by Paul Charles
‘When–’ McCusker started.
‘What I will say is that Louis wasn’t in any way down about it. If anything he seemed very happy and in a good space, if you will.’
‘When he left you yesterday how did he seem?’
‘Yeah, all good. We were going to go out for a meal tonight in fact.’
‘Can you tell me what you were doing on Thursday night between the hours of 9.00 p.m. and 1.30 Friday morning?’ McCusker asked.
‘Yes, the “ruling people out” question,’ the Vice-Chancellor said coyly. ‘Can I just say, I was with someone and I’d prefer not to give you her name, but if, at a later date, I have to then I will.’
‘I’m afraid that doesn’t work for us Vice-Chancellor,’ McCusker replied, and he had thought so much about the name issue that he very nearly addressed him as Vince Chancellor. ‘We will of course endeavour to be very discreet about it.’
The Vice-Chancellor seemed to consider all the issues and balance it up. He seemed very troubled about it.
‘She’s not married or anything like that,’ he claimed, ‘it’s just that… she works here at the university, and we’re trying to fly under the radar.’
‘So how long have you and Leab David been dating then, Vice-Chancellor?’ McCusker asked.
Chapter Twenty-Four
McCusker and O’Carroll arrived at Louis Bloom’s office just in time for the 15.00 appointment with Miles Bloom.
The look on Leab David’s face betrayed the fact that the Vice-Chancellor had already tipped her off that he’d told the detectives that, whereas Leab might just have been “washing her hair” on the night in question, but even if she had, she had been washing it in the company of the Vice-Chancellor.
As Miles Bloom was already waiting – Leab, it transpired, had already refused to allow him to enter Louis’ actual office until the members of the PSNI were present – they didn’t have time for a discussion with her.
Miles seemed to have calmed down since their last meeting; equally, he did not appear to be a brother grieving over his younger sibling.
McCusker took stock of Miles as O’Carroll directed the witness where to sit, successfully steering him away from his preference behind Louis’ desk.
Miles Bloom carried himself with his head back and his chin forward, much the same as a boxer who did not suffer from a glass jaw. If you wanted to be unkind, McCusker thought, you could say he was continuously looking down his nose at the world. His grey-silver goatee defined the line of his jaw rather than his actual jaw defining the line of his jaw. He was dressed in matching blue denim shirt, with mother-of-pearl snap-buttons, and jeans. His shirt was out over his jeans and under the shirt he wore a black T-shirt. His American-flavoured outfit was completed with a pair of expensive-looking moccasins. He’d a full head of silver-white hair, and the parting, if there had been one in the morning, had been lost to the autumn winds and his earlier hissy fit up at his brother’s house. He frequently swept his right hand – fingers first, from forehead to crown – through his hair. He had a habit of announcing this movement by hiking his shoulders slightly, as if he was lowering his head to accommodate the passage of his hand. McCusker figured that Miles Bloom had recently had a drastic haircut in that he was forever fiddling with phantom hair on his left shoulder. His silver stubbled face looked like it might be two stages this side of puffy.
‘Do I need a lawyer?’
‘We just want to ask you a few questions, Miles, but if you feel you’d like a solicitor present you’re most certainly entitled to one.’
‘I know my rights,’ he snapped.
McCusker and O’Carroll just looked at each other with an “Okay, here we go then” look.
‘What football team do you support Miles?’ McCusker started, throwing in his own curve ball.
‘What? What the eff?’ Miles started, and immediately went into a rant that made Gordon Ramsey sound like a choirboy. ‘Let me tell you something: I don’t have time to sit here with you discussing effing football teams. Let me tell you something: I am a very busy person. Do you realise I have four – that’s one, two, three, four – lawsuits going on at present…’
Mid-rant, McCusker turned to O’Carroll and in a quieter, yet audible voice continued to speak even as Miles ranted on: ‘How many lawsuits have you currently in your life, Detective Inspector?
‘…I know what’s going on here, I know that Louis…’
‘That would be none, McCusker, that’s N, O, N, E,’ O’Carroll answered.
‘…disappeared, just so that he could put my money beyond me…’
‘Yes, I’m the same as you, Detective Inspector; I find I can sleep better without them.’
‘…I’m on to him. I’m on to all of you…’
‘I mean, my solicitor is nowhere near as happy as he’d like to be,’ O’Carroll ping-ponged.
‘…I know for a fact it wasn’t Louis’ body that was found…’
‘But you know what they say?’ McCusker returned.
‘…if he thinks by disappearing he’s going to avoid our day in court…’
‘What do they say, McCusker?’
‘…that money is mine – he knows it, I know it…’
‘They say that a happy solicitor is as strange, yet acceptable, as a dog walking about with a lampshade around his neck.’
‘What the eff are youse two on about?’ Miles finally conceded, as he banged his brother’s desk loudly with his right hand, which immediately rose – stinging deeply, McCusker felt – to enjoy a wee, cooling-off dander through his hair.
‘Well, we’ve heard that you do seem to like a wee rant every now and then, so we thought we’d just chat among ourselves and let you get it out of the way before we started the questioning proper,’ McCusker replied, turning to face Miles Bloom for the first time in ages.
‘But we’d also like to tell you this, Mr Bloom: question you we will, and we’ve got all night to do it if we need to. Equally, if we need to take you down to the Customs House to do it officially with your solicitor then we can do that too, it’s entirely up to you,’ O’Carroll stated.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Miles,’ O’Carroll continued, ‘I feel I should also advise you that the body we found has been positively identified as the body of your brother, Louis Bloom.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Did you and your brother ever get on?’ McCusker asked softly.
Miles signalled he was about to allow his hand another cruise through his hair, by hiking his shoulders.
‘Let me tell you, even before I was aware of what “brothers” meant I never felt he was close to me. I never felt close to him. We didn’t fight; we just didn’t really get on. You see other brothers – and, yes, they would scrap a bit – but if anyone else picked a fight with one of them they were always picking a fight with both of them. I never went to Louis’ rescue.’
‘Did he ever come to yours?’ O’Carroll asked, when it was apparent Miles wasn’t going to add that caveat.
‘You know, I’d really like to be able to say no,’ he admitted, ‘but when I think about it now, I’d have to admit that, yes, he did, he came to my rescue in a few scraps… and he’d help me out and try to cheer me up when it didn’t work out with a girl.’
‘So why all the bitterness?’
‘My father was never on my side and he should have been.’
‘But don’t you think your father was just trying to prepare you for the world?’ O’Carroll offered.
‘Oh please!’ Miles’ voice rose again. ‘Don’t try and psychoanalyse me, sister.’
‘It’s none of our business, Miles, but a man’s estate is his to do with as he pleases,’ McCusker offered.
‘Yes…’ Miles appeared to agree, but then added, ‘…it’s none of your business.’
‘Well actually, it might be,’ McCusker replied, firmly but not aggressively.
‘How so?’
‘Well, let’s look
at the facts,’ McCusker continued, ‘you’re in dispute with your brother over the estate your father left him in his Will.’
‘Let me tell you this,’ Miles said, ‘where there’s a Will there’s a… lawsuit!’
‘That may very well be the case,’ McCusker admitted, ‘but you lost your lawsuit. As we’re led to believe it, you lost several of them, so it would appear that as far as the law of the land is concerned, your father’s Will is valid and you have no case. But for some reason or other you continued to hound your brother, way beyond what would be considered reasonable.’
‘And your point, if there was ever going to be one?’
‘My point is that you’ve tried every possible way to get your father’s estate back again and you failed at every turn. Your father legally left the estate to your brother. Then your brother is murdered, and within hours you turn up at his home claiming that now he’s dead, you are entitled to the estate. Most certainly this establishes a motive as to why you might have murdered your brother.’
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God man, what were you thinking?’ O’Carroll chipped in. ‘She’d just recently lost her husband in such a tragic way and yet within hours you’re round at the house, banging on her door, screaming and shouting like a spoilt child.’
“I’ve learnt to my cost that you can’t win an argument with a lion – so you shoot first and then they don’t talk back,’ Miles declared proudly.
‘Really? Really?’ O’Carroll hissed in disbelief. ‘That’s what you want to say to us?’
‘Let me tell you something about the precious door you said I was banging on,’ Miles continued, completely unfazed, ‘those doors were bought with my money. She is living under the roof of a house that was bought with my money.’
‘Miles, just listen to yourself,’ O’Carroll pleaded. ‘Louis, as well as benefiting from your father’s Will, was a very successful man. He bought Landseer Street with his own money, long before your father died.’
‘You don’t know what scheming Louis and my father got up to before my father died,’ Miles shouted. ‘Look, it’s now part of the official record that he advised my father about how to pass the businesses on to the workers, just because he didn’t want to run them himself.’
‘Miles, the reality is different,’ McCusker reasoned, trying once again to calm him down. ‘The reality is that your father feared you would run the business into the ground.’
‘That’s your reality, brother,’ Miles spat, ‘it’s certainly not mine. I think we’re done here.’
‘Miles, we’re not done here,’ O’Carroll advised him, ‘not by a long chalk and if you force us to arrest you in order to question you further, we will most certainly do that and continue this down at the Customs House. Your call?’
‘What else do you want to know?’
‘Are you self-employed, Miles, or do you work for someone?’ McCusker asked.
‘What does that have to do with anything?’
‘Well, it’s like you mentioned earlier: you have one, two, three, four court cases currently running, and the legal system as we know it is very expensive, so I’m assuming you must have a job of some kind to fund your cases.’
‘There’s always legal aid.’
‘Do you get legal aid, Miles?’
‘No.’
‘So are you going to tell us what you do for a living?’ McCusker persisted.
‘I’m a house husband,’ he admitted.
‘So your wife pays the bills?’ O’Carroll said.
‘Our family pays the bills.’
‘I see,’ O’Carroll said, betraying exactly what she saw.
‘We’d like you to tell us what you know about Louis’ life,’ McCusker began, ‘we’re getting a picture from his friends, but I’d be really interested in your perspective.’
‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Miles started off, surprising McCusker. Usually this was misquoted as “I am not my brother’s keeper”, which would have been more apt in the current circumstances. But interestingly Miles had quoted it correctly. Miles seemed to think better of what he had been about to say and eventually continued with, ‘Louis was unhappily married to an unhappy wife who hangs out with a pothead. Louis was the darling of the students on campus and the majority of his peers. He was a natural at public speaking. In his defence, he didn’t seem to have an ego. He was the perfect child, youth, young man. He caused my parents no stress. He knew what he wanted to do and he knew what he had to do to do it; he just got on with it. He even willingly worked in my father’s business to pick up pocket money. More fool him; I received the exact same pocket money without having to work and mix with humans.’
Guess which of the teenage brothers won that round, McCusker thought, uncharitably.
‘He has a subject he is passionate about: love, which is kind of ironic considering the state of his own love life. He has a book he’s been trying to get published for a few years. I tried to get a copy of it just in case it contained anything inflammatory about me. Our claim was rejected on the grounds that as there was currently no publisher, there was no need for justification. My lawyer did get an assurance from Louis’ solicitor that I’m not even mentioned in the book. This in itself is quite interesting, in that if it’s a book about his life, how come he doesn’t even mention his brother in it?’
‘Aye, it appears he’s damned if he does and he’s damned if he doesn’t’ McCusker said. He was thinking it, so he said it, then he thought perhaps he shouldn’t have.
‘But all in all,’ Miles started, completely ignoring McCusker, ‘apart from a disastrous marriage, hedid well for himself.’
‘How’s your father’s businesses been doing since he passed?’
‘Very well actually, no thanks to those fools he left to run it.’
‘Is Louis involved?’ McCusker wanted to continue with this line, if only to see where it would go.
‘He had an honorary seat on the board, I believe.’
‘He must do quite well out of that,’ McCusker said, knowing in fact that Louis hadn’t taken a salary from his father’s business.
‘Most likely raking it in from there as well.’
‘Actually, Miles, he doesn’t take a penny from your father’s business,’ O’Carroll started, seeming to have had her fill of Miles Bloom, ‘and you know that very well, being such a litigious man. It is my opinion – and I should qualify that by saying it’s not necessarily the view of the PSNI – that Louis behaved very honourably in all his dealings with his father’s business and estate. He probably could have dumped you behind bars in court several times over the years with your outrageous claims and lawsuits against him.’
‘Really, sister?’
‘Yes really, Miles. And I can’t understand your behaviour towards your brother. I have a real sister, Grace, and if she was ever left lock stock and barrel of my parent’s estate, I would be nothing but over the moon for her.’
McCusker hoped it wasn’t noticeable that he was absolutely beaming with pride, because he was.
‘And tell me this, Detective Inspector O’Carroll: is this bitch, the one you refer to as your sister, is she really your sister or was she, just like Louis, an interloper and adopted?’
McCusker found himself involuntarily rise from his seat, and the seat swiftly flew back from him. O’Carroll simultaneously rose and reached across to him and put her hand on his shoulder in a vice-like grip, exerting such force on McCusker as to render him stationary. She mouthed rather than whispered the words, ‘Leave this to me.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
‘God forgive me,’ O’Carroll hissed as they left Louis’ office, ‘but there is a part of me that would really like it to be him.’
‘And it still might be,’ McCusker chipped in, as they passed Galileo for the second time that day.
‘I’ll tell you, I was just this much away from arresting him,’ O’Carroll admitted, showing a space of about an eighth of an inch between her forefinger and thumb.
/> ‘Yeah, I noticed you were as keen as a sheep in search of the shade on a hot day.’
‘He’d just upped his own motive ratio with that bombshell about Louis being adopted,’ she said, while still looking at McCusker and shaking her head from his last statement. ‘But then I figured, we weren’t quite there yet and I was scared of botching all of it up and being responsible for him getting away with murdering his brother.’
‘Good call,’ McCusker replied, trying a more conservative approach.
‘We need to put a 24-hour surveillance on him until such time as we have enough to take him into custody,’ she said, as they strode into their office, ‘DI Cage – can I have a quiet word with you? I’ve a very important job for you.’
McCusker was impressed at O’Carroll’s powers of delegation. It was so seamless, he never even noticed the join.
‘We have a suspect – Miles Bloom – and I need you to–’
‘I thought he was missing,’ Cage said.
‘No, that was his brother, Louis.’
‘So have you found Miles?’
‘Yes, sweetie, we have found Miles. It’s Louis who is dead.’
‘And you suspect the brother?’
‘Yes.’
‘And this is the case that the TV people are interested in?’
‘Jarvis, it’s going to be a big local case.’
‘That’s genocide isn’t it, when a brother murders a brother?’
‘It would need to be a very large family of brothers before it would qualify as genocide, so you’re going to have to settle for fratricide on this one.’
‘Can we title it the Fancy Fratricider?’
‘They might think that’s a drink from the West Country, sweetie. Why don’t we just leave it to the TV people to pick the name?’
‘Good point, DI O’Carroll,’ Cage agreed, not even feeling the hook now deep in the roof of his mouth, ‘no matter what we call it, they’re probably going to pick their own name anyway. Right? So, what do you need me to do?’
