Close Call (17 page)
Authors: Stella Rimington
Two hours later, after Peggy had made a series of urgent phone calls resulting in a senior university administrator being rooted out of his home to consult the file in his office, Liz knew. Zara did indeed live in the hostel known as Dinwiddy House, and was studying for a Masters degree in International Relations at SOAS. He was a Yemeni called Samara and was in the UK on a temporary students’ visa. The address given on his visa application and supplied to the college was in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. He hadn’t drawn himself to the attention of the college authorities in any way and a search of the records in MI5 and MI6 came up ‘No Trace’. But then, thought Liz ruefully, if this guy was any good, that’s what you’d expect.
The Royal Standard Hotel was in an undistinguished street between Victoria Station and Buckingham Palace. Though it billed itself as ‘situated in the shadow of Buckingham Palace’, it was in fact much nearer to Victoria Station. An anonymous sort of place, part of a small chain, it provided everything a mid-level businessman or official visiting London might require: wi-fi, cable TV with ‘adult’ films, in-room tea and coffee, minibar and even an ironing board and iron. All of its 361 rooms were furnished identically, and carpeted and upholstered in variations on the colour theme of beige and maroon.
All in all it was the sort of place where people could come and go without anyone taking much notice. Which is why, a few years ago, Liz Carlyle’s colleagues had identified it as perfect for the sort of rendezvous they occasionally needed to conduct. The manager had been recruited as what was called a ‘facilities agent’, to provide a room or rooms as required, without asking any questions about who might occupy them or what might go on in them. In return he received a present at Christmas and the satisfaction of knowing that he was helping Her Majesty’s Government.
On this occasion, two pairs of interconnecting rooms had been booked on different floors. In one of the pair on the eighth floor, Liz Carlyle was sitting, waiting for Dicky Soames, the burly A4 officer and member of the team ‘minding’ Milraud while he was in London, to produce his charge, so she could find out what had happened at the meeting on Primrose Hill.
There was a light tap on the door and a deep cockney voice said, ‘Here we are. OK to come in?’ Milraud entered followed closely by Soames, who closed the door firmly behind him and put the lock on.
‘I’ll be next door, if you want anything,’ said Soames, and he went into the other room leaving the intercommunicating door slightly ajar.
Liz motioned the Frenchman to one of the two chairs. She thought how tired and strained he looked. Much more so than when she’d first met him in the safe house in Montreuil.
‘Would you like something to drink?’ she asked. ‘There’s tea or coffee, or a drink from the minibar if you’d prefer.’
Milraud shook his head. ‘
Non, merci
,’ he said shortly. He had kept on his mackintosh, and he looked chilled, even though it was warm in the room.
Liz switched the kettle on, and as she waited for it to boil, she pointed out of the window at the coloured lights strung across the street. ‘Christmas starts earlier every year,’ she said cheerfully. Milraud glanced out and nodded, but he seemed a million miles away. Liz took her time making coffee for herself and chatting inconsequentially, hoping to relax the man a little.
She sipped her coffee and winced. ‘You made the right decision,’ she said, but Milraud’s smile was perfunctory. He was clearly impatient for the debrief to begin.
‘So how did it go?’ asked Liz, sitting down at last.
Milraud shrugged. ‘Much as expected.’
‘Was he concerned about security? I mean, since your Paris meeting was aborted because of the surveillance.’
Milraud sat up. ‘Yes. He was worried that I might have been followed and he checked me out for a microphone. I assured him he need not worry; that I was once an intelligence officer and I know about these things.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘I explained that I had gone to Paris and Berlin under different passports and I was at least twelve hours ahead of anyone hunting me.’ He grimaced; they both knew Milraud had thought this himself.
‘Do you think he suspects you?’
‘In his position I certainly would – I never trust my customers, so why should they trust me? But when he pressed me about being spotted in Paris, I told him I had as much right to worry about him as he had about me. That shut him up.’
‘So after that, what did you discuss? He called the meeting, didn’t he? What did he want to say to you?’
‘He wanted to add to his order. That was for firearms, as you know.’
‘What else does he want?’
‘It’s a bit surprising. He wants grenades – two dozen of them.’
‘Really?’ Liz was astonished. The whole business seemed surprising, as it was generally assumed that the jihadi groups fighting in the Arab Spring countries had no difficulty acquiring weapons from their supporters, but this requirement was even more unexpected.
‘That’s right. And then the oddest thing of all – he wants more ammunition for the weapons he’d ordered. Not more weapons; just more ammunition. Twenty thousand rounds.’
‘
Twenty thousand
?’ Liz could not contain her astonishment. It sounded as if Zara was equipping an infantry battalion. And why so much ammunition for only twenty weapons?
‘I agree it doesn’t make sense, unless he already has a lot of weapons at his disposal. But I didn’t have that impression from our first meeting. It’s quite peculiar.’
Milraud looked uneasy; Liz sensed there was something on his mind. She waited, but he said no more. Eventually she asked, ‘Let’s come back again to this black man you met in Berlin. What did he want?’
‘I was asked to meet him. I was told he wanted to see who was involved in the deal. I was told he has not done this type of business before.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Almost nothing. He just asked about my business – how long I’d been supplying, what parts of the world I supplied, that sort of thing.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Very little, but it seemed to satisfy him. Then he rushed off. He was very jumpy.’
He still looked uncomfortable. Then he shrugged and returned to the subject of the meeting with Zara. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t sure how you wanted me to play it today. So I told him that I would check if I could get the goods he wanted in time and get back to him. He pressed me, so I had to promise to let him know tomorrow.’
‘How are you to do that?’
‘By email.’
She knew from Seurat that the French were in control of the email traffic.
Milraud asked, ‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Can you supply the extra things he wants in time?’
‘Yes. I only have to email my supplier.’
‘Where is he?’
‘In Bulgaria.’
Liz didn’t hesitate. ‘Do it then and tell him you can fulfil the supplementary order. But also tell him you need to know precisely where and how it should be delivered. Press him for details.’
She looked at Milraud intently. He might have been surprised by Zara’s request, but she was certain he was holding something back. It didn’t make sense that he knew nothing about Jackson. Milraud was acting as if Jackson was Zara’s contact and he had nothing to do with him, but she was sure that wasn’t the case. Maybe if young Thibault over in Paris could hack into their back email exchanges the full truth would emerge – and a lot sooner than if she waited for Milraud to come clean.
It was almost eight when Liz left the hotel. Milraud would be spending the night there in the other pair of interconnecting rooms, under the watchful eye of Dicky Soames and his colleagues, before returning to Paris with them as close escorts. There was no way Liz was going to be responsible for losing the man whom Martin Seurat had spent so many years hunting.
In the dark, Thames House looked like a lit-up half-filled egg box: unoccupied offices were dark, but enough officers worked late hours to dot the heavy masonry façade with the lights of their midnight oil. In her office Liz found a handwritten slip from Peggy:
Halliday rang. Said call him any time. He has news.
When she reached Halliday there was the background noise of a raucous party going on. ‘Hang on a minute,’ he shouted. Gradually the noise subsided, until she could hear only traffic whizzing past in the background, tyres wet from rain. Halliday must have stepped outside from whatever club he was visiting. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said.
‘It’s Liz Carlyle; I got a message to ring you. But I don’t want to interrupt the party.’
‘I’m working, believe it or not. I’m drinking vodka and tonic without the vodka, and waiting for the barman to offer to sell me three grams of coke. I thought I’d better take your call outside. I’ve got some news for you. Not good, I’m afraid.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘We raided Slim’s with Immigration – that’s the club owned by Lester Jackson. We arrested half a dozen girls working upstairs – they were “hostesses” but they were doing more than serving drinks. All from somewhere in Eastern Europe most likely but they didn’t have a set of papers between them.
‘Normally that would have been enough to close the place down, and maybe let me squeeze our high-flying friend Mr Jackson a bit. But he wasn’t there and he didn’t seem to care, and I now know why. He had a leading brief go to the lock-up by breakfast time, and bob’s your uncle, it turned out all the girls had proper papers and valid passports – the solicitor claimed he’d been holding them on the girls’ behalf.’
‘What sort of passports?’
‘Bulgarian – every one. And now that it’s in the EU that means they can work here, come and go as they please. Not that I believe for a minute their papers were kosher. None of those girls speaks Bulgarian.’
‘How do you know? Do you speak it?’
Halliday laughed. ‘No. But one of the cleaners at the police station is from Sofia. She said the girls couldn’t understand a word she said.’
‘But you had to let them go anyway?’
‘Yes. No choice. They’re all living in Manchester, so it’s not up to me. I would have tried to work the prostitution angle, but Manchester SB couldn’t be bothered. These days it’s hard to convict unless you show the girls involved are either under duress or illegal immigrants. None of the girls would make a complaint so we couldn’t do either.’
‘Too bad,’ said Liz, though she wasn’t very surprised. Jackson seemed unlikely to jeopardise his club by laying himself open to a single police raid.
Halliday paused and Liz heard the sound of a bus passing. As it died down Halliday went on, ‘That isn’t good news, but there’s worse to come. I had a source in the club – an older woman who functioned as a kind of “mother” to the working girls. Name of Katya.’
‘You “had” a source?’
‘Katya was found strangled in the kitchen of her digs two mornings ago. The uniform thought it was a burglary gone wrong but it doesn’t ring true to me. There was no sign of forced entry, nothing taken. One of her flatmates found her when she came home from work.’
‘Do you see a connection with the club?’
‘Yes I do, not that I can prove it.’ He hesitated, then finally said, ‘The thing is, when we arrested the girls we took Katya in, too. But she was released hours before the others were. I don’t know why – she was the only one sprung early. It would have looked peculiar. I didn’t ask for her to be let go, that’s for sure.’
Liz sensed he was very upset by this. She said encouragingly, ‘Maybe Forensics will find something.’
‘I don’t think so. The killer was very careful. Her place was in the Greater Manchester area and the CID guys there have made it a low priority.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Either because they reckon it’s a one-off and won’t lead anywhere, or because they know where it leads and have been warned off.’
‘What does that mean?’ She didn’t like the sound of it at all.
‘Ask your friend in Manchester Special Branch.’
He’s not my friend, thought Liz, but there was no point in saying this. She asked, ‘This woman Katya, did she have a Bulgarian passport too?’
‘I don’t know what passport she had, but I know she wasn’t from Bulgaria.’
‘Then where was she from?’
‘One of those funny ex-Soviet countries – the ones that end in “stan”. Hers was called Dagestan. At least that’s what she told me. Never heard of it myself. Have you?’
‘Yes,’ said Liz flatly. She had heard of it quite recently. ‘Listen, I wonder if you can help me with something.’
‘Just say the word,’ said Halliday so breezily that Liz wondered whether perhaps there had been some vodka in his tonic after all.
‘You remember I told you that we’d learned that Jackson was connected to an arms dealer.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well, we’ve now had confirmation that he’s involved.’ She hesitated, then decided she had to trust him – so far at least, he had been completely straight with her, unlike her old friend McManus. ‘I think there might be a connection between his role in this arms deal we’re investigating and his usual business at the club – bringing in the women, I mean.’