Bad Sons (Booker & Cash Book 1) (23 page)

But what did it have to do with anything now? Pipelines under the English Channel. I read on. There were two types of line laid. Both had an internal diameter of approximately three inches. Both contained materials – lead and other metals – deemed valuable enough to have been salvaged in the years following the official end of hostilities.

I learned that at Dungeness beachside bungalows had been built and used as pumping stations. They had housed big Mather and Platt pumps and the necessary plumbing and paraphernalia and teams to keep it all operational. Miles of pipes had been submerged in the shingle of the barren landscape of the Dungeness peninsula to supply these pumping stations from storage tanks and distribution networks remotely positioned and camouflaged further inland. With a growing sense of awe and respect I came to understand something of how vital this operation had been to the invasion effort.

But again, I came back to the same question: what did it have to do with the here and now? PLUTO had been written in my relatives’ diary and it had been accessed on their computer. It must have some relevance and possibly a connection to their fates. There was nothing else to consider.

As I sat there mulling this over and improving my knowledge of local history there was a determined thumping on the back door. I minimised the computer page, picked up the cricket bat and went to investigate.

***

33

Flashman senior stood on the gravel a punch away looking filled to bursting with something explosive and unstable. I had the bat out of sight down by my side. I flexed my grip on the handle. I wasn’t going to take any more beatings without a fight. And I didn’t intend to fight fair. That never got me anywhere. There were no niceties to dispense with.

‘The police have been to see me,’ he said.

‘And?’

I couldn’t tell whether he wanted to fight or talk. Rip my head off and shit down my neck or cry on my shoulder and pour his heart out. He had the hide of a rhinoceros, the bearing of a silverback and the growl of a bear with a thorn in his paw. He didn’t strike me as the sensitive type.

‘We need to talk.’

‘What about?’

‘My son.’

Given the circumstances, they were as powerful a combination of two simple one-syllable words as I’d ever heard. I opened the door to admit him. If I hadn’t he might have decided to come through it closed.

‘Go through to the shop.’ I stood the bat against the wall behind the door so he wouldn’t see it. No point giving him ideas.

We arranged ourselves on the furniture. He filled the two-seater Chesterfield and I perched towards the front of a matching wing-back feeling small and vulnerable opposite him. He showed little interest in his surroundings. Maybe he wasn’t much of a reader. Or maybe he just had more pressing issues on his mind.

‘The police arrested you yesterday.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘Yes. They did.’ I didn’t ask him how he knew.

‘Why?’

I saw nothing to be gained in being less than straight with him. He wanted answers to a tragic loss. So did I. As both recently bereaved we had something in common. He might be able to provide some answers for me, even if he didn’t know it. Alienating him would have been counter-productive and potentially dangerous.

‘The man in charge is incompetent. He made a mistake.’

‘About what?’ He wanted to hear me say it.

‘About a lot of things. But yesterday he made the mistake of thinking I had a hand in your son’s death.’

His sun-darkened lenses had cleared to give me a good view of his magnified eyes. His intense stare beneath his deep, slanted primate’s brow disconcerted me when I tried to match it.

‘Did you?’

I was glad I didn’t have to lie. ‘No. Nothing. Quite the opposite in fact.’

He didn’t like that. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Who spoke to you?’

‘Sprake.’

‘How much did he tell you?’

‘Very little. He just brought bad news and dropped your name.’

I made a note to self to thank Sprake for that next time I saw him. I took a deep breath. ‘I might have a lot more. If you want to hear it and you don’t know already know, it’s not going to make you any happier.’

‘I couldn’t be less happy.’

I thought maybe he could, but I didn’t say so.

‘The night before last I was kidnapped with violence. Knocked unconscious, bound, gagged and dumped in an agricultural building in the middle of nowhere – Appledore to be precise. I understand it’s a barn you own. Your son was involved. He was into something that involved at least two other men and late night activity in your yard that could have been regular. When they understood I had been watching them they waited for me, took me and left me for dead.’

His face was an impassive mask constructed of something harder than stone.

‘On top of that I now have reason to believe that your son and his friends were involved in the deaths of my uncle and aunt.’

Something happened to that mask then. It slipped. Only a fraction before he caught it and tried to fix it back. But it was skewed. It didn’t hold the determination and malice that it had just done. There was something else there now. It could have been sadness. It could have been regret. It could have been despair. It could have been all three and more.

‘What reason?’ His voice betrayed what I suspected. He was battling an internal wretchedness and grief. And he feared he knew. It threatened to spill out of him and embarrass us both. And I sincerely hoped it wouldn’t.

‘Did you know about any of it?’

He shook his head and swallowed hard and full. ‘Would you have a glass of water?’

I indicated an unopened plastic bottle of still mineral water on the table between us.

‘Help yourself. I haven’t touched it.’

He twisted off the lid and drank deeply. I felt I could press him.

‘What do you know of your son’s night-time activity and his friends?’

He seemed to relax a small amount, like a lumberjack’s unclenched buttock and about as pretty. Something went out of him. He was a rough diamond who’d lost his sparkle. A tomcat waking up to the reality of his neutering. A man who’d lost his only son.

‘I can talk to you without it getting back to the law?’

I indicated he could.

‘I knew very little about my son’s life any more. The truth is he had become a disappointment for me. We ruined him, of course. Spoilt him rotten. He was an only child and we could afford it. When he came back from university he was a changed man. He was supposed to follow me in the business, that was the deal, but he’d lost interest. He had grander ideas, schemes, and he didn’t want to get his hands dirty on building sites. All that was beneath him.’

‘What did he study?’

‘Mechanical engineering. Don’t ask me why. I don’t even think he knew when he signed up for it.’

‘How long had he been back from university?’

‘Not even a year.’

He was slipping away from me. I was losing him in his misery pit.

‘What was he using the container in the yard for?’

‘No idea. The yard was his to do what he wanted with. He rented a few units for cash pocket money. I told him I wasn’t going to keep him. He had to earn.’

‘He must have been doing well out of it for a four-by-four like that.’

He shook his head quickly. ‘The units wouldn’t have paid for that and he wasn’t getting it from me. His money was coming from somewhere else. I don’t know where.’

‘And you don’t know who he was knocking about with at night?’

He shook his head again, more slowly. ‘If he had something to do with your uncle’s and your aunt’s deaths, I don’t know what to say. They were decent people, even if your uncle didn’t like me much.’

I didn’t correct him by letting him know that my uncle hated his guts.

‘Your aunt was a woman I wanted to marry once.’ And there it was again: that hint of nostalgic and melancholy regret for the way things had turned out. ‘To think my own flesh and blood might have had something to do with her death is a horrible thing for me to know.’

It sounded like the closest I was going to get to an apology.

He surprised me then. ‘I don’t like the police and I don’t trust Sprake. You’ll be looking for who’s responsible for your relatives’ deaths, won’t you?’

I don’t know what about me had given him that idea. But I think I had already, somewhere deep in my subconscious, decided I was going to get more proactive in the hunt for my relatives’ killers and my abductors. I just hadn’t fully known it till then. My close shave with death of two nights before; the thought that they’d be back to finish what they started – tie up their loose ends – made me anxious. And I didn’t want to live with that hanging over me, darkening my days and troubling my nights.

My discovery on the computer just before Flashman had turned up felt like something pivotal. I knew something. And that gave me an advantage. If I could unmask them before they got to me that would have to be to my advantage. Besides, they had to answer for what they’d done. And like the big man sitting opposite me, I had no confidence in the local law.

I nodded. ‘I already am. I think that if I want answers, I have to find them for myself. The woman cop’s all right. She seems professional and thorough, but Sprake has lost me.’

‘Didn’t meet her.’

He stood to leave. I stood too. I thought about the time I’d met his son in the yard: wired, fidgety, edgy, a bit manic. I had a dangerous alliterative question for the grieving alpha male in front of me.

‘Did Dennis do drugs?’

How he didn’t react told me more than how he did. He was patiently subdued. It told me he’d had his suspicions.

‘I don’t know. If I’d ever caught him with them he’d have been out on his ear after a good hiding. He’d have known that.’

I made a note to ask Jo whether the autopsy of Dennis Flashman found any evidence of drug use in his system.

He gave me a hard searching look. ‘If you find out who killed my son before the Old Bill, let me know. Give me a good head start on them and I’ll give you the yard I bought from under your uncle’s nose. Dennis might have been a black sheep, a bad son, but he was still my only child.’

It seemed impolite to tell him I had no interest in the yard; that I wasn’t looking for reward or to profit from anything to do with finding justice for the murderers of my only family.

‘If you need any help, ask. If you want to know anything, ask. If I find out anything, I’ll let you know. You’ll keep in touch?’

I said I would. And I realised why he was being so open and agreeable with me. He wanted his revenge, his own form of justice for those who his son had been mixed up with, those who had found it necessary to kill him – and if I could help him to that end the maverick in him would take it.

I thought again of PLUTO. Someone with a university education in mechanical engineering might have been interested in that. ‘Which university did your son go to?’

‘Kent. Why?’

‘I can look for people who he knew on social websites, email contacts, look at his Internet browsing history,’ I said. ‘I take it Dennis had a computer?’ He nodded. ‘Would you let me see it? If I’m to have a chance of finding out anything, I need to do some homework. His computer would be the logical place to start, unless you or the police have already done that?’

‘Do you know something you’re not telling me?’

‘Not yet,’ I lied ‘but your son’s contacts might provide me with a way to find the people who he was hanging out with. Have the police asked for something similar?’

He shook his head. ‘Not yet and I don’t do computers.’ Then he gave me a meaningful penetrating stare. ‘I’d rather find them first. You understand me, don’t you?’

‘I understand you. Don’t forget I have my own reasons for finding them too.’

‘You know my house?’

House was a contender for understatement of the week. It was a bloody great converted barn. A bigger version of the one I’d been trussed up in.

‘Yes.’

‘Come round between seven and eight tonight.’

He gave me a look that made me think he might have been about to add something, but he only pursed his lips, turned and walked away, letting himself out. I heard his size fourteens leaving small evenly spaced craters in the gravel, and went to lock the door after him.

***

34

I sat back down at the computer and got up the page on PLUTO. The Internet is a truly wonderful and incomparable resource. A well-phrased search term followed by a couple of clicks and you can find out just about anything about just about anywhere.

I believe that the man who invented it gave it away to the world in some fit of deranged altruism. Or maybe he was drunk. I wonder, when he examines his decision down the telescope of hindsight to understand it could have made him the richest man in the Earth’s history, whether he ever thinks of killing himself for his reckless act of philanthropy. I made a note to Google him sometime. See how he was coping.