Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [reading in the dark TXT] 📗

He waved my comment aside. “You don’t need his permission to stay in the country. And if you’re acting for me, you can stay as long as you like.”

“I appreciate the offer. But we do need to get back to work. Unfortunately, we answer to our chief…”

He smiled and there was a wicked edge to it that said he was used to getting what he wanted, and he liked it that way.

“Inspector John Newman, of the 43rd Precinct, isn’t it?” He laughed at my expression. “Don’t worry, Stone, all I ask is that you hear me out, and Fi, my wife.” The laughter drained from his face. “I’m very much afraid Green is galloping off on the wrong track on this thing.” He turned his eyes on Dehan and I noticed for the first time how blue they were, and how intense his stare was. “I want my daughter avenged, Dehan. You understand that, don’t you? She was everything to us. We’re a close family. Not given to public exhibitions, wailing and thrashing. But we were close. Are close. And this killer, whoever he is, has taken my daughter from me. I want him caught. And I don’t trust Green to do the job.”

“OK.” I sighed. “So what didn’t you tell us at your office this morning?”

He turned his eyes on me and for a moment, his face reminded me of a hawk, or an eagle. “I am conservative, right wing. I don’t give a damn what your politics are. That’s your business. But I am right wing. I believe, passionately, in democracy, small government and our ancient liberties. They are the same as your ancient liberties. You inherited them from us.” He paused, staring into his glass. “I despise Fascism, Socialism, Communism and Islam: any doctrine that robs an individual of his freedom. I may seem to be going ’round the houses.” He raised his eyes to look at me under his brows. “But these are facts you need to know and understand.”

He sipped his whiskey and seemed to organize his next thoughts while he savored it.

“I don’t hate these ideologies in an arbitrary fashion. I hate them because I have studied them in depth and I believe them to be evil and inhuman. I am nominally an Anglican, a Protestant, but I am probably an atheist and don’t actually give a damn about religion. I am not pro-Jewish.” He turned to gaze at Dehan. “I am pro-Israel, because I believe that in a world that is going steadily insane, Israel is a small bastion of sanity and civilization. I am not a racist. I despise German Nazism as much as I despise Arab Islam. There’s bugger all to tell between them, frankly. Is all that clear?”

“Abundantly.”

He looked at Dehan. She had her eyebrows raised, but she nodded.

He asked, “Can you live with it?”

She said, “It depends what you mean by ‘live’. What do you want us to do with it, beside understand it?”

“Nothing. Just understand it. Understand that and you start to understand Katie. Katie was the same. She and I had very much the same views. She was sound, immensely patriotic, not nationalistic in the European sense. Damned Europeans never could get anything right. It has nothing to do with being racially superior or any of that bloody nonsense. She just believed in England, and loved it.

“Like me, she deplored what the Communists and the Socialists have done to it, she deplored what the European Union has done to it, and she deplored the way one damned government after another has sold our country to Islam in exchange for oil. She was very outspoken, courageous, and I was very proud of her for that.”

I was listening hard, trying to sift through his barely controlled passions to find what he was actually driving at. I said, “Are you saying that you think she was killed because of her views?"

He shook his head. “Not directly.”

“You’ll have to explain that.”

He stood and walked to the ancient, leaded window and stood looking out at the lawns and rosebushes outside. “There are people, on both sides of the House, socialists and conservatives, who will go to any lengths to bow to pressure from Islamic countries, who accommodate any number of immigrants and refugees, build any number of mosques and justify any number of atrocities, simply because they control most of the world’s oil reserves.” He paused and sipped his drink. “You’ve had scandals in your own country, as we have here, where political figures have been caught making arms deals in which British or American weapons have ended up in the hands of ISIS or the Taliban or Al Qaeda.”

He turned to face us. “But what Katie was worried about went a lot further. What had Katie terrified was that there are Al Qaeda cells in this country with close ties to Communist and Marxist parties that have, in turn, ties to the Labour Party, to the very establishment itself. Her project, as she called it, was to expose those ties, through a series of articles in a major, national paper, and wake the country up to what was happening in Parliament, in the Commons and the Lords.”

He paused, staring down at his feet. “Her theory was more radical than that. She claimed this sickness had spread all across Europe and the U.S.A. She may well be right, but her focus was England. And so is mine.”

Dehan winced. “That sounds pretty paranoid.”

He smiled at her without much humor. “If it were paranoia, Dehan, she would have committed suicide. But she didn’t. She was murdered.”

She stared at him, taking in what he’d said, then asked, “This was what she phoned you about the other night?”

“Yes. I didn’t want to discuss this in front of Green. He’d’ve thought