Killing Time (15 page)

‘Leaving grandma holding the baby?’

‘Quite. So grandma had her Christened with a fine Irish name, and shortened it to Maroonagh, but everybody either misheard it, or thought it was a joke, so she was Maroon Brown for ever more.’

‘So how do you know so much about her, guv?’

‘Oh, she gets nicked from time to time. I’ve seen her around, interviewed her a couple of times. She’s not a bad sort.’

‘And this snout of yours thinks she knows something about the murder?’

‘So it seems.’ He paused, weighing probabilities. ‘I’m off to have a chat with her. If I take you along, can I trust you to keep your mouth shut?’

Hart looked wounded. ‘Follow your lead in all things, that’s my rule.’

‘Ha!’ said Slider.

The house in Percy Road – sounds like a film title, he thought – was one of those miniature grand houses built in the 1840s, semidetached, three storeys including the semi-basement; where once a senior clerk, with a live-in cook and housemaid, aped the style of his immediate superior, who had much the same only bigger and detached. Now the house had fallen on hard times. It stood at the kink of Percy Road, alone of its type, surrounded by meaner dwellings; seedy and paint-lorn, it had sunk to the ignominy of division into a basement flat and four
bedsits. Judging by the bell labels, all the occupants were toms. What would Mr Pooter have thought of that?

Slider gestured to Hart to stand close by the door where the overhang of the shallow porch hid her, and rang the bell. The curtain at the front bay window stirred slightly, and Slider felt himself invisibly considered. He tried to exude unthreateningness. The door did not open, but there was a feeling of activity inside. He rang again. After a further pause the first floor window at the front opened and a female face looked out – black but not Maroon.

‘Whajjer want?’ it enquired uninvitingly.

Slider stepped back a little and looked up. ‘Is Mary there?’ he asked.

‘There ain’t no Mary lives here,’ the head said scornfully.

‘Mary Brown. Mary Oonagh,’ Slider said. The head drew back a little, and seemed to be conferring, if not with its own thoughts then with someone inside.

‘You a mate?’ it asked doubtfully.

‘Yes, I’m an old friend. It’s all right, it’s not trouble, I just want a chat with Mary.’

‘You better come in,’ the head said at last. ‘Push the door when the buzzer goes, and wait in the hall, orright?’

After a few moments the buzzer went. Slider pushed the door, gestured Hart inside with a finger against his lips, and let the door close again, flattening himself against it. Almost at once the bay window sash was put up, and a foot and leg appeared. He stepped out of the shelter of the porch to find Maroon halfway out, her leading limb reaching perilously over the short railings for the top step. She gave a squeak like a caught mouse when she saw him.

‘Hello, Mary. Going somewhere?’

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ she said, trying to reverse her progress.

‘Careful, now, you’ll hurt yourself,’ Slider said. ‘Come on, love, I just want a chat. You don’t need to go all Colditz on me. It’s not grief for you.’ She stared, wide-eyed, and struggled a little, unable to correct her balance so as to pull herself back. ‘I think it’ll be easier for you to come the rest of the way out,’ Slider said. ‘Here, grab my hand. And for God’s sake be careful. If you fall on those railings you’ll never play the cello again.’

‘I don’t need your bloody help,’ she growled. But he helped
her anyway, keeping a firm grip on her upper arm when she was safely on the ground. She wriggled it experimentally, between fear and anger. ‘Let me go, can’t you? What was all that Mary cobblers? Nobody calls me that except my mum.’

‘Reassurance,’ he said. ‘I just want to talk, that’s all, I promise. Don’t make it difficult for yourself.’

She was near to tears, and now that he was close to her he saw that she had been crying a lot recently, and he could smell how afraid she was. She had also been drinking. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s get inside. I don’t want anyone seeing you here.’

Despite her acquiescence he kept hold of her until she had opened the door and preceded him in. She started like a terrified deer when she saw Hart lingering in the shadows, but Slider soothed her, introduced Hart, and ushered Maroon into the first room on the left. He half expected her to bolt for the bay window again, but she seemed to have resigned herself, and went straight to the mantelpiece to get a cigarette. The room had been the best parlour of the original house. It had a splendid marble fire surround, which had been horribly, carelessly chipped at some time, and also painted red, though the paint was now abandoning it in sheets. It housed a gas fire of extremely, not to say life-threateningly, mature vintage. The rest of the room contained an unmade double bed, a large wardrobe with a mirrored door, two basket armchairs, a chest of drawers, and a tatty chaise longue covered with dirty yellow damask. The room was wildly untidy, a mess of clothes, papers, empty bottles, crockery and glasses and other clutter.

Maroon lit a cigarette rather shakily. Slider sat down on the chaise longue and watched her. ‘You must be in trouble if you were thinking of running away from me,’ he said at last. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

‘I s’pose that’s what you’ve come for. Oh Gawd.’ Tears began to leak out of her eyes again, and she puffed rapidly at the cigarette as if that might staunch them. She had been quite good-looking once, but her nose and right cheekbone had been broken at some time, giving her a lopsided look, and though she was only thirty-two or three, drink, cigarettes and her general lifestyle were aging her before her time. She looked entirely West Indian, except for the higher cheekbones and slightly narrower face which was all she had inherited from her grandmother.
Her hair was closely plaited into windrows from front to back, finishing off with eight little plaited tails tagged with red beads. Her eyes were bloodshot and heavy-shadowed as she looked at Slider miserably, but without flinching. ‘I had nothing to do with it, I swear to you. That’s the honest trufe. I’d never do anything to hurt Andy. Christ, you must know that.’

Slider heard, comprehended, and made the mental adjustment without external sign; willing Hart, standing by the door, not to move or look at him. Not Paloma, then. He had been sent here for the flip side: she had information about Andy Cosgrove. ‘If you had nothing to do with it, then you’ve got nothing to fear, have you?’ he said.

She moaned and sat down on the end of the bed. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘Is someone putting the frighteners on you?’ Slider asked. ‘You can’t be scared of me, surely?’

Maroon looked up, and Hart saw that indeed, she wasn’t afraid of him. How did he do it, she wondered? Must be pheremones. Maroon had already forgotten Hart. Her eyes were fixed on Slider with appeal, but she was going to come across. Hart almost held her breath, not to disturb the delicate balance.

‘Oh Gawd, oh poor Andy,’ Maroon said. ‘How is he? Do you know how he is? I tried ringing the hospital, but they wouldn’t tell me nothing. The word on the street is he’s still in a coma. Is that right? Is he going to die?’

‘I don’t know,’ Slider said, feeling his way with a sense of eggshells underfoot. ‘They say he’s stable, but of course they’re very anxious that he should regain consciousness soon. The longer he’s out, the worse it is.’

She put her face in her hands. ‘If I’d known how it would end, I’d never have asked him to help me. But I didn’t know. I thought he’d just – you know – start the ball rolling. Pass it over to your side. I never thought he’d go asking questions himself. Oh, my poor Andy!’

Her poor Andy? Slider’s ears were out on stalks, but he spoke matter-of-factly. ‘How did you and Andy first meet? I’ve often wondered.’

‘When I lived on the estate of course.’

‘The White City Estate?’

‘Yeah. He arrested me for drunk and disorderly outside the
General Smuts one night. I was only nineteen. I was all right then – before I got this.’ By ‘all right’ she meant in looks. She reached up and touched the broken side of her face delicately, as though it still hurt; probably it still did in her psyche. ‘I got let off with a caution, and he come back the next day, when he got off duty.’ She smiled shakily. ‘Wanted to reform me – talk me into going straight. “You could get a job,” he said. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I mean, me! What could I do? I been on the game since I was sixteen. I don’t know nothing else. But he got to me. He was so—’ She hunted for a word.

‘Earnest?’ Slider offered.

‘Yeah. Like that. For him it was like, the whole world was a good guy really, you know? He wasn’t long married then, and his wife was expecting their first. Little Adam.’ Her face softened at the name. Blimey, she knows all the history, Slider thought. ‘He was so happy, he thought he could change the world. Bleeding sunshine merchant. He even had me believing for a bit.’ She nodded, her eyes round with the wonder of it. ‘I tried getting a job, on the checkout down Gateway, just to please him. But I couldn’t stand it, getting up every morning and sitting there all day, bloody customers treating you like dirt, yes-sir-no-sir while the manager looks down your front, dirty old git. And the end of the week, what’d you got to show for it? Peanuts. So I chucked it.’

‘And what did Andy think of that?’

‘Oh, I kept out of trouble in those days, so I didn’t see much of him, unless I happened to see him walking down the street. No, it was later I got to know him really well. After I got away from Billy Yates.’

‘Billy Yates?’

A look of great bitterness crossed her face. ‘Yeah. Him. I’ll tell you about him, but you can’t use it.’ Now she glanced at Hart, aware of her danger. ‘You gotta promise me. He’d have me killed like you’d stamp on a beetle. D’you want to hear it all?’

‘Very much,’ Slider said.

‘Lock that door, then,’ she nodded to Hart, and got up and closed the window and pulled the curtains. Hart put the light on. Maroon crossed the room and put a rap tape on the cassette player, turning it up to a conversation-covering pitch. She was that scared, Slider thought. Hart had taken out her notebook,
but Maroon looked at her sharply. ‘Nothing written down. You can stay if he says. But you can’t use any of this.’

‘I vouch for Hart,’ Slider said. ‘Go on.’

Maroon sat on the bed and crossed her legs, putting the ashtray and cigarettes down beside her. Evidently it was going to be a long story.

‘Billy Yates,’ she said.

Billy Yates, it seemed, not only ran nightclubs, casinos and amusement arcades, he also ran a string of girls.

‘Night after night you lie on your back thinking sixty per cent of this is for Billy Yates. I got quite good at sums. Take a fifteen minute blow-job: you’re gobbling for Billy Yates for nine minutes.’ She made a violent sound of disgust. ‘But you know what was so creepy about him? He never did it himself. If he’d liked girls, if he’d come round now and then and had one on the house – management perks, like his boys used to – you could almost have liked him better. But he’s a cold fish, Billy Yates. He never does it – never done it in his life, if truth be known. And it’s not that he’s the other way, either. He’s not queer. He’s just cold as a corpse. He looks at you like you’re—’ She shook her head. ‘But I’ve seen him with his business pals, and it’s all smiles and big cigars and slap-me-back old pals act. We did this trick once, me and this other girl, Jasmine her name was, at some posh hotel up west, up Lancaster Gate. We was supposed to spend the night with some business contact of Billy Yates’s. See them come in together, you’d think they was brothers, arms round each other, laughing and joking. Only his eyes never smile. He’s making nice to this Arab, and all the time his eyes are going round like a machine, checking everything in the room. Like he’s taking photos. Click click click. The bed, the champagne, the lights, the fruity videos. And he looks at Jasmine and me, click click. That’s all we was to him, two bits of gear for oiling up this deal.’

But it was unusual for Maroon to see Yates. Normally he ran his girls at arm’s length, and that, in its way, was what they resented most. His ‘boys’ did all the hands-on work. They called themselves doormen or drivers or security guards, but Billy Yates just said, ‘I’ll send round one of my boys.’ They were bouncers in the clubs, croupiers in the casinos, managers
in the amusement arcades, and pimps to the girls; they were messengers and chauffeurs and bodyguards and sorters-out of trouble. They collected money and delivered rebukes. They were young, fit, tooled up, and saw themselves as an all-powerful elite. The girls hated and feared them.

‘They could do what they liked, as long as they didn’t damage the goods.’ She shrugged. ‘Some of them just wanted to get their end away, they was no trouble, just get on, do it, get off again. But some of them liked to hurt you. And they worked out ways to hurt you so it didn’t show.’

Maroon worked for Yates’s empire from 1982 until 1988. ‘Six long years,’ she said in a black voice. She was run by one of Yates’s top ‘boys’, Jonah Lafota. ‘We was his best girls, so we got Jonah for our pimp – only you’d never call him that, not if you valued your skin. Our ‘manager’ he called himself. He was supposed to keep us in order, and look after us, keep the customers from damaging us.’ She reached up and touched her face again. ‘It was him did this. I suppose I should thank him, because it got me away from Yates.’ She gave a bark of ironic laughter. ‘I’d kill him if I could,’ she said, ‘that’s how much I want to thank him.’

It had happened one night when she was about to start work, and Jonah had come in and wanted to use her himself. She had protested she had someone waiting. ‘I don’t know what came over me,’ she mused. ‘You didn’t argue with Jonah. But that night, I just turned round and answered him back. I think he was a bit lit up. Suddenly he just lashed out and hit me.’ She demonstrated. ‘Backhand, like he was playing bloody tennis. Sent me right across the room and hit the wall. Knocked me out cold. When I came to, I was in hospital with my face all broken.’ She shook her head. ‘Billy Yates was furious. If it had been anybody but Jonah, I don’t know what he would have done to him. As it was, he just demoted him.’ She shrugged. ‘Me, I was let go. I couldn’t work for Yates with this face.’