‘Shit, man. You promise not to tell her I told you?’
‘I promise,’ Dan lied.
‘Fuck.’ He squeezed his eyes shut. ‘This is not good.’
‘No,’ Dan agreed.
He waited while Tomas considered his position. Dan saw one of the pedestrians had paused and was peering at the alley. Dan realised he didn’t have long and pressed the knife against the back of Tomas’s neck. A drop of blood bloomed. ‘Stop pissing about,’ he hissed.
‘Okay, okay… Her name’s Helen Flowers. I don’t know where to find her, but the last I heard she was living near Birmingham.’
Dan didn’t like his hesitation. ‘You wouldn’t be making it up, would you?’
‘No, no…’ Tomas squirmed. ‘I swear it.’
‘When did you last see her?’
Silence.
‘I won’t ask again,’ Dan warned.
‘Last year. In the pub. The King’s Arms. On Newcomen Street. She was with a friend of my dad’s.’
‘Which friend?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I won’t ask–’
‘I swear, I don’t know! I’d tell you if I could, okay?’
‘When did you see her before then?’
‘Jesus. Fifteen, twenty years ago? I was about eight years old.’
‘Where can I find your dad?’
‘In the Nunhead Cemetery.’
From the smug tone that had crept into his voice Dan guessed he was lying. He would have nicked Tomas’s neck again to teach him a lesson but he’d run out of time. The pedestrian was crossing the road for the alley.
‘Oi!’ A man’s voice shouted. ‘What’s going on down there?’
Dan leaped off Tomas’s back. He cut the cable ties with his knife, tossed the knuckleduster in his leather holdall and without a backward glance, raced down the alley. At the end, he checked over his shoulder to see Tomas standing upright, swaying a little and rubbing his neck. He was looking after him. His face was like a small, pale moon.
39
Lucy had never been so glad of a phone call when Dan rang her. It had given her valuable time to compose herself. Not to let Colin Pearson see how shaken she was. That she knew Neil Greenhill.
She’d taken Dan’s call in the corridor and now she was back in Pearson’s office hoping he couldn’t sense the nausea roiling in her gut, the sweat pouring down her flanks and spine.
‘Anything else you know about Greenhill?’ she asked. Her voice was nice and even and thankfully seemed to give nothing away about her inner turmoil. ‘The car he drove, maybe? Where he was last seen?’
‘Nothing. Clever sod.’ He flipped through his folder for a while. Pulled out a sheet of paper. ‘Last seen 3 November 2001. At the factory. The day we issued the warrant for Flowers’s arrest and closed the factory down. We missed him by a whisker, apparently.’ His lips thinned. ‘I wondered if he’d had some intel to tip him off because if he didn’t, it’s like he had some sort of sixth sense that kept him just ahead of us.’
Lucy’s ears began to ring.
The day after they’d gone to arrest Flowers, 4 November, was the day that her father had supposedly flown to Australia with Tina, the yoga teacher.
Had Tina really existed? Or was she another lie? Where had he gone that day? Eastern Europe, as Pearson suggested? Or had he simply gone to Macclesfield and started again?
Her mother’s voice rang inside her head. He lied about who he was. He told me one thing, and then I discovered he was something else. Our marriage was based on nothing but a lie.
Her mind leaped further. Perhaps he already had a place in Macclesfield back then? Perhaps he’d had yet another name? Another family? Had he been emotionally involved with Helen Flowers? Had children with her?
Lucy resisted the urge to put her head between her knees. She felt as if her heart had been taken out, leaving a huge dark hole that threatened to swallow her. She forced herself to keep talking, holding Pearson’s eyes, terrified if she looked away he’d know. It was like driving across a patch of black ice, skidding in slow motion and praying you’d get to the other side safely.
As they began to wind up, she tapped the file before her.
‘Can I take copies of things I think relevant?’
‘Of course.’
After Lucy had spent half an hour photographing pictures of warehouse staff at TASS and details of Flowers’s old MoD colleagues, her nerves had steadied further and in place of her shock came a slow-burning anger.
Anger at her mother, for keeping this from her.
Anger at her father. Anger at Jaya, who had obviously known all along that Dad hadn’t buggered off overseas. Anger at everyone who had lied about Dad, from Tomas to his dad, Stan, Reg the publican and everyone else in between. She didn’t care if Mum had threatened to eviscerate them, hang their entrails on Traitor’s Gate – a stone’s throw from the King’s Arms in Southwark – they’d lied.
She shook Pearson’s hand. Thanked him for giving up his Saturday.
‘If there’s anything I can do to help,’ he told her, ‘call me. Night or day, I’ll be there with bells on.’
As she walked to the Tube, Dan rang. She ignored him. She didn’t want to talk to him. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She could sense her past being rewritten with every step, and felt that if she paused, she’d be a different person, marked in some way but invisible to anyone but herself.
She paused outside the Underground station and looked out at Piccadilly, glittering with shop lights, great neon boards strobing red, white and yellow. Tourists were standing and posing beneath the statue of Eros, smiling, laughing. She wondered when she’d laugh again. It felt like an alien concept, something deep in her past that someone else did.
She had no idea how long she’d been standing there when a man bumped into her, muttering, ‘sorry’. She came to. Gave herself a mental shake. It’s not the end of the world that your dad’s a criminal, she told herself. Perhaps you always knew it, which is why
