The Knowledge_A Richard Jury Mystery Page 6

  Jury frowned. “He paid the fare? Where is your information coming from?”

  Dennis was silent.

  “You can’t tell me? Okay—”

  Dennis told him. “Robbie Parsons and his friends got the information.”

  Jury frowned. “How?”

  “A girl named Patty Haigh.”

  “This is like pulling teeth, Dennis. Who’s Patty Haigh?”

  “A kid. She’s nine—no, ten, I think. There’re maybe four or five kids, Waterloo and Heathrow.” Dennis told him about the kids. “It’s like a stash.”

  “A stash of kids. Kids as informants. I expect Social Services would like to hear that.”

  “These kids steer clear of Social.” He paused. “You don’t like the story so far. You certainly won’t like the next installment.”

  “What is it?”

  Dennis sighed. “She’s with him.”

  “Who?”

  “Who the hell’ve we been talking about, Richard? Patty Haigh.”

  “What do you mean, ‘with him’?”

  “I mean what that generally means.”

  “Christ! She’s a hostage?”

  Jenkins cleared his throat. “Not really. It’s more like she decided to follow him—”

  Jury was out of his chair. “A nine-year-old kid with a killer? Jesus, Dennis!”

  “Ten. The kid’s very resourceful. She already had a coach ticket. Someone else’s, but it was in her possession. According to the Emirates attendant, Banerjee upgraded her to first.”

  “Upgraded her? So they sat together? Dennis, I can’t believe—”

  “In Emirates first class, nobody sits together. They each have a little room. Very private and posh.”

  “So what’s the last communication from this kid?”

  “From Heathrow before takeoff. She called another kid, told him the guy was named B.B. She boarded the Emirates flight with him. After that, it gets a bit fuzzy.”

  “Fuzzy? Fuzzy?” Jury laughed.

  “According to the airline, there was a flight out of Dubai at eight forty-five A.M. And they were both on it. Don’t ask me how that happened.”

  Jury didn’t. “Banerjee got through Heathrow with apparent ease despite the police.”

  “We had no ID for him, then. First we heard was after he got out of the cab at Waterloo.”

  “What about Dubai police? Were they contacted?”

  “Sure. But they only had, you know, a few hours to get anything together. Airport security in Dubai is good. But they couldn’t find them. Her. The Dubai police force is very enlightened. Well, it can afford to be, given it’s the UAE. You know what they drive? Lamborghinis, BMWs, Aston Martins and Bentleys. I mean those are the police cars.”

  “What about her?”

  “They’ll get her too.”

  “Dennis, she’s ten!”

  “Yeah, I know. We really should fetch her back before she gets in a fix.”

  “‘Before—?’” Jury tried to proceed as if they were making sense.

  “She managed to call this other kid at Heathrow before they left and give him this information and he then let one of the cabbies know, who then informed Robbie Parsons, et cetera. So that’s settled.”

  “What’s settled?”

  “The shooter. We know who he is.”

  “But we don’t know why he is, Dennis. Here’s a Kenyan traveling all the way to London to shoot an American couple. Why did he do it? Is the guy a contract killer? Was this a hit? And we’re all assuming the shooter was after David Moffit. But what about Rebecca Moffit?”

  “Collateral damage?”

  “Why would there have been any collateral damage? Why shoot her just because she’s a witness? Robbie Parsons was a witness. Is anyone investigating Rebecca Moffit?” said Jury.

  “Well, your lot, surely. They were US citizens. That wouldn’t be left to City Police. Don’t you guys communicate with one another?”

  “Not if we can help it.” Jury had his head in his free hand. “I’d like to talk to Parsons. I’d like to talk to these kids, too. Okay with you?”

  “Sure. You want me to round them up? The kids, I mean?”

  Jury thought for a moment. “They’re at Waterloo, right?”

  “Four of them. Two at Heathrow. Only one now. This Aero kid.”

  “Who are the four?”

  Paper rustled. “There’s Suki, Jimmy, Martin and Henry. That won’t help you much, though. Even if I had the last names, you’d still have to go through the drivers to find out where these kids are.”

  “Then I will. I’ll start with Parsons. What’s his number?”

  Jenkins gave Jury Robbie’s mobile number. “If he answers it.”

  Jury had taken it down and now asked, “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “Well, I called him an hour ago and asked him the name of one of the drivers, which he told me. Then he told me if I called again, he wouldn’t be answering because he’d be at that cabbies’ pub.”

  “What pub?”

  “The Knowledge. You’ve heard of it.”

  Jury frowned. “I have?”

  “Oh, come on, Richard, everybody’s heard of it. Only nobody knows where it is.”

  London

  unmapped,

  uncharted,

  undated

  8

  Probably no map, no street guide, not even the A–Z with all of its cobweb entanglements, properly conveys the difficulty of negotiating London. There was no city easier to get lost in, stuck in, pinned down in, go missing in. Although it was not as neat as a spiderweb, if your car was lost in one of its disconnected byways, you knew well enough how a fly must feel. The city seemed to mock any attempt to move forward: traffic lights winking, stop signs rearing, street signs baring their little black-lettered teeth.

  Yet with guts and patience, anything could ultimately be found.

  Anything, that is, except the Knowledge.

  It came to Maurice Benbow that in all of his years as a black cab driver he had seen dozens of Red Lions, King’s Heads, Crowns, White Harts (and Horses) among London’s over 5,000 pubs, but out of all of the silly, weird, wondrous names that had been thought up, from the Hung, Drawn and Quartered to I Am the Only Running Footman, he had never passed one called the Knowledge. And this despite the fame of London’s black cabs and the belief that this city had the best drivers in the world; still, not one pub with that name. So Maurice decided to fix that.

  The more he thought of what he wanted to do, the better he liked the idea. He considered himself fortunate in not having a family because he wouldn’t have to convince others to go along with the plan.

  It took him a year to find a place and he found it by accident. Or, he said later, fate. Fate in the form of a large white dog that sat like a statue on the broken pavement of a run-down bit of road where Maurice had never been before. He was astonished that there was any part of London he’d not been in, but this was it. He let his cab idle in the night as he watched the dog, curiously stolid and very white against the dark backdrop of a smallish, weathered building down a narrow lane. Finally he got out and crossed the nameless street and found that there was another dog, a black one, lying across the ground and surely dead.

  Maurice was astonished: the living dog appeared to be watching over the dead one. He approached very cautiously, nonaggressively. He spoke gently to the white dog, who looked down at the other dog and whimpered. A dead mate. Had to be. He sat down on the curb on the other side of the dead dog, hoping to announce himself as an ally in this terrible tragedy. He assumed the black dog had been hit by a car. Slowly and carefully he laid his hand on the dead dog’s head, ran it down the dog’s neck and a bit along the spine as the white dog sat and watched. Definitely mates. He couldn’t get over this kind of devotion. More than most humans, that was for sure.

  Maurice kept a blanket in the cab, an electric blanket that he could run off the cigarette lighter. He had attached a long cord to the blanket after one time he’d b
een on the Heath and had wanted to just lie under the stars, but the blanket wouldn’t reach. So he’d gotten this extension cord. He rose slowly, went to the cab and plugged in the cord and brought the blanket back. The white dog, still statue-still, watched him carefully but did nothing. The blanket warmed up and he spread it out, so that part lay across the dead dog and part across the ground, then patted it several times for the white dog to lie down. He sat there; the blanket lay there for a long time before the white dog moved. But he did move and he lay down and Maurice could tell the warmth was a comfort to him.

  They kept to these positions, dogs lying, Maurice sitting, for a good hour before Maurice realized nothing, absolutely nothing had come along—no person, no car, nothing. And he began to wonder how the dead dog could have been injured by a car, for there were no cars. Behind them was an old house, clearly unoccupied. To the left was a row of lockups. To the right stood the sad remains of what had been a business, or a couple of them. The building in ruins.

  Maurice pulled out his mobile and called one of his driver friends, Conrad Coover.

  “Yo!” said Coover.

  Maurice told him the situation and asked him if maybe they should get someone from the RSPCA out here to take care of the dogs.

  “Why? Sounds like you’re doin’ a better job’n they would.”

  “Could you come and help, then?”

  “Sure. Give me an address.”

  “There isn’t one. I mean, there’s no street sign, or anything.”

  “Well, just tell me how to get there.”

  Maurice thought. He’d been driving without paying attention. “I think maybe I went through Hackney or maybe Newham. I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Bloody unlikely, Maurice. You drive a black cab, man. You’d be paying attention even if you weren’t.”

  “Swear to God, Coov, it’s like the middle of nowhere.”

  Coover laughed. “There ain’t no middle of nowhere, mate. This is London. It don’t have ‘nowheres.’ Not for us, it don’t. So get back in your cab and drive around for a bit and figure out where you are.”

  “But I don’t want to leave the dog.”

  “Suit yourself. Call if you sort it.”

  Maurice turned and looked at the old house that sat far back off the road. It was, at least, shelter. He knew he’d never get the white dog into the cab. So he thought maybe he could get him into the house. He stood up and the white dog looked at him and got off the blanket. That was a good sign; the dog was accepting Maurice as a kind of friend. Maurice wrapped the blanket around the dead dog, pulled off the cord and picked up the dog. The white dog lifted first one paw and then another over and over. Questioning.

  “Over there, buddy. Come along.” He carried the black dog in the blanket and the white dog followed him into the house. Of course there was no electricity, but Maurice always had a torch. He flicked it on and ran it around the room, it fell on a big lantern that turned out to have a wick. He lit this with his Zippo and the flame sputtered up. Damn thing must still have a bit of fuel. It shed a good light.

  When dawn came he walked outside and turned to look at the house. It was actually well built. Fixable. Paint, plaster. He knew he’d found it.

  He knew nobody else would.

  This was his future pub; this was the Knowledge.

  Three months later, he’d finished with the paint and plaster; with getting in tables and chairs; with locating an amazing bar in Camden Passage, the “antiques” bloke said had come by hook or by crook (certainly the latter, thought Maurice) from Morocco. From Casablanca.

  “Sure, from Rick’s bar, right?”

  “You got it, pal,” said the dealer, winking broadly and counting the money Maurice handed over.

  He had to rent a van to get the bar back to his new pub. But he got it there. The dog, now named Ben, after himself, calmly waited for him. Maurice had taken the place of Ben’s dead friend. Maurice was now Ben’s mate.

  He had turned the old house into a perfectly ordinary London pub. Wooden beams and whitewashed brick, deal tables and mismatched chairs, Rick’s bar along one wall, big fireplace, warm and cozy. Cozier than most because of its gaslit wall sconces, candles and a long row of gaslights over the bar. No one was sure of the source of the gas, since Maurice was not a fan of British Gas, nor a patron of any of the Big Six (Greater London’s major electric companies). There were many easy ways of getting gas supplied to one’s residence, but Maurice simply used propane tanks. Nor did he bother with British Telecom, not with the advent of the throwaway phone. He had once had a landline, which came about not by paying BT, but by hacking into his neighbor’s line. Without electricity, there was, of course, no telly and one might have expected the pub’s patrons to raise a fuss over not being able to watch Manchester United clobber Leicester City, or Chelsea do the same to Arsenal. But there was surprisingly little objection. TV would have required the assistance of the Big Six and also some newfangled wiring to speed up reception, but Maurice wanted neither speed nor reception. He wanted complete and utter autonomy. In the colder months, heat was supplied in part by a gas stove, but mostly by burning logs in the big fireplace. Logs that Maurice himself brought in. Wood was not delivered any more than was mail. Every once in a while one of the waggish taxi drivers would go out and check if the trees in the woody back garden were still there and found all of them standing. No one knew where Maurice got his wood. He told them Epping Forest, ha ha.

  On that day over a year ago when Maurice had discovered there was no pub called the Knowledge, he decided to go one better. He would open a pub that only London’s black cab drivers could patronize. The pub would be otherwise unlocatable: untraceable, unfindable, unmappable.

  To get their green badges, these drivers had to pass an absolutely grueling test that took months, often years, of conveying themselves on foot, bicycle, moped, motorcycle or car through the streets, lanes, alleyways and roads of London. One had to learn not just the fastest routes from one point to another, but every monument, museum and tourist attraction along the way. The drivers were learning not just streets, but streetscapes. It was organic.

  The test was claimed to be one of the hardest in the world. It was called “the knowledge.”

  Robbie Parsons walked into the Knowledge that Friday night, or by that time it was more the small hours of Saturday morning. The pub didn’t bother with closing times, taxi drivers’ schedules being so erratic. There were still over a dozen cabbies at this offbeat hour.

  Word of Robbie’s wild ride had gotten round as quick as lightning and he was now by way of being a star. Nothing like that had ever happened to any of the others; he was congratulated again and again, clapped on the back and pounded on the shoulder.

  “Don’t give me all the credit,” said Robbie. “There was Brendan Small and a couple of others following. Four cabs—it was quite a show.”

  “Hell, man, when I first heard that a guy had pulled a gun on you, I figured it was just another arsehole wantin’ to get to the Knowledge!” That had brought a loud round of laughter.

  “So I get home,” says Robbie, “and a little later, up shows the Filth. Yeah. City Police wanting a word. I spent over an hour at Snow Hill talkin’ to some DCI. I got the idea he thought I was in on it: the getaway car.”

  “Bloody hell!” said Reggie Reeves.

  The others chimed in with their outrage, hard to muster at three A.M. when they were completely knackered.

  If you wanted to be out of reach, you could become an astronaut, fly to the moon—or maybe not: Neil Armstrong had been reachable. My God, that was something to give a man pause. They can even get to you on the bloody moon! But not at the Knowledge, which was a lot less trouble, at least if you drove a black cab. As for an ordinary citizen, well, he might as well try and fly to the moon. When word got out that there was this pub that nobody could find, naturally everybody tried to find it. A lot of people took bets, offered bribes, made maps, asked “people of influence”—all t
o no avail. The cabbies got a little tired of simpletons who waved them down, got in and asked to be taken to the Knowledge.

  Usually the drivers simply stonewalled, pleading ignorance when asked to be driven there. The driver would apologize, and tell the passenger that he’d never heard of it and that no such pub existed in London. But sometimes cabbies would get inventive. One of their favorite stories was Reggie Reeves’s. He had some American CEO in his cab, probably used to ordering people around, and Reggie said, “Yes, sir, that’d be south London, and it might take a bit of time, as that destination is across London Bridge and through Southwark and Brixton, then on from there to Dulwich.” The man said, “Yeah, just get on with it,” and Reggie did.

  Then they were driving up to the massive school with its stone gates, green lawns, a cricket pitch, beautiful old redbrick buildings.

  “Where in hell are we, driver?” demanded the man in the backseat.

  “The College, sir. Dulwich College. Isn’t that where you wanted to go? It’s quite famous—”

  His fare screamed at him, “No, you idiot! I said knowledge, not college! That pub called the Knowledge!”

  Clive Rowbotham had driven an obnoxious French (“Ain’t that redundant?”) couple for miles and miles to a pretty little country pub whose front garden was a mass of blue flowers.

  “What’s this?”

  Clive pointed to the sign swinging in the wind: “The Borage, sir. Ain’t that what you wanted?” He too was charged with being an idiot and both the man and the woman babbled at him in heavily accented English that they had said, “The Knowledge, you fool!”

  The other drivers had really liked that, several of them using the Borage to off-load their fares. But for the most part, it was stonewalling.

  The cabbies at the bar had insisted Robbie go through the details of the ride with the gun at his neck. Which he had done, ending with the drop-off at Waterloo Station.

  Coover said, “Then the Waterloo kids picked it up, I heard.”

  “True,” said Robbie, but the others hadn’t heard yet about Patty Haigh.

  “You mean she’s with him?” said Coover.