‘The risk would be yours,’ O’Loughlin said at last. ‘During any long discussion I might relax and slip up, and admit I organized it, in which event you couldn’t be allowed to leave.’
‘Nonsense!’ she said, her contempt not entirely forced. ‘An admission, here, to Harry and me — what would that mean? Nothing. Let’s just assume it was your bank job, and get down to business. You talk or you don’t talk. We can’t stick red-hot needles under your nails. And you never — never — slip up. All we want to do is trace Charlie Braine.’
There was a taut ten seconds of silence. Baldy growled. O’Loughlin covered his mouth with pale fingers. ‘Well now,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of assumptions there. Let me make one of my own. You want Charlie Braine because you think he’s still got the money.’ It was a statement.
She opened her mouth, decided to say nothing, and closed it.
‘We both,’ he said softly, ‘want Charlie Braine. So perhaps…a little co-operation?’
She nodded, holding her breath. His smile was hideous as he went on. ‘You’ve probably assumed I had the money and still have it. No, don’t you shake your head at me. Nobody shakes their head at me. But you would assume wrongly. If I’d had the money originally, you believe it couldn’t have been converted. Another wrong assumption. And you’re assuming this very moment that I’m saying this to convince you it wasn’t my bank job. Wrong again. Come here.’ He crooked a finger. He pointed to a space opposite him.
Baldy snapped to attention and ran to one of the loose chairs, brought it over, and as Virginia slowly advanced to the table, slipped it beneath the bottom he’d so recently fondled.
She sat. O’Loughlin, close to, was even more repelling. She was wondering about his accent. Certainly not Irish — something mid-European.
With an air of benevolent patronage he slipped fingers into one of the pockets of his pristine waistcoat. She saw that he wore a fob watch with a gold chain. White gold. The fingers emerged.
‘Your palm,’ he demanded.
She extended it. Into it he dropped a diamond.
There had never been in her life a desire for jewellery, except in a most modest way. She had thought of large diamonds as being a useless ostentation. This one was blue. It caught from the dark sky a flash of lightning that dwelt in its interior, and captivated her. She drew in her breath. A lifetime of dogmatism flowed away.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she whispered.
‘It’s worth a hundred grand.’ For O’Loughlin, that was its beauty.
‘You’re telling me,’ she asked, ‘that this is the haul from the bank job?’
‘All I’m telling you is its value. It could have come from the bank haul. There are ways of converting money, not necessarily in this country. At a loss, of course. But that…’ He leaned forward and picked it from her palm, then dropped it again. He leaned closer. His breath smelled of violets. ‘That,’ he said, so softly that the word barely brushed her ears, ‘will be yours, my dear, if you can find Charlie Braine and bring him and the money to me.’
The words ‘my dear’ on his lips sent a chill up her spine. She did not move her palm when he reached for the diamond again. He was fastidious in making sure their flesh did not make contact. In a second, as a blue flash, the diamond had found its way back into his waistcoat pocket.
She sat back in the chair, breathing quietly and deeply. This, she knew, had been the reason he had agreed to see them…to see Harry, in fact. But why should he believe that Harry could produce results, if he, with his organization, could not?
‘What makes you think we can find him?’ she asked.
‘Harry has been out of circulation for four years. Harry knows his way around. He’s got contacts I can’t reach. My lot…’ He gestured in contempt to Red and Baldy. ‘They don’t know anything but which end of a gun you grab hold of.’
‘But Harry can’t find him. He’s tried.’ Which wasn’t exactly true. ‘If there’s something you know…that you’ll tell us…then maybe…’
‘Tell me what you know already.’ He wasn’t prepared to concede more than he had to.
‘If we find the money,’ she said, ‘why should I bring it to you? I could buy my own diamond. A better one.’
He seemed surprised at that. ‘Because I’d send Carl and Llew to see you, to exercise their only ability.’ His hand negligently indicated his two protectors.
‘Then it’s a deal.’
‘Tell me,’ he repeated, ‘what you know already.’
She told him, every detail they had discovered already about the two crimes, or had worked out. She made no mention of Angela or Cynthia. She told him about the two-colour car, the fact that it had been washable paint, the way she believed it had been used as a decoy, driving up Trinity Street while the bank getaway car drove down it. O’Loughlin listened with attention, his face without expression. When she finished he at last took his eyes from her, staring down at his fingers on the table surface. Eventually he looked up.
‘Do the police know all this?’
‘No. Some Harry knew. Some we’ve found out. Some we worked out. We’re not about to tell the police.’
‘You said you weren’t interested in the money. Then…why?’
‘Harry’s got a score to settle with Charlie Braine. I believe Braine killed a young woman called Angela Reed.’
O’Loughlin raised an eyebrow.
‘In whom I have a close personal interest,’ she said. There was a formality in her voice and an impatience in the movement of her shoulders, which rejected any further probing into the matter.
O’Loughlin frowned a complete lack of interest, but Harry found his mind involved again with the question: who, exactly, was Angela Reed? Virginia had not actually agreed that they were sisters. When he was functioning again, O’Loughlin was speaking, his voice a grating sound as he drew venom from somewhere inside himself.
‘…tell you why I want the money,’ he was saying. ‘Suppose, for the sake of argument, that I had planned a bank job. Not that one, but another, a bigger one. In those circumstances, it might occur to me that a trial run at a smaller bank — such as the Mercantile branch you mentioned — would be a good idea. Not risking any good men, of course, on such a paltry job, which could easily go wrong.’
She smoothed the way with flattery. ‘I heard it was perfectly planned and wonderfully executed.’
He permitted himself a thin smile, inclining his head a couple of inches. ‘In one way, that’s why I find the outcome infuriating. Look at the basics. Four men on the bank operation, including the driver. Not my men, as I mentioned.’
‘Of course not. As you said, we’re only supposing all this.’
‘You understand me perfectly. Four men…mid-range talent, paid a fixed sum directly from the back pocket, you might say. There was a reason for this. It was all in the timing.’
Beyond the trees lining the far bank, beyond the valley, there was a distant rumble of thunder. For a moment the sky lightened. Virginia glanced at Harry, who had his eyes fixed on her.
‘You didn’t mention…’ she said quietly.
Harry got it in a flash. ‘I remember now. Charlie kept glancing at his watch. Never saw him wearing a watch before.’
O’Loughlin, prompted by the talk of watches, glanced at his slim, gold Rolex, and frowned. He might have put in a request for a storm, and it was arriving too soon.
‘As I said, all in the timing,’ he went on. ‘They were all supplied with chronometers, set to the second. You will understand why in a moment. There was another aspect to the job.’
‘Charlie Braine and his two-coloured car?’
‘That was his own idea. Clever, I thought. Yes. It would attract attention, though I wasn’t sure it was what was needed. Not too much. But this was no more than a rehearsal for bigger things. It didn’t really matter if it all went wrong. Ah! Didn’t I tell you I might slip up? It did matter, as it turned out. Because it went wrong in the worst possible way.’
Behind his head the lightning almost split the clouds, sending them tossing. The crash was caught by the shoreline trees, and bounced around, rippling the surface of the lake.
‘Braine,’ he said, ‘was too damned bright. His job was to pull the jeweller’s job and attract the attention of the police. And get out of there at two-eleven exactly. The whole thing was based on time. Two-twelve to the traffic lights, forcing in to his left, and up the hill past the Mercantile…’
‘Just as the others were coming down the hill with their take.’ She nodded. So far, nothing new.
‘But timed to the second,’ he said, his face expressionless as he poised himself to reveal the genius that was facing her. ‘To the second. You can see the point of paying them a fixed sum. The instruction was to leave the bank at exactly two-twelve. Without the fixed payment they would have been tempted to delay and get as much as they could. That was not the purpose of the exercise, but as it happened they struck lucky. Leaving at precisely two-twelve, they could be expected to be on a certain stretch of the road at the same time as Braine, within a couple of hundred yards. You know that street?’ She nodded. ‘Straight,’ he reminded her. ‘Fairly wide. They were both, the getaway car and Braine’s car, to be in their outside lanes, Braine with his off-side rear window open.’
Again she glanced at Harry, whose face was abruptly stark white from a flash of lightning that seemed to hiss into the lake. He nodded. ‘I remember that win…’ The rest was lost in the crash of thunder.
‘And they were to stop for the two or three seconds necessary to toss the take from one car to the other.’
But O’Loughlin was finding himself being hurried by the storm, its thunder robbing his. He frowned. His face stiffened with offence when a huge drop of rain splotted on the table near his hand.
‘How very clever!’ cried Virginia, her delight reinforced by O’Loughlin’s discomfort. Would he hurry them inside? she wondered.
‘I flatter myself…’
‘Always supposing it had been you who’d planned it…’
His mouth was a hard, straight line. He had to agree. ‘If it had, I would flatter myself that it was a superb plan.’
‘But poor Charlie Braine — it left him on a kamikaze mission,’ she pointed out.
‘There had to be a certain reliance on the confusion this would cause,’ he conceded. ‘But the idea was that the police cars would chase after Braine initially. Then the news would come through about the bank job, which would take precedence over a bag of trinkets from a jeweller’s, and most of the cars would be diverted to chasing the getaway car. If they caught it, there’d be no money in it. So maybe they’d return to chasing Braine. Maybe one or two cars were still after him. In any event, he got clear away with the money, and disappeared. An amateur, and he double-crossed me. Me!’
Heavy drops were smacking on the sawn pine surface of the veranda. One struck his forehead and trickled down his nose. His face was taking on colour, not entirely from the bitter memory, Virginia surmised. O’Loughlin refused to rise until she had left. She would probably top him by six inches or so, and his pride also refused to allow anybody to see him distracted from his purpose by a mere thunderstorm.
‘One assumes,’ she said, deliberately speaking slowly, ‘that, had you yourself planned it, there would have been a fixed meeting place, where the take — even though paltry — would be handed over?’
He matched her measured tone, defiance mottling his cheeks. ‘I have a farm, no matter where. These two goons were to be there waiting. There was even a powerful hosepipe waiting to wash-down the car. But Braine did not appear.’
She waited for a gap between the thunder crashes. She could now feel the weight of the rain on her head.
‘You’re certain of that?’
She looked round. Baldy was still standing where he’d been, legs apart, arms folded across his chest. Red, against the rail, seemed framed by the storm, and didn’t like it, was pale, his eyes staring darkly against his skin, but he did not dare to move.
‘Certain,’ said O’Loughlin, having to shout the second syllable. ‘I say jump and they jump. I say shoot each other, and they’d do it.’
‘So you want Charlie Braine…’
‘I want him and the money. How can I plan a job with confidence, and expect top-grade co-operation, until I have the money? The money, every single grubby note to the exact amount, to show, to convince people that nobody double-crosses Sean O’Loughlin. Especially a blasted amateur…’
He was speaking with such vehemence that for a moment he had completely forgotten the storm. His face glowed and flickered with the almost continuous lightning, the water poured down the runnels in his face, but his fury denied its presence.
‘Your fault,’ she said, ‘through taking on an amateur. With a pro, he’d have known you, and understood better. Charlie Braine wasn’t scared enough.’
She got to her feet. She could now walk away with whatever dignity her clinging, soaked clothes permitted. But she hesitated.
‘There’s more?’ he asked impatiently.
‘Do me a favour,’ she asked. ‘Tell that bald clown over there to raise his arms. He threw my gun in the lake, so he owes me one.’
He stared at her as though she was mad, but she knew he would respond to the nerve of it, though her legs felt weak. He stared through the roar of the downpour, and the tic produced a smile. She had to read his lips.
‘Another amateur, by God!’ Then he stared at Baldy and snapped his fingers.
Harry tensed, and glanced at Red, who was so terrified by the storm that he was useless. Virginia saw Harry moving in, and gestured. Harry was still.
She walked over to Baldy and stood in front of him. Slowly, his eyes filmed with hatred, he raised his arms. She reached inside his parka to the shoulder holster and slipped out the automatic pistol he carried. It was beneath his right armpit, but she’d noticed, when he tossed away her lighter, that he was left-handed. Because of this, it came easily into her right hand, and as she withdrew it she flicked off the safety catch. It was a heavy weapon. She guessed it to be a .45. It was necessary, as it came free from the parka, that it should be for a moment pointing at Baldy’s stomach. She lowered the angle a little, and looked up into his face.
It was grey and drawn. ‘I hope it’s loaded,’ she said to him, but his bloodless lips did not move. Abruptly she lifted it to the sky and fired, the blast coming between their faces. She was appalled by the shock to her arm, and was nearly taken off her legs.
Baldy’s eyes turned up. He swayed, but managed to stay on his feet. Still with her eyes on his, smiling slightly, she said: ‘Harry, shall we go?’ Then she turned and walked out of the rain into the long hall through the house, the gun hanging at her hip.
O’Loughlin snapped: ‘The launch. Llew…’
Harry watched Red unclamp his hands from the rail and stumble after Virginia. He followed them, brushing past Baldy, who’d forgotten to lower his arms. She was already in the launch when he reached it, sitting in the stern with the pistol on her lap.
But Red was in no mood for trouble. All he wanted was to get across and back. He threw the boat through the welter of the storm, barely waiting for them to set foot on the jetty before he whirled away and became lost in the curtain of rain.
‘You drive, Harry,’ she said, but he didn’t hear it for the roar in the trees. He knew what she meant, though, knew better than to lift her into the passenger’s seat. It was no time for lifting. She was shivering beside him as he started the engine. She put her head back.
‘For God’s sake, drive, Harry.’
Which he did, pretending not to notice when she put her face in her hands with her shoulders shaking. It could have been rain, running from her hair and down her cheeks.
Chapter Ten
The storm had died by the time Harry found a roadside café. They picked their way round the pools in the parking area. The air was sweet and clean, the trees dripping.
He
filled her with tea, and discovered that this and sandwiches was all the place could offer. He persuaded her to eat a cheese sandwich. At least she could smile. Weakly, as though testing it.
‘I bet I look a mess.’
‘Women only say that when they’re sure they don’t.’
‘I’m still soaked to the skin. It’s in my bones, Harry.’
‘That’s reaction. Why did you do that to Baldy?’
‘My father wouldn’t get me a licence for my own gun, and I felt I needed one.’
‘The truth,’ he said severely.
‘You don’t have to let them think they’ve got away with anything.’
‘O’Loughlin will discard him. Baldy won’t rest…’
‘I’ve got his gun.’
‘Which you won’t use. It’s too heavy for you, and it terrifies you.’
‘Then you have it, Harry.’
‘It terrifies me, too.’
She shrugged. Now that she was nearly back to normal she could forget the past and look to the future. After a few moments she said: ‘I’ll have to get home for a bath and a change. But we can do a diversion and drop you…’
‘I’ll be okay.’
‘But you’re wet, too.’
‘It didn’t get through my jacket.’
‘Then this,’ she said, ‘will be a good time for you to meet my father.’
‘Heh now!’
‘He told me to bring you to see him, and what daddy tells you, you do.’
Harry doubted that this was always true. ‘I’m an ex-con…’
‘For God’s sake!’ she snapped, then she snatched her bag from the table and marched out. The bag hung heavy in her hand.
When he got to the Range Rover she was behind the wheel. She told him she could find her way home from there and he could walk if he liked, so he sat meekly beside her and wondered how Angela Reed could have been her sister unless Virginia was married, and why, if Virginia was married, she called herself Brent. And wondered what her husband was like, and if he’d been unable to handle her and had run for the hills.
‘We’ll have to see Cynthia again, of course,’ she said, and her snap of anger was also in the past. ‘Unless you know where Charlie might have gone that day.’
The Second Jeopardy Page 11
