The Thursday Murder Club

by Richard Osman

  She looks down towards the lights of the village. Mostly off now, but Ibrahim’s light is shining bright. He’ll be working away. Good man.

  She looks back at Bogdan, shovelling earth into the grave, covered in dirt and sweat. Sliding a broken coffin lid back over one body while carefully avoiding disturbing another body. She thinks this is absolutely the sort of son she would like to have had.

  66

  ‘They are bang at it all the time,’ says Ron. ‘Always have been. Whatever it is, the Catholic Church will have a piece of it.’

  ‘Even so,’ says Ibrahim.

  Ibrahim and Ron are discussing who might have murdered Ian Ventham.

  They are working their way through the list of thirty names, weighing up the possibilities. It is just the boys this evening. Joyce has Joanna staying and Elizabeth was nowhere to be found. Which, at this time of the evening, was suspicious, but they have chosen to carry on regardless.

  Ron is insisting on marking everyone out of ten, and the more whisky he drinks, the higher his scores are climbing. Maureen from Larkin had just scored a seven, largely because she had once pushed in front of Ron at dinner, which ‘spoke a thousand words’.

  ‘Father Mackie’s our first ten, Ibbsy, write it down. Top of the list. He’ll have something buried up in one of the graves. Guaranteed, nailed on. Gold, or a body, or porn. All three, knowing that lot. He’s worried they’ll dig it up.’

  ‘Seems unlikely, Ron,’ says Ibrahim.

  ‘Well, you know what Sherlock Holmes said, old son. If you don’t know who did it, then … something or other.’

  ‘Indeed, wise words,’ says Ibrahim. ‘And Father Mackie wouldn’t just have dug it up himself, Ron? At some point? To save himself the worry?’

  ‘Lost his spade, I dunno. Mark my words though,’ says Ron, those very words beginning to slur gently and warmly. Late nights, whisky, something to solve, this was the life. ‘It’s a ten from me.’

  ‘This is not Strictly Come Poisoning, Ron.’ Ibrahim strongly disagrees with Ron’s marking system, but writes ‘10’ next to Father Mackie’s name. As it happens, Ibrahim also strongly disagrees with the Strictly Come Dancing scoring system, believing it gives too much weight to the public vote when compared to the judges’ scores. He once wrote a letter to this effect to the BBC and received a friendly, but non-committal, reply. He looks at the next name on the list.

  ‘Bernard Cottle, Ron. What do we think there?’

  ‘Another of the big guns for me.’ The ice in Ron’s whisky chimes as he gestures with his glass. ‘See how he was that morning?’

  ‘He has become increasingly agitated, I agree.’

  ‘And we know he sits up there a lot, on that bench, like he’s marking his territory,’ says Ron. ‘Used to sit there with his wife, didn’t he? So that’s where he gets his peace, innit? You can’t take that away from a man, especially our age. Too much change don’t sit right.’

  Ibrahim nods, ‘Too much change, yes. There comes a time when progress is only for other people.’

  For Ibrahim one of the beauties of Coopers Chase was that it was so alive. So full of ridiculous committees and ridiculous politics, so full of arguments, of fun and of gossip. All the new arrivals, each one subtly shifting the dynamic. All the farewells too, reminding you that this was a place that could never stay the same. It was a community and, in Ibrahim’s opinion, that was how human beings were designed to live. At Coopers Chase, any time you wanted to be alone, you would simply close your front door and any time you wanted to be with people, you would open it up again. If there was a better recipe for happiness than that, then Ibrahim was yet to hear it. But Bernard had lost his wife, and showed no signs of finding a way through his grief. And so he needed to sit on Fairhaven Pier, or on a bench on a hill, and nobody ever needed to ask why.

  ‘Where is your place, Ron?’ asks Ibrahim. ‘Where do you find your peace?’

  Ron purses his lips and chuckles. ‘If you’d asked me a question like that a couple of years ago I’d have laughed and left, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘You would,’ agrees Ibrahim. ‘I have successfully changed you.’

  ‘I think,’ starts Ron, face alert, eyes alive, ‘I think …’ Ibrahim sees Ron’s face relax as he decides to just let the truth come out, rather than think. ‘Honestly? I’m flicking through it all in my head, all the things you’re supposed to say. But, listen. It might be here in this chair, with my mate, drinking his whisky, dark outside, with something to talk about.’

  Ibrahim knots his hands together and lets Ron talk.

  ‘Just think of everyone who isn’t here, Ibbsy. Every bugger who didn’t make it? And here we are, a boy from Egypt and a boy from Kent, and we made it through it all, and then someone in Scotland made us this whisky. That’s something, isn’t it? This is the place, isn’t it, old son? This is the place.’

  Ibrahim nods and agrees. His place of peace is actually the wall of files directly behind him, but he doesn’t want to spoil the moment. Ron has stopped speaking, and Ibrahim can see he has gone somewhere very deep inside himself. Lost to memories. Ibrahim knows to keep quiet, to let Ron go where he needs to go. To think what he needs to think. Something Ibrahim has seen so many times over the years, with people in that very armchair. It is his favourite thing about his job. Seeing someone go deep inside themselves to access things they never knew were there. Ron tilts his head up; he is ready to talk again. Ibrahim leans forward, just a touch. Where has Ron just been?

  ‘Do you think Bernard is banging Joyce, Ibbsy?’ says Ron.

  Ibrahim leans back, just a touch. ‘I haven’t really thought about it, Ron.’

  ‘Course you have, I know you have. Psychiatrist. I bet he is, lucky sod. All that cake and what have you. Could you still, you know, if you had to?’ he asks.

  ‘No, not for a few years now.’

  ‘Same, same. A blessing in some ways. I was a slave to it. Anyway, I’d say he’s a nine, wouldn’t you? Old Bernard? He was there, you could see he doesn’t want the place bulldozed, and he worked in science or something didn’t he?’

  ‘Petrochemicals I think.’

  ‘There you are then, fentanyl. Nine.’

  Ibrahim is inclined to agree. Bernard does not seem to be living entirely in grace. He writes a ‘9’ next to Bernard Cottle’s name.

  ‘Of course, if they are banging, Joyce won’t like that nine,’ says Ron.

  ‘Joyce has the same information that we have. She will already know he’s a nine.’

  ‘She’s no fool, that one,’ agrees Ron. ‘What about that girl from the top of the hill? The farmer’s girl with the computers?’

  ‘Karen Playfair,’ says Ibrahim.

  ‘She was there, eh?’ says Ron. ‘Bang in the middle of it. Probably knows a thing or two about drugs. Pretty, too, and that’s always trouble.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Always,’ says Ron. ‘To me, anyway.’

  ‘Motive?’ asks Ibrahim.

  Ron shrugs. ‘Affair? Forget graveyards, it’s usually an affair.’

  ‘A seven perhaps?’ says Ibrahim. ‘Or perhaps a seven with an asterisk and a footnote explaining that the asterisk means “in need of further investigation”?’

  ‘Asterisk seven,’ agrees Ron, though with a pronunciation of the word ‘asterisk’ very much his own. ‘And that just leaves the four of us, eh? The only ones left on the list?’

  Ibrahim looks down at the list and nods.

  ‘Shall we?’ asks Ron.

  ‘You think there is a chance one of us did it?’

  ‘I didn’t do it, that’s for sure,’ says Ron. ‘They can redevelop what they like, more the merrier, far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘And yet you led the objections at the public meeting, you lobbied the council and you started the barricade. All designed to stop the redevelopment.’

  ‘Of course,’ says Ron, as if his friend has lost his mind. ‘No one takes liberties with me. And when else do you get the chance to cause a
bit of trouble when you’re nearly eighty? But, mate, think of the service charge, the new facilities. Probably won’t happen now. No way I’d have killed him, that’d be cutting off my nose. Score me a four.’

  Ibrahim shakes his head. ‘You get a seven. You are very combative, you are hot-headed, often irrational, you were there at the heart of the scuffle and you are insulin-dependent, so you know how to use a needle. That adds up.’

  Ron nods, fair enough. ‘All right, let’s call me a six.’

  Ibrahim taps his pen against his book seven times, before looking up. ‘And your son, I think, perhaps knew Tony Curran a little. Which adds up to seven.’

  Ron is no longer in his place of peace and his ice cubes now dance a different jig. He remains quiet, if not calm. ‘Don’t bring Jason into this, Ibrahim. You know better than that.’

  Interesting, thinks Ibrahim, but says nothing. ‘Are we scoring ourselves, Ron, or are we not scoring ourselves?’

  Ron stares at his friend for a long while. ‘We are, we are, you’re right. Well if I’m a seven then you’re a seven too.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ says Ibrahim and writes it in his book. ‘Any reason?’

  So many reasons, mate, Ron thinks. He is smiling now, the tension broken. ‘Too smart by half, there’s one. You might want to write these down. You’re a psychopath, or sociopath, whichever one the bad one is. Terrible handwriting, that’s a sure sign. You’re an immigrant, and we’ve all read about them. There’s some poor British psychiatrist, a white fella, sitting at home without a job because of you. Also, perhaps you’re furious that your hair is thinning, people have killed over less.’

  ‘My hair isn’t thinning,’ says Ibrahim. ‘Ask Anthony about my hair. He admires it.’

  ‘You were there, right in the thick of it, as usual. And you’re exactly the sort of person in a film who would commit the perfect murder just to see if he could get away with it.’

  ‘That is certainly true,’ agrees Ibrahim.

  ‘Played by Omar Sharif,’ adds Ron.

  ‘Ah, so we agree I have hair. OK I am a seven. Now, Joyce and Elizabeth.’

  Ibrahim relishes the thought of talking late into the night. Once Ron goes, all there will be to do is read, to make more lists, then force himself to lie on his bed waiting for a sleep that always takes too long to come. Too many voices wanting his attention. Too many people still lost in the dark, asking for his help.

  Ibrahim knows he is usually the last person awake in Coopers Chase, and tonight he is glad to have the excuse of company. Two old men, fighting against the night.

  Ibrahim opens his pad again and looks out of his window towards Joyce’s flat. Darkness everywhere. The village is asleep.

  Of course, Elizabeth is too much of a professional to let her torch beam show on her walk back down the hill.

  67

  Jason Ritchie sits at a corner table, finishing his lunch. Monkfish and pancetta, both locally sourced.

  He doesn’t know quite what to do.

  Jason is surprised by the changes in the Black Bridge. It is now a gastropub called Le Pont Noir, with its name written, black against grey, in minimalist lower-case font. Some of the rough edges have been really been knocked off Fairhaven over the years, some of the darker corners have gone.

  You and me both, Jason thinks, as he sips his sparkling water.

  Jason is thinking about the photograph. He would feel a lot safer with a gun, and twenty years ago that would have been easy. He would have walked into the Black Bridge, talked to Mickey Landsdowne, who would have rung Geoff Goff and, before he’d finished his pint, a kid on a BMX would have delivered a brown parcel to the saloon bar and been given a packet of crisps and twenty B&H for his troubles.

  Simpler times.

  Now Mickey Landsdowne was in Wandsworth for arson, and for selling fake Viagra at car-boot fairs.

  Geoff Goff had tried to buy Fairhaven Town FC, lost his money in a property crash, made another fortune selling stolen copper and had eventually been shot dead on a jet ski.

  And did kids even ride BMXs any more?

  The photograph lies in front of Jason on the table. Taken in the Black Bridge long ago. In the days before pancetta and sourdough bread.

  The gang, just like it was yesterday. Laughing away like trouble wasn’t round the next corner.

  Ever since he sat down, Jason has been trying to work out exactly where in the pub Tony Curran had shot that drug dealer down from London, trying his luck in sleepy Fairhaven. In about 2000, was it? It was hard because they had moved a wall, but he thinks perhaps it was by the reclaimed fireplace, with the locally sourced logs.

  ‘Coffee, sir?’ The waitress. Jason orders a flat white.

  Jason remembers that the bullet had gone through the guy’s stomach, straight through the paper-thin wall and out into the car park, where it went through the front wing of Turkish Gianni’s Cosworth RS500. Gianni was gutted, you could see it, but it was Tony, so what could he do?

  Turkish Gianni. Jason has been thinking about him a lot. He is sure Gianni had taken the photograph which had been left by the body. Always had that camera with him. Did the police know? Had Gianni come back to town? Had Bobby Tanner come back? Was Jason next on their list?

  The boy Tony shot had died in the end. They had often come down from London in those days. Sometimes south London, sometimes north; gangs looking to expand, to find soft new markets.

  The waitress brings his flat white. With an almond biscotto.

  Jason still remembers the boy Tony had shot. He was only a kid. He’d offered a wrap of coke to Steve Georgiou, in the Oak on the seafront. Steve Georgiou was a Cypriot lad, used to hang around on the fringes of the gang, never liked to get involved, but was loyal. Owned a gym now. Steve Georgiou had set him up, told the young drug dealer to try his luck at the Black Bridge. Which the boy had done, before quickly realizing his luck was out.

  He was bleeding a lot, Jason remembers that, and it wasn’t fun, he remembers that too. Thinking back, the kid must have been about seventeen, which seems young now, but didn’t at the time. Someone put him in Bobby Tanner’s old British Telecom van, and a cabbie Tony liked to use in this sort of situation drove him out to the ‘Welcome to Fairhaven’ sign on the A2102 and dumped him there. That’s where they found him the next morning. Too late for the boy, he was long dead, but he’d known the risks. The cabbie got shot too, because Tony thought you could never be too careful.

  That had been the end of things for Jason. The end of it for all of them, really. It was no longer young men making money, friends having fun, pretending to be Robin Hood, or whatever he had thought it was at the time. It was bullets and dead bodies and police and grieving parents. He’d been an idiot. He’d spotted it all too late.

  Bobby Tanner left soon after. His younger brother, Troy, had died on a boat in the Channel. Bringing drugs in? Jason never found out. Gianni did a runner too, straight after the cabbie was shot. And that was that. Just like that, with one bullet, those days were gone. And good riddance to them.

  They say two brothers from St Leonards now run things in Fairhaven. Good luck to them, thinks Jason. Still keeping it locally sourced.

  He walks over to the fireplace, then crouches. Yep, this was the place all right. He runs his finger across the reproduction antique tiles. Take them off, keep scraping and you’d find a little hole Mickey Landsdowne had filled in and painted over, twenty-odd years ago. The one bullet that changed everything.

  There was nothing left here now, in the Black Bridge, with its memories and with its green tea with ginseng. All the gang gone. Tony Curran, Mickey Landsdowne, Geoff Goff. Where’s that Cosworth with a hole, now? Rusting somewhere in a field? And where was Bobby Tanner? Where was Gianni? How could he find them before they found him?

  Jason sits back down and sips his flat white. Well, he supposes, he probably knows the answer to that. Has known it all along.

  Jason sighs, dips his biscotto into his flat white and calls his dad.
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  68

  ‘I got the photo on the Tuesday morning,’ says Jason Ritchie. ‘Hand-delivered, through the letter box.’

  Father and son are drinking from bottles of beer on Ron’s balcony.

  ‘And you recognized it?’ asks Ron.

  ‘Well, not the photo, I’d never seen the photo before. But I recognized what it was, where it was, all that,’ says Jason.

  ‘And what was it? And where was it? And all that,’ asks his dad.

  Jason takes out the photograph and shows it to Ron.

  ‘Here you are. It’s Tony Curran, Bobby Tanner and me. The three of us around the table in the Black Bridge, that’s where we used to drink. Remember, I took you there once, when you came down?’

  Ron nods and looks at the photo. In front of the little gang, the table is covered in cash. Thousands, twenty-five grand maybe, all in notes, just scattered about. And the boys all looking pleased about it.

  ‘And where was the money from?’ asks Ron.

  ‘That time? No idea, it was one evening out of many.’

  ‘But drugs?’ asks his dad.

  ‘Drugs. Always, in those days,’ confirms Jason. ‘That’s where I put my money. To keep it safe.’

  Ron nods and Jason holds out his palms, no defence.

  ‘And the police have got the photo?’ asks Ron.

  ‘Yep, they’ve got plenty more on me too.’

  ‘You know I’ve got to ask, Jason? Did you kill Tony Curran?’

  Jason shakes his head. ‘I didn’t, Dad, and I’d tell you if I did, because you know there’d have been a good reason if I had.’

  Ron nods. ‘Can you prove you didn’t do it?’

  ‘If I can find Bobby Tanner or Gianni, then I reckon. It’s one of them. I can understand someone else leaving the photo by the body, you know, red herring for the cops to find. But why send it to me too? Unless Bobby or Gianni want me to know they did it?’

  ‘And you’re not talking to the police?’