Read Online Dead Time by Tony Parsons - Free Book Online

Bush shoeshine for fifty quid and a Bacardi Breezer.’
    ‘A Shepherd’s Bush shoeshine? Is that what they call it? Shall I tell you what I think, Wendy?’
    ‘Why don’t you?’ she said, her face cold, her mouth hard but conceding nothing. She still believed she was going to catch her flight.
    ‘Ratana’s husband – I don’t think he was a missing person. I think he beat her one time too many and she made some enquiries. I think Ratana’s husband ended up in a mincing machine very similar to the one they were going to feed Lenny into at Smithfield.’ I glanced at the housekeeper standing in the doorway. ‘You certainly didn’t hire her for her cooking, did you, Wendy? She was a Guest Relations Officer at a place in Bangkok – and that’s a bar girl. Being a GRO in Bangkok is not light years away from being an exotic dancer on the Goldhawk Road, is it? I knew there had to be some special bond between you two when I nearly cracked a tooth on that turkey satay. How did you find each other, Wendy? How did you discover the nice little old Thai lady who knew how to make an unwanted husband disappear? I wonder how many missing husbands there are who ended up being served with the mashed potatoes…’
    ‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,’ said Wendy Lane, her tongue a small pink snake on her lips. ‘I want my lawyer
now.
’
    Ratana had picked up a medium-sized Buddha and was staring at it thoughtfully, as if she was unconnected to this conversation.
    ‘Who were they, Ratana?’ I said. ‘Who killed Lenny Lane and planned to turn him into sausages? Certainly not Goran Gvozden. And not even those bottom feeders in Faces. They don’t have the imagination for something like this. And they were too loyal to Lenny. I’m betting you kept it within the Thai community, didn’t you?’
    The gardener stood up and turned to look back at the house. I could see the claw marks on his face where Cara Maldini had fought for her life. And I could see the same man who stared into my eyes in the early hours of Boxing Day.
    He started towards the house.
    And he was limping.
    And from the look of murder in his eyes, he still hadn’t quite forgiven me for sticking a broken bottle into his leg.
    ‘
Bah kwai
!’ Ratana cried, and she struck me on the back of the head with the medium-sized Buddha.
    I went down like I had been hit with a sledgehammer. Both women legged it. Ratana out the back way and Wendy Lane out the front.
    The gardener was still limping towards the house. And I saw what was in his hands.
    An old-fashioned scythe, the straight handle twice as long as the curved blade, looking like the grim reaper’s gardening tool. The wicked blade gleamed in the weak winter sunlight.
    Then I heard Whitestone come through the front door and bang Wendy Lane hard against the wall and I saw a small red-haired young woman and a smooth-looking black man with a shaved head come over the back wall of the garden. Edie Wren and Curtis Gane wrestled Ratana to the ground as she screamed in their faces. A formal arrest will always be accompanied by physically taking control, they used to tell us in training. That’s what my colleagues had done. But I never had the chance.
    Because the gardener came straight through the big windows, the glass exploding more than breaking, and he swung the scythe at my head.
    I slipped sideways and he buried the blade deep into the coffee table, and as he gripped the handle with both hands to release it I hit him with three stiff left jabs to the side of the jaw, stinging him with the first one, snapping his head back with the second and – saving up my hardest shot for last – turning his lights off with the third.
    Fred taught me that.

NEW YEAR’S DAY
    London belonged to us.
    While the city slept off its New Year’s Eve hangover, Scout, Stan and I drove through the dark, silent streets, with my daughter’s new bike in the back of the BMW X5, heading for the green fields and