By the time my dad was up and about making breakfast, I had come to a series of conclusions.
‘You awake yet?’ My dad asked, wandering into the livingroom, bread knife in hand, his striped-pyjamas/paisley-patterned dressing gown combo producing a strobe effect to my sleepy eyes. He stared down on me, lying in my sleeping bag on the couch. ‘You look terrible.’
His sixth sense could kick in at any moment. I didn’t want him asking awkward questions. Attack was the best form of defence. ‘You'd feel terrible after two weeks sleeping on a sofa.’
‘Toast and egg do you?’ he asked, and not waiting for an answer padded back through to the kitchen.
I was up and dressed and drinking coffee by the time my dad had finished scrambling the eggs.
‘I’m thinking of going down to the cottage today,’ he said. ‘I phoned Arthur last night and he reckoned he’d be finished by tomorrow afternoon.’
‘That’s quick. Sort of.’
‘Malky says you’ve had problems with a venue for the party.’
By which I took it my brother had told him we didn’t have a venue and pinned the blame for that on me.
My dad seemed surprisingly calm as he confirmed my suspicions. ‘Malky says he’s ready to go. He’s just waiting on you to say where it’s to happen. It’s good to know that one of my sons is taking my birthday seriously.’
‘You’re sixty-seven, so what?’ I snapped at him. I couldn’t help myself. My nerves were frayed and the coffee wasn’t helping. ‘I’m sorry, Dad. Of course your birthday is important. It’s just that I’ve—’
‘Got more important things than me to worry about. I know that.’ He sniffed, picked up his dirty dish and dropped it into the sink.
‘It’s not that,’ I said, although it was.
‘No, no, I understand perfectly well. Your criminals come before me, always have, always will.’
If it hadn’t been for the intervention of one of my criminals the night before, he’d be one son down on his current total. But I couldn’t confide in my dad. What had happened had to remain between me and Deek and Jake Turpie.
My dad turned the hot water tap on full and squirted far too much washing-up liquid into the sink. ‘Jill phoned again last night,’ he said, over the roar of the water hitting the basin, bubbles billowing everywhere. ‘Somebody else you’ve been doing your best to ignore recently.’
How did Jill always manage to miss me? It was almost like she was doing it on purpose. As a long distance romance we were a disaster, but there was only one week to go. If I could keep alive until then. What should I do? Was it fair to propose marriage when I knew there was a contract out on me? Should I mention it to her? What good would it do if I did? So many questions. All I knew was that I missed her so much.
‘Well? What are you going to do about the party?’ my dad asked. He was really starting to annoy me. If Jill had been home, she’d have seen the funny side of the non-surprise, surprise party. She would have had the whole thing sorted out in no time and my dad eating out of her hand; Munro men and the wrapping of them around her little finger being just one of her many talents.
‘If your cottage is nearly ready, why don’t you have the party there?’ I said. ‘That was the plan all along, wasn’t it? Me and Malky could come along nice and early and help you with the furniture, blow up some balloons. You can leave before the guests arrive and come back at eight. Surprise!’
He didn’t disagree, mulling it over, arms up to the elbows in soapy bubbles. ‘You’d need to be there for about four at the latest. That would give us time to get the place back into order.’
‘It’s a date, then,’ I said. He didn’t reply so I took that as a sign of contentment. ‘What did Jill want?’
‘She’s your girlfriend. She wanted to speak to you, of course.’
‘When she phoned last time she said she had something important to tell me. Did you remember and ask her to leave a number?’
He’d forgotten.
I still didn't know what Jill's important news was. I was wondering about that and a lot of other things when I arrived at the office at half-past eight. Grace-Mary wouldn’t be in until nine and Joanna was going straight to the High Court. I checked the diary. Thursday: remand court day. Five deferred sentences. I called Paul Sharp and explained that I was bogged down with Kirkslap’s trial and asked him to cover court for me.
That out of the way, I had a great deal of thinking to do. Maybe it was years of court work, thinking on my feet, but I thought better pacing the room.
First things first. There was no reason to disbelieve Tam ‘Tuppence’ Christie’s last words. Mike Summers had put a contract out on me. Why? Who was I to him, apart from a long lost University acquaintance? I stopped pacing and found myself at the window looking onto the High Street. Two steady streams of traffic heading in opposite directions, a few folk under the bus stop shelter outside the Auld Hole in the Wall pub.
There was no reason Mike would want to kill me in particular, so it all had to do with Danny Boyd. After all, weren’t we part of a package? Who was Danny to Mike? Who was Danny to anyone? He was just a boy who ran messages for his mum and raided old tombs for a hobby, and, yet, there was some kind of link between him and me and between us and Mike. A link so potentially damaging to Mike that he wanted to kill us both.
Grace-Mary arrived. ‘Get your files okay? I left them on your chair.’
I told her I was giving court a miss, and asked her to fax over the copy complaints to Paul Sharp’s office.
‘Having the day off are you?’
‘Not exactly. Things to do, people to see.’
‘Like who?’
‘Like Jake Turpie. The rent’s overdue.’
‘I thought we had three months free?’ Grace-Mary said.
‘Change of plan. What cash have we got?’
‘I don’t even want to know,’ she said, returning with the contents of the Munro & Co. safe and slapping it into my hand. ‘There’s enough there for this and next month.’ She left the room again.
I closed the door. Peace restored. Back to the link. The link that bound me to Danny Boyd, the link that bound Danny to Mike Summers. And then there was Nathan. I had to assume he'd been murdered by Tuppence Christie's doorman, on the instructions of Mike Summers and for the same reason he wanted Danny dead. Danny, who thought his brother and he were cursed. If I was to solve the puzzle I had to find the boy. He’d been to see his mum recently. Maybe she would have a clue where he was now.
At the Boyds’ smallholding, there was no answer to my knocks. I tried the handle on the front door. It was unlocked. I pushed it open. I could hear the sound of someone working in the kitchen. From its vantage point, sprawled across the couch, the old dog lifted an eyelid, twitched an ear and then went back to sleep again.
‘What a fright you gave me!’ Mrs Boyd exclaimed, when I entered the kitchen to find her sitting at the table surrounded by heaps of green apples, chopping knife in hand.
I apologised.
She stood, set down the knife and wiped her hands on her apron. ‘Have you found Danny? Is he all right?’
‘I’m sure he’s fine. I just want to know if he said anything the other night that might make it easier for me to find him.’
Danny hadn’t said a lot. Just told his mum he was okay, taken away some food and fresh clothes and said not to worry, that he wasn’t far away.
‘Does he know that the police aren't looking for him?’
She nodded. ‘I told him. He’s not worried about the police. It’s the... you know...’
‘The curse?’
She nodded again.
‘You said Danny kept a list of tombs he’d downloaded from the internet. Do you know where it is?’
She showed me through to a bedroom. Two single beds, mismatched furniture, posters on the wall. In the corner was a computer, printer attached. After a great deal of searching for printouts from the internet we could find nothing. At last Mrs Boyd went over
to a corner of the room. There was no central heating, just a convector that had probably been a hi-tech appliance in the 60’s. She moved it out of the way and lifted the edge of the carpet. ‘The boys don’t know, I know,’ she said. ‘I never look. Well hardly ever.’ She prised up a loose floorboard. Inside there was a well-worn lads’ mag, a jar containing some money, mainly coins, and an A5 spiral bound notebook.
I took the notebook from her. There was nothing written on the cover, but inside, on the first twenty or so pages, was detailed, in painstakingly-neat print, facts about ancient Scottish tombs from all over Central Scotland and the Lowlands. Each tomb had a page to itself, listing the precise location, name, number of deceased and any associated family mottos or facts of special interest. The last entry was for the Binny Mausoleum. Beneath the heading was a date - the night that Nathan and Danny Boyd were caught and arrested.
‘I was sure there was a lot of other stuff the boys printed off the internet,’ Mrs Boyd said. ‘There was one web-site they were always on. I could hear them chatting about it. It wasn’t a big secret or anything. I didn’t really like it. It was all a bit creepy. I just thought it was boys’ stuff and if it kept them out of bother...’ she tailed off, probably realising how wrong she’d been. One son dead, the other running scared of some ancient curse; that was quite a lot of bother actually.
After promising to do my best to secure the safe return of her remaining son, and taking the notebook with me, I left Mrs Boyd to her apples and made the short journey to my dad’s cottage where Arthur Campbell was hammering away at the roof.
‘How’s it going?’ I shouted up to him.
He stopped what he was doing and drew a forearm across his sun-tanned brow. ‘I'm getting there. Did Alex send you out here to spy on me?’ he laughed. ‘He’s a terrible man, your old boy.’
‘Think you’ll have it done for tomorrow?’
‘Should do. I’ve got one of the lads coming off another job to help me this afternoon, so we’ll have the slates on today. Then all there is to do is to re-attach the guttering, point the chimney and sort the lead flashing.’
When he started on about soffits and water-gates, I decided it was all getting too technical for me and volunteered to make him a cup of tea. Internally, the place was much as I’d left it. Danny Boyd had been a tidy tenant. I checked the spare room. You’d never have known he’d been there. The only sign of occupancy was a black bin liner of rubbish which I put in the wheelie bin outside. At least something was coming together. The cottage was small, all on one level, with only three rooms, excluding kitchen and bathroom. If we got an early start at it, the place could easily be in order for the birthday party the following night.
Back in my car, I looked at the notebook again and the blank entry under the Binny Mausoleum heading. Ecclesmachan was only a two minute drive away. There was a series of country walks available and I took the one in the direction of Binny Craigs, until eventually I found the mausoleum, almost completely overgrown and carved into the rock face. Along the stone arch above the door was carved an inscription stating that the tomb had been consecrated by the Bishop of Edinburgh on 25th October 1873, and below, on the blocked up entrance, the minor damage caused by the Boyd boys was still clearly visible. Other than that there was nothing at all unusual. And yet the damage to this tomb and the criminal proceedings which had followed, were my only links with Danny Boyd; a boy I’d never set eyes on until I’d met him in court four weeks before. I stood there, staring at the solid concrete door that was covered in ivy What did Danny and Nathan Boyd know that Mike Summers wanted silenced? He had already had one brother killed and wanted the same for the other – and me. If I was on the same contract it had to be because Mike thought whatever Danny knew, he had told me. What was that? Unless I tracked Danny down, I was never going to find out.
Chapter 51
On the way back to the office from Ecclesmachan, I took a detour into Jake Turpie's yard, where I found him berating a group of men whose work ethic he was calling into question, punctuating his remarks by cracking a short length of scaffolding pole off the roof of a crumpled Corsa.
I knew most of Jake's employees, a cash-in-hand, hard-living group who were no strangers to the court and viewed by me as an important part of the Robbie Munro pension plan. Once the men had set about their business again with renewed vigour, Jake tossed the pole aside and marched off. I caught up with him at the foot of the flight of shoogly steps leading up to his HQ: a dilapidated wooden structure, guarded by a scruffy, wild-eyed mutt.
Jake held up a hand when he saw me approach. ‘Say nothing.’
‘I just came to pay the rent,’ I said, handing over the cash. Jake stuffed it into a pocket of his dungarees. ‘And to say that I've got those court papers from Deek. I'm not expecting the Crown appeal to go ahead. Once someone who knows what they're doing has a proper look at it, the whole thing will be ditched.’
Jake signalled his approval with a grunt, turned and began to climb the steps.
‘Jake, about—’
‘I told you—’
‘I only wanted to—’
Jake came down the steps and put his face in my face. ‘It never happened, all right?’
‘The bodies...’ I hissed.
He stepped back, baring teeth like a row of condemned buildings. ‘Deek's away tidying up the mess right now.’ He gave the impression that his minder was whisking a feather duster about, rather than collecting the burnt remains of Tuppence Christie and his doorman for onward disposal. At least Deek know what to do. When it came to disappearing bodies, his boss had written the book.
‘Are you expecting any repercussions?’ I asked. Jake looked about in an exasperated fashion, before coming to the conclusion that the easiest way to get rid of me was to talk. He grabbed one of my arms and dragged me across the rutted landscape, down an avenue of piled-high, scrap cars. ‘I'm not expecting any bother. The height of tuppence, he’d shoot you for thruppence,’ he snorted and spat. ‘The man was a legend in his own mind. No-one's going to find him, and no-one's going to care.’
That solved the mystery of the deceased gangster's nickname, but I was still worried his disappearance might be traced to me via Jake. ‘Somebody must know that he called you,’ I said.
‘So? A lot of people call me. I buy and sell cars.’ Jake sold second hand cars. He didn't sell brand new Range Rovers like the one that had transported me to deepest Lanarkshire, or the Mercedes I'd seen Tuppence getting into outside Karats. ‘Satisfied? Can I get back to work now? Please tell me you're not going to ask me to try and find out who put the contract out on you.’
‘I know who.’
‘That right? Then you know more than me.’
‘What I want to know is why.’
Jake kicked a stone with a steel toe cap. It bounced along the hard packed dirt and collided with the near-side wing of a battered Peugeot. ‘I was offered cash to set you up. You and the boy together. I wasn't interested. After I tipped you off, I had Deek keep an eye on you. And now I'm happy...’ he tapped the rent money in his pocket, ‘and you're happy. Everyone's a winner.’
He made it sound like a game show. Would I still have been a winner had Tuppence's price been right?
‘And you-know-who didn't say why he wanted you to set me up?’ I said.
‘I never asked. I just thought you must have narked someone off.’ Jake came to a halt. Gave me a light slap on the cheek. ‘You're good at that. Now, was there anything else?’
There wasn't.
‘Good,’ Jake said, ‘because some of us have work to do.’
We turned and started walking down the way we'd come. As we neared Jake's HQ, one of his men was leaving in an allegedly white Ford Transit van. Jake slammed a hand against the side panel and it stopped. The driver rolled down the window.
‘Have I got to do everything around here?’ Jake asked him. He reached into the pocket not containing Munro & Co.'s rent and pulled out a crumpled, oil-stained tissue. He w
ent over to a rain-filled pot-hole, of which there were many, dipped the tissue in the muddy water and splattered it against the front number plate of the van, partially obscuring the middle digits. ‘Eejit. The M9's got average speed camera's the length of it.’
‘Does that work?’ I asked.
‘How many speeding tickets have I brought you recently?’ He battered a hand on the van's bonnet and we stepped to the side as it drove off. ‘You'll still need to watch yourself, mind,’ Jake said. ‘There are other contractors out there.’
It was something I was well aware of. Tuppence Christie's contract had been terminated. Would somebody else pick it up? Until Mike Summers realised what must have happened, I had some time.
‘One more thing,’ I said. ‘How easy is it to change the number plates on an Audi?’
‘Thinking about getting a proper car? I've an A4 in the pound. Clean motor, only got twenty K on the clock. Or it will have. I could let you have it for—’
‘I’ve got a car. Just answer my question and I'll leave you alone.’
It was an offer Jake couldn't refuse. ‘Is it UK or Euro plates you're fitting.’
I had no idea.
‘If it's Euro's you're going to need a bracket and you'll have to drill mounting holes in the corners. If it's standard UK, you can go with the bolts and plastic caps, but double-sided tape is just as good and makes a cleaner job.’
‘I only want something temporary. It's just for one trip.’
‘I've got more tissues and there's plenty of puddles about,’ he said.
‘I don't want to conceal the numbers, I want to make them look like somebody else's. Just for the night.’
‘Then any double-sided tape will do. The cheaper the tape, the easier to rip off in a hurry. Most people use 3M command strips. They're good but a nightmare to come off again.’ He shoved the dog aside with a leg, and started up the steps. ‘If you need a getaway driver, let me know,’ he said, half-jokingly and disappeared inside his wooden HQ.
Killer Contract (Best Defence series Book 4) Page 23