Cobweb

by Margaret Duffy

  ‘Going somewhere?’ called Rex King, adding, ‘I knew you’d come this way.’

  He was alone and now approached us to lounge against the wall of a lean-to building of some kind that we had entered. It was open at one side, fronting on to a yard. He motioned with the gun in his hand that we were to stand to one side.

  The door at the bottom of the stairs was still holding.

  I started to obey the instruction while observing that Patrick had his right hand behind his back and a quite crazed look in his eyes. Another sideways glance told me he had begun to follow my move and then he side-stepped, and with that classic sideways sweep of his arm, threw the knife.

  The gun clattered to the ground, the blade having gone into King’s wrist and out through the other side.

  Patrick went up to him, King gawping with shock.

  ‘If I pull it out you’ll probably bleed to death,’ Patrick said. ‘I’d actually rather have it back right now too.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ King choked.

  ‘I would,’ Patrick whispered. ‘For Derek Harmsworth, John Gray and everyone else you’ve murdered. What have you done with DS Erin Melrose?’

  ‘Nothing,’ the other protested. ‘Who’s she?’

  Patrick took hold of the haft of the knife.

  ‘God, I haven’t touched her!’ King howled. ‘We – we just gave her a little tap on the head when we found her snooping around in my private apartment. She’s in room number 89 – quite, quite all right.’

  Patrick pulled out the knife and King, Brocklebank, the bastard, fainted.

  ‘I didn’t think it had punctured any major blood vessels,’ Patrick muttered, gazing clinically at the wound.

  From deep within the building there was a thunderous bang. The door behind us blew open and a shockwave like a volcanic eruption hit us. There was a revolting smell, like a burnt stockpot. We jumped to one side just in time as a huge dust cloud poured out. In it, judging by the sound as they landed on the ground, were fragments of glass.

  I did not care if Brocklebank bled to death. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked Patrick, stupidly I knew, seeing, as he came over to me, the burns and the bruise on his jaw livid in the half-light. No, of course he wasn’t OK, swaying on his feet and half off his head with pain.

  ‘You’re the one with the black eye,’ he pointed out with the hint of a smile.

  In MI5 days we got used to the hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing of policemen – especially our friend DCI James Carrick – following our efforts to apprehend lawbreakers, often, I agree, resulting in some collateral damage; but, strangely, Michael Greenway proved to be an exception. He did establish to his satisfaction, there and then, before he would even permit a medic, or anyone else, near Patrick, that a jubilant King had stressed to him that there was no one left in the hotel above the old cellar kitchen who could come to his aid and, potentially, have been killed in the explosion. Greenway also ascertained for himself that the accommodation section had indeed been well out of range of the subterranean blast, as Patrick insisted to him that it was, and I did not hold this mild ruthlessness against him: I could understand it. Nor did I mind – and the timing of all that followed was not Greenway’s fault – when the SOCA man dashed off, upon learning of her incarceration, to release Fred Knightly’s errant Detective Sergeant from her room 89 prison. He appeared with her, wanly on his arm, just as the press arrived, having broken through some kind of cordon; and before the more responsible sections of the media reported an accurate account, although not mentioning our names, Greenway was credited with having raided the place, 007-style, single-handed.

  ‘But how did you manage to turn most of the gas taps on without them noticing?’ I asked the real perpetrator.

  It was quite a while later that night and Patrick had been dosed, his burns dressed and had found his jacket, shirt and tie, not bothering with the latter. And right now, fresh from making a statement, he was rewarding himself – and Greenway, who he had just spotted coming in – with a very large tot of exceedingly expensive single malt from the hotel bar. All guests had been evacuated and there were so many police and firefighters in the place it was like Harrods’ January sale.

  ‘There were only seven of his mobsters left upright by the time they got me down to the kitchen,’ he replied, putting down the tumblers on a table and sprawling on a sofa. ‘Of the first four who came into the room we were taken to I put two out of action for long enough, another ran off never to return and I managed to lop off one of the fingers of his chum, who I understand is in hospital having it sewn back on before being arrested.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Greenway, seating himself. ‘Cheers. The bastard owes us a few of these.’

  All I had wanted was a glass of cold water. While awaiting Patrick’s reappearance I had endeavoured to repair, one-handed, some of the personal ravages of the night’s work in a ground-floor ladies’ cloakroom, and then exerted huge charm on a young fireman, who went down and found my dust-covered shoes and bag for me. There had even been time for a short nap on a sofa in a lounge next to the bar.

  ‘I came round on the stone stairs,’ Patrick was saying. ‘It’s difficult to carry someone in a cramped place like that and one of them was going backwards holding my feet.’

  Greenway bellowed with laughter, knowing what was coming.

  ‘So a shove here and there and a bit of yanking and overbalancing and suddenly everyone went down a lot quicker than they’d anticipated, me somehow on top with a fairly soft landing. By this time Brocklebank –’ Here he broke off and looked questioningly at Greenway.

  ‘Yes, it’s him all right,’ Greenway said. ‘Several scars, old bullet wounds, made identification easy.’

  ‘Good. Anyway, Brocklebank was raging; I played dead after we’d all bowled down the stairs and the ones without concussion or broken ankles hauled me into the kitchen and left me on the floor, then had to listen to a tirade from him telling them how bloody useless they all were. It went on for quite a while and I started to crawl back towards the door, getting up on my knees to turn on, just a little, every gas tap I could find. There were several at the sides of the room on water boilers, an old copper and a row of hotplates. Brocklebank didn’t really stop shouting. Then they realized I was getting away.’

  ‘What did they want to know?’ I asked. I am a writer; I could put flesh on the bones of his account, insert what he was omitting, see the mindless brutality, witness the kicking, hear the shouted obscenities.

  ‘Whom I worked for, where I was based, what I knew, police tactics on serious crime – all that kind of thing. I didn’t tell them and made a lot of noise hoping someone would hear me.’

  ‘I did,’ I said. I could still hear his screams.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said, succeeding in giving me a big smile this time. ‘Honest.’

  I said, ‘Several people witnessed that fracas just inside the entrance. What on earth were they told to prevent them from calling the police?’

  ‘Someone did,’ Greenway said. ‘I understand this lady wasn’t sure what to do, as they’d been assured that the hotel management had already dialled 999. A squad car arrived and the crew was told the whole incident had been dealt with, having been a private argument. Apparently, some chap not connected to the hotel was punched on the nose and there was blood everywhere, but no one seems to know who he was or where he’s gone.’

  I owned up.

  ‘Du Norde!’ Greenway exclaimed. ‘Isn’t he out on police bail?’

  ‘He tried to warn Brocklebank about us,’ I said.

  Greenway had caught sight of my right hand, which by now was colouring up nicely. ‘Get this man of yours to show you how to use your knuckles without wrecking yourself. Du Norde’s obviously another maggot in this rotten apple, then.’ He chuckled. ‘I reckon we’ll find him in the nearest A and E.’

  ‘I stabbed a man in the kitchen too,’ I said, feeling shaky again at the memory, ‘– in the dark. He grabbed me when I was trying to cut the
ropes tying Patrick to the table.’

  Greenway surveyed me keenly. ‘Have you made a statement?’

  ‘No, so far no one seems to think I was involved to that extent.’

  He said, ‘There were three bodies in the cellar, two burned almost beyond recognition. But one seemed to have escaped the blast – it might have been because he was already lying on the floor – with a knife wound in the chest, and he’s already been identified. His name was Ricky Blears. He’d been lying low since he escaped from a prison van eighteen months ago with the help of cronies, during which a prison officer was shot and killed. Blears had been sentenced to life for murdering his one-time girlfriend and her two children by pouring petrol through the letter box of their house and setting it alight. Shed no tears, Ingrid; he would have delighted in killing you too and up until you spoke it had been assumed he had died by the hand of one of Brocklebank’s hoodlums as a result of mistaken identity in the dark. I think that, right now, it can be left like that.’

  I suddenly realized that Erin Montrose was hovering nearby.

  ‘I just wanted to thank you, sir,’ she said shyly to Greenway after we had called her over.

  ‘This is the man to thank,’ he said, indicating Patrick. ‘He blew the bloody place up and caught Brocklebank.’

  ‘Erin caught Brocklebank,’ Patrick corrected. ‘But ask her how she did it tomorrow. Meanwhile, I suggest you take her home.’

  Greenway did not appear to mind being given these orders.

  Erin, it transpired, had tramped the streets, pored over records and worked long night hours in order to track down Brocklebank, but to no avail. Then, one evening, she had gone to the country hotel for a meal with her parents and, like Patrick, seen the photograph of the man calling himself Rex King. The board with staff details had apparently only been put up that week. In her view its existence demonstrated Brocklebank’s utter stupidity and also his contempt for the police, and this, of course, made her eventual triumph all the sweeter. All she’d had to do at the time was prove her suspicions and for that she’d needed an excuse to go behind the scenes there – hence the job application. When she hadn’t even got an interview, she’d made the mistake of using stealth but not telling colleagues her plans for fear of being prevented from carrying on. This, in a way, had been Knightly’s fault for forbidding her to investigate.

  I thought there was also truth in my own theory that, above all else, Brocklebank had desperately wanted admiration, especially from those he was trying to emulate, the serious career criminals. That he was now almost certainly a laughing stock in those quarters I know made Patrick’s quite serious burns and the emergence of more bruises than he had anticipated a little more bearable.

  ‘I hope Erin’s not in trouble for going it alone,’ I said to Patrick the next morning at our digs.

  ‘Well, yes, she is,’ he answered, ‘for the simple reason that the whole thing could have ended in tears. If we hadn’t found that letter, they might have been trawling for her body in the river as well of that of the bloke who worked in the nick’s canteen and murdered Smith. Actually, I’m finding that one hard to swallow. Just because some guy’s a nosy devil and a snout for a crook it doesn’t mean he’s necessarily going to commit murder for a few extra oncers. I’d put money on him somehow having sneaked Brocklebank into the nick, who then did the dirty deed.’

  Months later, during Brocklebank’s trail and under cross-examination, he admitted to the killing.

  With suspected structural damage to parts of the old building the country-manor hotel remained closed. A cache of weapons had been found in Brocklebank’s private apartments, and, in a safe, a considerable number of counterfeit fifty-pound notes. Thrown into a cupboard in the same room Scenes of Crime officers had come upon a collection of grim ‘mementoes’, possessions of his murder victims. Brocklebank had shown us Derek Harmsworth’s watch, which he had put back there, and together with several other items there was John Gray’s computer, smashed, a name bracelet that had belonged to the man who had worked in the canteen and whose body was soon found jammed on a weir, even an elephant-hair bracelet that was eventually traced back to Daniel Smith. This was not the first time Patrick and I have come across this keeping of trophies and, whatever psychologists call it these days, in my view those who practise it are criminally insane. Another thing to come out in Brocklebank’s trial was that he used to sometimes go to the cupboard and caress and talk to the things that were hidden there. He said that they reminded him how clever and important he was.

  Mad? Yes, raving mad.

  Fifteen

  A week later, after we had both ‘got our breath back’, as Patrick put it, at home and spent time with the children, we returned to Woodhill, as we felt it was important to visit Vera Harmsworth. At this stage it was not possible to return her husband’s watch as it was a court exhibit, but at least we could show her a photograph of it and promise eventual restitution. We would not mention the hoard of other possessions of murder victims or the find of the clothing that had been dumped by Daniel Smith in the garden where he had worked at Buckton Manor, the bloodstains on which DNA testing had proved to be the DCI’s.

  Although aware that Mrs Harmsworth would learn these more distressing details when the case came to court, we also kept to ourselves the circumstances of his death. Brocklebank had confessed to the killing and was taunting those questioning him with his skill in outwitting the police, bragging how he had told Jo-Jo to lure ‘the old fool’ to his restaurant early one evening with promises of information. It had been simple, he bragged, to get him into a back room, overpower him and force a lot of whisky down his throat. He had then been rendered unconscious and a few hours later been driven in his own car by Brocklebank to the bridge over the motorway, where he had killed the DCI with a single stab to the neck in a manner that he had thought would remain undetected. In doing so he had bungled it slightly and been covered in blood when the knife had punctured a vein. Then, with Daniel Smith’s help – he and Brocklebank went back many years, apparently, but Smith remained in ignorance of the other’s new identity – he had pushed the car through the gap in the railings.

  It was eventually discovered that Brocklebank had lived a double life for almost ten years and had not even told his brother how he had been squirrelling money away from various ventures, mostly illegal, but also from buying and selling property and dealing in stocks and shares. It transpired that he had then gone on to win a stake in the hotel playing poker and subsequently had gradually bought out the other stakeholders, most of whom, one imagines, saw the cut of Brocklebank’s jib and were glad to take the cash and run before they became enmired in questionable dealings.

  On the way to Woodhill we met Michael Greenway in London for lunch. As we might have predicted, this proved to be not a sushi restaurant, or somewhere serving miniscule works of edible art, but a pub off Wardour Street where what was on offer was home-made, the choices being steak-and-kidney pie or chicken-and-ham pie, both with heaps of freshly cooked vegetables and gallons of gravy. Patrick also can tuck into this kind of fare even when the temperature is eighty in the shade, which it was, but at least they did children’s portions.

  ‘My treat,’ said Greenway expansively, going on to say, before we could thank him, ‘Fred Knightly’s retiring – did you know that?’

  We said we did not.

  ‘I think they call it plea-bargaining in the States,’ he said with a laugh. ‘OK, I’ll sod off for good if you don’t take me to the cleaners for my sheer ineptitude and bad practice.’

  ‘Good,’ Patrick commented.

  ‘Are you mended?’ he was asked.

  ‘The burns have almost healed.’

  ‘Have another week off. No, don’t argue; I don’t use people badly and I never have.’

  I said, ‘Any more news on the Giddings investigation? – although I know it’s not really your case.’

  ‘Brinkley’s lot are still going ahead with the guy they’ve charged. He’
s not a well man, though; drugs have caught up with him. He’s in hospital – might not even make it to the dock.’

  ‘Better and better for John, then,’ Patrick said. ‘Case closed all nice and neat.’

  ‘You really can’t stand him, can you?’

  ‘The feeling would appear to be mutual, but we used to get on fine. Starting to have his hair blow-dried seems to have affected what goes on inside his head. At one time he’d never have tolerated someone like Hicks working for him.’

  ‘Who’s soon facing a disciplinary inquiry, and that’s all I know. But the man’s finished in the police – especially after the business of the photo. I can’t think Brinkley’s going to love you any more for that.’

  ‘I want to know what happened to Erin Melrose,’ I said.

  Greenway grinned. ‘She got the kind of carpeting from on high that’s both a reprimand and a commendation for good work. It wouldn’t have looked too good in the media either, would it, if it had got out she’d been hauled over the coals? And …’ Here, amazingly, he went a little pink. ‘We’re moving in together, actually.’

  We offered them both our best wishes.

  ‘I got a rocket from my mother,’ Patrick went on to say. ‘She wanted to know how I’d managed to get myself pictured on the front of the gutter press without my shirt and looking as mazed as though I’d come straight from an orgy. It took a bit of explaining.’

  Fortunately, the burns had not been visible in the photograph and Patrick had had no desire to tell her of torture.

  It was quite late by the time we had been to see Vera Harmsworth, stayed for a cup of tea, undertaken a little shopping and then, at my suggestion, attended a concert given in Woodhill Town Hall.