'Who was it?' asked Pringle, eagerly.
'Me.'
He looked up at McGurk. 'Your brother-in-law and I have someone in common. Her name's Rhian Lewis. She's a final-year medical student. I let something slip the other night; I also fixed it for her to sit in with Sarah on Mr Nobody's autopsy. She, in turn, passed it on, in similar circumstances, to your man Blacklock.
'I've spoken to Alan Royston already. Now I want to apologise to you both; to you, Dan, for compromising your investigation and to you Jack, for getting you implicated.'
'Not your fault, sir,' said Pringle, tactfully. 'We all talk in the dark.' He paused. 'The Margot girl's older sister, right?'
'Right.'
McGurk said nothing; Martin glanced at him again. 'I want him sorted, Jack.
'I don't want you to ruin your sister's life, necessarily; whether you tell her or not, that's down to your judgement. But I want you to let that brother-in-law of yours know from me that if he ever goes near Rhian again, far less tries to use her to get sensitive information out of me, then he is fucking dog-meat. 'Understood?'
The giant Sergeant looked down at him, his face thunderous. 'Don't you worry, sir. After I've finished with him he won't be touching anything female for a long time, especially not my sister or your friend.'
25
'Where do we start?' Stevie Steele looked round the big living room of Shell Cottage. The blinds were open; outside the untypical spell of early summer sunshine continued unbroken. The tide was out and people were walking, in ones and twos, on the wet sands, some of them giving their dogs a chance to run off the leash.
'The most obvious place,' said McGuire, beside him in the doorway. 'With that desk over there.' He looked around the rest of the room. Smith's clothes were gone, bagged as evidence and sent to the lab; the whisky glass was gone too. All of the ornaments which he had seen on the previous Saturday, each one carefully positioned, now stood together on the table.
The room seemed souless; Mario thought of a house which he and Maggie had looked at before their marriage — the home of a dead person, being sold by her executor. It had given them the same chill that came now from Alec Smith's cottage.
'That's an antique, that thing. There may be a panel in it, a secret drawer, that Arthur Dorward's lot missed.'
'It couldn't be big enough to hold much in the way of papers,' Steele pointed out.
'No, but there could be something inside it that tells us where they are.'
'True.' The Sergeant crossed the room and examined the heavy desk. He slid out every drawer in the two pedestals, pulling each one free from its runners and turning it over, looking for anything that might have been taped underneath. He looked inside the empty space which they had left, then examined the panel above the kneehole, pressing it but finding it unyielding.
Finally, he and McGuire lifted the empty carcass of the desk from its position beneath the window and examined its front. The Inspector leaned over, peering at the section which mirrored the central panel on the other side. He looked at it, at the line of its inlay to the rest of the woodwork, then he blew, gently, at the joints, sending motes of dust flying, and rapped on it with his knuckles, quickly and firmly as if he was knocking on a door.
With a click, the panel sprung two inches clear of its surround, revealing a shallow drawer. 'How about that then?' he said, beaming with undisguised pride.
'Papa Viareggio — my mother's father — had a desk like this with a secret drawer; and no-one knew about it but him… and me. When I was ten, he told me about it, and showed me how to open it. When he died, six years later, he left it to me in his will. He was a well-off man, my Italian grandfather; owned a chain of fish-and-chip shops. My uncle inherited the business, my mother got a big bequest, and he left ten grand each to my two girl cousins. I was his only grandson and yet all he left me was his bloody desk.
'My mother was bloody livid; she said he had always been a crazy man. She was going to ask my granny to keep the desk and give me ten grand like the girls, but I told her to wind her neck in. "That's what Papa wanted," I said, "that's what's going to happen." So they brought the desk to our house and I made space for it in my room.
'The first time my folks were out, I tapped the panel, just like Papa Viareggio told me, and the drawer popped out, just like that one. There was a key inside to a safe deposit box and a letter from Papa giving me the address of the bank where it was kept, and another addressed to the manager. My letter said, "When you turn twenty-one you can open this. Meantime, sell the bloody desk; it s a cumbersome thing but it 's worth a few quid." Some man, my Papa.'
'What did you do?' Steele asked, fascinated.
'I did as he told me. The desk was far better quality than this one. I got ten grand clear for it at auction, the same as he left the girls… he never liked them. When I was twenty-one, I opened the safe deposit box and found all the paperwork related to a trust fund in the Cayman Islands. Papa had set it up with fifty grand when I was ten and it had been growing big-time ever since: it still is. I won't tell you how much it's worth, but the income — all legal, tax paid and everything — will pay off our mortgage by the time I'm forty.'
'What happened to the business?'
McGuire laughed. 'Ah, Stevie son, that's another story. Just before he died, Papa put together this plan to float it as Viareggio pic and develop it, nationally and internationally, on a franchise basis. A week before he was due to push the button on it, he took a heart attack in his office and dropped down dead. My uncle didn't think it was such a good idea, so he cancelled everything.
'Every time I drive past a Harry Ramsden, I think of my Uncle Beppe, and I marvel at what a stupid fucker he is.'
He looked at the desk again. 'Alec's estate might get a couple of grand for this thing, but that's all. Still, let's be careful with it.' Gently, he drew out the hidden drawer. Inside, the two detectives saw a small cloth pouch, secured by a red drawstring, a box, and three keys on a ring. McGuire picked up the bag, loosened the binding cord, and slid back the cloth to reveal the muzzle of a small, black, oiled automatic pistol.
'Nine millimetre something or other, I'd say…' He looked closely at the barrel. 'Beretta, I think.'
Steele opened the box. 'Ammo,' he said.
'Aye, and just as illegal as this gun.' McGuire took the weapon out, checked that it was unloaded, then secured it in its pouch once more and slipped it into his pocket. 'Whatever Alec was up to, he must have perceived a threat, to have taken the risk of keeping this. Even for an ex-SB guy, possession of a firearm and ammunition would have meant prison for sure.'
He picked up the keys and tossed them in his hand. 'I wonder what these are for?' He looked at them closely. 'This one's for a Chubb mortise lock and this one's a McLaren; both top quality. All the locks in this place are either Era or Yale, so these are for somewhere else. I wonder where? And the third key; see how thin it is? Odd-looking; not for a door, I'd say'
'For a safe-deposit box, maybe?'
'Maybe.' McGuire scowled suddenly. 'The fact that there's nothing else in the bloody drawer makes me fear that we ain't going to find anything in the whole bloody house. If there was a pointer to a stash of photos and records, this is where we'd have found it, I'm sure. On the other hand, these keys might be a pointer of a sort; maybe he did have an office somewhere and maybe Maggie's search will turn it up.'
He dropped the keys into his pocket beside the gun, then took off his jacket and laid it across the desk-top. 'Let's get on with taking the place apart, anyway. I've been wrong before, so you never know.'