‘I loved that kid.’
‘Maybe, but you loved having Venus’s money more,’ Lee said. ‘Because you knew he was skint, you knew he couldn’t refuse it when you gave it back to him, and you also knew it would give you power over him to break from his Russian friends, even close them down. So much more power than a few mucky photos. Venus is so dirty you could dig coal out of him, but then at least he’s not thick.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I recognised that sports bag Tom de Vries put the money in because it’s the bag Venus bought for the second drop. The one that was supposed to be in the graveyard. Bright fucking red,’ Lee said. ‘De Vries nicked it from his flat. And I saw Venus take it out of your boot.’
‘Prove it.’
‘If de Vries’s DNA’s on it, and I’d bet it will be . . .’
‘What do you want, Arnold?’
‘Me? Nothing,’ Lee said. ‘I know you’ll rip my eyes out, Brian. Now why would I want that? No, what we all need, you too, is Venus out of the job. From my point of view he’s too bent, and from your perspective if he’s no longer in bed with the Russians . . .’
‘He won’t be.’
‘But if he’s not in the job you can be sure he won’t be because they won’t want him endorsing their clubs. Why would they?’ Lee said. Then he leaned in towards Brian and whispered, ‘So have a word with him, Brian. On the quiet. I’m sure he’d get a decent pension.’
‘Not my problem.’
‘And if you’re wondering how I can, as a man of the law, let you get away with it when I know you’ve murdered someone, Brian, then look at it like this. Cast your mind back to the eyes thing I just talked about. Always been very squeamish about eyes, I have. Squeamish enough to let me, just occasionally, hold hands with a devil like you.’
Now Lee Arnold sweated too.
*
Mumtaz’s mobile phone rang. Her new client, the woman once married to a Salafi, had been hard work, and she was shattered. Illegally divorced and trying to get her children back, the client was now convinced her husband, who had taken them, was a terrorist. But was he? Or did she just want to blacken his name so she could get her kids? Mumtaz could understand completely, but could she help her?
She looked at the phone on the passenger seat of the car, dreading seeing Naz’s name on the screen. But it hadn’t come up. Instead it was another client.
She picked it up. ‘Hi Alison.’
‘Mrs Hakim.’
‘How’s things?’
The last time she’d heard from Alison Darrah-Duncan her son Charlie was still refusing to talk to the police about Harry Venus’s kidnap.
‘I just wish that Charlie would tell the police the truth,’ she said. ‘George Grogan has given them a statement. According to him, Charlie was involved with Tom de Vries and the kidnap for longer than he was, but I don’t know if that’s true or not. But because Charlie has some of the ransom money, there’s enough evidence to prosecute him. It’s only a few pounds! Not even a hundred!’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh it’s his fault, and I’ve told him that if he owned up it would be better for him in terms of custody. You know?’
She was hoping that if Charlie spoke up he’d get a shorter sentence.
‘I don’t know.’
‘He doesn’t seem to care that this is making me ill,’ Alison said. ‘I thought we had a bond, Charlie and me. You can be wrong about your kids you know, Mrs Hakim. But anyway I didn’t call you to go on about Charlie. I’m aware I still owe you some money.’
‘Yes.’
‘Could I ask you to maybe come and collect it?’ she said. ‘I’m really not good on my feet, even walking to the postbox is a bit much at the moment. Could I ask you to call round?’
‘That’s fine. When?’
‘Whenever you can.’
Mumtaz looked at her watch. She didn’t have to be back at the office at any particular time.
‘Now?’
‘If that’s OK it would get it done.’
‘All right,’ Mumtaz said. ‘I’ll be about half an hour.’
‘Thank you.’
Mumtaz was just about to end the call when Alison said, ‘You know, Mrs Hakim, my Charlie has always been a very quiet boy. Undemanding and easy, yet in these last few days I’ve been able to see his great-grandfather in him.’
‘Perón?’
‘Well, you don’t get to be a dictator without being ruthless do you?’ she said. ‘And Charlie is ruthless. He will do what he wants to do and to hell with his parents. I’m finding it hard to even like him right now. He reminds me a bit of that awful boy Tom de Vries.’
Mumtaz put the phone down and shivered.
*
It took Shazia a while to realise that the front door of the house was open a crack. When had that happened? She was sure that Naz had shut the door behind him when the woman let him in. But had he? He must’ve done. It had been clear, so she thought, that he had been going to have sex with that woman. So logically he would close the door behind them, wouldn’t he?
No one else had gone in or come out of the house. She’d been there for just over an hour and the whole area had been quiet to the point of silence. That was why people liked living near the Flats. Locals, if they could afford it, and increasingly, people from outside. She’d seen a lot of very smartly dressed mothers out with their babies carried in expensive woollen slings in recent months. Well-spoken ladies, just like her. She’d tried to get rid of her private school accent since she’d been at college, but nobody was fooled and her friends accepted her for who she was. Nobody else mattered.
Shazia walked across the road and looked at that slightly open front door. Now she really studied it, she could see how dilapidated the house was. The front path was covered in litter, the door was only just on its hinges and the windows looked as if they’d never been cleaned. It was silent.
Shazia put her hand in her pocket and felt the knife between her fingers. If the woman was still in there, what did it matter? She’d come here to do something, now she had an opportunity to do it. She put one foot inside the hall.
*
‘Let’s talk honestly, shall we? You knew Tom de Vries’s mum, didn’t you Brian?’
‘You know I did. Adele.’
‘And it’s common knowledge Tom went to see his nan, Adele’s mum, in Poplar on the day he died.’
‘If you say so.’
Lee nodded. ‘He was killed just round the corner in Poplar Rec at the same time as Happy the alkie, but not by him.’
‘If that’s what the coppers think.’
‘They do now. There’s lots of mystery around what happened that day, but what we do know is that Tom very rarely went to see his nan. She says she hadn’t seen him for over a year.’
‘Get away.’
‘Weird he should suddenly take it into his head to go that day, don’t you think? He told her he had business over that way. She doesn’t know what. But what she does know is that he wanted to use her garage.’
‘For his motor.’
‘If there hadn’t been a connection between Tom and Adele’s mum’s flat, Tony Bracci would have found it very hard to find Harry. It was such a stroke of luck – if you believe in such things. But I don’t.’
They both heard the sound of cars entering the graveyard. Lee saw Brian look in his mirror.
‘No one takes the piss out of you, do they Brian?’ Lee said. ‘And a kid like Tom de Vries . . . No one gets away do they? And that includes me, doesn’t it?’
The old man took a gun out of his pocket.
‘You don’t disappoint, do you Brian? Always tooled up.’
Brian said nothing. Behind them a car door closed.
‘Did Tom threaten to kill Harry if you didn’t give him some money? Was that the deal?’ Lee said. ‘Was that why Tom invented someone who claimed to know where Harry was before the last drop? To fit in with your timetable? So he could get out of the country faster
? If you’re going to kill me, Brian, you might as well tell me the truth. Dead men don’t tell tales.’
Brian fired up the engine. ‘Get out and get in the driving seat,’ he said. ‘Run and I’ll kill you.’
‘We’re not alone, Brian. People come to cemeteries. They’re public places.’
‘Think I give a shit?’
‘You should,’ Vi Collins said. She was at Brian’s window and she wasn’t alone. What looked like a squad of robots surrounded the car. Lee had never been so glad to see an armed response unit in his life. ‘Put the gun down, Mr Green, and get out of the motor.’
Lee watched Brian turn to face him. The old man said, ‘Cunt.’
Lee’s sweating increased. Green’s gun was still pointed at his groin. ‘Today I’ve learned that you can use a mobile phone underneath a car,’ he said. ‘And you’ve learned, Brian, that not even the fear of blinding can make me bent. Call me a fool to myself . . .’
‘You’re dead, Arnold.’
‘Oh wind the macho shit in, Brian, and give me the gun,’ Vi said. ‘Because if you think this lot won’t shoot you if you make a wrong move, then you’re fucking wrong.’
*
The house smelt of damp and compost. Probably rotting food. What had once been a front room was empty, but there was an old fridge in the kitchen and a kettle which, when Shazia touched it, was still warm. And the back door was open. She looked out into the garden, which was full of old mattresses and dead electrical equipment. Just like her old house, there was an alleyway at the back that probably led out onto Lorne Road. The house was silent. Naz and the woman must have left through the back.
But his car was still outside.
She walked back into the hall and it was then that she heard what sounded like a gasp from upstairs.
*
‘Get Venus?’
‘On his way home,’ Vi said.
‘Did you get the sports bag?’ Lee asked.
‘We got it, but you’d better be right about this, Arnold,’ Vi said. ‘It’s not every day a girl gets to arrest her own boss. On a scale of one to ten of fear I’d put it at a good twelve.’’
They watched SO19 armed response officers put a handcuffed Brian Green into a Land Rover.
Lee lit a cigarette. ‘Keeping him talking wasn’t a walk in the park,’ he said. ‘I’ve not sweated so much since Iraq.’
Vi put a hand on his shoulder. ‘If you hadn’t we’d never have got Venus,’ she said. ‘If he’d got home who knows what he would’ve done? Destroyed that bag.’
‘At some point he would’ve done,’ Lee said. ‘Unless he actually believed Brian’s lies, which I can’t imagine he would.’
‘Venus, for all his faults, just wanted his son back,’ she said. ‘He’s not thinking even now. I wonder, when Harry wakes, if he ever does, what he’ll say. George Grogan has admitted they all roughed the poor kid up pretty badly when he was supposed to have come on to Laila Malik. They all looked down on him, used him, took the piss. His mum and dad too busy with work and their various love lives to take an interest in him. Harry Venus was the real neglected kid in this, not Tom de Vries. He was horrible.’
‘But he’s dead, Vi,’ Lee said. ‘And far too soon.’
‘So much for being an Übermensch,’ Vi said.
‘And so much for Alfred Hitchcock.’
She smiled. ‘If only Brian had just done a bit of good old-fashioned blackmail on Venus, eh? What a fucking mess.’
*
There were four rooms on the first floor. She could see that one was a bathroom, albeit wrecked. Shazia could remember when her old house had an avocado bathroom suite like that. Her father had loved it, but his sister, nasty Auntie Veera, made him replace it with a pink one when she came from Bangladesh for a holiday. Only when her amma had first come had sanity intervened. When he had still wanted to impress her, her father had put in a new white suite.
She walked past the bathroom and looked in through the door of a small box room. Empty except for a few mouldering soft toys. The gasp she’d heard downstairs sounded again, but this time it was louder. It came from the far end of the landing. She wanted to say, ‘Who’s there?’ but realised that people only said that in movies. Naz and the woman were probably shagging, that was the reality. She took her knife and her phone out of her pocket. If she lost her nerve the least she could do was take his picture having sex.
Why she crept along the landing, she didn’t know. But she did. The door to the room the gasp had come from was open, so she could be heard whatever she did. As she approached, the thump of her heart began to interfere with her hearing. It wasn’t every day that she killed someone. She’d often thought about it when her father had been alive. She had thought about murdering him all the time. But she had also loved him.
Shazia walked straight through the door.
25
There was only a mattress in that whole big room. It was over by the window and he was alone on top of it. Panting and gasping, he had both hands on his stomach. Had the woman kicked him? Punched him?
But he was too white for that, and when Shazia moved closer she saw that there was blood. But as she looked at it, she knew that she distrusted its provenance. Was it his? Or had he killed the woman and thrown her corpse somewhere? In that bathroom maybe?
She stood back.
But he’d seen her.
‘Shazia!’
There was blood in his mouth. How had he managed to do that? ‘Shazia, call an ambulance! I’ve been stabbed!’
And then she saw that blood was oozing from between his fingers. Had he really been stabbed? Was this some sort of elaborate trick to get her close to him, so that he could hurt her?
‘Who stabbed you?’
Her voice was husky and strangled, not her own.
‘Some eastern European bastard! Get an ambulance!’
‘I only saw a woman,’ Shazia said. Men usually only called other men bastards.
‘She was the bait. Get help or I’ll die!’
Shazia sat down on the filthy floor. She put her knife and her phone back in her pocket.
He knew a second after she did. ‘You’re going to let me die?’
She said nothing, just looked.
He moved his hands in the wet mush that was his stomach and then lifted his eyes to hers.
‘Don’t beg,’ she said. ‘It will do you no good.’
*
‘What’s happening with Malcolm McCullough?’ Lee asked.
Vi put another chip in her mouth, chewed, swallowed and then said, ‘Gone back to Henley. He’ll have to give evidence when the kids are tried, but he didn’t actually do anything.’
‘That school did my head in.’
They were in the station canteen. Brian Green had been booked in and was waiting for his brief, while Chief Inspector Stone was conferring with senior colleagues about Venus. Vi and Lee had snatched at this hiatus to get some food.
‘Too common for it, Arnold,’ Vi said. ‘School rejected you. God knows how it’ll play out for all the eastern European kids rocking up next term. I think old Malcolm hopes his mum dies before that happens, so he can retire.’
Lee ate his pie. It was gristly and tepid, but he was sort of glad of it. Being up close to Brian Green had left a nasty taste in his mouth and an ugly smell on his clothes. Lee just hoped that he was right about de Vries’s DNA being on the sports bag so that Green definitely went down. If he managed to wriggle free of any involvement in Tom’s death then Lee would have problems. And Brian almost certainly hadn’t killed the boy himself.
‘The kids took McCullough’s ideas and did what they did all on their own,’ Vi said. ‘Not that Charlie Darrah-Duncan’s ever gonna ’fess up.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘Between what I can only interpret as a love/hate relationship with Tom de Vries and some loyalty to that school, Charlie is completely brainwashed, as far as I can tell. Not even self-preservation left. Probably comes of being ga
y.’
‘Vi!’
‘I mean in that environment,’ she said. ‘Public school’s notorious for the persecution of gay boys. Not the teachers, the kids. Give them a well hard time.’
‘How do you know?’
She shrugged. ‘I know enough rent boys who’ve been with closeted old judges, all right? Damaged for life those geezers. Anyway, what does bloody Reeds think it is? Eton? We all know the only way to become anyone is to go there.’
He laughed. ‘Commie.’
‘Watch it!’ She held up a warning finger. ‘Anyway, we got equality in this country.’
‘How’d you work that out?’
‘Our crims are just as good as theirs,’ she said. ‘Brian Green.’
‘I was bricking it when I had to keep him talking.’
‘Not as much as I was when I had to get hold of Venus and then come and get you in short order,’ she said. ‘Stone was bloody brilliant.’
‘New job opportunity for him,’ Lee said.
‘Nah. I think he feels sorry for Venus. We all do. If he’s got a Russian girl habit he’s been funding by turning a blind eye to what their boyfriends do, then he deserves what’s coming to him. But what happened with Harry he didn’t deserve, and I don’t suppose he expected Brian Green to turn up in the middle of all that either.’
‘He should never have been close to him in the first place.’
‘Course not. But the Greens of this world get under your skin. When he sent his latest wife over here he must’ve known it wasn’t good for Venus. And according to you, Green wasn’t even in contact with de Vries at that time. Twisted old fuck! But then in his way I suppose you could say he was looking out for Venus on one level. He got his money back for him, even if poor Harry’s still in a coma.’
‘Do you think the kid’ll ever be right?’
‘Who knows? He’s on life support. Could wake up tomorrow, next week, never. Poor little bugger.’ She appeared to wipe a tear from her eye, but Lee said nothing. Vi didn’t do sentimentality. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘you need to get checked out at the hospital yourself.’
Enough Rope: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery) Page 27