A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series) (10 page)

Hanlon knew that one of her major faults lay in not seeing the bigger picture; she tended to concentrate on the now, rather than worry about the consequences. Trying to do, say, Corrigan’s job – marshal large numbers of officers and support staff to fight not just crime but terrorism, whilst steering a deft course through government policy, the police federation, civil liberties and human rights, a fickle public constantly veering from opinions that ‘all coppers are bastards’ to ‘string ’em up or lock ’em up and throw away the key’, budgetary constraints, the media and maybe ten to fifteen million Londoners – she’d have been disastrous. And then all the tedious meetings with Data Processing, monitoring the traffic on mobiles and computers, the technicalities and legalities of what they were and were not permitted to access, which she was hopeless at. Her mind just switched off in such situations. And as for tact and trying to keep the public on side, well, even a Hanlon enthusiast would duck that question. Hanlon and PR, a key part of Corrigan’s job, were irreconcilable.

Corrigan had once said to her that the criminals were the easy part of their job. She was beginning to realize the truth of what he had said. But if she lacked strategic vision, she made up for it in the tactical.

She noted the increased tension in the officers’ posture. Hanlon was failing the attitude test. Most people avoid the attention of heavily armed policemen. Hanlon’s slightly arrogant poise and athletic build together with her black eye, an injury from sparring at the boxing gym she used, had aroused their suspicions. One of them had even checked her footwear as they’d passed. Hanlon was wearing knee-length boots with a short skirt. Good for running in. The officer had added it to his checklist.

In a minute they’d be back. While they engaged her in polite, meaningless chat, wanting to confirm ID, etc., Joad, Dimitri and whoever they were meeting could have come and gone. She looked around her for inspiration.

She saw them immediately. The answer to a prayer.

Salvation.

It wasn’t a Guido Fawkes V-for-Vendetta mask – it was a piece of very expensive silk cloth, courtesy of Hermès, but it was equally effective. The arrangement of the barriers at International Arrivals was asymmetric and, as the metal curved round, Hanlon joined a group of about twenty Arab Muslim women waiting to greet arrivals from, she guessed, a Middle Eastern flight. The women all had their heads covered and half of them were wearing the shapeless, figure-concealing clothes favoured by the religious, the other half wearing Western clothes, jackets and jeans predominating.

Hanlon, her hair covered by her dark Hermès scarf, tagged along at the end of the group. The crowd that assembles at Arrivals is always excitable, always vibrant, never static. The attention of the greeters is universally concentrated on the focal point of the door through which the travellers appear. The women in the crowd, too, all seemed armed with mobile phones, either using them to talk to whoever they’d come to pick up or photographing their loved ones as they arrived.

Hanlon followed suit. She would be able to use her phone with impunity. Everyone else was. The images she had through the screen of the camera weren’t perfect, but they were good enough. Dimitri and Joad were just a few metres away but their attention was fixed on the doors to Arrivals. They’d glanced at the Muslim women but it had been a glance of dismissal. No threat there to them and, also, nothing to ogle. All they’d seen was a mass of headscarves; that was enough for them. Hanlon got busy with her phone.

Click. Dimitri glowering at the floor, Joad looking bored.

Click. Joad yawning, holding his sign. Hanlon couldn’t read the Cyrillic letters; she’d have them deciphered later.

It suddenly occurred to Hanlon that Dimitri obviously didn’t know what the Butcher looked like, otherwise why bother with the sign. Clearly he was a man who valued his anonymity.

Click. Dimitri and Joad in profile now, both looking alert, like pointers who have scented the prey.

Hanlon changed the phone’s camera to video as the first-class Moscow passengers started to arrive, filtering through from airside to terminal.

She would have missed Myasnikov if he hadn’t gone to greet Dimitri and Joad. Middle-aged, average height, conservatively dressed with a neatly trimmed greying beard, he looked as unlike her mental image of a blood-soaked gang leader as it was possible to get.

She had enough images of the Butcher now. She turned away and disappeared into the crowd.

Twenty minutes later, Hanlon stood on the top floor of the car park overlooking the huge airport and the enormously long runways. The planes came and went. The wind tugged at her thick hair as jet engines screamed overhead from take-offs and landings, while more planes circled round, waiting for their allotted slots.

To her east lay London, her city that she loved with a passion; to her west, Langley and Slough, hateful place of exile. Below her, the Russians, maybe her ticket back to where she wanted to be.

She leaned across the red bonnet of her car while she scrolled through the photos. They were all there, all good enough to use. She’d study them later. Particularly Myasnikov, Charlie’s killer. She scratched her head, toying with the idea of a police-to-police request for a photo of the
vor
from the Russian authorities. Probably not the best idea, not if the Russian cops were as corrupt as Oksana said. She thought again of Oksana. I doubt if I’ll be able to find your husband, she thought, but at least I have an image of his killer. And you’ll be able to translate his name. That’ll be a start; we can take it from there.

She got in her car and drove thoughtfully down the labyrinthine ramps of the car park, and once through the barrier turned towards the M4 and Slough.

Dimitri and Arkady, you’ll be seeing me again, I promise, she thought.

Sam Curtis didn’t have a therapist bound by the rules of his trade to confidentiality. He didn’t have a priest bound by the rules of the confessional, but he did have Chantal. Right now he was quite drunk in her studio flat, one room plus bathroom, in Cowley on the outskirts of Oxford.

She listened patiently as, sprawled on her bed, he told her about Jordan Anderson and Taverner and the girl and what had happened on Monday night. She took another sip of the Baileys that she was drinking to keep him company and lit a cigarette. She didn’t want to hear any of this but her boyfriend was not to be stopped. He was out of his mind on the booze and the drugs. Totally mullered, she thought. Curtis opened another can of Stella. That was twelve so far. It was only the coke that was keeping him from collapse.

‘First we had to go to Chelsea Harbour and we met this geezer called Barry. In Barry’s car there was this other bloke, sparko. Out for the count. We put him in the Merc and I drove them up to that industrial estate in Slough where I got them that warehouse. We carried out matey, inside, that’s where, well, let’s just say that’s where it happened.’

Curtis was lying next to her in his underwear, singlet and pants tight against his muscular body. The skin was taut against his powerful frame but it was goosefleshed and coated in a sheen of cold sweat.

Chantal nodded. She was wearing the lingerie set that Curtis liked, the one she’d got from Ann Summers. She might as well have been wearing a bin bag. Curtis didn’t have sex on his mind; he wanted expiation, not orgasm. He wanted forgetfulness. He wanted oblivion.

He imitated the Russian’s voice.
‘You pass me knife, you never do this to pig before, no, “dou’shit”, what is English? Yes, must suffocate him first or blood goes everywhere, we want in bucket.’

Curtis was a skilful mimic and accurate. He could have been good at languages – he had a good ear, a good memory – but it was a road he had never taken. Education had never been his forte. He had chosen crime. Up until now it hadn’t seemed a bad choice. He had earned respect, a lot of money and an enjoyably hedonistic lifestyle. All it had cost had been a spell in a juvenile facility and a couple of months inside a low-security prison. A price well worth paying.

He did Dimitri again. ‘
Go get bag for head, this is “mest”, what you say, payback time
.’ But now, now he was beginning to regret working for the Russians. He was in the deep end, he couldn’t swim that well and his toes didn’t reach the bottom. Panic was setting in.

In his newfound awareness of detail – the huge empty, dark space of the warehouse, the damp concrete smell of the floor overlaid with the butcher’s smell of Jordan’s blood, the whine of the electric saw and the silencing effect of Anderson’s tissue as the teeth of the saw made swift work through his spine and neck – he noticed how Dimitri, when he spoke English, didn’t use pronouns, no
the
or
a/an.
Presumably they didn’t exist in Russian. It was a piece of information whose accuracy he guessed he would never find out.

‘Then we drove back to London,’ said Curtis. ‘Down the Euston Road, down to Marylebone. With the head wrapped up in cling film, in a couple of bags.’ Jordan’s head had been surprisingly heavy.

He was rolling a joint now, the coke, two grams of it, all gone. Traces of it frosted his nostrils, his eyes were huge and she could smell the rank coke sweat on his body, floating like a top note on the metallic alcohol sheen that beaded his skin. The room stank of weed and sweat and booze. He was in a terrible state, she thought. She wished he’d shut up about the events he’d seen. She didn’t want to know and she was certain that she wasn’t meant to know. If Belanov ever found out, well, he would. . . She shut down the thought. He would burn her. Burn her. That’s what he liked to do, and Dimitri liked to watch.

‘Sh,’ she said. ‘You need to relax, Sam.’ Chantal moved provocatively on the bed and shrugged off one shoulder of her dressing gown. Curtis stared blankly at her cleavage. He drank some more lager and lit the joint. He carried on his narrative.

‘The girl knew Jackson. She let us in. There was some bloke on the sofa. The Chinaman had said he’d be there. The girl was in on it, but the Butcher doesn’t like loose ends, so she died and he died. Bang, bang, simple as. Easy, I suppose, after what we’d just done. Dimitri gave the head a wash in the kitchen sink. It needed a clean.’

Back in the present, Curtis shuddered. ‘And then Dimitri and I dropped Jackson back in Chelsea. Back to Slough, got rid of the body. In that warehouse I told you about, you know, the one I rented for them.’

‘Poor baby,’ said Chantal, and put her arms round Curtis. The money that he’d been earning from Belanov had been great. She remembered how she and Sam had laughed for pleasure at the huge amount he’d earned in his first fortnight for the Russian. It was all cash, of course, straight from the brothel’s takings. Four grand in tens and twenties. They’d strewn it all over the bed. It had been like winning something on the TV, not like ‘earning’ it. But he had earned it; that was the problem. It had terms and conditions.

Chantal was concerned that they could easily end up very dead, and dead in some absolutely awful way.

She thought, That could be us in that warehouse. In that barrel where Anderson’s body had ended up, covered in cement. That could easily be us. And there was no way out. It wasn’t the kind of job Curtis had that you could resign from. You couldn’t give a month’s notice. Arkady Belanov had his own idea of a confidentiality clause, his own way of imposing a gagging order. It didn’t involve lawyers. And you couldn’t even grass him up, he’d got two police contacts, that sleaze-bag, that bell-end Joad who’d already been round trying to cop a feel, and once when she’d been bent over for some reason, casually pushing his groin against her chuff.
Go on, Chantal
, he’d said,
just a quick one, I won’t take long
. And now this other one, this Chinaman whoever he was, if indeed he was a copper and not just some other high-powered civilian that was on side for the Russians. Like that bloke on the council. Not the chief constable, though. She was a woman.

She caught sight of the two of them reflected in the mirror above the bed, the view that her clients loved. Curtis’s slim, muscular body and the back of his head as he buried his face into her chest and her long blonde hair, the roots beginning to show their natural mousy colour.

It had been better when he was just dealing, with a bit of debt collecting on the side, she fucking the occasional punter, five hundred to a grand a week and relatively risk free. Not this.

Chantal had a nose for trouble; her whole life had been nothing but. She could see that Curtis had responsibility but no power and the more he knew, the more likely it was that Belanov would decide one day to get rid of him. Thank God he didn’t know who the policeman was. Thank God he didn’t know who the Chinaman was. Ignorance was bliss. He’d delete Curtis with as little compunction as a text message and she’d probably be processed too. Or shipped off to somewhere in Russia where a British whore might have curiosity value.

She’d opened the window earlier to get rid of some of the heavy smoke from the skunk Curtis was smoking. Now a cold breeze shook the curtains and she shivered, but not from the evening air.

She pushed her nose into Curtis’s sweat-drenched hair and tightened her grip round his back to feel the comforting heat and hardness of his body. She heard him mutter something, his low voice inaudible, his mouth pressed against her breast.

He lifted his head so that he could see her and their eyes met.

‘What, babes?’ she whispered.

‘I’m shit scared, Chantal,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Me too.’

Corrigan left the meeting room at the Home Office in a foul mood. He walked down the front steps of the startlingly ugly modern building, its facade reminding him of slatted blinds. It had won an architectural award. Of course it bloody well had, he thought angrily. Bloody idiots. He turned on his heel and glared venomously at 2 Marsham Street, a ten-minute walk from his office at New Scotland Yard.