Dead Time (3 page)

He showed me a table stacked with truncheons. Some of them had leather straps, some of them had rope handles and many of the older, Victorian truncheons were painted black and decorated with gold crowns and laurels. Any one of them looked like the kind of hard-wood club that put me on my knees.

I felt the back of my head start to throb, and remembered the small, sweet revenge of sticking the broken bottle in the fake cop’s leg.

‘He shouted something at me,’ I said. ‘Something in a language I didn’t understand.’ The strange words were just out of reach. ‘But I’ve no idea what it was.’

‘Any of these truncheons ring a bell?’ Sergeant Caine asked me.

I shook my head. ‘Not really, John.’

‘But you would know
him
again?’

I nodded. ‘Yes. He’ll be limping.’

There was music playing in Lenny Lane’s home.

Soft, ethereal music, full of tinkling temple bells and the sound of the sea, music that slowed your heartbeat and made you think of empty Asian beaches at sunset. The music went well with the room, where gold Buddhas sat in dim alcoves looking wise, and the floor was carpeted in soft Japanese tatami mats.

The housekeeper, a short, sturdy Southeast Asian woman of around fifty, had made me take off my shoes at the door. At the back of the garden I could see a man chopping at the bare branches of a cherry tree. You could almost forget that you were in Flood Street, Chelsea, where prices for a house like this started at around ten million.

Big money in making Ibiza dance, I thought.

The housekeeper frowned at me as I crossed the room and picked up the open CD cover by the sound system.
Mind, Body and Soul
, it said, next to a picture of a beautiful woman sitting cross-legged on the cover, her eyes closed in a state of blissed-out enlightenment.

‘I don’t know what you
wan
t,’ said the housekeeper, not very friendly. ‘Mrs Lane – she already
talked
to the police.’

I gave the housekeeper a reassuring smile. She was small and tough inside the grey housecoat she wore. They liked the help to dress the part in this neck of the woods.

‘The big man?’ she said. ‘With the yellow hair?’

‘DCI Flashman,’ I said. ‘Yes, he’s the SIO – the detective in charge of the investigation.’

The housekeeper narrowed her eyes. ‘Then what are
you
doing here?’

‘I have some questions of my own,’ I said.

Wendy Lane came into the room.

She was a slim, good-looking woman who was probably around forty but looked ten years younger. Her light brown hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail. She was dressed as if for a yoga class – baggy white leggings and neatly laundered T-shirt. Her feet were bare and her face was shockingly pale. She held out her hand and I shook it, feeling the coolness of her skin and thin bones that were as delicate as a bird’s.

‘Mrs Lane,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’

I told her my name and showed her my warrant card, which she looked at for just long enough to be polite, her hands gripping each other and her tongue touching her lips, as if she was wound tight with an anxiety that putting the
Mind, Body and Soul
CD on repeat play would not cure. Although I knew that every brick of this house had been bought with drug money, I felt a surge of human sympathy for the woman.

‘I know you’ve already answered some questions for DCI Flashman,’ I said.

She raised a hand. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind how many questions I answer. I’ve just lost the love of my life. I want my husband’s killers found. Shall we sit? Do you mind the floor?’

We sat down on the tatami mats, a small coffee table between us, Mrs Lane easily folding her limbs into a comfortable cross-legged pose, and me getting down on my butt with slightly less grace.

‘Ratana,’ she said to the housekeeper, and there was money in her voice, and the habit of having her wishes immediately carried out. ‘Would you bring us some refreshment?’ She looked at me. ‘Green tea? I’m afraid I never have caffeine, sugar or milk in the house.’

‘Green tea is fine, thank you.’

Ratana disappeared, and I wondered about Wendy Lane. Her voice had all the sense of entitlement of any Chelsea lady of the house, but when she said the name of her housekeeper –
Ratana
– there was something behind those triple vowels that made me think of sink estates in the poorer, flatter parts of Kent and Essex, where the only bright lights are from the oil refinery on Canvey Island. Wendy Lane had come a long way to Flood Street.

‘You found him,’ she said, and it wasn’t a question.

I nodded. ‘The murder happened directly below my home.’

‘It must have been … unspeakable.’

I nodded. ‘Who would want to kill your husband?’

But she was shaking her head, suddenly beyond speech, and I left her alone for a while as my eyes drifted to the three photographs that were placed on the coffee table.

Mr and Mrs Lane on their wedding day, grinning inside a blizzard of confetti on the steps of the Kensington and Chelsea Registry Office, both of them with hair like Princess Diana. And a photo of them in a bar with a tropical sunset waiting outside, tanned and happy, wrapped in each other’s arms. Maybe Ibiza, I thought.

And the third and final photo.

Lenny and another man in karate kit, both of them wearing black belts, both of them smiling for the camera as they bowed, their hands pressed together. Lenny’s companion was huge, but it was the face that you noticed most. It was a massive slab of a face, too large for his body, and too large for his smile, which revealed rows of pearly white teeth, small and neat.

‘I know what your husband did for a living, Mrs Lane,’ I said, and I watched her stiffen. ‘And I know why he did a five-year stretch in Belmarsh. But I have no idea how active he was in that world.’

She shook her head. ‘Lenny didn’t discuss his business affairs with me. He always said – right from the start, when I first met him – that it was best if I didn’t know. But he had no intention of going back to prison.’

She paused as the housekeeper came back into the room and placed a tray before us. Green tea for two and two small plates of grilled morsels of meat on a stick.

‘You already
answered
question,’ the housekeeper reminded her.

‘Thank you, Ratana,’ Wendy Lane said. ‘That will be all.’

The housekeeper scowled at me and left us alone. Wendy Lane closed her eyes and she seemed to be listening to the music. It sounded like choirs of angels and a bit of birdsong to me.

‘I know Lenny wanted to change,’ she said. ‘I know he wanted to be free of that world. Prison changed him – it’s a horribly dehumanising experience being locked away behind all those doors, all those walls. It takes something away from you that should never be taken away from anyone. Do you know what I’m trying to say?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I had always felt the same way inside a prison. It was a kind of claustrophobia that you felt could kill you.

‘Oh, I know what he did,’ she said. ‘And I know what he was. But he paid the price and he’d had enough.’

‘So Lenny wanted to get out of the game?’

She nodded. ‘I can’t give you the details – I wish I could – but I know that there were old business associates who did not want him to retire because it would have had a negative impact on their own businesses.’

Her eyes fell to the coffee table and I thought I saw her glance at the photograph of the two men in a karate dojo.

‘Will you have some turkey satay?’ she asked me.

‘Turkey satay?’ I said. ‘That’s a new one on me.’

I made no move towards the turkey satay.

‘Ratana does her best at Christmas,’ she said, and almost smiled for the first time. ‘But she’s Thai. From Phuket. And Christmas is not really part of the Thai tradition.’

I watched Wendy Lane smile indulgently at the turkey satay. I sipped my green tea. It was boiling and I put it back down.

‘Who’s the other man in the photograph?’ I said.

‘What photograph?’

‘This photograph right here. Your husband in his karate uniform. Who’s the man with him?’

‘Goran Gvozden,’ she said. ‘He owns the dojo where Lenny trained for years.’

I looked at the man with his great slab of a face and his small white teeth.

‘Goran Gvozden?’ I said. ‘What’s that? Russian?’

‘Serbian.’

I indicated the photograph. ‘May I?’

She nodded. ‘Of course.’

I picked up the photograph and looked at Goran Gvozden’s face and I tried to see murder in his eyes. But I couldn’t. All I saw was someone having a good time doing something he loved.

‘Goran came round to see Lenny on Christmas Eve,’ Wendy Lane said. She hesitated. ‘They had some kind of an argument.’

‘What about?’

‘I have no idea. I heard raised voices. And Lenny was upset after Goran left. But he didn’t discuss it with me. It might be hard for you to believe, but we did not have that kind of relationship.’

I put the photograph down.

‘Was Lenny still involved in his bar? Faces?’

‘Faces is a gentlemen’s club. It’s where we first met. But Lenny was trying to sell it. Please have some satay, detective.’

I picked up a stick of meat and took a bite. It was like chewing a small brick. I wondered what Ratana was good at.

Because she certainly hadn’t been hired for her cooking.

There was a little red rope across the unattended doorway of Faces Gentlemen’s Club.

Even standing on the street I could taste the thick fug of cigarette smoke, sweat and scent. The Jam was playing on the sound system. A song I knew and loved. Vicious chords and Paul Weller singing about having a row near Slough with the Eton Rifles. I stood there listening to it as I checked my phone for calls. I had phoned what was left of our Murder Investigation Team but I had only reached answer phones. Night had fallen and we were meant to be on leave.

Realising that nobody else was coming, I stepped over the rope and walked up a stained scrap of red carpet and into Faces.

Eyes turned towards me in the darkness. And Faces was dark everywhere apart from the over-lit bar that stretched right down the middle of the club. At either end there were poles where women slid up and down. They sported the usual uniform of string bikinis, high heels and bad tattoos. I watched the women for a moment, thinking that their athleticism deserved a more appreciative audience than the stone-faced men who drank at the bar.

Faces had an unusual crowd. They were all men, and although they ranged in age from their early twenties to their late fifties they all had the same look. A look that has existed among British males for half a century: a hard, neat look that takes a manly pride in itself, a look that began with Mod in the early Sixties, ran through skinheads and suedeheads and then all came back around in the Eighties.

The Faces crowd wore Fred Perry polo shirts under dark Crombie overcoats, Ben Sherman shirts with tight mohair suits, highly polished Doctor Marten’s boots or heavy English brogues on their feet. Hair was cut and shaved short. It was like the British Museum of long-lost youth cults in there. I was wearing a brown leather jacket and black jeans and they all looked at me as if I was wearing a burkha.

I took a seat at the bar.

A thin man in Fred Perry appeared before me, furiously polishing a half-pint glass. He had a haircut like one of the Oasis brothers when they first started out, all layered and feathery at the sides, but it was thinning on top now. I guess he was maybe forty years old, but there were a lot of chemical miles on his clock. He had the look of the ageing groover who never dreamed the long night would end.

‘Triple espresso, please,’ I told him. ‘No milk, no sugar.’

‘No chance,’ he said. He kept polishing the glass. ‘Members only.’

I smiled. ‘Then I’ll join.’

‘Membership’s full.’

‘That’s a shame. Maybe I’ll just have a look around.’

A fat man in a tight, short-sleeved Ben Sherman called out to him from the far end of the bar. ‘You got a problem up there, Pete the Mod?’ he said, looking at me.

‘No problem,’ Pete the Mod said, ‘but that thick bastard Roy is meant to be on the door.’ Then he smiled for the first time. ‘Got paper, have you?’

He meant,
Do you have a search warrant?

‘I don’t need a search warrant to take a look around if I’ve got something called a Section 18,’ I said.

He was smiling more broadly now. He had been skimping on the flossing.

‘But you can only have a Section 18 if you’ve got someone in custody for the crime you’re investigating,’ he said. ‘You got anyone in custody for Lenny’s murder?’

‘Damn, you’re good,’ I said.

He snorted with triumph.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m just making some discreet enquiries about Lenny Lane, okay? Let me talk to the manager.’

‘I’m the manager,’ he said. ‘Pete the Mod. And you’re wasting your time in here. We were his
friends
, right? If you want to talk to someone about the murder of Lenny Lane, you should start with that big Russian bastard who taught him kung fu or karate or whatever it was.’

I thought of the photograph on Wendy Lane’s coffee table. ‘Goran Gvozden?’

‘That’s him. I heard they had a big row before Christmas.’

‘I think the man’s Serbian.’

‘That’s a kind of Russian, right?’

‘You might be thinking of Siberia, Pete the Mod. Serbia is different. Part of the former Yugoslavia.’

The dancers were stepping down from the bar. They were replaced with two new dancers. One of them, at the far end of the bar, had exactly the worn-out, exhausted look of the first two. But the one nearest me was much younger. She tugged self-consciously at her pants as she began slowly to move to Eminem’s masterpiece, ‘Shake That Ass’.

‘What about you, Pete the Mod?’ I said. ‘You have any beef with Lenny? I heard he wasn’t dealing since he came out of Belmarsh. I heard he might be thinking about selling this place. Were you still getting paid on time?’

Pete the Mod’s mouth tightened with fury. He leaned close and I could smell cigarettes and lager and the mints he chewed to hide them.