‘Mr Green? It’s Sergeant Hayes from London.’
‘Sergeant Hayes?’ The voice sounded surprised to hear from him.
‘Yes. You called me. I have a note.’
‘I didn’t expect to hear back from you tonight.’
‘I’m working on your sister’s case.’
‘Have you heard from her?’
‘I haven’t, Mr Green. Sorry. I’m a bit unclear: why did you call me this evening?’
‘She called me, sir.’
‘Who? Iolanthe? Your sister rang you?’
‘Yes, sir. Today. First time in … ten, fifteen years. I didn’t know who she was at first. Her voice … She’s very upset, sir. She said … She said she was under a lot of pressure over money. She didn’t say how. She asked me, sir, actually … I’m sorry. I don’t know if I can tell you this. I’m not sure—’
Hayes cut him off in his blathering. ‘What can you tell me about your sister and where she is, Nathaniel?’
‘Well, she didn’t say. I mean she’s still in England, I guess. She talked about “over here” and “over there”. She asked me to move some money for her. Not her money really. Mine. She was concerned that someone might come after my savings but she didn’t tell me how. She seemed to be tired. I wondered if she might be drunk. Or ill. She didn’t sound like herself at all.’
‘What else did she tell you?’
‘Only that things were going quite badly for her and that she was trying to resolve them, sir. That’s what she said. “I have to make an end of it, Nat. I have to tie it all back down.”’
‘What do you think she meant by that?’
‘I don’t know. We only talked for a few minutes and then she was gone. I don’t have a number for her. She didn’t tell me where she was. I’m sorry. I should have asked her questions. I was just so shocked. I think I messed it up.’
‘You did fine, Mr Green. She’s your sister. It must have been very difficult. But … do something for me? If she calls you back, ask her where she is. It’s for her own good. Do you understand?’
‘I understand, sir. Yes. I understand.’
Hayes headed back out into the snow. Iolanthe was definitely alive: that was something, that was progress. He felt a certain triumph in her continuing existence although it really had nothing to do with his actions. If he could only find her now and bring her back he might be able to salvage something of his sense of self. He crunched and shuffled his way down towards St James’s Square.
‘It sort of sticks out,’ the receptionist at The Times had said. The Army and Navy Club – The Rag – was a vast glass-plated, steel-rimmed kind of affair built massively high amongst a cluster of pastel-coloured Italianate townhouses. Gothic black lights burned outside and the building was specked and dotted with lighted windows even though it was well past midnight now.
It had snowed on him again as he walked and he took a moment to stand outside the circle of light and brush the snow from his hat and coat. Places like this always made him anxious.
The liveried servant at the front desk of the club eyed him with a certain amount of lightly concealed disdain.
‘Can I help you …’ He searched for signs of a uniform or rank. ‘Sir?’
‘My name is Detective Sergeant Barnaby Hayes of the Metropolitan Police and I am here on a matter of police business. Can you tell me if James Wingate is drinking here tonight?’
‘Is he expecting you, sir?’
‘No. But we are acquainted. Mr Wingate has been helping us with our enquiries. I need to ask him some further questions as a matter of some urgency.’
‘I see. I think it may be that Mr Wingate is a little top-heavy, sir.’
‘Top-heavy?’
‘Yes. Do you think I might inform Mr Wingate that you wish to speak with him and make an appointment for the morning?’
‘I need to speak with him now. It regards the disappearance of Miss Iolanthe Green: a case that is still very much ongoing.’
‘It’s just that’ – the porter dropped his voice – ‘he’s medicated, sir.’
‘Do you have a problem with me speaking to him on the premises? Because I’m quite happy to take him down to the station.’
‘I don’t think speaking to him anywhere … I … He’s drunk, sir. I last saw Mr Wingate an hour ago and he was really enormously drunk. I think he may now be asleep.’
‘Well, go and wake him up then. I have questions that need answering tonight.’
The porter hurried upstairs, his heels clacking as he went and Hayes suddenly found himself overcome by the heat of the lobby. The whole building seemed quite airless and fuggy and he opened the front door and leaned against the door frame, breathing in the cold of the night. Orla’s note had stripped him of his layers of skin. Tonight he felt like the carcass of a policeman, like the boiled remains.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ the porter called to him from the stairs and Hayes drew his head back inside the club. ‘I’m so sorry, Detective Sergeant. Mr Wingate has been involved in a small altercation and we’re just having to clean him up. Would you mind waiting for ten or fifteen minutes? We need to find him a change of clothes.’
‘The man’s a liability!’
‘He’s normally rather placid, sir. I’m not sure what’s come over him. I think you may have caught him on a bad night.’
‘Can he walk? Is he sober enough to … Never mind. Never mind. I’m going to fetch a car. Can you tell Mr Wingate that I will be back for him in twenty minutes with a car.’ And Hayes threw open the door and walked back out into the snow.
‘Bloody man,’ he swore to himself as he walked. ‘Bloody, bloody man.’
At Savile Row he signed out one of the Morris Minors and when he had finally got it started he drove back to the Army and Navy Club to pick up the body of James Wingate.
We’re All Friends to the Police
Friday, 12 November
‘Is it about my daughter?’ Ottmar asked when he opened the front door to Detective Sergeant Hayes. It was quarter past seven, not even properly light yet.
‘Your daughter?’ Hayes was confused, ‘I’m looking for Anna Treadway.’
‘Oh. She lives in Flat B. You want to ring the bell above.’
Hayes stared at the various doorbells down the right-hand side of the door. The top two were both labelled Fleet. Ottmar stood and waited on the doormat in his paisley pyjamas, his hair sticking out in wild white and black tufts.
‘Sorry. Who is your daughter? Do I know her?’ Hayes asked at last.
‘Her name is Samira Alabora. She was arrested two nights ago. With Anna and the Jamaican man.’
Of course, Hayes thought, the Turkish girl in the short dress. ‘Your wife was very upset.’
‘My wife is still very upset.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it, sir. I am Detective Sergeant Hayes. I need to talk to Miss Treadway. Apologies for ringing the wrong bell.’
‘I’ll give Anna a knock,’ Ottmar said and padded upstairs, leaving the front door open and Hayes standing on the step. He came back a couple of minutes later, his brow wrinkled with thought.
‘She isn’t home. Only her flatmate. Her flatmate seems to think Anna has gone off with the coloured man.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I think his name is Aloysius.’
‘Does that seem likely?’ Hayes asked him, genuinely bemused.
‘Well, I think they might be friends.’ Ottmar raised his brows but Hayes ignored the intimation. She’s found Iolanthe, that was Hayes’ first thought; she’s found Iolanthe and they’re conspiring together for her to make some sort of escape.
Ottmar nodded towards the cafe window to his right. ‘The cafe here is mine. Would you like to come inside? It’s a terribly cold morning to be standing on doorsteps,’ he said with just a hint of an ingratiating smile.
‘I haven’t had any breakfast,’ Hayes admitted. ‘Do you think I could get some toast?’
‘Come through the back way. I will make you toast
and coffee.’ Ottmar spread his arms wide, welcoming the policeman in.
Ottmar seated the policeman at a gingham-clothed table by the hatch and withdrew to put on some clothes. He returned in a white shirt and black trousers to turn on the lights in the kitchen and start the toasting machine, the coffee urn and the grill.
Hayes sat in silence and watched people flow past the quiet cafe. Barrow boys, flower sellers, shop girls, taxi men. He thought of his borrowed car parked up on the pavement on Shaftesbury Avenue and worried that he’d be in the way of delivery vans. He had become, over the course of the night, almost completely numb. Now and again the fact that Orla had left him would resurface and he would push it out again with thoughts of Iolanthe and Wingate and the strange moving of the money.
The smell of coffee started to travel through the air. The grill sizzled and hissed. Somewhere in the depths of the kitchen a machine growled and creaked. Ottmar appeared beside him and laid the table with cutlery and a salt and pepper set. He reappeared with fried eggs and buttered toast and two cups of very black coffee.
‘Thank you,’ Hayes told him. ‘You really didn’t have to do this. It smells wonderful.’
‘Have something to eat.’
Ottmar seated himself at the other side of the table and sipped his coffee carefully. ‘I have an ulterior motive,’ he said at last.
‘Do you?’ asked Hayes, taken by surprise, his mouth full of toast.
‘I wanted to tell you something about my family.’
Hayes blinked at him and stopped eating.
‘We’re not people you need to worry about. We’re some of the good ones. Do you see?’
Hayes nodded, still a little lost in his own thoughts.
‘We’re not the robbers or the thieves or the murderers. We’re very straight people, Sergeant Hayes. You think … lots of people think that we do not love this country because our skin is the wrong colour. But what you don’t understand is that we love this country more. We weren’t just born here. We had to work very hard to get here. You see, you love something so much more if you had to work for it. Don’t you think that’s true?’
‘Well, yes. I suppose. I didn’t mean to suggest anything … I’m not sure why we’re having this conversation.’
‘We’re having this conversation because we both live in this city and I want you to know … if you ever have dealings with us again … I want you to know who we are. We are your friends, Sergeant Hayes. We’re all friends to the police.’
Hayes frowned at him. ‘I’m sure you are.’ Why hasn’t this man’s wife left him? Hayes wondered. And why has mine? Why would God take Gracie away from me?
‘I’m afraid Iolanthe may have been lost because we didn’t love her enough. When we don’t love people enough, you see, we do them harm. Myself and my wife love our daughter very much. That’s what made my wife so angry. She is not a bad woman. I think it’s better to love than not love. I think if we love people enough that gives them something to hold on to.’
Hayes tuned himself back in to Ottmar’s little speech. ‘Love?’ he asked. ‘I thought Iolanthe was a stranger.’
‘Oh, yes! I never met the woman. But don’t you think there might be different kinds of love? The love you have for your daughter. And then the love you show when you help an old woman across the road. And then the love you show your neighbours when they go missing and you look for them. And then the love a country shows when it says we will not kill. It’s just compassion, isn’t it? That’s the right word, yes? Compassion. It looks different but it’s all the same.’
Hayes looked at Ottmar. His eyes seemed to glow from beneath his brows as if he were a seer or a saint or a maniac. This is how the mad talk, Hayes thought.
***
Anna and Aloysius slipped out of the B & B and into the dark of morning at half past five, leaving a cheque for a pound on the telephone table before they went. They caught the first train to Liverpool Street, avoiding an early-morning ticket inspector by taking it in turns to visit the toilet. Having evaded the inspectors once, they decided not to risk the tube but caught a bus instead with the last few pence that either of them had, riding it far past the stop they had bought the ticket for. By eight o’clock they were back in Covent Garden, a grey morning sky above them, Anna leading Aloysius towards the Alabora with the thoughts of begging a little tea and sympathy from Ottmar while they made a plan.
And there was Ottmar, dressed already and drinking his coffee, and there beside him eating breakfast was Detective Sergeant Hayes.
Aloysius’s heart fluttered in his chest. The terrible fear of that night in the station flooded back inside him. He clasped Anna’s arm tightly through her coat sleeve. ‘I cannot see that man.’
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll go in on my own.’
Aloysius found sanctuary in a tobacconist’s shop at the top of Monmouth Street where he busied himself taking in the headlines of the morning papers.
CHAOS IN RHODESIA
WAS MAR A MEMBER OF THIS GANG?
HINDLEY’S DEADLY OBSESSION
No Iolanthe Green, he thought. How quickly she had come to bore all those who didn’t know her. I still don’t know her. I feel like I know her. I think I’m getting her muddled up with Anna.
He wanted to be alone with Anna. He wanted to feel safe and to make her feel the same in return. He wanted to find Iolanthe and be beside Anna when it happened. He wanted to rebalance the wrong that had been done him. He wanted to find himself heroic again. He could not do that when Hayes, his persecutor, was following their every move.
Out in the street he saw Anna exit the cafe and turn in a full circle, scanning her surroundings. He pushed the door of the tobacconist’s open and she moved towards the sound. They stood together on the step of the shop, Hayes watching them from a distance.
‘I gave him an expurgated version of the truth,’ Anna told him in a whisper. ‘No Geri, no Hen. But we think that Iolanthe went to stay somewhere in Essex and then came back to London yesterday by train. As far as he’s concerned that’s all we know. Now, his side of things is that Lanny phoned her brother in the States last night. Long story but it’s something about money. Hayes thinks she might be planning to hurt herself and he wants me to go along with him so that she’s got a friendly face to meet her. If we find her, that is … I said I’d go with him if you would too.’ She clasped his hand and gazed at him imploringly. ‘Please. Please. Be my friend and come with me.’
Aloysius could not speak. He could not speak for fear but he pressed the back of her hand to his mouth in assent.
‘Thank you,’ she told him. ‘Thank you.’ Hayes did not move. He stood very still and watched them as they moved back towards him.
‘We’re coming,’ Anna announced.
‘Right,’ Hayes said. ‘Okay. In that case I have a little job for Mr Weathers to do.’
Hayes’ blue and white Morris Minor was sitting parked up on the pavement and now he opened the passenger door, pulled forward the front seat and gestured to the dark of the back. A tall, skinny man in an overly large blue suit lay passed out on the back seat. ‘He’s your responsibility now,’ he told Aloysius. ‘Try to see he doesn’t vomit on the seats.’
Aloysius stared at Hayes and then at Wingate. He felt a trap becoming visible around him though he didn’t understand yet what it might entail. He glanced back towards the Alabora. A young girl in a fluffy blue dressing gown was standing beside Ottmar, watching them. It took him several seconds to realise he was looking at Samira.
‘Wait,’ he told Hayes. Anna started towards him. ‘Wait,’ he told her. He walked at a stately pace back towards the cafe and pushed open the front door.
He gestured to Samira to join him by the open door and then he bent and whispered something in her ear. He straightened, bowed to a baffled Ottmar and returned to where Anna and Hayes stood beside the panda car. ‘Just setting my affairs in order,’ he told them and then he climbed into the back with the unconscious Wingate.
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In the cafe Ottmar and Samira watched Anna and Hayes slam the doors. ‘What did he tell you, Sami?’ Ottmar asked his daughter.
‘Couldn’t possibly say, Dad. Much too secret.’ Samira watched the police car draw away. She pulled her dressing-gown cord tight around her. ‘Good riddance to the lot of them,’ she said.
‘You’re going to be late for school, flower,’ Ottmar told her.
Samira looked up at him and smiled a thin, hard smile. ‘And why would I be going there?’
Anna, Aloysius and Hayes rode in silence to Liverpool Street station. Barnaby parked in a taxi bay and went to make enquiries. Anna and Aloysius waited in silence for a few minutes while Aloysius perfected a way of keeping the man pinned in place using just his knees.
‘Does he know we came through here this morning?’ Aloysius asked when the body seemed more steady.
‘No. I thought I’d skip the bit about us not paying for our tickets and let him do the asking.’ Anna turned in her seat and gazed back at Aloysius whose face had just this morning started to emerge from the bruising and the swelling and to look like itself again.
‘What did you say to Samira?’ she asked him.
Aloysius pressed his lips together and thought about this. ‘Nothing that would hurt you or Lanny,’ he said at last. ‘But I can’t say.’
Anna felt a little stung. It wasn’t for him to have secrets from her; that seemed quite the wrong way round. Then she noticed the profile of the body in the back. ‘I know that man,’ she said. ‘He’s a journalist. Came to interview Lanny the day she left … Wingate. Smarmy man. Wonder what he’s doing in Hayes’ car.’
‘I think Mr Hayes likes collecting people,’ Aloysius said.
‘You know,’ said Anna, ‘I think Hayes is basically okay. I mean … Even given everything that’s happened I think he’s one of the good ones.’
‘Mr Hayes is very much a policeman,’ Aloysius noted.
‘Well, yes. But I think he really cares.’
Aloysius thought about this. ‘People don’t care about everything equally,’ he said at last.
They turned towards the sound of feet running towards the car. Hayes got in carrying a large hardback book, looked at Anna and exhaled loudly. His cheeks were bright red and his eyes were shining. There was something strangely manic about his whole bearing.
Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars Page 25