He didn’t know, I thought.
He didn’t know until now.
‘You were driving the white van,’ I said to her. ‘You were not usually the driver. But driving was your role that night, wasn’t it? And you did it well.’
She shook her head.
‘I want a lawyer,’ she said.
‘You’re going to need one,’ Whitestone said.
Jean Wilder was laughing as she took out a pack of cigarettes.
‘There’s no smoking in here,’ Edie said.
Jean Wilder ignored her.
She lit up, sucked hungrily on her cigarette and considered me, her eyes narrowing through the rising smoke.
‘You actually have to ask why we did that stinking junkie,’ she said, shaking her head with wonder. ‘Because your little cop-like brain can’t understand why anyone would want to remove someone like that – a drug addict who robbed and as good as killed an elderly war veteran for his pension money. You don’t get it, do you? You don’t understand that this country is better off without him, do you? Darren Donovan died because he deserved to die. Because your laws are too weak to deal with someone like that. Because your courts are too full, and the lawyers too slick, and the police too overworked – the poor little lambs.’ She was enjoying her cigarette. ‘Somebody had to do him,’ she said. ‘And it fell to us. He deserved to hang. Isn’t that reason enough?’
‘How did it work?’ I said. I looked at Barry Wilder. ‘Did Andrej Wozniak make contact with you when Mahmud Irani was on trial at the Old Bailey?’
‘My husband had nothing to do with it,’ Jean Wilder said. ‘Leave him out of it, will you?’
‘Leave him out of it?’ I said. ‘Nobody gets left out of it. Do you know the sentence for conspiracy to murder in this country? Life imprisonment.’
‘It was the women,’ Piper Maldini said quickly, one hand on her brother’s wheelchair. ‘It was only the women. Right from the start it was the women. Andrej contacted Jean. Jean approached me . . .’
‘And Wozniak brought in Doll Warboys,’ I said. ‘Where is she?’
‘Their lawyer just informed us that both Mr and Mrs Warboys respectfully decline to attend any further interviews voluntarily,’ Edie Wren said. ‘They’re making us do it the hard way.’
‘They’re probably on their way to the airport,’ I said. ‘Billy, check out today’s flights to Spain from all London airports. Don’t let them board a plane.’
Billy ran off to do it.
Piper Maldini was standing in front of her brother, shielding him, desperately pleading with Whitestone.
‘Do you understand me?’ she said. ‘It was always Andrej and the women. Always the women. Only the women.’
‘Because our men were too weak,’ Jean Wilder said, and her husband hung his head. ‘The men were too afraid of what would happen to them if they got caught.’ She stubbed out a cigarette on the floor and immediately lit another one.
Edie said, ‘There’s no—’
Jean Wilder raised a hand.
‘I’ve got lung cancer, darling,’ she said. ‘Terminal. It’s spread everywhere. Malignant tumours that are bigger than your breasts. I’m not scared of lung cancer. And I’m not scared of dying. So why the fuck should I be scared of you, you little ginger bitch?’
‘Because I’m the little ginger bitch,’ Edie said, stepping forward, ‘who is arresting you for murder.’
Jean Wilder went for her, throwing one big wild right that failed to connect before her husband had a chance to grab her. Piper Maldini was screaming something at Jean Wilder as Whitestone attempted to pull her away.
Nobody paid much attention to the young man in the wheelchair.
One hour later Paul Warboys opened the front door of his Essex mansion.
Every time we had met, the last of London’s celebrity gangsters had dressed for either Majorca, Spain – shorts, Hawaiian shirt, leather sandals – or Brentwood, Essex – polo shirt, chinos, Asics.
But today he was dressed for a wedding.
Paul Warboys wore a formal morning suit. A long-tailed black jacket, grey trousers and a pale lemon waistcoat. White shirt, blue tie, and a white carnation in the buttonhole. The flower was fresh but the suit, while high-end Savile Row, looked as though it was perhaps forty years old.
He smiled at me with what looked like genuine affection.
‘Hello, Max.’
‘Going to a wedding, Paul? I thought you might be on your way to the airport.’
‘I don’t run away. Never have. Never will.’
His eyes flickered on Billy Greene’s face and then to the BMW X5 parked on his gravel drive.
‘Is this it?’ he said. ‘Just you and this young man?’
‘This is it,’ I said.
‘You could have come mob-handed,’ Warboys said.
‘No need, is there?’
He shook his head. ‘No need. But I appreciate it anyway, Max.’
‘Andrej Wozniak is dead,’ I said. ‘Jean Wilder and Piper Maldini have been arrested for the murder of Mahmud Irani, Hector Welles and Darren Donovan. That just leaves Doll Warboys. That just leaves your wife.’
He stood to one side to let us enter.
A white English bull terrier came padding down the hallway. He had tiny black eyes that gleamed with life and a forehead that sloped the entire length of his head.
He sniffed my hand with recognition.
‘Hello, Bullseye,’ I said. ‘Hello, old buddy.’
‘I didn’t know until today,’ Paul Warboys said.
When I didn’t reply I felt his mood change, and saw his tanned face darken. The rage that had helped him stand his ground against the Krays and the Richardsons half a lifetime ago was never far from the surface.
‘You can believe that or not, I don’t give a toss,’ he said. ‘Doll’s dad – my late father-in-law – was a black cab driver. He had her tooling up and down the Walworth Road when she was ten years old. Sitting in that black cab, hardly able to see over the steering wheel, the old man killing himself laughing in the back seat.’ He smiled fondly at the image. ‘Driving in London was in her blood. She knows these streets. She can drive. So she drove for them, Max. That’s all she did. Christ, she was old enough to be the grandmother of the rest of them. But she was the driver. Because of what that bastard Welles did to Daniel. Two years for killing an innocent little kid!’ He gripped my arm and, even at his advanced age, I felt the power of the man and I was glad to have Billy by my side. ‘Doll was the driver. I told you – not my style. Not my style at all, Max. If I was going to slot the bastard, it wouldn’t have been with a rope. Just the driving, Max, that’s all she did.’
I patted his powerful arm.
‘We can talk about all that later, Paul,’ I said gently. ‘But right now you have to take me to Doll.’
We stood there in silence for a moment. Then he ran a hand through his thinning blond hair and smiled with sadness. There was no point in fighting it.
‘She’s waiting,’ he said.
We followed him upstairs to the master bedroom. He opened the door and we saw Doll Warboys lying on top of the covers.
Billy cried out beside me.
Doll Warboys was wearing her wedding dress, her eyes closed and her hands together as she clasped a bouquet of fresh flowers to her lifeless chest.
I moved quickly to the bed and touched her wrist and her skin had the texture of paper. It was very cold.
On the bedside table were a dozen pill bottles and a half-drunk glass of red wine. I read their labels as I felt her pulse. Zolpidem. Zaleplon. Zopiclone.
Enough sleeping pills to help you sleep forever.
Billy was calling for an ambulance. He was still young enough to believe that it was never too late to get help. But in the end we all run out of time.
I looked at Paul Warboys as he stared at the woman he had married a lifetime ago.
‘All these years,’ he said. ‘And she still fits into her wedding dress.’