by Marcia Woolf
It wasn’t easy getting a visitor’s pass at such short notice, but it was possible. When I finally got to see Jack it was four o’clock. We sat in a small room off the main visiting area, with a poker-faced guard playing gooseberry. I did try smiling at him, what with it being the season of goodwill to all men, even the ugly ones, but it cut no ice. Frankly, I doubt a blow-torch would have cut much ice. I bet someone once told him he had a granite jaw and he’d taken it literally.
Jack loped in, thinner than ever and an unappealing shade of greige.
“Jack? Are you okay? You really don’t look good.”
He frowned at me.
“Had a cold. Yeah, you look fabulous too. Nice coat. Been shopping again?”
We sat down. It wasn’t a scheduled visit: he knew I was there for a reason.
“So, what’s the occasion?”
I glanced at Ironman in the corner and lowered my voice.
“A big day in my life, Jack. A day for decisions.”
He eyed me suspiciously.
“Like what?”
“Do you want the bad news, the bad news or the bad news?”
He started to laugh but it turned to coughing: painful, dry, breathless rasps like there was no air in the room. I felt my resolve start to weaken, but it wasn’t beyond him to play for sympathy. Po-Face fetched him a plastic cup of water, which I thought was unusual, and worrying. He sipped it and spluttered, and carried on coughing.
“Jack, I didn’t know you were this ill. Have they let you see a doctor?”
The uniform spoke.
“Saw the GP this morning. He’s got tablets.”
Jack finally stopped hacking and waved at me to carry on.
“I don’t like this. Did the doctor say what was wrong with you? It could be pneumonia.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Don’t be fucking stupid. What are you here for?”
“If you must know,” I hissed, “I’m here to tell you that we got the result of the DNA test.”
“What DNA test? I haven’t done a test.”
“Yes, you have. I didn’t tell you about it. Look, it was just easier, okay? I gave the lab your baby tooth, the one from the silver box.”
He stared at me, then he remembered what I was talking about and started to cackle, and then cough again. He drank some more water. I looked up at the guard: he was uneasy, guilty-faced.
“Anyway,” I went on, conscious of the visiting room clock ticking, “basically, we have the same mother, so no surprise there. Shirley was telling the truth for once. But we do have different fathers.”
“Go on,” he rasped.
“You won’t like it. I certainly don’t.”
“For fuck’s sake get on with it.”
“Seems my father is Papa.”
Jack’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.
“What? Jesus Christ. That’s shit. No, no, no. No way. Where the hell did you get this test done? Some online crap place that charges a fiver?”
He was wheezing, drawing shallow painful breaths in between the words.
“The Metropolitan Police forensic laboratory, actually.”
I could see he was fighting to stifle another coughing fit and waited till he could speak.
“Right: I get it. You got your boyfriend Sullivan to run the test. Well, he’s going to turn up good news every time, isn’t he?”
“I’m not going to get into a fight with you, Jack. For one thing, you’re sick. You should be in hospital, by the sound of you.”
He banged his fist on the table, frustrated by his lack of breath. Uniform was about to intervene but I shook my head and he stayed on his spot, vigilant. In my head, it was around this time that I was going to smack little brother with the suggestion that I had more claim than him to the family fortune, but he’d shifted the ground from under me, again. Still, it could wait. He’d work it out. I had other levers to pull.
“What’s the rest of the news?”
“You want more?”
“Now you’re here. You said three things, three lots of bad news.”
“Two. I meant two. You know me, Jack. Never could count.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Go on.”
“I know about the two guys in the Mercedes. Your friends.”
I sensed a breeze blowing through the room: uniform’s ears were flapping so hard he was starting to taxi for takeoff, but I ignored him.
“It was you, wasn’t it, who sent them to check up on me? They’ve been doing a great job, Jack. I just wanted to report back on that. They are very diligent, spending all night outside the flat sometimes, even in the snow. I hope you’re paying them overtime.”
He glared at me. There wasn’t a lot he could say what with Big Ears standing there not ten feet away, so I took advantage and carried on.
“And one of them is quite a good shot, isn’t he?”
Jack flinched.
“Yes, it’s funny. Everyone thought he’d missed, but that’s what he was told to do, wasn’t it? Put the frighteners on. That certainly worked. I wish I knew who sent them, Jack.”
“That was nothing to do with me. How could it be? I’m in prison, remember.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
He shrugged and looked away.
“What about the shooter?”
Jack reached over and took hold of my hand. He gripped it hard, and his fingers felt cold and brittle, and more like a fistful of parched bones than any hand I’d ever held.
“I’ll never let you go. Not to that bastard Sullivan. He’s got you just like that.” With his other hand Jack pressed his thumb and forefinger together, two pale sticks pinched tight; his eyes, always the colour of water, glinted translucent under the electric strip. He pulled me a little closer so he could speak quietly, so our chaperone didn’t hear.
“Is he a good fuck? Good as me? Has he had you all the ways you like? You dirty bitch.”
“You’re hurting me,” I said.
He squeezed harder, leaned fractionally nearer.
“I would never hurt you, Cookie.”
At that moment my mind was filled with a flash of all the times he had hurt me; really hurt me. The times I’d been hit and slapped and punched and thrown across the room. The times he’d screamed in my face, dragged me by my hair, kicked me, held a knife to my throat, spat at me. All the times he’d called me brainless and boring and ugly and pointless. I could sense the guard was thinking about stopping the visit at this point: he shuffled and was probably going to push the alarm bell but I shook my head again, and he paused.
“I know that, Jack. But I need to know the truth about what happened at The Anchor. Sullivan could have died. You’d never get out of here. That would have been a really stupid thing to do.”
He let go of my hand and smiled. There was a noise from the corner: the guard was about to unlock the door.
“Jack? Please.”
He was still smiling to himself.
“Was it you?”
Jack stood up and let the uniform steer him away by the arm. At the doorway he turned around, and with his free hand made the gesture of a single cut across his throat.
“Time’s up,” he said.
The next morning the flat felt cold and the light in the room was bluish-white. Everything seemed quieter. More snow had fallen in the night. I opened the curtains a little and pushed my face towards the window, surprised to see the depth that had come down in the space of a few hours. London doesn’t cope well with snow: London does chaos caused by freak weather. I turned up the heating and went to make coffee, and mused on the course of action I’d decided upon the day before in Clive Godwin’s office.
Challenging the will would be the easy bit. Now that Sullivan knew about the hit squad, Jack wouldn’t dare try taking a pop at me again. He’d had enough of life inside, and I knew that if the choice was doing a stretch for attempted murder or handing over the money, it was no contest. It made no difference anyway:
I wasn’t planning on leaving my little bro penniless on the streets, any more than he would leave me. It was just a balance of power thing, like a bloodless coup by a benign dictatorship. Minus the uniforms: I really loathe uniforms. Oh yes, Jack would live to rue the day he thought Cookie Garrity could be fobbed off with sparklers.
Around nine-thirty Sullivan turned up.
“I thought you’d like an update,” he said, “following on from your meeting with the big boss.”
“He’s an odd one. As for that other guy – what’s his name?”
“Bassinet.”
“No, his mate. The little old guy with bad teeth.”
Ollie smirked.
“You mean the assistant to the Deputy Chief Commissioner?”
“Bluett?”
“That’s him.”
“No wonder the country’s in a mess.”
Ollie gave me a hug.
“You really are a complete airhead, aren’t you?”
“He didn’t introduce himself. Just came in and sat in the corner taking notes. Anyway, how come I got the gold-plated treatment?”
“Dame Sally Dannatt’s had a bit of a telling off. It seems HMRC had Lucy Fleming in at the bank undercover for at least a couple of months before we got involved. Dannatt decided to play along with the Met’s investigation and pretend she wasn’t carrying out her own enquiries. She knew all about Sam Dillon going in. Unfortunately, when you turned up and handed over Donna Cardew’s national insurance number, they jumped to the conclusion that you were Sam’s replacement.”
“What? The Revenue thought I was one of you lot?”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it? Anyway, that’s why Lucy – Carswell – was keeping an eye on you. It’s a pity she didn’t take more of an interest in Sam, otherwise we might have been alerted sooner when she disappeared.”
“I’ve been thinking about that.”
“And?”
“You’ve got nothing to indicate that Sam was killed in the store room, right?”
“She was definitely hit with the tombstone from the store, but there's a distinct lack of blood spatter in the room. Too clean to be the place she was killed, unless she was covered up at the time; that's possible. Maybe the blow didn't kill her: it could be she was just unconscious, and suffocated in the archive box. Too much decomposition to be sure.”
I felt a bit sick when he said that, remembering how it was, shut up in there.
“And the CCTV shows the archive box being put into Leach’s car boot. I saw that. But are you absolutely sure that Sam was in that box? I mean, have you found the box? Supposing something else was in there?”
“Oh, okay, no. We haven’t managed to find the box. I agree, that would be useful.”
“So, it’s possible that the box contained paperwork, files, anything other than Sam Dillon’s body – and Leach had it put into his car and he drove it away and did God knows what with it. I think Leach was removing evidence of fraud.”
Ollie frowned at me.
“You can be really tedious at times, Cookie. We will find the box, and it will show that Sam Dillon was in there, and that means that Leach killed her – somewhere – and disposed of her body.”
“On the other hand, if Sam’s body was in the box, don’t you think Lorenzo Gallo would have realised? Or the two guys from the storage company? They helped move it. I’m sure a body feels different from a stack of old files. I’m no detective, Detective, but I think you’ve got yourselves into a way of thinking here that just doesn’t add up. There was no body in a box.”
Ollie took off his coat and threw it across the back of the sofa, then he helped himself to coffee.
“I only came here to say that I’m very grateful to you for agreeing to keep quiet about the case. There’s going to be an internal enquiry, of course.”
“Like I care. Just so I understand it, how does Ash Kumar fit into all of this?”
“Dannatt tipped him off. She thought she’d managed to warn you off when you met her in the Gallery, but when you carried on going into the bank she told him, so he could take the credit, and drop Dawn and me in the shit for using an unofficial undercover.”
“So when I saw him in the lobby…”
“You were meant to see him. It was the excuse he needed.”
“I see.”
Ollie came over and put his arms round me.
“You over-reacted. If you’d ignored him...”
“It’s hard to ignore a man with such horrific dress sense.”
He rolled his eyes.
“Unfortunately, it meant I had to come clean and admit we were using you.”
“Using me! Is that what you actually said?”
“Well, yes. Don’t hit me. Look, I had to make it sound like we’d agreed to getting you involved – not like you’d just gone in there off your own bat and started interfering. How stupid would that be?”
He gave me a pathetic little boy look.
“Very. Okay, so you didn’t want to look like a lemon, and said you were ‘using’ me to get information. Then your boss decided I may as well carry on being used and he authorised you to continue the investigation. Except now this has come to light, he wants me to say I did it all on my own and you were oblivious.”
“I swear, Cookie, he didn’t know about Dannatt’s team. He had no idea that Fiona Carswell was already in there. If the Revenue had told us up front, there’s no way we’d ever have got into it in the first place. They should have told us, and they didn’t.”
“Bit of a fuck-up all round then, wasn’t it?”
He shrugged.
“Well, yes. Now we’re wading through mountains of paper and thousands of electronic files in the investigation and apart from the few dodgy-looking documents you found there’s nothing so far to confirm that either Leach or Nilsson has done anything criminal. There’s nothing to tie Nilsson into Sam Dillon’s murder and only the archive box to link Leach to it. And now we know about Leach’s HIV, even the suicide might not be relevant to the fraud. ”
“Didn’t the Revenue turn up any information?”
“Not a sausage.”
We sat down and snuggled up together. It was snowing again, great feathery waves sweeping across the glass and then catching a thermal from the heating vents and turning back on themselves, upwards into the wall of white. Perhaps we’d be snowed in, stuck here for weeks despite the valiant efforts of rescuers to reach the top floor. I slipped my hand inside Ollie’s jumper and felt his heart beating fast and hard. There were worse places to be stranded.
“Not a sausage, eh?”
He laughed.
“You really are incorrigible. What am I going to do with you?”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sunday 7th December
To Fail to Plan is to Plan to Fail
At 4pm precisely the phone rang, and I knew it was Jack.
“I got the letter.”
He was angry.
“And?”
“You’ve completely fucked me over, haven’t you?”
“No.”
“Yes, you have. Now Shirley’s dead, it’s your word against mine.”
“I thought we’d agreed. All we have to do is stick to it.”
He started coughing.
“Jack, I’m sorry. Dirk cornered me and I had to tell him what really happened. I wish we’d known about Dora being in the house. Look, it was the best I could do. They went for it, that’s the main thing.”
“So you want me to sign over the house to you, and all the investments.”
“You’re in prison. It makes more sense for me to manage...”
“Oh, yeah. Who’s going to believe that shit? We both know what’s going on here.”
We did, it’s true. Although it was difficult discussing it over the phone from Wandsworth, when someone could be listening in at Jack’s end of the line. I tried to shift the subject.
“The guys in the Merc seem to have got the message.”
“Yo
u won’t be seeing them again.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Oh, Jack. How did we get ourselves into this mess? I never wanted it to happen.
“So are you going to agree? To sign it all over?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Well, he did. We both knew he did, but it wasn’t a pretty one.
“Go for the simple option, Jack. Let’s not make things hard on ourselves.”
I could hear him wheezing: slow, painful breaths.
“Jack? Are you getting any medical attention? Because if not—”
“Look, I’m fine, okay? Still on antibiotics.”
He sighed.
“Okay, you win. Take the money. Take the house.”
“Don’t be like that. I’ll still be there, Jack. It’s our house, our money.”
“Of course it is. Unless you decide to do a runner with Sullivan. There’s nothing to stop you, is there? And if I try to do anything about it, you tell them it was me who—”
“Shh.” After a moment or two, I added, “It works both ways.”
“Yes,” he said, “but nobody ever believes me.”
I laughed, in case anyone really was listening.
“Don’t be silly. We both know it was an accident.”
Chapter Thirty
Monday 8th December
The Little Gem
I got back to the flat at around 4pm, carrying my Christmas shopping. One small bag from Selfridges. Ollie was leaning against the door.
“Oh, hello. Been here long?”
“Can I have my key back?”
“No. What do you want?”
He followed me into the hall.
“You’re an evil genius, do you know that?”
“I take it the tombstone idea panned out?”
“We’ve made an arrest.”
“Let me guess.”
He grinned.
“You’ve been thinking about this, right?”
I had. I’d been thinking about it ever since the morning Dawn had left me wafting a tea towel at the smoke alarm. Van Helsing Pyrotechnica. I’d googled the company after she’d gone and since found out more than I really wanted to know about firework displays. A niche business, as it turns out.