C.T. Brown - Second Time Lucky? (3 page)

"Oh
he didn't hand it over, it's much worse than that."

"What
now?"

"He's
dead."

"Seriously?"

"Yep.
Your knife was found," he looked down at a notepad, "protruding from
his chest, is the official description."

"Shit."

"Deep
piles of it."

Dishwater
made his excuses and left, leaving me in no doubt that if I needed his services
in the future I should feel free not to contact him. I was considered toxic by
one and all now. So much for action number one on my list, time for the
potentially suicidal action
number
two.

Part
Three

After
London the mean streets of Hatfield did not exactly seem all that scary, I had
to remind myself of Mr. Spigarelli's vendetta against me and of the fact that
he was one of the main suppliers into several of London's big drug dealers. This
might be a small place compared to London but his goons' knives and guns were
just as deadly as any in the smoke. I parked in the large car park behind the
big Asda in the town
centre,
at least I assumed it was
still an Asda - supermarket chains seemed to swap the place back and forth
every few years as they tried to extract a few quid from the remaining inhabitants
of the town before it finally died. Hatfield had once been a fairly big new
town in the Home Counties and most of the population had worked at British
Aerospace's huge facility there. Once that closed down unemployment took over
as the main profession and the centre of the town died, shops closed and the
market dwindled. Every few years the local council refurbished something or
rebuilt the shopping arcades and market area but the truth was that the centre
of the town was on its knees as were most of the population. Oddly the area
where British Aerospace had been was thriving thanks to the Galleria shopping
centre and mass house building on the old facility grounds. Unfortunately all
the residents commuted into London during the week and spent their weekends
shopping in John Lewis in Welwyn Garden City or the
Galleria,
no-one went near the town centre any more.

Oddly
enough the swimming pool was my destination, one of the local go-betweens
operated out of the small cafe there and I was hoping he could help set up a
meeting for me with Mr. Spigarelli with some sort of guarantee that I might
survive it. In all honesty I expected more of a reaction when I met him but all
I got was a shake of the head and some muttering under his breath about how
dumb I was. It took three hundred quid out of my dwindling stash to get him to
agree to try and set up the meeting, he left me drinking my lukewarm tea while
he went to make a few calls.

Pretty
soon the meet was arranged for that evening, when I asked what assurances I had
for my safety the response of "how fast can you run?" did not really
leave me feeling very optimistic.

As
with any meeting like this the idea was to have it somewhere public and
inconspicuous, so we met in the McDonalds under the Galleria. As it was right
by the car park I made sure to get a parking spot as close as possible, a quick
getaway might be useful. Mr Spigarelli took the (not quite as comfortable as it
looks) faux leather covered bench seat while I got the (even flimsier than it
looks) plywood and metal chair across the (nowhere near big enough for two
trays) table from him.

"You
really are even dumber than you look, aren't you?" he said by way of a
greeting.

"I'm
beginning to suspect I might be, yes."

"Remember
when I told you not to come back here again? When I said what I would have done
to you?"

"Of
course I remember." I still have nightmares about it.

"Then
why come back?"

I
laid it all out for him, the complete story of the last twenty-four hours. Then
I took out everything I had put together on his daughter's murder - the snippet
of footage from a lone CCTV camera that showed the limo on the wrong route to
be heading home (dismissed by the Police as a "different route"); the
single, grainy, long distance shot of what could be me in the background
walking home (dismissed by the Police as "that could be anybody");
the emails I had sent while she was being killed (dismissed by the Police as
"insufficient for an alibi"); the other knife that had been found a
hundred yards from her body (wiped clean and dismissed by the Police as
"forensically inconclusive"); the sighting of a man who did not fit
my description in the area around the time the body had been left there
(dismissed by the Police as the report came from a slightly drug-ravaged ex
lead singer of a punk band). He didn't look entirely convinced. Fortunately he
did not look entirely homicidally inclined
either,
I
decided that was probably a good sign that I had, at the very least, introduced
some doubt.

"So,
what do you want from me?" he said.

"I
want a chance to find out what happened."

"You
had that after your slimy lawyer managed to get you out. Months you spent
without getting a result."

"Yes,"
I said as I summoned up the courage for the next bit, "but I didn’t have
full cooperation from you then, did I?"

"What
makes you think you will get it now?"

"Simple.
We both want answers. You know there is something
suspect
about that ride home, I need to talk to your men about that. Who organised the
ride home for her? Who was checking up on the driver? No-one reported anything
wrong until well after they should have done. How come the police don't have
the limo on CCTV? There must be
something,
somewhere
showing its movements so why haven't the Police got it? Or, if they have got
it, why keep it quiet? If I have the full force of your backing on this I can
answer those questions, maybe then I will be closer to finding out what
happened."

Mr.
Spigarelli looked at
me,
it occurred to me that maybe
he was trying to decide whether it was easier just to get rid of me. There were
at least three of his men eating
McNuggets
that I
could see from where we were sitting and I did not doubt there were more I
could not see. "Ok, why not? I'll give you two days. And just to show you
have my full backing and to ensure that if you don't get an answer I can get
hold of you Davey will go along with you."

"Davey?
Your son Davey?"

"Yeah,
Carmen's big brother."

Great,
the only person more convinced of my guilt than her father was going to be my
shadow.
Fantastic.
We agreed I'd get to his home for
nine the following morning to get started, until then he suggested I find
somewhere to hide from the Police or, if I had changed my mind, to run to the
ends of the Earth where there was a tiny chance he would not find me and kill
me. It was a struggle to look nonchalant as I finished my burger and watched
him and his crew exit McDonalds.

After
a fairly uncomfortable night sleeping in my car in the multi-storey car park in
Welwyn Garden City town centre I made the trip to the Spigarelli home on the
outskirts of a village called
Tewin
. If I am
completely honest I was getting a little ripe by then as I had not had a shower
for a while, a liberal application of deodorant was the best I could manage.
Built back from the road on a large plot of land the Spigarelli home was exactly
what you would expect from a drug dealer who is trying to look respectable -
brand new and utterly tasteless. Fortunately the high hedges, which hid high
electric fences, surround the grounds meant that the inhabitants of the almost
impossibly cute Tewin village could ignore the property completely. The house
would have fit in much better in the huge posh area built onto the village of
Brookmans Park but as most of his neighbours would have been Premiership
footballers out there it was understandable why he had not built it there.
Pulling up in front of the house I could see why Carmen had never liked me
coming here, all the security cameras and the gorillas in suits looked really
suspicious to me now. I guess back when we had been dating I just swallowed the
lie that her dad was security conscious because he was wealthy because I loved
her and did not want to believe anything else. Plus her dad had a black Range
Rover Sport with tinted windows, I should have known - everyone who drives one
of those is a drug dealer.

Davey
stood on the doorstep glaring as I pulled up. He looked just as I remembered,
angry. Unfortunately for him Davey is one of those people that even in the most
expensive of tailored suits still
manages
to look a
mess. Huge sums of money and vast teams of people could be employed to try and
make him look his best but he'd still look like he had slept in his clothes for
a couple of days. I made sure to put on a big friendly smile as I exited the
car and walked up to him with my hand out ready to shake like we were old
friends. Despite the situation I just could not resist a chance to piss him
off.

"Put
that hand away before I give you more broken fingers so it matches the other
one." he said. Davey's threats would be more convincing if I did not
already know he was a wimp and a coward. "And what is with the stupid
grin?"

"Ah,
Davey.
I've missed your charm, the warmth of your personality
and your sunny disposition."

"You're
even more irritating than I remember."

"I
don't like to disappoint, always exceed people's expectations I say."

"Whatever.
Dad said I've got to make sure people talk to you, doesn't seem fair to make
anyone listen to you but it's up to him I guess. Who gets you inflicted on them
first?"

"Whoever
was working the night your sister went
missing.
One by one."

Unfortunately
Davey was exactly as intelligent as he looked and he really did bring in
everyone who had been working that night, including the cleaners and the cook.
I set up one of the empty bedrooms to do these interviews, with ten bedrooms
and only Davey and his dad living here it wasn't difficult to find an
unfurnished one - two chairs were moved in by a very happy gardener who only
seemed to speak an unidentified Eastern European language. As it turned out
Davey's blind stupidity helped, it turned out the cook and the cleaning staff
had a very good idea of everyone else's movements over the day leading up to
the disappearance and in the days after.

Following
those interviews I moved onto Don 'Wheels' Newton, the unimaginatively
nicknamed main driver for the family. First of all I asked why he hadn't been
driving the limo himself, he told me he had been driving the Range Rover to
take his boss to a meeting he refused to tell me anything about except that it
was "well out of town". When I asked him about the actual driver that
night he got even
more cagey
, it took some pushing,
and a reminder from Davey that cooperation was not optional, to find out he was
relatively new. Apparently he had been a bit of a brown noser, the boss had not
been interested but a couple of his lieutenants had taken to the guy's
compliments and he had become a popular driver for them. I made a note of which
lieutenants in particular. Wheels had not left instructions for this guy to
pick Carmen up from the party, in fact he had left no instructions for anyone
to do so - her plan had been for a quiet night-time stroll home with me it
seemed. On that evening I had seen her speak to the driver before she came and
told me she was getting a lift home but I assumed she was just telling him she
would be a few minutes while we said our goodbyes, I now wondered if she had
questioned what he was doing there. That brought up another
question,
why not walk home with me anyway? It was not like the driver could order her to
get in.

Next
up was the first of the lieutenants who had allegedly been complimented by our
brown nosing driver. Kaseem Smith, his real name by all accounts, was
immaculately dressed in a very expensive suit and not much older than me. Given
the way Davey carefully kept his natural arrogance under control around him I
got the impression Kaseem was someone to be very careful of. Anyone this young
in a position of power in the Spigarelli operation had to have done some
serious violence on the way. I asked him about the driver.

"Sure,
he seemed ok at first, but I didn't trust the man."

"Why
not?"

"He
didn't want to pick a winner."

"A
winner?"

"Everyone
here picks who in the level above them is going to win, at each level there's
fewer and fewer as you go on up so only certain one's is going to win a place
to go up. You pick the right geezer and you can step up behind him. Once you
get to where I am there ain't no further up because the boss ain't going
nowhere so you try to be the one he trusts the most instead."

"And
this driver was kissing up to way too many people."

"Yeah.
But
he also got it all wrong."

"How?"

"A
driver is several levels below someone like me. Even Davey's got to show me
respect, that's how high up I am. He should have been looking way lower down
the food chain. Plus he got carried away."

"Carried
away?"

"Yeah.
He
kept asking if there
was
any favours he could do,
anything needed moving, extra jobs to help us out and all that. Even things we
wanted no-one else to know about. Once he started in on that I told him to get
lost, I don't want to know nothing about anything going on on the quiet. The
boss gets upset when he finds out about that sort of thing. Upset and often
quite . . . unfriendly."

"I
can imagine what you mean."