by Chris Ewan
“So now I am a burglar too.”
“Don’t sound so appalled,” I told him. “In my book it’s a good deal more civilised than murder. Of course, you’d already been in my apartment once before when you came to question me about Michael’s attack but you didn’t have time to find what you were looking for then. Now you had the opportunity to search at your leisure, although I’m glad to say you didn’t find the two figurines I’d squirreled away.”
I looked back at Kirn and this time I gave her an apologetic look.
“That temper of yours got the better of you again, though,” I resumed, “and you made a real mess of my apartment. There’s always a chance you left some fingerprints there while you were doing it, of course, and I was careful to wear gloves when I cleared up.”
“If any prints are found,” Burggrave said, “they will be from when I first visited your apartment. From the things that I touched.”
“Oh, you could argue that,” I said. “But then how are you going to explain it if the third monkey happens to be found in your apartment? Your colleagues are there now, I believe, Detective Inspector Riemer?”
Riemer held my eyes, ignoring Burggrave’s bewildered look. She nodded slowly.
“What is this?” Burggrave demanded, turning to Riemer and leaning into her face. “You are searching my home! This is all lies. You cannot do this. On whose authority?”
“The Superintendent’s authority,” Riemer told him, blankly.
They stared at one another for a moment, neither of them conceding anything in the slightest. Their mutual loathing would have been apparent to a blind man, though Burggrave’s self-confidence was really quite something to behold. If I hadn’t been so sure of myself, even I might have been persuaded that I’d got it all wrong.
“We will see about this,” he said, and began to walk away from the group of us towards the double doors on the far side of the building, the tails of his police coat swinging from the back of his legs.
I looked at Riemer searchingly, waiting for her to do something. She held my gaze for some time, giving nothing away. Then, just as I threw up my hands in disbelief and tossed my head back on my shoulders, she reached into her inside pocket and removed a small two-way radio.
THIRTY-TWO
So,” I said, once Victoria had picked up the phone, “I have a view of the Eiffel Tower from my balcony.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Well, you have to lean out and crane your neck, then look through the sitting room of the flat across the way, but it’s all there, as clear as day. So long as you use a telescope.”
“Oh Charlie.”
“But I can smell croissants from the patisserie at the bottom of my building. And I have a wonderful traffic scene from my bedroom.”
“Will you be able to write?”
“Of course I will. Once I’m used to it, I won’t even notice the noise.”
“And you don’t regret not going to Italy?”
“Not at all. I ignored Paris for a while, you know. I mean, it just seems so obvious, doesn’t it? But it’s beautiful here.”
“And the women?”
“I hear there are some. They get everywhere these days. Some brave soul should really go in search of their nest.”
“The blonde got to you, huh?”
“It’s not so bad,” I told her. “Just a sucking chest-wound kind of pain.”
“Always so dramatic.”
“Occupational hazard.”
“Charlie,” Victoria said, “I still have some questions about what happened.”
“More?”
“Just a few. You know how I am with plot holes. Can’t rest if something doesn’t add up all the way around.”
“But the last time we spoke you said you were happy.”
“And I was. But then I went home and I finished off a manuscript I’d been reading and climbed into bed and it hit me. Wham! Why did the American do it? Why did he turn on the wide man and the thin man and try to take the diamonds all by himself? It just didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t sound like something he’d do.”
“He was a thief, Vicky.”
“I know.”
“Taking things was what he did.”
“Granted. But he’d mellowed, hadn’t he? And if the reason he hired you was because he couldn’t stomach taking the monkey figurines himself, how is it he felt just dandy about taking the diamonds?”
“Trust you,” I said. “You’re too good.”
“I am?”
“Yes. Vie, I had eight people in that warehouse with me, two of them trained investigators, and none of them asked me a question like that.”
“Does it hurt your theory?”
“Not really. Oh, it hurts the theory I set out for everyone else’s benefit. But that’s a different matter altogether. The thing is, I’d asked myself that exact same question when I was working things through. And it took me quite a while before I came up with something that I think makes sense.”
“And what’s that?”
“I think Michael planned to give the diamonds away.”
“Sorry?”
“To Kirn.”
“Oh Charlie. You can’t be serious. Why would he do a thing like that?”
“For starters, I think he felt guilty about the way things turned out for her father. More to the point, though, a young girl lost her dad because of a scam he got involved in and that girl was messed up enough to go and work in the prison where his killer was supposedly locked up. When he found out who she really was, I imagine that would have got to him. And then, of course, there’s the possibility he really had fallen for her.”
“Oh come on.”
“You didn’t see her, Vie. Sure, she was attractive. But there was something about her, some quality that set her apart in some way. I imagine that after twelve years in prison any man would find her pretty alluring.”
“Alluring enough to give her a fortune in diamonds?”
“For him, anyway. My thinking is he wanted to compensate her for what she’d lost. And it wasn’t as if the wide man and the thin man would understand that. I think I said before that there was something very appealing about Michael.”
“I’m not sure I buy it.”
“I suppose it is a little out there. But you know yourself how it is when you fall for somebody. You can throw logic out the window, really.”
“Hmm. Well I might be prepared to go along with you half way. Let’s say he planned to take all the jewels and run off with her.”
“It’s possible. Or maybe it was as straightforward as I made it seem in the first place. Maybe, after spending twelve years inside, he felt he deserved all the loot for himself.”
“I think I like that explanation most of all.”
“Well, that’s the difference between us,” I said. “The romantic and the mercenary.”
“Either way, I don’t suppose it matters much now. What with him being dead and the police having all the jewels.”
“Mmm.”
“‘Mmm,’ Charlie?”
“Well, one might say they don’t exactly have all of the diamonds.”
“But how can that be? You said you let them have the two keys you’d stolen and you told them where they could find the third monkey. Were some of the diamonds hidden somewhere else?”
“Not to begin with.”
“Not to…Oh Charlie, what have you done?”
“Nothing that should surprise you.”
“You took some?”
“More than some, as it happens.”
“But how?”
“It was easy, really. Once I was sure the wide man and the thin man and Kim didn’t have the final monkey, I was pretty confident Burggrave had it hidden somewhere. But before I went to his apartment, I went back to the place in Chinatown and paid for my own storage deposit box up front. It wasn’t cheap, I’m afraid, but I had a feeling it would be worth it. Of course, I was given three new figurines to go with my new keys
and my new storage box. So then all I had to do was smash open the figurine that was covering his ears and the one covering his mouth and keep those keys to one side. When I found the third monkey in Burggrave’s apartment, I switched it for the monkey covering his eyes that I’d been given that morning.”
“So the box the police had keys to was empty?”
“Well, no. I had to put some of the diamonds in it. Quite a lot of them, actually. Otherwise my story wouldn’t have added up.”
“But you took the rest?”
“Guilty.”
“Charlie, you’re crazy. They’ll come looking for you.”
“I doubt it. I handed them a murderer and a fair amount of the loot. And I can’t see the Van Zandts wanting to publicise any of this. They’ve been denying the theft out of hand for years, remember.”
“Well, I hope you’re right, for your sake. Are the diamonds worth a lot of money?”
“They should cover me for a few years, at least.”
“I’ve been slow, haven’t I? I mean, that’s why you went to Paris, right? To see that man—that fence of yours who got you into all this in the first place.”
“Pierre. I’m meeting him this afternoon as it happens. Putting a face to his probably-made-up-name for the first time.”
“I could kick myself. Why didn’t I think of that connection before?”
“You didn’t know I had the diamonds.”
“Oh yes.”
“And you forgot what I’m really like. You thought I’d solved the crime for free and walked away with a warm, all over glow for my troubles.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s not me, Victoria.”
“Really? So okay then tough guy, tell me you didn’t give any of the diamonds to the blonde.”
“I could tell you that.”
“But it wouldn’t be true, would it? And let me guess: she thanked you in the way that comes most naturally to her and then she ran off and broke your heart.”
“Hardly. I told her to go. And if she had any sense she listened to me and got a new fake passport to go with a new fake identity while she was about it. There’s no guarantee the Dutch police won’t decide to charge her with something, I suppose, but more importantly the thin man and the wide man aren’t the type of people you want on your tail.”
“Oh yes. What happened to them?”
“No idea, though I’m sure it’ll be in the papers if they’re ever charged. They naay not be, though. At the end of the day, Vie, all I had was a story. It might have been tied together pretty nicely, but it’s not the kind of hard evidence Riemer’s going to need if she’s ever going to bring charges.”
“It was a bit more than a story, Charlie. You gave them fingerprints.”
“You think? I don’t know—twelve years went by. And I handled that gun without my gloves on a few times. Stuart even fired the damn thing.”
“Witnesses then. Louis Rijker’s mother, for one. It was marvellous how she came through for you like that.”
I sucked air through my teeth, as if I’d just been cut.
“What?”
“Honestly? I assumed you’d seen clean through that one.”
“Seen through what? I don’t get it.”
“Well, let me put it this way—you remember my cat allergy?”
“Of course.”
“And you remember how I told you I reacted when I went to Karine Rijker’s house?”
“Yes, you sneezed.”
“Now think back to what I told you about the warehouse.”
“Okay, so now you mention it I can see that you didn’t sneeze in the warehouse. So big deal. It’s hardly surprising the allergy was less severe outside of her home.”
“But my allergy’s very acute, Vie.”
“And?”
“And I can see I’m going to have to spell it out for you. The Karine Rijker who came to the warehouse wasn’t the same Karine Rijker I met in the bungalow.”
“There are two of them?”
“Just one.”
“Then…”
“She was a set up. A contact of Stuart’s.”
“But…but she had that gun—the one Van Zandt had given to poor Louis.”
“Because I gave it to her myself.”
“But now I’m lost again. Charlie, you’re being deliberately obtuse. How did you get the gun?”
“You really want me to go over what I do when I’m not writing again?”
“Oh.”
“But if it makes you feel any better I did find the gun in the real Karine Rijker’s home. That morning before we met everyone at the warehouse, you remember I said Stuart and I ran some errands? Well, the first was we went back to Karine Rijker’s bungalow and Stuart kept her company while I had a quick look around her bedroom. The gun was at the bottom of a wardrobe, just like I said.”
“So it was a trick?”
“Half of it was a trick. But the gun was real. And it did match the gun I already had exactly. And I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that I was right about Van Zandt arming his guards.”
“Even so.”
“Even so, you’re disappointed.”
“A little. It seems kind of—”
“Sordid.”
“I was going to say underhand.”
“Well you’re right. It was underhand. But I’m a firm believer that sometimes the ends justify the means.”
“And Rutherford was happy with all this I take it?”
“Stuart, you mean. I don’t think he lost much sleep over it.”
“Did he ask for some of the diamonds?”
“He didn’t ask and I didn’t offer. He made six grand out of me if you remember and I guess he’ll use that to fund his next scam.”
“Yes, I guess so too.”
“So listen, you might not be comfortable with it, but the reality is most of the diamonds are with me now.”
“Right. Well, I wouldn’t say I was completely uncomfortable with it Charlie because the truth is unless you’ve found some time amid all this madness to solve your briefcase problem, I’m not going to be selling your book in the near future.”
“Oh yes—my book. I’m glad you mentioned that. Thing is Vie, I’ve decided to scrap it.”
“But you can’t! I wasn’t serious, Charlie. You just put my nose out a little—keeping me in the dark like that. You’ll figure the book out soon enough—you know you will. We can even work on it together now you’ve got a little more time on your hands.”
“But my heart’s not in it. The truth is I have another story I want to tell. I all but nailed the plot back in that warehouse in Amsterdam, you see. And with a few name changes here and there, and maybe the odd choice scene to spice it up a bit, well, what do you think?”
“A fictional memoir? I don’t know Charlie. It could work, I guess. But you’ll need a good title.”
“Funny,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about that too.”
THE END
Table of Contents
ONE
Two
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
Six
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
books on Archive.
