The Ninth Step - John Milton #8 (John Milton Thrillers) (15 page)

“You said yourself that you didn’t know him that well.”

“Not particularly.”

“Then I’m afraid I would say, with respect, that that’s not an assessment that you’re qualified to make. I’ve seen more than my fair share of suicides. Sometimes, you ask around and people aren’t surprised. The person’s been depressed. Something has happened to them that gives them a reason to do away with themselves. They’ve lost their job, their wife has left them, or their husband has shacked up with someone else. Normal things. Other times—and it’s more often than you might think—it comes completely out of the blue. Maybe this is one of those times.”

Milton let that go. Bruce was right. It
was
sometimes difficult to tell. Milton had seen suicides before, too. A soldier he had been friendly with had topped himself after it had become apparent that he was not going to pass selection for the SAS. Rather than return to his own regiment, he had taken himself off into the woods outside Hereford, tossed a rope over the low-hanging branch of an old oak, and strung himself up. There had been others, too, that Milton had made to look like suicides. He had sometimes stayed in situ long enough to watch the aftermath, to make sure that nothing was amiss, and he had seen the reactions of friends and relatives. Some were shocked. Others were resigned, as if the death had been expected.

But Eddie was different. There was something about his death that Milton couldn’t square.

“You said it yourself. He was dealing with a difficult situation. He said he had been abused. Maybe that was why he had to drink. Maybe he couldn’t handle it any more.”

“Did you take photographs of the scene?”

“We did.”

“Can I—”

“No. And there’s nothing to see, really. There was nothing suspicious there at all.”

“Just a quick look?”

Bruce shook his head firmly. “No, Mr. Smith. That’s not appropriate.” He stopped, regarding him for a moment. “What did you say you did again?”

“I didn’t say. I’m a cook.”

“I think, Mr. Smith, that it would be better if you stuck to cooking and left this to the police. If there was anything out of the ordinary, we would have seen it. Really.”

Bruce closed his notebook and pushed his chair away from the table.

“Hold on a minute,” Milton said.

“Mr Smith?”

“Are you going to look into what he told me?”

“About the man he said he had in his cab? Did he tell you his name?”

“Leo Isaacs.”

“I can ask around.”

“Ask his family.”

“Yes,” he said. “I will do that. But don’t expect anything to come out of it. I spoke to them yesterday. None of them mentioned anything like that.”

Bruce stood, but Milton stayed where he was. He thought of the Maserati and the Range Rover with the blacked-out windows. He had memorised the registration details of the second car. Milton could give that to Bruce, but what would he say? That he’d seen two vehicles pull out and follow Eddie’s cab? It might have been late, but it was Russell Square. It was a busy area. There was nothing unusual about any of it. Were they even following? Most people wouldn’t have given it a second thought, but then, he reminded himself, most people did not have his training or his instincts. He knew that there was something odd about what he had seen, but he knew, too, that he wouldn’t be able to persuade Bruce. It would be better if he looked into it himself.

Milton stood, too. “You’re right,” he said. “If there’s anything I can help you with, just let me know.”

Bruce collected his notebook and opened it again. “Do you have a number I could contact you on?”

Milton recited his phone number and Bruce wrote it down. He closed the notebook again, slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket and led the way back outside.

The waiting area was empty.

“Thanks for coming in, Mr. Smith.”

“Not a problem.”

“Did you come up from London?”

“I did. I thought it would be better than calling you.”

“Well, I appreciate it. It’s an awful situation. It’s good of you to put yourself to the trouble.”

“Do you know when the funeral is?”

“There’ll be a forensic post mortem to determine the cause of death, and then his body will be released to the family. It’ll probably be three or four days.”

Bruce put out his hand and Milton took it. Milton knew, without question, what would happen now. Eddie’s death would be classed as a suicide. There would be no follow-up work and no investigation. Milton, by coming here, had inadvertently made that more likely. He had given Eddie a motive to do what he had done. Would Bruce even ask Eddie’s family about what Eddie had told Milton? Probably not. Bruce wouldn’t want to upset them.

No.

This was a straightforward case of someone who was clearly upset with life—upset enough to have a problem with drink—deciding enough was enough and topping himself.

It would be case closed as far as the police were concerned.

Milton wasn’t ready to accept that conclusion just yet. There was digging to be done.

MILTON DROVE BACK TO LONDON. He worked as usual that night and the nights that followed, asking the drivers who came into the shelter whether they knew the details of Eddie’s funeral. Milton quickly got the impression that he had not been a particularly well-known driver, for none of the men he asked were familiar with him. He persevered, though, and, as the clock ticked over to three in the morning on the fourth subsequent night, he finally got a lead. A driver who usually came in for a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich said that he knew Eddie and that his family was based near Withington in the Cotswolds.

“You know about the Fabians?” the man asked.

“Not a thing.”

The man chuckled. “Not the sort of people you’d want to get on the wrong side of.”

“What do you mean?”

“They ain’t straight, John. They get up to all sorts.”

“Criminals?”

“They used to run the underworld. This was years ago, right after the war. They moved out when the Eastern Europeans and the Turks started throwing their weight around. They took all their money and went out to where they are now. The family has a place there. Big old country house, loads of land. The old man, Eddie’s dad, he’s still a serious player. You want to take some of the rumours with a pinch of salt, but I’ve heard all sorts of things about him over the years. They say he bankrolls big jobs. Puts teams together. There was gossip that he was involved in the Brinks job. Others, too. Like I say, serious.”

“I had no idea,” Milton said.

“There was one situation—I’m guessing this is ten years ago now—the police had him under surveillance. They had a man in the grounds outside his house. Fabian shot him. He went to trial and said it was self-defence. He got off, too.”

“I didn’t know,” Milton admitted.

“Knew Eddie well, did you?”

Milton shrugged. “Not really. I thought he was a nice guy. I’d like to pay my respects, though. Do you know anything about the funeral?”

“No,” the man said. “You’ll have to ask around.”

THE SHIFT was straightforward, and Milton was home in good time. He awoke at eleven, got out of bed, changed into his running gear, and went out for a five-mile jog. He returned to the flat, showered and dressed in clean clothes, and then took out the old MacBook he had picked up for next to nothing on eBay. It took an age to boot up, so he made himself a cup of tea and a slice of toast while he waited. He took his phone, opened Spotify, connected it to his Bluetooth speaker and then selected the playlist where he had stacked his favourite tunes from the Manchester musicians he preferred. He skipped through to Morrissey’s “Everyday is like Sunday” and went back to the computer.

It didn’t take him very long to find the information that he wanted. Kent Online had an announcements section, and it only took a little browsing to find the notice.

Edward Alan “Eddie” Fabian—much loved by all his family and friends. xXx

The announcement continued with the date and location of the funeral service, a request for no flowers, and the details of the undertaker. He checked the date, and then double-checked it.

The funeral was today.

He hurried through into his bedroom and opened the door to the wardrobe and his rather meagre collection of clothes. He had one suit, an old second-hand two-piece that he had bought in a charity shop for thirty pounds. He quickly ironed his only white shirt, polished his shoes, and dressed. He looked in the mirror. Not so long ago, his suit would have been bespoke from one of the finest tailors in London and presented to him with very little change from two thousand pounds. It was amusing to him how his situation had altered since he had stopped working for the government. It did not concern him—he had never judged himself by how wealthy he was, and those clothes had been no more than disguises to enable him to draw closer to his prey—and as he regarded himself he thought that he would just about pass muster. It would do.

THE FUNERAL was being held at St Michael and All Angels at Withington. The Cotswolds were ninety miles away. Milton got into his car and drove out of London, headed to the north-west. It was a straight run on the M40, passing through High Wycombe and Stokenchurch. The traffic was heavy, and there were several spots where they crawled at twenty or thirty miles an hour as first an accident and then road works blocked the way ahead. He thought that he was going to be too late, but the traffic cleared as he turned onto the A40 outside Oxford, and he was able to make good time. The rain fell heavily, a slick that seemed to perpetually blur his view out of the windscreen, but as he drove deeper into the Cotswolds it seemed to lighten a little and he was able to look out and appreciate the landscape around him. The area was famous for the golden-coloured stone that was quarried here and used to build the picture-perfect villages and the dry stone walling that demarked the rolling grass fields. It was beautiful.

He passed through Compton Abdale, following the single-lane road until he reached Withington. The landscape of the village and the seat of most of its settlement was a broad valley running from north to south. The village straddled either side of the River Coln, with an attractive pub residing on the east bank and climbing terrain on the west bank that led up to a knot of trees.

Milton drove through it until he reached the church. St Michaels was a large and imposing Norman building with a nave, chancel and tower. The original design had been enlarged with a south porch, a south transept chapel and a large clerestory. A school was adjacent to the church, and its playground had been opened up so that mourners could park their cars there. Milton turned off the road and found a space and then, with a glance at his watch, stepped out and jogged across the puddled road. There was an unpaved turning that ran around the boundary of the graveyard, and a glistening hearse was waiting there, a coffin being attended to through the opened back door. There were black BMWs and Mercedes there, too, the chief mourners waiting inside the vehicles.

He was just in time.

Other people were gathered at the porch, some sheltering beneath umbrellas, all of them aiming wary glances at the glowering sky as they waited to file inside. Milton joined the back of the queue. A boom of thunder rumbled overhead as he stepped through the doors.

THE CHURCH was full. Milton was only able to find a space on the end of a pew at the back next to a family with two young children who were evidently going to struggle to sit still for the duration of the service. There was an order of ceremony on the seat with a picture of Eddie on the front cover. He flipped through it, noting the hymns and that Eddie’s brothers would be making speeches. His father would be delivering the reading.

He looked around. All the light came from the clerestory windows; the original Norman window openings were blocked up, which made the interior feel rather gloomy. To the west of the south door, through which he had entered, there was a curtained area. There were memorials and monuments on the walls, a font that looked several hundred years old, and a simple wooden pulpit that stood in contrast to the ornate decoration.

“Blackbird” by the Beatles started to play. The people near the south door stood, everyone else following their example. The chief mourners came first: a woman in an expensive black dress, a handkerchief clutched in her hand. There was a man with jet black hair and a craggy face striated by deep wrinkles that made him look older than Milton suspected he was. Two younger women came next, one barely more than a girl and the other in her twenties, both wearing similarly expensive black dresses. The coffin came into the church, borne on the shoulders of six solemn-faced pallbearers. The two men at the front were obviously related to each other. Two older men followed, one of them particularly large and powerful. The men at the back were younger, one of them still in his teens. They brought the coffin to the central aisle and then proceeded to the front of the church, where they carefully laid it to rest on the catafalque.

The vicar, a plump and homely-looking woman, took her place in the pulpit.

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” she intoned as the congregation settled in.

Milton had been around death all his life, but had only been to two funerals. His parents’, after the car crash that had killed them, and a Regiment service in Hereford after one of the men who had undertaken Selection with him had died during the forced march on the Brecon Beacons.

“Death is not an easy thing to accept,” the vicar continued. “Nature has its seasons, but death can come to anyone, at any time, in any place. Truly we know not what a day may bring forth.”

Milton shuffled a little uncomfortably. It felt as if she was speaking to him.