“Sir,” said Novello. “I think someone’s trying to talk to you.”
A small tinny voice was rising from his lap.
“Really? Ever been to hospital, Shirley?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you’ll know how much time you spend there sitting around, waiting for some godlike consultant to arrive. Sometimes the whirligig of time does indeed bring round his revenges.”
Slowly he raised the phone and said, “Mr Chakravarty, how kind of you to spare me a moment.”
The conversation lasted less than a minute.
When it finished, Novello, marvelling that anyone could be so threatening while remaining so polite, said, “Wow.”
“You got that, did you?” said Pascoe.
“The poor bastard had an inoperable brain tumour. And Chakrawhatsit had been banging his sister. But I don’t see why this stopped him coming forward when he heard about the suicide.”
“He might well have done so eventually, even though doctors are naturally reluctant to share their patients’ secrets. But he received a strong disincentive when Tom Lockridge approached him. You see, Lockridge must have explained to him that anything he could say about Maciver’s possibly diseased brain might be very useful in helping the widow overthrow his will. His mistake was to mention that, in the new will, Pal’s sister, Cressida, was one of the main beneficiaries. And the prospect of standing up in court and giving evidence for the plaintiff in a will dispute case involving Cress was not very attractive to our Mr Chakravarty.”
“Because…?”
“Because,” said Pascoe, “while one can see why the playwright said that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, I think that a woman scorned and then done out of a large sum of money by the same guy would be several times more furious.”
Novello digested this.
“So he’d dumped her and she wasn’t pleased?”
“So my informant tells me.”
That would be Mrs Pascoe, she guessed, but this time she was wise enough not to display her cleverness. A police car passed them heading towards Cothersley. It was moving at a fairly stately pace which, she felt, matched its inmates, whom she recognized as Jennison and Maycock.
She said, “I reckon the wife will win the case.”
“Why so?”
“Because even though it makes a bit more sense, he must still have been off his trolley to try and set things up the way he did. He didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of getting away with it, did he? I mean, OK, you want revenge on somebody and you know you’re dying yourself, so why not just go round to their house and blow them away? You’ve got no worry about the consequences, have you?”
“And that, you feel, would have better indicated that Maciver was of sound mind than doing it the way he chose?”
Novello thought for a moment then said, “All right, probably not. But I still say it was a bloody stupid way of going about things.”
“That depends,” said Pascoe, “on what he thought he was going about.”
She thought this might be a prelude to another elenctic bout but instead he lapsed into a brooding silence allowing Novello to concentrate on trying to break whatever speed records existed for the journey from Cothersley to the station.
Here Pascoe made straight for his office, leaving instructions that Wield was to be ushered straight in the moment he showed his face.
While he waited, he went online and accessed the Ashur-Proffitt website to see if news of the Commission investigation had touched it yet.
It hadn’t. There it was, as solid and impressive as Ozymandias’s statue must once have seemed, with its network of partners and subsidiaries stretching across the world. Junius, he recalled, had described it as a rat warren. The beasts could emerge anywhere and you’d have no idea where they went in.
He checked to see if the Junius hyperlink was still in place. It was, or it had been renewed. He read through the newsletter again. Against the displayed might of the corporation it seemed like a puffball blown against behemoth. But there was a final paragraph that brought it right up to date. Junius rejoiced at news of the investigation. He drew a parallel with the Capone empire of extortion and racketeering back in the twenties, and forecast that the accountants might be able to do what the forces of law seemed powerless to do and bring the monster to book.
Pascoe sat back, closed his eyes and brooded on the links, as yet intuited rather than educed, between this and Pal Maciver’s death.
When he opened his eyes, Wield was standing before him.
“Make my day, punk,” said Pascoe.
The sergeant dropped a leather-bound diary stamped 1992 on to his desk.
Pascoe looked at the volume but didn’t touch it. Later he might browse it at his leisure but when you had before you a man famed for his speed-reading and almost eidetic memory, it was silly not to take the short cut.
“Sit down and give me the gist, Wieldy,” he said.
“Jake Gallipot. Pal Senior hired him to help check out what was going on at Ash-Mac’s. He wanted an out-of-town PI for extra security, but he didn’t pick Jake with a pin. He knew him from a Masons’ meeting, knew he’d been a cop and that he was crooked enough to need to resign but clever enough not to get caught. He wanted someone who’d be willing to bend the law if necessary. He fixed it for Jake to get taken on in the Ash-Mac Security section. Ex-cop, he had all the qualifications. And that gave him the chance to go poking around at night when everyone else was asleep. What old Pal suspected was that Ash-Mac’s was being used, either directly or sometimes as a staging post, for the export of material and machinery with military applications to countries on the sanctions list. At first Jake came up with some good stuff, memos, bills of lading-all circumstantial, but old Pal clearly felt he was close to discovering a smoking gun. But it was a long time coming and Pal got impatient. He’d sounded off to Tony Kafka a couple of times, trying to bluff an admission out of him by claiming he knew more than he did. All he got in reply was a polite warning that modern business was a much harder game than it had been in his day and he ought to be careful what he said. In the end, he decided he and Jake were getting nowhere alone and that was when he contacted the papers. His last entry was on the eve of his trip down to London. He was full of hope.”
“Now let’s see,” said Pascoe, unearthing the old Maciver file. “He went down on the fifteenth of March, 1992, came back two days later. Kay and Helen flew to the States first thing next day. Pal Senior topped himself the day after that, the twentieth. Now, I assume he kept this diary hidden in his concealed cabinet in the study, which would explain why there were no entries for days he was in London. But you’d think when he came back he’d have wanted to scribble something about what happened down there.”
“Perhaps he was just so disappointed at the reception he got that he didn’t feel up to it. Remember, he didn’t even feel able to write a proper suicide note.”
“No, he didn’t. Anything about Kay and the children in the diary?”
“No. He was obsessed by the firm, it seems. But I did notice something, could be owt or nowt. He mentioned a couple of meetings with a VAT investigator. Seems it was the business, not him personally, being investigated. And he seemed to have hopes that this might be a way to get at the new management if all else failed.”
“The Al Capone technique,” mused Pascoe. “This VAT man, any name?”
“No. But some initials: L.W. I had a word with Bowler. That guy Waverley he mentioned, friend of the bird lady, retired VAT inspector, his first name’s Laurence.”
“Whom Lavinia Maciver met for the first time at Moscow House ten years ago when she showed him the green woodpeckers.”
“No law against that,” said Wield.
“Perhaps not. But it’s interesting, particularly as the bird lady says that the only times she’s visited her old home in the past decade have been connected with violent death.”