‘What are we now?’ he asked in a broad Cockney accent. ‘Fucking pimps?’
‘We’re just doing our job,’ said his partner calmly. He was a little weasel of a man who, in better days, had once been a jockey.
‘Why have they laid all this on for that bastard anyway?’ The fat man was looking through the mirror again.
He felt sick. Not for the first time he wished to God he had never become involved with The Friends. He’d been an habitual punter who’d landed himself in trouble with the bookies. They had bailed him out... In return for certain services. And that was it; no escape after that, sucked in for ever, like it or not. There were a lot of racing people in the same situation.
‘Because “that bastard” is going to be prime minister one day,’ he heard the ex-jockey say.
Marcus had forgotten that anything in the world except his cock existed. He was now in his favourite situation. He had the two girls bent over the sofa and was hammering into them relentlessly from behind. The twins had not been prepared for this, nor for his size. First he plunged into one, holding the other one down with a strong arm, then he would change. Great powerful strokes. He was doing exactly what Jennifer had seen him do all those years before when she had returned unexpectedly to their apartment. The girls were looking in the direction of the two-way mirror, their faces registering pain and fear. Their little bodies were trembling, one of them was crying. Marcus’s face showed only the violence of his lust. His eyes were wild. He looked quite mad.
‘Gawd help us all,’ said the fat man.
Todd Mallett felt angry and frustrated. He had spent the week since Jennifer’s funeral going over and over the events that had followed the death of Bill Turpin. His chance meeting with Johnny had somehow made him even more determined to get to the bottom of it all. And his father, still racked with guilt and uncertainty over Johnny’s conviction, had begged him to find the truth at last, but Todd couldn’t seem to get near it.
Jennifer had been trying to contact him to tell him something important about the murders of Marjorie Benson and Irene Nichols. He had known the night they’d drunk together in the Old Ship that she had suspicions and maybe knowledge she hadn’t yet been prepared to share. Now it was too late. Whatever she knew about Bill Turpin and Marcus Piddell had died with her.
Todd was convinced that she had been murdered too, quite convinced of it. But if she had been, then her killers were so skilled that they’d managed to rig a gas explosion which had fooled the greatest explosive experts in the country. Todd had asked for more and more investigation. His superiors, the London Fire Brigade, and even British Gas, who would have loved nothing more than to have been able to blame foul play, were beginning to be bored with him.
The ‘Richmond Hill Explosion’ was to go down in history as a terrible accident, like so many other gas explosions when whole buildings had been destroyed. The experts reminded him again of the precedents: Ronan Point, the London tower block which collapsed like a pack of cards after a gas explosion in 1968, killing five people; the explosion in Motta Visconti, Northern Italy, in July 1994, when twenty-seven elderly people died in an old people’s home; the Coventry house flattened killing three when the priest who lived there lit his pipe — an IRA bomb had at first been suspected, and it was some days before the truth was uncovered; and, most spectacular of all, the explosion of an underground gas main in America’s New Jersey in August 1994, which vaporised eight blocks of flats leaving a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot crater and killing more than fifty. These things happened, and this latest explosion was yet another accidental tragedy. Todd must accept that.
He didn’t — but there seemed to be nothing he could do about it.
He had followed every possible lead, painstakingly checking back over old material, looking into those fine-art burglaries again, following all the other rumours about Bill Turpin, even the off-the-wall stuff, like the arms-dealing out of Bristol. He just came to the same dead ends. Nobody had ever got anywhere with that burglary network after the war, that had been some well organised operation. There was certainly nothing concrete to link anything criminal with Bill Turpin — apart from the murder of poor Irene Nichols. Much of the evidence he had compiled even now against Bill was purely circumstantial, like the horde of crime cuttings the old man had collected, and the discovery of the extent of Bill’s wealth, his dealings on the stock market and his Swiss bank accounts. But how did a man like Bill Turpin get into all that kind of stuff, and what was he doing with some of the most elaborate and sophisticated computer equipment in existence?
Todd had taken to staying at the Pelham Bay operation centre — where investigations into the deaths of Irene Nichols and Marjorie Benson were continuing, although probably not for much longer — virtually all day and all night, desperately trying to make sense of it all. His gut instinct told him that the Marjorie Benson murder must be a vital part of the riddle. He meticulously studied the court records, the statements taken, and even dug out Marjorie’s few pathetic personal effects. He’d found them still stashed away in an almost forgotten corner of the Devon and Exeter Constabulary stores — after all, nobody had claimed them: there was, it appeared, no one to do so.
And so Todd sat at the desk in his temporary office, staring at piles of neatly folded clothes, a few books, a bunch of keys, so little, all so uninspiring.
He touched things, picked objects up, as if hoping for inspiration. There were four keys. One he knew had been the key of Marjorie’s room at the golf club. There was a car key to a Ford of some kind — the records showed that attempts to trace it had proved futile, and there were two small suitcase keys. Nothing. Bugger all.
Todd was still fingering the keys, tossing the bunch up and down in his hand, when his sergeant rushed into the room.
‘Still here?’ asked Todd without a deal of interest. ‘Thought you left ages ago.’
‘Yeah — I’ve been down the road to the sports centre — got a game of squash booked. I left the key to my locker here somewhere...’
The man had started to rummage in his desk. Todd continued to throw Marjorie Benson’s keys monotonously up and down.
‘Shit,’ he said suddenly. With surprising speed for a big man, he lurched to his feet and half dragged the bemused sergeant out of the door with him.
‘Never mind your blessed squash — come with me!’ he ordered.
And he instructed the man to drive as fast as he could to the Royal Western Golf Club in Pelham Bay.
The lockers at the RWG were a law unto themselves.
It seemed there was only one man who knew anything at all about the system, such as it was, and he had been working there for a million years. Todd’s sergeant was despatched to bring him to the Club at once.
The elderly man who eventually arrived looked as if he should have been retired years ago. But Bert Cousins was part of the institution at the Royal Western. He peered short-sightedly at the two little keys Todd handed to him, and pointed to the slightly larger one.
‘Oh yes, that was one of ours,’ he said. Bingo, thought Todd. He looked around the ranks of lockers. Could one possibly have remained locked and abandoned for all this time? From the disorganised state of the place it seemed just possible...
‘What number, can you tell me?’ Todd asked.
Bert shook his head. ‘No way of telling. Long time ago though — we had a clear out a while back. Sorted out a lot of forgotten stuff, changed the locks and all, we did, got different keys now.’
Todd felt his heart sink.
‘What happened to the old stuff you found in the abandoned lockers?’ he asked desperately.