Blackstone's pursuits ob-1

  Blackstone's pursuits

  ( Oz Blackstone - 1 )

  Quintin Jardine

  Quintin Jardine

  Blackstone's Pursuits

  In which I stare death in the face, Uncle Hughie swamps the Yellow Peril, and McArse and I meet our match

  Being a Private Enquiry Agent isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, there are some days when it cracks me up. And this was going to be one of those days, all right.

  Quite a few of the people I’m sent to interview start out by being difficult. Many of them have a two-word vocabulary … if you know what I mean. It’s as if they blame me for their wives having found out about them shagging that nice brunette person, or for their having been caught nicking a few quid from the partnership account.

  This guy had done both, and I could tell at once that he was just not going to be the co-operative sort. It wasn’t only that I’d walked in on him and caught him stark naked. My main problem was that the poor, sad bugger was stone dead.

  Looking at him, stretched out on his back on the crumpled bed, I could tell that he had been a wee man, a bit closer to five feet than six. But equally, I could guess at once what the nice brunette had seen in him. People are always going on to me about my favourite adjectives. They say I use them for effect, but that’s not true. It’s more that I take pleasure in words which strike me as particularly descriptive. At that moment, looking at him, stretched out on his back on the crumpled bed, ‘disproportionate’ thrust itself to the front of my mind and lodged there.

  The knife was impressive too. At least its big hilt was. The rest of it, the blade, was rammed up under the wee man’s chin, nailing his mouth tight shut, away up behind his bulging eyes, all the way up, I guessed, into his brain.

  Standing there, with the newly opened curtain still swinging behind me, I must have looked about as daft as he did. I stared at him, my eyes bulging out like organ-stops, just like his. He was ludicrous, lying there staring at the ceiling, so ludicrous that an idiot grin flickered around the comers of my mouth. Oddly, I felt myself feeling self-conscious, although why, God above knew. The wee man wasn’t aware of anyone’s presence, not any more, and his erstwhile companion was long gone.

  It was the stench that drove home the enormity of it all. During my short, unhappy service as a probationer constable in Lothian and Borders Police I was called to the scene of precisely one death; yet another stupid kid found up a close in West Granton with a needle hanging out of her arm. My job had been to stand guard at the close-mouth, to keep a respectable distance between the wee girl — fifteen, she was, I remember — and the gawpers, oh yes, and between two bored, disinterested reporters who’d seen the same thing a few dozen times and who were pissed off because, but for this dead nuisance, they’d both have been freeloading at a civic lunch. The close-mouth was as close as I got to the victim, and until I walked into that room, that poor lassie was the only certifiably deceased person I’d ever seen.

  At first, the shock shut out everything but the sight of him, but after a few seconds the hum forced its way up my nose. By and large, sphincters are a closed book to me, but not to the wee man on the bed. His had opened all of a sudden.

  I turned back to the window, my stomach churning. The frames were the old wooden sash-cord type, the kind that usually you’d find stuck tight with paint. Thank Christ, though, once I’d freed the catch this one slid up nice and easy. I stuck my head out and took a deep breath, but it was no use. Normally, old Uncle Hughie eases up on you, giving you a couple of nudges so that you can be in the right place when finally he puts in an appearance. Not this time. The old familiar fist gripped my belly and squeezed as hard as it could, forcing up everything in there in a single violent shout, and firing it on to the pavement fifteen feet below. Well, almost on to the pavement. Instead of a splash, there was a yell.

  ‘Whit the … Away, ya dirty bastard!’

  My eyes were still shut tight from the effort of my mighty boak. I opened one of them, fearfully, and looked down into Ebeneezer Street. The flat top of the traffic warden’s cap, and the shoulders of his tunic had caught most of it, but I was pleased to see — it’s funny, the details the mind registers in times of crisis — that some of Uncle Hughie’s output had landed on the page of his notebook on which the Yellow Peril was noting down the details of my out-of-date tax disc.

  I opened the other eye and looked at him, pleading. ‘Aw come on, man! It only expired last week.’

  He stared up at me, sending the mess on his hat cascading down the back of his heavy, porous uniform. ‘Yellow Peril’ had never been a more fitting nickname.

  ‘Whit’s the game, Jimmy?’ He didn’t have the wit to be astonished, only angry.

  ‘Lamb Rogan Josh,’ I muttered. ‘From the takeaway in Caroline Street. Sorry!’ I decided that I preferred the sight on the bed. Besides, the traffic warden probably smelled even worse than him. I pulled my head back into the room. As I did, I felt a current of cool air on my face and realised that I must have left the front door open. I walked out of the room and into the hall to close it.

  I almost felt offended when she didn’t scream. I mean, isn’t that what women are supposed to do when they step into their flat and find a six-foot stranger standing in the lobby, even if he is wearing a Savoy Tailors’ Guild suit and holding a Motorola cell-phone in his hand?

  When I got round to asking her, she really did offend me. ‘You just looked terrified,’ she said. ‘I felt sorry for you.’ I could have handled it if she’d said that fear had struck her dumb, or even just plain surprise. I could even have lived with revulsion. But being told I was pitiful was as hurtful as a smart kick on the kneecap, and the effect lasted longer.

  In the there and then of it, she just stood and looked at me, her big brown eyes not startled, not even slightly wide, just questioning. She wore faded jeans, a crumpled tee-shirt and trainers with more than a few miles on the odometer. The bag slung over her shoulder looked bigger than she was. She let it slip to the floor as she shut the door behind her. In her right hand she held a bunch of keys big enough to choke a horse.

  ‘Well?’ she said, and I could have sworn she was smiling. ‘Are you him, then?’

  I looked back at her: blankly, I think. ‘Eh?’ Right at that moment that was all the articulacy I could manage.

  ‘The mystery man. Dawn’s wee bit of illicit rough.’

  The hair at the back of my neck prickled. This was like stepping into the middle of someone else’s movie. I decided that I’d better get a grip on reality, double-quick.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. My name’s Oz Blackstone. I’m a private enquiry agent. I work for lawyers, insurance companies and the like.

  ‘I had an appointment to meet someone here this morning, at ten o’clock. When I got here, the door was unlocked. I knocked, and it just swung open. I shouted, but there was no answer. I thought that was odd, so I stepped inside and took a look around.’ I pulled a card from the stash in the breast pocket of my jacket. ‘Here.’

  She looked at it. ‘Oz, eh. You don’t sound like an Australian.’

  I scowled at her. Always, the same wisecrack. I sighed, and gave her the stock answer. ‘I’m not. It’s just that Osbert doesn’t cut the mustard down Pilton way.’

  She gave me an odd smile, with a touche look about it. ‘I know what you mean. My name’s Prim Phillips. It’s short for “Primavera”. In English that means “Springtime”. I was conceived in May, on a holiday in a tent in the Costa Brava, and my Maw’s a terrible romantic. I decided early on that there was no bloody way I was going through life answering to “Vera”, therefore … You and I are kindred spirits in the daft name stakes.’ She shook her tousled sun-bleached head and
smiled, and flashed me the sort of look that doesn’t stop at your eyes, but drills right into your head. ‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘giving a wee girl a four-syllable name!’

  She picked up the huge bag. ‘Hold on till I stick this in the bedroom. Then you can tell me the rest of your story.’

  I stepped between her and the door. She frowned, and for the first time, looked just a touch apprehensive. I tried to sound cool and reassuring, but it came out flustered and panicky. ‘Don’t go in there, Miss Phillips. I said there was no reply; I didn’t say that there wasn’t anyone here.’

  She was afraid now. ‘Dawn …’ she began. She tried to push past me, but I gripped her arms and held her. It wasn’t easy. She’s a strong wee package.

  ‘No, it isn’t Dawn … unless she’s balding and helluva well hung.’ See me, see gallows humour! She looked at me, twisting against my grip and wincing. I realised that the Motorola was digging into her arm, and let her go. ‘Sorry!’

  ‘That’s my bedroom. I want to see what’s in there,’ she said. ‘However bad it is, I’ve seen worse. Come on.’ There was something in her voice which told me that ‘Don’t,’ would always be the wrong thing to say to this woman. I tried, ‘Are you sure?’ instead, but that didn’t work either.

  ‘Okay,’ I said finally. ‘But don’t get the wrong idea about me when you see in there.’ She looked at me, incredulously.

  When I got round to asking her whether, finding two strangers in her flat, one with a head like a kebab and the other heading for the door, it hadn’t occurred to her for a second that the live one might have had something to do with the dead one being dead, she offended me again. ‘Don’t be daft, Oz. I’ve met people who could do that sort of thing. You couldn’t, not in a month of Sundays, not if your life depended on it.’ It can do something to your manhood when a slip of a woman looks you in the eye and tells you that you don’t have the stuff to be a cold-blooded killer.

  Back in the there and then of it, she stood beside the bed, looking down at the wee man. ‘That’s got to be him, all right. Dawn’s bit of illicit. She said in her last letter that he was built like a cross between Danny deVito and Nijinsky. I thought she meant the dancer, not the horse!’

  His hands were by his sides. She leaned over and lifted one up. ‘Been dead for a while,’ she said. ‘He’s cold, and the rigor’s beginning to wear off. When did you find him?’

  I glanced at my watch, embarrassed by the tremble of my hand. It was almost ten-thirty. ‘About half an hour ago.’

  All of a sudden I couldn’t take it, all that coolness in the face of crisis. ‘Look, Miss Phillips, Prim, whatever: what is it with you? You walk into your flat and you find a strange guy knifed to death in your bed, and you’re standing here as if it’s just something that the cleaner’s missed. What sort of a world do you live in?’ My voice rose as I spoke, and suddenly there was a crack in it that I’d thought I lost in my teens.

  She took me by the arm and led me out of the room, through the hall and into a narrow kitchen. ‘Sit down, Oz.’ There were two chairs, one on either side of a gate-leg table. She picked up a white plastic kettle and filled it from the mixer tap over the sink, then switched it on. She lifted a jar marked ‘Tea’ and shook it. Turning, she bent her back against the work-surface and looked down at me, as the kettle began to hiss and bubble behind her.

  ‘I’m a nurse. I’ve just spent a year in a refugee camp in Central Africa, in the middle of a tribal war zone. When I say I’ve seen worse than that in there, I’m not kidding.

  ‘On top of that, I’ve just spent the last umpteen hours wide awake in aeroplanes. All I wanted, when I came in here was a shower, a vodka and tonic, and a sleep. Instead, I’ve got a slightly hysterical private eye in my kitchen and a corpse in my bed. If my reaction seems odd to you, it’s because all this is a dream; because none of it’s happening.

  ‘It’s also because I’m trying not to imagine where my sister is, or how she’s involved with what’s through next door.

  ‘That’s me. Now, before we do anything else, what’s your story?’ She turned her back on me as the kettle boiled and set about the business of making tea. I sat there, bewildered and dumb.

  She looked over her shoulder. ‘Well?’

  I stood up, in a feeble attempt to assert myself. I searched for something smart to say, but all I could manage was a shrug of the shoulders. She handed me a mug of tea. It reminded me of the dark, hot, sweet char that was my Granny Blackstone’s standard remedy for shock, exposure, skinned knees, a wee touch of the flu and a host of other conditions up to and including mild coronary incidents. My Granny’s tea was a wonderful brew. Apart from its therapeutic value, she used it to dye Easter Eggs, and swore by it as a tanning agent. She used to keep it cold in a jar, and slabber it on herself every time the sun poked its nose into the back court. She was found one day, dead in her deckchair. My Dad reckoned that she’d finally pickled herself.

  I took a sip of Prim’s version. It was sweet, as I’d expected, yet different. I took a deeper swallow, and felt it go to work, stilling the trembling in my arms and legs. ‘Nice,’ I said. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘A spoonful of honey. Better for you than sugar. Now, come on. Let’s hear it.’

  ‘Okay.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Like I said, I work for lawyers and insurers in the main. Taking statements from witnesses in court cases and so on. This commission was a wee bit different. A few days ago I was called in by the senior partner of a firm of stockbrokers called Black and Muirton. I’d heard of them, but I tend to do my investing through bookmakers. The guy, Archer, he’s called, said to me that they had a problem with one of their partners.

  ‘It seems that their practice accountant found some heavy irregularities in the books. The firm keeps an offshore bank account in Jersey for holding clients’ money on a short-term basis, when it buys and sells for them. Cash goes flying through it all the time, very serious cash sometimes, because it’s a big firm with some high-roller clients, plus, they handle business for banks and fund managers. What the audit found was that the account didn’t balance. In fact it was off balance by nine hundred thousand squigglies.

  ‘It took them a while but eventually they tracked it down. The cash had come from the sale of some loan stock held by one of their multi-millionaire clients. It had been transferred, electronically, to a numbered bank account in Switzerland. The sale had been authorised, and the transfer made, by one of the partners, a Mr William Kane. The trouble was, there was nothing on Black and Muirton’s records to show that the client had instructed it, and nothing to show that the bank account was his.

  ‘Archer pulled some strings in Switzerland. He found out that the account was opened by a Scots woman called Dawn Phillips. It was a real cloak and dagger job. When she set it up she showed the Swiss people half of a Bank of Scotland fiver, serial number AF 426469. Her instructions were that access was to be given to any two people who showed up with both halves of that same note.’

  Prim nodded. ‘That sounds right up my sister’s street. She was the only wee girl I’ve ever known to ask for an Action Man for Christmas. She was reading James Bond by the time she was ten. There was no way she was ever going to grow up to be anything but an actress.’

  Quite a family, I thought, Mother Teresa and Madonna in the same brood. ‘Some part she’s playing this time, then,’ I said. ‘Guess what happened next? While Archer was trying to figure out what to do, Mrs Kane dropped in on MrsArcher and poured her heart out. She said that William had been keeping some odd hours. They’ve been married for twelve years, and she could set her watch by him. But all of a sudden he started working late at the office on pretty much a nightly basis, and having to go off and see clients at the weekend.

  ‘Like any sensible wife she started to go through his pockets on the quiet, and found the usual. Ticket stubs for two at UCI, credit-card slips for hotel bills in Inverness when he was meant to be in London and so on. She fronted him up but he just told her she was
being silly. Then one day she got home from the shops and there was a “Dear Joan” note on the kitchen table, telling her that he had met this wonderful girl called Dawn, and sorry as he was, that was it.

  ‘To cut it short, Mrs Archer told Mr Archer and he had Kane into his office. He confronted him with the sale order and told him the story about the Swiss account. Kane admitted the lot. He told him that he had fallen truly, madly, deeply in love with your sister, and that he had come up with this daft scheme because he knew his wife would cut the nuts off him financially. His idea was to leave her to it and to shoot the craw with Dawn and the nine hundred thou.

  ‘Archer reckoned that he was completely off his trolley. He told him to bail out while he thought up Plan A, but to leave an address where he could be contacted, and a telephone number. He did. Yours.’

  Prim puffed up with indignation. ‘The cow! I let her use this place while I was away on the basis that I didn’t want any bloke’s shaving tackle in my bathroom.’

  ‘That’s the least of your worries. Those sheets of yours are definitely a goner, and I don’t think the mattress’ll be too clever either.’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘Ugh! Thanks, Oz. I was trying not to think about that.’ Wrinkled or not, as noses go it was a right wee cracker. It set her brown eyes off a treat, and didn’t bully her perfect mouth either. I realised that I was beginning to feel myself again.

  ‘So what happened next?’ she asked. ‘What brought you here?’

  ‘Archer sent me. He called me as soon as Kane was out of the office. By that time he was shitting himself about the good name of the firm. You know what a village Edinburgh is. One whiff of the unsavoury and his client list would disappear like snow off a dyke in August. He’d decided that the only thing for it was to get that nearly million back into the client’s account and to spin him a line about crystallising capital gains for him, or some such stuff like that.