Something to hide, p.55
Something to Hide, page 55
When he rang the buzzer for the flat, Lark’s voice replied. He identified himself and there was a pause. Then the silence that bore no hollow sound within it, telling him she’d broken their connection. He rang again. She answered with, “Do I need to ring your dad or what?”
Which was exactly what he needed to know. Lark was alone, as he’d suspected she would be. Or her children were with her. But in either case, Abeo wasn’t there.
He used the old trick, then. He pressed the buzzer for every flat but Lark’s. Someone in one of them released the lock without question. People, he thought, never learned.
Lark opened the door when he knocked. She seemed resigned to his presence. She stepped back and let him enter.
She looked hugely pregnant, and he wondered at this. She hadn’t seemed so pregnant when last they’d met. So Abeo’s newest offspring was soon to make an appearance. He wondered what the kid’s life would be like.
She said, “I’ve rung your father. You’ll want to be gone when he gets here.”
“What I’ll want,” he said, “is the passports. Hand them over and I’m out of here.”
“What passports? Whose passports?” Lark pressed her fingers into the small of her back and grunted. She looked hot, tired, and dispirited.
“Mine, Simisola’s and Mum’s passports,” Tani said. “They weren’t at home and you and me know there’s only one other place they’d be.”
“Is that the case? Then the location should spring into my brain. But it hasn’t and it’s not going to.” She walked into the kitchen where she opened the fridge’s freezer, saying, “This bloody heat.” She stared inside before she shifted things round, and in a moment she took out an icepack of the sort used by athletes after a workout or a sporting match of some kind. She put this on the back of her neck and walked to the dining table, where she sat. The table held crayons and a colouring book, opened to images from a Disney cartoon in which every hero was white and every heroine needed rescue. What shit, he thought.
He waited. He wasn’t lit up by the idea of tossing Lark’s flat to find the passports. He’d do it if he had to, but he took her at her word when it came to ringing his dad. And Abeo wasn’t about to come on foot from Ridley Road Market, not with his plans hanging in the balance. He’d be here within minutes, and Tani wanted to be gone before then.
Lark moved the icepack from the back of her neck to her chest. She gave Tani a glance. She looked surly. She moved the icepack to the back of her neck again. As she did this, she directed her gaze to a thirsty-looking potted plant beneath the lounge window, and she held it there. Then it was the sofa that interested her, and she held her gaze there.
Tani knew she was trying to misdirect him. She was trying to buy time as well. The question was, Where did she not want him to look? The answer was in that moment of hesitation she’d displayed, the one in which she realised she’d unwittingly made the wrong decision and quickly had to cover it.
Tani went to the fridge. Lark’s chair scraped the floor as she pushed back from the table. He thrust his arm into the freezer and began sweeping everything in it onto the lino. And there it was.
Along with frozen chips, three plastic trays of ice, two bags of veg, premade dinners, a package of crumpets, and two boxes of fish fingers, a small freezer bag of the sort used for sandwiches lay at his feet. Inside were the passports, their dark covers a contrast to the frost that had built up on the bag. They had probably been here for months, Tani thought. Perhaps for years.
He picked up the bag. Lark, on her feet now, said, “Leave them.” And when his reply consisted of opening the bag and drawing from it all of the passports, she said, “I told you to leave them. Leave them.”
He ignored her. He opened each to make sure whose they were. He tossed the plastic bag onto the floor into the freezer’s detritus. She took a step towards him and then another, one hand raised.
He shoved the passports into the back pocket of his jeans. He said, “I don’t fancy hitting you, but I will. You got that?”
“I don’t care. Do it.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Do it! He says that’s what you’re like. He’s told me. You’d do anything to get what you want.”
“That i’n’t the case,” Tani told her. “But you be wise and listen cos I will do this. You’re not likely to win against me if you wan’ to go at it. He’s prob’ly told you I fight dirty ’s well.”
She made a grab for the passports, but he stepped back. She came towards him. He stepped to the side. She snatched at his arm and her nails dug in. He shook her off. She blocked his route out of the kitchen and began to scream: for help, for the police, for his father. She was being brutalised. Intruder! Intruder! Burglar! Rapist! Murderer! Thief!
The only way out of the flat was the way he’d come in and she was blocking him. He had to move her out of his way. She was rock solid and screaming bloody murder into his face. He did what he had to do. He shoved her to one side. She crashed to the floor.
He didn’t stop to see how she landed or where she landed or if she needed help. He had to get out of there. That was what he did.
EMPRESS STATE BUILDING
WEST BROMPTON
SOUTH-WEST LONDON
His Met identification had been enough to get him through security and to the lifts this time round. When Lynley finally arrived from north London and rode up to the seventeenth floor, he found Mark Phinney seated at DS Jade Hopwood’s desk. As Lynley entered, DS Hopwood was shaking her head and saying, “Look, if you want my opinion, guv . . .”
“I do,” Phinney declared.
“Then here it is. No amount of enforced education is going to work for women if the men don’t start speaking up. You ask me, they’re the key, not the women. I’m talking about Nigerian men, not just Black blokes off the street. Until they begin stepping forward to declare they’re willing, happy, and eager to marry a woman who hasn’t been cut, there i’n’t going to be a change.”
“An entire paradigm shift,” was Mark Phinney’s response.
“Whatever you want to call it. And, if I can suggest . . . ?”
“Go ahead.”
“You need Black officers to take the messaging and sermonising where they need to go because these white blokes you’ve got now? It’s ludicrous, it is, to have them preaching anything about how Black men—Nigerian or not—need to start viewing Black women.” The detective sergeant saw Lynley then and said, “I expect DCS Lynley’ll take my side.”
“It makes sense,” Lynley said. “But I only heard the last minute of your conversation. I’m clueless about what went before.” And then to Mark, “I need a word, if you will.”
The DCS told DS Hopwood to carry on and took Lynley to his office. There, Lynley asked him about his brother’s car. He was in luck when it came to this, he discovered. Because Phinney had been meeting with Jade Hopwood, he hadn’t checked his phone. He did so at the mention of the car, however. But first he shut his office door.
“I did borrow it.” Phinney moved behind his desk but he didn’t sit. Instead, he went to the window, where the time of day allowed him to be backlit, his face made much more difficult to read. “I didn’t see that I had a choice. I was afraid she intended to confront Teo again, and there wasn’t a point to her doing that. It would upset her. It would upset Teo. I’d reassured Pete more than once. I’d said it was over, and it was over. I told her I would never leave her and Lilybet, and I wouldn’t have done. How could I and still live with myself? So in my mind, there was nothing left to say. About Teo, I mean. About myself and Teo. I could repeat myself again and again into eternity, but what was the point?”
His office window was large and he leaned against its sill. Behind him the blue of the sky was washed by smog and bore a growing yellow hue, another declaration that London—indeed, the entire country—was desperate for rain.
Phinney said, “For a few years, she’s been going out weekly to meet a friend of hers. It’s the only thing she’s willing to do, socially. She’s called Greer, the friend. She was to be the midwife when Lilybet was born. That wasn’t how things turned out, but she and Pete became quite close. Sometimes they have a two-person book discussion group, sometimes they go out for a drink or a meal or a film. This time, Pete said, they were meeting at a wine bar.”
“The meeting didn’t occur, I take it?”
“What occurred was a knock on the door and Greer on the front step. Coming along to say hello, she told me. She’d been in the area. First, I thought she’d mixed up their meeting place or p’rhaps Pete had. But it turns out they’d stopped meeting altogether. Pete had called a halt to it some three months ago. I wondered at this. Who wouldn’t? It seemed to me that if she’d stopped meeting with Greer but was still going out weekly, there were only two other possibilities as to where she was and where she’d been on those nights when she’d gone out. She either had a lover or she was . . . I don’t know . . . stalking Teo? Watching Teo? Waiting to see if I would turn up somehow?”
“That’s rather a leap, isn’t it?” Lynley asked.
“Why?”
“It seems you would have concluded there was someone else, a lover, before you jumped to the idea of her stalking Teo Bontempi.”
“It just didn’t seem likely to me: that she’d taken a lover. She gave no sign of that, and I reckoned there would have been signs. A new way with her hair? More makeup? Hasty phone calls? Messages on her phone? And she was so consumed—she is so consumed—with Lilybet. I couldn’t see her having something on the side. But, on the other hand, she knew there was something between Teo and me, so I thought . . . Like I said, I didn’t know. I thought she might have gone to Streatham. If she’d been doing something else—taking a class, perhaps? visiting the library? joining a choir? God knows what—why wouldn’t she have told me? But she’d never once said a word other than she was having a night with Greer. So when she left me—Greer, I mean—I rang Paulie. He stayed with Lilybet and I used his motor. I went to see if Pete had gone to Teo another time.”
“So Teo told you your wife had been there once before?”
“She had done, yes. But you know that, don’t you. You’ve her photo from the CCTV film. You’ve known it was Pete since you saw her that morning.”
Lynley didn’t reply to that, merely saying, “Why didn’t you just ring her mobile?”
“I did. But she’d turned it off, so I didn’t have a clue. I still don’t have a clue.” Phinney turned to look at the view. For a moment, he spoke to it, rather than to Lynley. “While I was there, waiting in Paulie’s car and thinking what to do next, Ross Carver turned up. I’d seen photos of him. I’d . . . I’d looked him up on social media and whatnot when Teo and I first became, you know, involved. He let himself into the building, and that was that.”
“He had a key, then. Did you?”
“Never. Like I told you, I had to ring the concierge when I went there to see why she hadn’t reported for her new assignment.”
“How long did you stay there? Parked, I mean.”
“Probably a quarter-hour. Bit less, p’rhaps. I waited to see if Pete would emerge. I couldn’t think she’d want to stay there once Carver arrived.”
“Did she emerge?”
“No. And as far as I could tell, she hadn’t been there in the first place. By the time I got back home, she was in bed and Paulie was gone. Asleep or faking it, I don’t know.”
“Did you ask her where she’d been, on the following day?”
He looked down at his feet. He shook his head. “I reckoned Greer would tell her that she’d been rumbled and she’d come to me and . . . What do I call it? Confess? But she didn’t. I suppose I don’t really want to know where she was. And the fact is . . .” He looked up at Lynley. His face bore a look that suggested the pain he’d been carrying round for so long.
“The fact is . . . ?” Lynley prompted him.
“I never saw the car. I mean our car. It wasn’t nearby and, believe me, I looked. I can’t see her hiding it. Why would she have done? She wouldn’t have known Greer blew the gaff. She wouldn’t have known I’d show up in Streatham. She had no reason to hide the car, did she.”
On the other hand, Lynley thought, she was a copper’s wife. She’d know the game better than most. And there was another consideration as well. She could have gone to Streatham and left Streatham in the time that it had taken her husband to arrange borrowing his brother’s car and driving to south London himself. He didn’t point this out to the DCS, however. Phinney wasn’t thick. He would have already worked this out.
“We’re going to ask for her fingerprints, Mark,” Lynley said. “DNA as well. If she did get into Teo’s flat somehow, no matter what occurred between them that night, we’ll need to eliminate her from the list of possible suspects.”
Phinney nodded. His expression was bleak. “I’ll let her know. But please understand. She wouldn’t have hurt Teo. That’s not who she is. That’s not her way.”
Lynley made no response to this. It was, after all, what most husbands would say.
BRIXTON
SOUTH LONDON
Monifa knew there was only one real choice. She could cook a thousand dinners for the Nkata family. She could add twenty Nigerian dishes to the menu at Alice N’s Café; she could add fifty Nigerian dishes if she thought that might work. She could join Alice there as a cook or she could teach Alice and her assistant Tabby how to go about creating the Nigerian dishes themselves. But none of that was going to get her closer to Simisola and Tani.
Once Alice and Tabby had mastered the egg rice, Monifa joined Alice in the café’s kitchen, where the cooker elevated the temperature so much that they draped wet hand towels over their heads and when the towels were dry, they dampened them again and each took another to wear around her neck. Throughout the day, Tabby worked behind the counter, taking customers’ orders for takeaway food, serving customers’ orders for eating in. There were plenty of both, and Monifa discovered that Alice as well as Tabby knew most of the clientele by name. Indeed, Tabby was able to order for most of them on her own, so regular were their habits. As cheerful Jamaican music played, conversation and laughter dominated the eating area.
The cleanup required two hours, delivering her back to Loughborough Estate just before six. Alice chose a different route to take them there from the one she’d used in the morning. Again, it served to confuse Monifa. She had no way of knowing exactly where they were once they made the first turn at the second corner beyond the café.
“Now you sit down and put your feet up, Monifa,” Alice told her as they entered the family’s flat. “I’m making us a pot of tea. Or p’rhaps you’d want a fizzy water?”
Tea, Monifa told her, would be very nice, thank you. She went on to ask Alice if there was any blank paper to be had in the flat. Alice thought there was a yellow pad inside the piano bench, from the long-ago days when Benj fancied himself a composer, she added. “There’s prob’ly a pencil or biro ’s well. But you say the word if there i’n’t and I can get you one.”
“I must write for the detective sergeant,” she said.
“Mind you make it legible, then. Jewel’s a stickler when it comes to penmanship. You ever see his, Monifa? No? He writes like it’s going into some museum, he does. Watch your q’s, specially. Jewel can’t abide q’s that look like g’s not able to make up their minds.”
Monifa lifted the piano bench and found the yellow pad. A biro was attached to it by its own clip. The top page of the pad did indeed hold some bars of music.
She thought about what she needed to write. She wanted to consider how she might state what she knew without damaging anyone. If the clinic was indeed closed as the detective sergeant had told her it was, then the only worry she actually had was what her statement would do to Mercy Hart. She could lie about Mercy Hart. She could swear that Mercy Hart had nothing to do with any part of whatever went on in the clinic. She could write that, as far as she knew, Mercy Hart’s job consisted of taking in down payments or full payments, making appointments for women and their daughters, and dealing with body temperatures and blood pressure. There would be no way for DS Nkata to have any other information. If he was trying to get it from her, it stood to reason that he hadn’t got anything from Mercy herself. But would lying bring Tani and Simisola back to her? It didn’t seem so.
When Alice came into the lounge with a teapot and cup, Monifa had not yet written a word. She was staring at the yellow pad as if it could remove her from the dilemma she faced. When Alice said, “Sugar and milk, Monifa?” Monifa didn’t register that she was being asked a question. Alice went back to the kitchen and returned with a white jug in the shape of a cow as well as a bowl of sugar. Monifa felt her light touch on the shoulder. She looked up.
“My Jewel’s a good man,” she said. “Whatever he’s said to you, I just want you to know you can trust him. I never knew him to lie about anything. Full stop. He doesn’t have it in him.”
When Alice returned to the kitchen and began removing items from the fridge for dinner, Monifa finally picked up the biro and put it to paper. She began the statement that Alice’s son required of her.
She started with her name: Monifa Bankole. She started with the fact of discovery: conversation with a customer at the stall selling dried herbs and spices. She herself was seeking Cameroon pepper, dried bitter leaf, yaji, ata Jos. She’d been listening to a woman next to her complaining about the scarcity of uziza leaves when, from behind her, a woman’s low voice said, “They do it different. There’s someone knows how to do it clean and sterile.”
Monifa glanced over her shoulder and saw two women having this low-voiced chat. She joined them, said her name, told them she had a daughter who was of age. The women had been reluctant to bring her into their circle till Talatu walked by and called out, “Tell that Simisola of yours that I’m still waiting for those head wraps, the special ones, she’ll know what I mean. Hope I don’t have to wait till next hols to get her back on board.”
