As if to read his mind, Cook said, “His defence team didn’t care. They could have driven a bus through the evidence, but it didn’t matter to them. Any more than it mattered to us. Harry Mack has got away with murder, robbery, extortion, and all the rest for years. Nobody wanted him on the streets and nobody wanted him walking out of that Court. We all got what we wished for.”
Rathe was shaking his head before Cook had finished talking. “That’s not the point, is it? That isn’t what justice should be about. Her eyes are blindfolded for a reason and that reason matters.”
He raised his head to meet the inspector’s gaze, finding the detective nodding at him as he did so. “Exactly, Rathe. Exactly. There’s no easy way to say this, but I have to say it anyway. I put Harry Mack in prison, but I don’t think he belongs there for the crime I got him for. He belongs there for a shitload of other offences, but not for the murder of Lenny Voss. I need to be sure I got it right. I need to know if my instincts about the conviction are wrong.”
“I understand that,” murmured Rathe.
“I don’t want what happened to you to happen to me,” said Cook, all the emotion drained out of his voice.
They said nothing else on the subject. But, as they drank together, their expressions said more than any words could have achieved and it was clear that, between the two of them, a deal had been done.
* * *
Shelly Voss must once have been an attractive woman. Her blonde hair might have glowed in an afternoon sun, her blue eyes might have been captivating in flickering candle flame, and her thin lips might have parted in an alluring invitation to a kiss. But now, in the cold grey of that autumnal morning, she looked as though time had been a cruel lover to her. The blonde hair was tied loosely at the nape of her neck, not so much golden sunshine as old straw; the eyes were heavy with the brutality of her life, not flickering with spirit but dimmed with sadness; and the lips were twisted into a sour pout of confrontation. As he introduced himself, she looked at Rathe as though he had come to judge her and she might need a strong defence against him. Privately, she told herself that she liked the look of him and a vision of a life which might have existed skidded into her vision. And out again. She knew it was a life which she could never truly have had, just as she could recognise quality when she saw it. She stayed motionless, watching him as he smiled gently at her. His clothes were expensive without being extravagant and he wore them well. The labels were an adornment of him rather than a fashion statement. She thought about Lenny, the way that he would have worn similar clothes, thinking he was sophisticated, when all he could ever do was make them look cheap and make himself look like a thug in fine threads. She felt a moment of emotion, taking it for sadness but thinking it was closer to regret.
Politely, in a voice which she might once have lay awake at night thinking about, he asked if he could come into the house. She stepped aside and gave him enough room to step into the hallway. She found herself wondering what he would think of the wallpaper, the furnishings, and the particular, individual smell which she knew all homes had. He gave her no clue of what judgement he had made, if any, but instead waited for an invitation to go further into the house. She led him into the kitchen, flicking the switch on the kettle and taking two mugs from a cupboard.
“Or would you prefer something stronger?” she asked.
“Nothing, thank you.”
He said it as though she might be offended by it, which she found strangely compelling. The vision of that other, imaginary life drifted into focus once more. She moved a strand of stray hair out of her eyes, a reminder of her subjugated appearance which must mean that he looked at her with nothing but contempt or, worse, pity.
“Do you mind if I have something stronger?” she asked.
“Not at all.”
Shelly smiled, but it was nothing more than a flicker of the lips. “Too early, right? You think I’m an alcoholic, a woman who needs a drink at half ten in the morning in order to face the fact that there’s another day to get through.”
Rathe shook his head. “I don’t think anything, other than that you must be grieving. Everyone deals with that differently. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your husband.”
“Did you know Lenny?”
“I knew of him.”
She smirked, again without any real trace of humour. She poured some gin into a tumbler, added lime, barely enough tonic to taste. “Lots of people knew of Lenny. I’m not sure I knew him at all. Not any more Didn’t share the same bed, let alone each other’s lives.”
Rathe watched her neck muscles work with the gin. “I wondered whether you could tell me something about him.”
She took a moment to savour the effects of the alcohol. A second measure seemed in order and she took care of it. Then, her eyes narrowing, she glared at him. “Who are you?”
“As I said, my name is Anthony Rathe and ‒ ”
“No. Who are you?”
“I used to be a barrister,” he said, making it sound like a confession. “I represented a lot of men like your husband. Some were innocent, some were guilty. I never cared one way or the other.”
She was glaring still, this time over the rim of the glass. “Why not?”
“It wasn’t my job to care. It was my job to defend.”
“That simple?”
“I used to think it was simple.”
“Think what was simple?”
“Justice.”
She sniggered, this time with humour, but it was a humour tainted with cynicism. “Was what happened to Harry Mack justice?”
Rathe crossed the room towards her, his face now close to hers. “Only if he was guilty.”
Shelly Voss ran her tongue over her top lip, tasting the gin and lime which was left there. She liked him being this close, but simultaneously she hated it. His dark eyes were impassive, unreadable, but they seemed able to hold her heart in their gaze. Lenny had impressed her when she had first met him, but she had never found him impossible to resist. In a matter of a few minutes, this man, this Rathe, seemed capable of possessing her with those eyes and that voice, and she despised him for it. But she knew that she hungered for him, somewhere deep inside herself, in that place where all humans are still animals. Rathe had said she was grieving. Perhaps she was. Grieving: for Lenny, for what her life had once been, for what it was now, for what she had become, and for all the lost opportunities with which marriage to Lenny Voss had burdened her. All those opportunities which this man before her now seemed to embody.
“Are you saying Mack wasn’t guilty?” she asked, feeling as though her heart might pulse out of her denim shirt.
Rathe turned away from her and her world seemed to grow smaller. “I don’t know. I just want to be sure.”
“Who doubts it?”
“A friend.”
“Who?” she asked, hardly expecting an answer. She didn’t receive one, other than a sly smile and those eyes turning back on her. “Fair enough. Then, why?”
Rathe shook his head. “Nothing tangible. A gut feeling.”
“This friend of yours… he’s not here himself.”
Rathe frowned. Shelly’s voice had hardened, as though she was insulted that Cook hadn’t come to do his own dirty work, through what Rathe assumed she took to be cowardice or pride. Until that point, he had seen a woman crushed by circumstance, someone who might once have been alluring and intelligent but who had been beaten into submission by a way of life which she had either chosen or had been inflicted on her. He hadn’t liked to speculate which it had been. But now, with those words spoken between the mouthfuls of gin, Rathe wondered whether in fact Shelly Voss was a woman who had argued with life from the beginning: a person not without those lost opportunities but, likewise, a person who blamed the world rather than herself for them.
“I just want to know the truth, Mrs Voss,” said Rathe.
“For your friend?” It was a sneer.
“For myself.” It was a rebuke.
&n
bsp; She considered him for a moment, the only sound the gentle tinkle of ice against glass as she swirled her drink. She kept her eyes on him but gave a slight nod of her head. “What do you want to know?”
“What sort of man was your husband?” It seemed to Rathe to be as pertinent a question as any other.
A sadness crept into Shelly’s eyes, replacing the hard scorn, albeit only briefly. “When I first met him, he wasn’t like anyone else I’d ever met. He wasn’t attractive, not looks-wise. He was always thin, a real bag of bones, and he wasn’t full of brains either. But he was funny, with a knack for a quick one-liner. He was quiet in those days, used to let Mack do all the talking. But when Lenny did say something, you knew it was going to be hilarious, well worth the wait. I used to see him looking at me as he got himself ready to say something, making sure I was paying attention, trying to let me know he was hoping it was impressing me. Which it was. But, as time went on, he stopped trying. He’d got me by then, hadn’t he? No need to keep fighting to impress.”
Rathe let her remember better days for a short while. “You never cared about where the money came from?”
“Never cared what he was, you mean? Sometimes, you don’t want to accept what’s under your nose, do you? You’re too busy enjoying the gifts, the jewels, the meals in restaurants you never dreamed of going to, the cars, the holidays. You don’t think about where the money’s come from, not at first. It’s only when you get fobbed off with a couple of grand and don’t see your husband for three days that you start to wonder. And regret.”
Her talk embarrassed him. He thought about the number of times Cook must have stood in similar circumstances, having similar conversations, and somehow he knew that Cook would remain detached from the situation. It was his profession, his duty, his protection to remain disconnected and not worry about being in a stranger’s house, listening to their most private thoughts. But it made Rathe feel like an intruder. He had no right to be there, listening to this woman bare her soul, delving into the pain of her past. He began to question what it was he was trying to achieve, whether this was another attempt to expunge his own regrets, atone for his own indiscretions. Shelly’s voice pulled him back into the present.
“The truth is,” she said, “that I never considered what he did for a living, not at first. I had no feelings towards it because I never contemplated it. But once I began to question it, when I had opened my eyes and seen the devastation which he and Mack had caused so that we could have yet another new car or one more trip to the Maldives, I began to hate every penny which came through the door.”
“Did you never think of walking away?”
She scoffed. “To what? To the family who cut me off because I married a man they despised? To the old, simple, but honest life I thought I‘d always hated? I was just as trapped then, Mr Rathe, as a kid in suburbia, with life mapped out. It was still a prison, only more respectable than the one I swapped it for.”
“We’re all in our own private prisons,” said Rathe. “The point is to try to escape from them.”
She was unimpressed by his sententious attitude. “What’s your prison like, Mr Rathe?”
He knew he had been unnecessarily pious, so the smile he gave her by way of an apology seemed inevitable. “Just as difficult to escape from as yours, Mrs Voss.”
“That’s your answer, then,” she said, returning the smile. “Whatever he was, whatever I thought about him, I loved him. That can be the only set of chains you need, right? But I hated Lenny’s work. And I hated Harry Mack for not letting Lenny leave it all behind.”
“Would he have left it behind? I understood he was looking to take over Mack’s business.”
Before she replied, she walked out of the kitchen into the room next door. Rathe did not follow; he had not been invited to do so. She returned within a matter of moments with a framed photograph in her hands. He took it from her, looking down at the frozen moment of time which showed a fresh faced boy approaching his teenage years. Smiling, eyes screwed tight with excitement, a plastic gun clutched in his hands. Behind him, a younger, happier version of Shelly Voss. She shared the smile with the boy. He had inherited it from her, Rathe could see that clearly.
“Your son?” he said, handing the frame back to her.
“Danny. He’s fifteen now. This photo was taken when he was eleven. When Danny was born, Lenny said he was going to give everything up. Get a clean job, no more dirty money.”
“Just like that?”
“I told you Lenny wasn’t bright. He knew every bad thing in the world, caused a lot of it in his own way. But he could be childishly naïve about some things. He was so proud of Danny. I watched him look with amazement at this tiny baby, as though he understood for the first time what life really meant. But Lenny had fads, impulses, opinions which mattered in that moment but which faded over time.”
“The wonder of being a parent lost its hold?”
She nodded. “And I blame Harry Mack for that. He drew Lenny back onto the streets, back to the guns and the sleaze, by making him believe that it was about family. Mack convinced Lenny that they were like brothers, so they belonged together. After all those years, they were still closer than any real brothers could be. Such bullshit. But Lenny believed it and Mack knew that Lenny was bound to believe it, just because of who he was. And then, Mack began to manipulate Lenny.”
“How?”
She was looking down at the photograph of her son. “By saying that Lenny could never give Danny the life he deserved working behind a bar or waiting on tables. By telling him that he could only give Danny a chance of a better life by accepting that his own life would only ever be by Mack’s side.”
“Lenny believed that?”
A single tear rolled down her cheek. “Completely.”
“And, over the years,” Rathe surmised, “Lenny began to think that if he took over the business from Mack, he could have more control and so… ”
“And so have more of the money. For Danny.”
Rathe nodded. The twisted, perverted logic of Lenny Voss’s mind was easy to dismiss as naivety, as Shelly herself had done, but Rathe suspected it was more profound than that. To a man like Voss, it would have been a simple equation: he knew only a life of crime but he wanted his son to have better chances than his father had been given; so, he would forfeit his own life to ensure that happened. Rathe thought he could understand how that would make sense to a man trapped in that particular prison, especially with someone as persuasive as Harry Mack holding the keys to the cell.
Shelly was still talking. “Lenny couldn’t see that the choices he was making were corrupting Danny instead of saving him.”
Rathe frowned. “Danny is in trouble with the police?”
“Minor things. Shoplifting, criminal damage, weed, a few fights on street corners. But, little acorns, right? I never wanted Danny to be like his father. I hate watching him go like his dad. I hate my dead husband and his friends for influencing my son. I hate all of it.”
The tears were coming now and Rathe felt that all he could do was to allow them to fall.
“I never wanted Danny to grow up thinking it was all right to cheat, steal, or worse,” Shelly sobbed. “I just wanted good for him. Always. But Lenny Voss was his father. And I was his mother. What chance could he ever have had?” She looked down at the photograph in her hands. “This is the last time I remember him being truly happy.”
Rathe moved closer to her, placing a hand on her forearm. Almost unwittingly, he allowed her to fall against him and then, almost without knowing it, his arms were around her. “I’m sorry, truly I am.”
She looked up at him, her streaming eyes fierce with frustration and remorse. “It’s not you who should apologise though, is it, Mr Rathe? It’s Lenny. It’s Harry Mack, all the others like him. Christ, maybe it’s even me… ”
* * *
Rathe wondered whether he had been right to insist on going there alone. Sitting in the small, windowless room, he began to
feel a vulnerability which he had never experienced before. He had been in prisons in his professional capacity, but he had never felt this sense of helplessness which seemed to stir within him now. Perhaps it had been the armour of his robes and wig, or the protective shield of the legal arguments which had occupied his mind on those earlier occasions when he had set foot in such places. Perhaps now that those defences were gone, his mind had nothing to guard itself with and the fear and the horror of the compact and isolated space could work its effect upon him. He felt the urge to stand, but he resisted it, not certain whether it would help or not. Instead, he forced his brain to focus upon his purpose here and the questions which he was compelled to ask.
The meeting had been easy to arrange. Cook had ensured that Rathe would be given a private room for his interview, that the confrontation would be outside the normal hours for visiting. It had required several phone calls, but Cook had managed to arrange things as required. Rathe had promised to update Cook as soon as he left the prison, the promise being made after a series of insistent demands from the detective. Rathe wasn’t sure whether it was a result of Cook’s need to know what had been said or from his hope that he would not have Rathe’s harm or destruction on his conscience. Whatever it was, Cook would not confess to either, Rathe knew that, but he had given his assurances that he would call and arrange a meeting with the inspector as soon as the thing was done.
It was not until the door opened that Rathe realised he had not known what to expect. How his presence there would be received was not something to which Rathe had given any consideration. With hindsight, perhaps it was better that he had not, for it meant that he had not had time to construct scenarios in his own mind. It had left him free from any perceived preconceptions he might otherwise have formed in his head, so that when the man stepped into the room, Rathe simply rose from his chair and met the man’s glare with his own. They remained staring at each other for some time before slowly sinking to their chairs.
When Anthony Rathe Investigates Page 7
