A Fatal Façade

by Linda M. James

  ‘No way,’ he croaked through parched lips.

  Bianca pressed the alarm button and suddenly the room was swarming with medical staff. ‘He’s come back to me,’ she kept saying over and over again.

  An hour later, Jack was striding down the corridor towards Batas’ room. He stopped as he saw all the hospital staff going in and out of the room; something had happened. A nurse was hurrying up the corridor towards him.

  ‘Is he okay?’

  She kept walking but turned back to look at him; Jack knew she was trying to work out if he was from the press. ‘I can’t speak about patients to strangers. Excuse me.’ She hurried on. Jack followed her.

  ‘I’m a family friend. I know Rico.’ Jack was beginning to find lies easy to find.

  The nurse stopped walking and looked at him skeptically. ‘Then you’ll know his girlfriend.’

  ‘Bianca,’ he said, without missing a beat. ‘Is she okay? I’ve been worried about her.’

  The nurse smiled at him. He’d obviously passed the test. ‘Mr. Batas is a lucky man. She’s been singing to him every day and He regained consciousness earlier today. You can speak with her, but you won’t be allowed in to see him yet. No one is except her.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Jack said before hurrying back to Batas’ room. He stood outside the window, watching two doctors running some tests on him while Bianca sat beside him, holding his hand. Jack didn’t know if Batas qualified as being lucky after being smashed on the head and thrown into a quarry, but perhaps he was; he was still alive and Bianca was obviously a good friend. Jack suddenly realized what was missing: a policeman outside his room. He was just about to ring Jamila to tell her when Bianca looked up and smiled at him. She struggled to get on her feet and walked towards him.

  ‘What are you doing here, Jack?’ Bianca’s eyes were heavy from lack of sleep.

  ‘Hoping your friend would give me some information that would help us convict Angelica Logan. How about this? she was the driver who killed that kid two weeks ago.’

  She gave him a small smile. ‘I’ll get it for you when Rico’s feeling better. I want the bitch locked up for life for what she did to Rico. Will you do something for me, Jack?’

  ‘Anything I can, but you should go home and sleep. You look shattered.’

  ‘I am. I want you to keep the press off his back. They’ll be swarming over him like maggots once they discover he’s regained consciousness. There used to be a policeman outside his room, but he left before Rico became conscious. I think they thought he was going to die.’

  ‘I’ll ring a colleague then I’m driving you home.’

  Bianca was swaying with exhaustion. Jack rushed to get her a seat from further up the corridor and pushed her onto to it.

  ‘Rico was mixed up with something nasty. You’ve got to help us, Jack. The last time I saw him he was terrified.’

  Jack’s nerves tingled. ‘Why?’

  ‘Some guys wanted a statue and Rico couldn’t find it. Told me I’d find him with his throat cut in an alleyway if he didn’t. I didn’t believe him then.’ She leaned her head against the hospital wall and closed her eyes.

  Jack’s heart was racing. Rico was involved with the drug smuggling. While Bianca rested, Jack phoned Jamila and told her that Batas was conscious and needed protection. He wanted to tell her about what Bianca had told him but he needed to check Cellini’s apartment first.

  He touched Bianca’s shoulder and she opened her eyes. ‘I’m taking you home, Bianca. You’d better tell the staff.’

  Bianca slept all the way to her flat as Jack drove through the dark streets; his brain in overload. The Black Madonna was as popular as the Mona Lisa, he thought. So where the hell was it? Jack desperately wanted to question Bianca about what Batas had told her, but he knew she needed sleep far more than questions. He took her up to her flat, left her to collapse into bed and sat in his car to think. He reached into his pocket for his mobile and touched some bubble wrap. What was bubble wrap doing in his pocket? He suddenly had an image of him picking it up from Cellini’s bedroom floor. A light went on in his head. He started the car and headed for Palladian Mansions.

  Jack was surprised to see Carla, Cellini’s maid open Mrs. M’s door.

  She smiled at him. ‘Signora Monty give me job, Signore,’ she said in broken English. ‘She nice lady.’

  She took Jack’s coat and he called out to Mrs. M as he walked towards the lounge.

  Mrs. M had her feet up, watching T.V. with a half-empty bottle of Scotch whisky and a bottle of green ginger wine on a table near her when Jack walked in. She turned to him in delight. ‘Jack, have a Whisky Mac! Have two or three!’

  Jack smiled at this effusive welcome. Mrs. M was drunk. ‘Just a small whisky for me. ’ He sat down near her while she poured him a drink with a less than steady hand.

  ‘Now spill the beans.’ Her eyes shone with excitement. ‘What new developments have you discovered?’

  So Jack wove a story highlighting the drama of Rico’s near-death experience and his recent return of consciousness which would lead to Angelica Logan’s future conviction. he left out any mention of the drugs. At first, Mrs. M was riveted; then she frowned.

  ‘But if he testifies, Jack, he’ll have to admit he was blackmailing her. How many years will he get?’

  ‘The maximum sentence is fourteen.’

  ‘Fourteen years!’ Her eyes flashed. ‘That’s outrageous! Dickens was right. the law is an ass! Some murderers get out in less! You should start a campaign to change the law, Jack. I’ll start a petition after Christmas to help you.’

  Jack laughed at the thought of him going to the chief super saying he was going to change the law with the help of an eccentric old lady. ‘It’s not likely he’ll get the maximum sentence after what Angelica Logan did to him, Mrs. M.’

  ‘But that’s not the point, Jack. The point is…’ Mrs. M waved a whisky glass in his general direction and frowned. ‘What is the point, Jack?’

  Jack smiled. ‘The point is I need to find the crate that the men delivered the night Cellini died. I’ve missed something.’

  ‘How’s finding a crate going to help you?’

  ‘“Assume nothing. Believe nothing. Check everything.” My wife’s mantra when she was a forensic scientist, Mrs. M.’

  ‘Sounds very clever, Jack – whatever it means.’ Mrs. M’s eyes suddenly drooped and her glass dropped from her hand before Jack could reach it. He picked up the glass from the carpet and went to look for the maid as Mrs. M started to snore.

  Carla was tidying up the already tidy kitchen and listening to some sentimental song on the radio. She didn’t hear him come in.

  ‘Carla,’ Jack said.

  Her body jerked as if she’d been electrocuted. ‘Santa Maria Madre di Dio!’ she gasped. ‘You scare me, Signore! My nerves…she…’ She stopped; obviously not having enough English to explain her fragile nervous system to Jack.

  ‘Sorry, I just wanted to ask you if you know where the crate was.’

  Carla looked at him with incomprehension and Jack realized that Cellini must have communicated with her solely in Italian. He wondered how Mrs. M coped.

  Jack got out the notebook he always carried around with him and drew a picture of a crate while she watched him. When he finished, he mimed looking around the room for it and she suddenly clapped her hands.

  ‘I show, Signore.’

  Jack went back into the lounge to check that Mrs. M was okay before Carla and he walked out of her apartment. Jack locked Mrs. M’s door securely and they went into the lift. Six floors later, they were in the basement and Jack was walking around an enormous room, divided up into lockable storage rooms. Carla marched past him and opened Cellini’s storage room and showed the empty crate to Jack. She made a wide expansive gesture with her hands as if to say: what’s the point of looking at an empty crate? ‘Nulla qui!’ she said, obviously thinking him mad.

  Jack searched his brain for his O-level Italian, trying to dredge up
a few words. He didn’t want her staying any longer. ‘Grazie, Carla. Si può tornare alla Signora Montgomery ora,’ Jack replied hesitantly, but thinking his pronunciation was pretty good for someone who hadn’t spoken Italian for ten years. She frowned at him with incomprehension and he realized that perhaps it wasn’t good at all.

  ‘Che cosa hai detto?’ she asked him.

  Jack repeated his phrase, but changed his pronunciation; this time, she smiled at him.

  ‘I understand, Signore! I go see Signora Monty.’

  They beamed at each other with mutual linguistic appreci-ation; then she left him alone in the lonely room.

  Jack closed the storage-room door and walked around the crate, studying it from all angles. What if he’d been right when he’d told Jamila that the drugs might not be hidden in the statues? He studied the inside of the crate; then studied the outside. His heart suddenly leapt. Why were the dimensions between the outer and inner walls so thick? Taking his Swiss Army knife out of his pocket, he carefully leveled out one of the boards; then suddenly sneezed. It must be his hay-fever again. He lifted out the board carefully; years of training had taught him that searching for evidence must be performed with the minimum amount of damage. Blood suddenly flooded into Jack’s face as he saw what was nestled neatly underneath the board: hundreds of small bags of white powder. Jesus Christ! The crate was over a metre high and wide; the haul would be worth millions! He whipped out his mobile and rang Jamila and told her to drop everything she was doing to meet him at once.

  The adrenaline surged through his body as he phoned Colin to tell him he’d be late home; he was working on something important. He heard Colin tell the others and suddenly Tom was on the phone. ‘You’re working under-cover, aren’t you, Dad? Is it big?’

  ‘Yes, it is. I can’t talk about it until we’ve found all the people responsible. Don’t tell anyone, Tom. I’m relying on you. It’s very important.’ He finished the call, feeling euphoric; it was the first time Tom had wanted to speak to him since he’d left the Met.

  Jack paced up and down the basement as he waited for Jamila. Catching a drug-smuggling gang was always dangerous because of the vast amounts of money involved, but there must be a way to do it. Jamila arrived before he had thought of a solution; he didn’t know how she’d managed to get there so quickly, but he didn’t care. He took her to the locked room and showed her the drugs.

  She gasped with shock. ‘There’s so much, Jack. I can’t understand why the sniffer dogs didn’t smell it all.’

  Jack leant against the crate. ‘Did anyone report some of the dogs sneezing?’

  Jamila looked at him in astonishment. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘But have they, Jamila?’

  Jamila tried to remember all the drug-related reports she’d read from the BA and SOCA. ‘Yes, a few of them did. A bit strange, I thought.’

  Jack took out his Swiss Army knife again and scraped along the outside of one section of the crate and caught the residue in his hand. ‘Sniff that.’

  Jamila bent down and sniffed hard. She immediately sneezed and looked at Jack in confusion. ‘What’s that mean?’

  Jack sniffed the residue too and sneezed. ‘It means that the gang are very ingenious, Jamila. They’ve coated the outside of the crate with a residue made from pepper. The dogs can’t smell the drugs through it.’

  Jamila was stunned. ‘How did you work that out?’

  ‘I never get hay-fever in the winter,’ Jack said enigmatically.

  ‘I don’t understand half of what you say,’ Jamila said, smiling at him. ‘But if they got that through there must be lots more crates out there stuffed with drugs.’

  ‘Yep, this crate is just the tip of an iceberg.’

  There was silence as Jamila watched Jack staring at the crate. She had spent a long time studying Jack’s methods; if he went silent, he was working something out and he didn’t like being disturbed when he was thinking. A minute later, he turned to look at her.

  ‘The only way we’ll find the gang is to set a fly-trap. I’m going to see the chief super after Christmas and get his authorization.’ But Jack knew that if this dangerous operation was going to be successful, he’d have to ask for help from someone he didn’t want to involve: Bianca.

  CHAPTER 38

  24th December 2012

  Angelica had been lying in bed since she had told Mark that she had given her brother away. The admission had made her withdraw from the world; Mark couldn’t reach her any more. The woman lying on their bed wasn’t the woman he married and loved so much. It tore tiny fragments from Mark’s heart each time he looked at her pale, porcelain face. He still couldn’t believe the things he’d been told about her could possibly be true. How could someone so beautiful be capable of such callousness? Such cruelty?

  He’d called their private doctor and asked him to come to the house urgently to see his wife. When the doctor had asked what was wrong with her, he didn’t know what to say. How could he tell him that she simply wasn’t there? Each day she picked at her food and washed herself if Mark told her to; but that was all the interaction she had with the world, except for her occasional ramblings which made no sense to Mark. He’d rung the owner of the newspaper after the police had left and told him that he needed to appoint a temporary editor as he was ill. He’d invented an illness that would lay him low for weeks. But he really was ill; not physically, but mentally; he was in torment, trying to replay every conversation he’d had with Angelica; trying to work out how many times she’d been with that bastard when he had thought she was busy with her charity work. He wasn’t a stupid man, so when had he become so gullible? The thought of her making love with Cellini made him feel like vomiting, but he couldn’t; perhaps because he couldn’t eat. He suddenly noticed that Angelica had gone to sleep and crept out of the bedroom. Perhaps the doctor would arrive soon. He wandered down the stairs and sat in the hall and waited.

  Angelica was running with her parents along the street and her mother was crying hysterically. They didn’t seem to notice that she was being left behind. Suddenly, they ran into a large building and disappeared. She had a stitch in her side, but Angel carried on running after them, terrified that she might never see them again and entered a large noisy room. It was packed with people shouting in Italian. Her parents stood in front of two policemen in black uniforms who didn’t seem interested in the shouting people. But everyone stopped shouting when her father bellowed: ‘Mio figlio è stato rapito!’ at the top of his voice. He ordered the police to get a search party out immediately. Everyone looked shocked and started shouting again. One of the policemen blew a whistle and ordered everyone out of the room, except the signore and his family. Everyone went out shouting at each other. The policemen kept asking Angelica’s father question after question while her mother wailed over and over again. Her father didn’t want to answer the questions. He kept shouting that they must start a search immediately, but the policemen just continued asking questions. Angelica tried to block out all the terrible noise. She wanted her mother to hold her, but she didn’t seem to notice her at all.

  ‘Find my baby. Find my baby,’ she kept sobbing over and over again.

  But the questions went on. What was their exact location when the baby disappeared? What was the baby wearing? How old was he? Did Signore da Carrara have any enemies who could have committed such a terrible crime?

  Angelica looked at her parents. Couldn’t they see that she was there? Couldn’t they see that she needed them? When The policemen started writing a report her father hit one of them and her mother’s wailing got louder and louder. Angelica put her fingers in her ears to cut out the sound, but it didn’t work. The noise went on and on and on.

  A man with a black bag came and put a needle in her mother’s arm and she stopped wailing. Angelica tried to cuddle her, but she didn’t even look at her. ‘Mama, I’ll look after you. Don’t be sad. Angel’s here.’ But her mother ignored her; everyone ignored her.r />
  Something was pressing different parts of her body. She looked down and saw another man with a black bag staring down at her. Why were there two men with black bags? He was talking to her, but she didn’t want to talk to him; she wanted her mother to cuddle her.

  ‘How long has she been like this?’ the doctor asked Mark when he’d finished testing her reflexes.

  ‘A couple of days. This is going to sound strange I know, but…it’s almost as if she’s living somewhere else.’

  He glanced at the doctor quickly to see if he thought him mad.

  The doctor looked worried. ‘Mark, Angelica doesn’t need a G.P. She needs a psychiatrist.’

  CHAPTER 39

  24th December 2012

  As Jack drove towards Chief Superintendent Ian Dunmore’s house, he hoped their encounter would be better than the last one. It had been after the siege and the CS had shouted at him that it was incredible that a DCI with his experience had botched an operation. It should have been straight-forward, and then he’d been stupid enough to admit he’d made a mistake in front of an undercover reporter! Jack tried to explain that it had been impossible to move quickly enough to stop the extreme actions of an Islamic husband who wanted to destroy his wife for committing adultery. He had doused her in petrol and set her alight in front of their son before Jack could rescue her. But you were in charge, Jack – you should have gone in earlier! The CS had shouted. Two days later, Jack had handed in his resignation.

  His satellite navigation system guided him to Hampton Wick, down the A 310; then told him to turn right into Park Road. Concentrate on the present, Jack, told himself, stop living in the past. The chief super’s modern house was halfway down the road; Jack was surprised; he’d expected an old-fashioned man like Ian Dunmore to be living in a Victorian villa. Claire Dunmore opened the door and smiled at him.