Kuiper sat astride the saddle of his bike. He had donned helmet and gauntlets and as Harry began to move towards him he gave an ironic wave of the hand before revving loudly and disappearing into the night.
Where was he going? Only one way to find out. Harry broke into a run, heading for his car. One of the gang members jeered after him, yelling some unintelligible obscenity, before the emergence from The Wreckers of two girls in mini-skirts diverted the yob’s attention. Harry took no notice. Within seconds he had reversed out of the car park and was racing down the road in pursuit of the vanished motorbike.
Dusk was beginning to fall. Away from The Wreckers, the New Brighton streets were quiet. Harry had no idea of Kuiper’s destination and when turns and junctions came up, he chose his route as randomly as if competing in a fairground game. For once in his life he won the lucky dip: on taking the long, straight road out of the town he caught sight of a dark figure on a speeding motorbike perhaps two hundred yards ahead. Peter Kuiper.
The gathering gloom gave the drive down Leasowe Road an eerie quality. To the left were houses, roads and streetlights, all the signs of suburban life. To the right was emptiness: market gardens, golf links and common land stretching towards the sand dunes by the shore of the Irish Sea. Harry kept his distance from the motor-cyclist, following him past the lights and turrets of the old Mockbeggar Hall, curving inland with the road away from the ruin of Leasowe’s landlocked lighthouse.
At the roundabout Kuiper took the road to the west of the peninsula. His course was unwavering; it was plain that he had a specific destination in mind. Afraid to lose his quarry, Harry closed in on him a little. They passed fields, shops, houses. Moreton, Meols, Hoylake. And, as he climbed the bridge over the railway which had its terminus at West Kirby, Harry realised where they were going.
Kuiper was returning to Prospect House. As soon as the thought occurred to him, Harry became unshakably convinced that he knew where the journey would end. There was something about the house on the hill which lured the boy, even though he would never see Claire there again. That was why he had turned up on Saturday afternoon. His claim that he had come to see her had sounded like an excuse, although at the time it had seemed the only explanation for his arrival. What had he wanted, what did he intend to do now? Surely a bruising encounter with Jack Stirrup was even less attractive than an evening in the company of the Merseyside Police?
First the motorbike, then the M.G. went by the library which Claire had been supposed to visit on her last day alive. Could there be an unsuspected connection between Kuiper and his girlfriend’s father? Or was that idea absurd?
Harry dropped back. There was no sign that Kuiper knew he had been pursued thus far; to blow the chase now would be folly. The motorbike sped ahead and out of sight. Taking his time as he climbed the hill that led to Prospect House, Harry concentrated on finding a discreet place in which to park.
Fifty yards from Stirrup’s driveway, a path led off the road into a small copse. Harry crawled past and saw the motorbike. It had been dragged off the main road, but with no special effort at concealment. By now it was dark. Harry thought he saw a figure disappearing into the drive. He pulled over on to the grassy verge, locked the car and hurried in pursuit.
At the gateway to Stirrup’s house he hesitated. That was a mistake. Everything was still and silent. No lights shone at any of the windows. The undergrowth of the garden remained thick and forbidding. The place was like a cemetery. What dead secrets might it be hiding? Suddenly Harry felt as cold as if he had stepped under a shower of icy water. He was on his own and didn’t know what he was about to encounter.
For a moment he contemplated retreat. No shame in it. He could contact the police from the town. Leave to them the investigation of whatever was happening in this isolated spot. That would be the cautious, lawyerly thing to do.
Ahead of him something moved. Harry crouched under the spreading branches of an oak. He could sense, rather than see, that someone was making his way stealthily towards the house. It must be Kuiper. Harry inched forward, peering through the night in a vain attempt to sight the student.
Every twig cracking beneath his tread sounded to him like the 1812 Overture. Yet it was better to skirt the drive than risk crunching over the gravel: Kuiper would certainly hear that and choose flight - or, perhaps, violent confrontation. Harry had never considered himself brave. And he did not know if the student had a weapon.
At the bend in the drive, he looked through the trees and at last saw Kuiper’s outline distinctly. The young man was picking his way round the side of the house. The care with which he was moving suggested that he too was absorbed in keeping as quiet as possible: there was no hint that he was conscious of Harry’s presence.
Emboldened, Harry crept after him. The dark silhouette of the stable block loomed up in front of them both. A dozen yards away from it, Kuiper stooped down. He remained bent over something for half a minute. Finally, Harry realised that he was struggling to shift something heavy without making any noise. In a moment of empathy, Harry understood that Peter Kuiper’s tension matched his own.
A low grunt reached Harry’s ears across the night air with remarkable clarity. A grunt partly of satisfaction, mostly of relief. Kuiper straightened for a second or two before bending down again. This time he disappeared from view.
Harry waited for a minute to see what would happen next. Nothing. He approached the place where Kuiper had been. It was on the edge of the clearing in which the stable block stood. Harry remembered the scene in daylight from his previous visit. Even in the dark, he knew at once that something was very different.
A large rock which had looked immovable had been pushed aside. Below there was an opening into blackness. Scarcely daring to breathe, Harry drew nearer. He looked down. So far as he could make out, there were a few rough-hewn steps which led to some subterranean chamber.
Kuiper was beginning to climb back up the steps. He was carrying something in his arms. As his head was just about to reach ground level, Harry coughed. There was a clatter as the student dropped whatever he had been carrying. A white face turned up to look at him.
“Devlin?”
“Evening, Peter. Do you come here often?”
In the moonlight he could see panic spreading over the student’s face and that was answer enough. For a few seconds Kuiper hesitated. The tip of his tongue appeared between lips no longer sneeringly curved. Harry heard the drawing-in of breath before the student lowered his head, and he was ready for the bull-like upward charge.
Blundering up the stone steps, eyes on the ground rather than on his intended victim, Kuiper never had a chance catching Harry off-balance, of butting him in the chest or knocking him to the floor. With all the time in the world Harry took a step to one side, then brought both hands down together in a single blow. Kuiper staggered backwards down the steps, hitting his head against the back wall of the passage. As he fell awkwardly to the floor, Harry heard a loud crack as bone splintered.
Harry reached into the hole in the ground and, putting hands under the boy’s arms, began to yank him back to the surface. Kuiper moaned in protest as Harry dragged the rest of his inert body back up to ground level.
“That hurts.”
“Pity.”
Harry shoved the boy to one side and peered down the hole. In the light cast by the moon he could see the oddments which Kuiper had dropped lying on the ground at the bottom. Items so everyday that the effect was surreal. A tin of baked beans. A small tub of biscuits. A boil-in-the-bag packet meal. Rations for a hermit? For a wild moment he thought he had uncovered a hiding place where Alison Stirrup might at last be found. Had she been the victim of some bizarre kidnap plot, imprisoned beneath the grounds of her own matrimonial home? Even as his mind played with the possibility, he caught sight of the retailer’s labels on the bits and pieces where Kuiper had let fall. They all bore the name and logo of the Saviour Money supermarket chain. At last the truth dawned.
Peter Kuiper had led him to a poisoner’s den.
Chapter Seventeen
One glance at Kuiper convinced Harry that the student would not be leaving in a hurry. The boy’s face was buried in the dirt. He was making a strange noise, the muffled weeping of pain and rage and defeat.
Panting after his exertion, Harry trudged towards the main building. He did not relish explaining to Jack Stirrup that his daughter’s boyfriend had used the grounds of Prospect House as an operational base in an attempt to hold Bharat Kaiwar’s business empire to ransom. Nor would words of persuasion alone convince Jack that the lad had not also killed Claire. If not checked, Stirrup’s interrogative techniques would leave Peter Kuiper yearning for a little genteel police brutality. As Harry pressed the doorbell, he steeled himself for his third physical confrontation of the evening and wondered why Liverpool Poly’s careers adviser hadn’t warned him that success in the law was marked by the award of a Lonsdale Belt.
No lights snapped on in response to his ring. After a minute he tried a second time. Again no answer.
Harry walked round the side of the building. No sign of life. Just the flickering red light of a burglar alarm box high up on the side wall. No window or door had been left conveniently open to allow him access to a telephone in the deserted house. Harry swore. Feeling hungry as well as tired, he was beginning to regret his failure to finish the microwaved pizza. To get the police here fast and leave them to sort everything out was all he wanted right now.
He picked up a half-brick left by the builders and hurled it through the kitchen window. The lack of finesse would have appalled the least sophisticated of his criminal clients, but he was past caring. He pushed in what was left of the shattered pane and opened the window. No casement lock: Stirrup should have consulted his neighbourhood crime prevention officer rather than frittering money on electronic gimmickry. An alarm siren started wailing, but there was no one to hear it except the crippled young man who lay prostrate fifty yards away. It was the work of a moment for Harry to heave himself up and inside. He found the phone and dialled a number he knew by heart; it belonged to Quentin Pike.
“Got a client for you,” he said and described in half a dozen sentences what had happened.
“Good God! Blackmail, you say? And you’re not able to act?”
“Conflict of interests. The kid doesn’t know you exist yet. But he’ll need a good brief.”
“Incidentally, what’s that bloody awful racket in the background?”
“The sound of a wasted investment.” Harry had already been in the house longer than it would take a seasoned burglar to strip everything of value. So much for home security.
He rang off and after trial and error in opening cupboard doors, discovered the control box inside a walk-in pantry and switched the siren off. It seemed easier than it ought to be. He put on an outside light, then rang 999 to summon the police and medical help. Next he found a couple of tumblers and filled them from a bottle of brandy he found in the dining room. He took them outside to where Kuiper was now lying on his back.
The boy’s face was a white blot on the blackness of the night, looking up at the starless sky. His tears had dried and he had tucked his bad leg awkwardly to one side.
“Get this down you.” Harry bent and held the glass to Kuiper’s lips.
The young man slurped a little as he drank. “My ankle’s broken, you bastard,” he said indistinctly.
“Think yourself lucky. If Jack Stirrup had been home, you’d be a candidate for intensive care. As it is, the police and the medics can argue over who’s going to have the privilege of looking after you tonight. They’ll be here any minute.”
Kuiper closed his eyes. His expression was stripped of hatred, fear and anger. All that remained was exhaustion and a grimace of pain.
“So, it’s all over.”
“For you and Claire, in different ways. Whose idea was it to blackmail Saviour Money?”
“Mine, of course.” The old cockiness had not quite drained away. With a flash of understanding Harry guessed that the boy wanted to explain what he had done. Now Claire was dead, he needed to look elsewhere for an audience.
“Tell me.”
“Claire was talking one day about the catering course she wanted to do. She rabbited on about hygiene in the kitchen. Food poisoning, all that stuff. About the junk people eat and how you never know if what you’re eating is full of bugs. I said something about those scare stories you read in papers, about people threatening to poison food shops if they’re not bought off. It set me thinking.”
Kuiper shifted his position on the ground, flinching with the effort. “Shit! That hurts.”
“Carry on.”
“Poisoning fascinates me. It’s a subtle crime. Guns and blunt instruments are for mindless thugs. Murderers who use poison think their crimes out in advance. They’re usually intelligent.”
“You think so?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.” The whites of Kuiper’s eyes gleamed in the darkness. “And even the fools carried it off with more style than your average gangland hood. You’ve heard of Major Armstrong?”
“How could I forget? The only solicitor ever hanged for murder.”
“Right. I often think about him, handing out his arsenic-laden scones for tea. So prissy. So English. He learned the law in Liverpool, you know.”
“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”
Kuiper contrived a hoarse chuckle. “Don’t say you wouldn’t like to get rid of one or two of your professional rivals the same way. Or what about Armstrong’s other victim, his wife?”
Harry said, “My wife was murdered. Stabbed to death in the street. Eighteen months ago.”
There was a long silence. Then, in a tone humbler than Harry had ever heard from him, Kuiper said, “No answer to that, is there? Sorry.”
“Okay. But you see the point, don’t you? Crime’s not fun, it’s squalid and belongs in the sewer. Like your silly prank with the supermarket.”
“I only tampered with a handful of things. And I gave them fair warning.”
“So that makes it all right? Anyway, why pick on Saviour Money?”
Kuiper made a faint movement with the upper half of his body, a painful attempt at a shrug. “Why not? But there was a reason, actually. Bryan Grealish was on their board.”
“So?”
“It was Claire’s idea to go for him. Grealish was at odds with her father, she said. I never knew the details. Some business dispute… you’ll know better than me. Stirrup hated the guy, so Claire did too. She was still a daddy’s girl at heart. More than he deserved, the fat old prat. So she wanted to teach Grealish a lesson.”
Something occurred to Harry. “And the Majestic? The glass in the greens the other week? Another of your little japes?”
“You’ve got it.” Hurt Kuiper might be, but he couldn’t keep a faint note of satisfaction out of his voice. “Our first attempt at - contamination.”
Harry stared hard at the boy. Even in the dark he didn’t like the look that had stolen over Kuiper’s face. It was an ageless look, an end-justifies-the-means look, a look a Nazi scientist might have worn when discussing his ideas for improving the human race.
“Call it a trial run. We didn’t ask for money, never contacted Grealish once. We simply wanted to prove we could bring it off, that’s all. That was the spur. Once we’d done the Majestic, we knew we could try something bigger. And make real money.”
“Claire didn’t need cash. The only daughter of a rich man.”
“You don’t get it, do you? What’s the point of inherited wealth? There’s no challenge. We both agreed on that. The ransom was to make people sit up and take notice. They might not know who we were. But we’d have them dancing to our tune.”
Harry indicated the hole in the ground. “Who decided to run the campaign from here?”
“She showed me the place. She’d noticed there was something here one day when she was mooching round, but she hadn’t the strength to lug
that boulder to one side. I opened it up. Nobody had gone down there for years, that was obvious. It’s an old ice-house, I think, left in ruins and overgrown. The perfect spot to keep the cans and stuff. Tell you what though, when I heard the police had come sniffing round looking for Stirrup’s bloody wife, I pissed myself. Needn’t have. Good old PC Plod, can’t see the nose in front of his face.”
“And Jack never knew the ice-house existed?”
“No way. Though it’s plenty big enough down there. Room for two. Till the ransom thing took over, we had another use for it.”
“She was only fifteen.”
“Yeah.” Another throaty chuckle. “But all woman.”
“All you could cope with, isn’t that nearer the mark?”
“Jealous? She wasn’t a… shit, they’re here!”
The wailing of the police sirens pierced the night air. Two cars came screaming along the drive, pulling up close to where Harry and Peter Kuiper were waiting. Harry got to his feet.
“I forgot to tell you - you’ll need a good lawyer. I’ve called a man called Pike. He’ll be looking for you at the police station. He’s all right. His advice will be simple: say nothing. Okay?”
He walked towards the detectives, not interested in any words of thanks. None of the wary faces of the men who had climbed out of the cars were familiar to him. In charge was a tall inspector, sandy-haired and supercilious.
“Mr. Devlin? The name’s Swarbrook. Detective Inspector. I understand you think you may have apprehended someone who has been demanding money with menaces from a local business?”
With such a talent for circumlocution Swarbrook ought to be a lawyer, Harry thought. But he simply said, “He’s over there.”
“I see. We’ll need a full statement from you, of course. The necessary…”
Suspicious Minds (Harry Devlin) Page 12
