Pike's Pyramid. Michael Tatlow
table. ‘Constable Noel Atkins and I couldn’t find any fresh fingerprints, I’m afraid, so I won’t need yours. There are a few smears, indicating that the intruder wore gloves.’
‘Intruder? Singular?’
‘I think so now, Hells. It was a pretty neat job. There’s part of a boot print in the garden, near the window, but there’s too much grass and shrubbery, and then the rain beat me to it.
‘However, there’s soft soil by the gap in the back fence to the Nut, where you illegally take Tasman for walks,’ he smiled. ‘I’ve got casts of two fresh boot prints, size eleven. And there’s another couple, less distinct ones and a few sizes smaller, which may or may not be related. They’re not good enough to cast. There are tracks consistent with a man carrying one load to this side of the gap, going back to the house for more, and perhaps an accomplice taking a load or two up to the chair-lift car park.
‘Can you think of anyone who might have done this?’ Bond looked searchingly at his two hosts.
Pike frowned. ‘I’ve thought about it all the way from Hobart, Sam. No, I’m stumped.’ Alex shook her head in similar puzzlement.
Bond wrote in his book. ‘It’s probably related to your network business.’
‘I’d say so,’ Pike said.
‘There are some rivalries and jealousies in the business here and there,’ Alex admitted.
‘Tell me about them,’ Sam asked keenly.
‘They’re rivalries like you get in any sort of competitive business, I’d say,’ she continued. ‘There’s no one really I could point to.’
‘Okay then,’ the policeman said easily. ‘I’ll come back to that. There’s big money involved in this network?’
‘Yes,’ Pike responded with automatic pride.
‘Hmm,’ Bond pondered over his beer. ‘This is the first house robbery in Stanley for more than two years, and the last one was by a drug-addict tourist. I don’t like the smell of this one.’
The policeman looked at Alex, then up at the face of the Nut. Grey, blue and mossy basalt radiated heat from the late sun. Patches of gold shone from rampant, flowering gorse. The chair-lift was returning visitors down to the Nut Rock Cafe. The Pikes waited.
‘No one could get in that window in daylight without being seen. Your neighbours saw nothing, so it must have been a night job.’
Bond drank some beer. ‘It must have been someone who’d sat up by the side of the Nut getting the lay of the land. A professional, who evidently knew when you’d be back home. And all for something of no street value… Well, not much, I suppose.’
Alex nodded. ‘I’ve checked in every room, Sam. The robber took only things to do with Argo, as if he was working to instructions.’
Bond said, ‘Did the files contain any personal information, say, sensitive material, about anyone or any business that someone would want to suppress? Or use for blackmail? Or could someone think you have information like that?’
Pike and Alex pondered. ‘Jeez, Sam,’ Pike said. ‘I don’t think so.’
Alex leaned forward and said quietly, ‘Blarn, you’d better tell him about Prague.’
‘Prague?’ Bond frowned.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Pike said to his wife. De Groote would be aghast about the revelations to come. He picked up Alex’s glass and drank its remaining few centimetres of red wine.
‘This might sound like chasing phantoms, mate, but in Prague it seems that Argo is corrupted. Peddling narcotics, money laundering of billions, yes billions of dollars a year for a gang of world crooks, we’ve been told.’ Bond listened bleakly.
Pike looked at the empty glass. ‘A friend of ours in Prague, an American veteran and high ranker in Argo, was going to blow the whistle on them. He wanted me to help him and told Alex and me about it. I think I was the last to speak to him before he was murdered. Tortured and his throat cut in his hotel room a week ago. And the killers took his written evidence of the racketeering.’
Blarney told his friend about the theft of his Argo organiser book the next morning. ‘Also in it,’ he added, ‘were a few pages of info Jack had given me about the racketeering. Yeah, our Stanley address was in there.’
The sergeant slowly looked back at the Nut. ‘Holy, sweet Jesus,’ he declared quietly. ‘This robbery might be related to that.’ He filled several pages of his pad with notes.
Blarney remembered the policeman’s combat skills becoming legendary in Stanley when Bondy single-handedly broke up a fight at the wharf, felling in minutes two tree-fellers, a wharfie and a fisherman.
He asked, ‘Was your Stanley address also in Jack Sussoms’ papers?’
The Pikes looked up apprehensively. ‘It was,’ Alex said in little more than a whisper. ‘Also the flat we rented in the suburb of Palmovka.’
The policeman said he would seek the police reports from Prague. He took Pike up through the garden to the back fence, ostensibly to illustrate where the robber had gone. Bond’s real reason was to speculate without unduly worrying Alex, who began clearing the scene of the barbecue. Tasman followed the men.
Blarney was pleased that the gooseberries and raspberries were ripe. He picked a few raspberries on the way. The potatoes he had planted in October sprouted bright green tops. A good crop was coming.
At the back fence, under an old apple tree, Bond ventured, ‘The Prague police might now have evidence that it was a random robbery that went wrong. Perhaps they’ve already made an arrest. However, my priority is to protect you two.
‘If Sussoms was killed to silence him, we might have to contend with a ruthless individual or gang who would take extreme action again. You being a journalist and maybe making public the evident reason for your friend’s death; that’d worry the killers.’
‘Yeah,’ Pike said quietly. ‘I hope it was a random slaying by a thief. An old Yankee millionaire up there alone. That was the official line from the cops, despite me telling them about Jack’s allegations up beside his gory corpse, when I was their suspect.’
‘That’s what they claimed they believe.’ Bond grinned at his pad. ‘I’ll have the Czech authorities informed about your break-in through my Hobart HQ. I’m also going to deliberately over-react to this lot, Blarney. Maybe, mate, the villains think you got documentary evidence from Sussoms and mailed it home for safe keeping.’
‘If they think you are a threat…’ he contemplated the garden, frowning. He began walking back down the path towards the house. Pike kicked at a sod of earth and followed, squinting into the sunset.
‘Struth!’ Blarney called out and stopped. ‘It might be Jack’s killer or killers who robbed our Prague flat. I’ve just remembered, bugger it.’
Bond swung around and faced him. Pike related the scene at Palmovka. He added that, wanting to leave the republic soon, he had not bothered telling the Prague police about it.
Nor did he report, he confessed, the attack on him and the near attack on Alex at Prague’s airport.
Bond frowned incredulously. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Sure.’ He told the astonished policeman all about it, adding that Harbek’s office had been told when they would be at the airport. ‘They could have been muggers who thought we were loaded with money,’ he concluded. ‘But, at least for now Sam, I don’t want Alex to find out about it. Nor the Prague cops.’
Bond said, ‘It sounds like two attempted murders. You two are, or were, marked for termination, mate. I’ll report that and the Palmovka robbery to the Prague