by Roberta Kray
‘Mr Tamer?’
‘Speaking.’
The voice at the other end was male, low, furtive. ‘It’s me. It’s Pym. I’ve got something for you.’
Max’s hand tightened around the phone. ‘I’m listening.’
There was a crackly pause, a long hesitation. ‘What about the money? I need the money first.’
‘You’ll get your money… if the information’s sound.’
‘You know it will be, Mr Tamer. When have I ever let you down?’
It was true that Pym was the eyes and ears of the underworld. He was a sly, shabby little man who hung around the pubs and bars and courtrooms, listening in to conversations, gathering snippets of news and gossip which he then sold on to any interested parties. ‘Just spit it out, okay? I haven’t got all night.’
‘It’s about that Tom Chase, you know, the geezer in Covent Garden.’
Max’s lips curled into a snarl as disappointment rolled through him. ‘He’s not the one. I’ve already told you that. Why the hell are you wasting my time like this?’
Pym made an unpleasant snuffling noise as if his feelings had been offended. ‘Hang on, Mr Tamer. Don’t go jumping to conclusions. This ain’t the same. This is something different.’
‘What then?’
‘He’s been in court, ain’t he? Charged with armed robbery and manslaughter. Yesterday, it were; I tried to call but you wasn’t around. Now the robbery, that was years back in the sixties, over Epping way, but the filth have only just caught up with him. Bloke called Paddy Lynch was left for dead in the back of the getaway van. Rum sort of affair, Mr Tamer. Nasty like, if you get my drift. Thing is – and this is the interesting bit – I’ve heard a whisper that Chase spent some time in Budapest.’
Max’s hand tightened around the phone. ‘What?’
‘You see what I’m getting at?’
‘When?’
‘When what?’
Max gritted his teeth. ‘When was he in Budapest?’
The beeps went and there was a short delay while more coins were fed into the machine. ‘Hello? You still there?’
‘When was he in Budapest?’ Max repeated sharply.
‘After the job. A year or so after. I don’t know all the details yet. I got his address though. Islington. Twenty-four Pope Street. First-floor flat. He’s still banged up – didn’t get bail – but his missus should be there.’
Max scribbled down the address on the notepad by the phone. ‘You got a name for her?’
‘Eden,’ Pym said, and then spelled it out: ‘E-D-E-N. As in Adam and Eve.’
‘Right.’
‘So, about the money, Mr Tamer. I was thinking a pony, yeah?’
Max gave a dry laugh. ‘Twenty-five quid? I don’t think so. We’ll call it a tenner for now. I’ll give Terry a bell and get it sent over to the Fox.’
Pym made a few grumbling noises, but bowed down to the inevitable. ‘All right. But I’ll stay on it, yeah? You want me to stay on it?’
‘Yes. Keep me informed.’
Max thought about Tom Chase as he put down the phone. It was getting on for two years now since he’d dismissed the photographer as being of no interest. Had he made a mistake? He wasn’t the man in the picture, not the guy he’d been looking for, but the Budapest connection was too much of a coincidence. That’s if Pym was right. But when wasn’t he? He might not be a pleasant creature but he was usually a reliable one. And if this Tom Chase had been capable of killing once, there was no reason why he couldn’t have done it again.
Max made a quick call to Terry Street and arranged for Pym to be paid. As he put the receiver down again his mother’s frail voice floated into the hall.
‘Max?’
‘Yes?’
‘Who was that?’
Max walked into the living room, sat down in the armchair and looked over at his mother. She seemed to be getting smaller by the day, to be visibly shrinking. Her eyes, pale and rheumy, peered back at him.
‘Nothing important,’ he said. ‘Just work.’
‘Oh.’
But contained within that simple ‘Oh’ was something so much more. He knew that she still clung on to a slender thread of hope – a hope he had long ago relinquished – that one day there would be news. Three years of waiting and still nothing. His wife had disappeared into thin air and was never coming home again.
Max watched the television: unemployment at an all-time high, the collapse of Laker Airways leaving six thousand passengers stranded abroad, the aftermath of rioting in Bristol. None of it meant anything to him. He felt disconnected from the world he lived in, cut adrift. All that kept him going was his drive to discover the truth.
He glanced over at his mother again. ‘Did you have any visitors today?’
‘Father Brennan dropped by. He sends his regards.’
Max gave a thin smile. He had no time for the priest and his empty words. God had abandoned the Tamers long ago; the all-seeing, all-forgiving Lord had thrown them overboard and left them to drown in a sea of despair. He sniffed the air, sure that a lingering smell remained, a curious odour of incense and sherry.
‘And what did the old crow have to say for himself?’
‘You should be kinder, Max. His heart’s in the right place.’
But kindness was no longer in Max’s repertoire. The pain festered inside him like a wound that wouldn’t heal. He had kept the bitterness alive, honing it until the edges were hard and cold and sharp as a blade. His wife was dead, he was sure of it, and one day he would have his revenge. An eye for an eye – wasn’t that what it said in the Bible? – but a wife for a wife seemed a more suitable and fitting retribution.
11
Eden wasn’t sure how she’d managed to get through the week. She had lurched from day to day, waking each morning with that same sick feeling in her guts, desperately trying to make sense of the senseless. She sighed as she stared down at the table. It was covered in books, paper, notes, pens, photographs and a stack of phone directories. What she needed was order, but what she had was chaos.
The phone directories, covering various parts of London, were all open at the letter C. She had made a start on ringing round but the name Chase was more common than she’d anticipated and the list of numbers was daunting. There was nothing under T. Chase and so she’d started working her way through alphabetically. To date she had made sixteen calls with every one of them drawing a blank. Not even a casual lead or two. Not even a hesitation while they thought about it.
Her cover story, after apologising for disturbing them and introducing herself as Cathy Harris, was that she was trying to track down an old friend of her husband’s, a mate from the sixties, for a forthcoming birthday party. ‘He was called Tom Chase. He’d be in his forties now and I know Sam would love to see him again.’
Some people were friendlier than others, a few were downright rude, but whatever the response the final answer was always the same: they’d never heard of Tom Chase. She was about to make call seventeen, had even lifted the phone to her ear, when she changed her mind and placed the receiver back on the cradle. What was she doing? Suddenly she was sure it was all a waste of time; no matter how many calls she made she would never get the answer she was looking for.
Could there really be another Tom Chase out there, a murdering, robbing Tom Chase? At first it had seemed the most likely explanation but the more she thought about it the less convinced she became. Although she had heard of doppelgangers, what were the odds of there being two guys of the same age, similar appearance and identical name? If it was John Smith, perhaps, but it wasn’t. And anyway, it didn’t explain the bracelet.
No, she was sure that Jack Minter was the key to all this. He had given the stolen bracelet to Tom and had probably been part of the armed robbery back in the sixties. She could try ringing people called Minter but didn’t relish the thought of starting all over again. It would be better to wait, she decided, until she’d spoken to Tom and then she might have a better
idea of the person she was searching for.
Eden glanced at the clock. She would have to leave in half an hour if she was to arrive in plenty of time for her first visit to HMP Thornley Heath. Her heart gave a leap. A week, a whole week since she’d last seen Tom, and so much had changed in their lives. What state would he be in? He was the type who could cope with most situations but prison could break the toughest of men. She feared for his safety, especially if word got out as to what he’d been charged with. Paddy Lynch must have had family and friends. They could be planning revenge at this very moment, unwilling to wait for the trial, deciding to take justice into their own hands.
‘Stop it,’ she muttered, knowing that she would send herself crazy if she continued to think along these lines. Her imagination was capable of conjuring up every kind of horror, endless nightmare scenarios that made her feel sick and scared. It was the helplessness that got to her, the thought of being able to do nothing. Which was why she was trying to do something, anything, to keep the demons at bay.
It occurred to her that Jack Minter could be the man who was trying to frame Tom. It had a sort of logic. Perhaps he’d been caught on another job and was now turning Queen’s evidence – and making stuff up – in the hope of saving his own skin. He couldn’t have known that Tom would still have the bracelet, not after sixteen years, but perhaps that had just been a stroke of luck. And for the police, of course, it was a damning piece of evidence.
The police. Her mouth twisted at the thought of the DI. It had been bad enough when Banner had turned up unannounced at the studio, but being interviewed by him was going to be even worse. The call had come yesterday, a summons to West End Central.
‘Is that Eden?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hey, it’s Vic, Vic Banner. How are you, love?’
As if they were old friends, as if he gave a damn how she was.
‘I’m fine, thank you.’ Trying to sound as cool as she could, trying to convey the impression that she wasn’t worried because ultimately she had nothing to be worried about. With any success? It was doubtful. She couldn’t quite keep the tremor from her voice.
‘So about that little chat I mentioned. Tomorrow suit you all right? About eleven?’
‘Yes, that’s not a problem.’
‘Good. Do you know where the station is?’
‘Yes.’
‘See you tomorrow then. Just ask for me at the desk.’ Banner had paused and then given a chuckle. ‘Looking forward to it.’
Eden, recalling that sly unpleasant laugh, pulled a face. She wondered if she should take a solicitor along, someone to support her, but then thought about the cost. Every penny counted at the moment and she couldn’t afford to throw money away. Unfortunately, Caitlin wasn’t around; she’d gone off for a few days to support the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common and wouldn’t be back until Monday. As there was no way of getting in touch with her, she would have to deal with the police on her own.
‘You can do it,’ she muttered. ‘Don’t let that creep get the better of you.’
All she had to do was be careful, right? To not do anything stupid. To think before she spoke. But God alone knew what tricks Banner might have up his sleeve. She had already realised he wasn’t the type to play by the rules. She’d have to be on her guard, to pay attention to every question. He’d be out to trap her, to try and make her say something that would incriminate Tom.
Eden glanced at the mess on the table, her gaze alighting on a heap of photocopies. On Monday she’d taken the Tube up to Colindale and gone to the newspaper library. Here she’d dug out everything she could on the Epping armed robbery – and there was plenty of it. The story had been widely covered in the national and the local press: an armed raid on a storage depot where the thieves had allegedly got away with over two million pounds’ worth of gold, gems and jewellery.
One of the security guards, called Roger Best, had attempted to thwart the raid and a sawn-off shotgun had gone off, injuring one of the robbers. The severity of the man’s injuries had been unknown at this point but an alert had been put out to local hospitals. Eden had made a note of the guard’s name, wondering if there was anything useful he could recall after all this time.
The follow-up reports, with their lurid headlines, made for uncomfortable reading. It was the morning after the raid when the body of Paddy Lynch was found in the back of a locked van in an Epping car park. Dumped by the rest of the gang, he’d been left to die alone even though the hospital was only half a mile away. Eden shuddered as she contemplated the man’s fate. It was hard to imagine how people could commit such a callous act; there was something brutal and chilling about it. Wasn’t there a code of conduct among criminals? Didn’t they always look after their own? Surely it would have been easy enough for one of them to have found a phone box and called an ambulance.
She found herself thinking about Jack Minter again. Who was he? Where was he? In jail, perhaps, trying to shift the blame for everything he’d done on to Tom. Or still walking the streets, free as a bird, while her husband was banged up and staring at a life sentence. But of course there was always the possibility that he’d had nothing to do with the raid at all. Minter could be completely innocent, having bought the bracelet from someone else, unaware of its origins. But what were the odds? No, she was sure he was behind all this.
Eden looked at the clock again. Still another fifteen minutes to go. She laid out a few of the Budapest photographs and stared at them. Black and white prints of a bustling marketplace, the sky low and grey, the crowd dressed in winter attire – heavy coats and scarves and gloves. A supermarket, houses and apartments. A stone plinth with a statue on top. Some tramps sitting by a gate, surrounded by bottles and cardboard. Meat, fruit and vegetable stalls. Men and women selling from bags and open suitcases. There was movement and life and feeling. The photographs were stunningly evocative, a heaving hotchpotch of humanity caught in a single moment and preserved for ever.
On the back of one of them, written in Tom’s familiar hand, was the name Garay Square. The name rang a bell and when she checked the airmail letters from Ann-Marie she saw that this was the address written on the front. She still hadn’t got round to trying to translate the French and now wasn’t the time to start. Later, she thought, when she got back from the visit.
Eden didn’t know much about Hungary, other than it was part of the Eastern bloc. She wondered what had made him go there and wished to God he hadn’t. If there’d been no Budapest, there would have been no Jack Minter and no bracelet either.
She was still mulling this over when the phone rang. She reached out and picked it up. ‘Hello?’
‘Ah, at last!’
Eden’s heart sank at the sound of her father’s voice. Had he heard about Tom? Did he know anything? ‘Hi, Dad. How are you?’
‘I’ve been trying to get through for hours. Are you ever off that phone?’
‘Sorry, I’ve been… I had some calls to make.’
‘How come you’re not at college today?’
Eden rolled her eyes, wondering why her father still felt the need to interrogate her when she was twenty-six years of age. ‘I haven’t got any lectures. I’ve got an essay to write so I’m working from home.’ She glanced down at the pile of unopened art books. ‘Caravaggio,’ she said. ‘Five thousand words, and it needs to be in by tomorrow.’
‘Well, you won’t get much done if you’re on the phone all day.’
‘I’m not on the…’ She pulled herself up, knowing it was pointless getting into an argument with him. ‘Anyway, I’ve almost finished,’ she lied. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Why shouldn’t it be?’
‘You usually call in the evening.’
‘I tried last night, but it was engaged.’ He sighed down the line. ‘I was just calling to say that I’m going to be in London next week from Wednesday to Friday. It’s a work conference but I’ll be free in the evenings. Perhaps we could meet up, the three of us, go
for dinner somewhere.’
‘Oh, right. Yes. Yes, of course.’ Although Eden was relieved that he wasn’t ringing about Tom’s arrest, she didn’t relish the prospect of having to lie to him about why her husband couldn’t be there. ‘I’m sure that will be fine. What night were you thinking of?’
‘Friday would be best.’
‘Okay. That sounds good.’
There was a short silence before her father said, ‘Wasn’t there something about a murder charge?’
Eden almost dropped the phone. She could feel the blood draining from her face. So he’d known all along, had just been testing her, waiting to see if she’d tell the truth. ‘W-what?’ she stammered.
‘A murder charge,’ he repeated.
