IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR the brown envelopes delivered regularly by the postman, Midge might already have dropped his surveillance. Seeing Quinn at the Spargo woman’s house had shaken him – though not nearly as much as he was shaken by the news in the papers about the body in Spargo’s cellar. Midge wondering if he had been set up in some way. Wondered why Mr Luis was paying him so much money to stare at a flat.
Midge used some of the money to trade in his old Fiat for a used Alfa Romeo with alloy wheels, tinted windows and a CD player. It wasn’t the make of the car that attracted him but its colour, it was silver with a shimmering hint of green. Iridescent, he’d though when he first saw it. Like the sheen on butterflies’ wings.
In his mind the car had two faults. The first was that the front number plate was mounted off-centre, to one side of the grill. Asymmetrical, he had said to the dealer at Sighthill, sure the man wouldn’t know what the word meant. The dealer responded that cars weren’t meant to be symmetrical, and if that were the case then the steering wheel and controls would be in the middle.
Midge’s second gripe was that the car had a CD player. The old Fiat did not, and over the years he had amassed a collection of tapes he now couldn’t use. He still had them beside him on the seat of the Alfa, so when he kept surveillance he could rummage through them. It looked as if he had stopped for a reason.
Italian, his new car. He loved it, loved the sleek styling. Loved the burble of the exhaust.
As he drove towards Princes Street something beeped. He studied the instruments and saw no warnings. He eventually realised it was his phone and he pulled in by the roadside. Didn’t want to attract the attention of the police by phoning while driving.
‘Is that Rollo?’
It wasn’t Mr Luis. It was a voice he’d not heard for a while.
‘It’s Midge.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Working.’ The dash clock said midnight. Saying he was working was sure to impress.
‘Still working for Benares?’
‘Still for Mr Luis.’
‘Job alright? Mail arriving alright?’
‘Good money. Bought a new car today.’
‘I don’t give a monkey’s what you do with your money, Rollo. Where are you now?’
‘Driving home.’
‘I asked you to get something for me.’
Midge frowned at the phone. ‘Get something? For Mr Luis, you mean? He didn’t take it.’
‘I just asked you to get it, Rollo, I didn’t say who it was for. You’ve got it? Is it a serious piece? I don’t want any tat.’
‘I’ve still got it. I stripped it down. I haven’t tried it.’
‘Jesus, Rollo! Tried it? The thought of you with anything more than a water pistol scares the shit out of me. What about rounds?’
‘Five. Can’t get more.’
‘Five is good. Listen to me. We need to meet.’
‘You’re here? In Edinburgh?’
‘Tomorrow at eleven, Starbucks at the Gyle. You can fill me in on what’s been going on.’
Midge hesitated. ‘Mr Luis says I’m not to talk to anyone about what I’m doing and you said whatever he said goes. You said – ’
‘Who pays you, Rollo?’
‘Mr Luis.’
‘Wrong. I do.’
‘Okay, you do. But it’s his money.’
‘Where the money comes from is none of your business. Just be there, Rollo. Eleven on the dot.’
The phone went dead.
Midge had bought new CDs. He didn’t want to leave them on the seat with the music tapes because it would look odd, so he opened the glove compartment, took out the car’s handbook to make room for them and shoved them inside. Deciding to put the handbook under the drivers’ seat he reached down with it.
The handbook went under the seat remarkably easily. Didn’t encounter the bag with the gun. Thinking his new car’s amazing acceleration must have forced the bag right back, he got out of the car, crouched down and groped under the seat.
The handbook was there but nothing else was. The carrier bag had never been under the seat in the Alfa. It was still in the Fiat.
In daytime, motorists used the roads on the industrial estate at Sighthill as a park-and-ride car park. Tonight, apart from the shell of a dumped and torched car, Midge’s Alfa was the only vehicle there, so parking in the road was out of the question. Security men in vans patrolled the industrial estate and a lone car, so close to so many car showrooms, looked wrong.
In a flash of inspiration Midge realised the best place to hide his car would be with the cars on the showroom forecourt. He turned off the road. Found his way blocked by a barrier.
His old car was where he had left it, parked in a corner well away from the others. He worked fast, wrenching off one of the wipers, bending it to make a hook and inserting it between the window glass and the rubber seal on the passenger door. He jiggled it, gave it a tug, and the lock knob popped up. Once he had the door open he crouched down, shoved his hand under the seat and groped the gritty carpet. Tense and nervous he reached further back, then relaxed as his fingers found plastic. He dragged the carrier bag out, tucked it inside his jacket, clicked the door shut and flung away the bent wiper blade.
Spargo dropped into his bed at around three that night. Though he fell asleep immediately he didn’t sleep well. He’d stayed online, studying the web pages Jez had emailed, reading lists of U-boats and their commanders. Found Volk but did not find Volker. He fared no better when he brought up the tables of U-boats. None had been allocated the number U-1500. He should have known better than to doubt his daughter.
Woken by his alarm he swung out of bed and confronted himself in the mirror. Some people managed without sleep for days but he wasn’t one of them, he needed his seven or eight hours. Downstairs, snatching breakfast, he phoned Benares. The man answered immediately and addressed Spargo by name. Caller ID was nothing new. But to Spargo it was as if Benares had sneaked up on him from behind, yet again.
‘It is a pleasure to hear from you,’ Benares continued. ‘I have good news. I am pleased to tell you the finances are in place for the first phase of our work. A contract for your services was despatched to you by express courier. Included with the contract is all the documentation you will need to make an initial appraisal of the project. Are you able to start immediately, Mister Spargo?’
‘What is the contract, exactly?’
‘I do not know. That is Mister Bar’s business. You must assume your questions will be answered by the contents of the package. If you have problems then please telephone me.’
The package arrived within the hour. Spargo tore off its wrappings to expose tight-folded maps and a stack of reports. The contract documents were inside a yellow envelope, written in English and signed by Bar in the presence of a Madrid attorney. So much for Jez’s suspicions. Bar and BarConSa were real.
Spargo carried the bundle upstairs and dumped it on his desk. He took the first file and read the label on the cover.
The name of the mine wasn’t Kilcreg.
The first page in the file showed a map of part of Canada’s Northwest Territories. A red circle had been drawn around a place near the map’s centre. Spargo attempted to pronounce its name, Cocwaiqui. Sure BarConSa had sent the wrong documents he looked at the contract again.
How had he got it so wrong? A consortium led by BarConSA was considering the purchase of a Canadian copper mine. He, Spargo, was to provide an independent review of the proposed deal. It was small beer; reading the documents and appraising the maps would take two or three days. Drafting and finalising a response would take another three. In front of him was no more than a week’s work.
What shocked him even more was the payment. He was to be paid in US dollars, half up-front and half on completion. The first cheque was there, pinned to the last page of the contract, signed by a name that mean nothing to him and drawn on a Los Angeles bank. He stared at the figures in the box. Then he read the w
ords to make sure the decimal point was in the right place. It was a ridiculously large sum for such a small amount of work.
Over the weekend Spargo spent time on the documents, familiarising himself with the Canadian mine’s underground workings. Slowly he digested data, extracted production figures and forecasts, entered them into his computer and pondered over the output. For the first time in weeks his mother’s murder was forgotten.
Jez phoned on Monday. It was the first break he’d had from the mine work and he was grateful for it.
‘I’ve managed to speak to the girl who shares Marie’s room,’ she said. ‘Apparently Marie is away.’
‘And the journals?’
‘She has taken them with her. She flew out to Spain last week, to some conference or other. What are you doing right now?’
‘Working.’
‘I’ve got something to show you.’
‘Now?’
‘Now. I think it’s important.’
This time Jez came to him. He heard the buzz of her bike as she rode right up to his door. He greeted her with a ‘Hi!’ and she responded by brushing silently past him into the hall. She started to strip off her bike leathers, speaking as she tugged off her boots.
‘On Saturday I took some of Lewis’s CDs into work to show Brenda,’ she said. ‘One of her music student is assembling a music collection and she asked if she could borrow some of them. Because I couldn’t carry the boxes I selected a few for her. Here, look at this.’
From somewhere in the mass of leather that collapsed on the floor she took a CD boxed set and held it out to him. Waggled her hand until he took it.
‘Wagner’s Valkyrie,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘It was still sealed in its plastic, remember? It had a James Thin price label still on the plastic film.’
He took the box from her. It was a three-disc set in a plastic case that opened front and back. He opened it and held it like a book.
‘Lift the inside flap. The third Valkyrie disk isn’t there.’
Tough, Spargo thought. They could hardly complain about a missing disc when they hadn’t even bought it. He turned the internal flap. There were three disks.
‘I thought you said one is missing? It isn’t missing. Someone’s put it in back to front.’
‘Take it out.’
He unclipped the disk and flipped it around. It had no label. Both sides were silver.
‘It’s not a music CD,’ Jez said. ‘It’s a data disk. It contains a word processor file with one hundred and twenty-two pages of text. Lewis didn’t have any trouble translating the journals. He translated them all. They are on the disk.’
Spargo said nothing. With the disk still in his hand he took the stairs two at a time. He returned with his laptop, placed it on the table, booted it up and slipped the CD into the drive. Nothing happened.
Jez reached out and pressed the eject tab on the side of the laptop.
‘You’ve put the disk in upside down.’
She flipped it over. The drive whirred into life. A menu appeared on the screen.
‘How much of this have you read?’
‘Nothing in detail. I flipped through the summaries Lewis added to each page. At the bottom of the page, see? The journals cover Volker’s entire naval career from the day he enlisted. I can see why someone with an academic interest in that period of history might find it interesting. Other than that, I’m inclined to agree with Lewis that the journals are probably worthless.’
Spargo sighed. Until that moment he’d been sure the journals held the key to both murders.
Jez watched him while he paged through the document, pausing every so often to read text.
‘You don’t look disappointed,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘I suppose I’m not. It’s a bit like closure. It sort-of finishes things.’
‘Volker was real enough, he was definitely the writer and he was definitely in the German navy. There were a few things in it I found particularly interesting. You once told me your father went to Germany before the war. Can you remember when?’
‘Not personally. I wasn’t born.’
‘Be serious.’
‘A German mining engineer visited Kilcreg in the mid-thirties. My father went to Germany shortly afterwards.’
‘Was that possible? The war started in thirty-nine.’
‘Your Gran told me foreigners travelled freely, right up to the last few months before war was declared. My father wasn’t in Germany for long. He was a member of a mining institute that arranged exchanges.’
Spargo studied Jez. She was holding something back.
‘What else? What is it?’
‘Guess what Theodor Volker did before he joined the Kriegsmarine.’
‘Surprise me.’
‘He was a mining engineer.’
‘Mining was a reserved occupation. Volker wouldn’t have been called up.’
‘He wasn’t. He volunteered.’
Spargo went quiet. None of this explained the journals. They were written during the war, not before it.
‘When does the journal end?
‘The last one is dated February 1945. That is three months before Germany surrendered.’
‘So what was Volker doing for those last three months?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. The last entry is incomplete but it’s obvious he is commanding a submarine. He doesn’t say where he is.’
‘He wouldn’t, would he? You didn’t write stuff like that.’
‘He did, sometimes. Sometimes he mentions places.’
‘There’s something I learned from Rydel, I almost got him to admit it. I’m fairly sure he and Lewis were here as prisoners of war. My guess is the U-boat and its crew, including Volker, were captured and interned. After the war some prisoners settled in Britain, which explains how Lewis and Rydel knew my mother. When I was a boy there were two young men living in the mine house.’
‘At least that might explain how the journals got here.’
‘Does it? If they were prisoners of war they wouldn’t have been allowed to keep stuff like that. Anyway, can you imagine them carrying something that heavy?’ He nodded at the laptop. ‘What else have you found?’
‘A lot. When I started reading I expected a war story. Instead I got emotions. It is not pleasant reading. Two months after Volker joined the navy he heard his wife was pregnant. She moved to Hamburg to be closer to him. After the child was born she was killed in a bombing raid.’
‘And her child?’
Jez shook her head.
‘There is a gap in the journals when he wrote nothing for weeks. After that it’s all remorse and guilt. He blames himself for what happened, saying that if he hadn’t joined up she wouldn’t have been in Hamburg and would have still been alive.’ She glanced up at Spargo. ‘I’m hungry. Have you eaten?’
‘There are pizzas in the freezer.’
‘When are you going to start eating real food?’
‘You choose something. The freezer’s full of ready-cooks.’
She slid off the stool. Ignoring the freezer she went to the fridge and started to sort through it. She lifted the lid of the waste bin and dropped things in one by one. Use-by dates exceeded, Spargo told himself. It had become a ritual. Whenever she went to his fridge she threw away half of its contents.
‘There’s a lasagne there somewhere.’
‘In the bin.’
While she continued her assault on his fridge he ran a finger over the touchpad and inspected the contents of the CD.
‘There’s a folder here called 3-Valk, he said. Third Valkyre disc, do you think?’
‘It’s the folder you are looking at. It contains the translation. The fact Lewis gave it that name means he knew where he was going to hide the CD.’
‘Why hide it?’
‘When you consider what happened to him I would have thought it was obvious. He knew someone would be after him.’
‘For the translation? Why
think that?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. I don’t have all the answers.’
‘Lewis was always scared,’ Spargo said. ‘According to Rydel.’
‘Did I tell you what Marie said when I told her Lewis had soaked the journals? She implied he soaked them to make them unreadable.’
More food packs clattered into the bin. ‘What else haven’t you told me?’ She put a pack of something into the microwave and pressed buttons.
‘If he didn’t want anyone to know what Volker had written,’ Spargo said, ‘then making the ink run makes sense. He could hardly destroy them, not if he had to return them to the police. ‘What I don’t understand is why he typed it up, when all he needed to do was to read it to himself.’
‘He was a professional translator. It’s how he worked.’
‘I don’t buy it.’
‘So what’s your explanation?’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘Well I do. He translated it and hid it in case anything happened to him. He wanted it found. He knew what the journals were.’
‘You said there is nothing important in them.’
‘Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps there’s something I’ve missed, something Lewis thought important that I didn’t. What you said about Wagner and anti-Semitism might be more relevant than you realised. If anything happened to Lewis, then somebody going through his things – Rydel, presumably – would see the Wagner as a cuckoo in the nest. It is out of place.’
‘Except he didn’t.’
‘Nor did we. It’s too subtle by half.’
‘No it’s not. It worked. We found it.’
‘We didn’t. We missed it. If it hadn’t been for that student…’
The microwave pinged. Jez opened the door, held the pack with an oven glove and scooped its contents onto plates. Then she placed the laptop where they could both see it.
‘There,’ she said, pointing at the screen with her fork. ‘That’s as far as I read in detail. A few pages further back there is a change in his writing style.’ She tapped keys with her free hand. ‘Look, here, after his wife dies he starts mentioning names and places. It’s almost as if he no longer cares what he writes. Here, Friedrichstrasse, a street in Berlin, the first time he mentions a location.’ She paged down. Using here fork again she jabbed at the words. ‘Lewis’s summary says the boy is safe and living with relatives in Ingolstadt. I looked the place up, it’s near Munich. Volker is trying to get there by train.’
The Man Who Played Trains: The gripping new thriller from the author of Playpits Park Page 34
