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  “Yeah, I know Ms Martin, they told me when they gave me back my money.”

  “You got it back?”

  “Not all of it, but quite a lot. Something to do with illegal proceeds from his business. I don’t know. I think I was lucky to get anything out of it at all.”

  “How are you getting on?”

  “Well, I’ve used most of the lump sum to set myself up in business – the same sort of thing I did for Telecom only freelance. Retraining work, conference kind of stuff.”

  “Your wife must be pleased?”

  “Yeah, we had a bit of a hard time for a while, but we’re working together on the business so it’s been good for us. We like working with each other. She feels more secure about me, and I think I owe her that. I guess I must owe you too?”

  “I don’t think so, I don’t think I made a very good job of any of this.”

  “Yes you did. If it hadn’t been for you, they’d never have found him and your Maggie would have taken all the blame.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t exactly find September for you, did I?”

  “You did.”

  “A little late.”

  “Better late than never.”

  “I don’t suppose her family think so.”

  “No. I don’t suppose Ms Simpson does either, and to tell the truth I can’t say I’m happy about it, of course not, but the fact remains, that if it wasn’t for you, she’d still be dead and Simon James McAuley would be running free. It may only be eight years, but it’s something.”

  “I ‘spose you’re right.”

  “I know I am. Now here’s the money I owe you, and I’m sorry it took so long.”

  “I don’t think I can take it.”

  “Well, there it is. I think you earned it. I expect the drug squad do too. Goodbye Ms Martin.”

  John Clark left Saz in the café with the cheque on the table. It was the same café he’d met her in nine months earlier. She picked up the cheque. Two thousand five hundred pounds. She went straight out and put it in a high interest account where she wouldn’t be able to touch it for three years.

  “That’ll please my mother. And hopefully by then I won’t feel so sick about it.”

  As she went into the tube she passed a young woman with dyed blonde hair and a thin puppy tied on a string.

  “Spare us twenty pence luv?”

  Saz reached into her pocket and pulled out a fifty pound note.

  “Here. Grow your hair out.”

  She gave her the money and went down the stairs into the tube.

  CHAPTER 30

  Afters

  Dolores told Saz about the funeral.

  “It was very quiet, cold really. Nothing like my grandmother’s funeral, with all of her old friends there. What was interesting though, was who turned up – we all went. All of her family of course, and even John Clark and his wife. We took Maggie with us. At least that’s how we all arrived, once we’d separated into the men and women it looked a bit different though. Her dad, her brother-in-law, a bunch of her other male relatives and ex-boyfriends, together with John Clark, Keith and his son. And all of us women crowded together.”

  “How were the family with Maggie?”

  “Well, how do you expect?”

  “I don’t know, I thought people always came round at times of great trial.”

  “Only in the movies, Saz. Anyway, I’m not sure if the parents even knew which one was Maggie. I introduced her to the sister though and she was quite civil – well, she had to be, the police had told her all the stuff that really happened, I think they gave the parents a watered down version of the little darling’s antics in New York.”

  “You still don’t like her much, huh?”

  “How can I not like someone who’s dead? No, I don’t dislike her, but I think she gave Maggie a very hard time. I don’t like this pretending. Any pretending. It can only end in tears. What she never understood was the good bits that come once the excitement’s worn off. I don’t think she ever really tried.”

  “Well, I can understand her desire for excitement. I certainly feel it.”

  “Yeah, sure. I don’t deny that. I like excitement as much as the next girl. What I think is sad is that she never gave Maggie the chance to experience the ‘passion of stability’.”

  “Sounds like you know all about it?”

  “I’m trying to.”

  Saz kept in touch with Maggie and Dolores. Maggie was slowly getting better. After a month in hospital she moved back in with Annie and Dolores.

  A year later Maggie took Saz to the cemetery.

  “So, do you come here often?”

  “At least once a fortnight. It’s less to see her how, more to give me a chance to think – the house is still bloody busy. Especially now that Gillian’s boyfriend has moved in. Keith still can’t believe he managed to produce three heterosexual kids!”

  “Is he nice?”

  “Keith?”

  “The boyfriend?”

  “He’s OK. For an American.”

  “Oh. Bad memories?”

  “They’re fading – and I thought I’d finished with therapy! This way. She’s just over here.”

  Saz followed Maggie over to the new gravestone. She picked up a small stone from the ground.

  “You have to put a stone on her. It’s a Jewish thing. I’m not sure why, but she told me that’s what you have to do.”

  She then took a small crumpled rose out of her pocket.

  “I leave her a flower too. I don’t think you’re supposed to, but she likes roses. I don’t suppose she’d mind. She liked bacon flavoured crisps as well.”

  She crossed herself and looked up at Saz.

  “Nice headstone, isn’t it?”

  Saz took in the plain white stone and read what she could, one part was in Hebrew.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s her name–Stav.”

  “Stav?”

  “Yep, only most English people called her Steph.”

  “Yeah, I heard that at the trial, what does Stav mean?”

  “It’s Hebrew for autumn.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, her mother told me the story.”

  “You’ve been talking to her mother?”

  “Once or twice, she’s OK. We’ve met here a few times. Accidently, but I kind of like it. I think she does too. She’s got some good stories.”

  “What’s the story of her name then?”

  “Well, they were living up north. Autumn comes sooner then, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’d been planning to go to Israel for a holiday, only her dad was working as a builder in those days and summer was a very busy time for them. They didn’t have much money then and they’d put this holiday off for ages, so Sarah – her mother’s called Sarah, of course – said that as soon as she saw the first yellow leaf on the tree in their garden then he’d have to take two weeks off. And she saw the leaf and they went away. He took the time off and she was conceived in Israel.”

  “And so they called her Stav because she wouldn’t have happened but for the autumn leaves?”

  “You’re very quick.”

  “It’s my job.”

  Maggie got up.

  “Sorry, I’ve got to go now, sad movies always make me cry.”

  “Me too, thanks for bringing me.”

  “Sure. ‘Bye.”

  Maggie was just walking away when a thought occurred to Saz.

  “Hey Maggie, did Sarah say when she saw the yellow leaf?”

  “Yeah. She said it meant she got a summer holiday in Israel after all. Well, late summer anyway. It was on the first of September.”

  Maggie carried on walking.

  Saz picked up a stone from the graveside and placed it with all the others.

  “Somehow I thought it might be.”

  Also by Stella Duffy and published by Serpent’s Tail

  Wavewalker

  “Very near the top of the new g
eneration of crime writers” The Times

  “The clever money should be on Duffy when the crime-writing Oscars are dished out” Telegraph

  “A feisty little page-turner guaranteed to keep you up all night” Big Issue

  Saz Martin investigates the activities of Dr Maxwell North, an internationally acclaimed therapist, healer and guru.

  Saz has been hired by a mystery employer – the Wavewalker – who walks at the edge of tides where the waves cover footprints and you can’t tell if you’re being followed or led. In an investigation which starts in seventies San Francisco and then comes crashing into her own nineties London life, the secrets of Dr North’s healing “Process” and a surplus of suicides propel Saz into lethal territory and a highly compustible conclusion.

  Beneath the Blonde

  “Saz Martin is … an ebullient heroine of courage and wry wit … Duffy’s third novel removes her from the category of ‘promising’ and confirms without doubt that she’s very near the top of the new generation of modern crime writers” Marcel Berlins, The Times

  “Stella Duffy’s writing gets better with each book” Val McDermid, Manchester Evening News

  “Always a pleasure to find a new Stella Duffy novel … a good read and highly recommended” Diva

  Siobhan Forrester, lead singer of Beneath the Blonde, has everything a girl could want – stunning body, great voice, brilliant career, loving boyfriend. Now she has a stalker too. She can cope with the midnight flower deliveries and nasty phone calls, but things really turn sour when intimidation turns to murder.

  Saz Martin, hired to seek out the stalker and protect Siobhan, embarks on a whirlwind investigation, travelling with the band from London to New Zealand, via the rest of the world. As jobs go, this one shouldn’t be too hard, except Siobhan isn’t telling the whole truth and Saz isn’t sure she wants to keep the relationship strictly business.

  Beneath the Blonde is the third Saz Martin thriller, following the highly acclaimed Calendar Girl and Wavewalker, and Fresh Flesh, her latest, confirming Stella Duffy’s position at the forefront of the new wave of British crime fiction.

  Fresh Flesh

  Patrick Freeman, celebrity chef, with the legendary bad temper and the obligatory wild child wife … Chris Marquand, adopted son of wealthy parents, a successful doctor, father-to-be … Georgina Leyton, high-powered lawyer and a beautiful bitch who’s as cool as they come … Luke Godwin, owner of the hottest South London bar and a talent for scaring the life out of people with his mad rages. Four virtual strangers, unwittingly bound together by a dark secret from the past. And, after all these years, it’s about to blow up in their faces.

  Everything was going just fine for Saz Martin and her partner Molly. It is summer in London. They’re having a baby and all looks right with the world. Saz has even stopped taking on any weird and wild cases. No more danger, just easy, steady work and tucked up in bed before midnight … Yeah, right.

  Fresh Flesh, Stella Duffy’s latest Saz Martin thriller, is a high-paced ride across a contemporary London of glitzy offices, fancy restaurants, designer bars and damaged lives. It is also a frightening journey through the emotional ruins of the past, a tale of the sins of the fathers, and the mothers, and of the greatest theft of all.

  Other Serpent’s Tail titles of interest

  Charlotte Carter

  Rhode Island Red

  Street Saxophonist and Grace Jones lookalike Nanette has a masters in French, an on-off boyfriend called Walter and a dead undercover cop in her apartment. But her life starts getting really complicated when she discovers $60,000 stuffed into her sax, the cop’s ex-colleagues turn up and she’s courted by that elegant older man who wants her to teach him everything she knows about Charlie Parker.

  And who, or what is Rhode Island Red?

  “Elegiac and musical … Nan is a wonderful character” Liza Cody

  “Wholly delightful … the year’s freshest crime debut” GQ

  “Sharp, funny and beautifully underscored with jazzy prose riffs” Good Housekeeping

  “Irresistible New York fable … sex and jokes and a love for jazz which blows hot, cool and true from beginning to end” Literary Review

  “It’s refreshing to find a heroine who has both a rocksolid moral centre and a sense of humour” Sunday Times

  “Enough spirit to keep you turning till the final page” The Voice

  Agnes Bushell

  The Enumerator

  Lamont Bliss came to San Francisco all right, but when they found him dead the flowers he wore weren’t just in his hair – they were spilling out of every wound in his mutilated body.

  What happened to Lamont should never have been any of Alex’s business. She was just back from New Mexico and the main thing on her mind was choosing a new tattoo. Then Sean the enumerator came calling.

  The enumerators were everywhere that year, sex surveyors tracking the spread of HIV in San Francisco. But when someone told the enumerator a little too much about their sex life – that’s when the killing started.

  Driven by passion and violence, soaked in fear and sex, The Enumerator offers the sharpest take on San Francisco since Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon.

  “Bushell’s post-AIDS, alternative San Francisco – a rich stew of blood lust, hypocrisy and death, Star Trek reruns, queer outings, and a promise of love – proves as arresting as her tattooed heroine’s foreground investigation into a gay murder imaginatively executed – corpse as floral display” Guardian

  “A twisting, subtle thriller of San Francisco in the AIDS years. Bushell conveys wonderfully well the lurking anger and darkness beneath this most sophisticated of American cities” GQ

  Diane Langford

  Left for Dead

  Montse Letkin works for the council. She’s what you might call a snooper. Montse is getting so good at her job that her boss Gwendoline Rhodes – that’s the one they used to call Red Gwen – has lined Montse up as her personal security consultant. Montse wasn’t so good at that though – Gwendoline fell out of a high window. And it would suit a lot of people if Montse took the rap.

  In Montse Letkin, Diane Langford has created a heroine of our times, a bruised and cynical young woman learning the hard way that the personal really is political.

  Left for Dead is a taut thriller set in London about ten minutes into the future. In a city where privatisation is the watchword and politics a dirty word. In a city where the weak and the homeless had best fend for themselves. In a city of secrets and lies, the legacies of the past collide in a unsettling, visionary slice of millennial noir.

  George P. Pelecanos

  A Firing Offense

  As the advertising director of Nutty Nathan’s – “The Miser Who Saves You Money!” – Nick Stefanos knows all the tricks of the electronics business. Blow-out sales and shady deals were his life.

  When one of the stockboys disappears, it’s not news: just another metalhead who went off chasing some dream of big money and easy living.

  But the kid reminded Nick of himself twelve years ago: an angry punk hooked on speed metal and the fast life. So when the boy’s grandfather begs Nick to try to find the kid, Nick says he’ll try.

  A Firing Offense, Nick Stefanos’ debut, shows why George P. Pelecanos is a cult figure in U.S. crime writing. As Barry Gifford puts it, “To miss out on Pelecanos would be criminal.”

  “A contemporary classic … Pelecanos is a fresh, new, utterly hardboiled voice. A Firing Offense is full of virtuoso scenes of imaginative sex and substance abuse, suspenseful action, and brooding meditation on a newly lost generation” The Washington Post

  “Pelecanos puts together a slam-bang climax that contains all the requisite elements – action, tragedy, victory, and random death. It’s a terrific start for a quality series” Mostly Murder

  George P. Pelecanos

  Nick’s Trip

  “The coolest writer in America” GQ

  “The kind of book you are always hoping to find but rare
ly do” James Sallis

  “Here is your first turn-of-the-century crime writer” Charlie Gillett

  “An even more promising follow-up to Pelecanos’ highly recommended first novel, A Firing Offense …” New Mystery

  “Snaps with authentic street talk and with a switchhitting plot … has something important to say about trust and treachery” Washington Post

  Nick Stefanos, having earned his P.I. license, quickly discovers that snapping photos of unfaithful husbands does not make for a fulfilling job. Tending bar one night at the Spot, Nick is visited by his high-school friend, Billy Goodrich. Billy’s wife is gone. Nick agrees to find her. And with that first step, he sets out on a one-way trip through a sewer of theft, intrigue and love.

  George P. Pelecanos’ reputation goes from strength to strength.

  George P. Pelecanos

  Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go

  After a night of drinking, Nick Stefanos passes out in a public park. Some time before dawn he wakes up when he hears a car door slam, and then a voice ‘’You already been a punk. Least you can do is go out a man.” Then a dull popping sound and a quiet splash.

  And that’s how Stefanos gets drawn into the murder of Calvin Jeter. The investigation takes him through the roughest part of the nation’s capital and the blackest parts of the human soul.

  Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go is the third title in the Nick Stefanos series – which establishes George Pelecanos as the rightful heir to the noir tradition of James Cain, David Goodis and Jim Thompson.

  “The customers at the Spot in Southeast D.C. like to hear Barry White and Isaac Hayes on the bar’s cassette player, but when they’ve all gone home, bartender Nick puts on P.J. Harvey. In his wallet is a state license which says he’s Nicholas J. Stefanos, Private Investigator … George Pelecanos has broken with tradition in so many ways, it feels as if he has launched a category of his own. Partly, it’s his convincing evocation of an unfamiliar setting but mainly it’s the feeling that we are definitely in the present – here is your first turn-of-the-century crime writer.” Charlie Gillett