Death Watch (34 page)

‘Never mind biscuits, what about the girl?’

‘What girl? They was Lincolns an’ all. None of your cheap rubbish. Y’know what I really like? Custard creams. I ain’t ’ad a custard cream in years.’

He got up, and felt in his pocket for change. ‘Here you are, Else. Go and buy yourself a packet.’

‘Gawd blesher, Mr Slider,’ she said, cupping her hands. ‘You’re a gent. Better’n that Mr Raisbrooke. Whass gone of ‘im now, anyway? I ain’t seen ’im for months.’

She was such a frustrating mixture of sense and forgettery, he thought as he climbed back into his car, there was no relying on her. But on the principle that the broken clock is right more often than the slow one . . .

Gorgeous George showed no resentment at being interrupted a second time. It was all part of the perpetual psychological warfare he waged that he sat relaxed and smiling, leaning back in his chair and playing gently with his gold cigarette lighter, almost as a man fondles a dog’s ears.

‘I hope you won’t be keeping me too long. I’ve got an important meeting to get to by two-thirty.’

They’ll run all right without you,’ Slider said firmly. ‘I’d just like to have a little talk to you about Richard Neal – and please don’t put on that enquiring look, like a friendly guide dog looking for a blind man. You know who Richard Neal is. I’m surprised at you, George, telling me lies.’

‘Lies?’

‘You said you didn’t know him when I showed you his photo.’

‘As I remember, I told you’d I never seen him going into the flat,’ he said smoothly. ‘That was perfectly true.’

‘A very selective truth.’

Gorgeous lit a cigarillo unconcernedly. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide. If you ask me the right questions, you’ll get the right answers.’

Slider leaned forward and laid a fist down on the table. ‘This is not a game, George, and I’m not here for the pleasure of your company. You were seen handing Neal a large sum of money in the Shamrock club, and having conversations with him on more than one occasion. Now I suggest to you that you’re in serious trouble, and it’s time you started being a bit more frank with me.’

He smiled. ‘Is that a warning, man to man? How can I be in trouble, arranging a few bets for a bloke? Successful bets at that.’

‘Come on, George, you can do better than that.’

‘Can I? This man you’re so interested in was a gambler, didn’t you know that? A bad one, like all amateurs – too fond of mug doubles and the fancy stuff, and ready to take anyone’s tip, if the odds were long enough. He was in bad money trouble and thought he could gamble his way out of it. He knew my reputation, and asked me if I’d choose some horses for him, and put the bets on.’

Slider stared in rank disbelief. ‘This is a new you I hardly recognise. A tender, caring creature, ready to go to any lengths to help his fellow man. What happened, George? Why the sudden benevolence? Did you find Jesus, or what?’

Gorgeous smiled lazily, his eyes gleaming like those of a cheetah that’s just spotted a wildebeest with its mind on other things. ‘It wasn’t benevolence, it was business. I did it on a commission basis. Do you think I’m stupid?’

‘Not at all. I have the highest respect for your animal instincts – self preservation and the like. But animals don’t do each other favours. It was a lot of trouble to go to for a complete stranger.’

Gorgeous shrugged. ‘It was no trouble. I was betting on the horses for myself anyway. The commission paid my expenses for the day nicely, with a bit to spare. Never say no to a spot of bunce, Bill, no matter how small. Contempt of money is the root of all evil.’

‘I’ve heard that. So the money you were seen giving to Neal was his winnings.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Lucky.’

‘Not luck – science.’

‘I suppose you wouldn’t happen to remember the names of those galloping horses, by any chance?’

‘I’ve got them all on file, of course. With the dates and the odds, if you’d care to check them.’

‘I’d be delighted to,’ Slider said. ‘But it was all a bit risky from Neal’s point of view, I should have thought. The horses might just as easily have gone down. I wonder he didn’t want a more reliable source of extra income, if he
was in trouble. You wouldn’t by any chance have put him in touch with someone who lends money at a high, not to say punishing, rate of interest, would you?’

‘Do I look like a bank clerk?’

‘You don’t look like a bookie’s runner. No, I was thinking more along the lines of some of your entrepreneurial friends. I was wondering if you made Mr Neal known to the Neary brothers.’

George shook his head sadly, and showed his white, carnivorous teeth in a pitying smile. ‘I don’t know who you’re getting your information from, but you ought to be sending him for immediate outplacement counselling. Everyone knows the Nearys are inside – where you, I might mention, helped to put them.’

‘Not Colum,’ Slider said gently. ‘Colly Neary’s out – sent on ahead, to get everything ready for the happy day when the Neary family is reunited on the outside. The old firm, back in business at the usual stand. In business lending money, for instance, on the Shylock principle, to those unfortunates who can’t persuade Barclays they’re a good risk.’

Gorgeous tapped the long ash from his cigarillo with complete unconcern. I’m surprised at you, going fishing during working hours. All I know about the Nearys is what I read in the papers, like everyone else. You’re throwing out spinners and hoping I’ll do your job for you. Not on. Sorry.’

Slider leaned forward. ‘Look, George, I’d just as soon write you out of this one, because, God help me, I like you. But you keep coming into the frame, and when a head pops up, it’s only human nature to shoot at it. I know you were involved with the Nearys before, and the word on the street is that you’ve been asked for another dance. And you’ve been seen in company with Colum Neary, so don’t give me that innocent crap. Now you and Neal were locked into some large sums of money together, and Neal’s turned up dead. If you’d like to show me how I can add all those twos together and come up with less than four, I’ll be happy to go along with it.’

Gorgeous George looked up and smiled, but his eyes had the long, remote stare of the veldt, as unrevealing as mirrors. ‘Neal approached me in the Shamrock club. I put some money on some horses for him, and they won, and I took a cut for myself. That’s all there was to our relationship. As for Colly Neary — I sell second-hand cars.’

‘To a man who’s driver for a gang of bank robbers, protectionists and racketeers?’

‘Erstwhile,’ said Gorgeous. ‘Colly didn’t go over the wall, remember. He’s paid his debt to society. And as long as my cars aren’t stolen, I can sell them to anyone who wants to buy them. Unless the law’s changed since I set up in business.’

‘How would you like to tell me exactly where you were on the Sunday night and Monday morning that the Master Baker Motel caught fire?’

‘Happy to oblige. As it happens, I went up to Chester on Sunday afternoon to stay with some friends – the Wilmslows, very nice respectable people. They had a few people in to dinner on Sunday night, and I stayed over until Monday for the race meeting.’ The smile was gentle and tormenting. ‘I have the perfect alibi, you see. Rotten luck for you, though.’

Slider was not surprised. He was dealing with a professional, and he knew the alibiferous Wilmslows would check out, and that the horses would have run, and won, as per the list he would be given. And the sums supposedly won for Neal would be small enough not to be remembered by the bookies at the courses. The question was, why did Gorgeous feel he needed to exercise his professionalism over this matter, unless there was something dodgy about it?

‘I’m a thorough man,’ Gorgeous George said, reading his mind. ‘You’re on the wrong track,’ he added softly. ‘The wrong track altogether.’

‘All right. Let’s talk about something else, shall we? Let’s talk about Helen Woodman.’

For the first time something flickered in the golden eyes. ‘Helen Woodman?’

‘Oh, don’t say you’ve forgotten her, George? A lovely-looking young woman like her, who rents your flat from you for three weeks, and disappears without a trace on the day Richard Neal does his now famous Burger King impersonation? She’d be heartbroken to think you didn’t remember her – particularly after such a long and fruitful acquaintance.’

‘You call three weeks long?’

‘Ah, you do remember her then? But it was more that three weeks, wasn’t it? You knew her before she came asking to rent your flat. Otherwise you wouldn’t have rented it to her at all.’

The Wilhelm stuck to Gorgeous’s lower lip. He removed it carefully, wet the centre of his lip with the tip of his tongue, took a long draw, and then put the cigarillo down on the edge of the ashtray as he blew the smoke slowly out towards the ceiling-fan.

‘Your two minutes is up, George,’ Slider said pleasantly. ‘You’re going to have to answer, or you’re out of the contest, and you lose your deposit.’

The head was lowered, the eyes levelled, the shoulders squared, the hands placed side by side on the desk top. The body language was that of a man preparing against all the odds to tell the truth and be damned; which, Slider thought, probably meant he was about to be presented with the finest pork pie since Messrs Saxby’s Gold Medal winner took the 1928 Northamptonshire Cooked Meats Exhibition by storm.

‘Look,’ said Gorgeous – sure sign of impending prevarication – ‘I want to be shot of this. I want to tell you the truth, but I’m not sure you’ll believe me.’

‘Why shouldn’t I? You’ve told me so many lies already, you must be nearly out of stock.’

Gorgeous sighed. ‘Don’t take it like that, Bill. This Helen Woodman business – it looks worse than it is, which is why I want to be rid of it, because it’s going to bugger up my legitimate business. And no-one is going to believe it’s got nothing to do with anything, which it hasn’t. You’re my best chance.’

‘Thanks. You think I’m more gullible than the rest, do you?’

‘Not at all. It’s just that you’ve got more imagination than the average copper. You’re not dead from the neck up, like the rest of ’em. I have great respect for you, Bill: I wouldn’t offer you a plastic daffodil.’

‘How do you feel about profiteroles?’

‘Come again?’

‘Skip it,’ said Slider. ‘All right, I’ll buy it. Tell me about Helen Woodman.

‘I did know her from before. You’re right about that. But it was a casual and completely innocent acquaintance. She was a barmaid in a pub I used to go to sometimes a few years back.’

‘How many years back?’

‘1987. The early part of 1987.’

‘What was the name of the pub?’

‘The Cock.’

‘Appropriate. Where?’

There was a hesitation this time. ‘Newyear’s Green,’ Gorgeous said at last, reluctantly.

Slider felt a low hum of triumph in his cortex. The Cock at Newyear’s Green was the pub formerly owned and run by the Neary brothers, where they had planned and out of which they had mounted their operations – the operations no-one had ever managed to tie George in with. And Webb had been murdered in a barn not half a mile away from there in April 1987.

‘Oh George,’ he said softly. ‘Ain’t life a bitch?’

Gorgeous met his eyes defensively, a wonderful new experience for Slider. ‘That’s exactly why I didn’t want to tell you. You’re going to make all sorts of deductions and they’ll all be wrong. Helen Woodman was a barmaid at the pub, and that’s all I know about her, or knew about her then. I noticed her because she was a looker. You know how I am about women. But I never had any other dealings with her, except for the drinks she served me in that pub, and that’s the truth, if I was to die for it this day.’

‘You didn’t take a crack at her then?’

‘Not then or later. I didn’t fancy her. I’ve told you that already.’

‘Presumably, then, she was known to the Nearys,’ Slider mused. Gorgeous looked away, and didn’t answer that one. Well, it would have been hard for him to do so without incriminating himself. ‘Where did she go when we nicked the Nearys and the pub closed down?’ he asked instead.

‘She left before that, of her own accord. She was only there a couple of weeks.’ George looked at him again. ‘I don’t know where she went. I swear to you I never saw her from that day to the time she came into my office here and asked to rent my flat.’

‘It explains how she knew it was for rent, I suppose,’ Slider said kindly. ‘And what did she say she wanted it for?’

‘I’ve told you that, too. She said she was doing some research and needed a base for three weeks.’

‘And you didn’t ask her what research?’ Shake of the head. ‘Why didn’t you just tell her to fuck off, George?’ Slider asked silkily. ‘If I was in your position, I’d be inclined to think she was a lot of trouble in size nine shoes. You didn’t fancy her. What did you want her about the place for?’

George sighed like a dying man. ‘I didn’t know what she was up to – or who’d sent her,’ he said.

‘Ah, I see,’ Slider said. ‘You thought she’d been sent by the Neary brothers, and that refusal to co-operate might upset them.’ He didn’t answer that. Slider shook his head. ‘It’s not like you to allow someone to incriminate you. It was very careless.’

‘I wish to God I had told her to get lost. But it’s too late now. All I can tell you is the truth – that I knew nothing of what she was doing while she was here. I made sure it was that way. I was careful never to see her coming or going, and when she left I made sure there was nothing left in the flat that anyone could light on.’

‘And you don’t know where she went? Where she came from? Where she lives? Anything about her?’

‘No. I swear it.’

Slider shook his head. ‘Curiouser and curiouser.’

‘You believe me, don’t you?’ Gorgeous said, as close to anxiously as it was possible for a man who’d eaten more wild animals than he’d shot hot dinners.

‘Well, oddly enough,’ Slider said, ‘I do. It’s the final touch of obscurity I was looking for, to make this case completely opaque.’ He stood up, and George’s eyes rose with him. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘And, by the way, this is a warning, man to man – keep away from all Nearys, great and small, and Firearms Freddie. And I should give the Shamrock club a wide berth too. Smoking Irishmen are bad for your health, you know.’