Pike's Pyramid. Michael Tatlow
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Название: Pike's Pyramid
Автор: Michael Tatlow
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Триллеры
isbn: 9780992590116
isbn:
Sussoms tapped his right nostril. ‘I’ve got a tight lip,’ he said. ‘There are more things about this criminality than I’ve talked about. Things that would scream off the front pages and put a lot of unlikely people in jail. Drugs, weapons, bombs. It’s the horror of the world.’
Sussoms left about 9pm for his suite to make some phone calls and note down more evidence. He muttered, ‘You’ll have it all in the morning, Blarney. My completed papers’. He swaggered to the elevators like a prize fighter charging to the ring.
Pike remained in the lounge, drinking low alcohol Pilsen ale and writing postcards, so Alex could get needed sleep in their room upstairs. He called the correspondence gloat cards. The standard Argo stuff made him feel guilty. The cards would go to his and Alex’s marketing team home in Stanley, in Australia’s southern island state of Tasmania. On them were rapturous lies, mostly about Argo’s presence in the Czech Republic.
After an hour and a half he had drunk only three glasses of ale. The demander in his head, gullet and gut, who Pike had named Ned, craved more. Pike reckoned he was not a real alcoholic. He was just a bit dependent on it, like cigarettes. He did not wake in the morning with Ned insisting on more grog. More likely, he woke with sore regret over last night’s intake. He could stop any time now, couldn’t he? Grog had ruined his first marriage. It was not going to harm this one.
He and Alex had taken a room in the hotel for the night after an afternoon of Argo meetings, with more tomorrow, rather than take a taxi across the Vitava River and a train on the long trip to their modest rented apartment in suburban Palmovka. Staying at the hotel all the time would have shattered their budget.
Two hours after Jack Summons left the lounge, a barman told an inquiring man in a shabby suit that the man sitting alone over there had been drinking with the American.
The short and rotund man strolled from the bar and introduced himself as Captain Schmidt. In remarkably good English he said, ‘Please accompany me to the suite of your friend, Mr Sussoms’.
‘Sure. But why?’
The detective said nothing.
Slipping his postcards in the mail box by the elevators on the way, Pike had a rush of anxiety. What’s wrong with Jack? A robbery?
Schmidt opened the door to Sussoms’ suite and waved him inside. To be confronted by a bloody corpse on the floor. Old Jack’s mouth was open as if in a roar of protest. A blue eye stared accusingly above his slashed throat. Where the other had been was a socket of gore.
Jack was on his back, arms stretched as if crucified. He wore only a Cartier watch and green socks. A jelly of scarlet had set obscenely under grey hair on a carpet of golden silk. More blood stained a white towel draped over the corpse’s waist.
CHAPTER 2
Murder! Pike was stunned with horror. The insensitivity of two suits casually standing there added anger. One was a big barrel chest of a man. A mop of red hair, greying around the ears, made him look like a Scots warrior. Gimlet blue eyes studied Pike from a florid face. The redhead was nearly as tall and heavy as muscled 95 kilo Pike.
‘This is Inspector Gelber,’ Schmidt announced.
Schmidt motioned to his other colleague. He was wiry and blond, a foot shorter than Pike. He looked no more than twenty, and blank. The collar of a white shirt bit into his neck.
Schmidt blurted an introduction to his junior. Officer Fuckoff? Pike coughed to stop a laugh. Fuckoff? Bloody surely not! The young detective blanched. It wasn’t the first time that name had thrown a foreigner, Pike decided.
Schmidt read his intrigue. ‘The name does not do well in English,’ he said unhelpfully. ‘Mr Pike, we think you were the last to see the deceased.’
‘At least the second last, Captain,’ he retorted, reeling at the horror at his feet. Who the hell would do that to Jack? He wondered what other injuries were hidden under the towel.
‘You knew him well?’
‘Jack Sussoms was my friend and colleague. As you seem to know, I was with him a couple of hours ago.’
Robbery was not the likely motive, Schmidt said. The deceased still wore his valuable watch. His billfold on the floor contained credit cards.
‘Jack was an American citizen, a millionaire,’ Pike interrupted. ‘Have you contacted the American embassy?’ His mind was a windmill in a gale.
‘In good time, sir. We have Mr Sussoms’ passport.’
‘He was an Argo Double Platinum, if you know what that is,’ Pike ventured, looking down painfully again at the cadaver.
‘He’s… Sorry, he was a pioneer in our Argo marketing network. That’s the American-based multi-level marketing empire. You must have read about it.’
He looked again at dead Jack’s accusing eye, the gaping mouth. A rising stench galled his nostrils. Pike took a deep breath and tried to pull himself together as the policemen studied him. Alex will be devastated!
‘I’ve been in this room often with Jack,’ he continued. ‘My wife, too. He had a lot of money in his wallet tonight. In US notes, German marks and a wad of Czech korunas. He didn’t trust hotel security safes. He keeps… kept more cash between the spare towels in the bathroom cabinet.’
That grabbed their attention. ‘His billfold is empty of money, Mr Pike,’ fat Captain Schmidt intoned. Fuckoff strode to the bathroom. He returned shaking his head and said something in Czech.
‘No money, but a fresh towel is on the floor,’ Schmidt translated. ‘We removed another from the rack for decency, to cover ah, mutilations.’
Pike wondered to himself, would these cops nick the cash? Inspector Gelber glared at him, seemingly reading his mind. Pike felt his scar flush. Ragged and pink on his dark skin, it was, with eighteen rough stitch marks. The scar curved from the corner of his right eye like the blade of a scimitar. From mid-arc, near the ear lobe, it curled to a florid splash on his chin. The scar gave Pike a knocked-about guise that made some men wary, some women randy and children loudly inquisitive. Hundreds of people had observed that it was shaped like a G.
‘G for grog,’ his former mother-in-law had declared. After finding out once about Pike thrashing a couple of thugs bullying an old bloke, she had branded him a time bomb.
‘That scar’s a barometer,’ she had added. ‘Pink for booze. Red, beware.’
‘Do we have to stand here?’ Pike testily asked the police.
The four of them moved stiffly to the bedroom. ‘You’ve got the research notes he was writing?’ he asked. ‘They’re in green ink on a lined, quarto pad. He’s made some serious allegations about criminality in Argo. Jack left me tonight to come here and write some more about it.’
‘No СКАЧАТЬ