The Copper Heart

by Sarah Painter

  Maria’s eyes widened a little.

  ‘I will prove that I had nothing to do with it. That no Crow had anything to do with it. And, if you require, I will help you to exact justice on the person or persons responsible.’ Wordiness was catching. Lydia took a deep breath and forced herself to stop speaking.

  Maria’s eyes had narrowed, again. She tilted her head back a fraction. ‘You will bring me your findings first.’ It wasn’t a question.

  ‘If I can,’ Lydia said, after a moment of hesitation.

  ‘What about your pet policeman?’ Maria indicated Fleet who was watching them intently, flanked by yet more security.

  ‘This has nothing to do with Fleet or the Met,’ Lydia said. ‘This is Family business.’

  Chapter Eleven

  The day after the funeral was a Friday and Fleet called Lydia. ‘Shall we go out to eat? Or I could cook, if you’re happy to come to mine.’

  ‘Not tonight,’ Lydia said. She wanted to dig into Alejandro’s life for the last few months, maybe see if Jason could use his computer wizardry to dig up any secrets. ‘You can come here later, though. If you want?’

  ‘Sure.’ Fleet paused. ‘It would be nice to go out sometime, though.’

  ‘Like a proper couple,’ Lydia said. ‘You old romantic.’

  ‘Less of the old. Nothing wrong with a proper date. There’s a Caribbean place in Vauxhall that’s supposed to be good.’

  ‘Next week, maybe. Or when things are more settled.’

  Fleet paused. ‘I hear what you’re saying, but I think we should go tonight or this weekend. If we wait for our lives to be more settled, we’re never going to go.’

  Lydia found a hot chocolate on the counter, the whipped cream deflated and congealed on the brown surface. She poured it down the sink. ‘Are you annoyed?’

  ‘Not at all. But I would rather we accepted that this is how our lives are and prioritise each other now, rather than waiting for it to get easy.’

  The man made a lot of sense. But Lydia didn’t hold the best track record in making time for normal life. ‘You know what you signed up for,’ she said, keeping it light. ‘I’m more about the late-night stakeouts, takeaway, sex and an unhealthy work-life balance.’

  ‘I know,’ Fleet said and she could hear the smile in his voice. ‘Think about it, though. It’s not like I’m asking you to take a holiday. It’s just an evening out.’

  ‘If I say yes and you book something I might have to cancel at the last minute.’

  ‘So might I, still not a reason to not even try.’

  ‘Well, if you’re going to be all reasonable about it…’ Lydia hoped that she sounded faux-annoyed rather than proper-annoyed. She felt proper-annoyed but knew she had no right to the emotion and that fact was enough to make the irritation worse. She felt as if there were pulls on her time and attention all the damn time and now Fleet was asking for more.

  ‘Just wait until you taste the salted fish, it’s supposed to be amazing with the curried goat.’

  ‘You had better be joking.’ Lydia was more of a pizza-and-a-beer kind of a girl, as Fleet well knew.

  ‘Chicken.’

  * * *

  That evening Fleet arrived with a thin crust pizza and a bottle of red wine and hadn’t argued when Lydia had said she still had a bit of work to do. She nibbled at a slice of margherita while she read yet another puff piece article about the wunderkind Alejandro Silver and his wildly successful career. Fleet was working at the other side of her desk, slumped in the client’s chair with his long legs stretched out to the side. At least, Lydia assumed Fleet was working. He might have been playing Candy Crush on his phone for all she knew. She had been researching Alejandro online, going over the last few months of his life and making notes. Which were mostly just questions and blank spaces. She wasn’t going to panic. All cases began like this, with random pieces floating in a big sea of ‘what the hell?’. If she followed the process, she would find more pieces and, eventually, fit them all together. What was clear to her after his funeral, though, was that Maria was no longer Lydia’s prime suspect. Not off the hook for his death, but no longer top of Lydia’s list. She was a Silver and naturally extremely convincing, but Lydia had seen real grief in her eyes.

  Alejandro had decided to enter politics the year before and, within months, had become the MP for Holborn. She broke the companionable silence to say as much to Fleet. ‘How did he manage that so quickly?’

  Fleet looked up from his phone. ‘I have no idea.’

  Lydia opened her laptop and began researching. The parliamentary seat had opened up in February when the existing MP had keeled over. Which was interesting. A Silver had got the very thing they wanted as a result of a timely death. The MP had been approaching seventy but there were pictures of her completing a five kilometre fun run the week before she died. It wasn’t conclusive, of course, but it suggested a certain level of health.

  A little further down the page, Lydia got her answer. It wasn’t age or health related. The MP, Nadine Gormley, had been hit by a car while holidaying with her family in Greece. It was a hit and run and the case remained open.

  Fleet stood up and walked to her side of the desk, leaning down to read over her shoulder. ‘That’s convenient.’

  ‘That’s what I was just thinking,’ Lydia said. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a handy contact in the Greek police?’

  ‘I can ask around. Nothing official, but someone might chat as a favour. Interpol are probably involved, too. It’s an MP, after all, not-’

  ‘A nobody,’ Lydia finished.

  ‘I wasn’t going to say that,’ Fleet said. ‘Of course, it could be something else, something entirely unrelated to Alejandro’s political career.’

  ‘He worked criminal law,’ Lydia said, echoing what Jason had suggested. ‘Could be a bad guy from his past, freshly out of jail and looking for revenge.’

  ‘I’ll look at his old cases and see if anybody has been recently released.’

  ‘I know the bill he was going to vote on that day didn’t look controversial, but was there anything else scheduled that someone might want Alejandro to miss?’ She was on the parliamentary website which listed all the public bills currently going through the houses. ‘What are private bills?’

  Fleet scanned the page. ‘Things that relate to private companies, I think. They’re not secret.’

  Nothing jumped out to Lydia, but then anything could conceivably be enough to kill a person over. Everything important enough to make it to parliament had ramifications, even if you couldn’t see them right away. Ripples spreading outward from a pebble thrown into a pool.

  Fleet straightened up. ‘Maybe there isn’t a motive.’

  Lydia was still skimming the list of bills. ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Because maybe it isn’t a murder. Maybe the pathologist is right and it was a brain aneurysm.’

  ‘I can’t go back to Maria and say that. It’s not going to fly.’

  ‘Even if it’s the truth?’

  Lydia kept quiet. She didn’t believe it was the truth. No, more than that, she knew it wasn’t the truth. It was down there in her gut, a certainty that only grew with every piece of so-called evidence to the contrary. Alejandro Silver did not drop dead of a brain aneurysm from some undiagnosed condition. He did not. If she told Fleet, he would say that she didn’t want to believe it. Or he would be defensive of the system he had dedicated his professional life to, the system he believed in. He would say that Lydia was mistrustful of his work, and that she had an inflated sense of the power of the Families. He wouldn’t go so far as to say she was letting emotions cloud her judgement – the man wasn’t a fool – but he might think it.

  Fleet stood up and cleared their plates, then went and made coffee. When he came back, he opened his work laptop and Lydia felt a small release of tension. He might not agree with her hunch, but he would do the work. He was a good copper.

  ‘So, motive,’ Fleet said after a few minutes. ‘I pulled recen
t releases who might have a grudge against Alejandro and there was nothing obvious. One man got out in December but he was in for white collar crime and I can’t see him turning violent. Only other possibility was released the week before Alejandro died. He just served twenty-three years for killing his wife with a hammer. Found God inside, apparently.’

  Lydia made a disbelieving noise.

  ‘Quite,’ Fleet said. ‘But even if his piety wouldn’t stop him from going after Alejandro, there are more obvious targets first. Like the brother-in-law who gave evidence. And I don’t see him as the mastermind type who could organise something as controlled as this. I looked at his file and he’s twice as thick as he is nasty, and has all the impulse-control problems associated with his crimes. I mean, if Alejandro had been bludgeoned in a pub then we’d have a suspect…’

  ‘Got it,’ Lydia said. ‘You know I was keen on Maria for it?’

  ‘You’ve changed your mind?’

  Lydia decided not to reveal her moment of empathy with Maria and stuck instead to the facts. ‘I haven’t found anything. She was in court on the day he died and alibis don’t get much better than a full room at the Old Bailey.’

  ‘So we’re back to an undetectable poison,’ Fleet said.

  Lydia liked the ‘we’ in the sentence. ‘Or something less prosaic.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Lydia didn’t want to say the word ‘magic’ out loud and she tried to think of an alternative. ‘I was thinking about the Families,’ she began. ‘JRB have been trying to stir up trouble between us. This would be an excellent way to turn up the heat. Maybe I’m supposed to suspect Maria and she’s supposed to go for me and, before you know it, there’s a full-on war.’

  ‘What about the Foxes? Couldn’t it be one of them?’

  It was no secret that Fleet didn’t like or trust Paul Fox and Lydia didn’t blame him. ‘I doubt it, the Foxes tend to keep out of this kind of thing. And I don’t see Paul trying to start a war. Too much work.’

  ‘You’re blind when it comes to him,’ Fleet said. ‘Your history…’

  ‘I see perfectly well,’ Lydia said. ‘You don’t know him the way I do.’

  ‘Well, that’s true.’

  ‘Let’s not fight,’ Lydia said. ‘Bigger fish.’

  ‘So. JRB. How close did you get to a contact there?’

  ‘Not close at all,’ Lydia said. ‘Shell corporations within shell corporations like a bloody Russian Doll. Best lead was the link to the Pearls.’

  ‘You’re not going there, again.’ It was a statement not a question.

  ‘Not unless I have to.’

  * * *

  Stepping into the barbershop which hid the entrance to the Foxes’ favourite drinking establishment was out of Lydia’s comfort zone. It was nowhere near as scary as the first time she had done it, though. Things were very different now. Paul Fox was the head of the Fox Family and, crucially, Lydia was the head of the Crows. Still, her pulse speeded up as she pushed open the door, nodded to the barber and headed down the stairs which led to the concealed door.

  One of Paul’s brothers was sitting at the bar and Lydia battled the urge to walk straight out again. She had last seen him kicking her while she lay on the ground, so her second urge was to go over and stab him somewhere soft and painful.

  Luckily, Paul appeared from the gloom, and wrapped his arms around her. Lydia wasn’t a big hugger and Paul hadn’t greeted her that way since they were an item, but she figured it was part of the show. He was marking territory with his Family and making it clear that Lydia was welcome, so she went with it. She had prepared herself for the onslaught of ‘Fox’ but the added proximity to his skin unleashed an extra set of pheromones into the mix. It felt like the hug went on for longer than was strictly necessary, but the sensation of being pressed up against Paul’s hard chest wasn’t unpleasant. Once he released her, he gazed into her eyes. ‘It’s good to see you here’.

  She smiled her shark smile and planned a cold shower for when she got home. ‘Drink?’

  ‘Of course,’ Paul signalled to somebody behind Lydia and led her to a table to sit down.

  Moments later, two glasses and a bottle of Macallan arrived, courtesy of the brother Lydia had seen when she walked in. He didn’t look thrilled at waiting on Lydia Crow and he would probably have preferred Paul beat him up again. After Lydia had been set upon, Paul had arranged, or more likely administered, a beating of each of the perpetrators, matching their injuries to Lydia’s. And then he had banished his own father for his part in the proceedings. As apologies went, it had been pretty comprehensive. Still, the Fox sibling by the table bowed his head as if expecting further retribution.

  Paul flicked his eyes and he moved away. Lydia let out her breath. She knew that she wasn’t in physical danger and that the guy had been following orders from his own father, but she had no desire to chat about the weather. Or, for that matter, to have a big heart-to-heart. The past was done. He couldn’t take it back and she wouldn’t forget.

  ‘I’ve got a proposition for you,’ Paul said, uncorking the bottle and pouring two fingers into each glass. ‘An alliance.’

  Lydia had guessed what he was going to say, but sitting in the Den with a glass of whisky in her hand, it suddenly became very real. Could she forge a formal alliance with the Fox Family on behalf of the Crows? Should she? It was one thing to be friendly with Paul but quite another to make it official. And the Crows didn’t trust the Foxes. Nobody did.

  ‘I know our reputation,’ Paul said. ‘And I know we haven’t been on the Crows’ Christmas list for a very long time, but things have changed. We’re the new generation. We don’t have to be bound by the past. We can work out a new way of doing things.’

  It sounded fine, but the past was still there. Was that why she kept being led to graveyards? Were her ancestors trying to remind her of her duties? That was a crazy thought. The pressure of leadership making her unstable. Already. ‘I’m here because Alejandro Silver has been murdered and that is bad for all of us.’

  Paul nodded approvingly. ‘You’re not taken in by the coroner’s verdict, then?’

  Lydia raised an eyebrow. ‘Please. The Silvers aren’t going to believe it, either. They will still be looking for retribution. I think it’s important to present a united front, at least until we find enough evidence so that Maria Silver accepts the police’s verdict or we find those responsible. It is also a gesture of goodwill and trust between our Families that is the first step toward a more generous and peaceful existence.’

  Lydia clinked her glass against Paul’s and they both drank.

  ‘You sound different,’ Paul said, head tilted back. ‘You been giving lots of speeches?’

  Lydia allowed herself a small, honest smile. ‘It’s exhausting.’

  ‘How was the funeral?’

  ‘Fancy,’ Lydia said. ‘And a bit creepy. Have you been inside Temple Church?’

  He shook his head. ‘I know it’s where the Silvers conduct all their significant events. Christenings, memorials, weddings. Rumour has it, the main bloodline Silvers are interred underneath the church.’

  ‘Does your Family have a church?’

  Paul snorted. ‘No. Not really our thing. You know the Silvers aren’t really believers? The Temple Church connection was purely business.’

  Lydia did know. As well as bedtime stories about the Crows, Henry had told her tales from the other Families. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Inns of Court were using the Temple Church and its environs and had invested in architecture and so on. Being men of law, and having learned from the decline of the Knights Templar who were buried deep under the church, they knew the value of a good contract and they wanted to protect their position. They petitioned King James for a charter that would ensure they could use the Temple in perpetuity and King James, being no more immune to legal persuasion than anybody else, agreed. In gratitude they gave him a gold cup which got lost years later by a broke Charles I. What wasn’t
in the history books, is that the Silver Family had arrived from their travels in the New World with a large cache of gold and silver and an uncanny ability to persuade others to see their point of view. They found their perfect match in the Inns of Court and quickly ingratiated themselves into the profession. Nobody knew how, but within five years of the original charter being agreed with King James, the Silvers had added an amendment; they also had use of the church in perpetuity with a special dispensation to build a Family crypt under the chancel. And there, nestled between the cherub-cheeked choristers above ground and the bones of the Knights Templars deep below, the Silver Family had interred their most important ancestors ever since.

  ‘What most people don’t know,’ Henry had explained. ‘Is that they liked the gold cup that the Inns of Court had used, so they made a silver one for their amendment. But, being the Silvers, they didn’t just give it to King James as a souvenir to be lost among Royal baubles. They made a big ceremony, where the King and the head of the Silver Family drank wine from the cup in recognition of their fealty. And then they convinced King James that the cup should remain with the Silvers, in their Family crypt as a sign of their devotion to the crown. Which meant, of course, that it was forgotten by the Crown as soon as King James passed on and the Silvers got to give a gift while never losing anything at all.’

  Lydia wasn’t in the habit of revealing her own knowledge, much better to find out what other people knew first, so she just said, ‘I know the Inns of Court used to use the church to do their lawyer stuff back in olden times.’

  Paul’s expression had turned serious. He put his glass down and folded his hands. If Lydia had been dealing with anybody else she would have said he seemed suddenly nervous.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about the Silvers anymore.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He tilted his head. ‘There’s another way to unite our Families. Fast-track it.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ The whisky was really good and Lydia finished her glass and poured another. She had missed the burn of it. The feeling of warmth and wellbeing. She had always had an exceedingly high tolerance and never seemed to get drunk, but four or five drinks had the pleasant effect of muting some of the buzzing in her mind and body, buzzing that she was barely aware of until the volume was turned down and a little bit of quiet space opened up.