The Ninth Step - John Milton #8 (John Milton Thrillers) (17 page)

“Gave the reading at the funeral.”

Olivia nodded across the garden. Frankie Fabian was standing in the shelter of the boathouse that was down the sloped lawn at the edge of the lake. His black suit was impeccable and the whiteness of the shirt almost glowed beneath it. He had stepped outside to make a phone call.

“The apple didn’t fall far from the tree with Frankie. They say he’s a genius. From what I’ve heard, he’s been involved in all the big heists of the last twenty years. Brinks Mat, the Knightsbridge Security Deposit job, all the big ones. The police have never been able to get close to him. He’s very careful, stays well away from the action, but he’s not someone that I’d want to get on the wrong side of. They say he’s ruthless, too, the people I spoke to. They say he’ll do anything to protect his family.”

“But he couldn’t help Eddie.”

“You know Eddie was adopted?”

“I do.” He finished his cigarette, saw that she had finished hers, too, and offered her another. She took it. “How do you know so much?” he asked.

She dipped her head again to light the new cigarette. “I’ve taken a professional interest in the family.”

“What does that mean?” Milton asked. “You’re police?”

She laughed. “Hardly.”

“What then?”

“Journalist.”

Milton pretended to be surprised.

“I recognised you straight away at the funeral,” she said. “Eddie was supposed to meet me at Piccadilly Circus the morning after he died. You were there too. I saw you. Waiting for him. I’ve got a great memory for faces.”

“I was,” Milton said, feigning surprise.

She looked him right in the eye and then spoke with certainty. “I don’t think he killed himself, Mr. Smith.”

Milton didn’t reply, and he tried not to react. He wanted to assess her more carefully before he voiced anything about his own suspicions.

She was watching him shrewdly. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“What happened outside the church? The men in the Range Rover—why did you go over to them?”

“They were parked in front of my car. I wanted them to move out of the way.”

She looked disappointed. “Come on, John. Don’t give me that. I’m not an idiot. Who were they?”

“I have no idea. I was just asking them to move.”

She finished the second cigarette, dropped it onto the gravel and ground it underfoot.

“Nice to have met you,” Milton said.

He started to head back to the house but she reached over and took his arm. “What are you doing now?”

“I was about to go.”

“Can I buy you a coffee? I’d like to have a talk with you.”

OLIVIA DEWEY drove an old and slightly battered Audi TT. Milton let her pull out of the row of cars that had been parked on the lawn and followed her down the long drive, over the hill and then through the wood to the main road. She bumped over the cattle grid, turned sharply to the right and took the narrow country lane to Withington. There was a pub in the middle of the village, a large sign fixed to the wall announcing it as The King’s Head. She indicated and turned off, reversing into a slot in the almost empty car park. Milton slotted the Volkswagen next to hers and got out.

“This okay?” she asked as they walked to the door together.

“Fine.”

Milton held the door for her and then followed her inside. It was a small pub, very quaint, with a low ceiling, exposed oak beams and horse brasses on the walls.

“What are you having?” she asked him. “My round.”

“An orange juice.”

“Don’t want anything stronger?”

Milton shook his head. “No, thanks. A little early for me.”

Milton took a table by the window and waited as she ordered a gin and tonic for herself, the orange juice for him, and a packet of cheese and onion crisps for them both. She brought the glasses and the crisps over, deposited them on the table and sat down.

She took a card from her purse and slid it across the table.

“Olivia Dewey,” Milton said, reading it. “Freelance journalist.”

“Used to work on the nationals, got sacked, now I work for myself. I live in east London, I’m not married, I drink too much, I don’t suffer fools gladly. That’s me. Anything else you’d like to know?”

He smiled, amused at her candour. “No, I think that’s all I need to know.”

“And you?”

“Like I said. John Smith. I’m a cook. I live on my own. I like The Smiths, The Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays.”

“John Smith.
Really
?”

“Yes, really.”

“Where are you a cook?”

“I work nights at the cabmen’s shelter in Russell Square.”

Her face lit up. “Those green sheds? I’ve seen them before. They’re actually open?”

“They are.”

“That’s where you met Eddie?”

He had no interest in telling a journalist that they had met at an AA meeting, so he took the opening that she provided. “Yes,” he said. “He came in for meals every now and again. We got talking. He’s a nice guy.”

“He was,” she corrected.

“Was, yes.” Milton acknowledged that with a nod. “He said he’d spoken to a journalist.”

“He called me out of the blue a while ago.”

“And said what?”

“He’d read one of my stories. He said he had some information for me.”

“What story?”

She sipped her gin. The ice cubes jangled against the glass. “You follow the news at all, John?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“This was a while ago. There was a Tory MP who was arrested for outraging public decency on Hampstead Heath.”

“Don’t recall it,” he said.

“Open-and-shut case. They had witnesses who were ready to testify that they’d seen this man having sex with another man, what happened, everything. Then, the day of the trial, the case collapses. The witness spontaneously changes his mind. Doesn’t remember being there, doesn’t recognise the man, doesn’t know anything at all. I covered it for the
Sun
. I got friendly with the detective who was running the case. But as soon as the case collapsed, he stopped returning my calls. Wouldn’t speak to me. I didn’t give up. Found him in a pub one night, drinking on his own, and I asked him what was going on. He told me to stop pestering him, said he wouldn’t speak to me and, when I kept at him, he got up and left. Two days after that, he killed himself. Threw himself off a multi-storey car park. And it wasn’t as if he had any reason to do it. He’d just had twins. Whole life to look forward to.”

“And you kept looking into it?”

“I was pretty green then, but even I could tell that there was a reason for what had happened. The case just dropped out of the papers. No one would cover it—everyone was afraid of getting sued. My editor knew I was still keen, told me to drop it. I said I would, but I didn’t. I kept at it. I tried to find the witness, but he disappeared. Just vanished. And then I found him six months later. He’d died of a heart attack. It was a strange one: everyone said how fit he was, running marathons, keeping himself in shape, still young, too. But whatever. Shit happens, right? That’s what I said. Shit happens.” She said it with a sarcastic twist of her mouth.

“Shit happens,” Milton agreed.

“In the end, I ran out of fresh places to look. I had a million questions, but no one I could ask. So I mothballed it, found another story and got on with my life.”

Milton watched her as she spoke. She was animated, nervous, and she punctuated her sentences with little stabs of her fingers. He thought he could see fear in her, but she was hiding it behind an irrepressible energy.

“So time passed without me really thinking about it. I got the sack from the paper and started writing for websites. And then someone emailed me. Out of the blue. Anonymous address. He said I could call him David although that wasn’t his real name. He said he’d read my old stuff, that he had a lot of information about the case and would I be interested? I said yes, of course I would, I’d look at anything he had. I got another email the next day. It was long, stream of consciousness stuff. It said that there was a flat in Watson Square in Pimlico and that thirty years ago, in the eighties, it was used as a brothel by some very high-end people. This place is a mile from Westminster. I went and had a look. Big place. Expensive. I went through the Land Registry details. More than a hundred MPs have apartments there. A dozen Lords. It’s got an amazing history. Oswald Mosley was arrested there in the thirties. Princess Anne lived there. Churchill’s daughter was evicted after throwing gin bottles out the window. You wouldn’t believe some of the stories.”

“And this particular story?”

“David said there were parties there every week, and the guests were politicians, civil servants, military, senior government types. And they had young kids there. Girls and boys. David said that he had been taken there several times over the course of a couple of years. He was in a boys’ home in Jersey. He said that they were very organised, that they sent boys over on the ferry and then had minibuses pick them up from the port to drive them to the parties, then they drove them back again. He went into a lot of detail. Very credible detail. He said that they were made to drink whiskey until they were drunk, they were forced to dress up in women’s lingerie, and then they were raped.”

“I don’t understand—why did he email you?”

“Because he’d read my old stories. He said the defendant in the case that got dropped, the man on Hampstead Heath—David said that he was one of the men who raped him at Watson Square.”

Milton nodded, suddenly getting the distinct feeling that he was standing on the edge of a precipice and, if he wanted to step back, he should do it now. The more he found out, the harder that was going to be.

But he didn’t want to step back.

“And then?” he said.

“And then nothing. I thought this guy, whoever he was, he must have lost his bottle, but then I got another email. More detail. Some of what he told me was sickening. He said he was raped over a bathtub while his head was held under the water. Another time he said he was ordered to punch another boy in the face, but he refused. He got a beating for that. He said that one of the men at the parties had medical training—they called him the Doctor—and he would treat the boys after they had been roughed up. He sent another email the next day and said that he knew of at least two boys who had been killed there.”

Milton said nothing.

“You can imagine how I’m feeling now. The Hampstead Heath story was big enough, but this had the potential to be enormous. I told him I was treating his claims very seriously and that if he wanted to take it to the next step, we had to meet. I didn’t think he’d follow through with it, but he did. He told me to name the place. I said I’d be under Waterloo Bridge last Saturday at five and he turned up.”

“And this was Eddie.”

“Yes. Eddie. We were there for three hours. I went through the story again, point by point, and he backed everything up.
Everything
. He was completely credible. I don’t have any doubt in my mind that what he told me was true. The only thing he wouldn’t do was go on the record. He said he had to think about that. I said he could have as long as he wanted, but that I thought his story needed to be told because these men need to be punished. And then he called me two days before he died. He said he’d do it, that he’d go through the story all again, and I could film him. We agreed to meet. Piccadilly Circus. I arranged for a cameraman to come, too, booked a hotel room where we could film it, but Eddie never turned up. And then I found out why. Gassed himself in his cab. Hours before he was going to give me the story. What are the odds of that?”

“You think that’s suspicious.”

“What do you think?”

“I think there are some questions that need to be answered.”

She laughed. “He was killed, John. I’ve got no doubt about it.”

“By who?”

“Someone who doesn’t want the story to come out.”

“The MP?”

“Maybe.”

“His name is Leo Isaacs, isn’t it?” Milton said.

“Yes. Did Eddie mention him to you?”

Milton nodded. “He told me a little. Not as much as he told you. How confident are you that this stacks up?”

“Very confident.”

“Can you prove any of it?”

She shook her head. “That’s the problem. All I’ve been able to find out are rumours and innuendo. Enough for me to print that
something
was going on there, but not enough to name names. A story like this, John, as big as this could be, you have to be watertight. The website I write for loves this kind of shit, but the editor won’t run anything unless he’s sure it stacks up—the risks of getting sued are too big.”

“So what’s next?”

“There is no next,” she said. “Back to square one.”

THEY STEPPED out into the car park together.

“There was one other thing,” Milton said.

“What’s that?”

“When Eddie came to see me, there was something else on his mind. Something about his family.”

Milton saw a flicker of recognition pass across her face.

“Did he say what it was?” she asked with a caution that was a little too obvious.

Milton cast his mind back and tried to remember what Eddie had told him. “He said he had problems with them. Do you know what he meant?”

No,” she said. But she took a moment too long to answer, and her eyes darted away from his face as she spoke.

“Olivia,” Milton said, “what was it? What did he mean?”

“I don’t know.”

Milton knew that she was lying.

They shook hands, and she told him that he should contact her if he found out anything that might be of interest. Milton said that he would, although he didn’t anticipate seeing her again. As he slipped into his car, he reached into his pocket and ran his finger along the edge of her card. No, he didn’t think that he would see her again, but he would keep the card for now. He had no way of predicting how this was going to turn out, and maybe he would need an ally. He pushed it back into his pocket.

He put the key in the ignition and twisted it, realising that he had already started to plot his next move. He had allowed her to walk him up to the edge and her story had tipped him over. Something had happened to Eddie. Had he killed himself? Maybe. But Milton didn’t think so. He wasn’t a betting man—compulsive behaviours were unhealthy for a man with his weaknesses—but if he had been, he would have staked a generous amount that there was more to what had happened than the sad, pathetic ending of a life.