by Mark Dawson
It would be case closed as far as the police were concerned.
Milton wasn’t ready to accept that conclusion just yet. There was digging to be done.
Chapter Twenty-Three
MILTON DROVE BACK TO LONDON. He worked as usual that night and the nights that followed, asking the drivers who came into the shelter whether they knew the details of Eddie’s funeral. Milton quickly got the impression that he had not been a particularly well-known driver, for none of the men he asked were familiar with him. He persevered, though, and, as the clock ticked over to three in the morning on the fourth subsequent night, he finally got a lead. A driver who usually came in for a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich said that he knew Eddie and that his family was based near Withington in the Cotswolds.
“You know about the Fabians?” the man asked.
“Not a thing.”
The man chuckled. “Not the sort of people you’d want to get on the wrong side of.”
“What do you mean?”
“They ain’t straight, John. They get up to all sorts.”
“Criminals?”
“They used to run the underworld. This was years ago, right after the war. They moved out when the Eastern Europeans and the Turks started throwing their weight around. They took all their money and went out to where they are now. The family has a place there. Big old country house, loads of land. The old man, Eddie’s dad, he’s still a serious player. You want to take some of the rumours with a pinch of salt, but I’ve heard all sorts of things about him over the years. They say he bankrolls big jobs. Puts teams together. There was gossip that he was involved in the Brinks job. Others, too. Like I say, serious.”
“I had no idea,” Milton said.
“There was one situation—I’m guessing this is ten years ago now—the police had him under surveillance. They had a man in the grounds outside his house. Fabian shot him. He went to trial and said it was self-defence. He got off, too.”
“I didn’t know,” Milton admitted.
“Knew Eddie well, did you?”
Milton shrugged. “Not really. I thought he was a nice guy. I’d like to pay my respects, though. Do you know anything about the funeral?”
“No,” the man said. “You’ll have to ask around.”
#
THE SHIFT was straightforward, and Milton was home in good time. He awoke at eleven, got out of bed, changed into his running gear, and went out for a five-mile jog. He returned to the flat, showered and dressed in clean clothes, and then took out the old MacBook he had picked up for next to nothing on eBay. It took an age to boot up, so he made himself a cup of tea and a slice of toast while he waited. He took his phone, opened Spotify, connected it to his Bluetooth speaker and then selected the playlist where he had stacked his favourite tunes from the Manchester musicians he preferred. He skipped through to Morrissey’s “Everyday is like Sunday” and went back to the computer.
It didn’t take him very long to find the information that he wanted. Kent Online had an announcements section, and it only took a little browsing to find the notice.
Edward Alan “Eddie” Fabian—much loved by all his family and friends. xXx
The announcement continued with the date and location of the funeral service, a request for no flowers, and the details of the undertaker. He checked the date, and then double-checked it.
The funeral was today.
He hurried through into his bedroom and opened the door to the wardrobe and his rather meagre collection of clothes. He had one suit, an old second-hand two-piece that he had bought in a charity shop for thirty pounds. He quickly ironed his only white shirt, polished his shoes, and dressed. He looked in the mirror. Not so long ago, his suit would have been bespoke from one of the finest tailors in London and presented to him with very little change from two thousand pounds. It was amusing to him how his situation had altered since he had stopped working for the government. It did not concern him—he had never judged himself by how wealthy he was, and those clothes had been no more than disguises to enable him to draw closer to his prey—and as he regarded himself he thought that he would just about pass muster. It would do.
#
THE FUNERAL was being held at St Michael and All Angels at Withington. The Cotswolds were ninety miles away. Milton got into his car and drove out of London, headed to the north-west. It was a straight run on the M40, passing through High Wycombe and Stokenchurch. The traffic was heavy, and there were several spots where they crawled at twenty or thirty miles an hour as first an accident and then road works blocked the way ahead. He thought that he was going to be too late, but the traffic cleared as he turned onto the A40 outside Oxford, and he was able to make good time. The rain fell heavily, a slick that seemed to perpetually blur his view out of the windscreen, but as he drove deeper into the Cotswolds it seemed to lighten a little and he was able to look out and appreciate the landscape around him. The area was famous for the golden-coloured stone that was quarried here and used to build the picture-perfect villages and the dry stone walling that demarked the rolling grass fields. It was beautiful.
He passed through Compton Abdale, following the single-lane road until he reached Withington. The landscape of the village and the seat of most of its settlement was a broad valley running from north to south. The village straddled either side of the River Coln, with an attractive pub residing on the east bank and climbing terrain on the west bank that led up to a knot of trees.
Milton drove through it until he reached the church. St Michaels was a large and imposing Norman building with a nave, chancel and tower. The original design had been enlarged with a south porch, a south transept chapel and a large clerestory. A school was adjacent to the church, and its playground had been opened up so that mourners could park their cars there. Milton turned off the road and found a space and then, with a glance at his watch, stepped out and jogged across the puddled road. There was an unpaved turning that ran around the boundary of the graveyard, and a glistening hearse was waiting there, a coffin being attended to through the opened back door. There were black BMWs and Mercedes there, too, the chief mourners waiting inside the vehicles.
He was just in time.
Other people were gathered at the porch, some sheltering beneath umbrellas, all of them aiming wary glances at the glowering sky as they waited to file inside. Milton joined the back of the queue. A boom of thunder rumbled overhead as he stepped through the doors.
Chapter Twenty-Four
THE CHURCH was full. Milton was only able to find a space on the end of a pew at the back next to a family with two young children who were evidently going to struggle to sit still for the duration of the service. There was an order of ceremony on the seat with a picture of Eddie on the front cover. He flipped through it, noting the hymns and that Eddie’s brothers would be making speeches. His father would be delivering the reading.
He looked around. All the light came from the clerestory windows; the original Norman window openings were blocked up, which made the interior feel rather gloomy. To the west of the south door, through which he had entered, there was a curtained area. There were memorials and monuments on the walls, a font that looked several hundred years old, and a simple wooden pulpit that stood in contrast to the ornate decoration.
“Blackbird” by the Beatles started to play. The people near the south door stood, everyone else following their example. The chief mourners came first: a woman in an expensive black dress, a handkerchief clutched in her hand. There was a man with jet black hair and a craggy face striated by deep wrinkles that made him look older than Milton suspected he was. Two younger women came next, one barely more than a girl and the other in her twenties, both wearing similarly expensive black dresses. The coffin came into the church, borne on the shoulders of six solemn-faced pallbearers. The two men at the front were obviously related to each other. Two older men followed, one of them particularly large and powerful. The men at the back were younger, one of them still in his teens. They broug
ht the coffin to the central aisle and then proceeded to the front of the church, where they carefully laid it to rest on the catafalque.
The vicar, a plump and homely-looking woman, took her place in the pulpit.
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” she intoned as the congregation settled in.
Milton had been around death all his life, but had only been to two funerals. His parents’, after the car crash that had killed them, and a Regiment service in Hereford after one of the men who had undertaken Selection with him had died during the forced march on the Brecon Beacons.
“Death is not an easy thing to accept,” the vicar continued. “Nature has its seasons, but death can come to anyone, at any time, in any place. Truly we know not what a day may bring forth.”
Milton shuffled a little uncomfortably. It felt as if she was speaking to him.
The two men from the front of the coffin stood next, each of them telling a story about Eddie. They were his brothers, introduced by the vicar as Spencer and Marcus. They bore no resemblance to Eddie, and Milton remembered that Eddie had told him that he had been adopted. The two spoke with an East London accent, and they were eloquent and generous, recounting their memories of their adopted brother. The woman at the front sobbed loudly as Spencer told the story of when Eddie had fallen from the boughs of one of the big oaks in the grounds of the estate, refusing to go to hospital so he didn’t miss a long-scheduled trip to watch Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. Marcus took Eddie’s green and yellow Hackney carriage licence badge and laid it next to the coffin. His story was how Eddie had declined the offer of a position in the family business, choosing instead to be a taxi driver. There were some knowing laughs at Eddie’s stubbornness. Looks were exchanged, too, and Milton could see that they were because of the unsaid nature of what the “family business” was. It was obvious that most people in the church knew, and from the reaction to the comment he guessed that, whatever it was, it wasn’t legitimate. He remembered what the cabbie had told him in the shelter.
Finally, the vicar called upon Francis Fabian to say a few words about his adopted son. The man with the black hair and the craggy face stepped up and spoke movingly of how they had come to adopt Eddie and how they had always treated him as if he was their own. The woman, who Milton guessed was his wife, sobbed again as he recounted Eddie’s introduction to the family. He spoke of the boy’s difficult start to life, going no further than that. He spoke eloquently, just as his sons had before him, but there was an edge to his words that was impossible to mistake. Milton was an excellent judge of people, and his initial impressions of Frankie Fabian were clear: he was a hard man, intelligent, and not to be underestimated. He would remember that.
The vicar finished the service with a psalm and then a short reading from the Bible, and then led the congregation in a prayer. She commended Eddie to God’s love and mercy.
The children next to Milton had been well behaved throughout the service, but now, as the pallbearers readied themselves to take the coffin once again, they started to fidget impatiently. The child immediately adjacent to Milton, a young boy of five or six, started to kick his feet against the pew in front of them. The mother, fraught with irritation, told him sternly to stop. Milton looked over at her and gave her what he hoped was an understanding smile.
The coffin went by, followed by the mourners, umbrellas unfurling as they stepped out into the rain again.
#
EDDIE’S COFFIN was loaded back into the hearse and driven away to the crematorium. The chief mourners got into their cars and followed the procession. The others gathered around outside, cowering beneath umbrellas and inside the shelter of the porch. The vicar was sharing consoling words with the mourners, and Milton nodded solemnly to her. He glanced around and saw, to his surprise, the detective inspector whom he had met at the station yesterday. He remembered the man’s name: Bruce. The policeman saw Milton, too, and made his way over to him.
“Mr. Smith.”
“Detective Inspector Bruce,” Milton said. “I’m surprised to see you here.”
“I thought it was the right thing to do.”
Milton gave a discreet nod in the direction of the women in the black dresses who were waiting to get into their cars so that they could follow the hearse. “Eddie’s mother?”
“That’s right.”
“And his sisters?”
“That’s right.”
Milton thought of what Bruce had told him yesterday, that the sister had been away from home when Eddie killed himself in her driveway. “What was the name of the sister Eddie went to see?”
“It’s Lauren, Mr. Smith.”
“Have you spoken to her yet?”
The man bristled. “I told you, I can’t talk to you about the investigation.”
“So there is one? An investigation?”
Bruce smiled indulgently. “It was good to see you again, Mr. Smith.”
The policeman walked away. Milton crossed the gravel path to a spot beneath the boughs of a broad alder that offered some respite from the rain, and took out his cigarettes. He was observing the mourners when his attention was drawn to a large car that had parked at the corner of the unpaved track and the road that ran through the centre of the village.
It was a Range Rover, new, a splatter of mud across the wing. Expensive. Darkened privacy windows.
Milton stubbed out his cigarette against the edge of a gravestone, dropped it into a rubbish bin, and made his way to the fringe of beech trees that marked the edge of the graveyard. He passed through the open gate and by the parish noticeboard, making no show of looking at the vehicle, just ambling along and pretending to look at something distracting on his phone. He opened the camera application, switched to video and set it to record. There was a row of cars parked nose first between him and the Range Rover: a red Audi, a blue VW Golf, a grey Mini Clubman. He aimed the phone down low, using the parked cars as cover so that he could approach as discreetly as possible. He walked by the Range Rover, filmed the registration details, and then walked up to the driver’s door. He rapped his knuckle on the window.
The glass slid down.
“What?”
There were two men inside. The driver was of medium build, with short hair and stubble across his cheeks and chin. The passenger had longer hair and a distinctive scar across his forehead. The driver was wearing a black bomber jacket and the passenger a faded denim jacket.
“Sorry for bothering you,” Milton said.
The driver shuffled around so that he could look right out of the window. “What do you want?”
“Smile for the camera, please.”
Milton brought the phone up and aimed it into the car.
The driver frowned as Milton filmed him. He should have been angry, or at least surprised, but, instead, he bore an expression that mixed confusion and wariness. The passenger was angry, already reaching down to release his seat belt. Milton made his way to the front of the car. He aimed the camera so that he could be sure that he had recorded the registration plate, and then kept filming as he stepped back onto the pavement. The passenger stepped out, and Milton aimed the phone and took a few seconds’ worth of footage of him. The man started forward and then, turning to look at the crowd of mourners—some of whom were looking their way—he stopped. Milton walked back to the cemetery, rejoining the clutch of people who were waiting for the family to leave the church. He didn’t feel particularly threatened. There were too many people here for them to try anything foolish.
He heard the grumble of a powerful engine and, as he turned back, the Range Rover jerked forward into the empty road and accelerated away. The driver’s window was open and the man turned to him as the car went by. Milton didn’t get a very good look at him, but he felt a flicker of something—
unease? surprise? recognition?—before the vehicle raced by him and disappeared around the corner.
Chapter Twenty-Five
MILTON FOLLOWED the procession of cars as the mourners transferred to the Fabian estate for the wake. Halewell Close was to the north of the village, along a narrow lane that doubled back after a sharp right-hand turn. Milton drove over a cattle grid, the Volkswagen’s suspension juddering ominously, passing onto a private driveway that was demarked by two stone pillars that were topped by impressive electric lanterns. An engraving on one of the pillars revealed the name of the property beyond. The drive was long, perhaps a mile, and marked by regularly spaced yew trees on the right and left. Milton bore right around a shallow turn and the headlights cast out into the gloom across a wide lake, the water sparkling. The road swung back around to the left and the rough tarmac surface was replaced with gravel. It opened out as it approached a hill and then, as he crested the brow, the house below was revealed.
The building was old and had clearly been rebuilt and added to over the years. It was set into its own private valley, amongst a sprawling beech wood, and was huge. It was built from stone, with parts that were two storeys tall and others that were three. Milton took it in: he picked out the three granges, set into the shape of a U, the steep slate roofs and the stone walls the colour of mustard. The granges surrounded a courtyard. The west grange was the largest, comprising four bays; the other granges looked as if they had been added over the years. Lights blazed in leaded windows all the way across the house, casting a lattice of gold across the wide lawns. A new addition, with broad glass windows, was topped with thatch. A row of converted stables was on the far side of a wide parking area, and at the end of the lawn were a swimming pool and summer house. The place was impressive.
Milton drove across a small bridge that spanned a stream. Wrought-iron lamp posts were set on either side of the final length of the drive, ready to cast their light across neatly terraced private gardens and the southern shore of the lake; there was a boathouse built next to a wooden jetty beside which a tethered rowing boat bobbed on the gentle swells.
