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Dead North (Sam Williams Book 1)

Page 9

by Joel Hames


  My voice wasn’t level any more, and it wasn’t quiet either. A nurse turned in my direction from the station at the end of the corridor, and I glared back at her until she looked away. Roarkes and Gaddesdon were staring the other way and pretending they couldn’t hear me. I didn’t care.

  “Fuck you, Sam,” she said. I could hear the tears in her voice, but I could hear that edge, too. I wasn’t surprised. I let her go on.

  “I was going to come up, thought you might want some help. Thought you might want to see me. Guess I was wrong about that.”

  And suddenly, like water draining out of a sink, all the anger was gone. It wasn’t just Carson and Roarkes and Tarney, I realised. It was me. It was my toilet-bowl of a career, my overdrawn bank account, my shiny new flat full of shiny new toys Claire was paying for.

  But that wasn’t her fault. I couldn’t think what to say. Sorry. Sorry was probably best. I started to say it but I didn’t get past the “s” before she cut back in.

  “I’ll see you when you get back. If I’m still here,” she said, and hung up. I toyed with the idea of ringing straight back but I knew she wouldn’t answer. I wouldn’t if I were her.

  9: Shogun

  GADDESDON GAVE ME a lift back to the hotel. What I wanted was a lift to the pub car park so I could pick up the Fiat and drive somewhere else, not home, not to Claire, but not the First Quality Inn either. Roarkes shook his head and that was it. I had my orders, Gaddesdon had his, and what I wanted was no more relevant than what I’d had for breakfast that morning. I was too tired to argue. Instead, I settled for telling Roarkes that he was a useless piece of shit and if he didn’t follow up on the Argentina lead then I’d make sure someone knew about it. He said he’d think about it, which was an improvement, at least, and reminded me we had more pertinent leads.

  “Oh yes?” I said, wondering what else he hadn’t bothered telling me.

  “Yes,” he replied, and pointed at my nose. It took me a moment to figure out what he meant, but only a moment. Tarney. My hunch on Tarney had paid off, even if it had cost me a bleeding face and several wasted hours in the hospital. The money.

  Where had the money come from?

  Roarkes didn’t know. No one knew. Tarney wasn’t saying a word, and in normal circumstances no one would be able to do a thing about it. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Tarney had been kind enough (I tried to snort at that “kind”, but it hurt too much) to beat the crap out of an innocent member of the public (Roarkes almost choked over the “innocent” as he was saying it), and straight after that he’d pulled out a wad of banknotes in what looked very much like an attempt to bribe a police officer, with enough witnesses to keep him locked up till he got bored of saying nothing.

  I wasn’t so sure. Carson hadn’t got bored, and he had a lot more at stake than assaulting a lawyer. Tarney had a reason or two to talk, sure, but he might have all the reasons in the world not to.

  As I sat in the passenger seat next to Gaddesdon, yawning and screwing my eyes shut every time the pain shot through my nose, which was every time Gaddesdon touched the brakes or the gas or turned the wheel more than a couple of degrees, I remembered the call I’d rejected at the pub. Maloney. He’d left a message. I lifted the phone to my ear and found myself listening in astonishment to a voice that was about as different from Maloney’s as a human voice could be.

  “Sam,” it said. It was a female voice, one I hadn’t heard for years and hadn’t thought I’d hear again. There had been two calls, of course. I’d assumed the second caller had been the same as the first. I’d been wrong.

  “It’s Elizabeth Maurier.”

  Like I didn’t know.

  “I appreciate there have been some difficulties between us, Sam, but there are some things we have to talk about.”

  A bit late for that, I thought. Maybe if she’d called me before I’d taken her stupid bloody firm to the cleaners – or not. I doubted it would have made much difference. And “some difficulties” was putting it mildly. She’d thrown me out, egged on by that bastard Brooks-Powell. She hadn’t tried to speak to me once since then, not even after I’d squeezed a seven-figure sum out of Mauriers on behalf of nineteen former employees who’d all been bullied out of the firm by Brooks-Powell himself. Employment law wasn’t really my thing, but a six-year-old could have handled the case. “Some difficulties” my arse.

  “You’ve got my number, Sam. Please call me back when you can.”

  I let the phone fall to my lap and wondered what the hell she wanted to talk about now. No doubt she was annoyed with me, with what I’d done to her firm and its precious reputation, but if that was the case it wasn’t me she should be angry at. Brooks-Powell had been the villain. And she’d hired him.

  I picked up the phone and listened to the message again, and this time it all flooded back, the heady first months at her firm, the thrill of a big win in court and the sudden realisation that a win did nothing for a victim’s pain. And all that followed: the slow decline, the mistakes, the parting of the ways. That gentle, slightly breathy voice, all country houses and champagne flutes, just as it had been when she’d told me she didn’t want to see me in her offices again. She didn’t sound annoyed, but she never really did. Maybe she wanted to talk about something else. Maybe she just wanted to build bridges.

  The way business was going, a bridge back to Elizabeth Maurier might not be such a bad thing. But there were other matters to take care of first. Elizabeth Maurier could wait.

  As I deleted the message the phone started to ring again. I looked down. This time it was Maloney.

  “Nice of you to pick up,” he said by way of greeting. I couldn’t be bothered to explain myself.

  “Got anything for me?”

  “Very well, thanks, Sam. And how are you?”

  That was too much.

  “Oh, fine. I’m in Manchester, Claire won’t talk to me and I’ve just had my nose broken by a dodgy cop, but apart from that, I’m just fine.”

  We were stuck at a red light and I could see Gaddesdon frowning at me out of the corner of my eye. So I’d exaggerated about the nose. And Gaddesdon knew precisely why Claire wouldn’t talk to me and whose fault that was. I didn’t care. Maloney was laughing.

  “Yeah, I just spoke to Claire. I couldn’t get hold of you, wondered if she might be able to. She doesn’t seem very happy with you. If I were you I’d give her a call and straighten things out.”

  I exhaled slowly. I didn’t need a lecture on relationship management from a gangster. Maloney must have realised he wasn’t getting anything else out of me, because after a couple of seconds silence he went on.

  “But I think you’re going to be happy with me. Or at least your friend Roarkes will. I’ve got something very interesting on Thomas Carson.”

  And suddenly the pain and the weariness were gone and I was sitting up, frowning into the darkness, waiting for whatever it was Maloney was going to say with all the patience of a four-year-old at a birthday party.

  “So?” I said, after all of half a second’s pause.

  “So Thomas Carson doesn’t exist.”

  Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t this. I thought back to what I’d just seen in the hospital.

  “For someone who doesn’t exist, he’s done a decent job of wrapping a belt round his neck.”

  “Eh?”

  I filled Maloney in on the day’s events, and waited for him to elaborate.

  “I checked out his background, Sam.”

  “And?”

  “And there isn’t one. All the documents, all the school records, the family stuff, even the passport and the driving licence, it’s all fake.”

  For a moment I was too stunned to say a word. But only a moment.

  “How come the police didn’t spot this?”

  I sensed Gaddesdon watching me again, glancing to his left, and then back to the dual carriageway he was hurtling down at a speed that would have got anyone else pulled over.

  “I didn
’t spot it myself. But you know my people. They do these things better than anyone else, and they can see when something’s not quite right.”

  I’d come across Maloney’s people before. I’d come across the man who “did” his documents for him. If he said Carson wasn’t real, then Carson wasn’t real. Maybe this was why Roarkes wanted me here. Forget the talent. Not a cop, not a lawyer, just a guy who knows people who know how to get things done.

  “So who is he?”

  “Don’t know. I’m looking into it. Your Thomas Carson must have got himself created before he went to Argentina, because he flew out there under that name. But before that – well, there are records with Thomas Carson on them. They’re just not real.”

  “Shit.”

  It wasn’t the most eloquent of responses, but I couldn’t think of anything else. There was a great big gap in my brain. Maloney tried to fill it.

  “So it looks like your guy, Carson, whatever his name is, he’s born aged eighteen or nineteen or something like that. Your real guy, how old he is, who he was before he was Carson, it’s anyone’s guess. But we’ll find out.”

  “How?”

  “We will. I’ll keep you posted. And call that girlfriend of yours and promise her you’ll stop being such a cunt. OK?”

  “Yup,” I said, and hung up before I remembered to tell him precisely how much I valued his input into my personal life. It didn’t matter. For a few minutes my mind was racing faster than Gaddesdon was driving and nothing mattered, not even the tiredness or the pain in my nose. Carson was a fake. And I didn’t care what Roarkes thought, or the Argentine police, or anyone else. I was right about the business partner, Alejandro, he had something to do with all this, the bit of paper with the glacier coordinates proved it.

  “Turn around,” I said.

  Gaddesdon carried on driving.

  “Turn this car around or I’ll get out and walk.”

  Gaddesdon turned to glance at me, briefly, and went back to driving. I stretched over to take a look at the dashboard. We were doing close to ninety, and it didn’t look like we’d be slowing down any time soon. I wasn’t going to get out and walk. I tried changing tack.

  “Whose car is this, Gaddesdon?” I asked, as if nothing had happened.

  It couldn’t be his. It was a Mitsubishi Shogun, POLICE all over it. Gaddesdon wouldn’t have a Shogun. And he was CID. From what I knew, CID didn’t drive marked patrol cars.

  “One of the sergeants from the station. Briggs. You haven’t met him.”

  I knew I hadn’t met him. When it worked, I still had that photographic memory, after all.

  “Nice bloke?”

  Gaddesdon shrugged. “He’s OK, I suppose. I wouldn’t want to piss him off.”

  Perfect. I smiled to myself.

  “OK then, Charlie,” I said. I’d heard someone shouting “Charlie” at him from the custody desk when we’d been running around chasing our own shadows in the aftermath of Carson’s suicide attempt. I hoped it was his name rather than an insult. “How do you think Sergeant Briggs would feel if I bled all over his nice clean Mitsubishi?”

  It was clean, too. No crumbs, no crisp wrappers or coffee cups, no bits of crap scattered about the back seats. I suspected Sergeant Briggs wouldn’t be too happy with blood on his upholstery. I doubted he was pleased Gaddesdon was in it at all.

  Gaddesdon was looking at me. I could see him weighing up whether to upset Briggs or Roarkes, and coming to a decision.

  “Your nose isn’t bleeding any more, sir,” he said. I smiled again.

  “You don’t have to call me sir, Charlie,” I replied, reached up to my nose, and twisted. The pain came instantly, sharp and brutal, a swarm of angry wasps roused without warning and stinging blindly in every direction. I tried not to scream. I felt the blood dripping onto my hand. Still dripping, not pouring. But that was just the first twist. And a gentle one.

  My eyes were closed but I could sense the car slowing and hear the gentle tick of the indicator alongside Gaddesdon’s gasp. When I opened them a moment later we were pulling off the dual carriageway and Gaddesdon was looking at me and slowly shaking his head.

  “You’re mad, you are,” he said. “Roarkes is going to kill me. So where do you want to go?”

  10: Fake

  I KNEW IT was a long drive, and I knew it was late, but I also knew there was no point going back to my hotel room and sitting there while a bunch of half-baked ideas flew in wild circles around my head like a flock of drunken geese. And late was good, anyway. Catch someone by surprise, they might say something they’d planned on keeping to themselves. Roarkes would be treating me like an ill-behaved ten-year-old by morning, but I’d gone beyond being afraid of Roarkes’ words. Tarney’s fists had put them in perspective.

  But Sally Carson didn’t seem that surprised to see us. She was red-eyed, standing in the open doorway wearing a dressing gown and indoor shoes with the news playing quietly on the TV behind her, and ushering us inside with the look of someone who’d been waiting for that knock on the door all evening.

  “How is he?” she asked, as soon as we were in, and I understood. Roarkes had let her visit her husband, or at least see him from behind a pane of glass and then step inside the room to hold his hand for a minute, but then she’d been told to go home and reminded that her husband was still under arrest on suspicion of murder. All while I’d been getting my nose turned to jelly by Russell Tarney, and she hadn’t heard a thing since. I was there to force answers out of her, not to play nice, but I couldn’t ignore the fear in those red eyes.

  “He’s OK, Sally,” I said, and she smiled and took my left hand and squeezed. The second woman to squeeze that hand in one evening, I thought, inappropriately, and went on before she could get too excited.

  “He hasn’t woken up or anything, not yet. But the doctors say he will soon and he should be fine when he does.”

  “Apart from a bruised neck,” added Gaddesdon, and I shook my head at him as Sally Carson’s briefly beaming face fell back into the desolate lines it had been wearing when she’d opened the door.

  Five minutes later we were sitting in the kitchen drinking hot, sweet tea and I was trying to explain the state of my face without letting too much information slip out. I didn’t want to get distracted. Tarney wasn’t important. Not right now. With someone to fuss around, someone with a bleeding nose – I’d twisted too hard, I realised, and the blood wouldn’t stop coming – Sally Carson was looking a little more composed.

  “Take this,” she said, and shoved a bowl of warm water in front of me with a wad of cotton wool. I dabbed away for a minute, while Sally tutted at the state of my face and my shirt, which had sustained more damage than I’d realised when Tarney had stamped on my arm.

  “Is your arm hurting?” she asked, and I took a proper look at it for the first time. There was some tenderness, a little blood, an uncomfortable spot or two where the stone from the car park and the material of the shirt had been driven into the skin. It didn’t hurt. Compared to my nose, my arm was Terminator. I shook my head and took another sip of tea.

  It was time.

  “Can you help me with a couple of things, Sally?” I asked, as gently as I could. I knew she was suffering, but I had a job to do, and I had more chance of doing it if I could catch her off guard. I didn’t feel bad about it. Not yet. I thought I’d save feeling bad about Sally Carson for later, when it could join feeling bad about Claire and my nose and have a nice little misery party.

  “Sure,” she said, and smiled at me. I decided to start with an easy one.

  “That bit of paper the police found, the one with the numbers on it.”

  She frowned, as if she were trying to remember what I was talking about. It seemed a little unlikely that she could have forgotten it already, but after the suicide attempt it was always possible.

  “In a book,” I prompted, and she nodded like it had suddenly come back to her.

  “Yes, I remember. One of Thomas’ books. Thriller,
wasn’t it? I don’t really go in for thrillers.”

  She laughed, and I smiled back at her, but at the same time I was thinking to myself, I didn’t ask whose book it was.

  “And you don’t know what these numbers are?”

  She shook her head.

  “41 12 17 71 50 00,” I said, just like that, and even though it was Sally Carson’s face I was watching I could sense Gaddesdon’s mouth fall open beside me. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a little bit of a kick out of it.

  But Sally Carson gave me nothing. A shrug, a slight frown. I was staring at her, I knew I probably looked strange enough myself, bloody nose, bruised face, eyes wide and unblinking. I didn’t care. Nothing. If this was a test, she’d passed it with flying colours.

  But, I reminded myself, that had been an easy one.

  “Tell me,” I asked, “when did you and Thomas get married?”

  “2005,” she said, immediately. The ghost of a smile returned to her lips as she spoke. “I wanted to do it at one of the smart hotels in Bariloche, it would have been beautiful, but Thomas wanted something that was more us, so we had a load of people from the town out in one of the fields and got some wine and beer and a huge asado going.”

  “What’s an asado?” I asked.

  “It’s a barbecue,” she said, and spent the next couple of minutes explaining what a barbecue was like in Argentina, which sounded a lot like a barbecue in England only with more meat and better weather. I let her go on. She was back there, with Thomas, with her friends, enjoying the day, enjoying herself. It was cruel, but if I was going to get anything at all from her I’d have to pull the rug out while she was still dancing on it.

  She tailed off, still smiling, and looked at me expectantly. That threw me, for a moment, and I wondered what it was she was expecting. I doubted it was what I was about to say.

 

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