Death Warmed Up

by John Paxton Sheriff

  ‘Why? You think that’ll save you? If you’re in the UK, that Gib cop’s hands are tied.’

  In the sudden silence a faint, distant creaking could be heard as the big boat moved gently at its moorings and a rope tightened. Ebenholz had stopped pacing. The restlessness had gone. There was a sense of purpose in his movements as he leaned back against the panelling and used his right hand to move the shoulder holster to a more accessible position.

  Clontarf began whistling tunelessly through his teeth.

  ‘Shut up,’ Rickman snapped.

  ‘Mate, I’m just wondering when you’re going to get to the point.’

  I nodded approvingly. ‘My feelings exactly. So tell us, Rickman, what is this situation that won’t be changed by a move to colder climes?’

  ‘You are now working for me.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘Karl Creeny came here via Tangier. One of his men was bringing certain goods to Gibraltar. This morning he flew in from Manchester—’

  ‘At last,’ Sian breathed, ‘an admission of guilt.’ She looked at me. ‘Didn’t Romero said something about a body, found near the airport?’

  ‘You’re right, he didn’t make it,’ Rickman said, nodding. ‘And yes, the goods were diamonds and they were in the man’s cabin baggage. He carried the small case off the plane. Somewhere between arrivals and the waiting car he was attacked, beaten about the head with a well-known blunt instrument. When he was found in a narrow passageway, his skull fractured and his blood seeping away through cracks in dirty concrete, the case was missing. Now Wise has disappeared. Karl Creeny sees me as responsible for his financial loss, reckons I should have had men closer to that courier when he came off the plane. Consequently, I am now being threatened. You are in this with Wise—’

  ‘I told you, that’s nonsense.’

  ‘Whatever. Wise is missing. You’ve been seen with Prudence. That’s a connection, however loose. So now you’re being threatened, Scott. By me. To remove that threat, you recover the diamonds.’

  ‘But the diamonds,’ I said, ‘were taken here in Gibraltar. Wise sailed for Tangier with them on that Sunseeker and disappeared down a big black hole. What possible use can I be if I’m in the UK?’

  ‘I’m getting tired of repeating myself. You’re in it with Wise. You know exactly where he is now.’ Rickman shrugged. ‘Maybe that’s the UK, I don’t know or care. But, believe me, you should.’

  ‘What if I call your bluff? March straight from here into Irish Town police station?’

  ‘Then you put yourself and people close to you in great danger. You have a mother, a colleague in Liverpool by the name of Calum Wick.’ He noticed my look of surprise, and grinned. ‘And then, of course, there is the lovely lady sitting by your side.’

  My skin was prickling.

  ‘So it’s up to you,’ he said. ‘And you’d better make sure the answer comes fast, and it’s the right one, or the danger your lovely lady’s in could be … how shall I put it? Imminent.’

  I watched Rickman pad across the carpet, pick up a bottle, unscrew the cap and take a long pull at what looked like tequila. All done. Terms stated. Without turning my attention to them I was acutely aware of the muscular black man’s watchfulness, the Australian with a crystal glass in his left hand and a Glock 19 tucked into the waistband of his jeans.

  Rickman’s put himself out of the way, I thought. Behind both of the heavies, he was out of the line of fire. He’d cleared the field for action. In case. And, realizing that my hot-blooded Soldier Blue would be looking at possibilities, weighing up the odds, I reached to the side and grasped her hand.

  She twisted it, pulled. I gripped harder.

  ‘Bugger this useless talk,’ Sian said. ‘Look, Rickman, we agree, okay? We’ll be on the first plane out tomorrow, and when we get where we’re going we’ll do what we can to find those bloody jewels. But not for you. They’re not yours. We’ll find them because there’s a couple of good friends you didn’t mention, and they’re Liverpool cops. Those jewels will be put back where they belong.’

  ‘A big mistake.’

  ‘Why? What can you do? Once you let us go, we can do what the hell we like. Keeping us here indefinitely achieves nothing.’ And then she smiled sweetly. ‘More to the point, neither you nor those two pistol-toting losers have a hope in hell of holding us against our will.’

  Rickman opened his mouth. Sian ripped her hand from my grasp and sprang to her feet. The black man pushed away from the panelling, eyes shining. One glance at him warned Sian what she was up against. She looked across at Rickman, grimaced and shook her head as if realizing instantly that she was being foolhardy. I knew different, and felt my mouth go dry. Still looking at Rickman, Sian spun and launched a vicious kick. Her heel rammed into the softness below Ebenholz’s belt. He grunted, instinctively made a grab for his groin with one hand, his pistol with the other, and began to fold. The glistening skull came down. Sian spun again, kicked again, met the descending target. Her foot exploded against Ebenholz’s jaw. His head snapped back. Blood sprayed. He went down with a thud.

  Clontarf hadn’t moved. Now he lifted his hands and clapped slowly, mockingly.

  ‘You beauty,’ he said. He looked at me, and shook his head. ‘Mate,’ he said, ‘that girl of yours is one holy terror.’

  ‘That’s the truth,’ Sian said. ‘And I think you should bear that in mind, because we’re leaving now so I’d like you to get out of our way.’

  And with that she brushed past the Australian and walked out of the saloon leaving me stranded in her wake.

  Five

  A single light illuminated the elegant timber panelling and brass fittings on a smaller boat – the carpet from which older bloodstains had so recently been cleaned – and bounced off the crystal glass of Islay whisky that was a little unsteady in my hand. I could hear the soft whisper of the shower, the faint sound of Sian singing. A slightly twisted smile lightened my face.

  I remembered a similar situation a short while after my brother, Tim, had been shot dead in this same saloon. Sian had emerged from the shower, and we had sipped gin and tonics while debating – perhaps agonizing – over whether a return to the UK was a good idea. Well, that decision had been made some time ago, but in the space of twenty-four hours the world seemed to have slipped on its axis. Suddenly we were off balance, struggling to keep a hold on reality when the solid ground beneath our feet was beset by tremors.

  Or perhaps, I thought wryly, it was just me feeling that giddy sensation of everything being out of kilter. Sian, if her recent actions were anything to go by, was serenely unaffected.

  I had met her in Norway; Sian taking a break from military duty – instructing an intelligence cell on deep water exercises in high-speed inflatables – me on holiday and stepping gingerly onto skis for the first time since my own stint in uniform. Over many pleasant evenings seated before a roaring fire in the ski lodge I learned that this young woman who looked as warm and soft as honey and melted butter had seen her Scottish seafaring father lost overboard in an Arctic gale when she’d been ten years old and illegally aboard his ship, had returned to nurse her dying mother in the Cardiff slums and, years later, with a university degree under her Shotokan karate black belt, had moved north to become something of a legend among the high peaks of the Cairngorms. From there the army had seemed the most natural next step on her climb to the top.

  Some time before the holiday that had brought us together I had bought Bryn Ayr – the hill of gold – a stone farmhouse set against the foothills of Glyder Fawr and Glyder Fach in North Wales. Across the yard from the main house, set beyond a massive oak tree, there was a workshop where I set out to design and manufacture what had since been acclaimed by purchasers as the world’s finest toy soldiers. It was there that I took Sian Laidlaw at the end of the skiing holiday (the house, not the workshop), and over the years since then my blonde Soldier Blue had shared my home and frequently my bed. But on more than one occasion I had caught mysel
f reflecting that nothing’s settled until it’s settled. The move to Gibraltar – mutually agreed – had proved to be yet another thorn, another fly in the ointment, another twist in a relationship in which the plot was always thickening.

  We had moved to the iconic Rock towering above the narrow strip of water separating Europe from Africa to take over a security business from a Gibraltarian friend who wanted to spend the rest of his days fishing from a lazily rocking boat, cans of beer clinking in a net submerged in the cool blue sea. But we had almost come to grief when I was dragged into a murder inquiry where I would have been the chief witness for the prosecution. Before that could happen, we took on the villainous Skaill family. We had both been injured, my brother murdered in cold blood.

  And now? Well, now there was another puzzle to unravel. But unlike our usual investigations involving a crime and a perpetrator, this one seemed to have several of each, and each one seen through a glass darkly.

  Which, I thought ruefully, might be a warped misuse of a biblical quotation, but it seemed the only one I knew that ideally fitted the circumstances.

  Deep in thought, I lifted my glass and almost chipped a front tooth when a damp and perfumed Sian Laidlaw came padding in from the shower.

  ‘How’s the foot?’

  ‘I have two.’

  ‘You balanced ballerina fashion on one, kicked hard with the other. You kicked again, and that one connected with bone and could have caused damage.’

  ‘Oh, it did.’

  ‘I mean to your foot.’

  ‘Ebenholz has lightning fast reactions. I doubt if anyone noticed, but as fast as I attacked, he’d already begun riding the blow.’

  ‘Yet even so you knocked him cold.’

  Sian grinned. ‘If he’d stayed stock still, he’d be crawling around that gin palace looking for his head.’

  ‘You must think …’ I hesitated. ‘Well, I really don’t know what you must think of me.’

  ‘I think your reactions are somewhat slower than Ebenholz’s. And I took you by surprise. By the time you realized what was happening, mulled over the situation and decided to come heroically to my aid, it was all over.’

  ‘Mm, slow but steady. Yet I seem to remember that a long time ago when we came up against Dakin, the taxidermist turned killer, I saved your life with a similar skilful martial arts manoeuvre.’

  ‘That was then, this is now.’ Sian smiled sweetly. ‘You’re a lot older.’

  ‘Than you, or than then?’

  ‘Both.’

  I sighed. ‘Damn it, but you were impressive. That raw-boned Digger said it all didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he did. But I have the uneasy feeling that if ever I were to come up against him, he’d be a damn sight more dangerous than his bruiser of a colleague.’

  ‘Why uneasy? It’s not likely to happen.’

  ‘You don’t believe Rickman?’

  ‘I don’t understand Rickman. We spoke to Prudence Wise at, what was it, eight o’clock or thereabouts? It’s now a little after midnight. In that time, a man we don’t know has used threats to force us to find another man we don’t know. From him we’re supposed to recover stolen jewels, and hand them over to – guess what – yes, another man we don’t know.’

  ‘I think the idea under all that talk is that we should give them to Rickman.’

  ‘Yes, well, we know where they’ll end up after that – or do we?’

  ‘If we don’t, it’s about time we sat down and worked this out.’

  So saying, Sian flopped down on one of the soft seats and cast a meaningful glance towards the cocktail cabinet. I rolled my eyes, got up, refreshed my own drink and mixed a gin and tonic for her. There was a board, with ice barrel, knife, and half a lime. I rattled ice, cut a slice of fruit, perched it on the rim of the glass. When I held it out to her she grasped my wrist, touched the tips of my fingers with her lips, pressed my knuckles against her still-moist cheek.

  ‘What’s that for?’ I said softly.

  ‘For understanding. For not being the ultimate macho male. For not angrily berating me.’

  ‘Ah. You mean when you emasculated me, metaphorically speaking, by taking on that muscular thug?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘No, nothing like that. It’s teamwork. You’re the brawn, I’m the brains.’

  She pouted, took the drink then slapped my hand away.

  ‘Then do some, big boy. Thinking, I mean.’

  ‘Mm. All joking aside, you were right. We really must sit down and work this out.’

  I plopped down opposite her, shook my head.

  ‘For a start, I meant it when I said I don’t understand Rickman. And the bit I don’t understand most is why we’ve been dragged into this. Looked at logically, we’re surplus to requirements. If he wants to find Wise, he’s got two armed men working for him who are well capable. I’m sure they got within a whisker of catching Wise when they riddled his Sunseeker with bullets.’

  ‘You think it was Clontarf and Ebenholz with a Kalashnikov?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Frowning, Sian sipped her drink. Sucked the slice of lime. Dropped it into the glass and swished it around.

  ‘If we don’t understand what’s going on,’ she said, ‘it’s because we don’t have enough information. We’re in the dark. So what we do is go along with Rickman’s weird ideas – or act in a way that makes it look as if we’re doing that – and then … well, we see what transpires.’

  I smiled. ‘I can’t see much transpiring when I haven’t got a clue where to start. Wise’s boat was found rocking in a heavy swell out in the Straits of Gibraltar. Bad place from which to start following a trail.’

  ‘That’s not like you.’

  ‘I’ve got no starting point, nothing to go on.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Charlie and Adele jumped ship, went Christ knows where. Same for Prudence. She checked out of the Eliott, and disappeared.’

  ‘Yes, but although Prudence drove her little Micra off into the sunset, she left something behind. Her laptop. There must be some personal information on that hard drive.’

  I closed my eyes, disgusted with myself.

  ‘You’re right, I’m being stupid. And, actually, so are you. We don’t need her laptop. When Pru said she was staying here for a while, she mentioned a website. Her website will have contact information.’

  ‘Yes, you big pudding, but you can’t look at a website without a computer. You have to go to Romero, get the laptop.’

  ‘Mm, I don’t know. We have to assume every move we make will be watched. If we’re really doing Rickman’s bidding – and that’s the impression we want to create – we should stay well away from the police.’

  ‘In that case, I know where there’s an internet café. You can pay to go online for as little as fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Hang on a minute. A thought has occurred. While we’ve been soaking up the sun, Calum’s been installing a modern computer system in the office at Bryn Aur.’

  Sian groaned. ‘Now he tells me.’

  I looked at his watch.

  ‘Which way does this hour’s difference work?’

  ‘It’s earlier in the UK.’

  ‘Then Mr Wick will have finished his day’s work casting toy soldiers, and is probably sitting in my living room drinking my fine liquor. Now’s the perfect time to get him up off his backside.’

  Digging my mobile out of my pocket, I keyed in the number and winked at Sian as I listened to the landline telephone ringing in distant Bryn Aur.

  Six

  Calum Wick looked around the big living room with an unexpected feeling of … fondness? Love? Well, maybe he wouldn’t go quite that far, but he had been so many times to the big stone farmhouse owned by Jack Scott that simply walking in through the front door and across the porch’s quarry-tiled floor was like slipping his arms into an old, shabby, very snug overcoat.

  Shabby? Well, no, hardly that either. Completing the fantasy
of wrapping that imaginary overcoat around him came when he passed the stairs where glossy toy soldiers stood in stone niches, and entered Bryn Aur’s living-room. It had been built in the late nineteenth century, had improved with age and was now stamped with the character of the ex-soldier who created exquisite military miniatures and helped the police solve intriguing mysteries. Twenty-five feet long and half that broad, the room had a floor of massive slate slabs scattered with rich Indian rugs beneath a low-beamed ceiling. Wall lights with tasselled red shades warmly illuminated white stone walls lined with bookcases. The door leading through to the kitchen and office had black iron hinges. There was a cavernous inglenook with iron dog grate, a basket of cut logs shedding dry bark, an Ercol coffee table and, well… .

  Thoughts drifting, feeling a sudden and most unexpected warm glow, Wick kicked off his shoes, lifted his long legs onto the leather Chesterfield and stretched out luxuriously.

  ‘You all right there?’ Stan Jones said.

  ‘And why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose you’re right. This must be dead luxurious to a Scot used to livin’ in a stone bothy with a few scraps of peat smoulderin’ in a rusty iron basket and the smoke goin’ out through a black hole in the roof.’

  ‘My dear old friend, you are labouring under an awful misapprehension.’

  Jones, an incorrigible Liverpool scally who was balding, whipcord thin and could have been fifty or ninety, scratched at the white stubble that he designed by the occasional trim with nail scissors, and grinned.

  ‘I was wonderin’, that’s all. I mean, what is it with you and Jack Scott? He makes toy soldiers; you paint them, but how did that come about? Did you come together with a bump, like, accidentally, and get stuck in a fuckin’ time warp?’

  ‘Fortuitously, not accidentally,’ Wick said. ‘And your suggestion of a bump is close to the truth, but much milder than the reality. To explain, I’ll need to go back a bit. Are you up for it?’