by Joe McNally
‘Doc, I never lost consciousness. I was a bit stunned by the noise and everything, but I knew what was happening. I knew my goggles had come off, that’s why I asked where they were.’
‘Can you walk to the ambulance?’
‘Sure.’ I tried to spring to my feet but the left knee almost gave way. I walked. He watched, looking for signs of poor balance. Concentration got me to the ambulance and the ambulance got me to the weighing room in time for my next ride.
Maven Judge came off the train lugging a heavy holdall. I leant on the wall watching her scrawny outline against the string of platform lights. She hoisted the bag on her shoulder, the weight dragging open the zip of her leather jacket. She hadn’t seen me and I watched her come toward me out of the lights, the bag’s weight making her hobble on her right side. I was in the shadows and as she drew level I said, ‘Carry your bag, madam?’
She stopped and quickly lowered the holdall. ‘The white knight,’ she said, then looked closer and saw the cut on my forehead and the long bruise the loose horseshoe had left in my earlier fall. ‘Who lost a fight…What happened?’
‘Fell off just before a horse decided to pry a shoe loose and fire it at my face.’
‘Could have been nasty if one of the pointy ends hit you.’
‘It’s a scratch.’ I took her bag and started walking.
‘You’re limping.’
‘One stood on my knee. In the same race.’
‘They had it in for you today, didn’t they?’
‘They did. Come on. It’s whiskey time.’
‘Jeez, this is axe-murderer country,’ she said as we trundled the final mile downhill to the house, headlights bouncing on the trees, making them look as though they were moving.
‘You hardly live in the heart of the metropolis yourself.’
‘But at least I can hear the sea and smell the ozone.’
‘And I can hear the silence and smell the woods in the rain.’
‘Aww, you’ve gone all romantic on me.’
I smiled as I stopped and pulled on the handbrake.
In the kitchen, I put the bag on the table. She unzipped it and hauled out another bag, thickly padded to protect her laptop, and a wet-sack type bag with a roll top.
‘I thought you were staying for a while?’
‘I am.’
I nodded toward the bag. ‘Is that all your clothes?’
‘It’s all I’ve brought. You want to audit them or something?
‘It just doesn’t look much. For a woman. Are your shoes being shipped in a crate or something?’
‘I travel light. I never buy knickers that don’t dry in an hour.’
‘Before washing them or after?’
She swung the bag at me and I stepped away laughing. ‘Come on. I’ll show you your room.’
Half an hour later we were at my desk. Mave was in my usual seat and my laptop had been pushed aside for her supersized silver one and a mug of tea.
It was strange seeing her live, crouched over her keyboard, fingers working it as though they’d been made to do nothing but that. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Importing today’s results into my programme.’
‘When do we get onto the scanner stuff?’
‘When I’ve finished this tea.’
‘I didn’t see a scanner in that big bag of yours.’
‘Would you know what one looked like?’
‘Fair question.’
She hit her last keystroke with the panache of a concert pianist and turned and smiled at me. ‘But you’re right. I’m scannerless at the moment. There’s a guy from Vodafone in Newbury getting one for me.’
‘When?’
‘As soon as you want. He’s got it. I told him it would probably be tomorrow before we could pick it up.’
‘Can you get it tonight?’
She took out her phone and opened contacts.
40
The shutters on Watt’s house looked daunting in the dark, the full moon burnishing the padlocks, exaggerating their thickness.
We started at the front. Mave wore headphones attached to the scanner which was in her jacket pocket. I walked beside her, pointing the flashlight on full flood beam. Every ten steps or so. I’d glance at her and she’d shake her head. We skirted the house and I imagined the architect’s original drawings as we followed the line of the walls, around the gable end, down into the main yard, the moonlight now on the cobbles making a group of them look like a tiny range of smooth hills.
We turned at the corner along the base of the U shape, moving slowly and Mave never faltered. We completed a circuit without stopping even once and she took off the headphones. ‘Zilch. You mentioned outbuildings. Where are they?’
There were four buildings behind the house, between the yard and the paddock fence. The doors on each faced east, otherwise, there was little uniformity. Different sizes. One with a tin roof, another with half a roof, and yet the security guys had sealed the doors and windows. I knew one had held the hulk of an old red tractor. The largest of them was used as a grain store and secondary barn. The big hay barn was attached to the complex and we’d covered that in the first run.
I changed the angle of the light beam, pointing it right in front of our feet trying to pick out old wire and masonry in the shin-high grass we stalked through. Hoping too for some disturbed ground, a shallow grave, and wondering if the bug would transmit through a few feet of earth.
No luck.
None of the buildings offered a sound.
We stopped and looked at each other. I turned the beam to narrow and aimed across the paddock over the fields, more as a reversion to a childlike compulsion than in any hope of seeing something. I switched the flashlight off. Mave removed the earphones.
‘Can we do one more circuit?’ I asked.
‘We can do as many as you like. I’ll keep narrowing the parameters each time. At least that will filter out a lot of the foreign stations and general crap.’
‘What are you listening for? If the bug’s in a watch then it would have to be a digital watch for it to have a battery, and digitals don’t tick, do they?’
‘Some of them have a tick programmed in. I’m just seeking a strong signal. The wave will still be transmitted even though there’s no sound being recorded.’
‘What you’re really saying is that it could be a long night?’
‘That’ll make me feel right at home.’ Mave adjusted the headphones and I turned the flashlight beam on and twisted it to wide angle.
Three more circuits brought nothing. We stopped by the hay barn. ‘Would it help, if we could get inside?’
‘Mave set her jaw and stared at me as though I was stupid. ‘What do you think?’ she asked.
I smiled. ‘I think it was a silly question. Wait there.’ I went to the car and returned with a set of lockpicks.
‘You know how to pick locks?’ Mave asked.
‘I used to know. It’s a delicate skill, and I haven’t used it for a long time.’ I was working on the lock on the back which secured the window into the kitchen.
‘Where did you learn to do that?’
‘Correspondence course. Lockpick dot com. You get a certificate and everything.’
She leant around my right side so she could see my face close up. I smiled without looking at her. ‘I learned in prison.’
‘Oh, I forgot about that. Jailbird.’
After six attempts, we were in.
I switched the lights on in the kitchen. Mave grabbed my arm and whispered. ‘What are you doing!’
‘Why are you whispering?’
‘Because you turned the lights on. Somebody might see us!’
‘All the windows are boarded up. The one we came in is at the back. Just fields and trees out there. Take it easy.’ It was the first time I’d seen any vulnerability in Mave. Her eyes were wide. ‘Come on.’ I said, ‘we won’t be long.’
We covered every room. I showed her where the hard drive had be
en for the CCTV. All the wires hung as they had when I’d taken a picture of them. As we walked down the hall to the opposite end of the house, I told her about seeing Kilberg that night prowling around this end room.
She scanned every inch. Nothing. ‘I think Kilberg was using it as a gym,’ I said, opening the cupboard door and taking out the silver dumbbells. ‘Bayley was never into physical fitness.’ I did a couple of bicep curls with them. ‘Come on, Eddie, let’s get out. I feel safer in the dark.’
As I laid the dumbbells on the mat in the cupboard, the edge of one caught the corner of the mat and moved it. Below the mat was a hatch, like an old floor safe. It was hinged, but there was no handle or catch, no obvious way of opening it. ‘Mave.’
She came over. I pushed the sharp end of a lockpick down the right edge and eased the wooden lid up. The space below was shallow, maybe six inches deep. Resting across beams was a soft neoprene case with a zip. Inside it was a black laptop.
Outside, I relocked the padlock on the window shutter, and carried the laptop under my arm. We headed out of the quadrangle of boxes on our way to the car, when something came back to me. This was the route Watt and I had taken on that ride-out in the snow. When Watt had wanted to stick to the roads and I’d suggested we go through the gate and up onto the Ridgeway. And my horse had spooked crossing a particular piece of ground. Spooked and seemed scared afterward.
I turned to Mave. ‘Is that scanner still on?’
She switched it on and pulled the earphones up again as I told her what had happened and led her toward the gate. Then I stopped. That ride out had been less than a week after Jimmy was buried. His body had still been in the graveyard. I steered Mave toward the main buildings.
Crossing the open ground between the outhouses and the yard, Mave stopped and held up a hand. I looked at her. She took two steps back then three forward. I swept the beam across the ground around her. She turned north and went four steps then spun and walked south…and walked…and kept going.
We passed the muck heap on our left and moved toward the paddock. She stopped and turned and went the length of the rear wall of the muck heap, ten strides, then along the side wall, across the open front and back along the third wall where the pile of old droppings and straw was at its lowest. I remembered that Bayley emptied the wheelbarrow from the northern side.
Mave took off the earphones and just looked at me.
I pointed to the muck heap. ‘In there?’
She nodded.
41
It took McCarthy five minutes to get in touch with Sara Chase and she had a team there within an hour. The vans parked on the drive, their headlights blinding. I shielded my eyes and saw four men dressed all in white emerge from the light carrying bags, coming toward us. Two had cameras, the straps around their necks, tripods under arms.
Mave had taken the laptop and her gear and returned to the car, uneasy about possible formalities. The men in white stopped in front of me. One nodded and began setting up his tripod. The others pulled up the hoods on their white jumpsuits and began emptying the bags.
‘Mister Malloy?’
I remembered the voice, and turned, baffled at how DS Wilmslow had managed to approach unseen. He looked no more human than he had that day when Sergeant Middleton brought him to interview me after Kilberg died. He was looking at the muck heap and grimacing.
He told me the men in white were scene of crime officers and that they’d have a fair bit of work to do before the muck heap could be searched. A vehicle bringing arc lights was on its way.
‘Arc lights and shovels?’ I asked.
He looked at the heap of droppings and filthy straw, from its top at chest height to ground level. A shallow tide of urine surrounded it, ebbed to about six inches. But the stains of its high tide mark darkened the concrete two feet from the heap. The January cold had chilled the smell to little more than a light odour, one I’d never found unpleasant anyway. But Wilmslow seemed disgusted by it. ‘They won’t use shovels,’ he said. ‘Might damage the corpse if it is in there, and contaminate evidence.’
One of the SOCO men returned to the vans, their headlights still blazing, engines running, and returned with four telescopic rods. ‘Probes,’ Wilmslow said.
I turned away. It had been bad enough waiting for them to arrive. The thought of Jimmy hauled from a grave that had been sprinkled with holy water and blessed by a priest, to be reburied in a heap of horse shit in a yard from which he used to ride out with great hope was beyond sickening. My anger at the thought had faded to deep sadness. I told Wilmslow I’d wait in the car.
Mave was lying across the back seat. ‘What are you so scared of?’ I asked as I closed the driver’s side door and settled into the darkness.
‘I’m scared of spending months of my life giving statements and attending inquiries and maybe prosecutions. I’m not here. Okay? I’ve never been here.’
I sighed and pulled out my phone. Mave sat up and grabbed my shoulder. ‘Eddie, keep me out of this. I’m serious.’
‘Okay. Okay. Cool it.’
‘Who are you calling, then? What are you doing?’
I put the phone down and turned to her, my eyes adjusting to the darkness again after what had seemed a long bath in bright light. She looked worried. ‘Mave, listen. I know how you feel about authority and government and cops and all that stuff, and if it’s anything to do with me, you won’t be asked a single question. But buried up there in that pile of horse shit is a friend of mine. He saved my life one time. Give me a break, will you?’
Slowly, she eased back in the seat, taking her hand from my shoulder. ‘Jimmy’s dead, Eddie,’ she said. ‘He won’t have felt a thing. It won’t matter to Jimmy where he’s ended up.’ She said it quietly, trying to console me. ‘It matters to me where he ended up, Mave.’
She nodded and slowly reached and squeezed my shoulder. She lay back down, and I dialled McCarthy’s number and told him where the police were at. ‘Mac, I need a big favour.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘If they find Jimmy in there, I want the police to say he was found in the barn, among the haybales, wrapped in clean blankets.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I don’t want his father to find out.’
Mac exhaled in that long sigh which many would have interpreted as frustration and impatience. I pictured him blowing out his cheeks and looking down at his feet and trying to figure out how he could help me. ‘Let me speak to Sara Chase.’
‘Mac-’
‘I know, Eddie. I’ll make sure she realizes how important it is to you.’
‘Thanks, Mac.’
I put the phone on the seat beside me and slumped back, my head on the soft rest. I could hear Mave’s even breathing and thought she’d fallen asleep, but after a minute she spoke quietly into the darkness. ‘I think I made a mistake coming here, Eddie. Spending too much time with you will make me soft. I know it. I just know it. If you turn me into an everyday member of the human race, I’ll never forgive you.’
I smiled, though she couldn’t see me. I watched the moon.
‘You hear me, Malloy? I will not forgive. Ever.’
42
Getting into the black laptop took Mave less time than it took me to make tea and sandwiches. As I put the plates on the desk, she groaned. I looked at her face, which was lit mostly by reflected light from the laptop. Her head was withdrawing in what looked an ultra-slow motion recoil. ‘You okay?’ I took two steps to get behind her and see the screen, but she quickly snapped the lid closed.
‘Child porn. Gross. Gross pictures.’
I moved back and sat across from her. She stared ahead as though the screen was still open, her face frozen in disgust and shock. I reached slowly for her hand. She withdrew it and folded her arms, sticking her hands beneath her armpits.
‘Mave…’
She looked at me. ‘There is no God,’ she said, her face a mix of anger and hurt, tears rising.
Even in the pales
t of light from the small desk lamp, I could see the colour had gone from her. She stood, holding onto the desk as though fearful of falling. ‘Can I go and lie down?’ she asked, almost whispering.
I got up and put an arm round her shoulder and led her to her bedroom. She sat on the edge of the bed staring, shocked. I eased her shoes off. ‘Lie flat. I’ll cover you up.’
She lay near the edge of the double bed. I went to the other side and gathered the covers, rolled them over her. She turned onto her side and curled up. I sat beside her. Still she stared. I rested a hand on her shoulder. ‘Put a pillow over my face,’ she said.
‘Mave-’
‘Eddie. Please! I need to be blind.’
I leaned across and picked up a pillow and laid it gently across her head. ‘Leave me, now,’ she said.
‘I’ll sit a while.’
‘Leave me, Eddie. Please.’
‘Okay.’
‘Turn off the light.’
‘I will.’
I shut the door softly and went back along the hall. I stood looking at the desk, at the closed PC, and walked away from it, to the Snug at the back of the house, to stare through the big window at the darkness and try to take everything in.
Watt and Kilberg and their blackmailer - I had to assume he’d got into Watt’s PC - faded now. Mave held my thoughts. She’d been the queen of logic, the chief among cynics. Who understood human behaviour better than she did? What was it she’d said …”A dispassionate view of humanity for one year will tell you all you need to know.” Maybe she knew it from reading about life, maybe from observing people from that remote emotional standpoint. But the reality of this part of humanity had skewered her.
Mave was the most unusual woman I’d ever met. Now she’d gone from invulnerable in my eyes, to helpless. Her protective layers had been stripped away by the images on a PC screen. Stupidly, I wondered what it might do to her love of technology, to her working night spent in front of a screen. Would she ever again be able to open a laptop without seeing what she’d just seen?
