Rob Johnson - Lifting the Lid (35 page)

‘Get that damn dog under control,’ Patterson said in an exaggerated stage whisper.

Trevor skirted the breakfast bar to find Milly snuffling manically at the base of one of the kitchen units. He bent down to grab her lead, and as he began to straighten again, he glanced indifferently at the notebook display. But his indifference was short-lived. Thrusting his head forward, he stared in disbelief at the face on the screen.

‘Blood-ee Nor-a,’ he said, each syllable pronounced with slow deliberation.

The woman’s dark brown eyes angled towards him, and her forehead creased into a frown, her head tipped slightly to the side as if straining to get a better view. Her lips moved soundlessly, but Trevor thought he could make out the words “Who’s that behind you?”. He reached for the worktop to steady himself.

‘Imelda? Is that… you?’

* * *

Patterson watched from the window until he was sure that Logan and the others had left the building. While he waited, he pondered his future and tried to convince himself it wasn’t as bleak as it seemed, even though it was abundantly clear from Statham’s conversation with his boss that a letter of resignation would not be unwelcome. So what? He was sick of the job anyway and had only hung on till now to boost his pension by a few more quid. Okay, he wouldn’t exactly be able to live a life of luxury, but at least he only had himself to worry about. Maybe he could get some kind of part-time job. It would be something to
do
after all. He detested golf and gardening in equal measure, and other than these two activities, he had no idea what retired people did with their time.

‘You bastards just gonna let me bleed to death, are yer?’

Patterson turned slowly and stared down at Harry Vincent’s sweat drenched face with undisguised distaste. ‘Possibly.’

‘Fucking wanker.’

‘What
are
we going to do with him?’ said Statham. ‘The boss wants us to tidy up here and get the hell out of it.’

Tidy up? Patterson found it amusing that she’d used such a seemingly innocuous phrase when what she really meant was: “Get the stiff to some place where he’s more likely to have been when he croaked, and as for Vincent—”

‘Guv?’

‘Sorry, Colin. Miles away.’

‘Vincent.’

‘Ah yes,’ said Patterson. ‘Leave him to me. You go next door and tell the others to start packing up. And get rid of the plods, but make sure you scare the crap out of them with the Official Secrets Act and all that stuff.’

‘Righto.’

Patterson followed Statham to the door and closed it behind him before taking his gun from his shoulder holster. He walked back over to Vincent, screwing the silencer into place as he went. He knew that he ought to make an effort to find out what had happened to the ransom money, but he doubted Vincent would tell him anything. Besides, it wasn’t
his
money. Why should he give a toss any more? He planted his feet either side of Vincent’s bulging waistline and aimed at the centre of his forehead, trying to avoid the inevitable look of terror when realisation dawned.

‘What the fuck d’you—’

That’s something, I suppose, Patterson thought as he began to remove the silencer. This is the last time I’ll have to do this sort of shit. Ever. Not that he felt particularly bad about Vincent. The world would be better off without him, and in any case, how could you kill somebody who’d already been dead for two years?

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Trevor didn’t even notice Sandra’s hand reaching towards the toast rack in the centre of the table. His eyes just happened to be pointing in that direction.

‘What?’

The indignation in Sandra’s tone snapped him out of his brooding contemplation. ‘Sorry?’

‘You’re keeping count, aren’t you?’ she said, her fingertips hovering within half an inch of the last remaining slice of toast.

‘Er… sorry?’ Trevor said again.

‘You’re thinking: That’s her third piece. No wonder she’s fat.’

‘No I’m not.’ He hadn’t a clue what she was on about. His mind was awash with rather more important matters than keeping a tally of how many slices of toast she’d eaten. Besides, he’d told her before that he didn’t think she was fat.

‘Was Imelda fat?’

Twelve hours or so earlier, Sandra’s use of the past tense would scarcely have registered, but in the present circumstances, it was especially poignant. He’d been in denial for over a year that Imelda might actually be dead, and it had taken several more months to get used to the fact that he’d never see her again. Then all of a sudden she pops up large as life on a bloody computer screen. It was bad enough that she’d deliberately subjected him to all that grieving and misery for no reason, but to discover that she’d only married him in the first place for the sake of “convenience”… What a bitch.

‘Well?’

Once again, Trevor had no idea what Sandra was asking. ‘Well what?’

‘Oh never mind,’ she said, spreading a liberal amount of butter onto her toast. ‘You’re not really with me at the moment, are you?’

‘And that’s surprising, is it? I mean, I’ve just been told by my missing-presumed-dead wife that all the time I knew her, she was an MI5 field agent, and to cap it all, she tells me she was ordered to get herself wed to any old sucker so her cover would be more convincing.’

‘Yes, I think she could have left out the bit about “the more ordinary the better”.’

Trevor didn’t respond. Imelda’s remark had certainly wounded him deeply, but when he’d thought about it later, he’d realised that the depth of the wound was directly proportional to the truth of her statement. He couldn’t deny it. He was as ordinary as they came.

‘Still,’ said Sandra through a mouthful of toast, ‘I suppose you’ve got to be grateful to her in one way.’

‘Oh?’

‘She got you off a murder charge, didn’t she?’

‘Yes, but if she hadn’t decided to disappear off the face of the planet because – what was it? – some enemy agent was on to her, none of that stuff would ever have happened.’ Enemy agent? Good grief, the whole situation was totally bizarre. ‘And anyway, it was only by pure fluke that I spotted her on the computer.’

‘Gotta thank Milly for that one, I guess.’

‘And what if I hadn’t? You think if it had gone all the way and I’d been convicted she’d have stepped in and saved the day?’

‘Yes, I do actually.’

‘Huh.’ Trevor slumped back in his chair and folded his arms.

‘Your sister thought so too.’

‘Oh she did, did she? What is this? Some kind of female conspiracy?’

Trevor was aware of Sandra’s mouth moving, but he heard nothing of what she was saying. His mind had already drifted back to the events at Janice’s house the night before. It had been close to midnight when they’d got there because Logan had insisted on getting confirmation that Imelda really was who she said she was, and he’d dragged them to the nearest police station and kept them hanging around for almost three hours until he was satisfied. “Satisfied” was perhaps not the most accurate description though. The guy was fuming and had issued all kinds of threats, including charging Trevor’s mother with wasting police time if she hadn’t been ‘completely off her bloody trolley’.

Not surprisingly, Janice had demanded a detailed explanation of exactly what her brother had been up to that had brought the police to her door in full view of all the neighbours. She had fed them soup and sandwiches, and when Trevor had finished explaining and wolfing down the food, she’d rung their mother, who had flatly denied all knowledge of any murder accusation and added that Trevor needed his head seeing to.

As it was so late, Trevor had hoped his sister would put them up for the night, but there was no way his ‘hooligan bloody mongrel’ would ever cross her threshold again. He had no intention of making Milly sleep in the car, so he and Sandra had found a couple of rooms in a nearby guesthouse which allowed pets.

‘So long as it’s well behaved,’ the guesthouse owner had said, casting a doubtful eye in Milly’s direction.

Trevor had lied – convincingly for once – and they’d been shown to their adjacent rooms.

‘’Night then, Trev,’ Sandra had said when the proprietor had headed off back down the hallway. ‘Sleep well.’

‘Yeah, it’s been a long couple of days,’ he’d muttered, suddenly aware that Sandra had taken hold of the doorknob to her room several seconds earlier but had so far shown no sign of actually turning it. Afraid that the slight reddening of his cheeks was about to develop into an incandescent beacon of embarrassment, he had mumbled a final goodnight and almost hurled himself and Milly into his own room before she could notice.

Utterly exhausted though he was, it had been almost four in the morning before sleep finally overcame him. Even then, he had slept only fitfully, his subconscious bombarding him with all manner of dreams, none of which were in the least bit pleasant. There was Harry Vincent, brandishing a chainsaw which dripped with blood and tottering towards him on stumps of legs that ended at the knees. Then there was Patterson and his crew carrying him at shoulder height towards an enormous cauldron of boiling water and chanting ‘Guts for garters, yum yum yum’ over and over again in a quasi religious monotone. Next, he’d lifted the lid of a toilet cistern and inside was Logan’s severed head singing
We’ll Meet Again
in a heavily Glaswegian accent. But weirdest of all was the sight of Sandra, completely naked and strapped into an armchair with the butt of a gun in her mouth and aiming it directly at his genitals. Blimey, if Sigmund Freud had got hold of any of that lot, he’d be—

‘Sssh!’

Trevor shook his head free of unbidden images of trains and cigars and focused on the reality of a fully clothed Sandra with nothing more in her mouth than a generously buttered piece of toast. ‘What? I didn’t say anything.’

‘Look,’ she said, pointing in an upward angle above his right shoulder.

He skewed himself round in his chair to see the flat-screen television mounted high up on the wall in a corner of the dining room.

‘That’s him, isn’t it?’

Trevor looked at the picture of a grey-haired man in collar and tie with a Remembrance Day poppy fixed to the lapel of his jacket and recognised him immediately.

‘…for Baileyhill and Redbridge,’ the newsreader was saying, ‘was found dead in the early hours of this morning at the Royal Lansdown Hotel in Bath. Initial reports suggest that the sixty-two year old MP died instantly from a massive heart attack, and police have already ruled out any question of foul play. Other sources have also revealed that Mr Quicke had been suffering from a serious heart disease for several months and that doctors had informed him that it was only a matter of time before—’

‘Well there’s a surprise,’ said Sandra.

The image on the TV then switched to a shot of the Prime Minister being mobbed by reporters and having apparently just emerged from a tour of some factory or other. He wore a suitably solemn expression as he trotted out the usual “deeply saddened”, “greatly missed”, “thoughts are with Gerald’s family at this difficult time” kind of platitudes that drip with insincerity.

‘I still don’t quite get it,’ said Trevor. ‘I mean, why all the hush hush?’

Sandra laughed. ‘Oh come on, Trev. Even you can’t be that naive.’

Still reeling from Imelda’s affirmation of his mind-numbing ordinariness, Trevor winced inwardly at this latest assault on his self esteem. He attempted to conceal his hurt by pretending to concentrate on pouring himself a third cup of coffee but realised he had failed when he felt Sandra’s palm rest lightly on the back of his hand.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I really didn’t mean that.’

‘No, you’re quite right,’ said Trevor. ‘Ordinary and naïve. Trevor Nice-but-dim.’

‘Nobody said you were dim.’

He felt Sandra’s hand slide from the top of his and instantly regretted the petulant self pity in his tone. ‘Okay,’ he said, trying to recover the situation with a show of positivity. ‘Let’s see if I can work it out for myself. MP gets kidnapped and government pays the ransom – or tries to – but in the meantime, the MP snuffs it. Prime Minister’s been banging on for yonks about not giving in to terrorist demands and all that, so it’d be a bit embarrassing if the whole ransom thing ever got out. Um…’

‘General election coming up. Plenty of other recent scandals without another one to deal with.’

Trevor felt slightly peeved at Sandra’s prompting, but he decided to stifle his irritation in the interests of restoring the amicable equilibrium. ‘The Honourable Member’s already dead, so where’s the harm in playing let’s pretend? No kidnap, no ransom. Situation normal.’

‘Bravo,’ said Sandra, clapping her hands together in mock applause. ‘I knew you could do it if you put your mind to it.’

Her accompanying wink reassured him he wasn’t meant to take her patronising manner seriously, and he smiled back at her to show that the irony hadn’t passed him by.

‘All the same,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to be happy about it. I mean, why should we let the bastards get away with it? What’s to stop us going straight to the press and—’