‘And if not?’

‘Plan B.’

‘Which is?’

‘These are wealthy guys, right, Daly and Pollock? They won’t be staying in some shithole. We’ll start with all the five-star hotels in Manhattan and work our way through them.’

‘Makes sense.’

‘Okay, so we’ll get you checked in. I’ve booked you into the Hyatt Grand Central, which is a good location for you. Then I was going to take you to Mickey Mantle’s – remember it, Roy?’

‘You took me there last time I was here, I remember. He was a big baseball star.’

‘You guys would have liked it. Great food – simple, nothing fancy; great burgers, great everything – but it’s closed. But I know a great Italian. You guys like pasta?’

‘Sounds like a plan,’ Grace said.

86

Amis Smallbone had a plan, too. It was 10.30 p.m. Earlier in the day he had watched Roy Grace kiss his beloved Cleo goodbye on their doorstep, then walk across the courtyard with his suitcase, and let himself out through the gate. It was a fine, sunny day, and around midday, Cleo had taken their baby out in his pushchair, returning mid-afternoon.

Apart from a brief break at midday to go downstairs into the kitchen and microwave a steak pie and some frozen peas for his dinner, he’d sat up here in his chair, behind the net curtains, watching the courtyard and the front door of the Grace house.

Shortly after 4 p.m. a smartly dressed and quite handsome woman in her mid-fifties had arrived at the house. Cleo’s mother. Mummy, she had called her. Mummy had stayed for two hours. Mummy said she would return tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. with Daddy, and they would take Cleo and Noah out, looking at houses in the country.

Which meant the house would be empty for several hours. Perfect. He might pop over and take a look around, although, from the plans, he already knew the layout of the place.

He poured himself another whisky and lit another cigarette. Noah Grace. What was your daddy planning to teach you about life?

He remembered his own father, Maurice. Not with affection, but with respect. His one abiding memory was from when he was a small child; he could not remember his age, exactly, maybe six or seven. His father had stood him on the kitchen table, then blindfolded him and told him to jump into his arms.

Amis had stood there, petrified, swaying, for some moments. His father had urged him, ‘Jump, Amis. Just tumble forward into my arms. I’ll catch you.’

Finally he had let himself go. His father had not caught him, but had stood, several paces back, with his hands in his pockets. Amis Smallbone’s face had smacked so hard onto the kitchen floor he had broken two teeth and his nose.

Then his father had removed the blindfold, dabbing his face with a cloth. ‘Let that be a lesson to you, son. Never trust anyone in life, not even your own father.’

Smallbone had never forgotten that moment. His mother standing there, lamely watching. Cowed and bullied by his father into silent acceptance of all that he did to his children in the name of toughening them up.

When he was fourteen, his father made him accompany him on his rounds as a debt collector. Knocking on doors of shitty dwellings, opened by tearful women or scared men. Sending them scurrying off into back rooms, scuffling around under mattresses, shaking banknotes and coins out of mugs, tea caddies, pleading. Scum, his father told him. Vermin. Liars, all of them. You have to do what’s right. What’s right is to collect what’s yours. Life isn’t going to give it to you; you have to take it. They’ll give you every excuse in the world. ‘Me husband’s off work, sick’; ‘Me husband’s lost his job’; ‘I’ve not been able to work because me child’s sick’.

Sometimes, Amis Smallbone felt sorry for one of the terrified people. But when he told his father, he would slap him hard on the face and glare at him.

They make me sick, Amis. Understand? They’ll prey on weakness. Show them sympathy and they’ll have you twisted round their little fingers. Understand, because if you don’t, they’re going to shit all over you and ruin your life.

Amis understood. By the time he was eighteen, he was doing rent collection rounds on his own. Accompanied by a barber’s razor that he kept in his pocket, and produced at any excuse, on scumbag women as much as scumbag men. Occasionally he would just slash, for the hell of it, to see the crimson ribbons on their cheeks. As he got bolder, he would knock on the door with the razor in his hand, blade open. Crimson ribbon or your rent? he would offer.

Maybe a crimson ribbon on Noah Grace’s face would be nice, he thought. The little bastard’s crying had kept him awake a lot during this past night. How would it be for Cleo to go running up to his cot and find blood everywhere?

How about a slit from the edge of his mouth up to his ears, on each side? It was what other prisoners did to rapists, inside. Depending what prison you were in, it was called the Glasgow Grin, or the Chelsea Smile or, simply, the Rapist’s Grin.

He liked that. The Grace baby branded for life as the most vile of all human life forms.

The more he thought about that, the more he liked it. Much better and much simpler than killing Noah.

He toasted himself. It was a great idea.

Genius!

87

Wide awake at 6 a.m. on a New York Sunday morning, Roy Grace rang Cleo. Her mood was subdued; she was with her parents, in their car, heading off to the first of four houses in the countryside, close to Brighton, that looked good on the estate agents’ particulars. Noah, she told him, had driven her demented all night.

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she replied flatly.

‘Call you later in the day,’ he said. ‘Love you.’

‘You too.’

He pulled on his running kit, took the lift down from his eleventh-floor room, then went out onto 42nd Street and turned right. The early morning air felt fresh and cool. The city felt huge and daunting. Bigger than he remembered. The buildings rising like canyon walls on either side of him. He crossed two sets of lights, then made another right and headed up Fifth Avenue towards Central Park. He ran past smart men’s and women’s clothes displays in the store windows. Past a street cleaner, brushes swirling, water spraying. On the left he saw the Abercrombie & Fitch store that Jack Alexander had mentioned last night.

He ran on past the Apple Store Cube, breathing in the early morning smell of horses along Central Park South. Ignoring the lights, he crossed the deserted street, and ran on up the uneven paving of the Fifth Avenue sidewalk, looking for an entrance into the park itself.

All the time he was thinking hard. The Patek Philippe watch was here. Eamonn Pollock was here. Gavin and Lucas Daly were also here.

The Daly family should be working with the police, but they weren’t. He felt sympathy for Gavin. He liked the old man. He had always had a soft spot for life’s survivors, and there was nothing Daly had done, in all his ninety-five years, that had attracted the attention of the police. He was less certain about his son; a rotten apple for sure. He could still see, in his mind, the bruises on Sarah Courteney’s chest.

But it was Eamonn Pollock who worried him the most. Gavin Daly had not lied to him and travelled to New York, aged ninety-five, simply to retrieve an old family heirloom, regardless of its value. If he had just wanted it back, surely he would have given Grace’s team all the information he had.

There was another reason.

Another reason why he’d had Ricky Moore tortured. Why two of the burglary team had been found dead in Marbella.