KILL ME IF YOU CAN (Dave Cunane Book 8) (26 page)

28

Wednesday 11.30 p.m. — Thursday morning

When we reached 12 Ridley Close, Altrincham, I made Lee and Tony open the garage and clear a space for the X5M and then drove straight in. I’d briefly forgotten my paranoia and didn’t check before approaching the house. Things couldn’t get any worse, so to hell with it.

I went straight in just as I’d walked into the trap at Sheepfold Cottage or rather sent Tony into it.

Clint was crouched over his model and didn’t even look up when I greeted him. I decided not to take offence. He can be like a surly teenager at times.

I went to the bathroom and stripped off without looking at myself in the mirror. Under an intense shower the mud and slime disappeared. I stood under the shower with the temperature on max for a full ten minutes before I began to feel normal again.

I went down and made myself a cup of coffee.

There was no sign of Lee and Tony apart from a pile of Tony’s soiled clothing which he’d dumped next to the washing machine. I wasn’t intending to play mother for him but I supposed I was under some sort of obligation so I scooped the stuff into the machine and went upstairs to retrieve my own foul smelling rags.

I set the machine on prewash and turned to my coffee cup. It looked lonely sitting on the table by itself so I fortified it with a hefty slug of whisky.

That helped to calm my nerves.

I held my hands in front of my face. There was no tremor but all the same I knew I was badly rattled. It’s one thing doing detection: following the
Detective’s Handbook
like a good PI and feeling your way to the solution clue by clue. It’s quite another thing battering your head against a brick wall while unknown ruffians try to kill you. I’d been counting on finding out the name of the leader of the opposition and all I’d come up with was an obscure biblical reference. For all I knew my ultra-religious godfather had come up with the name of a monster out of sheer terror while they worked him over.

No, that idea was unworthy. Lew was a brave man. The name meant something to him if only I could discover what. I wracked my brain for words to fit in an acronym; Manchester, Mosque, Muslim, Murder. It could be anything and I’d go crazy trying to come up with a solution. My best bet was to stick with what Tony’s reconditioned brain had come up with. So MOLOCH from the bible it was.

I had a quick look round the house for a bible. It wasn’t the sort of thing I expected Bob and Tammy to have lying around which just shows how mistaken you can be about the people you think you know well. There was a bible prominently displayed on a shelf under a window in the drinks lounge. The book plate announced that it was awarded to Tamsin Marsden for first place in RE. Perhaps Bob had positioned it there to remind her to be nice to Clint. It was well thumbed too.

I got the chapter and verse numbers for Moloch off Google and read through each one carefully.

My conclusions weren’t reassuring. Most of the mentions related to evil kings who’d gone to the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem and
passed their sons and daughters through the fire
. By which was meant that they’d sacrificed them to the gods of the Phoenicians and Canaanites; burned them in a fiery furnace while musical instruments were played to drown out the screams … lovely, jubbly! It was one of the ugliest things in the Old Testament. The Valley of Hinnom was also known as
Gehenna
which is appropriately translated as Hell in the King James Bible.

A fairy story made up to frighten old ladies?

I didn’t think so. Excavations at the Phoenician settlement of Carthage had uncovered evidence of child sacrifice and the Romans made a great song and dance about Phoenician child sacrifice as an excuse for their own genocide against the Carthaginians.

Why would Lew have devoted his last moment of life to scratching the word Moloch if it was meaningless? Was he telling us that his killers were men who intended to destroy children though fire? Sickeningly, I remembered that they’d attempted to do just that to my family and had nearly roasted me alive in the ‘security van’.

Was a terror plot emerging? A plot to murder children by fire?

My mind recoiled. I tried to think of other more mundane explanations of that horrid word.

Suppose Lew had been trying to write the words Molly Claverhouse before he died. Was it possible Paddy had mistaken what must have been a barely legible scrawl? Was Claverhouse the individual Lew feared?

That didn’t make sense.

Lew had spoken of a man, not a woman and anyway, Molly Claverhouse had very nearly perished in the van.

I went to the backdoor.

The faint aroma of marijuana wafted up to me. My assistants were communing with the gnomes at the bottom of the garden. I left them to it.

When I looked in to say goodnight Clint had gone to bed without a word. He was sulking because I hadn’t taken him on the expedition to the West Pennines.

I went up and slept badly and woke early with a strong feeling of oppression and impending doom.

The events at Sheepfold Cottage spooled through my mind like a silent film.

It was the arrival of the police so promptly which jarred. Were they hand in glove with the enemy? I had to know. If they were, I’d better arrange passage with Barney Beasley’s clandestine travel agency. Did he have lorry-drivers going to Brazil or Cuba? Or was the far side of the Moon the only place I’d be safe?

I’d no evidence except for the events of last night and the suppression of the facts about the attack on the ‘security van’. If the criminal intelligence files were available to MI5 then they must be available to moles in MI5. There was bound to be an open file on Bob Lane which mentioned his habit of frequent changes of address. Couple that with my name and the resources of the police and security service and they might pay a visit at any minute.

I was so jumpy that I took out the Glock pistol I’d tried to arm Tony with last night. I’d slept with it under my pillow. I cleaned it carefully and checked that the action was working. Should I carry the gun round with me during the day?

I decided that it would do me no good at all and put the gun back in the hollow carving. As for the Uzi I cleaned that, reloaded it and replaced it in its hiding place.

I tried to think my way through another day.

I opened the curtains and scanned the street. Once again there were no parked vehicles. I looked at the houses, studying each one carefully. All the ones with a view of Number 12 had their upstairs and downstairs curtains tightly drawn, and no wonder, it was another miserable rainy day.

I wasn’t under surveillance.

Lew’s killers knew nothing about Bob Lane. I was safe for the moment. I repeated the words to myself like a mantra.

As I went down I passed Clint’s room. There was a steady rumble of snoring coming from it. Wouldn’t it be nice to be really imperturbable? Not a care in the world beyond getting the latest DS game or model kit, that was Clint. It was a sign of how low I was at that moment that I could be jealous of Clint.

I went into the kitchen and grabbed a quick cup of coffee. It was just after seven a.m. There was no point in rousing the deadly duo, or Clint for that matter. I rummaged through the coats Bob had carelessly piled up in the utility room. Everything of his was either too wide or too short for me. At the bottom of the heap I found an ancient green Barbour jacket complete with attached hood which wouldn’t look too bizarre if I folded my arms and gathered it up.

I went out through the backdoor to the cinder lane pocketing up the remains of spliffs on the way. Once away from the shelter of the trees I was pelted by driving rain. It was torrential. I held the hood over my head with one hand and kept the floppy coat closed with the other, telling myself that I looked like a professional gardener on his way to work.

There were other people moving about on foot but they were preoccupied with fighting off the weather. I attracted no curiosity and made it into the centre of the small town and the phone box I’d used before.

Tom Brewer picked up at once.

‘Sorry to call so early Tom, it’s Dave again. Are my parents back at the cottage?’

‘Dave, the very man I wanted to talk to,’ he said in the tones of someone who has momentous news to impart. ‘All hell broke loose round here last night. You should have seen it. I haven’t enjoyed anything so much since the last time I was at the Cabbage Patch.’

‘A proper scrap was it? What about my parents,’ I asked anxiously.

‘It was better than anything you’ll ever see at Twickenham, a real three ringed circus and Paddy will be disappointed to have missed it. Your folks weren’t involved in any way, shape or form. I can reassure you on that.’

He obviously wasn’t going to be dissuaded from telling me what had happened in his own way so I let him rant on.

‘You know I mentioned that white van to you? Parked at the corner? Lindsay and I kept an eye on it for you. Lindsay swore she saw someone moving in the house but I, fool that I am, discounted her suspicions. She’s at a certain age you know. But then we saw that someone had moved the van up to the side of the house. I knew it wasn’t you or Paddy, so I got in touch with the local gendarmerie. For once they got their thumbs out of their tight little arseholes. They put up a most impressive show, I can tell you.’

‘What happened?’ I asked impatiently.

‘Softly, softly, catchee monkee,’ he replied. ‘They sent a young man round to my house disguised as a meter reader, gas company van and everything. He told us they suspected cattle rustling.’

‘What?’

‘Yes, there’s been quite a bit of it recently and they suspected the gang was preparing to remove Wilberforce’s herd, not that that would have upset me, but the law’s the law. We can’t have people carrying on as if cattle rustling had never gone out of fashion. The young fellow observed and then they laid on a major operation. We were forbidden to go out, and the Wilberforces were held incommunicado. Heavens, if Old Man Wilberforce had been allowed out he’d have had the whole Wilberforce tribe on the qui vive, there’s hundreds of them you know, and they’d have lynched the rustlers when they caught them.’

‘The police caught them?’

‘Oh yes, the rustlers had the cattle on the move but didn’t have time to bring up their cattle truck. The police came down on them like the proverbial ton of bricks: helicopters, cars, vans, dogs, they had the lot. We saw the prisoners being carted off.’

‘Prisoners?’

‘Yes, there were at least six by my count. Hmm, rewind that … I saw three with my own eyes. Well dressed too, some of them.’

‘So it was an exciting night? Is the cottage all right? Do I need to come up?’

‘No, it’s all secure. One funny thing though, I was just this minute watching the local BBC news expecting to hear about the police triumph but there’s been nothing so far. I thought they might have wanted an interview as we’re local.’

‘You’d think so,’ I agreed.

‘Anyway, can’t hang around chewing the fat with you, old boy, much as I’d like to. I’ve got patients to see and prescriptions to write.’

‘Thanks for your time,’ I said hanging up.

I trudged back to Ridley Close through the sheeting rain. I felt a lot happier. Providing Clattergob Tom with an audience was a small price to pay for the knowledge that the boys in blue weren’t hand in glove with Mr Big.

Or were they?

Was some local chief inspector even now being reamed out for botching an intelligence service operation?

No, I decided it wasn’t possible. To have laid on a helicopter and scores of men the local coppers would have involved higher authority and if the
certain individual’s
men had infiltrated the police to that extent then the operation would have been called off before it started.

Moles: that was the answer. There was a mole or two in the police but they weren’t in charge.

I was still anxious. There were so many intangibles involved but I felt I was safe for the moment. As I went along the cinder path dodging pools of water and trying to calculate my next move I was more careless than last night.

When I opened the back garden gate and entered the Ridley Close address I wasn’t looking left or right and when a burly man leapt out from behind a tree and pinioned me from behind I was taken by surprise. Fear and panic leant me strength and I wriggled in the loosely fitting Barbour like a snake shedding its skin. I dropped to my knees, swinging round low to tackle my assailant. I caught him behind the thighs and pulled him to the ground and, snatching up a jagged piece of white rock from the lawn edge, I raised it to bash his head in.

‘Dave, you bloody idiot, it’s me,’ the man yelled hoarsely.

My rage and fear were so overpowering that I almost continued the downward stroke. I deflected the heavy stone at the last instant missing Brendan Cullen’s head by millimetres.

‘You’re the bloody idiot,’ I gasped. ‘What’s the idea of creeping up on me like this?’

‘You’re a hard man to get hold of, Cunane,’ he said, ‘a real slippery customer. Help me up.’

I roughly yanked him to his feet. He wasn’t wearing one of his Armani suits but his dark raincoat and jeans were splattered with mud and soil.