by Tony Parsons
‘Maybe he was trying to protect you and your mother,’ he said, harder now, a touch of the tough old cop returning. ‘That ever occur to you?’
‘Later,’ I said. ‘That’s what I thought maybe happened a lot later. And he was like you. A hard man.’
Frank Lyle snorted in his hospital bed.
‘Maybe he just wanted to deal with it alone,’ he said. ‘But I think, more than anything, your father, he just couldn’t find the words. I don’t know how you find those words to tell people you love you’re not going to be around. That’s what is hard.’
‘It was all different with my mum,’ I said, ‘because we knew from the start. But in some ways, it was just the same, at the end.’
‘That must have been tough,’ he said, softening. ‘Losing them so close together.’
‘You ever meet people who lost both of their parents in the same car crash?’
‘A few,’ he said, then thinking about it. ‘A lot.’
‘Me too. Because married couples travel in cars together. They do it all the time. And so – some of them – they die together. It was a bit like that with my parents. I was like one of those kids who lose their folks in a car crash. You are living one kind of life and then suddenly you are living another kind of life.’
I watched him stop thinking, overwhelmed by the pain now, the pain of the tumour that was growing inside him and killing him.
I indicated the metal box. ‘Morphine,’ I said. ‘It will help you sleep.’
‘I don’t care for the stuff,’ he said, as if he was talking about Marmite. ‘It puts a fog in my head. It turns you into somebody you’re not.’
‘It will take the edge off the pain,’ I said, although I knew he was right about the morphine fog. ‘Until you get a bit better.’
‘They don’t put you in here to get a bit better,’ he said. ‘They put you in here to die.’
But the agony was all-consuming and he reached for the metal box on his bed and called for a nurse. I stood up when she whipped back the curtains and began to administer to him, as jovial as a nursery school teacher.
I got up to go.
‘What happened to you?’ he said. ‘After your parents were gone?’
‘I was lucky,’ I said. ‘Because I had my grandmother. You only really need one person who loves you.’
We were silent.
‘Like my grandson,’ he said. ‘Like Michael.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Like Michael. He’s lucky too.’
Whitestone was standing outside the main doors of the hospital.
A skeletal patient in a dressing gown sucked hungrily on a cigarette with one hand and steadied his oxygen tank with the other. Whitestone sipped from a vending machine cup of coffee that was too boiling hot to drink and she did not really want. But she sipped it anyway.
‘How’s the security guard doing?’ I said. ‘How’s Modric?’
‘Modric will live, I reckon,’ she said, not making it sound like that was necessarily a good thing. ‘He’s in a medically induced coma. They’re trying to protect his brain. He has a cerebral haemorrhage from where his head hit the car or the deck. Tubes coming out of every bit of him. I saw his wife outside the ICU. They’ve got two little kids. She can’t stop crying.’
I looked back at the hospital.
‘Maybe I should talk to his wife,’ I said. ‘Tell her how well he did.’
‘She knows,’ Whitestone said flatly. ‘And with that and two quid, she can buy a cup of coffee.’ She nodded at me. ‘Tell me what happened again,’ she said.
She had done the hot debriefing while they were patching me up in Accident and Emergency, but they always liked you to keep telling the story. Just in case it was different.
‘I saw Ruben Shavers in the Pergola and as I was arresting him I was struck from behind by Derek Bumpus,’ I said. ‘And as Bumpus was attempting to strangle me, they argued and Shavers said to him, Do you want to top another one?’
‘Another one after killing Jessica Lyle.’
‘And maybe also Lawrence, the fiancé that got knocked off his bike. Pat, I am really struggling to believe that was just another accident statistic.’
‘Shavers and Bumpus have worked for Flowers for years. They could have bodies buried all over this town. What else?’
She watched me hesitate and knew that there was something I had censored in the hot debriefing. But I told her now.
‘Bumpus talked about Scout,’ I said.
‘How does he know about Scout?’
‘He saw her the first time Flowers came to see me after Jessica was taken. And the first thing he said to me was – How old is your kid? And he talked more when he had his hand around my throat. He said he was going to pay her a visit. He said he knows where we live.’
Her face was impassive in the glow of the vending machine.
‘He asked me about Scout’s bedroom, Pat.’
‘He’s taunting you. He’s getting under your skin.’
‘Yes, all that,’ I said. ‘But I think he means it, too. I think he means every word. There are men like that in the world. We have busted enough of them. Men who want to do things to children. And Derek Bumpus is one of them. And he has this thing, Pat, this obsession with Scout.’
She was silent. And then she nodded.
‘Then what happened?’
‘Bumpus wanted to kill me but the sirens were coming and he ran out of time. But he could not stop himself from taunting me. Wanting to show me – I don’t know – that he thought he had somehow won. Look for her in the graveyard, he told me. And then they fled.’
Whitestone thought about it. She sipped at the scalding brown liquid pretending to be coffee and then, with a grimace of disgust, poured it into the vending machine’s little silver drain.
‘How many graveyards are there in this city?’ she said.
‘We can’t dig up all of them.’
‘Then it’s a false lead. He wants us chasing our tails instead of him.’
I wasn’t convinced.
‘But if you want to bury a body that will never be found,’ I said, ‘then where better than a graveyard?’
25
Late morning on a glorious summer’s day, the sky an unbroken blue, perfect for a white wedding. The Flowers house was waiting for the bride and groom, the manorial gates wide open and adorned with bows of white silk.
We parked on the other side of the road, waiting for the father of the bride.
From the road you could see the marquee that had been erected in the back garden – actually more of a real building than a marquee, with high white walls and pretty, white-framed windows. On the lawn black-clad waiters and waitresses stood to attention as they were given their instructions by the caterers. Music was playing inside the marquee – the romantic end of R&B. Guests were beginning to arrive in their own cars, the women in their hats and summer dresses, some of the men dressed in morning suits, even a top hat or two, really pushing the boat out, all of them turning to look at the convoy of police vehicles on the road. Some of them giving us the finger.
I was in my BMW X5 with Whitestone and Adams. Behind us there were two large vans full of uniformed officers and a smaller, unmarked van containing Jackson Rose and a team of Specialist Firearms Officers.
One of the guests buzzed down the window of his green Porsche 911 to spit at one of the police vans. I saw the face of Junior Flowers, his smooth face twisted with loathing.
‘On my sister’s wedding day,’ he bawled. ‘The disrespect of you people! Un-fucking-believable!’
More cars were arriving back from the church.
‘How much for a wedding like this?’ Whitestone said. ‘Fifty grand? A hundred?’
I shrugged. I didn’t know much about weddings.
‘Recycling dead motors doesn’t pay for a do like this,’ Whitestone said. ‘Used cars don’t pay this kind of bill.’
I was looking in my rear-view mirror. ‘Here they come,’ I said.
The
Bentley Bentayga led the way, followed by a black Mercedes and then a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud with a white ribbon tied to the hood. Harry and Charlotte Flowers were in the back of the Bentley with Mo at the wheel. Another middle-aged couple were in the Merc – the parents of the groom, I assumed. And in the back of the Rolls-Royce were the happy couple, Meadow Flowers smiling among a mass of white lace with a handsome young man by her side.
We let them pass through the gates.
Whitestone gave the nod and we followed them inside.
They were still getting out of their cars when the uniformed officers piled out of their vehicles and went quickly into the back garden. Joy Adams went with them. Jackson and a dozen shots got out of their van but stayed on the driveway, their short Sig Sauer MCX assault rifles held at the 45-degree angle. With their grey body armour and their Glock 17 handguns, they looked like an army from the future.
Wedding guests came from the garden to gawp at them, flutes of champagne in their hand. Meadow Flowers, a riot of white, was helped from the Silver Cloud by her groom, with one hand in his and the other laid instinctively across the gentle swell of her belly, that gesture of instinctive reassurance and protection that I remembered Anne making when we were waiting for Scout to be born.
Nobody was spitting at us now.
‘We’re looking for your men,’ Whitestone told Harry Flowers.
He stared at her, long and hard, as if she had some nerve, as if he had never expected to see her again. He was sweating inside his light grey morning suit.
‘Dad?’
Flowers glanced at his daughter and her husband.
‘Do you need the whole family?’ he asked.
‘Just you, Harry,’ I said.
‘Go,’ he told his family.
They hesitated, all of them, his wife and his son and his daughter. Then something flamed in his eyes and they obeyed his instructions.
We stood on that gravel driveway, just us and Harry Flowers, with Jackson and his shots at a discreet distance around the back of their van, and Beyoncé singing ‘If I Were a Boy’ drifting to us from the garden.
‘Where are your men?’ I said. ‘Where are Shavers and Bumpus?’
He mopped his sweaty brow and snorted with disbelief.
‘You think they’re going to be handing out the canapés? That pair are not my men. Not any more. And it looks like they haven’t been my men for a while.’
‘I thought they might still be your men,’ Whitestone said.
He turned on her. There was cheering from the garden. The bride and groom were making their big entrance at the party.
‘How could those Judas bastards still be my men?’ Flowers said.
‘Here’s a theory for you,’ Whitestone said. ‘Jessica Lyle was dumping you. She had had enough of her well-heeled bit of rough. You were a rebound thing after she started feeling a bit stuck with her fiancé, Lawrence. You were a sympathetic listener on a big budget. And effectively her landlord, of course.’
‘I was not her landlord. She was Snezia’s flatmate. I was nobody’s landlord.’
‘And Jessica was bailing out,’ Whitestone continued, ignoring him. ‘And you couldn’t stand it. Some men – and some women too – they think they are the only ones who are allowed to do the dumping. They think that they can never be the one who gets rejected. And then it happens to them. And it hurts.’
He shook his head.
He muttered something under his breath.
Whitestone cupped a hand to her ear. ‘Louder?’
‘I said – I love her. And I can prove it to you. Come on.’
We followed him into the house, flowers everywhere, and into his office. Behind a framed photograph of Winston Churchill smoking a cigar and carrying a machine gun there was a wall safe. He tapped in the code, opened the door and reached inside.
He took out a phone.
‘A second phone,’ Whitestone said, as he turned it on. ‘A dedicated phone only used for your screwing around outside the marriage, right? My ex-husband had one of these. So you had a second phone dedicated to Jessica Lyle? It doesn’t prove a thing.’
He scrolled through the phone’s photographs and, finding what he was looking for, held it up for us to see. Harry Flowers and Jessica Lyle in a hotel room at a room service table, raising a wine glass and smiling.
‘Look at the date stamp,’ he said.
We looked. It was the night she had been abducted.
‘Does that look like someone who was unhappy?’ he said. ‘Does that look like a woman who wants to get out of a relationship?’
Whitestone chuckled.
‘Christ, Harry! Women can fake bigger things than a smile for a selfie! Your secret scrapbook doesn’t prove a thing.’
From the window I could see the uniformed officers moving among the guests, asking questions, taking notes. The music was still playing. Somehow the party was going on as the Met made their enquiries.
‘Harry,’ I said, watching the garden. ‘Either they took Jessica because you ordered them to, or somebody hired them to do it. Which is it?’
He shook his head bitterly, as if he had nothing more to prove to us.
‘I can believe it of Bumpus,’ he said. ‘He is unstable. He has always been unstable. Devoted to me – at least he was once – but always borderline psychotic. Maybe a bit over the borderline.’
‘Then why was he on your payroll?
‘Because people are scared of a madman,’ he said. ‘You know – the Ronnie Kray effect? Sometimes it is not enough to be harder than the rest. You need that element of madness. You need genuine lunacy – the feeling that anything could happen. That it wouldn’t end in black eyes and broken bones, but someone might get their nose bitten off. Or killed. And back in the day, before I went straight, Big Del Bumpus gave us that. I know he didn’t like Mo and the cousins being on the payroll. Big Del wasn’t very broad-minded when it came to living in vibrant, multicultural society. He felt he was being pushed out.’
‘What about Shavers?’
‘Ruben was always moaning about money. Always blowing cash he didn’t have to impress the women. Back in his boxing years, he thought he was going to be on the earnings of Anthony Joshua. And although he didn’t make it, he never made that adjustment in his head, he never reduced his expectations. You know what I think? I think that Bumpus had hurt feelings. And Ruben was a greedy bastard.’
‘Who hired them?’
‘My guess is they did it off their own bat.’ He gestured towards the wedding party. ‘You’re not going to find them here.’
Joy Adams appeared in the doorway.
Flowers stared at her as if he was seeing her for the first time.
‘But you should look for Shavers in Tottenham or Brixton,’ he said. ‘That’s where Mo’s cousins are looking. Ruben still had contact with the old neighbourhoods.’ He was still looking at Joy. ‘They never really leave, do they? And Bumpus is from Manchester way, but he grew up in care so there’s nobody to run to up there. They haven’t gone far. And if I find them before you do, I will personally bring them to West End Central.’
Whitestone nodded, unimpressed.
‘Let me ask you, Harry – how does a glorified grease monkey pay for a wedding like this?’
‘You save up.’
Then he smiled at her, shaking his head, genuinely amused.
‘Oh, DCI Whitestone. I can’t believe you would come to my home on my daughter’s wedding day.’
‘You think you’re some kind of no-go area, Harry?’
‘Just do your job,’ he said, jabbing his finger at her face, his voice suddenly cracking with rage and grief. ‘I want them found. I want them found and then I want them hung in their cells. I know that you can arrange it because we all know that it happens all the time,’ he said. ‘There’s still capital punishment in this country, it never went away, but now it happens in police custody. Another tragic suicide in police custody. That’s what I want for the men who took Jessica. Get it do
ne. Make it happen or you will wish you had never been born, Whitestone.’
‘Excuse me?’
He took a step towards her, starting to lose it, his mouth pulled out of shape with outrage.
I stepped forward, took a fistful of morning suit lapel and shoved him back.
‘Don’t you get it?’ he told her, shrugging me off but knowing enough to keep his distance. ‘You belong to me now.’
I looked across at Joy and nodded.
She headed for the front door.
Whitestone took a step towards Flowers.
She lowered her voice, so it was just between the pair of them.
‘You think I’m afraid of you, Harry?’ she said.
‘Not as much as you should be.’
‘I don’t think you have anything on me,’ she said, stepping back, attempting a smile, making light of it. ‘Maybe some old lag clocked me. But that’s it. No CCTV. No photos. You played your cards well. But that’s it. Bluffing.’
‘Try me.’
‘Maybe I will, Harry.’
As we were leaving he poured himself a drink, needing to steady himself before joining the party in the garden. But he called my name at the door.
‘You were the last person to see them,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘What did they say?’
‘Bumpus told me to look in the graveyard,’ I said.
Whitestone and Adams returned to the car, but I lingered by the back door, watching the wedding party. Charlotte Flowers approached me with a flute of champagne in each hand. I thought she might throw it in my face. But she offered me one of them and I declined.
‘Is this where you say you’re on duty?’ she smiled.
‘How did you end up here?’ I said.
Her smile grew wider.
‘At this wedding?’
‘In this house. In this life.’ I looked towards the closed door of Harry Flowers’ den. ‘In this marriage.’
She sipped from one of the champagne flutes.
‘My father died when I was ten. My mother – a great beauty in her day – remarried. The man had sons. Older sons. Three of them.’ She sipped her drink and seemed to be listening to the music from the garden for a moment. ‘And it was hell,’ she said, still smiling. ‘And then I was a few years older and I was this privately educated party girl from central casting. And I was around a lot of drugs. I mean – a lot.’
