The Garden Party (28 page)

‘I saw her get taken away, so I did.' The woman opened the door to her house just an inch and kept the security chain in place. ‘About six o'clock this morning. I was awake and I looked out from my bedroom window which is opposite her house. Didn't give her no time to dress they didn't, just in a red T-shirt, nothing else . . . no shoes . . . nothing. Such long legs she has, long legs.'

‘Who took her?'

‘You did, the Old Bill. You're the Old Bill, aren't you?'

‘We did?' Penny Yewdall gasped. ‘Yes, we're the Old Bill.'

‘Yes, they was police, four of them. Four big geezers.'

‘How did you know they were police, madam?' Tom Ainsclough asked.

‘Cos they had her in . . . what are those things? Handcuffs, they had her in handcuffs.'

‘You can buy handcuffs from a toy shop!' Yewdall could not contain her anger.

‘Were her hands cuffed in front of her or behind?' Ainsclough fought to contain his annoyance.

‘Behind,' the woman replied. She was timid. Elderly. Dark-haired.

Tom Ainsclough sighed. ‘They were not police officers; we would not handcuff a female DP with her hands behind her back.'

‘DP?' The woman asked.

‘Detained Person,' Yewdall replied coldly. ‘What sort of vehicle did they have?'

‘Red van, dearie, just a red van; she went in the back with three of the men.' The woman shut her front door.

Yewdall and Ainsclough looked at each other. ‘Now what?' Yewdall said softly. ‘Now what do we do?'

‘We built the business up from nothing, me and my brother.' Roy Cole received Frankie Brunnie on the south-facing porch of his modest, paint-peeling, bungalow where he had received Yewdall and Ainsclough a few days earlier, and similarly Brunnie found himself sitting adjacent to a plethora of colour and abundance of flora, with bees humming and birds in song. ‘We had both left school with no qualifications and we were walking near our house one day, two sixteen, seventeen-year-old lads, and there was a team of blokes digging a trench along the pavement. So there were a couple of spades standing propped up against the wall and me and my brother, well, we just grabbed one each and pitched in. We grafted with that crew all day and went home when they knocked off, and the next day we went back to the trench and worked with them like a pair of Trojans, and at the end of that day the boys said to the gaffer, “Set 'em on, boss”, and we were set on and we worked with that crew for the next year and a half, and we got to know the building trade. We got known, got offered jobs and the work just kept coming in, and over the years we became established. Then, a few years ago, we got word of an odd parcel of land which was up for sale and we bought it because it was next door to our premises. I mean, it was the next field. We owned two acres, more than we needed, and the field next to us suddenly sprouted a “For Sale” sign; that field was ten acres. Now ten acres with planning permission . . . that land would then be worth something. So we bought it without planning permission, and if we threw in our two acres and then applied for planning permission for houses on a twelve acre site, that was retirement money for me and my brother. I mean low to middle seven figures; North London, a green field site . . . it was valuable with planning permission.'

‘I can believe that,' Brunnie commented.

‘So we applied for planning permission, achieved interim status, not full permission, but we lodged the application. It was received and we had it progress to the “pending” stage, when we were visited by a man who offered us what the land was worth without planning permission.'

‘Which you declined?'

‘Of course we did. So then the guy says, “I am representing a gentleman who always gets what he wants. This way you stay alive. So you are offered a fair two hundred thousand pounds for the twelve acres. If you refuse the offer you will meet with an accident, you'll just vanish.” To which I said, “Don't threaten us like that!”'

‘Yes.' Brunnie nodded his head. ‘As you would.'

‘To which he replied, “I am not threatening you, Mr Cole, I am making you a solemn promise.” So we had warnings; our yard was vandalized, our vehicle set on fire. We would come home and some soul's clearly beloved cat or dog would be on our doorstep with its neck broken. I don't mean a stray but a well-fed pedigree with an owner's collar, that sort of thing. Then one day my brother got attacked, they broke his legs. Then I got a phone call at home and the voice said, “You're next.” Eventually we sold it all for a quarter of a million pounds, we managed to negotiate an increase of fifty thousand. The people who bought it still have it; they haven't built on it but they now have the planning permission we applied for. The planning permission went through. It's now worth about five million pounds with clear planning permission for an estate of sixty houses plus amenities. The building trade is in a depression at the moment so those guys are clearly waiting for things to pick up again, then they'll sell it and make a killing. If we had kept our mouths shut me and my brother would have shared five million pounds between us instead of a quarter of a million.'

‘Who did you talk to, Mr Cole?' Brunnie glanced at the multitude of colours that was the small garden in front of Roy Cole's modest house.

‘Only the men we employed as builders,' Cole explained. ‘We told them that we had bought the field next to our depot and had applied for outline planning permission, and if we got full planning permission then there would be at least twelve months' work for them. There was nothing on the land at all; just an old wooden hut which looked like it had been there since Victorian times, so one of them, one of our crew, told someone, who told someone . . . or one of our builders was probably known to the proprietor of A. R. Holdings, being the people who now own the land.'

‘So who is the glazier who occupies your old site, Mr Montgomery?'

‘He's no glazier,' Roy Cole snarled as he brushed a fly from his face, ‘he's just keeping an eye on the land, occupying it in case travellers find it. It doesn't sound like A. R. Holdings will have any problem getting a bunch of travellers off their land, but probably, sensibly, they don't want them there in the first place.'

‘I am sorry.' Brunnie stood. ‘That is not a clever story.'

‘It's done now,' Roy Cole sighed. ‘I live here, modestly. My brother lives in Spain, modestly, but we are alive and we have been left alone.'

‘Long Liz' Petty pulled on the length of chain but it was soundly fastened. Outside, it was silent apart from the birdsong. She sat against the wall of the hut and tried to calm herself, breathing the hot, stale air with difficulty; adjusting her eyes to the gloom. She felt about her with her fingertips and eventually found a section of floorboard which was loose and could be lifted up. Below the section of boarding she felt a small enclosed space. She tugged at her scalp hair, pulling out as many strands as she could, and then rolled them into a tight ball and placed them in the space. She then replaced the small section of flooring.

‘One day, one day, someone might just find them,' she said quietly to herself.

She sat against the wall of the hut and thought of her life, the escape from Basingstoke to the not much better existence of nights in King's Cross and daytime sleeping in cramped bedsits in East London . . . and her death . . . tomorrow . . . battered half to death with golf clubs before being drowned in Snakebite's swimming pool, her body incinerated, her bones dropped into the river at still not thirty years old.

If only she had accepted the witness protection offer. If only she hadn't gone for a drink with a copper in the pub in the middle of the day . . . if only . . . if only . . . if only . . .

Harry Vicary sat on the settee clutching the bottle and grinned inanely as his wife entered the living room.

‘Harry!' Kathleen Vicary strode forward and grabbed the half-empty bottle of whiskey from her husband's hand. ‘Why? Why now? You've been so good. You know your job depends upon you staying off the bottle. Heavens, Harry, why? This is going down the sink . . . but Harry, why?'

‘Why?' Vicary slurred his words. ‘Why? You ask why? Well, three women, that's why. Three young women . . . one's a raspberry ripple . . . a cripple.'

‘Yes, I know what a raspberry ripple is. I am a nurse! Remember.'

‘Another is in a coma and the third looks like she's been run over by a steamroller, that's why . . . Oh . . . there's a fourth, she's been abducted and she is going to be murdered if she hasn't already been iced.'

‘So, is that your fault?'

‘Yes,' Vicary replied quietly, ‘yes, it is . . . all of it, all my fault, all because of my stupidity.'

Penny Yewdall lay in her bed again watching Orion track really quite rapidly, she thought, across the sky.

She sat upright. Staring straight ahead. She said to herself, ‘I know where she is.' She leapt out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and a pair of sports shoes. She left her house quite calmly, ensuring that the door was locked behind her, then she got into her socially responsible grubby car, which was good for London but not any further afield, and drove slowly and steadily away, towards the Dartford Tunnel. She knew the value of taking her time.

It was a night of a full moon and once clear of the city, and off the main road, the landscape was bathed in moonlight. Switching off her car's headlights, she found that she could see clearly for a distance of about, she guessed, half a mile in all directions. She halted the car at the entrance of the first field and then, expediently, turned it around so that it faced back towards London. She opened the door slowly and quietly and let it remain open.

An owl hooted.

She crept stealthily onwards between the glazier's lorry and the first hut, and saw, clearly, the second hut standing as if forlorn in the second field. She halted at the entrance of the second field, recalling advice given to her in her childhood, “Don't go into that empty field because that empty field might not be so empty . . . search, search the shadows.” So she searched the shadows as the owl hooted once more. Then she crept forward, approaching the second hut, and then she halted at the door. She tapped on it. ‘Liz . . . are you in there?'

There was no answer.

‘Liz . . . Liz . . . it's Penny.'

There was still no reply. Yewdall examined the hasp and padlock . . . it was small and screwed into rotting timber and would, she guessed, be easily broken. She returned to her car, moving more speedily by then, and took a large screwdriver from the tool kit and returned to the shed, confident that she was the only person in the vicinity. At the shed once again, she forced the screwdriver behind the hasp and levered it towards her. The hasp tore away from the rotting wood of the shed and she opened the door.

The shed was empty.

There was though, as if by some compensation, a sense felt by Penny Yewdall of someone having recently been within the shed, not dissimilar, she thought, to returning to one's hotel room after room service has called . . . There was a definite presence in the confines of the wooden structure, and she saw in the moonlight a length of silver chain which lay on the floor of the shed, with one end affixed to a ring bolt set into the frame.

She had been here. ‘Long Liz' Petty had been here . . . Penny Yewdall had been correct . . . and she had also been too late.

Yewdall returned to her car . . . disconsolate . . . even the owl's hoot then seemed to have a spiteful, mocking tone. In the distance she saw the vast spread of the lights of north-east London; to her left and behind her, all was darkness. She knew then that Long Liz Petty was out there . . . anywhere. Anywhere at all.

‘Long Liz' Petty lay on the grass shivering in the early morning, wearing only the red T-shirt she had on when she had been abducted by the men who had woken her up by knocking on her door and shouting, ‘Police, Miss Petty, open up . . .' She looked about her. The house hadn't changed much, if at all, so far as she could see; the large lawn, the swimming pool, the barbecue area, the Leylandii, taller now, and doubtless still concealing the impossible to climb high wire fencing, which, she assumed, was the only reason why she had been left on the lawn unsupervised and unrestrained . . . There was just nowhere for her to go . . . she was like an animal in a huge cage . . . all she could do was wait.

‘Rainbird won't have her at his house . . . he's too fly for that . . . he'll keep that drum very clean, you can bet on that,' Frankie Brunnie offered to the group who sat in front of Harry Vicary's desk; Swannell, Ainsclough, Yewdall and, behind the desk, Harry Vicary himself, and with each person in front of the desk noticing Vicary's heavily bloodshot eyes, and smelling the vapour of strong mint on his breath, which did not fully smother the under odour of stale alcohol. Each person thought, ‘Come on, Harry, pull through, pull through, you can do it, you've been doing so well . . .'

‘Where?' Penny Yewdall turned to Brunnie. ‘Where, Frankie . . . ?'

‘The big house up in Bedfordshire, Snakebite's drum . . . it's the place they used to execute people before. That back garden has probably seen quite a few lives snuffed, many more than the two we know about.'

‘Yes.' Vicary nodded. ‘It's the only place she can be . . .' He reached for the phone on his desk.

Ainsclough stood and grabbed the phone. ‘Let me do the talking, Harry . . . you'd better get home . . . lie down . . .'

‘No. I am staying.' Harry Vicary sank back in his chair, but he allowed Ainsclough to make the phone call.

‘Bedfordshire, isn't it?' Ainsclough dialled a four figure internal number.

‘Yes.' Harry Vicary put another strong mint into his mouth. ‘Ask them to get there asap. Tell them to batter their way through that front gate . . . a Range Rover should be able to cope with that. If we leave now, we'll arrive at about the same time . . .'