Suspicious Minds

Chapter Seventeen

One glance at Kuiper convinced Harry that the student would not be leaving in a hurry. The boy’s face was buried in the dirt. He was making a strange noise, the muffled weeping of pain and rage and defeat.

Panting after his exertion, Harry trudged towards the main building. He did not relish explaining to Jack Stirrup that his daughter’s boyfriend had used the grounds of Prospect House as an operational base in an attempt to hold Bharat Kaiwar’s business empire to ransom. Nor would words of persuasion alone convince Jack that the lad had not also killed Claire. If not checked, Stirrup’s interrogative techniques would leave Peter Kuiper yearning for a little genteel police brutality. As Harry pressed the doorbell, he steeled himself for his third physical confrontation of the evening and wondered why Liverpool Poly’s careers adviser hadn’t warned him that success in the law was marked by the award of a Lonsdale Belt.

No lights snapped on in response to his ring. After a minute he tried a second time. Again no answer.

Harry walked round the side of the building. No sign of life. Just the flickering red light of a burglar alarm box high up on the side wall. No window or door had been left conveniently open to allow him access to a telephone in the deserted house. Harry swore. Feeling hungry as well as tired, he was beginning to regret his failure to finish the microwaved pizza. To get the police here fast and leave them to sort everything out was all he wanted right now.

He picked up a half-brick left by the builders and hurled it through the kitchen window. The lack of finesse would have appalled the least sophisticated of his criminal clients, but he was past caring. He pushed in what was left of the shattered pane and opened the window. No casement lock: Stirrup should have consulted his neighbourhood crime prevention officer rather than frittering money on electronic gimmickry. An alarm siren started wailing, but there was no one to hear it except the crippled young man who lay prostrate fifty yards away. It was the work of a moment for Harry to heave himself up and inside. He found the phone and dialled a number he knew by heart; it belonged to Quentin Pike.

“Got a client for you,” he said and described in half a dozen sentences what had happened.

“Good God! Blackmail, you say? And you’re not able to act?”

“Conflict of interests. The kid doesn’t know you exist yet. But he’ll need a good brief.”

“Incidentally, what’s that bloody awful racket in the background?”

“The sound of a wasted investment.” Harry had already been in the house longer than it would take a seasoned burglar to strip everything of value. So much for home security.

He rang off and after trial and error in opening cupboard doors, discovered the control box inside a walk-in pantry and switched the siren off. It seemed easier than it ought to be. He put on an outside light, then rang 999 to summon the police and medical help. Next he found a couple of tumblers and filled them from a bottle of brandy he found in the dining room. He took them outside to where Kuiper was now lying on his back.

The boy’s face was a white blot on the blackness of the night, looking up at the starless sky. His tears had dried and he had tucked his bad leg awkwardly to one side.

“Get this down you.” Harry bent and held the glass to Kuiper’s lips.

The young man slurped a little as he drank. “My ankle’s broken, you bastard,” he said indistinctly.

“Think yourself lucky. If Jack Stirrup had been home, you’d be a candidate for intensive care. As it is, the police and the medics can argue over who’s going to have the privilege of looking after you tonight. They’ll be here any minute.”

Kuiper closed his eyes. His expression was stripped of hatred, fear and anger. All that remained was exhaustion and a grimace of pain.

“So, it’s all over.”

“For you and Claire, in different ways. Whose idea was it to blackmail Saviour Money?”

“Mine, of course.” The old cockiness had not quite drained away. With a flash of understanding Harry guessed that the boy wanted to explain what he had done. Now Claire was dead, he needed to look elsewhere for an audience.

“Tell me.”

“Claire was talking one day about the catering course she wanted to do. She rabbited on about hygiene in the kitchen. Food poisoning, all that stuff. About the junk people eat and how you never know if what you’re eating is full of bugs. I said something about those scare stories you read in papers, about people threatening to poison food shops if they’re not bought off. It set me thinking.”

Kuiper shifted his position on the ground, flinching with the effort. “Shit! That hurts.”

“Carry on.”

“Poisoning fascinates me. It’s a subtle crime. Guns and blunt instruments are for mindless thugs. Murderers who use poison think their crimes out in advance. They’re usually intelligent.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.” The whites of Kuiper’s eyes gleamed in the darkness. “And even the fools carried it off with more style than your average gangland hood. You’ve heard of Major Armstrong?”

“How could I forget? The only solicitor ever hanged for murder.”

“Right. I often think about him, handing out his arsenic-laden scones for tea. So prissy. So English. He learned the law in Liverpool, you know.”

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”

Kuiper contrived a hoarse chuckle. “Don’t say you wouldn’t like to get rid of one or two of your professional rivals the same way. Or what about Armstrong’s other victim, his wife?”

Harry said, “My wife was murdered. Stabbed to death in the street. Eighteen months ago.”

There was a long silence. Then, in a tone humbler than Harry had ever heard from him, Kuiper said, “No answer to that, is there? Sorry.”

“Okay. But you see the point, don’t you? Crime’s not fun, it’s squalid and belongs in the sewer. Like your silly prank with the supermarket.”

“I only tampered with a handful of things. And I gave them fair warning.”

“So that makes it all right? Anyway, why pick on Saviour Money?”

Kuiper made a faint movement with the upper half of his body, a painful attempt at a shrug. “Why not? But there was a reason, actually. Bryan Grealish was on their board.”

“So?”

“It was Claire’s idea to go for him. Grealish was at odds with her father, she said. I never knew the details. Some business dispute… you’ll know better than me. Stirrup hated the guy, so Claire did too. She was still a daddy’s girl at heart. More than he deserved, the fat old prat. So she wanted to teach Grealish a lesson.”

Something occurred to Harry. “And the Majestic? The glass in the greens the other week? Another of your little japes?”

“You’ve got it.” Hurt Kuiper might be, but he couldn’t keep a faint note of satisfaction out of his voice. “Our first attempt at — contamination.”

Harry stared hard at the boy. Even in the dark he didn’t like the look that had stolen over Kuiper’s face. It was an ageless look, an end-justifies-the-means look, a look a Nazi scientist might have worn when discussing his ideas for improving the human race.

“Call it a trial run. We didn’t ask for money, never contacted Grealish once. We simply wanted to prove we could bring it off, that’s all. That was the spur. Once we’d done the Majestic, we knew we could try something bigger. And make real money.”

“Claire didn’t need cash. The only daughter of a rich man.”

“You don’t get it, do you? What’s the point of inherited wealth? There’s no challenge. We both agreed on that. The ransom was to make people sit up and take notice. They might not know who we were. But we’d have them dancing to our tune.”

Harry indicated the hole in the ground. “Who decided to run the campaign from here?”

“She showed me the place. She’d noticed there was something here one day when she was mooching round, but she hadn’t the strength to lug that boulder to one side. I opened it up. Nobody had gone down there for years, that was obvious. It’s an old ice-house, I think, left in ruins and overgrown. The perfect spot to keep the cans and stuff. Tell you what though, when I heard the police had come sniffing round looking for Stirrup’s bloody wife, I pissed myself. Needn’t have. Good old PC Plod, can’t see the nose in front of his face.”

“And Jack never knew the ice-house existed?”

“No way. Though it’s plenty big enough down there. Room for two. Till the ransom thing took over, we had another use for it.”

“She was only fifteen.”

“Yeah.” Another throaty chuckle. “But all woman.”

“All you could cope with, isn’t that nearer the mark?”

“Jealous? She wasn’t a… shit, they’re here!”

The wailing of the police sirens pierced the night air. Two cars came screaming along the drive, pulling up close to where Harry and Peter Kuiper were waiting. Harry got to his feet.

“I forgot to tell you — you’ll need a good lawyer. I’ve called a man called Pike. He’ll be looking for you at the police station. He’s all right. His advice will be simple: say nothing. Okay?”

He walked towards the detectives, not interested in any words of thanks. None of the wary faces of the men who had climbed out of the cars were familiar to him. In charge was a tall inspector, sandy-haired and supercilious.

“Mr. Devlin? The name’s Swarbrook. Detective Inspector. I understand you think you may have apprehended someone who has been demanding money with menaces from a local business?”

With such a talent for circumlocution Swarbrook ought to be a lawyer, Harry thought. But he simply said, “He’s over there.”

“I see. We’ll need a full statement from you, of course. The necessary…”

The noise of another car engine interrupted him. Someone else was coming up the drive, headlights tracing a path through the trees. It wasn’t a panda car this time. Brakes squealed as the driver found his path blocked by the police cars parked near the front of the house. A door banged. Harry peered through the gloom and saw two figures getting out of a Jaguar. Jack Stirrup had come home.

“What the bloody hell is going on here?”

Harry moved to meet his client, a couple of paces ahead of DI Swarbrook.

“Jack, it’s me. Been having fun and games in your absence. It’s…”

But his voice trailed away as he looked beyond the red face of his client to the person who had been a passenger in the Jaguar. A lithe, long-legged woman with a mass of frizzy brown hair. The nervous way she was biting her lip contrasted oddly with the confident provocation of her tight black dress. Harry didn’t know who she was. One thing he did know: this wasn’t Alison Stirrup. Nor, by the look of her, someone Jack had invited back simply for a quiet evening’s game of snooker.