Kill and Tell (4 page)

Josie pauses the CCTV footage again, scrutinises the man on the screen and she saves him as a still image, dragging him to her folder marked ‘Carmelo’s House Day of Disappearance’.

The image is foreshortened and taken from above, but Josie can see that he wears an overcoat with the collar turned up and a hat. His face is obscured and he moves slowly. He doesn’t look around, simply goes straight to the entry pad at the side of the main gates and taps in a code, gains access immediately through the iron gate in the high wall. The time was four seventeen. Carmelo’s Daimler had left through the gates twice on the day of his abduction, and arrived once, but that was the only other traffic. Josie clicks another saved file and watches the Daimler leave for its second time, at six thirty-two.

Staffe comes across to her desk, says, ‘Is this the CCTV footage from Beauvoir Place?’

‘There’s just one man going in, all day.’

‘And the car?’

‘It’s Carmelo’s. It left at half six in the evening, but he wasn’t driving.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The man who went in didn’t come out again. Unless he’s still in the house—’

Josie clicks the icon for the still of the man.

‘It’s not much to go on,’ says Staffe, looking at the grainy enlargement of the elevated and rear view of the man in the hat. ‘Is that the best we’ve got?’

‘Afraid so, sir, except that he must have known Carmelo. He had the code for the gate.’ Josie’s phone beeps and she looks at the screen, walks to the window. ‘I can’t really talk now – work.’ She looks out of the window and wraps her free arm across her body, clasps her own shoulder. She laughs softly into the phone – a private joke. ‘Maybe later.’ She looks over the shoulder, towards Staffe, who is watching her. He looks away and she says, ‘I’ll call you. OK. Right.’ She laughs again, says, ‘Don’t!’ in a joking way and clicks off. Returning to her desk, she says, ‘Sorry about that.’

He makes a tight smile. ‘If you can spare a minute, Attilio Trapani is coming across to give his statement.’

‘You don’t want me there, do you? I was going to call on Carmelo’s accountant.’

‘I’ll do that when we’re done.’

‘So what’s in store for me?’

‘That depends.’

Staffe goes to the window. Outside, it is suddenly darker than dusk and a jag of lightning darts across the narrow strip of sky. ‘When Attilio leaves here, follow him. Everywhere he goes.’

‘For how long?’

‘As long as it takes.’ Staffe points down below, to Cloth Fair, where a motorcycle appears, gliding quietly along the street. It is unmarked and the rider has a spare helmet strapped to the rear seat. ‘Use him, if you need to. He’s one of ours.’

The rider lifts his visor, looks up and salutes.

‘I’m wearing a skirt. I—’

But Staffe is gone.

Attilio’s face is red and he chews his lip. Staffe notices that just to the right of his Adam’s apple, he has a small cut. He can’t remember if Attilio had it when they interviewed him down at Ockingham Manor. ‘What’s that?’

Attilio’s gaze is unfocused, his mind elsewhere.

‘The mark on your neck. Where did it come from?’

Attilio puts a finger to his throat, feels where the skin is broken. ‘Must have been shaving.’

Staffe leans forward, peering. ‘Funny-shaped razor you use.’

Like the tip of a knife
, he thinks. ‘Tell me about your father.’

‘My father and I were never close. And of course, I never knew my mother. He was all I had and, you know—’ He looks up at Staffe again. ‘That was never enough. Not for either of us.’

He looks at his statement, begins to read it and glazes over. ‘He never held me. Did I say that already?’ He signs the statement, says, ‘My wife and the servants will verify it.’

‘And your guests, of course.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t trouble them. It’s not done.’

‘Done?’ Staffe wonders who the hell Lady Ballantyne’s latest husband thinks he is. ‘What about Fahd Jahmood?’

‘How do you know him?’

‘It’s my business to know everything about Carmelo.’

‘Jahmood doesn’t know my father.’

‘How can I be sure?’

‘I’d like to go now.’

‘When this is all dusted and done, you will thank us, for finding the man who stole into your father’s house and slipped that mickey into his grappa and watched him pass out and crack his head on the floor, then drove him away in his own car. It was someone he knows, of course, and they even disposed of those two Murano tulip glasses. I bet your father loved those glasses. I bet he savoured every sip of grappa he took from them. They’re forty, maybe fifty years old. And now there’s only four.’

‘Shut up! They were a present – for my mother.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘I killed her.’

‘What!’

‘And then I was born. That’s what killed her.’ Attilio stands up. ‘So how could he love me?’

‘We have to find him, Attilio. He is old, and if he is alive, he may well be suffering.’

‘How can I help? I don’t know where he is and that’s the God’s honest truth.’

‘They put him in the boot of his own car. He shouldn’t have left home for the last time in the boot of his car.’

Slowly, Attilio bends further and further over, his head in his hands. ‘For God’s sake,’ he mumbles. ‘You don’t think I had anything to do with this, do you?’

‘Where’s Jacobo?’ Staffe puts his hand gently on Attilio’s shoulder. ‘Jacobo and your father have a secret. I know.’

Attilio stiffens. ‘How do you know?’

It is strange, muses Staffe, that Attilio asks this, rather than ‘What secret?’

‘Appolina as good as told me, but she’s afraid. It seems that everybody’s afraid.’

Attilio clams up and Staffe leads the way into reception, says he is sorry if Attilio suffered any distress and he knows what it is like to lose your parents.

‘No, you don’t,’ says Attilio.

The memory of his mother, laid out in Bilbao, repeats on Staffe. She was covered up by a thin cream sheet and from the shape she made, he could tell she was not all there. He has nightmares about what the remains of her would have looked like, beneath the shroud. He looks at Carmelo’s son and all he can see is what is absent.

Outside, the rain is pelting down now and thunder rumbles over the meat market.

Staffe offers Attilio his hand and they shake, uncertainly. He watches him go, looks across to the other side of the road, sees Josie taking shelter and looking daggers at him, her hair in thick, drenched strands. Up the road, the motorcycle revs – ready to go. Attilio hails a cab. Josie scurries to the rider and Staffe goes back in, makes his call.

The sign ‘Goldman and Son, Accountants’ is a narrow brass plaque on a blue door next door to a Lebanese restaurant called Shawiba on Hackney High Street. Sbaring a little Middle-Eastern rapprochement, a fellow in a
yarmulke
sits with a young man in a
burnous
, exchanging sucks on a hookah pipe beneath Shawiba’s canopy.

A voice rattles in the speaker grille, and Staffe says, ‘Mister Goldman? I’m from City Police. DI Wagstaffe.’

The electric lock on the blue door whirrs and Staffe goes through. The hallway is narrow and the steps are ridiculously steep, the bulb insufficient, but the décor is fresh and the carpet new.

Staffe wonders, as he climbs, how Carmelo would have managed with the stairs. Before he reaches the top, a man appears. ‘Mister Goldman?’ says Staffe.

The man’s suit is cut in the style of Jean-Paul Belmondo and his hair is slicked forward at the sides and tufted up at the top.

‘The son,’ laughs the slicker, ‘Anthony,’ turning on his heel and walking into a modern, open-plan office, surprisingly spacious and incredibly light. There are only two desks and at one, a beautiful young woman with long, raven hair is busy with her computer – fingers clattering super-fast. There is no paper on her sleek, glass desk. Staffe tries not to look, but her blouse is a half-size too small, a button too undone. She looks up, smiling, but her fingers keep clattering and behind her, on the wall, is a framed certificate. Ms E Thyssen-Wills.

‘And your father?’ says Staffe. ‘Does he still look after Mister Trapani?’

‘You speak as if Carmelo is still with us. We feared the worst when Attilio advised what had happened.’

‘You represent Attilio Trapani, too?’

‘You know I’m not going to divulge that, Inspector Wagstaffe, unless Mister Trapani instructs me so.’ He winks and indicates that Staffe should sit in one of the deep-cushioned, cream armchairs.

Smooth fucker
, thinks Staffe. He says, ‘
Does
your father represent Carmelo Trapani?’

‘My father is retired.’

‘So you handle Carmelo.’

‘That’s the wrong word, but I administer his investments.’ Goldman’s eyes are too light. Just then, they blinked too fast.

Staffe suspects contact lenses; his nails are manicured, but his skin is a little loose around the neck – a little too tight around the eyes. ‘You seem a little young,’ he says.

Staffe hears a stifled snort behind him and Goldman shoots a look at Ms Thyssen-Wills. ‘Look, I’m busy, and I won’t answer anything about Carmelo until I have an instruction or you have a warrant. If you don’t have any meaningful questions I can answer—’

‘Tell me about Martin, your brother.’

‘Martin used to do this, but he wasn’t as suited as me. It’s a dirty business, inspector.’ He laughs. ‘Father soon saw it was I who had the knack with money.’

Staffe stands.

‘Did Carmelo share his opinion?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘He was moving his portfolio around, from what I’ve heard. Didn’t he dissociate himself from Abraham Myers?’

‘Like I said—’ says Goldman.

‘You said you had a knack for money. Did you mean you had a knack for figures?’

‘I suspect you have a gift for finding the truth. It’s what you’d want in a policeman, but it’s not the same as having a gift for the law.’

‘Very clever,’ says Staffe, leaving.

‘Is that it? You’re done?’

‘Not by a long chalk. Next time, we’ll be even closer to the truth and the lies will be there for all to see.’

‘You only just got here.’

‘You’re not going to tell me anything. It’s what I came to find out, Mister Goldman.’

Josie is in Veneto’s, an old-school sandwich shop with a few stools in the window, which is where she perches, alongside two damp, steaming cycle couriers who talk in a metro patois, constantly saying ‘dude’, ‘random’, ‘awesome’.

The rain comes and goes. When it comes, it is biblical and people rush to the sides of this ornate, Victorian arcade, sloping into the coffee shops and spaghetti houses that line Sicilian Avenue. Just across from Veneto’s is Blum’s, advertising chicken soup and salt beef on its ancient sign.

Josie can see straight into Blums and Attilio is sitting in the back with a Jewish man slightly older but not nearly so kempt. They have been there an hour now and the waiter has stopped bothering them.

Her phone goes and she looks down, feels a small surge in her tummy. ‘Conor calling’. She looks at her watch, sees it is ten to and she is not yet late. ‘Hi you,’ she says.

‘I’m here already. Finished early.’

‘I’m tied up.’

‘Oh my.’

‘I was about to call, but I—’

‘You’re going to blow me off, aren’t you?’

‘I’m sorry, Conor.’

‘I hope they’re paying you well.’

Josie looks to the sky. The rain has stopped and a chasm of blue dares to open up. People in the streets are looking up.

‘You still there? Hey, it’s sunny. Is it sunny where you are?’

‘You’re smoking,’ she says.

‘How d’you know that?’

‘You can’t see the sky from inside the Polar Bear.’

‘Ahaa. My little Miss Marple.’

‘I’ve got my surgical stockings on.’

‘Stop it, you’re driving me wild!’

Attilio Trapani comes to the door of Blum’s. He looks at the sky and says something to his companion in the
yarmulke
. They walk to the end of Sicilian Avenue and a car slows down, on Southampton Row. Attilio and his companion get in.

Josie’s rider appears outside Veneto’s and she fumbles in her pocket for money, says to Conor, ‘I’ll call you.’

‘What? Is that it?’

She puts a fiver on the counter and hurries out, clicking her phone off and hitching her skirt, getting a few looks as she hooks her leg over the motorbike’s seat, feeling the force as the rider speeds off, weaving traffic all the way back round to Holborn and right onto Oxford Street, heading west and spending most of the journey on the wrong side of the road, buses coming at them. The sound of horns is constant all the way to Oxford Circus, when they catch up with Attilio’s car, slowing right down and keeping two or three cars between them all the way into and out the other side of Mayfair, pulling up outside Les Ambassadeurs.

Josie knows enough about Les Ambassadeurs to realise this is the end of the line. Herein lies a casino and one of the finest dining rooms in all of London town. For members only. Attilio could be here until two in the morning.

A brace of overly pretty girls in short, shifting cocktail dresses loop arms and smile as they pass Attilio. His companion remains in the car, which moves off. As Attilio disappears into the club, Josie can see he is greeted by the dark-eyed and beautiful Arab who was at Ockingham Manor the other day.

Josie calls Staffe, relates the events of the past two hours, telling him about Attilio’s companion in the
yarmulke
.

‘Martin Goldman?’

‘Who the hell is Martin Goldman?’

‘The Trapani family lawyer. Blum’s, you say. And now Les Ambass,’ says Staffe. ‘From one side of the West Bank to the other.’

‘What?’

‘I’m guessing he hooked up with Fahd Jahmood.’

‘There’s no way I’ll be able to get in there.’

‘That’s OK. There’s someone I know who’s a member.’

It’s quiet on the line, and she can tell Staffe wants something.

Eventually, she says, ‘You only have to ask, sir. Is it to do with Pulford?’

‘You know me too well. I was going to go up onto the Attlee, see if I could catch up with Shawne Haddaway. I need to see if our friend Haddaway has been visiting Google Earth recently.’

‘That sounds a bit random, sir.’

‘I saw a printout in Pulford’s papers and I know he’s not allowed access to the Internet inside prison. I’ve got a bad feeling about it.’

‘I’ll do it, but you know what Pennington said about staying away from the e.gang.’

‘It’s OK. Leave it to me.’

‘No! I want to do it, sir.’

‘Be careful, Josie.’

She hangs up, calls Conor and from the sound of things, he is in company. ‘I’ve just finished,’ she tells him. ‘There’s something I have to do later, but I’ll come over now.’

‘Aaah, damn. We’re on our way up north – Belsize Park or something. I’ll call you.’

She wants to say, ‘We? Who is we? And why aren’t you inviting me?’ But instead she says, ‘OK. Call me,’ and clicks off.

The sun goes in again, like someone switching a light off.

Pulford presses his face against the cold steel window frame. Through the narrow slots of toughened glass, he looks up at the sky. There’s all kinds of madness going off today.

A bang makes him jump and he catches his cheek on the rough junction of the metal window frame where somebody has had a go at dismantling it. The slightest thing seems to get him going lately.

‘Pulford!’ shouts a PO, through the door. ‘Feeding time.’

‘Not for me, Mister Crawshaw,’ he calls. But the door opens anyway and a large inmate fills the frame, holding Pulford’s tray.

‘I said—’

‘Yeah? What did you say, you fucking frag? Why you on this wing, Pulford, if you’re not a fucking snitch?’ The orderly throws the tray on his bed and the mulch of spuds and fish spills onto his sheets. ‘Or a fucking fiddler.’

Pulford knows the orderly. This is Beef, one of the hardest men in the jail, on the verge of acquiring don status, as well as being a senior partner in the e.gang.

‘Levi,’ says Pulford, to Beef.

‘Don’t call me Levi,’ says Levi Salmon. ‘Name’s Beef, you frag.’ Levi Salmon is known as Beef for good reason. He has shoulders like a bull and is over six foot but his waist is narrower than his neck. His trick in the yard is to give a con a free hit. Pulford saw it the other day and Beef didn’t even blink when an armed robber from Canvey Island punched him full on the nose. The crunch of the blow resounded across the yard and the assailant stood briskly back, his jaw dropping. Silence fell in the yard and Beef stepped forward, said something to the con that made his face turn grey. That night, an ambulance came, went, and the armed robber from Canvey hasn’t been seen since.

Pulford peers over Beef’s shoulder, sees Mister Crawshaw withdraw onto the landing.

‘What the fuck you got to be scared about, sergeant? Or do you need to watch your tongue?’ Beef puts his hand to Pulford’s mouth and grabs it, like you would an apple from a tree. He breaks Pulford’s skin where the window had grazed him.

Crawshaw sneers, ‘Careful, Salmon, he’s bleeding. Don’t catch AIDS.’

Beef puts his face right up to Pulford’s. He licks the blood from his wound and whispers, ‘I ain’t ’fraid of fuckin’ nothing, me. You get me? I’m an animal. Everyone says so.’ With one hand still squeezing Pulford’s mouth, Beef reaches behind him, pulls a piece of paper from his waistband and holds it up to Pulford. ‘See this? I gave you a copy.’

Pulford focuses on the piece of paper, sees it is the printout from Google Earth. He raises a hand, grabbing Beef’s neck, but he makes no impression.

Beef says, ‘Mummy’s house. We been there and her next door, Jean, she reckons your mummy thinks you’re wasting yourself in the police. Maybe it’s ’cos you can’t do your fuckin’ job. People like us, we’re above the law and you can do fuck all about it.’ Beef drops the piece of paper and takes something from his pocket. He squeezes Pulford’s mouth even tighter until his lips part. His jaw cranks open and Beef presses his handful into Pulford’s mouth, puts his hand over and holds it there as Pulford gags.

After ten seconds, he lets Pulford go and steps back, laughing as Pulford spits out the mouthful of dog hair.

He spits and spits, but his mouth is dry and he has swallowed some. The taste is rank and it spikes all the way down his throat.

‘Simba,’ says Beef. ‘That’s mummy’s dog, right?’

‘You cunt,’ says Pulford, rushing at Beef, but just before he gets to him, Beef shouts, ‘Thor!’

Now, Crawshaw steps in.

Pulford has his hands on Beef’s throat again, but barely covers half the circumference.

‘Don’t use that language, Pulford,’ says Crawshaw, stepping up and twisting him.

‘Thor,’ says Beef. ‘That’s the name of my dog. A proper name for a dog.’

The PO has Pulford bent double, his arm up the back and his shoulder right on the edge of its socket. His bleeding cheek is pressed to the cold floor and Mister Crawshaw says, ‘You’re on a Governor’s. See how that looks in the case for the defence.’