The Inspector Walter Darriteau Murder Mysteries - Books 1-4 by David Carter (best finance books of all time .txt) 📕

‘Too late now!’

‘They are overworked and underpaid and are snowed under with crazy people coming in and demanding all sorts. It’s not excusable, but it is understandable, that occasionally they may send the wrong people away.’

‘Like me, you mean?’

‘Yes. Maybe. Like you.’

‘So you concede I might have a case?’

‘I’d like to look into it further.’

‘Too late, mate. Far too late!’

‘Tell me something about the Chester Mollesters thing, and the bad spelling.’

‘Not much to tell. A futile attempt to mislead, I regretted it afterwards.’

The landline telephone in the hall rang.

They both jumped.

A phone ringing in the small hours is far louder than during the day. Walter glanced at the clock. Sam at his wrist. Five to one.

‘Who the hell’s that?’ said Sam. ‘Who’d be ringing at this time of night?’

‘No idea, probably a wrong number.’

The phone rang for ages, maybe thirty, forty, double rings.

Sam didn’t answer, just cursed it. It still rang.

‘Whoever it is, they’re a persistent bastard!’

The ringing stopped.

Sam sighed. He looked nervous.

Walter did too. He wanted to ask another probing question, preferably one that might produce a thirty-minute answer. For a moment his mind went blank. He really needed a pee.

The mobile atop the television set began leaking sound. Karen had programmed it to chime that awful seven-note ringtone, the one that sounded like water splashing off the roof. God knows how she did it. He didn’t care, didn’t like it either. Each note lower than the last, splash, splash, splash, splash, splash, splash, splash, stop. Then the same seven splashes again and stop. Seven. And again. Seven and again.

Sam jumped from the chair. Went to the phone. Picked it up. Saw who was calling. Grinned.

‘It’s time, Walter, it’s time.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Who do you think?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘The lucky bitch.’

‘Karen?’

‘Yeah! The very same. You’re only in this position because of her; you know that, don’t you? If you hadn’t saved her, I’d have vanished. Mission accomplished. I’d have cleared off to Barcelona. Happy memories there, you understand. I would have enjoyed a second honeymoon, all alone, yet not alone at all. Sometimes dressed as a lonely lady, a striking woman in mourning, a woman with admirers. Wealthy old businessmen would have paid court to me, felt sorry for me, sent me flowers, dinner invitations. Who knows, I might even have let them buy me jewellery... I might even have let them live. You would never have seen or heard from me again, except you couldn’t stop interfering, in your size ten clodhoppers. Big mistake, Walter. Fatal mistake.’

Walter fired off another question, ‘Why did you leave it so long afterwards, before you began killing people?’ He was desperate to keep Sam talking, encouraged in knowing that Karen was awake, and thinking.

‘I’d been considering it for ages, planning it, wondering how I might go about it. I guess I hoped you might see sense and reopen your enquiries. But you didn’t, and there was no sign you would. And then that guy came along on the highway. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. There he was, nodding at me, and there was my foot hovering above the accelerator; and something in my head was shouting: Don’t stop! Do it! Do it now! And I did, and I don’t regret it, not for a moment.’

‘He was an innocent family man.’

‘Tough shit!’

‘A decent person, don’t you have any regrets?’

‘Desi was a decent person! Devoted to searching for cures to save mankind, and look what happened to her!’

Sam stood up and went to the sports bag, took out a large pair of gleaming scissors, held them in the air, practiced a few snips. ‘I still hoped you might reopen Desi’s case, that justice would prevail, that you might see sense, get it right for once, but no...’ and his voice trailed away.

He was suddenly busy, scissors in hand, cutting into Walter’s right shirt cuff, clean through, up to the wrist, careful not to snip the plastic tie, and then all the way up to the shoulder, cutting off the raggy bits, exposing Walter’s flabby arm, his wrist still firmly fixed to the arm of the chair.

‘I’ll reopen the case, you’ll get your justice; we’ll open the whole damned can of worms.’

‘Too little, too late, Wally! Time’s up. Here we go.’

‘And the different coloured eyes?’ he said, desperate to say anything to prolong the conversation.

‘You know the answer to that. Contact lenses, of course, you can have any colour you like. There’s a place in Manchester that sells nothing but weirdly coloured lenses, fab it is. We built up quite a collection, red, yellow, black, gold, purple, you can have any colour eyes you want.’

Walter sniffed and said, ‘I know someone who’d adore purple eyes.’

‘Do you? Who?’

‘You don’t know her.’

‘Who, Walter? Who?’

‘Cresta.’

‘Who’s Cresta?’

‘The profiler on the case.’

‘Ah yes, Cresta Parsnip, or whatever she’s called, I read about her in the Sunday supplements. American, isn’t she?’

‘Raddish, her name’s Raddish. She’s not American, just studied there. Crazy about the colour purple.’

‘Yeah, well, I considered doing her, taking her down. But your sweet chick was a more enticing target. Are you plugging that girl, Walter?’

‘No, course not. I’m old enough to be her father.’

‘Doesn’t stop a lot of men, Walter, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

Walter shook his head and said, ‘Which killing gave you the most satisfaction?’

‘Oh, that’s easy.’

‘Which one?’

‘The Right Reverend, of course, the railway killing. That was so sweet, so poetic. I thought of Desi every second, as he was crunched under the wheels. It seemed somehow appropriate that there he was, a man of God, meeting his maker in an identical fashion. God could chew on that, part payment for my Desi’s loss. Had to be that one, didn’t it?’

‘I still don’t understand why Desiree was killed.’

‘She was killed, Walter, because she was stealing information, you moron! That’s how they saw it; they couldn’t prove it; so they eradicated the problem. Simple as that. One day there’s a big difficulty, the next day there isn’t. You are