A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series) (16 page)

Now Dimitri’s iron fingers dug expertly deep with bone-crushing pressure into the nerve endings in Curtis’s shoulder and upper back, as Yuri had taught him, just as he had with Chantal but with ten times the force. The nociceptors, the pain-transmitting neurons in Curtis’s shoulders, exploded into sheets of agony and he screamed out loud, head thrown back, mouth wide open in his pain.

‘You like it, like your
bliyad
bitch did?’ hissed Dimitri. Curtis was howling with agony now as he kneeled like a supplicant in front of the grinning Russian. He couldn’t stop himself. If only Arkady could be here, thought Dimitri regretfully, he would love this. Arkady appreciated the artistry as much as the floor show of sadism and Dimitri enjoyed a discerning, approving audience.

More pressure. Dimitri switched to a question that was bugging him. Did Curtis know about the policeman; had he sold them out?

‘Who was policeman, who is this Enver Demirel? Who is Demirel,
otvechai
! Answer me.’

Through his tears, through the pain, through the swearing and the pleas and the begging, Curtis made it clear he didn’t know who or what Enver was.

‘Answer me,
zasranets
, arsehole,’ hissed Dimitri. ‘Answer me!
Davai vikladivai.
’

It was obvious from Curtis’s contorted face that he had nothing more of use to contribute. If he had known anything of use he’d have said, to make the pain stop. Dimitri let him go and Curtis collapsed on his side on the cold, screeded, concrete floor of the warehouse.

Dimitri looked down at him pitilessly. Curtis lay on his side. He was crying now. His chest was heaving like a wounded animal’s. Dimitri took one step to the left, to the first of the three empty oil drums Curtis had brought here earlier that day.

He dug his nails under the lid and lifted. It came off easily. Curtis had wondered earlier who the drums were for. Well, now he knew the answer to at least one of the questions.

Dimitri looked down again at Curtis. Myasnikov’s words came back to him.

‘Terminate Curtis’s contract. . . close any loose ends.’

He bent over Curtis, who looked fearfully up at him. There was nothing he could do. He knew what was going to happen but he had no more fight left in him; he hoped it would be quick. Closing his eyes, compliant and submissive, he made no attempt to resist as Dimitri’s hands circled his neck and then tightened.

It didn’t take long.

Half an hour later, Dimitri patiently washed the grey cement residue off the metal head of the spade in the trough-like sink on one of the walls of the warehouse. He looked across the expanse of floor, the concrete shaded here and there by darker geometric patches where machinery belonging to the former occupants had been removed.

The art installation had been rearranged.

Before, there had been one barrel to the left, three to the right. Now there were two and two. Two full, two empty. Temporarily.

‘Phone him and tell him you have information on me,’ said Dimitri to Chantal. He was wearing one of his inevitable tracksuits and several heavy gold chains. She could see the onion domes of the cathedral he had tattooed on his chest clearly, looming over the scalloped top of his low-cut vest.

It was Wednesday morning and Chantal hadn’t seen Curtis since the morning of the day before. He hadn’t responded to any of her texts or voicemail.

It wasn’t unusual for Curtis to disappear for a couple of days, but Chantal had his drugs stashed in one of her kitchen cupboards in an airtight container so no moisture would get to the thirty grams of coke he had given her to look after. He had also left a couple of grand in twenties and tens in a ziploc bag, hidden in a packet of frozen veg in the tiny freezer compartment of her fridge. It was unthinkable that he would go so long without either the Charlie or the cash.

She was very worried, but couldn’t think of anything to do. There was nothing she could do.

Family. Her mother was a foul-mouthed drunk living in Woodstock; Chantal wasn’t going there unless she had to. She was worse than useless. Chantal had been taken into care when she was young and even she felt that had probably been the right decision.

Friends. She didn’t really have any, just Curtis and the phone numbers of a couple of ex-boyfriends, both violent, both untrustworthy. All she could do was text him and add increasingly desperate emojis. Now she was down to just sending emojis. The bright primary colours cheered her up a little.

Maybe he was with another woman.
He’d have phoned with some pathetic excuse
, a cold voice inside her head said.

Maybe he’d just got off his face with some friends, a stag do he hadn’t told her about.
He doesn’t have any, he’s Billy No Mates
, the voice said.

Now here was Dimitri. He stroked her hair proprietorially and she flinched. He took his tracksuit top off and she could see even more of the sinister tattoos that covered his body.
I’ll tell Curtis
, she imagined telling him. The inner voice laughed, coldly unimpressed.
What’s he going to do against Dimitri? Him and whose army?

Perhaps, she wondered, if the policeman came round he would be able to deal with Dimitri; he’d certainly looked sizeable. But then her gaze took in the huge, muscled bulk of Dimitri, his horribly animal presence. The big policeman had looked kind and, although he had been bear-like in build, it was a cuddly kind of impression. She had found herself considering Enver Demirel in her professional capacity. Men like him were her favourite clients; he’d have been polite, gentle, no trouble at all. She had even quite fancied him. That comforting, muscular weight on top of her. Not like Dimitri.

His hand was still in her hair; now his fingers tightened and clenched and he pulled at it viciously. She gasped in pain.

‘Call him now,
bliyad
, get him over here.’

She nodded and took the business card with his number out of the cutlery drawer where she’d put it for safe keeping.

She typed the number into her mobile, heard Enver’s voice on the other end, a questioning tone when he answered as he didn’t recognize her number.

He sounded pleased to hear from her. Yes, he’d be round in about an hour and a half’s time. She hung up and looked at Dimitri.

‘He’ll be round in about an hour,’ she said.

He started taking off his shoes. ‘I heard hour and half. We have plenty of time.’

The other shoe followed. He was wearing white ankle socks. The right one had a hole in and she could see the nail of his big toe. It was quite long and grubby. Like the rest of him it looked strong, like a broad claw. It made her feel sick.

‘Curtis might be back soon,’ she said desperately.

Dimitri tugged off his sock and looked at her. ‘He won’t.’

The amused look in his eyes said it all. There was no hint of,
I don’t care if he comes
; no hint of,
So what
, or,
Call him and tell him you’re busy
. It was just callous good humour. She doubted if he would even care that she had noticed. It was then that she knew Curtis was dead.

Enver had lied about the time it would take to get to Chantal’s flat. He was in Oxford when his phone rang, sitting in a café eating doughnuts. They weren’t American-style donuts. They were jam, the real deal as far as Enver was concerned. Thick, sugar-encrusted, plumply seductive. He had meant to have just one but he told himself that, technically, he was on holiday and, as such, deserved a treat. He would walk them off later.

He had no idea how many calories were in a doughnut or indeed how long it would take on foot to negate their effects. The truth was, he didn’t care. He was in a nice café, drinking good espresso and eating these hard-to-find excellent doughnuts. Besides, he thought righteously, the café was independent, not part of a chain, so he was also benefitting the local economy. In fact, the more he spent, the better.

The proprietress eyed him in a friendly way from behind the counter. She liked a man who enjoyed his food. Enver was on his fourth doughnut, his eyes gleaming, his strong white teeth occasionally visible beneath his heavy black moustache, now dusted with caster sugar as he chewed. She noticed that his powerful fingers were free of a wedding band. The look in his eyes, unalloyed greed and good nature, reminded her of her Labrador when she fed it. Enver looked like the kind of man who would be as nice as her dog, and, she felt, he could do with a woman to advise him on clothes; that T-shirt did not go with that jacket.

He was surprised that Chantal had called him. She had looked so scared when he’d been in her tiny flat.

He stared at his phone and drummed his fingers gently on the table in front of him. He had a vague sense of disquiet but he shrugged it off. What could she possibly do to him? Equally Sam Curtis posed little or no threat. Enver’s increased body mass, allied to his powerfully muscled physique, while of no use in a boxing ring, was ideally suited to successful brawling. He would have flattened Curtis like a steamroller.

He toyed with the idea of phoning Huss but decided against it. He thought of his approaching evening with Melinda Huss with excitement. He was going to invite her to stay the night, provided all went well, and he could see no reason why it shouldn’t.

He’d checked that the film,
A Room with a View
, was on and that it was what it purported to be, not some porno version or a remake. He’d had another look at the menu, even eaten a solitary, exploratory lunch and made friends with two waitresses and the manager. His family name, or rather the restaurants associated with the Demirels, was reasonably well known in this part of London, plus of course he knew quite a few names that he dropped to good effect – catering is a tight-knit community.

Enver was a formidably good planner. Entertainment was sorted; dinner was sorted; his flat was nearly there. He was halfway through Operation Springclean in his flat. It was always clean and tidy; now it gleamed. All he had left were the insides of the windows to clean and the skirting boards, in case Huss got down on hands and knees to run an exploratory finger along them.

He pushed the chair back and smiled politely at the woman behind the counter as he left. What a nice man, she thought as she cleared away after him and pocketed her tip.

Enver walked to a nearby taxi rank and gave Chantal’s address in Cowley to the driver. He’d had enough of negotiating the one-way streets of the town and the endless, problematic bicycle chaos the last time he had driven here with Huss.

As if he had conjured her up by thinking of her he felt his phone vibrate and there was a text message from her, asking about the coming evening. The mannered Oxford streets passed by outside the windows of the cab as he laboriously typed in the time of the train he’d expect her on at Paddington and where exactly at the station they should meet.

Enver was leaving nothing to chance. He thought of Huss’s attractive curved body; he thought of her blonde hair. He thought of her clever, competent hands and the look of studious concentration on her face as she adjusted some tricky component on the exposed gears of a car. He thought of the scent of her body, wholesome and attractive, like rising bread. He thought of her lovely breasts and underwear as revealed by the half-undone boilersuit. He thought of her even white teeth. Melinda Huss, he thought wonderingly, I think I’m in love with you.

The taxi pulled up outside Chantal’s flat. He got out and paid off the driver. The car pulled away and Enver’s thoughts of Huss vanished as he looked at the doorway sandwiched between a betting shop and a fast-food outlet that sold fried chicken.

His good humour evaporated. Chantal’s surroundings were as depressing as her life.
Win, win, win
screamed the betting shop, its frontage bright with vibrant primary colours, green and red and yellow, its lettering bold, emphatic, confident.

Its optimistic slogan was negated by its neighbour. The fast-food shop’s photos of the takeaways it sold had been bleached and yellowed by the sun and time. The chicken in the pictures was gnarly with dun-brown corrugated batter, like growths waiting to be removed. The shop smelled sharply of rancid fat.

Enver could imagine only too well what the kitchen would look like, the cracked rubber seals of the fridge grimed with dirt like a tramp’s fingernails, the off-putting reek of out-of-date chicken in stained plastic tubs and boxes of congealing coleslaw. He knew the horrors that lurked in crappy kitchens only too well – not in the Demirels’ kitchens, but in rival places he’d worked when he’d been a student.

He walked up to Chantal’s front door. Someone had pissed in the recessed doorway during the night and there was still a residual puddle of thickened, semi-evaporated urine in front of the scuffed white door, the smell mingling with that of the chicken joint next door.

He pressed the buzzer and heard Chantal’s voice, sounding slightly out of breath, metallic and tinny on the scuffed, steel honeycomb of the intercom.

‘Hello?’

‘DI Demirel,’ he said. The door buzzed and he pushed it open, stepping carefully over the puddle as he went.

He glanced at his watch as he stood at the bottom of the narrow, steep carpeted stairs, the beige fabric unpleasantly stained here and there. A smell of stale skunk clung to the walls.

He thought of Huss longingly. Only a few more hours, he thought.

He started up the stairs and knocked gently on the door. Chantal opened it and he went into the cramped flat. Enver looked at her with concern. She had obviously been crying. Her eye make-up had run, and her fingers plucked nervously at the hem of her dressing gown. It was a cheap, oriental-effect garment made of red synthetic fabric with a gold dragon, the kind of thing you bought on a stall in a not-very-good market for a tenner. It looked highly flammable. He had the feeling that she was naked underneath the tawdry gown, which added to his discomfort.