Never Die in January Read online

  “What a sad story. Do you think houses absorb sadness? Do you think they can communicate with you?”

  Linda looked at her oddly. “No, of course not. I’m sure you’re going to be very happy here.”

  “Are you?”

  “Very. You’ll forget about Grace soon.”

  “I wonder.” She rose and went to the door. “Do you think she could have been murdered?”

  “Murdered! No, of course not. There was no suggestion of that. It was suicide. An overdose. It was all in the local paper.”

  Irene smiled again. This time there was no warmth. It was chilly, forbidding. “You don’t want to believe everything you read in the papers,” she said.

  At the time Macrae first joined the police, Battersea was much as it had always been, dismal. But over the years it had been gentrified. Except for small pockets. Macrae lived in one of these. At one end of his street the houses had been tarted up, at his end the front gardens had been concreted to make hard standing for cars, and what greenery was left was spindly and covered in grime. Variegated privet was the shrub of choice.

  When Macrae got back to his small terraced villa it was empty. Frenchy had taken her bag and gone to work. The house was cold and smelled of stale cigar smoke, but before leaving she had tidied it up and washed the dishes and Macrae was grateful. He hated coming home to squalor but didn’t do much about it.

  He gave himself a whisky, looked at his mail — all bills or offers — and threw the lot in the bin. Then, still dressed in his hat and coat, he sat down at the kitchen table and pulled out his notebook.

  ASSETS, he wrote at the top of a blank page. The enumeration of these took him five seconds: house, car.

  The house carried a second mortgage and even if he put it on the market there was almost no chance, in the recession, of selling it. In fact his street was patterned with For Sale signs, some of which had been there for a year or more.

  The car hardly existed in cash terms. No one would give him the time of day for it. It had a scrap value but that was about all.

  LIABILITIES, he wrote.

  Where to begin?

  Abruptly he ripped out both pages, crumpled them up and threw them away.

  To hell with liabilities.

  The worst liability was Stoker. What really angered Macrae was that his dignity had been bruised even by having to speak to Stoker, by having to be in the same room with him. In the old days he would have knocked his teeth down his throat. Why hadn’t he done so today? Was he himself getting old? Or was he gradually being sucked into the “new” policing methods by fools like Scales?

  Or was it none of these? Wasn’t it simply the fact that if Stoker let it be known that he had borrowed money from a criminal acquaintance he’d be the subject of disciplinary proceedings the end of which might well mean having to leave the Force?

  And did he want to leave the Force?

  What would happen if he resigned? On the plus side the problem of Stoker would vanish.

  What about money? He’d get a lump sum and a relatively small pension, so he’d need another job. He’d been offered several in private security at twice what he was getting in the police.

  But he didn’t want to work in private security.

  He wanted to remain in the police.

  He picked up the phone and dialled the Chronicle and asked for the chief crime reporter, Norman Paston.

  “Hello, George. Got something for me?”

  “Not this time.”

  He could visualize Paston in his elegant 1950s tailoring, his yellow waistcoat, his handmade shirt, and his Sulka tie. A most unlikely figure to be rooting about in London’s dirty washing but someone who rooted well and whose relationship with Macrae had lasted for years — on a strictly symbiotic basis.

  “Remember Artie Gorman?” Macrae said.

  “Vaguely.”

  “Used to be a bookie’s runner and then became legitimate. Made a lot of money.”

  “Wasn’t he mixed up in some betting fraud a few years back?”

  “No one could prove it. Anyway, he died a few months ago and a villain called Stoker is living with his widow. Name mean anything?”

  “Didn’t he knife a copper?”

  “Not a knife, a tyre lever.”

  “What’s the interest?”

  “Molly — Artie’s widow — has fallen for him, and he’s playing about with her money. Pretending to be a financial expert when he can hardly sign his name.”

  “So, I repeat, what’s your interest?”

  “I’ve always liked Molly and — ”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t see. It’s not like that. I think he’s going to bleed her white and dump her. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “And you want me to keep my ear to the ground vis-a-vis Mr Stoker.”

  “Aye. That’s it.”

  “Anything for you, Georgie.” His voice took on a voluptuously camp tone, one which he knew made Macrae sweat. “We must get together. Come to lunch at the flat and bring that good-looking sergeant.”

  “Silver? He’s not for you, Norman. He’s got a girlfriend.”

  “If I had a ten-pound note every time I met someone who had a girlfriend and who — ”

  “Goodbye, Norman.”

  Macrae put the phone down. Well that was a start. Paston had as good a nest of informants as he did and that was saying something.

  He dialled Frenchy’s ponce, Rambo. He had been one of Macrae’s best sources of information for several years.

  “Evening, Julius.”

  Macrae was the only person, apart from his family, to call Rambo by his proper name.

  “Evenin’, Mr Macrae.”

  “D’you know a villain called Stoker?”

  At least he was doing something, Macrae thought.

  CHAPTER VIII

  She touched the walls with the tips of her fingers.

  Had Grace touched these?

  Did he who made the lamb make thee?

  The line of Blake’s, last read at school, flashed through her mind and tears came to her eyes.

  No weakness!

  It wasn’t the first time she had said that to herself and wouldn’t be the last.

  She moved through the apartment, now with her own things in it. Did death leave an aura? Was there some shadow? A radioactive silhouette burnt on to the walls like those in Hiroshima?

  I am a camera, she thought.

  Yes? The man had said. Yes?

  Yes.

  Then he had flipped the sheet to cover Grace’s face and pushed the sliding drawer back into the wall.

  He was sorry. Was she all right? It was a shocking thing to have to do. Some fainted dead away.

  Yes, she was all right.

  In that case he needed her to fill in papers now, next of kin, identification, that sort of thing. And then there was the question of disposal.

  Disposal.

  The word brought bile into her mouth.

  They left the big room with its smell of death and violent antiseptics and went to his office. She signed the papers.

  She wanted Grace’s things, she said.

  After the inquest.

  When would that be?

  Soon. There were no suspicious circumstances so there would be no delay.

  What about the letter? The one she had left.

  Strictly speaking, it was one of Grace’s effects.

  For God’s sake, she was —

  Yes, he knew. He was merely trying to protect her. She could have a copy, if she wished.

  She had taken the letter to her hotel room. She knew it was going to be terrible, and it was. In a way, even more terrible than the news of Grace’s death.

  There was no way she was going to read it cold. She had a bottle of gin and drank a double, neat. It gave her courage.

  Mother (Not even “Dear”. That had hit like lightning, scorching her eyes. But what had she expected?)

  You must have entertained
the possibility…

  (Most began: By the time you read this I shall be dead. But Grace was never ordinary.)

  You must have entertained the possibility that something like this would happen. I hope that you care. I want you to care.

  They say suicide is a search for blame and the paying back of old scores. Children fantasize. Look what you made me do, they say, you’ll be sorry when you find me dead.

  Are you?

  I tell myself the scenario. The phone call. Is that Mrs Davies? This is the police. Do you have a daughter called Grace? Yes? Then I’m sorry to tell you —

  Something like that.

  I see your face, frozen for a moment. And then you hear the word “overdose.” That is when I’d like to see your eyes.

  A thousand questions will go through your brain but only one will matter. It is the question all parents ask themselves. Where did I go wrong?

  I’m going to leave you with that question. I wonder if you will ever find an answer.

  Grace.

  Once she read it she knew why the man had tried to protect her. She had drunk herself into insensibility that night, and every night for weeks. It hadn’t helped. She had to face it.

  And she had faced it…Until the inquest. Until the medical evidence of bruises, of battery. She felt the blows on her own flesh.

  Macrae had a few days of accumulated leave owing to him and decided to take it. He had never been one for allowing things to happen to him by chance. He had always gone out and taken life by the throat and made things happen. The fact that life had often retaliated by kicking him in the balls was something he had never quite got used to.

  Stoker came into this category. Macrae was damned if he was simply going to sit back and wait for Stoker to do what he wanted.

  But what did Stoker want, apart from the money? Six thousand wasn’t all that much when he was playing with Artie’s fortune. And it wasn’t as though he was losing face because Macrae was getting away with anything. It hadn’t been his loan in the first place. And anyway, no one knew.

  So, if it wasn’t the money, then what was it?

  Macrae tried to recall in detail what had happened on the one occasion he had had to deal with Stoker. He had been on loan to Hackney to help them reorganize their area, when there was an emergency call about the wounding of a local constable. He’d been found unconscious and close to death. He had been struck about the head — later they found the tyre lever — and his arm had been broken.

  Even though he was in severe pain he was able to identify his assailant and Macrae had gone out and brought him in. Stoker was seventeen then but a real villain, a throwback to the gangs of the 1950s. Macrae and two other officers had taken him down to the holding cells and dealt with him severely.

  Severely meant loss of teeth, broken nose, two swollen eyes. Very severely would have meant some permanent damage. So in Macrae’s opinion Stoker had got off relatively lightly when you combined that with being sentenced to youth custody. Macrae thought that people who stood on other people’s arms and broke them did not really deserve much in the way of consideration.

  But he was open-minded enough to accept that Stoker might have held a different view. It was possible he had not taken kindly to his beating and might have harboured a grudge against Macrae.

  So…given all the circumstances, he could not see Stoker simply forgetting about the money just because he told him to get stuffed. Stoker was doing this to get his revenge, which would undoubtedly be sweet — if he managed it.

  It wasn’t often, Macrae thought, that tearaways like Stoker had such a strong position vis-a-vis a senior police officer. Twenty or thirty years ago it would not have mattered so much, things would have been hushed up. But now everything — or a lot of things — had to be done out in the open where the Great British Public could see and judge. And in the police force borrowing money from villains was especially frowned upon.

  In which case Macrae was looking for a fall-back position.

  But what?

  He could try to fit Stoker up, but framing anyone needed the co-operation of other policemen. He considered Silver, his own partner, but there was no way he was going to involve him, he had too much pride for that. Anyway, he was never sure how Silver would react in a given situation — that was the problem of the highly educated intake of recent years: they thought too much.

  And there was something else bothering him: how was he ever going to be certain — even if he managed to buy back the tape — that that was going to be the end of the story? Wouldn’t Stoker simply produce another copy…and another…?

  Information, that’s what he needed, information which would give him something as strong against Stoker as Stoker had against him. Then there would be a stand-off.

  In which case there was no use sitting at home: the proper study of crime was criminals.

  He decided to go on a tour of his manor and see how things stood, and what he discovered made him deeply uneasy. First he went to the Goodwood Sporting Club, which lay between the Strand and the Thames. It occupied the top two floors of a building in a small, twisting alley and its sporting ethos extended only to card games — mainly a form of gin rummy called kalooki, played for high stakes.

  It was a club organized for criminals by criminals who liked to have somewhere they could display their “wedges” — the thick piles of large-denomination banknotes kept together with silver clips — their Monte Cristo coronas, their Gucci this and Gucci that, in short somewhere they could go and have the simple pleasure of showing off their goods.

  Macrae had used the Goodwood for years. He liked its dangerous atmosphere, he liked the slight frisson he felt when he mounted the stairs and walked into the gaming-room past the little statue of a jockey which stood near the door. But mostly he liked to see the expressions on the faces of the villains as he came in. They were usually mixtures of fear, hatred, and respect: no bad thing for a policeman, he always thought.

  But on this January evening as he entered the room and walked past the gaming tables to the bar he felt a distinct difference in the atmosphere.

  He nodded to one or two faces he had last seen in the dock at the Old Bailey but did not receive any recognition. He did not expect the really hard men to greet him; they resented his presence but were realistic enough to leave things as they were. But from the lesser fry, the pickpockets, the con artists, there would usually be a muttered, “Evening, Mr Macrae.” Tonight no one greeted him. He might have been invisible.

  “A pint and a dram,” he said to the barman, whose name was Freddy and who had been put away — not by Macrae — for helping old ladies over dangerous road junctions and leaving them with nothing in their handbags.

  Freddy was polishing glasses as though his life depended on it.

  His eyes were fixed on a point above Macrae’s right shoulder.

  In his time Macrae had ordered scores of pints from Freddy, now he appeared not to hear. Macrae repeated his order and a hush fell over the tables.

  “Are you a member here, sir?”

  “Of course I’m not a bloody member. What’s the matter with you, Freddy?”

  “Only members allowed to buy drinks at the bar, sir.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since today, sir. New rule of the club, sir.”

  Slowly Macrae turned to face the room. He leaned back on the bar. There were half a dozen villains there who might have gone down for longer periods than they had done, except for deals made with him. Any one of them might have bought him a pint. No one moved.

  Macrae slowly nodded his head. He wasn’t going to demean himself by asking. If that’s the way they wanted it, then fine. But why? Was something heavy in the wind? But this wasn’t the sort of behaviour that presaged a major crime. Then everyone was nervous, jerky, 2nd it was “Evening, Mr Macrae…Evening, sir…”

  And you could cut the tension with a knife.

  Well, there was tension all right, but the wrong sort. No one was nervo
us. The tension had an ugly undercurrent to it.

  Macrae moved away from the bar and picked his way towards the door. His back felt vulnerable. His hair prickled. The most violent man in the room was a stubby chunk of flesh and bone called Rubbers, who was playing cards at a table near the door. His head was completely bald and shone like a billiard ball. Macrae stopped at his side in an intense silence. He bent down and inspected Rubbers’ bald dome and said, “Coming along, nicely, laddie, just keep using the lotion.”

  Then he went out and down the stairs.

  It wasn’t much, he told himself, but it was a gesture.

  He visited a few pubs where known villains hung out. The atmosphere was the same and Macrae was a worried man when he reached his house. He had just finished frying himself a bit of bacon when the phone rang. It was Rambo.

  “You got something good for me?”

  “Well it is and it isn’t, Mr Macrae.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  “The word on the street is that a senior copper in Area One is bent.”

  “What? Who?” He felt a cold hand close over his intestines.

  “Well, that’s the thing, Mr Macrae. I ain’t got a name. Only that he was deep in the shit, owing money, that sort of thing.”

  “OK, Julius, let me know if you hear anything further.”

  “Count on me, Mr Macrae.”

  He stood by the phone for some minutes. Then he poured himself a drink. In the kitchen the bacon grew cold and lay on a bed of white grease.

  CHAPTER IX

  Manfred Silver, drying his plump white hands on a paper towel, entered the kitchen of his flat and stared broodingly at Zoe, who was standing over the stove stirring something he guessed was, in an hour or so, to be his dinner.

  “What (vot) are you doing?” he said.

  “Cooking.”

  It was now nearly seven o’clock and Zoe had been in the kitchen since a little after six. There had been an office party for someone’s birthday and she had had a couple…well, four…glasses of a fruity white wine from South Australia.

  As she got out of the lift she could hear one of Manfred’s pupils playing, very slowly, the Rondo alia Turka.

  Manfred had heard the lift gates close and had put his head out of the music-room when she opened the front door.