Rob Johnson - Lifting the Lid (32 page)

‘It was the dog.’

‘The what?’

‘The dog. All that barking and stuff distracted me. If you’d warned me that there—’

‘Oh I see. So it was all my fault, was it?’ Patterson folded his arms across his chest and turned away to look out of the side window, barely registering the taxi which pulled up in front of the block of flats or the three men who got out of it.

‘I’m not saying that. It’s just—’

Statham was interrupted for a second time when the onboard radio hissed and crackled into life: ‘Hello? Jarvis here. Come in, guv. Are you there?’

Patterson took no notice and continued to stare out of the window.

‘You want me to get that?’ said Statham.

‘Laurel and Hardy reporting the latest bloody disaster? Help yourself.’

Statham took the microphone from its mounting on the dashboard. Then he closed his eyes and listened while Jarvis recounted how he had followed the blind man to Flat 12 on the second floor. One of the apartments next to it was unoccupied, and he and Coleman had broken in and set up the surveillance gear. They’d only got audio, but they hadn’t heard any voices yet, so it was more than likely the guy was on his own in there.

‘Where are you anyway? You caught up with the Peugeot yet?’

Statham leaned forward and spoke into the microphone in little more than a whisper. ‘Er… not as such, no.’

‘Don’t tell me the tracker didn’t work. Jeez, the guv’nor must have— Hang on a minute. There’s something…’

Jarvis’s voice tailed off into a barrage of radio static but returned a few seconds later. ‘Seems like he’s got company. Two or three of ‘em by the sound of it.’

This was surely too much of a coincidence, thought Patterson. It must be the three men who’d got out of the taxi just now. Come to think of it, there’d been something shifty about the way they’d looked up and down the street before they’d disappeared into the flats. And the fattish bloke in the black overcoat. He knew him from somewhere, he was almost certain of it.

He threw open the car door. ‘Come on, Colin. We might be about to salvage something from this unholy mess after all.’

* * *

MacFarland wasn’t in the least surprised that Julian Bracewell was already in the flat, nor that he was pointing a gun at them as they came through the door. Harry’s tanned complexion, on the other hand, turned a pale shade of grey.

‘Well, well. Julian Bracewell as I live and breathe.’

MacFarland couldn’t be certain, but he thought he detected a hint of a tremor in Harry’s voice. He stared at the man he had first met as a tramp outside the hotel in Sheffield only a few hours earlier. Clean shaven now and looking twenty years younger, he was half perched on the narrow window sill at the opposite end of the room, dressed in a dark blue suit and red tie. Eyeing Bracewell’s gun, he contemplated reaching for his own but instantly abandoned the idea as not only a futile gesture but very probably a suicidal one.

‘I must say you appear to be in remarkably good health for someone who’s supposed to be dead, old boy,’ said Bracewell, raising and lowering his gun in Harry’s direction like it was some kind of long distance body scanner.

‘Not lookin’ so bad yerself in the circumstances.’

‘Can’t complain, Harry. Can’t complain. But speaking of the dead, would this chappie here have anything to do with you by any chance?’

Bracewell nodded towards the armchair in the middle of the room, only the back of which was visible to Harry and the others.

‘Dead? What the fuck are you talkin’ about?’ Harry seemed to have forgotten about the gun that was being aimed at him, and he strode over to the armchair. ‘Jesus Christ. What did you do to ‘im?’

‘Nothing to do with me, old boy. He was like that when I got here.’

‘And where the hell are Carrot and Lenny?’ Harry’s eyes darted around the flat as if he thought they might be hiding somewhere.

‘Who?’

‘The two muppets who were supposed to be lookin’ after ‘im.’

‘Just me and the stiff I’m afraid,’ Bracewell said with a shrug. ‘Can’t get the staff these days, eh, Harry? Present company excepted of course.’

MacFarland felt awkward at the wink and the beaming grin that was directed at him, uncertain whether to return the smile or not.

‘How’s the old war wound by the way?’ Bracewell waved the barrel of his gun at MacFarland’s feet.

‘Aye, well,’ he said, looking down at his injured foot, which still shot a bolt of pain up his leg whenever he put weight on it. ‘I guess it’s nae so bad now, ta very much. Mind you, I have tae—’

‘Oh shut up, ‘Aggis,’ Harry interrupted, his face contorted with contempt. ‘Nobody gives a toss about your bleedin’ foot.’

Bracewell’s smile vanished instantly, and he whipped the gun round to aim it at Harry’s chest. ‘I beg your pardon, old boy, but I do believe
I
was expressing an interest in our Scottish friend’s podiatric wellbeing.’

‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ said Harry with a forced laugh, throwing his hands in the air in mock surrender. ‘Let’s not get hasty, shall we?’

There was a lengthy silence as Bracewell glared at him, all traces of feigned good humour now entirely obscured beneath a mask of sheer loathing. ‘No, no. I think it would be best if you keep them where they are,’ he said when Harry made to lower his arms.

MacFarland watched Bracewell screw a silencer onto the barrel of his gun, and his whole body tensed when he heard the faint click of the safety catch. He wondered again whether he should risk making a grab for his own weapon, but it was almost as if Bracewell had read his mind.

‘I wouldn’t advise it, dear boy,’ he said without diverting his attention from Harry. ‘We wouldn’t want to ruin the English-Scottish
entente cordiale
, now would we? In fact, perhaps this might be an opportune moment to relieve you of temptation. – Delia, if you’d be so kind?’

MacFarland’s immediate confusion intensified when he turned to see Delia coming towards him and gesturing at him to raise his hands. He did as he was told, and Delia reached inside his jacket and removed the gun from his shoulder holster. MacFarland studied his face the whole time for some kind of clue, but all he got was a half grin that seemed more like a facial shrug of apology. Okay, so maybe this explained his strange behaviour on the train and then later on the station platform, but why Bracewell? What was the connection?

He watched Delia cross the floor to the window, giving Harry the widest possible berth as he went. When he got there, Bracewell rested his free hand on his shoulder and, in return, Delia kissed him lightly on the cheek.

Bloody hell. So that was it.

‘Fuck me,’ said Harry, whose mouth had hung open in silent horror from the moment he had witnessed Delia’s betrayal.

‘I’d really rather not, old boy, if it’s all the same to you. Besides, I’m very much a one-man man nowadays, aren’t I, Michael?’ Bracewell said with an impish smile and moved his hand from Delia’s shoulder to his waist.

Although still in a state of shock himself, MacFarland found the look of disgust on Harry’s face highly entertaining and in any other circumstance would have been hard pressed to have stifled a snigger. Despite his obvious revulsion, Harry seemed to have no such inhibition, but there was no trace of amusement in his scornful laughter.

‘Michael?
Michael
? Fucking Judas, more like. Or maybe that should be Judy, eh? I’ve been bloody good to you, I ‘ave. Scabby little cocksucker.’

‘You see, Harry, it’s exactly that kind of—’

It was the first time Delia had uttered a word since they’d entered the flat, but Harry wasn’t about to let him get any further. In fact, he ignored him altogether and turned his attention on Bracewell instead.

‘And since when ‘ave you been a knob jockey? Still, I s’pose I should‘ve known with a name like Joooolian and that poncey fuckin’ accent of yours.’ Then a thought seemed to occur to him, and his eyes blazed like a shark’s in a feeding frenzy. ‘Hey, maybe you developed a liking for takin’ it up the arse ever since I screwed you over that Croydon job.’

Even though MacFarland had been half expecting it, he still flinched at the dull pinging sound and the flash from Bracewell’s silenced gun.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Convincing DS Logan about the dead body in the flat had not been easy. From the moment Swann had brought Trevor back into the living room, he had been intent on one course of action alone – to continue questioning him about Imelda’s disappearance. He had completely ignored Trevor and Sandra’s protestations, and it was only when Sandra had told him the man was a Member of Parliament that he had begun to hesitate. Then she had shown him the MP’s identity card, and the hesitation had turned into a full scale pause, at the end of which he had instructed Swann to make some enquiries.

She had made a couple of calls, but there had been no reports of a missing MP. Logan had seemed satisfied that Trevor and Sandra had invented the whole ridiculous story and asked them what the hell they’d expected to gain from it. But before they could answer, Swann had pointed out that the absence of any reports didn’t really prove anything one way or the other.

‘Maybe he hasn’t been gone long enough for anyone to have noticed,’ she had said. ‘Besides, if what these two say is true, it would certainly explain why the spooks have got their oar in.’

Now here’s a guy who doesn’t like his authority being undermined, Trevor had thought as he’d caught the look of thunder which Logan directed at his colleague. But any tirade that might have followed was nipped in the bud when Sandra had launched into the briefest of explanations as to what had led them to their discovery of the dead MP.

After she’d finished, Logan had crossed the floor of the living room and stared out of the window in silence for several seconds. Then he had turned and pointed his finger at Trevor.

‘And you needn’t think this is going to get you off a murder charge,’ he’d said. ‘As soon as we get there and find out you’ve been pulling my pisser, I’m nicking the pair of you for wasting police time. That’ll do for starters anyway.’

‘As soon as
we
get there?’ Trevor had repeated.

Logan’s laugh had sounded more like an elongated grunt. ‘You don’t think I’m going to let you out of my sight after the merry little dance you’ve been leading me already, do you?’

Trevor’s sister had been adamant that there was no way he was leaving his vandal of a dog behind, and although Logan had been equally resistant to taking her with them, Milly was now wedged between Trevor and Sandra on the back seat of the car as they sped through the streets of Bristol.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

There was little doubt that the favourite colour of Flat 13’s absent occupant was a particularly gaudy shade of purple. Every surface that could be painted purple had been – not only the doors, walls and ceiling, but tables, chairs and even the casing of the television in the corner of the room. The carpet was almost exactly the same colour, and anything unpaintable, like the two-seater settee and the single armchair, was covered in purple fabric.

‘God almighty,’ said Patterson when Coleman had let him and Statham into the apartment. ‘It’s enough to send you blind. – And speaking of which, what’s our friend with the white stick been up to since his chums arrived?’

Jarvis was sitting on one of the purple wooden chairs at the side of the room, wearing a pair of headphones. These were attached to a black box on his lap, and this in turn was connected to a small square of plastic fixed to the wall. He lifted the headphones clear of his right ear and half turned towards Patterson. ‘Bit hard to tell without a visual, guv, but I’m pretty sure there’s a stiff in there.’

‘A stiff?’

‘A dead body, guv.’

Patterson rolled his eyes. ‘Yes, I do know what a stiff is, thank you. Any idea who it is?’

‘Dunno,’ said Jarvis with a shake of his head. ‘Seems like he’d already croaked when the blind guy arrived. One of them’s called Julian Bracewell and then there’s a Harry and a bloke with a heavy Scottish accent. Oh yes, and somebody called Delia.’

‘Delia?’ Patterson thought back to the three people who had emerged from the taxi a few minutes earlier. He was sure that all of them were men. And what about this Julian Bracewell? He told Coleman to run a check on him, although he wondered whether there was much point. If, as he suspected, the dead body belonged to Gerald Quicke MP, then the whole job was screwed anyway.

‘Hang on a sec.’ Jarvis adjusted the headphones so that both ears were covered once again and frowned in concentration.

‘What is it?’ said Patterson, guessing from Jarvis’s expression that he was hearing something that wasn’t going to be good news.

Jarvis held up his hand to motion him to silence. ‘Sounds like there’s a bit of an argy-bargy going on… Cockney-sounding bloke – I think that’s Harry – calling somebody a Judas… Something about a— Agh, Jesus!’

He snatched the headphones off and dropped them to the floor before clasping his hands to his ears and rubbing them vigorously. Even without the aid of a listening device, the wall was thin enough for Patterson and the others to be in no doubt as to the sound which had almost deafened him. It was a man screaming in pain.