Free The Ties That Bind by Erin Kelly Page A

agent, but they all knew why he was there and none of them would have given his address to Jem. All his bills were paperless and there was no post to redirect from the flat so he couldn’t have found out that way. He must have made good on one of his other threats: calling the police or hiring someone to trace him. Sweat flowered under his arms. The police wouldn’t send someone all the way from Leeds for petty theft, surely?
    He forced himself to look through the spyglass. It wasn’t Jem, nor a uniformed police officer, but the top of a stranger’s head. Luke pressed his nose into the door to get a better look at his visitor. It was a little old man, shrunken further by the convex lens. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses and a camel coat and his sparse dark grey hair was oiled and side-parted. Luke could just see that he carried in a shaking left hand a small posy of flowers. Behind him, a uniformed driver sat at the wheel of a gleaming black Bentley T1, its perfect sleek curves tipped with a silver B on the bonnet.
    The door was rapped again, gunfire at chest height. When Luke opened it the old man resumed human proportions, apart from his eyes which remained telescoped behind thick lenses. In a blink Luke took in the pressed pinstripe suit under the coat, the brogues, the tie-pin, the ebony walking stick: he looked like the king of 1965.
    ‘Are you the son? Michael, isn’t it?’ the man said in the wheeze of the lifelong forty-a-day smoker, although his breath did not carry the corresponding stench of cigarettes. ‘No, you’re just a boy. Who are you if you’re not Michael?’
    ‘I’m Luke.’
    The driver, a thick slab of a man in his fifties, leaped from the car and ran towards his passenger as though Luke was about to assault him. ‘What’s going on? Sir?’
    He must have been six feet five and sixteen stone of solid muscle, and while his voice was rough Brighton, he was as well dressed as his passenger, in wool and silk. His potato face was punctuated by a dimple in his chin that looked as though it had been done with a knitting needle.
    ‘But where’s Kathleen?’ said the old man. Luke didn’t know what to say. In the films, the police never gave bad news to someone unless they were sitting down and it looked like a light breeze might knock this man over.
    ‘Er. You’d better come in.’
    The visitor registered the bare walls. ‘Where are Kathleen’s things? Who the fuck are you?’ This time his voice was reinforced with steel, heavy with authority, and Luke found himself taking a step back as though away from a raised fist. ‘I’ll ask you again and this time I want a straight answer. Where is Kathleen?’
    ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Duffy passed away last week.’
    Now it was the visitor’s turn to stagger backwards. The little spray of flowers dropped to the floor. A single violet petal floated down after them.
    ‘Dead?’ he said. ‘Kathleen, dead ?’ He parted his lips in a grimace, revealing perfect dentures that didn’t match the cross-hatched face.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Luke again. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come in?’
    ‘What happened?’ said the chauffeur, taking his boss’s elbow.
    ‘A stroke. I only met a relative . . . look, are you sure you don’t want to come in?’
    ‘My Kathleen!’ he said. ‘My gorgeous girl . . . how will I get on without her?’ He addressed the question directly to Luke, who was embarrassed by this naked grief. He stood to one side to let them pass if that was what they wanted. The stripped interior only seemed to distress the old man further. A long continuous tear zig-zagged from his right eye through the grooves of his cheek.
    ‘All her things have gone! It’s as though she was never . . . forty-five years wiped out, just like that.’ He ran out of breath, or words, and stroked the edge of the door with trembling fingertips, then laid a cheek against the wall. He and the widow had clearly been – what should he call them? The