“I’ve only just got back from — ”
The dog howled and scratched.
“What on earth’s that? Sounds like the Hound of the Baskervilles.”
“It’s the estate agent’s dog. Leo, I think something’s wrong.”
CHAPTER XXIII
Macrae felt slightly cheered. Interviews with people like Geach often cheered him. Now he was the bearer of good tidings which was something that didn’t often happen to him. He could ring Gladys that evening or the following day or he could go and tell her now. He decided to play Father Christmas and set off on foot along the road that led to Rosemary House.
Where they came from he never knew. One moment he was plodding along the curving road, the next, like fetches, they were simply there, ghostly shapes in the mist. They stopped, stood on the muddy grass at the side of the road and, incredibly at first, seemed about to let him pass.
Macrae was afraid. He wasn’t often afraid, but he was now.
No eye contact, he told himself.
He had read somewhere that in Africa predators always killed the animal that broke and ran. He did not change his pace. He was almost past the group of youths when one shouted. “I know ‘im. He’s a fuckin’ copper.”
Only a few words, but a war cry.
They came at him from all sides and Macrae’s fleeting memory of Africa was not far-fetched. The youths were like Cape hunting dogs attacking an isolated buffalo. They came from behind — he felt blows on his legs — and from the sides. He saw a half-brick, he saw a bicycle chain, he saw a length of metal tubing.
Don’t fall! Don’t fall!
Under the orange sodium lights which gave the fog an unearthly colour, he fought back. It was unscientific, uneducated. He swung punches, sometimes connecting, sometimes not. He grabbed hair, ears, anything he could lay his hands on. But there were too many of them. They hit and kicked, their hard Doc Martens thudded into his calves and thighs. One jumped on to his back and pressed an iron bar against his throat.
It was then he knew they were going to kill him. They might not mean to kill him but they were in the grip of a mob hysteria that was communicating itself, from one to the next, like a frenzy.
Don’t fall!
But he could not stand. His legs were being battered and kicked, his strength was going. They pushed him, he staggered, his foot hit one of Geach’s “sleeping policemen” — and he went down.
The pack was on him in an instant. He pulled up his legs into the foetal position to protect his genitals and his stomach and covered what he could of his head and face with his arms and hands.
It was all he could do.
So far, the youths had preserved a grim silence while they beat him. Now he heard a voice he recognized.
“Here! Give us a go!”
Through his fingers he could see Stoker. He had a tyre lever in his hand.
“My turn!”
Stoker grabbed one of the youths and pulled him aside to get at Macrae. The youth was far gone in a state of savage hysteria and the interruption was like igniting an additional emotional fuse.
A blow, meant for Macrae, changed its parabolic arc and found Stoker’s kneecap.
“Christ!” he yelled.
Someone swung a chain and caught him in the mouth. Blood flowed on to his chin.
“Don’t!” he shouted. “I hates coppers. I’m one of you!”
One of them? For an instant they stopped as they digested this unlikely statement.
Stoker picked a tooth from his mouth and stared dully at it.
“Look what you did!” he said.
Then he turned and ran.
They were after him in a flash. A moving target.
Macrae heard the unmistakable sounds of flesh and bone being pounded. He heard a cry. Then he crawled away. He pulled himself along on his elbows like some stricken saurian.
Great mountains reared above him. A line of dustbins. He crawled behind them and lay unconscious for the better part of twenty minutes.
Slowly his senses returned. He began to test the exposed parts of his body, then the extremities. Nothing broken. His heavy coat had saved him. But he was bleeding from the mouth and nose.
At his feet was a bundle of newspapers neatly tied for the dustmen to remove. He sat up, ripped up a newspaper and cleaned his face and hands. Slowly he rose to his feet. He was shaky and dizzy. He knew his car was only fifty yards away. But could he make it?
He lifted the lid of a dustbin to throw away the blood-stained paper. In the light from the nearest sodium lamp he found himself looking down at Stoker. He had been stuffed into the bin in a sitting position. For a moment Macrae thought he was alive. Then he looked into the staring eyes and realized they would never see anything again.
Carefully he lowered the lid, put the newspaper into his coat, and, keeping to the grass, silently made his way back to his car.
Leo Silver and Linda Macrae stood on Irene’s terrace.
They had phoned the estate agency from Linda’s flat but only got an answering machine. Leo was anxious to be off in search of Macrae and did not want to become embroiled in something that wasn’t in his patch.
But Linda had been firm. “We can’t just leave things,” she said. As she spoke the dog howled again. “We must check that she’s all right.”
They had banged on windows and doors, carefully avoiding the dog, but there had been no reply.
And so they had come to the terrace and Leo was looking at the french doors. “I’ll have to break the glass,” he said.
“I thought the police could pick locks. George always said — ”
“The key’s in the lock on the other side.”
He took a brick from the garden and carefully smashed a single pane next to the door handle. He put in his hand, turned the key, opened the door, pushed the heavy curtains aside — and they were in.
The room was warm and well lit. Cosy. As though it was expecting company.
“Irene!” Linda called.
The dog answered with hysterical barking.
“What’s that?” Linda said, looking at something that had fallen partly under a chair.
Leo bent and picked it up. “Apple,” he said. “She must have been eating — ”
He stopped. The juice of this grass-green apple was stained with red. “Oh, Jesus!” he said.
The trail of blood led across the carpet. They followed it into Irene’s bedroom.
The two bodies were interlocked on the floor. The man’s body with the knife deep in his stomach lay on top, the woman, her face purple and her eyes bulging out of their bloody sockets, underneath. His dead fingers still lay at her throat.
CHAPTER XXIV
It was a bright, brisk morning. The fog had gone and the sun was out.
Macrae lay in his bed. Frenchy had decided to give him a breakfast she considered would help return him to the man he had been. There was bacon, eggs, sausages, a steak, fried bread, grilled tomatoes, and chips.
Macrae, sore and battered, looked at this in apprehension and dismay.
“Lassie, I’ll never — ”
“Just get your teeth around this, George, and you’ll feel a lot better. I’m going to have a bath then I’m coming to dress your cuts.”
“Cuts” was a general understatement for the bruises, contusions, abrasions, wounds, and general havoc which had been done to his body.
“And then I’m going to give you a sponge bath.”
He was too weak to argue.
When he had got back from Lambeth she had been appalled by what she had seen; so much so that she had phoned Rambo and told him she would not be working until further notice and was threatening to ring certain other numbers which would bring down vengeance on the yobs. Macrae had asked her to desist and from then on she had been a regular little Florence Nightingale.
He heard the water run into her bath. Slowly and painfully he levered himself out of bed, found a plastic shopping bag, emptied the plate of food into it, and
hid it on the top of his wardrobe.
He crawled back into bed, drank his coffee, and lit a cigar. He was supposed to return to work the following day but had extended his leave by a week.
He wondered what Scales would say. He wondered if he had even the slightest inkling of what had been going on. No…Scales was too much a bloody desk-wallah to have pipelines into the underworld. And even if he did know, Stoker was dead and he was sure Molly would never come after him on her own.
He wondered if he should see her; do something about the tapes. Probably be a good idea.
Some time.
He had never thought he’d be grateful to a bunch of hooligans. But he was. He’d assumed they were all in their late teens but the local community copper who’d gone into the estate and pulled them in had told Macrae that one of them was only twelve. God knew what that little darling would be like when he grew up; another Stoker perhaps.
Which reminded him, he’d have to phone Norman Paston and tell him there was nothing to the rumour about the bent copper. He’d enjoy that.
And then there was Silver. What the hell did he know? It was apparent that he knew something. Didn’t matter at the moment. They’d sort it out.
The point was, nothing mattered at the moment. There was just the pain and his cigar.
His mind went back over several incidents. Buckle…Gladys (she’d be all right now)…Irene what’shername…
Silver had told him the details. “The strange thing was the apples,” he’d said. “She was crazy about apples. They were everywhere. She had a bowl in the sitting-room, one in her bedroom. Even one in the bathroom. Some of them half-eaten.”
Macrae’s mind had been ticking over as he listened, now it went into gear. “And knives?” he said.
“Oh, sure. You know, the sort cooks use. She used one on the estate agent. Must have grabbed it when he came for her. I mean she was nearly bloody lucky, guv’nor.”
“Aye. Nearly.”
He realized he had unwittingly outlined to Irene a modus operandi for murder by self-defence. He felt a momentary convulsion of conscience. But what the hell, people who were going to commit murder usually did. And remembering her eyes he realized that nothing he might have said or left unsaid would have changed it. Only the method.
Frenchy came back from her bath and saw the empty plate. “That’s good, George. You must be feeling better.”
“It’s your cooking,” he said, gallantly.
“Well, you have a sleep, and I’ll have a little peruse downstairs.”
She picked up Our Mutual Friend; all nine hundred paperback pages.
“You’re sure you want that?” he said.
“You like it, so I’ll like it. Anyway, I like reading about people’s friends.”
Less than a couple of miles from Macrae’s house, Leo and Zoe were also in bed. They had just finished making love and Leo was still lying on top of her, his bones turned to rubber, fighting the desire to drift off into sleep.
She patted his naked bottom. “That was very nice indeed,” she said. “Leopold Silver — Lover.”
“Uuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhh,” he said, and rolled on to his own side of the bed.
After a while she said, “Leo? Are you asleep?”
“Uuuuuuuuhhhh.”
“What’s going to happen now with this Macrae thing?”
“Scales is going to go ape. That’s what’s going to happen. No Stoker, no debt; no debt, no stick to beat Macrae with.”
“I thought you were brilliant. I would have told you except it would have given you a swollen head.”
“Thanks. Listen, what about going out for lunch? What about driving out into the country? Something like that.”
She raised herself on her elbow and looked down at him. “Do you know what day this is? This is the day all good boys eat with their parents.”
“I’ll ring my mother.”
“God, Leo, what’ll you say?”
“I’ll lie.”
“Wow. And then we can come back to bed this afternoon and do this all over again.”
“Uuuuuuuuhhhh!”
“But only if you feel strong enough.”
He lay back and looked at the ceiling. He felt tired but happy. “What’s that?” he said.
“What’s what?”
“On the ceiling.”
It was one of the signs she had lettered to welcome him back.
““Home is the hunter”,” he read. “You’ve got it wrong.”
“I’ve got it what?”
“It doesn’t go like that.”
“My God! Leo, you’re getting impossible!”
“Well, it doesn’t. It goes — ”
“I’m waiting.”
“Listen, it’s one of the most misquoted lines in the world.”
“OK, well, quote it correctly then.”
“It goes…Oh, Christ, I can’t remember exactly how it goes. But take my word for it.”
“No, Leo, I will not take your word for it. Where’s our book of quotations?”
“Upstairs.”
Naked, she got out of bed and ran across the room.
Leo turned to the wall. He might just be able to get a couple of minutes’ sleep before she came back.
Molly Gorman walked along the paths of one of those bleak cemeteries that spread for miles beside the Southern Railway. Finally she came to Stoker’s grave. The earth was fresh, which distinguished it from its neighbours. One day she might order a headstone for it. She hadn’t known whether he wanted to be cremated or buried so she’d had to make the decision.
It was a pity about Gary. But it wouldn’t have lasted. Funny, she must have seen him around as a little boy without even knowing who he was. Now he was gone.
First the father, then Gary, but what else could she have done? It was everyone for themselves in this life and once the old bill got their hooks into you, they never let go.
She felt sad. Cemeteries always made her feel sad. She didn’t think she’d come again.
She placed a wreath of plastic flowers on the grave and began the long walk back to her car.
They were selling forced daffodils at the cemetery gates; the first signs of spring.
Thank God January was over.
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Never Die in January (A Macrae and Silver Mystery Book 2) Page 19
