The Garden Party (5 page)

‘No matter,' Yewdall added, ‘we don't take it personally.' She showed the publican her ID. ‘May as well show you the warrant card anyway, just to keep things right and proper. We aren't here to arrest anyone.' She slid her ID into her handbag.

‘Good, that really would not be good for business.' The publican continued to smile. ‘Not very good at all.'

‘We're looking for a geezer called Holst,' Ainsclough explained, ‘Des . . . or Desmond Holst, works, or used to work as a builder . . . a bricklayer especially.'

‘Used.' The publican stopped smiling. ‘He used to be a good brickie so they say, a much sought-after trowel in his day.'

‘Used?' Ainsclough echoed.

‘Used . . . the Almighty called Des's name and number about a year ago . . . June now . . . so more than a year. It was the winter before last when Des was planted. Around Christmas time it was, because some old geezer made some remark about what a fine present it made for his old ball and chain . . . but Pearl . . . she's a foot soldier. She just planted her old man and got on with life. But Des, Des the builder, he was one of my regulars was old Des. He was a nice enough sort; seemed to get a bit quieter in himself in the last years of his life . . . not coming in as often, not drinking as much . . . but still a good regular and it's the regulars that keep a pub going. Regulars spend two hours in here, drink six pints and then amble home and never cause trouble . . . never cause no bother, like all my customers. Get very few strangers in here; nice local pub and we like it that way.'

‘Good for you.' Ainsclough glanced once again round the pub.

‘Yes, I'm still ticking over when other pubs are closing, so I don't complain.' The publican drummed his fingers on the bar. ‘Don't complain at all.'

‘Is his wife still with us . . . the foot soldier?'

‘Pearl? Yes, she's still going strong, she just tramps on, Pearl does. She also nips in here for a vodka now and again. Saw her today, in fact, walking down the High Road just as I was opening up. She just took old Des's death in her stride, but she must have been getting ready for it; every woman has to G.S.M.W. as my old trouble and strife keeps saying. She tells it to our daughter.'

‘G.S.M.W.?' Yewdall inclined her head slightly to one side. ‘What does that mean?'

‘It's a woman's lot, pet . . . according to my old lady anyway, unless she dies young or becomes a nun . . . Girlhood, Spinsterhood, Motherhood, Widowhood . . . no one escapes except by death or holy orders. It's a bit cynical but that's my wife, a cynic, but it's fair, at the same time; it's fair enough, men die young and women just keep going.'

‘Or elective spinsterhood.' Yewdall straightened her head. ‘That is another way out of G.S.M.W., at least the “M” and “W” bits.'

‘Is that your status, darling?' The publican beamed at Penny Yewdall. ‘An elective spinster?'

‘Possibly. So where does Pearl Holst live?'

‘She's not in any trouble?' The publican suddenly wore a solemn expression.

‘None.' Ainsclough held eye contact with the publican. ‘None at all, we assure you.'

‘Hope you're right because publicans who grass up customers to the Bill . . . well, they tend to lose custom; tend to lose other things as well . . . like arms and legs, use of, if not completely . . . and Pearl, she's a small woman with a huge temper. She's a “pikey”; well not her, not now, but she comes from travelling people stock and they have their own way of settling things. You don't want to mess with those people. Pearl and I had a run in a few years ago and I took second prize, but I didn't slap her back because I was frightened of her relatives, not of her.' The publican wiped his hand across the surface of the bar, as if brushing away a fly that only he could see.

‘Understood. Well, we know her name; we'll find her easily. A regular in here, woman in her sixties . . . Pearl Holst . . . old man was a brickie and she sounds like she'll have form.'

‘Oh she has.' The publican raised his bushy eyebrows. ‘She's got form, all right.'

‘So if she comes in here wanting to go ballistic, you just say we found her because of her police record and we'll do the same,' Yewdall replied. ‘That will cool her off.'

‘Dare say that's true, but if she's not in trouble and her old man's in the clay, I don't see why I shouldn't point you in her general direction, don't see why not at all. Her old drum is just round the corner . . . five minutes' walk.'

Frankie Brunnie smiled. Harry Vicary had been quite correct. There were few Monkhams in London, just three in fact, one Avenue, one Road and one Lane, and there was a plentiful number of thoroughfares called Orchard something, but only one of the Monkhams, Monkham Lane, joined a thoroughfare called Orchard something. In this case it was Orchard Hill and they met each other in Woodford, north London.

Pearl Holst lived in what Yewdall and Ainsclough found to be a modest, neatly kept terraced house on Eynsford Road in Ilford. The houses along the length of the street had, they noted, a small area of land between their frontage and the pavement, and which the officers observed had either been retained as garden, or turned into a parking space for the family car, either one or the other, in equal measure. The houses were of a ground and upper floor design, with the occasional vaulted roof indicating the existence of attic space which could be developed into a living area. The complete absence of ventilation grills or small windows at ground level showed that the houses on Eynsford Road had no cellars. Yewdall and Ainsclough parked their car half on and half off the pavement where a space to do so was to be found, so as not to impede traffic flow along the narrow road, and walked up to the highly varnished door which was, they had been advised (and confirmed by means of a criminal record check) the home of Pearl Holst. Tom Ainsclough paused and then knocked on the door, twice, in what Penny Yewdall thought to be a soft, reverential, but yet authoritative tap.

The door was opened rapidly and aggressively by a short, strongly built woman, wearing a yellow T-shirt, faded blue jeans and sports shoes. She planted herself strongly on the threshold of her house in a manner which said loudly, ‘This is my territory; no one comes in unless I say so'. She was, the officers guessed, in her sixties but had the muscle and facial tone of a much younger woman. Her blonde hair was worn back in a tight ponytail, further adding to a more youthful appearance for a woman of her years. The woman's face was small and pinched; her eyes seemed, to Ainsclough and Yewdall, to be cold and dark and piercing: the eyes of a raptor. ‘The Old Bill?' she asked in a local accent.

‘Yes.' Yewdall showed her ID card, as did Ainsclough. ‘I am DC Yewdall, this is DC Ainsclough of Scotland Yard.'

‘The Yard!' The woman seemed alarmed. ‘Must be serious.'

‘It is.' Yewdall replaced her ID in her handbag. ‘But it is nothing for you to be alarmed about. All we need is a little information. Nothing more.'

‘Just information? Well, I can't see what good anything I can tell you will be but you'd better come in . . . the curtains are twitching already.' Pearl Holst stepped aside and allowed the officers ingress to her home.

The two officers entered what they found to be a neat and cleanly kept living room with a television and a CD player on a shelf in the corner of the room. Net curtains prevented passers-by looking into Mrs Holst's living room. The air smelled strongly of furniture polish. Penny Yewdall's eyes were drawn to a line of framed photographs which stood on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, all showing a young woman dressed in swimwear and incongruously, in Yewdall's view, heavy wrestler's boots encasing her feet and calves.

‘That's yours truly.' Pearl Holst followed Penny Yewdall's gaze. ‘Me in my younger days,' she said proudly. ‘I was a body sculptor.'

‘A body sculptor?' Yewdall inclined her head and raised her eyebrows.

‘Some people call it bodybuilding but we prefer the term sculpting, body sculpting. Building isn't an art form but sculpting is. I was runner-up in the North London finals, sort of one step short of the nationals. I was disappointed at the time because I wanted to be top of the pyramid, but looking back, well, it wasn't a bad achievement, especially since I never took no steroids, darling; I never used 'em. I seen the mess they can leave a woman's body in, so I left it out. I mean, I left it well out. For me it was all down to diet and pumping iron, that's how I did it. Dieting and pumping iron. If you ask me the women that used steroids were cardboard cut-outs . . . but me . . . me, I was the business.' Pearl Holst looked pleased with herself. ‘I still work out . . . down the gym three times a week circuit training.'

‘You are indeed very trim for your years, ma'am.' Yewdall once again inclined her head. ‘Very trim indeed.'

‘Thank you, pet, you can come again, even if you are the Bill. Take a seat . . . I'm going to.'

Once seated Yewdall began, ‘It's actually about your late husband Des . . . or Desmond Holst.'

‘Des?'

‘Yes.'

‘So it was the governor at The Neptune who told you where I lived?'

‘We can't say . . . but you have form and we checked with CR.'

‘He would have done, you can't protect him, he's got too much rabbit about him, just can't keep shtum. He doesn't know the meaning of this –' Pearl Holst drew her fingertip across her lips – ‘he would have told you. Anyone looking for Des would go to The Neptune and talk to the governor.'

‘We would have found you anyway, Mrs Holst.' Tom Ainsclough became suddenly very frightened for the welfare of the helpful publican of The Neptune.

‘That's not the point.' Pearl Holst began to look angry, setting her jaw firm. ‘Yeah, I've got form and I have lived in Seven Kings all my life . . . all my days I've been here . . . old Seven Kings. There's Seven Dials in the West End, there's Seven Sisters up Tottenham way and there's Seven Kings in Ilford . . . nothing to do with seven biblical kings or seven biblical kingdoms.'

‘What isn't?' Penny Yewdall asked.

‘Seven Kings, the name of this little corner of dear old Ilford, it's an old word . . . and I mean ancient. Seven Kyng meant a place where the gang of a geezer called Sootica lived; I looked it up when I was in the library, trapped in by the rain one day . . . over the years it became Seven Kings.'

‘Interesting.' Ainsclough hoped to placate the angry Pearl Holst. ‘You never stop learning.'

‘You don't, do you? That day in the library I found out that Seven Sisters refers to a group of stars, possibly the plough . . . the sailors' stars . . . and Seven Dials in Covent Garden . . . nothing special there, just seven streets meeting at the same place, but I was always good at history when I was at school, that's when I went; I was a chronic truant.' Pearl Holst smiled at the memory. ‘We used to go as far as Wanstead Park on hot summer days, do a bit of shoplifting on the way there and back. They used to larrup the living daylights out of the boys who truanted, but they couldn't or wouldn't touch the girls, so I was always all right. They just gave me a note to take home to my old man expecting him to do it, but he just laughed and said it showed I was adventurous, that I had an adventurous spirit. He said that that would take me further in life than anything I could learn in Ilford Secondary School. I think he was right as well, looking back. So Des; what's Des done from the grave that could interest the boys and girls in blue?'

‘He did us a favour,' Yewdall explained. ‘At least we think he did us a favour.'

Pearl Holst looked up at the ceiling. ‘That isn't like Des to do the Old Bill a favour . . . not Des. Mind you, I suppose you know him as Ralph Payne.'

‘Yes, we do.' Yewdall nodded. ‘Desmond Holst aka Ralph Payne.'

Ainsclough remained expressionless.

‘Aka?' Pearl Holst queried.

‘Police speak, Pearl,' Yewdall replied. ‘You don't mind if I call you Pearl?'

‘No, pet, so long as you don't want me to grass anyone up.'

‘No, we don't want that. Aka,' Yewdall explained, ‘it means “also known as”. So Des is aka Ralph Payne.'

‘I see. Well, you'll know he only went back to calling himself Desmond Holst towards the end. In the last few years he came over all Gandhi for some reason; just wanted to earn honest money for once. I mean, he got really Gandhi, full of the right and wrong of it all.'

‘Honest money,' Yewdall queried, ‘as a builder?'

‘As a builder . . . as a bus driver . . . as a jobbing gardener, even working on old people's gardens for nothing . . . nothing! Can you believe it? Ralph Payne, now he was something, he was always very useful in a skirmish and a very useful geezer to have on your team. Well handy he was. A blagger's blagger and my dad liked him, but then a few years before the end he changed, Ralph did, went back to calling himself Desmond Holst, his real name, and only making honest money . . . and not very much of that.' Pearl Holst shook her head. ‘He was a big old let down in the end; just not the geezer I married . . . now he was a wide boy, someone to be proud of.' She shook her head again in a despairing gesture. ‘But Des, at the end, right at the end, last few months, he started to throw away all his possessions or give them to charity shops because they was moody goods, not bought with straight pennies . . . moody . . . so he says. He even tried to half-inch my jewellery for the same reason, but he got a slap for that and never tried it no more . . . but half his stuff went to the charity shops, like I said . . . right at the end he came over all Gandhi.'

‘Did he ever talk to you about his honest work?' Yewdall asked.

‘Stroll on, darling, stroll on . . . he never did. He knew I wouldn't have been interested. So . . . no . . . he didn't.'