Because the house was in Cleo’s name and no one had made the connection, he knew. That was the truth. They’d had a lucky escape. Shit.
He shuddered.
Just how close an escape had Cleo and Noah had?
How the hell could he protect them in the future? What could he do? Quit the police force and spend the rest of his life guarding them? That was how he felt right now.
His thoughts switched to the link that the informer, Donny Loncrane in Lewes Prison, had told him about. Amis Smallbone and Eamonn Pollock, thick together, many years back.
He hadn’t given it too much significance at the time, but the latest news about Smallbone was making him rethink, hard. Smallbone had rented the house next door to Cleo, clearly with some very nasty intent, and had installed listening equipment so he could eavesdrop on them. Now he was dead, apparently fallen from the rooftop fire escape the day after someone had broken into the letting agency’s offices and stolen the spare keys to his rented house.
How coincidental was that?
Smallbone’s house was now a crime scene, and SOCOs would be hunting for any evidence of an intruder. Who had wanted Smallbone dead? It could have been any number of people who the nasty little shit, and his equally vile criminal family, had crossed over the years. But if someone wanted to get Smallbone for revenge purposes, they would almost certainly have had him sorted during his twelve years in prison. That was the place scores were settled.
If Smallbone’s death was not an accident, and he had been pushed, it had to be for altogether another reason.
To silence him?
Was the connection between Eamonn Pollock and Amis Smallbone, however historic, a factor?
Pat Lanigan took a call, but Grace barely noticed, he was so deep in thought. Could Pollock have wanted Smallbone silenced? Had Smallbone been involved in this robbery in some way? As a fence? Donny Loncrane had said Pollock was a fence – so were the two of them involved?
One person might know: Gareth Dupont – but would he talk?
He switched to a different track. Eamonn Pollock’s two henchmen in Spain had been found dead. Almost certainly, Lucas Daly was involved. Daly had travelled to Marbella with Augustine Krasniki; his golf caddy, he had said. Bollocks.
Intelligence on Krasniki had revealed him to be Lucas Daly’s minder. An Albanian immigrant; a thug; Lucas Daly’s hired muscle. So had the two of them gone to Marbella to kill Macario and Barnes. For what reason? Why would they have wanted those two men dead? Revenge? To silence them? Or another motive altogether?
And now Lucas Daly, like his father, was in New York. What the hell was going on?
Suddenly, Pat Lanigan was leaning over the front-seat headrest, holding his phone in his hand, terminating a call. ‘Roy, I think we’ve found our man. There’s just been a shooting in a Manhattan antique dealer’s office. Victim identified as Eamonn Pollock, seriously injured.’
115
The Lincoln Town Car cruised slowly along the vast, ugly, concrete and brick wharf buildings. As they passed the closed steel doors of a loading bay, Gavin Daly, peering out of the rear window, said to the driver, ‘Here!’
The car pulled to a halt outside the entrance, marked PIER 92 and with a big yellow stripe around a concrete pillar.
‘Wait for us,’ Daly said. ‘We’ll be a while.’
‘I’ll be right here, sir!’ The driver jumped out and helped Gavin Daly to his feet, handing him his cane. Lucas Daly followed his father into the open entrance to the building.
Gavin Daly read the company names on the wall, then went through a door into a huge restaurant. It had a high ceiling with an exposed metal grid superstructure. A window ran the full length, giving a fine view across a small marina, the West River, and New Jersey on the far shore.
Mid-morning, the place was empty. Shiny wooden tables were neatly laid with place settings and bottles of ketchup. To their left was a curved bar, behind which was a row of tall copper beer vats. A balding, middle-aged bartender, polishing a beer glass, gave them a friendly smile. ‘Can I help you, gentlemen?’
‘We’re looking for Hudson Scuba,’ Gavin Daly replied. ‘They told us to come here.’
‘You’re in the right place.’ The man pointed. ‘Go through that far door; you’ll see them on the boat, down at the dock.’
They walked through the bar and as Gavin Daly stepped outside, he stopped in his tracks, the memories catching him like a snare.
Something twisted inside his heart.
It was different now, of course it was. Ninety years later.
But it was the same, too.
The same place.
His eyes moistened.
He barely noticed the small powerboats and yachts berthed along the marina’s pontoons. He was staring beyond them at the ugly, grey, two-storey superstructure of Pier 54 in the distance, stretching out into the calm, muddy-looking water.
The very place he had stood, back in 1922, with his sister, Aileen, and his aunt, Oonagh, waiting to board the Mauretania.
The very place where the messenger had pushed through the melee of departing passengers, and handed him the package with the gun, pocket watch and newspaper cutting with the numbers and the names.
And the message.
Watch the numbers.
A sign in front of him in large red letters on a white background read, PRIVATE PROPERTY. OWNERS AND THEIR GUESTS ONLY ON CHELSEA PIERS.
Beyond was a steep, planked gangway down onto the dock. A substantial open fibreglass day boat, with twin outboards and a steering wheel and midship-mounted controls, was moored alongside. One man, in his early twenties, with bleached hair and wearing a wetsuit, stood on the boat, while another, older, stood on the dock passing him scuba tanks, fins, a snorkel, and then a cool box.
‘Hudson Scuba?’ Gavin Daly called out, as he made his way carefully down.
‘That’s us!’ the older man, good-looking and tanned, said. ‘Mr Daly?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m Stuart Campbell, and our diver today is Tommy Lovell.’
‘Thank you, gentlemen, I really appreciate this. How do I pay you? You take cards?’
‘We do indeed, sir.’
Stuart Campbell gripped Gavin’s arm and stick, and with Lucas holding his other arm, they helped him aboard. Campbell indicated a wide, cushioned bench seat in the stern. ‘You’ll be most comfortable there, sir. Driest place, too.’ Then Campbell ducked down beneath the helm and produced a credit-card machine, as if by magic. ‘We charge seven hundred and fifty bucks the first hour, then five hundred an hour after that, sir; fuel’s extra.’ He handed Daly the machine.
The old man slipped in his American Express card, then tapped in the information requested, and handed the machine back to Stuart Campbell.
Campbell looked at it, and then said, dubiously, ‘I think you’ve put a zero in the wrong place, Mr Daly.’
Gavin Daly studied it, then shook his head. ‘No, that’s what I said to the person who answered your phone. That I would give you a bonus of ten thousand dollars for doing this right away.’ He put his hand against the raised side of the seat to support himself, as the boat rocked in the wash.
‘Well, that’s very generous – incredibly so. But with respect, sir, that is a lot of money.’ Campbell frowned, as if looking at the two men in a different light now. ‘Are you able to give me some kind of assurance there is nothing illegal going on here?’
‘Dear boy, I can categorically assure you there’s nothing illegal whatsoever – if there was, I’d be giving you ten times this amount. Happy now?’
Campbell nodded doubtfully.
Lucas, standing with a sullen expression, leaned against the windshield support.
‘So do you have a specific location, Mr Daly?’
‘Manhattan Bridge.’
‘Manhattan Bridge? Okay.’
‘I’ll give you more details when we get there.’
‘You’re the boss.’ Campbell twisted the key in the i
gnition, firing up the engines. As they burbled, Tommy Lovell untied the mooring ropes.
For some moments they drifted, free, then with a clunk and a sharp change in pitch of the engines, they began moving forward, the water rustling beneath them. Gavin Daly smelled the tang of salt and petrol fumes in the air.
Inside he was jangling.
116
The Crown Victoria raced along Madison Avenue, weaving through the traffic, siren wailing, then slowed as the traffic ahead was heavy and moving at a crawl. Through the windscreen, Roy Grace saw a mass of strobing red lights ahead.
A cruiser was angled across two lanes, and another, a hundred yards further along, was similarly parked. Two further police cruisers were stopped in the middle of the street, and a large, box-shaped ambulance, its doors shut, was parked against the kerb. Not a good sign that the ambulance was still there, Grace thought. From his experience it meant they were working on the casualty in situ; something paramedic crews normally did only when a patient was in a critical condition.
They pulled up alongside the ambulance and he saw yellow and black POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS tape blocking off the sidewalk either side of a row of shops. Standing outside the tape were several NYPD cops. To one side, two men in suits, detectives, Grace presumed, were talking to an elderly, flamboyantly dressed and rather distinguished-looking man, who seemed in shock.
Lanigan, Cobb and Grace climbed out of the car, the two New York detectives flashing their badges at a police Captain who came over to them.
The Captain jerked a finger at the ambulance. ‘Not looking good,’ he said. ‘Femoral artery’s been shot through. The man’s lost a lot of blood; they’re trying to give him a transfusion before moving him to hospital.’
‘Who’s that guy?’ Pat Lanigan asked, pointing at the old man.
‘Owner of the premises where the shooting happened.’
‘We need to talk to him urgently.’
‘Go right ahead.’
‘Sorry to interrupt, gentlemen,’ Lanigan said, nodding at the two detectives, who he clearly knew, before addressing the old man. ‘Detective Lanigan and Detective Lieutenant Cobb, and this is Detective Superintendent Roy Grace from Sussex, England. We believe the perpetrator might be an English gentleman, Gavin Daly.’
The man’s eyebrows were twitching, and he was shaking. ‘That’s right. He’s normally a – a very – how you say it – calm, nice guy. He went crazy in my office.’
‘And you are, sir?’
‘Julius Rosenblaum.’
‘Can you give us any idea where Mr Daly might be now?’
Despite his shaking, Rosenblaum’s voice was calm. ‘My guess would be Manhattan Bridge.’
‘Manhattan Bridge?’ Lanigan repeated.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘On the bridge?’
Rosenblaum shook his head. ‘No, sir, on the water, somewhere underneath it, or close by. His son’s gone with him.’
‘What’s his reason for going to the Manhattan Bridge?’
‘He’s looking for his father.’
117
As they left the marina, Stuart Campbell opened up the throttle. There was a slight chop on the Hudson, and as the boat came up onto the plane, it hit the waves with a jarring thump-thump-thump. Gavin Daly steadied himself by gripping the seat either side of him with his hands. To his left was a rack of oxygen tanks, a lifebuoy and a small fire extinguisher secured by two brackets. A sturdy winch handle lay amid a coil of rope close to his feet.
Ahead of them, the pale-green Statue of Liberty rose high into the sky. Beneath, wound all the way around the grey slab of the concrete base, was a long line of tourists waiting their turn to take its elevator to the top.
The further towards the open sea the boat headed, the choppier the water became. The salty wind whipped his face, misting his glasses and making his eyes sting, but Gavin Daly stared resolutely ahead. He was in another world. So many memories now coming back to him. The Wall Street skyline rose to his left, and straight ahead, beyond the white prow of the boat and the green chop of the water, was the suspension bridge across the Narrows.
The bridge hadn’t been built in 1922 when, as a small boy, he’d sailed from New York. He could still remember clearly how he had watched that statue receding into the mist and dusk from the stern of the Mauretania.
His dad receding.
His life receding.
One day, Pop, I’m going to come back and find you. I’m going to rescue you from wherever you are.
Now he was back.
Finally.
Finally he was going to fulfil that promise he had made, and nothing would stop him.
The boat turned to port, heading around the southern tip of Manhattan. He saw Battery Park; stared at the structures rising on Ground Zero, and the high-rises all around. The Staten Island ferry was passing a short distance away. A few moments later they hit its wash, and the boat thumped hard, twice, pitching and yawing. The winch handle slithered out of its rope nest and clattered past him. He reached down, grabbed it and replaced it. Then, as they entered the East River, he stared across at Brooklyn, where he had lived the first five years of his life. A pleasure boat with teeth painted on its prow thundered past, across their bows, and moments later he had to hold on hard as the wash rocked them. Again the winch handle clattered past him and he grabbed it once more.
A short while later the superstructure of Brooklyn Bridge loomed ahead, its vast, dark-grey pillars rising like monoliths above them. They slipped beneath its inky shadow, heard the roar and rumble above them, and then they were out the other side in sunlight again. Speeding toward the vast, gridded span of Manhattan Bridge.
A sightseeing cruiser was coming through it, heading downriver, passing them wide to their port side. They passed several drab brown high-rises to starboard. The red brick slab of a power station, with one chimney stack, was next. Then the bridge.
His heart flipped. He felt butterflies in his stomach. The water was calmer here, crunching beneath them, above the whine of the outboards.
Stuart Campbell eased off the throttle as they slid into the wide shadow beneath the bridge, and Gavin felt the boat decelerate.
He looked up at the concrete pillars rising from the water. The steel columns rising from them, holding up the bridge. The vast, dark span of its underbelly.
It felt cold suddenly.
He began to shiver. The boat was rocking in the wash from the passing pleasure boat. This was never how he imagined it might be. And yet, he was here. He could feel his pop’s presence. Calling him. His booming voice echoing beneath the bridge. Louder than the incessant traffic roar above them.
Hey, little guy, you still awake?
His gullet tightened. The water was dark, inky dark, ominous. Maybe it was better to leave things be. Better not to disturb its secrets. Was he making a mistake? But he had come too far; he had to go through with this. He had to know. And he had to keep his promise.
Lucas looked at him, a curious, quizzical expression, but he ignored his son. This was about one person. One promise.
Nothing else mattered. It never had and it never would.
The boat was drifting now.
Stuart Campbell was staring at the compass binnacle. ‘Mr Daly, we are on the bearings you gave us. Forty, spot forty-two, spot four zero four, north. Seventy-three, spot fifty-nine west. We are three digits short – do you have them? We need them if you want us to pinpoint.’
Gavin Daly pulled the Patek Philippe out of his pocket. Although he knew the numbers by heart, he still felt the need to check.
The hands pointed to 4.05 p.m.
‘Four zero five,’ he said.
Stuart Campbell tapped the numbers into the binnacle. Then he said, ‘Thirty-nine feet of water on this exact location.’
Gavin Daly looked down at the watch, and a shiver rippled through him. Something he had never taken any notice of before. The position of the seconds hand.
It was stopped at 39 se
conds.
118
The diver had been down for fifteen minutes. A pink buoy, tethered to the boat and drifting a short distance from them, marked the spot. Stuart Campbell kept an eye on the anchor rope, running down from the prow and holding them steady against the rapid current from the falling tide.
The sonar was on, but the image on the green screen, of the river bed below them, was fuzzy and indistinct. Occasionally when he looked at it, Gavin Daly could see a fish flit past, and from time to time something bigger, moving, which he assumed was the diver coming in and out of view.
There were no anomalies, Campbell had told him. That meant the sonar had shown nothing significant down there on this spot.
Had the messenger boy who had brought him the watch and the numbers, and the other items, merely delivered someone’s idea of a joke? A cruel, nasty, sick joke? Or had it been someone with a heart?
It was feeling like a sick joke now.
He sat, waiting, clutching the watch in his hands, watching the buoy, occasionally staring across at the mess of slab-shaped buildings on the shore. His eyes drifted over some scrubland, and the remains of the last pier still standing that dated back to his childhood. A black and white tug droned past, a row of tyres as makeshift fenders, hanging down its side. He looked back at the watch.
As he did so, he caught the glint in Lucas’s eye. His son was still standing, looking down at him. Or rather, at the watch.
Gavin Daly held it up. ‘It’s caused a lot of trouble, hasn’t it, this damned little machine?’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Beautiful?’ Gavin shook his head. ‘You’re not looking at its physical beauty; you’re only looking at its value. That’s what’s beautiful to you.’