by Tony Parsons
‘Do you know what that is?’ Flowers asked me.
I shook my head, but I felt my insides fall away.
Because I knew with total certainty that it could only be the registration number of Pat Whitestone’s car. The car that had hit the boy on the scooter. The car that had needed to be repaired before anyone saw.
But someone had seen.
And someone had told.
‘Nobody’s above the law, are they?’ Flowers said. ‘Apart from you lot. Apart from the law themselves. Why do you think so many people hate you? Because you think the rules don’t apply to the police. And you are dead wrong, mate. You are about as wrong as you can be.’
I gave him back the match folder. I couldn’t stand to touch it.
‘What do you want, Flowers?’
‘Nothing.’
There was an old car blanket draped over the porch of the Wendy house. He took it, spread it on the grass and gently, gently laid Michael on top of it.
Then he tore off a match, struck it and held the sudden flame to a corner of the Auto Waste Solutions folder. It caught, the old cardboard burning slowly until it reached the match-heads and then suddenly flaring.
Flowers carried on holding it, both of us watching the match folder burn in the soft light of the dying summer afternoon, and then, just as the flames were about to reach his fingers, he dropped it on the porch of the Wendy house, kicking it far away from where the baby was sleeping.
From the big windows that looked on to the garden, Mrs Lyle and Tommy were watching us.
I was still waiting to hear what Harry Flowers wanted.
‘Bring her home,’ he told me, his voice choked with feeling. ‘Bring her home or I swear to God I will burn the lot of you.’
21
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.’
22
Snezia Jones was moving out of her apartment.
In the soft light of the summer evening, a procession of dark, unassuming men of Anglo-Pakistani descent were toting cardboard boxes out of the apartment block in Eden Hill Park and loading them into the back of a removal van. The cousins. It was taking a while. The van was filling up and the cousins were sweating, but they kept going back inside. I suspected Snezia was a bit of an Imelda Marcos when it came to accumulating stuff.
The men were being instructed by Mo, Flowers’ driver, and every one of them could have been his family member. Perhaps they really were his cousins. Mo saw me watching from the BMW and gave me a polite nod. I nodded back. I had always liked Mo.
Snezia came out of the building, a dozen designer bags hanging from her arms. I got out of the car and approached her.
‘You never told me you got dumped,’ I said.
She bristled with professional pride, her Gucci and Louis Vuitton bags jiggling with irritation.
‘I wasn’t dumped. I have never been dumped. Nobody dumps me.’
‘But you knew that Harry Flowers was seeing Jessica. You knew they were in a relationship. You knew she had his baby. And yet you didn’t tell me.’
‘My relationship with Harry was over before he began with Jessica,’ she said, reluctant to move on from the dumping issue, her professional pride piqued, wanting to get this important point clarified. ‘So I was never dumped. And I have never been dumped. And I never will be dumped.’ She smiled proudly. ‘I have never met a man who did not want me again in the morning.’
‘You should have told me that Jessica was involved with Harry Flowers.’
‘I was told not to.’
‘You don’t have to follow Harry Flowers’ orders, Snezia. You really don’t get it, do you? Have you ever heard of Obstruction of Justice? It’s the legal term for withholding information from the law. And it is bad news. You can do twenty years.’
‘Or you can get a small fine, depending on the offence. Don’t you have to prove – what do they call it? – specific intent to obstruct justice?’
‘Did Harry tell you that? Flowers is just some old career criminal, Snezia. You should stop confusing him with Yoda.’
‘But I always wanted to help you find Jess, didn’t I? And I never tried to obstruct justice, did I?’
‘Don’t try to get smart, Snezia. It doesn’t suit you.’
‘Look, I have never wanted anything but for Jess to come home safely. If I ever had something important to tell you, then I would. But Jess was terrified of her father finding out about her and Harry. When it comes to his daughter, that man is a maniac. Jess made me promise never to tell anyone about her and Harry. She thought her father would try to kill Harry if he knew. I mean – like literally kill him. And she was right, wasn’t she? If he wasn’t such a sick old man, he might have succeeded. An honour killing. Is that what they call it? That’s what Jess was afraid of, because she knew her father would never accept Harry. She was always the golden girl in that family. There’s not much competition. There’s only her and that retarded brother.’
‘Tommy Lyle has learning difficulties.’
She nodded. ‘Retarded, like I said. So it was almost like she was the only child with all parental hopes riding on her. She thought that getting knocked up by Harry was not what her father planned or wanted or would ever accept. And she was right.’
A beautiful young man with elaborate, swept-back hair came out of the building, carrying a magnificent kettle. He placed a long, wet kiss on Snezia’s mouth, put the kettle in the back of the van and went inside. He wasn’t knocking himself out. He wasn’t working up a sweat like Mo’s cousins. But then he had his hair to think about.
Snezia looked at me as if she had proved a point.
‘You moved on,’ I
said.
She glanced towards the glass doors that the beautiful man had just swished through.
‘I always move on,’ she said.
‘But it has to hurt,’ I said. ‘Getting dropped for your flatmate.’
‘I told you – it was all over between Harry and me before Harry and Jess began.’
‘Yes, you told me and I don’t believe you. But I do believe that Harry Flowers loves her. He’s crazy about her.’
She inhaled deeply. ‘Jess might have thought it was serious, but that doesn’t make it serious.’
‘Harry seems to think it’s serious. They have a child. That’s about as serious as it ever gets. But help me with the timing, Snezia. The dead fiancé – Lawrence – got knocked off his bike six months ago. Jessica hadn’t worked up the nerve to end it with him at the time of his death. So she was cheating on Lawrence when Flowers was cheating on you.’
‘You’re so sweet,’ she said. ‘Harry never cheated on me. A man can’t cheat on his mistress. Someone once told me that. Somebody’s wife.’ She smiled. ‘And Jessica never cheated on Lawrence. Not really. They were like brother and sister towards the end. Isn’t that the way it always ends up between men and women, if you leave them together long enough?’
‘Harry Flowers would disagree.’
‘Look, Harry is always very keen at the start. He was keen on me at the start. Then his interest wanes. Then his eye wanders. He is a man of limitless sexual opportunities, and that kind always get bored in the end. Just as Harry would have got bored with Jess. Even if he is too pussy-whipped to know it right now.’
‘Nobody blames you for feeling bitter.’
She shook her head. ‘I wish none of this had ever happened. I wish Jess was still here. I think about what might have happened to her and it rips my heart out. But I’m not bitter. Look at my boyfriend,’ she said proudly. ‘Do you know what he is?’
‘A hairdresser?’
‘He’s age appropriate. And there’s a lot to be said for it.’
