‘George -1 wasn’t gone more than an hour. I swear it. I wouldn’t have gone except we’re running out of food. They were watching TV. I said to them, “Listen, I’ll make you milk shakes when I get back.” They love that. Well… kids do. And they said yeah they’d like that and asked if I’d tell them a story and — ’
‘Where are they?'
‘When I got back — Oh God! When I got back, they weren’t here.’
‘Not here?’
He felt confused, and angry. His heart was fluttering in his chest as though trying to get out. His breathing became short and rapid. He thought: I’m hyperventilating. Jesus, I’ll have a stroke if I’m not careful.
‘Tell me!’ he shouted.
‘That’s what I’m trying to do. I only got back a couple of minutes ago.’
He brushed her aside. ‘Bobby!’ he shouted as he crashed up the stairs. ‘Margaret! Are you hiding?’
He ran down again and into the kitchen. ‘It isn’t a game!’
He opened the door on to the small back garden and switched on the light. A cat, crouching in the weeds, looked at him with blazing green eyes and vanished.
Macrae’s mind, tuned as it was to violence, was moving at great speed. Was this a hit? Had someone grabbed them? Revenge? God, he’d put away hundreds of villains.
‘George!’ Frenchy burst into the kitchen brandishing a piece of paper. ‘It was on the TV.’
Dear Dad and Frenchy, he read. We have gone home. Do not worry about us. We are OK. Love Bobby and Margaret.
He grabbed the phone and dialled Joe’s number. The phone rang and rang. He slammed it down.
‘George, where are you going?’
‘Get out of my fucking way!’
He drove as fast as he could, jumping red lights, and reached Joe’s house in twenty minutes. In the warm summer evening the street was filled with cars and people. At first he could not see his two children. Then he spotted them sitting with their backs against the front door of their stepfather’s house.
He took them home.
Except he didn’t call it ‘home’ now but said ‘my place’ instead. When he saw the expression in their eyes something inside him seemed to wither and die.
‘You can go back to Joe’s,’ he said. ‘Course you can. I’ll fix it.’ The police computer had given him Gammon’s address. Now he sat in the West London street trying to fix it.
He’d thought about it and decided that there was no point in going to Mandy. When she wanted someone she never let anything stand in her way. Not even her kids. So he had decided it was Roger who was going to bend or break.
As he finished his cigar he saw him come out of his house and walk to the cab. The light on the roof flicked on. Macrae got out of his own car and waited on the pavement. As the cab approached he signalled it.
‘Where to, guv?’
‘Piccadilly Circus.’
Macrae settled back. Gammon switched on the meter and they pulled out into the traffic.
They hadn’t gone more than two blocks when Macrae banged on the glass partition and said, ‘Pull over.’
Gammon turned. ‘I thought you said Piccadilly.’
‘Never mind what I said. Just let me out.’
Gammon stopped the cab and said, ‘You want to make up your mind, squire.’
Macrae got out and held up his warrant card.
‘Oh, Jesus, what am I supposed to have done now?’
‘Get out, laddie.’
‘Listen, I’m on shift. I’ve a living to make.’
‘Get out.’
Gammon stepped on to the pavement and Macrae studied him. He thought he must be five or six years younger than Mandy. He was of medium height and, Macrae supposed, he was not bad looking. He wore a flowered shirt, jeans, and a baseball cap.
Macrae began to walk slowly round the cab. He kicked one of the rear tyres.
‘Here! It ain’t paid for yet.’
Macrae ignored him and continued his slow circle.
‘Tell me what you’re looking for. I may be able to help.’
Macrae remained silent. He opened the driver’s door and searched the glove compartment. Then he felt under the seat. He straightened up and showed Gammon something in the palm of his hand. It was a small plastic bag holding white powder.
‘You gotta be kiddin’,’ Gammon said.
‘Your word against mine.’
‘Hang on, hang on. What’d you say your name was?’
‘It’s Macrae. Mandy’s first husband.’
‘Well, what’s it to you, then?’
‘I’ll tell you what it is to me. She has two kids. My kids too. She’s not doing her duty. You follow me?’
‘To tell you the honest truth, no I don’t. She says you hardly bother with them. You want the kids to doss with me that’s OK. It was her who said no.’
‘No one wants the kids to doss with you, Gammon. No one.’ ‘That's uncalled for.’
‘It’s no place for children. You’re committing adultery. You’re an immoral person.’
‘But there’s no law that says — ’
‘I’m the law, laddie, and I’m saying it.’
‘Well, what about you? I don’t do drugs, not hard drugs anyway. That’s not right what you just done.’
‘I don’t want to discuss ethics with you. I don’t want to discuss anything. You’d better return Mandy to Joe or you’ll be going down for possession. You follow me now, Roger?’
‘Yeah, I follow you.’
Macrae watched the cab out of sight, threw the little plastic sachet containing talcum powder into the gutter, and then got back into his car and drove home. The stimulation of the encounter drained away from him leaving him depressed.
*
Alice had been dozing. The heat inside the garden hut made sleep difficult. She loved warmth because it reminded her of home but this was a different kind. It was stifling. The smell of the fungicides and the insecticides combined to give her a breathing problem.
But she lay back and let herself be taken by the great river to a destination she could not even guess at.
She catnapped.
A noise woke her.
The planking from which the hut was built had shrunk and warped in the summer dryness and she could see out through the cracks.
A thin many stooping with age, was standing at the parapet, looking into the night through his binoculars.
Mr Pargeter, she thought. Arthritis. Kestrels.
Bird watching?
At night?
*
Macrae had also been dozing. These days he slept badly. He woke and looked at his bedside clock. Just past three. He heard Frenchy breathing softly beside him. He’d been bloody awful to her. It wasn’t her fault about the kids. She wasn’t a nursemaid.
He got up and went to the spare bedroom and stood in the doorway. It was softly lit by the radiance of the city. The two kids were fast asleep, Margaret on her back, Bobby curled in a ball. He remembered this was how they had always slept.
Safe.
But not in their own home.
Was it true what that sodding cabbie had said? That he hardly bothered with his own kids?
Without any warning, he began to cry. The tears squeezed themselves from between his tightly closed eyelids and ran down his cheeks.
He was shaken. Horrified.
He went downstairs into the living-room and sat in his chair.
His chest contracted in a series of convulsions and he heard himself sob.
He couldn’t believe it was happening to him. It was like standing outside himself and watching some other man.
The sobs wrenched his body. He tried desperately to stop himself but it seemed that the harder he tried the worse it became.
He cried for nearly ten minutes until he became exhausted. He had not cried for years. Not since he had grown up. Not since his mother died.
Slowly the spasms grew less intense, but the misery settled on him like dust. Who had called i
t Black Dog?
No words could describe how he felt.
‘George?’ It was a whisper. ‘Oh God, George.’
Frenchy knelt beside him, too embarrassed, too frightened to touch him. She looked into his face and even in the dim light she could see a hopelessness that scared her. And then she thought: I shouldn’t be seeing this at all.
Softly, as though to himself, he said, ‘It was me who found her.’
‘Who, George?’
‘My mother. I’d gone down to the river early to see if I could get a fish. The Manse Pool. Not far from the house. I saw something flap away. A magpie. People think it’s only crows that peck at the dead. But magpies do it too. They’ll land next to a sick sheep and go for its eyes. That’s what it had been trying to do to Mother.’
‘Don’t, George.’
He waved the objection aside. It was as though he had a need, after all these years, to speak of it.
‘But she was on her front. Face down in the water. She’d been caught by the current and pushed into an eddy. It couldn’t get at her eyes.’
‘George… please…’
‘Pathologists love maggots, you know. They can tell when a person died by the size of the maggots. But there weren’t any maggots in my mother’s body. She’d drowned some time during the night. They said at the inquest that she must have gone for a walk and fallen into the river. But I don’t think so. I think she went down there meaning to do it.’
‘Come to bed, George.’
‘You go up. I’ll come in a wee while.’
‘I’ll wait with you.’
‘No. Go up.’
‘George… I’m sorry… About everything… ‘I know, lassie. I know…’
Chapter Sixteen
The City of Westminster is the heart of London. The Thames is its southern border and from there it spreads north to St John’s Wood, west almost to Shepherd’s Bush and east as far as the Aldwych and the Law Courts. It is home to Oxford Street, Piccadilly, Hyde Park and Regent’s Park.
It is also home to Bayswater.
Kill an Arab arms dealer in Bayswater and it is the job of No. 8 Area Major Incident Pool based in Cannon Row police station — itself in the left ventricle, so to speak — to sort it out.
Within a matter of hours from the time Dr Nolan had joyfully discovered his maggots, an incident room had been set up and thirty-two detectives and aides were working on the case.
It hadn’t taken long to discover that the victim was an arms dealer. But dealing with whom? The IRA? The Iraqis? The Iranians? The Armenians? The Albanians? The Croatians? The Serbs? The Georgians? The Afghans? The South Africans? The Argentines? The Chileans? The Palestinians? The Libyans?
Or was he only here for the beer?
Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist squad, MI5, MI6, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence — all had been contacted about Mr Sadeq, deceased.
Questions were raised. Had he been murdered by fellow Arabs? By Mossad, the Israeli secret service? By the PLO? By the IRA? Etc etc The Deputy Commander at Cannon Row, Kenneth Scales, had come rushing in from the purlieus of Sidcup to oversee events. Officially, he was still on holiday, and had decided to play a subtle hand. Macrae was the best man in Eight Area; the man who would bring praise and congratulations to Cannon Row (and therefore to Kenneth Scales) if he solved it.
On the other hand Scales could flee back to his lawnmower the instant something went wrong with the investigation, and leave the buck in the unwilling hands of DCS Leslie Wilson.
He won either way.
But — and this was what he had least expected — Macrae was telling him that this arms dealer, well known apparently in Baghdad and Teheran, might have been beaten to death by a burglar or a woman. And not only that, a servant woman.
Scales sat beneath his no-smoking sign, clicking his ballpoint pen agitatedly. He was thin-faced and bony and his hair was brushed across his skull to hide the fact that he was seriously bald. Macrae sat opposite him, big, surly, and uncompromising.
‘That wasn’t your first theory, George.’
He called him ‘George’ when he needed him, ‘Macrae’ when he didn’t.
‘We didn’t know about the maid then. At that time we had a series of burglaries all in the same area. It’s possible they could have been done by different people but unlikely. There were no forced locks, no broken windows.’
‘Skeleton keys. Porters.’
‘Maybe. But I don’t think so. Too obvious. I mean no bloody porter in his right mind would do a thing like that. He’d be scooped up instantly.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Scales said, hastily.
‘Anyway the burglaries weren’t only in the flats. The Arab was in a house near by.’
‘Fine, George, fine.’
‘So at first we thought all right, say the burglaries were done by the same person. He comes back for more. The Arab sees him. Bang. There would have been a link. A common factor. But then we found the blankets in the kitchen. And the maid was missing.’
‘She could have been placed there especially to make the hit.’
Macrae frowned. Scales had been watching too many American movies.
‘She could be anywhere by now,’ Scales said.
Click… click… went the pen.
‘But we’ve got the lab report on the blanket stains,’ Macrae said. ‘Human blood mixed with vaginal fluid and semen. Probably assaulted and raped then crawled back into her blankets and bled there. Anyway we’ve got prints on the handle of the weapon and they match prints in the kitchen and on the woman’s passport. I don’t think we need to make it any more complicated.’
‘You don’t think…?’
‘Arms dealers, drug dealers, even policemen get murdered for reasons other than professional ones. Maybe he was trying to rape her again and she fought back.’
Click… click…
‘Or the burglar may have raped her,’ Scales said.
‘Or the burglar…’
‘My word, George, it would be a feather in our… your… cap if you could prove that. I mean the whole place is in uproar. Conspiracy theories everywhere.’
‘Aye… well, first I’ve got to find the woman…’
‘That’s it, George… cherchez la femme… And keep me in touch…’
‘Oui, mon capitaine.’
‘What? Oh… Yes… Right…’
*
‘Zoe says there are good ones and bad ones,’ Leo said. ‘And if she knows anything about her boss or his wife they’ll have gone to a bad one.’
Macrae grunted. He was still feeling weak and depressed from the uncharacteristic emotional upheaval of the previous night.
One good thing had come out of it. When he got back into bed with Frenchy he had become tumescent in a way he had not done for a long time. He had not so much made love to her as had gone to war, using himself as a battering ram.
Frenchy had held on to him with one hand and the bedhead with the other and had ridden him like a rodeo rider. Not a word had been spoken, not a kiss exchanged, but she had sensed a need on a scale not sensed before and she had taken pride in her work.
They were in Kilburn High Road, long, dreary and dirty.
‘There’re more Micks around here than in Dublin,’ Macrae said, viewing with displeasure the groups of men standing on street corners.
‘There it is,’ Leo said.
The small neon sign read: DOMESTICS UNLIMITED.
‘I’ll drop you here, guv’nor, and find some parking.’
Macrae heaved himself from the car. It was a little after nine and the day was already hot. The door of the agency was open and Macrae walked into a large office with a row of straight-backed chairs along one wall which reminded him of the cheerless dental surgeries of his Highland childhood.
At a desk in one corner a woman was tapping at a computer. A wooden sign near her said Mrs Gillian Hyde-Cooper. She was in her sixties, with grey hair cut like a man’s. She wore a wh
ite jacket, a tie and trousers and was smoking one of the thin pana-tellas which Macrae used.
‘Oh, so you’ve come, have you,’ she said, glaring up at him through the smoke. ‘I’m glad one of you deigned to show up. My God, the middle of a bloody recession and only one of you bothers. Are you Irish?’
‘Scots.’
‘Thank God for that. They’re all bloody Irish round here. Effing layabouts the lot of’em. Draw the dole or cadge off their women and off to the pubs for a skinful of Murphy’s or Guinness. Mind you, they wouldn’t have done anyway. I mean who wants a bloody Irishman in the house these days. Wouldn’t have a moment’s peace wondering if he was making effing bombs in the kitchen. What’s your name?’
‘Macrae.’
‘All right, Macrae, come in here.’
She led him into a small back room. There was a table and chairs, a sideboard stacked with napery, silver, and cut glass: it looked like a very ritzy dining-room.
‘Let’s see what you can do. Set that table for six then tell me what you suggest for dinner: cold starter, game of some sort, sorbet, summer pudding, savoury, cheeses, the works. One of the guests is vegetarian, another is allergic to fish. OK?’
Macrae thought it time to stop. ‘I’ve come to buy, not sell.’
‘What?’
‘I’m looking for a housekeeper.’
‘My dear man, why didn’t you say so? I thought you’d come about the butler’s position we advertised. Come and take a pew. Now, what sort of person were you looking for?’
‘Who can you recommend?’
‘In these bloody times I’ve got more on my books than ever. Female?’
‘Right.’
‘Cook-generals. I could do you Spanish, Greek or Portuguese. Or if you’re only wanting a cleaner there’s a good Turkish woman I use. She’s married to a Brit. And we’ve got a few Irish women… Oh, I know what you’re thinking… but the women are quite good. Some of’em trained as chambermaids in Irish hotels. Mind you, I suppose you’d still have to worry about the effing dynamite. And I mean to say they’re always blowing up the wrong people, aren’t they? Bloody typical.’
‘Any English?’
‘Oh, Christ, no! They don’t like to work as domestics. Don’t like to work period.’
‘What about Filipinas? I hear they’re pretty good.’
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