by Joe McNally
‘Okay, well, we’ll see. Just keep me fully informed, will you?’
‘As and when I can, Mac. Did you find anything out about Mrs. Gordon’s claims?’
‘Not yet. I haven’t had time. And this Harle stuff complicates any conversations I have with them now. I need some time to think.’
‘Fine. Look, I might be at Roscoe’s place tonight. I’ll check tomorrow’s declared runners at noon. Roscoe’s got two entered at Wetherby. If they run, he’ll travel up this evening and-’
‘Don’t tell me any more, Eddie. Just keep in touch and don’t mention Racecourse Security Services to the police. Goodbye.’ He hung up. I banged the phone down and cursed him.
Several coffees and a car wash later I went into a quiet little betting shop and checked next day’s racecards: Roscoe’s were running. I felt a brief thrill – tonight’s visit was on.
But first, much as I knew I was probably stirring up trouble, I was determined to confront Cranley.
28
At five past two, I was tapping on the enquiries desk at the police station. The desk sergeant returned. ‘I’m afraid Detective Sergeant Cranley can’t see you just now, Mister Malloy, he’s rather busy.’
‘When will he be free?
‘He said if you’d like to take a seat for an hour or so he’d try to fit you in but he can’t promise anything.’
Bastard. ‘I’ll come back at three.’
Cranley was standing at the enquiries desk when I returned. He looked up, smiling sarcastically. ‘It’s Mister Malloy! To what do we owe the pleasure of today’s visit, Mister Malloy? Wait, don’t tell me, you’ve caught all those villains you were after, haven’t you? Are they outside in the car? Would you like me to send some men?’
‘What I would like is five minutes of your time, Detective Sergeant.’ I was determined to keep calm.
‘Five minutes! For a famous crime-buster like you? Certainly. No problem. Come this way.’
He led me into the same room we’d used last time. We sat down. His smile had gone and the sneer was back.
‘I’m not here for a shouting match,’ I said. ‘All I want is reasonable access to Alan Harle.’
‘What for?’
‘Because he’s my friend. I’m entitled to see him.’
‘Why would you want to see him?’
‘Because I’m interested in his welfare.’
‘Oh don’t worry about that, we’re taking good care of him. That was what you marched in here demanding last night, was it not? That we take care of him?’
I stared at him. ‘Why are you making things difficult for me?’ I asked.
He smiled his cold little smile again. ‘Because I do not like you, Mister Malloy. Because I doubt your motives. Because you think you’re a real clever bastard.’
I fought my rising anger.
‘Would I be right to doubt your motives?’ he asked, ‘why were you trying to find Alan Harle?’
‘I told you, he’s my friend, I was worried about him.’
‘Very noble. Was that the only reason?’
‘Yes.’
‘What were you doing in Newmarket yesterday morning?’
I hesitated. ‘I had business there.’
‘What kind of business?’
‘Personal.’
‘Did you visit anyone there?’
‘Yes.’
‘A Mrs. Gordon, by any chance?’
‘What if I did?’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘Nothing that would interest you.’
He smiled. ‘You’re lying again, Mister Malloy. See, that’s another thing I don’t like about you, you’re a liar.’
‘I found Mrs. Gordon’s husband after he’d been killed. I was as much entitled to go and see her as I am to see Harle.’
‘You’re not entitled to interfere with police business and that’s what you were doing in Newmarket, and that’s what you’re trying to do here, and I am not having any of it.’
‘How am I interfering?’
‘Because you told Mrs. Gordon you’d catch her husband’s killer, and Mrs. Gordon passed that on to my colleague in Newmarket in no uncertain fashion. In fact, she raved and ranted so much at them in the station yesterday afternoon that she almost got herself locked up.’
‘Maybe if they’d done their job properly-’
He raised a flat palm so quickly, I flinched. ‘Don’t get yourself in deeper than you already are, Mister Malloy. I am looking at this whole case and if I can find anything at all to nail you with, it will give me great pleasure.’
‘You’re in charge of it personally, are you?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, I haven’t much to worry about then, have I?’
His acne got redder. ‘Listen, Malloy-’
‘I’m finished listening.’
We stood. ‘And you’re finished with this stupid crusade or whatever the hell it is,’ he said. ‘What is it, Malloy, all this amateur detective stuff? Because you found Gordon’s body and the police haven’t caught anyone yet? Is it some personal vendetta to embarrass us?’
‘You don’t need me to do that, you manage fine yourselves.’
I walked past him to the door and out along the hall. He followed, calling after me. ‘Listen, Malloy, stay out of this from now on! If you don’t you’ll end up back in prison, believe me. That’s a personal guarantee!’
The doors swung closed behind me on his whining voice.
29
Roscoe’s place was in darkness. I had parked the car in a lay-by half a mile away and cut across fields and fences on foot to reach the stables. The house stood separate from the stable block and the lads’ hostel.
Dressed in my best burgling clothes and wearing soft silent boots, I crept toward the front of the house and stopped at the entrance. It was like a porch with an American-type screen guarding the door.
The front was long with three windows either side of the porch. Stopping, I leaned against the wall and listened. The wind rustled the hedges and pushed clouds across the moon. In the stable-yard at the rear, a dog barked; another answered, louder and longer. Then they were quiet. Turning to the porch, I was through both doors and in Roscoe’s hallway in less than a minute.
I stood waiting for my eyes to adjust. Shafts of half-light through the windows as clouds passed the moon gave me shadowy glimpses of the hallway.
Although I had a flashlight, I only wanted to use it when absolutely necessary. I started walking but the crepe soles on my shoes rasped off the floor at each step like the sound of sticky tape being peeled. I removed the shoes and carried them.
Passing the dark shapes of furniture against the walls, I was ten steps from the wall at the bottom when I froze mid-stride, the breath I’d just taken locked in my lungs.
Someone stood in the corner by the door…small, narrow, motionless. I waited, letting the breath trickle through my nostrils, hearing my heart beat, feeling the adrenaline racing…I was aware of my eyes straining, staring in complete concentration.
More than a minute passed. Neither of us moved. I could not hear him even breathe. The doubts crept in. Bringing the flashlight up, I pointed it at his eyes and pressed the button. A shiny painted face smiled back at me. A life-size statue of a jockey wearing red and blue silks. When the tension rushed out, I almost laughed.
I looked round the rooms, paying more attention to the study and the library than the others. In the library I used the flashlight again to examine the contents of a glass-fronted gun case. Inside it were three shotguns. I tried the handle; the case was locked. The guns looked expensive and very well cared for.
Many trainers took part in hunting, shooting and fishing, but Roscoe, with his Gucci shoes and coiffed hair, seemed about as far from that type as you could get. Maybe the guns were for show.
In the two rooms I found trophies, photographs, paintings and bronzes, copies of The Racing Calendar, entry forms, bills, vet’s certificates for two new horse
s, expensive writing paper and a gold pen. On Roscoe’s desk, ironically, sat a glossy brochure showing burglar alarms. Two separate systems had been ringed in ink and marked ‘cottage’ and ‘house’. I wondered if the cottage was Harle’s place.
Aside from the guns not sitting quite right with me, I found nothing that linked Roscoe to anything other than training racehorses. I sat at his desk for one final search through his papers and that’s when I noticed the orange light blinking on his answering machine.
I pressed the play button.
The tone bleeped. I waited. An accented voice, anger barely subdued, said, ‘Roscoe! Who the fuck is running this show? I want a meeting and I want it fast!’
The machine clicked. I sat there in the darkness smiling as I wondered what had upset the caller, the normally calm Gerard Kruger. I opened the tape door in the machine and levered out the mini cassette: the first solid evidence of a link.
I stopped. It was also evidence for Roscoe that someone had been in his house while he was away. But there was no way he could guess it was me. I looked in his desk drawer and found an opened pack of cassettes with three left in it. I loaded one of them in the machine and pocketed the tape with Kruger on it.
Time to go.
Standing by the porch door, I let the night air cool my face. Sweat ran from my armpits down my ribs.
Moving along the wall to the corner of the building, I listened before cutting across the narrow road. All quiet. The wind had dropped. The sky was clear.
I vaulted the fence into a small apple orchard, waking a pair of wood pigeons who flew off in panic, their wings slapping like rifle-fire, and I quickened my pace on into the meadows. They were grazing fields, though empty of livestock. I jogged in the direction of the car, casting a bobbing moon-shadow.
My mind buzzed. Just when it had looked like I’d get nothing on Roscoe, Kruger’s phone call had implicated him. Roscoe had to know something about Harle’s abduction.
Slowing to a walk as I approached the lay-by, I was breathing quite heavily, and sweating. I took my jacket off and threw it in the passenger side. Leaning over, I opened the glove compartment and put the flashlight inside. When I straightened up, someone in the back pushed a cold metal tube under my ear. It hurt my jawbone, and my heart almost burst through my shirt.
30
The courtesy light was still on. I looked in the mirror; he wore a dark balaclava with two eyeholes and no mouth-hole. Someone sat beside him.
‘Reverse,’ he said. The voice was even, calm. I started the engine, switched on the lights and as I turned to look through the rear window, he moved the gun from my right ear to the same position behind my left. My heart hammered but I’d handled the initial shock. I reversed the car into the road, facing the way I had come.
Sliding the gear stick to neutral, I waited for directions. He moved the gun to its original position.
‘Drive.’
I slipped into gear and drove, trying to force my mind to work on the problem, to analyze it, suggest a solution. But it kept veering off. How did they know I was here? Had they followed me? How long have they been watching me?
I tried to be conversational. ‘Where are we going?’
No answer.
We were less than a mile from the main road when a warning light showed on the dashboard. The temperature gauge was in the red section and climbing. I clutched at the straw. ‘We’re overheating badly, ‘I said, ‘we’ll have to stop.’
‘Stop,’ he said, voice still calm and level. Pulling into the side, I switched off the engine.
The door clicked open and he began sliding out, but the gun remained in contact with my skin. He stood outside now, though his hand was still inside holding the gun against my neck.
‘Get out.’
He stayed behind my door so I couldn’t bump him as I opened it. I stepped out. His friend got out the other side. The gun went to the nape of my neck. ‘Open the bonnet,’ he said. I thought I detected a West Midlands accent but couldn’t be sure.
‘The lever is inside the car,’ I said. He nodded to the other one, who got in the driver’s door and fumbled under the dash until he sprung the lock. I walked to the front, released the catch and opened the bonnet.
‘Prop it up,’ he said.
I felt for the metal supporting rod and fitted it. The radiator hissed steam from tiny openings.
‘Face the engine. Put a hand on each wing,’ he said.
I did so slowly, wondering what the hell he was up to. He changed position behind me, moving to the right. I sensed him switching the gun to his left hand but it never lost contact with the upright hair on my neck. I could just see him reach into his army-style jacket and bring something out.
‘Open your legs.’
I did. I was now half bent over the radiator, arms and legs spreadeagled. He pushed down on the back of my head with the gun. ‘Bend.’
When I realized what he was going to do, I felt nauseous.
A man must have instincts to help him survive, especially when the brain is caught by surprise or unable to function, and as my face was forced nearer and nearer to the roasting radiator surface, instinct tried to take over from brain. But although my ears set off every alarm bell in my body as they heard the bubbling, spitting water, brain knew the consequence of resistance was a bullet in the head.
The gun barrel pressed against the protruding bone at the base of my skull now, hurting. My face was a foot away from the hot grey metal.
A bead of sweat fell from my forehead onto the radiator and I watched from six inches as it sizzled into vapour. My fingers gripped the wings of the car as my feet slid wider on the loose gravel.
My eyes were three inches away, already burning. I closed them. Gritting my teeth, I tried to turn my head sideways so my left cheek would make contact first.
He stopped pressing down.
He held steady.
I looked at the radiator cap an inch away, the steam under terrible pressure, hissing and bubbling; it seemed deafening.
‘Stay away from Harle and Roscoe.’ His voice was still calm. I had not heard mine for a minute. Mine would not be calm. I thanked God, or whoever was up there, that they were settling for a warning and not frying my face. I thought of Harle and how far from him I’d be staying in future.
I wondered when he would let me straighten up. Things were pretty uncomfortable.
Then I saw a hand.
The other man’s hand.
It moved toward my face at eye-level. It was inside a thick grey industrial glove and it crept over the top of the radiator and came to rest on the cap.
The sickness returned.
An inch from my eyes, the hand pressed down, slowly unscrewing… The captive steam sensed freedom and the hiss became a roar in my left ear. The final seconds were a blur. On the last turn of the cap, the hand disappeared. The cap burst off and steam and boiling water rushed upwards as my face was pushed over the scalding eruption. I opened my mouth to scream, but I don’t remember hearing any sound. I don’t remember anything except the moments of searing pain before I blacked out.
31
Consciousness returned as dawn broke. It was cold. I lay staring at a tyre a foot from my face. Pips of gravel stuck in the tread. I didn’t move. Just my eyes. I became aware I was on my side beneath the front bumper, my right arm under my body. My eyes moved again and I saw the frosty spiky grass at the roadside. It was higher than my head.
Strange.
Very cold.
I tried to remember the season…spring. I was sure. Must be a cold snap.
My eyelids felt like dried, wrinkled leaves. My cheek and nose throbbed and stung as though someone had shaved me with a dry razor after my skin had been cooked.
My lips felt puffed. I prodded them with my tongue and regretted it immediately…tender, raw-flesh tender.
The sky grew lighter. I lay still. It wasn’t the first time I’d lain injured on the ground. I had fallen from horses at speed more times t
han I could count.
I’d seen the green earth coming at me fast, felt it pound the wind from my body. I’d heard the crack of my own bones at impact. I’d shut my eyes and rolled my head on a pillow of mud and wet grass, counting out the pain with each turn of the head until the ambulance arrived.
And they always had arrived. I wished they were coming to get me now…pick me up from this road, wrap me in warm blankets, morphine the pain away.
Help me.
I lifted my right cheek and felt the gravel stick to my skin. Rolling over I looked at the sky. It was still grey but getting bluer. Slowly I tried to flex my arms and legs. A crow sat in the tree above me, watching as I moved like a dying spider.
My limbs were stiff and, though they weren’t sore, the slightest movement anywhere in my body seemed to increase the pain in my face.
Very slowly, I sat up. My eyes reached the level of the radiator grille. Gripping the bumper, I pulled myself up…oh so slowly trying to keep my head still.
Every movement seemed to send shock waves into my skull to bounce around on the inside walls of my face, like some kid’s computer game. Direct hits each time. No electronic beeps, only agony, agony, agony.
I held on to the front of the car for a long while. I stared into the black hole of last night’s instrument of torture…the cap was nowhere to be seen and nature’s overnight irony had applied to the rim a coat of ice.
The journey from the front of the car to the driving seat must have taken ten minutes. Moving in tiny steps, stopping till the pain was bearable for the next few inches, I heard the crow fly off. Bored, I suppose. If he’d been a vulture, I think he might have stayed.
The final small movements had to be made in bursts of held breath, squatting to sit on the side of the seat, sliding backwards, hauling my legs in and turning round to face the front. Each an individual stage.