Post Mortem by Gary Bell (free children's ebooks pdf .TXT) 📕

door, opening it, a fireball with a designer handbag swinging wildly behind her.

‘Jenny –’

‘It’s Jennifer.’ She stopped at the bottom of the steps outside. ‘Keep the note. And if I find another, it’ll be you answering to the police.’

And as she thundered up the staircase, I could feel my heart leathering against my ribs. Not because I was angry, I realised. It was because I’d missed our fighting as much as everything else.

The last thing I wanted to do next was meet the solicitor, but a stiff drink was definitely on the agenda. I took the death threat along with me, folded in my coat pocket, for light conversation.

I was already late by the time I hailed a black cab, and it took another twenty minutes to get through traffic to the Dog and Duck, a tiny pub on a corner in Soho that had once hosted the likes of John Constable and George Orwell and boasted these facts to this day. The Thursday crowd was piled deep outside, spilling off the kerbs onto Bateman and Frith Streets, and I couldn’t see her standing among it. I had to elbow my way into the building, which was incredibly old and still decorated with its original glossy tiles, mahogany panelling and enormous Victorian mirrors.

Lydia was there waiting. She’d managed to secure for herself one of the copper-topped tables at the rear of the bar, and she appeared to be as relaxed as I was rattled, arms stretched across the back of her seat.

‘Over here, Elliot!’

She was wearing a crimson dress that spoke nothing of business; against so much red, her strawberry-blonde hair seemed blizzard white. Her goblet of gin was a fishbowl. Raspberries and ice floated like sailors overboard.

I tugged my shirt straighter and pointed to her glass. ‘Do you want another?’

‘I wouldn’t say no. Just tell them I’m having the usual.’

It took me almost five minutes to get served, so I took two pints and another fishbowl back to the table with me. She finished off her first and moved the same plastic straw into the new glass. ‘Two pints?’ she noted.

‘It’s a two-pint kind of night,’ I said, and then slid the plastic wallet out of my pocket and onto the copper tabletop for her to read.

She choked around her straw, eyes bugging out, and put her glass down. ‘Where has this come from?’

‘No idea. They could’ve at least signed it, so I know who wants me dead this time.’

‘Jesus!’ Her eyes were darting around suspiciously, as if anybody in the bar might be responsible. ‘Did it come to your office?’

‘My wife’s doormat.’

If her eyes could’ve only widened further, I think they’d have tumbled out into her drink. ‘Your wife?’

‘Ex-wife,’ I swiftly adjusted. ‘I’m still getting used to the idea.’

‘You get used to it, believe me. So, this was posted?’

‘Sometime last night, I presume, to the house I used to live in.’

‘Jesus,’ she said again. ‘How could they find the place?’

‘Quite easily, I suspect. The former Mrs Rook works from home. Art studio in the loft. She keeps the address, and our surname, as her place of business online.’ I drained half a pint and felt better for it. I needed to belch but managed to hold it down, albeit with watery eyes. ‘The more pressing question is: who the hell stands to gain from Charli Meadows going to prison?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘I did have my own suspicions, but I can’t see what he could gain from her being incarcerated.’

‘He?’

‘Oh, nobody. Nothing.’ I drank some more.

‘Elliot, I hope you’re not holding out on me.’ She looked down into her glass and swirled the liquid, imitating a starlet’s pout, breaking up the raspberries and ice. ‘We’re in this together, aren’t we?’

Her confidence was obvious. In her younger days, Jenny had been confident in her own purposely outrageous sort of way, but this was different. Lydia’s was a confidence in people she hardly knew, and its effect was at once beguiling and oddly unnerving.

‘I’m not holding out on you,’ I said, stuffing the note back into my pocket. ‘That would require me having some idea of what was going on.’

‘But there is a he, isn’t there?’

I nodded. ‘Charli has a boyfriend. A younger man by the name of Deacon. Did she ever mention him to you?’

‘No.’ She frowned. ‘She explicitly told me she was single, in fact.’

‘Probably because this Deacon is a former inmate at the prison.’

‘Now that is interesting,’ she said. ‘You suspect he put the drugs in the car?’

‘He was inside at the time on a drugs charge. Perhaps he was coercing her into bringing what she assumed was tobacco onto the grounds for him.’

‘Plausible,’ she said. ‘Highly plausible. I’ll nose around, see if I can find anything out about this Deacon and his convictions. Are you certain that this note is actually referring to the smuggling case? Is there not another trial you have lined up?’

‘It’s the Meadows case. I’m sure of it.’

‘It isn’t hard for somebody to get hold of a printer and a sheet of paper. What about this drug-dealing case you’ve been assisting Zara Barnes with? Is she your pupil? I didn’t think silks took them on.’

‘Not mine, no, she’s –’

‘Oh God! The railway case last year! From the papers, she was your junior! So, she was there the night that …’

‘Yes.’

‘Wow.’ She whistled and took another long pull on her straw, leaving cherry-red lipstick on black plastic.

‘This Israel case,’ I said briskly. ‘How many of the defendants did you represent from the raid?’

‘All of them.’

‘The whole lot?’

She hummed around the straw, then smacked her lips dry. ‘Almost didn’t bother going when I got the phone call at eleven o’clock on a Thursday night. What a mistake that would’ve been. Thirty cells at Leyton Custody Centre, and six were occupied thanks to that raid.’

‘This may sound peculiar,’ I said, ‘but have any of the other defendants mentioned a gang that calls itself the Cutthroats? E10 Cutthroats, I believe.’

‘No!’ She laughed, which caught me off guard. ‘What