Full Fury Read online

  They took some details from me. Then the car went off with a howl of siren that hardly seemed necessary. The firecrew were neatly putting away their gear. I got in the Porsche and went on to Bridgnorth.

  Paul had given me a few clues and the actual address. Hobs Terrace. Perched between High Town and Low Town, he’d said, up a steep run of steps cut out of the rock. He had mentioned a view of the river. I drove into town, carefully skirting the lower road, not making much fuss with the exhaust. I parked the car on the silent forecourt of a petrol station, and got out. Paul had said he had nowhere to park, so the steps obviously climbed directly from the road.

  The rain had ceased. A few stars came out. I found a wicket gate opening on to a climb of steps leading off at an angle. Twenty steps up, there was a painted sign that said this was Hobs Terrace. I climbed on. The vertical sandstone surface nudged my left elbow; a tubular steel rail protected my right. At the top the steps opened out on to a bit of flat. There were two old houses, dug into the rock. I could see the river, with beyond it the orange street-lamps of the Kidderminster Road. This was the right place.

  There was a little light. The two houses were numbered 37 and 38. I went round the side of number 38. There was a wooden outside staircase with a rickety rail. The places were old black and white buildings, pressed hard against the rock face behind. I got out Paul’s keys.

  I needn’t have troubled. The door was a weak planked job with an old sneck latch. They’d fitted a new Yale, but they must have had difficulty setting it in the rotten woodwork. Somebody had leaned on the door, and it had opened.

  I went in, but I knew it was too late.

  Paul Hutchinson had two rooms, this sitting-room and a bedroom beyond. The window in here was tiny, with flowered curtains and a white earthenware sink beneath it. One tap—obviously no hot water. There was a table with a cover on it and two chairs, and an old easy chair in front of a fireplace that had an inset gas fire. The high mantel had a little skirt of the curtain material. There were genuine hand-hewn beams across the ceiling, low enough to cause me to duck.

  The bedroom matched it, the window even smaller, the beams sloping to the roof-line. The bed was iron with brass knobs, but he had a candlewick spread on it. There was a chest of drawers that had a varnished surface, now worn down to bare wood. But there was no wardrobe.

  I started in the bedroom and worked my way back to the butchered door. I was hoping for some notes, at least, of the lines his enquiries might have been taking. But I found nothing. In the living-room there was a kitchen cupboard against one wall, and in the left-hand drawer I found a loose-leaf binder with notes on electronic circuits. There was a whole run of radio manuals and text books in a low bookcase beside the fireplace.

  Beneath the loose-leaf binder was a manilla envelope, eight inches by three. I picked it out by the edges only and squeezed it to open its mouth. A letter fell out. It was dated two months before and was from a firm of solicitors in Wolverhampton called Fiston & Greene. Mr Greene was writing. He said he enclosed a letter from Paul’s father, which the coroner had now released. There was no enclosed letter, but there was a paper clip where it had been.

  I put it all back, then put out the lights and went away. Paul had been a tidy lad. It was a pity his death had been so messy.

  It was nearly one o’clock. My first case had lasted around nine hours, and I’d lost my client. Keep it short, Finn had said. He couldn’t have had it much shorter than that. I decided to go back and tell him, watch the pleasure seep into him, and I wondered whether he would forget he had said I wouldn’t lose by it.

  The Beeches was still bouncing with activity. It was only one-forty when I drove in there again. I parked in the same spot. The 3 litre Rover wasn’t where it’d been, but I wasn’t sure it was Finn’s anyway. I had a quiet look round, but there was no dark, large car that bore impact marks. It was time to go on in, I decided. No it wasn’t. There were the old stables over the other side still to be investigated.

  I limped round. My ankle was aching a little; nothing that mattered. I knew just where the stables were, because we’d parked in front of them the day I’d brought Crowshaw. This side of the house was where they had their front door. They had changed the stables into a row of eight garages with wooden doors. The first four were locked, so I left them alone. I tried the other four. The end one had something big crouching in the gloom. I closed the doors quietly behind me and searched for a light switch by touch. It turned out to be a length of cord with a knot in it. A naked bulb sprang into life.

  It was the grey Rover. There was a dent in the front bumper—off-side—and a score along the bonnet. The doors were locked. I couldn’t see any red Mini paint in the score. I turned to reach for the knot.

  Troy had the door open a yard or so and was leaning on it with one hand level with his shoulder, preserving the plum-coloured jacket from contact. ‘I wouldn’t hang around here,’ he said. ‘It could be dangerous, Mr Mallin.’

  It was the nearest his voice had approached to warmness, just a shimmer of water on the icy surface.

  ‘I must have lost my way.’

  He nodded. ‘Some of the boys might have drifted round. They’re very rough, the boys.’

  ‘I was looking,’ I said, ‘for a large, dark car with scores along the sides.’

  ‘Were you?’ He stood back for me to leave. I heard a slight tinkle from the chain on his wrist. ‘A pity you didn’t find it.’

  I agreed. ‘You didn’t give me time.’

  ‘If I find one,’ he promised, ‘I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘If you’re around.’

  He lit a small cigar and watched me walk away. I took it steady, a prickly feeling between my shoulders. But nothing happened to the back of my head, and I arrived safely at the club entrance.

  Feeney Keston was still on duty. He looked shocked on seeing me. His eyes were going up and down, taking me in with horror. Then I realized. They had a tall mirror on one wall, so I checked.

  I had discarded the nylon raincoat. There was caked mud all down the right side of my trousers and a scorched hole in the left arm of my jacket. My tie was twisted and drooping, the shirt soggy. I turned and grinned at him.

  ‘I’d like to see Karen Gaines,’ I said.

  ‘Karen?’ he asked. ‘Karen Finn?’

  ‘So you find her and bring her out here. Eh?’

  He got the point, and went.

  While he was away I tidied what I could. Then I lit a cigarette to create an impression of lack of concern for my appearance. She was three minutes.

  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.