by Mark Dawson
“Good afternoon, Mr. Fabian,” Milton said.
The older man regarded him with suspicion. “Do I know you?”
“No. We haven’t met. I’m a friend of Eddie. I came to the funeral.”
“Really? I don’t remember you.”
“I’m not surprised. There were a lot of people here.”
“Yes,” Fabian said disinterestedly.
“Eddie was popular.”
“Not really,” Fabian said. He drew on his cigarette and didn’t elaborate; Milton waited for him to speak again. “What’s your name?”
“John Smith.”
“So what do you want, Smith?”
“There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“I’m busy, and I don’t know you. I don’t really have time. Sorry. Best you go.”
Bruce’s BMW crunched over the gravel as he turned it around. The car drew alongside and the window slid down.
Bruce leant across the cabin and called out, “Everything all right, Mr. Fabian?”
“Fine. Mr. Smith is about to leave.”
Milton managed to suppress his impatience. He turned back to Fabian and, making sure that Bruce couldn’t see or hear him speak, said, “It’s about Eddie.”
Fabian shook his head. “I’ve got nothing to say about that. I’m not interested.”
Milton spoke firmly. “I need to talk to you about him. Eddie didn’t kill himself.”
Fabian inhaled, his eyes fixed on Milton’s face, and then blew smoke. “What did you say?”
“He was murdered.”
Bruce called out again, “On your way, Mr. Smith. You’ve said your piece.”
Frankie Fabian looked at Milton, then looked past him to Bruce. “It’s all right,” he called back to the policeman. “Thanks, Detective.”
Bruce wound the window up, put the car into gear and drove away.
“What did you say?” Fabian said again.
“Should we go inside?” Milton suggested.
#
FABIAN TOOK MILTON into the house and led the way to a smaller reception room than the one that had accommodated the wake. It was opulent: an impressive inglenook fireplace, wooden panelling on the walls, and furniture that looked old and expensive. There was a red leather Chesterfield sofa, and Fabian sat down in the middle of it. He waved a hand to indicate that Milton should sit in the nearest armchair to him.
“You know who I am, Mr. Smith?”
“Yes,” Milton said. “I do.”
“So you know I’m not the kind of man you want to annoy.”
“Yes, I know that.”
“I just want it to be clear between us. I wouldn’t want to get off on the wrong foot.” He folded his legs, revealing an inch of scarlet sock and a well-polished black brogue. “Now, then. Eddie. What did you mean?”
Milton nodded. He had rehearsed what he wanted to say as he had driven to Withington, and he was sure that he had it all down. But he knew that his success or failure depended more upon the impression that he conveyed than the content of his words. It was important that he come across as confident, even cocksure, with the kind of arrogance that would suggest that this wasn’t the first time that he had tried to pull a stunt like this.
“I met Eddie at an AA meeting. Don’t get the wrong idea—I’ve never had any time for any of that. It’s a lot of religious nonsense, if you ask me. There’s nothing wrong with a drink. If you find you’re drinking too much, then you stop. Simple as that. All this happy-clappy kumbaya nonsense is a waste of time.”
“But you went anyway.”
“You could say it’s my workplace.”
“Meaning?”
“You’d be surprised the things you can learn in those meetings. All that honesty, people telling strangers their deepest secrets. It’s tough to find a better place to get leads if you’re into the kind of business that I’m into.”
“And what kind of business is that?”
“The buying and selling of information.”
“Blackmail?”
“If you like.” Milton didn’t bother to varnish his words for Fabian’s benefit. He just needed him to believe his story. “That’s what I do. I find people with interesting stories to tell, then I make a little money from them. Meetings like that are perfect. Alcoholics, gamblers, sex, drugs. I’ll be honest with you, most of the time the opportunities are low rent. An alcoholic tells me he cheated on his wife. Maybe a woman tells me she stole the money for her next fix from her boss. You can use that information and turn a profit. Sometimes you’ll get a high roller you can string along for a bigger payday. But mostly it’s just people like Eddie.”
“So, let me get this straight. You’re a fucking cockroach?”
Milton ignored that, the audacity of the insult coming from a man like Frankie Fabian, and concentrated on laying the rest of his bait. “I go from city to city, meeting to meeting. I can’t stay in one place for too long, obviously. People talk and then I have to move on. I came down to London a month ago. I found Eddie straight away, the very first meeting I went to. I could see he had a lot going on. Lots of troubles. Lots of potential. I made an effort to get to know him. He was vague about his family history, about you, but he told me enough so I could join the dots. I did my research. Learned all about you and what you do. The more I learned, the more I could see Eddie could be a really big score, so I pushed the boat out with him. I let him think we were best mates. I listened to him whinge and moan for fucking hours, Mr. Fabian; you wouldn’t believe it. I thought I was going to drown in all his self-pity, but it was worth the pain in the end. More than worth it. He needed a sponsor, I offered, and he said yes. And then he told me why he had a problem with drink. Specifically. It was the guilt he carried around with him. The guilt—that was the reason.”
Fabian looked at him cautiously. “Yeah? What did he have to be guilty about?”
“Tell me when you want me to stop. I know the whole story. He told me that he was involved in an armoured car job ten years ago. Him and your two boys. He said a guard was shot. I looked into it. He didn’t give me much to go on, but I found all the old newspaper reports. It was a big thing at the time, wasn’t it? Big case. Police never got to the bottom of it.”
Fabian didn’t reply, but his eyes sparkled with fresh malice.
“I can see it’s not something that bothers you. Doesn’t bother your conscience the same way that it bothered him. I can see why: it was a long time ago. The guard probably got what was coming to him. Right? But, thing is, Eddie never got over it. He made it very clear to me: he always blamed himself for what happened. He’s had it on his conscience for years. That’s one of the things about going to AA. One of the things they make you do is to come clean about all the things that you did. That’s what you do when you get to the ninth step. You have to unburden yourself, they say. You do that and you get rid of the reason why you’ve been drinking. All Eddie wanted was to go to the police and confess what happened.”
“This is bollocks,” Fabian protested. He said it angrily, but Milton could see it was bluster. There was no conviction in it.
Milton went on. “Did you know he’d written it all down? A confession. I think you suspected it, didn’t you? He showed it to me. He didn’t care. He was ready to go and give it to the police, but I would never have let him go through with that. He comes clean and the damage is done. There’s nothing in it for me then. Because I knew that you’d care. I knew that you’d care a lot.” Fabian rose up out of his chair, his fist clenched, and Milton raised his hand. “Don’t,” he said. “It’s in everyone’s interests that we keep it civil.”
“You’re full of it,” Fabian said.
“No. I’m not.”
Fabian glared at him, still standing, his hands braced on the table. “Prove it.”
Milton felt his gut tighten up. This was the gamble.
Milton took out the confession that he had found in Eddie’s house and handed it across. “This is a copy. The original
is safe and sound. Read it.”
Fabian looked at the first few paragraphs, his cheeks blooming with blood. He pushed the letter back across the table. “Where did you get this?”
“Eddie’s house. I had a look around last night.”
Fabian responded a little too hastily. “No, you didn’t. There was nothing there.”
“You’d cleaned the place up pretty well, but you didn’t look hard enough. It was hidden in the cistern. There was more, too. A scrapbook with articles about the heist. Eddie had annotated them. Useful background, not that I needed it.” Milton tapped a finger against the letter. “He’s very clear what happened.”
The conversation was going about as well as Milton could have hoped. It appeared that Fabian believed him or, at least, was not ready to call his bluff. He had included all of the information that he wanted to use. There was no point in mentioning anything about Leo Isaacs and the abuse. Suggesting that there was a noble intention to his intervention did not serve Milton’s narrative. He had considered it and concluded that he stood a better chance of getting what he wanted by painting himself in the worst possible light.
Fabian’s mood darkened. “I ought to have you shot,” he said. “No one puts the black on me.”
“Let’s try to forget about the preliminaries, shall we? You wouldn’t be talking to me if I didn’t have a little leverage. I know you’re not used to people you don’t know talking to you like this, but try to put it to one side. Just listen. I have a proposal. A mutually beneficial arrangement. Let’s concentrate on that.”
“What do you want?”
“Your help, actually. You help me with something that I need, and the confession is yours. You can burn it, do whatever you want with it.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I’ll send it to the newspapers and then I’ll disappear.”
“Go on, then. I’ll humour you. What help?”
“I know what you do for a living. Safe deposit boxes and so on.”
Fabian regarded him quizzically, and Milton could see that he was making a decision. “Fine. Go on.”
“You have a specific set of skills. I’d like to take advantage of them.”
“You want to break into somewhere.”
“I do. The London Vault.”
“In Hatton Garden?” Fabian chuckled and shook his head. “That’s a tough nut to crack.”
“Maybe. But that’s my price. If you want this to go away, you need to get me in there.”
“What for?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It’d be difficult.”
“But not impossible?”
“Nothing’s impossible.” Fabian regarded him with sly aggression. “What do you get out of this? Really? What do you want? Diamonds?”
Milton gave a little shrug. “I’m used to making small scores here and there. There’s only so much you can get a cheating husband to pay. This, though—it’s something else. You know that. It could be the score that means I don’t have to work ever again. You know better than I do. A place like that—it’s millions, right?”
Fabian was tracing his finger across the photocopy of Eddie’s confession. He was considering his response.
Milton tried to nudge him in the right direction. “Can I make a suggestion? Don’t look at this and call it blackmail. You need to think of it as a business proposition. It’s not what I get out of it. It’s what we all get out of it. You get the confession. But we’ll be in a vault, Mr. Fabian. I can only imagine what else is down there. You’re not going to leave without opening a few other boxes, are you?”
Chapter Thirty-One
MILTON WAITED A WEEK without hearing from Fabian. He thought he might have to wait three days, maybe four. But a week? It felt bad. He went over their meeting again and again, trying to diagnose the moment when Fabian must have decided not to consider his proposal. There must have been a point when he had lost him. Maybe he didn’t accord Milton with enough credibility to take his suggestion seriously. Maybe he was going to call his bluff.
Hicks had called him the day after he had returned from Withington to ask, again, for his help. Milton told him that he was still investigating his options and that he would get back to him when he was ready. Hicks sounded desperate, almost pleading for movement, but Milton reminded himself that Hicks wasn’t his fault or his responsibility. He would help him, if he could, but only if that meant that he was able to do what he wanted to do for Eddie.
And, to do that, he needed Frankie Fabian’s help.
By day eight, he had started to doubt that the plan would work. Fabian had seen through his ruse. The proposal was too difficult to pull off, or the risks outweighed the threat that Milton had presented. There was the possibility, of course, that Fabian would decide to follow a different course. Milton knew that he had put himself in danger by threatening him that way, and had stepped up his own security accordingly. He was cautious by nature, but he had examined his routines and eliminated all of the small bad habits that he had allowed himself to fall into. He took a different route to work every day. He stopped going to his usual meetings, travelling to alternatives in the West End instead. He had parked his car in a long-stay car park and taken public transport instead. He had been very aware of counter-surveillance when he had travelled back from Withington to London on the day of their meeting, and he was sure that he had not been followed. The only link between him and Fabian was Eddie, but now that Eddie was dead, he couldn’t think of any other way in which he might betray himself. But that didn’t mean that he was prepared to take any chances by being slapdash with his behaviour. He took a small kitchen knife from the shelter, sharpened it until the edge was as keen as he could make it, wrapped it in a dishcloth, and kept it in his pocket.
#
HE WAS in the shelter one evening when his phone finally rang with a number that he did not recognise. He served his only customer with a plate of beans on toast and a tea, took the phone outside, and shut the door behind him. It was a cold night, the damp seeping into his clothes and chilling his skin. He took out his phone and accepted the call.
“Mr. Smith?”
“Speaking.”
“Be at Bethnal Green station at midnight.”
Milton tried to respond, but there was no reply. The line was dead.
#
MILTON CLOSED UP at eleven. The drivers would be annoyed, but he had no other choice. He took the Central Line from Oxford Circus to Bethnal Green and emerged at midnight, just as the guard rattled the station’s iron cage door closed behind him.
Milton sheltered from the rain in the doorway of a betting shop and waited, staring into the night and smoking cigarettes. He had no idea how the next few hours would play out. He hadn’t recognised the voice of the man who had called him, but he assumed that he was connected to Fabian. He must have considered his offer, and now he was going to deliver his verdict. Milton hoped that it would be the answer that he needed. If it was something else, he was going to have to come up with another angle. And that, of course, ignored the very real possibility that Frankie Fabian might not give him the chance to pivot and try something else. Milton had read as much as he could find about the head of the Fabian family. There was a lot of conflicting information about him, but one thing was constant: he was unpredictable. There was no way to foresee how the meeting Milton assumed he was about to have was going to play out. He would have to adapt to whatever came his way.
Milton looked out over the crossroads where Bethnal Green Road met Cambridge Heath Road. There was a church, St John on Bethnal Green, where Milton had attended meetings of the fellowship when he had first tried to leave Group Fifteen behind him. It was a dark, ugly building, reaching up to a dome with a golden cross atop it, fenced in from the street by iron railings. There was a park on the opposite side of the road to the church, and, opposite Milton, the landlord of the Salmon and Ball was just ejecting the last stragglers from the pub. There was a small concourse of s
hops, including a unisex hair salon and an off-licence. There were a few pedestrians passing by, and the queues of traffic that formed at the junction quickly dispersed once the lights turned green. A group of youngsters, wearing puffer jackets with the hoods pulled up, loitered in the park. Milton could see the red tips of the joints as they toked on them, passing them around.
He finished his second cigarette and was about to light a third when his phone rang.
Milton put the phone to his ear. “Yes?” he said.
“Where are you?”
“I’m here.”
Milton looked left and right and saw a parked Audi flash its lights.
“I see you,” Milton said.
“Hurry up.”
He put the cigarette back in the packet, crossed the road and got into the car. There were two men inside. He recognised them from the funeral. Marcus and Spencer Fabian, Eddie’s brothers. Marcus was driving. Spencer was sitting in the back. Neither looked pleased to see him.
“Hello,” Milton said.
Spencer looked across the cabin at him. “We’re going for a drive.”
“Where to?”
“Maybe somewhere quiet where we can have a proper chat about what a great idea it is to try to blackmail our father.”
Milton didn’t respond.
“Just shut up,” Marcus said from the front of the car. “You’ll find out where we’re going when we get there.”
The car pulled away from the kerb and into the flow of traffic. Milton was acutely aware that he was barely armed, outnumbered, and being taken somewhere he didn’t know.
Chapter Thirty-Two
THEY DROVE OUT to an industrial estate in Hounslow, beneath the flight path of Heathrow airport. Big jumbos roared overhead at regular intervals and, as Milton turned to watch the latest make its descent, he saw the lights of another four planes stacked up in the darkness behind it.
Marcus parked the Audi, killed the engine and got out. His brother followed him and Milton did the same. He looked around. There was a line of warehouses in the park, facing onto a narrow parking lot and hemmed in on all sides by a steep wire mesh fence. It was late, and the car park was empty save for their car and three others.
