The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries Page 35

  “The tube,” I said. “Which exit?”

  Patrick grinned. “You’ll get it figured.”

  She came up the steps leading on to Cranbourne Street and I recognized her immediately; tall, taller than I’d imagined, and in that moment – Jesus! – so much more beautiful.

  “Diane?” Hands in my pockets, trying and failing to look cool, blushing already. “Patrick got stuck in some kind of meeting. Business, you know? He asked me to meet you.”

  She nodded, looking me over appraisingly. “And you must be Jimmy, right?” Aside from that slight flaw, her eyes were brown, a soft chocolatey brown, I could see that now.

  Is it possible to smile ironically? That’s what she was doing. “All right, Jimmy,” she said. “Where are we going?”

  When we got to the Flamingo, Patrick and Val had still not arrived. The Tony Kinsey Quintet were on the stand, two saxes and rhythm. I pushed my way through to the bar for a couple of drinks and we stood on the edge of the crowd, close but not touching. Diane was wearing a silky kind of dress that clung to her hips, two shades of blue. The band cut the tempo for Sweet and Lovely, Don Rendell soloing on tenor.

  Diane rested her fingers on my arm. “Did Patrick tell you to dance with me, too?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, let’s pretend that he did.”

  Six months I suppose they went out together, Diane and Patrick, that first time around, and for much of that six months, I rarely saw them one without the other. Towards the end, Patrick took her off for a few days to Paris, a big deal in those days, and managed to secure a gig for Val while he was there, guesting at the Chat Qui Pêche with René Thomas and Pierre Michelot.

  After they came back I didn’t see either of them for quite a while: Patrick was in one of his mysterious phases, doing deals, ducking and weaving, and Diane – well, I didn’t know about Diane. And then, one evening in Soho, hurrying, late for an appointment, I did see her, sitting alone by the window of this trattoria, the Amalfi it would have been, on Old Compton Street, a plate of pasta in front of her, barely touched. I stopped close to the glass, raised my hand and mouthed “Hi!” before scuttling on, but if she saw me I couldn’t be sure. One thing I couldn’t miss though, the swelling, shaded purple, around her left eye.

  A week after this Patrick rang me and we arranged to meet for a drink at the Bald Faced Stag; when I asked about Diane he looked through me and then carried on as if he’d never heard her name. At this time I was living in two crummy rooms in East Finchley – more a bed-sitter with a tiny kitchen attached, the bathroom down the hall – and Patrick gave me a lift home, dropped me at the door. I asked him if he wanted to come in but wasn’t surprised when he declined.

  Two nights later I was sitting reading some crime novel or other, wearing two sweaters to save putting on the second bar of the electric fire, when there was a short ring on the downstairs bell. For some reason, I thought it might be Patrick, but instead it was Diane. Her hair was pulled back off her face in a way I hadn’t seen before, and, a faint finger of yellow aside, all trace of the bruise around her eye had disappeared.

  “Well, Jimmy,” she said, “aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  She was wearing a cream sweater, a coffee-coloured skirt with a slight flare, high heels which she kicked off the moment she sat on the end of the bed. My drums were out at the other side of the room, not the full kit, just the bass drum, ride cymbal, hi-hat and snare; clothes I’d been intending to iron were folded over the back of a chair.

  “I didn’t know,” I said, “you knew where I lived.”

  “I didn’t. Patrick told me.”

  “You’re still seeing him then?”

  The question hung in the air.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got anything to drink?” Diane said.

  There was a half bottle of Bell’s out in the kitchen and I poured what was left into two tumblers and we touched glasses and said, “Cheers.” Diane sipped hers, made a face, then drank down most of the rest in a single swallow.

  “Patrick . . .” I began.

  “I don’t want to talk about Patrick,” she said.

  Her hand touched the buckle of my belt. “Sit here,” she said.

  The mattress shifted with the awkwardness of my weight.

  “I didn’t know,” she said afterwards, “it could be so good.”

  You see what I mean about the way she lied.

  Patrick and Diane got married in the French church off Leicester Square and their reception was held in the dance hall conveniently close by; it was one of the last occasions I played drums with any degree of seriousness, one of the last times I played at all. My application to join the Metropolitan Police had already been accepted and within weeks I would be starting off in uniform, a different kind of beat altogether. Val, of course, had put the band together and an all-star affair it was – Art Ellefson, Bill LeSage, Harry Klein. Val himself was near his mercurial best, just ahead of the flirtations with heroin and free form jazz that would sideline him in the years ahead.

  At the night’s end we stood outside, the three of us, ties unfastened, staring up at the sky. Diane was somewhere inside, getting changed.

  “Christ!” Patrick said. “Who’d’ve fuckin’ thought it?”

  He took a silver flask from inside his coat and passed it round. We shook hands solemnly and then hugged each other close. When Diane came out, she and Patrick went off in a waiting car to spend the night at a hotel on Park Lane.

  “Start off,” Patrick had said with a wink, “like you mean to continue.”

  We drifted apart: met briefly, glimpsed one another across smoky rooms, exchanged phone numbers that were rarely if ever called. Nine years later I was a detective sergeant working out of West End Central and Patrick had not long since opened his third night club in a glitter of flash bulbs and champagne; Joan Collins was there with her sister, Jackie. There were ways of skirting round the edges of the law and, so far, Patrick had found most of them: favors doled out and favours returned; backhanders in brown envelopes; girls who didn’t care what you did as long as you didn’t kiss them on the mouth. Diane, I heard, had walked out on Patrick; reconciled, Patrick had walked out on her. Now they were back together again, but for how long?

  When I came off duty, she was parked across the street, smoking a cigarette, window wound down.

  “Give you a lift?”

  I’d moved up market but not by much, an upper floor flat in an already ageing mansion block between Chalk Farm and Belsize Park. A photograph of the great drummer, Max Roach, was on the wall; Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning next to the Eric Amblers and a few Graham Greenes on the shelf; an Alex Welsh album on the record player, ready to remind me of better times.

  “So, how are things?” Diane asked, doing her best to look as if she cared.

  “Could be worse,” I said. In the kitchen, I set the kettle to boil and she stood too close while I spooned Nescafe into a pair of china mugs. There was something beneath the scent of her perfume that I remembered too well.

  “What does he want?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Patrick, who else?”

  She paused from stirring sugar into her coffee. “Is that what it has to be?”

  “Probably.”

  “What if I just wanted to see you for myself?”

  The green in her eye was bright under the unshaded kitchen light. “I wouldn’t let myself believe it,” I said.

  She stepped into my arms and my arms moved around her as if they had a mind of their own. She kissed me and I kissed her back. I’d like to say I pushed her away after that and we sat and drank our coffee like two adults, talked about old times and what she was going to do with her life after the divorce. She was divorcing him, she said: she didn’t know why she hadn’t done it before.

  “He’ll let you go?”

  “He’ll let me go.”

  For a moment, she couldn’t hold my gaze. “There’s just one thing,
” she said, “one thing that he wants. This new club of his, someone’s trying to have his licence cancelled.”

  “Someone?”

  “Serving drinks after hours, an allegation, nothing more.”

  “He can’t make it go away?”

  Diane shook her head. “He’s tried.”

  I looked at her. “And that’s all?”

  “One of the officers, he’s accused Patrick of offering him a bribe. It was all a misunderstanding, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Patrick wonders if you’d talk to him, the officer concerned.”

  “Straighten things out.”

  “Yes.”

  “Make him see the error of his ways.”

  “Look, Jimmy,” she said, touching the back of her hand to my cheek, “you know I hate doing this, don’t you?”

  No, I thought. No, I don’t.

  “Everything has a price,” I said. “Even friendship. Friendship, especially. And tell Patrick, next time he wants something, to come and ask me himself.”

  “He’s afraid you’d turn him down.”

  “He’s right.”

  When she lifted her face to mine I turned my head aside. “Don’t let your coffee get cold,” I said.

  Five minutes later she was gone. I sorted out Patrick’s little problem for him and found a way of letting him know if he stepped out of line again, I’d personally do my best to close him down. Whether either of us believed it, I was never sure. With or without my help, he went from rich to richer; Diane slipped off my radar and when she re-emerged, she was somewhere in Europe, nursing Val after his most recent spell in hospital, encouraging him to get back into playing. Later they got married, or at least that’s what I heard. Some lives took unexpected turns. Not mine.

  I stayed on in the Met for three years after my thirty and then retired; tried working for a couple of security firms, but somehow it never felt right. With my pension and the little I’d squirreled away, I found I could manage pretty well without having to look for anything too regular. There was an investigation agency I did a little work for once in a while, nothing too serious, nothing heavy, and that was enough.

  Patrick I bumped into occasionally if I went up west, greyer, more distinguished, handsomer than ever; in Soho once, close to the little Italian place where I’d spotted Diane with her bruised eye, he slid a hand into my pocket and when I felt where it had been there were two fifties, crisp and new.

  “What’s this for?” I asked.

  “You look as though you need it,” he said.

  I threw the money back in his face and punched him in the mouth. Two of his minders had me spread-eagled on the pavement before he’d wiped the mean line of blood from his chin.

  At Val’s funeral we barely spoke; acknowledged each other but little more. Diane looked gaunt and beautiful in black, a face like alabaster, tears I liked to think were real. A band played Just Friends, with a break of thirty-two bars in the middle where Val’s solo would have been. There was a wake at one of Patrick’s clubs afterwards, a free bar, and most of mourners went on there, but I just went home and sat in my chair and thought about the three of us, Val, Patrick and myself, what forty years had brought us to, what we’d wanted then, what we’d done.

  I scarcely thought about Diane at all.

  Jack Kiley, that’s the investigator I was working for, kept throwing bits and pieces my way, nothing strenuous like I say, the occasional tail job, little more. I went into his office one day, a couple of rooms above a bookstore in Belsize Park, and there she sat, Diane, in the easy chair alongside his desk.

  “I believe you two know each other,” Jack said.

  Once I’d got over the raw surprise of seeing her, what took some adjusting to was how much she’d changed. I suppose I’d never imagined her growing old. But she had. Under her grey wool suit her body was noticeably thicker; her face was fuller, puffed and cross-hatched around the eyes, lined around the mouth. No Botox; no nip and tuck.

  “Hello, Jimmy,” she said.

  “Diane’s got a little problem,” Jack said. “She thinks you can make it go away.” He pushed back from his desk. “I’ll leave you two to talk about it.”

  The problem was a shipment of cocaine that should have made its way seamlessly from the Netherlands to Dublin via the UK. A street value of a quarter of a million pounds. Customs and Excise, working on a tip-off, had seized the drug on arrival, a clean bust marred only by the fact the coke had been doctored down to a mockery of its original strength; a double shot espresso from Caffè Nero would deliver as much of a charge to the system.

  “How in God’s name,” I asked, “did you get involved in this?”

  Diane lit a cigarette and wafted the smoke away from her face. “After Val died I went back to Amsterdam, it’s where we’d been living before he died. There was this guy – he’d been Val’s supplier . . .”

  “I thought Val had gone straight,” I said.

  “There was this guy,” Diane said again, “we – well, we got sort of close. It was a bad time for me. I needed . . .” She glanced across and shook her head. “A girl’s got to live, Jimmy. All Val had left behind was debts. This guy, he offered me a roof over my head. But there was a price.”

  “I’ll bet.” Even I was surprised how bitter that sounded.

  “People he did business with, he wanted me to speak for him, take meetings. I used to fly to Belfast, then, after a while, it was Dublin.”

  “You were a courier.” I said. “A mule.”

  “No. I never carried the stuff myself. Once the deal was set up, I’d arrange shipments, make sure things ran smoothly.”

  “Patrick would be proud of you,” I said.

  “Leave Patrick out of this,” she said. “This has nothing to do with him.”

  I levered myself up out of the seat; it wasn’t as easy as it used to be. “Nor me.” I got as far as the door.

  “They think I double-crossed them,” Diane said. “They think it was me tipped off Customs; they think I cut the coke and kept back the rest so I could sell it myself.”

  “And did you?”

  She didn’t blink. “These people, Jimmy, they’ll kill me. To make an example. I have to convince them it wasn’t me; let them have back what they think’s their due.”

  “A little difficult if you didn’t take it in the first place.”

  “Will you help me, Jimmy, yes or no?”

  “Your pal in Amsterdam, what’s wrong with him?”

  “He says it’s my mess and I have to get myself out of it.”

  “Nice guy.”

  She leaned towards me, trying for a look that once would have held me transfixed. “Jimmy, I’m asking. For old time’s sake.”

  “Which old time is that, Diane?”

  She smiled. “The first time you met me, Jimmy, you remember that? Leicester Square?”

  Like yesterday, I thought.

  “You ever think about that? You ever think what I would have been like if we’d been together? Really together?”

  I shook my head.

  “We don’t always make the right choices,” she said.

  “Get somebody else to help you,” I said.

  “I don’t want somebody else.”

  “Diane, look at me for fuck’s sake. What can I do? I’m an old man.”

  “You’re not old. What are you? Sixty-odd? These days sixty’s not old. Seventy-five. Eighty. That’s old.”

  “Tell that to my body, Diane. I’m carrying at least a stone more than I ought to; the tendon at the back of my left ankle gives me gyp if ever I run for a bus and my right hip hurts like hell whenever I climb a flight of stairs. Find someone else, anyone.”

  “There’s nobody else I can trust.”

  I talked to Jack Kiley about it later; we were sitting in the Starbucks across the street, sunshine doing its wan best to shine through the clouds.

  “What do you know about these types?” Jack asked. “This new bunch of cocaine cowb
oys from over the old Irish Sea?”

  “Sod all,” I said.

  “Well, let me give you a bit of background. Ireland has the third highest cocaine use in Europe and there’s fifteen or twenty gangs and upwards beating the bollocks off one another to supply it. Some of them, the more established, have got links with the IRA, or did have, but it’s the newer boys that take the pippin. Use the stuff themselves, jack up an Uzi or two and go shooting; a dozen murders in Dublin so far this year and most of the leaves still on the fucking trees.”

  “That’s Dublin,” I said.

  Jack cracked a smile. “And you think this old flame of yours’ll be safe here in Belsize Park or back home in Amsterdam?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know what to bloody think.

  He leaned closer. “Just a few months back, a drug smuggler from Cork got into a thing with one of the Dublin gangs – a disagreement about some shipment bought and paid for. He thought he’d lay low till it blew over. Took a false name and passport and holed up in an apartment in the Algarve. They found his body in the freezer. Minus the head. Rumour is whoever carried out the contract on him had it shipped back as proof.”

  Something was burning deep in my gut and I didn’t think a couple of antacid tablets was going to set it right.

  “You want my advice, Jimmy?” he said, and gave it anyway. “Steer clear. Either that or get in touch with some of your old pals in the Met. Let them handle it.”

  Do that, I thought, and there’s no way of keeping Diane out of it; somehow I didn’t fancy seeing her next when she was locked away on remand.

  “I don’t suppose you fancy giving a hand?” I said.

  Jack was still laughing as he crossed the street back towards his office.

  At least I didn’t have to travel far, just a couple of stops on the Northern Line. Diane had told me where to find them and given me their names. There was some kind of ceilidh band playing in the main bar, the sound of the bodhran tracing my footsteps up the stairs. And, yes, my hip did ache.

  The McMahon brothers were sitting at either end of a leather sofa that had seen better days, and Chris Boyle was standing with his back to a barred window facing down on to the street. Hip-hop was playing from a portable stereo at one side of the room, almost drowning out the traditional music from below. No one could accuse these boys of not keeping up with the times.