Dead Man's Time

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.
    Another reason why Gavin Daly and his son had travelled, in a hurry, to New