So he left him in the grass and ran inside but Emmy wasn’t there. Only the man from the Ritz. The man with the cigarette hair, strung out across the floor, reaching for the empty glass. Pathetically he thought Jimmy had come to save him. So he begged for the glass. Begged for the water. There was blood around the man’s mouth which trickled as he spoke. Jimmy guessed the square man had hit him. A bruise, oddly green in the moonlight, was rising quickly over the man’s cheek and eye, distorting his face.
The contents of the Tesco bag had been dumped on the straw floor. Jimmy looked down at them stupidly and the man from the Ritz saw his chance.
‘I told him. I don’t know – don’t know whose they are. I missed the lorry. Tuesday. I missed it. Perhaps it was for them? I don’t know.’ Then his eyes turned again to the glass on the shelf and he almost whispered it this time. ‘A drink?’
So Jimmy asked him where Emmy had gone. Where they’d all gone. What was the plan if the drop was missed? Was there a plan? But he wouldn’t say, or he didn’t know. And then when Jimmy didn’t give him the water he made something up, babbling rubbish to win himself the water. Jimmy had felt anger then, and humiliation. He felt a fool, manipulated always by the white men who ran his life, the men who had lost his son. A simple bargain they had failed to keep. They’d taken the money and his son. The anger made him swoon.
So he left the glass on the ledge. And then he ran, hearing the man’s screams diminish slowly, until he could only imagine them in the silence of the fields.
The humiliation came back now, fresh and powerful. He stood, and took up his post at the open window again, pulling the gunsight to his eye and training it on the loading bays. ‘It’s where he sleeps,’ he said, out loud this time. The skinhead who had driven the lorry. The skinhead the black men paid to do the job. His hatred for the skinhead made him vomit, heaving up over his chin, but at least the taste of the bile stopped him shaking, so he put the crosshairs of the gunsight over the red door they always used, and waited, counting the seconds into minutes.
He thought of Emmy’s body in the morgue, but this time there were no tears. He’d kissed him that one last time and although his skin had been cold, as the barrel on the gun was cold, he’d made him a promise as the lips touched his cheek. The skinhead. Then the red door opened and he led them out, the metal in his teeth catching the sun. A truck must be coming. The skinhead blinked in the sunlight and spread his arms wide in an embrace of life, while the others went to flag the truck in off the drove road. Arms wide, his face to heaven; the skinhead grinned and rubbed his hands in his short, cropped hair. So Jimmy put the crosshairs on his neck, waited a second to make sure they were both still, pulled the trigger, and sent him to hell in a spurt of bright, arterial blood.
Friday, 20 June
40
Dryden had considered playing Maggie’s last tape on the Capri’s deck. Did he have the right? Technically it was Maggie’s testament, and it had been left for Estelle and Lyndon to hear. But he couldn’t wait. He’d try Estelle at Black Bank first, then he’d play it. Still he had one other option to try to find his own answers to the mystery of Black Bank. What he needed was to talk to someone who had been there in 1976, but was prepared to tell the truth now about the Beck family, and its secrets.
Tracking Constance Tompkins down had been easy enough. Estelle was not answering calls at Black Bank and Johnnie Roe’s ex-wife had offered him few details. But she must, he reasoned, be close by to have attended Maggie’s funeral. He’d checked with a contact at County Hall and they’d traced her through the files on the county library service. She had emigrated, but she was back now, and drawing a pension. They were happy enough to give Dryden the address once he explained that Maggie Beck’s children wanted to contact their great-aunt.
Which had led him here: Fenlandia. The wooden sign on the stone gate post said ‘Rest Home’, and Dryden felt a familiar surge of nausea at the euphemism. The house stood somewhere in a stand of pine trees at the end of a dreary, dead-end lane out of town. An unnecessary and undiplomatic sign added: DEAD SLOW in letters so large they were hard to read.
Dryden left Humph ordering a bottle of make-believe retsina at Nicos’s taverna and crunched his way up the gravel drive until the building came into view. He was surprised to find it was ultra-modern, boasted two satellite dishes and solar-powered roof panels. In a nod to the more traditional model it had a large conservatory along the building’s frontage, overlooking lawns. Wisteria drooped from the eaves in a splash of washed-out purple and ivory.
‘Wisteria,’ said Dryden happily, thinking it was the perfect plant to reserve for old age.
A line of Lloydloom wicker chairs stood in firing-squad formation behind the smudge-free glass of the conservatory. All were empty except one. He’d rung ahead and the woman who had answered the phone said Mrs Constance Tompkins would love to see him. But she might not say much: ‘Mrs Tompkins is with us sometimes, and sometimes not. She’s happy either way.’
The rest of the residents were in a TV lounge at the rear. The heat was stifling, but try as he might Dryden could not detect the tell-tale odour of stale urine. Faintly disappointed not to have his prejudices confirmed he talked loudly to everyone he met on the assumption they were deaf. The woman who ran Fenlandia wore a dark suit and could have been a director of a City insurance company. She led Dryden to the conservatory at a military pace.
Mrs Tompkins was reading a novel with rapt concentration. The paperback cover was frayed and stained, a Penguin Classic from the sixties, lovingly re-read. She didn’t look up when they arrived and, while she might have been deaf, Dryden suspected she was just ignoring him.
‘I’ll leave you alone for a few minutes,’ said the proprietor, touching Mrs Tompkins on the arm. ‘This is the man I mentioned, Connie. From the newspaper.’
She carried on reading pointedly until she finished a chapter. Then she folded the book and put her reading glasses away. She looked sprightlier than she had at Maggie’s funeral, but Dryden guessed she must be seventy-five, perhaps more. She looked like Queen Mary, but in colour. If there was a family resemblance with Estelle he couldn’t see it, except, perhaps, around the darting, playful eyes.
‘Hello,’ she said, and laughed. Dryden felt he’d made a misjudgement somewhere, sometime, about seventy-five-year-olds. ‘You want to know about Maggie, don’t you? I read the piece.’ She pulled a copy of The Crow from the side of the cushions she sat on. ‘It’s got your name on it.’
Dryden sat down. Outside, the sunshine was burning the grass lawn quietly to stubble. The antimacassar on the seat oozed lavender water; he suddenly felt very tired. It took an effort of will to summon up the first question. ‘Maggie died before she could tell Matty why she did what she did. I think she planned to tell him. She left some tapes – about her life. Estelle says she never explained, at the beginning at least, why she swapped the children. We know she wanted to give Matty a new life, but what was wrong with the one she could have given him herself? Matty should know – it’s what Maggie would have wanted. Do you know, Mrs Tompkins?’