Across the hall was a dining room with a large oak table and matching chairs and behind it a small room with a modern desk in one corner. Its drawers had been forced open but they seemed to have contained nothing more exciting than a telephone directory. If this were Piggott’s study, he certainly didn’t use it.
Upstairs, more policemen were combing the three bedrooms. All were pristine, decorated in the antiseptic style of a chain hotel, and so devoid of anything personal that it was impossible to make out in which of them Piggott slept.
When they came downstairs they found the sergeant in the kitchen, where the elderly housekeeper was sitting at the table drinking a mug of tea, seemingly oblivious to the comings and goings of the policemen.
Binding, showing his frustration, asked, ‘Anything?’ But the sergeant shook his head.
‘Is there a cellar?’ asked Liz.
‘Yes. There is. But there’s nothing down there. Do you want to see? ‘He led her down a flight of stairs by the back door into a small, empty room, with a rough cement floor and cold brick walls.
‘Not even a rack for wine,’ said Binding, who’d followed them down.
Liz was looking round at the walls. ‘There’s something weird about this room,’ she said suddenly.
‘What?’ asked Binding.
‘When do you think this house was built?’
Binding shrugged. ‘Not that long ago. I’d have thought the land was part of the estate, then got sold to someone who put a house on it. I don’t know – maybe thirty, forty years ago. Why?’
‘Well, an old house would have a cellar – a wine cellar, cold rooms for storage, that sort of thing. But if you built a cellar in a house this age, surely you’d make it a decent size, wouldn’t you? Why go to the trouble of digging it out just to make a tiny little room like this. What’s the point of it?’
‘You’re right, Liz,’ chipped in Peggy, who had joined them in the little room. ‘You’d make it a basement, like the Americans have. Rooms you could use.’
‘Meaning what?’ asked Binding.
‘Meaning we’ve been looking for even one room that showed signs of Piggott using it, and there haven’t been any. So maybe there’s another room. Hidden. One that we haven’t found yet.’
Binding’s lips tightened, but he said nothing.
‘What do you think that’s for?’ asked Peggy, pointing to a metal box on a bracket halfway up one of the brick walls.
The sergeant poked at it, trying to open it. ‘It’s locked. There’s no sign of a key anywhere here. Perhaps the housekeeper has it. I’ll go and ask her.’
‘Don’t bother with her,’ Binding ordered. ‘Break it open.’ And five minutes later, with the aid of a crowbar from the boot of one of the patrol cars, the small metal door was off its hinges.
Inside was a switch, like the switch in a fuse box. It was up. The policeman looked questioningly at Binding, who nodded. ‘Here goes then,’ said the policeman, and pulled down the switch.
Immediately a low grinding noise came from behind them, and the entire far wall started moving on tracks, opening to reveal a room on the other side.
Liz moved forward slowly, taking in the comfortable furnishings. On the desk lay a neat stack of files; she picked up the top one, then showed its label to Peggy who was standing beside her. Fraternal Holdings Q4. This must be Piggott’s office.
The sergeant was pointing to something in the corner of the room. ‘Yes, what is it?’
‘It’s a folding bed, miss.’
Binding said, ‘Surely Piggott didn’t sleep here.’
‘I suppose he might have done. Or possibly,’ Liz said grimly, ‘it’s where they kept Dave.’
Just then a young constable came running down from the kitchen, his shoes clacking loudly on the stairs. ‘Sarge,’ he said, panting breathlessly, ‘they’ve found something in the grounds. Can you come?’
‘What is it?’ asked Binding.
The constable hesitated, and looked to his sergeant for guidance. ‘Go on lad,’ said the sergeant. ‘Spit it out.’
The constable nodded. ‘It’s graves, sir. Two of them. They said you’d want to know right away.’
Liz counted seventeen people, all of them male, including two pathologists and a deputy superintendent of police. Three hours had elapsed since the youthful policeman had run down the stairs to the cellar, time that seemed endless to Liz as she waited for what she felt was certain to be bad news.
The wind had dropped and the rain had turned to a steady drizzle as she and Binding and Peggy stood huddled together under one of the tall oaks. Someone had produced coffee in plastic cups and they warmed their hands as they waited for news in the fading light. Not fifty feet from them two white tents had been erected over the graves – temporary morgues. Inside them the grisly work of disinterment proceeded. There had already been a leak to the press – they’d heard that several reporters had arrived, but were being held at the police post in the National Trust gatehouse.
At last a policeman beckoned and Liz went forward. Binding touched her arm, but she shook her head – she’d do the identifying, since she was more likely than he to recognise the second body. They would all be able to identify one of them, she thought grimly.
She stooped down to enter the tent and was momentarily blinded by the dazzling light of the halogen lamp hanging from the top pole. A curious, sickly, chemical smell hung in the air. The pathologist looked eerie in his white suit and surgical gloves and beside him a constable in uniform stood looking. A sheet covered the body on the ground.
‘Ready?’ asked the pathologist.
Liz nodded, taking a deep breath, trying to prepare herself for the worst. The constable pulled back the sheet and she looked down.
She allowed herself to breathe out. It wasn’t Dave. A young man with dark hair lay on his back, looking startlingly peaceful. He could have been asleep, were it not for the black hole in his temple. The bottom of one of his trouser legs was darkly stained, as if it had been soaked in ink.
‘Do you recognise this man?’ asked the constable.
‘No,’ said Liz quietly, and saw out of the corner of her eye that Michael Binding had come into the tent. ‘But I think I know who it is. Tell me how tall he is. I can’t judge, looking down at him like this.’
‘Between five six and five seven,’ said the pathologist.
Liz turned to Binding, who was still blinking as his eyes adjusted to the harsh light of the overhead lamp. ‘It’s almost certainly Sean McCarthy. He was the gunman who shot Jimmy Fergus. Jimmy hit him in the leg when he fired back at him. He described him as short and dark-haired.’
Binding nodded, looking stunned. Liz took another deep breath. ‘Right. Now let me see the other one.’
They followed the pathologist and the constable in a sombre procession, outside through the drizzle and into the adjacenttent. Again, a sheet covered a disinterred corpse lying on the ground. And the same sickly smell hung around.
Liz felt sick and as she stepped forward she gritted her teeth to prevent her gorge rising. Why had Dave been so stupid? And why hadn’t she rung from Paris, or London? Anything to avoid this. She waited as the police officer reached down to pull back the sheet, bracing herself for how the familiar features would look. She only hoped it had been quick for Dave at the end.
‘No!’ she shouted as the sheet went back. For the face that stared up at her with dead blank eyes was not Dave’s. Someone else lay on the ground. A much older man than Dave. But the face was familiar.
‘What is it, Liz?’ Binding demanded, seeing her astonishment.
‘This is Dermot O’Reilly.’ Her voice trembled with a mixture of relief and horror. ‘It’s Dave’s informant, Brown Fox.’
44
Nausea. Whenever it seemed to subside, it would quickly come back. Dave couldn’t think about anything else, as fresh spasms gripped him.
He felt the floor beneath him rocking gently, and heard a faint smacking sound – water slapping
against wood. He must be on a boat, below deck, in some kind of hold. The throbbing background noise was the engine; the rocking, which was making him feel so sick, was the boat’s movement through choppy waters.
Dave had no idea where he was, but he knew that he had been out of it for a long time. He wanted to flex his arms, but as he tried to lift one he found it held fast to his side. He was lying on a low camp bed and he saw that he had been tied up – very neatly, like a chicken painstakingly trussed before cooking.
So he was a prisoner. But whose? He tried to remember how he had got here. Gradually coming to, he found images were flickering in a bewildering sequence through his head. A small room, with a desk and chairs. Across the desk a man, speaking with a strong accent – a foreigner, who had been trying to sell Dave something, hadn’t he? He remembered the voice behind him, guttural, foreign, and a bulky man with a gun in his hand.
Then another room, some sort of library this time, and the cold unfeeling eyes of the man who’d injected him in the arm. What was his name?
Suddenly the hold door swung open and Dave was half-blinded by an incoming rush of light. He blinked and made out a figure looming in the doorway. A familiar man with a dark face – did he know his name either? – who was holding a tray, which he put carefully on the floor. Reaching down, he suddenly grabbed Dave with both hands and flipped him over like a fish, so that he flopped off the bed and lay face down on the floor.
He could feel the man fiddling with the rope that bound his hands. ‘Where are we?’ Dave managed to ask. The man ignored him. When he’d untied the knots he hauled Dave roughly up onto his knees and put the tray down with his free hand in front of Dave.
‘Eat,’ he said tersely.
Dave looked down at the plate, where a watery stew lay on a small pile of mash. It looked revolting, and his nausea surged again. He clenched his jaw, but there was nothing he could do to stop himself as he vomited straight onto the plate.
The foreign man stepped back in disgust, then quickly left the room. Dave moaned and retched again, propping himself on his hands and trying to still the spasms in his stomach. I need to get out of here, he told himself dimly, realising that his legs were still tied. He reached down and touched the knots of the ropes at each knee, then tried to pick at them with his fingernails.
The foreigner returned. He held a syringe in one hand and a pistol in the other. He pointed the gun at Dave and motioned him to leave the knots alone. Then the man leaned down, ignoring the spattered plate on the floor, and plunged the syringe straight into Dave’s arm before he had time to object.
‘Where are we?’ Dave asked again, this time more feebly. He felt fatigue settling on him like snow, and struggled to keep awake. It was no good; he barely noticed as his head fell back against the wall, and realised he could no longer keep his eyes open.
‘Suenos dulces,’ the man said.
45
Peggy put the phone down at the end of yet another call. She lifted her head for a moment to look out of the window and realised that it was morning. A brilliant red sun like a perfectly round tomato was just appearing over one of the barracks buildings, making the frost-covered tiles sparkle. She had been working all night.
The discovery of the bodies buried at Piggott’s County Down house had energised everyone. Until then, no one had admitted that they thought Dave was dead, but Peggy knew that she wasn’t the only one who had been secretly thinking it. Now, perhaps illogically, when dead bodies had been discovered and Dave’s was not one of them, they had all begun to think that he was alive.
The forensic teams were still hard at work in the County Down house and its grounds, and it would be some time before their efforts produced anything for the investigators to work on. But one thing had been discovered straight away that had kept her at work all night. When Dermot O’Reilly’s body had been disinterred, in his trouser pocket they’d found his mobile phone. In their haste to get rid of the body and go, his murderers must have overlooked it. The pathologist had said that O’Reilly had been dead no more than twenty-four hours and that he had been buried very soon after death. So as Peggy had trawled through the phone’s memory of calls made and received, she had concentrated on the period shortly before his death.
It was the final call that the phone had received that interested her most. And, after a night spent in conversation with a variety of contacts in different agencies, she now knew that the call the phone had received at five p.m. the afternoon of Reilly’s death had been made from a mobile phone that was at that time somewhere in County Down. Dermot’s phone had been in Belfast when the call was answered.
It seemed to Peggy fair to assume that the call had been connected to Dermot’s visit to Piggott’s farmhouse. It could well have been the call summoning him to his death. As she contemplated her night’s work, she had the satisfaction that though she didn’t know who had made that call or even whose phone it was – it was a throw-away phone, bought recently at a shop in Belfast with no service contract – if that phone came on the air again, she would be immediately notified. She’d circulated the details to all foreign liaison intelligence agencies and at last, it seemed to Peggy’s tired mind, there was a chance of getting somewhere in the search for the people who had taken Dave.
She stared again at the list of numbers on the sheet in front of her, wondering if there was anything more she could do. Most were landline numbers in Belfast, some mobile calls traced through the local transmitters. One number had immediately stuck out – a twenty-minute call three days ago to a landline with an area code in one of the southern suburbs of Dublin. Peggy had been onto the Garda in the Republic, and they’d moved quickly, but it turned out that the number belonged to the sister of Dermot O’Reilly’s wife. Two hours wasted on a false alarm.
As she sat at her table, her eyes drooping now, Judith Spratt came into the office.
‘Morning, Judith. I wasn’t expecting you. Who’s looking after Daisy?’ asked Peggy.
‘Bridget Kearne’s taking her to school. Daisy’s taken a real shine to her. She’s now saying she never liked Mrs Ryan; she said she was scary. Children are strange. She always seemed very fond of her to me.’
‘What have you told her about why Mrs Ryan’s leaving?’
‘I just said she had to stay at home because her son was ill. It’s funny how you tell lies to kids without a second thought.’
‘Well, that seems reasonable enough. You could hardly tell her that Mrs Ryan hated us all. Or that her son had tried to kill Liz.’
‘No. That’s true,’ said Judith. ‘By the way, you probably haven’t heard, but A4 now accept that Liz’s car was tampered with. Apparently the nuts holding the wheel bearing had been overtightened; if you do that the bearing can collapse and the tyre shreds. Suddenly you’re veering all over the road. It’s the kind of mistake an amateur can easily make, but not an experienced mechanic. So they’re certain it was done on purpose.’ Judith shook her head. ‘It’s difficult to imagine how someone as young as Danny Ryan could feel that level of hatred for someone he’d never met. Anyway the police have got him now – he was caught speeding just outside Newry yesterday. He was going eighty-five in a forty-mile-an-hour zone.’
‘Good. Maybe they’ll get something out of him,’ said Peggy. ‘Though if his mother’s anything to go by, he’ll keep his mouth firmly shut. A nasty piece of work – that goes for both of them.’
‘I know. It doesn’t do to forget how much hatred there is still around in this place. But tell me about last night. I’ve only heard snippets from Liz – I saw her when she got back to her flat and gave her a whisky. She seemed shattered.’
‘We all were. Especially when the bodies were found. I think everybody was certain one of them would be Dave. It was worse for Liz than any of us. She was really brave, Judith. She had to look at the bodies to see if she could identify them; I know she was expecting to be staring down at Dave’s face.’ Peggy shuddered and the shudder turned into a yawn.
&nb
sp; ‘Peggy, you’ve been here all night, haven’t you? Go and get some breakfast. The canteen’s open. I’m going to start working on this boat theory.’
‘Boat?’ said Phil Robinson. He was up in Antrim, cleaning up the National Trust hides on the coast ready for the bird count that would begin in April. He sounded confused at first by Judith’s question. She had explained again that she was talking about the National Trust property in County Down and the neighbouring house. Had he seen a boat moored at the jetty there?
‘Ah,’ he said with sudden comprehension. ‘Yes indeed, I have seen a boat there sometimes. One of those rigid inflatables. It’s the dinghy from a big motor cruiser. I’ve seen the big boat anchored just offshore where the sea’s deeper. It’s hard to forget it. It’s one of those glitzy sort of things you see in the Caribbean or the Greek islands; there aren’t many of those on this side of the Irish Sea.’
‘It’s the motor cruiser I’m interested in. Can you describe it?’
Robinson thought for a minute. ‘Well, I’m not an expert, but I’d say it was a good thirty metres long, maybe longer. White with chrome railings all around, and a big open space on the rear deck. You could see it had several cabins below. Then there was a small upper deck, with a glass window all round it. I suppose that’s where it’s steered from. There was a sort of winch mechanism at the back that they used to haul up the dinghy. I watched them doing it one day. Very smooth operation it was.’
‘Was there anything else about it you remember?’
‘Yes, now that you mention it. It had a kind of squashed bow – it was wide, like a hammerhead shark. It gave the boat a powerful look.’
Judith had saved the obvious question for last. ‘I don’t suppose you noticed its name by any chance.’
Robinson laughed. ‘I thought you’d never ask. I do, because it sounded so peculiar. Mattapan, with a Roman numeral III next to it – so I guess you’d say ‘Mattapan the Third’. Not an emperor I’ve ever heard of.’
Present Danger Page 21