weren’t a fat cat, more like Robin Hood in an old suit from C amp; A. All the same, she kept pressing me to make something happen. That was how she came to cut her wrist.”
Harry leaned forward. “Tell me.”
“I’d arranged to meet her, we’d booked a room at the North Atlantic. She was just getting into the bath. She’d already sliced through one wrist, there was blood all over the carpet.” He half-closed his eyes. “Fortunately, there wasn’t much damage done. I got her to a doctor who was able to stitch her up without asking too many difficult questions. She spun some cock-and-bull story to Coghlan, although she said he was so bound up in his own affairs that he hardly noticed. She thought he had another woman. And she said she’d tried to kill herself because she couldn’t see us ever getting together. Said she was depressed and couldn’t carry on. She was trying to push me into a corner, force me to leave my wife. Oh, yes, I understood how her mind worked. But I didn’t intend to lose her.”
“No?” Harry didn’t bother to hide his disbelief.
“No. Whatever you may think, Mr. Devlin, we cared deeply for each other. And in any case, we were overtaken by events.”
“She announced her pregnancy?”
“Yes. At first, I wondered whether I should believe her. She might have been making it up, I wouldn’t have put it past her. But she showed me the confirmation from the testing centre. Admitted she’d been careless, hadn’t taken proper precautions. So, you see, I had to make up my mind and choose.”
“And?”
“And I chose Elizabeth,” said Gallimore. “She was wild, unreliable, at times untruthful — I don’t have to tell you that. But she was everything a woman should be. God forgive me, I had to have her. Somehow I broke the news to my wife. It’s the worst task I’ve ever had to undertake. If I hadn’t loved Elizabeth so much, I could never have hardened my heart to resist the tears, the pleading in her voice.” A remote look, another excerpt from his seductive repertoire, came over the tanned, blemish-free face. “You may think you loved your wife, Mr. Devlin, but I–I worshipped her.”
What chilled Harry most was the memory of how heavily Liz had fallen for this man, with his soap opera rhetoric and over-rehearsed mannerisms. He skewered Gallimore with his gaze. “Did you know she was being followed?”
“You heard about that? Yes, she told me. I found it hard to understand. God forgive me, to begin with I thought she might have invented it, perhaps she hadn’t believed me when I said we would soon be together and she would be free of Coghlan. She told me he’d put one of his men on to her, she was sure that he’d realised she was seeing someone else and was determined to get the proof. I tried to reassure her. If he had a new girlfriend of his own, why would he bother? It didn’t make sense to me. Again I couldn’t be sure she was telling the truth. But I knew she was afraid of him, said how ruthless he could be if someone got in his way.”
A security guard in East London had discovered that to his cost, thought Harry. “Did she recognise the man who followed her?” he asked.
“No. He wasn’t one of Coghlan’s usual hangers-on, she said. Eventually she caught the man off guard and came close enough to see that he’d been in a fight recently. His cheek had been badly scratched. When I learned about that, I knew who the man was.”
Gripping the Mauser tightly, Harry said, “Go on.”
Gallimore waved at their surroundings. The happy faces of the artistes in the photographs beamed back at him. “One of the regular punters here. He was always hanging around backstage as well, though I’d noticed he took care to shift whenever I came anywhere near. A hard man. People called him Joe. I never heard his second name.”
“Rourke.”
“Is that it?”
“So what did you do?”
The reply was a non-commital movement of the shoulders. Gallimore was beginning to relax. Perhaps he had decided that Harry would never use the gun. “I told her not to worry. I didn’t believe anything would come of it. It isn’t unknown for men to follow attractive women around. Perhaps he had a thing for her, I didn’t know. She thought he’d been sent by Mick Coghlan to spy on her, but I couldn’t see that. What would have been the point? Coghlan wasn’t short of female company by all accounts. I said she was working herself into a lather over nothing.”
“What happened after that?”
“I had to go to Birmingham. We were negotiating a fresh loan from the brewery, re-financing this place. I had a couple of long meetings. All Wednesday and most of Thursday I was hammering out the deal. I promised Elizabeth that when I got back, I would sort everything out. We’d soon be together. She was panicking, Coghlan was down in London, also on some kind of business, but she didn’t dare go back to their house. She was convinced he was going to harm her. God forgive me, I thought she was being childish.”
“When were you due back in Liverpool?”
“She said she’d meet me at Lime Street. If the train was on time, we would have an hour or so together before I had to be back here. I’d booked a room for us at a place up in Mount Pleasant.”
“Train?” asked Harry. “Why not drive? It isn’t far.”
“I’m banned from driving,” said Gallimore. “One of the penalties of being in this trade, I suppose. They picked me up on the M62 last Easter, I was twice over the limit, got a twelve months’ ban. My lawyer’s Pike, you must know him, he said I got off lightly.”
“So did you meet her at the station?”
“Of course not. The train was on time for once, but she wasn’t there. I waited for twenty minutes until it was obvious that she wasn’t going to show. I couldn’t understand it. I called the hotel, but they hadn’t seen her or taken a message. So I came back here.”
Harry recalled the man’s abstracted manner on the night of Liz’s murder. His story explained that, but it was still worth digging deeper.
“Carry on.”
Still looking at the gun, Gallimore said, “There’s nothing much more I can add. Until I read the papers the following day, I had no idea about what had happened. I couldn’t believe it. She was so alive, so…”
“You weren’t sufficiently shocked to volunteer a statement to the police,” interrupted Harry. “Why not?”
“What could I say? I was in a difficult position, I…”
The self-justifications went on for over a minute. Harry barely listened. Beneath the glossy looks and fluent line in chat was jelly. But might Gallimore yet prove to be a murderer? Now was the moment to find out.
Without warning, Harry raised the pistol and pointed it at Gallimore’s forehead.
“Are you quite sure you don’t know Joe Rourke, Tony? Wasn’t he the man you hired to kill my wife? Didn’t the pressure get too much for you?” He watched the dark eyes glaze over as Gallimore stared in mixed horror and fascination at the Mauser. “Liz pestered you, didn’t she? You had a nice set-up, it suited you to have a mistress, but you weren’t so keen on a change of wife and all that maintenance pay. Liz had threatened to kill herself, now she was expecting a kid. Where would it end? You had the idea of getting rid of her. What better idea than to pay a yobbo you’d met in the Ferry to do the necessary while you were nicely alibied, tucking into a sandwich on British Rail? I’m sure the train times will stand up, the story tripped so easily off your tongue. You’ve obviously been practising just in case the police got a whiff of your identity. But I’m not fooled, Tony.”
Gallimore’s hands shook as if he had Parkinson’s disease. The temperature in the room seemed to have dropped below zero as Harry slowly rolled out the final question.
“How much did you pay Rourke?”
It was a credible theory, soundly reasoned. Harry had been building up towards it for several days now. So many of the pieces fitted if Joe Rourke was a hired killer, Tony Gallimore his paymaster. The motive was there, so too plenty of circumstantial evidence. Rourke’s sudden access to liquid cash, the photograph to help him identify the victim, the clumsy attempts to keep Liz under surveillance whilst waiting for the right moment to strike. And afterwards, Rourke’s conversation in the club with Froggy, who must have stumbled onto the truth on the very night of the murder, a conversation which Marilyn had interrupted in front of Harry’s own eyes.
But even as he watched the man his wife had loved squirm at the sight of the gun poised to blow his good looks away for ever, Harry became conscious of an agonising wrench inside his stomach, more acute than ever
