Rathe’s eyes glinted. “Then you have to do something about it. You have to find out what really happened and put it right. Through the correct processes. That’s what you have to do.”
“Can we do that?”
“Of course you can.”
“No, Rathe, can we do that?”
And Rathe now recognised it for the plea it was, for the request for help that it had been, the unexpected display of vulnerability from Cook took him by surprise. He found himself nodding his agreement, not daring to speak in case his chosen words were misguided and he belittled the humility of the moment. Cook acknowledged the agreement with his own bow of the head and they turned back to look out over the lawns, allowing the shift in their relationship, however brief or understated it had been, to settle.
* * *
The girl eyed them both with suspicion, but it was for Cook that she reserved the majority of her dislike. She was young, barely in her twenties in Rathe’s estimation, but the heavy make-up made it difficult to be sure. Her hair was bleached blonde, a longer and straighter version of Monroe; whilst the peroxide matched the paleness of the skin, it contrasted starkly with the heightened darkness of the lashes and the livid crimson of the lips. Beneath it all, Rathe thought she might have been naturally pretty; certainly, despite the harshness of her stare, the eyes were a delicate shade of green which he thought he could never remember seeing before, and the lips were naturally full beneath their clown-like adornment. The falsity of her cosmetics was all the more gaudy next to the natural beauty which lay beneath it.
“Tell me why I should say anything to you, Cook,” she spat as he placed a Bacardi and Coke in front of her. “After you bloody well framed my Harry for murder. A right victim of yours, my Harry is.”
He pointed to the drink. “Because I didn’t frame him. And because that cost me a packet, Carla, and you don’t often get to go to places like this.”
She looked around the cocktail bar. “Nothing special. Harry takes me to places like this all the time. And he owns them all.”
Cook raised a glass of whisky to his lips. “That right? Well, like I said, you don’t get to go to places like this often. Because this one, see, is legitimate.”
“You’ve always been a bastard, Cook,” spat the girl.
“You’re not old enough to know that for sure, Carla, so tell your mouth to drown its bullshit with some Bacardi.”
It was later that same night. It had been after they had begun to go back over Mack’s interview with Rathe that Cook had thought about Carla. It had been Rathe’s comment about Mack standing up a girl in order to drive to Newcastle. Cook had known who Mack’s current piece of meat was and they had sought her out without any difficulty.
“There’s been loads of Carla Malones in the past,” Cook had told Rathe, “and there’ll be a load more in the future. Mack gets bored easily. Once he’s satisfied himself with one girl, he moves on. To him, it’s a business transaction rather than an emotional one.”
“Don’t any of them retaliate?” Rathe had asked.
“A girl retaliate against Harry Mack?” Cook had replied, the tone of his voice pouring scorn on the idea.
“So, what happens to the girls when Mack’s had enough?”
“What do you think? If they can still earn money for him, he puts them back where he found them. The streets. Assuming they’re lucky enough not to have bored him or upset him so much that he has them put in the ground or underwater instead.”
“And if they can’t earn any more?” Rathe had asked, hardly needing to hear the answer.
“Depends. If they didn’t upset him but they can’t work, they’ll be plied with drink and drugs and told to enjoy themselves. Within two months, they won’t recognise themselves or remember what got them on smack in the first place.”
Rathe had remained silent for some time. “This Carla, she was from the streets?”
“Since she was fourteen. And she’ll outstay her welcome soon enough, believe me.”
Cook had known Carla would be in one of Mack’s bars, because she was almost never seen anywhere else. She wouldn’t let an inconvenience like Mack’s imprisonment get in the way of her enjoying free drinks on the sole basis that she was invited into the criminal’s bed every night. Mack wouldn’t have minded her being out without him either, Cook knew that. If she was in one of Mack’s clubs, he would have loyal eyes on her and any one of the punters would know who she was. There was no danger of her doing anything she shouldn’t as long as she stayed in one of Mack’s places, so he could rest easy. Which is why it had been difficult for Rathe and Cook to prise her away. In the end, it had been Cook’s threat of arrest which had done it. He didn’t care: there would be no reprisals if what Carla could tell them would help get Mack out. As he thought it, Cook felt a twist of repulsion in his stomach at the filthy obligation he felt on account of his personal instincts and conscience. The things he felt he had to do just so he could sleep at night.
Carla took a long drink, her eyes bulging at the taste. “Jesus, that’s more than a double, isn’t it?”
“No,” drawled Cook, “but it’s not watered down like Harry’s probably is. So drink it slowly.”
“Fuck off,” she spat.
Rathe felt it was time to intervene. “Miss Malone, I think it’s probably best if we don’t take up too much of each other’s time. It’s pretty clear that none of us wants this interview to last longer than it has to.”
She looked at him initially with the same glare of contempt which she had reserved for Cook, but his voice changed her expression and those green eyes became warmer. “I don’t often hear men talk like you. Lovely, it is.”
Despite himself, Rathe felt his cheeks glow and the hairs on his neck rose slightly. “There are just a few questions we’d like to ask,” he said with an embarrassed grin.
“You could recite the bloody drinks menu and I’d get it on me,” she drooled with a short, sharp cackle. “I bet you sound right seductive on the phone.”
Cook hissed. “You wouldn’t know what to do with him unless he slapped you about a bit first, Carla, so lay off.”
The warmth in her eyes froze over once more. “I told you to fuck off, didn’t I?”
This time, Rathe slammed the table with the palm of his hand. “You can both do that if you’re going to go on like this. We’re here with a common goal and that’s to get the truth about what happened to Lenny Voss so that we can help Harry Mack. We can’t do that if we’re going to end up in the playground every time one of you speaks.”
For a moment, it occurred to Carla that she might be able to make a joke about the eroticism of Rathe’s fury, but she thought against it. His eyes had grown darker and his lips had tightened into a taught whipcord of anger. She looked across at Cook, who was now drinking to hide his own abasement, and she decided that whoever this man, Rathe, was, he ought to be kept on side. She had never seen Terry Cook cut down so quickly and so effectively before.
“All right,” she replied. “Say what you’ve got to say and let me go.”
Rathe took his time in formulating his questions. The bass line of the music of the bar drummed in his head and he seemed to be hearing it for the first time, as though his outburst had somehow awakened his senses, as if his explosion of anger had broken apart all the jumbled facts of the case in his head and now they were falling back into their correct places in time to that incessant, banging rhythm. And, in that moment, he thought he saw with the sharpest clarity to date, the truth behind the murder of Lenny Voss.
He became aware of them both staring at him and he realised that he must look like a simple child, unable to form words but making every effort to do so. “You were due to meet Harry on the night of Voss’s murder, is that right?”
Carla nodded. “He was meant to be taking me to his new restaurant. Not even opened yet, but Harry wanted me to have the first meal ever cooked there. He’s cute like that.”
“I wouldn’t say cute,” Cook fel
t compelled to say.
Rathe ignored him. “What reason did he say for changing his plans?”
“Business,” shrugged Carla, as though there was never any other reason for a change in Harry Mack’s plans. “Something came up, something urgent.”
“Did he say what?”
“No. Never does.”
“So you have no idea what this urgent meeting was about?”
Carla rolled her eyes. “I’ve said, haven’t I?”
“Weren’t you angry, though?”
“A bit,” she purred, “if I’m honest. I was looking forward to my dinner for one thing.”
Rathe leaned forward. “And for another thing… ?”
Carla’s eyes drifted from his to her glass, but the battle was short lived and Rathe’s intense stare won the war. “Maybe I didn’t like what sort of business Harry was talking about.”
Cook sneered. “You know what sort of business Mack’s into, Carla.”
Rathe was smiling, but his eyes were filled with a dark understanding. “She doesn’t mean business for money. Do you, Carla? You mean business for pleasure.” A pause. “Who was she?”
Carla began to pick at one of her scarlet, false nails. “I don’t know.”
“But you have suspicions?” pressed Rathe.
“Sort of.”
Rathe bent closer. For that instant, nothing in Carla Malone’s world existed except for him. “An old flame of his?”
The girl showed her age in a petulant sniff. “Harry and me was walking through town one night, on our way to a club. All of a sudden, he turns me round and we start walking back the way we’d come. I didn’t question it. You don’t question anything with Harry, not really. You just go with it, get me? But I looked back over my shoulder and there was this sulky old bitch staring after us.”
“Did you recognise her?” asked Cook.
“Sort of. I’d seen her sitting outside Harry’s house a few times, just staring at it, like she was plucking up the balls to get out of her car and knock on the front door. She never did. Used to just sit there, staring, then drive off.”
“But you don’t know who this woman is?” pressed Rathe.
“Never seen her before.”
Rathe looked over to Cook. The detective glared back, conscious that there was something in the younger man’s eyes which suggested some sense of finality to the matter. Rathe’s expression was strange, not exactly triumphant but not exclusively malignant either. It was a curious blend of the two, as though he was satisfied with his conclusion but furious that he had not seen it sooner. Cook kept his eyes on Rathe as the latter turned his attention back to Carla Malone.
“You were right, Miss Malone,” Rathe said. “Your Harry was a victim. As much a victim of murder as Lenny Voss himself was.”
* * *
Almost eleven at night and the only sound was the ticking of the clock which stood on the mantelpiece. Rathe stared at it for a long moment, wondering how it could be that the minutes continued to tick by when, in the room itself, time seemed to have stopped. He had declined the invitation of a seat, preferring to stand by the window as if to remind himself that there was still a world outside which was nothing to do with murder and violence or him. Cook had accepted the offer, however, sitting himself down in one of the leather armchairs placed in the corner of the room. Both men had refused a drink, so she helped herself.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Shelly Voss said as she dropped the ice into the glass.
“I want you to tell me the truth,” Rathe said. “Just like I wanted when I first came here.”
“Why you? Why not the policeman over there?” Shelly indicated Cook with a tilt of her head.
Rathe moved so that he was closer to her. “Because it’s me that wants to hear you say it. Inspector Cook knows it’s the truth, just as much as I do. He doesn’t care if you say it or not. But I do.”
“Why?”
“Because I think I understand.” He looked into the blue circles of her eyes. “And I’m old fashioned.”
Despite herself, she smiled. “Why didn’t I meet you twenty years ago, do you suppose?”
Rathe did not return the smile. “Tell me the truth.”
She filled the glass with gin, added so little tonic it was virtually redundant. As redundant as her refusal to speak, was the thought which occurred to Rathe’s mind. Shelly looked up at him as she drank. “You think you understand? See if you’re right.”
He watched her cross the room and sit down, one leg draping itself over the other. He closed his eyes, wishing she was not forcing his hand like this, but knowing too well that every second her mouth remained closed was one more lost chance for her to do some good.
“All right,” he conceded at last. “Have it your way. Perhaps I will have a drink after all.”
A signal from Cook showed that no drink was required by him, so Rathe filled a tumbler with Scotch and began to pace the room, gathering his thoughts.
“Harry Mack was sentenced for the murder of your husband and nobody gave a damn about it. A world without Harry Mack free in it was a better place for all concerned. That was what everybody thought, except for that man sitting over there. The man who led the investigation into your husband’s murder. If it hadn’t been for Cook, Mack would have gone down in history as the killer of Lenny Voss and everybody would have been happy.” He pointed a finger at Shelly. “Including you. Because you wanted them both out of the way, but for very different reasons. Isn’t that right, Shelly?”
She drank some gin. “Keep talking, Mr Rathe.”
“The more I listened to Cook, the more I began to think he was right,” Rathe continued. “The evidence against Mack was almost unbearably weak, so much so that if he hadn’t been who and what he is, the case would never have seen the inside of a Courtroom. The trial was opportunistic, a perverse charade of justice in action, but it was allowed to happen because Mack was an animal. And, in many ways that was the point.”
“In what ways?” hissed Shelly.
“All in good time,” replied Rathe. “Carla Malone was the crucial witness in this case. It wasn’t until she accused Cook of framing Mack that I began to see the truth. She said Harry was the victim of a frame up by the police, by Cook in particular. But she was wrong. Harry was framed, yes, but not by the police. They simply drew the obvious conclusion which they had been led to draw. The marks on Lenny’s face and the public argument between the two men were all indicative of Harry’s guilt. But if Carla and Cook were both right, and if Mack had been framed, then whoever had done it must have had a reason, both to kill Lenny and frame Mack. And that person must have known Mack and Lenny well enough to be able to mimic Mack’s murderous trademarks and know that he would have a possible motive to murder Lenny because of that fall out between them.”
“Any number of their boys would have known that,” said Shelly.
“True. But they would also know that Mack had taken his revenge on Lenny by beating him half senseless. You wouldn’t know that. After all, as you told me, you no longer shared the same bed, let alone the same life. Do you remember saying that?”
“I remember,” she spat. She got up to fill her glass.
“You knew enough about Mack and Lenny to mimic the tell-tale cuts and fabricate the motive; but you didn’t know quite enough to know that the motive wasn’t viable any more. And you didn’t know because both men had abandoned you. Lenny had abandoned you for Harry Mack, in some sort of new-found loyalty to his childhood friend. And Mack had abandoned you… for Carla Malone.” She remained motionless, but Rathe could tell from the whitened knuckles that his words had stung. “You and Mack had been lovers. He told me himself he had a string of lovers, the spice of variety in his life. I couldn’t be sure but it didn’t seem too much of a leap to suppose that you might have been one of them, Shelly. You’d be close to him through Lenny, through the same man who was ignoring you emotionally and physically. The same man you were growing to despise.�
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She shook her head. “I loved Lenny.”
Cook had risen too, closing in for the kill. “But he was taking your Danny away from you, wasn’t he? You were watching your son follow Lenny’s lead into crime. To drugs, to guns, to whatever else.”
Rathe was behind her, his voice softer. “You said to me that Harry manipulated Lenny. Did he manipulate you into believing he loved you, that he would take care of Danny, that you were the one who mattered to him?”
Her tears now fell like autumn rain. “I knew what he was like. I knew what he was. But I just wanted someone to hold me, to tell me I was beautiful.” She looked into Rathe’s eyes and he felt his heart turn into ashes. “I wanted someone to tell me I was a woman. When your life has gone like mine, you take what little you can get. I don’t expect you two to understand what that’s like, but believe me it’s true. And the little I could get was Harry bloody Mack. From Lenny to Harry, from muck to shit.”
Rathe placed a hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t fall into his embrace this time. She remained standing, crying. “If you knew about the argument over Frank Lovett, you could engineer the phone call to Mack which would get him out of the way. There was no reason for Harry to think it was you. A little softening of the voice and he’d never make any connection with you. He’d take it for granted, because that’s what people are like. He took it as the voice of a young kid. But Lovett doesn’t have young kids in his gang.”
Cook was staring at Rathe, his attention seized by the younger man’s words. “So it really was Mack in his car driving up to Newcastle?”
Rathe nodded, turning to the inspector. “You told me yourself that Mack was in the habit of loaning out cars for certain business trips he couldn’t be bothered to make himself. The implication was that when the business was important enough, Mack would deal with it in person. He himself didn’t deny making the journey north when I interviewed him.”
Cook grunted in agreement. “After that mess of a first meeting, any call from Frank Lovett would be important enough to drag Mack wherever he was told.”
When Anthony Rathe Investigates Page 9