by Adam Baron
There was also Alison’s body. The person who had killed her hated her so passionately that Alison hadn’t just been murdered. It went further than that. Her body had jealousy written all over it.
But none of it was proof, and Coombes couldn’t have done anything if I hadn’t gone in with a wire and got her to confess. Draper would have gone away for it – either that or Shulpa would have come forward to save him from prison. I didn’t know whether or not she would have done that. I guessed not. She wouldn’t have been any nearer to him either way.
In the days that followed the events in her flat I spent a lot of time in a hospital in Hammersmith, with Nicky and his parents. Both of the bullets that had come out of Shulpa’s gun while she was struggling with Jack had gone into her. One wasn’t serious, a flesh wound only, but the second had punctured her kidney and had stayed there. She’d been operated on as soon as she’d arrived at the Hammersmith unit and was still in intensive care after three days. The fact that the police had been right on the scene must have helped her, but as it was the doctor in charge didn’t know which way it was going to go. I stayed with Nicky, explaining again and again why I’d done what I had. Sometimes he could understand it and sometimes he couldn’t.
‘Would it have been so bad to let them leave?’ he asked me finally. ‘Would it have been so bad to let her get away with it?’
‘Yes, Nicky it would,’ I said to him. I told him about finding Alison, what she had looked like. ‘Yes. It would have been so bad.’
It was while I was just sitting there with him, trying to make him see that it would never have ended with Jack and Shulpa riding off into the sunset, that I had a thought. I suddenly realized how I could find the money Shulpa had taken. It was simple. I thought back to the night that she was shot. I’d trooped out of the place onto the street, following Coombes and the stretcher down to the ambulance. Amid all the lights and noise a bewildered minicab driver had shown up.
He’d been called by Shulpa. He’d had to prove that he wasn’t an accomplice by showing all sorts of driver ID, and calling his office, but in the confusion no one had asked him one very simple question: where had the cab been booked to. I remembered the name of the firm and after waiting around an hour on a fold-out chair in a cramped and smoky office in Fulham the driver came in, straight from an airport job. When I asked him he said he remembered very well where he was supposed to be heading that night. He wasn’t likely to forget that call in a hurry.
‘Well?’
‘To Clerkenwell,’ he said.
I spent three hours in the cellar of the Old Ludensian before I found the canvas bag stuffed with notes, packed at the bottom of a box of old plates Nicky didn’t need any more. All she’d done was move it, not wanting, I presumed, to be seen with it by Nicky. The money had been there all the time, it had been right there when the mirror had got smashed, only down the road when Nicky had been attacked. It had never ever left. It would have been funny if it wasn’t funny.
I didn’t tell Nicky. And it wasn’t because I didn’t want to let him have the money. Did he need to know that his sister had sold him out, that she would have let him die to get Jack Draper? I didn’t think so. Shulpa was through the worst, so the doctors were saying. If she’d died I would have told him – what difference would it have made? But one thing Nicky kept saying to me as we sat outside intensive care, waiting for news of her, sometimes holding hands with his mother, was how much he realized that he loved Shulpa. In spite of everything. How he would visit her, try to be there for her, if only she would make it through. When she did, I knew I shouldn’t take that love away from him. Or from his mother. From either of them. Even from Shulpa, who was going to need it. I was worried that Shulpa might tell Nicky, thinking he still needed the cash, and when she was well enough I asked to see her. She wouldn’t speak to me, or her family. The only person she did want to see wasn’t there. DS Coombes agreed to give a message to her from me. Just tell her that Nicky is safe, I said. Coombes was curious as usual but she just nodded.
* * *
Shulpa was tried for the murders of Alison Everly and Jeff McKenna and given two life sentences. Nicky and I stayed very brittle with each other throughout the trial and for a long time after. I spent time on my usual cases, down at the gym, visiting my brother. I even ran into Sharon there. Over coffee I told her all about what had happened. It was great to see her and we’ve since met each other there a couple of times. I keep nearly calling her, asking her out for a drink, and I keep hoping that she’s nearly calling me. Who knows, maybe one day one of us will do it. Someone who did call was Louise Draper, and I went to see her, to tell her how things had gone. I hadn’t called her and I was a little nervous. I offered her a refund but she wouldn’t take it. The doctor was there with her again but this time he only went through to the kitchen. Louise told me that Jack had begged to be allowed home but she’d had enough of it. No more. She was getting a divorce and planning to marry her neighbour as soon as it was through. She’d even appeared in the Express to explain her decision. A picture showed her and the doctor arm-in-arm, above an article about being brought together by pain.
On the way back I drove through Hoxton Square again, just as I had the night I’d first driven down Stepney Green. I found myself slowing and I found myself parking, and then I found myself standing in front of Alison Everly’s door on the fourth floor. I’d taken the door from someone coming out. Alison’s flat was shut up, cold and quiet, but there was no police tape covering it. Nothing to show, no flowers or anything. I put my hand on the door and just stood, staring at it, not really thinking of anything other than the fact that it somehow felt right for me to be standing there. I must have been there five minutes when I felt a movement beside me, and turned to see a woman walking up.
‘What do you want?’
She was a plump woman with a small face, in her early thirties. Her voice was cold and suspicious.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I just… I sort of knew the girl who lived here. I know what happened to her.’
‘Oh,’ the woman said. ‘I knew her too. Alison.’
‘Yes.’
‘She was nice.’
‘Yes. I came to think so.’
‘They called her a slut. But she wasn’t. Her mother, she needed money for her mother.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’d kind of thought. But I’m glad someone else thinks it.’
‘She wouldn’t have done it otherwise. I found her.’
‘You…’
‘I found her body. It was horrible. I was supposed to be getting married. I found her in the morning.’
‘And you were getting married. That day?’
She almost laughed. ‘That day. It was a blessing in disguise for me actually, if not for Alison.’
‘Yes?’
‘He wasn’t right. I don’t know. He was a bit of a snob about Alison, the time they met. When I saw him later, I could just tell. Sometimes you can, can’t you, for no good reason?’
I thought of Shulpa, and of what Sally had tried to make me see about her.
‘Yes. But sometimes you can’t,’ I said.
Karen Mills invited me in and we talked about Alison. She said she hadn’t known about Draper, but she did know Louise wasn’t happy. On the table was a copy of the Express, opened to the picture of Louise and her new love. Karen laughed.
‘It serves him right,’ she said. ‘The bastard. Even if he didn’t do it. It serves the smarmy bastard right. I hope it really hurts him. I hope he realizes what he’s gone and lost. What you get when you treat people like that.’
I said goodbye to Karen and thanked her for the tea she’d made me. I didn’t know, actually, how Jack felt about losing his wife. Maybe he didn’t have time to think about it. He was a big star now. Jack was on the back pages of at least one paper every day and had been signed up for exclusives by most of them. His one-to-one interview with Martin Bashir had been a ratings smash. His first game back for the Mighty ‘O’
s was against Newcastle in the FA Cup. People wondered if he was fit enough after what he’d been through but Draper got both goals in a dramatic last-minute victory that had nearly raised the roof. After the game the Newcastle chairman had immediately expressed an interest in Draper, following Chelsea who had already come in for him. Everyone would have to wait, however, because, according to the pundits, Draper was waiting until the end of the season for his contract to run out. Then he would be a free agent. Then he could ask the earth from anyone.
I didn’t speak to Jack. He didn’t come to the hospital. Coombes’ effort to get him charged with Shulpa’s attempted murder didn’t get anywhere. Draper never called to thank me for getting him out of the jam he was in, and nor did he mention my role in any of the interviews he gave. But one morning a package arrived by bike at my office. It was two tickets for that night’s FA cup clash, the next round, against a first division side now managed by his former friend and manager Dave Harvey. I thought it was a beautiful slice of irony and immediately phoned Nicky. Things seemed a little easier between us now that it was clear Shulpa was doing fine, though she was still refusing his visits. Nicky was more than willing to go out to East London with me.
‘Toby can cope,’ Nicky said. ‘He’s kind of got used to being the boss now anyway.’
We got there just before kick-off. Nicky and I did our bit for Mr Korai by buying a couple of overpriced hotdogs before taking our seats in the stand, where Jack Draper’s name was being chanted by a capacity crowd. He was their obsession and they were letting him know it. Shulpa never felt anything more for him. As the game got underway I thought to look for Janner but I couldn’t see him. I did see a guy I thought I recognized, though, sitting where Janner should have been. I asked the woman next to me what was going on. She explained that Janner had been given the boot, even though Orient were now back in the top three. His place had been taken by a former England star in his first managerial role. She was going to tell me more but was taken by a passage of play, Draper going in for a header that got tipped over the bar. Nicky and I got drawn in too. His play really was mesmerizing. If Nicky used to be the same standard he wasn’t any more. Jack was a class apart and not only with his feet. He exuded something, an arrogance if you like, his chest out, his silky hair shining in the floods. He had it. I had to admit, he really had it. The goal he got just before halftime was a beauty. A simple turn, a neat curl. The goalkeeper didn’t even move.
Leyton Orient were drawing one-one with ten minutes to go when Jack Draper’s career came to an end. Dave Harvey had stood up from the bench and ordered a substitution. Harvey was being investigated following allegations Draper had made in excerpts from his autobiography printed in the Evening Standard. He brought on a player not listed in the programme, who, it later transpired, had only just been signed by his club. The player looked a little overweight to me, and I couldn’t work out why Harvey had brought off the man he had, why he was bringing on a defender at all when his team were the bigger club and could easily have won the game. Apart from Draper, Orient didn’t look much. But I soon realized that the visiting manager knew exactly what he was doing. The tackle, if you can call it that, rang round the ground like a gunshot. You could tell that it would take Draper six months before he could even stand, let alone kick a football. His leg snapped in two like a dry twig. It wasn’t the shape any leg should be. As the medics ran on people around me looked away. The other players went green, walking up to him then turning away. A silence fell over the ground like a pall. The woman sitting next to me held her hand up to her mouth and I thought she was going to be sick. The ref showed the red card and the substitute left the field to a chorus of boos. Jack Draper screamed like a baby as they lifted him onto the stretcher. You could hear him all the way down the tunnel.
The crowd stayed subdued for ten minutes. I hadn’t even noticed that Draper had been replaced by the nippy teenager. Gradually the atmosphere got back to normal. The kid found a lot of space at the back, the other team being down to ten men. He was fast and keen, definitely lightning. He got applause for a run that ended in a corner. Two minutes later he won the game with a brilliant burst of pure speed that sent him past the last defender, and a neat bit of skill that took him round the keeper. The place erupted. The woman next to me was jumping up and down. At the end of the game Yish Korai came out onto the pitch and held the lad’s arms aloft. Both had smiles on their faces wide as empty goalposts. The crowd went crazy. They loved it. They ate it up.
* * *
And the money? It’s under my floorboards. I’m wondering what to do with it.
Acknowledgements
Naomi, of course, comes first. Your rare beauty, quick mind and generous spirit inspire a thousand stories. Thanks are then due to the Delaps, my new family, who continue to amaze me with their faith, love and confidence. My old family are pretty inspiring too, from top to bottom and at the sides as well, but especially when playing Max Bruch at eighty or slagging me off in newspapers at thirty-seven. Both require bravado and panache, two things any writer should admire. Susannah Zeff once again provided the gold dust of clear feedback in the days of doubt, while Andy Watts’ work-rate continues to make me feel lazy and useless and hence forces me back to the rock-face. Thanks to Ben, Becky and Annie for taking it upon yourselves to bat on my team. A mention also for Vicky Tennant’s kind words, Marston Bloom for taking it on the chin and coming out smiling, and the wonderful Clays – I thought it was gone for ever.
Beverly Cousins and Elizabeth Allen make finishing a book a real pleasure – it means I get to see them and work with them again. Likewise, profound and heartfelt thanks to Lisanne Radice and Jane Gregory, who both know when a gentle word softly spoken isn’t going to do any damn good at all. If you were jockeys you’d be banned for overuse of the whip, but I loves ya.
We only sing when we’re fishing.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2001 by Pan Macmillan
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
57 Shepherds Lane
Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU
United Kingdom
Copyright © Adam Baron, 2001
The moral right of Adam Baron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781911591634
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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