Bad Sons (Booker & Cash Book 1) (25 page)

Besides, I didn’t know what was going on, yet, and I shouldn’t go making any rash decisions before I did. The van and its driver might have absolutely nothing to do with anything I was looking into. The Queen of England could be a man.

I think I’d stopped at the pub with the idea of asking for information, but what would I say? Who could I ask? There was no sign of the stereotypical weather-beaten local who propped up the bars in the clichéd detective novels just waiting for the day a stranger in town asked about the old secret pumping station.

The girl who brought my sandwich looked about fourteen and slightly retarded and the acned youth who’d pulled my pint was engrossed in a tabloid newspaper and had
don’t bother me
written all over his face. I doubted very much whether either of them had much knowledge of, or interest in, local history. In any case, once I’d mentioned it then someone else would know. If something bad happened to anyone out there and the police were called, I wouldn’t take much describing.

I drank half of my drink, ate the sandwich and left.

I took the road to Lydd to risk another drive by the bungalows. One final look to see if I’d missed anything.

The white van had gone. I slowed, toying with the idea of maybe parking up and investigating, but just because the van wasn’t there didn’t have to mean the places were empty and I’d seen too many films where the bad guys returned to surprise a snooper while I’d been shouting at the television for the hero to get his stupid arse out of there. Fools rush in and all that. Better to stay one step ahead. Besides, I still had the dead Flashman’s computer to check out.

*

It was late afternoon by the time I arrived back at the shop. Three hours before I was due at Flashman’s for a poke around his son’s virtual life. And after that I was entertaining. I thought the best thing I could do was to tidy up upstairs, have an hour’s lie down, get some wine in the fridge and smarten myself up a bit.

*

I pulled up in front of Flashman’s converted barn later than I’d meant to: it was half past seven. He answered the door himself and invited me in. I had to pass comment on the spectacular interior. It would have been rude not to and it demanded it. Flashman waved away my observations and I understood that, rightly, everything that had once provided a source of enjoyment for him would, temporarily at least, mean little while he dealt with his loss. Even Absalom’s father mourned his bad son’s death.

He wasn’t standing on ceremony. He led me through to a large open-plan arrangement at the back of the building. It was huge and incorporated everything I would expect to see in a spoiled young man’s space: big bed, big wardrobes, big television, big games console, big desk with a big computer on it, big hi-fi and big posters on the walls. No books. The only thing it wasn’t was messy. The Flashmans had a cleaner and it shouldn’t have been a surprise to me.

He motioned towards the desk and the computer. ‘There it is.’

‘There might not be anything on it. You haven’t looked yourself?’

‘I told you, I’m not a computer person and I’m not keen to go poking through my son’s life.’

‘I understand.’ And I thought I did. He couldn’t face nosing through his son’s life. He didn’t want to learn things that might twist the knife of his loss. But he didn’t mind me doing it, so long as I shared anything with him that could be pertinent to his son’s death. He was treating me like an unpaid investigator. Well, that was fine. I wasn’t doing this for money.

I stared at it. ‘Let’s hope it’s not password protected.’

‘Good luck. I don’t understand them. If I need work done on a computer I pay someone.’

I believed him. He’d be more at ease with a shovel than a laptop.

‘When you’re done come and find me. I’ll be in the lounge.’

He left me to it and I heard his heavy slippers slap away on the polished wooden floors. I got the impression there were just the two of us in the house and it made me wonder briefly about any Mrs Flashman.

The likelihood the device would be password protected was something I hadn’t thought of when I invited myself around. If it was it would be a quick visit. I’d be finished. Ethan Hunt, I wasn’t.

I opened the lid and had a bit of luck for a change. I’d been due some. It hadn’t been shut down. I was conscious of breathing out. The desktop glowed brightly and was filled with icons – short-cuts for this and that. I clicked on Internet Explorer. The home page was his email service provider. It didn’t need a password because it was set to
remember me
. All good.

He had unopened messages. I clicked on them. Nothing for me. I went back a page, running my finger down the names of senders. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I thought I’d go back a month with them and if anything jumped out at me from the titles and senders I’d start opening them. I checked the time. An hour before Jo was due and I didn’t want to be late.

I was snapped back to my present by reading a company name that had sent an email to Dennis Flashman two weeks previously: Mather and Platt. That, I remembered, was the name of the company that had made the pump at the PLUTO pumping station at Dungeness. The email had an attachment. I opened it.

***

36

The email was formal. It thanked Dennis for his enquiry. After reading it through I understood Dennis had contacted the firm enquiring after the availability of blueprints for the Mather and Platt pump that had been installed and used during operation PLUTO. There was a serial number.

Dennis was claiming he was part of a group of like-minded enthusiasts hoping to recondition the pump and have it cleaned up and back in working order as a museum piece in an Operation Overlord showcase. It wasn’t clear where this would be. But they needed the original plans. Probably not true, but enterprising. The company seemed only too happy to be part of such an initiative and apparently it would be their pleasure to supply, free of charge, the copies he sought. Please see attachment. I did. And there they were. Totally confusing and meaningless to an ignoramus like me.

I tapped the desk and tried thinking logically. I had a lot of it to do and quickly. There was a solid link between Dennis and something my uncle had jotted down in a diary and then followed up online. I didn’t think Dennis was serious with the reasons that he gave for his email enquiry. He hadn’t struck me as the type. No anorak.

I didn’t think historic fuel pump enthusiasts killed each other if they fell out, anyway.

Dennis was clearly involved with some bad people. They had killed him and almost certainly killed my relatives. If the white panel van I’d seen that afternoon had been the one I’d seen at the yard and then travelled in tied up and terrified then the bad people and Dennis had been involved with something to do with an old wartime installation. And it was something important. Important enough to murder thrice over. Therefore, it was probably very illegal and highly profitable.

They had a significant interest in the pump of the time. Again, if that was their van out there and they had this interest in the pump then the pump must still be there.

Would an old wartime pump be worth enough money to murder three people for? Unless it was made of solid gold, I doubted it. If not then it had to be something to do with what the pump could do, especially as they seemed to want it working. Then, I had to consider where it was. That must be what was making it special. Pumps, even big old powerful ones, aren’t so thin on the ground or expensive that someone would have to kill for them. So that made its location part of its attraction. But there was nothing important or valuable where it was. Just some abandoned old bungalows. And what use would a pump be? Pumps, pumped. That was all.

And then my logic went off at a tangent. It wasn’t a tangent my reason was confident or comfortable cuddling up to. It wasn’t a
eureka
moment, more of a
don’t-be-a-fucking-idiot
moment. And I was glad it wasn’t something I was explaining to someone else.

That pump was once attached to at least one pipeline that snaked across over twenty miles of English Channel seabed to France. Possibly more than one pipeline. There had been a total of seventeen lines stretching from Dungeness to France, I remembered. Could that be the key to this? I struggled to remember something I’d read on the very useful and educational site about PLUTO.

I opened the Internet and searched for it. The Internet was still making me appreciate its amazingness. A few clicks, less than half a minute, and history was once again laid bare before me. At the end of the war a salvage operation had reclaimed for scrap the hundreds of miles of pipe, primarily for the lead and steel it contained.

So that was it. My thinking had run itself into a cul-de-sac. I had a sixty-something-year-old pump that didn’t work hooked up to pipes that didn’t exist in a forgotten building. Maybe. The only thing I had ‘proved’ was a tenuous link between Dennis Flashman – dead – and my relatives – both dead. If I wanted answers I was going to have to find someone alive.

As if that wasn’t enough to be contemplating, I had to decide what to do with this information, or lack of it, depending on one’s perspective: whether to involve Flashman senior, whether to involve Jo or whether to pursue it further on my own for a fuller picture.

Having suffered a double loss myself, I felt I could empathise with Flashman. For the killing of my harmless, honest and elderly relatives, especially for what they had done to my uncle, those responsible deserved not just to die but to suffer on their way out. But could I be directly physically involved in that? Really? In theory, yes. No problem. But in practice? Could I be judge, jury, torturer and executioner? That was a whole new area of which I had no experience and I wasn’t sure I wanted any. And it wasn’t the morality aspect that brought me up short, it was getting caught for it and going to prison.

Perhaps if I had lost my only child I would have been more decisive, more murderous, less considering, less cowardly.

Perhaps I should have considered what would happen to me if my misguided path of retribution went wrong and I found myself once again facing a violent death.

I checked the time, forwarded the Mather and Platt email to myself, closed the computer and went in search of my host.

He was sitting in an expensive-looking white leather reclining chair staring at the wall and I instantly felt I was intruding on his thoughts, his grief. He heard my approach and turned to face me. I noticed a glass of something strong and amber nestling in his big paw.

‘Anything?’

I had been about to lie to him. But I couldn’t and it didn’t have anything to do with me being afraid of him. I was past that.

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

He motioned to a chair. ‘Sit down. Drink?’

I shook my head. ‘Thanks, but I’ve got to be somewhere.’ I sat down though. Perched on the edge of the seat. ‘Did Dennis ever mention anything about a pump, a big heavy duty pump?’

‘What makes you ask about that?’

‘He did then?’ I was surprised.

‘Yes. He was working on one with a friend. Something old. What’s it got to do with anything?’

‘Honestly, I don’t know that it has. I didn’t find anything that makes me feel there was something to learn about all this.’

‘Why are you asking about the pump then?’

‘It was just something recent on his computer,’ I lied. ‘Did he say where it was?’

‘No. But he ordered some parts through one of my accounts.’ So he was trying to get it working. ‘And all that bloody water pipe.’

‘What water pipe?’

‘Mile and miles of three-quarter inch standard drinking water pipe. Christ knows what he wanted that lot for. I thought he’d made a mistake with the order quantity at first but he said it was right.’

‘Where is it now?’ But even as I was asking the question I realised I knew the answer. I’d been locked up with a lot of it for a night.

He seemed not to have heard me. ‘That’ll have to go back.’ Then to me, ‘What was he up to?’

I didn’t know and so I didn’t have to lie to his face. I told him I was going to try to find that out and when I did, he’d be the first to know. I don’t know what he thought of me then.

I made my excuses and left for my evening with Jo.

***

37

I beat Jo to my place by ten minutes. That was good; it saved me explaining my whereabouts and gave me time for a smoke.

Our greeting was naturally cool on both sides. I let her in and followed her up the stairs after locking up again.

She smelt as good as a field of freshly cut hay, but not like one. I think she’d made an effort in a casual-dress-down-kind-of-way: a zipped hooded top, snug-fitting jeans, T-shirt and trainers. She was very casual. Her hair looked brushed and clean.

I had to wonder at her motives for coming round. I wasn’t the ugliest man I’d ever seen but as well as me being married, which she knew, we were still on opposite sides of a murder investigation. At least as far as I was aware, I hadn’t been struck off the suspects list. I doubted her superiors would adopt anything other than a dim view of that sort of frivolous fraternising on a social level. Then again, maybe this was modern policing. Results at any cost.

Whatever her reasons, she was company. And I was glad of some. The fact she wasn’t the ugliest woman I’d ever seen didn’t hurt. Besides, I wanted to talk to her.

I’d made a decision on my way back from Flashman’s. I was going to tell her all I knew, everything I’d found out. Call it cowardice if you like, but the law is there for a reason and I’m basically a law abiding citizen, at least when we’re talking murder. If I’d gone pursuing my leads myself it could only have ended badly. I could have hurt someone, badly. More likely, I’d have been hurt, very badly. Either way, I’d have fouled it up.

I couldn’t see how I, an emotionally-involved amateur and working alone, could achieve any degree of success. And after some soul-searching, I figured that leaving Flashman senior out of things was doing him a favour in the long run, even though he probably wouldn’t thank me for it. If I involved him, encouraged him to break the law with my information and unproven theories, then I’d have been responsible in large part for whatever he would have chosen to make of it. If he’d gone looking for an eye for an eye and succeeded, I’d have been a party to it and if he’d failed then I’d have been culpable in whatever sort of mess he made of it. I tried to convince myself I was leaving him out and bringing the police in for the best of motives. It would be something I’d have to reconcile later. I didn’t want his lousy yard anyway.

Jo made herself at home. I liked that about her. She didn’t stand on ceremony, waiting to be invited to sit here, go there, have this. She accepted a glass of Chateau mini-market, sipped it and grimaced like a filling had come loose. I think she was being funny. I doubted whether she could have told a Riesling from a Piesporter.

She was hungry. I was hungry. We ordered a take-away from the Chinese. Wendy sounded awkward on the phone, which seemed understandable to me given the elephant on the line. She invited me to collect in twenty minutes. Jo and I killed that time standing in the kitchen.

‘I heard back from forensics. About the slipper. It was your uncle’s.’

My appetite packed its bags.

‘I knew it anyway.’

I could have passed further comment, but what good would it have done? I couldn’t unknow it and talking about it wasn’t going to help, wouldn’t change anything. Dwelling on horrors only serves to cloud judgement, sour outlooks and squeeze perspectives. And I had enough poisoning my mind. The confirmation did make me momentarily reconsider whether to keep my new-gained knowledge to myself and go for a style of rough justice. But, thankfully, it was fleeting.

It occurred to me that if I got what I knew off my chest to Jo then I would no longer have a decision to make regarding retribution. It would be out of my hands and that, I realised, would be the best thing all round.

‘I’ve found out something.’ She stared at me expectantly over the rim of her glass. ‘Aren’t you going to chastise me for sticking my nose in?’ It was meant playfully.

‘Would there be any point?’

‘I suppose not. It’s done now.’

‘So what is it?’

I pointed to the desk diary from the upstairs office that I’d placed on the worktop. I put down my glass and opened the marked entry page.

‘You remember the dates and times marked in my relatives’ diary I told you about? And the single word: PLUTO?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s not just a cartoon dog or an ex-planet. I know what PLUTO means and I can prove a connection between PLUTO, Dennis Flashman and my relatives. Something specific and local.’

She sipped. I thought it was more for something to do than because she was enjoying the vintage. She forgot to make a face, looked serious instead and said, ‘Go on.’

I explained everything I’d learned. I also mentioned the coils of water pipe that had been piled up in the barn I’d been dumped in.

Talking it through with someone did something to my understanding. It elevated it to a higher level – and with a racing of my pulse I thought I might finally have a good idea of what they were doing.

With the anxiety of someone holding an ugly baby, I unveiled it. ‘I think they’re planning to run their own pipeline under the ocean.’

She made a face like I’d pulled out dentures she hadn’t been aware of. ‘With small bore plastic tubing? No way. Think about the logistics of it and the physical demands on the tubing. That’s silly.’

I was smiling at her. ‘What if they already had an outer sleeve in place?’ She went to interrupt but I held up my hand. ‘I know. I said that all the original pipelines had been salvaged. That’s what the website said. Actually, thinking about it, the website only mentioned a salvage operation. But what if they hadn’t been? What if one, or more, was still down there, on the bed of the Channel and connected either end? There were seventeen laid. It’s the only thing that makes any sense of what they were doing. If they have twenty miles of water pipe then they have enough tubing to stretch the width of the English Channel.’

Whether she was going for it or not, Jo decided to play along. ‘If an original pipeline is still connected either end, why the new tubing?’

It all became clearer and clearer, as Alice’s antithesis might have been tempted to remark. ‘Two reasons. One, with smaller-bore pipe they wouldn’t need as much pressure to send something from one end to the other. Two, it suggests that whatever they do, or did, intend to pass along could have been managed in a much narrower pipe.’

She’d had enough. She threw back the remainder of her drink. ‘It’s the stuff of fantasy. It’s a ridiculous idea.’ Now, I was smiling broadly at her. ‘What?’

‘I seem to remember reading that’s what they said about PLUTO when it was suggested and look what happened there. It could have won the Allies the war.’

‘It’s like something out of the Famous Five.’

‘Doesn’t matter, if I’m right. Truth can be stranger than fiction.’

‘All right, clever clogs. Time for the sixty-four-thousand dollar question.’

I played along, humouring her, and gave voice to her thought. ‘What’s the commodity? There’s only one thing it can be to justify that kind of outlay, commitment, practical constraint, secrecy and disregard for human life: drugs.’

‘If I agreed with everything you’ve said so far, I think I’d have to agree with that too. That Chinese ready?’

***

38

We walked together and while I felt comfortable with that – not awkward, nothing forced, natural – I experienced a strange and tingling sensation that we were being observed: a presence of something malevolent and threatening. I didn’t want to alarm Jo with my paranoia, so I said nothing. But I kept a keen eye on the shadows and, when the opportunity presented itself, I manufactured a reason to glance behind and around our progress.

Apart from us, the Chinese was empty. Wendy seemed both pained and pleased for my business. I understood both.

The walk home was uneventful. The food was excellent and the new wine Jo insisted on picking up from the mini-market was a definite improvement, even if it was double the price of what I’d supplied.

We hadn’t put the television on, which was nice.

After we’d finished the meal we took our glasses down to the shop. I’d promised her I’d show her the PLUTO website. Before I did that, I was curious to know the price of water pipe.

The wonders of the Internet, again. The narrowest gauge water pipe could be bought in hundred-metre coils. List price off the shelf where I was looking was sixty pounds plus the dreaded at twenty per cent. But buying it through the building business would have allowed someone to claim the VAT back.

Some quick and rough calculations making allowances for discounts for purchasing in those sorts of quantities gave me to understand I could buy enough of the stuff to span the Channel and have change from thirty thousand pounds. Even Jo, the sceptic, had to concede that sort of outlay would be small potatoes when compared with the rewards determined and serious importers of drugs could stand to reap if they got a good operation up and running and then some longevity into the bargain.

For the sake of argument, we got around to discussing that if the drugs idea was right how they’d do it.

‘I suppose whatever it was would have to be pumped down the line,’ I said. ‘That would involve a fluid. Water would be cheapest. Maybe they could even utilise the seawater on their doorstep. There’s a lot of it and when it reaches the other side it can simply be drained back into the Channel. At Dungeness that would just mean letting it drain into the shingle bank and finding its own way home. No one would need to be any the wiser and no great water bills.’

‘So, we’d be talking something like shrink-wrapped capsules or pills. Something small and light to go with the flow. Solids, not powder or liquids.’

I agreed.

‘Pump them through and filter them out. That wouldn’t be hard, would it? A big sieve would do it. Box them up and drive them away to market. Show me about PLUTO.’

I got a couple of chairs up to the screen and we sat close together and leaning in. We were being pretty relaxed and whereas she was, naturally, engrossed by the information in front of her, being quite familiar with it, I found myself distracted by her nearness.

I got up and paced about a bit. She trawled through it a couple of times.

After I thought she’d had long enough, I said, ‘If it’s like I think, they’re taking a hell of a risk. They couldn’t be sure the original pipe would still be serviceable after all this time down there.’

‘What isn’t a risk when you’re dealing in drugs? And like I said, twenty, thirty grand would be a drop in the ocean, excuse the pun, if it came off. They’d only need to run it for a good month to double or treble their investment. The rest is all gravy.’

I sat down next to her again. ‘What are you going to do?’

She tapped a nail against her front teeth. It was a nice nail and they were nice teeth.

‘I’d like to have a look for myself before I start sounding the alarm.’ She smiled at me. ‘You’ve done a good job of selling me a fantastic tale, but I would look pretty stupid if I went to my senior officers with it and it turned out to be nothing of the sort. You understand that for a female detective, even in the twenty-first century, a career is much harder to carve out than for a man, especially in a place like this. That is the sad reality. I can’t afford to have a false alarm on this scale as a skeleton rattling around in my locker. I’d be the laughing stock of the district.’

I had no choice but to accept this. At least she appeared to be taking me seriously.

She went on, ‘And, from what I understand, they don’t have all the pipework in place and it’s not operational. If we go busting in there it’s likely we’d frighten off the big fish. If you
are
right, this is going to be a massive operation, something that could swamp the UK. The big fish are going to be very big indeed.’

‘And it wouldn’t hurt the career of a lowly but ambitious police Detective Constable stuck in a provincial male-dominated rural backwater to be able to claim responsibility and brownie points for uncovering something like that?’ I’d rumbled Detective Cash’s sudden self-interest and while I couldn’t blame her for thinking that way my concerns were more immediate. I wanted those responsible for murdering my relatives brought to justice.