Full of Money (30 page)

‘Pellotte and Dean have dawdled?'

‘Are they too busy poncing about at literature conferences? A lot of comment gets muttered around Whit. Hodgy would be aware of it. Estate commitments, company commitments, should get main attention from a leader like Adrian Pellotte, not fucking books. One of those commitments we've just discussed: Gladstone Milo Naunton. Forgotten about? Ignored? Back-burnered after the crem? Then there's Dean Feston and the girl Cornish, half accused of doing a reporter who wanted to know about the trade and the warfare and Naunton. Those two got released, yes, but was Adrian doing enough to keep the heat off them in the first place? Sloppy? Sleepy? Oh, sure, Gladstone had a great subsidized funeral, and Bert Marsh, his live-in, sweetly pensioned, to date. Those are only basics though. Where are the Temperate corpses? All right, it's too late to get Whit retaliation in first, but it looks to many as if it's not going to be got in at all. And, talking of Temperate, there's another topic. Is Adrian Pellotte so worried about his daughter's love life, as well as literature, he can't be bothered with the firm's day-to-day health and duties, such as the Gladstone situation and home-patch blame for the dead journalist situation? Dione? We've discussed it, you and I – she being on the rebound to one of your people who lives on Temperate, isn't she – Rupe Bale? Pellotte's focused on that, and only that, except for the books? This is the mutter that goes around. It's not friendly.'

‘And Hodge will see to all this for them?' Edgehill replied.

‘Gordon's always been great at spotting niche opportunities.'

‘Is he . . . is he familiar with that kind of work? Would he be putting himself at crazy risk?'

‘The thing is, he thinks he's at risk anyway, doesn't he? They might have been slow going after who did Gladstone Naunton, but maybe they'd act faster against Gordon. Why he came desperate to you.'

‘Misguidedly.'

‘He'll accept that, I believe. Don't make yourself suffer. He's not going to broadcast you let him down. Like I say, a gent.'

But Edgehill did suffer and felt he'd been shifty, unlike himself. He wanted to put this to rights by protecting Hodge now – a bit late admittedly. So, he'd come to share the problem with Esther Davidson, perhaps shift the problem to Esther Davidson. That's what police were for, wasn't it – to give protection?

He said: ‘Look, to get specific, I think Hodge is going to look for and slaughter – attempt to – someone on Temperate suspected of killing a Whitsun trooper, Gladstone Milo Naunton, during a frontier spat, and possibly the journalist, Tasker, as well. This would be Hodge doing a payback to Adrian and Dean for trying to siphon some business profits. People on Whit wonder why the firm hasn't answered in style for Naunton. Hodge will see to it for him, restore his reputation and grandeur. Perhaps they'll put a whisper around that whomever Hodge targets was the journalist's killer also, and you'll be able to close that file, give up harassing Adrian's outfit.'

‘You're afraid Hodge will get killed, instead of killing?' Esther asked. Would Hodge go after Joel Jeremy North? Was the word around that she'd accosted and quizzed North herself? Was the word around that Tasker had met him also?

Edgehill said: ‘I don't know whether he's capable of this kind of operation.'

‘Nobody can know.'

‘But it's got to be stopped, anyway, hasn't it?'

‘If what you've “sensed” is true.'

‘He's bought a gun.'

‘How would you know that?'

‘He has,' Edgehill replied.

‘I'll have a look around Temperate. It's difficult. He's committed no offence, except possible possession of a firearm.'

‘The idea is to stop him committing an offence, or having an offence committed against him, isn't it? Police don't actually want these people eliminating one another, do they? Do they?'

‘I'll certainly have a look around Temperate,' Esther replied, ‘and put some extra people on.'

And she did. As a result Esther missed the live showing of Gerald's performance on
A Week in Review
, though when she watched the film of it later she thought he came over as quite sane and nice-natured, regardless. She had gone again with him to the studios as support, but in the hospitality suite pre-broadcast was called away on her phone by one of the extra officers patrolling Temperate to the scene of that new, appalling death. She drove there at once. ‘I have to leave,' she told Gerald, ‘you'll probably need to get a taxi home.'

‘Oh, thank you,' he said.

‘It's important.'

‘More important than my debut appearance on this television show, I suppose.'

‘I can catch up on it later.'

‘More important than my debut appearance on this television show, I suppose.'

‘Yes,' Esther said, ‘much more important, you daft prick.'

Gerald had been talking to the woman from News, Nellie Poignard, in Hospitality for another of her free drinks. Sacheverell Biggs had just topped her up.

‘What is it?' she asked Esther.

‘Something she's fucking manufactured because she hates to see me spotlighted,' Gerald said. ‘She tells some minion to ring her here, create a stir, a diversion from me, something to prove she's the distinguished, indispensable chief of detectives. It's her standard ego aggression and cruelty.'

‘Where?' Poignard said. She put her full glass on to a window sill. ‘One of the estates? Which?'

Esther also put her glass down.

Nellie Poignard spoke briefly into her mobile.

‘Best of luck, Gerald,' Esther said, blowing him a kiss. ‘You'll be great.'

‘As if you fucking cared,' he said. He was yelling. The room became silent for a minute. Perhaps his behaviour soured the evening, and prepared a route to the absurd fist fight between Bale and a panellist, Rex Ince. Esther heard about it later – Ince, a don from one of the Cambridge colleges, screaming that Bale had been offered a new programme series only because he was backed by his fucking girlfriend's gangster father, who'd fixed the fucking culture show of the year award and terrorized the television company bosses. Both Bale and Ince had to be smothered in make-up powder so their injuries would not be visible on camera. Less visible. Esther could see them well enough when she ran the tape. But Gerald seemed jaunty enough and was able to work in one of his jokes. They were discussing a revival of John Osborne's drama,
Luther
, which suggested the great reformer's personality was much affected by constipation. ‘The play should have been called
An Immoveable Feast
,' Gerald said.

On her way to Temperate, Esther thought she might have a Volkswagen on her tail. The Poignard woman? Had she alerted a camera crew? Newshounds! They wouldn't, couldn't, rest. Or not until what happened to Tasker happened.

Eighteen

ON TV LAST NIGHT

by
Morning Express
critic, Tim Gold-Bravo

Pre-publicity for Nellie Poignard's documentary,
Powder
Kegs
, about the two London estates, Whitsun Festival and Temperate Park Acres, said many months had gone into preparation of this film. Never can time have been better spent. This was a brilliant, thorough and thoroughly disturbing portrait of an enormous concentration of the capital's municipal housing and flats. And perhaps what the programme showed is typical of many other large cities here and abroad.

Apparently, the idea first came to Poignard – previous notable exposés on the box,
Drying Out
and
A Taste For Children –
two years ago in the winter of 1998 when she began trying to badger her bosses into allowing her to start building a film ready for the explosion of full-scale drug gang warfare between the estates, which she so rightly foresaw. An investigative journalist had already been murdered, and a Whitsun dealer shot dead in a turf battle for the resonantly named but continually fought over William Walton Avenue.

But it was the killing in 1998 of small-time pusher, Gordon Basil Hodge, that finally compelled Poignard's chiefs to give the OK. She began to collect and store what has turned out to be a magnificent, sensitive, eloquent series of glimpses into the two massive estates. She and her crew caught with marvellous skill, doggedness and, perhaps, danger the feel of these streets, the nature of the hatreds, plus the despair and suppressed anger of ordinary folk who live there and who find their existence constantly diminished and even threatened by the violence around them: this anger suppressed because of a constant fear of reprisals.

Among several dozen gripping scenes was the discovery on Temperate waste ground of Hodge's body, with the voice-over explanation that he had been on a frantic vengeance campaign, trying to compensate for offending an unnamed drugs baron on Whitsun. But, instead, Hodge himself became the target. Police presence had been increased on the estate following a tip-off, and the shooting was actually witnessed by a special patrol detective, who could not prevent it, but who arrested the gunman, Joel Jeremy North, later convicted and jailed for life.

By some fluke, or some astonishing intuition, Poignard and her camera and sound people had arrived just after the police and were able to catch the appalling misery of the death scene and interview other shaken, sickened witnesses immediately following the event. A sequence filmed at the conclusion of North's trial in 2001 showed Detective Chief Superintendent Esther Davidson announcing that police would not be looking for anyone else in connection with the murders of the reporter and Gladstone Milo Naunton, the Whitsun dealer killed in a territorial dispute. This gave a kind of completeness to the Poignard essay, though not necessarily a comforting one.

Some of the coverage of the outright open warfare between Whitsun and Temperate when it erupted as she had predicted, was on a par with anything we have seen from Vietnam or Northern Ireland. No, this was not a reassuring programme, but it had the resounding ring of continuous authenticity and, oddly, perhaps, of caring.

Nineteen

Karen Tyne likes to have a talk now and then with Dean Feston about things in general. Very regularly, so far, she, Dione, Rupert Bale, plus Dione's mother, Olive, when not abroad, go out to Marlborough Road Cemetery to tidy up the graves of Adrian Pellotte and Dean. Pellotte's other daughter, Clarissa-Mercedes, occasionally joins them, but she lives a long way off and can't always make it. In any case, Karen heard she married a Church of England rector, who probably disapproves of the visits, given the kind of special career followed by Pellotte and Dean. The graves lie not far from each other, reflecting the men's relationship in life. The women always place new flowers.

Karen enjoys briefing Feston via the white masonry chippings above him, invariably congratulating Dean on what happened to Dr Rex Ince. This morning she says: ‘Nobody's been caught for that. The police keep trying to tie it on you. They want to close the file, don't they, and get their success rate up? How? Accuse someone who's not around to make denials. Easy.'

Today, Karen has brought with her a copy of Abel Vagrain's new novel,
On the Frontier
. She has pink-highlighted some passages in it which she feels would have interested Dean. ‘The book's a mix of fact and fiction,' she says, ‘known as “faction” – very fashionable. We're all in it, but disguised a bit and under different monikers, naturally. The estates are there, too, also with made-up names. He's done a very nice chapter describing how you and Adrian eventually died. There's honour in it, Dean. Well, I should hope so. He shows you and Adrian out there on the streets in person, fighting nobly for your territory around what the novel calls Thackeray Crescent, but which is really William Walton Avenue, of course. Although a business tycoon, the Adrian figure – Vince Caldrake, in the story – has to get to where the bullets are flying, to show he's still a worthy leader. Some have doubted this, because he had failed to avenge the death of one of his foot soldiers. And where the Adrian figure has to go, his bodyguard must go, too. That's you, Dean, but rechristened Grenville Lampoda. You get bopped when selflessly trying to protect your boss – which is really how it happened, isn't it?

‘This next bit will really amuse you, Dean,' she said. ‘In
On the Frontier
a university don, Norbert Gale-Hive is found murdered, apparently as punishment for a public slur on Adrian – Vince Caldrake, that is, and Gren Lampoda – you, that is – to do with a television awards incident. This is sure to make the reader think of the way that creep Rex Ince got slaughtered in reality, isn't it? The Hodge death is in the book, too, and there's a girl who might be me, giving pillow-talk tips during a one-night stand. Plus, we have a woman who makes a stir in a television arts show and then goes on to turn out art-house films that dispense with central characters. True name Sandine? I think so. At the end of the book, Dione and Rupert – or Angela and Cedric – are married and their house in Wandsworth is featured in a
Home and Gardens
three-page article. More near fact! It should be St John's Wood.

‘And still more near fact? In chapter twenty-two, Lampoda and Caldrake go to a literary meeting where Lampoda is to give a keynote address. They are both loaded with money because they've collected from a pusher
en route
. Lampoda leans forward at one point and almost goes off balance because his suit is so full of cash. A nine mm pistol falls from his shoulder holster on to the lectern. Remind you of anything?

‘There've been changes. Dione tells me the woman top detective has left London to take an even grander law and order job in Wales. You'll probably remember her reputation soared and stayed high after she schemed the arrest of a multi-killer on the estate where Rupe Bale lived. Dione thinks this officer somehow devised the battle in which her dad and you were so conveniently taken out by the other crew. I can't believe it. People's minds may be pushed off balance by grief. This might have happened to Dione, I fear. Admittedly, though, to choreograph such a smart, cleansing shoot-out is possibly the kind of ploy a big rank gendarme
would
get promoted to staff level for.