Deathly Suspense

by John Paxton Sheriff

  ‘The Creeney Protocol,’ Calum offered.

  ‘How about The Jones Supremacy?’ Stan said, deadpan, and he winked at Calum.

  ‘Call it what you like,’ I said, ‘but we’re going back to the beginning. Joe Creeney killed a man called Wayne Tully because he thought Tully was, erm, bedding Lorraine.’

  ‘Bedding?’

  ‘Polite term.’ I grinned at Calum. ‘But according to Stephanie, Joe was wrong and it was someone else doing the—’

  ‘Bedding,’ Calum said, and nodded sagely.

  Stan pinched out his dog–end and put it in his pocket. ‘So what’s this mission, then?’

  ‘Dig up the Wayne Tully story. Locate his relatives. Bring me names and addresses.’

  ‘Do I get a cyanide pill. You know, in case of torture, stuff like that?’

  ‘Stuff like that?’ I shook my head. ‘And here’s me thinking you were blessed with the vocabulary of a self-taught man.’

  ‘Yeah, but the stuff I’m talkin’ about is stuff I know.’

  ‘Convince me.’

  ‘Wayne Tully’s old man lives in Colwyn Bay.’

  I blinked. ‘As in North Wales?’

  ‘As in one phone call and you’ve got his address.’

  I tossed him my mobile. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Yeah, but my sources are—’

  ‘Unsavoury?’

  ‘Sacrosanct.’

  ‘OK, take the phone into the kitchen.’

  He went. I heard a cat miaow, the scrape of a chair.

  I looked at Calum. ‘Sacrosanct?’

  ‘I told you, he’s a reader. First War and Peace, now The Da Vinci Code. He’s found some kind of religion.’

  ‘Jones the Pious. Mm. Has a certain ring to it.’

  Whatever he was to be called, he came back within minutes. The address he gave me for Karl Tully, Wayne’s father, was one I recognized from my infrequent visits to Colwyn Bay. Stan was grinning as he walked out and clattered down the stairs to his van, Jones the Informer, off to dig up more dirt. But we’d changed plans. With Karl Tully located, Stan was now going to find out what he could about Joe Creeney’s cell mate, Damon Knight.

  I had one more task before I went to bed. Through solicitor Stephanie Grey, Caroline Spackman was my employer. I rang her, offered her my sympathy, and assured her I was doing all I could to find out who was behind the murder that had, indirectly, led to her brother’s death. I even told her where I was going the next day.

  It was only when I rang off to face Calum’s look of disbelief that I realized giving out information like Smarties might not be the safest way to proceed.

  SEVEN

  DAY TWO – TUESDAY 1 NOVEMBER

  I set off early the next morning, crossed the River Mersey at Runcorn, took the coast road from Queensferry and was driving past police headquarters, Eirias Park athletic track and through the east end of Colwyn Bay at a little after nine o’clock. Karl Tully lived on the west side of town. I parked on the main road alongside Rydal College rugby fields, skipped across the road through the early morning traffic and walked back to the block of flats on the corner of Marine Road.

  Built of modern brick and set in attractive lawned grounds, they were clearly ideal for elderly people looking for maximum comfort, minimum work, and proximity to local shops, libraries and transport. I’d called Tully before leaving Grassendale and he’d told me he lived on the top floor where the salt air could be appreciated when the wind was in the right direction and wide windows afforded oblique views of the rugby grounds. I pressed the bell, he buzzed me in and moments later the introductions were over and I was gazing through the slats of vertical blinds at those sun drenched playing fields.

  ‘Beats Liverpool’s acres of concrete,’ he said at my shoulder.

  ‘Horses for courses. A lot would disagree with you. I’d guess Declan Creeney’s one of them.’

  ‘He would, wouldn’t he, poncing around with the filthy rich on Queen’s Drive. But that didn’t help his kid brother, did it?’

  ‘News travels fast. And that sounds like my cue. What about Joe, Karl? Was he as bad as they say? He killed once, twelve months ago. They say he had good reason, but it wasn’t good enough to keep him out of prison. And what about now, this latest murder? Did Joe break out of prison to kill again? To murder his wife?’

  Tully scowled. He was probably in his seventies, tall but bent as if his spine was giving way under the weight of massive shoulders, with watery pale eyes in a face as grey as fissured pumice stone under a shaven skull tanned by the sun. He motioned me to a chair, then sat down facing me across a glass coffee table with the sun shining in my face and on his broad back so that eyes devoid of humanity were lost in pools of deep shadow.

  ‘Why ask me?’’ he said. ‘They say he did; they say he was caught at it – the silly bugger. And they say it was you that picked him up and drove him home so he could do it.’

  ‘I was roped in as taxi driver, and my part in it went no further. But I came here to talk about you and your family. I’ve been told threats were shouted in court when Joe was sent down. He couldn’t have enjoyed prison, but with your mob still after him escape must have been like leaping out of the frying pan into a situation where he could get badly burned.’

  ‘My mob?’

  ‘Maybe that’s disrespectful. But you have got other sons, and I’ve been told it was them doing all the shouting.’

  ‘So what? Joe gets out of gaol, murders Lorraine because she’d been playin’ away and cracks his skull when doin’ a runner. All in the same night. Christ, he was dead before my lads got word he was out.’

  ‘So you say—’

  ‘What – you callin’ me a liar?’

  ‘I’ll put it another way: what if you’ve been misinformed? What if your boys heard about the break before it happened? – it must have been planned. And if they did know about it in advance, what possibilities does that open up if I tell you Joe Creeney did not murder Lorraine?’

  My meaning wasn’t difficult to follow. Karl Tully grunted, uncoiled from his chair and crossed to a cocktail cabinet under a black-and-white photograph of dinner jacketed men with squashed noses cosying up to a glistening boxer wearing a shiny Lonsdale belt. He poured amber fluid from a decanter into two glasses, passed me one, sat down on the leather settee with his face out of shadow. It was deliberate. I was now seared by the naked menace in eyes that blazed.

  ‘Let me work this out,’ he said. ‘You’re a private dick hired by Caroline Spackman because she believes little Joe never killed his wife. Now you’re pluckin’ names out of thin air, and who better to latch on to than a couple of angry lads who’ve seen their brother beaten to death with a lead pipe—’

  ‘Seen?’

  ‘They weren’t there, but isn’t hearin’ about it bad enough?’

  ‘Wayne cracked his head when he fell.’

  ‘Yeah, only he didn’t fall.’ Tully’s tone was scathing. He tossed back his whisky, clattered the glass on the coffee table alongside a bowl inside which cornflakes clung like wet cardboard. Leant back. Steadied his breathing. ‘Wayne didn’t fall, he was knocked down,’ he said. ‘He was dead before he cracked his head. My opinion – but who cares, what’s the fuckin’ difference? Dead is dead.’

  ‘Your boys care, and for twelve months their hands were tied. Then one wet night Joe’s back on their side of the wall and on his way home to his wife. And so your boys get what might be their one big chance, an eye for an eye: they lose a brother, Joe loses a wife and walks in to a nightmare.’

  ‘Wrong.’ Tully shook his head. ‘This is not the Colombian fuckin’ drug mafia, dynasties slaughtered for stealing a couple of ounces of white powder. The way we work it’s strictly hands off families—’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘So now, at last, it’s “we”.’

  Tully’s snort was derisive.

  ‘Bollocks. You know bloody well Joe Creeney sweated for a full year then broke out of gaol so he could get rid of all that sh
it inside his head that was drivin’ him crazy. He killed his wife. End of story.’

  He climbed out of the chair. His big fists were clenched, his fierce glare was daring me to argue, and I sensed that if I didn’t leave willingly he’d send me the short way down to the lawn in a shower of broken glass.

  I rose, shrugged, thought of shaking one of those big hands and decided against it.

  ‘The odds are you’re right. Joe Creeney went to pieces, arranged a break and murdered his wife. That’s the way the police see it, and so far all I’ve got is madcap theories. You’ve heard one of them, and refuted it, but I’d still like to ask your boys where they were on the night Joe’s wife died.’

  ‘Feel free.’ He was grinning like a shark, and I knew he was looking ahead with relish to the reception I would get.

  That in itself was food for thought, but the one thing I couldn’t get out of my mind was that in the half-hour or so I spent talking to Karl Tully, Joe Creeney’s name came up but Karl never once said outright that Joe had killed his boy. Wayne was beaten to death with a lead pipe, Karl said. He didn’t fall, Karl reminded me, he was knocked down – but despite the fury blazing in his pale eyes, never once did he place the blame for his boy’s death squarely on Joe Creeney’s shoulders.

  I walked out with two names, two Toxteth addresses and four phone numbers – land lines and mobiles – but before heading back to the big city I decided to call on DI Alun Morgan. He had ended his phone call to Grassendale with a challenge: find out what connected two murders that occurred sixty miles apart to victims who lived close enough to each other for the fairies at the bottom of their gardens to link hands. I knew a lot about Joe Creeney’s death, but almost nothing about how Rose Lane had died. Now was the time to put that right.

  Alun was based in Bethesda, and I had many times visited his house cum office nestling just off the A5 in the lee of Carnedd Daffydd. The easy way from Colwyn Bay was a fast drive along the A55 coast road to Bangor then inland on the A5 through the Nant Ffrancon. So I took the easy way, but instead of stopping at Alun’s house I continued for a mile or so up the Nant then swooped down the single-lane road and across the Afon Ogwen to my home and workshop beneath the soaring peaks of the Glyders.

  Two murders were begging for my attention but I still hadn’t heard from my Soldier Blue, and I had suddenly remembered Calum and I being worried about her during the Sam Bone case and walking into a silent Bryn Aur unaware that Sian was fast asleep upstairs.

  I drove there with anticipation and a dry mouth, but this time I was out of luck. The Quattro bounced over the humpbacked stone bridge and up the stone and slate yard and as I pulled in under the oak tree I could see at once that there was no metallic-silver Mitsubishi Shogun parked behind the house. Clouds had covered the sun. The air was swiftly cooling and I could smell rotting autumn vegetation and the dank of the river as I walked towards the house. The spare key was in the sludge and the wood lice crawling beneath the stone pot of now woody geraniums, and when I turned the key in the door to cross the quarry-tiled porch overlooked by silent toy soldiers standing in stone niches lining the steep stairs and enter my big living-room I knew at once that I was alone in an empty house.

  And yet …

  I tossed the car keys onto the chesterfield, felt sudden nervous tension tighten my shoulders as I let my eyes stray over white walls and bookshelves, stone inglenook fireplace and red-shaded wall lights, the thin Laura Ashley cotton curtains that allowed light from the small window to spill onto a floor where bright Indian rugs were scattered over huge slate slabs. Shiny slabs now marked, as clearly as black fingerprints mark a white linen tablecloth, by the sole of a cleated trainer too large for Sian’s feet.

  Just the one footprint. How could that be? Even a man hopping on one leg leaves a trail. But this single print was almost hidden by the coffee table and I visualized someone with a yellow duster tied round the head of a broom, diligently wiping prints from the tiles, but in haste or because of bad light missing just this one. Sian … removing the evidence?

  What alerts you when you enter your home and realize that your privacy has been violated? With me it’s always an unfamiliar smell in a room that’s as comfortable and familiar as an old slipper, a rogue scent that alerts the senses like milk bottles bearing the sudden stink of petrol during a peaceful demonstration. Doesn’t matter how faint it is. And an unfamilar smell had been there when I walked into the living-room. It had stopped me dead. Raised hackles. Made me step to one side out of the exposed doorway and sent my eyes flicking left and right while my head stayed unnaturally still as if any unnecessary or sudden movement would invite … what? Attack?

  I grinned mirthlessly into the heavy silence, sucked in a slow deep breath that to my straining ears sounded as haunting as winter winds hissing across naked moorland, and metaphorically got a grip of my knickers.

  It took me a couple of minutes to search the rest of the house. I scooted up stairs and along passageways, sniffing like a bird dog, and decided from lingering scents and small signs of disarray that a stranger had slept in the spare room, Sian in the main bedroom. That last bit was debatable; Sian had been sleeping in my bed ever since a warm homecoming during the Danny Maguire case, that investigation had ended two weeks ago and so her presence there was well established.

  Nevertheless, as I finished the search and sat down behind my desk in the office I admitted that no signs of forced entry led to the inevitable conclusion that Sian had let him in. Unless, of course, he knew about the spare key hidden in the shadows. And anyway, why was I assuming it was a him, a he? Why not a woman with big feet who’d got to know Sian on one of her adventure training courses and been invited back for drinkies?

  I swivelled, sniffed, shook my head. No. The scent I could still detect was male perfume. A cheapy: Lynx, Gillette Arctic Ice, something along those lines, something sprayed on liberally enough to soak into the walls.

  Again I grinned, and now the tension was seeping out of my muscles as the bright side of what I’d discovered began to warm the cockles. The stranger was male, but by God he hadn’t shared Soldier Blue’s bed! And while yesterday I’d been scared witless by the sight of Sian’s name staring at me from the LCD of a silent mobile phone, I now knew that she had walked into this house, and walked out again, at some time in the past twenty-four hours.

  For all I knew she might be shopping in Bangor or Beaumaris, yet even as the thought crossed my mind it was dismissed. A woman expecting to come back leaves traces: clothes on the bed, toiletries in the bathroom … soft indoor shoes or slippers in the porch ready for her return.

  There was nothing.

  And I caught myself wondering, as I locked up and walked down the yard to my car, if the peculiar goings on that both Sian and I seemed to be experiencing could be linked not only to each other but to the two murders that themselves might be connected.

  About the latter, I was hoping soon to find out much more.

  ‘Have you ever heard of the Lysander?’

  I looked into Alun Morgan’s sharp grey eyes and saw amusement lurking as he waited for me to answer the question he had lobbed in my direction like a bowler delivering a googly.

  ‘Wasn’t he a Greek general who lead the Spartan armies in the Peloponnesian War?’

  ‘He may well have done that, and won,’ Morgan said, skilfully fielding my return, ‘but the Lysander I’m thinking of is a plywood boat.’

  ‘Right. And this has relevance?’

  ‘Connectivity.’

  ‘To?’

  ‘Murder.’

  I’d arrived at the DI’s house with clouds gathering and the wind gusting hard enough to flap his trousers as he emerged from the front door on his way to a late lunch in Bethesda. I drove him there in the Quattro and the conversation was taking place in the timber and stained-glass lounge of his local pub. Trees tossed madly on the other side of the car park. Raindrops as hard as airgun pellets rattled the windows.

  ‘Murder as in the
death of Rose Lane?’ I said, sipping my half-pint of shandy.

  ‘And more,’ Morgan said. ‘The Lysander links Rose Lane to a bearded man who lives in a tatty caravan off the beach at Red Wharf Bay. There’s another link you’ll be interested in – but that can wait.’

  ‘I could be ahead of you – but go on, tell your tale.’

  ‘The Lysander,’ Alun Morgan said, ‘was a trailer-sailer designed in 1963 by Percy Blandford. You could build it in a large domestic garage using marine ply. The original was gunter rigged for sailing on rivers and estuary waters, but I’ve seen cutter and gaff rigged variations. Davey Jones specializes in Bermudan rigged versions strong enough to cross the Irish sea in bad weather.’

  ‘Davey Jones?’

  ‘Middle-aged, long hair going grey and a liking for fancy shirts and jeans and leather sandals worn barefoot summer and winter. A craftsman producing exceptional work with the minimum of tools. Lives on the aforementioned Red Wharf Bay.’

  ‘And where does Rose Lane come in?’

  ‘The flat where she was murdered was her holiday home. Just hers; her husband is Barry Lane. He’s an ex–boxer, fighting name Rocky Lane, but long retired and sliding in and out of dementia. Walks the dog, stares at the tele. Having a flat overlooking Conwy harbour got Rose interested in sailing, that led her to old Davey’s boat-shed on Anglesey, and she ended up paying him for her very own seventeen-foot Lysander that he put together with hammer and nails in less than a month.’

  He paused, looking at me expectantly across the rim of his glass.

  ‘I’ve heard from reliable sources,’ he said softly, ‘that Rose was never one for sailing single handed.’

  ‘Ah.’ I nodded, thinking about the second link he knew would interest me and going over a recent conversation with a murdered woman’s sister-in-law. What was it Caroline Spackman had said? – Lorraine’s friend was planning a trip to Wales, and Lorraine would have followed her if she had lived. For friend, I thought, I need look no further than close neighbour Rose Lane. And my only objection to that obvious connection was that, if the trip had been planned in advance – before Lorraine died – it could not have been motivated by criminal activity Rose had witnessed. She lived behind Lorraine Creeney’s house, but had almost certainly seen nothing. I was at once elated and disappointed.