#taken

by Tony Parsons

  But not quite enough to get them out.

  The search teams were still pulling apart the caravan where mother and son had lived.

  But nobody was expecting to find a trace of Jessica Lyle.

  Whoever had taken her, it wasn’t the alcoholic Peter Mahone and his arthritic mother Janet.

  ‘You didn’t have to drive me back,’ Harry Flowers said as the city’s eastern suburbs slipped into the flat Essex countryside. ‘My man could have picked me up.’

  This was true. And I was sick of the sight of Harry Flowers. And I was in pain, one eye still burning, although the other one, the eye I was driving with, was almost as good as new. And I would have preferred not to have to ask Mrs Murphy to stay at our loft overnight, and not to have to ask her to walk Scout to school and feed and walk Stan. I would much rather have done all that myself. But I was reluctant to let Flowers go because I could not believe he had no idea about who would hate him enough to snatch his mistress, even if they were dumb enough to take the wrong woman.

  ‘Maybe some foreign mob tried to kidnap your friend,’ I suggested.

  Harry Flowers shook his head.

  ‘The influence of what you call foreign mobs has been vastly overstated,’ he said. ‘Foreign mobs don’t run London. Are you interested in history, DC Wolfe? Then you know this country has not been invaded for one thousand years. Think about that for a moment. That means something. The idea that the British are going to roll over and surrender for a bunch of Russians – or Kurds, Albanians, Turks, or whatever they might be – is fanciful. And this kind of abduction is not their style. Too subtle. Our foreign friends just go in with all guns blazing and slaughter everyone in sight. Like the Russians did in Berlin in 1945. Foreign mobs? No. This feels personal.’

  London was behind us now and there was nothing ahead but the open road and the green fields of Essex in summer.

  I put my foot down.

  ‘You must have a theory about who wants to hurt you,’ I said. ‘About who tried to snatch Snezia. That operation to take her – although a royal cock-up – was meticulously planned. Peter and Janet Mahone might not have been up to it, but somebody was, and I can’t believe you don’t have a short list of suspects.’

  Flowers said nothing.

  ‘The kidnapping has been all over the news, thanks to Frank Lyle,’ I said. ‘But your link to it is not public knowledge. So how did the Mahones know about it?’

  ‘Are you kidding me? Because the police talk,’ he said. ‘You lot talk for money, and you talk to even up scores, and you talk because you’re like a bunch of old fishwives gossiping over the garden gate.’

  Flowers snorted with contempt.

  ‘If you want to get something into the public domain, just tell a secret to a policeman,’ he said. ‘Some old copper with a grudge slipped the word to the Mahones – that’s my best bet – and they crawled out from under their stone, howling for my blood. Maybe it was your boss. Maybe it was DCI Patricia Whitestone.’ He touched his face where she had slapped him. ‘Did she always like a drink or ten?’

  No, I thought. That’s a new thing.

  ‘That’s the way it works, isn’t it?’ Flowers said. ‘The law always lets somebody else get their hands dirty. Present company excepted. You got your hands quite dirty last night.’

  I felt a surge of anger.

  ‘You poured petrol over the Mahone family when they were having their roast beef and Yorkshire pudding,’ I said. ‘Allegedly. You can see why they might bear a grudge.’

  ‘That never happened,’ he said, not for the first time. ‘Not the way you think. Not the way it gets talked about.’ He rubbed at his eyes. ‘And what’s your story? How did your legs get messed up?’ He smiled at my face. ‘What – you don’t think you walk right, do you?’ His grin broadened. ‘And you don’t think you hide it, do you? You walk like a sailor on shore leave, son! What’s all that about?’

  ‘Accident at work,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said, suddenly not smiling. ‘I heard about that terrorist who detonated a couple of old Croatian grenades she had stuffed down her burka. Around the Angel, right? Killed one detective – a woman. A young woman. And injured another detective. A man. And that was you, Wolfe, wasn’t it? And that’s shrapnel in your legs, isn’t it?’ He nodded at the rolling countryside. Harry Flowers was almost home.

  ‘You should take the next exit,’ he said.

  The Flowers’ home stood in a wealthy commuter belt, an area of golf courses and gardener’s vans, the residents outnumbered by the daily workers who came in to clean, prune, cook, walk the dogs and drive the children. A lot of green, expensively managed, and curving gravel driveways with multiple vehicles out front.

  It was a neighbourhood for the men and women who caught the early trains into Liverpool Street and Fenchurch Street, and pushed money around on computer screens. Many of them were from families who, like Flowers, had headed east in the decades following the Second World War to a different world of private schools and orthodontists, riding lessons and ski trips. It was just a thirty-minute fast train to the City, although you would never guess it from the leafy, tree-lined streets we were driving through.

  Harry Flowers lived in the biggest house of them all.

  The Bentley Bentayga V8 was out front. The driver I had seen in Smithfield, the young Asian with the shaven head, was polishing the chrome and glass and gleaming steel.

  I parked my filthy old BMW X5 next to it.

  Ruben Shavers and Derek Bumpus came out of the house and stood either side of the open doorway.

  Welcoming their master, waiting for orders.

  ‘I know your man,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes, you probably would. Derek Bumpus. Big Del. I found him working on the doors when he was fourteen. Hardest bouncer in London. Can you imagine that? Working the doors at fourteen?’

  He thought I was talking about the fat white man who favoured the Michelin Man.

  ‘The other one,’ I said. ‘The black guy. Ruben Shavers. He was a boxer. Heavyweight. It must have been ten, fifteen years ago.’

  ‘More like twenty.’

  I remembered that slick, fast, good-looking heavyweight and a string of first-round knockouts. And I remembered when I went to Auto Waste Solutions and I saw the hands with the ugly white circles where a hammer had come down.

  ‘What really happened to him?’

  Flowers smiled with affection.

  ‘Ruben liked the ladies,’ he said, getting out of the car. ‘One of them was married to a close personal friend of a big boxing promoter.’

  I followed him as he approached his driver.

  ‘Mo,’ Flowers said, ‘where’s Junior?’

  ‘Not back yet, boss.’

  Flowers looked at his watch, then his eyes drifted to the roof. Two men had climbed a ladder and were attempting to attach something to the roof of his house. Cables flapped behind them.

  ‘How are your cousins doing, Mo?’

  ‘Nearly finished, boss.’

  And I saw that Mo’s cousins were fitting CCTV cameras.

  ‘Beefing up security around here, Harry?’ I said.

  He turned to look at me.

  ‘You need to use the bathroom before you head back?’

  ‘I need to ask you one more question.’

  He waited.

  ‘It’s about Snezia Jones,’ I said.

  He glanced towards the beautiful house with his bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Not out here,’ he said.

  We stepped inside.

  The atrium was two storeys high. At the top of the staircase to the first floor there was a huge painting. At the centre of it there was a young Harry Flowers in minimalist swimming shorts holding a surfboard like a shield, his six-pack glistening in the sunshine. There was a grinning blonde bombshell spilling out of a string bikini hanging on to his arm, an inch or two taller than her man. Two small children, twins, a smiling cherub of a girl and a frowning little boy, frolicked in th
e sand at their feet, building castles of sand.

  Flowers saw me staring at it.

  ‘Do you like art?’ he said. ‘I had that done for me. That’s Charlotte, my wife, and our kids. Meadow and Junior.’ He got a wistful look in his sore eyes. ‘When the children were babies,’ he said.

  ‘Boss?’ Mo said behind us. ‘Delivery for Meadow.’

  A FedEx delivery van was parked outside. A courier and some men who looked like more of Mo’s cousins – how many did he have? – carried tottering piles of white boxes into the house. The boxes were of every size and shape imaginable – from tiny cubic things to massive rectangular packages that it took two men to carry – but they were all wrapped exactly the same way. Pure white boxes delicately tied with a cream-coloured ribbon. The FedEx man and the cousins gently placed the packages on the ground and went back to the van for more.

  ‘It’s here!’

  There was a young woman in a T-shirt and jeans at the top of the stairs. She was clearly the girl in Harry’s family painting, his daughter, all grown up. She came down the stairs, placing a quick kiss on Harry’s cheeks before she began to tear open the boxes. A white veil appeared. And then a long tailored white underskirt. And some elaborate little tangle of costume jewellery, which I knew was a headpiece for the bride’s hair, because I had got married once. And there were two pairs of white shoes – barefoot sandals and high heels, one for the wedding itself and one for the reception – and Meadow Flowers gasped with wonder at all of it, and she kept opening the boxes to reveal their snow-white treasure until only one package remained.

  Then she held her breath as a circle of men watched in reverential silence and she opened the biggest white box of them all.

  It took both hands for Meadow Flowers to lift out her wedding dress, and it unfurled from its rustling nest of paper like a great white sail, and Harry Flowers stared as his daughter clutched it to her chest and closed her eyes.

  ‘What do you think, Daddy?’ she asked.

  ‘Bad luck for a bride to be seen in her gown before the day,’ he said. And then I saw something soften inside him. ‘I think you will be the most beautiful bride in the history of the world,’ he told his daughter.

  ‘What on earth happened to you?’ said a voice from the top of the stairs.

  Charlotte Flowers was dressed for the tennis court.

  And she was not what I was expecting.

  There was a Grace Kelly cool about her, the kind of good looks that seem subtly chilled to encourage the world to keep its distance, a beauty that feels as though you are always looking at it from behind glass.

  Gangsters usually marry a girl from the old neighbourhood.

  Harry Flowers had gone upmarket.

  She was in her middle fifties, in the kind of great shape that you can only get from both gym and genes. All those summer days on the tennis court had left her skin a little too tanned and her hair, already fair, streaked lighter by the sun. Her accent was too cut-glass for the wife of Harry Flowers. She should have been married to an art dealer, not a drug dealer. As she descended the stairs, I recognised the way she walked. That lazy poise. It is how off-duty models walk.

  ‘Harry,’ she said. ‘Your poor eyes.’

  ‘Bumped into the Mahones,’ he said.

  ‘The Mahones?’ she said, flinching. A blast from the past, clearly.

  ‘Peter and Janet. The wife and one of the kids. It’s all done now. Don’t worry about it.’

  She shook her head. ‘But the Mahones?’

  ‘It’s all sorted, Charlotte.’

  She smiled indulgently at her daughter examining her wedding-day delivery and then she turned her gaze on me, still smiling. If she knew I was a policeman, she gave no sign. Perhaps she had other things on her mind. Perhaps she didn’t care. The gilded class have this wonderful gift of not caring. You have to admire that about them. When she smiled at me I felt like the only person in the room.

  ‘This is Max Wolfe,’ Flowers said. ‘He gave me a lift home.’

  She nodded politely and then turned back to her husband, the smile finally fading.

  ‘That journalist keeps calling on the landline,’ she said. ‘How did she get the number?’

  Harry looked shifty. ‘What about?’

  ‘How would I know? She wants to talk to you. But she says she doesn’t mind talking to me.’

  Flowers visibly stiffened. He gestured to me to follow him.

  ‘You know what to say to journalists,’ he told his wife.

  ‘But even when I say no comment, she keeps calling back for a comment, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Then don’t answer the phone!’ he shouted.

  I followed Flowers to his office and he closed the door behind us. It was a good room. A man cave built with a limitless budget. Harry was free to indulge his passions in here. And his passions included West Ham United and what looked like bespoke shelves full of 12-inch vinyl. There was a lot of heavy hard wood, and a lot of claret and blue. A black-and-white photograph hung above Harry’s desk. Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters, the West Ham team that won the World Cup in 1966.

  He turned to look at me.

  ‘She doesn’t know, does she?’ I said. ‘Your wife. Charlotte. She doesn’t know about the kidnapping. And she doesn’t know about Snezia Jones.’

  ‘She knows something has happened,’ he said. ‘She knows someone has tried to hurt me. But she doesn’t know the details. Why would she? And who’s going to tell her – you?’ He nodded impatiently. ‘So what’s your question?’

  ‘Snezia,’ I said. ‘Do you love her?’

  He laughed with something like embarrassment.

  ‘That’s a funny question.’

  ‘Because it doesn’t make sense unless you love her,’ I said. ‘Getting at you through Snezia doesn’t make any sense if she is just a girl you keep on the side. I imagine – just guessing here – that Snezia is not the first girl you have had on your payroll. And the only way kidnapping her makes any sense is if she is special to you. The only thing that makes sense is if you love her.’

  ‘I love my wife,’ Harry Flowers said. ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But did you look at her? That’s the kind of woman you fall in love with. I’ve been married for twenty-five years. I intend to be married for another twenty-five years. And it’s the kind of love that comes from going through things together. Having children. Watching your parents die. The ups and downs of any career. With Snezia – I love her the way I love my Bentley Bentayga. How could I not love it?’ He was smiling now. ‘Twin-turbocharged, 4.0 litre, and it does nought to naughty in 4.4 seconds.’

  ‘But if that’s the way you care about her – the same way you care about your car – then why is she still dancing in the Western World?’

  He looked shocked.

  ‘You can’t stand in the way of a woman and her career,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know anything about women?’

  As I came out of the house, a car roared up the drive.

  I had to stop to avoid being hit by it. A green Porsche 911.

  Two young men got out of the car.

  The little boy in the beach painting was grown up too. Junior Flowers. His shoulders were wide with lifting weights, and he walked with a self-conscious swagger, a man displaying the strength of a manual labourer who would never have to do any manual labour. His friend got out of the passenger side and they stared at me with a default aggression, a pair of Essex boys who had been up all night.

  ‘Boo,’ I said.

  They looked at each other and laughed.

  ‘What are you?’ Junior asked. ‘Some kind of tough guy?’

  ‘That’s me,’ I confirmed. ‘Some kind of tough guy. Catch you later, kids.’

  I heard them laughing behind me.

  ‘Look at the gimp go,’ Junior Flowers chuckled.

  The men from the roof were on the ground now, the cousins of the driver, Mo Patel. I wasn’t sure if they were real cousin
s, although they were so like him that they could have been. They turned away from admiring the new CCTV cameras they had just fitted to stare at me. So did the two bodyguards, the enormous white man, Derek Bumpus, and the taller, leaner black man, Ruben Shavers, both considering me with a professional interest as I made my way to the old BMW.

  Harry Flowers was right.

  I walked funny these days.

  Then a shirt fluttered at my feet like some dying bird. A white shirt, the same shade of impossible virginal white as the wedding dress of Meadow Flowers. And then two more shirts. Emmett, Jermyn Street, London, Slim Fit, it said on the collar. And then a Loeb shoe. Hand-made in England. Impressive. And then another, its identical twin. Then the jacket from a Savile Row suit. Alexandra Wood, Savile Row. And then the trousers.

  All Harry’s stuff. All of Harry’s beautiful stuff. I remembered a book from school. Jay Gatsby throwing his beautiful stuff at the feet of the woman he loved, trying to hold her heart.

  But this was something else. This was stuff being thrown by a woman.

  I lifted my eyes just as Charlotte Flowers began to scream.

  ‘You bastard … you fucking bastard … you cheating whore-monger lying bastard …’

  The lovely face of his wife was at the open second-floor window, her yellow hair unkempt and her over-tanned face twisted with tearful fury. She still sounded quite posh. The hired help fluttered around the drive, picking up the shirts and suits and shoes. Mo the driver. The enormous white man. The taller, leaner black man. The cousins. All of them stooping like frightened housekeepers to pick up Harry’s possessions.

  ‘Leave it!’ Charlotte Flowers screamed at them. ‘Leave it all!’

  And they did as they were told.

  They left it.

  Meadow Flowers came out of the house and stared up at the window. She was still in her T-shirt and jeans combo but she was wearing a wedding veil over her face, completely ignoring her dear old dad’s advice about bridal superstitions. She looked up at her mother. And now there was a crowd of us looking up at Charlotte Flowers throwing things from the window. Junior and his friend. Mo and the cousins. Big Del who worked the doors when he was just a lad and Ruben Shavers who could have been a contender if he hadn’t liked the ladies quite so much. Meadow and me. And we were all watching the woman in the window furiously hurling her husband’s possessions on to that curving gravel driveway.