Kill and Tell (15 page)

He shakes his head. ‘Not since you. Not really.’

‘Not really? What does “not really” mean?’

‘You know.’

‘I’ll be thirty-four in a couple of weeks.’

‘What do you want for your birthday?’ He smiles at her.

‘I’m getting old.’

‘Maybe we could go for dinner.’

‘I don’t think so. But I know what I want.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I want a baby, Will.’

‘My pleasure,’ he laughs.

She looks him in the eye. She doesn’t laugh and he soon stops.

They eat the crabs and Sylvie finishes the Chablis. She says, ‘You’re right, they are the best. Let’s have some more.’

Staffe orders more crabs and asks for another glass of Chablis each and when the Chablis comes, he raises his glass and Sylvie touches his with hers. She is glassy eyed and he remembers a few of the things she has forgiven him. His heart aches at the thought of her being unhappy and he recalls the times they talked about one day having a family. He blew that.

He says, ‘Let’s do it.’

‘Don’t say that just because you don’t want to see me sad. Don’t think you owe me, Will.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You need to think about it.’

‘I want to be a father.’

‘We wouldn’t be together.’

‘I want to be a father.’

‘We’d rely on you. For certain things.’ Sylvie reaches across and puts her hand on his wrist. She is shaking. ‘You really want to do this?’ Her voice cracks. ‘You can’t let me down again.’

‘I saw Sylvie,’ says Josie.

‘I know!’ Staffe snatches the pile of papers from her. On top, the potted biography of Maurice Greene. ‘You shouldn’t have said anything.’

She looks hurt. ‘I was trying to be a friend, sir. We care about you.’

‘We?’

Josie busies herself at the coffee machine in the corridor outside his office.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘But I’m OK.’

She turns round, says, ‘No, you’re not.’ And she walks away without a drink, leaving Staffe to the dossier on Maurice Greene.

Greene was born in Palermo, March 1982. His parents were Nicoletta Cottanesta and Claudio Verdetti. Claudio Verdetti was born in City Royal hospital, 1937, and was therefore forty-five when Maurice was born. Maurice’s mother, Nicoletta, was seventeen when Maurice was born and she died when he was seven. Thereafter, Maurice was in the care of his father, until Claudio drowned whilst swimming off Cefalù when Maurice was thirteen. Maurice tried and failed to save his father.

Claudio’s own father, Maurizio, died in October 1936 in London and he is buried in the church of St George-in-the-East, Cable Street.

Staffe flicks through the facsimiles of the source documents. Every now and again, he rubs his temples, trying to get things straight in his head.

After Claudio drowned, Maurice entered the guardianship of Carmelo Trapani and was schooled at Stonyhurst in Lancashire. He later graduated in English from York University.

Staffe goes through each document again, ends up with ruffled hair and a thick head. Amidst all the papers, one fact announces itself with a hazy familiarity. Staffe taps away at his keyboard and his suspicions are confirmed.

Maurizio Verdetti died on 4 October 1936, the very day of the Battle of Cable Street.

Abie Myers’ thick eyebrows pinch together and his large lips slant into a snarl. His old face seems younger today and it seems that the rising bile is good for him, because when Staffe enters the drawing room to his house in Stepney Green, the old fellow is quick to his feet, saying, ‘I don’t know what the hell gives you the right to treat me like a criminal. Look at this!’ He gestures at a scene of crime officer still sifting his way through Abie’s life.

In the corner, Miles Hennigan stands with his arms crossed over his chest, looking at Staffe, unblinking.

‘The judiciary seems to think we have sufficient grounds to look more deeply at you.’ Staffe approaches Abie and says, so just the two of them can hear: ‘Maybe you should take a walk, if you’re finding this too traumatic.’

‘What in God’s name do you expect to find?’ hisses Abie.

‘Tell me about Maurizio.’

‘You mean Maurice?’

‘I mean what I say. Maurizio Verdetti.’

‘If Carmelo is alive, you should be trying to find him – not wasting my time.’

Staffe turns his back on Abie. Inside this house, the way Abie has kept it, the years might not have roared by. Right here, you could be back where you wanted to be. He says, ‘When did Darens go?’

‘You don’t know Darens,’ says Abie.

‘Bread shop and bakery,’ says Staffe. ‘I have this hunger for knowledge‚ history, so I know that Maurizio Verdetti would have known little of your beloved Cable Street. It killed him, after all – just a month or so after he came here from Carmelo’s home town. They were cousins, you know, and Maurizio’s grandson became Carmelo’s ward. Maurice. I really do think you and I should take a walk.’ Staffe says to the SOCO, ‘Have you found Maurice Greene’s prints here?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Carmelo’s?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Staffe takes out the phone which he had taken from the girl on the Overground. He scrolls down to the mobile number she last called and presses green. All eyes are on him and he holds up the phone, says, ‘I don’t even know who this belongs to, but . . .’

Miles Hennigan blinks. He reaches for his pocket, like a gunslinger, but he’s too late on the draw. First, everyone hears the low buzz of vibrate, then the ringtone. Miles looks at the phone, so small in his large hands.

‘Hadn’t you better answer that?’

‘Later,’ says Miles.

‘Don’t mind us,’ says Staffe.

‘What’s going on?’ says Abie, looking daggers at Miles Hennigan.

The phone rings and rings, then stops and Staffe presses green again and Miles’s phone begins to ring once more. The SOCO laughs and Staffe says, ‘Come on, Abie, let’s take that walk.’

As he leaves, passing Miles Hennigan, he says under his breath, so only Miles can hear, ‘I call the tunes from now on. You’d better be a bit quicker with your answering.’

Abie and Staffe walk past the Ashbury Youth Boys Club to the Green, from where London seems spread flat all the way to Canary Wharf. Abie twiddles his cane in the air on the off beats. The sun is out and the sky is cloudless. Up above, the white vapours from traffic in and out of City Airport trail the blue sky.

‘There was none of that when you first came,’ says Staffe, indicating the sky.

‘Plenty’s changed.’ Abie jabs at Canary Wharf: an oblong of nothing but money and a triangle on top. It looks near and modest, but is actually far away and not. ‘Progress? Bah!’

‘What happened to Maurizio, Abie?’

‘How would I know?’

‘You employ his grandson.’

‘Maurice is a numbers man. He’s a genius is what he is, but I am not his family historian.’

‘Is he with you or Carmelo?’

‘Why should it be a case of “or”?’

‘I can’t make him out, you know. He seems to have a fine life, gambling and consuming the arts, and now Carmelo bequeaths him half his home.’ Staffe stops in the shadow of the four-storey tenements on Cable Street. ‘Where was Panners, Abie?’

‘Panners? Darens? What is it with you and the past?’

‘I have a feeling. I think you know what I mean.’

‘I don’t give a damn for your feelings. Shouldn’t you be trying to find Carmelo?’

‘Would you be happy if we were to find him?’

‘I don’t care one jot for that money he left me, if that’s what you mean.’

‘I know, Abie. This has nothing at all to do with money, except Carmelo knew we would follow the money to get to something higher than money.’ He nods at Canary Wharf.

‘Higher?’

‘Your hold over Jacobo Sartori intrigues me.’

‘You talk in riddles.’

‘I had to put a man on his door because he is afraid of you.’ A train rattles past, above them, rollicking west to the Tower.

‘Well, you can take him off. That’s an absurdity.’

They pause by the Crown and Dolphin pub, its Meaux Ales livery all spotted and faded to almost nothing. Each looks up at the mural of the riots: police horses rising up on their hind legs, Blackshirts with venom in their eyes, and the people standing steadfast. Leagues of Jews and Communists shoulder to shoulder.

Abie stabs his cane again, up the road, says, ‘That’s where Panners Dairy was. I would go every day.’

‘What exactly were you and Carmelo doing in those days?’

‘I didn’t know him so well then.’

‘I’d bet my bottom dollar you were into illegal gambling.’

Abie laughs. ‘That might be a good bet, but I do believe there’s a statute of limitations on misdemeanours like that.’

This makes Staffe consider the legality, after all these years, of prosecuting buried crimes. ‘It’s all a question of reasonable doubt. The passage of time makes that difficult, but we can put it in the hands of the Crown if the evidence is there.’

‘We covered our tracks quite nicely.’

‘Evidence can be durable.’

‘As you will discover, I went into property. Completely respectable. Carmelo was the same.’

Staffe says, ‘And now he rewards you in his will. He shines a light on you, doesn’t he, Abie? He shines twenty million watts right down on you, to put you centre stage. And then there is Blackfriars Holdings – you helping out Attilio; getting a chunk of that blue-blooded Britain. That must feel good. But only a month ago, Carmelo sold his stake in Blackfriars, didn’t he? It doesn’t add up.’

They are outside St George’s Town Hall now, with its plaque declaring ‘
No pasarán
!
’ in memory of the many who went on from Cable Street to defend democracy in the Spanish Civil War. Staffe leads them into the gardens at the back of St George-in-the-East. Through the great arching oaks they look past a row of enormous gravestones, leaning against a wall, like soldiers enjoying tobacco between exchanges.

The church of St George looks French with its octagonal nave, but it was bombed and in its place is a smaller church – like a Russian doll, which sets Staffe thinking and he studies the dates on the gravestones, says, ‘You know, sometimes it feels as though Carmelo’s disappearance is like a Russian doll.’

‘Enough with your riddles.’

‘A crime within a crime, is what I’m thinking. What if I have to discover something far beyond his disappearance, to solve his disappearance?’

Abie says, ‘Let’s get on our way. I have plenty to do. You know, the closer you get the more there is to do.’

‘You’re good for a few years yet, I’d say.’

‘It’s not the time that’s left that . . .’ Abie’s words trail in the air and his eyes become milky. The old man opens his mouth to say something but bites his lip.

‘It’s what you leave behind,’ says Staffe, pointing to a gravestone.

MAURIZIO VERDETTI

1914–1936

HE DIED THAT OTHERS MIGHT THRIVE

Abie says, ‘I heard something of this fellow. It seems so long ago. It was a different age, thank God. You might hear people reminisce, but it was hard, then. A bad time, through and through. You know, people can say what they like about the modern age and the violence but I wouldn’t have those times back. It was so – so
hard.
’ He wipes his eyes and peers at Maurizio’s grave.

Staffe says, ‘He was a cousin of Carmelo’s.’

‘He’d have been asking for trouble, I dare say.’

‘Trouble?’

‘They didn’t care about what happened to us, those Italian boys, they were having their day in the sun. A free hit, they say now – just like those awful kids the other summer – when they rioted.

‘The kids in ’36 threw pepper in the horses’ eyes, and rolled marbles under the hooves. Everyone was packed so tight. We kept being told this and that about where the Fascists would be and where they were coming from. It turned out to be a grand day, but it could have been different. History plays its tricks, but you know that, don’t you, inspector?’

‘I know there were casualties in the crowds, and I read about what they did to the police horses.’ Both men look at the headstone again: ‘That Others Might Thrive.’

‘Maurizio was trampled underfoot, by the very horses he was goading?’

‘That’s what I heard.’

‘You were here that day.’

Abie looks away. ‘Where else would I be?’ He turns his back on the church. ‘These places give me the willies.’

Staffe watches him trundle off, back the way he came, through the past and out the other side onto Cable Street. A group of youths huddles beneath one of St George’s oaks, passing round a bag, washing it down with super-strength cider.

As Abie passes them, they say something and he goes for them with his cane. They stand up and Staffe walks slowly across, but whatever Abie said makes them disperse. They look afraid.

Attilio opens the bathroom window and steam rushes out. The sky is pink, the day nearly done. Beyond the gallops, he sees the horse box being towed home from Goodwood. They had a winner today. As a result, there is a fat wad of twenties on the Federal dressing table in his bedroom, next door. Funny, he might have had to sell the Federal to pay the lads’ wages – if the deal with Blackfriars hadn’t gone through.

Earlier, he took five hundred down to Rodney, to put behind the bar for the lads and lasses. Rodney said, ‘Thank you’, but with ‘Sorry’ in his eyes. Then he had insisted they had a large one together. It seems everyone was on Gemstone.

He rubs a porthole in the steam on the mirror and dabs his face with cologne. He has shaved twice, the way he always has since Helena first put her hand to his face and said, ‘You have a fine jaw. A jaw to die for, but you prickle me.’ Dominic Ballantyne had been there, at Cowdray Park, and Helena dragged her fingers down his back whilst her husband looked him dead in the eye, saying, ‘You must come to Ockingham.’

He always liked Dominic.

A week later, Dominic had a pair of ponies off him and before long Attilio was coming to Ockingham once a week, discussing with Dominic and Helena his grand plans to establish a yard, to begin training as well as breeding and trading horses. And not long after, he was visiting Ockingham three times a week, but when Dominic was not there.

He dips his fingers in the pomade and patters his hair, draws a comb through, slipping for a short while into a trance within which he realises that when a man has almost everything he wants, those last inches can kill you – and they will. Tonight.

Lately, Helena doesn’t even tell him when she is going to be away. A month ago, she took a room in the oldest, Jacobean part of the house. She said his snoring was keeping her awake. He doesn’t snore. Many men say this, he knows, but one night when she was away, he paid the gardener to sit in the corner whilst Attilio slept and now he knows he doesn’t snore.

Earlier, when he had just got back from Goodwood and was booking entries in the office, Attilio’s heart had slumped when he heard the tyres of her car in the gravel – leaving.

Without her, he is nothing more than an imposter here. Helena was born to rule and this seat will cushion her nicely long after he is gone. With Fahd, she will be able to stop Abie Myers taking the place, if that was his game. She has an imperious instinct for survival, even though it had faltered that day at Cowdray when she chose Attilio, but now she is back on form. Fahd Jahmood would have sent shock waves through the county a couple of decades ago, but times change.

He puts on his Bengal striped shirt and selects the silver links that Helena had bought for him when he had his first winner. One is a cap and the other a whip. He steps into his ox-blood moleskins, pulls on the hacking jacket and finally dons a riding helmet, clad in his father’s silks. He hopes the casing of the helmet will keep everything in. The hand-painted wallpaper is from Milan, cost three hundred quid a roll. It’s vintage, from when she loved him.

The gun cabinet was a wedding gift from Jacobo. He can’t remember what his father got him. Perhaps nothing, but Jacobo was proud that Attilio had managed to marry so deep into the heart of everything English. The boy might have killed his mother but with the marriage to Helena Ballantyne, Attilio thought he was giving the old man the benediction he always craved. Instead, it was treated as betrayal.

Attilio has long arms, a good thing for the task in hand. He breaks the Mossberg and loads each barrel with its twelfth of a bore. Out of habit, he looks down the barrels, then locks it, holding it aloft and turning it on himself, placing the end of the barrels in his mouth.

The metal is bitter and cold on his teeth and tongue.

His heart beats fast and he takes the gun out of his mouth. He pulls Helena’s pillows across to his side, and lays down again, head propped up.

Tatiana is lost without her phone. She has tried Maurice from a payphone, but he’s not answering.

Looking up at the window, she is not sure whether to go ahead, or to come back another day, when the instructions are clearer.

Miles Hennigan said to go ahead, but she isn’t entirely sure he is to be trusted. She knows his type, ex-military. He is cold behind the eyes, not like Maurice who is full of warmth and love and humanity.

She checks up and down the quiet road and lets herself in by pressing the code into the keypad by the door. It is what Maurice would want, she is sure.

The place smells of vanilla and this makes her smile. Maurice has the vanilla plug-ins at home and the perfumed oil, and also the reed diffuser. He’s done the same here.

On the top flight of stairs, she hears him stir, within, and this freezes her to the tread she is on. She looks at the door, wary. After a second or two, she pushes off; taking a hold of the newel post and then reaching out, putting the key to the Yale lock she and Maurice fitted. The house belongs to an owner Maurice knows from Dubai and the lock isn’t an issue. Tatiana had wondered what hold Maurice has over the man.

The room is dark. They screwed the Georgian shutters closed and she puts on a small lamp, goes to the chair he is in, smells that he has soiled himself. She puts her hand to his cheek, says, ‘Sorry,’ even though she knows that he is responsible for a terrible, terrible thing.

Tatiana removes the tape from his mouth as gently as she can. When it comes away, the tape has blood on it.

‘Hello, my dear,’ he says, his voice hoarse as hair.

Tatiana sinks to her knees, says ‘Sorry.’

‘Good will come of this.’

She unties him, trying not to gag from the smell, and when she has finished, Carmelo gets very slowly to his feet.

‘I will clean myself, then we shall have some dinner.’

‘It is lunchtime.’

‘I could eat a horse.’ He tries to laugh, but his mouth and throat are too dry. ‘I can’t face Saint Peter on an empty stomach.’

 ‘It’s been difficult. The police, you know.’

‘You didn’t bring them? Why didn’t you—’

‘Not yet,’ she says, handing him a roll of kitchen paper and a tub of baby wipes. ‘I’ll get you some clothes.’

While Carmelo is busy in the bathroom, Tatiana cuts some bresaola and improvises some bruschetta by chopping olives from a jar and dicing the lone tomato from the fridge. The bread is stale but she toasts it anyway, and throughout her preparations, the sound of Carmelo’s coughing gets louder, deeper.

She goes to the bathroom and calls, through the door, ‘You need a doctor.’

‘Then take me.’

She knows, until Maurice gives the word, she can’t.

Carmelo opens the door, cleaned up and shaved, his old clothes in a pile in the bag. He dabs cologne on his pudgy jowls and smiles with the certitude of someone who thinks he is saved. ‘When will Maurice come? I’m not sure how much time I have.’

As he speaks, Tatiana sees a line of blood, thin as thread, tracing the line between his teeth and his gums. Still, he smiles – like the mad. But she knows he isn’t mad.