Dead Man's Time (44 page)

‘That would be helpful.’

‘Okay, leave it with me. I’ll get back to you.’

‘You’ll be home in the morning.’

‘Absolutely. My flight’s booked.’

‘I’m really scared.’

‘You needn’t be, darling. I’ve got the patrols stepped up around the house, and a scene guard on the gates. Has the FLO arrived?’

‘Yes, a lovely lady called Linda Buckley.’

‘Good, you’ll be fine now. How’s Noah?’ His phone was beeping.

‘Noah’s fine. He’s pooing for England.’

He grinned. His phone continued beeping. ‘I’ve got another call. Love you.’

‘Love you, too.’

He switched to the incoming call.

It was Glenn Branson at the mortuary, where he was attending Amis Smallbone’s post-mortem. ‘I’ve got some fast-time developments, Roy. Alec Davies, right? He’s bright;
you’re right about him.’

DC Alec Davies was a young officer Grace had recruited to his team a few months back, a young, extremely keen detective who he felt certain had a great future. ‘Tell me all.’

‘He just happened to notice a serial about a firm of estate agents, Rand and Co., who were broken into on Saturday night. They’re the ones that handle Cleo’s next-door
neighbour’s house. He checked with them and found that there was only one thing stolen – ready for this?’

‘Ready.’

‘The spare keys to the house – Chez Amis Smallbone.’

‘Any idea by whom, or for what reason?’

‘There’s more. SOCO found shoeprints at Rand and Co., and I’ve just had an analysis done by Haydn Kelly, comparing them to shoeprints found at Smallbone’s. They’re
an exact match.’

Grace thought hard for some moments as he absorbed this. ‘So, if Haydn Kelly’s right, the implication is that someone helped themselves to a set of keys to Amis Smallbone’s
house, and then let themselves in. On the same night that Smallbone fell from the roof?’

‘You’re playing catch-up very well, for an old man.’

‘Sod you! So did he fall, or was he pushed?’

‘I thought I’d let you work that one out.’

Beads of sweat rolled down Eamonn Pollock’s face; his Mediterranean tan had vanished and his complexion was now sickly white, as he stared into the gun barrel and at the
fury in the old man’s eyes behind it.

‘Dad!’ Lucas Daly said, standing up. ‘Put that down.’

‘I’ll put it down when I’ve emptied it into that sack of shit,’ he said, waving it at Pollock. ‘Now you sit back down.’

Lucas hesitated.

‘SIT DOWN!’

‘Dad!’

Gavin Daly pulled the trigger. In the confines of the room the shot was like a thunderclap. The bullet tore through the tabletop a couple of feet from where Lucas was standing, sending splinters
flying, and plugged into the carpet.

In the stunned silence that followed, all four of them were motionless, momentarily deafened, their ears popping, breathing in the reek of cordite.

‘I said
sit down
!’ Gavin Daly hissed at his son.

Lucas sat down.

‘Gavin!’ Rosenblaum said. ‘What the heck—?’

‘I’ll pay for any damage, Julius. You have to understand what’s going on.’

‘Jesus, Gavin! You got some score to settle, do it someplace else – not in here, please!’

Supporting himself on his walking stick, Gavin Daly jabbed the gun at Pollock. ‘This piece of vermin’s uncle murdered my father.’ He swung the gun towards Lucas. ‘This
other piece of vermin is my son, unfortunately. These two charmers killed my sister to get this watch.’

‘I never – I never did – Dad, that was not the plan!’

‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me what the plan was, exactly? I’d like to know. I’d like to know why my sister was murdered and why the pair of you are in New York trying to
sell my stolen watch? Go on, tell me, I’m all ears, and it had better be damned good.’

The two seated men looked at each other.

The door opened and Rosenblaum’s secretary looked in, nervously. ‘I heard a – Is – is everything all – ?’ Then she froze as she saw the gun.

Rosenblaum nodded, then looked at her, uncertainly. ‘Just a little family dispute, Marjorie.’

‘Shall I call the police?’

‘That won’t be necessary.’

She retreated, slamming the door hastily behind her.

‘Dad, I can explain,’ Lucas said.

‘I said I’m listening. But I know what your involvement is, you little shit. Money to pay your debts, right?’

‘Because you wouldn’t give me any.’

‘At your age, isn’t it about time you learned to support yourself, instead of sponging off me and your wife? Or are you planning to kill a member of the family every time you need
money?’

‘Dad, I told you, that was never the plan. It just all went – it went – wrong. No one ever intended to harm Aileen, you have to understand that!’

‘I only understand one thing. My sister is dead, and the watch that was in her safe, that belonged to the two of us, is lying on that table. And you two are behind this.’

Daly swung the gun on Pollock. ‘I want to hear from you. I want the whole damned story. I want to know everything you know.’

‘Don’t kill me!’ Pollock pleaded, raising his hands. ‘Please don’t kill me.’ Heavy beads of sweat were guttering down his face, and he was shaking.

‘Why not? Did your thugs show any mercy to my sister? I don’t think so, Mr Pollock.’

‘Please, I’ll tell you everything I know.’

‘Go right back in time. I want to know about Pegleg. I want to know about the night he shot my mum and took my dad away. How much do you know about that? What are your family stories? Did
your uncle boast to you about the night he murdered my mum?’

‘I know a little of the story,’ he yammered. ‘My – my dad used to talk about my uncle. I grew up in Brooklyn until my dad was put in prison. My mum was from England and
she took me back there. My dad told me my uncle, Mick – Pegleg – was murdered a few years after your dad.’

‘What a sad loss,’ Gavin Daly said acidly. ‘Your uncle was a murderer and your dad a jailbird. And you’re a murderer. What a nice family. You can all have a happy reunion
in Hell.’

‘I know a bit about how your dad died.’

Gavin Daly stared at him in silence for some moments. The words seemed to echo inside his head, and to go on echoing. He steadied himself on his stick, his hands shaking. ‘What do you
know?’

‘You ever heard the expression,
take a long walk down a short pier
?’

Daly stared back at him icily.

‘My dad told me one day about Brendan Daly – your father. They took him for that walk one night.’

‘Which night? The night they took him from our home? Or did they keep him prisoner for a while and torture him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What pier?’

‘There was a wharf at the end of the tobacco warehouse beneath the Manhattan Bridge. Almost all of that old Brooklyn waterfront’s gone. Redeveloped.’

Gavin stood still, letting it sink in, continuing to point the gun alternately at Pollock, then Lucas. There was no surprise, not now, not after all this time.

‘There was snow on the ground,’ Pollock said. ‘My dad told me it was lucky that the cops weren’t very smart back then, otherwise they might have noticed.’

‘Noticed what?’

‘There were five sets of footprints walking along the pier out into the East River, and only four sets walking back the other way.’

‘Three and a half, if your uncle was one of them.’

Pollock looked at him warily, as if unsure whether he should smile.

‘Did your dad say anything to you about numbers?’ Gavin Daly asked.

‘Numbers?’

‘Twelve numbers.
9 5 3 7 0 4 0 4 2 4 0 4.
Those mean anything to you?’

Pollock frowned. ‘Can you repeat them?’

Daly said them again.

Pollock shook his head.

‘I was about to board the
Mauretania
, with Aileen and my aunt Oonagh. Someone, a messenger, came up to me,’ Gavin Daly said. ‘He gave me the watch, busted and stopped
like it is now; he gave me this gun; and he gave me a newspaper cutting with four names written on it – your uncle among them – and those twelve numbers. And he gave me a message.
“
Watch the numbers
,” he said, then he vanished.’

Now Julius Rosenblaum was frowning. ‘What were those numbers again, Gavin?’

Daly repeated them and Rosenblaum scribbled them down. Then he stared at them for some moments, and frowned. ‘I’ve done it again – I’ve reversed them! This is really
interesting!’ He held up the sheet on which he had written, then rewritten, the numbers, excitedly.

‘I used to know the waters around New York like the back of my hand,’ Rosenblaum said. ‘Sailing up the East or West River on a fine day, looking at glorious Manhattan and all
the surrounds. Could never tire of it. Go around into the Harlem River, in summer, and all you can see is trees on both banks; you can’t see a building at all. You could be in a wilderness
anywhere in the world.’ He rummaged in a drawer, and pulled out a scrolled sheet of paper that was held by an elastic band.

‘
4 0 4 2 4 0 4 0 7 3 5 9
,’ Rosenblaum said. ‘I have an idea.’ He unrolled the sheet, and Gavin Daly could see out of the corner of his eye that it looked like a
nautical chart. ‘If I’m right, there are three digits missing. And a few letters and symbols. Okay, first we add an
N
in front of the
40.
Then a
degree
symbol
after it. Forty degrees north. We add a minute sign after
42.
That’s forty-two minutes. Then the 404. We stick a
W
in front of
073
and a degree sign. And a minute
sign after
59.
And that puts us three digits short, as I thought.’

‘Short of what?’ Gavin Daly asked. ‘Three digits short of what?’

‘These co-ordinates put you in the area of the Manhattan Bridge, Gavin. But it’s a big bridge, covers a huge area. We need those last three digits.’

Gavin Daly glanced down once again at the watch. And then he realized.

It had been staring him in the face for ninety years.

In the back of the Crown Victoria, Roy Grace was aware of the minutes ticking away. With each one that passed, the chances were increasing that Eamonn Pollock had offloaded the
watch, and was on his way out of town and probably out of America, doubtless under one of his aliases.

‘Hey, move it!’ Aaron Cobb shouted out of the window at a delivery van blocking the cross-street. ‘Just move it, will ya! We’re on an emergency!’

Grace could barely contain his anger at Detective Lieutenant Cobb. If he had done his job properly, they would not be in this situation now, and instead would have had a tail on Pollock. The
crook could be anywhere in this city, or in any of its boroughs. He wasn’t necessarily even taking the watch to a dealer; it could be to a private buyer. Hector Webb, the former head of the
Brighton Antiques Squad, had told him there were rich people who got a kick out of buying famous stolen works of art, and hiding them away in private galleries in the basements of their homes
– a kind of guilty secret pleasure for the super-rich. The same could apply to this watch.

One thing was for sure, Eamonn Pollock was no fool. He’d showed up on the hotel’s CCTV camera when checking in, but he’d managed to evade them when he had done his moonlight
flit. The hotel had only one exit not covered by a camera, which was a fire door in the kitchens. How he knew about that was anybody’s guess, but no doubt that was the exit he had used.
Besides, it was irrelevant how he had left. The fact was, he had gone.

Guy Batchelor phoned in to say they’d had no joy at any of the dealers they’d visited so far. Moments later, Jack Alexander reported the same news.

Grace did a quick calculation. He needed to be at Newark Airport by 7 p.m., which meant leaving Manhattan at 6 p.m. This gave him a shade under seven and a half hours to find Pollock, or return
home empty-handed. He intended leaving Batchelor and Alexander out here, but all his instincts were that today was the day that counted.

If they didn’t find Eamonn Pollock with the Patek Philippe in his hot, sweaty palm, they weren’t going to have a hope in hell, right now, of charging him with anything.

Pat Lanigan turned round to face him. ‘Any news from the others?’

‘Goose eggs,’ Grace said with a grim smile. And that’s what this felt like at the moment: a wild goose chase. Eamonn Pollock had done the rounds of the legitimate dealers on
Friday, no doubt to fix a value for the watch in the market. But now, very obviously, he was not being stupid and risking walking into a trap.

He peered out of the window at a street vendor, with his stall selling hats and scarves. A cyclist wormed past them, bell pinging. A fire engine honked its way through traffic close by. Then he
looked up at a wall, rising sheer into the sky, with maybe a thousand windows. Eamonn Pollock could be behind any one of those at this moment. Behind any one of the millions and millions of windows
of this city.

One man and a watch.

A needle in a haystack.

Pointing the gun at his son, Gavin Daly said, ‘Take the chart, we’re going.’ Then he turned back to Rosenblaum. ‘Julius, I’m sorry for the damage
I caused, and send me the bill for whatever it costs to fix. I’m also apologizing in advance for what’s about to happen, and any further damage.’ He reached forward, picked the
watch off the table and dropped it into his jacket pocket.

Eamonn Pollock started to stand up.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Daly snapped, pointing the gun at him. ‘Sit down! You’re not going anywhere. I’m not done with you yet. You know how the
Irish punish people? A bullet in the kneecap. I should give you one in each knee – one for what your uncle did to my ma and one for what he did to my pop. Yes? That’s what I think I
should do.’

Pollock, his eyes bulging in fear, was shaking his head frantically. ‘Please. I’ll tell you everything I know.’

‘Gavin,’ Rosenblaum cautioned.

‘Julius, this skunk’s uncle ruined my childhood. Now this skunk himself has ruined my old age. You think he deserves mercy? This fat, greedy vulture?’