‘But … but …’ Braithwaite spluttered, astonished.
‘But what?’
‘But by falsely accusing you of murder, they have so weakened their own position that—’
‘That they should be the ones to back down?’
‘Well, yes.’
Coutes laughed. ‘How little you know about power, Braithwaite,’ he said. ‘The very worst time to make people back down is when they are already feeling weak. They will never forgive you for it. On the other hand, if you are in the strong position, and you choose to back down, they will be eternally grateful. We will give the Americans a little of what they want in this particular negotiation, and they will give us a great deal of what we want in future conflicts of interest.’
‘But your Cabinet colleagues will never—’
‘Sanction such an agreement?’
‘Yes.’
‘My Cabinet colleagues are experiencing an emotion hitherto almost entirely unknown to them. Can you guess what it is?’
‘No, I—’
‘Guilt! They abandoned me, and they are feeling guilty about it. In a month or so, they will have persuaded themselves that they behaved entirely properly in the circumstances, but at the moment they will give me anything I want.’ Coutes paused. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Braithwaite.’
‘Do you, Minister?’
‘I believe so. Now I have explained my own thought process to you, you are thinking that it’s little wonder that I am a minister of the crown, while you are a mere aide.’
And, indeed, Braithwaite had been thinking exactly that.
Nicholas Bosworth looked like a weaker, more watered-down, version of his older brother. He hadn’t seemed exactly happy when he answered the door, but once Rutter had identified himself, the unhappiness had rapidly transformed itself into a look of pure panic.
‘You’re … you’re a policeman,’ he gasped.
Rutter made a show of examining his own warrant card. ‘Yes, that’s what it appears to say here,’ he agreed.
‘Who … who told you where I live?’
‘Your brother, as a matter of fact. But that doesn’t really matter, does it? The only important thing, as far as you’re concerned, is that I’m here now – and I want to talk to you.’
‘W … well, I don’t want to talk to you,’ Bosworth said, with a sudden show of defiance.
‘Please yourself,’ Rutter replied, turning to go. ‘After all, it’s your funeral, not mine.’
‘My f … funeral? What do you mean?’
‘Sooner or later, you’ll have to talk to somebody about what you did at Haverton Camp,’ Rutter told him. ‘And my main worry is that the next person they send might not be anything like as friendly and understanding as I am. I’m told that Special Branch, for example, can be really quite rough.’
‘Why would Special Branch want to talk to me? I haven’t done anything,’ Bosworth whined.
Rutter put his hand on the other man’s shoulder, and looked him in the eye. ‘I believe you,’ he said.
‘You do?’ Bosworth asked, hardly able to believe his own luck.
‘Or rather, I believe that you didn’t know just how serious the thing you got yourself involved in was,’ Rutter said, tightening his grip on Bosworth’s shoulder ever so slightly.
‘I didn’t know,’ Bosworth moaned. ‘I swear on my mother’s grave that I didn’t.’
‘Then why don’t we go inside, where you can tell me all about how you were duped?’ Rutter suggested. ‘That sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it?’
Bosworth nodded his head weakly in agreement.
Twenty-Nine
As Monika Paniatowski picked up the phone in the box at the edge of Haverton Village and dialled the number of Dunethorpe CID, she noticed that her pulse was racing.
It’s the excitement that’s making it do that, she told herself – the excitement and the tension.
But there was a part of her which suspected that it probably had much more to do with shame.
‘I’ve done what you asked me to,’ DCI Baxter said, from the other end of the line.
‘Good, I’m very—’
‘But before I tell you what I’ve found out, I want to make it quite clear that there are no strings attached to my giving you the information.’
‘Strings?’
‘If you still want to see me when I’ve given it to you, that’s fine. And if you don’t – well, I’ll get over it.’
‘I do want to see you,’ Paniatowski said.
And she meant it. Baxter might not be the handsomest man or most exciting lover in the world, but he was kind and gentle – and he would never have used her as Special Agent Grant had tried to.
‘Are you sure that when you gave me the name of the man you’d wanted me to ask about, you got it exactly right?’ Baxter asked.
‘Yes.’
‘It wasn’t “Brant” or “Grantham”, or anything like that?’
‘It was Grant.’
‘And his first name is definitely “Edward”?’
‘Yes. Why are you asking me these questions? Are you about to tell me that there isn’t anybody working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation called Edward Grant?’
‘No, I’m not,’ Baxter assured her. ‘There certainly is an Edward Grant on the FBI payroll.’
‘Well, then?’
‘It’s just I’m surprised, given what you do for a living and what he does for a living, that your paths have ever crossed.’
Nicholas Bosworth’s living room was a shrine to apathy and neglect. The sofa and easy chairs were shabby, the table dust-covered, the windows streaked with dirt. The only item on which any care had been lavished was the large television that the rest of the room seemed to be centred around – and even that was probably only ever switched on for the horse racing.
‘Tell me how it all started,’ Rutter suggested.
‘I’m not sure I know where to—’
‘Begin with whoever it was who first put the idea into your head. You do know who that was, don’t you?’
Nicholas Bosworth nodded miserably. ‘It was a girl,’ he said. ‘A very pretty girl.’
Well, isn’t that amazing? Rutter thought wryly. Whoever would have thought that a girl – and a pretty one at that – would have been involved?
He had no idea he was being followed when he came out of the betting shop, Nicholas Bosworth said, but looking back on it, he supposed that he must have been.
He went straight to the nearest pub. He wasn’t much of a drinker under normal circumstances, but after the implications of the loss he’d just suffered had sunk in – after he’d really begun to appreciate that he’d dug himself into an even deeper hole than he’d been in already – he needed a shot of whisky to give him the courage to keep on going.
He knew he wasn’t looking anything like his best – and that even at his best, he wasn’t exactly great – so he’d been more than surprised when the attractive young woman sitting at the bar had given him a broad, inviting smile. And his surprise had only increased when she’d climbed down off her stool, come over to his table and asked if she could join him.
‘You look a bit down in the mouth,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you?’
He hadn’t needed a second invitation. He poured out his woes in a great torrent. And she just sat there, giving him all her attention and occasionally nodding her head sympathetically.
‘Do you know what you need?’ she asked, when even he had finally grown tired of hearing himself rail against his place in the universe in general, and his place in the bookmakers’ account books in particular.
‘No,’ he said. ‘What do I need?’
‘You need to make yourself one big killing. You need to hit the jackpot just once, so you can tell yourself you’re walking away a winner.’
‘But how would I do that?’ he wondered.
‘There’s lots of ways, if you just stop and think about it. But the one th
at comes to mind at the moment is that you could find something valuable – something that everyone else is looking for.’
‘Like what?’
‘Oh, it could anything. An infallible betting system—’
‘I’ve been trying to find one of those for years.’
‘—a cure for cancer, a way to make cars run on something much less expensive than petrol—’
‘You have to be very clever to come up with something like that. And the problem is, I’m not.’
The girl smiled. ‘I suppose I was getting a bit carried away there,’ she admitted. ‘Let’s think about something more ordinary – something much more down to earth. A big jewellery robbery, for example.’
‘What!’
‘The insurance companies hate paying out the full amount, so they usually offer a ten per cent finder’s fee – no questions asked. And in the case of really big jewellery thefts, even ten percent can be a lot of money.’
‘Go on,’ he said, intrigued.
‘Say this particular gang of robbers we’re talking about had buried their stash somewhere. Say that one of the robbers had a girlfriend who was tired of the relationship and wanted to leave him – but wasn’t prepared to go away empty-handed. And say that she knew where the jewels were buried. What do you think she should do?’
‘I suppose she could dig the jewels up herself – or else tell the insurance company where they were buried,’ Nicholas Bosworth suggested.
The girl laughed. ‘Not if she wanted to go on living, she couldn’t. These are very bad people we’re talking about here. Very violent people. If there was to be even the slightest suspicion she’d double-crossed them, they’d kill her without thinking twice.’
Nicholas Bosworth shuddered. ‘Yes, I suppose they might,’ he said.
‘There’s no might about it,’ the girl assured him. ‘But say the jewels were discovered in a way which looked totally random and accidental. The robbers wouldn’t suspect the girl, would they? And she would be free to split the reward with her new accomplice. So all she would need, to make things work out beautifully, is to meet a man who had an excuse for digging things up.’
‘And you actually fell for that?’ Rutter asked incredulously.
‘Yes.’
‘You actually believed she was a gangster’s moll?’
‘I’d never met one before, so how would I know what they look like? And it wasn’t as crude as I know I’m making it sound. She didn’t rush things, like I have when I’ve been telling you about it. And she smiled a lot.’
‘She smiled a lot. So she must have been genuine!’
‘You had to be there,’ Beresford said sadly.
‘Well, I wasn’t. What happened next?
‘She said she’d been thinking about how to get her hands on the reward for a long time, and when she noticed the New Elizabethan Properties sign go up close to where they’d buried the loot, she saw it as the answer to her prayers. It all seemed so plausible.’
Yes, Rutter thought, to a man who – against all the evidence – believed he could make a fortune by backing horses, most get-rich-quick schemes probably would seem plausible.
‘What instructions did she give you?’ he asked.
‘She told me exactly where we should dig. All I had to do was to persuade the other surveyors to go along with it. I was expecting to find a box, but what I found was a b … body.’
‘A skeleton, anyway,’ Rutter said, unsympathetically. ‘Did the girl speak to you again, after you’d done what she really wanted?’
‘No.’
‘But somebody else did?’
‘A man phoned me. He said that I could go to prison for a very long time for what I’d done. He said my best plan was to keep quiet about it. But that didn’t work, did it? You’re here, and I’m doomed. How long will I get?’
It was on the tip of Bob Rutter’s tongue to tell him he’d probably get no more and no less than he deserved. And then he found himself asking exactly what he did deserve.
Bosworth was a weak man – there was no doubt about that – but he wasn’t necessarily a very bad man.
He had thought that the only people he would be stealing from were criminals.
And he wasn’t the first person in the entire world to do something which was both wrong and stupid, because there was a pretty young woman involved, now was he?
To be honest, he wasn’t even the only person in that room!
‘I promise I’ll do my best to keep your name out of the whole affair,’ Rutter heard himself say.
‘You … you will?’ Bosworth asked, incredulously.
‘But in return, you’ve got to promise me to try and beat this gambling addiction of yours.’
‘I will! I have been—’
‘Because if you don’t, it’ll ruin your life even more than it has already,’ Rutter concluded.
And as he was saying the words, it occurred to him that though they came out of his mouth, they could just as easily have been spoken by Charlie Woodend.
The bright red ex-Post Office van was standing on the forecourt of the village garage, with a ‘for sale’ sign slashed across its window.
If it had been a horse, it would probably have been taken to the knackers’ yard by now, Monika Paniatowski thought, but Charlie Woodend had said it was probably the best thing available, and she supposed herself that beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Not when they were stuck out in the arse-end of nowhere.
Not when they were working desperately against the clock.
There was no one in evidence around the petrol pumps, but she heard a banging sound from the back of the garage, and when she went there to investigate, she found herself in the repair shop.
A pair of legs, clad in greasy blue overalls, were projecting from underneath a dilapidated Ford Prefect.
‘Excuse me!’ Paniatowski said loudly.
The man slid out from under the old banger, giving her lower half a thorough inspection as he did so.
He was about her age, she guessed, but his hair was thinning and his weak chin suggested he had already experienced more than his fair share of life’s disappointments.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked, completing his inspection of her by running his eyes up and down her torso.
‘I saw that old van outside,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Are you the one who’s selling it?’
‘I am,’ the mechanic agreed.
‘And have you had any offers for it yet?’
‘No,’ the mechanic admitted, ‘not yet.’
‘I wonder why that could be?’ Paniatowski asked innocently.
‘Don’t be fooled by the appearance of the old girl,’ the mechanic said. ‘She might look a bit clapped out—’
‘She does!’
‘—but she’s got a fine little engine in her, and she goes like a bomb. Why are you asking, anyway? Are you interested in buying her?’
‘I may be,’ Paniatowski said. ‘But only if you can give it a complete re-spray for me.’
The mechanic grinned. ‘That’s no problem at all. I’m very good with my spraying. People bring their cars from miles away to have them sprayed by me.’
‘I’m sure you’re the Leonardo da Vinci of the paint spraygun,’ Paniatowski said.
‘Pardon?’
‘But it’s speed, not beauty, that I’m interested in. I’ll want it done by six o’clock tonight.
‘Now that is a problem,’ the mechanic admitted. ‘I’ve got a lot of work on at the moment, you see.’
‘It has to be by six o’clock,’ Paniatowski said firmly. ‘It’s no good to me if it isn’t done by then.’
‘Well …’
Hating herself for doing it, Paniatowski put her hands on her hips and favoured him with her sexiest smile.
‘I know it’s a big job,’ she said, ‘but then you’re a big man and I’m sure you can handle it.’
The mechanic, who – in point of fact – wasn’t that big at all, melted almost immediat
ely.
‘Like I told you, it’ll mean putting other jobs off,’ he’d said, ‘but if you say it’s important—’
‘It’s very important!’
‘—then I can probably just about do it in time.’
‘Wonderful,’ Paniatowski said, giving him another flash of that sensual promise which would never be his to enjoy.
‘What colour would you like it?’ the mechanic asked. ‘Red, like it is now? Or would you prefer a nice electric blue?’
‘Neither of those,’ Paniatowski told him. ‘I’d like it to be South Western Electricity Board yellow.’
‘That’s not a very attractive colour, you know,’ the mechanic said doubtfully.
‘Perhaps you’re right about that—’
‘I’ve got charts I could show you—’
‘—but it’s the colour I want.’
‘Thing is, you’ll probably be having people mistaking you for the electricity board,’ the mechanic pointed out.
‘Perfect!’
‘Perfect?’
‘That’s what I said, and that’s what I meant. And just to complete the illusion, I’d appreciate it if you’d paint the electricity company’s name on the sides of the van.’
Thirty
Darkness had already fallen over Haverton Camp, but under the glare of several powerful searchlights, the work of completely dismantling ‘Hoover City’ continued unabated.
There was an almost unseemly haste about it, Woodend thought, as he made his way towards the trailer of the man whose name he could no longer pronounce without putting mental inverted commas around it.
By the following afternoon – at the very latest – everything belonging to the Americans would be gone. The trailers and their generators, the jeeps and the trucks, would all be on their way back to the United States, and the only evidence they had ever been at Haverton Camp would be a few indentations in the ground, and the odd piece of rubbish which the clean-up team had somehow missed. And then, within another day or two more, the bulldozers from New Elizabethan Properties would arrive and plough up the earth with callous indifference to whatever life it had had before.
A Long Time Dead Page 22
