Tony lets himself in and sets to work switching off the alarm. Ventham had got some of his gang to fit it last week. Polish, the lot of them, but then who isn’t these days? He gets the four-digit code right on the third attempt, a new record.
Tony Curran has always taken his security very seriously. For many years his building company had really just been a front for his drug business. A way to explain away his income, a way to wash away his dirty money. But it slowly got bigger, took up more of his time, brought in more and more money. If you’d told young Tony he would end up living in this house, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised. If you’d told him he’d buy it with money earned legally, he’d have keeled over there and then.
His wife, Debbie, is not back, but that suits him fine for now. It gives him time to concentrate, really think it all through.
Tony rewinds back to the row with Ian Ventham, and his fury rises again.
Ian was cutting him out of the Woodlands? Just like that? A conversation on the way to his car? Outdoors, just in case Tony felt like swinging a punch. He would’ve loved to have smacked him there and then, but that was the old Tony. So they’d had a little row, nice and quiet. No one could possibly have noticed, and that’s good for Tony. When Ventham turns up dead, no one can say they saw Tony Curran and Ian Ventham having a ding-dong. Keeps it clean.
He sits on a barstool, pulls it up to the island in his vast kitchen, and slides open a drawer. He needs to get a plan down on paper.
Tony is not a believer in luck; he’s a believer in hard work. If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail. An old English teacher of his had once told him that, and he’d never forgotten it. The next year, he’d torched the same teacher’s car, following an argument about a football, but Tony still had to hand it to the guy. If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.
As it turns out, there is no paper in the drawer, so Tony decides to work out the plan in his head instead.
Nothing needs to be done tonight. Let the world continue for a while, let the birds keep singing in the garden, let Ventham think he has won. And then strike. Why did people ever mess with Tony Curran? When had that ever worked out for anyone?
Tony hears the noise a second too late. He turns to see the spanner as it swings toward him. A big one too, real old-school stuff. There’s no way of avoiding the swing, and in the brief moment of realization he has, Tony Curran gets it. You can’t win ’em all, Tony. That’s fair enough, he thinks, that’s fair enough.
The blow catches him on the left temple and he collapses to the marblefloor. The birds in the garden stop singing for the briefest of moments and then continue their merry tune, high up in the sycamore tree. Or is it the beech?
The killer places a photograph on the worktop, as Tony Curran’s fresh blood begins to form a moat around his walnut kitchen island.
11.
Coopers Chase always wakes early. As the foxes finish their nightly rounds and the birds begin their roll call, the first kettles whistle and low lamps start to appear in curtained windows. Morning joints creak into life.
Nobody here is grabbing toast before an early train to the office or packing a lunch box before waking the kids, but there is much to do nonetheless. Many years ago, everybody here would wake early because there was much to do and only so many hours in the day. Now they wake early because there is much to do and only so many days left.
Ibrahim is always up by six. For insurance reasons, the swimming pool doesn’t open until seven. He has argued, unsuccessfully, that the risk of drowning while swimming unsupervised is dwarfed by the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease or respiratory or circulatory illness due to lack of regular exercise. He even produced an algorithm proving that keeping the pool open twenty-four hours a day would make residents 31.7 percent safer than closing it overnight. The Leisure and Recreation Amenities Committee remained unmoved. Ibrahim could see that their hands were tied by various directives, and so he held no grudge. The algorithm was neatly filed away, should it ever be needed again. There was always much to do.
“I have a job for you, Ibrahim,” says Elizabeth, sipping a mint tea. “Well, a job for you and Ron, but I’m putting you in charge.”
“Very wise,” says Ibrahim, nodding. “If I might say.”
Elizabeth had rung him the night before with the news about Tony Curran. She had heard from Ron, who had heard it from Jason, who had heard it from a source yet to be documented. Dead in his kitchen, blunt force trauma to the head, found by his wife.
Ibrahim usually likes to spend this hour looking through old case notes, and sometimes even new ones. He still has a few clients, and if they are ever in need, they will make the trip out to Coopers Chase and sit in the battered chair under the painting of the sailing boat, both of which have followed him around for nearly forty years now.
Yesterday, Ibrahim had been reading the notes of an old client of his, a sad-eyed bank manager from Godalming who took in stray dogs, and had killed himself one Christmas Day.
No such luck this morning, Ibrahim thinks. Elizabeth had arrived with the sunrise. He is finding the break in his routine challenging.
“All I need you to do is to lie to a senior police officer,” says Elizabeth. “Can I trust you with that?”
“When can you not trust me, Elizabeth?” says Ibrahim. “When have I let you down?”
“Well, never, Ibrahim,” she agrees. “That’s why I like to keep you around. Also, you make very good tea.”
Ibrahim knows he is a safe pair of hands. Over the years he has saved lives and saved souls. He was good at what he did, and that’s why, even now, some people will drive for miles, past an old phone box, past the farm shop and the wooden bus stop, and take the right turn before the bridge, just to speak to an eighty-year-old psychiatrist, long retired.
Sometimes he fails—who doesn’t, in this world?—and those are the files that Ibrahim will reach for in these early mornings. The bank manager who sat in the battered chair and cried, and cried, and could not be saved.
But this morning there are different priorities; he understands that. This morning the Thursday Murder Club has a real-life case. Not just yellowing pages of smudged type from another age, but a real case, a real corpse, and somewhere out there, a real killer.
This morning Ibrahim is needed. Which is what he lives for.
12.
