Dispossession (46 page)

I could see the difference, too: that it had gone up lifted,
awkward and effortful, and it was coming down freefall.

o0o

“Jesus, look out!” That was Deverill, his eyes a little
older or his mind a little slower, lagging half a second behind mine.

“It’s all right,” I said dully, though it wasn’t. “Not going
to land on us.”

Nor did it. Its erratic path into the air had taken it some
little way askance from us, so that it crashed into the stable yard, or else
into the stables. There was a high wall between it and us, I couldn’t see.

Appalling loss stung at my eyes, I couldn’t see.

Until he shook me, until Deverill’s big hand closed on my
shoulder and shook me hard, and I could vaguely see his other arm pointing.

Pointing up.

Then I dashed the back of my hand across my eyes, turned my
aching neck up again, and peered into the star-sharp black of the sky. And saw
a misshapen figure coming down, nice and slow and easy. Walking almost on the
wind, finding it solid enough.

I thought I was seeing awry, not slender graceful Luke could
look like that. Not until he was almost on the ground did I make out truly what
I was seeing, my long-time angel with my new love wrapped around him and
clinging tight.

Luke hates to fly, but when he must—no, when he
chooses
...

o0o

He touched down like a dancer, and opened his arms like a
man with a gift to present. Suzie broke free of him the instant that she could
and came weaving uncertainly towards me, her feet hesitant on solid ground.

I ran to her and wrapped my own arms around her, half
expecting to be rejected as Luke had been, no man’s touch welcome to her just now.
Her hands gripped my jacket, her face lifted and her eyes found mine. There
were tears on her cheeks, I saw, and I wanted to kiss them away. She opened her
mouth and whispered, “Sorry...”

I shook my head in denial, and simply kissed her
sweat-sodden hair instead of her wet cheeks as she was violently, stinkingly
sick all over me.

Not the formal rooms, these, downstairs in the big house.
Deverill had brought us to his own private suite to get clean, to get as
comfortable as we could manage, and then to explain.

There was no comfort in it, except the purely physical; but
for me at least, for the moment at least, that was enough. Suzie and I shared
the luxuries of his marbled bathroom with its gushing gold dolphin taps and fur
rugs on the floor, and took our time in doing it. I offered her the choice,
bath or shower, and she said, “Bath. And you, too.” So we shared that also, a
long soak in a deep tub and each of us soaping the other’s trembling body with
expensive unguents, me fussing over her cuts and bruises, she surprised to find
none on me: “I thought they were giving you a bad time, something he said, I
was so afraid for you...”

I didn’t tell her about Luke’s healing, hurting hands. Not
then, it wasn’t the time. I didn’t say anything, and she didn’t pursue it. She
only nestled close into my lap, spilling water all over the floor; I held her
tight, all bones and skin she seemed, all nerves and terror too late allayed. I
nuzzled dripping black hair and ears and eyes and cheeks, still tasting of
Suzie despite the perfumed cleansers, and wouldn’t let her go until she’d at
least stopped crying and those bones lay still within that battered skin.

At last we moved, we climbed out of the bath and patted each
other dry with soft towels. Then I searched the cabinets for medical supplies,
plasters and antiseptic, though she wouldn’t let me use much of what I found.
“I’m not going out there smelling of TCP like a kid,” she said, fending me off.

“Witch-hazel?”

“Not that, either. Stuff stinks. I smell nice,” sniffing at
her wrist with the first, faintest touch of a smile.

“I just don’t want you dying of blood-poisoning, that’s
all.”

“I won’t. Uncle Han wouldn’t let me.”

She let me plaster the worst of her cuts, but no more than
that. We swathed ourselves then in a couple of heavy bathrobes; combed each
other’s hair with delaying, dallying fingers; finally touched lips in something
more sigh than kiss, only an exchange of air, and nodded an unspoken
acceptance. She took my hand, I unbolted the door, and we went out to Deverill.

He was waiting in a sitting-room that had probably been
furnished by Mrs Tuck before she left him: slightly faded, slightly chintzy, a
motherly kind of room that looked oddly cheap for such an imposing house.
Looked cheap to me, at least, until I’d walked barefoot across the carpet and
sat down on one of the sofas, felt its fabric under my palm and its nurturing
cushions engulf me. Quality like that, comfort like that comes expensive.

What wasn’t comfortable was Deverill’s gaze, where he sat in
a chair by the fireplace. Bleak and grey he looked, grey through to the bone of
him. Miracles take people like that, sometimes; but he must also have been busy
while we bathed, arranging for his men to clear up the mess in his stable yard.
His ex-wife, the mess. And not understanding anything that had happened here
today, knowing neither of the stories, knowing only that Dean was dead and Mrs
Tuck was dead and that neither death was the least bit natural. Small wonder if
he looked zomboid and unbalanced.

He was at least ready to sit and listen. That was something.
Actually, he looked like he never wanted to move again; drained, he looked, of
more than human kindness. I picked a sofa and sat myself, was surprised by
comfort and thought I understood him, thought I shared the feeling. Then I
heard distant sounds of a heavy motor revving, chains clashing and men calling:
noises in the stable yard, they were. And Suzie dropped down into my lap and
nestled her still-damp head under my chin, curling up ridiculously small for a
grown-up so that I could contain all of her within the circle of my arms; and I
thought suddenly that no, I didn’t share Deverill’s feelings at all, probably
couldn’t come close to understanding.

To be honest, though, I didn’t particularly feel like
trying. A little sympathy I could manage, much tempered by my earlier knowledge
of him, something at least of what he had done to other people. Empathy, not.
Too much to ask.

Mostly, I wanted to be home. Didn’t at all want to move: me,
sofa, Suzie, bathrobes, that much was fine. They were just in the wrong place,
that was all. I wanted the flat around us, and no Deverill.

So. Soonest begun, soonest over.

“You paid me to find out who had set up Lindsey Nolan,” I
said.

“I paid you a lot.”

“Yes. That was part of it, I’ll come to the money. Thing
was, I already knew; only that I couldn’t tell you, because you’d have told it
straight to Mrs Tuck, and then Nolan and I both were in the shit.”

“Why so?”

“We’d both be dead by now. Nolan’s lucky, actually, that he
isn’t yet. She probably wasn’t sure of him, is all. Suspicious, but not sure.
Maybe she was hoping that I really would turn up some third party with their
screws into him, to prove all her suspicions false. I don’t know that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No. I’m sorry, I’m not telling this well. I’m tired, and I
don’t want to be here. From the top, then: Lindsey Nolan wasn’t set up. Not by
anyone else,” as he shifted irritatedly in his chair, ready to deny me. “He set
himself up.”

“What?”

“He panicked, I think,” I said. “But he panicked in a smart
way. What happened, he found out the truth about Scimitar Securities, or some
of it at least—went sneaking into their computer files, most likely, snooped
through their accounts and put the numbers together—and he got scared. If Mrs
Tuck ever found out how much he knew, he was a dead man. Also I think he’s a
moral man, at least by his own lights. He’ll have wanted to stop her, if he
could find a way to do it safely. So he sets up a deliberately clumsy scam,
tips the police off and does a runner to Spain. Where he makes sure the
guardia
pick him up, and what do you know? He’s
nice and snug in a Spanish jail for a few months, fighting extradition. One
thing about jails, they’re designed to be hard places to get into. It’s not
ultimately safe, not for ever; but for the moment it makes a pretty good hole
to hide in. And he gets visits from Scotland Yard, very public, very legit. I
don’t think they’re only talking about a defrauded charity. I think he probably
left plenty of evidence behind him, that he was running that scam in
self-defence and deliberately turned himself in. I don’t suppose it’ll even
come to trial, in the end. Likely they’re negotiating about that at the moment,
and meanwhile he’s just been feeding them fragments of what he knows, holding
the rest back till he’s sure of his own position, that’ll be why the police
haven’t busted the whole operation yet—”

“Wait a minute.” Deverill held his hand up, physically to
stop me. “Wait a minute. Why would they bust Dorothy’s operation, what are you
talking
about? What does Lindsey know about her,
that I don’t?”
Nothing
, his voice was
saying; and
whatever she’s done, I’ve done worse,
and Lindsey knows all about that and he’s never tried to bust me. He’s not a
moral man, he’s as bent as a three-bob bit...

“I can’t say for certain, you’ll have to ask him; but what I
know about for sure is kidnap, murder, trafficking in drugs and trafficking in
flesh,” working them off on my fingers one by one, with just a faint grunt from
Suzie at losing even that much contact with me. “Specifically, organising sex
rings for the abuse of children and then killing the kids after. Anything with
the word ‘traffic’ in it, I suppose, that was their speciality: moving things
about, whether it was people or other goods. Well, you know about that, they
supplied your work-crews, didn’t they?”

His eyebrows twitched an acknowledgement, though he was far
too experienced a hand to admit it directly. Instead, “Drugs?” he said.

“Yes. I don’t know the details; ask Lindsey Nolan. That
would have been the most profitable, I’d guess, so it’s most likely what he
spotted on the account sheets. It’s hard to cover up that much laundry.
Especially from a specialist.”

“I hate drugs,” he said, and his face shifted. Odd, to see
that in a man so professionally hard, ordinarily so controlled. “My first wife
died from an overdose, did you know?”

No. First time around, probably I had known; my research
would have thrown that up. But I hadn’t bothered to make a note of it,
discipline slipping by then, so no, I hadn’t known this time until he told me.
Made sense, though. That was when Mrs Tuck had wanted to stop answering
questions, as soon as I mentioned drugs. Those would be Vernon’s scruples, and
a problem to her if he found out. “Well, your second wife dealt in the stuff,”
I said, deliberately brutal. “She dealt in anything she could get her hands on,
so long as it was illegal.”

“Why? Why would she need to do that? If it was money she
wanted, I’d have given her more. I
offered
her more, but she wouldn’t take it...”

“It wasn’t money,” I told him wearily. “I think it was the
competition. Now she wasn’t partnering you any more she needed to challenge you
instead, to take you on and beat you at your own game. She couldn’t hope to
compete on money terms, you’d been at it twenty years longer and you had an
empire already; all she could do about that was take half of it in settlement,
and that would have been no victory at all. So she did some hard thinking, and
found another way. She took just one company from you, and set out to be a
better villain than you are, every which way she could. You’re a bad man, Mr
Deverill, but your ex-wife was a hell of a lot worse.”

He grunted, was silent for a time, absorbing the news. Then,
“You’re not so pure yourself. You took a lot of money from me, lad.”

“Camouflage,” I said. “Misdirection. All the information
that came to you, went to her. I couldn’t let her think I was onto her, so I
let her think I was ripping you off instead. Stopped you mounting your own
investigation, stopped you going to Spain yourself to talk to Nolan...”

“You stopped me. Told me to keep away.”

“That’s what I mean. Very useful to her, that would have
been. I don’t suppose he’d have talked to your emissaries”—and a shake of
Deverill’s head confirmed that—“but he might just have talked to you. She’d
have been concerned. Besides,” coming back to the money and being scrupulously
honest with him now, as I couldn’t have been before, “I’d ruined my career for
this. Whether I was doing it for your sake or not, it all came back to you in
the end. I think it probably seemed only fair to me, that you should put a
little capital into my future. I wanted it to cost you something, I think, and
money was all I could invoice you for.”

Not all he’d paid, though, not now. His face reminded me of
that; my turn to fall quiet.

Then, “So—tonight, then,” he said slowly. “That—that
conjuring trick, that
man
,” though there
was a suppressed shiver in his voice that said he knew neither of those labels
fitted, “what was going down there?”

Mostly it was his ex-wife going down, I thought madly, in
her Portakabin. But, “Different story,” I said. “Just a coincidence they both
came together tonight. Luke’s a road protestor, he’s big into trees. Not big
into people. That girl you were so vicious with, last time I was here? He
killed her, for bulldozing trees at Leavenhall. Then he killed Dean, for making
her do it. I guess someone told him it was all Mrs Tuck’s idea, so he killed
her too.”

“Actually, it was my idea,” he said; and his face said
don’t tell Luke
, and I thought we had permanent
protection there, against any retribution Deverill might decide to take from
us.

There was a phone on a table by the sofa. I reached out an
arm, picked up the receiver and dialled. When a known, husky voice answered at
the third ring, I said, “Dulcie? Send someone to rescue us, there’s a pet.”