Authors: Phil Rickman
‘CLEAN FILTH.’ HER VOICE WAS HUSKY WITH TEARS AND SMOKE AND
gin. ‘That’s what he used to say about you. Maiden’s clean filth. He liked that.’
The Edwardian sitting room was lit by one small Tiffany lamp, and the long velvet curtains were open to the period glow of Danks Street with its imitation gaslights.
Her name was Shelagh Beckett; she sounded like a Londoner. Maiden recognized the voice, thought he’d seen her before, but not for a good while.
‘I can see why he said that, Maiden. You don’t look like a copper. It’s them big, dark eyes. Coppers develop little squidgy eyes, you ever notice that?’
And she laughed. She was saving the real crying, she said. She’d make a night of it, serious grief, then pick herself up at five in the morning, take herself to bed with the gin.
‘How long had it been?’ he asked her. ‘You and Vic.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you, Maiden … me and Victor, it was convenience more than anything, and he’d have told you that himself. What he loved most of all was this address, this big brick townhouse with the high ceilings and the plaster coving. And the mahogany four-poster, Victor loved that four-poster.’
He thought for a second she was going to break her vow on the crying, but she laughed again, and this time he realized: it was the name which had misled him, Shelagh Beckett.
‘Connie?’
‘Blimey,’ she said, ‘you must be older than you look.’
Used to mind the lower bar at the Biarritz. Before that, a regular on the Feeny Park beat, when Maiden was a young copper. Consuela, she’d called herself, accentuating the Latin look: big earrings and black frocks with mega-cleavage.
She peered at him. ‘
You
never nicked me, did you, Maiden?’
‘Never did,’ he said. And was glad. The hair was shorter and near-white now and she’d put on a couple of stone since Feeny Park. She was spread over the peacock-blue sofa, in her lime-green frilly dressing gown. On the carpet was the jersey dress she’d worn earlier, with Vic’s blood all over it from when she’d cradled his pumping head.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I can’t keep calling you Maiden. What’s your name?’
‘Bobby.’
‘Sweet. We had a cat called Bobby. Listen, Bobby, I know how it is – somebody like Vic goes the way he did, somebody who’s done bird, and the police look into it without much interest for a couple of weeks, and then it’s like: Oh, it don’t involve the general public, it’s an underworld thing, it ain’t worth the candle. If it don’t look like escalating into gang warfare, they just let it go. That’s what happens, isn’t it?’
‘I won’t let it go, Connie,’ he said.
‘I know you wouldn’t, darling, not left to yourself.’
‘It’s why I’m here again.’
‘Again?’
‘I was here earlier. With George Barrett?’
‘So you was.’ She shook her head as if to clear it. ‘Georgie Barrett.
He
nicked me once. Never again, though – I done him a quickie in his Panda, and I said if he bothered me again I’d tell ’em down the station. Give a description and everything, you know what I mean? I would have too. See, there I go … I’m telling you that ’cause you don’t look like a copper.’
‘Can you tell me who did it, Connie?’
‘Victor?’
‘Who was driving the car?’
‘I never seen it and that’s God’s honest truth. If I’d seen it, I’d tell
you. I didn’t know nothing till the neighbours come banging on the door. They seen more than me … Mr … what’s his name … Parsons. He seen the back end of the car.’
‘George talked to Mr Parsons. What I’m thinking of, Connie, is not so much what you saw as what might’ve occurred to you. Having had a couple of hours to think about it.’
She gave him a shrewd look over the cigarette she was lighting. ‘You’re on your own, ain’tcha? You got history too, you and Vic, I’d say. Things he never told me. Well, Bobby, I wish I could help you. Don’t you go thinking I wouldn’t love to grass up the cowardly vermin, after I’ve been down there in the road with Victor, thinking, if he’s got to die, please God let him die in my arms. But he’d already gone, hadn’t he? I reckon he’d gone. I hope he’d gone. State of him.’
She curled her legs underneath her on the sofa.
‘I knew who did it, Bobby, I’d be telling you and if you couldn’t make it stick I’d be waiting for him in a dark alley some night, with a ballpin hammer … There I go again. But I would. I’d do it. What’s to lose?’
‘More than there used to be, maybe?’ Maiden looked around the room.
‘Yeah. Nice, innit?’ She smiled. ‘It’s an
address.
A real address. Victor thought he’d died and gone to … Oh Gawd, now he has, poor love. Listen, you wait till you see the funeral I’ll give him. Nothing naff, none of your Victor spelled out in white carnations kind of crap. Class. Real oak coffin. Marble headstone, proper verse. I knew him twenty years, on and off.’
Maiden said, ‘But only on again quite recently?’
‘Like I said, convenience. When you get to our age, comfort and convenience is important.’
‘Vic implied an old boyfriend died and left you the house.’
‘He
implied
that, did he? Connie shook her head, chuckling. ‘You know who give me this place? Dorothy Parker.’
‘What?’
‘Tony’s wife. Widow. The one he kept in style, down the swish end of Essex, away from all this murky stuff and who never come up here, not once, not till he snuffed it. Well, of course, shocked when she seen it all – the scale of it, for a start. All the property. Forgetting you can buy a palace up here for the price of a bungalow down
there. But she didn’t want it, any of it. Didn’t like the town, didn’t like the atmosphere, didn’t like the picture she was getting of Tony as Little Caesar. So she hires a fresh solicitor to organize flogging the clubs. And the odd properties, she just … give away.’
‘This house was Tony Parker’s?’
‘He bought it about three months before he passed on. Repossession job put his way by Laurie Argyle, the estate agent. Tony was going to divide it into bedsits. Asked me was I interested in looking after a couple of good-class girls here. Small, respectable set-up, nothing sordid, no drugs. Well, see, I was the one went around with Mrs Parker, giving her the grand tour, so I told her all about it. What was to hide any more?’
Maiden had heard about Dorothy Parker’s grand tour. He’d been away at the time, compiling the file on the Green Man.
‘Took a shine to me, I think,’ Connie said. ‘Must’ve been the accent. Plus I told her nothing but the truth, and all the bits of it she didn’t know. Next thing she’s bunging me the house.’
‘Just like that?’
‘
Just
like that. Start a guesthouse, she says, make an honest living. Worth over a hundred grand now, apparently. Deeds made over in my name, Shelagh Beckett. Blimey, I thought Tony’s ashes’d come spurting out the casket.’
Maiden smiled.
‘Course, there was a good bit of fuming among certain people about the things she done, disposal-wise,’ Connie said, ‘but she didn’t want none of it. Wanted it off her hands for good and all, and the quicker the better. So Victor and me, we moves in, figure we’ll live in style for a while before doing the guesthouse bit. Victor done most of the decorating. What do you think?’
‘It’s very tasteful, Connie.’
Maiden felt a lump in his throat, knew he wasn’t ever going to let this one go.
‘Victor wouldn’t have nothing for nothing, Bobby, not ever. I says here, take my credit card, go out and buy yourself a new suit. He comes back with this bright blue number, fifteen quid from the Oxfam shop. That’s the kind of bloke he was.’
‘Yes. Connie, when you said
certain people
were put out by what Dorothy was doing …’
‘People with investments in the businesses.’
‘The businesses.’
‘The businesses she couldn’t sell on account of there being no books, no spreadsheets.
Them
businesses. You know?’
‘Got you.’ Maiden nodded.
‘See, she’d made them businesses unmanageable by destroying the infra … what’s the word?’
‘Infrastructure.’
‘Right. Now, one person in particular was thinking to take over the Biarritz, through a third party. Because, without the Biarritz … But you probably know this.’
‘No,’ he said honestly.
‘Bet you know the person we’re talking about, though.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Victor learned about it. What this person was after. Victor told me, I told Dorothy. See, Tony I could work for. Tony, I knew where he was coming from. But you have a geezer you know you’re
never
gonna know where he’s coming from …’
‘Vic knew exactly where he was coming from.’
Vic’s switch of allegiance, following the death of his son, had been slow and careful and linked to his esteem for Parker’s daughter, Emma. His removal of a killer – probably hired by Riggs through an intermediary to deal with Maiden – had been, fortunately, unprovable.
‘Connie, did this person know the extent to which Vic messed up his long-term plans?’
Connie pushed herself back into the cushions of the peacock-blue sofa. She still had style. He wondered who Vic’s successor would be.
‘This is what you really come about, innit, Bobby?’
‘I think so.’
‘This is the geezer I should be after with the ballpin hammer. Martin Riggs, yeah?’ Connie said. ‘Just to confirm it?’
‘Shhhhh,’ Maiden said softly.
In the CID room, when he walked in, coming up to nine p.m., DS Beattie was on the phone.
‘Rear offside tyre,’ Beattie said. ‘Right, OK. And it’s not hedgehog blood, is it?’ He laughed. ‘Yeah. Absolutely.’
George Barrett beckoned Maiden into the passage and told him the worst.
Traffic had found Maiden’s car tucked into a layby two miles down the bypass. A meaningfully dented wing, a significantly smashed offside tail lamp.
The vehicle which had mounted the pavement and broken both Vic Clutton’s legs, before being fast reversed over Vic Clutton’s top half, had then clipped a brick gatepost on the corner of Danks Street and Ironbridge Road. Shards of tail-lamp cover had been hoovered up by SOCO within a few yards of the post and Vic’s squashed and leaking head.
GRAYLE COULD HEAR MALCOLM OUTSIDE THE STUDY DOOR. HE WAS
padding up and down the hallway. She got up to let him in, but Malcolm backed away and sank down, panting, in the doorway of the editorial room, where Mrs Willis had done her healing.
Grayle came back.
‘Happens all the time,’ Callard was saying. ‘Last year, a Sunday paper offered me a quarter of a million to contact Diana.’
‘Tempting?’ Grayle wondered, sitting down.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Which paper was that?’ Marcus asked.
‘I’ve no idea. The offer was made through … well, a PR man you’ll have heard of. The deal was I wouldn’t find out who it was until I’d signed a secrecy agreement. They were obviously afraid I’d tell a rival tabloid I’d been approached and
they’d
do a story about what a shoddy outfit the first paper was. I say no to everything like that.’
Diana. Out of pure curiosity, Grayle had combed Marcus’s Callard file for anything relating to her sessions with the Princess of Wales. No mention. Even after Diana’s death, Callard had revealed nothing.
‘But you accepted twenty-five grand from this MP, right?’
‘E
x
-MP. That’s the point: I’m making. At least he wasn’t trying to conceal his identity.’
‘Who
is
this guy, Marcus?’
‘Richard Barber? Time-serving back-bencher. Low-profile. Rural constituency. Lost to the Lib-Dems, I think. Where exactly did this happen, Persephone?’
‘A party. Sort of. In Cheltenham. An expensive flat, newly refurbished, in one of those discreet blocks near the Rotunda. I was told Barber had sold his constituency house, bought something in France, plus this
pied à terre
in Cheltenham, because his daughter lives there, apparently.’
Marcus sniffed. ‘More like dubious business dealings in the area. Never met an MP of any political persuasion who wasn’t a greedy little shit.’
‘Normally, Nancy, my agent, has instructions to bin invitations like this on sight. But the crazy money Barber was offering for a single sitting … plus the fact that this was the eminently respectable former honourable member for somewhere green and quiet. I mean, it was all terribly civilized – a suite booked for me at a hotel in the town centre, Barber sends his … driver to fetch me.’
‘How long ago was this?’
‘A month? Five weeks?’
Grayle said, ‘The guy lives most of the time in France, but he keeps a driver over here?’
‘The man certainly wore a chauffeur’s hat. He was very amiable, very chatty. He said his esteemed employer had a great and abiding interest in spiritualism and couldn’t wait to meet me. Which, in hindsight, seemed rather odd because the welcome I got from Barber was lukewarm, to say the least, and the event turned out to be some sort of extremely bland cocktail party – the kind someone like him might host on behalf of a charity. He didn’t appear to know the guests particularly well, he was quite distant – didn’t really know what I did. Just seemed to want to … get it over.’
‘After paying twenty-five grand?’ There were people in the States who’d toss this kind of money about; in England, unlikely, in Grayle’s view.
‘I suppose, by the time I began the sitting, I was feeling rather resentful. There was this dreadful cabaret atmosphere – people drinking rather a lot and some of the men were ogling me as though I was a stripper. So when I had a message through from a boy who’d killed himself, I made no real attempt to filter the information.
To the … dismay … of a particular middle-aged couple.’
‘Message?’ Grayle was still finding it hard to get her head around this stuff being entirely routine for Callard.
‘It’s irrelevant really. The boy got in a state and killed himself more in anger after he found out his girlfriend was sleeping with his father.’
Grayle was appalled. ‘The mother didn’t know about this and you told her?’
Persephone Callard scowled. ‘I was in a bad mood.’
‘What if it was bullshit?’ Grayle threw up her arms. ‘Jesus, so much for if you receive a disturbing message you keep it under your ass!’
‘Look,’ Callard snarled, leaning forward, ‘I never claimed to be Mother Teresa. Don’t be so fucking holier than thou, Grayle. Go back and read some of your more lurid columns.’
‘Can we scratch each other’s eyes out later?’ Marcus levered himself up in his armchair. ‘What happened then?’
Callard leaned back. ‘What happened was that the father walked out. Then a couple of the women took the mother upstairs or somewhere. And I was feeling rather sick and disgusted with myself and disgusted with Barber for setting it up. So I decided to leave, too. Told him he could keep his money.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He grovelled.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Kept saying,
We want you to carry on. We want you to stay. Please don’t go.
That sort of thing.’
‘
We
?’ Grayle said.
‘That’s what he said. I think he was frightened.’
‘Of what?’
‘I don’t know. I was a bit scared myself by then – had a feeling the father was going to be out there waiting for me. I don’t think he believed it was a message from his son; he thought I’d been given information about the suicide in advance. That he’d been set up. I really didn’t want to run into him in the dark while trying to attract a taxi. So I stayed. I did the sitting, proper. I had them play my music, my spooky Debussy, and I … said the words.’
Grayle remembered.
‘The lines are open.’
‘Yes. It’s become fairly well known now, more of a catchphrase than an invocation. But it’s useful because it acts on the … audience. Shuts them up. I mean on both sides of the curtain.’
‘Shuts up the spirits?’
‘What usually happens then is that I’m aware of almost a
throng.
Like when you’re tuning a radio – fragments of voices, questions, pleas, and static. Only worse because it’s like half a dozen stations coming at you at once. At this point one can either request a guide or guidance or suggest that they form, I suppose, an orderly queue.’
The lamplight showing up a sheen on her face that hadn’t been there before. She was being deliberately prosaic – all this about radio stations and orderly queues – maybe to keep from spooking herself. It wasn’t working. Grayle became watchful.
We’re coming to something.
‘This time, the voices were far back.’ Callard moistened her lips with her tongue. ‘And about as comprehensible as a football crowd when you’re driving past the stadium. I couldn’t bring them
up
because of
him
…’
Callard closed her eyes, and Grayle saw her fists tighten on her knees. Outside of her blouse now, the dark gold cross was in shadow.
Marcus said, ‘You mean Barber?’
She blinked. ‘Barber?’
‘You said because of
him.’
She sat up. ‘I don’t know who he is. He doesn’t talk.’ The sheen of sweat on her face was dense as tanning oil. ‘Sometimes I think he’s the devil. Satan. Sometimes I think I’ve brought down Satan.’
There was silence.
Outside the door they could hear Malcolm padding up and down the hallway.
‘I don’t understand,’ Marcus said eventually.
‘He was just there,’ Callard said. ‘
It
was there.’
Grayle and Marcus both stayed silent, Grayle thinking it was maybe only the tea-party approach and the Salvation Army hymns that prevented spiritualism from mutating into some kind of dark necromancy.
It was there?
Jesus.
‘I smelled it first. This happens sometimes.’
‘A scent of violets.’ Grayle remembering some old country-house ghost story.
‘No. It was rather acrid and oily and spiced with that … that smell one tends to associate with violent, male lust.’
Grayle said, ‘Huh?’
Marcus looked uncomfortable.
Grayle was thinking,
Justin. Motor oil. The bitch is making this up.
She said, ‘Maybe, when you’re feeling resentful, you don’t get violets.’
Persephone Callard, not even looking at Grayle, said mildly, ‘The bitch is
not
making it up.’
Grayle froze. A log shifted inside the stove.
Outside the study door Malcolm howled once – sharply – and then Grayle heard the patter of his heavy paws, receding.