And in the sudden silence we both heard the unmistakable sound of a car bouncing across the stone bridge and crunching up onto the yard.
DS Willie Vine, the Merseyside police officer with literary aspirations, was prowling my living-room elegantly, somehow managing to avoid tripping on the Indian rugs scattered across the vast slate floor while sweeping his gaze along the packed bookshelves. DI Mike Haggard had flung himself onto the settee and was watching his detective sergeant with scorn. His jacket was open, white shirt crumpled, tie drooping from the unbuttoned collar. The usual king-sized cigarette was in his big fist, the usual glower darkening his broad face.
Calum was in the kitchen. The sound of water gushing and the rattle of percolator and mugs told me he was brewing coffee.
‘Good news or bad? Which d’you want first?’ Haggard said, switching his gaze to me.
I was standing with my back to the stone inglenook. The pale green curtains were moving like gossamer in the draught from the open window. I was soaking up sights and sounds: the oak tree with its yellowing leaves beginning to fall like weightless petals in the sunlight, the stone and gravel slope down to the old humped bridge, the hiss and tumble of the unseen waters of Afon Ogwen; looking, listening, relishing with a kind of grim determination the calm I knew was about to be shattered….
I heaved a sigh. ‘Better make it the good.’
‘Last night, some time after midnight, that expensive toy you drive was seen up a muddy track behind a house owned by Joe Creeney.’
‘He was doing time,’ Vine said without turning. ‘Fifteen years for manslaughter.’
‘Take note of that “was”,’ Haggard said. ‘It was definitely your car behind his house, and the timing made it a couple of hours after he broke out of HMP Altcourse – Walton gaol to you – where he was seen getting in a metallic silver saloon. Could’ve been a Quattro.’ He leered.
‘If it was, and it was outside the prison, it wasn’t mine. And isn’t that the bad news?’
‘The bad news,’ Haggard said, ‘is half an hour after you drove off, Joe Creeney murdered his wife.’
‘So where were you,’ Willie Vine said, still examining the books, ‘between ten and ten-thirty last night when young Joe was going over the wall?’
‘Kibitzing. Watching the poker players in the Sleepy Pussy night-club, Brighton-le-Sands.’
‘Bollocks,’ Haggard growled. ‘You think a straight flush is a bog without a bend, two pair something you see bouncin’ around on a couple of page three birds.’
‘A phone call will provide proof,’ I said, ‘so stop showing off.’
Willie Vine chuckled appreciatively as he came away from the shelves, but there was a touch of steel in usually mild eyes.
‘What about dropping Creeney off at his house? Are you admitting that?’
‘I took a man called Joe home some time after midnight. His house was in Calderstones.’ I lifted my shoulders in a slow shrug, at the same time pulling a ‘you tell me’ kind of face.
‘The neighbour who bubbled you lives in a house on the other side of the lane behind Beech Crescent,’ Haggard said. He shook his head. ‘He was out in the dark lookin’ for his black dog, if you can believe it – apparently it gets out several times a night, his wife was out chasin’ it earlier…. Anyway, while he was usin’ a considerate suburban whisper to call this black mutt he saw headlights, poked his head over the conifers and got the car number. When his wife eventually phoned in – too fuckin’ late to stop a murder – your name came up on the PNC. So … now you know as much as we do. The man you took home was Joe Creeney. He must’ve got in the house through a back door, and when the uniforms broke down the front door his wife was hanging from the fuckin’ chandelier – or as good as.’ He shook his head. ‘What the fuck’s goin’ on, Ill Wind?’
He’d used the name he’d given to me during the Gault case. I thought that might be a good sign, a deliberate softening, a hint that he and Vine were resisting the urge to clap me in irons. I moved away from the inglenook and dropped into a chair and the DI flicked his unfinished cigarette onto the logs in the dog grate. Calum ambled through from the kitchen, fingers poked through handles, a bottle under one arm. He put two steaming mugs and the bottle of brandy on the Ercol coffee table, handed a mug to me, sat down like a reclining telegraph pole and crossed his long legs at the ankles.
Willie Vine carried his coffee across to the window and stood gazing out at the view.
‘First, what exactly is this?’ I said. ‘Off the record, two cops socializing, or an official visit with me being very careful what I say?’
‘Day off,’ Haggard said. ‘There’ll be a welcome in the hillsides – and DS Vine’s doin’ the driving,’ and he looked pointedly at the bottle.
‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ I said, leaning forward to splash fiery liquid into his mug. I looked at Vine. He shook his head. I said, ‘The barman in the Sleepy Pussy got a phone call. I was at the bar. He told me there was man called Joe whose car had been stolen, and could I take him home. I said OK. I found him waiting in a shop doorway on Breeze Hill.’
Willie Vine turned around, back to the window. He was frowning.
‘That’s what I thought,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t make sense. If the man I picked up was Joe Creeney and he was on his way home to Calderstones after breaking out of Walton, what was he doing on Breeze Hill? He was the wrong end of Liverpool, miles off his route. And why arrange to be picked up by me anyway, if a car was waiting for him outside the prison? That car could have taken him home.’
‘But why go home anyway?’ Vine said thoughtfully.
‘Exactly. That’s the first place your lot would look.’
‘It’s obvious why,’ Haggard said, splashing brandy into his mug with a defiant glance at Vine. ‘He had unfinished business with his wife.’
‘So tell me more,’ I said. ‘What unfinished business? How did she die? What gave him away?’
‘Lorraine Creeney heard a news flash sayin’ Joe had got out, and phoned the police for protection,’ Haggard said. ‘She went to bed, we put a patrol car out front—’
‘Joe Creeney told me he was expected,’ I cut in. ‘If Lorraine wanted protection, who was expecting Joe?’
‘She was expectin’ him, but she wasn’t puttin’ out the welcome mat – she wanted him kept away from the house.’ Haggard shrugged. ‘Anyway, some time after twelve your car was spotted up that track. A little after one there was a noise inside the house. Uniformed officers hammered on the door, got no answer and forced their way in. Joe Creeney was in the hall with a decorator’s ladder. It’s a fancy house with a wide hall and the stairs go up, turn on a small landin’ then double back to reach the first floor. That leaves an open stairwell. Joe had tied a nice, bright orange rope to the first floor banister so it hung down in the well – between the stairs and the living-room wall. The way it looked he must’ve forced her up the ladder, put the noose around her neck with just the right amount of slack in the rope, then kicked the ladder away.’ His grin was chilling. ‘When the uniforms got to it the body was still warm, the muscles twitchin’. According to the doc, she died at one o’clock, minutes before she was found. Creeney got it right: her neck was broken, death was instantaneous.’
‘Unlike the preparation.’
Haggard’s look was sour. ‘It took time to set it up, and I’m bettin’ he didn’t hurry. There’s a connectin’ door to the garage, the rope and ladder must’ve been in there.’
‘All that going on, the police outside and nobody heard anything?’
‘The man’s wife was in the house, she was livin’ on her nerves,’ Haggard said, suddenly enraged. ‘There was no noise, then there was. Christ, she was a decoratin’ fanatic, passin’ the time while Joe was in nick by remodelling the house. She could’ve come downstairs in her nightie and started rearrangin’ the furniture, or splashin’ silk emulsion on the fuckin’ walls.’ He shook his head, fumbled for a cigarette, changed his mind and got
to his feet.
‘Your mistake,’ I said, ‘was in watching the front door but not the back. ‘Creeney told me he was going in through patio doors that had been left unlocked. If he could go in that way, someone else – the killer – could have got out.’
‘No.’ Haggard shook his head. ‘He got in that way, but then he must’ve played safe. Those doors were locked from the inside.’
‘And before you jump,’ Willie Vine said, ‘the back door leading out of the kitchen was also locked with the key on the inside, as was the front door.’
‘Windows?’
Haggard sneered. ‘The place was sealed like a fuckin’ tomb. But just so you’ll be happy, I can tell you the back garden and the lane were checked. It was raining. Great time for leavin’ tracks. Your tyre marks were there, we could see where someone got out of the car and slipped on the grass, and his footsteps were clear all the way across the lawn and onto the paved patio. His footsteps. Goin’ just the one way. And that’s it. Nobody else went in or out the back way.’
‘If Joe Creeney is going to wriggle out of this one,’ Willie Vine said, ‘there’s a locked-room mystery to solve. That doesn’t happen outside mystery novels. John Dickson Carr wrote a lengthy dissertation on the subject in The Hollow Man – published in the USA as The Three Coffins.’ He flashed a glance at Haggard as the DI rolled his eyes. ‘According to Carr, in Beech Crescent we’re dealing with a hermetically sealed room – or as good as – in which various events have or haven’t happened. Like, there was no murderer because the death was suicide, or an accident. Or the murder was committed by someone outside the room. Or there was a time element, the murder was committed earlier or later or there was some other twist—’
‘Yeah, an’ that’s all clever stuff for those who go through life with their nose stuck in a book,’ Haggard said, cutting in rudely, ‘but it’s not relevant. It’s a locked room all right, but there’s no bloody mystery because the only one locked inside is the killer. With the implements he used to commit murder. And the killer’s in custody. His name’s Joe Creeney.’
‘Exactly the point I’m making,’ Vine said. ‘Locked-room mysteries don’t happen outside the pages of fiction. If Ill Wind’s thinking of taking this on, he’s wasting his time.’
‘Yes, and there’s something else, isn’t there?’ I said, looking at Haggard.
The DI took a breath, puffed his cheeks as he let it go.
‘When Creeney ran out the door, he had blood on his face. He’d taken a knock on the snout. Later, smears of blood were found on Lorraine Creeney’s elbow. Conclusion? She’d put up a fight.’
‘And the blood on her elbow was fresh?’
‘Sticky. And it matches Joe Creeney’s group: B Positive.’
‘DNA?’
‘Awaiting results.’ Haggard grinned. ‘I’m taking bets.’
‘Aye, well, all this erudite reasoning obviously leads to just the one conclusion,’ Calum Wick said. ‘It pains me to say it, but for once the police have got it absolutely right. Nevertheless, I am extremely puzzled. If it really has to be Joe Creeney, what was wrong with a nice clean kitchen knife through the heart? Why all that elaborate bloody palaver with ladders and ropes?’
‘Who knows?’ Haggard said, his back to the inglenook, hands thrust in his pockets. ‘He’d spent a year in the nick. Maybe he wanted her to suffer before she died.’
‘Surely that would only be true,’ I said, ‘if she put him there?’
There was silence for a few minutes while four minds lingered on how well he had succeeded if suffering had been his aim. Haggard and Vine were experienced police officers who would have no difficulty imagining the terror that woman must have felt as the man who had broken out of gaol crept into the house, bound and gagged her and rigged a home-made gallows as she watched in horror. My own thoughts were hovering somewhere between gnawing guilt and intense anger at my stupidity. Without a second thought I had taken a man I didn’t know to an address he gave me and watched him sneak in the back way. All right, so I’d had some misgivings – but I’d failed to act and now a woman was dead. And then realization kicked in.
‘I don’t know what part I’m supposed to be playing in this,’ I said, ‘but it’s possible I was set up two weeks ago.’
Willie Vine had come lazily away from the window. Haggard was managing to look both bored and impatient. With the two detectives up on their feet I was feeling crowded. I stood up, ignoring Calum Wick’s amused, knowing glance.
‘We were here in the kitchen talking,’ I said, ‘the day after Danny Maguire and Georgie were taken away in handcuffs. I got a phone call. It was from a man interested in toy soldiers, sets of Papal Guards I don’t produce. He was willing to commission them, exclusive designs, one offs. I arranged to meet him.’
‘In the Lazy Moggy,’ Haggard said, and grinned at Vine.
‘Right. I went there at nine-thirty. He didn’t turn up.…’
‘What a surprise,’ Vine said softly.
‘… and just after twelve the barman took the phone call that sent me out in the rain looking for a man called Joe.’
‘Forget it,’ Haggard said.
‘No. It explains my link to Creeney, and raises important questions.’
‘Not about the murder. That’s my priority, and as things stand it’s over. Joe Creeney broke out of gaol and murdered his wife. Case closed, all over bar the shoutin’ – and maybe findin’ out who got Creeney out of gaol – and now here’s you flyin’ off on a fuckin’ tangent. You were involved, but on the sidelines, and if someone’s got it in for you—’
The phone cut him off. The cordless handset was on the coffee table. Ignoring it, I excused myself and raced through the kitchen to the office. I flung myself into the swivel chair and grabbed the phone.
‘Jack Scott.’
‘Good morning, Mr Scott. My name is Stephanie Grey. I’m a partner in the firm of Knott, Knott and Arbuthnot, solicitors. We’ve been asked by Caroline Spackman to represent her brother, Joe Creeney – if needed, and perhaps temporarily, but there are … complications that need looking into.’ There was a pause. ‘Your name came up.’
‘I’m honoured, but puzzled. I’ve already spoken to the police—’
‘You have!’
‘Mm.’ I didn’t bother explaining, because I couldn’t see where this was going. ‘Joe Creeney escaped from gaol and was caught by uniformed police officers, in his house, alongside the body of his murdered wife. That sounds pretty straightforward.’
‘If he did it.’
‘There’s no other explanation.’ I hesitated, then took the plunge. ‘You’ll find this out anyway, so it might as well be from me. I was there, Ms Grey—’
‘Stephanie.’
‘Right. Well, I dropped Creeney off in the lane at the back of his house. He told me he was going in through open patio doors. Within half an hour his wife was dead. Seconds after that he was caught holding the ladder used in the … the hanging.’
‘Caroline is quite sure Joe did not murder his wife.’
I took a deep breath. ‘What does Joe say?’
‘Joe Creeney is in no position to say anything, Jack. When caught he tried to escape, and was … restrained. He’s unconscious, in Liverpool Royal Infirmary, and the signs are not good. He can’t confess to murder, or protest his innocence, because he can’t talk and is unlikely to remember what happened when he can – and that, really, is where you come in.
THREE
By the time I came through from the office, Haggard and Vine were already bouncing over the bridge in the DS’s old green Mondeo. Fading exhaust was drifting in the sunlight and, as the roar of the engine became a distant drone, I walked with Calum down my sloping yard to the workshop. A gift shop in Nova Scotia wanted five sets of kilted Black Watch grenadiers circa 1775. We cleaned the flash from thirty castings to make them ready for painting, popped them in a box lined with tissue and set off for Liverpool.
My appointment with the solicitor was
at three o’clock. I dropped Calum at Grassendale with the raw castings, drove into town and parked in Paradise Street then made my way to Cheapside and the offices of Knott, Knott and Arbuthnot.
This was one of those business premises where time is measured by the slow swings of a long-case clock’s brass pendulum, and hoary solicitors already crumbling to dust fight like tigers to keep away the man with the scythe. I remember walking into a bank in Kirkwall on Mainland Orkney and talking to the cashier across a polished counter without bandit screens while rubbing a fingertip absently over black stains around recesses where inkwells once lodged. I had the same feeling here. My hand caressed polished banisters bearing ancient scars, my shoes slapped on brown linoleumed stairs under which ancient treads creaked and, in the upstairs corridor, I knocked on a deep-panelled door of immense weight that opened on brass hinges to admit me to a room where the opposing forces of mustiness and beeswax had long since declared a truce.
‘Jack Scott.’ Stephanie Grey was smiling as she came around the desk with pale hand extended. ‘For Joe’s sake, I’m delighted you could make it.’
I returned her smile, lightly squeezed fingers like smooth, cool bone.
‘If you don’t mind, I’ll reserve judgement and tell you if I’m pleased to be here when I’ve heard the full story.’
‘Full doesn’t come into it; there isn’t one. Just a conviction that something is amiss.’
She was as slim and straight as a witch’s broom, with black skirts brushing the dusty wooden floor, one of those pink blouses you screw into a twist of wet rope rather than iron and lipstick so darkly red her mouth was like a parted wound as she smiled and I half expected to see blood glistening on white teeth. She noticed my confusion, and amusement danced in dark-ringed eyes. There was about her an aura of intelligence that to a lesser man might have been intimidating.
I smiled at my own arrogance that was as tedious as the history evident in piles of bulging manila folders heaped precariously on every available surface. She was watching me with a half smile of her own as she returned to her chair, one pale finger toying with a lock of shoulder-length black hair. I lifted some of the papers to the floor, grunting under their weight, and sat gingerly on a chair stiff enough to tame lions.
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