Someone had done a good job on Pat Whitestone’s car.
I stood outside her home, a terraced house on a quiet street off the Holloway Road, and slowly walked around it.
I looked at the registration plate and it was the same number that I had seen scribbled inside a match folder that said Auto Waste Solutions.
The last time I had seen this car, parked under a street light directly below our loft, it had been a mess – the driver-side headlight caved in, a dent in the front bumper and paint torn from the side where something had hit the car at speed. That damage had all been made good. Almost too good. I lightly touched my fingertips to the car, as if the paint might still be wet. The headlight and the paint looked box fresh, with none of the wear and tear that was on the rest of the car.
You would never know she had been in an accident, I thought. Not unless you knew what you were looking for.
The door of the house opened and Whitestone’s son Justin came out with his assistance dog, Dasher, a three-year-old Labrador-Retriever mix.
‘Justin,’ I said.
‘Max,’ he said. It wasn’t a question.
He came down the path, a tall good-looking kid, the beautiful Dasher tracking by his side. The gangling awkwardness of Justin’s teenage years had gone and he was now a fine-looking young man. A couple of years ago he had been blinded in one of those meaningless eruptions of violence that can happen to young men in any city. A quiet kid who had been in the wrong bar at the wrong time with the wrong people. But he was not letting that monstrous bad luck define his life.
There was the same quiet courage in him that was in his mother.
He smiled as he reached me. He had ditched the dark glasses that he had worn when he first lost his sight and I saw the scarring high on one cheekbone where the bottle had hit him.
I held out my hand and Dasher gave it a desultory sniff.
Yes, I know you, pal, but don’t get too excited.
Dasher was working and the two-year training that every assistance dog receives is largely about learning to never be distracted. Dasher’s days of jumping with joy at the sight of some old friend were behind him. Dasher had a job to do. The dog was deeply loved, but he was not a pet.
‘Still thinking of joining the family business?’ I asked Justin.
The Metropolitan Police has thirteen thousand civilians working alongside thirty-one thousand officers. There had been a time, in the black months after his accident, when Justin had talked about possibly one day being one of them. That was the plan at the worst of times when he could not get out of his room or out of this house and he was struggling to find his way forward.
But now he laughed and shook his head, as if it had been a childish fancy, like being an astronaut, something that he had grown out of. He leaned down to soothe Dasher and the dog settled, waiting for his instructions.
‘My mum tried to talk me out of joining the police and she’s done a pretty good job. I’m studying PPE.’
‘Personal protection equipment?’
‘Politics, Philosophy and Economics, Max.’
‘What can you do with that?
‘You can do anything.’
‘That sounds good.’
We shook hands and I watched him until he had gone around the corner with Dasher and then I went up the short garden path and rang the bell.
Whitestone did not look surprised to see me. She was stone-cold sober and I was glad about that.
She was going to need to be stone-cold sober from now on.
‘They’re keeping Frank Lyle at the hospital to drain his lungs,’ she said. ‘At first they thought he had had a stroke. But it’s the lung cancer, getting worse.’ She looked at me for a long moment. ‘And what’s the bad news, Max?’
‘I went to Frank Lyle’s house,’ I said.
‘OK,’ she said.
‘I went there to ask Mrs Lyle to get him to take a step back from the investigation,’ I said. ‘Because he’s not helping anyone.’
She nodded, steeling herself.
‘And Harry Flowers was there,’ I said.
She shook her head, trying to make sense of it.
But it made no sense at all.
‘Flowers was having an affair with Jessica,’ I told her. ‘The flatmate of his mistress. Flowers is the father of baby Michael. I don’t even know if affair is the right word. They were seeing each other. They were in a relationship. They were sleeping together. That’s why Frank Lyle tried to take Flowers’ head off with a hammer. Because he just found out. Jessica’s mother has known for a while, but it was breaking news to the old man. And he wasn’t thrilled to bits.’
She thought about it. ‘So Flowers was ready to move on from Snezia and he took a shine to Jessica?’
I shrugged. ‘Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe he took one look at Jessica and he was ready to move on from Snezia. You’ve seen photographs of Jessica. You’ve heard the way everyone talks about her. Everyone who meets her is crazy about her.’
I saw the spark of triumph in her eyes.
From the very start she had liked Flowers for the abduction.
‘Flowers wanted Snezia gone but she was reluctant to move out of the love nest,’ Whitestone said. ‘Flowers wanted her out – out of the apartment, out of his bed, out of his life. And whatever goons he hired snatched the wrong woman.’
I shook my head. ‘I can’t buy it,’ I said. ‘If he wanted to press the eject button on Snezia, he didn’t need the heavy mob. He didn’t need to kidnap or kill her. He just needed his chequebook.’ I hesitated. ‘And we have to tread lightly with Flowers, Pat.’
She laughed out loud.
‘Tread lightly? Why’s that?’
I took a breath.
‘Where did you get your car repaired?’ I said.
She shook her head, running through that night in her mind.
The panic. The guilt. And the feeling that she had managed to put it behind her. But it wasn’t behind her.
She looked at my face.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Harry Flowers can’t possibly know what happened that night.’
She was seeing it all in her head. The delivery driver on a scooter coming out of nowhere. The collision over before she knew what was happening. And the terrible moment come and gone when she had to decide if she was stopping.
And I had my own memory of that night. Whitestone standing at my door, the desperation all over her face. And later, driving up and down that empty road alone until I saw the stolen phones scattered across that lonely road north of King’s Cross.
She found her bag, dug deep inside and took out a yellow match folder.
Auto Waste Solutions.
‘He knows your car was in an accident,’ I said. ‘He knows you hit something you should not have hit.’ I took the match folder from her. ‘I don’t know how much else he knows, but I watched him burn one of these things with your registration number on. I’m betting he will have photos of the car and maybe even CCTV of you bringing your car in. He knows, Pat. Or at the very least he suspects you hit something and never reported it. Think about it. His yard must have contacts with every garage in the city, maybe even the entire south-east of England. I’ve seen the place. It’s huge. It’s a giant graveyard for cars that have had their time. Where did you get it repaired?’
‘Where I always go. A pair of Greek-Cypriot brothers off the Holloway Road.’
‘Do they know you?’
‘They know me because I go in there for petrol, service and MOT. A packet of Pringles and a newspaper on Sundays.’
‘How many people work there?’
‘I don’t know. It’s just a family-owned business on the Holloway Road. There’s the brothers. The mechanics. A girl on the reception desk. And one of those car washes that employs twenty blokes from Kabul or Baghdad who just jumped off the back of a lorry.’
‘Maybe it was one of the brothers who told Flowers. Or one of the blokes who just jumped off the back of the lorry. My bet? It was whoever fixed your car, some grease monkey who knows you’re a cop. Or maybe it doesn’t work like that. Maybe that garage – and every garage – clocks the registration number of anyone who drives in looking sweaty and desperate and asking for some urgent cash-in-hand repairs, fast as you can do it. And then they hand the information on to Auto Waste Solutions to check out the owner later, to see if it is someone that they can bleed dry. I bet it happens all the time. A good revenue stream for anyone in the wrecked car business. And they got lucky with you.’
Behind her spectacles, I saw her pale blue eyes blaze with anger.
‘This is what the bastard does. This is how he buys your soul. This is what his business was built on. Harry Flowers finds your price. If it’s money, if it’s pouring petrol over your children – whatever it takes to make you bend the knee. He finds your soft spot and then he makes you his creature. When I was in uniform I saw decent policemen whose lives were trashed because they took his shilling. Good people who did the hardest of time, Max, the kind of hard time that ruins you forever, decent coppers who became the shoe-scrapings of prison life, just because Harry Flowers bought them. What does he want?’
‘He wants us to find Jessica Lyle. Or her body. And he says that’s enough.’
She laughed bitterly.
‘Harry Flowers can never have enough of you,’ she said. ‘He thinks I’m his creature now. He thinks he has me for life.’ She buried her face in her hands. ‘What am I going to do, Max? I can’t live with this hanging over me. I can’t be one of his bought coppers.’
I could suddenly feel it all unravelling.
‘Listen to me, Pat. You’re going to do your job. We’re going to find Jessica Lyle. And you are never going to be on Harry Flowers’ payroll, OK? That’s not you and it will never be you. We’re going to find Jessica and, if she is still alive, we’re going to bring her home to her family. And if she’s dead, then we will bring them her body.’
She nodded, steeling herself, and something was settled in her mind.
I watched her turn the yellow match folder in her hands.
‘OK, Max, that’s what we’ll do,’ she said.
She pulled off a match and struck it, placing the flame against the folder. It caught, flared and began to burn. We watched the fire advance to her fingers.
‘And then I will finish it with Harry,’ she said. ‘Finish it forever.’