R. J. Ellory
Page 1
Praise for R. J. Ellory
A QUIET VENDETTA
‘With exquisite pace and perfect timing, R. J. Ellory has given us a piercing assessment of the nature of love, loyalty and obsessive revenge, not to mention a deep understanding of la cosa nostra’ Guardian
‘A sprawling masterpiece covering 50 years of the American dream gone sour . . . [A] striking novel that brings to mind the best of James Ellroy’ Good Book Guide
CANDLEMOTH
‘An ambitious first novel . . . incisive, often beautiful writing’ The Times
‘You know you’re on to something from the opening line . . . compelling, insightful, moving and extremely powerful’ Sydney Morning Herald
GHOSTHEART
‘This compelling novel, with its shock dénouement, is both beautifully written and skilfully crafted and confirms Ellory as one of crime fiction’s new stars’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Genuinely heartbreaking . . . an extremely vivid, moving picture of the human condition, Ghostheart is a superb tale of tragedy and revenge’ Big Issue
CITY OF LIES
‘Ellory writes taut, muscular prose that at its best is almost poetic . . . City of Lies is a tense and pacy thriller taking the reader into a world of secrets, betrayal and revenge’
Yorkshire Post
‘A gripping thriller with many twists and turns’
Woman’s Weekly
A QUIET BELIEF IN ANGELS
‘A Quiet Belief in Angels is a beautiful and haunting book. This is a tour de force from R. J. Ellory’ Michael Connelly
‘This is compelling, unputdownable thriller writing of the very highest order’ Guardian
‘Once again R. J. Ellory shows off his special talents . . . it confirms his place in the top flight of crime writing’
Sunday Telegraph
R.J. Ellory is the bestselling author of numerous novels. A Quiet Belief in Angels, a Richard & Judy Book Club selection in 2008, was shortlisted for the Barry Award, the 813 Trophy, the Quebec Booksellers’ Prize and was winner of the Nouvel Observateur Crime Fiction Prize. His work has been translated into over twenty languages worldwide. R.J. Ellory currently lives in England.
www.rjellory.com
By R. J. Ellory
Candlemoth
Ghostheart
A Quiet Vendetta
City of Lies
A Quiet Belief in Angels
A Quiet Vendetta
R. J. ELLORY
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Praise
About the Author
Also By Author
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Epilogue
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Orion
This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books
Copyright © R. J. Ellory Publications Ltd 2005
The moral right of R.J. Ellory to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Extract from ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’, Book II, by William Carlos Williams, from Collected Poems 1939-1962, Volume II © 1944 William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press Limited.
All the characters in this book are fictitious,
and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 2430 6
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
www.orionbooks.co.uk
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To all those at Orion: Malcolm Edwards, Peter Roche, Jane Wood, Gaby Young, Juliet Ewers, Helen Richardson, Dallas Manderson, Debbie Holmes, Kelly Falconer, Kate Mills, Sara O’Keeffe, Genevieve Pegg, Susan Lamb, Susan Howe, Jo Carpenter, Andrew Taylor, Ian Diment, Mark Streatfeild, Michael Goff, Anthony Keates, Mark Stay, Jenny Page, Katherine West and Frances Wollen. As well to Mark Rusher at Weidenfeld & Nicolson; and to Robyn Karney, my own Thelma Schoonmaker – the embodiment of patience and care.
To Jon Wood, editor and consigliere.
To my agent and friend, Euan Thorneycroft.
To Ali Karim at Shots Magazine and Steve Warne at CHC Books.
To Dave Griffiths at Creative Rights Digital Registry; the crew of BBC Radio WM; Maris Ross at Publishing News; The UK Crime Writers’ Association; Daniel, David and Thallia at Goldsboro Books; Richard Reynolds at Heffers in Cambridge and Paul Blezard at One Word Radio.
To Sgt Steve Miller, Metro-Dade Crime Laboratory Bureau, Miami, FLA, for staying after-hours to answer questions about body parts and the frailty of human beings.
To my brother, Guy.
To my wife of sixteen years, my son of eight.
I owe you all.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction.
Irrespective of the fact that it is set against historical events and amidst people whose names you will recognize, it is nevertheless a work of fiction. Where actual events have been modified, or perhaps a sequence changed, this was done only to facilitate the telling of the story.
Many of the people herein are long-since dead, and perhaps the world is a better place for it, but they populated my life for some weeks, and in their own way gave generously of themselves. Some of them were funny, some of them disturbing, others just downright crazy. Regardless they came and went, they made their mark, and I acknowledge them for their contribution.
It has been said that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts, and perhaps in collating and binding these parts together I have made errors. For this I assume complete responsibility, but also plead an element of mitigating circumstance: I was in bad company at the time.
The Author
Approaching death,
as we think, the death of love,
no distinction,
any more suffices to differentiate
the particulars
of place and condition
with which we have been long
familiar.
All appears
as if seen
wavering through water.
From ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’, Book II
William Carlos Williams
ONE
Through mean streets, through smoky alleyways where the pungent smell of raw liquor hangs like the ghost of some long-gone summer; on past these battered frontages where plaster chips and twists of dirty paint in Mardi Gras colors lean out like broken teeth and fall leaves; passing the dregs of humanity who gather here and there amongst brown-papered bottles and steel-drum fires, serving to tap the vein of meager human prosperity where it spills, through good humor or diesel wine, onto the sidewalks of this district . . .
Chalmette, here within the boundaries of New Orleans.
The sound of this place: the jangled switching of interference, the hurried voices, the lilting piano, the radios, the street-walking, hip-dipping youths playing mesmeric rap.
If you listen, you can hear from porch or stoop the quarreling voices, innocence already bruised, challenged, insulted.
The clustered tenements and apartment blocks, pressed between streets and sidewalks like some secondary consideration, the unwanted reprise of an earlier discarded theme, and running like a strung-together, slipshod archipelago, hopping a block at a time out through Arabi, over the Chef Menteur Highway to Lake Pontchartrain where people seem to stop merely because the earth does.
Visitors perhaps wonder what makes this ripe, malodorous blend of smells and sounds and human rhythms as they pass over the Lake Borgne canal, over the Vieux Carre business district, over Ursuline’s and Tortorici’s Italian to Gravier Street. For here the sound of voices is strong, rich, vibrant, and there is motion spilling randomly, a pocket of curiosity gathered along the edge of a one-way street, a corridor of downward-sloping entries into parking lots beneath a tenement.
But for the squad car flashes, the alleyway is hot and thick with darkness. The tail-ends of cars – chrome fenders and liquid silk paintwork – catch the kaleidoscope flickers, and wide eyes flash cherry red to sapphire blue as police cars drive a wedge across the street and halt all passage.
To the left and right are hospitals, the Veterans’ and LSU Medical Center, and up ahead the South Claiborne Avenue Overpass, but here there is a splinter of activity through the network of arteries and veins that ordinarily flows uninhibited, and what is happening is unknown.
Patrolmen back the sensation-seekers away, herding them behind a hastily erected barrier, and once an arc lamp is hooked to the roof of a car, its beam wide enough to identify each and every vehicle pigeonholed in the alley, they begin to understand the source of this sudden police presence.
Somewhere a dog barks and, as if in echo, three or four more start up somewhere to the right. They holler in unison for reasons known only to themselves.
Third entrance from the Claiborne end a car is parked at an angle, its fender running a misplaced parallel to the others. Its positioning indicates speed, the rapid arrival and departure of its driver, or perhaps a driver who had not cared to harmonize with perspective and linear conformity, and though the carboy who walked this alleyway – minding automobiles, polishing brights and hoods for a quarter’s tip – has seen this car for three days consecutive, he hadn’t called the police until he’d looked inside. He’d taken a flashlight, a good one, and, pressing his face against the left rear quarterlight, he’d scanned the luxurious interior, minding he didn’t touch the white walls with his dirty, toe-peeping kickers. This wasn’t no ordinary car. There was something about it that had drawn him inside.
More people had gathered by then, and down a half a block or so some folks had opened up the doors and windows on a house party and the music was coming down with the smell of fried chicken and baked pecans, and when a plain Buick showed up and someone from the Medical Examiner’s office stepped out and walked towards the alleyway there were quite a few people down there: maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty.
And there was music – our human syncopations – as good tonight as any other.
The smell of chicken reminded the ME’s man of some place, some time he couldn’t remember now, and then it started raining in that lazy, tail-end-of-summer way that seemed to wet nothing down, the kind of way no-one had a mind to complain about.
It’d been a hot summer, a quiet kind of brutality, and everyone could remember how bad the smell got when the storm drains backed up in the last week of July, and how they spilled God-only-knew-what out into the gutters. It steamed, the flies came, and the kids got sick when they played down there. Heat blistered at ninety, tortured through ninety-five, and when a hundred sucked the air from parched lungs they called it a nightmare and stayed home from work to shower, to wrap split ice in a wet towel and lie on the floor with their cool hats pulled down over their eyes.
The Examiner man walked down. Early forties, name was Jim Emerson; he liked to collect baseball cards and watch Marx Brothers movies, but the rest of the time he crouched near dead bodies and tried to put two and two together. He looked as lazy as the rain, and you could sense in the way he moved that he knew he was unwelcome. He knew nothing about cars, but they’d run a sheet through come morning and they’d find – just like the carboy had figured – that this wasn’t no ordinary automobile.
Mercury Turnpike Cruiser, built by Ford as the XM in ’56, released commercially in ’57. V8, 290 horsepower at 4600 revs per minute, Merc-O-Matic transmission, 122-inch wheelbase, 4240 pounds in weight. This one was a hardtop, one of only sixteen thousand ever built, but the plates were Louisiana plates – and should have been on a ’69 Chrysler Valiant, last booked for a minor traffic violation in Brookhaven, Mississippi seven years before.
The carboy, released without charge within an hour and a half of his report, had stated emphatically that he’d seen blood on the back seat, a real mess of it all dried up on the leatherwork, clotted in the seams, spilled over the edge of the seats and down on the floor. Looked like a sucking pig had been gutted in there. The Cruiser wore a lot of glass, its retractable rear window, quarter-lights and sides designed to permit full enjoyment of the wide new vistas open to turnpike travellers. Gave the boy a good look at the innards of this thing, because that’s what he’d figured was in there, and he wasn’t so far from right.
These were the Chalmette and Arabi districts, edge of the French business quarter, New Orleans City, state of Louisiana.
This was a humid August Saturday night, and only later did they clear the sidewalks, haul out that car and lever the trunk.
Assistant Medical Examiner Emerson was there to see a can of worms opened right up, and even the cop who stood beside him – hard-bitten and weatherworn though he was – even he took a raincheck on dinner.
So they levered the trunk, and inside they found some guy, couldn’t have been much more than fifty years of age, and Emerson told anyone who’d listen that he’d been there for three, perhaps four days. Car had been there for three if the boy’s observation was correct, and there were sections of the trunk’s interior, bare metal strips, where the man’s skin had adhered in the heat. Emerson had one hell of a job; eventually he decided to freeze the metal strips with some kind of spray and then peeled the skin away with a paint scraper. The trunk vic looked like mystery meat, smelled worse, and the autopsy report would read like an auto smash.
Severe cerebral hemorrhaging; puncture of temporal, sphenoid and mastoid; rupture of pineal gland, thalamus, pituitary gland and pons by standard dimension claw hammer (generic branding, available at any good hardware outlet for between $9.99 and $12.99 depending on which side of town you shopped); heart severed at inferior vena cava through right and left ventricle at base; severed at subclavian veins and arteries, jugular, carotid and pulmonary. Seventy percent minimum blood loss. Bruising to abdomen and coeliac plexus. Lesions to arms, legs, face, hands, shoulders. Rope burns and adhesive marks from duct tape to wrists, left and right. Rope fibers attached to adhesive identified beneath an infrared spectraphotometer as standard nylon type, again available from any good hardware outlet. Estimated time of deat
h Wednesday 20 August, somewhere between ten p.m. and midnight, courtesy of New Orleans District 14 County Coroner’s Office, signed this day . . . witness . . . etc, etc.
The vic had been beaten six ways to Christmas. Tied at the wrists and ankles with regular mercantile and hardware nylon rope, beaten about the head and neck with a regular mercantile and hardware claw hammer, eviscerated, his heart cut away but left inside the chest cavity, wrapped in a regular sixty percent polyester, thirty-five percent cotton, five percent viscose bed-sheet, dumped in the back seat of a ’57 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser, driven to Gravier Street, moved to the trunk and then left for approximately three days prior to discovery.
There were interns to see to the arrival of the body at the Medical Examiner’s office, to watch over it for the couple of hours before it was moved to the County Coroner for full autopsy. Fresh-faced they were, young, and yet already beginning to get that world-weary edge of madness in their eyes, the kind of look that came from spending your life moving the dead from the scene of their misfortunes. They kept thinking This is no work for a human being but perhaps had already joined that happy, foolish crowd of folks who believed that, if they were not there to do these things, then no-one else would take care of them. There would always be someone to take their place, but they – in their infinite and very mortal wisdom – could never see them. Due, perhaps, to the desperation of looking.
The Crime Scene Security Officer was the man who stood sentinel over the dead to ensure this mortality was not violated further, that no-one would walk through the spilled blood, no-one would move the torn clothing, the fibers, the fragments, that no-one would touch the weapon, the footprint, the microscopic smudge of vari-colored mud that could isolate the one thread that would unravel everything; selfishly, with some sense of internal hunger, he would clutch these images and visions to his chest. Like a child protecting a cookie jar, or candies, or threatened innocence, he sought to make permanent the very impermanent, and in such a way lose sight of the real truth of the matter.