by RJ Dark
‘You drunk?’ she said.
‘No.’ I could see her feet; she was wearing sandals and had painted her toenails an unpleasant shade of yellow.
‘High?’
‘No.’
‘Good. You want some tea?’
‘No.’
‘Can’t blame you. It’s shit tea.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you should never have got involved with a Stanbeck,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘You better get up – Mrs Lantry is coming at four.’ I sat up, had to use my hands to do it as my stomach muscles felt like old elastic bands.
‘I told you to cancel that.’
‘And I said if you want to cancel it, you ring her. I’m not your secretary.’
‘You actually really are. That’s what your contract says and everything.’
She stared at me. ‘I’ll make you some shit tea.’
‘Don’t tell Jackie about this.’
‘He probably knows.’ I followed Beryl into the little kitchen.
‘Yeah, but if he knows I know he knows, he’ll feel like he should do something.’
‘No great loss if he sorts out Stanbeck and his lot.’ She filled the kettle. ‘Nice if they did for him too.’
I ignored that. I never quite understood why Beryl hated Jackie so much.
‘How did your date go?’
‘I got some action, but she was too skinny for me. I’m looking for real love.’
‘Two sugars, please, Beryl.’
‘One.’
The office bell rang again. And I left the little kitchen to go deal with my client.
‘Mrs Lantry, I—’
It wasn’t Mrs Lantry. It was two women, both in off-the-peg suits and flat shoes. One was tall, white, sharp and austere, the other small, black, round and smiling. But if she was happy that was unlikely to mean anything good for me.
‘Not conning pensioners out of their savings today, Mr Jones,’ she said with a grin. ‘I am afraid Mrs Lantry is in the cells for shoplifting biscuits from Aldi. But she was most upset that you might think she had stood you up, so I agreed to come and tell you about it, as I was coming here anyway.’
‘Why?’
The taller woman, DC Sarah Harrington, stared at me. ‘To arrest you for fraud,’ she said. She’d tried that before. A few times.
‘Provide a service, that’s all I do,’ I said.
The smaller woman, DI Esther Smith, bustled over and linked her arm through mine. There was something of the mother hen to Esther, though I suspect that was a deliberate ploy to make people like and trust her.
I did not trust her. She didn’t like Jackie and saw me as a way to get to him.
‘Of course you do, love,’ DI Smith said, and patted me on the arm. ‘Of course you do. Now you, my sweet, have had an exciting day haven’t you?’
‘You don’t have to speak to the pigs, Mal,’ said Beryl from the back room. DI Smith didn’t even react to her voice.
‘Janine Stanbeck, Trolley Mick and his two soft lads have all been to visit you in one day,’ said DI Smith. ‘That’s a very busy day for you, isn’t it? What’s happening, Malachite? Not gone back to shoplifting, have you? Supplying them with some cheap meat, are you? Or are you running your little con jobs again? Cos if you’ve slipped back into drugs, I’ll be very let down – we had a lot of fun when I was a constable, but let’s not go through it again, right?’
‘They had questions for the spirits, that’s all.’ I tried to get loose from her grip but she wasn’t having that. ‘How do you know who comes into my office?’
‘I know everything that happens on the Edge.’ She looked up into my face and pointed at me with an exquisitely manicured, bright-red nail.
‘This isn’t the Edge.’
‘It’s near enough.’ She placed a foot on mine and leant her weight onto it.
‘I think you might be police-brutalising me, DI Smith.’
‘I can’t see anything happening,’ said DC Harrington.
DI Smith started to grind her foot a little.
‘Alright,’ I said and pulled my foot from under hers. ‘She wanted to contact her ex. Mick wanted to know why.’
She stared at me.
‘I would like to know why too, Malachite. Why don’t you share your information with Aunt Esther?’
‘Because we haven’t got that far yet. I don’t have anything to share.’
‘Trolley Mick doesn’t leave the Edge without a very good reason,’ she said.
‘I really don’t know what that might be.’
‘You don’t know.’ The register of her voice dropped with each word.
‘But—’
‘But, my love?’ she smiled.
‘Maybe I could take a guess in exchange for a look at Larry Stanbeck’s autopsy report.’
She stared at me again. She wore bright-red lipstick to match her nails; some of it was smeared on one of her front teeth.
‘Autopsy report?’ she said. ‘I can arrange that for you.’
‘You can?’
‘Of course I can – I’m a DI, sweet.’ She grinned up into my face. ‘Now, maybe in this new-found spirit of cooperation, you could share a little bit of information about your special friend, as a starter?’
‘Jackie?’
‘I don’t think he has any other friends,’ said DC Harrington.
‘What could I have on Jackie?’ I said. ‘He is a successful local businessman, Detective Inspector.’
‘My arse he is.’ She leaned in close and trod on my foot again. ‘He’s scum, and we both know it. Though I have to admit, he’s charming scum – I quite like him.’ She pulled me closer to her using our linked arms, so she could speak in a whisper. ‘One day, Malachite Jones, he will go down. And you know what? He will be fine in jail when he does. He’s a hard one. But you will fall with him – I will make sure of it – and you are not a man cut out for jail, my love, are you? So, maybe you should think about making some more friends now, eh?’
‘I don’t know anything about Jackie’s business.’
‘Oh, come on, there must be some of your father’s blood in there, right?’ She touched my chest.
She was good at her job, DI Smith, and she knew she had lost me as soon as she mentioned my father, if not why. She sighed and let her arm snake out of mine, stepping away and relieving the pressure on my foot.
‘I thought you were the clever one, Malachite,’ she said. ‘Turns out I was wrong.’ She walked to the door, followed by DC Harrington, but paused in the doorway. ‘Tell me, if I look in your drawers, am I going to find a load of false IDs?’
‘No, DI Smith,’ I said, ‘and you’d need a warrant to look in my drawers.’ Any trace of bonhomie fled.
‘Free advice, Mal: you are not a bad man. Whatever you have got yourself into with the Stanbecks won’t end well – extricate yourself from it as quickly as you can. If I end up watching some SOCO picking bits of your brain off these walls, it will ruin my day.’ She pointed at me. ‘You add a bit of local colour. I like it.’
5
I have never been particularly popular. It’s not my thing. So, four sets of visitors in one day was a bit much. And that was why the phone on my desk was currently ringing, and I was currently ignoring it, despite occasional shouts of ‘pick up the fucking phone, twat,’ from Beryl in the back office.
Back office is a bit of a stretch actually. It is more a small kitchen with a desk where she keeps her computer.
But I wasn’t picking up the fucking phone no matter what she said. It was keeping up a steady rhythm, ringing eighteen times before I heard the click of my old-fashioned answering machine – cassette-based that I’d picked up at a car boot sale – taking the call. Then the phone would go dead. Start to ring again.
It was on its eleventh ring when Beryl’s meaty face appeared at the door.
‘It’s your mate.’
‘Which one.’
‘You only have one,’ she s
aid and slipped back into her office. I picked up the phone.
Me: Jackie, you absolute arsehole.
Jackie: What do you mean by that, Mal?’
Me: First you send Janine, who quite plainly did not want to be here. I could have done with a bit of warning about just how sceptical she was.
Jackie: Yeah. She was pretty sceptical.
Me: I know that. Then I get visited by bloody Trolley Mick and the twins.
Jackie: I’ve slept with one of them, you know. But I never know which one, so I can’t chat up the other.
Me: I didn’t know they were gay.
Jackie: Sexuality is a spectrum, Mal.
Me: Stop it! That is not the point, Jackie. After Trolley Mick came round I got a visit from Esther Smith.
Jackie: She fancies me.
Me: Jackie …
Jackie: I like police officers, they’re all dirty.
Me: Jackie. That is not the—
Jackie: Still, it means Larry’s money’s real – that’s good, innit?
Me: I’m not sure it is if Trolley Mick is involved. He wants me to find it.
Jackie: Obviously, you’re good at stuff like that. A million is a physically large amount of cash, Mal, and she led me to believe it was a lot more than that. So he’d want some sort of secure lock-up – that’s what you should be looking for.
Me: It’s a lottery ticket.
Jackie: A what?
Me: It’s not cash, Jackie. It’s a lottery ticket.
Jackie: Fuck.
Me: That is pretty succinct explanation of the situation.
Jackie: How do you find a lottery ticket?
Me: I wish I knew.
Jackie: DI Smith is probably interested in Trolley Mick, not you. Or maybe me.
Me: She’s definitely interested in you.
Jackie: I did say she fancies me.
Me: I didn’t mean like that.
Jackie: Yeah, but she does.
Me: She wants you locked up.
Jackie: Told you, police are dirty.
Me: Jackie, what am I going to do? Trolley Mick actually thinks I can talk to the dead – he is expecting me to find this money.
Jackie: You can’t give it to him. He’s a bastard.
Me: I can’t give it to anybody, Jackie – it’s a bit of paper, I don’t know where it is and there’s no realistic way of me finding it.
Jackie: We’ll sort something out.
A long pause.
Jackie: Did the Krays hurt you?
Me: Nothing I can’t handle.
Jackie: You’d tell me if they really hurt you though?
Me: Yes.
Jackie: Good. You get some sleep or something – have a think on what we do next.
He put the phone down.
Helpful as always.
I have a client called Elsie Smallwood, and Elsie Smallwood was sure that her deceased husband, Eric – well, Eric’s ghost – was stealing money from her. This upset Elsie because she and Eric had always been close, and if he wanted the money, he could just ask. Now, if I was actually dishonest, rather than someone providing an important, if admittedly slightly dishonest, service, I could have welcomed Elsie into my office, told her Eric needed the money but couldn’t ask from the great beyond and Elsie would have been happy with that. Fifty quid in my pocket and a happy client who was probably going to come back to me so she could have a chat with her husband now and then.
But the whole thing felt wrong.
Elsie was sure that Eric was taking the money because there was never any sign of a break-in when the money went missing, so how else could the money be vanishing from her bedside cabinet?
How else indeed?
So, we had a puzzle, and I was determined to find out the solution.
Which that is why I spent five nights in December 2015 up a tree with a pair of binoculars watching Elsie’s bungalow in the Nine Elms assisted-living park. Because, of course, Eric isn’t stealing money; Eric is mouldering in a box in the churchyard. But someone was stealing money, and Elsie was eighty-two and she had paid me fifty pounds. I owed her.
It had turned out that Eric used to like a drink, and when he stayed out late, he often forgot his keys, so he hid a key under the doormat, which his neighbour and drinking partner, Clive, knew about. And Clive also knew Elsie took a lot of painkillers, so Clive liked to drop in and help himself to her savings when she was asleep and as dead to the world as her dearly departed husband.
So, I had a word with Clive, but Clive didn’t really care what I thought. So, Jackie had a word with Clive, and Clive did, after a bit of persuasion, care what Jackie thought. So the next time Elsie came to see me – twenty-five pounds, because the second visit is half price – I told her how Eric was thankful for the money and had returned it to her with the key he had been using and refunded her the fifty quid of my original consultation fee as he didn’t want her to be out of pocket, and she would find it all under her doormat.
I’m not a person who, presented with something unlikely, just takes the easiest option. I am quite stubborn. To the point of, maybe, not quite learning the lessons I should but I am not a quitter is the point.
Clive was not a quitter either. He died of exposure when he got stuck part way in the bathroom window of Elsie’s neighbour on the other side, trying to steal from her, but that illustrates another truth of life: just cos you find a way, doesn’t mean it will work.
But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, and besides, I like puzzles. Most mysteries aren’t mysteries at all, the answer is usually right in front of you.
Beryl had made me a folder on Janine Stanbeck, where she lived, her family, etc. In the file, there was a picture of her wedding from a newspaper with the word twats written above it – Beryl’s work. Janine looked like a sad and lonely figure. There were no pictures of her husband, Larry – odd for wedding photos – but the women and men who were there all had the Stanbeck stamp on their faces. Trolley Mick was hanging round the edges of the pictures. Janine didn’t look like she had anyone, and still, she stared into the cameras as though taking it on in a fight. I wondered what she had been running from at home to end up there.
I’m not sure how knowing that would help me find a lottery ticket, but there’s no such thing as bad information. I stared at the picture a bit more and felt oddly melancholy. It was a while until I realised why. In my head, I’ve been programmed like everyone else to think of a wedding as the happiest day of someone’s life, but in the picture no one was smiling. Not even Larry Stanbeck when I finally found one with him in it – he was avoiding looking at the camera the way I avoid pubs.
I didn’t really like Janine Stanbeck, but if I really wanted to find this lottery ticket, then her home was where to start, and I couldn’t see a way of avoiding visiting it without her being there. I liked the idea of putting it off, but I knew it would tug at the edges of my conscious until I did. So I went round to Mr Agarwal, who was the current manager of Spice ‘N’ Saucy and asked to borrow his car, which he was happy enough to lend me. I have a car of my own but I wasn’t going to drive it into Blades Edge.
Some things are ingrained into you young, and the roads of Blades Edge are as much a part of me as the veins in my arms. It was created as a paradise, patches of green, alleyways running between the houses and fences you could talk to your neighbours over. Plenty of playgrounds with borderline lethal equipment for kids to play on, two pubs, a church, a school and a working-men’s club. There were old couples on the estate who still remembered the slums that had been in the city, who remembered the sense of wonder they’d felt when they first moved to the Edge. Didn’t last, of course. Cheap buildings poorly maintained, not enough investment in the space, and by the time I was growing up there, it was where the council put the problem families and then tried to forget about them.
I knew every street and back alley because, for my entire childhood, knowing where to avoid and where to hide felt like the only way to survive.
; Summer had come to the Edge and the green spaces, usually tramlined with the scars of joyriding cars, were now scrubby brown spaces tramlined by the scars of joyriding cars. Rubbish collected in gutters and gangs of teenagers lounged on street corners. Younger children played in gardens around huge paddling pools and couples, old before their time, watched me drive past with suspicious eyes.
I was glad I wasn’t walking.
The car broke down at the top of Hensley Lane where Janine Stanbeck lived. I rang Mr Agarwal at Spice ‘N’ Saucy, and he told me to leave the car where it was. He didn’t seem to care that it would probably lose its wheels, but I wouldn’t want to pass through the Edge just to get back a car that was ninety per cent rust if my skin was brown either. I called Jackie instead, told him where the car was and I half hoped he would come, not to pick up the car – I knew he wouldn’t – but just to walk with me.
He didn’t.
Jackie has a very ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ approach to other people’s lives.
Hensley Lane was the longest street on the Edge; it curved round the outside of the entire estate with other streets branching off it. In the centre was what had been a shopping centre but had closed down and was now just a brutalist canvas for local graffiti artists, though ‘artists’ was a stretch. However, if you wanted to know who was a slag, then the Hensley Centre was the place to go. The road used to be a racetrack for joyriders, but traffic-calming measures had been put in that, if they hadn’t stopped the races, had at least slowed the cars down. Hensley Lane also provided the only way in and out of the estate. all the other roads were blocked with concrete bollards. And, together with the hill rising behind it, they served to make the place even more like a prison. A gentle rain started to fall, but it brought no relief; the smell I associated with new rain after a warm day was absent. Somewhere a barbecue was happening and somewhere else, from the smell, I suspected someone was burning plastic. I didn’t look, didn’t search the skyline for a plume of black smoke – let the place do what it wants. I wanted no part of it.
I felt the van draw up, a darkening of the world as its shadow crossed me. The chug of poorly maintained diesel engine complaining as the driver geared down to slow the vehicle. I kept my hands in my jacket pockets, kept my eyes fixed on the floor. There were people here who had never left the Edge and to whom anyone who looked different or had come from outside their little world was fair game. They might shout at me, spit at me, who knows, but I knew that the best way of dealing with things like this was to ignore them.
