The Queen's Cipher (30 page)

“Right, my fine bibliophile, what do you know about the Morgan Coleman?”

“Is this some kind of joke?” The abused man spat out a loose tooth.

“No joke, I assure you. Let’s try a different question. Where’s the genealogy you bought from Strachan?”

Duncan grunted in recognition. “Do you mean Bacon’s genealogy?”

“The very same, tell me what you did with it.”

“I put the manuscript up for sale.” Duncan was gabbling now. “The Folger Shakespeare Library wanted it for their collection. Cut me down and I’ll find the invoice.”

The balaclava head shook slowly from side to side. “Don’t play games with me, Major, if you want to get this over with.”

“But it’s the truth. For God’s sake, man, I buy and sell rare books and I sold this one to the Americans because they pay top dollar.”

“That’s the wrong answer, I’m afraid. You’re lying.” His interrogator lit another cigarette.

Duncan’s eyes widened with terror and he began to scream, straining against his bonds.

“Let me give you another chance. But don’t try my patience. I really wouldn’t do that if I were you. Where have you hidden the genealogy?”

Duncan couldn’t hold out any longer. He surrendered his prize possession. “Look in the book stack behind you. You’ll find a slim volume with a brown leather binding, third shelf down. It’s a collector’s item.”

To his intense relief the sadist dropped his half-smoked cigarette on the floor and stubbed it out. “You’re doing well,” he said soothingly, patting Duncan on the cheek, before turning his attention to the book shelves.

Through mists of pain he saw the codex waved in front of his eyes. The most flawless calligraphy had gone into telling the brief histories of every English ruler since the Conquest.

The torturer flicked through its pages. “I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

Hanging naked from a crossbeam with dislocated shoulder-blades, Duncan was once again the bookseller. “It’s one of a kind - hard to put a price on,” he gasped. “A unique manuscript coming out of Francis Bacon’s scrivenery in Twickenham, probably meant as a gift for Queen Elizabeth. Take it! Only let me go.”

His captor shook his head. “There’s got to be more to it than that. Why is it worth so much?”

Duncan screamed with pain and annoyance. “It’s unique, that’s why!”

The torturer clicked his teeth. “You can do better than that,” he purred.

“I really can’t,” Duncan wailed. “I haven’t studied its provenance. I’ve been too busy stocktaking. Ask at the Garibaldi. Ask Shirley. She’ll vouch for me.”

“Been a naughty boy with Shirley upstairs in the Garibaldi, have we? Of course, she’ll vouch for you, Major. She knows all your nasty little secrets.”

“I can’t tell you anything more about the genealogy,” Duncan shrieked, panic-stricken. “You’ve got to believe me.”

“But I do believe you. I believe you implicitly,” the man said, pocketing the genealogy.

Something snapped in Duncan’s anguished mind. “All right then,” he spluttered, spitting out more blood. “Why are you torturing me for information I haven’t got.”

There was a long pause before his persecutor said anything. “Partly for the fun of it and partly for what your pal Bacon calls ‘wild justice.’ That’s revenge, in case you didn’t know.”

“Revenge for what?”

“Revenge for at least fourteen Catholics murdered on your say-so. But the worst thing the FRU did was to set off a chain reaction which led to years of tit-for-tat killings.”

Duncan’s heart almost stopped. His past had caught up with him. The years spent in Northern Ireland’s dirty war when the British Army tore up the Queen’s Regulations and got down in the gutter with the Provisional IRA. He had been a leading light in the Force Research Unit, downloading military intelligence about potential IRA targets onto floppy disks and giving them to the UDA and the UFF.

“Do you deny being at the Lisburn barracks where your job was to liaise with the Loyalists? They sent your boss to the British embassy in Beijing to keep him out of the way but they left you here to rot.”

The voice was cold and forensic. Duncan remembered what his CO had said during training at Catterick Garrison. Be strong and stand like a man at the end.

Ignoring the pain in his neck and shoulders Duncan raised his head in a pathetic gesture of defiance. “Why wear a disguise when you mean to kill me? Get it over with, man.” 

“To tell you the absolute truth, Major, I haven’t decided what to do with you. Either way, I’ll keep this book, just in case it’s as valuable as you say it is.”

Once again the gag was wound tightly around Duncan’s mouth while, down below, he could feel the sharp edge of a knife slicing into his torso.

“They used to play music while they did this,” the sadist said above the Major’s muffled screams. “Classical mainly, Mozart’s
Eine Kleine Nacht Musik
was a favourite.”

Without warning, he lunged with his knife stopping short of the Major’s dilated pupil. “Let’s call another time out, shall we? I’ll give you a drink of brandy. What do you say?”

The Major shook with fright, incapable of any rational response.

“I’ll take that to be a ‘yes’ then.” The hooded man undid the gag and poured the contents of a hip flask into the eager open mouth. Ironically, it was this humane gesture that finished off his victim. Duncan choked, eyes bulging. His body kicked and convulsed before going still.

“Oh fuck!” The torturer yanked up the sagging head but to no avail. The Major had found release.

A new plan was needed. He was pretty sure no one had seen him lurking outside the bookshop but it paid to be careful. There was a can of petrol in the boot of his car.

The Argus
carried the story in its late edition on Friday. A couple of paragraphs under the headline, ‘Bookman dies in blaze’. Hardly anyone gave it a second glance.

Hardly anyone came to the funeral either. Shirley turned up and cried a little as they scattered Major Duncan’s ashes in the Garden of Remembrance.

25 MAY 2014

Head spinning, Freddie opened his eyes and stared blankly at the ceiling, mesmerised by the midnight blue paper. This was someone else’s bedroom and someone else’s body next to him, snoring softly. A freckled arm lay draped across his chest. He couldn’t see the face but he didn’t need to – it was Cheryl Stone. Her heavy, coppery hair cascaded over the pillow. She murmured something indistinct and slipped one of her legs between his. He could feel her warm flesh.

Now he was fully awake. Stiff-limbed, dry-throated and needing to pee, he tried to remember how he came to be here. By getting drunk was the simple answer. The ancient Greeks believed drinking from the river Lethe caused complete forgetfulness. He had tried to achieve this on champagne and whisky chasers, until he was so paralytic he couldn’t find his way home. Cheryl had taken him to her bedsit, put him under her quilt and snuggled up for warmth. Later, with fingers and tongue, she had managed to arouse him. He had had sex with one of his students.

Not that Cheryl seemed to mind. “That was fucking great,” she had whispered. “Don’t worry, I won’t say a word.”

There must be something in the college statutes forbidding this, he thought, as he studied her slender back in the early morning light. Hours earlier it had been slick with sweat as he repeatedly thrust into her. Why had he done this? He didn’t even like the girl. Was he taking his revenge on the entire sex for how one woman had treated him? No, if anyone was to blame it was that damned policeman. If he hadn’t rung up and suggested a drink none of this would have happened.

They had agreed to meet at seven in the Eagle and Child. DI Owen wanted to tell him something and fancied doing it ‘over a jar’ in Oxford’s best-known pub. With its nooks and crannies, old gas lamps and low beamed ceilings, the ‘Bird and Baby’, as it was known locally, looked like a Victorian coaching inn and boosted its takings on the post-war drinking exploits of the Inklings, a literary group led by the greatly loved and highly initialled J.R.R Tolkien and C.S Lewis.

Sure enough the detective was waiting for him at the Inklings’ table in the Rabbit Room.

“Hi yeah, what’s your poison?” he yelled. Freddie asked for a pint of London Pride and Owen went off to get it. He returned with a tray on which four pints of beer were precariously balanced.

“Thought you could do with a second round,” he explained.

The inspector sat down and gazed about him appreciatively. “You may not believe this,” he chuckled, “but a lot of Oxford’s serious villains hang out here. You’d be surprised how many jobs are planned in this pub.”

“Not now, I hope.”

“No, it’s quite respectable today.”

Owen drained his pint glass in one long gulp. No wonder he ordered two at a time.

“Did you always want to be a detective,” Freddie asked.

“No way, my mum wanted me to be a schoolteacher but I messed up my A Levels,” he said reproachfully, as if that was someone else’s fault.

“I thought you had to be bright to be a copper these days.”

“That’s what we want you to believe.”

“Chasing terrorists can’t be good for the health. Wouldn’t you be safer on Merseyside?”

“Not necessarily, not when your old school chums see you as a traitor.”

“How do you mean?”

“Where I lived, the worst thing you could do was become a cop. You had put yourself on the wrong side in the class war.”

“Isn’t that a thing of the past, now the social boundaries are blurred?”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. Mind you, Liverpool is still in my blood. ‘God bless all policemen and fighters of crime. May thieves go to jail for a very long time.’ That’s a Roger McGough poem.”

Freddie tired of the small talk. “Look, you didn’t bring me here for a poetry reading. What’s on your mind?”

The smile disappeared from the police officer’s face. “Right, did you know a Major George Duncan?”

“Sorry, the name doesn’t ring a bell. You used the past tense. Has something happened to him?”

“Oh yes, Major Duncan is no more. He died when his Hove bookshop burned down on Thursday night but the local police don’t think it was an accident.”

Freddie had a sinking feeling in his stomach. “Why do they think that?”

“It’s a combination of things really. What we call circumstantial evidence. Duncan served with the British Army in Northern Ireland and played a prominent part in the so-called ‘dirty war’ and, without giving too much away, our forensic people believe the flammable liquid used to ignite the bookshop fire was one that was very popular with IRA terrorists.”

“That’s all very interesting, inspector, but what has it got to do with me?”

Owen took a large gulp of beer before answering. “Simply this, Duncan bought books from a retired actor called Donald Strachan and I believe you know him quite well.”

“Yes, we’ve met a few times.” Freddie couldn’t think what else to say. His mouth was dry and he was in a state of shock.

“Two men die who may be said to be enemies of yours, one of them due to an IRA bomb, and a third man with whom you are indirectly connected is killed in mysterious circumstances and, once again, there’s evidence of IRA handiwork. Something is going on here, wouldn’t you say, sir?”

“You may be r-right,” he eventually stammered, “but it doesn’t alter the fact that I have no idea why people die around me.”

Two more pints were downed while Freddie continued to stonewall. Cartwright had been an acquaintance, Dawkins not even that, and he had never heard of Duncan before now.

Eventually Owen gave up the chase and let nostalgia take over. Quaffing another pint he reminisced about his teenage years on the Kop watching Liverpool play. “Those were the days. Crazy Horse, Kevin Keegan, Kenny Dalglish, Ian Rush ...”

He glanced at his watch, sparing his companion an even longer litany of Anfield idols. “Look at the time,” he said. “I must fly. I promised to take Kath to the pictures.”

Once he’d gone Freddie heaved a sigh of relief. The inspector was right of course. Three related murders in a month couldn’t have happened by chance and, in drawing this conclusion, Owen didn’t even know about the burglaries on the Shoreham houseboat and in his Walton Lane flat where nothing appeared to have been stolen. Something was definitely going on but what? When they had had lunch together in Oxford earlier in the week, Strachan had hinted darkly that the break-ins must be connected to ‘the Shakespeare mystery’ which had a political dimension to it. But when asked to explain what he meant by that the actor went tight-lipped and changed the subject.

Freddie didn’t know what to believe. Not for the first time, his world had collapsed around him. He stared miserably at his glass of beer and tried to summon the energy to drink it. At that moment a group of noisy students burst into the pub.

“Can I sit down?” He looked up to finding a smiling Cheryl Stone standing over him. Flicking her tousled, Titian hair out of her eyes with tapered fingers, she revealed the emaciated features and androgynous look of the celebrity model – all pale skin, deep set eyes and jutting bones.

“I said can I join you?”

“No,” he said rudely, “I’m just going.”

She sat down anyway. “What’s all this I hear then? You being in trouble with the college authorities – sounds a load of Barry White to me.”

One of Cheryl’s more annoying habits was her use of rhyming slang to remind people of her East End roots. “And where’s that American bird everyone’s talking about. Not with you tonight.”

“Or any other night, we’re finished. You can feed that into the rumour mill.”

Cheryl’s green eyes widened. “Yeah, well, you don’t look great; bags under the eyes, hair all over the place. Pining for her, are we? Don’t worry, makes you darker, more of a babe magnet. In any case, from what I saw, she was all fur coat and no knickers.”

He gave a noncommittal grunt. “Why do you keep going on about knickers?”

“Because, tutor dear, they are the window to a girl’s soul. If you wear big pants, you’re saying keep out, guard dogs on patrol, while little ones are a maybe.”

“Talking of which,” she continued brightly, “I saw a performance of
The Tempest
in London last week in which Miranda wore only a man’s shirt and frilly knickers. Nothing demure about her! Really up for it, fully hot, when she catches Caliban choking the chicken.”