The Bug House (15 page)

Delon needs no more encouragement. He blurts out the location.

‘There now,’ says Severin. ‘That wasn’t so hard, was it? And now I’ll get the nurse to bring the bedpan, shall I?’

*   *   *

In a smart house in the sprawling Newcastle suburb of Heaton, Alex Vos is staring at the gently smoking neck of a glass bong being held under his nose by his best friend, Chris.

‘Come on you fucking
dweeb
,’ Chris says. ‘Get your lips around it.’

His words are met with a murmur of approval from the three other teenage boys sprawled in Chris’s attic bedroom.

‘I’ll be sick,’ Alex says.

‘So you’ll be sick,’ says one of the other boys. ‘So fuck?’

‘
Everybody
’
s
sick, Alexei,’ says Chris. ‘That’s why you’ve got to do it.’

‘That’s not terribly logical, C.’

‘Fuck logic, you tool! Who the fuck are you? Mr Spock?’

Another boy, who happens to have brought the weed to the party, makes a stoned lunge for the bong, but Chris flaps him away.

‘It’s Alex’s turn,’ he says firmly. Then he pushes the bong even closer to Alex’s face. ‘It’s your turn,’ he says.

With a deep sigh of resignation, Alex takes the bong in both hands and brings it to his lips. He takes a hit of the tangy smoke and immediately begins coughing.

Chris grins, taking back the bong and patting his friend on the back. ‘You da man,’ he says. ‘Now let’s go out.’

In the Bug House meeting room, the incident board is now dominated by a blown-up image of Jimmy Rafferty. Beside it is a photograph of the 1986 Jaguar XJ6.

‘Do you really fancy this kid for Okan Gul’s murder, Theo?’ says Mhaire Anderson. She is sitting in a chair facing the board, peering at it over the top of her new spectacles.

‘He’s not a kid, guv’nor,’ Vos says. ‘He’s a violent offender. Four years ago he was a whisker away from being a murderer. Plus the rope that was found in his car is a match to the rope used on Okan Gul, the stun gun has his fingerprints all over it, and there are fibres from Gul’s clothes in the boot. Which perhaps explains why he never bothered to report the car stolen and why he has subsequently vanished off the face of the Earth. You want more?’

‘You know me,’ Anderson says. ‘I always want more.’

‘Rafferty’s Jag was stolen to order from a car park in Morpeth the day after Gul was killed less than four miles away at Stannington. So in answer to your question, yes, I fancy him for the murder.’

‘OK. But what’s the connection with the Turkish mob?’

‘We’re assuming there
is
a connection.’

‘Jesus, Theo! You said it yourself: Gul was kidnapped, zapped with a stun gun and tied to a railway bridge,’ Anderson points out. ‘You can’t tell me that this was a
random
killing. That Jimmy Rafferty did this because Gul happened to spill his pint.’

‘All I’m saying is we’ve looked into his history,’ Vos says. ‘There is absolutely nothing to connect him to Jack Peel or the Manchester mob.’

Anderson takes off her glasses and polishes them on the lapel of her jacket. ‘So what’s his motive?’

‘I don’t know. But you’re right: there’s nothing random about this. It’s totally premeditated. I just think we’re being distracted by this big heroin deal. Don’t forget, Gul’s last visit to Tyneside took place when Heddon and the KK head-bangers were meeting in Amsterdam. So why was he here? Who was he meeting?’

‘Well, I don’t imagine it was a cultural visit.’

‘Me neither. I’d bet the house he was setting up another import deal, only this time with one of the Newcastle gangs. And not necessarily heroin. The KK are capable of supplying anything from cheap coke to cheap fags. They’re the Matalan of illicit, smuggled goods.’

‘Anyone in mind?’

Vos shrugs. ‘You know this city as well as I do. Timmy Wong, Ma Breaker, the Tunstalls, the Gilotis – take your pick. Or maybe it was all of them. And maybe that’s what got Okan Gul killed. In Amsterdam he’s a big-time gangster. Used to getting his own way. Maybe he just pissed someone off. Someone who decided to teach him a lesson.’

‘Then how do you want to play it, Theo?’

‘We have to go back to the tried-and-trusted methods, guv’nor,’ Vos says. ‘We need to rattle some cages.’

At the Excelsior Bingo Hall on Shields Road, Ma Breaker has five cards on the go and a blotting pen in each hand.

At Aspers Casino on Stowell Street in the heart of Newcastle’s Chinatown district, Timmy Wong has three grand on red at the roulette table.

At Sandro’s Ristorante on the quayside, Sandro Giloti and his brother Italo have opened a second bottle of Sangiovese and Sandro is pouring it into the glasses of two attractive escorts who have been hired for £1,000 each from an agency in central Newcastle.

At Close House Country Club on the outskirts of Newcastle, Eddie Tunstall is watching football on a flatscreen TV in the members-only bar and drinking mineral water on his doctor’s advice.

And by the end of the evening, all of them will have had their evenings’ entertainment unceremoniously interrupted by members of the Major Crime Unit.

Meanwhile, in a bar on a side street near the river chosen specifically for its cheap alcohol and its less than scrupulous policing of the under-eighteen drinking regulations, Alex Vos walks with as much dignity as he can to the nearest toilet, where he locks himself in a cubicle and throws up.

When he emerges, several minutes later, there is a girl standing by the door, leaning on the beer shelf. Alex recognizes her as the same girl who has been smiling across at him all night. She is blonde and beautiful, and he does not for one second think that she is waiting for him until she smiles again to reveal perfect white teeth and says, ‘Hi.’

‘Hi,’ Alex says, aware of his vomit breath and of his friends sitting over in the far corner of the bar, laughing heartily at something – at
him
? No, they can’t see him because of the throng at the bar, and they can’t hear him either, because Dexys Midnight Runners are singing ‘Come On Eileen’ on the jukebox and the music is so loud he can hardly hear the girl when she leans over to him and says, ‘Do you want to go somewhere quieter?’

And then he doesn’t know what time it is or where his friends have gone, but he is with the girl and they are walking along the Quayside, where the evening is just beginning; the dwindling pub crowd has been boosted with a transfusion of clubbers, and the late-night bars are open for business. He is weaving along the pavement, his footsteps dipping in and out of tempo with the thudding bass-drum beat from bars on either side, and he can hear the girl’s laughter, although he cannot understand what she is saying. Faces come and go like streetlights in his peripheral vision, their words cut-and-pasted in his mind, then instantly deleted. He pauses to be sick once again in an alleyway, and when he staggers back into the streetlights a white van is parked by the side of the road with its engine running; and the girl –
the girl with kaleidoscope hair?
– is gesturing for him to get in; and he tells her where he lives and she smiles and laughs and gestures and says, ‘Come on, get in, I’m heading that way anyway.’

And by four in the morning even the clubbers have called it a day, and an unnatural calm has fallen over the city.

In his flat overlooking Jesmond Dene, Mayson Calvert, soothed by Mendelssohn’s
Violin Concerto in E Minor
and by the pulse of his own thoughts, is bathed in the glow of his laptop computer. He is working on a theory, one that he has worked on for several hours, one that has involved a great deal of research on the internet, trawling through sites so obscure and specialist that they would not even register on a popular search engine.

And now, after chasing up several blind alleyways, he has found the answer. Or at least he has found
an
answer. What it means is not clear at all, but Mayson knows that in his experience, answers are merely the catalyst to more questions.

But he has time. It is 4.15 a.m. and everybody is asleep.

By the time they are ready to begin the day, he may well have worked out what it all means.

The buzzing of Vos’s phone is insistent. He opens his eyes and is confronted by the sight of an empty whisky bottle and a full ashtray next to his chair on the balcony. He cannot remember coming to bed but is cheered by the fact that he obviously did. After a night’s excess, any evidence of good sense is a triumph.

He reaches for the phone on the night stand. The number on the display is Seagram’s. The time is 7 a.m.

‘Bernice,’ he says.

‘Morning, boss. Didn’t wake you, did I?’

He detects the mischief in her voice. ‘What have you got for me?’

‘Put the kettle on and I’ll tell you.’

Vos gets out of bed and goes out to the balcony. Seagram is standing on the pavement opposite, grinning up at him. One hand presses her phone to her ear, the other is waving a bacon sandwich.

‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ he says, pulling on a dressing gown.

‘Couldn’t sleep?’ he says. He waves her through to the kitchen. ‘Or have you found Jimmy Rafferty?’

‘We did a tour of the usual suspects last night,’ Seagram says. She places something on the counter and sheds her coat onto the back of a stool. ‘Of course nobody had heard of him, but we let it be known in the strongest possible terms that we were very keen to speak to him.’

Vos fills the kettle. ‘So what’s up?’

‘Mayson Calvert called me just before six. I was passing, so I thought I’d give you the heads up before he started blinding you with science in the office.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘He says he’s worked out what the dust particles are.’

He regards her blearily. ‘Dust particles?’

‘On the rope. On Okan Gul’s clothing. In Jimmy Rafferty’s car.’

‘Tea or coffee?’ Vos says, opening the cupboard.

‘Compressed wood pellets,’ Seagram says. ‘They’re a type of man-made fuel made from compacted sawdust. They’re very popular now that gas and electric prices have gone through the roof, apparently. Oh, and coffee please. Do you have decaf?’

‘You must be fucking joking.’

‘About the coffee or the wood pellets?’

‘Both,’ Vos says, shovelling granules into two mugs. He sees the object on the counter. ‘What’s this?’

‘It was on the doorstep,’ Seagram says. ‘You must have dropped it when you were trying to get your key in the lock last night. Anyway, Mayson was terribly excited, although I think he was more excited about beating George Watson to the punch.’

‘On the doorstep?’ Vos says. He picks the object up. It is a wristwatch with a cheap rubberized strap with the words
BOCA RATON
printed on it. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah.’

‘This is Alex’s. His mum gave it to him last time she was over.’

‘Thought it must be,’ Seagram says. ‘He must have dropped it . . .’

Vos takes the stairs two at a time. He opens Alex’s bedroom door. His son’s bed has not been slept in.

‘Everything all right, boss?’ Seagram shouts up the stairs. ‘The kettle’s boiled.’

‘Did you see anyone hanging around outside, Bernice?’

‘No. Why?’

In the bedroom, Vos grabs his mobile and dials Alex’s number, but it is switched off. He returns into his son’s room. His movement is calm and unhurried, but his mind is racing.
What the fuck is Chris
’
s surname? Swedish-sounding. Johanssen? Jorgenssen?
He scans the room for a contacts book or a directory or something where Alex might have kept a list of numbers.
Don
’
t be fucking stupid. Kids keep all their numbers in their phones these days
.

‘You sure you’re all right, boss?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

And Alex is fine too. He
’
s crashed at Chris
’
s. He dropped his watch as he was leaving the house last night
.

Except Alex would never do anything like that. He’s far too precise.

Precise. Where has he heard that word recently?

He rips open Alex’s desk drawer. Right up against the corner at the back, almost hidden among the piles of paperclips and thumb tacks, is an old Nokia handset. Alex’s first phone, only a couple of years old but already centuries out of date to any technologically savvy teenager. Vos grabs the phone and goes downstairs.

‘The batteries have gone on this,’ he says, handing the phone to Seagram. ‘How the hell do I get it working to open the contacts book?’

Seagram looks mystified. ‘Have you got a power adaptor?’

‘Probably. Somewhere. Let’s just assume that I don’t.’

‘I’ve got a Nokia phone. Maybe I can switch the SIM cards.’

She forces the back off Alex’s phone, picks out the SIM and places it in the slot at the back of her own phone. She activates the Power button, waits for it to spring to life and then goes to her contacts book.

‘There you go,’ she says, smiling uncertainly. There’s a look on the boss’s face that seems close to panic.

‘Look up Chris Jorgenssen. Or Johanssen. Or something Scandinavian.’

Seagram scrolls down the list of names. ‘Jesperssen?’

‘That’s it.’

Vos grabs the handset and presses the Call button. Presently someone answers with a grunt.

‘Chris, this is Theo Vos. Alex’s dad.’

‘Uh, oh yeah. Hi, Mr V.’

‘Is Alex there?’

‘Alex? Uh, no.’

‘You mean he’s left?’

‘Uh, no. He’s not at home?’

In the pit of his stomach, Vos feels tremors of unease growing steadily. ‘You mean he didn’t stay at yours?’

‘No.’

‘What about the other guys?’

‘They stayed here.’

Vos takes a breath. ‘Listen to me carefully, Chris: what happened to Alex last night?’

‘I dunno. We were in this, er—’

‘Look, I know you were out drinking. Just tell me what happened.’

‘We kind of lost him.’

‘You kind of
lost
him?’

‘Yeah. He was a bit pissed and I think he went to the toilet and then I think he must have just left. We looked for him, but he’d gone.’

‘What time was this?’

‘Half ten, something like that.’