The Winter House

by P. R. Black

  He laughed, gruffly. ‘People from all over Europe knew about it. There’s a rumour about twenty people have died because of it, up and down the chain. Double-crosses, heists, ambushes. Lot of blood in the mix. The shipment was very, very valuable at all levels of the chain. I’m not sure how Grainger got it, but he did. And its last known resting place was in that Datsun. Since then…’ Bell snapped his fingers. ‘No sign of it. The car, as well as the drugs. Until it turned up in your paper.’

  ‘That’s a shock to me,’ Susie said. ‘There wasn’t any sign of drugs when it was opened up.’

  ‘You sure about that? How did Vonny and Seth react?’

  ‘Well they were surprised about the car. They were quite keen to get it in the paper. Good selling point, for their careers. I got the impression they wanted the story to get picked up by the nationals.’

  ‘They tell you what they’re doing with the house?’

  ‘Uh… living in it?’ she said, in puzzlement.

  ‘Not putting it up for sale and getting out? Cashing in?’

  Susie shook her head. ‘Not according to them. It’s their dream place. Their forever house.’

  ‘Interesting that they should take out a glorified ad in the paper, then. No offence.’

  ‘None taken. That’s what I assumed at first, too. But they were more looking to market themselves. She wants to showcase her designs. I think he’s a DJ – had a number-one hit, too.’

  Bell waved this comment away. ‘I couldn’t tell you any number-one since about 2002. I’ll look him up, though… Anyway. It’s an awesome house, that’s for sure.’

  ‘You’ve been there?’

  ‘Oh yeah. I took a good look around. As I said, I spoke to Vonny yesterday.’

  ‘Lovely lady.’

  ‘That’s right. So, I just want to ask – nothing was found in the car, to your knowledge?’

  Susie shook her head slowly, as if trawling through files in her memory. ‘No, I didn’t see anything unusual.’

  ‘Who opened up the car? Was it Seth or Vonny?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  He frowned a little. ‘You’re a reporter, aren’t you? I know some reporters in London. I’ve got a bet on with one or two – that a copper would always notice more than a hack. And I always win. But you look like you could be different. You look like you’re a details person. Are you sure you can’t remember?’

  ‘It may have been Seth.’

  Bell nodded. ‘I get you. Sounds like I need to talk to Seth. He’s a hard man to pin down.’

  ‘I could send over some photos to you, if you like? Of the place we found the car, that type of thing?’

  ‘Won’t be necessary. I’m sure the car’s clean as a whistle. I took a few boys over to check it out a few days ago. Guy who bought, this classic car dealer, was very helpful. Not a speck of drugs in there, that’s for sure. The drugs will be buried somewhere, probably at the bottom of that artificial lake. Mice and badgers will have been into it. They’ll have the time of their lives. Anyway – Susie, thanks for taking the time to talk to me.’ They shook hands, awkwardly. ‘I’ll leave you a number to put in your phone, if you want to talk to me.’

  She agreed to this, then that was the end of the interview.

  *

  It wasn’t quite a nagging suspicion. There was no eureka moment, no time when Susie understood that something untoward had happened. Something seemed to pick at her psyche the way a cat will worry a torn patch in upholstery, until the hole is too big to ignore.

  She turned towards the three men in the office. They were surrounded by greasy wrappers, the second takeaway of the day. ‘Hey, Wheels. Is it true your cousin’s in the police?’

  Whelan snorted. ‘Yeah, sadly I can confirm. Based at Holmouth Street cop shop. An embarrassment to the family. And to the police as well, probably.’

  ‘He on duty today?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  Susie googled ‘warrant cards’. She googled ‘Inspector Bell, Met Police.’ She drummed her fingers. ‘I think I’ll go down there and see if he’s on,’ she said, shutting down her computer.

  ‘You that desperate for a date?’ Struth said.

  ‘Not at all, twenty-eighty-five.’

  There was silence for a second. ‘Twenty-what?’

  ‘Twenty-eighty-five. That’s the number I’ve assigned you. Who’s your number two, incidentally – that cleaner from Poland who comes in on a Tuesday? Looks like an athlete? Forgets her bra?’

  She smiled at the silence as she put on her coat.

  *

  PC Whelan looked hilariously like his older cousin – as if the former had been put on a medieval rack, and had all the bad manners twisted out of him. He was very tall, with the same jet-black hair cut very short, very stiff in the shoulder, and as green as they came.

  ‘How can I help you?’ he said, guardedly, despite being behind the front desk of the police station. Susie thought of a meanie in an old cowboy movie, with his hand on his pistol under the card table.

  ‘Just a quick question or two about a police officer I spoke to… Is your beat Brenwood Green?’

  ‘Well, yes, that’s our patch.’

  ‘Did you speak to an Inspector Bell from the Met, in the past couple of days?’

  ‘No… No one from the Met. Why?’

  ‘That’s weird. Can you show me your warrant card?’

  ‘My what? Warrant card? What for?’

  ‘I just want to know what the Real McCoy looks like.’

  Glancing over his shoulder at a chorus of jackals sniggering at his back in the main office block, PC Whelan pulled out his card. ‘Can I ask what this is all about?’

  ‘I think someone might be impersonating a police officer.’

  ‘Right.’ Whelan raised his eyebrows, then began to make a note. He wrote out ‘IMPERSANATING’ in all caps. ‘Tell me all about it, miss…?’

  ‘McCracken. Call me Susie, please.’

  *

  Susie finished up at 7.30, exhausted. It was too close to the end of her wages, and she had a driving lesson the next morning; there would be no Saturday night, other than a catch-up on the telly and trawling social media. The three amigos had cleared up for the night, and Susie was on her own, typing up a report about the next month’s council meetings. After twenty minutes looking for jobs – there weren’t any – she logged off, switched off the lights, said goodbye to Brian on the front desk overnight shift, and went to catch the bus.

  She was scrolling through Twitter when she saw something about a property renovation show – score one for the algorithm, at least it pays attention to my work – when she had that faint alarm bell, the one that rang earlier on in the day when she’d noticed the photo on the warrant card Bell had shown her. She scrolled through her phone to Vonny Kouassi’s number.

  ‘Yes?’ Vonny sounded like a startled rabbit.

  ‘Ah, hi, it’s me – Susie McCracken from the paper?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Eh… it’s a strange one. Have you had any policemen contact you in the past couple of days?’

  ‘Yes, someone came over.’

  ‘Tall guy? Quite gawky? Scottish accent?’

  ‘That sounds like him. Inspector Bell?’

  ‘This is hard to explain, but I met him today and… I don’t think he’s a policeman. If he shows up again, tell him you’re going to call Brenwood police station, and see how he reacts.’

  ‘That sounds weird.’ Vonny sounded distracted. It was odd; as if her personality had undergone some sort of change. Or maybe she was drunk. Previously, Susie hadn’t been able to get her off the phone, when she was setting up the feature about the house. She’d wondered who was interviewing whom.

  ‘Yeah. I’m having a look into it, but just to warn you. There’s something fishy going on.’

  ‘Probably nothing,’ Vonny said. ‘I wouldn’t bother. I’m really busy at the moment – can I call you back, maybe next week?’

&n
bsp; ‘Sure.’

  Vonny hung up.

  Sat at the back of the bus, Susie stared at the dead screen for a second or two, hearing the distant bells chiming, a little bit louder this time. Then she opened up her Notes file, and began to write.

  34

  ‘Thing is, I can’t sleep,’ Vonny whispered.

  Seth jerked awake like a sprung bear trap; his back sang, and he grunted in harmony. The room was a nest of phantoms, undulating like smoke, until he flicked on the bedside lamp. Nothing. No one there; just an after-image. ‘What? Christ.’ He was out of breath. He checked his phone: 2.34a.m. ‘God’s sake, Von. Do you have to wake me up as well?’

  ‘I don’t know how you can sleep.’ She was turned on her side, facing him in bed. She might have been in a trance, her eyes wide. ‘After what you did. After what we did.’

  ‘I don’t want to go over this again, Vonny. I’ve got a long day ahead of me. So do you. It’s best to sleep. Please. Let me sleep.’

  ‘What if the reporter is telling the truth? What if that guy wasn’t a policeman? Seth, we’ve got to leave.’

  ‘That’s what we’re going to do. I have one or two things to take care of, first. Then we’re out of here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, it’s best we take a break. Get on a plane. Christmas in the Caribbean. Or the Maldives. Or Benidorm. Anywhere. Then… Then maybe we think about selling up.’

  Her pulse quickened. She said nothing. The idea sliced into her. ‘You did this,’ she said. ‘This house was all I wanted… This house…’

  He sighed, but made no response.

  A tear spilled out of the corner of Vonny’s eye, but she didn’t weep. It was the tears that came from not blinking for too long. Seth saw a drop hit the pale blue sheet she lay on. ‘Things aren’t the same. They never will be… I don’t know if I can go on. Knowing this. Having seen that.’

  ‘You need to speak to someone. You need to get this out.’ Seth took her gently by the shoulder. ‘But you can’t talk to the police. We’ll both go to jail, for a long time. Especially as we’ve concealed it, now.’

  ‘You’ve concealed it.’ She drew back from him. ‘You concealed the crime.’

  Seth took a breath and sat up. He was calm – almost eerily so. ‘It’s done, now. There’s no point going over it. We could be a couple of days away from our problems being over.’

  ‘Even if we get through it… Drugs, Seth.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Drugs. You know what happens better than me, but I know enough. Mules… Prostitution… Corruption… Protection rackets. And the people who take the stuff. The ones at the bottom. The ones who die.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Seth said, abruptly. ‘All of those things. And yet, here we are, sitting in our pleasure dome. If we ever sell up, we could treble our money… quadruple it. The property market’s full of crooks, Vonny, and dirty money… Where do you start? There’s a reason gangsters and oligarchs invest in London.’

  ‘We aren’t talking about high rents or dodgy landlords, here – we are talking murder!’

  ‘We didn’t murder anyone. Those two would have stopped at nothing to get what they wanted. Their next move was probably to torture you, and worse, to make me talk. And if we’d given them what they wanted… If they knew that we had their gear… They’d have killed us. They would not have left us alive. And they’d have burned the place down. So that was out. I’m tired of going over this. The situation is what it is, and I’m dealing with it.’

  ‘I have to know about the bodies.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ His head sank into his hands.

  ‘I need to know how you did it. Did you bury them? Chop them up? I can’t see it. I don’t know if I can deal with the fact that I’m sleeping next to the person who did that.’

  ‘If you must know I burned them,’ he said, without raising his head. ‘In the woodpile. The ruins of the old shed. I burned them, burned our clothes. Then I added the floorboards of the new garden shed, some of the panelling– then I’ll have to burn down the rest of it, once I get the chance to knock it down. It took light easily. I don’t have any gory details. I kept on piling wood, charcoal, shavings, fuel… Once or twice I might have seen an outline… but I don’t know if it was my imagination. After it… the bodies didn’t burn as well as I’d thought they would. It’s hard to burn bones. So I broke up what was left. There were shards, fragments. I smashed them with the garden tools, shovels. I scattered what was left, buried it in places. There’s nothing of them now. Then I did the same to the shotgun. I buried the shells in the forest.’

  She was choking, her face covered. She could see him doing it. She could see the rigid, hard face, the one he’d kept hidden from her. The unsmiling one. She remembered the smell of smoke. And she choked. His hand touched her shoulder, and she flinched.

  ‘There wasn’t a trace of our clothes – not so much as a zip or an eyelet on the boots. I battered it all into ash, there was nothing traceable there. I dumped it into the stream with the wheelbarrow. I took all day to do it. Then I dug around the pit and piled in the rest of the ashes. There’s not a trace of them left, nothing. I didn’t chop anyone up. I didn’t bury any bodies. They had to be destroyed, and I destroyed them. They’d have done the same to us, don’t doubt it. They knew about our security system, and they neutralised it. That’s professionals. That’s serious people. They’d have killed us in a minute. When it comes to that amount of gear, people will get killed. And as for sleeping beside me… I’m sleeping beside someone who was prepared to blow a guy’s head off. It was only luck… I’m not sure if it was good or bad luck… that you didn’t.’

  ‘I know!’ she screamed, at the top of her lungs. She grabbed his shoulder, and he flinched, alarmed. ‘You don’t have to tell me!’

  He waited until she let go of him and shrank back, appalled. ‘This is awful, for everyone,’ he said, controlling his own temper, facing her with an effort. ‘Neither of us asked for this situation. We did what we thought was right, and we survived. We can do well out of it. I’ve got friends who are looking into things. I’ve got a deal set up where we can get the money nice and clean, into a bank account abroad. Just one or two details need to be sorted out, then we can move the gear.’

  ‘You sound like a businessman,’ she said, snuffling. ‘Just like a real businessman.’ Then she turned away from him. He stared at her back for a while, then clicked off the light.

  ‘Try to sleep,’ he said. ‘If you can’t do that, relax.’

  ‘Blow it out your arse, Seth.’

  He chuckled, only once.

  ‘Where did you hide it?’ she said, after a long silence.

  ‘I won’t tell you. It’s safe – I’ll tell you that.’

  ‘In this house?’

  ‘Good God, no. That’d tie us directly to it, should we get raided. No, it’s safe. I can’t tell you where, and I’m not giving you any hints. So don’t ask.’

  ‘I want out of here.’

  ‘You can leave if you want. But if you do, you might get kidnapped. People might be watching out for you.’

  ‘And what’s the plan if they come back? Another shootout? Maybe we should order a tank. Will Prime do free delivery?’

  ‘I don’t think that’ll be a problem just yet. We’re the only people who know what happened here, the other night. It could just be two guys, and no one else. We don’t know what’s going on. If there’s a gang of them, they’ll assume we called the police. Home invasion? Machetes, samurai swords? This’ll be the last place they’ll want to mess with. They’ll assume it’s crawling with cops. And they don’t know what happened to the other two.’

  ‘This is too much of a gamble. I want out of this nightmare. I’m expecting the door to get kicked in, any minute.’

  ‘Well, with the new locks, no one’s getting in without making a lot of noise. That gives us all the opportunity we need. Once I make the swap, I propose never coming back here. We lea
ve, and let the estate agents sort it out.’

  ‘What are we going to do? Long term?’

  ‘Live our lives. Take it one day at a time, until I get it sorted out. There’s nothing to worry about.’

  The idea would have been laughable. If it had happened to other people, in a different place.

  *

  She didn’t believe him, of course, but it was still a shock to be faced with the two policemen the next morning. They arrived before breakfast time, and perversely, just when she had begun to sink into a decent sleep. The security cameras were still completely offline, but the buzzer and intercom worked well enough.

  ‘Hi – am I speaking to Vonny Kouassi?’

  ‘That’s right. Who’s this?’

  ‘Detective Inspector Leonard and PC Whelan.’ The accent was London – upbeat and bright. Vonny knew terror, then – absolute panic. She saw blue lights, handcuffs.

  She turned to Seth. ‘I’m not here,’ he said, his volume control one or two notches above mute. ‘Deny everything.’

  ‘But you are here!’

  ‘Say I’m out in the woods somewhere. Gone for a walk. I’m not talking to the police. Be polite, but say absolutely nothing.’

  ‘But why? Can’t you at least come out with me?’

  ‘I’ve been moving old branches and logs over the top of the fire site.’ He showed her his grimy hands. ‘Plus I need to make a phone call in the next ten minutes. I don’t want them asking questions. Reasonable enough for me to be not indoors. Remember, nobody will suspect us of anything. We’re the only people who know what happened. We can keep it that way.’