Full Fury (5 page)

She
had changed her dress. Now it was something in powder blue that ran in a very nice line over her hips. The neckline was high, and she was carrying a tiny dress handbag. Her eyes looked darker than I remembered them.

‘
Yes?’ she said abruptly. ‘What is it?’

‘
Where can we talk?’

She
waved a hand impatiently. I suggested we went out to the car. She was eyeing me with more tension than I thought my appearance warranted. We walked together down the steps.

When
she saw how low the Porsche is she said use hers. Her Rapier was only four cars away. I let her slide behind the wheel and reach over to unlock the other door, then I got in with her.

‘
It’s Paul, isn’t it?’

They
have intuitions, as they call them, which are the result of putting two and two together.

‘
There’s been an accident.’

‘
He’s hurt?’

‘
I’m sorry, Karen, but it’s worse than that.’

She
drew in her breath, clutched the little bag to her lap, and stared out over the wheel. ‘He’s dead?’

‘
Yes.’ I looked at her. One of the floodlights glanced harshly through her side window and did unflattering things to the lines of her face. She hadn’t got the fine planes of her mother’s features. In the cross light her eyes looked wild.

‘
Tell me what happened.’

‘
He ran off the road. The visibility was very poor.’

‘
Oh Paul,’ she whispered. ‘Poor Paul.’

I
offered her a cigarette. She took it automatically, and her eyes didn’t focus on the lighter. Smoke bounced back at her from the windscreen. ‘He was a good driver,’ she said.

‘
Everybody makes mistakes. Some people take chances.’

‘
Yes. Yes, I suppose so.’ She paused. ‘He rather fancied himself, you know. Kind of a romantic, I suppose. He lived on dreams.’ She turned to me then, quickly, her eyes bright and eager. ‘He fancied himself as a rally driver. He always drove just a little bit beyond his abilities.’ She sounded very mature, choosing her words so carefully.

‘
He fancied himself as a writer, too,’ I said.

She
looked squarely into the night ahead. ‘Yes.’

‘
Which could also be dangerous, I suppose, depending on what he intended to write.’

‘
Oh that!’ She delicately picked a morsel of tobacco from her tongue. ‘Nobody took it seriously.’

‘
Then what did they take seriously?’

She
seemed not to have heard. ‘He was wildly enthusiastic.’ She was already used to speaking of him in the past tense. ‘Well, I mean… you met him. You must have seen how he was.’

Yes,
I’d met him. ‘He was my client.’

‘
That silly business!’

‘
Which nobody took seriously?’

At
about that time she became aware that I was cross-questioning her. I saw her shoulders stiffen. Then she relaxed, drew in smoke, then flashed me a look of entreaty. I smiled to show I’d received it, and duly noted it.

‘
Mr Mallin,’ she said quietly, ‘you’ll need to remember I was nine when that terrible thing happened to my father. Other little girls have their fathers die. They get over it. Mine didn’t die.’ She drew in her breath and got the words out in one burst of passionate disgust. ‘He was hanged.’ She gave me ten seconds to consider it. ‘Can you imagine what that would mean? I was Karen Gaines. My father was hanged. It followed me wherever I went. That’s Karen Gaines. Her father was hanged. I could
feel
the stares, the… the… not contempt, but the kind of gloating horror. It was a morbid thrill for them.’

‘
I hadn’t realized.’

‘
I’ve grown up with it, Mr Mallin. It followed me through school, college—mother sent me to the U.S.A. in the end—but it followed me there. Karen’s father was hanged for murder.’

She
turned on me with a burst of righteous anger. ‘I was only nine! What had it got to do with me? Why should it haunt me?’

‘
I can see you wouldn’t want the old mud stirred around.’

She
dismissed that as too obvious and facile. ‘It’s not that. Not just the resurrecting of it all. I can face it now. You get a hard shell in the end. Yes, I could face it.’

‘
But you changed your name to Finn.’

She
gave a short bark of angry, mirthless laughter.
‘His
name! Yes. But not to run away from Karen Gaines. Oh no. It was just because he wanted it.’

So
much affection for her? ‘You must be very close?’

‘
He hates me.’ She spat it out, turning her face to me, two heavy lines between her eyes.

I
tried to look blank, while my mind was racing. Carter Finn was jealous of Karen, who was much too close to Myra for his liking. This name business had been just a tiny lever. It brought Karen within his own sphere; it inferred he shared her equally with Myra, dividing the influence. But it hadn’t worked. Their mutual hatred kept them worlds apart.

‘
So it didn’t help, changing your name?’

Dark
fortress walls reared between us. She turned to me and the boiling oil was canted ready to pour. ‘My father was hanged. Nothing can change that. Nothing can help.’

‘
Such as proving he was not guilty?’

She
was startled. ‘There was no suggestion of that. How could there possibly be?’

‘
Then of what?’ I thought for a moment she was not going to answer. I added: ‘Paul must have come to your mother with at least a promise.’

‘
I don’t know what he said to mother,’ she replied in a flat, defiant voice. I was losing her. The portcullis was down.

‘
But he perhaps gave you a hint?’

Then
it tumbled out in a chaos of anger and distress. ‘A hint! Yes, but you couldn’t tie it down. Suggestions… inferences. He was so proud of it, and… secretive.’ Both hands now gripped the wheel firmly, knuckles white with little peaks of reflected light on each knuckle. ‘He thought he was doing me a favour! My God, a favour! What good was it to me if he could have proved my father should not have been found guilty?’

‘
Just that? No more than that?’

Her
voice sounded weary, lacking in emotion. ‘I’d live then with the knowledge that he could have gone free.

‘
And I was expected to be pleased.’ The small laugh was sickly.

‘
To some people it could matter.’

She
looked at me blankly. ‘What sort of people?’

‘
If he’d promised more—that he could prove your father was definitely innocent—you could claim his body from the yard in Pentonville and bury him in the family vault.’

Her
breath hissed with shock from between her teeth.

‘
Get out of the car,’ she said softly.

I
had the door lever well over, ready to get out of there fast. ‘But he never promised you that?’

She
whirled out of the driver’s side, slamming the door nearly through the bodywork. I’d really got to her. I watched her stalk away, her head high, the floodlights catching tossed highlights in the soft gold of her hair. As she penetrated the deeper shadows I saw the red arc of her cigarette, flung high and wide.

I
got out of the car, not feeling too good.

Troy
was standing by the Porsche. One hand was negligently in his trouser pocket, but there was nothing negligent in his bunched jaw muscles as he glanced after Karen.

‘
You’re upsetting people, Mr Mallin.’ And he stabbed out his cigar in a shower of sparks against my paintwork.

‘
There was only one way of telling her Paul’s dead.’

Something
moved behind the screen of his eyelashes. His mouth flexed. ‘That’s so, is it?’

I
nodded. He reached into his pocket, produced a paper handkerchief, turned, meticulously polished the little patch on my paintwork, then screwed it up and threw it away.

‘
He wants to see you,’ he said.

Finn
wanted to see me. No argument. No discussion.

‘
Then take me round the other way.’

He
did so. We walked in painful silence side by side. He was an inch or so taller than I am, but I thought I’d be a little heavier. I hoped I’d never need to take his gun from him. He moved with the controlled grace of a pacing tiger, softly beside me, and took me round to what had been the main entrance when it had been an ordinary residence. The door was open. We went into the hall that I’d already met.

Troy
mounted the stairs lithely, three at a time, and did the same trick with the door. This time I was ready and spotted it. There was a button in the wall a foot from the doorway. The door swung open. I went in. It silently closed in Troy’s face.

It
was like a stage set. Karen was seated on the edge of the chair I had used. She had her legs crossed, one elbow on the higher knee and another cigarette going in the supported hand. She was looking across the room at nothing, and she did not turn when I entered. Myra was over by the magnificent fireplace, holding it up with one hand. She wasn’t sparkling any more. Her eyes met mine at once. I was expected to tell her it wasn’t true, perhaps. She looked startled, shocked. The turquoise and diamond brooch was no longer over her left breast, and there was a little tear in the material. Normally she’d rush to climb out of such a desecrated dress, so it couldn’t have happened long before I arrived.

I
looked at Finn. He was at the bar pouring himself a drink, and, I saw with approval, one for me. He was dapper in a sky-blue mohair suit. On the surface of the bar was the brooch. He had only just put it down. Karen would have arrived only a minute before me. It appeared that her entrance had interrupted something violent.

He
came towards me with the drinks. His eyes were cold and deadly, his mouth hard. He had poured me a scotch and flipped in a dash of soda.

‘
More soda if you want it,’ he said in a flat voice.

The
air crackled with tension.

‘
Karen’s just told us,’ said Finn.

He
didn’t say they had only just heard, I noticed. But Myra was looking like a woman who
had
only just heard, and was appalled.

As
she didn’t speak, Finn said: ‘What happened?’

I
moved the hand with the glass in the general direction of Karen, who might have caught the movement but only lazily drew on her cigarette. ‘She hasn’t said?’

‘
There hasn’t been time,’ Myra put in quickly. ‘Only that it was a car accident.’

‘
That was all I told her.’

Something
passed between Carter Finn and Myra, a warning.

‘
There’s more?’ he asked.

‘
Where it happened,’ I said helpfully. ‘How it happened.’

I
was showing the bull a flutter of the cape. His eyes took me in and assessed me. I couldn’t have looked very dangerous. I certainly didn’t feel dangerous.

‘
If there was an accident, it looks as though you’ve been in it.’ He cocked his head in challenge. ‘You haven’t touched your drink.’

I
was aware that Karen’s attention had been attracted. Her eyes were on me. ‘I think, perhaps, I’ll have some more soda,’ I said, ‘after all,’ and drew Karen to her feet at once. ‘Let me.’ Her hand was out for the glass, but I was casual about it, turning from her. ‘No… I’ll get it,’ I said, leaving her hand poised in the air, and it was Myra who was forced to ask, ‘then you were involved in it?’

‘
Not my car.’ I put the glass on the bar, leaving the remark hanging in the air. In the mirror behind the bottles on the shelf I saw the quick look of warning from one woman to the other. Finn’s eyes were squarely and uncompromisingly on the small of my back. I reached out for the glass, diverted it fractionally, and picked up the brooch.

It
was a plain setting in platinum and couldn’t have been worth more than four thousand. On the back was a safety fastening, which was supposed to save you losing it if you bent to pick up a lousy quid note, and an inscription which read: ‘Myra, my inspiration. Carl.’ I put it down gently. Then I squirted more soda into my glass and turned back to them.

‘
Then why don’t you say what you mean?’ said Myra with pained indignation.