Gordon Ferris - Truth Dare kill

“Get out, Wilson. Or rather, don’t come in.”

He ignored me and slouched in. “Looking for this?” He drew out a folder from under his arm and waved it at me as he approached. He tossed it on my desk and slumped, chest pumping, into my visitor chair. It groaned under him. I wished his heart would pop.

I looked at my clippings file and then at him. There was still some contusion about the left eye, and his mouth looked swollen. Better. I was through playing games. I picked up my smart pen and unscrewed the top. This time I was on my own ground. If he attacked me I’d see how long he could fight with a pen in his fat throat. My voice was cold. “Did you have a warrant?”

He smirked. “By the book.”

“Yours, or the police manual?”

“All proper. Of course.”

“I’d like to see the section that allows you to steal a man’s whisky.”

His smile widened. “Thirsty work.” Then his face closed. “Why are you so interested in these murders, Mr McRae?”

Mister now. What was going on? “I told you before, Wilson, I was curious. That’s all. Professional curiosity.”

He reached out, took the folder and flicked through the clippings. He was obviously intimate with it. He found what he was looking for and laid it out flat on my desk, facing me. It was the one reporting the arrest of the “Ripper”.

My handwritten Ha bloody ha! leapt out from the page.

“Why did you write that?”

“Because I knew you had the wrong man.”

“And how did you know that? You cleverer than all of us down at the Yard? That it?”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it? The man you arrested didn’t fit with the picture that was coming through from the newspapers.”

“Oh, really. Got that from the papers, did you? Wasn’t because you knew who the real murderer was?”

“I don’t have to answer any more of these daft questions.”

He sighed. “Not here. Not now. But you could, if I was to arrest you.”

“What the hell for Wilson? You’re flying a kite.”

“For the murder of three women in London. Not to mention the little incident in France.”

“That’s bullshit! Total shite!” I was furious and terrified at the same time.

“Is it? After our little set-to the other night, I got a warrant, McRae. Saw your personal file at the SOE. Documents missing, weren’t there? But there was a note on top. Said you weren’t to get any information about events or people in the SOE if you came looking. Made me wonder. Didn’t find the missing papers on you when you were arrested for breaking and entering. Had a little hunch. I’m good at hunches. Asked for your old boss’s file, Major Caldwell. What did I find?”

I knew what he found. My stomach was knotted with the terror of what he would do with that information.

“Seems you’re a handy man with a knife.”

“There’s no proof!”

“Maybe. But it made me wonder about our little run-in in Soho. Made me wonder what you were doing there. So I got another warrant and found this.” He stabbed the clippings with his finger. His nails were shredded and split like a miner’s.

But they’d seen no such honest work.

“So what? It’s no crime to read the newspapers or keep bits of them.” Which was true, but I knew how it looked.

“No, but it’s adding up. It’s all adding up, McRae. Circumstantial to be sure, but it’s beginning to come together.” He leaned over the desk at me. “You ever pay little visits to Soho, McRae? You know, for fun? Like New Year’s Day? If we start showing your photo about the place, would they recognise you?”

This was too close. I panicked. “No more than they’d recognise you, Wilson, if I started asking around.”

His face purpled and his mouth worked under his puffy cheeks.

“I think some day soon you’ll make the one mistake, McRae, leave the one clue, that ties you to one of these.” He pointed at the paper. “And when you do, we’ll have you back down the nick and this time you’ll stay there. Until of course…

“He mimicked a noose going round my neck and pulling tight.

He tossed the clippings folder on my desk and clumped out the room. I sipped at my cup to stop the shakes. The tea was stone cold, but I drank it anyway. Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, it had. Trouble was, I could see Wilson’s point of view. Leaving aside his tendency to punch first and ask questions after, my own police training would have sent me down the same road. I would have made myself a suspect if I’d been in his shoes. And he didn’t know about my blackouts, those little gaps in my life that were unaccounted for except for the cryptic – insane? – scribbled residue.

Hell, in the grey world of circumstantial evidence I could make a case for Wilson himself being investigated. God knows what he got up to in Soho with those poor girls Mary said he misused. Did it get out of hand? He certainly had the violent tendencies. Doc Thompson would have him in a straitjacket in a flash.

I’ve found that when there’s so much shit coming your way that you’re going to drown in it, the best thing to do is start swimming. It still stinks, but you can take your mind off it by concentrating on staying afloat. That’s how I survived when my unit of the Seaforths was under fire from tanks, machine guns, artillery and Stuka bombers in the desert.

My leg was broken and bleeding from being blown against one of our Shermans by a near miss. I stopped the bleeding with a tourniquet made from the belt of a man who no longer needed to hold his trousers up. I made a splint from the ribs of the wrecked canopy of a truck. I collected three water bottles and started my hobble towards my own lines. Or at least where my own lines had been yesterday; we moved a lot. It was a long three days; I had to keep stopping to release the tourniquet before my leg dropped off. I holed up in a hollow I scraped in the tough desert sand during the day and hobbled slowly in the night. The war was going on around me, but all I concentrated on was walking.

It worked. I’m here. It was time to tie on my tourniquet again, set my compass and make a start.

I took my pad out and wrote two names at the top. On the left, the dowdy Mrs Caldwell, on the right, the elegant Kate. Then I started to write what I knew under both of them. Then I wrote down the simple questions I wanted to put to them both.

Kate Are you also known as Mrs Catriona Caldwell?

What’s your real relationship with Tony Caldwell?

What was really wrong with you in the hospital the night of the bomb?

Why hire me to find out if he was dead? You could have done it yourself.

Liza Are you or are you not married to Tony C?

Why don’t you care enough that your husband is dead?

Did he mention the murder to you? What else did he say about me?

Why are you lying to me?

Finally I stared at both columns trying to plan what action to take. I needed to move fast; Wilson was bearing down on me. But I also needed to move with circumspection; I didn’t think I’d get anywhere by phoning up Kate or Liza and asking if I could pop round for tea and questions. I thought about where they lived, and then the decisions became very easy. Liza’s house bordered the heath.

It would give me terrain to operate from.

The next day, good and early, I got out my sole remaining screwdriver and my hammer. The screwdriver was fine and thin and it didn’t take much bashing on the edge of the iron stove to knock up a snake-ended pick. It wasn’t the quality of my bike-spoke versions but it would have to do.

I dug out my oldest clothes: a tough jacket of Harris tweed that still smelled of my father, corduroy trousers, boots and a good flat cap. I put them on over vest, shirt and a sleeveless pullover my mother had knitted. When I got out of hospital she’d sent down a cardboard box full of my old stuff, on the mail train that stops at Kilpatrick on its way south from Glasgow.