Angel on the Inside (14 page)

The little old man moved to my side so he could place his hands on the rail that ran around the inside of the capsule and stare out to the north west.

‘You haven't asked me how I know you,' he said, gazing into space. ‘You haven't asked why I wanted this little chat. In fact you haven't asked anything, Mr Angel. Cat got your tongue?'

I knew a cat who'd have his once he was feeling better.

‘I think you're going to tell me, Mr Turner,' I said, turning round so that I was in the same position and gripping the rail like he was. The main difference was that my knuckles had already gone white with the strain. ‘Sometime in the next 20 minutes or so,' I ventured.

He made a show of consulting his watch.

‘Yes, you don't get long on this thing, do you? Still, the view's worth it. So let's get the ugly business part over with and we can enjoy the rest of our flight.'

If he made a signal to Ron behind me I didn't see it. Maybe Ron had been waiting for a raised eyebrow or something, reflected in the perspex. Whatever. The next thing I knew, my right leg had given way and my chin was bouncing off the rail between my two hands, rattling my teeth. Then Ron grabbed a handful of my hair, pulled my head back and slammed it against the capsule wall.

Nothing else happened for a while after that. I realised I was on my knees, still holding the rail like someone taking communion, trying to focus on a trickle of blood on the plexiglass. I turned my head slightly to see if it hurt. It did, and more blood spotted my shirt front.

‘Ron was always getting into trouble at school, giving the other boys the dead leg. Some of the girls, too,' Len Turner was saying, but now I had to look up to him. ‘He's quite good at it.'

‘What was that for?' I managed, resisting the urge to burst into tears.

‘For not answering my questions.'

‘You haven't asked any, have you?'

I tucked my head into my shoulder in case there was another blow. It was all I could do, as I had no feeling in my right leg at all. Still, where was there to run?

‘No,' he said reasonably, ‘but I'm about to, and it was you yourself who pointed out we don't have any time to mess about, so I thought it best if Ron showed you we mean business beforehand. Ready, then?'

‘Anything, anything,' I mumbled, thinking it best to go for the defeated, totally servile approach. It wasn't a hard act and I think I was pretty convincing.

‘Keith Flowers. There's a name you'll know.'

‘Yes, yes, I do,' I said quickly.

‘A guest at one of the better Windsor Hotels – Her Majesty's Prison Belmarsh to you – until a month or so ago. Now he's in a padded cell at Rampton – a maximum security loony bin – and totally unapproachable, which is why I'm having to ask you these questions and not him.'

‘I know nothing about the guy,' I said, trying to make it sound as if I was pleading for mercy – and doing a good job of it.

‘You knew him well enough to put him in hospital,' Len said, still taking in the view. ‘And you know his wife very well, from what I hear.'

‘Ex-wife,' I said automatically.

‘Don't tell me she never mentioned him? Or the divorce?' He looked down at me for the first time and smiled. ‘No, she didn't, did she? Well, I can't blame her. She naturally would want to put all that behind her now she's so successful. Anyway, it's her “ex” I'm interested in, not her. I want to know what Keith Flowers was up to between coming out of one prison and you putting him back in another, which as I understand it involved a fair proportion of violence with a bulldozer. Sounds like you're not a man to cross, Mr Angel. At least, not on a building site.'

He allowed himself a chuckle at that, while I wondered how the hell he knew it.

‘Look, he came out of the night at us. He was trying to abduct Amy. She didn't want to go with him. He took a shot at me. I stopped him.'

‘That sounds a fair summary of what ...' Len started, but he was interrupted by Barry – or it could have been Huw – from somewhere behind me.

‘What sort of a gun did he have?'

For a split second there was fire in old Len's eyes, his face the troll rather than the garden gnome again as he glared at whoever had spoken out of turn. I averted my eyes before he could see I'd noticed.

‘I don't know; it was dark,' I mumbled. ‘The police took it. I'd never seen the guy before that night, but I'll tell you something for nothing, you're not the only people interested in what he was doing while he was on the loose.'

Now it wasn't strictly true to say I'd never seen Keith Flowers before that night, but in high-stress confrontational situations I've found it helps relieve the pressure if you can offer something as a diversion. Normally it's called lying.

‘What makes you say that?'

At least it hadn't resulted in any more pain. I risked shaking my head to clear it and noticed that we were almost at the top of the Eye's axis. Immediately below us were all the other capsules filled with happy-go-lucky sightseers, and not one of the bastards looking my way.

‘Because somebody's been following me – and not just me, but anyone who could possibly have had anything to do with Flowers while he was out on licence or whatever it's called.'

‘Really?' said Len Turner, mildly interested. ‘Could it be the police?'

‘They're not interested. As far as they're concerned, they have enough to hang Flowers with already. Anyway, he was arrested in Suffolk and I'm saying somebody's interested in his movements here in London.'

Old Len, the grandad from hell, reached out his right fist and took my nose between the knuckles of his first and middle fingers and twisted.

I can't remember if I screamed but I certainly fainted – one of those narcoleptic rushes you get when you're dreaming sometimes and you wake up thinking you've just stepped off the edge of a cliff or a platform on the Jubilee Line. (Why is it always the Jubilee line?)

The faint lasted just long enough for me to topple sideways and come to just as the back of my head bounced off the floor of the capsule, and now I was looking up at all of them. The entire Turner clan with not an expression between them and our Flight Attendant at the far end of the capsule, his back to us, his hands clasped behind his back, oblivious, but 40 quid better off.

Barry and Huw made to get up off the bench, but Ron their dad didn't need them to pick me up and lean me against the hand rail. I could feel something in my right leg now but not a lot. Everywhere else just hurt, especially my nose.

‘It's not broken,' said Len, wiping his hands on a handkerchief. ‘Or if it is, it's nothing serious. It'll heal. So when did you notice our little detective?'

‘What?'

For a moment I thought my hearing had been affected and it was I who should have had the hearing aid, but maybe I just had brain damage.

‘The private detective I've had looking into things – at great expense I might add.'

‘What?' I said again.

‘The ... other ... people ... interested .... in .... Flowers,' he said slowly, so I could take it in. ‘There aren't any. It was me all the time. I hired myself a detective to find out who Flowers saw and where he went. Thought it best to call in a London firm, you know, us not being used to the big city, that is. And wouldn't you know it, but it all seemed to come back to you, Mr Angel.'

He reached inside his raincoat pocket and I flinched, expecting a gun or a cosh or a set of thumbscrews. His hand came out with a yellow envelope, the sort you get photographs back in from the Kwiksnap/Fotoflash/Expresspix type of franchise on most street corners in the West End.

‘Take it. Have a look.'

I took the envelope as if it contained anthrax. It had ‘FASTFLASH' and ‘1-Hour Service' printed on the front and an address in Shepherd's Bush and it contained photographs but no strips of negatives. I was so relieved my hands hardly shook at all as I flicked through them.

The prints were standard six-by-four inch holiday-snap size and hardly works of art, but a couple of them did show my good side. There was me going into Duncan the Drunken's garage, me coming out of same garage and saying something over my shoulder. There was me talking to Fenella on Stuart Street, then one of the back of me running into the house followed by one of me running out of the house with a towel-wrapped bundle in my arms. There were several of me and Debbie Diamond, on Oxford Street and leaving the hotel on Portman Square, all good shots and the very stuff of divorce cases in years gone by before the ‘Oh let's just call it a fucking day' solution came in. There was even a very fuzzy one of me standing in a doorway, lit only by a security lamp and the nearby streetlight. It took me a while to work out that was me talking to my neighbour Mr Dunmore. It seemed like years ago.

The ones that really interested me, though I tried not to show it, were half a dozen shots of Amy. Three showed her leaving the office, three showed her leaving the Hampstead house with her Gucci overnight bag and getting in to the Freelander parked in the driveway. She was wearing a light blue two-piece suit I couldn't remember ever seeing before, and the last shot was of her sitting sideways on the driver's seat, taking off her red Jimmy Choo heels so she could drive in her stockinged feet, as she always did on long journeys.

‘Very nice,' I said, handing back the envelope. ‘And to answer your question, I didn't spot your pet snooper. The local Neighbourhood Watch did, and they reported her to the cops.'

Len pocketed the photographs.

‘Well, that doesn't matter now, but I'll bear it in mind if I ever need their services again. You have to admit, though, that you take a good picture. You could offer me a penny for my thoughts and I'd have to give you change if I didn't think there was some connection.'

‘Connection with what?' I realised my voice was getting shrill, so I tried to chill it and took another tack.

‘Look, Mr Turner, you're a reasonable man …'

‘What makes you think that?' he said, with a look of such innocence I almost believed he was interested in an answer, so I chanced one.

‘Because there's four of you, one of me and we're still 300 feet off the ground. I don't want to get off this thing before the people six capsules in front of us do.'

Ron took a deep breath and probably clenched his fists. I didn't see him do it, just felt it, as I was keeping eye contact with old Len.

‘Go on, then,' Len said, not flinching.

‘So think this through. Keith Flowers – and I'd never heard of the bastard until a month ago – has caused me nothing but grief. He comes out of the nick to find his ex-wife is hitched up with someone else and he throws a wobbler. All I did was get in his way. I'm the one he shoots at. It's my car he trashes. It's me who has to answer questions from the cops. You think I want this in my life? Christ, it'd be bad enough finding out there was a stamp-collecting, civil servant of an ex-husband let alone a psycho with form and a gun.'

Len tilted his head and there was something close to pity on his face.

‘You really didn't know about Keith and young Amy?'

‘No I didn't,' I said, but I was thinking:
how does he?

‘You poor bugger. I suggest you have a long talk with that woman of yours.'

Yeah, right. If I could find her.

‘But where does that leave us, Mr Angel? It doesn't solve my particular problem.'

‘And I don't know what that is, Mr Turner. If you've got some sort of candle burning for Keith Flowers, then I'm sorry for what happened to him, but he brought it all on himself.'

Len Turner smiled, and his teeth reminded me of tombstones.

‘If I lit a candle for Keith Flowers, it would only be to jam it up his arse, flame first. Maybe you can't help me after all.'

‘Why not try telling me what your problem with Flowers is? If it puts him deeper in the shit, I'm up for it.'

‘I think he's just about as deep in the shit as it's possible to be and still be breathing without a snorkel,' said Len Turner, looking out at the view again, downriver this time. ‘My information is that he genuinely has gone mental, you know. It's not an act. But even if you did act your way into Rampton, you can't act your way out of that place. Trouble is, I can't get in to ask the little scum-bag where my money is.'

I blinked. I know I did, for it hurt my forehead and more blood dripped on to my shirt.

‘Money?'

‘Ah, got your interest now, have I?'

He had mistaken my wincing for interest.

‘I'm always interested in money,' I said, glancing down to my left and seeing the Thames and the concrete landing pad getting nearer.

‘Well, let me say this,' he said pompously. ‘I gave Keith Flowers a deposit on a certain transaction we were engaged in and – partly thanks to you; no, mostly thanks to you – he never managed to complete the deal. He's in no position to do so now, so I'd like my deposit back. It's not so much the money, it's the principle. You with me?'