Blood Relative (17 page)

She shrugged disconsolately: ‘Yes, I suppose so. I mean, of course – whatever you want.’

‘I’m afraid that doesn’t smell too good,’ I said, nodding towards the bin-liner that was now sitting between us on the tarmac. ‘Do you want to open it up?’

‘Might as well,’ Vickie said. ‘God knows what he’s got in there.’

She bent down, gingerly undid the knot and then recoiled as the full, pungent blast hit her. ‘Oh my God, what is that?’ she almost shrieked. ‘It smells disgusting, like … urgh! … antiseptic, really cheap scent and one of those pine fresheners people hang up inside a car.’

I laughed rather nervously at her description, not sure whether she would appreciate any sign of humour on my part. ‘I was thinking fag ends and beer myself, but you’ve obviously got a better nose than me.’

Now Vickie gave a hesitant smile, a tiny echo of her usual vivacity. She raised her nose, gave the purse-lipped sniff of a snobbish wine connoisseur and said, ‘I detect a hint of … mmm … gentleman’s urinal, too.’

This time we both laughed, cutting through the tension that had stood like a wall between us. As the sound died away, Vickie grimaced. ‘Oh, that’s terrible. I shouldn’t be joking at a time like this.’

‘Of course you should,’ I reassured her. ‘Andy would hate it if you didn’t. You know how he always liked a really good laugh.’

The back of the car was still open, so I lifted the overnight bag out of the bin-liner and perched it at the edge of the boot. ‘So, are we brave enough to go in?’ I asked. ‘All right then, here goes … Whoa! That is pungent!’

The smell rasped my nose and throat. Vickie wrinkled up her face: ‘My eyes are watering!’

‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘What’s he got in there, mustard gas?’

I turned to one side, took a deep breath of clean air, then plunged my hand into the bag. It came back up carrying a small, slightly damp cardboard box, decorated with a picture of Chinese ivory chess pieces set against a brown background. On the front of the box were the words ‘PRIVILEG After Shave Lotion’. On the side there was more writing in both German and a script that looked like Russian and then, in English, the words, ‘Made in German Democratic Republic’.

Inside stood a spectacularly ugly brown bottle with a pseudo-ivory top that had been screwed on loosely enough that some of the contents had leaked.

‘That,’ I declared, holding the bottle up for Vickie to inspect, ‘is genuine communist aftershave.’

‘Yuck! I pity the women who had to snog men smelling of that.’

‘I doubt the girls smelled much better.’

Vickie smiled to herself. ‘Andy told me he’d got something in Berlin he wanted to surprise you with, but he never said what it was. He probably knew I’d only tell him to throw it away, horrible muck like that.’

‘That’s Andy, though, isn’t it? Going all the way to Berlin and that’s what he comes back with. Bet he didn’t remember to get a present for you.’

She shook her head, beginning to laugh again. ‘No.’

‘Not even something from the Duty Free?’

‘Not a thing!’

‘But he does track down the nastiest aftershave in the entire history of mankind.’

‘Good thing he never went to North Korea,’ she said. ‘God knows what he’d have found there.’

It wasn’t the funniest line anyone had ever come up with, but to the two of us in that cold, damp, gloomy car park it didn’t matter. We staggered about like drunks, helpless with the giggles, letting go of all the accumulated tension and pain and letting a small scintilla of joy back into our shattered lives.

‘Come on,’ I said, getting my breath back and wiping my eyes. ‘Let’s go and have that drink.’

We ended up having supper together, swapping stories about Andy over a couple of bottles of wine. Right at the end of the meal, after I’d asked for the bill and made sure that Vickie had a cab home, she seemed finally to run out of energy, falling quiet and looking more sombre, more thoughtful.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘Anything I can do?’

‘I wasn’t sure whether to tell you this,’ she said. But … it was just, well, Andy wanted you to be his best man.’

‘His best man – me?’ The possibility had never occurred to me. Had I thought about it at all, I’d have assumed Andy would have chosen a fellow-journalist or one of his pals down in Kent.

‘Yes. Andy was really proud of you, his big brother. He didn’t say this, but I think he was hoping, if you could get to know him a bit better, you’d be proud of him, too.’

‘I had no idea,’ I said, wishing so much that I could have heard and accepted the offer. ‘He never said … I mean, I just didn’t know that at all.’

25

MONDAY

A solitary magpie rose from the graveside at the sound of the funeral party’s approach, leaving its burden of sorrow behind. The bird was as monochrome as its surroundings: grey sky, black trees, white snow and black-clad mourners. The ground was hard with frost and the only sounds of life came from the cawing of crows. ‘A murder of crows’: that, it occurred to me, was the correct collective noun.

After Andy’s body, death-cold, had been laid into the ground people milled around the graveyard for a while, stamping their feet, making jokes about the freezing temperature and waiting impatiently for instructions on how to get to the reception Vickie had organized in the pavilion of a cricket club, not far away, where Andy used to play. It was barely half past nine. A lot of the mourners had missed breakfast to get here and were in serious need of coffee. Amidst the surprisingly large turnout I recognized Andy’s agent, Maurice Denholm. He’d got Andy a couple of book deals: nothing block-busting, but proper hardbacks all the same, published by a respectable company and reviewed, albeit briefly, in the Sunday broadsheets. We’d met at one of the launch parties, seven or eight years ago.

‘Peter,’ Denholm said, putting on a suitably sombre expression and grasping my hand with one of his while the other squeezed my upper arm. ‘I’m so, so sorry … Must be terrible for you. If there’s anything I can do …’

‘Actually there is.’

A momentary look of alarm flashed across Denholm’s face as he realized his bluff had been called, instantly replaced by his usual air of professional affability. ‘Splendid! Just name it, dear boy, and it shall be yours.’

‘Did Andrew mention anything to you about any work he was doing on my wife, Mariana?’

‘I’m not sure I follow you.’

‘He was doing quite a bit of research about her background. He’d flown to Berlin, started digging around there. I just thought that if he’d been planning a book or something, he might have told you.’

As I’d been speaking Denholm took on a look of dawning comprehension, followed by genuine surprise and even excitement as he suddenly joined the dots of what I’d been saying. ‘So that’s what he meant!’ he said. ‘My word – he had been stirring, hadn’t he?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, he told me he was working on a story about false identity, someone living their life on the basis of a lie. He said he didn’t know what to do with it, whether to tell it straight, as non-fiction, or use it as the basis of a novel. I tried to get him to tell me the details, but he became very coy about it. Now I see why. He was investigating his own sister-in-law.’

Denholm narrowed his eyes at me: ‘So, did he have a hot story?’

As I considered how to answer him I looked away for a moment, letting my eye wander over the churchyard. I’d arrived early and my Range Rover was parked quite close to the church gate. A man was standing beside it, dressed in a charcoal-grey coat. I frowned and screwed up my eyes, trying to make out his face in the gloom.

‘Andy’s story,’ Denholm repeated. ‘Was it any good?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said, dragging my attention back to our conversation. ‘I’m still trying to work it all out myself.’

Before we could continue the conversation, Vickie bustled up. ‘Ah, there you are!’ she said. ‘The two most important men in Andy’s life! We’re all leaving for the drinks now, so just join the convoy and it’ll take you straight to the cricket club.’

Denholm ushered her to one side. I gathered he was making his apologies: he had to get back to London. I glanced back at my car. The man was still there, looking straight at me.

I walked towards him down the churchyard path. As I got closer I could see that he was slim, with high cheekbones and bleached blond hair swept back off his forehead: a few years older than me, perhaps, but in rather better condition. His coat was perfectly cut and beneath it his tie was black, out of respect for the occasion.

‘Mr Crookham?’ he said. His voice sounded German.

‘Yes.’

I wanted to get straight into the driver’s seat and clear off as quickly as possible. But without making any fuss about the matter, the German was blocking my way.

‘I have been asked to pass on some advice,’ he said.

That word again: advice. That was what the email had offered Andy. Now I was getting it too and it scared the hell out of me. ‘Was it you?’ I asked, struggling to get the words out as my heart thumped out of control and my knees seemed to buckle beneath me. This was the second time in a couple of days that I’d experienced serious fear and it wasn’t getting any easier. ‘Was it you that sent the email?’

However the German had expected me to respond, it can’t have been like that. I saw a flicker of genuine surprise, even puzzlement, cross his eyes before he managed to restore his equanimity and say, very calmly, ‘I am sure that you are curious about the death of your brother. Such a tragedy and so hard to understand. It is only natural that you would wish to find out more about why your wife … your lovely wife … would do such a thing. But my friendly advice to you is: contain your curiosity. Do not investigate. It can only lead you into harm.’

The message was horribly familiar: the words so close to those of the email, with the same warning to stay away from Mariana’s past. So too was the potential for darkness and violence that seemed to lurk behind the messenger’s impeccable appearance and the icy politeness of his speech. This man, whoever he was, came from a world I neither knew nor understood. But with every day that went by, I was more certain that it was the world in which Mariana had been raised.

I managed to ask him, ‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Absolutely not. I am trying to warn you only. Stay away from all of this. From your wife, from your brother and his questions—’

‘How do you know about my brother’s questions?’

He continued without acknowledging what I had said: ‘from all of it.’

‘Who are you? What’s your name?’

The man thought for a moment. ‘You can call me Mr Weiss,’ he said, making it sound like ‘Vice’.

‘So who do you work for, then?’

‘That is not important,’ Weiss replied. ‘All that matters is that I deliver my message, which I have done, and that you understand it and act upon it. I urge you, Mr Crookham, pay attention to what I have said. And now I must leave. I offer my sincere condolences to you upon the death of your brother. Good day.’

He left without waiting for my reply. I watched him walk down the road and as he got further away he became little more than a black silhouette outlined against the backdrop of a country lane. I suddenly had a flashback to another black figure: the man sitting on the sofa, playing the role of Andy. Were they one and the same? I felt caught in the coils of a conspiracy I could not begin to understand, as trapped as a diver in the grip of a giant, writhing octopus, pushing one arm away only to be seized by another. And what made it worse was that I was the only one who could see or feel this creature. Everyone else just wanted to tell me that it didn’t exist, that I was just imagining it. Maybe I was. Maybe the whole thing was just some kind of paranoid delusion. And maybe that thought was even more frightening.

As I got into the car my pulse was racing. When I held my hand out in front of me it was shaking. I tried a breathing exercise to calm myself down: taking long, slow breaths and pushing out my stomach as though it, too, were filling with air. Gradually my nerves settled. And then another thought struck me.

I leapt out of the car, raced round to the back, lifted the tailgate, pulled back the boot cover and looked inside. My case was still there. My wellies were still there. All the junk that accumulates in any car boot was still there.

But Andy’s laptop was gone.

26

I wasted ten seconds staring at the space where the laptop should have been, feeling sorry for myself before my brain finally kicked into gear. That was no delusion. Someone really had taken it. And anyone who wanted the laptop that badly almost certainly wanted more besides. If they could get into my car that easily, they could get into Andy’s flat as well. That was enough to make me dash back to the driver’s seat, start up the engine and set off after Vickie and the rest of the mourners.

She was standing just inside the door of the pavilion, greeting everyone as they arrived for the reception, just as her parents should have been standing at her wedding. I barged to the front of the line, apologizing frantically and making daft expressions and hand signals indicating that I had to get through to take my place alongside Vickie. Which, come to think of it, was where I should have been in the first place. I was the dead man’s brother. I ought to have been greeting and thanking all the friends who’d come to see him off. At that precise moment, though, that was the last thing on my mind.

‘Do you have the keys to Andy’s place?’ I said, when I finally got to where Vickie was standing.

She looked alarmed.

‘Well, it’s … it’s our place actually,’ she said. ‘What do you want from it? I mean, does it have to be now?’ Vickie frowned. ‘You all right, Peter?’

I nodded a little too forcefully. ‘Sure. But I really do need those keys … I’ll bring them back …’

‘And then you’ll tell me what’s going on?’

‘Promise.’

She reached into her handbag, took out a bunch of keys and detached two of them from the ring. ‘That’s the Yale, and that’s for the other lock, just below it. Do the other one first.’