“You did this?” Winston asked him, the anger bringing out the old patois in his voice, lowering his pitch to a baritone.
“Should it matter to you who did it?” Soames replied, unfazed. “I thought the point of you was that you didn’t ask questions.”
Winston stretched himself to his full height, tension pressing his tendons to the upper surface of his throat.
“Imma ask you again,” he said. “Did you do this to this girl?”
Soames smiled lazily, untroubled by the unspoken threat.
“What do you say?” he asked the girl. “Was it me? Did I do it?”
She swallowed, but didn’t answer immediately - only fixed the table with the same dead-eyed stare she’d worn since they arrived.
“No,” she whispered eventually, as unconvincing as anything Winston had ever heard.
He’ll kill her one day, he thought, with sudden but absolute certainty. If she leaves here with him, if she stays with him… he’ll kill her, as surely as I stand here now. And she’ll suffer more and worse than this, before he does.
He clamped a hand to Soames’ narrow shoulder, ready to pluck him from his chair and remove him, bodily, from the flat.
Soames barely flinched at the touch.
“So melodramatic,” he said, his short tongue styling so as tho. “Do sit down, Winston. I’m not leaving, not until you’ve done whatever it is you need to do to restore this lovely lady to her former glory. And you’re not going to make me leave, whatever opinion you might have on the subject. Not unless you want to spend every fortnight of the next ten years visiting your lovely lady down in Holloway.”
“He’d done his homework, the bastard,” Ruby said, uncharacteristically flat. “Must have been keeping tabs on me for months, me and Sita both, in case he ever needed a favour and we weren’t inclined to give it to him. He were like that, you know what I mean? The blackmailing sort. Always had one ear out for something he could use to get one over on you. Sort that’d salt away every detail, every bit of information for his little black book.”
“As it happened, he weren’t clued up on the job we were running right then - it were too recent, even for him. We’d only just started. But he had all the details on what we’d been up to before: names, dates, everything. And he’d have used it an’ all, if he hadn’t got his way - Win were sure of it.”
And so, with something worse than a gun to his head, Winston set to it: cleaning the girl’s wounds with water and then an antibiotic ointment he kept under the sink; sterilising the flesh around and inside them, stitching and bandaging where he had to.
Nausea rippled through his guts at the sight of them - the acid burn of swallowed vomit kissing his windpipe as his hands threaded the needle to sew the ragged ends of her skin together, Soames watching him as he worked.
Watching, and smiling.
None of the others spoke. Only Sita, whom El guessed must have heard the story before – might have known it well, even - seemed unaffected by the telling.
“Soames tried to pay him, when Win finished up with the girl,” she continued, still sounding distant, her mind tuned to another place and time. “Not a lot, probably just what he had in his pockets, but still. Pay him, like Win had done him a service. If it’d been me, I think I might’ve decked him, bunged the girl a few hundred quid and a train ticket to Scotland and drove her to the station before he came to – and hang the consequences. But Win weren’t like that - weren’t impulsive like I am. He’d never have done nothing to put me in danger.”
Her face sagged, the effort of recollection apparently taking its toll.
Karen cleared her throat.
“That’s horrible,” she said. “It is, really. But what’s it got to do with this Soames coming after you, now?”
Ruby rubbed at her eyes and sighed.
“Like I said,” she answered. “Win weren’t impulsive. But it gnawed away at him, thinking about Soames and that girl and what she’d likely gone back to, what he’d let her go back to. Thinking his hands were tied, that he couldn’t help - that Soames’d trace it back to him if he said anything, tried to do anything for the girl. Trace it back to him, then pick up the phone to the Old Bill and tip ‘em off about some of the things me and Sita here’d been up to.”
“He had himself convinced we were helpless, is what I’m saying - that Soames had us over a barrel, and that was all there was to it.”
“Me, though… I had other ideas.”
Chapter 10
Edgware, London
May 1972
She couldn’t get it off her mind, once Winston had told her. It kept her awake at night.
It was like a virus; a sickness. As if the knowledge of Soames and his young girlfriend and those crescent-shaped tears on her breasts, her neck, her hips was a disease her husband had contracted and then passed on to her.
And then there was the other part of it - the knowing that Soames had her. That he’d kept tabs on her, made notes and gathered evidence - evidence he could use at any time he fancied, any time he wanted a favour. Could keep using.
Because it was true, what they said about blackmail: you paid, and you paid, and you never stopped paying.
On the third, sleepless night, a solution came to her.
It wasn’t elegant; wasn't particularly fair, if you believed in the dispensation of justice. But she wasn’t sure she could do better, especially not with Sita temporarily out of the picture, and the longer she waited, the worse things would be for the girl, and possibly for Ruby too.
The following morning, with the boys at school and Win at the allotment - the place he went to get away from himself, to perform his godless variation on a prayer - she took the bus to her lock-up, a ten-car storage bay in Colindale she’d been renting in cash since the ‘60s from a property developer who, as far as she could make out, had her pegged as either a wealthy housewife with a spending problem she’d been hiding from her husband or a second-tier film star with a very forgettable face. She made a point of wearing her biggest, most elaborate sunglasses whenever they met, to keep him guessing.
She chose the Corvette for the journey: a vintage cherry red C1 she’d had shipped over from a dealer in Los Angeles the previous month. It was a lovely car; a great shiny slice of Americana, big and bold and impressive. It lifted her mood, driving it - sliding into the soft leather seats, running her hands over the steering wheel, hearing the engine come roaring into life like a jungle cat. It gave her a spring in her step; a bit of extra confidence.
She’d need them both, where she was going.
In the Corvette, she crossed the upper reaches of north London, zig-zagging the suburbs of Finchley and Southgate, the grey estates and half-built tower blocks of Tottenham and Walthamstow until she hit the cluster of Palladian architecture and well-tended greenery on the peripheries of Epping Forest that she still thought of as Essex, whatever the government said.
The place she was looking for was hard to find, necessitating a handful of detours through the eerily quiet streets of Ilford and Harold Wood and more than a couple of glances at the A to Z in the glovebox. The Corvette was more conspicuous there, the look and feel of the area more threadbare - the older money of Barnet and Brent and Harrow seeming to stretch not quite far enough east to touch the newer money flowing west from the Essex boroughs.
When she finally did see the house, separated from its neighbours by a long, wide driveway and a line of densely planted fir trees, she couldn’t believe she’d managed to miss it, even from a distance.
It was strangely proportioned, for one thing - both its bright white walls and the many windows dotted around them curved rather than angular, cast in rounds and not the squares and rectangles she’d come to expect of a conventional dwelling. There were three storeys, one layered on top of the other in circles of decreasing size, the final storey topped by a small open balcony surrounded - penned in - on all sides by high metal railings. The overarching impression was of a nautical wedding cake, or
an artistically inclined baker set loose on the early sketches of a luxury cruise liner.
She left the Corvette at the top of the driveway, wanting to maintain the element of surprise as long as was possible, and walked the path to the front door - an old-fashioned hardwood number that wouldn’t have been out of place on the top deck of a tea clipper, crowned by a bulky brass knocker in the shape of an anchor.
The man who answered the door had aged ten years in the eighteen months since she’d seen him last: his pot belly now bloomed to full fat, his black hair and moustache streaked with grey and slivers of white, the smoker’s lines at the corners of his mouth deepened to scar-like grooves and the circles under his eyes turned to sagging purple pouches.
The cigarette he’d been preparing to light before he registered who he was looking at fell from his lips to the ground as he took her in.
She seized the advantage his surprise gave her; it might be the only one she’d get.
“Alright, Des?” she asked him. “Mind if I come in? I got a proposition for you.”
“Desmond King,” said Sita, jumping in to fill the pause left by the parched throat and dry tongue that had caused Ruby to lapse into silence.
“Where have I heard that name?” asked Karen.
“Your Mum knew him,” Ruby answered, sipping at a glass of water Dexter had conveyed to her from some unseen region of the apartment. “Your old man too, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Knew him?” asked El.
“I’m afraid he’s no longer with us,” said Sita.
“Liver failure,” Ruby added. “1983, must have been. Can’t say I was surprised, neither - not with what he used to put away.”
“Who was he, then?” said Karen.
“He was a lot of things, Des King,” said Ruby. “But what he really liked was crossing the pavement. Him and his gang must’ve done over two dozen banks in the ‘60s. Never got caught for one of them, neither. Always managed to get away clean.”
She took another long drink of her water.
“Well,” she continued, “I say always…”
He hadn’t wanted her there; that much was clear. But he’d known better than to insult her outright, so he held the door open to let her inside; walked her through the house with its decking floors and portholes and sat her down in the garden with a glass of lemonade. He’d poured himself three fingers of Scotch in a coffee mug, she noticed, but she couldn’t begrudge it - not after she saw how badly his hands shook as he unstacked the chairs.
“What can I do for you, Ruby?” he asked, when he’d taken a drink - coughing to clear the morning phlegm from his throat.
Go careful, she told herself. He’s polite enough now, but you don’t know how he’ll turn if you push him too hard.
“You got a problem,” she said, slowly.
“Do I?” he answered, equally wary.
“Yeah.”
“You gonna tell me what it is, then?”
She ran a finger across the rim of her lemonade glass.
“I know you done that building society job over in Woolwich last month, you and your lads,” she said. “The one that got that old bloke killed.”
It was a nasty way of putting it - she knew that. As she’d heard it, neither Des King nor his gang had gone in intending to hurt anyone, much less put a hole in the chest of a pensioner queuing up to deposit a bagful of loose change. But one of the young ones had been green, jittery, not used to handling a shotgun, and when it went off accidentally in his hands, he hadn’t had the sense to point it up to the ceiling before it hit someone.
And now it wasn’t just an armed robbery charge King and the rest of them would be looking at, if they got picked up for it. It’d be manslaughter. Murder, even.
“Thing of it is,” she continued, when he didn’t respond, “if I know, then it won’t be long before the Bill know, too. Because I might have a bit more of an ear to the ground than your average plod, but they ain’t all stupid. And sooner or later, one of them’ll hear some of what I’ve been hearing. And then… well, like I said: you got a problem.”
“What do you want?” he said, not looking her way. He was shaking again, she saw; the remains of the Scotch spilling out of the mug and onto the green cast iron of the table.
Go careful, she told herself again.
“Believe it or not,” she said, “I want to help. Turns out, I got a bit of a problem of my own that needs sorting. And it seems to me that, if you’re amenable, there might be a way to get rid of both our problems. Sort ‘em both out, all in one go.”
“He might’ve dumped the guns,” she told them. “Chucked ‘em in the river or buried ‘em somewhere. In which case, I’d have been snookered. But I didn’t think he would’ve done, somehow. He weren’t stupid, neither. And the trouble with chucking things in the river or burying ‘em in a field is that all it takes, all it takes, is for one of them things to wash up on a mudbank or get dug up by some bright spark with a metal detector, and suddenly you’re right back where you started - only worse off, because now other people’ve got their hands on what it was you wanted hidden in the first place, and they’re asking themselves, and maybe more than just themselves, how it is that a shedload of serious ammunition happened to find its way to that field or that mudbank unaided.”
“He’d kept ‘em - that was what I reckoned. Kept ‘em close.”
“My problem,” she said, moistening her suddenly dry mouth with the lemonade and pushing on before he could deny it all or lose his rag, “ain’t quite the same as yours, I’ll grant you. I ain’t going into details, ‘cause you don’t need to know ‘em, but the fact of the matter is, there’s someone I need out the picture, sharpish. And soft touch that I am, I’d rather see him inside than six feet under.”
“So what I’m proposing is a bit of a quid pro quo. You help me get shot of him - and I’ll see to it that the Bill don’t so much as look your way about that Woolwich business.”
“Sound good?”
“I see where this is going,” said Karen. “Des King gives you the guns and whatever else incriminating he’s got from his bank job, and you use it to set up Charlie Soames. That about right?”
Ruby nodded.
“Spot on,” she said.
“And you weren’t at all worried that Soames might have given you up to the police anyway?” asked Dexter, ever the lawyer. “Especially if he made the connection between the setup and the threats he made to Dad?”
“‘Course I bleedin’ was!” Ruby replied. “Worried myself sick about it, morning and night. But was else was I supposed to do? Didn’t have a lot of other options, did I? At least if he was banged up, I’d have a bit of time to have a rummage round his gaff and see if I could find whatever it was he had on me. And he’d have a hell of a lot less credibility throwing accusations ‘round from the inside of a cell than he would’ve done from some rich bird’s house off Park Lane.”
King pulled another cigarette from the box in his top pocket, clamped it between his stained front teeth and lit it, his hands steadying as he inhaled.
“Alright,” he said, “you got my attention. I’m not saying any of it’s true, what you just said. But let’s say for argument’s sake that it was, and I had found myself with a problem like that one you just mentioned. How exactly would you go about fixing it? And what would I have to do for you, if you did?”
“That,” she replied, with more confidence than she felt, “is a bloody good question. And I think you’re gonna like the answer. Because what I got in mind, it don’t need much more from you than your blessing.”
She recounted what she thought it would take - the shopping list of ingredients that, together, would bring about the right result.
First, the van. It would have to be new - that was a given. She couldn’t risk there being any previous owners waiting in the wings for the Bill to talk to, when the time came. But it would have to be unremarkable, too - something completely innocuous, drab even, a Transit or a Morris Minor in gre
y or brown. Something you wouldn’t look twice at, if you passed it in the street.
She was confident enough that she could lay her hands on one without much trouble.
Next, the certificates - the legal-looking bits of ownership paperwork that, when strategically placed in the glove compartment, would tie Soames irrefutably to the van. These, too, she could take care of, or so she told Des King - though here (and this part she kept to herself) she’d likely need to pull a bit on Sita, who had of the two of them both the keener nose for forgery and the more cordial relationship with Ralph Anderson, a wizened little pixie of a man over in Wood Green who was widely considered the Michelangelo of the counterfeit document world.
Then something belonging to Soames, something that anyone who knew him knew was his. Not the knife; he’d never let that out of his sight. But a piece of jewellery, perhaps. The little gold pendant he wore round his neck, the chain so cheap and thin that a halfway decent pickpocket could sidle up to him in the pub or the paper shop and have the clasp untied before he’d even noticed they were there.
(She’d need Sita for that too, once she was back, Ruby thought - not because Sita was the better dip, but because she’d always been marginally better at disguising herself of the two of them, and keeping Soames in the dark for as long as possible was a definite necessity. Doing it herself would be too risky, too risky by far).
And finally, assuming King still had them - the shotguns.
“And anything else you might have left over from the job,” she added. “Anything the Bill can trace back to that bank. Don’t matter what it is, so long as it’s evidence.”
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 9
