Borrowed Time Read online

  She turns from the window. Seats herself at the table and kicks one of the antique chairs into a position she can use as a footstool. The nail polish crowning her tanned toes is a shade of red that makes her think of London buses. Dad doesn’t like it. Slag red, he calls it, though he says it with that smile of his: lopsided, teeth clenched, as if accommodating an invisible pipe.

  Alison sips her coffee and feels the warmth seep into her. The kitchen isn’t much changed from the days when servants and butlers busied themselves pleasing their betters: plucking fowl and kneading bread, faces a mask of flour and sweat. The modern table in the centre of the cold room looks out of place, as does the giant, flat-screen TV on the wall by the entrance to the larder, wires dribbling like a rat-tail down the cracked surface to the plug by the skirting board.

  ‘Afternoon.’

  Alison shivers. Goose pimples rise from her ankles to her armpits.

  ‘Afternoon,’ she says, disguising her disquiet with a gulp of coffee. It scalds her lip, already swollen from Jimbo’s rasping stubble, his sandpaper kisses.

  The creature called Irons passes silently into her field of vision.

  Black coat, scarf, cap, sunglasses. Jeans and work boots. Always the same. Never any alteration to the adornment of his giant, scarred, looming presence. And always that smell. A stagnant pond, concealing a forgotten corpse. An air of something dark. Something putrid. Something dead.

  ‘Alison,’ he says. ‘Sleep well?’

  ‘I hate waking this late – messes up my body clock.’

  ‘Your father? How’s his chest?’

  ‘Well enough. You should go and see him.’

  ‘He doesn’t need me bothering him.’

  ‘He asks after you.’

  ‘No he doesn’t. He wouldn’t want me seeing him when he’s poorly. He has enough on his mind. My face doesn’t make people feel better, Alison.’

  ‘Now that’s just silly. He’s never cared about that kind of thing.’

  ‘I have.’

  Irons looks at her over the top of his glasses. His face is a butcher’s window, all pink and red, meat and offal: a rag-rug of ruined flesh. He still has to apply lotions five times a day to stop his cheeks tearing open when he laughs. Not that Irons laughs often. He’s a quiet man. Hasn’t engaged in much chit-chat since the brothers went to work on him with a bayonet, a blowtorch and a claw hammer.

  Alison drains her coffee. Watches as Irons pours himself a mug of hot water and takes a sip. He leans with his back to the counter. Looks at her in a way that Alison isn’t used to being looked at.

  ‘We’ve had word. Definite. Not one we missed. Fresh.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And word’s out that Kukuc won’t be coming back.’

  ‘That was always going to happen.’

  ‘It troubles me,’ he says, quietly. ‘There’s no chance of coinci-dence. Somebody did it to point the finger at you. At me. At your father.’

  ‘And we dealt with him, didn’t we? He’s not much more than mince now. He’ll be lining somebody’s drive before the week’s out. It’s done with.’

  Irons pauses. Blows on his hot water. ‘I want to be satisfied.’

  Alison pushes her hair back from her face, sweat beginning to prickle her skin. She works so hard not to let her anxieties show but Irons has always seen through her layers of protection.

  ‘Now isn’t the time for things to start coming apart,’ she says. ‘We’re so bloody close.’

  ‘Yes. That’s why we need to make sure.’

  Alison looks out through the glass. Broods on just how much she has to lose. She and a select group of associates have invested huge sums of money in the Docklands project. Alison has ploughed the entirety of the family fortune into buying up old buildings and parcels of land in the derelict swathe of waterfront where work will soon begin on building the stadiums which will host the finest athletes in the world when the Games come to the capital in 2012. Her dad, delirious through pain and medication, has approved the scheme in part. He’d tried something similar in the seventies, back when London was bidding to host the 1988 games. He was part of a consortium that spent colossal sums on the same forgotten warehouses and crumbling real estate: his contacts ensuring that the planning applications sailed through committee without hiccup. Alison believes he would approve of the resurrection of the scheme. There has been minimal bloodshed. Some of the old faces haven’t wanted to sell, but she has good men at her disposal and those who have not bent to her will have broken instead.

  ‘Larry Paris,’ says Irons, gravel in his throat. ‘You want to hear?’

  Alison wraps herself in her robe. Nods, all business.

  ‘Larry, to his mates. He’s small-time. Business partner is ex-Army. Military Police. Done time for half-killing a Provisional but he’s been clean enough since setting up the business in ’96. They do surveillance work. Paris started off in cyber security, back when computers were the size of your living room, and then did some consultancy jobs for big firms running checks on employees. Pretty straight. Put a few noses out of joint but that’s the business, isn’t it?’

  ‘So why was he looking into Nicholas Kukuc?’

  Irons wipes a pink tear from his cheek. ‘I don’t know if he was.’

  ‘No? He was at Nicholas’s warehouse, wasn’t he? I mean, that’s what you said. Why we did what we did …’

  Irons sips his hot water, waiting for her to stop talking. He takes a breath. Behind his glasses, his eyes close.

  ‘I think he was looking for us, Alison. Or your father, at the least.’

  Alison looks confused. ‘A private dick from Portsmouth fronting up to Dad? Who’d be daft enough?’

  ‘I’ve got a lad on the edges of the investigation of the team,’ says Irons, softly. ‘He’s sent me chapter and verse on his last movements. Every premises he visited or called in the days before he went to the warehouse – they’ve all been owned by your father.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean …’

  Irons flashes her a hard look and Alison stops talking. He nods, grateful. ‘We did business out of that lock-box on Lawrence Road for a while. The one we gifted Kukuc. Quiet. No interruptions. People knew we were there. If this Paris was hoping to find Mr Jardine, it’s a place people would point him to in exchange for a few quid.’

  Alison rubs her arms, suddenly cold. ‘And what? Kukuc didn’t like him poking around – saw a chance to make life difficult for us. Did him in and dumped him where he knew people would make the connection to us?’

  Irons looks past her. It’s a cold, grey afternoon: the sun a broken promise; the sky a lid of hammered tin. Incongruously, a jet of water arcs from the mouth of the plump, libidinous mermaid who lounges, green and gold, upon the lip of the pond. Koi carp suckle, wetly, among the great lily pads that catch the tumbling droplets as they arc back down into the water. Irons looks as though he could stare into the distance forever. His thoughts seem far away.

  ‘I want to see his computer records,’ snaps Alison, colour rising in her cheeks. ‘His phone. I want to know everything about him. Wife? Kids? Who do we step on?’

  Irons readjusts his sunglasses, waiting for her to stop talking. ‘Whatever they know, we’ll know soon enough. They took somebody in this morning. Bosworth …’

  ‘The skinny bitch who thinks she’s a Fed?’ snorts Alison.

  ‘A bloke that Paris and his business partner use from time to time. Couple of minor convictions. Clever lad but a bit of a fuck-up. Name of Nunn.’

  ‘Means nothing to me,’ says Alison, and begins opening drawers looking for her cigarettes. Irons hands her one of his own.

  ‘I know the name,’ says Irons, softly. He taps his head. ‘It’s all up here. I just can’t find the page I’m looking for.’

  Alison sucks smoke into her lungs. ‘We’ve done nothing wrong,’ she says, reassuring herself. ‘Whatever Paris was looking for, it can’t be anything to do with the Docklands. We’re watertight there. And this
bloke that Bosworth’s picked up – what’s he to us? Done time, has he? Any cellmates we should be contacting? Maybe he’s picked up some pad-mate gossip and thinks it’s worth a few quid …?’

  Irons places a cigarette between his own lips; two scrawny lugworms; a slash in the proving dough of his face. ‘I’m going to go talk to him,’ he says, in a plume of grey smoke. ‘Do what needs to be done.’

  Alison pauses before saying anything. She wonders what would happen if she told him not to go; to tell him that his job is to be here, with her. To run things. To keep things sweet. To keep her safe.

  She grinds out her cigarette on the glistening marble of the worktop. Nods her assent.

  ‘Make it go away,’ she says, flatly. ‘All of it.’

  SEVEN

  Binsteed Road, Portsmouth

  4.41 p.m.

  It’s damp inside the car. Adam watches the steam rise from his clothes, his jaw bulging with the effort of keeping his teeth locked together. He smells of the cell they kept him in while they were processing the paperwork. Smells like the manky carrier bag they had kept his clothes inside. The whole thing is fading like a dream. He keeps having to centre himself. Has to stop erupting with small, private exclamations of amazement at the direction his day has gone. He’d been arrested! Been questioned in connection to a murder. Been grilled about names he only knows from gangland memoirs and lurid headlines. Then just as quickly he’d been let go. No apology. No explanation. He found himself blinking in the rain at the front of the police station, a dozen missed messages from Zara on his phone. He’d called her back before he did anything else. Laughed it off. Apologized for the kerfuffle and told her he’d try to pop by the restaurant later if time allowed. He told her he loved her, and meant it.

  Here, now, he isn’t sure what to do next. The man he hired to find his birth parents is dead. Before he died, he’d taken the time to scrawl down a number implicating Adam. But Adam knows he’s done nothing wrong. He’s hurt people in temper, but he is a better man now than he has ever been and he’s got too many problems without adding to them by killing a man to whom he has just given three grand.

  He wants a drink. His liver is kicking like a foetus. He wonders if he is feeling excited or scared. He’s never been sure. Taking shallow breaths, he buzzes the window down another centimetre and peers out at the terrace of squat brown houses. It doesn’t help. There’s a smell of Indian takeaway; a sticky scent, heavy enough to taste. It serves as a deodorant of sorts in this part of the city; a spicy cologne above the background miasma: that juicy stench of rotting cardboard and ammonia. The breeze seems gleeful as it sweeps into the car, displacing papers, scattering parking permits, riffling the clip full of receipts that hangs from the rear-view mirror. On his knee, the cigarette paper lifts off like a kite, scattering tobacco into the footwell.

  ‘Jesus,’ mumbles Adam, and suddenly feels unbearably lonely.

  He glares out through the glass, wishing he could afford air con, or a radio that played more than static and soft rock. The windows of the car are dribbly with condensation and every time he smears his hand across the windscreen he only succeeds in making things worse. He can barely make out the genders of the people at the bus stop at the end of the road. He grins, madly, as the scene comes into focus. A mum with a yanked-back ponytail has ordered an offspring to lean over so she can roll a cigarette on his back.

  A shape appears at the window beside him. Angus Lavery is a giant of a man. He’s fiftyish: all beard and hair and yellowed false teeth. As he pulls open the passenger door and thrusts out a colossal hairy arm, Adam winces in readiness for the ritual finger-crushing that he associates with shaking the big man’s hand. As ever, the hand that closes around his is warm and soft and slightly damp. Adam gives him a quick once-over. He wears jogging trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, which struggles to contain his rotund, hair-carpeted gut. There is a clatter as he throws his walking stick into the car, then plonks himself down. The chassis groans in protest as twenty-five stone of ex-Army Scotsman makes himself comfortable on the threadbare seats. Adam pushes himself back against his own door, trying to accommodate the great mountain of flesh that has just invaded the too-small space. He looks down and glimpses the black, specially made shoes that protect his ankles. He looks like he has his feet stuffed into baby seals.

  Adam stays quiet until the big man has lit his cigarette. He knows Angus’s quirks. He likes to get himself settled; to let his breakfast settle and to get his phlegm level in his lungs before he suffers himself to speak.

  ‘They gave you a walloping, so I heard,’ says Angus, his voice a low Glaswegian rumble. ‘Brought it on yourself, like as not. Told you before, your temper does you no favours.’

  Adam barks out a laugh. ‘So says the man discharged from the Military Police for taking a shovel to a paramilitary.’

  ‘Touché,’ says Angus, and it sounds peculiar in his accent.

  Adam starts rolling himself a cigarette, wondering whether the big man is going to punch him in the side of the head. He has fists like basketballs.

  ‘Why didn’t you ask me?’ says Angus, at last. ‘I wouldn’t even have charged you.’

  ‘There’s always a price, Angus,’ says Adam, with a note of regret. ‘You’d have waived the bill but banked the favour. You’d have had me doing something I don’t want to do.’

  ‘That’s what you’re good at, boy,’ says Angus, turning dark eyes on him. ‘You’re right, though, I would have. But you’d be two grand better off and my partner wouldn’t be dead.’

  ‘Two grand? I paid three.’

  Angus gives a low chuckle. ‘Even dead he’s got his hand in my fucking pocket.’

  They sit in silence for a time, Adam wondering whether he should pretend to know more than he does, or just wait to see how things play out. He’d known Angus would call from the moment that Bosworth mentioned Paris’s name. It was Adam who suggested this quiet side street, not far from where the big man takes his lunch most days, and where the waiters know better than to let the stack of poppadoms at his elbow slip to an unmanageable level. There’s a faint smell of garlic and cardamom coming off him and Adam thinks he can see a whole cube of diced lamb hiding in the strands of his beard.

  ‘I didn’t need this,’ says Angus, grinding out a jalfrezi-flavoured belch.

  ‘Neither did Larry,’ mutters Adam. ‘How’s Val?’

  Angus tugs at his beard. ‘Weepy. He was insured, but it will take an age to sort it all out. They were still on good terms. He wasn’t bitter about the settlement. Gave her what she wanted without complaint, so if Bosworth starts thinking she’s a suspect then she really is out of her depth.’

  ‘He didn’t deserve what happened,’ says Adam. He looks uncomfortable. Winces, as if he’s having a splinter removed from somewhere tender. ‘Was it me, you reckon? Was he there for me?’

  Lavery softens his features. He can look a lot like a young Father Christmas when he isn’t scowling. ‘If he was, that’s not on you. He was doing what you paid him for. Off the books, might I add. If he hadn’t been trying to trouser that extra bit of cash, maybe I’d have known what he was up to. Maybe we could have done things properly. But no, he never could resist the old cloak-and-dagger. Always saw an opportunity, did Larry. I can see it now – his eyes lighting up like Chinese lanterns the second he stumbled on the name Jardine.’

  Adam pushes his hair back from his face. Watches as the windscreen wipers carve a likeness of the Sydney Opera House into the rain-jewelled glass.

  ‘Bosworth mentioned that name. Kukuc, too.’

  Angus picks at a stain on the leg of his trousers. Looks at Adam pointedly, as if waiting for more. Then he laughs, an exasperated, bass-note chuckle, and his accent changes back to broad Glaswegian.

  ‘Jesus, Adam, are you buttoned up the back? You really are a fucking chancer, aren’t you? Are you playing us all or are you really clueless about all this?’

  ‘All what?’ asks Adam, unsure whether to look lik
e he is sitting on a secret he’d rather not share. ‘Look, this isn’t how I wanted any of this to play out, y’know? My dad gets sick. Starts losing his marbles, tells me I’m not their real son. Then him and Mum clam up. And I try to forget it but I can’t. So I ask Larry to dig into it for me. To make enquiries. And then he goes quiet on me and the next thing I’m being handcuffed and Larry’s been murdered and dumped in Dedham Vale.’

  ‘You know that name, at least,’ says Angus. ‘Dead Man’s Vale, to those in the know.’

  ‘Course I know it – anybody who’s read a true crime book knows that once Epping Forest got too full, the London firms went upmarket. Started dropping bodies in the countryside.’

  ‘And you know the names, yeah?’ coaxes Angus.

  ‘Mad Frank. The Brothers. The Richardsons. Billy Hill.’

  ‘Keep going,’ growls Angus. ‘You’ll get to Jardine eventually.’

  Adam frowns. Thoughts drop into his gut like coins into a slot. ‘I knew I knew the name.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Angus. ‘Now you’re on it.’

  ‘But that’s nothing to do with me, is it?’ asks Adam, scratching nervously at his chest. ‘I just wanted a copy of my birth certificate and maybe an answer or two. I didn’t send him off to this, Angus.’

  Angus breathes out, heavily: his nostrils two shotgun barrels emitting great gouts of smoke. He reaches into the pocket of his short-sleeved shirt and retrieves a folded square of paper.