by Mark Timlin
‘How do I know… ?’
‘You don’t. Just trust me. Give me the address. Please.’
I think it was the please that did it. ‘It’s in my book,’ she said. ‘Wait here.’ She came back two minutes later holding a slip of paper in her hand. ‘I’ve written it down.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘What’s his name, by the way?’
‘John. John the gardener.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t know his surname?’
‘I never asked.’
‘OK, Babs.’
‘I hope he’s all right.’
‘So do I.’
I went back to the car and drove towards South Norwood. With the aid of the A-Z I was at the street I wanted within about twenty minutes. John’s address was on the corner opposite a big pub. I went up the three stone steps outside the front door and banged hard on the knocker.
A middle-aged woman in a flowered apron opened the door.
‘What’s all the noise about?’ she demanded.
‘I’m looking for John. John the gardener,’ I said.
‘You’re in a hurry,’ she said acidly. ‘Are you late with planting your hardy annuals?’
I ignored her sarcasm. ‘Is he in?’
‘No.’
My heart sank. ‘Do you know where he is?’
‘If he’s not here, he’s at work. If he’s not here or at work, he’s in the pub over there.’ She pointed across the road. ‘With the other wasters. Public bar.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and walked down the steps again and crossed the street. It was an old-fashioned boozer, still split into ‘Public’, ‘Saloon’ and ‘Lounge’ bars. I pushed through the door with PUBLIC BAR cut into the glass panel at the top. It was small, dingy and nearly empty. John the gardener was sitting on a stool at the bar itself. He looked like he’d already had a few over the eight. I hadn’t been so relieved to see anyone for a long time. I went over and tapped him on the shoulder. He looked round and blearily up at me. In front of him were the remains of two pints and what looked like a large Scotch.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Hello, John,’ I said. ‘Remember me?’
I saw the bulb go on over his head. ‘Hello, son,’ he said, suddenly all friendly. ‘Have a drink.’
‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you at work today?’
‘No,’ he said, breathing fumes into my face. ‘I talked to your mate. He was more generous than you.’
‘My mate?’ I said.
‘Yeah, he came by the other morning. Told me you’d sent him. Gave me a hundred nicker.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘What I told you.’
‘About the girl in the car with the sticker on it?’
‘Yeah. It was all right, wasn’t it?’
I wasn’t about to tell him what had happened to Natalie. It wasn’t his fault. Any more than it was Jim’s. Or mine. Or maybe more mine than anyone else’s. Who knows? ‘It was all right,’ I said.
‘A hundred nicker,’ said John, almost disbelievingly. ‘That’s more than I earn in two weeks from that cow. She can stuff her sodding garden.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Who?’
‘My mate.’
‘Yellow hair. Tall. Blue coat. Don’t you know?’
‘Course I do. Just checking.’
‘He is your mate, isn’t he?’
‘Course he is. He didn’t give you his name by any chance?’
‘No, I don’t believe he did. Are you sure you won’t have a drink?’
‘Go on then,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a half.’
There was nobody about behind the bar. John banged on the counter. ‘Service,’ he shouted. Nothing. ‘Bastards,’ he said, and banged again.
A minute later, a middle-aged woman with a worried face came in from the back. ‘Is nobody serving you, John? I am sorry. Where’s Alfred?’
‘In the bloody cellar, where else?’ said John.
‘I swear he spends half his life down there,’ said the woman.
‘I expect he’s got a secret tunnel down there, to some tart’s house,’ said John.
And suddenly I knew what was wrong with the cottage in East Grinstead. ‘Forget the drink, John,’ I said. ‘I just remembered somewhere I should be.’
‘Are you sure, son?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘And I think Mrs Conway is worried about her turf.’
‘Sod her turf,’ he said.
‘I think that might be the idea,’ I said, and left.
30
I got into the car and drove to East Grinstead again. I was beginning to feel like a commuter.
The evening traffic was snarled all the way, and the Granada began to overheat. Typical of one of Charlie’s clunkers. But eventually I turned off the main road and drove past the cottage.
I stopped well out of the way, just in case there’d been any other visitors in my absence. I cut across the orchard and into the lane at the side of the building. There were no fresh tyre tracks in the damp earth.
Good sign.
I went to the front of the house and stood in the shadow of an over-grown privet hedge.
Everything looked quiet. And empty.
I walked up to the door and let myself in silently. Inside the place had a deserted feel. Just like I’d left it. I went through the cottage in less than a minute. No one had been there since I’d left it days before, I was sure of that. Nothing had been disturbed that I hadn’t disturbed. So Natalie hadn’t told. She’d killed herself first. I wondered if I would have been so brave. Or maybe it had just been the last of many straws for her. The final indignity in a lifetime of indignities.
I could still see her eyes staring lifelessly at the wall. Wherever she was, I hoped she was free now. Free to walk. Free to run.
I went out to the shed in the garden. Just as I remembered, there was a big retractable tape measure in a leather case on one of the shelves. I went back and measured the kitchen and the cellar.
That was it.
The cellar, which looked like it ran the length and breadth of the cottage, was about four feet short at the back. Under the living room.
I tapped the walls again. They still sounded solid. Then I looked closer. I went over every inch of them. Every square centimetre of plaster and brick.
It took me hours to find it. I pushed, pulled, twisted everything I could find to push, pull and twist, until I’d ripped off three nails and the skin on the tips of my fingers was like sandpaper.
It had to be there, and it had to be easy. You just had to know how.
I went to the light switch at the top of the stairs and fiddled about with it. I even went into the living room above to see if there was a trapdoor in the floor.
Finally, when I was just about to give up, I tried the rose in the ceiling where the single bulb was housed.
That was it. I turned it once right, then left and right again, and one section of the wall in front of me opened silently. Sweet, David, I thought. Well sweet. And I walked over to the door I’d found, and looked inside.
It was dark, but I found a switch and turned it on. Another single, bare bulb came on to reveal a small fortune.
It was a blagger’s dream inside the little room I’d found. A thieves’ paradise.
There was money everywhere. Stacks of it. Solid blocks of fivers, tenners, twenties, fifties, all neatly banded and piled against one wall, to the height of a tall man, and about two feet deep. There were cartons full of loose money too. Baked bean cartons, beer cartons, crisp cartons. In one corner was a mountain of coins that reached almost to the ceiling. Some in off-white cotton sacks, some in clear plastic bags, marked with the amount inside and the denomination of the coin. Some loose. Like it had just been shovelled there as too much trouble to count.
The floor was carpeted with empty money bags. From Barclays, Nat West, Lloyds, and most other major banks and building soc
ieties. There were night safe bags, boxes marked with the name of security firms, and jewellery display cases and ring trays. There were cartons full of jewellery too. Rings, necklaces, bracelets, mixed in together in a mess of gold, silver, platinum and precious stones. There was one box with just Rolex and Cartier watches. No Taiwan fakes either. These were all in their cute little velvet-lined boxes, with their guarantees still intact. I pushed my hands into one carton of tom. It gleamed and glittered in the light from the bare bulb in the ceiling. The stuff was heavy and cold and slippery as I lifted a double handful.
I found the deeds to the cottage. They were in an old cardboard file on top of a carton full of cash. Along with cheque and paying-in books in the name of Donald King. And Access, Visa and American Express cards in the same name. In one of the pockets of the file was a British passport. Just one. Name: Donald King. Photograph: David Kellerman.
In another corner, up against the wall, stood a canvas gun case. Next to it was a leather holdall. I unzipped the case. Inside was a Savage 20-gauge, four-shot, pumpaction shotgun. I worked the pump. Smooth as silk. A real rock ‘n’ roller’s dream. I opened the holdall and found a hammer-shrouded Colt detective Special, still in its factory packing, a box of .38 ammunition, another box with shells for the Savage, and a comprehensive gun cleaning kit.
So Robber had been right. Kellerman/King was dirty. Very dirty. And Webb too? I didn’t know. And the others? The mystery men who’d been following me? Were they the rest of a gang of over-the-pavement merchants led by Kellerman? Almost certainly. Some part of this loot was theirs, and that’s what they’d been looking for.
Christ, but my head was beginning to ache again.
I took the Colt out of its box, and wiped the excess gun oil off it with a soft rag from the cleaning kit. Then I loaded both the pistol and the shotgun and put extra ammunition for them in the pocket of my jacket.
I took the guns and went upstairs and sat on the sofa in the cold darkness of the sitting room and tried to think. Tried to put it all together in my head with the help of a two-thirds-full bottle of Scotch from the tray of spirits, and the remains of my packet of Silk Cut.
By then it was late. Very late. Too late for some, but just the right time for others.
With the information I had, and some supposition on my part, I came up with about as many questions as answers. But this is how I worked it out: James Webb calls me in to find out who killed his sister’s family. He’s all cut up about it. Or is he? Did he actually employ me to find the murderers, or to recover the take from what looked like a series of very lucrative robberies that his brother-in-law had stashed away?
Not that it was all the take. It couldn’t have been. Andrew Cunningham, Kellerman’s accountant, had told me that there had been too much cash floating around the business for a long time. Suddenly there was too little. So presumably Kellerman had been laundering money for quite a while. The cash and jewellery downstairs must have been the skim that he had appropriated from the rest of the gang for his own use. A bit like trying to steal a fillet steak out of a shark’s jaws.
So whilst Kellerman’s playing this dangerous game, he’s building up a fake identity for himself. Just himself. Then he buys a remote cottage for himself and his lover to live in and uses his building skills to construct somewhere to hide the skim. Owing to an unfortunate oversight on his part, the cottage doesn’t suit the lover, who happens to be wheelchair bound.
So Kellerman buys another house but doesn’t sell the cottage and tells his lover that it’s ‘an investment for the future’. Some investment. A real hedge against inflation.
There had to be a million quid’s worth down in the cellar.
Then he buys the second house, the bungalow in Epsom. He puts it in Natalie Hooper’s name and settles a large amount of money on her. Almost as if he knows he might not be around for long. Either he’s ready to take it on his toes or he suspects that he’s close to the Big Au Revoir. Maybe he realises that sooner or later the gang is going to go down the river for a long time, and him with them, or that they’re beginning to suspect he’s been double-crossing them.
Now no one knows, or apparently even suspects, that Kellerman has a lover. The pair of them manage to keep it dark for years, mainly because Natalie Hooper is in a wheelchair. And like she said, most people only see the chair and not the person inside it. So after Kellerman’s death no one considers that she might know where the goodies are hidden.
And what about her? Did she know or guess what had been going on? Had she conned me into coming here? I didn’t think so. All my instincts told me she was being straight when she’d told me her story. She was in love with the geezer and that was that. If she knew where the stuff was, or even thought she knew and wanted me to find it, why didn’t she just tell me? If she was going to get her hands on it, she’d have to tell someone eventually. She couldn’t get to it on her own. She couldn’t even get in the house. No, I stuck with my original feeling. She was on the level.
But someone was taking the piss, and I didn’t like it.
Common sense said call in the law, turn what I’d discovered over to them and bow out gracefully.
But then, whenever did I listen to common sense?
I finished the bottle and tossed it into the fireplace next to the empty vodka bottle from the other day, and the butts of the cigarettes I’d smoked. My mouth felt like crap and the headache had arrived good and proper.
Eventually I must have dropped off into a fitful sleep. I woke up feeling grimy and gritty-eyed. I couldn’t remember when I’d last washed or changed my clothes. It was five in the morning and light.
I went upstairs and had a lick and a promise in cold water in the bathroom. Then I went back down to the cellar and closed the secret door. I didn’t touch the money. Like Kellerman and his gang, it was dirty. Tainted with too much blood. I wanted no part of it. I locked the front door behind me and went back to my car.
I took out the back seat and hid the guns and spare ammunition under it. I had a feeling they might get some use before long.
31
I stopped for something to eat at a Little Chef on the main road. It had just opened. I was the first customer.
I had an all-day breakfast with toast and three pots of tea. Not bad. Nor were the waitresses. But they steered well clear of me. I thought that I must be losing my sex appeal. How right I was. When I went to the men’s room and looked in the mirror I wasn’t surprised they were wary. I’d seen better-looking things squashed on the side of the road. The case was beginning to get to me.
I left a decent tip to make up for the view and drove back to town.
I went straight home. You know what they say. It’s somewhere they’ve got to let you in.
I hoped that the Indian family had been keeping Cat’s calorie count up. I needn’t have worried. He was outside the front door when I bumped the Granada on to the front of the house. Fat as a rat, and pleased to see me.
I checked my mail. Just bills. The flat itself was secure and I opened a window to let some fresh air in. There were no strange cars in the street, and no one had nailed a dead chicken to the door.
I showered and changed into fresh clothes, and my other pair of Doc Marten’s. I made some tea. Whilst the kettle was boiling I tried Fiona’s number. Her answerphone was on. She was probably still asleep. I left a message, asking her to ring when she got up.
I took the tea and sat on the bed. I was whacked. I put the mug on the bedside table, leaned back and closed my eyes for a second.
The telephone woke me with a start. The sun had moved to the centre of the sky. The tea was stone cold, and Cat was asleep on my chest breathing curry into my face.
I looked at my watch. It was past noon.
Outstanding behaviour.
I picked up the receiver. ‘Sharman,’ I said.
‘Tony Keogan,’ a man’s voice said.
I was suddenly wide awake. ‘What? How the hell did you get this number?’
‘It wasn’t exactly difficult,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking forward to speaking to you for a long time, Mr Sharman.’ His voice was light but cultured. Just what you’d expect from a brief. Even a failed one.
‘I can’t say that the feeling is mutual.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it. And I can see you’re a man who has no time to waste on idle chit-chat. So let’s get straight down to business. I believe you know the whereabouts of – how can I put it? – certain assets that belong to my business associates and myself.’
‘And what makes you think that?’
‘Just a feeling I have.’
‘I hope you and your feeling are very happy together.’
He ignored my comment. ‘What did Natalie tell you?’ he asked.
‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’
‘Of course I would. That’s precisely why I’m asking.’
‘And I’m not telling.’
‘I’m afraid I must insist.’
‘Go to hell.’
‘I’ll pass the message on to Judith and Fiona.’
I went cold all over. I actually felt the goose bumps breaking out on my flesh. ‘What did you say?’ I said.
‘Judith and Fiona. You do know their names, don’t you? A beautiful couple of young women. You must be very proud of them.’
‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’
His voice hardened. ‘You shouldn’t have left them on their own. But you did. And now they’re with us. And here they’ll stay until we get our money.’
‘Where are they?’ I demanded.
‘They’re safe. For now. But the more time goes by, the less safe they become. Capisce?’
‘How do I know…?’
‘Hold the line,’ he said. The phone went dead.
My hand was shaking. I watched it shake, like it belonged to someone else. ‘Nick,’ said Fiona’s voice. She hardly ever called me Nick. ‘For Christ’s sake, do what he says. He’ll kill us if you don’t.’ The phone went dead again.
Then Keogan came back on the line. ‘Satisfied?’ he said.
‘If you hurt either one of them, I’ll kill you, I promise,’ I said.
