I was lucky to find Detective Inspector Hood still at his desk in West Hampstead police station, just catching up on some paperwork on unpaid overtime. Or so he said.
When I said who I was and that I wanted to talk about Keith Flowers he couldn’t have been nicer. He asked if this was off the record – as if policemen know the meaning of the words – and would I prefer to meet somewhere other than the police station; a pub, say? Despite my own Rule of Life Number 38A (You know you’re getting old when the policemen appear helpful), I agreed and stifled a laugh when he named a pub on Shoot Up Hill that was as well-known for drugs deals as it was for after-hours CID parties.
I left Debbie Diamond in her office, putting the flowers I had brought into a glass vase that looked as if it had been designed for medical samples. She said she didn’t need a lift anywhere as she could walk to Oxford Street tube, which was just as well as I hadn’t offered. Well, she’d never said thank you for the flowers.
The traffic thinned out at Regent’s Park and I was sure I would make the pub before Hood did, but I was wrong. He was there already, leaning on the bar drinking a bottle of Budweiser by the neck. He looked just about old enough to be doing so legally.
We had met once before when he had taken a statement from me about Keith Flowers’ burglary, but what had happened subsequently in Suffolk was out of his patch. I had assumed that the more serious charges Flowers now faced in Suffolk would have meant that Hood’s interest in him had diminished, so I was keen to know why he had been visiting Amy at her office.
‘Mr Angel,’ he said, tipping his bottle at me.
‘Mr Hood,’ I answered, neither offering to shake hands or say his rank out loud, thus observing pub/copper etiquette. ‘Can I get you another?’
‘Sure, thanks.’
A barman who didn’t seem to speak English very well – well, it was London and it was the summer – produced another Budweiser and a orange juice for me and relieved me of a fiver. There was no change. What else did I expect from a pub where the idea of classy decor was shelf after shelf of Readers’ Digest condensed books bought job lot by the yard?
We found an unoccupied table, made level by a folded beer mat under one leg, and two chairs that almost matched.
‘You’ve got something for me then?’ he asked, sucking on his bottle.
‘Actually, I was hoping you could tell me a couple of things,’ I said, hiding my surprise. I’d never offered to tell him anything.
He didn’t attempt to hide it. His eyebrows went up and his lips made a ‘Prrft’ noise. ‘About what?’
‘About Keith Flowers, the guy who burgled my house, stalked my wi- ... my partner ... and then pulled a gun on us.’
‘That was out in Suffolk,’ he said.
I noticed the ‘out in’ rather than ‘down in’ or ‘up in’ or even just ‘in’. Suffolk was out there; beyond the M25; bandit country; duelling-banjos land; manglewurzles and Tractor Boys. What did I expect? Like the vast majority of CID detectives in the Met he wasn’t from London – I suspected Bolton or maybe Salford from his accent – but now he was here, nothing outside of London existed. Or nothing worth talking about.
‘I know, I was there,’ I said, but I flashed my best smile to show I wasn’t being lippy. ‘I was just wondering where we were with the case.’
‘Against Flowers? Fuck knows. I don’t. That’s down to the local force and the Crown Prosecution Service, and even they couldn’t screw this one up. Only a matter of procedure now, going through the motions and a mountain of paperwork. I don’t even think it’ll make a full trial.’
‘What? You mean Flowers could walk?’
I drained my glass almost as a reflex and realised that orange juice did absolutely nothing for my blood pressure.
‘No way, Mr A.’ He liked that. I think he’d been rehearsing that since I phoned him. ‘Flowers is down and out, maybe for good. They might even section him.’
‘You mean as in “Under the Mental Health Act” or whatever it’s called these days?’
Hood nodded.
‘He’s mad?’
‘Do normal sane people follow you around and pull guns on you, Mr Angel?’
If that was a serious question I was going to campaign for a Fifth Amendment, even though I wasn’t quite sure to what. Thankfully, Hood didn’t want an answer.
‘What he did out in Suffolk was enough to get him a return trip to the jug without passing “Go”, and certainly not collecting £200, but now his credit rating’s shot up from Category D to B, which is enough to depress anybody. So naturally he’s thrown a wobbler and gone into clinical depression. Tried to top himself twice, word is. The psychiatrists will be all over him for months yet. I really don’t think we’ll be pressing the burglary charges. No point.’
I knew what Hood meant by a prisoner’s credit rating. Category A prisoners are top of the tree, a serious danger to the public – or an embarrassment to the government of the day. Category B were the dangerous sods – bank robbers, anyone using guns. Category C were prisoners whose escape should be prevented – if possible. And Category D were open prison fodder – company directors, ex-MPs, writers, people like that.
Every prisoner except the lifers or the totally bonkers would have a Release Plan with the aim of downgrading their status from A to D over a period of time. I guessed that the last stages of Keith Flowers’ plan had been a change to Category D and the month he’d spent in the hostel in Chadwell Heath. Pulling a gun on us had jerked him back up the serious list to Category B and his Release Plan had gone out the window.
‘What was he in for originally?’ I asked. I had asked Amy that and never got a straight answer.
‘I don’t honestly remember, though it’ll be on the computer somewhere. I suppose I could look up his record, but I’d need a good reason to do so as it’s not technically our case any more.’
He pushed his empty beer bottle to one side and interlocked his fingers. He was after something but it wasn’t another drink.
‘For peace of mind, Amy and I would like to know, and if you could see your way to helping us we’d certainly co-operate with any other enquiries you might have,’ I said slowly, thinking it through as I spoke, checking for loopholes.
‘Funnily enough, there is an enquiry you can help me with; a personal one.’ Here we go, I thought. ‘Your SOH, she’s the Amy May as in the TALtop thing, that blouse thing, isn’t she?’
When I worked out that SOH meant Significant Other Half, I said: ‘Yes, that’s her.’
‘Well the girlfriend tells me there’s this new design with, like, silver stitching or something, but can I find one in the shops? Like gold dust they are and, you see, there’s a birthday coming up ...’
‘What size?’ I asked with a smile.
‘Twelve.’
‘I’ll get her a ten. Don’t worry, it’ll fit and she’ll be flattered.’
‘Hey, that’d be really good of you.’
He opened his arms, palms out to me. Big mistake.
‘And what size is the wife?’
His face froze as he realised it was too late to hide his wedding ring again. Fair play to him, he brazened it out.
‘Fourteen.’
‘I’ll get her a 12. She’ll be chuffed, you get the double whammy.’
‘Decent of you,’ he said.
‘I know. Just let me get one thing straight, though. You went to see Amy yesterday in her office, right?’
‘Yes,’ he said carefully. He thought I was going to ask him why he hadn’t tapped her up for a free sample direct, but then he’d had another policeman with him and that wouldn’t have been kosher.
‘And that was to tell her about Keith Flowers going all depressive, right?’
‘No, wrong.’ He shook his head. ‘It had nothing to do with Keith Flowers.’
‘It didn’t?’
‘Well, only that Flowers came to our attention when Ms May – by the by, does she use the name Amy Angel?’
‘No, never. I think she’d rather have hot needles jammed into her eyes or be forced to wear Spandex. You were saying ...’
‘We first became aware of Flowers when he was reported as a stalker and Amy – Ms May – took out the restraining order. It was just a flagging-up operation as far as we were concerned, but the computer remembered it.’
‘Remembered what?’
The guy was driving me nuts. God knows what he would have been like if I hadn’t already agreed on a bribe.
‘The whole stalker scenario. When it happened again, the computer flagged it up again.’
‘What’s happened again?’
Hood took a deep breath.
‘She hasn’t told you, has she?’
‘I haven’t seen her since yesterday morning,’ I snapped, then added: ‘She’s away on business, ordering some more of those silver-thread TALtops.’
‘Oh, right, I get it. Look, Mr Angel, the reason we went to see her yesterday was because of the report we’d had from Ivan Dunmore.’
‘Who the fuck is Ivan Dunmore?’
‘Your neighbour.’
‘He is?’
‘From across the street, or so I’m told. He’s reported a suspicious person hanging around outside your house on two occasions now. Says he’s seen her every morning for about a week and she follows Amy when she leaves the house.’
‘She?’
‘Yeah. Don’t worry, it’s not an ex-husband this time, it’s a young blonde girl.’
As soon as I got home, I was on the phone and got an instant result. My pizza would be with me in 20 minutes. Good. I was starving.
I cracked open a bottle of Leffe Brun beer – supposedly brewed by Trappist monks in Belgium, and after a couple you could understand the vow of silence bit – while I waited.
Then I thought I had better check the house just to make sure Amy wasn’t back, but there was no sign of her and her shoes were still missing. I checked for e-mails on the computer but there were none for me (there never were as I never tell anyone my e-mail address) and the ones for Amy seemed standard business ones, all from names in her address book. There was one message on the answerphone in the bedroom, but it was from Duncan the Drunken telling me to call him regarding Amy’s BMW as he’d had some quotes for the bodywork.
While I was in the bedroom and in detective mode, I rifled through the drawer where Amy kept her stockings and tights, most pairs still in their packets as she regarded hosiery as mostly disposable, though there was a pair of neatly folded pure silk stockings with seams, which brought back fond memories at least for me.
I was actually looking to see if her passport was there, which it was. Or rather both of them were. She has two, which is not unusual; so do I. But Amy had got both hers legitimately as a businesswoman of some standing who might have to travel at short notice, so she has one with visas for America and Israel and one for countries that might take exception to that.
So wherever it was she’d travelled to at short notice this time, it wasn’t abroad, which was comforting, and I began to convince myself that I was worrying unnecessarily. If I could only think hard and straight, I was sure I could come up with a logical explanation.
The doorbell rang. It was my pizza, and when I had paid the spotty, moped-riding delivery boy (he’d taken 21 minutes and 15 seconds, so no tip) I opened another beer and flipped on the TV.
I never could think hard and straight on an empty stomach.
I heard the chirping of an electronic lock and then the sound of a key being cranked and finally not one but two deadbolts being drawn, and all the time I showed my best smile to the peep-hole as I stood there under the halogen security light. The door opened inwards but no more than 20 degrees.
‘Mr Dunmore? Good evening. I’m Roy Angel, your neighbour from across the street.’
‘I know you are.’
The voice was used to giving orders. It was middle-aged, still had a suit and tie on in the house at 9.30 in the evening and owned the new Mercedes parked in the drive. There was probably a second, smaller one in the garage.
‘You do?’
‘This is the third house you’ve tried, isn’t it? The Cohens and the Elringtons rang me. We’re all in the Neighbourhood Watch.’
He wasn’t wrong. It had been trial and error on my part; but it was their own fault. No-one who is anyone is in the phone book these days – just think of the population of London and then look at the size of the Residential directory. And in Hampstead, everyone thought they were somebody.
‘I believe you reported a suspicious character lurking around our house?’ I said, keeping it friendly, hoping he wouldn’t notice I wasn’t wearing a suit and hold it against me.
‘If you’d been a member of the Neighbourhood Watch, you’d have found out three days ago,’ he said snootily.
‘I wouldn’t join any Neighbourhood Watch that would have me as a member,’ I quipped before I could bite my tongue.
Ivan Dunmore looked as if he just had bitten his tongue.
‘But seriously, I came to say thank you for being so vigilant,’ I pressed on. ‘We’re trying to be careful. You know we were burgled about a month ago?’
‘The police did mention it,’ he said cautiously.
That was one up to the Neighbourhood Watch, wasn’t it?
‘So I was wondering if there was anything you could tell me about the person who was hanging around the other day?’
He shrugged his shoulders as if it didn’t matter. He’d done his bit, after all, telling the cops. Why should he have to give a repeat performance for me? Because I was standing at his front door making his driveway look untidy and giving the rest of the Neighbourhood Watch something to watch.
‘She was young, about 20 I’d guess. Blonde, quite long hair. I suppose you could say pretty if we’re still allowed to say that without being a sexist pig.’
There was something in the way he said it that made me think a nerve had been struck and I really didn’t want to go there.
‘How was she dressed?’ I said, to change tack, but that only made him look down at me as if I was a pervert.
‘The same way all girls of that age dress – in things that look as if they come from Oxfam and they wear only once even though they actually cost a small fortune.’
Woops, I think he had a history here. I hoped he didn’t know what Amy did for a living.
‘Oh, the usual. White T-shirt with something written on it and those tight blue jeans with flares and the faded stripes up the legs and over the arse cheeks where there should be back pockets.’
On reflection, a Neighbourhood Watch this observant might just be worth joining.
‘Can you remember what was on the T-shirt?’
‘Yes I can, actually. It was “Fuck” but the letters were jumbled up.’
He meant ‘FCUK’, or I hoped he did. I knew several taxi drivers who had had T-shirts made up with ‘FUCK OFF’ printed backwards so that drivers who cut them up could read it in their mirror and be afraid.
‘She had a bag as well, a big shoulder bag thing that looked as if it could carry the kitchen sink.’
‘And you noticed her when?’
‘First thing in the morning three days ago. She was hanging around behind some parked cars watching your house as I was going to work. Then I saw her that evening as I came home. Miss May was unloading some things from her Land Rover and there was the girl again, just down the street, watching her. She was there the next morning according to Mrs Cohen two properties to the west.’
I liked the ‘two properties to the west’ bit. Normal people would have said ‘two doors down’, but this was Hampstead.
‘So you know Amy, do you?’ I said with a smile.
‘Not really, no. We did ask her to join the Watch when she first moved in here.’ Then he added: ‘When she was living alone.’
‘What did she say when you asked her to join the Watch?’
‘She laughed.’
That’s my girl.
‘Was this young woman acting at all suspiciously? I mean, did she do anything that would be a cause for concern?’
Other than just be on a piece of pavement that you claim by divine right, I thought, but didn’t say.
‘Mrs Cohen is quite firm about the fact that she saw the girl taking photographs of Miss May as she was leaving for work the other morning.’
He let the implication hang in the warm night air. Amy got up and went to work; I didn’t.
‘Did she follow Amy, when Amy went to work?’
‘I have no idea where she went, but she left the area shortly after, in a taxi.’
‘She could be a journalist,’ I said reasonably, and I could see that the prospect of that worried him more than a bus load of burglars or somebody organising a street party for the gay, black, disabled homeless.
‘That’s for the police – or you – to sort out. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some paperwork to finish.’
‘One last thing. Did you notice what sort of shoes she was wearing?’
He stared silently at me for a full minute before he closed the door in my face.
I scoped the street before I went back into the house, hoping to spot a trenchcoated figure under one of the streetlights, a cigarette cupped in a curled hand, trilby brim snapped down over the eyes. But there wasn’t a living soul in sight, not even a cat. They had probably all been rounded up by the Animal Branch of the Neighbourhood Watch. I had been right not to inflict a move here on Springsteen.
Which reminded me that I ought to check up on him.
Back indoors, I cracked another Leffe and phoned Stuart Street, knowing that Fenella would be the one sent to answer the house phone.
She said she had to be quick as she had three separate text chats going at the same time and she’d broken two nails already that evening. Springsteen was still growling and moving about in reverse, but he was eating well and drinking a lot of water. I said that was a good sign, though I had no idea if it was or not, and that she should try him with some lean minced beef or lamb. Fenella made the ‘eeeuuu’ sound only teenage girls can really make and said that handling meat was going a bit far. I told her not to worry, just buy a pack at the supermarket and throw it in the flat. Springsteen could easily unwrap it himself as long as it wasn’t frozen – which just took longer. She said okay, if she really had to and, by the way, that car mechanic friend of mine had called round on the off-chance I would go to a pub with him and his wife but I wasn’t to worry as he’d give me a ring.
I didn’t bother to ask if ‘Alison George’ had paid a return visit, assuming that to be highly unlikely. Nor did I ask if Amy had rung, as that would have sounded a bit weak and surely Fenella would have mentioned it.
Duncan the Drunken calling round to take me for a drink, now that could be serious. It probably meant the estimate for the BMW’s repairs was going to be horrendous.
I dialled his home number, not really expecting him to be in and, sure, enough, got the start of his recorded voice message.
‘This is Duncan. Me and the wife Doreen have gone down the pub and we’re probably shit-faced by now so you can either come and buy us a drink or ...’
There was a click as the receiver was picked up and Duncan’s Yorkshire accent cut across the message.
‘Talk to me.’
‘Duncan, it’s Angel. Why aren’t you down the pub?’
‘Bit of a cock up, there, mate. We thought we’d try the karaoke down The Whalebone in Barking, but it seems we’re barred from there.’
‘You forgot you’d been banned from the pub?’
‘Not me,’ he said haughtily. ‘Doreen.’
‘Oh. Fair enough. You have some bad news for me, then?’
‘Aye, about the chassis on that Beamer. Could be up to three grand to sort it out before we start on the systems checks, and then there’s the bodywork.’
‘All right, Duncan, don’t sweat it. Let’s cost the whole job like we said and see if it’s worth getting it back on the road and maybe selling it on.’
‘Just thought you’d like to know, now the insurance company’s got it on the agenda.’
What insurance company? I hadn’t even sent in the claim form.
‘What insurance company, Dunc?’
‘I don’t think she said the name of it.’
‘She?’
‘The blonde bint who came sniffing round here this afternoon. I wouldn’t mind having her on my case, I can tell you. Long as Doreen didn’t find out, of course.’
‘Would her name have been Alison George by any chance?’
‘Aye, that’s it. But she said I could call her Georgie if I wanted to.’
‘I’ve got a few other names for her,’ I said.
The next morning, I awoke with a plan. I knew exactly what I was going to do.
But first, I reached over and patted the other side of the bed. It was empty, which was a relief.
It would have been a shame to waste such a good plan and, anyway, Amy would have killed me if she’d been there, what with all those empty beer bottles scattered over the duvet.
It wasn’t about me, or Amy, it was about Keith Flowers.
Whoever this Alison George character was, she was tracing Keith Flowers’ movements in the month he spent out of prison. Flowers had stalked Amy in and around the Oxford Street office, so Alison George had been there, only to give Debbie Diamond an earful when she found Amy had done a runner having being warned by the cops that someone had her under surveillance.
She had hung around the house in Hampstead, the house Keith Flowers burgled, and she’d even been to Duncan the Drunken’s garage to see the car he’d stolen. She would have known from the Suffolk cops where to go, as Duncan would have signed for the wrecked BMW when he picked it up and he would have used a kosher name and address if there was a chance of a legitimate insurance payout. The one thing I couldn’t figure out was why she had visited the flat in Stuart Street. Keith Flowers had never been there – he’d phoned there when he tracked me and Amy to Suffolk (thanks, Fenella blab-mouth). But how would Alison George have known that?
There was one other place I knew Keith Flowers had been during his one moon cycle of freedom and that was St Chad’s Hostel in Chadwell Heath, which I assumed was some sort of halfway house for ex-prisoners waiting to jump from the rock of confinement on to the hard place of life on the outside. I had no idea where it was or how it worked, but I had spoken to the warden on the phone a month back. I would go and see him and ask for ... well, anything he could tell me. That was my plan, carefully thought-out, immaculately researched.
About halfway round the North Circular Road I remembered the warden’s name – Roberts – and felt a lot more confident.
At the ridiculously named Charlie Brown’s Roundabout (Good grief!), I cut off under the M11 towards Gant’s Hill and Eastern Avenue, then pulled in to a post office near the old Goodmayes Hospital, leaving Armstrong right outside with the engine running. The postmaster, a Sikh, took great delight in meeting a London taxi driver who didn’t know everything and had to ask directions. After a couple of minutes of smirking, he told me that St Chad’s Hostel was in Sydney Gardens on the other side of St Chad’s Park.
Back in Armstrong I consulted a battered A-Z once I was out of sight of the postmaster and worked my way through the suburban back streets parallel to Eastern Avenue and round the northern end of the park until I hit an enclave of streets named after either Australian cities (Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney) or trees (Yew and Cedar) for no apparent reason. Who knew what had possessed the local town planners? And why did these Australian ‘Gardens’ all run in to Whalebone Lane, which crossed Eastern Avenue at the Moby Dick Roundabout? I swear you could make up any ridiculous street name you liked and Londoners would believe you. Don’t try it on a real black cab driver, though.
St Chad’s Hostel had a rusted metal plate on one of its gateposts saying just ‘St Chad’s’. It was just like any of the other detached houses on Sydney Gardens: two brick gateposts, though no gate, either side of a yard-wide concrete path that ran all of ten feet across a Kleenex-sized garden to a porched front door. The house was detached from its next door neighbours by a gap you could see but not squeeze through. Unlike its neighbours, St Chad’s paintwork was bright and fresh. Indeed, there was a white-haired old geezer wearing blue overalls halfway up a ladder painting a window frame as I arrived.
He nodded to me as I walked up to the front door, and tried to draw on a thin, hand-rolled cigarette as he did so. The coughing spasm almost shook him off the ladder, and I felt there ought to be something in the health and safety legislation about people like him being allowed to work more than three feet off the ground, or even with chunky heels.
‘‘Mornin’,’ I nodded back. ‘St Chad’s?’
‘So they tell me,’ said the old man, concentrating on his painting again.
I pressed the doorbell and a single chime sounded somewhere inside.
The inner door opened and I saw a blurred figure through the frosted glass reach for the lock on the outer door, and then up above to a deadbolt, and then bend over and lean down for another bolt. The door opened six inches – on a chain.
‘Yes?’
The voice came from behind the moustache of a man in late middle age, balding and with that stiff, upright posture that means either ex-serviceman or fallen arches or perhaps both.
‘I’m looking for Warden Roberts,’ I said politely.
The chain came off and the door opened. He wore dark, heavyweight trousers with creases that could have sliced bread, shined black shoes I could see my reflection in and a white shirt and dark blue tie with a logo I didn’t recognise. His one concession to informality was a green cardigan buttoned up the front, which failed to hide the key chain running into his trouser pocket. I had the feeling he had so many keys on the end of that chain that he clanked when he walked.
‘You’ve found him,’ he said. Then, slightly louder, ‘Hasn’t he, Spider?’
‘If you say so, Mr Roberts,’ said the old man on the ladder, exhaling smoke and hot ash and tobacco shreds as he did so.
‘So, what’s your business here?’ he turned back on me.
‘Detective Inspector Hood of West Hamp–’
‘You’re not DI Hood!’ Roberts snapped and I saw him think about reaching for the door.
‘Of course I’m not,’ I said smoothly. Damn. It had been worth a shot. ‘Inspector Hood of West Hampstead is investigating a burglary about a month ago at my house ...’
‘It wasn’t me, guv,’ said the old man on the ladder. ‘I was securely elsewhere at the time, whenever it was.’
‘Shut up, Spider. I’m sorry if you lost any valuables, sir, but whatever you think your grounds are, it is highly improper to bring them here. Now please leave before I call the police.’
It suddenly dawned on me why they had so many locks on the inside of the door here: to keep angry civilians out.
‘I wish you would,’ I lied, ‘but they can’t help. Inspector Hood and I spoke last night. He’s unlikely to be able to follow up the burglary because the ... the ... er ... perpetrator faces more serious charges elsewhere. It’s likely that the burglary charge and the theft of a very expensive car are going to be dropped. Meanwhile, I’m in the middle of a very complicated insurance claim.’
It was a bit thin but not bad for being made up on the spot. I only wish we had the charge of grand theft auto like they do in America (rumoured to carry the death penalty in some States still). It sounds so much more impressive than ‘TWC’ – taking without consent.
‘And what has this got to do with St Chad’s, if anything?’ Roberts growled, but he must have known what was coming.
‘The car thief was Anthony Keith Flowers, and he was living here at the time of the crime.’
‘If this person was one of our residents at the time in question, and I’m not saying he was, I cannot possibly think what I could or should tell you, Mr ...? I didn’t catch your name.’
‘Angel,’ I said, not seeing any percentage in lying about it, ‘and really all I’m after is some idea of what Keith Flowers did during his stay here. It was a month, wasn’t it? I just need to know anything about his movements ...’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Angel, if that really is your name, but that sort of information is none of your concern, and without instructions from an officer of a court, none of your business. I am certainly not prepared to help you on the doorstep, out of the blue like this. If there is any ongoing legal action, then the proper authorities will have all the facts. I suggest you consult your solicitor. Good day.’
I was left looking at the door and hearing the slam of deadbolts and the snick of the chain going back on, still thunderstruck by his advice.
See a solicitor? Things couldn’t be that bad, could they?
I could still see Warden Roberts’ distorted figure through the frosted glass when a voice from above me – though not very far above me – whispered:
‘End of the road; five minutes.’
‘Got anything to smoke, then?’ asked Spider, leaning into Armstrong through the nearside front window.
‘Only tobacco,’ I said.
‘Factory or roll-up?’
‘Ready made.’ I pointed to the glove compartment. ‘In there.’
His hands shot out as if on springs form his arms and he had the compartment open and was helping himself to one of my emergency Benson & Hedges, which he lit with a disposable lighter. A hand shot out again – I thought to put the packet back – and retrieved my emergency half bottle of vodka (mostly full), which quickly disappeared into one of the large, flapped pockets of his paint-stained overalls.
‘Hey, you’re having a laugh now, aren’t you?’ I said, but made no move to take it back. I noticed the cigarette packet had vanished too.
‘Can’t help it, mate,’ he said, drawing on the cigarette. ‘I’m a thief, in’ I? A persistent offender, a ree-sid-ivisit. Or so they tell me. You shouldn’t give people like me the time of day.’
I resisted the urge to check that my watch was still on my wrist.
‘That’s probably the only useful thing you’re going to tell me, isn’t it?’
‘How do you know that? I ain’t said nothing yet.’
I put both hands on the steering wheel and began to tap out a little rhythm with my fingers, looking straight ahead and whistling Take the A Train loudly, but in the wrong key. That was usually good for sending Amy ballistic within two minutes.
Spider didn’t last that long.
‘You wanna hear what I’ve got to say, then?’
‘Sure. Whenever you’re ready. Take your time. But preferably while I’m still in my thirties.’
Spider hissed something that could have been ‘chopsy little git’ as he took another drag on the cigarette. He held it in between two fingers, but backwards, pointing into the palm of his hand. I bet he could nip the end out in an instant, with thumb and little finger if he had to. He was 60 if he was a day and he’d been smoking like that for a long time.
‘There’s somebody wants to see you.’
I stopped whistling. ‘There is? Why would somebody you know want to see me?’
‘‘Cos you’re that Angel guy that’s shacked up with that clothes designer Amy May.’
I kept a blank face.
‘And you got this where? Cosmo or maybe Vanity Fair? I don’t remember Hello! magazine coming round.’
Actually they had, but I had made sure I had a darts match to go to and Amy hadn’t minded. In fact she’d seemed quite relieved.
‘Got it from the ‘orse’s mouth – her husband hisself. Okay then, ex-husband, but he talked about her all the time.’
‘You know Keith Flowers?’ I tried to keep my voice down, but I wasn’t sure I managed it.
‘Yeah, I do. Did. No, I do. He’s not dead, is he?’
‘Not for the want of trying.’
‘Ooooh! Now you’re scaring me,’ Spider shrilled.
‘Look, you old toe-rag, where’s this going? And how much is it gonna cost me?’
‘Nuffing. I’m taken care of. I get paid to deliver the message. No concern o’ mine what happens after that.’
I looked into his pale, wrinkled face. Another year and he could model for garden gnomes.
‘Let me get this straight: you had a message for me and I just happen to turn up on your doorstep?’
‘Being up that ladder and thereby able to earwig your every word was a bit of a bonus, I admit,’ he said, nodding sagely to himself, ‘otherwise I’d have had to come looking for you.’
‘To deliver this message?’
‘Yep.’
‘That somebody wants to see me?’
‘Yer getting there.’
‘And who exactly is it wants to see me?’
‘Mr Creosote.’
I burst out laughing, as I couldn’t avoid the image of the Mr Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, the gargantuan vomiting character who eats so much he finally explodes after being tempted by one last ‘waffer thin mint’.
Spider was clearly hurt that I wasn’t taking this seriously enough.
‘Don’t tell me,’ I sobbed, trying to get my breath back, ‘he wants to meet me in his favourite restaurant!’
Deadpan, Spider said: ‘Oh no, you have to go see him. The law’s very insistent about that.’
‘No, don’t interrupt,’ I said, ‘let me tell you what’s happened as I see it, because that’ll give me a chance to get it straight in my mind, as, frankly, it’s starting to do my head in.
‘It’s clear to me that this Alison George is not the sharpest blade in the knife drawer. I mean, she goes to all the trouble of setting up her computer to print off business cards for phoney professions and yet she uses the same name all the time. What’s all that about? If her IQ gets to 50 she should sell.
‘She’s interested in what Keith Flowers did in his month of semi-freedom, when he was out of jail but hadn’t passed “Go” and certainly hadn’t collected £200 anywhere that I know of. But he had made a nuisance of himself at Amy’s office, so this Alison George goes there. He turned over our house, so Alison George is hanging around there, almost like visiting the scene of the crime.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me to find out she’d been up to Suffolk, or maybe she just called the cops up there, but she knew about Keith Flowers’ nasty accident with Amy’s BMW and she turned up at Duncan’s garage just to see it for herself. It’s as if she’s trying to retrace his steps.
‘I know, I know,’ I held up a hand to stifle the questioning looks. ‘Flowers never came to Stuart Street, but he did ring here. Now how she knew about that is interesting, but there was never anything here to find that connected to Flowers. It’s like she’s trying to get a feel for things somehow.’
I lit up a cigarette – just to help me concentrate – despite the audible sniffs and glaring eyes.
‘I know, I know,’ I admitted, ‘but I need it.
‘So I figured the next logical place for her to go would be St Chad’s, if she really was walking back the cat.
‘No, that’s just an expression that spies used. Don’t ask me how I know. “Walking back the cat” means following a trail backwards not to find where somebody’s going but where they started from.
‘Now I can’t think of a way this Alison George would know about St Chad’s. I mean, it’s only dumb luck I did. And even if she knew about it, I don’t know how she would find it, and anyway, I shouldn’t think the cops or the Prison Service would release details like that, and if she did go there, they wouldn’t talk to her. But lo and behold, there was somebody there waiting to talk to me!
‘Would you believe a Mr Creosote? I mean, this just gets better and better. And according to his ageing messenger boy, who looks like he was the Artful Dodger’s understudy, to see him I have to go and visit him in prison.
‘Well, I suppose the authorities might look a bit askance at him nipping out for lunch down Soho for a couple of hours, though if you’ve been, say, a Cabinet Minister, you seem to get away with it.
‘So now I’ve got two problems: a rogue female dogging me wherever I go and a hardened criminal in Belmarsh high security prison snooping by remote control. And as far as I can see, both of them are trying to track not me, but Keith-soddin’-Flowers and find out what he did on his brief holiday from Her Majesty’s Prisons.
‘What I don’t know is, why?
‘Why are people suddenly interested in Keith Flowers when all the time he was inside nobody mentioned his bloody name? He comes out, and now he’s going back inside for attempted maiming and mayhem on his ex-wife. Mostly. Plus being certifiable; I suppose that helps.
‘So why the sudden interest in the month he was out? Why has it spooked Amy into doing a runner? It’s not like her just to disappear for days on end. That’s what I do. I know, I just thought I’d say it before you did.
‘But what does it all mean? Gimme a break here, think of something.’
Springsteen raised his splinted paw at me in a mock salute – if he’d had fingers, the middle one would have been upright – and limped backwards into the kitchen with as much dignity as he could muster.
Fat lot of use he’d been.
As I left the Stuart Street flat, I thought that the day just couldn’t get any weirder, which was a dumb thing to do because as soon as you think that – it does.
But even I couldn’t have guessed that I was about to be kidnapped and then beaten up in full view of 11 million Londoners.
Maybe it’s to do with getting older, but I’m really beginning to hate surprises.
One of them piled into the back of Armstrong almost as soon as I had the driver’s door open. (Mental note: it was a daft idea to install central locking.) The other one had climbed out of a white Rover 600 and rapidly crossed the street on the diagonal, coming into the corner of my eye only when it was too late to do anything about it.
My first impression was that they were calm and professional, which was worrying. My second impression was that they both Welsh, which was frightening.
‘Jubilee Gardens, please, down near Waterloo,’ said the one who had climbed in the back, his voice modulated with the unmistakable Celtic lilt.
‘Sorry, mate, this isn’t a licensed cab, it’s a private vehicle and not for hire,’ I said, almost on autopilot as I had done a thousand times before when unsuspecting punters had jumped in the back at traffic lights or in pub car parks. ‘I couldn’t take your money even if I wanted to.’
‘No-one said anything about money, did they, Huw?’
I became aware that something was preventing me from closing the driver’s door: a pair of hands gripping the top of the door frame. Huw, I presumed.
‘Wouldn’t count on a tip, either,’ said Huw.
They were both mid- to late twenties, clean-shaven and with short hair. They could have been Mormons, but the fact that they were the only two people wearing blue, beltless gabardine raincoats in London on a warm August afternoon singled them out as Welsh.
‘Anytime you’re ready,’ said the one in the back, still polite and cheerful. ‘You’ve got about 35 minutes.’
‘Where are we going?’ I asked him casually, making no move to start the engine, like I was interested.
‘I’ve told you once. Jubilee Gardens near Waterloo. You’ve got 35 minutes.’
He stared me out with a faint smile, head slightly on one side as if he forgave me for not hearing him the first time.
‘What I really meant,’ I tried, ‘was why do you want to go to Jubilee Gardens?’
‘Now that’s a good question, isn’t it, Huw?’
‘Certainly is, Barry,’ said Huw over my head. ‘Can’t say I want to go, and you could probably think of better things to do, but we don’t have much choice in the matter really, do we?’
‘None at all in the matter,’ said Barry philosophically. ‘And all this chit-chat and gay banter means you now have about 33 minutes.’
Barry on the back seat had been sitting with his hands resting on his lap on the folds of his unbuttoned raincoat. Now he pulled back the coat slowly and delicately, like a stripper revealing a flash of stocking top. Across his knees lay a big, ugly, silvery revolver.
‘I think you’d better start your engines, but try not to make it a bumpy flight, eh?’
I had no idea what he was talking about, but Huw obviously did, as he started to giggle, still hanging on Armstrong’s door.
‘Not two in one day, eh, Barry?’
‘Did you bring the sick bags, Huw?’ Barry replied with a laugh.
I looked from the gun to Barry and then turned my head to Huw, who was reaching inside his raincoat for something.
I started Armstrong up as quickly as I could, not fancying the idea of a gun in each ear one bit. But Huw didn’t have a gun, or if he did, he didn’t draw it. His hand came out of the folds of his coat with a pair of handcuffs, and before I could react, he had caught my right wrist and snapped one bracelet on. The other half of the cuffs he clicked on to the rim of the steering wheel.
‘I’ll be right behind you,’ he said into my face, ‘but don’t go too fast if you wouldn’t mind, ‘cos I’m not used to driving in the big city.’
‘Don’t dawdle, though, Huw,’ said Barry. In my mirror, I could see him folding his coat back over his lap and smoothing it down. I didn’t know whether to be more frightened of his gun or his fashion sense. ‘We don’t want to miss our flight.’
Huw chuckled some more then slammed the door on me and stalked across the road to the white Rover, shaking his head as he went.
‘He hates flying, that’s his problem,’ said Barry.
We were almost at Liverpool Street, the white Rover right behind us, before I realised we were going for a ride on the London Eye.
Barry-in-the-back wasn’t giving anything away, even when I used my most subtle approach.
‘Want to tell me what’s going on, then?’
‘No, I don’t think I will. You’ll find out soon enough. Patience is a virtue and everything comes to him who waits.’
He deserved a slap as much for the platitudes as for the sing-song accent in which he delivered them, not that I was in a position to give anyone except myself a slap, anchored to the steering wheel as I was.
‘We’ll be going over Tower Bridge, then, will we?’ Barry asked.
I arched my back and strained my buttocks so that I was taller in the driving seat and could get a better angle in the driving mirror. Barry had a paperback size London A-Z open on his knee, the bastard. For a real London cabby, that was more threatening than the gun he’d shown me earlier.
‘Can do,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level, ‘but we’ll lose the Taffy in the Rover. Once you ... Ow!’
Barry had jumped forward and swatted me on the left ear with the A-Z. It didn’t hurt much as a smack; the pain came from the indignity and the humiliation of wincing away in case another blow came. It was only later that I considered the farcical nature of my situation. To an innocent observing Londoner, it must have looked like a fantasy come true or a set-up from a ‘reality television’ show. The scenario: a black cab driver handcuffed to his own steering wheel, being beaten about the head with an A-Z guide by an irate passenger fed up with being taken the long way round.
‘He’s not called Taffy. Nobody’s called Taffy these days,’ Barry was saying. Even though my ear was ringing, I could tell his voice was calm and reasonable. ‘Now why aren’t we going across Tower Bridge?’
‘We can if you want, but on the other side we’ll probably lose your friend in the Rover in the traffic system.’ I chose my next words carefully. ‘Unless you know where you’re going, you can end up halfway to Kent before you can turn round.’
‘Fair enough, but it’s a pity. I was looking forward to seeing the Tower,’ he said with a note of genuine disappointment.
I was tempted to tell him that if he tried what he was doing to me on one of the real fraternity of London cabbies then he might find himself inside the Tower, as there was bound to be a law still on the books to cover such outrages.
‘I’m going through the City and across Southwark Bridge, if that’s okay,’ I said instead.
Barry flicked a page in his A-Z.
‘That looks acceptable. You’ve got about 20 minutes before flight time.’
That was when it clicked.
‘You’re going on the London Eye, aren’t you?’
‘We all are,’ said Barry, and his smile filled my mirror. ‘Should make a nice day out, shouldn’t it.’
It wasn’t a question, but I risked another burning ear by answering it.
‘So it’s a day out for you guys, is it? I didn’t know there was any rugby on this weekend.’
You don’t actually have to know anything about Rugby Union to know when they’re playing the Six Nations championship and the games are in London, you just have to hang around the pubs. All London publicans – and customers – love it when the Irish fans are in town, because it guarantees a party; they don’t mind the Scots, because they keep to themselves and get on with the serious drinking; the French pop in for some pub grub before hitting Marks & Spencer’s, so they aren’t really any trouble; and the Italians – well, nobody is quite sure what they do, as they’ve never been seen. But when the Welsh hit town on the Friday before a Saturday match, publicans give their best staff the night off and employ only those who don’t mind the constant whining about London prices, the fact that there are no public bars any more (where the beer is traditionally a penny cheaper), or that no-one sells mild ale (cheaper) in London nowadays.
It didn’t seem a good idea to share any of this with Barry-in-the-back-with-a-gun.
‘No, there’s no rugby on,’ he said chattily. ‘We’re here on business. The sightseeing is just a perk of the job, you might say. Travel broadens the mind, and all that.’
I hoped he had lots of Airmiles stacked up.
‘Can I ask what business you’re in?’
‘Oh, I don’t think you’d want to know that, and if the boss wants to tell you, he’ll tell you.’
‘The boss?’ I asked, but he didn’t reply.
Trying to psych me out with a menacing silence is quite a good tactic, and it always works for Amy, but Barry was Welsh and just couldn’t stand the pressure of not hearing his own voice.
‘You’ll be meeting the boss. He’s waiting for us and we’d better not be late. He’s been looking forward to his trip on the big Ferris wheel for ages. He’s just a big kid at heart, but don’t tell him I said that, will you?’
‘Gets upset easily, does he? This boss of yours?’ I tried, pushing it.
‘Best hope you don’t find out,’ said Barry.
I parked Armstrong in the shadow of the archway that carries the rail line over Hungerford Bridge, and the white Rover pulled up behind me.
Barry got out and stood there looking at the few passenger capsules you could see from this angle, suspended up in the air and rotating so slowly it didn’t look as if they were moving at all. I didn’t join him, because I couldn’t. I had to wait for Huw to climb out of the Rover, lock it with an electronic remote and take his own sweet time approaching my door and opening it.
He looked down at me and at my wrist still cuffed to the wheel.
‘Tut-tut,’ he scolded, ‘and they said you big city boys were smart.’
He reached in and grasped the cuff on the wheel with two fingers and it sprang open immediately, falling off the wheel and dangling from the one still on my wrist.
I held my wrist up and examined the bracelet still intact. If you looked carefully you could see that what was supposed to be a keyhole was actually a raised button in the metal. I pressed it and that half fell away with a ratchety click.
Huw held out his hand for the cuffs.
‘Just toys, really,’ he said. ‘Get them in the local sex shop, we do.’
‘Sex shops in Wales?’ I said before I could stop myself. ‘I thought they were called farms.’
I remember being impressed as to how strong he was for a man of his size, and how he must work out down at they gym, maybe doing the weights. That was as I was being lifted out of Armstrong by the ears and slammed against the bodywork. It was only when I’d got my breath back from the three punches he put into my stomach – pausing only to reflect on the fact that he’d been so quick he’d had time to slip the steel handcuffs over his right fist as a knuckleduster – that I realised he must be a boxer. There were other telltale signs – like the way he had positioned his feet and balanced his weight and not wasted effort, taking short-distance jabs rather than wild swings – but mostly it was the pain that convinced me.
He put a hand on my shoulder to keep me from sinking to my knees while I frantically tried to remember how to breath. To passers-by heading to and from Waterloo Station just across the road, it must have looked like we were having a friendly chat about the current programme at the National Film Theatre.
Barry appeared from behind Armstrong, or rather the bottom half of him did, for I could only register his shoes, trousers and the bottom half of his raincoat without raising my head, and that seemed just too damned difficult.
‘Oh dear me,’ said Barry. ‘You didn’t mention sheep-shagging did you? The Welsh national sport. Something like that? Huw doesn’t like that. None of us likes that, now I think about it. ‘Specially not Mr Turner. He definitely doesn’t like such talk. Better keep it to yourself for now, eh? Come on, he’ll be waiting and raring to go. It’s this way, is it?’
I staggered after him as he strode across Jubilee Gardens, mostly propelled by Huw’s hand in the small of my back. If I’d been able to think, I would have remembered I had left Armstrong unlocked and the key in the ignition.
If I’d been able to speak, I would have asked who the fuck Mr Turner was.
It’s London’s fourth tallest structure at 450 feet, has 32 ovoid capsules carrying 25 people each, it takes 30 minutes to rotate through 360 degrees, and on a clear day can offer views of up to 30 miles out as far as Windsor Castle and Heathrow. What else did I know about the London Eye? It was the only worthwhile remnant of the Millennium beanfeast – the famous wobbly footbridge down by the Tate Modern had already been forgotten and everyone pretended that the Dome had never happened at all. It had been interrupted twice, once when a WWII unexploded bomb had been dredged up by Hungerford Bridge and once when the river police had to fish out a ‘floater’, and when it had opened to the public the Ministry of Defence building in Whitehall directly across the river had issued instructions to its staff to keep the windows closed and the office curtains pulled in case the Eye carried coach parties of spies with binoculars.
The other thing I knew was that even though the novelty had worn off, you could still queue for an hour or more to get on at quiet times in the winter. Now was summer and London was tourist central, which should have given me plenty of time to find out a bit more about the mysterious Mr Turner by quizzing Barry and Huw when I got my breath back.
No chance.
With Barry and Huw so close to either side of me that I could have slipped under their raincoats in the event of a sudden shower, we marched straight up the switchback concrete ramp to the head of the queue – and then beyond it.
I was about to protest, or rather get the people in the queue to protest, except that most of them were Japanese and far too polite to cause a fuss, but then we were over the yellow line and through the gates with the attendants waving us through to the curved landing platform.
‘Come on, lovely boys, you’re just in time. This one’s ours.’
Up that close, you can’t help but feel dominated by the Eye as it towers above you, and especially when one of the capsules inches in along the loading platform. You automatically look straight up to the capsule over 400 feet directly above at the top of the arc and you think that in 15 minutes you’ll be up there hanging in the air with people down here staring up your trouser leg through the transparent capsule walls. The big difference between the Eye and the amusement park rides called ‘Terminator’ or ‘Scream Machine’ is that they don’t give you time to think.
I tried to spot where the voice had come from, and through a melee of disembarking passengers (all chattering happily and none of them even the slightest bit green) and bustling attendants, I saw its owner.
He was a small man, no more than five foot four, stocky but not particularly fat, and balding, the skin on the top of his head glowing pink where he’d caught the sun, though not enough to persuade him to take off his raincoat. He was of at least pensionable age and he had a hearing-aid plugged into his right ear. He waved an arm to hurry us on, and almost did a jig with excitement. I bet his eyes twinkled when he smiled and he was somebody’s favourite grandad.
Immediately behind him, hands clasped together near his groin in classic bouncer posture, was a much taller, younger version of the old man. This one was somewhere around the mid-forties, built like a rugby prop-forward, and his eyes scanned the crowd like an American secret serviceman guarding a President. He wasn’t wearing a raincoat, just a denim blouson jacket – he was that hard.
Even as I was hustled towards them, I noticed the family resemblance. The middle-aged bouncer was almost certainly the son of the old man and, after a quick look left then right, was probably the father of Barry and Huw. That made the old man their favourite grandad.
Up close, the old man beamed at me, and when he spoke, he leaned slightly to his left so he could catch what I said in his hearing aid ear.
‘Ah, Mr Angel, so glad you could join us. I’ve been looking forward to this.’
I put on my best bemused expression, somewhere between a drunk after ten pints of snakebite and a rabbit caught in headlights.
‘I’m sorry? Who did you say?’
It was worth a shot. After all, neither Barry nor Huw had actually asked me who I was.
It fooled Grandad for about two seconds.
‘Oh, very good, Mr Angel. You did that with a straight face.’ He pointed a finger at me, then wagged it. ‘You could have had me going there, but you see, I know who you are. Now, come for a ride on this wonderful contraption with us.’
‘I’m scared of heights,’ I tried.
‘Don’t be, Mr Angel,’ smiled Grandad, taking me by the arm. ‘There are plenty of other things you ought to be frightened of before you worry about heights. But do bear in mind, Mr Angel, that just because I’m up in the big city for the day, it doesn’t mean there’s a village somewhere that’s deprived of an idiot. You with me?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘Don’t we need a ticket?’
‘All done and dusted,’ he said proudly, steering me to the platform edge, where a capsule had seemingly come to rest, though they never actually do. ‘Private Capsule Hire, that’s the name of the game, though I wish they’d called them carriages. Capsules sounds like a suppository, don’t you think?’
Once the last of the passengers was out of the capsule, two attendants dived in armed with short sticks or wands with mirrors on the end. They homed in on the central light fitting of the capsule and held up the mirrors along either side, checking in case the previous occupants had left a bomb.
‘I think the security’s a bit amateur –’ the old man said in a stage whisper, pronouncing it ‘ammerchewer’ ‘– if you ask me.’
I agreed silently with the old man, thinking about the gun Barry had shown me in Armstrong.
Then I was distracted by another attendant, who clambered on board the slowly moving capsule with a small metal trolley loaded with trays covered with white cloths, ice buckets, glasses and three bottles of champagne.
‘Thought a snack might be called for whilst we chat,’ said Grandad. ‘It’s only £155 plus VAT on top of the £300 for the private hire, and if you’re going to do things, you might as well do them right, mightn’t you?’
‘You really have hired this?’
‘Oh yes. Private hire, and you can take up to ten people with the buffet. Funnily enough, they do a thing called “Cupid’s Capsule”, which costs £50 more, but you and a lady friend get the whole thing to yourselves. Goodness knows what people get up to on those trips. I bet those mirror-on-a-stick boys find plenty of unpleasantness after one of them. Come on, climb aboard.’
I stopped automatically as my feet reached the edge of the platform. I wasn’t consciously trying to resist – there didn’t seem much point, as I could feel Barry and Huw and the other one right behind me shepherding me into the nine-tonne transparent egg-shaped cell.
Grandad tightened his grip on my arm and looked up into my face. There was no expression of concern on his.
‘Who are you?’ I asked.
The question seemed to surprise him.
‘I’m Len Turner. Haven’t you heard of me?’
‘No, can’t say I have,’ I said apologetically.
‘Well, that’s probably been for the best for you. Up until now of course.’
I stepped in and we went up.
It had been a bit of a miscalculation on my part that nothing untoward would happen to me in a see-through cage rotating ever-so-slowly through 360 degrees in full view of 11 million Londoners. Correction, 11 million people, which is reckoned to be the day-time population during the tourist season, though not all of them are Londoners. And not all Londoners can actually see the Eye – surprisingly few of them, actually – as, though it dominates the skyline, the natural inclination is to live nearer the Earth, and then the buildings tend to get in the way. And even if a fair proportion of the, say, eight million residents were actually looking in the right direction and upward to a point about 300 feet in the air and did in fact catch a glimpse of me having my face smashed against the inside of the plexiglass capsule, would they give a shit? Probably not.
It all started innocently enough.
Our private capsule inched its way into the air and Len Turner – whatever and whoever he was – made a fair fist of being the genial host. He even introduced the big bouncer type as his son Ron, who was indeed the ‘Da’ of Barry and Huw, whom I’d already met, hadn’t I? Boxers all three of them, they were, he’d told me proudly, and I’d said yes, I’d noticed.
‘Now that down there, that’d be Westminster Bridge, wouldn’t it? I recognise that one from the telly.’ He pointed just like a tourist would. ‘And that’s the Houses of Parliament, or the English Parliament as we have to say these days. So what’s that one?’
It seemed to be up to me to do the guided tour bit as our London Eye attendant was busying himself with his trolley, laying out aluminium plates of canapés and sandwiches on the wooden bench that ran down the middle of the capsule.
‘That’s Lambeth Bridge,’ I said cautiously, just in case it was a slap-earning trick question, ‘and the next one down is Vauxhall Bridge.’
‘And the other way?’ He turned and pointed down river.
‘That’s Hungerford Bridge right there, or rather Bridges: the railway one and the new footbridge. Then it goes Waterloo, Blackfriars, Southwark, London, Tower and eventually the Thames Flood Barrier but I don’t know if we’ll see that.’
‘Tower Bridge. That was the one the youngsters wanted to see.’
He thought for a moment then added: ‘And who forgot to bring the binoculars out of the car?’
There was a silence and then a shot rang out and my heart stopped. What kind of man would shoot his grandsons for forgetting the binoculars?
‘At last, lunch is served,’ he boomed.
My heart started going again as a glass was thrust into my hand and our ‘Flight Attendant’ began to share out the champagne from the bottle he’d just popped.
‘Let’s drink to London,’ said Len Turner, raising his glass. ‘London all around us, but most importantly, below us.’
Why not? I thought. I had to get through the next 25 minutes somehow, and the Thames looked an awful long way down already.
‘Look at it, boys, all laid out below you.’
The diminutive Len Turner was waxing lyrical, taking a dramatic turn so that his initially friendly gnome-like face was morphing into evil-troll. If we’d been in a pub, I would have started to back towards the door. But once you’re on the Eye, there’s nowhere to run.
‘All below us, the result of two thousand years of invasion, feudalism, civil war, social evils, plague, fire, imperialism, political turmoil and corruption, and what does it produce? Chaucer, Shakespeare, parliamentary democracy, Christopher Wren, the Great Exhibition, Karl Marx, Churchill, the Trades Union Congress, the British Museum and the Carry On films.’
He flung out a hand in no particular direction, but as it held an empty glass the Flight Attendant filled it and started work opening another bottle.
‘And somewhere over there: Switzerland.’ He paused for dramatic effect, but wisely not for too long. ‘Four hundred years of peace and brotherly love and what does it produce? Cuckoo clocks.’
His chest inflated as he reached his conclusion and he beamed at his family and at me.
‘And Toblerones,’ said Huw.
I bit my tongue.
‘And watches, good watches,’ said Barry.
‘And bobsleighs, like at the Winter Olympics,’ added Barry.
I started to chew the lining of my cheeks.
‘I was paraphrasing,’ stormed Len. ‘I was quoting from a famous film, you morons! The Thin Man. A very famous film. Haven’t you lot ever seen a film in black and white? No, you wouldn’t have, would you? Beneath you, it would be.’
I was beginning to see where the idea for the voice of Yoda in Star Wars came from but I couldn’t trust myself to say anything.
‘Know who wrote that?’ Len rounded on his grandkids. ‘‘Course you don’t. It was Graham Greene. A bloody fine writer for an Englishman. And a Catholic at that.’
Len drained his glass and handed it to his son Ron.
‘Get us a refill, Ron, and you two, you might as well get stuck into the grub. It’s paid for.’
Barry and Huw didn’t need a second telling. They sat down on the central bench and began to hoover up small triangular sandwiches three at a time. Nobody offered me anything, and as I put my glass down on the floor, I could feel the champagne refermenting in my empty stomach.
‘Better take care of the Trolley Dolly whilst you’re at it, Ron.’
Ron grunted as he handed over his dad’s refill, then stepped towards Barry and held out his hand for something. Barry dug into the flaps of his raincoat, and for one awful moment I thought he was going to produce the revolver he’d shown me earlier and Big Ron was going to take care of our Flight Attendant permanently. But whatever it was he did pass over fitted easily into the palm of Ron’s large paw.
I don’t know what Ron said to the Flight Attendant and I couldn’t see his expression, as he was hidden by Ron’s shoulders, but I could see two £20 notes being slipped into the Attendant’s jacket pocket. And then the Attendant had turned around to face the glass at the far end of the capsule and was busy screwing in a set of earplugs.
I watched fascinated by the unreality of it all as more of London unfolded beneath us, the human figures rapidly turning into ants and not one of them concerned with what was happening up here. With our personal Trolley Dolly now bribed, deaf and effectively blind, I was on my own with three generations of inbred Welsh nastiness.
‘We could do with one of these in Cardiff, you know,’ said the elder Turner, squinting towards the west as if to check you really could see Heathrow on a clear day, should you want to. ‘Put it somewhere down Queen Alexandra docks and you could see up to the valleys and Caerphilly or across the Channel, maybe as far as Bristol.’
That sounded cruel to me, like the prisoners on Alcatraz being able to see the lights and night-life of San Francisco without being able to touch it.
‘You got the Millennium Stadium, we got the Eye,’ I said.
‘That’s true,’ he agreed, ‘and the English football teams have to come cap in hand to play their big matches there, not that they’re grateful, mind you.’
The little old man moved to my side so he could place his hands on the rail that ran around the inside of the capsule and stare out to the north west.
‘You haven’t asked me how I know you,’ he said, gazing into space. ‘You haven’t asked why I wanted this little chat. In fact you haven’t asked anything, Mr Angel. Cat got your tongue?’
I knew a cat who’d have his once he was feeling better.
‘I think you’re going to tell me, Mr Turner,’ I said, turning round so that I was in the same position and gripping the rail like he was. The main difference was that my knuckles had already gone white with the strain. ‘Sometime in the next 20 minutes or so,’ I ventured.
He made a show of consulting his watch.
‘Yes, you don’t get long on this thing, do you? Still, the view’s worth it. So let’s get the ugly business part over with and we can enjoy the rest of our flight.’
If he made a signal to Ron behind me I didn’t see it. Maybe Ron had been waiting for a raised eyebrow or something, reflected in the perspex. Whatever. The next thing I knew, my right leg had given way and my chin was bouncing off the rail between my two hands, rattling my teeth. Then Ron grabbed a handful of my hair, pulled my head back and slammed it against the capsule wall.
Nothing else happened for a while after that. I realised I was on my knees, still holding the rail like someone taking communion, trying to focus on a trickle of blood on the plexiglass. I turned my head slightly to see if it hurt. It did, and more blood spotted my shirt front.
‘Ron was always getting into trouble at school, giving the other boys the dead leg. Some of the girls, too,’ Len Turner was saying, but now I had to look up to him. ‘He’s quite good at it.’
‘What was that for?’ I managed, resisting the urge to burst into tears.
‘For not answering my questions.’
‘You haven’t asked any, have you?’
I tucked my head into my shoulder in case there was another blow. It was all I could do, as I had no feeling in my right leg at all. Still, where was there to run?
‘No,’ he said reasonably, ‘but I’m about to, and it was you yourself who pointed out we don’t have any time to mess about, so I thought it best if Ron showed you we mean business beforehand. Ready, then?’
‘Anything, anything,’ I mumbled, thinking it best to go for the defeated, totally servile approach. It wasn’t a hard act and I think I was pretty convincing.
‘Keith Flowers. There’s a name you’ll know.’
‘Yes, yes, I do,’ I said quickly.
‘A guest at one of the better Windsor Hotels – Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh to you – until a month or so ago. Now he’s in a padded cell at Rampton – a maximum security loony bin – and totally unapproachable, which is why I’m having to ask you these questions and not him.’
‘I know nothing about the guy,’ I said, trying to make it sound as if I was pleading for mercy – and doing a good job of it.
‘You knew him well enough to put him in hospital,’ Len said, still taking in the view. ‘And you know his wife very well, from what I hear.’
‘Ex-wife,’ I said automatically.
‘Don’t tell me she never mentioned him? Or the divorce?’ He looked down at me for the first time and smiled. ‘No, she didn’t, did she? Well, I can’t blame her. She naturally would want to put all that behind her now she’s so successful. Anyway, it’s her “ex” I’m interested in, not her. I want to know what Keith Flowers was up to between coming out of one prison and you putting him back in another, which as I understand it involved a fair proportion of violence with a bulldozer. Sounds like you’re not a man to cross, Mr Angel. At least, not on a building site.’
He allowed himself a chuckle at that, while I wondered how the hell he knew it.
‘Look, he came out of the night at us. He was trying to abduct Amy. She didn’t want to go with him. He took a shot at me. I stopped him.’
‘That sounds a fair summary of what ...’ Len started, but he was interrupted by Barry – or it could have been Huw – from somewhere behind me.
‘What sort of a gun did he have?’
For a split second there was fire in old Len’s eyes, his face the troll rather than the garden gnome again as he glared at whoever had spoken out of turn. I averted my eyes before he could see I’d noticed.
‘I don’t know; it was dark,’ I mumbled. ‘The police took it. I’d never seen the guy before that night, but I’ll tell you something for nothing, you’re not the only people interested in what he was doing while he was on the loose.’
Now it wasn’t strictly true to say I’d never seen Keith Flowers before that night, but in high-stress confrontational situations I’ve found it helps relieve the pressure if you can offer something as a diversion. Normally it’s called lying.
‘What makes you say that?’
At least it hadn’t resulted in any more pain. I risked shaking my head to clear it and noticed that we were almost at the top of the Eye’s axis. Immediately below us were all the other capsules filled with happy-go-lucky sightseers, and not one of the bastards looking my way.
‘Because somebody’s been following me – and not just me, but anyone who could possibly have had anything to do with Flowers while he was out on licence or whatever it’s called.’
‘Really?’ said Len Turner, mildly interested. ‘Could it be the police?’
‘They’re not interested. As far as they’re concerned, they have enough to hang Flowers with already. Anyway, he was arrested in Suffolk and I’m saying somebody’s interested in his movements here in London.’
Old Len, the grandad from hell, reached out his right fist and took my nose between the knuckles of his first and middle fingers and twisted.
I can’t remember if I screamed but I certainly fainted – one of those narcoleptic rushes you get when you’re dreaming sometimes and you wake up thinking you’ve just stepped off the edge of a cliff or a platform on the Jubilee Line. (Why is it always the Jubilee line?)
The faint lasted just long enough for me to topple sideways and come to just as the back of my head bounced off the floor of the capsule, and now I was looking up at all of them. The entire Turner clan with not an expression between them and our Flight Attendant at the far end of the capsule, his back to us, his hands clasped behind his back, oblivious, but 40 quid better off.
Barry and Huw made to get up off the bench, but Ron their dad didn’t need them to pick me up and lean me against the hand rail. I could feel something in my right leg now but not a lot. Everywhere else just hurt, especially my nose.
‘It’s not broken,’ said Len, wiping his hands on a handkerchief. ‘Or if it is, it’s nothing serious. It’ll heal. So when did you notice our little detective?’
‘What?’
For a moment I thought my hearing had been affected and it was I who should have had the hearing aid, but maybe I just had brain damage.
‘The private detective I’ve had looking into things – at great expense I might add.’
‘What?’ I said again.
‘The ... other ... people ... interested .... in .... Flowers,’ he said slowly, so I could take it in. ‘There aren’t any. It was me all the time. I hired myself a detective to find out who Flowers saw and where he went. Thought it best to call in a London firm, you know, us not being used to the big city, that is. And wouldn’t you know it, but it all seemed to come back to you, Mr Angel.’
He reached inside his raincoat pocket and I flinched, expecting a gun or a cosh or a set of thumbscrews. His hand came out with a yellow envelope, the sort you get photographs back in from the Kwiksnap/Fotoflash/Expresspix type of franchise on most street corners in the West End.
‘Take it. Have a look.’
I took the envelope as if it contained anthrax. It had ‘FASTFLASH’ and ‘1-Hour Service’ printed on the front and an address in Shepherd’s Bush and it contained photographs but no strips of negatives. I was so relieved my hands hardly shook at all as I flicked through them.
The prints were standard six-by-four inch holiday-snap size and hardly works of art, but a couple of them did show my good side. There was me going into Duncan the Drunken’s garage, me coming out of same garage and saying something over my shoulder. There was me talking to Fenella on Stuart Street, then one of the back of me running into the house followed by one of me running out of the house with a towel-wrapped bundle in my arms. There were several of me and Debbie Diamond, on Oxford Street and leaving the hotel on Portman Square, all good shots and the very stuff of divorce cases in years gone by before the ‘Oh let’s just call it a fucking day’ solution came in. There was even a very fuzzy one of me standing in a doorway, lit only by a security lamp and the nearby streetlight. It took me a while to work out that was me talking to my neighbour Mr Dunmore. It seemed like years ago.
The ones that really interested me, though I tried not to show it, were half a dozen shots of Amy. Three showed her leaving the office, three showed her leaving the Hampstead house with her Gucci overnight bag and getting in to the Freelander parked in the driveway. She was wearing a light blue two-piece suit I couldn’t remember ever seeing before, and the last shot was of her sitting sideways on the driver’s seat, taking off her red Jimmy Choo heels so she could drive in her stockinged feet, as she always did on long journeys.
‘Very nice,’ I said, handing back the envelope. ‘And to answer your question, I didn’t spot your pet snooper. The local Neighbourhood Watch did, and they reported her to the cops.’
Len pocketed the photographs.
‘Well, that doesn’t matter now, but I’ll bear it in mind if I ever need their services again. You have to admit, though, that you take a good picture. You could offer me a penny for my thoughts and I’d have to give you change if I didn’t think there was some connection.’
‘Connection with what?’ I realised my voice was getting shrill, so I tried to chill it and took another tack.
‘Look, Mr Turner, you’re a reasonable man …’
‘What makes you think that?’ he said, with a look of such innocence I almost believed he was interested in an answer, so I chanced one.
‘Because there’s four of you, one of me and we’re still 300 feet off the ground. I don’t want to get off this thing before the people six capsules in front of us do.’
Ron took a deep breath and probably clenched his fists. I didn’t see him do it, just felt it, as I was keeping eye contact with old Len.
‘Go on, then,’ Len said, not flinching.
‘So think this through. Keith Flowers – and I’d never heard of the bastard until a month ago – has caused me nothing but grief. He comes out of the nick to find his ex-wife is hitched up with someone else and he throws a wobbler. All I did was get in his way. I’m the one he shoots at. It’s my car he trashes. It’s me who has to answer questions from the cops. You think I want this in my life? Christ, it’d be bad enough finding out there was a stamp-collecting, civil servant of an ex-husband let alone a psycho with form and a gun.’
Len tilted his head and there was something close to pity on his face.
‘You really didn’t know about Keith and young Amy?’
‘No I didn’t,’ I said, but I was thinking: how does he?
‘You poor bugger. I suggest you have a long talk with that woman of yours.’
Yeah, right. If I could find her.
‘But where does that leave us, Mr Angel? It doesn’t solve my particular problem.’
‘And I don’t know what that is, Mr Turner. If you’ve got some sort of candle burning for Keith Flowers, then I’m sorry for what happened to him, but he brought it all on himself.’
Len Turner smiled, and his teeth reminded me of tombstones.
‘If I lit a candle for Keith Flowers, it would only be to jam it up his arse, flame first. Maybe you can’t help me after all.’
‘Why not try telling me what your problem with Flowers is? If it puts him deeper in the shit, I’m up for it.’
‘I think he’s just about as deep in the shit as it’s possible to be and still be breathing without a snorkel,’ said Len Turner, looking out at the view again, downriver this time. ‘My information is that he genuinely has gone mental, you know. It’s not an act. But even if you did act your way into Rampton, you can’t act your way out of that place. Trouble is, I can’t get in to ask the little scum-bag where my money is.’
I blinked. I know I did, for it hurt my forehead and more blood dripped on to my shirt.
‘Money?’
‘Ah, got your interest now, have I?’
He had mistaken my wincing for interest.
‘I’m always interested in money,’ I said, glancing down to my left and seeing the Thames and the concrete landing pad getting nearer.
‘Well, let me say this,’ he said pompously. ‘I gave Keith Flowers a deposit on a certain transaction we were engaged in and – partly thanks to you; no, mostly thanks to you – he never managed to complete the deal. He’s in no position to do so now, so I’d like my deposit back. It’s not so much the money, it’s the principle. You with me?’
‘I think so. You can’t get to Flowers so you’re tracking whoever he might have seen or had contact with in his month out of Belmarsh.’
‘You are with me. Good. Huw, get one of those cloths and wrap some ice in it. Mr Angel seems to have a nosebleed.’
‘I told you I was scared of heights,’ I said.
‘So you did. They must disagree with you. But I think this little trip has been useful. I mean, we’ve seen the sights and I’ve learnt something very useful.’
‘What’s that?’ I said warily, taking the makeshift icepack from young Huw.
‘That you know fuck all. Oh, and that London detective agencies are a waste of money.’ He sucked on his bottom lip. ‘I suppose you were a long shot anyway, but I had to be sure. You see, the only people Keith Flowers had contact with on his brief holiday from custody, were you and your Amy. Now Amy takes out a restraining order on him, doesn’t she? That doesn’t sound too friendly, even if it’s understandable. So that left you, and your were unknown. You weren’t one of the old gang, so I had to be sure you weren’t his silent partner. I’m sure now that you’re not, because you’re basically a little innocent at large, aren’t you, Mr Angel? I’m a good judge of character, and you’d be out of your depth in a puddle in a pub car park.’
‘You’re not wrong there,’ I said very quietly, no more than a whisper, from behind the cloth stuffed with ice.
‘No, I’m not, am I?’ he answered, proving that his hearing aid was either state of the art and capable of picking up a mouse fart on Saturn or it was just for show.
‘Come here a minute.’
He pulled my hand so that my icepack came away from my face and he studied my nose.
‘How many fingers am I holding up?’
‘None,’ I said, bemused.
‘Correct,’ he said and he straight-fingered me in the stomach with his right hand.
It didn’t hurt that much; hardly enough to take my mind off the throbbing in my nose or the dull ache in my leg, but enough to keep my attention.
We were coming in to land now, the capsule below us already disgorging cheery passengers. In a few minutes we would be at head-height of those in the front of the queue.
Old Len took the cloth with the ice and, using a damp corner, cleaned half a dozen spots of blood – my blood, already dried in the sunshine – from the inside of the perspex where I had come into contact with it.
‘See to our Trolley Dolly, Huw, and compensate him for the tea towel. Oh, and bring that other bottle of bubbly. It’s paid for.’
He handed back my icepack and I folded it as small as a large handkerchief so as not to upset the tourists. I zipped up my jacket so the red spots on my shirt couldn’t be seen either.
Turner watched me closely.
‘Good thinking,’ he said. ‘Don’t draw attention to yourself. It might be best if you get off first.’
‘But when the doors open, right?’
He actually smiled at that, though maybe it was the way my voice sounded as if I had the mother of all head colds and it probably came out as: ‘Dut ben de doors dopuh, drite?’
‘Sure, sure. No hard feelings, eh?’
I glanced around. We were almost at the landing platform and our Flight Attendant was gathering up the glasses and plates of canapés, studiously avoiding catching my eye. Outside on the concrete, two more staff with mirrors on sticks were poised to do their security sweep. As if anyone dare plant a bomb in Len Turner’s presence.
‘Oh yes, I’m afraid so, Mr Turner,’ I said quickly and quietly so that only he could hear me. ‘Lots of hard feelings, but not against you. I’m saving them all for Keith Flowers. I blame him for getting me into this, and the cops are going to want to talk to me again.’
He mulled this over and even ran a hand over his bald pate, but there wasn’t time for subtlety now. We would either land and I’d walk away or he’d hit me again.
‘I could find out what they know,’ I said. ‘I mean, he shot a gun at me. I’m a victim in all this, so I have some rights, don’t I? I can ask questions. See if they know who Flowers came into contact with. Would you be interested?’
‘I might, Mr Angel, I might just be. But this would cost me, wouldn’t it?’
‘Naturally.’
Number One son Ron moved closer to us, wondering what the whispering was about. Behind me, I heard the capsule doors start to slide open.
Old Len shot a hand inside his raincoat and it came out holding a wallet. Instead of money though, he produced a white business card and held it up in front of my eyes so I could read it. There were two lines of print – ‘Haydn Rees, LlB’ and, underneath, ‘Solicitor’ – and then a phone number starting 02920.
‘You can contact me through my solicitors, with tact and discretion,’ Len said as I took the card and thrust it into my jeans pocket.
The doors were opening fully now and I was tempted to say that I thought With, Tact and Discretion was a funny name for a firm of solicitors, but I didn’t. It wasn’t the time or the place. With Len Turner, I somehow didn’t think there ever would be a time or a place.
So I just nodded to him, even though that stung my sinuses and misted my eyes, and stepped backwards off the Eye and kept my head down as I pushed through the crowds.
I found Armstrong unlocked and with the keys in, exactly where I had left him.
As I climbed in, I noticed that the white Rover that Huw and Barry had driven had a number plate that said the supplier of the car was www.expolicecars.com. I also noticed that it had been issued with a parking ticket and Armstrong had not.
So, there was some justice in the world after all.
I needed to think. I needed pen and paper to write things down before I forgot them. I needed a drink. I probably needed a doctor. I needed food. I needed to put the river and some distance between me and the Welsh Mafia. I needed to go somewhere where black cabs could go but white Rovers with parking tickets (ex-police cars or not) driven by grockles thumbing through the A-Z couldn’t.
I did a dog-leg around Waterloo and zipped over Westminster Bridge only marginally over the speed limit, though everyone knows that doesn’t really apply to taxis. There was nothing in my mirror – or at least nothing white and Welsh – but I did two circuits of Parliament Square just to be sure, then cut across the traffic into Parliament Street alongside the Treasury. Using a Number 88 bus as cover, I hung a right and shot down the side street on the corner of The Red Lion pub, which lead to Cannon Row police station and, in days gone by, the former New Scotland Yard.
Well, if you were going to park illegally and drink and drive, you might as well do it with style.
With my head down and a damp, pink tea-towel over my nose, I bypassed the entrance to the downstairs bar and went for the main door on the corner. Once inside, you can nip up the stairs to the toilets without having to enter the bar – one of the few pubs left in London where you can do that.
In front of the mirror in the Gents, I cleaned up as best I could. The bleeding had stopped but I had a blue-green-black bruise forming nicely across the bridge of my nose. I had lifted my fake Ray-Bans from the glove compartment of Armstrong and they hurt like hell but covered the worst of it. All I had to do now was negotiate the steep staircase down to the bar and hope they gave priority to a blind man.
The main bar was busy, at it usually is, but with tourists rather than with MPs who listen out for the Division Bell when Parliament is in session just across the Square. Parliament was on holiday; and so was most of Europe, judging by the accents of the thronging customers. As always when a pub is full, nobody noticed a scruffy, wet-haired (I’d had to remove the dried blood) oik wearing sunglasses limp his way to the bar and order a large vodka and the last brie and bacon baguette in the place. The Australian barman didn’t bat an eyelid when the vodka disappeared before the sandwich arrived, or say anything when I grabbed a thick wodge of paper napkins, took the baguette and handed back the plate. What the hell; for half the year, his customers were mostly MPs. He must have seen worse.
Back in Armstrong, which I had turned around to face Parliament Street in case I needed a direct line of escape, I used two of the napkins to hold the baguette and formed the rest into a neat pile on my thigh, where the numbness had subsided into a dull tingling sensation.
Behind the driver’s sun visor, which like real cabbies I use only as a filing cabinet, was a battered, well-out-of-date A-Z and a felt tip pen that still worked. As I ate, I composed my thoughts: one per napkin, in big letters, as I still didn’t trust my eyes to focus properly.
‘1: LEN TURNER’, I wrote on the first one, the felt-tip blurring and smudging the ink as it ran on the tissue paper. Then again, that might have been my eyesight.
‘2: IS NOT MR CREOSOTE’. He couldn’t be. That ageing toe-rag Spider had told me of a ‘Mr Creosote’ only an hour or so before the Chuckle Brothers had picked me up at Stuart Street, and anyway, ‘Mr Creosote’ was unavoidably detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Which meant there was another party interested in Keith Flowers, apart from Turner and his private detective.
‘3: BUY MORE CIGS’. That toe-rag Spider had palmed my emergency packet.
‘4: PRIVATE EYE’. So my mysterious stalker – and almost certainly Springsteen’s assailant – was a private eye, and probably a cheapskate one who had surveillance pictures developed like holiday snaps at – where was it? – ‘Fastflash’ in Shepherd’s Bush. As it happened, I knew a real firm of private detectives who worked out of Shepherd’s Bush. Maybe I could hire a stalker to stalk the stalker.
‘5: TURNER KNEW ABOUT AMY’. Or at least he sounded as if he did. He was Welsh, and Amy was supposed to have gone – maybe had – to Welsh Fashion Week. As a connection, was that tenuous or what? He’d also said something about me not being one of the ‘old gang’. Did that mean Amy was? I supposed I could ask her.
‘6: FIND AMY’. I’d better do that too.
‘7: FLOWERS’. How did Turner know about Keith Flowers’ arrest? And the restraining order Amy put on him? And that he was now in Rampton, and that he trollied big time in the mental department? Could a private eye have dug all that up for him?
‘8: SILENT PARTNER’. Turner was sure I wasn’t Flowers’ ‘silent partner’ – so who was? And in what?
‘9: GUN’. One of the younger Turners had asked what sort of gun Keith Flowers had used on me, and while that wasn’t in any way an unusual question for people who actually carried them, and may have been no more than professional interest, old grandad Len had skewered him with a filthy look, effectively telling him not to go there. Was it important? What did it all mean? Was there anything else I’d forgotten?
‘10: AMY’ …
I’d run out of napkins.
But at least I had a plan.
There were people I had to talk to. One was this Mr Creosote character, and that was out of my hands but in hand, or so I’d been told. Another was DI Hood of West Hampstead, who ought to know something, and if he didn’t then he ought to know a man who did.
Above all, there was Amy. Where the hell was she and why hadn’t she called?
Maybe she had. I should get to a phone.
I had a phone.
If my nose and forehead hadn’t hurt so much, I would have gladly banged my head against the nearest wall or maybe just slapped it and gone ‘Doh!’. Instead, I dug into the glove compartment for the mobile phone she’d bought me, hoping the battery still had juice in it. She was always complaining that I never turned it on, and I bet she’d left hundreds of messages on it just to wind me up.
The battery had held up and there were three Missed Calls and three Messages, all from Amy’s office number.All from Debbie Diamond. Each voice message was more obscene than the last, but the gist was that I really ought to try and find the time to ring her if it was at all convenient. Oh, and that I was a minging pillock.
Minging? Charming.
Her mood hadn’t improved between the messages and my voice.
‘Where have you been all day?’ she snarled, like today of all days she could intimidate me.
‘Sightseeing,’ I snapped back. ‘Any word from Amy?’
‘No, there sodding well isn’t – and just where does that leave Madrid?’
That floored me for a minute.
‘Somewhere in central Spain?’ I tried.
‘Oh, sweet Sister Fidelma, will you grow up? Amy’s supposed to be in Madrid next week, flying out there on Monday afternoon. Or had you forgotten that as well?’
‘No, I hadn’t forgotten.’ How could I have? I hadn’t known about it. ‘I’m sure she’ll be in touch. Somehow.’
I hoped that didn’t sound as if I meant with the aid of a psychic.
‘By the way, has anybody named Turner phoned, or tried to get into the office?’ I said casually so as not to alarm her, though I wouldn’t give the office security men more than half a minute up against Ron, Barry and Huw.
‘No, nobody named Turner, but there’s a woman been after you all day. Well, it seems like all day, and I’m pretty sure she’s mad.’
With the women I knew, that didn’t narrow it down, but I put my money on it being Fenella.
‘What does she want now?’ I asked, resigned.
‘She wants to invite you to a party. In fact, more than that, she sort of insisted you went. Said it was important. Vital, actually.’
That didn’t sound like Fenella.
‘And she must be mad,’ Debbie went on, ‘because she said the party started this afternoon, at 3.00 pm sharp. Which is a bloody funny time to hold a hen night if you ask me.’
A hen night?
‘This wasn’t Fenella, was it?’ I said confidently.
‘Who’s Fenella? I’m talking about Stella, not Fenella.’
I didn’t believe it.
‘I don’t believe it,’ I said.
‘Well it is a bit odd, but she was very insistent.’
‘We are talking about Estelle – Stella – Rudgard, right?’ I said, just to be sure.
‘That’s her. That’s the name. Spelled it out for me like I was a right div. Said she was getting married tomorrow and simply had to talk to you today and that you knew her number but if you couldn’t ring by three o’clock, you had to go along to her hen night at somewhere called Gerry’s in Soho. She said you knew it. I mean, what sort of a person holds their hen night in a Soho club at three o’clock on a Friday afternoon?’
‘Stella Rudgard would,’ I said.
‘I mean, can you really believe that?’
‘No, Debbie. Like I said, I just don’t believe it.’
But what I didn’t believe was the awful coincidence.
Somewhere on the floor of Armstrong where I’d dropped the paper napkins was one with ‘Private Eye’ written on it to remind me to use the one real private eye firm I knew of to check out who Len Turner had hired to follow me.
The detective firm in question: R & B Confidential Investigations.
As in (Stella) Rudgard & (Veronica) Blugden Confidential Investigations.
Of Shepherd’s Bush.
Long before I ever met Amy, I knew Stella Rudgard and had a healthy respect for her exhaustive dedication to sex as a cross between aerobics and training for the Olympics heptathlon. I suspected that her enthusiasm for sex was the one thing that kept her borderline sane, but it still made her dangerous to know. But then, I knew her only briefly. Very briefly; and it was long, long before I met Amy. Several years in fact.
Veronica Blugden was another kettle of fish entirely. From school reports that had said things like ‘This young lady has delusions of adequacy’ she had graduated to dead-end jobs and annual staff appraisals ranging from ‘She has set low personal standards and consistently failed to achieve them’ to ‘This employee should go far, and the sooner she starts the better’, which is what she did. Moving to London with only the vaguest of ideas about being a private detective – in fact, all her ideas were vague – she found herself working for a one-man enquiry agency run by an ex-Met copper called Albert Block. Her first case, almost by accident, involved finding Stella Rudgard, even though Stella didn’t actually want to be found and was working to her own agenda. Anyhow, Albert Block retired and Veronica inherited the agency, such as it was; and Stella – in a bizarre variation on the Stockholm Syndrome, where the kidnapped goes over to the kidnapper’s side – joined forces with her to form R & B Investigations. They had done well. I had read a couple of magazine articles about how they employed only female operatives, which had probably been good for business, with no mention of their policy of occasionally employing unlicensed male cab-drivers with more time on their hands than sense – and then quibbling about his expenses.
I reckoned R & B Investigations owed me a favour, and maybe Stella wanted to repay me, or – if she really was getting married the next day – maybe she wanted to buy my silence. Unless she’d had a character transplant since I’d last seen her, I could guess that hubby-to-be would be (a) rich, (b) posh and (c) connected. Definitely not the sort to be impressed by stories of Stella’s raucous past. That could give me an edge.
I could imagine what sort of friend Stella would invite to her hen night and what sort of hen would go to a party at Gerry’s Club at 3.00 in the afternoon. I would need an edge. But then, an invite was an invite.
I looked in the mirror to check I was presentable enough. With the fake Ray-Bans on, I reckoned I wouldn’t be the scariest thing in Soho that afternoon; and Gerry’s was dimly-lit, so the spots of blood on my shirt probably wouldn’t show. I could have gone home and cleaned up, but then again it was already 3.30 pm and I was missing the party.
Plus, there were two uniformed policeman strolling up the lane towards the rear of Armstrong.
I started the engine and pulled out, signalling right towards Whitehall.
Party on.
The traffic was snarled in Trafalgar Square and it took ages to find a place to park in one of the alleys behind Frith Street. That plus stopping off to buy a wedding present (a bottle of rice wine in a set with a transparently thin china flask and two matching bowls on special offer in a Chinatown supermarket) meant I was well late for the hen night, if it had started on time.
On Dean Street, I pressed the intercom on the wall at the door of Gerry’s and said ‘Rudgard party’. The response was incomprehensible due to the background mix of music and high pitched screaming, but the door lock clicked open anyway.
Gerry’s is a discrete subterranean drinking club, founded for actors and theatre people. Most of the clientele of the flashier Grouch Club, virtually next door, stumble by the front door without even noticing it, for which most of Gerry’s members are eternally grateful.
The stairs go down to a blank wall and then turn almost back on themselves and take you down into the club proper. The noise washed over me before I turned the corner and could see into the place. It’s not a big room, but usually you can find a spare seat or at least see a square inch of floor space. Not today. I was looking down at a sea of women, all standing, all talking, some singing along to a piano being played in the far corner, the piano and pianist taking up about 20 percent of the floor space. Some seemed to be trying to dance, or perhaps they were just swaying in the tide. Most of them were smoking, holding their cigarettes up at eye level because their couldn’t lower their arms without making a pass at someone, such was the crush.
Behind the bar, besieged like a scene out of Zulu, Michael the owner and two T-shirted blondes who could have been twins (but the light was bad and I was wearing shades) were handing out bottles of wine and champagne like their lives depended on it. They probably did. Some of the bottles were passed, as if floating, over the heads of the revellers, others just sank into the mass and disappeared without trace.
I elbowed my way to the end of the bar, being twice bounced against the cigarette machine by soft but unyielding female flesh.
‘Angel, my dear chap,’ said Michael, proffering his hand over the bar when I got within range. ‘Sorry about the crush, but all the regular members were told there was a private do on.’
Even with a hundred thirsty women waiting to be served, Michael couldn’t resist the dig, but he did it with a twinkle in his eye and a grin thinly hidden by his blond beard.
‘Sorry I haven’t been in much lately,’ I said loudly, above the chatter, ‘but I’m invited to this one.’
‘You’re not the stripper they ordered, are you?’ Michael asked with a look of genuine horror.
One of the blonde barmaids said something to him and he listened, nodded then turned back to me relieved.
‘It seems he’s been and gone,’ he said. ‘Lasted about 30 seconds, I’m told. Usual?’
I nodded and he stretched out to hand me a bottle of Backs with the top off.
‘Sorry it’s warm. Fridge is full of champagne.’
I shrugged philosophically. There I was in a small room with dozens of women clad in their scantiest summer clothes, many of them already the worse for drink, with some already eyeing me up, and the piano player was making a decent fist of Bonnie Tyler’s ‘It’s A Heartache’, though few of the partygoers looked old enough to remember Bonnie Tyler, and yet the beer was warm. It was as if the gods had decided there had to be one thing to stop it being perfect.
‘I’m looking for Stella Rudgard,’ I said, hoping Michael could lip read.
‘Table by the piano,’ said Michael, pointing with an empty champagne bottle.
I turned but couldn’t see where he meant, even though the piano wasn’t more than 15 feet away. There was nothing for it but to push through the wall of female flesh, beer in one hand, present in the other, saying ‘Excuse me, coming through’ as I went. I was fondled once and groped twice, which, given the distance travelled and the factor by which I was outnumbered, was probably a fair average.
And then I was at the piano, my knees no more than an inch from the stool the pianist was sitting on, and I still couldn’t see Stella. So instead I tried to look as if I was enjoying the music, just swaying in time with everyone else.
The pianist was good and well worth a second glance, even from behind.
Especially from behind.
She was another blonde – long, straight hair flipped back over her ears – and she wore a tight, short-cut white top and tight, low-cut jeans. Between the bottom of the top and the top the jeans, she had a breaching dolphin tattooed right in the small of her back. As she bent forward over the keys of the ancient stand-up piano, which was almost in tune, the dolphin seemed to fly even further out of the water. As she straightened her back, it dived into the beltless rim of her Wranglers.
‘Angel! You made it!’
I heard that above the music and the background noise and turned to see Stella sitting at a table no more than a yard away. She had seen me only because two women had decided to change positions, probably to avoid cramp. I pushed between them to get at Stella, and one of them said ‘Oooh!’ and flashed me a killer smile, but then Stella’s arm was round the back of my neck and she drew me in until my knees hit the table to kiss me full on the lips. I had a beer in one hand and her present in the other. I was powerless to resist.
‘That was nice,’ she shouted in my ear. ‘I’d forgotten just how nice. What have you done to your face?’
‘I didn’t do anything to it,’ I shouted back as the pianist pounded out the opening bars of ‘Satin Doll’. ‘Are you really getting married?’
She nodded, her face about an inch from mine. ‘Tomorrow morning at 11.00, down in Sussex. Very posh do, not allowed to misbehave. No smoking, no drugs, no boozing, so, naturally, you couldn’t be invited, but I wanted one last night on the town. What dyer think?’
She shooed away the two women sitting at the table with her, then she pushed the table away so that it almost collided with the pianist’s stool. The pianist didn’t seen to notice; she had her head down (dolphin rising), concentrating on the high register chorus and making a good job of it.
I squeezed into the space Stella had made and examined her as she stood, hands on hips, her left leg bent slightly at the knee.
Stella was taller than me barefooted, and in heels she towered above me. She was dressed almost entirely in black: a black chiffon tie shirt over a black lace-panel corset top, and a narrow black hook-and-eye skirt that ended at the knee, with a slit up the left side that showed a lot of leg and the lacy top of her hold-up stockings plus a glimpse of white flesh. The only splash of colour was in her shoes, three-inch-heeled pink sandals trimmed with black lace from Kurt Geiger, which cost £159. Amy had a pair of them.
‘You on the pull, then?’ I said, leaning in to her hair, which she’d had cut almost boyishly short since I’d last seen her.
‘No, just the tease.’ I should have known. Stella had a PhD in Tease. ‘That’s why I’m not wearing my engagement ring.’
‘I’d noticed that,’ I said. Well, I would have eventually.
‘Not that the insurance company would let me,’ she said casually. Then she put her hands gently on my face and pulled me in for another kiss, and when she broke for air, she said: ‘We could hock it and disappear somewhere.’
‘But I haven’t finished my beer,’ I said, ‘and you haven’t opened your wedding present.’
I handed over the box I was carrying.
‘Prezzy!’ shouted Stella, and in one deft movement she ripped off the gift wrapping the girl in the Chinese supermarket had slaved over.
‘Oh, sweet!’ she said, then placed the box on the table and pulled the small bottle of rice wine out of its holding slot. She tapped the bottle on the shoulder of a small redhead in a green satin dress. ‘Ask Michael for some glasses and some ice for this, would you, Randy?’
Randy’s eyes cut her through a pair of rimless octagonal glasses. ‘Certainly, miss. Will there be anything else, miss? What did your last slave die of, miss?’
‘Oh, shut up, you old tart,’ said Stella with a grin.
‘Slag.’
‘Slipper.’
‘Hag.’
‘Bitch.’
‘Minger.’
‘Er ... it’s supposed to be served warm,’ I said.
‘Then tell Michael to stick it in the microwave,’ said Stella.
‘I don’t think he’s got a microwave,’ said Randy, blowing cigarette smoke as us.
‘Then stick it down the front of his trousers for five minutes,’ said Stella, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Randy cheered up at that, took the bottle and headed for the bar.
‘You just can’t get the staff these days,’ Stella said, moving closer in to me than was strictly necessary.
I took a pull on my beer and reached for the pack of cigarettes Stella had left on the table. It meant I had to lean in to her, but she didn’t seem to mind.
‘Randy is staff?’ I said, fumbling with the cigarette packet and trying to ignore Stella’s left knee as it nudged its way between my legs. I was in danger of being assaulted in front of witnesses twice in one day. That would be a record even for me.
‘We have lots of staff now; we’ve expanded,’ Stella said, so close to me now she didn’t have to shout.
The pressure of her knee increased, and I drew heavily on the cigarette I had finally managed to light. Stella caught my hand and directed the cigarette to her own lips, tilting her head to do so, but her eyes never leaving my face. If she got any closer she’d be behind me. I had to break the spell.
‘Is Veronica here?’
‘No, she’s on a job on a cruise ship in the Baltic, trying to spot which of the crew are diddling the passengers.’
Her knee moved back a fraction and suddenly I felt a lot cooler. Talking about Veronica obviously had the same damper effect on both of us.
‘So she’ll be missing the wedding?’
‘Yes,’ Stella smiled. ‘But then, she’s not really a wedding person.’
‘I didn’t think you were.’
‘I was sure you weren’t, but, hey, what do I know?’
‘You must know something. You called me.’
She edged backwards, leaving enough room for cigarette smoke to drift between us, and then came to a decision.
‘Yes, you’re right, I did. We need to talk before I get totally trollied. Come on.’
She grabbed my hand and began to push through the crowd, smiling, talking, air-kissing as she went, ignoring the suggestions and nudge-nudge, wink-wink accusations thrown at her from virtually everyone in the room. At one point she responded with ‘It’s my party; I can do who I like,’ and she also managed to liberate an almost full bottle of champagne from someone. I had just time to grab her cigarettes and lighter from the table before she dragged me in her wake.
The pianist had started a very slow version of ‘I Wish I Knew How It Felt To Be Free’. She was good, even if, with my back to her now, I couldn’t see what the dolphin tattoo was doing. Some of the guests were swaying (as much as was possible) and humming along, and I caught snippets of conversation as they tried to remember which TV show it had been used as a theme for, which film it had featured in and who had done the previous year’s grim cover version. None of them would have ever heard of Nina Simone, but the pianist probably had. She was good.
‘Back in a few minutes. You enjoy yourselves. Get more drink. Call of nature, that’s all,’ Stella was saying to all and sundry.
As we came level with the end of the bar, I saw Michael tangling with Randy, who had managed to get behind the bar and was tugging at the belt of his trousers, waving the small bottle of rice wine in front of his face. He caught my eye at the same time he realised what Randy was suggesting, shrugged his shoulders and, with a smile, let her work the bottle down the front of his trousers, making lots of over the top faces and giving me the thumbs up sign with his right hand.
I realised that Stella was dragging me towards the toilets, and when Michael saw that, his grin broadened, and he put both thumbs up in the air.