The Body in the Boot: The first 'Mac' Maguire mystery

by Patrick C Walsh

  ‘Twenty thousand!’ Mac exclaimed in disbelief.

  ‘Oh yes and not that long ago he got flown out to Los Angeles to do her hair for the Oscars. Oh who was it now? Gerald, darling,’ he shouted over his shoulder.

  A tall man in his thirties came out and presented a paper bag to Mac on a little silver platter.

  ‘You called, dearest?’ he said, draping his arm proprietorially over the young man’s shoulder.

  ‘Who was that actress? The one Giorgio went all the way to LA to do her hair for the Oscars?’

  Gerald gave a name that even Mac knew.

  ‘After that they all want him to do their hair. He is really good though and so good looking with it. I love you, sugar,’ Gerald said turning to the young man, ‘but he is fantastic eye candy.’

  They both nodded dreamily in unison.

  He went back to his car and ate his sandwich. It cost twice as much as a dinner at The Magnets but he had to admit it was good. He made sure he’d gotten a receipt though. Twenty thousand for a haircut, he thought in wonder. He felt there was something deeply wrong about that. He knew some people had shed loads of money but still, twenty thousand for something that would need doing again a few weeks later. Some coppers starting off didn’t get much more than that in a year.

  Giorgio was still hard at work even after the salon closed at six. He and the young woman who had arrived first, obviously his assistant, were looking at what Mac thought might be an appointment book and some other papers. She left around six thirty and was met at the door by another woman who hugged her and gave her a lover’s kiss full on the lips. They walked off down the street hand in hand. Definitely not the love interest then, Mac thought.

  Giorgio locked up a few minutes later and Mac followed him all the way back to the electric gates of the de Vesey house.

  Chapter Twenty

  Friday 16th January

  Wednesday and Thursday had been exactly the same routine. Mac wasn’t bored though. It was work and he always found observation interesting. He thought of it as being a sort of microscope and looking at the minutiae of someone’s daily life can tell you a lot. He found that he was warming to Giorgio who was a real worker and seemed to be well liked by his team.

  His new duties also gave him some time to dispassionately turn over the facts of the unsolved case in his head but, for all the effort he put in, it got him exactly nowhere.

  Mac waited expectantly for the afternoon to come. If Laura was right he might find out a bit more about the mysterious Giorgio. Sure enough just before one o’clock he said goodbye to his team and got into the Audi. Mac followed him through the busy London streets feeling the excitement mount. Instead of carrying straight on, the Audi turned right. He definitely wasn’t heading towards home.

  He found himself on the A10 heading north and he was surprised when Giorgio turned left and headed towards Haringey. What would a hairdresser to the stars want in this part of town? Giorgio quickly turned left and right down residential side streets until Mac wasn’t quite sure where he was. He even began to wonder if Giorgio had spotted his Nissan and was trying to lose him. Eventually the Audi pulled up outside a nondescript 1960s council house. Mac went straight past but Giorgio never even gave him a glance. He turned the car around at the top of the road and parked where he could get a good view of the house.

  The area had definitely seen better days. The street was strewn with litter, shop windows were boarded up and he was pretty sure the twelve year old hanging about on the corner wasn’t selling newspapers.

  A few minutes later someone in the house pulled back the curtains and Mac got out of the car for a closer look. He could see inside the front room of the house. An old lady was sitting in a chair with a towel around her shoulders. She smiled broadly as Giorgio started to cut her hair. Then she turned her head and Mac got a good view of her profile.

  ‘Christ almighty!’ he said out loud.

  He knew who she was and he knew who Giorgio was. He looked at the house number, 192. It was the same house and suddenly it was sixteen years ago. The memories flooded back as if it were only yesterday.

  He knew Giorgio had looked familiar the minute he’d seen his photo. Of course he’d been just plain Georgy White back then. He rolled his eyes upwards in disbelief. Giorgio Lo Bianco is, of course, George White in Italian but he’d never twigged. Of course it had been a long time ago and Georgy had changed a hell of a lot but it had been such a bad business, a case he’d never forgotten.

  Mac stood there frozen, uncertain as to what to do next. His heart was telling him to knock on the door but eventually his head won the day and Mac reluctantly went back to his car and drove away from Haringey and the case. At the bottom of the road a burnt out van stood half on the pavement, half on the road. He slowed down as he passed the van knowing it should mean something to him but he couldn’t think what. His brain was in a whirl.

  He sighed, another case that hadn’t exactly been a success. Of course he’d have to tell Laura he couldn’t carry on following Giorgio but the real problem was that he couldn’t tell her why. Again he wondered if he should have knocked on the door and again he decided he’d made the right decision. He reminded himself that it wasn’t up to him.

  He gave his name at the electronic gates and he could hear a tremor of fear in Laura’s voice as she replied. The gates glided open and Mac started down the long drive. The drive went straight on for quite a while and then turned to the left. Only then did he get a view of the De Vesey house. More of a castle than a house, he thought, must be forty, fifty rooms at least.

  Laura was waiting at the front door, arms crossed. He could sense the anxiety from her body language even from a distance away. She led him into a room bigger than the floor space of his entire house and gestured for him to sit on a delicate looking chair. He hoped it was stronger than it looked.

  She sat opposite. All the blood seemed to have drained from her face.

  ‘What have you found out?’ she eventually asked in a tremulous voice.

  He told her about the hairdresser’s and how all he’d seen Giorgio do was work. He had to remind himself not to call him Georgy.

  Laura looked puzzled.

  ‘There’s more to this, I know it. So where is he now? Why aren’t you following him?’

  ‘I’m afraid I won’t be able to take the case any further’.

  ‘Any further? What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean I can’t continue with the case, I can’t follow Giorgio anymore.’

  ‘Why?’

  She looked stunned as she said this.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,’ he replied, feeling both deeply embarrassed and deeply sorry for Laura.

  ‘You can’t tell me?’ Laura said loudly, standing up. ‘Christ, what have I done to deserve this? I can’t even hold on to a bloody private detective.’

  She was close to tears and inadvertently gave Mac a clue as to why she might be so desperate. She held her hands over her lower stomach as if protecting something. Mac was sure she was pregnant. This didn’t make Mac feel any better but again he had to remind himself that it was not up to him.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Laura,’ was all he could say.

  ‘Yes they’re all sorry, they’re all so fucking sorry. Daddy’s sorry he missed the school play, sorry you’re such a wonderful person but I’ve met someone else, sorry darling but it was always about the money. It’s always sorry but it means nothing does it?’

  Mac could see she was close to hysteria. All he could think to do was to take her in his arms where she went completely to pieces. After the tears had stopped she pulled away and apologised.

  ‘I’m…sorry,’ she said with a slightly ashamed smile.

  ‘Don’t be. Have you thought it might not be as bad as you’ve been thinking?’

  ‘You mean there might be hope?’

  He said a little prayer that he was doing the right thing.

  ‘Yes, there might be. I know I’ve only bee
n on the case for a few days but I’ve seen nothing that suggests Giorgio has a lover, all I’ve seen him doing is work very hard.’

  ‘There might be hope?’ she repeated again to herself, as though fearing to believe it.

  ‘Will you take my advice? Talk to Giorgio tonight and tell him everything. Tell him how miserable you feel and why. Will you promise me?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I will, Mr. Maguire. I’ve wanted to for ages but I’d always feared…I was so sure…but now you say there might be hope.’

  Mac left hoping to God that he had done the right thing. He went back to the office and let the silence wash over him.

  Two cases so far, both ending very unsatisfactorily. Mac wondered if being a detective was really the answer. He pulled Tim’s present from the drawer and sat looking at the unopened bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey.

  He wondered how Georgy might react when Laura spoke to him. He hoped to God he was right in giving Laura hope but he was beginning to doubt his own judgment. He supposed he should have asked her not to mention his name but somehow he couldn’t. The genie was out of the bottle now and he had no idea how the cards would fall.

  He started to open the bottle. He wasn’t normally a whisky drinker, although he liked a shot occasionally, but he was now seriously considering downing the lot. He sighed, tightened the cap and put it back in the drawer. He didn’t even have the energy to get drunk.

  The tiredness was taking over again, weighing him down. The black fatigue which had kept him bedbound for days at a time was washing over him and he almost felt grateful. Right now all he wanted to do was escape into a dark place where there were no dead girls, no tearful women and no memories. He was just about to get up and leave the office for his bed when the image of the burnt out van flashed into his head. His brain was trying to tell him something but what?

  He relaxed and tried not to think at all. Again he saw the burnt out van but this time it wasn’t a van, it was a BMW saloon. He had it! His tiredness suddenly evaporated.

  Excitedly he rang Dan.

  ‘Dan mind if I borrow Tommy and Martin for an hour or two?’

  ‘Have you come up with something?’ Dan asked excitedly.

  ‘It’s just an idea, I’m not even sure it will get us anywhere, but I’d like to give it a go.’

  ‘Okay with me, come now if you want. Oh, by the way forensics have confirmed that Matyas, or Oleksandr Shevchenko as I should call him now, was definitely our man. His DNA and shoe prints match for the professor’s murder, also his car was definitely the one that was used to run over and kill Stelios Andreou. Interestingly we’ve also heard from Dr. Tereshkova and she’s confirmed that he had the same drug in his system as Hetty Lewinton just as you suspected.’

  This news made Mac even more sure that Matyas had an accomplice.

  Less than an hour later he found himself once again in the incident room with Tommy and Martin sitting like schoolboys paying keen attention to what he was saying.

  ‘It was when I saw a burnt out van that I got the idea. Our man stole cars to ferry girls back to Luton and pick up new girls but what happened to the cars afterwards? We know he was careful, there were no prints or anything else in the car Hetty Lewinton was found in, but the girls might very well have left some forensic evidence behind inside the car or in the boot. If he was really careful he’d have set them on fire when he was finished with them, wouldn’t he?’

  Tommy and Martin looked at each other and then nodded.

  ‘If we assume he did indeed burn out the cars then they must be on our records somewhere but unfortunately buried in the statistics along with a mass of other car crimes.’

  ‘So what can we do?’ Tommy asked.

  ‘We’ve got dates and we know the make of car he prefers. It’s a long shot but if we can identify the locations of the cars he stole it might tell us something about where the girls were kept after they were abducted.’

  ‘We could probably get a lot of information about burnt out BMWs from the data bases,’ Martin said.

  ‘Okay but we’d then need to contact the local stations to narrow it down a bit by asking if any were found in unusual locations.’

  ‘Why unusual locations?’ Tommy asked.

  ‘He probably wouldn’t know where joy riders usually ditch their cars,’ Mac answered, ‘plus we also need to rule out any insurance frauds. The local police might be able to identify some of those for us.’

  ‘Okay,’ Tommy said. ‘Where do we start?’

  ‘I think we should start with Luton and then fan out towards the east,’ Martin suggested. ‘It was on the east side of Luton that the collision happened and where we found Hetty Lewinton in the car boot.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Mac said rubbing his hands together.

  Martin printed out reams of phone numbers and they started phoning. By five thirty they’d only covered Bedfordshire and they’d gotten no good candidates. Mac told them they might as well call it a day.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ Tommy said on his way out.

  Martin said the same before he disappeared.

  ‘But its Saturday tomorrow,’ Mac said to the empty room.

  He couldn’t stop himself smiling.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Saturday January 17th

  Mac was back in the station well before eight. He couldn’t wait to get on with it. Martin arrived just after eight thirty and Tommy a few minutes later. After a sandwich and coffee they got to work. It was nine thirty before they got their first good candidate. By eleven thirty they’d gotten good candidates for all five dates. Martin marked the locations on a map and then printed off a large version. Mac pinned it to a board and they all looked hard at it.

  In all they’d gotten nine candidates that corresponded with the dates and type of car so four had to be discounted. Mac couldn’t see any pattern at first.

  ‘It’s strange, I had it in my head that he was working with a pharmaceutical company and that’s why he lived in Stevenage but none of these are even in Hertfordshire.’

  ‘Hundreds of pharmaceutical and life science companies in Cambridge though,’ Tommy said.

  Mac suddenly thought of something.

  ‘Good boy!’ he exclaimed. ‘Can you print off this same map but with the train stations on it?’

  ‘No problem,’ Martin replied.

  He pinned the new map to the board.

  ‘See, these five here.’

  Mac pointed them out.

  ‘Yes they’re all quite close to train stations, aren’t they?’ Tommy commented.

  ‘Martin, can you print off the locations of where the cars were stolen from?’

  They checked and those too were close to train stations.

  ‘So what does it mean?’ Tommy asked.

  ‘Unfortunately in one way it doesn’t bolster our case for more than one man being involved. It looks like our man ditched the cars near train stations so he could get back home again. All of the locations are near stations on the main line to Stevenage.’

  ‘Why not use a bus?’ Martin asked.

  ‘Buses have drivers,’ Mac replied. ‘You might be remembered but train stations are a lot more anonymous, especially if you don’t have to buy a ticket.’

  ‘I’ll check for any season tickets in the name of Mark Brody then,’ Martin said with a grin.

  ‘Good idea.’

  Mac looked hard at the map again.

  ‘So if we get rid of these four, which aren’t near a station then…’ Mac crossed them off with a pen and, as he did, the pattern jumped out at him.

  ‘It’s Cambridge, look.’

  All five locations were within twenty miles of Cambridge and they formed a sort of rough circle around the city.

  ‘So it looks like this pharmaceutical company might be in Cambridge then,’ Tommy said.

  ‘Yes, I think our man thought he was being clever by varying the location of where he disposed the cars but all he’s done is draw a big bulls e
ye on the map for us. As you said there are hundreds of companies in that area but it still narrows it down a bit for us and that’s always helpful.’

  Tommy looked at the clock and cursed under his breath. He took his phone out and turned it on.

  ‘Expecting a call?’ Mac asked.

  For some reason Tommy gave Mac an evasive look.

  ‘No, why should I be expecting a call? Just thought I’d turn it on that’s all.’

  Tommy was hiding something but Mac didn’t have a chance to find out what.

  It was Mac’s phone that went off first. It was a text message and all it said was –

  ‘See JD ASAP Mr. C’

  ‘Come on Tommy we’ve got to go and see someone and I hope to God it isn’t what I’m thinking it is.’

  Martin gave him the address from the case file. On their way there Tommy asked more than once where they were going and why but Mac was deep in thought and didn’t answer.

  Tommy pulled up behind the Porsche four by four.

  ‘You have to tell me something Mac,’ he implored.

  ‘Sorry I was thinking. Okay this guy is a pimp, bottom of the food chain, but I’ve been getting some information from the very top of the food chain.’

  Mac pictured Mr. C as a Great White Shark and it seemed fitting somehow.

  ‘This is where I got all the information on the missing girls in the first place. The text message just told me to see this guy but it didn’t say why.’

  As they walked to the front door Tommy persisted, ‘What do you fear it might be then?’

  Mac didn’t answer, he rapped loudly on the door. A few seconds later the door opened a couple of inches and Mac could see the pale, fearful face of Jay Dee peeking out. He seemed relieved that it was only the police at the door. They followed him into the living room where Mac could see that a few more pizza boxes and beer cans had been added to the pile.