‘You had no option. What did you tell the police? That you are innocent of all charges?’
‘I am.’
‘You knew what would happen to that witness. Wet behind the ears, you might have been, but you knew.’
‘Even if I did, murdering a man in cold blood in my house was a mistake.’
‘Marcus, blood! Pure yellow ran through the man’s veins.’
‘Stephen Palmer?’
‘Why do you want to go there? The police told me about this Devon Toxteth. That’s how I knew it was you who had been talking, and then they mentioned Yanna.’
‘Toxteth, did you kill him?’
‘If I had, I can’t remember the name.’
‘Are you admitting to killing?’
‘What if I am? What are you going to do about it? You were responsible for Yanna being found guilty. The woman was mixed up, unable to talk about her life, to throw herself on the mercy of the court.’
‘You know why.’
‘She’d had a rough life.’
‘No conscience?’
‘None at all. And besides, Yanna didn’t suffer with me. In the end, I wished her well and sent her on her way. How was I to know that she was going to top her husband?’
‘How long have you got?’
‘Six months to a year,’ McIntyre said. ‘Not enough time for us to argue, is it?’
‘Jacob? He was your friend when you were young.’
‘Yours as well.’
‘I can’t remember him. Fred Wilkinson, I can.’
‘He’s family on my mother’s side, you’re not.’
‘Are you going to have me killed?’
‘I should, but I don’t think so.’
The two men continued to drink, even to enjoy each other’s company. After all, they had been the closest of friends until the age of nine, when Stanford had left the area, eventually adopting his mother’s new husband’s surname.
‘It’s a quiet life that I want now,’ McIntyre said.
‘What you sow, you reap, to quote from the Bible.’
‘You were always smarter than me, even as children. I barely scraped through school, not that I was much interested, but you graduated from university with honours, became a respected man.’
‘Soon to be derided.’
‘How?’
‘I’ll be condemned due to you regardless.’
‘No one needs to know about our childhood. Fred’s the only one who remembers, and he won’t talk.’
‘Marcus Matthews?’ Stanford repeated.
‘I never used Bedford Gardens, not often anyway.’
‘Women?’
‘Not for that, and believe me I wasn’t involved, not that much. Sure, there was a time when I didn’t care who was hurt, only that the money came rolling in. Give me a good old-fashioned English criminal anytime. Foreign criminals, especially the Romanians, are a whole different breed; it took me a while to find out how treacherous they were.’
‘Yanna?’
‘She told me some of it. It was the day I wished her well. Admittedly, I’ve been a savage bastard in my time, but what she told me sickened even me.’
‘You had grown fond of her?’
‘Strange, isn’t it? A man like me, but underneath the exterior, there was something for that woman. I wished her well, gave her enough money to find a place to live.’
‘Did you ever see her again?’
‘Never. I knew she had married, a couple of kids, a dull and honest man for a husband. I never expected you to convict her.’
‘I had no option. She never denied that she had killed the man.’
‘If you had known?’
‘Unless it were put forward as evidence, then it wouldn’t have helped. Yanna was determined to pay for her crime.’
‘The depth of the woman, to hold that in,’ McIntyre said. ‘A unique person, not like us.’
Stanford had to admit it was good to see his childhood friend one last time.
‘The police will solve your son-in-law’s murder,’ he said.
The charmless pub had filled up while they had been sitting there. Over near the bar, a group of youths out for the night were bragging to each other about who they were going to chat up, who they were going to take home. Sitting at the next table, three women in their early twenties. McIntyre had looked over, smiled at them; they ignored him. A drunken old lecher, they would have thought, not realising they had given the cold shoulder to one of the most violent men in London.
‘It was Marcus. He believed a man’s word was his bond,’ McIntyre said.
‘You just said that’s what you admired about the English criminal.’
‘To an extent, but with Marcus, it was an obsession. When he had made Samantha pregnant, he visited me in prison, asked my permission to marry her. Can you believe it?’
‘It’s the decent thing to do.’
‘Decent, it might have been, but Marcus knew my reputation. He knew I could have put him six feet under, or organised a savage beating.’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘I don’t know who killed Marcus, that’s the truth. If, as the police reckon, the man sat there and allowed himself to be shot, then it must have been someone as obsessive as him.’
‘Why did you phone me to tell me about the drugs in the basement?’
‘I knew Marcus was there.’
‘How?’
‘If you want to get the police off our backs, you’ve got to tell them the truth.’
‘The whole truth?’
‘Of course not.’
‘What then?’
‘It was a few months before the man was shot. He started to change, became more furtive. Before that, he was impulsive, making mistakes.’
The three women left, the young men at the bar casting glances as they went, none saying anything. McIntyre knew their sort: the sort who had come into the strip clubs he had once owned, full of themselves, big mouths, money inside the skimpy underwear of the women on the stage, but when it came to a decent woman, they were tongue-tied. The only women they’d be taking home that night would
