Willing Flesh

by Adam Creed

  ‘Are we going somewhere?’ says Staffe. He thinks it might be a trick of the moonlight and the dappling sea, but Roddy Howerd appears to smile.

  ‘Bella is safe,’ says the young heir. ‘We have always loved night sailing.’

  ‘She is safe from whom?’ says Staffe.

  ‘You don’t know?’

  Roddy makes his way below, leaving the fenders out, and calling, ‘Father! He has come.’

  Staffe follows him down. Leonard Howerd is now sitting at the round table in the Imogen II’s galley. He stares at his hands, locked in a slowly twisting, constantly ravelling knot.

  ‘You have Arabella,’ says Staffe.

  Howerd raises his head and summons vigour to his eyes. They are bloodshot. ‘She is safe.’

  ‘I must talk to her.’

  ‘You are a guest here, Inspector.’

  ‘I’m not here as your guest, Mr Howerd, or your lackey. I have come to find out who killed Elena Danya and Rebeccah Stone.’

  ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree,’ says the Elder, looking not so kindly now.

  ‘And I’m expected to believe you, Thomas? If that’s your name. I guess not.’

  Behind the Elder, a younger man studies a chart. He is lean and has a ruddy face, a stitched wound across his forehead. Staffe’s head floods and he steps towards the Younger. ‘Where did you get that cut?’

  He doesn’t look up, simply says, ‘Fuck you.’

  Staffe continues, ‘Do you like hotels? Do you have something against prostitutes?’

  The Younger doesn’t look up, still. In his soft, Scouse accent, he says, ‘You put her in harm’s way.’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ says the Elder.

  Staffe considers something of what he doesn’t understand: the decades of the rosary, England’s shadowy lineage, the privacy of clubs. He says, to Howerd, ‘Why did Elena Danya visit the Colonial Bankers’ Club? An unusual place for your whore, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘She wasn’t my whore.’ Howerd regards Staffe with an unblemished superiority he simply can’t help.

  The Elder says, in low, measured tones, ‘Mr Howerd had nothing to do with any of that. There is irrefutable proof.’

  ‘He signed her in,’ says Staffe. ‘A week before she was murdered.’

  ‘We have new information. This will ensure Mr Howerd’s situation is not misunderstood.’

  Staffe turns back to Howerd. ‘How does a man like you end up in cahoots with someone like Markary? Your father must turn in his grave.’

  ‘You have no business with my family, Inspector.’

  ‘You keep strange company. Brothel keepers, immigrant workers. You had a thing for Elena.’

  ‘Shut up!’ shouts Roddy.

  Staffe feels a tight grip on his arm. He flexes, but the grip tightens. It is the Younger and Staffe twists to face him but feels himself sag to his knees, unable to resist.

  Leonard smiles down at Staffe, thin-lipped, life returned to his eyes. ‘Roddy will tell you, I’m not much of a father.’

  ‘Why are you so keen that I don’t speak to your daughter, Leonard?’

  ‘As you can see, she is secure.’

  ‘She was taken against her will. That’s a crime,’ says Staffe, on his knees, looking up.

  The Younger stoops, hisses at Staffe, ‘You know fuck all.’

  ‘Surely your own daughter wasn’t blackmailing you?’

  Howerd nods to the Younger. ‘Let him go. He needs to understand.’ He looks directly at Staffe as he is unhanded. ‘Do you believe in Right?’

  ‘I believe in evidence. I have just visited your site, Leonard. You have quite a source of cheap labour there, and I’m guessing Vassily Tchancov is sorting you out.’

  ‘Guessing? I thought you believed in evidence.’

  ‘I’ll get the evidence. But I know, by his admission, that he knew Elena. Was he putting the squeeze on you, Leonard?’

  ‘It’s not a term I would use. But I have had cause to undertake some research into Mr Tchancov.’ He holds out his hand. ‘You might call it an investigation.’ The Elder passes him a buff folder, marked VT, top right.

  The Elder invites Staffe to sit down, which he does – opposite Howerd. ‘You will have asked yourself why exactly Rebeccah Stone’s employer would want Elena Danya dead.’

  ‘Tchancov?’

  ‘Believe me, Inspector, had we not removed Arabella when we did and how we did, she would have been in the gravest danger.’

  ‘And Rosa?’ Staffe regards the Younger, with contempt.

  ‘She was never at risk.’

  ‘What would Tchancov have to gain?’ says Staffe.

  Thomas nods towards the buff dossier and Staffe opens it, reads quickly, his thoughts colliding, bleeding sense as he absorbs the press cuttings and military discharges, charge sheets and witness statements.

  ‘This is for flavour, Inspector,’ says the Elder. ‘There is more.’

  One charge sheet is dated four months before Vassily Tchancov’s discharge document from the Russian army. It is translated, as are the rest of the papers.

  The charge was for the rape of a girl, Ludmilla Shostavic. The girl was fourteen years old and her mother ran a farm on her own in the Urals, near the camp where Tchancov’s company had been based.

  The Elder says, ‘Wherever he went, Tchancov would coerce farmers to take his men on as labourers. The wages were paid straight to him, but Mother Shostavic worked the land herself and had no money for wages. It didn’t take Tchancov long to find a means of exchange. Ludmilla was thirteen when it began. Ludmilla took it for a year, then hanged herself, from the hay winch in the barn.’ He pulls from his pocket a photograph of a young girl hugging a boy. Whilst the girl is quite indistinctive, the boy is not. He is, indisputably, Bobo Bogdanovich. ‘This is Ludmilla, with her brother, Bobo. He changed his name.’

  ‘Ludmilla was Elena’s sister? Elena knew about this?’ Staffe takes the photograph from the Elder. ‘She’s not in the photograph.’

  ‘You really don’t want to dwell on where she might have been when this was taken. What she was …’

  ‘Tchancov would have remembered her.’

  ‘She was young and there were many. Believe me, Inspector.’

  ‘I don’t think I can go down this road. This isn’t evidence.’

  ‘He’s a powerful man, and really quite wealthy – though we have cause to believe he has been called upon to stretch himself, of late. Elena knows how to get the last drop from such men.’

  ‘She was blackmailing him?’ Staffe recalls the PRIVAT envelope from Rebeccah’s trove, the lilac correspondence in Tchancov’s house. ‘How did you get this information?’

  ‘We knew Miss Danya might bring you to Mr Howerd’s door. We had to prepare the truth.’

  ‘This isn’t exactly my idea of proof,’ says Staffe. ‘I don’t subscribe to hearsay.’

  ‘Perhaps you should start,’ says Howerd. ‘That man is a bastard, of the lowest order.’

  ‘Hearsay, Mr Howerd? How about you and Taki Markary – I’d never put the two of you together and I dare say you wouldn’t either. But I can see Imogen with a foot in each of your worlds. And I know that in your world, under your God, you could never divorce each other, no matter how much you loved or hated each other. I guess Taki and Sema were a real comfort.’

  In the doorway, Arabella appears. Her blankets shed, she stands tall, frail, holding onto the frame of the door. Her fair hair is lank and her eye sockets are dark, hollow. Her pale skin is mottled with dry, red blotches, her lips the colour of milk.

  ‘It is time you went,’ says Howerd.

  ‘Not until I have spoken to Arabella. I can see that if my curiosity was at all aroused by your relationship with Elena, then Arabella’s disappearance would throw me off that scent.’

  Arabella squints, trying to recall who Staffe is. The Elder stands by her, whispers into her ear, wary in the extreme as to what she
might say. ‘Have you brought Darius?’ She says it to nobody in particular. ‘I want Darry.’

  ‘I would like you to come with me, Arabella,’ says Staffe.

  She shakes her head, says, ‘I am happy here,’ as if reading from a cue card.

  And Staffe knows he has missed that boat. He buttons his jacket all the way. It will be cold up top. He feels the photograph that the Elder gave him, of Bobo and Elena’s sister. He says, to the Elder, ‘You were in the army, weren’t you? I’ll check.’

  ‘Don’t waste your time. I don’t exist any more.’

  ‘Is that where you met your scummy friend?’ Staffe looks at the Younger.

  ‘I wouldn’t rile him,’ says the Elder. ‘I’ve trained him, but he’s different from us.’

  ‘Thank God for small mercies.’

  ‘I take it you won’t be needing that lift in the morning.’

  ‘I’ll manage on my own.’

  On deck, Staffe looks around. The slap of sea on dock in the dark punches through the wind. The long beach he ran along just a few days ago trails away north, like a knife smear of oil paint.

  He will call on Tchancov, try to get to the bottom of what Arabella might have known but was prevented from saying.

  As he steps over the harbour chains, Staffe looks back. The Younger watches him, with cool, dead eyes. This is the man from the dunes. Staffe senses that he moves to an alternate beat.

  *

  Taki Markary sits at a table by the window and wipes his eyes, looks out to sea. ‘Elena,’ he says, under his breath. He brought her here, occasionally, to the Nelson, down the coast from Saltburgh and the other side of Warblingsea estuary. She liked the lobster but would never finish it. She always took some away in doggy foil. The staff would swarm around her.

  Afterwards, they would take coffee in the lounge and he would watch her read her book. Always with her book; mouth open, entranced, her eyebrows pinched by the puppetry of story. She loved it here, and she loved Taki, too – so he believed.

  Still, at night, when Sema puts her hand on his stomach and hooks her thigh over his and breathes heavy, Taki can see Elena. In dreams, they are sometimes here.

  The last time they came, she ate all her lobster and afterwards they drove straight back up the coast to the Signet. Elena didn’t read that night. Instead, they talked.

  She asked him why he had never had children. She seemed angry, accused him of having a cold heart. Taki told Elena that she had no business asking such questions and he and his wife wanted children but Sema couldn’t carry them. It was because of a fall from a horse when she was younger. ‘So don’t talk to me about a cold heart when my wife cries at night for children she cannot bear. Imagine her tears if she knew I was talking about such things with a whore in a hotel.’

  Waiting, now, for another woman to come to ‘their’ place, he feels the full weight of his history.

  His chest becomes tight. He thinks he misses a beat, two, and on the perimeter of his vision, he feels her. He shoots his cuffs, chin up, turns slowly – a gentleman.

  Crow’s feet pinch the corners of her eyes, but her cheeks are high and wide, her nose straight, and she is absolutely alive. Too much life. Here and there, men subtly turn.

  She sits beside him, takes his breath clean away. For an instant, an old love issues new.

  ‘Hello, Marky,’ says Imogen, breathily. Despite the years, she is every inch the woman she ever was.

  ‘You don’t change,’ he says.

  ‘Then you know nothing. How is Arabella?’

  ‘Safe, I hear. Do they know you have arrived?’

  ‘It’s been five years. I think we can all wait another day. I need to be ready for it.’ She takes a lusty swallow of Markary’s wine. ‘And how is Roddy?’

  ‘The same. He’s a quiet one.’

  ‘I miss him so,’ she says, wanting to say more, but deciding against.

  Markary calls the waiter over and, as if it is a proclamation, Imogen requests a glass and another bottle, orders lemon sole. ‘I know it’s not on the menu, but could you ask Chef to do me a tiny side bowl of black butter, and a few capers. Thank you.’

  The waiter nods, anxiously, ‘Of course. Of course, madam,’ he says, as if nothing could possibly be too much trouble for this lady.

  Her hair is shorter and she has a Mediterranean look to her, but still Markary is afraid she will draw attention to herself, may be recognised.

  ‘Don’t worry, Marky. I didn’t ever come to this place. It’s where Leonard would bring people – if you know what I mean. And even if they thought I was me, they’d be wrong, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘You really haven’t changed.’

  ‘Some things can’t change, but thank God I’m not one of them. Poor Leonard, he’s stuck with his lot.’

  ‘I thought that’s what you wanted.’

  ‘It’s for the best, but it’s not necessarily what you would choose.’

  ‘Have any of us got what we would choose?’ says Markary.

  ‘It’s a bloody mess, but as messes go, it’s quite a fine one.’ She laughs and her eyes sparkle. In the candlelight, all the years he has known her roll away.

  The waiter comes with his starter and Markary eats his whitebait, one by one. Every four fish, he takes a delicate bite of the buttered brown bread. He eats with his fingers, the way you should and the way you are prohibited from in places such as the Colonial Bankers’ Club.

  ‘You still enjoy life,’ she says.

  Looking at her, that long and fateful afternoon reprises – on the sun deck by the Bosphorus, drinking wine whilst Leonard and Sema were away, sailing. Of all the women he had ever had, she could never be sated. Like the sea, she came and she came.

  He holds up a small fish. ‘Nothing like the real thing. The catches we landed in Turkey, fresh from the sea.’

  Imogen says, ‘It’s still the same – over there.’

  ‘Nothing is the same.’ Taki finishes his whitebait. ‘What good can come from this?’

  ‘We have to think about the greater things,’ says Imogen. ‘Do you think they will get the Russian before I go back?’

  ‘I don’t understand how you can fight so hard for this and then return to the shadows.’

  ‘It is what’s right. It’s what we strove for and not as if we have a choice. There is no free will, here, Taki.’

  This saddens him. If anybody’s spirit was born to be free, it is Imogen’s. He thinks about accidents of birth, raises his glass. ‘To the Howerds,’ he says.

  Imogen says, ‘To what is right.’

  ‘And if there is a slip, between the stirrup and the ground, as you say?’

  ‘I will confess.’

  ‘To your priest?’

  She laughs. ‘That will happen, come what may.’

  The waiter brings Imogen’s sole and Markary’s calamari. He lifts a forkful to his mouth, tastes the sea. The flesh is tender, perfect and melting. He closes his eyes and sees the Black Sea, the sun dipping to a more eastern west. ‘How is Mark?’ he asks.

  Imogen reaches down, picks up a small, hand-sewn clutch bag, produces a six-by-four photograph and shows it to Taki. The young boy with the dark skin and the mop of jet-black hair and the straight nose smiles into the camera.

  Taki takes it but Imogen grabs it back, returns it to the bag. ‘I’m afraid you can’t have it,’ she says.

  ‘But I’m his father.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like, Imogen.’

  ‘Oh, I do. But you shouldn’t worry. I love him enough for the both of us.’

  ‘Too much can be as bad as too little, don’t you think?’

  ‘We need to love, Marky, but we have to take it when and where we find it.’

  Twenty-eight

  Staffe swivels in his chair, turns his back on Pulford and stares loosely into the windblown snow above Cloth Fair. The words garble. The truth beyond them rings untrue.

  Blears is dead. He took his ow
n life as if he were both pig and slayer.

  ‘There’s better news, though, sir,’ says Pulford.

  ‘Better? Is that an appropriate term?’

  ‘For the case, yes. We can hook Tchancov up to the development in Suffolk. The registered address and company secretary of Vodblu match to a Magellan Holdings. Magellan has registered a charge against the land up there. It relates to a profit-share agreement. Do you think he was extorting Howerd? Shall I bring him in?’

  ‘I’ll pay him a visit.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’ says Pennington, coming into the room, twirling a pen between his fingers. He stands next to Staffe, planting a palm on his DI’s shoulder.

  Staffe explains what he knows to Pennington, shows him the photograph of young Ludmilla and the charge sheets for the Shostavic rape.

  ‘I think that maybe Elena was blackmailing Howerd, on Tchancov’s behalf, to get him a fatter share of the profits in Aldesworth Country Town. He’s supplying all the immigrant labour up there, making millions. He scared off the big UK contractors to get the job.’

  ‘They’d never testify to that,’ says Pennington.

  ‘Elena came to avenge her sister.’ Staffe taps the photograph of Ludmilla Shostavic, and closes his eyes, recalls the first time he saw Elena Danya: pale and naked; beautiful and dead. ‘She came with her brother, Bobo. She was trying to turn the tables on Tchancov.’ Staffe picks up the charge sheets and slams them back down on his desk.

  ‘You have nothing to prove that she was blackmailing Tchancov or Howerd.’

  Staffe has been in a quandary all the way from Saltburgh, and now, with heavy blood, he goes to his filing cabinet, reaches deep, puts his hand on the envelope marked PRIVAT in Elena Danya’s hand. But in the moment, he thinks better, lets go of the envelope.

  Pennington says, ‘You’re just making all this up.’

  ‘The truth is, sir, I can’t prove Danya was blackmailing anybody. I need to speak to Bobo. He’s the only one who can prove it was Tchancov behind everything.’

  Pennington stands, picks up the photograph and Vassily Tchancov’s rape charges and discharge from the army; gives them a final once-over. ‘I’ve made some enquiries of my own. You’re right about Tchancov – he is under pressure. His cousin is coming to live in London.’