by Tony Parsons
‘She moved in a flatmate,’ Whitestone said. ‘Jessica Lyle. For all the nights when you were with the wife out in Essex. Another dancer.’
‘Two different kinds of dancer,’ he said. ‘But yes – two dancers.’
‘You’ve owned that apartment up on Eden Hill Park for twenty years, Harry,’ I said. ‘Snezia has been there for less than three. So is that your official love nest?’
‘It’s the best investment in the world,’ he said.
‘Strippers?’
‘London property.’
‘Do you have the next girl lined up and ready to install?’
He shook his head. ‘No, because that flat is going to be my wedding present to my daughter Meadow and her young man. Her new husband. Don’t you know how hard it is for a young couple to find a decent place in London these days? So, yes, I wanted Snezia out – but it’s crazy to suggest that I wanted her hurt.’ He folded his thick arms across his chest. ‘And I had nothing to do with the kidnapping. You want my advice? Look at everybody who cooks.’ He wasn’t talking about Jamie Oliver. ‘Look at every little home brewer in the city,’ he said. ‘Look at everyone who makes illegal substances in their backroom. They all want my scalp. Even though that all ended for me years ago. Young gunslingers like to take out an old gunslinger. It looks good on the CV.’
‘How did Snezia feel about moving out?’ I said.
‘She knew she would be well reimbursed. Truth is, a lot of my special friends are glad when it ends. They want to meet a man they can have a life with. It’s only natural.’
‘Snezia was really that understanding?’
He nodded.
‘Snezia understands,’ he said. ‘Everything ends.’
We held him for twenty-four hours.
With a charge as serious as Kidnap and False Imprisonment, Whitestone could have applied to hold him for thirty-six or ninety-six hours without charging him. But by the following morning the certainty and strength seemed to have gone out of her. She seemed tired and preoccupied.
‘Let him go,’ she told me in MIR-1.
I went down to the basement and signed Harry Flowers out with the Custody Sergeant.
‘She really thinks I had something to do with it,’ he said. ‘Everything to do with it. Do you all think that?’
‘No,’ I said.
I walked him to the lift.
‘My young colleague, TDC Adams, reckons it was random. That Jessica was taken and is being held against her will somewhere unknown.’
A cloud passed across his face.
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Because that’s what some men like,’ I said. ‘And they are willing to pay for it.’
The lift came and we stepped inside. I hit the button for the ground floor.
‘What about you?’ he said. ‘What’s your theory, Detective Wolfe?’
‘I think someone hates you, Harry. I think they hate you more than you know. I don’t know if it is someone from the old days of dealing MDMA in Ibiza clubs, or if the beef is more recent. But I think it is someone who lies awake at night thinking about how much harm they would love to do to you. And they got the wrong woman because – like my boss told you – villains are stupid.’
It was still early and the Bentley was parked right outside 27 Savile Row, the engine idling, Mo at the wheel.
He hurried out to open the door for his boss.
I had been expecting the goon squad to show their faces, but perhaps they had disgraced themselves during the arrest. Or maybe Big Del was still getting his broken arm put in plaster.
But Junior was there.
Harry Flowers smiled with genuine pleasure and his son grinned bashfully. Harry began walking towards his Bentley.
I felt I saw him breathe out.
The good life was calling him home.
An hour on the soft leather seats of the Bentley bonding with his son, as the city slowly slipped away behind tinted windows, then safe and sound in his big suburban mansion, somehow making it all up with his poised, privately educated wife.
A free man.
And then Frank Lyle stepped around the corner with a hammer in his hand.
13
The son froze.
At the sight of the big man coming towards his father with a hammer in his hand, Junior Flowers was paralysed, overwhelmed by an anaesthetising combination of shock, fear and inexperience.
All those hours spent pumping the free weights in Essex gyms. All the nights spent swaggering around the pubs, bars and clubs between Bond Street and Basildon. All those moments spent punching and kicking things that would never hit him back.
And he could not react.
The fight or flight reaction is beyond rational thought, I realised, as I felt myself move. You are all at once fighting for your life or you are suddenly running for your life without having the time to weigh the pros and cons of your action.
You fight or you run.
The only other option is what was happening to Junior Flowers. He stood there with his mouth half-open as Frank Lyle brushed past him and struck Harry Flowers in the face with the hammer.
Harry went down and curled up in the foetus position, covering his face and his balls, like a man who knew how to take a good hiding.
I jumped off the steps outside West End Central and was on my way to the man on the ground and the man with the hammer. Then Frank Lyle raised the hammer again and my heart lurched because I saw that the plan was not to punish Harry Flowers but to kill him, to beat his brains out right there on the Mayfair pavement, to mete out punishment for bringing his daughter into another world.
I was shouting a warning, a threat, a war cry to buck myself up as Junior still stood there, shivering with shock at the eruption of sudden, unfettered violence.
Then suddenly Mo the driver was there before me, screaming something I didn’t quite catch and bravely attempting to wrap his thin arms around the old cop. Frank Lyle shook him off easily, sending him flying with little more than an angry shrug.
Junior’s chin trembled and he began to cry as the hammer came down again on his father’s flesh and bone.
Harry Flowers grunted with the pain and Frank Lyle was screaming, screaming, screaming as he raised the hammer for the third time, for the killer blow.
But by then I was on him.
He was the bigger and stronger man and I would not have fancied my chances against him twenty years ago. But he was older now and rusty and made no attempt to defend himself when he saw me coming and so I hit him at the run, the full weight of my body slamming into him, my shoulder connecting with his chest, banging him backwards, the open door of the Bentley the only thing that kept him on his feet.
He had dropped the hammer.
Mo gently picked it up and stared at it, as if it was someone’s lost glove and should be returned to its rightful owner as soon as possible.
And the fight was all out of Frank Lyle as I bent his right arm, his hammer arm, halfway up his spine and sank my right knee into the back of his legs, folding them up like a closed umbrella and slowly sinking him to the ground.
Uniformed cops were coming out of West End Central. One of them helped Harry Flowers to his feet and I saw that his mouth was bloody mush and he had a lump on his forehead the size of a small Easter egg. As I watched, it grew to a medium-sized Easter egg.
Flowers spat out half a broken tooth and pushed off the cop who had helped him up, staring at Frank Lyle where I had him pinned to the pavement.
‘I’m sorry,’ Flowers said, his voice hoarse. ‘But I never hurt your daughter.’
‘I’ll … kill …’ Lyle said, but the words stuck in his throat.
Then Lyle turned his face to look at me and I saw his eyes were shining with tears, the bitter tears that flow when it all comes at once and overwhelms you – anger and loss and a grief that rips out your heart.
‘What would you do?’ he said, quietly enough for only me to hear. ‘If it was your girl – and someone did this
– what would you do?’
‘Stop talking,’ I said.
And we stared at each other and we said nothing more.
Because we both knew what I would do.
Harry Flowers declined to press charges.
So Frank Lyle did not go to the holding cells. Instead, I drove him home.
He sat in silence in the passenger seat of the BMW X5, gingerly touching his face where it had been pressed into the pavement and covering his mouth politely while he coughed. That old smoker’s cough that sounds as though it comes from the bottom of the lungs.
‘Who does it help?’ I said, because I had to say something. ‘If you kill Harry Flowers, or put him in a hospital bed, does that bring back your daughter? Does it help your wife or your grandson? And do you know what they do to ex-cops in jail, Frank?’
‘Probably better than you,’ he said, and began coughing, louder now, less controlled.
I shook my head and let the old man cough in peace.
As his home came in sight, a small white house in an Islington terrace, he took out a crumpled tissue and hawked up a chunk of thick blood.
I was surprised at the blood.
Because I knew I had not hit him that hard.
His wife heard the key in the door.
Jennifer Lyle came down the corridor with baby Michael in her arms.
I remembered Scout at that age. I remembered exactly that short neat haircut, carefully brushed to one side for both boys and girls, because they are so new that their hair has not had time to grow. And very soon, I thought, they are no longer babies but not quite toddlers. Six months is a great age. Frank Lyle gently touched his grandson but did not look at his wife.
‘What happened, Frank? Your face.’
She was staring at the raw mark high up on one cheekbone where I had pushed his face into the street.
‘Nothing, Jen,’ he said, walking past her. ‘Man-bags at ten paces. Don’t make a fuss. God, woman!’
He went into the small back garden. There were high fences on both sides, the garden of a man who liked his privacy, or disliked his neighbours. There was an old, weather-worn Wendy house out there. I had always wanted one of those for Scout. I guess it’s too late now. Yes, eight is too late for a Wendy house. Frank Lyle sat down on the worn wooden porch of the Wendy house and pulled out a packet of cigarettes.
There was a boy in the garden, a big boy with wild, unkempt black hair that looked like it had never met a comb, and he was booting a plastic football up against the side of the Wendy house. He kept kicking it as Frank Lyle sucked hungrily on his cigarette. Man and boy did not speak to each other, but the boy was watching him as he kicked that football, he never took his eyes off Frank, and the ball eventually careered off into a bed of roses.
Expertly cradling her grandson in one arm, Jennifer Lyle put her head around the door to the garden.
‘Tommy?’ she called. ‘Watch the roses with that ball, darling.’
The boy turned to look at her and I saw he was not a boy at all, but a man in his twenties, maybe older. He carried himself with the loose-limbed gait of a kid but his face was stubbled with the beginnings of a dark beard, as untouched by grooming as his hair.
‘That’s Tommy,’ Jennifer Lyle told me, closing the door again. ‘Our son.’
Tommy stared back at the house with blank, uncomprehending eyes. Then he returned to his game, watching his father smoke, the old man making no acknowledgement that he was there.
‘Tommy is special,’ Jennifer Lyle explained. ‘They’ve been doing tests on him all his life, but they still can’t tell us what’s wrong. He has difficulty learning. Retaining information.’ She looked from her son to me. ‘Some wayward chromosome in some unlucky cell.’
‘That sounds like Down’s syndrome,’ I said. ‘But Tommy doesn’t have Down’s syndrome.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘And do you know what those doctors would have told us in the past? They would have said – your son is simple. And we would have all proceeded from that point. But they can’t say that any more. So we subject Tommy to all these tests that will never change anything and can’t even explain anything.’
I watched the father and son standing metres apart in the back garden.
The father smoking his cigarette, the son kicking his plastic football against the Wendy house. They could have been in different countries.
‘Is my husband in trouble?’ Jennifer Lyle asked me.
‘He went for Harry Flowers outside West End Central. With a hammer. Flowers is not pressing charges. I don’t know how your husband knew he was up there.’
She stared at her husband.
‘Frank still has a lot of friends in the job. Someone must have called him and told him you were holding Harry Flowers. They would have thought they were doing him a favour.’
‘Your husband’s friends are not doing him any favours by letting him loose on Flowers. If he does it again, we can’t give him a pass.’
She watched her husband sitting on the porch of the Wendy house where their daughter had once played.
‘Frank blames Flowers,’ she said. ‘Frank blames him for everything.’
‘Mrs Lyle, I don’t think Harry Flowers had anything to do with the abduction of Jessica.’
‘Not for taking Jess. But for letting his world touch her world. For ruining her.’
We watched him smoking. Coughing. Smoking. Covering his mouth with the back of his hand and then examining the contents.
‘And how sick is your husband?’ I asked.
She gave me a look.
‘I’ve seen lung cancer before,’ I said.
‘The doctors give him nine months,’ she said, no emotion, a bitter truth that she had learned to accommodate. ‘The tumour in his lungs has spread. When people ask him what kind of cancer he has, he says, The end-of-the-road kind. Stopping smoking now would not make a lot of difference. He just wants a chance to say goodbye to his daughter. He wants Jess home before he goes.’
‘You seem a lot calmer than your husband.’
Michael was sleeping in her arms. She held him close.
‘Because I know you will find my daughter,’ she said.
I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t want to spin her a line. She knew as well as me that we had to find Jessica soon or we were never going to find her at all.
‘We can’t give up hope,’ I said, and it was the best I could do. ‘There’s a possibility that it was a random abduction, that there was no connection to Harry Flowers.’
‘Is that what you think?’
What I thought was that Harry Flowers had accumulated too many enemies. What I thought was that Jessica Lyle had got caught in the crossfire of some dirty war of half a lifetime ago.
‘It doesn’t matter what I think,’ I said. ‘Your husband was in the job for a long time. You know how it works. We get it wrong. We change our minds. We test new theories. We explore all possible leads. We wait for new leads. But we’re going to find her. I’m going to find her.’
It felt like worse than cold comfort, the possibility that her daughter had been taken by random men for profit and pleasure.
It felt like no comfort at all. But Jennifer Lyle smiled at me.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For all your efforts. I have felt from that first night that we will see Jess again. I have never doubted it.’
Michael stirred in his grandmother’s arms and she lovingly smoothed his nearly brand-new hair with the palm of her hand.
‘I sometimes feel as if Jess is beside me but out of sight. In the next room, almost. Or as if she just passed through a door. As if she is gone, but not gone very far.’ She smiled. ‘I sound like a mad old woman, but I am not imagining it. Do you think I’m imagining it?’
I shook my head. ‘No, ma’am.’
The newly dead do not go far, I thought, and pushed the thought away.
‘Did you ever have that feeling, Detective?’ she said. ‘As if someone you love is very close but ju
st out of reach?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
Then she smothered Michael’s sleeping face with kisses and a love so fierce that it might rip out her heart.
And I knew that feeling too.
14
I was lying on the sofa with Stan and the new issue of Your Dog, feeling myself slipping into the sweet deep sleep of exhaustion.
And then the doorbell rang.
It was just after midnight. As always, our neighbourhood was coming awake. Lights were blazing at the meat market on the other side of Charterhouse Street and the dancing kids in their glad rags were heading for the clubs that line our street.
But my doorbell ringing at this hour meant trouble.
There was a little monitor that showed the street.
DCI Pat Whitestone was standing outside the front door.
I buzzed her up.
She stood in the doorway, running a hand across her mouth.
I saw she was shaking. Not just her hands. All of her. The smell of vodka was very strong.
‘I didn’t know where else to go,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
‘What happened?’
‘I hit someone, Max.’
I thought she meant that she had lost her rag and given someone a beating. I thought of the yellow security guard at Eden Hill Park and how angry his cowardice had made her. I knew she had it in her to fly at anyone if her blood was up. I remembered her slapping Flowers in West End Central.
But it was too much to hope for.
This was worse, I saw as she came into the loft.
Much worse.
She had not hit someone with her fists.
‘I was in my car,’ she said. ‘And he came out of nowhere.’ Behind her glasses, her eyes were wide with shock. ‘And I didn’t see him, Max. Not until it was already over.’
Stan stirred himself at the happy sight of an unexpected visitor.
Whitestone sank to the sofa and absent-mindedly ran her hands through his fur.
I went to one of the huge loft windows and stared down at the street.
Her Prius was parked right outside and even from four floors up I could see that the headlamp on the driver’s side had been caved in and was now a crumpled mess of broken glass and smashed metal.
