Dead or Alive (9 page)

She went to sit behind her desk, looked at her computer monitor and tapped away on the keyboard, talking to him as she did so. ‘Would you say you're having your ups and downs again?'

‘Obviously, but not for no reason. It was never for no reason. Outside agencies always caused my ups and downs.'

She looked at her watch, Sep took the hint. ‘Time's up, eh?'

‘Not quite.'

‘Well,' he said, ‘you've left no stone unturned so, what's my psychiatric condition? Does everything I've just told you add up to me being a nutcase, or a man who's got things figured out?'

‘I'll let you know in a month.'

She stopped what she was doing and studied him, waiting for his reaction, but he held himself in check and said, ‘I do hope you're not going to ask your people to step up their offensive against me, to get me to crack before my time is up.'

‘They don't have an offensive against you.'

‘So what am I doing here? Do you honestly think you can make me better than I already am?'

‘I want to see if you can maintain your level of sanity.'

‘This is not a good place for a sane man to be, especially a sane man being treated as an insane man, so if I don't maintain my sanity you only have yourself to blame.'

‘I can live with that.'

‘Can you?' he said, annoyed now. ‘Maybe you should stick me on the Broomhill Ward with the advanced nutters who piss themselves and shout at the wall and bang their chairs on the floor all day long.'

‘Yes I understand you've been in there. There was a complaint from one of the patients – Mr Cordingley.'

‘Don't know him.'

‘Well he knows you – you threatened him.'

‘What? Oh him – of course I didn't threaten him. This old bloke kept dancing about in front of me trying to block my way. I wanted to go through there to get to the so-called library. You know, that room with all the comics and Rupert Bear books.'

‘What did you say to him?'

‘If you must know I said if you don't get out of my way, I'll put a frog in your colostomy bag.'

P
eter Strathmore was sitting opposite DI Cope and Detective Superintendent Ibbotson. Strathmore was thirty-five years old and looked many years older. He had the pale, drawn features of a spiritually defeated man who hadn't slept for many nights. His voice was hoarse and without strength as he spoke to the policemen.

‘I want you give me a straight answer. Do you think Formosa's killed my children?'

‘We honestly don't know, Mr Strathmore,' said Ibbotson.

‘But you know it was Formosa who took them.'

‘Sadly, with the death of our main witness we have no proof of who took them, which is why we can't charge Formosa.'

‘Look cut the crap! You know it was Formosa, just as you know it was Formosa who killed the witness.'

‘We've no idea how Formosa could have found out about the witness,' said Cope, ‘or how he found out we were about to arrest him. Because of the children we were playing it very carefully. We didn't want to scare him into doing anything rash.'

‘You mean like killing my children?'

‘We, er, we suspect the witness might have inadvertently given himself away,' said the superintendent.

‘Shouldn't he have been in a safe house or something?'

‘He was due to be moved into a safe house today as a matter of fact.'

‘What about the other witness?'

‘The other witness's evidence wouldn't have been enough to convict him.'

‘Does this other witness know where my children are?'

‘I'm afraid not. Nor did the witness who was killed.'

Strathmore hung his head and began to cry. His shoulders heaved with great sobs. He looked up at the policemen and said, ‘Jesus Christ! We all know who took them and yet we can't do a thing about it. If ever I get my hands on Formosa I'll kill him, you know that, don't you? He'll tell me what happened to them, then I'll kill him and hand myself over to you.'

Strathmore was a big man. Originally a bricklayer who had built a house-building company up from nothing. He had huge hands that would throttle the truth out of Formosa if he could get them around his neck.

‘That probably wouldn't be wise,' said Cope, ‘but we couldn't blame you.'

‘All this for a piece of poxy land. If I'd owned the land myself I'd have given him it but my partners thought it best to call you lot in.'

‘I understand the land is worth over four million and Formosa wanted you to sell it for half a million.'

‘He wanted it to look like a standard business deal, so as not to arouse suspicion. Hard thing to steal is land.'

‘Did he actually tell you he'd taken your children?' Ibbotson asked.

Strathmore shook his head. ‘No, all he ever did was to ask me if anything valuable was missing from my life. If so, that thing might well be restored to me once the deal was signed. At the time I didn't know what he was talking about. He'd just made the stupid offer and I'd just turned it down.'

‘Did he say this in front of witnesses?' asked Cope.

‘No, just me. Then he left. Ten minutes later my wife rang to say the kids had gone missing. I was so worried I actually didn't associate what Formosa had said to me with them going missing until later that evening.'

‘But you didn't tell us – why?' asked Ibbotson. ‘We were already on the case.'

‘I wasn't thinking straight. I just wanted them back. I rang him up and asked him what he'd done with them. He acted as though he knew nothing about it but he said he might be able to help if I went round to see him, but I mustn't say anything to you lot.

‘I told my wife and she told me to do exactly as he asked, so I did. I went round to meet him. All I wanted was to get my kids back.'

‘Where did you meet him?'

‘Oh, in a pub car park.'

‘Which pub?'

‘The Wellington out on Wetherby Road. He didn't get out of his car and I was surrounded by three heavies with him otherwise I'd have dragged him out of the car and throttled the truth out of him. He said he might be able to help me because he has influence with people who kidnap children, but I must help him first by selling him the land for half a million. I told him I had three partners and he told me to get them to agree.'

‘But they wouldn't,' said Ibbotson, who already knew the story.

‘No, they wouldn't. They told you lot without asking me, the lousy bastards! If my kids are dead it's their fault!'

‘We're working on the assumption that your children are still alive,' Ibbotson said. ‘He might well be holding on to them for some future blackmail attempt. You're a wealthy man and your children are his key to your money.'

Strathmore looked at him with a gleam of hope behind his tears. ‘Do you think so?'

‘It's a possibility.'

‘Well, do you think I might be able to do a deal with him?'

The policemen looked at each other. Ibbotson didn't think the children were still alive and neither thought Formosa would go along with such a risky deal even if they were. Superintendent Ibbotson shook his head and said, ‘I'm afraid we couldn't approve such a thing.'

‘I'm not asking for your fucking approval!' said Strathmore.

V
ince Formosa was of Maltese extraction. He was a small, squat man in his late forties. He had fallen into bad company in Manchester as a youth, ending up running the gang he had joined as a thirteen-year-old who had a sub-human capacity for violence. At the age of eighteen he had skedaddled to London as the police were looking at him for a murder. Luckily for him the two witnesses to this crime had both died in suspicious circumstances. In future years many people who threatened Formosa's freedom died in suspicious circumstances. It was this sort of luck that had kept him out of police clutches for so long. In Vince Formosa's world a man made his own luck.

In London he'd prospered under the name of Vic Robinson until things got too hot for him, which was when he moved up to Leeds in Yorkshire, once again operating under his real name. A Met officer, who had been in his pay in London, had recently followed him up to Leeds in anticipation of the Met's corruption investigation. He was still in his pay.

He now kept a low profile. His existence was known by the police and villains but his actual whereabouts wasn't; few people knew the location of his domicile or his headquarters. He'd relied heavily on a fearsome reputation which kept away challenges from all underworld competition, plus his reputation made the police very wary of him. He ran a very tight and ruthless ship and right now he had some tidying up to do. He had two men whose work was good but whose tongues were not one hundred per cent reliable, and reliability, to Vince, had to always be one hundred per cent. They were both standing in front of him, awaiting payment for their latest job. Vince looked up at them and smiled. His office was a basement in the centre of Leeds. He had four offices scattered around the city. No one but he knew the location of all four. In the next room were another two men who were both one hundred per cent reliable. He had four such pairs of men. None of these pairs knew of the existence of the others. Additional men, such as out-of-towners Sharky and Spud, were recruited on an ad hoc basis. There was another level below this basement in which there was a furnace room which had originally heated the four-storey block above. In more recent years this had been replaced by a modern gas heating system, but the old furnace still remained, connected to the original chimney but not to the heating system. The block was owned by Vince Formosa.

‘You did an excellent job,' Vince told Spud and Sharky. ‘You probably wasted one more than was necessary, but no matter. She was a cheap whore and her death rubbed the message in a bit deeper. People out there will know better than to cross me in future.'

‘No fear of that, Mister Formosa.'

Vince opened a drawer in his desk. The two men assumed he was taking out their money – five grand each. Instead he brought out a 9mm automatic handgun, into which was screwed a silencer. He pointed it in their general direction.

‘However,' he said, ‘I'm not too happy with the one of you who's planning to do a runner.'

He sounded as if he was criticising them for some minor transgression, but Spud and Sharky both knew that there was no such thing as a minor transgression in Vincent's world. They both froze, each assuming it was the other who had let something slip. Vince aimed his gun at Spud whose heart skipped a beat just before his boss shot him clean through it. Dead on his feet, Spud's legs ceased to support him and he collapsed to the floor without taking his dead eyes off Vince. Sharky frowned and looked down at the Irishman. Spud had been an arsehole at times, but he was the nearest Sharky had to a friend. As he looked down, a shudder of realization ripped through his body. He looked up at Vince who was now pointing the gun at him and explaining the situation in a matter-of-fact voice.

‘Actually, it's both of you, but I didn't want you panicking and making yourself a moving target.'

Sharky was about to do just that when Vince shot him through the heart as well. He was also dead before he hit the floor. Vince rose from his chair and peered over his desk at the two bodies. He gave a nod of self-congratulation. The second pop of the gun acted as a signal for the men in the next room to come in. Vince put the gun back in the drawer and got to his feet. He then looked down at the rug under the two dead men and tutted in exasperation. It was stained with blood. Not too much, because dead hearts don't pump blood, but the slightest drop of incriminating blood had no place in his office.

‘You'd think they'd have had the decency not to bleed on my rug. Better burn it as well – and get me another one. Something with a nice cheerful pattern … and remember … this only happens to men who disobey my rules. I must be always obeyed to the letter.' He noticed the Colt in a holster strapped to Sharky's leg in wild-west style. ‘I'll have that gun and his gun belt.'

The two men nodded and did his bidding, then they dragged the bodies out to take them down the stone steps to the furnace room below. In ten minutes all trace of Spud and Sharky would be reduced to ashes, as were all connections between Vince Formosa and the deaths of Lee Dench and Chantelle.

‘H
ow was I to know he wears a colostomy bag?'

Professor Gilmartin walked away from Sep and sat down behind her desk. ‘Well, he does.'

‘OK. I'll apologize to him and tell him he's got nothing to worry about. His colostomy bag will be forever frog-free.'

Gilmartin nodded, then said, ‘There's more than Rupert Bear in the library, surely.'

‘They're the only decent books in there,' said Sep. ‘The Rupert stories are written in prose as well as rhyme, so you can take your pick.'

‘Tell me what you like.'

‘The Lottery, best idea anyone ever had.'

‘Lottery?'

‘Yeah. It gives people hope of great riches. Yeah, I know it's a zillion to one shot but it's real and it's the best two quid's worth in town – and half of that goes to charity.' He looked at her and asked, ‘OK, what does that make me?'

‘A dreamer.'

‘Yeah, I'll go with that.'

‘I meant whose books do you like?'

‘James Joyce.'

She shook her head, ‘I might have known.'

‘Mind you, I think you have to read him while you're drunk which is what he was when he wrote
Ulysses
. I also studied him at university.'

‘Ah, that's right. You have an English degree.'