The door was open by now. The constable went in, calling Alice Grant’s name. Mercy followed.
The kitchen was empty, as was the darkened living room. The standby light glowed on the sound system. The bedroom door was ajar but dark with light only at the edges of the blackout blinds.
The policeman continued to call her name and rapped at the bedroom door. He turned on the light.
‘Oh Christ,’ he said.
Mercy looked past him, saw Alice Grant lying on her back. Not far from her outflung arm was a green crack pipe. There were flecks of vomit on her face and down her front. The pallor of her face and stiffness of her body gave no doubt that Alice Grant was dead and had been for a number of hours.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ said Mercy, backing away, pulling the constable with her. ‘We need a homicide squad for this.’
Dennis and Darren Chilcott travelled on an easyJet flight out of Madrid to Gatwick, while Jaime and El Osito took British Airways business class to Heathrow. Jesús had stayed behind to clear El Osito’s flat and scour the bathroom floor and the shower with hydrochloric acid before spraying bleach on everything to destroy any possibility of DNA testing.
El Osito was taken to the plane in a wheelchair. It wasn’t a pain-free flight as business-class seats were no different to economy, but they were given a meal. He was in an ugly frame of mind when he arrived in London. A limousine took them to the Pestana Chelsea Bridge Hotel and Jaime arranged for a private doctor to visit with a shot of morphine. By midday El Osito was installed and asleep. Jaime fingered his mobile as he looked out over the railway tracks towards Battersea Power Station and sent a cryptic message to Vicente letting him know they’d arrived. The reply gave him a phone number to call. Soon after he left the hotel heading for a Colombian restaurant in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre.
The Chilcotts arrived at Gatwick a little after one o’clock. They took the train to Clapham Junction and from there a cab to Dennis’s six-bedroomed house in Camberwell Grove. They dropped off their bags, picked up Dennis’s Range Rover and drove to the warehouse on Neckinger.
‘I can’t believe the shit we’re going through for this guy,’ said Darren. ‘Since we’ve met him we’ve spent about forty minutes discussing business and the rest of the time arm-wrestling, clubbing and now sorting out his girl problem. Are you sure Vicente’s the right person to be doing business with?’
‘He’s the one supplier who’s really taken on the problem of UK delivery,’ said Dennis. ‘You don’t remember what it was like before. Going over to Mexico and buying half a ton here and half a ton there and then relying on some hare-brained public schoolboy to bring it over in Daddy’s yacht. Those days are over and thank Christ for that. But now we’re in the hands of an organisation there’s politics and relationships to consider. Vicente needs the Colombians to supply him. They can switch to El Chapo in a blink. He has to keep them sweet. And that means you can’t tell El Osito to get lost. We’re just playing our part in maintaining the relationship and Vicente will remember us for that. This is how they work. Loyalty still counts for something in this world.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Amy, now that they’d calmed down, taken a break from each other. ‘You ever been in this position before?’
‘What position?’ said Lomax, irritable.
‘Holding someone’s life in the palm of your hand,’ said Amy, who still couldn’t quite believe what was happening.
Lomax looked at her. Blind and trussed, she’d become animal to him. He was distancing himself.
‘It happens,’ he said. ‘Drug runners try to fuck me over. I spend my day weighing and checking purity so that they know not to take the piss. But there’s always one. If the measures are out or the purity’s dropped, I isolate the bastard. He gets dealt with. The boss sends a hitter round with a baseball bat. Bones get broken. Interfering fingers get crushed. You can’t be seen as a soft touch in this game.’
‘So how did you run up a twenty-eight-grand debt?’
‘You know something?’ said Lomax. ‘You got to think before you speak. Kids and old people are the same. No filters. Something occurs to them and comes straight out with no thought attached.’
‘But it’s true, isn’t it?’
‘There you go again,’ said Lomax. ‘It’s more important for you to be right than anything else. You have to prove your superiority. Well, here’s your first lesson.’
He lashed her across the face with the back of his hand. The pain ricocheted around her head; tears sprang into her sleeping mask.
‘What did you do that for?’
‘Think about it.’
For the first time in years she thought, I want my mother.
‘I know kids like you,’ said Lomax. ‘I used to be one myself until I had some sense knocked into me. Want me to talk you through it?’
Her mouth was crumpling. She was scared. She nodded.
‘Why is it a bad idea to remind people of their mistakes?’ he said.
‘Because it makes them annoyed.’
‘Yes, but why’s that?’
‘People don’t want to be thought of as dumb.’
‘Nearly,’ said Lomax. ‘You’ve just got to get the other half.’
‘The other half?’
‘You. You’re the other half,’ said Lomax. ‘What gives you the right to tell me I’m stupid when you haven’t got the first idea of the circumstances. So this is your first lesson in life: you haven’t got a clue. Say it.’
‘I haven’t got a clue.’
‘How do you get a clue?’ asked Lomax. ‘I’ll tell you, because you’ll never guess. You shut the fuck up. You find people who know what they’re on about and listen to them. Shit. I don’t know why I’m bothering.’
‘Why are you?’
He knew the truth of it and it made him sad. He’d told her already, but she hadn’t listened or maybe she had and hadn’t believed it. He wasn’t going to tell her again. She was a danger to him. She wasn’t going to come out of this alive now. But Lomax, unlike Amy, had learned a few things in his time: don’t tell anyone a truth they won’t be able to take.
‘I’ve never known anybody under the age of twenty able to listen,’ said Lomax.
There was a knock at the door outside. Amy’s body stiffened.
‘What’s that?’
‘Your new blind date.’
28
11:30 A.M., FRIDAY 23RD MARCH 2012
Alice Grant’s flat, Andover Estate, London
There are only two glasses here,’ said Mercy, pointing to the living-room table with a latex-gloved hand. ‘Her next-door neighbour said there was a party and she heard three voices—two female, one male. There’s a glass missing.’
‘Unless one wasn’t drinking,’ said DI Max Hope from the homicide squad.
‘There’s no alcohol in the flat. There’s no Coca-Cola in the flat. There are no Coke tins in the rubbish,’ said Mercy, ignoring his comment. ‘I think you’ll find there’s alcohol in the half-finished glass and something else.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t think she would vomit from just smoking crack. She’s ingested something with alcohol that’s made her sick,’ said Mercy. ‘She had the music on, her neighbour said. You might want to check the remote for fingerprints, because I don’t think it was Alice who turned it off.’
The forensics were in the room now that the police photographer had left. They were nodding along with her. The remote went into an evidence bag. The liquid from the glass went into a bottle, the dregs from the other glass too. The glasses found their way into bags as well.
‘And what were you and the constable doing here?’ asked Hope.
‘I was hoping to trace my daughter, Amy, who’s gone missing,’ said Mercy. ‘The constable was going to tell Alice that her daughter, Chantrelle, had b
een killed in Madrid. Amy and Chantrelle were friends. It’s a long story, but I’d like you to compare any fingerprints you find in this flat to these.’
She gave Hope the card with Amy’s prints on that she’d lifted from the mirror in her room the night she’d disappeared.
‘You keep your daughter’s prints with you?’ asked Hope.
‘It was the only thing left of hers in the house when she ran away. She’d tried to erase herself from my life. I had an old fingerprint kit with me from a course.’
‘That’s not going to stand up in court.’
‘It doesn’t have to. I just want to know if she was here.’
‘Somebody’s wiped half this table down,’ said the forensic. ‘The other half where the two glasses were hasn’t been touched. You can still see the circles of Coke where the two cans were.’
‘The neighbour says the party ended abruptly just after midnight,’ said Mercy. ‘The first person turned up at about eleven. Someone left and came back a few minutes later around ten past. There was another knock a little after eleven thirty.’
The forensics were working around them so Hope and Mercy left the room, went outside the flat and stood in the taped-off corridor.
‘I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job,’ said Mercy. ‘I’m only doing this because I’m anxious about my daughter. My instinct’s telling me to get some quick answers about what happened here. I’m scared for her.’
‘You’ve given me a good start,’ said Hope, who hadn’t taken her interference badly.
They exchanged numbers.
‘The neighbour said that Alice had been trying to stay off the crack. Hadn’t had any since the new year. The only time she left the house was to get her money, go to her NA meetings and do some shopping. It sounds to me like the party came from the outside, and there had to be a reason for it.’
*
‘We need to talk,’ said Lomax, nodding the Chilcotts back up the steps into the alleyway, ‘out of her hearing. I’ve no idea what your plans are for her, but it’s best to keep your hostage in the dark about your intentions. Know what I mean?’
Dennis and Darren exchanged glances, not quite sure what he was on about. Lomax seemed to have thought himself into a position well beyond them.
‘Everything all right?’ asked Dennis, going for upbeat.
‘Depends what you mean by “all right”,’ said Lomax. ‘She’s in there, if that’s all that concerns you.’
‘What else?’
‘There are no facilities and I’ve been on my own here for twelve hours.’
‘What happened to Tel and Vlad?’
‘I sent them home, didn’t want them to mess the situation up.’
‘How would they do that?’ asked Darren. ‘They’re just go-fetch boys—that was the idea.’
‘They couldn’t be trusted to keep their dicks in their trousers.’
‘Why? She tasty or what?’
‘She’s female, which is all they care about,’ said Lomax. ‘But it’s not the point.’
‘Why bring it up then?’
‘It had an impact on the situation.’
‘You know I always told Dad, that Miles Lomax bloke, he’s too fucking brainy for his own good,’ said Darren. ‘Read too many books, ain’t yer?’
‘I seem to remember, Darren, you chose me for this job for precisely that reason,’ said Lomax.
‘Faith that was well placed, I’d say,’ said Dennis, trying to keep it calm.
‘So what have you got planned for the girl?’
‘We’re exchanging her for somebody else plus thirty grand.’
‘Was that to cover my twenty-eight-grand debt?’
‘No,’ said Darren brutally.
‘So you’re exchanging her for someone who’s prepared to be a hostage in her place?’
‘That’s about it.’
‘That sounds like a very strange kidnap arrangement to me.’
‘It doesn’t matter what it sounds like to you,’ said Darren.
‘So the girl goes free and you get a replacement plus thirty grand?’
‘That’s it,’ said Dennis.
‘Then we have a problem,’ said Lomax.
‘What went wrong?’ asked Darren.
‘She was weak after the drug I gave her. I had to help her up off the bucket she was using for the toilet. She jumped me, tore off her mask and saw my face before I got her back under control.’
‘She’d already seen your face last night,’ said Darren.
‘One of these days I’ll give you some GHB, Darren,’ said Lomax. ‘You’ll find it’ll take you a few days to remember where your arse is, let alone scratch it. GHB erases memory.’
‘So now you’re saying she’s seen your face when she’s in a fit state to remember it.’
‘You’re quicker than I thought, Darren,’ said Lomax.
Boxer left the letters to Mercy and Amy on the dining table. The one to Mercy included instructions about things like the safe and the gun. She already had a set of keys to his flat. She was the only person he trusted to mind her own business.
He still had until evening before he had to hand himself over, so now he was on his way, with the thirty grand, to what he realised was going to be a very strange final meeting with Isabel, the woman who could have been the one, but now he would never know.
As he sat on the Tube his father came to mind, and he imagined it must have been a similar experience for him when he set about leaving his life in the space of twenty-four hours. Except that he’d just walked away. There were no goodbyes. Not even any final cryptic meetings or messages. Why hadn’t he at least written a letter of explanation for his son to open in later life?
It was cold but sunny as he walked up the hill to Isabel’s house. He felt remarkably cheerful and free of care. It was, he thought, perhaps how martyrs feel once they’ve embarked on their sacrificial mission.
Isabel was not expecting him. He hadn’t called her because he knew she worked from home on Fridays, which she set aside for reading manuscripts away from the constant demands of the office.
‘Why didn’t you call?’ she said. ‘We could have done something.’
‘I don’t want to do anything,’ he said. ‘I’m waiting for a call to send me somewhere for work and I wanted to spend the time I had left with you.’
‘You look happy.’
‘I am.’
‘Does this mean you’ve found Amy? Are we celebrating?’
‘Not quite, but she’ll be back with us soon . . . I’m pretty sure.’
‘That’s very cryptic of you.’
‘You know what it’s like when you’ve got to extricate yourself from the wrong choice. It takes time for a seventeen-year-old to swallow her pride.’
They went to the kitchen. She poured him a beer, gave herself a glass of white wine. She was in jeans, which was surprising, because she normally dressed for maximum feminine impact. She even apologised for being caught in her ‘sitting around reading’ clothes. He told her she looked great—even younger.
‘I just wanted to thank you for looking after Mercy that night,’ said Boxer. ‘You were the only person who could have done that.’
‘We covered a lot of ground,’ she said.
‘About what?’
‘Amy, inevitably, and . . . you.’
‘Did you get anywhere with the latter?’
‘We talked about when you were married.’
‘Not our finest hour.’
‘No. She said as much.’
‘I’m not sure I’m the marrying type,’ said Boxer.
‘Why not?’
‘Too secretive,’ said Boxer. ‘And I can’t take the pressure of my secrets under the relentless observation of a marriage.’
‘Have you lived with any
body else since you split from Mercy?’
‘Not for any length of time. I’m more of a staying-over kind of person.’
Isabel wanted to ask about those secrets, but she also didn’t want any answers. This was her ideal state: to be in the presence of someone substantial who only gave her glimpses of himself. It was her own, very personal definition of love.
‘Mercy told me you that you were a good father to Amy when she was small, but how your work interfered and gradually you grew distant.’
‘Did she admit to you there was some question mark about Amy’s paternity?’
‘Yes, she did,’ said Isabel, hesitant, a little astonished.
‘We all have our secrets,’ said Boxer. ‘Some bigger than others. Even between two people as close as Mercy and me. That can be difficult in marriage.’
‘And how do you feel about that?’ asked Isabel.
‘It doesn’t matter to me. I’m beyond genetics. It comes down to what I feel for Amy. I’ve always considered her my daughter and even more so this past week. If a lab tech says I’m not her father it makes no difference. I’m both deserving and undeserving. When I found that the body part did not belong to her I was so relieved . . . elated, even though I haven’t always been there for her.’
‘A lot of men would find it hard to deal with a revelation like that.’
‘You mean Mercy’s deceit?’ said Boxer. ‘That’s what you really mean. And you’re right. Men have killed for a lot less. Paternity reaches down to their core. But I’m not that kind of guy.’
‘How do you know?’
‘You can’t kill someone, even if it is in the heat of battle, and hope to remain the same. Once you’ve felt that kind of savagery and done that kind of damage to a fellow human you can never re-enter the world of men. You’re always going to be separate, an outsider. Some can live with it, others can’t. It was why Mercy, and then Amy, became very important to me.’
The truth was flowing out of him, but even in this new heightened state he could still feel the checks, small dams arresting the flow, never allowing himself to reveal everything. It wasn’t easy to overcome a lifetime’s withholding in a few hours.
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