Dead Silent by Neil White Read Free Book Online Page A

days are gone now. Even barristers are feeling the pinch.’
    ‘What’s wrong?’ Hunter replied. ‘No more sports cars, no second homes in France?’ He scoffed. ‘I’ll hold back the tears. And anyway, even all the money Gilbert had wasn’t good enough for him.’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘Because he tried to get more by throwing it away in casinos,’ Hunter said. ‘His old school friends had gone to work in the City. This was the eighties, and they were making big money. Claude was stuck on the northern circuit, but he couldn’t say no to the high life when it was there to be had. Claude was richer than most of us, but he was the pauper in his crowd. Even when he started doing television, you know, one of those awful debate programmes, it didn’t change things. It just took him away from home more often, gave him another chat-up line, and he had some big debts by the time he disappeared.’
    ‘Didn’t everyone live the high life back then?’ I asked. ‘It was the boom before the bust.’
    Hunter smiled ruefully. ‘My life didn’t change much. The only change I saw around here was the mills closing down. And maybe that’s what sucked him in: that all around him he saw people losing their jobs, but he had the house and the sports car, and so he thought he was still the high-roller, the big man. There were rumours around court that Claude had talked about giving up the law to become a professional gambler, that he thought he had the knack of the skill games, had even tried counting cards at the blackjack tables, but he didn’t have the brain for it and started to lose money.’
    ‘Maybe he owed money to the wrong people,’ I said. ‘Lawyers find out things that they shouldn’t know, and gambling debts made him liable to be blackmailed. Maybe he had to pass on information that he was supposed to keep secret.’
    ‘What, are you saying that Nancy was killed by gangsters?’ Hunter said.
    ‘Maybe him too,’ I suggested.
    Hunter shook his head. ‘I’ve thought about that, but why get rid of the bodies separately? Why be so cruel to Nancy?’
    ‘If Nancy was buried alive, Gilbert knew he was on a timer,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he had to say what he knew before she died.’
    ‘I’ve heard that theory, but I don’t believe it,’ Hunter said. ‘They found his car at Newhaven, abandoned. That’s the other end of the country. What gangster would dump the car so far away, as some kind of red herring?’
    ‘So why do you think the car was there?’ I asked.
    ‘Because he jumped on a ferry,’ he replied.
    I smiled. ‘Maybe that’s why a gangster would dump the car all the way down there, to make you think that.’
    ‘That would be good in a detective novel, but real criminals don’t work like that,’ Hunter said. ‘Why go all the way down there? Why not the airport?’ He shook his head. ‘Gangsters wouldn’t set up a false trail. They would get rid of the body and leave no trail.’
    ‘So what about all the sightings?’ I said. ‘Do you think any might be true?’
    Hunter leant in. ‘They’ve either been unconfirmed or proved to be false. Any tall, suave stranger in a foreign land was thought to be Claude Gilbert. There was a sighting a couple of years ago, some hobo in New Zealand living out of his car. Someone hawked a photograph around the papers and the media went crazy. But all the locals knew him; he had been there all his life. And there was a man in Goa. A book was even written about him, naming him as Gilbert, but people from England knew him. He was just some busker from Birmingham who had moved out to Goa to get spiritual.’
    ‘I was told that you never really let go of the case,’ I said.
    He looked sheepish for a moment. ‘He’s guilty of a cruel murder, but he was able to just walk away from it,’ he said. ‘I suppose it got to me.’
    ‘So what do you think happened to him?’ I asked.
    Hunter smiled, and I could tell that he was enjoying the audience, that his