Death Warmed Up

by John Paxton Sheriff

  ‘Oh no,’ she said quietly, ‘not the chorus girl. You know, from time to time I’ve caught myself wondering which is the real you. Is it the man who creates those exquisite miniature figures clothed in gorgeous uniforms, or the other, the man with an army special investigation background who uses those skills to help others? And then one day I realized that there’s no difference. Each of those talents – for that’s what they are, of course – makes a small part of the world a better place. And you go about both without conceit, without—’

  ‘You make me sound,’ I said, ‘like some kind of noble savage.’

  She giggled. ‘Well, if the cap fits—’

  ‘We’ll share it,’ I said, ‘because for all your talk of differences you know damn well that it’s the methods we use as individuals that make us an efficient team. With Calum there to exercise a measure of control. And all this talk of you spoiling for a fight is nonsense. What you have is a short fuse. You don’t consciously seek a punch-up, you don’t go looking for a fight; what you do is explode into action without thinking of the consequences. Usually when someone lies, threatens, or simply rubs you up the wrong way.’

  ‘Which,’ Sian said with a sensual pout, ‘brings us neatly back to the proposal uttered bashfully when I was half asleep with my red socks up on the dashboard—’

  My mobile phone trilled.

  I sighed and pressed it to my ear, put a finger in the other to deaden Bianca’s din. It was Calum Wick. I listened, nodded, listened some more and said, ‘The canoe’s closer. You’ll find us there,’ then switched off.

  Sian was staring intently. She said, ‘I thought Tim’s boat was up for sale.’

  ‘I kept a key. And I’m paying the mooring fees.’

  ‘What did Calum want?’

  ‘He’s at the border, about to cross. He’s on his own.’

  ‘He’s supposed to be. Isn’t Charlie Wise arranging some accommodation over there for him and Adele?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So?’

  I sighed. ‘Yes, I know. If Calum’s made it this far, and is coming across on his own, then everything seems to be going according to plan. So why is it, I wonder, that I have this terrible foreboding that something has gone badly wrong?’

  Nineteen

  ‘This wee nutter, Charlie Wise,’ Calum said, ‘has an image of himself which, frankly, is complete and utter balls. He’s got this crazy idea that he can rub shoulders with the worst kinds of European underworld riff raff and they’ll scamper to do his bidding at a mere snap of his podgy fingers. And this, as those guys well know, is a man who made his living manufacturing pink bloody bog paper.’

  ‘One of life’s necessities,’ Sian said primly. ‘I take it everything that could go wrong has gone wrong?’

  ‘Disastrously so. This contact Charlie was relying on to come up with some safe accommodation across the border, Mario something-or-other, is operating on home territory, his nose sniffing the air for the smell of ready money. And he’d just heard of cash being offered by a man in Gibraltar for information relating to a couple of names. Christ! Out of a clear blue sky, those names dropped in his bloody lap.’

  I grimaced. ‘Charlie phoned him from the UK, digging for a different kind of information?’

  ‘Exactly. Charlie heard about this other reward, fifty thousand quid being offered by the Liverpool firm for the safe return of their stolen goods. He at once thought of his Spanish contacts, thought there must be someone there who could provide information about the diamonds: who’s holding them, what’s their next move – the wheres, the whys and the hows of any sale.’

  ‘But, after that phone call, he was as good as dead.’

  ‘Mario was probably already fantasizing about how he was going to spend the reward he’d get for shopping Charlie when he picked up the phone and called Bernie Rickman.’ Calum scowled at me. ‘I drove Christ knows how many miles across Europe and ended up delivering the poor bastards to the enemy.’

  His words were irate, but there was a gleam in his dark eyes and Calum Wick, I realized, was thoroughly enjoying himself. He was his old, relaxed self, sprawled full length with his ankles crossed on the only long and comfortable seat in the canoe’s saloon. A Schimmelpenninck cigar smouldered between his paint-stained fingers; from time to time he reached up to stroke his salt-and-pepper beard and even by the saloon’s subdued lighting I could see that he’d managed to drive all those miles without once cleaning his John Lennon glasses.

  Sian, as always, had her legs drawn up on one of the seats, and looked as soft and as drowsy as a kitten. But she was listening intently to Calum, toying idly with her loose blonde hair, occasionally sipping from a glass of water.

  I was Captain Bligh, pacing the deck in torment. There was a slight movement beneath my sandals as the dying fringes of a heavy swell rolling down the straits reached the marina and stirred the sleeping yachts at their moorings. Ropes creaked in protest. Somewhere, metal tinkled. And in my pacing past the canoe’s neat oval portholes I was always conscious of a gleaming white shape and aware that, on the other side of the concrete walkway, Bernie Rickman’s Sea Wind was still sneering down at us – and with justification.

  I flopped into the remaining chair, groaned, and ran fingers though my hair.

  ‘So you arrived at the address Charlie had been given, expecting to be met by this Mario – and then what?’

  ‘We came in on the A383, hit La Línea early in the evening. Charlie was navigating. He directed me through classy suburbs, houses in groves of palms, festooned with bougainvillea, with long drives barred by locked gates. Stockbroker belt. Where we finished up it was a lot less salubrious: littered streets gradually narrowing to become little more than a maze of back alleys, walls of flaking stucco, rusting iron balconies, threadbare nightdresses and underwear hanging limply from drooping overhead clotheslines.’ Calum paused. ‘And would you believe when I pulled in alongside one of those crappy buildings at the end of a lofty terrace, there was another black Mercedes sitting in front of mine, with two grinning men in suits leaning against the boot watching our arrival.’

  ‘Clontarf and Ebenholz,’ I said. ‘But how the hell—’

  ‘If you say so. I didn’t ask. I know they were the same two blokes I saw walking into Jokers Wild. They were careless enough with the way their jackets hung for me to know they were armed; one was black and the one who told me cheerfully that it was much quicker by plane had an accent you’d have got used to if you were painting outback fences.’

  I nodded. ‘Suits, you say. A clever move. They flew in from Manchester, changed their image so they became just two more of Gibraltar’s lawyers and financiers drinking lattes in the coffee shops and bars. We don’t know their real names, but clearly those names don’t ring police alarm bells. Then Rickman got word from meretricious Mario, they crossed the border and waited for you to hit town.’

  ‘They acted like gentlemen. Charlie was impressed. The Aussie told him the place where they were parked was a tip, that Mario had got them classier digs for the same price. Charlie beamed. Adele looked wary, but was left with little choice when the two suits ushered them into the Merc. Charlie waved his thanks, shouted something about seeing me, and they drove away in a cloud of gritty dust with me standing there like a leftover haggis. It took me all of thirty fucking minutes to find my way through that maze of streets to the border.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t be able to find you way back to that block?’

  ‘Waste of time because they’re not there, Jack,’ Sian said, ‘and I’m at a loss to know what we can do next. We’re back in that same situation where no crime has been committed. Charlie and Adele are two adults who arrived where they were supposed to, were met by two respectable men in a respectable car, and were whisked away.’

  ‘Could be a waste of time for Rickman, too,’ Calum said. ‘If Charlie’s been telling the truth, he knows nothing about those diamonds.’

  ‘That’s what bothers me,’ I said, ‘becau
se who’s going to believe him? I can see Charlie and Adele in some dank cellar, duct-taped to chairs, and in such a situation Karl Creeny’s methods of persuasion don’t bear thinking about. My guess is he’ll start on Adele with the pliers and the blow torch, seeing her as Charlie’s soft spot.’

  ‘Christ, Jack,’ Sian said, ‘will you shut up.’

  ‘I know, it’s hard to stomach.’

  ‘So we stop it.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Yes. Somehow. You told Romero you don’t like being used. Well, it’s gone way beyond your hurt pride. We’ve been inextricably linked to the Wise family ever since Prudence talked to us in the Eliott Hotel. She’s dead; Charlie and Adele are in deep trouble. We’ve got to find them, and save them from those two thugs. If we succeed, we’ll also find the diamonds, and the airport killer. We can wrap this up, but we’ve got to move, and fast. There’s no time to lose.’

  ‘What if I’m wrong?’ Calum cut in. ‘What if Wise had been lying from the start? If he has, then he’s no better than Creeny and we leave him to his fate because he’s a thief and a killer.’

  ‘Jack,’ Sian said curtly, ‘what’s your impression?’

  ‘Of Charlie?’

  ‘Has Calum got a point? Or what? Come on, let’s have your thoughts.’

  I frowned, remembered the two of them in North Wales, Charlie and Adele, looking sad and forlorn in their Mediterranean togs while their daughter lay cold and still in a mortuary and outside Bryn Aur the wind and rain lashed the bleak mountain slopes.

  ‘I think Charlie has been out of his depth from the moment he retired and moved to Gib,’ I said. ‘Well, he told us all about it, didn’t he? Set off south with high hopes, and, keen to make an impression, he eventually got in with the wrong crowd and found himself swimming with sharks. Cunning bastards, crooked bastards, well able to manipulate him, to use him. Bernie Rickman polished his ego, told him what a clever lad he was and Charlie suddenly found himself skipper of a bloody big yacht, cruising the Med with Adele – only, after a while, he was shocked to discover that there was a price to pay. But by then, of course, he was in too deep. I don’t know what he was involved in, probably small-time drug smuggling, almost certainly people smuggling – taking half a dozen illegal immigrants at a time from Africa across to Italy or France.’

  ‘So in that respect, at least,’ Calum said, ‘he became no better than Rickman.’

  ‘In the eyes of the law, that’s true, but to Charlie’s credit the luxury lifestyle palled and he became sickened by the illegal activities. He couldn’t take any more, so he began working on a plan, a way of escape.’

  ‘I think that’s a reasonable assessment,’ Sian said. ‘We know what he did, trumpeting that trip to Tangier when he had no intention of going all the way. And if you’re right, and he’d been working on that idea for some time, then he’s telling the truth, isn’t he? He has to be. He was far too involved in a very risky venture of his own – engineering his and Adele’s escape to a cleaner life – to pay any attention to newspaper reports of a robbery in Liverpool. He knew nothing about the diamonds.’

  Was she right? Could I trust her judgement? I was pretty sure I could, because she was at the very least echoing my own feelings. Yet even as Sian’s closing words told us emphatically that we were committed to saving Charlie and Adele, beneath us the deck tilted, rocked, settled.

  We had been boarded.

  I looked at Sian. She’d slopped water from her glass, not from the canoe’s gentle movement, but from her start of alarm. We had, after all, been discussing the worst kinds of thugs and now a stranger had come calling.

  I was out of my seat. Calum remained horizontal, but was no longer relaxed. I looked questioningly at Sian. Still curled up, and with a damp patch on her thigh, she spread her hands in a ‘search me’ gesture.

  ‘Whoever has just stepped on board,’ Calum said helpfully, ‘is not acting furtively.’

  ‘Difficult to do with success,’ I said, ‘when the floor you’re walking on is floating on water.’

  And then the saloon door clicked open, swung wide, and Reg Fitz-Norton strolled in with worn brogues poking from beneath cavalry twill trousers, a paisley cravat tucked carelessly into the fraying collar of his white shirt and a nervous smile on his face.

  Twenty

  ‘I’ve got myself in a spot of bother,’ Reg said, ‘and, frankly, you’re making things a hell of a sight worse.’

  Sian, deciding that as her leg was damp she might as well be wet all over, had kissed Reg, twiddled his ponytail and gone for a shower. Calum had yet to move. I was trying to look intelligent.

  ‘You’ve lost me, Reg,’ I said. ‘It was easy to work out that you’d trodden on a few toes, but are you saying the push on Eleanor that led to her fall and a painful broken ankle was a warning of more to come unless you…?’

  ‘Unless I hand something over, old boy. At a financial loss, which I’m supposed to bear. Trouble is, I no longer have it.’

  ‘Explain. No, I’ll do it for you. You’ve been dabbling in dodgy art again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘At Bernie Rickman’s expense, which is what he hinted at. Fingers burnt, and so on. I gather he had a deal going and you snuck in and snaffled the goods. Sold them on, at a profit.’

  ‘Eloquent, accurate, but unhelpful. What I want to know is what you’re going to do.’

  ‘Nothing, yet, because I can’t see how I wouldn’t be making that situation a hell of a sight worse. Or worse in any respect. I’m not involved, Reg.’

  ‘You don’t go poking an already angry bear with a sharp stick, Jack.’

  Calum stirred. I’d feared he was dead.

  He said, ‘You know, I do believe Reg is asking us to lay off Rickman.’

  ‘I am,’ Reg said. ‘Rickman when angry is dangerous. Anyone in the firing line is at risk. So I want you to forget all about those diamonds. If you back off, Rickman will go off the boil.’

  ‘But Rickman,’ I said, ‘wants us to find them.’

  ‘Not any more he doesn’t, old boy. I told you he’s fuming, and I must say he has good reason. If you remember, the last time you were on Sea Wind you accused him of stealing those diamonds.’

  ‘Indeed I did. But during that talk his frightening description of what was about to happen in Liverpool pretty well ruled that out; his men were still over there, and they were furiously following up an anonymous tip-off. It was a good one. And if he no longer needs my help, it’s because Rickman believes he’s found the diamonds.’

  Reg’s eyes narrowed. He looked puzzled. ‘If he has,’ he said, ‘it’ll be a miracle that could well save my bacon.’

  ‘Why a miracle?’

  Reg hesitated. ‘Well, because I thought Charlie Wise had those diamonds – and hasn’t he gone missing again?’

  ‘That was very short-lived.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Reg said absently, and I could see his mind working furiously.

  ‘Reg, Reg, come on now, you said it yourself, this could work in your favour,’ Calum said. ‘If Rickman’s got his hands on the diamonds, surely your troubles are over? Hell, he might be overcome with emotion, become tearfully philanthropic and give you a hefty cut.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Let bygones be bygones. Honour among thieves and all that rot.’

  Reg rose to his feet.

  ‘A deal done honourably is not theft,’ he said stiffly, ‘even if the goods in question are—’

  ‘Questionable?’

  ‘Have a dodgy provenance,’ Reg said, and was unable to suppress a grin.

  ‘Heaven forbid that should be said about your artistic fiddles,’ I said, also getting to my feet. ‘Anyway, Reg, if Rickman has found those diamonds then it’s over, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not quite,’ he said, ‘because unfortunately his making a profit from stolen jewels won’t get him off my back. However, it does change everything. I asked you to forget those diamonds, but if Rickman has them then it’s your d
uty to report the matter to the police.’

  ‘What a brilliant idea. With Rickman safe behind bars, that transaction you finagled—’

  ‘Handled with honour—’

  ‘—remains a done deal and you and Eleanor can ride off into a Mediterranean sunset.’

  ‘Do your best, old boy. Talk to Romero. Eleanor does quite often; they’re close friends.’

  There was a heavy silence when Reg had gone. The canoe rocked gently when he stepped down onto the concrete, just as it had when he’d come aboard. Again it settled. There was the faintest lapping of ripples against stone, against fibreglass hulls, then all was still. I looked at Calum.

  ‘What the hell was all that about?’

  ‘If it’s any consolation, I don’t think it means she’s having an affair.’

  I grinned. ‘Might not be that bad an idea, though,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t know if he’s realized he let it slip, but Reg Fitz-Norton must have been on board Sea Wind when Sian and I were talking to Rickman.’

  ‘We didn’t see him, so how do you know?’

  Sian had come back in time to catch what I’d said, smelling of steamy soap, swathed in a cuddly towelling robe and rubbing her blonde hair into tumbling disarray with a big fluffy towel.

  ‘He knew we’d accused Rickman of stealing the famous stones. And I remember, when I walked out while you were by the rail phoning Calum, I heard him calling to someone. There was an answering voice, male, by the sound of it. Reg’s mistake tells me it was him.’

  ‘That’s like someone saying, when they hear a man talking in darkest Africa, oh, gosh, that must be Desmond Tutu.’ She draped the towel over her folded arms, shook her head so that her golden hair fluffed out damply, and perched on the edge of a chair. ‘If Reg is in deep schtook with Rickman, why wouldn’t he be in there grovelling?’

  ‘Aha, so that’s what that wee diplomat’s been doing all his working life,’ Calum said.

  ‘Well, politicians and the like call it by another name,’ I said, ‘but favours are always bought in one way or another so there must be a lot of crawling. The only person who knew Charlie was going to be using that flat in Booker Avenue was the owner, Eleanor, my dearest mother. She told Reg, of course, and now I know he was on Sea Wind I’m wondering if he thought of his own troubles and saw an opportunity to buy off Rickman.’