Dead Man's Time

And suddenly he was back ninety years. To the quay on Ellis Island, waiting to board the Mauretania. The youth in the cap with the heavy brown-paper bag. And he remembered those words too now.

  ‘What do you think he meant, Aileen?’

  But there was no reaction.

  17

  The elderly blue Mercedes limousine, with its darkened rear windows, wound down the potholed drive. Music was playing loudly. The ‘Ode To Joy’ chorus from the Philharmonic Orchestra. His boss’s choice. The boss liked cultural stuff like this. Choral, ethereal. Music that sounded like the gods were calling you. That kind of shit.

  The grand Edwardian house sat below them, fronted by mature shrubbery, a rockery and a steep lawn. The drive went all the way around to the rear. At the bottom, in the wide space between two decrepit garages, was a whole cluster of vehicles. Two marked police cars, and what looked like two unmarked ones, and a white van with the Sussex Police crest and the words scientific support unit emblazoned along the side. Blue and white crime scene tape sealed off the pathway to the house itself, in front of which stood a uniformed woman police officer with a clipboard.

  The driver got out; a week short of his seventieth birthday, he was thin as a rake and stooped, with ragged silver hair poking out beneath his chauffeur’s cap that was two sizes too big.

  ‘Sorry about the bumps, boss,’ he wheezed as he opened the rear door.

  Gavin Daly put down the SuDoku he was working on, stepped out, steadying himself with his black, rubber-tipped cane. Its silver head was a hawk with a piercing gaze. He ignored his minder’s proffered helping hand, and pulled himself upright.

  Tanned, with immaculate, veneered teeth and a ramrod posture, Daly could have passed for a man two decades younger. He had a hooked, down-turned flat nose that gave him the air, like the head of his stick, of a bird of prey, a shoulder-length mane of white hair, and electric-blue eyes that were normally filled with warmth and charm, but today burned bright with anger behind his horn-rimmed glasses. He was dressed in a beige linen suit, open-neck blue shirt with a paisley cravat, tasselled brown Ferragamo loafers, and held an unlit, half-smoked Cohiba in his hand. Only the liver spots on his face and hands, his wrinkled neck and his slow pace gave any real clue to his age.

  Masking his fury as he walked up to the police officer, he spoke calmly but firmly. ‘My name is Gavin Daly,’ he said. ‘This is my sister’s house. Detective Superintendent Grace is expecting me.’ His voice was rich and polished, carrying just the faintest trace of his Irish antecedents. When he needed it, he had the true gift of the gab. He could sell snow to Eskimos, sand to Bedouins and bathing suits to fish. He had made his first fortune in clocked old cars, and his second, much greater one, in high-end antiques, specializing in watches and clocks.

  She looked down at her clipboard, then spoke into her radio.

  A few moments later a tall black man in a white protective oversuit and overshoes approached him. ‘Mr Daly, I’m Detective Inspector Branson, the Deputy Senior Investigating Officer on this case. Thank you for coming – and I’m sorry about the circumstances.’

  ‘Not as sorry as I am,’ Daly said, with a wry smile.

  ‘Of course, sir. I understand.’

  ‘You do? Tell me what you understand? You know what it feels like, do you, to see your ninety-eight-year-old sister in Intensive Care, and to be told of the vile things that have been done to her?’

  ‘We’re going to do everything in our power to catch the despicable people who did this, sir.’

  Daly stared back at him, but said nothing. He was going to have his son do everything in his power to find them too. And if his violent son got there first, as he intended, the police weren’t going to find them. Ever.

  A stocky man, fully suited and hooded, appeared holding a protective suit and boots. ‘I’m David Green, the Crime Scene Manager, sir. I’d appreciate it if you would put these on.’

  Glenn Branson helped the old man struggle into them. As he did so he said, ‘I understand you’ve flown back from France today – and you’ve been to see your sister?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘How is she doing?’

  ‘Not good,’ Daly replied, curtly. ‘What would you expect? That she’s standing on her bed performing a jig?’

  Branson was grateful that Roy Grace was here at the scene. This man was not going to be easy to deal with – as he had already been forewarned. David Green handed Daly a pair of gloves, then the three walked around to the front of the house. As they entered the porch, and walked onto SOCO metal stepping plates through the doorway into the hall, Daly saw two Scenes of Crime Officers, a male and a female, both in white over-suits, the woman on her knees making tapings, the man taking photographs.

  He looked around at the dark rectangles on the walls. He’d last been here a fortnight ago. Then it had been filled with paintings and beautiful objects. Now it looked like removals men had cleared the place.

  ‘Your sister lived here all on her own, Mr Daly?’

  ‘She has a part-time housekeeper – but the woman’s away on holiday. And a gardener who comes once a week.’

  ‘Would you consider both of them trustworthy?’

  ‘The housekeeper’s about seventy-five – she’s been with my sister for over thirty years – and the gardener for at least ten years. No question.’

  ‘We’ll need to talk to them, to eliminate them from our enquiries – if you can let me have their contact details, please.’

  Daly nodded.

  ‘Something that’s very important is if you could indicate as much as you can of what’s been taken. I understand you know this house well, sir?’ Glenn Branson said.

  ‘I guided my sister on just about everything she bought,’ Daly said. ‘She and her late husband. I don’t see anything important remaining in this hall. Whoever’s done this knew what they were doing. I can list everything that was in here. There should be a photograph album somewhere of all the most valuable items.’

  ‘That could be very helpful.’

  Daly was silent for some moments. Then he said, ‘Helpful to whom?’

  ‘This enquiry, sir.’

  Daly looked at him sceptically. ‘You really think so?’

  ‘It would help us if you could identify, as much as possible, everything that’s been taken.’

  ‘From what I’ve seen just in this room, it might be easier to identify what’s been left behind.’

  Branson looked at him uneasily. ‘It does seem like the perpetrators are professionals.’

  Daly did not reply. He walked through into the drawing room. Above the mantelpiece used to be one of his sister’s most valuable pictures, a Landseer landscape, worth a good half a million pounds. He had long tried to convince her to move it to another location for fear of heat damage from the fire. Now, fire damage was the least of her problems, he thought, staring at the dark rectangle. On the wall opposite had hung a gilded, hand-made, eighteen-wheel Whitehurst clock, made in 1791. It had exposed workings, which showed the time anywhere on the globe. Its auction value, today, would be over three hundred thousand pounds.

  He looked around at other dark rectangles on the walls. At empty spaces in the display cabinets, and on the walnut bureau. Everything of high value was gone. Almost everything. But there was one thing he was more anxious about than anything else. He went through into his sister’s office and stared at the wall. As he suspected, the safe door was open. He peered in, but the door to the second, secret chamber at the back was open, also.

  His heart sank, but anger rose inside him.

  ‘Bastards,’ he said, quietly. He shook his head, stared again, just to be quite certain. ‘Bastards.’

  Then he walked back into the hall, followed by the Detective. There was a pile of mail sitting on top of a Victorian table, one he had never particularly cared for. Ignoring Branson’s caution not to touch it without his gloves on, he began sifting through it. Halfway through the pile was a single A4 sheet of paper with a form letter. br />
  It was headed: R. C. MOORE.

  Below was an address in Brighton’s Kemp Town. And beneath that the wording:

  Dear Sir or Madam

  In the many years that I have been visiting this area, I have never ceased to take satisfaction from the pleasure people gain from realizing money from some unwanted, often forgotten item. Funds that you can put to good use – items that I, in turn, can sell.

  I am always interested in buying items such as:

  Old leather and crocodile suitcases

  Children’s books

  Old jewellery

  Scrap silver and gold

  ‘Looks like a knocker-boy leaflet,’ Glenn Branson said, bagging it to get it fingerprinted later.

  Brighton’s knocker-boys hailed back to the post-war days of the rag and bone men, and they had been a scourge of the elderly and vulnerable for decades, using leaflets like these to get inside houses and then either rip off the owners or pass on tips about valuable items to professional burglars.

  Daly nodded. He knew. He’d been one himself, years back. Then suddenly his phone rang. Excusing himself, he stared at the display. There was no name showing.

  ‘Gavin Daly,’ he answered.

  ‘It’s Nurse Wilson, Mr Daly. Your sister is weakening. I think you should come back quickly.’

  18

  Roy Grace, in protective clothing like everyone else in Aileen McWhirter’s house, stood alone in her ground-floor study, at the rear of the property, on his phone, with a map of the area in front of him. He paused from his task of putting together his enquiry team, and issuing instructions to each person he called, to text Cleo and warn her he would be very late home tonight.

  The only information Aileen McWhirter had been able to give was that two of the men who attacked her were in brown uniforms, saying they were from the Water Board. He needed to cocoon an area around the property, and arrange for a house-to-house enquiry team to approach neighbours to see if any of them had had similar visits. But the officers carrying out this task needed to make these into reassurance visits at the same time so they did not frighten people, and to dispense crime-prevention advice. They needed to see if there were any CCTV cameras in the area that might have picked up anything. Unfortunately Withdean Road and its environs were not covered by the city’s police CCTV network, although plenty of the homes had their own. He needed to establish whether there had been any similar crimes in the city, or in the county, recently. And he needed to set up an ‘anniversary visit’ check, placing Sussex Police billboards on the street, either side and to the front of the property, asking if anyone had seen unfamiliar vehicles in the area either on the night of the attack, or the previous Tuesday evening.

  When villains cased a property, he knew from experience, they would often carry this out a week before, checking the movement patterns of the occupants for the same day.

  Something felt wrong about this devastating attack on the old lady, but he could not put his finger on it. This kind of brutal tie-up robbery had, sadly, a long history. But all his instincts told him there was something more going on here.

  The contents of the bookshelves had been the first thing to catch his eye in here. Then a movement outside distracted him. Through the leaded-light window he saw a sparrow washing itself in an ornamental fountain, totally unaware of the horror that had recently taken place here.

  Grace had never been particularly interested in poetry, but there was one poem he remembered from his schooldays, because he’d had to learn it by heart and recite it during an English class. It was by W. H. Auden, and the first two lines seemed so apt here, he thought suddenly.

  Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read

  The hunter’s waking thoughts …

  He stared beyond the bathing sparrow across the terrace of lawns and over to the far side of the valley, a mile distant. This time of the year much of the view of the eastern side of the city was obscured by greenery, but he could still make out the large rectangle of Varndean School, where he had been a pupil, before becoming a police cadet.

  On the victim’s walnut bureau was a large leather diary, some framed photos of children and adults, all discoloured with age, an old-fashioned red leather address book, a Parker pen lying on a blotter pad, her blue headed notepaper, and a birthday card with a blank page inside and a blank envelope that she had obviously been planning to send to someone. The clue might be in the diary, he thought, flicking backwards and forwards through a few pages with his gloved fingers. But at a cursory glance the pages were blank except for an appointment note, in three days’ time, written with a fountain pen in a sloping, spidery hand: Dr Parish. 11.30.

  Above the bureau, surrounded by a dark rectangle where a painting had probably hung, there was a safe, with a combination lock, and the door to it open. He peered inside but it was empty. At the back was what looked like a panel on its side, and a second door, as if to a secret chamber in the safe, which was also open.

  He turned his attention back to the bookshelves, and ran his eyes over some of the titles again. The First 100 Years of the American Mafia. Young Capone. Early Street Gangs and Gangsters of New York City. Irish Organized Crime. King of the Brooklyn Waterfront.

  There was shelf after shelf of them.

  Why?

  The collection was like an obsession.

  Why had this lady got all these books on the early gang history of New York?

  Aileen McWhirter. That was an Irish name. Did Gavin Daly’s sister have some historic link with American organized crime? Did they both?

  From what little he had gleaned about Aileen McWhirter since being called out here, she had been married to a stockbroker, and widowed for the past fifteen years. Her own children had predeceased her, but there was a granddaughter and her husband, Nicki and Matt Spiers, and their two children, Jamie and Isobel – Aileen McWhirter’s great-grandchildren – whom the police were currently trying to contact. She had no record, other than a traffic offence three years ago, when she had collided with a bollard for no apparent reason, which had resulted in her licence being revoked.

  Perhaps she had once written a thesis on the subject? A book? Was trying to learn something about her family history?

  Suddenly his phone rang. ‘Roy Grace.’

  It was Glenn Branson, outside. ‘Boss, Gavin Daly has just been. I was going to get you to meet him, but he’s been called up to the hospital urgently.’

  ‘What’s the latest on Mrs McWhirter?’

  ‘We’ve got an officer there, guarding the ward. He’s keeping me in the loop. It’s not sounding good.’

  ‘It never was,’ Grace replied grimly.

  ‘Something I want to show you in the hall.’

  ‘I’ll be right there.’

  Branson was standing on a SOCO board on top of a frayed Persian rug by a hall table, tapping an A4 leaflet, in a bag, headed with an ornate typeface that was, no doubt, intended to convey an air of class, but which, in Grace’s view, made it look even more like the work of a spiv.

  R. C. MOORE

  Roy Grace glanced briefly at it.

  Dear Sir or Madam

  In the many years that I have been visiting this area, I have never ceased to take satisfaction from the pleasure people gain from realizing money from some unwanted, often forgotten item.

  Then he looked at his colleague. ‘Shit, I thought knocker-boys were a thing of the past. That everyone now sees Antiques Roadshow and Cash in the Attic and all those other shows and they don’t get suckered in any more by these creeps.’ He remembered, with anger, his grandmother getting conned out of almost all her few family heirlooms by knocker-boys when he was in his teens.

  ‘Obviously not completely, boss. I guess wherever there’s a pond, you’ll find something crawling around in the mud at the bottom.’

  Grace smiled grimly. ‘We’ll need to question R. C. Moore asap.’ Then he glanced down at the carpet. ‘Strange – such a beautiful home, filled with, presumably, love
ly things, and yet she had this tatty hall carpet!’

  Branson gave him a sad look. ‘You’re so ignorant!’

  ‘Thanks. But actually I think I know beauty when I see it.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Do you have any idea of the value of this rug?’

  ‘I’d probably give a fiver for it in a car boot sale.’

  ‘You’d be getting a bargain if you did. It looks Persian to me, probably worth several thousand quid. Ari’s dad traded in them, taught me all about them. When they make these rugs they put flaws in them, deliberately.’

  ‘Why?’

  Glenn Branson smiled. ‘Because in the eyes of those carpet makers, only God is perfect.’

  Grace smiled. ‘I’ll remember that.’ He pulled his phone from his pocket and took a couple of close-up photographs of the leaflet. As he was checking to make sure they weren’t blurred, he heard Glenn Branson answering his own phone. After a brief exchange of words, Branson ended the call then looked at Grace with his large and, recently, world-weary eyes.

  ‘That was our officer at the hospital, boss.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Looks like we are now upgraded to a murder enquiry.’

  19

  New York, 1922

  The boy’s aunt was urging him to come in out of the cold, but he refused. He clung for dear life to the stern rail of the RMS Mauretania, salty wind tearing at his hair, a lump in his throat, tears streaming down his cheeks, oblivious to the numbing cold. His eyes were fixed on the steadily disappearing Statue of Liberty as they passed through the Verrazano Narrows.

  It was tiny now, just a distant speck. It was being swallowed by the mist and cloud, which were relentlessly closing in on it in the falling darkness. He kept his eyes on the statue until it was gone completely, and then he felt even sadder. As if the cord between him and his pa had now been severed, totally and finally.

  The deck thrummed beneath his feet. There was a strong smell of paint and varnish, mingled every few moments with a snatch of smoke from the funnels. His aunt was saying his name again, and tugging at his coat sleeve. But he ignored her, and stared down at the foaming wake, a hundred feet below. Every second, the distance between the stern of the Mauretania and New York increased. Every second, he was further away from finding his father. The mystery of his disappearance swallowed up by clouds much darker than the ones now cloaking the Statue of Liberty.