He looked at her as if to say: ‘It’s only the morning after, Bin, for fuck’s sake. Things take time.’ On form, I’d expected him to tell her to get lost. Charlie’s family’s complicated. Families aren’t my strong point. You’re into deep feelings. I didn’t say anything. She knew I’d be seeing this as a first for her and what it implied. Charlie stared at his drink, as much as to say fuck it, I’m going to let this pass; she has a right this time. All to keep the pressure on me to clear up the mess he’d brought about through Drake. Not that he’d be looking at it like that. Charlie’s a great one for creating an atmosphere where the blame gets shifted from him onto someone else.
Bin looked ready for crying, yet determined to fight it back. I wanted out of there. Yappy women get on my tits. Here she was: ‘What does this Lucille Kells look like? Do you even know that, Red?’ Do you even know that? See what I mean? What had been said before I’d arrived, I couldn’t say, but he’d let her think I was more to blame than he was. Not that she was shouting or anything. This was more a case of a mother not being told all the facts and knowing she wouldn’t be. She’d been eavesdropping, had heard the name ‘Lucille Kells’ and grabbed it. She might even have heard the words ‘scam’ or ‘laptop’. Whatever they were linked to, all she wanted was her son back and knew she’d largely be kept in the dark about the circumstances that lay behind it.
‘So what have you got, Red?’ Bin asked. Jesus I hate that tone. ‘I asked you if you even know what she looks like?’ ‘Even’, like ‘have’, had sarcasm wrapped around it.
‘Only by the photographs in her flat, Bin.’
Which told her I’d been there and seen them. Where she intended going with this I hadn’t a clue. She hadn’t enough info to take it far. I decided to use it to keep her quiet.
I hit her with what Charlie had indicated. ‘This only happened last night, Bin. It’ll take time to figure out.’
‘Greg will be delighted to hear that.’
Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes, Bin. No point having a go at me. I have my own problems. If Charlie ever gets wind I’m sitting on the laptop, Kane’ll be ‘taking care of it’ boot-firsting me over some fucking cliff.
It just goes to show what families are really like. For a lot of years I’d kept Charlie out of jail by planning jobs that he otherwise would’ve fucked up and got done for. Charlie’s streetwise and the best at what he does – inspiring terror in others; the cunt’s a terrorist – but he’s no Mastermind contestant. Where did she think this fancy gaff came from? The grand in the ‘drawing room’? The nightclubs and the whole pile? I helped build it. And what do I get for it in return? Sarcasm.
I’d always be an outsider to her. Welcome me during good times, occasionally, have a dig at me during bad. There’s no percentage in it. This time I was putting myself first. I’d get Greg off when the time came. I had the evidence at home. But only after I’d dealt with my family – for a change. If this doesn’t tell you how our ‘relationship’ – I hate the intimacy of that word – had weakened over the years, I don’t know what will. Sure I was still the guy who was closest to Charlie. Sure I was still high up in his ‘organised crime’, as Winters liked to label it, with his: ‘Charlie Swags is organised crime in this city’. And that wouldn’t change. But I was still an outsider. A couple of weeks in custody wouldn’t do Greg any harm as far as I could see.
LUCILLE
His studio contained everything you’d expect: easel, palette, brushes, canvas. A zinc-topped table sat in the corner, draped in bloodstained velvet. Beside it an upright fridge-freezer. It contained human hands in plastic bags. Eleven in a row. All right. Three fingers had been cut off each one; only the indexes and thumbs remained, each labelled with their victim’s name and that of a flower.
On a lower shelf lay two more hands, labelled Jackie Hay and Lisa Shine. Their fingers had not been removed.
A tongue in a cellophane bag lay on the bottom shelf: a dog’s.
His wallet was in a chest of drawers. It contained scalpels of various sizes and the protractor he’d used on Gemma. The surgical saw was in the next drawer along with an album full of photographs of his victims, taken after he’d finished with them. A camera sat next to them.
A second album, of newspaper clippings and magazine articles, confirmed that he was Picasso.
All the paintings in the gallery were of girls. One had had her arms and legs removed and rearranged like spiders’ legs around her upright torso. Another had Medusa’s head, only with fingers instead of snakes. All the girls’ heads were slightly bowed to the side. Several wore nuns’ veils. Others wore Christian Brothers’ belts, complete with crucifixes tucked into them. Every girl had a flower on her chest. One a rose, the next one a carnation and so on. Eleven singles, plus one double – a portrait of two girls. It hung in the centre of the main wall: Duet.
None was signed. Each had been stamped with a handprint, before the oil had dried. Of the singles, Gemma would have made twelve. He had been carving a flower into her chest.
Below Duet stood a leather-bound lectern. On it sat a journal. It contained the names of the girls, addresses and personal details, the nights they’d been abducted, how they’d been abducted. Girls who had been killed but not painted had the words ‘unsatisfactory models’ written beside their names.
He had portrayed
