‘I’ll look out for him,’ says Anthony.
‘Bald as a coot,’ says Stephen, and starts laughing.
Anthony catches Stephen’s eye in the mirror and starts giggling too. ‘No good to me, then, is he?’
Stephen nods. ‘What’s your line of work, Anthony?’
‘Me, hairstylist,’ says Anthony, fingers on Stephen’s temples, tilting him this way and that. ‘How about you?’
‘Well,’ says Stephen, ‘I potter about. Bit of gardening. Allotment.’
‘I’d kill for an allotment,’ says Anthony. ‘I grow cannabis under my sunbed, but that’s it. This haircut for a special occasion? Going dancing?’
‘Just felt it needed doing,’ says Elizabeth.
‘If you see Kuldesh, you tell him Stephen says hello,’ says Stephen. ‘Tell him he’s an old rascal.’
‘I like a rascal,’ says Anthony.
‘Me too,’ says Stephen.
Stephen remembers so few of his friends now. School friends mainly. Elizabeth hears the same stories, and laughs in the same places, because Stephen is one of those people who can tell you the same story a hundred times and still make you laugh. Language trips from him with such grace and joy. Most of the time now he struggles with words, but those old stories stay note perfect, and the smile on his face as he tells them stays true. He remembers Kuldesh because that was his last adventure. Out and about with Bogdan and Donna. It must have made him feel alive.
‘I used to have my hair cut in Edgbaston,’ says Stephen. ‘Do you know it?’
‘I’ve never heard of anywhere,’ says Anthony. ‘I thought Dubai was in Spain. I couldn’t believe how long the flight was.’
‘A barber called Freddie. Freddie the Frog, they called him, I don’t know why.’
‘Long tongue?’ guesses Anthony.
‘You might have it there,’ laughs Stephen. ‘An old boy he was. Probably dead now, wouldn’t you say?’
‘When was this?’ asks Anthony.
‘Gosh, 1955? Something like that.’
‘Probably dead, then,’ says Anthony. ‘Perhaps he croaked?’
Stephen laughs, his shoulders shaking under his gown. Elizabeth lives to see these moments. How many more will there be? It’s nice to sit here with him. To not think about the case, and let the others get on with it for once. Wherever the heroin is, it can wait a while longer. Joyce probably knows something is up. Joyce always knows when something is up. Elizabeth will have to speak to her at some point.
Anthony is finishing, and Elizabeth dips into her handbag for her purse. A little heavier than before their visit to Viktor.
‘Don’t you dare,’ says Anthony. ‘The handsome ones are free.’
Elizabeth smiles at Stephen in the mirror and he smiles back. Love can be so very easy sometimes. She decides she will switch off her phone. They can cope without her for a day. She would like to know how Joyce and Ibrahim got on with Samantha Barnes, but she would rather give her full attention to Stephen. Work isn’t everything.
Anthony takes his final look at Stephen in the mirror. ‘There, that should last you.’
Stephen admires himself. ‘You ever come across a chap called Freddie the Frog?’
‘Freddie from Edgbaston?’ asks Anthony.
‘That’s the one,’ says Stephen. ‘He still knocking about?’
‘Still going strong,’ says Anthony.
‘Freddie the Frog, fit as a fiddle,’ says Stephen.
Anthony puts his hands on Stephen’s shoulders and kisses the top of his head.
36
Breaking into buildings with a warrant can be a lot of fun. A dawn raid the most fun of all. You get to have a bacon sandwich in the back of a van and arrest a drug dealer in his pants before the world has even woken. Sometimes they’d make a run out of the back of the house and you’d get to see them rugby-tackled by an out-of-breath sergeant.
Other times they would hide in the loft and you’d have to play cards on the landing until they needed the loo.
But breaking into a building without a warrant is a different matter entirely. Patrice is perched on a parking bollard, with a perfect view of the wine warehouse, Sussex Logistics and the entrance to the business park. Chris waits a while, until an old lady in a red coat disappears from view. To his surprise, he finds that the window has already been forced open. Who knows how long ago, but it would take a brave, or a very foolish, person to break into this particular warehouse. Chris chooses not to reflect on which of those he might be. The window leads him into a small storage room filled with cleaning products. No alarms so far.
Slowly opening the door of the room, Chris finds himself in a large, open hangar, stacked with boxes along the far wall. Filled with what? There are three raggedy sofas arranged in a horseshoe shape around a television so old it isn’t even flat screen. Whoever uses these sofas is not here now. His footsteps echo on the concrete floor, and his breath steams in the cold air.
At one end of the hangar, metal stairs lead up to a wooden Portakabin office, forming a mezzanine level. Chris can see a padlock on the door. Finally, some security.
Chris decides to leave the boxes for now and head up to the office. What is he expecting to find? Phone numbers? Anything, really. Anything Elizabeth doesn’t have, he realizes. Has it really come to this? Compelled to outmanoeuvre a pensioner for the sake of professional pride?
Perhaps the heroin will just be sitting there? Won’t he be a hero then?
No one is in the building, but he treads lightly up the latticed metal stairs regardless. On a small semi-landing he sees cigarette butts, and on the door of the office he sees what looks like dried blood. Old though – hopefully there’s not a fresh corpse behind the flimsy door.
Chris might have to force the lock. Will that finally raise an alarm? There’s been nothing so far, which seems odd. Chris feels the padlock and, as he does so, it opens in his hand. The door is unlocked.
Chris stands, motionless, for a long moment, just listening. No sound from inside the office. From the hangar, just the erratic, metallic clang of the winter wind against the closed loading-bay doors. He presses down on the door handle and kicks the door open, very gently, with the side of his right foot.
Still no alarm.
Chris sees filing cabinets, as he was hoping, and the corner of a wooden desk.
Walking into the office, he sees the whole of the desk. And, behind the desk, in a high-backed ergonomically friendly office chair, is Dom Holt.
With a bullet hole in his forehead.
37
‘So I can’t phone this in, you see,’ says Chris. ‘Because I shouldn’t have been here.’
‘Gotcha,’ says Ron, as he and Joyce scrutinize the corpse of Dominic Holt, with the detached air of people pretending to be professionals. ‘And we were the first people you rang?’
‘Of course,’ says Chris.
‘The very first?’
‘Elizabeth wasn’t picking up,’ says Chris.
‘I can’t believe Patrice was your lookout,’ says Joyce, returning to sit with Patrice on a small sofa.
‘It was pitched to me as a date. I was all for it,’ says Patrice.
‘It’s a bit like an escape room,’ says Joyce. ‘Joanna did one with work, but she panicked and they had to let her out. She once got stuck in a lift in Torremolinos and it’s stayed with her.’
‘I was only going to be in here for five minutes,’ says Chris. ‘Have a rifle through the files, see if I could find any numbers, any contacts.’
‘That’s illegal, Chris,’ says Joyce. ‘Did you find anything?’
‘Do you know, Joyce,’ says Chris, ‘after I found the corpse, I thought better of it.’