by Greg Keen
‘Is there anyone who was around in the seventies I could speak to?’
‘There’s Maggie. She was part of the original group who saved the place. The old girl’s in her nineties now, though, and you have to catch her on a good day.’
‘Would you mind having a word with Maggie?’ I asked. ‘I’d be very grateful, and I’m sure Keith would be too. Perhaps he could make a donation . . .’
‘She lives in the village. I’ll pop round this afternoon.’
I thanked Clive and made for the exit, leaving him to strike up a conversation with the workmen. I was confident he would keep our chat to himself in case it wrecked his chances of escorting a bona fide rock god around the cemetery. If not, it wouldn’t matter as long as he pumped Maggie for any Porteus-related incidents.
The guy behind the counter of the gift shop unlocked the gate for me and I ambled on to Swain’s Lane. The road was deserted and there wasn’t much to do but check my emails while waiting for Gary. Top of my inbox was one from Odeerie.
Kenny, have found out where Ray Clarke is living and what he’s calling himself now. Call me when you get this.
I was vaguely aware of a white SUV pulling to a halt further down the road. The driver got out, although I was too busy finding Odeerie’s number in my address book to take much notice of him. The fat man answered after a couple of rings.
‘How are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Not bad. I’ve found Ray Clarke.’
‘So I gathered. Where’s he living?’
‘On a Carbury Estate in Wapping. That’s not the interesting bit, though. You’re not gonna believe this, Kenny, but—’
‘Hang on a sec, Odeerie . . .’
The guy who had got out of the car was in front of me. In his early forties, he was wearing a Fair Isle sweater over a pair of chinos. Greying hair was neatly side-parted and he sported a military-style moustache.
‘Sorry to interrupt, mate,’ he said. ‘D’you know if there’s a tour about to start? I can’t see a sign or anything.’
‘It’s just finished,’ I told him. ‘I think that’s it for today.’
‘Bugger,’ the man said.
‘You could always try the East Cemetery,’ I suggested.
‘That one over there?’
There was a hut on the opposite side of the road where tickets were sold. No one was buying any. The driver registered this before looking left and right like a hyper-careful pedestrian. Then he bent down, put his arms around my waist and heaved me across his shoulder.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I shouted.
As the guy approached the SUV, a rear door opened. The car’s engine was running.
‘Kenny, what’s happening?’ I heard Odeerie ask. Before I could reply, my kidnapper plucked the mobile from my hand and threw it over the railings.
Gary emerged from Waterlow Park and began sprinting towards the car. I struggled to stop myself from being deposited on the back seat by clutching the rim of the door. Twenty seconds longer and Gary might have made it. The door slammed. My abductor entered the van and turned the key in the ignition. Lance was on the seat next to me.
‘Put your foot down, Miles,’ he said.
Gary carried on running but no way he was going to catch us. The last thing I saw through the rear window was him hunched over in the road as though about to throw up.
ELEVEN
It was small consolation that Lance had spruced up sartorially since he and Steve had ambushed me in the flat. Then his outfit had comprised a Crombie overcoat over mauve tracksuit bottoms; now he had matched a cream Harrington with a blue denim shirt and black jeans. I guess it’s come as you are for retribution, whereas kidnapping is a more formal occasion. Unless this was Lance’s murder outfit, of course.
Naturally I had a few questions, where are we going being first, closely followed by what’s going to happen to me when we get there, and is all this strictly necessary? Lance instructed me to shut up and that I would find out soon enough.
Lance and Miles weren’t in a chatty mood either. Not a word had been spoken by the time we joined the A10 and then the M25. Although the silence was oppressive, at least it allowed me to focus on ways to placate Billy Dylan. Sadly I couldn’t improve on Gary’s suggestion that I offer to track down his errant wife. Tough on Cheryl, but then she had married the bloke. And besides, if the silly cow hadn’t hoodwinked Odeerie, none of this would be happening. Not to me, anyway.
After leaving the motorway, Miles navigated a couple of roundabouts and drove down a tree-lined lane. We pulled to a halt outside a pair of ten-foot gates. A sign that read DUCKETT’S FARM formed an arc between its posts. A security camera swivelled to focus on the SUV. A few seconds later, the gates opened. We sped down a tarmacked track towards the only building on the horizon.
The sprawling bungalow couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. There wasn’t a grain hopper or a combine harvester in sight. It looked as though the Dylans weren’t sowing barley that year. We entered a courtyard, in the centre of which was a red telephone box. Next to it stood a Victorian gas lamp with a wooden parrot perched on top. Outside a double-bay garage was a BMW 7 Series and a superbike with a helmet hanging off the handlebar. Miles parked and killed the engine.
‘Get out,’ Lance said. ‘And remember, you’re fuckin’ miles from anywhere, so there’s no point tryna run for it.’
‘Why would I do that?’ I asked.
Lance grinned and squeezed my cheek between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Because you’re shitting yourself, Kenny,’ he said. ‘And I don’t fuckin’ blame ya.’
The front door comprised two frosted-glass panels set in a wooden surround. Each had a swan etched into its surface in such a way that their beaks met in the middle. Attached to the brickwork were at least a dozen multicoloured tin butterflies.
When Lance pressed the bell, the first few bars of the theme from Love Story sounded out. It was so kitsch that I half expected Barry Manilow to answer the door. Instead it was a stocky woman in her forties with a prominent front tooth.
‘Shoes off,’ Lance instructed me.
I removed my Hush Puppies and entered. To my left was a large wooden box. Inside were half a dozen pairs of male shoes all at least three sizes larger than mine. I placed my Pups next to a pair of biker boots. Lance followed suit with his Nikes.
‘Where’s Mrs Dylan, Magda?’ he asked.
‘Madam in the day room.’ Judging by her accent, Magda was Eastern European. She looked at me briefly and with zero interest.
‘This way,’ Lance said.
We walked down a rose-coloured passage. A pair of elaborate chandeliers hung from the ceiling. Lance bobbed down slightly to walk beneath them. We stopped at the second door on the left and Lance tapped on it. A female voice instructed us to enter.
Perched on a sofa was a small woman in her mid-fifties, wearing a cream broderie anglaise dress matched with a charcoal jacket. Her dark hair had been pinned up and she was wearing hoop earrings. She stood and extended a hand.
‘I’m Meg Dylan and you must be Kenny Gabriel. I hope you had a pleasant journey and that Lance treated you well.’
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Apart from snatching me off the street.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry about that. But you probably wouldn’t have come otherwise.’
‘Probably not,’ I agreed.
‘Lance, would you ask the others to join us?’
‘Everyone?’ he asked.
‘Yes, including Magda and the boys.’
Having received his instructions, Lance left the room. ‘Do have a seat, Kenny,’ his boss said. ‘I was about to take tea – would you care to join me?’
The sofa was upholstered in lemon fabric and could have accommodated five people were it not for the proliferation of cushions. To Meg Dylan’s left was a table bearing a large teapot and a pair of dainty porcelain cups. At its base I noticed a large claw hammer and a green velvet bag.
‘That would be n
ice,’ I said, settling into a capacious armchair and trying hard not to stare at the bag and the hammer.
Meg Dylan got busy with the makings, allowing me to take in the room. Three walls were shelved from top to bottom. On each were crowded tiny glass animals and ornaments lit by tiny spotlights. There had to be hundreds of crystal creatures in the twinkling menagerie. We could have been sitting in a Swarovski boutique.
Hanging above the sofa was a family portrait executed in oils. It depicted a man in his late thirties with shoulder-length dark hair, a rock-solid jawline and a tight shirt undone to the navel. Marty Dylan had his arm around a younger Meg Dylan. To his right was his teenage son.
‘Ah, I see you’re looking at the family portrait.’ Meg Dylan poured a golden stream through a strainer into each cup. ‘Do you have children, Kenny?’ I shook my head. ‘Well, they really do grow up so quickly.’
I’d have expected Meg Dylan to be a peroxide blonde wearing a leopard-print dress over a fake tan. Exclude the taste in décor and furnishings and she could have been the wife of an architect, as opposed to the spouse of Marty Dylan.
‘Is your son around?’ I asked.
‘He’ll be with us shortly.’
‘That’s good, because I wanted to clear up all that nonsense in the papers. I’m sure Billy had a perfectly valid reason for visiting—’
Meg held up a hand and cut me off in mid-sentence.
‘We can discuss Cheryl in due course.’ She handed me a cup and saucer. ‘Do you know how hard it is for a woman to run a successful organisation, Kenny?’
‘I’m sure it can’t be easy.’
‘It’s terribly difficult. Occasionally you have to make an example of someone, however much you may dislike doing so. It’s important to me that you understand that, Kenny. What’s about to happen next will be distasteful to both of us.’
The floodgates of my imagination crashed open, engulfing me in all manner of hammer-and-bag scenarios. ‘What is going to happen next?’ I asked.
‘All in good time, Kenny,’ Meg replied. ‘All in good time.’
I can’t recollect what we chatted about for the next two minutes. I’ve an idea it had something to do with gardening. Equally it might have been the best way to treat piranha bites or the shortcomings of Icelandic fiscal policy. The small-talk part of my mind was on autopilot while the rest worked on strategies to extricate myself from whatever it was Meg Dylan thought I might find so distasteful. A knock on the door preceded a procession into the room. At its head was Lance, accompanied by Steve and Miles. Three missing links shuffled in next, followed by Magda and Billy Dylan.
I recognised Billy from surveilling his girlfriend’s house. He was average height with dark-brown curly hair. He wore a Videodrome T-shirt and leather trousers. That a gangster would be into a cult eighties sci-fi movie was peculiar but somehow in keeping with Billy’s overall appearance. He resembled a mature student more than a hardened criminal.
The motley group congregated around Meg Dylan’s sofa. Although not specifically instructed to do so, I opted to stand.
‘Thank you all for joining us,’ she said. ‘For those of you who don’t know my guest, his name is Kenny.’
I offered up a token wave. The only response was a smirk from Lance. Meg Dylan picked up the bag and withdrew something from it. On the palm of her hand lay the separate parts of a broken crystal horse.
‘I found this at the back of a shelf this morning,’ she said. ‘As none of you apart from Magda are allowed in the day room, only one person can be responsible.’
The focus of interest devolved from me to the cleaner. Her eyes were fixed on the carpet, and the cheeks on her slab-like face began to redden.
‘Have you got anything to say for yourself, Magda?’ her employer asked.
‘It was accident,’ she said without looking up. ‘I no mean break hoss.’
‘That’s not what upsets me,’ Meg Dylan said. ‘What upsets me is that you didn’t admit what you’d done.’
Or have the nous to throw the fucking thing away, I thought.
‘I buy new one,’ Magda offered. ‘You take money out my pay.’
‘They don’t make them any more and, besides, that’s not the point. What you’ve done is betray my trust, Magda, and we all know how important trust is.’ Meg Dylan paused to stare at everyone in the room. ‘So the only thing that needs to be done is decide how to punish you,’ she said. ‘I’ve had to think long and hard about this.’
‘I buy new hoss,’ Magda repeated.
‘You can’t, you stupid Polish bitch,’ Meg Dylan said, her accent slipping several notches down the phonetic scale. ‘I’ve told you that.’
A tear rolled down Magda’s face. She knew what was coming would be bad, although she didn’t know quite how bad. Meg Dylan held the shattered glass out.
‘You’re going to eat it,’ she said.
TWELVE
Intact, the horse would have been two inches high and four inches long. It might have been possible to swallow each of the three individual pieces whole, although they probably wouldn’t navigate Magda’s system without surgical intervention. That she would chew each chunk to render it smaller was out of the question. Judging by the way her front tooth was angled, Magda hadn’t lived in the golden age of Polish dentistry.
Considerately, Meg Dylan had anticipated this.
‘Now, you aren’t going to be able to get these down as they are,’ she said to Magda. ‘So I’m going to give you a little help with that.’ She dropped the pieces into the bag and I felt a trill of anxiety at the base of my neck. ‘A couple of weeks ago, Billy and I went to see this magic show in town. Actually, it wasn’t a magic show, exactly, more of a . . . How did Darryl describe himself, Billy?’
‘Said he was a mentalist, Ma.’
‘That was it. It’s all down to the way you look at things. Most people think you can’t eat glass, but that isn’t true. To prove it, Darryl ate a light bulb. Can you imagine that, Magda?’
The cleaner rubbed her eyes and shook her head.
‘Me neither. Mind you, Darryl showed us how. First of all, you’ve got to get the pieces really small, otherwise they’ll cut your insides to ribbons. He did it by putting the bulb in a bag and smashing it up.’
Meg Dylan handed over the velvet bag and the claw hammer. Magda took them from her as though she were living in a dream. A very bad dream.
‘Now, you can crush a bulb in ten seconds, but it’s going to take longer when you’re dealing with the finest Austrian lead crystal. So I’m going to give you a minute to get these pieces as small as you can.’ Meg Dylan held her thumb and forefinger a fraction apart. ‘D’you understand that, Magda?’ she asked. ‘Teeny, tiny . . .’
Although Magda’s English wasn’t great, a nod indicated she knew what was expected. Meg Dylan reached under the sofa and produced a breadboard.
‘Better use this, otherwise you’ll ruin the carpet.’ She placed the rectangle of wood at Magda’s feet. ‘Okay, you’ve got sixty seconds, starting . . . now.’
Magda was generously proportioned and she knew how to swing a hammer. For the next minute we all watched as she beat the living shit out of the remnants of the horse. The sound of crunching glass accompanied by grunts of effort was made even more horrible by the knowledge of what was to come.
‘Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . stop!’
The final blow descended after the countdown had finished. Meg Dylan allowed it to pass. Magda was scarlet-faced and sweating profusely. I helped her to her feet.
‘Look, if all this is for my benefit, there’s no need,’ I said. ‘You’re clearly pissed off, and I know what you’re capable of. But I’ve got something—’
‘Well done, Magda,’ Meg Dylan said, as though I weren’t in the room. She took the bag from Magda and looked inside. ‘You know, I think you’ve every chance of managing this. Mind you, there are a few larger pieces so there’s still work to do.’
Lance ges
tured at me to stand aside. I thought about telling him and Meg Dylan to go fuck themselves. And then I thought again. Nothing I could do would make any difference to the outcome. What was going to happen was going to happen.
‘Get the glass right to the back of your mouth and grind it slowly,’ Meg Dylan advised Magda. ‘And get lots of spit in there so you don’t slice your gums up.’
‘I buy two new hosses,’ Magda said, a pleading note in her voice.
Meg Dylan picked up one of the teaspoons from the table. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t entirely clean, although I don’t think that’s going to matter too much in the circumstances. Maybe start with the smaller pieces first . . .’
Magda opened the bag and peered inside. She poked around like a kid probing a bag of sherbet dip and eventually withdrew the spoon. On it was a small heap of splintered glass. She looked at Meg Dylan as though hoping for a last-minute reprieve. It wasn’t forthcoming.
The cleaner opened her mouth and inserted the spoon. She manipulated her jaw from side to side to distribute the shards evenly, and then, tentatively, began to chew. After ten seconds’ grinding there was a muffled crack. It was impossible to tell from Magda’s wince of pain whether it was a tooth splintering or a chunk of crystal horse. She took a deep breath and carried on chewing.
It was about a minute before she swallowed. Her eyes widened slightly but there was no other reaction. Only when Magda opened her mouth did the damage show. Her gums and teeth were wreathed in blood.
‘Urgh, that’s disgusting.’ Billy Dylan sounded both revolted and delighted, as though watching a gross-out comedy.
‘For God’s sake, stop this,’ I said. Lance’s hand detonated against the side of my head. The impact staggered me backwards into an armchair. The room shimmered for a few seconds before returning to focus. I struggled back to my feet.
‘I’m so sorry, Kenny,’ Meg Dylan said. ‘Lance tends to overreact sometimes. Although, to be fair, I did say that you might find this distasteful.’
‘Distasteful! It’s fucking barbaric.’
Lance looked as though he was about to give me some afters. Meg held up her hand to prevent him. ‘Mr Gabriel is a guest, Lance,’ she said. ‘Although I would remind you, Kenny, that even a guest has certain obligations . . .’
