‘No cops.’
‘Absolutely no cops. We can handle this,’ I said with a degree of confidence that I certainly didn’t feel.
Chapter 53
Professor Annabelle Weston looked at her watch and pushed aside a second-year student’s essay that she had been marking.
Jungian archetypes in contemporary graphic novels. She sighed dismissively and picked up the telephone, tapping in some numbers. After a while, the phone she was calling clicked into a recorded message – she waited for it to finish.
‘Laura, this is Professor Weston, just to remind you that you were due for a tutorial. I can understand if you’re not coming in but I just wanted to make sure you’re all right. Please give me a call.’
She hung up and twirled a perfectly manicured finger around a lock of her strawberry-blonde hair. She looked at the first paragraph of the essay again and put it to one side once more, unable to concentrate.
She snatched the phone up again, consulted a business card that was sitting on her desk and dialled another number. After a second or two it was answered.
‘Dan Carter.’
She smiled a little hesitantly. ‘Dan, it’s Professor Weston. Annabelle.’
‘Hi,’ he said and she could hear the warmth in his voice, picture the smile at the other end of the line. He had a nice smile. He was bright, too, she could tell that much.
‘I just wondered if there had been any developments your end? I have spoken to the police, of course, and all they can tell me is that they are pursuing all lines of enquiry. Which I take to mean that they have no idea.’
‘They’ll be doing all they can.’
‘I guess they are. I just feel so helpless. I feel like I should be doing something.’
‘I know it’s hard. But remember what the poet said. “They also serve who only stand and wait”.’
‘Shakespeare?’
‘John Milton. He was referring to his blindness. And even if it does feel like we are stumbling around in the dark, professor, we’re not. There is light ahead and we will guide Hannah home by it.’
‘You sound like something has happened.’
‘Just experience. Things happen for a reason. And when we understand why – then we can take steps to deal with them.’
‘And you are close to an understanding?’
‘I believe we are working towards that, yes.’
‘And you’ll let me know when you can?’
‘We will.’
‘Thanks, then.’
Annabelle Weston hung up, running her thumb and the first finger of her right hand around the wedding-ring finger of her left. There was still a faint white band from where her wedding ring had been removed some years earlier.
A slight smile tugged wistfully at the corners of her lips. I wonder what Dan Carter would be like in bed? she thought to herself.
Her smile faded as she picked the phone up for a third time and hit the speed-dial button.
‘Kht Mn Qlby…’ she said as the call was answered. ‘It’s me.’
Chapter 54
Gary Webster had the word Mechanic written in the job section of his out-of-date passport.
He also had a medium-sized bodywork and repair shop in Marylebone not far from the thrust and bustle of the High Street that would stand testimony to the truth of it. Certainly as far as the taxman was concerned that was how he made his money. Crash repairs, bodywork, paint jobs, brake and wheel replacements.
In reality, though, he had a number of other profitable sidelines from which he derived his main income. None of them legal.
He was sitting in his local, The Prince Regent – what he called a proper Victorian boozer – on Marylebone High Street, drinking a pint of Abbot Ale when I walked in and went up to him. I sat on the stool next to his.
‘Dan,’ he said, gesturing to the barmaid, and holding out his hand for me to shake. I waved his hand away.
Gary Webster had a grip like a Russian arm-wrestler overloaded on steroids. He was a good three inches shorter than me and a good few inches off the chest too. I’m a forty-four long and he was about a thirty-eight, I reckoned. But his forearms were like legs of pork and I hadn’t shaken hands with him since he’d left the fifth form and gone to work with his dad. Not because I hadn’t seen him, but because I didn’t want my hand mangled.
I slapped him on the shoulder instead and took the bottle of Corona the barmaid had brought across for me. It wasn’t the first time I had been in that particular pub.
‘How’s business?’ he asked.
I waggled my hand in a banking-aeroplane movement. ‘I’ve had better days,’ I said.
‘Why you contacted your old pal, I guess?’
I nodded in agreement. ‘Why I got in touch.’ I took a long pull on the Corona.
‘So… this is calling for something outside the legitimate range of your normal operations?’ He took a pull of his pint.
‘Again, your guess would be correct,’ I concurred.
‘What do you need?’
‘Same as last time.’
He smiled sardonically. ‘Nothing for Tonto?’
He was referring to Sam. They didn’t get on. ‘Sam doesn’t touch them – you know that.’
‘Yeah, I know that. Wuss.’
‘Say that to his face.’
Gary grinned. ‘I would if I could reach that high.’
I drained the Corona and he did likewise with two deep swallows of his ale.
‘I don’t know how you can drink that stuff. It looks like pond water.’
He stood up and slapped my shoulder. ‘It’s the canonical ale, Dan. Puts lead in your pencil – and might in your mitre.’
We took Gary’s car. Nothing too flash on the outside: an oldish Mercedes saloon. A three-litre S320 about fourteen years old – you could probably pick one up for under a grand.
You wouldn’t get one like this, though. Gary had tweaked it a little. Putting the kind of muscle under the bonnet that can get you from nought to sixty in the time it takes a patrol cop to switch on his siren, and out of sight before he’s made it into third gear. It wasn’t registered to him and he never made the mistake of boy-racering it through town. Time would come when its secret powers would be needed and when that time came he would make a nice little earner out of it.
Gary always drew a line between business and pleasure. That was what marked the difference between the professionals and the amateurs in his game.
You could feel the sheer power of the engine, though, even as it purred in low gear through Marylebone High Street. But it was muscle of a very different kind that had brought me to see Gary Webster.
The killing kind.
Chapter 55
Ten minutes later we were in a lock-up about a quarter of a mile from Gary Webster’s garage.
The place wasn’t registered in his name. Was registered, in fact, to a bogus person in a bogus company should anyone want to look too closely.
Gary pulled the door shut behind him and flicked on the overhead strip lights. In the centre of the room was an almost new Jaguar XK five-litre V8 convertible. About seventy-three grand and upwards the last time I looked at one in the windows of the showroom in Berkeley Street, Mayfair.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there waiting to have its wheels balanced and a bit of detailing done.
Gary led me past the car to the back of the lock-up. An old-fashioned safe was to one side amidst a pile of used motor parts. He spun the dial and opened the safe, taking out a pump-action shotgun and a semi-automatic pistol that he handed to me. I slipped them into a holdall I had brought along for that purpose.
He reached in again and brought out a couple of boxes of ammunition, which I put in the bag as well. Then I pulled up one of the towels that I had put into the bag earlier to cover everything and zipped the bag closed.
‘Is it a good idea keeping stuff like this here, Gary?’ I asked.
‘The wife doesn’t like them at home.’