‘I believe you knew my father,’ she continued. ‘I only became aware of this recently because of my involvement with Gina.’
Frank filled the kettle from a bucket of water and put it on the gas. Of course, she thought. We’re going to have tea.
‘Gina,’ said Frank with a big sigh. ‘A right little madam, but the apple of her granddad’s eye, eh?’
The sensation of having fallen down a rabbit hole grew stronger.
‘What took you so long?’ he asked.
‘Well, I – you know how it is,’ she said. ‘There’s always something.’
Frank nodded sagely. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’
He left the kitchen, taking the torch, and Berlin heard his footsteps fading into the nether regions.
She was on her feet straightaway, checking the cupboards, drawers, and under the sink. She had no idea what she was looking for, but if this was the only room Frank lived in, anything to be found would be here. It was another habit: the need to know.
But everything was empty. Even the cutlery drawer. A single knife, fork and spoon lay on the draining board. And two cups. She lifted the corner of the blackout blanket. The sash window was nailed down; beyond it a bleak, white wasteland.
She sat down again, overcome with fatigue and disappointment, and decided she was a fool. Maybe she was kidding herself about the real reason for coming all the way out here. She was as deluded as Frank. He was a sad old man, and Doyle, for all his faults, was a dutiful son who kept a close eye on him.
The clump of Frank’s boots heralded his return. He came in carrying an old brown photo album, coated in thick dust.
‘Kettle’s boiling! Don’t waste the gas!’ he said, plonking the album on the table. He scuttled about making the tea with industrial-strength tea bags, a concession to modernity.
He passed her a cup then sat down at the table, dragging his chair around so he could sit next to her. He flipped through the pages of the album and she saw his eyes grow misty with memories. Each page bore a small black and white photo. Holiday snaps mostly. Post-war. Street parties for the Coronation. Southend Pier. He kept turning until finally he found what he wanted.
‘See!’ he exclaimed, pointing at a snapshot. ‘What did I tell you? I’d have known you anywhere.’
Berlin leant forward and turned the album to catch more of the light from the bare bulb that hung over the table.
Her heart lurched. Two young men stood side by side. They wore wide trousers with turn-ups. Their hair was Brylcreemed into quiffs. One was taller, stocky, his arms crossed to show off his muscles. The other one was her father. Between them stood a little girl, blonde, frowning. Berlin remembered the dress.
Doyle had told her Frank knew her father and here was the proof. But what was the real nature of the connection between her father and a family of East End villains? She had a feeling she should let it lie. But couldn’t.
Bethnal Green was a smaller, tighter community then. Her father had his shop on the high road. It wasn’t so surprising that they knew each other. Frank was probably a customer. Perhaps Archie Doyle’s rings had once rested on black velvet in the shop window.
The photo implied a closer relationship. Her father must have taken her to visit Frank. They were smiling, standing shoulder to shoulder. She had no memory of the visit, or of Frank, but by the time she would have been old enough to take notice she was living with her mother.
She closed the album and took a deep breath. ‘Frank,’ she said. ‘What about Gina?’ And there it was, almost rhetorical, more a plea than a question, out of her mouth before she realised. The thing that was bothering her.
This time, at the mention of the name, Frank frowned. ‘Her mother was here a few days ago. Or was it last week?’ he said.
Jesus Christ. Nancy’s alive, thought Berlin. Maybe she had heard about Gina.
‘You mean Nancy, your son’s wife?’ she asked, very quietly.
Frank looked at her as if he didn’t recognise her. ‘Shouldn’t you be in a shelter?’ he asked. ‘You should get down the Underground. The Nazis are at it every night, bombing the docks.’
Berlin waited a moment and saw the thought leave him.
‘What did Nancy want?’ she asked.
Frank’s fist came crashing down on the table. ‘She wanted the fucking ledger!’ he roared, and flung open his overcoat to reveal a thick black notebook tucked into his belt. Confusion clouded his face again. ‘But how could she know about it? She was dead before I started the business.’
He seemed to have forgotten Berlin was there.
A gust of wind rattled in the eaves and she shivered.
Retired Senior Constable Marks and his chocolate bourbons came back to her. He had said that Nancy had a nest egg and that Frank Doyle wasn’t in the sharking business in those days. He started after Nancy had gone. The juxtaposition of the two facts came into sharp focus.
Her confusion evaporated at the same time as Frank’s. He regarded Berlin with narrowed eyes, suddenly completely compos mentis. Coldly rational.
A chill crawled up her spine.
‘Who are you and what the fuck do you want?’ he said in a quiet, menacing voice.
‘My name’s Catherine Berlin. I’d like to ask you some questions about Nancy and Gina Doyle.’
In an instant the old man became an enraged, scarlet gargoyle, eyes popping, hands clenched in lethal fists.
Berlin pushed back her chair very slowly and rose with care, afraid of provoking this ferocious creature who glowered at her, ready to pounce.
That’s why I’m here, she thought. They’re all dead. My father, Nancy and Gina. Her heart was pounding as she saw there were only two possibilities. Either Frank knew Doyle had killed Nancy or he had done it himself. She had disappeared the year they began loan sharking. Using her nest egg.
She took a step back from Frank and the horrible symmetry which presented itself. She had insisted Gina come up with hard evidence, so Gina had come for the ledger. At first the demented old man mistook her for her mother.
‘Gina came out here after the ledger. She said it was her birthright,’ sneered Frank. ‘She said her dad had killed her mum for her bit of capital. As if he’d have had the balls to do it!’
Frank had remembered Gina’s mother was dead because he had murdered her. She was trapped in an icy labyrinth with a deranged killer. Just as Gina had been.
Frank reached up and with his bare hand crushed the light bulb. There was a bang and they were plunged into darkness.
83
FLINT PARKED UP against the wall, climbed on top of his car and dropped over the wall into a foot of snow, which reflected the full moon and bathed the scene in an eerie glow.
He carefully made his way to a garage attached to one side of the sprawling bungalow. A thin strip of light from one window was the only sign of life, but as he watched, it blinked out. All gone to beddy-byes then. Good.
He pushed the roller door tentatively and, to his surprise, it slid up in well-oiled silence. His penlight picked out racks of tools, cans of paint and piles of junk. In the middle of it all was a car covered with a heavy canvas. He lifted the corner, expecting an old rust bucket, but the Jag was in pristine condition, apart from mud under the wheel arches. It had been used recently.
His instincts were right; the bastards kept their buried treasure out here somewhere. All that cash Doyle collected wouldn’t be left hanging around his flat in Bethnal Green, waiting for the burglars to turn up. And he couldn’t bank it. Flint tried the door which led into the house. It was locked, and the lock was new.
But the timber was old. He reached for a rusty crowbar.
X marks the spot.
*
Doyle was surprised when he got out of the car and found the gates ajar. He might not have secured the padlock, but he always yanked the chain tight. Maybe it was the wind. He put his weight against the gates and shoved. Bloody weather. At least they didn’t grate on the
concrete any more – the ice had smoothed their path.
He was glad to get back in the car, which was warmer than it would be inside the bloody house. He drove up the driveway and stopped, but didn’t get out, reluctant to leave the cosy cocoon.
There was no light on in the kitchen and Frank didn’t open the door. Doyle switched off the motor and sat in the sudden ticking silence, enjoying the peace and quiet. What a bloody life he led. He didn’t understand the half of it. Then the silence was shattered by an almighty racket coming from somewhere inside the house.
Berlin felt Frank’s hands brush her face as he grabbed at her in the dark. She ducked, and his hand closed around her hair. She kept moving, gripped the edge of the table and overturned it. She heard the torch strike the floor and felt Frank totter as the edge of the table struck him. She struggled from his grasp, but his grip didn’t falter and she felt a fistful of hair torn from her scalp as she broke away.
He stumbled about, his heavy boots betraying his movements. He went for the door, no doubt expecting her to do the same, but she edged around the kitchen, reaching out until her fingers brushed the blackout blanket. When he realised what she was doing he flung himself across the room, kicking the table out of his way.
‘Come here, you cunt!’ he growled.
She felt his hot, fetid breath on her neck as she put all her weight on the blanket and brought it down.
For a moment they were both shrouded in the dense, suffocating fabric. She kicked back, using his body to propel her forward. The window shattered and she fell out into starry nothing.
*
Frank flung open the front door and nearly collected Doyle, who was trying to get in. Frank shoved him out of the way.
‘Stop the bitch! She knows everything! Get her!’ he screamed.
‘What the fuck?’ gasped Doyle as Frank shot down the steps and ran around the side of the house. Christ, he thought, the old man’s really lost it this time, and ran after him.
When he turned the corner he was astonished to see someone crawling away from the kitchen window. Frank was gaining on them fast. The figure was in shadow and Doyle couldn’t make out who it was as they staggered to their feet and stumbled across the strip of gravel, which was obscured by snow.
Suddenly the whole area lit up, dazzling Doyle. Frank must have rigged a motion detector to the exterior spotlights. He blinked. When his vision cleared he saw that Berlin woman fleeing across an expanse of tall grass, the glistening tips rigid above the snow. Frank was standing at the edge of it, watching her.
Doyle ran up to him. ‘What the fuck’s going on, Frank?’
‘Don’t worry, she won’t get far,’ Frank replied, suddenly placid, as he tracked Berlin’s stumbling progress.
Berlin stopped and looked back at them. Doyle watched her weighing her options. The wall was too high for her to scale and although the gates were only about fifty yards to her right, if they moved fast, they could still cut her off.
‘He killed them, Doyle.’ Her voice carried across the still night. ‘Frank murdered Nancy and Gina. Your wife and your daughter.’
The silence was rent by Frank’s enraged howl. Doyle felt it as a blow. Frank had told Doyle to stop Berlin because she knew everything. He realised it was all true. He struggled to breathe, paralysed by the horror.
Frank broke the spell. He bore down on Berlin and she fled.
*
Berlin ran towards the wall she couldn’t climb: the wall she faced in her nightmares. The cracks in it were closing now, crushing her father, who was desperately trying to reach her, no longer whispering but screaming at her to run.
The next thing she knew she was pitching forward. A ring of fire bit into her ankle and she struck the ground. Jagged teeth tore at her face. Agony obliterated time.
She lay beneath a sea of towering, frigid thistles on a frozen tundra. The black sky bled sharp, silent crystals, which pierced the swollen skin around each embedded tooth of the spring-loaded trap. It clamped one cheek and jaw at an unnatural angle and crushed her nose flat against the ridge of her shattered eye socket.
Her throat filled with blood from an almost severed tongue. She couldn’t open her mouth to release it from the grip of her teeth. She tried to swallow and imagined she was encased in a scold’s bridle, the iron muzzle studded with spikes.
Above her, she could hear knuckles crack, bone on bone, and the gasping wheeze of lungs fighting for air.
All she could see were legs and torsos twisted together, a knot of serpents locked in a hissing struggle. Frank’s hand clawed at his belt buckle and the ledger fell to the ground. With a fierce grunt he pushed himself free of Doyle, his clothes riding up as he dragged off his belt.
The white expanse of his stomach was scored with deep purple scars, the sort of scars that might be left by lances or burning pokers. Or by the spikes of iron railings that had dug deep into your flesh as you hung over them to haul a skinny boy from the midst of a crushing stampede.
Berlin put her hand on her chest as she felt the breath squeezed from her lungs. She tried to turn her head, but the teeth of the trap bit deeper with every movement. No doubt it was designed that way. She inched forward and a shrill pain shot down her twisted spine. She passed out.
When she came around, there was silence. A figure loomed over her, but she couldn’t move her head enough to see who it was. The figure crouched and bent to look her in the eye.
Doyle’s face was wet with tears. ‘I loved him,’ he said. He fell to the ground beside her, curled up like a baby and sobbed, his face inches from hers.
‘I loved them, too,’ he gasped between despairing sobs. ‘I loved them and he killed them. He shouldn’t ought to have done that. It wasn’t right!’ he raged.
The pain of his loss covered them both, a suffocating blanket of horror.
‘Gina!’ he screamed, calling her out of the night.
But there was no reply, only the explosive sound of ice as it slid from the roof of the house and shattered. Icicles snapped in imitation of bullets striking tin, pipes burst and released a torrent.
Berlin heard the cacophony of the thaw and wept.
Doyle’s fingers crept around her throat, finding space to insert themselves beneath the rusted steel bands of the trap. ‘It’s only right, Miss, to put an animal out of its misery.’ His hands tightened, crushing her windpipe.
There were no nosy neighbours to call the cops so Flint had time to search the house before venturing outside to inspect the carnage. He’d heard glass breaking and Doyle’s cry for Gina, but whatever was happening was outside, so he took the opportunity to get on with the job at hand.
When he emerged from the house the place was lit up like Christmas. He followed the trail of crushed grass and disturbed snow until he came upon the old man. Two others lay close together in the deep shadow just beyond reach of the floodlights.
He picked up the thick black notebook lying on the ground near the body, flicked through it and knew it represented a gold mine. Coulthard’s name was in there, along with dozens of others. He put it in his pocket. There was a collection of cash books like this one in an old tin trunk he’d found inside the house, one for every year since 1986. All the entries were in the same fine, meticulous hand.
There was money stashed all over the place, but he was a trained expert and he’d pretty much managed to find most, if not all, of it. Sod everything. Leave the crooks and the politicians to it. He was off.
A small movement caught his eye. A cosy couple was locked together. He walked towards them and stepped out of the light. In the gloom he could make out Doyle and Berlin. She was caught, head and foot, in two evil-looking animal traps.
Gobsmacked, he realised that Doyle’s fingers were clenched around her throat. If she was still alive, he was slowly choking the remaining life out of her.
Flint saw a brighter future beckon. He picked up a slab of broken concrete, held it high and dropped it.
A skull shattered.
He flicked open his mobile and dialled. ‘Acting Detective Sergeant Flint here,’ he announced. ‘There’s been a murder.’
The Tenth Day
84
BERLIN GASPED AND tried to claw at her throat. Someone restrained her. She opened her eyes. It was a woman she didn’t know.
‘Take it easy,’ said the woman. ‘It’s to help you breathe.’
The light was dim and there was a faint purr and click of machinery. A battery of soft blue lights blinked on a monitor. Berlin heard a voice and tried to turn her head, but it was held fast. It took all the energy she had left to raise her hand and touch the cold steel frame that encased one side of her face.
The woman, a nurse, fussed around her then disappeared from her field of vision. A man appeared. She recognised Thompson.
‘You’re going to be all right, Berlin,’ he said. ‘Thanks to Detective Sergeant Flint.’
She was aware of someone on the other side of the bed taking her hand. She was able to move just enough to see that it was Delroy.
‘Jesus, mate,’ he said. He had tears in his eyes.
She must look a sight. She squeezed his hand and saw the surprise on his face. It was probably the first affectionate gesture he’d ever known her to make.
Thompson cleared his throat and she looked back at him.
‘We found Gina’s DNA in the boot of Frank’s Jag. The ground was frozen solid, so he couldn’t bury her at Chigwell. Unlike her mum. Nancy’s remains were out there. Dug up and moved more than once, from the look of it. We think she was killed for her savings: the capital he needed to start loan sharking. And Frank’s wife’s bones were encased in the concrete floor of the lock-up.’
How long had it taken them to uncover Frank’s secrets? How long had she been unconscious? She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. Lack of trust had nearly cost her her life.
She focused hard and mouthed ‘Dempster?’
Thompson frowned.
She tried again. The croak she heard was her own voice. ‘Dempster. Ask him to come,’ she rasped.
In Her Blood Page 23
