Blackstone's Pursuits (11 page)

All of the cupboard doors lay open. The drawers of my desk were stacked upon its surface, one on another. Even the lining of Wallace’s cage had been disturbed.

Ever seen an outraged iguana? That’s the only way I can describe the look on his face as my dinosaur appeared down the ladder from the belvedere. He glared around the room in human indignation, then at us, as if to say, ‘What the hell’s this then?’

Prim saw him and all at once her tears, which had been making my shirt decidedly damp, turned into laughter.

‘Poor old chap,’ she said, jumping on to the sleeping level, and for the first time in either of their lives, picking him up. The old bugger swelled with pride. I’ll swear that he nuzzled his head against her breast. Imagine, for a fleeting second I was jealous of an iguana. She carried him down, and separated some food from the pile on the floor, putting the rest back into its box. As she did, she looked up at me.

‘Who did it, Oz, do you think? Were they looking for...’ My nod cut off her sentence unfinished.

‘What else? Or did you smuggle some uncut diamonds back from Africa? As far as “who’s” concerned, who knows about the fiver? Mike Dylan asked about it, but that doesn’t prove that he understands what it’s about. It’s quite possible young Morrow’s story was straight up, and that Dylan was just trying to cover up a mistake.

‘No, the only people we know of who understand what that fiver’s really worth are Ray Archer and your sister, although it’s possible that Dawn only opened the account, and doesn’t know what’s in it.’

Prim shook her head and stood up, leaving Wallace munching on the floor. ‘There could be another.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘The mystery man who was looking for Dawn before we found Kane’s body.’

‘True, unless that was Ray Archer — and it could have been. Whoever it was, he still doesn’t have the fiver, does he. And with the sort of dough it unlocks at stake, somehow I don’t think he’s going to give up looking.

‘The safest thing we can do, love, is go to see Mike Dylan, give him the fiver and tell him the whole story. If we were lucky he’d only charge us with wasting police time.’

She squeezed my arm. ‘I know that, but ...’

I cut her off again. It’s a bad habit of mine. ‘Yes, I know. That would land Dawn right in it. Even if she could prove she was out of town when Kane was killed, she could still be charged as a party to theft, for opening that bank account. The police, and nine juries out often, would assume that she knew what Kane was going to do.

‘There’s also the small matter,’ I added, ‘of our cut from Ray Archer for picking up the money.’

‘Except that if you’re right and if Archer is involved in Kane’s death, that cut might be our throats.’ Primavera has a wonderful knack of getting to the nub of a situation. ‘So what are we going to do, Oz?’

‘The same thing we set out to do this morning. Find your sister, before someone else does. Leave this place exactly as it is just now. Let’s stuff that bag of yours with enough clothes for a few days, arrange an iguana sitter, and head on up to Connell Ferry.’

She nodded and began to pack. Five minutes later, we closed the door behind us. This time, I locked the mortice as well as the Yale. We looked around as we stepped into the street, as ready as we could be for anything, but no-one was watching us that we could see. I threw our bag in the boot of the car and turned the key in the lock, then taking Prim by the hand, I led the way up to the High Street.

As I looked down the street before crossing, I thought I saw a familiar Armani suit in the distance.

‘Hullaw ther youse two. Enjoy the breakfast then? Mair sausage for lunch, or is it back tae the tuna rolls?’ I shook my head and explained to Ali that we had decided to go away for a couple of days. Some people think that I take a hell of a chance asking Ali to look after Wallace, but that’s a racist slur. I happen to know that he’s very particular about what he puts into his curries.

I handed him my spare key, then took a flyer. ‘You just had the police in here?’

‘Aye. Did you see the bastard? It was that flash boy Dylan, him that’s in the papers a’ the time. He came marchin’ in saying something about fake banknotes, and wantin’ tae check the cash in the till. Cheeky sod. Accusin’ me of handling bent money! He had a look through it, but he didnae find anything. ’S as well he didnae come yesterday. Ma lunchtime relief took a tenner that was practically still wet. Ah wis dead lucky. Got rid of it in change tae a whisky salesman!’

Smiling at Ali’s good fortune, and mulling over all the possible connections between Dylan’s official search, Prim’s off-the-cuff fabrication to young Morrow, and our visitor with the ability to open Yale locks without a key we jumped into the Nissan as fast as we could and put the old grey streets of Edinburgh behind us.

‘Why would Dylan lie to Ali?’ Prim murmured, eventually, as we passed the towering bowl of Murrayfield on our way out of the City. ‘Why would he spin him a line about fake money, when all the time he knows that he’s looking for just one particular note? All he had to say was that the note was evidence in a case.’

Smart girl, my Primavera, isn’t she. I glanced at my watch, which told me that I had known her now for over twenty-eight hours. A day and a bit. The longest day and a bit of my life, the most memorable, and even if we didn’t come through this whole business intact, the greatest. We were flying, Primavera Phillips and I, high on adrenalin, high on the thrill of the chase. And we were flying too, from a city where danger lived. More than likely we were quarry ourselves, in the eye of someone with the ruthlessness and the physical strength to ram that knife all the way up into wee Willie (or big Willie, if you want to look at it that way) Kane’s head. Now, I guessed, we had what that someone wanted, the key to a bank vault containing a serious amount of hot, and once it was moved on, untraceable money.

‘Why’s Dylan after the fiver in the first place?’ I said. ‘The boy Morrow was right. Technically he shouldn’t have let us take anything out of that house, in case it had an essential print on it or a piece of DNA. Maybe he’s embarrassed by that. But if he is, why stir the thing up? The best way for him to cover his tracks is just to forget about it.

‘Instead, he has Morrow ask us about the fiver. Yet he’s so keen to get it back that at the same time he takes the chance of breaking into the loft and turning it inside out.’

She looked at me in astonishment. ‘You think Dylan did that?’

‘Aye, of course he did. Policemen know a thousand ways of opening lockfast places as quick as you like without making a mess. And whoever did the loft went through two locked doors, the one to the street and m ...’ I caught myself. ‘... ours,’ She smiled and squeezed my hand at the plural, ‘without leaving a mark. Point one, a real housebreaker would have gone straight through the door with a crowbar, point two, would not have been daft enough to try the street door in the daylight, and point three, would have had no way of knowing that the loft was empty. Last and finally, point four, straight after the break-in Dylan walks into Ali’s, just round the comer, and talks his way through the till. What’s the betting he’d just phoned young Morrow?’

‘Aghast’ is another of my favourite words, but I’d never seen anyone looking that way until Prim looked at me in the car. ‘But that’s desperate!’ she gasped. ‘Why would he do all that?’

‘Either because someone’s cut him in on the deal, or because someone’s put the fear of God into him over his career prospects if he doesn’t get the fiver back, having broken procedure by letting you take it from the flat.’

‘But who could do that?’

I opened my mouth, the usual smart-arsed ‘Ah, my dear, that is the sixty-four dollar question!’ hanging on the edge of my tongue. And all at once I knew. I saw for certain who could put the fear of God in Mike Dylan. I saw too, that he was not a man to concern himself unduly with a trivial oversight. He didn’t want that fiver back as a point of principle. He wanted it for what it was. Oh no: whatever the incentive, it came to me that the threat that had shaken the creases out of Dylan’s Armani suit had issued straight from the mouth of the man who had killed Willie Kane.
‘Smart bastard, that Blackstone!’
you may be thinking, but I knew him all right, in that very moment, and for the first time since I had walked into Prim’s flat and discovered the befouled corpse on her bed, I was scared. Really scared for me, but absolutely terrified for Prim. Dylan I could cope with. Dylan was a clown, a slightly bent and mentally limited copper, but no threat. But this guy ...

Prim was looking at me. Her aghastness had changed to expectation. My hands gripping the wheel as I turned towards the M8 junction, I smiled, sideways, the first and last insincere smile I’ve ever given her.

‘Ah, my dear,’ I said, ‘that is the sixty-four dollar question!’

She laughed and punched my arm. ‘Oz, that’s my first disappointment. I thought you had an answer for everything!’

In which the fourth most famous human on the planet buys us a drink.

We made a deal that on the journey to Connell Ferry we would forget Dylan, torn fivers and the rest. The amazing thing was that just by being with each other we could do that. We chatted about nothings, funny experiences from our lives. We sketched in the broad facts of our previous love-lives, without either of us feeling any strange pangs.

I filled Prim in on the basics of my relationship with Jan. She tutted in disapproval when I admitted that my last live-in had left after she found out that under the influence of a few bevvies, I had admitted to Ali that my nickname for her was ‘Tomorrow’. It was a cruel thing and I’m not proud of it. I didn’t have to spell out the punchline for Prim.

A daft thought came to me as I drove along, casting off the shackles of prehistory. ‘All my past life now,’ I said grandly, ‘I’ll call BP, Before Primavera.’

She laughed spontaneously, brightly, joyously, doubling over in the driver’s seat and holding her sides. ‘You can’t do that,’ she spluttered, ‘or all of mine will have been BO!’

It wasn’t that funny, but tension made us laugh so hard, that I had to pull the car into a parking place. We sat there, our chests heaving from our mirth ... heaving very provocatively in Prim’s case, I have to say. Occasionally one of us would look at the other, and we would break out again. Eventually, I reached across and held her shoulders, and as I did a feeling came over me, as yet another emotional height was scaled. ‘In that case, my love, since acronyms are out, all my life till now has been Winter. I’ve spent it waiting for my Springtime, and now she’s here.’ I was only slightly surprised when I realised that Mr Lump was back in my throat.

She looked at me and smiled. ‘You’re really laying it on the line, aren’t you,’ she whispered. ‘Just give me time. That’s all I ask.’

After a while we drove on, heading towards the West, watching as the leafy countryside gave way to moorland, and as the surrounding hills grew into mountains. Eventually a salty tang came into the air and flooded the car through Prim’s open window.

‘God, but you don’t know how good the taste of this is, my dear, daft Oz, after twelve months of Africa. The heat, the poverty, the cruelty, the blood. I never ever want to go back to that place again.’

‘What, not even to minister to the sick?’ The old Oz was disappearing. There wasn’t a trace of irony in my question.

I glanced across at her. She was sitting with her legs pulled up on the squab, grasping her neat ankles. She shook her head slowly and deliberately. ‘No way on Earth. I’ve hit the compassion wall too, just like my late pal. I left the hospice for a different world, and what I found was far, far worse. I can’t take it any more. Sister Phillips has hung up her starched bunnet for good and all.

‘Although I haven’t a clue what I’m going to do next!’

‘Don’t do anything, then. I can look after us both.’

She flashed me a glance, suddenly sharp and serious. ‘Don’t even think that, far less say it. I’ll consider living with the right man, although that’s something I’ve never done before. But I’ll always want my identity, and working is part of it. What if you and I got together, and it wore off, or something? Where would I be?’

‘Primavera,’ I said, ‘when it wears off for me it’ll be because your zimmer keeps on blocking the stair up to the loft; and even then I’ll just rig up a pulley and haul you straight up to the balcony.’

She took a hand from her ankles and rubbed it, gentle as silk over the back of my hand on the steering wheel. We drove on for a while, safe in our island away from the action, and the danger.

‘Where are we going to stay tonight?’ asked Prim.

‘That kind of depends on whether or not we find your sister, doesn’t it. Let’s play it by ear.’

Connell Ferry’s a bit of a misnomer, because there’s a bridge there, a big iron single-track thing that was built in the days when, even north of Oban, the prospect of today’s traffic volumes would have looked like visions from one of H. G. Wells’ wilder efforts. We saw it well before we reached the village, and slowed up, looking for the Falls of Lora Hotel.

It wasn’t hard to find. It’s a big building on the left, as you come into the village; once it was someone’s grand house, no doubt, but extended now, in a totally uncomplementary style. The car park looked as if it might have been a cowshed once, but now it was empty, save for a Land Rover with the Falls of Lora logo on its spare-wheel cover.

I parked the Nissan under the curving roof, and jumped out. Prim took my arm, as we crunched along the gravel towards the entrance.

The reception area was small, and empty. There was nothing fancy about it, just a dark-varnished counter in the shadow of the staircase, with a doorway leading off. Prim pushed the service bell, and after a few minutes a girl appeared, fresh-faced and not far out of her teens, wearing what looked like a waitress’s uniform.