Bitter End Part 40

Buchanan did his best to achieve a slightly more upright posture as he said, 'So, you both gave evidence? Not just Jamie?'

She nodded, looking thoughtfully into her whisky.

'Jamie never tried to keep me out of things. I knew right from the off that he was into something and, of course, I wasn't supposed to know the details, but Jamie never could keep anything to himself. Kincaid -Jerry's dad, like enjoyed flaunting his "family", as he called us. He thought he was untouchable and he loved rubbing people's noses in it -the police and everybody else. He'd take us all out for flashy dinners every week, the boys and their wives or girlfriends -or girls hired for the evening. We all had to be done up to the nines, wearing bags of jewellery and fancy evening dresses -the works. Fifteen or twenty of us sometimes.'

She concentrated on her drink and a second cigarette for a few moments, smiling to herself with bitter rancour. 247. 'It was all so silly and childish, but at the time I thought I was living high, living life the smart way. Then Kincaid started giving me little jobs to do. Just once in a while. Just on the fringes of the operation. You know -taking stuff through customs, driving a van load somewhere, stuff that it's easier for a woman to get away with. I never got stopped. Maybe I looked too young and innocent. Being quite small, you know?'

Buchanan knew all right. He didn't look at Fizz as he asked, 'Jamie didn't mind you being involved?'

'No. Why should he? The money was good and Kincaid always said that if we got nabbed he'd get us off. He had contacts. That's what he told us anyway.' She leaned forward to stub out her cigarette. 'But then he started asking me to do other things, like luring a mark into a taxi and then b.u.g.g.e.ring off. I never asked why I was doing it but it eventually sunk in that I never saw that mark again.'

'You mean, Kincaid was b.u.mping them off?' Fizz wanted to know.

'That's what I believed, even though Jamie tried to tell me they'd just been told to leave town. Either way, I wasn't too happy about it and I told Jamie I wasn't doing it any more, but he wouldn't listen to me.' She twisted her lips nastily. 'Jamie had a way of making you listen to his opinion that had me in st.i.tches -literally.

More than once.

And Kincaid was another one who got ugly with people who didn't do what they were told. The way he put it, if you weren't with him you were against him.'

Fizz was about to start prompting as soon as Poppy stopped for breath but Buchanan sent her a warning look and waited. Poppy hauled herself up out of the sofa's close embrace and refilled their gla.s.ses. Both she and Fizz had already sunk more spirits than it would have taken to slow Buchanan's reflexes quite considerably, but only Poppy was showing it.

'Anyway,' she said, coming back to her seat and reclaiming Buchanan's hand, 'Jamie started to want out as well, 248. after a while. I think he was doing things for Kincaid, by that time, that were a bit much even for him. He never said, but I could tell he was getting scared. Then, this guy came along. I think they called him "Bats". He had a friend in the force -that's what he told Jamie, but we suspected he was really a police nark -and he put it to Jamie, bit by bit you know? -that if he gra.s.sed on Kincaid's operation he'd do pretty well out of it: no charges against him, a new house as good as the one we were staying in, a complete new ident.i.ty and all the rest of it.'

'So you went along with it?' Fizz got in.

Poppy nodded, guzzling her drink. 'You know,' she said, manifestly voicing the thought as it occurred to her, 'I'm really glad you two came in this evening. I needed a bit of company. I'm feeling better than I've felt since ... it happened. You're awf'ly nice.'

Fizz took that compliment to herself, smiling chummily at Poppy as if she were succ.u.mbing as rapidly as Poppy was to a whisky-induced euphoria. 'And after the trial you were set up in a rented house in Chirnside, right?'

'Just temporarily. They'd promised us a nice place like the house we'd left -not tucked away in the back of beyond like that one. It was driving me nuts, that place, with no-one to talk to but Liza Armstrong and the Pringles, for G.o.d's sake -Bonnie and Clyde with wrinkles, Jamie used to call them. I wish those two nosy old b.u.g.g.e.rs had got blown up into the bargain.'

Buchanan would have liked to free his hand. Hers was uncomfortably hot, suddenly, and a bit sweaty and besides, he had a suspicion that she was actually pus.h.i.+ng her luck a bit. Whether it was due to his comforting presence or the result of getting her story off her chest or, more likely, the whisky, she was undoubtedly on the mend. Her head was lolling on the back of the couch but she was, to his eyes, more elated than sleepy.

'So, how does Vanessa Gra.s.sick come into the story?'

Fizz said, still as razor sharp as ever, which was, to 249. Buchanan's mind, yet another sign of a mis-spent youth.

Poppy lifted her head a fraction but the effort was too much for her and she let it bounce back again. 'Vanessa?

Has she got something to do with it? How do you mean?'

'What was she doing in Brora Lodge?'

'She lives there.'

'Yes, but how come she was arriving at two-thirty in the morning?'

'How would I know?' Poppy retorted, with a certain lack of clarity and a happy giggle. 'I didn't ev'n know she was in there till they tol' me.'

That was not the answer Fizz had been hoping for. She said, 'You and Jamie -you weren't involved with the Gra.s.sicks?'

'You kidding? They didn't even wave to us over the hedge. Very pally with the Pringles, though. Old man Pringle looked after their house for them. Had done for years.'

'Yes, we know all about that,' Fizz said with a hint of impatience, and spent a little time tapping her gla.s.s irritably against her teeth. Then she said, 'But Vanessa didn't usually visit Brora Lodge on her own, did she? If she came at all she came with her husband, right?'

'Not always,' Poppy said, sounding a fraction defensive.

'She w's there 'lone one mornin' quite early, not that long ago. Just for 'bout five minutes. I saw her go in with a heater.'

Fizz's face froze in an expression of shocked disbelief and, since he was currently questioning the efficacy of his own hearing, Buchanan had to a.s.sume that he looked much the same. n.o.body said a word.

Then the door crashed open, rebounding off the wall and sending the smashed handle flying across the room. 250.

Chapter Twenty-One.

Fizz was stone-cold sober. If she hadn't been a moment

ago she sure as h.e.l.l was now. Even before the door had hit the wall, or so it seemed to her, she had dived over the arm of her hugely overstuffed chair and was now crouched on her knees beside it making herself invisible. Only not invisible enough.

'You!' roared an unfamiliar voice. 'Out of there and round here where I can see you!'

There wasn't much doubt who he was speaking to since both Poppy and Buchanan were trapped in the embrace of the couch and staring past her with their eyes on a level with their kneecaps. She stood up and moved, as if someone new at the job was operating her with strings, into the middle of the carpet, discovering as she did so that the intruder was the centurion-type she'd suspected of tailing her. He was streaming wet, throbbing with potential violence, and waving a ma.s.sive gun that would have made Dirty Harry's look like a cigarette lighter.

'Over there.' He waved the pistol and Fizz made haste to obey, flattening herself against the wall facing the fireplace.

Buchanan and Poppy were roughly the same shade of pale blue; Buchanan rigidly unmoving, Poppy gasping for air and clinging to him like a condom.

The centurion gave a chuckle, deep in his chest, which did all sorts of unpleasant things to Fizz's sphincter muscles. 251. 'Well, well, well. Now this is a pleasant surprise. Three fish in the one net. That's something I hadn't expected.'

He stepped forward into the room and stood there, straddle-legged and grinning, while he looked them over with almost obscene rapacity.

No-one could have called him an attractive man, but Fizz had failed to register on their previous encounters just how ugly he was. His face was big and muscular, like his body, with a large, fleshy and discoloured nose like an aged s.c.r.o.t.u.m, and his jaw alone was, to Fizz's inflamed senses, a weapon of ma.s.s destruction. It was heavily boned and too wide even for his big face, and it was set with big yellow teeth that leaned this way and that like old tombstones.

Now that his hair was plastered to his head Fizz could see a square scar above one temple: probably the result of an operation or the repair of an old wound.

Moving crabwise and keeping them all covered with his cannon, he grabbed the open bottle of whisky and sunk a couple of large gulps.

'Right,' he said, allowing a trickle of amber liquid to run unchecked down his chin so that he could retain his grip on the bottle. 'Now let's not do this the hard way, folks.

n.o.body's going to get hurt. You're all going to stay very quiet. No talking. No fidgeting around. You're going to sit there and I'm going to sit here and we'll all get along like a house on fire.'

He lowered himself carefully to the seat Fizz had just vacated and, keeping the gun swinging backwards and forwards between all of them, he took a mobile phone out of his jerkin pocket and, using the same hand, thumbed in a number.

'It's me. I got good news for you.' He leaned back on the cus.h.i.+ons and grinned all over his face. 'Yeah, but not just her, I got the other two here as well . . . the lawyers . . .

Yeah. No, Curly didn't lead me anywhere, in the end. It was the copper you were talking to in the pub . . . Yeah, eventually . . . with a little persuasion. Sure. Had to, didn't 252. I? But don't worry, I tidied up real careful. The lawyers?

Yeah, sure they're alive. You said to ... yeah, well I didn't know that, did I? They was all sitting here, like Sunday school, havin' a quiet drink. Well . . . Yeah sure. No prob lemo.

How long . . .?' The grin withered abruptly and he sat up, struggling against the pull of the fat cus.h.i.+ons.

'You're b.l.o.o.d.y joking. Can't you make it before that? Why can't I do it myself? Yeah, but the other two? Yeah, well okay Jerry, but put your foot down, for f.u.c.k's sake. I've got another migraine and it's f.u.c.kin' blinding me. Yeah, well try.'

His good humour hadn't lasted long. He put the phone down on the arm of his chair and, standing up, carefully shrugged off his wet jerkin, one arm at a time, and threw it on the floor. As he sat down again, Fizz could hear Buchanan shhhhh-ing Poppy who was gargling like a coffee percolator and trying to hide inside his jacket.

That's right,' the centurion growled, pouring some more whisky down his gullet. 'You just keep her quiet and we won't have any trouble.'

Fizz's intellectual faculties were not operating on all cylinders. In fact, she was in such a state of panic that her brain had virtually shut down to permit all support systems to be diverted to the primary task of keeping her conscious.

Had it not been for the proximity of the wall, she thought, her legs would have given way minutes ago. Even as it was, they were twitching so hard she was sure Buchanan could see her jeans flapping, and the way he was looking at her, she was afraid he'd do or say something and get himself pistol-whipped at the very least. Hurriedly, she moved a hand a little to attract the centurion's attention and said, 'I'm sorry, but I'm going to faint. Can I sit down?'