The Fortune Men Read online

  ‘I’ve never changed.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you have.’

  ‘All of it was always inside me.’

  ‘Hmm, that’s probably true, but who wants to search out every last thing hidden within them? Certainly not me. There’s some things you keep the door closed on.’

  ‘That’s women’s talk, men have to go out in the world and see what it does to them, you can’t sit at home like a virgin.’

  ‘Go under that canal bridge and you’ll find enough women with that very same attitude.’

  ‘Even you, Laura …’

  She baulks at the suggestion.

  ‘No, no, that ain’t how I meant it.’ Mahmood kisses his teeth. ‘I meant … you were told that marrying someone like me was the worst a girl could do – worse than stealing, by miles – and yet, you did it, didn’t you? Your brother stopped talking to you.’

  ‘I was a fool for love.’ She smiles.

  ‘No, not a fool …’ Mahmood rises from the armchair and lifts David into it. He crosses the rug and kneels beneath Laura, taking her warm hands in his own. ‘You are the best thing God ever gave me, you and these three boys. I would steal the stars out of the sky for you.’

  ‘Don’t get soppy on me now.’ Laura blushes and tries to slip her red, eczema-wrinkled hands from his grip but he holds on.

  ‘It’s true, I swear on my life.’

  ‘So change, then. Mahmood, change! Don’t be so soft in the head. Get rid of this jacket – and that infernal bear too, if you managed to pinch him an’ all – and just give it a break, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘The bear’s legit, he’s not going anywhere, but I’ll take the jacket back if it makes you happy.’

  ‘It does. It will. Get a straight job, Moody. Until then, I don’t want to hear any more smooth talk.’

  Mahmood paces up and down a dim and derelict corner of the docks, where the railway tracks stop and a row of storage depots begin. Although overlooked by ships’ funnels, cranes and rattling chutes tipping tons of grain into the holds, in the evening when the dockworkers have clocked off and the sailors amble uptown to sink a skinful, there is not a soul about, apart from the occasional copper whistling by on his four-hour patrol. He has found a job starting in the morning, in a rubber hose factory, but he just needs to offload this coat and then he can relax and begin that clean, legal life again. The Maltese fence he had agreed to meet with, Alfredo, had stood him up earlier, when they were meant to meet at their usual spot in a yard behind The Packet pub. He was usually good for his word but Mahmood had given up after fifteen minutes of waiting. There’s another guy who he’s done business with a couple of times before, another Maltese but shabbier and more dubious than Alfredo, who uses this patch. The last time they’d met, Mahmood had a wristwatch that he’d finagled off a Nigerian watchmaker, which he was trying to offload, a good watch that just needed repair. Should have got him eight pounds but the fence didn’t offer even half that. Hearing distant footsteps approaching, Mahmood straightens his hat and pulls the belt of his mackintosh tight. There is a street lamp about ten yards away but on this moonless night he can’t see anyone approaching. He doesn’t like stepping out here when mobs are negotiating and deciding deals; it doesn’t pay to see something you’re not meant to. Whisky, opium, seamen’s clothing allowance cards and tobacco are the real money-spinners, lucrative but controlled by a few gangs: British, Maltese or Chinese. He would never get a look-in. Now and again a fight breaks out between them, and maybe a dead body is dredged out of the canal or the sea, but otherwise it is a quietly efficient world.

  The footsteps are close now, rebounding off the metal storage depots and brittle, frosted iron railings. He peeks out again and sees two thickset men, wearing long black overcoats that give them the bearing of undertakers, with just their pale chins visible under the shadows of their hats. They step closer and closer, the snap, snap, snap of their soles biting the glittering cobbles. Mahmood steps back into the confusion of carts, barrels and diesel stores, wishing his dark skin would absorb all the darkness of the night, his breath leaving his nostrils in two thin white streams.

  The men stop, confer and then briskly stride to Mahmood’s inadequate hiding place. The taller man stops just a yard from Mahmood and with a gloved hand pushes the brim of his trilby further up his forehead. With a small pause and a smile he pulls out a pair of gleaming handcuffs and reaches for Mahmood’s wrist.

  ‘Mahmood Mattan? You do not have to say anything but anything you do say may be taken down and given in evidence against you.’

  FIVE

  Shan

  Diana had at first fled 203 Bute Street, sending Grace to Maggie’s house and staying there for a few nights to settle her in but now things have to be arranged. She locks the door to the shop and then sits, back aching, on Violet’s stool behind the counter. The last few days have been evil; a vortex of black clothes, bleak appointments, harried sandwiches and sleepless nights. The funeral took place on the weekend, the cortège leaving from the shop at 2.30 p.m. exactly with a large crowd of locals trailing it to Cardiff’s Jewish Cemetery. White flower wreaths, two blinkered horses with black plumes on their heads, the coffin in a glass carriage, the roads lined by men holding their hats at waist height, children walking too close to the horses so as to touch their flanks, the coach driver in top hat and greatcoat using his whip to nudge them away. Grace had walked the whole way, neither crying nor grumbling, her hand squeezing Diana’s tight. Her face framed by a black scarf that made her look older than her years. There must have been more than two hundred mourners from all districts of Cardiff: black and white, Muslim and Christian, Old Jewish families and greeners, lawyers and butchers. It was a good send-off, with no caution to expense, but it passed by like a silent film, unreal and unmemorable. Violet had been so quiet, so reclusive, that few knew how to eulogize her, they just kept saying, ‘She was a good girl, a real mechayeh.’ They didn’t know that she kept a scrapbook of actors’ portraits, or spent hours of her Sunday in the bath reading crime novels, or had taught herself how to waltz, foxtrot and cha-cha by following printed guides.

  Blood. Blood. Blood. The floorboards have seams of red varnish running through them where blood has pooled and dried. The white wall will need to be repainted to remove the faint spray of oxidized blood, but that won’t be her responsibility. The property is already on the market, the Volacki’s sign that has been up for forty years destined for the scrapyard. Her sister’s blood will remain there as long as possible to remind everyone of her absence. She pushes the stool back to stretch her legs and then glances to the left, where the safe is: the cause of all this heartache. She had little knowledge of Violet’s financial affairs but the police keep pursuing it. Diana kept out of the shop and avoided work talk over dinner. How much was in there? When did she go to the bank? How much float did she keep? How much did she take in a day? She could only guess the answers. Violet was as self-reliant and secretive with the business as their father had been, and the turf commissioning kept Diana too busy to ask any questions. Fortunately, the shop girl, Angela, had her head screwed on and could give a better sense of the figures; she was adamant that from looking at the little accounting book Violet kept, there must be about a hundred pounds missing from the safe. The value of a life proven not to be immeasurable but easily rounded up to one hundred pounds sterling. Enough to buy a second-hand car, or three cases of Château Latour wine, or a second-tier racehorse, or the land under a ruined house. Whatever the devil spent it on, she hoped it would be cursed, would never bring him or his people anything but pain.

  Daniel has already moved as much of the clothing stock as can be resold to his shop, so now only the small domestic and maritime goods remain on the shelves and in the displays. Coiled ropes, waterproofs, matches, gumboots, blades, small tin trunks; just enough supplies to take a boat out to sea and sail away with Grace.

  Diana is still trying to be sensible, appropriate, holding back the torrent of expletives she wants
to scream at regulars who turn up at the door, pushing at it and standing there, stupefied, when it doesn’t open. Even if they know what’s happened, they ignore the black crêpe and still come by force of habit to cash an advance note of pay or buy a pair of socks.

  She has been the tough one in the family for so long that she hasn’t felt the scale of her own helplessness for years. ‘Such a trooper’, ‘Hard as nails’, ‘Did you see her in the paper? Didn’t she look powerful in her uniform?’ Corporal Diana of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, who had given up her home and business to enlist straight after Kristallnacht with her Scout leader husband, who only returned to Cardiff because she was pregnant with their first, and in the end only, child. Tough Diana, the tomboy, who became her father’s long-wished-for son, given a car for her eighteenth birthday, unlike her sisters with their ballgowns, who decided to raise her daughter alone rather than risk the unsure affection of a stepfather.

  Corporal Diana is imploding, she is cracking up, but so deep runs the hard exterior that only she can notice the fine fractures running along her bones. ‘It’ll be Whitchurch asylum for you if you don’t pull yourself together,’ she reminds herself regularly, but it’s no fix. She can get through the next few days, weeks, maybe even months, if she just lets go of everything. For the first time in her life she will let the men decide what to do: with the case, the shop, and her child. She’ll make herself as pliant as possible so that she doesn’t crack any more. The tide of it all just pulling her in and pushing her out, the shipwreck slow and ongoing until maybe, one day, she will wash up on some distant, unknowable beach, hopefully with Grace still beside her.

  Grace, Grace, Grace, Grace. Darling Grace. Already Tough Grace, who will take the entrance exam for Howell’s despite everything, who said that Aunty Violet would have wanted her to. How can she continue to love this child so hard when life has made it clear that no one really belongs to her? That she can so easily be left behind in the ruins of their life. Diana covers her face with her hands and tries to rein in her quickening breaths.

  Grace says she saw him too, the man on the doorstep, when she had peeped into the shop from the living-room door. It is one of the few things that confirm he wasn’t just a figment of her imagination; a phantasm of what a murderer must look like, a black shadow with a mouth of gold. Grace thinks he looked Somali but Diana is not sure, sometimes some of the West Indian men are long and lean and have those gaunt faces too. She cannot remember his features precisely, but at night, in bed, flashes come back of his leather gloves, his pointed shoes, and the brass buttons of his overcoat. Extraneous details that just taunt her. The pain of sitting, eating, dancing while her sister was murdered a few feet away is something that claws at her, that makes her feel stupid and worthless. She did not hear anything; that is the cold truth. Nothing to make her think Violet was in danger or needed her aid. Now her heart races at the thought that she might fail Grace too.

  Purim arrived five days after the murder. It was agreed that it would be inappropriate for Grace to attend any parties but it feels as though she is already being marked out, tainted by tragedies that she can’t help but be tied to. They had seen children dressed as clowns, bats and fighter pilots, gathered outside the Methodist Hall assembly room, and watched for a few moments before the children had recognized Grace, waving for her to join them. After they had started to walk away, Grace had looked back only once before turning her head to the ground, and she didn’t speak a word of the missed party when they got back to Maggie’s.

  She has spent the whole day cleaning, her knuckles scored and red from scouring away the policemen’s dirty footprints, ink markings and tea stains. It was meant to be a solitary task, but Angela and her mother, Elsie, had appeared early in the morning with buckets and cloths and refused every kind of no she proffered.

  Tall and elegant, born of a Nigerian sailor father and a mother who’d run away from her husband in Sheffield, Angela wears a velvet hairband and ties her Afro hair into a faultless chignon each day. She had started to work in the shop soon after her sixteenth birthday, just like Violet had, and despite their dissimilar looks they were almost like mother and daughter in their mannerisms and reticent speech. Maybe one day she would have taken over the daily duties of the shop, if Violet had ever decided there was a life beyond work, giving Angela a position she would have enjoyed and deserved. Their presence today, in the end, was fortunate, their chatter and gossip suspended the desolate sense that they were wiping Violet away; removing not just the neat handwritten reminders she taped on to drawers, the floating strands of her brown hair, or the smear of her medicated hand lotion on the switches of the cash register, but the very fact of her existence. Violet Volacki, Spinster, Dead at forty-one years of age. That is all the papers write. But when will even those bare details be put aside? By the time the soil over her grave has settled and can bear the weight of a headstone? Or not until her ‘silent killer’ is executed and forgotten himself?

  Maggie had appeared after lunchtime, when the shop was in complete tumult: dust thick in the air, chairs and stools stacked precariously in a corner, all the display-cabinet doors wide open. She had brought rubber gloves and pulled them purposely out of her handbag, her red-rimmed eyes dry for the moment.

  ‘I can’t leave all of this to you, Diana,’ she said, grabbing a sponge from the counter and wringing it over the mop bucket.

  Understanding that her sister might need to occupy her hands as much as she did, Diana shouted, ‘Go for it, Maggie!’ and turned back to sweeping the stockroom.

  When she returned to the shop floor, maybe ten minutes later, her sister was leaning against the wall, grey-faced, the sponge twisted in her hands.

  ‘What happened?’ Diana asked, rushing over.

  Angela held out a photo. ‘She found this. She looked like she might faint, so Mam’s gone to get her a glass of water.’

  Diana glanced down at the black and white snapshot and then shoved it quickly into her pocket. Disentangling a stool from the pile, she ordered Maggie to sit and then took the sponge from her. ‘You shouldn’t have come!’ she said, her voice loud and harsh. ‘You’re just making it more difficult.’

  Maggie looked up through the tears, her wide and helpless eyes those of a housewife unfamiliar with tragedy.

  Diana’s anger was quickly subsumed by pity and regret. She kissed the parting of her sister’s smooth hair and apologized quietly. ‘Just sit there, Sis, help when you feel up to it.’

  Elsie returned with the glass of water but it remained untouched in Maggie’s hands as she stared, tears coursing silently down her cheeks, at the three women rushing to and fro.

  Angela and Elsie had stayed until five and then insisted on walking Maggie home. Angela had brushed away payment but Diana had already hidden two £1 notes in her handbag in anticipation of the refusal.

  The doorbell rings and startles Diana; she checks her watch and is barely able to make out its face in the gloomy room. The grey clouds have hardened into night without her even noticing. She snaps the table lamp on and finally she can make out the time – 6 p.m. It must be him. The journalist from the Western Mail. Bastard. He had insisted on meeting her in the shop, for ‘colour’, he said, but ‘to gawp’ was what she heard. That conversation with him on the telephone had bothered her all night, it was the reason she had arrived so early in the shop, to disrupt any ghoulish pleasure he might find in witnessing ‘the murder scene’. He had wanted to bring a photographer but she had refused, there would be nothing to capture now beyond a shop in full spring-clean disarray. Maybe he thought there would be a chalk outline on the floor, like in a gangster movie, or bloody handprints, or some telling clue to the identity of the culprit that he would be the first to discover. The oorbell rings again and Diana slowly approaches the door.

  Before turning any of the locks she yells, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Parry from the Western Mail, Mrs Tanay.’

  Her sigh is heavy enough to burst her lungs. Click
, clack, the locks go, like small bones breaking.

  ‘Good evening, Mrs Tanay, I trust you’re well.’ He steps into the shop before she has even opened the door wide, her ‘come in’ trailing after him.

  He’s a young chap with narrow trousers and a weaselly face, he moves lithely and with complete entitlement around the room, his tight-lidded blue eyes darting from one corner to another while he writes notes on a small pad. ‘You’re not still living at the property, are you?’ he asks.

  Diana shakes her head and pulls a chair to the counter. ‘Sit,’ she orders.

  ‘You sound like a sergeant.’

  ‘Corporal.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘First of all, let me offer you my condolences on this most terrible of losses.’

  She shouldn’t have agreed to this.

  Daniel had kept on at her. ‘The rabbi said it was a good idea, and so did the solicitor,’ he said.

  ‘What about the butcher? Did you ask the rag and bone man too?’ she had replied.

  ‘Mrs Tanay.’

  Diana lifts her eyes from the floor.

  ‘Could you tell me as much as you know of the circumstances of the … crime?’

  ‘There is not much to tell at the moment, it must have happened just after eight p.m., we didn’t hear anything, and she was found about twenty past eight.’

  ‘You heard nothing at all? “Silent killer” indeed.’ He sounds delighted, jotting frenetically, his shorthand like the sequences of an ancient language. ‘Where were you at this time?’

  ‘With my daughter.’

  ‘Upstairs?’

  ‘No, in the dining room through there, teaching Grace to dance.’ Diana nods towards the internal door.

  ‘A matter of yards.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Diana blinks rapidly and then looks back to the adjoining door.

  ‘Would you say that Miss Volacki had any enemies?’