“We know where Jimmy Carter, Johnny Ho, Tiny Tim and Charlie Chisel are. And Billy is obviously accounted for, but we’re still missing Al Halliwell and some character called Gary the Ghost, about who nobody seems to know much at all, and who we’ve not been able to find.
“Billy had the stones, and was due to hide them until such time as the heat had died down. Only we think one of the gang killed him, hid the body behind a fake wall in the pub and made off with the diamonds.”
She looked at me incredulously. “They bricked him up?”
I nodded.
“Jesus, how much time did they have to do that? Half the pub would surely have heard the noise.”
“It’s a good point,” I answered, “but the pub was closed for a refurb, which means everything they needed – well, bricks and mortar – were all probably sat in the cellar beside them. And they killed him on a Friday night, so they would have had all weekend to hide the body.”
She frowned. “But why wouldn’t whoever killed him have just dragged the body out of the pub – I dunno, rolled up in some raggy carpet or something – and dumped it in the river?”
“Also a good question,” Caz nodded, “except while the inside of the pub was likely to be relatively quiet and undisturbed, the streets around The Marq, twenty years ago, weren’t exactly dead, especially at weekends.”
I nodded. “Whoever killed him would have been risking a lot to get the body out of the pub and away safely, while bricking the body up would have hidden it at least long enough to allow the killer to escape.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” she said, looking up. “He can’t have been murdered twenty years ago.”
“We’re fairly sure he wasn’t faking it,” Caz replied.
“Eve,” I said, trying to sound as sympathetic as I could, “he’s definitely dead. We found his body. Two gunshots.”
“But how do you know it’s him?” she asked, her frown deepening. “How?”
I glanced at Caz, who was also frowning.
“The police?” she asked, and I shook my head.
“We only know it’s Billy,” I said, “because Jimmy Carter told us it was. And since he didn’t see the body, he can’t have known who it was.”
“Unless,” Caz pointed out, “he’s the one who put the body behind the wall.”
“But if he had the stones,” I said, “why would he have come back?”
“Tell me more about these diamonds,” Eve asked.
“Not much more to tell. Billy was supposed to stash them somewhere safe until the heat died down. Somewhere an eye could be kept on them, but where nobody would think to look. Except, someone killed him and took the stones.”
“Or not,” Caz murmured, gesturing to Eve Stewart, who was muttering to herself and counting backwards on her fingers.
“No, definitely,” she said. “I met Frank in ninety-seven, we were married in ninety-eight and Billy sent me a letter in early ninety-nine.”
“A what?”
“A letter, dear,” Caz said, shushing me. “It’s like an email only on paper. Do you still have the letter?” she asked Eve Stewart.
The other woman shook her head. “I binned it. No real reason to keep it. It was pretty much what you might expect it to be. Fury that I’d gone with another man, threats of what he would do to me if he ever got his hands on me, all the rest.”
“Can you remember anything else about it?” I asked.
Her brow creased in concentration. “It had a foreign stamp on it,” she said. “I think it was Columbian.”
“Columbian? He went to South America?”
She lifted her cup and sipped her tea again, still racking her brain for answers, then shook her head. “It might have been Peru. But I’m fairly sure it was Columbia.”
“But if Billy was alive in 1999, then whose body was down in the cellar at The Marq?”
“Well surely the police can tell,” Eve said. “I mean, they must have – what do they call it – DNA? Fingerprints?”
Now it was my turn to shake my head. I dropped into the kitchen chair, running my fingers through my hair. “They can only compare DNA if they have some DNA to compare with, and they’re still trying to get fingerprints off the body because of the decomposition.”
And then a light went on.
“You know,” I said, “there may be a reason why we’ve been unable to identify, let alone locate, Gary The Ghost.”
Caz rolled her eyes back in her head. “And that would be…?” she asked.
“Because maybe,” I offered, “Gary has actually been a ghost for twenty years, ever since he was shot and put behind the walls of The Marq.”
THIRTY-ONE
I knocked again at the door and stepped back, keeping an eye on the curtains in the window beside it to see if they twitched.
They remained almost resolutely still.
The glass of the window had been cleaned lately with, I assumed, some industrial solvent, but the shape of the spray paint that had been daubed on it was still visible in the shape of a ghostly ‘F’.
The door I was banging on – a solid metal one that looked more like the door of a safe than of a fifth-floor council flat – showed the ghostly ‘AK’ under the obviously recently-applied red gloss paint, and the brickwork between the two, to which someone had obviously taken a wire brush, now had a patina of white paint smeared across it, as the ‘R’ and the ‘E’ had been removed, even if not all trace of them had been obliterated.
I banged again and stepped back.
“Maybe she’s out,” Caz murmured behind me.
“Maybe,” I said, “but I’m not entirely convinced.”
“So,” Caz said, “apropos of nothing, if Billy the Brick killed Gary the Ghost, and – in keeping with his nickname – bricked him up behind the walls of The Marq before running off to South America with his ill-gotten gains, who killed Jimmy Carter? And why?”
“That,” I admitted, “is a perfectly god question. And one which I have – at present – not a single clue how to answer.”
I turned away from the door. “Not in,” I said, pulling a notebook and pen from my pocket and scribbling a note and my contact details on it, before realising that there was no letterbox to post it through.
Dropping to my knees, I attempted to slide the note under the door but found that even this entrance to the property was blocked.
Sighing, I stood, shoved the note back into my pocket and stepped back, looking around. A curtain in the next flat twitched but, even as I watched, it stopped moving. I moved towards the front door, which was open and was just in time to see a sour-faced woman appear in the hallway, glare at me and slam the door shut.
“Perhaps,” Caz suggested, “we should come back another time.”
There seemed little alternative. But just to be sure, I pressed the doorbell one last time, waiting until the dim and distant tones had rung themselves away to nothing before turning and walking back along the landing, heading for the stairs.
We had descended from the fifth to the fourth floor and were walking down the next set of stairs when a woman, head down, two heavy shopping bags straining at her side, pushed past us on her way up the stairs.
I stopped.
“Tara?” I said.
The woman’s back straightened but she said nothing until she reached the landing above us, at which point she stopped, turned and stared down on us.
“Are you Tara?” I asked again.
“What’s it to you?” she asked.
I smiled, putting my hand out and introducing myself as I began to re-ascend the stairs.
The woman lowered the bag in her right hand to the landing, her hand darting into the pocket of her raincoat. “Stay right where you are,” she said, steel in her voice.
“I don’t think you’ll need the taser with us,” I said. “We just want to talk.”
“So talk,” she said, all emotion flattened from her voice.
“Look,” I glanced behind me at C
az, held both hands up in a position of surrender and took another step forwards, “this is probably best if I at least come up on to the same level you’re at.”
“What do you want?” she asked again, her eyes moving slowly between the two of us, her hand never leaving her pocket.
“To talk,” I said, fishing in the inside pocket of my coat and pulling out a printout from the security cameras. “About him.”
Tara glanced at the photo I was holding out to her, frowned, stared harder and looked up at me again. “Why?”
“Because he’s our friend,” I said, “and he’s in trouble. We think you might be able to help.”
She glanced over my head at Caz then dropped the other shopping bag to the floor. “Bring the groceries,” she said, turning on her heels and heading for her flat.
Caz and I – me carrying both heavy bags – scuttled after her, as she withdrew a large ring of keys from her pocket and began turning the first of four visible locks. At last, the door swung open and, without so much as glancing at us, she walked into the flat, saying, “Take your shoes off.”
I walked behind Caz and, on an instruction from Tara, put the groceries in the small kitchen to the left of the front door. She carried on walking, shoeless now, her coat hung on a wooden peg behind the door, down the hall and into the living room.
“Put the kettle on, while you’re in there,” she called. “The tea’s in the caddy on the side. Mine’s black, no sugar.”
Teas made, I placed the cups on a tray and walked the length of the hallway to find Caz and Tara sitting and chatting amiably in a couple of red leather clubman armchairs either side of an old-fashioned fireplace with a small gas fire inserted into the space.
“Cheers.” Tara laconically reached a hand out to me to accept the proffered mug and, tea delivered to Caz, I took my own and sat on a matching red leather art deco sofa on the opposite side of the small sitting room.
“You’d make a good butler,” Tara said, sipping her tea and looking at Caz. “Don’t you think he’d make a good butler?”
Caz considered this momentarily, then shook her head. “Not got the temperament. Or the height. In my experience, the best butlers buttle from a height. Otherwise, they get mistaken for furniture,” she said, sipping her tea. “Tara’s been having some trouble with the local population,” she said to me.
“Some of the local population,” Tara corrected, sipping her tea. “Most of ‘em don’t care. Either way. They just want to live their lives. But some of them can’t live their lives unless they’re making other people’s lives unhappy. They knew me when I was Tommy,” she said, glancing across the living room to a framed picture of a woman in a hospital bed, crocheted bed jacket thrown across her shoulders, a tiny newborn baby cradled in her arms, “and they didn’t much like me then, so I suppose I’ve made it easier for them to hate me now. Never mind,” she said, “I’ve survived worse.”
“So, this friend,” she turned her attention to me, “what’s he done?”
“Nothing,” I said, reluctant to mention murder at this stage.
“Well there should be nothing to worry about,” she said, rising from her armchair. “I’ll show you out. Only I like to make sure the door’s locked behind any visitors.”
“He’s confessed to a murder. But he didn’t do it.”
“He’s covering for someone,” Caz explained, as Tara dropped back into the seat.
“Only she didn’t do it either,” I added, before finishing, somewhat lamely, with, “it’s complicated.”
“Jimmy,” Tara said.
“You know him?” I asked, and she shook her head.
“He – Carlton– spoke about him a lot, that night. About how he wanted to kill this Jimmy. About how Jimmy had ruined his life, ruined his mum’s life, ruined any happiness they ever had. He called him the devil.”
“So how long did Carlton stay here?” I asked quietly, and Tara’s guard descended again.
“What’s that to you?”
“Look,” I pressed on, “we’re trying to prove he’s innocent. So far we’ve managed to follow him from when he left my pub to when he ended up meeting you. And then he left with you. Jimmy was still alive at that stage, and dead – according to the coroner – by early the next morning, so we need to know how much of that time we can fill in.”
Tara flicked her hair from her eyes, stared suspiciously at me, at Caz.
“We came back here,” she said at length. “Look,” she said, “it’s not what you think.”
“I don’t think anything,” I said quietly, “and even if I did, what business would it be of mine what it was what some might think?”
She stared at me for a moment, then glanced at Caz. “Does he always talk like Yoda?”
Caz chuckled. “He’s not a bad guy,” she said, “but prone to caring a bit too much. Give him a break,” she smiled, “he genuinely wants to help.”
Now Tara sighed. “I’d never met him before,” she said, “just stumbled on him that night getting the shit kicked out of him by those gorillas. But I’m usually good at reading people.”
“You pulled a taser on me,” I protested.
“Correction,” she held a hand up, “I fumbled in my pocket where I usually keep my taser. I did not pull it on you. And anyways – how do you know I’ve got a taser?”
“We saw the security footage of what you did to the fat gorilla,” Caz explained.
“Yeah, well, he had it coming,” Tara said, her eyes flashing momentarily. “Bastard’s always been a complete pig.”
“So as a reader of people…” I prompted.
“I brought him back here,” she finished. “But it—”
“Wasn’t what I think,” I finished for her. “You’ve said. So what was it?”
“He was shaking,” she said. “I thought with anger. Then I realised it was with fear. Not a fighter, really. When we got back here some of my neighbours had,” she nodded her head towards the front of the flat, “decided to redecorate my frontage with some new street art for me.”
“I’m sorry about that,” I said, and she waved my apology aside.
“It happens. Carlton was livid. I thought,” her glance dropped to the carpet, “because of me, but he was cool. It was the graffiti that wound him up. We talked.”
Her gaze came up and fixed, coolly, on me. “That’s all we did. Sitting on that sofa, him telling me about bullies – well, one particular bully, to be honest, and I think you know which one – and me just listening, until he asked me why I didn’t just pack up and leave here.”
“Why don’t you?” Caz asked, and Tara’s eyes flashed.
“Cos this is my home. This was my mum’s home before me and my Nan lived here when they built the block. I’ve as much right to be here as anyone, and I’m not gonna let those fuckers push me away from my place.”
“So, that night…” I prompted.
“He cried,” she said. “Not at first. Took a while, then it was like he’d been storing it up his whole life. God,” she shook her head, “I’ve never met anyone so sad in my whole life. It was like he thought it was all his fault. All these bad things that had happened, he thought, were because he hadn’t been able to stop them happening.”
“He was just a kid,” Caz murmured, and Tara smiled sadly at her.
“That’s what I told him, but I don’t know if it helped.”
“So what time did he leave here?” I asked, and she came straight back with the answer.
“I don’t know,” she said, “but he was still here when I left at lunchtime the next day. He slept for a bit that night, then woke up and asked if I had any paint thinners, so at first light, he was out on the balcony with some old newspaper and a bottle of turps cleaning the window, then he got my wire brush and rubbed the graffiti off the wall as best he could.
“When B&Q opened at nine we were waiting outside, bought a couple of pots of paint, got back here, and he rubbed down the front door and put a coat of paint over the graffi
ti. He was waiting for it to dry when I left – I had an appointment at one thirty I couldn’t afford to miss. He’d done another coat of paint, locked up and left by the time I got back about half three.”
I glanced at Caz. “By which time Jimmy Carter’s body had been found floating in the Thames.”
“So he’s innocent,” she responded, with a raised eyebrow, “which can’t come as a surprise to anyone, really.”
“Tara,” I said, “would you be willing to tell your story to the police?”
“The police?” She laughed mirthlessly. “Love, the police round here don’t place much stock in the word of people like me.”
“They will this time,” I said. “I promise.”
She considered the request and, at length, shrugged. “If it helps.”
“Oh, it’ll help.” I stood, collecting my cup and Caz’s. “And thank you.”
Tara stood too, following us out of the living room and to the kitchen where we put the cups on the side.
“I hope it all works out okay,” she said, shaking my hand and receiving, from Caz, a hug and air kiss.
“Likewise,” Caz said, handing her a card. “And if those artistes should ever return, would you do me a favour and ring this number?”
Tara glanced at the card and smiled. “Why thank you, Your Ladyship. Listen,” she turned serious again, “would you do me a favour?”
“Anything,” I said.
“Tell Carlton thank you, for the paintwork. And tell him I said hello.”
I nodded. “Done,” I said, and she reached out a hand and laid it on my arm.
“And tell him, please, that none of it – none of it,” she repeated the phrase, loaded with meaning, “was his fault. He’s a sweet guy. I hope it works out for him.”
THIRTY-TWO
We left Tara’s flat and made our way to a grim and desolate high street, the rows of empty shop fronts broken up by charity shops, burger bars and betting shops.
Caz looked around her in search, I supposed, of a cab and sighed. “Lord, Danny, how did we get to this?”
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