wouldn’t have thought he’d have had enough raw material for you to work on,’ he said doubtfully.
‘Oh, you’d be surprised what we can do. You should have come to us for your last cut. Really you should.’
They ran across the carpark through the rain to Lowry’s Escort. Kathy was interested to see that whoever took care of his laundry obviously didn’t handle the interior of his car. It was full of rubbish: fast-food containers, newspapers, cigarette packets and odd bits of clothing jumbled together over all the passenger seats. He grumbled as he threw things into the back to make room for Kathy, who was shivering by the time she got in out of the rain.
‘I’ll get the heater going,’ he muttered. ‘There’s a box of tissues somewhere. Look down there.’ He began pressing numbers on his phone.
‘You reporting to Brock?’ Kathy said, groping around her feet.
‘Yeah,’ he said, but from the muttered words she could pick up it sounded more as if he was calling first for armed support and then, more surreptitiously, with his back to her, speaking to someone about cameras and a news crew. Then he drove off, pulling the car over short of the carpark exit and sitting with the engine running, tapping the steering wheel impatiently while he examined a street map.
A second car appeared on the road behind them and flashed its lights.
‘About bloody time,’ Lowry muttered, and threw the car into gear.
The address was a modern brick terrace, compact and drab in the rain. The front doors faced a tarmac parking court into which Lowry turned his car, the other following close behind. He switched off the engine and waited.
‘Did you call Brock?’ Kathy asked. She hadn’t seen him at Silvermeadow that morning, and there were things she wanted to speak to him about. She pulled out her phone. ‘I’ll give him a call.’
‘Hang on.’ He pointed through the rain-washed windscreen as an unmarked van swung fast into the court and squealed to a halt. ‘I told Phil,’ Lowry said. He looked at his watch. ‘You’ve worked with the Indian guy before, I take it. Desai?’
The sudden jump in topic threw Kathy. ‘Eh? Yes, a couple of times. Why?’
‘Like him, do you?’
‘What?’
Lowry grinned and pulled a bag of barley sugars out of the door pocket and offered them to her.
‘I’m sensitive to these things,’ he said.
Kathy undid the paper from the sweet and threw it into the ankle-deep trash. ‘Go wax yourself,’ she said, and saw another van come to a halt in the street opposite the entrance to the carparking yard. It had a satellite dish on its roof and the logo of a TV channel’s news programme on its side.
‘Come on.’ Lowry jumped out of the car and ran to the back of the first van. As he pulled open the back doors, Kathy saw the outline of men inside with guns.
The woman who answered their knock on her front door was instantly recognisable from the hairdresser’s description. Her chemical hair colouring, her glossy orange lips, her lime-green costume jewellery, all vibrated in the dull grey light, working very hard to make the dreary world a brighter place. Kathy immediately understood what ‘fluoro’ meant.
‘Hello.’ She smiled at them, taking in the support people hanging back in watchful anticipation. ‘To what do we owe this little visitation?’
‘Mrs Goldfinch?’ Kathy said, showing her warrant card.
‘That’s me, darling. Call me Jan.’ Eddie’s aunt appeared unperturbed.
‘We want to speak to your nephew, Eddie Testor. Can you tell us where he is, please?’
‘Why yes, certainly!’ She gave them a little flash of brilliant white dentures. ‘He’s here! How on earth did you know? Everyone seems to want to speak to him today. Why don’t you come on in? I don’t think there’ll be room for all of you, mind.’
After they’d got Eddie dressed and taken him downstairs to the car with a towel over his head, Jan realised she was almost out of cigarettes, and went back up to Eddie’s room to see if he had any. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ she said from the doorway, staring with fascination at Lowry pulling on a pair of latex gloves.
‘Why don’t we go downstairs and talk about Eddie, Jan?’ Kathy said, steering her back out onto the landing. ‘I’d love a cup of tea.’
Aunty Jan was happy to do that, because it was a touching story that she loved to tell. The poor boy had had a very difficult time of it after his parents were killed in the accident, she explained when they were settled in the kitchen. It was divine intervention really that had brought the two of them together after so many years. She had been checking out the sunbeds and spa pools and saunas at the fitness salon at Silvermeadow one day when she had stopped to admire the photographs of the waxed body builders hanging in their golden frames (‘Well, Kathy darling, there’s no harm in looking, is there?’), and one in particular had caught her eye. It had reminded her so much of her sister’s brother-in-law Donald, on whom she’d had a terrible crush twenty years ago, before he and his wife were killed in the accident. So like him, in fact, that she began to think of their little orphan kid Eddie, whom she hadn’t heard of for years. And then she’d looked at the signature scrawled across the bottom of the photo and when she managed to decipher the name her heart had gone all of a flutter, for there he was, Eddie Testor, in the glorious flesh.
‘It’s not that I fancied him, Kathy darling,’ she said. ‘Not really, cos that would be like incest almost, and anyway I’ve got a boyfriend, who’ll be here any minute actually, to take me to our dancing class, Latin American. But I had to speak to him, and tell him that we were long-lost relatives, and that if he ever needed an aunty I was here. He didn’t really take up my offer until last Sunday night, when he showed up in such a state, poor kid.’
‘Did he say what had happened? The black eye, the cut lip?’
‘Some thugs beat him up, didn’t they? He looks a great hunk of muscle, but he’s like his dad, a real softie inside.’
‘How did he get here?’
‘Taxi dropped him off.’
‘And he brought a bag with his things?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘So he’d been to his home, then?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘After he’d been beaten up, he went home.’
‘Oh yes, I suppose he did. He was done in when he arrived here. Completely exhausted. He’s hardly stirred from his bed since he got here. He’s really not been well.’
Lowry joined them in the living room. He was carrying a number of clear plastic bags containing packets and bottles, which he laid on the coffee table.
‘What are these, Mrs Goldfinch? Do you know?’
‘From Eddie’s room?’ she said vaguely. ‘They’ll be his pills. For his body building, you know. He has to take a lot of pills.’
‘Where does he get them from?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t know that. From his doctor, I suppose, or his friends at the gym.’
‘Do you take pills, Jan?’ Kathy said.
‘Me? Only what the doctor gives me. I’m depressed, see, since Alfred passed away. That’s my late husband. But I don’t believe in letting it show. You have a duty to add a little sunshine to the world, I always say, no matter if it’s raining in your heart.’
Kathy thought that probably explained Aunty Jan’s remarkable unconcern at being the subject of a police raid.
‘That’s your pills in the bathroom cabinet is it?’ Lowry said.
‘Yes, they’re mine… Oh!’ She looked at him in alarm. ‘You haven’t touched them, have you?’
Lowry shrugged ambiguously.
‘Oh no! You can’t take them away!’ Panicking, she looked to Kathy for support. ‘You mustn’t do that!’
‘It’s all right, Jan, I’m sure that won’t be necessary.’ She looked at Lowry, who seemed at first reluctant to cooperate, but then he reached into one of the plastic bags and took out a packet which he handed to Kathy. She made a note of the name and the chemist’s label before she returned them to Jan, who looked relieved.
