Ascension Day

by John Matthews

  He could no longer be sure of that until he’d made one more call; but he didn’t have time now. He had to get away. As far away as possible!

  He made a quick stop at a deli for a take-out coffee to clear the dust from his throat and his head-throb from last night, sharpen his senses – though fear and adrenalin seemed to have already done half of that job for him. And running on that high-octane mix of fear, adrenalin, caffeine, and night-before Jim Beams and brandies, within seven minutes he had everything he needed from his apartment packed in a suitcase and was heading back down the stairs.

  A final anxious scan of the road outside, having already checked every other minute while packing, then he scampered a block round the corner and hailed a cab to an internet café in Metairie where he’d make the rest of his travel arrangements.

  Cuba! The remotest-placed friend he could think of – probably the only one of his old friends who hadn’t yet been shot. Not a million miles away, but with US travel restrictions a nightmare to get to: he’d be travelling half the day with stop-offs at Atlanta, Miami and Nassau to get there. Then a six hour drive from Havana.

  The arrangements made, he suddenly thought of something he’d forgotten. He couldn’t leave it in his office, yet he couldn’t risk going back there, either. He checked his watch. 8.46 a.m. He called Cynthia’s cell-phone – he’d need to tell her he’d be away for a few days in any case – and instructed her where to find what he needed and the P.O. Box in Cuba to send it to.

  ‘DHL… immediately you get to the office. And don’t for God’s sake tell anyone where I’ve gone.’

  Anyone? She told him about Nel-M’s visit the day before. ‘Big black guy, eyes like a dead frog’s. Seemed to be the day for people barging into your office.’

  ‘Him in particular don’t tell.’

  But Cynthia knew that something was seriously wrong, probably from the breathless, rapid-staccato way he spat everything out, as if afraid a minute later it would be too late; and as the questions started to come, he cut her short.

  ‘I can’t tell you, Cynthia. I can’t.’ I might have set up an innocent man, and everyone who gets near to knowing about it ends up dead! The stale drink, caffeine and sour bile was like a bubbling quagmire surging up through his lungs. Hard to breathe! The throbbing in his head and body’s trembling was so heavy that it felt as if a limb might fall off at any second. ‘I just need to get away for a few days, that’s all. Just DHL that package straightaway and don’t tell anyone where I’ve gone – you’ll be okay. And Cynthia: be especially careful what you say on the office line. It might be bugged.’

  He hung up quickly before any more questions came, and dialled straight out to his friend in Cuba as he went outside and hailed a cab to the airport.

  ‘Yeah… yeah, Brent… on my way right now.’

  ‘Be great to see you, old buddy. Been a long time… lot of catching up to do. Four-shot Mojito session, at least…’

  Never any doubt. But if he hadn’t been able to stay with Brent, he’d have simply booked a nearby hotel. As his taxi headed towards the airport, he made his last call; the one that had troubled him more and more the past hour.

  ‘Bell South.’

  Truelle explained about the engineers’ visits he’d booked three weeks back to clear suspected bugs from his home and office telephones.

  Brief flurry of keyboard taps. ‘Yes… I’ve got them here. Both booked at the same time on the fourteenth of last month.’

  Truelle’s hopes raised; then, with a few more taps at her end, quickly sank again as she looked at the next entry.

  ‘And then both cancelled again the following day.’

  ‘That’s… that’s not possible,’ Truelle spluttered. ‘I didn’t cancel them, and two different engineers called at the times arranged, both wearing Bell uniforms.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. If those visits actually happened – then we don’t have any record of them here on our computer. The last recorded entry we have is for the two cancellations. And no new times set for alternative visits.’

  No point in arguing further with the girl; he now knew the truth of what had happened. How they’d done it.

  ‘Thanks.’ Falling… sinking deeper into the abyss, his voice little more than a hollow, detached echo rising up through it.

  The two engineers had put the bugs in rather than taken them out! From then on, they’d listened in to every word. And when Chris had left the message with his details, he’d signed his own and Alan’s death-warrant.

  Truelle shut his eyes as he felt the first tears of the day sting them. Maybe Ayliss was right: if they were clever enough to set all of that up, perhaps they’d set up the DNA evidence as well. And in two days time, he’d have Durrant’s death also on his conscience.

  Truelle kept his eyes shut, the tears rolling gently down his cheeks as the taxi sped to the airport. But at least the battle inside his head was over: there were no longer any spinning city lights, only dark demons.

  Melanie Ayliss’s enquiry landed on the desk of Joe Rayleigh, a portly, six-three black detective with a constant scowl. He glanced briefly at its opening page as it arrived. He had a stack of murder, rape, missing persons and armed robbery files on his desk; impersonation wasn’t exactly a priority. The only thing to give it a curious edge was that it concerned Larry Durrant’s new lawyer, Darrell Ayliss.

  Rayleigh glanced at his watch. Not much he could do about it that night. But at 9.20 the next morning, he called the two places where he thought he might get a contact number or the current whereabouts of Darrell Ayliss.

  At Libreville prison, Warden Haveling’s secretary said that it was likely either Warden Haveling or his assistant Mr Folley had a number for Mr Ayliss. But Folley had been on night duty and wouldn’t be in until midday, and Warden Haveling was tied up in a meeting until 10.30 a.m. ‘But I’ll get Warden Haveling to call you back the minute he comes out his meeting.’

  Rayleigh left his number and made his second call to Payne, Beaton and Sawyer, the law firm that previously represented Durrant, and was put through to a John Langfranc.

  ‘No, unfortunately I don’t have Mr Ayliss’s number,’ Langfranc commented. ‘But I know someone who very likely has: Mike Coultaine. He used to work for us and apparently has kept in contact with Darrell Ayliss since. In fact, I understand that it was Mike Coultaine who recommended Ayliss to the Durrant case now.’ The small bit of scuttlebutt he’d found out when he’d called Rodriguez to find out how the BOP hearing had gone.

  Rayleigh took Coultaine’s number, and dialled it the second he hung up on Langfranc.

  ‘Yeah. I know how to get in touch with Darrell Ayliss,’ Coultaine said. ‘In fact I met up with him just a few days ago. What’s this all about? Something to do with the Durrant case?’

  ‘No, no. Some query to do with his ex-wife.’ Rayleigh was thinking more about the first part of what Coultaine’s had said. ‘You mentioned you met up with him. What did he look like?’

  ‘Like… like Darrell Ayliss.’ It was obvious from Coultaine’s tone that he found the question odd. ‘Why?’

  Rayleigh sensed that he was about to make a serious horse’s ass out of himself unless he explained a bit more. He told Coultaine about Melanie Ayliss’s brief encounter with someone she’d expected to be her ex-husband in a car the day before. ‘And although it was only for a couple of seconds and she hasn’t seen her husband for seven years, she’s got it in her head that the man she saw wasn’t him. So, I have to ask you, sir – do you know Darrell Ayliss well? Well enough, when you met him a few days back, to know whether it was him or not?’

  Coultaine exhaled heavily. ‘I shared an office with Darrell Ayliss for three full years, with him no more than a few yards from me. And, unlike his ex, I’ve had the benefit of seeing him far more recently. I’ve visited him in Mexico twice now, the last time just fourteen months back. It was him. There’s no question about it.’

  ‘Right. Thanks for that, sir.’ Rayleigh chuckled awkward
ly. ‘You know, we get these things in… we gotta chase them up.’

  ‘I understand.’ Fresh breath from Coultaine. ‘But I think you’ll find this is more to do with Melanie Ayliss’s old maintenance battle with her ex-husband. She’s trying craftily to make use of police resources to track him down.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah…. could be.’ Sounded about right. But he loved it when they were cleared up quickly. ‘Thanks again.’ The second he rang off, he threw the folder onto the ‘Case closed’ pile.

  And at Coultaine’s end, as soon as he hung up, he called Jac.

  39

  The phone was on its fourth ring before Bob Stratton finally picked up and Jac worried for a moment that he wasn’t there. He put on the drawl and introduced himself as Darrell Ayliss, said that he’d seen Stratton’s name in the file he’d taken over from Jac McElroy.

  ‘He’s noted here that you’re good at finding people – with an exclamation mark. And that’s exactly what I’m after.’

  I was there at the time… I’d have incriminated myself…

  The thought had struck Jac in the early hours of the morning, woke him sharply at 5.40 a.m. – not that he was sleeping that well in any case, different hotel beds every night and the turmoil of thoughts in his head – another crime going down at the same time! That’s why he hadn’t been able to come forward; fear of self-incrimination.

  Maybe he was clutching at straws – maybe it was just an old friend or hoaxer – but with still no reply to his last e-mail and only forty-eight hours now left, that was all there was left to do: squeeze every last drop out of the few remaining possibilities.

  He explained his thinking to Stratton. ‘Probably not in the Roche house itself – too much of a coincidence – or even immediate neighbours. But somewhere within, say, fifty or a hundred yards… close enough that this person would have got a reasonable look at the murderer leaving the Roche house that night. Enough to say that it wasn’t Larry Durrant.’

  ‘And you say you’ve got some photos and a description of this mystery e-mailer?’

  ‘Yeah. From a girl in the internet café, I…. I see from McElroy’s file.’ Having to be careful every second what he said. ‘Though the photos don’t give that much, they’re only partial cam-shots with at most thirty per cent facial profile, and the description – black, stocky, five-ten, maybe six foot, late thirties, early forties – could fit ten or twenty per cent of the city’s black population.’

  ‘Okay.’ Stratton was thoughtful for a second. ‘But if I get fresh photos of a few live-ones in front of this girl, something might strike a chord.’

  ‘Yeah, possibility,’ Jac agreed. ‘Except don’t forget we’re looking for someone that was active twelve years ago. If they’re not active now, mug-shots are going to be thin on the ground.’

  ‘True.’ Stratton took a fresh breath. ‘But that’s going to be stage two. The first thing’ll be to find out if another crime did go down nearby twelve years ago. Then we’ll have a start point to know if it’s even worth looking further. And also what type of crime and connected mug-shots we’re looking for.’

  Nel-M tried to grab some sleep on his twenty-minute-delayed 6.45 a.m. flight from Vancouver, but the images still surging through his head were making it difficult.

  If only everything his end of things had gone as smoothly as Garrard’s. If only.

  He’d spoken to Tommy Garrard two hours ago and it apparently had gone like clockwork: car in the drive, alarm set off twice, husband comes out, no other family there at the time, into the house to get the envelope, two quick shots, and away again.

  ‘Nobody saw me. But just in case, like you suggested, I wore a mask at the time.’

  But with Nel-M’s target, there’d been no car in the driveway, and he’d had to bang a side-passage dustbin to hopefully get the man of the house out to investigate. Three sharp bangs at two-minute intervals, Nel-M starting to worry that he’d bring the neighbours out as well, before a heavy-set guy finally emerged – wielding a baseball bat and moving surprisingly fast for his size, perhaps not realizing Nel-M had a gun until it was too late. Nel-M floored him with a leg shot, then had to drag the stumbling, bleeding body back through the house with his wife and son, no more than eleven, looking on – swinging his gun towards the wife for a second as she made a move towards the phone – to get the envelope from a bedroom drawer. He’d made sure to ask about the envelope while they were still outside, out of earshot of his family, then clamped a hand across his mouth as they moved inside, knowing that if the man did mention it, he’d have to shoot them too.

  But as he levelled his gun to finish the job halfway back down the hallway, his wife screamed and lunged for him then – only a split-second to turn his gun from the head-shot to put one in her leg to take her down. Then he stood over them both for a second, breath falling rapid and short, as he pondered whether to finish her too.

  He’d also used a mask from a joke shop – so what else would her and her son have seen other than a bit of dark skin and some salt-and-pepper curls either side of an Ozzy Osborne mask? Then at that moment she groaned heavily with pain from her leg wound, made him worry that she’d disturb neighbours; but as he raised his gun, he caught the look in her son’s eyes, questioning, pleading. What was he going to do – shoot the kid as well? As Joe Pesci once said, ‘You could be out there half the fucking night.’

  He waggled the gun at them threateningly as he backed away along the hallway and out the front door, then turned and ran off into the night.

  But now, as he tried to sleep on the flight, those boy’s eyes were with him again, strangely haunting… reminding him of that night twelve years ago with Jessica Roche, that woman walking her dog staring at him. Only once before had he left a witness alive, and look where that had led.

  Jac sat anxiously outside Truelle’s office building, his earlier telephone conversation with Cynthia still rattling through his mind.

  ‘When do you expect him back?’

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’

  ‘Do you know where he’s gone?’

  ‘Didn’t tell me that either.’

  ‘What about the patients he has today?’

  Cynthia sighed tiredly. ‘That, if you don’t mind me saying, is none of your business.’

  Jac sensed he was getting the run-around, that something was wrong – but if he pushed harder and she revealed anything sensitive, anyone listening in on Truelle’s line would hear it at the same time, and so he’d signed off then, ‘I’ll try him again later,’ deciding in that moment on another unannounced visit.

  He’d originally planned to wait outside and observe for thirty or forty minutes, then barge in and let loose with all guns – on Truelle if he was there, on steel-blonde Cynthia if he wasn’t. But then Mike Coultaine’s call about Melanie Ayliss had come through just as he was leaving his hotel, and suddenly he felt vulnerable sitting in the open in the street. It was bad enough posing as Ayliss, padded out like a Weight Watchers reject, feeling as if he was in a constant pressure-cooker, worried that half his face might suddenly melt and slide off – but now he had this crazy ex on his tail, telling the police or anyone who’d listen that the man running around town as Darrell Ayliss wasn’t her husband!

  After only fifteen minutes, his nerves were worn, spending as much time looking round at the street for anyone who might be looking at him as at Truelle’s entrance and window.

  Still no sign of Truelle, only a couple of people he didn’t recognize, perhaps going to other offices in the building, and a DHL messenger heading in and then out again two minutes later. Jac managed to last only another three minutes.

  A short gasp from steely Cynthia as he burst in, then a cool, imperious eyebrow raised. ‘What do you want? I told you earlier he’s not here… and he still isn’t.’

  ‘Save it!’ Jac snapped. He went through to Truelle’s office to check, then glared back at her. She held the same cool stare; she was getting used to this by now. He moved toward
s her desk, leant on the edge of it. ‘So, let’s try again. What time do you expect Mr Truelle back?’

  ‘I don’t know?’

  Jac sighed tiredly. A re-run of their telephone conversation forty minutes ago. He asked where Truelle had gone and she said she didn’t know that either. Jac closed his eyes for a second, the sigh heavier now – severely pissed off. He leant over a fraction, more intimidating.

  ‘We could spend the next half hour with me asking variations on those same questions, with you continuing to be uncooperative – but the only problem with that is, I don’t have much time. I’ve got a man on death row because of Truelle, and the clock’s ticking fast against him. That’s why, when I was here yesterday, I gave Mr Truelle a deadline.’ Jac glanced at his watch. ‘Now at that deadline, only half an hour from now, if Truelle isn’t in the DA’s office ready and willing to talk, then the DA is going to have him arrested. And if he’s not here to arrest, then he’s going to have you arrested instead and charged with obstruction of justice.’ A bluff, but he doubted Truelle had told her enough for her to know that; he’d probably simply instructed, don’t say anything. She stared back at him, hardly a flicker or flinch. Mrs Cool-steel-blonde. ‘And you’ll end up having to answer these same questions after a night in a jail cell and with a year’s sentence hanging over your head.’ Jac eased the syrupy Ayliss smile. ‘Only I don’t have time to wait for you to languish in jail for a day – I need the answer to those questions now!’ He slapped one hand against the desk for emphasis; in the quiet of the office, it was like a rifle-shot.

  She didn’t move or flinch, all it raised from her was a slow blink. Defiant: you’re not going to break me. She returned the smile smugly.

  Jac reached for his back-up ammunition, took the photo of Nelson Malley out of his briefcase and slid it across her desk, asking, ‘Do you know this man?’