Kill and Tell by Adam Creed Read Free Book Online

them. It’s not done.’
    ‘Done?’ Staffe wonders who the hell Lady Ballantyne’s latest husband thinks he is. ‘What about Fahd Jahmood?’
    ‘How do you know him?’
    ‘It’s my business to know everything about Carmelo.’
    ‘Jahmood doesn’t know my father.’
    ‘How can I be sure?’
    ‘I’d like to go now.’
    ‘When this is all dusted and done, you will thank us, for finding the man who stole into your father’s house and slipped that mickey into his grappa and watched him pass out and crack his head on the floor, then drove him away in his own car. It was someone he knows, of course, and they even disposed of those two Murano tulip glasses. I bet your father loved those glasses. I bet he savoured every sip of grappa he took from them. They’re forty, maybe fifty years old. And now there’s only four.’
    ‘Shut up! They were a present – for my mother.’
    ‘What happened to her?’
    ‘I killed her.’
    ‘What!’
    ‘And then I was born. That’s what killed her.’ Attilio stands up. ‘So how could he love me?’
    ‘We have to find him, Attilio. He is old, and if he is alive, he may well be suffering.’
    ‘How can I help? I don’t know where he is and that’s the God’s honest truth.’
    ‘They put him in the boot of his own car. He shouldn’t have left home for the last time in the boot of his car.’
    Slowly, Attilio bends further and further over, his head in his hands. ‘For God’s sake,’ he mumbles. ‘You don’t think I had anything to do with this, do you?’
    ‘Where’s Jacobo?’ Staffe puts his hand gently on Attilio’s shoulder. ‘Jacobo and your father have a secret. I know.’
    Attilio stiffens. ‘How do you know?’
    It is strange, muses Staffe, that Attilio asks this, rather than ‘What secret?’
    ‘Appolina as good as told me, but she’s afraid. It seems that everybody’s afraid.’
    Attilio clams up and Staffe leads the way into reception, says he is sorry if Attilio suffered any distress and he knows what it is like to lose your parents.
    ‘No, you don’t,’ says Attilio.
    The memory of his mother, laid out in Bilbao, repeats on Staffe. She was covered up by a thin cream sheet and from the shape she made, he could tell she was not all there. He has nightmares about what the remains of her would have looked like, beneath the shroud. He looks at Carmelo’s son and all he can see is what is absent.
    Outside, the rain is pelting down now and thunder rumbles over the meat market.
    Staffe offers Attilio his hand and they shake, uncertainly. He watches him go, looks across to the other side of the road, sees Josie taking shelter and looking daggers at him, her hair in thick, drenched strands. Up the road, the motorcycle revs – ready to go. Attilio hails a cab. Josie scurries to the rider and Staffe goes back in, makes his call.

Seven
    The sign ‘Goldman and Son, Accountants’ is a narrow brass plaque on a blue door next door to a Lebanese restaurant called Shawiba on Hackney High Street. Sbaring a little Middle-Eastern rapprochement, a fellow in a yarmulke sits with a young man in a burnous , exchanging sucks on a hookah pipe beneath Shawiba’s canopy.
    A voice rattles in the speaker grille, and Staffe says, ‘Mister Goldman? I’m from City Police. DI Wagstaffe.’
    The electric lock on the blue door whirrs and Staffe goes through. The hallway is narrow and the steps are ridiculously steep, the bulb insufficient, but the décor is fresh and the carpet new.
    Staffe wonders, as he climbs, how Carmelo would have managed with the stairs. Before he reaches the top, a man appears. ‘Mister Goldman?’ says Staffe.
    The man’s suit is cut in the style of Jean-Paul Belmondo and his hair is slicked forward at the sides and tufted up at the top.
    ‘The son,’ laughs the slicker, ‘Anthony,’ turning on his heel and walking into a modern, open-plan office, surprisingly spacious and incredibly light. There are only two desks and at one, a beautiful young