Peter James - Dead Man’s Footsteps

‘Then when I told him to take me home, he tried to drag me out of the car, said I was an ungrateful bitch and he was going to show me what a proper shag was. I scratched the side of his face, then I hit the horn and suddenly there were headlights coming towards us. He panicked and drove me home.’

‘And?’

‘He didn’t say a word. I got out of the car and that was it. I used to see him around town from time to time, always with a different woman. Then someone told me he’d gone to Australia. Not far enough in my view.’

Ronnie sat in awkward silence. Lorraine crushed out her cigarette, which was burnt down to the filter, and lit another one. Finally Ronnie spoke. ‘He’s all right, Chad is. He was probably just pissed that night. Got a big ego, always had. You’ll find he’s mellowed now, with age.’

Lorraine was silent for a long while.

‘It’ll be all right, babe,’ Ronnie said. ‘It’ll work out. How many people get a chance of a totally new start in life?’

‘Some start,’ she said bitterly. ‘Where the person we are going to be totally dependent on once tried to rape me.’

‘You have a better plan?’ Ronnie snapped suddenly. ‘You have a better plan, tell me?’

Lorraine looked at him. He seemed different from before he’d gone to New York. And not just physically. It wasn’t just the beard and the shaven head, something else seemed to have changed. He seemed more assertive, harder.

Or maybe, because of the long absence, she was seeing him as he actually was for the first time.

No, she told him reluctantly, she didn’t have a better plan.

Abby, waiting on the leather sofa in Hugo Hegarty’s study, blew on her tea and sipped it. Then she took a biscuit. She hadn’t eaten any breakfast and felt in need of a sugar hit. Hegarty seemed to have been gone a long time before he finally returned.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said politely, and sat back down behind his desk. Then he looked at the stamps again for some moments. ‘These are all excellent quality,’ he said. ‘Mint condition. This is a very substantial collection.’

Abby smiled. ‘Thank you.’

‘And you’re looking to sell it all?’

‘Yes.’

‘What price do you have in mind?’

‘The catalogue value is just over four million pounds,’ she replied.

‘Yes, that would be about right. But I’m afraid no one’s going to pay you catalogue prices. Anyone who buys these will want a margin. And the better the provenance, the lower the margin, of course.’

‘Are you willing to buy them?’ she asked. ‘At a discounted price?’

‘Can you explain to me in more detail how they came to be in your hands? You said, last night, you were clearing out your aunt’s house?’

‘Yes.’

‘In Sydney, Australia?’

She nodded.

‘What was your aunt’s name?’

‘Anne Jennings.’

‘And do you have anything that can show me the chain of title?’

‘What do you need?’

‘A copy of her will. Perhaps you could get her lawyer to fax it to me? I don’t know what time of day it is there now.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Middle of the night, I think. He could do that tomorrow.’

‘And how much would you pay me for the collection?’

‘With kosher chain of title? I’d be prepared to pay around two and a half. Million.’

‘And without? Cash on the nail, now?’

He shook his head with a wry smile. ‘Not the way I operate, I’m afraid.’

‘I was told you were the man I should come and see.’

‘No, not me, not any more. Look, young lady, I’ll give you some advice. Break this collection down. This is too big. People are going to ask you questions. Break it right down. There are a few dealers here in the UK. Take one plate to one of them, another plate to another one. Maybe go to a few dealers abroad. Haggle with them. You don’t have to take their prices if you don’t like them. Sell them quietly, over a couple of years, and that way you won’t pop up on any radar.’

He gathered the stamps up carefully, almost reverentially, and slipped them all back in their protective sheets.

Gutted, Abby said weakly, ‘Can you recommend any dealers here in the UK to me?’

‘Yes, well, let me think.’ He reeled off several names as he began putting the stamps back into the Jiffy bag. Abby wrote them down. Then he added, as if it was an afterthought, ‘Of course, there is someone else who springs to mind.’

‘Who?’

‘I hear Chad Skeggs is in town,’ he said, giving her a hard stare.

And she couldn’t help it. Her face turned the colour of a beetroot. Then she asked if he would call her a taxi.

Hugo Hegarty saw Abby to the front door. There was a frosty silence between them and she could not think of anything to say that would break it, other than a lame, ‘It’s not what you think.’

‘That’s the problem with Chad Skeggs,’ he retorted. ‘It never is.’

When she had left, he went straight back to his study and phoned Detective Sergeant Branson again. He didn’t have a lot more to add to his previous conversation, other than to give him the name of the young woman’s aunt, Anne Jennings.

Anything he could do, anything at all, to get one back on Chad Skeggs would not, in his view, be enough.

Abby opened the rear door of the taxi, deeply distressed by the encounter with Hugo Hegarty, and shot a bleak glance through the pouring rain up and down Dyke Road Avenue.

The British Telecom van was still there and the small, dark blue car was still parked further along. She climbed in the back of the taxi and pulled the door shut.

‘The Grand Hotel?’ the woman driver checked.

Abby nodded. It was the wrong address, which she had given deliberately when she phoned from Hegarty’s office, not wanting him to know where she was staying. She would bail out somewhere before there.

She sat back, thinking. No word from Ricky. Dave was wrong. It was going to be a lot harder to sell the stamps than he had told her. And it was going to take much longer.

Her phone started ringing. The caller display showed it was her mother. She felt sick with fear as she answered, clamping the phone tightly to her ear, aware that the driver would be listening.

‘Mum!’ she said.

Her mother sounded disoriented and deeply distressed. Her breathing coming in short bursts. ‘Please, Abby, please, I’ve got to get my medication, I’m getting-’ She stopped and drew her breath in sharply, then let out a gasp. ‘The spasms. I’ve – please – you shouldn’t have taken them. It’s wrong-’ She let out another gasp.

Then the call terminated.

Abby redialled frantically, but it just went straight to voicemail, as before.

Shaking, she stared at her phone’s display, expecting it to come back to life at any moment with a call from Ricky. But it remained silent.

She closed her eyes. How much could her mother take? How much more could she put her through?

Bastard. You bastard, bastard, bastard, bastard, bastard.

Ricky was smart. Too bloody smart. He was winning. He knew she wouldn’t be able to sell the stamps easily and that therefore she almost certainly still had them all. Her plan to palm him off with a small cash payment, telling him that she’d transferred the bulk to Dave, was now out of the window.

She didn’t know what to do any more.

She looked at the phone again, willing it to ring.

Actually there was one thing she could do, and she had to do it as fast as possible. She had to stop her mother’s suffering, even if that meant making a deal with Ricky. Which was going to mean giving him what he wanted. Or at least pretty much everything.