The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 (21 page)

I would have to make my move. Now. But if I did, there was no way I could avoid being shot, and I would need all my strength, all my skills, to take him down. This time, I’d have to be ready for his fancy moves. But first I needed him to shift the gun from my side.

‘I’ve got it. It’s in my pocket,’ I said. Reach for it, I silently prayed. ‘Who’s McNaught?’ He didn’t take the bait.

‘What? Who’s this McNaught you keep talking about?’

‘You’re telling me you don’t know?’

‘I wouldn’t be asking if I did. And seeing as I’m the one holding the gun, I don’t have a reason to lie about it.’

‘If you’re not one of McNaught’s people, who are you? Why have you been following me?’

He gave an ugly, rat-like snigger in the dark. I felt another sharp jab of the gun muzzle, making me wince. ‘You really don’t get this whole question and answer thing being all about who’s holding the gun, do you?’

I looked at him, trying to read a face almost completely hidden in the shadows. I was confused and, given the alternative, I decided to hold back on making a move. For the moment.

I answered his question. I told him who McNaught was. I told him that I was there the night Tommy died. I told him everything. I had no other cards to play.

He listened to me in silence. After I finished, after he sat small and dark and unreadable, he said: ‘I’m not who you think I am. I’m going to take the gun away, but don’t do anything stupid. You got me?’

I nodded, then realizing he probably wouldn’t have seen me in the dark, I said, ‘I’ve got you.’

‘My name is Baines,’ he said. ‘You’re right about one thing, I served with Tommy during the war. We became friends. Close friends. Or at least as close as Tommy could be with anyone. We were in the same commando unit for a while. We had both been picked because of our
special
talents – Tommy because he could get in and out of almost any building undetected, me because – well, I think you’ve seen my special talents for yourself.’

And I had. This man was a killer – a natural viciousness and propensity for violence had clearly been honed into a professional skill by the military. It all fitted – except I couldn’t for the life of me imagine Quiet Tommy Quaid being close friends with someone whose principal skill was the taking of lives with ease.

Then I remembered the conversation I’d had with Tommy. He had been disturbed by my violence and talked about a murder-eyed member of his wartime unit. I remembered Tommy had said: ‘
Someone who called himself my friend too.
’

‘There were a lot of special units about,’ Baines went on. ‘Commando units dropped behind enemy lines for all kinds of reasons: sabotage, assassination, intelligence gathering. We were in the last category. Our job was mainly to steal plans from the Krauts; ideally without anyone finding out we’d been in and out. But if we were disturbed, then it was my job to deal with the opposition.’

‘And you were on missions with Tommy?’ I asked.

‘A few. The unit we were in was headed by Captain Jack Tarnish – the hardest bastard I’ve ever known. Maybe even a bad bastard. Tarnish was one of those men who had been born at the right time, the type who thrived on war. He was a Jock too, like Tommy.’ Baines gave another rat-like laugh. ‘For some reason Tarnish took a shine to Tommy, who was the youngest of us. But it wasn’t a protective thing, you know? It was more like Tommy was an investment to be looked after, like Tarnish had special plans for him.’

‘What kind of plans?’

‘That I didn’t know for sure at the time, but looking back, and with what I’ve found out since, I can guess. Back then, all I knew was that there was something big about to happen – some big mission behind enemy lines. But before it came off, I was transferred out of the unit. Suddenly and without any reason or warning. I ended up in another unit, a sabotage outfit. I tell you, mate, I was lucky to survive the fucking war.’

‘You think Tarnish wanted you out of the picture?’

‘I got the impression he was handpicking the team he wanted around him. I mean, we were already handpicked, but it was like he was fine-tuning his team. Like he had something particular in mind and maybe something that wasn’t strictly kosher. About six months later, after my old outfit had carried out their secret mission that I was no longer party to, I heard these rumours about a large cache of Nazi loot going missing and began to suspect that Tarnish had used Quaid in an off-the-books job.’

‘This Scottish officer, Tarnish – did he have a wound to his face?’ I asked.

‘No. Why?’

I told Baines about McNaught, describing his build and his lopsided face.

‘No . . . that’s not Tarnish. Tarnish was tall and lean. Dark hair. No damage to his face. In fact, he isn’t unlike you in appearance. By pure chance I saw him shortly after the war, outside a pub in London, dressed like a country gent and with a couple of tarts on his arm. No signs of any wound to his face. Anyway, it sounds like your McNaught has a totally different build. But that doesn’t mean McNaught isn’t somehow connected to Tarnish. And anyone connected to Tarnish is dangerous.’

I thought about what Baines had told me. I asked the obvious question: ‘So what is your interest in Tommy’s death? In me? Why have you been following me all over the place?’

‘Like I told you, I liked Tommy. We got on. The outfit we were in was as tough as you get and Tarnish made a habit of recruiting misfits. Some of them were probably psychopathic.’

I repressed my urge to laugh or to bring up accusations of blackness by pots against kettles. Baines must have sensed my thought in the dark.

‘You maybe think that they couldn’t be worse than me, but some of them were. Much worse. The one thing that held them all together was Tarnish, who seemed to inspire some kind of deep loyalty in men. Me – I didn’t get it. Problems with authority and all that bollocks. That’s why Tarnish had me transferred, I think. But my point is this – the story that did the rounds was that Tommy Quaid was part of this raid on some top Nazi’s place in occupied France. The story goes that they got what they were after – plans or documents or shite like that – but Tommy found all of this other stuff in the safe. I don’t know if it was gold or jewels or something else, but whatever it was it was worth a mint. Tommy came out a lot heavier than when he went in. Rumour has it that he didn’t let on to the rest of the unit.’

‘And you think that they found out?’

‘If they did,’ said Baines, ‘and if, like you say, Tommy’s fall off that roof wasn’t an accident, then that would make Tarnish and the others the prime suspects in his death. In my opinion, anyway.’

‘So you’re not here to do the right thing by Tommy, after all,’ I said. ‘Just like Tarnish, you’re out for looted Nazi treasure. That’s why you’ve been following me.’

‘A bit of both, if you like. If it was Tarnish who killed Tommy, then I don’t want him getting the loot whatever happens and I want to get even for Tommy. And if we find the loot I’ll split it with you. You can do whatever you want with your half. But I want you to know that I’ll get it, with or without your help.’

‘There’s a flaw in your logic,’ I said. ‘If Tarnish killed Tommy, then he must have found out first where the loot was hidden. Otherwise he would be killing the goose before it laid the golden egg.’

‘Except you have the key. And you have the shed number. And even if they’ve already got it, I don’t want them keeping it. Believe it or not, I want to help you find out who killed Tommy. Maybe there is no loot. Maybe Tarnish went away empty-handed. But Tommy Quaid was my friend and the only person I trusted in the army. At the least I want to find out for his sake.’

I was less than convinced by the nobility of his motives, but I didn’t have a gun in my ribs any more, so I played along. If we did find a cache of war loot in the lock-up, then I didn’t fancy my chances of walking away with half of it, or walking out alive. For the moment, I was winging it.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We split what we find. My half goes to Tommy’s sister, agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

I started the car, switched on the headlights, reversed out and headed down the main avenue between the sheds. They all were the same design, double-doored and a similar construction to a domestic garage, only about twice the size. I guessed you could park a truck inside each. Baines reached into the glove box and took out a flashlight. Each shed had a square wooden plaque above its doors, each plaque with a number and letter. As we crawled along, he shone the light onto the numbers. I counted down until I reached the shed number I’d been given.

‘Shed seventeen, row B,’ I said. ‘This is it.’

I killed the lights and we got out, Baines taking back his car keys and pocketing them. The shed, like the others, was varnished almost black under layers of creosote, an angular black shadow against the lighter deep blue sky. I took the key from my pocket and Baines shone the flashlight onto the heavy-gauge padlock – new and bright against the dark age of the storage shed doors it secured. ‘Not much protection if he has stashed in here what you think he has,’ I said. ‘A tyre lever would open this as easily as a key.’

Baines, small and dark in the night behind the glare of the flashlight, said nothing.

I took the blue-fobbed key Jennifer Quaid had given me, unlocked the padlock, hooked it back onto the loop, and swung open the double doors.

‘Give me the flashlight,’ I said. Baines did nothing. ‘The torch, give it to me. While I look, you keep a watch for someone coming.’

He handed me the flashlight and I hoped he wasn’t complying just to have his hands free. I didn’t like Baines; I didn’t trust him; I didn’t believe the whole wartime-buddies-bound-by-hoops-of-steel crap about his friendship with Tommy. For all I knew, it really could have been Baines who had killed Tommy on the roof of the foundry.

We could be a matter of feet away from a hoard of Nazi loot: maybe the light of the flashlight would suddenly be reflected by a twenty-four-carat gold bust of Eva Braun’s tits or a pile of diamond-encrusted swastikas. Then my lights would go out for good.

I shone the flashlight around the shed. Shelving units, the kind garages used to store car parts, lined the walls. A very small car sat parked in the middle of the space between the shelving units: a grey Austin A40 and the last kind of car you would expect to see Quiet Tommy Quaid driving. I guessed that, like the van on the night of the foundry job, this was stolen, renumbered and ready to provide anonymity when on his next job.

Personally, the Wyvern was bad enough: I wouldn’t be seen dead in something like the A40.

The shelving units were full of stuff, very carefully arranged and organized. Boxes of small items that Tommy Quaid had obviously stolen but not yet fenced: china ornaments, low-value jewellery, three television sets and a row of radios. What surprised me was the number of tools that filled some of the shelves. By the door there were five large metal petrol cans, a kerosene lamp with spare bottles of kerosene – paraffin as the Brits called it – and stacks of boxes, dozens of boxes, all neatly arranged.

‘This is going to take a while,’ I said to the small dark shape at the doorway. I took the kerosene lamp, struck a match and lit it. ‘I’m going to have to shut the doors over or everyone’ll be able to see the light. You keep watch.’ I swung the doors closed but Baines jammed a foot in so I couldn’t get them completely shut.

‘I’ll keep an eye on you from here as well,’ he said.

‘Just make sure you look out for anyone coming. I have to tell you that this isn’t exactly Aladdin’s cave – I don’t see Tommy stashing stolen Nazi loot in here.’

‘Just keep looking. And don’t think about playing me for an arse, mate – you find anything valuable, you’d better tell me.’

I sighed and went back to searching. The boxes were full of documents and other stuff that Tommy had stolen and obviously thought might be of some future value. From what I could see, there wasn’t any single thing of great value in the storeroom, but altogether there would have been several hundred pounds’ worth of stuff. Still, it was a disappointment. This didn’t look like Tommy’s retirement fund, and there certainly was no sign of any loot, if it existed at all, from the wartime raid behind enemy lines.

But there was enough to incriminate Tommy, and I worked out that the cans of petrol weren’t just there to fuel the A40: if Tommy had had to destroy evidence in a hurry, he could set the place alight in a few seconds.

I found the keys to the A40 hanging on a wall hook. Using my handkerchief on the handles – chrome was a gift to the coppers when looking for prints – I opened the car up. Other than a handbook in the glove box and a tyre lever, jack and spare wheel in the trunk, there was nothing. I tapped the panels and they sounded hollow, the way they should have; again no evidence of Teutonic treasure packed into voids. I decided, however, to suggest to Baines that we take the A40 with us when we left and take it apart.

I turned my attention to the shelving units, working top to bottom, and along the wall from the door to the far end of the shed.

By the time I had worked my way to the bottom shelf at the far end of the storeroom, I had given up hope. I still had the other wall to do, but it didn’t look promising. A last three boxes had been stuffed into the corner. I took the kerosene lamp with me to see better but also to move it as far away as possible from the gap in the doors. I took the lid off the first box and it revealed nothing more than a pile of old newspapers. I was about to move on to the next box when I decided to start lifting the papers to check if there was anything underneath.

I mouthed the word
paydirt
.

Cash. Bundles of sterling banknotes neatly fastened with rubber bands. I reckoned there was no less than a thousand pounds. The second box revealed another large quantity of banknotes, probably in the region of another two thousand, and some gold jewellery.

This, I knew, should go to Jennifer. It wasn’t any Nazi loot and Baines had no claim on it, but that was where things were going to get sticky. Keeping my back to the door, I replaced the newspapers into both boxes, trying to work out what I should do next. Baines slipped into the shed, closing the doors behind him.