A few days ago during my discussions with Maggie Sinclair, five thousand, even three thousand pounds for delivering up Billy Paris and his evidence, had seemed like a good deal. Now I was feeling short-changed at the suggestion I take twenty thousand.
‘The deal was forty,’ I said.
‘Well it’s twenty now. Think yourself lucky.’
‘What about the trust between two businessmen?’
In answer Thorn raised his hands to show me the shiny palms of his brown leather driving gloves. ‘I’m afraid in business there is no such thing as trust, Mr Munro, only winners and losers. Now hand the money over.’ He cocked his head at Oleg.
There was no need to involve the Russian. I pulled the two wads from my pockets and laid them on the counter. Thorn shoved the shot glass towards me again, lifted his own and drank. If drinking that Russian paint-stripper would end this sorry deal and see me back on the road to civilisation I was all for it. I picked up the shot glass, careful not to spill any, and tossed it down my throat.
Thorn stacked the two bundles of notes, one on top of the other, and squared them up. He stared at them hard for a moment and then, smiling, looked me straight in the eye. ‘Oleg, I think we can say goodbye to Mr Munro now.’ I felt the Russian’s heavy hand on my shoulder. Thorn edged further along the bar, dipped down and swung open the safe door. ‘Why isn’t this locked?’ He stood again, not smiling anymore, the canvas bag from the safe in his hand. ‘Where is the envelope?’
What had Oleg done with the memory card? Was it him on that video file? Had he killed Thorn’s son? Was that why he’d wanted it so much? If so, at that moment our interests might coincide. He wouldn’t want to admit to having taken the USB. I could use that to my advantage.
‘I didn’t bring it,’ I said. ‘I didn’t trust you and it looks like I was right. Give me my money as agreed and then I’ll send the USB on.’
Thorn reached across the counter and grabbed me by the throat. ‘Where is it?’ he snarled.
I seized hold of his wrist and wrenched his hand away. I stepped back, bumping into Oleg.
From the canvas bag Thorn produced a compact semi-automatic pistol. Was it real or a replica? If in doubt always assume the former. ‘Search him.’
Oleg didn’t move.
‘I said search him!’
Oleg stood rock-still for a second or two before very slowly reaching with two fingers into the breast pocket of his suit jacket and pulling out the tiny USB card. He placed it in the palm of his other hand and slapped it down onto the bar top.
Thorn lowered his gaze, placed a finger on the small plastic rectangle and then looked up at his head of security, the confused expression on the music mogul’s face gradually morphing into one of tired resignation. Oleg’s granite left hand clamped down on the hand holding the gun, pinning it to the countertop while with his right he straight-armed Thorn, sending him crashing into the rows of bottles and glasses on the shelves behind. I knew how it felt to be hit like that. It hurt. A lot. Thorn’s legs folded. He hadn’t hit the floor before I was on the move, my only thought to put as much distance as possible between myself and the Russian.
‘Mr Munro!’
I turned. Oleg took a stride towards me. I backed away with a quick glance at the row of pool cues. It would be like stopping a charging reindeer stag with a sprig of holly.
‘You are lucky man,’ he said, ‘but you are right. A deal is a deal.’ One after another he tossed the two wads of notes at me. ‘Better you take this too.’ He flicked the tiny USB card. It arced through the air. I reached out to catch it with a stack of fifties in either hand and fumbled. It fell. I stooped to pick them up from the floor.
When I looked up again Oleg had about-turned and was walking back towards the bar from where came the sound of groaning and soft whimpers of pain. ‘Yes, you are lucky,’ he said. ‘Not like Jerry.’
I saw no one on my trudge back to the barrier. It was even colder now. The wind had dropped and the snow had stopped falling. Homer was clearing the path to the gatehouse. Best to look busy when the boss was on site. I presumed his young colleague was having the pleasure of perimeter patrol.
I climbed into the Merc and commenced a three-point turn, thinking about Oleg’s bizarre and violent behaviour. I couldn’t fathom why the Russian had acted like that, or his parting words to me. Yes, I was lucky. I was another twenty thousand pounds lucky. And Jeremy Thorn? Of course he was unlucky. He’d been murdered.
Why had Oleg turned on his employer? Was it so that he wouldn’t find out the truth that it was Oleg who had killed his son? It didn’t make sense. The Russian had taken the video file and presumably viewed it. If it incriminated him, why not scrub the USB or destroy it? Why give it back to me? I’d given him the perfect opportunity. All he had to do was let Thorn think I’d reneged on our deal. That way he wouldn’t have had to terminate his employment in such a dramatic fashion.
I stopped the car, got out and walked back to the barrier.
‘Stuck?’ Homer asked, shovelling snow and tossing it onto a mound against the wall of the glass hut. ‘I can give you a push.’
‘The car’s fine,’ I said. ‘I was just wondering, Homer. Were you actually on site when Jeremy Thorn’s helicopter went down?’
He stared into a sky that was fast clearing of clouds to reveal bright stars pinned to a black velvet cushion. ‘Not this again.’
‘Remember before, when I said I was Billy’s lawyer and you wondered if people were trying to blame him for the crash?’
Homer stuck his spade into the mound of snow, rested a boot on it and pointed the finger of a black, fleecy-glove at me. ‘That was you on telly. I told the wife it was you. They said on that programme the chopper was sabotaged and that you knew who done it. That’s right, isn’t it?’
I shook my head. ‘Don’t believe everything you see on TV.’
‘Come on, you can tell me. Who was it?’
Why would no one believe me?
‘I’m betting it wasn’t Billy,’ Homer said. ‘Him and Jerry got on great. Everyone here got on fine with Jerry. Best boss I ever had, that’s for sure. Best job too, meeting all the famous folk. My daughter’s got a book full of autographs thanks to me.’ He winked. ‘I used to make them all sign in twice. Once for the timesheet, once for my wee girl. ‘Won’t be like that again. Don’t know if us lot will even be kept on if the place gets sold.’
‘I was speaking to Oleg,’ I said.
‘Ivan the Terrible? I know, young Frankie told me he was on the prowl.’
‘Oleg told me that Jerry was banned from flying for doing crazy stunts, like skimming across Loch Tay for instance.’
The red face creased along well used laughter lines. ‘Aye, that was Jerry all right. Did he tell you about the time he tried to fly under the Glenfinnan viaduct? You know, the Harry Potter one?’
I joined in with his laughter before breaking off. ‘The night he died, why was he flying if he was disqualified?’
Suddenly, Homer wasn’t finding things quite so amusing. ‘I dunno. Just taking his girl for a spin, I suppose. Showing off to her when there was no one around. So what?’
‘You were on duty the night he disappeared, weren’t you?’
‘No, I was back-shift. I finished at ten.’
‘But before you went off duty, did you know that Jerry was going flying later that night?’ Homer’s already flushed face reddened further. I took his complexion as answer enough. ‘Then why didn’t you do something about it? You’re supposed to be a security guard.’
‘Aye, and Jerry paid my wages.’
‘That the best you can come up with? What was wrong with the CCTV in the hangar? Oleg says you reported it wasn’t working the evening before the helicopter disappeared. That just a coincidence? Have the police asked you about that yet?’
The security guard rubbed a ruby jowl, a fleecy glove catching the stubble on his chin. ‘You’re a lawyer, right? What I tell you is off the record?’
&nb
sp; ‘Try me.’
‘All right. Jerry went up in the whirligig back and forward. He was a pilot. He liked flying. Usually he just went up himself, late on or early in the morning. He was the boss. What was I supposed to do?’
‘And the CCTV system? Was there really something wrong with it?’ The look on Homer’s face confirmed my suspicion. ‘What did you do? Disconnect it so there’d be no record of the flights? Do it just before Oleg finished work, tell him you’d call out maintenance and then sort it yourself the next day after Jerry was back, with no one any the wiser?’
‘What harm was there in it?’ Homer kicked some snow off the top of the mound with a steel-toecapped boot. ‘I got a wee bit extra in my pay packet, Jerry buzzed about for a couple of hours. Big deal.’
‘Why would Oleg think that Jerry was unlucky?’
‘He crashed, didn’t he?’
True, but if Jerry had been unlucky, someone had been very fortunate indeed. I thought back to Stewart Howie’s rape case. He’d seemed so obviously guilty. That was because one vital factor had been overlooked. When the lawyers had read the forensic report, they’d concentrated on the evidence that was there. No one had realised that what was there shouldn’t have been. Was Jeremy Thorn unlucky to have had his helicopter sabotaged? Yes, but he was all the more unlucky if he should never have been in that helicopter in the first place.
‘How many chopper pilots work here?’ I asked.
‘Three, if you include Jerry.’
‘I’m not including him.’
‘Just Pete and big Davie, then.’
‘Which one was supposed to be flying the chopper that crashed?’
The eyes set deep in the ruddy face narrowed to gaze past me into the mid-distance.
I turned to follow his line of vision and saw Oleg lumbering through the snow towards us. There was no sign of Philip Thorn. ‘So, Davie and Pete, they were just lucky it was Jerry’s chopper that was sabotaged and not theirs?’ I said.
Homer pulled the spade from the snow pile and began to set about the path with renewed vigour. He dug deep. The blade of the shovel scraping along the tarmac beneath. ‘Aye, I suppose they were lucky. But not,’ he hurled a wedge of snow over his shoulder, ‘as lucky as some other folk.’
57
I’d been a parent for less than six months. Tina was nearly five years old. I’d missed her birth. I’d missed her first words and her first steps. Of course, I’d also missed her first nappy and the last nappy and all the many nappies in between, so there had been an upside to arriving late on the scene. One day I’d read her a last bedtime story and we’d play our last game of dominoes. One day, many, many, many years from now, I’d meet her first boyfriend. This Christmas it was Pyxie Girl, soon it would be designer clothes, expensive perfume, luxury handbags. It was life. Things moved on, children grew up. Six months. I’d learned so much about child-rearing in such a short space of time.
Tina had learned a lot too. She’d learned very quickly that in order to have her own way she needed to play her Dad and Grandpa off against each other, that telling Malky he was the best uncle in the world was the quickest route to a pocketful of sweets, and that if she remained very quiet around about bedtime there was a chance I’d forget she was there and so she could stay up a few precious moments longer than normal. One thing she hadn’t yet learned was to distinguish between my stomach and a trampoline. To her my body wasn’t so much a temple as a bouncy castle.
‘It’s Christmas Eve!’ she yelled, landing a child’s size five right where my six-pack would have been if I’d had one.
It was Saturday. I’d not made it back from St Edzell Bay until after three that morning. Four and a half hours of painfully slow driving, peering through the frequent snow flurries and trying to stay on the road, had left me with a splitting sore-head. The red digits of the radio alarm said eighty twenty. Late, by Tina’s standards. My normal routine when receiving an early morning visit was to send my daughter through to see her gramps on some fictitious errand. That was usually good for securing a few extra minutes’ shut-eye, but not that morning. That morning the old man was in my room too, standing at the bottom of the bed wrapped in his Paisley-pattern dressing gown looking nothing like Joanna and a lot like the Ghost of Christmas Past His Sell-By Date.
‘You’ll need to get up,’ he said. ‘There’s a TV crew outside and some lassie called Cherry who’s very keen to see you. She says she’s a pal of yours.’
I sprang out of bed on the legs of a newborn gazelle, tottered to the window and pulled back the curtains. Through the misty murk of a mid-winter morning I could see human shapes, bundled against the cold. They were standing around holding big square silver cases, poles and tripods, blowing white as they spoke to each other, stamping their feet to keep warm.
Two minutes later, face washed, teeth brushed and outside of a couple of paracetamol, I was at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in my hand, Tina on my knee and Cherry Lovell sitting across from me.
‘I couldn’t very well let the lassie stand out there in the cold while you took an age getting ready,’ was my dad’s reasoning for allowing this intrusion, although he’d thought standing about in the cold to be good enough for the male contingent of the Night News team.
‘Thanks very much for this, Robbie. All I want is your response to the news. We can set up in your front room. Ten minutes and we’ll be out of your hair.’ Cherry reached across and tweaked Tina’s nose. ‘I’m sure you’ll have lots of last-minute Christmas shopping to do for this little lady.’
‘What news?’ was the most I could manage even after a reviving sip of coffee.
‘You must have heard on TV or the radio?’
I hadn’t.
‘Where have you been?’
I’d been in bed. Before that I’d been driving down the A90 at twenty-five miles an hour trying not to run Joanna’s Merc off the road and into a field. I’d listened to the radio all the way down. There had been no sensational news, just lots of crap Christmas music.
‘Philip Thorn’s dead. He was found washed up on the beach at St Edzell Bay earlier this morning.’
‘Dead?’
‘They’re calling it suicide. There’s some chat that he shot himself, but there’s no official word on the cause of death yet. I’m betting he…’ Cherry made bunny ears with her fingers, ‘drowned. Just like your client.’ The news of Thorn’s fatal soaking didn’t seem to have dampened her Christmas spirit any. ‘And, guess what? Kirkton Perch is not available for comment. There’s a shocker.’
Philip Thorn was dead? I sucked in more caffeine. It was awfully early in the morning and my head was too sore to take in the news properly, or to focus on Cherry’s conspiracy theory. Not that my fragility was going to stop her rehearsing it anyway.
‘Kirkton Perch wanted Prestwick for a spaceport. Only Jeremy Thorn stood in his way, and...’ Cherry looked at Tina who was listening intently in the manner children only do when they shouldn’t be. ‘Well, we know what happened to him, according to the Air Accident Investigation report.’
‘I was in a hairy-plane yesterday,’ Tina said. How much of this was she taking in? I tried to lift her down from my knee, but she wasn’t for budging. She leaned across the table at the reporter and sniffed. ‘You smell nice. You smell like Vikki. Joanna smells better though. Dad, does Joanna smell better than this lady? I think she does.’
As a general rule, I didn’t comment on the fragrance of those women I came across in my day-to-day life. There may have been a proper time and place for passing such a compliment. If there was, I was sure my dad’s kitchen at half-eight on a Saturday morning wasn’t one of them, and, anyway, telling a woman how good she smelt? It sounded to me like the sort of creepy chat-up line someone might make before inviting the female in question back to his place and making a lampshade out of her skin.
Cherry, a little put out by my daughter’s opinion on matters aromatic, continued anyway. ‘Your client William Paris told you he knew who’d
carried out that sabotage, didn’t he?’
Tina wanted to know what a sabotage was. I looked to my dad who was also listening in keenly to the conversation. Reluctantly, he removed Tina from my knee and carried her kicking and wriggling through to the living room.
‘Not in so many words,’ I said, ‘but don’t let the facts get in the way.’
‘The facts?’ Cherry said, now free to speak. ‘Let me present you with the facts. I’ll try and make them very simple for you.’
‘That would probably help,’ my dad said, reappearing, having plonked Tina down in front of some Saturday morning TV. I really hoped it wasn’t a Pyxie Girl re-run.
Cherry gave us her painting-by-numbers version. ‘William Paris knew who killed Jeremy Thorn. Paris is dead. Your client must have told you who was responsible—’
‘How do you come to that conclusion?’ I asked.
‘Because he was your client and because you had an arrangement with Philip Thorn to sell the information to him.’
How could she possibly have known that?
‘Oh, don’t look so shocked. I’m an investigative journalist. I investigate. Do you think I just let you wander off after our interview on Thursday morning? We filmed your meeting with Thorn. Unfortunately, telescopic lenses don’t carry telescopic microphones, but why else would you meet with him? What would he want more than to know who had murdered his son?’
‘All the same, I think I’ll pass on the interview,’ I said.
‘Talk sense to him, please,’ Cherry appealed to my dad. ‘Now that Thorn’s also sleeping with the fishes, that leaves one person who knows the truth and we all know what that means.’
My dad looked confused enough for both of us. ‘No, what does it mean?’
‘It means,’ Cherry said, rising from her chair, ‘that it would be inadvisable for your son to go anywhere near Linlithgow Loch unless he wants to end up in it.’ She placed both hands on the table and leaned forward at me. ‘Do this interview. Blow the story wide open before some government spook pushes your head under the water too.’
Present Tense Page 26