All the Lonely People (23 page)

Peanuts was waiting for them inside the flat. He was stretched out in an armchair like an eastern sultan, taking his ease. Reggae music filled the room. As Harry and the two prostitutes walked through the door, Peanuts grinned and said, “Shit, man, I never knew you were kinky. Two beautiful ladies. For anyone else, this would cost real money, you know what I mean?”

Harry left the explaining to Trisha. As she talked, he whispered to Marilyn, “Joe Rourke, your feller, I need to talk to him right now. Where is he?”

She yawned. “Who cares?”

“I care, Marilyn. Tell me.”

“No idea. I'm finished with him anyhow. We was only together for a couple of weeks. Got other protection now. Me old boyfriend's come out of the nick last Monday.”

The stomach knot was tightening again. “Give me an address. Anything.”

“Can't help you, mister. He stayed at my place till I threw him out. What do I want with him now? Besides, the money's all gone.”

“The money?”

“Yeah, yeah, he had a few quid. All spent, like I said. It doesn't last long.”

Harry gripped her bony arm hard, his fingers digging into the flesh. Marilyn cried out, as much in surprise as in pain.

Peanuts said, “Hey, man, that isn't nice,” and made as if to get out of his chair.

In a warning voice, Trisha said, “Harry, be careful.”

He released the blonde, but the suddenness of his action seemed to have loosened the woman's tongue. She said, “He'll be out on the razz as usual. Fancies himself, does Joe. You'll find him easy enough.”

“Where, Marilyn?”

Pouting, she said, “Try the Ferry Club. He likes the scenery.”

Harry groaned. “That place, yet again. All right, I'll try it.”

Trisha gave him a make-the-best-of-a-bad-job smile. “Might see you there later on, then. You're getting to be a regular. Better watch it, else Tony'll fix you up with a job.”

Harry spun round. “Tony?”

“You must know Tony,” said Trisha.

The stomach ache had become agony. “No,” he said. “Who is he?”

She gazed to the heavens. “He's only the boss man. The feller who runs the Ferry.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The city centre streets had an uneasy early evening calm as Harry walked towards the Ferry Club. From a basement bar came the sound of the drunken singing of “Danny Boy”. A loiter of kids aged twelve or thirteen hung around a hamburger stall nearby, loudly re-telling old jokes about the Pope. A police van cruised towards Dale Street, the men inside scanning the pavements in search of the first signs of trouble. Harry nursed closer to his chest the heavy object that he was carrying wrapped up in a chamois cloth inside his jacket. He was aware of the rapid beating of his heart. He arrived at the Ferry to find its entrance bolted and barred. The doors would not open for another two hours. He paused outside, looked up and asked himself how he could have been so blind. The realisation of his own stupidity hurt him as much as the drubbing he had taken outside the Empire Dock the other night. Tony - Anthony. Anthony - Tony. He had noticed the name of the boss of the club above the main door on the night of the first murder. Reginald Anthony Gallimore, licensed pursuant to Act of Parliament, et cetera et cetera. That unthinking failure to make the obvious connection when Dame had mentioned the name of Liz's lover was wormwood and gall to him. He understood now why his wife had suggested that they meet at the club on that dreadful Thursday night. Not, after all, in order to see Rourke. She had planned an assignation with the man in charge that night and had meant to accompany him back to the Ferry, so as not to miss the chance of a minute in his company before they split up for the night.

So it was Gallimore of whom she entertained such high hopes. Moneyed and handsome, the man she hoped to marry. What had gone wrong and why had he not come forward in response to the news of her death? And was it mere coincidence that Rourke, the man who kept her picture, who followed her around the city, also frequented the Ferry? Slowly, the fog within Harry's mind was beginning to clear. At last he could identify the shadowy outlines of the truth.

He turned down the alleyway where forty-eight hours earlier he had lain in wait for Froggy Evison. It was deserted. Lined up against the wall were half a dozen black bin liners from which old ring-pull lager cans and torn crisp packets spilled. The side door was shut. He tested it. Locked.

For half a minute he beat on the metal panel until his knuckles were raw. Nothing. Impossible to make anyone hear inside. He had taken a step back towards the front of the building when he heard a key turn in the lock. The door swung open and the fair-haired keyboard player whom he had encountered on his previous visit stepped out into the night.

Glancing back over his shoulder, the man was saying, “Maybe the agent will come up with someone. The kid from Wrexham might be free. The one who sings like Randy Crawford.”

The reply was too low for Harry to hear. As the door began to close, Harry moved swiftly. Grabbing the door's edge, he held it fast for a moment and stepped inside. He was looking straight at a tall black-haired man in a slim-fitting designer suit, the man whom on previous visits Harry had assumed was the manager, without appreciating that he must actually own the place. In the intervening week the tan seemed to have faded and his moustache to have drooped. Wrinkles had crept around dark eyes that no longer smiled with complacent authority. At the sight of Harry he stared as if coming face-to-face with a poltergeist.

He knows who I am, thought Harry. He's been afraid that I would turn up.

“Tony. Tony Gallimore.” The words came out harshly; for Harry, it was like listening to someone else talk. During the
past few days he had spoken to more than one man who had slept with his wife. But this was the one whom she had thought she loved.

“You're Devlin.” A statement rather than a question, spoken in smoothed-down mid-Atlantic tones which bore not a trace of the Scouser's catarrhal whine.

The keyboard player joined them in the doorway. “Problems, boss?”

“Nothing I can't handle, Neil. I'll see you later.”

“If you're sure . . .”

“Yes, Neil. No sweat. There's no need for you to stay.”

With a last dubious look at Harry, the keyboard player zipped his white blouson and was gone. Gallimore said, “What do you want here? We have nothing to say to each other.” That charming smile reserved for the punters and his ladyfriends was nowhere to be seen.

“Wrong.” Harry jerked his thumb. “Let's talk indoors.”

Gallimore hesitated, but another glance at Harry's face helped to make up his mind. “As you wish.”

He led Harry to a room at the far end of the passageway. Its door was marked manager - strictly private. The office was palatial in comparison to the cubby-holes which Harry had seen on his previous visit. Comfortable chairs, a paper-laden desk, swish cordless phone and a year planner festooned with coloured oblongs and triangles. Two walls were covered with photographs of club acts. Perhaps half of them showed Gallimore with his arm round skimpily clad singers and dancers. Most of the pictures were adorned with trite messages and autographs:
All the best from the Stimson Sisters, Luv to Tony from Cara xxx.
Gallimore sat behind the desk and waved Harry into the other chair.

“You didn't answer me, Mr. Devlin. What do you want?”

“To talk.”

“Talking won't help any of us. Elizabeth is dead.”

Elizabeth. Harry would never associate the full name with the woman he had married. To him, she had always been Liz. Perhaps that had been her problem: she was a Liz who yearned to become an Elizabeth. He said, “It's about her death that I wanted to see you.”

“I can't tell you anything.”

“I think you can,” said Harry.

Tony Gallimore laughed sourly. “Elizabeth used to talk about you. She said you were sharp enough on the surface, but that crazy obsessions would take hold of you, then you became unreasonable. I hope I'm not going to be one of those obsessions.”

“She seems to have spent most of her time discussing me with her fancy men,” said Harry wearily.

Gallimore started to rise from his chair. “I don't mean anything to you, Mr. Devlin. The one link between us has gone. Now why don't you go home and start putting your life back together again? That's something we all need to do.”

“Sit down.”

Harry took the gun from his jacket. It was a 9mm Mauser automatic, short-barrelled but, Peanuts confirmed, effective enough at short range. Harry had pressured the pimp first to admit that he still kept an unlicensed firearm as a souvenir of his days as a hard man who handled tricky jobs for the proprietor of a Caribbean night spot, then to lend it to him for the night.

Peanuts had been reluctant. “Man, you don't know the damage this thing can do. Okay, people call it a ladies' gun, but you can bet it'll still cut a big man down. And if you open up some guy's stomach, I sure as hell ain't gonna help you beat the rap.” But Harry had persisted, calling in all his owed favours, and at length his client had given in and handed over the gun. “You going to use this, man?” Peanuts asked after showing how to cock the pistol. Harry had said simply, “I need to be prepared.”

So now he was prepared and Tony Gallimore sat down again, mesmerised by the Mauser. Slivers of sweat shone on his forehead.

“Okay, let's hear it. When did you first meet Liz?”

Gallimore kept the Mauser under an unwavering gaze. He was breath|ng rapidly. “Three months ago. She was here one night alone. Coghlan had disappeared somewhere, up to no good as usual. Some men were bothering her. I sorted the problem out, the lads on the door made sure their feet never touched the ground. We got talking. That's how it began.”

“And you became lovers “ Harry squeezed every last trace of emotion out of his voice. He might have been a newscaster on Radio 4.

That night. I simply couldn't get enough of her. She was beautiful, warm, vivacious. Not like some of the plastic dolls we get here. She was a real woman.”

“And Coghlan?”

“He terrified her,” said Gallimore, still watching the gun. “I told her not to worry - I had some connections. You don't survive in this business without knowing one or two rough people. But it wasn't a straightforward situation. There was my wife, too. She's a jealous woman. I told Elizabeth we had to be careful, for both our sakes. It was our secret. Elizabeth liked that, it seemed to add to the excitement for her. She took a job at the shop where she used to work in town, it was handy for lunchtimes and gave her an excuse to be out if Coghlan ever got nosey. We moved round the hotel circuit.”

“When did you decide to make it permanent?”

“There were difficulties,” said Gallimore. He twisted a little in his chair, as if to illustrate what he was saying. “I needed her, of course I did. But I didn't want to leave my wife, nor the club. I'm not a rich man, and Elizabeth had no money of her own. Coghlan had a tight grip on the purse-strings. She had found out that he was short of ready cash. The money that went on his gambling was criminal, she used to say.”

He mustered a wry grin, his first attempt to try on Harry the charm-the-pants-off-you style that Trisha had said was his stock-in-trade. Harry tapped the Mauser impatiently on the surface of the desk. Running the tip of his tongue over his lips, Gallimore continued, “I asked her about divorcing you, but she said you couldn't afford heavy alimony. Besides,” - again a hint of a winning smile- “whoever made money out of suing a solicitor? She said you weren't a fat cat, more like Robin Hood in an old suit from C & A. All the same, she kept pressing me to make something happen. That was how she came to cut her wrist.”

Harry leaned forward. “Tell me.”

“I'd arranged to meet her, we'd booked a room at the North Atlantic. She was just getting into the bath. She'd already sliced through one wrist, there was blood all over the carpet.” He half-closed his eyes. “Fortunately, there wasn't much damage done. I got her to a doctor who was able to stitch her up without asking too many difficult questions. She spun some cock-and-bull story to Coghlan, although she said he was so bound up in his own affairs that he hardly noticed. She thought he had another woman. And she said she'd tried to kill herself because she couldn't see us ever getting together. Said she was depressed and couldn't carry on. She was trying to push me into a corner, force me to leave my wife. Oh, yes, I understood how her mind worked. But I didn't intend to lose her.”

“No?” Harry didn't bother to hide his disbelief.

“No. Whatever you may think, Mr. Devlin, we cared deeply for each other. And in any case, we were overtaken by events.”

“She announced her pregnancy?”

“Yes. At first, I wondered whether I should believe her. She might have been making it up, I wouldn't have put it past her. But she showed me the confirmation from the testing centre. Admitted she'd been careless, hadn't taken proper precautions. So, you see, I had to make up my mind and choose.”

“And?”

“And I chose Elizabeth,” said Gallimore. “She was wild, unreliable, at times untruthful - I don't have to tell you that. But she was everything a woman should be. God forgive me, I had to have her. Somehow I broke the news to my wife. It's the worst task I've ever had to undertake. If I hadn't loved Elizabeth so much, I could never have hardened my heart to resist the tears, the pleading in her voice.” A remote look, another excerpt from his seductive repertoire, came over the tanned, blemish-free face. “You may think you loved your wife, Mr. Devlin, but I - I worshipped her.”

What chilled Harry most was the memory of how heavily Liz had fallen for this man, with his soap opera rhetoric and over-rehearsed mannerisms. He skewered Gallimore with his gaze. “Did you know she was being followed?”

“You heard about that? Yes, she told me. I found it hard to understand. God forgive me, to begin with I thought she might have invented it, perhaps she hadn't believed me when I said we would soon be together and she would be free of Coghlan. She told me he'd put one of his men on to her, she was sure that he'd realised she was seeing someone else and was determined to get the proof. I tried to reassure her. If he had a new girlfriend of his own, why would he bother? It didn't make sense to me. Again I couldn't be sure she was telling the truth. But I knew she was afraid of him, said how ruthless he could be if someone got in his way.”

A security guard in East London had discovered that to his cost, thought Harry. “Did she recognise the man who followed her?” he asked.

“No. He wasn't one of Coghlan's usual hangers-on, she said. Eventually she caught the man off guard and came close enough to see that he'd been in a fight recently. His cheek had been badly scratched. When I learned about that, I knew who the man was.”

Gripping the Mauser tightly, Harry said, “Go on.”

Gallimore waved at their surroundings. The happy faces of the artistes in the photographs beamed back at him. “One of the regular punters here. He was always hanging around backstage as well, though I'd noticed he took care to shift whenever I came anywhere near. A hard man. People called him Joe. I never heard his second name.”

“Rourke.”

“Is that it?”

“So what did you do?”

The reply was a non-commital movement of the shoulders. Gallimore was beginning to relax. Perhaps he had decided that Harry would never use the gun. “I told her not to worry. I didn't believe anything would come of it. It isn't unknown for men to follow attractive women around. Perhaps he had a thing for her, I didn't know. She thought he'd been sent by Mick Coghlan to spy on her, but I couldn't see that. What would have been the point? Coghlan wasn't short of female company by all accounts. I said she was working herself into a lather over nothing.”

“What happened after that?”

“I had to go to Birmingham. We were negotiating a fresh loan from the brewery, re-financing this place. I had a couple of long meetings. All Wednesday and most of Thursday I was hammering out the deal. I promised Elizabeth that when I got back, I would sort everything out. We'd soon be together. She was panicking, Coghlan was down in London, also on some kind of business, but she didn't dare go back to their house. She was convinced he was going to harm her. God forgive me, I thought she was being childish.”