‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, who might he have paid to do the job? Who do we know who is paid to hurt people?’ Joanna put a finger to the corner of her mouth, tilted her head, and gazed into the mid-distance.
‘I’ve got another idea.’
‘I really hope so.’
‘We may not know who killed Daisy, but we know what killed Lafayette.’
‘Who’s she?’
‘Molly’s real mum. She OD’d on heroin. Heroin that I’m sure was given to her by her sister’s partner.’
‘This your latest theory? Go on, then,’ Joanna said. ‘Try me.’
‘I thought you had work to do, calls to return, trials to prepare for.’
‘I need a wee-wee,’ said a sleepy voice. Tina uncurled, sat up and yawned.
‘Then let’s go to the little girls’ room.’ Joanna said. ‘We can clean your face while we’re there.’ She went around the desk, took Tina’s hand and helped her hop down from the chair.
‘I’m hungry too.’
Joanna crouched down beside her, hands on my daughter’s shoulders. ‘Good, because so am I. And do you know what? Your dad’s taking us both out for our tea.’
It’s difficult to say which was more difficult, eating with chopsticks or discussing a murder defence over a banquet-for-three with an inquisitive four-year-old listening in on every word of the conversation.
‘Put yourself in Estelle’s shoes. Her supermodel sister, the girl she’s admired all her life, leaves home. Naturally, she’s devastated. Then one day La-La . . . ’
Tina looked up from her lemon chicken. ‘La-La’s the name of Molly’s birdie.’
I patted her head. ‘That’s right. Now eat up.’ I scooped a mixture of sugary lemon sauce and rice with a prawn cracker and pushed it at her. She bit hard, sending cracker shrapnel flying.
Joanna brushed crumbs from her blouse. ‘You were saying?’
‘So, La-La’s back from the smoke, pregnant and nowhere to go. She ends up at the women’s refuge where she makes friends with Daisy the drug addict. Estelle is delighted—’
‘Who’s Estelle again?’
‘La . . . ’ I glanced down at Tina who, chopstick in either hand, was stubbornly trying to transfer a slippery slice of chicken from plate to mouth. ‘You-know-who’s sister, overjoyed by her long-lost sister’s return, and then . . . ’ I drew a finger across my throat.
‘I thought you-know-who OD’d?’ Joanna said.
‘She did. That was me miming it.’
‘No, that was you miming someone getting their throat slit. Stop confusing things. This . . . ’ Joanna pretended to inject herself in the arm and slumped in her chair, tongue sticking out the side of her mouth, ‘is how you mime an overdose.’
‘Whatever.’ I said, ‘She’s no longer with us and so who do you think Estelle blames for that?’
Joanna, now recovered from her death throes, skilfully dipped a button mushroom in a dish of sweet chilli sauce and held it up in front of her face, neatly trapped between chopsticks. ‘It would be a bit hypocritical, wouldn’t it? Estelle killing Daisy for giving smack to her sister when, according to you, it was probably Estelle’s partner who was La-La’s dealer.’
‘This is where it gets more complicated,’ I said.
‘I’m not sure if that’s possible.’ Joanna said, popping the mushroom into her mouth.
Tina was staring quizzically at a prawn. I really didn’t want to have the food-with-faces discussion all over again, and so continued, ‘Estelle’s partner. The dealer. He’s also posted missing. Could be Daisy’s ex-husband has been tying off a few loose ends.’
‘In that case . . . ’ Joanna prodded around in the sauce for more non-meat items, ‘who’s the guy on the kitchen table who Deek dealt with so efficiently in self-defence? A hired killer? If you’re going to incriminate the florist, you’ll have to establish a link.’
Tina had given up on the chopsticks and was cramming the piece of chicken into her mouth using fluorescent-tipped fingers.
Joanna caught her before she could wipe her hands on her T-shirt. ‘It would have to have been a hit man with a clean record, otherwise the cops would have identified him from fingerprints or the DNA database,’ she said, wiping Tina’s hands with a red paper napkin, bits of it peeling off, adhering to my daughter’s sticky little fingers. ‘How likely is that?’
It was a good point, but then, ex-PF that she was, Joanna was trained to poke pins into defence balloons. I was still thinking of a way to patch up the hole in my theory after we’d waved her off and returned to my office to collect the bags of groceries from my earlier shopping trip. We were met by the sound of whistling made all the creepier by my darkened office.
Tina clung to my leg. ‘Dad, what’s that noise?’
It was coming from my room.
‘Wait here,’ I whispered.
‘No,’ Tina whimpered, voice shaking, clinging even more tightly to my leg.
Another whistle. Then another. The sound wasn’t human. I laughed with relief when I remembered. ‘It’s okay, Tina. It’s just my new phone beeping to say it’s fully charged.’
My daughter didn’t seem all that convinced, so switching on every light in the vicinity, I took her by the hand and together we went through to my room where I unplugged the mobile phone from the wall.
Whose phone was this? Molly’s? What was a five-year-old child with learning difficulties doing with a nice new phone? I pressed the contacts icon. There was only one: Z.
Was this Daisy Adams’ phone? Vikki said that she and Daisy had kept in touch via text messages. There was nothing to suggest this phone had ever been used to send a message or even make a call. So, if not Daisy’s phone – whose? The dead guy’s? I should have handed it into the police, and yet I couldn’t help but be intrigued by that one and only contact number. I highlighted the initial and pressed the little green phone. Would anyone answer?
They did. Immediately. A male voice, abrupt and yet I detected a nervous note. ‘Who is this?’
A hundred different possible replies flew through my mind in an instant. ‘Who do you think it is?’
The phone went dead.
Seconds later it buzzed with a text message.
35
The text contained a postcode, a number and a time.
The postcode took me to Hillington, an industrial estate between Glasgow and Paisley. I’d managed to rearrange Tina’s usual Wednesday nursery appointment and booked her into the Little Ships for the noon cruise. My daughter had not been too pleased when she discovered her usual shipmates weren’t aboard, and I’d been forced to shove her off with a strange crew for the afternoon. Still, it meant that by a quarter to one, a good fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, I was already in place and parked alongside scores of other cars on the perimeter of a central loading bay that served a number of commercial outlets and warehouse type businesses.
Across the yards of concrete from me, one unit was closed for business, a ‘To Let’ sign partially obscuring the name of the previous occupiers, a number 14 stencilled in white paint on a huge, steel, roller-shutter door drawn down over the front of the building.
I sat watching the minutes tick by. Lorries and vans came and went, were loaded and unloaded, but still no sign of life from number 14.
The one o’clock news came on the radio. The appointed hour. I waited five more minutes. Still nothing. Keeping it casual, I alighted and wandered over, not sure what to do when I arrived.
‘Follow me.’
I turned to see a man, a good bit younger than me or perhaps just better preserved. His gelled hair was swept back, his shave a near-miss, his eyes concealed behind the tinted lenses of a pair of heavy-framed sunglasses. He was tall, wearing a navy-blue suit offset by a pale-blue shirt and contrasting mustard tie, the ensemble made complete by a three-quarter length, double-breasted camel-hair coat with wide lapels. In the fashion stakes I wasn’t so much handicapped as a cripple. ‘After you.’ He poi
nted a hand-held device at the front of the building and the steel shutter rose to reveal a glass door.
Inside the air was stale. The young man pressed a button on the wall and the steel shutter began to lower again. A press of another button and row upon row of fluorescent strips buzzed and flickered into life. We were in a warehouse fitted out with ranks of metal racks. Forklift trucks and pallet trolleys stood idly around, every piece of equipment, every fixture and fitting, covered by a thin layer of dust.
‘Zed?’ I said, trying to keep the uncertainty out of my voice. Something I was well practised at. In court a lot of the time it wasn’t what you said, it was how you said it.
The tinted lenses turned again in my direction, but the smile had slipped from his face. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked. ‘We’re not supposed to meet.’
I’d spent a lot of time preparing myself for such an encounter, trying to anticipate what questions I might be asked and how best to answer them. ‘Change of plan.’
‘But it’s done?’ he asked.
I shrugged trying to remain nonchalant while thinking of a way to find out what was going on without tipping the young man off as to my ignorance.
‘I suppose you’ve come for the rest of the money?’ he said.
This was one question I hadn’t expected, but the answer didn’t require a great deal of thought.
‘Wait there. I’ll get it for you.’
There was something in the way he said that. I couldn’t place my finger on it exactly. His face was hard to read, eyes obscured by the tinted lenses. Had his tone of voice changed ever so slightly? Was he less confident now, more nervy?
The young man walked across to a long counter beneath which were row upon row of drawers, all of different sizes and ideal for holding various tools or spare parts for machinery. Or for stashing a gun.
I had a flashback to another industrial building, a vehicle inspection pit and a man with a box of matches and a can of petrol.
‘It’s right here,’ he said, bending down to one of the lower drawers.
I could almost smell the fumes. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the man in the camel-hair coat, I didn’t like the deserted unit with its steel shutters and I didn’t like what might be in that drawer. Call it intuition, call it instinct; the primeval sense that connects civilised man to the wild. The feeling that something isn’t quite right. For the deer in the forest, the snap of a twig or the rustle of leaves. For me, the over-friendly attitude of a young man happy to part with cash to a man he had never met before. A man he must have believed was somehow involved in the murders at Sunnybrae Farm.
He pulled open the drawer and reached inside. The deer runs. The deer is in a forest. It’s fast and only has a few trees to dodge. I was inside an industrial unit with a lowered steel shutter. I slammed the sole of my shoe against the drawer, trapping the camel-haired arm at the wrist. The young man screamed in pain. He stopped when I hooked a fist into his face. He fell sideways, head banging against the hard floor, hand still jammed. I wrenched open the drawer. Inside was a slim white envelope.
Instinct? Okay, sometimes it is just the wind rustling the leaves.
‘I’m really, really sorry about that,’ I said.
All the man could do was groan. I unbuttoned his coat, reached inside his suit jacket, searching for a wallet that might contain some form of identification. Fumbling around, my right hand sore and throbbing from the blow, the only items I could find were a set of keys and a folded handkerchief that matched his mustard tie. I changed to my left hand; less painful, but slower. The young man stirred. Still stunned, his body suddenly slammed into some kind of self-protection gear. He thrashed around, moaning and groaning, wriggling on the ground, scuffing the heels of his brown Chelsea boots on the concrete floor as though having a fit.
I waited. Eventually the thrashing around stopped. He came to, scrambled away from me to a workbench and used it to haul himself to his feet.
‘You’ve got your money,’ he whimpered. His glasses had gone flying. It had been one of my better punches.
‘Look, I’m sorry about hitting you,’ I said.
He wasn’t listening. ‘That was the deal.’ His breath came hard and fast. ‘The Adams woman is dead. Nobody knows anything.’ He wiped blood from his lip with the back of his hand. ‘Just take the money and go.’
I didn’t want to go. Not yet. I had too many questions. I took a step forward, hands up and open to show my good intentions.
Once bitten, twice terrified, the young man fumbled in his pocket, pulled out the remote control and dropped it. The plastic device smashed, a battery rolled across the floor towards me.
‘Take it easy. It’s just been a misunderstanding.’ When I’d started the sentence we’d been face-to-face. By the time I’d finished I was talking to the back of a camel-hair coat that was heading at speed in the opposite direction.
‘Come back!’ I called to him. ‘It’s all right! I made a mistake!’
My words were drowned by fists on steel shutters.
Time to leave. The white envelope fitted snuggly into my back pocket. An illuminated green sign in the far away corner indicated a fire escape. Loud clanging reverberated throughout the hollowness of the building as I retreated to the rear of the unit. I pressed down on the metal bar, threw open the fire escape door and ran out to meet fresh air, freedom and the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen in my life.
36
Could you call it abduction? If I’d charged out of that fire escape, bumped into a couple of heavies, been hurled into the back of a car and driven off at great speed to meet their boss – now that would have been an abduction. Allowing myself to be enticed into a red Ferrari, driven by the woman of my dreams, no, that was something entirely different. Different but just as effective.
I was being taken to see Dame Ursula Pentecost. My driver made it sound like the Queen had asked me to nip round for a bite of lunch. I’d never heard of the woman. I let what I thought was a respectable amount of motorway hurtle past before asking, ‘Who is she?’
The gorgeous one’s eyelashes fluttered as though she’d been pinched somewhere sensitive. ‘Dame Ursula? Dame Ursula is the head of the House of Pentecost. It’s one of the world’s most renowned fashion houses.’
Perhaps, but word of it had yet to reach the House of Munro. Still, there I was, trapped in a sports car with one of the Dame’s top models; not to make the most of it would have been a dereliction of duty. Like finding yourself locked in a pub and cracking open a Diet Coke.
‘Then I take it you’re her top talent scout.’ I breathed in, expanded my chest, smoothed down an eyebrow. ‘Well, I’ll say one thing. You obviously recognise quality when you see it.’
The azure eyes under the long, black lashes gave me a sideways look, scanned me up and down, from scuffed shoes to jeans to T-shirt and bomber jacket before returning their exquisite gaze to the Tarmac.
Some would have been put off by that. I took her non-response as a challenge. A Polar explorer equipped with only an anorak, a pair of wellies and a packed lunch, I pressed onwards through a blizzard of indifference.
Now it has to be said, the Robbie Munro book of chat-up lines, though not critically acclaimed, is a fairly substantial and well-thumbed volume built up over a lifetime. Yet, as I chucked about some of my best material like a curtain salesman on a market stall, still the woman on my right managed to remain resolutely unimpressed, her very occasional response polite, but stilted.
After five miles my initial enthusiasm began to flag. By the time we came to the sign for the Erskine Bridge I was more or less ready to jump off. We took the next slip road and rode on in silence, passing Bishopton Parish Church and made a right turn up a mile-long, tree-lined road towards Mar Hall, latterly a hospital for limbless servicemen, now a five-star golf and spa resort, where the Ferrari drew to a halt in front of the great facade of a neo-Gothic building. To our right the emerald fairways of the championship golf course stretched down to the
south bank of the River Clyde. I got out, opened the door for my driver and we walked together up the steps, through the entrance lobby and into the magnificent Grand Hall. Either side of the central avenue, bathed in light from towering windows, guests lounged on plush sofas and elegant armchairs. I should have felt uncomfortable, dressed so scruffily in such high-class surroundings, clumping my way down an endless oriental carpet. But nobody was looking at me. They were looking at the woman floating by my side. How could anyone walk so quickly with such grace and poise? I felt like a bull being led to market by a ballerina.
When we at last reached the top of the hall a member of staff showed us to the lift and from there to the first floor, through a set of double doors and into a room which, in keeping with the rest of the building, was richly furnished with a high, elaborately corniced ceiling and tapestries on the wall. On the far side, standing by an enormous window, taking in the view across the golf course to the Clyde and the Kilpatrick Hills beyond, sat a woman in a wheelchair, her steel-grey hair piled high and spiked with a single pheasant feather. She carried out a slow three-point turn when she heard us enter.
‘Dame Ursula,’ my driver said to me, and was gone.
‘So glad you agreed to come, Mr . . . ?’
‘Munro,’ I said. ‘Robbie Munro.’ If she wanted to see me, how come she didn’t know my name?
The woman manoeuvred herself so that we were face on. ‘Pleased to meet you, and also very pleased that you Scots voted to keep the UK together. Scotland is still my favourite place to be. I find the culture, the people, so inspirational.’
‘I can see that by your dress,’ I said.
She looked down at a frock of palest lilac. Fine iridescent threads ran through the material, catching the light to give the outfit the ghostly appearance of plaid. ‘I’d like to take the credit, but it’s one of Stephen’s designs. She smoothed an arm of ethereal tartan. ‘He was a Scot, of course, and a great golfer. Well, perhaps not that great,’ she laughed. ‘Enthusiastic. And he loved the national drink. Which was unfortunate for me.’ She tapped the armrests of the wheelchair. ‘And even more unfortunate for him.’
Last Will Page 17