Crooked Smile

Paul Barker

Description

Who exactly, is Anna? Even more puzzling: where is she? Taylor, a close-lipped private investigator, searches for Anna and her crooked smile. In a high-wire act, he finds the stink of corruption and betrayal at all levels of British Society. Even death can come gilt wrapped, as more and more blood is spilled.

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: The Grainwater Press
• Date de parution: 19 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783011209
• Langue: English

Extrait

A CROOKED SMILE
Paul Barker
The Grainwater Press
Copyright Paul Barker 2013
Cover design copyright Richard Hollis 2013
Paul Barker has asserted his rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by The Grainwater Press
First published in eBook format in 2013 eISBN: 978-1-78301-120-9
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
All names, characters, places, organisations, businesses and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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For Sally
1.
He walked down from the railway station in this calm midlands town. It was hunting country. The bus shelters carried pictures, on their glazed sides, of cheerful little foxes. Taylor winked at one fox. A young blonde in blue jeans was waiting for her bus, or for some whirlwind to take her out into a wider world. She seemed to think he was winking at her. She turned the corners of her mouth down and looked away.
At last he reached the address he had been given. An old house, probably Victorian. Nothing much to say about it except that it was old. The street door was latched but not locked. Taylor opened it and went up the stairs. The wallpaper was covered with little Dresden shepherdesses, some pink, some blue. Faded almost to grey, they looked as old as the house. The dead man was on the landing. Hunched in one corner of the brown carpet. A revolver on the floor next to him. The front of his pale wool sweater was drenched in blood. All the doors onto the landing were shut. No one was looking out of any of them to see if they could help. No sound, except for the scratching of a bare winter branch against a cracked window.
They had told him everything, except who the man was. He opened the landing doors. A shabby bathroom, two shabby bedrooms, one of them with nothing on the bed but a grimy mattress. He went downstairs. Nobody there, either. He went back up and did what he had been asked to do. He pushed his hands into the man's tight chinos, trying to keep away from the blood. A wallet in brown leather, a bunch of six keys, half a dozen coins, a packet of supermarket tissues. He took the wallet, the keys and, as an afterthought, the coins. He left the house as fast as he could. The mid-morning street looked deserted. But he knew that there would be someone somewhere, watching. There always was.
He went down into town through a cluster of side-streets and alleys. About half the houses looked as if they hadn't been painted for the past 50 years. The rest had the usual emblems of newcomers. Lavender-blue or seaweed-green doors, the Japanese paper lampshades. Little eco-friendly stickers on the window glass. Sometimes cedar-wood blinds. Taylor knew there was a university of some sort at the edge of town. These streets were where the teachers commuted from if they couldn't yet afford to move to a lime-washed cottage or, more likely, a bricky village-edge estate, in the heart of the huntsmen's woods and fields. The parked cars were small, the double-locked bikes expensive.
The cold and damp gave him every reason to hurry. In the end he came out at kind of market square. It wasn't really a square, and it wasn't much of a market. He saw the steamed-up window of a café on the other side. It was almost hidden by a stall of cheap fabrics, run by two young Asian men. He slipped along behind the stall, went into the fug of the café and sat down at the far end with a large mug of weak coffee. He felt like a fox that had gone to earth. So far as he knew, no one was after him. Not yet.
A bunch of students burst in, almost all of them in yellow and green scarves. They were collecting for some charity. The café owner put a handful of cash in the tin. So did a couple of customers near the front window Taylor thought it would make him more forgettable to give rather than not to give. He dug out the dead man's coins and slotted them in the tin. When the café quietened down, he took out the keys from his raincoat, under cover of the bright-red table top. One of them looked like the key to a deposit box. But where?
He put the keys back in his pocket and slid out the wallet. It held nothing with a name on it. It did have a black and white snapshot, scarred where it had been folded. Few people took such photographs any longer. It must be at least ten years old, probably more. A young woman looked out at the camera. Long straight hair, very dark. Wide eyes, under brows which met in the middle. A smile which didn't reach as far as her eyes. The smile had something else odd about it. Taylor couldn't pin down what. He kept thinking about that after he had put the wallet away. The woman was attractive but not glamorous. He wasn't the Beast, or he liked to think not. Nor was she a standard version of Beauty.
He would have to stay in the town for a while, he thought. He bought a small bag at a hardware shop. The shop was so full of brooms and plastic buckets he could hardly reach the counter. The bag made him look more like a legitimate overnight visitor.
The Madison Hotel sounded as if someone, once, had thought there might be a chance of American tourists. The town had little to offer them. It had made its money out of print and paper works, all now closed. The hotel was the usual 1960s box, set back from the road, with two flags in the forecourt, the union jack and the European circle of stars. The hotel had about as much character as a slot machine. Taylor hoped that anyone seeing him would think him just as anonymous.
The girl behind the reception desk was half-watching a daytime show on a portable television set. He told her his name was James Kirk. He gave her a credit card which appeared to confirm this. In the lounge behind him a man in his sixties was talking avidly to a woman half his age. Business was business at the Madison.
The woman glanced across at Taylor. She could see that she already had placed a better bet. She kept on listening and sometimes smiling. The receptionist gave Taylor his room key and turned back to study the little screen full-time. He went up to the second floor. From the window he could see no one keeping an eye on the hotel. He stretched out on the ochre bedspread and tried to work out his next move.
The train ride had been slow and wearisome. He had thought it might be harder to track him than if he drove. The hotel room was so sparse that Taylor felt like a corpse in a crematorium, waiting for the furnace. The only thing missing was the anodyne music oozing out from a chapel-of-rest loudspeaker. He stared at the one picture on the wall. A sub-impressionist print of a yellowish bridge over a greenish river. It must have been chosen to soothe customers to sleep. An artistic knock-out drop. It worked. Taylor dozed off.
He was woken by a triple knock at the door. He called out but there was no response. The knock was repeated. Taylor sat up, took his gun out of its holster, laid it on the pillow and moved towards the door.
The door sprang open inwards, kicked in. A man stood there, legs apart, holding a semi-automatic and pointing it straight at Taylor.
"Open the bag," he said. Taylor picked up the bag he bought at the hardware store. It still had the little white price sticker. It was empty. He shook it upside down to confirm this.
"Where's the stuff?" the man said. He had a slight London accent. Taylor thought it sounded genuine, not adopted. Probably some south or east suburb. A place where, like football or the music business, guns and knives were seen as one of the ways to get off the bottom of the pile. The gun was the most memorable thing about the man. He wore a black leather jacket, blue jeans, unremarkable trainers. He had a face like a hatchet. Oddly for a marksman, he had a slight squint in his left eye.
"There isn't any stuff," Taylor said. "Only this." He took the bunch of keys out of his pocket and threw them across to land on the floor. The man bent down, without changing the aim of his gun. "What deposit box is the small key for?" he said. "I don't know," Taylor said. "Go into the bathroom, count up to 100 and don't come out before then," the man said. It was like being back at school. Taylor did as he was told. The bathroom bore every sign of being looked after by an underpaid cleaner. A lump of soap, embedded with hairs, was stuck in the outlet of the washbasin. There was no plug. We are now living in the aftermath of the longest economic boom in recorded history, Taylor thought. Was this all that this boom had delivered?
After a slow count of 100, he came out. The room door was as closed as it could be, given the broken lock. Nothing else in the room had been touched, except for his own gun, which had gone. The visitor had got as much as he wanted. Or as much as he reckoned he would get.
At the end of the corridor the glass door of a fire escape swung gently. Taylor walked along and looked down. Besides a plumber's white van, the car park only held a small Peugeot and an ageing Jaguar. Love at first sight, he thought. Or at first payment.
All he had now was the photograph. He took it out again. The more he looked, the more certain he was that he had seen this face before. It was the slightly crooked smile. The rest of the woman's face might be almost anybody. The smile was her own