“So if you’ve come here on your own initiative, what’s your reason for telling us not to meddle?”
This question patently confused him. Again he gave the impression that he hadn’t prepared fully for this encounter. It was a moment or two before he said, “Don’t meddle. You don’t need to know why.”
“And if we do meddle, as you call it,” asked Carole, “what will happen to us?”
“Don’t go there,” he replied,, “if you want to keep breathing.”
Jude was beginning to have a problem stopping herself from giggling. The young man’s posturing was so inept, his American accent kept slipping and his B-movie dialogue made him almost pathetic. On the other hand, there still was something dangerous about him. Who could say how far he would go in making his fantasies real? It would pay to proceed carefully.
Carole was not held back by any such inhibitions. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she said. “You sound like a hitman from some second-rate thriller.”
The description seemed to flatter him rather than anything. “Hitman? You could be right,” he responded. “Second-rate – never.”
“Are you telling us you are a hitman then?”
He appraised Carole with narrowed eyes, then said, “If I were, I wouldn’t tell you. It’s not a business you brag about. A good hitman doesn’t stand out from the crowd. He takes his instructions, does the job, gets the money and then sinks back into obscurity. All he does then is keep his gun clean and ready.”
“And do you have a gun to keep clean and ready?”
“I wouldn’t tell you that either. Let’s just say, when it becomes necessary, I’ll be tooled up.”
“Where would you get a gun from?” asked Carole with something approaching contempt. “It isn’t the kind of thing that you can just pick up at Fethering Market.”
Her tone annoyed him. “You can get guns if you know the right people. A lot of military stuff got smuggled out of Iraq.”
Carole’s ‘Huh’ showed how unlikely she thought that was.
“What kind of gun have you got?” asked Jude, more gently.
He smiled a strange half-smile, his mouth only curling up one side of his face. “I favour revolvers. With them you can fill your spare time playing Russian roulette.” He laughed as if he’d just made a rather good joke, then looked serious again. “Anyway, like I say, a hitman always sinks back into obscurity. Till the next job comes along.”
“Is that how you operate?” asked Jude.
He gave her a thin smile. “Like I said, hitmen don’t talk about their work. They just hit – hard, efficient, fast.”
“And is it your work as a hitman that makes you worried about my having visited Kelly-Marie yesterday?”
“Just lay off the kid. Ray’s dead. Talking won’t bring him back.”
“No, but it might help find who murdered him.”
He let out a little cynical laugh he’d heard from some film star. “People who try to find murderers often get murdered themselves.”
“Well, I think that’s a risk we might be prepared to take. Are you actually threatening us?”
“Not threatening. Warning.”
“And if we don’t heed your warnings,” said Carole who was getting a bit sick of Viggo’s play-acting, “what are you going to do to us – go into hitman mode, get out your gun – which you have of course been keeping clean and ready – and blow us away?”
“Don’t joke, lady. You could be playing with fire.”
This got the harrumph it deserved from Carole, but Jude started on another line of questioning. “The thing about hitmen is that they work to order…” Viggo nodded in acknowledgement of this self-evident rule of the profession. “Contracts are taken out on people, and the hitmen fulfil the contracts. Is that how you work, Chuck?” She made the name sound as phoney as it was.
“I didn’t say I was a hitman.”
“No, but you’d like to be one, wouldn’t you?”
This question threw him. His façade of cool dropped just for a moment as he hissed, “Yes. I could do it. I could do that kind of stuff. I have done that kind of stuff.”
“Have you?” asked Carole contemptuously.
“I…I…” He looked confused for a moment, then rescued himself with an old line. “If I had, I wouldn’t tell you. Like I said, hitmen keep quiet about their work.”
“You said earlier,” Carole went on, “that nobody told you what to do.”
“That’s right.”
“Which, if it’s true, must mean that you’re not a hitman. Hitmen, as we’ve established, do exactly what they’re told.”
He was silent for a moment, trying to work out the logic of that. Jude, who had been fiddling with her mobile phone, joined the attack. “So who would you take orders from? It’d have to be someone you respect, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t take orders from someone you didn’t respect, would you?”
“No,” he said cautiously, still not sure where this was all leading.
“So what kind of a man would you respect?”
“Someone who’s tough. Someone who stands up to people. Someone who wouldn’t give away any secrets even under torture.” As he itemized it, this wish-list, so far from Viggo’s own character, sounded pitiful.
“Someone like this?” As she said the word, Jude thrust her mobile phone towards him. On the screen appeared Zosia’s photograph of the scarred man with the bikers at the Crown and Anchor.
There was no doubt from Viggo’s reaction that he knew who it was. However much he faffed around with subsequent denials, his first instinctive reaction had been the give-away. Eventually, he said, “So what if I do know him? What’s it to you, lady?”
“Some people think that that man started the fight at the Crown and Anchor last Sunday.” Jude wasn’t too sure about the accuracy of what she was saying. She hadn’t actually heard anyone express that opinion, but she thought it might elicit some response from Viggo.
“So what if he did? Fighters fight. That’s what they do.”
“Do you know the name of the man in the photograph?” Carole asked suddenly.
“I don’t do names.”
“Except to change your own from time to time, Viggo.”
That riled him. Carole’s pale blue eyes took the full beam of his black ones. “Chuck,” he said. “I’m Chuck.”
“Then who was Viggo?”
“Someone else.”
Carole was getting sick of his gnomic responses. “So who was the man in the photograph?”
“You won’t get that out of me, even under torture.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. You’re talking to two middle-aged women in Fethering. We don’t do torture.”
“Others do.”
“Yes, maybe.” Carole looked with exasperation towards Jude, who tried another approach.
“The man in the photograph went to Copsedown Hall to see you.”
Viggo didn’t question her assertion. “So?”
“Why did he come and see you?”
The man’s face took on a pugnacious look. “I can have friends, I can’t I?”
“Friends? Heroes, maybe. Is he your hero?”
“Why shouldn’t he be? He’s a man of action. He’s strong.”
“Does that mean you would take orders from him?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said you’d only take orders from someone you respected. The way you describe this man who came to see you, he’s someone you’d respect.” Viggo nodded. “So, what orders did he give you?”
The man’s face closed down. “Orders are secret. Information is only given out on a ‘need-to-know’ basis. No operative should know what orders another operative has been given.”
Carole was beginning to wonder how much more of this nonsense they had to listen to, but Jude persevered. “From the way you speak, you sound as if you are also an operative yourself.”