The Body in the Boot: The first 'Mac' Maguire mystery (20 page)

‘You were saying that you overheard Giorgio…’

‘God my heart was thumping so hard I thought I’d pass out but I calmed down when I realised it was his sister. I’m an only child and I must admit I was jealous of the way they talked to each other, so easily, so full of love. It was obvious he loves every bone in her body.’

‘How did she sound?’

‘Nice, really nice, like someone I’d like to meet. It didn’t take me long to work out that if he wasn’t ashamed of her, it must be me that he’s ashamed of.’

He had no answer to that.

‘Have you a photo?’

She pulled a photo out of her pocket and put it on the desk. Mac glanced at it. Giorgio was young and very good looking but there was something familiar about him, something he couldn’t quite put a finger on.

Mac thought that Laura’s suspicions were all a bit nebulous so far, so he tried again.

‘Anything else that makes you suspect Giorgio?’

‘Every second Friday afternoon he just disappears from the salon. His staff don’t know where he goes and, when I asked him directly, he made up some story about seeing an old friend. I knew he was lying of course, more like an old flame I’d say. Will you take my case Mr. Maguire?’

He knew he was in a corner. When he’d agreed to try out being a private detective he hadn’t figured on chasing around after unfaithful boyfriends, but he knew he desperately needed to be doing something.

‘Yes, I’ll take the case’.

He observed her as he said this. Her expression was a mix of relief and fear.

‘Tell me about Giorgio’s routine.’

‘He leaves the house around six thirty every day except Sunday and comes back late, around seven or eight. Sometimes he’s even later, he always says it’s because of ‘special client’. I just don’t know what to believe any more.’

‘What does he drive?’

‘A black Audi TT.’

‘Bought by you?’ Mac asked.

Laura nodded.

‘Okay Laura, I just need your address and a phone number.’

She rummaged about in her pocket and produced a card.

‘It’s all on there. Try the mobile number first just in case I’m out. I’ve put the address of Giorgio’s salon on the back.’

‘I’ll report in when I know something. By the way when’s the next ‘second Friday’?’

‘This Friday coming. Thank you Mr. Maguire, I just need to know the truth, to be put out of my misery. If he is seeing someone, find out who she is so I can end it. I thought Giorgio wasn’t like the rest, I really did, and somewhere in here,’ she said holding a hand over her heart, ‘I still hope. I still hope Mr. Maguire and its bloody killing me.’

She was making for the door when he said, ‘Don’t you want to know what I charge?’

‘Charge whatever you like, I’ve got lots of money, everybody knows that,’ she said with a twisted smile and left.

He sighed and picked up the boyfriend’s photo again and studied it. Where did he go every second Friday? And why didn’t Giorgio want to talk about his previous life and his family? What was he hiding?

Mac was certain he’d seen that face before and, considering his previous line of employment, this didn’t bode well for Laura de Vesey.

Tuesday 13
th
January

Mac sat motionless as he waited for the Audi to appear. He’d been waiting since before six. He’d decided to follow Giorgio’s car into London just in case he made any side trips on his way in. He’d parked a hundred yards or so before the huge electric gate behind which, somewhere, stood the De Vesey house. He’d checked it out yesterday in the daylight so he’d be sure of finding the best place to park up, somewhere he wouldn’t be seen by a car leaving the house. He’d stopped in front of the gate first and looked down the long drive on the other side. There was no sign of a house. He’d wondered just how big the grounds were.

He took a sip of coffee from his travel mug and thought of the hundreds of times he’d pulled observation duty. When he’d been in the force he knew that many of his colleagues hadn’t like going on observation with him as he hardly said a word. He’d always thought it was a good time for reflection and, anyway, he felt he should be actually observing, paying real attention to what was going on outside the car window. He glanced over at the passenger seat and remembered that for a lot of those times his sergeant, Peter Harper, had accompanied him. Silence had suited them both. All that was there now was his crutch, leaning against the passenger door. With a twinge of remorse he also remembered Peter knocking on his front door not much more than a couple of months ago. He’d hid in the kitchen.

For once he was grateful his thoughts were interrupted by the electric gates gliding silently open. He started his ageing car up and waited for the Audi to appear. The black car, headlights on, eased out of the gates and made towards the main road. Mac followed the red tail lights not worrying if Giorgio spotted him. His old Nissan Almera was anonymous and wouldn’t get a second glance.

The Audi made towards London on the motorway. He had no problem following Giorgio, he was just one in a sea of cars so he kept as close as possible. They were heading towards Central London, a trip Mac had made almost every day when he’d been working. They went straight down the Edgware Road and, although it was still early, they still hit some traffic. Then they went around the side of Hyde Park where the Audi made its way to Belgrave Square and pulled up outside a shop down one of the side streets. Giorgio got out and opened the front door of the shop.

Mac knew this area well. He’d always called it ‘Embassyland’ as there seemed to be at least three or four of them on every street. Mac looked around. The street was signed ‘One way only’ with parking bays on one side and double yellow lines on the other. He parked on the double yellows in a place where he wouldn’t be obstructing traffic and where he could get a good view of the shop front. He thought it ironic that one of the very few perks of being disabled and in constant pain was that he could park virtually anywhere he liked. He got his disabled blue badge and time disc out of the glove, placed them on the dashboard and started earning his money.

He’d only ever come to this part of town before on police business. He could remember at least three cases that involved embassy staff, a pain in the arse every one of them due to having to dance around diplomatic immunity. He looked across the street. The shop Giorgio had just entered was surrounded by expensive restaurants and retailers whose windows had never been coarsened by a price tag.

The shop front was elegant and restrained and the sign above the shop the sign said ‘Capelli Giorgio’. The lights went on and behind the large plate glass window Mac could see a row of padded chairs and high tech hair dryers, all coloured white. He got his tablet out and typed the shop’s name into Google Translate. It meant ‘Hair by George’ in Italian. Again he felt the same tickle in his brain as when he’d seen Giorgio’s photo. He felt it should have some significance for him but again it proved elusive. He searched to see if there was a web site and, while the site was elegant and expansive about the business, it revealed nothing about Mr. Lo Bianco he didn’t already know.

A young woman arrived. She was very pretty and she gave Giorgio a wide smile. Was this the love interest Mac wondered? However Giorgio just gave her a quick hug and a peck on the cheek, hardly the actions of a lover. She listened intently as Giorgio spoke to her and it was all too obvious who was in charge.

All in all another four women and three men drifted into the shop over the next half hour. Just before nine o’clock they all gathered around Giorgio who seemed to be giving them a team talk. While he was doing this a Bentley, followed by a Rolls-Royce, pulled up and a very fashionable woman stepped out of each. If such well-heeled women like this were prepared to get out of bed this early to get their hair done he guessed that Capelli Giorgio must be good.

After a quick look around Giorgio opened the shop door and the women swanned in. Within five minutes Mac saw three more Rolls-Royces, an Aston Martin, a Lamborghini and a Bugatti pull up. The cars might have cost a fortune but he guessed that the women who got out of them might be a tad more expensive. He wondered idly how much a haircut would cost at Capelli Giorgio.

The team were hard at it all morning, especially Giorgio. If he wasn’t cutting hair he was meeting and greeting customers and keeping a careful eye on the rest of the team. Mac had wondered about the amount of money Laura had given Giorgio but, this being such an expensive area, he guessed that a million to fit out a business like this might be just about right.

Mac sat up, Giorgio was on the move. He retrieved his crutch and got out of the car. A sudden bolt of pain shot through him as he straightened his back but thankfully it disappeared as fast as it had come. He followed Giorgio staying on the other side of the street and was grateful that Giorgio only went around the corner to a smart coffee shop and delicatessen. He could see Giorgio reading his order out from a piece of paper.

He followed him back to the shop where Giorgio went straight back to work. Mac was surprised at the way these hairdressers kept at it, he felt tired just watching them. About half an hour later a man arrived with coffees and sandwiches. He realised he was getting hungry too. While Giorgio was busy eating he decided to get a sandwich and, hopefully, some information as well.

He went to the counter of the coffee house and ordered a cheese sandwich and coffee to go. The young man behind the counter offered him six types of bread, eight types of cheese and an even greater range of different coffees to choose from. Mac found the amount of choices confusing so he just ordered cheddar on white and a cappuccino to go. While he waiting for his sandwich he decided to see what the young man knew about Giorgio.

‘I was thinking of booking my daughter in for an appointment at the hairdresser’s around the corner. Is he any good?’

The young man looked Mac up and down. 

‘Come into money have we?’ he said archly. ‘Sorry, just my little joke, don’t mind me. Is Giorgio any good? He’s the best, you want to see some of the women who go in there, God they are gorgeous. Not that I’m interested in them that way of course. No, I definitely picked the wrong profession. Here I am serving coffee and sandwiches while the beautiful Giorgio is getting up to twenty thousand for a haircut.’ 

‘Twenty thousand!’ Mac exclaimed in disbelief.

‘Oh yes and not that long ago he got flown out to Los Angeles to do her hair for the Oscars. Oh who was it now? Gerald, darling,’ he shouted over his shoulder.

A tall man in his thirties came out and presented a paper bag to Mac on a little silver platter.

‘You called, dearest?’ he said, draping his arm proprietorially over the young man’s shoulder.

‘Who was that actress? The one Giorgio went all the way to LA to do her hair for the Oscars?’

Gerald gave a name that even Mac knew.

‘After that they all want him to do their hair. He is really good though and so good looking with it. I love you, sugar,’ Gerald said turning to the young man, ‘but he is fantastic eye candy.’

They both nodded dreamily in unison.

He went back to his car and ate his sandwich. It cost twice as much as a dinner at The Magnets but he had to admit it was good. He made sure he’d gotten a receipt though. Twenty thousand for a haircut, he thought in wonder. He felt there was something deeply wrong about that. He knew some people had shed loads of money but still, twenty thousand for something that would need doing again a few weeks later. Some coppers starting off didn’t get much more than that in a year. 

Giorgio was still hard at work even after the salon closed at six. He and the young woman who had arrived first, obviously his assistant, were looking at what Mac thought might be an appointment book and some other papers. She left around six thirty and was met at the door by another woman who hugged her and gave her a lover’s kiss full on the lips. They walked off down the street hand in hand. Definitely not the love interest then, Mac thought. 

Giorgio locked up a few minutes later and Mac followed him all the way back to the electric gates of the de Vesey house.

Friday 16
th
January

Wednesday and Thursday had been exactly the same routine. Mac wasn’t bored though. It was work and he always found observation interesting. He thought of it as being a sort of microscope and looking at the minutiae of someone’s daily life can tell you a lot. He found that he was warming to Giorgio who was a real worker and seemed to be well liked by his team.

His new duties also gave him some time to dispassionately turn over the facts of the unsolved case in his head but, for all the effort he put in, it got him exactly nowhere.

Mac waited expectantly for the afternoon to come. If Laura was right he might find out a bit more about the mysterious Giorgio. Sure enough just before one o’clock he said goodbye to his team and got into the Audi. Mac followed him through the busy London streets feeling the excitement mount. Instead of carrying straight on, the Audi turned right. He definitely wasn’t heading towards home.

He found himself on the A10 heading north and he was surprised when Giorgio turned left and headed towards Haringey. What would a hairdresser to the stars want in this part of town? Giorgio quickly turned left and right down residential side streets until Mac wasn’t quite sure where he was. He even began to wonder if Giorgio had spotted his Nissan and was trying to lose him. Eventually the Audi pulled up outside a nondescript 1960s council house. Mac went straight past but Giorgio never even gave him a glance. He turned the car around at the top of the road and parked where he could get a good view of the house.

The area had definitely seen better days. The street was strewn with litter, shop windows were boarded up and he was pretty sure the twelve year old hanging about on the corner wasn’t selling newspapers.

A few minutes later someone in the house pulled back the curtains and Mac got out of the car for a closer look. He could see inside the front room of the house. An old lady was sitting in a chair with a towel around her shoulders. She smiled broadly as Giorgio started to cut her hair. Then she turned her head and Mac got a good view of her profile.

‘Christ almighty!’ he said out loud.

He knew who she was and he knew who Giorgio was. He looked at the house number, 192. It was the same house and suddenly it was sixteen years ago. The memories flooded back as if it were only yesterday.

He knew Giorgio had looked familiar the minute he’d seen his photo. Of course he’d been just plain Georgy White back then. He rolled his eyes upwards in disbelief. Giorgio Lo Bianco is, of course, George White in Italian but he’d never twigged. Of course it had been a long time ago and Georgy had changed a hell of a lot but it had been such a bad business, a case he’d never forgotten.

Mac stood there frozen, uncertain as to what to do next. His heart was telling him to knock on the door but eventually his head won the day and Mac reluctantly went back to his car and drove away from Haringey and the case. At the bottom of the road a burnt out van stood half on the pavement, half on the road. He slowed down as he passed the van knowing it should mean something to him but he couldn’t think what. His brain was in a whirl.

He sighed, another case that hadn’t exactly been a success. Of course he’d have to tell Laura he couldn’t carry on following Giorgio but the real problem was that he couldn’t tell her why. Again he wondered if he should have knocked on the door and again he decided he’d made the right decision. He reminded himself that it wasn’t up to him.

He gave his name at the electronic gates and he could hear a tremor of fear in Laura’s voice as she replied. The gates glided open and Mac started down the long drive. The drive went straight on for quite a while and then turned to the left. Only then did he get a view of the De Vesey house. More of a castle than a house, he thought, must be forty, fifty rooms at least.

Laura was waiting at the front door, arms crossed. He could sense the anxiety from her body language even from a distance away. She led him into a room bigger than the floor space of his entire house and gestured for him to sit on a delicate looking chair. He hoped it was stronger than it looked.

She sat opposite. All the blood seemed to have drained from her face.

‘What have you found out?’ she eventually asked in a tremulous voice.

He told her about the hairdresser’s and how all he’d seen Giorgio do was work. He had to remind himself not to call him Georgy.

Laura looked puzzled.

‘There’s more to this, I know it. So where is he now? Why aren’t you following him?’

‘I’m afraid I won’t be able to take the case any further’.

‘Any further? What do you mean?’

‘I mean I can’t continue with the case, I can’t follow Giorgio anymore.’

‘Why?’

She looked stunned as she said this.

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,’ he replied, feeling both deeply embarrassed and deeply sorry for Laura.

‘You can’t tell me?’ Laura said loudly, standing up. ‘Christ, what have I done to deserve this? I can’t even hold on to a bloody private detective.’

She was close to tears and inadvertently gave Mac a clue as to why she might be so desperate. She held her hands over her lower stomach as if protecting something. Mac was sure she was pregnant. This didn’t make Mac feel any better but again he had to remind himself that it was not up to him.

‘I’m really sorry, Laura,’ was all he could say. 

‘Yes they’re all sorry, they’re all so fucking sorry. Daddy’s sorry he missed the school play, sorry you’re such a wonderful person but I’ve met someone else, sorry darling but it was always about the money. It’s always sorry but it means nothing does it?’

Mac could see she was close to hysteria. All he could think to do was to take her in his arms where she went completely to pieces. After the tears had stopped she pulled away and apologised.

‘I’m…sorry,’ she said with a slightly ashamed smile.

‘Don’t be. Have you thought it might not be as bad as you’ve been thinking?’

‘You mean there might be hope?’

He said a little prayer that he was doing the right thing.

‘Yes, there might be. I know I’ve only been on the case for a few days but I’ve seen nothing that suggests Giorgio has a lover, all I’ve seen him doing is work very hard.’

‘There might be hope?’ she repeated again to herself, as though fearing to believe it.

‘Will you take my advice? Talk to Giorgio tonight and tell him everything. Tell him how miserable you feel and why. Will you promise me?’

She nodded.

‘I will, Mr. Maguire. I’ve wanted to for ages but I’d always feared…I was so sure…but now you say there might be hope.’

Mac left hoping to God that he had done the right thing. He went back to the office and let the silence wash over him.

Two cases so far, both ending very unsatisfactorily. Mac wondered if being a detective was really the answer. He pulled Tim’s present from the drawer and sat looking at the unopened bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey.

He wondered how Georgy might react when Laura spoke to him. He hoped to God he was right in giving Laura hope but he was beginning to doubt his own judgment. He supposed he should have asked her not to mention his name but somehow he couldn’t. The genie was out of the bottle now and he had no idea how the cards would fall.

He started to open the bottle. He wasn’t normally a whisky drinker, although he liked a shot occasionally, but he was now seriously considering downing the lot. He sighed, tightened the cap and put it back in the drawer. He didn’t even have the energy to get drunk.

The tiredness was taking over again, weighing him down. The black fatigue which had kept him bedbound for days at a time was washing over him and he almost felt grateful. Right now all he wanted to do was escape into a dark place where there were no dead girls, no tearful women and no memories. He was just about to get up and leave the office for his bed when the image of the burnt out van flashed into his head. His brain was trying to tell him something but what?

He relaxed and tried not to think at all. Again he saw the burnt out van but this time it wasn’t a van, it was a BMW saloon. He had it! His tiredness suddenly evaporated.

Excitedly he rang Dan.

‘Dan mind if I borrow Tommy and Martin for an hour or two?’

‘Have you come up with something?’ Dan asked excitedly.

‘It’s just an idea, I’m not even sure it will get us anywhere, but I’d like to give it a go.’

‘Okay with me, come now if you want. Oh, by the way forensics have confirmed that Matyas, or Oleksandr Shevchenko as I should call him now, was definitely our man. His DNA and shoe prints match for the professor’s murder, also his car was definitely the one that was used to run over and kill Stelios Andreou. Interestingly we’ve also heard from Dr. Tereshkova and she’s confirmed that he had the same drug in his system as Hetty Lewinton just as you suspected.’

This news made Mac even more sure that Matyas had an accomplice.

Less than an hour later he found himself once again in the incident room with Tommy and Martin sitting like schoolboys paying keen attention to what he was saying.

‘It was when I saw a burnt out van that I got the idea. Our man stole cars to ferry girls back to Luton and pick up new girls but what happened to the cars afterwards? We know he was careful, there were no prints or anything else in the car Hetty Lewinton was found in, but the girls might very well have left some forensic evidence behind inside the car or in the boot. If he was really careful he’d have set them on fire when he was finished with them, wouldn’t he?’

Tommy and Martin looked at each other and then nodded.

‘If we assume he did indeed burn out the cars then they must be on our records somewhere but unfortunately buried in the statistics along with a mass of other car crimes.’

‘So what can we do?’ Tommy asked.

‘We’ve got dates and we know the make of car he prefers. It’s a long shot but if we can identify the locations of the cars he stole it might tell us something about where the girls were kept after they were abducted.’

‘We could probably get a lot of information about burnt out BMWs from the data bases,’ Martin said.

‘Okay but we’d then need to contact the local stations to narrow it down a bit by asking if any were found in unusual locations.’

‘Why unusual locations?’ Tommy asked.

‘He probably wouldn’t know where joy riders usually ditch their cars,’ Mac answered, ‘plus we also need to rule out any insurance frauds. The local police might be able to identify some of those for us.’

‘Okay,’ Tommy said. ‘Where do we start?’

‘I think we should start with Luton and then fan out towards the east,’ Martin suggested. ‘It was on the east side of Luton that the collision happened and where we found Hetty Lewinton in the car boot.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Mac said rubbing his hands together.

Martin printed out reams of phone numbers and they started phoning. By five thirty they’d only covered Bedfordshire and they’d gotten no good candidates. Mac told them they might as well call it a day.

‘See you tomorrow,’ Tommy said on his way out.

Martin said the same before he disappeared.

‘But its Saturday tomorrow,’ Mac said to the empty room.

He couldn’t stop himself smiling.