“No,” said Shelley firmly. “It wouldn’t be fair to Greg.”
Her husband was divided between respect for his wife’s loyalty and annoyance at the realization that, if she wouldn’t go into the shed, he was going to have to find another way of murdering her.
“All right. If that’s what you feel...” And, as a petulant punctuation to his words, Dan slammed the shed door shut.
Things happened very quickly then. Just at the moment Greg heard the clunk of the wooden door latch finding its slot and locking him in, he was aware of a sudden roar of combustion behind him. He turned back to the inferno that had once been a sofa-bed, and saw flames licking along the floor towards him from every direction.
Greg Lincoln had been a very good planner, after all. His twenty-minute twine fuse hadn’t really gone out. Burning more slowly because of the damp, its spark had still crept inexorably towards the knothole and the pool of petrol inside the shed.
Realizing that that’s what must have happened was the last thought of Greg Lincoln’s unlamented life.
And his last sight, through the flames and the cracking windows of the garden shed, was his wife Shelley, held in the protective arms of the gardener Dan. Which was where she would stay for the remainder of her very happy life.
Finders, Weepers
Adrian Magson
The runner stands blinking into the sunlight like a small, pudgy rodent. He’s wearing a neat Paisley-print silk dressing gown and leather slippers, and looks like one of the Wise Men from a nativity play.
I don’t need to check the photograph to see we’ve got the right man. Plumper than when the snap was taken, and wearing a tan he didn’t have a year ago, but it’s him: Gerald Martin Bream, once of south London — until he decided to go runabout with a bagful of his employer’s money.
Problem is, he’s got one hand behind his back and I can’t see what he’s holding.
Even small, paunchy rodents have teeth.
I look at the large brown envelope in my hand. “Uh... Mrs Tangmere? I’ve got a package.”
Bream’s gaze slips instinctively to the envelope, which holds a couple of old magazines, but he shakes his head.
“This is Mandeville Cottage, though, right?”
“Yes. But there’s no Mrs anybody here. I’m renting.”
“Oh. Must be a computer glitch. Sorry.”
I leave the Paisley-print dressing gown and go back to the car where my partner, Reece, is waiting. We’ll come back later and pick him up.
Reece and I are people finders. We get called in when all other methods have been exhausted. Understandably, not all of the people who disappear want to be found — it’s why they did a runner in the first place. Among their reasons for going are debt, guilt, anger, confusion, loss and fear. Fear is the biggie; it makes people go deeper than most. Fear of death, fear of retribution — sometimes fear of fear itself.
Bream, though, doesn’t quite fit this category; he’d just got greedy without thinking it through; an accountant with dreams of freedom. After a lot of pointless dithering — mostly to do with professional reputation — the company had called in Reece and me.
By then, Bream had probably already spent a lot of the stolen money trying to hide his tracks. But he’d been dumb enough to hang on to his mobile phone. One call to the number, pretending to be a call centre offering a big cash prize, and he’d given away where he was hiding.
All we have to do now is go back and pick him up when he’s dropped his guard, and we’ll collect our fee. We don’t always get asked to take the runners back, but Bream is what we call a “take-away” — the client wants him on a plate.
Back down the lane, Reece is in the Range Rover, scowling over the Telegraph crossword. He’s stuck on twenty-six down.
“It’s our boy,” I confirm, sliding in alongside him. “Dinner or coffee?”
“Too many letters.” He hurls the Telegraph into the back, a sign the crossword isn’t going too well. “I need sustenance.” Another sign.
We find a decent restaurant, eat dinner, then go back for Bream. We park down the lane again and walk up to the house and through the front door.
But someone has got there before us.
Bream’s Paisley-print gown is no longer neat, due to two bullet holes in the front.
Unfortunately, Bream is still inside it.
“Stone me,” says Reece. We split and do a rapid tour of the place to make sure no one is waiting to pounce on us. It’s soon obvious that nothing has been touched. Even if we’ve never been inside a place before, we can tell if a place is naturally tidy or if it’s been cleaned up after a search. This one looks normal.
I feel uncomfortable and peer out of the window. The street lights are just coming on, and if anyone is waiting for us to come out again they’ll have a clear shot.
“This is some weird shit,” mutters Reece, staring around the room. “If they were after the money, why didn’t they toss the place?”
“Maybe that wasn’t the point.” I peer closely at Bream’s body. Just visible in the skin of his upper chest are two vivid impressions, like knuckle marks, only deeper.
He’d been punched before being shot. One of his slippers is across the other side of the room, confirmation of a struggle, as if he’d been forced back in off the doorstep.
We hoof it back to the car. Death doesn’t happen often in our business — at least, not by our hand. We’ve tracked down people who died before we got to them, and we once found a man who had a heart attack the day after he returned home.
But nothing like this.
I ring Jennings. He’s a sort of Mr Fixit who makes his living in various ways, mostly security related. Rumour says he used to be a high-level government spook. He approached us not long ago when one of his regular stringers was off sick, and we’d picked up several tracing jobs since then. Some were on the run after doing something illicit; others were unfortunate souls who went walkabout with no rational explanation. Either way, someone wanted them back and was willing to pay.
Jennings doesn’t react well to the news.
“What the hell were you wasting time on Bream for?” he explodes, as if we’ve been laying waste to the home counties with a flame-thrower. “Melinda Blake is your current assignment.”
Melinda Blake, late of Her Majesty’s armed forces, is a private investigator whom nobody has seen for over a month, which is apparently out of character. Jennings sent us the brief a week ago, with a key to her flat so we could do an audit of her belongings. It wasn’t going well, but along the way, we’d tripped over Bream’s trail. Sometimes multi-tasking does that; one door closes, another opens.
“Change of plan,” I explain. “We got a lead to Bream’s whereabouts. It paid off. Well, almost. Blake’s next on the list. What’s the problem?”
“Leave it,” he says after a lengthy pause. “I’ll deal with the Bream thing. Get on Blake — and ring me when you find her.” He clicks off before I can use the phrase I keep for people who upset me.
The Corpos Fitness Centre is a modern, single-storey building near Battersea Park, catering to those who like their exercise in air-conditioned comfort. Forget pounding the streets in the wind and rain; that’s for freaks, army types and London Marathon wannabes.
Melinda Blake, according to a membership card we’d found in her flat, is a member, so it seems a good place to start our search.
Finding where runners might have gone can be a laborious process. Nine times out of ten, there’s a link, a clue, no matter how tenuous. Usually it’s to a place from their past life — maybe their childhood — even somewhere they’ve fantasized about but never been. Reece and I work on the basis that tucked away in the fabric they leave behind, there’s always something, often overlooked by friends and family.