Читать книгу The Returned Dead - Rafe Kronos - Страница 6

It’s all about deceit: most of my job is investigating deceit. I’m good at it because I have spent years deceiving others. In that time I learned that it is often best if you can get people to deceive themselves. Now that trick helps me make money. Take my firm’s location, for example. Most people think private investigators operate out of grubby offices over kebab shops or next door to seedy mini-cab firms. By contrast my firm, Charles Dawson and Co., occupies Twelve Hanover Crescent, a three storey Georgian house in the middle of one of Chester’s most handsome terraces. When I was setting up the business I calculated that the place’s age and elegance would persuade people that my firm was both old established and respectable – and it does. The council rates I pay on the building make my eyes water but the place works its silent deceit on clients: only the rich bother to turn and to hire us.

I stopped and looked across the road towards our premises and smiled as I thought how my neighbours helped us without knowing it. The house to the left serves as the offices of Carter, Carter, Blake and Carter, solicitors of frigid and rigid respectability since the days of Queen Victoria. On our right resides Sir Blair Hunter, a choleric retired university Vice-Chancellor who lives with his crushed wife and his braying daughter. Sir Blair sits on all sorts of important committees and I feel that a little of his eminence rubs off on my firm. Occasionally one of his visitors notes our existence and later brings us their business. Thank you, Sir Blair.

It is good to have such a fine building to work in although I have mixed feelings about the city itself. Even after four years here Chester, the ancient Roman city of Deva, still strikes me as an odd place. Too often it feels like a smug self-regarding matron, pulling in her skirts to escape contagion from nearby rough Birkenhead and even rougher Liverpool across the Mersey. Some days I like its Roman walls, the beautiful race course overlooking the gentle curves of the River Dee, even the stumpy red sandstone cathedral – though aren’t cathedrals meant to soar? – and I enjoy the way they all contribute to its air of calm prosperity. On other days I recall what keeps me tied to the city and everything about it becomes a flimsy façade hiding dark horrors.

Still, despite its superficial calmness the city does throw up plenty of work for us. An added source of work is the surrounding countryside which is waist deep in millionaires. Not a few of them are footballers, testosterone soaked young men who have great trouble keeping their trousers on. We get a lot of lucrative divorce work from wives in that section of the community. Some of the cases we handle are undeniably sordid but I am happy to take them. When other people prove how fallible they are it goes a little way to lessen my guilt at my own failures.

The traffic final slowed and I was able to dodge through a gap in the stream of cars, cross the road and stop in front of our front door. The firm’s brass name-plate gleamed like a fragment of trapped sunlight. It bears the words ‘Charles Dawson and Co.’ though the letters are almost worn away and difficult to read. People look at the elegant house and then at the worn name-plate and assume we’d been here for decades. After all, what better indication is there of a firm’s age and probity than a brass plate with lettering rubbed away by years of regular polishing?

I gave the shining golden rectangle a fond look. For something faked up only four years back it was doing a splendid job.

As I say, in my career I’ve learned you can get people to deceive themselves and the plate, the house, the neighbours all do just that. There is nothing malicious about it, you understand, it’s just I want to distinguish my agency from all the sleazy, fly-by-night operators who give investigators a bad name.

We get all sorts of clients and charge them appropriately for our high quality service but this was the first time that I’d been hired by a client who thought he was two people, one of them dead. Well, the sooner I began work, the sooner I’d get to the bottom of all that.

I opened the front door and went in. In the hall Mrs Beattie, our receptionist, smiled and moved her hands apart to indicate there were no messages that I needed to bother about. I like her sensible, motherly approach to looking after me and my staff: she is another layer in the protection I have tried to wrap around myself.

I walked past her desk and through to my office at the rear of the ground floor. It has large windows that look out over a lawn edged by gloomy evergreens. Whenever I look at it, it strikes me that the place is pretty dull. From time to time I’ve toyed with the idea planting flowers to give it some colour. I thought about how even a little of the £15,000 could buy a lot of bulbs. Then I recalled the far more important thing that required money; improving the garden would have to wait.

I settled myself behind my desk, thought again about our new client for a few moments and then addressed the empty room and said, “OK, Kate, you can come in now.”

A minute later the door opened and Kate Simmonds, my number two, came in and seated herself neatly in the client’s chair. She pulled down her skirt, brushed back the lock of her red hair that fell over her left eye, looked at me and laughed. It was a deep, rich sound at odds with her petite figure. I waited for her to speak and tried not to stare at her. There were times when I found her beauty disturbing.

“Well, well, Charlie, we’ve really got one this time. Amazing, truly amazing! A man comes through the door and expects us to believe a dozen impossible things and then, just to add to the fun, he hands over fifteen thousand pounds in used notes. Wow.”

It was not a bad summary of what had happened.

“And as for handing over all that money, well, Charlie, you should have seen your face when he tipped it over your desk,” she giggled. “By the way, I noticed the firm’s receipt book did not put in an appearance.”

I ignored that.

She giggled again. I tried to look serious; after all, I was the boss. It was a struggle; her high spirits always made me want to smile. I just hoped she would stay that way: so far experience had not darkened her mind.

“So I take it you listened to all of it?”

“Of course I listened and watched the whole thing, of course I did. When you press your button and the little red light on my console starts to flash I’m all ears and eyes. I must say enjoyed it; in fact the whole thing was better than most of the stuff on TV these days, though you must admit it was a bit Dr Who-ish. So what do we call the investigation? The Man who was Two? The Return of Mr Rankin?” She laughed again. It was clear that, like me, she couldn’t believe our new client’s story.

I gave a smile and waited: I wanted to hear her views before I said anything.

“Right, Charlie, I told you the video stuff would be useful. I’ve pulled some good stills of our client from the recording. We can take them around and see if anyone recognises him as Rankin or, I suppose, as Baxendale.” She grinned, “Which is he? Do you think we should start calling him Rankindale or Baxenkin? We certainly need a name for him till we decide who he really is and what he’s doing. I’ll bring the pics up later and you can decide whose name we use to file them. You’ll be impressed by how sharp they are. I told you it was worth spending the extra money on high-end kit.”

I refrained from looking at the places in the ceilings and walls where the cameras’ tiny lenses and the microphones were hidden.

Kate looks after the firm’s technology. One of the reasons I hired her was her doctorate in information technology from Imperial College -- that and her quick intelligence – and, I have to admit it, her red hair and her green eyes. I like to have her near me because it reminds me that beautiful young women need not end up horribly deformed and broken. Sometimes, just sometimes, her presence helps to blot out my memories.

“Anyway, go on, say it, Charlie, say it,” she said, wrinkling her nose and giving me her slightly crooked grin. “Say what you always say at this point in an investigation. Repeat to me those immortal words. Let me hear the proud motto of our firm -- though I don’t know why I’m bothering to ask because I know you’ll do it anyway”

I found myself smiling. “Why is this man lying to me?”

“Exactly. The firm’s golden motto: ‘why is this man lying to me’? Plus, of course, ‘bring the money -- now’. That bit’s important too, especially for you, Charlie, isn’t it?”

I shrugged. I hoped she’d never find out why we needed to earn so much money. If she ever did she would see me in a very different light and I didn’t want that. As for ‘why is this man lying to me’ our unofficial motto, well, she could mock but as far as I am concerned complete scepticism has to be the starting point in any investigation into the murkier areas of human existence.

‘Why is this man lying to me’ had been taught me years ago by a Scottish professor of Biblical History. Scholars like him don’t have blood in their veins, they have liquid doubt. When I think of him I regret leaving academic life. Perhaps if I’d stayed I might be a seriously overworked and underpaid lecturer by now, even a professor. It mightn’t have been a bad life. But it’s all too late now, much too late.

I became aware Kate was speaking again. “You know, Charlie, this Baxendale bloke tells a fascinating story but…”

As her voice faded away I finished the sentence for her, “but the whole thing’s impossible, utterly so.”

She leaned forward and the lock of hair flopped back over her left eye. “Right, Charlie, do you think we can we believe one single word he said?”

“I wish I knew,” I replied. “Of course his story seems incredible, well, it is incredible. But I’m puzzled by Baxendale himself. I was watching him closely all the way through and he was convincing, very convincing. I’m pretty sure he believes everything he told me. Either that or he’s a damn good actor.”

“Hmm. But you must admit your judgement of people sometimes goes wildly wrong.”

I remembered the last time I’d made a catastrophic misjudgement and my flesh grew icy cold.

Kate was continuing, unaware of how her words had affected me. “You know, Charlie, now I think of it, didn’t you once tell me you thought that George Lazenby was convincing as James Bond? And as for Tony Blair…” She grinned derisively.

“Well, if you found the man convincing, even if you think he really believed what he was saying, I still think we’ve just been hired to investigate a story that’s got more holes than a string vest.”

“I agree. So why don’t you point out the holes and I’ll see if we’re thinking along the same lines.”

“OK. In brief we have been hired by a bloke who says he’s Baxendale, though how he came to be Baxendale sounds very odd -- the coma and everything. But recently he’s begun to think he’s also a dead bloke called Rankin. Right so far?”

“Right.”

“OK, for the moment let’s concentrate on the Baxendale part of the story. Let’s start with the coma. He says he was in a coma for about six months and the coma made him lose his memory, it made him forget everything he ever knew.”

She shook her head vigorously. “There’s no way I can believe that, Charlie, it just doesn’t add up, no way. I don’t believe a man can suffer a sort of brain-wipe because of a viral infection and then recover physically, become totally normal again, after six months -- apart from a total loss of memory that is. I bet that doesn’t make medical sense. I don’t think comas work like that.”

“I remember reading that a severe stroke or a viral infection can destroy a person’s memory.”

She was looking completely sceptical. It’s one of the things Kate’s paid to do: doubt everything she’s told – especially by me. I reciprocate; between us we manage to keep on the right track with most investigations.

“You’re being naïf, Charlie. Just think about it: that sort of severe illness would damage other parts of the brain as well as the memory. It would wreck things like co-ordination, speech, balance, perhaps even vision. OK? But everything about our new client seems normal, doesn’t it -- apart from the fact he thinks he’s two people at once? There’s not the slightest sign of any brain damage, any; he showed no sign of residual paralysis or slurred speech or a lack of balance or poor motor control, all the things that you’d expect if someone had suffered a severe brain infection. He has none of them. The only odd thing about him is he believes he’s two people at once – well, he might believe it but I cannot. No, Charlie, I can’t believe the coma story, let alone all the weird stuff about being Rankin who happens to have died eight years ago.”

They were all good points. “OK, tell me what else seems wrong to you,” I asked.

She filled her cheeks and blew out a long breath of exasperation. “What else is wrong, Charlie? What else? Everything, just about every single damned thing. He says he’s married to this Debby woman and they’ve been married for twelve years. Right? But if he was Jack Rankin till eight years ago that would have been impossible -- unless he was a very fast moving bigamist, whizzing between two homes and two wives. And that’s not likely, is it?”

I agreed that it wasn’t.

“And if he was Rankin then he’s dead, dead and buried, or rather dead and cremated. And if he was cremated then he’s not able to wander around and hire us and dump a heap of money on your desk. No, dead men can’t do that, Charlie. The whole thing’s impossible, totally impossible.”

“Look,” she continued, jabbing her finger at me for emphasis, “his story is full of contradictions and impossibilities. He admits someone died in his, Rankin’s, bed, so there really was a corpse there. Now also according to him the body in his bed was identified as Rankin. It was identified by three people, three, who knew him well: his cleaner, one of the employees at his car firm and his doctor. They all identified the body as a dead Rankin, a seriously dead Rankin, so dead that he could be cremated without him popping out of the coffin and objecting that it was getting damned hot in there. OK, got that: Rankin is dead, Rankin is identified, Rankin is cremated. Got it? ”

She paused briefly. “But obviously the man who’s just left here is not dead. He certainly didn’t look like a little heap of crematorium ash, did he? It’s simple: if he’s not dead then he can’t be Rankin. Let me repeat: that man cannot be Rankin. No way.”

She was working herself up into a fine flurry of annoyance at all the impossibilities in our client’s story. She hates it when things are not clear; she takes it as a personal insult. It is one of the things that make her a good investigator. I tried not to smile.

She began to speak more thoughfully. “So what on earth is he up to? Why did he tell us this stuff and practically throw all that money at us? The man in your office can’t be Rankin, he isn’t Rankin. So why is he paying us all that money to investigate his preposterous story?”

“I agree, the man’s story can’t be true but there’s a problem – he produced a piece of physical evidence that seems to support it. You haven’t seen the press cutting he brought in.”

I went to the safe, twirled the combination lock and opened it. The mass of used notes gave out their sour smell. I removed the yellowed piece of newsprint and handed it to her.

She stared at it for a minute then looked as furious as if someone had pinched her bum.

“Oh bloody hell! Damn it.” She pouted. “OK, Charlie, I agree, it looks like him, it looks very like him. Hell.” She went on scrutinising the photo, her lips pursed and a tiny frown creasing her forehead. After a while she said slowly, “If this really is Rankin’s picture then the man we had in here is Rankin. Except he can’t be, there’s no way he can. As the cutting says, Rankin is dead. Dead.” She shook her head angrily. “So what the hell is all this about? Is it some sort of con?”

“You know, Baxendale-Rankin seems to have gone out of his way to show us he has nothing to hide.” She pulled a face in mock amusement. “Well, there’s a novelty; we’ve never have a client like that before.”

She didn’t need to remind me. “Right. Everyone has something to hide,” I said quietly. Including me, I thought.

We sat in a pensive silence for a minute or two. We were getting nowhere. It was time to attack from a different direction.

"Right, Kate, we’ve done the scepticism bit, for a moment let’s just try to suspend our complete disbelief in Baxendale’s unbelievable tale. Let’s suppose that he really is Rankin." Jumping from one position to its complete opposite sometimes helps to pick things out of a case. “Just suppose he didn’t die and really is Rankin. Where would that get us?”

"I guess it would mean that someone brainwashed him into thinking he is Baxendale and now the conditioning’s wearing off so he's begun to remember he’s Rankin. But why would anyone want to do that to Rankin?”

I thought for a moment, "Well, there's one very obvious reason."

She was on to it in an instant; she is very bright. "Oh, you mean they needed a substitute Baxendale because the genuine one had died or was missing? OK, let’s follow that idea. Why would someone choose Rankin?” Another brief pause then, “Well, the obvious reason is because he looked like Baxendale. If you needed a Baxendale substitute then it would be best to start with someone who looked like him. Do you think that could explain it?”

I wanted her to go on with her theorising. “Perhaps,” I said.

“OK, Charlie, so where does that take us?” She pulled a face. “Not a lot further, I think. No, as an explanation it stinks, it’s still completely unbelievable. Do you really think someone could get hold of Rankin, leave another body in his place, presumably one that also looked just like him -- because we know three people identified a body as his -- and then somehow convince Rankin he is Baxendale?”

“If he looked like Baxendale then Baxendale must have looked like him,” I pointed out. “So perhaps if Baxendale had died they could stick his corpse in Rankin’s bed and people would think the dead man was Rankin. If Baxendale was very rich then they might have needed him to stay alive even if he was dead.”

“No, Charlie, I still can’t believe it. The whole operation would be much too complicated. Think about what it would involve: they would have to know about Rankin, have him lined up in case they needed him, then somehow drug him, taken him away, dump the dead Baxendale in his bed and then make Rankin believe he was Baxendale. Come on, Charlie, it’s one impossible thing after another. How they could convince Rankin he was Baxendale? How could they manage to do that?”

We were edging towards a subject that scared me because so much turned on it. After a moment of hesitation I forced myself to speak. "Well, for a start I guess they’d need to wipe out Rankin’s memories. If they were to re-programme him as Baxendale they’d need to start with a clean sheet by removing everything he could recall about his previous life."

Was that possible, could memories be erased? Could someone be given a mind cleared of memories? The idea was wonderfully attractive.

She pulled a face. “OK, just let’s suppose that’s possible – and I’m not saying it is, because I don’t think it is -- then I doubt it could be achieved overnight. They’d need time to empty Rankin’s mind and then they’d need more time to convince him he’s Baxendale.”

Suppose really terrible memories could be erased? How could it be done, what would it cost? I had to force myself to listen to what Kate was saying.

“OK, so let’s consider the time-line – or at least what our man said was the time-line. According to him there was a six month gap in his Baxendale life when he was in hospital in a coma. Then he came out of the coma and he was taught he was – is -- Baxendale.”

“OK, it might work. They get hold of Rankin and they have six months to somehow empty out his Rankin memories. Then, after those six months, he wakes up with a completely blank mind and this Debby woman teaches him everything, but everything, about being Baxendale and convinces him he’s Baxendale who’s been sick for six months.”

I’d noticed a feature of Baxendale’s story that could be relevant; I wondered if she’d spotted it. It could make the whole story slightly more believable.

“And another thing, Charlie: you know he said he woke up and found this woman Debby by his bed? Before all that vomit-making yukky stuff about how beautiful she is and how deeply he loves her?” Her voice dripped acid powerful enough to burn through armour plate.

I tried not to grin; Kate may be beautiful but there is absolutely no room for romance in her ruthlessly rational approach to life. I often wondered what had made her that way. “Yes?”

“Well, he said she whispered something to him. When you asked him what it was, he said he couldn’t remember – even though he’d tried. And he also said Debby couldn’t remember what she’d said to him. Now I find that very interesting.”

She’d got there. I let out a long breath and congratulated myself on hiring her – smug bastard Dawson, that was me.

“So what does that sound like to you, Charlie?”

I knew what it sounded like but I just shrugged my shoulders again. There is no harm in letting her think she is brighter than I am. Besides, I suspect she is.

“It sounds to me like it could be a post-hypnotic trigger. You know, Charlie, you hypnotise someone and when they are in a trance you tell them that when they wake up they’re going to have a wooden left leg or be a gorilla – but only when someone utters the key phrase that you implant in their memory. When someone says the phrase it serves as the trigger. So then you bring them out of the trance and they act completely normally. But hours, even days later someone says the magic phrase and suddenly they start hobbling about like Long John Silver or beating their chest and searching their armpits for fleas. So perhaps when Baxendale woke up this Debby bird said the implanted words that would make him believe he was her husband.”

She thought for a moment then shook her head and said, “No, Charlie, no. It’s all fantasy. I still can’t believe it. No way. No, definitely no.”

Still shaking her head she handed back the newspaper clipping. “Enough of this, we’re wasting time. We need to get out and ask questions instead of sitting here. Facts, we need facts, you taught me that. Facts, Charlie, facts,” she repeated. It was her usual way of prodding me into action.

She was staring at me. “You still don’t look very happy. What’s bothering you?”

“What’s bothering me are all the leads, all the names and dates and places. He’s handed us all the things that can prove he’s been telling a load of lies. There’s something odd there and it’s giving me a bad feeling. I’m beginning to wonder if we’re being set up.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

I shook my head but said nothing. To explain why someone might be planning to harm us I would have to tell her about my past and I wasn’t going to do that.

We sat in silence, each thinking our own thoughts; mine were especially dark. Eventually Kate said, “Well, I repeat, the only way to make progress is to establish some hard facts. The obvious place to start is to check on Rankin, the very dead Rankin, the very seriously cremated Rankin.”

I grunted my agreement and began to divide the tasks between us. Kate would follow up all the paper traces people leave as they move through life: Rankin’s death certificate, the birth and marriage certificates of him, Felicity and his parents, the ownership of Rankin Motors, the record of the doctor who signed his death certificate, in fact everything she could think of.

“And find out everything you can about how his wife died in the hit and run. Dig out the reports, there might be something there. Find out everything about it,” I instructed.

“Just in case,” she added.

“Yes, just in case,” I said, as I always did in these circumstances, “just in case.”

She grinned her usual mocking grin but I knew she’d do it.

My role was to speak to the people who might have known Rankin. I took that area of the investigation because, except in special circumstances, Kate is much too attractive to be sent out to ask questions. Because she is so beautiful people remember her and that can cause problems as an investigation develops. I by contrast am so unmemorable that five minutes after I’ve left most people find it hard to describe me or even be sure they’ve seen me. I like it that way. There is another reason I do not want Kate poking around among the public: some inquiries can turn nasty and violent. I want to shelter her from that.

“There’s one other thing,” she said. “All that stuff about the cleaning woman finding the body and the doctor and the bloke from his firm identifying it. How did he find that out? Not from reading that press cutting. Either he’s lying or he’s been doing a lot more research than he’s telling us.”

I’d already wondered about that.

“Also there’s this: he says he’s been wandering around his old haunts. So if he has, how come nobody recognised him and said, ‘Oi you, Rankin, you’re supposed to be dead. I went to your cremation.’? It just brings us back to, ‘Why is this man lying to us,’ because he must be.”

“Well then, we’d better find out why. Go on, get ferreting, dig, dig, dig,” I told her.

“Yes, O Master, at once.” She was laughing as she left my office and I thought she gave an extra wriggle of her bottom, just to tease me.

I was pretty sure that once we started looking we’d find big holes in Baxendale’s fantastic story. I was wrong.