by James Becker
“I see what you mean,” Mallory said, his enthusiasm waning slightly. “But if you haven’t got any better ideas, it’s still something that I think is worth checking out.”
He glanced around the bedroom.
“Look,” he said, “this isn’t a bad hotel, and I still don’t think that anybody could possibly have followed us here, so why don’t we stay here for one more night and then go somewhere else tomorrow?”
“That’s fine with me, but I still need to make that phone call, and both of us need to find a clothes shop somewhere, if only to buy some more underwear.”
Mallory nodded.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Why don’t we go now, then come back and start working on the parchment?”
On their way out of the building, Mallory confirmed with the receptionist that they would be staying for one more night, and then they walked the quarter mile or so to a shopping complex and went inside. They hit the shops, paying cash for everything they bought. When they’d both replenished their wardrobes, and also bought a couple of soft bags to put the clothes in, and two cheap pay-as-you-go mobile phones from two different and busy shops, they had a snack lunch in one of the cafés.
“There’s another thing I think you should do,” Mallory said as they finished their meal.
“And that is?”
“Buy a wig, or maybe even a couple of wigs. The first thing most people—including policemen—look at on a woman is her hair, so if you pick up a long blond wig and change your makeup slightly, you’ll completely alter your appearance.”
Robin nodded. “Okay, if you really think it’s a good idea.”
They found a shop selling wigs and hairpieces, and Robin bought a light blond wig and another that was midbrown, one long, the other medium length. At another shop that sold a wide range of cosmetics, she picked up some lipsticks and a set of plain contact lenses that would change her eye color to light blue.
“Now we’re set,” Mallory said as they walked out of the shop together.
The last thing they were going to do in Exeter, Mallory had decided, was make the phone call to Robin’s bookshop in Dartmouth. And she was going to do that well away from the hotel where they were staying.
Rather than risk getting the Porsche out of the garage, they took a bus across to the other side of the city center, but only after Robin had vanished into a ladies’ loo and emerged fifteen minutes later looking so different that Mallory barely recognized her, the blond wig and blue contacts completely altering her appearance.
They rode the bus almost to the end of the line, then got off and walked about a hundred yards to a small shopping arcade that linked two streets, and outside which were a couple of public phones.
“Be as quick as you can,” Mallory warned, “because I’m pretty sure there’ll be a tracer running on your business telephone line. Identifying the originating phone will take about two minutes, and my guess is that it’ll then take the police between five and ten minutes to get a patrol car or motorcycle to this spot. So to be on the safe side, just in case a police car happens to be driving down this street when they complete the trace, please make sure you end the call no more than four minutes after you dial the number, and then come straight into this arcade so we can walk through it to the other street. Okay?”
“You’re the boss,” Robin said.
“If only that were true,” Mallory murmured as he watched her walk the short distance across the pavement toward the nearest booth.
Just over three and a half minutes after she had picked up the phone, Robin walked swiftly across to the entrance to the arcade, her face white and strained. But there was no time for Mallory to ask her anything, because at that moment they both heard the sound of an approaching siren, and just moments later a marked police car squealed to a stop near the two phone booths. They didn’t stop to watch what happened, just continued walking through the arcade to the other side.
That street was crowded with people, which would help keep them out of sight. But more important, there were a couple of taxis parked by the curb on the opposite side. Mallory didn’t hesitate and crossed the road, Robin right beside him, and climbed into the back of the first one.
“City center, please,” he instructed the driver, then glanced at Robin. “Are you okay?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Not really, no. I’ll tell you later.”
They got out of the taxi some distance from the hotel, deliberately, because Mallory didn’t want to leave any obvious trail that could be followed, then walked the rest of the way.
Robin didn’t speak again until they were back in her room. Then she sat down heavily on the bed, her head cradled in her hands.
“Tell me,” Mallory said softly.
“They’re dead,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion.
“What?”
“Those three men. The Italians. Betty told me they’re dead. Somebody shot each of them in the head.”
For a few moments Mallory didn’t reply, his mind racing. For the first time he realized he genuinely had no idea what was going on.
“What the hell have we got involved in, David?”
Mallory shook his head, trying to organize his thoughts.
“I have no idea,” he said, his words echoing his confusion, “but now we’re going to have to be really careful, because we’ll be at the top of the ‘most wanted’ list for the police, as well as having whoever shot those Italians after us as well.”
“But we didn’t do anything!”
“That probably won’t make much difference. Those three men were killed in your apartment—I presume that’s what happened—and that will obviously make you a prime suspect, just because of that fact. The old murder triangle is means, motive, and opportunity, and while you don’t have any obvious motive, the mere fact that it’s your apartment is more than enough to put your name right up at the top of the list as far as opportunity is concerned, and in ink rather than pencil. We don’t have an alibi, except for each other, and that wouldn’t wash because the cops would just assume we were just trying to protect each other.”
“But who killed those men?”
Mallory shook his head again. “I don’t know, but there was such a short window of opportunity that it really must have been another one of the same group, another Italian, I mean. We didn’t leave your apartment until we heard the police car approaching, and actually saw its lights, so realistically the police would have arrived on the scene within minutes. So the only person who could have climbed the stairs to the apartment and then shot those three men had to be the fourth man in the SUV. Nothing else makes sense.”
“But why would he kill his friends?”
“We don’t actually know that those men even knew each other,” Mallory pointed out. “In fact, the more I think about it, the more it looks to me like a contract, a job that needed doing in a hurry and for which a group of mercenaries were hired. That would explain the identical contents of their wallets and the fact they were all carrying exactly the same types of weapons. As for the why, the only reason that makes sense to me at the moment is that somebody decided it was vital that none of them could be allowed to talk to the police or the authorities here. When whoever it was went up into the apartment, he was probably hoping to get the other men out of the building before the police arrived, but when he found that two of them were unconscious and all of them tied up so that they couldn’t move, he probably realized that that option wasn’t going to work, and so he just walked around pulling the trigger.”
“Oh God,” Robin said, tears welling up in her eyes. “That means I killed them.”
Mallory looked at her.
“Don’t be so stupid,” he said, trying to snap her out of the mood. “The man who killed those three Italians certainly wasn’t you. It was the man who climbed the stairs after we’d gone and fired his pistol
three times. That wasn’t your fault, so don’t you even start to feel guilty about what happened. If you hadn’t done what you did back there, the chances are that both of us would now be dead. I don’t wish anyone any harm, but if it’s a choice between three Italian thugs lying on slabs in a mortuary and the two of us in the same state, then my vote goes to the Italians, thank you.”
The briefest of smiles illuminated Robin’s face as she glanced across at Mallory.
“You have a way of cutting to the chase and immediately making me feel better,” she said, “and because of that I’ll even forgive you for calling me stupid. I’m sorry, but I think I’m still kind of in shock because of what Betty told me. She said the police want to speak to me as soon as possible to eliminate me from their inquiries.”
Mallory gave a hollow laugh. “That’s just police-speak for sticking you in a cell until they can assemble or create enough evidence to charge you with something. Don’t you believe it for a second. Our best bet at the moment is to stay well below the radar until we find out exactly what’s going on. And the answers must lie within the text on that parchment. We absolutely have to decipher the Latin and then translate what it says.”
Robin was silent for a few moments, and when she spoke again her voice sounded distant and somehow detached.
“I don’t think I’ve ever broken the law in my life,” she said, “until last evening, anyway, and even then I was only acting in self-defense. But I really don’t like the feeling of being a fugitive through no fault of my own. Are you sure we can’t just contact the police and make a clean breast of everything? I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?”
“That’s entirely up to you, but I think it would be a very bad idea, even leaving aside the fact that those three men are now dead. If they hadn’t been killed, you’d probably still be in trouble, because it would be difficult to convince the guardians of law and order in this country that you didn’t know that the book safe had that vicious antitheft device built into it. After all, they could establish that you’d already sent an e-mail to me containing some of the words from the manuscript—that’s how we met, after all—and they could argue that because you didn’t try to stop that Italian from trying to open it, that was pretty much the same as assaulting him yourself.
“You couldn’t even prove that those men were threatening you. Yes, they had guns in their pockets, but at the end of the encounter you walked away without a scratch on you, and you left one man with really badly mangled hands, another knocked unconscious with a possible concussion and probably a broken wrist—when you kicked his arm I definitely heard something crack—and the third one with a dislocated shoulder. However you weigh that lot up, the obvious conclusion is that you—or both of us—were the perpetrator of the attack and they were the victims.
“And now that we know somebody else walked into the apartment just a few minutes after we had left and killed the three of them, I don’t have the slightest doubt about what would happen if either of us went to the police. We would be immediately arrested and we’d spend the next few months in separate prisons somewhere, waiting for the case to come to trial.”
Robin nodded. “But we didn’t fire a gun. Neither of us. Couldn’t we prove it?”
“Proving a negative is extremely difficult. If we’d been arrested at the scene, just after the killings had taken place, then we might have a chance of doing that. There are tests that you can run to show whether or not a person has fired a pistol, and of course you would have tested negative for that, though I would be positive because of what happened afterwards. And neither of us would have had the murder weapon in our possession. In those circumstances, then we possibly could have walked away. But once we’d left the scene of the crime, our chances of doing that would have fallen away to zero. The police could argue that we’d worn gloves, or washed our hands a sufficient number of times to remove all traces of cordite, and lobbed the gun into the sea or a rubbish bin or some ditch miles away from Dartmouth. Something like that. And we’d be in trouble. Probably a lot more trouble than we’re in now, difficult though that may be to believe.”
Robin nodded.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “When you put it like that I know we’re doing the right thing. We really do have to solve the puzzle of the parchment and what’s going on with these Italians before we even think about talking to the police.”
“Apart from wondering if her employer was a triple murderer,” Mallory asked, “how was Betty?”
This time there was a real smile.
“Whatever the police may have told her, I really don’t think she’d believe that of me. I mean, I sell books for a living! I don’t go round killing people, obviously. But I think confused is the word that covers it best. The place was swarming with cops when she arrived to open the shop this morning, and she said she had to produce her driving license and show them her photograph before they’d believe she wasn’t Robin Jessop. A tense few minutes, apparently. Anyway, there’s no damage to the shop, and the crime scene is in the apartment, which of course is entirely separate, although it’s obviously a part of the same building. Despite the murders she’s told me she’ll be happy to keep working there until I get back. Quite a tough lady, our Betty.”
“One question,” Mallory said. “Can you remember the first thing she said to you when you made the call?”
“Er, yes, I think so. She just asked where I was. Why?”
“If that’s what she asked, then I think that more or less proves the police were monitoring the call and telling her what to say, because if she’d found out this morning that three men had been found dead in your apartment, and then you called her, that would have been the first thing she’d want to tell you. The fact that she didn’t means she was being closely supervised, and the police were probably hoping that you’d just blurt out your location as soon as she asked the question. You didn’t, I hope?”
Robin shook her head. “No. I’m not an idiot. I obviously didn’t tell her where I was or why I wasn’t at the shop. In fact, I didn’t answer her question at all. I just told her about the couple of orders that needed sending out, and tried to keep the conversation as businesslike as possible. And then she told me that three men had been found dead in the apartment. That was a hell of a shock, and I denied all knowledge of what had happened. That wasn’t difficult, because it was news to me, and I hope that was obvious from my voice. I was totally stunned because what she said was so completely unexpected.”
“You did the right thing,” Mallory said. “By being matter-of-fact and just telling her what you needed her to do today in the shop, you will at the very least have raised doubts in the minds of whichever police officers were listening to the call, and that can only be a good thing. But I presume she asked you again where you were, because that’s what the police will want to find out.”
“She did, yes, but again I didn’t tell her. All I said was that I’d had to go away unexpectedly, which has the advantage of being the absolute truth. Then she said that the police wanted to see me as soon as possible. At the end of the call she also told me that they’d already questioned her about my movements and the usual sort of stuff about friends and family members that I might be staying with. This morning the police took Betty up to the apartment to ask her if anything had been taken, and she said everything seemed to be in place, as far as she could tell, except for my laptop. If you remember, that was still on the desk when we left the office, but she was quite certain that it wasn’t there when she went up to check out the apartment.”
“Obviously whoever killed the three Italians took that as well, and that could be a bit of a problem for us.”
“Why?” Robin asked.
“Because the scanned images of the parchment are on that laptop, as well as the transcription of the encrypted text. If you remember, I copied that from my computer onto a memory stick, and then you saved the file onto your lap
top. That means that whoever took your machine—and he’s obviously one of the bad guys—will know pretty much the same as we do about the parchment.”
“They won’t get into it,” Robin said. “That laptop’s protected by a password.”
Mallory laughed shortly.
“If only that were true,” he said. “Cracking a Windows password is really pretty basic stuff, and you can download a whole bunch of programs from the Internet that’ll do the job in a few seconds, or minutes at the most. And even if they can’t do that, there are tools you can use to boot the machine from the optical drive and simply bypass it. Trust me, if they know what they’re doing, they’ll be able to get inside it.” He paused for a couple of seconds. “Did she—Betty, I mean—say anything else?”
“Well, she could hardly avoid mentioning the fact that there was a lot of blood on the floor of the office, though I don’t know if the police really wanted her to say that. I think I replied, but I was still in shock and I can’t remember what I said. Then she told me again that the police wanted to talk to me, and said I had to get back to Dartmouth as quickly as possible. I told her I couldn’t and that I wouldn’t be back for at least a week, and then I had a slight brain wave, and I said I couldn’t talk anymore because the taxi had just arrived to take me to the airport. I also told her I’d dropped my mobile and broken it. Lies compounded on more lies, but I hoped that would create a bit of confusion.”
Mallory nodded approval.
“That was good thinking,” he said. “I don’t suppose for a moment that the police will believe you, but by now they’ll know where you made the call from, and they’ll certainly have to run checks on all the passenger lists for flights departing from Exeter Airport, just in case you actually have flown off somewhere. And that will give them something to keep them uselessly occupied while we’re working on the parchment and trying to decide what to do next.”
27
Exeter, Devon