The Company

by Sally Spencer

  I tapped my inside jacket pocket. ‘It’s here.’

  ‘The full ten thousand?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘The full ten thousand,’ I assured her.

  ‘Right,’ Marie said. ‘Let’s go to the buffet, and I can brief you on developments so far.’

  It was almost as if I’d dreamed the last part of that phone call, I thought, as I followed her past students with rucksacks, women in expensive country suits who were only in town to shop, and dossers who held out their hands for spare change and kept one eye open for the police.

  ‘I love you,’ she’d said. ‘I meant that, you know. I really do love you.’

  How could she have spoken those words only a few hours ago, and yet be so cold now?

  ‘You still don’t understand what’s going on, do you, you bloody fool!’ jeered a nagging voice at the back of my mind. ‘She needed money for the next phase of her operation, and what better way to ensure you came through with it than by telling you what she knows you’ve always wanted to hear?’

  I didn’t believe it! I wouldn’t believe it!

  And yet the thought had come from inside my own head, so there had to be at least a part of me which accepted it as a strong possibility.

  We reached the buffet. Marie, without asking me what I wanted, ordered two coffees, and took them over to the smoking section. As soon as she’d set the tray on the table, she took out her cigarettes and lit up.

  I sat down opposite her. ‘You know Bill Harper’s been murdered, don’t you?’ I asked.

  Marie nodded. ‘I heard about it on the radio. But it’s got nothing to do with this case.’

  ‘The police seem to think it might have.’

  ‘The police are wrong,’ Marie said, waving her cigarette like a dismissive magic wand. ‘Paul Taylor’s probably the one who killed your brother, and he’s never left Bristol since the crash.’

  ‘You sound very sure of yourself.’

  ‘It’s my job to be sure of myself.’ Marie smiled, but it was a complacent smile, rather than an affectionate one. ‘Do you want to know how I found Paul Taylor when the combined might of several police forces failed?’

  ‘Why not,’ I said, though there were many things in my tormented mind that I would rather have talked about.

  ‘As you know, I started my search in Lancashire, but the moment I found out that on the day of the crash, Paul had gone into a bank in Bristol and withdrawn twenty thousand from the company account—’

  ‘He’d done what?’ I interrupted.

  ‘He withdrew twenty thousand pounds from the company account. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know,’ I admitted, ‘but more to the point, how did you know?’

  ‘If you get two publishers together, they’ll talk about nothing but publishing,’ Marie said. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

  ‘In the same way, two coppers will talk about nothing but police work. And if they’re doing that talking in a pub, and you’ve positioned yourself so you’re quite close to them, you’ll find you can learn all kinds of interesting things – especially when one of them has a mouth as big as Detective Sergeant Matthews has.’

  ‘But even if Paul Taylor drew out the money in Bristol, how could you assume that he was still—’

  ‘I checked up on Taylor’s background. He’s led a completely conventional life. He was brought up in a nice suburb, attended a good secondary school, and chose a sensible business course at university. He’s never shown any real spirit of adventure in his entire life – and he’s never been in trouble with the police.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘His picture has been in all the papers, there’ve been reports about him on the television, and the police have been manning a hotline round the clock,’ Marie continued. ‘If they’d been looking for you, rather than Paul, they’d have had you within a couple of days. But Paul is still missing. How do you explain that?’

  ‘Perhaps he’s gone abroad,’ I suggested.

  ‘Not him,’ Marie said. ‘He’s scared enough being on the run in this country. Abroad, he’d be absolutely terrified.’

  ‘So what did he do?’

  ‘To stay hidden, he needed help – the sort of help which wasn’t too scrupulous, and possibly had criminal connections. The problem was that nice, straight Paul didn’t know anyone like that – except that he did!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Was your father part of the team negotiating the purchase of Western Haulage?

  ‘Yes, Grandfather insisted on it, because he wanted all the directors to be behind the deal.’

  ‘And Paul would have gone with your father?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So he’ll have met Hugh Morgan then, and even if your uncle couldn’t see that he was a villain, Paul could.’

  ‘Oh, Uncle Tony could see he was a villain, all right,’ I said, ‘but since the honest partners were prepared to sell the company cheap, he didn’t really care.’

  ‘So Paul was in Bristol with his pockets full of money, blood on his hands, and nowhere to run to,’ Marie said. ‘He had no choice but to turn to Hugh Morgan – and once I’d realized that, the rest was easy.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I went to see Morgan and gave him some guff about there being a substantial reward for information which would lead me to Paul Taylor. At that point, I still wasn’t one hundred per cent sure I’d got it right, but as soon as I mentioned the money, his eyes lit up, and I knew I was spot on.’

  ‘He admitted it?’ I asked amazed. ‘Just like that?’

  Marie snorted. ‘Of course it wasn’t just like that. What he said was that he wasn’t sure, but he might know a man who knew a man who might be able to get the address where Paul was hiding. He didn’t want any money himself for providing this information, but the other two men would probably want ten thousand pounds each. I told him that for that kind of money I could find plenty of men who knew men, and he said that in that case, maybe it could be fixed for ten grand between them.’

  ‘Why is he so willing to sell Paul out?’

  ‘My guess is that Taylor’s now paid him all the money he could lay his hands on, so there’s no point in running the risk of hiding him any longer. So, given that Morgan was planning to withdraw his protection anyway, the extra ten thousand is something of a bonus.’ She lit a second cigarette from the stub of her first. ‘By the way, he wanted you to know that he was involved in this. He was most insistent on that.’

  He would have been, I thought. He’d promised to get his revenge and now he had – first by impeding the murder inquiry for quite some time, and then by squeezing money out of me.

  ‘The reason you asked me for the money, rather than going to Lydia, is that you don’t trust her,’ I said. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when did this lack of trust begin?’

  ‘It was there right at the start. She either wanted Paul to be found or to make certain he couldn’t be found – and whichever it was, that meant she was tied in with the murders in some way.’

  ‘So even though you didn’t trust her, you still agreed to work for her?’

  Anger flashed in Marie’s eyes. ‘I had no choice but to work for her,’ she said. ‘I’m not rich, like you Conroys. If I was going to carry out my investigation properly, I needed someone to pick up my expenses, and Lydia’s offer was like a gift from heaven.’

  ‘Let me see if I’ve got this straight,’ I said. ‘You were already intending to try and find Paul Taylor, even before Lydia hired you?’

  The anger in her eyes was suddenly replaced by defensiveness. ‘That’s right,’ she agreed.

  ‘Why?’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s an interesting case.’

  ‘An interesting case?’ I repeated ‘Tell me, Marie, what makes it so interesting – the fact that it involved my family?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Lydia had been right – about
this matter at least. Marie had always shown an unnatural interest in the Conroys.

  Even during that first meal we had together in the little Italian restaurant in Oxford – the very night we met – she’d been pumping me for information. I could see that now.

  But why had she done it? Though Lydia claimed that she knew the reason behind it, I was as much in the dark as I’d ever been.

  ‘Just what kind of game are you playing, Marie?’ I asked.

  ‘Game?’ she echoed, as if she had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. ‘No game! Someone tried to kill you, remember?’

  ‘Of course I remember.’

  ‘And that really matters to me,’ Marie said. ‘Doesn’t it matter to you, Rob? Don’t you want to find out who was responsible for three members of your family dying unnecessarily?’

  It was an evasion, and I knew it, but what else could I say but, ‘Of course it matters to me.’

  Marie stubbed her cigarette out forcefully in the ashtray. ‘Then can I suggest that instead of questioning me like this, we get on with the job we’ve both come down here to do?’

  ‘Will you ever tell me what’s going on inside your head?’ I pleaded. ‘Will you ever let me see what you’re really feeling?’

  ‘Perhaps when this is over,’ she said. ‘Maybe then, I’ll finally be able to let myself come clean.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  There were uniformed officers in every room of the house – going through drawers, tapping the backs of cupboards, and lifting floorboards. The man who had instituted the search stood next to the picture window in the lounge, looking down across the fields to the mere, while the man whose home was being subjected to such detailed scrutiny paced agitatedly up and down behind him.

  ‘This is totally outrageous,’ my cousin Philip said.

  Owen Flint turned round to face him.

  ‘The magistrate who signed the search warrant didn’t seem to think it was too unreasonable,’ he said mildly.

  ‘Why would I have murdered Bill Harper?’ Philip demanded. ‘I promoted him. I gave him a status in the company equal to my own.’

  ‘You’ve made the point before,’ Flint reminded him. ‘But the promotion was business – the murder might well have been an affair of the heart.’

  Philip laughed. ‘An affair of the heart? Whatever can you mean by that, Mr Flint?’

  ‘You chucked Susan Harper, but then you discovered – much to your surprise – that you really were in love with her. And you had to have her at any cost – which is why you killed her husband.’

  ‘Do you think that Bill would have objected if I’d used my droit de seigneur to take his little Enid off him – because I don’t,’ Philip said. ‘And far from falling in love with her, if it hadn’t been for the convenience of her happening to live in the village, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with her at all.’

  You really are a little shit, aren’t you? Flint thought.

  ‘Susan’s nothing but a vindictive little bitch!’ Philip said, with sudden venom, ‘and if it’s the last thing I do, I’ll find a way to pay her back for this.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think you were exactly in a position to be making threats, sir,’ Flint said. ‘Besides, look at it this way – Susan Harper’s testimony may have made you the number one suspect for the murder of Bill Harper, but at least it’s got you completely off the hook for the murders of your father, uncle and cousin, because she’s your alibi for the night before the crash, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, she is,’ Philip agreed. ‘With Bill away in Bristol and Swansea, it was the ideal opportunity for us to spend some time together. But she’s totally wrong about the other thing. It wasn’t me she saw coming up the fields and entering this house.’

  ‘Who was it then? A burglar? A passing tramp who just happened to have your door key? The Mad Hatter?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Philip said angrily. ‘You’re the police – you find out who it was.’

  A uniformed constable entered the room, carrying an iron bar in a plastic evidence bag.

  ‘We found this buried in the garden, sir,’ he said.

  Flint turned to Philip with a pitying expression on his face. ‘You look surprised we’ve found it so quickly,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of metal detectors?’

  ‘Anyone could have put it there,’ Philip said frantically. ‘All they had to do was open the gate and dig a hole. I can see what’s happening here. I’m being framed, aren’t I? I’m being set up for something I didn’t do.’

  ‘If you didn’t kill Bill Harper, then you’ve got nothing to fear,’ Flint told him. ‘But let’s just say you killed him, and then buried the murder weapon. Can you be sure – absolutely sure – that one of your neighbours, out for a late-night stroll, perhaps, didn’t see you at it?’

  Philip’s head jerked back, as if he’d been slapped.

  ‘Are you saying that you’ve got a witness?’ he asked shakily.

  ‘I’m saying there’s a possibility of a witness,’ Flint said, noncommittally.

  Panic flooded Philip’s eyes. ‘Even if I did bury it – and I’m not saying that I did – it’s just an iron bar,’ he said. ‘There’s absolutely no proof that it’s the murder weapon.’

  Flint shook his head. ‘You think that, just because you cleaned it, you’ll have got rid of all the traces,’ he said. ‘If you do, you’re wrong, boyo – terribly, terribly wrong. The lads in forensics will have come up with enough material to fill a small book by tomorrow. And there’ll be other things. We’ll find your footsteps leading down to the mere – and we’ll be able to tell when you made them. We’ll find soil samples on your shoes. There may even be some bloodstains on your clothes.’

  ‘He didn’t blee …’ Philip began.

  ‘No, he didn’t, did he?’ Flint said. ‘So that’s one little pointer we can’t use. But like I said, there’ll be enough others.’

  ‘Am I being arrested?’ Philip asked, now on the verge of hysteria.

  ‘Not till we’ve done a few tests,’ Flint told him. ‘But if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t go making any long-term plans.’

  The tests would turn out to be positive, he was sure of that. So they’d have both the means and opportunity to help them make their case. The only problem was, he still had no idea – absolutely no bloody idea at all – why Philip should have wanted to kill Bill Harper.

  Marie stubbed out the third cigarette she’d smoked since we entered the buffet, and glanced down at her watch.

  ‘It’s time to make a move,’ she said. ‘Give me the money.’

  I placed the brown envelope on the table between us. I was expecting her to put it in her handbag, but she merely grabbed it, and then stood up.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  We made our way across the station, towards the main exit. Marie still had the envelope in her hand, and I found myself looking around nervously for signs of pickpockets and muggers.

  ‘When will the exchange be made?’ I asked.

  ‘Soon,’ Marie replied, unhelpfully.

  We were almost at the street. A newspaper seller was shouting out the day’s headlines, and one of his customers took a sudden step backwards and banged into Marie.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ the man said. ‘I can’t think what could have made me so incredibly clumsy.’

  ‘No harm done,’ Marie said.

  The man stepped clear of her. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘Well, in that case, I’ve got a train to catch.’

  The man hurried away, but not before I’d noticed the corner of a brown envelope sticking out of the corner of his newspaper.

  I turned my attention to Marie. She was studying a single sheet of cheap writing paper.

  ‘This is the address,’ she said.

  ‘But how do you know it’s the right one?’ I asked. ‘That bastard Morgan could have written down his granny’s address, for all you know, and still have taken th
e money.’

  ‘When you cut through all the morality crap, he’s simply a businessman making a deal,’ Marie said. ‘Why would he bother to double-cross me – and possibly store up trouble for himself later on – when it’s just as easy to tell me the truth?’

  ‘If he’s not double-crossing you, he’s double-crossing Paul Taylor,’ I pointed out.

  Marie snorted. ‘There’s nothing I can do about that – because you simply can’t protect people like Paul Taylor. They’re born to be double-crossed.’

  I’d always realized we came from different worlds, but now – when I was already feeling out of my depth, and in danger of drowning, while she was as calm as if she’d never left the paddling pool – I began to see just how different our worlds were.

  We left the station and turned right. Marie’s Golf was parked on a double yellow line, but – with the luck of the Irish – she hadn’t been ticketed.

  ‘There’s an A to Z of Bristol on the passenger seat,’ she said. ‘Look up Alexander Terrace.’

  We left the city centre behind us and were soon passing through an area of grim terraced houses, most of which seemed to have been abandoned.

  ‘It’s not very salubrious, is it?’ I said.

  ‘Did you really expect Hugh Morgan to book a desperate fugitive like Paul Taylor a room in the Ritz?’ Marie asked.

  I read a street sign, and then checked my map again. ‘Alexander Terrace is the next street on the left,’ I said. ‘As far as I can work out, number seventeen will be about halfway down it.’

  Marie indicated, but instead of turning, as I’d expected her to, she merely pulled into the curb.

  ‘No point in advertising the fact that we’re here,’ she said.

  We walked down the street. Many of the houses were boarded up, and even those still occupied looked as if they would crumble to red brick dust with the slightest encouragement. There was an alley running along the side of number eleven and Marie came to a halt there.

  ‘Go up to number seventeen, and knock on the front door,’ she told me. ‘Make sure you knock very loudly.’

  ‘And where will you be?’

  She looked at me as if I was a slow pupil she really despaired of teaching anything.