Rob Johnson - Lifting the Lid (29 page)

‘We need to find out who he is, don’t we?’

Assuming that the question was rhetorical, he didn’t reply. Besides, he was busy contemplating whether they really did need to find out the guy’s identity. What did it matter? He was dead. End of story. Or perhaps it wasn’t. The end of the story – or the beginning of the end – might be when the police or Harry and his cronies or some other bunch of psychopathic lunatics turned up and found them with a dead body. Why should
he
care who the bloke was? Far better that they left it a mystery and got the hell out of there.

‘He’s not going to bite,’ said Sandra with evident impatience.

‘Why don’t you do it then?’

‘I’m covering you.’

‘From a dead man?’

‘From any unexpected visitors.’ Sandra waved her gun vaguely in the direction of the apartment door.

She was right of course. It wasn’t as if a corpse could do him any harm as such. It was just that—

‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ said Sandra and reached towards the body with her gun-free hand.

‘Okay, okay, I’m doing it,’ said Trevor, deflecting her outstretched arm with his own and placing himself between her and the chair.

He avoided looking at the man’s face and concentrated instead on the lapel of his charcoal grey jacket. Careful not to make any direct physical contact with the body itself, he slowly peeled the lapel backwards until the inside pocket was revealed.

‘Expensive,’ he said, more to himself than to Sandra when he spotted the Savile Row label.

He slid his fingers into the pocket and felt the edge of some kind of wallet. With all the caution of someone removing the trigger mechanism from a nuclear bomb, he eased it out and saw that it was indeed a slim, black leather wallet and had the initials G.M.Q. embossed in gold in one corner. He flipped it open. The main section contained a dozen or so banknotes, and all the other compartments were filled with an assortment of business cards and credit cards. He selected one of the latter at random.

‘Mr Gerald M. Quicke,’ he read aloud. ‘Mean anything to you?’

Sandra shrugged. ‘The Quicke and the dead? Never heard of him. See if there’s something else.’

Trevor looked again, and although only the top edges of the cards were visible, he noticed that one of them was slightly different from the others. It was fractionally larger than a standard credit card, and the upper part of a gold-coloured crest seemed strangely familiar. He slipped the card from its compartment.

‘Bloody Nora,’ he said, almost dropping the card.

‘Well?’ Sandra’s patience was clearly being tried to the limits.

‘Gerald Montague Quicke—’

‘Yes, you’ve said that already,’ she snapped.

‘—Member of Parliament for Baileyhill and Redbridge.’

Sandra whistled softly through her teeth and pursed her lips. ‘As you say, bloody Nora,’ she said and took the card from him to examine it for herself.

‘Right,’ said Trevor, trying to sound assertive but the quaver in his voice giving him away. ‘There’s nothing else we can do here, so I suggest we get out before someone turns up.’

But his attempt to take control of the situation fell on deaf ears, and Sandra ignored him.

‘At least that explains why MI5 are involved,’ she said, looking from the photograph on the identity card to the ashen features of the man in the chair and back again as if to verify they really were one and the same.

‘Oh?’ said Trevor, realising that unless he walked out of the flat on his own, he’d just have to wait until Sandra was good and ready to go with him.

She nodded towards the body in the chair. ‘This isn’t just any old stiff. This is a Member of bloody Parliament. The duly elected representative of the good people of Baileyhill and…’

‘Redbridge.’

‘Whatever. You want me to draw you a picture?’

Trevor guessed his expression must have conveyed mystified bemusement, but this was far from being the case. He knew as well as she did how all of the pieces had suddenly fallen into place. Or nearly all.

‘The bit I don’t get though…’ he said, hoping this would indicate that he understood all the rest of it and so wasn’t as stupid as she seemed to think. ‘The thing I can’t get my head round is why Harry’s mob would want to kidnap an MP. I mean, he’s not even a well known one, is he? Why not go for a Cabinet Minister or one that’s never got their mug off the telly?’

‘No idea. But I certainly intend to find out,’ said Sandra. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing else we can do here. Let’s go before someone shows up.’

Trevor rolled his eyes. So she had been listening to him after all. ‘And what about the Honourable Member for Baileyhill and Redbridge?’ he said, even though he had no desire to delay their escape a second longer than necessary.

Sandra glanced at the dead MP. ‘There’ll have to be a by-election, I suppose.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about…’ He tailed off when she turned towards him and he could see the smirk on her face.

‘I know what you meant,’ she said. ‘We’ll tip off the police as soon as we’re clear of the place. Anonymously, of course.’

Trevor barely registered the last few words as his attention was distracted by the screech of tyres from the street outside. ‘What was that?’

‘Somebody in a hurry by the sound of it.’

He was already at the window, looking down on a dark blue Ford Mondeo that was slewed sideways across the middle of the road. The driver had his head out of the window, and a shortish man in a tan-coloured leather jacket seemed to be yelling at him while another guy stood watching from a couple of yards away. There was something familiar about the man in the leather jacket, but he couldn’t quite place him. As he trawled his memory for some clue as to where he’d seen him before, he became aware of Milly’s frantic barking from inside Sandra’s car.

‘Anything I should know about?’ said Sandra, who had made no move to join him at the window.

Trevor was beginning to feel distinctly uneasy about what he was seeing and hearing from outside and thought that her tone seemed inappropriately nonchalant. He was about to tell her what was going on when the man who was talking to the driver suddenly slammed his fist down onto the roof of the car and took a step backwards.

‘Holy shit,’ said Trevor when the man’s face came fully into view for the first time, and he instantly ducked down below the window sill. ‘It’s him.’

‘Him who?’ Sandra’s tone was a lot less nonchalant all of a sudden.

‘The guy who stopped me when I was trying to leave the festival.’

‘The one you almost ran over?’

‘That’s the one. Er… Patterson.’

‘On his own?’

Trevor shook his head and crawled to the side of the window so he could stand upright again without being seen. ‘No, there’s at least two others. Maybe more.’

‘Anyone see you?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Well that’s something to be grateful for, I guess.’

From his position beside the window, Trevor strained to try to see what was happening in the street below without being spotted himself. He soon discovered that this was an almost impossible task and decided to err on the side of caution. He began to turn towards Sandra but stopped immediately when he felt something hard and cold being pressed into the back of his neck, just below the base of his skull.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

‘Useless fucking twats.’

MacFarland had seen Harry Vincent in some blisteringly foul moods before but never anything that came even close to this one. Apart from an all too brief interlude when he’d fallen asleep, Harry had spent almost the entire train journey labelling pretty much everyone as useless fucking twats – all of the other passengers who were keeping him awake with their ‘constant bloody yattering’; the train company for making him spill piping hot coffee and staining his clean white shirt; the railway engineers for ‘pratting about’ and making him half an hour late arriving in Bristol; and of course MacFarland himself for just about everything.

The driver of the taxi they’d climbed into outside the station was another one, but this was after he’d taken exception to Harry’s derogatory remark about his ethnicity and ordered them back out again before he’d even released the handbrake. Then, every taxi driver on the planet automatically became a useless fucking twat on the basis that Harry had had to wait ten more minutes until another cab was available.

In this particular instance – and on several occasions during the past hour – the twats in question were Carrot and Lenny. Ever since Harry had first called them from the train, he had repeatedly tried to phone them back but with a resounding lack of success.

‘Why don’t the bastards pick up?’ he said in response to the incessant ringing tone as the second taxi driver ferried them through the streets of Bristol.

‘Maybe there’s no signal,’ said the cabbie helpfully, glancing at Harry’s reddening face in the rear-view mirror.

‘Course there’s a fucking signal, you usele…’

MacFarland smiled to himself as Harry’s voice petered out. Despite his mood, it seemed that even Harry didn’t relish the idea of having to stand around waiting for yet another cab.

By shifting his position slightly in his seat next to the driver, MacFarland managed to glimpse Delia’s profile in the mirror. He was staring fixedly out of the side window and appeared to be lost in thought. Come to think of it, he had spent most of the journey from Sheffield doing much the same thing, gazing out of the carriage window and barely speaking unless Harry addressed him directly. Once, he had left his seat to go to the toilet but hadn’t returned for several minutes. Harry had even commented on his lengthy absence and made some remark about how Delia might benefit from a good dose of Ex-Lax.

MacFarland guessed that Delia had realised long ago that the best strategy for dealing with Harry in situations like this was to say as little as possible for fear that whatever he said might set him off on yet another rant. All the same, he couldn’t help wondering what was going through Delia’s mind. Keeping your gob shut to avoid incurring Harry’s wrath was one thing, but there was something about his body language and the faintly furrowed brow which seemed to suggest that something was troubling him. Maybe he was anxious about what they might find when they got to the flat, or maybe he was just mentally going through the runners and riders for tomorrow’s big race at Haydock Park or wherever.

Then again, Delia’s behaviour had struck him as particularly odd when they’d stepped off the train at Temple Meads Station. He’d been strangely agitated and had looked repeatedly up and down the platform as if he was trying to spot someone he knew amongst the throng of disembarking passengers.

‘How much further?’ said Harry from the back seat of the taxi as he pressed the redial button yet again and held the mobile phone to his ear.

‘Not far,’ said the driver, gently revving the engine while he waited for a traffic light to turn to green.

Harry leaned forward a few inches. ‘That’s not what I asked you,’ he said quietly but in a tone that was heavy with menace. ‘How – many – minutes?’

The cabbie eyeballed him briefly in the mirror. ‘Dunno. Ten? Five maybe if the traffic’s not too bad and we don’t get too many more red lights.’

Harry slumped back into his seat, clicked the cancel button on his phone and tossed it onto the space between him and Delia. ‘Useless fucking twats.’

This time, the driver glared at him in the mirror. ‘What you say?’

‘It’s okay, pal,’ said MacFarland, deciding that an immediate diplomatic intervention was called for. ‘He wasnae talking to ye.’

‘And you can fuck off an’ all, ‘Aggis Bollocks.’

* * *

Once they’d spotted the dark glasses and the white stick, most of the people in the queue for taxis outside the station were insistent that he should go in front of them.

How quaint, he thought. Almost restores one’s faith in human nature.

But Julian Bracewell had no intention of getting too close to the head of the queue until he saw Harry and his companions were safely aboard a taxi of their own. As soon as this was accomplished, however, he became rather more proactive in getting himself to the front of the line, tapping his white stick loudly on the pavement to attract the attention of anyone who had so far failed to notice his disability. A young Nordic-looking man with an enormous rucksack helped him into a cab that had been five cars behind Harry’s, but even though these had already driven off, Harry’s hadn’t moved an inch.

‘Where to, guv?’ said the cabbie.

‘Milton Street, please. Cabot Tower.’

The cabbie clocked him in the mirror. ‘You sure about that, guv?’

‘Oh absolutely.’

The driver pulled away from the taxi rank, and Bracewell was surprised to see the passenger and rear doors of Harry’s cab suddenly open and all three men getting back out again.

What’s he playing at now? he wondered, but quickly decided that arriving at the flat before them was probably not such a bad thing after all.

* * *