“Achievements?” We’d hit the lake – not exactly Windermere, but not far off it. “Jesus. He could drown a battalion in that,” I said, stopping dead.
“And leave them there,” Caz pointed out.
Now, it was my turn to moue, dissatisfied at her point. “But I’m still not letting him off the hook.”
We turned towards the house – a large pile that looked like Palladio had, perhaps, gone to work for Barratt Homes.
“And what, exactly, apart from picking a few random numbers, are Mr Boyle’s achievements?”
We began mounting the steps to the ludicrously-overbearing Neo-Georgian door, the fanlight above it filled with stained glass that seemed to depict a series of brown discs and a few fish shapes.
“Well,” Caz admitted, finally, as I lifted the door knocker – a heavy brass item shaped like an emaciated man caught mid-Macarena – and slammed it down, “he does a lot for charity.”
And, at that moment, the door swung open.
Standing in front of us – liveried like he’d just stepped out of Downton Abbey – was a butler, only one who’d clearly, at some point in the past, doubled as an all-in wrestler. He was colossal, his bulk filling the entire door, his shiny bald pate towering almost seven feet above us. Both his knuckles were blackened and bruised, as though he’d been punching oak trees for the past hour and a tattoo of a tear drop seemed to be trying – and singularly failing – to disguise a scar that ran from the edge of his right eye down to the top of his lip.
He looked down at us like some ancient God inspecting the goings-on of mere mortals, and the corners of his lips curled in what was either a smile, a barely-disguised growl or trapped wind.
And then he spoke. “You must be Mr Bird,” he said in that Uriah Heep voice, all sibilants and grovelling, and, as I was getting used to the clash between his physical presence and his voice, he stepped to one side and from somewhere under his right arm appeared the purpose of our visit.
Tiny Tim Boyle had been his nickname because, at one stage, he had tipped twenty-five stone. In the interim, he had obviously cleaned up, gone straight, eschewed carbs and become, quite clearly, Hampstead’s most successful ever weight watcher.
Mind you, having all the money in the world hadn’t failed to deal with one of the most alarming lazy eyes I’d ever encountered. Tiny Tim had a small, sharp, angular face that looked like one of Da Vinci’s studies of Renaissance low-lives, but with a nose – broken several times in his past life – and a pair of what my mum would call ‘blew eyes’ (as in: one blew east and one blew west) that managed to peer, almost, at us and at the giant butler, simultaneously and thus transformed the Da Vinci study into a Picasso painting brought to life.
He stared, with one eye, at the proffered fancies as though they were crème-anglaise-stuffed dead babies. “How kind,” he murmured, in a tone that suggested what he really wanted to say was: Are you taking the piss? then handed the lot to the giant. “Green, perhaps you can put these to some use…”
“Thank you, sir.” The mammoth, his neck straining the collar of his shirt like a blowsy girl’s front testing a kid’s t-shirt, reached out and relieved him of the box, as though it were radioactive material, murmuring something about how, “Mrs Green will put them to use,” before he in turn dropped the box unceremoniously onto a side table.
I hesitated, feeling the moment was entirely lost, and was then rescued by the woman who had walked me into this situation.
“How lovely,” Caz said, in her best Margaret Thatcher, smiling graciously at the goateed, stringy-necked figure that stood before us, his off-white t-shirt hanging loosely over shoulders sculpted, obviously, by a ruthless trainer and hanging down past an ascetic belly, razor sharp hips, a pair of jeans so skinny they made Karen Carpenter’s last frock look like an Etam sale rack item, and a pair of knobbly-toed feet encased – I shit you not – in sandals.
Basically, if it had been a week or two earlier, I’d have assumed Tiny Tim was dressing up as Hipster Jesus for Halloween.
Green stepped forward and relieved me of my coat with a lack of genteelness that suggested he wasn’t entirely used to people willingly handing their belongings over to him.
“My,” Caz gasped, as the Brobdingnagian yanked her tartan cape from her, “what a charming home you have.”
The triple-height ceiling towered above us and suspended from it, looming over the entrance hall like original sin over a Catholic school sleepover, was a nine-foot-long wooden crucifix, with a carved wooden Jesus writhing in agony thereon.
Whoever said, ‘There’s no such thing as too much,’ had clearly made acquaintance with Tiny Tim’s interior decorator. Although his person spoke of ascetics and abstention, every inch of the walls in the hallway was covered in icons, religious paintings, framed bible tracts and – encased in a rosewood frame and hung over the door to what looked like an ultra-modern kitchen – a life-sized reproduction (I assumed) of the Turin Shroud.
“That’s kind of you to say,” Boyle smiled, ushering us onwards as the giant shuffled off towards the kitchen. “Tell me,” he murmured at Caz, “have you been saved?”
“Many times,” Caz deadpanned, “many, many times.”
Her response clearly confused the man, which gave us enough time to get into what can only be described as a drawing room slash medieval cathedral.
Here, again, every available inch of space was covered in religious tat, as though Boyle’s discovery of Christianity weren’t enough in itself and had to be accompanied by the acquisition and display of the entirety of Christianity and all it entailed.
A silver platter in the corner held, rather than the head of Saint John, a tall shiny coffee pot and three cups.
“Coffee?” he asked, gesturing at the pot and then at the sofa, which was covered in cushions embroidered either with religious scenes or tapestried quotes from the New Testament.
Caz murmured a yes for both of us and settled herself gingerly between a woman taken in adultery and Lazarus larking about having been turned into the undead by his Lord and Saviour.
I dropped myself beside her, trying not to notice what was on the cushions around me, failing, and noticing that one said, ‘Love thy fellow man,’ which made me suspect that I may – once or twice – have taken the instruction more literally than Tiny Tim or Saint Paul would have expected.
“Now,” he said, his voice gentle, “what can I do for you?”
I smiled, reassuringly, I hoped and prepared to jump right in.
“We wanted to talk to you,” Caz said before I could get a word in, “about your work in the community, and to ask how you felt about the need for individuals to provide services and support that – some might argue – should be coming from central government and the tax payer.”
I stared at her in shock – What. The fuck? I then smiled at Boyle. “Exactly,” I said.
“Did you have any specific work in mind?” he asked, his coffee, I noticed, sitting untouched by his side as he sipped a glass of water in which a slice of lemon bobbed listlessly.
“Oh all of it,” I vamped.
“All of it?” His cheeks puffed out. “Well, as everyone now knows, I won the lottery some years ago. And it changed my life. Before then, I wasn’t a very nice person. And, to be honest, even after then, I wasn’t a very nice person.”
He sipped his water. “I ran with a hard crowd. One that didn’t really care about anything but pleasure and possessions, and that didn’t care about anyone other than our own selves. Truth was whatever we wanted it to be. Loyalty was whatever was expedient. Women,” he nodded at Caz as he said this, “were nothing but possessions.”
“You said you were still unsaved after the win,” I said, wishing Caz had warned me that I was supposed to be a reporter so that I could have brought a notebook or something, and then deciding that – if challenged – I’d claim to be an impressionistic reporter and say I’d got the gist of the conversation.
Tiny Tim nodded. And sighed.
And sipped his water.
And stared, with his watery eyes, out of the high sash windows of his vast Neo-Georgian mansion.
And sighed again.
And as Ron Moody began singing, ‘I’m reviewing the situation,’ in my head, he nodded again. “There was a girl, once,” he said, “who disrespected one of my gang. She was scarred for life. Acid.”
His eyes turned to face me, fixed me hard, and he said, “I had a girl, when I won the money. I saw it as my way out. Of the life I’d been in.”
He half-laughed. “I’d been terrified and horrified for most of my life, and suddenly I had all the money I’d need to get away. And I did. Only I brought my girl with me and decided that she was too much of a reminder.
“So, to put it bluntly, I dumped her. Harshly.”
He flicked his eyes away from mine to Caz then around the room as the light outside began to dim and a set of spotlights came on, causing eerie shadows to shift across the high ceiling.
“I might as well have thrown acid in her face,” he said.
I glanced at Caz. Something more than running to the Daily Mail had happened, I figured. “What happened?” I asked.
“She went running to the Daily Mail,” he answered, then, as I relaxed in the knowledge that the kiss ‘n’ tell had been the extent of it, he added, “then – two months later – she was found face down in the Serpentine.”
The shadows shifted.
“She drowned?” I said.
“Or was drowned,” Caz offered.
“Either way,” Tim Boyle nodded, “I realised that thinking money would take you away from the past was pointless. Using the money to try to make people less likely to do the things I’d been doing – hurting the way I’d been hurting – was the only way I’d ever escape from it all.”
“So you became a philanthropist?” I essayed, and he nodded.
“And before you were a philanthropist,” Caz asked, “what were you?”
“You know what I was,” he said, fixing her with his jelly-blue gaze as a number of lamps in the room flicked on, highlighting various agonised Christs, “I was a sinner.”
“And a crook,” I prompted.
“Guilty,” he nodded.
“So has any of your past come visiting you lately?” I dived in, and his eyes narrowed.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning has any of your past come visiting lately,” I repeated.
“I try not to spend too much time with the unsaved,” he said, in the way a minor royal might say ‘The great unwashed.’
“But if, say, Jimmy Carter turned up,” I said, as he coughed loudly and the door behind us opened, the bulk of Mr Green blocking out what little light came from the hallway beyond.
“So that’s what this is about,” he said. “Well, Mr Bird, I gave up lying years ago. Because, you see, when you’re rich, you don’t need to lie. Truth is, Jimmy came round here a week or so ago, banging on about some job that people may – or may not – have been involved in many years ago.”
“So lying’s off the menu,” I commented, realising that the jig was up, “but prevaricating’s acceptable?”
“I’m not prevaricating,” he said. “There’s just nothing to say. Only other person from that time that I’ve had any dealings with lately was Billy’s girl Eve. She came here a while ago, said she was down on her luck and needed cash.
“She told some story about having to sell off her belongings – even stuff she’d kept from the old days – all to pay debts. Wanted to know if I wanted to buy any souvenirs.”
“Souvenirs?” Caz asked.
“I got the distinct feeling she was trying a little bit of blackmail – though whether emotional or real, it’s hard to say. Whichever it was, I wasn’t playing. I know I was never a saint, but I don’t think she could have anything on me that my lawyers nowadays couldn’t cut through.”
“So what happened?”
“I wrote a cheque. Took her address, in case anything came up, and Green here sent her on her way.”
“Do you still have that address?” I asked.
Tim exhaled slowly and noisily – as though he had taken on all the ennui in the world – and gestured listlessly at the hulking Green, who threw our coats at us and jerked his head in a way that suggested that, if we didn’t stand, put them on and make our way towards the exit, he’d personally crush us to atoms.
“But regarding Jimmy,” Tim added as we were lead from the room, “I have nothing to say beyond this. He turned up here, I heard him out – I didn’t want to get messed up in whatever craziness he was getting in to – and he left. As,” he glanced at his enormous manservant, “you are about to.”
And, with only a pause to get an address in Wimbledon written down on a notepad in the hallway, we were led from the house.
TWENTY-NINE
“Right, it’s just here,” said Dash, gesturing at the screen.
I leant forward, peering at the grainy images on the flickering monitor. “What am I looking at?”
“Him,” Dash pointed out a tall skinny bloke in a shell suit and a trucker cap. “He goes for a dip. Just… About… Now.”
I saw the man, as a clearly inebriated Carlton leaned over the bar trying to attract the attention of a busy barmaid, dip his thumb and forefinger partially into the back pocket of the boy’s jeans and begin to extract his wallet.
At which point, despite being shitfaced, Carlton clearly turned around – a look of high umbrage on his face – and had words with the beanpole.
“Lowlife scumbag, that bloke,” Rodger Reese said over my shoulder.
Reese was a pub landlord straight out of central casting: Shaven head, tight black t-shirt stretched across a chest like a barge, biceps as big as my head and hands like boiled hams. On first glance, he was not the sort of person you’d want to spend time with, let alone pay for the privilege of hanging with.
But first glances can be deceiving, and Rodge, his missus Barb and the crew at his pub The Monmouth, were an open, friendly, welcoming bunch… who happened to run a pub on the edges of one of the dodgiest areas of South London.
“Like cockroaches, them lot are,” Rodge muttered as, on screen, the pickpocket put his hands up in what looked like a placatory gesture. “As fast as we clear ‘em out one door, they’re coming in the other. This is where it kicks off.”
On screen, another shell suit had, unseen by Carlton, come up behind the lad while he continued to remonstrate with the thief. The new shell suit was squat – fat rather than muscle, I figured – but was in possession of a beer bottle and an angry look.
On the very edge of the screen, Rodge – his giant torso clad in an open-necked short-sleeved shirt – appeared and began to pour white wine into a glass for a waiting customer.
And then, with no obvious provocation, the short, fat shell suit necked the contents of his Corona, flipped the bottle in his hand and smashed it over Carlton’s head.
Or rather, attempted to smash it, for either Carlton had a harder head than usual, the bottle was of thicker glass than normal, or the shell suit’s arm strength was lacking; and, instead of smashing on Carlton’s head in ancient bar-brawl style, the bottle bounced back, startling the fat shell suit and causing Carlton to stagger slightly and to half turn towards whatever it was that had just smashed into his skull.
Then, all hell broke loose.
The skinny one, sensing, I suppose, that the gig was up, jerked to his left as though to escape. He was quick but not quick enough, as Carlton clearly caught the movement out of the corner of his eye, swivelled, his arm coming up and smashed his fist full on into skinny shell suit’s face.
Skinny’s head flipped back, an arc of dark liquid – visible even on the grainy monitor – spewing from his nose and, as he reached the apex of the arc, his hands flying up towards the source of his pain, Carlton brought his knee up full force into the would-be pickpocket’s groin.
Behind me, Rodge oofed. “Gets me every time,” he mutt
ered.
Fat shell suit – who’d stood in seeming shock while his mate was punched and kneed – now seemed to decide it was time for action, but he’d delayed too late. Carlton was on him, grabbing him so hard by the neck of his shell suit that the fabric ripped, causing the fat one to half-stagger backwards and the tall Carlton’s intended side-on punch to become a glancing blow.
Skinny, recovering some of his awareness and doubtless furious at having been bested by the young man, now reached out, grabbed a handful of Carlton’s hair, yanking his head back and slamming his fist into the young man’s lower back.
“Kidneys,” Dash muttered unnecessarily.
Fat bloke snatched a pint glass from the bar, emptied the contents on the floor and eyed up Carlton’s exposed throat.
But, again, he waited a second too long and Carlton’s right leg swung up, extended – the foot pointing straight up – and was slammed straight between the fat man’s legs, causing him to drop the pint glass and double over.
“Well at least neither of ‘em‘ll be spawning any time soon,” Rodge growled.
On screen, Carlton snapped his head forward – leaving Skinny shell suit holding a handful of hair – grabbed the fat one by the collar and the top of his tracksuit bottoms and swung him around, using him as a battering ram straight into the gut of his mate.
All of this had taken seconds and it was at this point that Rodger Reese and three bouncers suddenly piled in to the scene, fists flailing and arms flying out to the sides as they herded the three brawlers up and shoved them towards the door.
“Sorry about this,” Rodge said. “Looking back at the footage, I can clearly see your mate was the innocent party here but I got a pub to run and, in cases like this, all I can do is get the brawl away from my punters.”
The threesome was shoved from shot, the camera stayed where it was, showing an empty corner of the pub, a beer bottle and empty pint glass discarded on the carpeted floor; and, in a few moments, a barmaid came into shot, picked both up, placed them on the bar and rambled back out of shot.
Death Of A Devil Page 19
