dismissed them.
'Does he come often?'
Timo Rahman did not believe that Ricky Capel, the mouseboy, would have dared lie to him. Nobody lied to him. If Ricky Capel said he did not know the man who had broken into their garden, then he was believed. It was inconceivable that Ricky Capel – in his power – should lie to him.
'You were in the summer-house. You give me no explanation why, in the darkness, you were in the summer- house. When he is seen, the man is on the wire behind the summer-house. Why was he there?'
His wife, Alicia, was on the bed, curled, shrivelled, against the pillows. She had pulled her knees close up to her chest, and he could see her shins and thighs.
Anger swarmed through him.
'Is my wife, to whom I have given everything she could want, a whore?'
Her arms were round her head and her body shook with her tears.
'Does my wife go to the summer-house in the evening to be fucked? Do you lie on the cushions and open your legs wide to take him? Is that what my wife does?'
She seemed to wait for him to strike her.
'You are in the summer-house, and he is there. What else should I think?'
She flinched, was back against the cushions, could not escape further from him.
'Do you not understand the shame you have brought on me, on my children?'
There was a light knock on the door.
'I will clean you. The dirt on your skin will be taken off, where his body was against your body. I promise it – I will clean you.'
He left her. Outside the door, Timo Rahman turned the key in the lock. The Bear was impassive, as if he knew of no crisis gripping the family. He had made his promise: he would clean her. He was told of the telephone message sent from the warehouse of his company that sold self-assembly furniture, and as he strode away from the bedroom door, he showed no sign of the hurt that wounded him – deeper than a knife had, more painfully than a bullet had.
He believed that his wife, his children's mother, was a whore.
Malachy saw the dawn come up.
She'd said, 'I am reliably told you are a man with a price on your head. So, to keep that pretty head on your shoulders, you keep it down. What you've seen already is good enough for me and should be for you.
Play the silent wallflower in the corner, if you want to, but understand that, right now, computers are spilling out your life story. When I come back, with your biography, I want you here, no more silly buggers, with explanations.'
First light caught the beds of flowers, with colours laid in tight-set banks, and above them were canopies of spring blossom. She had clasped her hands together, made a stirrup for his shoe, taken his weight, then heaved him up so that he could straddle the top of the fence separating the empty car park of the conference centre from the botanical garden and she had waved him off towards dense shrubs. Her questions in the car on the drive through the city had gone unanswered. He had been shaken awake in the car, a few minutes after he had given her the name and street where the hotel was. Then they had gone slowly down Steindamm and had seen men hurry out through the doors carrying the clothes he had left there and the bag. They had shouldered past two girls looking for the last trade of the night, and one had had a mobile at his face. He had not been able to answer the spray of questions because to have done so would mean reliving the pain of his disgrace. He could not, yet, confront it. The low point, down in a gutter of slime and shit, was deep-set agony – since he had taken the train to London, months before, he had not known a friendship tight enough for him to confide in. A dog did not go, after so hard a kicking, back in search of love.
She'd called after him, as he'd sloped towards deeper shadows, 'Did you hear me? I want some talk out of you, no more of wasting my bloody time.'
Hidden from the main path by the bushes, he sat on a bench and the wind flaked blossom petals down on him. They lingered on his hair, face and shoulders. He doubted he could fight her any more.
Last thing, as he'd gone for cover, she'd yelled,
'When I'm back, I'll have you stripped as bare as the day you were born, believe it. I'll be getting more than your blood group, religion and your damn number.
Try me.'
Chapter Fourteen
'It's quite a read, your life, isn't it?' She gazed at him, her mouth set. The eyes behind the spectacles were big and seemed to bore into him. Malachy looked away from her.
'And that's only the digest that I've been sent. I suppose when the whole lot of it spews up it gets worse.'
'I don't look for sympathy/ he muttered.
'Wouldn't have thought, where you're coming from, there were too many barrowloads of pity. Can you talk about it? I'm not a shrink, don't know about couch therapy.'
She'd found him in a squared-off sunken area on the edge of the Japanese garden. A feeble fountain trilled a spray down into a stone-banked pool and its drops mingled with the rain. The blossom snow covered his shoulders and the cobbles round his feet, and had begun to form a covering on her hair. They were together on a bench and the wind was in the trees, but they were protected from it by the high shrubs that encircled them. He felt a sharp spasm of anger.
'I don't go scavenging for a shoulder to cry on. For a simple reason, I don't give explanations for what happened, for what I did. I don't know what happened.'
'That's a good enough line. In your boots I'd stick with it.'
'Hear me again… I don't know what happened – everybody else does, but not me.'
'They called you a coward.' She seemed to roll the word on her tongue, as if it were strange to her, not a word she had used before. Beyond her experience.
But she said it with a boldness, coward, like it was of no importance to her if he were hurt by the word. 'My boss has dug it up. Seems there were other descriptions of you, but all end up in the same locker, 'coward'. Were they correct in their assessment?'
'I don't know. That's not just soap and water to wash it out. It's what I'm tagged with… but I don't know. Why, Miss Wilkins, do you not just go and find something else to do?'
Her face, which had been cold, chilled further. Her voice had edge: 'I am trying to make a decision that involves you. Do I spend time with you? Do I dump you and walk away? My work is on a short fuse of opportunity and I am loath to waste the few opportunities available to me in semantic bloody sparring with you. I work at VBX and-'
Malachy said, 'I know what's at Vauxhall Bridge Cross, haven't been there but people from the place came to us.'
She flared, 'Learn, please, not to damn well interrupt me. I am wet through, tired and hungry and… I am tasked, for reasons that have sod-all to do with you, to investigate Timo Rahman, godfather, brothel-owner and people-trafficker. What do I find? I find, on hour one, a guy in dosser's gear hanging on Rahman's security fence with the dogs of hell trying to pull him off it, and the dosser is a former Brit officer whom I then learn has enough disgrace on his back to bury him. This guy is now a fox, no cover to run to, with the hounds baying and bloody horns tooting
… What's extraordinary about the fox, he's put his head over the wall and gone into the hounds' kennelyard. That is either death-wish stupidity or courage based on purpose. Are you going to help me make my decision?'
'If it were easy… '
'Don't wriggle, get honest. For God's sake, look at me.' Her arm snaked out, her wet hand snatched at his chin, her fingers caught the flesh and her nails pressed on his jawbone. She twisted his face towards hers. He blinked, but did not try to break her grip.
