Come Clean (1989) (25 page)

Tacette did some ruminating for a while. ‘What I mean, look at me and Daphne, coming up to a silver wedding in no time at all. That’s how the years go.’

‘True. Big celebration?’

‘You bet.’

‘Nice,’ Desmond said. ‘When’s that?’

‘Next month. We would have invited you, naturally, and your good lady, goes without saying, but I know your protocol wouldn’t allow anything like that.’

‘Probably a bit difficult,’ Desmond agreed.

‘I understand. Even at a lower level, I mean tonight, what I’d like, of course, is to have a bottle of Krug on the house sent to your table.’

Desmond said at once: ‘Thank you, but –’

‘Oh, I know it’s an absurdity even to think of your accepting any such thing, worry not.’ Tacette nodded gravely as if he regretted this, but mightily approved of police
incorruptibility.

Desmond said: ‘Well, Leo –’

‘Who can ignore the Stalker story, outrageous as his treatment might be? And we’ll make sure you get a proper, signed receipt and are charged for every last mouthful! Sorry to sound
so damn brutal and grasping, Mrs Iles, but I know the pressures people in your husband’s position are under. Might I sit down for a moment, Mr Iles? It’s possible I have something of
interest.’ He did not wait for a reply and drew up a chair. Possibly he felt exhausted after so much conversation. ‘Please, you carry on eating as if I weren’t here, Mrs
Iles.’

‘This wise, Leo?’ Desmond asked.

‘I’ll be brief. Only two or three matters.’ He glanced around nervously and she realized then that police were not the only ones who had to take care about the company they
were seen in.

Leo did not speak at once, though, and the delay was more than his usual hesitancy. Eventually, he said: ‘I don’t know whether it’s all right to be telling you these things in
front of Mrs Iles. I mean from the point of view of distressing her, at a meal, and so on.’

‘Let’s see how it goes, shall we, Leo?’ Desmond replied. ‘If Sarah’s here it looks less like a briefing, only social.’

Leo nodded. ‘Perhaps.’ He still did not seem comfortable, though, as if he thought there were things she should not hear. ‘This is the first item then: Panicking Ralph has
taken a beating, I mean, a real beating, possible deep damage, internal.’

Sarah forced herself to keep eating and to keep looking at Leo and Desmond in turn, though she was badly thrown.

‘This is this afternoon,’ Leo went on. ‘My other boy, Gerald, he has a contact, a lad who’s done a bit of nursing far back, and he feeds us certain facts now and then. He
was called over to the Monty and found Ralph not too good at all. He says Ralph might have gone under if he’d taken only a little more of it.’

‘Robbery?’ Desmond asked. ‘He surprised someone?’

‘Not as I understand. No sign of a turn-over and Ralph’s not making a complaint.’

‘Ralph doesn’t make complaints, not to us,’ Desmond said.

‘No mention of robbery to Gerald’s contact.’

‘What then?’

‘Mr Iles, we can both makes guesses. Some sort of disciplining?’

‘What does that mean?’ Sarah forced herself to ask. She tried for a puzzled, innocent smile, as if learning all this for the first time.

‘He’s gone wrong somewhere,’ Leo replied. ‘Offended. The thing is, who is he working for?’

‘Yes?’ Desmond said.

‘Not me. I can tell you that.’

‘Offended how?’ Desmond asked.

‘Obviously, that’s the problem,’ Leo said. A waiter came and asked about drinks. ‘Can I at least buy you brandies?’

Desmond said: ‘We’ll buy you one. Put them on the bill.’

‘If you say,’ Leo replied.

‘So who
is
he working for?’ Desmond said.

‘Benny?’

‘You’re not sure?’

‘No, not sure.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Not sure of that either. You know Ralph: free-lance, small-time business commissions now and then. Consultancy matters you could call it, when needed, like the royal family’s
gynaecologist.’

‘Sure,’ Desmond said.

Sarah felt some relief for a moment. She finished her cassoulet. The waiter brought the brandies.

‘This develops,’ Leo went on. ‘The nurse lad is patching up Ralph and one of his kids comes into the room and asks about some woman who was there in the afternoon – who
left, so it seems, just before the nurse arrived. The kid says the woman was talking to them in the yard, asking their names and what have you, discussing their school, and the child wants to know
who she was. But Ralph gets ratty – he’s lying there, bandages and lint trailing all ways from him like a maypole, but he throws a real rage, saying he told this woman not to talk to
them.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Desmond said. ‘She’s part of the attack? Hangs about talking to kids?’

‘I don’t get it either. But something’s going on, Mr Iles. Our nursing lad can’t ask questions, just keeps an eye open.’

‘Ralph knocking off someone’s woman? Is this a vengeance thing?’

‘So why is she still there afterwards?’

‘You ought to be a detective, Leo.’

‘The kid says she’s a very nice lady, but Ralph is still shouting his head off about it. You know Ralphy: there’s his family, and there’s the rest of the world, and he
thinks they ought to be kept apart. Sanitized they call it?’

‘So, what else, Leo?’ Desmond asked.

‘Else?’

‘You said two or three items.’

‘No, just about Ralph.’

Sarah had a feeling he had changed his mind and decided to say no more while she was present. In a little while, Leo stood, laboriously made his farewells, and went to the pay desk to join his
wife and son.

‘So, was that a powerful revelation?’ she asked Desmond. ‘This man, Ralph?’

‘Not much we can do about it unless he wants to bring charges, which he won’t. An internal business matter, like a death in the Kremlin.’

‘He seemed to think it pointed somewhere.’

‘Yes, where, Sarah?’

‘God, I don’t know.’

‘Nor me. Nor him. These people, they love to stir, that’s all.’ His face became impenetrably shuttered and the topic was closed. She and Desmond talked only gossip for the rest
of the meal.

As they were leaving, Tacette came out to the foyer with his wife to say goodbye. ‘Daphne so much wanted to meet Mrs Iles,’ he said. Sarah saw Desmond immediately grow troubled again
as the connections and phoney affability here mounted. He would feel he was being deliberately sucked in.

Dressed in a white silk trouser suit which must have cost a handful, Daphne Tacette began to talk chummily to Sarah about food and the quirks of customers. Round-faced, dyed-dark, full of life,
she seemed pleasant enough, unpolished but bright: who the hell expected polish from the wife of a very heavy, career villain? Her conversation was salty and vivid, and Sarah could see why Leo
might not be accustomed to saying much. Sarah found chatting with her a treat.

After a few minutes, though, it occurred to her that Daphne might have been brought out deliberately to take her aside, while Leo talked again to Desmond, this time one-to-one. Leo drew him out
of earshot, and Desmond was listening carefully, his face now not so much troubled as blank: again that closed-off, professional look he could put on when keeping his reactions private.

‘So you’ve a big day coming?’ Sarah said to Daphne.

‘Oh, the silver wedding? Frankly, kid, I’ll be glad when it’s over. So many preparations, and people to be kept sweet. “If you ask her you’ve got to ask her mother
as well” – you know the carry-on.’

‘But grand to have all the family and friends close around you for the day.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes, I suppose that really will be nice, though half of them bore the eyebrows off of me. And maybe it really is something, twenty-five years together. Christ knows how. Matter
of keeping your loathings locked away, wouldn’t you say? But it gets no easier, that’s what amazes me. There’s still some good, tough, brainy part of you piping up to ask,
“What the hell am I doing with this guy still, putting my life on a plate?” You know what I’m getting at? But, obviously, you’ve got a distance to go before your
silver.’

‘Quite a way.’

‘Going to make it?’

‘Who can tell?’

‘And who cares?
Want
to make it? What’s so brilliant about a quarter of a century in the same bed, more or less, same hands, more or less, digging their nails into your bottom
three nights a week? So, where’s he digging them the other four? And then set sail for the gold? Jesus.’

Sarah shrugged.

‘I’m prying? If you like, tell me to get lost.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘Somebody else in the frame, dear?’

‘Twenty-five years is a very long time.’

‘Yes, I am prying. But lucky you. Hang on to it, regardless.’

‘Well, I hope it’s a wonderful party, and everything goes beautifully. I know you’re going to have a really great time.’

‘Yes. I sound cynical, but really, love, I’m thrilled to bits.’

On the way home, Sarah asked: ‘More disclosures? Big after-thoughts from Leo?’

‘Afraid not. As a tipster, he falls dismally short.’

She said: ‘But he looked really intense.’

‘He was. About nothing much, though.’

‘Honestly, Des? He had nothing else interesting?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I’ll say this for you, when you lie you do give it all you’ve got. Ever thought of joining the police?’

Benny Loxton said. ‘Some of my boys was real anxious about this meeting, Leo, I mean, coming here alone and leaving it to you to decide where.’ Loxton felt a bit
anxious himself, although he was armed. ‘They can be fretful, my people.’

The bugger smiled very big and grand over that. ‘They don’t understand about you and me, Benny – the old days, school, all those years. Good God, this talk is something agreed
on at Miss Binns’ funeral. Don’t they see what that means to you and me?’

‘How could they? They’re bloody kids. They got no history.’ They were sitting opposite each other in Tacette’s golf club. God, Leo was a crude-looking item – all
that nose and the jumpy eyes, real common. He could have been an MP, or working on the rubbish trucks.

‘They think everything’s so simple, Benny. Way they see it, there’s friends, there’s enemies. And friends stick together and enemies try to hurt and kill each other. They
wouldn’t realize that enemies, well, so-called enemies, you and me, could have a great deal of mutual respect, and might want to come to an accommodation for old times’ sake.’

Benny said: ‘Vision’s what they haven’t got even a spot of. They can be good boys every other way, the best, but vision? Not a chance.’

‘I remember from school, that text in a frame by Miss Binns’ room: “Without vision the people perish.” I didn’t know what it meant, then, but –’

‘There you are. Vision’s top priority. Vision’s the difference between humanity and the animals, as I see it. A horse or an elk, have it got vision? Not that I heard, Leo.
Churchill or Bobby Bartok with his music or them lads who did the bank through sewers in France – what people like that got first and last is great vision. Think of Columbus, Ronny
Biggs.’

Somehow, Leo had wangled a membership of this place, out in the back of beyond, and with big clouds of flaky grime from an industrial estate blowing right across the greens, you could watch it,
like telly interference. But a decent enough spot with very strong, old-fashioned, wood toilet seats and the chairs in this room real green leather.

Phil Macey had said Loxton was a fool to come and that he was offering a target. Well, Macey would. Even this morning he had still been arguing. Phil saw threats from all ways. He wouldn’t
turn his back on his mother, and them pictures on the screen of the Metro in the dock had made him worse than ever. In a way, you could understand it. Macey had come right out and yelled it was
stupid to be so casual and easy-going about this meeting. Sometimes, he talked like he ran the fucking operation, but he meant well, mostly. If you bought a savage for your team don’t ask him
to act like baby powder.

‘Look, I got to go to this,’ Loxton had said. ‘Leo got to believe things are coming all right between us, like almost harmony, nothing brewing. He get a whiff of anything and
that silver wedding do is somewhere else, with everyone on the look-out, and we’re finished. That Metro – it could worry him. He got to be convinced everything’s nice.’

‘So, how did they find that bloody car, anyway?’ Macey had asked. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘I don’t like it, either,’ Loxton said. ‘But they got no identification yet.’

‘They will,’ Macy replied.

‘Let’s wait till they do before we start worrying. In any case, I got to play Leo along.’

‘Well, of course,’ Macey replied. ‘Yes, you got to keep up a show, but on ground he picks, Benny? No. A time he picks? No. We got to have participation in the planning, we got
to demand parity of influence.’

‘It’ll be all right,’ Loxton had said. ‘I can feel it.’

‘Yeah, well feeling it, I don’t say that don’t add up to nothing at all, Benny. You got a great way of getting to things intuitive, I see it plenty of times, and it’s
great, why this outfit is where it is today, no question. But certain risks – well, one got to invest due forethought, make everything as neat and non-hazard as it can be.’

‘My feeling is Leo really wants this agreement, Phil. He’s getting to feel old. He’s not old, only my age, but some it gets to sooner. So, there isn’t going to be no
funny work at the meeting.’

‘Suppose he’ve had a whisper?’

‘What whisper?’

‘Suppose he’ve had a whisper about what we got lined up for the silver wedding? The surprise. I mean, everybody knows they’re having a silver wedding. Just a small whisper
would make him worried.’

‘He can’t have had no whisper.’

‘We hope he can’t, of course we do. But if he had. We so sure Justin never spoke to anyone? We got to that boy early, very early, but was it early
enough
? He got a girlfriend
we can’t find, he got a mother, there’s them people in the Monty. This meeting Leo’s setting up could be for them to get in first. You remember what we spoke about before,
what’s known as pre-emptive? Leo saying to himself, I’ll wipe this sod out before he wipes me and mine out? That’s the danger.’