I could see staff dotted all around the grounds. A man trying to capture a solitary leaf that glided on the pristine swimming pool. A team of gardeners fussing around the flower beds and mowing the lawn. A maid in traditional black-and-white uniform giving strict instructions to a supermarket delivery driver.
But Paul Warboys opened his front door himself.
‘I’ve been expecting you, Max,’ he told me, almost smiling. ‘Come in.’
Paul Warboys was dressed for the beach and had a deep tan that did not come from a spray can. Polo shirt, khaki shorts, flip-flops. Chunky gold jewellery clinked on his thick muscled arms. No tattoos. His thinning patch of hair was dyed an unbelievable shade of blond but he looked like what he was: an extremely fit old man who had not had to worry about money for a long time.
‘I thought you might come alone,’ he said, squinting over my shoulder at Edie Wren.
‘I can’t do that, Paul,’ I said. ‘You know that.’
‘Trace, Interview and Eliminate,’ he said. ‘Right, Max?’
‘DC Wren, Homicide and Serious Crime Command,’ Edie said, holding out her warrant card.
Paul Warboys’ smile grew bigger. His teeth were the dazzling white of a game-show presenter. Then he nodded.
‘Put it away, sweetheart,’ he told Edie. ‘I believe you.’
We followed him into the living room. An English Bull Terrier padded across the carpet towards me, wagging his stumpy tail. I held out the back of my hand and the dog bent his magnificent sloping head towards me, confirming we had met before.
‘Bullseye remembers you,’ Paul Warboys laughed, scratching the dog behind his ears.
Bullseye had once belonged to an old face called Vic Masters, who I had found dead in a ditch on Hampstead Heath. Bullseye had stayed with me, Scout and Stan until Paul Warboys had come to claim his dead friend’s dog.
‘I never knew about your grandson,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
He nodded briefly, folding up something within himself. He wasn’t from the generation that needed to share every emotion with the rest of the world.
‘Yeah. Well. Thanks. No reason why you should have known, is there? A little boy getting knocked down by a car. It’s not news, is it? The story got a paragraph here and there. But nobody was holding the front page.’
‘But I would have thought it was news,’ I said, as gently as I could make it. ‘The grandson of Paul Warboys . . .’
He laughed. ‘It’s news now!’ he said. ‘Now that bastard got hanged by the neck until dead.’ Another laugh, harder this time, and it was laughter in the dark, full of something bitter and raw. ‘Now it’s news!’
A woman came into the room.
A tiny blonde woman, maybe fifteen years younger than her husband, and she also seemed dressed for some beach far away, with the blue-and-gold batik wrap she was wearing and a tan the colour of teak.
‘Doll,’ Paul Warboys said. ‘This is DC Wolfe.’
‘The young man who looked after our Bullseye?’ she said. ‘Of course. Thank you.’
Doll Warboys shook my hand, and the chains on her tanned arms made the same sound as her husband made when he moved, a soft clinking sound, the sound of money in a life that had not been born into money.
‘Hello, love,’ she said to Edie, and I was reminded of the London I knew when I was growing up, where love was almost a punctuation mark, an endearment casually bestowed on total strangers. But when Doll Warboys smiled she seemed very tired, as if she had been awake all night tormented by old wounds.
Her grandson had been killed many years ago, but the execution of the man who did it was still trending online. All the old pain had been awakened. She smiled and left us. Edie and I took the chairs across from the sofa where Paul Warboys sat with Bullseye’s monstrous head in his lap.
‘Someone killed Hector Welles,’ I said.
He shot me a ferocious look. Paul Warboys had always been friendly to me, thanks to our connection to Bullseye, but I was under no illusion that we were anything resembling friends. And even now, even after all these years since the Warboys brothers had been almost as famous as the Krays, I could still see the serious violence in the man.
He got his rage under control.
‘We don’t say that name in this house,’ he said very quietly, his fingers deep in Bullseye’s fur. The dog whimpered with something between pleasure and pain. ‘We never say that name, Max.’
It was a threat as much as a statement.
‘But I have to talk to you about him,’ I said.
‘I understand that you have to run your fucking Trace, Interview and Eliminate,’ he said. ‘But this is my house and we never say the name of the man who killed my grandson in this house.’ He waited for me to contradict him. ‘OK?’
Edie had her notebook out. ‘Where were you when Hector Welles was being hanged?’
Under the deep tan, his face flushed with fury, the kind of fury that once enabled him to order the amputation of an informer’s tongue. But then he laughed.
‘I was home with Doll,’ he said, and I was reminded that he had been answering police questions since before Edie Wren and I were born.
‘How did you hear about it?’ Edie said.
‘How do you think?’ he said. ‘The phones started ringing. Ringing and ringing and ringing they were. Friends. Family. Former colleagues. Some of them were laughing. Some of them were crying. And they all said the same thing. Go online, they said. Go online, Paul, because someone is stringing up the bastard that killed your Danny.’
‘And you can corroborate your alibi?’ Edie said.
‘Darling, I can give you all the corroboration you need. But let me ask you a question.’
She held up her notebook as if to protect herself.
‘Mr Warboys—’
‘Do you know how long ago it was that I last hurt someone for profit or pleasure?’ he said. ‘A lifetime. When people talk about the Krays and the Richardsons and the Warboys, they forget that it was all over before most people in this country had colour television. They came after us, love. Your lot. Your mob. And we all went down hard. Charlie Richardson got twenty-five years in 1966 – when England won the World Cup! A couple of years later, Reggie and Ronnie went down for thirty years – the longest sentence ever passed at the Old Bailey.’
‘And you and your brother both served life sentences for murder,’ Edie said. ‘For removing your lawyer’s tongue.’
‘The evidence was circumstantial,’ he said. ‘But my point is that our generation – those days when family firms ran London – ended fifty years ago. We all went away for a long time, and we either died inside or we came out into a changed world. You know – lovely modern multicultural Britain, where the blackies, the Pakis and the Iraqis all deserve their slice of the pie or it violates their human rights.’
‘Yes,’ said Edie. ‘If only we could go back to the good old days when Reggie and Ronnie Kray were helping little old ladies across the street.’
He waved a dismissive hand.
‘Now you’re just taking the piss,’ he said, sounding almost bored. ‘But if you honestly think that the world is a safer place these days than when Reggie and Ronnie and Charlie and Eddie and Danny and myself were young men, then you are kidding yourself, young lady.’
He leaned forward and looked from Edie to me.
There was no warmth in him now.
‘Do you actually know what happened to little Daniel? My grandson? He was riding his little bike over a zebra crossing when that bastard came along in his fucking Porsche and mowed him down. Daniel was in a coma for six months before they turned off the life support. Do you know why we’ve got the dog? Why the dog’s with us? Because Daniel’s mother – my youngest – can’t look after a dog any more because she has never been right since her boy died. She has the lot. Depression. Pills. Panic attacks. Self-harming. Falling to bits. Can’t even walk a dog twice a day. Can’t get out of bed to feed old Bullseye. Can’t get out of bed to wash herself or take her daughter to school. She can’t see the point to any of it – you know. Fucking living. That bastard wrecked lives, Max. Served two years for what he did to a child. I served twenty years for what I did to grown men.’