“You find anything down there?” said Joanne as Dan approached. Her hair was tousled from the rummaging and graft beneath the structure of the jetty. Mark had gone deeper under the structure, ferreting between the columns with his metal detector whining whenever it came near a rivet.
“Besides mud, you mean?” replied Dan. “Nothing. But if I keep raking through that stuff with my bare hands, sooner or later a razor clam is going to cut me to ribbons. We should have brought a spade and a torch. What about up here? Any joy?”
“We’ve made about three pounds in loose change so far. If we keep going, who knows? We might have a full tenner by morning,” said Joanne.
“Cash but no weapon,” said Dan.
“And no treasure either,” called Mark.
“That’s it. I think we can forget all about finding Clancy’s missing gold,” said Dan. “Whoever killed Renton probably took it as a bonus. Bet they couldn’t believe their luck.”
“What now then?” said Joanne. “You’re actually saying that you want to give up?”
“Hang on a minute,” said Dan. “You know I don’t like those words. But I would settle for going back home and getting clean again. Think of it as retreating and regrouping. We need more than a metal detector and our bare hands. Daylight would be good for a start.”
Joanne gave a vague nod of agreement.
“If that weapon is here, I suppose a few hours’ rest won’t hurt, Joanne.”
“Then we start again in the morning?” she said.
“What about your day job? Won’t the council sack you if you keep ducking out?” said Dan.
“I can hold them off a little while. This investigating business is far more my thing.”
Dan laughed. He peered under the jetty. “Mark. Come on out. We’ll come out again tomorrow. Go home, get clean and get some rest.”
“But we’ve hardly even started,” he said.
“Yes you have,” said Dan. “You’ve done the whole length of the jetty. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
“Fine, fine,” said Mark with a sigh.
They gathered together at the edge of the wide platform area behind the marine centre. The two uniformed policemen watched them the whole way. Their only entertainment for the night was finally leaving them behind. Dan tutted to himself and Joanne looked at him, waiting until he spoke.
“This case. It’s beating us. It’s like a nut you can’t crack open.”
“But you don’t give up,” said Joanne.
“No,” said Dan “Though sometimes I think it might be easier if we did.”
Joanne gave him a look which said she didn’t believe him.
“Meet you here in the morning then?” said Joanne.
“Only if your boss says so. Don’t get sacked on account of a wild goose chase.”
“My boss doesn’t have a choice in the matter.”
Dan shook his head and smiled at Mark. “This girl is a bad influence on you,” he said. “On all of us,” he added.
Mark grinned. “Don’t I know it.”
Dan waved them off and stared out to the water. There would be no jet ski run tonight. Tommy Pink and Clive Grace were in custody. Shame. Dan felt the need to vent his frustration at something, but no chance. Not even the boxing club was open at this time of night. Dan rubbed a muddy hand across his brow and turned reluctantly to find his car.
***
Eva stood up and aimed her phone carefully, shielding the torch beam from the window with her other hand. She tried the top of the bureau, but the fold-down leaf was also locked fast, and wouldn’t budge at all. Just as she’d expected. But the bureau was an antique. She’d seen them before. Eva’s father used to have one, a hand-down from her grandfather. It was an antique item, the kind which was opened with a tiny old-fashioned key. It was the kind of key which few would put on a keyring. Simply the wrong sort of key for that. Which had Eva wondering where it would have been stored... She opened the side cabinet again, pushing the awful homespun novel aside to run her hand along the back of the shelf. But she found no key in the cabinet. Was the key buried in the ceremonial tool drawer after all? She opened the drawer with another clatter which seemed to reverberate even louder than before... Or had she heard another noise somewhere in the house? Eva stilled her breath and listened. She heard nothing but that same old pregnant silence. She stood up and moved to the window. Aaron Clancy’s car was nowhere to be seen. The driveway was empty. Good. She let her breath go and took a deeper one. Her eyes flicked to the bookshelf and she scanned the tomes there. Nothing, no sign of a dish or anything in which a key might hide. Next she tried the usual alternatives and ran a hand high along the top of the bookshelf, but only got a trace of dust for her trouble. Eva shook her head and in a moment of desperation ran her finger along the framed cabinet of trinkets on the wall beside the presentation cabinet. Her finger nudged against something cool and tiny, and promptly knocked it down to the floor. She tutted and turned her phone torch beam down to the floorboards, and the tiny thing gleamed back at her. An ornate little key, dark and brassy. A grin broke across Eva’s face and she swiped it up. She moved to the bureau and unlocked the top lock, then tried the key on the top drawer. Both locks gave with a gentle click. Eva opened the bureau lid and lowered it down onto the wooden supports which were slid out by hand. She gazed around the small internal drawer and compartments and at the mass of catalogues and paper junk dumped in the main section between the pigeon holes. She scanned the compartments, prodding the contents left and right before her eyes settled on the pile in the centre. The pile – the stuff she had assumed as unloved accounting – something about the disorder didn’t look right. It looked hurried and inconsistent with what she had come to expect of a man like Aaron Clancy. Eva frowned. The mess of papers and books and pamphlets did seem to have an order to it once she looked more closely... it looked to her like a hastily crafted mound of whatever lay to hand, including a few of the man’s prized catalogues. Eva looked at the pile and started to pull out one small catalogue, receipt and clipping after another. She pulled out a bulldog-clipped pile of bank statements and set them aside. The same for a set of programmes for past jewellery auctions. She laid everything aside in a neat pile until all that was left was a battered looking jiffy bag with a torn corner. She pulled the yellow-brown jiffy bag away and was about to look inside when she saw something lay behind it. A dirty silver-grey item which looked like it had been designed to look like braiding or rope, ending in a wider circular footing. Beside the silvery stick was a large dark gold buckle. A square made of two rectangles, thick and weighty, with detailed engravings on all sides. Both looked extremely old. Eva frowned at them. They weren’t just old, they were quite obviously ancient. Eva gasped and turned her phone over in her hand. She thumbed the phone screen, opened the web browser app and typed in a few hasty search terms. As she typed, a sound came from somewhere beyond Clancy’s study. Eva paused and listened. Nothing but the silent hum. Probably just the pipes or something. She carried on typing... Items Stolen from Saxon King Tomb Treasures Southend. Click.
The first hit in the search list was an article written by Eva’s most recent nemesis, the young man-stealing harpy, Alice Perry. The article was no more than a week old, written when the pieces first went missing. Without saying it outright, Perry’s article had implied that Councillor Audley had been selfish in the extreme and taken a huge risk in borrowing the items from the museum for his so-called fundraising dinner, held at his own Chalkwell home. By the end of the article, she had even hinted the councillor had left the items unguarded when he was drunk and might even have engineered the theft himself. But there was nothing libellous. It was all carefully crafted insinuation, and possibly enough to curtail the man’s career, leaving the councillor on the defensive. No wonder the council interfered when the police found Clancy’s missing Celtic gold torq on the beach. They were desperate to regain the Saxon gold, feverish to do so. But the explanation behind it now seemed clear. Joe Clancy had
given it to Carl Renton with all the rest of his repentance gifts and Renton must have dropped it during the fatal attack. None of which explained what Eva was seeing in Clancy’s bureau. She scanned Perry’s article until she found the part she was looking for.
“...said to be priceless, the missing items from the King’s hoard include the silver corded stem of a goblet and the buckle of the Saxon King’s belt. Councillor Audley, who had requisitioned the treasures as the star exhibits for his privately hosted fundraising soirees was unavailable to comment.”
Eva read the words again before she gasped. She aimed her phone camera at the two pieces laying in the central compartment, framed by the dark wood on either side and took a snap. Then she hastily folded back the lid to inspect the drawer below. As she slid the drawer open, the handle on the door behind her began to dip, slow and silent.
Inside the drawer at the top of a small pile of ornaments and papers, Eva saw another item wrapped in canvas. The canvas was tied in the middle with a piece of old-fashioned twine. Eva teased at the knot in the twine with her fingernail, and loosened the knot. She bit her lip as she pulled the canvas open. Inside was a substantial piece of ornamental gold, copper and silver. A heavy metal-headed implement with one sharpened edge, albeit much softened by age. The heavy head was connected to the handle shaft with a braiding and twisting of decorative bronze and silver, which stretched down the length to join a complementary gold criss-cross pattern pressed onto a smooth handle of aged wood. The hatchet was marked, damaged and grooved by the centuries. Eva blinked, astonished. Clancy had told her this item had been stolen along with everything else. But he had only said so after she had noticed it missing from the nearby cabinet. With a trembling hand Eva pulled down the writing flap of the desk and turned out the contents of the creased-up jiffy bag onto the maroon leather inlay. Behind her the door opened wider, and Aaron Clancy’s bright cold eyes stared in as the contents of the jiffy bag tumbled down over the desk. “My God,” said Eva. Every single item Clancy had hired them to find lay before her on the desk. Eva opened the catalogue from her handbag to check, but it was a pointless gesture. She already knew. “That’s why we couldn’t find it,” she muttered. “He hired us to chase a lie!”
The voice behind her jolted her like an electric shock.
“Oh, it wasn’t a lie, Miss Roberts,” said Clancy. Eva spun around to face the man as he leaned into the doorway, his eyes sharp and dangerous. “And if I may say, I’d appreciate you being careful with my precious items. That hatchet for instance, I have no liking for it anymore. I’m going to sell it on as soon as I can find a buyer who’ll pay the right sum.”
Eva’s throat tightened, her heart raced and she fought to keep control of herself. She took a breath and stepped back against the desk, guarding the truth it held, blocking a likely murder weapon from Clancy’s hand.
“Of course you lied,” said Eva, anger and disgust filling her voice. “You had these things the whole time. The whole exercise, hiring us, involving the police – it was a charade – a waste of time.”
Eva still held her mobile phone in her hand by her hip. She kept it there, hoping to be unobtrusive. Trying for a sleight of hand she slipped the phone behind her into her palm and cupped it with her fingers.
“Come on, Mr Clancy. I remember you closing your desk back when you said I had a sharp eye. You had these things here the whole time... ever since poor Carl Renton was bludgeoned to death on that beach.” Her mind filled with thoughts of the hatchet blade, and the body on the beach. “What did Carl Renton have to die for? For trying to help your son? For trying to save this town from another wave of needless drug deaths?”
The man’s eyes sparked at the accusation. An accusation Eva couldn’t quite bring herself to say outright. Not yet. Because Eva sensed what would follow. So she put on an act, and glanced back across her shoulder, turning her head to the desk as if she wanted to make sure she had really seen the murder weapon. But instead she stole a glance at her phone and traced her fingers across the sweat-dampened screen. She dabbed the contacts icon and stole the briefest of moments hunting for Dan’s name. She looked back at Aaron Clancy and saw a trace of suspicion his eyes.
“Something alerted you to me,” said Clancy. “What? Indulge me. I’m a very successful jeweller and a man of good standing. If I wasn’t so thick-skinned I might have been offended.”
Eva saw a wicked glint in the man’s eyes.
“You shouldn’t take offence in that regard, Mr Clancy. I never doubted your status. I wouldn’t have ever suspected anything if it wasn’t for a needless lie,” she said.
“A needless lie?” said Clancy, raising his eyebrow. “What lie?”
“When you made a comment about checking in on your son on Thursday night. I really had no reason to doubt you at the time. You might well have checked on your son, he was unwell after all... but that turned out not to be true. I mentioned your visit to Joe – he didn’t remember it at all.”
“Joe? Joe wouldn’t have known what planet he was on, let alone whether I’d visited him in bed or not. Last I saw of him he was delirious and irrational. I had him down as stealing some of my liquor, though I couldn’t prove it for sure, like I had my suspicions about some of my missing gadgets. Teenagers do that kind of thing. Didn’t you? So long as Joe didn’t steal my finest stuff, I really didn’t mind too much. It kept him off the streets, or so I thought. Of course, I didn’t know then that he’d been stealing from me to fund a drug habit...”
“A deadly habit too, Mr Clancy. Surely you must have heard about the killer ecstasy tablets doing the rounds. They call them Ubers. And just a few can kill. Your son has been taking small amounts of them for a long time. He’s been playing with his life.”
“As I said, I didn’t know.”
“But you still thought he was getting wasted under your roof, on your watch and you did nothing about it. You’re his father! It’s your obligation to know what was going on and to help him. But you’ve abandoned any duty of care to pursue your wants over his. You’re never here. You lead the life of a dilletante and call it work. But your son needed you, and I think you knew you had deserted him. That’s why you lied about visiting your son. Because you knew you looked bad. It was vanity!”
“Don’t presume to judge me, Miss Roberts. That wouldn’t be a good move on your part, would it?
Eva ignored the threat. “But your lie gave it away, Mr Clancy. It was what led me here.”
“You couldn’t have known whether I lied or not. Joe isn’t a reliable witness.”
Eva glanced back at her phone once more. Her thumb slid over Dan’s name, and prodded at it. But somehow the screen didn’t react. The sweat perhaps? Eva’s mouth started to dry up. When she looked up Clancy was studying her closely. His brow dipped low over his cold, bright eyes.
“But Joe wasn’t the only witness. Georgie told me. You do know what they have is way more than just an ordinary teenage crush, don’t you? That girl is devoted to him. And as Carl Renton did, Georgie is trying to make up for the love and care you’ve denied him.”
“Georgie! She was here?!”
Eva blinked at him, reading the man’s eyes. She needed to check her phone but sensed his suspicion. One more slip and Clancy would know what she was up to.
“Georgie was always here, Mr Clancy. She slips in when you’re not looking. She hides from you because she knows you’re not really paying attention. You didn’t know, did you. She was even here when you came back very, very early on Friday morning – when you forced your way into Joe’s bedroom...”
It was a shot in the dark, but Eva saw the reaction she had wanted in his eyes. Surprise. He saw he had been rumbled. He had come back. But of course he had.
“I think I know why you went in his room.”
“You’re a skilled mind-reader as well as a detective, I see,” said Clancy.
“Just a good judge of character with plenty of experience when it comes to liars,” said Eva. She snatched one
glance down to her hand, saw her thumb over Dan’s name, and dabbed it. The screen turned bright white. The call was trying to connect. Eva felt the perspiration prickling at her forehead, her back and under her arms.
“You were angry with Joe, weren’t you? Furious, in fact. Because like you said, you didn’t lie about everything, Mr Clancy. You did think there was a robbery, didn’t you? You came home late from your girlfriend’s place, and you found the back window had been smashed in. You checked your collection and found your most favoured pieces were missing. The very cream of the crop. You were outraged. Your son only had one job to do, didn’t he? The only thing you kept him for, paid him for – and he couldn’t even do that right.”
The call suddenly connected and Dan’s voice came on the line.
“Eva? You done yet?” The voice was faint, but there was no hiding it. Clancy’s eyes narrowed and his lips opened. He surged towards her, but Eva backed away. She swiped a hand behind her, knocking Clancy’s precious centrepieces off the desk to land on the floor with a clatter. Clancy snarled and yanked at her wrist but Eva managed to pull free. But the violent motion loosed her grip on her phone and sent it flying through the air. It hit the wall, bounced to the floor and the screen turned black and silent.
Between Two Thieves Page 35