Arms and the Women (50 page)

'So you decided that what
you
do is so important you could steal other people's money?' she sneered. 'Well, well. How
terribly
highly you must value yourself, Miss Macallum. Below St Francis but above Mother Teresa, would that be about right?'

Feenie took this with a faint smile, but Kelly turned angrily on Daphne.

'What do you know about anything? Who the hell are you anyway, with your snooty accent and hundred-quid hairdo?'

'Takes a one to know a one,' said Daphne with spirit. 'As to who I am, among other things, I'm a customer of the Nortrust Bank, so I suppose I'm one of the victims you and your grandmother have been robbing.'

'No, there aren't any victims. The bank owed my grandmother that money,' retorted Kelly.

'It's all right, dear,' said Feenie.

'No, they can say what they like about me but not about you,' said Kelly. 'So listen in, Miss Twinset and Pearls, but be careful. I may shock you so much you'll mess your silk drawers. I move money around for certain groups in South America. Dirty money, you'd call it. But it's dirty work these groups have to do, a bit like your housemaid cleaning your grate.'

'For someone who looks so young, you really are awfully dated, my dear,' murmured Daphne. 'But do get on with your interesting exposition.'

'One good route for cleaning it up is to pass it through a charitable organization. I've always been interested in Liberata, as a cause, I mean. In fact, I've used my South American contacts to get the names of women Liberata could help, sometimes women I knew personally, and I've passed them on to my grandmother. So naturally I thought of using its account in one of my laundry operations. I say naturally because something always gets left behind and I'd have seen to it that Liberata got a real benefit. Only there was a problem. Some of the organizations I act for have their financial basis in the cocaine industry. Sometimes it's used directly instead of currency, but mostly it has to be sold to get the money to buy whatever's necessary to keep the struggle going. And that's the money which needs to be cleaned up.'

'Cleaned up? You could shovel it into a furnace and the ashes would still stink!' interrupted Daphne.

'Hey, I'm surprised you don't get on better with Gran,' said Kelly. 'That's the way she thinks. She wanted nothing to do with my little proposal. In fact, we had a serious falling-out. I felt I'd disappointed her and I wanted to make it up to her. Then I saw the Nortrust Bank advertising for a systems expert and suddenly I saw the way. You see, I knew they owed her.'

'Ollershaw. George Ollershaw.'

The words were spoken so softly it took a moment to trace them to their source.

It was Shirley Novello, face still pale as death, eyes hardly open, lips hardly moving. But nothing the matter with her ears. Good cop. Always working. Peter will be pleased, thought Ellie.

'Right,' said Kelly. 'How do you know that?'

'Financial adviser. . .ran him off the road. . . could've killed him. I saw the file. Should have made the connection..’

Suddenly Ellie did make a connection - between the skimpy pants she'd found at Nosebleed and Cornelius. Feenie must have had to get her out in a hurry when Mrs Stonelady told her Daphne and friends were on their way. Presumably Feenie had informed her grand-daughter there was a cop, and a cop's wife, in the party.

So why was Kelly talking so freely?

The good answer was because she was confident of being long gone before Novello was in a fit state to use any of it against her.

The bad answer was because she didn't have much hope that any of them would be in a fit state for anything when this came to its end.

How close was that end? From time to time there were noises beneath them. Popeye, Jorge and Luis down in the cellar, she presumed. When they returned . . .

Look on the bright side. Every time she thought about Rosie wandering around alone in the increasingly wild weather, her stomach churned. She longed to see her, hold her, comfort her. But if she'd been given the power to transport her to her side, she knew it would have been an act of huge selfishness to use it. The blacker things looked in here, the better off Rosie was at the mercy of nothing worse than wind and rain.

And that was the bright side!

She shook these thoughts out of her mind and said, 'Feenie? Is this true?'

'Not in law, maybe, but I was certainly cheated out of money by Ollershaw, and Nortrust ultimately benefited. So yes, I felt entitled.'

'Could you explain that for the benefit of us poor citizens who are bound by more conventional notions of legality?' said Daphne sweetly.

Ellie recalled some of the doubts she knew Peter still had about Patrick Aldermann and wondered if any of them had ever impinged on Daphne's consciousness. You could know a lot about people, but there were always no-go areas.

Feenie gave a succinct account of her dealings with George Ollershaw, concluding, 'So that's the story, Mrs Aldermann. You must decide for yourself if I had a grievance.'

Daphne, who would hold up long supermarket queues to dispute a possible ten-pence overcharge, nodded vigorously and said, 'I should think you had! You say you ran him off the road? You should have waited till he got out of his car and finished the job!'

'That wouldn't have got Gran's money back,' said Kelly. 'My plan did. I worked out that Ollershaw's little fiddle had done Gran out of at least three million pounds, including interest, and that's the amount I took Nortrust for. And I left all lines leading back to dear old George. The more they dig, the worse it's going to look for him. The only way he's going to keep out of jail is by paying it back out of his own personal savings.'

'Bravo,' said Daphne, completely converted. 'And the three million, I take it, is somehow going to end in Liberata's account as a genuine charitable donation?'

'You got it,' said Kelly. 'And I assure you that the law's got more chance of finding Lord Lucan than they have of tracing that money back to Nortrust.'

She and Daphne were smiling at each other like old chums now and Ellie, feeling an irrational urge to interpose her own body, said rather sourly, 'If you'd got things tied up so neatly, why were you doing a runner when my husband caught you?'

'Your husband? Of course. You're the policeman's wife. And in answer to your policeman's question, something came up. Nothing to do with Nortrust. I needed to get somewhere safe with people I knew who would help sort it out.'

She glanced shamefacedly at her grandmother, who said, 'I think these good people who have been led into peril by your irresponsible behaviour deserve the whole story, don't you? A story which, incidentally, I knew nothing about until this afternoon.'

Kelly grimaced like a child finally obliged to confront an unpleasant task she has been putting off. She was one of those rare women whose beauty survives the expression of no matter what emotion, thought Ellie enviously. I bet that red-eyed and snivelly she'd still get the fellows horny.

'Gran, I'm really sorry,' she said. 'Like I told you, I wouldn't have done it but it was an emergency. I'm sorry.'

'Would you please stop being sorry and start being clear?' exploded Daphne. 'I thought all this Nortrust stuff was leading up to an explanation of why we're sitting here at the mercy of these lunatics. You mean there's something else? Something worse?'

Simply and directly, Kelly told them about PAL and Fidel Chiquillo and Popeye's arms cache and the deal with the Cojos and the shoot out in Kielder. Rapt though she was by the narrative, Ellie had time to observe the rapid dissolution of the brief rapport between Kelly and Daphne, who believed that terrorists in general and Irish terrorists in particular should be hung by their balls till their scrotums snapped.

'Fidel suspected the Cojos might try a double-cross,' concluded Kelly. 'So we had a contingency plan. I knew no one ever came close to this place any more, and Feenie was out of the country, and I thought we could get things turned around long before she came back. But Fidel was wounded, so that was going to take a little time, and then. . .'

She glanced uncertainly at Feenie, who replied with a glower which defied her to be reticent, then went on, '. . . and I got this warning message, don't know where from, telling me it was time to go, and when I told Fidel, he said no point in hanging about to see what happened, I should make a run for it, head back to South America where in any case I could be useful contacting his friends to make new arrangements for receipt of the arms shipment. But unfortunately . . .'

'You met my husband on the Snake,' said Ellie. 'How unlucky for both of you.'

'Oh, I wouldn't say that. I must admit I was really knocked over when I found he was a cop, though. He's such a dish.'

She flashed a smile, congratulatory, almost conspiratorial. From another woman it might have stirred jealous resentment, but somehow Ellie felt simply complimented.

She smiled back, then Daphne threw in some cold water by saying, 'So what you're saying is we're up to our necks in trouble because this terrorist friend of yours brought a truckload of IRA arms here and you hid them in some cellar beneath our feet?'

'That's right. But don't be frightened,' said Kelly, brightly reassuring. 'They won't go off unless someone's smoking down there.'

'Ha ha,' said Daphne, stung by the accusation of fear into what Ellie thought of as her brisk Girl Guide Commissioner manner. 'In fact, I was just wondering how you and your wounded friend managed to unload the arms. Must have been an effort even for someone as wirily built as yourself.'

It took real expertise to find something down-putting to say about Kelly's figure. Perhaps, thought Ellie, for whom this was turning into something of an apostatizing experience, there was something to be said for private education after all.

'I had help. Mrs Stonelady's Donald.'

The old country woman had been sitting still as a stone on a mountainside and scarcely more noticeable since their arrival. Now all eyes, except for Novello's, which were once more firmly closed, turned to her.

Feenie said, slightly accusing, 'Mrs Stonelady?'

'I does What's asked and says nowt,' declared the woman. 'If they didn't turn off my bread-and-butter, it'll be ruined.'

This seemed a pretty fair assertion of both philosophy and priorities, thought Ellie. Oh for such certainties!

Wendy Woolley, as though in a classroom, half raised her hand and said, 'Please, I have a question.'

'Yes?'

'What happened to the cocaine? And your friend, Fidel?'

Before Kelly could reply, there was a noise from the doorway and the three men returned from the cellar. Luis was carrying a bulky leather grip.

The two Cojos were as usual engaged in animated conversation. They spoke too low for Ellie to catch what they were saying, and in any case they were rattling away at a speed which would have made it impossible for someone at her level of colloquial Spanish to understand more than the occasional very basic phrase.

Popeye seemed to be in the same or perhaps an even less seaworthy boat. He looked from one of the Colombians to the other, shook his head as if in puzzlement that such a cacophony could actually make sense, took a swig from a bottle of water he was holding, then came wandering across to the women.

'How are you doing, ladies?' he asked. 'Anyone like a drink?'

He offered the bottle. Ellie took it, wiped the top, and drank, then passed it on to Feenie.

She took a pull, then said, 'What's going on?'

'You'd need to be a United Nations interpreter to know that,' said Popeye. 'But in any case I don't think it's anything you need to be bothering your old grey head with, lady.'

The old grey head gave him a coldly assessing stare which chilled Ellie, but the Irishman's eyes had already slid from the grandmother to the granddaughter.

'I see you found the left luggage,' said Kelly pertly.

'That's all I'm here for, darling. Getting what's rightly mine. You'll not dispute that, will you?'

'I won't. But you don't imagine those two are going to let you keep it, do you?'

'Now why shouldn't they? It's mine, they know that. Whose the weapons are is between Jorge and your friend, what's-his-name? Chiquilla, is it?'

'Chiquillo,’ said Kelly precisely.

'Of course. Sorry, darling, I was never very good at the old linguistics, hard enough coping with English,' said Popeye, giving her a broad smile which she didn't return. 'But while we're on the subject of Chiquilla, sorry, o, I ought to warn you. Those two are seriously pissed off because your friend wasn't here to greet them. Sooner or later they're going to start asking you where he might be. If you know, I would seriously advise you to tell them, sooner rather than later, which might be too late. I'll do what I can for you. Blood's thicker than water, they say. But that works against you too, you see. One of those two goons your guy killed was Jorge's brother.'

Kelly said, 'And the two men he killed were your friends. For God's sake, Uncle Paddy, how can you stomach working with these people when they killed your friends?'

'Now I don't know that, do I? All I heard were a lot of shots and when I opened my eyes and decided I wasn't in heaven, there were bodies everywhere and the only person officially alive was our unpronounceable friend, which has to mean something. Jorge told me that it was him that must have planned the double-cross, and then he went all the way and killed his own people too. Makes sense.'

'No, it doesn't, and you know it,' said Kelly forcibly. 'Tell me this. Did you find Jorge or did he come looking for you?'

'Bit of both,' said Popeye, smiling slyly. 'He thinks he found me, but I wanted to be found. When you've been nearly killed and totally ripped off, you've got to be ready to deal with anyone who can help you get your pension fund back, wouldn't you agree? As a businesswoman, that is.'

'Maybe. But as a businesswoman, I'd be very careful about my long-term investments.'

'Is that right? I'll remember that. Getting back to your own long term, me darling Kansas, when Jorge starts asking, I'd have my story ready. Tell him the plain truth. That's what I did. Told him everything I saw and heard as I lay there pretending to be dead because I didn't know what your friend would do if he knew I wasn't dead.'