He remembered his own father, Maurice. Not with affection, but with respect. His one abiding memory was from when he was a small child; he could not remember his age, exactly, maybe six or seven. His father had stood him on the kitchen table, then blindfolded him and told him to jump into his arms.
Amis had stood there, petrified, swaying, for some moments. His father had urged him, ‘Jump, Amis. Just tumble forward into my arms. I’ll catch you.’
Finally he had let himself go. His father had not caught him, but had stood, several paces back, with his hands in his pockets. Amis Smallbone’s face had smacked so hard onto the kitchen floor he had broken two teeth and his nose.
Then his father had removed the blindfold, dabbing his face with a cloth. ‘Let that be a lesson to you, son. Never trust anyone in life, not even your own father.’
Smallbone had never forgotten that moment. His mother standing there, lamely watching. Cowed and bullied by his father into silent acceptance of all that he did to his children in the name of toughening them up.
When he was fourteen, his father made him accompany him on his rounds as a debt collector. Knocking on doors of shitty dwellings, opened by tearful women or scared men. Sending them scurrying off into back rooms, scuffling around under mattresses, shaking banknotes and coins out of mugs, tea caddies, pleading. Scum, his father told him. Vermin. Liars, all of them. You have to do what’s right. What’s right is to collect what’s yours. Life isn’t going to give it to you; you have to take it. They’ll give you every excuse in the world. ‘Me husband’s off work, sick’; ‘Me husband’s lost his job’; ‘I’ve not been able to work because me child’s sick’.
Sometimes, Amis Smallbone felt sorry for one of the terrified people. But when he told his father, he would slap him hard on the face and glare at him.
They make me sick, Amis. Understand? They’ll prey on weakness. Show them sympathy and they’ll have you twisted round their little fingers. Understand, because if you don’t, they’re going to shit all over you and ruin your life.
Amis understood. By the time he was eighteen, he was doing rent collection rounds on his own. Accompanied by a barber’s razor that he kept in his pocket, and produced at any excuse, on scumbag women as much as scumbag men. Occasionally he would just slash, for the hell of it, to see the crimson ribbons on their cheeks. As he got bolder, he would knock on the door with the razor in his hand, blade open. Crimson ribbon or your rent? he would offer.
Maybe a crimson ribbon on Noah Grace’s face would be nice, he thought. The little bastard’s crying had kept him awake a lot during this past night. How would it be for Cleo to go running up to his cot and find blood everywhere?
How about a slit from the edge of his mouth up to his ears, on each side? It was what other prisoners did to rapists, inside. Depending what prison you were in, it was called the Glasgow Grin, or the Chelsea Smile or, simply, the Rapist’s Grin.
He liked that. The Grace baby branded for life as the most vile of all human life forms.
The more he thought about that, the more he liked it. Much better and much simpler than killing Noah.
He toasted himself. It was a great idea.
Genius!
87
Wide awake at 6 a.m. on a New York Sunday morning, Roy Grace rang Cleo. Her mood was subdued; she was with her parents, in their car, heading off to the first of four houses in the countryside, close to Brighton, that looked good on the estate agents’ particulars. Noah, she told him, had driven her demented all night.
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she replied flatly.
‘Call you later in the day,’ he said. ‘Love you.’
‘You too.’
He pulled on his running kit, took the lift down from his eleventh-floor room, then went out onto 42nd Street and turned right. The early morning air felt fresh and cool. The city felt huge and daunting. Bigger than he remembered. The buildings rising like canyon walls on either side of him. He crossed two sets of lights, then made another right and headed up Fifth Avenue towards Central Park. He ran past smart men’s and women’s clothes displays in the store windows. Past a street cleaner, brushes swirling, water spraying. On the left he saw the Abercrombie & Fitch store that Jack Alexander had mentioned last night.
He ran on past the Apple Store Cube, breathing in the early morning smell of horses along Central Park South. Ignoring the lights, he crossed the deserted street, and ran on up the uneven paving of the Fifth Avenue sidewalk, looking for an entrance into the park itself.
All the time he was thinking hard. The Patek Philippe watch was here. Eamonn Pollock was here. Gavin and Lucas Daly were also here.
The Daly family should be working with the police, but they weren’t. He felt sympathy for Gavin. He liked the old man. He had always had a soft spot for life’s survivors, and there was nothing Daly had done, in all his ninety-five years, that had attracted the attention of the police. He was less certain about his son; a rotten apple for sure. He could still see, in his mind, the bruises on Sarah Courteney’s chest.
But it was Eamonn Pollock who worried him the most. Gavin Daly had not lied to him and travelled to New York, aged ninety-five, simply to retrieve an old family heirloom, regardless of its value. If he had just wanted it back, surely he would have given Grace’s team all the information he had.
There was another reason.
Another reason why he’d had Ricky Moore tortured. Why two of the burglary team had been found dead in Marbella.
Another reason why Gavin Daly and his son had travelled, in a hurry, to New York.
There had to be.
And he had a feeling he knew what it was.
He ran past the Central Park pond, then headed on, threading his way along the pathways, towards the huge, circular Jacqueline Onassis reservoir, determined, as he had tried to do on a couple of past visits, to run right around the gravel track of its circumference without stopping.
Thinking all the time.
And getting increasingly worried about the task in front of him.
That the watch was merely a sideshow. And the true reason for Gavin Daly’s journey here was revenge. The settling of a very old score.
88
At 6.30 a.m. Gavin Daly lay in his fourteenth-storey hotel room, propped up against the pillow, as he had been since 2.15 a.m. when he had woken, and had been unable to sleep again. He could not get the air-conditioning right, so half the night he had been too hot; now he was too cold, and there was a constant tick-tick-tick sound accompanying the air-con every time it cycled.
All the time, his brain had been spinning. He was back in the city of his birth. Back in a place that still, in so many ways, felt like home to him. Back to fulfil a tearful promise he had made all those years ago, on the stern of the Mauretania.
A memory as vivid in his mind now as it had been then. And the words just as clear.
One day, Pop, I’m going to come back and find you. I’m going to rescue you from wherever you are.
He ordered English Breakfast tea from room service, with milk, not cream. After he had hung up he remembered how weak they served tea here, phoned down again and asked for an extra teabag. Then he closed his eyes again.
He had woken thinking with deep sadness about his second wife, Ruth, and realized he had been crying in his dream. She was still so vivid in his mind. Some people said that all people only ever really love once in their lives, and he wasn’t sure that was true. There had been a time, so many years back, when he had loved Sinead, really loved her. Until the day, ten years into their marriage, when the private detective’s photographs showed her startled face, in a bed in some hotel room with her lover, another antiques dealer in the city. It had taken him a long time after that to trust any woman again – many years. Then he had met Ruth, with her red hair and freckles, and the loveliest smile he had seen in all his life.
He could feel her in his arms now. He had loved to stand behind her, holding her slender bod
y tightly, their cheeks pressed together, her hair tickling his face, feeling intoxicated by her scent and by his love for her. She was the most precious gift in all the world. The most precious gift he had ever known since his father. But, it turned out, the poor darling did not have the gift of health.
Firstly she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer; then a few years after her hysterectomy, the cancer came back. Everywhere. He tried specialists around the world. Jetted her in private planes to hospitals and clinics in America, Switzerland, Thailand, to any doctor he could find good words about. But it didn’t make one bloody bit of difference.
Money could buy you comfort and luxury, but it couldn’t buy you the only thing in the world of real value, which was health. It couldn’t buy you a cure. It was ironic, he thought. He was lying in this big bed, in this big suite, with enough money stacked away, in banks, in stocks, in properties, to do almost anything he wanted and to buy almost anything he wanted, and it meant absolutely nothing. Except, right now, just one thing.
His chest pains came shooting back, suddenly, like a firework burning inside his chest. He reached out to the vial beside the bed for a nitroglycerin pill. A few minutes later, as the pain subsided, the doorbell rang.
He climbed out of bed and stood for a moment, in his pyjamas, feeling stiff, shaky, old. Very old. Too old. His eyes were tired. Using his stick because he did not trust his legs or his balance, he let the waiter in, waited for him to set the tea down, signed the bill and tipped him a bunch of dollar bills.
Then he padded over to the huge window and opened the curtains. The view was straight out across Central Park. It promised to be a fine day, just like the little card that had been left on his pillow last night predicted. A light mist hung over the trees. He saw a man, the size of an ant from here, jogging. Keeping healthy.
Gavin had never had truck with exercise. It was all in the genes, he believed. Ruth had been a health fanatic – all salads and fish and just the occasional glass of wine at celebrations; yoga every day; tennis; cycling. But she hadn’t made old bones. At least he had outlived the bitch Sinead. And he would go to his grave knowing she wasn’t around to dance on it. Although bloody Lucas would be.
And he did not like that thought.
He fiddled with the air-conditioning control, wrestled his way into a bathrobe, turned his attention to the huge parcel with the FedEx label and the customs stamp, addressed in his own handwriting to a New York antique watch and clock dealer. It had been brought to him at the hotel last night by its recipient, Jordan Rochester, another very old friend in this city. Rochester had kindly booked the room in his own name, and used his credit card. Gavin Daly did not want anyone finding him in New York. And particularly not Detective Superintendent Grace, or any of his New York Police Department associates. Not until he had finished his business here.
As a precaution, he hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign outside the door and engaged the security lock. Then he put the teabags into the pot, and while he waited for them to steep, he removed his tools from his suitcase, and began to open the package.
Ten minutes later, he took a sip of his tea, then gently lifted the Ingraham chiming mantel clock from its nest of shredded paper, which lay inside the polystyrene outer casing he had fashioned for it a fortnight ago.
Carefully he removed the round, brass gong from inside the clock’s casing. Then even more carefully still, he opened up the two halves of the gong.
And smiled for the first time since his plane had landed.
89
The yellow cab was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a fine, cloudless morning; Roy Grace, squashed in the cramped rear alongside Jack Alexander and Guy Batchelor, stared out at the sparkling water of the East River. He was all too mindful that it had been less than a mile from here where the horrors of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack had taken place – and that Pat Lanigan had lost a cousin in it.
A short time later the driver, who spoke only mumbling English, pulled over. Grace recognized, from his last visit here, the Brooklyn police HQ office building, housing the Mafia-busting team to which Lanigan was currently assigned. To their left, across the street, was a square slab of a building with a yellow sign on which was written BARCLAY SCHOOL SUPPLIES, and in front of it was an open elevator-system car park that looked like a giant Meccano construction.
They clambered out, paid the driver, then entered the modern skyscraper, and gave their names to the security guard. A couple of minutes later, holding their visitor passes, they waited as the lift stopped on the tenth floor.
Pat Lanigan, wearing a yellow polo shirt, cream chinos and trainers, greeted them cheerily; Grace was relieved, from past experiences with Lanigan, that he’d chosen to dress casually today, as had his two colleagues.
The detective led them through a door with an NYPD shield and combination lock, and along a labyrinth of carpeted corridors, through an open-plan office full of empty cubicles with high-sided partitions. Each little space had a clean waste bin with a neat bin bag and clinically tidy desk. They passed a Stars and Stripes flag with the wording FLAG OF HONOR pinned to a wall, followed by a black and white map of Brooklyn, gridded and numbered, and all the other boroughs of New York beyond it.
Then they passed a wall chart, on which was a family tree, headed COLOMBO CRIME FAMILY – PERSICO FACTION. Beneath were interconnected boxes headed BOSS, ACTING BOSS, CONSIGLIERE, CAPOREGIME, SOLDIERS OF INTEREST, ASSOCIATES OF INTEREST.
Grace stared at it intently for some moments, then followed his colleagues into Lanigan’s office.
It was laid out in a similar manner to his own, Grace noted. There was a round conference table, a small, cluttered desk laden with piles of documents, a mug full of pens, as well as his computer keyboard, screen, car keys, a photograph of his wife, and a trio of flags. On the wall above it was a photograph of the aircraft carrier on which Lanigan had served in the US Navy, and several group photographs of himself and fellow ratings, and a large, colourful banner proclaiming in bold lettering, DEFENDING FREEDOM.
Lanigan sat them down at the table, and offered them coffee. A few minutes later they were joined by the three detectives he had organized for them today, all, to Roy’s dismay, dressed sharply in business attire.
Detective Specialist Keith Johnson, a solidly built man in his late-forties, with a trim beard and moustache, and a no-nonsense air about him, wore a beige suit and a dark-brown tie. Detective Linda Blankson, who Grace put in her late-thirties, had Latino looks and a catwalk figure, with sleek brown hair framing a severe but not unattractive face. She was power-dressed in a black trouser suit and white blouse, and concentrating on typing out a text or email on her phone.
The least amicable of the three was Detective Lieutenant Aaron Cobb, in his mid-thirties, with close-cropped hair brushed forward that reminded Grace of the actor Ryan Gosling. He shook hands cursorily with each of the British detectives, then sat down at the table, chewing gum, with the resigned air of a man who was less than happy about being here on a Sunday morning.
Lanigan began the meeting by asking Roy Grace to detail the history of the circumstances that had brought him and his colleagues over here. When Grace had finished, Detective Lieutenant Cobb asked the first question, in a voice that was even more deeply Brooklyn than Lanigan’s.
‘We’re very happy to help you out but why do you guys need to be here?’ He stared pointedly at Grace, chewing his gum hard. ‘Like, you’ve given us the information. Feels to me you don’t trust us to do the job.’ He dug his finger into his right ear and began an excavation of its interior.
‘That’s not the case at all, Detective Lieutenant,’ Grace said. ‘We’re here to advise and assist you, and I think we may have information helpful to you.’ Although Lanigan was the eldest, he was unsure from the way US detectives did their rankings who was the most senior officer here.
‘I don’t see it.’ Cobb looked down at his notes. ‘Eamonn Pollock, Gavin Daly, Lucas Daly. We have their descriptions. We’ll find
’em.’
Grace caught Pat Lanigan’s eye and saw his apologetic look. ‘Pollock is the only one who is an actual suspect at this point, with respect, Detective Lieutenant,’ Grace said. ‘I believe Gavin Daly and his son Lucas are here with criminal intent. Their motives and their relationship are all very complex. In my view we should be here to help you to understand what is likely to happen. We need to tread carefully if we want to arrest them.’
‘Sir, out of interest, why do you think we could not do that by ourselves?’ asked Detective Specialist Keith Johnson. He spoke with a strong, clear Midwestern voice.
‘I’m not saying you couldn’t,’ Grace replied. ‘But in my opinion there is much more going on than simply the recovery of a stolen watch, and the arresting of the perpetrators. I have a hunch about what is going to happen.’
‘I’m intrigued!’ said Detective Linda Blankson, abruptly but pleasantly.
‘So where do we start?’ Keith Johnson asked.
‘By finding Eamonn Pollock, Gavin Daly and Lucas Daly,’ Grace replied. ‘Without them knowing.’
90
Sunday lunch. He could smell it cooking somewhere, in one of the neighbouring houses. That’s what most people would be having now, Amis Smallbone thought, bitterly. 1.30 on a Sunday. Families sitting down to a roast. He’d done that every Sunday of his childhood. Roast beef or pork or lamb or chicken. He’d maintained the tradition until he got married to Christine – Chrissie. What a bitch.
He drank some more whisky, feeling a little drunk, but not in a pleasant way. Building up Dutch courage too early in the day.
He and Chrissie, Tom and Megan. That was how it had been, once. She’d was a good cook, Chrissie. He’d give her that, but she was crap in bed. Always blaming him. Taunting him about his manhood. She hadn’t minded it when they’d first started shagging – told him she liked it; didn’t like men with big dicks because they hurt her. In their divorce she’d got custody of the kids, and buggered off to Australia with them. Melbourne. Maybe he shouldn’t have hit her all those times, but she’d deserved it. And screw it, what did it matter now?