.’
‘Bêche de mer, to use another name, supposed to be a gastronomic delicacy,’ said Magnus. ‘Trouble is, we have so little information. We’ve always assumed that it was a straight accident, until very recently, when it started to look as if the local malefactors were after Dad all along, because he was trying to prevent them from illegal harvesting of these . . . er . . . creatures. But let’s try another hypothesis.’ He nodded professorially at them both. ‘Suppose it wasn’t Dad they were trying to get rid of at all, but someone else.’
‘Someone else in the car, you mean?’ Janine said.
‘Exactly.’
‘It could hardly have been Annie, or Ms Bailey, could it?’ Kate said. ‘Annie was only eight, and Ms Bailey was only there for a few weeks; she can’t possibly have had time to annoy anyone enough to want to kill her.’
&
nbsp; ‘But you said she was the one they shot at first.’
‘Maybe she was just the nearest.’ Kate sipped at the glass of brandy Magnus had poured. ‘And I wasn’t doing anything that could make anyone want to remove me from the scene.’
‘Except demonstrating all over the place at university, getting up peoples’ noses.’
‘Pretty harmless stuff, Magnus. Besides, if so, why single me out?’
‘Suppose,’ Janine said, ‘I mean, I don’t know the circumstances, but suppose, just by pure chance, someone who’d seen you in England protesting against something he really believed in, and just happened to be in . . . um . . . Ecuador and saw you there, and decided that . . . um . . .’ She looked at them both. ‘Sorry, pretty feeble, really.’
‘Not at all,’ Magnus said, in the encouraging tone he used for the kind of student who could hardly remember his or her own name but who nonetheless had demonstrated a real enthusiasm for the subject under discussion. ‘But what about Luisa?’
‘What about her?’ Kate refilled their glasses.
‘Supposing we’re right about all this, could she possibly have been the intended target? Dad met her when he was working out there and, after all, we never really knew that much about her—’
Kate glared at her brother. ‘Except that she was lovely, and loved us, and we loved her.’
‘Of course. I meant that maybe she was, or her family was – maybe quite innocently – mixed up in something we knew nothing about, and someone was taking revenge or something. After all, they’re a fiery lot in Latin America, aren’t they?’
‘That sounds hugely xenophobic,’ Janine said.
‘I don’t mean it to be but—’
The doorbell pealed suddenly, and Magnus sighed. ‘Oh ha, ha,’ he said. ‘The local peasantry think it’s hilarious to ring the door and run away.’
There was more pealing, accompanied by heavy thumping and the rattling of the letter-box, followed immediately by muffled shouts.
‘That’s not yobs,’ said Kate.
Magnus got unwillingly to his feet. ‘All right, I’ll go, but don’t blame me if we’re overrun by the screaming hordes intent on rape and pillage because there won’t be an awful lot I can do to—’
‘Oh, get on with it, Magnus,’ Kate said. She picked up a knife from the dining-table and followed her brother to the front door, where a figure could be seen gesticulating behind the stained-glass.
‘Who is it?’ Magnus shouted.
An indistinct cry made itself audible.
‘Who?’ Magnus said, but Kate marched ahead of him.
‘It’s Jefferson Andrewes,’ she said, pulling the door wide, then standing back as a bloodied figure lurched into the hall.
‘Jeez, what on earth happened to you?’ Janine cried.
‘Kade,’ the newcomer said, his features smeared with dried blood, ‘whodd are you dooigg here?’
‘I live here, or used to.’
‘You’re Bagnus’s sisder?’ Jefferson said, still thickly but at least sounding human. ‘You cahd be.’
‘Why not?’ Kate got Jefferson’s arm round her shoulder (‘Warm water in a bowl, Janine, please. Magnus, get some of your brandy and some codeine from the first-aid kit.’) and guided him into the sitting room.
A look of pained irritation crossed Jefferson’s battered cheeks as he thought of all the time he could have spent with Kate if he’d only realized. ‘Ouch!’ He held his side, looking piteously at Kate, who remained relatively unmoved. ‘I think I’ve got a broken rib or two,’ he said, more or less intelligibly, ‘but I thought you were going grey, you see, and wore an awful cardigan like your brother’s, and suffered from period pains and – and . . .’
‘Why would you think that?’ She patted his face dry with a damp towel. ‘What on earth have you been saying about me, Magnus?’
‘What’s wrong with my cardigan, anyway?’ Magnus said, giving Janine the opening she’d been longing for.
‘There’s a button missing,’ she said quickly, ‘but I could easily sew it back on for you – there’ll be a spare one on the label, most likely, down on the left side.’
Magnus checked, and indeed there was. ‘How do you know that?’ From his admiring tone, Janine might have just turned in a thesis which proved beyond all possible doubt that Tsar Nicholas II was the love-child of Queen Victoria and Rasputin.
Janine smiled. ‘Take it off and hand it over.’
Jefferson sipped cautiously at his brandy, wincing as the spirit stung his bruised lips, but making it easier to enunciate. ‘Sorry to come calling so late, but I think I have some information you might like to hear.’
‘We think we may have some too,’ said Kate. Briefly she reprised what she had just told Magnus and Janine. ‘The police are keeping their hands off this Charlie Lyons character – or Carl Someone, as he’s also known—’
‘What?’ Janine stared at her.
‘I don’t know. They didn’t say.’
‘You said something about someone called Carl.’
‘Yes, one of Stefan Michaels’ father’s many aliases.’
‘Carl? Are you sure?’ But Janine knew she was right, the likeness to George Clooney was only one of the many links to her lover, and she’d always suspected him of operating on the wrong side of the law; perhaps in her heart of hearts she had known it. But killing people? Oh God, what had she been doing all these years? Would she be hauled into the dock for consorting with criminals and murderers, put away for years? What would Mum say, and Magnus, how would he feel about her if he knew?
‘Absolutely,’ Kate was saying. ‘Apparently the police are hoping he’ll lead them to the Boss, name so far unknown.’
‘Actually,’ Janine said, her voice tremulous, staring down at the cardigan in her lap. ‘I think I met this boss once.’
‘You did?’ Jefferson asked.
‘He was a nasty little creature, gingery sort of moustache, wore cowboy boots and kept trying to feel me up.’
‘Cowboy boots? Oh Christ, that just codfurbs it,’ Jefferson said, waving a sheet of paper at them.
‘It’s because of . . . of Carl,’ said Janine. A tear fell on to the grey cashmere, followed by another, and then a whole flood of them. ‘I simply had no idea he was anything to do with Stefan.’
‘Why should you?’ Magnus said forcefully, finding her hand and grabbing it tightly, only to pull rapidly away as his palm was painfully stabbed by the needle she was using to attach the button to his cardigan.
‘Exactly. Why should you?’ Kate echoed. ‘I’m not following any of this.’
‘Carl,’ said Janine.
‘What about him?’
‘He’s . . . um, my . . .’ Janine looked piteously at Kate and down again at her lap, while Kate rapidly reviewed what she knew of Janine and concluded that for some bizarre reason, which would need to be clarified at a later date, the mystery lover in London was the same man who had been responsible for the deaths of her family ten years ago on Galápagos, the nice man who was also the father of her own abductor and who had, apparently, shed tears at hearing that his son was dead. ‘I see,’ she said, ‘I think,’ nodding wisely while Magnus smoothed the black hair away from a by-now sobbing Janine’s forehead.
‘Janine isn’t responsible for anything,’ Jefferson said, a remark which, once his listeners had translated Jadide isud respossible for eddithig into normal English, had them nodding in agreement. ‘But I know precisely who is, the filthy murdering rat-arse.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Kate said. ‘I thought we were talking about . . . um . . . this Carlos man.’
‘Carlos the Jackal,’ said Magnus, pleased with the contemporary take on things he had achieved, his mind then meandering, for some reason, towards the paper he had recently contributed to one of the learned Romanov-specific journals, his thesis effectively demythologizing Grigori Effimovich Rasputin (‘More Sinned Against Than Sinning’) offering a rehabilitative interpretation of the red-haired holy man and heal
er from the Caucasus who had generated so many legends about his abilities and turned an entire empire against him.
‘Not quite,’ Jefferson said thickly, though alcohol was definitely clearing the congestion in his nasal passages. He gulped down the brandy and held out his glass for more. ‘But Mr Big, the Big Boss, is . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Even now I’ve had time to think about it, I still can’t believe it. Jesus Christ, I’ve eaten the man’s bread and drunk his bloody wine, for heaven’s sake. Listen to this, I should have realized yonks ago . . . the sea-cucumbers, he pretended he didn’t know anything about them, but he was well aware that they had aphrodisiac qualities, and then he pretended to mix up Ecuador and Peru, in case I realized he knew perfectly well, and it was probably him who got the hotel staff to steal my papers, lucky I’d got copies . . . and then all those sodding crocodile tears for my mother, how he missed her so, when it was perfectly obvious that he almost certainly arranged to have her killed out in the Galápagos, and the hell with anyone else in the car.’
‘What’s he on about?’ Janine said.
‘Look!’ Jefferson spread out the page he had been holding, while Magnus pondered the exact meaning of bread and wine in the context of Jesus Christ (the Last Supper?) and whether Jefferson was in fact a renegade priest or something similar – stranger things had happened, though the man had evinced no particularly religious leanings on their way to visit his stepfather, nor indeed on the way back. ‘I found this among my father’s papers, stuck to the back of a report on global warming.’
‘Would you like me to read it for you?’ asked Kate, noticing that he was finding it painful to take the copious breaths which his heightened emotions were causing him to draw. He said that he would, please, his eyes reddening as he handed over the page. It was all very emotional, especially after all these years, his poor mother, never did anyone any real harm, and as for that little cowboy-booted ponce . . .
‘“Truman,”’ Kate began. (‘That’s buy father.’) ‘“Truman: I have no right to ask anything of you, but I can’t see where else to turn. I won’t trouble you with the details, but I’ve discovered that G is—” (‘Gordon, that is.’) ‘“—is, not to put too fine a point on it, a big-time crook, maybe even worse. You know me, I’ve never been one to hang back when it comes to exposing matters I perceive as wrongs, but I’m actually frightened for my own safety, now that he knows I know. Of course I ought to go straight to the police, but he is my husband, for better or worse, and I find it hard to do this, which is why I’m turning to you for advice. I’m leaving tomorrow for the Galapágos Islands – I managed to get a grant to work with a Professor Lennox there – and shall be away for six weeks. I should be safe out there, at least, but can we talk when I get back? I should really value your input. Rhoda. PS I’ve been SUCH a fool.”’