‘So this is about Joe Creeney – and you mentioned complications,’ I said, gently probing.
‘I think those are now out in the open, aren’t they? The evidence against Joe is overwhelming, but his injuries prevent him from speaking. As far as the police are concerned, he broke out of prison and murdered his wife.’
‘That’s the argument I used over the phone. It’s so damning I’m wondering why I’m here.’
‘It’s not an argument; we’ve both been quoting facts. But the facts are wrong.’ She considered for a moment, her lips pursed. ‘This might not help, but it’s something you should know. Nine times out of ten a murderer will have a motive, but Joe Creeney had none, no reason to kill his wife. Twelve months ago he loved her enough to forgive her when he discovered she’d been sleeping with another man. Unfortunately, a confrontation that followed went wrong and he killed the man he thought she’d been seeing. That terrible mistake sent him to prison.’
‘I’m impressed, but we need much more than his declaration of undying love. To strengthen the case against him it’s easy to conjure up some more facts – and that’s what the police and the CPS most assuredly will do. For example, we know a spell in prison affects a man: Creeney brooded for twelve months in a locked cell, love withered and died, he snapped, broke out and murdered his wife.’
‘No.’
‘I told you I’ve spoken to the police. The story I got from DI Mike Haggard was that between me dropping him off and Lorraine being found dead, Creeney rigged a makeshift gallows—’
‘Somebody did. It wasn’t Joe.’
Baffled, I shook my head. ‘All doors were locked from the inside. He was in the hall. His wife was hanging in the stairwell. Her body was still warm.’
‘Yes, I know, and he was alone.’ She nodded as if what she’d said added weight to an argument. It did, but on the wrong side of the scales.
‘You see,’ I said patiently, ‘all you’re doing is giving me more facts, more damning evidence that in the end will put Creeney in prison for life. You’re not coming up with anything to suggest that somebody else could have killed that woman. Yet still his sister is convinced he’s innocent. More, she’s managed to convince you he didn’t commit murder when we both know he was as good as caught in the act.’
Stephanie Grey leaned back in a swivel chair that was all buttons and padded leather buffed to a rich oxblood shine.
‘What did Poe call it? The Imp of the Peverse?’ She smiled. ‘I don’t know if I’ve got it right, but if I have then I think that’s what lurks within me; if things are too neat, I get suspicious. So, because all the evidence points to Joe Creeney, my imp’s prodding me with his fork and telling me there has to be another explanation for this killing.’
‘Give me something, anything, to suggest you might be right.’
‘Joe worked as a casual barman—’
‘And could afford a house in Calderstones?’
‘That came from Lorraine. Her father died and left her … well, comfortable. But what I’m getting at is that Joe was a barman, he spent a lot of time in night-clubs, on and off duty, but he’s no killer.’
‘He’s killed before.’
‘That was a mistake, an accidental killing that resulted in a conviction for manslaughter – and in any case, Joe had got it wrong.’
‘How?’
Stephanie tutted, a mischievous smile lurking. ‘I’m disappointed, Jack. You haven’t been listening. What I said just moments ago was that Joe Creeney was there at the death of the man he thought his wife had been with.’
‘Ah!’ She was right, of course, I hadn’t been listening, but that was because at that point she’d been talking about Joe Creeney’s love for his wife and my thoughts had drifted and I’d once again seen his face – the wet shine in his eyes – as he sat in my car and told me he was going home. Had that been the face of a man planning cold-blooded murder?
‘The man died,’ Stephanie said softly, ‘in an accident eerily similar to what happened to Joe last night. Joe hit him, the man fell and banged his head. He died instantly. Later, Joe learned that he’d attacked the wrong man. He was distraught. That’s what convinces me that if Joe was conscious now he could explain everything. Unfortunately, he chose the wrong time to make his second mistake: when the police burst into the crime scene, he bolted.’
‘What, then fell and banged his head?’
‘When the police broke in he was holding the ladder. Nobody knows what he was trying to do. Toss it aside perhaps so that he could get to Lorraine; use it so he could reach high enough to cut her down….’ She shrugged. ‘What actually happened was that he went beserk. He threw the ladder at one of the policemen, then ran out of the open front door and leaped down the steps. The drive slopes; there’s a rockery alongside the front lawn. The other policeman plays rugby. He tackled him. Joe fell awkwardly and cracked his head on one of those huge rocks.’ She hesitated, frowning. ‘I think the term for his condition is diffuse or axonal brain injury. If it is, the coma can last for weeks.’
‘And meanwhile…?’
‘I expect you to prove Joe Creeney’s innocence by finding the person who murdered Lorraine Creeney.’
‘You expect?’
‘Come on, Jack. You’re the PI who found that knife thrower, Pedro and his Flashing Blades, when he’d been missing a full year. You dealt with his ghoulish killer in a derelict windmill. On another case it’s said you took a bullet in the arm subduing a young woman bent on self-destruction.’
‘Waste of effort. She died.’
‘But you lived to soldier on.’
‘You’ve done your homework.’
‘Yes, and kick started the investigation.’ She slid a sheet of A4 paper across the desk. ‘This is a list of people you should talk to. Names, addresses, phone numbers. Joe’s sister and brother. A man who shared his cell—’
My mobile interrupted her. It was a day for phone calls coming at the wrong time. I excused myself, stood up and walked away from the desk. The caller ID told me it was Sian. My heart thumped. I clicked on, listened. There was no sound.
‘Sian? Sian, are you there?’
Pressed to my ear, the phone went dead.
I took a deep breath, switched it off and slipped it into my pocket. When I turned around, Stephanie Grey was watching me.
‘Is everything all right?’
I went back to the desk, picked up the list and said yes. But of course, it wasn’t.
Back at Grassendale I climbed the stairs to Calum Wick’s flat overlooking the Mersey and walked into the big room that boasted a settee and leather easy chairs, Pioneer stereo system, wide-screen television with a Sky box and video over and under, a wall on which the Scot pinned his pictorial history of Liverpool, and a work table laden with soldiers of tin-alloy standing in massed ranks under an anglepoise lamp so heavily daubed it made Calum’s spectacles look like polished Caithness glass.
The Black Watch figures were already primed, lined up, and drying under the anglepoise, the Scot watching over them like a bearded clan chieftain in wire-framed glasses. He had a coffee mug in one hand as he peered at me through paint-smeared lenses that did nothing to dim the query blazing in his dark eyes.
‘One word springs to mind,’ I said, sending my car keys bouncing across the leather settee. ‘Impossible. I sat in an office straight out of Rumpole of The Bailey and the talk went round in decreasing circles and gave me nothing new. Everything Stephanie Grey told me matches what we got from Haggard and Vine – well, it would, wouldn’t it, because that’s where she got it? Yet despite all the evidence, Caroline Spackman has managed to convince her that Joe’s innocent.’
‘Stubborn and determined. A potent mix.’ Calum rattled a brush in a jar of white spirit, dried it on a rag. ‘I take it you listened politely, then told Stephanie the famous private eye was stumped, couldn’t take the case and didn’t want their money?’
‘No.’
‘Aye, that’s what I expected: fool
ish and big headed – another mix to make strong men tremble.’ He cocked an eyebrow. ‘So now we get down to the hard graft, right? And, being sleuths of incomparable brilliance, we’ll unmask the real killer in a matter of days and leave the police to mop up the bloody mess.’
‘Perhaps not that quickly,’ I said, ‘but – as this is your day for aphorisms – hope springs eternal.’ I smiled abstractedly. ‘Joe Creeney murdered his wife, there’s no other possibility – yet, strangely enough, Stephanie Grey’s stubbornness is catching and I’m beginning to believe in the impossible.’
‘The locked room situation adds to the piquancy, of course,’ Calum said, getting up from the work table and switching off the anglepoise. ‘But now get to the point and tell me what’s really bothering you.’
It was hardly surprising that Calum Wick could sense my every mood. I’d first encountered the ex-SAS man, ex-potholer, more than ten years ago outside a rain swept spit-and-sawdust pub in Brixton. He had a fierce grin on his face, beneath the streetlights his black eyes glittered, and he was about to be beaten to a pulp by three huge Yardies. I was thirty-five, suntanned, fresh off the plane after five years in Australia. He was – well, he was Calum Wick, and in time I realized that was all I would ever know.
That night, shoulder to shoulder, we prevailed. The Yardies were vanquished, we retired from the scene to wash the blood of battle off faces and split knuckles in the ice-cold water of a cracked basin in an evil-smelling underground gents’ toilet, and went on to become partners in a scam that involved ferrying expensive cars of dubious provenance over from Germany and selling them on through a bent Liverpool detective sergeant who had well-heeled contacts.
Neither of those activities could be called careers. Neither armed us with the skills needed to investigate violent crime. But before Australia and Calum Wick I had been a regular soldier, and over some fifteen years my tours with the Royal Engineers and SAS were complemented by a lengthy spell with the SIB – the army’s Special Investigation Branch. When, disillusioned and conscience-smitten, I left Calum and his luxury car scam and began hitting the bottle, I was rescued and taken on by Manny Yates in his Lime Street firm of private investigators – an apprenticeship in investigation techniques which, when I walked out after five years, I thought I had put behind me.
But as the army had so often told me, I wasn’t paid to think!
While working for Manny Yates I had discovered a talent for military modelling. It developed rapidly. In the mountains of North Wales I bought the isolated farmhouse known as Bryn Aur that became home and workshop, and set up business: Magna Carta – Military Miniatures for the Connoisseur, with Wick as a distant but irreplaceable colleague, because the man I had first met splitting his knuckles on the skulls of those massive Yardies had found in hands too delicate for such violent work a skill with fine paint brushes to which Magna Carta owed much of its success.
He painted toy soldiers. And when, in time, I found myself once again drawn to hunting down criminals of the very worst kind, he became an amateur private dick’s assistant.
Somewhere along the way, Sian Laidlaw arrived on the scene.
Nowadays they would call Sian’s childhood deprived: she had seen her Scottish seafaring father lost overboard in an Arctic gale when she was ten years old and illegally aboard his ship, had returned to nurse her dying mother in the Cardiff slums and, years later, with a university degree under her Shotokan karate black belt, moved north to become something of a legend among the high peaks of the Cairngorms.
I had met her in Norway – she taking a break from military duty, me on holiday and stepping gingerly onto skis for the first time since my own stint in uniform. Some months after that first meeting she had walked one day into my stone workshop at Bryn Aur and in the next two years had shared my home and occasionally my bed.
If I ever used the word relationship I’d say the one Sian and I had was on and off, but whatever name we gave to what we did have, we worked at it. After a spell instructing on an outward bound course for tired executives in storm-force winds at Cape Wrath – long after she had quit the army – she had returned to Liverpool and helped me with the Gault case but, behind the scenes, other more attractive propositions were looming. After Cape Wrath she had conducted a successful radio phone-in. That led to the offer of her own television series, to be filmed by Granada in Manchester. We were delighted, Sian anticipating less time spent in the field teaching overgrown office boys how to abseil down vertical cliff faces, me looking forward to more togetherness at Bryn Aur.
In a way it had worked out. We did spend more time together. But then the Sam Bone case took over, drew to a bloody close in Conwy harbour, and Sian was called to Manchester to discuss another series – this time overseas. And so I found myself nursing a gunshot wound at Bryn Aur – alone, once again without my Soldier Blue.
But a young executive called Nigel got the overseas trip put on hold and suddenly, a little more than two weeks ago and smack in the middle of the Danny Maguire case, the togetherness I had come to believe would never be permanent had seemed about to happen. Sian moved into Bryn Aur – the emotional decision as always made light of with wacky humour, this time something to do with sheltered accommodation. And so the Maguire case drew to a perilous close. Sian saved the valiant private eyes from a disastrous cock up. The future had never looked so rosy.
Until last night.
‘You made no comment when we got to Bryn Aur,’ Calum Wick said, ‘and said even less the next morning. I naturally assumed Sian had again been summoned by the moguls. Television work. More high jinks in wild, Godforsaken places.’
We were in his kitchen. Satan, the scarred moggy sans goolies, was curling sinuously around my ankles like a fat snake in a fur coat as I munched on a slice of two-cheese pizza and drank ice-cold Holsten from the bottle. Calum was minus the wire-framed glasses but the stains thereon seemed to have migrated to his beard, and thence to his shirt. The smears on his fingers could have been ketchup, Humbrol enamels or blood. Whatever they were, he seemed to like the taste.
‘No,’ I said, ‘she’d said nothing. I suppose I noticed the Shogun wasn’t behind the house, but it was late, dark, we were shattered, the penny didn’t drop.’ I shrugged. ‘Then, when I went upstairs….’
‘Empty bed, icy cotton sheets.’
‘And chilling images preventing me from sleeping. Where the hell is she, Cal?’
‘For a start, you can ignore that mysterious phone call. You know what mobiles are like. Think adventure training, wilderness, mountains surrounding deep valleys. She didn’t answer because where she is she can’t get a signal.’
‘So why not phone back?’
‘Same reason. Or she’s took busy. Look, she phoned—’
‘Or somebody used her phone. And listened.’
‘Who?’
‘Same person that phoned me two weeks ago to set in motion a chain of events that led to murder.’
Calum pulled a face, licked his fingers absently and crossed to the stove to reheat the coffee. Satan had padded into the living-room. I pushed away my unfinished pizza and moved restlessly to the window.
‘I agree there’s something weird going on,’ Calum said, ‘but wouldn’t it be foolish to see connections before we look deeper?’
‘It would be even more foolish to do nothing.’
I swung away from the window. He had his back to the stove and was watching me with reproof.
‘That wasn’t what I said.’
‘No. I know.’ I smiled an apology.
‘So?’
‘So I’m wrong anyway. If an adult hasn’t been in touch for a while, nothing is all we can do. We wait. Assume the best, not the worst. And in the meantime we look at the intriguing case that’s been dumped in our laps and begin with what we’ve got. That’s a list of names.’
The coffee was bubbling. I left him to pour and went through to the living-room. Satan lifted his head to blink sleepily at me from the settee, then c
ollapsed. The list given to me by Stephanie Grey was on the coffee table. I sat in my usual chair, unfolded the sheet of paper.
Caroline Spackman (Joe’s sister, married to Max Spackman). Declan Creeney, Joe’s brother. Alec Creeney, his father. Cell mate, Damon Knight. Fiona Lake, Lorraine Creeney’s sister. Names, addresses, phone numbers. Five of them, but they would lead to others.
I looked up as Calum came through carrying steaming mugs.
‘Declan Creeney? Is that a name that rings bells?’
‘Night-club owner.’ He sat next to the cat, located a Schimmelpennick cigar, struck a match and looked at me over the flame. ‘If I recall correctly, it was for the killing of one of Declan’s minions that Joe Creeney found himself on the wrong side of bars – iron ones, that is.’
‘Minion as in?’
‘Manager of some kind.’
‘Would one of the clubs Creeney owns be the Sleepy Pussy?’
‘Aye, it would.’
I rolled the list into a tube, leaned back and tapped it thoughtfully against my chin. Calum went over to the Highlanders, tested the primer on several of them with the tip of a finger, then sat down and clicked on the anglepoise.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘when we were up that lane, in my car, I asked Joe Creeney why he was going in the back way. He told me the patio doors were open – he was expected.’
Calum, head bent, brush poised, peered at me over his glasses.
‘Didn’t Haggard tell us Lorraine Creeney called the police for protection once she knew her man was out?’
‘Yes. So who was expecting him?’
Glass tinkled as he rinsed the brush. ‘In the mind of a man who had been living with his imagination for twelve lonely months, I suppose she was.’
‘All right, but why the back way?’
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