Patchwork Man: What would you do if your past could kill you? A mystery and suspense thriller. (Patchwork People series Book 1)

by D. B. Martin

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The cat we got to get rid of the mice, remember?’

  Of course. ‘I thought you said the cat’s female?’ But who was I to argue. I hadn’t seen beyond the end of my nose for years, and I hadn’t really been listening to Louise’s cat carryings-on.

  ‘She is, but I like the name.’

  ‘OK, so what did you need me for?’

  ‘Oh, yes – Mr Juste,’ her voice took on an agitated burr. ‘Mr Gregory asked me to call you and tell you we have a date for the Hewson trial – you know, the little boy.’ I was dumbfounded.

  ‘I didn’t know it had even been passed on to the Crown Court yet.’

  ‘Oh yes, it went straight away – on Mrs Juste’s instruction.’

  ‘Christ! When?’

  ‘Next week. It went when it first came to us.’ I sat down at my desk and picked up Margaret’s down-turned photo as Louise burbled on. The purring softened the message but not the facts. I focused on the red splotches on Margaret’s dress and tried to get my head round what Louise was saying. ‘The really awful thing is that it’s scheduled for the day before Mrs Juste’s funeral.’ The red splotches blurred and overlapped, encompassing my future as surely if I’d looked down the barrel of a gun and the bullet had entered straight between my eyes. The streaming blood coloured my vision. We all have our uses – until we don’t.

  The blood vision turned to anger. Why hadn’t my junior told me about this? And why the hell wasn’t it in the file? And how could you kill your own sister, and think of her merely in terms of use, or lack of it?

  ‘Have we entered a plea yet?’

  ‘Mr Gregory said to enter not guilty just in case.’ Just in case. I’d thought of my own siblings as people to extract information from. They’d had their uses too. I disgusted myself. ‘What shall I do?’ Louise sounded worried.

  ‘There’s not a lot you can do, Louise. We have a date. Let the party commence.’

  And the funeral.

  24: Rough Justice

  I didn’t know what else to do. The messenger I’d avoided I now sought. I didn’t expect any kind of acceptable advice from him, yet he was my older brother. I called the number on the card and he answered almost immediately.

  ‘I been waiting to hear from you. What’s happening?’

  ‘I said I’d be in touch when I was ready. Well, now I’m ready.’

  ‘So you spoken to them all, then?’

  ‘Yes, and I know the truth, Win. Not what you would have had me believe.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have you believe anything but the truth – but I knew you wouldn’t believe it from me so you had to find it out for yourself.’

  ‘So you haven’t been Jaggers go-between all the time, then?’

  ‘Jaggers. Blimey.’ He started laughing. ‘Nah, I ain’t been his go-between, but like I said – I get what I want.’

  ‘Well, that still makes two of you making the same claim. So which of you gets what he wants first?’

  ‘So you seen him as well? OK, you are ready then. Meet me at The Tavern on Warberry Street in about an hour.’ The phone clicked down and there was obviously no discussion to be had. I debated whether to ring Kat and tell her what was happening, but what could I say? I’m about to lose everything so you and Danny don’t get annihilated? Yeah, really. That was exactly my style. At least I had that smallest element of integrity still in me.

  Win was lounging at the bar when I arrived. It was one of those places that had been modernised to olde worlde without taste or credibility. I could see his bulk leaning on the dark wood even from outside the door, stomach spilling untidily over his waistband and sweat patches making dark rings under his arms. A sudden memory of Pop in the same position after a small gain at the bookies – for once –dragged me unwillingly back to childhood. They looked so similar, and yet Pop wasn’t Win’s father. Perhaps it was the type rather than the people I was seeing in them. What about me? Was I that type of man too? I’d been trying to be someone else for so long, but I wasn’t even sure who I was now. My type – another Atticus, I’d once hoped – wouldn’t have used his kin for protection, or denied them when they were an encumbrance. Or taken the easy way out to personal success by damning someone else, for that matter, even if that person might deserve justice of some sort. I had to face it. I’d become a variant of Jaggers.

  The sour smell of old smoke and rancid ash trays floated through the doorway. Despite the hoot of traffic and the stink of exhaust outside, it still smelt cleaner than the anticipated proximity to Win, but I was no longer entitled to draw a distinction between him and me. My stomach churned and my instincts told me to go – anywhere but in – yet I had to. He presented the only possibility there was of extracting myself from the cesspit Jaggers had tossed me back into. To escape it I had to join it first, and what better sponsor than my brother?

  I slid onto the bar stool alongside him. He didn’t even move, just studied me.

  ‘You reckon you know all of it then?’ he remarked, as if starting an idle conversation about football or the dogs.

  ‘I do know all of it – or can surmise the rest.’

  ‘What you gonna do with it?’

  ‘That depends on you. Do you still want your pound of flesh from Jaggers or were you hand in glove all the time?’

  ‘Huh,’ it was a shout of laughter. ‘I might work for the bastard but I ain’t his servant!’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, yeah – I still want me pound of flesh, as you put it. How you gonna give it me?’

  ‘To be honest, Win, I don’t know. He’s got me over a barrel unless there’s evidence you’ve got and I haven’t.’ I outlined everything I knew as he listened quietly, swigging his beer.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said at the end of it. ‘I got something you haven’t; who run your missus down.’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘You knew?’

  I nodded. ‘One of the things I surmised, anyway. Christ, how could a brother do that to his own sister?’

  ‘How can anyone do anything to anyone? Life ain’t pretty, Kenny-boy. Ain’t you learnt that by now – you of all people?’ I suppose I deserved it. ‘It don’t matter who it is. If they’re in the way, they have to go in his world. He ain’t one for sentiment – kin or not. She knew that – your missus. She learnt what a mean bastard he could be once she were past knee-high. Kimmy knows too – got his own back with Jonno for her little games, and then with the nipper too. I knew that but there weren’t anything I could do at the time.

  ‘So it’s Jonno then.’

  ‘How do you make that out?’ he asked curiously.

  ‘It has to be for there to be the right gene pool – a faulty gene pool. Did you know Danny’s a haemophiliac and he could only have the condition, not merely carry it, if he inherited faulty genes from both mother and father? Terry Hewson’s clear so that makes his father someone else with the problem. If it’s not you, it has to be Jonno because I know he and Kimmy were involved. Jill and Emm told me about it – and how you queered his pitch with Emm. But he was Kimmy’s half-brother too. That’s just as bad. Why the hell did you sanction it?’

  ‘I didn’t. You ever tried telling a woman what to do? It ain’t him anyway.’

  ‘Then it’s you. Mary gave me your father’s death certificate.’

  He stared at me, aghast. ‘Me? Christ, no! What do you take me for? I just helped when the kid were born. Me and Jonno were mates before I found out he was me brother too. We hung around together and we did stuff together – yeah with Jaggers too. He helped me out when I first came out – looked me up and offered me some work at the club to start with. And he already knew the others from when we were kids. When I found out about our Dad I steered him away from Emm. It never even occurred to me that he and Kimmy’d get it together. I was fuckin’ furious when I found out. But it ain’t him.’

  ‘Then who?’

  You want to find out, do some digging, little brother. I’ve given you the clues already.’r />
  ‘But Jill and Emm said you were responsible for setting Jonno up. I assumed that was revenge for getting Kimmy pregnant.’

  ‘I s’pose it was in a way – but not because of that. His nibs threatened to mince Kimmy after she tried to pull the fast one on him and he had the little problem with a girl to deal with. I had a choice – let Kimmy get hurt, or help his nibs out and let Kimmy go clear. I figured Jonno knew the ropes in clink and I were furious with him for getting with Kimmy, so I told him to use Jonno.’

  ‘So he set Wilhelm Johns – Jonno up?’

  ‘Yeah, got his own back on Kimmy too, and sorted out his little problem. Efficient bastard, I’ll say that for him. I thought Jonno would get off because he hadn’t done nothing but I didn’t bargain on him setting him up so proper-like. ’

  ‘So who was the real murderer?’

  ‘I dunno, but I can guess. Ask Molly – Margaret, whatever you want to call her.’

  ‘I can’t, she’s dead.’

  ‘Yeah, and probably best left that way. No-one else gets hurt then.’ I thought about the blood-red finger nail clipping and my own blood froze. I looked him in the eye and knew he meant it.

  ‘Fucking hell!’

  ‘They were only kids. Didn’t know what they were doing a lot of the time. Molly were in her twenties or so, Kimmy a couple of years older but still naive. He needed someone to make it stick and that’s when your name came up. I worked out who you were because he was so interested in you, and I was angry with you too – you’d already shafted me, why not get me own back on you too. I let it slip to him and there you were – in the frame too. I thought you were going to be brief for the defence though – not the prosecution. All of us nicely set up and no way of undoing now. Best left alone, matey. You’ve got more important shit to shovel than playing detective – like shafting Jaggers, for me and you.’

  I laughed sarcastically. ‘And so how do we do that? How would we prove he killed his own sister? We’ve no chance!’

  He looked smug. ‘I got something he ain’t bargained on.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The car that run Molly down, covered in her blood and with his fingerprints all over the wheel.’

  ‘How the hell did you get hold of that?’

  ‘Win Juss – gets you what you want when you want it. And he’s so sure of me he don’t even bother. He just told me to get rid of it afterwards and to him that meant it were done – no questions.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘I got it in a lock-up in Camden. I got some stuff about Jonno there too, and Molly.’ I stared at him. ‘Files and the like.’

  ‘From our archives?’

  ‘Nah, the stuff that weren’t in them.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Everyone has their price, don’t they? And like I said, Win Juss gets what ’e wants. By the way, your little man in reception likes little girls – did you know?’

  ‘Gregory?’

  ‘Yeah, something poncy like that.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ I was speechless. It seemed as if everyone was a patchwork of disaster, not just me.

  ‘Why the fuck didn’t you just tell me all this, Win – instead of putting me through all this shite I’ve been coming up against for the last few weeks?’

  ‘’Cos that shite is your family, mate,’ he said quietly, ‘and this had to be personal. I don’t reckon things have been personal with you since you were nine. It ain’t real life unless it’s personal. Gotta live before you die, ain’t you? Gotta put stuff right sometimes too. I reckon you still got some of that to figure out though.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like what you want; that girl and your wife – and Danny.’ His expression made my stomach turn over again.

  ‘I know what I don’t want.’

  ‘Ha, don’t be so sure. Appearances ain’t all they seem, are they?’

  ‘Some appearances are all they seem. And as far as Danny’s concerned, he’s my nephew and Kimmy’s my sister. I’m accepting that.’ But he was right – the living had to come first and I still had a lot of figuring out to do. ‘What else do I need to figure?’

  ‘What if Jonno were your brother too?’ I stared at him. It was personal now. It was very personal.

  25: Atticus

  I didn’t like Win’s solution. I didn’t like it all, but I couldn’t see any other. Violence was still violence even if it was also rough justice, and Jonno had appeared to be rough justice and that had turned out to be no justice at all. Win proposed bypassing the police, and handing the car over with the whole story, including the suppressed evidence and case notes still collectively in his possession and mine, to the family of the girl murdered in 1988 – supposedly by Jonno. Win would see to the rest. I didn’t need to know what happened after that. It didn’t take much to read between the lines if you opened your eyes. Not particularly respectable or upright as a family in the community themselves, he was confident that Jaggers would find his way, with the car, to the bottom of the Thames before Danny’s case was heard.

  The girl’s family and its support network would conveniently lose all recollection of the event when questioned. I went along with it because I didn’t know what else to do but Atticus plagued me about it. I kept away from Kat because I didn’t want to implicate her further, or expose her to Jaggers. That meant I kept away from Danny too, but I couldn’t have faced him anyway after Win’s last knife in the guts.

  I sent my clerk off to fill in the necessary paperwork and brief them whilst I languished in my office at Chambers or my office at home, chewing over the case and trying to find a way – any way – to avoid Win’s plan. I couldn’t think of one. The only thing that kept coming back to me was the little piece of evidence in the Johns’ paperwork that didn’t fit and Jaggers’ reaction to my question about it. Momentarily his ice-cool had cracked. Why, why, why? Was the person who’d killed the girl and the one who’d helped Molly on her way really one and the same, and not Win’s creative twist? But I couldn’t prove anything so why had he reacted? Something about it – something – was the key.

  I spoke to Kat the day before the hearing because I could no longer avoid it. She hadn’t rung me but she knew something was wrong. Even Gregory’s smarmy charm didn’t fool her. Could she have started to see past my façade, I wondered? The idea was as intriguing as it was terrifying. I assured her I had everything in hand. I had – just not in the way I would have liked it to be. Her tight little voice told me I was pushing it. I used the funeral as my excuse again, but shortly there would be no excuse.

  I put Margaret’s photograph back on its face and the stopper back on the brandy decanter. The patchwork man had unravelled completely and now he had to be re-sewn in a different form. A hitherto unfathomed part of me wanted to go back and talk to Sarah, or even Binnie or Jill and Emm – to find where I should have been by now. I needed roots in a way I’d never felt the need for before, and they were mine. The acknowledgement surprised me.

  Yet I couldn’t. Win told me Sarah had been taken into a hospice and was only days away from the inevitable. Jill and Emm were furious with me for not telling them she was so ill, and Binnie? Binnie just plain refused to talk.

  ‘Can’t pick and choose if you’re family. You either is, or you isn’t.’

  I could imagine her saying it even though she hadn’t, but it would have been the gist of her opinion of me. She was right, of course – like Win had been. All of life is about people – it has to be. Family, family, family – it all revolved round them; the patchwork of people and emotions that created the whole. I’d had one, but it had disintegrated. I wished I’d done more now to sustain it. The only people who’d unreservedly accepted me, despite the most enormous of failures, had been Danny and Kat, but I’d shut them out too. I had to become like Jaggers now, securing safety through splendid isolation. Worse – I had to send Jaggers to his grave in order to preserve myself. Atticus would never sanction that. Atticus would never sanction me. I was glad I n
o longer had the book I’d given Danny.

  In the end I rang Kat and explained what I was meant to do and why I couldn’t. Her reply was as easy as breathing.

  ‘But Lawrence – it’s simple. Bullies are cowards. You’re not a bully.’

  ‘No, but nor do I have a defence against it – for myself, or you, or Danny.’

  ‘You do. It’s called the truth. Tell it. By the way, did you get my message about the the blood test results? Terry Hewson doesn’t carry the faulty gene so he’s definitely not Danny’s biological father.’

  ‘Yes, I did. So what’s being done about it?’ I waited for the axe to fall.

  ‘Nothing at the moment. The ball’s in Kimmy’s court. Whether she wants to do anything about it or try to gloss over it all, I don’t know. Whatever is best for Danny, I suppose, maybe.’

  I couldn’t imagine Kimmy considering what was best for anyone other than herself but at least it was something I didn’t have to face head on just yet. I made a mental note to chase up my own results, given Win’s final bombshell, but later. The coward in me didn’t want to face that just yet. I put the phone down, wondering who ultimately would find themselves uppermost in court: Lawrence, Kenny, or a man I had still to come to terms with.

  The truth was fine where lives weren’t at risk. Lives. One life – two lives. Many lives. Margaret’s lives; my lives. We’d both had two of them, and there were two versions of us. Then I got it. There were two versions. I could still choose which was public – for now. The whole truth – or the kind of truth Atticus would have revealed. The one that did no harm.

  *

  The sun was streaming in through the long window on the side of the court building, spattering the marbled floor with splashes of white light on muddied footprints. It reminded me of the dappled sides of the rag and bone man’s horse when I was nine. Kat and Danny were in the cells – a formality I’d been unable to overturn given the charge against him and the not guilty plea required he be present to answer the charge and submit his plea. I’d already made my last visit to them and we’d sat in silence after going through the usual routine of reassurance – knowing no assurances meant anything at that stage – until I’d made my excuses about needing to be in court before the Judge entered.