Blackstone's Pursuits (2 page)

‘Look, I’m sorry. My name’s Oz Blackstone. I’m a private enquiry agent. I work for lawyers, insurance companies and the like.

‘I had an appointment to meet someone here this morning, at ten o’clock. When I got here, the door was unlocked. I knocked, and it just swung open. I shouted, but there was no answer. I thought that was odd, so I stepped inside and took a look around.’ I pulled a card from the stash in the breast pocket of my jacket. ‘Here.’

She looked at it. ‘Oz, eh. You don’t sound like an Australian.’

I scowled at her. Always, the same wisecrack. I sighed, and gave her the stock answer. ‘I’m not. It’s just that Osbert doesn’t cut the mustard down Pilton way.’

She gave me an odd smile, with a
touché
look about it. ‘I know what you mean. My name’s Prim Phillips. It’s short for “Primavera”. In English that means “Springtime”. I was conceived in May, on a holiday in a tent in the Costa Brava, and my Maw’s a terrible romantic. I decided early on that there was no bloody way I was going through life answering to “Vera”, therefore ... You and I are kindred spirits in the daft name stakes.’ She shook her tousled sun-bleached head and smiled, and flashed me the sort of look that doesn’t stop at your eyes, but drills right into your head. ‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘giving a wee girl a four-syllable name!’

She picked up the huge bag. ‘Hold on till I stick this in the bedroom. Then you can tell me the rest of your story.’

I stepped between her and the door. She frowned, and for the first time, looked just a touch apprehensive. I tried to sound cool and reassuring, but it came out flustered and panicky. ‘Don’t go in there, Miss Phillips. I said there was no reply; I didn’t say that there wasn’t anyone here.’

She was afraid now. ‘Dawn ...’ she began. She tried to push past me, but I gripped her arms and held her. It wasn’t easy. She’s a strong wee package.

‘No, it isn’t Dawn ... unless she’s balding and helluva well hung.’ See me, see gallows humour! She looked at me, twisting against my grip and wincing. I realised that the Motorola was digging into her arm, and let her go. ‘Sorry!’

‘That’s my bedroom. I want to see what’s in there,’ she said. ‘However bad it is, I’ve seen worse. Come on.’ There was something in her voice which told me that ‘Don’t,’ would always be the wrong thing to say to this woman. I tried, ‘Are you sure?’ instead, but that didn’t work either.

‘Okay,’ I said finally. ‘But don’t get the wrong idea about me when you see in there.’ She looked at me, incredulously.

When I got round to asking her whether, finding two strangers in her flat, one with a head like a kebab and the other heading for the door, it hadn’t occurred to her for a second that the live one might have had something to do with the dead one being dead, she offended me again. ‘Don’t be daft, Oz. I’ve met people who could do that sort of thing. You couldn’t, not in a month of Sundays, not if your life depended on it.’ It can do something to your manhood when a slip of a woman looks you in the eye and tells you that you don’t have the stuff to be a cold-blooded killer.

Back in the there and then of it, she stood beside the bed, looking down at the wee man. ‘That’s got to be him, all right. Dawn’s bit of illicit. She said in her last letter that he was built like a cross between Danny deVito and Nijinsky. I thought she meant the dancer, not the horse!’

His hands were by his sides. She leaned over and lifted one up. ‘Been dead for a while,’ she said. ‘He’s cold, and the rigor’s beginning to wear off. When did you find him?’

I glanced at my watch, embarrassed by the tremble of my hand. It was almost ten-thirty. ‘About half an hour ago.’

All of a sudden I couldn’t take it, all that coolness in the face of crisis. ‘Look, Miss Phillips, Prim, whatever: what is it with you? You walk into your flat and you find a strange guy knifed to death in your bed, and you’re standing here as if it’s just something that the cleaner’s missed. What sort of a world do you live in?’ My voice rose as I spoke, and suddenly there was a crack in it that I’d thought I lost in my teens.

She took me by the arm and led me out of the room, through the hall and into a narrow kitchen. ‘Sit down, Oz.’ There were two chairs, one on either side of a gate-leg table. She picked up a white plastic kettle and filled it from the mixer tap over the sink, then switched it on. She lifted a jar marked ‘Tea’ and shook it. Turning, she bent her back against the work-surface and looked down at me, as the kettle began to hiss and bubble behind her.

‘I’m a nurse. I’ve just spent a year in a refugee camp in Central Africa, in the middle of a tribal war zone. When I say I’ve seen worse than that in there, I’m not kidding.

‘On top of that, I’ve just spent the last umpteen hours wide awake in aeroplanes. All I wanted, when I came in here was a shower, a vodka and tonic, and a sleep. Instead, I’ve got a slightly hysterical private eye in my kitchen and a corpse in my bed. If my reaction seems odd to you, it’s because all this is a dream; because none of it’s happening.

‘It’s also because I’m trying not to imagine where my sister is, or how she’s involved with what’s through next door.

‘That’s me. Now, before we do anything else, what’s your story?’ She turned her back on me as the kettle boiled and set about the business of making tea. I sat there, bewildered and dumb.

She looked over her shoulder. ‘Well?’

I stood up, in a feeble attempt to assert myself. I searched for something smart to say, but all I could manage was a shrug of the shoulders. She handed me a mug of tea. It reminded me of the dark, hot, sweet char that was my Granny Blackstone’s standard remedy for shock, exposure, skinned knees, a wee touch of the flu and a host of other conditions up to and including mild coronary incidents. My Granny’s tea was a wonderful brew. Apart from its therapeutic value, she used it to dye Easter Eggs, and swore by it as a tanning agent. She used to keep it cold in a jar, and slabber it on herself every time the sun poked its nose into the back court. She was found one day, dead in her deckchair. My Dad reckoned that she’d finally pickled herself.

I took a sip of Prim’s version. It was sweet, as I’d expected, yet different. I took a deeper swallow, and felt it go to work, stilling the trembling in my arms and legs. ‘Nice,’ I said. ‘What’s in it?’

‘A spoonful of honey. Better for you than sugar. Now, come on. Let’s hear it.’

‘Okay.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Like I said, I work for lawyers and insurers in the main. Taking statements from witnesses in court cases and so on. This commission was a wee bit different. A few days ago I was called in by the senior partner of a firm of stockbrokers called Black and Muirton. I’d heard of them, but I tend to do my investing through bookmakers. The guy, Archer, he’s called, said to me that they had a problem with one of their partners.

‘It seems that their practice accountant found some heavy irregularities in the books. The firm keeps an offshore bank account in Jersey for holding clients’ money on a short-term basis, when it buys and sells for them. Cash goes flying through it all the time, very serious cash sometimes, because it’s a big firm with some high-roller clients, plus, they handle business for banks and fund managers. What the audit found was that the account didn’t balance. In fact it was off balance by nine hundred thousand squigglies.

‘It took them a while but eventually they tracked it down. The cash had come from the sale of some loan stock held by one of their multi-millionaire clients. It had been transferred, electronically, to a numbered bank account in Switzerland. The sale had been authorised, and the transfer made, by one of the partners, a Mr William Kane. The trouble was, there was nothing on Black and Muirton’s records to show that the client had instructed it, and nothing to show that the bank account was his.

‘Archer pulled some strings in Switzerland. He found out that the account was opened by a Scots woman called Dawn Phillips. It was a real cloak and dagger job. When she set it up she showed the Swiss people half of a Bank of Scotland fiver, serial number
AF 426469.
Her instructions were that access was to be given to any two people who showed up with both halves of that same note.’

Prim nodded. ‘That sounds right up my sister’s street. She was the only wee girl I’ve ever known to ask for an Action Man for Christmas. She was reading James Bond by the time she was ten. There was no way she was ever going to grow up to be anything but an actress.’

Quite a family, I thought, Mother Teresa and Madonna in the same brood. ‘Some part she’s playing this time, then,’ I said. ‘Guess what happened next? While Archer was trying to figure out what to do, Mrs Kane dropped in on MrsArcher and poured her heart out. She said that William had been keeping some odd hours. They’ve been married for twelve years, and she could set her watch by him. But all of a sudden he started working late at the office on pretty much a nightly basis, and having to go off and see clients at the weekend.

‘Like any sensible wife she started to go through his pockets on the quiet, and found the usual. Ticket stubs for two at UCI, credit-card slips for hotel bills in Inverness when he was meant to be in London and so on. She fronted him up but he just told her she was being silly. Then one day she got home from the shops and there was a “Dear Joan” note on the kitchen table, telling her that he had met this wonderful girl called Dawn, and sorry as he was, that was it.

‘To cut it short, Mrs Archer told Mr Archer and he had Kane into his office. He confronted him with the sale order and told him the story about the Swiss account. Kane admitted the lot. He told him that he had fallen truly, madly, deeply in love with your sister, and that he had come up with this daft scheme because he knew his wife would cut the nuts off him financially. His idea was to leave her to it and to shoot the craw with Dawn and the nine hundred thou.

‘Archer reckoned that he was completely off his trolley. He told him to bail out while he thought up Plan A, but to leave an address where he could be contacted, and a telephone number. He did. Yours.’

Prim puffed up with indignation. ‘The cow! I let her use this place while I was away on the basis that I didn’t want any bloke’s shaving tackle in my bathroom.’

‘That’s the least of your worries. Those sheets of yours are definitely a goner, and I don’t think the mattress’ll be too clever either.’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘Ugh! Thanks, Oz. I was trying not to think about that.’ Wrinkled or not, as noses go it was a right wee cracker. It set her brown eyes off a treat, and didn’t bully her perfect mouth either. I realised that I was beginning to feel myself again.

‘So what happened next?’ she asked. ‘What brought you here?’

‘Archer sent me. He called me as soon as Kane was out of the office. By that time he was shitting himself about the good name of the firm. You know what a village Edinburgh is. One whiff of the unsavoury and his client list would disappear like snow off a dyke in August. He’d decided that the only thing for it was to get that nearly million back into the client’s account and to spin him a line about crystallising capital gains for him, or some such stuff like that.

‘He told me to go and see Kane, to get both halves of the fiver from him, then to get my arse over to Switzerland with some close-mouthed helper, and bring back the lolly. He promised me a five per cent success fee. To spare you the mental arithmetic, that’s forty-five grand. For me, more than a year’s wages in one hit.

‘I phoned your number last night. A woman answered; I guessed it must have been Dawn. She put me on to Kane, I told him what the score was and he said “Yes sir, very good, sir. Come here at ten tomorrow morning, and I’ll give you the bank-note.” That’s us up to date.

‘I’ve never seen Kane, not even a photograph, but I’m assuming that’s him through there on your bed. Unless your sister’s lying under it in the same condition, then it looks as if you’re in for a family scandal.’ Her face twisted in pain, and I bit my tongue, to punish it for running away with itself, like always.

‘That’s your theory, Mr Detective, is it?’

‘Prim,’ I said, ‘I’m a private enquiry agent, not a detective. I interview witnesses in court cases for lawyers, and that sort of stuff. I was a policeman for six months, once upon a time, and I turned it in because I couldn’t stand the Clever Bastards in the CID, and the bullying sergeants in uniform who’d spent the best part of their service sitting on their brains.

‘But what I said there, I’m sorry, but it’s the first thing they’ll think. No, it’s the
only
thing they’ll think. If these blokes see any easy answer, they don’t spend a hell of a lot of time looking for a difficult option. They’re not trained to be clever, they’re trained to be logical.’

The old tongue was really running away with itself now. I suppose I could have stopped it, but I wasn’t prepared to bite it that hard.

‘Look Prim, I find it difficult to believe that anyone could do something like that next door, especially someone with a sister as ...’ I gulped, but I had run straight off the cliff, like Wiley E. Coyote, and all I could do was keep on running and hope that I didn’t hit the ground. ‘... as downright tasty as you, but the boys and girls from the Leith Polithe won’t dithmith the idea. And like it or not, we’re going to have to call them.’

She nodded. Her blonde hair was cut fairly short, and more than a bit untidy after her journey. Suddenly I found myself wanting to smooth it.

‘I know we are,’ she said, ‘but how about if we have a shooftie round to see if we can find that fiver before we do? Your clients would like that, wouldn’t they.’ Until that moment, I’d never grasped what ‘askance’ meant, but when I looked at Prim, I knew for sure. ‘Well,’ she said, picking up my expression. ‘If it’s there, all of it, it’ll mean that Dawn ... and we don’t know for sure she was here ... didn’t kill him for the money. Won’t it?’

I saw the sense in that. But I saw even more in the forty-five thousand good reasons I had for wanting to find the fiver too. ‘Aye, okay. Let’s look, at least.’