He nodded. ‘Suits me. I don’t have a job to go to in the morning.’
‘Right!’ She got to her feet and fetched a bottle of wine and a corkscrew, which she handed to him while she went for glasses.
On the way back she carefully shut the living-room door and when she spoke she kept her voice low.
‘Cheers,’ she said.‘No, they’re doing pretty well, considering. Do you know, when they ran out of money Stewart started knocking on neighbours’ doors, offering to wash their cars. In the snow. Nobody thought to ask what was going on. And I was 12,000 miles away. It’s amazing Amber survived on the headland in that cold.’
‘How’s she doing now?’
‘It’s a terrible thing to say, but the stronger she gets the more trouble she becomes. She gets fretful, then abusive, then aggressive. What I’m most worried about is when she’s completely recovered physically and starts demanding the children back.’
‘Can she do that?’
‘I’m getting advice.’
He refilled her glass, unable to express the sadness he felt for her.‘Would it help,do you think,if I came with you to see her in hospital?’
She looked surprised, then smiled.‘I don’t know . . . Not now. Maybe later? Anyway, tell me about your disaster.’
So he did, and at the end of it she said, ‘Poor you. And you still don’t really know what happened to those two teenagers or the three men on the waste ground.You must be furious.’
‘Am I? I don’t know.When you peel away the hurt pride and the frustration, maybe I feel relieved. Coming on Roach again was like scratching at an old wound.Who needs it?’
‘I’ll drink to that.’
‘The only thing is that I did have a theory about those men, and now I’ll never know.’
‘To do with the old files you were going through?’
‘Yes. What I couldn’t understand was how they’d been disposed of-three shallow trenches in open ground. It seemed unnecessarily exposed and risky, when the Roaches had a safe and
discreet way of getting rid of their victims.’
‘What was that?’
‘They had their own funeral business. I knew that because I remembered we mounted a surveillance operation against it to try to find out what they were up to. But when I went back through the files I discovered that that came later.What happened was that one of the supergrasses we had at that time, a North London gang boss, started telling us about this perfect set-up south of the river, that gangs all over the city were paying big money to make unwanted corpses disappear.We traced it to Cockpit Lane.The business was in the name of Cyrus Despinides, whose daughter Adonia was married to Spider Roach’s son Ivor. But this didn’t come out until late in the summer of 1981, at least four months after the three men on the railway land were buried.So the question was,if Ivor and his brothers killed those men, why didn’t they use the family business to dispose of them, the same way everyone else did?’
‘Hm, all right, why didn’t they?’
‘Perhaps they didn’t want Cyrus to know what they’d done. Could the three Jamaicans have been friends of his or doing business with him? So I started investigating his background. We had quite a lot about him on old files, but nothing about any dealings with Jamaicans. In fact, from what I could gather, his attitudes were extremely racist. Then I had another thought. Perhaps it was his daughter Adonia, not Cyrus, who wasn’t to know what the Roach boys had done.
‘Tom Reeves had collected quite a bit on Adonia. Like her daughter Magdalen, who was used to trap Tom, she was fond of the Jamaican club scene. Before she married Ivor in ’78 she’d had at least one Jamaican boyfriend, for whom she’d provided an alibi in a rape case.’
‘You think she was involved with the three victims?’
‘It’s a thought, isn’t it? With all or perhaps just one of them. A series of revenge killings, interrogating the victims, trying to find out which one of the Tosh Posse was playing around with Ivor’s wife. Then there’s the matter of her daughter Magdalen, born on the eighth of October 1981. Adonia was three months pregnant with Magdalen when the three victims were killed.’
‘You think one of them might have been Magdalen’s father? But . . . they were black.We’d know, surely?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. She’s darker than her mother. At thirty-three weeks, Adonia and Ivor went to the US on family business, and Magdalen was born there, the only child they had. Maybe they wanted to see what colour she was before they brought her home.’
‘You’ve just got a suspicious mind.’
‘True, and even if one of them was Magdalen’s father, I could hardly use it, could I? It doesn’t prove that Ivor and his brothers killed them. But all the same . . .’
They sat in silence for a while, and then Suzanne murmured, ‘The penitent-that’s one of the meanings of the name Magdalen, isn’t it?’
Later, they made their way upstairs. When they reached the landing Suzanne said,‘Oh damn,the spare bed isn’t made up.’
‘Ah,’ he said.‘What shall we do?’
Kathy had prepared extremely carefully for their meeting. Though not herself suspended, she had been advised to keep out of the way while the review team was around, and she took the opportunity to buy some clothes and get her hair done. Martin had reacted with smug disingenuousness to her call, and had suggested Arnold’s, an upmarket cocktail bar where he was apparently known.
She arrived a calculated fifteen minutes late and he was already there, looking at home in the deep green leather banquette, absorbed in a brief of evidence.He tossed it aside as she reached the table, and stood and kissed her on the cheek, giving her arm a squeeze.
‘Mm, that smells nice. Is it new? I ordered you this. It’s Arnold’s trademark.’ He pointed to a green drink on the table.
‘Lovely.’ She slid in at right angles to him.
He raised his glass. ‘Great to see you. And you’re looking so good! You’ve done your hair differently.’
‘Well, I had to do something. Everyone’s going around with such long faces.’
He gave a little smile.‘I wasn’t sure you’d call.’
‘Nor was I. It took a little courage.’
‘Courage?’
‘Well, you know . . . History.’
‘Ah, history. But we’re all different now, aren’t we?’
‘Are we? Sometimes I think so, but then something happens and I feel just as vulnerable as I ever did.’ She guessed vulnerable was a word he’d like, a turn-on word.
‘I know what you mean,’ he nodded sagely. ‘Something happens and suddenly you’re back in short trousers, trying to hold back the tears.’
Tears? Martin? ‘Your brother, you mean? Yes, of course. Are your parents still alive?’
‘Mum is. She was devastated, of course. He was her favourite. Oh, I don’t mean that in a resentful way. It was just a fact of life. Doted on him.’
‘What did he do? I’ve forgotten.’
‘Academic, earned a pittance, wrote incomprehensible books about philosophy that were reviewed at inordinate length in the
‘A philosopher?’
‘Yuh. I told him, ages ago, he should get onto the popularising bandwagon, get on the box, write some bestsellers-
She smiled.‘He scorned your advice, then?’
‘Of course, like always. But time has proved me right, hasn’t it? They’re all at it now. Daniel Connell could have been a household name. Never mind, what does it matter-money, fame-when you’re gone?’
A moment’s silence,then Kathy raised her glass.‘To Daniel.’
‘Yeah, yeah. To Daniel. Poor old sod.’
