George grinned at Gus. ‘You might as well give in,’ she said. ‘You know she means it.’
He made a face but he picked up his fork and began to eat. It was clearly not with any appetite but he did shovel the food in, and she was grateful to Kitty. There was no doubt that Gus had lost weight. It might be only three days since the bombshell that had shattered his world had been thrown at him but he had shrunk in that time. His square shoulders had lost their swagger and his cheeks had a flattened look that, while it suited him, for it made him even craggier, told her that he was not looking after himself at all.
After a while his metabolism, however, did take over and he ate the second half of the fried halibut with some evidence of liking it. George leaned back in her own chair and watched him, her own meal almost untouched.
Around them the restaurant was its usual glittering self, with the light of the big central lamps bouncing off the chrome of the chairs and the white of tablecloths and the rich smell of good food well cooked wreathing around the ceiling in an almost visible haze. People looked comfortable and relaxed and she glanced at them and thought: will we ever again be as comfortable as they are? It seemed an eternity since the last time they had sat here in the Aldgate branch of Gus’s fish-and-chip empire to laugh and tease their way through a meal. Would it be another eternity before they did so again?
‘Well,’ he said abruptly and put down his fork. ‘I’ve eaten it, all right?’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘That’ll keep Kitty off your back. So, how did it go today? Did you get anything?’
‘Not a lot,’ he said and scowled. ‘It takes forever there. They must go out of their way to get the most weary willies they can for their staff. They’ve got three speeds: slow, dead slow and stop. A few of ’em seem to go backwards. Still, I got what I needed in the end.’ He made a face. ‘It makes a difference being just a punter. Usually when I do this sort of thing I flash my ID and that’s it, I’m in. But today – well, it took time.’
‘And what did you get?’
‘Copper’s Properties is part of a network of companies. It deals not only in property but in metals. That’s why it’s called Copper’s, I suppose. I thought at first it might be some sort of bad joke tied up with the police, but that’s really getting paranoid, ain’t it? Anyway, there’s a list of directors and so forth. None of them names I know, and mostly giving addresses that turn out to be other companies. I spent all day going from one to another and I finish up with an address for the managing director, OK?’
He reached into his breast pocket, took out his wallet and out of that a slip of yellow paper and pushed it over to her. ‘Here you are.’
She looked, excited for a moment, then bent her head closer to look again. ‘But that’s the address of Lenny’s shop.’
‘You noticed! Great lady. Yeah, that’s the address of Lenny’s shop. And that is all I could get. After a whole day in the horrible place, I just came full circle. Whoever Copper’s boss is, he’s very clever.’
There was a silence and she said tentatively, ‘So, now what?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m up a gum tree. Wherever I turn there’s the CIB. If they go where I’ve already been they’ll think I’m involved in a cover-up. But since I can’t find out where they’re going, I can’t go there afterwards. It’s like walking over a floor covered in glue.’
‘I could, though. Why not let me –’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t drive me crazy, George. I won’t have you doing things that are dangerous. And the more I think about what’s going on the more I believe there’s danger in it.’
‘I do too,’ she said soberly and caught her tongue between her teeth. Could she tell him what she had done this morning? Would he be impossibly angry? Would it make him feel worse about his helpless situation or better because someone was doing something on his behalf, even if he couldn’t himself?
She had a thought then and contemplated it. After a while she decided to put it into action. ‘I need you to tell me what to do.’
‘Eh?’
‘I want you to choose a colour. Green or blue?’
‘What for?’
‘It’s a thing I used to do with my mother years ago. If I couldn’t make up my mind what to do, I’d ask her to choose a colour. And the one she chose told me what to do.’
‘Why not toss a coin?’
‘That’s simply chance. This way involves you, and it’s about something to do with you. I have to make a decision. It’s the way the questions I had used to involve Ma. So, choose a colour.’
He quirked his head and laughed. It was the first relaxed and unaffected laugh she’d heard from him since the whole affair had begun and it made her feel warm all the way through to her middle. He wasn’t, after all, completely destroyed by what was happening.
‘You are a daft object, you know,’ he said fondly. ‘But I like you …’ He leered horribly and she tossed her head at him, rather like the girl in the last betting shop.
‘I’ve seen that Dick Emery imitation too often. Choose a colour.’
‘OK. Blue.’
‘Oh, shit,’ she said. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t. I think.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m now going to make you mad.’
‘How?’
‘Telling you I’ve done something I said I wouldn’t.’
He sat up very straight and pushed his plate to one side so that he could lean forwards to glare at her. ‘What? Just what have you done, you – you – what have you done?’
‘The betting shops. This morning.’
‘Oh, Christ.’ He closed his eyes. ‘That’s just peachy, that is. Peaches and cream and a bit of banana thrown in. You silly old bag! Suppose the CIB get the same idea and start looking for Lenny via Don? If they find out you’ve been asking questions at those places –’
‘But George Barnabas hasn’t been asking questions,’ she broke in. ‘It was Bridget Connors who did. I hope she forgives me for it too. Next time I call home I’ll confess and get her absolution. I was Bridget Connors, employee of a casino company in Las Vegas who’s dumb as it’s possible to be and who let her computer go down with some important addresses on it. And she’s looking for them. That’s who went round the betting shops.’
‘Dumb? You’re off your bleedin’ trolley!’ he bawled and Kitty, who was at the next table, looked up and grinned happily. That was more like the Guv’nor. ‘What did you think you’d get, you daft –’
She sobered. ‘I got a lot, in fact. Gus, listen.’ She dropped her voice a little. ‘I found three places where they knew Don Greeson. They all told me the same things. He hasn’t been seen for a month or thereabouts – I couldn’t get any actual dates out of them except for one girl, and she wasn’t quite sure, but they all said a month or so. They all also said he had a dog – a big ugly thing, a lovely dog, a good fighting dog, depending on who was doing the telling. And one of them, the girl, told me that a piece of luck had come his way and he’d told her he might be going abroad, because he’d been given his great opportunity and when he came back they’d splash out on the proceeds. Only he hasn’t come back.’
Gus was silent, sitting and staring at her. Then he said simply, ‘Oh!’ and leaned back.
‘Yes,’ she said after a while. ‘I think all I can say is, “Oh!”’
‘No more than that?’ He looked at her hopefully. ‘More facts?’
‘Isn’t that enough? But there’s something else you mightn’t know about.’ She hesitated. ‘You’ll remember the severed leg we found on the foreshore?’
‘Yes. And I’ve been thinking about it, don’t think I haven’t.’
‘It was well dressed. Expensive shoe. Silk sock. Manicured foot and so forth.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Does that fit Don Greeson?’
He said it unwillingly. ‘He was always dapper. Well turned out, if that’s what you’re asking.’
‘I confess I am. I guessed he might be. I aske
d the girl in the last place I went to. She said as much. Always looked good, she said. A snappy dresser.’
‘You think it could have been Don’s leg?’
‘That’s not all. There was something a few days later.’ And she told him about the dog’s carcase. He sat and listened, watching his own fingers playing with the crumbs of his bread roll on the tablecloth and saying nothing.
There was a long silence between them when she’d finished and then he stirred and nodded. ‘It’s a theory, I grant you, it’s a theory. Whoever it was wanted to fit me up did it through Lenny and somehow Don got to know about it. Maybe he got Lenny in? It’s very likely. And then for his pains…’
‘Yes. And the dog was always with him when he was in London. No matter what, he had his dog with him. It was his – his trademark. And if they hurt Don, whoever they were, the dog wouldn’t have liked it. So they dealt with the dog too.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ he said softly. ‘Lenny. That poor bastard. What’s happened to him, George? What’s happened to him?’
‘I’m sorry, Gus.’ She longed to reach out and hug him but couldn’t, not here. ‘But I think we have to face the possibility. He could have been dealt with the same way Don was. Not that we know for sure about Don, of course.’
‘It’s all too horribly likely, isn’t it? Though …’ His face puckered. ‘How the hell did just one leg land on the foreshore? Where’s the rest of him? And of the dog come to that. It wasn’t the whole body, was it?’
‘No. It was a skinned section of the trunk.’
‘Skinned? How –’
‘Horrible. Yes, it is a horrible thing. It’s odd, too. Why should they bother?’
‘I can’t imagine. Until I know just who did it, I can’t begin to guess, either.’
They sat for a long time, smiling vaguely at Kitty’s bright scolding chatter when she brought them cups of coffee, saying nothing to each other. Then George moved abruptly and said, ‘I’m going to go and see Monty Ledbetter, Gus. I know you don’t want me to, but I must. I can’t think of any other step to take and I sure as hell won’t stand still. So I’m not asking you to choose a colour, I’m just going.’
He said nothing, just drank his coffee and looked at her. After a while he nodded.
‘You don’t mind?’ she ventured.
‘I mind like hell, but I know I can’t stop you. So why waste breath?’
‘At last. You’re being sensible.’
‘No, I’m not. I’m defeated.’
Filled with compunction, she reached out and touched his face. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to – Let’s go home, Gus. To me or you. You need a lot of hugging.’
‘No,’ he said, and then, at the sight of her stricken face, said quickly, ‘Don’t take that personally.’
‘I can’t help but take it personally,’ she said, and indeed she had. Her eyes were hot and tight with unshed tears of anger at his refusal to let her take care of him. ‘It’s not as though it’ll do you any harm.’
‘But you’re wrong there,’ he said quickly, then shook his head as she lifted her chin sharply to look at him.
‘What do you mean?’
He was quiet for a long moment and then said, ‘Choose a colour!’
‘What?’
‘Choose a colour.’
‘Blue.’
‘It’s hell, this. You get stuck with what you’d rather not say.’
‘Too bad. Blue.’
‘OK. I’m being watched,’ he said. ‘If there’s one thing a copper knows it’s when someone’s stalking him. It’s been going on the last two days and I – well, I don’t want you part of it. It’s OK that we came here separately, OK if you leave on your own. But I won’t have you labelled in any way, not by anyone. So I won’t go home to you and you can’t come home to me. Not till this whole stinkin’ mess is cleared up.’
‘I don’t give a damn if they label me in any way they want to! They can call me the Whore of Babylon if they like. Why the hell should I worry if–’
‘Oh, George, give me a rest!’ he said. ‘I don’t know if – I don’t know who the tail is, all right? And that’s why I can’t let you be part of this. When it’s over, OK? Now go home. On your own.’ He leaned over and kissed her briefly. ‘I love you. Now go home. And’ – he managed a grin of sorts – ‘be careful with Monty. He fancies ladies with long legs.’
‘He should be so lucky,’ she managed to say. And went. And let the tears run down her frightened cheeks all the way home.
22
She drove off eastwards, negotiating the heavy traffic through Barking and out on to the Eastern Avenue, map open on the seat beside her, too concerned with finding her way to worry unduly about what she might say when she got there. It took her almost an hour because of the inevitable rash of roadworks, and when at last she turned into the leafy road she had been looking for, she pulled over to the kerbside to sit and think about how she would deal with Monty Ledbetter.
There could be no question of telling him the sort of nonsense tale she had used in her dealings with her contacts so far; tales about Las Vegas casinos or flower-drying partners would get her nowhere. He knew she was a doctor, knew her name, knew she was a friend of Gus’s. That being so, she thought bleakly, it will have to be the truth. What was it Edgar Allan Poe said? Or was it Sherlock Holmes? When everything probable has been eliminated all that is left is the impossible. Well, something like that, and with a strong suspicion she’d got the quotation quite wrong, she released the brake and moved on, peering along the side of the road for the Ledbetter house.
It was a wide road lined with plane trees, with houses on her right and an open tree-scattered green space on the left. Gidea Park itself? she wondered. Probably. The houses were big, handsome and clearly expensive; many of them had fancy names rather than numbers and she grinned a little at an artfully engraved pseudo-rustic board outside one of them which read Green Badge Towers. A taxi driver, she told herself. This, she had been told by Gus, was where inner-London taxi drivers aspired to live. Clearly here was one who had succeeded.
The house she was looking for was called The Better Place and sat foursquare and smug behind a wide paved carriage drive and a couple of round flower-beds filled with carefully barbered grass and neat shrubs. There were unconvincing and absurdly white pillars holding up a canopy over the front door and on each side of the broad doorstep a pair of heraldic lions, equally snowy, displayed large blank shields. The bricks walls were perfectly pointed, there were a number of brass-trimmed carriage lamps, windows carefully fitted with security mesh behind which ruffled net curtains flounced (which means that even Monty, powerful though he’s supposed to be, isn’t immune from the attentions of would-be burglars, she thought as she looked at the glitter of the metal) and flowering baskets hanging from each window-frame. It looked, George decided, like the cover of a catalogue of a really cheap and nasty build-your-own-furniture kit warehouse.
I’m getting to be as snobby as the Brits, she thought as she pressed the doorbell. Making judgements about other people’s taste this way; I should be ashamed.
Within the house there was a tinkle of ‘Greensleeves’ played on chimes and then she heard footsteps. The door was opened by a girl with very long legs encased in tight scarlet leggings, topped with an almost see-through black silk shirt, beneath which she was clearly wearing nothing at all, and with yellow hair frizzed into a wild Afro mop.
‘Yes?’ she said in a bored drawl and stared. George managed a bright smile.
‘I wonder if I could speak with Mr Ledbetter?’ she asked. Mr Monty Ledbetter? If he’s at home.’
‘Who wants him?’ the girl said, leaning on the doorframe so that George couldn’t see into the house, even if she had been trying to. She hadn’t, not yet.
‘My name is Barnabas. Dr Barnabas,’ George said, beginning to be irritable. This child was barely sixteen, if that, and had a patronizing air that was remarkably annoying. ‘Mr Ledbetter will remember me, I’m sure.
A friend of Detective Chief Inspector Hathaway of Ratcliffe Street Police.’
‘Really? That’s nice for you,’ the girl said, staring even more offensively.
‘Isn’t it?’ George said with gritted-teeth charm, managing to smile back. ‘So, if you would ask your father –’
‘Uncle,’ the girl said contemptuously. ‘He’s busy. I dare say you could phone.’
‘But I don’t want to phone,’ George said with the same poisonous sweetness. ‘I do want to speak to him, however. And I am here.’
‘Well …’ the girl began, but then someone behind her pulled the door open and peered out over her head. It was Monty Ledbetter and George managed to prevent herself sighing with relief. She just smiled even more widely, if that were possible.
‘Mr Ledbetter, I do hope you remember me. We met –’
‘With Gus. Yes, I remember,’ Monty said and pushed aside his niece (if that is who she really is, George thought fleetingly) with a finger’s pressure on the side of her head. ‘Why didn’t you call me, Jade?’
‘You said to see who it was and get rid of them.’ The girl was less sneering but still very much in command of herself. ‘So I attempted to do so. Simple obedience.’
‘Well, that’s as may be. But I never meant it for someone like the doctor here, now did I? You ought to use a bit o’ common, my girl. Your fancy school and your GCSEs don’t count for fourpence if you don’t use your common.’ He held the door open widely in a gesture of invitation. ‘Bright as they come, this one, doctor. School talks very highly of her. Goin’ to do an A level in Sociology, they say. Now do come on in. It’s a privilege to see you in my home. You’re very welcome.’
Jade went hipping away with a return of her original insolence, her hair bouncing on her shoulders, and Monty Ledbetter, looming huge above George, chuckled admiringly.
‘Just look at her, will you? I spend a fortune on that girl’s schooling, just like the rest of ’em, and all she can do is turn out like that. But there you go, that’s modern kids for you. Do come into the lounge.’
Third Degree Page 22
