19. Jimmy
The crowd at the Flag and Flowers had thinned. Fewer people in black, in suits and somber dresses, and more in casual clothing or dressed up for Friday night out, as mourners had left and normal customers replaced them.
Young guys in hoodies and joggers clustered around the games machines, their voices loud, their movements exaggerated. A mixed group in their teens and early twenties now occupied the window seat where Frank had been earlier. Orange skin and hair gel, piercings, lots of exposed flesh. It made Jimmy feel old.
He pushed through to the back bar, unconcerned by the raised voices left in his wake.
Let anyone try to stop him right now. Just let them.
He saw a few more familiar faces here in the back bar. Family, friends of the old man, business acquaintances.
There was no sign of Glenn and his big-hitting friends, though. Now Frank was holding court at the family table at the back, one arm draped across the shoulders of Auntie Cyn, who looked as if she’d been crying again. Jimmy was struck again by the oddness of being a stranger in his own family.
Then the red haze descended once more and he strode over to stand before Frank.
Everyone at the table turned to stare. Frank, Cyn, the lad Tyler who was some kind of cousin; Billy Macrae and Kieran Lee; the redheaded dancer he’d sat next to earlier.
“Where is he?” Jimmy demanded, glaring at Frank.
His uncle didn’t react, other than matching that glare with one of his own. Jimmy knew of at least two men for whom that glare had been the last thing they’d seen.
“Leave now, Jimmy,” said Frank calmly. “I don’t want to have to make you.”
Only now did the rational, trained part of Jimmy’s mind kick in. He’d come here with no plan, had barely given a thought to how this might play out. If he had, he’d have known an approach like this would never work.
He hadn’t thought it through, though. He’d just burst in, hoping Glenn would still be here.
“Just tell me where he is, Frank,” he said, forcing his frame to slump, a visible signal to his uncle that the moment of confrontation was past.
Frank shook his head. “I genuinely don’t know,” he said. “I’m not his babysitter. Your old man made that clear: Glenn’s The Man now. Me? I’ve retired from all that crap. And good riddance.”
Frank had been drinking all day. His words, although not slurred, were slow and enunciated, his every movement careful.
“I need to find him,” said Jimmy. “Before he does something stupid.”
Frank laughed at that, shaking his head. Then – slowly, deliberately – he stood.
He was still an imposing man, taller and broader than Jimmy, his boxer’s nose reinforcing an impression of casual menace.
“I said I don’t know where your brother is, and I asked you very politely to fuck off. Now which part of that didn’t you understand?”
Jimmy’s mind rushed through the kind of calculations he’d had to make many times before now. Assessing the risk, not just from Frank but from all the other drunken mourners who were following this escalating confrontation. Assessing the consequences of rising to Frank’s challenge or making good his escape. Separating out the elements of pride, the testosterone haze, the potential humiliation of either losing or backing off.
He could take Frank, he knew. He was younger, stronger, faster, and trained. He could probably take on most of the other drunks in this room, too.
But it was a distraction. None of this mattered – the testosterone haze, the thoughts of what they would think of him, whatever. He didn’t need any of this.
He turned, and walked out through the bar.
For a moment silence descended as drunken brains struggled to catch up. Then a jeer, a burst of laughter, a rising babble of voices.
And then the pub doors were swinging shut behind Jimmy and he stood outside, pausing to let his brain catch up, to try to focus, and work out what the hell to do next.
§
He sat on the bed in Mel’s room. A space to think.
He’d come here on the pretext that there might, conceivably, be some kind of clue. Something to indicate her thinking. An insight into the woman she had become. Anything that might somehow make sense of the story of the past 48 hours.
He knew that was bollocks, though.
He’d come here because it was the most tangible connection he had with her. The few things she’d deposited in this room before heading out for the evening – the make-up, the wash bag, the clothes. Pieces of Mel Conner.
The air she’d breathed. One small space she’d considered, even temporarily, her own.
He’d spent the night here with her, and the morning after.
That was all he had.
When he’d knocked on the door, Mr Singh had clearly wanted to turn him away. But then he seemed to read something in Jimmy’s expression. In the time Mel had been here, she’d shown up with bruises on her nose and neck, she’d brought Jimmy in his blood-soaked shirt, she’d gone missing.
“Is Ms Conner in trouble?” Singh said, stepping back to let Jimmy in.
“I hope not.”
“I only started having people stay here last month,” said Singh. “Is it always like this?”
“I won’t be long,” Jimmy told him. “I just need to check her things.”
And so now he sat here, legs twisted so his shoes were clear of the bed covers, Mel’s bag beside him, its contents tipped out.
Again, he came close to calling Doug Conner. Mel’s father should at least be made aware of what was happening.
He didn’t even reach for his phone.
He had to think this through.
So what did he know?
Glenn had been lying. Playing games with Jimmy. He’d sent the dancer, Suze, after Mel at the King’s Head the previous evening, and the two of them had left sometime after eight in a car that had been waiting outside for them – clearly a planned maneuver and not a spontaneous thing. Around that time, Mel’s phone had gone offline, so either she had handed it over for some reason or it had been removed from her possession.
Had Glenn made some kind of deal with her, and handing her phone over had been part of that? Or had she been duped, and the phone taken from her either by force or stealth, a hand slipped into her bag when her attention was distracted?
And if Glenn had Mel, then that must surely mean he had Harriet, too.
What kind of game was his brother playing?
Jimmy hated to think of his family in their own preferred terms, as old-school villains with principles, but that was what they had always been. The Lazenby family had been responsible for some serious crime, but kidnapping had never been part of the portfolio.
Revenge had been, though. The idea of ‘face’: that you never let anyone get the better of you.
Doug Conner had said this was all about revenge. That was why Glenn had taken Harriet, and now it must be why he’d taken Mel, too.
Revenge against Conner, but also a chance to come out on top over Jimmy – that ‘face’ thing, again.
So what was his end game?
Murder? Let the bodies turn up somewhere, so Conner and Jimmy would know they’d been bettered? In that case, Harriet was almost certainly dead already. Mel, too, in all probability.
Or would Glenn draw out their suffering first, so Conner and Jimmy would have to live with the knowledge of what had happened to them?
He knew that by far the most likely scenario was that Harriet and Mel were dead already.
The other scenarios – that they were being kept alive in order to maximize suffering, that they might be handed over in exchange for something even more important to Glenn, that there was some kind of vaguely innocent explanation still – were highly unlikely.
But they were all he had.
He couldn’t give up now.
“Hey, Mamta, don’t you have a life?”
“No, sir. My husband has left me for his twenty-two-year-old mistress, and I comfort eat when I’m on my own at home, so this job is my safe haven. What can I do for you?”
Mamta Patil was happily married and skinny as a stick, last time he’d checked.
“Glenn Lazenby. I need details of any properties in which he has an interest – places he owns or has leases to, places he visits, places he’s looked at lingeringly. I need a phone trace on him, too. A record of where his phone’s been over the last forty-eight hours. The same for Ronnie Bosvelt, Emre Denis, Thom Sullivan, David Viera, Frank Lazenby. Cross-references between their movements. Anything you can find.”
“And you want all that asap, right?”
“Afraid so.”
“I’ll have details with you as soon as possible, sir.”
The line went dead.
Idly, he flicked through the things lying beside him on the bed. A top, a pair of linen trousers that had been neatly rolled until he tipped the bag out, toiletries, a pen, a notebook – which had snagged his attention until he opened it and found it blank, unused.
This was stupid. It’s not as if Mel had known in advance she was going to be abducted. There were no clues here.
He went to the window and looked out over a neat array of urban gardens. Bird tables, shrubs, trampolines surrounded by safety netting, patios, and barbecues.
He went down to his car, came back in with a laptop.
Back in Mel’s room, he sat at the dressing table, scrolling through reports, intelligence chatter, social media, news reports on anything involving Glenn and his cohort.
Close to eleven, Patil messaged him, said there was a report waiting for him on the Section Eight system.
She’d been thorough, as she always was. Logs of phone activities for the people he’d named. Details of properties owned and leased, of hotels stayed at, flights taken. All these details were layered onto a heat map of their activities in the area. Clusters around the town, and down in London. Other hotspots across the Home Counties – country homes, industrial units, commercial premises.
In the last 48 hours, Glenn had remained within a few miles of his home town. Or, at least, his phone had – Patil’s trace was on the phone records, not the person.
There were gaps, too, though. Periods of an hour or two when his phone had been turned off.
Why would he do that, other than to conceal his activities?
Jimmy stared at the reports and maps until his head hurt, trying to extrapolate from those gaps, from the last known locations before phone silence, to the locations where the phone was reactivated.
It was no good, though. All he could determine was that, if Glenn had kept his silenced phone on him, at least, then he’d probably not strayed more than twenty miles or so from the center of town. That still left a vast area where he might have been.
He didn’t even know that Glenn would have gone anywhere near where Mel and Harriet were being held.
Jimmy was sure he would though... Glenn would not miss a chance to gloat and witness the suffering he was causing.
Jimmy looked again at the list of properties. Ryders, the Flag and Flowers, half a dozen more commercial addresses in the center of town. The old family home on the south side of town, a modest Victorian townhouse that had been in the family for years before the old man started to bring in serious money. The farmhouse their father had bought to the north of town, where Jimmy had lived with his family for a few years before leaving for good.
He pictured the place, the sprawl of outbuildings. Of all the properties Patil had found, this was the most likely, perhaps. Familiar territory. But would Glenn be stupid enough to hold them at the family home? Some anonymous industrial unit would make far more sense. He started to scan through the details of commercial properties around the town where the family had at least a tentative interest. So many!
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and held it. He needed to think like Glenn, like a Lazenby.
Yes, Glenn would make sure to minimize the risk. But he was an egotistical bastard, too. Playing host to his ‘guests’ at the family home would appeal to something in him.
Jimmy’s head was spinning by now, jumping from one likely conclusion to the opposite and back again. But he had to start somewhere.
Jimmy closed the laptop, let himself out of the house, and went back to his car, trying hard to convince himself he wasn’t clutching at the flimsiest of straws.
They could be anywhere, and here he was, doing little better than guessing.
Frustrated, he stabbed a finger at the ignition button, kicking the car into life, and set off along roads far too familiar.
§
The farm brought back memories long buried.
Jimmy’s mother had been the stabilizing influence, the rock of the family. When she became ill they’d stayed on in their modest townhouse even though they could have afforded somewhere far more comfortable – stayed there right until the end, when cancer took her, with Jimmy still only in his teens.
After that his father had said he couldn’t stay in the same house, but to Jimmy it was as if the old man had been liberated. Now he could spend the money he’d accumulated, could live the life he’d earned, as he put it one drunken night with Frank and the boys.
The farm had already been a base of operations for years – the outhouses cover for lorries that came and went in the dead of night, the house itself a base away from the prying eyes in town. After the death of his wife, Trevor Lazenby had moved to the farm, taking his two sons, and an ever- changing entourage of minders, hookers, business associates, and lovers.
In Jimmy’s memory, the farm was the place where his father’s inner monster, previously constrained, had finally emerged.
He wished he’d burned the place down when he left ten years before.
He approached along the farm’s private track from the public road with lights off, relying on night vision and memory. He parked on an area of hard-standing where a barn had once been, still a couple of hundred meters from the farm.
Glenn still lived here, at least occasionally, according to the files, and the address was flagged up repeatedly in the dossier Conner had given Jimmy, still a base for Lazenby family operations.
The place was in darkness, though, which could not be a good sign. If Glenn had Harriet and Mel here, there would be guards and others. People would be awake, and that meant lights on at least somewhere in the building.
Unless they were trying to give the impression of abandonment.
He approached on foot, the way lit by stars and a half moon.
Somewhere an owl screeched.
From what he could see, the property looked well-maintained. The hedge neatly trimmed, the paintwork around doors and windows fresh.
There were no cars in the yard at the front, and as he circled the main building, there was nothing but a tractor and an old van with a wheel missing at the rear.
A white box truck occupied one barn, but that was it.
He worked his way from outbuilding to outbuilding. Again, there were plenty of signs that this place was in regular use, but nothing to indicate it was currently occupied.
He was putting off checking main farmhouse, he knew.
There was a door at the back that led into a half-basement – the point of entry least likely to draw attention if he had to force it. It took him seconds to work the lock, and then he was down the half-dozen steps into a wide basement stacked with boxes.
He climbed a flight of stairs and paused at the door that opened onto a hallway on the main floor, listening for long seconds. Nothing.
In the hallway, again, nothing.
He hated the way this place transported him back. The feeling that at any moment he’d hear his father’s voice, that he’d know a shit-storm was about to descend.
Glenn had taken beatings for him, and, as many times in return, Jimmy had taken them for his brother. They’d had each other’s backs for the longest time.
He worked through the ground floor, lingering in a room Glenn had made into an office.
He was getting nowhere.
He went upstairs, and checked through the bedrooms and dressing rooms and god knows what, but still found nothing. No sign that Mel or Harriet were here, or had ever been here.
There were clear signs that Glenn lived here, though. This was his place – his clothes and shoes; a games room; photos of Glenn and their parents, and even one or two where Jimmy featured.
This, at least, was a minor result. If this was Glenn’s home and he was not here, even though he had been in town until late, where was he now?
Did he stay at one of the other places he had around the town with one of the dancers, or was there somewhere more important for him to be?
§
He drove around. He should sleep, he knew, but he wouldn’t, and anyway, night was the best time to observe atypical activity on many kinds of premises. A farmhouse with lights burning in the early hours; an industrial unit with cars parked overnight.
He stopped for a time at a block of warehouses leased by a company indirectly owned by the family, drawn to the burning lights coming from within. Then an articulated lorry pulled up, reversed into a loading bay and metal doors rolled up to reveal one unit’s cavernous interior. Night deliveries of some sort. Just normal activity.
The story was the same elsewhere. The old family home in town, in darkness now. The Flag and Flowers and two other pubs, closed up for the night. Ryders still open, but then that was normal for the kind of place it was. Another industrial unit, this time in darkness, and revealing nothing suspicious when Jimmy let himself in.
He parked up in a picnic area in the woods to the north of town, tipped his seat back and was asleep in seconds. Woke to sunlight, the sound of birds. Checked his phone, but nothing.
He drove back into town.
He’d call Conner when he got there. He’d run out of options, run out of time.
He’d never failed on a case before. Never run out of ideas.
But this time he’d got so much wrong, every step of the way.
Was too involved, too close.
Conner had got it wrong, too, sending Jimmy in. He should have sent someone who didn’t give a shit, and who wouldn’t have got lost in it all.
The main reason Jimmy had got it so wrong was the illusion that he understood his own brother. They’d grown up together, had each other’s backs. Competed with each other and stood by each other at the same time. They had history. Each knew how the other worked, how he thought.
But ten years was a long time.
Glenn was someone very different now, a man twisted by resentment and simultaneously liberated by the death of their father.
And despite all the aura around the family, the illusion of being villains with principles, old-school gangsters, Glenn had become something else entirely. Ruthless and cruel. Relentless.
He was not their father – he was something far worse, and it shocked Jimmy to see this.
He stopped outside Uncle Frank’s house on the edge of town, an anonymous suburban redbrick surrounded by neat shrubberies and flower beds, immaculate bowling-green lawns. Frank had learned to garden when he was in jail, the growing cycles of his crops giving him a sense of scale, and time passing. It wasn’t something you’d necessarily associate with a man like Frank Lazenby, but was clearly something he’d stuck with in his retirement.
It was still early, but from his vantage point in the back garden Jimmy spotted movement in the kitchen window. Frank, filling a kettle, scratching his jaw, stretching.
Jimmy had been over-complicating things. Relying on technology, on other people, on protocol and established approaches.
He needed to be more direct.
He went over to the back door, and stood where Frank would see his shape through the frosted glass.
Waited for the door to open.
Frank came out, and eyed him up and down. Said, “I thought you were fucking off, like you were told?” He didn’t seem surprised, though. He nodded toward a set of black wrought-iron chairs and they sat.
“He’s out of control, isn’t he?” said Jimmy. He remembered Frank’s wry laugh when Jimmy had said he needed to find Glenn before he did something stupid. He knew.
“Glenn was never in control,” said Frank. “He just knew how to create the illusion. I was the only one who ever understood that. I’m retired now, Jimmy. I’m not a part of it anymore. We all have to know when to walk away, don’t we?”
Like in the Flag and Flowers last night, Jimmy turning away from the challenge, the jeers. Sometimes ‘face’ had to be put aside.
“Where is he?”
Still, Frank shook his head. He shrugged, then, and said, “Not my business, is it?”
“Is kidnap your business? That and whatever else he’s got into? Help me, Frank. Do the right thing.”
Silence, still. Frank sat with his gaze averted, as if studying his immaculate lawn.
“What would the old man have made of all this?” said Jimmy. That moment of realization as he drove, the understanding that all the old bullshit about villains with principles might actually have meant something. His father was a bastard. Frank was a bastard. But neither one of them was what Glenn had become.
Frank laughed, short and sharp, shaking his head.
“You could have been something, you know?” he said, obliquely. “If you’d stuck around.”
“I am,” said Jimmy. “I’m someone who stops shit like this. And you know what? I reckon that somewhere in his heart the old man would have got that.”
“Maybe he did.”
Jimmy looked away, took his own turn at studying the lawn, the evenly trimmed blades briefly blurring.
“You checked the farm?”
Jimmy nodded. “Where else?”
“He’s been spending time with Ronnie Bosvelt and Thom Sullivan,” said Frank, the distaste clear in his tone. “Sullivan has an old farmhouse on the edge of Hatherly Forest. Used to be the Slater place.”
Jimmy knew the farm. Terry Slater had been a friend of Trevor Lazenby, had ended up owing him for getting him out of some big gambling debts and had done occasional jobs for the family ever since. No doubt Sullivan had got hold of the place through Lazenby connections. Jimmy wouldn’t be surprised if his brother had called in Slater’s debts once their father had lost his grip, seeing an opportunity to use the property to ingratiate him with his new friend.
“That’s where they are?” he asked.
Frank shrugged. “I don’t know. Like I say, I’m well out of it all now. Your brother gives me the creeps, and not many people have ever done that.” He paused, then went on, “But he’s been out there a lot recently. Even before Sullivan was back in the country. Has to have a reason, doesn’t he?”
Jimmy stood, and his uncle followed suit, the two coming to stand awkwardly, facing each other.
Finally, Jimmy nodded, started to turn, then paused as Frank came to him, took him into a brief hug, stepped back.
“You’re right,” Frank told him. “Your brother’s out of control. Look out for yourself, you hear?”
“I will.”
§
He made the call from where he’d parked, deep in the shade of the trees, a hundred meters past the turning to the old Slater Farm.
A quick reconnoiter had been enough to confirm that the place was in use, with four cars parked to the rear, including Glenn’s black Range Rover.
“Sir.”
“Jimmy.” His controller’s voice gave nothing away.
“I’m making progress. You were right, it’s Glenn. I don’t know quite what his game is, but...” The crunch. He braced himself for Doug Conner’s reaction as he went on, “He has both of them. Harriet and Mel.”
Nothing. Seconds passed.
Then: “I know. You have it in hand?”
Of course Conner knew. Even though he’d stepped back from direct involvement, it was inevitable he’d be monitoring things.
“I think so. I... I don’t know what I’m going to find.”
“We rarely do.”
And so Jimmy brought his controller up to speed, told him about Glenn, and what Frank had told him. Told him where he was and what he was going to do.
And then he climbed out of the car, closed the door gently, and set off through the trees.