Reluctantly, I took a pair of scissors from my rucksack, leaned down and cut the ties holding Alex’s hands behind his back.
“I might run away,” he said, sitting up and rubbing his wrists.
“Not like that you won’t.” I pointed to the plastic ties that still bound his ankles together.
“Come on,” he said. “Cut them too.”
“No,” I said. “You can hop.”
Grudgingly, he pulled himself upright and hopped into the bathroom beneath the stairs.
I thought it unlikely that there would be a phone in the bathroom, but nevertheless, I took the precaution of removing the house telephone from its cradle in the kitchen. You can’t dial out on one extension if another is off the hook, and his cell was still lying, switched off, on the kitchen counter where I’d left it.
Alex was taking his time, and I was beginning to think he might be trying to escape out of the bathroom window, when I heard the flush. Presently, he reappeared, hobbling out into the hall.
“Cut these bloody things off,” he demanded angrily. He had obviously been using the time to try to break the plastic ties around his ankles, but I knew from experience that they were tougher than they looked. Much tougher indeed than his skin, which was chafed and reddening.
“No,” I said.
“What the bloody hell more do you want?” he asked angrily.
“My WMD,” I said.
“Eh?”
“My weapon of mass destruction,” I said. “My nuclear deterrent. I need some hard evidence.”
“What sort of evidence?”
“Evidence of conspiracy to defraud my mother of one million U.S. dollars.”
“Dream on,” he said, smiling.
“Maybe I should just ring up Jackson Warren and ask him about my mother’s money, telling him that it was you who suggested I did so.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” he said, looking a little worried.
“Don’t tempt me,” I said.
“He’d bloody kill me just for talking to you.”
Good, I thought. It was much to my advantage that Alex remained more frightened of Jackson Warren than he was of me. That alone would prevent him from telling Jackson anything about this nocturnal encounter. Maybe that in itself was my nuclear deterrence.
“Or perhaps I should call Jackson and ask for the number of the Swiss bank account into which he and Garraway put all the money they steal.”
“You’d better bloody not,” Alex said. “Or I’ll be onto the tax man about your mother.”
I strode into the kitchen, and he hobbled in behind me. I walked straight past his flight bag, and I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye as he pushed it farther out of sight beneath the table. I didn’t mind one bit that Alex believed I hadn’t accessed his computer.
“Sit down,” I said sharply, pointing to one of the kitchen chairs.
I don’t think he really knew how to react. He didn’t move.
“Sit down,” I said again, in my best voice-of-command.
He wavered, but after a few seconds, he pulled the chair out from under the table and sat down while I sat on the chair opposite him.
“So whose idea was it to get my mother’s horses to lose?” I asked.
“Julie’s,” he said.
“So she could bet against them on the Internet?”
“No, nothing like that,” he said. “She just wanted to give her old man’s horses a better chance of winning. He gives her such a hard time when they lose. It was me who bets against the horses on the Internet. Not too much, like, not enough to attract attention. But it’s been a nice little earner.”
Amateurs, I thought. These people were amateurs.
The doorbell rang, making both of us jump. It was followed by a persistent gentle knocking at the door. I glanced at my watch. It was ten to one in the morning.
“Stay there,” I ordered. “And keep quiet. Neither of us wants the police involved in this, do we?”
Alex shook his head, but I thought it most improbable that the police would knock so softly. They were far more likely to break the door down.
I walked through into the dark front room and looked out through the window. Julie Yorke was standing outside the door, rapping her knuckles gently against the glass. I went back into the hall and opened the door.
“What have you done to him?” Julie asked in a breathless voice.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Where is he, then?” she demanded.
“In the kitchen,” I said, standing aside to let her pass. I glanced out at the dark and silent road and closed the door.
When I went back into the kitchen Julie was standing behind Alex, stroking his fine ginger hair. In other circumstances, it might have been a touching scene.
I could see that she was still wearing a nightdress under her raincoat.
“Couldn’t sleep?” I asked sarcastically.
“I had to wait for my bloody husband to drop off,” she said. “I’ve taken a bloody big chance coming here, I can tell you. I tried to call, but it was permanently engaged and Alex’s cell went straight to voice mail.”
I looked across the kitchen at the house phone still lying off the hook on the countertop, and at the switched-off cell alongside it.
“I thought I told you not to contact Alex,” I said sharply, pointing to her.
“You said not in the next thirty-six hours,” she replied in a pained tone. “That ran out at ten forty-five this evening.”
I hadn’t been counting, but she obviously had.
“So what happens now?” Alex asked into the silence.
“Well,” I said, “for a start, you return all the blackmail money to my mother. I reckon that’s about sixty thousand pounds.”
“I can’t,” he said. “We’ve spent it. And anyway, why would I?”
“Because you obtained it illegally,” I pointed out.
“But your mother should have paid it to the tax man.”
“And so she will when you give it back.”
“Dream on,” he said again, with a laugh.
“OK,” I said. “If that’s your attitude, I will have to go to Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway and ask them for it.”
“You’ll be lucky,” he said, still laughing. “They’re the most tightfisted pair of bastards I’ve ever met.”
“I’ll tell them you said that.”
The laughter died in his throat.
“Now, don’t you go telling them anything of the sort, or I’ll be straight on the blower to the Revenue.”
Mutually assured destruction—it was what nuclear deterrence was all about.
“And what about my pictures?” Julie demanded, gaining some confidence from Alex.
“They prove nothing,”Alex said. “All they show is that you were in the mailbox shop. That doesn’t mean you were blackmailing anyone.”
“Not those pictures,” Julie said, irritated. “The other pictures he took of me yesterday.”
“What other pictures?” Alex demanded, turning to me.
Oh dear, I thought. This could get really nasty. How might Alex react to my taking explicit images of his naked girlfriend? I sensed that Julie had also worked it out that if Alex hadn’t already seen them, it might be much better for her if he didn’t do so now.
“Er,” she said, backtracking fast. “They’re not that important.”
“But pictures of what?” Alex persisted, still looking at me.
Should I tell him? Should I show him just the sort of girl she was? Or could the pictures still be useful to me as a lever to apply to Julie?
“Just some photos I took outside the Yorkes’ house yesterday afternoon.”
“Show me,” he said belligerently.
I thought of my camera, still safely out of sight in my little rucksack.
“I can’t,” I said. “I don’t have the camera with me.”
“But why were you taking photos of Julie outside her house?” he demanded.
I thought quickly. “To record her reaction when I showed her the prints of her in the mailbox shop. That’s when I told her not to contact you for thirty-six hours.”
Julie seemed relieved, and Alex appeared satisfied by the answer, even if he was a tad confused.
“So what happens now?” he asked again.
It was a good question.
I thought about asking Julie if she knew anything of Warren and Garraway’s other little fiddle, the tax one, but I decided I might get more from her without Alex being there, especially if I were to use my photo lever on her.
“Well, I don’t know about you two,” I said, standing up, “but I’m going home to bed.” And, I thought, to read Alex’s e-mails.
I collected my “insulin” bag from the stairs, slung my rucksack onto my back and left the two lovebirds in the kitchen as I left the house by the front door. But I didn’t walk off down the road. I removed the camera from my rucksack and went quickly down the side of the house to the rear garden and the kitchen window.
I had purposely left a small space at the bottom when I’d closed the blind, and I now put my eyes up close to the glass and looked in.
Alex and Julie really weren’t very discreet. Making sure the flash was switched off, I took twenty or more photos through the window of them kissing, him sliding his hands inside her coat and pulling up her nightdress. Even though Julie’s back was mostly towards the window, there was little doubt where Alex was placing his fingers, and my eighteen-times optical zoom Leica lens captured everything.
Presently, Julie cut the plastic ties from around Alex’s ankles and they went, hand-in-hand, out of the kitchen and, I presumed, up the stairs to bed. Short of shinning up a drainpipe, I would see nothing more, and in spite of being called Tom, my artificial leg didn’t lend itself readily to climbing up to peep through bedroom windows.
Even then I didn’t return to Ian’s car and go home. Instead, I went back down the side of the house and out into Bush Close, to where Julie had parked the white BMW. It was some way down the road, well beyond the glow from the streetlight outside number twelve. I tried the doors, but she had locked them, so I sat down on the pavement, leaned up against the passenger door and waited.
I was getting quite used to waiting, and thinking.
A
lex Reece clearly received more than an average bonus after being away for five days in Gibraltar, and I was just beginning to think that Julie was staying for the whole night when, about an hour after I left, I saw her coming towards me through the pool of light produced by the solitary streetlamp.
I pulled myself to my feet using the car’s door handle but I remained crouched down below the window level so Julie couldn’t see me as she walked along the road. When she was about ten yards away, she pushed the remote unlock button on her key and the indicator lights flashed once in response. As she opened the driver’s door to get in, I opened the passenger one to do likewise, so we ended up sitting down side by side with both doors slamming shut in unison.
Startled, she immediately tried to open the door again, but I grabbed her arm on the steering wheel.
“Don’t,” I said in my voice-of-command. “Just drive.”
“Where to?” she said.
“Anywhere,” I said with authority. “Now. Drive out of this road.”
Julie started the car and reversed it into one of the driveways to turn around. In truth, it was not the best-performed driving-test maneuver, and there would probably be BMW tire marks on the front lawn of number eight in the morning, but at least she didn’t hit anything, and I wasn’t an examiner.
She pulled out into Water Lane and turned right towards Newbury, towards home. We went a few hundred yards in silence.
“OK,” I said. “Pull over here.”
She stopped the car at the side of the road.
“What do you want?” she said, rather forlornly.
“Just a little more help,” I said.
“Can’t you just leave us alone?”
“But why should I?” I exclaimed. “My mother has paid you more than sixty thousand pounds over the past seven months, and I think that entitles me to demand something from you.”
“But Alex told you,” she said. “You can’t have it back. We’ve spent it.”
“On what?” I asked.
She looked across at me. “What do you mean ‘on what’?”
“What have you spent my mother’s money on?”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“No. How could I?”
She laughed. “Coke, of course. Lots of lovely coke.”
I didn’t think she meant Coca-Cola.
“And bottles of bubbly. Only the best, you know. Cases and cases of lovely Dom.” She laughed again.
I realized that she must have been sampling one or the other during the past hour with Alex. It was not only fear that had caused her to drive on the grass. I couldn’t smell alcohol on her breath, so it had to have been the coke.
“Does Ewen know you take cocaine?” I asked.
“Don’t be fucking stupid,” she said. “Ewen wouldn’t know a line of coke if it ran up his nose. If it hasn’t got four legs and a mane, Ewen couldn’t care less. I think he’d much rather screw the bloody horses than me.”
“So what is Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway’s little tax fiddle?”
“Eh?”
“What is Jackson and Peter’s tax fiddle?” I asked again.
“You mean their VAT fiddle?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said excitedly. I waited in silence.
She paused for a bit, but eventually she started. “Did you know that racehorse owners can recover the VAT on training fees?”
“My mother said something about it,” I said.
“And on their other costs as well, those they attribute to their racing business, like transport and telephone charges and vet’s fees. They can even recover the VAT they have to pay when they buy the horses in the first place.”
The VAT rate was at nearly twenty percent. That was a lot of tax to recover on expensive horseflesh.
“So what’s the fiddle?” I asked.
“What makes you think I’d ever tell you?” she said, turning in the car towards me.
“So you do know, then?” I asked.