Unnatural Justice ob-7

by Quintin Jardine

  I felt myself start to shake with anger, but I controlled it. "You did the really stupid thing next, though." I felt like a dark side version of Michael Aspel, with the red "This is Your Life' book. "You signed up as a member, at a number of sites probably, not just Neptune. And you paid with your credit card." Nod. "And the form asked for your address, and you gave that too." Nod again.

  "How many times?"

  He shrugged his shoulders; if I'd let him, he'd have turned his back on me. He certainly couldn't look me in the eye. "I don't know," he whispered. "Maybe half a dozen."

  "Maybe. Maybe if I checked your credit card statements I'd find lots more." I shook my head, struck by an irony. "You know, in recent times, I've come to think of myself as one of the luckiest guys on the planet. You, on the other hand, must be one of the unluckiest. Most of these sites are run from places like Thailand or Mexico. You just happened to sign up for a do-it-yourself operation run out of Pitten-fucking-weem! And you told them where you lived!"

  I tried to catch his eye, but still he looked away. "There never was a surgery incident, was there?" I asked. "I'll bet if I look at your list I'll find that Andrea Neiporte wasn't even a patient. Right?" I barked it out.

  His shoulders gave a great heave as he sighed. "Of course you're right. I made that story up, Oz, in the hope… Oh, I don't know in what hope."

  "I do. You did it in the hope that I'd take care of it in some way.

  Pay them off, scare them off; you didn't care as long as I fixed it for you."

  "I suppose so." Finally, he did look at me. "Son, I was desperate. It was like living a nightmare. The first thing that happened was that an envelope arrived in the mail, addressed to me, personal and confidential. When I opened it, I found print-outs of some of that stuff you saw in the computer."

  "Let me guess. The personal stuff?"

  "Yes, graphic, blown up so you couldn't fail to recognise my face.

  There was no note with it, but next day Andrea Neiporte phoned me in the surgery. She told me that the next envelope would go to Mary, unless…"

  He sat on the edge of the table. "The first time it was five hundred.

  I agreed, and I posted it to her, in cash. I thought that would be it, but a week or so later, she called again. She said that they'd spent the five hundred, so would I give her a thousand, please. I did, of course. It was the third phone call that asked for the fifty grand. I said that I didn't have that sort of ready cash. She laughed and said that you did. She said she'd call me in a couple of weeks, and that when she did, they'd be expecting the money. It was a couple of days after that that you came up."

  "What would you have done if I hadn't?"

  "I don't know. Paid her, I suppose."

  "But instead you turned me loose on them." He nodded.

  "When did you know that hadn't worked?"

  "I had that first nasty, spitting phone call from her, the one I told you about. She said she'd show me how scared they were, then she'd be back in touch."

  "The can of paint at the premiere; that was a message for you, not me?"

  "That's right. When she called me again, the day after, she said that the time scale had shortened. They wanted the money in three days, or Mary got the photos."

  "So," I said, 'finally, you plucked up the courage and you killed them.

  And that show of outrage on the golf course afterwards, that was all a sham."

  "No!" he shouted, violently, vehemently. "No, I did not kill them! I wasn't kidding that day. I really thought you killed them, or you had your man Jay do it. If you want to know the truth, I still do."

  "Well you're wrong," I told him, 'although you might have been on the mark. I sent Jay up to life to put them off for good, and I gave him an open ticket. Our deal was that we wouldn't talk about it when he got back, and when the bodies were found, I will admit that I thought the same as you. But then the police published the date and time of death, and I knew it couldn't have been him."

  "And that's how I can prove it wasn't me," my father exclaimed, with a sudden exultation that struck me as shameless, given the circumstances.

  "When it happened, Mary and I were in Kirkcaldy, at a life Rotary and Inner Wheel joint fundraiser. I have a couple of hundred witnesses to say I didn't do it."

  I looked at him for a while. I knew that my life wasn't the same any more, and that it never would be. My Dad… I always thought of him with a capital letter, like God… didn't exist any more, not as such. I could never think of him in that light again, in the special way I always had until then. I realised that I had suffered a bereavement as real as I had when Jack Gantry's overenthusiastic messengers had killed Jan.

  Is there no forgiveness in me, do I hear you ask? Truly I wish that there could be. I wish that I could excuse him by rational ising that every one of us has a weakness, something that's beyond our control.

  But I can't, not completely: for there were people on that computer, victims, who were no more than kids, and I'm a father myself.

  "What would you have done?" I asked him.

  "I don't know," he replied. "I sat at home waiting for a phone call but it never came. If it had, I might have called you again, or I might just have paid them."

  "And hoped that it was over?"

  "Yes," he whispered.

  "Just as you think it's over now?" He frowned up at me, puzzled. "The website's still open," I pointed out. "I just logged on to it, using your woefully insecure passwords. It'll stay open until the unscrupulous service provider who maintains it stops getting paid and shuts it down. Then there's the police investigation. You're not fucking special you know, other than having a rich son; the Neiportes were probably blackmailing other people, one of whom had them done. life CID will be looking through their database right now for suspects, and sooner or later they'll come to you. When they do, coppers being as they are, some detective constable or uniformed PC in the know will phone the Sun or the Record and tell them that Oz Blackstone's father's a suspect in a porn ring murder, and you'll be all over the fucking papers anyway. And when that happens, and they come to me for a quote, you know what? I may well disown you. I'll have trouble finding anything sympathetic to say, that's for sure."

  "Son," he began. I knew that a plea was on the way, but I wasn't in the mood to listen.

  "I'm not sure that I am," I retorted, 'not any more. I don't know if I have a father any more. I'll need to work that out over time. But for now, let me show you something."

  I picked up his two grand laptop, the sturdily built top of the range Shoei, and I broke it to pieces with my bare hands. I ripped the screen off, easily, and threw it away, then I took the base and twisted it as hard as I could. It buckled, and character pads started to fly from the keyboard, until finally it cracked and split open. I wrenched at it, furiously, until the inner workings were exposed and I could see the hard disk, where all that filth was stored. I pulled it out, slipped it into my pocket and threw the debris into the surgery waste bin.

  "There. You'll feel better for that, once you think about it. I won't, though."

  I walked towards the door. "A couple more things," I said, before I left. "That ice-cream's made you sick. You're not going to be able to face the Craw's Nest tonight. I just can't sit at the same table as you and pretend this didn't happen, so I'll take everyone out and you'll stay home. And there's this too. I'm not going to shop you; if the police come to you, that's your tough luck. But when you think about it, you may decide that you'll never be a man again until you've told Mary about this, and Ellen. Apart from that, they might appreciate hearing of your sins directly from you, rather than from a string of tabloid reporters."

  As far as I know, he's still thinking about that.

  Forty-One.

  I found Jay in the kitchen, making himself coffee. "Change of plan," I told him. "We're going to stay at Ellie's tomorrow night, after the dinner, and Sunday. We'll put you up in Rusack's Hotel, so you can enjoy the exciting nightlife of St. Andrews. Who knows
, maybe you'll find a nice American coed. The place is dripping with them, especially since Thingummy went there."

  "I should be closer to you, boss."

  "No need. There's only two Bears left now, and they'll be too busy dividing up Jock Perry's bit of the empire to bother with the likes of us." He looked at me, surprised. Clearly, Jay hadn't been listening to the radio on the drive through.

  "Make an extra coffee and come with me for a minute, though." When he was finished we picked up our mugs and I led him out of the kitchen and into the long garden of my father's house. There's a bench seat at the foot, looking out over the Firth of Forth, and we sat there. I laid down my coffee, took out my mobile and called Mark Kravitz, on a number he gave me once. He filters all his calls, so I left a message and he called me back a minute later.

  "Hi Oz," he said, cheerily. "What is it this time? Another favour or a job?"

  "The latter, if you can do it." I gave him the web address of King Neptune's Sea of Pleasure. "I want the ISP traced and I want the site shut down, whatever the cost."

  "The proprietors might want a lot."

  "The proprietors have become part of cyberspace itself."

  "Should be easy, then."

  "Today if you can. Send the bill to Jay, not directly to me."

  "Sure. Take care up there." He hung up. That last part was a big speech for Mark.

  I turned to my minder. "Jay, I need to know," I told him. "My whole fucking world's gone pear-shaped here. When you came back from your trip to Pittenweem, you said I wouldn't want to know what you'd done. I went along with that because I put the wrong interpretation on it. But now I really do have to know what happened."

  He nodded. "If you've had a face-to-face with your old man, and I heard some of it, I guess you do." He took a sip from his mug. "I did as you asked; went to the Neiportes' cottage. I had a game plan all worked out; you don't need to know the details but I have certain calling cards that imply I'm officially connected, if you understand me. I intended to put on a small show for them and to convince them that by messing with your family they had stepped on some very sensitive toes, and that if they didn't desist, Walter would find himself deported and back in the States faster than you could say "Elvis". This could have been awkward for him, since there are a couple of small cases of internet fraud that the FBI wanted to discuss with him."

  Jay looked at me. "I didn't anticipate any problems. That sort of approach never fails with small-timers like these were. But the big difficulty was, they weren't home. It was seven thirty in the evening, and the house was empty. So I went in, through a back window, easy as you like. I could tell they hadn't been home for a while, a day at least. The breakfast dishes in the sink were not from that morning, and the mail, and the newspaper, were still in the hall."

  He drank some more coffee. "So I had a really good look around. There was nothing downstairs that told me anything, but upstairs, in a couple of attic rooms…" he whistled '… that was different. They told me the whole story. One was like a photographic studio, with a bed and various cameras, masks, costumes, props… it reminded me of a street in Amsterdam. The other room was full of computer equipment; a couple of desktops, one newer and a lot faster than the other, scanners and the like. I switched them on… no security at all. Probably figured they didn't need passwords. They were running a porn website, Oz; bloody hardcore too."

  Jay seemed to wince at the memory. "Anyway, I wasn't interested in that. I wanted their diary, and it didn't take me long to find it, on the newer computer. There was an entry for the day before and it said "19:00. M. Blackstone. Lesser Saltgate Farm, Arncroach". So I let myself out… I took a key with me, so I could get back in through the door if necessary… and headed for that farm."

  He looked at me, sadly. "People should not be allowed to keep animals that way, Oz. The place was deserted and it didn't look like anyone goes there very often. The poor bastards were filthy. They were penned in, and they were fed in troughs from these bloody great hoppers that were filled with this horrible stinking swill. There were dead piglets lying about too, and some of them…" He broke off.

  "I found the bodies easy enough. They were in one of the troughs, but they hadn't been covered up properly. They'd been shot, him in the chest, her in the chest and head, close range, with a shotgun, not sawn-off, though, or the spread would have been wider and the wounds would have been worse."

  "What did you do?" I asked him quietly. I was struck by the fact that he had been a lot more distressed by the state of the pigs than that of the Neiportes. Me too, I'm sure, had I seen them.

  "I covered them up properly, that's all, then I got out of there before the farmer or one of his hands turned up." He held his mug close, in both hands. "Let's just say, boss, that I reached certain conclusions, and I acted accordingly. I went back to the cottage and I stripped it as best I could. I found a couple of suitcases and I packed all the stuff from the studio into them, then I made it up with clean sheets and covers to make it look like an ordinary bedroom. Then I had another look at the computers. I wiped them clean of all the porn stuff, all the databases, all the addresses, all the client information: and when I say clean I mean really clean. There's nothing in any wastebaskets or anything like that. I spent half the night deleting and removing all traces of what had been there, and then, just to make sure, I reinstalled the system software in each of them.

  There's nothing left there to connect that place with what had been happening there. I sold the cameras to a bloke with a stall at Barrowlands in Glasgow; they'll be untraceable by now."

  "What about the money?" I asked. "The Neiportes were collecting through credit cards."

  "That all went into a bank account in Jersey, with a false name. The police won't find that, not by accident at any rate. I found the records in a filing cabinet, and a lot of other stuff too. When I was done, there was nothing left in the house other than purely domestic papers. Everything else is ashes."

  "And the tabs? The ecstasy? What about that?"

  "I got them through Mark," he replied. "I figured that I needed to send the CID off on a false trail, so I called him and asked him if he could get me a supply of something or other to plant on a bad guy. He sent me somewhere up in the Highlands. I picked up the gear, went back to the house again and hid it for the police to find when the bodies were discovered. Then I headed home."

  He looked into his mug intently, as if something was swimming in it.

  "You don't have to worry, Oz. Your old man's safe."

  "I know he is. He didn't do it. He was up to his elbows in Rotarians when the Neiportes got it; as alibied as you could get."

  "Eh?" Jay had been as convinced as me of my father's guilt. "But that only leaves…"

  I nodded. "Exactly; me. I sound just like my father on the phone."

  "You mean you sent me up there to clear up the mess?"

  I winked at him. "Sorry. I didn't know there would be so much work. I didn't know about the porn site until today."

  "What happens to me, now I know?" he asked, quietly.

  "Nothing. You're as guilty as me in the eyes of the law. Accessory after the fact. All that happens to you is that you live long and prosper, like Mr. Spock."

  He laughed. "You doing a Star Trek movie next?"

  "Some day, mate, some day."

  I glanced at him again. "How am I paying you for all that stuff? The gear must have cost more than you got for the cameras."

  "I've been looking for a way your accountants won't spot," he said.

  "You'll be paying me extra for the installation work on Janet's playground."

  I smiled. "As much as you like. See you later."

  He stood and walked back towards the house. The smile left my face as soon as he had gone. As I've said, I've been in some personal danger in my life, but I've never felt scared; it's all happened too fast for that, I suppose. Yet as Jay's footsteps crunched on the gravel behind me, I sat there feeling more frightened than at any moment in my li
fe.

  Forty-Two.

  When I went back to the house myself, Ellie and the boys had just arrived. She greeted me like a long-lost brother… which I was to an extent, as it had been weeks since I'd seen her, and she and I have always been very close.

  "Hey," I asked her, 'would you fancy putting up the junior branch of the family for a couple of nights? I've been thinking, it's daft to come all the way back to Enster after the dinner. And I thought that Sunday will give you a chance to get to know your niece better."

  "That'll be great, Oz; as long as I can cook for you on Sunday night."

  I grinned. "I can live with that." I turned to Jonathan, who was standing quietly behind her, Colin having gone crashing off to the garden. "Young man," I began. He looked up at me, but not far up. I still wasn't used to his eye level being so close to mine. "Do you fancy a ride in a genuine Lotus sports car?"

  "Right now?" he exclaimed, a child's reaction in a man's tone.

  "Sure, we've got time."

  My nephew and I headed outside. As he slid easily into the passenger seat, I thought of Wylie Smith and smiled. As I started the engine he looked around the cockpit. "When you're finished with this, Uncle Oz," he asked, cheekily, 'can I have it?"

  "I'll tell you what," I told him, as we slipped out on to the main road and turned westwards. "When I'm done with it, I'll put it away for you. But you won't drive it until you can afford to insure it yourself. If that isn't an incentive to get your head into the books I don't know what is."