Incinerator (10 page)

I used Sean as a barricade to keep him off by wrenching on his arm some more, and most of his mate’s flailing punches hit Sean, who was squealing curses at both of us. I was kind of enjoying myself at this stage, which is never a good sign, and was trying to think of some smartass remark to get them even angrier when a shattering pain on the crown of my head made my eyes water and my knees weaken.

I was forced to let go of Sean so I could turn to face Dean, who had come up behind me. He’d pulled off his own mask to reveal a grin like a terrier that had cornered a rabbit. He had clubbed me with the blunt end of the crowbar and now he coolly flipped it in his hand so the sharp end was pointing at me. He feinted with it while I dodged and backed off, hoping my
vision would clear before he came at me, and hoping too that I could make the three of them get in each other’s way. But with the wall of the gym behind me I had little room to retreat or manoeuvre.

The bonnet of the Ford to my right was long and low and I was just about to jump up on it and run over the roof when Sean came rolling over it towards me like a walrus on a water-slide, pushing the car down on its springs and leaving an enormous dent in the bodywork. From the corner of my eye I saw Dean lunge with the crowbar, and I stepped forward, gritting my teeth as his knuckles cracked on the top of my head, taking most of the force. I threw a right but the crowbar’s point still came down hard, biting into my right shoulder, and it skewed the punch so it barely connected with Dean’s face. By that time Sean was on top of me, blood running down his mouth and chin, and his massive paw clutched at my throat.

I was still running the odds in my head and wondering what had happened to the friend they had brought along, and when he was going to join in the fun, when I felt Sean’s attention
wander for an instant. In that instant I grabbed the hand that was gripping my windpipe, found the little finger and wrenched it back until I felt it pop out of its socket. My fists followed the now-familiar sound of Sean’s squeals to his face, where I landed a good right to top up the bruise I had given him the other day. His legs folded and he went down weeping. I was bracing myself for Dean to come back with that bloody crowbar again when I saw what had distracted Sean.

Delroy had come out of the gym. He had propped his back up against a car, and was standing solid as Dean and Sean’s pal hammered at him with his fists, trying in vain to penetrate his guard. As I watched I thought Delroy had been too long out of the ring, because his arms were too high, and sure enough the heavy noticed that and swung a punch in low. That was when Delroy unleashed a right that nearly took the heavy’s head off his shoulders, sending him reeling. He was about to topple when I finished the job, barrelling into him, bringing us both down in a heap with me on top, ready to finish Delroy’s good work. But something was obscuring my
vision—blood was running into my eyes, and now I was being grabbed and hauled roughly to my feet. By Dean? Or Delroy?

When I was thrown face down across the bonnet of the Ford—narrowly avoiding a long livid trail of brake fluid mixed with auto paint—and felt the familiar bite of handcuffs on my wrists, I realized this was neither Dean nor Delroy. Mashed in with the shriek of the car alarms were sirens and the squawking crackle of police radios. The poky car park was a heaving mass of uniformed coppers. Two of them dragged me upright and frogmarched me towards a police van waiting with rear doors wide open. I saw Sean and his mate being manhandled into another, Sean yelling in agony every time his hand was jogged. Of Dean I could see no sign. Delroy, I noticed, was being closely questioned by a female cop, and presumably telling her that I had been trying to protect my business from being vandalized, but then the door slammed shut and my skull started to throb and I realized that every time I turned my head I was spattering blood around the place like an avant-garde art project.

* * *

I’d been a guest in several West London cop shops since I turned twelve, but this one I hadn’t seen before. Thanks to budget cuts my local nick had been mothballed a few months earlier and the coppers that hadn’t been laid off were relocated to this place—a tatty 1970s office block painted in loony-bin beige with dodgy neon lights that pinged faintly as they flickered off and on again. The cut the crowbar had left in my scalp was patched up by a pale, tired, monosyllabic medic who had never heard of any of the officers I had got to know a few months ago, after my dad’s death. One of them, Detective Sergeant Amobi, I had almost got to tolerate. For a copper he seemed relatively intelligent and open-minded, which was probably why he wasn’t around any more.

But by the time I was brought from the holding cells to an interview room the atmosphere seemed to have lightened a bit. I was no longer being shoved around like a thug hauled in for fighting in the street. I presumed Delroy and witnesses from the gym would soon set the record straight and I could go home. But one pallid cup of tea went cold, and a PC brought me another, and told me someone
would take my statement “soon.” But that cup of tea went cold too, because the police’s concept of “soon” isn’t the same as yours or mine. We’re not being paid by the hour.

“Mr. Maguire. We’ve been looking for you.”

Detective Sergeant McCoy was wearing a different suit, but she had the same frightened assistant in tow, hiding behind a manila folder and clearly itching to leave the scruffy suburbs.

“Well done, you found me. Can I go home now?”

“Not just yet. Somebody still has to take your statement.”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“Sorry, this is way off my patch. I’m here about that solicitor of yours that went AWOL. Nicky Hale?”

There was something extra-smug about the way she asked, as if she already had all the answers and wanted me to beg her to share them.

“Have you found her?”

McCoy settled into the chair opposite me and her sidekick sat at her elbow like her shadow, only less useful. “I’ve been looking
into your background, Mr. Maguire. Quite the dark horse, aren’t you?”

“I’m not any shade of horse,” I said.

“Friend of the famous. Infamous, rather.” I stared at her, refusing to toss that ball back. “This brief of yours, Nicky Hale, did she know you were a big pal of the Guvnor?”

“I’m not. But don’t let that stop you making up theories.”

She smiled as if I was being coy. “Don’t you think you should have mentioned your connection to him when you first reported Ms. Hale’s disappearance?”

“There is no connection, as far as I know. I’m not a pal of the Guvnor. If I was, do you think scumbags like Sherwood would try to nobble my business?”

“When the cat’s away,” said McCoy. “We’ve been getting a lot of this recently. Small-time criminals scrapping over territory.”

“I’m not a criminal. I run a gym, and Sherwood’s trying to strong-arm money out of me. I think it’s called extortion, which is the sort of thing the police are supposed to prevent.”

“Have you made an official report of this … extortion?”

“I’ll make one now,” I said. “Have you got a pen?”

“So you’re saying there’s no connection between today’s incident and Nicky Hale’s disappearance?”

“No, I’m not saying that, because I have no idea what happened to Nicky Hale.”

“Is that why you’ve been calling on her family and clients, asking questions?”

I wondered who had complained about me. Joan Bisham? Or Nicky’s husband?

“Somebody had to,” I said. I was pleased to see McCoy bristle a little.

“We’ve made very thorough enquiries into Ms. Hale’s disappearance, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“And what have you found out?”

“We’re still missing a few pieces of evidence.”

“So nothing, basically, is that it?”

“At the moment we’re trying to track down her phone.”

Ah … Nicky’s phone. McCoy pinned me with a stare. Her eyes were two different shades of brown, I noticed, but I didn’t mention it. She probably knew that already, and
it might have sounded like I was chatting her up.

I went for sarcasm instead. “Have you tried ringing it?” But I’d already hesitated too long.

“Ms. Hale’s husband says the last time he saw his wife’s phone was when you visited him in his house. Shortly after you left he discovered it had disappeared.”

“Well, has
he
tried ringing it?”

“So you have no idea where Ms. Hale’s phone might be?”

I shrugged, as if mystified, but I had the feeling McCoy wasn’t fooled for an instant.

“Well,” she said, “if you happen to come across it, do let us know.” Why was she backing off? I nearly protested that it was her bloody job to find the phone, not mine. I didn’t particularly want her to look harder, but all the same …

“Why do I get the impression,” I said, “that you’re not bothered if this phone never turns up?”

She smiled again—she had a gap in her top front teeth too, and I found myself wondering if she could wolf-whistle—and held a hand out to her assistant. He wordlessly opened the
folder and handed her a sheaf of photographs, and she turned them the right way up and slid them across the table to me.

Stage by stage, in blurry colour stop-motion, a woman in a baseball cap and sunglasses approached a glass cubicle and handed something over to the uniformed bloke inside. It was an immigration checkpoint somewhere in the EU, judging by the blue sticker on the glass of the cubicle showing a circle of yellow stars. The border guard made some gesture, and the woman pulled off her hat and shades. She was Nicky Hale, with a fat, split lip and a swollen black eye. I could barely recognize her, but the blouse and suit she was wearing I’d seen a few times. The guard handed Nicky her passport back and waved her through. She slipped the sunglasses back on her face, turned away, dropped out of the bottom of the frame and vanished.

“She’d been hurt?” I asked, aware too late of the concern in my voice. But if DS McCoy noticed it she didn’t let on.

“Looks that way. But more to the point, these photos confirm Ms. Hale left the country, using her British passport, early on Monday
the fourteenth—the same day you came to us.”

“So where did she go?”

“We’ve traced her as far as Charles de Gaulle airport, but after that …” She shrugged, as if there was nothing more she could do. “Before these pictures were taken the money—your money—was transferred to an offshore account in the Cayman Islands, and almost immediately transferred out again, and we can’t track that down either.”

I shuffled through the photographs again, as if something in them might have changed since the first time I’d looked at them. Then I realized something had.

“You said ‘her British passport.’ Does that mean she had another one?”

“Ms. Hale had dual nationality,” said McCoy. “English-Brazilian. Chances are she travelled on from Paris using her Brazilian passport. The UK has an extradition agreement with Brazil, but first they’d have to find her, and we don’t even know if that’s where she went.” She leaned back in her chair in a way that suggested sympathy and regret and the closure of the case. “She hasn’t been
abducted, Mr. Maguire,” she said. “She stole your money, and she fled the country. There’s nothing more we can do, and there’s no point in you running around interrogating her acquaintances. That’s it. I’m sorry.”

I noticed the way she said sorry. She’d guessed it wasn’t just the money I’d lost. Sitting there it felt like I’d been clubbed with a crowbar again. I hadn’t wanted to accept Nicky could have fleeced me—I’d refused to believe it. I’d wanted to find her, to ride to her rescue, avenge her, even … All just futile, idiotic teenage fantasies. I’d been shuttling back and forward like a bluebottle butting its head against a window because it’s too stupid to see the glass.

“Anyway, we felt you were entitled to know,” said McCoy. “And if that phone does turn up, you can return it to her husband. Sooner rather than later, I’d suggest.”

I was so dazed I barely noticed her get up to leave. It was like she and her sidekick were tiptoeing out to avoid upsetting me any further.

“Yeah, no, thanks,” I said. My scalp was throbbing and wouldn’t let up, right now I was glad of the pain.

A uniformed PC took my statement about the car-park brawl, very slowly and methodically. He was a southpaw and wrote with his hand hooked over the top of the pad. I could imagine him spending hours after this interview reading my words aloud while a bored typist who couldn’t make out his handwriting transcribed it onto the police computer. I envied him all the same, because bad as his scrawl was, mine was so terrible even
I
couldn’t make it out. The PC seemed a bit irritated when I insisted there had been three attackers, because the cops had only arrested two—presumably Sean and the apprentice legbreaker or whatever he was. I got the impression recording the fact that Dean had been present but had got away would mean loose ends and more work
for the cops, so the PC tried his best to write Dean out of the story by muddling him up with Sean. Who, apparently, was in another interview room saying nothing to anyone about anything. The hired help he and Dean had brought along couldn’t speak English, or wouldn’t, and the police were still trying to figure out what language he was refusing to answer questions in.

Asked if I wanted to press charges, I said no. I had no lawyer, and I was sure that Sherwood retained someone to look after his chimpanzees. By the time he or she had finished plaiting the facts into decorative knotwork it would look like I had laid into two big-hearted blokes who had been washing cars for charity. The legal system wasn’t there to establish the truth, I knew, just to bang someone up and be done with it, and I wasn’t going to risk that someone being me. I didn’t check the statement over, of course. I just scrawled a squiggly line at the bottom so I’d finally be free to go.

As I stepped out of the nick and down its wet steps into the night, an ice-cold breeze sliced into me. I had no idea where the hell I was or which direction was home, but a long
squint at a map in a nearby bus shelter gave me my bearings, and I pointed my feet east and started to run.