Peter thinks for a while. “Did he, now? I don’t remember, but that would make sense. I’m guessing you know the story? The boy Tony shot in the Black Bridge? Johnny shooting the taxi driver who got rid of the body?”
“We know that story, yes,” confirms Elizabeth. “Then Johnny disappears back to Cyprus.”
“Well, it wasn’t quite that simple,” says Peter.
“I’m all ears,” says Elizabeth.
“Someone grassed Johnny up to the cops. They raided his flat, but he’d gone already.”
“And who grassed him up?” asks Elizabeth.
“Who knows? Not me.”
“No one likes a grass,” says Joyce.
“It doesn’t matter who,” says Peter. “What matters is that when Johnny legged it, he took a hundred grand of Tony’s cash with him.”
“Is that so?”
“Money he had lying around his flat. Tony’s money. All disappeared. Tony went mental. A hundred grand was a lot of money to Tony in those days.”
“Did he try and find Johnny?” asks Elizabeth.
“You bet. Went off to Cyprus a couple of times. Didn’t find a thing.”
“Not easy when it’s not your natural territory,” says Elizabeth.
“So I’m guessing you haven’t found Johnny either?” asks Peter Ward.
Elizabeth shakes her head.
“How did you find me, by the way? If you don’t mind me asking? I don’t really want to be found by anyone, especially if Johnny’s back in town, leaving photos of me next to bodies.”
Elizabeth takes a sip of her cappuccino. “Woodvale Cemetery, where they buried your brother Troy?”
Peter nods.
“I got access to the CCTV, thanks to a mortician whose uncle I once saved on a train,” says Elizabeth. “That’s where I found you.”
He looks at her. “Elizabeth, I’ve been there twice in a year. There’s no way you found me from the CCTV. That’d be a needle in a haystack.”
“You went there twice, yes,” she agrees. “But on what days?”
Peter sits back, folds his arms, then nods and smiles. He sees it now.
“Twelfth of March and seventeenth of September,” continues Elizabeth. “Troy’s birthday and the anniversary of his death. I was hoping to see the same car both times, jot down a number plate, get a friend of a friend to runit through a computer somewhere. But on March twelfth I saw a white van from a Folkestone flower shop, which I thought unusual at a cemetery in Brighton. Not impossible, but noteworthy. And I thought it very, very unusual to see the same van on September seventeenth. I found that very noteworthy, indeed. You see?”
“I do see,” says Peter with a nod. “And no need for a number plate.”
“Because you had your name, your address, and your telephone number printed on the side,” says Elizabeth.
Peter can’t help but give her a quiet round of applause, and she responds with a slight bow.
“That’s very good, Elizabeth,” says Joyce. “She’s very good, Peter.”
“I see that,” he says. “So no one else knows where I am? No one else can find me?”
“Not unless I tell them where you are,” says Elizabeth.
