Deadly Pleasures

by Martin Edwards

  ‘Yes,’ Alf agreed straight out.

  Her eyes turned glassy at that. He remembered the first time they met after Hardcastle’s snatch team took him into custody. How she didn’t even ask the obvious question: was it true? Did he really do those terrible things?

  She was the only one who’d believed him from the start. Even the brief they found fell for Hardcastle’s clever fit-up in his own head, or so Alf reckoned.

  ‘I don’t want to lose you again. All them years wasted. I can’t go through it twice.’

  He didn’t know what to say. So he pulled up a stool, got her to sit on it, took her hands, leaned over, kissed his wife on the cheek, held her.

  ‘Truth is,’ he said, ‘sometimes things come along you can’t walk away from. ’Cos if you do they’ll just follow you anyway.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means you need to trust me. One last time. And then …’

  Then what? Compensation, said Norm’s friend Bruno, a curious stranger who came offering a gun. Life-changing. But rewards came in different guises. And the Spaniard, if that’s what he was, didn’t get specific.

  ‘Drop me off on the way to the shop,’ he said. ‘Tonight …’

  She was crying full on now and he hated to see that. So he took out his freshly-ironed hankie and wiped away the tears.

  ‘You stop that now, love. It’s not needed. Tonight we’ll go out for dinner. Somewhere nice. My treat. You deserve it.’

  Two hours later he was with Norm and Bruno watching Hardcastle’s bit of stuff manoeuvre her Mercedes soft-top out of his palace then disappear down the road to Malaga, the word ‘shopping’ etched across her pretty, vacant face.

  ‘Lithuanian,’ the man from Madrid said. ‘The man has no class.’

  ‘All that money,’ Norm grumbled. ‘Who needs class?’

  He looked at Alf.

  ‘You want me to get him to open up again? I can say I’m back to do a bit more work.’

  ‘Nah,’ Alf said. He had his best jacket on, the Glock tucked inside it. ‘He’ll let me in.’

  Then he walked up the road, went to the gate, pressed the bell and smiled at the camera lens above it.

  A voice. Calm, English, familiar.

  ‘DCS Hardcastle,’ Alf said quickly. ‘Long time no see. We got matters to discuss, Owen. Don’t you think?’

  A long pause. Then the gate buzzed. He pushed it open and went inside.

  The man himself was standing by the front door, phone in hand, pink Bermuda shorts and a green polo neck with the name of a golf club above the pocket. The tash was so bad it looked stitched on. He was smiling, which was never a pretty sight, and seemed leaner, richer, nastier.

  ‘You’ll want a stiff one after all this time,’ Hardcastle said.

  On the way up the drive Alf had shifted the handgun from his jacket pocket to the back of his trousers, stuffing it under the belt. Wouldn’t be easy sitting down like that. But Owen Hardcastle was no fool. He’d have seen it otherwise.

  Alf gazed at the pink shorts and shook his head.

  ‘Just a chat’ll do.’

  He looked just as much at ease now as he did giving his lying evidence in court. Phone still in hand as they sat down.

  Alf said, ‘I’m not interrupting anything …?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. I’m retired. Enjoying myself.’

  Hardcastle’s voice sounded posher than ever. It wasn’t hard to imagine him mixing with the mayor and chief of police, regaling them with stories about his former life as a financial wizard back in London. And the rest.

  They were in a long room, lavishly decorated, Alf on the leather sofa in front of a low coffee table, the Yard’s most wanted renegade officer on a winged chair opposite, fidgeting from side to side.

  ‘What’s it you’re after?’ he asked. ‘Money, I imagine.’

  ‘Everyone likes money. But most of all I’d like an explanation. Why me?’

  A glance at the watch. A brief sigh.

  ‘Because you were there. Because it was easy. I don’t want to talk about this.’

  ‘Shame,’ Alf said, then leaned forward, took out the Glock, placed the handgun on the coffee table. It was uncomfortable where it was anyway. ‘I do.’

  Hardcastle shook his head.

  ‘I thought you were the wronged innocent, Alf. Above all this. Smart.’

  ‘If I was smart I wouldn’t have spent twelve years inside for something I didn’t even know about. Let alone do.’

  ‘I told you. It was easy. You were there … Nothing else to say.’

  Alf picked up the Glock, aimed it, watched Owen Hardcastle stiffen with alarm then pulled a shot into the floor-length mirror behind him.

  Long time since he’d fired a gun. It was louder than he remembered.

  The man opposite jumped in the air, came down in his seat. Glanced across the room, scared. Looked at his watch again.

  ‘You need to find something to say,’ Alf told him. ‘Fill in the gaps. Now please.’

  Twenty laboured minutes it took, as if Hardcastle was spinning it out as much as he could. Alf had suspected most of the tale anyway but it was nice to get the sequence of events, the pre-planning, the job itself, the laying of evidence, all down and clear.

  ‘That wasn’t hard, was it?’ he asked when the man was done.

  ‘None of it was aimed at you. Could have been anyone.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember that the next time I’m thinking about those twelve years I spent in the Scrubs.’

  ‘What do you want, Alf?’

  ‘Five million. Real money. Pounds. Not euros. Cash on the nail. Nothing wired. Nothing on tick. All in my sweaty palm by tomorrow lunchtime. Think you can do that?’

  ‘No,’ Hardcastle replied. ‘Give me three days.’

  ‘You got two.’

  ‘Two then.’ He looked at the door. ‘And then you’re gone? I don’t hear from you any more?’

  ‘You have my word. Which is worth something, by the way, but I imagine you know that.’

  A short, mirthless laugh.

  ‘Oh yes. Mr Honest. Why do you think it was so easy? I have to emphasise this. It wasn’t—’

  Alf waved the gun at him again.

  ‘Don’t say it wasn’t personal, Owen. Please.’ He stood up. ‘Do we have an agreement?’

  Hardcastle got to his feet, nodded, held out his right hand.

  ‘I’m sorry. If that helps.’

  ‘Not really,’ Alf replied but he put the Glock on the coffee table and reached out anyway.

  It was quick. He had to give Owen Hardcastle that. One brisk step and he’d dodged Alf’s outstretched hand, was down snatching the gun, grabbing it greedily.

  The mask dropped then. Alf listened. Tut-tutted. When the barrage of profanities and threats ended he said, ‘I’ll never know how you got through university, let alone made DCS, with a trap on you like that. Really …’

  More curses. The Glock waved in his face.

  ‘There’s people on the way here who are gonna take care of you,’ Hardcastle spat at him, a touch of estuarial leaking into his voice ‘They can pick up the bloody pieces now. They can clean up the mess.’

  Alf shook his head.

  ‘You don’t mean that, Owen. Not really.’

  Another flurry of foul words. Alf was tut-tutting when Hardcastle pointed the Glock in his face and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing.

  Two more clicks.

  Two more nothings.

  Alf smiled, retrieved the rest of the shells from his jacket pocket, scattered them round the marble floor where they bounced and tinkled like ice cubes just let loose. Then he retrieved the wired mike from inside his shirt and, just for good measure, said into it, ‘All yours now, gents.’

  A thought.

  ‘Hang on …’

  Memories. It was all coming back.

  ‘Let me do this,’ he said, prising the gun from Hardcastle’s shaking hands and lobbing it behind the sofa.
‘If I can remember.’

  Of course he could. It had been a part of his life – the best outside Eileen – for more than twenty years.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Alfred Hawkins. West Ham serious crime squad, sir. I would caution you but for the life of me I don’t know what passes as a caution in this warm and foreign land. So let me just say …’

  Voices, the sound of a door coming down, windows smashing, men coming in behind him.

  Alf reached forward and grabbed Owen Hardcastle by the front of his golf club polo shirt, pulled his smooth, scared face close enough to smell the sickly aftershave.

  ‘Your nickedness knows no bounds, sunshine.’

  The funny Spaniard stood there grinning, Norm the Chisel too.

  ‘Book him, Bruno,’ Alf said. ‘We’re done ’ere.’

  By three o’clock the team from Madrid had Hardcastle in custody in a special incident room they’d set up down the coast in Marbella. In the neighbouring cell they had the four Ukrainian hoods they’d nabbed on the way to the villa, summoned by the fugitive copper to deal with his unexpected visitor.

  An hour later the mayor was in another custody suite, with the local chief of police in the adjoining one. Bruno was well prepared. Once he had Owen Hardcastle on tape admitting to fixing the bullion job there was enough to pull him in as a local crim, along with his chums.

  ‘Take you back to when you was working?’ Norm asked as they were getting ready to leave.

  ‘Not really.’

  The lines weren’t quite so blurred then. There were bent cops, true. But the idea someone would fit up one of their colleagues …

  They walked out of the temporary HQ Bruno had set up and went to a café round the corner. The story was on the news. Reporters and TV teams were flying in from London to cover the biggest crime bust to hit the Costa del Sol in years. Norm was going to make himself scarce with a quick holiday to Gibraltar. Bruno had fixed for Alf and Eileen to spend a couple of days at a posh hotel in the mountains at his expense.

  Scotland Yard said they were sending out an assistant chief constable who wanted to talk to Alf about compensation and the reinstatement of his lost pension. The Spaniard had leaned forward when he heard that news and said, very firmly, ‘Don’t sign anything, Alf. Those people screwed you over. Get a lawyer and take them to the cleaners.

  Norm had winked at that and said, ‘You’re minted, mate.’

  Alf kept quiet at that but in the café he raised his glass of San Mig, proposed a brief toast then asked, ‘Bruno’s what then? Spanish Special Branch or something?’

  ‘Kind of. And a bit of Interpol or whatever they call it now.’

  The man from Peckham answered so easily.

  ‘Was he waiting for you when you got out of the Scrubs?’

  Norm put down his glass and looked bashful.

  ‘I’m not mad about this,’ Alf added. ‘I’d just like to know.’

  ‘Saw me three times while we was in there together. Thought you might have noticed. I didn’t get many visitors.’

  ‘Oh,’ Alf said.

  ‘They were onto you as soon as Eileen bought that place. Bruno reckoned you and ’Ardcastle was in it together. I told ’im not to be so stupid. That bastard sent you down. But he reckoned sometimes it worked like that. Someone did the time and got their reward afterwards. I wasn’t ’aving that.’

  Alf lifted his glass again and said thanks.

  ‘I told ’im you was a good ’un,’ Norm went on. ‘They’d been hunting all these locals for years apparently. Couldn’t quite get enough evidence. Not surprising if the local boss copper was in on it, eh?’

  ‘True.’

  ‘I couldn’t level with you, Alf. It wasn’t part of the arrangement. He fixed the job for me. The flights. Told me to find you in the Donkey and …’

  He was a gentle, kind man and starting to get upset. So Alf put a hand on his, said a few quiet, comforting words then asked, ‘What now?’

  ‘I’ll try and get some work,’ Norm said. ‘Not much back for me in London, is there?’

  They didn’t have much to say after that. Close to five Alf wished him luck and left. Bruno had laid on an unmarked squad car to take him home then pick up Eileen and head off for their unexpected treat.

  The place the men from Madrid took them was somewhere Alf would never have found, or paid for, on his own. A hunting lodge high in the forests of the Sierra Blanca. Almost empty for some reason. Quiet, well-dressed staff, an elegant suite as big as the ground floor of their little villa. A restaurant looking back to the busy lights of the coastline. No sound except birds in the trees and the low chatter of the staff. They ordered some food and sat alone on the terrace at sunset, lost for words for a while. At the view. And events.

  ‘A man from the Daily Mirror offered an awful lot of money if you wanted to talk to him,’ Eileen said as the waiter came with the first course: lobster.

  ‘He can sod off.’

  ‘A gentleman from the Guardian wants to talk too but he wasn’t offering nothing at all.’

  ‘He can sod off too.’

  Alf had taken down the Dunblagging sign before they left. She’d liked that but they hadn’t spoken much along the way, not with Bruno up front talking about the countryside and its history.

  ‘I suppose you want to go back now,’ she said quietly. ‘To Plaistow. Wasn’t such a good idea coming down here anyway. I don’t think the cake shop’s going to make it.’

  He prodded his lobster and thought for a moment.

  ‘Alf? Did you hear what I said?’

  ‘If you hadn’t bought that place in Fuengi none of this would have happened, would it? How can that be a bad idea?’

  ‘Well no, but … London. I mean … it’s where you grew up. It’s home.’

  ‘Nah,’ Alf said, then took the decision to dive in and try the thing in front of him. Lobster. First time ever. A good call. It was new and it was nice.

  ‘You’re just saying that …’

  ‘Home’s where you are, sweetheart,’ he said and squeezed her hand across the table. ‘If we’ve got money we can put some of that into the cake shop. Do an extension on the house too. Maybe build a little pool. I know a good chippie. Wouldn’t mind learning a bit of the lingo either. Quite fancy knowing what I’m eating for one thing. And …’

  And lots of things when he came to think about it. It wasn’t just Bruno’s sly and engaging talk about how the Arabs lived here once and left behind some beautiful buildings if only you knew where to look for them. There was a travel book with pictures in the hotel bedroom full of stuff he ached to see: cities and castles and cathedrals, all manner of spectacular places. He could hardly stop talking about it once he started. Especially when he saw how Eileen’s face lit up along the way.

  Then she was crying again. Women all over. Blub when you’re happy. Blub when you’re sad.

  ‘Oh please, love …’

  ‘You got your glint back, Alf. That’s all. You got it back and I thought I’d never see that again.’

  He grinned, felt happy, truly happy, for the first time since he’d stepped out of the Scrubs.

  ‘Only ’cos you kept it for me all them years.’

  There was a Spanish word Bruno’d taught him that afternoon after they nabbed Owen Hardcastle, the first of many to come.

  ‘Salud,’ Alf said and chinked his glass against hers.

  CLICK

  Alison Joseph

  Alison Joseph’s first book about Sister Agnes was Sacred Hearts, published in 1994, and the most recent title in the series is A Violent Act. She has worked in local radio, and is the author of a number of radio plays; she has also adapted books written by other writers for radio. She is the current Chair of the CWA.

  ‘You’d know if he was dead, though, wouldn’t you? Your own husband …’

  She stared into the black water. Around her the trees dripped with recent rain.

  Would I? she wondered.

  It was all very well for Rosemary
to say that, pouring her yet another cup of coffee in her warm kitchen. Trying to help, of course. ‘I mean, put it this way, Sheila, no news is good news, in my view David has just wandered off, memory loss, you know the kind of thing, I saw a programme on the telly about it, people just forget who they are sometimes, they’ll find him safe and sound, trust me …’

  Safe and sound.

  She left the lake and headed through the trees, her Wellingtons squelching in mud. Six days he’d been missing. Five and a half days since her phone call to the police, reporting that her husband hadn’t come back. Yes, she’d said, uncharacteristic. Very out of character, she’d agreed. A solicitor, she said. Semi-retired. Concentrating on the garden these days, and his antique collecting, a bit of tennis too, although his knee had been playing up … Our marriage? We’d been married thirty-two years last August. ‘Any problems in your marriage, madam?’ No, she’d said. No problems. ‘Ours was a happy marriage,’ she’d told the police officer.

  The damp branches shivered in the cold wind.

  A happy marriage.

  How do I know? I know nothing about my marriage. I know nothing about my husband. All I know is that he set off for Waitrose in the Volvo, as he did every Thursday, and he never came back. There it was, our car on the news, last night, abandoned, police crawling all over it.

  A happy marriage.

  For all I know, he might be anywhere. He might be dead. For all I know.

  She reached the path that led out to the Otley Road. The sky was heavy with impending rain.

  Click. Camera 722, Otley Road. ‘11.04,’ the timecode said. Click. Camera 723. ‘11.21’ Click.

  He zoomed in. The black and white image on the screen grew fuzzier, but the number plate was visible. That’s the car all right, he thought. Click. Camera 724 … 725 … Silver Volvo, there it is. And then it disappears. And reappears, six days later, abandoned in a side street, they’d had the call this morning.

  He checked the map. So, he leaves his home, heads on to the Otley Road, Waitrose, the wife said, and then vanishes. CCTV of the Waitrose car park, no sign of him there—

  There was a knock at his door. ‘Matt …?’ She stood in the doorway, black hair, black trouser suit, red lipstick.