by Anna Smith
Rosie turned to face her. ‘Yes. I live nearby,’ she said. ‘Guy found shot in one of the flats. Not what you’d normally see around this neck of the woods.’
‘Exactly.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘But that’s the problem these days. It used to be a good class of people who lived in these flats and this area, but now it’s all that new money. People can buy anything, and the area’s not as pleasant as it was.’ Her accent was posh Glasgow West End.
‘Did you know your neighbour – in the flats where the body was found?’ Rosie ventured, thinking that if she was getting away with it so far she’d keep it simple, not admitting that she was a reporter.
The woman rolled her eyes to the ceiling.
‘Her?’ She sniffed. ‘Nobody really knew her. Or him, for that matter. Not the dead man. I mean her husband. That bloke who went missing – the accountant. They’ve only been here about five years. They lived down below me, but I wouldn’t say I knew them. Mind you, some of the fights . . .’
‘What, fights between the woman and her husband?’
‘Yes. Before he went missing. I reckon he just did a runner to get out of her way. She’s a bit of a lowlife. Bit rough. She’s got a mouth on her like a sewer.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. And that bloody bloke she’d been knocking around with.’
‘Who?’
‘The guy they found in the flat. The one who got shot? Frankie, his name was, I think.’
‘You’ve met him?’ Rosie hoped she wasn’t wide-eyed.
‘Just on the stairs. He’s only been on the scene for the last year. He was never in the house when the husband was there, as far as I know. But I used to see him picking her up outside, in a car, when her man was at work. She was obviously at it with him.’
Rosie tried to keep her face straight. Who needed a newspaper, when you could get a running commentary like this? God bless nosy neighbours.
‘Really? That’s interesting. It’s Lewis, isn’t it? Helen Lewis.’
‘Yes. That’s it.’
‘They say he’s been lying there for a few days – the dead guy.’
‘I know. It was me who phoned. The last day or so, the stink in the place. It would have turned your stomach. I phoned the police this morning. Of course the last thing I expected was someone lying dead with a gunshot wound. It’s like a bloody film.’ She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin.
‘I suppose the police were asking you to make statements and stuff.’
‘Yes. But what can I say? I just told them everything I knew over the last few months. She was hardly ever there. I think they might have a house in Spain or somewhere. Or maybe up north. But she’d be there one day and not the next. She doesn’t even work, to my knowledge, so I don’t know where she goes.’ She paused. ‘But the last week or so, I heard her and him – the dead guy – shouting and bawling at each other. And one time I looked out of the window and saw them in the street – he grabbed her and she seemed to be trying to get away from him.’
Rosie nodded, enjoying how much the woman was relishing the drama. She’d barely asked a question, and now she had enough for an exclusive splash. No doubt the woman would have told the police everything she’d relayed to her, but the cops wouldn’t be putting this kind of stuff out to the press. So unless any other reporters were fortunate enough to get this woman on the doorstep, she’d have it all her own way. But Rosie’s forever guilty conscience was beginning to niggle, and if she was going to blast this background information all over the front page tomorrow, she might at least come clean. She wouldn’t be attributing her comments to anyone in particular, but the woman might recognise some of her words, and you never knew when you might need someone again. Best to be honest. At least she hoped so. Rosie took a breath.
‘Look,’ she glanced over her shoulder at the half-empty café, ‘I would have said to you earlier, but I didn’t get the chance. I’m actually a journalist.’ She paused for a reaction.
‘A journalist?’ The woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘But I assumed you lived here.’
‘I do. But I’m also a reporter. From the Post. My name is Rosie Gilmour.’ Rosie stretched out her hand.
‘Oh,’ the woman said, taking her hand, but looking a little sheepish. ‘And here’s me running off at the mouth. I . . . I shouldn’t have said so much. Look, I hope you’re not going to quote me.’
‘Of course not,’ Rosie said. ‘I don’t even know your name. The street and the building is big enough for me to attribute your comments to anyone. But I do think something stinks up there – and I don’t just mean the dead body.’ She leaned in conspiratorially, sussing that the woman would like this. She did.
‘Yes. You and me both.’ She nodded. ‘But really. Don’t be quoting me in the papers. I mean, I’m just trying to mind my own business. It’s not my fault if I hear all that shouting and arguments. This place used to be so quiet. It’s people like them who are ruining it for the decent folk.’
‘Don’t worry. I totally understand.’
As the woman stood up, Rosie drained her cup, left two pounds on the table and got up.
‘Do you think we could have another chat some time? I’m going to be working on this story. And, actually, I already was investigating Alan Lewis’s disappearance, but got nowhere. I’d like to get a bit more background, on both him and his wife.’
The woman shrugged, looked a little uncertain. ‘Well. I don’t know that much. Only what I see and hear. And that Alan bloke. He was away a lot too. I think he kept some dodgy company. I saw people picking him up in a car a few times. Foreign-looking people.’
‘Really?’
The woman pulled on her coat. ‘I have to go just now. I have a dental appointment down the road. So do you have a card or anything?’
‘Yes.’ Rosie fished out her card and handed it to her. ‘If you’re free, give me a call. Or, can I have your phone number? I don’t even know your name.’
‘Elizabeth,’ she said. ‘Elizabeth Baxter. I’m retired now. I was a dance teacher. I’m out quite a bit during the day.’ She reeled off her number.
‘Do you mind if I give you a call later today, and maybe we could have a coffee tomorrow? Or I could come to your flat?’
She frowned. ‘No. Don’t come to the flat. There might be police about. I mean, I’ve nothing to hide, and I’ve told them everything I know, but I don’t want to be seen talking to a reporter.’
‘No problem,’ Rosie said.
They walked out of the café together, the woman tucking her red cashmere scarf into her coat.
‘Thanks for your help, Elizabeth. I really appreciate you being so frank. I’ll call you later.’
‘I should keep my mouth shut sometimes.’ She smiled. ‘My husband used to say that to me, God rest him.’
She walked away, and Rosie watched as she disappeared around the corner and crossed the road towards the city centre.
Chapter Two
Helen Lewis was still reeling from seeing Alan walking into her flat, so much so that she could barely string a coherent thought together. She was holed up in a hotel next to Waterloo Station. She must have been on automatic pilot all the way down on the train from Glasgow, because right now she could barely remember anything about the journey south, as though she’d done the whole thing in shock. In fact, shock didn’t even cover it. No wonder. It’s not every day your dead husband walks back into your flat, seconds after you’ve just pumped several bullets into the guy you’d hired to kill him. Jesus wept! How the fuck could that have happened? She cracked the seal on the third miniature of Jack Daniel’s from the hotel minibar and poured in some Coke and ice.
She lay back on the bed, glancing at the blonde wig beside her, and felt her face smile a little.
The whole wig as a disguise idea had come to her as she’d planned her getaway. And even if it did feel a bit ridiculous, it had to be done – for the moment anyway. It actually looked quite good on her, like the real thing, and enhanced her high cheekbones
and full lips. She might make it a more permanent fixture. She swirled the ice in the glass and swallowed another mouthful, puffing on her cigarette and letting out a trail of smoke.
She’d planned this to the letter. Of course, all the plans were those she’d actually made a month ago, while she was still besotted with that arsehole Frankie Mallon. But they had to be binned once she realised, first, that he was giving her the heave-ho, and second, that he intended to hump her out of every crooked penny her husband had ever earned. What a bastard.
Frankie and her went back a long way, and were cut from the same cloth, even though they hadn’t known each other back then. She was older than him, but she remembered him as a figure in the Gorbals where they grew up. He was a known kleptomaniac, who could tell a lie that would get you hanged. Shoplifting at twelve, and then a fraudster by the time he was fourteen, always managing to stay one step ahead of Borstal. Frankie brought a whole new meaning to the word ‘chancer’, and gangsters often used him as a front man in mortgage frauds because he was the kind of smiling, drop-dead gorgeous charmer who could walk into a building society, armed only with a fake ID and wage slips, and waltz back out with a hundred-grand mortgage in his back pocket.
But by the time Helen met Frankie again, she’d long since left the world of the Gorbals and its stinking poverty behind her. She’d bagged an accountant. Crooked or not, didn’t matter a shite to her. Alan Lewis was loaded. And she liked loaded. She’d been conscious of her stunning beauty from an early age, and it had been her saving grace. It gave her power she wouldn’t have had, coming from the kind of background she did, where she had no right to have the expectations she had. Once she met Alan Lewis, she knew she wouldn’t have to do much to have him following her around like a lapdog, and in months he had proposed to her. This was the good life, travelling, best restaurants, meeting his posh public-schoolboy mates and their horrendously boring, naff wives. She didn’t fit in, but she could do a great Oscar-winning performance if she needed to. She’d been royally pissed off when he bought a lavish villa in the countryside in Romania, instead of Marbella where Helen felt truly at home among the designer shops and teeming wealth of Puerto Banus. But Alan had assured her the property – set in the spectacular hills of Moldavia – was a huge investment, dirt cheap, because he’d got in on the ground floor after the country’s dictator was ousted. Romania was the future, he’d declared, and soon everyone would want property and business there. And he threw even more money at investing into a wine-importing business. But Helen was bored rigid with the place after a few months of visits. She was in the middle of bloody nowhere. Alan was out doing business most of the time. Some of the guys he mixed with looked like they would tear your head off, so Helen always made herself scarce when they were around; she knew thugs when she saw them, and these guys were thugs. But money was pouring in from the wine business, and Alan was organising the accounts of his associates. Yeah, sure you are, she thought privately. Laundering their money, more like. He was even involved in doing the accounts of some UK charity who brought clothes and aid to Romanian orphans, for Christ’s sake. Mother Fucking Teresa she wasn’t, so she steered well clear of that as much as she could. But there were no flies on Helen either, because despite leaving school at sixteen, she’d excelled at bookkeeping. And it had come in handy when she began to unravel Alan’s accounts one time when he was away on business and she had the place to herself. He’d come to trust her implicitly, and he had so much money, he didn’t seem to miss the few grand she was moving around every couple of months. She couldn’t believe how easy it was. She would have kept it that way, saved up for the inevitable rainy day when she got older and he got tired of her, trading her in for a younger version. But things changed. Alan came home from one trip to Bucharest and gave her a dose of gonorrhoea, no doubt picked up from one of the hookers who hung around the hotels. He begged her forgiveness and while she told him she accepted his apology, it was the final nail in his coffin. She’d always been planning to get out, from the moment she saw how filthy rich he was. It had only been a matter of time. But it was triggered by the chance meeting of an old Gorbals chancer.
When Frankie Mallon had turned up at a posh accountants’ dinner in a Glasgow hotel, he took her breath away. At first she didn’t recognise him, but had been stunned by the handsome smouldering hunk dressed in a black suit and shining like a new pin. He was introduced to her as a business associate who was a property developer, but as soon as he said his name she nearly dropped out of her chair. She managed not to show any reaction, and if Frankie recognised her, he didn’t show it either. But later that evening, when Alan had gone to the bar to talk to another associate, Frankie had sidled over to her table, leaned in and whispered to her.
‘You’ve done fucking well for yourself, for a wee tart from the Gorbals.’
‘And you’re still a chancing bastard, Frankie Mallon.’
He’d grinned and clinked champagne glasses with her, and it was as though there and then the seeds of the plot were sown.
*
Helen puffed up her pillow on the bed, recollecting how she and Frankie had planned Alan’s murder to a T. It had started off as a quip by Frankie one night when they were both high on champagne and cocaine. But as soon as he said it, a light went off in her head and all sorts of pictures of a future without Alan suddenly appeared possible. If she was a widow, she could have his money, the trappings of his wealth, and live happily ever after with Frankie. She owed it to herself, she convinced herself over the few days that followed. Frankie hadn’t mentioned it again, so it had been she who brought it up. She’d asked him about getting rid of Alan, what it would take. He said people could do that, no problem, the circles he moved in. Then they hatched the plot. He would do it himself. Had he ever killed before? she asked, but he wouldn’t say. She suspected he had. The decision was made. It would have to be abroad, they decided – in Romania. And that was it.
When it was done, Frankie returned to Glasgow, and Helen arrived from Spain where she’d gone to cover her tracks so she could be nowhere near Romania when it happened. He’d told her how he did it. They’d gone out fishing, and had a few drinks. He’d hit Alan on the back of the head and pushed him over the side of the boat. He watched him disappear under the water and when he didn’t resurface, Frankie started the engine of the boat and headed back to shore. He didn’t look back. How had Alan got out of that? Helen thought now as she lay there. Frankie said his head injury knocked him clean out and blood was pumping from his head. How the Christ had he survived? Now she was thinking that Frankie had lied to her all along. Knowing him for the scheming bastard he was, she wouldn’t have put it past him to double-cross her. Perhaps he even told Alan she’d sent him to murder him, and maybe Alan promised him more money to let him go. Anything was possible. But it didn’t do him any good, because now he was lying stiff. Fuck him!
Helen picked up the remote control and switched it to the news, staring at the television, half listening. Then she heard the Scottish news leading with a story about the body of a man found in a Glasgow flat. She perked up, shook her head to clear it for a moment, put the glass down as she turned up the volume. Frankie Mallon’s body had been found in the flat of a woman whose husband went missing in Romania several months ago. Police will not say if there is any connection, but are following up all lines of enquiry and appealing for anyone to come forward who was in the vicinity of the apartment and who may have seen someone enter or leave a few days ago . . . Helen watched as Frankie’s body was stretchered out to a waiting hearse, the few cops and locals hanging around like ghouls. They were anxious to trace Helen Lewis, who lived at the flat, but who had not been seen for several days. They would not say if she was a suspect, but wanted to talk to her.
‘Fat chance,’ Helen muttered as she got off the bed, went into the bathroom and ran a bath.
She came back out and opened her small airline carry-on bag and pulled out one of her passports. She had three, and all of the
m were fake, courtesy of Frankie’s mate. But the one she was using was in the name of Linda Barnet, and she’d be out of the country before the cops could get off their arses and do any more digging. She swigged the dregs of her drink, then took off her clothes and stood naked, gazing at herself in the mirror. Icy blue eyes stared back, and she narrowed her gaze. She felt nothing. She just wanted to get as far away from here as possible. By tomorrow morning she’d be in Paris, and from there she had a flight booked to the Cayman Islands, where she’d spirited away plenty of Alan’s money in the past few months. For an accountant, he was so wrapped up in whatever shit he was in, he hadn’t even noticed. She raised her glass and thought of what Frankie had said that first night she met him and fell for him.
‘Not bad for a wee tart from the Gorbals.’
*
Helen stepped out of the old hotel with her suitcase on a trolley and into the chilly morning air, then walked across the concourse and into Waterloo Station, where she stood looking up at the board. Then she put her bags through Security on the other side with the rest of the waiting passengers. She had thirty minutes to her Eurostar train, so she crossed to the coffee shop and sat down, her eyes on the magazine she’d picked up in the hotel foyer. But she was not really reading it. She looked around at the business executives and travellers and the air of tranquillity around the station and congratulated herself that she’d decided not to fly. Security was so simple here. A man reading a newspaper came over and sat a distance away from her, but she caught him looking at her. He was dark, Slavic-looking or Balkan, and not unattractive. She glanced back at the magazine. Then the train was called and it was time to board. She made her way to the queue and on to the train. It was her first time and she was more than impressed by the luxury. She settled into her seat and closed her eyes. During the journey she got up only once to go to the toilet, noticing most of the other passengers asleep or reading, and she saw the same man who’d been opposite her in the café. He didn’t look in her direction. When she finally got off and decided to have the evening in Paris, she thought she saw him again, but decided it must have been her imagination. Enough of the paranoia, she told herself.