Framed

10

Shortly before ten o clock on Thursday morning, a police patrol car drew up outside the small terraced home of Phil and Moyra Sheffield. DI Jimmy Falcon got out of the car, checked the address with his notebook, and walked up the path. He rang the doorbell. A moment later Phil Sheffield opened the door; DI Falcon showed him his ID card and was then invited into the house.

Forty minutes later DI Falcon left the Sheffields’ house. He hurried out to the patrol car and got in beside the uniformed driver. The car moved off.

Inside the house Phil Sheffield turned away from the window. He was a big man, gaunt-eyed, blunt in his speech and manner. He looked at his wife, sitting on the sofa twisting a damp tissue between her fingers. Her eyes were rimmed with red.

“Well? You going to tell me what all this is about? Moyra?” He came closer, bending forward, trying to make her look at him. “Moyra?” She was on the point of saying something, then she began to cry, losing control, her shoulders heaving. Phil sat beside her and drew her close.

“I’m sorry, love...” He smoothed her honey blond hair, hooked a finger under her chin. “Moyra. Look at me. What did he say?”

She turned away and began to sob harder. Phil stared at the back of her head, exasperated, clenching his fists to keep himself under control. After more sobbing and snuffling, Moyra finally blew her nose and was able to speak.

“I told him about the phone call,” she said.

“Well, I bloody know that — I told you to call them. Did they know who it was?”

Moyra shook her head.

“So what did the copper say? Is it somebody playing silly buggers? Moyra, for Christ’s sake tell me what the bastard said!”

“He’s alive, Phil,” she said huskily, swallowing hard. “They... they picked him up in Spain.”

Phil sat back, staring at her. His mouth was open a clear inch.

“He seemed more interested in the phone call, asking me if the caller told me his name.”

Moyra stood up by the mantelpiece, her shoulders hunched. She stared balefully at her collection of Capo di Monte and Lladro figurines.

“I told him how the man kept on asking about Eddie,” she said, “kept on asking if I knew where Eddie was. I said I couldn’t take it in, because all I could think of was, I’m scared, I’m so scared...”

Phil had been staring at the carpet as if he couldn’t understand where it had come from. He stood up suddenly.

“That cop told you? Moyra, did he actually tell you Eddie is alive?” He watched her nod. “Jesus Christ. What about Italy? Did he ask about us?”

“Oh, God.” Moyra groaned. She hadn’t heard his question; her head was filled with confusion and turmoil.

“He’s been alive all this time.” Her arm shot out and swept the ornaments off the mantelpiece. “The bastard!”

“You missed one,” Phil snarled, knocking the remaining figure flying. He looked at Moyra. “I’ll bloody kill him.”

He could hear her sobbing her heart out as she ran up the stairs, heard the bedroom door slam shut. He went into the kitchen for a pan and brush to sweep up the broken china. He tipped it into the bin outside, then went back into the spotless kitchen and sat at the pine table, sat on the pine chair with the blue and white frilled cushion that matched the curtains. She was still crying, he could still hear her and he wanted to go up to her, but knew it was best to let it all come out.

He had taken her to Italy, it was a real tough journey, she hadn’t seen or heard from her husband in years, not until the call to say his body had been found. All the way there she had clasped Phil’s hand tight, chewing her lips, sighing, and repeating over and over that she was glad, glad they’d found him... it meant they could get married.

Phil had been with Moyra for three years before that Italy trip. He adored her and wanted to marry her, had wanted to after the very first date. Moyra had been the pampered only daughter of a wealthy builder and she had been just seventeen when she met Edward Myers. They had married six weeks later. Myers had just appeared one night, she told Phil, in a pub her crowd used to go to, and she had no memory of anyone even introducing them. Phil had had to coax the background of her marriage out of Moyra. She found it hard to discuss, harder still ever to come to terms with Myers’s leaving her. Her parents had been against the marriage but had bought them the house as a wedding present.

Phil looked around the kitchen he’d redecorated. In fact, he reckoned there wasn’t much left of the bastard, it was their home now, but while he could throw out all the objects, the furniture that had been part of Myers’s life with Moyra, what he had never been able to do was rid the house, or Moyra, of her memories. Phil had even made her put all the wedding photos in the trash, and she had agreed, but what he didn’t know was that she had retrieved them later, and hidden them. She couldn’t part with them, and even though she had married Phil, there was some part of her that had never let Eddie go, some part of her that always hoped he would come back. But that had ended after Italy.

After the Italy trip, after seeing the body, it was easier, she had no hope, and she had agreed to marry him. Phil made a pot of tea and fetched a tray, which he carried up the stairs. He stood outside the bedroom and listened. She was still crying, so he went back to the kitchen and drank the tea alone. He didn’t know what to do, how to comfort her, he knew it must be a terrible shock. It was to him. Christ, they weren’t even legally married. He shook his head, wishing he could have just ten minutes with the bastard. He’d like to squeeze the life out of Eddie Myers, thump the living daylights out of him, not just for himself, but for his Moyra.

Moyra never knew, would never know how tough it had been for him. It had taken so long for her to forget Eddie, so long for her to admit that she loved Phil, but even when she had said it, it wasn’t quite what he had wanted, or hoped it would be like. She was so beautiful, like a perfect china doll, and that bastard had broken her heart. Her parents had told him she’d had a nervous breakdown after he’d walked out, she’d refused to eat, would stay up all night waiting, sure he was coming home again.

“How can you still love him, Moyra, after what he did to you?”

She had given that sweet soft smile, turning away from Phil, and he had gone to her, put his arms around her tightly. “I love you, Moyra, you got to forget him, if you don’t we don’t stand a chance together.”

Moyra had turned in his arms, rested her head against his big wide chest, and it was as if he held a fragile bird, her whole body quivered and shook. “I will love you, Phil, I do love you, but don’t ask me about Eddie, don’t keep asking me, because every time I hear his name, something happens in my heart. It’s like somebody punches me all the time, and it hurts, no matter how long ago, you just say his name and... and I hurt inside... Oh, Phil, I loved him so very much, it was like he had some kind of magic.”

Phil had tried to make a joke of it, saying he was no competition for a magician, he was just an ordinary bloke, a plumber, and all he had was his love...

Moyra had reached up and touched his face. “I don’t want magic, just honesty, I want to care for you, and I want... I do love you, Phil.”

He had contented himself with that, it was enough, but it had taken the body in Italy to make her agree to marry him. They would get through this scene, get over that bastard coming back from the dead.

At the interrogation session that same morning — conducted with both men sitting cross-legged on the floor, Larry looking particularly crisp in a borrowed cotton shirt — Von Joel confirmed the details of three more robberies with which he’d had a slender connection, all of them committed over a fourteen-month period. He also mentioned an incident concerning a shotgun, bought by George Minton for use in a robbery, which turned out to have been used earlier to kill a security guard during a raid in Hounslow. Minton had thrown a fit when he found out the gun was hot, and eventually he threw it into the Thames at Tower Bridge. The story was important and as the lunch break drew close Larry went over it again. He was curious to know if the gun might still be recoverable from the water.

“You said in your first statement you can remember the exact spot...”

“That’s right.” Von Joel nodded. “I was with Minton when he chucked it, wrapped in a sack with a weight to keep it in the drink. It took only a second — he stopped the car, got to the parapet, flung it in.”

“Do you know who sold Minton the shooter?”

“I don’t know.” Von Joel rubbed his chin, thinking. “It was definitely the same gun that knocked off that security officer.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Maybe...” He looked at Larry. “Bingham. Yeah, it could have been him.”

It seemed to Larry a good time to stop. They withdrew to the kitchen, where Von Joel insisted that he make lunch for them both. He prepared rice dishes again, plus an elaborate salad and — the French mustard now being on hand — a spectacular dressing. The heart of the meal was monkfish with steamed fresh vegetables.

Larry confessed his misgivings. He had never eaten monkfish — in fact he had no clear idea what it was.

“Monkfish are any of about ten or twelve species of shark,” Von Joel told him. “They all form the one group with the Latin name Squatina. The one we’re having today, which tastes like very superior scampi, is a Mediterranean variety called Squatina squatina — angel shark.”

Larry tasted a piece. It was delicious.

“That’s something else I’ve found out I like,” he said.

Von Joel winked. “Wait till you taste my calamari.”

As they sat down to eat Larry asked if Von Joel’s wife had taught him to cook. The question appeared to amuse him, but apart from saying no, he had nothing further to offer on the subject. As before, he moved nimbly on to something else. He put two small capsules on the table in front of Larry. They were B vitamins, he explained.

“Take them tomorrow before warm-up. Keeps your blood in good condition. Food okay?”

DI Shrapnel put his head around the door.

“They picked up Minton,” he reported brightly. “Bastard was hidden in his cellar all the time. He said he was doing some home improvements!”

Larry watched Von Joel. For a moment he registered sadness, perhaps remorse; he recovered quickly and carried on eating.

A few minutes later, as they were finishing the meal, Von Joel said, “I hope McKinnes’s security’s tight. Minton’s got a lot of friends.”

“Scares you, does he?”

“It’s not me I’m worried about, Larry.” Von Joel chewed in silence for a moment. “You’ve got a wife and kids.”

Larry stared at him, his appetite dying.

Later that afternoon DCI McKinnes paused to watch a small procession of uniformed officers lead three handcuffed men along a corridor outside the incident room at St. John’s Row station. As he stood there DI Falcon appeared at his side. They waited until the prisoners passed, then walked together down the corridor.

“Did you get the message?” Falcon asked. From McKinnes’s expression it was obvious he hadn’t. “Eddie Myers’s ex-wife, she got a call, doesn’t know who it was from, but the caller asked if she knew where Eddie was. No name, like I say, but she freaked. So. Her husband contacted the local police, who contacted us. I went along to see her this morning. She was hysterical, howling her eyes out. I’m running a check on her husband, he looks a tough bugger...”

A moment before Falcon had finished speaking, George Minton was led out of an interview room at the end of the corridor. He glared at McKinnes.

“I’ll be out!” he shouted. “You’ve got nothing, McKinnes!”

The DCI studied the toes of his shoes.

“Hear me, you bastard? You tried this six years ago...”

McKinnes turned away and practically bumped into DC Summers. “Guv...” Summers paused to swallow. He always seemed to be in a hurry. “We got this Rodney Bingham coming in, and he’s with his solicitor.”

“So?”

“It’s bloody Jefferson — Eddie Myers’s man.”

“What?” McKinnes blinked.

“Straight up.”

“I don’t believe it!” McKinnes turned toward the incident room, then turned back to Summers. “Get Jefferson in to see me! Now! Jesus Christ! What the hell does he think he’s playing at?” He caught DI Falcon by the arm. “You didn’t say anything to Myers’s wife about the stiff in Italy?”

Falcon shook his head.

“Good. Now check out her husband, and get a local to keep an eye on them. I think the ruddy cat’s out of the bag.”

That night, sprawled at one side of the mattress on the floor in Von Joel’s room, Larry stared at the chess board lying between them and wondered if there was anything the man opposite him did not know, or at least didn’t have an opinion about.

“Checkmate,” Von Joel said, capturing Larry’s king with a soft click. He looked up, smiling. “Think you’re getting the hang of it?”

Larry nodded. Spending time with Von Joel had to be a better move than joining the Open University. Earlier, while he was preparing dinner — tonight it had been carrots in orange and brandy sauce, with bowls of spiced rice on the side and a chicory and watercress salad with a pink peppercorn mustard sauce — he had explained the scientific basis of his diet.

“There are two main constituents in our food, Larry — proteins and carbohydrates. Proteins are essential constituents of your body; they make up the building blocks of muscles, tissues, and organs. Carbohydrates are the sugars and starches, the sources of energy. Now, we need both protein and carbohydrates in order to survive, no doubt about that, but the body digests and distributes them best if they aren’t mixed when we eat them. So, the rule is, never have proteins and carbohydrates at the same meal. The system likes to deal with them separately and it’s no trouble to make sure it does. You just have to be organized.”

He dictated a list of dos and don’ts, which Larry scribbled down on the cover of one of his official notebooks.

“Try to eat only one kind of protein or carbohydrate at each meal — fish, meat, eggs, or cheese for the protein, and bread, rice, pasta, or potatoes for the carbohydrate. Always buy food in season, it’ll be fresher and cheaper. You should eat a little salad of raw vegetables before every meal — that’s important for a lot of reasons; I’ll tell you about something called free radicals another time. Oh, and when you’re putting together your salad, try to pick two or more vegetables that have grown below the ground and combine them with the same number that have grown above the ground. What else? Oh, yes — when you’re cooking vegetables they should be steamed in their own juices with as little added water as possible. The exceptions are cauliflower and asparagus.”

All that, plus sparkling conversation over the meal, and then this. Chess. Until now, Larry had managed to go through life without knowing the game. Apart from being able to identify the pieces by name he had never felt inclined to learn anything else, feeling it was inappropriate for the likes of him to get into a game that had such highbrow associations.

He looked at the board now and smiled. In the space of two hours it had come to mean something. It was no longer an opaque code. With a minimum of concentration on his part, the arrangement of pieces translated itself into the lines of a strategy; the avenues of attack and defense, devious and tricky, were nevertheless apparent, they could be visualized. Already, the richness and density of the game were suggesting themselves to him.

“That was a straightforward little exercise,” Von Joel said, replacing the pieces on the board. “Just something to get you started. Now then” — he rubbed his hands — “how about a swift Q and A session on the moves, then we’ll call it a night, huh?”

Larry nodded. “Fire away.” He was enjoying himself.

“Right. Tell me about the king.”

“Ah...” Larry scratched his nose, staring at the board. “The king moves in any direction, one square at a time.”

“The rook?”

“He can move all the way across the board, as long as there’s nothing in his way. He has to do it in straight lines.”

“He moves on the rank and file. Correct. What about the bishop?”

“He’s a long-range mover, too, but he does it diagonally.”

“And the queen?”

“A combination of the rook and bishop — she can move on any open line.”

“One more. The knight.”

“Let me get it right, now...” Larry stared at the board again. “His move is a kind of L-shaped affair covering two squares at a time, one straight, one diagonal. He can jump over any black or white piece that’s in either of those squares, and if the piece is an enemy he can capture it.”

“You catch on fast.” Von Joel put his hands behind his head and lay back on his cushion. “By the time I’ve finished with you, you’ll be able to teach your wife to play.”

“I don’t think she’d fancy it.”

Larry glanced sidelong at Von Joel, tempted to bring up the subject of his wife again, just as he kept making glancing references to Susan.

“Did you teach your wife to play?”

“Nah.” Von Joel stared at the ceiling. “We never got near enough to being emotionally or intellectually matched, if you get my drift.”

“Sorry?”

“I got married when I was eighteen. It was over after a few weeks; it was a mistake. She was a good girl, but” — Von Joel shrugged — “a night out for her was a trip to a home furnishings shop.” He shifted his head on the cushion and switched his gaze to the wall. “I was the end of her growth. She was satisfied with being married, didn’t want anything else except fixtures and fittings. I could never understand how she could look at one of those crap women’s magazines, and her voice would grate, ‘This is nice, Eddie.’ ” He held up his hand, forefinger and thumb an inch apart. “Her sphere was this big.”

“She stood by you,” Larry pointed out.

“So did my Labrador. She’s better off never seeing me. I hurt her enough.”

He jumped up suddenly, crossed to the wardrobe, and swung open the door.

“Feel this,” he said, bringing out a beautifully cut jacket. Larry came across, fingered the fabric gently. “That’s pure cashmere,” Von Joel said. “Two thousand quid. My wife would have had heart failure just running her hand down the sleeve.”

“How much did those shirts set you back?”

“Well, Maestro Fabriani made-to-measure linen shirts can go up to a few hundred each.” Von Joel snatched up a pale blue one. “Try this!”

Larry shook his head, embarrassed by the generosity. He stared into the wardrobe, slightly appalled that one man could spend so much money on clothes. “Any time you want, Larry, just try something on.” Von Joel went back to the mattress and sat down. “I love women, Larry.” He smiled broadly, opening the fresh topic without preamble. “Young, fresh-skinned, tight-arsed women. Their lean limbs, that special shine on their hair — and the teeth, white perfect teeth. Their smell, Larry, nothing is as sweet... nothing compares with the beauty of a female body. The curves, that wonderful sweep from hip to thigh... Aaah! What am I doing to myself?” He clamped his hands over his eyes in comic agony, but underneath he was watching Larry. “Tell me about your wife, Susan...” He began to sing, “Oh, Susanne, won’t you tell me...”

Larry turned from the wardrobe abruptly, checking his watch.

“It’s late,” he said, and went to the door. “See you in the morning.”

“Sweet dreams,” Von Joel said, laughing softly.

As the door closed he got to his feet. He stood with his hands on his hips, face taut with concentration. Crossing to a calendar hanging on the wall he flipped through the leaves, studying the dates. All the days up to the present had been crossed off. As he stared his eyes became distant. His mouth tightened to a grim line. Anyone seeing him would have said he looked uncommonly tense, even dangerous.