Hope Road (32 page)

“Why not listen to me first?”

“Not here,” she says. “I’ll be outside, if you can tear yourself away from the booze.”

“I
s this a general feeling?”

Detective Superintendent Shirley Kirk has been following events closely all day, and now she’s called Steve Baron up to her office to discuss the timing of charges.

“I wouldn’t say that,” he says, pinching his brow with thumb and forefinger, closing his fatigued eyes. “But there’s a feeling that we should be looking at John Ray a bit more closely.”

“Which officers?” she asks. “Matt Steele by any chance?”

“Mainly Steele, yes.”

“Do you agree with him?”

“There might be something in it. Ray didn’t buy the Mondeo from its last registered owner. He got it from a bloke at the side of the road who we can’t trace. Ray leaves it unregistered, and five days later there’s a dead girl in it. Plus there’s the fake cash in the boot, obviously.”

“But there’s a trail of evidence from the boy’s flat back to the money in the Mondeo, and ultimately to the girl. So there’s no case against Ray on that score, right? The notes do match, don’t they?”

Baron nods. “But the notes that are now turning up all over town? From the flood we’re pinning on the Ukrainians? They’re different.”

She sits back in her chair, looks up at the ceiling.

“All of them? There’s no crossover at all?”

“No. So far, it’s just the note found in the suspect’s flat. Donna gave him it, we’ve got that in his statement and on video.”

She grimaces as she thinks.

“The Mondeo was used to collect Bilyk’s latest shipment. We have Freddy Metcalfe’s statement on that, and there’ll be CCTV at Immingham docks. Bilyk’s smart. Perhaps he’s got more than one source. That would guarantee a steady supply, in case anything gets stopped at customs or stolen. Multiple sources makes sense. The supply of counterfeits is not going to be a hundred percent reliable, is it? It’s not baked beans you’re buying from a factory.”

Baron freezes.

“As of now,” the Super continues, “we’ve got enough to take both cases to the CPS. Let’s do that first, then Steele can have a poke around, see what he finds on Ray. Agreed?”

He planted the evidence
. The thought has been at the back of Baron’s mind since John Ray came to see him.
He switched the note in the bathroom. It’s the only way this could have happened. Ray planted the note, then he planted the idea in Baron’s head.

The Superintendent rises from her chair, hand outstretched.

“Well done Steve. Brilliant work.”

He leaves as calmly as he can and manages to get to the senior officers’ toilets before he throws up.

S
he’s in her car when he comes out. Leans across to open the passenger door.

As he gets in she takes one last draw on a cigarette and extinguishes it in the ashtray.

“Can I have one of those?” he asks.

“No. Talk.”

Hope Road is behind them, to their left. You can see the edge of the new showroom, a strip of silver light in the darkness.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about Joe,” he says. “It’s probably not the right time for this, but thanks, y’know, for getting me through everything the way you did.”

“No, it’s not the right time. But okay.”

“After Joe died, there was a lot of stuff up in the air. Houses to sell, debts that needed paying. Me and Dad had to deal with it all, make sure no one was ripping us off. There was something wrong, though.

“Just before he was killed he sold a couple of houses. When I traced the proceeds from the sale, a hundred twenty-five grand was missing. Dad and Moran didn’t know anything. It was a mystery.

“Then, a couple of months later, a bloke came looking for me. Turns out Joe had ordered a shipment of counterfeit notes, hundred twenty-five grand, face value of half a million quid. He paid up front but never collected. The bloke didn’t offer a refund. But what he wanted to know was whether we still had a deal. Seems like it was a regular order.”

“And you said
yes
?”

He laughs.

“I said
no
. The guy left me his phone number. Plus, he left a sample note.”

Den looks straight ahead, waits.

“The sample note was good.
Very
good. Twenties are hard to forge these days, loads of security features, very tricky to copy. But these notes were done by professionals, no doubt about that. And it was was a very discreet operation from what I could see. Well organised, offering only a limited supply. Joe was buying at twenty-five points…”

“That’s a good price, is it?”

“For notes of that quality? It’s pretty decent, yeah. Ironic, really. He always struggled to live up to Dad’s reputation, but the last thing he does is score the best fake notes I’ve ever seen. He’d have sold ’em easy. Buy at twenty-five on the pound, sell down the chain at fifty. Double your money. He could have retired in a couple of years, tops.

“Really good producers are in it for the long haul. They’re very careful not to over-supply. No flooding the market like those stupid Ukrainians. If your product is good, you look for a few careful buyers, sell ’em a bit at a time, let the trail go cold each time.”

“Fancy giving a seminar for us over at Millgarth?”

He ignores her sarcasm.

“I gave it some thought. Ended up saying
yes
. The showroom’s a cover. Plus it kind of links in with what I do with the money.”

“Which is?”

“I buy sports cars. Expensive ones, secondhand. Always down south, or Scotland, far enough away that nobody’ll bump into me the next day.”

“How many?”

“Each shipment of notes is half a million quid face value. They stash it for me in an old motor and I buy it off ’em, somewhere nice and visible, like it’s just a bloke selling his car at the side of the road.”

“The Mondeo? What about the registration documents?”

“They buy the motor off someone desperate enough to sell ’em it without doing the paperwork. Not difficult. And that way, the bloke
I
buy it from can’t be traced.”

She sighs. “So you keep the car in your lot, and store the money there? Is that why there was money in the Mondeo on Friday?”

“Yes. Freddy had no idea. He probably saw that the car hadn’t been entered into our system, that’s why he used it. There were notes left in there because the last person I went to see on Friday wasn’t suitable.”

“Suitable?”

He shrugs. “Just didn’t like the look of her. In general I get a shipment of notes on a Monday, buy two cars every evening for five nights.”

“How many shipments?”

“This was my fifth.”

“
Jesus Christ
, John. Fifty cars? Two and a half million quids’ worth?” She shakes her head. “No, it’s not possible. The sellers…”

“I do a deal with the sellers. First I buy the car, pay cash. I get it safe, satellite tracking disabled, new plates, quick as possible. Then I ring the seller and explain that they’re holding fifty grand in fake notes. They’ve got a choice: either go to the police, have the notes confiscated, and take a risk telling the insurance company…”

“The insurance won’t pay out on…”

“Right. The alternative is they can report the car stolen. I tell ’em to say that while they were showing the car to me, someone else rang about the car. They nipped into another room, and when they came back I’d stolen the spare keys from the back of a kitchen drawer and taken the motor. They can even say it was my phone call. The number’ll be traced back to an anonymous mobile. I get a new phone for every shipment.”

For a while neither of them speaks. He takes a Nokia from his pocket and holds it up between finger and thumb like a court exhibit. And now his head begins to feel heavy and unmanageable. Four large whiskies and four pints and the effects are coming on good and hard. He wishes he were somewhere else with her, anywhere, just not here, of all places.

“You stood there,” she says in the end, “outside the station on Saturday. You stood there and you lied.
You don’t think I had anything to do with this
, that’s what you said to me, like you were offended that I even asked. You know, whenever I had even the slightest thought that perhaps you might be involved in something dodgy, I felt ashamed of myself. You made me believe your lies until I hated myself if I ever stopped believing them.”

“There was only one lie.”

“Oh, yeah? All the trips south to buy cars, the evenings away? Every one a lie. The showroom? Total lie. You.
You’re
a lie. And to top it all you were shagging a copper. The icing on the cake. You must’ve felt so bloody clever!”

The whisky is biting into his guts. He doesn’t feel clever. He feels like he’s run a pointless scam and it’s cost him the only person he cares about. He feels like an idiot.

“I only buy from rich people,” he says. “If they look like they’re in difficulties of any sort I walk away. These are expensive motors, the folk who drive ’em are savvy. You tell ’em they’ve no choice but to say the car was stolen, then you throw-in fifty grand in very high-quality fake notes to be spent judiciously? That’s cushioning the blow a bit.”

“So it’s charity work!”

“And I always make a withdrawal from the bank,” he continues, getting it all out now, “fifty grand, just in case anyone ever asks where I was last night, y’know, like you lot did on Saturday.”

“You’ve really thought of everything…” she says, staring out into the night. “How much do you make?”

“Not much. I renegotiated the price of the notes, but they still cost me twenty points. So if I buy a car for fifty grand, it costs me ten. And I sell it on for fifteen or sixteen. I make five or six grand per car.”

“Kids get that for nicking sports cars off the street. Why not sell the notes on, double your money?”

“Because this way it’s almost risk free. We get the car safe inside a container lorry then I call the seller back with the bad news. Until that point nobody’s reporting anything as stolen. No risk for me, or the buyers.”

“Who are?”

“I got a contact. Turns out it leads back to Lanny Bride. I never knew. The only person I see is a truck driver. Each night that I work I steal two motors, make about ten grand profit.”

“Export?”

“Never asked. A week’s work and fifty-odd k is deposited in an account of mine in Honduras.”

“And how long were you planning on doing this?”

“Five years.”

“That sounds very specific.”

“At this rate five more years is enough for a sixty-one foot motor yacht and running costs forever after. That’s my price, my out.”

He looks over his shoulder at the showroom, and the city beyond, then up at the sky, as if it might be of some help.

“I came back home to help Joe sell the showroom. Within a month he’s dead and Dad has his first stroke. That’s when it hit me. Twenty-five years I’d been away, the prodigal son who wanted to escape the life of crime. And I did. I left. Thing is, I never knew what to do once I’d gone.”

“The police?” she says. “That’s what you told me, or was that another lie?”

He snorts.

“For a while, yeah. That was going to be my life, the son who walked away from his criminal father to be a copper.”

“And?”

“Didn’t have the guts. Bottled it.”

“You had a career though.”

“Correction. I drifted. Taught English, worked in bars, short order cook, purser on a ferry for a while… At the age of thirty I trained as an accountant and a decade later I was making forty grand a year and spending most of it on food and wine. Then I met you.”

“Ha! So this is my fault?”

“You woke me up, Den. Made me look at myself. I was tired of the struggle to be an upright citizen, knowing that wherever I went someone would eventually find out who my dad was. Can you imagine what it’s like being an accountant, and having a dad like Tony Ray? I wanted to be free. Free of my name.”

He slumps sideways against the passenger door, as if he’s ashamed to tell her, even to face her.

“The sea,” he says. “To wake up on a yacht. Every morning. A yacht in the sun, bobbing on the tide, seagulls overhead. That is what I want. That’s all. Is it too much to ask?”

He screws up his face, stifling a yawn.

“I’m not even a very good accountant. Forty grand I was on. Dad’s nursing home costs more than that.”

“It’s more than I make.”

“It’s different for you. You’re doing something good. Least you think you are.”

“I thought you approved of the police?”

“I used to.” He runs a hand across his forehead, which is greasy with sweat. “But now? I don’t think anything does much good. This counterfeit thing came up, I didn’t go looking for it. But suddenly I could see the chance to escape for good.”

“A
yacht
? That’s it?”

“And what about you? Chasing down scum, finding bodies, knocking on the doors of parents with the bad news.”

“Making the world a decent place to live.”

“I grew up with criminals. They get caught. They get out. They get killed. Whatever. Nothing changes. But I know this: I was born in the wrong place. Everything we owned was off the back of a fucking lorry, Christmas presents, clothes, football boots. All I remember about my mum is being dragged around the markets checking on perfume sellers.”

“
Opium
,” Den says, as if to herself.

He doesn’t understand.

“
Opium
. She wore
Opium
. Donna Macken.”

“I know,” he whispers.

“What? John?”

He swallows down the acid bile in his throat.

“There’s a fake twenty note in Craig Bairstow’s flat.”

“Bairstow?”

“Lad from the hotel. He killed her.”

She shifts in her seat.

“How do you know?”

“Craig Bairstow had one of the notes Bilyk was peddling. I broke into his flat today and switched it for one of mine.”

“I don’t believe you. I just…”

“Makes no difference to Bairstow. Makes no difference to Bilyk. He’s long gone.”