Chapter 161: Received From II

At 8 the next morning Danny was on the narrow staircase above the dry cleaner’s with his helmet under his arm and the receipt in his inside pocket.

The machine downstairs hadn’t started. The door at the top was open.

Priya Anand was at her desk with her coat still on and the kettle going. In front of her was an envelope with a first-class stamp already on it. Mr D. Flynn, Flat 40, The Sterling Riverwalk. Her own handwriting.

“You are 2 hours early,” she said. “Sit down.”

He stayed standing.

“Is that the letter?”

“It is.”

“Then before it goes, I’ve got to tell you something you won’t like.”

Priya brought her glasses down off her head onto her nose.

“Go on.”

“Yesterday a man gave me 3,200 quid in cash. He’s 90, he lives on the 17th floor of my building, and I was with his brother when he went. He said it wasn’t a loan. I told him you’d said not 50 quid.”

Danny kept his hands at his sides.

“I took it anyway. Last night I gave it to my plasterer, and I told the plasterer where it came from before he put his hand out.”

He put the receipt on her desk.

“And the plasterer wrote this.”

Priya read it, and read it a second time with her finger under each line.

“By hand of,” she said.

“He’s been self-employed 30 years.”

“Then he has done you a favour.” She squared it to the edge of the desk. “Why did you take it?”

“The old man said if I didn’t, he’d take it to Verney Road himself and put it in Deniz’s hand. Then it’s his money in my shop and me not there to say so. I wanted it going through me, and written down.”

“And why are you telling me?”

“You said not 50 quid and I broke it. If you’re going to stop acting for me, I wanted you to have the real reason in front of you.”

Priya looked at him over the glasses.

Then she picked up the stamped envelope, opened the desk drawer, put it inside, and shut the drawer.

“That letter says I cease to act,” she said. “I wrote it at 10 o’clock last night. It is going in the drawer and not in the post.”

He sat down.

“It will stay in the drawer until the day you lie to me again,” Priya said. “Then it goes in the post, and you do not get another one.”

She pulled her pad across.

“This is the best-documented piece of paper in your whole file. A third party paid a tradesman through your hand, for work on your premises, and the tradesman has receipted the third party by name.”

“So it’s not a loan.”

“It is a gift to the business. I will copy this, you will keep the original, and I will ring Lorraine myself at 9 and tell her before anybody else does.”

She fed it through the little copier on the cabinet, whirr-clack, and handed Deniz’s original back to him. “What is the old man’s name?”

“Pemberton.”

She wrote it. “And the brother?”

“Robin Hollis. 94. He owned the block I lived in from 17, through a company, and he signed my first tenancy. He died yesterday morning holding my wrist.”

Priya’s biro stopped on the H.

She looked at the name she’d half written for a moment.

“Does that mean something to you?”

“Not yet. It might. Wait.”

She turned to the computer on the side of the desk, the old one with the yellowed keys, and moved the mouse until it woke.

“When your building manager rang me about you, I told you. She rang on a Thursday afternoon. You told me you had given her my name on the Friday.” Her hands were on the keyboard. “I have asked myself since how she had my number a day early.”

“Did you get an answer?”

“I will not discuss any client of mine, past or present, Mr Flynn. But I have a window onto the road.” She did not look round. “The day you brought me your birth certificate, I watched the woman who had just left this room stop on my pavement and speak to you. Somebody has found my name written down next to yours. Tell me where.”

Thursday before Friday. She’s had that sat in her head for weeks.

“The flat’s in a company,” Danny said. “That company’s owned by a second one, the second by a third, and the third owns the first. Round in a circle.”

“And the address on them.”

He didn’t need the pad. “2a Clapham Road. Above the dry cleaner’s. P. Anand.”

Priya typed for a minute, tick-tick-tick on the old keys, and turned the screen round so he could see it.

Companies House, in grey type, 3 companies with 3 registration numbers. Under each one, correspondence address: 2a Clapham Road, London SW9, and her name.

“I have never acted for any of these companies,” Priya said. “I have never heard of them. I did not consent to my name or my address on them, and no post has ever come here for them.”

“Only Naomi’s phone call.”

“Only that, and I answered it in writing.” She put a fingernail to the screen. “Look at the date on all 3.”

He looked.

11 October.

“That’s the day my record starts,” Danny said. “Nothing before 11 October. That’s what the check said.”

“Yes. I had noticed.” She sat back. “So on the day your history begins, somebody puts my name on the company that owns your flat. And a few days later you walk up my stairs. How did you come to me, Mr Flynn? You have never said, and I have never asked.”

Say it straight. She’s put the letter in the drawer.

“I found you online. Solicitor, café lease, south London. You were on the first page.”

“My website was built in 2014 by my nephew, when he was 15. It is not on the first page of anything.” She took her glasses off. “I should have told you this in October. It did not seem to matter.”

“Tell me now.”

“On 10 October, in the morning, a man telephoned this office. He said a young man called Flynn would be in touch about buying a café. He said the young man would need somebody careful and honest, and would I please keep a morning free. He spelled Flynn for me.”

The 10th. The night of the first one. And he’d rung her that morning, before any of it.

“I was referred 4 clients that month,” Priya said. “I do not tell clients who referred them unless they ask. You did not ask.”

“Did he give a name?”

She looked down at her pad, at the half-written H.

“Hollis.”

Danny’s hands had gone cold on his knees.

“Robin Hollis was East London,” he said. “He sold cars in Romford. He talked like it right to the end. Was that how this man talked?”

Priya thought about it properly. He watched her do it, with her eyes on the dead plant.

“No,” she said. “He did not talk like a man who sold cars. He talked like Kensington, or a school that sounds like it. Very old. Beautiful manners. And when I asked him a question he did not want to answer, he said Mm.”

The machine downstairs started. Thump. Thump. Thump. The dead plant began to move.

“Write it down,” Danny said. “The call, the date, what he said, the name he gave. And today’s date, and that I asked you to.”

Priya was already writing.

“And the companies?”

“I will write to Companies House today and tell them my name is on 3 companies without my consent,” she said. “They will take it off. Whoever runs these companies will then have to give them another address, and to do that they will have to file something in their own hand.”

She did not look up.

“Do you understand what that might cost you? I do not know what happens to a flat when the people behind its company have to show their faces.”

40. The bath. The glass. Pettit’s wardrobes.

None of it’s in my name. It’s on a company that borrowed hers without asking.

“Write to them,” Danny said.

“Before you know who put me there?”

“This morning. And write to Pat Mulvey and all. She wants it from you on paper, with your name at the bottom.”

Priya wrote Mulvey under Companies House, and underlined both.

“I ring Lorraine at 9,” she said. “Where will you be at 9?”

Danny looked at the clock over the filing cabinet. 8:41.

“There’s an old man who swims 40 lengths at 9 every day of his life. His brother died upstairs while he was doing them yesterday.” He stood and put the receipt in his inside pocket. “He’ll be in the water this morning.”

He rode north over the bridge with the river grey under him.

The Sterling’s pool was warm and blue and smelled of chlorine. At 9:12 there was one swimmer in it, in the far lane, going up the length in a navy cap, slow and even, the way Danny had seen him do everything.

Danny walked the side of the pool in his coat with his helmet in his hand and the wet tile under his boots. He crouched at the end of the far lane.

Pemberton touched the wall a foot from Danny’s boots, turned, and went back up the lane without lifting his head.

So Danny sat on the slatted bench by the wall with his helmet on his knee and watched the clock over the door. 9:16. 9:19.

The water slapped in the gutter every time the old man turned. A cleaner came through with a mop, looked at a man in a coat on the bench, and went out again.

At 25 past, Pemberton touched the wall and stayed there with one hand on the rail. He pushed his goggles up onto the cap and looked up at Danny, who had come back to crouch at the end of his lane.

“40,” Pemberton said. “Mr Flynn.”

“Mr Pemberton.” Danny didn’t stand. “On the 10th of October, in the morning, somebody rang a solicitor on the Clapham Road. He told her I’d be coming, and he spelled my name, and he said his name was Hollis.”

The old man’s hand stayed on the rail.

“Your brother talked like Romford,” Danny said. “My solicitor says this man talked like Kensington, and said Mm when he didn’t want to answer.”

He held up the receipt with RECEIVED FROM MR PEMBERTON across the top in Deniz’s capitals.

“And 11 years ago you paid Deniz 50 extra to get my ceiling done by the Saturday. So I’m asking you before I ask anybody else. Who told you I was coming, both times?”