by John Harvey
‘That sort of money,’ Michaels said. ‘I’d be lucky to earn that in a year. A good year at that.’
Malkin shrugged. ‘You want a job well done…’
‘Listen.’ Leaning in, Michaels took hold of Malkin’s sleeve. ‘I could go down some pub in the Meadows, ask around. Time it takes to have a good shit, there’d be someone willing to do it for a couple of hundred quid.’
‘Yes,’ Malkin said. ‘And ten days after that the police would have him banged up inside and he’d give you up first chance he got. Listen to him, you’d been the one talked him into it, forced him more or less, did everything except pull the trigger.’
Michaels knew he was right.
‘You want another?’ he said, eyeing his empty glass.
Malkin shook his head. ‘Let’s get this sorted first.’
The money,’ Michaels said, ‘I don’t see how…’
‘Borrow it,’ Malkin said. ‘Building society. The bank. Tell them you want to extend. I don’t know. Add on a conservatory. Put in a loft.’
‘You make it sound easy.’
‘It is if you want it to be.’
For several minutes neither man spoke. Whoever had been the centre of all the police attention at the court had been taken in under close guard and now, indeed, there was a helicopter making slow small circles above their heads.
‘That bastard Silver,’ Michaels said. ‘He’s going to make a fucking fortune out of this.’
‘Yes.’
‘Smelling of fucking roses won’t be in it.’
‘That’s true.’
‘All right, all right. But listen, I’m going to need a few days. The cash, you know?’
Malkin laid a hand on his arm. ‘That’s okay. Within reason, take all the time you need. Silver’s not going anywhere quite yet. Meantime, I’ll ask around, make a few plans.’
‘We’ve got a deal, then?’
The skin around Malkin’s grey eyes creased into a smile. ‘We’ve got a deal.’
What was it they said about converts? They were always the strictest adherents to the faith? Since he’d turned away from a thirty-a-day habit two years ago, Will had been that way about smoking. Just about the only thing he found hard to take about Helen was the way her breath smelled when she’d come in from outside, sneaking a cigarette break at the rear of the building. Not so long back he’d given her a tube of extra-strong mints and she’d handed them back, saying they were bad for her teeth.
It was the day after Fraser’s body had been found.
Careful examination of the scene had found little in the way of forensic evidence; no stray hairs or fingerprints, no snatches of fabric snagged by chance on ladder or doorway. A series of footprints, fading in the slow-melting snow, had been traced across two broad fields; at the furthest point, close in against the hedge, there were tyre tracks, faint but clear. A Ford Mondeo with similar patterned tyres, stolen in Peterborough the day previously, was discovered in the car park at Ely station. Whoever had killed Fraser could have had another car waiting or have caught a train. South to Cambridge and London; east towards Norwich, west to Nottingham and beyond.
It was an open book.
‘Fraser,’ Will said. ‘I’ve been doing some checking. Fifty-two years old. Company director. Divorced five years ago. Two kids, both grown up. Firm he was running went under. Picked himself up since then, financially at least, but it seems to have been pretty bad at the time.’
‘That was when the wife left him?’
‘How d’you know she was the one who left?’
Helen touched her fingertips to her temple. ‘Female intuition.’
‘Bollocks!’
‘Excuse me, is that a technical term?’
‘Definitely. And you’re right, she walked away. What with that and the business thing, Fraser seems to have fallen apart for a while, started drinking heavily. Two charges of driving with undue care, another for driving when over the limit. Just under three years ago he lost control behind the wheel, went up on to the kerb and hit this eight-year-old. A girl.’
Pain jolted across Helen’s face. ‘She was…’
Will nodded. ‘She was killed. Not outright. Hung on in hospital for five days more.’
‘What happened to Fraser?’
‘Fined six thousand pounds, banned from driving for eighteen months…’
‘Eighteen months?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘And that was it?’
‘Two years inside.’
‘Of which he served half.’
Will nodded. ‘Two-thirds of that in an open prison with passes most weekends.’
‘That’s justice?’
Will shook his head. ‘Not so’s you’d notice.’
Helen drew breath. ‘What time’s the post-mortem?’
‘An hour from now?’
She nodded. ‘My car or yours?’
Malkin showed the appropriate credit card and booked a room at the Holiday Inn under an assumed name. It was a city he knew, though not well, and it was doubtful that anyone there knew him. Average height, average build, he was blessed with one of those faces that were instantly forgettable, save possibly for the eyes.
At the central library he read through the coverage of Silver’s appeal and then the reporting of the original shooting and trial. Aside from Silver’s own faded celebrity, much was made of the delinquent lifestyle of Wayne Michaels and his companion that evening, Jermaine Royal. Both young men had been in trouble with the police since their early teens; both had been excluded, at various times, from school. An accident, one compassionate reporter said of Wayne Michaels, just waiting to happen.
Malkin found a cut-and-paste biography on the shelves. The Fall and Fall of Alan Silver. He took it to one of the tables on the upper floor to read; just himself and a bunch of students beavering away at their laptops, listening to their iPods through headphones.
Silver’s mother had been a chorus girl, his father a third-rate comedian in music hall and a pantomime dame; Alan himself first appeared on stage at the age of six, learning to be his father’s stooge. A photograph showed him in a sailor suit, holding a silver whistle. By the age of seventeen he was doing a summer season at Scarborough, complete with straw hat and cane, Yorkshire’s answer to Fred Astaire. There were spots on popular radio shows, Variety Bandbox and Educating Archie; even some early television, Cafe Continental with Helene Cordet.
Three marriages, but none of them stuck; no children, apparently. A veiled suggestion that he might be gay. In the eighties, he had something of a comeback in the theatre, playing a failed music hall performer in a revival of The Entertainer, the part originally played by Laurence Olivier. Asked how he did it, Silver replied, ‘I just close my eyes and think of my old man.’
Soon after this he was featured on This is Your Lift and had some brief success with ‘Mama Liked the Roses’. Somehow he kept working into his sixties, mostly doing pantomime, trotting out his father’s old routines at the likes of Mansfield and Hunstanton.
Oh, no, it isn’t!
Oh, yes, it is!
He bought an old farmhouse between Newark and Nottingham. Retired, more or less.
Malkin phoned Michaels that evening, wanting to make sure he was still on board; asked a few questions about Wayne’s friends. Something Wayne’s pal, Jermaine, had claimed at the trial, that they’d been out to Silver’s place before and he’d told them come back any time. Did Michaels think there was any truth in that?
Michaels had no bloody idea.
‘Besides,’ Michaels said, ‘what difference if there was?’
None, Malkin told him. None at all.
‘Too bloody right,’ Michaels said. ‘Dead is fucking dead.’
The phone rang and before Will could reach it, Helen had snatched it up. Coat buttoned up against the cold, she had just come in from outside.
‘Lorraine,’ she said, passing the phone swiftly across.
Will’s throat went dry and his stomach p
erformed a double somersault, but all his wife wanted was to remind him to pick up an extra pint of milk on his way home if possible. Will assured her he’d do what he could.
‘No news?’ Helen asked, once he’d set down the phone.
‘No news.’
‘Well, I’ve got something.’
‘You’re not pregnant, too?’
‘Chance would be a fine thing.’
Will stood back and looked her over. ‘You want to get pregnant?’
‘You’re offering?’
He grinned. It was a good grin, took maybe ten years off his age and he knew it. ‘Not today.’
‘Damn!’ Helen smiled back. She liked flirting with him; it was something they did. Somehow it helped them along; kept them, Helen sometimes thought, from ever getting close to the real thing.
‘You want to tell me your news?’ Will said.
‘You know that expanse of water the other side of Ely? Close to the railway line?’
‘I think so.’
‘These kids were out there the day Fraser was killed. Late morning. They’d taken a makeshift toboggan, thinking the water might have frozen over, but it hadn’t. Just a little at the edges maybe, but that’s all. Not worth taking any risks; near the centre it’s pretty deep.’
Will nodded, waiting, perched on the edge of a desk. She’d get to it in her own time.
‘While they were there, the Nottingham train went through. They didn’t know it was that, but I’ve checked. One of the boys swears he saw someone throwing an object from the window between the carriages. Just for a moment, he thought it looked like a gun.’
‘How old? This kid, how old is he?’
‘Nine? Ten?’
‘You think he’s any way reliable?’
‘According to his mother, he’s not the kind to make things up.’
‘Why’s he only come forward now?’
‘Mentioned it to his mum at the time. She didn’t think anything of it till she saw something about the investigation on the local news.’
‘You know what the boss is going to say. Divers don’t come cheap.’
‘Not even if they’re our divers?’
‘Not even then.’
‘Think you can persuade him?’
‘What else have we got?’
‘So far? Diddly-squat.’
‘Why don’t I tell him that?’
‘Instant Tanning’ read the sign in the window. ‘Manicure, Pedicure’ in similar lettering below. ‘Top Notch Beauty Salon’ above the door. Lisa was sitting on the step outside, pink tunic, sandals, tights, smoking a cigarette.
Malkin crossed towards her and as he came close she glanced up and then away.
‘Busy?’ Malkin said.
She looked at him through an arc of smoke. ‘Takin’ the piss, right?’
By appearance she was a mixture of African-Caribbean and Chinese, but her accent was East Midlands through and through, Notts rather than Derby.
‘Lisa?’
‘Yeah?’
Malkin squatted low on his haunches, face close to hers. ‘You used to know Wayne Michaels.’
‘So what if I did?’
‘I’m sorry. About what happened.’
‘Yeah, well. Been and gone now, i’n’t it?’
‘You’ve moved on.’
‘Something like that.’
‘Good.’
Something about his voice made her feel ill at ease. ‘Look, this place.’ She looked up at the sign. ‘It’s what it says it is, you know. Not one of them massage parlours, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘Not at all. It’s just, if you’ve got the time, I thought we could talk a bit about Wayne? Maybe his mate, Jermaine? You were friendly with both of them, weren’t you?’
Lisa narrowed her eyes. ‘You’re not the police, are you?’
‘Perish the thought.’
‘Not some reporter?’
Malkin shook his head. ‘I used to know Wayne’s father a little, that’s what it is.’
‘Him told you ’bout me, I s’pose, were it?’
‘That’s right.’
Lisa lit a new cigarette from the butt of the last. ‘Got a good twenty minutes till my next, why not?’
There was a pair of divers, borrowed for the occasion from the Lincolnshire force, and they struck lucky within the first hour. Will grateful he could assure his boss there’d be no need for overtime. The weapon was a Glock 17, its bulky stock immediately recognisable. Any serial numbers had, of course, been removed. If they begged and pleaded with the technicians, another twenty-four hours should tell them if it was the gun responsible for Arthur Fraser’s death.
Will and Helen were both parked up at the side of the road, a lay-by off the A10, the Ely to Cambridge road. They were sitting in Will’s car, a faint mist beginning to steam up the insides of the windows.
‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ Will said.
‘Most probably.’ A hint of a smile on Helen’s face.
‘This shooting. Nothing to suggest any kind of fight or quarrel. Nothing personal. Every sign of careful planning: preparation. A single shot to the head with a weapon that’s almost certainly clean. A professional job. It has to be.’
‘Someone hired to make a hit on Fraser?’
‘It looks that way.’
‘Then you have to ask why.’
‘And there’s only one answer,’Will said. ‘Sharon Peters.’
Helen nodded. ‘The family, the parents, we should go and talk to them?’
‘Let’s wait,’ Will said. ‘Till tomorrow. Make sure the ballistics match up.’
‘Okay.’
It was warm inside the car. Their arms close but not touching. An articulated lorry went past close enough to rock them in its slipstream. Still neither one of them made a move to go.
Finally, it was Helen who looked at her watch. ‘Shouldn’t you be getting back?’
‘If anything had happened, Lorraine would have called on my mobile.’
‘Even so.’
He left her leaning against the roof of her VW, smoking a cigarette.
When Will arrived home, Lorraine was wandering from room to room, Cowboy Junkies on the stereo, singing quietly along. ‘A Common Disaster’ playing over and over, the track programmed to repeat. To Will, it wasn’t a good omen.
‘Lol?’
‘Huh?’
‘Can we change this?’
‘Change?’
‘The music. Can we…?’
‘I like it.’
Okay, Will thought, go with the flow.
A good few years back, when he and Lorraine had first started going together, she would fetch her little stash from where she kept it upstairs in the bedroom — her dowry, as she called it — and roll them both a joint. Now that he no longer smoked cigarettes and, Will supposed, with this latest promotion, if she ever suggested it, he passed.
Lorraine, he was sure, still partook from time to time, the sweet smell lingering in the corners of the house and in her hair. Maybe, looking at her slight, slow sway, she was stoned right now.
How would that be for the baby, he wondered, if it were so?
Would it make him a cool kid or slightly crazy?
There were some cans of beer in the fridge and he took one and went into the living room and switched on the TV. Lorraine had been vague about dinner, but he thought she was entitled, hormones all over the place like they were. Later he’d phone for a curry or, better still, a Chinese. It was ages since they’d eaten Chinese.
They were in bed before ten thirty, Lorraine set to read a chapter or so of whatever book she had on the go, Will rolling away from her and on to his side, arm raised to shield his eyes from the light.
He must have fallen asleep straight away, because the next thing he knew it was pitch dark and the bed beside him was empty. Lorraine was sitting on the toilet with her nightgown pulled high across her thighs.
‘You all right?’ Anxiety breaking in his voice
.
‘Yes. Yes, just woke with this pain.’ She indicated low in her abdomen.
‘But you’re okay? I mean, nothing’s happened?’
‘Nothing’s happened.’
When he bent to kiss her forehead it was damp and seared with sweat. ‘Why don’t you let me get you something? A drink of water? Tea? How about some peppermint tea?’
‘Yes. Peppermint tea. That would be nice.’
He kissed her chastely on the lips and went downstairs.
Back in bed, he found it near impossible to get back to sleep, dozed fitfully and got up finally at five.
Jake was fast off, thumb in his mouth, surrounded by his favourite toys.
Will made coffee and toast and sat at the kitchen table staring out, willing it to get light. At six thirty he gave in and dialled Helen’s number. She answered on the second ring.
‘Not asleep then?’
‘Hardly.’
‘Yesterday,’ Will said, ‘you think I was being overcautious?’
‘In the car?’
‘What I said in the car, yes. About waiting to see if we had a match.’
‘You don’t think there’s any doubt?’
‘Has to be some. But, shit, not really, no.’
‘You want to go over there now? Sharon Peters’ parents?’
‘What do you reckon? A couple of hours’ drive? More?’
‘Coventry? This time of the morning maybe less.’
‘I’ll meet you by the Travelodge on the A14. This side of the turn-off for Hemingford Grey.’
‘It’s a deal.’ Will could hear the excitement rising in her voice.
The traffic moving into and out of the city was heavy and it was close to nine before they arrived at the house, a twenties semi-detached in a quiet street with trees, leafless still, at frequent intervals. Cars parked either side.
There was a van immediately outside the house with decorating paraphernalia in the rear, partly covered by a paint-splodged sheet. The man who came to the door was wearing off-white dungarees, speckled red, blue and green.
‘Mr Peters?’
He looked Will and Helen up and down, as if slowly making up his mind. Then he stepped back and held the door wide. ‘You’d best come in. Don’t want everyone knowing our business up and down the street.’
One wall of the room into which he led them was a virtual shrine to Sharon when she’d been alive, photographs almost floor to ceiling.