Death on Demand

by Paul Thomas

  “Then he called in the favour.”

  “There was this private collection of Chinese snuffboxes that was going on public display. The Prof wanted inside info on the security arrangements. He said the stuff was insured up the jacksie, so it was effectively a victimless crime.”

  “I doubt the insurance company saw it that way.”

  “Well,” said Van Roon, “I guess they just would’ve bumped up their premiums.”

  “So you gave him what he wanted, and then he had you by the balls?”

  “Not really,” said Van Roon mildly. “He came up with this scheme: at any given time, between the two of us, we’d have an idea which crooks around town were sitting on the takings from a job. As he pointed out, if you steal stolen goods from a crim, he’s hardly going to dial 111.”

  “But as they say,” said Ihaka, “it’s all fun and games till someone gets hurt.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning the five rounds Jerry Spragg put in Blair Corvine.”

  Indignation convulsed Van Roon’s face. “Fucking hell, what do you take me for? I had nothing to do with that. When McGrail told us Corvine had picked up a whisper there was a cop in this outfit that was robbing the robbers, I decided then and there that was it, no more. I never breathed a word about Corvine to anyone on the outside. Christ, I’d never sell out another cop, even a worm like Charlton.”

  He changed pace again, throttling back to matter-of-fact. “There were three of us in the crew – me, Yallop and Spragg. Spragg was a headcase, but Yallop wanted him on board to do the strong-arm stuff if the need arose. Word got back to Spragg that Corvine was taking an interest in our operation. I don’t know exactly how it went down. Yallop reckoned Spragg, who was paranoid at the best of times, got jacked up on P and did it pretty much on the spur of the moment. I doubt that. I suspect Spragg consulted Yallop who did some digging, maybe put a tail on Corvine, and put two and two together. He was a pretty average human being, the Prof, but he was sharp, no two ways about it. And when he’d figured out what Blair was up to, he would’ve got in Spragg’s ear. You know, ‘What are you going to do about it?’”

  “So that’s you off the hook then,” said Ihaka.

  “Come on, Tito, you’re better than that. Corvine had been inside Spragg’s outfit for months. If I was going to drop him in it, I’d have done it much earlier.”

  “He wasn’t making waves earlier.”

  “Christ almighty, when you wanted to find Blair the other week, who did you call? Me. I’ve known where he was all along, and a few people would’ve opened their wallets for that information.”

  “You told John Scholes where to find the guy who put him inside.”

  Van Roon shook his head impatiently. “No I didn’t. I mentioned it to Yallop, which I know I shouldn’t have, but it never occurred to me that he’d tell Scholes in return for him putting the bash on Spragg. Something else I had nothing to do with. Incidentally, the fact Yallop was so anxious to shut Spragg up is why I’m sure he was in on the Corvine hit. He was worried Spragg would implicate him.”

  “And you weren’t?”

  “Spragg was an animal who’d done way too many drugs, but he was staunch. He wasn’t going to roll over. And even if he did, no one was going to take his word against mine.”

  “Next thing you’ll be telling me Yallop committed suicide.” Van Roon didn’t say anything so Ihaka pressed on: “I did a bit of checking. You called in sick the day Yallop was killed. What did you do, fly up under a false name or drive? I guess you used a gun you acquired on one of your nights out stealing?”

  “Look at you,” said Van Roon bitterly, “sitting there in moral judgement. You should be thanking me. I saved your fucking life.”

  “Really?”

  “Yallop got spooked when you turned up asking about Spragg and Corvine. Not surprising, I suppose. He’d heard me talking you up often enough. He wanted to put a hit on you. So, yeah, Tito, I called in sick, I drove up, I shot him, then I drove home again. And I did it for one reason only. To protect you.”

  They locked eyes. The stare went on and on. There was a time, thought Ihaka, when I would have sworn this guy was incapable of lying to me. Now I just don’t know.

  “So what now?” asked Van Roon.

  “I’ve got some thinking to do, haven’t I?”

  “Listen to me, Tito. You don’t have to do anything. Just let it lie. Okay, I know I went off the rails and did some shitty things but, when all’s said and done, it wasn’t that big a deal. No innocent people got hurt. I wouldn’t say my conscience is clear, but I can live with myself. The only blood on my hands is Yallop’s, and he had it coming. He egged Spragg on to do Corvine, and he was going after you. And it’s all over. I got out of that toxic place and went back to being a good cop. What would be the point of blowing the whistle on me? They’ll never prove a thing. You trained me well. You taught me how to put myself in the other guy’s shoes. Believe me, the trail is cold.”

  Van Roon was pleading now, reaching back into their friendship, shuffling the emotional cards looking for a trump. “All it would do is fuck my career. You know how it works: mud always sticks. They wouldn’t find anything, but that would be it anyway. They’d shunt me off into some dead-end desk job or pay me out. Even if you think I deserve that, even if you just want to wash your hands of me, think of what it would do to Yvonne and the kids. If this thing blows, they’ll go through absolute hell.”

  “They’re your wife and kids. Maybe you should’ve thought of that.”

  “Who do you think I did it for?” Van Roon stood up. “So I guess it’s all over between us.”

  Now that he’d come to the reckoning, Ihaka felt nothing but desolation. “I don’t know what it is.”

  “Just walk away – from the whole fucking thing.”

  “Including you?”

  Van Roon nodded. “You’re going to do that whatever happens.”

  “I’m sorry it had to be me.”

  There was shame and grief and something close to love in Van Roon’s glassy smile. “It was only ever going to be you, Tito.”

  He walked out of the bar. Ihaka sat there with his head in his hands, thinking, so this is what heartbreak feels like.

  EPILOGUE

  On their way home from work, the private investigator Grant Hayes had an exchange with his live-in girlfriend, secretary and partner-in-crime Simone that fell somewhere between a negotiation and an argument.

  Hayes tended to have a light breakfast and lunch and didn’t eat between meals, so there was a lot riding on dinner, especially the main course. He wasn’t much of a dessert man, and had decided that cheese gave him a double chin. Simone, though, regarded the main course as protein intake, necessary but nothing to look forward to. She was far more interested in what followed.

  There was a chicken in the fridge which she was prepared to roast with all the trimmings, provided he went and got something nice for dessert. Hayes’s opening gambit of hokey pokey ice cream with chocolate sauce, both procurable from the corner dairy, was rejected out of hand. She wanted raspberry sorbet and triple chocolate brownie, which meant going to the St Lukes supermarket, a round trip of anything up to an hour at that time of day. Fuck that, said Hayes, who was hanging out for a beer. “Suit yourself,” said Simone with a cold shrug. “Takeaways it is.”

  Hayes dropped Simone off and headed for the mall. If he hadn’t been so absorbed with saying to himself what he would have said to Simone if he didn’t value her home cooking and wantonness, he might have noticed the car parked across the road from his place pull out from the kerb and fall in behind him.

  Having taken the edge off his mood by treating himself to a four-pack of high-alcohol, high-priced boutique beer, Hayes hurried back to his car in the supermarket car park. In fifteen minutes, traffic permitting, he’d be sinking piss with his feet up in front of the TV while the little bitch slaved over a hot stove. As he put his purchases in the boot, something hard poked him in the back.
He jerked upright, his head snapping around. There was a guy right behind him, so close Hayes felt a puff of breath on his earlobe.

  The rear passenger door of the car in the next space, a Ford Falcon, swung open.

  “In case you’re wondering,” said the guy poking him in the back, “it’s a Browning 9. Now get in the car.”

  The gunman herded Hayes into the Falcon and got in beside him. Hayes was sandwiched between him and a fat guy with a round, pink face, ginger scalp stubble and what under different circumstances he would have regarded as an encouraging smile. There were two more in the front, big buggers by the look of them, but they didn’t even bother flicking him an over-the-shoulder glance. As the car took off, Hayes felt panic sweat popping out all over, as if he was being squeezed like a lemon. Even his shins were sweating.

  The gunman looked straight ahead, ignoring him. The fat man stared out the window. As they headed west on St Lukes Road, the fat man twisted around so he didn’t have to turn his head to look at Hayes.

  “You know who I am?”

  He sounded like a Pom, but that was no help. “No. No idea.”

  “John Scholes is the name. Me and my mates here belong to an outfit known as The Firm. Maybe you’ve heard of us.”

  Hayes’s voice stalled. Scholes didn’t wait for him to finish clearing his throat.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. “You whacked out some bird and tried to get a couple of my lads done for it. Where I come from, that’s called taking a diabolical liberty.”

  Scholes was still smiling, but even in the state Hayes was in, dizzy with nausea, bile leaping in his throat, his body not responding to simple commands, he could tell it didn’t mean anything. Actually, it did. It made it worse. If Scholes was screaming at him, threatening his life, it would mean he wanted something and there was still a chance Hayes could talk his way out of it. As it was, they were treating him like a dead man walking.

  They hit the North Western Motorway.

  “You were warned,” said Scholes, “but you didn’t take a blind bit of notice. Being inside wouldn’t have been a doddle, mind, but as the saying goes, where there’s life, there’s hope.”

  Hayes managed to speak, although not in a voice he recognized. “What are you going to do to me?”

  “I just told you, old son. Now shut it, because there’s nothing more to say. You just get yourself ready, all right?”

  Scholes craned his neck to look through the rear window at the city skyline, a glittering silhouette against a blue-black sky. “I love this fucking view,” he said.

  One of the others murmured assent. After that the car was silent.

  They took the Henderson turn-off, swung down a side street and pulled up behind a Range Rover. Another big unit got out of the Range Rover and came over to open the door for Scholes.

  Scholes got out of the Falcon and looked down at Hayes. “Well,” he said, “it’s goodbye from me and it’s goodbye from him. Him being a bloke whose wife topped herself.”

  The new guy got in beside Hayes. “Who’s this cunt?” he asked, with a jerk of his head.

  “What fucking difference does it make?” said the driver. He did a U-turn and headed back towards the motorway.

  Scholes sat behind the wheel of the Range Rover, making a call on his cellphone. “Hello, love, it’s me. Yeah, all finished for the day, I’ll be home in ten. What’s for tea, then? Oh, a surprise, eh? I only like nice surprises. You know that, don’t you? I’m sure it will be, love. Looking forward to it. Those kids behaving themselves? Yeah, tell him Dad will read him a bedtime story as long as it’s not that Harry Potter, fucking four-eyed git. Why? Because those fucking books are as long as the Oxford fucking Dictionary, that’s why. Don’t worry, I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse. All right then, love, see you soon.”

  Scholes dropped the phone into his jacket pocket and started the car.

  This time Finbar McGrail himself answered the door. “Perfect timing, Sergeant. I was just about to have a glass of port. Come on in.”

  He led Ihaka down the corridor to his study and ushered him into a chair.

  “Actually, I’ve been expecting you,” said McGrail, taking care to ensure the measures were exactly equal. “When I heard you were burning the midnight oil at Central, I assumed you were onto something.”

  He handed Ihaka a glass.

  “Thanks,” said Ihaka. “Heard from who?”

  “Beth Greendale. She went through and covered your cyber-tracks, just in case.”

  “So Van Roon was right. She was keeping an eye on me for you?”

  “Paranoia doesn’t become you, Sergeant,” said McGrail primly. “I was conscious both that I’d dropped you into a snake-pit and that, come what may, you wouldn’t ask for help.”

  Ihaka swallowed most of his drink. “You know what I think? The Lilywhite case was never a priority for you. It just gave you an excuse to get me back up here. You knew I wouldn’t be able to resist poking into what happened to Blair Corvine. You wanted me to shake the tree and see who fell out.”

  McGrail moved his nose to and fro above his glass, taking his time. “So who did?”

  “Why didn’t you just say so?”

  “You explained it rather well,” said McGrail. “I didn’t need to.”

  “You mean it gave you deniability if the shit hit the fan.”

  McGrail tut-tutted. “Such a cynic. Are you going to keep me in suspense?”

  “Didn’t Beth figure it out?”

  “She had no idea what you were looking for. True to form, Sergeant, you played your cards very close to your chest.”

  “Jesus, you’re a fine one to talk.”

  “Touché,” said McGrail, inclining his head.

  “It was Johan.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s it – ‘oh’?”

  “Well, bear in mind when you took everything into account there weren’t that many candidates. But I’m very sorry to hear that, partly on my own account. I would’ve said Van Roon was a good officer and a good man. It turns out he’s neither.”

  “It’s not black and white.”

  “Carry on.”

  As McGrail refilled their glasses, Ihaka summarized Van Roon’s self-defence.

  “Artful,” said McGrail, resuming his seat. “And perhaps not without some validity. But I rather suspect he executed Yallop to protect himself, rather than you.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “You’ve done your bit by telling me. I’m sure Van Roon pressed you to keep it to yourself.”

  “Okay, so what are you going to do now? He’s a bright bastard, Johan, and very careful. It’ll be a bloody tough nut to crack.”

  “He has two areas of vulnerability,” said McGrail. “One is money. It’s difficult for someone on a salary to conceal supplementary income or explain sudden spikes in expenditure which aren’t balanced by borrowings. Conversely, it takes an almost inhuman degree of self-discipline to hide it somewhere and forget about it for a couple of decades. The other one is family. My impression would be that he’d dread the impact public disgrace would have on his wife and children.”

  “No doubt about that.”

  “So my recommendation to the commissioner will be that we offer him a choice: resign with immediate effect, or we publicly announce an open-ended investigation into his involvement with Yallop.”

  “And if he walks the plank, that’ll be the end of it?”

  “Good heavens, no. Murder is murder, Sergeant. We can’t sweep that under the carpet. You’ll share your theory regarding Yallop’s murder with the officer in charge, Detective Sergeant Firkitt, and then let the cards fall where they may. There’s nothing new in us knowing who committed a crime but having the devil’s own job proving it, although Firkitt is nothing if not persistent.”

  McGrail went behind his desk to peer at his computer screen. “On another matter, would the Grant Hayes whom you suspect of killing Eve Diack be the same Grant Hayes who wen
t out to the supermarket last night and never came home?”

  “I hadn’t caught up with that.”

  “I can’t imagine there are two private investigators by that name. I assume you issued a ports and airports alert?”

  Ihaka nodded. “I wouldn’t worry about Hayes. He’ll turn up eventually.”

  McGrail took off his glasses, breathed on them, polished them with a piece of cloth, put them back on. “Sergeant, I’ve known you long enough to have the strong sense that you could shed some light on this situation.”

  “You know Jonathon Bell had Arden Black done in because he thought Black drove his wife to suicide?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I told Bell who really drove his wife to suicide.”

  The intensity of McGrail’s scrutiny went up several notches. “Didn’t it occur to you… Let me rephrase that. It obviously occurred to you that he might do the same to Hayes.”

  “That’s exactly what I pointed out to Hayes,” said Ihaka mildly. “He reckoned he could stay out of jail and stay alive. I warned him he could do one or the other, but not both.”

  “And what about Bell?” said McGrail sharply. “What sort of rough justice do you have planned for him? After all, he had an innocent man beaten to death.”

  Ihaka drained his glass. “Bloody nice drop, that. Last time I went after someone in that neck of the woods it didn’t turn out too well for me, so I might sit this one out. I’ll leave Bell to others, like John Scholes.”

  “Why Scholes?”

  “Bell wanted blood so badly he sold his soul to the devil. I wouldn’t call that getting off scot-free. I’d call it a life sentence, no remission, no parole.”