Darren was the first to recover. “Blimey, talk about your cat among the pigeons.”
I shook myself. “Axel,” I said urgently. “Did you tell your dad about it?”
He was crying silently with his head on his drawn-up knees.
“Axe,” I repeated. “Did you? Did you want him punished for, you know, turning you down?”
Axel looked up at that. “I never wanted him hurt! I wouldn’t have . . . It was a threat, that’s all, so he’d give me another chance. All I wanted was a chance with him. M-Mum didn’t need him. She could have anyone.”
“So you didn’t tell your dad anything?”
“I just wanted to talk to Jonathan. He never let me catch him on his own anymore at home. So I had to go to the Smithy. I didn’t know . . . h-he was there.” Axel buried his head in his knees again.
I struggled to make it out. “What? Your dad was there? What, when you were talking to Jonathan?”
Axel didn’t answer and didn’t look at me, either.
I patted his arm. “Your mum’s right, you got that? You didn’t do anything wrong. You weren’t to know he was going to fly off the handle about a drunken snog.”
“That all it was?” Darren’s voice broke in, making me jump. I’d almost forgotten him and Hazel were in the room with us. “See, I know Brian Tarbox of old, and he ain’t the sort to blow something like this out of proportion. Kill a bloke for kissing his son? Seems a bit excessive to me. Break his legs? Yeah, I can see that. Tell the poor sod if he don’t sling his hook, there’ll be worse coming. But murder? That’s taking a risk, and he ain’t daft, old Tarbox ain’t. So I’m thinking maybe he got the idea somehow there was more to it than that. Would I be right there, Axe?”
Hazel drew in a sharp breath, then sat on Axel’s bed and put her arm around him. “Axe? You can tell us. Did anything else happen?”
Axel choked out a no.
“When you were talking to Jonathan about it, though,” she went on, then took another deep breath. “Did you say you were going to tell Dad he’d done more than that?”
He broke down completely into racking sobs that shook them both. Christ. I was taking that as a yes. So Tarbox had taken the threat at face value and killed Jonny-boy for messing around with his kid.
And Lilah had just gone to confront him about it. I turned to Darren. “You look after them. I’m going after Lilah.” I mean, bloody hell, she was half his size. Less than. A quarter his size.
“Oi, hang about.” Darren grabbed my arm. “You even know where you’re going?”
Shit. No, I didn’t. “Okay, where would Tarbox be, right now?”
“Who knows? Got fingers in a lot of pies, that one.” Darren said it with an air of satisfaction I didn’t quite understand.
“He said he was going to the office,” Axel said, his voice hoarse.
“So where’s that?”
Darren folded his arms, then sighed. “Studley Bottom. But, oi, you don’t want to go down there and get yourself caught up in any aggro.”
“What?” I shook my head, trying to clear it. “But what about Lilah? She’ll be on her own with him, won’t she?”
“See, it’s like this. Lilah’s a mate. But she’s made her bed, ain’t she? And Phil’s a mate and all, and he won’t thank me for sending his fiancé off to get flattened by a bloody bellend like Tarbox. Sorry, Axe, but that’s the truth. Your dad ain’t the kind of person you want to mess with.” Darren turned back to me. “I’ll have another go getting hold of the man with the muscles, and you just sit tight, yeah?”
What, and leave it for the big boy to sort out? Sod that. I grabbed my phone. Fortunately the company name, Lickett & Lovett, wasn’t one I was going to forget in a hurry. I bunged it in the search bar, added Studley Bottom—was that seriously a real place?—and waited impatiently for the 4G I was paying for to kick in.
There. Found them. “See you later,” I said, and legged it.
It all made sense. I drove as fast as I could without risking an accident. That’s why Jonny-boy had been running scared back in Camden—he’d known Tarbox was gunning for him. Bloody hell, he must have been crapping himself when he’d found out Tarbox had heard him and Axe talking.
The only thing that surprised me was that Tarbox hadn’t done him in there and then, given what he thought old JP had been up to. Natural caution? Darren seemed to think he was generally risk averse. Or was he just a revenge-served-cold sort of bloke? Did that mean Lilah was safe, even if she laid into him with righteous indignation after having only heard half the story? I couldn’t take that chance.
Studley Bottom was almost due north of Pluck’s End as the crow flies. The B road network not having been laid out by crows, Lilah’s drive to work wouldn’t be quite as quick and easy as you might think, and meant doing a fair bit of wiggling and winding around narrow country lanes. I’d have done better to bring the Fiesta instead of the van, but it was too late now.
I was beginning to wish I’d been around in the 1930s, when murders were civilised and took place on posh trains, cruise ships, or in snowed-in country houses, and your suspects didn’t keep sodding off to who knew where. Hercule Poirot never had to worry about his GPS letting him down.
Then again, if him and Captain Hastings had wanted to sail off into the sunset together, they’d have found themselves on the wrong side of the law sharpish, so maybe things were better these days after all.
I clenched my hand on the steering wheel to stop myself beeping at a couple of old dears tootling along at thirty miles an hour. As soon as the road got more or less wide enough to get two vehicles abreast, I zipped past them, the hedge on the wrong side of the road knocking my wing mirror wonky. Ah, sod it. Roads like this, no other bugger was going to be daft enough to try overtaking.
Tarbox wouldn’t hurt Lilah—would he? They’d been married for . . . Actually, I wasn’t sure how long they’d been married, but long enough to produce Axel. And they’d worked together for a couple of decades, presumably amicably. That had to count for something, right?
Damn it, where was this bloody place?
I pulled over, had another butcher’s at the GPS and realised I’d taken a wrong turning, damn it. I heaved the van into a three-point turn—not easy in these narrow lanes—waved an apology at the line of cars I’d been holding up (although it was their own fault for appearing from nowhere) and set off again.
At this rate, I might just make it in time for Lilah’s funeral.
I eventually screeched into the car park outside Lilah’s office building, parked the van in a space marked “Holborn & Co, Accts,” and ran to the door.
I dunno what I was expecting “the office” to be like—wall-to-wall naked people, the inside of a BDSM dungeon, whatever—but in reality it was just, well, an office. In a building with a bunch of other offices. Christ alone knew what the accountants thought about sharing an address with a porn company. Maybe it was good for business?
The further I got inside the tastefully carpeted, magnolia-painted building, the more certain I was that I’d been wildly wrong about Lilah being in danger. It wasn’t the sort of place you could imagine anything violent happening. What was Tarbox going to do to her, anyhow? Bash her over the head with a hole punch? Even the windows were sealed to keep the air-con in and the unfortunate fatalities out.
It wasn’t big enough to have a receptionist, so I followed the signs up to the first floor and walked straight into Lickett & Lovett. At least here, it was more obviously something to do with the entertainment industry, with shelves full of DVDs and a big telly on the wall.
And Lilah, sitting at a desk and making a phone call without a care in the flippin’ world.
She raised her eyes, smiled at me, and held up a finger, presumably to let me know she’d only be a mo, seeing as it wasn’t her middle finger. Then she got on with her conversation while I stood there like St. George togged up in full armour and battle regalia to face down a dragon, only to be confronted with a kitten in a bow.
Lilah hung up. “Sorry, love, I was booking in a private shoot.” She gave me a flirty smile. “They’re getting really popular with couples, you know. Get your own sex tape, but professional production values and all. I could do you and your other half a discount if you want.”
“Uh . . . Thanks. I’ll, um, let you know.” What the bleedin’ hell had happened to all the mortal peril I’d been expecting?
“If you want to hire some models to play along, I can let you have a flick through.” She brandished a Lever Arch file at me.
“Where’s Tarbox?” I asked desperately.
“Little boys’ room. Why, did you want him?” The light of speculation was in her eye.
“I . . .” I sank into the visitor chair opposite her, across the desk. “Bloody hell, Lilah. I thought he was going to kill you!”
“What? Why would he want to do that?” She seemed honestly baffled.
“But—” I broke off as the door opened, and Tarbox swaggered in. I jumped up instinctively.
His eyebrows almost disappeared under the brim of his bowler hat. “What’s all this, then? Come to audition for us, have you?” He ran an assessing eye up and down my body that somehow made me feel extra naked under my clothes.
“You killed Jonathan,” I blurted out.
Lilah and Tarbox stared at me. “No, he didn’t,” she said after a pause. “He was with me that night.”
Shit. I’d forgotten that, hadn’t I? Her and Tarbox were each other’s alibi for the night Jonny-boy died.
Tarbox pushed back his hat. One of these days he was going to do that a time too many and it’d fall right off, but apparently today was not that day. “Like I told Lilah, I never touched the bloke. Think I’m stupid? I know when my own son’s telling porkies. Cry for attention, wasn’t it? I told him, if he wants to make up stories, he wants to do it proper and sell ’em to the papers.”
I stared at him in disbelief. “What, so you hear Axel talking about Jonathan and him . . . you know, and you just told him to pull the other one?”
“That’s right.” He folded his arms. “Because it’s a load of bollocks.”
“Course it bleedin’ is,” Lilah put in. “My Jonny wouldn’t do nothing like that. Everyone kisses family. It don’t mean nothing.”
“See? And that’s why I never told you about it at the time. All a load of bollocks.” He rolled his eyes at me in a Women, eh? sort of way.
I was so weirded out by this surreal, anticlimactic calm I actually laid a hand on Tarbox’s arm. “So it wasn’t you Jonathan was scared of? Because when I met him in Camden, he was jumpier than a bloody bunny-rabbit who’s just heard foxhunting’s been banned.”
Tarbox sent me a glare that said Move your hand, chum, unless you want to be taking your fingers home in a bag.
I moved it.
Lilah tsked loudly. “We’ve been through all that. You tell him, Bri.”
“I may have made one or two comments on what anyone who messed around with my boy might expect from the rest of his short, miserable life.” Tarbox sounded like he’d enjoyed doing it too. “But I never laid a finger on him. Not my fault if he ain’t got the courage of his convictions, now is it?”
Lilah squared up to him across the desk, hands on her hips. “Oi, don’t you say nothing about my Jonny. I loved that man.”
“He wasn’t good enough for you, babe.”
“Not good enough for your precious bloody son and heir, you mean.”
“So? What of it? Wasn’t wrong, was I? Snogging an underage boy like that. Disgusting, I call it.”
Lilah’s eyes narrowed. “He was drunk, wasn’t he? Made a mistake. Like we ain’t all done that. And you know as well as I do you wouldn’t have given a toss if it’d been a woman Axel had been messing about with. All them stories you used to tell me about bunking off school to have it off with your best mate’s mum . . . You’d have patted the boy on the back and given him a bleedin’ cigar for being a chip off the old block.”
“So?”
“So what’s the difference, just ’cos it’s a bloke, eh?” Lilah was leaning over the desk so far her boobs were almost popping out of her dress. Tarbox had his eye on them, presumably so he could offer a hand to help keep them in line if necessary.
I couldn’t help thinking they were both missing the point. Surely underage was underage, whatever the gender and/or orientation involved?
“Lilah,” I interrupted, because somebody had to keep his mind on the actual murder case. “That message that was sent luring Jonathan up from London, did you send that?”
“Course I bleedin’ didn’t.” She sighed. “Wish I had, mind. ’Cos then I’d have been there. And he’d be okay, and we could’ve got this mess with Axel sorted out proper. I know just ’cos he came up to meet me don’t mean he wanted to come back for good. I ain’t daft. But maybe he wanted to tell me to my face? That it was over? That’d still have been better than what happened.”
I swallowed. Should I say something about the vibes I’d felt from the package? But I was still only guessing about Jonathan’s state of mind. And anyway, that wasn’t what was important right now. “Have you got any idea who might have used your phone to send it?”
“It’s like I told the police. We all went out for lunch at the Brewer’s Droop—me, the kids, their dad here, and their Aunty Loos—and I must have dropped my phone. I didn’t even realise it was missing till I got home. Had to go back to the pub to look for it, and when I got there, they had it behind the bar. The girl found it on the floor when she was clearing tables. So it could’ve been anyone.”
And wasn’t that convenient? Maybe my thoughts showed on my face, as Lilah gave me a sharp look. “You can ask ’em at the pub if you want, they’ll tell you.”
Tarbox was nodding. “She rang me up bitching about it and all.”
For a couple—sorry, ex-couple—who’d just been having a shouting match, they were pretty quick to get back to the united front. Well, he would back her up if he’d been the one to borrow the phone, wouldn’t he? “Whose idea was this meal, anyhow? Was it like a birthday or something?”
Lilah turned to Tarbox. “It was you what suggested it, wasn’t it?”
“Me? Nah. Least, I don’t think so.”
“Maybe it was Hazel, then. She’s a good kid, and she knew her mum needed cheering up. Or maybe it was—”
“Now I think about it,” Tarbox interrupted, “it could have been me after all. It ain’t like we never go out normally. Family’s important.”
I stopped listening. Because there was one person nobody had mentioned—although my guess was that Lilah had been just about to—who could quite as easily have made the suggestion. Who else spent a lot of time at the Smithy—more than Tarbox, in fact—and might have overheard Axel making his threats? Tallulah. His Aunty Loos, who was closer to the lad than his mum, in some ways. Close enough to take him for days out; one of ’em on the very day he’d tried to kill himself. What if she’d heard Axel’s bluff too, and unlike Tarbox, had believed the tales he’d been threatening to tell were true?
What if she’d decided to sort Jonathan out herself?
Had she told Axel what she’d done, on that Sunday outing? Or had he worked it out for himself? I’d thought the kid tried to off himself because he reckoned his dad had killed Jonathan. Was it possible that he was trying to pull the wool over our eyes and damn his dad to shield his aunt?
“Did anyone else know about Axel’s claims?” I demanded, fixing Tarbox in the eye.
He shrugged. “Not from me, they didn’t.”
“Where’s your sister now?” I asked Lilah.
She stared at me for a mo. “Why?”
“Uh, she wasn’t at the hospital. I just want a word.”
Lilah shrugged. “S’pose she’ll be at the Smithy, this time of day.”
“Even if it’s closed? Or was she planning to open up today?” I frowned. “Wouldn’t she have called Hazel in for that?”
“She wouldn’t have bloody got her. I told my girl she’s either with me or with her Uncle Darren today.” Her lips tightened, and she looked suddenly older. “My poor baby would never have hurt himself if I’d been with him.”
“Could you give her a call? Your sister, I mean. Not your daughter.”
Lilah rolled her eyes but pulled out her phone and dialled.
“No answer.”
Bloody hell, it was turning into a full-scale epidemic.
“What do you want to go bothering Tallulah for, anyhow?” Tarbox was looming right in my face. “Girl’s got a business to run, and having her staff keep dying on her ain’t helping.”
I bet Jonny-boy and Oliver would be feeling horribly guilty about that. If they weren’t, you know, dead.
“Yeah, you leave my sister alone,” Lilah butted in. “She ain’t got nothing to do with all this.”
“Yeah? How do you know? Really? She’s close to Axel, isn’t she? Close enough she might come over all protective?”
“Yeah, but . . .” Lilah made a face. “She ain’t got the balls to kill anyone. Him, now”—she jerked her head at Tarbox—“I could see him bumping someone off. No offence,” she added with a smile in his direction.
He smirked. “None taken, love.”
“But Loos?” Lilah went on. “She ain’t got it in her.”
“No? Any idea where she was on the nights of the murders?”
“She wouldn’t,” Lilah repeated, but I reckoned she was wavering.
I fixed her straight in the eye. “Somebody did. And you might want to ask yourself if Axel’s in any danger from her too. Now he’s started telling people what happened. What if she panics?”
“But . . . he’s with his sister. And Darren.”
Tarbox snorted.
Lilah paled. “Oh, bloody hell. I’m going back to see my boy.”
“I’m coming with you,” Tarbox said, his face stony.
They reached for their coats, and I realised I’d better get out of the office sharpish, unless I wanted to be locked in for the night. Two minutes later, I was standing in the car park watching them drive off, Lilah in a racy and presumably specially adapted little Honda and Tarbox in an honest-to-God Rolls-Royce, the poser.
Great. I was on my own.
And where the bloody hell was Phil? I hated to say it, but he was usually quicker at working things out than I was. And even if he hadn’t, wouldn’t going to talk to Tallulah be an obvious step, seeing as how Axel had spent the day of his suicide attempt with her?
If he was with Tallulah . . . There had to be a reason he wasn’t answering his phone. And I didn’t like to think what it might be.