by Peter James
Fergal Kilpatrick. Mick Pollock. Aiden Boyle. Cillian Cregan.
The men who, the police had told his aunt, had entered his parents’ house, entered his bedroom, shone torches at him. Filled his bedroom with the stench of their booze and sweat.
The men who had shot his mother dead and taken his pa away.
All of them long dead. But that knowledge gave him no comfort, no satisfaction. Just regret. A deep regret that he had never returned to America years ago and gone looking for those who were still alive. And now it was too late.
He had often googled them. All their names were there, lieutenants of ‘Wild Bill’ Lovett, who had taken control of the White Hand Gang, which controlled the waterfronts of Manhattan and Brooklyn after the murders of the gang’s leader, Dinny Meehan, and subsequently his next in line, Brendan Daly.
His father.
He had long studied the photographs of their hateful faces that came up on his computer. Pegleg Pollock had been the first to die, shot dead in a bar in a turf war, his killers never identified.
The other three had vanished, faded into the mists of time. Their surnames popped up, meaninglessly, on his internet searches, along with Daly countless times.
Your old men shall dream dreams; your young men shall see visions.
His aunt, who brought him and his sister back to Ireland, had a deep faith. She had read them passages from the Bible daily on that voyage from New York, and every night of their childhood outside Dublin.
He’d never had any truck with religion, but the book of Joel had been right in that one passage. He’d had plenty of visions as a young man. And now all he had were his dreams. He looked up at the bust of the handsome, equine face of Lawrence of Arabia. There was a quote from that great man’s book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, that had been his mantra throughout life.
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
He had always been a dreamer of the day. But now he realized that maybe he had only been a sleepwalker. He was ninety-five years old and he had failed to keep the biggest, most important promise he had made in his life. A promise he had made standing on the stern of the Mauretania, as a small boy, all those decades ago.
One day, Pop, I’m going to come back and find you. I’m going to rescue you from wherever you are.
He looked again, for the millionth time, at the only clue he had ever had. Those twelve scrawled numbers below the names of the four men.
9 5 3 7 0 4 0 4 2 4 0 4
He had tried endlessly. Checking plot numbers at every cemetery in the New York area. Checking prisoner numbers – but the numbers were too long. Checking co-ordinates – but they were too short. Telephone numbers. House numbers. Car indexes. Bank account numbers. Safety deposit box codes. He’d even employed code breakers to see if they represented letters or words of a secret message. But always the same negative result.
Then he was distracted by a steady beep-beep-beep sound.
The intruder alert system. It warned of anyone approaching the perimeter of his property. He looked up at the bank of CCTV screens on the wall to the right of his desk. And was pleased at what he saw.
They were here.
About time, too.
22
‘Arrivederci, sunshine,’ the driver said, turning round, showing his face to Ricky Moore for the first time. He looked an old, unkempt git, Moore thought, sullenly.
The Apologist hauled Moore out of the rear of the Mercedes as easily as if he were a cardboard cut-out. Then he held him upright in the ankle-deep gravel, in the glare of the floodlighting and the silence of the night, outside the grand entrance porch of the white mansion.
They were half a mile down a tree-lined private driveway and three miles from the nearest dwelling. From his knowledge of Sussex Ricky Moore had a vague idea where they were, but he wasn’t familiar with all the back lanes beyond Lewes. He heard an owl hoot somewhere close. In front of him a burly middle-aged man, with short, gelled hair and a sharp business suit, climbed down from the driver’s side of the black Range Rover. Something was bulking out the front of the man’s jacket.
A cooling engine ticked steadily, like a clock. The man in the business suit strode up to the porch. In the darkness and the silence and the total absence of any neighbours, Ricky Moore was becoming increasingly frightened with every passing second. He had to escape, but how? His brain was all over the place, almost paralyzed with fear. Then he cried out in pain as one of the nerves in his right arm was agonizingly crushed.
‘I’m sorry,’ the Apologist said to Moore, escorting him forward, maintaining the excruciating pressure. ‘Really, I am. Believe me. You may find it hard to believe, but I am sorry, truly.’ He smiled. Most of his teeth needed work. ‘I’m just doing my job.’
‘Look,’ Moore said, urgently. ‘I’ll pay you good money to take me back to the pub. A lot of money. I mean it, a lot.’
The Apologist was a loyal man. He’d been given his nickname in prison for constantly apologizing to everyone, about everything, and he’d liked the name. He hardly ever used his real name, Augustine Krasniki. Apologizing was his nature; he couldn’t help it. As a small boy, in his native Albania, his mother had blamed him for his father leaving her. She’d blamed him for everything, and the only way to calm her was to apologize, constantly, day and night. It was even his fault when it rained, so he learned to apologize for that also. Eventually she had put him into care, for reasons he never understood, but he assumed it must have been his fault. From there he had been moved from foster home to foster home. People felt scared by him, intimidated by the way he looked – and by his physical strength. It had taken him a while to understand and control his own strength. Once he killed a child’s pet gerbil by stroking it too hard; another time he crushed a budgerigar to death by accident. Often people screamed in pain when he shook their hand. He tried to remember to be gentle, but his brain did not always work that well.
When boys had picked on him at school for being so ugly, he had tried – but failed – to control his strength. With one punch he would smash their ribs, or knock all their front teeth out, every single one of them, like a ten-pin strike! He couldn’t help his temper when other kids taunted him, calling him Boris Karloff, telling him he looked like Frankenstein’s monster, so he just got used to hitting them and then apologizing after.
Only one person had ever been kind to him in his life. His boss, Lucas Daly. He gave him money, let him have the flat above the shop in the Lanes, which he guarded fiercely, and had him sit in on all his drug deals. No one ever messed with Lucas Daly, not after they had taken one look at the Apologist. He was unswervingly loyal to his boss.
‘I’m sorry,’ the Apologist said to Ricky Moore. ‘I’d like to say yes, really I would. I’d like to say yes and take your money. But I can’t. You’ll have to trust me on that one.’
The man in the business suit opened the front door with his key and Ricky Moore, propelled by the grip of the Apologist, stumbled in. The door closed behind him. They were in a huge hallway, with a black and white chequered floor. Two suits of armour, each with a lance in their steel right hands, stood either side of a grand stairway. Fine, classical oil paintings hung from the walls, the kind of paintings that would normally have piqued Ricky Moore’s interest. But tonight he barely noticed them through his tears of pain.
There was a strong smell of cigar smoke. Moore was craving a cigarette. An elderly man with flowing white hair, wearing a smoking jacket and monogrammed black velvet slippers, walked towards them, with the aid of a silver-headed cane. He held a large cigar in his free hand, and fury blazed in his cornflower-blue eyes.
‘Ricky Moore?’
He nodded sullenly.
‘I’m Gavin Daly. I appreciate your dropping by.’
‘Very funny,’ Moore said defiantly
.
Daly grinned back. There was a flash of warmth that was gone in an instant, like a fleeting glimpse of the sun behind a storm cloud. ‘Funny? You like jokes, do you? Think it’s funny to con vulnerable old ladies out of their possessions?’
‘I dunno what you’re talking about.’
‘Get nice kickbacks, do you, for your information? Send your leaflet out in advance, then go into houses and take photographs of anything of value?’
‘Nah, not me. I honestly dunno what you’re talking about.’ He gasped in pain as the Apologist crushed the nerve in his arm again, as if to remind him not to bother thinking about trying to get away. ‘It’s not me.’
‘A house in Withdean Road.’
‘Never been there.’
‘There’s a lady in a house there who has one of your leaflets on her hall table.’
‘Not that I recall.’
‘Let me jog your memory,’ said the man in the business suit in a snide, assured voice. Then he sniffed. He looked taller than when Moore had seen him outside, and more immaculate, with black hair gelled back. He reminded Moore of photographs he had seen of those gangsters, the Kray twins.
Moore glanced around, wondering if he could make a break for it the moment the gorilla let go of his arm.
‘This your iPhone?’ the Kray lookalike asked, holding it up in front of him.
Moore nodded, and gasped in pain as the gorilla squeezed his arm even harder.
‘Sorry!’ the Apologist said.
‘I’m Lucas Daly, by the way,’ the Kray lookalike said. ‘It was my auntie who got robbed and murdered, thanks to you. My dad’s sister. Neither of us are very happy about it.’
‘I didn’t have nothing to do with it!’ Ricky Moore said.
Lucas Daly frowned, looking down at the phone. He tapped it several times, then held the phone up in front of Moore’s eyes.
‘Recognize that, do you?’
Ricky Moore stared, reluctantly, at the close-up photograph of the gilded case of the Whitehurst clock that had been hanging in the drawing room of Aileen McWhirter’s house. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘You must have a fucking short memory.’ He sniffed again.
Moore said nothing, his brain racing, trying desperately to come up with something convincing – and failing.
‘What about this?’
Moore stared at another photograph. This time of a swan-necked Georgian tallboy. Again he shook his head.
The man tapped the iPhone again. ‘This?’
Moore stared at a Chippendale gateleg table.
‘Never seen it before, honest! Not my photos. I didn’t take them. I didn’t!’
Then the man dug his hand inside his jacket, and pulled out the implement that had been bulking it out. It was a pair of electric curling tongs, with a flex trailing. ‘How about these, Mr Moore?’
‘I’ve never seen them before, honestly!’
‘These are like the ones used on my auntie,’ Lucas Daly said. ‘They were used to make her give up her safe code and her bank pin codes. Do you think they might make you talk, too? We’d like some names from you. Starting with the men who did Auntie Aileen’s house in Withdean Road.’
‘Lucas!’ the old man cautioned. ‘No violence. That’s not what I want. We’ve had enough of that. I don’t operate that way.’
‘I don’t know no names, honestly, sir,’ Ricky Moore addressed the old man, sensing hope.
‘Go to bed, Dad, it’s late,’ Lucas Daly said.
‘I don’t want violence, you understand?’ Gavin Daly said to his son.
‘Go to bed, Dad. Let me deal with this.’
‘I just want the names of the people who did this to my sister, Mr Moore,’ the old man said. Then he turned and walked away down the hall.
Moore stood, staring at Lucas Daly, then up at the large, blank face of the Apologist.
‘My dad’s a gentle person, Mr Moore. So we’re going to take you away from here; he wouldn’t like to see what we’re going to do to you – to help jog your memory, you see?’
Ricky Moore gurgled with terror as he felt himself being propelled towards the front door. Moments later he felt a damp patch down the front of his trousers.
He had pissed himself.
23
Once, way back when she had a life, Sarah Courteney used to love Friday nights. The start of the weekend, a time to kick back, watch rubbish TV, Big Brother or whatever, followed by an even trashier, smutty 10 p.m. show on Channel Four. But not any more. Friday nights now meant her husband, Lucas, arriving home even drunker than all the other nights of the week. If he arrived home at all.
She woke up with a start. The television was on, muted, an old film playing. Peter Sellers, as Inspector Clouseau, standing in Herbert Lom’s office. It was 2.30 a.m. Upstairs she could hear awful heavy metal pounding from her bolshie teenage son’s room. And the sound of bed springs creaking. Accompanied by the faint smell of marijuana. That was all Damian seemed to do these days. Listen to God-awful music, get stoned, and wank.
Ever the dutiful wife, she had cooked Lucas a meal, made it ready for eight o’clock, when he’d said he would be home, and kept it in the warming oven ever since. She heard the sound of the front door opening, then banging back against the wall – the stop had long ago been ripped out of the floor and never replaced – then her husband’s clumsy footsteps.
They stopped as he entered the large, open-plan living area of their house on Hove’s smart Shirley Drive. A house they were only still living in because of her earnings paying the mortgage.
‘What the fuck have you done to your face?’ he slurred, then sniffed.
‘We talked about it last night. Your dinner’s in the bottom oven,’ she replied.
‘I said, What the fuck have you done to your face?’
‘Are you deaf? I said we talked about it last night. You wanted dinner at 8 p.m.’
‘Stop ignoring me, bitch. I’ve had business to deal with. Yeah? My auntie who got murdered, yeah? Where’s your sympathy?’ He tapped his chest. ‘You have any idea how I feel? Had to deal with the bastard that done it. Wasn’t nice. Had to have a couple of beers to get over it. Know what I’m saying?’
He staggered over and stood above her. I loved you once, she thought. God almighty, I really, really loved you. You pathetic beer-sodden wreck. I loved the way you used to make me feel, the way you used to look at me. I loved your knowledge of antiques. I loved the way you could walk into a room and tell me everything about every piece of furniture in it.
‘You’ve had that Botox again, haven’t you? Lovely Dr Revson. Paying him money we don’t have. Are you fucking him or something?’
She held her composure. ‘More losses at the casino today?’
‘I’ve had a shit day.’
‘Just for a change? I’ve had my face done,’ she said calmly, ‘to try to preserve my career. So I can afford to put food on our table – and beer in your fat, stupid belly. I had it done so you don’t have to go running to your dad for more money every few months—’
She never got the rest of her words out. His right fist smashed into her chest, knocking her to the floor. The bastard was clever. He always hit her where it wouldn’t show.
Tomorrow, she vowed, she would leave him. And yet she knew tomorrow he would weep, and apologize, and tell her how much he loved her and that he could not live without her. Tomorrow he would promise, as he always did, that they would make a fresh start.
24
Peregrine Stuart-Simmonds was a tall, cheery man in his mid-sixties, with a portly figure elegantly parcelled inside a double-breasted chalk-striped suit. He sported a full head of wavy silver hair, and his narrow, horn-rimmed spectacles, worn right on the end of his nose, gave him a rather distinguished, academic air.
He sat at the round meeting table in Roy Grace’s small office, exuding the smell of a masculine soap, and stifling a yawn. ‘Apologies!’ he said, cheerily, in a booming, salesroom voice. ‘Been up mo
st of the night working on the inventory for you.’
It was 7.20 on Saturday morning, another weekend shot to hell. Grace yawned, too. He’d also been up most of the night. He’d stayed at work with several members of his team until after midnight, then Noah had barely let him or Cleo sleep a wink. ‘Can I get you some coffee?’ he offered.
‘With a hypodermic syringe, I’ll take it intravenously! Black, no sugar, and as strong as you can make it, please.’
Grace stepped out, and returned a few minutes later holding two steaming mugs. ‘I really appreciate your moving so fast, Mr Stuart-Simmonds,’ he said.
‘Have to, Detective Superintendent, if we’re to have any chance of playing catch-up. You can be damned sure this has been carefully planned, and most of the items, if not all, are already overseas. What time does your briefing start?’
‘Eight thirty. I’d like to use this hour to learn as much from you as I can. If we could run through the highest-value items that have been taken from Mrs McWhirter’s home, what their identifying features are, and how rare they are. Also, in your experience, how they might have been transported, where they are likely to have been shipped to – and which agencies overseas are most likely to be able to help us locate them. Then you could help me set some parameters for my team, as well as giving us a crash course in how the global antiques world works.’
An ASDA lorry rumbled up the hill outside. The expert blew on his coffee, then sipped. ‘More to the point, how the global antiques black market operates – I think you’ll find that more helpful.’
‘I’ll be guided by you.’
‘What you have to understand is that small stuff such as low-value porcelain, jewellery, pictures, silverware – items worth only a few hundred quid – can be fenced easily in a city like Brighton, with all its antiques stalls and little shops. But these days important pieces are recorded on an international register, along with photographs and their details, which every reputable international dealer subscribes to. None of them would touch a stolen item on it with a bargepole.’