Incinerator (5 page)

A few months back I had fallen for Zoe
Prendergast, and she’d distracted me with her assets while her boss arranged for me to be turned into Spam. Now Nicky had taken me for half a million quid, and I’d never even got to sleep with her.

As I sat there, sipping the insipid milky lukewarm liquid from a dribbly plastic cup, I thought about all the trouble Nicky must have gone to—winning my trust, egging me into buying that gym so I’d authorize transfer of my inheritance from Spain straight into her client account … Had buying the freehold of the building been my idea or hers? It was hard to believe it had all been a scam.

In fact, the more I thought about it the less I believed it. I’d liked Nicky, and I thought she’d liked me, and—apart from Zoe—my instincts usually weren’t that far wrong. Delroy had said Nicky would break my heart, but I was pretty sure he hadn’t meant she was going to rip me off. I’d sat with her after that pummelling she had taken from Bruno and looked into her eyes and she’d told me she’d see me today. She’d made several appointments for today, in fact, from what her receptionist had said, and
why would she bother if she had been planning all along not to be here? The more clients she pissed off, the sooner her theft would be spotted. If it was a theft.

If she
hadn’t
run off with my money, then what had happened to her?

The door opened and a sharp-faced woman entered. She was thirty-something with dark hair, high cheekbones and the expression of a copper who hated dealing with the public but had drawn the short straw in the station canteen. Her short cropped hair and smart suit suggested she wanted her colleagues to assume she was a lesbian so they’d stop hitting on her and let her get some work done.

“Finn Maguire?” Her accent was Brum and I noticed she didn’t bother calling me “Mr.” Two words in and she was already patronizing me. “I’m Detective Sergeant McCoy, this is Detective Constable Whelan.” I honestly hadn’t noticed she had a DC with her, a guy in a rumpled suit who didn’t look much older than me, so nondescript he faded into the background like a stain.

By the time I’d explained my problem the
look on McCoy’s face suggested my story was a wind-up that someone was going to regret, starting with me.

“You’re how old—seventeen?—and you had half a million pounds in the bank?”

“I inherited it from my dad. He was left it by a family friend.” I’d told her all this already. I hadn’t told her Dad had been murdered over it, because that was none of her business. It didn’t matter anyhow; like most cops she’d jumped to a conclusion early on and was ignoring anything afterwards that didn’t fit. “My lawyer had control of it, not me,” I explained again.

“Only she’s absconded with it.”

“I don’t think she has.”

“Well, has she or hasn’t she?”

“She’s not the sort of person who would.”

“Believe me, for that sort of money a lot of people would.” I noticed that she’d shifted from sceptical to sardonic, which was progress of a sort.

“I think it’s more likely something happened to her.”

“Let’s hold off on the conspiracy theories for now. Give us the facts, and let us do the investigating,
OK? Your lawyer Nicky Hale has disappeared, and so has your money, is that right?”

I could see where this was heading. Nicky had gone, her passport had gone, and the money had gone. As far as McCoy was concerned she could skip straight from recording a crime to marking it “case solved” and heading to the pub to celebrate.

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“I might as well tell you now, you’re unlikely to see that money again.”

“Then what the hell are we all doing here?”

“Oh, she’ll be caught eventually, don’t worry. But chances are she’ll have blown all the cash by then. If she hasn’t already.” McCoy actually found this funny, I realized—a lippy kid with more money than he knew what to do with had been taken to the cleaners by his bent brief. McCoy realized she shouldn’t have let her amusement show in her voice. She cleared her throat, looked down at her paperwork and clicked her pen pointlessly.

“Right—is there a number where we can contact you, Mr. Maguire?”

* * *

My first thought as I emerged from the station into the cool evening was that there was little point heading straight back to the gym. Delroy could manage without me till closing time, and anyway I didn’t want him to read on my face how deep in shit I was—how deep in it we both were. Things were bad enough, but my deal with Sherwood had made everything worse. Detective Sergeant McCoy had made it very clear that as far as she was concerned, this was a case of fraud, not robbery, and the suspect had made a clean getaway, so what was the point of hurrying? She’d glanced at the institutional clock on the wall of the interview room. It was after six. In the morning she’d make a few calls to confirm what I’d told her was true, and then the police investigation would clank and grind into motion like some clapped-out British car built in the seventies. As soon as it did, anyone who’d ever been involved with Nicky would hire lawyers and clam up. I had at best a few hours to find out what had really happened to her, starting with her husband.

I’d never met the guy, though I’d seen his car in the drive of Nicky’s house—a sleek,
sculpted BMW with one of those metal roofs that fold away into the boot. The house itself was a double-fronted Victorian number behind wrought-iron railings, all red brick and white-painted woodwork, immaculately maintained, like the cover shot on one of those glossy property mags for the stinking rich. Beyond the house you could just about glimpse the tops of silver birch trees running the length of their enormous rear garden. When I’d mentioned to Nicky that it looked like a great house for kids to grow up in, her smile was faked and sad. I’d known instantly that she’d wanted children but couldn’t have them, and I’d wondered why, and knew I couldn’t ask. All I could do was mentally kick myself.

The thick cream-coloured gravel crunched beneath my trainers as I approached the massive and gleaming front door, its stained-glass panes glowing from a light deep within the house. The noisy gravel was there to deter burglars, I knew; it almost deterred me, as I realized how scruffy I looked. Even with half a million quid in the bank I’d never have fitted into this universe. Certainly not now.

The doorbell rang like a distant cathedral
bell, and I saw movement flicker through the rippled stained glass. A tall, heavyset figure resolved itself as it approached and reached for the latch of the door.

Nicky’s husband Harry was roughly the same height as me, but instead of my mousy spikes his jet-black hair was neatly trimmed. His blue eyes were cool in his tanned face, and that cleft chin made him look like an old-fashioned Hollywood heartthrob. He was wearing a spotless white cotton shirt and blue jeans, and his feet were bare. He was muscular and fit, and he moved with a sort of twitchy nervous energy; he was frowning at me with irritation, as if he knew my face but couldn’t place me.

“Mr. Hale?” I said.

“No one here by that name,” he said. He watched me flounder but didn’t elaborate.

“Sorry, I thought Nicky Hale lived here—”

“Nicky is my wife,” he said. “Her name’s

Hale.”

“Sorry—right.” She’d told me all this. “Mr.—Anderson, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah, you’re her trainer. Finn, yeah? Nicky’s not in.”

“I know. I’m looking for her.”

He thought about that for a second. Maybe he was wondering what sort of trainer door-stepped customers who hadn’t turned up, while I was wondering how he knew who I was when we’d never met before.

“Like I said, she’s not in. And I don’t know when she’ll be back.” He sniffed and rubbed his nose. I shuffled on the doormat as if making to leave, hoping he wouldn’t notice me placing my foot where I could slip it forward to block the door if he tried to shut it.

“When was the last time you heard from her?” I said.

“Sorry,” he said. “This isn’t a good time. Try her mobile.” He moved back, ready to close the door. I didn’t put my foot in the gap—I didn’t want to get in his face just yet.

“Mr. Anderson, could I come in? It really won’t take very long.”

“Actually I was just about to go out,” he said. This must be how double-glazing salesmen feel, I thought.

“It’s just that Nicky’s my lawyer, and it looks like she’s run off with all my money. I was hoping to speak to you before the cops turn up.”

Anderson blinked. “What do you mean, run off?”

“The cops think she’s absconded,” I said.

Now he seemed to be paying attention.

“Holy crap,” he said eventually.

“Can I come in?”

He looked at me as if calculating which would cause him more grief—keeping me out or letting me in—before he finally stepped back and held the door open.

Anderson led me along a long hallway with a red and cream chequerboard floor and into a massive library lined with bookshelves. With its deep button-backed sofas and its mottled leather-bound books the room struck me as cheesy and old-fashioned, not the sort of decor I would have expected Nicky to like. Between the bookshelves were hung ornately framed classical paintings, all depicting ancient countryside scenes with milkmaids in suspiciously clean smocks, apart from an odd one depicting a heap of dead partridges … or pheasants, or possibly grouse—my local supermarket stocked more frozen burgers than fresh game, so I was no expert. The place
might have been cosy in the evenings with the fire going, but right now it was as bleak and chilly and cheerless as a funeral parlour. I noticed a tall mahogany cupboard to one side with ostentatiously locked doors. Was he that paranoid about people stealing his brandy?

Anderson looked as if he would have preferred to sit back in an armchair like the lord of the manor, but right now was too rattled by my news to relax, so he paced the room, rubbing his forehead. “I’m sorry, I had no idea you were a client of Nicky’s,” he said. “I thought you were just her personal trainer.”

“I’m not her trainer,” I said. “She works out at my gym, that’s all.”

“Oh yeah, your gym.” Something about the way he said that suggested he’d driven by once to have a look, and not been impressed. Nicky must have told him about me, and whatever she’d said had made him curious.

“Sorry, but how could you not notice your wife had gone missing?” I said.

“We had a row last night. She left the house. I thought she’d gone to stay over with—friends.”

“How often did that happen?”

“Have you ever been married? Sorry, silly question. How old are you, twenty?”

“Can I ask what you two were arguing about?”

He held his hands open in a hopeless gesture. “Nothing. Everything. Are your parents still together?”

My parents hardly ever fought, I wanted to tell him—they were happy together … right up to the day my mum walked out. But that was none of his business.

“My parents are dead,” I said.

“Sorry. Look, Finn, if you’re right, and she really has run off … I’ve got to start making some calls. And you need to find yourself another lawyer.” He ran a hand down his face, pinching his nose, as the implications sank in. “The police are going to turn this place inside out. They’re going to think I knew what she was planning. What a bloody mess.” He looked back at me. “Can I ask—how much did she take you for?”

“I don’t think that’s what happened,” I said.

“I don’t want to believe it either,” said Harry. “But here we are.”

“You think she’s capable of something like that?”

“Honestly? Yes, I do.” He hesitated, as if reluctant to bad-mouth his own wife, then seemed to decide it didn’t matter any more. “She’s a selfish, spoiled … bitch. I’m just sorry you had to find out this way. Anyway, like I said, I’ve got to start making calls so …” He walked to the door to show me out.

“Can I use your loo? Sorry,” I said.

He eyed me up and sniffed, as if wondering if I was going to run off with his toilet roll. But the good manners that were probably beaten into him as a boy eventually prevailed, and he nodded towards the hallway. “Of course,” he said. “There’s one in the hall, under the stairs.”

Crap … I’d been hoping there wasn’t. I checked to make sure he wasn’t watching, found the loo and opened the door noisily, switched on the light—the walls were hung with cartoons of hunting scenes—and shut the door again, but from the outside. Slipping off my trainers I sprinted upstairs in my socks on tiptoe, trying not to make the treads creak.

The upstairs landing was long and dimly
lit and stretched on for half a mile, with about a hundred doors leading off. I didn’t know what I was looking for but reckoned whatever I found would tell me more than Anderson was going to. The door immediately ahead of me was the master bedroom, I discovered, and the bed was neatly made and scattered with plump shiny cushions. A book lay open on a bedside table—I didn’t have time to decipher the title—and the wardrobes were all firmly closed. If any clothes had been strewn about in a frenzy of packing, they’d all been tidied away now.

I hurried up the landing and tried the furthest door. The air in there was slightly staler, as if the windows and the door were rarely opened. A guest room? The bed was made up like the first one, except instead of a pile of cushions a small holdall sat half sunk into the soft quilt. It was full, but not zipped up. Peeking inside I found several neatly folded blouses of the cut Nicky liked. There was a leather address label hanging off one handle. I lifted it and squinted at the name written on it … 
Susan Horsfall
.

“Are you lost?” Anderson had come up the stairs even more silently than I had, and caught me red-handed. No point making feeble excuses, I thought.

“Sorry, is this Nicky’s?”

“I really think you should leave now.” Harry’s air of sympathy and commiseration had evaporated, and he had planted his feet wide apart as if he thought this might get physical. He was big and fit, but that didn’t worry me unduly—he didn’t look like he was used to getting smacked in the face, at least not by a bloke his own size.

“If Nicky did do a runner, why would she have left this behind?”

“If I ever see her again, I’ll ask her.” He stood to one side, pointedly. I raised my hands in surrender and left the room. As I walked back down the landing I could hear a mobile phone ringing from below in the hall, distant and muffled, as if it was in a coat pocket. The ringing stopped as I reached the foot of the stairs, Anderson a few steps behind me. As we headed in silence towards the front door the ringing started again. It was a ringtone I’d
heard before, on Nicky’s phone, and it was coming from a drawer in a little side table near the front door.