Amphetamines and Pearls (15 page)

‘For the last three years I've worked for a man called Crosby Blake. Have you heard of him?'

I shook my head from side to side. I was still watching the way in which her fingers curled around the cup, holding it tight.

‘Well, he's a rich man, Mr Mitchell. He made a lot of money from chartered aircraft and invested that in a great many things. He also owns a large taxi fleet and several firms which hire out vans and lorries.'

I interrupted. ‘You mean he's nationalised the transport industry all by himself.'

‘In a way. Except that he runs his business efficiently.'

‘And takes all the profit.'

She leaned forward in her chair and stubbed out her cigarette in the ash tray.

‘All that is merely background and largely beside the point.'

‘Which is what?' I asked.

She looked up at him sharply and her voice was as cold as iced water. ‘For a man who obviously isn't overburdened with work, you are very impatient. I can always take this somewhere else.'

I stood up and began to move around the desk.

‘I hope you're going to get me some more coffee,' she said quickly, ‘and not do anything petty and dramatic like opening the door and showing me the way out.'

I turned right and went for the percolator. As if I had been going to do any such thing as offer her the door. As if!

After I had sat down again, she continued.

‘Mr Blake has no immediate family of his own. He has never married. He lives with his sister and her daughter—her husband was killed in a road accident sixteen years ago. A year after the daughter was born.'

‘Which makes her seventeen,' I offered. I'd forgotten to tell her that I did arithmetic at night school as well.

She looked directly at me again. ‘Which makes her seventeen and missing.'

I drank a little of the coffee. It had a sharp tang to it that tried to take my palate by surprise.

‘Lots of girls go missing at seventeen. Including some from the finest homes.'

‘I know that, Mr Mitchell,' she said, ‘but Cathy isn't simply missing. She's been kidnapped.'

That took me by surprise as well. I looked at her and tried to see something in those green-blue eyes. But I didn't know what I was looking for. So I asked a question instead.

‘When did this happen?'

‘Two days ago.'

I whistled softly. ‘You've told the police, of course.'

‘Of course.'

‘Then why
… 
?'

‘Why come to you?'

I nodded.

‘There's been a ransom demand. Crosby wants to pay it.'

I noted the switch from Mr Blake to Crosby and nodded for her to carry on. Maybe it would be three years before she got to call me Scott.

‘The police are keeping well out of things. Maintaining a low profile, I think they called it. After one or two other cases recently, they've decided to handle things rather differently.'

‘Which is why there's been nothing about this in the press,' I suggested.

She had finally felt able to put down the cup. But only to reach for the security of another cigarette. There was something strangely interesting about a confident woman coping with a situation that she found in some way upsetting.

Yet she did it well. I wondered if she even knew what she found disturbing and why. Wondered whether she realised the way she had been making use of her cup and now her cigarette.

‘The police had some difficulty achieving it, apparently, but all of the media have agreed to give no coverage to the kidnapping whatsoever. For the time being. I don't know how long they will wait.'

She blew a gentle wreath of smoke in my direction.

‘I hope it's long enough,' she said.

I asked, ‘Where exactly do I come in?'

‘Crosby was terribly uncertain about how to deal with the paying of the ransom, the whole business of making the arrangements. This thing has affected him really badly. I've never known him like it.'

The fingers that held the cigarette trembled very slightly.

‘He wanted someone who would help him with those kinds of things. Obviously, the police themselves were out of the question. He asked the officer in charge of the case and you were suggested.'

I made a mental note to buy Tom Gilmour a bottle of scotch for Christmas, then remembered that since his trip to the States he drank bourbon. It wasn't the only habit he'd picked up over there; neither the worst nor the best. Just one of many.

And now someone had saddled him with a nice quiet case of kidnapping which he was having to handle as though wearing velvet gloves.

I wondered what he thought about that. Then I stopped wondering. I thought I knew.

‘Okay,' I said, ‘do I get the details from you, or from Blake himself?

‘Mr Blake will see you this evening, if that's satisfactory.'

‘This evening? What's wrong with this afternoon? Or isn't his niece a matter of urgency to him?'

She flashed me a look I didn't understand and said, ‘Oh, yes, Mr Mitchell, I think I would say she was that.'

She was half-way to the door when I called her back.

‘There's the little matter of my fee.'

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don't suppose that it will worry Mr Blake, whatever it is.'

I stood up. I didn't suppose it would worry him either. No more than a fly walking up an elephant's back would worry the elephant. But I wasn't the elephant—not in this or any other story. And being a fly was getting frustrating.

‘Seeing as Crosby Blake's a friend of yours, my fee is twenty pounds a day, plus expenses. All right?'

‘You mean seeing that he's rich you'll put the screws on him and what you normally charge is fifteen. I thought I was going to like you, Mr Mitchell, but now I'm not so sure. I'm in danger of going off you before I got on.'

She turned round and walked smartly out of the office, leaving me staring at the swivel of her behind under the hem of her fur coat. I knew what she meant though. It was the way I normally affected people: especially myself.

And usually I charged ten pounds a day.

My call to Tom Gilmour seemed to be transferred through several dozen switchboards and exchanges, but finally I got through to him, sounding harrassed and as usual hanging on to as much of his American accent as he could.

It was like wearing an especially garish tie.

‘What is it, Scott? I'm up to my mothering arse in work!'

I grinned down the phone at him. ‘I know. I've just had a visitor. I gather you sent her this way.'

‘You mean the Miller woman?'

‘That's who. She's some lady.'

Tom grunted at the other end of the line. ‘She's okay.'

‘Look, Tom, the guy she works for, the one whose niece has been pinched. He wants me to go out there tonight and find out what's happened from him. I'd rather find out from you first. I don't want to meet him without an idea in my head.'

There was a silence and I could sense that Tom was weighing up the possibilities.

Finally he said, ‘Get here in half an hour and I'll fill you in. But it will have to be quick. I've got so many bastards breathing down my neck, my collar's curling up with the heat.'

I said I'd be there and hung up.

What would I do without the telephone, I wondered. I didn't know. I took the cups over to the sink and ran the tap. Such a clean, methodical guy!

Tom Gilmour had been sitting in an office surrounded by maps, plans of a house which I took to be Blake's, piles of typed reports and four telephones. He couldn't do without them either but from the way they kept ringing when we were trying to talk, it was clear that he wished he could.

But I did get the basic facts, as far as they were known.

Three nights ago, Cathy Skelton had disappeared from Crosby Blake's Finchley home. She had been out that evening, had gone to a friend's house to play records and talk. She'd got home at around ten-thirty, made herself a hot drink, said goodnight to her mother and to Blake, then gone to bed.

Blake had looked in on her room at somewhere close to midnight on his way to bed—something he apparently always did—and she had been sleeping peacefully. The light had been left on and there was a book lying open beside the bed. He had closed the book, put out the light and gone on to his room.

Her mother had already been in bed for half an hour.

In the morning, when Cathy's mother woke up, she went down to the kitchen in her dressing gown and made a pot of tea. She took a cup up to Blake's bedroom and left it outside the door. She did this at a little after seven every morning. Then she poured a cup for herself and made instant coffee for Cathy.

She took this up to her room. When she took the cup into the room, the bed was empty.

At first, she thought that Cathy had got up and gone to the bathroom or something like that. Nothing about the bed or the room suggested anything different. It was only when she had searched the house thoroughly that she became alarmed and knocked on Blake's bedroom door.

Neither of them could understand what had happened. There were no signs that the house had been broken into, so everything suggested that Cathy had left of her own free will.

The trouble with that theory was that she hadn't apparently taken any clothes, neither had she touched the money that she kept in a white glass jar on her dressing table. And there was no note.

So all through that first day, her mother sat at home and fretted and Crosby Blake phoned her every half hour to see if there was any news. Each time the mother's heart jumped with a mixture of joy and fear; each time she was let down; each time there was nothing to report.

That night the two of them spent awake downstairs. At first they called all of the friends listed in Cathy's phone book. None of them had seen her since she had disappeared. The girl she had spent the previous evening with said that Cathy had seemed the same as usual and hadn't said anything about going off anywhere.

When they had exhausted all the numbers in the book, they had simply sat and stared at the walls and the blank television screen.

At a quarter to seven the following morning, Blake finally broke down and phoned the police.

Cathy Skelton had already been missing for a day and a half.

The police took careful details and said they would send someone round to the house as soon as possible. They gave instructions that as far as possible nothing was to be touched or moved. It was rather late for that.

At seven precisely the telephone rang: it was the first ransom demand.

2

When I was a kid there had been days when the sun had shone so strongly that the thought of cooping myself up in school for yet another day had been impossible. So instead of getting off the bus at the school stop, I had stayed on until we had arrived in the greener suburbs of the city.

Just by cutting across a few roads, it was possible to spend the whole day walking from park to wood and back to park once more. In those days some instinct had told me that was a better thing to do with a sunny day.

Who knows if I was right?

I thought of those times now, as the car entered Finchley, the starting point for all those journeys.

One of the roads I'd never walked down was the one known to us kids as Millionaires' Row. We'd walked hastily past the end of it, peering down in spite of ourselves, like looking into the top of a Christmas stocking you knew was never going to hang at the end of your own bed.

It was into this road that I now turned the car.

The houses were set well back from the pavement; well enough to provide room for a couple of Rovers, a quantity of gravel drive, some lawn, a few stone gnomes and a simple little water fountain.

Nothing elaborate, you understand. For these are basically simple people that live here.

I thought about parking in the driveway, but something wouldn't allow it. Instead, I drew in to the kerb—but not so close that I didn't have to put one foot in the gutter when I got out.

No-one was going to say that Mitchell didn't know his place.

As I walked towards the front door, I gave the house a, looking-over. For all the money that it must have cost, it was comparatively tasteful. If you liked creeping ivy and those stupid little square windows that were nearly impossible to clean. But then, people who bought places like this never worried about how the windows were going to be cleaned. They sure as hell weren't going to do it themselves.

I knocked on the door with a knocker that would have made an elegant nose ring for one of the wild bulls of Marathon.

After a couple of diplomatic minutes, the door opened wide and I was face to face with the lovely Miss Miller. Perhaps it was going to be a better evening than I had thought.

I slipped into the hall and she pushed the door to behind me.

‘Working late?' I murmured.

She made a nasty face—something difficult enough when you looked as naturally beautiful as she did—and pointed to a walnut hatstand in the corner.

‘Yes,' she said quickly, ‘but not for you.'

I hung up my coat and hat and followed her through the door she had opened. It was a good pastime. I thought that I could get used to it. Following her, I mean.

I was wondering whether I would ever catch her up, when some guy thrust his hand at me and I found myself shaking it and looking up into a handsome enough face. Handsome enough for a fiftyish man who's allowed himself to go soft and who has lines and dark patches under his eyes from missing too much sleep.

‘I am Crosby Blake, Mr Mitchell.'

I felt like telling him that I didn't think he was Santa Claus, but somehow I didn't figure my sense of humour would be appreciated.

‘Would you like a drink, Mr Mitchell? It's a cold evening.'

It was and I accepted a large scotch. Stephanie poured it and she made her move towards the drinks trolley a shade before he asked her if she would mind. Obviously a girl with a good knowledge of her own duties.

I sat down in an armchair that sank so low I had the feeling I was about to pass through space. I sipped at the scotch and looked across the room at my new employer.

Crosby Blake was around fifty years old right enough, but maybe I'd misjudged the softness. There was something about the set of his body that suggested a time in his life when he had to fight for what he had got.

He was a little under six foot in height, with a head of dark hair allowed to grow fashionably long so that it brushed against the edge of his collar. His mouth was the only really troubling feature about him. Somehow the lips were too thin, the tightness too controlled. I wasn't sure what it made me think, but whatever it was I didn't like it.

‘Miss Miller will not have told you of the events the night that Cathy disappeared. I had better begin there.'

He waited to see if I was going to say anything. I wasn't.

He carried on. The story he gave was basically the same as that I had got from Gilmour. I said so.

‘You mean you went to the police before coming to me?' he asked, affronted.

‘Sure,' I replied.

‘Do you think that was necessary?' he asked.

‘If I hadn't thought that, Mr Blake, I wouldn't have wasted my time doing it.' I put down my glass and leaned forward. ‘I'm a professional and what you're buying when you buy me is my professional ability. Which means that I use my own judgment and do things in my way. Or I don't do them at all.'

I looked hard at those tired eyes and saw something begin to flicker deep within them.

‘Just so long as that's clear,' I said.

I allowed myself to sink back in my chair. I felt better for that. Crosby Blake obviously didn't. He wasn't used to being spoken to in that tone of voice and right now he was trying to work out whether he should snap back at me or sit there and take it.

He finally decided that he was going to take it—for now.

From the corner of my eye I could see that Stephanie was looking at us with some interest. She wasn't used to seeing anyone talk to him like that, either. What I couldn't tell was whether she approved or not.

‘May I ask you, then, Mr Mitchell, why you allowed me to go through the story once again?' The voice was calm, easy—restrained.

‘I would have thought the reason was fairly obvious,' I told him. I was beginning to. enjoy this.

He looked at me and the thing that had shown in his eyes was more obvious now. It was temper. Pure temper. I wondered how long he would be able to keep himself under wraps if I kept needling him. But maybe now wasn't the best of times to find out.

‘You wanted to see if there was any interesting discrepancy between my version to you and the one you got from the police.'

Smart boy, I thought.

‘Right,' I said. There wasn't much point in pushing my luck right now.

‘And are you satisfied?' he asked.

I nodded my head. ‘Perhaps you could tell me about the ransom demand?' I asked.

He said he would.

‘And could I refill my glass,' I said, holding it up.

Stephanie Miller was quick on her feet. She took the glass from my hand, giving me a strange half-smile.

‘Let me, Mr Mitchell. We don't want you overusing your professional abilities, do we?'

‘The phone went at exactly seven in the morning,' Blake began, ‘and I went to answer it. I was anxious, naturally. I thought it might be Cathy. It wasn't, of course.

‘At first I didn't think it was anybody. There was this silence that I thought would break when the person at the other end put the phone down. A wrong number or something like that.

‘But nothing happened. I became conscious of someone breathing. It was really most unpleasant. Then he spoke. It was an odd voice, rather muffled and unclear—afterwards I realised that the person was probably talking through a handkerchief or something like that in order to disguise his voice.'

I thought he could leave the detective work to me. I said, ‘What did he say?'

Crosby Blake blinked across the room, glanced at Stephanie for a moment, then went on.

‘He said that he had Cathy. That she was all right. That she would stay that way as long as I did what he said.'

‘Which was what?'

‘I was not to talk to anyone about Cathy's disappearance. If he saw anything about it in the papers or on television then … then
…'

He had stopped and a slight tick was bouncing along merrily above his right eye. He shifted his position in the chair, as though he had become suddenly aware that he was sitting in the middle of some wet and nasty mess.

‘And then?' I prompted him.

‘Then I would never see her alive again. No-one would ever see her alive again.'

The voice had broken into an odd tremble and the nerve above the eye was working overtime. If he kept stopping like this I'd never get to hear all of the story.

Stephanie got up and went over to him.

‘Would you like a drink, Crosby?' she asked quietly.

Her fingers brushed his shoulder only for a moment, but brush it they did.

I took another dip into my scotch and let the thoughts that were running after one another round my brain have their head. They were sure having fun in there.

Blake took the glass and drained it in one swallow.

‘I'm sorry, Mr Mitchell. This has all been rather a strain for me, I'm afraid. You see, I don't have any children of my own and Cathy has always been like a … like a daughter to me.' He paused and looked at me. Suddenly the temper was rising up behind his eyes once more. ‘I feel so helpless, Mr Mitchell, so stupid and helpless. It's not a feeling I am used to.'

I allowed myself to sink a few more feet down into the chair.

‘Apart from telling no-one, Mr Blake, what other conditions did the man make?'

‘I had to get twenty thousand pounds in used five and one pound notes and have them ready at the house. He would get in touch with me and arrange where I was to leave the money.'

Blake looked up and his face was clearer.

‘That was all?' I asked.

‘That was all.'

‘But you have seen the police?'

‘That first time, yes. They arrived almost as soon as I had put the phone down from talking to him. There was nothing I could do to stop that happening. But since then, I have only spoken here to the man in charge of the case. Gilmour. I went to the station that is directing the enquiry, but it seemed unlikely that he could be both watching me and the house as well.'

‘If either,' I said.

‘But he said he would know if I got in touch with the police. That he would kill Cathy if
 
…'

‘He tried to frighten you,' I interrupted. ‘I would doubt very much if he stuck around here to keep an eye on what was going on. No, he'd bank on the media getting hold of it.'

‘Are you certain?' he asked anxiously.

I stared at him. ‘No.' I said flatly. ‘In things like this there's not much you can be certain about. In fact there's only one certainty when it all comes down to it.'

‘What's that?' It was Stephanie's voice. I had almost managed to forget that she was there. Almost.

I turned to face her. ‘The certainty is death. She could be dead already. She could have already been several hours dead when that man phoned.'

She put her face in her hands. Blake jumped up from his chair and slammed the empty glass down hard on the nearby table. Then he walked over to the corner of the room and busied himself with examining the pattern that was embossed on the wallpaper.

It didn't occupy his attentions for long.

‘How can you sit there and say that?' he almost screamed at me.

‘Look, I can say it because I'm talking about a girl whom I've never seen and that I don't know, don't have any feelings for. I can say it because it's a possibility, always has been ever since she left this house. I can say it because none of us must allow ourselves to become deluded by the prospect of ever seeing her alive again. I can say it because I can't afford to have you breaking down at the crucial moment. So you've got to face it now and get it over with.'

I stood in the centre of the room and he lifted his face to look at me.

I said: ‘Your niece, Cathy, could well be dead. You have to know that. Know it and, acknowledge it.'

The head was lowered slowly; the voice was no longer either bossy or agitated; it barely travelled the distance between us.

‘I know it.'

We were standing there like that when the door opened and a woman appeared in the doorway. A small woman, rather round, rather dull, rather bewildered. She looked up at me. Her mouth opened, stayed open, then closed without having uttered a sound.

The door closed and she was no longer to be seen. At no time had she looked either at Blake or beyond me to Stephanie.

‘That was Cathy's mother,' Blake explained.

I nodded my head. I had known. I was thinking that there were a hell of a lot of things that I didn't know. And wondering whether I wanted to know them.

Blake walked back to his chair.

‘Shall we sit down again, Mr Mitchell? This must be very wearing for you, walking in upon us while we are all in such a state. Although I imagine you must be used to it in your business?'

In a pig's eye I was!

I sat down anyway.

‘He's been in touch with you again?' I asked.

‘Once. At seven the following day.'

‘That's today,' I confirmed.

He looked as though time had lost much meaning for him.

‘Of course,' he said after a little thought. ‘I've been so preoccupied with this business every normal consideration has gone through the window.'

Then what were you doing this afternoon that was so all-fired important that you couldn't meet me till tonight? I didn't say it, just thought it. I carried on listening.

Blake carried on talking.

‘He asked whether I had got the money. I told him that I couldn't lay my hands on that amount so easily. He told me that I had to have it ready by tomorrow.'

‘And can you?' I shot at him.

‘Yes. I think so. He's going to call tomorrow with instructions. That's all I know.'

‘Did he say when he'd call?'

‘No, but up to now it's been at the same time.'

‘So the police will be waiting to run a trace on him at seven.'

Blake looked confused for a moment. ‘I don't … I mean, they didn't say anything to me.'