It was only when she reached the main street and paused to look up and down its length that it came to her. Colin Maynard. The man from the Waldorf.
The implications confused her. Why should he be in Scotland? Interest in Alusha Mackenzie’s case? Interest in Catch? If so, he must have done some serious homework to find out when and where the inquiry was being held.
The more she thought about it the more unlikely it seemed. She was seeing demons, she was having what Alan would call one of her windy phases.
The rain, which was gentle but relentless, dribbled down her face and flattened her hair coldly against her head. A few intrepid people were braving the shops, their heads hidden beneath lowered umbrellas. Two men appeared from a doorway and strode towards her. Both were short with fat bull-like necks, and by the time they had darted into the public bar of the nearby pub, their hair, too, had acquired a wet slicked-back look.
She turned back.
It was Campbell who called with the news on Monday.
Finding undetermined. The matter of Alusha Mackenzie’s death was to be left open.
Daisy felt relief, as if Nick had been on trial and found innocent.
But of course it hadn’t been Nick who had been on trial, it had been Alusha Mackenzie, the charge, mental instability.
Chapter 19
DORKING, BACKBONE OF England, boasted several boutiques, small high-class establishments with two to three racks of tailored suits, floral dresses and glittery evening clothes.
Daisy drew a blank at the first two, but in the third the owner showed some interest at the mention of a pilot brother. She did not have one herself, but she had heard that Jane Ackroyd did, and directed Daisy to a boutique called The Dresser.
The shop was a few yards up an alley off the main street, the sort of place where the rents are only half the price. A door-operated bell sounded as Daisy entered and a well-groomed fortyish woman popped her head round a curtain at the far end of the shop.
‘Are you Jane Ackroyd?’ Daisy asked.
‘Yes.’ She was what some people might call faded, with pale washed-out eyes, soft blurred features, and a pair of deep vertical frown lines over the bridge of her nose.
‘I believe you have a brother Peter Duggan,’ Daisy said, diving in. ‘I wanted to get in touch with him.’
A strange expression, half defensive, half curious, came over Jane Ackroyd’s face. ‘Oh yes? In connection with what?’ she demanded.
So Duggan was her brother. Concealing a flutter of triumph, Daisy began the marginally adjusted story she’d prepared on the way down. ‘I’m a solicitor making enquiries into the affairs of a company called Acorn Flying Systems,’ she explained, ‘and in particular one of its directors, a man named Keen. I believe your brother worked for the company last year.’
Jane Ackroyd stared. ‘You’re a solicitor?’ she asked doubtfully.
‘Yes.’ When the disbelief in Jane Ackroyd’s face failed to recede she added: ‘Though I’m what you might call off-duty today.’ She gestured apologetically towards her scuffy clothes. ‘I was on my way to the country. Going fishing.’
‘Fishing?’ She was incredulous.
That was the trouble with lies; they had to be repeated.
‘Fishing,’ she restated.
Jane Ackroyd gave the sort of nod she probably used to humour difficult customers. ‘Who are you acting for, Miss – er?’
‘Field. Daisy Field. I’m sorry, I’m not at liberty to reveal the name of my client. I can only say that my client has a direct interest in the matter.’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It’s money then, is it?’
Daisy shrugged regretfully as if ethics prevented her commenting further, but allowed a small collusive smile to slip onto her face which Jane Ackroyd could take any way she wanted.
She got the message all right. ‘Money,’ she affirmed knowingly. ‘It had to be. They still owe Peter several weeks’ salary. It’s outrageous when you consider he was doing all the work and taking all the risks. Quite outrageous.’ She eyed Daisy one more time, as if making up her mind about her. ‘Wait here while I phone, will you?’
‘Is he a long way away?’ Daisy asked her retreating back.
‘Oh no,’ Jane Ackroyd called over her shoulder, and Daisy tried not to get too excited at this second unaccountable stroke of luck.
‘Peter?’ Jane Ackroyd’s voice floated out from behind the curtain before dropping to an inaudible murmur. Daisy wandered closer to the curtain, touching the sleeves of the dresses as she passed. Just as she began to catch the occasional snatch of conversation, the street door opened, the bell sounded with a loud buzz, and a customer came into the shop. Jane Ackroyd peered round the curtain and cut short the conversation with a ‘Must go now.’ She emerged with a smile for the new arrival, then, returning her attention to Daisy, politely but skilfully shepherded her towards the door. ‘My brother’s on his way into town,’ she announced in a low voice. ‘He’ll meet you at The Saddler’s Arms in fifteen minutes.’
It was more than Daisy had dared hope for, and she must have let it show in her face because the defensiveness sprang back into Jane Ackroyd’s eyes. She said sharply: ‘This business – it’s not going to involve Peter in any unpleasantness, is it? I mean, no court cases or anything like that?’
This was a promise that Daisy knew she couldn’t make. ‘A court case?’ she murmured. ‘There’s no suggestion of that at the moment.’
‘You see …’ Jane Ackroyd dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Peter’s been through a bit of a rough patch recently. He … Well, he’s not too …’ Then with an abrupt shake of her head, she abandoned her speech and opened the door.
The lounge bar of The Saddler’s Arms was empty except for an ancient lady sipping a pint of stout which had left a broad foam moustache on her upper lip, and a couple of jovial salesmen arguing amicably over a sheaf of papers. Daisy bought a Coke and sat at a table opposite the door.
After a few minutes Duggan came in. She knew it was Duggan even before he caught her eye and raised his eyebrows questioningly; he looked like something out of a boys’ comic, a parody of a flying man with his spotted cravat, his cavalry twills and blazer, and his longish black hair neatly parted and flattened against his head. The only thing lacking was a moustache.
‘Miss Field?’
‘Mr Duggan.’
He sat down, rubbing his hands energetically, and glanced in the direction of the bar. ‘A drink?’
‘No thanks.’
‘God, not an abstainer, I hope,’ he said with forced heartiness. ‘Article in the paper today says all this health talk is claptrap. A little booze does wonders for the arteries.’
Close up, Duggan didn’t look quite so dapper. His blazer had seen better days, his shirt collar was frayed, while his hair, which was heavy with grease or dirt or both, had discharged a sprinkling of dandruff over his shoulders. His face, which must have been quite good-looking once, appeared worn: his eyes were red-rimmed with pronounced pouches underneath, his skin was coarse and blotchy, and his teeth were heavily stained. It was no surprise when he lit a cigarette and drew on it with a deep gasp.
‘Think I might have a little something,’ he said, jerking his head towards the bar and ambling over. The barman seemed to know him well enough because he greeted him by name and, putting a glass unhesitatingly under the gin measure, gave him a double. Duggan returned to the table, cigarette jammed between his lips, eyes half-closed against the smoke. Sitting down, he dashed some tonic into his gin and took a quick swig. ‘My sister said you were trying to find Keen.’ He had a smoker’s voice, deep and throaty.
Daisy ran through her prepared story, though she took care to shift the emphasis away from Keen to the broader canvas of Acorn Flying Systems.
‘It was a limited company, Acorn, you know,’ Duggan said. ‘Can’t get anything out of a limited company if it’s got no assets. I know. I tried. Not a penny left in the kitty. Stripped bare. It was that bastard Keen, of
course. Cunning little shyster. Expensive cars, Italian clothes, that sort of thing. Bled the company dry. Left everyone else to carry the can. Should have known. Nasty common little upstart.’ He took another gulp and sucked it through his teeth with a hissing sound. When he wasn’t talking or drinking he was drawing on his cigarette, dragging the smoke deep into his lungs.
‘How did you come to work for him?’ Daisy asked.
‘Had a job out in Oman which folded unexpectedly. Needed a job for the summer. Hadn’t heard about Keen’s reputation when I took it on, of course.’
‘Had you done crop-spraying before?’
Duggan’s lazy gaze fixed on her with new interest and he narrowed his eyes as if he’d got smoke in them. ‘Yup. A bit.’
‘It’s quite tricky, isn’t it? I mean, don’t pilots kill themselves regularly?’
He liked that idea. His eyes came alive. ‘It happens,’ he said, tossing off the remark with a well-practised blend of nonchalance and bravado. ‘But then just as many pilots get killed in road accidents, probably more.’ The devil-may-care persona was obviously one he enjoyed and had doubtless used to some effect over the years.
He drained his glass and, holding it at chest height, twiddled the stem slowly between thumb and forefinger. Daisy guessed she was meant to notice how empty it was. ‘Can I buy you another?’ she offered.
He attacked the next drink only marginally less slowly than the first, and she saw that his hand trembled slightly as he reached for the ashtray. It occurred to Daisy that this was not Duggan’s first drink of the day. The bad patch Jane Ackroyd had alluded to began to take on a new dimension.
‘You don’t know where Keen disappeared to?’ she asked.
He gave a dry laugh which turned into a phlegmy cough that rattled deep in his chest. ‘Christ, no,’ he said, recovering himself. ‘Don’t care either. It’s no good knowing where the bastard is if I can’t get any money out of him, is it? I just hope he’s got his come-uppance. Wrapped his BMW round a lamppost or something.’
‘He was difficult to work for, was he?’
‘Christ – was he. Always buggering things up. Phoning new instructions through, trying to make me fly over my hours, wanting everything done pronto. It wasn’t as if he provided any bloody backup. Just a mechanic, a field operator and an office girl who didn’t know her arse from her elbow.’ He stabbed his cigarette ineffectually into the ashtray so that it lay there smouldering. ‘I must have been out of my tiny,’ he snorted. ‘Sweating my guts out to finance his flash lifestyle.’
‘How long were you with the company in fact?’
‘Oh – May till September. Something like that.’
‘And the spraying – what sort of jobs were they exactly?’
‘Forest stuff. Estates, that sort of thing. Everyone was in a tizz about this beetle moth or whatever it was. They all wanted everything done yesterday.’
‘Willis Bain was one of your clients, I believe?’
He took a long slow drink, eyeing her over the rim of his glass, and she sensed a sudden caution in him. ‘Yup,’ he answered finally. ‘Did quite a bit for them. But, um …’ He hesitated, pulling out another cigarette and lighting it with an old-fashioned steel Zippo. ‘Thought you were just interested in Keen? Tracing him and so on.’
‘Wish it were that simple,’ Daisy said. ‘But I need a whole lot of background information. Evidence, facts.’
‘You’re actually trying to nail him, are you?’ he said in sudden admiration. ‘What for?’
She gave a shrug. ‘Oh, financial irregularities. That sort of thing.’
‘Bloody good. Bloody fantastic. Hope you get him!’ He drained his glass and grinned congenially, displaying teeth which were so discoloured and unattractive that Daisy couldn’t help staring at them.
‘Only thing I don’t understand is what your client hopes to gain.’ He said it so casually that it was a moment before Daisy realized the difficulties inherent in the question.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Well, it can’t be money.’
‘No.’ Daisy was thinking hard.
‘Jail then?’
Daisy spread her hands to show that this might not be so far from the truth.
‘My God!’ Duggan exclaimed with relish. ‘Keen must have upset your client very severely if they want to pin something that serious on him.’
‘You could say that.’
‘So it might be jail?’
‘It might be.’
Duggan gave a long lazy wink that was probably intended to look conspiratorial but which merely appeared lecherous. ‘Well, you can count on me.’
Daisy thought: Now I wonder if that’s true? For all his affability Duggan didn’t seem the steadfast type. Tricky and difficult, she guessed; out for number one.
She offered him another drink. He accepted readily, though not before going through the heavy drinker’s time-honoured ritual of insisting that he couldn’t possibly drink alone. She ordered a low-alcohol lager and a packet of crisps to soak it up with.
‘You don’t look like a lawyer,’ he said.
‘What does a lawyer look like?’
‘Older and uglier.’ He winked again, and this time the suggestiveness was deliberate though self-mocking.
She said: ‘Well, you know how it is, one has to overcome these handicaps.’
He laughed appreciatively, then, just as she was thinking the interview was beginning to go smoothly, he added casually: ‘You didn’t say what firm you worked for.’
‘Didn’t I?’ Was he trying to catch her out? Or was he just curious? She laughed it off. ‘I’ll give you my card.’ She went through a pantomime of rooting through her bag. ‘Well, I would give you a card, but I seem to have run out.’
He was waiting.
Aware that she was being forced into open lie, she heard herself give him the name of her old firm, the solicitors where she’d worked before joining Catch. ‘Here – I’ll give you the phone number.’ She wrote down Catch’s unlisted number on a scrap of paper. This lie she liked far less than the fishing story she’d told Jane Ackroyd, if only because there was a far greater chance of being found out. Duggan only had to look up her old firm and call their real number to discover she wasn’t there any more. Or to call the Catch number before Daisy had a chance to brief Jenny.
But would he bother? It was all too easy to imagine that his mind was as languid as his body. Yet those sharp little questions hadn’t come out of thin air.
She asked him about his dealings with Keen, routine stuff about paperwork, how the wages were paid, what money went through the Portakabin office.
‘Never saw the cash,’ Duggan declared, waving an expansive hand. ‘In fact he kept us so tight that we had trouble getting enough petty cash for lav rolls. Not that we used the bloody place at all if we could possibly avoid it.’
Daisy smiled. ‘You mean the hut?’ The moment she’d said it, she could have kicked herself.
Duggan’s glass paused half way to his mouth. ‘You’ve been to the airfield then?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Why? What for? Nothing to see.’
‘I was just passing. On business.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded sagely, but she sensed him carefully weighing the information.
‘Did you ever sign for things?’ she asked. ‘You know, fuel deliveries, that kind of thing?’
He shook his head. ‘Nah. Though I bloody well checked the stuff once it arrived. Didn’t trust Keen an inch.’
‘In what way?’
‘I wouldn’t have put it past him to try and give me low-grade fuel.’
‘Good God, really? Wouldn’t that have been dangerous?’
‘Probably.’ Duggan chuckled to himself. He was back in the role of fearless daredevil pilot battling against unfavourable odds. All this boyish bravado, not to mention the heavy drinking, made Daisy wonder how Duggan was ever allowed in charge of an aircraft.
Keeping her tone light, she nudged th
e conversation forward. ‘What about the chemicals – the stuff you used to spray the trees with – did you check that out too?’
‘No. Didn’t have to. Keen didn’t have anything to do with the gunk, thank God. Davie, the mechanic, he was in charge of measuring and mixing and all that. The gunk was delivered direct from the customer most of the time anyway. They bought it direct from the manufacturers or whatever.’
‘Of course.’ Daisy nodded vigorously as if he had just reminded her of something she knew perfectly well.
‘That way there was no chance of Keen short-changing them,’ Duggan explained in case she’d missed the point.
‘Quite. And the stuff you were using – er, remind me …?’
He shrugged. ‘We used to call it “the usual”. I’d say, is it the usual? And Davie’d say, it’s the usual. And that would be that. But the name – it was feni – fenitri … Christ, never could say the bloody word.’
‘Fenitrothion?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Was that the only stuff?’
He brushed at a fall of ash on his lapel and managed to smear it deep into the fabric. ‘Mmm – sorry?’
‘What other chemicals did you use?’
‘Other chemicals? No, that was it. Feni-whatsit.’
‘But I thought … Hang on.’ Daisy made a show of getting out her notebook and flicking through it. ‘Something else was used for a couple of jobs near Loch Fyne, wasn’t it?’ She looked up expectantly.
He wasn’t crazy about the question. He took a long sip at his gin, frowning at her over the glass. It was time for another refill, she noticed. She caught the barman’s eye and pointed in the direction of Duggan’s glass.
‘Something else?’ Duggan echoed coolly. ‘I don’t see what the hell that has to do with anything.’ His voice had an edge to it, a note of truculence. ‘I mean, how can your client be interested in the gunk we used on a particular job?’
‘It’s a matter of finding out if Keen did what he was contracted to do.’
‘But like I said, it was a limited company. It doesn’t matter if he delivered the goods, if he did what the client wanted – it’s all bloody water under the bridge, isn’t it? The only thing you can possibly get him for is fraud, and I don’t see that what we sprayed on the treetops of Loch Fyne has got a blind thing to do with how Keen managed or mismanaged the bloody finances.’
Requiem Page 36