Killer in the Shade (17 page)

Micky took his eyes from the rear-view mirror and glanced down and back across his left shoulder to the bags pushed down on the Viva's floor. He allowed his glance to linger on the brown-paper carrier bag
on the back seat. He knew what was wrapped in newspaper in the carrier. He should. He had removed the jewels from three places that had been chosen by the man who was suffering an acute headache.

Micky Hanlon brought his gaze back to the road in front of the Viva. He too was indulging in very personal thoughts that centred on the possibility of murder making him a man who didn't have to worry about the future.

Not if he could make that redhead see things his way, and he thought he could. He knew for a fact that she didn't give a damn about her husband, not the way a dutiful wife should.

Or even a dutiful woman who wasn't a wife but liked a man's company at night.

Micky smiled at that thought. It was even more pleasing than thoughts about violent persuasion and big wads of currency to stuff in his pockets. He had only seen her once. That was when she was with her husband and that Vic Clayson character Humph
was determined to chill because he had a grudge against the bastard. Jackson Rennie said it was something about Clayson shopping him.

Well, that could make a man want to kill. He could understand that. Though it was a waste of time being too damned clever about it, like getting into that place Holly Lawn and unlocking a cabinet of fancy knives, sticking one in Clayson's back, and then putting the key of the locked cabinet in a dead man's pocket, just so the police could find the fingerprint of another dead man.

Micky Hanlon was a realist. To him a man had to be sick in the head to pull a caper like that. Either that or damned sure of himself.

He cast a side-glance at the man with eyes closed under the down-drawn peak of his cap, to avoid the sunlight hitting them through the windscreen.

Maybe a man could be both sick in the head and sure of himself. That was something to think about, something that created a real problem for a man who had to solve it if he wanted to get anywhere
far enough away to feel comfortable at having made the effort. Thought of the redhead came back to him.

Humph had pointed out Clayson and told him that he planned to repay a long-owing debt and at the same time make monkeys out of the police, but he hadn't really been listening. He had been staring at the redhead, and then she had looked up over Clayson's shoulder and their eyes had met and held. Not for long, but then time didn't matter. What they had said to each other had been instantaneous. Her husband had looked up and she had tried to act resentful of a man staring across the floor of a lounge bar at her, but he knew that was only for the husband's benefit.

What he had said to her in that swift silent glance was precisely what she had said to him. Moreover, it hadn't been said in words. Words couldn't express what both had known. It was like seeing death and realizing in that instant that a whole life had ended with that moment, which was fixed in time before the person who had died was born.

Micky Hanlon dragged his left wrist across his mouth after running his tongue over dry lips. He didn't want to think this kind of thoughts. They didn't make a man comfortable. But then he had to think them because that was what thinking about the redhead did to him, started his mind wandering in directions where she was an influence.

Like killing Humph when the time came. That meant Cecil Weddon had to go, but then he knew she wouldn't worry about that. She would be an accommodating woman when she was on the receiving end of what she desired. He knew that about her although he had not spoken a word to her.

What puzzled him and created an unease he refused to admit could grow to acute discomfort was his ignorance of what had put that sheen in her eyes that was more eloquent than spoken words. It amounted to unqualified invitation.

He knew damned well what had made him look at her the way he had. That was simple enough to understand. So simple it made laughter in the deeper silences
of his being, so that he felt keyed up as though a drug had been pumped into his veins.

‘I'll take a couple of my pills, Micky.'

The quiet words spoken by the man he had thought asleep were so totally unexpected, dragging his mind back to the immediate present, that he gasped, aware that he had been holding his breath for no good reason except that he was excited.

‘Sure, Humph. Want me to pull up?'

‘Off the road, Micky. I'd best not be seen swallowing them.'

He wanted to ask who the hell would see him tossing a couple of white pellets in the back of his mouth, but he kept silent and nodded. Peel didn't look like boss man, but then it wasn't his looks that gave him his real inches, but his head and the way he used it.

He was the one man who thought of everything. Micky Hanlon was happy to go along with that. For the first time in his short life as a thoroughgoing thug and criminal he had teamed up with someone who had all the answers because he took
the trouble to think everything right through. So Humphrey Peel planned and other men put those plans into execution under his supervision. That was fine by Micky Hanlon. He was no big brain and knew it. The only thing he wanted to plan was when to get rid of Peel.

That would be when he had his hands on the boodle.

Peel was already running out on a string of others who had been recruited to operate with him, then disperse until the next call came.

Decentralization, he had called it. Sometimes he talked like a bloody shop steward. But that was all right, too, as long as his brain went on with its constructive planning. Like now, with a boat that the redhead's brother had stashed away somewhere on Selsey's eastern shore of Chichester Harbour. Peel hadn't thrown a panic when the news of the power workers' strike ending had come over the radio.

He already knew of the car, the stolen Jag, kept in a lock-up, of the green
van with the Devon number-plates, and how he would grab the old notes being returned to London from West Country bank branches. He could switch plans like a computer operator pressing a button.

That's what made him a man to be kept alive until it was all over.

‘This do you?' Micky's foot was on the brake pedal, his left hand was pointing to a grass verge.

‘Better farther up, where the trees are.'

Perfection, rumbled Micky complainingly to himself. Always wanting perfection. And then deep in those silent areas of his Celtic darkness there was again laughter, because that was what he admired in the man, and depended on to the limit — his insistence on perfection. Leaving nothing to chance unless he had calculated that chance as totally in his own favour.

It was a system that couldn't be beaten.

Who the hell else would leave a supposedly dead man's fingerprints for the police to find, so they wouldn't know what the hell they were up against?

He had mistrusted that joke, but now
he was finding in it a perverted pleasure. After all, he was going to do some turning of the tables himself.

When it suited him, of course.

Only then.

Micky felt suddenly very good. The sun had an extra brightness. He was on his way out from cop trouble for ever, and it was a pleasant feeling, like going on a new sort of holiday, and that was what it was — a new kind of holiday. One that would last the rest of his life.

The bubbling laughter came back, surging through his deep silences until he felt awakened in a way he never had before. It was a wonderful feeling. It made him want to sing.

Instead, he whistled.

‘Shut up,' said the man beside him. ‘Keep your mind on your driving. No time to relax now, Micky. Just do what I say. Under those trees, and nose in. You can never be too careful. Never.'

Micky Hanlon stopped whistling, concentrated on a neat turn into the trees, flasher winking like mad although
the road was clear of traffic in either direction.

‘I'll take a leak first,' Peel said. ‘You coming?'

Micky nodded. ‘Might as well,' he said, as though he had a mind to do the other a favour.

And so he was, but he didn't know it. Nor was there any expression on Peel's face to suggest he was aware of the fact. But then it was almost the face of a stranger without the dark whiskers that had been removed from it.

They went into the trees, and Micky unzipped his flies. He turned to say something because he always felt constrained to talk when relieving himself in company. It was something the other man had noted and remembered.

But he didn't say it. He didn't have time. In the split second awareness raged over and through him, helping to paralyse his nerve centres, the gun in Peel's hand coughed lethally through its six inches of metal silencer. The bullet tore into Micky Hanlon's brain through a suddenly red ragged hole over his right eye.

Peel left him where he fell, with his flies unzipped, looking like a new-style obscene clown in a very modern version of the
commedia dell'arte
.

He pocketed the gun with the bulging snout, removed from the pockets of the man he had just murdered his money and few possessions, including sheath-knife, cigarettes and lighter, and the map.

He stood for a short while squinting with his weak eyes at the map. Behind the thicket of young trees the sunglare was kept to a green gloom and in the shade his headache was no more than a troublesome warmth which he knew he had to cool quickly.

He took out the bottle of white pellets, tipped a couple into his hand and swallowed them.

His eyes were squeezed almost shut when he returned to the beige Viva and climbed into the driver's seat. Before he meshed the gears he put the map beside him on the passenger's seat.

On the outskirts of Chichester he pulled on to the forecourt of a petrol station and ordered four gallons. While the attendant
was serving him he sat and listened idly to a radio chattering in the glass-enclosed office. An announcer was saying, ‘Since the arrest yesterday of Brian Christopher Haswell, long sought by the police, and a coloured companion who was with him there has been no further news of — '

A heavily laden lorry drove by, drowning the announcer's words. The attendant appeared at the open window beside a man slumped against the back of his seat.

‘Anything wrong, sir? You feeling all right?'

A couple of pound notes were pushed at him.

‘Just something I ate last night. Nothing really. I'll be all right in a minute.'

The attendant walked away to get change.

The announcer was saying, ‘A report just received from Cairo confirms that Mr Sadat will — '

But Humphrey Peel wasn't listening. He had something else to listen to. A sound that was locked in his head.

‘You don't scare me, Whitey, and I ain't squealing to the pigs. They can do their own squealing.'

Jackson Rennie wasn't a big man, but he tried to talk big. He wanted to make the big sound because it was reassuring, and he needed reassurance. Very badly — and fast.

Somehow the grin on Frank Drury's face made him more scared than the angry contempt on the square features of big Bill Hazard.

‘Oh, I can scare you, Rennie. Scare you so that you'll wither up inside just like a zombie's gone to work on you, and, come to think of it, that's just about what will happen if you don't keep a civil tongue and let it tell the truth to a lot of questions to which I want answers. You know what I mean?'

Drury's smile seemed to be growing in confidence, like the man was sitting
in this game with a whole stack of aces up his sleeve. Jackson Rennie showed his chalk-white teeth that belied the rot in his gums that made women turn their heads unless he chewed goddamn mint pellets all the time.

‘I don't talk sweet to the fuzz, mister.'

‘No?' Drury leaned across the desk in his room at Scotland Yard, scanning the challenging black face opposite as though anxious to decide what kept it in one piece. ‘You will. Oh, you will.'

‘You threatening me, pig?'

Bill Hazard's shoes squeaked as he went up on his toes and came down again. Both his ham-sized fists were knotted. The seated coloured man frowned. He was only getting through to the wrong man. That wasn't good.

‘I asked if you were threatening me, pig?'

Drury laughed at him. He knew what laughter would do to Rennie, how it would churn inside him until the bitter flavour almost made him choke on his own bile.

‘I don't have to threaten you, Rennie,
to get you to talk. In fact, you'll spill your guts. But first I want you to know what you're going to do. You'll squeal louder than any pig I've heard. Hang on to that.'

He laughed again, happy that the coloured man was hating him with his eyes. Rennie became sullen, held back the next abusive words, and grew suddenly cautious. There was something here he didn't reach and that was bad, too.

‘Give me a reason, man.'

‘I'll give you two,' Drury said magnanimously. ‘First, an LP record with your prints, found in a house where a murder was set up. Think about it.'

The white teeth vanished in the dark, evil-smelling cavern of a mouth. Jackson Rennie didn't have to think about it. He remembered the redhead and her bold eyes and his stupid promise to lend her the calypsos, even though he knew she didn't want the records, but was using him to needle that bank manager, her husband.

‘I love that bongo beat,' she had lied, hating him for his colour. That had been
no lie. It was in her eyes, mixed in with the rest of it.

‘That don't prove a thing,' he retorted. ‘Not a thing.'

‘Think about it,' Drury invited for the second time.

Jackson Rennie sat like an image carved from ebony and grotesquely clothed in raiment that didn't fit him or suit him because it was made by a world that was not his, a world he despised without knowing why, though he could always find a spur-of-the-moment reason.