Boiling Point Read online

  ‘Step outside for a moment, will you, sergeant?’ he instructed Munro, who obeyed with a sulky frown.

  ‘Where did you get the kid?’ I asked as the door closed. ‘On a Job Seeker’s allowance, is he?’

  ‘Joke if you want but the laugh will be on you if you’re covering for that woman and she turns out to be a killer. Friend or no friend, I’ll do you as an accessory.’

  ‘I don’t know where she is.’

  ‘OK, Dave, you’re not telling, but just don’t get the idea into your head that you can stick your long nose into this. I’d hate to see you stretched out on a slab like Lou Olley. He was another clever guy with a lot of jokes.’

  ‘He wasn’t joking when I made his acquaintance.’

  ‘No, and he isn’t now. I’ve been at the PM this morning. Someone put two in his head and two in his body – special point two-two ammo, hollow point, Stinger bullets. This is premier league crime, Dave. Stay well clear.’

  ‘Right, guv!’ I said in a cockney accent.

  Cullen stood up, shaking his head. At the door he turned round, anxious to have the last word. ‘Dave, are you really making some progress in getting Vince King out?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said bravely.

  ‘Well, if I was in charge of a massive detective machine like you I’d suspend operations until I knew exactly why Lou Olley was slotted.’

  He favoured me with another of his enigmatic grins. This time I felt a shiver as if someone was walking over my grave.

  17

  WHEN THEY’D GONE Celeste came in.

  ‘Do you want me to spray air freshener in here?’ she asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, they stink, that lot. If you could bottle their odour you could market it as Human Repellent.’

  ‘I had no idea you felt so strongly about the Blues.’

  ‘I can’t stick them. My brother’s got a BMW and they’re always stopping him just because he’s black.’

  ‘Celeste, if you want a career as a legal executive you’re going to have to get used to them. They’re not all bad. The one with the suit that looks like a sleeping bag, DCI Cullen; he’s all right.’

  ‘If you say so, Mr Cunane,’ Celeste replied, scepticism dripping from every syllable.

  I looked at her. This was the second time in recent days that I’d found myself defending the police. What was happening to me? I shook my head.

  ‘Any business coming our way?’ I enquired. My question was far from casual. As I’d boasted to Cullen, I had a number of casual employees, all of whom knew how to charge for their services.

  Neither the cheque nor the promised file from Northern Mutual had arrived. No doubt Ernie Cunliffe was demonstrating just who was top of the class these days. I made a mental note that I wouldn’t phone his office and give him the opportunity for a little gratuitous fun. One of the advantages of being at ground-floor level on a busy street in Central Manchester is that I get a fair number of casual callers. Some of them think that I’m a branch of the Citizen’s Advice service but others have problems that I can help to solve. If I stuck to the casual callers I might make enough to just about pay the rent and live on air. I told myself that I had to look on their problems, impossible to resolve though most of them were, as the price I paid for independence from the likes of Ernie Cunliffe.

  ‘Yes, there’s a lady waiting for you. She looks like a real saddo.’

  ‘Wheel her in,’ I commanded. ‘Oh, and Celeste, if she’s not out in ten minutes you might like to pop your head round the door and ask if I want coffee. Then if she’s biting the carpet you can wrestle her out into the street.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ she said scornfully.

  After that the day went ahead briskly, if not very profitably.

  The lady Celeste brought in was a tall, painfully thin and anxious woman of about forty with a café-au-lait complexion. She was clad in a long raincoat of identical colour to herself that reached almost to the ground and she said she wanted me to help her feed the pigeons in the park. They say pet-lovers begin to resemble the object of their affections. This lady’s nervy, jerky manner seemed to confirm that.

  Mrs Griffiths had prominent, watery blue eyes. Too much iodine or something, I guessed.

  Her problem was simple. Every morning she went into her local park to feed the birds. All I had to do was turn up and walk into the park with her to shield her from the attentions of a fanatical pigeon hater who was threatening to ram the bird food down her throat. As the park was local and the time early I agreed.

  A second-hand book dealer I know always tells me that he’s had a ‘slow week’ when I try to offload some of my surplus reading matter on him. It looked like being a fast day at Pimpernel Investigations, because no sooner had Mrs Griffiths departed than Celeste showed in the next customer.

  When he came in I thought someone was pulling a wind-up. We’ve all heard of Elvis lookalikes; the elderly man who shuffled in now was a Harry H. Corbett lookalike. He was clutching a trilby in his hand and sported a head of dense black hair. Far from receding with age, the man’s hairline appeared to be advancing down his forehead like a coal tip on the slide. Bushy black eyebrows, long sideboards and heavy black plastic framed glasses completed the impression of a man in disguise.

  I looked at him for a moment before speaking. I wondered if I was expected to guess who he really was. But no, he was a bona fide customer.

  His problem was that he’d lost his wife . . . Not a bereavement, he’d just mislaid her.

  It took some coaxing to get to the facts. He had a curious way of speaking. Every other sentence he uttered was a question spoken softly in a pronounced Yiddish accent that life in Manchester hadn’t erased. The sentences were punctuated with significant hand gestures.

  Mr Levy told his tale with an air of world-weary sadness. He was wearing a well-cut green three-piece worsted suit complete with gold watch chain and was shod in a pair of those expensive handmade brown leather brogues that are supposed to be the trademark of the English land-owning classes. An exotic touch was supplied by the silver-handled cane he carried.

  It turned out that Mr Levy was not in fact a country landowner but a gentleman of the turf.

  ‘You’ve heard of Pearl,’ he said with quiet pride. ‘That was me. Started from a little shop much smaller than this office.’

  ‘Weren’t they taken over by . . .’

  ‘I sold out five years ago. You know how many betting shops I had? Thirty-nine!’

  I don’t know whether I was more flattered or surprised. Whatever else he was, Mr Levy must be a millionaire many times over. I decided to drag the conversation back to the matter in hand: ‘And now your wife’s gone missing?’ I said.

  ‘Blunt, businesslike . . . I like this,’ Levy said in a deep, rumbling voice. He didn’t seem to be overwrought about the disappearance of Mrs Levy.

  ‘Er . . . when did you know she’d gone?’ I asked.

  ‘Two months ago, end of June. We married in April.’ He made a chopping motion with his right hand into his left palm.

  ‘So let’s get this straight. You were married approximately four months ago and then two months after the wedding Mrs Levy went AWOL?’

  He nodded gravely.

  ‘Have you made any effort to trace her?’

  Levy smiled and then shrugged as if I’d asked for the combination of his personal safe.

  ‘Mr Cunane, anyone ever call you names, eh?’ he said, illustrating his difficulty with expansive open-handed gestures. ‘Some of my friends have names for men who can’t keep their wives in order. Not very nice names, not names that I should wish someone to call me. At first I thought . . . maybe another man. It happens, yes? So I waited for her to get in touch. Anyone would, right? Then I found that she’d gone home to her mother. Only me, do I have the mother’s address? No. So what do I do? I come here.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s like every day is holiday when you marry a young wife, isn’t it?’ he asked.
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  I nodded, waiting for him to go on, but he paused courteously for my comment.

  ‘Just how young is your wife?’ I asked awkwardly.

  Now my potential client’s head started rocking while his right hand gyrated at the same tempo as if he was conducting the Hallé Orchestra through a slow movement. A faintly rueful smile played on his lips as he spoke. ‘Is twenty-five too young? Asking too much, eh?’

  ‘From you or her, Mr Levy?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the question. Yes, her or me, eh?’

  ‘So your wife is twenty-five?’

  ‘She could be about that, yes. I think so.’

  ‘Is she or isn’t she?’

  An expressive shrug was the only answer I got.

  Mr Levy’s elliptical remarks set off a warning bell. Once I traced a ‘missing wife’ only to find that she was a stalker’s prey. What sort of husband doesn’t know his wife’s age?

  My suspicion communicated itself to Mr Levy because he leaned across the desk with the gravity of a man making a final plea to his bank manager. ‘She’s not Jewish, you see,’ he insisted. ‘I made a mistake by marrying out, not that I’m prejudiced. Waste of time, isn’t it? Life’s too short.’ He then placed a large brown envelope on the desk and signalled me to open it.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Angelina couldn’t cope with life in a new country.’

  ‘I see,’ I muttered. Not that I did see. I was busy looking through the documentation he’d provided. Angelina was certainly his wife. He’d brought the marriage certificate and wedding photos to prove it. Angelina was a Filipino woman, a mail order bride.

  I looked at him quizzically.

  ‘Three years ago,’ he said, ‘a friend told me I should go on a cruise to the east. Fine and dandy, I’m not getting any younger, am I? So I go with him. We get to Thailand and suddenly it’s raining young women, all eager for a bit of fun. I mean, old as I am, I still have feelings, yes? At first I thought they were just being friendly. Hah! I haven’t had any operations to put that department into retirement, have I? All is hunky-dory, we get back to England and there are certain consequences . . . I can tell you this – you’re a man of the world aren’t you, Mr Cunane?’

  I nodded, trying to guess what was coming next and keep the smile off my face.

  ‘Hah!’ he laughed, banging his cane on the floor. ‘I go to the clinic for treatment and I say to the doctor, I bet you don’t have many men of my age coming here for this. Well, laugh, the doctor’s in stitches! Doctor Mac-What’s-it, he says, you’re not the oldest. We had a guy of ninety in last week. Gonorr what-you-call-it, same as you. You old geezers go on the cruises, I know all about you . . . He’s a good sort, that doctor, knows how to put a man in an embarrassing position at his ease. He’s like you, Mr Cunane, nothing can shock him.

  ‘So I go again the next year and this time I take precautions but still I have to visit that same doctor again. You know, this time it is embarrassing. He thinks I don’t learn by my mistakes. So this year when my friend comes round I say, let’s try somewhere different this time. We go to Bangkok but for the food and massage only. The ship sails to Manila and there we get off. We meet not just the girls but their whole families, lovely people – mother, father, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, grandparents . . .’

  The silver knob of Levy’s cane rose and fell as he registered each degree of his lady-friends’ kindred with a rap on the floor.

  ‘So the next thing I know we’re all talking about marriage and I find that, old as I am, I’m engaged.’

  ‘Did any money actually change hands?’ I asked.

  ‘Hah! The cynic!’ Levy said, tossing his head back. He put a finger to the side of his nose. ‘I did pay for her air fare, clothes, trousseau and expenses, and if it seemed to run a bit expensive who’s to say it shouldn’t? Those people haven’t got much.’

  ‘I see,’ I muttered.

  ‘You can see she came with good references, even one from her parish priest. I took her to Ireland with me . . . the racing . . . I don’t know, maybe it was being in a Catholic country again made her homesick.’

  After half an hour of him lobbing my verbal volleys back to me as I tried to probe the circumstances it emerged that Mr Levy suspected that his wife might have saved up her spending money and flown off to Manila – there were charges for air tickets on her credit card statement – and would I like to go and fetch her back?

  ‘Now, Mr Levy, it’s not like changing your library books. I can’t just go over there and pick her up off the shelf.’

  Mr Levy took a chequebook from an inside pocket and with elaborate slowness opened it, then took out a gold-capped fountain pen, unscrewed the top, and poised the nib above the paper. He looked at me expectantly.

  ‘Name a figure,’ he commanded. ‘You might be out of the country two weeks, say three weeks. You could do the job in a couple of days and the extra time will be a bonus for you, yes?’

  I got the impression that this wasn’t the first time or even the hundredth time Mr Levy had got a result by waving his chequebook at someone. There was a glint in his eye as he tried to coax compliance out of me. Was I supposed to drool with greed?

  That little glint in his eye made my decision easy. ‘Sorry, but I’d be taking your money for nothing. I can trace your wife in Manila without leaving this office. I can get a private detective over there to find her and ask her to get in touch.’

  ‘You go yourself and I’ll pay. That’s the best way, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, Mr Levy, it isn’t. We aren’t even sure that Angelina’s still in the Philippines. Did she have any friends in England?’

  ‘Married two months, we were. No time for friends, was there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Did she go out? Did she meet people?’

  ‘I told you. I gave her a wonderful home. Everything delivered from catalogues. No need for her to go out, was there?’

  ‘What about your relatives? Was there one of them she might have been interested in?’

  ‘Do I have relatives now? Do I look like a man with relatives?’ He sounded quite offended.

  ‘She must have met someone . . . the milkman, the gardener?’

  He shook his head resolutely. I could feel Mr Levy’s two brown eyes boring through to the back of my skull.

  ‘Did she phone the Philippines often?’ I asked after an interval.

  Levy shook his head impatiently.

  ‘Enough questions,’ he said and then flashed his pen over the chequebook again. ‘I pay you, you find her.’

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ I argued, fully aware that to Mr Levy it apparently was that simple. You press the right buttons and a guy gets on the plane to Manila in pursuit of errant wife – simple.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked, rapping the side of his head with his index finger. ‘You want to let a paying customer walk out?’

  ‘No, I’ll take a normal advance to get someone else to trace your wife in the Philippines, a local man. That will be much cheaper for you. I’ll just charge a handling fee.’

  I scribbled a figure on a scrap of paper and pushed it to him. He shook his head and then made out the cheque.

  ‘You’ll never get rich looking free horses in the mouth, Mr Cunane.’

  ‘True, but maybe I won’t get my teeth kicked in so often this way,’ I muttered to myself when he’d gone. I studied the picture of Angelina that he’d left on my desk. Her head was tilted back. Even teeth were displayed in a warm smile and a lock of hair tumbled across her forehead. Her features were as regular as a child’s drawing and about as appealing. If this was what Mr Levy wanted in a wife, how did he fill her requirements? That was easy. He was rich and gullible.

  So why had the wheel come off the wagon?

  Some private investigators of my acquaintance would have bitten Levy’s hand off right up to the armpit. What could I have asked for – £10,000, £20,000? Perhaps even more to deliver Angelina to England, willing or unwillin
g. A real shark would entice Angelina back by offering to split the take with her. She wasn’t unattractive. Yes, a forward lad would work his wiles on the lovely Angelina and use her to squeeze poor, rich Mr Levy like a lemon, or do something even more sinister. After all, as his wife, Angelina stood to inherit Levy’s worldly goods. The possibilities were endless.

  Mr Levy must have been a shrewd operator at one time, but now here he was walking into the office of a private investigator he didn’t know from Adam and throwing his chequebook around. Possibly the shock of Angelina’s departure had knocked him off his gimbals, though he certainly didn’t look grief-stricken. I scratched my head and tried to work it out. I told myself there must be a catch in it somewhere. Levy didn’t seem to be in the grip of Alzheimer’s, but you never can tell.

  I spent much of the rest of the day on the phone and fax machine. I phoned the home number of a private detective I knew in Sydney. It was one o’clock in the morning there as he immediately informed me.

  ‘Jeez, I dunno, mate. You pommy bastards. Don’t you work normal hours?’ he grated in an exaggerated Strine accent.

  ‘Cut the crap, mate,’ I said. Tommy Braithwaite had emigrated from Manchester only three years previously. ‘You’re always saying you want to keep in touch with your roots.’

  ‘Yeah, well cobber, Dave, me old bludger, what’s this Sheila worth to me?’

  I named a figure and after some addition for unsocial hours he promised to phone back, which he did half an hour later.

  Braithwaite gave me the number of a reliable man in Manila who was used as a stringer by the agency for which he worked. It was 1.40 a.m. in Manila when I spoke to the Filipino detective. He made no fuss about the time but quickly robbed me of the illusion that all Filipinos speak fluent English with an American accent. His language was Spanglish with quite a lot of other words thrown in. After half an hour of linguistic gymnastics and much debate about fees he agreed to track down the homesick runaway and persuade her to get in touch with her old man.

  My day’s labour wasn’t concluded. At around four Celeste showed in a hard-eyed young woman in leather trousers with silver rings through her eyebrows, a Miss Greenidge. I sensed a certain aggressive streak in Miss Greenidge’s makeup as she bounced up to my desk and plonked herself in front of me. She fronted at me boldly as if challenging me to turn her down. Celeste watched me too.