Angel on the Inside

by Mike Ripley

  ‘I think so. You can’t get to Flowers so you’re tracking whoever he might have seen or had contact with in his month out of Belmarsh.’

  ‘You are with me. Good. Huw, get one of those cloths and wrap some ice in it. Mr Angel seems to have a nosebleed.’

  ‘I told you I was scared of heights,’ I said.

  ‘So you did. They must disagree with you. But I think this little trip has been useful. I mean, we’ve seen the sights and I’ve learnt something very useful.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I said warily, taking the makeshift icepack from young Huw.

  ‘That you know fuck all. Oh, and that London detective agencies are a waste of money.’ He sucked on his bottom lip. ‘I suppose you were a long shot anyway, but I had to be sure. You see, the only people Keith Flowers had contact with on his brief holiday from custody, were you and your Amy. Now Amy takes out a restraining order on him, doesn’t she? That doesn’t sound too friendly, even if it’s understandable. So that left you, and your were unknown. You weren’t one of the old gang, so I had to be sure you weren’t his silent partner. I’m sure now that you’re not, because you’re basically a little innocent at large, aren’t you, Mr Angel? I’m a good judge of character, and you’d be out of your depth in a puddle in a pub car park.’

  ‘You’re not wrong there,’ I said very quietly, no more than a whisper, from behind the cloth stuffed with ice.

  ‘No, I’m not, am I?’ he answered, proving that his hearing aid was either state of the art and capable of picking up a mouse fart on Saturn or it was just for show.

  ‘Come here a minute.’

  He pulled my hand so that my icepack came away from my face and he studied my nose.

  ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’

  ‘None,’ I said, bemused.

  ‘Correct,’ he said and he straight-fingered me in the stomach with his right hand.

  It didn’t hurt that much; hardly enough to take my mind off the throbbing in my nose or the dull ache in my leg, but enough to keep my attention.

  We were coming in to land now, the capsule below us already disgorging cheery passengers. In a few minutes we would be at head-height of those in the front of the queue.

  Old Len took the cloth with the ice and, using a damp corner, cleaned half a dozen spots of blood – my blood, already dried in the sunshine – from the inside of the perspex where I had come into contact with it.

  ‘See to our Trolley Dolly, Huw, and compensate him for the tea towel. Oh, and bring that other bottle of bubbly. It’s paid for.’

  He handed back my icepack and I folded it as small as a large handkerchief so as not to upset the tourists. I zipped up my jacket so the red spots on my shirt couldn’t be seen either.

  Turner watched me closely.

  ‘Good thinking,’ he said. ‘Don’t draw attention to yourself. It might be best if you get off first.’

  ‘But when the doors open, right?’

  He actually smiled at that, though maybe it was the way my voice sounded as if I had the mother of all head colds and it probably came out as: ‘Dut ben de doors dopuh, drite?’

  ‘Sure, sure. No hard feelings, eh?’

  I glanced around. We were almost at the landing platform and our Flight Attendant was gathering up the glasses and plates of canapés, studiously avoiding catching my eye. Outside on the concrete, two more staff with mirrors on sticks were poised to do their security sweep. As if anyone dare plant a bomb in Len Turner’s presence.

  ‘Oh yes, I’m afraid so, Mr Turner,’ I said quickly and quietly so that only he could hear me. ‘Lots of hard feelings, but not against you. I’m saving them all for Keith Flowers. I blame him for getting me into this, and the cops are going to want to talk to me again.’

  He mulled this over and even ran a hand over his bald pate, but there wasn’t time for subtlety now. We would either land and I’d walk away or he’d hit me again.

  ‘I could find out what they know,’ I said. ‘I mean, he shot a gun at me. I’m a victim in all this, so I have some rights, don’t I? I can ask questions. See if they know who Flowers came into contact with. Would you be interested?’

  ‘I might, Mr Angel, I might just be. But this would cost me, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  Number One son Ron moved closer to us, wondering what the whispering was about. Behind me, I heard the capsule doors start to slide open.

  Old Len shot a hand inside his raincoat and it came out holding a wallet. Instead of money though, he produced a white business card and held it up in front of my eyes so I could read it. There were two lines of print – ‘Haydn Rees, LlB’ and, underneath, ‘Solicitor’ – and then a phone number starting 02920.

  ‘You can contact me through my solicitors, with tact and discretion,’ Len said as I took the card and thrust it into my jeans pocket.

  The doors were opening fully now and I was tempted to say that I thought With, Tact and Discretion was a funny name for a firm of solicitors, but I didn’t. It wasn’t the time or the place. With Len Turner, I somehow didn’t think there ever would be a time or a place.

  So I just nodded to him, even though that stung my sinuses and misted my eyes, and stepped backwards off the Eye and kept my head down as I pushed through the crowds.

  I found Armstrong unlocked and with the keys in, exactly where I had left him.

  As I climbed in, I noticed that the white Rover that Huw and Barry had driven had a number plate that said the supplier of the car was www.expolicecars.com. I also noticed that it had been issued with a parking ticket and Armstrong had not.

  So, there was some justice in the world after all.

  Chapter Eight

  I needed to think. I needed pen and paper to write things down before I forgot them. I needed a drink. I probably needed a doctor. I needed food. I needed to put the river and some distance between me and the Welsh Mafia. I needed to go somewhere where black cabs could go but white Rovers with parking tickets (ex-police cars or not) driven by grockles thumbing through the A-Z couldn’t.

  I did a dog-leg around Waterloo and zipped over Westminster Bridge only marginally over the speed limit, though everyone knows that doesn’t really apply to taxis. There was nothing in my mirror – or at least nothing white and Welsh – but I did two circuits of Parliament Square just to be sure, then cut across the traffic into Parliament Street alongside the Treasury. Using a Number 88 bus as cover, I hung a right and shot down the side street on the corner of The Red Lion pub, which lead to Cannon Row police station and, in days gone by, the former New Scotland Yard.

  Well, if you were going to park illegally and drink and drive, you might as well do it with style.

  With my head down and a damp, pink tea-towel over my nose, I bypassed the entrance to the downstairs bar and went for the main door on the corner. Once inside, you can nip up the stairs to the toilets without having to enter the bar – one of the few pubs left in London where you can do that.

  In front of the mirror in the Gents, I cleaned up as best I could. The bleeding had stopped but I had a blue-green-black bruise forming nicely across the bridge of my nose. I had lifted my fake Ray-Bans from the glove compartment of Armstrong and they hurt like hell but covered the worst of it. All I had to do now was negotiate the steep staircase down to the bar and hope they gave priority to a blind man.

  The main bar was busy, at it usually is, but with tourists rather than with MPs who listen out for the Division Bell when Parliament is in session just across the Square. Parliament was on holiday; and so was most of Europe, judging by the accents of the thronging customers. As always when a pub is full, nobody noticed a scruffy, wet-haired (I’d had to remove the dried blood) oik wearing sunglasses limp his way to the bar and order a large vodka and the last brie and bacon baguette in the place. The Australian barman didn’t bat an eyelid when the vodka disappeared before
the sandwich arrived, or say anything when I grabbed a thick wodge of paper napkins, took the baguette and handed back the plate. What the hell; for half the year, his customers were mostly MPs. He must have seen worse.

  Back in Armstrong, which I had turned around to face Parliament Street in case I needed a direct line of escape, I used two of the napkins to hold the baguette and formed the rest into a neat pile on my thigh, where the numbness had subsided into a dull tingling sensation.

  Behind the driver’s sun visor, which like real cabbies I use only as a filing cabinet, was a battered, well-out-of-date A-Z and a felt tip pen that still worked. As I ate, I composed my thoughts: one per napkin, in big letters, as I still didn’t trust my eyes to focus properly.

  ‘1: LEN TURNER’, I wrote on the first one, the felt-tip blurring and smudging the ink as it ran on the tissue paper. Then again, that might have been my eyesight.

  ‘2: IS NOT MR CREOSOTE’. He couldn’t be. That ageing toe-rag Spider had told me of a ‘Mr Creosote’ only an hour or so before the Chuckle Brothers had picked me up at Stuart Street, and anyway, ‘Mr Creosote’ was unavoidably detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Which meant there was another party interested in Keith Flowers, apart from Turner and his private detective.

  ‘3: BUY MORE CIGS’. That toe-rag Spider had palmed my emergency packet.

  ‘4: PRIVATE EYE’. So my mysterious stalker – and almost certainly Springsteen’s assailant – was a private eye, and probably a cheapskate one who had surveillance pictures developed like holiday snaps at – where was it? – ‘Fastflash’ in Shepherd’s Bush. As it happened, I knew a real firm of private detectives who worked out of Shepherd’s Bush. Maybe I could hire a stalker to stalk the stalker.

  ‘5: TURNER KNEW ABOUT AMY’. Or at least he sounded as if he did. He was Welsh, and Amy was supposed to have gone – maybe had – to Welsh Fashion Week. As a connection, was that tenuous or what? He’d also said something about me not being one of the ‘old gang’. Did that mean Amy was? I supposed I could ask her.

  ‘6: FIND AMY’. I’d better do that too.

  ‘7: FLOWERS’. How did Turner know about Keith Flowers’ arrest? And the restraining order Amy put on him? And that he was now in Rampton, and that he trollied big time in the mental department? Could a private eye have dug all that up for him?

  ‘8: SILENT PARTNER’. Turner was sure I wasn’t Flowers’ ‘silent partner’ – so who was? And in what?

  ‘9: GUN’. One of the younger Turners had asked what sort of gun Keith Flowers had used on me, and while that wasn’t in any way an unusual question for people who actually carried them, and may have been no more than professional interest, old grandad Len had skewered him with a filthy look, effectively telling him not to go there. Was it important? What did it all mean? Was there anything else I’d forgotten?

  ‘10: AMY’ …

  I’d run out of napkins.

  But at least I had a plan.

  There were people I had to talk to. One was this Mr Creosote character, and that was out of my hands but in hand, or so I’d been told. Another was DI Hood of West Hampstead, who ought to know something, and if he didn’t then he ought to know a man who did.

  Above all, there was Amy. Where the hell was she and why hadn’t she called?

  Maybe she had. I should get to a phone.

  I had a phone.

  If my nose and forehead hadn’t hurt so much, I would have gladly banged my head against the nearest wall or maybe just slapped it and gone ‘Doh!’. Instead, I dug into the glove compartment for the mobile phone she’d bought me, hoping the battery still had juice in it. She was always complaining that I never turned it on, and I bet she’d left hundreds of messages on it just to wind me up.

  The battery had held up and there were three Missed Calls and three Messages, all from Amy’s office number.All from Debbie Diamond. Each voice message was more obscene than the last, but the gist was that I really ought to try and find the time to ring her if it was at all convenient. Oh, and that I was a minging pillock.

  Minging? Charming.

  Her mood hadn’t improved between the messages and my voice.

  ‘Where have you been all day?’ she snarled, like today of all days she could intimidate me.

  ‘Sightseeing,’ I snapped back. ‘Any word from Amy?’

  ‘No, there sodding well isn’t – and just where does that leave Madrid?’

  That floored me for a minute.

  ‘Somewhere in central Spain?’ I tried.

  ‘Oh, sweet Sister Fidelma, will you grow up? Amy’s supposed to be in Madrid next week, flying out there on Monday afternoon. Or had you forgotten that as well?’

  ‘No, I hadn’t forgotten.’ How could I have? I hadn’t known about it. ‘I’m sure she’ll be in touch. Somehow.’

  I hoped that didn’t sound as if I meant with the aid of a psychic.

  ‘By the way, has anybody named Turner phoned, or tried to get into the office?’ I said casually so as not to alarm her, though I wouldn’t give the office security men more than half a minute up against Ron, Barry and Huw.

  ‘No, nobody named Turner, but there’s a woman been after you all day. Well, it seems like all day, and I’m pretty sure she’s mad.’

  With the women I knew, that didn’t narrow it down, but I put my money on it being Fenella.

  ‘What does she want now?’ I asked, resigned.

  ‘She wants to invite you to a party. In fact, more than that, she sort of insisted you went. Said it was important. Vital, actually.’

  That didn’t sound like Fenella.

  ‘And she must be mad,’ Debbie went on, ‘because she said the party started this afternoon, at 3.00 pm sharp. Which is a bloody funny time to hold a hen night if you ask me.’

  A hen night?

  ‘This wasn’t Fenella, was it?’ I said confidently.

  ‘Who’s Fenella? I’m talking about Stella, not Fenella.’

  I didn’t believe it.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ I said.

  ‘Well it is a bit odd, but she was very insistent.’

  ‘We are talking about Estelle – Stella – Rudgard, right?’ I said, just to be sure.

  ‘That’s her. That’s the name. Spelled it out for me like I was a right div. Said she was getting married tomorrow and simply had to talk to you today and that you knew her number but if you couldn’t ring by three o’clock, you had to go along to her hen night at somewhere called Gerry’s in Soho. She said you knew it. I mean, what sort of a person holds their hen night in a Soho club at three o’clock on a Friday afternoon?’

  ‘Stella Rudgard would,’ I said.

  ‘I mean, can you really believe that?’

  ‘No, Debbie. Like I said, I just don’t believe it.’

  But what I didn’t believe was the awful coincidence.

  Somewhere on the floor of Armstrong where I’d dropped the paper napkins was one with ‘Private Eye’ written on it to remind me to use the one real private eye firm I knew of to check out who Len Turner had hired to follow me.

  The detective firm in question: R & B Confidential Investigations.

  As in (Stella) Rudgard & (Veronica) Blugden Confidential Investigations.

  Of Shepherd’s Bush.

  Long before I ever met Amy, I knew Stella Rudgard and had a healthy respect for her exhaustive dedication to sex as a cross between aerobics and training for the Olympics heptathlon. I suspected that her enthusiasm for sex was the one thing that kept her borderline sane, but it still made her dangerous to know. But then, I knew her only briefly. Very briefly; and it was long, long before I met Amy. Several years in fact.

  Veronica Blugden was another kettle of fish entirely. From school reports that had said things like ‘This young lady has delusions of adequacy’ she had graduated to dead-end jobs and annual staff appraisals ran
ging from ‘She has set low personal standards and consistently failed to achieve them’ to ‘This employee should go far, and the sooner she starts the better’, which is what she did. Moving to London with only the vaguest of ideas about being a private detective – in fact, all her ideas were vague – she found herself working for a one-man enquiry agency run by an ex-Met copper called Albert Block. Her first case, almost by accident, involved finding Stella Rudgard, even though Stella didn’t actually want to be found and was working to her own agenda. Anyhow, Albert Block retired and Veronica inherited the agency, such as it was; and Stella – in a bizarre variation on the Stockholm Syndrome, where the kidnapped goes over to the kidnapper’s side – joined forces with her to form R & B Investigations. They had done well. I had read a couple of magazine articles about how they employed only female operatives, which had probably been good for business, with no mention of their policy of occasionally employing unlicensed male cab-drivers with more time on their hands than sense – and then quibbling about his expenses.

  I reckoned R & B Investigations owed me a favour, and maybe Stella wanted to repay me, or – if she really was getting married the next day – maybe she wanted to buy my silence. Unless she’d had a character transplant since I’d last seen her, I could guess that hubby-to-be would be (a) rich, (b) posh and (c) connected. Definitely not the sort to be impressed by stories of Stella’s raucous past. That could give me an edge.

  I could imagine what sort of friend Stella would invite to her hen night and what sort of hen would go to a party at Gerry’s Club at 3.00 in the afternoon. I would need an edge. But then, an invite was an invite.

  I looked in the mirror to check I was presentable enough. With the fake Ray-Bans on, I reckoned I wouldn’t be the scariest thing in Soho that afternoon; and Gerry’s was dimly-lit, so the spots of blood on my shirt probably wouldn’t show. I could have gone home and cleaned up, but then again it was already 3.30 pm and I was missing the party.