Brian Freemantle - Two Women

Carver was so tired he had literally to force himself to move, simply to walk back into the dressing room, where he found by feel more than sight the valise, in which he packed the five-year-old files from the nightstand and stumbled back downstairs into the study to add the will, diary and the four photographs of the laughing, dark-haired girl named Anna.

Jane still lay on her back but there weren’t any more sobs. He let his clothes lie where they fell and eased as carefully as he could into bed beside her, anxious to avoid movement or contact that might awaken her. There was no instinctive, automatic shift at his presence.

Who, wondered Carver, was Anna?

‘So what the hell happened!’ demanded Burcher, the soft voice unaccustomedly loud.

‘He wasn’t up to it. He croaked,’ said a crinkle-haired, heavily built man.

‘Who are you?’ said Burcher.

‘Who wants to know?’

‘I want to know because the Families want to know. Because they’re not happy.’ Burcher thought again how wise he’d been letting the people he represented know that he was strictly adhering to the pyramid procedure. There were far more people in the restaurant back room than when he’d last been there. The attitudes and atmosphere were bravado.

‘He’s my caporegime, Paulo Brescia,’ wheezed Emilio Delioci.

‘Were you there?’ Burcher asked the man and knew at once from the discomfited shift that he hadn’t been.

‘I sent people.’

Burcher let the silence build and when he spoke he was quiet-voiced again but sounded every word, as if he were tasting it as he wanted them to taste it. ‘Aren’t you aware of how important George Northcote was to the Families?’

‘He was ours,’ said Emilio Delioci.

Burcher shook his head. ‘You were allowed to believe that as a mark of respect. Northcote created a system that benefited not just New York but every other Family in this country and so every other Family in this country is going to be as sore as they are in New York and that’s as sore as hell. You’re close to being put out of business.’

‘You can’t threaten us like that, asshole!’ said Brescia.

‘You want to put that to the test, asshole?’ challenged Burcher. ‘Let’s all of us get something very straight and very clearly understood. What I say is what New York say: you insult me like some bit player in The Godfather, you insult New York and if they feel like it – if they feel you are not doing what you’ve been asked to do, then…’ Burcher extended his hand towards Brescia and snapped his fingers dismissively, ‘… you’re gone. History that no one remembers. Have I made that very straight and very clear to everyone here?’

‘I don’t want any misunderstandings,’ said Delioci.

‘Neither do I,’ said Burcher. ‘So I’ll ask again. What happened?’

‘My people told Northcote they wanted what he’d held back,’ said Brescia, all the truculence gone. ‘He said he’d given you the message: that that was how it was going to be. They tried to persuade him. He suddenly went stiff and died on them. They made it look like an accident: that’s how the local radio and newspapers are reporting it.’

‘So somewhere there’s a load of stuff that could cause us a lot of harm?’

The capo smirked and Burcher realized the man was playing to the rest of the audience in the room. Brescia said: ‘He was being persuaded. There’s a guy taking over the firm, married to Northcote’s daughter. Carver. He knows all about it. And a woman, Janice Snow, did the computer entries.’

It could all be turned into a coup, Burcher decided. And if it could be, it would be his coup, not that of these half-assed small-timers. ‘What about the material Northcote was holding back?’

‘I told you, he passed out before they could get that out of him.’

‘What about in the house?’

‘There’s staff. We couldn’t get near it.’

‘Here’s what you’re going to do,’ said Burcher. ‘You’re going to send people back to Litchfield, to find some way in. You’re going to find out everything I need to know about this Carver guy. Use a legitimate private detective agency in the city. And you’re going to find out how much the woman, Janice Snow, knows. All that very straight and very clear?’

‘I don’t enjoy disrespect, Mr Burcher,’ said Delioci.

‘I mean no disrespect to you,’ said the lawyer. ‘I was told very specifically to pass on the feelings of those to whom we are all answerable and most specifically of all to ensure that everybody understood there are to be no more mistakes.’

‘I think you have done that,’ said the old man.

‘Then it’s been a good meeting,’ said Burcher. How much more, to his personal benefit, could he manipulate it? He wondered.

John Carver thought he’d prepared himself for what he had to do but he hadn’t. He gasped, aloud, and felt his legs begin to go at the sight of George Northcote’s body on the gurney. He instinctively snatched out for the table upon which the body actually lay, pulling further aside even more of the covering sheet and seeing more awfulness and when he tried to speak he couldn’t. What he tried to say came out as an unintelligible hiss. He finally managed: ‘Oh dear God,’ his voice still a dry whisper.

He felt Al Hibbert’s supportive hand at his elbow. The sheriff said: ‘Easy, John. Take it easy.’

‘I’m OK,’ croaked Carver, his voice better but only just. Stronger still he said: ‘What the hell happened to him? It’s like… it’s like he’s been flayed…’

Northcote’s face was practically non-existent and there was virtually no skin and most of the lion’s mane had been torn off, scalping the man. There seemed to be no skin either on much of Northcote’s chest, from which Carver had tugged the sheet. It was flat, not a body shape at all, and there was a lot of bone and grey, slimed viscera.

‘The mower got him first, then the tractor,’ said Hibbert.

‘No,’ refused Carver. ‘It isn’t possible. I saw the rig. The mower blades were covered, shielded against just such an accident. If he fell backwards he wouldn’t have been cut… skinned like that. He’d have maybe broken an arm or a leg on the protective covering but that’s all. And going backwards would have taken him away from the tractor, when it tipped over, not underneath it…’

‘That’s what Pete and I thought at first,’ said Hibbert, nodding to Simpson on the other side of the slab. ‘We stayed up there past midnight last night: got engineers in. Here’s how we worked it out. George goes too close to the dip, throwing the tractor sideways. The force of it going tips the mowing rig, which runs on its own motor. When George hits it, it’s upside down, the blades going full belt. Does that to him. The mower is wider than the tractor that’s pulling it. For a moment or two – God knows how long – it prevents the tractor going right over but swings it back towards where George has been tossed…’

‘He would have most likely been dead by then… unconscious, certainly,’ broke in Simpson. Belatedly the medical examiner put the sheet back over the corpse. ‘This is an odd one, sure. But I get a dozen accidents like this every year, guys driving operating – machinery they’re not used to… something goes wrong… bang, they’re dead…’

‘The tractor is heavier than the rig, finally makes it give way… we’ve got photographs of how it bent, when it finally wasn’t able to stop it going right over,’ picked up Hibbert. ‘And when it goes, there’s George right under the whole fucking thing.’

The perfect murder, thought Carver: the absolute, totally unprovable, perfect murder. Once you’re in, there’s only one way out. Out like George, in front of him although covered again by an inadequate sheet. Skinned alive. Not actually alive. Skinned by being thrust in and out of the mower blades to an agonizingly slow death. Would he have told them: given them what they wanted? He would have screamed. Been demented. Carver went to Simpson. ‘Charlie Jamieson examined him, day before yesterday. Says his blood pressure was so high he could have had a heart attack.’