The Wolves of London (22 page)

‘That was the rumour. That the Wolves of London had done it. That was what everyone said.’

‘So is it just the case that they get blamed for every unsolved underworld crime? Villain against villain? Is that what you’re saying?’

Benny frowned. His voice was clipped. ‘No. Because it isn’t as simple as that. It’s the
type
of crime. What’s done and where it’s done. Some of the things the Wolves have done, or are
supposed
to have done, are… how shall I put this? Hard to believe. Impossible even.’

‘In what way?’ asked Clover.

Benny looked thoughtful, perhaps sifting through which stories to relate, or even deciding how much he should reveal of the world in which he operated. Finally he said, ‘There was this one bloke, Ray or Roy something. He wasn’t much – a drug dealer, driver, odd-job man, fence, small time stuff, you know? Anyway, he cut in on someone’s business, and the next thing anyone knew, he’d disappeared. He was found three days later in a field in Kent.’

Benny paused, his cold gaze sweeping across us. Then he went on, his voice quieter, heavier.

‘His body was smashed to pieces. Literally. Scattered across the ground. The story was that he looked as if he’d been dropped from a plane.’

‘Maybe he had,’ I said.

‘The police investigation could find no evidence that a plane had flown over that area. That doesn’t mean that there hadn’t been one, just that they could find no evidence of it. But a contact of mine on the force told me the body had weird marks all over it.’

‘What kind of marks?’ asked Clover.

‘He said they were like claw-marks. Like some big fucking bird had flown away with him, and then dropped him.’

‘And what do you think?’ I asked carefully.

A ghost of a smile crossed Benny’s face. ‘I haven’t a clue. But there are other stories too, of people being torn to pieces in their homes. Not chopped up, but literally
torn
to pieces.’

My guts turned over. I hadn’t given Benny the details of what I had found in the hotel bathroom, had said only that the men had been dead and that they hadn’t died easily. I glanced at Clover, wondering whether I should tell Benny the full story, but she gave the tiniest shake of her head.

If Benny noticed he didn’t let on. He drained the last of his coffee. ‘Look, I don’t want to scare you half to death with horror stories. The chances are, whoever wants that heart of yours is just trying to put the shits up you.’

At the mention of the heart, my hand crept to the lump in my hoodie pocket. When Candice was little she had had a pet rat called George, which used to fall asleep on her belly while she was reading or watching TV. As I touched the heart I was reminded of George. I even kidded myself that the stone felt warm beneath my palm.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything, Benny?’ Clover asked. ‘Why people are after the heart, I mean?’

Benny shook his head. ‘Not a thing. But I’ll put a few feelers out, make some discreet enquiries.’

‘Thanks,’ Clover said. ‘It would be good to know exactly what we’re up against.’

Benny gave a curt nod and turned his attention to me. ‘Mind if I have a look?’

As ever, his scrutiny made me feel as though he’d caught me out in some way. ‘What?’

‘At the heart. I’d like to see what all the fuss is about.’

He held out his hand, like a school bully demanding money. Oddly reluctant to comply with his request, I licked my lips. I glanced at Clover, and she raised her eyebrows, as if to say,
What are you waiting for?
So I forced a smile and handed it over.

Benny examined the heart closely, turning it in his hand, feeling its weight, his surprisingly slim and dextrous fingers probing at it. I felt like the curator of a museum nervously watching a visitor handling a precious artefact. Weirdly, despite what it had done to McCallum, it wasn’t Benny’s welfare I was worried about, but the heart itself. I knew how tough it was, and yet I had to fight an urge to tell him to be careful.

‘Nice piece of work,’ he said, but he didn’t appear overly impressed. When he offered the heart back to me I had to make a conscious effort not to snatch it out of his hand.

Outside on the lawn, Lesley or the dog had finally grown tired of the game. Lesley turned and trooped off to our right, towards the back door that led directly into the kitchen, the dog leaping at her heels. She glanced up once, her face flushed with cold, and waved at us. I saw Benny’s icy countenance melt into a sudden and surprisingly tender smile. Opposite him, Clover drew up her legs, tucking her feet beneath her, and slumped back in her chair with a heart-felt sigh.

‘It’s so peaceful here,’ she said, looking out at the back garden. ‘I could just curl up and go to sleep.’

‘Well, why don’t you?’ Benny said.

‘Because we need to be… doing something. Looking for Alex’s daughter.’

Benny leaned forward, elbows on knees. ‘Oh yeah, and how would you go about that then? Where would you go?’

Clover hesitated. ‘Well… I don’t know. We’ll think of something.’

‘Is that right?’ His voice was quiet and without inflection, and yet it was pitched in such a way that it exposed the flimsiness of our situation, the sheer folly of our intentions.

‘What would you suggest, Benny?’ I asked.

He gave a brief upward flick of the eyebrows, as if the answer was so obvious I hardly need to have asked. ‘You’ll stay here till this thing’s sorted out.’

‘We can’t,’ said Clover.

‘You can and you will.’

‘What if the Wolves of London come looking for us?’ I said. ‘We don’t want to put you and Lesley in danger.’

Benny looked not at me, but at Clover. ‘I promised your dad I’d look after you,’ he said, ‘and I never break my promises.’

I looked across at Clover too, realising there was still so much I didn’t know about her. We’d barely had a chance to get to know each other in the normal way. ‘Your dad?’ I enquired.

She rolled her eyes. ‘Long story.’ And then she changed the subject quickly enough to make me determined to return to the topic at a more opportune time. ‘Benny’s right, Alex. Our best bet is to lie low here for now. There’s nothing the two of us can do on our own. At least Benny can use his contacts to try to find out what’s going on.’

The idea of sitting around while Kate was out there somewhere was excruciating, but I knew Clover was right. Reluctantly I said, ‘Okay. But if you can find out anything that might lead us to Kate, Benny…’

Benny was already rising to his feet. ‘I’ll make some calls right now. Relax, Alex. Put your feet up. Make yourself at home.’

He stalked out of the room. We heard his footsteps cross the hallway and then the creak of the stairs as he ascended them.

Neither of us said anything until he was out of earshot and then I released a rattling sigh.

‘Relax, he says.’

S
omething woke me, though I had no idea what. All I knew was that one second I was in a sleep so black and dreamless it was like death, and the next I was lying on my back with my eyes wide open and my heart pounding so hard it was throbbing in my ears.

My limbs were tense too. No, not just tense – rigid. My fingers were claws digging into the mattress and I could feel the ache of stretched tendons in my shoulders and down the backs of my legs.

It was dark. Quiet. Not exactly silent – a wind had got up in the night and I could hear it rushing through the trees, causing branches and dry leaves to scrape together – but hushed enough to tell me it was the dead of night, and that if a sound
had
penetrated my subconscious enough to stab me awake it had subsided again now.

Perhaps I’d been woken by a sound that had already been and gone? The cry of an owl? The screech of a fox in the darkness? Maybe even the creak of a footstep on the landing from someone who’d got up to use the loo, or a door closing as they went back to bed?

Or maybe it hadn’t been a sound at all. Maybe it had been a bad dream, instantly forgotten, or even the after-effects of a good dinner and several glasses of red wine. I couldn’t deny that my belly was uncomfortably full and my mouth tacky with dehydration. I also needed a piss, but for the time being I lay where I was and listened to the world around me, acclimatising myself.

It had been a restless day. I had spent it feeling exactly the same as I had after Kate had disappeared – that I should be out there doing something, making things happen. But there was no denying that Clover and I were currently at a dead end. Until email man got back in touch with us, or Benny’s contacts unearthed information that might lead me to my lost daughter, there was little we could do but wait.

To be honest, I still wasn’t sure that I could trust Benny – or even Clover for that matter. I had been watching him carefully that day, looking for indications that he knew more than he was letting on, but if he did he hid it well. At dinner I had even asked him outright whether he had been the one who had paid off Candice’s boyfriend’s debts, but he had scoffed at the idea. But if it hadn’t been Benny, then who? And more to the point, why? I didn’t know anybody who had that much disposable income – or at least nobody who would pay out that kind of money with little chance of a return.

Of course, I was glad that Candice was out of imminent danger, but mulling over the possible identity of her mysterious benefactor still made me uncomfortable. In the last few days I had come into contact with a lot of dangerous people, and I was all too aware how rare it was to get something for nothing. Even if it wasn’t immediately obvious, there was nearly always a price to pay.

I knew that lying in the dark worrying about it wasn’t going to solve anything, though. The thoughts buzzing in my head were only serving to make me increasingly agitated. For that reason I decided that I needed to
do
something, even if it was only switching on the light and going downstairs for a smoke and a cup of tea. With a groan I turned slowly on to my left-hand side and stretched out a hand towards the lamp on the bedside table.

And froze.

Although the room had taken on a basic shape around me in the few minutes since I’d opened my eyes, it was still too dark to make out details. The chair in the corner on which I’d dumped my clothes was a squatting lump of blackness, and the curtains over the leaded windows on the opposite wall were a dim, ripply expanse of greyness, like corrugated iron. The lamp on the bedside cabinet was a thin spear of black with a spherical blob on top. But under the lamp was…

…what?

I knew what it was
supposed
to be. I knew what it had been when I had put it there a few hours before. It had been the heart. I had taken it out of the pocket of my hoodie and placed it on the bedside table under the lamp. Don’t ask me why. I had had a lot of wine, followed by a couple of whiskies, and my thoughts hadn’t been too clear. I guess I had just wanted it close to me, so that I could… I don’t know… protect it?

But the thing was, it didn’t look like the heart now. Whatever was sitting in its place looked two, maybe three times bigger.

And it was
moving.

As I say, it was dark, and my head was pounding, and I was still a little disorientated, but even so, I could have sworn that the heart – if that was what it was – had swollen, expanded, and grown what looked like tentacles. The tentacles were rippling, curling upwards, slowly and sinuously, like the fronds of some undersea plant. And the main body of the heart seemed to be rising and falling, as if performing the function of a real heart, as if blood was pumping through it, in and out. Although there was no sound, for those few seconds I had the feeling that on the bedside table next to me was some creature the size of my head, something like an octopus or a fat black spider, or a mixture of the two.

Half-expecting the tentacles to respond and wrap tightly around my wrist, I jerked my hand towards the lamp and switched it on. The instant light flooded the room it was as if the real world had snapped back into place and everything was normal again. The heart, dwarfed by the lamp, was nothing more than a carved lump of shiny, black obsidian. I touched it, closed my hand over it, felt its coldness, its solidity. I picked it up and put it down again gently. It made a satisfying clunk, one hard surface against another.

I breathed out slowly, then sat up. With the light on, the room seemed smaller, less fluid. I had never been scared of the dark, and I wouldn’t say I was exactly scared now. It was just that, with what had happened these past couple of days, the dark suddenly made the world seem less trustworthy, and not only because things could hide in it. It was as if the dark had properties of its own, as if it could stretch matter, expand boundaries, create doorways. I shook my head to rid myself of ideas that didn’t seem quite my own, and threw back the duvet.

Checking my mobile I saw that it was 4.25 a.m. Shivering at the predawn chill, I crossed to the chair and pulled on the clothes I’d peeled off earlier before collapsing into bed. I hesitated a moment, wondering whether I needed my socks and boots, and then put them on anyway. The events of the past few days had triggered the long-dormant sense of self-preservation I’d nurtured during my years in prison. To survive inside, even with the promise of Benny’s protection, I had needed to be ever watchful, ever alert, ever prepared for fight or flight.

The bedroom door creaked when I opened it, and the floorboards under the landing carpet groaned beneath my feet. Tiny sounds, but they seemed as loud as gunshots in the sleeping house, even with the wind rattling outside. I left my bedroom door ajar, so that a glow of light spilled from it, but it only stretched halfway down the stairs before petering out. I crept across to the toilet for a piss, and then hesitated, wondering whether to flush and risk waking everyone up. In the end I left it, simply lowering the toilet seat as if that was some sort of compromise. At the top of the stairs I stood for a moment, peering down into the hallway below, even screwing up my eyes as if that could make me see better.

There were no street lights lining the private road outside, which meant that there wasn’t even a faint glow leaking in through the half-moon of stained-glass panels in the front door. As a result the blackness looked thick as tar, and as if it stretched for ever. My only point of reference was the heavy ticking of the grandfather clock somewhere down to my right. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.