by Thomas Perry
EDDIE’S BOY
Also by Thomas Perry
The Butcher’s Boy
Metzger’s Dog
Big Fish
Island
Sleeping Dogs
Vanishing Act
Dance for the Dead
Shadow Woman
The Face-Changers
Blood Money
Death Benefits
Pursuit
Dead Aim
Nightlife
Silence
Fidelity
Runner
Strip
The Informant
Poison Flower
The Boyfriend
A String of Beads
Forty Thieves
The Old Man
The Bomb Maker
The Burglar
A Small Town
THOMAS
PERRY
EDDIE’S BOY
A NOVEL
The Mysterious Press
New York
Copyright © 2020 by Thomas Perry
Jacket design by Cindy Hernandez
Jacket photographs: man © Arcangel/Mark Owen; stained glass © Arcangel/Richard Nixon
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FIRST EDITION
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
This book is set in 13-pt. Arno Pro with Helvetica Neue by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: December 2020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-5777-5
eISBN 978-0-8021-5779-9
The Mysterious Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
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For Jo, as always.
1
Michael Schaeffer had not killed anyone in years, and he was enraged at the fact that he’d had to do it again tonight. He drove the big black sedan along the deserted, winding British lane toward the south under the lightless sky, keeping his speed near the limit of his ability to control the car. Strapped upright with the seat belt in the passenger seat beside him was a man with a small, neat bullet hole through the side of his head. In the rear seats two more men with more pronounced firearm wounds were strapped upright. In the trunk of the car—he still thought trunk even though everyone around him said boot—was another corpse that had bled profusely and was wrapped in a tarp. The sun would rise in a few hours, and he would have to be rid of this car and far away from it before then. He went over his memory of the way this had happened. It had started with a normal conversation with his wife, Meg.
Meg’s family had kept a house near the Royal Crescent in Bath for a couple of centuries, and Bath was where she and Michael had met decades ago and still lived for most of the year. Each spring, she would pick a day when it was time for their retreat from Bath. One day a few weeks ago, she’d had her laptop open on the big Regency desk in her study when he walked in.
Meg had already checked what she called “migration day”—the end of the spring semester in the academic schedules of American universities. She usually began with the ones in and around Boston. During the winter, Boston held over 250,000 students, and each summer a great many of them would be heading for England, most of them stopping in Bath, population 84,000. She used American students as bellwethers, because their movements were predictable, but there would also be hordes from other countries.
“I’ve checked the spring-semester exam schedules. It’s off to Yorkshire no later than May fifth this year.” She meant the family’s historic home, the old estate a dozen miles outside the city of York. York was also a destination for tourists and students in the summer, but the house was off the main routes and was not the best historical example of anything or the site of an important battle or a Roman ruin.
“Got it,” said Michael. “I should be able to pack a razor and a toothbrush by then.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll be reminded. Many times.”
Whenever they stayed in the Yorkshire house, they slept in the second-floor bedroom remodeled in the 1650s for the earl of that generation and his wife and last modernized five years ago. It was one of eight large chambers for the family, but Meg and Michael were childless and the older members of her family had died years before. The lower level of the old house had been designed for public functions: a central dining hall, a big kitchen and pantry behind it, a drawing room, and a library—all modernized in the 1630s, over stone laid in the 1300s, and refurnished many times since then. The top two floors had contained an attic and the servants’ rooms, but were long unoccupied. Meg had spent every day since they’d arrived planning and arranging her annual May party, and Michael helped with the practical work but stayed as unobtrusive as possible most of the time.
Then it was their tenth day back at the Yorkshire house, the day of Meg’s party. The party was important to her, because it was her way to issue greetings to her York friends and their families and the web of relatives and ancient connections who lived in the north. Her May party had gone on for enough years now that it was seen by many as the unofficial start to the part of the year when the island became less cold and wet.
Few if any of the minor aristocracy could afford to keep the garrisons of workers these houses had once employed. So once a year for her party, Meg would retain a gardening company and a crew of cleaners for ten days, a party rental company, a good caterer, and a group of parking attendants.
In her unabridged form Meg was the Honourable Margaret Susanna Moncrief Holroyd. Her family’s holdings in York were first granted in the time of King Edmund in 941, after he had restored Anglo-Saxon control from the Scandinavians. In 946 he was murdered at age twenty-five by a robber in his royal hall at Pucklechurch, near Bath. In 1472 Edward IV granted the estate again to that generation’s earl, his close drinking and whoring buddy. When Meg told Michael about it, he laughed, because it had cost the king nothing: it had already belonged to his friend’s family for five hundred years.
The manor house had been given several major renovations over the centuries. The last large one was the result of the April 29, 1942, bombing raid that Hitler ordered after the RAF bombed Lübeck and Rostock. Ninety-two people were killed in York that night, none of them on the estate, but the central hall received a bomb through its roof, which needed to be repaired and restored.
Meg’s party always began as soon as anyone appeared at the front gate and wouldn’t end until she detected a diminution of gaiety late in the evening. In the morning there was a cricket match on the huge south lawn, where the party rental company had set up tables so that Meg could provide tea, pastries, and other refreshments for
spectators. At one o’clock the caterers served lunch on the long tables of the great hall. In the afternoon a chamber orchestra performed and a church choir sang. Older adults played sedate outdoor games like croquet, lawn bowling, and lawn darts, and there were foot races and other sports for the young and the irrepressible. The caterers set out a buffet dinner at six, and at eight a rock DJ began playing music on the old pasture on the east side of the house.
That evening the party did not show signs of exhaustion until 11:00 p.m. Meg stopped the music at 11:30 and sent the parking attendants to direct traffic so that cars could get off the estate without hitting each other. She had drivers offer van rides to anyone who needed or wanted one.
Meg was triumphant. “It went smoothly this year, don’t you think?” she asked.
Michael nodded. “Yep. You’ve outdone yourself again.” Meg’s party was one of his least favorite days of each year. Meg was not only an extrovert, but was also strikingly attractive, and had the money and taste to be glamorous. She was generous, witty, irreverent, and socially in demand even now, in her fifties. There were people from the North Sea to the English Channel at intervals of about a half mile who considered her one of their closest friends. Thirty years ago, when she first got romantically involved with an American who had typical American tastes and manners, there were some people in her social sphere who had been horrified, and others who simply shrugged and said that scandalizing snobs was her chief delight, but there was nobody who wasn’t a little sick about it.
As soon as they met, Michael had realized that a man in his special circumstances had no way to survive except to become part of the background. The day he had flown to England, he had left many people in America who wanted him dead, people either burning for revenge or eager to collect on one of the contracts out on him, or whose job it was to put him in prison.
Once he was in England, he made an effort to avoid conversation when he could, and to cut it short if he couldn’t. When Meg’s friends asked what he did for a living, he said he was retired. When they wanted to know from what, he said he’d been in business. When they asked what business, he said it had been so dull that he had promised himself never to bore anybody else about it. He also maintained a lack of visible interest in most things other people said about themselves, and he had learned to keep Meg at the front, where she would attract all the attention.
Trouble had found him a couple of times anyway during their years together. The first time was just a chance sighting. A young American who had seen him once as a child in New York had been sent to serve an apprenticeship with casino operators in England and had spotted him at the horse races in Brighton with Meg and two of her friends. The next time was about ten years later, when an American boss named Frank Tosca had tried to inflate his reputation with the Mafia families by showing that his men could find and kill even the professional murderer who had been known as “the Butcher’s Boy.” Both times Michael had done the only thing he could—kept himself and Meg alive, and then made the person who had ordered his death realize, if only for a second, that he had made a terrible mistake.
Meg’s Yorkshire party was one of the few times of the year when Michael could not be absent, hidden, or anonymous. He was Meg’s husband, one of the hosts of the festivities that he dreaded. When Meg declared this year’s party a success, he agreed, but what he meant was that he had not attracted much attention, had not had many personal conversations, and had not made himself memorable. There had also been no accidents, injuries, or illnesses at the party that would have forced him to deal with any authorities, now or later.
He and Meg stayed up that night until the caterers had cleaned the kitchen, packed their remaining supplies, and departed; the party rental people had loaded their trucks with all their furniture, appliances, tents, and decorations, and driven off safely; and all the extra helpers, parking attendants, and others had been paid and then cleared out. When Michael locked the doors and went up to bed with Meg, he felt a profound sense of relief. The damned Yorkshire party was over for another year.
But it wasn’t. It was not until later that night, when Michael and Meg were asleep, that the final four visitors arrived.
Michael heard the sound from downstairs and identified it instantly. One of the leaded-glass panes of the windows along the side of the great hall had been pried out and slipped, and he heard it smash on the stone floor with a musical sound. He touched Meg’s arm and whispered, “Wake up. Something’s happening downstairs.”
He stood up and remembered that he had locked the pistol he’d brought from Bath in the trunk of their Jaguar so that it wouldn’t be where guests or temporary workers could stumble on it, and at the end of the evening he’d neglected to bring it upstairs.
He got out of bed, put on the clothes he’d taken off at bedtime, stepped into the old smoking room down the hallway, and went to the gun cabinet that had belonged to Meg’s great-grandfather. The guns displayed behind the glass doors were beautiful pieces of workmanship. His hand skipped past the three Purdey shotguns. They were each worth over £100,000. The two Holland and Hollands beside them were worth more. He had once used the Westley Richards with the single trigger and the barrel selector switch on top, so he chose it. This intruder was probably just an incompetent burglar who had cased the house during the party, and if so, Michael wouldn’t have to fire the weapon anyway.
He slipped the gamekeeper’s bag containing shotgun shells off its hook and over his shoulder and opened the gun to insert two shells. He moved down the hall away from the grand staircase and hurried to the back stairs, which had been used by the maids in the old days. He descended quietly, emerged in the kitchen, and stepped into the dining hall.
He saw two men at the window. They had already reached through the empty frame where they had removed the glass and had disengaged the latch. Now they were climbing in.
Schaeffer moved along the inner wall across from the windows until he was abreast of the one they had opened. One of the men looked up and saw him, so Michael said, “What are you doing here? Are you lost?”
The man crouched and aimed a pistol at him. Michael pulled the trigger of the antique shotgun. It roared, and the man was swept backward, as though swatted by an invisible hand.
The second man aimed his pistol at Michael, so Michael selected the other barrel. The shotgun roared again, and that man jerked backward and collapsed onto the floor in a lazy dive.
Michael heard the sound of running feet toward the open window. He ran to the first man’s body, pulled off his hooded rain jacket, put it on himself, then laid the antique shotgun across the second man’s chest. He lay down on his side with the man’s watch cap tugged down on his head and checked the man’s pistol by touch. It was a nine-millimeter semiautomatic, and the rectangular shape of its slide told him that it was a Glock. The safety was incorporated into the trigger mechanism, so he wouldn’t have to search for a catch.
The third man ran to the open window and stepped to one side so he could see the three bodies in the moonlight. He quickly chose the man with the shotgun across his chest, assuming he was Michael, and fired a round into the man’s head.
In a single quick motion, Michael half turned, raised the Glock, and fired it upward into the underside of the man’s jaw.
He stood up, picked up the second man’s pistol, put it in the pocket of the coat he’d taken, and then climbed out the open window.
The grass beside the manor house was wet with dew, and in the moonlight he could see the three men’s shoe prints on it. They clearly had come across the lawn from the direction of the woods on the south side of the estate near the gate.
He looked closely at the wet grass, and once he was in the open, he could see that the feet had not been walking. They had been trotting. It made him think there must have been a time issue. If they had just driven onto the estate, they should have been able to park and walk as slowly and quietly a
s they wished.
So time must be tight. That meant they must have concocted some sort of idiotic alibi that required them to come here and kill him while their alibi time was ticking. With beginners, the alibi was usually a ticket to a movie or a sports event, something that would not require an actual person to stand up in front of the cops and lie for him.
They had certainly been amateurish. They hadn’t been difficult to kill, and their plan seemed to have been no more than to put themselves in his house while he was asleep and assume that made him practically dead to start. There had to be a car parked somewhere. No, it could be more than that. Anybody who wanted him dead would be an American, and Americans might have an English driver.
He supposed the three were the current generation of American bosses’ idea of professionals. Someone had sent them to England to take him out after all these years. Somebody—maybe a British contact—should have realized that they were not the best choice for driving a long distance over the English countryside at high speed in the dark, getting themselves to Meg’s Yorkshire house, and driving themselves back in time to save their alibi. So somewhere on the property would be a fast car and maybe an English driver. He hoped that if the driver existed, he hadn’t heard the difference between the shotgun blasts and the pop of a pistol. But Schaeffer hadn’t fired the shotgun outdoors, so the thick old stone walls might have muffled the sound a bit.
Michael broke into a trot. If the schedule of the attackers required that they run to the manor house and back, surely it required that he run too. If the driver heard or saw a man trotting toward him instead of sneaking, he’d feel reassured. At least he would until Michael got there.
As he went farther toward the woods, he could smell the exhaust of the car in the night air, and then he could hear the engine, faintly. The car had to be in among the trees. Michael followed the sound and found the car parked just inside the edge of the woods, where the trees were far apart. It was a big black Bentley sedan. The car added to the evidence that these men had not simply been violent burglars. They had been sent to kill him. He approached the car in its blind spot to the right behind the driver’s head.