He’d kept his hair bleached blond and gelled into the same high spikes he’d worn on Top Of The Pops, and the crystal fishbone earring that was his trademark still dangled from his earlobe, but the Barbour boots, the shooting stick and the twenty five-acre Essex estate on which he’d built a working brewery and an orangery as well as the climate-controlled storage space that housed his vehicle collection told Dexter that he’d moved squarely into the Country Gentleman phase of his career.
And his once-notorious vanity was still intact too, if the delight he’d taken in showing off the land, the half-mile of miniature racetrack and now the cars themselves was any indication.
Although it was entirely possible, Dexter thought, that he might have succumbed to a touch of vanity himself, with a Royale in his garage. And he couldn’t fault the description: it was beautiful; spectacular really, a perfect convergence of art and science, from the leaf-spring suspension to the whalebone controls. He’d have sold… well, perhaps not his own mother for a chance to drive away in it, but certainly a more distant relative, a great uncle or a second cousin once removed.
“Shall we get down to it, then?” asked Hartwood.
Dexter returned, with some reluctance, to their conversation.
“With pleasure,” he lied.
“I’ll give you thirty large for the Jag,” Hartwood said.
“It’s worth forty.”
“Forty cash, is that? ‘Cause I got a big stack of fifties lined up in the safe, all ready to go. Leave the Jag and you can walk off with ‘em now, today. I’ll even get Gerry to give you a lift to the station.”
He threw a thumb back at the quiet man in the suit and tie standing a foot or so behind them, the one Hartwood had introduced as his business manager. He was older than Hartwood, white and bald and luxuriously bearded - the combination of domed scalp and beard suggesting an eagle’s egg incubating in a particularly well-thatched nest.
Dexter considered the offer.
He could certainly believe that Hartwood was good for the money. Whatever investments he’d made since his Glamshell days seemed to have paid dividends, and it was hardly out of the ordinary for a serious petrolhead to pay cash upfront. And Dexter did want rid of the Jaguar.
But there was also the matter of Hartwood’s rodent looks and abrasive personality, the wide boy rudeness that had grated on Dexter from the first, the air of entitlement with which he’d refused point-blank to come into town to look at the Jag - insisting instead that it be brought to him, so he could take it for a run around his estate before he made the decision to keep it or throw it back.
The prospect of riling him a little, of forcing him to negotiate on someone else’s terms - that too, Dexter thought, had its appeal.
“No,” he said. “No, I think not. Thirty five, cash, or I’ll be driving myself back to London.”
Hartwood pursed his lips, irritated.
“It’s like that, is it?” he said. “Thirty two. Last offer.”
“You’re not the only buyer I’ve been speaking to,” said Dexter. “And yours isn’t the only offer I’ve had. Thirty five.”
“And yours ain’t the only E-Type I’ve been looking at. So you can fuck off with your haggling.”
Gerry The Eagle leaned in towards Hartwood and whispered something in his ear. Hartwood pursed his lips again, this time in a way that suggested he’d just swallowed something disagreeable.
“Yeah, alright,” he told Gerry. “Alright.”
He turned back to Dexter.
“Thirty four,” he said grudgingly. “That’s as high as we go.”
It was probably as good as he was going to get, Dexter thought.
“Perfect,” he said, giving Hartwood the lazy, self-satisfied smile he reserved for police and other people’s solicitors after winning a settlement. “We have a deal.”
“You got the keys?” said Hartwood.
“In my pocket. And you can have them, just as soon as we’ve finalised payment.”
Hartwood glared at him.
You want to take a swing at me, don’t you? Dexter told him, silently. You haven’t quite got the guts for it, but I bet you’d say something, wouldn’t you? If I were shorter, and scrawnier, and had a bit less melanin.
“Something wrong?” asked Dexter sweetly.
Hartwood didn’t answer.
“Gerry!” he barked instead, spinning around so that he was facing his business manager. “Bring him his money, would ya? And get the paperwork sorted while you’re at it. He ain’t leaving here until I’ve seen a logbook.”
“I’m thinking there’s more to this story than you selling him a car,” said El. “So what happened? Was he scamming you?”
The Range Rover, creeping at a snail’s pace through the surprisingly dense evening traffic on the Abbey Road, braked to a stop at yet another traffic light.
“He was,” Dexter admitted.
“And you fell for it?”
Dexter sighed again.
“I did,” he said.
A fortnight later, the phone calls started.
The first was benign, in comparison to the ones that followed: a low-key message from Gerry The Eagle on the answering machine at the Strand office one morning, requesting that Dexter ring him back at his earliest convenience to discuss the sale of the E-Type. Something had cropped up, Gerry said - a small problem, nothing serious, but it would be terribly helpful if they could have a quick chat, for clarity’s sake.
Dexter had been confused - not least since, to the best of his knowledge, the Jag had been in perfect working order when he’d taken it out to Essex. But he’d made a note to return the call sometime that day.
Which apparently wasn’t quickly enough.
The second message, left while he was on another call, came from Hartwood personally. Though it was delivered via Dexter’s secretary, the matronly and entirely unflappable Mrs Day, and though it had undoubtedly lost some of its bite and bile in translation, the point was clear enough: Hartwood was dissatisfied with his purchase, extremely dissatisfied, and he wanted his money back.
“He said the engine had conked out on him,” Dexter said, turning into a quiet street off West End Lane. “And it was his belief that I’d clocked it, before I’d sold it to him. That I’d taken a lot of miles off the odometer to increase its value,” he added, for Rose’s benefit - apparently assuming that El’s knowledge of both internal combustion and the car con as a genre was sufficiently advanced to require no elaboration. This was only partially true, but El had no intention of telling him so.
“Which you hadn’t, of course,” said Rose.
“Which I hadn’t,” Dexter agreed. “That’s Mum’s game, not mine.”
“So, what?” asked El. “He was shaking you down?”
“Like a chestnut tree,” said Dexter. “But I wasn’t biting.”
He ignored the second message; went about the remainder of his day, reasoning that Hartwood, having failed to provoke the reaction he was looking for, would eventually give up and move on to a weaker target.
Though it certainly gave Dexter more insight into how a washed-up pop star best known for telling the nation that it was Time To Pull The Cracker had amassed those cars and that absurd country pile. If Hartwood and his business manager had been trying their luck with a reverse-clocking scam on even half of the people who sold to them, and if even half of those played ball - paying back the money but leaving the car in Hartwood’s possession, perhaps under the not-so-veiled threat of police involvement or private prosecution - then the pair of them would have been sitting on a mountain of undeclared, untraceable cash in virtually no time. And the cars would have paid for themselves.
The third call came at 7pm that evening, when he was at home and working his way through a Lincolnshire Poacher and chilli relish combination he’d recently received in a hamper from a particularly grateful import/export client. Michael was, thankfully, out at the supermarket, and his Mum busy doing something unspecified with Sita; he ans
wered the phone himself, expecting to find nothing more malign on the other end of the receiver than a wrong number or a telesales operative mispronouncing the name of the flat’s previous resident.
Instead, he found Hartwood.
“You been avoiding me,” he said.
“I’ve done nothing of the sort,” Dexter replied. “I was intending to call you back earlier, but the day got away from me. You know how it is sometimes.”
“I don’t care how it is,” Hartwood growled, in a way that was obviously intended to intimidate. “You think you can just pull one over on me and then skip away into the sunset? It don’t work like that, friend.”
The friend was pure Hollywood, an Essex boy crack at Dirty Harry or one of the Corleones. Dexter almost laughed aloud.
“Look,” he said, trying to keep his voice even, “can we cut to the chase? We both know I didn’t touch the milometer on the Jag. I appreciate you’ve got a con to run, and I’m sure you’ve found it very effective in the past, but you must believe me when I tell you that I would be an absolutely terrible mark. More to the point, I have no intention whatsoever of returning your money, however many times you call.”
There was silence at Hartwood’s end, punctuated by what Dexter thought was probably heavy breathing.
“I ain’t fucking around,” he said, when he spoke again.
“I’m very glad to hear it. And neither am I. So shall we agree to go our separate ways, no hard feelings?”
The growl this time was practically a splutter - an angry, disbelieving choke that sounded to Dexter not unlike the firing of an antique engine.
“You’re gonna regret this, Mr Redfearn,” Hartwood said, still channelling his inner De Niro. “I don’t know what you think you know about me, but I’m not someone you ought to be talking to like that. I’m connected, you know what I mean? I got mates. Mates you don’t want to be meeting down a dark alley. And they listen when I talk. So I’d watch myself, if I were you.”
Dexter considered, for perhaps half a second, whether he ought to take seriously whatever kind of threat Hartwood was making. Then, deciding against it, hung up the phone and went back to his cheese and chutney.
“I didn’t hear from him again,” Dexter said. “But this was last week. And for Michael, who to the uninitiated eye looks exactly like me, to get himself stabbed on our doorstep almost immediately afterwards… It seems likely that these two events are connected, doesn’t it?”
El was inclined to agree that it did.
“Hmm,” said Rose, as if chewing on a meaty problem. “I’m not so sure I think so. Taking out of the equation the possibility of a random act, a botched mugging or some poor soul acting out their troubles, and I’m certainly not saying that we ought to… You mother has her enemies, too. And it isn’t wholly unthinkable that one of them might see an attack on her son as the best way of getting to her.”
That’s true, El thought. Except…
“None of them know where she is,” said Dexter, answering the unasked question for her. “Michael’s been fanatical about secrecy - about not giving out the new flat number and keeping us ex-directory.”
“But you think that Hartwood worked out where you live?” Rose asked.
“He didn’t need to,” Dexter replied. “I filled out the paperwork for the Jag - contact details, everything. I gave him the address myself.”
Chapter 4
Stroud, Gloucestershire
July 1997
El looked out across the fields from the top of the hill, watching the grassland below slowly filling up with cars and people.
“That,” said a voice from behind her, “is a lot of old men.”
She spun around, her spiked heels carving divots out of the turf, and there was Karen Baxter, resting casually back against the hood of the vintage Rolls-Royce Phantom El had come in.
“How do you know they’re men?” El asked. “They look like ants to me from up here.”
“This your first time at one of these?” said Karen. “They’re always men. And they’re always old. Nobody but old men has got the time to do this sort of thing or the money to plough into it.”
She looked the same as she had the year before, El thought: still compact and muscled, still younger looking than her age, still draped in the ironic bemusement that covered her like a force-field.
The clothes were different, though - her standard leggings and vest top replaced by a very well-cut charcoal suit with more than a suggestion of a collapsible baton in the bulge at the inside pocket. Her curly black hair was cropped short at the sides, slicked and parted; she wore dark glasses high on her head and a very visible comms device in one eardrum, the cable looping from her mastoid bone to her neck and then disappearing into the collar of her starched white shirt.
“You scrub up well,” El said.
“What do you expect? I’ve done this before.”
She’d been playing the hired heavy the first time they’d met, El remembered. And playing it convincingly then, too.
“It’s the biceps,” she said. “And that scowl on your face doesn’t hurt, either.”
“It’s bloody typecasting is what it is. I shouldn’t have to keep being someone’s henchman just ‘cause none of you lazy fuckers ever drag yourselves to the weights room.”
“What is it you want to be, then? Zookeeper? Diamond merchant? Another dominatrix? Say the word, we can make it happen next time.”
“Next time? I thought you were retired.”
She’d hoped they’d be able to avoid the topic of her sudden return to the job - her conscription, as she’d been calling it, to herself if no-one else.
“I am,” she replied. “This isn’t me back. It’s… a favour. Just a favour.”
Karen nodded.
“Yep,” she said sagely. “That’s what I’ve been telling myself, too.”
Michael had been laid out on a futon in the living room when they’d arrived at the West Hampstead flat, thick layers of gauze and bandage criss-crossing his chest like a poorly-fitted toga.
He’d sat up as they’d entered, using the back of his head on the pillows behind him as leverage, then winced at the obvious discomfort the manoeuvre caused him.
“You need to stay still, darling,” said Sita from the cushion-stuffed armchair across the room. “Keep thrashing around like a conger eel and you’ll do yourself another injury.”
She was heavier and more furrowed than she’d been in her heyday - back when, or so Ruby insisted, the sway of her hips and the dark cascade of her hair could stop more traffic than a pelican crossing - but every bit as glamorous, from the jewelled heels of her Giuseppe Zanottis to the sweep and fall of the cashmere scarf around her neck. Even in her sixties - after two children, three husbands and innumerable lovers drawn from every block of the global population pyramid - she was striking, memorable, the sheer force of her personality plugging the aesthetic gaps her age had left behind. If she were ever inclined to seek him out, El thought, husband number four wouldn’t stand a chance.
Michael had allowed himself to sink, apologetically, back down onto the pillows.
“Good boy,” said Ruby, crouching down next to him and touching a hand to his sweating forehead. “You listen to your Auntie Sita.”
She was paler than usual, El thought; her lined face grey and her eyes red-rimmed, as if she’d been crying. Her hair, newly dyed an unlikely chestnut brown for reasons El suspected had more to do with her hibernation in Rotherham than with any con she was running, was loose and unbrushed. Her top, like Dexter’s, was painted with streaks of dried blood.
“Has Barbara gone?” Dexter asked - still sounding penitent.
“Only just,” said Sita.
“She stayed for a cup of tea and a chat, after,” Ruby added. “Gets a bit lonely without Terry. And a bit of company’s the least we can give her, after what she done.”
“I can’t help but feel she quite enjoys a captive audience,” said Michael.
Dexter grin
ned; Michael grinned back, and El found she was relieved to see no hard feelings lingering between them.
“You tell ‘em about Hartwood?” Ruby asked Dexter.
“In the car,” he answered.
She turned her attention to El and Rose.
“What do you two reckon, then?” she said. “You think it was him that done it?”
“I think it’s possible,” said El, hedging her bets.
“What do you think, Michael?” Rose asked. “I imagine you have a better sense than any of us.”
Michael shook his head.
“Unfortunately not,” he said. “I’m confident he was male, whoever he was - he was very broad in the shoulders and at least my height, perhaps even taller. Large feet, too - I had a front row view of his trainers, from the ground. But as to his face or any other kind of identifying feature… I really couldn’t say. He was wearing a mask - one of those rubber ones you find in joke shops. Unless he really was Prince Charles. In which case I believe we’d have ourselves an entirely different set of problems.”
This earned a chuckle from Dexter and a scowl from Ruby.
“You want to take this a bit more seriously,” she said. “And that’s both of you I’m talking to. It ain’t a joke.”
“Sorry, Mum,” said Dexter, chastened.
“Sorry,” Michael echoed, equally sheepish.
“Alright, then,” said their mother, mollified. “So, let’s say it was him, Hartwood - or someone working for him, more like, if he’s as much of a little weasel as he sounds. What do you lot want to do about it?”
“You’ve not done bad yourself on the costume front,” Karen said, as she drove them down the hill to the cluster of marquees that doubled as a registration area. “You gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse?”
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 3