Eoin Miller 02 - Old Gold (10 page)

“How about Posada, are you still liking it there?”

“It’s home, yes.”

The awkward silence settled back over us. I didn’t want to be here, I really didn’t want to be here, and I didn’t think she really wanted me here either. But there had to be a reason she’d asked.

“How are your parents doing?”

It was my turn to crack, point for Laura.

1–1.

“Fine,” she said.

“They’re probably busy showing off pictures of you and telling everyone how well you’re doing. Nice office, by the way.”

She blushed, and I tried not to smile.

2–1.

“Laura, why did you want to see me? It can’t be because you miss me.”

“No, I—” The silence halfway through a sentence is always familiar to failed couples. It gets to be like an old friend after a while.

“It’s just…I know you’re looking into the Perry case for Becker—”

“He thinks you don’t know about that.”

“I know, and I need to keep it that way. Listen, between us, this needs to go away quietly, and I can’t let the department get involved.”

“I still don’t get why this is all so secret.”

“Well, for Perry, this would be the end of him. Either his boy’s dead, god forbid, or he’s run away. Either of those would be too much damage to a political career.”

“And for you? Why do you want it quiet?”

She paused and then shrugged a little bit.

“Perry is going to have a big say in who gets this chair permanently. A lot of the senior guys have been brown-nosing like you wouldn’t believe. I can’t be seen to get involved, one way or another.”

“So this is all just about careers then, really.”

“Don’t be like that,” she said. “I’m glad you’re doing it. I think it’s what you need.”

“What I need? I’m not a charity case.”

“Look, I’m not—I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that this seems safer than—”

“What,” I said wearily.

“Than what we both know you’ve been doing since you left.”

“Look, I don’t know what you’ve been told or who you’ve been talking to, but—”

“Eoin, I didn’t ask you in here to argue about this. I know who you’ve been working for, and I’m glad you’re giving something else a try. I think it’s a good thing you’re getting some distance from the brothers.”

There was a look that passed between us as she said that, something I almost didn’t catch in the movement of her eyes. It hung between us for a moment.

“Are you warning me off the Mann brothers?”

“I’m not warning you off anything.”

“Laura, are you planning something? Is the department going to move in on their operation?”

“Don’t be silly. There’s no way we could get permission on something like that.”

“Well, a big collar like that, it might get you this job permanently. It would make a good case anyway.”

“Don’t be silly. We both know I’m too young and too female to get the promotion this time around.”

I nodded. “But filling in like this will be earning you the points you need for next time, when you’re older and less female.” I counted that as a score to me.

3–1.

“And really, what you’re asking me to do with Perry is do the right thing by you. You want credit if it goes well, and you want it buried if it goes bad, right?”

There it was again, and this time there was no missing it, the look passing between us. A warning. I realized it was best to take it and not to push.

“Well, it’s been fun,” she said, reaching for her phone. “I’ve got appointments. See you soon, Eoin.”

Just like that she was dismissing me from her office, and I was getting up to leave. How is it that we let women have that power? Maybe it’s a mother thing, I don’t know, or maybe they have some hidden abilities. All I know is that most women can make any man feel like a naughty child with one turn of phrase.

That’s worth a hat trick, right there.

4–3 to Laura Miller
.

I felt sheepish.

I decided the best way to get back at her was to visit our marital home and kick the crap out of something she’d liked. That wasn’t my first order of business, though. The main point of the trip was to go to pick up my savings. I wasn’t raised to trust banks. I was taught to have a roll of cash nearby and a packed suitcase just in case. Even during my marriage, I’d had a bag packed and hidden away.

As I pulled my car onto the drive and looked at my house, my breath caught in my throat.

The door was open.

And Bobby was sitting on the step, waving at me.

“They broke in, Eoin.”

“Who? Who broke in?”

“I don’t know who it was. They were gone when I got here.”

“When was this?”

“Last night, when I came looking for you.”

“Wait, hang on, go over it for me.”

I was in the house now, checking the hallway. I don’t know what I was expecting to see.

“I was looking for you last night—”

“What time was this?”

“No, it wasn’t that late, would have been about nine, maybe half past. So I was walking past, and I saw the door open, just a little, not wide open like it is now.”

The kitchen had been trashed; the fittings had been torn off the wall, and the floor was littered with smashed plates. The fridge was unplugged and pulled away from the wall. The sink was full of food and milk, the contents of the fridge all removed from their wrappings and tipped out. My collection of herbs and spices was scattered across the floor, the jars stomped on and smashed. The back door, which opened off the kitchen, was also wide open.

Someone had done a very thorough job of looking for something. The advantage they had over me was that they knew what they were looking for. Nobody knew about my savings, not even Laura, so it had to be about Mary.

“So what did you do?” I was in shock over the mess. At least I had Bobby to tell me a few details.

“Well, I was scared, to be honest,” Bobby said. “I didn’t know who’d done it or if they were still here. So I stood in the doorway for probably ten minutes.”

“That happens a lot in this situation,” I said. Over the years in the force I’d noticed that people who weren’t used to seeing real crime always seemed shocked when they came face-to-face with it.

“So then I came in and started looking round,” he said. “I saw what they’d done to the kitchen and went upstairs to take a look.”

“So whoever it was had left by then, by half nine?”

“No. I thought they had, but they must have still been in the house. See, remember I said I looked in the kitchen first?”

I nodded.

“Well, the back door was closed. When I came back down from upstairs, the back door was open. So they had
still been in the house when I first came in. I bet they stood and watched me standing in the doorway for ten minutes, staring off into space like a moron.”

I didn’t have any problem picturing that image.

“So they must have done upstairs first, then been doing the kitchen or the living room when you showed up?”

I checked the living room; it was a mess, but not as much as the kitchen. Shelves had been pulled away from the wall; the carpet had clearly been pulled up because it lay loose under my feet. I left Bobby on the sofa while I checked upstairs. The bathroom was a disaster site. The bath was cracked; there was water all round the toilet. In the bedroom, the bed had been turned over, the mattress slashed. A section of wall, where the wallpaper had been bubbled and loose, had been punched through to reveal the bad plastering job covering an old fireplace.

What the hell had they been looking for?

One thing I hoped they hadn’t found was my savings. If you’re ever going to hide money, never put it under a loose floorboard. Loose floorboards are loose. They make noise, they move, anyone seriously doing over a house will find them. I found the flat-headed screwdriver I kept in my bedside drawer. I knelt to the skirting board, stuck so firmly to the wall that it was about the only thing in the room the searchers hadn’t moved. I worked the head of the screwdriver into the gap between the board and the wall, a gap that was only there if you knew what you were looking for. It took me a few minutes to pry the board loose. The wood glue and nails I’d used to stick it back to the wall in the first place wanted to fight. I put the screwdriver in my coat pocket and pulled the wood loose. As I pulled the roll of money out of the cavity, I heard a cough at my shoulder—Bobby standing over me.

“What you got, Eoin?”

How long he’d been there I had no idea. I’d played football with him a couple of times, and though you had to shout constant instructions at him, he moved like greased lightning. He’d make a great ninja.

“Just my cash, Bobby. How long you been there?”

“Oh, not long. I heard noises and thought, I don’t know, it goes through my mind maybe the people were still here or something. Maybe you needed help.”

“So what did you do next? After you found out they’d just left the house when you got here?”

“Well, I waited for you. You’re not easy to get hold of at the moment. You haven’t got a mobile. Even my granny has got a mobile, but not you.”

When I’d quit my job I’d found that I didn’t want to be reachable. It had been easy enough to lose my mobile, and then I kept finding excuses not to replace it.

“So you just waited for me?”

“Yes.”

“You waited here all night and all morning for me?”

“Yes.”

“But, Bobby, you knew where I was. You gave me the keys to one of the spare flats, remember?”

It took a moment, but a slow grin spread across his face.

“Oh yeah.” He shook his head. “I did.”

I slipped a couple of notes off my roll and handed them to him. He’d earned it. I pulled off a few more notes and handed them to him too.

“You could do a few things for me, if you’re available?”

He took the money and nodded.

“OK, first things first, I’m going to need this place cleaned up. You could get some supplies from town and get this place fixed up.”

“Sure, sounds good.”

“Great. Thanks, Bobby. The other thing I need is a mobile. Get me a decent one. No contract, though.”

Bobby nodded and took the hint, turning to leave.

“One other thing,” I shouted after him. “Why were you looking for me?”

He turned back and stared at me for a moment. As usual, it took a little while for the information to run around the inside of his brain.

“Jellyfish. I haven’t been able to find him. Some guys reckon he’s over in Walsall, maybe.”

Bobby waved and left. I heard him walk down the stairs and shut the front door after himself, then the sound of mail hitting the floor.

I walked downstairs to find the mail from the past few days in a pile on the floor. It must have been pushed up against the wall, hidden by the open door. It looked like the usual collection of reminders, bills, and junk. There were two more from Dr. Guthrie. I added them to the pile marked with his return address that I kept ignoring. Most of the mail was the usual bland white envelopes. One envelope caught my eye, though, a brown A5. It didn’t have a postmark or an address written on it.

It had been hand delivered.

I opened it and tipped the contents out onto the floor.

Photographs. Black-and-white, high-quality photographs. The first two showed Mary and me as we walked home, then the moment she opened the front door with my key. The third showed Mary’s body in the state I had found it, wrapped in my bedsheets. There was a fourth, and that was the one that made my blood run cold.

It was a close up; it showed me leaning over the body.

From the angle, it looked like it had been taken by someone standing in the doorway to my spare room. Someone who had still been in the house when I found the body.

The message was clear. The killer could fuck me over anytime he chose. And he’d torn my house apart looking for something. I should probably have reacted in fear. After all, I’d panicked and run away like a git once already this week. Instead I did something that even I didn’t expect.

I laughed.

Out loud.

I’d been wasting my time looking for the killer. I’d been making a lot of noise and leaving a trail. But the whole time, the killer was looking for me, or at least for my stuff. He thought I had what he wanted. Because whatever Mary had stolen from him was still missing. He didn’t have it, and it seemed like he thought I did.

I didn’t need to find the Polish dealer.

I needed to find whatever he was looking for.

And I needed to find it before he framed me for murder.