The stars Weiskopf had made me see were drifting out of my field of vision, and my brain was beginning to clear. The first thing that came to me was Phoebe. Where the hell was Phoebe?
Silly question. Phoebe was right where I’d expect her to be, in the very front of the crowd, gaping at the stiff with her little mouth hanging open, close enough to get blood on her darling little pumps if she stepped six inches off the curb.
I snaked an arm through the mass of bodies and caught hold of the strap of her shoulder bag. At the same time, I said her name, gently but firmly. The last thing I needed at a time like this was to be busted as purse snatcher.
“Phoebe?” I said. “Phoebe?”
I was pulling on the strap, but she wouldn’t move.
“Phoebe!” I barked, and she jumped and looked at me.
With an incredible effort of will, I forced myself to smile and not to scream.
Keeping a gentle traction on the strap, I pulled her through the crowd, all the while talking gently.
“Phoebe,” I said. “Come along, dear. We don’t want to be morbid, do we?”
She goddamn well did want to be morbid, but by a combination of a continued pull on the bag and the wedging action of the more unabashedly morbid who were edging into the space Phoebe had occupied, I finally managed to get her free with only a single wistful backward glance.
Still pulling her by the bag strap, I led her down the street and around the corner. I did not do the more natural thing and take her hand, because I was afraid if I laid a finger on her, I would strangle her.
A couple of blocks up the street, Earl’s Court was deserted. Naturally. Even the Headmistress and her naughty clients had to roll out to see this. I felt it safe to vent a few of my feelings.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” I hissed.
Phoebe said nothing. Her face started to cloud up. Another hundredth of an inch fall in her emotional barometer, and she would start to cry.
I realized I was still holding the strap of her bag, and for the first time I also realized something else. The bag was heavy all out of proportion to its size.
“This thing weighs a ton,” I said. “What have you got in here, a brick?”
I took it off her to look inside. I don’t know why I did. To distract myself from the anger and frustration that were about to explode me into a bigger mess than Weiskopf now was, maybe. Maybe because it was one mystery about this mess that had a solution right to hand.
Anyway, I took the bag, into which a brick might just about have fit, opened it, and found the gun.
This was no toy gun, either. This was a no-nonsense blue steel, American-made Hopkins & Allen .38 caliber Police Special, loaded (a quick look at the cylinder told me) with actual bullets.
“Phoebe!”
“Yes, Matt?”
“For God’s sake, what is this? And if you tell me it’s a gun, I swear I’m going to slug you one.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” she said confidently. “You’re a gentleman, American or not.”
I counted to ten in four languages, took a deep breath, and said as calmly as I could, “Why are you packing a rod, Phoebe?”
She smiled. “I like that,” she said. “It makes me feel like a moll. Do you still call them molls?”
“I don’t call them anything. Listen, Phoebe, try to relate to something back here on Planet Earth. I more or less just chased a man to his death, okay? I would very much like to know what the hell is going on in my life. Are you with me so far?”
“Of course I am. Sometimes people treat me as if I had no sense at all. I think it’s because I’m little. But I am a fully mature married woman, you know.”
“I know, I know. The gun?”
“Stephen gave it to me. Made me take it, really. He said with the situation the way it is, there was a small but real chance I might be in danger. So he wanted me to be able to protect myself.”
“Do you have a license for this thing?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Stephen might. Do I need one?”
Actually, I didn’t know the answer to that myself, though I strongly suspected she did need one, based on how the British papers ran distraught editorials at least once a day on how lax American gun laws were.
“I’ll keep this,” I said. I slipped it into my pocket.
“All right,” she said, “but you don’t have a license for it either.”
“I’ll risk it. Tell me what happened out on the street. No. Tell me what happened after you came back upstairs.”
She looked surprised. “Nothing, really. I felt stupid waiting halfway up the stairs, so I came up.”
Of course, it never occurred to her to go the rest of the way downstairs, the way I wanted her to in the first place.
I could hear sirens from around the corner. Ambulance, cops, didn’t matter. Time to make this quick and get out of there.
“Did you hear anything of our conversation?” I asked.
“No,” she pouted. “And it wasn’t from lack of trying, either. I strained to hear. I did everything but put my ear to the keyhole.”
“Phoebe,” I said, “I hope you enjoyed your afternoon. From now on stay out of the investigations business.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” she went on, “until you called to me to run away.”
“Okay, you ran away. Where did you go?”
“Just outside the building, on the pavement. I—I didn’t know where to go.”
“That part was fine. He had no reason to recognize you. What happened next?”
“Nothing for the longest time. I was worried about you.”
Actually, it had been about thirty seconds, but it had seemed like the longest time to me, too. Now, with a dull ache in my loins and an acute case of trauma-induced indigestion, I felt as if it were still going on.
“Thank you.”
“Then he came out of the building. He was a bit disheveled, but he was laughing. He was looking back at the building. I’d come around to the edge of the pavement by then, hoping to get a look into the vestibule, when he walked right by me. He was fixing his cravat, you know, looking up into the air the way men do. At least, Stephen does it that way. And laughing, he was still laughing.”
Phoebe made a helpless little shrug.
“And then ... and then without knowing it, he stepped off the curb, stumbled and fell into the road. And the taxi came by—it couldn’t stop in time. There was a crunch and a splash—it was horrible.”
“I’m sure it was,” I told her. “Here’s what I want you to do. Let me put it this way. I’m about to ask you to do something. Please, please, please just do it, okay? No matter how many better ideas you have.”
Her eyes opened until they were nearly as wide as her eyeglass frames.
“All you have to do is tell me,” she insisted. “You’re the boss. That’s what we agreed. Don’t worry about being forceful with me, Matt. I admire that in a man. Forcefulness is very ... male.”
God spare me, I thought. “Okay,” I said. “I’m being forceful. Go home. Sit there. Read a book. Watch the telly. Read today’s Orbit. Don’t phone anybody to tell them your big adventure. Don’t interrupt Stephen to tell him. Let him do his best for Shakespeare in peace.”
“I can’t tell anyone?”
“Not till you hear from me.”
Her voice went all warm and gooey. “Am I going to hear from you, Matt?”
I ignored her. “The police. If the police come to you and tell you about this, tell them the truth. Answer all their questions.”
“I’m tired of answering their questions.”
Dealing with Phoebe was like fighting Marshmallow Fluff (which is available in England, by the way)—no matter how hard you hit it, it didn’t get hurt, and you were stuck all the worse.
“Force yourself,” I said.
The eyes were still round. “Matt,” she said. “This has been the most exciting day of my life.”
“You’re young yet,�
�� I told her.
She thought that over for a second, then said, “Matt? It would be mad for us to have a ... a fling, wouldn’t it?”
“Mad,” I said, “doesn’t begin to describe it.”
15
“I don’t think much of the platform.”
“Well, it’s my party.”
“And you’ll cry if you want to.”
Tony Cannon and Bobby Ball
Cannon & Ball, ITV
I FINALLY GOT HOME about ten o’clock at night.
“Thank you,” I told Roxanne when she greeted me at the door.
She gave me a kiss and said, “What for?”
“The only reason Bristow did not throw me back in the clink was that he was afraid of what you’d do to get me out of there this time.”
“What happened?”
I told her about my adventures in Earl’s Court.
She showed me a grin of triumph. “I told you, huh? Didn’t I? I knew she was after your bod.”
Then she frowned. “Your bod!” she said. “Take off your clothes.”
“Roxanne, for God’s sake!”
She rolled her eyes. “Nothing wrong with your ego, is there? Yes, Cobb, I do find you irresistible, but I’m not about to ravish you right here. Get the clothes off.”
I was still suspicious. “What for?”
“You’ve been, as the English would put it, ill used, haven’t you?”
“I’ll say.”
“All right then. Consider this a study into the feasibility of future ravishments.”
“Ah.”
“Or do I mean ravishings?”
“Either one sounds good to me.”
“Mmmm. Then you can’t be too badly hurt.”
I agreed, but she went ahead and checked me out.
“Nice bruise on the abdomen,” she said. “Looks like a map of Australia.”
“Don’t mention Australia. It reminds me of Earl’s Court.”
She touched me. “Does that hurt?”
“No, actually. It feels pretty good.”
“Cobb, I swear you could get aroused by a navel orange.”
“Only if it was your navel orange,” I said staunchly.
“Okay, no swelling—”
“No?”
“No abnormal swelling, okay? Have you gone to the bathroom since this happened?”
“Couple of times. Learned how to work three new kinds of toilets.”
“Urine look okay? Not cloudy or dark?”
“No, doctor, it looked the way it usually looks. How do you know to ask me all this stuff?”
“At one point, during the time you were wasting your life with lesser women, I took a notion that I might want to be a doctor.”
“Why did you decide against it?”
“You could never count on a day off.”
“Can I get dressed now?”
“If you must. I think you’re going to be okay, but I wish you’d see a regular doctor. After all, it’s free.”
She laughed. We’d already had a few experiences with socialized medicine.
“And worth every penny of it,” I said.
“Well, it is if you can’t afford anything else,” she said.
“And if you don’t smoke,” I said. The papers were full recently of a man who was refused necessary heart treatment because he smoked. The other big recent NHS stories included a woman on the dole and her boyfriend who were given fertility treatments so they could bring a sextuplet of little mouths to the public trough, and thousands of people who were told they had cancer when they didn’t.
“Our doctor is good,” Rox said.
“True. I’ll see him tomorrow.”
As I slid back into my sweats and T-shirt for hanging around the house, Rox asked me, “So why did Bristow want to throw you back in jail?”
“Shucks,” I said. “Got me. All I did was horn in on the closest thing he had to a suspect, or even a lead, and provoke the guy into killing himself. Then, a half hour later, I turn up in a cab with an unlicensed gun in my pocket to tell him I’m sorry, and he takes offense. How do you figure that?”
She shook her head sadly. “Some people are just touchy, I guess.”
“Mmmm,” I said. “Guess so. Seriously, though, it’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“It’s not? How?”
“He had a big mystery on his hands—why did Weiskopf go striding, laughing like a maniac, out of his office in the middle of the afternoon, with his packing still left undone? I solved that one for him at least. And I brought him information, even if I cut off a source of actual evidence.”
“What do you mean?”
“Weiskopf wrote the anonymous letter. That connects him with the start of the investigation. The brochure connects the school—and by extension Weiskopf—with Aliou. He keeps turning up, you see.”
Roxanne bit her lip. “I know this is probably horrendously dumb in some obvious way, but has it crossed anybody’s mind that it might have been Weiskopf who did the killings?”
“It has,” I said. “Bristow was working on it even before today’s little unpleasantness. He’d already found out a lot about the guy.”
“Such as?”
“To start with the most suspicious circumstance, Weiskopf had an alibi for Sunday afternoon, when Winston was killing Aliou, but no alibi for Sunday night when Winston was getting his.”
“That’s the way it would work if he were guilty, right?”
“That’s why that’s the most suspicious thing. His background is interesting, too. He was the son of a Nazi who fled Germany after the war. The old man wasn’t a war criminal, or at least, he wasn’t wanted for anything. He just decided he’d find more congenial company in the Argentine. Weiskopf came to England in 1977, to study at Cambridge.”
Rox was surprised. “That’s a piss-poor job he had, for a Cambridge graduate.”
“He didn’t graduate. He flunked out, or was quietly kicked out for cheating—something like that. Bristow’s still got men working on it. He was about to lose his student visa, but he married a waitress, and was granted landed emigrant status.”
“What happened to the wife?”
“Divorced about a year after Weiskopf got permission to stay. Ex-wife died about five years ago. She really did have cancer. No kids. Turns out, Weiskopf had a bit of form, as they say here.”
“A what?”
“A criminal record.”
“That’s interesting. What did he do?”
“Public disturbances, things like that. In 1982, during the Falklands War. He started an organization called ‘Justice for the Malvinas.’ I think, like Lee Harvey Oswald and his Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Weiskopf was the founder and only member.
“Still, he got some ink—Bristow showed me a big story from the Orbit—and made himself drastically unpopular. I saw the file. Some enthusiast at the Yard considered the possibility of arresting him for treason, but somebody senior (and with more sense) said that would be giving him infinitely more publicity than he deserved. He tried to make it as a writer—essays, plays, poems, whatever.”
“Maybe Stephen could have helped him,” Rox said with a smile.
“Maybe so,” I agreed. “He certainly could have used the help. He was on the dole for a couple of years in the late eighties. No record of his ever actually publishing anything.”
“Then, in 1990, he bought the W. G. Peterson School of English and installed himself as headmaster.”
“How did he do that if he was on welfare?” Rox asked.
I shrugged. “Part of it came from a grant; the rest, who knows? I don’t suppose it’s easy to save money on the dole, but if you live alone, it shouldn’t be impossible. Maybe he borrowed money from a friend. Maybe he had a good tip on a horse race.”
“Maybe,” Roxanne suggested, “his father had told him the secret location of a missing hoard of Nazi gold and art treasures.”
I nodded. “There you go. That’s undoubtedly it. He just suffered th
rough years of penury to make it look good later.”
“Sounds good to me,” Rox said.
“Dollink,” I told her, “sometimes living with you is like living with Tom Sawyer.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“That’s how I meant it. Anyway,” I went on, “there is no remaining doubt that the school in question was in fact a visa mill, Bristow had been tracking down former students, promising to straighten things out with the Home Office if they’d talk.”
“Can he do that?” she wondered.
“Sure,” I said. “He can make promises all day. As for actually getting legit long-term visas for them, that I don’t know.”
“This is such an unpleasant business, sometimes,” she said.
I sighed. “I know, my love. That’s why I tried to get out of it, remember?”
“Dimly,” she said. “Well, we had it going pretty good there for a couple of months.”
“We will again, after this is cleared up,” I promised.
“We’ll try. Sometimes, though, I think you can’t fight Fate.”
“You can fight it,” I said. “I do it all the time. Sometimes it seems that that’s practically all I do.”
“How often do you win?”
“Often enough. I’m here with you, am I not? What were the odds against that?”
“Good point,” she said. “While we’re talking about odds, what are the odds that the case is already cleared up?”
“You mean that Weiskopf was the killer, and the Crown doesn’t have to shell out for a trial or incarceration because he so considerately offed himself?”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s what we were talking about.”
“Well, even though Bristow and I would dearly love that to be the case, I have to say that the odds are tiny that Weiskopf was it.”
Rox seemed offended. “Why not?” she demanded. “He was weird enough. He was sleazy enough. He was smart enough. He was ruthless enough.”
“How do you know he was ruthless enough?”
Killed in the Fog Page 13
