“Where is she?” I shouted.
I thought he was going to scream, but terror became puzzlement and he stood looking at me over the safety of the car.
“Where is who? What are you talking about?”
I looked in the back of the car, then I opened the boot. A neat little tool bag, a torch and two folding picnic chairs. My breathing slowed down to the cold realisation that I had probably got it all wrong. Damn damn damn.
“You were parked outside my flat. You were talking on your mobile, you looked at me then drove off.”
He stared as if he wanted to cry.
“Yes. I stopped because my phone rang. My wife – she told me to get home quickly because my brother’s had a heart attack.”
“I’m sorry. Did you see a young woman with blondish hair, slim, in jeans, go by?”
“What? No. I was on the bloody phone. My brother is in hospital. He might be dead for all I know. What the hell are you up to? Who are you? Why do you want to hurt me?”
“What’s your brother’s name?” I asked.
“What? Barry. Why do you… what’s going on?”
By now cars had stopped. People were watching the spectacle. I realised I must look like a barking clown and was in imminent danger of the police being called, so I did what the occasion demanded – I took out my wallet. Luckily I also had my cheque book. I must be one of the few people in the western hemisphere who still uses them. He tried to back away when I walked around the car, so I held out the cheque book. I asked him his name. Malcolm Hardy.
“Look. It’s all a terrible mistake, Malcolm. I’m a doctor – see? A top psychiatrist. Dr. Paul Rook – it’s on the cheque. A young woman has just escaped from an asylum. She’s dangerous, mad, psychotic. I was told she got in a blue Audi – so you see how it happened. A perfectly rational error. The police have already been informed. And here…” I wrote out a cheque for three hundred pounds, “…this should cover the cost of the window, and your trouble. The insurance would take ages because of the extraordinary circumstances. Take it. Three hundred pounds.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and left him looking at the cheque, then at me, his wits long gone.
I drove home. The silver Mercedes was parked outside. I got the number plate: CDF 808P. The driver obviously saw me in the mirror and moments later the car pulled away. Cass. I ran through the front door and upstairs. Cass was sitting by the front door, her back against it, cheeks grubby and tear-stained. I sat down next to her and she hid her face in my shoulder. I could hear her breathing. I’m sure I could hear her heart beat, or was it my own?
“I’m sorry, Cass,” I said.
“I’m sorry. You were only saying what you thought was best,” she said.
I thought my heart was going to bleed dry.
“I forgot my key. Were you out looking for me?” she asked. I nodded. “I hope you didn’t do anything stupid, like you usually do.”
“No,” I said. What would be the point in saying anything? The truth was too hideously comical. “The thing is, Cass, when I worry about you my judgement goes AWOL, and that puts us both in more danger.”
She nodded and a large jewel of a tear zigzagged down her cheek.
“I could just do the safe stuff,” she said.
I smiled. We went inside. On the first floor the flat door was open – had I left it unlocked? We both stopped at the living room door and stared at the carnage.
Chapter Fourteen
I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations – one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it – you will regret both.
Kierkegaard
Someone had made one hell of a mess. Furniture was broken, books and papers were scattered everywhere, cushions were slashed, food and milk from the fridge had been thrown on the floor, pictures yanked off the wall and the glass smashed. I made sure the intruder was no longer there though I was fairly sure I’d seen him drive away in the Merc. Fedora man. The acid scare had also been a way of keeping us occupied while my flat could be ransacked. My laptop had been taken, but it was so heavily encrypted it would take a cyber-genius to get into it, and I had copies of everything. The papers Cass had stuck to the wall regarding the Hebden case were gone, so Brissot would soon know what we knew. What really annoyed me was that they hadn’t had the courtesy to turn off the hob and the linguine had sizzled to a brown frazzle in the bottom of the pan and was gently smoking. Thankfully I don’t have a smoke alarm so there was no din to contend with. I could see Cass was starting to panic so I suggested that we draw a line under a remarkably mixed evening and go out for a pizza. The mess wasn’t going anywhere fast. The break in had a dual purpose. First, to find out what we knew. Second, by creating such carnage, to scare us by showing we were dealing with someone who wasn’t frightened of going a little crazy.
The next morning I rang a locksmith to come and secure the place. I waited until he arrived and left Cass to her essay and to see if she could find out anything about Sarah Davenport, Freud’s crystal woman, the image of whom he still carried around in some deranged annex of his mind. It seemed a safe enough job. With a “Be careful, Dad” still in my ears, I looked around outside, and wondered if I was being watched. I drove to the university, put in a requisition for a new laptop and went to my office. Alfred was extremely pleased to see me and came straight to my shoulder and started nibbling my ear and whispering lines from The Charge of the Light Brigade. Kierkegaard the hamster was patrolling his cage in search of anything edible, his little cheeks already stuffed with morning goodies that Mrs. Simpson had fed him. I started to go over the case again and again, to see if I’d missed anything. Sometimes the act of recreating the past, step by laborious and detailed step, can pitch in a new insight. What had I missed? Something was starting to form in my mind when the door opened and Audrey stood, dressed in what appeared to be a bacofoil shirt and a skirt that thankfully hid her legs. I wondered if she had taken a foundation course in bad taste.
She looked distastefully at Alfred. He wolf whistled at her. She was about to speak when she saw the hamster. Her distaste turned to disgust.
“What is that mouse doing here?”
“Kierkegaard? He’s taking the First Year Option in Methods of Philosophical Enquiry. And he’s not a mouse, he’s a hamster. He’d be most offended to be called a mere mouse, but luckily his mind is obviously on higher things and he didn’t hear you rustle in.”
Given her failed attempt to have Alfred thrown off campus, she made some mental adjustments, swallowed her bile, for now at least, and smirked slightly. Things were heating up nicely between us.
“Dr. Rook, just to let you know that arrangements for your placement are finalised. Tomorrow you will teach an Introduction to Philosophy class to a group of teenagers who have either been excluded or expelled from conventional schools. It should be an interesting challenge. I sent you an email with the details but perhaps you didn’t read it?”
Of course I hadn’t read it. I smiled and said nothing. Savouring her victory she turned and rustled from the room like an overcooked turkey. I got back to work. My earlier ruminations kept returning to Hebden’s offices and the floor below. I’d made too many assumptions: that it really was a security measure to rent a whole floor of offices below – increasingly it didn’t make sense. The sheer expense would prohibit it – better to spend ten grand on enhanced security. I needed to go back. Cass rang and either she had a streak of genius for finding people, or she’d struck lucky. Freud had mentioned that Sarah Davenport went to Warwick University and Cass, pretending to work for a solicitor’s, fabricated a story to the alumni office, ever greedy to squeeze cash from former students, about Sarah coming into an enormous inheritance and how if they could trace her they would make a fat contribution to the university’s coffers from their own considerable fee. Never underestimate the power of greed. Sarah Davenport was now Sarah Chander and living in Banbury. The address was also a surgery
so she’d either become a GP or married one. I could stop there after my trip back to Birmingham.
*
The door code still worked at the office block where Hebden had died. I was half expecting a fruitless journey because the whole office area should now be a crime scene swarming with police. I was surprised. No yellow tape, no vans, no bustle of uniforms – nothing. It didn’t make sense and increased my suspicions. I went up to the twentieth floor. The security camera had been removed. Dancy had cleared her desk and obviously moved on. Hebden’s office door was open and inside someone had done an excellent evacuation job. No sign of the body, the carpets and windows scrubbed bloodless. This was not police work. Had Brissot or someone else decided to clean up the mess? If the killer had been involved, then why make the mess in the first place? And why hadn’t Dancy contacted the police? Perhaps she had been considered too dangerous and someone had ensured her permanent disappearance too. Everything here had the smell of mystery. I closed my eyes and felt ghosts scream at me.
I went down to the nineteenth floor again. What had seemed inconsequential detritus before now seemed crowded with meaning. Storage boxes and flattened cardboard – for what? Cleaning fluids. Why clean somewhere you didn’t use? Dozens of packets of aspirin – so who had the headaches? Tea bags and packets of sugar – in an unused suite of offices? I looked at the white patches on the floor, where I thought plaster or paint had flaked away. I knelt down and tasted the white powder. I expected cocaine but it had the sharp taste of aspirin. Perhaps this was a drugs den and someone was using aspirin to cut the coke and increase profit.
I heard a sound behind me and turned. Marty Hebden, unshaven and ragged-eyed, looked at me. He held a knife in his right hand and pointed it as he came for me.
Chapter Fifteen
The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.
Albert Einstein
I got to my feet and stumbled back against the wall. I was pinioned between another wall and a metal desk. The only way was forward. Marty kept coming, a feverish determination about him. The knife was viciously thin, with a serrated edge, about six inches long, the kind used for gutting fish.
“Marty! Wait!” I said.
He kept coming and when he was about a metre away he stopped and looked at me. A stale smell emanated from him, as if his life was poisoned and seeping from his pores, an infinitely painful weariness in his expression, beyond appeal, beyond regret. His life in the raw moment was a pitiful thing, even as he was about to take mine. He pulled his right arm back to stab me. My legs seemed to have turned to mush. I put out my right hand in a feeble effort at defence, and foolishly had a flash of guilt that I hadn’t been to see my mother for months, followed by an exhausted and bitter sense of failure. I’d neglected her, even though after a lifetime of silence she had recently scrawled my father’s name for me: Pete James. And I hadn’t even bothered to try and trace him, after a lifetime of whining that I didn’t know who he was. Nearly everything had been a shameful waste of time. I hoped Cass and Mrs. Simpson would keep Alfred and Kierkegaard safe from the clutches of Audrey. I wished Lizzie would kiss me one last time. I wish I’d written my book on Nietzsche. Marty was looking at me curiously, as if he wanted permission to kill me.
“You have no idea what a complete idiot I am,” I said.
Marty breathed out heavily, a dire tobacco stained rasp from some dark cave of the soul. Time seemed like a bell waiting to clang the end of everything. Suddenly he swapped the knife into his left hand, blade first, and held the handle out to me. I stared at it stupidly and he waved it, annoyed. I took the knife, amazed, as he stood looking at me. He breathed heavily, his face waxy and unshaven, sleep a mere memory to those ruby-rimmed eyes. He whispered something I couldn’t hear properly. Then he focussed.
“Go on. Do it. Stick me,” he said. “I’m so bloody tired.”
I turned the knife and a sliver of light danced on the blade.
“How about a cup of tea first?” I said. “I’m sure I saw a kettle around here.”
Fifteen minutes later we were sitting on the floor with mugs of tea, two haggard refugees from some ordeal that neither of us understood properly. Marty took back the knife and dug bits of pile from the carpet with it while we talked. He explained that his addiction to gambling had led to heavy borrowing from Brissot, about which his brother knew nothing. Brissot had taken the half million and paintings on account and told Marty that to properly clear his debt he’d have to kill his brother too, because Andy wanted to sever the business connection with Brissot. Marty agreed but then lost his nerve and disappeared – now there was a contract out on him and he had been hiding on the nineteenth floor for the past two days.
“Andy’s death is my fault. It should have been me.”
“So who did kill Andy?” I asked.
Marty shrugged. “One of Brissot’s team.”
“Or more than one?”
He shrugged again.
“Why kill him anyway?”
“Because Brissot wouldn’t trust him, nor me, if we weren’t still involved. Damn, we only got into bed with him because I insisted. I thought the profits would set us up for life. By the time Andy knew what was really going on it was too late, but he still wanted out. I told him – you don’t get out – not with a creature like Brissot.”
I picked up a pinch of the crushed aspirin. “You were cutting coke. A lot of it to judge by the storage boxes.”
Marty smiled ruefully and shook his head. “Worse, a thousand times worse,” he said.
There was a story here and I was only standing at its murky edge.
“I have an errand to fulfil, then I’m driving to London to see someone. You can’t stay here forever. Come with me, you can tell me all about the business while we drive.”
Marty looked around.
“What the hell? I’m a dead man anyway.”
By the time we reached Banbury I knew the whole sordid tale. Brissot’s main business was pharmaceutical drugs, particularly to combat malaria, typhoid and AIDS, sold in massive quantities to some of the poorest countries in the world – Somalia, the Congo, Ecuador, and through the agency of a charitable trust which financed the offset costs so that the drugs could be sold so cheaply. Only most of the drugs were simply crushed aspirin, reconstituted and sugar coated in various colours, then repackaged. The toll in human life, suffering and misery, must have been monumental, as were the profits. The supply company kept having its name switched and was never traceable to Brissot directly; neither was the charitable trust. Some of the shipments were bona fide, and this helped the argument that the legitimate cargo was ‘infected’ by rogue replacements in the indigenous countries by corrupt officials, whereas the opposite was true. The names of the drivers were code names for particular charities.
The implications sank in. I don’t love humanity in the abstract. In fact I don’t love it at all. My few affections are specific, but even I went cold at the thought of thousands, perhaps millions, needlessly suffering or destroyed by one man’s desire for profit. Marty had no idea what ‘sugartop’, Sam’s last word, could mean. Nor did he know where I could find anything to incriminate Brissot. Nor did he know the silver Mercedes. I’d checked it and the licence plate was a fake.
“You know what’s really weird about Brissot? I mean, we’re all in the same grubby bed with these dodgy drugs, but with him… I said once I felt a bit queasy about it. All those people. And he said that’s precisely what he liked about it. Fucking weird, eh?”
I was beginning to seriously dislike Brissot, even if he did have a worthy ancestor. I assumed Darnel and my mysterious stalker in the fedora hat were both involved in killing Andy and arranging the body so strangely. I’d been wrong about Marty being the killer. Perhaps the bizarre arrangement of the body was Brissot’s idea – certainly the man cultivated expensive and bad tastes in strange measure.
In Banbury, a
nother of those faceless midland towns, I found the surgery of Dr. M. Chander. Marty stayed in the car and I got out and rang the house bell by the side. A boy of four or five with dark saucer eyes opened it and looked at me somnolently until his mother, a pretty petite woman with shining loose velvet-brown hair and cat-green eyes, arrived and put her arms on his shoulders as she stood behind him. I smiled.
“I’m merely a messenger. Someone asked me to look you up. They want to know how you are,” I said.
“Who?”
She looked worried.
“Freud. Although I believe you knew him as Septimus King.”
She gasped and looked panicked. A thousand small readjustments occurred as she looked over my shoulder to make sure he wasn’t actually there.
“He’s not here, and I’ll never tell him where you are. He just wants to know you’re OK, and I see that you are,” I said.
She nodded.
“Adios,” I said, and turned to leave.
“Is he…?” she began, but then the question dissolved into, I imagine, a thousand memories.
I turned back. “Yes. He is,” I said. It didn’t matter what she had meant. Is he in a bad way? Is he psychotic? Is he a flaming nutter under a curse? Is he baroquely unhinged but still glittering with intelligence? The answer would always be yes. Then I left.
In the car Marty seemed even more exhausted, as if telling his story had emptied him of what was left of his life. I had no idea what to do with him.
“What now?” he asked.
“Now, I’m going to get Jacques Brissot.”
Marty turned and faced me.
“You’ll never get Brissot. He’s beyond it. It’s as if there’s something protecting him.”
“Like what?”
“Evil.”
Perhaps there really is such a thing as evil. And perhaps it wears a Gucci suit and makes millions from the suffering of others. Perhaps its name is Brissot.
Chapter Sixteen
Beyond Good and Evil Page 7