Dead Man's Time

behind him. They were in a huge hallway,
with a black and white chequered floor. Two suits of armour, each with a lance in their steel right hands, stood either side of a grand stairway. Fine, classical oil paintings hung from the walls,
the kind of paintings that would normally have piqued Ricky Moore’s interest. But tonight he barely noticed them through his tears of pain.
    There was a strong smell of cigar smoke. Moore was craving a cigarette. An elderly man with flowing white hair, wearing a smoking jacket and monogrammed black velvet slippers, walked towards
them, with the aid of a silver-headed cane. He held a large cigar in his free hand, and fury blazed in his cornflower-blue eyes.
    ‘Ricky Moore?’
    He nodded sullenly.
    ‘I’m Gavin Daly. I appreciate your dropping by.’
    ‘Very funny,’ Moore said defiantly.
    Daly grinned back. There was a flash of warmth that was gone in an instant, like a fleeting glimpse of the sun behind a storm cloud. ‘Funny? You like jokes, do you? Think it’s funny
to con vulnerable old ladies out of their possessions?’
    ‘I dunno what you’re talking about.’
    ‘Get nice kickbacks, do you, for your information? Send your leaflet out in advance, then go into houses and take photographs of anything of value?’
    ‘Nah, not me. I honestly dunno what you’re talking about.’ He gasped in pain as the Apologist crushed the nerve in his arm again, as if to remind him not to bother thinking
about trying to get away. ‘It’s not me.’
    ‘A house in Withdean Road.’
    ‘Never been there.’
    ‘There’s a lady in a house there who has one of your leaflets on her hall table.’
    ‘Not that I recall.’
    ‘Let me jog your memory,’ said the man in the business suit in a snide, assured voice. Then he sniffed. He looked taller than when Moore had seen him outside, and more immaculate,
with black hair gelled back. He reminded Moore of photographs he had seen of those gangsters, the Kray twins.
    Moore glanced around, wondering if he could make a break for it the moment the gorilla let go of his arm.
    ‘This your iPhone?’ the Kray lookalike asked, holding it up in front of him.
    Moore nodded, and gasped in pain as the gorilla squeezed his arm even harder.
    ‘Sorry!’ the Apologist said.
    ‘I’m Lucas Daly, by the way,’ the Kray lookalike said. ‘It was my auntie who got robbed and murdered, thanks to you. My dad’s sister. Neither of us are very happy
about it.’
    ‘I didn’t have nothing to do with it!’ Ricky Moore said.
    Lucas Daly frowned, looking down at the phone. He tapped it several times, then held the phone up in front of Moore’s eyes.
    ‘Recognize that, do you?’
    Ricky Moore stared, reluctantly, at the close-up photograph of the gilded case of the Whitehurst clock that had been hanging in the drawing room of Aileen McWhirter’s house.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t.’
    ‘You must have a fucking short memory.’ He sniffed again.
    Moore said nothing, his brain racing, trying desperately to come up with something convincing – and failing.
    ‘What about this?’
    Moore stared at another photograph. This time of a swan-necked Georgian tallboy. Again he shook his head.
    The man tapped the iPhone again. ‘This?’
    Moore stared at a Chippendale gateleg table.
    ‘Never seen it before, honest! Not my photos. I didn’t take them. I didn’t!’
    Then the man dug his hand inside his jacket, and pulled out the implement that had been bulking it out. It was a pair of electric curling tongs, with a flex trailing. ‘How about these, Mr
Moore?’
    ‘I’ve never seen them before, honestly!’
    ‘These are like the ones used on my auntie,’ Lucas Daly said. ‘They were used to make her give up her safe code and her bank pin codes. Do you think they might make you talk,
too? We’d like some names from you. Starting with the men who did Auntie Aileen’s house in Withdean Road.’
    ‘Lucas!’ the old man cautioned. ‘No violence. That’s not what I want. We’ve had enough of that. I don’t operate that way.’
    ‘I don’t know no names, honestly, sir,’ Ricky Moore addressed the old man, sensing hope.
    ‘Go to bed, Dad, it’s late,’ Lucas Daly said.
    ‘I don’t want violence, you understand?’ Gavin Daly said to his son.
    ‘Go to bed, Dad. Let me deal with this.’
    ‘I just want the names of the people who did this to my sister, Mr Moore,’ the old man said. Then he turned and walked away down the