‘Are you sure you’re happily, happily married?’ she asked simply. She picked up a scalpel.
‘Yes,’ he said without hesitation.
O’Connell’s eyes played over his face, trying to see if there was a lie there. Her jaw line tensed and relaxed several times. ‘OK,’ she relented. ‘Desperate woman, acting desperately…’ She picked up a pair of latex gloves and blew into one of them, inflating it. ‘Let’s go and cut up our next body… people do seem to have a habit of dying around you, Henry,’ she observed.
Billy Costain’s large body had been laid out on the slab and prepared for post-mortem. A CSI was in position to record events.
Henry looked at the four bullet holes arced across Costain’s wide chest, and he realized how close he himself had been to being the next body for examination. His phone vibrated in his pocket, making him jump.
‘Excuse me.’ It was ‘Home’ calling. He backed out of the mortuary and answered it, expecting to be speaking to Kate. ‘Hiya, sweetheart.’
‘I may be many things to you, but sweetheart ain’t one of them, buddy,’ Karl Donaldson told him.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Henry said. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘You mentioned Jerry Tope, the custard cream licker?’
‘What about him?’
‘Can I borrow him after all? I’m still having difficulties, shall we say, accessing work. I could do with him having a look-see. And he owes me a favour for not sending him to prison for fifty years for hacking into the FBI website.’
‘Which is what you want him to do now?’
‘Well, yeah…’
‘You’re welcome to him. I’ll have to ring off, find his number, then get back to you…’
‘I’ve had a drink,’ Jerry Tope said. ‘Can’t turn out.’
‘How much have you had?’
‘A pint.’
‘And you can’t drive after a pint?’
‘I can drive after ten pints, I just choose not to,’ Tope said, clearly annoyed at the interruption to his evening.
‘I need your help. A computer thing. Can I come and see you?’
Tope sighed so heavily that Donaldson expected to feel a draught down the line.
‘Where do you live?’
‘A place called Lea, just on the Blackpool side of Preston.’
‘Gimme the address, I’ll find it,’ Donaldson said. Tope told him, Donaldson scribbled it down and as an afterthought asked, ‘Do you have a broadband connection?’
Tope tutted and said, ‘No, I’m the only computer geek in the world without one.’
‘Sorry.’ Donaldson hung up gently, his mind in turmoil, still completely unable to fathom out why he should have been denied access to FBI files. Then another thought struck him. ‘Shit, I don’t have a car.’
For some reason beyond Henry’s comprehension, Kate had always seen herself driving a Fiat 500. So when the model was redesigned and the opportunity presented itself, she bought one. There was no doubt about it. They were classy, cool, small — tiny — cars, and, for a woman of Kate’s stature, ideal.
Not so for Karl Donaldson. Six-four and broad to match, when Kate waggled her keys at him and said, ‘You’re more than welcome to borrow it,’ he wondered just how the hell he was going to fit into it. His own car was a spacious Jeep.
‘This looks like a bizarre logic puzzle,’ he said. ‘Rearrange this shape — ’ he wafted his hand down his body — ‘to fit into that cupboard. Last time I had my knees around my ears was when the doctor was massaging my prostate.’
‘Far too much detail, and an image I’ll be unable to wipe from my mind forever.’
‘Didn’t you used to have a Ford?’
‘Fell to bits.’ She jangled the keys and dropped them on to his open palm.
He approached the car with trepidation and like a member of a circus freak show, folded himself into it limb by limb.
As well as the luxurious transport, Kate had also provided Donaldson with a satnav into which he keyed Jerry Tope’s postcode, and pulled up outside the pleasant semi-detached house some twenty minutes after leaving Blackpool. A combination of tiredness and the physical assaults he’d endured recently had made him stiffen up on the journey in the Fiat and he had to force his joints to open in order to get out of the car.
Tope came to the door to greet him, grinning at the size of the car versus the size of the man. Noticing the smirk, Donaldson said, ‘I’m good at getting big things into tiny spaces.’
He shook hands with Tope, who gestured for him to enter the house where he was then introduced to Tope’s wife who was emerging from the kitchen. She was a tiny, rotund ball of a lady, with thick spectacles, a serious monobrow and facial hair issues.
‘Marina, this is Karl Donaldson I was telling you about.’
Donaldson proffered his hand. Mrs Tope squinted up at him as she shook his hand — and gasped as he came into focus. Tope eyed both of them and noticed his wife’s reaction with a drop of his face.
‘Err,’ he interrupted, ‘what exactly do you want me to do?’
Unwillingly, Marina Tope let go of his squeezed hand.
‘Could we talk privately?’ he asked Tope. He glanced at the wife. ‘Nothing personal, but…’
‘Ooh, I understand. Why don’t you take him up to your room, Jezzer? I could bring a drink up for you both. Tea, coffee, something stronger?’
‘Tea, milk, no sugar, would be excellent, thanks.’
‘Consider it done.’ She bit her bottom lip and Donaldson saw that her top set of teeth were like tombstones.
‘Yeah, yeah, come on up,’ Tope said. ‘And I’ll have a brew too, luv.’ Tope steered his visitor toward the stairs. ‘First on left.’
Donaldson had to duck on the stairs as he went up, then also to get into Tope’s room, which was a back bedroom.
‘You’ve got your own rumpus room?’
‘Yeah… no kids,’ he said wistfully.
Donaldson had expected an all-singing, all-dancing technology show. Instead, he found the room to have been kitted out as a study but with plenty of bookshelves and cupboards. The books on display were mainly thick, Tom Clancy type techno-thrillers, but there was a good selection about computers too. He had also expected to be faced by a barrage of computer screens and stacks and bits ’n’ pieces, and satellite dishes, but all there was, was a desktop PC and a laptop next to it. Knowing what he knew about Tope, Donaldson was a tad disappointed that he wasn’t looking at a room from somewhere like Bletchley Park.
‘You OK?’ Tope asked him.
‘Yeah… kind of thought…’
‘Bells and whistles? Was once like that, but truth is you don’t need all that much crap these days. Just keep your machines up to date and Bob’s your uncle. Although I do own an exact replica of an Enigma decoding machine.’
‘I’d like to see that,’ Donaldson said. ‘One of those things we Yanks liberated from a German U-boat, if I’m not mistaken.’ He saw Tope stiffen at the twist of history. ‘Only kidding,’ he said.
‘Mm.’ Tope sounded doubtful. ‘Anyway — take a pew.’
He sat on one of the two office chairs and it creaked under his weight. He’d brought along his own laptop, which he hoisted on to the desk. ‘I want you to do some hacking for me.’
O’Connell was deep inside Billy Costain’s chest cavity when Henry’s mobile phone rang again. He was glad of the diversion because the atmosphere between him and the pathologist wasn’t really conducive to a pleasant post-mortem, if such a thing could exist. She had turned to ice since he’d snubbed her and the already chilly temperature of the mortuary seemed to have a second layer to it.
It was Donaldson on the phone. ‘Need to see you urgently, Henry,’ who didn’t need to be a detective to detect the extremely worried tone.
‘I’m up to my neck in blood and guts,’ Henry told him. ‘Only about a quarter of the way through a PM.’
‘How about I see you there, then — half an hour?’
‘I take it you’ve unveiled something of interest?’
‘Understatement, buddy, understatement.’