Die Last

by Tony Parsons

  ‘But you got them,’ Mrs Greene said.

  I remembered Madam Theresa when they dragged her out from behind the recycling bins in the basement of the Hopewell Centre. And I saw Troy twitching as his lifeblood ebbed from him on the floor of that room with the empty bath and the single bed. And I also recalled how they ran, all of them, the clients and the women and the hired hands, how they couldn’t get away from the penthouse of the Hopewell Centre fast enough.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And it wouldn’t have happened without Billy.’

  There was a fierce pride in the face of Mrs Greene. But the fiancée was still poleaxed by the loss of all their plans.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I still don’t understand why Billy died.’

  ‘Billy lost his life helping us to smash a people-trafficking network that was run out of the Grand-Synthe refugee camp in Dunkirk,’ I said. ‘Illegally bringing vulnerable young women into this country to work in the sex industry.’ I thought of Rabia Demir, full of a killer dose of Fentanyl. ‘It is quite likely that murder charges will result from our investigation.’

  She shook her head, as if my words were meaningless.

  And they were.

  Because I knew what she was really asking but I had no answer.

  Was it worth it?

  We had our tea and cake, and my left elbow throbbed like a beating heart where Troy had hit me with his hammer and we were not in that room for more than thirty minutes for there is never much that can be said.

  ‘Billy’s fiancée – Siobhan – will meet someone else,’ Edie said when we were back in the car.

  ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘What is she? Twenty-three? She should meet someone else, shouldn’t she?’

  ‘But that will make it hard for her to see Billy’s mum. The new man will not understand if she wants to stay in touch with Mrs Greene. He – the new man – will see it as clinging on to the past and he is not going to like it. So she’ll lose contact and the old lady will be left alone. That’s what it will be like, isn’t it?’

  ‘But that’s what is meant to happen, Edie,’ I said. ‘You are meant to meet someone else.’

  But not Billy’s mother, I thought. The world was not big enough to fill the gap in her life.

  Edie cursed, and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. And then we did not talk about it for a while.

  And that was part of the ritual, too.

  After a short drive across North London we sat in my car, a box of Milk Tray opened on Edie’s lap as she removed all the chocolates that would be too challenging for her grandmother’s teeth.

  ‘Doesn’t look too bad, does it?’ she said through a mouthful of Hazelnut Swirl, showing me the box. There were three or four missing chocolates. I nodded approval, my mouth full of Apple Crunch.

  ‘She’s still got her Strawberry Temptation, Orange Truffle and Caramel Softy,’ Edie said, closing the lid.

  We ate our forbidden chocolates in silence and stared out across the gardens of the Golden Years retirement community, Finchley branch. It was set on one of those winding, leafy backgrounds that make parts of North London look almost rural.

  The building itself was a small manor house built for some local big shot at the turn of the twentieth century, a city house that dreamed of the countryside. Beyond the net curtains of leaded windows, white-suited nurses drifted like angels. Another nurse in white was walking carefully along a sanded garden path with an elderly woman, arm in arm, both of them laughing. The nurse pulled the old lady’s collar up against the chill.

  ‘Lil’s settled in?’ I said.

  Edie nodded and I could see her relief.

  Lil had a corner room on the first floor. The room was tiny – all the rooms at Golden Years were designed for a largely sedentary single person – and Lil was sitting in the room’s only chair while a Filipina nurse in a pristine white uniform changed her bedding. They were laughing together as we walked in and I was struck by the genuine and easy affection between the residents, who were mostly women, and the white-suited staff.

  Edie presented her grandmother with the chocolates.

  Lil made her selection, ignoring the missing chocolates, and grinned at us through a Strawberry Temptation.

  ‘My favourite young couple,’ she said, and I felt my face redden.

  ‘Wow,’ Edie said. ‘Now the old girl’s really gone batty, hasn’t she?’

  Lil swatted a playful hand at Edie’s head and thrust the Milk Tray at her nurse.

  ‘Maria?’

  ‘No thank you, Mrs Wren,’ Maria said, as she finished making up the bed and helped Lil back under the covers.

  ‘Salamat po,’ I told her and she nodded, smiling at my Tagalog.

  Edie sat on the bed and took her grandmother’s hand.

  ‘Happy, Nan?’ Edie said.

  ‘Best place I ever lived, sweetheart,’ Lil said, her mouth full of Orange Truffle.

  We drove to New Scotland Yard and went up to the first floor where Sergeant John Caine was waiting for us. There were no visitors to the Crime Museum today.

  There is a glass cabinet in Room 101 of New Scotland Yard, a modest display dedicated to police officers who have perished in the line of duty.

  OUR MURDERED COLLEAGUES

  More than a hundred years of faces. The images of the nineteenth century almost grey with age now. All of them are official portraits but some of the faces are dead serious, as if aware of what violent fate was waiting, and some of them grinning with genuine amusement. There were only men in the older pictures but then, from the middle of the last century the faces of the women officers start to appear. Some faces were still in the flush of youth and some in their middle years. Most of them were unknown to me but I had heard about some of them. A few had been my friends.

  DCI Victor Mallory. Age 50. Stabbed.

  DI Curtis Gane. Age 29. Died of injuries.

  All those dead coppers. They were in plain clothes and in the uniform of the Metropolitan Police, most of them long forgotten but some of them so famous that their deaths had been front-page news.

  WPC Yvonne Joyce Fletcher. 17 April 1984. Age 25. Shot.

  PC Keith Henry Blakelock. 6 October 1985. Age 40. Stabbed.

  Rank. Name. Age. And cause of death.

  All those policemen and women, I thought. All those different ways for us to die.

  Stabbed. Shot. Run over. Killed by a blow to the head. Rammed by vehicle being pursued. Bludgeoned during arrest.

  And yet they were not infinite, these ways to kill us. The same causes of death came round again and again and again, and they were no different now than they were when Queen Victoria was on the throne.

  Shot. Stabbed. Run over. Shot. Stabbed. Run over. Kicked in the head. Kicked in the head.

  John went to put the kettle on as Edie and I stood by the glass cabinet and stared at all those names, our eyes always coming back to the latest one.

  ‘He’s in there,’ John said. ‘He’s with the rest of them now.’

  ‘Thanks, John.’

  Trainee Detective Constable William Greene, it said. Age 25. Stabbed.

  The first warrant number in the Metropolitan Police – number one – was issued in 1829 and the first police officer to die in the line of duty was one year later – PC Joseph Grantham, kicked in the head while attempting to arrest a drunken man in Somers Town.

  Knocking on for two centuries of our dead.

  We thought about Billy.

  We remembered him.

  It is always cool and dark inside the Crime Museum, and although its prime function is as a teaching aid, when it is deserted, it is a place that seems built for remembering.

  We thought about the sacrifice our friend had made for people who would never meet him, and we thought about the dangers that he faced every time he went off to work, we thought about the mother and the woman who loved him.

  We thought about ourselves and all the luck we had enjoyed so far.

  We had our tea
.

  Then we went back to work.

  And this was the ritual too.

  32

  ‘So how did it work?’ Whitestone asked.

  Edie and I stood outside the interview room in West End Central, watching on the CCTV feed. Madam Theresa sat with her elderly lawyer.

  ‘She’s aged twenty years overnight,’ I said.

  ‘Then that makes her one hundred and ten,’ Edie said. ‘Someone should have busted her years ago. She’s never going to live long enough to make it to the Old Bailey.’

  Madam Theresa’s eyes narrowed at Edie as we walked into the interview room.

  ‘You could have done very well with me,’ the old woman said. ‘Juicy little thing like you. Petite rousse chaude! Hot little redhead! You could have had a great career on your back.’

  Edie leaned against the wall and folded her arms.

  ‘Until I overdosed on Fentanyl during my tea break,’ Edie said.

  Madam Theresa looked from Edie to me and laughed bitterly.

  ‘I should have seen the pair of you coming,’ she said. ‘Slipping in my dotage. Letting my guard down. Becoming too trusting.’

  ‘Yes, you’re just an old softy at heart,’ Edie said.

  I sat next to Whitestone, staring across the table at Madam Theresa. I did not think she would be dead before she came to trial. If anything, she seemed energised by her arrest, full of rage and poison for those who had put her in this room.

  ‘It was that little Filipina whore in Chinatown, wasn’t it?’ Madam Theresa said. ‘The things I did for her when she was fresh off the banana boat! And she ratted me out! Turning up her nose at me and then sending me a pair of undercover cops. That little bitch. What does she get in return? I bet you all look the other way in Chinatown, don’t you?’

  Whitestone rapped her knuckles on the table.

  ‘Look at me, you old crone. You are under arrest. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. I want to show you something.’

  Whitestone’s hand slapped down hard on the table.

  When she took it away, Billy Greene’s warrant card was there.

  ‘Pick it up,’ Whitestone told her.

  Madam Theresa glanced at her lawyer, as if this was another trap, and then reluctantly picked up the warrant card.

  ‘Look at that face,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘I never saw him before.’

  ‘And his mother’s never going to see him again. And his girlfriend is never going to see him again.’ Whitestone was trembling with anger now. ‘And the baby she’s carrying is never going to see him.’

  I looked at Edie.

  She nodded.

  I had been so wrapped up in the ritual that I had not noticed Billy’s fiancée was pregnant. I felt something flinch inside me.

  ‘That’s the warrant card of Trainee Detective Constable William Greene,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘The policeman who died,’ Madam Theresa said. ‘The one who was driving the lorry.’ She pushed the warrant card away. ‘It had nothing to do with me.’

  Whitestone clenched her fists. ‘It’s all to do with you! This reeking mountain of misery. I’ve got a lorryload of dead girls in Chinatown. I’ve got a knocking shop that is using up twenty women a week. What happened to them? I’ve got a young woman whose name was Rabia Demir – whatever grotesque pet name you gave her – who was killed by an overdose of Fentanyl.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Madam Theresa said, desperately looking at her brief.

  ‘My client wishes to cooperate,’ said the old lawyer.

  ‘Good for her.’

  ‘But she can’t answer questions about activities that she had nothing to do with. This lorry in Chinatown – Madam Defarge is not a people trafficker!’

  ‘No,’ Whitestone said. ‘She’s just a done old pimp.’

  I recognised Madam Theresa’s brief as a criminal lawyer from way back. I thought he had retired years ago. And perhaps he had and Madam Theresa never upgraded to a newer model. A common mistake made by the ageing villain. Whitestone was running rings around him.

  ‘So how did it work?’ I said. ‘Who set you up in the Hopewell Centre?’

  She looked at her lawyer. He nodded.

  ‘I was semi-retired,’ Madam Theresa said. ‘Conducting some minor business to pay the bills. Making introductions. Giving odd jobs to foreign students who needed to pay their rent. Young actresses who were resting. Models who were not quite tall enough or not quite skinny enough or not quite pretty enough or no longer quite young enough. And then I received an offer to set me up in a new establishment. Someone was bringing large numbers of young women into the country and there was a surplus. The Hopewell Centre was where we would put them to work in a high-end, big-ticket environment.’

  ‘But why bring them in?’ I said. ‘Why go to all that risk?’

  ‘Makes for a passive, pliant workforce,’ Whitestone said. ‘This old pimp’s just like every other corporate employer in the world. She prefers her workers to be terrified of losing their jobs.’

  I did not quite buy it. Running illegals across borders still seemed like a lot of heavy lifting for an upmarket knocking shop.

  Unless it was far more than that.

  ‘Who was your sponsor?’ I said. ‘Who set you up in business? Troy?’

  Her face twisted with genuine loathing.

  ‘That abomination? Fils de pute! That son of a whore was just a hired thug under the delusion he was some kind of revolutionary. I remember Paris in 1968 …’

  ‘Spare us the detours down memory lane,’ Edie said.

  ‘I am so sorry about what happened to you,’ Madam Theresa said to me. ‘I have always abhorred violence.’

  I felt my left elbow throbbing with the memory of that hammer coming down.

  ‘No harm done,’ I said. ‘Why were you getting through so many girls a week? What happened to the ones that disappeared? You boasted to me about residencies – as if I could buy a woman. Not for an hour, or a night, but forever. As if they were there to be bought and sold.’

  She waved a dismissive hand.

  ‘That was just sales talk,’ she said. ‘Women come and go in this field. Ask your little whore from Manila. Ask anyone. They get sick of it! They get a better offer! Some man with a soft heart and a hard cock takes a shine to them! That’s why there was a large turnover.’

  Whitestone looked at me and I shook my head.

  The old woman was lying through her pearly white teeth.

  Whitestone placed an empty notebook and pen on the desk.

  ‘I want to know who set you up in the Hopewell Centre or I am concluding this interview.’

  ‘I never saw my sponsor,’ Madam Theresa said. ‘I never met him. I never spoke to him on the phone. It was all conducted by some kind of factotum. A driver, I believe. I would know the driver if I saw him, but not his boss.’

  ‘Not good enough,’ Edie laughed. ‘Nowhere near good enough.’

  Whitestone grinned. ‘But maybe it’s true. Maybe there’s nothing more you can tell me. And then there’s really nothing you can do for me.’

  ‘I want to help you!’

  ‘I’ve got you on trafficking, manslaughter and living on immoral earnings.’ Whitestone nodded at me. ‘And I’ve got you on the attempted murder of this detective. And you want to cooperate? I am going to watch you die inside with or without your lousy cooperation.’

  ‘I’ll tell you everything I know,’ Madam Theresa said, suddenly desperate. ‘Troy. The Grande-Synthe camp. The lorry drivers.’ I saw her hesitate. ‘And what happened to the women who left. But on one condition.’

  Whitestone chuckled. ‘There are no conditions!’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you nothing.’

  Whitestone smiled, shaking her head. ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘I have a son,’ Madam Theresa said. ‘He has … problems. There�
�s some money put aside. I don’t want the money confiscated. I want it to go to him.’

  Whitestone laughed out loud. ‘Every old lag inside has children! Every low-life scum doing time has a son or a daughter who has to queue up to see Daddy or Mummy with all the other poor little sods whose parents got sent down! You should all think of those innocent little children before you buy the ticket.’

  ‘My son is not a child. He’s a man. And he’s in a home.’

  ‘A home?

  ‘My son is a long-term resident at Summerdale.’

  ‘Summerdale is a psychiatric hospital,’ I said. ‘How long has he been there?’

  ‘Always. Since he was a small boy. He has learning difficulties. And now he is a middle-aged man.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘In the Sixties they called him backward.’ There was a lifetime of bitterness in the word. ‘They would have other names for it today. They would be more understanding today. But fifty years ago there was no understanding. Fifty years ago there was only fear and shame and contempt.’

  Whitestone mockingly touched her heart.

  ‘So you did it all for your son! A tart with a heart of gold – my favourite criminal cliché.’ She headed for the door. ‘I am concluding this interview.’

  ‘I’m not asking for your sympathy,’ Madam Theresa said, her voice rising. ‘I will take what’s coming to me. But there’s a little money put aside. I want to make sure that my son is properly cared for. In return I will cooperate as fully as I possibly can.’

  Whitestone laughed out loud, and I saw the chip of ice that had been in her heart ever since the night that someone ruined her son. Whitestone would have listened to Madam Theresa once, I thought. There was a time when she would not have so casually dismissed a villain begging in the name of their child. That time had gone.