Cold Kill (39 page)

‘Who told you this?'

‘It went round the casino. Came from one of the other security guys, I expect.'

‘The guy never made a complaint. The guy Bloss hurt?'

‘He couldn't.'

‘He died?' Maxine asked.

‘Not as such. He's away with the fairies. You're going to talk to Billy about this.' Maxine nodded. Lousie wrapped her arms around herself as if she were cold. ‘I thought it was too good to last.'

‘While I was waiting for you,' Maxine told her, ‘I visited every table in the place, spoke to every croupier. After you left the bar, several others took a break. I spoke to them too. Billy won't know where it came from.' Louise nodded, but it wasn't a nod of agreement or belief. ‘Give me your number here, and your mobile. If I need to speak to you again, I won't come to Jumping Jacks.'

Louise wrote the numbers on a Post-it note. She said, ‘He used to give me the shivers, Leon Bloss.'

‘Why was that?'

‘There was a story he did snuff.'

Maxine looked at her. ‘Snuff… what? Videos?'

‘No, no, not that… Contracts. Snuff.'

‘He killed for money?'

‘I heard it. I didn't say it was true.' She was silent a moment, as if thinking back, seeking clues. ‘He would look at you and there was no one there. No one there behind the eyes.'

Maxine called Stella from her car. Stella was in bed but not asleep. She was listening to the radio and reading and
drinking coffee and trying hard to be distracted from the insistent thought that Vigo Street was becoming a permanent address again.

She said, ‘There are firms, we know that. There's a tariff. Rates for a broken leg, rates for a kneecapping.'

‘Rates for a bullet in the back of the neck and another through the heart,' Maxine suggested.

‘Exactly.'

‘She didn't say that Bloss was a member of a firm.'

‘Well… there are freelances too.' Stella turned the radio off. ‘Leon Bloss is our man. The connections are too close to mean anything else.'

‘Best if I didn't go back to Jumping Jacks. My source there is getting very edgy.'

‘I think we'll see Billy Souza at home. He won't like that. But I'll take Harriman or Silano.'

Maxine pulled up outside her flat and looked up to the window. The light was on. When she got in, she found Jan asleep on the sofa and baseball on the TV. She knelt down and kissed her lover softly on the lips.

Without opening her eyes, Jan said, ‘Where have you been?'

‘Among the low-lifes and the high-rollers.'

‘Did you win?'

‘In a way.' Maxine got up and went towards the kitchen.

‘Are you having a coffee?'

‘Tea.'

‘Me too.' When Maxine brought it to her, Jan said, ‘There's something I've been meaning to say.'

‘Okay.'

‘I love you. You don't have to say it back.'

Maxine did say it back. She didn't quite mean it, but she said it anyway.

To most people, money simply means bank balance or pay packet or mortgage. It means credit card or cheque book or cold cash. To others, though, it's a concept. There's no question of having too much or too little; it's not that kind of commodity. It comes in planks and tranches. It comes in multiples. It lies offshore like a small, independent state or it takes flight, a jet-stream of blurred figures setting off for somewhere safer or more profitable.

It was the kind of money Billy Souza dealt in. It had given him an apartment in Putney Wharf and the consumer durables that went with it. It made him powerful and the power showed as arrogance. When Stella showed Leon Bloss's picture to Billy, she'd been expecting deadpan, but what she got was a broad smile.

‘Leon Bloss,' Billy said. ‘I'm not surprised.'

‘Not surprised by what?'

‘That you want him. He's trouble, that's why I let him go.'

‘How long did he work for you?'

‘About six months. House security at first, then personal protection. He was good, but he was heavy-handed.'

Stella had taken Pete Harriman with her; she'd decided that the scar worked to her advantage. Harriman had been looking down fifteen floors to the traffic backed up on Putney Bridge. Now he said, ‘Nearly killed someone, we heard.'

‘Not while he was working for me.'

‘That's the story.'

‘No. Wrong.'

Stella asked for background, but Billy didn't have anything to offer. She asked for history, but it seemed that Billy didn't feel the need to know where his staff came from or where they went after they'd left. He did, of course, have an address for Leon Bloss and he was happy to hand it over, though he suspected it might be a little out of date. Stella suspected the same.

She said, ‘Here's the problem. When we last spoke, I was asking about a man called Oscar Gribbin. He was murdered.'

‘I remember.'

‘He gambled in your casino.'

‘Many people do.'

‘Now we're here again to ask about Leon Bloss. Know why?' Billy spread his hands and shrugged. ‘We think Bloss killed Gribbin.'

Something happened then: Billy's gaze slid sideways before coming quickly back to meet Stella's; there was a fractional pause that he tried to fill with a cough. He said, ‘I don't understand.'

‘What I said?'

‘What you mean.'

‘It's an odd coincidence. A client murdered by an ex-employee.'

Billy paused, regaining his balance. ‘I have a casino full of clients. And everyone is someone's ex-employee.'

Harriman asked, ‘Do you see him?'

‘No.'

‘He gambles at your tables.'

‘I'm not surprised. He knows his way around.'

‘So you might have glimpsed him on CCTV.'

‘I don't do that. People do that for me.'

Stella put a few copies of the computer-image down on
a vast, glass coffee-table. ‘Give those to the people who watch the screens. If they see him, call us.' Stella thought it was a pointless request, but it would seem odd not to have made it. Souza smiled faintly and nodded, but let the pictures lie.

They joined the northbound on Putney Bridge. Harriman said, ‘We should just lift him.'

‘On what grounds?'

‘He's a gun-importer. Gribbin was a carrier. Bloss used to be Souza's minder. Bloss killed Gribbin.'

‘We think all that. We don't know for sure. And there's the Serious Crimes Squad to consider; they're still building a case. We're on a different track. We need Bloss for Valerie Blake and the rest. Serious Crimes need Souza out and about for a while. They have to find the money and that'll be off somewhere, a BVI account, several trips through the laundry. People like Billy Souza aren't easy to box up. They've got intelligence networks, they've got fallback positions, they have their places swept for bugs on a weekly basis.'

‘For some you look in the court records,' Harriman suggested; ‘for others you look in
Who's Who
.'

‘Exactly.'

‘What's BVI?'

‘British Virgin Islands,' Stella told him. ‘No place for you.'

Billy Souza drove along by the river without bothering too much where he was going. For a man who thought of money in block-units, Billy was carrying a large amount of change. In his business it was called shrapnel: the sort of stuff that punters collect from change-counters in polystyrene cups and carry from one fruit machine to the next.

It didn't matter to Billy where he drove because any pay-phone would do. The one he found was standard issue: whores' cards and a strong smell of piss. He made a long-distance call, got referred, made a second, listened to an answerphone message, made a third. He said, ‘You know who this is?'

The man taking the call had a slight Slavic burr to his voice, but his English was near-perfect. All business transactions are negotiated in English, the international language of opportunism and deceit.

‘I know who.'

‘All shipments go on hold as of now.'

‘I'm not sure we can do that.'

‘It's not a request.'

‘We're backed up here, you understand?'

‘Your problem. Make a shipment and it'll be backed up here, because no one's going to be making any collections.'

‘You have a difficulty.'

‘It's just temporary.'

‘I think I can find a buyer for your consignment.'

Billy thumbed shrapnel. He said, ‘Give me a month.'

‘A month is a long time. Markets are opening up every where.'

‘Give me three weeks.'

A pause. Then, ‘Okay. Three.'

‘I'll call soon. Don't call me. Not the mobile, not the office.'

‘Okay.'

The man on the other end of the phone had already made a mental note that involved notions such as chains of evidence and dominoes. He thought,
This guy's in trouble. This is no one to do business with
.

He said, ‘No problem.' And because his English was so good, he added, ‘Season's greetings.'

Billy used more shrapnel to call Leon Bloss. He said, ‘Time for you to be gone.'

‘There's a problem,' Bloss suggested.

‘This DS Mooney… she's as close as dammit, close so it makes no difference.'

‘Close –'

‘They've got you down for Gribbin.'

‘That's impossible.'

Billy had been holding it down for over an hour. Now it hit the surface, rising. ‘No, it's not fucking impossible, because I heard the bitch say it to me. Don't say impossible, you moron, they want you for it. They showed me a fucking picture of you, like a photofit. They'll have it in the press, they'll have it on TV: you'll be headlines, you'll be on every screen in the fucking country. Someone's given you up, my friend, and she's going to nail you, this Mooney. She's on your fucking trail. So listen – it's time for you to leave. I don't want you around. Take a break. Go a long way off.'

‘That's the plan. That's what I intend to do.'

‘Do it now.'

‘I haven't had my money.'

‘JD will bring it over. Don't come near me. Don't come anywhere near. You're the plague to me; you're the Black fucking Death.'

Bloss hung up. He walked to the tall windows that looked out to the river and watched snow flurries drifting above the surface of the water. He made a phone call and booked a plane ticket in the name of James Hill, which was the name on the passport he had bought in Chinatown a couple of days earlier. He thought he needed two days. Two days to set things up and then to get clear.

His flight was for four thirty on the afternoon of Christmas Eve.

Maybe she'd moved on. Maybe she'd decided that the wage-earners and home-owners of Notting Hill had given all they were going to give. Maybe the weather had finally pierced to the bone and she'd looked for a refuge, some warm place where you could get food and methadone and make good connections for later.

Kimber had been out since early morning. He'd seen a lot of street-people but not Sadie. He'd seen the skinny guy who talked to himself but not Sadie. He felt miserable and slightly unwell, as if he'd eaten something bad. He thought about Jan and the moment in the street when he'd quickened his pace, feeling the shaft of the hammer knocking his thigh. He thought about Stella, the yard with the wheelie-bin for cover, the shapes on the shade. He was out of touch, that was the problem. He was losing contact.

A girl with a dog, a girl with piercings, a man with a cardboard sign, a man with a mouth organ, a girl sleeping against a shopfront, a man playing a plastic traffic cone as if it were a didgeridoo. But not Sadie.

Jamie sat where he and Sadie usually sat, his hand out, talking to himself. He wasn't the kind of beggar people liked: he was pitiable but in a remote, unconnected sort of way. This meant not many people gave, so Jamie hadn't eaten much for a few days. He felt light-headed and the chill went deep, but he was content. Except he missed Sadie. She had slept alongside him near the grille in the Ocean Diner alley and then left early. She was unhappy, Jamie thought.
She was out of sorts, a bit distant, but everything would come right soon, when Jesus turned up, when the Saviour appeared.

Just a few days.

Nick Robson was a good exhibitions officer, but he wasn't a street cop. He read the reports and he kept a tidy room. Every item that had a bearing on the case, the contents of victims' pockets, objects found at the scene, whatever was handed on from the morgue or Forensics, anything that might appear as evidence in court – it was bagged and labelled and shelved.

Sue Chapman would have been the officer who kept a record of all this on computer and ran checks from time to time. Except Sue was in recovery, Marilyn Hayes was her stand-in, and, of course, Marilyn was also in recovery thanks to Pete Harriman's emotional miscalculation. Which is why Marilyn had missed what Nick Robson had just picked up.

Stella looked at the evidence bag Robson had placed on her desk, along with two reports. The highlighted passages made their point clearly. She said, ‘When did you notice this?'

Nick leaned down and pointed at the time-code on the report. ‘Today.'

‘I should have seen it,' Stella said. ‘We all should have seen it.'

In the bag was an item taken from Oscar Gribbin's pocket at the scene of crime: a gaming chip from the Jumping Jacks casino. The first report noted it. The second report was the incident-tree that Gerry Harris at Notting Hill Gate nick had emailed to her. It included a list of items logged by the station officer as having been in Sadie's possession at the time of her arrest:

Penny whistle

Twelve pounds, seventy pence in cash

Book:
Sophie's World

Sleeping-bag

Key ring, two keys, tag from Jumping Jacks casino