Kill and Tell Read Free Page B

rubs his face hard. ‘Did I hear the phone?’
    ‘It was me,’ she says. Josie can’t take her eyes off Staffe’s two scars, one between the left pectoral and the crease of his armpit; the other below the heart in the soft flesh above the waistband of his boxer shorts. The scars are bright pink, the rest of him still darkly tanned.
    ‘Why are you here?’ He squints at the clock. It says it is nine-twenty.
    ‘I was phoning you for ages. Too much cocoa, maybe. Or too much Havana Club. Since when did you sleep twelve hours a night?’ Josie’s eyes are plump, from lack of sleep. ‘I told Pennington to let you be, but he insisted I come round. I have a key, remember? I watered your plants while you were in Spain.’
    ‘What does Pennington want?’
    ‘I told him you were supposed to be taking it easy, sir.’ She bites her lip and for a long moment they exchange a look.
    ‘Never mind.’ He pulls on a blue checked shirt, frayed at the collar. ‘So what the hell is it?’
    ‘Someone called Carmelo. He said it’d ring a bell with you.’
    ‘Carmelo?’ Staffe’s eyes open wide and he steps into his trousers – a scrunched-up pair of Dockers. ‘Carmelo Trapani?’
    ‘That’s the one.’
    Staffe rubs his face again, this time the way you would T-cut a car. ‘He must be getting on by now. What’s happened?’
    ‘We’re not sure. A neighbour called to say his gates were open and a couple of uniforms went round, found the garage open and blood on his floor, but no sign of anyone. Apparently, he’s worth millions. How do you know him?’
    ‘I don’t. Not really, but Jessop had a bit of an obsession. It goes back to Calvi.’
    ‘God’s banker?’ says Josie. ‘Hanged from Blackfriars Bridge?’
    ‘Yes, but Carmelo was clean as a whistle. You ask me, he’s a good man. A kind man.’ Staffe drifts away. Since he came back from Spain, he finds it difficult to maintain his concentration. He remembers that Carmelo Trapani was once kind to his friend Rosa. Carmelo had taken one of his associates to one side when he had wanted to stake a claim on her. Rosa, on the game and vulnerable to such affairs of the heart.
    ‘Pennington is worried, sir. He says this could flare up in our faces.’
    ‘We should be focusing on Pulford, not missing persons. We’ve got to find who killed Jadus Golding.’
    ‘We have no choice,’ says Josie.
    *
    Attilio Trapani cuts a fine figure. He is wearing a splendidly tailored shooting jacket and perfectly sculpted tweed breeches with a moleskin waistcoat to boot. He seems the archetype of an English country gentleman. But something is amiss. His nose is Roman and his skin the colour of walnut husks. His hair is waxed: combed back and blue-black. He is roasting his bespoke Latin backside in front of a seven-foot medieval fireplace of dressed stone in the hall of Ockingham Manor.
    He stands at the centre of a coterie of large-jawed English playboys and an Arab gentleman in his thobe, lounging in club chairs in a shooting den. The heads of kills adorn the room, as does a sixty-inch plasma screen fed by the Racing Channel.
    As Staffe and Josie are shown in by a straight-backed butler, the coterie breaks into a guffawing outburst of laughter. This, Staffe assumes, cannot be the man whose beloved father has just disappeared, leaving a trail of blood. This, Carmelo’s only son, seemingly preoccupied with a shooting party.
    When the laughter subsides, Attilio says, ‘Ahaa. My visitors. You must excuse me a moment or two, gentlemen.’
    To which the gathering solemnly nods, heads bowed, as if they might suspect something. Attilio leads Staffe and Josie through an ante-room into the original, Jacobean part of the manor. In a dark library, the curtains are half-drawn and a beautiful woman sits on a settle beneath a mullioned window. She is forty-something and dressed in low-waisted jeans and a tailored designer lumberjack blouse. Her mouth is grimly pursed and she has a handkerchief