Death Of A Nobody

by Derek Farrell

  “Well, that’s enough to get anyone across the river,” Mike said, gesturing at the view across the wide low Thames.

  The City of London – from the dome of Saint Pauls to the Ultra-modern SwissRe Gherkin building was slowly fading – almost as we watched - from smoky purple to sepia to flaming gold.

  “Amazing that all the people who want to live over there get no view, and end up coming over here to see the beauty they ignore all day,” he said, sipping from his pint. “Thank God for gentrification,” he said.

  “You say that like it’s a good thing,” I replied.

  “Well isn’t it? You said yourself: this used to be a wasteland, and now it’s moving from being a no-go area to being one that decent people actually want to be in.”

  “But what about the people who already lived here? They were – are – decent too. Just,” I shrugged, “Poorer. It wasn’t a no-go area for them; it was their home.”

  Mike shrugged, “Yeah, but they sat there and let it crumble. Everything ends, and out of the ashes of the ruins, something better rises.”

  Heavy, I thought, but aloud I said, “So what ashes did you rise from?”

  Mike stared into the distance, his pint halfway between the table and his lips. “I rose,” he said after a pause, “From the ashes of Doctor Simon Doherty.” He caught my puzzled look, and smiled. “I was with Simon for five years, and at the end of it, we were both burned out, in every way.”

  “I know that story,” I murmured, and swigged from my pint as a way of encouraging Mike to go on with his story.

  “The first couple of years were fine, but then things changed. Simon became emotionally cold, but I was so in love with him that I didn’t want to see it.

  “By the time he became physically violent, I was too far gone to be able to do anything about it. I figured I’d got what I deserved.”

  “Jesus.”

  Mike sighed, smiled, and sipped from his drink. “It ended well,” he said, winking at me. “Eventually, I realised I was worth more. So I cashed in my pension and made the move from Manchester.”

  He drained his pint, and waved at the crowd, – “Though, if I’d known it’d be like this, I might have thought twice.”

  “Like what?”

  “This crowded. I know: now, I sound like I’m doing a Northern Yokel impersonation. I’ve been to cities before, but it’s different here. It’s all so big, so impersonal. Nobody knows you. Most people don’t want to know you.”

  I do, I wanted to say. I want to know you. Then I remembered that the wheel – the place Nick had taken me for our first date – was just a little further along the river, and I was no longer sure what I wanted.

  “I mean, look at that lot,” Mike continued. “A sea – no, an ocean – of interchangeable nobodies. Line em up, and half of ‘em you’d never tell from the other half. All the builders in their overalls, all seem interchangeable, the city boys in their shirts and slacks: each looking, from here, exactly like the others. They make you feel like leaving, before you’re as dead as them.”

  “Dead?” The word came out a little too sharply. Mike looked at me and made an apologetic face.

  “Sorry. Forgot.”

  I waved his apology aside, “What do you mean by ‘dead’?”

  “Well, only that, back home, I was someone; not anyone that everyone knew, but there were faces and people and things you knew, and there were different levels, and you could have a good life, and – when Simon wasn’t being punchy - feel good about yourself being in one of those levels. But here the place feels like you’re either a Somebody, or you’re a Nobody. And if you’re no one, you might as well be dead.”

  I looked out at the smiling mass of people enjoying the summer, shimmering, golden in the setting sun, and I didn’t feel like a nobody. “I don’t see that,” I said. “And I hope you’ll learn to see what I see. I hope you stay.”

  “What do you see?” Mike asked.

  “I know what you mean: Any city can make you feel alone and small and afraid, but when I look out here – especially on a night like tonight – I don’t see an army of nobodies. I don’t see the dead. I see the survivors; the ones who stayed and fought and won, and who are entitled to the spoils.”

  “Anyone ever tell you you’re a poet?” Mike Green asked me, a smile hovering gently over his lips.

  “Not lately,” I answered, as the sun sank lower in the sky.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  She answered on the fifth ring, and her voice was already thick with sleep. “This better be good…”

  I was stunned for a moment. “Are you in bed?”

  “Danny,” Caz growled, “This had better be important.”

  “What are you doing in bed? You never go to bed before three A.M.. Are you sick?”

  “No, I’m tired.” She seemed to rouse herself, “What’s up?”

  “I think we’ve got it all wrong,” I said.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “No…. Yes, but just a few pints. And a bottle of wine with dinner. Oh, and a cognac after dinner.”

  “Good boy. But that still doesn’t explain why you’re calling me at this ungodly hour.”

  “It’s just gone One O’clock, Caz.”

  “Has it? I thought it was later.”

  I checked my watch. “Well, it’s not. And you need to get up, and come over here.”

  “Why? Because we’ve got it all wrong?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Dearest, the history of humanity is a series of misconceptions and misunderstandings. If I rose from my couch every time we had it wrong, I’d rarely sleep. What, in particular, have we messed up this time.”

  “Dave Walker’s murder,” I said, and I could hear her sitting up in bed, a tiny, almost inaudible cough showing that she’d finally come fully awake.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “We’ve been asking the same question that everyone has,” I said.

  “Which is what? Why you’re calling me at One A.M.?”

  “That’s not late. And besides,” I suddenly remembered, “I thought you were going out tonight.”

  “I was. I did. But now I’m home, and I’m tired; this heat’s got me exhausted. So what’s this question everyone’s asking?”

  “Well, I’ve just been out with Mike, and that’s where the idea came to me.”

  I was about to launch into the detailed rationale behind my theory, when she stopped me. “You’ve been what?”

  “Out. For dinner. With Mike. The guy from the shop a few doors up.”

  “Yes,” she said, in the tone I liked to refer to as her Headmistress voice. It usually indicated a stiff word was approaching. “Danny, Have you spoken to Nick yet?”

  “What’s there to speak about? He’s married. To a woman. He has a wife, Caz. What do you want me to say to him? Anything else slipped your mind?”

  She sighed. “Give him a chance, Danny. Give him a chance to explain why he didn’t mention it.”

  “I can’t,” I answered.

  “Call him Danny. Give him the chance to explain. If nothing, you can at least make him squirm.”

  I sighed. Should I tell her I already had? Should I explain how the call had been stilted, confusing and – ultimately – humiliating?

  No, I decided. I shouldn’t. “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  “Good.” I could hear her smile from here. The Headmistress tone was dropped. “So tell me: what question is everyone asking?”

  “Why anyone would kill Dave,” I answered.

  “And what question,” she asked, “Should we all have been asking?”

  “Simple,” I answered, “Why did nobody try to kill Anthony Taylor?”

  There was silence from the other end of the line.

  “Hello?” I called. “You still there?”

  “That,” she finally said, “Is not funny.”

  “But think about it, Caz: From the moment Taylor turned up, he was antagonistic, and he was already
clearly out of favour with half the people there. You’ve gone quiet again,” I said.

  “I’m thinking,” Caz replied. “There were a few punches thrown at him.”

  “And a drink,” I reminded her. “And yet – with such an obvious target in the room – someone brains poor average Dave.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “They brained Dave. So what’s this got to do with Tony Taylor?”

  “What do waiters usually wear?” I asked, remembering the rows of city boys in their identikit shirts and trousers.

  Caz sighed. “I don’t know: White shirts? Black trousers? Dark jackets?”

  “And what do mourners – at a funeral – wear?” I asked.

  More silence, then: “Don’t go to bed,” Caz said. “I’m coming over.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “OK.” Caz put the two mugs of coffee on the table, dolloped a slug of cognac into each, and settled herself opposite me.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this before,” I said.

  “Well it didn’t seem relevant,” she said. “And besides, I sort of assumed you knew.”

  “Knew? How would I know?”

  “Well, dearest, it’s Tony Taylor. I thought everyone knew about Tony Taylor.”

  “Everyone in your world, maybe, but Caz,” I swept an arm to indicate the grimy kitchen of The Marq, looking grubbier and even more Victorian in the pale blue light of early morning.

  We’d sat up all night, walking through the day of Dave Walker’s murder, and it hadn’t taken long for Caz to admit that – when she was younger – she’d run in Anthony Taylor’s circle, and that – if we were looking for reasons to kill someone – Taylor did seem to have more people with motive than poor Dave.

  “He’s Olivia Wright’s second cousin,” Caz explained, “And should have been in line for a good chunk of old Maggie’s cash. But word on the street…”

  “By which,” I said, “I assume you mean Sloane Street.”

  She ignored me, “Is that he was basically disinherited some years back.”

  I perked up, “Why would he have been disinherited?”

  “Because Tony Taylor,” Caz said, with what seemed like an impolite, level of enjoyment, “Is what used – in Victorian Melodrama – to be called a thoroughly bad ‘un.”

  “Cor guvnor, strike a light,” I muttered. “Go on.”

  “Well,” Caz sipped her coffee, pulled a face, dropped another ounce of Hennessey into the mug, sipped again, and – satisfied this time by the ratio of coffee to grape alcohol – launched into her potted history of Anthony Taylor.

  “His mother died while he was still a child, and his father – the typical stiff upper lip Englishman – sent him away to school and had as little to do with him as possible. Daddy moved to L.A. as far as I can recall, and proceeded to work his way through a selection of starlets and tarts whilst somewhat quickly drinking himself to death.

  “Tony, meanwhile, either fled or was expelled from almost every single school and university he attended.

  “Through the whole thing, the only constant in his life was Maggie Wright. Maggie tried to take Tony under her wing, but things just went from bad to worse.”

  I swigged my own coffee, pulled a face of my own (almost neat coffee-infused alcohol not being my favourite beverage at five A.M.) and gestured at her to go on.

  Caz sighed, as though saddened by what she was about to tell me. “He got into drugs – well, it seemed obvious that he would eventually – and there were more scrapes with the law. Which Maggie always sorted. Thing is, for all the perception of her as a gorgon, Maggie Wright had both a soft spot for Tony, and a fiercely loyal streak.”

  Caz sipped from the mug, considering what I’d just said. Outside, the sound of a truck rumbling slowly down the street broke the silence of the morning. The kitchen felt – for the first time in weeks – almost cool, but I knew that, once the sun came up, the heat would quickly build, until the place would be as unbearably hot as it had been since May.

  “There was a girl,” she said at length. “Some convent girl who’d gone into modelling – all blonde and floaty. You know the sort. And she died. Heroin. Which, the rumour mill said, had been purchased for her by Tony.”

  “Jesus.” I swigged the brandy.

  “And a restaurant – Gambera – the Italian one that had London talking for a whole year. The chef was some wunderkind, it came close to Michelin status. It should have been a marriage made in heaven: Tony loved having fun and dining out, and he had lots of very wealthy friends who loved same.

  “Sadly, neither Tony nor the wunderkind had a clue about the financial aspects of running a business, and in short order they bankrupted the restaurant. The chef killed himself.”

  I slugged my booze wordlessly this time, then, after a silence, found the words. “What a charmer,” I said, “I can see why Taylor would be written out of the will.”

  Caz smiled sadly and shook her head, “People don’t disinherit their relatives because a silly girl overdosed, or a highly-strung chef hanged himself. Tony was around those people, and his life was a mess, but they did what they did of their own volition, Danny.”

  I wasn’t sure I agreed with her, but I said “So why was he disinherited?”

  “Because, after the failure of everything he’d put his heart into for a whole year, he started drinking heavily- he’d given up drugs after the model’s death, but replaced them with booze. And then, one night, after a bottle of scotch and several gins, he ran over a cyclist.

  “The girl was killed instantly. He should have gone to prison for a long time, but Maggie Wright pulled out the big guns. The girl had had no lights or viz jacket. She was basically invisible.

  “The judge gave him two years. He served nine months, and when he got out, Maggie sent him off to New Zealand. I heard that he gets a monthly stipend – enough to live on, nowhere near enough to drink or drug on – and has his rent paid. But not a penny coming to him from the estate.”

  “So why did he come back?” I wondered.

  “Maggie,” Caz said simply.

  “Meaning?”

  “He stayed away because Maggie told him to. Because to return would have meant upsetting her, and –despite all his bravado – I think he actually cared for her. But once she was gone, there was nothing stopping him from coming home.”

  “And within a couple of hours of his arriving back in the country,” I said, “A man dressed like him – in a white shirt, black trousers and black brogues – is bludgeoned from behind.”

  “You think Tony was the target, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “Maybe Reid was right: Dave Walker was a nobody. There was no obvious reason why anyone in the room would have a reason to kill him, but Anthony Taylor…”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We press Restart,” I said. “We step away from the Himbos and anyone linked to Dave Walker, and we look at the people who might have had a reason for wanting to kill Anthony Taylor.”

  “And what about Tony?” Caz asked.

  “What d’you mean?” I said, wondering when she’d gotten so matey with Taylor that she’d started referring to him as Tony.

  “Well if someone intended to kill him,” she said, “They failed. Which means they might try again.”

  “We’ll need to warn him,” I agreed.

  Caz emptied her mug in one gulp. “I’ll find out where he’s staying. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to use the one way in I have: Olivia Wrights Poison pen writer. That’ll get me in to the room, and we’ll see what we can find from there.”

  “Shouldn’t we tell the police?”

  “No.” I was emphatic. “All we have so far is a theory. We need something more solid. Then, we can go to the police.”

  Caz shook her head worriedly. “Are you sure about this, Danny? I mean, would Nick want you involved in this case?”

  “Nick,” I informed her, “Is not the boss of me. Now, let’s get the lun
ch service sorted, you can find out where Taylor is staying, then I’ll give the Wright-Benson household a bell and tell ‘em we’re coming round to talk threatening letters.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  As predicted, the heat built as soon as the sun rose, and by the time Ali and the ASBO twins arrived to start stocking the shelves, I was down to cargo shorts and a wife beater as a vast tray of chicken poached slowly on the hob, ready to be added to my saffron infused Greek style Filo pies.

  Elaine arrived some time later than everyone else, and proceeded to noisily clink bottles and shuffle boxes of crisps around.

  Caz was on the other side of the table slicing a kilo of onions into translucent slivers by hand, the job having fallen to her because we both hated mandolins having had repeated kitchen accidents with them, and because she was the only person on the planet who could sliver a kilo of onions without shedding a single tear. “Sweetheart,” she’d said mysteriously, I haven’t cried since 1985.”

  Elaine entered the kitchen, sniffed the steam from my poaching chicken, announced “My days! That smells rank,” mimed gagging, and leering over at Caz, added “Mind you don’t slice yer finger off your ladyship,” and giggled at her own weak joke.

  “Don’t you have a rock to crawl under,” Caz growled as she dumped another handful of sliced onions into a bowl.

  “You got a guest,” Elaine announced to me. “The Lesbo Queen said I should tell you to get yer arse out front pronto.”

  “Elaine, I don’t think Ali is a Lesbian. Not that there’d be anything wrong with it if she were. And, as you’re working in a Gay pub,”

  “South London’s Premiere Gay Pub,” Caz corrected me loudly from the other side of the room.

  “I’m not too keen on your language. Have you got a problem with the LGBTQ community?”

  “Apart from the fact they sound like a dyslexic trying to learn his alphabet?” She snorted. “Nah. But I do have a problem with Bolshy old ladies who keep tryin’ to tell me what to do while makin’ me feel like shit,” she snapped back.