Patchwork Man (33 page)

There was just one more twisty I’d already bargained for but hadn’t expected to come from Kat. It arrived in a horrified phone message left on my ansaphone whilst I was ruminating over how badly I was about to be screwed over in front of Ma’s grave.

‘Lawrence, I think you need to know this before it breaks anywhere else. Danny’s family have all been tested for the faulty genes and there’s a bit of bother with the results. The hospital rang me this afternoon because they were concerned about the impact on him if he gets to find out before we’ve worked out what to do about it. Terry Hewson is completely clear, and so are the other kids – in fact they don’t even have the same blood group. That means he can’t be Danny’s father. I can’t get hold of Kimberley at the moment ...’

The message rambled on longer about legalities and parental responsibility but I switched off after hearing the salient point. It was too late to ring the hospital to find out my own test results – which presumably would also be back now, but maybe I didn’t need to after all. It seemed from what I now knew, there was potentially another candidate for Danny’s other parent – and another explanation for why he was baying for blood. Half- brother and unacknowledged son, both being destroyed by Jaggers – why wouldn’t he? And so the circle was complete, apart from the price to be extracted from me. I had to find that out from the man himself, not his messenger this time.

I
t was surprisingly difficult to reach the message himself – Jaggers. I didn’t want to contact him through Win. That felt like doing things his way and I wouldn’t ever do that again. In the end I resorted to the only way I knew would get to him. It took forty-eight hours for the note I hand-delivered to the reception desk of FFF to get a response. I wondered how many of those hours had been in the delivering, and how many in the deliberation of said response. They didn’t show in the reply. It was brief and to the point, as mine had been. A time, a place and a date. A meet.

I drove there so I could easily leave when I wanted to. No waiting around for non-existent taxis – apart from which I didn’t want anyone else seeking a ticket to the party or tracking my path there. The area was seedy – back-street Finchley – and from the outside the building looked like any other run-down tenement in the area. It was the peephole in the door that gave it away. I knocked and waited, casting glances over my shoulder at the passers-by and the tramp on the corner. Look-out maybe? The tramp had a small terrier-like dog with him, and was perched on a dirty red sleeping bag, cap out and with the usual begging letter scrawled on mud-spattered paper perched behind it, but the dog’s collar was new. The area smelt of stale urine and despair.

I turned back to the door, black paint peeling and chipped. The doorstep had been painted red – brick paint. It reminded me of how Ma had scrubbed the stairs up to our flat as part of her weekly routine. When they were dry they were dull, blood brown. When she was scrubbing them the wet patches were bright red – fresh blood red. Why had she bothered? By the time we kids had tramped up and down them, Pop had dropped his fag ash en route to the bookies and numerous other purveyors of gossip, sugar borrowers and visitors with what passed for neighbourliness had all made use of them, the clean veneer was inevitably back to how it had been an hour or so before. What a pointless task. Surely she must have seen the futility of it – the futility of life itself in that environment? Or maybe I was just biased now and current events had wrought an inability in me to see any good in my childhood world. Sarah wasn’t so bad – and nor in their ways were Jill, Emm and Binnie. We were just worlds apart and now the gap between us was unlikely to ever be filled by common experience. And I deserved and accepted their hostility – it was my reward for years of abandonment. The only bridge was Danny, and I had still to decide whether to cross it.

The peephole was filled by a distorted eye and it reminded me of Mary and her bizarre world, with its own peephole through the hanging birds. The look-out had obviously done his job satisfactorily. I passed muster and the door swung open to a narrow entrance and banged shut immediately behind me. The corridor was gloomy and the walls painted a dreary brown, but there was sufficient light spilling from the doorway at the end of it to see that my companion wasn’t Jaggers.

‘ID?’ he demanded. He was muscle-bound, tattooed and smelt of cheap aftershave. I felt around in my pocket and came away with nothing.

‘I’m here by invitation.’

‘Don’t give a shit, mate. ID.’ The only thing I had vaguely resembling a passport was Margaret’s birth certificate – or maybe I should say Molly’s birth certificate – ages old. I flashed it under thug’s nose and it worked like ‘open sesame’. I followed him into the room at the end of the corridor to find it was an old-fashioned snooker hall. Three full-sized tables complete with overhanging lights graced its length with a bar at one end and some rickety looking tables and chairs. It was speak-easy days personified. One the tables contained a huddle deep into a card game, a pile of crinkled tens and fives heaped in its centre, ringed by full ash trays and poker faces. They’d obviously been at it all night judging by the five o’clock shadows the unshaven ones sported and the under-eye bags they all nursed along with their un-played hands. One or two others lounged at the bar, whisky-deep and oblivious of me.

My attention wasn’t on them though. It was on the man leaning casually against the central snooker table, smiling sardonically at me as I approached. The same crawling terror from childhood almost overwhelmed me. I struggled to control it – and the inclination to turn on my heel and run. I gritted my teeth, reminding myself I’d risen above it – and him – once. I could do it again. More so now. I was a man. My neck crawled, anticipating the tightening twist of polythene round it, and my chest went into spasm, lungs clamouring for air. I breathed in deeply, subconsciously measuring the millilitres of oxygen filling them like I had as a child. One long deep breath was better than short staccato ones. I continued walking towards him, every pace tightening my chest muscles to screaming pitch, until I was within a few paces of him. He didn’t move, just studied me laconically with a half-smile.

‘Long time, no see,’ he greeted me when I was within an arm’s length of him. There was no resemblance between him and Margaret up close. I’d assumed the disparity between their ages in the photo, and its bad quality had masked it.

‘How I would have preferred it to stay,’ I replied, consciously steadying my voice.
Don’t let him see. You did it once. Do it now.
As ice-cool as ever – his elegance was discordant against the backdrop of sleaze and the underbelly of society. He was dressed informally but with a style I knew would run into thousands if I cared to tot up the cost. Savile Row at least. And perfectly relaxed. We were roughly the same age but he easily looked ten years younger – but then the excesses of brandy and insomnia hadn’t been doing me any favours lately. I could see a different family resemblance though. His eyes clearly had that similarity to the old judge that I’d missed before. The anger inside was like a cold hard rod of steel, piercing me from head to gut.

‘Sorry to hear that. We do good business when we do it – you and I.’

‘Hardly what I would describe it as.’ I hoped the rattle in my throat sounded like sarcasm, not fear.

‘Well, we always did view things a little differently, didn’t we?’ He laughed dismissively. ‘Do you play?’ He indicated the snooker table, and without waiting for me to reply, continued. ‘I do. Let’s have a game.’

‘It’s not really my forte.’

‘Oh my dear chap, don’t worry about that. You won’t win – no-one wins against me. It’s why I usually play against myself. No-one else is sufficient of a challenge, but let’s give you a sporting chance, shall we?’ He threw a cue at me and I caught it awkwardly, twisting my thumb backwards doing so. ‘You can go first. White to red and split the pack. Then you can have first pot – if you can make it.’

‘I told you I’m not a player.’

He stared at me before laughing harshly. ‘Oh forgive me, but you are – you’re very much a player, but never mind. I’ll get us under way.’ He lunged into position and sent the triangular cluster of red balls spinning across the table. They collided with each other in a volley of clicks, and three dropped snugly into pockets before the rest settled, splayed across the green baize like splotches of Margaret’s blood. He potted the black as swiftly and waited for the hovering attendant to white glove it back into position. ‘Shall I continue?’ He asked.

‘Shall we talk?’ I countered.

‘We can talk
and
play. What’s your move?’

‘Molly.’

‘Yes?’

‘Your sister Molly.’

‘Yes, the lovely Molly – oh wait, that’s Margaret to you, isn’t it?’ He threw a glance my way before potting the next red. ‘Of course I know you’ve worked that one out. So what? What else have you to tell me?’

‘Win and Kimberley.’

‘Dear Win. Yes. Such a faithful henchman. And Kimmy, his
delightful
sister.’ His mouth twisted in derision. ‘Your delightful sister too? Have you divested yourself of the paternity claim yet?’

‘Is that relevant?’

‘No; but it’s fun, isn’t it? Really got you applying the grey matter. Maybe it will prove to be true – or maybe not. What do you think? Are you a betting man? Oh no, you don’t
play
, do you? Molly thought she could get you involved by appealing to your fear of the past. I knew it was your potential future that would worry you more. Romantic soul, isn’t she?’ I thought of Margaret and her manipulation. Under no circumstances would I have called her business-like use of me romantic. He smiled lop-sidedly. ‘However, we managed it pretty well between us, wouldn’t you say? All the little twists and turns.’

‘So what is it exactly that you wanted to manage?’

‘Well, it generally all boils down to cold hard cash, doesn’t it my dear chap? Sadly it’s no different here – as you’ve no doubt also surmised.’

‘The money from the will.’

He turned his back on me and potted a red, the black, another red and the pink in succession. He surveyed the table, and re-chalked his cue. The tiger’s head ring on his little finger winked its tawny eyes at me. He nodded, smiling. ‘Yes, the money from the will. That has become somewhat important over the years.’

‘Over ten years?’

He laughed appreciatively. ‘You do catch on well after a bit of help, don’t you?’ He sighed and put the cue down on the side of the table. ‘Your go. I’ve hogged the limelight long enough. Let’s look at your star turn, shall we?’

‘You employed us on the Wilhelm Johns case.’

‘Yes,’

‘You primed all the evidence to point to him and buried anything that didn’t. That’s why our brief stipulated we carried out no independent research to verify evidence.’

‘Did I?’

‘How did you get the police to go along with it?’

His expression was surprised. ‘The police go along with it? Who said they did? But if they did, it would be very simple, my dear chap; everyone has a price. You merely have to know what it is. Take you, for instance. Your price then wasn’t in pound signs, it was in recognition – success. As long as you won and won big, your future was made. The case paid for your future, like my uncle did in his will. He arranged it as a form of a loan, didn’t he? Now I simply require the loan back – nothing underhand, just good business.’

‘Why wait for so long?’

He paused melodramatically, as if considering my question. ‘I’m a patient soul.’ He laughed, watching me. ‘No? The truth is that to begin with I didn’t need it. It was a nice little investment for the future I didn’t need to realise immediately. My dear devious uncle left sufficient of his fortune to my father to keep us going quite comfortably, but my father became financially decrepit in his decline – for all his bluster and bravado.’

‘He looked sharp enough in the portrait.’

‘The one in his office? Yes, I heard you paid a visit.’ He laughed. ‘Skilful artist. Didn’t include the alcohol-shakes or the failing memory. A figurehead. We agreed that was what he’d paint. A figurehead with no substance. It took years for him to become that bad though, and my own ventures were going tolerably well in the meantime. It all changed in the early eighties unfortunately. I had a number of US interests. The depression and the banking crisis there made rather an impact on how I did business. I had to tap Daddy and found he’d been leaking cash for years. There was hardly any left in the reservoir by then. Something had to be done, and a swift review determined it should be you.’

‘You’ve been planning this for over ten years?’

‘Oh, only mildly. I wouldn’t even have put it as strongly as planning to begin with – more like taking out an insurance policy. The case locked you in, and Molly kept a hold on the key. I must admit it made me feel very lazy – letting you work whilst I played, but you were such a workhorse, weren’t you, Kenny.’ I flinched involuntarily at the name. He smiled cruelly. ‘Oh my apologies – its Lawrence these days, isn’t it? Success bloated you like a leech sucking blood; blood money.’ He laughed again. ‘Ah, money – the root of all evil.’

‘The love of it,’ I corrected sarcastically.

‘Indeed. Ever correct,
Lawrence
– and so self-righteous. It becomes you.’ The urge to tell him to fuck off was almost uncontrollable but personal satisfaction was something I would have to shelve under the circumstances. It was plain that as his
insurance policy
I was strung higher than a hangman’s noose.

‘Thanks for the compliment,’ I countered nastily. The shackles of childhood receded with anger.

He grinned good-humouredly. ‘I suppose you want the rest? They always do – the little pawns in the game. There was really no need to do anything for a long time. Molly siphoned off what we needed, through your lovely
expensive
house renovation project once you handed over management of the bank account. All those bill payments we had to divert before you gave in – really, you can be tedious at times. And so it would have continued, no doubt, if Molly hadn’t become a little too ambitious. Those charities –
so
expensive to run, even if they did do a perfectly splendid clean-up job with the dirty money. We needed an investor, a big one. One who would invest everything, and everything you had seemed sufficient – since you did originally acquire it with my help.’