“Yeah, well, our Craig has always been blessed with an overripe imagination.”
“True, true.”
“A ninja with a Luger sounds like something from one of those comics you two used to read. Was he on anything?”
“Yeah, a motorbike,” I said.
“Not the ninja, you plonker, Craig!”
“Ah, well…”
“Jesus. I thought you were supposed to keep an eye on him?”
“Hey, he was already as high as Sly by the time I met him.”
The story was this: one of the Ferry family’s occasional entrepreneurial activities was importing unusual animals through the docks and selling them to collectors of exotic pets. One such collector was Bobby Bowles, the former football superstar, who had a private zoo just outside Seatown.
Craig’s job was to deliver a kangaroo to Bobby in exchange for a wad of dosh. However, on his way to Bowles’s place, Craig’s van was stopped by a ninja with a gun who shot the kangaroo and scarpered on a Harley Davidson. Craig phoned me to help him get rid of Skippy’s body, of course, hence my fun day at the graveyard.
“This is a very bloody important time for the family business,” said Bev. “Dad’s very ill, Alanby is never going to get out of Wakefield nick since he spiked that warden’s tea with ecstasy, and Dafydd is, well, Dafydd…”
Dafydd had, for many years, been so far in the closet he was in Narnia, but when he eventually came out he shocked the family by moving down south to open up a scuba diving club with an Australian. This was blamed for causing Glyn Ferry’s first heart attack. The moving down south.
“So, Craig is being groomed to take over as head of the family business?” I said.
Bev raised her eyebrows.
“Supposedly,” she said.
“Oh, dear,” I said.
“Oh, dear, indeed,” said Bev.
EIGHT
We were in Velvette’s Gentlemen’s Club, staring behind the bar at a stained-glass recreation of the famed poster of the female tennis player scratching her arse that many a teenage boy had on their wall in the seventies.
“Lesbians?” I said. I finished my pint of Stella. I was well and truly off the wagon now.
“Yep,” said Craig.
“I’ve never heard that one before.”
“Aye. Good With Colours is a euphemism for gay men, and Tennis Fans is for lesbians.”
“Well, as always, Craig, you are an education.”
“Well, you should read more, shouldn’t you? Might learn something.”
I finished my drink and went over to the bar. The dancers were starting to arrive at Velvette’s. It was a couple of hours before opening time but Jack Martin, the owner, usually gave them a little booze-up on a Saturday night to get them in the mood. Jack was more of your benevolent kind of gangster.
“But I think you’re avoiding the issue, Craig,” I said, as I sat back down. “What are you going to do now?”
“Well, I’ll see if Jack needs anyone for a bit of occasional strongarm work. Him and Dad are on good terms. For the moment, anyway.”
“But Bev’s the family gaffer now?”
“Yep, pretty much. Head of the family. The Godsister. Dad’s said he can’t trust me after ‘The Kangaroo Incident’, as he calls it.”
“You ever find out who shot Skippy? Or why?”
“Not a clue. And Bev doesn’t seem too bothered about finding them, either. Thinks they were from out of town. Albania or somewhere. She thinks we might have been encroaching on their territory.”
“Oh, can’t go around encroaching. Well out of order, that.”
As the girls hovered around the bar there was a cacophony of foreign accents. It was nice. A welcome change.
Seatown had a population of less than one hundred thousand. It was on the north-east coast of England and its location meant that you couldn’t really end up there by accident. All the main roads bypassed the place. People rarely left the town and not too many outsiders decided to settle here, either.
Contact with foreigners was once, in fact, such a rarity that, legend had it, during the Napoleonic wars, the people of Seatown hanged a monkey because they thought it was a French spy. Not an unreasonable mistake, in many people’s minds. So, I suppose you could say that there was a track record of exotic animals coming to an unfortunate end in Seatown.
It was also very hard to keep a secret here.
Which was why I knew all about Bev’s new Harley Davidson, even if the rest of her family didn’t. And why I wasn’t particularly shocked when she’d mentioned Craig’s attacker using a Luger, even though I hadn’t mentioned it to her before.
I did consider sharing this information with Craig, of course. Well, for all of five minutes, I did.
After all, it was pretty clear that the Ferry family were in safe hands with Bev ruling the roost. And it was a lot safer for me to have her on my side than against me.
After all, despite what Craig might have thought, it isn’t what you know, it’s who you know.
INHERITANCE by Jane Casey
FROM THE ROAD, you couldn’t see there was a house there at all. The granite gateposts still stood but the gates themselves were long gone, and the lodge beside them was dark and shuttered, derelict.
But there was a house, and Anthony Gallagher knew it. He knew a lot about it, in fact. He had done his research. And he had chosen a moonless night, a night when the rain was relentless – a night when you wouldn’t turn a dog away from the door, no matter who you were – to make his move. He stood just inside the gate, tapping his fingers against his thighs like a footballer preparing to take a penalty. This was the worst bit. It was always the same. Once he got started, he’d be all right. But before, the nerves got to him. Every time.
The rain fell steadily, collecting in the potholes that pitted the gravel drive. He flipped up the collar on his jacket and started walking. A good half-mile in the dark, on a surface that promised a broken ankle or worse with one false step. He was swearing blue murder before he’d gone halfway, wishing he had his torch handy, but it was somewhere at the bottom of his bag. Besides, it would look suspicious to turn up with a torch. It wasn’t the sort of thing a casual traveller would carry, probably, and he wanted to look like nothing more than a casual traveller.
The bag kept knocking against his legs no matter which hand he carried it in. It was light enough. Just a change of shirt, a toothbrush, a razor and shaving foam, the torch and some odds and ends for later on. He needed to be presentable. Part of the game was looking smart. It was all about setting them at their ease. Making them trust him. Gaining their confidence.
Taking advantage.
There was a light on, he was glad to see as he rounded the last corner of the drive. It wasn’t late, he knew. Half-past eight. Too late to send him away, not so late that the occupant would refuse to answer the door on principle. But there was always the danger they would have gone to bed early. Old people did. Especially in houses where central heating was an unfamiliar concept.
Framed between two straggling yew trees, the house looked grander than he had expected. It was a foursquare Georgian box, grey stone like the gateposts. Five windows ran across the upper storey. On the ground floor, soft golden lamplight shone through the two windows to the left of the porch. He moved towards the rectangle of brightness nearest him, careful to stay in the shadows, treading softly on the loose gravel that gave under him with every step. A lovely room: small, but elegant, with grey silk-covered walls, a marble fireplace carved with sleek, well-fed figures and Doric columns, and a ceiling ornate with swags and garlands of plasterwork. On the walls, landscapes and portraits and miniatures and hunting scenes hung three and four deep, as if there weren’t enough wall for all of them, and pairs of gold-framed mirrors with dim old glass in them softened the room’s reflection to a dream. And the furniture. He didn’t know a lot about it – small items were his bag – but he’d spent enough time looking in windows on Francis Street to recognize the living glow of top-quality mahogany and the arrogant, springing sweep of an Irish Georgian table-leg. A fine breakfront bookcase filled most of one wall, and a pair of brassbound peat buckets flanked the fire. He was looking at wealth, generations of it, there for the taking by anyone who chose to walk up the dark drive.