Blood on the Line (18 page)

‘My question is this – what will Oxley’s next move be?’

‘He’ll go into hiding, sir,’ Leeming put in.

‘Any fool could work that out.’

‘It needed saying nevertheless.’

‘On the contrary, Sergeant,’ said Tallis. ‘It could be taken as read. There are certain assumptions that we can make without having to put them into words. Agreed?’

‘You could be right, sir.’

‘I am right, man – now please shut up.’

‘Victor is quite right in one sense,’ said Colbeck, ‘but wrong in another. Two people on the run will always look for a place of refuge. However …’

‘Go on,’ said Tallis, standing beside him.

‘I suspect that they won’t stay there for long. Oxley will have been shaken rudely out of his complacence by the reports in this morning’s papers. The fact that we arrested his two friends will come as a terrible blow to him, sir.’

‘And so it should. We trailed them to their lair.’

‘It was all because I spoke to that clerk from the ticket office at Euston,’ said Leeming, wishing that he’d never spoken when subjected to the superintendent’s basilisk stare. He retreated into a corner. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to interrupt.’

‘Pay attention to Colbeck. He has something sensible to say.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘They’ll feel that we’re closing in,’ resumed Colbeck.
‘They tried to kill me and they failed. They thought they were safe with their friends yet we found them. Our pursuit will seem inexorable.’

‘That’s why it must continue with vigour.’

‘Why did you say that I was wrong, Inspector?’ asked Leeming.

‘You almost invariably are,’ sniped Tallis.

‘They’ll hide in the first instance, Victor,’ said Colbeck, ‘but the ground will tremble beneath them when they learn about the way that we almost caught them. They may well decide that there’s only one course of action left open to them.’

‘There’ll be a second attempt to kill you?’ asked Tallis.

‘That would be far too risky, sir. No, I believe that they will seriously consider leaving the country altogether. That way – and that way only – they’d feel out of our reach.’

‘It makes sense,’ remarked Leeming.

Tallis was not persuaded. ‘It’s yet another of the inspector’s famous theories,’ he said with a slight edge. ‘How valid this one is, I have my doubts. We are talking about a man who’s contrived to evade the law for a very long time.’

‘He’s beginning to lose his touch, sir,’ observed Colbeck. ‘He was arrested in Wolverhampton. That was careless of him. And when he set out to kill me, he shot someone else in my place.’

‘There’s no need to harp on about that,’ said Tallis, uneasily.

‘I fancy that they’ll consider going abroad.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Leeming. ‘You can’t trust foreigners. I
hated it when we had to go to France. They were so shifty over there.’

‘Spare us your reminiscences,’ said Tallis, acidly.

‘They never made us feel welcome, sir.’

‘You are rapidly outwearing your welcome in this very room, Leeming. Either hold your tongue or get out of here.’ Leeming shrank back into his corner again. ‘Where will they go, Inspector?’

‘My guess is as good as yours, sir,’ said Colbeck, ‘but I know one thing. If they
are
to emigrate, they’ll need time to arrange everything. We might catch them before they go.’

‘How do you intend to do that?’

‘We’ve seen before that Irene Adnam still has feelings for her father. I don’t believe that she’d leave the country without paying him a last visit.’ He picked up a pin and jabbed it into the map. ‘This is where I believe we should go next, sir – Manchester.’

Even in the relatively short time since she’d last seen him, Silas Adnam’s health had visibly deteriorated. Irene saw that his cheeks had hollowed, his eyes were bloodshot and his skin pallid. His cough was now almost continuous and causing him so much pain that he kept putting a hand to his chest. Adnam’s voice was hoarse.

‘I’m surprised to see you again, Irene,’ he said.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘My lungs are on fire. It’s getting worse.’

‘You should have spent some of that money I gave you on a doctor. You need help, Father.’

‘I’m past helping.’ He came forward to glare at her. ‘I never thought that it would come to this.’

‘It was your own fault,’ said Irene.

‘I’m not talking about me – I’m talking about
you
.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘A detective came to see me. His name was Inspector Colbeck. He told me exactly what sort of a daughter I have.’

She reeled. ‘The inspector came
here
?’

‘Yes. It looks as if I helped to bring a monster into the world.’

‘Don’t believe everything you hear,’ she warned.

He went on the attack. ‘You don’t work as a governess in London, do you?’

‘No, I don’t, as it happens.’

‘Then why did you tell me that you did?’ he said, resentfully. ‘Why did you tell me lie after lie? There was I, thinking that I had a dutiful daughter, when all the time she was stealing from the people who employed her.’

‘They deserved it,’ she countered. ‘They treated me like dirt.’

‘So it’s true, then?’

‘I don’t deny it.’

‘What about the murder?’ he asked, searching her face with widened eyes. ‘Did you really shoot a policeman?’ She was lost for words. ‘Tell me, Irene. Try to be honest with your father for once in your life. Did you or did you not kill someone?’

She lowered her head. Taking her silence as a confession of guilt, he let out a gasp of horror then had a coughing fit.
He flopped down on the bed and put a palm to his chest. Irene was mortified that he now knew the truth about her. The fact that Colbeck had actually been to see her father was more than unsettling. It induced instant panic. Irene could simply not understand how he’d made contact with the old man. It altered the whole situation. Having come to tell him a rehearsed story about going abroad with the family for whom she worked, she had to think again. Before, her father had been no more than a pathetic ruin. Now, however, he was a potential danger. Shocked by the ugly truth about his daughter, he might be tempted to report her visit to the police.

Irene knew exactly what Oxley would do in her position. There’d be no hesitation. Faced with the possibility of betrayal, he’d kill the old man without compunction. He’d only be shortening a life that had very little time to run. That option was not available to Irene. She had no weapon and she was held back by a vague sense of duty to the man who’d fathered her. Besides, her conscience already had far too much to accommodate. Irene decided to buy his silence.

‘I’m leaving the country,’ she told him.

‘Good riddance!’ he said.

‘You’ll never see me again, Father.’

‘That won’t trouble me. I want nothing to do with a killer.’

‘I had to do what I did,’ she said. ‘It’s no good explaining because you’d never understand. But before you start to look down on me, you should remember how much money I’ve given you over the years. I’ve kept you alive, Father. I had no need to do that.’

‘If I’d known where the money came from, I’d never have touched it,’ he said, rising to his feet to strike a pose. ‘I don’t have much to call my own but I do have moral standards. I used to think that I’d instilled them in you.’

Irene was blisteringly honest. ‘What good are moral standards when your father drags you from a decent life in a proper home into a kind of hell? What use are they when you’re a mere servant and your master starts to molest you? Do you know what it’s like to be at the mercy of lecherous old men?’ she demanded. ‘Do you know what it’s like to be treated like an unpaid prostitute?
That’s
what you did to me. That’s the sort of father you were.’

Adnam was hurt. ‘I did my best for you, Irene.’

‘The only person you ever thought about was yourself.’

‘It was your mother,’ he whimpered. ‘When she died, I lost my way. One thing led to another. It wasn’t my fault, Irene.’

‘You turned me into someone else’s slave and I’ll never forgive you for that. I had two choices,’ said Irene, temper colouring her cheeks. ‘I could either submit or I could fight back. I could either let my employers use my body whenever they wished or I could steal what I wanted from them and run away.’

‘So you turned into a thief.’

‘It was the only way I could survive, Father.’

His eyes began to water and another coughing fit seized him. When the pain finally eased, he looked at her with a disgust laced heavily with curiosity.

‘When will you go?’ he asked.

‘At the end of the week.’

‘Where will you sail from?’

‘Liverpool.’

‘Who are you travelling with? Is it that man, Oxley?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, irritably. ‘The point is that I’m going out of your life for ever. I’d hoped we could have a proper farewell.’

‘Ha!’

‘You’re still my father. I came here to give you some money.’

Adnam’s expression slowly changed. The look of contempt in his eyes was eventually replaced by a glint of self-interest. He despised what she’d done and was glad that she was going far away from him, but he was too wretched to be able to refuse the offer of money, even from such a tainted source. After wrestling with his conscience for a while, he eventually got the better of it.

‘How much money?’ he asked.

Inspector Zachary Boone gave each of them a warm handshake. He had been warned by telegraph that Colbeck and Leeming would be coming to Manchester again and the message had contained a request for him. It had asked that Silas Adnam be brought to the police station for questioning. Boone had bad news for the visitors.

‘He’s not there, I’m afraid,’ he said.

‘Did your officers go to his lodging?’ asked Colbeck.

‘They did, Robert. They talked to everyone else in the house, to his neighbours and to the landlord of the pub where Adnam is well known. Nobody has any idea where he is. Or if they do,’ added Boone, corrugating his brow,
‘they’re not telling us. We don’t get much help from people in Deansgate. They think policemen are vermin.’

‘We have people like that in London,’ said Leeming. ‘They’d sooner die than be seen giving assistance to the police. We’re the enemy to them.’

‘There’s one possibility,’ suggested Colbeck. ‘Adnam is a very sick man. Since the time I was last here, he may even have died.’

‘I considered that,’ said Boone, ‘so I told my men to check on the local undertakers. None of them had been called to collect the body of Silas Adnam. He’s still alive.’

‘Then where is he? The fellow can’t have left Manchester. He’d have no money to do so. Unless …’

‘What are you thinking, Robert?’

‘His daughter got to him before your men did.’

Boone’s office was more cluttered than ever. Files had now been stacked on the floor and the desk was invisible beneath a blizzard of paperwork. He presided over the general anarchy with the confidence of a man who had everything supremely under command. In one deft movement, he plucked a telegraph from beneath a pile of documents.

‘All that this told me,’ he said, ‘was that you were coming to Manchester and that you needed to speak to Adnam. Could I have some more detail, Robert?’

‘How much do you already know?’

‘I read the London newspapers, so I know about the death of Constable Peebles. Such a pity – I liked him on sight.’ He smiled at Leeming. ‘I was a little more wary of you, Sergeant.’

‘I sometimes have that effect on people,’ said Leeming.

‘No offence intended.’

‘None is taken, Inspector. My face never wins friends.’

‘It does when people get to know you, Victor,’ said Colbeck, patting his shoulder. ‘But let me fill in the gaps in Zachary’s knowledge of the case. A lot has happened in the last few days.’

Amplifying the details given in the press, Colbeck told him about the flight of Oxley and Irene, the arrest of the two suspects and the abundance of information that had come in, enabling them to place the suspects at various hotels at specific times. Boone agreed that the fugitives might well consider emigration as their only viable option.

I think you’re right, Robert,’ he said. ‘If she’s about to shake the dust of this country off her shoes, Irene Adnam is very likely to pay a last visit to her father.’

‘There’s a big difference this time,’ noted Colbeck.

‘Is there?’

‘Yes, Zachary – her father knows the truth about her. When she kept supplying him with money, he was happy to believe the fiction that she worked as a governess. After all, he could take some credit for having got her the education that qualified her to take on such a post. Teaching the sons and daughters of the wealthy would seem to be a worthy occupation to someone who’d sunk as low as he has.’

‘If his daughter
did
go to see him,’ said Leeming, ‘how do you think Mr Adnam would react?’

‘I think he’d condemn what she did. Any father would.’

‘That would take her by surprise. Irene Adnam had no
idea that you’d visited her father and laid the whole facts before him. She’d be expecting to be able to wear the same mask as before.’

Colbeck nodded. ‘That’s a good point, Victor.’

‘If he started yelling at her, she’d be very upset. Her first thought would be that he might even report her to the police.’

‘I don’t think he’d do that somehow.’

‘It’s a possibility she’d have to consider, sir,’ said Leeming, as he tried to imagine the confrontation between father and daughter. ‘If he did threaten to turn her in, what would she do?’

‘Get away from there as fast as she could,’ answered Boone.

‘That wouldn’t solve the problem. She’d have every policeman in Manchester looking for her. I’m wondering if she acted on impulse.’

Boone sniffed. ‘She’d never kill her own father, would she?’

‘We know that she’s capable of murder. If she was desperate, there’s no telling what she might do.’

‘I think it’s unlikely that she’d resort to violence,’ said Colbeck, mulling it over. ‘In her own way, she still loves her father. Otherwise, she’d have disowned him years ago. Anyway, why else bid him farewell unless she had a parting gift for him? If he decided to report her to the police, he wouldn’t get anything. That’s what it may come down to in the end,’ he concluded. ‘What price will he put on his silence?’