by David Thomas
Denholm ushered her to one side. I gathered he was making his apologies: he had to get back to London. I glanced back at my car. The man was still there, looking straight at me.
I walked towards him down the churchyard path. As I got closer I could see that he was slim, with high cheekbones and bleached blond hair swept back off his forehead: a few years older than me, perhaps, but in rather better condition. His coat was perfectly cut and beneath it his tie was black, out of respect for the occasion.
‘Mr Crookham?’ he said. His voice sounded German.
‘Yes.’
I wanted to get straight into the driver’s seat and clear off as quickly as possible. But without making any fuss about the matter, the German was blocking my way.
‘I have been asked to pass on some advice,’ he said.
That word again: advice. That was what the email had offered Andy. Now I was getting it too and it scared the hell out of me. ‘Was it you?’ I asked, struggling to get the words out as my heart thumped out of control and my knees seemed to buckle beneath me. This was the second time in a couple of days that I’d experienced serious fear and it wasn’t getting any easier. ‘Was it you that sent the email?’
However the German had expected me to respond, it can’t have been like that. I saw a flicker of genuine surprise, even puzzlement, cross his eyes before he managed to restore his equanimity and say, very calmly, ‘I am sure that you are curious about the death of your brother. Such a tragedy and so hard to understand. It is only natural that you would wish to find out more about why your wife … your lovely wife … would do such a thing. But my friendly advice to you is: contain your curiosity. Do not investigate. It can only lead you into harm.’
The message was horribly familiar: the words so close to those of the email, with the same warning to stay away from Mariana’s past. So too was the potential for darkness and violence that seemed to lurk behind the messenger’s impeccable appearance and the icy politeness of his speech. This man, whoever he was, came from a world I neither knew nor understood. But with every day that went by, I was more certain that it was the world in which Mariana had been raised.
I managed to ask him, ‘Are you threatening me?’
‘Absolutely not. I am trying to warn you only. Stay away from all of this. From your wife, from your brother and his questions—’
‘How do you know about my brother’s questions?’
He continued without acknowledging what I had said: ‘from all of it.’
‘Who are you? What’s your name?’
The man thought for a moment. ‘You can call me Mr Weiss,’ he said, making it sound like ‘Vice’.
‘So who do you work for, then?’
‘That is not important,’ Weiss replied. ‘All that matters is that I deliver my message, which I have done, and that you understand it and act upon it. I urge you, Mr Crookham, pay attention to what I have said. And now I must leave. I offer my sincere condolences to you upon the death of your brother. Good day.’
He left without waiting for my reply. I watched him walk down the road and as he got further away he became little more than a black silhouette outlined against the backdrop of a country lane. I suddenly had a flashback to another black figure: the man sitting on the sofa, playing the role of Andy. Were they one and the same? I felt caught in the coils of a conspiracy I could not begin to understand, as trapped as a diver in the grip of a giant, writhing octopus, pushing one arm away only to be seized by another. And what made it worse was that I was the only one who could see or feel this creature. Everyone else just wanted to tell me that it didn’t exist, that I was just imagining it. Maybe I was. Maybe the whole thing was just some kind of paranoid delusion. And maybe that thought was even more frightening.
As I got into the car my pulse was racing. When I held my hand out in front of me it was shaking. I tried a breathing exercise to calm myself down: taking long, slow breaths and pushing out my stomach as though it, too, were filling with air. Gradually my nerves settled. And then another thought struck me.
I leapt out of the car, raced round to the back, lifted the tailgate, pulled back the boot cover and looked inside. My case was still there. My wellies were still there. All the junk that accumulates in any car boot was still there.
But Andy’s laptop was gone.
26
I wasted ten seconds staring at the space where the laptop should have been, feeling sorry for myself before my brain finally kicked into gear. That was no delusion. Someone really had taken it. And anyone who wanted the laptop that badly almost certainly wanted more besides. If they could get into my car that easily, they could get into Andy’s flat as well. That was enough to make me dash back to the driver’s seat, start up the engine and set off after Vickie and the rest of the mourners.
She was standing just inside the door of the pavilion, greeting everyone as they arrived for the reception, just as her parents should have been standing at her wedding. I barged to the front of the line, apologizing frantically and making daft expressions and hand signals indicating that I had to get through to take my place alongside Vickie. Which, come to think of it, was where I should have been in the first place. I was the dead man’s brother. I ought to have been greeting and thanking all the friends who’d come to see him off. At that precise moment, though, that was the last thing on my mind.
‘Do you have the keys to Andy’s place?’ I said, when I finally got to where Vickie was standing.
She looked alarmed.
‘Well, it’s … it’s our place actually,’ she said. ‘What do you want from it? I mean, does it have to be now?’ Vickie frowned. ‘You all right, Peter?’
I nodded a little too forcefully. ‘Sure. But I really do need those keys … I’ll bring them back …’
‘And then you’ll tell me what’s going on?’
‘Promise.’
She reached into her handbag, took out a bunch of keys and detached two of them from the ring. ‘That’s the Yale, and that’s for the other lock, just below it. Do the other one first.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. And then, as an afterthought, ‘What was Andy’s postcode?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘Well, I need it for the satnav.’
She shook her head sadly. ‘You two … You were supposed to be brothers … You never even came to our house.’
‘I’m sorry, I should have made the effort, I know. But please, the code?’
Grudgingly, Vickie recited it.
‘Look, I’ve got to go,’ I said. Catch up with you later …’
I pushed my way back out again and made it to the Range Rover in one piece before I stumbled up into the seat, closed the door and slumped my head against the steering wheel.
‘Get a grip,’ I chided myself, leaning back into my seat and blinking hard. I cleared my throat, rubbed a furtive hand across my face and punched Andy’s code into the satnav.
‘At the first opportunity, turn around,’ said the prim female voice from the machine.
‘It’s a bit bloody late for that,’ I muttered, and headed off.
Only now did it occur to me to be scared. What if Weiss was there when I arrived? What if he had someone else with him? He must have had at least one accomplice, otherwise he’d have been holding the laptop when I saw him. And of course, there’d been two men at my house the night before last. So now I had a choice: I could either follow the satnav’s suggestion and turn around, go back to Yorkshire and forget the whole thing, or I could act like a grown man and deal with my own problems for myself.
‘You have reached your destination,’ said the voice a few minutes later.
‘You sure?’ I argued.
I’d had a picture in my mind of a scruffy flat on the first or second floor of a terraced house. But the satnav woman was telling me to stop outside a whitewashed period cottage on the main street through a village on the outskirts of Ashford. It wasn’t a big place, but it had a real four-square solidity to it: very simple
and unapologetic in its plainness.
As I got out of the car, the nerves kicked in. I had to make myself walk up to the front door, wondering all the time whether someone was watching me as I came. An image planted by countless films and TV shows came to me – the man walking into a trap, a gun aimed at his head. I could almost feel the sights lined up on my skull and the impact of bullet on bone. I had to make a conscious effort to keep walking.
The house stood in a small patch of land, with space on all four sides, so I could walk round it easily enough, my heart pounding against my ribcage as though I were halfway through a marathon. I couldn’t see any broken windows or smashed-open doors. When I came full circle and tried the front door it was shut: both locks. My pulse began to slow down a little. Unless they’d teleported in, I couldn’t see how there could be anyone inside.
I unlocked the door, went in and turned on the lights. Now I could relax enough to take stock of my surroundings. The cottage had been given a thorough modernizing, with nice new oak floors and halogen downlighters recessed in the hall ceiling, but Andy and Vickie had kept plenty of old rustic touches: the wooden beams, the bare brick fireplace. They had a good eye for furniture, too. The stuff in the downstairs living room wasn’t fancy, but it was well chosen. There were lots of books on the shelves, as you’d expect from a writer, and some great framed photographs on the wall: an assortment of people and landscapes that were all very different, yet somehow seemed connected both to each other and the room where they were hung. Perhaps they’d been taken on Andy’s assignments, with a story behind each of those images: a story that I’d never heard.
It didn’t look as if anyone had been here. Everything was very neat and tidy, with none of the devastation I had expected to find. The kitchen and dining room were equally undisturbed. A pile of correspondence sat on the dining room table next to a box of headed notepaper with matching envelopes. Beside the paper stood an empty screw-top bottle of Aussie Chardonnay and a glass with a few dregs left in the bottom. I thought of Vickie dutifully answering the letters of condolence, keeping herself going with another sip of wine. I owed it to her, if no one else, to find out why her man had died.
Upstairs, the master bedroom and bathroom were equally untouched. There was just the second bedroom to go. I assumed that Andy used it as a study and I was right. This was where he’d worked, all right. And it looked as if a twister had torn through the window.
Whoever had been here had ripped the room apart. Every book, every box-folder, every one of the old interview tapes that Andy kept in carefully labelled boxes had been taken from the shelves that ran down the full length of one wall, examined, then thrown down on the floor. Every drawer of his filing cabinet had been emptied. The top of his desk was bare except for a large monitor screen – I remembered Andy telling me that he simply plugged in his laptop when he was working at home – and all the clutter that had been on it was now strewn beneath it along with all the other devastation.
The savage thoroughness with which the room had been taken apart contrasted sharply with the restraint that had been shown elsewhere and the extreme care that had been taken to go in and out of the property without leaving any trace. It was all of a piece with the man who’d been waiting for me by the Range Rover: that same sense of self-control and violence cohabiting seamlessly. A calculation had been made. The best use of limited time had been determined and all the intruders’ energy had been concentrated on the one room most likely to produce something of value.
And yet, whatever they were looking for, I had a strong feeling that they had gone away empty-handed. The screen of the computer was smashed, leaving it staring blackly like an empty eye-socket. It was the one example of pointless destruction anywhere in the house, and it suggested frustration: a parting shot, perhaps, as whoever had been here had left the room.
Was that really what had happened? I imagined Weiss and his accomplice, or accomplices, leaving the house, knowing they still had one more shot. The funeral was public knowledge. I was bound to be there … Then the triumphant smiles as they opened up the car and found the laptop.
I am not a violent man. The constant tension and temper I’d been feeling since Andy’s death were not natural to me. I’m no hero, either. I did a few terms in my school cadets, just because my mates were in it, but I’d never in my adult life had a fight, or fired a gun. As I stood in the middle of Andy’s office though, surrounded by the contemptuous desecration of his entire life’s work, I realized that I wanted very badly to take my revenge for what these bastards, whoever they were, had done. I wanted to hit back.
27
Back at the cricket pavilion, things were beginning to wind down. Just half a dozen guests were left and Vickie was already starting to clear up, scurrying about the place, picking up cups and plates and wiping down tabletops. At first glance, her energy seemed undiminished, but there was a palpable sense of strain about her. She was running on her last reserves of energy, barely able to maintain the brittle façade that had got her through the day. As I gave her back her keys I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was about to smash it down and leave her utterly exposed.
‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news,’ I said.
There was a brief flash of panic in Vickie’s eyes as she answered, ‘What kind of bad news?’
‘It’s your house – someone got into it.’
Her eyes widened and she put a hand to her mouth.
I reached out to touch her shoulder. ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they took anything. I’m afraid they made a bit of a mess of Andy’s study. But it looks like every other room in the house was untouched.’
‘But why?’ she asked and I could see that she was fighting for every last shred of self-control. ‘What did they want?’
‘I think it’s to do with the research Andy was doing, looking into Mariana’s past. He may have stumbled on something someone wants to keep quiet. Or maybe they’re just afraid he did – I don’t know …’
‘Oh God …’ she began to take short, quick breaths. ‘What if they come back?’
‘Come over here,’ I said, guiding her to a chair. ‘Sit down.’
She bent over with her head in her hands and I got down on my haunches so that our heads were roughly on the same level.
‘They’re not coming back, I promise. They got into my car and stole Andy’s laptop. Everything he had was on there. I’ll bet you anything you like they’ve gone back to wherever it was they came from. You’ll be safe, I’m sure.’
‘I don’t care,’ she said, her voice catching as the tears began to flow. ‘It’s too late. They’ve wrecked it, haven’t they? That house was the one thing … the one thing I had left … the one place I could still feel Andy … And those … those bastards have taken that from me. I can’t go back now … I just can’t … Not now they’ve been in there. Oh God …’
She let out a wail of pure, primal pain and broke down in heaving, racking sobs. I stayed with her, offering words of comfort, fresh tissues and a glass of water until she had recovered some kind of composure.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked, ‘Anything at all?’
Vickie looked me straight in the eye, took a deep breath and said, ‘Yes, you can go … I’m sorry, Peter, I’ve done my best to understand what you’re going through. I’ve tried to be reasonable. But when I look at you, all I see is the unhappiness you’ve brought into my life. Your wife killed the man I loved. I don’t know why. I don’t really care. What difference does it make? Andy’s never coming back. Now I’ve lost my house as well. Just go … right away … please.’
There was nothing to be said, nothing that could ease her suffering or my crushing sense of shame. I went back to my car feeling as low as at any point since Andy’s death and further away than ever from any kind of resolution.
And yet something was going on here that just didn’t fit with the cosy consensus opinion that the police and the lawyers seemed to have about the case. I ca
lled up Iqbal and told him I had new information on the case.
‘Really?’ he said, conveying a massive weight of scepticism with that one short word. ‘Perhaps you should tell me about it.’
I ran through the events of the past few days: the email; the break-in at my house; my meeting with Weiss; the raid on Andy’s place and the theft of his computer. ‘So what are we going to do now?’ I asked at the end.
‘I am not sure that there is anything we can do,’ Iqbal replied.
‘What do you mean? Surely the police will pay attention now that there’s been another two incidents.’
Iqbal gave the sigh of a long-suffering man whose patience has been tested to the limit. ‘Mr Crookham, please, consider what you have just told me. Or, more importantly, what you have not just told me. You talk about a threatening email, sent after the man who was threatened had tragically met his end. You say you met this German gentleman who called himself Mr Weiss, but you have no proof of his identity, no number plate of his car and thus no means at all by which he might be traced. Nor do you have any actual evidence that he stole your brother’s computer, let alone that he broke into your brother’s house, and certainly not that he was one of the individals who broke into your house and did nothing but enact a distasteful, but hardly illegal, re-enactment of a tragic crime.’
‘Look, I know I don’t have any proof,’ I said. ‘But I’m absolutely certain Weiss has had a hand in all this. It was obvious by the way he acted. You’d have thought so too if you had been there.’
‘But I was not there. Nor were any police officers. So they would have nothing to go on. As for the break-in at your brother’s house, I am afraid to say that this is an all-too-common occurrence. There are unscrupulous criminals, Mr Crookham, who take the trouble to read their local papers. They see the funeral notices and they know for sure that the home of the deceased will be empty at that time. So they take advantage of this opportunity and commit crimes very like the one you described.’