2 The Imposter (25 page)

“You and Joseph. You better tell me what happened.”

“Originally? I was young, it was a little bit foolish, but I still loved him. Father and I argued about it. On and on and on. He told me I couldn’t see him but how was that fair? I was fifteen years old. Almost a woman. Fifteen is old enough to make your own decisions. He had no right to tell me what to do, where I could go, who I could and couldn’t see, and so I ignored him. He found out I’d defied him and we had another row, a big one. He was drunk and he slapped me. He told me I had to do what he told me while I was under his roof and so I decided I wouldn’t be under his roof any more.”

“And then?”

“I had a friend in Wigan. She used to work down here. I told her what had happened and she said I could go up and stay with her for as long as I wanted. I thought maybe I’d go for a week or two and then contact Joseph. We’d spoken about running away together. I didn’t see him before I went and when I tried to get in contact with him again he had enlisted. Burma! It broke my heart. There wasn’t any point in moving back to London without him and so I tried to make a life for myself up there.”

“Why did you come back?”

“My friend died last year. The cancer. It was different, then––I didn’t know anyone else, I was lonely and I missed the city. So I moved back again and got a job waiting on tables. Joseph came into the restaurant just after I started. I could hardly believe it. It’s like we were never away from each other. I can’t tell you how happy I am.”

“You know why your father objects to him, don’t you?”

“Yes, and he’s wrong. Joseph’s a good man. He treats me well. He loves me and I love him. That’s all that matters.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“A few weeks.”

Charlie paused. He needed to work through the angles.

“Please, Uncle Charlie. Please, you mustn’t say. He’ll ruin everything.”

Charlie paused again. He could see it clearly; it really was a simple choice. On the one hand, he could tell Frank and end five years’ of misery at a stroke. That would be the right thing to do, the fraternal thing, but then Charlie had never been constrained by morality and he rarely saw his brother, anyway. The alternative was to treat this as divine providence, a means to access the Costello family’s affairs. He thought of the difficulty of the investigation so far, the blind alleys and stalled leads, the barely coded warning from the Deputy Assistant Commissioner: bring the black market to heel or we’ll take the job away from you and give it to someone else who can. The end of his gilded reputation. It would be as good as dismissal.

And, if he needed further justification, that was a simple enough thing. Was an end to Frank’s misery worth more than the public good of bringing dangerous spivs like Joseph Costello and the rest of his family to heel?

Charlie didn’t think that it was.

Frank wouldn’t understand it like that but, then, he wouldn’t know.

He knew what he had to do. He crossed the room, crouched by the armchair and laid his hand atop hers. “You know what you’re asking me to do, don’t you? Your father is a broken man. Any brother with a heart would tell him that you had come back.”

“Please don’t––I’m begging you, Uncle.”

“If I didn’t tell him, you’d have to promise to help me.”

She looked at him with pitiful eagerness. “Anything. What do you want?”

“I want information.”

33

IT WAS VERY LATE, or, rather, it was very early. Edward and Joseph had ended up in a Costello establishment, a spieler in one of the back doubles near Holborn. A motley collection of gamblers were ranged around a bare wooden table: a couple of faces from the Costello organisation, local businessmen with too much money and too little sense. The talk was of Jack Spot and Lennie Masters, and of what the Costellos would do about it. One of the participants noticed Joseph and the conversation stalled, an awkward silence falling upon the room until a fresh subject was proposed. Edward knew what they had been debating: they had been questioning the lack of response, perhaps even doubting that there would be one. Violet and George had continued to ignore his advice, which, while foolish, need not have been calamitous. Striking back hard and fast was the alternative, but they seemed unable to do that, either. Edward had heard speculation that the Costello soldiers were afraid of Spot’s brawny gypsies and their reputation for shocking violence.

Days had passed and still they had done nothing. They had left it too long. Doubt had been allowed to fester and grow and Edward knew that the infection would metastasise and spread. Morale would be the first casualty. Cracks would start to appear. Questions would be asked, and, eventually, they would not be quashed by the appearance of a Costello in a bar. Hard-won unity would fracture and the family’s strength would dissipate. Spot would absorb the remnants or destroy them.

Joseph did not see what Edward saw. He banged his empty glass on the bar. “Another one,” he announced.

“What are you going to have?”

“Rum,” he said with conviction. “At this hour of the morning, rum is the best thing. Rum for you?”

“Whatever you like. Anything.”

“Two rums.” The barman poured. “Doubles, man, doubles,” Joseph exhorted, and the man poured again.

Joseph took out his wallet and opened it. Normally, it would have been stuffed with banknotes. It was empty.

Edward opened his own wallet. It, too, was empty.

“On the house,” the barman said.

Edward put his wallet away. “How did that happen?”

“Bloody women,” Joseph chuckled. “Cost you an arm and a leg and you don’t get nothing to show for it.”

They settled back with their drinks, sipping them as they watched the action on the table. Joseph had told Edward to watch one of the faces, a wiry brawler called Mumbles on account of a pronounced lisp. He had a deft touch when it came to fiddling the hands. His opponents were tired and had imbibed too freely on the booze, and none of them noticed the aces that had a habit of appearing in his hands. He pulled the trick for the third time, corralled the others’ banknotes and dragged them across the table.

“See here,” Joseph started, nodding at Mumbles’ pile of cash. “I could do with a little walking around money myself. What do you say we make a withdrawal?”

“Where were you thinking?”

“What time is it?”

“A little after four.”

“There’s a house in Chelsea, this businessman owns it––he got rich in the war. Munitions. He’s not there at the moment. It’s empty.”

“Where do you get all this from?”

He tapped the side of his nose and grinned. “Lot of nice stuff there, apparently––some very nice silver. It was going to be the next one I suggested, but I don’t see why we can’t just do it now, the two of us. What do you say?”

Edward’s natural caution had been replaced by drunken bravado. “Why not,” he said.

Outside, it was growing light. They were drunk, but not foolish enough to use Joseph’s Snipe. They found an MG Y-Type parked on Glasshouse Street. It was a medium saloon, beautifully finished with plenty of leather and wood in the interior. Edward knew the model, and knew that the 1,250cc engine beneath the bonnet packed quite a punch. The drag was more ostentatious than he would normally have liked but he was in drunken high spirits and it seemed perfectly natural to want something fast and swanky. While Edward kept watch, Joseph kicked in the driver’s side window, reached in and unlocked the door. Edward got in next to him as he fumbled underneath the dash. The engine started and they pulled out and away.

“That Eve,” he said as they drove away. “She’s a right cracker, ain’t she?”

“Give it a rest––it’s Eve this, Eve that, all bloody night.”

Joseph laughed. “But she is, ain’t she? She was lovely when I was with her before, but she’s grown up bloody lovely, hasn’t she?”

“She certainly has.”

“Can’t believe my luck. I’ve got you to thank. If it wasn’t for your birthday party, I’d never have met her again.”

They drove across town. Men in wide hats and thigh boots were washing the streets. Bums on the benches in Trafalgar Square shivered in the cold wind that blew up Whitehall, waiting for the parks to open. In the all-night cafés waiters nipped their cigarettes and swept the floors, their nocturnal trade gradually being replaced by men on their way to work. They reached Chelsea and Joseph parked on a grand residential street. Big houses lined both sides of the road. There was a milk float further down the road, but it was two hundred yards away and the dairyman would never be able to see them from there.

They didn’t need to say a word. The routine was second nature by now.

They got out and went down the steps at the front of the house to the basement entrance. Joseph addressed the door, and kicked hard at the spot next to the handle. The door crunched, but held. Joseph kicked it again. It still held.

The shriek of a whistle pierced the early morning quiet.

Edward spun around and climbed the steps: two policemen were sprinting towards them.

“Shit,” he cursed. “Joseph, police. Come on!”

They clambered up the steps and threw themselves into the car. Joseph fishtailed it as he stamped on the accelerator. The engine backfired loudly. Ahead of them, the dray horse was spooked by the sudden explosion of noise and pulled against its harness, yanking the milk float across the road until it was parallel to the oncoming traffic, blocking the way ahead. “Bugger!” Joseph cursed, stamping on the brake. The MG was already travelling too fast and they skidded twenty feet until their progress was finally arrested as the car smashed into the side of the float. Edward’s head bounced off the veneer panel as bottles rained down on the windscreen with a cacophonous shattering, gallons of spilt milk covering the glass until it was impossible to see out. Joseph swore again and tried to put the car into reverse.

There was an horrendous metallic screeching.

“Come on, you bitch!”

It was futile: the axle of the float was jammed into one of the wheel arches and it was impossible to separate. The MG was going nowhere.

“It’s jammed!” Edward’s nose had mashed into the dashboard and blood was running freely. He swung around and looked through the rear window: the woodentops were blowing their whistles for all they were worth. They would be there in seconds. “Run for it!”

Edward sprinted but Joseph could not keep pace. Edward stopped and turned back. He was limping badly. He must have injured his leg in the crash. He was trying to run, a pathetic hop and skip, pain written across his face. Edward paused. He could get away but to do so he would have to abandon Joseph, and how would that look? He paused, caught between two competing urges: the desire for self-preservation and the need to remain in Joseph’s good graces.

“Dammit!” Joseph spat.

The policemen were two hundred yards away.

Edward ran back to him. “Come on,” he urged. “I’ll help.” He took his elbow and started to drag him along.

“My leg––I’ve done something to it. It’s hopeless.”

“Come on!”

“No, Doc, go on. Clear off. No sense us both getting nicked, is there?”

The woodentops were almost on them. Edward started to edge backwards.

“I’ll sort it out,” Edward said.

Joseph shoved him. “Get going. It’ll be fine.”

Edward turned and ran. The bobbies shouted out for him to stop but he ignored them. He crossed the road at full pelt and reached the junction. He turned to see Joseph shoved to the pavement, both woodentops on top of him, one with his knee in his back and the other yanking his wrists up towards his shoulder-blades. His face was angled towards Edward and, through the grimace of pain, he thought for a moment that he caught a wink.

34

EDWARD TOOK THE UNDERGROUND and emerged at Embankment. By the time he had reached Victoria Gardens he was as confident as he could be that he was safe. He went across the road, past the fruit-hawkers, and into the park. Not many people were sitting on the benches at that time of the morning and he sat down, joining the anonymous and the dispossessed: the old man feeding sparrows; the woman with a brown-paper parcel marked Swan & Edgar’s; the down-and-out blowing a tuneless ditty on a penny whistle. He sat among them with his head bent, staring at his shoes, shivering in cold sweat and trying to regain his breath. He stayed there for ten minutes, watching the grey cumulus passing over the south bank, the eddying throng of people accumulating around the entrance to the underground station. The gulls flew low over the barges and the shot-tower stood black in the cold light among blitzed and ruined warehouses. He thought about what had happened. Their long string of successes had inured him to the prospect of failure, and what that meant, but the consequences were real now.

Joseph had been caught and he had barely escaped. And, if he had been caught, everything would surely have been unravelled. Burglary would be the least of his concerns.

No, he chided himself. No. You’re too smart. Clever and resourceful. You can get out of this, and you can get Joseph out of it, too. He told himself to calm down, and, eventually, he did. He stayed there until the man who had fed the sparrows had gone and then, his confidence returning, he retraced his steps, passed the fruit-sellers and went back down into the Underground.

He caught a train towards Holborn, emerged into the sunlight and walked the short distance to the Hill. Billy Stavropoulos still lived with his mother in a two-up, two-down on one of the better streets in the area, but it was still a stone’s throw from The Rookery and far from pleasant. He walked down the terrace to number seventeen and rapped on the door.

A raddled woman from whose face dried paint and powder were falling in little flakes opened it. “Yes?” she said, uncovering teeth like mildewed fragments of cheese.

“Is Billy here?”

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “No-one called Billy here.”

“Please.” Edward put his foot between the door and the jamb before she could close it. “I’m not the police.”

“No? Who are you, then?”

“I’m a friend. It’s about Joseph Costello. It’s important.”