He laughed, but it was as cold as his voice. There was triumph in it, triumph over me, triumph over Prim. He had my girl and me in his power and suddenly I hated him for it. Truly, I’d never hated anyone in my life before. The ice began to melt. Something I had been told years before by a soldier pal came back to me. ‘Anger overcomes fear.’ It doesn’t, but it helps. I concentrated on my hatred as hard as I could.
‘That was so easy,’ he said, maddeningly self-confident. ‘One is an actor after all. It’s one’s job to make people believe. I told him that I was a policeman on an Interpol operation with two Special Branch colleagues. We were off to pay off an informer who’d helped us round up some terrorists. I told him that the money was in the account that poor little Kane used dear Dawn to set up.
‘I said that I’d travelled down first, and that you two would come down later with the banknote, pick up the cash and then rendezvous with me in a hotel in Lausanne. Only your car had broken down on the way, and I wasn’t sure when you’d arrive, so I’d cancelled the hotel in Lausanne and come to meet you at the bank.
‘I arranged with Berner to give you a little surprise. He’d allow me to wait in his anteroom until you two arrived, then when you’d done our business, he’d press his bell and I’d appear out of nowhere. It worked a treat, didn’t it! One of my better productions, I’d say. It certainly gave my audience a start.’
Suddenly it all came back to me, what Dawn had said about him, and the College of Cardinals. ‘Willie Kane cried it all out on your shoulder, didn’t he. At the theatre club. He told you what he’d done for Dawn, about the bank account, about the money he’d stolen, about the key. Gay men are such good listeners after all, aren’t you!’
We had reached the traffic lights, and the crossing indicator was flashing. ‘Go on,’ he said digging me in the ribs with the gun. ‘Right,’ he said, once we were on the other side of the street, ‘that’s where we’re going, to that park down there. So we can decide what to do with you.’ He added that as an afterthought, but we both knew that he’d made up his mind.
‘You really are a good detective, Oz,’ he said. He was rubbing his power into us now, the bastard. ‘That’s just what happened.’
‘But how did you get into Prim’s flat? When I phoned, it was a woman who answered.’
He laughed softly. ‘Did you really think so?’ I thought back. A high voice. An arch tone. But in hindsight, no, not feminine: effeminate.
‘Poor little Willie. When Dawn told him it couldn’t go on he was distraught. He had stolen the money by that time. Even if he had given it back, his career would have been over. If he’d gone back to that wife of his, she’d have torn out his fingernails as a punishment.’ He paused.
‘She was there, you know, on the night. Just as I parked my car she came out, looking furious, having given the errant husband one last piece of her mind.
‘The little chap asked me to come and see him, you know. He hadn’t a clue what he wanted any more. So I persuaded him that he needed something new, something different. I told him to get undressed, lie down, and close his eyes, and that I’d make everything all right.’ He laughed, an awful cold sound. ‘And didn’t I just.’
Geneva, they say, is famous for its parks, and the one towards which we were heading was probably its biggest, with a wide grassy area leading up to thick woodland. It was the middle of the afternoon, and for all its size it was uncomfortably empty. The forest seemed to go on for ever, and it looked very dark indeed. I suspected that on the other side there was nothing but the lake, since, above the tree-line, I could see the spume of the great Geneva fountain. All in all, it didn’t look like the sort of place where you’d want to go with a man with a gun. But we had no choice: Brooks shoved us roughly through the gates.
‘But you didn’t find the fiver, Rawdon, did you?’ I said, as we stumbled towards the woods.
‘No indeed. Hard as I looked. And I never would, but for the strangest piece of luck. The very next night, dear PC McArthur came to the club. He was actually smiling! Unusual for him. I asked him what the joke was, and he said that his inspector was in terrible trouble because he had allowed a witness to take a piece of evidence away from a murder scene. A five pound note he said. A young couple, he said.
‘And then, the morning after, you come barging into the Lyceum, all bright-eyed and full of investigative zeal. I had the whole picture then.’
We were more than halfway across the grass, nearing the woods. ‘That policeman who questioned you before us,’ said Prim. ‘He never existed, did he?’
Brooks laughed. ‘Of course not. Just a little something to set you off a-worrying about little sister.
‘Once I knew you had the note, I knew that eventually, you’d wind up here. With the company in recess, it was just a matter of coming down here and waiting. Although I did think you’d have got here sooner.’
‘So what happens now?’ asked Primavera, direct as always. It was a question I’d been avoiding.
‘Ferry crossings are really insecure things, you know,’ said Brooks. ‘You can take an unlicensed gun abroad in a car without worrying about being searched. You can even take really high quality heroin through, and a hypodermic.’
‘A bit of a junkie,’ Dawn had said. ‘So that’s it.’ I think I may have snarled at him. ‘We’re going to have an overdose.’ A picture flashed, unbidden into my mind: that poor dead lassie from years back, in that close, with me, in uniform, on guard at its mouth. I could see her, as clear as day.
‘Precisely. You’ll just be another couple of dead addicts. And when they find you, sooner or later, there’ll be nothing to identify you. I think there are foxes in there too.’
We had reached the woods. ‘Right, Hansel and Gretel, hold hands and go on ahead. But don’t forget the gun.’
He drove us on through the trees, like animals. It grew darker and darker in there, with no sign of the other side. The traffic noise was distant, too. No, this was no copse, this was an urban forest.
At last we saw an area up ahead, where the trees seemed to thin, and where more light was allowed in from above. ‘Enough,’ said Brooks. ‘This’ll do. Now: Oz, dear boy, drop the bag. Then, both of you, turn around.’
We did as we were told. The big bastard just stood there, smiling at us, almost laughing. It was the way he was enjoying it, that was what was working on me. He was going to kill Prim, and he was looking forward to it.
He threw his raincoat on the ground and reached into the side pocket of his blazer with his left hand, pulling out a thin metal box. He flicked up the lid with his thumb and held it out for us to see. There it was, right enough, a hypo, primed and ready. ‘I cooked it up in advance,’ he said. ‘There’s enough in there to see you both off, believe me. It’s a relic of a rogue consignment I confiscated from a member of the company in Edinburgh last year. The fool was going to take it. It’s quite pure, uncut.’
A slow, wicked, leering smile, spread across his face. ‘Right, to the performance. Oh, how I love live theatre!
‘Let’s see. Who goes first?’ He looked at us, from me, to Prim, and back again. ‘You, Oz, you’ve drawn the lucky bag. Primavera and I will be your audience. But worry not; it will be only a short time, before you are together again.
‘Come here, both of you.’ We stepped towards him. Fear was beginning to conquer anger, after all. Death is helluva final, when you look at it up close. He held the box out to Prim, keeping the gun on me.
‘Take it,’ he said, smoothly. ‘Dawn told me that you are a nurse, so find a vein and give him half of the barrel.’
Prim looked mesmerised as she took the syringe from its cottonwool bed. She stared at it as she held it up. She gave it a wee squeeze, like they do in the movies, sending some of the juice spraying upwards. She beckoned me. ‘Come here darling,’ she said, softly, hypnotically. I felt myself drawn to her. The ice was melted, the hamster had gone. I sensed rather than saw Brooks looking at me, anticipating.