Martin Edwards - Suspicious Minds

Kuiper made a faint movement with the upper half of his body, a painful attempt at a shrug. “Why not? But there was a reason, actually. Bryan Grealish was on their board.”

“So?”

“It was Claire’s idea to go for him. Grealish was at odds with her father, she said. I never knew the details. Some business dispute… you’ll know better than me. Stirrup hated the guy, so Claire did too. She was still a daddy’s girl at heart. More than he deserved, the fat old prat. So she wanted to teach Grealish a lesson.”

Something occurred to Harry. “And the Majestic? The glass in the greens the other week? Another of your little japes?”

“You’ve got it.” Hurt Kuiper might be, but he couldn’t keep a faint note of satisfaction out of his voice. “Our first attempt at — contamination.”

Harry stared hard at the boy. Even in the dark he didn’t like the look that had stolen over Kuiper’s face. It was an ageless look, an end-justifies-the-means look, a look a Nazi scientist might have worn when discussing his ideas for improving the human race.

“Call it a trial run. We didn’t ask for money, never contacted Grealish once. We simply wanted to prove we could bring it off, that’s all. That was the spur. Once we’d done the Majestic, we knew we could try something bigger. And make real money.”

“Claire didn’t need cash. The only daughter of a rich man.”

“You don’t get it, do you? What’s the point of inherited wealth? There’s no challenge. We both agreed on that. The ransom was to make people sit up and take notice. They might not know who we were. But we’d have them dancing to our tune.”

Harry indicated the hole in the ground. “Who decided to run the campaign from here?”

“She showed me the place. She’d noticed there was something here one day when she was mooching round, but she hadn’t the strength to lug that boulder to one side. I opened it up. Nobody had gone down there for years, that was obvious. It’s an old ice-house, I think, left in ruins and overgrown. The perfect spot to keep the cans and stuff. Tell you what though, when I heard the police had come sniffing round looking for Stirrup’s bloody wife, I pissed myself. Needn’t have. Good old PC Plod, can’t see the nose in front of his face.”

“And Jack never knew the ice-house existed?”

“No way. Though it’s plenty big enough down there. Room for two. Till the ransom thing took over, we had another use for it.”

“She was only fifteen.”

“Yeah.” Another throaty chuckle. “But all woman.”

“All you could cope with, isn’t that nearer the mark?”

“Jealous? She wasn’t a… shit, they’re here!”

The wailing of the police sirens pierced the night air. Two cars came screaming along the drive, pulling up close to where Harry and Peter Kuiper were waiting. Harry got to his feet.

“I forgot to tell you — you’ll need a good lawyer. I’ve called a man called Pike. He’ll be looking for you at the police station. He’s all right. His advice will be simple: say nothing. Okay?”

He walked towards the detectives, not interested in any words of thanks. None of the wary faces of the men who had climbed out of the cars were familiar to him. In charge was a tall inspector, sandy-haired and supercilious.

“Mr. Devlin? The name’s Swarbrook. Detective Inspector. I understand you think you may have apprehended someone who has been demanding money with menaces from a local business?”

With such a talent for circumlocution Swarbrook ought to be a lawyer, Harry thought. But he simply said, “He’s over there.”

“I see. We’ll need a full statement from you, of course. The necessary…”

The noise of another car engine interrupted him. Someone else was coming up the drive, headlights tracing a path through the trees. It wasn’t a panda car this time. Brakes squealed as the driver found his path blocked by the police cars parked near the front of the house. A door banged. Harry peered through the gloom and saw two figures getting out of a Jaguar. Jack Stirrup had come home.

“What the bloody hell is going on here?”

Harry moved to meet his client, a couple of paces ahead of DI Swarbrook.

“Jack, it’s me. Been having fun and games in your absence. It’s…”

But his voice trailed away as he looked beyond the red face of his client to the person who had been a passenger in the Jaguar. A lithe, long-legged woman with a mass of frizzy brown hair. The nervous way she was biting her lip contrasted oddly with the confident provocation of her tight black dress. Harry didn’t know who she was. One thing he did know: this wasn’t Alison Stirrup. Nor, by the look of her, someone Jack had invited back simply for a quiet evening’s game of snooker.

“Why did Peter do it?” asked Valerie.

They were together on the sofa in her Crosby flat. A candle’s unsteady light cast strange shadows across the room. After a Mexican meal washed down with plenty of wine, Harry’s mood was mellow. He hoped for once in his life he might end the night feeling more like Warren Beatty than Woody Allen.

He found it hard to believe that only twenty-four hours had passed since the bizarre events at Prospect House. The discovery of Kuiper’s cache of contaminated foodstuffs and of the other woman whose existence Jack Stirrup had kept so quiet. Explanations seemed to Harry to have lasted half the night before Swarbrook was willing to let him crawl home to bed. And even then, much had been left unexplained.

How much better it was to be here with Valerie. She was curled up beside him, her pale green frock revealing much more than it concealed, her Giorgio fragrance deepening the intoxication of the moment. All evening they had talked of things other than Peter Kuiper’s arrest and Jack Stirrup’s embarrassment. The conversation had ranged from sixties music and Entertaining Mr. Sloane to Jim Thompson’s books and Chandler’s screenplay for Double Indemnity, while sixties love songs played in the background. Now Harry was relaxed and ready to tell her about the previous evening, for the only taboo tonight was talk of going home.

“He had at least a hundred thousand reasons. You can do a lot with the kind of ransom he was after. All the same, I don’t believe the money was everything to Peter.”

“What else, then? The lure of living dangerously?”

“If you like. He wanted to put himself beyond the law. Above it. Remember Rope ?”

She nodded. Her love of Hitchcock movies exceeded even his. He slipped an arm round her bare shoulder.

“Or its true life equivalent, the Leopold and Loeb case? Peter reminds me a little of what’s his name, Nathan Leopold. The clever student who felt superior to the outside world and turned to crime to prove it.”

“Nietzsche has a lot to answer for.”

“Doesn’t he play in goal for Bayern Munich? Anyway, Peter had the perfect help-mate in Claire Stirrup. A young girl, intelligent enough but naive, adoring and eager to share in whatever scheme her boyfriend-who-could-do-no-wrong might dream up. An experiment in blackmail which promised a small fortune as well as the thrill of teenage rebellion was simply too much to resist.”

Valerie moved her face close to his. “ Folie a deux. Where two people share the same delusion.”

“Folly is right,” he said.

He looked into her eyes, trying to read what was in her mind. His fingers traced an invisible pattern on the smooth skin of her shoulder. He had never possessed the gift granted to so many other men of being able to slip at will into slickly seductive chat whenever a woman gave the slightest encouragement. The sexy lines refused to spring to his lips.