It was just getting dark on New Year’s Eve but Chelsea was already gearing up for revelry.
There was lots of fancy dress on the Fulham Road, people dressed up as cowboys and Red Indians, criminals and cops, and from Sloane Square to the Chelsea Harbour the tasteful white lights shone and twinkled with renewed vigour. Already the fireworks were crackling and popping high above the Thames.
‘I thought we were done,’ said Wendy Lane when she opened her front door.
She wasn’t wearing her yoga gear now. She was wearing a little black dress showing legs that were longer than I remembered. She looked as though she was all dressed up with somewhere special to go. But it was more than that. A pair of matching Samsonite suitcases were waiting in the hall, the lightweight aluminium gleaming like freshly minted money.
‘We’re nearly done,’ I said.
We settled ourselves in the room with the tatami mats. The music tinkled and sighed and soothed. The gold Buddhas shone in their dark alcoves, raising one hand to bless us. I could see the gardener hacking away at the cherry tree in the garden.
‘Your gardener does a lot of work for you,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have thought there was much for him to do at this time of year.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ she said, following my gaze out of the big floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on the back garden. ‘It’s the perfect time of year to chop back all the dead stuff. I would offer you some green tea, detective, but I’m afraid I’m a bit pushed for time. I have a plane to catch.’
‘We raided Faces last night,’ I said. ‘Did a mouth swab on all the boys. Pete the Mod and the rest. Compared their DNA with what forensics found under the fingernails of Cara Maldini.’
‘Yes?’
I shook my head. ‘It wasn’t them.’
We sat in silence.
‘Everything pointed at Goran Gvozden. But it was just too neat. It was just too perfect. And he was a good man, that big hard Serbian. He didn’t have a criminal bone in his body.’
Wendy Lane looked just a little flustered. I may have been mistaken, but it looked like she took one of those calming yogic breaths.
‘But my husband had many enemies,’ she said. ‘He was The Man who Made Ibiza Dance! Lenny was the most successful drug dealer this country has ever seen.’
‘Yes, everyone is always telling me what a criminal mastermind old Lenny was – but as Gvozden told me, your husband did five years in Belmarsh, his money had run out and he ended up getting his head cut off. If that’s what a successful drug dealer looks like, then I would hate to see an unsuccessful one.’
‘But it was obviously some kind of gangland hit…’
‘No, Mrs Lane,’ I said. ‘This was what we call a domestic.’
Ratana came and stood in the doorway.
‘You shouldn’t have killed the girl, Wendy.’ I said.
She looked away from me, her mouth tightening, and she stared at the sturdy little housekeeper. Something passed between the two women, but I could not read it.
‘Having Cara Maldini killed was just pure spite,’ I said.
‘Fucking a married man is pure spite!’ said Wendy Lane.
‘Lenny was going to leave you,’ I said. ‘I would have thought you would be glad to get shot of him. Your husband’s dancing days were over. The boom years were a long way behind him. But you wanted to be the one to leave, didn’t you? He wasn’t allowed to be the one who walked away.’
Wendy Lane’s face twisted with some old fury.
‘He was leaving me for some little whore who danced on the bar at Faces. Some little scrubber who would give you a Shepherd’s Bush shoeshine for fifty quid and a Bacardi Breezer.’
‘A Shepherd’s Bush shoeshine? Is that what they call it? Shall I tell you what I think, Wendy?’
‘Why don’t you?’ she said, her face cold, her mouth hard but conceding nothing. She still believed she was going to catch her flight.
‘Ratana’s husband – I don’t think he was a missing person. I think he beat her one time too many and she made some enquiries. I think Ratana’s husband ended up in a mincing machine very similar to the one they were going to feed Lenny into at Smithfield.’ I glanced at the housekeeper standing in the doorway. ‘You certainly didn’t hire her for her cooking, did you, Wendy? She was a Guest Relations Officer at a place in Bangkok – and that’s a bar girl. Being a GRO in Bangkok is not light years away from being an exotic dancer on the Goldhawk Road, is it? I knew there had to be some special bond between you two when I nearly cracked a tooth on that turkey satay. How did you find each other, Wendy? How did you discover the nice little old Thai lady who knew how to make an unwanted husband disappear? I wonder how many missing husbands there are who ended up being served with the mashed potatoes…’
‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,’ said Wendy Lane, her tongue a small pink snake on her lips. ‘I want my lawyer now.’
Ratana had picked up a medium-sized Buddha and was staring at it thoughtfully, as if she was unconnected to this conversation.
‘Who were they, Ratana?’ I said. ‘Who killed Lenny Lane and planned to turn him into sausages? Certainly not Goran Gvozden. And not even those bottom feeders in Faces. They don’t have the imagination for something like this. And they were too loyal to Lenny. I’m betting you kept it within the Thai community, didn’t you?’
The gardener stood up and turned to look back at the house. I could see the claw marks on his face where Cara Maldini had fought for her life. And I could see the same man who stared into my eyes in the early hours of Boxing Day.
He started towards the house.
And he was limping.
And from the look of murder in his eyes, he still hadn’t quite forgiven me for sticking a broken bottle into his leg.
‘Bah kwai!’ Ratana cried, and she struck me on the back of the head with the medium-sized Buddha.
I went down like I had been hit with a sledgehammer. Both women legged it. Ratana out the back way and Wendy Lane out the front.
The gardener was still limping towards the house. And I saw what was in his hands.
An old-fashioned scythe, the straight handle twice as long as the curved blade, looking like the grim reaper’s gardening tool. The wicked blade gleamed in the weak winter sunlight.
Then I heard Whitestone come through the front door and bang Wendy Lane hard against the wall and I saw a small red-haired young woman and a smooth-looking black man with a shaved head come over the back wall of the garden. Edie Wren and Curtis Gane wrestled Ratana to the ground as she screamed in their faces. A formal arrest will always be accompanied by physically taking control, they used to tell us in training. That’s what my colleagues had done. But I never had the chance.
Because the gardener came straight through the big windows, the glass exploding more than breaking, and he swung the scythe at my head.
I slipped sideways and he buried the blade deep into the coffee table, and as he gripped the handle with both hands to release it I hit him with three stiff left jabs to the side of the jaw, stinging him with the first one, snapping his head back with the second and – saving up my hardest shot for last – turning his lights off with the third.
Fred taught me that.