What had possessed the woman, God alone knew. She knew, or she damn well ought to have known, that the Hall always threw its gates open to the public on the last Saturday before Christmas. There wasn’t a great deal to admire in the garden at that time of year, but it was a tradition: people paid a couple of pounds to wander round the gardens-all profits to the St. John Ambulance Brigade-and then, believers or no, went on to the carol service and mince pies at the church.
But there was no telling people like the Mundays. They had a decent house, granted. Several million pounds’ worth of elegant Georgian manor house on the other side of the village, to be precise, all paid for out of the lavish salaries and bonuses that Sir Ralph Munday had seen fit to award himself in his final years in the City. And the gardens at Creake Manor were OK too-or had been before Diane had got her over-manicured hands on them. Now it was all Sheraton-style coachlights and fancy trelliswork and horrid little fast-growing conifers. And that swimming pool, which seemed to think it was part of a Roman villa, and the pink pampas grass… One could go on pretty much indefinitely. When the Mundays opened their garden to the public the event had nothing in the world to do with horticulture, and everything to do with a crass display of wealth.
Which was fine, Anne supposed-not everyone had been born with one’s social advantages. And one didn’t want to appear boringly snotty and stuffy. But the silly woman could have troubled to check the date. Really, she could have bothered to do that, at the very least.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the crackling roar of fighter jets. She looked upwards as three US Air Force fighters drew cursive trails across the hard blue of the sky. Lakenheath, she supposed vaguely. Or Mildenhall. How many miles to the gallon did those things do? Pretty few, she supposed-rather like Diane’s ridiculously oversized four-wheel drive. Which reminded her that police cars had been whizzing backwards and forwards in front of the house since well before breakfast. Extraordinary. The place was like Piccadilly Circus at times.
Anne walked down the path towards the sea. The Hall and its gardens occupied an elevated spit of land flanked to east and west by open mudflats. At high tide these were covered by the sea but at low tide they lay shining and exposed, the domain of cormorants, terns and oystercatchers. At the far point of the spit, beyond the garden, was the seventy-yard bank of shingle known as the Hall Beach. This was the only navigable landfall for a couple of miles in either direction, and as such afforded Anne and Perry Lakeby considerable privacy. Or would have done, mused Anne grumpily, had it not also been the place where Gunter kept his boats and nets.
The shingle crunched underfoot, and the brine was sharp in the air. There had been a bit of a blow the night before, Anne remembered, but the sea had settled. For a moment she gazed out towards the horizon, and surrendered herself to the ebb and wash of the tide. Then something caught her eye on the wet shingle at her feet. Bending, she lifted a tiny silver hand, a charm of some kind. Pretty, she thought absently, and slipped it into the pocket of her puffa jacket. She had taken several paces before she stopped dead in her tracks, wondering where in Heaven’s name it had come from.
14
L iz arrived at her desk at 8:30 to discover a switchboard message to contact Zander as a matter of urgency. Glancing at the FBI mug, wondering whether there would be a queue for the kettle, she flicked on her computer and pulled down Frankie Ferris’s encrypted file. The number he had left for her was that of a public call box in Chelmsford, and he had asked her to ring on the hour until he answered.
She rang at 9:00. He picked up on the first ring.
“Can you talk?” Liz asked, lining up a pencil and pad.
“For the moment, yeah. I’m in a multi-storey. But if I hang up, you’ll… The thing of it is, someone got done on the pick-up.”
“Someone got killed?”
“Yeah. Last night. I don’t know where, and I don’t know the details, but I think it was a shooting. Eastman’s gone completely off his head, ranting on about raghead this and Paki that and all sorts…”
“Just keep to the point, Frankie. Start at the beginning. Is this something you’ve been told, or were you in Eastman’s office, or what?”
“I went into the office first thing. It’s on the Writtle estate, which-”
“Just tell me the story, Frankie.”
“Yeah, well, I ran into Ken Purkiss, that’s Eastman’s storeman. He says not to go up, everything’s come on top, the boss is like totally off his…”
“Because someone’s been killed on a pick-up?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know what sort of pick-up?”
“No.”
“Did he say where it happened?”
“No, but I’d guess that headland place, wherever that was. What he said, according to Ken, was that he’d told the Krauts they were overloading the network. Something about when their problems ended, his begun. And all the stuff about Pakis and that.”
“So did you speak to Eastman yourself?”
“No, I took Ken’s advice and slung it. I’m supposed to see him later.”
“Why are you telling me all this, Frankie?” Liz asked, although she knew the answer. Frankie was covering his back. If Eastman was going down, as well he might if there was a murder hunt, Frankie didn’t want to go down with him. He wanted to be in a position to make a deal while he still had a few cards in his hands, rather than from a police cell. If Eastman wriggled his way out of the charge, on the other hand, he still wanted to go on working for him.
“I want to help you,” said Frankie, his tone injured.
“Have you spoken to Morrison?”
“I’m not speaking to that bastard. It’s you and me or the deal’s off.”
“There’s no deal on, Frankie,” said Liz patiently. “If you have information relating to a murder you must inform the police.”
“I don’t know anything that’d stand up,” protested Frankie. “Only what I told you, and that’s all hearsay.”
He paused.
Liz said nothing. Waited.
“I s’pose I could…”
“Go on.”
“I could… see what I can find out. If you like.”
Liz considered her options. She didn’t want to step on Essex Special Branch’s toes, but Frankie did seem adamant about not speaking to Morrison. And she would bounce the information straight back to them. “How do I contact you?” she asked eventually.
“Give me a number. I’ll call you.”
Liz did so, and the phone went dead. She stared at her scribbled notes. Germans. Arabs. Pakistanis. The network overloaded. Was this a drugs story? It certainly sounded like one. Drugs were Melvin Eastman’s game. His stock-in-trade, so to speak. But then a lot of the drugs people had moved into people-smuggling. Economic migrants brought in from China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East in return for fat wads of hard currency. Hard to resist when you’d got your border guards bribed and a good shipment line up and running.
But Eastman, as far as Liz was aware, had no Asian operation. He wasn’t the type. He knew his limits, and competing with the Afghans and the Kosovars and the Chinese Snake-heads was a very long way out of his league. When all was said and done, Melvin Eastman was basically an East London wide-boy who imported Class A drugs from Amsterdam and distributed them in Essex and East Anglia. Bought wholesale and sold retail, with the Dutch taking the decisions about shipment and volume. It was a local operation-a franchise, effectively-and the Dutch were running at least half a dozen just like it up and down the UK.