The Garden Party (25 page)

‘Yes,' Vicary replied, ‘that's the way it works.'

‘So, he's picking up the pieces of his life, he's rescuing what he can and Daniel is in the soil . . . it is so unfair.'

‘You can't leave a man alone, can you?' The woman spat the words. She was short, with dark hair – clearly had a fiery temper.

‘It's just a friendly chat,' Swannell replied in a calm, soothing voice.

‘Very, very friendly,' Brunnie added. ‘Just couldn't be more friendly.'

‘And if he doesn't want to chat you'll be back with a warrant,' the woman snarled. ‘I know how you work.'

‘Yes, possibly,' Swannell continued to be calm. ‘We could do that but we'd rather not.'

‘Let's keep it unofficial,' Brunnie added.

Arnie Rainbird then appeared behind the woman and stood staring at the officers. He showed himself to be tall, well groomed, clean-shaven, with cold, piercing eyes, and wore blue jeans and a blue T-shirt. He was lean and muscular; his physique had benefited from prison life and he hadn't let liberty soften him. ‘I was expecting you,' he announced speaking in an East London accent. ‘Snakebite phoned me.'

‘We thought he might,' Swannell replied.

‘You knew he would, more like.' Rainbird stood in the doorway of his home, which the officers found was a solidly built Victorian house set in its own grounds in Hertfordshire, and they knew not a brick of it had been bought using honest money; all on the back of ruined lives; all purchased with the money used to purchase heroin before the present source of income derived from human trafficking. ‘You're just putting the frighteners on me.'

‘Sorry you feel like that, Arnie, but it's really just a social call. We just wanted to introduce ourselves.'

‘We've been asking a lot of questions about you, Arnie,' Frankie Brunnie added, ‘so we thought we'd come and meet you; put a face to a name and all that.'

‘So you can go now,' Arnie Rainbird snarled, ‘you've put a face to a name; you needn't stay here, you're wasting space.'

‘Things might get a little more serious, Arnie. You have read about the bones being found in Ilford a few days ago?'

‘Yes, so what?'

‘They belonged to Convers and Tyrell, but Snakebite would have told you that so the “so what” doesn't cut much ice.'

Arnie Rainbird remained silent. He was stone-faced.

‘The gofer who was supposed to drop the bones in the river,' Swannell explained, ‘well, he had other plans didn't he?'

‘In fairness, the bones were not intended to be found until we were all well into the next world, but a geezer got drunk and rammed his vehicle into a brick wall, and out popped a note telling us where the bones had been buried,' Brunnie explained. ‘And here we are.'

‘And here we are,' Swannell repeated. ‘Very creative all round; getting battered, then drowned, then their bodies burnt to reduce them to bones. If they did go in the river they would never be found, but the gofer, he was creative as well, and like we said, here we are.'

‘We are learning about the party to celebrate you getting out,' Swannell continued with a smile, ‘a garden party . . .'

Arnie Rainbird continued to remain silent.

‘Lots of lovely witnesses,' Swannell said, ‘mainly brasses, but not all, scared into silence, but it's the old elephant in the room number.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘Well, if something is so huge, so monstrous, it is sometimes easier to ignore it, but the nature of elephants in rooms is that over time they get smaller. With every day that passes they get a little smaller, they pygmify, and they pygmify, until they get small enough to recognize, and then they get talked about, and after seven years the goings on at your coming home party are now small enough for folk to talk about them.'

‘Like who, who's talking?' Arnie Rainbird's knuckles whitened as he gripped the front door of his house.

‘Can't possibly tell you that, Arnie.' Swannell grinned. ‘That would be telling, but there were a lot of girls there who were all free agents, not part of any crew. The fear you had them in is wearing off. Do you know where they still are? Girls move from drum to drum, get married, change their names; just move on in life and leave the street. We are investigating a double murder, Arnie, it won't be manslaughter; you won't be getting out in ten years, not this time. This time you're going back for life.'

‘I was fitted up for that last charge, that boy in the pub.'

‘You knifed him.'

‘I may have . . . I may not have, but the rat who gave evidence against me, he wasn't even in the pub.'

‘So how did he know what happened?' Brunnie asked. ‘He had to be there.'

‘He was primed, your lot primed him, told him what to say. We knew him, he was a blagger and he was looking at eight years for armed robbery so he gave evidence. The charges against him were dropped and he vanished . . . police witness protection.' Arnie Rainbird eyed Swannell and Brunnie coldly. ‘You won't be doing that to me again. You won't be fitting me up again.'

The whirring machine which kept the lungs of Charlie Magg's latest and possibly last victim inhaling and exhaling and kept his stomach supplied with liquidized food was, in an atmosphere of sorrow and solemnity, switched off. The supervising physician said, ‘All right, it's done. Somebody call it.'

‘Eleven fifty-six in the forenoon.' Staff nurse Bridie O'Driscoll ‘called it' in her thick Irish accent upon consulting her watch, which hung upside down on the left side of her tunic. She thought as she called it that the decision to switch off the machine and thus terminate the wretched man's life was a decision which was taken none too soon. It always had, in her opinion, been hopelessly optimistic to think that the patient could ever recover, and if he did regain consciousness he would never be anything more than a vegetable. The physician pulled the bed sheet over the man's face. ‘I dare say that makes it a murder now. I'll notify the police.'

Tom Ainsclough tapped on the door frame of Harry Vicary's office. He held a manila file in his hand and, Vicary thought, he looked worried.

‘Do you have something, Tom?' Vicary put his pen down and reclined in his chair. ‘Come in . . . take a pew.'

‘Yes . . . yes, sir. I've been following the paper trail like you asked me to, digging up what I could about who I could.'

‘Yes?'

‘Well, sir, I confess I am a bit worried.'

‘I thought you looked troubled. Do sit, please.'

‘It appears that there was once a crew called The Whitechapel Fleet.' Tom Ainsclough slid into a chair in front of Vicary's desk.

‘Fleet?' Vicary smiled. ‘As in a fleet of ships?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘It's a good name for a gang,' Vicary commented.

‘Yes, I thought so too, sir.' Tom Ainsclough also grinned briefly. ‘But it's really the only thing that is amusing.'

‘Oh?'

‘The chief of The Whitechapel Fleet was a fella called Eddie Fretwell, aka “Slick” Eddie to his mates, and “Slimy” Eddie or “Slimy” Fretwell to his enemies. It seems that he was a sort of eye-on-the-main-chance individual, out for himself all the time and would sell anybody out to save his skin, hence “Slimy” Fretwell or “Eddie the Slime”, another name he acquired.'

‘I see.'

‘Well, “The Fleet” cruised Whitechapel and were not on good terms with Arnie Rainbird's crew, and they each had recognized territory with The Fleet being the smaller of the two outfits.'

‘OK . . . I follow.' Vicary picked up a ballpoint pen and began turning it over and over in his hands.

‘They avoided all out war,' Ainsclough explained, ‘because The Fleet were still in the middle of the twentieth century; strong arm boys blowing safes, stealing wages and bulldozing their way into jewellers' shops, whereas Rainbird's team had got into illegal substances and then into people smuggling. So they didn't like each other, but at the same time they didn't tread on each other's toes.'

‘I'm with you,' Vicary replied, ‘carry on.'

‘It turns out that the prosecution's witness to the murder for which Rainbird was arrested was none other than Eddie “The Slime” Fretwell.'

‘Rainbird's enemy!' Vicary sat forward. ‘I see where you are going, and I don't like the sound of it.'

‘It doesn't sound good, does it, sir?' Ainsclough replied. ‘The two gangs were territorial; the murder took place in The Cross Keys just off the Mile End Road, right in the middle of Arnie Rainbird's territory, and not only that but it was his much favoured pub.'

‘So Eddie Fretwell would not have been there?'

‘No, sir. If Eddie Fretwell set foot in The Cross Keys he'd wake up in the Royal London Hospital, probably with his entire body encased in plaster.' Ainsclough raised his eyebrows. ‘He would not have been present when the fight took place, as you say.'

‘Who was the senior officer in the Daniel Meed murder?'

Tom Ainsclough consulted the file. ‘One Detective Inspector Scaly.'

‘Scaly?' Vicary smiled. ‘As in scaly dragon?'

‘That's what it says here, sir.'

‘Is he still with us?'

‘Yes, sir. He is now with the Anti Terrorist Squad.'

‘Him,' Vicary said, ‘him I would like to have a little chat with.'

Victor Swannell, feeling weary and drained, returned home to his modest terraced house on Warren Road in Neasden, where he, like the majority of householders, had concreted over their small front lawns to form a parking space for the family car. Warren Road was laid out before mass car ownership was the norm and was just not wide enough to permit the householders on both sides of the street to park their cars at the kerb. He entered the house by the front door and found his two teenage daughters sitting on the lounge floor, both deeply engrossed in an Australian soap opera which at that moment was being shown on television. They did both manage to say, ‘'Lo, Dad', but didn't take their eyes off the screen. He went into the back garden, which was filled with the sound of the incessant hum of traffic on the North Circular, where his wife was weeding the rose bed. She stood up on his approach and perfunctorily pecked his cheek without saying anything and then knelt again and continued to stab at the soil with a small hand-held garden fork, drawing out and casting weeds into a sieve. Swannell turned and walked back into the house.

It was, he had come to realize, all that he could now expect from family life.

Tom Ainsclough also returned home, also feeling tired but satisfied after his day's work. He entered his home in Hargwyne Road in Clapham and checked for post on the top of the table that stood in the communally owned hallway which he and Sara shared with their neighbours, the Watsons, who owned the lower conversion of the house. Ainsclough took the two letters which he found addressed to Mr and Mrs Ainsclough, both from the bank, and unlocked the door leading to the stairs and to the upper conversion. His wife met him at the door and kissed him warmly, but she was already dressed in her uniform and hurriedly leaving for work, anxious not to be late. Newly promoted to Sister at the hospital she was keen to create a good impression and to lead from the front, believing that ‘good timekeeping makes good leaders'. Tom Ainsclough spent the evening channel surfing the television, wondering again if it was the constant crossing of paths with his wife as one leaves and the other returns that kept their marriage, in their cramped accommodation, healthy.

Penny Yewdall also felt a sense of satisfaction at a good day's work as she returned home. She took the train from Charing Cross and alighted at Maze Hill, from where she walked the short distance, through narrow Victorian streets, to her modest house in Tusker Road. Once showered and changed into jeans and a T-shirt, she went for a stroll in Greenwich Park and up to the observatory, where a group of foreign youth were photographing each other standing astride the meridian, and was reminded of the amusing incident wherein two Argentinian women seeking the meridian had stopped her and asked, with limited but sufficient English, ‘Please, where is half the world?' Upon Observatory Hill, she turned and enjoyed the vista of the Thames and of East London beyond the river. Penny Yewdall then walked home, casually, enjoying the safety that Greenwich afforded. It was a safe place for a woman to walk alone and, being a young woman, she could still rejoice in her single status; there was time for marriage and a family yet, she told herself . . . still time and that bit is not to be hurried; perhaps, she thought, perhaps she was not the ‘elective spinster' she thought she was. After eating, she retired to bed early and as darkness fell the night sky revealed a good Orion. Sometimes the constellation of Orion was stationary but at other times, as on that night, it could be observed marching across the sky. She lay quite still watching the seven observable stars of the constellation move slowly across the window pane of her bedroom, and as she laid there her mind turned to Elizabeth ‘Long Liz' Petty, she of the endless legs, who would at that moment be out there, negotiating a price on the hoof in London's other meat market.

‘I
feel that I must confess that I find it most unnerving. Most unnerving indeed.' Davinia Bannister was, Yewdall observed, a short, auburn-haired woman of trim, almost petite figure. She and Penny Yewdall walked the athletic track on the school playing fields. Davinia Bannister had suggested that they walk ‘the white lines on the green stuff' as it was the only place that they would find peace, the games field not being required at that particular time.

‘Yes, I'm sorry,' Yewdall replied, ‘I can well imagine how unnerving it would be to have your past tapping you on the shoulder like this, but please don't let it alarm you.'