Avenida Hope - VERSIÓN BILINGÜE (Español-Inglés) (John Ray Mysteries) (Spanish Edition)

by John Barlow

  Yes, she tells herself as she finds her way out into the cool evening. For John I probably would.

  Twenty-eight

  Another car showroom built of glass and steel. Scholes BMW. But this is the real thing. Huge frontage, cars inside and out, new and used. Must be seventy motors on show, easy. Plumb on the ring road. Prime location.

  The competition, John tells himself with a smile.

  He sees his man through the glass.

  David Adger. Suit drab but smart, white shirt, inoffensive tie. The clincher, though, is his face, something homely about it, pudgy, believable. It’s a whole different shtick from Freddy’s, but the result is the same; put the customer at ease and the motor sells itself.

  “John Ray!”

  Adger strides towards the door and offers a handshake twice as powerful as the wimp-wristed one he uses on prospective customers.

  “I need a favour,” John says. “Why don’t you show me some wheels?”

  Adger is straight out the door, leading John around the side of the building where the secondhand models are lined up. They walk slowly down the row of spruced up beemers, looking at them as they talk.

  “Adrian Fuller. Know the name?”

  “Remind me.”

  “Manager of a hotel up on the York Road. Bought a silver Series 3 off you a while back.”

  “Late thirties? Never had a decent car before?”

  “How d’you know that?”

  They keep walking. “He asked about servicing costs, tyre prices, whether you have to replace airbags. The whole thing. You know the kind, a twenty grand beemer is like their Rolls Royce. They come into some money, and they want their little dream boat. But they want to get it right. Tell ’em a mile off.”

  “Is that what he paid?”

  Adger stops. Rubs his chin.

  “That’s confidential. I can’t just start…”

  “It might help get Freddy off a charge for murder. A murder I’m pretty sure he didn’t do.”

  “I heard about that. What’s the latest?”

  “News is he’s still being held, and he’s heading for a charge. They don’t know everything though.”

  “And you do?” Adger says, stopping to admire a black M5 that’s been waxed to a high shine but is still showing its age.

  They stop and examine the car.

  “Something like that. But I need to know about Fuller’s new motor.”

  Adger shakes his head. “If he finds out where you got the info and makes a complaint, I get the sack. Nah, I’m on a good thing here.”

  “He won’t.” John gets himself a cigarette. “You want one?”

  “I quit.”

  John lights up anyway.

  “Look, they’ll be onto Fuller soon enough. The murdered girl? There was money involved. Lots of it. They’re gonna be looking at Fuller’s bank account, his car, everything. Believe me, there’ll be blue uniforms buzzing around here like flies on shit if I can’t sort all this out.”

  “And how d’you plan to do that?”

  John takes a long drag. “I only want to know how much he spent, when, and how. There’s a couple of grand for your trouble.”

  Adger continues to pay attention to the front of the M5.

  “That’s it?” he says, twisting his neck far enough to see that there’s nobody else out on this side of the building. “What do I tell the coppers if they come around?”

  “Tell ’em the truth. Just don’t mention me.”

  “So it’s just a head start you want?”

  “Precisely.”

  For a second or two he stops pretending to sell cars.

  “Four.”

  “Three’s all I’ve got on me, mate.”

  Adger nods.

  “I don’t get it though. How can it help Freddy? I mean…”

  “It’s complicated. Let’s leave it at that.”

  John extends his hand, palm downwards.

  “Ring me in five,” Adger says, and makes his way back inside to consult the sales log, the three thousand safely in his pocket.

  ***

  A hundred yards down the ring road John pulls in and waits. He watches the traffic go by, the Saab taking a sudden battering of wind from each vehicle as it races past just feet away. And he imagines the red Mondeo driving down here, Fedir peering ahead into the night, looking for a dark corner of the city to abandon the car. Dump it, then away. Ten hours and he’d’ve been out of the country. They’re never gonna see Fedir again.

  “Fuller,” says Adger in a lowish voice. “Motor was going for twenty-two. He haggled pretty good. I took nineteen four fifty. Cash.”

  “You sure it was cash?”

  “Yes. Fortnight ago.”

  “And the money, was it okay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was there any problems with it?”

  “Never heard anything. Got my commission.”

  “Right. Thanks, Dave.”

  “See you around.”

  Not if I see you first, greedy bastard.

  Twenty-nine

  When he arrives at the showroom the lights are on, and even from outside he can hear that Radiohead is playing a little too loudly.

  “Sorry,” Connie shouts as the automatic door slides open and he walks in. She turns the music down, but not off.

  “After the day I’ve had,” he says, throwing his jacket on the roof of a black Audi, “I don’t care.”

  He looks at his watch.

  “Hold on. It’s half past six. Why are you still here? Come to think of it, it’s Sunday. You don’t work Sundays.”

  “I decided to come in and clean up a bit, stock the fridge, y’know. You did that, did you?” she says, pointing at the red Audi with an uneven stub of glass in place of a passenger door window.

  “I’m afraid so,” he says, noticing that there is now no glass on the floor.

  “Then,” she says, as if the broken window is immediately forgotten, “I thought, why not? I’ll open!”

  “Sell anything?”

  “Nearly. The silver Astra out back? They offered two-four.”

  “What’s it going for, three grand? You should’ve sold it.”

  “Really? What kind of margins are you working on?”

  “Who gives a shit?” he says. “This place has a bottom line of break even. Or haven’t you noticed?”

  She had noticed.

  He immediately regrets saying it.

  She notices that too.

  He goes over to the tiny office at the back of the showroom and slumps down into the chair behind the desk.

  “You know,” she says, standing in the doorway, hands on hips, “you should put a picture of a yacht in here, not a car.”

  He twists around. On the wall behind him is a photo of a blue and yellow Subaru.

  “What, remind customers of what they’ll never have? Nah.”

  “It’s funny,” she says. “Every man in my family, his dream is a yacht.”

  “Any of them manage it?”

  “Yes. One or two.”

  “Perhaps I’ll be the third.”

  Her mouth wrinkles as if suppressing a smile. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you already had one.”

  “Well I don’t. But I will, one day.”

  Although that day is suddenly looking a long way off…

  “Is Freddy still at the station?” she asks.

  “Yes. They’ve extended his detention.”

  “And is it, how do you say…”

  “Looking bad for him?”

  “U-hu.”

  “Well, I don’t think he’ll be coming out unless the real killer turns up.”

  “Mmm,” she says, weighing up the news. “The tapes? Freddy taking the car on Thursday evening? What shall we do with them?”

  “Where are they now?”

  “In my flat.”

  John blows through his lips. “They already know he took the car on Thursday. Freddy told ’em.”

  “The tapes, y
ou give them to the police?”

  He fiddles with a pen on the desk. When he looks up she’s still there, hands on hips, and he can tell she hasn’t finished.

  “There’s the whole week on tape,” she says. “All day, all night. Well, almost all day.”

  It feels like an interrogation. He says nothing. This must have been how it was for his dad, hour after hour, all those police interviews, and saying absolutely nothing. He’s about to tell Connie that she’d make a good a detective, but she goes on:

  “Freddy takes the car on Thursday at eight, brings it back at eleven. Is that what he’s telling them?”

  “I guess. But is it true?”

  “Yes. I saw the tape.”

  “No,” John says, “I meant about Donna. Freddy told the police he was with Donna on Thursday evening. They drove to a lay-by up near Wetherby and had sex on the back seat.”

  “Why would he lie about that? Anyway, where’s Wetherby?”

  “About twenty minutes north of here.”

  “Does he have family there?”

  John shakes his head. “Mum’s dead and his dad disappeared when he was a baby. I’m the closest thing to family he’s got. Poor kid.”

  He puts his elbows on the desk and rests his chin on his knuckles. “Sex in the car? Were they avoiding Fedir?” he says. “Donna was Fedir’s personal property, apparently. So if she and Freddy were going behind Fedir’s back…”

  “They drive to, what’s it called, Wetherby?”

  “I dunno,” she says. “Who goes to Wetherby for sex?”

  He starts to laugh.

  But then he stops.

  “The racing,” he whispers, as if the revelation will astound her. “Jumpers, ehm… national hunt, y’know… horses! It’s a racetrack. He goes there all the time. That’s why he said it. First place that came into his head. He never went to Wetherby…”

  “So he’s covering something up?”

  “Yeah, I reckon. But what?”

  “He takes the car two nights in a row,” Connie says, “but the second night, not til midnight.”

  “Just before they dumped Donna into the boot.”

  He checks his iPhone. There’s a message. Must have arrived when he was driving. Caller unrecognised. She’s using a second phone or a new sim card. Because it’s definitely from Den.

  The message reads: 87,367.

  Nothing else.

  The mileage on the Mondeo.

  “Right,” he says. “The car’s done about a hundred and sixty miles more than when I bought it. But on the Friday it only goes from here to the hotel, then it’s abandoned somewhere close to town. You don’t drive around half the night with a dead body in the boot. You get rid as quick as you can.”

  “So, Freddy drove a hundred and sixty miles on Thursday night?”

  “Seems about right. Hundred and fifty… sixty. In three hours, including, y’know, getting together with Donna on the back seat.”

  He sits back, hands behind his head.

  “Look more closely at that Subaru,” he says, beginning to smile.

  “What?”

  “Go on. See anything strange about it?”

  She squeezes into the office and leans across the desk. The heat of her body and the distant aroma of Chanel’s Coco are impossible to ignore.

  “It’s a model?” she says, confused.

  “Yep. They retail at thirty quid. Scale models.”

  “And?” she asks, rearranging her top as she steps back from the desk.

  “A bloody container full of eighteenth-scale models from China. Toy cars, trucks, tractors, aeroplanes, rockets… God, I remember staring into the crates, one after the other, all of it counterfeit. Dad ordered the shipment before Joe was shot. By the time it arrived he’d forgotten all about it.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “We sold everything on pretty easily. But I kept a Subaru. Took a picture of it. Kind of a joke, I suppose.”

  Connie doesn’t see the funny side.

  “I’m going for a cigarette. You want?” she asks.

  ***

  The shadows are long and dark, angling across Hope Road so that it could already be night.

  “Where, then?” she says after they’ve smoked for several minutes in peace.

  He likes the way Connie is never in a rush to hear the full story, as if everything is circumstantial, and the truth lies way beneath.

  “The things is,” he says, “they had three hours on Thursday. There’s no time to be driving along the country lanes of Wetherby looking for a quiet spot. They have to do a hundred and fifty miles in three hours.”

  “So?”

  “Motorway. Gotta be.” He grins. “Crates of tinny radios around the house, knock-off handbags everywhere, plastic drums of fake perfume in the cellar, all of it from the Philippines and Hong Kong… My whole bloody childhood, and now Freddy brings it all back!”

  “Brings what back?”

  “The docks! Dad used Immingham docks. Always. Biggest in the country. For dodgy imports that’s your place.”

  “Distance?”

  “From here? Seventy-odd miles down the M62.”

  No wonder Freddy didn’t want to take his own car. He was making a pick-up.

  “Why the docks?” she asks.

  “Why do you think!”

  “Me? I’m just a receptionist, remember?”

  “Ha!”

  As if by agreement, they smoke in silence for a while.

  “You never did tell me what you did in Spain,” he says eventually.

  She seems surprised.

  “I worked for my Uncle Henrique.”

  “The ceramic tile business?”

  She shrugs. He takes it as a kind of.

  “Henrique? The ‘think then speak’ guy, right?”

  “That’s him.”

  “I wish I was in Spain now, a glass of wine and a plate of ham.” He sighs. “Instead of which I’ve got all this shit to sort out.”

  “You can have the ham, at least. Got one in my flat.”

  “A leg of ham? Are you serious?”

  “Black-leg. The best.”

  “Jesus, I must be paying you too much.”

  “Bring the wine, you can have all the ham you want.”

  “You’re not going out tonight?”

  She shakes her head.

  “It’s a deal.”

  “Okay,” she says. “See you later.”

  “It’ll be about nine I think…”

  “Fine.”

  She grabs her bag and off she goes, down Hope Road.

  ***

  Immingham docks and back, he tells himself as he watches her. And it wasn’t for a bootload of toy cars.

  Thirty

  He can see her in the flat above the sandwich shop, peeping down at him from behind the curtains. Fifteen minutes he’s been here and she’s refused to pick up the phone or answer the door bell. But she’s there all right. Yesterday they bump into each other at the hotel, first time in quarter of a century. Now she’s hiding from him.

  Town Street, within walking distance of the city. This is where he grew up, in a big end terrace with a double attic and a front parlour that nobody ever went in. Then Dad decided to move to the leafy splendour of Grange Drive, with its detached villas and the sniffy respectability of a golf club. The neighbours never took to the Rays, thought they were vulgar and distasteful, especially after the Old Bailey trial. Dad never saw it, but Mum did. She’d have preferred to stay down here.

  “This is fucking ridiculous,” he says out loud, leaning on the Saab and staring up at her flat. “Sandy? What’s going on?”

  He can see her shadow, hanging there behind the curtains, hardly moving.

  Tries her number again. Listens as she lets the phone ring.

  “Right.”

  He leaps up onto the Saab, lands on his knees and nearly slides off again. Grabs a wiper and steadies himself. He stands up, one foot on the wing the other on the middle of the b
onnet. It makes a whupple sound as it buckles inwards a few inches.

  “Sandy!” he shouts, as loud as he can. “Sandy! Yes, you behind the drapes! Open the bloody door or I’ll kick it down!”

  She moves out from behind the curtains, points down to the door below.

  That did the trick, then.

  ***

  “How’s things, Sandy, apart from not answering your…”

  “Shut your mouth and come inside, you bloody clown.”

  She’s a tall, solid-looking woman in her late fifties with short hair dyed blond and a silver stud in her nose. You can’t see them, but you just know she’s gonna have old tattoos on her shoulders, like fading bruises.

  “Sit down. Want a drink, course you do, I know I do…” She’s talking fast, the bottle of gin already in her hands, two massive measures into half pint beer glasses. “You dented your bonnet, you moron. Here.”

  Sandy used to run a pub just down the road. He’d go drinking there with his mates, all underage, and him skulking out of sight in a corner in case anyone his parents knew saw him getting pissed. It wasn’t until years later that he realised the whole pub probably knew who he was: he was Tony Ray’s son.

  She hands him a half pint of warm, flat gin and tonic.

  “You’re gonna get yourself killed, John,” she says, flopping down into a saggy old armchair that drops her a little further than she had anticipated, some of the G&T spilling onto her jeans.

  “Someone already got killed,” he says. “What am I supposed to do? Let Freddy go down for it?”

  She says nothing, lights a cigarette.

  “And what about you?” he says. “Looks like someone’s had a word in your ear since yesterday.”

  She smokes away, says nothing.

  He smells her perfume again, and it knocks him back to another time, a time when all his options were open, his life ahead of him.

  “Still wearing Charlie I notice,” he says, sniffing the air. “The aroma of youth!”

  “Cheeky twat,” she says, smiling for the first time.

  She always used to smell good. Whenever she was behind the bar you could sense those same sweet chemical edges of Charlie, the tingling promise of sex and adulthood that made him yearn to be older and experienced, preferably with her.