Suspicious Minds

Chapter One

“Do you think I murdered Alison?” asked Stirrup.

Harry Devlin shaded his eyes against the glare of the midday sun. They had stepped out of the police station into a wall of heat and he needed a moment to catch his breath. As well as to judge how to answer a question better left unasked.

“What if I say yes?”

Stirrup stopped in his tracks.

“Remember, it’s easier to get rid of a solicitor than a wife.”

Tiredness had rubbed the varnish off Stirrup’s good humour, leaving his Brummie accent ugly and bare. Small wonder: the interrogation had stretched through four long hours into a test of patience and nerve.

Stirrup had phoned at seven that morning with the news that the police had called at his home again; they wanted to re-interview him about his wife’s disappearance.

“Said I was willing as long as you could make it too. All right?”

“I’ll meet you there. And remember, you haven’t been arrested. You’re not forced to say any more. They’ll try to get under your skin, that’s what they’re paid for. So keep your temper under control.”

“No problem. They’ve nothing against me, Harry boy. Nothing at all.”

DI Bolus evidently thought otherwise. Fresh-faced and bespectacled, he resembled an inquisitive schoolboy more closely than Tomas de Torquemada. Yet his ingenuous manner camouflaged the persistence of a Toxteth kerb-crawler.

“People like your wife simply don’t vanish into thin air,” he kept saying. Lines of puzzlement creased his brow. “There must be an explanation. Don’t you agree?”

Harry watched his client straining to keep himself under control. To his relief, Stirrup stuck to the straight denial they had agreed on when first it became clear the police suspected that Alison was dead.

“I’ve no idea where she is.”

“Do you care?” Bolus sounded genuine in his anxiety to be reassured.

“I want her home again. And the sooner you get off my back and find her, the better.”

And so it continued, with Bolus determined not to let go without a struggle and Stirrup intent on giving nothing away. Eventually the time came for Harry to stand and say that his client, a free and respectable man with a business to run, had helped enough with inquiries for one day and that now they would be going. The moment of decision. And Bolus had dismissed them with a courteous nod of thanks. Stirrup wasn’t to be charged today.

***

“Want a lift?” asked Harry as they reached his rust-scarred M.G.

Puffing and grunting, Stirrup squeezed into the passenger seat.

“What do you say, then, Harry boy? Do I look to you like a wife killer?”

Sweat shone on Stirrup’s bald head and well-fed jowls. Harry wondered if it was a clue to fear lurking beneath the customary bravado. But the sun was harsh and they had spent half a day in a tiny airless room which had it been a cell would probably have been in breach of some convention on human rights.

Harry slung his jacket and tie in the back of the car. Inside, the shabby upholstery burned his palm. The steering wheel felt too hot to hold.

“Jack, take my advice. Guilt and innocence are for a jury to decide.”

“Are you saying it’ll come to that?”

“Look, if Bolus had enough to pin something on you, you’d be changing your suit for something made of paper by now. So relax. Or worry about something constructive, like staff pilfering or last month’s sales figures.”

Stirrup gripped Harry’s shoulder. “Listen, you know me well enough. I didn’t kill her, all right? She’s as alive as you or me, take my word for it.”

“Unless I learn something to make me do otherwise, my job is exactly that. To take your word for it.”

Stirrup fell silent as the car moved off. Out of the corner of his eye Harry glanced at his client. On that bulky frame the Armani suit had no more elegance than a vacuum cleaner bag.

You know me well enough. Was that true? Harry had once been let into the secret that his client’s full name was John Aloysius Kendrick Stirrup, but more meaningful confidences had been few and far between. His firm had handled Stirrup Wines’ legal work for three or four years, buying sites for off-licences throughout Liverpool and here on the Wirral peninsula, appearing regularly in the magistrates’ court to secure the right for each branch to sell alcohol to the public. So many of Crusoe and Devlin’s other clients were rogues or traders (or both) in a small way of business. Representing a boom company was a lawyer’s dream. Harry had wined and dined Stirrup, had in turn accepted the man’s hospitality; it was as close as he ever came to attempting to market his practice. Yet they did not have enough in common to call themselves friends and for all their frequent contact Harry realised that he could not say he knew Jack Stirrup well.

“Straight on.”

“The sea front?”

“Why not, Harry boy?” Joviality again. “Terrific day. Where better to spend it than at the seaside? The weather forecasters reckon it might touch ninety today.”

“If you’d told me earlier, I’d have brought my raincoat.”

Stirrup laughed. “Know your trouble? You’re a sceptic, Harry. You ought to have more faith.”

“For that, I’d need a change of job.”

“Not a bad idea. Earning a living out of legal loopholes is enough to turn any bugger sour. But save me from Strange-ways first, all right?”

Soon they were driving along Mockbeggar Drive, looking out from Wirral’s tip to Liverpool Bay and the Irish Sea. At this distance, the cloudless sky and blue sea came straight out of a tourist’s idyll. If you could forget about global warming and gaps within the ozone layer, they were sights to lift the heart and soothe the mind.

Yet Harry always had a feeling of melancholy when he returned to New Brighton. He couldn’t help casting his mind back to Sunday afternoons he had spent here with Liz, his wife. Afternoons which now seemed to belong to another life. But more than that, the resort itself reeked of days beyond recall. Like a senile, smelly old woman who still believes herself to be sweet and sixteen.

Round every corner lurked a reminder of the past: in the theatres converted into bingo halls, in the shops boarded up because they could no longer pay their way. So much had gone over so many years. The Tower; the old pleasure grounds; the pier demolished to save it from sinking into the sea.

Here and there, signboards promised building work and regeneration. New litter bins had been put out and lampposts painted, but it would take much more to tempt the sun-seekers away from Torremolinos.

“Pull up over there. We’ll call in at the Majestic. Never know your luck, we might bump into Bryan Grealish.”

“Isn’t that something we’d both prefer to avoid?”

After parking, they stood together on the broad promenade. In front of them squatted the red sandstone mass of Fort Perch Rock Battery, built to guard the Port of Liverpool from seaborne invaders who had never even bothered to arrive.

“Listen, Harry boy, someone’s setting me up with the police. Someone with a grudge against me, yes? Grealish fits the bill.”

“So what are you after? Do you seriously expect him to break down in tears and confess?”

Stirrup pursed fleshy lips. “I’ll be honest with you — he’s not my number one suspect. But seeing as we’re here…”

“Okay, okay. But don’t start World War Three over it, Jack. You’ve got enough problems as it is.”

“Don’t I know it? But after that session with Bolus, I need a bit of sustenance. Talk about the third degree. Anybody would think I was a murderer.”

He bellowed with merriment, but Harry could still recall the earlier apprehension, understandable even in an entirely innocent man, yet out of character in Jack Stirrup.

Curiosity began to stir inside him. He recognised it as a weakness, like hunger pangs in a glutton. But Alison Stirrup’s vanishing trick intrigued him, tempted him into wanting to understand.

“So where do you reckon she is, then?”

Stirrup screwed up his eyes as if to keep out the sun. “Wish I knew.”

“Won’t you hazard a guess?”

Stirrup spread his arms. “What’s the point? She might be anywhere. Women aren’t logical, Harry, they’re unpredictable. Surely by now you’ve learned that?”

The hard way, Harry thought. He said nothing.

“I could never read Ali’s mind. Never tried. In her way, she was deep. Course, she’d been to college, not like me. I’m a university of life man myself, as you well know. School of hard knocks.”

“Even so…”

“Even so my arse.” Stirrup wagged a thick finger under Harry’s nose. “For God’s sake, you know her. Have you ever managed to figure her out?”

You know her. Again that false assumption. Harry had met Alison Stirrup several times. On each occasion she had been in the company of her husband — and in his shadow. She had seemed a slight, insubstantial figure, wraith-like in comparison. Harry pictured her in his mind. She was fifteen years Jack’s junior and attractive enough, but somehow unremarkable. Harry struggled for more than a vague impression of short blonde hair and a quiet way of speaking. Out of the blue, he recollected once catching sight of her smothering a yawn as Stirrup recounted an anecdote which she must have heard a dozen times. An understandable reaction; Harry had attached no importance to it at the time. He had found her pleasant but reserved and had simply taken it for granted that she must enjoy the moneyed lifestyle which marriage had brought. With hindsight he wondered if her appearance of calm masked a deep discontent.

“She’s your wife. You must have some idea about why she left so suddenly.”

Saying that prompted memories of his own. When Liz had left him, he had known precisely to whose arms she was running. And knowledge, however painful, was surely preferable to the prickling of uncertainty. For the first time that day it occurred to him to feel sorry for Stirrup.

“Can’t fathom it. Didn’t I tell the bobbies that till I was sick of the sound of my own voice?”

“Has Claire any ideas?”

“She’s as baffled as me.” Invariably Stirrup’s tone softened when his daughter came into the conversation. “Alison and her were never close, of course. Couldn’t expect it, after all. They didn’t have much in common. Only me.”

“They quarrelled?”

“Don’t get me wrong. Ali’s no wicked step-mother. And Claire can be a she-devil — but she knew better than to try to throw her weight around too much, I wouldn’t have stood for it. No, they never had much to say to each other, but there were no rows, no slinging matches. Perhaps it would’ve been better if there had been.”

“Was Claire upset when Alison went?”

“She hasn’t said much. You know what teenage kids are. And she’s been seeing this lad, not been at home as much lately. He’s older than her, I don’t approve. But when did young girls take any notice of their dads when they first start up with a boyfriend?”

They began walking. Past the Floral Pavilion and the ten-pin bowling alley, past hot dog stands and a place which sold bags of broken pink and white rock. Madame Rosika, the clairvoyant, was open for business. Harry wondered if she would dare predict if and when Jack Stirrup would be reunited with his missing wife.

“And you?” he asked gently. “How are you coping without her?”

“All right.” Stirrup scratched his nose. “Look, I won’t pretend it was the ideal marriage. I never said otherwise to that bloody police inspector, did I? Ali and me, we had our differences. You think, going into it the second time around, you’re older and wiser, you won’t make the same mistakes again. But you do. You do.”

“So you still say you can’t understand why she walked out without a word?”

The bonhomie faded again. “Yes, I do say that. Whose side are you on?”

Harry didn’t respond. It was his job to be on Stirrup’s side and he had no grounds for believing his client guilty of murder. The case against him was flimsy and circumstantial. Yet Stirrup was telling less than the whole truth, of that Harry was certain. Instinct and experience insisted that something was being withheld. There was more to be known about the disappearance of Alison Stirrup.

And against his better professional judgment, Harry wanted to know it.