Black Horn-Creasy 4 Read online

  Chapter 03

  Father Manuel Zerafa glanced at the girl at his left. She was in her mid-teens, but already very much a woman. Long straight sun-bleached hair, a golden face with high cheekbones, a straight nose and a wide full mouth. She glanced back at him demurely. Had she winked? Or was he mistaken? No, he was sure she had winked, just in that split second that he had first glanced at her. She had winked at Michael, sitting opposite her. That wink meant she held the ace of trumps and she was signalling such to her partner. The priest looked across the table at Creasy who was his partner.

  "She has the ace," he said.

  "Maybe," Creasy answered thoughtfully. "But she could be bluffing." Almost imperceptibly, the big scarred man brushed at the left side of his chest, as if to scare away a fly. The priest picked up the signal. Creasy was telling him that he held the queen of trumps.

  They were playing a game of cards unique to the island of Gozo. It was called bixla and was much loved by the fishermen and farmers, who would play it for hours on end in the local bars during winter. The essence was to cheat by secretly signalling your partner what cards you held. With people who had played so many hours together and who watched each other like hawks, these signals became bluffs, double-bluffs and even triple-bluffs. The game was never played for money but with great humour and the slamming down of a card when a particular piece of chicanery had worked well.

  The priest looked at Michael, who gazed back innocently. A man in his twenties. Jet-black hair and sharp-featured. Tall and as slim to be almost thin, but with a frame like steel wire.

  "Maybe Michael has it," the priest said to Creasy.

  Michael laughed and showed two of his three cards to the priest. One was the jack of spades and the other the four of diamonds. His third card was laid flat on the table as if taunting the priest.

  Gruffly, Creasy said, "It's a sure bet that Juliet has it. Play your king."

  The priest played the king. Juliet dropped a nothing card. Creasy cursed and discarded his queen and Michael stood up and slammed down the ace with a cry of triumph.

  The priest pushed back his chair saying, "Liars! A young pair of liars." He pointed a stern finger at Michael and said, "Get a cool bottle of the white wine from the case I gave you for your birthday and bring it out to the patio with two glasses."

  Michael said, "Father, you gave me twelve bottles for my birthday four months ago. There are four left. Of the eight that have been drunk, you've had at least six."

  "Sounds right to me," said the priest, and walked out on the patio.

  Creasy looked after him through deep-set, heavy-lidded eyes. Eyes without emotion... but his ravaged face and body could not easily conceal the scars of anger and revenge. He rose and followed the priest, his menacing six-foot frame seeming to shadow him. He had a curious walk, the outsides of his feet making contact with the ground first.

  The old stone farmhouse stood on the highest part of Gozo, looking out over the island and across the sea to the small island of Comino and, beyond that, the large island of Malta. It was a view the priest never tired of. They sat down on canvas chairs beside the swimming-pool.

  Father Zerafa chuckled and remarked, "There is a saying on the island: 'Lead your life as you would play bixla, and the fruit will fall into your hands'." He gestured at the beautiful house and the view. "But I guess the fruit has already fallen into your hands."

  Creasy said, "Father, I disagree with the saying. To play bixla well, you have to cheat. To lead a good life, you have to be honest. To cheat at cards when it is expected and when there is no wager of any kind is just fine. But from what I've known and seen, if you cheat in life, it's not fruit that falls into your hands but a rock on your head."

  The priest sighed and said, "You should have been a priest... I shall use it for my sermon on Sunday."

  Michael came out carrying a tray with the wine in an ice-bucket and two glasses. He poured the wine ceremoniously and then left them. They drank for a while in silence; two good and old friends who did not require the bond of light conversation.

  Finally, the priest remarked, "These past few weeks I see an edge of boredom in your eyes."

  "You see too much, Father. But it's true, I get restless. But since Juliet's been going off to the clinic and the hospital and learning all that first aid and stuff, there's not been much to do. Next week, she's off to the States and to college. Michael and I are thinking of taking a trip to the Far East, to look up some of my old friends. We might even go into China, now that it's opened up." He glanced at the priest and said, "You know that in my life I have travelled so much, but when you travel with young people and show them the world, you see it again through fresh eyes. I guess we're ready to go"

  "When?" the priest asked.

  "Oh, in a couple of weeks. We'll stop off in Brussels first and see Blondie and Maxie and a few others, and then head East from there."

  They heard the phone ringing from inside the kitchen and Michael answering it. After a while, Michael came to the kitchen door and called out, "It's for you, Creasy... Jim Grainger from Denver."

  Creasy grunted in surprise and pushed himself on to his feet.

  He returned to his chair and the wine ten minutes later, his face thoughtful.

  "A change of plan," he said to the priest. "We leave tomorrow and we go West not East." He turned to Juliet, who was standing at the open door and said, "Michael and I are travelling to Denver with you tomorrow."

  Chapter 04

  Chinese funerals can be very elaborate affairs. Professional wailing women dressed in white mourning robes; the louder they can wail, the more they are paid. Houses, furniture, cars and money are made out of brightly coloured paper and then burned at the temple, so that they pass on to the other world with the deceased.

  Lucy Kwok Ling Fong did none of this. She simply had her father, mother and brother cremated. She put the ashes into a single urn and drove with them to an old building in Causeway Bay, where she paid several thousand dollars to have the urn placed on a shelf, together with thousands of others.

  As she left the building, a man approached her, a Caucasian. He had short blond hair, a red, round, perspiring face, and was dressed in a light blue safari suit. He introduced himself as Chief Inspector Colin Chapman. She recognised the name. He was the head of the Anti-Triad Department of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force. He had been away on leave at the time her family had been murdered.

  "I wonder if we could have a talk, Miss Kwok?" He had a broad Yorkshire accent, which somehow irritated her.

  "I think I've told everything I know to your assistant, Inspector Lau."

  "Yes, you've been very co-operative, but I would appreciate just a few minutes of your time." He gestured across the road at a tea house. She sighed and glanced at her watch.

  "Just a few minutes then," she said reluctantly.

  She ordered jasmine tea and he had a San Miguel beer.

  "I must first offer my condolences," he said. "It was a terrible tragedy for you."

  She took a sip of tea and looked at him. It was noisy in the tea shop. She glanced around the large room. Chapman was the only foreigner in the room and probably within a square mile. She felt her resentment rising and let it come out.

  "I find it very strange, Chief Inspector, that an Englishman should be the head of such a sensitive department. It would be rather like sending a German to Sicily to head the Anti-Mafia department there. Surely, it would be impossible for a foreigner to understand the minds of these people." She gestured around the room. "Even of these people here. Oh, I'm sure that you passed your Cantonese language examinations and speak it well enough to impress the bar-girls in Wanchai. How old are you, by the way?

  He appeared to take no offence. She noticed that his eyes were very dark brown.

  "I'll be thirty-five next week," he said, pulling a ball-pen from the breast pocket of his safari jacket. He reached for a napkin and pulled it towards him, and very quickly drew on it with the pen. She watched in puzzlement. He put the ball-pen back in his pocket, turned the napkin and pushed it across the table. She looked down at it. After five seconds, her eyes narrowed in deep concentration. Ten seconds later, she felt her skin prickling. She was looking at six Chinese characters drawn by an expert calligrapher. Her skin had prickled because she could not interpret the characters. Slowly she looked up at him. His brown eyes gazed back.

  To read a Chinese newspaper requires the knowledge of approximately seven hundred and fifty characters. A university graduate would be satisfied to know three thousand characters. Lucy Kwok Ling Fong was a graduate of the Hong Kong University and was proud of her knowledge of over four thousand characters. She could not read the six characters in front of her.

  "What do they mean?" she asked.

  "In which dialect?" he replied in his Yorkshire accent.

  She smiled slowly and answered, "Cantonese."

  In flawless Cantonese he told her: "'Not every stranger is completely stupid'."

  Her smile widened and she asked in the same dialect, "Is that Confucius?"

  He shook his head.

  "That's Colin Chapman." He switched to Shanghainese, which again was flawless. "Or would you prefer to talk in your mother dialect?"

  She lifted her head and laughed, and said in Mandarin, "Very clever, Chief Inspector, but surely you agree that somebody can be stupid in many languages. After all ... a parrot is just a parrot."

  For the first time, he smiled. He took a sip of beer and said in English, "That's very true, Miss Kwok, and I don't blame you for having doubts about a gweilo's capability to understand a Triad's mind, but I've had more than ten years' experience. The subject fascinates me and, without any false modesty, I would rate myself as one of the top three experts in the world.
"

  "Who are the other two?"

  "My assistant Inspector Lau, who interviewed you extensively, and a Professor Cheung Lam To at Taipei University."

  She was looking down again at the napkin. She tapped it with a long red fingernail.

  "How many?" she asked quietly.

  "About eighty thousand," he answered. "But of course, one never stops learning."

  She smiled again and said, "May I borrow your pen?"

  He passed it over. She wrote something along the bottom of the napkin and pushed it across. He looked down and read: "Dis girl vellee solly. She will talk to you."

  He smiled again and said, "Perhaps we can do it more privately in my office, this afternoon. I need at least two hours of your time."

  "You have it, Chief Inspector."

  Chapter 05

  The Doberman greeted him like an old friend, despite the fact that some years earlier Creasy had put her into an undignified sleep with an anaesthetic dart. She wagged her stumpy tail and licked his hand.

  Senator Grainger gave a firm handshake to Creasy and to Michael, then he kissed Juliet warmly on both cheeks and said, "Welcome. I hope you'll be happy here."

  She looked around the opulent hallway of the mansion and then at the plump Mexican maid, waiting to take her suitcase.

  "I'm sure I'll be happy," she said. "It's very kind of you to take me in."

  Five minutes later, they were seated next to the pool with long cold drinks in their hands. The Senator glanced at his watch.

  "Your flight was a bit delayed," he said, "and Gloria will be here quite soon, so I'll brief you right away." He took a sip of his drink, absent-mindedly patted the Doberman, and let his mind go back over the years.

  "Gloria Manners came from a poor background. Southern white farmers whose farm was too small and the family too big. She got a job as a waitress in a good restaurant here in Denver. That's where she met Harry, who was a regular there. He came from a good property-owning Colorado family, which objected strongly to him marrying someone as low down the totem pole as Gloria. He went ahead anyway, and his Pa cut him off without a cent. Starting with nothing, Harry went right on to build a huge fortune in real estate and oil rights speculation."

  "Sounds like quite a guy," Creasy commented.

  Grainger nodded. "He was a hell of a guy. We had big battles on some real estate deals. He was tough but he was honest. Anyway, he was killed in a car crash about three years ago. Gloria was crippled in that same accident. She's paralysed from the waist down and spends her life in a wheelchair."

  "What sort of woman is she?" Creasy asked.

  The Senator took another sip of his drink and answered, "I never got on well with her. To be honest, I always thought she was a bit of a bitch who got lucky. Since the loss of her husband and her paralysis, she's got worse. She has a mean streak in her... but she loved Harry... and he loved her ... so me and most of our friends put up with her, I guess, originally, for the sake of Harry, and now for his memory."

  "Age?" Creasy asked.

  "Early sixties, but looks a lot older."

  "Money?"

  The Senator thought for a moment and then answered, "At least a hundred million dollars. She worked with Harry in his business, and I can tell you that she's shrewd and tough. They only had the one child, Carole, who was a fine young woman. Not at all like her mother, although strangely, they got on very well together. Carole's body was flown back for burial in Denver. I went to the funeral. Gloria's face showed no expression. She just sat there in her wheelchair, as though she was carved from stone, but I guess she was hurting bad inside. She's determined to find the people who killed her daughter."

  Michael joined the conversation. "Jim, if you dislike this woman, why are you helping her?"

  Grainger glanced briefly at him and then looked back at Creasy.

  "Two reasons. Firstly, because Harry Manners was a friend of mine and Carole was his daughter as well; secondly, because I happen to be the Senior Senator for Colorado and Gloria is one of my constituents. It's my duty to help her."

  Creasy had the open file in front of him. It was all too brief. He flicked through the few pages while everyone looked on silently, then he said to Grainger, "I have some strong contacts in Zimbabwe. Even now, all these years after independence, and even though I spent some years fighting the present government as a mercenary." He studied Grainger and then asked, "What will the deal be, Jim?"

  "I guess, any deal you want," Grainger answered. "With her wealth and her desire for justice, she'll do anything to find out who killed her daughter."

  As he finished speaking, they heard the chimes of the doorbell. The Doberman growled softly in her throat. Two minutes later, Gloria Manners was being wheeled across the patio by a middle-aged nurse in a starched white uniform. Creasy noted that Mrs Manners' face was etched with many furrows and lines, distorting what had once been a face of immense beauty. Her grey hair and thin face also depicted her tragedy. Despite the heat of this early summer day, she wore a heavy black crocheted blanket around her now useless legs.

  Her eyes settled immediately on Creasy and she studied his face in silence. Creasy gazed back at her, looking directly into her bitter blue eyes. She glanced at Michael and Juliet and finally turned to Grainger and said, "At least he looks the part." She lifted her head and said to the nurse. "Run along, Ruby, and come back in exactly half an hour."

  The nurse turned and went back inside the house.

  Grainger leaned forward and asked, "Would you like a cool drink, Gloria?"

  She shook her head impatiently. "Thank you, no." She was looking again at Creasy. She said in her Southern drawl. "I understand you're from Alabama?"

  "A long ways back, ma"am."

  "Can you help me?" she asked.

  "I can try."

  "What will it cost?"

  Grainger sighed and started to say something. Creasy held up his hand.

  "I have no idea," Creasy answered. "It will cost you about fifty thousand Swiss francs as expenses for myself and Michael to go down to Zimbabwe and look around. If, after a couple of weeks, I think there's no chance, I'll tell you that and we'll go on home."

  She moved her gaze to Grainger.

  "A few days ago, I talked to a couple of guys that Harry's brother-in-law sent me. They asked for three hundred thousand dollars as an upfront retainer... your guy comes cheap."

  The Senator smiled slightly.

  Creasy said, "Ma'am, I don't take money for nothing." He tapped the folder in front of him. "The Zimbabwe police came up with a dead-end and they had a lot of pressure from the American Ambassador down there. I guess there's only a slim chance of finding anything out."

  "And if you do?" she asked.

  "Then I'll start charging. I might have to bring some other guys into it. I might have to pay some folding money to get information."

  Now the Senator interjected. "I have personal proof of Creasy's honesty, Gloria."

  Creasy was still looking at the woman. He went on, "If I find out who did it, without doubt, I'll charge you half a million Swiss francs."

  "Still cheap," she said. "What if you find out who did it and they have political or other kinds of protection? Understand, Mr Creasy, I want justice." She spoke the last words quietly but with great intensity.

  He leaned forward and also spoke quietly and again tapped the file. "Ma'am, my intuition is that whoever killed your daughter, did so because she happened to be with that guy Cliff Coppen. I guess he was their target and, for them, her death was incidental."

  "In a way, that makes it worse."

  "I agree. If I find them and they have such protection that they cannot be brought to trial, I'll kill them myself. That will cost you a further million francs."

  There was a silence around the pool and around the garden. For the first time, her ravaged face showed slight animation. She glanced down at the gold watch on her bony wrist, and then said to Grainger, "Jim, if you're serving lunch, I'd like to stay."

  They had cold meats and salad, together with an ice-cold bottle of Frascati, served to them at the pool by the Mexican maid. Creasy told Mrs Manners that he would need a full personal history of Carole and plenty of photographs. She assured him that he would have everything he needed later that afternoon, and asked when he would leave for Africa.