Hope Road (22 page)

“And?” she asks, rearranging her top as she steps back from the desk.

“A bloody container full of eighteenth-scale models from China. Toy cars, trucks, tractors, aeroplanes, rockets… God, I remember staring into the crates, one after the other, all of it counterfeit. Dad ordered the shipment before Joe was shot. By the time it arrived he’d forgotten all about it.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“We sold everything on pretty easily. But I kept a Subaru. Took a picture of it. Kind of a joke, I suppose.”

Connie doesn’t see the funny side.

“I’m going for a cigarette. You want?” she asks.

The shadows are long and dark, angling across Hope Road so that it could already be night.

“Where, then?” she says after they’ve smoked for several minutes in peace.

He likes the way Connie is never in a rush to hear the full story, as if everything is circumstantial, and the truth lies way beneath.

“The things is,” he says, “they had three hours on Thursday. There’s no
time
to be driving along the country lanes of Wetherby looking for a quiet spot. They have to do a hundred and fifty miles in three hours.”

“So?”

“Motorway. Gotta be.” He grins. “Crates of tinny radios around the house, knock-off handbags everywhere, plastic drums of fake perfume in the cellar, all of it from the Philippines and Hong Kong… My whole bloody childhood, and now Freddy brings it all back!”

“Brings what back?”

“The docks! Dad used Immingham docks. Always. Biggest in the country. For dodgy imports that’s your place.”

“Distance?”

“From here? Seventy-odd miles down the M62.”

No wonder Freddy didn’t want to take his own car
.
He was making a pick-up.

“Why the docks?” she asks.

“Why do
you
think!”

“Me? I’m just a receptionist, remember?”

“Ha!”

As if by agreement, they smoke in silence for a while.

“You never did tell me what you did in Spain,” he says eventually.

She seems surprised.

“I worked for my Uncle Henrique.”

“The ceramic tile business?”

She shrugs. He takes it as a
kind of
.

“Henrique? The ‘think then speak’ guy, right?”

“That’s him.”

“I wish I was in Spain now, a glass of wine and a plate of ham.” He sighs. “Instead of which I’ve got all this shit to sort out.”

“You can have the ham, at least. Got one in my flat.”

“A leg of ham? Are you serious?”

“
Black-leg
. The best.”

“Jesus, I must be paying you too much.”

“Bring the wine, you can have all the ham you want.”

“You’re not going out tonight?”

She shakes her head.

“It’s a deal.”

“Okay,” she says. “See you later.”

“It’ll be about nine I think…”

“Fine.”

She grabs her bag and off she goes, down Hope Road.

Immingham docks and back
, he tells himself as he watches her.
And it wasn’t for a bootload of toy cars
.

H
e can see her in the flat above the sandwich shop, peeping down at him from behind the curtains. Fifteen minutes he’s been here and she’s refused to pick up the phone or answer the door bell. But she’s there all right. Yesterday they bump into each other at the hotel, first time in quarter of a century. Now she’s hiding from him.

Town Street, within walking distance of the city. This is where he grew up, in a big end terrace with a double attic and a front parlour that nobody ever went in. Then Dad decided to move to the leafy splendour of Grange Drive, with its detached villas and the sniffy respectability of a golf club. The neighbours never took to the Rays, thought they were vulgar and distasteful, especially after the Old Bailey trial. Dad never saw it, but Mum did. She’d have preferred to stay down here.

“This is fucking ridiculous,” he says out loud, leaning on the Saab and staring up at her flat. “Sandy? What’s going on?”

He can see her shadow, hanging there behind the curtains, hardly moving.

Tries her number again. Listens as she lets the phone ring.

“Right.”

He leaps up onto the Saab, lands on his knees and nearly slides off again. Grabs a wiper and steadies himself. He stands up, one foot on the wing the other on the middle of the bonnet. It makes a
whupple
sound as it buckles inwards a few inches.

“Sandy!” he shouts, as loud as he can. “Sandy! Yes,
you
behind the drapes! Open the bloody door or I’ll kick it down!”

She moves out from behind the curtains, points down to the door below.

That did the trick, then.

“How’s things, Sandy, apart from not answering your…”

“Shut your mouth and come inside, you bloody clown.”

She’s a tall, solid-looking woman in her late fifties with short hair dyed blond and a silver stud in her nose. You can’t see them, but you just know she’s gonna have old tattoos on her shoulders, like fading bruises.

“Sit down. Want a drink, course you do, I know I do…” She’s talking fast, the bottle of gin already in her hands, two massive measures into half pint beer glasses. “You dented your bonnet, you moron. Here.”

Sandy used to run a pub just down the road. He’d go drinking there with his mates, all underage, and him skulking out of sight in a corner in case anyone his parents knew saw him getting pissed. It wasn’t until years later that he realised the whole pub probably knew who he was: he was Tony Ray’s son.

She hands him a half pint of warm, flat gin and tonic.

“You’re gonna get yourself killed, John,” she says, flopping down into a saggy old armchair that drops her a little further than she had anticipated, some of the G&T spilling onto her jeans.

“Someone already got killed,” he says. “What am I supposed to do? Let Freddy go down for it?”

She says nothing, lights a cigarette.

“And what about you?” he says. “Looks like someone’s had a word in your ear since yesterday.”

She smokes away, says nothing.

He smells her perfume again, and it knocks him back to another time, a time when all his options were open, his life ahead of him.

“Still wearing
Charlie
I notice,” he says, sniffing the air. “The aroma of youth!”

“Cheeky twat,” she says, smiling for the first time.

She always used to smell good. Whenever she was behind the bar you could sense those same sweet chemical edges of
Charlie
, the tingling promise of sex and adulthood that made him yearn to be older and experienced, preferably with her.

“You always did have a nose for perfume,” she says. “Do you remember traipsing round the markets with your mum, checking on the sellers?”

“God, do I!” he says. “If you think there are dodgy characters in the secondhand car business, try fake perfume. Present company excepted.”

“It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?
Chanel No.5
in a backstreet pub in Armley!
It is genuine, isn’t it?
they’d ask…”

“As they paid a fifth of the shop price!”

She chuckles into her glass.

“
Charlie
,
Poison
,
Obsession
,
Opium…
Come to think of it, they all sound a bit dodgy. Couldn’t sell
Charlie
under the counter these days. The kids’d think it was spray-on cocaine.”

“There’s one I still like,” he says. “
Coco
, Chanel. That’s an innocent enough name. Did Dad ever have that one?”

“Dunno.”

“Me neither.”

They both take a drink.

“That’s the small talk over, then,” he says, and takes another sip. “I need to talk to you about the
Eurolodge Hotel
.”

She sighs. “Do you know what your dad used to say, whenever I asked about you?
Working on his own stuff
, he’d say. And there’d be that wink…”

“I thought the small talk was over.”

“It is.
Got high hopes for him
, he’d say. Always mentioning that you’d been Head Boy, and that you went to Cambridge an’ all that.” She takes a drag of her cigarette, the smoke escaping from the sides of her mouth. “If I was you, I’d keep it that way.”

“Meaning?”

“You’re the one who left all this shit behind. I wish I didn’t have to say this, John, but do you wanna end up like your brother? Cos you’re going the right fucking way about it.”

“Out of my depth, eh?”

“I’m out of
mine
, that’s all I know.”

He looks around at the room, the saggy armchairs, ancient telly, black and white photos.

“You been working up at the hotel long?”

She shakes her head. “You won’t be told, will you! If you must know, I’ve been there about three months. The pay’s nothing special, but it’s cash in hand. Without it I’m eating
Pot Noodles
for Sunday dinner.”

“Adrian Fuller,
owner-manager
…”

She sniffs. “He’s all right, Fuller. He inherited the building a couple of years ago, had an idea for business hotels, budget ones.
Eurolodges
all over the country. Told me one night when he was pissed.”

“So what happened?”

“Place didn’t take off. Then he started getting funny guests. Blokes, groups of ’em all in one room, asking for big discounts. They’d book by the week, or longer, and they’d be coming and going at all hours…”

“Let me guess. The kind of people my dad used to employ?”

“Something like that. Before he knew it, his normal customers had disappeared.”

“I bet.”

He watches as she puts out her cigarette and immediately lights another.

“Ahh, that hits the spot,” she moans, almost curling up in pleasure.

“Jesus, I spend years trying to get it down to two-a-day, then one-a-day. Suddenly I’m surrounded by women who just adore tobacco.”

“It’s about the only pleasure I can afford, love,” she says, and takes another huge draw.

“So, what can you tell me about the Ukrainians?” he says.

“Don’t you ever give up…”

“The older one, Bilyk, what you make of him?”

She blows a massive cloud of smoke out in front of her. “Clever bastard, and he looks like he can mix it. But he’s not just muscle. That’s all I know, John. I don’t want to…”

“Yeah, yeah. The young one, Fedir?”

She shudders at the name.

“He treated that girl like a bloody animal.”

“Just him?”

“Other one didn’t seem interested. Always on the phone, or talking to Fuller in the office. Poor lass. She had some face. But that’s not enough, not in a situation like that. She was tense, every time I saw her, tense. She’s always been a cocky bitch, but…”

“You knew her?”

“Knew her mum, from years back. As for Donna, I don’t know what she put up with in that room, but she wasn’t in control.”

“And Freddy, what’s he doing whilst all this is going on?”

“One minute he’s playing the big shot with Bilyk. Next minute he’s Fedir’s fun-loving brother, dragging him out to clubs, twenty-four-hour party people, all that shit.”

“And with Donna?”

“I’ll tell you one thing. When Freddy was around, she was a lot happier. Different girl.”

“Do you think he was protecting her?”

“Didn’t do a very good job, did he?”

She turns away, looks at the wall.

“You’ve been to see her mum, I hear.”

“She told you, did she?”

“Yeah. I didn’t let on I knew you, but the way she described you, it wasn’t hard to work it out.”

“Well something tells me the police might miss a trick or two on this one, so I’m having a go myself.”

“Look, John,” she says, sitting forward in the armchair. “You’re in a lot of danger. You should be going…”

“Never mind that. Tell me about Craig Bairstow.
Please
.”

She sighs.

“Craig? Been working there longer than me. Bit of a creep.”

“Did he know Donna?”

“Used to buy her enough drinks.”

“Installing a digital surveillance system, is that right?”

“If it costs money, it’s not gonna be on Fuller’s shopping list.”

“But Craig’s in charge of the system?”

“Spends a lot of time in that room, whatever he’s doing.”

“Since when?”

She frowns.

“I don’t know. I never thought about it. Last few weeks I suppose. He’s been working more shifts recently. Evenings. Someone’s gotta do it. Mike does nights, Fuller does days. Then it’s just Craig and me.”

“Staff of four?”

“We still outnumber the guests most days.”

Her phone rings.

“Shit,” she says, eyes down as she answers it.

Outside, a car comes to a stop. Doors slamming. Voices.

Her head snaps up.

“Ah,” he says. “I should have known…”

“Sorry love,” she whispers.

“The surveillance camera outside the hotel,” he says as they both struggle up from their sagging armchairs, “how long had it been broken?”

She looks astounded, like she’s going to explode.

“Bloody hell, are you for real? Do you know who’s out there, I mean,
now
?”

“I’ve got an idea,” he says calmly. “The camera?”

“Never worked since I’ve been there,” she says, staring at him as if he’s gone mad.

“The police ask you about it?”

She nods.

“What did you tell ’em?”

“Nothing. Like I said, the money’s not great but it’s cash in hand. I never noticed it, right?”

“Right.”

She stops, puts her hands on his neck, holding his head still as if inspecting it.

“You’re not scared! You’re really not. There’s a bit of Joe in you, after all.”

There are tears in her eyes.

“Do as he says, love. Just do what he asks.”

“Why should I?” he asks.

“Because you don’t fucking understand. It’s…
Donna
.”

She kisses him on the lips.

Now why didn’t you do that quarter of a century ago?

He breathes long and slow as he takes the stairs down to street level.

Pauses, hand on the door.

He is scared. He’s never been so scared in his life.