The Elephant Girl (Choc Lit) (27 page)

‘What do I ’ave to do?’

‘See those girls there at the back? I want you to find out what they’re looking at.’

‘Thass all?’

‘That’s all, yes.’

‘Gimme a minute.’ The youth dragged the hose back into the yard, and Jason followed him just inside the fence in case Helen and Charlie came out while he was waiting. A few minutes later the youth returned holding a cloth and a Tupperware of water. ‘I pretended I was, like, wiping the tables,’ he said, clearly pleased with his own cleverness. ‘They didn’t even no’ice.’

‘Did you see what it was?’

‘Money first.’

Jason handed him two crumpled twenty pound notes and a tenner, which were crammed into a jeans pocket faster than lightning.

‘It’s some kind of wooden book, but it’s like a painting as well, know what I mean?’

‘Not quite. Did you see the motif?’

‘Eh?’

‘What was on the painting?’

‘Something you might see in church. Like a saint.’

Like a saint, Jason thought. Grinning, for the first time he actually found himself thanking his father for his expensive education. It sounded like they could be looking at an icon. It was the right size for the parcel he’d glimpsed in Helen’s hand, and it fitted with the Russian connection. But was it significant? He had no idea, but wondered what had made them open it. Couriers didn’t normally open the parcels they were carrying, and he’d even heard of some who’d carried drugs or cash without knowing it.

He could hardly ask them. With a sigh he got back on the bike and drove in the direction of Tower Bridge. There was one other person he
could
ask.

Ms Barclay pursed her lips when he entered the inner sanctum. ‘We’re in a foul mood today. Be warned.’

Jason grinned. ‘I’ll call you if there’s any trouble. He respects you.’

‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

‘Wouldn’t you like to know? In the meantime, could you look after this for me, please?’ He passed her the motorcycle helmet. ‘I can do without a cross-examination.’

‘Very wise.’

Derek was on the phone. He held up a hand to stop him from interrupting, and Jason dropped into one of the squishy armchairs, content to wait. The office hadn’t changed since the last time he was here apart from a vase of strongly scented roses in pride of place on the desk. Ms Barclay, he thought, probably from her garden, although he doubted if his father could tell the difference between home-grown and shop-bought. That woman could tame lions.

‘What do you want?’ Derek snapped when he’d finished on the phone.

‘Nice to see you too, Dad.’

Derek smiled, of sorts. ‘How are you, son?’

‘Very well, but I didn’t come here to discuss my health. You’re a collector of rare and expensive items.’ He flung out his arms to indicate his father’s office in general: the paintings, the statue, the desk with its gilded ink stand and period-piece paraphernalia. ‘Tell me what you know about icons.’

‘Turkish? Greek? Russian?’

‘Yes, Russian,’ Jason replied.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Market. How they get into this country. Authenticity. Anything else which might be relevant.’

Derek’s eyebrows rose, and he looked amused. ‘Market is good, not saturated, but they’re expensive. Collectors’ items only. They come from Russia, obviously, or other countries belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church. Value depends on age and condition. The older they are, the more they’ll fetch. The Byzantine ones are incredibly valuable. But that’s all stuff you can look up on Wikipedia. Why come to me?’

‘I want to know about the darker side of the trade.’

His father laughed. ‘And you think I know?’

‘Well, don’t you?’ He held his father’s eyes.

Derek rose and went to mix himself a drink from a silver tray on a wall-mounted cabinet. Like the rest of the furniture in his father’s office, the cabinet was sleek and modern. One of the doors concealed a mini fridge, and his father pulled out an aircraft-sized can of tonic water.

‘Drink?’

‘A tonic without the gin would be very nice, thanks.’ It was a delaying tactic, and Jason decided to lull his father into a false sense of security by giving him time to consider his answer. He’d get it soon enough.

His father handed him a tumbler of tonic water with ice, poured himself a drink, then sat back in his office chair with his hands behind his head. The posture signalled superiority, but Jason saw through that too. It struck him that he’d managed to rattle his father’s cage, and that he was trying hard not to show it. He sipped his tonic to hide his own smirk.

Interesting.

‘What if it was really old?’

‘Well, there are rules and regulations about that. Russia tends to hold onto her treasures these days. Anything over a hundred years old is hard to come by.’

‘And if I wanted to buy a really old one anyway? Like a Byzantine one.’

Derek heaved a sigh. ‘You could buy one which has been “authenticated” to be newer than that. There’s always a way.’ He sent Jason a hard look. ‘Thinking of starting a collection?’

‘Yeah, with what?’

‘Or is it another Russian you’re interested in?’

‘As far as I’m aware she’s not for sale.’

‘Everyone has their price, even Little Orphan Annie,’ said Derek. ‘Yes, I’ve done my homework,’ he added in response to Jason’s surprise. ‘Now, if that’s all …?’

The realisation that her mother may have died because of dirty money was strangely other-worldly, and Helen made one mistake after another in her work. Bill didn’t hide his frustration. ‘Come on, come on, this is no time to hang about. We need to mark up this lot ’ere before the end of the day.’ They were working on a consignment of Chinese vases which were being auctioned off the following morning.

Shutting out Bill’s grumbling, Helen lifted one of the vases out of a packaging crate and turned it over in her hands. According to the accompanying notes, it originated from China,
in the style of
Ming Dynasty antiques, but if Charlie was right, it could be an original. Not being an antiques expert, she had no way of telling.

She was still studying it when Letitia walked past the door to the packing room in a swish of Shantung silk and clattering stilettos.

On a whim she let the vase drop, and it smashed on the concrete floor.

‘Oops,’ she said. ‘God, I’m so sorry.’

The room fell silent, and Bill stared at her, mouth opening and closing like a goldfish. Letitia stopped, turned, and reappeared in the packing room, the clattering heels echoing in the silence.

Helen stuck out her chin. ‘Just as well it was only a copy.’

‘A copy?’ A small muscle worked in Letitia’s jaw.

‘It says so in the paperwork. But you can take the money out of my pay anyway.’

Letitia cleared her throat. ‘No, there’s no need for that. We’re insured against human error, among other things. Have to be in this business.’ She looked at the shattered vase on the floor, drew herself up, then smiled coolly. ‘I’d better call the owner. The overall responsibility is mine.’

She left the room, and the scent of her perfume lingered in the air with a sense of doom.

Bill grabbed Helen roughly and dragged her to the staff room, then slammed the door. ‘What’s your game, girl?’ he hissed. ‘What are you playing at?’

‘It’s no game.’

He shook her hard, then let go of her. ‘If you know what’s good for you, you stay well away. You hear?’

Rubbing her arm, Helen winced. The old geezer had fingers of steel.

But it wasn’t steel which tinged his voice, but regret, when he added, ‘Said the same to your mother a long time ago, but would she listen?’

‘What do you know, Bill?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

‘Bullshit.’

He glared at her and stabbed her in the chest with his finger. ‘And neither do you.’

‘This is important to me,’ she said, crossing her arms. ‘I’ve waited all my life to find out what happened to my mother and why. I’m not going to stop now. If you don’t tell me what I need to know, I’ll just keep digging until I find out for myself.’

‘I bleedin’ well hope not. ’Cos you might just be digging your own grave.’

‘Is my aunt a fence?’

Bill sent her a startled look. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘Well, is she?’ she repeated, cross with Charlie for planting the idea in her head in the first place.

‘First and foremost, your aunt’s a successful business woman,’ he replied with a pained expression.

‘And apart from that?’

‘Many things, I suppose. She has a good standing in the industry. A lot of contacts, as you’d expect, some of them from the, shall we say, shadier side of life. Sometimes she bends the rules. But a fence … that’s a bit strong. You’d better be careful throwing words like that around. Someone might take it amiss.’

‘I’ve got nothing to lose.’

Bill didn’t comment. Instead he said, ‘I’d like you to stay in here for the rest of the day until I figure out what to do with you. Can’t have you in the packing room if you’re going to be Miss Butterfingers. It’d be my head on the block if you break something else.’

‘In here?’ Helen protested. ‘But there’s nothing to do, not even a magazine to read!’

‘You can tidy up.’

‘No way!’

‘Or you can go home for the day.’

Jutting out her chin, Helen weighed up the humiliation of cleaning the staff room or having to leave and miss something important. In the end she settled for the staff room.

‘Thought not,’ he said smugly. ‘Tidying up it is.’

Helen mouthed an expletive behind his retreating back.

By the door he turned. ‘Here’s what I think. Everyone’s got something to lose.’

Helen began clearing up, wrinkling her nose at the overflowing bin, the dregs of tea and curdled milk left at the bottom of mugs, and a table top which surely hadn’t seen a wet cloth in years.

She thought of what Bill had said, that everyone had something to lose. Of course they did, but there were degrees of loss. Losing her mother and her whole world at the age of five and never having had a real substitute, his words didn’t have much impact. Unless he meant her losing her life.

Her mother was concerned about something suspicious going on twenty years ago. If she was killed because of it, that would exonerate Fay, wouldn’t it? Or had Fay, as Aggie suggested, played into someone else’s hands?

Grimly she began washing the dirty mugs.

Bill was just a cranky old coot. She’d met plenty like him over the years. People who liked things just so because the slightest change in their usual routine made them feel unsettled. Fair enough, he was cross with her for breaking a vase, because she didn’t doubt Letitia would hold him partly responsible for that, telling him to supervise his staff better.

She picked up Charlie’s jacket, which had fallen off the back of the chair where she’d flung it earlier, and hung it on a coat hanger. Something hard fell out of one of the pockets and clattered to the floor. She bent down and saw that it was a knife.

And not just any old knife.

Stunned, she stared at the blue-handled paper knife. It was one of Arseni’s Fabergé knives, and how it had ended up in Charlie’s pocket was an easy guess. A laugh escaped her. Charlie was too much sometimes, but her quick fingers could work to Helen’s advantage. Ever since she’d spotted the knives in his display cabinet, she’d been itching to examine them.

The chunky lapis lazuli handle had a good weight to it, and the leaf detail on the end was worn thin from the many hands which must have held the knife in the last century. The blade, made from white gold she guessed, was unexpectedly sharp.

Curiously, it wasn’t a particularly good stabbing weapon, something she discovered when she tested it on the sponge scourer in the washing up bowl. Her hand slid down the handle towards the sharp knife edge, and it was clear that the force one would need to drive the knife into the throat of a person might be enough for the murderer to do themselves a minor injury.

You’d have to wear gloves, another indication that her mother’s murder had been premeditated, even carefully planned. Fay, her brain addled by drugs at the time, didn’t strike her as a meticulous planner, more likely she was so unhinged that she simply grabbed the nearest thing she could find.

To her surprise, the act of stabbing the sponge brought home to her that even though she wanted to know the truth about her mother’s death, she was now able to step back from the personal loss and regard it from a more investigative perspective. This had to be a good thing, surely?

The paper knives puzzled her. There had been four in total, two belonging to her uncle, and the other two to her mother. Mimi had given one to Fay. Aggie was adamant Mimi wouldn’t have sold her own, and it wasn’t on Sweetman’s inventory list. One had been at the crime scene, then disappeared, and the fact that Fay’s husband could confirm Fay’s knife was missing from their home had, combined with Helen’s testimony, been enough to convict her.

She weighed it in her hand. If Fay had been set up, it would have to have been by someone close enough to both Mimi and Fay to know that Fay had a knife like this. Arseni might have, if Mimi had told him that she was breaking up the family set, and Fay’s husband certainly did. Who else? Letitia and Mimi worked together and must have seen each other socially despite their mutual dislike. Perhaps Letitia knew. Ruth might have known too. Then there was Bill and Mrs Deakin, although they’d said nothing but nice things about her mother.

And there was Aggie.

She thought back to their conversation, when her grandmother talked about Mimi’s yellow curtains. Had she mentioned knowing back then about Mimi giving one of the knives away? Or was that something Aggie had learned during the court case? Helen couldn’t remember now. But if Aggie had known, as an antiques dealer she’d probably have hated the idea of the set being broken up. Why
did
her mother give away something so precious? And who might Aggie have told? Even if it had only been a chance remark to the wrong person, it could account for Aggie’s bad conscience. Now that Helen had come to know her better, she hated the idea, but had to accept it was possible.