The Take (29 page)

Beavis tried to throw up again. Finally, he sat back against the side of the bath. Faraday could hear the steady drip-drip of water into the cake tin next door.

‘Can you believe any of that?’ He shook his head. ‘Bastard.’

‘Who?’

‘Fucking Lee Kennedy. Do you know how old that man is? Twenty-eight, and he does that kind of stuff with my Shel.’ He reached for a flannel and wiped his mouth. ‘Bastard.’

‘Donald Duck?’ Dawn queried.

Beavis hadn’t heard her. His voice was almost a whisper.

‘I wouldn’t have believed it,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t. I’ll be honest with you. She’s never been an angel. But that …’ He shook his head. ‘Fucking outrageous.’

Dawn squatted beside him. She wanted to know about the mask. About the three little excursions, out into the night. About the three times Beavis had dropped his drawers and given the women a good look. He stared at her, blinking, trying to follow the logic. At last, he got there.

‘Me, love? You think I did that?’

‘I do.’

‘Them Donald Duck jobs?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’ He wiped his mouth again, this time with the back of his hand. ‘Not me. Wrong bloke.’

‘Who, then? Who was Donald Duck?’

Faraday would remember the silence for years to come. The drumming of the rain on the roof overhead. The drip-drip-drip from next door. And the moment when Beavis finally arrived at some kind of decision, the floorboard creaking beneath him as he staggered to his feet. When he came back, he was carrying a battered old sports bag.

‘Inside, love,’ he said.

Like a retriever, he dropped the bag at Dawn’s feet. Dawn looked at Faraday, who shook his head.

‘You.’ Dawn glanced across at Beavis. ‘You do it.’

Beavis pulled the bag open. The mask was on top, Donald Duck, the manic cartoon smile leering up at them. Underneath, the rumpled black of a tracksuit.

‘There’s trainers and gloves in there as well,’ he said. ‘You want to see them?’

Faraday shook his head, reaching out to stop him as he prepared to rummage through the hold-all.

‘Leave it,’ Faraday said. ‘We’ll need to bag this for forensic.’

Dawn’s eyes hadn’t left Beavis’s face.

‘So who does it all belong to?’ she said.

Faraday braced himself for another silence, more rain, but Beavis hesitated for less than a second.

‘Lee’s,’ he said stonily. ‘This is his gear. He asked me to look after it for him. He wanted me to do it first off, but I wouldn’t so he did it himself.’

‘Did what?’

‘Wore that.’ He nodded at the mask.

‘
Lee
did the Donald Duck jobs?’

‘Yeah. To screw Addison.’

‘And he wore that stuff?’

‘Yeah.’

Dawn was staring down at the contents of the sports bag. Faraday was right, she thought. The smell of roll-ups would have come from here, this house, but the DNA would be Kennedy’s. On the tracksuit. In the trainers. Everywhere. She looked up at Beavis again, just to make sure she had it right, but he was miles away.

‘Should have worked it out for myself, shouldn’t I?’ he muttered. ‘He’d wave it at any fucking woman. Even Shel.’

*

In Jersey, the weather had got worse.

‘Where do you sleep?’

‘Through there.’

Hennessey’s head jerked towards the bow. Twice already he’d complained about the tightness of the handcuffs, but Winter had ignored him.

‘Go on, then.’ Winter gave him a push.

Hennessey shot him one last despairing glance. He’d offered money, a lot of money, for Winter to leave him alone. He’d got out his cheque book and promised a handsome dip into offshore funds, here in Jersey, and when Winter had shaken his head he’d even owned up to five thousand in cash on the boat, his for the taking, but Winter had just laughed. There were some things that money couldn’t buy, he’d said. And this, the sweetest settling of accounts, was one of them.

Hennessey was manoeuvring himself sideways down a flight of four steps. Beyond the bulk of his body, Winter glimpsed a heart-shaped bed draped in a shiny mauve coverlet. Yuk.

Winter told Hennessey to strip.

‘I can’t.’ He gestured helplessly at his cuffed hands.

‘Do it,’ Winter said, ‘or I’ll do it for you.’

With infinite slowness, Hennessey managed to rid himself of his brogues. The corduroy trousers came off next.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘The top’s impossible.’

‘It doesn’t matter about the top.’

‘What?’ Hennessey’s face was the colour of putty. He held out his cuffed hands. ‘There. See that?’

Fresh blood had appeared through the crêpe of the bandage on his wrist. The fact that Winter plainly didn’t care deepened the alarm on Hennessey’s face.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Take your pants off.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said, take your pants off. Then lie down on the bed.’

Winter had already looped the ends of two lengths of rope he’d picked up from Joannie’s potting shed.

Hennessey hadn’t moved.

‘I meant it about the money,’ he tried again.

‘Fuck the money. I know where that money came from. I know how you earned that money. That’s the last thing I’d want, believe me.’

‘Are you a relative?’

‘Yes, in a way.’

‘Should I know your name?’

‘No.’ Winter nodded at his belly. ‘Get them off.’

Hennessey pulled down his underpants and stepped out of them. His eyes never once left Winter’s face.

‘You meant it about the bed?’

‘Yes. Just do it. Before I get fucking annoyed with you.’

Hennessey crawled onto the bed and lay face down.

‘Turn over.’ Nothing happened. ‘I said, turn over.’

Winter lashed out with the rope, scoring an angry scarlet weal across Hennessey’s buttocks. He did it again, and then a third time, until it occurred to him that Hennessey was crying, his huge white fleshy torso shaken by uncontrollable sobs.

Finally, Hennessey rolled over. His glasses had become dislodged, giving his face a strange, skewed look. Never had Winter seen anyone so vulnerable, so pathetic. Quickly, he unlocked the handcuffs and pulled Hennessey’s arms back over his head. With the cuffs on again, Hennessey’s wrists were now anchored to the brass rail that ran along the top of the bedhead. Back at the foot of the bed, Winter was about to remove the surgeon’s socks when he had second thoughts. He knew exactly the tableau he wanted to create, the effect he wanted it to have, and he realised that socks, especially red socks like these, would help. Immeasurably.

The loops at the end of the lengths of rope he slipped over each of Hennessey’s ankles. Winter pulled them tight, then looked for anchor points in the master bedroom to tie them off. Grab handles on both walls were perfect. Winter tightened each of the ropes until Hennessey’s legs were scissored open. In the en suite closet, he found a big roll of Elastoplast which he used to tape Hennessey’s mouth. On the shelf above, from a largish bag marked
SURGICAL
, he took a scalpel, a pair of metal dilators, a pair of forceps and – a late thought – a pair of rubber gloves. Back in the master bedroom, he laid them carefully on the pillow beside Hennessey’s head.

The surgeon watched his every movement, plainly terrified. Winter looked down at him, and winked.

Back up in the saloon, still gloved, Winter began his search. He was as methodical as he’d ever been – every drawer, every cupboard, every crevice, every last inch of space Hennessey might have used as a hidey-hole – and when, after an hour, he’d turned up nothing, he went through exactly the same procedure in the guest bedroom and the little galley.

Around lunchtime, still with no result, he at last found them under an astrakhan rug, back in the master bedroom. They were in a thick, battered envelope with the address of the Advent Hospital on the front. He shook them out onto the bed, looking down on a shot of Nikki McIntyre, her legs up in stirrups, her genitalia exposed. The other photos were variations on the same theme, different angles, different framings, insistently explicit. These were shots Hennessey had looked at time and time again, pulling them out of the envelope and spreading them over the bed. These were the shots he pawed over, drooled over. This was the way he went to sleep every night.

‘Clinical aids?’

Hennessey had his eyes closed. Winter gave him a shake, forcing him to look at a couple of the photos.

‘For the file or the album?’

Hennessey just stared up at him. Finally, he closed his eyes again and turned away. He’d had enough of this, more than enough, but Winter was far from finished.

He bent down low, his lips to Hennessey’s ear.

‘You knew she was here, didn’t you? You knew where to find her and you came looking.’ He paused. He was word perfect. He’d been rehearsing this conversation for days. ‘Do you go there every night? The Abbey? That nice hotel along the way? Do you slip into the club downstairs? Have you got a table at the back? Do you listen to her singing? Do you remember all those times when she was yours? Your patient? Your slave? Do you come back here afterwards? Fetch out this lot? Have another look? Remember what she felt like? No gloves on? Is that what you do? Eh?’

Winter’s hold-all was over by the steps. He’d got a fresh roll of film in the camera. He circled the bed, taking shot after shot, Hennessey’s favourite angle, total exposure. He’d give some of these to Parrish, little souvenir, little reminder of a scam that very nearly came off. Two guys with money to burn. Two guys after services to hire. Twenty grand each. One wanting revenge. The other, an escape to invisibility. Play both ends against the middle and you ended with a murder so perfect that there wasn’t even a body. A murder so perfect that people like Faraday would go digging up whole apartment blocks on a fool’s hunt for a nonexistent corpse. A murder so perfect it would buy you a whole new life.

The film rewound, Winter circled the bed and settled briefly in a chair by a porthole. Hennessey was watching his every move.

‘Were you going to fuck off, then? After here? Just nod or shake your head. Go on. Just do it.’

Hennessey didn’t react. His eyes were filled with tears again.

‘What about your name? Were you going to change it? New passport? New ID? New life?’

Again, no reaction. Winter pursed his lips for a moment, regretful, then fetched the hold-all. Hennessey stared at the drill as Winter went slowly through the choice of bits, weighing each in his hand, eyeing Hennessey’s lower body. 2mm? 5mm? 10mm? Something big enough to make a serious hole? Finally he settled on a 7mm, tungsten-tipped for longer life.

‘Brand new.’ He showed Hennessey. ‘That’s supposed to be hygienic, isn’t it? Less chance of infection?’

This time he didn’t wait for a reaction but laid the drill beside Hennessey’s head and busied himself with the photos, returning them to the envelope.

‘These I get to keep,’ he explained, ‘just in case there’s enough of you left to think about going to the police. OK?’

Winter glanced up at Hennessey. He thought he detected the faintest nod, but he couldn’t be sure. He told him again about the photos, before tucking the envelope into his hold-all. Any kind of investigation, and the photos would go to all kinds of interested parties. OK? This time, for sure, Hennessey understood.

‘Good.’

Winter crossed the cabin and knelt beside the opposite porthole. The shag pile carpet was secured with anodised battens where the floor met the outward curve of the hull. With a screwdriver, he loosened a batten, then levered it free. He’d rolled the carpet back less than a metre when he found the inspection hatch.

‘This would go into the bilges, wouldn’t it?’

He glanced over his shoulder. Hennessey’s eyes were shut again. He might have been dead already.

‘Shame,’ Winter murmured, ‘making a mess like this.’ He pulled the carpet back, exposing the entire hatch, then retrieved the drill from the pillow. Hennessey didn’t move a muscle. When Winter pulled the hatch open, there was darkness beneath and the hollow slurp of water against the hull. At full stretch, Winter could reach the roughly textured interior of the hull. He pressed the trigger and the screech of the drill echoed back at him, amplified by the empty bilges; then, to his infinite satisfaction, the tungsten tip began to bite into the GRP. Revenge smells of hot glass fibre, he thought, pushing down even harder.

Forty minutes later, Winter stepped off the boat and made his way back along the pontoon. There was a public call box outside the marina office. When he got through to the newsdesk on the
Jersey Evening Post
, he gave them the name of Hennessey’s motor cruiser and the number of the marina berth. The owner was having a rather special party. They’d be crazy if they didn’t get down there sharpish, and crazier still if they didn’t take a photographer.

‘Big story,’ Winter promised. ‘Exclusively yours.’

When the reporter pressed him for details, he repeated the name of the boat and told him it belonged to a national figure.

‘Like who?’

‘Bloke called Hennessey. He’s a gynaecologist. Been in all the papers.’

The brief silence told Winter he’d rung a bell or two. Asked for his own name, he laughed and hung up.

Stepping out of the call box, Winter ducked his head against the driving rain. He’d already chosen the restaurant, a first-floor bistro across the road. Two o’clock, he thought. Perfect for a late lunch.

With the restaurant emptying, he settled at a window seat with an uninterrupted view across the marina. He ordered skate with chips and a light salad, and sent the first bottle of Chablis back because it wasn’t cold enough. Three glasses down, with the food yet to appear, he offered a private toast to Hennessey, still bound and gagged aboard his £115,000 hideaway. He’d drilled two holes. He was no expert in hydraulics, but already
Crazy Lady
was visibly nose-down beside the pontoon.

The reporter arrived while Winter was busy with the skate. There was a photographer as well, with an aluminium camera case, and Winter watched while they hurried along the pontoon, bodies bent against the weather. They both clambered aboard Hennessey’s boat, and it was several minutes before the journalist reappeared, running back towards the marina office. Winter returned to the last of his skate, imagining the photographer making the most of the tableau he’d so carefully prepared. Humiliation, he’d decided, deserved the widest possible audience. He smiled to himself mopping up the caper sauce with the remains of his bread roll, then reaching for the menu again.