The Bug House (12 page)

She looks at him in astonishment. ‘And they didn’t fucking tell us? Cheeky bastards. Who’s in charge down there these days?’

‘Frank Maguire.’

‘Oh, well. That explains everything. Maguire wouldn’t share the cure for cancer if he thought it would compromise one of his operations.’

‘True,’ Vos says. ‘But if Heddon’s mob killed Okan Gul, then it becomes our operation, too. And we’d need to see Maguire’s files.’

Anderson knows Vos’s tone of old. ‘And you think Detective Superintendent Frank Maguire will be swayed by my womanly charms? Is that it, Theo?’

‘I was thinking more about your shared heritage, guv’nor.’

Anderson gives him a hard stare. ‘Maguire’s from Antrim. My people were from Fermanagh. There’s a big difference.’

‘I’m sure you can bury the hatchet. Especially as he’s been investigating one of our own without telling us.’

‘Jack Peel’s one of our own now, is he?’

Vos shrugs. ‘He is now.’

Anderson leans over the rail and pours the dregs of her coffee into the river. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she says. ‘Meanwhile I want you to find out who Peel’s replacement was as middleman in this deal. If some other small-time Charlie is looking to make a name for himself now Peel’s gone, I want them hammered down.’

‘I can certainly make inquiries,’ Vos says. ‘But there is a quicker way.’

‘I know. Al Blaylock.’

‘Lawyer to the stars.’

‘Go and lean on him.’

‘I thought I was under investigation by the IPCC? I imagine Gilcrux would take a very dim view of me approaching Al Blaylock.’

Anderson reaches into her bag. Produces a manila envelope. ‘Gilcrux’s interim report and recommendations,’ she says.

Vos stares at the envelope. ‘And?’

‘Don’t you want to read it?’

‘Not really.’

‘It’s quite clear he doesn’t trust you as far as he can throw you.’

‘I guessed that.’

‘But he can find no grounds for an investigation.’

‘So that’s it?’

‘That’s it, Theo. You’re in the clear.’

‘Good,’ Vos says.

‘So go and lean on Blaylock,’ Anderson says.

The cloud hangs so low over Newcastle that it is almost raked by the barbed spires jutting up from the fourteenth-century tower of St Nicholas’s Cathedral.

From across the street Vos peers through the spitting rain as the congregation begins to file in through the great wooden door. He has been standing here for thirty minutes, watching the great and the good of the Tyneside underworld arriving with their tarty wives and bullet-headed minders. How they’ve loved every minute of the exposure, these two-bit villains, pretending it’s the mid-sixties all over again, or what they’ve been led to believe the mid-sixties were like. The solemn handshakes on the steps. The fraternal embraces. The bullshit platitudes about what a great guy the dead man was. All that is missing is the glass-sided hearse, drawn by a couple of plumed horses, containing the pearlescent casket, and Jack Peel’s name spelled out in flowers.

But then this is the memorial service, not the funeral. They have come to celebrate Peel’s life, but the man himself has been dead for nearly a month.

Presently a dark saloon pulls up and the driver gets out. Dark suit, close-cropped blond hair. Jack’s driver-cum-bodyguard for fifteen years. He opens the rear door and Melody Peel exits, pushing a pair of oversized sunglasses onto the bridge of her nose. In her knee-length fur coat and designer fascinator she looks every inch the gangster’s daughter. She takes a moment to sweep a disdainful glare at the crowd of onlookers who have filled the corner of St Nicholas’s Street and Mosley Street, bringing the rush-hour traffic to a standstill on two of the city’s busiest thoroughfares. Then the driver offers his arm and walks her to the door of the cathedral, where Al Blaylock, the lawyer, is waiting with a solemn expression.

Meanwhile a second car has arrived. This one contains Kimnai Su, Peel’s Thai bride, in a black dress and wide-brimmed hat. This time Blaylock comes forward, taking the tiny woman by the elbow and leading her inside.

Now Vos crosses the street. He is wearing a dark overcoat with the collar turned up and a sober scarf.

‘Friend of the family.’

The heavies at the door have no reason to doubt him and let him past. Vos enters the church and takes a seat on the back row of pews, next to a white-haired man in an expensive camel-hair coat, who explains he has come all the way from northern Cyprus for the occasion.

‘Bloody good turnout,’ he says. And he’s right. There must be two hundred people crammed into the cathedral.

‘It’s what he would have wanted,’ Vos says.

The service lasts forty minutes. There are speeches and eulogies and then ‘Wonderful World’ comes on the speakers as the congregation files back out into the drizzle. If Vos had a pound for every villain who chose Louis Armstrong’s life-affirming ballad to send them off into the next world, he would already be a rich man.

Kimnai Su and Melody are standing at the door accepting the platitudes, the fat lawyer at their side like an obedient pot-bellied pig. Vos keeps at the back of the queue, his head down, until he feels the draught on his face. Then he looks up and his eyes meet theirs the first time since that hot day by the swimming pool.

‘Hello, Mrs Peel,’ he says to Kimnai Su. ‘Lovely service.’

Al Blaylock’s eyes are out on stalks, but Kimnai Su does not flinch. Beside her, Melody regards him quizzically.

‘What’s
he
doing here, Al?’ she says. ‘What’s the
murderer
doing here?’

‘I’ll sort it, dear,’ Blaylock says hurriedly. ‘You get yourself back to the car.’ He calls for the driver, who hurries across from the top of the church steps. ‘Take Miss Peel back to the car, will you?’

‘Everything all right, Mr Blaylock?’ the driver says, glaring at Vos.

‘Everything’s just
fine
. Just take her back to the car.’

At first Melody shakes off the driver’s outstretched arm, then allows herself to be led out of the church.

Throughout the exchange, Kimnai Su has remained her usual impassive self.

‘Thank you for coming, Mr Vos,’ she says deliberately, careful to get her mouth around the unfamiliar English words. ‘We having a reception now. You most welcome attend.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Vos says, somewhat taken aback by the invitation. ‘But actually it was Mr Blaylock I came to see.’

‘I’ll see you at the hotel, my dear,’ Blaylock says.

Kimnai Su nods and turns away, leaving Vos and Blaylock alone under the cathedral portico with Satchmo’s rubbly voice echoing on the ancient stone.

‘You’ve got a fucking nerve showing up here,’ Blaylock growls.

‘Believe me, Al, if I had something better to do I’d be doing it.’

‘Aren’t you supposed to be under investigation?’ Blaylock says, moving towards the door. ‘Don’t you think this is a very bad idea?’

‘If I was still under investigation I would agree,’ Vos says. ‘You obviously haven’t had your letter from the IPCC yet.’

Blaylock pauses and flashes Vos a look of pure venom. ‘So what do you want?’

‘I want you to look at this picture, Al.’

From his overcoat he produces a print of the picture attachment emailed by Remmelink. Blaylock makes a show of putting his spectacles on before peering at the grainy photograph.

‘What am I looking at?’ he says.

‘You’re looking at Jack Peel, Okan Gul and a very unpleasant man from Manchester called Wayne Heddon. The picture was taken in a bar in the red-light district of Amsterdam a week before Jack died.’

Blaylock shrugs. ‘I’m none the wiser.’

‘Do I really have to spell it out, Al?’

‘As far as I can see, this is a photograph of three men having a drink in a bar. One of them is Jack Peel. I have no idea who the other two are. Now if you’ll excuse me—’

He makes a move to leave the cathedral portico, but Vos steps in front of him.

‘Let’s talk about the Kaplan Kirmizi from Amsterdam. And the Manchester mob.’

‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘I think you do. You see I think Jack was in the middle of setting up a nice little import business with them when he met his unfortunate demise. Okan Gul was a regular at Jack’s club, Al. They were seen together on more than one occasion.’

‘Says who?’

‘Lots of people use the casino,’ Vos says. ‘People see things. Thing is, I can’t imagine Jack would do any sort of business without his lawyer to hold his hand.’

‘You can go to hell.’

They are on the street now. The traffic is moving. The people are going about their business. Blaylock speeds up as he heads to the kerb, his hand extending for a nonexistent taxi.

‘Okan Gul is dead, Al.’

The lawyer stops. His arm lowers fractionally.

‘Somebody tied him to a railway bridge over the East Coast Main Line. The Edinburgh express did the rest.’

A minicab has turned the corner of Mosley Street and is making its way towards the cathedral.

‘Maybe you read about it in the papers,’ Vos says. ‘We just didn’t release the name.’

Blaylock seems visibly shaken.
But is that because he didn
’
t know Okan Gul was dead, or because he didn
’
t know how he
’
d died?

‘Who took over as middleman when Jack died, Al? Was it you? Or did they ask you to find another one? After all, most of the villains in this city are clients of yours.’

‘Like I said, you can go to hell.’ Blaylock is trying to look insouciant, but there is fear behind his eyes.

‘Right now I don’t give a shit what dirty little deals Jack was involved in,’ Vos says. ‘What concerns me is when dead Turkish gangsters end up in footballers’ gardens – because I don’t ever think it’s going to end there. So if you know something, I’d really like you to tell me.’

The minicab is approaching. Blaylock sticks out his hand and flags it down.

‘I thought you were walking to the hotel, Al,’ Vos says.

Blaylock gets into the taxi and slams the door behind him. The cab pulls away, and Blaylock stares straight ahead.

Until now Ptolemy has never realized just how much crap people keep in their cars. As well as the usual junk – CDs, umbrellas, phone accessories, notepads – she has unearthed a top set of dentures, a clarinet, the collected works of Franz Kafka, three wraps of cocaine, a box of 800 studded condoms, a wig, and, most disturbing of all, a pair of soiled underpants. Every item has been fastidiously logged, along with the relevant details of the vehicle of origin, and it strikes Ptolemy that, were she a psychologist, the results would make for a fascinating study of human behaviour.

She rolls her head in order to stretch her stiff neck, but it provides only momentary relief from the gnawing ache that has now crept down to her shoulder blades. Through the office window, the rows of stolen vehicles are bathed in an eerie turquoise glow from the security lights in the warehouse below.

‘Would you like a cuppa, ma’am?’ says WPC Millican.

Millican insists on calling her ‘ma’am’, even though there’s no more than six years between them. Yes, it’s protocol, Ptolemy thinks, but it still sounds weird.

‘If I have any more tea I’ll be piddling for England,’ she says. ‘But I will have one of those chocolate digestives.’

Millican giggles and goes across to a table on the other side of the office, where over the course of the last twenty-four hours she has systematically assembled a small life-support pod containing a kettle, tea, milk and, most importantly, a tin of chocolate biscuits.

Ptolemy thinks back to her days in uniform, to her first secondment to CID as part of a door-to-door inquiry team investigating a fatal hit-and-run. The detective in charge was a DI from Carlisle called Barrie Doggart, a quiet, pensive man with grey skin and a permanently furrowed brow. Aged eighteen and fresh out of training school, Ptolemy had thought Doggart was the most thrilling man she had ever met. She imagined him as a lonely maverick, existing on the margins, living his life to a soundtrack of Miles Davis and the rhythm of a whisky bottle. Later she found out he lived with his wife in a semidetached new-build on the outskirts of Workington, spent most of his time on the sick with a bad back and was therefore regarded not only as a malingerer, but as the detective with the worst clear-up rate in Cumbria CID.

Ptolemy wonders what Millican thinks about her. What she will say five or six years down the line when she looks back at her first CID investigation.

Yeah, I was stuck in a warehouse with this biscuit-scoffing DC who was obviously a useless bitch, because they
’
d given her all the paperwork to do. What a fucking loser she must have been
.

It wasn’t even as if she led a glamorous life outside of work, Ptolemy reflects glumly. Ray had called this morning from Tallinn to say one of the other truckers had suffered a suspected heart attack, and that he was now expected to drive on to Riga to fulfil the contract. That meant he wouldn’t be back home until the middle of next week at the very least, and she could tell from his voice just how utterly thrilled he was at the prospect of another four days driving on Eastern Europe’s potholed roads and staying in its primitive truck stops.

Almost as thrilled as she is at the prospect of another night on her own with only the prospect of a frozen dinner and some backed-up episodes of
EastEnders
on Sky+ to look forward to.

As she drags over another box, she wonders what Severin will be doing tonight. Letting his hair down? Toasting his success in cracking the car-ringing gang? Just how
did
an undercover detective let his hair down? Presumably the nature of his job meant there were limited places he could go. A darkened cinema, perhaps? The idea of inviting him round for dinner skitters unexpectedly into her mind; two lost souls, all dressed up with nowhere to go, sharing a lonesome spaghetti bolognese and a tragic bottle of cheap red wine.

Stop it, Kath
.

She reaches into the box, removes the attached paperwork and keys the VIN and the registration number of the vehicle in to the computer database, along with the name of the registered owner and insurance details. Beneath it, something bulky inside a plastic grocery bag.
What now?
she thinks wearily. She picks up the bag and tips it upside down. Its contents fall with a thud on the desktop.