Baildon Moor - Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Baildon Moor, October 1993

 

The drive to Buttershaw and back took nearly an hour despite the Sunday traffic – guilt made me drive under the speed limit all the way. Marie lived on a wretched estate: ranks of blocky grey houses surrounded a square of muddy turf that mocked the traditional English village green. A slashed, sprouting mattress and the remains of a burned-out car lay in the centre of the grass and feral dogs roamed in a loose pack.  A teenage girl pushed a pram across the road.

‘Drop us off here, will yer? Dad’ll give me another hiding if he sees me come home in this, he’ll think I’ve been wi’ a bloke all night.’

I did as I was told.

 

Back at the farmhouse, Sullivan was sitting in the kitchen, looking uncharacteristically worried and smoking a joint. Billy was nowhere to be seen.

‘What’s up?’

‘We had a visitor whilst you were out. More to the point, Rudy did.’

‘Oh?’

Sullivan took a drag of the joint and passed it to me and I followed suit; my nerves were jangling with panic again.

‘Just after you left a guy came to the door, he was looking for Rudy. I told him Rudy’s not around, that he’d gone out and I didn’t know when he’ll be back. He ummed and ahhed for a bit, like he didn’t know what to do and I finally asked what he wanted.

‘Was he police?’

‘That’s what I thought. That someone had seen us take Rudy to the mine, got your registration number and called the cops. But no, thank Christ, he wasn’t police. Apparently this guy had an appointment to buy fifty trips from Rudy and he wasn’t best pleased when I sent him away with no gear.’

‘Fucking hell….Fifty tabs? That’s pretty major league.’

 ‘I know. I want to take a look in his room, see what we’re dealing with here. Maybe I’ve misunderstood something.’

I thought that was very unlikely.

‘First of all, what about the wallet and glasses? I’ve still got them in my bag.’

‘Give them here a minute.’

I fished out the items from my bag, still wrapped in a tea towel.

Sullivan looks around the kitchen, searching for something.

‘What do you need?’

‘Rubber gloves, so we don’t leave prints.’

There was a box of latex gloves in the Wreck’s glove compartment; I‘d been meaning to take them to the studio for the past couple of days but had kept forgetting. I went to the car and came back with the box; Sullivan took a pair and struggled to get his hands inside.

Gloves on, he opened Rudy’s wallet and removed its contents. It held the ephemera of a student’s life: a tightly folded and pristine driving licence, a university library card, NUS membership, a Midland Bank cash card and fifteen pounds in notes. He placed the money to one side.

‘What shall we do with this?’ I ask, gesturing at the various cards and the glasses. ‘Burn them in the Aga, or…?’

Sullivan replaced the cards back into the wallet and folded it up.

‘No, I don’t think so; why would a missing man burn his wallet before he disappeared? We’ll put them in his bedroom; make it look like he just went out.’

‘But the glasses? Would Rudy have gone out without them too?’

‘These are broken, right? Maybe he had a spare pair that he used, and he left these behind and was going to get them repaired.’

He pocketed the fifteen pounds cash and picked up the glasses and wallet.

Sullivan had thought of everything. I felt a flicker of hope: as long as he was here everything would be alright.

 

I took a pair of gloves and we went upstairs.

‘Where is Billy?’

‘I sent him to bed,’ said Sullivan. ‘He was about to collapse completely so I gave him a glass of whiskey and put him to bed like when we were kids.’

Rudy’s room was a mess: the desk, the floor, the chest of drawers were all covered in clothes and magazines; Judge Dredd stared at us from the wall. The curtains were closed and the murky room smelt of rotten things and socks. Sullivan pulled open a drawer at random from the white melamine chest and poked around. He closed it, opened another and put Rudy’s belongings inside.

‘Where do you reckon he hides his stash?’ I asked.

‘Try under the bed, or in the wardrobe.’

Under the bed I found a pile of dust an inch thick, some well-used porn magazines and some screwed-up, soiled tissues. I yelped and jerked away, despite the fact I was wearing gloves.

‘What’s up?’ said Sullivan.

‘I think I’ve found his porn stash.’ Sullivan sniggered as I got up and opened the wardrobe.

There were a pair of jeans and a couple of shirts on hangers but I was more interested in the old fashioned leather attaché case that was leaning against the back of the wardrobe.

‘Does that look like it?’

‘Could be.’

I laid the case on the floor, popped the catches and lifted the top. The smell of weed was overpowering.

‘Jesus Christ!’ whistled Sullivan.

The case was tightly packed: two nine-ounce bars of hash were wrapped in cellophane and cling film - I pressed a thumbnail into one; it was sticky and pliant and excellent quality, none of your cheap grey henna-cut stuff. A plastic ziplock bag held several sheets of blotting paper printed with dozens of facsimiles of Mickey Mouse’s smiling face. Another bag held about thirty pale green pills with embossed logos: I decided those were probably Es. A small blue velvet box contained an ornate set of brass scales and weights.

There was something solid and bulky in a yellow drawstring bag. I picked it up and passed it to Sullivan; he undid it and pulled out a wad of banknotes.

‘Oh my God.’

He took handful after handful of notes out of the bag and put them on the floor - about a third of the notes were still wrapped in paper bands but the others had been used. We quickly sorted the notes into piles and realised that there was over twenty thousand pounds. There was something unsettling about that amount of money – over two years’ wages, all in cash.

‘Fucking hell.’

‘These can be traced,’ I said, indicating the banded notes. ‘Surely they’ve been robbed from somewhere? Why else would you have notes still in their wrappers?’

Sullivan ignored me and looked at the last item in the case .

‘What’s that?’

It was about ten inches long, an irregular shape and covered in a thick piece of cloth. I unwrapped it to find a handgun: oiled, maintained and loaded with six bullets in the chamber.

‘Oh Jesus, Sullivan, I can’t cope with this.’ I put the gun down and felt as if I was sinking further and further into a nightmare; with every step things were getting more unreal.

‘Can’t deal with what?’ says Billy from the bedroom door.

 ‘I thought you were in bed,’ said Sullivan.

Billy shrugged. ‘Couldn’t sleep. I heard you in here and thought there must be something going on.’

I closed the lid of the attaché case, hiding the gun and the drugs, but it only served to draw Billy’s attention to what was on the floor in front of us.

‘What’s that?’ He pointed at the money.

‘Sit down,’ said Sullivan. ‘It’s a long story.’

 

We filled Billy in on everything – Rudy’s visitor, the contents of his suitcase. His eyes grew wider and wider as we tell him what has happened.

‘I didn’t have a clue….he was a bit odd, always going out an’ that and I never knew when he’d come back, he didn’t like me asking….and the gun too… Bloody hell….’ He paused. ‘What are we going to about this?’ He gestured at the pile of bank notes.

‘We should leave it,’ said Sullivan.

‘Agreed. I know it’s tempting but those new notes are traceable, we’d get caught soon as we tried to pass them on.’

‘Do you reckon he robbed a bank?’ said Billy, wide-eyed.

‘Him or someone he knows,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t really matter. All I know is that I want to get out of this place as soon as possible.’

 ‘What if we take the used notes and leave the new ones behind? Used ones won’t be traceable,’ said Billy.

‘Not unless they’re fakes, no. Then we’re in the shit.’

‘Didn’t think of that.’

Sullivan gave me back the notes. I replaced everything as we found it, stashed the suitcase back in Rudy’s wardrobe and went downstairs.

I burned the gloves in the Aga and waited until they were nothing but sticky grey ash.