Classic in the Barn

by Amy Myers

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  My oil business days had taught me it’s wise never to be far from a phone, and I had my mobile in my pocket. My mouth felt dry. Should I ask Guy outright if he’d killed him? He didn’t look like Guy the Gorilla any more; he was out of his depth, struggling to communicate, only able to jerk out the words:

  ‘Gun’s over there. Not mine.’

  He was right. Tomas Kasek’s body was hunched up on its side and the gun tucked into its curve.

  ‘Did you use it?’

  He looked at me as if I were mad. ‘He was dead when I got here. I didn’t touch it.’

  I believed him. We were communicating OK now. On the same side. At least I hoped we were.

  I made the call, and we retreated to the same tree trunk I’d sat on before. Correction, I retreated there, but it was only with difficulty that I persuaded Guy to move. He remained gazing down at the body, and I had to return, grab him and drag him back with me. Then he began to go to pieces. He clasped his trembling hands, as though that would stop them. But it didn’t, and talking was only going to make it worse. I reckoned I had to push it though. No time would be wasted once Brandon got the message, as he undoubtedly would.

  ‘OK,’ I said to Guy gently. ‘Tell me. Before the police get here.’

  It took him a while, but he managed to speak. ‘He was dead. Killed hours ago, I reckon. I came to see where he’d got to. I touched him.’

  I wondered whether the irony of the situation had occurred to him. Our roles were reversed from the day he and Polly had found me apparently looting the barn. If so, he didn’t comment. Everything served to confirm my impression that he was innocent. What on earth would Guy want to kill Tomas for? Guy had been his main supporter, and one of the few who believed him innocent.

  ‘Any sign of anyone else around when you arrived?’

  It couldn’t have been coincidence that Mason Trent had appeared at Frogs Hill that morning. No sign of a gun, but that was no proof. Would he have been fool enough to come to see me, however, if he’d had every intention of meeting and killing Tomas? Or had that been mere chance, because Tomas and he had arrived at the same time on the same quest: buried treasure.

  I glanced across at the barn, trying to avoid looking at the body lying outside it. I couldn’t be sure from this distance, but it looked as though the door was still locked. The security system was in place, and Bea would have heard if there was an intruder.

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was here the day before yesterday too. I saw him off, and Bea got a new security system fitted. I told him I’d throw the book at him if he came again – yet he obviously did.’

  ‘There’s no current maintenance work in this field,’ Guy told me. ‘There’s no legitimate reason for his presence. I came because someone told me they’d seen Tomas heading this way, so I hoofed it up here.’

  A crazy idea came to me. ‘Listen, Guy, we’ve about two minutes before the police arrive. I’ve got the keys, and I’d like to go into that barn to look for something before they get here. Will you bear witness that that’s all I’m doing?’

  A return of his old spirit, hardly surprisingly. ‘No, I bloody won’t. We’ll wait for the police.’

  He was right, and I told him so – reluctantly. If Tomas was so determined, there was a strong chance there was something in that barn. The initial attraction must have been the Lagonda, perhaps in his role as spotter for his Polish brother’s network. But that didn’t explain why he’d kept returning to the barn when it no longer housed the Lagonda. Maybe he was working for someone else too? Someone who didn’t want that secret pocket found, and who had gone to the lengths of trying to burn Frogs Hill down in order to be sure the Lagonda vanished for good – and who had commissioned Tomas to search the barn thoroughly after the car had departed. If I needed more evidence that Polly and Mike weren’t the only players in their game this could be it. It surely showed that they couldn’t have been the Mister Bigs of the organization. Which brought me back to buried treasure.

  It might seem heartless for me to have been thinking about buried treasure, but it served the purpose of taking my mind off Tomas’s body and the memories it raised of Polly. Tomas’s face was half hidden from me, but it didn’t take much imagination to think what the shot had done to him.

  The usual routine of a couple of constables arriving first to assess the situation didn’t apply in this case. Brandon arrived with the whole caboodle, so eager was he to nab me. He looked most pleased to see me, as though it made his job all the easier for him and he could arrest me right away. Fortunately, Guy confirmed my story that he was here first this time, to Brandon’s disappointment. No doubt he was wondering whether I shot poor Tomas, hid in a nearby tree and then returned, but if so he didn’t bother to waste his breath.

  I waited to give my evidence, bore the removal of my shoes patiently, and Guy and I sat side by side on our tree trunk, donning our crime scene shoes.

  We were then left on our perch to await Brandon’s pleasure, and Guy grew surprisingly chatty after his former reticence. ‘Tomas has been strange recently, Jack. Not surprising, I suppose, with a murder charge hanging over his head. Not that he seemed worried, more . . .’

  I helped him out. ‘Belligerent?’

  He thought about this carefully. ‘Smug’s more the word. The sort of “I know more than you do, mate” look.’

  I hadn’t taken to Tomas, but he was young and he probably merely suffered from the arrogance of youth; he was brash and self centred rather than evil, and money was a high priority. I wondered whether, baulked of finding his crock of cash gold at the end of this rainbow, he’d been daft enough to look for it in other directions. Such as from Mason Trent.

  I felt honour bound to suggest this to Brandon when he marched over to us, but he forestalled me with the usual: ‘And what were you doing down here again, Mr Colby?’

  ‘I came to look for something in the barn on Bea Davis’s account – you can check with her.’

  ‘We’ll do that. What’s the something?’

  ‘Money.’ I had hesitated whether to tell him, but the police would have to know sooner or later, so there was no sense in holding it back. I decided what I would hold back, however, was any mention of Mr Trent or art theft until I’d consulted Dave. I’d no proof that Trent had been planning to visit this barn.

  ‘What money?’

  ‘Cash left by Mike Davis.’ How honest can one get?

  Brandon just grunted though. ‘Keys?’ he barked.

  I handed Bea’s set over. ‘Does Tomas – the victim – have keys on him?’

  A scathing look. ‘Yes. They’re evidence.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said meekly. ‘Thought it might provide a motive.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Money always does.’

  Brandon just grunted again and said grandly he’d bear it in mind.

  It was well into the evening by the time Brandon said we could go. Sarah had come down to join Guy, after he had rung her, but there was no sign of Bea. Nor could I bear to ring her. She must have wondered where I was, and I just hoped she hadn’t heard the sirens and connected me to them. Instead, I asked permission to go with a PC if necessary to break the news to her myself. Permission was grudgingly given.

  All the way back to the farm I rehearsed what to say. Everything seemed wrong, but I couldn’t leave it to the PC to do, even though Zoe and Rob would be there as extra support. In the end my telling her came out naturally. Bea looked alarmed, but that was partly seeing me arrive with the law.

  ‘Sweetie, there’s a problem,’ I told her as gently as I could, glad she had come to the door by herself. ‘You don’t have to come back with me, but you do need to know what’s happened.’

  ‘What? Who?’ She looked almost paralysed with fear.

  ‘It’s Tomas. I’m afraid he’s dead. Guy found him.’

  I’d hoped to get away with not telling her where he was found, but I
was unlucky. The PC saw his chance of importance. ‘I understand it’s your barn, Miss Davis.’

  ‘That’s where . . .’ Bea swayed on her feet, and I had to remember that she and Tomas had been lovers, even if the relationship had been a short one. ‘I’m coming with you,’ she managed to say. ‘I’ll get a coat.’

  ‘What’s up?’ Rob the Rabbit was scuttling out of the kitchen and on the scent, and in the end he and Zoe came with Bea and myself, PC still in tow, as we went back to the barn.

  The coat Bea had grabbed must have been Polly’s because I recognized it. That sent a shiver through me. Apart from the PC telling Bea a few things about Tomas that she didn’t need to know, we walked in silence. I took Bea’s hand in token support, for which she seemed grateful.

  As we walked along the track, we had to stand aside for the mortuary van to pass us. I was relieved – at least there was one ordeal she didn’t have go undergo, and she didn’t seem to realize that’s what the van was.

  So far as I could tell from the perch to which all of us except for Bea were promptly banished again, Brandon went gently with her, and when she returned to us, Guy, too, was in comforting mode. Luckily, Sarah homed in as chief comforter together with Zoe, which kept Rob out of the picture. It hadn’t escaped either Guy’s or my attention, however, that Bea was bound to be a suspect. Tomas was her former lover, there’d been a first-class family row over him – all on record – and worst of all Brandon might come up with the idea that she could have shot him in revenge for his killing her mother. I knew none of these scenarios would get past first base, but Bea could do without them.

  ‘Mr Colby –’ Brandon summoned me as daylight faded – ‘you might like to know there’s nothing in that barn. It’s been checked. If Kasek did have plans to break in, whoever murdered him got him first, as the alarms didn’t go off. But who, Jack?’

  For a moment, Brandon looked almost human.

  I could have murmured Mason Trent, I could have told him about the possible stolen art connection, but that wasn’t possible without Dave’s permission. Anyway, I was still trying to get my head round what the hell was happening.

  It took until Tuesday for the crime scene to be lifted, and time seemed to pass in interminable interviews and talking to everyone under the sun. Guy seemed to have become a bosom friend of mine, so had Sarah – and as for Bea, hats off to her. She and Guy dealt with the police, and I rang Brian, assuring him that there were no hard feelings over Barton Lamb, and in gratitude he said he’d come up with the goods on Dave’s missing BMW. I rang Dave about this and about Tomas’s death – he’d already heard about it, of course, and he told me that the gun was unregistered and offered little in the way of prints, which didn’t surprise me. I brought him up to speed with my run-in with Mason Trent and passed on his cheery message.

  Dave sounded fairly friendly about it, so I launched into the magic words: ‘Art theft? Could the Davises have been mixed up with it?’

  Funny how you can sense reactions over a phone line. Even from the silence I instantly knew just how unhappy Dave was over this. All he said was: ‘Not your job, Jack.’

  ‘My job too now, Dave. Believe me. Mason Trent had a special message for me too – my neck in particular – only I floored him first.’

  Pause. ‘Convince me.’

  I spent some time doing just that, ending up with: ‘Trouble is, I don’t see Trent as a godfather in the art world, Dave. A Spanish master to him would be a man with a whip and a girl in a frilly dress doing the fandango.’

  ‘Right.’ He was making me work for it. ‘Who then?’

  ‘Give me a few days and I’ll tell you.’

  ‘Dave, you said Mason Trent ran the cloned getaway cars for the Talbot Place job.’

  ‘Maybe I did.’ Dave was still playing cautious. Then he opened up a crack. ‘That Merc we got back was another of Trent’s teasers to make us think he had us on the run. Which he has. Call in whatever favours you can, Jack, from whoever you have to. We’ve no line on Trent, and we need one.’

  He told me to steer clear of art theft where Brandon was concerned – that was his business, not mine – and rang off, leaving me to puzzle a way through this quagmire. Mason Trent was thought still to be running a cloning business. Mike probably owed him money. Which presumed he could have been working with Mike over the art thefts. Mike was not an art expert, but Polly was. Was the reason for Mike’s death the money? If so, how did Tomas’s death fit in with Polly’s and Mike’s? Money again, or had it been coincidence that Tomas’s body was found in exactly the same place? Tomas knew the Lagonda was no longer inside the barn, so the attraction had to be money – or canvases.

  Whichever way I looked at it, I realized that the sooner I had another look there myself the better. I didn’t believe that I was any cleverer than Brandon’s team, but I had the advantage of knowing that the likelihood was that there was something somewhere in that barn. Stolen art, stolen money, whatever.

  When Bea rang me that afternoon to say that the barn was now accessible, I was over at Greensand Farm like a shot. She told me she had pleaded for more time off work to cope with this emergency. ‘Want to come with me this time, Bea?’ I asked doubtfully. I was in two minds because the chain round Trent’s neck might still be jingling with thoughts of that barn.

  ‘Yes,’ she said immediately. ‘Dad used to say that if you can’t find something, go to the place you’ve already searched and check it again. So I’m coming. I’ll be OK if you’re there.’

  I swelled with pride. I felt like a million bucks – and I might even be going to find them.

  It was raining, which was hardly auspicious, but we went anyway. Entering the barn was an ordeal for both of us, but I fixed my mind on buried treasure and hoped Bea was doing the same. We were faced with three bare walls, another with a door in it. It looked innocent of anything but piles of hay pushed to the sides and its iron roof. I examined the hay hopefully. Nothing. I gazed at the walls in despair, but there were no disguised holes to be found, no hollowed out bricks, and the roof was clear of secret pockets.

  ‘It must be the floor,’ I said. My only excitement so far had been seeing something that looked like a crack in it, but it had been a false start. There were plenty of cracks because the floor had been constructed in concrete squares like pavement slabs. My mind wasn’t working fast enough, because it was Bea who queried this.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  I stared at her, I stared at the floor. Where do you hide a body? Amongst other bodies. How do you hide a crack? Surround it with other cracks. Could that be why it was in squares? ‘Perhaps one of them’s loose,’ I said, ever hopeful. None of them looked loose, and only logic made me give them a careful going over.

  ‘How do we get it up when we’ve found it?’ Bea asked as she watched me doing so. It sounds a silly question, but she was right.

  ‘Crowbars?’

  ‘Not for the first heave. Too fat. Call the Gorilla,’ I ordered her. ‘Got your mobile?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Tell him we want the digger.’

  Bea giggled, but did as I suggested. I went on staring at that floor. ‘That one?’ I pointed at one that looked out of kilter. It was at the rear, where the backside of our Lady Lagonda had been swathed in hay. ‘No.’ I changed my mind. ‘The one next to it. Look. It’s not as flush as the others.’

  Mere fingers achieved nothing, nor the nail file Bea found in Polly’s coat pocket, nor the screwdriver I carry with me. We waited impatiently for Guy, and when he at last strode in, he didn’t so much as blink at seeing me. ‘What’s this about a floor?’

  I explained there might be something hidden underneath, and he blenched.

  ‘Not another body,’ I said hastily, following his thoughts, and he looked happier. ‘Money.’ When I told him my theory about Mike as a courier of stolen art, he looked less than convinced, however.

  ‘Mike? Are you sure?’

  ‘No, but we might be if we’re right a
bout that slab.’

  We weren’t – not the one I’d picked out, anyway. Guy nobly went outside and drove in the digger, but we had to work our way right round the barn until we were fairly sure we were on the right track. With enormous self control I let Guy make the discovery though – just in time, as my credibility was getting very thin indeed. He still thought I was barking mad. But once we’d found the right slab, it was relatively easy going because the concrete was thin at that point, as it had been used only to disguise what lay beneath. That was a thick iron lid and under that—

  ‘A hole,’ I cried in triumph.

  ‘Buried treasure?’ Bea said. Her voice wobbled, but this time it was with excitement. Even Guy got interested, and as I saved my macho image by heaving up the iron lid myself, we realized that the hole was bigger than we’d thought, and moreover had something in it: a metal box about a foot deep and three feet long, purpose built, it seemed, for this very special hole. It had been provided with straps to help heave it out, but even so Guy and I had a tough struggle. When at last we managed it, we placed it at Bea’s feet, and watched her as she squatted down to try to open it.

  ‘It’s not even locked,’ she said in disappointment. ‘It’s probably empty.’

  But it wasn’t. It was packed solid with used fifty-pound notes and hundred-dollar bills.

  There was a stunned silence. I don’t think any of us had really expected cash treasure like that. Guy cleared his throat. ‘That should take us all to the Caribbean for a week or two.’

  An underestimate. There must have been at least a million there.

  ‘Money,’ Bea said in awe, and she burst into tears. Through relief? Through despair that her parents weren’t as she had assumed them to be? Or because this was one more step towards a solution to Polly’s killer. A step that was going to take us I knew not where.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ‘But why didn’t they tell me?’ Bea had seemed annoyed rather than upset at the confirmation of her parents’ secret life. So much had happened, perhaps her emotions had been put on hold. Between us, we had thrashed over the subject of Polly and Mike’s choice of fun to the point of exhaustion after we returned from the barn. It still didn’t seem to be taking us forward, so Zoe had answered a three-line whip to join us, and she had her own answer for the question.