John Harvey - Ash & Bone

'Until Mallory kills Grant. No, apparently not. But who knows?'

'Someone,' Elder said. 'Somewhere there's someone.'

'How about Lynette Drury? What she knows would fill a book and a half.'

'Have we got an address?'

'Funny you should ask.' Framlingham took a slip of paper, folded, from his breast pocket. 'There. Blackheath. Two years old, she might have moved on since then.'

'Surely you'd know?'

With a lazy movement, Framlingham's arm snaked out towards the wine. 'Best finish this off, Frank. Can't abide the waste.'

Not so long after Framlingham had left, Elder's mobile rang again. 'Bland,' Maureen said. 'He's taken the bait. This weekend maybe, Monday at the latest.'

The house was off the southern edge of the Heath, a tall Victorian villa set well back from the road behind high hedges and an iron gate. The gate complained a little as Elder raised the latch and pushed it back. In the edge of dark earth, between shrubs and grass, a pair of blackbirds searched for worms. Heavy curtains hung across the upstairs windows, the lower ones covered in patterned net. What looked to be the original stained glass was still in the front door. On a different day, under different skies, he could imagine the house seeming forbidding and grim; but this morning, pastel blue overhead and church bells ringing down in the Vale, it was anything but.

Elder rang the bell and a dog barked and then was still.

Footsteps on the stairs and along the hall.

'At least,' said the man who opened the door, 'you're not the Jehovah's Witnesses. Unless they've taken to dressing down.'

The man himself was wearing a black T-shirt and off-white cotton trousers that left little to the imagination; his hair was fair and cut short – not as short as a soccer player or a supporter of the BNP, but short enough to be fashionable. The dog was an off-white wire-haired terrier, which the man nudged out of the way with his foot.

'Frank Elder.'

'Don't tell me, you're standing as an independent in the local elections. For sustainable resources and the recycling of waste, against gay marriages.'

'Is that an issue?'

'Gay marriages? Not for me. Unless you're about to make me an offer.'

'For fuck's sake, Anton,' came a woman's voice from the interior, 'stop the second-rate cabaret and let the man in.'

She was a slim figure in a wheelchair, a shawl round her shoulders, rug across her knees. The chair was battery-operated and she eased the toggle forward to bring herself to the door. Her face, Elder saw, was deeply lined, the skin twisted tight around her unaligned left eye, as though perhaps she had suffered a stroke.

'I'm Lynette Drury,' she said, her voice a harsh rasp.

'Frank Elder.'

'Is this official, Frank? Should I be calling my lawyer out of Mass?'

'I don't think so.'

She stared at him with her good eye, as if making up her mind. 'I don't get that much company these days, Frank, I can afford to turn it away.'

Adroitly, she manoeuvred her wheelchair round and back into the house.

'Anton, do you think you could demean yourself long enough to find us something to drink?'

Anton peeled off right, the dog at his heels. Elder followed Lynette Drury into a high-ceilinged room with windows to the back and side, the garden at the rear largely lawn surrounded by shrubs and small, spiny fruit trees, rose bushes pruned well back.

'You're not the usual kind, Frank, but you've still got the smell about you.'

'Takes a while to wash off,' Elder said.

'Ben didn't send you?'

'No.'

'George Mallory neither.'

Elder shook his head.

'Thought not.' She gestured towards the dark, polished table near the window. 'Get me a cigarette, will you, Frank? Light it for me?'

She inhaled deeply enough to bring on a fit of coughing and summon Anton from the other room to pat her back and wipe spittle and dark lipstick from her mouth.

'What?' she said. 'No lecture?'

Anton shot her a look over his shoulder as he left.

'"You've got to stop, you're killing yourself,'" she mimicked, then laughed. 'Does it look like I'm alive, Frank? Is that what this looks like?'

She coughed again, more controlled this time. 'Anton,' she called towards the doorway, ' where's that fucking drink?'

The answer was the popping of a cork and Anton, moments later, reappearing with two glasses of champagne, the bottle in an ice bucket on a silver tray.

'Cheers, Frank. Your good health. Got to be some little perks, eh? Otherwise what's the point?'

'Cheers.'

'All right,' she said to Anton, 'you can get back to your Gameboy or whatever it is you get up to in the servant's quarters. Polishing the silver.'

'I've sold it already.'

'That and your skinny arse.'

Elder sipped some champagne; if it were high class or £6.99 from Tesco he had no idea. The bells seemed to have stopped ringing. Presumably all the good people of Blackheath were already on their knees.

'Each month,' Lynette said, 'Ben sends a case of champagne. Saves him coming round in person. Rubs a little Vaseline over his conscience. And he pays for Anton, of course. Though he's probably knobbing him as well. Not that he's queer, don't get me wrong. Ben, I mean. Just doesn't care what he fucks as long as it's tight.'

She coughed again and some of the champagne spilled across the purple veins at the back of her hand.

Elder lifted away the glass.

Anton appeared for a moment at the door, then, reassured, went away again.

'But my guess,' she said, 'it's George Mallory you're more interested in. More than Ben. Am I right?'

'Maybe.'

'Georgie-Porgie, kissed the girls and made them cry. He did that, all right. And now he's running scared, isn't he? Not that he'd ever admit it, of course. He could be standing in the middle of a fire, flames up to his armpits, and swear blind everything was hunky-dory. But he sent that creep Repton round, didn't he? A sure sign. Maurice Repton smarming up to you in one of those neat little suits he likes to tell you are custom-made by some tame tailor out at Winchmore Hill, used to be a cutter in Savile Row.'

'Maurice with all those questions. Anyone been to see me, sniffing round. CIB or whatever they're called nowadays. Change their fucking names as often as a whore's knickers. No, I says. Number of visitors I get these days, anyone'd think I've got the fucking plague. HIV. If anyone does, Maurice says, you will give us a call? Let us know. Us, like they're husband and fucking wife.'

She paused, collecting her breath. Ash fell from the end of her cigarette.

'Course, like I told him, no one ever came near. Till you.'

Elder took what remained of the cigarette from between her fingers and replaced it with the glass of champagne.

'Should I tell them about you, Frank? Maurice and George. What do you think?'

'I think it's up to you.'

'We'll see, we'll see. See how you behave, what it is you want. What you want to know. What do you want to know, Frank?'

'What it is has got Mallory rattled, that would do for starters.'

She looked at him lopsidedly across the top of her glass. 'Wouldn't it, though? Just wouldn't it.'

After several moments' thought, Lynette swung her chair around and repositioned it close to the rear window.

'Bring that over, would you, Frank?'

'That' was a small rosewood table with an ashtray and a coaster for her glass, which Elder refilled before lighting her another cigarette. He carried across a curved-back wooden chair and set it down close by.

There was little sign they were a relatively short drive from the heart of London, a short walk down the hill to the tat and turmoil that was Lewisham. Or that visitors, on this fine January morning, would be strolling across Greenwich Park to the Observatory, then down the sloping paths towards the Maritime Museum and the Cutty Sark.