Angel on the Inside (19 page)

‘There's no such thing!' I snorted. She didn't twitch a muscle.

‘You think I didn't check him out? I'm a professional. If you have personal issues with him, that's your problem.'

‘Issues? Damn right I've got issues. I've been sightseeing with a family of Welsh psychopaths thanks to your client.'

Her small face still remained impassive.

‘I know nothing about what happened to you today. I'm talking about personal issues between you and Haydn Rees.'

‘I'd never heard of Haydn-fucking-Rees until this afternoon.'

‘Yeah, right.'

She looked down to her left and shot her eyebrows up as she said it. I was so shocked that her face had cracked, I put down my glass.

‘It's true,' I said.

To my left, Charlotte the comedian cracked the joke about the woman in the queue at the sperm bank and half the table screamed at the punchline, so I missed what Steffi muttered.

‘What?'

‘Like you didn't know Haydn Rees was involved in Amy May's divorce?'

I picked up my glass again to buy myself thinking time.

‘We need to talk. Let's go somewhere for a quiet drink,' I said.

‘I don't drink,' she said primly.

‘I don't care.'

 

Finding somewhere quiet for a drink in the Dean Street area on a warm summer's evening was no more difficult than DIY dentistry without a mirror, but it gave me a chance to look at Steffi Innocent in what remained of the daylight and think of the things I needed to ask her.

One question she had already answered as soon as she had sat down beside me and crossed her legs. Ankle-high olive green hiking boots, made from waterproof Gore-Tex with about 30 unnecessary metal loops for their 150 centimetre laces and called things like ‘Explorer' or ‘Challenger', were not exactly the height of Bo-Ho chic this season, but they were just as comfortable pounding the mean streets of London as they were hiking up a peak in the Peak District or doing whatever it is you do up a Munro in Scotland. They also had steel toe-caps that put them way ahead of trainers in the kicking-your-way-out-of-trouble stakes.

The other burning issue was how the hell she had dogged me around town without me noticing her. She'd actually got close enough to photograph me in different locations, which meant a vehicle, but even if I'd missed a telephoto lens as long as a musket, I would have spotted the same car turning up time and time again, wouldn't I?

The rest I felt confident I could piece together. I was confident partly because of my alcohol intake but partly because I knew of another piece in the jigsaw that I was pretty sure she did not.

We settled on the Nellie Dean, or rather I did. Steffi just shrugged her shoulders and stomped through the open doors, zeroing in on a corner table that had two empty stools near it as most of the customers were outside, leaning on the windowsills and making Dean Street look untidy. There was a time when the Nellie had been the almost exclusive haunt of film technicians – cameramen, sound men, lighting techs, electricians – who worked on industrial films for big business or public information films or recruiting shorts for the Army or Navy. Nowadays, video or digital camcording and computer enhancement could produce broadcast quality material for half the price of a five-man unit out on location, so the pub now let just anybody in.

I got to the bar and bought a glass of mineral water with ice and lemon and a pint of lager. There seemed to be no change from a fiver, but I knew better than to argue with a barman in Soho on a Friday night.

I put the drinks down on the table and straddled the stool, so close to her that the tips of my trainers and her steel toe-caps actually touched briefly. I took a drink, smiled my best smile and decided that a charm offensive would be the best way to get her to loosen up.

I never got the chance.

‘So Stella's going to fire me, is she? Just for showing a bit of initiative. Typical. Well, I should've known. Hard work, initiative and honesty – no match for sex, is it? Never was, never will be.'

I took another drink. Quite a long one, quite quickly.

‘Don't go away,' I said, and I dived back to the bar, where I bought a box of matches with another five pound note and had just enough change to get a pack of cigarettes out of the machine in the corner.

By the time I got back on my stool and lit up, Steffi had managed to bring herself to pick up her glass of water and moisten her lips. If she carried on enjoying herself like that I might have to sedate her.

‘Right, let's try again,' I said. ‘What the hell are you talking about?'

‘You know well enough,' she said petulantly.

I was confused. The dolphin tattoo (and no attempt to hide it) and the ability to play really smooth soulful jazz in public, just didn't sit with the straight-arrow, work ethic persona. Maybe she was just very, very young. Maybe I was looking at the Conservative party of the future.

‘No, I really don't,' I said. ‘Explain.'

‘I do a job, a job I took on from first client meeting up to final report, and I do it well. But because it involves someone who has a history with the boss and is not averse to a quickie in the toilets, then the whole thing will get sat upon. Instead of “job well done” it'll be a P45 as soon as Stella gets back in the office, just for daring to mention one of her many ex-boyfriends in my report.'

‘Now hold on a minute.' I waved a finger at her. It didn't seem to scare her. ‘For a start, Stella will have forgotten about this by –' I made a point of looking at my watch and counting down three seconds ‘– about now, I'd say. For another thing, what is there to get sat upon? You just said you'd handed in your final report. What can she do now, even if she wanted to?'

I didn't bother to add that if Stella had kept a tighter reign on her staff and noticed me being put in the frame even a couple of days earlier, it could have saved me a good kicking. But then, I'd never have got to ride the London Eye.

Steffi nodded and pursed her lips, which I took to be a sign that she was with me so far.

‘Now, I'm not saying Stella doesn't feel guilty about you spying on me, and ....'

‘I don't like “spying”,' she said. ‘I had you under surveillance, and you'd never have known if she hadn't told you.'

‘Actually, you're wrong there. The Neighbourhood Watch in Hampstead spotted you – you were wearing an FCUK top, which you should have known would have got you noticed up there. They reported you to the cops, I'm afraid, not me.'

She looked crestfallen at that and, if it was possible, even younger and almost waif-like. I decided not to tell her that there was a lesbian in Hackney who had her down to her dress size, a video tape of her in disguise on Oxford Street and a car mechanic in Barking who would examine her big end for free.

‘Anyway, like I said, even if Stella does feel guilty about you having me under surveillance, that's business, isn't it? And what's done is done. All I need now, and Stella said you'd help, is to know what this client of your knows, so I can deal with anything that comes up in the future.'

‘So it is about you and Haydn Rees.'

She said it smugly to herself, reaching for her glass of water, not expecting an answer.

I finished my beer and stood up to get another. It was less hassle than causing a scene by strangling her there and then.

‘Look, I've told you, I'd never heard of this Rees character until this afternoon. All I know about him is he's a solicitor who represents some very dodgy people and he's probably Welsh with a name like that. Now there's at least two bloody good reasons for not knowing him or wanting to know him.'

‘So it's not about Keith and Amy Flowers' divorce? I mean, like it's not personal at all?' She looked up at me with mild, but only mild, curiosity.

‘Why should it be? There was a divorce. One of them needed a solicitor. So what?'

I lit up another cigarette in case there was a wait at the bar.

‘No, I think you misunderstood what I said. Haydn Rees was
involved
in the Flowers' divorce, he wasn't their solicitor. He was the co-respondent when Keith divorced Amy for adultery.'

I realised that if I didn't go to the bar now, right this second, I would just stand there swaying and looking foolish.

I dropped the pack of cigarettes into the lap of her Wranglers.

‘I don't smoke,' she said.

‘You will.'

 

So, okay, she had more or less ambushed this Haydn Rees character when he'd turned up at R & B Confidential (hah!) Investigations' office on Shepherd's Bush Green without an appointment, on a day when the senior partners were otherwise engaged. But then, he was a solicitor and what he had wanted had seemed absolutely kosher, so why shouldn't she have picked up the ball and run with it? Veronica had been perfectly happy to issue a standard no-fault contract on the basis of one week's retainer, which had duly arrived by bank credit the next morning. Steffi had assured her she could handle it – after all, it had seemed like no more than an extended background check – and had been allowed to do the leg work.

Rees' brief had been simple but vague, which in my opinion should have set off Steffi's alarm bells, as solicitors are usually incredibly
complicated
and vague. But then, I was beginning to suspect that Steffi didn't have an inbuilt alarm system.

He had represented – or at least had given the impression that he represented – someone called Keith Flowers, who was in custody in a ‘secure medical facility' in Nottinghamshire, pending several serious charges. The mental state of his ‘client' (though he had never actually used the word, now she thought about it) was such that there was little issue over whether he was guilty or not. There was a chance, however, that mitigating circumstances could be entered in his defence if it was possible to track his movements in London during the month he had spent preparing for his return to society.

Flowers, Rees had said, had served four years of an eight year sentence, which was the norm these days, and had been a model prisoner. The fact that his last spell inside had been in HMP Belmarsh was entirely due to him wishing to be in the London area prior to release and nothing to do with Belmarsh's status as a high security containment facility. In fact, the High Security prison at Belmarsh is actually
inside
the normal Belmarsh prison, which gets used as a transit station as well as a local nick for the Old Bailey.

What had he been put away for? Naturally, Steffi had asked that right up front, as she was, after all, a professional, and an eight year stretch was definitely for something more serious than non-payment of parking fines or having to take the rap for your offspring playing truant from school.

The gist of it seemed to be a fraud, specifically the embezzlement or misappropriation or just downright theft of a substantial amount of grant aid money from the EEC (now known as the EC or just ‘Europe') for the regeneration of an underdeveloped area (known as Wales), coupled with a stubborn reluctance to say where the cash had gone. Pressure from the Inland Revenue would have been enough to make sure that the book was thrown at Flowers, who was – surprise, surprise – a qualified accountant, let alone the fact that the whole thing had come to light when he had perpetrated an assault with an office stapler on two Cardiff VAT inspectors on a routine visit. (An assault so severe that both inspectors had taken early retirement and counselling, and would still probably never enter a branch of Office World again.) The plea that he had been under pressure during a particularly acrimonious divorce hadn't seemed to butter any parsnips as far as the judge at Cardiff Crown Court had been concerned.

To get Flowers out of his current predicament, some more mitigating circumstances were needed: anything that would explain why a model prisoner had suddenly gone off the rails like he had. Here, Rees had had an idea. Flowers had been on semi-release in London. Amy May, his ex-wife, lived in London. Amy had taken out a restraining order on him, so it was obvious he had at least tried to see her. Maybe that had been too much for him and he'd cracked under the strain of being restrained? So a logical place to start had been with Amy and, by extension, the person who had replaced Flowers in her bed.

Steffi had set to with dogged determination. Police and court records in Suffolk had confirmed the details of Flowers' re-arrest, and Suffolk traffic police had gladly given her details of how the wrecked BMW that Flowers had stolen had been taken away at my request by an idiot car mechanic from Barking. A chance word with Stella about the famous Amy May (and, yes, she admitted she'd been trying it on there, but she had heard rumours) had revealed that Stella knew me and where I had lived. Steffi had had to check it out. She had had no particular idea what she was looking for, but thought it would prove to her client that she'd covered all the bases.

She made no attempt to hide the fact that she had more or less broken into my flat in Stuart Street. In fact, she became almost animated at the thought of it.