by Mike Ripley
‘So it was a case of while the cat’s away, the mice will play, was it?’
Will somebody please protect me from friendly policemen? There ought to be law against them.
‘If I wanted to play away from home, do you think I’d go to Wales?’
‘Fair point, sir, fair point.’
He wrote ‘Mr and Mrs Angle not at home’ and Tuesday’s date in his notebook.
‘What’s this all about, officer?’
‘The burglary,’ he said, putting his pen away.
‘We haven’t been burgled,’ I said.
Well, not recently. In London, it’s bound to be your turn sometime.
‘No, of course you haven’t. It was just in case you’d seen anything. We were looking for witness statements. It was that house over there got done.’
He pointed.
‘The Dunmores?’
He allowed himself a smirk. ‘Yeah, and him the big cheese in the Neighbourhood Watch.’
‘I bet he gave you lot some stick,’ I said.
‘He was about to, be we caught the guy. Though Mr Dunmore is going to tighten up procedures in the Watch ready for a rapid response, as he calls it.’
‘Good for you, catching the bloke.’
‘Wasn’t difficult. He was a bit of an old boy; an old lag, really. Had his pockets stuffed with Mrs Dunmore’s jewels out of the bedside table. He should have legged it, but he said he just couldn’t resist the wide-screen television. Got as far as the end of the street there and sat down on it. Had a smoke under the streetlight. God knows how he thought he’d get it on the tube. He was there when we arrived. Almost like he was waiting for us. Hard to believe, isn’t it?’
‘There’s just no understanding some people,’ I agreed.
I hoped Spider had a Happy Christmas.
Amy’s plane was not only on time, it was early, and she had already swanned through Customs weighed down with bags, one of them chinking.
‘You missed a treat!’ she said, loading me up with shopping bags.
‘Good time?’
‘Excellent businesswise, and I’ve got a tan to prove I did nothing in the afternoons. It’s far too hot to work out there except for about two hours a day. You’d love it.’
‘Would I have to do the full two hours every day?’
‘Not if you were sleeping with the boss. Don’t drop that one. There’s two bottles of a Spanish brandy that’s even worse than that Italian stuff you drink. Do not light a cigarette after that.’
In Armstrong, which I’d parked in the taxi rank, she asked me what I’d been doing with myself.
‘Touring around with the guys,’ I said, remembering my cover story. ‘We supported a Breton bagpipe band and a group called The Judith Charmers, would you believe.’
‘Believe not!’ she yelled in my ear.
‘They’re a good pub band,’ I protested.
They did exist and they were.
For the rest of the journey, it was mostly her talking about the Madrid fashion scene and which ideas she could steal, which trends she could start.
‘You’re very quiet,’ she said as we neared Hampstead.
‘Just impressed by the jet-set world of high fashion.’
‘High fashion? Cut ‘em low, price ‘em high. That’s all there is to it.’
She put her hand through the sliding partition and rubbed my shoulder.
‘I wished you’d come. It’ll probably be my last freebie abroad for a while.’
‘It will? Why?’
There was a pause before she answered.
‘A change of direction is called for. No, not called for, it’s actually coming. We have to adapt to it.’
‘That was a “we”, wasn’t it.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said suspiciously. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘No reason.’
‘Oh yes there must be. What is it? Do we need to talk?’
‘Probably.’
‘Oh, fuck. When you say “probably” like that it means you’ve been brooding.’
‘I have not been brooding.’
‘Yes you have. I can tell.’
‘I haven’t, I’ve been busy.’
‘Brood, brood, brood, brood ...’
‘We’ll talk inside,’ I said, as I turned into the street.
I had a feeling two bottles of Spanish rotgut wasn’t going to be enough.
We watched the tape together, or at least some of it.
Probably about 15 minutes of it, but it seemed longer. The tape was silent, so were we.
Then Amy stood up and grabbed the remote control, froze the image on the television screen and stood in front of it, hands on hips, staring at me.
She was wearing what she’d worn on the flight back: a white shirt and khaki cargo trousers with leg pockets that had never been used, and light brown suede shoes with kitten heels. With a military cap on she could have stepped out of a recruiting poster for Desert Storm.
‘A long time ago ...’
‘In a galaxy far, far away.’
‘Don’t interrupt me! Just listen!’
I nodded an apology.
‘This is something I was never going to tell you, because it happened before you. Just like I don’t want to know what you did before me. Can you understand? That should have gone – history. Good, bad history, gone. It was before you. Okay?
‘Keith and I got involved in a scam involving some European money.’
‘In Cardiff.’
‘I said don’t interrupt. This isn’t easy for me. You’ve no idea how this isn’t easy.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Yes, we were in Cardiff. Keith knew this solicitor on the make, a man called Hadyn Rees. He would help us by making everything look legal. Long and short of it was, we were getting a grant for one thing but spending the money on something else. I thought we were spending it on developing what became the TALtop, i.e. on my fashion ideas. Keith had other plans; but then, he was a psycho. When it all went ballistic, Hadyn Rees had it so that Keith took the fall. He deserved to. He’d become unstable by that time – even violent.
‘Years go by, right? Keith’s in prison, I meet you. Things have moved on. There’s you now.
‘Then Keith gets out of prison and starts making a nuisance of himself. Then he gets himself rearrested and everything’s back to normal. Well, it isn’t. I know it’s not the same, maybe it can’t be.
‘Because now Hadyn Rees comes out of the woodwork for some reason. He suspects Keith has some sort of revenge mission planned and he wants to make sure that Keith is stitched up good and proper this time. He’s got too big, too important, to have shadows from his past embarrassing him in court. He wants reassuring that Keith isn’t going to bring up old grievances.
‘So I have to go and reassure him, because Hadyn Rees has a long memory and so has his computer. He’s got everything to do with our early business on file, and that could damage me. Seriously. So I had to go and see him.’
She paused for breath. She was actually panting.
‘He was cited as co-respondent in your divorce,’ I said.
‘How did you find that out?’ she cracked back.
‘By accident, just like I found out your were fucking married before. I didn’t know that until a month ago.’
‘I said, that was before you. Now is with you. Nothing else counts.’Her face showed a half-hearted smile. ‘You’re jealous.’
‘And you’re pushing it.’
‘Yes I am, because it’s so fucking stupid.’
I knew it would all be my fault, but there was no stopping her now.
‘Think, man, for fuck’s sake. You’ve seen the tape, you’ve seen what Hadyn Rees likes from women. He likes them to sweat. He does a bit of nominal bondage, that’s true
, but mostly he just likes to watch them sweat. He doesn’t fuck them, he doesn’t whip them, he doesn’t verbally abuse them – he’s not even in the fucking room when it happens. He records them and watches later at his convenience and creams his jeans in front of the video. Do you honestly think there could be anything between me and a so-solid perv like that? Do you think I did that willingly? I did it to get the file from his computer. That was all. It was a business stratagem, nothing more. That was the deal. I played his games and gave him my underwear – oh, yeah, he collects female underwear.
‘Just a minute. Where did you get this fucking tape.’
‘It was with the others,’ I said.
‘Others?’
‘There were 16 in the house at Tregaron. He’d transferred the digital pictures from the camcorder on to his computer in some cases, but mostly they were video. He had a feed running through the wall into a VCR in the workshop.’
Amy put her hands back on her hips, looked at the floor and shook her head.
‘The fucker.’
I looked at her and, bizarrely, all I could think was that she was putting on a bit of weight.
‘Have you seen the end of this tape?’ she said, looking back at me.
‘No, not the end,’ I said nervously.
She grabbed the remote and fast forwarded to what I guessed was about the two hour mark. It took a few minutes. A few minutes of silence as she concentrated on the images flashing by. She was set on something, and it was like I wasn’t there.
‘There!’ she said triumphantly. ‘Watch this bit.’
There was Amy in her super-heated prison in Tregaron, chained to the radiator. There was Amy, skirt round her waist, suit jacket half-shrugged off her shoulders, her bra totally grey with sweat, her hair hanging in ribbons.
I didn’t see the point. I hadn’t watched this far because ... well, because it was obscene. It was revelling in someone’s powerlessness.
And then suddenly there was Amy, head up and alert, listening.
‘I heard his car go,’ she said, and her voice startled me. I had almost forgotten she was here, live, in the house.
On the screen, she waited, her head moving as if confirming something. Then she snapped the release button on the handcuffs – just like the Turner boys had done with me – and in an instant she was free and on her feet and marching towards the camera with a look on her face that would have frozen hell.
Then the tape went dark.
‘I took the memory disc out of the camera,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know the bastard had a video link-up.’
I eased my buttocks off the sofa and took out the tape I’d been sitting on.
‘And he made a copy so he could watch in the office.’
She didn’t take it from me. She sank to the floor, cross-legged, and sat in silence.
‘Cigarette?’ I asked her, producing a pack.
‘No, I’ve given up.’
That was news too.
‘I thought I was doing everything right. I got the company files off him, and then I thought I’d dealt with the camcorder,’ she said, as if trying to work out where she’d gone wrong.
‘Are you sure you cleaned out the computer?’ I asked.
‘Yes. I know what I’m doing there. The record’s gone. He’s got nothing anymore.’ She looked up at me. ‘Where did you get the tapes?’
‘I had help.’
‘You said there were more.’
‘He used to hire girls to ... perform for him. Paid well, so I’m told.’
‘There’s not that much money in the world.’
Her head sank down again.
‘I’m sure I’ve got the only ones with you, if that was the only time ...’
She flashed me a killer look.
‘Yes it was. And you know why I did it? Because it was the only way I could think of to protect us, what we have.’
I came out of the chair and put my arms round her.
‘I think you did a damn good job,’ I said. ‘And it’s over now. It’s then, this is now.’
‘I knew he was a perv. I just thought he I could outsmart him.’
She looked me in the eyes and smiled. ‘You can’t out-perv a perv, can you?’
I smiled back. ‘I’ve never met the geezer, but I could have told you he was a perv.’
‘Yeah, right, Mr Smart Arse.’
No, I could.
Malcolm ‘Creosote’ Fisher had told me Rees was a ‘panty sniffer’ when we were in Belmarsh.
Sole reason for going to Wales.
I wasn’t going to have a panty sniffer threatening my wife.
The doorbell rang.
‘Who the fuck is that?’ we both said together from the floor, arms around each other.
It was the so-solid perv himself.
Stupidly, we didn’t check first, we just opened the door together, arms round each other’s waists, me trying to confirm that she was adding a few ounces here and there.
We stopped giggling – it was a laughter of relief rather than anything specific – as the door swung open and there was Hadyn Rees.
He was dishevelled and unshaven and he had his hands in the pockets of a beltless raincoat with the two lower button fastened. He must have thought he was still in Wales.
‘I want to speak to Amy,’ he said.
I just gawped at him, but then I’d never seen him before, not really.
He had once had curly blond hair, which was now thinning fast, and he was about five foot ten. He had the look of someone who needed to wear glasses, probably used contacts. In that raincoat, he looked like Michael Caine playing Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File, but without the glasses and with none of the charisma.
I said nothing. I was gobsmacked, thinking things like: of course he’s here, he would have got bail. He was a solicitor, after all.
Amy said nothing, but I felt here grip on my waist tighten.
‘I want to talk to Amy alone,’ he said. Why was he talking as if she wasn’t right there in front of him? This guy had real problems with women.
‘Why?’ I managed to say.
‘Because I love her and I want her to come away with me to a new life.’
I looked at him in disbelief.
Amy looked at him.
Amy looked at me and I looked at her.
‘You hold him, I’ll hit him,’ she said.
And that’s what we did, right there on the front doorstep.
I did what Humphrey Bogart did to Elisha Wood Jnr in The Maltese Falcon. I got behind him before he could move and pulled the shoulders of his rain coat down over his arms so he was pinned helpless.
Personally, I was surprised that it worked, but it did. Then Amy hit him with the best left upper/right cross combination I had seen outside of pay-per-view TV.
He staggered backwards, taking me with him, and I felt him frantically trying to pull his right hand out of the raincoat pocket. I got there first and wrestled from him the Brocock air pistol he was trying to draw.
This one was an air pistol. It was a frighteningly accurate model of a Walther automatic. I knew that, because I could read Walther CP 88 along the four-inch barrel. It had a chestnut wood handle that fitted snugly into the palm of my hand and it had a safety catch. Beyond that, all I knew was that it wasn’t one of Ion Jones’s specials that fired real bullets. They were revolvers, not automatics.
Well, I was pretty sure.
‘He’s got a gun,’ I said as I struggled with him.
‘Here we go again,’ said Amy, and she kicked him in the stomach.
I stood over him. It seemed a bit naff to point the air pistol at him. It was only an air pistol, after all. Humphrey Bogart would have tossed it into the sage brush and snarled at him.
I looked down at him as he gasped for brea
th.
‘Hadyn Rees? I don’t believe we’ve met.’
He didn’t answer, just concentrated on getting to his feet, and then stood there, panting.
I had moved back to be next to Amy, who was pumped up ready to have another go at him.
‘I don’t think you’ve got any business here,’ I said.
‘I’m not fucking finished with him,’ said Amy.
‘Yes you are, because he simply doesn’t matter any more.’
‘He doesn’t?’ she said quietly.
‘He never really did,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t see it that way for a while.’
Hadyn Rees spoke.
‘I’ve got nowhere to go.’
‘Tough,’ I said.
‘My reputation’s in ruins,’ he said.
‘Double tough,’ said Amy.
He didn’t say anything else, he just turned on his heels and began walking down the drive, head down.
‘Let’s see him off the premises,’ I said.
Amy slipped her arm back around my waist, and we followed Rees until he’d left the drive and turned right along the street.
About 20 yards down the pavement there was a silvery Lexus, and he must have had a remote in his pocket, because the lights flashed as he unlocked it.
‘What do you think will happen to him?’ Amy whispered.
‘As if I cared,’ I said.
But suddenly I did care, because although he had unlocked the doors of the Lexus, he wasn’t getting in it, he was opening the boot, and then he was leaning in and pulling something out that glinted in the streetlights.
‘Oh, no.’
This was a revolver, and I wasn’t going to stop to ask if was a specially-adapted one. I should have known he’d have at least one in his collection. He was a model freak and a collector. He was bound to have.
And there he was, calmly cracking the cylinder and loading the thing from a box of ammunition he had balanced on the bumper of the car.
I had an air pistol. He had one too, but his fired real bullets.
‘Run,’ I said to Amy. ‘Run for the house and lock the door. Now would be good.’
I knew I couldn’t physically reach him in time. I had to shoot it out. But if he thought this was going to be some ten-paces-turn-and-fire duel, he was out of his fucking mind.