Текст книги "Dead Man's Time"

Автор книги: Peter James

Соавторы: Peter James
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

22

‘Arrivederci, sunshine,’ the driver said, turning round, showing his face to Ricky Moore for the first time. He looked an old, unkempt git, Moore thought, sullenly.

The Apologist hauled Moore out of the rear of the Mercedes as easily as if he were a cardboard cut-out. Then he held him upright in the ankle-deep gravel, in the glare of the floodlighting and the silence of the night, outside the grand entrance porch of the white mansion.

They were half a mile down a tree-lined private driveway and three miles from the nearest dwelling. From his knowledge of Sussex Ricky Moore had a vague idea where they were, but he wasn’t familiar with all the back lanes beyond Lewes. He heard an owl hoot somewhere close. In front of him a burly middle-aged man, with short, gelled hair and a sharp business suit, climbed down from the driver’s side of the black Range Rover. Something was bulking out the front of the man’s jacket.

A cooling engine ticked steadily, like a clock. The man in the business suit strode up to the porch. In the darkness and the silence and the total absence of any neighbours, Ricky Moore was becoming increasingly frightened with every passing second. He had to escape, but how? His brain was all over the place, almost paralyzed with fear. Then he cried out in pain as one of the nerves in his right arm was agonizingly crushed.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Apologist said to Moore, escorting him forward, maintaining the excruciating pressure. ‘Really, I am. Believe me. You may find it hard to believe, but I am sorry, truly.’ He smiled. Most of his teeth needed work. ‘I’m just doing my job.’

‘Look,’ Moore said, urgently. ‘I’ll pay you good money to take me back to the pub. A lot of money. I mean it, a lot.’

The Apologist was a loyal man. He’d been given his nickname in prison for constantly apologizing to everyone, about everything, and he’d liked the name. He hardly ever used his real name, Augustine Krasniki. Apologizing was his nature; he couldn’t help it. As a small boy, in his native Albania, his mother had blamed him for his father leaving her. She’d blamed him for everything, and the only way to calm her was to apologize, constantly, day and night. It was even his fault when it rained, so he learned to apologize for that also. Eventually she had put him into care, for reasons he never understood, but he assumed it must have been his fault. From there he had been moved from foster home to foster home. People felt scared by him, intimidated by the way he looked – and by his physical strength. It had taken him a while to understand and control his own strength. Once he killed a child’s pet gerbil by stroking it too hard; another time he crushed a budgerigar to death by accident. Often people screamed in pain when he shook their hand. He tried to remember to be gentle, but his brain did not always work that well.

When boys had picked on him at school for being so ugly, he had tried – but failed – to control his strength. With one punch he would smash their ribs, or knock all their front teeth out, every single one of them, like a ten-pin strike! He couldn’t help his temper when other kids taunted him, calling him Boris Karloff, telling him he looked like Frankenstein’s monster, so he just got used to hitting them and then apologizing after.

Only one person had ever been kind to him in his life. His boss, Lucas Daly. He gave him money, let him have the flat above the shop in the Lanes, which he guarded fiercely, and had him sit in on all his drug deals. No one ever messed with Lucas Daly, not after they had taken one look at the Apologist. He was unswervingly loyal to his boss.

‘I’m sorry,’ the Apologist said to Ricky Moore. ‘I’d like to say yes, really I would. I’d like to say yes and take your money. But I can’t. You’ll have to trust me on that one.’

The man in the business suit opened the front door with his key and Ricky Moore, propelled by the grip of the Apologist, stumbled in. The door closed behind him. They were in a huge hallway, with a black and white chequered floor. Two suits of armour, each with a lance in their steel right hands, stood either side of a grand stairway. Fine, classical oil paintings hung from the walls, the kind of paintings that would normally have piqued Ricky Moore’s interest. But tonight he barely noticed them through his tears of pain.

There was a strong smell of cigar smoke. Moore was craving a cigarette. An elderly man with flowing white hair, wearing a smoking jacket and monogrammed black velvet slippers, walked towards them, with the aid of a silver-headed cane. He held a large cigar in his free hand, and fury blazed in his cornflower-blue eyes.

‘Ricky Moore?’

He nodded sullenly.

‘I’m Gavin Daly. I appreciate your dropping by.’

‘Very funny,’ Moore said defiantly.

Daly grinned back. There was a flash of warmth that was gone in an instant, like a fleeting glimpse of the sun behind a storm cloud. ‘Funny? You like jokes, do you? Think it’s funny to con vulnerable old ladies out of their possessions?’

‘I dunno what you’re talking about.’

‘Get nice kickbacks, do you, for your information? Send your leaflet out in advance, then go into houses and take photographs of anything of value?’

‘Nah, not me. I honestly dunno what you’re talking about.’ He gasped in pain as the Apologist crushed the nerve in his arm again, as if to remind him not to bother thinking about trying to get away. ‘It’s not me.’

‘A house in Withdean Road.’

‘Never been there.’

‘There’s a lady in a house there who has one of your leaflets on her hall table.’

‘Not that I recall.’

‘Let me jog your memory,’ said the man in the business suit in a snide, assured voice. Then he sniffed. He looked taller than when Moore had seen him outside, and more immaculate, with black hair gelled back. He reminded Moore of photographs he had seen of those gangsters, the Kray twins.

Moore glanced around, wondering if he could make a break for it the moment the gorilla let go of his arm.

‘This your iPhone?’ the Kray lookalike asked, holding it up in front of him.

Moore nodded, and gasped in pain as the gorilla squeezed his arm even harder.

‘Sorry!’ the Apologist said.

‘I’m Lucas Daly, by the way,’ the Kray lookalike said. ‘It was my auntie who got robbed and murdered, thanks to you. My dad’s sister. Neither of us are very happy about it.’

‘I didn’t have nothing to do with it!’ Ricky Moore said.

Lucas Daly frowned, looking down at the phone. He tapped it several times, then held the phone up in front of Moore’s eyes.

‘Recognize that, do you?’

Ricky Moore stared, reluctantly, at the close-up photograph of the gilded case of the Whitehurst clock that had been hanging in the drawing room of Aileen McWhirter’s house. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘You must have a fucking short memory.’ He sniffed again.

Moore said nothing, his brain racing, trying desperately to come up with something convincing – and failing.

‘What about this?’

Moore stared at another photograph. This time of a swan-necked Georgian tallboy. Again he shook his head.

The man tapped the iPhone again. ‘This?’

Moore stared at a Chippendale gateleg table.

‘Never seen it before, honest! Not my photos. I didn’t take them. I didn’t!’

Then the man dug his hand inside his jacket, and pulled out the implement that had been bulking it out. It was a pair of electric curling tongs, with a flex trailing. ‘How about these, Mr Moore?’

‘I’ve never seen them before, honestly!’

‘These are like the ones used on my auntie,’ Lucas Daly said. ‘They were used to make her give up her safe code and her bank pin codes. Do you think they might make you talk, too? We’d like some names from you. Starting with the men who did Auntie Aileen’s house in Withdean Road.’

‘Lucas!’ the old man cautioned. ‘No violence. That’s not what I want. We’ve had enough of that. I don’t operate that way.’

‘I don’t know no names, honestly, sir,’ Ricky Moore addressed the old man, sensing hope.

‘Go to bed, Dad, it’s late,’ Lucas Daly said.

‘I don’t want violence, you understand?’ Gavin Daly said to his son.

‘Go to bed, Dad. Let me deal with this.’

‘I just want the names of the people who did this to my sister, Mr Moore,’ the old man said. Then he turned and walked away down the hall.

Moore stood, staring at Lucas Daly, then up at the large, blank face of the Apologist.

‘My dad’s a gentle person, Mr Moore. So we’re going to take you away from here; he wouldn’t like to see what we’re going to do to you – to help jog your memory, you see?’

Ricky Moore gurgled with terror as he felt himself being propelled towards the front door. Moments later he felt a damp patch down the front of his trousers.

He had pissed himself.

23

Once, way back when she had a life, Sarah Courteney used to love Friday nights. The start of the weekend, a time to kick back, watch rubbish TV, Big Brother or whatever, followed by an even trashier, smutty 10 p.m. show on Channel Four. But not any more. Friday nights now meant her husband, Lucas, arriving home even drunker than all the other nights of the week. If he arrived home at all.

She woke up with a start. The television was on, muted, an old film playing. Peter Sellers, as Inspector Clouseau, standing in Herbert Lom’s office. It was 2.30 a.m. Upstairs she could hear awful heavy metal pounding from her bolshie teenage son’s room. And the sound of bed springs creaking. Accompanied by the faint smell of marijuana. That was all Damian seemed to do these days. Listen to God-awful music, get stoned, and wank.

Ever the dutiful wife, she had cooked Lucas a meal, made it ready for eight o’clock, when he’d said he would be home, and kept it in the warming oven ever since. She heard the sound of the front door opening, then banging back against the wall – the stop had long ago been ripped out of the floor and never replaced – then her husband’s clumsy footsteps.

They stopped as he entered the large, open-plan living area of their house on Hove’s smart Shirley Drive. A house they were only still living in because of her earnings paying the mortgage.

‘What the fuck have you done to your face?’ he slurred, then sniffed.

‘We talked about it last night. Your dinner’s in the bottom oven,’ she replied.

‘I said, What the fuck have you done to your face?’

‘Are you deaf? I said we talked about it last night. You wanted dinner at 8 p.m.’

‘Stop ignoring me, bitch. I’ve had business to deal with. Yeah? My auntie who got murdered, yeah? Where’s your sympathy?’ He tapped his chest. ‘You have any idea how I feel? Had to deal with the bastard that done it. Wasn’t nice. Had to have a couple of beers to get over it. Know what I’m saying?’

He staggered over and stood above her. I loved you once, she thought. God almighty, I really, really loved you. You pathetic beer-sodden wreck. I loved the way you used to make me feel, the way you used to look at me. I loved your knowledge of antiques. I loved the way you could walk into a room and tell me everything about every piece of furniture in it.

‘You’ve had that Botox again, haven’t you? Lovely Dr Revson. Paying him money we don’t have. Are you fucking him or something?’

She held her composure. ‘More losses at the casino today?’

‘I’ve had a shit day.’

‘Just for a change? I’ve had my face done,’ she said calmly, ‘to try to preserve my career. So I can afford to put food on our table – and beer in your fat, stupid belly. I had it done so you don’t have to go running to your dad for more money every few months—’

She never got the rest of her words out. His right fist smashed into her chest, knocking her to the floor. The bastard was clever. He always hit her where it wouldn’t show.

Tomorrow, she vowed, she would leave him. And yet she knew tomorrow he would weep, and apologize, and tell her how much he loved her and that he could not live without her. Tomorrow he would promise, as he always did, that they would make a fresh start.

24

Peregrine Stuart-Simmonds was a tall, cheery man in his mid-sixties, with a portly figure elegantly parcelled inside a double-breasted chalk-striped suit. He sported a full head of wavy silver hair, and his narrow, horn-rimmed spectacles, worn right on the end of his nose, gave him a rather distinguished, academic air.

He sat at the round meeting table in Roy Grace’s small office, exuding the smell of a masculine soap, and stifling a yawn. ‘Apologies!’ he said, cheerily, in a booming, salesroom voice. ‘Been up most of the night working on the inventory for you.’

It was 7.20 on Saturday morning, another weekend shot to hell. Grace yawned, too. He’d also been up most of the night. He’d stayed at work with several members of his team until after midnight, then Noah had barely let him or Cleo sleep a wink. ‘Can I get you some coffee?’ he offered.

‘With a hypodermic syringe, I’ll take it intravenously! Black, no sugar, and as strong as you can make it, please.’

Grace stepped out, and returned a few minutes later holding two steaming mugs. ‘I really appreciate your moving so fast, Mr Stuart-Simmonds,’ he said.

‘Have to, Detective Superintendent, if we’re to have any chance of playing catch-up. You can be damned sure this has been carefully planned, and most of the items, if not all, are already overseas. What time does your briefing start?’

‘Eight thirty. I’d like to use this hour to learn as much from you as I can. If we could run through the highest-value items that have been taken from Mrs McWhirter’s home, what their identifying features are, and how rare they are. Also, in your experience, how they might have been transported, where they are likely to have been shipped to – and which agencies overseas are most likely to be able to help us locate them. Then you could help me set some parameters for my team, as well as giving us a crash course in how the global antiques world works.’

An ASDA lorry rumbled up the hill outside. The expert blew on his coffee, then sipped. ‘More to the point, how the global antiques black market operates – I think you’ll find that more helpful.’

‘I’ll be guided by you.’

‘What you have to understand is that small stuff such as low-value porcelain, jewellery, pictures, silverware – items worth only a few hundred quid – can be fenced easily in a city like Brighton, with all its antiques stalls and little shops. But these days important pieces are recorded on an international register, along with photographs and their details, which every reputable international dealer subscribes to. None of them would touch a stolen item on it with a bargepole.’

‘So that works in our favour?’ Grace said.

‘Yes and no. What happens in reality is the stolen items go underground, which is the bugger. Most, if not all, are likely to have been stolen to order or presold to private buyers. In twenty, thirty or fifty years’ time, if those buyers want to sell, the items will have long since dropped off the register.’

‘Where do we begin looking?’

‘I understand Mrs McWhirter’s brother is Gavin Daly?’

‘Yes.’

The antiques expert nodded. ‘He has a tremendous reputation. At one time he was one of the most important dealers in this country – and very respected.’ He smiled. ‘That’s not to say possibly a bit of a rogue.’

‘Oh?’ That piqued Grace’s interest.

‘Most of the old dealers in Brighton were. They operated an illegal cartel called the Ring, where they’d band together to rig prices at auction, for instance. But that’s not to deny Gavin Daly’s expertise. It’s clear from looking through the list of items taken from Mrs McWhirter that she had some jolly fine stuff. Clearly someone was advising her when she bought them – I would imagine her brother. But, like everyone, she’d have had some less good stuff as well.’ He raised a finger. ‘I think one of the first areas you should be looking at is the low-hanging fruit.’

‘Low-hanging fruit?’ Grace frowned and took a tentative sip of his scalding coffee. Light rain was falling outside and it felt chilly in the room. Almost autumnal. Outside, in the large open-plan detectives’ area, a phone warbled, unanswered. He felt desperately tired, and it was going to be a struggle to make it through the very long day ahead, although he had no option but to get on with it. And more importantly, he wanted to get on with it. He wanted the bastards who did this. Very badly.

‘Well, from the amount taken, and the size of some of the pieces, we can assume there were at least two men, probably three, if not even a fourth. In my experience, when hired hands are sent to steal to order, they almost always help themselves to some extra items not on the list, and pass them on to fences for a bit of extra cash.’ He blew on his coffee again. ‘Almost certainly Mrs McWhirter would have photos, taken for insurance purposes, of the contents in each room. If you can get hold of them, then you can check what has been taken and what is still there, beyond the high-value items her brother has already identified. If there are other items missing, then I’d put some officers out, with their photographs, around all the antiques shops, street stalls and car boot sales in the area, as well as getting them to carefully trawl through eBay.’

Grace made some notes. ‘When you say steal to order, that implies insider knowledge.’

The antiques expert nodded. ‘You said you found a knocker-boy leaflet in the house?’

‘Yes. Someone called R. C. Moore.’

‘This has all the classic hallmarks,’ Stuart-Simmonds said. ‘The knocker-boy charms his way into the house, and sees a treasure trove of beautiful things. He makes a note, and often takes surreptitious photographs. Then he sells on the address and a contents summary. Some of the big players have connections to the insurance companies – an employee they bribe within them – and they get the full inventory that way.’

‘Interesting,’ Grace said. ‘The one item that wasn’t insured was the pocket watch.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘For the very reason you’ve just told me. Gavin Daly reckoned if it was registered with an insurance company, it would be a target. No one knew it was there, in her safe. Also, it was an extremely well-concealed safe. He designed it himself as a double safe.’

‘Double?’

‘Yes, very ingenious. If you opened it, you would think that was it. But the wall at the back of it is false; you insert an Allen key, twist and it opens, and there is a second combination lock behind. Ordinarily that false wall would fool any burglar.’

The expert chewed the inside of his mouth for some moments. ‘If they didn’t know about the watch, then it won’t have been presold. Whether they handed it to whoever hired them or try to sell it themselves, a Patek Philippe from 1910 is a damned rare thing. I’d say finding possible buyers for that should be a major line of enquiry for you, Detective Superintendent. That watch will lead you to the perpetrators, for sure.’

‘If it surfaces,’ Grace said.

‘It will, I guarantee. It may be the biggest value item they’ve taken, but it’s also the most dangerous for them.’

25

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE. BUT IT HELPS!

Some offices had that sign up as a joke, but there was no sign here. You had to be crazy to do this job. Really, you did. Being crazy was probably the best qualification, Gareth Dupont thought. And he was crazy all right, he knew that. He’d done drugs, done time for GBH – the jerk he’d beaten up had deserved it for goosing his girl in a pub, but maybe it hadn’t been worth the two years he’d served in prison and the criminal record, he reflected. And more recently, he’d done serious time for burglary.

Gareth Dupont was thirty-three. He had handsome, olive-skinned looks and shiny dark hair from his mother’s Hispanic genes, along with a toned body from obsessive weight training in gyms and his passion for Salsa dancing. He’d made a shedload of money in a Spanish-based telesales stock market scam – most of which had gone up his nose – sold loft insulation until Friday, and now, at the start of this new week after the Bank Holiday, was selling advertising space in sports club magazines for the Brighton-based company Mountainpeak Publishing. In addition he had his sideline, which could, on occasion, become a nice little earner. Also, he talked to God a lot. Occasionally God talked back, but not as often as he would have liked. Recently, he reckoned, God was pretty displeased with him. Quite rightly. But hey, you couldn’t always be perfect. God had to understand that.

After school, he’d toyed with becoming a monk. Except, he realized at the last moment that he liked women too much. And booze. And coke. And the money to buy them. But the pull was always there. Something about a monk’s cell. A sanctuary. One day, but not right now. Right now, telesales gave him good money, which he needed because he was always skint by the end of every weekend, and all the more so after a long weekend. Skint and usually hungover. And today he was very skint and badly hungover.

And in love.

Hey, that’s what weekends were for, weren’t they? Partying and getting trashed – oh, and going to church, but the less said about that the better. Not really his thing, church, he was starting to think. He wasn’t much enjoying spending time either with old ladies with hatpins and elderly rectors with clattering teeth, or the happy clappy alternatives. You could do God without doing church, right? God was inside you: in your heart, in your head, in your eyes.

God was in the vision of Suki Yang. She was Chinese-American, over here working for an IT media company; he’d met her late on Friday night in Brighton’s hip Bohemia bar. They’d slept together in the small hours of Saturday morning, and spent most of the rest of the weekend heavy-duty shagging, fuelled by all kinds of stuff they’d swallowed and snorted.

The slight problem was the few lies he had told her. Like he hadn’t mentioned the other lady he was seeing, he didn’t actually own the flat, as he had claimed, but only rented it, and he didn’t at the moment have enough dough for the next quarter’s payment – due in seven weeks’ time. And he’d lied about the great job he had in media. Well, Mountainpeak was a media company. Sort of.

There were six teams of five telesales people and a manager – all men – in this second-floor office on the industrial estate just outside the port of Newhaven, ten miles east of Brighton. Each of them in shirtsleeves, some with ties at half-mast, some open-necked, seated at bland modern desks. No one in here, apart from the pleasant boss, Alan Prior, seated over the other side, was older than thirty-five. Each of them had a flat screen in front of him, a keyboard, a phone, coffees and bottles of water. It was 9.30 and Gareth had only been at his desk for thirty minutes, but the morning was already feeling several hours old. Nine calls so far and no sales. Maybe now he’d get lucky.

Gareth sucked on a small scab on his right knuckle, then dialled the number in front of him, abdicating responsibility to God for the call when it was answered. Hey, despite everything, God owed him a whole bunch of credits. This one’s down to you, God, he mouthed silently, his eyes momentarily closed.

A female voice, sharp, brittle. You could tell from the way they answered if it was going to be a tough or an easy sell. This already felt tough. He looked down at the script in front of him and read from it, sounding all bright and breezy.

‘Hi there, it’s Gareth Dupont here. I’m calling on behalf of the North Brighton Golf Club. May I speak to the business owner or whoever’s in charge of your marketing and advertising, please?’

Silence at the other end. He wondered if the cow had already hung up. Then she said, ‘What is this about, exactly?’

He skipped down the script to the paragraph that dealt with this kind of a response, then read aloud, still sounding breezy and chatty. ‘The reason I’m calling is that we’re producing the official annual corporate brochure for the North Brighton Golf Club in a couple of months’ time, and we’re going to be distributing extensively across the area. Thousands of homes and most businesses in the area will be covered, not to mention the club itself.’

‘We don’t have any connection with golf in our business,’ she replied icily.

‘Well, you might not think that. But I’ve been asked to source well-established businesses and offer them an opportunity to get involved. With your particular category, we see it as an ideal match. We’re targeting a demographic of wealthy and affluent people who have the money to pay for your services, and I’ve been asked to make sure that only reliable and professional companies go in. What I’m doing is making it so there’s only one of each profession or trade available within the entire publication. It literally locks out all of your competitors and means you’re the only company available to turn to.’

‘We are funeral directors,’ she replied. ‘Why would we want to advertise in a golf club brochure?’

‘The club is bound to have many elderly members. Sooner or later they’re going to die. I’ll give you the broad strokes, briefly—’

There was a click.

The bitch had hung up.

Thanks a bunch, pal, Gareth Dupont mouthed to God. He moved on to the next name on his list, took a swig of his water, and punched in the number.

*

By five o’clock, when the office was winding down for the day, Gareth had sold one half-page, to a flooring company in Portslade called D. Reeves. Not a great start to his new job, he knew. But hey, maybe tomorrow would be better. It needed to be.

He left the office, pulled on his Ray-Bans against the bright, afternoon sun, climbed into his leased black Porsche cabriolet, started the engine and lowered the roof. He sat for a moment, pensively. He was thinking about the apartment rental, and the next lease payment due on the Porsche. Maybe a bit of prayer was needed, which he hadn’t done in a while, not in any serious way. Although he was always wary of praying too soon after he had pissed off God. Better to leave some distance.

He drove off, heading down into Newhaven. Then, as he threaded through the town, heading for the coast road that would take him home to the Marina Village, the Argus newspaper banner hoarding outside a newsagent’s proclaimed, in large black letters:

McWHIRTER MURDER £100,000 REWARD

Ignoring the car behind him, Gareth Dupont slammed on the brakes and pulled over onto the kerb. He ran into the shop, bought a copy of the paper, then stood in the entrance reading the frontpage splash, ignoring the traffic jam along the narrow street his car was causing.

Gavin Daly, brother of Aileen McWhirter, who was murdered in her Withdean Road mansion last week, has announced a reward of £100,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of his sister’s brutal killers.

He read on. There was a phone number to the CID Incident Room, and also the one for anonymous calls to Crimestoppers.

He grinned. Sometimes in life you got lucky! He mouthed, silently, Thank you, God. All’s forgiven!