“He was all I had,” Charlie half sobbed, the sound seeming to come from deep within him and echoing like something collapsing. “All I had.”
“And now you know what it feels like,” Eve spat back. “I did what you lot have been doing all your lives – all my life. I took what I wanted, I did what I needed to do to keep myself safe. I hurt whoever needed hurting. Don’t fucking look at me like I’m a fucking monster, Charlie; I learned everything I know from people like you.”
Charlie lifted the gun, his hand trembling slightly.
“Charlie,” Lilly called, reaching a hand out to him. “Don’t do this.”
Rene Halliwell put her hand on his shoulder and Charlie, his eyes never leaving Eve’s face, simply reached a hand across his shoulder and solidly, firmly, shoved her as hard as he could, sending her sprawling, a look of confused hurt on her face.
Nick and the other copper had moved from the front and back of the crematorium in a pincer movement and were steps away, each focussing intently on Charlie and Eve, while Ali’s escort struggled to free himself from his silent and grim-faced prisoner.
A chorus of voices called out, beseeching Charlie to put the gun down, not to be stupid, to let the law handle it, and above it all came Eve’s voice.
“Pull the fucking trigger, Charlie. Go on! If you’re a man – if one of you stupid selfish bastards is a man – pull the fucking trigger.”
I held my hands out to her, heard myself shushing her even as she spoke and realised that Eve and her ilk had been shushed for too long.
“Cos I tell you,” she carried on, “I’ve had enough. I’m done. There’s nothing left, and I’m not going back to living in a fucking hovel. I’m done with just surviving, so you might as well pull that fucking trigger!”
Charlie seemed to relax, his shoulders slumped, his breathing slowed and, “he was all I had left,” he said, as the gun went off, one of the stained-glass windows shattered and Charlie dropped to the floor screaming in agony, his whole body spasming desperately.
Tara stood ten feet away, the small black box of the taser still held in her hand.
Eve sighed, her shoulder slumping. “Typical,” she muttered. “Fucking useless, the lot of them.”
“Right,” Chopper grabbed my shoulder as the police descended on Eve and Charlie, “where are them fucking rocks?”
“Gone,” I said simply, staring him in the face and realising that any trace of geniality had evaporated as his greed and fury at being thwarted fought with each other. “I suspect they went not long after the original robbery.”
“Gone?” This did not compute, and he looked at me in confusion.
“Gary the Ghost,” I said simply. “The con man you could find no trace of. The one who got the alarms turned off. I suspect he managed to nab them – probably told Billy he’d meet him at The Marq and while Billy was waiting, Eve turned up, and the story ended like this.”
“So this,” Chopper gestured at the chaos unfolding around us as Mo sobbed, clutching her chest; Tiny Tim and Mr Green were interviewed by one of the uniforms; Lilly and Rene huddled together, Rene sobbing onto Lilly’s shoulder; and Charlie was dragged to his feet; whilst Eve, seemingly in shock, now that all of her secrets had been disgorged, was handcuffed and lead away, “was never about the diamonds? The money?”
“No,” I shook my head, my eyes straying to where Ali, Carlton and Tara were together; Carlton sobbing as he hugged his mother and Ali kissing him on the top of his head, before reaching a hand out towards Tara who put her arms around the two of them and hugged.
“It was about something bigger than money, Mr F. It was about freedom. About happy endings. But it all went wrong. Maybe it went wrong because endings are never happy. Maybe Eve should have just asked for a happy middle.”
Caz came up beside me and squeezed my shoulder.
“Yeah, well,” Chopper nodded at Cyril, who came up behind him, “much as I love a bit of John Boy Walton, I got business elsewhere. Nice job, kid,” Chopper patted my shoulder like a feudal lord praising his dog, nodded again at Cyril and the two of them left the crematorium.
We waited until they had left, and then I turned to Caz.
“Right,” she said, “are you ready for act two?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said, and she kissed me on the cheek.
FORTY-THREE
“Are you sure about this?” Priscilla frowned at us, her lips pursed disapprovingly. “It seems rather flighty.”
“Flighty?” Caz, dressed now in a Tiffany-blue Chanel skirt and jacket combo with an ivory silk blouse and pale-blue patent court shoes, reached a gloved hand out to Prissy and wiggled the fingers in a demanding style. “Coming from the woman whose stupid partying ways and inability to keep her mouth shut got us into this mess, that’s rich. Have you brought my grandmother’s brooch?”
I slipped on a pair of surgical gloves, dived into my bag and began setting up the disposable mobile that Phoenix had advised me to acquire. Checking that it was charged, the sim card functioning and the unit ready for use, I turned back to the ladies, as Prissy tutted, dug into her handbag and extracted a small black velvet box, which she opened.
The brooch was in the shape of a woman, her arms outstretched, her head lifted so that the throat – all delicately portrayed in almost creamy platinum, a corona of diamonds and rubies above her head, a field of emeralds and sapphires under her feet – stretched, the breasts pressed outwards, and the effect of someone captured as though in ecstasy or flight was complete.
“Gaudy little thing,” Prissy said somewhat bitterly, as Caz – looking as though she had been born to wear it – pinned it almost rapturously to her lapel.
“Well if you didn’t want it,” Caz murmured, without lifting her eyes to Prissy, “you could have let me have it when I asked for it all those years ago.”
“Did you ask for it?” Prissy frowned, her face doing a great impersonation of struggling-to-remember. “I really don’t recall. Well,” she shook her head dismissively, “no matter. It’s yours now. I’ve never been very fond of diamonds.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, digging my own gloved hand into my rucksack, extracting the Ziploc bag that I’d found in the freezer at The Marq and slapping it onto the table, “you’d best put those into your purse, Caz.”
The diamonds – a myriad of sparkling stars – glinted and glistened in the artificial light of the McDonald’s where the three of us had met.
The presence, all these years, of the stones in the freezer – dropped there, no doubt, by Billy Bryant on his arrival at The Marq, perhaps as a temporary hiding place while he decided where best to actually secrete them – had been the key that had unlocked, for me, the entire mystery.
Eve had come to the pub and, in my imagination, Billy had let her in and taken her down to the basement where he was already busily preparing a hiding place for the loot.
He’d demanded to know what she was doing there, and she had pulled from her pocket the gun that she’d acquired, probably, from his own collection and shot him there and then.
And once she’d shot him, she’d simply entombed his body behind a fake wall.
The things, as Chopper Falzone had once said to me, that people will do for love.
And so Billy the Brick was bricked up in his own personal mausoleum, the freezer had been plugged in, the ice had formed, the meat and bags of petrified veg and frozen Yorkshire puddings had been dumped unceremoniously on top and the world had carried on until, one night, someone tried to torch The Marq, leading to the fire brigade dousing the hallway with water, which had seeped through the building, weakening the fake wall and, shortly afterwards, the freezer, already many years past its normal life expectancy, had finally given up the ghost and begun to defrost.
I’d looked at the bag of scintillating stones in my hand and realised, suddenly, that whoever had killed Billy hadn’t done so for the jewels, which meant that I had to look at who else gained by having him out of the way,
and why, if not financially.
And Eve – the ‘Missus,’ who wasn’t his wife, the girlfriend, who was more like his property, was the most obvious first option.
Once I looked at Eve, and especially after I remembered noticing how discoloured Jimmy’s dye job had been, everything else fell into place and I was left with a murderer and the bag of diamonds.
And I realised at once that Chopper and his ilk would never rest until they had found either the stones or the people who had taken them.
But I had a use for them. I had someone who was blackmailing my best friend and now me, and sitting in my hands was the means to pay him off.
“Gloves,” I handed a pair to Prissy, who raised an eyebrow.
“How come you two have white cotton and I have yellow rubber?” she asked, a trace of a whine in her tone.
“Because we got to choose,” Caz responded smartly, slipping the bag of jewels into her bag. “And I thought it would be a novel sensation for you.”
“You know what to do?” I asked Prissy again; worried that she might mess up even the simplicity of this plan. In return, I got a look that suggested she was well aware I considered her a moronic aristo with less sense than a watermelon.
“I’ll see you outside his office in an hour,” she said, as Caz and I pushed ourselves off our plastic benches and, nodding sombrely to Prissy, made our way out of the restaurant, along Baker Street and turned off, heading for the square where Balthazar Lowe’s office was located.
We got there in minutes. Caz, her hands still entombed in their white cotton gloves, pressed the doorbell and we reintroduced ourselves to the still sepulchral Miss Morgan, her tombstone teeth remaining, this time, tucked deeply inside her mouth, as though she’d been advised of the purpose behind our visit and found it non-U to grin at blackmail victims as they arrived to settle up.
Lowe was in his office – which we were shown directly up to – along with a small wizened old man who had the biggest, most pointy ears I had ever seen.
Basically, if Yoda had been Indian, and prone to wearing the most exquisite tailoring on the planet, he would have been Lowe’s associate.
I kept my hands in my pockets and my jaw set firmly, as though simmering with rage. Which I sort of was, to an extent.
“Lady Caroline,” Lowe smiled the smile of a victor, not bothering to extend a hand towards either of us but merely indicating the two seats on the opposite side of his desk and lowering his own bulk into a carved, high-backed chair opposite. “How lovely to see you again. This,” he indicated Yoda, “is Mr Chatterjee, who has kindly agreed to assist us with this somewhat unusual transaction.”
“Unusual?” Caz tilted her head in mimed confusion.
“Most people,” Lowe said, “donate in cash, securities, sometimes a direct bank transfer from another account – though often from an offshore account not in their own name. You’d be amazed how many people do that, thinking that disclosing to me the fact that they have a tax-dodging offshore account is a good – or indeed wise – thing to do.”
Caz smiled at him, a smile so devoid of warmth as to be glacial, and unclipped her handbag. “I think, Mr Lowe, that saying ‘Good morning’ to you would be an unwise and highly unpleasant thing to do. But we’re here and we’re here because you gave my family, and Mr Bird here, a deadline.”
“Ah yes,” Lowe turned his eyes on me. “The pretty policeman with the heart of gold and the fake wife. Careers would be ruined, lives destroyed, if it were to get out that he’d deliberately married her for the purposes of getting her into the United Kingdom and cheating the standard immigration processes.”
“It’s hardly international terrorism,” I shot back.
“Doesn’t have to be,” Lowe smiled coldly back at me. “Just needs to be a big enough scandal, a serious enough breach for you, or people like you, to want to pay me to keep it quiet.”
“Yes, well,” Caz said, reaching into the handbag, “you gave us a deadline which made it impossible for me or anyone in my family to lay hands on sufficient cash or bonds, but these have been in the family since grandfather brought them back from out East after the war.”
She, still wearing her white cotton gloves, laid the diamonds on the desk and sat back. Chatterjee leaned forward, opened the bag, lifted a jeweller’s eyepiece from his pocket, inserted it into his eye socket and, choosing a diamond from the pile, eyed the stone.
“Which war?” Lowe asked and Caz frowned, confusion evident on her face.
“Does it matter?” she asked.
“Not really; just making small talk.”
“I’d prefer,” Caz said freezingly, “if you didn’t.”
Chatterjee grunted, dropped the stone back into the pile, selected another, holding it up to the light in a pair of tweezers and began, once again, the analysis. Three or four more and Lowe – impatience clear in his voice – demanded, “Well?”
“They’re good,” Chatterjee said. “Top quality, excellent facets.”
“Good,” Lowe said, “they’ll cover the required donation. Thank you so much.” He stood, opening his desk drawer and sweeping, with one hand, the stones into it whilst at the same time extending a hand towards Caz. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Lady Caroline. Mr Bird,” he nodded at me, allowing his hand – unshaken by Caz – to drop.
“What happens,” I said, “with the,” I hesitated, as though searching for the right word, “evidence?”
“The evidence?” He paused, frowning, as though nobody had ever asked him that question before, then smiled, the shark glint back in place. “Oh, I destroy it. You have my word on that.”
“Insufficient,” Caz said flatly.
Lowe’s smile flickered. “I beg your pardon.”
“Not good enough,” she said, to clarify her previous remark. “I want to watch you delete the necessary files. I know you’ve got them on computer. I want to see you delete everything from your system with my own eyes.”
The smile came back, coldly. “I don’t think,” he said, “you’re in any position to want anything, Lady Caroline.”
“Really?” Caz dipped into her handbag, and extracted her mobile phone. “Only, I’m the woman who just gave you a fortune in diamonds, and I could easily call the police to ask them to come around here and ask you to explain what they’re doing in your desk drawer.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” he said, his eyes narrowing as Caz dialled the first nine on her phone. “If the police come here, all your brother’s secrets – all Mr Bird’s secrets – will be disclosed.”
Chatterjee looked nervous, shoved his jeweller’s eyepiece into the inside pocket of his Saville Row and eyed the door. “I really must be off, Balthazar. It’s been a pleasure to see you again. Sir,” he nodded to me, “Madam,” a nod to Caz, and he shuffled out of the room as quickly as his little legs could take him.
“Nine,” Caz said flatly, pressing the key on her phone again.
“Okay, alright,” Lowe threw his hands in the air, pulled another desk drawer open and extracted an ultra-thin laptop from inside, opening it on the desk and tapping some keys. “I just need to access my cloud account and find the right files. Ah yes,” he paused, sighing deeply, as though disappointed that he was going to have to delete the contents, “here they are.”
“Wait,” I said, pulling from my trouser pocket a USB stick, “I want them,”
“You want what?” Lowe looked from me to the USB, to Caz, to her phone and his confusion mounted. “What the hell is wrong with you people?”
“I want you to delete the files,” I said, “but first, I want the ones relating to Nick Fisher and I copied on here.”
“Copied?” He goggled at me. “You want copies?”
“I want copies,” I said coldly, holding the stick out to him.
“This isn’t someone’s holiday photos,” he explained to me, as though I were an imbecile.
“I don’t trust Nick Fisher,” I said, “I’ve been messed around by men befo
re, and I want some insurance to make sure he stays on side. Insurance which you have already collected for me. So I want those files copied to this USB.”
“You’re crazed,” he said, his eyes still flicking back to Caz’s phone.
“Just do it,” she growled, and he snatched the USB from me, jammed it into the drive on the side of his laptop and commenced tapping at the keyboard.
A few moments later and having shown us the screen – filled with dozens upon dozens of folders stored in the cloud – as he deleted the two marked ‘Bird’ and ‘Holloway,’ he handed me back the USB, shook his head as though still marvelling at how I could be so untrusting as to want the blackmail evidence of a lowlife like him to keep my boyfriend in check and, all pretence at normality or formality gone, watched us leave the office.
As the door closed behind us, I heard the sound of his desk drawer slide open and the delicate click of diamonds as they ran through his fingers.
Back on the street and having been absolutely sure that I had touched nothing with my un-gloved hands, we met Prissy on the far side of the square, the burner phone in my pocket vibrating slightly.
I removed it from my pocket and glanced at the screen. A text message had arrived. One word: ‘INSTALLED.’
I handed the phone and an index card to Prissy, who read the text on the card and pursed her lips. “I’m not saying this,” she said, vexedly.
“Neither of us can call,” I said, “he knows both our voices.”
“But this—”
“Just do it, Prissy,” Caz snarled, and the other woman blushed, bit her lip and dialled the number and spoke, her cut-glass diction lending a wholly new slant to the somewhat vernacular script I’d written for her.
“Alright? This Detective Inspector Reid? How’s the Chalfonts, mate?”
There was a tussle of noise from the other end, the sound, I imagined, of Reid spluttering, cursing and demanding to know who this was.
“Don’t matter who I am,” Prissy said, sliding a little further into character as a habitué of some demi-monde she’d doubtless seen once in a Dickens adaptation on the Beeb.
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