Dead Trouble by Margaret Duffy

Author:Margaret Duffy [Duffy, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wyndham Books
Published: 2024-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

‘It seems to me,’ Tim Shandy said, one hand making what I can only describe as a graceful guillotine movement, ‘that it’s time I acquainted myself with Max Norton.’

We had finished dinner and were sitting in the hotel lounge drinking coffee, having postponed going to Hinton Littlemoor until the following morning. Patrick was refusing point-blank to allow me to take an active part in the investigation for at least another day, threatening even longer, until my headache had quite gone without the use of painkillers. My plea that the latter would occur far more readily when I was not bored to tears hanging around doing nothing had fallen on deaf ears. My only entertainment then, and I had to admit that my interest was waning rapidly, was to watch these two men ‒ friends and from good backgrounds, well-educated, expensively trained in their slightly different fields ‒ trying in decreasingly polite fashion to find common ground and forge a pattern that would enable them to work together as part of a close-knit team.

And, no, because D12 demanded something different, something other than putting the world to rights down at the pub, it wasn’t going to work.

That something different, regrettably, was that whatever made Patrick so good at his job, the something he possessed that would have turned him, with only a slight variance in his mental make-up, into a first-class criminal, was lacking in Shandy. In short, Shandy was too much of a gentleman. Career-wise he functioned as though on the cricket field. I knew he recognised the anarchic trait in Patrick and that it worried him. He still thought that he needed to keep his junior-ranking officer in check and it was this failure to recognise that a certain flair at handling life, not to mention acting ability, not only tended to keep one alive in highly dangerous situations but got the job done.

Nothing could be achieved until Patrick persuaded Shandy that the reverse would have to happen and that Tim himself would have to develop a different mind-set. That would only happen when they both ran out of patience, politeness was swept aside and they faced one another without any kind of veneer. There would be a big bust-up and I was not sure if I could predict the outcome.

‘Well, yes,’ Patrick said. ‘We don’t have to refrain from treading on Max’s toes just because of Carrick. What have you in mind?’

‘Confront him with the photo you made off with.’ This had been the cause of a little contention between them. ‘Ask who the other character in the picture is. Trace him. Who knows, Ingrid’s hunch about a possible connection between the big man, the knife and this crew-member might pay off.’

‘Are we trying to track down John Norton’s killer though? Or do you think the priority ought to be finding out if Max is still supplying weapons to terrorists? Or what was behind the attack on Ingrid?’

Shandy took a sip of coffee. ‘The two latter by all means.

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