NO KISS FOR THE DEVIL (Gavin & Palmer 5) (6 page)

When Riley
brought the mugs into the living room, Palmer sat and eyed her steadily,
waiting. He knew she’d have questions. Some of them would be disguised as
throwaway comments, but she’d still be angling for answers. In his experience,
women invariably had the edge when it came to interrogation techniques. It was
something passed across at birth along with the DNA.

He didn’t have
long to wait for the first one.

‘You never said
why you and Helen broke up.’

Palmer sighed.
This wasn’t something he felt good talking about. Not that he had any reason to
feel guilty, but saying nothing wasn’t an option. ‘Actually, we didn’t so much
break up as move on. When it was over, it was over.’ He took his mug and stared
into it. ‘Ships that pass, I suppose.’

‘I know what
you mean.’ Riley sat facing him.

He smiled
gently. If there was anyone who understood the transient nature of
relationships in their respective trades, it was her. He didn’t know every
aspect of her private life, and didn’t pry, but he knew she was still coming to
grips with a lengthy split from former army officer, John Mitcheson, who was
somewhere in America. Palmer knew Mitcheson as a likeable, cool, yet detached
individual who seemed hell-bent on ploughing his own furrow, even if that took
him away from Riley. But he also knew it wasn’t as simple as the divergence of
paths: there were questions in Riley’s mind over Mitcheson which even Palmer
wasn’t sure about. Some of those questions concerned just what his moral limits
were when it came to doing his job, which was partly centred on private
security work. It was the ‘partly’ which raised some of the most searching
questions.

As if reading
his mind, she said simply, ‘Life’s a bitch, isn’t it?’

He nodded and
looked at his coffee. ‘Do you have anything stronger than this crap?’

‘You ingrate.
That’s best Colombian - a grade five. I’ve got some Kenyan, but it’s only a
three. I keep it for any girlies who come round.’ She stood up and went into
the kitchen, returning immediately with a bottle of whisky and two glasses,
already poured. ‘You had me worried, there. I thought you’d gone teetotal on
me.’ She put down the bottle and handed him a glass, and took a deep pull of
her own to lead the way, wincing as the liquor burned its way down her throat.
‘You’ll have to talk to the police, Frank. A DI named Pell seems to be the lead
man.’

Palmer nodded
and took a sip of his drink. ‘What’s he like?’

‘Reasonable.
Professional… but I got the impression he’s a bit of a rebel on the quiet.’ She
explained about being allowed at the crime scene, a favour for a favour between
Pell and his colleague in forensics. ‘He wants to get results, but he’s
thorough.’

‘I’ll call
him.’ Palmer twisted his glass, then said, ‘Tell me about it.’

He listened as
she went through it, leaving nothing out. She began with the receipt of the
phone call from Pell, dragging her out of bed and into the night, with terse
instructions to tell nobody. She described the scene with the SOCO team and the
rain-soaked glare of lights, the position of the body, and the way Helen
Bellamy’s wrists had been tied, the bruising around her face. There was a dull
flatness to her voice, the telling as unemotional as possible, and he knew she
was finding this the most difficult of all.

He waited until
she finished, making no comment. He had switched on that part of his brain that
was analytical and calm; the part which his RMP training had instilled in him -
the ability to remain detached and objective - seeing the subject of the
investigation as no more than a set of facts, events and figures.

‘What do they
reckon?’ he said finally. He meant how did the police think Helen had died.

‘Pell didn’t
say. Or wouldn’t. They only wanted me there to see if I could identify her.’
Riley flicked a hand, indicating her face. ‘At a guess, I’d say she was hit.
Hard. There were marks, but it wasn’t easy to tell what they were under the
lights. They didn’t allow me get close enough to judge.’

Palmer’s
expression was grim. ‘If she was tied up, it was to keep her subdued. She must
have got involved in something. You said there was a car?’

She described
how the vehicle was buried deep in the undergrowth, adding to the images in his
mind. ‘It looked like a Golf. Was that what she drove?’

‘Yes. An old
one.’ Palmer was puzzled. If the car was found by the first walker who came
along, it wasn’t exactly well hidden. Why flag up the location in that way? He
sat back, unravelling the facts in his mind, slicing and dicing until he had
some sense of order. Riley had her way; this was his. He didn’t have all the
information right now – not even a fraction of it – but it was his way of
teasing out all the possible answers until he had something to work with.

The other
question was why she’d had Riley’s name and phone number in her car. Plans for
a girlie exchange of information, perhaps? Or a work thing?

‘There’s
nothing significant about her last assignments,’ Riley told him, ‘at least, as
far as I could tell.’

‘You checked
already?’ Palmer lifted an eyebrow. ‘That was quick work.’

‘I mentioned it
to Donald and he gave me a lead.’ She shrugged. ‘I thought it best to check it
out.’ She explained briefly what she had learned at Copnor Business
Publications. ‘It was standard work. They don’t cover commercial frauds or
anything like that, unless it has a wider market impact, so they’re not exactly
into anything murky or overtly criminal. But Helen did let drop that she was
hoping to get into something more interesting.’

‘Like what?’
Palmer was surprised. From what he remembered of Helen, she had enjoyed her
work.

‘The editor
thought she was bored with the same old same old. I can relate to that. His
assistant said she’d asked recently if they’d ever covered the Russian
oligarchs as a topic.’

‘Rich Russians?’
He chewed it over. They were as much in the news for buying football clubs and
large chunks of the London property market as they were for their on-off
relationships with Moscow. Maybe Helen had stumbled on a juicy story and was
testing the water.

‘She also rang
last week and asked for any outstanding fees to go to a woman at an address in
Hampshire.’

Another
surprise. Helen had centred her life on London, apparently eager to be where
the action was. She’d never mentioned anyone outside the capital. ‘A family
member?’

‘I was hoping
you’d know the answer to that.’

‘We didn’t get
to that level.’ He was aware that his voice was probably tinged with regret.
‘She didn’t talk about herself much,’ he explained. ‘But then, neither did I.’
He held her gaze. If Riley had any thoughts about men’s lack of curiosity about
the women in their lives, she wasn’t saying anything. ‘It seemed to suit us
both. You’ve done good work. Thanks.’

Riley stood up
and dug out the sheet of paper Emerald had given her. ‘Here’s the address. We
could take a look tomorrow, if you like.’

He scanned the
details. Helen had definitely never mentioned a connection with Hampshire –
certainly nobody close enough to have sent money to. ‘Why wait?’ He glanced at
his watch, suddenly taken by the idea of doing something positive. ‘Like now.’

‘I can’t.’
Riley waved an apologetic hand. ‘I’ve got a meeting this afternoon to pitch for
a job. I have to get my glad rags on and act civilised. You know how it is.’

Palmer knew.
Like Riley’s assignments, most of his jobs came along by word of mouth or
through Donald Brask. But every now and then, he had to do his own legwork to
help things along. The brutal reality was, if freelances didn’t pitch, they
didn’t eat.

‘Do you mind if
I do it?’

‘Of course not.
Just don’t frighten her, that’s all. She could be a frail old biddy with a weak
ticker.’

He nodded. It
was also highly likely that the woman in Hampshire might not know about Helen’s
death. Springing the news on her could be disastrous. It was a lesson he’d
learned first-hand in the RMP, when delivering bad news to someone in married
quarters, after an accident in training or at a local pub.

He tucked the
paper in his breast pocket. He had a sudden thought. ‘Back at the site, did you
notice signs of another car?’

‘No. It was too
dark. And Pell didn’t say anything. Why?’

‘Because it
would have taken two people to get Helen there: one to drive her car, the other
to help dump the body, then drive them away. A single man dumping the car and
moving away on foot would have been noticed.’ He was trying to picture the
scene as Riley had described it. The car had been dumped at a remote spot, but
less than two hundred yards from the road. Other than forcing it into the
undergrowth, there had been no elaborate attempt to hide anything. Why?

‘Why leave her
outside the car?’ Riley wondered aloud.

Palmer
shrugged. ‘Maybe they didn’t care. Or they were interrupted while moving the
body and didn’t have time to conceal it. I think they took her there in a
second, larger vehicle.’

‘Why larger?’

Palmer knew all
about VW Golfs; he had spent enough time in Riley’s to know them inside and
out. ‘Because a Golf is hardly the best car to drive around with a body on the
back seat. Too easy to see inside. They’d have used something bigger.’

‘So all we have
to do is find the other vehicle.’ Riley looked sceptical. It would be like
looking for a grain of sand – and where did they even begin?

‘We’ll find
something.’ Palmer twisted the whisky glass in his fingers. Somehow it had
emptied without him realising it. He put it down on the coffee table and stood
up.

‘How?’

His face was
suddenly dark and stony, as if the complexity of the problem had just hit home.
‘I don’t know, yet. But give me time and I will.’

*******

Long Cottage stood
at the end of a neat terrace on the edge of Cotton Hill, a hamlet barely six
miles from Basingstoke. Other than a tiny pub, a whitewashed village hall and a
scattering of other houses set behind hedges and trees, there couldn’t have
been more than a dozen buildings in sight, as if progress had passed them by,
leaving a remnant of a time long gone.

Palmer parked
his Saab and climbed out. The air was cool after the inside of the car, and he
eyed the darkening sky with suspicion. The journey down the M3 from London had
been a stop-start series of road works, and it was a relief to be out in the
open.

He eyed the
cottage. It had a small, crumbling brick wall surrounding a neat front garden
of herb borders and shrubs. An elderly woman in a baggy grey jumper was bent
over a large terracotta urn, stabbing energetically with a hand fork at the
contents as if giving the coup de grace to some unseen enemy.

Palmer strolled
across the road and smiled genially when the woman looked up. ‘Mrs Demelzer?’

She
straightened her back with a grunt and dropped the fork into the urn as if
relieved to be done with it. She had silver hair swept back into a tidy bun,
round cheeks and a pleasant face, and laughter lines around keen eyes. Palmer
was never good with women’s ages, but he guessed she was somewhere in her
seventies.

‘You don’t know
anything about slugs, do you?’ the woman said chattily. ‘All my years
gardening, and the buggers still keep coming. I’ve tried pellets and stuff, but
none of them work.’

‘Have you tried
copper?’ Palmer said easily, recalling a fragment of a gardening programme,
courtesy of a lengthy surveillance job in his car. ‘I’ve heard that works.’

She gave him a
pitying look. ‘Is that right? Well, someone had better tell the local slugs,
because they haven’t caught on yet.’ She brushed her hands together and used
her wrist to push a stray hank of hair off her forehead. ‘So, what can I do for
you, young man?’

‘I’m a friend
of Helen’s. She talked about you, and I said I’d drop by if ever I was
passing.’ He told her his name and wondered if the approach was as lame as it
sounded. But short of telling her the shocking truth, which he had no right to
do, he hadn’t been able to come up with a better reason for being there.

The woman
tilted her head to one side and smiled, eyes assessing and accepting him all in
one look. ‘Helen? Oh, that’s nice. What’s she been up to, then?’ She didn’t
wait for an answer, but turned towards the front door of the cottage. ‘You’d
better come in,’ she said. ‘Do you fancy a cup of tea?’

‘Helen’s a sweet
girl. Her mum was my best friend - ever since school days. She died ten years
ago, but Helen always kept in touch, bless her.’

They were
seated in the warmth of the cottage’s tiny front room, with a tray of tea and
biscuits on a footstool between them. The room was like an antique shop, with
ornaments of every kind packed on to every bit of shelving and flat surface,
even overflowing on to the floor. It was clear that Mrs Demelzer had never
thrown away a single souvenir she’d been given or collected, no matter how
kitsch. Figurines, pots, plates and statuettes, most of them bearing a place
name in gaudy script, all jostled each other in a mad fight for space. And
Palmer had never seen so many heavy crystal ashtrays in one place before. Maybe
the old lady was a heavy smoker.

Mrs Demelzer
stared into her cup as if reading something meaningful in the depths and gave a
vague half-smile. ‘I’m not sure why she bothers, to be honest. We’re hardly
related, and it’s only because of my friendship with Margaret, her mother, that
we ever met. But we sort of rub along, which is nice.’ Her smile broadened.
‘She keeps me in touch with the modern world, I suppose.’

‘Did you see
her often?’ Palmer could have bitten his tongue at his use of the past tense, but
she hadn’t appeared to notice.