The Make

The first thing the police did was call the pathologist and SOCOs to establish a crime scene right outside their own front door. The next was contact the DVLA and place the wrecked car’s registration number. It gave them Mona Thomson’s name and address. They got straight over there, and found Mona just coming out of her front door with her grizzling daughter clutched in her arms and her mother following on with bags and a suitcase.

‘Mona Thomson?’ asked the police. There were two of them, a man and a woman. Luminous jackets. Scary.

‘No,’ said Mona, gulping, eyes wide and frantic. ‘She used to live here, she moved out.’

The police stood there and looked at Mona, at her daughter still in a thin nightdress, at the bags, the suitcase, her mother’s anxious face.

‘Only there’s been an incident with a car, and its owner is Miss Mona Thomson, listed at this address,’ said the male police officer.

‘She ain’t here,’ said Mona, raising her chin, lips trembling.

‘Are you Mona Thomson?’ asked the female police officer.

‘Shit,’ wailed Mona, and crumpled. The little girl caught her mother’s distress and started crying too.

‘She ain’t Mona Thomson, she don’t even know that girl,’ piped up the mother, quivering with indignation.

Mona sent her a look. ‘It’s all right Mum. It’s okay.’

‘No,’ said her mother, and now she was on the verge of tears too. ‘It’s Christmas,’ she said desperately.

And I’m Santa Claus, thought the male policeman. He’d heard it all before. The denials, the threats, the pleas and the weasel words.

‘Miss Mona Thomson?’ asked the female police officer.

Mona nodded slowly. ‘Yeah. That’s me,’ she said.

‘If you could accompany us to the station . . .’

And so it began.

Her mum took Josie back to her house and Mona sat in the interview room at the station late into the night. She’d seen the furore at the front of the station, the tent, the police tape all around it; inside was her car, with Lefty’s head jammed in the window. She wasn’t sorry about that, anyway. She told the police that in no uncertain terms.

‘Lefty Umbabwe was a bastard,’ she said, clutching her hands around the Styrofoam cup of coffee they’d provided for her.

‘Tell us about it,’ said the hard-eyed detective. He had straight mud-blond hair, a long, lugubrious face and narrow, deep-set conker-brown eyes. He looked tired and fed up as he sat opposite her. His female assistant, a skinny, hawk-nosed and spotty brunette, watched Mona with a stony face.

Mona scarcely knew where to start, but eventually she did. She told them about Lefty being a heavy butane user and about him being a procurer of young male meat for Deano Drax.

The female plain-clothes officer was writing it all down. She asked Mona for Deano Drax’s details, and Mona said she worked in Deano’s club and that was how she had become embroiled in Lefty’s concerns.

‘He had to find the boy, Alfie,’ she said, cupping her hands around the cup to keep warm, to stop the shivering that was part cold, part fear. ‘Deano was frantic to get him back after Alfie managed to give Lefty the slip. Lefty knew that Deano would rip him an extra arsehole if he failed. He was hopping mad about it, so Lefty was desperate. He said I had to help him, make it look like I was Alfie’s mum or some fucking thing, out on the streets searching for him. We looked and looked. Couldn’t find him. I didn’t want to help, but he forced me to. I was glad the boy got away. I’ve seen others hanging around with Deano, and it’s horrible.’

‘What then?’ asked the weary-looking cop when Mona halted, drank a little.

Mona shuddered.

‘It got worse and worse. He got more desperate. He was shit-scared of Deano, he had to get a result. Then one night . . .’ Mona’s voice tailed away. Her eyes were suddenly blank, lost in memory.

‘Go on.’

‘There was a cab driver. He was young.’ Mona swallowed hard. ‘Lefty was talking to him, asking if he’d seen this boy, this teenage blond, pretty as an angel, you couldn’t mistake Alfie for anyone else, he’s so beautiful. He was talking to the driver, and . . . all of a sudden, I don’t know how it happened, but Lefty just lost it. Completely lost it. I was just standing there beside him and suddenly he starts stabbing this poor guy in the throat, and then . . .’

Mona stopped again. A tear slipped down her cheek. They said nothing, but sat there watching her, allowing her time to gather herself together. Eventually, Mona took a shuddering breath and went on.

‘He forced me to help him. I didn’t want to. He told me to get in the cab. Then he pushed the dead man to one side and drove over to some old docks, near London Bridge. He pushed the cab into the river. I helped him; I had to. But I didn’t want to. You got to believe that. I was sick and I was afraid of him. He’d just killed a man in cold blood; I couldn’t believe it. I was afraid.’

More tears poured down Mona’s face. The police sat there, watched her.

Mona swiped at her face with a shaking hand and ploughed on.

‘Then, a while after that, he wanted me to go out with him again. I tried to refuse, but he wouldn’t let me. He told me we’d use my car. We were at the club, Deano’s club, and . . . oh fuck . . .’

‘Take your time,’ said the female police officer.

Mona ran a trembling hand through her hair. ‘It was horrible. Horrible. He brought this thing out to the alley where I’d parked the car. It was wrapped in a sheet, tarpaulin, that stuff, you know?’

They nodded. The female officer was taking brisk notes.

‘And I thought, what the hell is that? I didn’t have a clue. But Lefty told me to drive, so I did. We went out to the forest and . . . he dug a hole. He dug a grave.’

Mona gave a sob. ‘There was a body in there, but it was light, I knew it was light because Lefty lifted it so easily, and he wasn’t Rambo. And I started to think . . . shit, I’ve been thinking about it ever since, I haven’t been able to sleep for thinking . . . I started to think that it was one of Deano’s boys, that they’d overdosed a kid and Lefty was disposing of the evidence for him.’

‘What happened then?’ asked the male officer.

‘He dug the grave . . .’

‘Can you remember where it was?’

Mona shook her head tiredly. ‘No. Well, maybe. It was dark, I was scared, I wasn’t thinking about anything except the fact that he was burying a body and I was involved, I knew about it, so would he kill me too, tip me in there with it? I didn’t know what he was going to do.’

‘Go on.’

Mona stopped, plucking at a hangnail.

‘Mona?’ prompted the female officer.

‘It was awful,’ said Mona, looking up at them both with tears in her eyes. ‘This . . . body . . . it started moaning. It wasn’t dead. And it was like when he knifed the driver, it was just like that. He just acted really quickly. Really . . . quick. You know?’

They nodded.

‘He hit it with a shovel. It . . . the kid in there, I could tell it was a kid because of the voice, the sound, the scream . . .’

‘It’s all right, Mona, take your time.’

‘The kid screamed,’ said Mona, and now she was sobbing brokenly, trying to get the words out in between gasping breaths. ‘The kid screamed, but he just went on hitting him until he didn’t scream any more. I can’t forget it. Every night I go to sleep, and I see it over and over again . . .’

‘Go on.’

‘And then he found Alfie. He found the poor little cunt.’ Mona looked up at them. ‘I prayed to God he wouldn’t find him, but he did. And I tried . . . I had Alfie in the car, and I thought, I can’t do this, I thought about the taxi