Emboldened, Harry crept after him. The dark silhouette of the stable block loomed up in front of them both. A dozen yards away from it, Kuiper stooped down. He remained bent over something for half a minute. Finally, Harry realised that he was struggling to shift something heavy without making any noise. In a moment of empathy, Harry understood that Peter Kuiper’s tension matched his own.
A low grunt reached Harry’s ears across the night air with remarkable clarity. A grunt partly of satisfaction, mostly of relief. Kuiper straightened for a second or two before bending down again. This time he disappeared from view.
Harry waited for a minute to see what would happen next. Nothing. He approached the place where Kuiper had been. It was on the edge of the clearing in which the stable block stood. Harry remembered the scene in daylight from his previous visit. Even in the dark, he knew at once that something was very different.
A large rock which had looked immovable had been pushed aside. Below there was an opening into blackness. Scarcely daring to breathe, Harry drew nearer. He looked down. So far as he could make out, there were a few rough-hewn steps which led to some subterranean chamber.
Kuiper was beginning to climb back up the steps. He was carrying something in his arms. As his head was just about to reach ground level, Harry coughed. There was a clatter as the student dropped whatever he had been carrying. A white face turned up to look at him.
“Devlin?”
“Evening, Peter. Do you come here often?”
In the moonlight he could see panic spreading over the student’s face and that was answer enough. For a few seconds Kuiper hesitated. The tip of his tongue appeared between lips no longer sneeringly curved. Harry heard the drawing-in of breath before the student lowered his head, and he was ready for the bull-like upward charge.
Blundering up the stone steps, eyes on the ground rather than on his intended victim, Kuiper never had a chance catching Harry off-balance, of butting him in the chest or knocking him to the floor. With all the time in the world Harry took a step to one side, then brought both hands down together in a single blow. Kuiper staggered backwards down the steps, hitting his head against the back wall of the passage. As he fell awkwardly to the floor, Harry heard a loud crack as bone splintered.
Harry reached into the hole in the ground and, putting hands under the boy’s arms, began to yank him back to the surface. Kuiper moaned in protest as Harry dragged the rest of his inert body back up to ground level.
“That hurts.”
“Pity.”
Harry shoved the boy to one side and peered down the hole. In the light cast by the moon he could see the oddments which Kuiper had dropped lying on the ground at the bottom. Items so everyday that the effect was surreal. A tin of baked beans. A small tub of biscuits. A boil-in-the-bag packet meal. Rations for a hermit? For a wild moment he thought he had uncovered a hiding place where Alison Stirrup might at last be found. Had she been the victim of some bizarre kidnap plot, imprisoned beneath the grounds of her own matrimonial home? Even as his mind played with the possibility, he caught sight of the retailer’s labels on the bits and pieces where Kuiper had let fall. They all bore the name and logo of the Saviour Money supermarket chain. At last the truth dawned.
Peter Kuiper had led him to a poisoner’s den.
Chapter Seventeen
One glance at Kuiper convinced Harry that the student would not be leaving in a hurry. The boy’s face was buried in the dirt. He was making a strange noise, the muffled weeping of pain and rage and defeat.
Panting after his exertion, Harry trudged towards the main building. He did not relish explaining to Jack Stirrup that his daughter’s boyfriend had used the grounds of Prospect House as an operational base in an attempt to hold Bharat Kaiwar’s business empire to ransom. Nor would words of persuasion alone convince Jack that the lad had not also killed Claire. If not checked, Stirrup’s interrogative techniques would leave Peter Kuiper yearning for a little genteel police brutality. As Harry pressed the doorbell, he steeled himself for his third physical confrontation of the evening and wondered why Liverpool Poly’s careers adviser hadn’t warned him that success in the law was marked by the award of a Lonsdale Belt.
No lights snapped on in response to his ring. After a minute he tried a second time. Again no answer.
Harry walked round the side of the building. No sign of life. Just the flickering red light of a burglar alarm box high up on the side wall. No window or door had been left conveniently open to allow him access to a telephone in the deserted house. Harry swore. Feeling hungry as well as tired, he was beginning to regret his failure to finish the microwaved pizza. To get the police here fast and leave them to sort everything out was all he wanted right now.
He picked up a half-brick left by the builders and hurled it through the kitchen window. The lack of finesse would have appalled the least sophisticated of his criminal clients, but he was past caring. He pushed in what was left of the shattered pane and opened the window. No casement lock: Stirrup should have consulted his neighbourhood crime prevention officer rather than frittering money on electronic gimmickry. An alarm siren started wailing, but there was no one to hear it except the crippled young man who lay prostrate fifty yards away. It was the work of a moment for Harry to heave himself up and inside. He found the phone and dialled a number he knew by heart; it belonged to Quentin Pike.
“Got a client for you,” he said and described in half a dozen sentences what had happened.
“Good God! Blackmail, you say? And you’re not able to act?”
“Conflict of interests. The kid doesn’t know you exist yet. But he’ll need a good brief.”
“Incidentally, what’s that bloody awful racket in the background?”
“The sound of a wasted investment.” Harry had already been in the house longer than it would take a seasoned burglar to strip everything of value. So much for home security.
He rang off and after trial and error in opening cupboard doors, discovered the control box inside a walk-in pantry and switched the siren off. It seemed easier than it ought to be. He put on an outside light, then rang 999 to summon the police and medical help. Next he found a couple of tumblers and filled them from a bottle of brandy he found in the dining room. He took them outside to where Kuiper was now lying on his back.
The boy’s face was a white blot on the blackness of the night, looking up at the starless sky. His tears had dried and he had tucked his bad leg awkwardly to one side.
“Get this down you.” Harry bent and held the glass to Kuiper’s lips.
The young man slurped a little as he drank. “My ankle’s broken, you bastard,” he said indistinctly.
“Think yourself lucky. If Jack Stirrup had been home, you’d be a candidate for intensive care. As it is, the police and the medics can argue over who’s going to have the privilege of looking after you tonight. They’ll be here any minute.”
Kuiper closed his eyes. His expression was stripped of hatred, fear and anger. All that remained was exhaustion and a grimace of pain.
“So, it’s all over.”
“For you and Claire, in different ways. Whose idea was it to blackmail Saviour Money?”
“Mine, of course.” The old cockiness had not quite drained away. With a flash of understanding Harry guessed that the boy wanted to explain what he had done. Now Claire was dead, he needed to look elsewhere for an audience.
“Tell me.”
“Claire was talking one day about the catering course she wanted to do. She rabbited on about hygiene in the kitchen. Food poisoning, all that stuff. About the junk people eat and how you never know if what you’re eating is full of bugs. I said something about those scare stories you read in papers, about people threatening to poison food shops if they’re not bought off. It set me thinking.”